Black Creek Crossing

  One foot, straight at the hole.

  No slopes, at least not that he could see.

  The knot in his stomach throbbed.

  He felt his father’s eyes fixed on him and knew exactly what would happen if he missed the putt.

  His arms trembling, he swung the putter back a few inches and gently tapped the ball.

  It started slightly left, and for one horrified moment Seth was certain it had happened. He’d missed a twelve-inch putt—a putt that anyone but Zack Fletcher would have given him. Then, just as the ball was about to roll past the cup, it veered slightly right, hovered on the edge for a moment, and fell in.

  “Not your hole,” Blake Baker said. “We split.”

  Zack rolled his eyes scornfully. “Ooh, I’m so scared! Now we’re going to lose.”

  “I’ve gotta go to the bathroom,” Seth mumbled fifteen minutes later, after he and his father had lost the ninth hole by two strokes. Without waiting for his father, he rushed to the men’s locker room, ran directly to the toilets, slipped into one of the stalls, and threw up. For almost ten minutes he crouched by the toilet, puking his brains out until there wasn’t anything left to vomit up. But no matter how much he threw up, the terrible knot in his stomach never loosened. The retching finally eased up and he was sitting on the toilet catching his breath when he heard the door open.

  Then he heard his father’s voice: “You can’t hide in here all day, Seth. You’re holding up the whole game.”

  The terrible knot in his stomach tightening even more, Seth nevertheless flushed the toilet and left the stall. Knowing that telling his father his stomach hurt too much to play would only make things worse than they already were, Seth trudged back to the course.

  Ed Fletcher had already driven his ball down the right, where it drifted into the trees. As Seth watched, his father sent his ball into the bunker that lay two hundred yards out on the left side of the fairway, then glowered at Seth as if somehow the shot had been his fault.

  Seth could already feel the sting of the extra lash he’d get from his father’s belt later tonight.

  Now Zack was teeing up, and a moment later he began his backswing, his club coming smoothly up, his athletic body twisting until the club was extended horizontally behind his neck. The driver’s enormous head hovered for a moment, and then, just as Zack began his swing, there was a sudden blur of motion as something darted out of the boxwood hedge behind the tee box, shot past Zack’s ball, and disappeared into a tangle of ivy. Startled by the sudden movement, Zack pulled the shot. The ball soared in a huge hook, disappeared into the stand of ancient maples that bordered the fairway, and a second later they all heard it clatter off at least two trees.

  Zack hurled his club at the ivy into which the animal had vanished. “No fair!” he howled. “I should get the shot over!”

  “This is a tournament,” Blake Baker replied. “There aren’t any mulligans.”

  “Come on,” Ed Fletcher said. “It’s not like it was his fault—anybody would have jumped when that happened. I jumped, and I wasn’t even at the tee!”

  Blake Baker shrugged impassively. “Doesn’t make any difference. The rules are the rules.”

  Ed Fletcher’s eyes narrowed angrily. “For Christ’s sake, Blake—he’s a kid!”

  “Do you see me giving Seth mulligans?” Baker asked. “Or even asking for them?”

  “If you did, we’d be here all day,” Ed Fletcher shot back. “He hasn’t hit a decent shot yet.”

  Seth barely heard what Ed Fletcher had said. His eyes were still fixed on the spot where the animal had vanished into the ivy.

  It had looked to him exactly like the black cat he and Angel Sullivan had buried yesterday.

  But that was impossible. Houdini was dead! He’d been dead when he took him out of Angel’s locker.

  “So what’s it going to be?” he heard his father saying. “Is he going to play it as it lays, or be three off the tee?”

  “Who cares?” Zack said, his voice trembling with anger. “It’s best ball anyway, and we’ll just use Dad’s—he’s farther out than you, and you’re stuck in the bunker.”

  Blake Baker’s eyes narrowed angrily, but he said nothing, rather than risk offending Ed Fletcher. Instead, he gave his own son a tight-lipped nod that told Seth it was time for him to get on with it.

