House of Reckoning (16 page)

There was a note pinned to the bread with a toothpick.

Sarah’s heart faltered as she began to understand her punishment.

She unpinned the note and held it up to the glow of the porch light.

She read the note again, barely believing that someone would lock her out of the house, leaving her to sleep on a porch in November.

Even the dog got to sleep in the laundry room.

But what else could she do?

Maybe she should go back to Shutters. Bettina would let her sleep there—she’d already offered.

But the cold was penetrating deeper and deeper into her, and her hip was throbbing and her leg aching so badly she’d barely made it the last couple of blocks before she got back to the Garveys’.

She’d never make it all the way back to Shutters.

Sighing, she unrolled the heavy down sleeping bag and kicked off her shoes. Then, still wearing her coat, knit cap, and scarf, she wriggled into the sleeping bag and pulled it close around her.

She reached out a hand into the cold and picked up the sandwich from the plate.

She nibbled at it, and then, as the cold began to ebb out of her body, quickly finished the rest of it.

She stretched out flat on her back, and felt the throbbing in her hip begin to ease, despite the hardness of the porch. As her body warmed, exhaustion flowed through her, and suddenly even the wooden floor of the porch didn’t seem so bad.

Better, anyway, than trying to keep on walking through the cold and darkness. Letting the last piece of bread crust fall from her fingers, Sarah gave herself up to sleep.

Tiffany smiled in the darkness of her room when she heard the doorbell ring, and a tingle of excitement ran through her as she waited to see if her parents were really going to make Sarah sleep outside all night.

She’d never seen her mother as furious as she’d been when Sarah just walked out of the house before dinner. Her mother hadn’t even been that mad when she had to pick Zach up at the Morganton police station after he took her car for a joyride with Conner West.

And the best thing was that her mother’s fury had only gotten worse as the evening went on and Sarah didn’t come back and apologize. Still, even given how angry her mother was, Tiffany couldn’t quite believe she’d actually make her sleep outside. She’d probably let Sarah
shiver out there for a little while longer, then let her in and start yelling at her.

The doorbell turned into a couple of knocks, but Tiffany knew it didn’t matter how hard she knocked—her mother had gone to bed—or at least disappeared into the big bedroom at the end of the hall, and her father would be asleep on the sofa.

Except he wasn’t really asleep—he was passed out, and no amount of ringing or knocking would wake him up.

So it was true—nobody was going to let her in until morning.

Then an ugly thought occurred to her: What if her mother did the same thing to her?

Behave, or you’ll sleep on the porch
.

No. Doing it to Sarah Crane was one thing, but her parents would never do that to her. Sarah was no more than a way for her folks to get some extra money, and the way she’d acted, she needed a good slap in the face to learn her place in the family.

Which was no place at all.

Suddenly, Tiffany wanted to actually see what was happening, to witness it with her own eyes, so she could relate every detail to everyone at school tomorrow. If people were snickering about Sarah already, just wait until they heard this one—they’d all die laughing.

She slid out of bed, put on the robe she’d tossed over her desk chair, and silently slipped out of her room on bare feet. She stepped over the creaky step on the stairs just in case her father wasn’t quite as passed out as she thought he’d be, but when she went through the living room, he didn’t so much as twitch.

Pepper was in his bed in the laundry room, and he got up and wagged his little stump of a tail when she came in, and she crouched down and petted him for a second just to make sure he didn’t start whimpering or barking.

Then she peeked out the back door window.

Sarah was in Zach’s sleeping bag.

Lying on the porch.

Still wearing her hat.

Perfect! Exactly what she deserved.

And for tonight, at least, she had her room all to herself again, the way it should be.

Which gave her another idea.

Giving Pepper one more pat on his head, Tiffany quietly retraced her steps until she was safely back in her room, then locked the door, just in case.

She crouched down in front of the dresser and opened the bottom drawer.

Sarah’s drawer.

The bottle of pain pills was right where she’d left it when she took a few last week. She’d earned enough money from those to buy a new sweater, and now she wanted a skirt to go with it.

