Nightshade Page 6

  The box drawing her like a magnet, Joan moved toward it, her fingers untying the string and lifting the lid almost of their own volition.

  And then, from behind her, she heard her mother’s voice.

  “What are you doing? How dare you touch that box!”

  Joan spun around, her hands going behind her back as if to hide from her mother’s wrath.

  “Useless!” her mother said, shoving her out of Cynthia’s room and closing the door so she couldn’t even see the box, let alone the beautiful dress inside. “What if you’d ruined it? What if you’d spoiled the most wonderful night of your sister’s life?”

  * * *

  BUT SHE HADN’T ruined the most wonderful night of Cynthia’s life.

  And, despite what Mrs. Fillmore had promised, she’d never had a prom dress of her own.

  “Useless!” she heard her mother mutter behind her. “You’re just as useless now as you ever were. I don’t know why I ever had you!”

  I don’t either, Joan thought. I truly don’t. But she said nothing, reminding herself once more that her mother didn’t mean what she was saying.

  It will be all right, she insisted to herself as she carefully hung the dress in the exact spot her mother wanted it. I’ll get through this.

  I’ll get through this, just as I’ve gotten through everything else.

  But even as she repeated the reassurances to herself, she still heard her mother’s angry words echoing in her mind.

  Useless . . . useless . . . useless . . .

  * * *

  BILL HAPGOOD GAZED down the fourth fairway of the granite Falls Golf Club course. The fourth hole had always been his favorite — the fairway ran 180 yards from the tee, then veered sharply to the right to proceed another 150 yards to the hole. There was a dense stand of forest to the right of the first run, and if you couldn’t control your slice, there was no chance of finding the ball. On the left was a grove of pines that Bill’s father had planted (“Why should the hookers get off easy?” George Hapgood, a notorious slicer, had complained, instantly earning himself a reputation as being a stalwart foe of prostitution, a profession that no one in Granite Falls was practicing anyway.) But once you got successfully through the narrow slot off the tee and made the turn to the right, you discovered that your troubles had just begun. The woods were still on the right, but now there was a pond on the left, and six deep bunkers guarding the green, which most members were absolutely certain was becoming smaller every year. There were even rumors that Bill himself sometimes snuck onto the course at night to cut away small sections of the fourth green, making the sand traps even larger than they already were.

  Though the rumors weren’t true, no one would have been surprised to find out that they were: indeed, there wasn’t a soul in Granite Falls who could even remember a time when a Hapgood wasn’t tinkering with the course; Bill’s grandfather carved the first nine holes out of his farm sixty years earlier, and he and his friends had built the original clubhouse themselves. Bill’s father had figured out how to add enough new tee boxes to at least half-convince the membership that eighteen holes wasn’t just a matter of going twice around the original nine, and Bill himself hadn’t missed a workday since he’d inherited his father’s membership when he was still in college. Indeed, the old hickory clubs his father had sawn off to teach Bill the game when he was four — and that Bill had used to teach Matt when he was five — were still stored in the club’s locker shed, waiting for the day when he could use them to teach Matt’s son.

  Matt’s son.

  His grandson.

  Not his grandson, he reminded himself. His step-grandson. Not for the first time, he wondered if he’d made a mistake not adopting Matt when he and Joan first got married. But it had been impossible then, for his grandfather was still alive, and Bill would never forget the scene he’d had in the den the night before his wedding when he broached the subject to the old man, who had only reluctantly left his retirement home in Scottsdale to come to the wedding.

  “Never!” William Hughes Hapgood had roared. “It’s bad enough that you’re marrying that Moore girl at all. But to even think of adopting her bastard — ”

  “Come on, Grandpa! Nobody uses that word anymore. It’s archaic!”

  “Morality is not archaic,” W.H. had growled, his brow furrowing dangerously. “And don’t begin prattling about modern times.”

  “I won’t prattle about them if you won’t try to pretend they don’t exist,” Bill replied.

