House of Reckoning (8 page)

He dropped his tray on the counter next to the kitchen door, then fled to the library, where at least he might hide in the stacks until his medicine kicked in.

But one of these days the medicine wasn’t going to work anymore.

And then his only hope might be the girl whose mere presence seemed to calm the voices, if not completely silence them.

Sarah paused at the door of the art room, steeling herself against the glare she’d receive from the teacher for being five minutes late for the last class of the day. Then would come the stares of her classmates. But
she’d moved as fast as she could, and as she pushed her way into the art studio, her whole body ached.

Instead of glaring at her, though, the teacher actually smiled, pausing in the midst of distributing oversized sheets of drawing paper to the class. “Come on in. You must be Sarah Crane.”

“Sorry I’m late,” Sarah muttered, sliding as inconspicuously as she could into the closest empty chair to the door. She shrugged out of her heavy backpack and let it drop to the floor next to her seat.

“You’ve all read the textbook about perspective,” the teacher said, laying a sheet of heavy drawing paper on the table in front of Sarah. “Today we’re going to put that theory into practice.”

But Sarah hadn’t read the textbook and knew nothing about perspective. So here was yet another class for which she was completely unprepared. She gazed down at the blank sheet of paper the teacher placed in front of her and wondered what she was going to do. But then the teacher was speaking again, and Sarah felt a twinge of hope—she was giving the class a quick review of the text, and though she seemed to be talking to the whole class, Sarah had a feeling the words were being spoken just for her.

She stole a look at her class schedule to remind herself of the teacher’s name.

Philips. Bettina Philips.

“Things that are closer are larger,” Ms. Philips was saying as Sarah looked up again. “If you draw a road, the telephone poles closest are tallest and biggest. For the picture to appear real, everything in it must be focused on a vanishing point somewhere in the picture. You also have to consider the point of view of the artist. Where is the artist—or photographer—situated in order to capture the scene? So now I want all of you to think of something to draw, and concentrate on showing it from your perspective.”

Sarah closed her eyes and an image of the huge house that had haunted her nightmares rose in her memory. But today, with a blank sheet of paper in front of her, the details of the structure were far clearer than they’d been in her dreams. It was a stone house with a gabled roof, and she tried to imagine it with morning sun throwing shadows on the angles of the roof. And if she were farther from it than she ever was in her dreams, looking at it from maybe a hundred yards from its southeast corner … She opened her eyes, blinked at the
bright fluorescent lights, and picked a medium brown oil pastel crayon from the box on her table.

Her hand moving quickly, she began to draw.

A few minutes later she felt someone behind her, and twisted around to see the teacher looking down at what she was drawing. As if she sensed how difficult it was for Sarah to move in the chair, the woman crouched down so their heads were on the same level. “Hi,” she said quietly. “Welcome to the class. I’m Miss Philips.”

Sarah found herself looking into a kindly pair of blue eyes in a face framed by light brown hair that flowed straight down her back. She was wearing exactly the kind of clothes an artist should wear: a long skirt, a brightly patterned blouse, and a purple velvet vest. Exactly the kind of thing she herself would have worn if she hadn’t grown up on a farm. “Hi,” she said, instinctively liking Bettina Philips.

“You’re doing a good job there,” Miss Philips whispered, tapping a forefinger on Sarah’s paper. “Keep at it.” Then she stood up and continued making the rounds of the classroom, murmuring suggestions and encouragement as she moved from one student to another.

Sarah looked back at her drawing, but suddenly couldn’t concentrate as she remembered the warmth in Miss Philips’s eyes. She tried visualizing the house again, tried to remember how the walkway went up from the circular drive to the double front doors, but somehow couldn’t quite bring back the image as clearly as she had seen it before the teacher stopped to talk with her. She looked up to see that Miss Philips was now bent over the drawing of one of the other students, but as if sensing her gaze, the teacher looked up and gave her a smile.