She even knew who her best customer was going to be: Conner West, who’d bought one of the pills last week and asked her for more.

Now she had more.

Silently, she closed the drawer, then unzipped her backpack, put the pills in her makeup kit and buried it in the bottom of her pack.

Then she took off her robe, slipped back into her warm bed, and snuggled down into her soft mattress, thinking of Sarah shivering out on the porch.

Whatever happened tomorrow, tonight at least had been a great evening.

No Sarah, and plenty of pills to sell in the morning.

N
ick stamped his feet against the cold and flexed his fingers inside the mittens his mother had knit for him. He knew he’d be warmer if he kept moving but decided to try to walk to school with Sarah this morning, so for the last twenty minutes he’d been hanging around the corner closest to the Garveys’ house, trying to keep an eye out for her while not appearing to wait for her. By now he was freezing, and if she didn’t show up soon, he knew they’d never make it on time.

Maybe she was sick.

Maybe she wasn’t coming at all.

Tiffany and Zach had left the house at least ten minutes ago and were probably inside the school building by now.

The nice,
warm
school building.

When Conner West drove by—flipping Nick the bird as he passed—Nick glanced at his watch. He’d give her another minute and then—

The Garveys’ front door opened and Sarah appeared, gripping the railing tightly as she made her way down the three steps of the front porch.

And then the voices in Nick’s head—the voices that had begun babbling angrily as Conner West lifted his finger at him a minute ago—fell silent as Sarah caught sight of him and waved.

Nick hurried toward her. Maybe if he carried her book bag they could still get to school on time, but when he caught up to Sarah, he stopped short. She looked as if she’d barely slept at all. “Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” she said, but the way she kept her eyes down told him she wasn’t telling the truth.

“You don’t look fine,” he said, then realizing how that sounded, felt his face burning and tried to find better words. “I mean, you look great—really pretty, but—” He reached for her backpack. “Let me carry that, okay?”

Sarah stopped long enough to let him slip it off her shoulders. “I didn’t get much sleep.”

“What happened?” Nick pressed.

Sarah hesitated, then offered Nick a careless shrug that he didn’t believe any more than he’d believed her words when she told him she was fine. “They made me sleep outside,” she finally admitted.

Nick stopped short, staring at her. “They made you sleep
outside? Why?”

Instead of answering his question, Sarah pulled the collar of her coat tighter and started down the street. “We have to hurry or we’ll be late.”

“It’s November! They can’t make you sleep outside.” Nick tugged on the shoulder of her coat until she stopped walking. “You should tell someone. Don’t you have, like, a social worker or something?”

“No!” Sarah looked up at him with such fear that Nick took a step backward. “If I tell anyone, the Garveys won’t let me go see my father.”

“How can they do that? I mean, he’s your father! Will you please tell me what’s going on?”

Sarah kept walking, but finally began telling Nick what had happened yesterday, starting with going to church, then recounting everything right up to coming home and finding the note on the sleeping bag.

They were just across the street from the school when she abruptly stopped walking. “There was one more thing, too,” she went on. “I drew this weird picture up at Miss Philips’s house. It showed this dark room filled with skeletons.” Nick felt a tingle at the back of his neck, and on the edge of his consciousness he thought he could hear the
voices whispering among themselves. “It was like I was possessed or something,” Sarah finished, her voice dropping to a whisper so low he could barely hear it.

“Like I feel,” he said softly. “Only I feel like that most of the time.” As they started across the street, Nick finally told her what had happened to him last night. “It was really awful—I mean, I think my dad wants to send me back to the hospital.”

“What were they about?” Sarah asked, stopping at the foot of the steps leading to the school’s front doors. “I mean, the stuff you saw. What was it?”

Now it was Nick who shrugged, but the voices in his head were murmuring a little louder. “Just weird stuff—really thick black bars …” He groped for a better word. “Like huge beams or something, you know? Like—”

“What time was it?” Sarah cut in.

