Nightshade (15 page)

Stepping out of the car, Joan tucked her right hand under Matt’s left arm. “Are you going to be all right?” she asked softly as they started up the walk toward the doors.

Matt, his face strained and looking thinner than it had just three days earlier, shook his head. “I’m never going to be all right again.”

Joan squeezed his arm, certain he was remembering the cruel words his grandmother had uttered earlier. “You’re not responsible, Matt. You have to believe that whatever happened, it was an accident.”

Before Matt could reply, the double doors were pulled open by two of the pallbearers, and a terrible sensation of déjà vu suddenly gripped Joan. Except it wasn’t déjà vu at all, for ten years earlier she had stood at the doors to this same church, with Matt at her side, nervously waiting to start down the aisle to the altar where Bill Hapgood was waiting for her.

Waiting for her to marry him.

She could still remember how terrified she’d been, wondering what all the people gathered inside the church — Bill’s friends, every one of them — really thought of her. Were they snickering behind their smiles? Were they laughing at the dress she’d chosen? That day, it had been Matt who squeezed her hand and looked up into her face. “You look beautiful, Mommy,” he’d told her, and his words had been enough. Taking a deep breath, she’d strode down the aisle, her son beside her, to marry the one man she’d ever loved.

Now all of Bill’s friends were gathered in the church once more, and once more Bill was waiting for her in front of the altar.

Waiting for her to bury him.

The casket stood open, but as she paused at the top of the aisle, Joan refused to let herself look at it, knowing her tenuous hold on her emotions might easily give way the moment she saw her husband’s face. Taking a deep breath — just as she had a decade ago — she started down the aisle toward the front pew, Matt on her right, Gerry Conroe, who was serving as chief pallbearer, on her left.

Ten years ago Gerry had been standing beside Bill, serving as his best man.

Now, murmuring the same sympathetic words Joan had heard so many times over the last few days that they no longer seemed to have any meaning at all, he saw them into their pew, then retreated to his own, one pew back and on the other side of the aisle.

The pew directly across from Joan and Matt was as empty as their own.

As soon as they were settled in, Myra Conklin began muting the organ and Reverend Charles Frobisher, whose ancestor had founded the church, slipped through the side door and entered the pulpit. His eyes scanned the quiet mourners, then came to rest on the front pew, and as he began to speak, his gaze fixed on Matthew Moore. “We are gathered together to mark the tragically premature passing of our dear brother William Apperson Hapgood into the company of angels.”

Matt, his mother’s fingers squeezing his left hand, did his best to concentrate on the minister’s words. All the way down the aisle he’d kept his eyes riveted on the face of his stepfather, terrified that if he let his gaze waver at all, he’d see the accusing looks on the faces of everyone he’d ever known.
They don’t care,
a voice had whispered inside his head.
They don’t care what really happened. They’ve already made up their minds. Your fault. All this is your fault.

Somehow he had survived the walk and slipped into the pew and kept his mind on what the minister was saying. But his eyes kept going back to his stepfather.

He’s not dead,
he kept thinking.
He’s just asleep, and in a minute he’ll wake up and sit up, and everything will be all right again.
But as quickly as the words ran through his mind, he knew they weren’t true, for even though his stepfather’s face looked as peaceful as if he were merely sleeping, it was still framed in the coffin like a mask of death.

The minutes crept by.

As the congregation rose to sing or knelt to pray, Matt numbly reacted to every cue. But through every second of it his eyes remained fixed on the figure in the coffin. Then, as the prayers and the eulogy and the singing began to draw toward an end, something happened.

Something that Matt knew was impossible.

He saw his father sitting up and turning to look at him in exact imitation of the fantasy that had entered Matt’s mind when he first slid into the pew.

His stepfather was smiling at him, and reaching out a hand toward him.

Matt rose from his place in the front pew and stepped out into the aisle, reaching out as if to touch his stepfather’s hand.

