The Night Visitors(55)

“Why didn’t you die that night?” Alice asks.

“I wasn’t here. I was, true to my promiscuous nature, out with a guy. Frank Barnes, to be precise. Only we had a fight and I came back early. I came in through the basement and up the back stairs. I didn’t realize that there was gas in the house until I got to Caleb’s room. I could barely rouse him. I dragged him down the front stairs and met my father at the bottom.” I pause, as breathless as I’d been in that headlong flight from my home all those years ago. “He was coming out of this room, a bandanna over his mouth, waving his gun. I turned and pushed Caleb out the front door—I told him to run—and I was right behind him in the doorway when I heard a gunshot. Then everything went black. When I came to, Frank was here. He’d found me lying in the doorway, outside in the air enough that I didn’t asphyxiate, but inside enough so I didn’t freeze to death. The bullet had only grazed my scalp, knocking me out but not causing any real injury. Caleb . . .” I gulp air that tastes like blood and gasoline, the smells I’ve carried with me since that night. “Caleb wasn’t so lucky. Frank’s father found him in the barn, his head caved in. My father must have chased him out there and killed him. Then he came back in, stepped over my body, presumably thinking I was dead, went into his study, and shot himself.”

I look away from Alice to Davis. “He was sitting where you are now, blood splattered all over the papers on his desk, those papers you’ve got out now, and even over that window . . .” As I look up at the window my voice freezes. Part of the window has been covered by the drapes to keep the cold and snow out, but the uncovered part is frosted by mist and covered with the same splatter marks I saw that night when I made Frank and his father show me what had happened.

No one has to know he went like this, Hank Barnes had said to me. You don’t want the world to see him like this. They’ll drag his name through the mud and yours and Caleb’s along with it. It will bring up all that old business about your time at Hudson. That’s how people will see you, Mattie, like you’re tainted by your father’s deeds. Do you want that?

No, I had told him.

Then let me help you put this behind you. The medical examiner is a good friend of mine and your father’s. He’ll say they all died of carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s what your father wanted. After all, the person who is guilty has been punished. I think your father would agree that justice has been served.

That’s what the splatter pattern on the window looks like. The constellation of Virgo. Justice. The same pattern that has appeared on every window in the house, in the stars in Caleb’s room, written in the dust on my father’s desk. If justice has been served, then why is Caleb still demanding it? Is it because I hid the truth?

As if in answer to my unvoiced question I see a figure rise up on the other side of the frosted glass—a specter coalescing out of swirling snow. But it’s not Caleb; it’s Frank Barnes. He has a gun in one hand; his other hand is clenched in a fist. When he’s sure that I see him he holds one finger up. This is a signal we had when we used to play war games in the woods with Caleb. He’s counting to five. I’m supposed to do something on the count of five. But what? Out of the corner of my eye I see that Alice is leaning across the desk looking at some paper Davis is showing her. That’s why she doesn’t see Frank—who’s put up a second finger and is pointing the gun at Davis. Oh. I nod, and Frank puts up a third finger. I brace my left foot on the ground and pivot slightly toward Alice while keeping Frank in my peripheral vision. Four fingers. I check that there’s nothing behind Alice that will strike her head. Then as Frank begins to lift a fifth finger I spring forward and tackle Alice to the ground at the same second that the window explodes.





Chapter Twenty-Seven


Alice


DAVIS IS SHOWING me a stamped certificate of some kind when Mattie tackles me to the ground. For a moment I think it’s because she doesn’t want me to see what’s on the certificate—it’s got one of those stamps on it with the two Greek ladies—but then I hear a gunshot and glass explodes over our heads. There’s a thump behind the desk, and when I open my eyes I see Davis lying on the floor, blood covering his chest. Thank God, I think, thank God he’s finally dead.

But then his arm moves. The gun he’d been holding on us was on top of the desk, but I remember that it’s not the only gun he has. “He’s going for the gun in his back pocket,” I hiss in Mattie’s ear as I struggle to get out from under her.

Mattie rolls off me and hisses back: “Run! Find Oren. Look in the attic.” She scrambles under the desk, trying to reach the gun before Davis does.

I feel like a coward leaving her but I need to find Oren and I want to get away from Davis. As I run from the study I hear another shot and another explosion of glass. I don’t wait to see who’s shot; I sprint up the front stairs and into Caleb’s room, dive under the bed, and scramble through the panel to the back stairs. The attic, Mattie said, so I grope around until I find stairs that go up, wishing I had a flashlight. Anything could be on these stairs. Spiders. Mice. Ghosts.

One particular ghost. A little boy whose own father killed him thirty-four years ago. Caleb Francis Lane. It was his birth certificate that Davis had been showing me—

Something brushes against my hand. Spiderwebs, I tell myself, but then the spiderweb grows fingers that intertwine themselves with mine. Small fingers, ten-year-old boy fingers. The same cold hand that clasped mine in the crawl space and gave me the button. Caleb Francis Lane, born May 10, 1973, at St. Alban’s Hospital, and he wants to tell me something. Just like Oren wanted to tell me his secrets through the tin can phone that day.