Nightshade (3 page)

Eric eventually decided there wasn’t any secret to Pete and Matt’s precision at all — that they probably didn’t know how they did it themselves. Besides, all that mattered was that if they kept it up, there was no way anyone was going to beat Granite Falls on the football field this year. As Matt joined his team’s huddle, half a dozen boys gathered around Eric. “Well?” someone asked.

Eric shrugged. “How the hell should I know?”

“Maybe we should just always take Matt out,” Mark Ryerson suggested, flexing his huge tackle’s body to let Eric know he was prepared to do exactly what he’d suggested. “There’s always been something weird about that guy.”

Eric eyed Ryerson balefully. “You break one of his legs and there goes our shot at the championship.”

“I didn’t mean
really
hurt him,” Mark said quickly. “I meant like — just keep him covered, you know?”

“If that’s what you meant, why didn’t you say it? Just make sure that’s all you do,” Eric replied. Though he was playing opposite Matt and Pete today, Pete was still his best friend. And even if he didn’t care that much about Matt, there was still no way he would let Mark Ryerson mess up their shot at the school’s first winning season in more years than Eric could remember. He saw a flicker of anger in Ryerson’s eyes, but before the other boy lost control of his temper, their attention was diverted by the wailing of a siren, which was quickly coming closer.

As the boys huddled around Matt Moore and Pete Arneson turned toward the blaring sound, a fire truck — immediately followed by a second one — came around the corner off Manchester Road onto Prospect Street, raced by the practice field, then braked hard and turned onto Burlington Avenue.

No more than a house or two from the corner, a curl of smoke was rising up into the afternoon sky. The sirens died away, and for a second an almost eerie silence fell over the football field. Then a girl’s voice called out.

“Matt? Matt!”

The boys on the field watched as Kelly Conroe — dressed in her gym clothes for song-leading practice — ran across the field from the gym. “It’s your grandmother’s house!” Kelly gasped as she came up to Matt. “We could see it from where we were practicing!”

For a moment Matt didn’t seem to comprehend what Kelly was saying, but then, as the smoke from Burlington Avenue billowed up, he came to life. Grabbing Kelly’s hand, he started running, Pete Arneson and Eric Holmes right behind him.

*                                     *                                     *

“LET GO OF me!” emily moore demanded, struggling to pull her arm free from the fireman’s grip. “It’s my house! Don’t you understand? It’s mine!”

“I know it’s yours, Mrs. Moore,” Sean McCallum replied. He cast an eye around the quickly gathering crowd in search of the old woman’s daughter. “But I can’t let go of you unless you promise you won’t try to go in!”

Emily’s eyes flashed dangerously. “I can go in if I want to! It’s my house!”

“No, you can’t, Mrs. Moore,” McCallum said doggedly. “Not until the fire’s out and we know it’s safe.”

“I have to go in,” the old woman insisted. “I have to — ”

Before she could finish, Matt Moore appeared, panting and sweating from his dash from the practice field. “Gram? Gram, what happened? Are you okay?”

“Mrs. Moore is your grandmother?” Sean McCallum asked. When Matt nodded, he eased Emily toward the teenager, finally releasing his grip on her arm. “She’s trying to go into the house. Make sure she doesn’t.”

Before Matt could reply, the fireman was gone, disappearing around the corner of the house toward the kitchen.

“What happened, Gram?” Matt asked again.

Emily’s eyes were still fixed on the house, and when she took an unsteady step toward it, Matt reached out to steady her. She recoiled from his touch and turned her angry gaze on him.

“Don’t touch me!” she cried. “Don’t — ” Her words died on her lips, and her eyes seemed to lose some of their anger. “I know you,” she finally said. “You’re — You’re — ”

“Matt,” he prompted, dropping his voice so no one would hear him having to remind her who he was.

“Joan’s brat!” Emily hissed the two words, and now it was Matt who recoiled.

“I’m your grandson, Gram,” he said. Just as Sean McCallum had done a few moments ago, Matt scanned the crowd in search of help in dealing with the old woman. “You know me, Gram,” he went on. “It’s Matt! You’ve known me all my life!”

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Emily suddenly demanded, her eyes narrowing to suspicious slits as she peered into Matt’s face.

“M-Me?” Matt stammered.

Emily took a halting step forward, jabbing at his chest with her bony forefinger. “You did it! Don’t lie to me! It was you!”

