Second Child (24 page)

Phyllis abruptly stood up. “I will,” she said, taking Melissa’s hand and pulling her off the bed. “We’ll both go. And,” she added, her voice ominous, “I hope for your sake you haven’t made all this up.”

Phyllis marched her daughter out of the bedroom and down the hall. They came to the turn at the main stairs, and Melissa stopped abruptly as she saw Teri, clad in her pajamas and bathrobe, standing at her door.

“Melissa?” Teri asked, cocking her head as a worried frown creased her brows. “What’s wrong? I thought I heard someone scream a few minutes ago.”

Melissa wiped at the tears that still flooded her eyes, and nodded.

“I-It’s Blackie—” she began, but her mother didn’t let her finish.

“She seems to think she saw that stupid dog up there, along with some kind of ghost. It’s nonsense, of course, but she insists I go see.”

Teri’s eyes widened. “Can I go, too?” she asked.

Phyllis hesitated, then smiled grimly. “Why not?”

A few seconds later, with Teri right behind her, Phyllis mounted the stairs to the attic. Melissa, still too terrified by what she’d seen to go back up to the shadowy chamber beneath the roof, hovered in the hall on the second floor. A few seconds later, though, Melissa heard her mother’s voice speaking to Teri. “Well, there’s the ghost, anyway!”
Her voice rose as she called down the stairs. “Melissa, come up here.” Melissa hesitated, and Phyllis spoke again, her voice sharp. “Did you hear me? I told you to come up here!”

Melissa crept up the stairs, already certain that something had happened, that whatever she’d seen, her mother and Teri had not.

“Look,” her mother said as she reached the top of the stairs. “Is that what you saw?”

Melissa’s eyes followed her mother’s pointing finger, and she felt an icy finger of apprehension as she saw the old dressmaker’s mannequin.

The mannequin she and Teri had seen only a few days earlier.

The mannequin that still wore an old white ball gown.

The mannequin that, only a few minutes ago, must have looked like a ghostly figure looming in the shadows. Her chest tightening, Melissa’s eyes searched the attic for any trace of Blackie.

“Look around carefully,” she heard her mother’s voice instructing her. “Where, exactly, did you see the dog?”

A lump rose in Melissa’s throat, and she tried to swallow it. “O-Over there,” she breathed. “Right by the mannequin.”

Grasping her daughter by the hand, Phyllis threaded her way across the cluttered floor until they stood only a foot from the mannequin. “Well?” she demanded. “Do you see him?”

Melissa shook her head.

“But you said he was right here.”

Melissa nodded.

“And now he’s not.” When Melissa made no answer, Phyllis jerked at her arm. “He’s not here, is he?”

“N-No, Mother.”

“And there’s no ghost wearing a veil, is there?” Phyllis demanded.

“N-No.”

“Then what happened?” Phyllis asked, her voice taking on a patronizing tone, as if she were talking to a five-year-old.

“I—I don’t know,” Melissa whispered, her eyes darting around the attic, searching for something, anything, that might prove what she’d seen.

“Well, then, since you don’t seem to know what happened,” Phyllis went on, starting back toward the stairs, “why don’t I tell you. You had a bad dream, that’s all.”

“But it wasn’t a dream,” Melissa insisted, her eyes instinctively going to Teri for support. “I heard footsteps up here and came to see what they were. I—I thought it was you. I thought you were playing a trick on me.”

Teri shrugged, shaking her head. “It wasn’t me,” she said. “I was asleep. I only woke up when you screamed.”

“But—”

“But nothing,” Phyllis declared. “You’ve been up here—you’ve seen that there’s nothing here. If you were up here before and really saw what you say you saw, then you must have been walking in your sleep again.”

The words battered at Melissa’s mind. Was it possible her mother was right? Could she have been sleepwalking again, and only dreamed the sounds she’d heard and the things she’d seen?

It didn’t seem possible.

She stared once more at the pearls still clutched in her hand. “But I found these—” she began.

Her mother cut her off. “You brought those in hoping to convince me you were telling the truth. But it won’t work. You’re going back to bed, and this time you’ll stay there.”

