Second Child (13 page)

Melissa’s door.

Teri gazed at the door for a moment, then tentatively touched the knob. Her hand closed on it and she twisted it.

The door was locked.

She returned to her own room, closing her door behind her once more, then went to the bathroom that separated her own small room from Melissa’s much larger one.

She pressed her ear against the door separating the bathroom from her half sister’s room, and a moment later thought she heard the sound again.

A sob, as if a child were crying but trying not to be heard.

Teri tried the door and found it unlocked. She pulled it open an inch, and whispered through the crack.

“Melissa?”

There was no response.

She pushed the door farther open and stepped into Melissa’s room. Moonlight flooding through the open windows cast a silver sheen across the bed. From the doorway Teri could see her half sister lying on her back, her eyes open.

“Melissa? Are you all right?”

Again there was no answer. Her brows knit into a slight frown, Teri crept into the room and slowly approached the bed. At last she stood next to it and gazed down at her half sister’s face.

In the moonlight Melissa’s skin took on a deathly pallor, her features were expressionless as her eyes gazed steadily up at the ceiling. A chill passed through Teri. For a moment she had the feeling that Melissa had died.

Then she saw the steady movement of Melissa’s chest as it rose and fell with her gentle but steady breathing.

Teri reached out and touched Melissa, prodding her shoulder.

“Melissa, wake up,” she whispered.

Her half sister didn’t move.

Teri took a step backward, wondering if she should go and get her father. But then, as her eyes scanned the bed once more, she saw something.

It looked like a strap, emerging from beneath the sheet that covered Melissa, its end securely fastened to the bed frame.

Teri stared at the strap for a moment. Then, her hands shaking slightly, she reached out and drew the sheet away from Melissa’s body.

She gasped slightly as she saw the cuffs that were bound around Melissa’s wrists and her ankles.

For a moment she felt an urge to undo the straps, to release her half sister from the bonds that held her to the bed, but she changed her mind as the words of the kids on the beach that afternoon echoed in her mind. “Everyone thinks she’s crazy …”

Was that it? Was that why Melissa was tied to her bed?

Was
she crazy?

Carefully pulling the sheet back up so it covered Melissa’s shoulders again, Teri backed away from the bed, then turned and hurried into the little bathroom, closing Melissa’s door behind her.

And when she returned to her own room, she made sure she locked her own door to the bathroom behind her.

She lay awake in bed for a long time that night, thinking about what she’d seen.

And as she thought, an idea began to form in her mind.

Teri’s dream had the perfect crystalline clarity of an autumn afternoon. In it she awoke just before dawn, far from Maplecrest. Indeed, she was back in the small house in San Fernando, the house in which she’d spent all but the first few years of her life.

The soft chime of her never-before-used travel alarm
barely disturbed the quiet of the night, but she turned it off quickly, then listened for a few minutes.

The house was silent, her stepfather’s soft snoring the only disturbance to the predawn silence. She got out of bed, slipped into her bathrobe, and glanced around the little bedroom. At last, slipping her hand into the pocket of her robe to make sure the strand of pearls her father had sent her last Christmas was still there, she left the room and made her way silently down the stairs, carefully stepping over the fourth one from the bottom, the one that always creaked, no matter how careful you were.

At the foot of the stairs she paused again, listening, but the silence of the house was still undisturbed. From here, indeed, she couldn’t even hear Tom MacIver’s snoring.

She turned through the dining room, then into the kitchen and out onto the service porch, where the washer and dryer stood side by side above the stairs to the basement. Moving quickly even in the darkness, she went down the cellar stairs, into her stepfather’s workshop. There was wood everywhere—some of it ready to be put together into a bookcase he was building, other pieces just scraps, piled here and there against the concrete walls of the subterranean chamber.

At last she came to the furnace, and, groping in the darkness, found what she was looking for.

A pile of rags, rags she’d made sure were well-soaked with linseed oil only that afternoon. She placed the rags on the floor next to a pile of wood.

Then she took a match from the box that always sat on her stepfather’s workbench and struck it.

She held the match to the rags. A second later the oil that had been absorbed in the cotton fibers ignited, bursting into flames with a speed that made Teri lurch backward. She stared at the fire for a moment, as if fascinated by it, then shook the match out, tossing it away.

As the flames grew and spread to the wood around them, Teri moved to the foot of the stairs. After one more look at the spreading fire, she hurried up the stairs, back into the service porch. But instead of moving on, going out the back door into the yard, she went into the kitchen instead, then the dining room.

Then she waited at the foot of the main stairs, waited
for the fire to take hold, waited for the flames to begin engulfing the house.

It seemed to take forever, but finally she could hear a faint crackling in the basement, and then she began to sniff the first faint wisps of smoke creeping through the floor beneath her feet.

Still she lingered.

At last the floor of the dining room itself began to glow, and then the fire burst through, spreading quickly. The crackling grew to a roar, and then, as more flames began to eat through the living room floor, Teri bolted to the front door. A moment later she was in the front yard, her bathrobe clutched tightly around her neck. She turned to watch as the flames rampaged through the first floor and began to creep upward.

Around her, lights started to come on in the neighbors’ houses, but Teri was barely aware of them as she watched the flames advance through her home.

At last she heard her mother scream, the sound instantly lost in the roar of the blaze. She moved across the lawn to the driveway, where she looked up to see her parents’ window.

Her mother was there, sitting on the ledge, swinging her legs over the windowsill.

Then she jumped, and the spread she’d wrapped herself in caught on something.

She was falling, her head striking the pavement.

Teri ran, screaming, to her mother, and knelt beside her, to take her mother’s bleeding head in her arms.

Only this time her mother wasn’t dead.

