All the Way Home (4 page)

“A boo boo? Oh, you mean because I look sad? Yes, Molly has a boo boo, sweetie,” she says wistfully.
A big, hollow boo boo right in her heart
.

“I will kiss it for you,” Ozzie declares. “Where the boo boo is?”

She smiles and ruffles his big blond corkscrew curls. “I’ll tell you what, Ozzie. A great big hug will help the boo boo heal. Okay?”

She pulls him into her arms and squeezes him tight, feeling his small heart thumping against her own.

He’s so sweet, this child. And his affection is so . . .
needed
.

Especially now that Kevin’s gone and she has no one else.

Tears spring to her eyes and she holds Ozzie close until he squirms and demands to be put into his bath.

She leaves his little sandals on, knowing he’ll insist that he be allowed to walk down the hall. The floors are a mess, and she hasn’t let him go barefoot since he got a splinter several weeks ago.

“I walk,” Ozzie says eagerly, bolting for the door the moment she sets him on his feet. “I walk.”

“No, you
run,
little guy,” Molly says with a laugh.

She hurriedly follows him back down to the bathroom, flicking the light switch outside his door as she goes, so that the naked bulb in the ceiling high above illuminates the long hallway.

She knows Ozzie likes to linger in his bath, and once or twice before, she’s found herself having to make her way along the darkened hallway back to his room.

Being in the dark in a haunted house isn’t a prospect she would like to repeat.

And even though she’s never actually seen a ghost here, or heard so much as a strange creak, she’s certain the place is haunted. So is Rebecca, who lives on the other side of the Randalls and refuses to baby-sit here. If Molly didn’t love Ozzie and his parents so much, she wouldn’t be willing to set foot inside, either.

She can’t help thinking of the girl who used to live here. Emily Anghardt.

She doesn’t remember her at all. But there are times, when she’s alone downstairs at night after Ozzie’s asleep, that she feels connected to Emily in some inexplicable way.

After all, this was her house. She lived here, slept here, played here. And one day, she walked—or, perhaps, was carried—out the double front doors with the leaded glass panes, and she never came back.

The very thought of what might have happened to Emily, and to Carleen, and the others, sends a chill down Molly’s back despite the muggy summer night. So does the local legend that Emily Anghardt’s spirit haunts the house.

“C’mon, Ozzie,” she says brightly. “Let’s take off your sandals now.”

“Do ‘wee wee wee,’ ” he responds, wiggling his toes expectantly as she unfastens the buckles of his sandals
.
“Do ‘wee wee wee,’ Molly.”

“Sure,” she tells him, and begins, “This little piggy went to market . . .”

I
t’s dusk, and lamplight spills from the windows of the once-grand old houses looming along Hayes Street
.
There’s no breeze to stir the heavy, still air. He can hear crickets, and the faint sounds of a baseball game coming from a television set or radio, and, farther off, the steady drone of a lawn mower.

He’s the only one walking along this street right now, looking for all the world like he’s taking a casual stroll after dinner on a warm summer night.

He slows his steps as he nears number 52, a shabby three-story house set back behind a cagelike wrought-iron fence. The gate stands half open, as though beckoning a visitor—or perhaps, he notes as an afterthought, as though providing a potential escape route, should an occupant be startled into having to flee.

He studies the house as he passes, noting the lopsided front steps and the gaping holes in the porch railing where spindles are missing
.
The place is badly in need of a paint job, having faded to a peeling, nondescript neutral shade with a muddy-colored trim
.
The shrubbery is unkempt, though the patchy grass is at least mowed, and the bright pink dianthus in full bloom by the front steps seem conspicuously out of place in the drab landscape.

So this is where Carleen Connolly lived,
he muses, and moves on, glancing up at the next house on the block.

Number 54.

And this is where Emily Anghardt lived
.

This place is just as run down as number 52, but it shows subtle signs that somebody intends to do something about it. There are paint cans stacked on the front porch, and a ladder is propped against the side steps
.
A big Dumpster, the kind you can rent when you’re working on renovations, can be seen at the back of the long, straight driveway that runs along the far side of the house.

The first floor is dark, but there are lights on upstairs. He knows that a young family lives there now, with a new baby on the way. He wonders if they know the history of the place, or if they care.

And he thinks about the Connollys, still living at number 52, even though the place must hold memories of the daughter they lost.

He walks on up the straight, sloping sidewalk toward the corner, leaving the two big houses behind, not wanting to be so bold as to stop right here and stare, and risk bumping into one of the occupants.

He doesn’t need to know them yet. There will be plenty of time for that later.

After all, he’ll be here all summer.

Just as he was ten years ago.

R
ory hesitates outside the closed door in the third-floor hallway, her hand on the knob and her heart pounding.

Then, after closing her eyes briefly, she turns the knob and pushes the door open.

Nothing but blackness.

She reaches out, feels along the wall to her right, just inside the doorway, until she finds the light switch. She flicks it and blinks at the burst of brightness overhead, then finds herself looking around at her sister’s old bedroom.

A wave of emotion surges over her and she reaches out to grab the nearby desk for support.

Oh, God, Carleen,
she thinks, desperately missing the sister she has tried so hard to forget.

She takes a deep breath to steady her emotions and notices that the air is hot and musty-smelling. She forces herself to look around.

There, on the cluttered desk, is a Stephen King novel with a bookmark in place
—The Shining
. Carleen had been reading it that summer, Rory recalls. She was always reading something.

