Hellfire Page 3

  But it was a matter of principle. Beth was his daughter, and he wanted to support her, whether she needed his support or not.

  The money, he suspected, was probably going into a trust fund for her. That would be very much like Phillip—children should have trust funds from their fathers, and he would see to it that Beth had one, whether Alan knew anything about it or not.

  Grinning to himself, he wondered if Carolyn knew how well he and Phillip really got along together. In fact, if Carolyn hadn’t married Phillip, they would probably have become good friends, despite the difference in their backgrounds.

  For Phillip, alone among the Sturgesses, had somehow managed to overcome the sense of superiority that had been bred into him from the day he was born.

  He’d gone to the right schools, played with the right children, met the right women—even married one of them, the first time around—but no matter how hard his parents had tried, Phillip had never been able to put on the aristocratic airs the Sturgesses were renowned for. Now that Phillip had married Carolyn, the two men should have kept a wary distance, but, in fact, Alan could not help liking Phillip Sturgess. Now that Carolyn had what she wanted—position, money, all the comforts of life he had not been able to provide—he hoped the marriage would thrive. For one thing was certain, Phillip loved her—as much as Alan himself once had.

  He wanted his ex-wife to be happy, if only for his daughter’s sake, knowing that if Phillip and Carolyn found it rough going, somehow Beth would get caught in the middle.

  Whatever happened, Alan would never allow his daughter to be caught in it. It wasn’t Beth’s fault that things hadn’t worked out for him and Carolyn. In fact, if he really thought about it, it was probably the Sturgesses’ own fault.

  For as long as he’d known Carolyn—and they’d grown up together—she had been fascinated by the Sturgess family.

  Fascinated by them, and repulsed by them.

  And yet she’d married Phillip.

  So maybe the revulsion of them that she’d always professed had not been quite what she’d said.

  Maybe it had been envy, and a wish that she’d been born one of them.

  At any rate, when Phillip Sturgess had suddenly reappeared in Westover a year ago after living abroad for nearly a decade, Carolyn had wasted no time in snaring him. Which, Alan realized, wasn’t really a fair thing to say. The two of them had met and fallen in love, and Carolyn had resigned her job in the local law office when she’d married Phillip, claiming that continuing as assistant to an attorney when she was marrying his major client involved a conflict of interest.

  Perhaps it did; perhaps it didn’t. None of it mattered, not anymore. The fact was that Carolyn had married Phillip, and Alan hoped she would be happy. When Abigail followed Conrad to the grave, he thought, maybe she would have a chance at that. Until then, Alan was certain his former wife had an uphill battle ahead of her.

  The door opened, and his secretary walked in. She dropped a stack of mail on his desk, then surveyed him critically. “Thoughtful,” she said. “Always a bad sign.”

  “Just thinking about the Sturgesses, and hoping they didn’t all drown in Conrad’s grave.”

  Judy Parkins snickered. “That would be something, wouldn’t it? And after Carolyn worked so hard to get Phillip, too.”

  The smile faded from Alan’s face, and Judy immediately wished she hadn’t spoken. “I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean that.”

  Alan shrugged wryly. “Well, let’s just hope they’re happy, and wish them well, all right?”

  Judy regarded her employer with a raised brow. “How come you always manage to be so damned good? And if you are, how come Carolyn wanted to trade you in for Phillip Sturgess in the first place?”

  “First, I’m not so damned good, and second, she didn’t trade me in. She chucked me. And it’s over and done with. All right?”

  “Check.” Judy turned, but as she was about to leave the office, Beth burst in, her face blotched and streaked with tears. She threw herself into her father’s arms, sobbing. Judy Parkins, after offering Alan a sympathetic look, slipped out of the office, quietly closing the door behind her.

  “Honey,” Alan crooned as he tried to calm his daughter. “What is it? What happened?”

  “Th-they hate me,” Beth wailed. “I don’t belong there, and they all hate me!”

  Alan hugged the unhappy child closer. “Oh, darling, that isn’t true. Your mother loves you very much, and so does Uncle Phillip—”

  “He’s not my uncle,” Beth protested. “He’s Tracy’s father, and he hates me.”

