Second Child (40 page)

Melissa nodded automatically, though she’d barely heard the words.

If Tag was gone …

No,
she told herself once more.
It was just a nightmare.
But no matter how hard she tried to convince herself, she knew she didn’t believe it had all been a dream.

An hour later, still lying in bed, Melissa heard the familiar crunching of the gravel on the driveway as Cora backed
her car out of its stall behind her house and left the estate on her way into the village. Cora had brought some breakfast up to her a little while ago, but the tray still sat untouched on her vanity. She’d asked Cora about Tag, but although Cora had tried to assure her that he’d probably be back any minute now, Melissa could tell the housekeeper didn’t believe her own words. She’d started to tell Cora about her nightmare, but Cora had refused to listen.

“I don’t want you even to talk about it,” she’d said. “You should just forget about bad dreams. If you let them get you all upset, they’ll just come back over and over again. They’re like demons, that’s what.” She’d chattered on, but Melissa had stopped listening. She could not force her mind away from the horrible images she’d seen the night before.

Now, with her mother and half sister long since gone to the club to play tennis, and the house completely empty, she finally got out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and her favorite T-shirt—the one Tag had given her—and shoved her feet into a pair of worn sneakers. Though she still had no appetite, she forced herself to drink the glass of orange juice Cora had brought her, then took the tray downstairs.

The house had a strange silence to it, an oppressive emptiness that made Melissa want to run outside. She started to do the dishes, but as she ran some water into the sink, she suddenly knew she could stand it no longer.

She had to go out to the pottingshed and look for herself. If what had happened last night had truly been only a nightmare, at least she would know, and finally release herself from the terrible fears that had held her in their grip since the moment she’d awakened.

But if it hadn’t been a nightmare …

She put the thought out of her mind.

Abandoning the dirty dishes and leaving the sink half filled with water, she opened the back door and stepped out into the sunlight, but even the heat of the morning couldn’t penetrate the cold knot of fear that had settled into her belly.

She crossed the terrace and skirted the pool, unconsciously
retracing the path she’d followed the night before, while lost in the sleep to which D’Arcy had sent her.

At last she came to the pottingshed, and a wave of trepidation broke over her as she examined its broken door. She felt her legs tremble and for a moment wanted to turn back. But she knew she couldn’t.

She had to know.

She forced herself to move forward, and reached out to push the door open. The first thing she saw, the morning sun glinting brightly on its blade, was the machete.

Her eyes fixed on it, willing it to disappear, to return to its accustomed place against the wall inside the garage.

It remained where it was, silently accusing her.

And then she noticed the scent.

The sickly sweet fumes of decaying flesh assaulted her nostrils, and as her lungs filled with the noxious odor, the images leaped back into her mind with a new clarity.

With shaking hands she reached down and lifted one of the floorboards.

Her mind reeled at the sight she beheld.

Flies covered Tag’s corpse, a black undulating mass of feeding insects that swarmed upward as the floor opened above them. Beneath the flies were the maggots, feeding on the ragged edges of Tag’s wounds.

Her gorge rising as her eyes fixed on the grisly scene, a stream of vomit spewed from Melissa’s mouth, but she was unaware of what was happening to her body, for her mind—stretched finally too taut—was at last beginning to rend asunder.

Silently, she screamed out for help, screamed out to the only friend who had never abandoned her, never failed her.
Help me, D’Arcy. Please help me …

She felt the familiar blackness closing around her, felt all the sights she could no longer bear to witness fade away.

Sleep.

She had to sleep.

And this time she hoped never to wake up again.

This time she wanted to fall away into the black abyss and simply remain there, submerged forever in the soft darkness of forgiving sleep.

No one was there to see the change that came over
Melissa now, no one witnessed the strange transformation as the personality of D’Arcy emerged once more, coming for the first time into the light of day.

Her eyes, only a moment ago clamped shut against the horror at her feet, now opened, and she gazed steadily, almost curiously, at the carnage beneath the floor.

Teri’s words, words that in her memory had been uttered only a few minutes ago, drifted into her mind.

“…  it wasn’t really you that did it, was it?”

