Nightshade (11 page)

Marty Holmes’s expression darkened as he turned and started toward the bluff, pushing his way through the branches that blocked his path, Eric following right behind him. As a terrible fear began to gnaw at his gut, Matt looked once more at the deer he’d last seen in the sight of his rifle, then hurried to catch up with Eric and Marty Holmes. A few moments later they were on the trail that ran along the top of the bluff. Almost against his own will, Matt made himself look down.

For a moment he saw nothing, but then, almost hidden by the bushes it had fallen through, he saw it.

A body.

And even though it lay face-down, he knew exactly who it was.

His stepfather.

“No,” he breathed. “I didn’t shoot. I know I didn’t shoot!”

But when he opened the Browning’s clip, he knew he was wrong. Of the five cartridges he’d loaded, only two remained.

Three bullets — bullets he clearly remembered loading himself — were missing.

*                                     *                                     *

JOAN HAPGOOD EYED the stacks of frozen pizza as if they were so many cobras waiting to strike. Which, in truth, they might as well have been, since she knew it wouldn’t matter which one she finally reached for — when she got home it would turn out to be the wrong one, and her mother’s words would certainly be sharper than a serpent’s tongue.
Make up your mind,
she told herself.
Just make up your mind, put them in the cart, and go home. If it’s wrong, you can bring it back tomorrow.

But it wasn’t just that. If she chose the wrong pizza — and she knew there was no possibility of choosing the right one — her mother would harp on it all day long. On the other hand, her mother would find something to harp on anyway, so what did it matter if it was the pizza or something else? Pulling the freezer open, she tried to remember whether it was pepperoni or sausage her mother had declared inedible, then gave up and tossed two of each into the grocery cart. No worse to be hanged for being a spendthrift than for bringing the wrong thing.

She finished the shopping, went through the checkout stand, and loaded the groceries into the Range Rover, then glanced at her watch: almost ten. Where had the time gone? She would have to hurry if she was going to get home, put everything away, tend to her mother, and still get to the caterers by eleven to go over the last details for Matt’s party tonight.

After the dinner last night, she almost wished she could simply cancel the party.

But that wouldn’t happen — it would just be four times worse than last night — or, more accurately, ten times worse, since they’d had only three guests last night, and there would be thirty tonight. She was not looking forward to it, hadn’t been looking forward to it since the night Bill left. She’d been sure he was bluffing then, assumed he’d stay away that night and be back the next morning. Except Bill hadn’t come back.

He hadn’t even called.

The days had crept slowly by, and she just as slowly came to understand that he might not be back, at least not right away. Over and over again she’d replayed the arguments they’d had about her mother, and eventually she had to admit to herself that Bill was more than half right — he’d tried to talk about the problems her mother was causing them — and all she’d done was put him off. When she came to that conclusion, she’d picked up the telephone book and begun looking for someplace to put her mother. But even as she stared at the listings in the yellow pages — beautifully scripted advertisements for Continuing Care Facilities and Leisure Living Centers and Retirement Environments — she knew she would never be able to do it. She would never be able to send her mother to a nursing home — no matter what they called it, or how nice it looked. The only reason she’d even considered finding a place for her mother was to repair her marriage, not to give her mother the best life she could.

But as the time Bill was gone lengthened, she’d started feeling as if she were literally being torn apart, her mother pulling at her from one side, her husband from the other. And she was caught in the middle, with no escape.

The problem was that deep in her heart, she knew that Bill was right, that for his sake and for Matt’s sake — even for her own sake — she should find a place for her mother. Matt was already suffering, though she hadn’t realized just how much until last night. And she’d seen the unhappiness in Bill’s eyes too.

She’d tried to ignore what she herself was going through, but as she steered the Rover back toward Hapgood Farm, she found herself going slowly, putting off as long as she could the moment when she would have to start dealing with her mother again.

Her mother, and Cynthia.

Cynthia, who had become almost as strong a presence in the house as her mother. Not an hour went by that her mother didn’t speak of her long-dead sister.

If it goes on much longer, I’m going to start to hate her,
Joan thought as she turned through the gates. And she’d never hated Cynthia. Even now she could remember how she’d adored her older sister when they were growing up. Cynthia had been everything she had not — blond, and beautiful, and graceful. She’d loved nothing more than sitting on Cynthia’s bed, her arms wrapped around her knees as she watched her sister get ready for a date.

And Cynthia had many dates — practically every boy her age wanted to go out with her. Cynthia went out with them all, and every night when she got home Joan would sneak into her room and the two of them would whisper in the darkness for hours as Cynthia told her everything that had happened.

Now, though, it was her mother who whispered in the darkness for hours. But it wasn’t always whispering, and it wasn’t always in the darkness. But it was always about Cynthia, and what would happen when Cynthia got home. Every day, her mother spent hours in what Joan had already come to think of as Cynthia’s room, going through everything over and over again, making certain that everything was in its place, that nothing had been touched.

