House of Reckoning Read online

  By the time she reached the foot of the steps leading up to the school’s front doors, she was so worried about Nick that she didn’t even notice the way people were looking at her, but by the time she got inside and started making her way through the crowded hall toward her locker, she couldn’t miss it. She couldn’t miss the looks, and she couldn’t miss the whispers, especially when the whisperers made sure they whispered loud enough so she could hear.

  “… heard she was putting out for Conner West…”

  “… so nutty Nick tried to kick West’s …”

  “… Jolinda said she was doing three guys …”

  “… I can’t imagine even one guy wanting to do it with her. I mean, she’s crip—”

  Sarah stopped listening then, and for the rest of the morning, through the first four classes, she’d done her best to look at no one, to hear nothing. Let them talk, she told herself over and over again. Just ignore them. All of them.

  Once, between second and third period, she caught a glimpse of Nick at the far end of the hall, but he hadn’t seen her, and just as she started toward him, the bell rang. But at least she knew he was there.

  Now, at last, the clock was ticking down to the end of fourth period, and when the bell finally rang, she didn’t stay in her seat the way she usually did, waiting for the crowd to thin out. Today she stood up, picked up her backpack, stuffed her history text into it and—

  A hard shove knocked her back into her chair, and she looked up to see Jolene Parsons rolling her eyes. “Can’t you wait until the rest of us are gone?” she hissed, keeping her voice low enough so only Sarah could hear her. “Why should we all have to wait just because you can’t keep up?” Without waiting for an answer, Jolene turned away, and a few seconds later one of Jolene’s friends looked back at her, snickering.

  When the room was finally empty of everyone except the teacher, Sarah stood up again and walked out into the corridor. Looking at no one, refusing to hear anything, she clutched her backpack close to her chest and headed toward the cafeteria.

  She saw Nick sitting at his usual place at the farthest table back.

  Sarah smiled and waved, but just as in the hall earlier, he didn’t seem to see her.

  She bought a slice of pizza and a glass of lemonade and carried her tray over to him, but before she could sit down, he spoke, his voice low, his eyes fixed on the food in front of him.

  “I need you to sit somewhere else.”

  “What?” Her hands weakened and her tray clattered to the table.

  Nick still didn’t look at her. “Someone might see us together.”

  Sarah’s heart was starting to pound, and she could feel the eyes of the rest of the people in the cafeteria watching what was happening. What was going on? Why was Nick acting like this? “What—” she began, but Nick shook his head.

  “Don’t talk to me. My father says if I don’t stop seeing you, he’s going to send me back to the hospital.”

  “Why?” Sarah demanded, sitting down in the chair opposite Nick. “Does he think I beat you up?”

  Nick moved his tray away from her and slid into the next seat. “Just leave it alone, okay?”

  She stared at him and tried not to hear the snickering rippling through the cafeteria. “Are you serious?” she demanded, lowering her voice in the hope that only Nick would hear her.

  Finally he looked at her, his face twisted in misery. “Please,” he whispered back. “Just sit somewhere else. If you don’t, someone will tell my dad. You know they will!”

  Sarah held his gaze until he looked away. She opened her backpack, fished around in it until she found his cell phone, and set it down on the table. Then she stood up, picked up her tray, and looked for another place to sit.

  But everywhere she turned, people either shook their heads at her or pretended they didn’t see her at all. Not that it mattered—even if she found a table where they’d let her sit, her appetite was gone and her chest felt so tight she knew she wouldn’t be able to swallow even a sip of lemonade, let alone choke down the pizza.

  Leaving the tray on the busing table, she left the cafeteria and started back through the empty halls to her locker, struggling with every step against the tears that threatened to overwhelm her. By the time she found her locker, her eyes were so blurry she could barely see the lock, and it took her three tries before she finally got it open.

  Sitting on top of her science book was a piece of notebook paper, folded twice.

  No envelope. Not even her name written across it.

  And even though she hadn’t opened it yet, she was sure it wasn’t signed, either.

  In fact, why even bother to read it? It was probably some kind of death threat from Conner or one of his friends, or some disgusting picture someone had drawn of what they’d been whispering about all morning.

  Maybe she should take it to the principal’s office.

  Or just throw it away.

  But even as she tried to decide, she found herself picking the sheet of paper up and unfolding it.

  Meet me at the library right after school.

  Nick had scrawled his initial at the bottom, and as she gazed at the N, the tears she’d been fighting so long finally flowed.

  Why had she doubted him, even for a minute?

  Ten minutes, Sarah promised herself as she hurried down the sidewalk toward the old Carnegie Library that was still a block away. If I hurry, I’ll still only be fifteen minutes late getting back to the Garveys. Maybe Angie wouldn’t even notice. But as she waited for the light to change, she was already casting around in her mind for something that might deflect her foster mother’s anger. But what did it matter, really? Even if she got home on time, Angie would still find something to punish her for.

