Second Child (38 page)

Teri stood up. “We’d better go see,” she said. “Where’s your flashlight?”

Melissa shook her head. “No—I don’t want to. I—”

“But we have to,” Teri insisted. “We have to find out what you did. Don’t you see? If you’ve done something—”

“No,” Melissa wailed again. “I couldn’t have—”

“But you
must
have,” Teri pressed. “Come on!”

She pulled Melissa off the bed and helped her into her bathrobe, then turned off the light after she’d retrieved Melissa’s flashlight from the drawer in her night table. Silently, she led her half sister downstairs and out the French doors onto the terrace. The night was bright, with the moon high, and Teri instinctively ducked into the shadows close to the house. They skirted their way along the terrace, then dashed around the pool behind the bathhouse. A few seconds later they stood in front of the pottingshed.

“Oh, God,” Teri whispered, sniffing at the air. “It smells like something died in there.”

Melissa’s eyes widened and she felt a chill pass through her, but when Teri pushed the door of the pottingshed open and stepped inside, she followed, almost as if in a trance. Closing the door behind them, Teri turned the flashlight on and shined it around the little room.

The beam caught the machete, its blade still glistening with blood.

Melissa gasped as she saw it. “Wh-What’s it doing in here?” she breathed. “Tag keeps it in the garage.”

Teri shifted the beam of light and played it over the floor-boards, where more bloodstains showed. “Look,” she said softly. “They’re loose.”

Dropping down to her knees, she lifted one of the floorboards and shined the light into the space below.

A scream rose in Melissa’s throat as she saw Tag’s body sprawled out beneath the floor, his head split open, maggots already nibbling at the dead tissue of his brain. But then, before any scream could erupt into the quiet of the night, she felt Teri’s hand clamp over her mouth.

“Don’t scream,” she heard Teri say. “If anyone hears you, there won’t be anything I can do. They’ll know what happened, and they’ll send you away.”

The scream died away in Melissa’s throat, to be replaced by a wrenching sob. It was all impossible—Tag couldn’t be dead—it was all just a horrible dream, and she’d wake up.

She’d wake up and be back in her room and everything would be all right. She wrapped her arms around her half sister, her sobs overwhelming her.

“I didn’t mean to do anything,” she sobbed. “It wasn’t my fault. I wouldn’t have hurt Tag. I wouldn’t have …”

Teri, smiling in the darkness, gently stroked her half sister’s hair. “It’s all right,” she crooned. “I’m here, and I won’t let them do anything to you. I’ll think of something. You’ll see. I’ll think of something to get you out of this. Besides,” she added, her voice dropping even lower, “it wasn’t really you that did it, was it?”

Melissa, startled by the words, gazed up at Teri, her breathing still choked by her sobs.

“Don’t you understand?” Teri asked. “It wasn’t you at all. It was D’Arcy.”

And suddenly it all came together in Melissa’s confused mind, and she understood what had happened.

D’Arcy had come to her once again, come to her while she slept.

Come to her, and possessed her.

And this time, while she had slept, and trusted D’Arcy, D’Arcy had killed her best friend. Her anguished sobs overcoming her once again, she sank back into Teri’s embrace.

But it was going to be all right. Teri was with her, and Teri would figure out what they should do.

Teri would save her.

Cora stirred restlessly in her chair, and a moment later her eyes blinked open. She felt disoriented for a moment, but then realized where she was. She’d been sitting up, waiting for Tag to come home, but must have dozed off. The book she’d been reading lay open in her lap, and her small living room was lit only by the reading lamp behind her chair, which she’d turned on as the evening light began to fade.

She felt stiff, all her joints aching from the hours she’d spent in the chair, and she slowly began stretching her limbs as the last vestiges of sleep released their hold on her. At last she peered at her watch.

Almost one
A.M.
She must have slept for nearly four hours.

She hauled herself to her feet and started toward the stairs, but then stopped.

The house had an empty feeling to it. She was almost certain that Tag still hadn’t come home.

