House of Reckoning Read online

  Then she was gone, slamming the bedroom door behind her.

  Give it time, the echo of her mother whispered. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems at first. Taking a deep breath and ignoring the pain in her leg, Sarah leaned over, braced herself on the dresser with her left hand, and used her right to work the bottom drawer of the dresser open. She peered down into the empty drawer, then over to her full suitcase, and found herself smiling. There wasn’t going to be a problem at all—everything she owned would easily fit in the single drawer, and the suitcase itself would go under the bed. Maybe her mother was right: maybe things wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  Ten minutes later everything was folded and in the drawer, and Sarah was working the suitcase into the space under the bed when she heard the front door slam and a voice shout out.

  A man’s voice.

  Mitch Garvey was home.

  “Sarah?” she heard Angie call up the stairs. “Come down and meet your new father.”

  My new father? Sarah silently echoed. I already have a father. A father who loves me. “Just a minute,” she called back.

  The man’s voice—an angry voice—roared up from below. “Not in a minute, young lady! Now. Come down right now. Don’t make me stand here waiting for you. Not ever.”

  Moving as quickly as she could, Sarah started for the door, but it seemed to take forever just to limp across the room. Finally, though, she was there, pulling the door open and lurching toward the top of the stairs, where she hung tightly to the banister for a moment, both to steady herself and let the pain in her hip and leg ease slightly before she started down. At the foot of the stairs, two faces were tipped up, two pairs of eyes were looking at her.

  Angie Garvey was smiling that same not-quite-warm smile Sarah had seen earlier.

  Mitch Garvey was scowling, his face red.

  Grasping the handrail, Sarah took the first awkward step down, then another.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mitch Garvey said, his voice grating with anger he didn’t even bother to conceal. “They sent us a damn cripple!”

  Sarah’s fingers trembled under her foster mother’s critical eye as Angie straightened every one of the five forks, centering each on its perfectly folded napkin. “Better,” Angie declared, looking pointedly at Sarah. “Anything worth doing is worth doing right.” She turned to Tiffany, who sat curled up on the chair in the living room, watching TV. “Dinner’s ready. Go get your brother and your father.”

  Tiffany jumped up, ran to the bottom of the stairs and called out,

  “Dad! Zach! Dinnertime!”

  Sarah took an uncertain step back from the table, not knowing which place was hers, while Angie wiped the top of the pepper shaker with the palm of her hand.

  Moments later a teenage boy, a little older than Tiffany, but with the same dark eyes, came down the stairs dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.

  “Sarah, this is your foster brother, Zach,” Angie said.

  “Hey,” Zach said, giving her the barest of glances before he pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “Hi,” Sarah said, her voice weaker than she intended. She cleared her throat.

  Moments later Mitch Garvey took his place at the head of the table, and Tiffany sat next to her brother.

  Sarah pulled out the remaining chair and was about to sit when Angie said, “You may serve now, Sarah.”

  Sarah froze for a second, then realized there was no food on the table. She moved into the kitchen as quickly as she could and brought back bowls of mashed potatoes and string beans, setting them on the table and waiting for some sign of Angie’s approval.

  When Angie said nothing, she went back for the platter of chicken breasts, and by the time she uncovered them, put a fork on the platter, and limped back to the table, Mitch was saying, “Amen,” and as she set the platter down, everyone began to fill their plates.

  Sarah finally took her seat, but just as she was starting to relax, she heard Mitch Garvey say, “Bread and butter.”

  Sarah looked up to see Angie peering at her, one eyebrow arched accusingly, and suddenly the entire scope of her role in this household was crystal clear.

  She was the help.

  The maid.

  The foster child who was paid for her work with room and board.

  She pushed back her chair and struggled to her feet. In the kitchen, she found butter in the refrigerator and a loaf of bread in the cabinet. She put five slices on a small plate and set them in front of Mitch. Then, stifling the sigh that rose in her chest, she sat down once again and slid her napkin from the table to her lap.

  By the time the dishes were passed to her, Sarah had to scrape the sides of the bowl for a spoonful of potatoes, took the last four green beans—three of which looked like they’d been starting to rot when they were cooked, and the half chicken breast that was left after her new foster father took the other half to add to his already filled plate. She started eating, waiting for the chatter that always filled the farmhouse kitchen at dinnertime to begin. But the Garveys ate in a silence that dragged on until finally Tiffany held up her glass and looked accusingly across the table at her. “Water?”

  The single word sent Sarah back to her feet. Her hip and leg stiffening from the long day that still hadn’t come to an end, she took Tiffany’s glass and limped to the kitchen. As she filled the glass from the pitcher of cold water in the refrigerator, she heard Zach’s voice.

  “Kickoff.”

  By the time she’d put the pitcher back in the refrigerator and returned to the dining room, the table was empty.

  Empty except for all the dirty dishes.

  The family had moved into the living room to watch the game, and Sarah, without being told, knew exactly what was expected of her. She set the water down by Tiffany’s abandoned plate, then sat down at her own place and silently finished her meal.

