Black Creek Crossing (17 page)

Except that everything had changed, and the minute she’d come downstairs, her mother knew that something was wrong. And now, even though she’d already said she was fine, her mother was giving her one of those penetrating looks that always made Angel feel as if she couldn’t hide anything, no matter how hard she tried.

Then her father came into the room, and Angel felt a terrible chill pass over her. There was a bandage on his left cheek, high up near the temple. Though she wanted to look away—look anywhere but at the bandage—she couldn’t tear her eyes from it. As the seconds ticked slowly away, her father’s eyes finally fixed on her, and when he spoke, his voice was as dark as his expression.

“What you looking at?”

“N-Nothing,” Angel stammered, at last managing to pull her eyes away from the bandage. But even as she looked back down at her oatmeal, she could feel her father’s eyes still fixed on her, and felt her skin begin to crawl as it had last night when she’d felt the presence of someone in her room and heard the floorboards creak as he came close to the bed.

Came close, and bent down, and—

“Gotta go.” Her father’s voice jerked Angel back into the present, and a second later she reflexively jerked away as his lips brushed her cheek. “What’s with you? Too old to kiss your daddy?”

Then he was gone, but it wasn’t until she heard the old Chevelle roar away that Angel finally tried to eat again.

Tried, and failed.

“Maybe you’d better not go to school today,” her mother fretted. “You look tired.”

“I’m okay,” Angel insisted. “I—I just had a lot of homework to do.”

Her mother frowned. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Angel looked up at her mother, and once more her mother’s words from a few days ago echoed in her head:
Your father loves you
.
.
.
he’d never do anything to hurt you.
And he hadn’t hurt her, really. He’d scared her, and she was terrified of what might happen if he came into her room again, but he hadn’t really hurt her. And after he got cut, maybe he wouldn’t come back at all.

“Well?” her mother pressed. “What is it? You’d better tell me.”

Angel felt her resolve to say nothing about what had happened last night weaken. But even if she told her mother, how would she start? The answer rose as quickly as the question: “D-Did Dad tell you how he cut himself?”

Myra, caught off guard by the question, cocked her head. “What does that have to do with anything?” she asked.

“Did he?” Angel pressed.

“He cut himself shaving.” Now Myra lowered herself into the chair across from Angel. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Why are you so interested in a shaving cut?”

Suddenly, her fear and the exhaustion from the nearly sleepless night overwhelmed Angel, and the whole strange story—everything except the marks she’d found on the mirror this morning—came pouring out. She tried to make sense of it as she told it, but even as she spoke, she knew it sounded even stranger out loud than it had when she’d pieced it together this morning.

And when she saw her mother’s expression, she knew she’d made a mistake telling her anything at all.

“How dare you?” Myra Sullivan said, her voice hard. “Your father loves you, and takes care of you, and would never do anything to hurt you! And what are his thanks? To have you come to me with terrible stories? You must have been dreaming! How could you even
make up
such vile things?”

Angel’s mouth opened as if to say something, but before she could utter even a single word, Myra’s hand snaked across the table and slapped her hard across the cheek.

“Filth!” her mother shouted. “That’s all it is! Filth! And you will not speak it in my house! After school today you will go to church, and you will confess your sins to Father Mike! All of them!” Myra’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. “It’s that boy you had in the house yesterday, isn’t it? That’s really what this is about. Your guilty conscience!”

Seeing the fury in her mother’s eyes, Angel knew better than to argue. The house felt like it was closing in around her, and all she wanted was to escape, to get away both from the terrors of the night and her mother’s rage. Leaving her oatmeal half finished, she stood up. “I better hurry,” she said softly. “I’ll be late.”

“Yes,” Myra Sullivan said coldly. “You’d better hurry. And you’d better think twice before you tell me any more lies about your father!” As Angel picked up her backpack, Myra said, “Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?”

Angel hesitated, then gave her mother a quick peck on the cheek and fled from the house into the crisp sunshine of the fall morning.

Skirting around the house, she cut across the front yard and headed along the road toward town, but before she went around the curve that would cut the house off from her view, she turned to look back at it once more. In the bright morning light it looked just as it had the first time she’d seen it—a small white house with a peaked roof, nothing out of the ordinary.

And there was no sign at all of the black cat.

So her mother must be right—she must have dreamed it all.

But then she remembered the pictures Seth Baker had showed her yesterday, with flames billowing from her window in one of them, and something that looked like it might be the shadowed image of a face peering out of another.

Chapter 18

ITH THE MEMORIES OF THE NIGHT DOGGING HER
every step, Angel dragged herself through the morning. By the time the bell signaling the lunch break rang, she wasn’t sure she could get through the rest of the day. She made her way to the cafeteria, looked around until she spotted Seth Baker sitting alone at the same table as yesterday, and bringing her lunch over, sank into the chair opposite him. He looked up, a smile starting to spread across his face, but as he gazed at Angel, his smile faded.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Her eyes darted nervously around the cafeteria. Zack Fletcher and Heather Dunne were sitting at the same table as yesterday. Angel hesitated about saying anything, then couldn’t keep it inside any longer, and words began tumbling from her mouth. She poured out every detail about what had happened—or what she thought had happened—and Seth listened to it all, not interrupting. He was so engrossed in what she was saying that he didn’t even notice Chad Jackson and Jared Woods ease themselves into two chairs at the table directly behind him, their backs to the table at which Angel and he were sitting.