  “Now who told you that?”

  “T-Tracy,” Beth stammered. She stared up into her father’s face, her eyes beseeching him. “She … she said her father hates me, and that by the end of the summer, I’ll have to go live somewhere else. Sh-she said he’s going to make me!”

  “I see,” Alan replied. It was exactly the sort of thing that had happened in the spring, when Tracy had last been home from school. “And when did she tell you this?”

  “A little while ago. Everyone was in … in the library, and I was by myself in the living room, and she came in, and she told me. She said that now that her grandfather’s dead, her father owns the house, and … and he’s going to make me go away!”

  “And was anybody else there?”

  Beth hesitated, then shook her head. “N-no …”

  “Well, I’ll bet if Uncle Phillip had heard Tracy say that, he’d have turned her over his knee and given her a spanking. Maybe I’d better just give him a call, and tell him.”

  Beth drew back, horrified. “No! If you call him, then Tracy will know I told, and it’ll just be worse than it already is!”

  Alan nodded solemnly. “Then what do you think we ought to do?”

  “Can’t I come and live with you, Daddy? Please?”

  Alan sighed silently. This, too, was something they’d been through before, and he’d tried to explain over and over why it was best for Beth to live with her mother. But no matter how often he explained it to her, her reply never changed.

  “But I don’t belong there,” she always said. “They’re different from me, and I just don’t belong. If you make me stay there, I’m going to die.”

  And sometimes, when he looked into her huge brown eyes, and smoothed back her soft dark hair—the hair she’d inherited from Carolyn—he almost believed she was right.

  He stood up, and took his daughter by the hand. “Come on, honey,” he said. “I’ll drive you home, and well talk about it on the way.”

  “Home?” Beth asked, her eyes suddenly hopeful. “To your house?”

  “No,” Alan replied. “I’ll drive you back to Hilltop. That’s where you live now, isn’t it?”

  Though Beth said nothing, the eager light faded from her eyes.

  2

  Alan Rogers turned off River Road, shifted his Fiat into low gear, and started up the drive.

  “Almost there.” When there was no response from Beth, he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She sat huddled against the door, her eyes clouded with unhappiness.

  “Act as if,” Alan said. Beth turned to face him.

  “Act as if? What does that mean?”

  “It means if you act as if things are all right, then maybe they will be. Don’t think about what’s wrong—think about what’s right. It helps.”

  “How can it help? Pretending doesn’t change anything.”

  “But it can change how you think about things. Like that apartment I lived in for a while. The one above the drugstore?”

  A hint of a smile played around Beth’s mouth. “You hated that place.”

  “Indeed I did. And why shouldn’t I have? I wasn’t living with you anymore, and I missed you terribly. And the apartment was small and dark and empty. It was awful. And then one day Judy came over.”

  “Judy Parkins?”

  “The very same. Anyway, I was griping about how bad the place was, and she asked me what I’d
do with it if I liked it.”

  “But you didn’t like it,” Beth protested. “You hated it!”

  “That’s what I said. And Judy said, ‘So pretend you like it. What would you do with it?’ So I thought about it, then told her that I’d start by getting rid of the Venetian blinds, and put shutters in, and I’d paint it, and cover the floor with grass mats. And the next weekend she came over, and we did it. And guess what? It turned out the place wasn’t so bad after all.”

  The Fiat passed through the gates of Hilltop House, and Alan drove slowly along the wide circular driveway that skirted a broad expanse of lawn in front of the Sturgess mansion. He brought the car to a halt between a Cadillac and a Mercedes, then sat for a moment staring at the immense house. As always, he was struck less by its size than its strange appearance. Whoever had designed it had apparently been less interested in creating a thing of beauty than in making a declaration of power.

  “All right, all right,” he said, turning a deadpan face to his daughter as though she had spoken. “I’ll admit that grass mats and paint won’t help this place.”

