House of Reckoning (20 page)

She mounted the second half of the flight, but now there was something else: the air smelled dank and musty.

Like the basement.

Bettina’s heart began to hammer in her chest. What was it? What was going on? “A window must be broken,” she whispered out loud. The words didn’t even sound convincing to herself.

At the top of the stairs, Forlorn, the gray tabby with one ear and no tail, and an expression that had given him his name the moment Bettina first saw him, sat staring at one of the walls with such intensity that she involuntarily followed his gaze.

Again, nothing.

Just a blank wall, unadorned with anything that might have caught the cat’s attention. She scooped him up and held his warm body close, but even the cat’s heat couldn’t penetrate the cold that filled the long corridor.

None of the doors were open.

And two of the animals were still missing.

She started down the corridor, listening at every door before she opened it, then reaching in to switch on a light before pushing the door wide.

All the rooms were empty.

Nothing seemed to be wrong.

And yet nothing felt right.

She had just pulled the door to the blue bedroom closed when the
silence of the house was shattered by Rocky’s yapping bark, and a second later the little terrier came running down the stairs from the third floor. Charging down the corridor, he hurled himself into Bettina’s arms, nearly knocking her over, and garnering a furious hiss from Forlorn.

“What is it?” Bettina demanded as she put the dog back on the floor. “What did you do?”

Rocky only tried to scramble back into her arms.

The temperature in the hallway seemed to drop even further, and the musty smell grew stronger.

Then, as Bettina watched, the last door on the right swung slowly inward, its hinges creaking.

Cooper’s body stiffened and he pressed up against Bettina’s legs.

A whimper emerged from Rocky’s throat as Forlorn uttered a low hiss.

A terrible fear began to engulf Bettina, a terror that seemed to emanate from the room whose door was still creaking open.

Her mouth went dry. She wanted to turn and bolt back down the stairs, flee the house and go—

Go where?

Anywhere! She wanted to be anywhere but here, with the house feeling all wrong and the animals behaving as they never had before and doors opening by themselves and—

And then suddenly Houdini, the ancient—and stone-deaf—white cat who had been living with Bettina for almost twenty years, emerged from the room at the end of the hall.

And Pyewackett was right behind him.

Suddenly, with all the animals back around her, the spell seemed broken.

The house felt almost back to normal, except for the strange smell. Dropping Forlorn to the floor to join the rest of the menagerie, Bettina strode down the wide hallway to the last door, reached in to switch the chandelier on, then looked around.

Inside, a lamp lay broken on the floor—a big, ugly, old midcentury TV lamp in the form of a leaping wolf whose eyes glowed when it was turned on. Bettina had been terrified of it as a child and hated it as an adult.

Well, it was gone now, and good for Houdini for having finally smashed it!

Mystery solved.

She switched off the light and pulled the door closed, shutting off the musty odor. She’d clean up the broken lamp and air out the room over the weekend.

It wasn’t until she was back downstairs and in the kitchen that she wondered how Houdini—and Pyewackett, too—had gotten into that room in the first place. Even she hadn’t been inside it in years. Too many years, actually, given the smell that had built up in it.

On the other hand, getting into closed spaces was what Houdini had always specialized in, which was exactly how he’d gotten his name.

Still …

Stop! Bettina told herself. Don’t freak yourself out.

Shutters, after all, was just a house.

Wasn’t it?

As the clock in the niche under the main stairs chimed nine, Bettina headed back up the stairs, this time to go to bed.

Houdini lay curled up on top of the pages of her thrice-great-grandfather’s manuscript, which was mostly still on the bedside table where she’d left it.

But at least fifty pages were strewn over the floor around the table.

As the other four animals began settling themselves into their usual places for the night—all on her bed—Bettina stroked the white cat, who began to purr. “Whatcha been doing, sweetie? Reading the old man’s tales?” Giving the cat another scratch, she stooped down to gather up the pages the cat had scattered as he made himself a little nest.

