Second Child (46 page)

She was imagining it. The house was empty—she knew it! She’d seen the lights in Cora’s living room, even seen the old woman herself dozing in her chair.

She had begun to relax when she heard the steps again.

Now they were on the same floor she was on, moving slowly down the hall toward her closed door.

Gasping, she hurried to the door, twisted the key in the lock, then went back to her vanity.

The footsteps grew louder, and now she could sense a presence just outside her door.

Her heart was beating furiously, and icy fingers of panic were reaching out toward her.

Once more she insisted to herself that it was nothing, that it was only her mind playing tricks on her, as she had
played tricks on Melissa, making her half sister believe she saw things that weren’t there.

Her lock on her memories suddenly snapped and all the images of what she’d done poured forth, looming before her, horrifying her.

Was this how the rest of her life was going to be?

These terrible visions of her own guilt sneaking up on her, leaping out of their hiding place to torment her?

She turned away from the door, but the images in her mind followed her, mocking her. She closed her eyes for a moment, but then, as she heard the sound of a key turning in a lock, her eyes reopened, and she stared into the mirror.

Behind her the door that had been locked only a moment ago, the door she’d locked herself, stood slightly ajar.

Trembling with fear but unable to resist, she turned around.

As she watched, transfixed, the hinges groaned and the door swung slowly open.

A figure in a white dress, its face veiled, stood framed in the doorway, staring at her. Though she could see nothing of the face beneath the veil, her own terrified mind filled in its features.

Polly MacIver’s features
—her face contorted in a mask of death as she lay in the driveway after having fallen from the second-story window.

Tom MacIver’s features
—the flesh of his face burned away, the hollow sockets of his eyes gazing accusingly at her.

Tag Peterson’s face
—the features bloody and crawling with maggots. Tag was hidden beneath the veil, too, and she could see his eyes clearly, watching her, gazing at her as if he could see right through her. She’d had to kill him—there hadn’t been any choice! He’d known what she was doing, and he was going to stop her.

Even Jeff Barnstable’s face
—he was there, too, and now, in this terrible moment of clarity, in which all her victims had risen from the dead to confront her, she knew that she’d killed Jeff as well. Perhaps not with the cold deliberation of the others, but in the end, the responsibility for what had happened to him was hers.

And finally, gazing at her almost pityingly through the
heavy mesh of the veil, she was certain she could see Melissa Holloway.

Melissa, whom she’d hated for years before she’d ever met her.

Melissa, whom Teri had finally succeeded in exiling from her life and her home.

She could see them all in the veiled figure, and as the cold hands of her own guilt closed around her, she knew that whatever this figure demanded of her, she would do.

The figure raised its left arm to point at her accusingly.

But there was no hand at the end of the arm.

Only a bloody stump, the flesh and tendons curling back from the severed bones, so that it was white, glistening bone that pointed at Teri.

She rose, knowing already what she had to do, and followed the grisly figure as it turned and led her from the room.

In her room at Harborview, Melissa came slowly awake in her bed. Even before she opened her eyes, she sensed that she was not in her room at Maplecrest. No, she was somewhere else.

A hospital.

She was in a hospital where they’d brought her after …

Her eyes flew open and she sat straight up in bed as the floodgates of her memory suddenly opened.

The memories tumbled over one another as they struggled to capture her attention.

Some of them were familiar—familiar, and horrible.

The vision of Tag, his mutilated body lying under the floor of the pottingshed.

And Blackie, a string of pearls around his neck, hanging from a rafter in the attic.

Some of them were strange.

She saw an image of herself in the shower, scalding water pouring over her skin while her mother scrubbed her roughly, screaming at her.

Lying in her bed through endless nights, the cuffs around her wrists and ankles chafing at her.

Teri, her face looming over her in the darkness, talking to her.

No—not talking to
her
.

Talking to D’Arcy.

Talking to D’Arcy …

Her mind shifted suddenly, and she remembered the night of the costume ball. But now she remembered all of it. She remembered putting on the wig and going up to the attic. She remembered going down the servants’ stairs and moving through the strangely unfamiliar kitchen.

