The Night Visitors(38)
“If you wanted some reading material there’s plenty in the house.”
I nearly piss my pants, she startles me so bad. Mattie is standing not three feet from me, arms folded over her ample chest, with that same smug look on her face as her father’s.
I toss the newspaper onto the pile at my feet. “I thought I saw someone out here and I came to check it out. A bunch of newspapers fell over and I was just picking them up.”
My hand itches to grab the knife, but if I do Mattie could say I was threatening her, so I don’t. Mattie smirks and looks around the barn. “Because you wanted to leave things neat?”
“Yeah, it’s a mess in here. A fire hazard. You really should clear it out . . . and what the hell is that hook for? It looks like something out of a horror movie.”
She gives me a look like I’m an idiot, the way that Lisa used to look at me when I didn’t know something about living in the country. City kid, she’d call me, even though I’d spent most of my childhood in foster homes in upstate New York. “It’s a hay pulley that was used for lifting hay bales into the loft,” Mattie says, then she points at the knife I laid on the filing cabinet. “Did you scare off the intruder with that?”
“There wasn’t anyone out here, but they could have gotten away before I reached the barn.” I suddenly remember that Oren’s alone in the house.
Mattie must realize the same thing. “Let’s get back,” she says, reaching past me to pick up the knife. “We shouldn’t leave Oren alone.” She puts the knife in the pocket of her baggy old cardigan, like she’s used to carrying weapons in there, and turns around. But then her eyes snag on the newspaper I let drop to the floor and she flinches like someone’s hit her. She walks out of the barn quick then, like she doesn’t even have to check on whether I’m following her.
I hurry to catch up with her, stopping only to pick up the newspaper and stuff it in my coat pocket. Mattie’s a pretty cool customer. I’d like to know what made her flinch like that.
Chapter Eighteen
Mattie
I DON’T STOP until I reach the back door. Why that newspaper, out of all the trash out there? (My archives, my father called them.) I didn’t even read the local papers after my family died. But they came to the house anyway—the judge subscribed to four daily papers—and at some point after I’d let them stack up on the front porch, one of the well-meaning church ladies who came by to straighten up after the tragedy must have decided they belonged in the old barn with the other junk.
Unless Alice was snooping around trying to find out more about me. To blackmail me or commit identity theft. One of our volunteers, a sweet man getting his MSW in Albany, gave his credit card to a woman to buy groceries. Big surprise, he had more than a thousand dollars in fraudulent charges on his next statement. What had seemed to bother him the most was the frivolous nature of the charges—an Xbox at Best Buy, a case of beer from the Beverage Barn—as if the poor didn’t want the same things everyone else did.
I turn to watch Alice making her way across the snow, bare head bowed, arms wrapped around her skinny chest, face pinched and intent. Her hair is plastered against her head and without its soft fall around her face she looks much older than I first took her for. Early thirties, Frank had said. More like mid-thirties, I’d say now. She’s not the poor teenage mother I’d first taken her for and sympathized with. How much else about her have I missed?
She looks up when she reaches the shelter of the porch, and there’s so much anger and resentment in her eyes that I flinch. I’ve seen that look before in abused women, that look that doesn’t just expect the next blow but says, I know I deserve it. But I’ve never gotten used to it, or liked how it made me feel, that little split-second flicker of Maybe you do.
Most of the people who come before my bench have done something to get themselves there, my father used to say. You’re not doing them any favors by feeling sorry for them and not holding them accountable.
“What?” Alice demands like a surly teenager. “What are you waiting for?”
“You,” I say. “I wanted to make sure you made it.”
“You should have gone right in to check on Oren. He doesn’t like being alone.” She pushes past me into the mudroom and then stops, listening to something. I close the door behind me and listen too. It’s Oren, talking, but to whom?
Alice rushes into the kitchen and I follow, my hand on the knife. When I reach the kitchen, though, I see that except for Dulcie, who’s sleeping under the table, Oren is alone. He’s standing at the stove stirring the chili with one hand and holding one of the empty tin cans to his ear with the other. A six-inch-tall shaggy figure stands on the counter.
“Who are you talking to?” Alice demands.
Oren rolls his eyes and holds up the empty tin can. “I’m listening to orders from the rebel base and relaying them to Chewbacca, of course. Who were you talking to out in the barn?”
Alice blanches like he’s caught her at something. Was there someone out there? Maybe an accomplice I don’t know about? “No one. There was no one out there. Hey, didn’t you lose your Chewbacca?”
“This is one of Caleb’s,” Oren answers. Hearing Caleb’s name drop so casually out of his mouth gives me a chill.