The pages in hand, Bettina perched on the edge of the bed, and began to reassemble them, tapping them back into alignment. But when she tried to brush Houdini off the manuscript to return the stray pages to their place, the cat wouldn’t go. And when she reached out to pick him up, the cat lowered his ears and hissed, lightning-fast claws slashing out and narrowly missing her hand.

Bettina jerked reflexively back. “Okay,” she said. “You win.”

She set the fifty-odd pages in her hand next to those the cat was lying on, and moved into her dressing room to get ready for bed. When she returned a few minutes later, now clad in her flannel pajamas and a thick robe, Houdini had shifted position.

Now he was lying on the stack of pages he’d rejected when he first decided to turn the manuscript into a bed. And when Bettina tried once more to move the cat to the bed, Houdini narrowed his eyes again and snarled.

“What the hell is going on with you?” Bettina demanded. Then her eyes shifted to the rest of the animals, all of whom were sitting up and watching her intently, rather than curling into their usual nighttime balls of fur. “What’s going on with
all
of you?”

Forlorn blinked innocently.

Rocky and Pyewackett twitched their tails.

Cooper jumped off the bed and went to the door, but instead of scratching to be let out, he only sat down, apparently planning to continue the sentry duty he’d been performing downstairs earlier.

But what was he standing sentry against?

Bettina put the thought out of her mind, certain that if she didn’t, she’d scare herself out of any sleep at all. Besides, despite all her worries earlier—
oh, all right, her outright fear
—nothing had actually happened.

Nothing except an ugly lamp getting broken.

She slid into bed and tentatively reached for the manuscript, bracing herself against an attack from Houdini, but the cat simply sat where he was, watching her.

She picked up the manuscript and gazed at the top sheet. By chance, Houdini had knocked the pages off at the beginning of a story—if that’s what the collection was—entitled “Carnivore.”

Apt, considering how many of that exact kind of animal she was currently surrounded by. She hesitated.

Maybe this wasn’t the best night to read any more of her ancestor’s strange fantasies. So far the ones she’d read weren’t like any kind of stories she’d ever come across, but more like graphic depictions of some of the terrible things perpetrated by the kind of people who had once been incarcerated on the property.

Yet her ancestor had made no mention of them being case histories or even being based on case histories.

He had presented them as fiction.

His own fiction.

Bettina started to flip through the pages, wondering if there wasn’t something she might want to read other than something called “Carnivore,” but the minute she began, Rocky growled, and Pyewackett lashed out at her bathrobe, his claws extended.

Even Forlorn hissed and showed his fangs.

What was going on? she wondered once again.

These were not her pets. Or at least not the same ones she had left in the house that morning.

They, like the house, seemed to have changed.

It was as if there were a presence within the walls of the mansion that she had never felt before—a menacing presence.

And clearly the animals felt it, too.

“Which is all ridiculous,” she said out loud, but her voice sounded like a tiny whisper in the vastness of the old house.

Her robe still on, Bettina slid under the covers, then drew the collar of the robe snug around her throat. Suddenly certain that she no longer had any choice in the matter, she began to read. Soon she was lost in the story, fascinated by the tale of a man and his dog.

Not just a dog.

A German shepherd, large, and lithe, and perfectly trained, and utterly obedient to its master.

Bettina Philips tried to stop reading when she came to the passage where the man bound his pet to a table and picked up a scalpel.

She tried to stop, but she couldn’t.

Either the animals—or the strange presence in the house—kept her turning page after page after page.

S
hep Dunnigan didn’t have to listen to the warden as he droned on with the standard politically correct speech about sexual harassment. He could have given the speech himself, he’d heard it so many times, but it never hurt to show the boss that he was a team player. Most of the rest of the guards and administrators of the prison that were gathered in the big meeting room seemed to feel the same way; most of the people around him were either checking their e-mails on their BlackBerries, texting someone with their phones, or doing anything other than listen to one more pile of P.C. crap handed down by the state, like calling the prison a “correctional facility.” Who’d thought that one up? The same clowns who had tried to call prisons “penitentiaries” for a few decades? And when had the same people decided to call the guards “correctional officers”?