Why was she here?

She had gone back to the house.

She’d gone back to the house to put Melissa to bed.

But someone had sent her away.

Someone had started talking to her, and Melissa had finally heard them and awakened.

And now she was back in the pottingshed, and Teri was gone, and somehow it was daylight.

She gazed once more at the corpse beneath the floor. Had Melissa done this?

She didn’t know. But she had never known
why
Melissa was in trouble. All she’d ever known was that when Melissa was being punished, it was up to her to take care of her.

And if Melissa had done this, surely she would be punished.

D’Arcy knew what that meant.

She turned away from the gaping hole in the floor and walked slowly back to the house. Ignoring the dirty dishes in the sink, she passed through the kitchen to the old servants’ stairs and climbed quickly to the second floor.

Emerging from the door at the end of the guest-wing hall, she walked down the length of the corridor until she came to the master suite. She opened the door and went inside, going directly to the cedar chest in Melissa’s father’s dressing room.

In the bottom of the third drawer, hidden beneath a stack of sweaters, she found what she was looking for.

At last she went to Melissa’s room and pulled back the covers on the bed.

She began attaching the thick nylon straps of the restraints to the frame of the bed, and, when she was done,
took off her clothes and slipped into a pair of Melissa’s pajamas.

At last she got on the bed, stretched out her legs, and began fastening the leather cuffs to her ankles.

When she was finished, she used the fingers of her right hand to fasten another cuff to her left wrist.

At last, the final strap, the one she’d been unable to fasten to her arm, held firmly in her hand, she lay stretched out on her back.

Once more she would endure Melissa’s punishment.

Tom Mallory unconsciously tapped the eraser of his pencil against his front teeth as he scanned the report Cora Peterson had filled out. At last, dropping the pencil on his desk, he shifted his eyes from the report to Cora herself, perched nervously on the hard wooden chair on the other side of the desk. “Well, if it was anybody else but Tag,” he observed almost reluctantly, “I’d have to say there isn’t much we can do for another twenty-four hours or so. But I don’t know …” He sighed, leaning back and folding his hands over his stomach. “I guess I tend to agree with you. Tag’s never given anybody in this town a speck of trouble, and ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, he’s been more grown up than half the men we got on the force here.”

For the first time since Tag had disappeared, Cora felt a little of the nervous tension ebb from her body. “Then you’ll look for him?” she asked anxiously.

Mallory nodded. “I’ll have all the boys keep an eye out, and get copies of his picture made.” He held up the snapshot of Tag that Cora had brought with her. In the picture, Tag was grinning happily, wearing a baseball cap that Tom Mallory himself had given to him only last summer. Mallory shook his head sadly. “I just can’t see anyone wanting to hurt Tag,” he mused almost to himself. “There isn’t a soul in town who doesn’t like that boy.”

Cora nodded. “That’s why I can’t understand it. He was right in the middle of his chores when I came to town yesterday. And when I got back, he’d just vanished.”

Mallory shrugged. “What about that dog of his? It ever show up?”

Cora shook her head. “But that’s different. Dogs run off all the time.”

“Well, I think the first thing we better do is have a few people check out the woods around the cove, and maybe that stretch of rocks up north. If Tag was out hunting for the dog, he could have had some kind of accident. If he was trying to climb some of those rocks …” He let his voice trail off as he saw the color drain from Cora’s normally ruddy face.

“He wouldn’t have done that,” she said. “He knows how dangerous the bluffs can be. He—”

“Now, take it easy, Mrs. Peterson. I didn’t say anything had happened to him. But it seems to me that right now the best thing we can hope for is that he fell somewhere and maybe broke a leg. And if he did, he’ll be all right. We’ll find him.”

But Cora still wasn’t convinced, and now she shifted uneasily in her chair. There was something she’d left out of the report, something she hadn’t yet told Tom Mallory about. But it had been gnawing at her ever since yesterday. All night—as she’d lain awake listening every minute for Tag to come home—she kept thinking about Teri MacIver. But even now it seemed … well, it seemed just plain disloyal to talk to the police about Charles Holloway’s own daughter.