Sarah’s face warmed, and she went back to her drawing, and the image of the old rock house was once again clear in her mind. It had big shutters on the front and the side, and she quickly sketched them onto the paper. As her hand transferred the image from her mind to the paper, she worked faster, quickly losing track of the time.

When the bell rang, everyone around her scrambled to pick up their things and get out of the classroom as quickly as possible. “Don’t forget to put your name on your drawings,” Miss Philips told them, raising her voice above the rustling of the class. “And the pastels go back in the cabinet.”

Sarah waited until everyone else was out the door before she hauled
her backpack from the floor to the desk, then finally pulled herself to her feet, holding on to the table for support.

“You’ve got a lot of talent,” Miss Philips said, seeming not even to notice how hard it had been for her to rise from the chair. “But then I’m sure you already know that, don’t you?” she added, grinning at Sarah without so much as a hint of pity.

“I just like to draw,” Sarah said, signing her name and handing the sketch to the teacher. “Usually I draw people, but this was fun.”

Bettina Philips laid the drawing flat on the table and looked at it. “Do you know this house?”

“No,” Sarah said. “It just sort of came into my mind.”

“Really? You just imagined this?”

Sarah nodded, and struggled with her backpack.

Miss Philips added the drawing to the stack of paper already on her desk, reached over and lifted up the bottom of Sarah’s backpack so she could slip the straps over her shoulders.

“Thanks,” Sarah said, settling the weight evenly.

“I’m glad you’re in this class,” Bettina said. “You’ll do very well.”

She looked up at the teacher one more time and felt an easy warmth flow through her.

Seventh period art had just become her favorite class of the day.

B
ettina Philips turned her battered Mini Cooper onto the rutted driveway and through the ornate wrought-iron gates that hung rusted and crooked from two once-proud granite columns that were now so covered with moss and lichen that the inscription carved into them when they were new was now illegible. Sighing softly at the decay, Bettina downshifted and gunned the little car up the long curving driveway toward the house she’d lived in all her life.

When she was little, a gardener had been employed for almost half the year in an attempt to keep the grounds of the old mansion up to her grandfather’s exacting standards, but after he died, the gardener was the first expense to be cut, but hardly the last. And Shutters—as the house had always been known—fell into worse disrepair every year since. Bettina did what she could to try to keep the place up, but just paying the heating bill in the winter was beyond her meager salary, and when the shortest and coldest days came, she retreated to the kitchen and her studio, letting the rest of the house freeze.

Someday the historical society would make her an offer she couldn’t refuse, hopefully before the manse was beyond repair.

She parked in the garage, entered the house through the kitchen door, and called to her two dogs and three cats, but as usual none of
them came to greet her. That was all right; one by one they’d eventually show themselves, eyeing her suspiciously and looking vaguely guilty, as if they had been up to no good while she was at work.

She moved on through the big kitchen and through the huge dining room and the salon beyond, coming finally to the north side of the house, where she had turned her great-great-grandfather’s old conservatory into an art studio.

As was her ritual, Bettina took a moment to look out the back windows, across the terrace, and down the broad lawn to the shore of Shutters Lake. The waterfowl had long ago flown south, but the lake still held its ethereal beauty, looking different every day of every season. Now, in late fall, the lake was rippled with a northern breeze, a precursor of the bitter cold to come. What was left of the cattails drooped in the fading afternoon sun. Soon, the lake would be frozen over and snow would cover everything, and the eerie silence of winter would fall over not only the lake, but the house as well.

Bettina took a deep breath, unzipped the portfolio containing her students’ work for the day, and laid its contents on her worktable. The top drawing was the one done by Sarah Crane, the new girl with the crippled leg.

Sarah had done a study of a stone house, using a single brown pastel crayon, which gave the drawing an old, sepia-toned mood. Her talent was evident in every stroke of the sketch. Her perspective was precisely correct, from the artful shadows on the gabled, multilevel roof to the corresponding aspects of the roofline with the shutters on the front and side. She’d accomplished a lot in a very limited amount of time, even adding touches—more like indications, actually—of landscaping and shading on some of the stones around the heavy, double front door.