  Built primarily of carved stone, the house spread in two flat-roofed wings from a central core, the main feature of which was an immense stained-glass window—which Alan thought more appropriate to a cathedral than a home—over the massive double front doors. The facade was nearly devoid of decoration, and the only breaks in the roof line were provided by a few chimneys, scattered haphazardly wherever the floor plan had required them.

  There was something vaguely forbidding about the structure, as if the house were trying to defend itself against a hostile world.

  “It’s not like a house at all,” Beth said. “It’s like a museum. I always feel like I’m going to break something.”

  “You’ve only lived here a few months, sweetheart. Give yourself a chance to get used to it.” But even as he spoke the words, Alan wondered if it would be possible for his daughter to be at home in a house such as this. Certainly, he knew, he never could have. “Come on,” he sighed. “Let’s get you back inside.”

  Beth reluctantly got out of the Fiat as Alan held the door open for her, then slipped her hand into her father’s. “Couldn’t I stay with you tonight?” she pleaded. “Please?”

  Alan pulled his daughter close, and dropped his arm over her shoulder. “Don’t make me feel like I’m feeding you to the lions,” he replied, but his attempt at humor sounded hollow even to himself. He reached out and pressed the bell. A moment later the door was opened by the old woman who had been the Sturgesses’ housekeeper for as long as anyone could remember.

  “Beth! Why, where have you been? Your mother’s been looking everywhere for you!”

  “She came down to say hello to me, Hannah. I guess she didn’t tell anyone where she was going.”

  Hannah’s eyes narrowed in mock severity. “Well, you might have told me, mightn’t you, young lady?”

  “I … I’m sorry, Hannah. But I just … I—”

  “I know,” Hannah broke in. She glanced over her shoulder nervously, then lowered her voice. “All the swells standing around acting like they care about old Mr. Conrad, and each other too, for that matter. Don’t see how they can stand themselves.” She reached out and gently drew Beth away from her father and into the house. “Come on into the kitchen and have a cup of cocoa. You too, Alan—”

  “I don’t think so, Hannah. I’d better—”

  “Hannah?” Carolyn’s voice called from inside. “Hannah, who is it?” A second later Carolyn, her face drawn, appeared at the door. Seeing Alan, she fell silent for a few seconds, then nodded with sudden understanding. “She came to you again?”

  Alan’s head bobbed in agreement, and Carolyn hesitated for a moment, then slipped her arms around her daughter. “Darling, what happened? Why didn’t you tell me where you were going?”

  “Y-you were busy.”

  “I’m never too busy for you. You know that—”

  “It was just too much for her,” Alan interjected. “She didn’t know anyone, and—”

  Carolyn glanced at him, then turned to Hannah. “Take her up to her room, will you, Hannah?”

  “I was going to give her some cocoa, ma’am.”

  “Fine. I’ll be there in a minute.” She waited until Hannah and Beth were gone, then faced her ex-husband. “Alan, did something happen? Something Beth won’t want to tell me about?”

  Alan shook his head helplessly. “Carolyn, what can I say? If there’s anything she wants to tell you, she’ll tell you.”

  “But you won’t,” Carolyn said, her voice cool.

  “No, I won’t. We agreed long ago that—”

  “We agreed that we wouldn’t use Beth against each other. But if something happened that I need to know about, you have to tell me.”

  Alan considered his wife’s words carefully, then shook his head. “If you want to know what’s happening with Beth, talk to her. After all, she lives with you, not with me.”

  Carolyn stood at the door until Alan was gone and she could no longer hear his car. Then she closed the immense carved-oak front door and started toward the kitchen. But before she had crossed the foyer, her mother-in-law’s icy voice stopped her.

  “Carolyn, we still have guests.”

  Carolyn hesitated, torn. Then, as if drawn like a puppet on a string, she turned to follow Abigail Sturgess back to the library.

  It was nearly midnight when Carolyn finally went through the house for the last time, making her nightly check to be sure the windows were closed and the doors locked. It was unnecessary—she knew that. Hannah went through the house too, as she had done each night for the last four decades, but Carolyn did it anyway. When Phillip had asked her why one night, she hadn’t really been able to tell him. She’d said that checking the house helped make her feel that it was really hers, and that it was a habit left over from all the years before she’d married Phillip. But it was more than that.

