House of Reckoning (2 page)

“They’re quiet when you hold me,” he said.

“Then I’ll hold you all night,” she said.

She felt him smile, but they both knew that holding him, rocking him, was not the answer.

But that hospital hadn’t been the answer, either, and neither, apparently, was this latest medication.

Nor had her fervent prayers released Nick from the grip of what she’d come to think of as his demons. And if God couldn’t free him, what could?

Maybe if they tried a different doctor.

Or a different medicine.

Or if Shep spent more time with his son.

But since Nick’s last hospital stay, Shep didn’t seem to have any time for Nick at all, and when the two of them were together, Shep had nothing to say to the boy, and at fourteen, she knew that Nick needed his father far more than he needed her. Yet Shep only seemed more absorbed in his work as each day and each week passed. The thought she tried to hold at bay but that always seemed to escape her control in the darkness before each dawn now stabbed through her like an ice pick driven directly through her heart.
He no longer cares about Nick. My own husband doesn’t care about our son
.

Well, it couldn’t go on—not while Nick seemed to get worse each day.

She would talk to Shep when he got home. She’d talk to him again.

But for now she would just hold Nick close, hold him and rock him and wish that things—many things—were different.

Big Ed Crane blearily lined up his shot, jabbed the stick at the cue ball and completely missed. For the second time in a row. Dropping the pool cue on the felt table in utter disgust, he made his way unsteadily back to the bar.

“Dude! You owe me two bucks,” the kid in the John Deere ball cap called after him.

“Sue me,” Ed muttered as he slid onto the corner bar stool and tried to bring Christine, the bartender, into focus. “Boilermaker for the road,” he said.

Christine eyed him from her position at the beer tap. “I think maybe you’ve had enough, Ed.”

“You cuttin’ me off?” he demanded, belligerence rising inside him like molten lava.

“I’m thinking you could use a cup of coffee,” Christine said, sliding the just-poured beer in the opposite direction, then pouring a steaming mug from the pot next to the tap and setting it in front of Ed. “And you need to pay that kid his two bucks. He beat you fair and square.”

“Got no money,” Ed said, his anger melting into drunken self-pity. “Got nothin’ anymore.” He ran his hand over his face. “Used to have … everything before Marsha died. Now I got nothin’.”

“Man, you don’t know how lucky you are,” a man two stools away, wearing stained bib overalls, said. “Women are all whores. Take your money, and steal your soul. Wish
my
wife would die and leave me in peace.”

Ed pushed the coffee mug aside, swung around on his bar stool, and glowered darkly at him. “Marsha wasn’t like that.”

“Sure she was,” the guy shot back, ignoring the warning note in Big Ed’s voice. “’Course she was—they’re all bitches, every one of ’em. Didn’t you just say you’ve got nothin’? That’s ’cause she stole it all from you, then left you to rot.”

“Not Marsha,” Big Ed grated, his eyes narrowing and his right fist clenching dangerously. “She was the bes’ woman of ’em all.”

“More like was the biggest
whore
of ’em all,” the other guy sneered. “And your daughter’ll be just like her. Just another fu—”

In one swift movement Ed lurched over the adjoining stool, grabbed the guy’s bib overalls, and jerked him close enough so he could see panic in the man’s eyes. “You lookin’ to get hurt?” he growled.

“Hey!” Christine said, pulling a worn baseball bat from behind the bar. “Settle down, you guys, or I’ll settle both of you down.”

Ed gave the guy a shove backward and he teetered for a second before he fell off his bar stool and crashed to the floor. Swearing angrily, the man worked his way slowly back to his feet with the help of one of the regulars who frequented the Fireside in the futile hope of accompanying Christine to her apartment upstairs after she closed the bar.

“That’s it,” Christine sighed, turning the lights up bright. “Drink it up, everybody.” A chorus of complaints arose from the small crowd, but she ignored them, focusing instead on Big Ed Crane. “As for you—out. Now.” Her cold gaze shifted to the man who a few seconds ago had been sitting near Ed. “Both of you.” She came around the bar and poked Ed in the ribs with the bat. “Out! Out!”