The bookcase on the far wall of the room is packed with double rows of books, and more are stacked on the floor beside it. Some are mainstream fiction, and there are a few cherished classics and hardcovers among them; others are dog-eared young-adult paperbacks—mostly “sophisticated” books by authors like Avi and Richard Peck and Paul Zindel, rather than the Sweet Valley High series that takes up most of the shelf space in Rory’s room across the hall.

Above the bookcase hangs a wooden crucifix, identical to those in every other bedroom in the house, placed there, of course, by Maura. Rory remembers being frightened, as a child, of the gory image of the blood-encrusted gaping wounds in Christ’s feet and hands. She swiftly moves her gaze past the crucifix even now, focusing on the wide dresser beside the bookcase.

One drawer is ajar, as though someone has just grabbed something out of it and not bothered to close it all the way. Rory notes the dresser top is cluttered with cosmetics and hair clips and lotions, and she can see a round purple glass bottle that she recognizes as Carleen’s favorite perfume. Christian Dior’s Poison. Some boy had given it to her for her seventeenth birthday, and Carleen had bragged about how expensive it was. She used to douse herself in it, ignoring everyone’s wrinkled noses and comments that she was wearing too much.

Over there on the bedside table is Carleen’s senior yearbook, and, tossed haphazardly on the floor, a familiar-looking maroon leather-bound document binder that Rory recognizes as her sister’s high school diploma. She herself got one just like it from Lake Charlotte High School the following year.

There’s Carleen’s canopy bed, the one Mom and Daddy had bought her for her thirteenth birthday after she’d begged them. Rory, who had always believed her sister was Mom’s favorite anyway, had, of course, been jealous. But Carleen had generously allowed her to spend a few nights in the bed when she was away on a Girl Scout camping trip.

That was back when Carleen was still herself, before . . .

Well, before everything changed.

Rory takes a few cautious steps into the room, noting that it’s just the way her sister left it ten years ago. Mom wouldn’t let anyone touch it after Carleen vanished, saying she wanted her room to be waiting the day she came back.

And Daddy hadn’t argued.

Maybe he, too, thought Carleen was coming back.

Or maybe he knew how traumatic it would be for Mom to give up hoping.

During the first few weeks and months after Carleen disappeared, there had occasionally been reason to think that maybe she was out there somewhere, alive; that maybe she had simply run away. Doug McShane, the detective in charge of the police investigation, said they had received tips from people who claimed to have seen her—but then, nothing ever came of any of the information.

And, as Daddy said, the world is full of crackpots and sickos.

Rory remembers the night she had answered the phone to hear a girl’s voice, a girl claiming to be Carleen. And her heart had leapt into her throat even though it didn’t sound like her sister’s voice, and she was momentarily fooled until the girl burst into a fit of giggles, and she realized it was just some kids playing a prank.

Another time a psychic showed up at the door and told Mom she had a message from Carleen. She said Carleen was alive and being held in an underground dungeon by a stranger. For two hundred dollars, she would describe the stranger and provide his initials.

Mom, the devout Catholic who should have known better than to believe in occult mumbo jumbo, would have given her the two hundred dollars if Daddy hadn’t come home right then and thrown the so-called psychic out.

Rory still remembers how the woman had scurried to her car parked out at the curb as Mom wailed helplessly and Daddy yelled.

“Don’t you think I want to believe she’s alive someplace?” he had hollered at Mom after the psychic had driven away. “Don’t you think that my heart jumps every time Doug McShane calls and says he’s got another tip from someone who says they saw her?”

And that was when Rory, who was crouched at the top of the stairs listening, had realized her father thought Carleen was dead.

That was when she allowed herself to believe it, too.

And after that, she had never set foot inside Carleen’s room again. She knew it would be too painful to see everything waiting for her, as if she were coming back.

Now, after ten years, the pain has dulled somewhat to a hollow ache. Now she’s an adult. Now she can stand here and look at her sister’s room and mourn the loss of someone she had once loved, but she isn’t paralyzed with grief the way she once might have been.

Now there’s only this deep-seated sadness.

And, of course, the mystery.

What happened to you, Carleen?

And to you, Emily?

She reaches into the neck of her T-shirt and pulls out a locket on a chain, fingering it absently as she thinks about her sister. Then, realizing the room is unbearably warm, she steps over to the window and tugs on it. After a few tries, it begins to raise with the reluctant, squeaky groan of wood scraping along wood.

The air outside is hardly cool, but not nearly as stifling as it is in here. Rory inhales the sweet scent of honeysuckle blossoms from the sprawling hedge two stories below.

She stands looking down at the side yard, remembering how she and Carleen used to spread their Barbie dolls in the shade of the big oak tree just inside the fence. They would play there for hours, trading clothes and setting up elaborate Barbie houses among the gnarled roots jutting out from the base of the tree.

Carleen had the best ideas,
Rory remembers, smiling faintly.
She was always staging a Barbie wedding or sending her Ken off to war. And I would forget to play with my own dolls. I would end up sitting there, watching the scenes she created with hers
,
like the audience at a show
.

If her sister had lived, Rory thinks wistfully, she might have become an actress. Or maybe an interior decorator—she was a genius at designing her Barbie houses, turning postage stamps into framed “prints” for the walls and propping plastic coffee can lids on spools to create tables.

A sudden, involuntary shudder takes Rory by surprise.

She stares out into the twilight below, feeling as if something startled her, when there’s nothing to see but a deserted yard.