  Part of it was a simple need to reassure herself, for every night before she went to sleep, she listened to the old house creaking and groaning in the darkness until she could stand it no longer, and giving in to what she knew were irrational fears, got up to search through the rooms to make sure everything was as it should be. After the second month—last February—she had decided it was easier simply to make her rounds before she went to bed.

  But it was more than that. There was something about Hilltop House at night—after Abigail had gone to bed—that drew her with a fascination she rarely felt in the daylight. During the day, Hilltop always seemed to her to be trying to shut her out. But at night, it all changed, and the cold stone took on a different feeling, less forbidding and chilly, cradling her, assuring her that no matter what else happened, the house would always be there.

  She wandered slowly through the rooms, pausing in the dining room to gaze, as she often did, at the portraits of all the Sturgesses who had once lived in this house, and were now in the mausoleum or the small graveyard behind it. They gazed down on her, and she sometimes imagined that they—like Abigail—were disapproving of her. But of course that was ridiculous. Their expressions of vague contempt had nothing to do with her.

  Nothing to do with her personally, at any rate.

  Tonight she sank into the chair at the end of the immense dining table, and stared up at the portrait of Samuel Pruett Sturgess. The soft light from the crystal chandelier glowed over the old picture. Carolyn examined it carefully. For some reason she had almost expected the old man’s demeanor to have softened tonight, as if meeting his grandson that afternoon had pleased him.

  But if it had, the portrait gave no hint. Samuel Pruett Sturgess glowered down from the wall as he always had, and Carolyn caught herself wondering once again if the founding Sturgess had been as cruel as he seemed in the artist’s depiction of him, a mean-faced, stern-looking patriarch.

  Had the artist heard the rumors about Samuel Pruett, too, or had the rumors about him only begun after his death? There had
been so many stories whispered about the old man, his rages, his ruthlessness, that some of them must have been true. And in Carolyn’s own family …

  She shuddered involuntarily, and was once more glad that both her parents had died long before she married Phillip Sturgess. In her family, hatred for the Sturgesses had run deep, and all the rumors had been accepted as fact. For the last child of the Deavers to have married a Sturgess would have been, for both her father and mother, the ultimate shame.

  The Deavers had lived in Westover as long as the Sturgesses, perhaps longer. And in Carolyn’s family, the legend had always been that Charles Cobb Deaver—Carolyn’s great-great-grandfather—had been in partnership with Samuel Pruett Sturgess. Charles Deaver had been a cobbler, and the legend had it that Samuel Pruett Sturgess had used him to get the shoe mill started, then squeezed him out. As the mill had grown, and the Sturgess fortunes risen, the Deaver fortunes had declined. Charles had ended up as nothing more than a shift foreman, and found himself in the position of overseeing the labor of his own children. In the end, he had killed himself, but it was an article of faith to Carolyn’s parents that Samuel Pruett Sturgess had murdered him, as surely as if he’d held the gun himself.

  Looking at the portrait of Samuel Pruett Sturgess, Carolyn found it hard to doubt the legend. Certainly there was nothing in the man’s face that hinted at any sort of kindness. It was a pinched face, an avaricious face, and often Carolyn wished it didn’t hang in the dining room, where she had to see it every day. But at the same time, she found the portrait held a strange fascination for her, as if somewhere, buried in the portrait, was the truth behind all the legends.

  She stood up, switched off the light, and made her way back through the vast expanse of the living room to the entry hall. She checked the front door once more, then started up the stairs. On the second-floor landing, she glanced down the north wing, and saw a sliver of light beneath the door to Abigail’s suite. For a moment, she was tempted to go and tap on the door and say good night to the old woman. But in the end, she turned away, knowing that it would do no good. She would only be rebuffed once more. She turned the other way, and hurried down the wide hall to the suite she and Phillip occupied at the opposite end of the house.