“And the worst part of it is I don’t even know how much of it was a dream and how much of it was real! I mean, things don’t just fly off the dresser! And how could I have made a drawing on the mirror and not even remember it?”

When Angel at last fell silent, Seth sat quietly for a while, trying to sort it all out in his mind. But none of it made any more sense to him than it had to Angel. Unless . . .

“What if you
didn’t
draw on the mirror?” he finally suggested. “What if it all happened just like you remember it? And what if you don’t remember some of the stuff because you didn’t do it?”

Angel stared at him. “But if I didn’t do it, who did?”

Before Seth could respond, a sound erupted from the table behind him—the same loud, mock sucking and kissing sounds he’d heard yesterday afternoon as he passed Chad and Jared on his way home. His jaw clenching, Seth tried to shut the sounds out.

Then, while Jared kept making the kissing sounds, Chad stood up and turned around, his eyes glittering with malice. “Maybe it was Beth,” he said, his voice as scornful as the sneer on his lips. “Maybe Beth sneaked into your room last night to play with your lipstick!”

Angel gazed uncertainly at Chad.
Beth? Who was Beth? What was he talking about?
But a second later, as she saw Seth’s face paling, she understood.

Chad shifted his attack. “Except who would want to sneak into your room in the middle of the night?” he said to Angel. “Even Beth can’t be that hard-up!”

Jared Woods, bursting into laughter that was even uglier than the sounds he’d been making, stood up too. “Come on,” he told Chad. “Let’s get out of here before we catch whatever they’ve got!”

Picking up his tray, Chad shoved hard on Seth’s chair. Seth winced as the table dug deep into his stomach, but he managed to stifle the yelp of pain that rose in his throat. Neither he nor Angel said a word until they saw Chad and Jared drop into a couple of chairs at the table next to the one across the cafeteria where Zack and Heather were sitting.

“What was that all about?” Angel finally asked.

Seth shrugged and tried to look nonchalant. “They live down the street from me.” He picked up his fork and poked at the food on the plate in front of him.

“But how come they called you Beth?” Angel pressed.

Seth’s face flushed again. “How should I know?” he asked. “Maybe it’s just because I’m not very good at sports.”

Angel frowned. “That’s the name, isn’t it?” she asked. “The one you wouldn’t tell me yesterday.”

Seth nodded but said nothing.

“It isn’t any worse than ‘Mangy—’ ” Angel began, but Seth didn’t let her finish.

“Can we just talk about something else?”

“Like what?” Angel challenged.

“Like how that stuff got on your mirror last night,” Seth replied. “’Cause I know it wasn’t me.” He pulled a piece of paper from his notebook and pushed it across the table. “Draw what was on the mirror.”

Angel sat perfectly still, gazing at Seth, but when he said nothing else, and wouldn’t even meet her gaze, she finally fished around in her backpack, found a pen, and began to draw, doing her best to recreate the image she’d found on the mirror this morning. When she was done, she pushed it toward him.

Seth gazed at the drawing for a long time. “It looks like someone going down stairs,” he said at last. “But what’s that square under the stairs?”

Angel gazed at him in exasperation. “How should I know? I don’t even know if the jagged line is supposed to be stairs!”

“Well, what else could it be?” Seth argued.

“I don’t know! Maybe it’s supposed to be lightning or something?”

“That’s not what lightning looks like,” Seth shot back. Picking up the pen, he drew the kind of zigzag line that depicted lightning in every comic strip he’d ever seen. “Does that look like what was on your mirror?”

Angel shook her head. “But it doesn’t matter anyway, because it had to have been me that made the marks. I mean, the lipstick was all over my fingers, and my sheets and pillowcase, and everything.”

“Well, it won’t hurt for us to at least look, will it? And with all the stories about your house . . .” His voice trailed off. Then: “It just seems like we should try to find out, that’s all.”

There was a burst of laughter from Zack and Heather’s table, and a moment later Jared Woods was once again making the ugly sucking and kissing sounds. Then Chad Jackson joined in, and then Zack and the rest of the boys at his table took up the chorus. As the mocking sounds echoed through the cafeteria, Seth’s face turned crimson.

“Let’s just leave,” Angel said, putting the pen back in her backpack.

Seth shook his head. “That’s what they want.”

“So what are we supposed to do, just sit here and pretend it isn’t happening?”

Seth looked directly into her eyes. “Isn’t that what you did back in Eastbury?”

Angel wanted to shake her head but knew she couldn’t, because back in Eastbury it had been the same as it was here and there had never been anything she could do about it except pretend it wasn’t happening.

Just like Seth was pretending the laughter that was steadily building around them wasn’t directed at him.

“Why won’t they just leave us alone?” she finally asked. “What did we ever do to them?”

Seth said nothing, because he knew the answer as well as Angel did.

Neither of them had done anything at all.

They just had to deal with it.

Or figure out a way to make it stop.

Chapter 19

ELL? WAS I RIGHT? AREN’T YOU JUST LOVING YOUR
house?” Joni Fletcher asked, fixing Myra Sullivan with a look of such utter triumph that Myra half wished she hadn’t agreed to have lunch with her sister. “I’m telling you,” Joni plunged on, “it was an absolute steal!”