  Forty minutes later Sarah gave the spotless kitchen one final inspection and hung up the damp dish towel. She’d never minded cleaning up after dinner; she always did it at the farm, while she listened to her parents talking farm business as they lingered over their coffee. And when she was done, it always made her feel good to have the kitchen fresh and ready for the next morning.

  She turned off the light and slowly made her way though the living room. Everyone but Zach was still staring at the television, while Zach himself was nowhere to be seen.

  No one so much as spoke to her as she passed them on the way to the stairs.

  The climb to the top seemed longer than she would have thought possible, and it seemed as if fire were coursing through her hip and leg with every step. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she clung to the banister with both hands and slowly made her way up, pausing at the top to catch her breath.

  Zach was in his room, talking on his cell phone. Sarah glanced at him lounging on his bed as she passed his open door a moment later.

  “Hell no, she isn’t hot,” she heard him saying. “She’s a crip.” He glanced up at her, then quickly looked away again. “And an ugly one, too.” He reached out with his leg, caught the edge of the open door with his toe, and slammed it in her face.

  Four years, Sarah thought as she brushed her teeth and put on her nightgown a few minutes later. How was she going to get through four years in this house, with these people? Then, even before she could formulate an answer to her question, she remembered how her father would be spending the next four years, and a lot more as well. Finished in the bathroom, she made her way back to the bedroom, put the linens onto the bed, and slipped between the sheets.

  She turned out the nightstand light.

  And thought once again of her father.

  If he could get through the next four years, so could she.

  And she’d do it without the crutches that were still standing by the front door downstairs in case she needed them, and she’d do it without complaining.

  And tomorrow, she told herself, would be a better day.

  Her father was smiling at her, a sad smile,
his face lined and gray. It was the same smile he’d given her at her mother’s funeral. But they weren’t at the graveyard—they were somewhere else. She tried to look around, but everything was cloaked in a damp gray fog.

  Slowly, the fog began to lift, and Sarah knew where they were.

  The mansion—the enormous house she’d dreamed about before, the one that was empty but not empty, that was filled with voices she could not hear, people she could not see.

  But this time she wasn’t alone. Her father was with her, and someone else, too.

  Her mother?

  She turned, searching the shadows around her, but saw nothing. And when she turned back, her father was walking away from her. She wanted to cry, and reached out as if to touch him, to pull him back, but just as she was about to reach him something happened and—

  Sarah woke up, a sob rising in her throat.

  The dream had been so real that the tears she’d tried to hold back in her sleep now ran from the corners of her eyes.

  She wiped at them with the sleeve of her pajamas, then took a couple of deep breaths and tried to calm her heart.

  And tried to remember what happened at the very end of the dream, what happened that jerked her awake.

  Tiffany breathed softly in the bed by the closed window. The bedroom door was closed, too, and the room felt so hot and stuffy she felt as if she were suffocating. She threw off the quilt, but that barely helped—she wasn’t quite so hot, but there was still no air in the room and she could hardly breathe.

  A drink. That’s what she needed.

  Maybe she should go to the bathroom and get a glass of water. But what if someone woke up? What if she ran into Zach, or Mrs. Garvey?

  Better to simply try to ignore it all, relax back into the pillow and go back to sleep.

  Where the terrible dream would be waiting for her.

  Her stomach growled.

  If she were at home on the farm, she’d just go get a glass of milk, then turn on her nightstand light and read for a while. If her mother was also awake—as she’d been so often during those last months—they’d snuggle under an afghan on the couch, wrapped up together, and just talk for a while. Not about anything.

  Just talk.

  Suddenly missing her mother so badly she knew she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, Sarah slid out of bed and carefully tested her injured leg. It was sore but not so bad that she couldn’t stand it. She slid her feet into her slippers and silently left the bedroom.

  Even the air at the top of the stairs was fresher than in the bedroom. Maybe tomorrow she’d ask Tiffany if they could sleep with the door open. Or at least the window. At home they’d always slept with the windows open, even in the middle of winter.

  She paused at the top of the stairs, which seemed somehow to have become steeper and longer than when she climbed them earlier. What if she stumbled? What if she wound up at the bottom in a heap with her one good leg broken? She wouldn’t—she couldn’t. Steeling herself, Sarah made her way slowly down to the kitchen. Pepper got up from his bed in the corner of the mud room, stretched himself, then trotted over to lick her ankles.

  Very quietly, Sarah poured herself a glass of milk. She was tempted to put it in the microwave for a few seconds, but the silence in the house seemed so complete that she was sure even the sound of the machine’s fan would waken somebody else.

  She opened the kitchen window just enough to feel the cool draft, and stood for a moment, sipping the cold milk as the stream of air blew across her flushed cheeks.

  Suddenly, the kitchen was flooded with light, and Sarah whirled to see Mitch Garvey standing in the doorway, clad only in his underwear, scratching his belly. “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.

  “I—I—I just came down for a glass of milk,” Sarah stammered, trying to look anywhere in the room except at her foster father’s nearly naked figure.

  “You!” Mitch said. “Back to bed.”