Matt could see Pete Arneson and Eric Holmes standing behind his grandmother. Both of them were grinning, and while Pete grotesquely rolled his eyes, Eric mockingly twirled a finger around his ear.

“If you two jerks don’t want to help, why don’t you just go away?” Kelly Conroe said to them as she moved close to Matt and his grandmother. “You might be a little confused, too, if it was your house that was burning.” As their grins faded, she turned to Emily Moore. “It’s going to be all right, Mrs. Moore,” she said, gently taking Emily’s hand in her own. “We’re going to take care of you.”

The old woman peered into Kelly’s soft blue eyes. “Cynthia?” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

“It’s Kelly,” Matt replied. “You know her, Gram — Kelly Conroe.”

But Emily didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes remained fixed on Kelly, and now she was holding both of the girl’s hands, her fingers digging deep into Kelly’s flesh. Her lips worked for a moment, then she found the words. “She did it, didn’t she?”

“D-Did what?”

Emily’s rheumy eyes shifted to the burning house. “She did it,” she muttered so softly that Kelly and Matt couldn’t be certain she was speaking to them. “It was her. I know it was her.”

Seeing his mother and stepfather coming across the lawn, Matt breathed a silent sigh of relief.

“Mother?” Joan Hapgood cried, her voice reflecting the relief she felt as she spotted Emily. “Mother, what happened? Are you all right?”

The sound of her daughter’s voice brought Emily out of the reverie into which she’d fallen, and she wheeled around to face Joan. “Now look what you’ve done!” she said.

Dear God,
Joan silently begged, knowing from years of experience what was coming.
Please don’t let her do this. Not right here. Not right now.
But even as she offered the silent prayer, she knew there was no hope of it being answered, for Emily was already shaking an accusing finger in her face.

Emily’s voice rose querulously. “How many times have I told you?” she demanded. “How many times have I told you not to leave the skillet on the stove?”

Joan’s heart skipped a beat as she realized what must have happened. How close had her mother come to burning herself up entirely? And what had she been doing cooking at three-thirty in the afternoon in the first place? But she knew better than to try to argue. Better just to try to calm the old woman down. She glanced at the house, where the smoke had given way to steam and the fire appeared to be under control. “It’s all right, Mother,” she said. “Whatever happened, it’s almost over with. Everything’s going to be all right.”

But Emily Moore wasn’t about to be appeased. “You did it on purpose!” she accused. “Don’t think I don’t know . . . don’t think you can fool me — ”

Joan looked beseechingly at her husband, and Bill moved closer, laying a placating hand on his mother-in-law’s shoulder. “It’s going to be fine, Emily,” he assured her. “They almost have the fire out, and it doesn’t look like it got past the kitchen.”

Emily brushed Bill’s hand away as if it were a mosquito buzzing around her. “You don’t care! None of you care!” Her gaze shifted back to Joan. “You’re protecting her! That’s all you’re doing! Just protecting her!” Her voice was rising again, and Joan was acutely aware that the crowd of Emily’s neighbors had fallen silent to listen.

“Nobody’s trying to protect anybody,” Joan tried to assure her. “Whatever happened, it was just an accident.”

Emily adamantly shook her head. “It wasn’t an accident! You did it on purpose!”

Again Joan cast her husband a pleading look. “Help me get her into the car.” With Matt trailing behind, Bill and Joan led Emily Moore to Joan’s Range Rover. “I’m going to take you home, Mother. You’ll stay with us until we decide what to do.” They were at the car now, but suddenly Emily balked.

“No! I have to stay here — I have to be here when Cynthia comes home!”

As Emily made a move to turn away from the Range Rover, Joan’s hands closed gently but firmly on the old woman’s thin shoulders, and when she spoke, her voice showed none of the frustration she was feeling: even when the house was burning down, her mother was still obsessed with Cynthia. “Cynthia’s not coming home, Mother,” she said softly. “You know she’s not.”

Joan’s words struck Emily like a physical blow. She staggered for a moment, seemed about to topple over, and both Matt and Bill reached out to support her. But then she rallied, and her eyes glowed with anger again.

“Don’t ever say that!” she commanded. “Don’t you dare ever say that!” But finally, exhausted as much by the confrontation with her daughter as by the fire that had preceded it, Emily allowed herself to be helped into the backseat of the Range Rover. As they drove away, though, she turned to look back at her house once more. The kitchen window was broken, the white siding blackened with smoke. “What will she do?” she asked, her voice breaking. “What will Cynthia do when she comes and I’m not there?”