But as he stared at the impossible apparition, it abruptly changed: his father’s head transformed into the head of the buck he’d been stalking that morning.

The finger of Matt’s right hand slowly curled as if he were gently squeezing a trigger.

In his mind, he heard the report of the rifle once more.

As the terrible sound echoed in his brain, the apparition shifted again, and once more he was gazing at his stepfather’s face.

Now his stepfather’s eyes were open and in the center of his head was a neat, round hole.

A bullet hole.

A bullet hole from which fresh blood was oozing, running down his stepfather’s face, into his eyes and down his cheeks, to drip onto the perfectly pressed blue suit and starched white shirt in which he would be buried.

“I’m sorry,” Matt whispered. He lurched forward, half tripping on the step that led to the altar, his arm still stretched out as if in some kind of supplication. “I’m sorry.”

He was at the coffin then, gazing down into his stepfather’s face, and still he could see the bullet hole, see the open eyes accusing him.

“I didn’t — ” he began, and his voice faltered. What if it was true? What if everything his grandmother had said that morning — everything his friends and everyone else he knew was thinking — had actually happened?

“I’m sorry,” he moaned again, his voice choking on the terrible constriction in his throat. “I didn’t want anything to happen. I just wanted you to come home. Just come home. . . .” His voice trailed off as his mother slipped her arm around him and gently led him back to the front pew. As the final prayer began, he repeated the words: “All I wanted was for him to come home. . . .”

*                                     *                                     *

SILENCE FELL OVER the cemetery next to the church as the pallbearers slowly lowered the coffin into the grave. Even the birds that had been chirping in the trees paused in their song, as if sensing the solemnity of the ritual being carried out below. As the coffin came to rest on the floor of the grave, the church bell began to toll, but as Matt gazed down at the lid of the coffin, he barely heard the striking of the hours, for a terrible fear was slowly growing inside him.

Suddenly it was no longer his stepfather in the coffin being lowered into the grave.

It was himself. But it was a mistake, a terrible mistake — he wasn’t dead at all, even though everyone thought he was.

As Reverend Frobisher whispered the final benediction and dropped a clod of earth onto the casket, Matt flinched, imagining the hollow sound it must make inside the coffin.

What if that sound woke him up? Would he even know where he was? No, of course not — how could he know? He would be surrounded by a darkness so intense he could feel it even as he imagined it. There would be no flicker of light — not even the faintest glow would penetrate the seal of the coffin.

In his mind he heard the hollow
clunk
as the next clod fell into the grave. Would he know then?

Now he imagined himself reaching out to explore the darkness, but feeling only the satiny softness of the casket’s interior, a softness whose deception would be exposed as he felt the unyielding walls behind the padded fabric.

He was pushing against the lid now, trying to raise it, but already there was too much earth on top, and even as he struggled, more and more was piling onto the top of the coffin, until he could almost feel its weight. He tried to scream, but there was no way his voice could penetrate the coffin and the earth above. How long could he survive? How long before he suffocated?

Would it hurt?

Would he tear his fingernails off scratching at the walls as he tried to free himself?

Or could he force the panic back, make himself lie still and await the death that now would surely come?

But even in his imagination the darkness bore down on him, and the walls of the coffin closed around him, and an ineffable terror rose within him. The scream that no one would hear rose in his throat, but as he opened his mouth to give it vent, he felt something.

A hand, squeezing his elbow.

“Matt? Matt!” Though his mother’s voice was low, there was an urgency to it that jerked him out of the daydream. “It will be all right,” he heard her say. “Just do what I do.”

Numbly, he stepped forward to the edge of the grave and stood beside his mother as she stooped, picked up a clod of earth with her gloved hand, then dropped it onto his stepfather’s coffin.

Matt crouched, reached down, touched the pile of crumbling loam beside the grave.

And the terrible image of being trapped inside the box, knowing what was happening even as you were being buried alive, leaped again to the forefront of his mind.

He couldn’t do it!

