“Torched her?” Oliver echoed, recoiling from the word. “Jesus, Ed, maybe you did criminal law too long. Why on earth would Martha Ward want to kill her own daughter?”
“Well, you said yourself she didn’t seem to be too sorry Andrea had died. Didn’t you say something about it being God’s will?”
“ ‘Divine retribution,’ was the way she put it,” Oliver corrected him. “Martha’s a religious fanatic. You know she sees the hand of God in practically everything.”
“Sometimes people like that decide they are the hand of God,” Becker said pointedly.
“Come on, Ed,” Oliver said, lowering his voice and glancing around at the other patrons in the diner. “You know how gossip spreads around here. If anybody hears you, it’ll be all over town by this afternoon.”
“Let it!” Ed Becker said, leaning back and smiling mischievously. “Personally, I never could stand Martha Ward. Even when I was a kid, I always thought she wasn’t just holier-than-thou. She was just plain mean. What I can’t figure out is why Andrea came back at all.”
“No place else to go, according to Rebecca,” Oliver replied. He was about to tell them about the abortion Andrea had had yesterday, but stopped himself as he remembered that it was the miscarriage Bill’s wife, Elizabeth, had suffered that led to her suicide, just days after losing their baby son. “I, on the other hand, do have places to go,” he announced, sliding out of the booth. “And so does Bill, unless he’s planning to drag the remodeling of my office out until all the problems at the bank are cleared up.”
McGuire smiled for the first time that morning. “Finally figured it out, huh? Well, just don’t tell your uncle, okay?”
Oliver eyed the contractor sardonically. “You think he hasn’t figured it out too? Why do you think he keeps coming up with new ideas every couple of weeks? Come on. Let’s go figure out a whole new idea about what my office is going to look like, just on the off chance that Melissa Holloway gets the bank straightened out and you can finally get to work on the Center. And let’s not talk about curses or dire plots, all right? I’m a journalist, not a fiction writer.”
The two men hadn’t been gone more than a minute before the Red Hen was once again buzzing with low voices, each of them passing on whatever scrap of Oliver’s conversation they’d overheard.
Finally, Leonard Wilkins spoke. A crusty seventy, he had run the drive-in theater for thirty years before it closed and the grounds were given over to the flea market.
“You ask me,” he said, “I think we should be keeping an eye on Oliver Metcalf.”
“Come on,” someone else said. “Oliver’s solid as a rock.”
“Maybe so,” Wilkins replied. “But we still don’t know just what it was that happened to his sister back when they were kids. Lately, since the trouble around here started, it seems to me that boy’s been acting strange. And I heard from my Trudy that he was talking to Phil Margolis about headaches the other day. Bad headaches.”
After only the shortest of pauses, the buzz in the diner resumed.
But now they were no longer talking about the fire that had killed Andrea Ward.
Now they were talking about Oliver Metcalf.
Chapter 9
It wasn’t just the look of the room, though that was bad enough. The bed—the one Rebecca had slept in nearly every night of the last twelve years—was a sodden, blackened ruin. Even from the doorway—Rebecca hadn’t yet found the courage to actually go into the room—she could see that the fire must have started in the bed and spread from there. She shuddered as she imagined Andrea falling asleep, a cigarette between her fingers. The cigarette must have dropped onto the coverlet, slowly burned its way through the blankets, sheets, and pad, and eventually burrowed into the mattress itself.
But why hadn’t Andrea awakened? Wouldn’t she have begun choking on the smoke filling the room? Or had she just gone from sleep directly into unconsciousness, utterly oblivious to what was happening to her? She must have, or surely she would have awakened as the fire had spread out from the bed, crawling across the carpet, then climbing up the curtains around the windows. The paint on the window frames was badly charred, and the wallpaper hung in scorched shreds. Everything in the room would have to go, and the paper and paint peeled down to the bare wood.