Now the voices were getting louder, but they weren’t shouting at him, and they weren’t screaming or howling in fury or pain. It seemed they wanted him to tell her about them. “It started while we were eating dinner,” Nick said. “Then I went upstairs, hoping my dad wouldn’t see how bad it was, but I guess I started throwing things or something, and they finally came up and gave me a shot.”

“What time?” Sarah pressed. “I mean, what time did they give you the shot?”

“About eight, I guess. But I don’t really know.”

“That’s about when I left Miss Philips’s house,” Sarah said. “And the room I drew while you were seeing something has really heavy rafters on the ceiling.”

The voices sounded even more excited now, and suddenly in the periphery of his vision Nick caught a glimpse of something. A skull?

But it was gone as quickly as it had come, and he couldn’t be sure. “I don’t remember exactly—it was really dark, and the voices were screaming like they were people being tortured or killed or—” He shook his head. “I don’t even want to think about it.” He moved up the steps and pulled open the heavy door just as the bell rang. “You want to meet up after school?”

Sarah hesitated only a second, but that second seemed to Nick to go on and on. Then she nodded. “Sure.”

By the time Nick slid into his seat in his first class—a moment too late to escape a glare from his teacher—he had decided on two things.

For the first time in his life, he would struggle to remember the hallucination he’d had, instead of trying to forget it.

And second, no one—not the Garveys or anyone else—would ever treat Sarah Crane as she’d been treated last night.

Never.

Conner West gazed dolefully down at the big red F on the corner of his English test, then wadded it up and tossed it expertly into the trash can that stood fifteen feet down the hall from his locker. If English were basketball, he’d ace the tests every time. As it was, the only way he could keep from flunking the course was to write a book report tonight for a few extra credit points. Or he could do a class presentation on one of the authors they were studying, but even Mrs. Roselle knew he wasn’t going to do that. So it was the book report or nothing, and he couldn’t just chuck his quarterly report card into the trash like he had the test.

Crap.

Now he’d have to eat lunch fast and spend half the hour on one of the computers in the library trying to find CliffsNotes on the Internet for one of the books on the list Mrs. Roselle had handed him. Not that using the Cliff Notes was cheating—even old Mrs. Roselle knew he wasn’t going to actually read the book.

“But you will do the writing, Conner,” she’d told him when she held him after class a few minutes ago. “And don’t think you can just copy and paste something—I’ve seen them all, and I have a program that will find anything new and compare your work to it. Even a little decent paraphrasing will do you enough good to get you a D. Okay?”

What was he supposed to say? If he didn’t pass English, he might not graduate.

Even worse, his dad would take away his car keys.

“Mac and cheese for lunch again,” Bobby Fendler said as he opened the locker next to Conner’s.

“Swell!” Conner said, slamming his locker door and spinning the dial on the lock. “Just freakin’
swell!
If it’s like yesterday’s, I’ll hurl in study hall.”

“Hey, Conner,” a voice he recognized as Tiffany Garvey’s said from behind him. Suddenly things were looking up.

And things were looking even better when he turned around, saw the look in Tiffany’s eyes, and remembered the pills she’d been selling last week. If she had more—

“Want to take me to McDonald’s?” Tiffany asked, twirling a lock of her blond hair around a finger and running her tongue over her lower lip in a way that drove any thoughts of spending part of the next hour in the library out of his mind.

“Sure,” he said. But even as he spoke, he remembered the condition of his wallet and glanced at Bobby Fendler. Bobby always had plenty of cash. “Want to go along?”

“Beats mac and cheese.” Bobby was about to toss his backpack into his locker, but then eyed Tiffany speculatively. “We comin’ back?”

Tiffany shrugged. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what you buy,” she replied. She glanced around to see who might be listening, then patted her own backpack. “You guys buy what I’m selling, and I’m going shopping after lunch.”

Grabbing Elliot Nash on their way to the parking lot, Tiffany slid into the front seat next to Conner while the other two boys piled into the backseat. Conner floored the accelerator as he turned out of the parking lot, laying a strip of rubber that would take at least a thousand miles off the rear tires.