House of Reckoning (7 page)

Just talk.

Suddenly missing her mother so badly she knew she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, Sarah slid out of bed and carefully tested her injured leg. It was sore but not so bad that she couldn’t stand it. She slid her feet into her slippers and silently left the bedroom.

Even the air at the top of the stairs was fresher than in the bedroom. Maybe tomorrow she’d ask Tiffany if they could sleep with the door open. Or at least the window. At home they’d always slept with the windows open, even in the middle of winter.

She paused at the top of the stairs, which seemed somehow to have become steeper and longer than when she climbed them earlier. What if she stumbled? What if she wound up at the bottom in a heap with her one good leg broken? She wouldn’t—she couldn’t. Steeling herself, Sarah made her way slowly down to the kitchen. Pepper got up from his bed in the corner of the mud room, stretched himself, then trotted over to lick her ankles.

Very quietly, Sarah poured herself a glass of milk. She was tempted to put it in the microwave for a few seconds, but the silence in the house seemed so complete that she was sure even the sound of the machine’s fan would waken somebody else.

She opened the kitchen window just enough to feel the cool draft, and stood for a moment, sipping the cold milk as the stream of air blew across her flushed cheeks.

Suddenly, the kitchen was flooded with light, and Sarah whirled to see Mitch Garvey standing in the doorway, clad only in his underwear, scratching his belly. “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.

“I—I—I just came down for a glass of milk,” Sarah stammered, trying to look anywhere in the room except at her foster father’s nearly naked figure.

“You!” Mitch said. “Back to bed.”

Startled, Sarah looked up to see him pointing at the mud room, and Pepper, tail down, slinking back toward his pile of old towels. With the dog banished, Mitch reached across her and slammed the window shut. “Think we can afford to heat the whole planet?” he demanded. “It’s November, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I’m sorry,” Sarah breathed, shrinking away from him. “I couldn’t sleep, I was too hot, and I just—”

“You just thought you’d come down here and steal milk?”

“Steal? No, I—”

He took the glass from her hand. “Milk is expensive, and Angie’s a good planner. She knows what she’s gonna use this for, and there isn’t any extra.”

Sarah’s cheeks burned. “I—I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“If you’re thirsty, drink water,” Garvey told her, pouring the milk back into the carton, then pulling a beer out of the refrigerator before closing its door. “Better for you, anyway.” He twisted the cap off the beer and took a long swallow, his eyes steady on her.

Sarah crossed her arms in front of her chest, and wished she’d put on her robe.

“You better go back to bed,” Mitch said.

The smell of beer on his breath brought back the memory of that last terrible night on the farm when her father opened one beer after another, and Sarah suddenly wanted to be as far away from Mitch Garvey as she could get. She ducked past him through the kitchen door, but he followed her through the living room and stood at the bottom of the stairs, drinking his beer and watching every painful step she took as she made her way back up to the second floor.

The bedroom seemed even stuffier and hotter than when she awoke from the dream, but there was no way she would leave the door open, not given how she’d felt as her foster father watched her climbing the stairs a moment ago. Even if it meant she’d lie awake for the rest of the
night, tossing and turning, and be a wreck for her first day of school, it would be better than having Mitch Garvey staring in at her as she slept.

Then she remembered her pain pills. She hadn’t taken any for almost two weeks, because whenever she did, they instantly made her drowsy.

Which was exactly what she needed right now.

With a glance at Tiffany’s still form in the bed by the window, Sarah quietly opened the bottom dresser drawer, shook one pill out of the prescription bottle, put the bottle back under her clothes, then went to the bathroom and washed the capsule down with a glass of water. Hoping the pill would allow her to sleep well enough to let her get through her first day at her new school, she crept back into her bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and drifted into sleep.

Tiffany waited until she heard Sarah’s deep, regular breathing, then slipped silently out of bed, opened Sarah’s dresser drawer and felt around until her fingers closed on the prescription pill bottle. Using the tiny flashlight she kept in the drawer of her nightstand, she studied the label on the plastic bottle. She didn’t recognize the name of the drug, but the red sticker warning that it could be habit-forming told her all she needed to know.