“Hey,” the kid at the pool table said. “My two bucks.”

“That’s your own problem,” Christine tossed back over her shoulder as she marshaled both men out the front door. “Go home.”

The blast of cold September air slapped Ed in the face, and he stumbled as he fished in his pocket for his keys. He didn’t want to go home—home was nothing but emptiness and sadness and terrible loneliness.

The Fireside Tavern—or any other bar—was warmth and distraction.

“She was a whore!” the guy in the overalls yelled at him from a few steps down the block. “You should be glad she’s dead!”

In an instant Ed Crane’s long-suppressed rage at the loss of his wife flared inside him. Fueled by hours of drinking, the fury erupted and he charged toward the man, again grabbed him by the bib of his overalls and hurled him against the brick wall of the building at the mouth of the alley he’d been passing.

“Don’t say that!” Ed said, the words twisted by the alcohol in his blood and strangled by the grief that had overwhelmed his soul. Barely aware of what he was doing, he slammed the man’s head into the brick wall.

“Hey, I’m—”

“Don’t!” Ed commanded. Then, while smashing the man’s head
again and again, as if to punctuate every word, he said, “Do. Not. Say. That.” The man’s knees buckled, and Ed let him sink to the ground. “Idiot,” he muttered, barely noticing the blood that began to pool beneath the man’s head. “You don’t know nothin’.”

Ed stumbled back to his old truck, held on to the door handle while he pulled the keys from his pocket, dropped them, groped in the gutter until he found them, and eventually hauled himself into the cab. After a half-dozen tries he fit the key into the ignition and started the truck.

“Idiot,” he muttered again, revving the engine. He ground the gears, trying to find reverse, then spit gravel from the tires as he popped the clutch and shot out onto the dark, lonely road that would take him to his equally dark and lonely home.

Sarah Crane woke up with a start, her heart pounding. The image from the nightmare she’d been having since her mother died was fading rapidly, and all she remembered was that in the dream she was in a house—a huge house—and even though it was filled with people, she couldn’t see or hear them.

But she knew they were there.

And they were as lonely and frightened as she was.

Now she lay still in her bed, her pulse slowly returning to normal as the last images from the nightmare faded away. She was about to turn over and try to go back to sleep when she suddenly had a feeling that something wasn’t right.

She listened, but heard nothing.

The house was silent, as silent as the great mansion in her nightmare.

A clouded moon cast soft shadows across her bed in the stillness. She hugged the worn plush rabbit that had been her nighttime companion for as long as she could remember, and listened again.

Nothing.

The house was quiet. Too quiet.

Her mom used to say that her father could snore the paint off the barn, but tonight Sarah heard no snoring from the next room, nor anything from anywhere else in the house.

Which meant one thing: he’d gone out drinking at the Fireside.

Hoping, wishing, even praying that it might not be true, Sarah slipped out of bed and peeked into her parents’ bedroom. But the bed hadn’t been slept in. She crept quietly down the stairs, but even before she got there, she knew she was alone in the house.

She could actually feel the emptiness.

The sofa, too, was vacant, the crocheted afghan still stretched cleanly over its back. A dozen beer bottles littered the kitchen table, and a glance out the kitchen window showed her that her father’s truck was not in its usual place in front of the garage.

Which told her that he was indeed at the Fireside, where he’d gone more and more often, and drinking more and more every time he went. And last time he’d come home drunk, he almost rammed the truck into the barn, and she’d decided that the next time it happened, she would go to the bar and bring him home herself.

And tonight was “next time.”

She didn’t have a driver’s license yet but had driven the truck all over the farm since she was ten, so she could certainly drive it the two miles home from the Fireside.

She pulled on jeans and a sweater, and tried to imagine herself walking into that bar and trying to convince her father that he needed to give her the keys and get into the truck so she could bring him home.

But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t picture it at all. But her mother had done it, so she would do it, too. And maybe someone there would help her if they weren’t all as drunk as her father.

Sarah wrapped the wool scarf she’d worn to check the chicken coop and the barn a few hours earlier back around her neck, pulled a thick stocking cap down over her head and ears, put on a heavy jacket and a pair of fleece-lined gloves, and went out into the frosty night.