It was the smell that truly made Rebecca shiver. The terrible smell that was nothing like the friendly odor of a fire burning on a hearth. This was an odor she would never forget. From the moment she and her aunt had come back into the house, it filled her nostrils, every breath bringing back the memory of awakening in the middle of the night and realizing that the house was on fire.
Though Martha Ward objected, Rebecca had gone through every room of the house save the chapel, opening the windows as wide as she could and propping open all the doors to prevent any of them from blowing shut and cutting off the breeze. The cold air was eliminating at least the worst of the acrid smell. She’d stripped her bed, and her aunt’s too, and put the linens into the big washing machine down in the basement, but even as she began the first batch of laundry, she’d known that it was going to be endless. Every piece of clothing would have to be washed, every stick of furniture cleaned. Every rug would have to be taken to the cleaners. Even then, she was certain the smell would remain, which meant that every time she entered the house, the whole terrifying scene from last night would come back to her like a nightmare from which she would never escape.
She was still standing at the door to Andrea’s room, willing herself to go in, when she heard her aunt calling to her from downstairs: “Rebecca? Rebecca! This house won’t get clean by itself.”
Rebecca was about to turn away from the door to Andrea’s room when something caught her eye.
Something that glittered in odd contrast to the charred blackness of the room.
Something that was almost hidden beneath the bed.
Even as she went into the room to pick the object up, she knew what it was.
The cigarette lighter she’d given Andrea the day before yesterday, in the shape of a dragon’s head.
Wiping away the worst of the soot, she turned the shining object over in her hands. The dragon’s red eyes glared up at her, and though there were still some smudges of soot on the creature’s golden scales, it seemed undamaged by the fire.
When she pressed the trigger in its neck, a tongue of flame immediately appeared.
“Rebecca? Rebecca! I am waiting for you!”
Her aunt’s commanding voice startled her, and Rebecca scurried out of the ruined room and down the stairs. Martha was waiting in the foyer, a bucket of soapy water at her feet. She handed Rebecca a rag. “Start here. I shall start in the kitchen.”
Rebecca glanced at the soot-stained paper on the walls. “It will ruin the paper, Aunt Martha.”
“The paper will not be ruined,” Martha pronounced. “The Lord will cleanse our house as surely as He punished Andrea for her sins.” Then her eyes fell on the object in Rebecca’s hand. “What is that?” she demanded.
Rebecca’s first impulse was to slip the dragon into her pocket, to keep it out of her aunt’s sight, but she knew it was already too late. Reluctantly, she placed the golden dragon in her aunt’s hand. “It’s just a cigarette lighter,” she said softly. “I gave it to Andrea on Sunday, when she came back.”
Martha Ward held the lighter up, turning it and examining it from every angle. “Where did this come from?” she asked, her eyes still fixed on the dragon.
“The flea market,” Rebecca replied. “Oliver and I found it, and—”
“Oliver?” Martha cut in. “Oliver Metcalf?”
Rebecca shrank back from the opprobrium in her aunt’s voice. “Oliver is my friend,” she said, but the words were uttered so quietly they were almost inaudible.
“I might have expected Oliver Metcalf to find something like this,” Martha said, her fingers tightening around the dragon for a moment before she deposited it in the pocket of her apron. “I shall dispose
of this.”
“But it’s not yours, Aunt Martha. I gave it to Andrea, and—” Her voice broke. “And I’d just—well, I’d just like to keep it.”
Martha Ward’s expression hardened into the same dark mask of condemnation that had appeared on her face at dinner the evening before, when Andrea told her what she’d done in Boston. “It is a graven image, and a tool of the Devil,” she pronounced. “I shall decide how best to dispose of it.”
She turned away and disappeared down the hall toward the kitchen.
Rebecca dipped the rag into the bucket of soapy water, wrung it out, and began wiping the layer of soot from the woodwork around the front door. But even as she worked she knew it was useless. No matter how long they might scrub, the terrible stench of the fire would never be removed from the house.
