The Night Visitors(44)

“So he was holed up in his study poring over his files all day and late into the night. He told me my mother was just high-strung and Caleb was just going through a phase. The thing is not to coddle the boy.”

Mattie’s voice lowers on this last part and I shiver. It doesn’t even sound like her. It sounds like some hard-ass judge.

“I tried to keep Caleb busy and out of their way. The third Star Wars movie had just come out.” Her voice softens. “I took him to see it three times. Each time we came back the game became more complicated—there was a whole plot having to do with Han Solo on Endor with the Ewoks . . . well, you can imagine. That’s when he hid Yoda down in the hollow behind Stewart’s.”

It takes me half a second to realize what she’s saying and then I feel as cold as if we were still standing in that frozen hollow. “Like the one Oren found? You think it was the same Yoda? But how . . . ?”

“I don’t know,” Mattie says. “Maybe it’s just that two boys in the same situation think the same.” She sounds unsure but goes on. “Caleb was straying farther and farther from home. I was afraid that he was going to run away. We started playing in the house more. That’s when he found the house inside the house.”

“That’s what Oren wrote in his note. What does it mean?”

Instead of answering me Mattie opens the door. Even though the electricity’s out, the room has a muted glow: a Milky Way of plastic glow-in-the-dark stars across the ceiling, walls, and even the floor, hundreds of them. Mattie walks into the center of the room, her face tilted up to the ceiling, turning around in a slow circle as if she’s as weirded out by the spectacle as I am. I kneel and check under the bed, just in case, but Oren’s not there. When I get up I find Mattie running her hand along a pattern of stars on the wall.

“That’s the same pattern that’s on all the windows,” I say. “Does it mean something?”

“It’s the constellation Virgo,” she says, her voice small and far away.

“Was that Caleb’s zodiac sign?”

“No,” Mattie says, “it stands for Justice. It’s a story from mythology that my father liked to tell.” She’s still tracing the pattern of stars with her fingertips. Then she looks down at her feet. There are stars there too, but the pattern is interrupted by an old rag rug. She picks it up and flings it aside. There’s the pattern again, pointing toward the floor under the bed.

“Wow, Caleb really went to town with these stick-on stars,” I say, just to be saying something. It creeps me out that the stars point under the bed.

Mattie shakes her head. “These ones on the floor weren’t here before.”

“But then who . . . ,” I begin, but then I stop at a sound from downstairs. Mattie hears it too. Breaking glass.

“Come on.” Mattie pushes me to the floor and begins scrambling under the bed. It’s crazy; we’ll never both fit under there. There’s got to be a better place to hide.

“Where the hell are we going?” I demand as Mattie pushes me against the far wall under the bed.

“To the house inside the house,” she says as the wall gives way and I begin to fall.





Chapter Twenty-Two


Mattie


I’D FORGOTTEN ABOUT the drop. It’s been thirty-four years since I used the sliding panel under Caleb’s bed that leads to the closed-off back stairs. Before the stairs were blocked off I asked my father what the panel was for and he told me it was a laundry chute to make it easier for the housemaid to collect laundry from upstairs. There would have been a wicker hamper underneath it. Now there’s a three-foot drop to hardwood floor.

I hear Alice’s aggrieved curses as she hits the floor. I scramble down to put my hand over her mouth and shush her. “Do you want to give away where we are?” I hiss. I feel her head shake no. When she’s still, I reach up and slide the panel shut as slowly and carefully as I can. Then I crouch next to Alice and listen.

The breaking glass sounded like it came from directly under Caleb’s room, which means it came from my father’s study. Even after all these years I feel a shock at the violation of the sanctity of that space. Sancta sanctorum, Frank, an ex–altar boy, jokingly called it when we snuck up the back stairs, past the now blocked-off door that led to the study.

The intruder is in the study. Thank God I took the gun out of the desk drawer. And thank God the study door locks from the outside . . .

Assuming I remembered to lock it. Did I? I’d been upset about seeing that pattern in the dust. Could I have forgotten to lock the door from the outside, like I forgot to let Dulcie in? I strain my memory, but while I remember dropping the key in the crystal bowl, I don’t remember locking the study door. At least I have a gun. I reach to feel its comforting cold bulk in my pocket, but before I can touch it Alice grabs my hand.

“What is this place?” she whispers. Her voice sounds much younger.

It’s creepy, Frank had said when I showed it to him.

“It’s just the back staircase,” I whisper. “My parents had it blocked off when I was fourteen.”

“Why?” Alice whispers back.

I sigh. This is not a story I want to tell, but at least it might take Alice’s mind off her murderous ex (Could it be? I wonder. Did Davis have time to get here from New Jersey?) rifling through my father’s study. “I used to use the stairs to sneak out at night—and then I got in trouble and was sent away.”