And screaming at her if she so much as set a foot through the door.

Would the screaming of her guilt be any worse, if she put her mother into one of the facilities she’d found in the yellow pages? Joan wondered. She had actually driven by one of them a few days ago. It was a lovely three-story brick Colonial surrounded by beautiful gardens, and if you didn’t notice the people in wheelchairs sitting under the trees — wrapped in heavy scarves against the nip in the fall air — it would be easy to mistake it for someone’s private home. But even as she enjoyed the beauty of the place, Joan remembered the things she’d read about how the elderly were sometimes treated.

Tied into a chair and left in the hall for hours.

Strapped into bed at night and kept so drugged they didn’t even have the will to complain.

She could never do that to her mother. Never.

And so, tonight, she would stand next to Bill in the receiving line at Matt’s party and try to pretend that nothing was wrong, that they were just going through what some of her friends called “a bad patch” in their marriage, though she suspected that what her friends usually meant by “a bad patch” was that their husbands were having an affair. Bill would be fine, of course; a talent for always being gracious and never letting his true emotions show had been bred into him for generations.

I’ll get through it,
she told herself.
I’ll get through it somehow.

She came around the last curve in the driveway and was pulling the car into the carriage house when she noticed that a fourth car had joined the group parked in the area behind the house.

The brand-new black-and-white Ford Taurus that the town had bought for Dan Pullman in recognition of his tenth year as the Granite Falls police chief.

Mother!
she thought.
Oh God, what’s happened? What’s she done?

Leaving the groceries in the car, she hurried to the house, letting herself in through the back door. Dan Pullman was standing in the kitchen, and there was something about the look in his eyes as he turned to face her that told Joan the problem wasn’t her mother.

“What is it?” she breathed. “What’s happened?”

Pullman hesitated, but knew there was no way to break the news gently. “There’s been an accident, Joan,” he said, running a hand through his shock of steel gray hair as he uncomfortably shifted the weight of his six-foot-two-inch frame from one foot to the other.

“Not Matt!” she gasped, her heart racing.

Pullman shook his head. “It’s Bill,” he said softly, the emotion in his voice telling her just how bad it was.

“Oh God,” she whimpered, sinking onto a chair. “No. Please . . . no . . .”

CHAPTER
7

THIS ISN’T HAPPENING
, Joan told herself. It can’t be happening.

The whole scene seemed somehow surreal — she was sitting next to Dan Pullman in the front seat of his Taurus, and everything beyond the windshield looked perfectly normal. It was a perfect late fall morning; the ancient maples, birches, and oaks that had been protected by generations of her husband’s family were clothed in brilliant foliage that was almost blinding against the clear turquoise of the sky.

But it was all wrong!

The sky should have been a heavy leaden gray.

There should have been a cold drizzle falling through sodden leaves.

A chill wind should have been blowing, which would at least have accounted for the terrible cold that had fallen over her, making her shiver even in the warmth of the car.

They were half a mile from the house, moving along one of the narrow unpaved tracks that twisted through the woods. The road eventually wound around to the base of the waterfall and the swimming hole that was a favorite picnic area not only of the Hapgoods, but of everyone else in town. She and Bill were always careful to leave it undisturbed until late in the season, when the trees were bare and the road would be covered with shimmering leaves. Then, on a morning as perfect as this one, they’d go out and walk the road, hand in hand, listening to the rustle and crunch of the leaves underfoot, sometimes even abandoning their adulthood to roll around in them like children, their noses filling with dust until they were sneezing helplessly. But this morning the leaves that had already fallen were crushed, the ruts in the road laid bare by the wheels of . . . How many cars? Had they called an ambulance? For some reason — maybe to keep from thinking about what had happened — Joan found herself trying to remember if she’d heard the wailing of a siren while she’d been moving through the aisles of the market, doing the shopping as if nothing was wrong.

And nothing should have been wrong — she should have gotten back to the house just as Bill and Matt returned from their morning hunt. The scene began to play itself out in her mind: the two of them bursting into the kitchen through the back porch and the mud room, their faces flushed with the chill of the autumn air, regaling her with details of the hunt, each giving the other the credit for whatever they’d bagged.

Matt, grinning at Bill, saying, “I wouldn’t have even seen the deer if it hadn’t been for Dad.”

Bill, sloughing off the compliment: “Matt’s got the eye — and he’s a better shot now than I ever was! Another couple of years and he’ll be good enough for competition!”

But as the car rounded a sharp bend in the road and braked to a stop, the happy scene in her mind was shattered by what she saw.