And the path that seemed somehow to have changed.

All the blank spots in her memory were suddenly filled in, and for a moment a great fear filled her.

Instinctively, she called out to D’Arcy.

There was no reply.

There was no reply, for D’Arcy had gone away.

No, not gone away, not exactly.

Rather, D’Arcy had become a part of her, finally adding her own memories to Melissa’s.

She sat still in the bed, looking around the room. There was nothing strange about it; indeed, she found that she knew every nook and cranny, every slight imperfection in the wallpaper. And yet it was also as if she’d never seen it before.

Her eyes wandered to the night table and the string of pearls that lay on it. She picked them up, feeling the familiar texture of them in her fingers.

But something was wrong.

One of the pearls—the third one from the end—should have had a slight imperfection in it, just the tiniest bump that you could barely feel.

Frowning, she examined the pearls more closely, and her eyes fell on the necklace’s golden clasp.

The clasp that was engraved with her initials, in letters so tiny and fine they were hardly legible.

She brought them close, straining to read them, looking for the familiar
M.J.H.

But what she found were other initials.

T.E.M.

Teresa Elaine MacIver.

But it was impossible. They were
her
pearls! Her father had given them to her last …

And then she remembered.

These were the pearls she’d removed from Blackie’s neck the night she’d found him hanging in the attic.

For a long time she sat perfectly still, absorbing the meaning of what she’d found on the necklace’s clasp.

The memories—all of them, hers and D’Arcy’s—began to fit together and take a logical shape.

At last, as tears flowed down her face—more of pity for the people who had died than for herself—she pressed the buzzer that would summon the night nurse.

Charles and Phyllis let themselves into the house, and Phyllis impulsively threw her arms around her husband and hugged him. “Wasn’t it wonderful?” she asked. “How could it have been more perfect?”

It would have been perfect, Charles silently thought, if Melissa had been there. But for tonight he wouldn’t mar Phyllis’s joy with his own sadness. He would let her enjoy her moment of triumph, let her go on basking in the glow of her success. Time enough tomorrow for her to begin dealing with reality once again.

For he knew she’d been avoiding it, was all too aware of the excuses she was making to escape having to visit Melissa in the hospital.

But Melissa was still her daughter, and she still had a responsibility to her, no matter how distasteful that responsibility might be.

As if sensing his thoughts, Phyllis released him from her embrace, her happy smile fading away. “Couldn’t you put her out of your mind even for one night?” she complained.

Charles shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t. It hurt so much not to have her with us tonight. She’d been looking forward to it for so long.”

Phyllis sighed with impatience. “She doesn’t even know she missed it, Charles. Dr. Andrews says—”

Charles held his hands up in a gesture that pleaded for peace. “Not tonight,” he said. “I didn’t even mean to bring it up. Now, why don’t you go up and say hello to Teri. Her light’s still on, and I can’t believe she’s gone to sleep yet. In fact, why don’t you bring her downstairs? I’ll fix us a nightcap, and she can have a Coke or something.”

Her momentary anger forgotten as quickly as it had
welled up inside her, Phyllis hurried up the stairs. The moment she reached the landing, she knew something was wrong.

Something in the house didn’t feel right.

“Charles?” she called. “Charles, come up here!”

Charles hurried up the stairs to find Phyllis staring at the floor. His own gaze following hers, he saw a trail of dark red staining the hardwood floor.

He frowned, following it to the open door to Teri’s room.

With Phyllis following him, he hurried down the hall. “Teri? Teri, are you okay?”

The room was empty, but lying in the middle of the floor, a shapeless crumpled mass of brilliant green material, was the dress Teri had worn to the ball that night.

He stared at the dress uncomprehendingly, then quickly crossed to the bathroom.

It, too, was empty.

Leaving the bathroom, he strode out of the room and followed the trail of blood in the opposite direction.