  Startled, Sarah looked up to see him pointing at the mud room, and Pepper, tail down, slinking back toward his pile of old towels. With the dog banished, Mitch reached across her and slammed the window shut. “Think we can afford to heat the whole planet?” he demanded. “It’s November, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah breathed, shrinking away from him. “I couldn’t sleep, I was too hot, and I just—”

  “You just thought you’d come down here and steal milk?”

  “Steal? No, I—”

  He took the glass from her hand. “Milk is expensive, and Angie’s a good planner. She knows what she’s gonna use this for, and there isn’t any extra.”

  Sarah’s cheeks burned. “I—I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “If you’re thirsty, drink water,” Garvey told her, pouring the milk back into the carton, then pulling a beer out of the refrigerator before closing its door. “Better for you, anyway.” He twisted the cap off the beer and took a long swallow, his eyes steady on her.

  Sarah crossed her arms in front of her chest, and wished she’d put on her robe.

  “You better go back to bed,” Mitch said.

  The smell of beer on his breath brought back the memory of that last terrible night on the farm when her father opened one beer after another, and Sarah suddenly wanted to be as far away from Mitch Garvey as she could get. She ducked past him through the kitchen door, but he followed her through the living room and stood at the bottom of the stairs, drinking his beer and watching every painful step she took as she made her way back up to the second floor.

  The bedroom seemed even stuffier and hotter than when she awoke from the dream, but there was no way she would leave the door open, not given how she’d felt as her foster father watched her climbing the stairs a moment ago. Even if it meant she’d lie awake for the rest of the night, tossing and turning, and be a wreck for her first day of school, it would be better than having Mitch Garvey staring in at her as she slept.

  Then she remembered her pain pills. She hadn’t taken any for almost two weeks, because whenever she did, they instantly made her drowsy.

  Which was exactly what she needed right now.

  With a glance at Tiffany’s still form in the bed by the window, Sarah quietly opened the bottom dresser drawer, shook one pill out of the prescription bottle, put the bottle back under her clothes, then went to the bathroom and washed the capsule down with a glass of water. Hoping the pill would allow her to sleep well enough to let her get through her first day at her new school, she crept back into her bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and drifted into sleep.

  Tiffany waited until she heard Sarah’s deep, regular breathing, then slipped silently out of bed, opened Sarah’s dresser drawer and felt around until her fingers closed on the prescription pill bottle. Using the tiny flashlight she kept in the drawer of her nightstand, she studied the label on the plastic bottle. She didn’t recognize the name of the drug, but the red sticker warning that it could be habit-forming told her all she needed to know.

  Whatever they were, someone at school would be willing to buy them. Maybe she’d try to remember the drug’s name to look it up on the Internet, but that part didn’t really matter. She could sell anything that might get someone high.

  Tiffany shook out a half-dozen pills, then put the bottle back, stashed the pills in a little zipper pocket in her backpack, and went back to bed.

  Tomorrow, after school, she’d be going shopping.

  Chapter Five

  Sarah sat in the front row of her biology class, holding her emotions firmly in check. She wanted to cry, but not because of the pain in her leg and hip. She was used to that; in fact, most of the time she could almost ignore it. What she couldn’t ignore was that everyone was looking at and whispering about her.

  But not talking to her.

  And it was only third period.

  At home, she’d loved going to school. School was easy and fun and everyone was a friend and it was the best part of the day.

  Here, fi
nding her locker and her classrooms had proved almost impossible when she got caught up in the swirling rivers of students that flooded the hallways of Warwick High School between classes.

  At home, the school was small, and all on the same floor. Here, she’d already gone up and down the big marble staircase in the center of the building four times. And either they hadn’t been teaching her anything at her old school or she simply hadn’t learned it, since most of the morning she had no idea what her teachers were talking about.

  But worst of all, she had no friends.

  She’d known she was going to be the new girl.

  But she hadn’t realized that she would be the weird, gimpy girl.

  The girl whose father killed someone and was in the penitentiary just outside of town.

  The girl whose father had run over her.

  Tried to kill her.

  She’d heard it all as the morning dragged on, heard the bits of conversations as people passed her, felt eyes watching her, then seen people quickly look away when she turned around.

  And now she felt like crying, which wouldn’t help at all. In fact, it would only make it worse. She chewed on the side of her thumb to keep the tears at bay and tried to listen to the teacher, and when the bell rang, she consulted the little printed schedule they’d given her at the office that morning.

  Lunch period. Was it really possible? Was she going to have an hour when she didn’t have to sit in another classroom wondering if she’d ever be able to catch up with the other kids after the weeks she lost in rehab?

  She found her locker, dropped off her heavy biology book, put the literature book she’d need in the class after lunch into her backpack, then followed a stream of kids to the cafeteria.

  The three dollars Angie gave her that morning bought a small carton of milk, an egg salad sandwich, and a bag of chips. The change from the three dollars safe in her backpack, she balanced the tray carefully and scanned the room for an empty chair, already starting to feel her bad leg threatening to give out.

  She spotted Zach Garvey, but there were no vacant seats at his table, let alone any girls. Besides, even from where she stood, she could feel their eyes on her, and when she finally limped by Zach’s table on her way toward an empty place at the table where Tiffany sat with her girlfriends, she heard someone whisper a few words: “… killed some guy, then ran over her …”