The Night Visitors(58)
“Actually, I think getting sent to boot camp was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Frank says, anger sharpening his voice. “It wiped clean all my illusions. I saw the world for what it really was. And as for all those kids your father sent to Pine Crest, hell, most of them were thugs who were better off for the experience. I know because my father arrested most of them—”
A low chuckle from Davis stops Frank cold. I think we’d both forgotten he was there. “What are you laughing at, asshole?” Frank demands.
“Oh, not you, buddy, her. She doesn’t know, does she?”
“Know what?” I ask, and then mentally kick myself for playing into his game.
“His father wasn’t the arresting officer on most of the cases in that stack. He was the arresting officer on all of them. I noticed it right away. He was probably in on the whole thing.”
Frank’s jaw is clenched and his eyes are narrowing, looking at me as if I’m the dangerous criminal. I take a step toward him to reassure him and my foot lands on something . . . a metal button, which I see, when I kneel down and pick it up, has the same pattern as the one Alice found in the basement, the seal of New York State. Did it fall out of my pocket? But when I check, the other button is still there.
I glance up from the button to Frank, and my eye catches on his uniform. On the buttons. New York State police officer buttons emblazoned with the state seal. Well, sure. Frank’s father sat in this office a thousand times and could have lost a button any of those times—
But how did he lose one in the crawl space behind the furnace?
“Frank? Is that true? Was your father involved in putting those kids away at Pine Crest?”
“And what if he was?” Frank snaps, all the softness gone from his voice now. “Those kids needed a firm hand. I see it all the time now—kids getting away with too much, their parents going too easy on them. Your father knew that, but he was too high-minded to understand what it took to make a place like Pine Crest work. When he found out a few details that weren’t up to his standards he was going to turn my father in. Can you blame my father for wanting to stop him?”
“Stop him?” I ask, appalled. “By killing him? What about my mother? What about Caleb?”
“My father said they would be all right. He planned to come by and rescue Caleb and your mother, but then you came home. You were supposed to be with me but then we fought and you came back here. When you came down the stairs with Caleb, your father revived and came out of the study, and Caleb ran and saw my father.”
I replay the scene in my head: my father stumbling out of his study, waving his gun . . . not at me and Caleb, but at Hank Barnes standing in the doorway behind me. “I heard a shot . . .”
“Your father fired at my dad. You were turning. If you had seen my dad we would have had to kill you too, so I hit you over the head.”
I feel like I’ve been hit over the head now. “You let your father kill Caleb?”
“I didn’t know that’s what he was going to do until it was done. What could I do about it then, Mattie? If I said anything my father would have killed you too. I kept quiet to save you. All these years . . . I could barely look you in the eye because of Caleb, but I knew that I had saved you.”
“Aw,” Davis says, “that’s really kind of sweet . . .”
“If you don’t shut the fuck up,” Frank says, pointing the gun at Davis, “I will shut you up.”
He’s just trying to scare him, I think. The Frank I know wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man. But then the Frank I knew wouldn’t have gone along with covering up Caleb’s death.
“Like father like son, eh?” Davis says.
Maybe, I think as I see Frank’s finger tighten on the trigger, I never knew him at all.
Davis’s head jerks back and seems to vanish in a red cloud. I hear a scream and turn to find Alice and Oren, openmouthed and wide-eyed, standing in the doorway.
“Run,” I tell them.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Alice
I GRAB OREN and turn. Behind me I hear a scream and then a gunshot, and a bullet thuds into the wood sideboard two feet to our left. I push Oren toward the foyer, not looking back even when I hear a door slam behind us.
Oren wrenches open the front door and a gust of snow blows into the house. I try to stop him—we should stay in the house, hide in the basement or the attic—but he’s already outside, barreling down the steps and into the snow. I am afraid we will both die out here like the boy in that story Lisa told us, but what choice do I have? I fling myself down the porch steps, landing in an open patch of ice at the bottom, stumbling to my knees.
When I look up I’m held by a sense of wonder. In front of me is the path Oren shoveled earlier today, impossibly free of snow. The howling wind must have blown the snow up into drifts that tower on either side, so that the path is like a tunnel carved out of ice. But what’s truly remarkable is that it’s lit up. There are little hollows scooped out of the ice where plastic figures stand—Han Solo, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca—all the Star Wars heroes glowing as if they were lit by candles. But there are no candles. The light seems to be coming from the snow itself, from the ice walls and the swirling crystals.
I remember the feeling I had in the attic that Caleb was in the glittering snow, and I’m certain that he is here now, lighting the path that Oren shoveled to the barn. In fact, I can just make out a figure on the path ahead of me, flickering in and out of focus as the wind scours the snow. It doubles, turns into one, and doubles again until there are two boys on the path. Caleb is leading Oren to the barn.