  W.H.’s features had grown as hard as the New Hampshire granite from which he’d sprung. “I’m not forbidding you to marry this Joan person, am I? But I draw the line at adopting her — ” He cut himself short, reading the danger signals in his grandson’s eyes. “ — her son,” he finally went on. “We have no idea who the child’s father was, and I can only assume that since she’s never told anyone, she’s not terribly proud of whoever he was. And while you may find it old-fashioned, I still believe that in the long run, breeding will out. Know the lineage, and you know the man. But if you don’t know the lineage — ”

  “You can’t trust the man.” Bill finished the phrase that had been drilled into him since childhood like a catechism, and in the end he’d given in to his grandfather’s wishes.

  Just as Joan had given in to her mother’s wishes.

  But it wasn’t the same thing, Bill told himself as he teed up his ball and took a couple of practice swings. Matthew Moore had never disrupted his life; if anything, Matt had been the son he’d always hoped for, and in the end even old W.H. had grudgingly conceded that Matt wasn’t “as bad as I was expecting.”

  Emily Moore, on the other hand, was even worse than Bill had been expecting, and now, as he lined up his drive, his eyes rested for a moment on the chimneys of his house, just visible above the grove of trees that stood at the far end of the fairway, beyond the dogleg.

  Maybe he should have gone back this morning, just to make certain things were all right. After all, if Emily could set fire to her own house, there was no reason she couldn’t do the same to his.

  But no — if he’d gone back so soon after leaving, Joan would take it as a sign that he might move back in, and until Emily was gone, that wasn’t going to happen. Not given the condition Matt had been in when he’d first moved from his grandmother’s house into Hapgood Farm. Even now, ten years later, Bill remembered how afraid Matt had been to go to sleep those first few nights. Though the boy had never been able to tell him exactly what his nightmares were about, Bill was certain he knew the cause: Emily. Though he suspected the woman had never exchanged more than a word or two with his grandfather in her life, she seemed to share W.H. Hapgood’s archaic ideas about lineage and breeding, even though she had none herself.

  None, at least, that anyone knew of.

  Joan’s bastard.

  That’s how she’d always referred to her grandson. And with her feeling that way, how could Matt not have nightmares? So Bill had come up with the Night-Knight, and stayed up with Matt, reading to him and reassuring him that there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, and afterward the nightmares that had plagued Matt in Emily Moore’s house had vanished.

  But with Emily in the house, how long would it be before they came back?

  Now, his hands clenched tightly on his driver, Bill began his downswing, and immediately knew that the shot would go wrong. As the ball curved off into the woods, cracked against two trees, then dropped into a thicket of mountain laurel, he heard Gerry Conroe chuckle.

  “Thought you said you were just fine,” the publisher of the Granite Falls Ledger said sardonically.

  “I am just fine,” Bill growled, sounding more like his grandfather than he would have liked.

  “That’s the third drive you’ve blown,” said Marty Holmes, who, along with Paul Arneson, made up the rest of their regular foursome. “A couple more drives like that and I might be able to retire early.”

  His jaw clenching, Bill teed up a second ball, told
himself to relax, and swung again.

  As the second ball disappeared into the woods, he decided that Gerry Conroe was right.

  He was upset. He was very upset, and he was going to do something about it.

  The only question was what. But even as the question came into his mind, so did a possible answer.

  Maybe it was time to do what he’d been thinking about doing for two years.

  Fishing his cellular phone out of his golf bag, he dialed his lawyer’s number.

  “That better not be business,” Marty Holmes said as Bill began talking. “You know the club rule about discussing business on the course.”

  “And you know how often it’s enforced,” Bill replied as he waited for the attorney to come onto the line. “But it doesn’t matter. This is just about as personal as it gets.”

  As the other three started down the fairway, Bill hung back.

  No sense letting the whole town know what he was thinking of doing.

  * * *

  “JEEZ, MOORE! WHAT’S wrong with you today?”

  The anger in Pete Arneson’s voice grated on Matt, and his right hand clenched into a fist. What was Pete so pissed about? All he’d done was miss a catch!