Who was kidding whom? This was a prison, and most of the people in it were neither penitent nor interested in being “corrected.” They were interested in getting out, and that was pretty much all they were interested in. Shep, on the other hand, was interested in keeping them in, as were most of the rest of the people around him.

Including Mitch Garvey, who had plopped himself down in the
chair next to Shep, and was even less interested in what the warden was saying than Shep. On the other hand, Shep knew Mitch didn’t like him any more than he liked Mitch, so why had Mitch sat down next to him?

It didn’t take more than a second after the warden finished his talk before Shep found out.

“So,” Mitch said, pulling the top off his paper cup of the stale coffee the prison cafeteria seemed to specialize in. “What did you and Lily do about that kid of yours?”

Shep flipped through his memory of the previous evening. Nick had done nothing that required disciplinary action. Not that he knew about, anyway. “What do you mean?”

Mitch’s eyebrows went up and his lips curled into a hint of a smirk. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?” Shep asked, wishing Mitch would just get to the point. But he never did; instead he strung you along, paying out information like fishing line, a little bit at a time, doing whatever he could to make himself seem more important than he was.

“About the dog?” Mitch said, looking Shep square in the eye. “You don’t know about Dan West’s dog?”

Shep wanted to shake Garvey, but kept his placid expression carefully in place. “No,” he said calmly. “What about the dog?”

Mitch leaned closer than Shep would have liked. “Seems like Nick and our foster kid killed the sheriff’s dog.”

“Are you nuts?” Shep demanded, pulling away from him.

“Ask Dan,” Mitch said, the smirk on his lips starting to spread across his face.

Shep could barely believe it. Lily would have said something.

Wouldn’t she?

No, she wouldn’t. Not if she thought it might mean Nick would be sent back to the hospital. Shep stood up, nodded to the warden, and left the room. The minute he was back in his office, he picked up the phone and dialed the sheriff’s number.

“Results from the vet aren’t in yet,” Dan West told him after confirming that his dog had, indeed, died yesterday and that Nick and Sarah Crane seemed somehow to be involved, but so, apparently, were a few other people, Dan added, his own son among them. “Don’t know
what happened yet. Looked to me like a clean slice that cut the dog wide open. Conner and his friends say they had nothing to do with it, but there’s no evidence pointing at Nick or the girl, either.”

“Weird,” Shep said.

“Very,” Dan responded. “And you better believe I’m going to get to the bottom of it, whatever it is.”

“Keep me posted, okay?”

“Sure thing.”

Shep hung up the phone and leaned back in his desk chair.

Maybe Lily was right—Dan didn’t seem to have Nick under any serious suspicion. On the other hand, she knew just what he thought of Mitch Garvey, and the least she could have done was give him a heads-up so he wouldn’t look like an idiot in front of one of the guards, especially Mitch.

He’d have a talk with Nick when he got home.

He’d talk with Nick, and then he’d have a little chat with Lily.

Mitch waited until the last possible moment before finally crumpling up the paper coffee cup, tossing it into the trash barrel by the door, and heading back to work.

Except he wasn’t going back to the cellblock he normally worked. He was going to pay a little visit to Ed Crane.

Mitch crossed the yard with his usual swagger, checked with the supervisor in the block housing Crane, then headed down the long line of cells on the second tier until he came to the last one.

Ed Crane was lying on his bunk staring into space with a closed library book on his chest, but stood up as Mitch approached.

Mitch walked into the neat cell and looked around for something that would give him an excuse to write the son of a bitch up, but it seemed that Crane was the kind of prisoner he hated most—took care of his cell, didn’t make trouble for anyone, and didn’t even bother to claim he shouldn’t be there. Finally, Mitch settled on the charcoal portrait of Sarah that Ed Crane had taped neatly to the wall above his bed. “Your daughter draw that?”

Ed nodded.

“Some artist, huh?”

Ed nodded again, but more slowly this time. What was going on? Why was this guy talking about Sarah?