  The light changed and Sarah increased her pace to a lopsided trot. She was only about twenty yards from the library when a car horn blared, startling her so badly she lost her balance. As she grabbed at a lamppost to steady herself, Conner West’s car slammed to a stop next to her, and she saw Tiffany Garvey grinning at her.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” her foster sister demanded. “Our house is the other way!”

  “I have to do a—a book report,” Sarah blurted, snatching at the first excuse that came into her mind.

  “Yeah, right,” Tiffany drawled. “Going to meet your boyfriend, aren’t you? Going to get it on in the history section?”

  Sarah felt her own blush betraying her.

  “Nutty Nicky can’t get it on,” Conner West chimed in. “After what I did to him, he won’t even be able to get it on with himself for a week.”

  Sarah put her head down and started once again toward the library, but the car idled along beside her, keeping pace.

  “Better be careful,” Conner went on, his voice taking on a tone of menace that sent a chill through Sarah. “We’re watching you. Not just me and Tiff—a whole bunch of us. And what we do to you’ll be a whole lot worse than what happened to Dunnigan.”

  Sarah stopped short and turned to glare at Conner. “Why don’t you just leave me alone? And Nick, too. What did we ever do to you?”

  For a split second Conner West looked surprised that she’d actually talked back to him, but then his eyes narrowed in cold fury. “You killed my dog. And you’re going to pay for it. You and Dunnigan both. I don’t know how you did it, but I saw it, and I’m not forgetting it.” He stepped on the gas and the car sped away, the screaming tires spitting a plume of rotting leaves over Sarah.

  She looked around to see if anyone had seen what just happened, or even heard Conner’s threat, but the sidewalk, as well as the street itself, was empty. Brushing the worst of the muck from the gutter off her clothes, Sarah climbed the marble steps of the library, pulled open the heavy doors, and instantly felt transported back to the days when her mother used to take her to the library back home for story time or to use her very own library card to check out as many books as she wanted. As the warmth of the building and the smell of ol
d books began to seep into her, she looked around for Nick, but he wasn’t sitting at any of the big wooden tables, nor could she see him standing in the stacks, waiting for her.

  Then she remembered what he’d said at lunch and knew that wherever he was, it wasn’t going to be where someone was likely to see him talking to her.

  She scanned the children’s area, empty except for a couple of little girls playing with puppets, then made her way between the tables and through the stacks to the back of the main room.

  Nick sat at a reading carrel in the farthest corner, his back to her and his head in his hands. For a second Sarah thought he might be crying, but then she realized he was concentrating on a large book open in front of him. Slipping her backpack off her shoulders, she slid into the chair next to him.

  He looked up, a relieved smile spreading across his face. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come,” he whispered. “I was afraid maybe you wouldn’t see my note, and that you’d think—”

  “That you really didn’t want to see me anymore?” Sarah broke in. “I might have—you put on a really good show at lunch.”

  Nick’s smile faded. “I’m sorry. I was hoping you’d find my note before you went to the caf, but when I saw the look on your face after I told you to leave me alone, I knew you hadn’t. But by then it was too late, and my dad really will send me back to the hospital.”

  “It’s okay,” Sarah assured him. “I found the note and I’m here. So what’s going on?”

  Nick was silent for almost a full minute, and when he finally spoke, he kept scanning the area around them for anyone who might be listening. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, closing the book and turning it so Sarah could see the cover clearly. “I’m not even sure I believe it myself.”

  She gazed down at the old leather-bound book on the carrel desk. Its color had faded to a greenish shade, and the gold-leaf letters embossed into its surface had long since worn away. “What is it?” she breathed.

  “It’s about the place where Miss Philips lives. Not just the house—the whole thing, from back when there was a whole other building. They called it an ‘institute,’ but it was really a prison.”

  “For insane people,” Sarah said. “Bettina—Miss Philips—told me.”

  Nick nodded. “Anyway, I used to spend a lot of time here, and one day I decided to see if I could find the oldest book here. And I found this.” He looked up into her eyes. “And it scared me.”

  “Scared you how?”

  Nick opened his mouth, then closed it again. What if Sarah thought he was as crazy as his father did? But she wouldn’t—she couldn’t. And he had to tell her, had to find exactly the right words. “I—well, it—I’m not sure. I know it sounds really weird, but it seemed like when I was looking through it, I could almost hear some of the people in it.” His eyes shifted to the book for a moment, then came back to Sarah. “I think maybe that’s when I first started hearing the voices. I don’t really remember, but …” He waited, watching Sarah closely. If she got up and walked out … “I don’t know—it just seemed like the way I’ve been seeing what you’ve been drawing … well, doesn’t it seem like there’s got to be some kind of connection there?”

  He waited, afraid that Sarah was going to give him that look—the look the rest of the kids at school always gave him.

  The look his father gave him.

  But instead she reached out a finger and touched the fragile edges of the scarred leather binding. Finally, she opened the cover to expose the frontispiece, and Nick heard her gasp as she gazed at a photograph of a house with a man standing by the front door, then read the caption beneath it.

  Warden Boone Philips at the New Residence, 1857

  “I drew that house,” she whispered. “Exactly like that, with charcoal!”