  Except that it wasn’t just one catch. So far, he’d missed every pass Pete had thrown him, and on two of the plays he hadn’t even been able to remember which pattern he was supposed to run. On the last play, Eric Holmes had somehow managed to knock him off stride as he began to run, and that had never happened before. But long before he was ready to receive Pete’s pass, the ball sailed over his head, dropping to the ground near the goal post.

  Fifteen lousy yards, and he hadn’t even come close to hitting his mark!

  “Screw you,” he snarled.

  Pete’s eyes widened. “ ‘Screw you’?” he repeated. “That’s all you’ve got to say? Then fine, Moore — screw you too.” He turned to Kent Stackworth. “After that last play, they’ll expect me to try to run this time. So I’m passing to you.”

  “Me?” Stackworth repeated. What was going on? Pete always passed to Matt — they were like a team within a team.

  “Yes, you,” Arneson shot back. “You can’t do any worse than Moore, can you? As for you, Moore, you’re blocking on this play.”

  A few seconds later Matt, seething, was back on the line, facing Eric Holmes.

  Concentrate, he told himself. Just forget about everything else and focus. But as he crouched down, Pete Arneson’s words kept running through his mind, and when he heard the last number of the count, something happened.

  Instead of launching himself into Eric Holmes and blocking him, Matt spun out to the right, letting Eric lunge past him. A second later he heard Pete Arneson’s outraged howl as Eric took him down, but it didn’t matter.

  Matt was already off the field.

  “Moore!” he heard the coach shouting as he started toward the locker room.

  Matt kept walking.

  “Moore! Hold it right there!”

  Matt hesitated, but then turned to face the coach, who was walking quickly toward him.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” Ted Stevens asked. “Since when do you just walk off the field in the middle of a play?”

  Matt’s jaw tightened and his right hand clenched into a fist.

  The coach’s tone changed when he saw the uncharacteristic anger in Matt’s face. “What is it, Matt?” he asked. “What’s going on?” For a moment Matt’s expression didn’t change, but then, as if he’d made a decision, Matt unclenched his fist and his shoulders slumped.

  “I just don’t feel very good today.”

  “You sick?”

  Matt shrugged. “I didn’t sleep very well last night.” He hesitated, then: “And my dad left.”

  Suddenly, Ted Stevens understood. No wonder the boy’s game had been off. “You want to talk about it?” he offered. “It can be pretty rough when your folks split up.”

  “He’s not my father,” Matt said, a little too quickly. “He’s just my stepfather.”

  Stevens knew better than to challenge the defensiveness in Matt’s words, but instead slung a friendly arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you call it a day and hit the showers? And if you want to talk, I’ll be in my office. Okay?”

  Matt shrugged the coach’s arm off. “Hey, it’s no big deal,” he said. “Everybody’s folks split up, right?”

  Again the coach knew better than to try to argue. “I’ll be in my office,” he repeated. “The door’s always open.”

  Right, Matt thought as he went to his locker, stripped out of his jersey and padding, then headed for the showers. Everybody wants to talk about it.

  He turned the hot water up until the needle spray was nearly scalding and stepped under it, letting it sluice the sweat off his body. But even the stream of hot water could do nothing to ease the tension that had been building in him all through last night and then the long day at school. He finally shut off the shower, toweled himself dry, and pulled on his clothes.

  As he headed for the door he didn’t even glance in the direction of the coach’s office.

  Nor did he head out Manchester Road toward Hapgood Farm.

  Instead he found himself walking toward Burlington Avenue.

  Five minutes later he was standing in front of his grandmother’s house. From where he stood, there was no sign of the fire at all, but even though it had been only a week since his grandmother had moved in with his own family, the house had already taken on a look of abandonment.

  “It’s weird, isn’t it?”