Standing up, he turned away. His eyes glazing with tears, he threaded his way through the crowd around the grave, barely aware of the murmur that was passing through the throng of mourners, the eyes that watched his every move. Finally he was away from the crowd, and a moment later his mother was beside him.

“Matt? Darling, what happened?”

Matt shook his head. How could he explain the terrible, irrational fear that had suddenly taken hold of him? “Nothing,” he blurted. “I just . . .” His voice trailed off and his eyes moved back to the grave, where one by one the mourners were stooping to pick up a clod to add to the earth that was on the coffin. “I — I just couldn’t do it, that’s all,” he finally finished, his voice trembling.

His mother put her arms around him. “Just a little while longer,” she said. “Just a little while, then we can go home.”

But the little while seemed to stretch into a terrible eternity as he stood beside his mother just inside the door to the parish hall. As the mourners filed by, he heard them whisper words of sympathy to his mother, the women leaning forward to kiss her cheek, the men holding her hand in theirs.

But as they came to him, they fell silent.

Their eyes refused to meet his, instead darting first one way, then another, as if seeking some means of escape.

They think I did it on purpose.
The first time the dark thought rose in his mind, he tried to ignore it, tried to tell himself that they just didn’t know what to say to him. But the thought kept coming back, jabbing at him over and over again.
They think I did it on purpose. They all think I meant to kill my own dad!

Finally, though, the last of the throng who had come to bid their final respects to his stepfather had spoken to his mother, and one or two even nodded to him. His friends had gathered in the far corner of the room, whispering among themselves just out of earshot of their parents.

Both Eric Holmes and Pete Arneson were in the group, and so was Kelly Conroe. By force of habit, Matt made his way over to them, but instead of widening their circle to include him as they always had before, today they moved closer together, falling silent as he approached. A memory flashed into his mind. He was four years old, and he’d just come out the front door of his grandmother’s house, only a block away from where he was right now. A group of other children were playing in Eric Holmes’s yard across the street. He wanted to play with them, but when he started to cross the street, Eric and his friends had abruptly stopped talking. And he knew, without any of them saying anything, that they didn’t want to let him play with them. Doing his best not to cry, he’d turned around and gone back into his grandmother’s house.

Today, though, in the parish house next to the church, they didn’t stay silent. When Matthew was still a few feet away, Eric Holmes spoke. He kept his voice low enough so it wouldn’t fill the room, but loud enough so Matt would hear his words clearly.

“How did it feel?” he asked. “How did it feel to shoot your dad?”

Matt stopped short, the words slashing through him like a razor. For a moment he couldn’t speak — couldn’t even think. Then his mind slowly began to function again, yet still he didn’t speak, for he knew there was nothing he could say.

They had made up their minds: he was guilty.

His eyes moved from face to face. For ten years they had been his friends, the people he’d gone to school with! They’d known him! They’d liked him!

Or had they? Was it possible they’d never been his friends? That they’d only pretended to be because of who his stepfather was? Suddenly Matt felt as if he were four years old again.

Then, as his eyes fell on Kelly Conroe, he felt a flicker of hope. There was something in her expression that told him she wasn’t as certain about what had happened as the rest of them. He took a step toward her, but as if reading his thoughts, she shook her head in a quick movement and she edged toward Eric Holmes.

Another stab of pain shot through Matt, and as he felt his eyes sting with tears, he turned quickly away.

At least he didn’t have to let them see the pain he was feeling.

Out!

He had to get out!

His head down so no one could see his glistening eyes, Matt hurried toward the door, brushing past his mother and pushing his way out onto the loggia that connected the parish hall to the church. Breathing deeply, he tried to swallow the lump that had blocked his throat, and to conquer the tears that streamed from his eyes.

How can they know?
he silently demanded.
If I don’t even know what happened, how can they?

But it didn’t matter — nothing mattered now.

Everything was gone.

His stepfather.

His friends.

Even Kelly.

When he heard the door open behind him, he held very still, refusing even to turn around.