Melissa felt a chill as she heard the words, for she was certain she knew exactly what her mother was talking about. And when they got back to the second floor, her mother’s next words confirmed her fears.

“Why don’t you go on down to the kitchen, Teri?” she suggested. “Put on some milk for cocoa, and I’ll be down in a minute.” She paused, her eyes fixing on her daughter. “As soon as I get Melissa settled into her bed,” she finished. But instead of going with Melissa to the room at the end of the hall, she sent her daughter ahead.

When she came into Melissa’s room a minute or so later, the girl flinched as she saw the straps in her mother’s hands.

“I don’t like these any more than you do,” Phyllis said as she began fastening the leather cuffs around Melissa’s arms and legs. “But I just don’t know what else to do. You can’t just wander around the house at night, can you?”

Melissa made no answer, for the moment she had seen the dreaded straps in her mother’s hands, she had called out to D’Arcy to come and help her.

And D’Arcy had responded, sending Melissa instantly to sleep while she herself stayed awake to endure the terror of the bondage.

Half an hour later Teri came back upstairs with Phyllis, kissed her stepmother good night, and returned to her room. She waited until she heard the door to the master suite close, then crossed to the bathroom door, unlocked it, and moved through the bathroom itself to Melissa’s door. She paused, listening, and heard nothing.

Finally, she opened the door and slipped through it into the darkness of Melissa’s room. Her bare feet padding silently across the floor, she went to the bed and looked down into her half sister’s face.

Melissa lay on her back, her eyes open, staring, at the ceiling.

“Melissa?” Teri whispered. “Are you awake?”

There was no answer.

Teri smiled in the darkness, her lips curving upward in an expression of hard cruelty. “They’re going to think you’re crazy,” she whispered. “They’re all going to think you’re crazy, and they’re going to lock you up.”

Laughing silently to herself, she returned to her room and quickly drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Teri awoke a second or two before the alarm on her nightstand went off, her hand clamping over the little clock before its soft buzzing reached full volume. She peered at the clock’s dimly glowing hands; it was four-thirty, and outside her window the sky was still black. She lay in bed for a few minutes, listening to the night sounds, but there was nothing out of the ordinary; only the chirping of crickets and frogs against the backdrop of gentle surf lapping at the beach.

The house itself was silent.

She slipped out of bed, pulled her robe on, and went to the window. Beyond the pool, Cora Peterson’s house was no more than a shadow against the dark mass of the woods at whose edge it sat.

Next she crept into the bathroom, where she listened at Melissa’s door for a moment. But Melissa wasn’t a problem, for Teri knew that she had at least a couple of hours before Phyllis would come in to take the restraints off her half sister.

And all she needed was a few minutes.

Going back into her own room, she dressed as quickly as she could, fumbling only a little bit in the darkness. At last she found her sneakers, exactly where she’d placed them last night, right next to the night table. She slipped her bare feet into them, pulled the laces tight and tied them.

She crept to her door, listening once more before she opened it, but the house was still as silent as a tomb. A tiny smile of satisfaction curving the corners of her mouth, she pulled her door open, slipped through it and shut it silently behind her.

She crossed the broad landing around the head of the staircase, brushed past her stepmother’s door, then turned right into the guest wing.

At the end of the hallway she came to the closed door of the servants’ stairs.

She opened the door, stepped through it into the pitch-black shaft and pulled it shut behind her. Now, blinded by the total darkness, she was operating only by her memory of her earlier climb up these stairs, when she had been carrying Blackie’s corpse up to the attic. The moon had still been up then, and there had been enough light coming in the skylight at the top of the stairwell to see the turns in the stairs. Now, though, she had to feel her way along, carefully counting the steps as she went.

If she stumbled on the way down …

She put the thought out of her mind. So far, almost everything had worked perfectly.

The only bad moment had been when Melissa, instead of running screaming from the attic the moment she saw Blackie, had taken the pearls from his neck first. She hadn’t counted on that happening. She’d assumed that the sight of the dead dog would be enough to send her half sister into hysterics. But Melissa had crossed the attic, almost as if she didn’t believe what she was seeing.