The knot of worry that had been growing within her all evening now congealed into fear—Tag had never stayed
out this late, and certainly never disappeared for so long without telling her where he was going. And surely, if he’d come home, he’d have seen her in the chair and wakened her.

Maybe not, she told herself, refusing to give in to the panic she could already feel creeping furtively around the edges of her mind. Maybe he saw me and just decided to let me sleep.

She climbed the stairs, one hand pressing against her left hip, which was sending a sharp stab of pain all the way down to her toes with every step. Perhaps, she reflected, it was time for her to move downstairs. She could convert the little dining room, which she and Tag never used anyway, into a bedroom, and at least be done with the stairs here. Not, of course, that it would help with the stairs in the big house …

She came to the landing and reached for the light switch, but knew even before the brilliant light blinded her for a moment that Tag was not up here.

The door to his room stood open, just as it had been when she’d come upstairs a few hours ago. Still, she moved on, checking both bedrooms and the bathroom.

She went back downstairs, going automatically to the kitchen, where she put a pot of water on the stove to make a cup of coffee. Then, as she waited for the water to heat, she tried to decide what to do.

Her first impulse was to go to the main house and wake up Mr. Charles. But if she did that, she would awaken Phyllis as well, and even as she stood at the stove, she could see the look on Phyllis’s face and hear her words.

“You woke us up simply because Tag didn’t come home? Really, Cora, I can’t understand how you could be so inconsiderate! I’ve had a terrible day …”

And it would go on and on, until finally Mr. Charles put on a robe and the two of them went downstairs together. But tomorrow Phyllis would still be angry at having her sleep interrupted, and she wouldn’t take it out only on Cora.

She would take it out on Melissa, too.

No, talking to Mr. Charles would have to wait until morning.

What about the police?

She almost grinned as she imagined their response. They’d think she was turning dotty, reporting a teenage boy as missing when he’d actually only been gone a few hours and it was still only a little after one in the morning.

And maybe they’d be right—maybe there really wasn’t anything to worry about. After all, how many nights had Tag’s father stayed out all night when he was the same age as Tag was now?

She couldn’t even remember, it had happened so often. And usually he came home—-if he came home at all—so drunk he could barely stand up.

The teapot began to whistle, and she put a teaspoon of instant coffee into a mug, then filled the cup with hot water.

Maybe all that was happening was that Tag was finally growing up, she told herself. Maybe he’d just decided it was time for him to go out and have some fun.

But even as she tried to convince herself that was all that had happened, she knew she didn’t believe it. Tag wasn’t at all like his father, and never had been.

She stirred the coffee, then took a sip, wincing as the nearly boiling fluid scalded her mouth.

Taking the mug with her, she went back into the living room. Completely alone in the house for the first time in nearly fifteen years, a strange feeling came over her.

She felt lonely. Lonely, and vulnerable.

She glanced around uneasily; the black rectangles of the windows seemed to gaze back at her, and she suddenly had a crawly feeling that there were eyes outside, watching her. Setting the mug down, she moved from one window to the other, closing the drapes.

Her eyes went to the wood laid in the hearth for a fire, and she toyed with the idea of lighting it. But it was midsummer, and the night was already warm. Though the flames themselves might make her feel better, the heat of them would quickly become unbearable.

She went back to her chair and picked up her book once more. Perhaps if she could concentrate on reading, she could put her worries out of her mind. But as she tried to focus her eyes on the words, she only became more and more conscious of the emptiness of the house.

And she also had a strange feeling that something was wrong outside the house.

She tried to assure herself that she was letting her imagination get the better of her, but the harder she tried to ignore the uneasiness, the stronger it got.

“You’re a foolish old woman,” she finally muttered to herself as she got once more to her feet. “You’ve got yourself all worked up over what’s probably nothin’ at all, and now you’re going to scare yourself half to death, imagining things that aren’t there.” But despite her words, she moved to the front door, switched on the light, and stepped out on the porch.

The blackness of the night hung all around her, seemed to close in on her, and the uneasy feeling blossomed inside her. Her first instinct was to go back into the house and lock the door behind her, but she determinedly put her fears aside.

If something was wrong, a voice inside her whispered, it almost surely involved Tag.