  Matt turned to see Becky Adams smiling at him. Before Matt’s mother had married his stepfather and they’d moved away from Burlington Avenue, Becky had been his best friend. Now, ten years later, he wasn’t sure if they were friends at all; it wasn’t just his family and address that had changed, but the crowd he hung out with as well. And there was Becky’s mother too. His eyes automatically flicked across the street toward the Adams house as he wondered if Becky’s mother was drunk, but a second later he pulled his gaze self-consciously away. Then he relaxed: even if Becky had noticed his glance, she couldn’t know what he was thinking.

  “What’s weird?” Matt countered. “It’s just a house.” But even as he spoke the words, he knew it wasn’t “just a house” at all. It was the house of the nightmares and nameless terrors of his early childhood, along with the frightening woman who was his grandmother. Now, as he gazed at it, a thought crept into his head.

  Why couldn’t it have burned to the ground? And why couldn’t she have been in it?

  “All the little kids on the block think it’s haunted,” Becky said.

  “I bet they think my grandmother’s a witch too.”

  Though Becky shook her head, her blush told him the truth.

  “Well, she’s not,” he went on. “She’s just — ” He fell silent as fragments of the last few days flitted through his memory. Crazy, he wanted to say. She’s just crazy. But when he spoke, his words were carefully tempered: “She’s just sick, that’s all.”

  “How come your mom didn’t put her in a nursing home?”

  “Why would she?” Matt countered.

  Becky Adams’s flush deepened. “Well, I mean — ” she stammered. “Like — everyone knows how she treats your mom. And my mom said — ”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” Matt said, his voice harsh enough to make Becky flinch. “Look, Becky, I’m sorry,” he quickly went on when he saw her reaction. “It’s just — oh, Jeez, I don’t know . . .”

  His voice trailed off and he turned away, suddenly wanting to be by himself.

  “Matt?” Becky called.

  He turned back.

  “If there’s anything I can do . . . I mean to help . . .”

  “There’s not,” Matt said. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

  CHAPTER 5

  BILL HAPGOOD SLOWED his car to a stop as he came to the black wrought-iron ga
tes of the home he’d left almost three weeks earlier. This would be the first time he’d set foot on the property since the night he packed his suitcase and moved into the Granite Falls Inn. He was still there, camping out in the two-room suite on the second floor whose main attraction, for him, was that it faced away from his own house. Even tonight he was reluctant to go back; indeed, he’d almost called Joan an hour ago to tell her he wouldn’t be there after all. In the end, though, he succumbed to his mother’s social dictum that the only valid excuse not to attend a dinner party is death. “People like us do not ruin someone’s evening merely because we don’t feel well, or are out of sorts,” she’d instructed him when he was a child. “We attend the dinners we’ve accepted, and eat whatever is put before us. And we expect no less of others.”

  Aside from his mother’s rule, tonight’s dinner party was a special event that had been on the calendar for months. In truth, the dinner had been on the calendar for years, for every Hapgood boy was given a formal dinner on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, and it had never occurred to Bill not to continue the tradition for Matt simply because his name was Moore instead of Hapgood. “I raised him,” he said when Gerry Conroe suggested that perhaps the dinner was inappropriate for a stepson. “I’ve brought him up to be a Hapgood, and I’m proud to be able to say that I’ve succeeded.” So tonight the table would be set for six: Gerry and Nancy Conroe would bring Kelly to join Matt and his parents.

  Tomorrow, the rest of the Hapgood sixteenth birthday tradition would be carried out:

  At dawn, he and Matt would go hunting, along with Marty and Eric Holmes, and Paul and Pete Arneson.

  In the afternoon, he and Matt would play a round of golf.

  And tomorrow night would be the big party at the house for Matt and all his friends.

  Tonight and tomorrow, at least, they could all pretend that nothing was wrong. And the next day . . .

  The next day will take care of itself, Bill told himself as he put the car back in gear and drove through the gates. Pulling up in front of the big brick house a few moments later, he switched off the ignition, but didn’t immediately leave the car. Instead he sat there, looking at the house, trying to get a sense of what might be happening inside. And he wondered if he really wanted to go back in, with Emily Moore still there. She’s just an old woman, he reminded himself. None of this is her fault. He got out of the car, strode up to the front door, then hesitated before knocking.