  Pulling his driver out of his bag, Seth set up the ball, but by now all he wanted was to get the whole tournament behind him. So this time he didn’t even bother to aim, or take a practice swing, or any of the other things his father had pounded into him the other day when they were out practicing. Instead he just straightened up from the tee, stepped back, pulled the club up, and swung it, barely even bothering to watch where the ball was.

  Except for the sharp thwack when the face of the club struck the ball, Seth would have sworn he’d missed completely, for he didn’t feel the contact at all. But the ball shot off the tee, arced high into the afternoon sky, seemed almost to hover in the air for a few seconds, then began its descent.

  It landed in the exact center of the fairway.

  More than two hundred yards out.

  There was a long moment of silence, then Ed Fletcher uttered a low whistle, followed by a quizzical expression. “Where the heck did that come from?”

  Blake Baker only rolled his eyes. “You know what they say—even the stupidest pig finds a truffle now and then.”

  But Seth barely heard him, for his entire attention was focused on the black cat, who had now emerged from the hedge and was sitting on the edge of the tee box, its tail wrapped around its legs exactly the way Houdini’s always had.

  Its eyes fixed on Seth for a moment, then it vanished back into the hedge.

  Five minutes later, after first Ed Fletcher and then Zack had blown the shot out of the woods—winding up with their third shot coming out of the light rough and no farther ahead than before—Seth stood over his own ball, not quite certain what to do. It was the first of his balls that he and his father had used all day, and until now he’d simply used whatever iron his father had used, knowing it wasn’t going to make any difference anyway. But he’d just caught a glimpse of the black cat again. It was sitting in the shade of the closest tree, and he would have missed him except for the white blaze on his chest.

  The blaze that looked to Seth to be identical to Houdini’s.

  And the cat was staring at him again.

  Almost like it was trying to tell him something . . .

  “Looks like a five iron,” Seth heard Ed Fletcher say. “Or maybe a six.”

  With no better idea of his own, Seth pulled the five iron out of his bag, stepped up to the ball, and once again swung without thinking.

  And again the ball soared into the air.

  This time it dropped onto the green.

  “Well, well, well,” Ed Fletcher said quietly. “Looks like we got a sandbagger.”

  Seth stared at Zack’s father. “I—I don’t know how I did that,” he stammered.

  Ed Fletcher’s brow lifted. “Looked to me like you did it perfectly.” His gaze shifted to Blake Baker. “Want to just take that one and get on with it?”

  Blake shrugged. “I guess I can live with it—should be good for a par anyway.”

  With their next shots the Fletchers still weren’t on the green, but with their fourth they managed to leave the ball only three feet from the pin.

  As Seth set up his putt, he once more saw the cat watching him, this time from the top of the bunker at the back of the green, and when the putt was finished, the ball lay only six inches from the cup.

  Ed Fletcher conceded the hole.

  “Not sandbagging, huh?” Ed Fletcher said as they approached the eleventh tee.

  “I never hit a ball like that before,” Seth said. “I mean, never!”

  Ed Fletcher shrugged. “You know what you did different?”

  Seth shook his head.

  “You relaxed. That’s the key to golf—just relax. Trouble is, most
of us just can’t do it.”

  “And flukes can happen to anyone,” Blake Baker said. “Even Seth.”

  Something that looked like anger flashed through Ed Fletcher’s eyes so quickly that Seth wasn’t certain he’d seen it, and then it was gone.

  But as Seth was setting up for his tee shot, Ed Fletcher said, “I’ve got twenty bucks that says it wasn’t a fluke.”

  Blake Baker eyed his client uneasily. “You want to bet on Seth?” he asked with disbelief. When Ed Fletcher nodded, Blake shrugged. “Fine—easiest twenty I’ll ever take from you.”

  As his father agreed to bet against him, Seth felt his eyes start to sting with tears, but rather than either wipe them away or risk anyone seeing them, he simply pulled his driver back and took a swing at the ball.