Phyllis, her breath already coming in choking sobs, stumbled after him. At last they came to the base of the attic stairs.

That door, too, was open. Charles, with Phyllis clutching at his arm, stared up into the darkness above. At last, taking a deep breath, he started up the stairs, but Phyllis’s hand tightened on his arm.

“N-No,” she whispered. “I—I don’t want to.”

Charles’s voice rasped through his clenched jaw. “We have to,” he said. “If she’s up there …”

He left the sentence incomplete, hanging in the air, and once more started up the flight to the attic.

He came to the top, his hand grasping his wife’s, almost pulling her along behind him. Then, when she was standing beside him on the landing, he reached into the dark cavern of the attic and switched on the light.

They both saw it at the same time.

Fifteen feet away, Teri, clad in the bloodstained white dress that Melissa had worn the day she’d led the police to Tag Peterson’s butchered corpse, was hanging from one of the rafters, a thick rope knotted tightly around her neck.

The dress itself glistened redly in the harsh light of the naked bulb. There was a pool of blood beneath Teri’s feet.

Her left arm, ending in a stump that was still dripping fresh blood, hung at her side. On the floor, directly below Teri’s lifeless form, gleamed the blade of a meat cleaver.

Phyllis stared at Teri’s contorted face, the eyes bulging outward to gaze at her accusingly, a grimacing smile of death twisting her lips. Then, screaming once, she collapsed to the floor, sobs racking her body.

Charles, stunned for a moment by the grisly sight, felt his gorge rise inside him, but then seized control of his roiling emotions. Turning away, he bolted down the stairs and ran to the master suite and the telephone on the bedside table. Grabbing the phone with one hand and turning on the light with the other, he started to dial the emergency number.

And froze.

The phone dropped back onto its cradle as his eyes fixed numbly on the object on his pillow.

It was Teri’s severed hand. In its blood-soaked fingers was clutched a string of pearls.

The pearls, he slowly realized, she’d sworn she never received.

He was still staring at them a moment later, trying to absorb what they meant, when the phone jangled loudly at his side.

He wanted to ignore it, to shut the insistent buzz out of his mind while he tried to comprehend everything he’d seen in the last minutes.

But the phone kept ringing, and finally he picked it up.

“H-Hello?” he asked, his voice shaking so badly it was barely intelligible. There was a momentary silence, and then a voice, a whispered voice almost as shaky as his own, spoke from the other end.

“P-Papa? This is Melissa.”

Melissa felt a shiver run through her, but wasn’t certain whether it had been brought on by fear or anticipation. Though she said nothing at all, Charles Holloway sensed his daughter’s sudden unease and glanced over at her from his position behind the wheel of the Mercedes. “It’s not too late to change your mind, honey. There’s no reason we have to do this at all.”

Melissa shook her head. “There are all kinds of reasons, Papa,” she said. “We can’t just pretend nothing ever happened here.”

It had been five years since either of them had been back in Secret Cove, and when she’d first suggested to her father that they go to the August Moon Ball this year, his reaction had been a flat-out refusal.

“I can’t imagine why you’d want to go, nor can I imagine anything in the world that would make me go,” he’d told her. But she’d just grinned knowingly at him.

“How about if I asked you?”

And so they were here. Cora had stayed in New York, shaking her head dolefully when they’d told her where
they were going. “Not me,” she’d said. “If you two want to go stir up all those memories, I don’t suppose I can stop you. But I’ve had my share of grief, and it’s all tied up with that place.” Her old eyes had fixed on Charles. “And that place never brought you much happiness, either.”

But Melissa had been adamant. “I want to see it,” she’d insisted, trying to find the right words to explain her feelings about both Secret Cove and herself. “I don’t want to live at Maplecrest again—I don’t think I even want to spend a night there. But I want to know that I
can
go there. I hid from too much for too long. I don’t want to hide from anything anymore. And,” she added, “believe it or not, I still want to go to the August Moon Ball. So you have to go with me, because you promised to dance the first and last dances with me, remember?”