Two police cars, their lights flashing incongruously in the morning light, were parked haphazardly beneath the canopy of immense maples. And a boxy ambulance, bearing the orange and white paint of the aid unit of the fire department. Its lights, though, were not flashing, and her heart sank as she realized why: for the ambulance, at least, no emergency existed.

Then Joan saw it.

Bill lay facedown on the other side of the stream. If she had stumbled upon him while walking in the woods, she might have assumed he’d merely fallen asleep.

She might even have left him undisturbed, and enjoyed watching him sleep. But the activity around his motionless figure betrayed the truth of what had happened as clearly as the lack of flashing lights on the ambulance.

Yet even in the face of what she had heard from Dan Pullman and what she saw before her, a glimmer of hope still flickered inside her. Before the police car came to a complete stop, Joan scrambled out, waded across the stream, and hurried toward her husband, crouching down beside him.

Reaching out to him.

Touching him.

His skin was cold, his flesh unresponsive.

His hair was matted with blood.

The flicker of hope in her heart guttered and went out.

As the terrible finality of what had happened settled over her, she could no longer bring herself to look at her husband’s body, and raised her eyes. Seeing the bluff rising a few feet away, she suddenly understood.

An accident — just a stupid accident! He and Matt had been on the trail at the top of the bluff, and Bill had lost his footing! “How could it have happened?” she blurted, barely even conscious she was speaking aloud. “He knows that trail so well! He — ”

Then Dan Pullman was beside her. “It wasn’t the fall,” he said softly.

Joan gazed blankly at him, as if the words he’d just spoken had been uttered in some foreign language. Not the fall? What was he talking about? Then, slowly, she became aware of the figures around her.

Figures — not people.

The paramedics, in their white uniforms, made sense to her.

So did the police officers.

But Marty Holmes and Paul Arneson were standing with their sons a few yards away.

Looking at her.

Looking at her, but not talking to her.

And Matt! Where was Matt?

Then she saw him. He was sitting in one of the police cars, his face ashen, his eyes staring straight at her.

Staring at her, but not seeing her.

“What is it?” she whispered, turning back to Dan Pullman. “What killed him?”

When Pullman still said nothing, she reached out again, took Bill by the shoulder, and turned him over.

His body rolled onto its back, and now she could see it.

A hole exactly in the center of his forehead.

Perfectly formed.

But not bloody.

Shouldn’t there have been blood?

She reached out, her fingers hovering over the strange hole, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. Then her gaze shifted back to Dan. “How?” she breathed. “Oh, God, Dan, how . . . ?”

“We think Matt shot him,” he said softly.

“An accident,” she breathed. “It had to be . . .”

Dan’s jaw tightened, and she saw the pain in his eyes, and finally he shook his head. “We don’t know, Joan. It might have been an accident, but — well — ” He bit his lip, then forced himself to go on. “Apparently there was some kind of argument.”

He continued speaking, but Joan didn’t hear his words; as the full reality of what had happened broke over her, a wailing scream of grief rose in her throat. “Nooo,” she howled, shattering the eerie quiet that had fallen over the scene. “Noooooo . . .”

*                                     *                                     *

IT WAS THE ringing telephone that first told Gerry Conroe that something had happened. After twenty years of running the little paper that managed to serve most of Granite Falls’ needs with its one edition a week, he had grown accustomed to a certain pattern: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays were the big news days, if you could really call the stories in the paper news at all. In truth, he thought of most of what he published as features, not news. Perhaps the scores of the high school athletic teams might be considered news; even the latest slate of officers for the Lions Club, Rotary, or the Gardening Ladies might fall into that category. But for hard news the people of Granite Falls turned to the
Manchester Guardian
rather than the
Granite Falls Ledger.
Thus, it fell to Gerry to keep them abreast of local doings, and everyone knew that if you wanted something in the paper on Monday morning, you’d absolutely better let Gerry know before lunch on Friday, and even then you’d better be able to convince him that there was a good reason to make changes that close to press time. So in Gerry’s life, Saturday mornings were generally quiet, spent helping his two-person staff finalize the layout of the paper so it could be sent down to Manchester to be printed on Sunday, coming back to Granite Falls just in time to be delivered Monday morning. So when all three of the office lines suddenly lit up at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, he knew immediately that something in town had gone wrong.

And when Kelly, who had started working Saturday mornings a year ago, appeared at his office door — her face ashen and her eyes glistening with tears — he knew it was serious, and very close to home.

Not Nancy. Please, not Nancy.

But when Kelly spoke, the blow her words dealt him was almost as powerful as if she’d told him something had happened to her mother. “It’s Uncle Bill,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “He — They say he’s dead!”

For a moment Gerry Conroe’s mind simply refused to accept it. Dead? Bill Hapgood couldn’t possibly be dead! They’d just had dinner at Bill and Joan’s last night, and this morning Bill was taking Matt —

In a flash, it came to him.