And then she’d taken the pearls.

Teri, hidden behind a trunk a few feet away, had almost panicked when that happened. But even as Melissa had run screaming back to the stairs, she’d figured out what to do. Untying Blackie’s body, she’d stuffed it into one of the trunks, then hurried back down the servants’ stairs to the second floor. By then Melissa was already in her mother’s
room, blubbering out her story, and Teri had slipped by unnoticed in the darkness of the hallway.

She’d unlocked her room and gone through the bathroom into Melissa’s room. Melissa’s pearls were exactly where Teri had found them a few days before, and she’d been back in her own room, the pearls hidden away in her own chest, long before Phyllis and Melissa had started up to the attic.

The whole thing had worked perfectly.

She came to the top of the stairs and pushed the door open. Its unoiled hinges squealed in protest, and Teri froze, but then reminded herself that she was at the other side of the house. No one could possibly have heard the faint squeaking noise.

She began threading her way through the attic, groping in the darkness, until finally she came to the trunk in which Blackie’s body lay. She opened it, lifted the dog’s dead weight out onto the floor, then eased the lid back down.

Five minutes later, the corpse heavy in her arms, Teri emerged into the kitchen. She went out the back door, making her way across the lawn to the shelter of the pool house. A faint glimmer of light was showing on the eastern horizon now, and above her the night sky was losing its inky blackness.

Taking a deep breath, her arms already beginning to ache from the weight of Blackie’s corpse, she started across the patio around the pool.

And froze.

From somewhere in the darkness, eyes were watching her.

But it was impossible—the house was dark; everyone was asleep.

She turned, scanning the house once more. The windows were all dark and everything seemed peaceful. But then, as she turned away once more, a flicker of movement—barely visible—caught her eye.

The attic.

Had someone been at the small dormer window in the attic, looking out at her?

She paused for a moment, thinking, her eyes fixed to the window. But as the sky began to brighten further, she
decided she’d been mistaken. There was nothing there; no eyes were watching her.

She was safe.

She skirted the pool house, then paused once again, gazing intently at Cora’s house before crossing the lawn toward the old pottingshed behind the garage.

“But what’s it for?” she’d asked Melissa only a few days ago, when they’d come across the crumbling lean-to while her half sister was giving her a tour of the grounds.

“It’s where the gardeners used to grow flowers. They’d plant the seeds in pots in here, so when they went into the garden they were already blooming. But nobody’s used it for years.”

“Why don’t they tear it down?” Teri had asked, gazing at the sagging walls. “It looks like it’s about to collapse.”

Melissa giggled. “It is. But every time Daddy says he’s going to have someone pull it down, Mom tells him she’s going to use it for something. Once it was going to be an art studio, and another time she was going to do ceramics. But she never does. She never even comes near it.”

Which was why Teri had thought of it tonight.

Dropping Blackie’s corpse to the ground she pulled the door open. Inside, just as she remembered when she’d peered into the shed before, were the loose floorboards. It only took her a moment to lift three of them free.

She went back outside, picked Blackie up for the last time, and carried him up the steps.

Less than a minute later it was over. The floorboards were back in place and the crumbling shack was exactly as she’d found it.

Except that now it concealed Blackie’s body in the space beneath its floor.

It’s all right,
D’Arcy’s voice whispered.
I’m going away now, and it’s all right for you to wake up.

Melissa came awake slowly, her eyes fluttering for a moment, finally opening as Phyllis loosened the last of the straps that held her to the bed. She felt a flash of panic as she saw the restraints, but a moment later her mind cleared and she realized the night was over. It was morning, and a
stream of bright sunlight was pouring through the window. “What time is it?” she asked.

Phyllis’s brows rose slightly. “Oh, so you’ve finally decided to speak to me?” Melissa gazed blankly up at her. “Oh, please, Melissa. Why do you always do that?”

“D-Do what, Mama?” Melissa asked, her voice wary. Was it possible she’d already done something wrong this morning? But she’d just awakened a second ago!

And then the memory of the scene in the attic last night came flooding back to her. Was her mother still angry about that? But it wasn’t fair.

She
had
seen Blackie up there, and—