Whatever they were, someone at school would be willing to buy them. Maybe she’d try to remember the drug’s name to look it up on the Internet, but that part didn’t really matter. She could sell anything that might get someone high.

Tiffany shook out a half-dozen pills, then put the bottle back, stashed the pills in a little zipper pocket in her backpack, and went back to bed.

Tomorrow, after school, she’d be going shopping.

S
arah sat in the front row of her biology class, holding her emotions firmly in check. She wanted to cry, but not because of the pain in her leg and hip. She was used to that; in fact, most of the time she could almost ignore it. What she couldn’t ignore was that everyone was looking at and whispering about her.

But not talking to her.

And it was only third period.

At home, she’d loved going to school. School was easy and fun and everyone was a friend and it was the best part of the day.

Here, finding her locker and her classrooms had proved almost impossible when she got caught up in the swirling rivers of students that flooded the hallways of Warwick High School between classes.

At home, the school was small, and all on the same floor. Here, she’d already gone up and down the big marble staircase in the center of the building four times. And either they hadn’t been teaching her anything at her old school or she simply hadn’t learned it, since most of the morning she had no idea what her teachers were talking about.

But worst of all, she had no friends.

She’d known she was going to be the new girl.

But she hadn’t realized that she would be the weird, gimpy girl.

The girl whose father killed someone and was in the penitentiary just outside of town.

The girl whose father had run over her.

Tried to kill her.

She’d heard it all as the morning dragged on, heard the bits of conversations as people passed her, felt eyes watching her, then seen people quickly look away when she turned around.

And now she felt like crying, which wouldn’t help at all. In fact, it would only make it worse. She chewed on the side of her thumb to keep the tears at bay and tried to listen to the teacher, and when the bell rang, she consulted the little printed schedule they’d given her at the office that morning.

Lunch period. Was it really possible? Was she going to have an hour when she didn’t have to sit in another classroom wondering if she’d ever be able to catch up with the other kids after the weeks she lost in rehab?

She found her locker, dropped off her heavy biology book, put the literature book she’d need in the class after lunch into her backpack, then followed a stream of kids to the cafeteria.

The three dollars Angie gave her that morning bought a small carton of milk, an egg salad sandwich, and a bag of chips. The change from the three dollars safe in her backpack, she balanced the tray carefully and scanned the room for an empty chair, already starting to feel her bad leg threatening to give out.

She spotted Zach Garvey, but there were no vacant seats at his table, let alone any girls. Besides, even from where she stood, she could feel their eyes on her, and when she finally limped by Zach’s table on her way toward an empty place at the table where Tiffany sat with her girlfriends, she heard someone whisper a few words: “… killed some guy, then ran over her …”

She shut the words out, quickened her pace as much as she could, but just before she set her tray down one of the girls plopped a book bag onto the vacant chair. “This seat’s taken,” she said.

Sarah stopped abruptly, staggered, almost lost her balance, and lurched against Tiffany rather than risk letting go of the tray to grab the chair for stability. “Sorry,” she said.

Tiffany glared at her but said nothing.

Now two tables full of kids were staring at her. The noise level in
the cafeteria dropped as conversations died away and everyone watched her limp around looking for a place to sit.

Way in the back, a boy sitting alone watched her, too. There were plenty of empty seats at his table, but as soon as she made eye contact with him, he averted his eyes and looked down.

Sarah got it—he didn’t want her to sit with him, either. Yet the way he ducked his head seemed familiar, as if she’d seen him somewhere before.

Then, in the far corner of the cafeteria, she spotted four students sitting at one end of a long—and otherwise empty—table. Her face burning as everyone watched, she hobbled through the maze of tables and chairs, almost tripping over a book bag someone shoved in front of her as she passed. Finally she set her tray at the opposite end from where the other kids were sitting and let her backpack slip off her shoulder onto the floor.