A hunting accident! Another damned hunting accident!

Suddenly, his shock at what had happened was tempered with fury. Every year it was the same — every year he printed the same editorial, questioning the whole idea of men going out hunting deer in this day and age. And every year he heard all the arguments from all his friends: if they didn’t argue that hunting was “in their genes,” they tried to raise it to a constitutional issue.

“What’s the point of having the right to own guns if we don’t own them?” Bill Hapgood himself had argued just a few weeks ago. “And we have to own them — some day we just may need to defend ourselves against our own government. So if we own them, it follows that we should know how to use them.” When Gerry had suggested that Bill had just named the exact purpose of shooting ranges, his friend only laughed. “Don’t give me that nonsense about target shooting — that’s all well and good for a novice, but once a man’s learned to shoot, he wants a challenge!”

And now Bill Hapgood was dead.

Mindlessly, stupidly, dead.

Then, through his anger, he heard Kelly speak again.

“They think Matt might have done it,” she whispered.

Once again his mind reacted without thought. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard — ” he began, but the words died on his lips as he remembered the scene at the Hapgoods’ last night.

Until he’d heard Matt argue with his father, he hadn’t thought him capable of such anger and bitterness.

Except Bill wasn’t Matt’s father.

Bill was Matt’s stepfather.

Not that it had ever made any difference to Bill. How many times had he heard Bill say that Matt was exactly the son he’d always wanted? Recalling the angry dinner, Gerry did his best to banish the idea that came with that memory. What was he thinking of? Was he seriously thinking that Matt might have shot Bill on purpose?

Ridiculous!

It was an accident.

It
had
to be an accident.

“I’d better get out there,” he said as he pulled on his jacket. “Where did it happen?”

“Not very far from the falls,” Kelly said. She followed him as he walked out of his little office and through the single large room where the two-person staff worked. “I want to go with you, Daddy.”

Her words jolting him to a stop, Gerry Conroe turned to look at his daughter. Go with him? But she was just a little girl!

“I’m almost sixteen,” she said, seeing his thoughts etched on his face. “I’m not a baby anymore.”

“For God’s sake, Kelly — why would you want to go out there?” As she hesitated, he knew exactly what she was going to say, and didn’t need to hear her explanation before he made up his mind. He was already shaking his head when she spoke.

“I want to see Matt. If they really think he — ”

Gerry held up a hand to silence her. “No,” he said. “You’re only fifteen years old. You don’t need to see — ” His throat tightened and he couldn’t bring himself to finish what he’d been about to say. It was going to be hard enough for him to see Bill Hapgood’s lifeless body himself, and he knew it was an image he would never forget. There was no reason for Kelly to have to bear the memory of that image. “No,” he said again, his voice much softer now. He cast about for some words that would neither offend Kelly nor upset her more than she already was. “Look,” he finally went on, reaching out and pulling her into his arms, “it’s going to be crazy out there. There’ll be police, and medics, and God only knows how many other people. I wouldn’t even go myself, except Bill’s my best friend, and I have to be there.”

“But Matt’s my boyfriend — ” Kelly began.

Gerry stiffened, then let his arms drop to his sides. “No,” he said one last time. His voice took on a tone that warned Kelly against pressing him further. “And I really don’t want to argue.” But even as he spoke, the hurt in her eyes made him relent slightly. “Let’s just wait until we know what happened, okay?”

As he drove away from the office, though, Gerry found himself wishing that Kelly had not been dating Matt at all, and in the back of his mind he could hear his own father explaining how to judge his friends. “The apple never falls far from the tree, Gerald,” Jerome Conroe had taught him when he was no more than six or seven. “Know the father, and you will know the son. That’s why you must always know who your friend’s families are.”

But no one except Joan Hapgood knew who Matthew Moore’s father really was. So maybe Bill had been wrong.

Maybe Matthew Moore hadn’t been the son he’d always wanted.

Maybe none of them — not even Bill Hapgood — really knew Matthew Moore at all.

*                                     *                                     *

“MATT?”

His name sounded muffled, as if it were coming from somewhere far off in the distance — or perhaps even from underwater — and it wasn’t until he heard it a second time that he slowly looked up to see his mother standing close to him, her eyes anxious, her face pale. She reached out to touch his cheek, but her fingers were like ice and he reflexively pulled away from the chill of her touch.

Joan winced at the rejection of what she’d intended as a gentle caress, but told herself it meant nothing — that he was still in shock from what had happened. “It’s going to be all right,” she told him softly. “Everything’s going to be all right. I’ll take care of you.”

Again Matt barely heard the words. From the moment when he’d looked down from the top of the bluff and seen his stepfather’s body lying in the thicket of brush next to the stream, something had changed. It was as if in that instant a barrier of some kind had fallen between him and the rest of the world.