Finally, Joan’s own self-control gave way, and she turned around to face Emily. “Cynthia won’t do anything at all, Mother,” she said. “She’s dead, remember? Cynthia’s been dead for years!” Regretting her words almost as soon as she spoke them, Joan turned back, and for several long moments silence hung in the car. As Bill Hapgood turned through a pair of wrought-iron gates and started up the winding driveway toward the house that sat in the midst of the three hundred acres that had been his family’s home for five generations, Emily seemed totally unaware of where she was. But as the house finally came into view, she suddenly spoke.

“She’s not dead,” she said. “Not Cynthia. Not my perfect Cynthia.”

CHAPTER
2

EMILY MOORE MADE no move to get out of the car as bill Hapgood pulled up in front of the sprawling house his thrice-great-grandfather had begun building as a farmhouse in the early part of the nineteenth century. Originally nothing more than a cabin built at the edge of the first small field that Luther Hapgood had carved out of the forest surrounding the hamlet of Granite Falls in the early part of the nineteenth century, the house had been remodeled and expanded, as had the farm, by the next three generations of Hapgoods. Its architecture was vaguely Federal, but with so many bastardizations that it was nearly impossible to assign it to any particular style. “Eclectic” was how either one of the agents in Bill Hapgood’s real estate business would have described it, though Bill himself refused to label his home. “It’s just what the family wanted,” was all he said if anyone happened to ask how the house had come to be. No one in Granite Falls, of course, would ever ask; everyone in town not only knew Hapgood Farm, but knew its history as well. Emily Moore, though, was now staring suspiciously at the rambling, ungainly brick edifice as if she’d never seen it before.

“Is this a hospital?” she asked, her voice trembling with sudden fear. “I’m not sick — I don’t need a hospital.”

“It’s not a hospital, Mother,” Joan replied. Her frustration with her mother, which had boiled over a few minutes ago, was back under control, and as she opened the rear door of the Range Rover to help Emily out, she explained what was happening once again. “It’s our house, Mother. You remember it — you’ve been here hundreds of times.”

“I don’t want to go to your house,” Emily fretted. “Take me home.”

“You can’t stay at your house, Gram,” Matt said, reaching in to take his grandmother’s hand. “There was a fire, remember?”

Emily’s eyes clouded and she pulled her hand away from Matt. “Of course I remember,” she muttered. “Joan did it.”

“Mom wasn’t even there — ” Matt began, but his mother didn’t let him finish.

“It was an accident, Mother,” she said, knowing better than to argue with the old woman right now. “And I’m sure the damage isn’t too bad. I’ll get you settled in, then Matt and I will go get whatever you need.”

Her eyes filled with suspicion, Emily reluctantly let herself be guided into the house and up the wide staircase to the second floor. Joan opened the door to a spacious guest room in the southeast corner and drew her mother inside. “Isn’t this lovely? You’ll have sun all morning, and most of the afternoon too.”

Emily peered around the room. The walls were papered with a bright floral pattern on a pale yellow background, with curtains and a bedspread to match. Besides the bed, night table, and dresser, there were a pair of wing-back chairs flanking a small fireplace, and a door leading to a bathroom that was shared with another guest room. Emily ran a finger over the small occasional table that stood next to one of the wing chairs. She scowled disapprovingly at the dust she saw on her finger.

“I’ll dust it in a little while, Mother. Would you like to take a nap?”

Clearly not yet certain where she was, Emily eyed her daughter suspiciously. “Why do you want me to go to sleep?” she demanded. “What are you going to do to me?”

It’s the sickness,
Joan reminded herself.
It’s just the sickness, and it doesn’t mean anything.
She silently repeated once more what Dr. Henderson had explained to her when Emily’s Alzheimer’s had first been diagnosed: “There will be times when she’s angry about everything, and times when she gets paranoid. But for a while at least, there will also be times when she’s just like her old self, and you’ll think she’s actually getting better. But there’s no way of reversing her condition, and in the long run she’s only going to get worse. You just have to try to be patient with her, and remember that she doesn’t always even understand what she’s saying, let alone mean anything by it.” And as the illness progressed, Joan had managed to deal with it.