But her aunt, she also knew, would never let her stop trying.
Chapter 10
In the silence of the night, Martha Ward moved slowly through the rooms of her house. She had lived in it all her life; the past was hidden in every corner. It had been years since she’d gone in search of the memories though, having long since confined herself to the rooms in which she felt safest.
Her room. Not her parents’ room, where she and Fred Ward had slept in the few short years before he deserted her, but her own childhood room, where she’d lived When she was still an innocent, before she allowed herself to be tempted into sin. The room she’d moved back into the day Fred Ward left, to tempt her no more.
She had been lucky, or so she’d thought. She, at least, had married Fred Ward before allowing him to lead her away from the path of righteousness.
Not like her younger sister, who had given birth to Rebecca only five months after marrying Mick Morrison.
And certainly not like her older sister, who had allowed Tommy Gardner to show her the ways of evil, and never married her at all.
In the course of her bitter catechism, Martha had come to understand the wages of sin, and all the forms of retribution that God’s will could take.
Certainly His divine will had been visited on her family many times over the years, and in many ways.
First, there was her older sister, who had been banished from the house as soon as her sin was discovered. But Martha herself was a small child then, and hadn’t understood Marilyn’s sin. She had simply thought her sister was sick, and that was why she’d been taken to the hospital on the top of the hill. Finally, after Marilyn had been gone a very long time, Martha opened her piggy bank, took out all the money, and bought her sister a present. It was a cigarette lighter, and to her six-year-old eyes it had been beautiful, with its golden scales and its ruby eyes. She had gazed lovingly at it before taking it up to the front door of the big stone hospital and giving it to the first person she’d seen, who had promised to deliver it to her sister.
Her father had been very angry when he found out what she’d done. He’d beaten her, and kept her in her room for a week, and when finally she’d been allowed out, he told her that she would never see her sister again.
It wasn’t until years later that she finally learned what had happened to her sister, and when she’d gone to her priest to confess the sin of having given her sister the instrument with which Marilyn had killed herself, the priest had reassured her. “It was God’s will,” he told her. “Your sister sinned grievously, and the gift you offered her was no more than a tool of divine intervention. You are blessed, for God chose to act through you.”
Though her older sister had been promptly punished for her sin, Martha’s younger sister’s punishment had not been meted out by the hand of God for sixteen years. Yet when the “accident” had finally come, Martha quickly understood that it had been no accident at all. In the flickering candlelight of the chapel, with the Gregorian chants numbing her mind to all other sound but God’s voice, Martha had quickly come to understand that Rebecca’s parents had finally been punished for their sin. She had also understood that it was her duty to take Rebecca—the fruit of that long-ago sin—into her home and shelter her from the ways of evil.
Martha had done her best to do just that.
She had given Rebecca her own daughter’s room, and tried to keep her on the path from which even Andrea had strayed.
Two of the rooms—the room in which her parents, and even she and Fred Ward, had lain together, and the room in which Rebecca’s mother had lain with Mick Morrison—she refused to set foot in. Others, such as the dining room and living room, which her parents had used for entertaining their godless friends, she simply avoided.
Rebecca kept them clean of course, for Martha had been careful in her instruction of the girl, instilling in her not only the virtue of chastity but of cleanliness as well.
For herself, Martha used only her childhood bedroom, where she knew no sin had ever been committed, and the chapel, in which she prayed for salvation and the guidance to keep herself and Rebecca free of sin.
And it had been working. As the years of prayer and devotion went by, Martha slowly felt a purity coming into the house, the same purity she felt in her own blessed soul, and she had grown secure in the knowledge that she, at least, was safe from the damnation that had befallen both her sisters.
Two days ago, when Andrea—unbidden and unwelcome—had returned, Martha knew she should have closed her doors to her, refused even to look upon her harlot’s face. But she had not. Instead she allowed Andrea to enter the house, and Satan had slipped in with her.