She stepped off the porch and out of the bright circle of light from the lamp next to the door.

Teri stared at Melissa in the dim moonlight that streamed through the pottingshed door. Her eyes were open now, and fixed once more on the grisly corpse beneath the floor. But she’d stopped crying, and a calm seemed to have come over her since she’d uttered her strangled plea for D’Arcy to help her.

Suddenly Teri understood. It was just like that night when she’d found her half sister strapped to the bed, gazing blankly at the ceiling. And now it had happened again. Melissa’s own personality had shut down, to be replaced by the “friend” she’d invented to shield herself from the reality of what was happening to her.

It was perfect.

Even more perfect than Teri had hoped.

A light suddenly came on—the light on Cora’s porch—shining brightly in the night, and Teri instantly snapped off the flashlight and drew back into the deep shadows of the shed. A moment later she saw the silhouette of a figure against the brightly lit wall of the housekeeper’s cottage.

Cora—still awake, still waiting for Tag. If she came this way …

But it was all right; Cora seemed to be going the other way, circling around her house.

“Wipe the machete off, Melissa,” she whispered as loud as she dared.

Melissa remained where she was, unmoving, as if she hadn’t heard Teri at all. And then Teri remembered.

“D’Arcy?” she asked. Melissa’s head moved slightly and her strange, vacant eyes fixed on Teri. “You want to help Melissa, don’t you? Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Melissa’s head slowly nodded.

“Then clean off the machete,” Teri whispered again. “Pick it up and wipe the blood off the blade.”

As she watched, Melissa obediently reached out and took the weapon in her hand, wiping at the blood with a rotting rag that was lying in a corner of the floor.

“That’s right,” Teri whispered. “Now drop the rag in the hole.”

Moving like an automaton, Melissa obediently dropped the rag onto Tag’s body.

“Now help me,” Teri went on. “We have to get the boards back in place.”

She picked up the end of one of the floorboards and shifted it into position over the hole in the floor, and Melissa silently repeated her motions at the other end. Seconds later all the boards were back in place, the gap in the floor had disappeared, and the machete was once more leaning against the wall of the pottingshed.

“You have to go back to the house now, D’Arcy,” Teri whispered. Her eyes scanned the pool of light in front of Cora’s house, but the old woman was still nowhere to be seen. “You have to take Melissa back to her room and put her back in bed.” Melissa said nothing, but again her head bobbed obediently. “Go around the bathhouse, so if anyone sees you, they won’t know where you’re coming from.”

She searched the darkness once more for any sign of Cora, then nudged Melissa gently through the door. Melissa, her eyes staring blankly ahead, moved through the darkness toward the bathhouse.

Teri herself, after checking the pottingshed one more time, hurried back around the garage, ducked into the
deep shadows by the walls of the house, and slipped through the French doors, locking them behind her.

Cora finished her circuit of the house, having seen nothing, and was about to go back inside when a flicker of movement near the pool caught her eye. She shaded her eyes against the glare of the porch light, then reached inside and flipped the switch. A moment later, as her night vision returned, the figure by the pool emerged clearly out of the darkness.

A figure, clad in white, moving slowly toward the back door of the house.

A gasp escaped Cora’s lips as she instinctively remembered all the tales she’d heard of D’Arcy. A moment later her reason returned, and with it, the certainty that she knew who the figure was.

Leaving the porch still dark, she moved quickly down the steps and crossed the lawn, slowing as she approached the pale figure. She could see it clearly now, and nodded to herself as she realized she’d been right.

It was Melissa, her eyes open, her arms hanging limply at her sides, moving toward the house.

Moving toward the house, but sound asleep.

Instantly, Cora remembered the instructions she’d received when Melissa’s sleepwalking had first begun.

“The doctor says the most important thing is not to frighten her,” Charles had told her. “It’ll probably never happen, but if you ever have to deal with it, try not to wake her up. She might wake up anyway, and if she does, just tell her she’s all right, explain what happened, and get her back to bed. But you might be able to get her back to bed without waking her up at all. Just speak softly to her and try to guide her back to her room.”