  Once again it soared into the air and flew down the fairway, landing to the right, where it would be easy to send the next shot around the dogleg toward the green. As the ball rolled to a stop, Seth saw the black cat disappear into a thicket behind the tee box.

  Seth’s next shot hit the green five feet from the cup.

  With the black cat watching from the shadow of one of the granite outcroppings that dotted the course, Seth sank the putt.

  “What the hell’s going on?” his father asked him as they walked toward the next tee.

  “I don’t know,” Seth said. “All I’m doing is just hitting the ball!”

  “ ‘Just hitting the ball’?” his father echoed. “Nobody ‘just hits the ball’ like that!”

  Seth stared at his father in bewilderment. “But I’m doing good, aren’t I?”

  Blake eyed him darkly. “You know what a sandbagger is?”

  Seth swallowed. “I—I guess it’s someone who suddenly does better than anyone thinks he can do.”

  Blake Baker’s voice hardened. “It’s someone who pretends he can’t do something to sucker someone else in.”

  “But I’m not any good at golf,” Seth said. “You saw me just the other day, when we were practicing!”

  “Or I saw you faking,” Blake replied.

  By the fifteenth hole, when not one of Seth’s shots had gone wild and he and his father had won every hole since the ninth, the word had begun to spread that something strange was going on. As they walked down the eighteenth fairway, with each team having won eight and a half holes, and having split one, the green was ringed with all the teams that had already finished, and most of the people who’d been spending the afternoon at the pool as well.

  Zack Fletcher looked furious, and even Ed Fletcher’s tone had changed. While he’d actually seemed amused at how well Seth had been doing on the first few holes of the back nine, his good humor drained slowly away as the difference in the two teams’ scores had narrowed.

  Now that he seemed to be on the very verge of defeat, he’d stopped talking altogether.

  And finally they came to the green, where Zack and Seth would be the first to putt for their teams.

  Zack was twenty feet from the hole, Seth about fifteen.

  Heather Dunne and Sarah Harmon were standing with Chad Jackson and Jared Woods, and all of them were rooting for Zack.

  Zack studied the putt from every angle, carefully took two practice swings until he was sure of the line, then stepped up to the ball and putted.

  The ball rolled straight toward the hole.

  “You’re the man, Zack!” Chad Jackson yelled as it drew closer to the cup.

  Zack raised his fist into the air, ready to pump it the instant the ball dropped into the cup.

  And then it veered off, drifted half an inch past the hole, and came to a stop.

  The beginnings of the cheer that started to rise from the crowd around the green died abruptly away, leaving Zack staring unbelievingly at his ball.

  And Seth, his eyes drawn by a slight movement from the other side of the green, glanced over to see the black cat seat itself on the edge of one of the sand traps that ringed the putting surface.

  The black cat with the white blaze on its chest.

  Seth’s eyes met those of the cat as Zack, swearing, marked the spot where his ball had stopped.

  As the murmur of sympathy for Zack’s failed putt died away, Ed Fletcher placed his ball at the spot from which Zack had putted, spent even more time analyzing the putt than his son had, and finally struck the ball.

  And missed.

  Seth walked over to his ball, glanced once more at the cat, which was still sitting by the sand trap, and swung his putter.

  The ball dropped into the hole.

  As the crowd realized what had happened, Seth looked one more time at the sand trap.

  The cat was gone.

  The Fletchers, Zack and his father, had lost.

  And Seth could see the fury not only in his father’s eyes, but in everyone else’s as well.

  But he hadn’t cheated.

  He wasn’t a sandbagger.

  He’d simply won.

  And everyone—including his father—hated him.

  Chapter 32

  YRA SULLIVAN GASPED AS THE FIGURE APPEARED in the kitchen doorway, and the memory of the terrifying specter she’d glimpsed in the living room only a few hours earlier instantly leaped back to the forefront of her mind. Her hand flew to her breast as if to still her suddenly racing heart, then moved on, unconsciously making the sign of the cross as she mouthed an inaudible prayer so deeply rooted in her subconscious that she was barely aware of its utterance at all.