Mallory, sensing her sudden discomfort, leaned forward once again. “Is there something else, Mrs. Peterson?”

Cora took a deep breath and made up her mind. “Well, yes,” she finally admitted. “I—I hate to even bring it up, really. It—Well, it’s Teri. Teri MacIver.”

Mallory nodded. “Beautiful young lady. Looks just like her mother.”

“Well, she certainly doesn’t
act
like her mother,” Cora observed tightly. Now that she’d finally broached the subject, her words tumbled from her lips in a swift torrent. “Nothing’s been the same since that girl came into the house. Oh, she acts just as sweet as pie when anyone’s around. Acting like she’s Melissa’s best friend, and all. But I don’t believe it, and neither did Blackie!”

“Blackie?” Mallory echoed.

Cora nodded emphatically. “The minute he saw her, he backed away from her. Oh, she tried to make up to him,
but he always snarled at her. A dog can tell about people, you know. If a dog doesn’t like someone—” Realizing she was starting to ramble, she cut her words short. “Anyway, Tag saw her kick Blackie once. And ever since she’s come, Melissa’s problems seem to get worse and worse. The nightmares, and the sleepwalking …” She shook her head, her tongue clucking sympathetically. “I just can’t help thinking Teri’s doing something to her. I—”

Mallory held up a hand. “Hold on,” he said. “Are you saying Melissa walks in her sleep?”

Cora paused, flustered. She hadn’t meant to say that, hadn’t meant to at all. But now that she’d made the slip, she couldn’t take it back. Reluctantly, she nodded.

Mallory frowned deeply. “How come nobody told me that Saturday night?” he asked. “Could that be why she didn’t remember going up to the road? When the Barnstable kid had his accident?”

Cora gazed at him uncertainly. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. She thought back to that night, when Melissa, all dressed up in her costume, had come through the kitchen on her way to the club. Now that she thought about it, Melissa’s eyes
had
looked strange. In fact, they’d had that same strange vacant look as last night. “But now that I think of it,” she went on, “there was something a little peculiar about her that night. She was acting kind of odd. I thought maybe she was just, you know, sort of pretending to be someone else, the way you do when you put on a costume.”

“All right,” Mallory told her. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll have some of the guys start looking around, but I also want to come out to Maplecrest myself. Just to talk to people—find out when the last time they saw Tag was—that kind of thing.” And I also want to find out what’s going on with Melissa Holloway, he added to himself. Saturday night, when he’d been talking to the whole family, not one of them had mentioned that Melissa had a problem with sleepwalking. Instead, they all—especially Phyllis—had insisted that the shock of the accident had simply caused a loss of memory.

But if it was something else …

Was it possible that she had, after all, caused the accident, rather than simply witnessed it?

He didn’t know, but he intended to find out.

*   *   *

It was close to noon when Phyllis and Teri finally returned from the club. As soon as they came into the house, Phyllis went to the kitchen, her jaw setting angrily as she saw that Cora had only just begun to prepare lunch. “Really, Cora,” she said. “I told you we’d be back by noon and that I expected lunch to be ready. If you can’t follow the simplest—”

“It’s almost ready,” Cora broke in, pulling a platter of sliced melon from the refrigerator. “Won’t be more than ten or fifteen minutes. I had to go into the village to tell the police about Tag.”

Phyllis’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “Cora, he’s barely been gone twenty-four hours! He’s a teenager, for heaven’s sake. You know how kids these days are.”

“Not Tag,” Cora declared, turning to face her employer. “And Tom Mallory agrees with me. Fact is,” she added, a rare feeling of spitefulness rising within her as she shifted her gaze to Teri, who had followed her stepmother into the kitchen, “he’ll be coming out here to talk to everyone.” She kept her eyes on Teri, but remained uncertain whether the girl had reacted to her words at all. “He’ll be wanting to know—” And then she caught herself. Why let Teri know what the police were going to ask? “Well, he’ll just be wanting to talk to people, that’s all.”

Phyllis shrugged dismissively. “Well, I’m sure he’s welcome to talk to us,” she said. “But what could any of us possibly say? None of us has any idea where Tag went.”