Adultery with a married man.
A child unblessed by wedlock.
Abortion!
Why had she tolerated it?
And now, as she roamed sleeplessly through the rooms of the house, all the memories came back. In the living room she could still feel her older sister’s presence, even smell the perfume she’d used to draw the Devil—in the form of Tommy Gardner—near.
In the big bedroom upstairs, unused for decades, she could hear her younger sister’s moans of pleasure as she’d given herself to the false joys of sin in the arms of Mick Morrison.
Despite Martha’s years of prayer and atonement, Satan still resided here. Even the smell of the smoke from the fire in which Andrea had died couldn’t cover the stench of sin, which drenched the house in a sulfurous fog.
Finally, Martha went into the chapel. Lighting all the candles, she turned on the music of the Gregorian chants, keeping it soft enough not to awaken Rebecca, then sank onto the prie-dieu. The rosary draped from her fingers, she began silently reciting the decades of her prayers. As the candles flickered and the chanting droned, she opened her mind to the voice of God and fixed her eyes on the face of her Savior. But as the minutes of prayer ticked by and slowly turned into hours, the face that Martha Ward beheld began to change.
The face of her Savior was transfigured, and now she was gazing into the eyes of the dragon.
As she gazed deep into the ruby eyes, a voice came to her, and told her what she must do.
Martha Ward rose and left the chapel.
Rebecca ignored the first drop of water that fell onto her face. It was a perfect spring day, the kind she loved the best, when the sun was shining brightly in a soft blue sky, the trees were covered with the pale green of newly spreading leaves, the last of the crocuses were still in bloom, and the barely opened daffodils were showing the first traces of yellow. Birds were singing and a gentle breeze was blowing, carrying the pungent fragrance of the pine woods behind the house through her window, and she breathed deeply of it. Sighing, she shifted her position, squirming contentedly under her light coverlet.
Another drop hit her face, and then another.
Rain?
But how could it be rain?
She was in her room, and even though the window was open and a cool breeze was wafting in, she could see that the morning sky was perfectly clear.
But then another drop hit her face, and yet another.
She squirmed again, then rolled over, trying to escape the rain that was spoiling the p
erfect morning.
The sunlight was fading away, and as darkness gathered around her, the breeze died, and with it the pine scent it had carried. The fresh, perfumed air she had thrilled to only a moment ago now had an acrid quality to it that made her want to turn her head away.
Even the rain had changed; it no longer felt like rain at all.
The birdsong had shifted too, dropping from the merry tune of a moment ago into a low murmur of sounds that were familiar but not quite identifiable.
She rolled over again. Suddenly she was coughing and choking. Her nostrils were flooded with the acrid odor. She jerked awake and the last remnants of the dream gave way to consciousness.
It wasn’t morning at all: the only light in the room came from the moon that hung low in the sky outside.
Nor had she felt a breeze, for the window was tightly closed against the cold March night.
But the rain? What had caused her to dream of rain?
Then she realized that the bedding around her was cold and wet, clammy with something that smelled like …
Turpentine?
But it wasn’t possible. Why would—
Only then did she notice the movement in the room, and hear the muttering that in her dream had sounded like the singing of birds.
Her heart pounding, Rebecca freed herself of the clinging bedding and groped for the switch on the small reading lamp on the table next to the daybed. She blinked in the glare, but then her eyes focused and she recognized her aunt.
Her eyes wide and unblinking, gazing into the distance upon something that Rebecca couldn’t see at all, Martha Ward was moving around the room, pouring turpentine from a large can onto the curtains and the walls. The smell of it was so strong that it utterly obliterated the smoky odor that had filled the room when Rebecca went to sleep. Instinctively, Rebecca clutched the sheet to her nose and mouth to filter out the noxious fumes, only to begin coughing once again. As her gorge rose in response to the bitter taste of the turpentine she’d sucked into her mouth, she shoved the soaked covers away.