  The figure stood still in the doorway. Clad completely in black, a cape falling from its shoulders nearly to the floor, the ghost-white face seemed almost to float like a disembodied object above the body.

  The mouth was a scarlet slash, the eyes—enormous in the ghostly face—were circled with black. The lips parted to expose fangs so distended that Myra lurched back a step. Then, just as a scream began to form in her throat, she heard the sound of laughter.

  Angel’s laughter!

  “Got you!” her daughter crowed, her bloodred lips broadening into a grin. She stepped farther into the kitchen and whirled around so the cape billowed out, and pulled away the black scarf she’d wrapped around her head so her hair fell back to her shoulders. “What do you think?”

  “Dear God,” Myra breathed, her right hand still on her breast. “For heaven’s sake, Angel, what are you trying to do to me?”

  “It’s my costume!” Angel cried. “What do you think?”

  Myra took a deep breath as her pulse began to slow. “I think it’s a little early, don’t you? Halloween’s still a few weeks away. And where on earth did you get that cape?”

  “Last year, remember? When you said Zack was going to invite me to his—” She fell abruptly silent as the pain of the invitation that had never come rose inside her. She’d looked forward to it for almost a month, and bought the vampire kit the day the drugstore in Eastbury had stocked its shelves with Halloween decorations.

  Even on the afternoon of Halloween, she’d been sure the phone would ring and her cousin would invite her to his party.

  It hadn’t happened.

  She’d put the costume away and tried to pretend it didn’t matter, and never even asked Zack about it. Now, suddenly, as the pain of what had happened almost a year ago came flooding back, she knew what had happened this year. Nobody had told her the country club was having a costume party tonight, and if she hadn’t overheard Heather Dunne and her friend talking in the dressing room this morning, she would have been the only one to show up without a costume.

  And she would have felt even worse this year than she did last, when she hadn’t been invited to the party at all.

  But what about Seth? Why hadn’t he told her? But she knew the answer even as the question rose in her mind—no one had told him either. And it was way too late to call him—he was stuck in the golf tournament with his father.

  Half an hour later Myra pulled the old Chevelle into the parking lot at the country club, which was mostly filled with Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs,
and Lexuses. Myra finally spotted a handful of cars that looked more like the Chevelle than the fancy models parked closest to the front door, and only realized when she was locking the car that she’d parked in the employees’ area. As she gazed at the contrast between her car and those of the members, Myra wondered once more if coming had been a mistake—it still wasn’t too late to get back in the car and go home.

  Home, where Marty would be going back to his beer, despite the promises he’d made just before they left. Besides, Joni and her friends had been so insistent that she come, and it would be a great opportunity for Angel to come out of her shell and start making more friends than just that one boy Marty had told her about.

  It would be fine.

  Less than five minutes later, she and Angel passed through the front doors of the country club and were scrutinized by a hostess who seemed reluctant to tell them that the barbecue was on the patio around the pool. And then they stepped through the French doors out onto the terrace overlooking the pool, she knew she was wrong. It wasn’t going to be fine at all.

  There were at least forty youngsters gathered around the pool, ranging in age from ten to sixteen or seventeen.

  The boys were wearing khaki pants, polo shirts, and loafers, mostly without socks.

  The girls who weren’t wearing clothes almost identical to the boys were wearing skirts with white or plaid blouses, and had sweaters draped around their shoulders that Myra could see were cashmere even from this distance.

  Not one of them was wearing any kind of costume at all.

  As Myra and Angel stood gazing down at them, the youngsters began looking up at the terrace and fell into silence.

  Someone snickered.

  Then someone else snickered.

  Then the snickering turned into a ripple of laughter.

  Then a single voice rose above the laughter: “Ooooh, I’m sooo scared! Is it a vampire or a witch?” A pause, then: “Oh, no—I’m wrong! It’s an Angel!”

  As the laughter erupted into a roar, Angel turned and fled back into the shelter of the clubhouse, Heather Dunne’s mocking voice echoing in her mind. By the time she’d found the ladies’ room, tears were streaming down her face.