The door.

Bettina stood back and looked at the drawing again.

Shutters?

She moved the drawing under the light and looked more closely. Sarah’s drawing looked much like a smaller version of her own house. The house in the drawing had a gabled roof and a circular drive similar to hers and oversized shutters very much like the ones that had not only given her house its name, but the lake upon whose shores it had been built as well.

But Shutters had a carriage house—now her garage—to the east, and servants’ quarters to the west. An enormous maple tree, the leaves of which were now falling fast and blowing into the angles of the house and roof, stood in the center of the circular drive.

Still, despite the differences, the similarities could not be denied.

Bettina looked up through the conservatory’s enormous roof of glass. Daylight was fading, but if she went out now, she’d still have time to see the front of the house clearly before it was obscured by dusk. She hurried across the large marble-floored foyer, an orange tabby cat scuttling out of her way and ducking under the massive round table.

Bettina opened the great front door and took the drawing out into the cold twilight. Crisp brown leaves swirled around her ankles in the wind and she shivered in her light sweater, but there wasn’t time to go back for a jacket.

Holding the sketch high, she backed away from the house onto the big driveway and began working her way toward a point of view that might duplicate the one in Sarah Crane’s drawing.

There wouldn’t be one, of course, since Sarah’s house existed only in her imagination, but even in the face of this impossibility, Bettina had a feeling she would find something close.

Something very close.

She found herself in front of the garage, the old servants’ quarters on the other side and to the rear of the house hidden by the house itself. Again she held the drawing up in front of her, blocking off the view of the garage, and there it was.

With the leaves stripped from the enormous trees, she could see that the complex, multilevel roofline on Sarah Crane’s drawing perfectly matched that of the old house. The windows were all in the same place, and though there were different details on the double front door, the shiver that ran up Bettina’s arms was not caused by the chill November air.

Still, this couldn’t be; surely she was only imagining the similarities in the fading light. She went back in through the double front doors, started back down the length of the foyer toward the conservatory, then heard Rocky whining softly. The mottled terrier mix had been brought in from the woods as a tiny puppy by one of the cats half a dozen years ago. Now, he sat facing the door to her grandfather’s study, twisting his neck so he could look back at her.

Bettina moved toward the conservatory again, and Rocky barked, just once, but as he always did when he intended to get his way. And right now, apparently what he wanted was to get into her grandfather’s study. “Oh, all right,” she muttered, turning back. “God, I am such a pushover.” Rocky stood up as she approached, his tail wagging, and he slithered inside as soon as she opened the door.

The room still smelled like brandy and cigars.

Suddenly, Bettina felt like a little girl, looking around at book-lined walls, the leather chairs, and enormous desk. Not only did her grandfather’s spirit still seem to be in this room, but so did those of Harold Philips’s own father and grandfather. Rocky was now sniffing at the double doors of a cabinet below one of the bookcases, and Bettina, her curiosity aroused, knelt down and pulled open the cabinet’s doors.

Dozens of identical dark leather photograph albums stood lined up on the shelves. Bettina pulled out the first one, took it to the big desk, turned on the desk lamp and opened the album as the dog curled up at her feet. The first few black pages held yellowed newspaper clippings from the
Warwick Sentinel
, announcing the appointment of Boone Philips as the superintendent of Shutters Lake Institute for the Criminally Insane, followed by formal photographs of her great-great-grandfather as a middle-aged man. In succeeding pages there were photographs of him in front of what the townspeople referred to as the old “retreat.”

Bettina kept turning pages, and then, there it was: a sepia-toned photograph of Boone Philips standing next to the door of Shutters as it was when he’d first moved in.

The enormous maple tree, then no more than a sapling, grew from the center of the circular drive.

The photograph was taken from the west side of the driveway, and there were no servants’ quarters on that side of the house. If there was a carriage house on the east side, it was out of sight, but she could see nothing that indicated a roadway to that side.