  Nick stared at her.

  “It was my first or second day here,” she told him. “How could I have done that? How could I have drawn Bettina’s house the way it used to be when I hadn’t even seen it the way it is now?” Without waiting for Nick to answer, Sarah scanned the title page.

  Shutters Lake Institute for the Criminally Insane

  A History

  By Liam Clements

  She turned the page.

  The first photograph looked like a prison, but the caption said it was a hospital. It was still under construction, and the men working on it wore the black-and-white-striped garb of nineteenth-century prisoners as they leaned on their shovels next to newly planted saplings, with the building in the background.

  Nick sat silently as Sarah turned the pages, and as he watched her, the murmurs in his head began to rise.

  Rise, as if in anticipation.

  She turned another page, exposing a plate in which nearly a dozen inmates stood in front of the house, their placement looking deliberately posed and the smiles they displayed for the camera appearing forced even in the ancient photograph.

  “Look!” said a voice so sharp and loud it made Nick jump. “There I am!”

  “Wait,” Nick said as Sarah started to turn another page. “Did you hear that?”

  Her hand froze a few inches above the page and she looked up at him. “Hear what?”

  Nick ran his finger over the photograph, and as he touched each face in turn, the voices in his mind rose and fell, almost as if he were running through the stations on a radio.

  Select inmates with good behavior earn the privilege of working at the residence

  “It’s them,” Nick whispered, his voice sounding haunted even to himself. “These are the people whose voices I hear.” He waited, again half expecting Sarah to get up and walk out of the library, but instead she simply studied the picture for several more seconds, then looked up at him again.

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded.

  “You hear them now?”

  Nick nodded again.

  “Then let’s try something. I’m going to turn the page.”

  A moment later they were gazing at a couple standing on the lawn in front of Shutters. The man wore a formal black suit, while the woman, clad in a white dress, was wearing an elaborate hat on her head and gloves that came past her elbows.

  Boone Philips Married Astrid Moore On August 13, 1868

  “Do you still hear the voices?” Sarah asked.

  Nick hesitated, then nodded. “But not as loud—they’re just sort of whispering now.”

  Sarah turned more pages, and the voices in Nick’s head faded, but then he reached out a hand to stop her. His eyes fixed on a photograph of Boone and Astrid and their two daughters and two sons. “Look,” he said, pointing at one of the teenage girls. “She looks exactly like you.”

  Sarah leaned closer and gazed at the young woman’s face.

  The girl didn’t look like her—didn’t look like her at all.

  It looked exactly like her mother, and she didn’t look anything like her mother. “No,” she said, “it looks like—”

  “It looks like you,” Nick insisted. “It looks exactly like you.”

  “Sarah?”

  The single word was spoken so clearly in her mother’s voice that Sarah’s head jerked up and she looked around, half expecting to see her mother standing behind her.

  But there was nobody.

  “It’s time, Sarah,” her mother’s voice said again. “Time to go home. Time to go back where you belong.”

  She gazed down at the picture. The image—the image of her mother—was smiling at her, but the voice wasn’t coming from the pages of the book.

  It was coming from inside her head.

  Apparently, what had been happening to Nick for years was now happening to her, too. She tore her eyes away from the picture and looked at Nick. “I heard her,” she said. “My mother—she said it’s time for me to go home.”

  “Home?” Nick echoed. “The Garveys’?”

  She shook her head. “Where I belong. She said I have to go back where I belong.” Her eyes shifted to the book, and Nick un
derstood in an instant.

  “Shutters,” he breathed.

  Sarah nodded.

  Nick closed the book. “We have to go out there, Sarah.” The voices in his head began murmuring.

  “I can’t,” Sarah said, her eyes pleading with him. “I have to go back to the Garveys’. I promised Angie—”

  “Go home,” her mother’s voice said. “Go back where you belong.”

  “We have to go,” Nick said. “It’s where the people in my head are.”

  Sarah touched his arm. “Nick, they’re all …” Her voice trailed off, but Nick completed her sentence.

  “They’re all dead,” he said softly. “They must all be in the old cemetery.” Inside his head, the murmuring grew louder. “I think I have to go up there. And I think you have to go with me.”

  Sarah looked deep into his eyes. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “We have to go. Both of us. You know we do.”

  Sarah took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I should have stayed with Nick.

  It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed Sarah’s mind since the two of them left the library separately, neither one willing to risk being seen together. And Nick had insisted she couldn’t miss the old graveyard—it was only two hundred yards off the road to Shutters, and the trail was both good and well-marked.

  And the sun had still been high and the sky blue.

  Now the sun was dropping fast and the sky had turned a steel gray, and the shadows of the forest fell across the road. Even though the trail was right there where Nick said it would be, the shiver that went through Sarah as she gazed at it was far colder than the afternoon. But she hadn’t stayed with him, and it was too late to turn back now.

  She stepped off the road and started along the trail, and with every step she took the path seemed to grow narrower, the forest denser. She froze as something moved in the brush off to the right, unconsciously holding her breath as she listened.