This time her mother was staring up at her, her eyes accusing her, her lips forming the terrible words.

“Why? Why did you do this?”

Rage rose in Teri. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be! Her mother wasn’t supposed to survive at all!

Her mother was supposed to be dead!

Her fury rising inside her like a monster, she raised her fist and smashed it down into her mother’s face.

And woke up, her clenched fist smashing into the pillow where only a split second earlier her mother’s head had been.

She lay still for a few moments, willing the dream to
release her from its grip, the pounding of her heart slowly returning to its normal pace. Slowly, reality began to creep back into her mind.

She wasn’t on the driveway in San Fernando; she was in her bed at Maplecrest, and the sun outside was shining brightly, and she could hear the lapping of the surf on the beach.

Her mother was dead, and no one had found out what she had done.

She was safe.

An hour later she awoke once more, this time not from a recurrence of the dream, but because of a shout from somewhere outside the house. She got out of bed and went to the window. On the tennis court, just beyond the pool, she could see her father playing tennis.

Playing tennis with Melissa.

A brief spasm of the anger she’d felt in the dream seized her for a moment. Her father should be playing tennis with
her,
not with Melissa. That was the way it was supposed to be, the way she’d planned it.

She’d dreamed about coming home for so many years; dreamed about the immense house facing the sea, and the big room she would have, and all the other things her mother had walked away from.

And she certainly hadn’t planned on sharing any of it with a half sister, especially not one who had taken her home and her father and everything else she should have had.

Her mind went back to the strange scene she’d witnessed in Melissa’s room last night, and the idea that had begun to form in her head just before she’d gone to sleep.

Turning away from the window, she unlocked the bathroom door and went through to Melissa’s room. She glanced around, uncertain of what she was looking for, but knowing with a deep certainty that somewhere in here there was something she could use.

She went to the little vanity that stood against the wall between two of the windows and began opening its drawers.

In the middle one she found a slim black box, and knew even before she opened it what was inside. Still, she
opened the box to stare at the single strand of pearls that lay on its satin bed.

A single strand of pearls that was identical to her own.

Another wave of anger washed over her. Melissa even had the pearls, even though she was almost two years younger than she was. Closing the box, she put it back where she’d found it, then went through the rest of the vanity.

Nothing.

At last she went to the big chest on the opposite wall and began going through its drawers.

In the second drawer, hidden beneath a pile of socks, she found what she was looking for.

It was a small diary, bound in black leather, with Melissa’s initials embossed in gold on its cover. Teri opened the book and quickly began scanning its pages.

All the entries in the diary seemed to be written as if they were letters to someone named D’Arcy. But if they were letters to some friend of Melissa’s, why were they in a diary?

Had she given the diary itself a name?

But then as she began to read, she also began to understand.

D’Arcy, she was almost certain, didn’t actually exist at all, nor was it a name she’d assigned to the diary.

Rather, it seemed as if D’Arcy was someone Melissa had made up.

An imaginary friend.

Teri scanned some of the pages quickly, turning several of them at a time. Much of what she found was almost illegible, scrawled in an awkward script that looked as if a five-year-old might have done it. But from what she could decipher, it became clear that to Melissa, at least, her friend had become real:

Teri was still reading, trying to figure out what it all meant, when she heard the door to the hall open. She dropped the book back into the drawer and was about to shut it when she heard Cora Peterson’s apologetic voice.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought—” And then her tone shifted as she saw it wasn’t Melissa in the room at all. “Teri? Why, what are you doing in here?”

Teri’s mind raced, then her fingers closed on a pair of Melissa’s socks.

Turning, she smiled at the old housekeeper. “I ran out of socks,” she explained, leaning on the drawer to close it. “I just came in to borrow a pair of Melissa’s.” She composed her features into an anxious expression. “She won’t mind, will she?”

Cora’s eyes, which had been fixed suspiciously on Teri, cleared. “Well, of course not,” she said, clucking her tongue. “And I’ll just speak to your father—it seems to me you ought to be doing some shopping. You can’t keep wearing the same clothes over and over again, can you, now?”

Teri suppressed a sigh of relief and smiled gratefully at the housekeeper. “Would you?” she asked. “I just hate asking for anything. I mean, everyone’s been so nice to me …”

Cora gently silenced her. “Now, you mustn’t think that,” she admonished. “Why, you belong here just as much as anyone else does, and you should have everything you need.” The housekeeper began making up Melissa’s bed, chattering along as she worked.

But Teri had stopped listening, for she was still reflecting on Cora’s earlier words.

“You should have everything you need …”

And I will have, Teri thought to herself a few minutes later as she left Melissa’s room and returned to her own.

I’ll have everything I need, and everything I want.

“Look at that! Isn’t it the most gorgeous skirt you’ve ever seen?”

Melissa gazed through the shop window at the white cotton skirt splashed with a flowered pattern in a blue that exactly matched the shade of Teri’s eyes. It was at least the sixth skirt they’d seen so far that would look perfect on her half sister, and so far they hadn’t even gone into any of the shops.

They’d been in the village for almost an hour, wandering from store to store, enjoying the cool shade of the huge maple trees that formed a broad canopy over the streets and sidewalks. In almost every window they’d seen something—a skirt like the one they were looking at now, or a blouse or sweater, maybe only a pair of shoes—that seemed to cry out for Teri to try it on. But Teri had so far resisted going into any of the shops.

“I can’t stand to think about how much they must cost,” she’d explained. “Out in California, I used to spend whole days wandering around in the mall, pretending I could afford anything I saw.”

“Well, now you can,” Melissa replied, grasping her half sister’s hand and pulling her toward the door. “Didn’t you hear what Mama said? You’re supposed to be buying clothes, not just drooling over them. Now come on.”