The other kids at the table instantly rose to their feet, picked up their trays, and walked away.

Sarah glanced around and saw that everyone in the cafeteria had seen what happened.

She sat down but couldn’t make her trembling fingers open the milk carton.

Then, after what seemed an eternity, the hum of conversation began to rise again as people found something else to do besides watch her.

Except that now, she was sure, instead of staring at her, they were talking about her.

It doesn’t matter, she told herself.

Shutting out the hum of the chatter around her, and refusing to look anywhere but at the table in front of her, Sarah finally took a small bite of her sandwich.

It tasted almost as bad as she felt.

The perpetual storm inside Nick Dunnigan’s head fell suddenly quiet as he took the first bite of his lasagna, and for a moment the unfamiliar calm inside his head unnerved him. Then, without even looking around, he knew that the girl he’d seen at the door of the Garveys’ house yesterday had walked into the cafeteria.

How did the voices know before he did?

Nick felt a sudden urge to run to her, to cling to her, but all he managed to do was glance up from his solitary table at the back of the room. She looked every bit as awkward as he always felt as she struggled with her tray and her backpack while everyone else in the room just stared at her and wouldn’t even let her sit at their tables.

The voices in his head began their mumbling again, and at first Nick couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. But as the girl went from table to table, searching for a place to set her tray down, and was being turned away from seat after seat, the voices began to whisper to him about what he should do to all the kids who were shutting her out.

Nick’s palms began to sweat.

And then she looked over at him, almost as if she knew he was watching her.

And knew what was going on in his mind.

Their eyes met and every nerve in Nick’s body tingled as if a jolt of electricity had just run through him.

The voices in his head quieted, too, as if they as well as he had been shocked into silence.

Shamed, he looked down, but prayed that she would come sit with him.

She didn’t, of course.

And the voices began discussing among themselves what they would do to each of the kids sitting at Tiffany Garvey’s table.

Nick looked over at Tiffany, and her face seemed to melt before his eyes.

Bonnie Shupe burst into flames and her agonizing screams tore through his mind as the flesh on her skull charred and flaked off.

Across from Bonnie, Beth Armstrong’s head—severed by an invisible machete—toppled onto the table and rolled between the lunch trays, her blank eyes wide open and staring at the other girls.

And inside Nick’s head the terrible voices screamed in glee at the mayhem they were showing him.

Nick clamped his eyes closed, bent over so his head was as low as he could get it, and squeezed his temples with both hands.

Stop, he silently begged. Leave me alone!

He wanted to rip his hair out, but knew it wouldn’t help.

He wanted to scream back at them, to order them to silence, but
the last time he did that, his father had taken him to the state hospital, where things were even worse than what went on in his head.

He opened his eyes, staring down at his cold lasagna, wishing himself invisible to everyone around him, when another sound, sharp and intermittent, slashed through the cacophony in his mind.

The alarm on his cell phone.

Nick groped in his pocket for his phone, silenced it, then turned his attention to his backpack, struggling to keep his eyes from wandering even for an instant to the horror going on around him. His fingers closed on a pill bottle, he shook one out and washed it down with milk.

“Taking your crazy pill, Nick?” someone yelled from across the cafeteria.

“Wouldn’t want you to miss your pill,” someone else said. “You might become normal.”

“Nah,” came an instant rejoinder. “He’ll never be normal.”

Once it started, the mocking only grew worse as everyone around him fed on one another’s insults.

Get out!

He had to get out before the new girl heard them, before she understood what they were saying, who they were talking about. He couldn’t let her see him the way the rest of them did. Nick grabbed his book bag, picked up his tray, and started toward the door. He kept his eyes straight ahead, ignored the taunts, tried to ignore the hallucinations, but all around him blood was spurting from torn arteries, faces were dissolving as if doused in acid, and maggots tumbled from empty sockets where the eyes that were watching him should have been.