She wheeled her bicycle out of the garage and climbed onto it, riding down the long driveway and out onto the quiet road with only the intermittent glow of the moon to light her way.

She stood up on the pedals and pumped hard, the cold breeze making tears stream from the corners of her eyes, and hoped she’d make it to the Fireside before her face froze.

As she came around a bend in the road, she saw headlights crest a hill in the distance, then disappear as she dropped into a dip and then
pedaled even harder up the small rise beyond. When the headlights appeared again, they were on the wrong side of the road.

And far closer than they should be.

Too late, she realized she had not worn the jacket with the reflective stripes that her mom bought for her when she went out at night.

And the generator for the bike’s headlight had given up last year. She told herself that when she got to the top of the hill, where whoever was coming toward her could at least see her, she’d pull off to the side of the road and let them pass.

But by the time she crested the hill, it was too late.

The car was still on the wrong side of the road, and it was careening straight toward her.

Blinded by the headlights, Sarah swerved her bicycle across the road to get out of the way, but the driver seemed to see her at the same moment and jerked the steering wheel, slewing straight at her.

She didn’t want to dive into the ditch, but had to get out of the car’s way. She jumped from her bike and pushed it off the road, intending to follow it into the ditch.

She was a split second too late.

The driver saw her at the last instant and swerved too hard the other way, overcorrected, and slewed back to the left, tires screaming in protest.

Sarah, terror freezing her in place, suddenly realized exactly who was hurtling toward her.

“Daddy?” she whispered.

The single word still hung in the night air when the truck’s enormous radiator grille slammed into her.

S
arah shivered. She’d been caught outside without a coat, and now the cold seemed to have penetrated to her bones. Then came the sounds, strange beeping noises and something that sounded like squeaking shoes, but very faint, as if they were muffled by a thick fog.

Yet there was no fog.

Only the cold of the air and—

Huge, blinding headlights racing straight toward her!

She gasped, jerked awake, and a bolt of white-hot lightning struck her in the lower back, shot through her hip, and blazed down her right leg.

“Sweet pea? You awake?”

Sarah gasped for breath, searching for something—anything—to drive away the cold and the pain, but everything was wrong. She should be outside, but she wasn’t, and if she wasn’t outside, she should be warm. But she was still freezing. Panic rose up inside her, but just as she was about to scream she saw—and felt—something familiar: the silhouette of her father sitting at her bedside, and his hand holding hers.

“Cold,” she whispered through chattering teeth.

“Would you like a warm blanket?” a strange voice said. Sarah turned from her father as a pretty blond nurse checked a bag of something connected to a tube in her arm. She nodded, and turned back to her father. “Wh … wh …”

“You were in an accident, honey,” her father said, his voice trembling, his features strained. “You’re in the hospital now, but you’re going to be okay.”

Her father was lying. If the pain in her hips and her leg wasn’t enough to tell her so, his voice and expression left her no doubt. She struggled to sit up, but white-hot agony seared down her side. She shuddered.

“Can’t you give her something?” she heard her father ask, the fear in his own voice reinforcing her own.

A new voice spoke, a man this time. “She’s awake? Sarah? Sarah, can you hear me?”

She made herself nod, too tired even to open her eyes. “I’m Dr. Cassidy, Sarah. We’ll be taking you into Surgery in a few minutes to fix your hip and leg. So you just lie back and relax, and let us take care of you. All right?”

She opened her eyes as the nurse wrapped a warm blanket around her and tucked it under her chin. She blinked a couple of times trying to clear the fog, and looked around. She was surrounded by striped curtains, and several people in white coats stood by her bed.

“You’re in the emergency room, honey,” her father said.

She barely recognized his sunken, unshaven face. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with red, and there was blood all over the front of his shirt. And even from where she lay, she could smell the stale beery odor of his breath.

A new woman slipped through the curtain. “Mr. Crane? I’m Leila Davis from the business office. I need you to come with me to fill out some paperwork. Do you have your daughter’s insurance card with you?”