Black Creek Crossing

Chapter 6

YRA SULLIVAN ROSE STIFFLY TO HER FEET. HER rosary beads still twined through the fingers of her left hand, she silently repeated the last of the prayers one more time as she moved from the pew out into the aisle and toward the main door. She was halfway up the aisle when she abruptly changed her mind, and crossed over to the left side of the church and the statue of St. Joseph. Lighting a candle, she dropped once more to her knees, and though the rosary beads were still in her hands, it wasn’t the rosary prayers that tumbled softly from her barely moving lips.

“Please,” she pleaded. “Make it work. Make this be the right one.”

Getting to her feet once more, she hurried on out the main door of the church. Father Raphaello had told her she could cut through the chancery behind the altar and use the back door to make it easier to cut through the hedge to her house, but she never had. Taking the shortcut from the rectory was one thing. Taking it from the church was quite another.

She thought that would be disrespectful, and she was certain that if she showed any form of disrespect at all, none of the saints would ever answer her prayers.

This morning, though, it seemed that things were going to be different. Marty hadn’t awakened by the time she got home, and when he finally came downstairs half an hour later, the smell of bacon and fresh coffee filled the kitchen, and she put his oatmeal in front of him even before he asked for it.

Nor did he seem to be quite as hung over as he should have been, given his condition when he came home the night before. In fact, he’d come home drunk every night since he’d been fired, and then gotten up each morning with bloodshot eyes, foul breath, and an even fouler temper. She’d been praying about it all week, though, and this morning the Holy Mother finally seemed to be answering her prayers. Now, if St. Joseph would only come through, too—

She cut the thought short, reminding herself that all she could do was open her heart to the saints, and then leave it to the Holy Spirit to know what was best for her. “Prayers are never unanswered,” Father Raphaello had told her. “It’s just that sometimes the answer is no.” Myra had listened carefully as he explained that it was a sin of pride to think that either God or the Holy Mother, or even the saints, were bound to give her something merely because she had asked for it. “Virtue takes many forms,” he said, “and often the gift of grace is given to those whose burdens seem otherwise too heavy to bear.” The priest had been talking about Marty then, and how God would grant her the grace to please the man she’d married, no matter how hard it might sometimes get. But she was pretty sure Father Raphaello would give her the same advice about the house too. Whatever happened with the house they were going to see today, she would understand that it was God’s will.

Still, when Angel came in for breakfast and Marty didn’t start in with his usual carping at her, Myra couldn’t help but let a little ray of optimism touch her soul; perhaps today was going to be the day when things began to get better for all of them.

Marty Sullivan pulled the battered Chevelle that had served as the family car since before Angel had been born to a rattling stop in front of 122 Black Creek Road. Joni Fletcher’s brand new Volvo was already there, and Marty’s lips twisted into a sneer as he eyed it. “Don’t see why people think those are so hot,” he observed. “Bet it won’t hold up anywhere near as good as old Gracie, here.”

Myra, already getting out of the car to greet her sister, ignored the remark. Joni was coming down the front steps of the house.

Angel, still sitting in the backseat of the Chevelle, barely heard her father. A house, she thought. It’s a real house — not even a duplex. And even better, it was all by itself in the middle of a small lawn surrounded by a forest of maple trees, with the nearest neighbors so far away you couldn’t even see them. Well, maybe you could see them, but you wouldn’t hear them at all, which meant that for the first time in her life she wouldn’t have to worry that no matter how low she turned the volume on her radio, the neighbors were going to complain.

And then her father would yell at her, and then—

She shut down the next thought before it could form in her mind and forced her attention back to the house. There were some things it was better just not to think about.

“Well, don’t just sit there,” her father growled. “Might as well see what it is got her prayin’ so early this morning.” Getting out of the car he eyed the structure balefully, and as Angel scrambled out of the backseat, she could almost hear him thinking up arguments against the house.

“I think it’s beautiful,” she declared, believing that even though it wasn’t true, the house she saw in her mind’s eye existed somewhere beneath the tired facade she now beheld. All it needed was a straight roof beam, a fresh coat of paint, and new shutters, and it could be even prettier than she imagined.

“You think lots of stuff,” Marty Sullivan growled. “Thinkin’ it don’t make it so.”

By the time Angel and her father got to the front door, Myra and Joni were already inside.

“It’s not big,” Angel heard her aunt saying. “But it’s certainly big enough for the three of you.”

“And it’s a lot bigger than what we have now,” Myra said, her sharp eyes taking in the empty living room. It echoed the simple rectangular form of the house itself, with a fieldstone-faced fireplace in the southern wall. The firebox was small, the bricks that lined it blackened by decades of flames, and above it, set into the stone facade, there was a rough-hewn oak mantel.

“I’m told it’s original,” Joni Fletcher said, crossing to the mantel and stroking its ancient patina with gentle fingers, almost as if she were stroking the soft fur of a mink coat. “I can’t swear to it, of course — the house has changed hands so many times and had so much done to it that it’s hard to tell what’s original.”

“That’s the real thing,” Marty Sullivan declared, striking the mantel with enough force to make Joni snatch her hand away. “Can’t get oak like that anymore. And you can believe it’s twice as big as it looks — there’s gotta be more’n half of it buried in that stone.”

Angel saw her mother and aunt glance at each other. Her aunt winked, and when her mother crossed her fingers, Angel did too.

They went through the rest of the house, which consisted of the living room in front downstairs, a dining room and kitchen at the back, and three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. There was a basement below the house, which was a single cavernous chamber walled with concrete, and the huge oaken timbers were clearly visible above, timbers that Marty was certain were as ancient as the one that formed the mantel.

“Probably came from the same tree,” he declared, prodding at one of them with the tip of his jackknife. “But the concrete’s starting to rot. Gonna cost a bundle to fix that.” He fell silent for a moment, then shrugged. “’Course, I could build the forms myself, and maybe even mix the concrete.”

While her parents and aunt fell into a discussion of just how much work the house might require and what it might cost to accomplish it, Angel went back up to the second floor. The stairs, built in a narrow well between the kitchen and the dining room, led straight up to the second floor landing. The three bedrooms were of varying size, with the largest one occupying the southern wall. It was long and narrow, with a second fireplace to give it heat, and Angel could see by the worn areas on the pine floor that the bed had stood at the back, leaving enough room at the front for a table and a pair of chairs.

The other two rooms were smaller, separated by the bathroom, and Angel went first into the one at the back of the house. Its windows faced north and east, which meant the sun would pour into it every morning just like it did in her room in Eastbury. But even though she had always loved the morning sun, she kept thinking about the other room.

The one at the front of the house.

It was the smallest of the three bedrooms, and shared a wall with the big room that would be her parents’, and the front window faced west, so she’d never get to see the sunrise or have her room flooded with light when she woke up. But there was still something about the room that tugged at her.

But what?

There was nothing special about it, really. In fact, as she looked at it more closely, it was easily the ugliest room in the house. Its walls were covered with faded wallpaper with a floral pattern Angel thought must have looked worse when new than it did now. There were cheap lace curtains hanging at the windows, and they were dirty, and most of them were torn too.

There was one little closet that didn’t even have a light inside.

Frowning, she went back to the other room, which was larger, and brighter, and had a bigger closet.

A much better room.

So why did she like the other one so much?

Her frown deepening, she went back to the smaller room, closed the door, moved slowly around to look at it from every angle. Finally, she sank down to sit on the floor, her back to the wall, her knees drawn up against her chest with her arms wrapped around them.

And all at once she knew why she liked the little room. Because it’s just like me, she thought. It’s ugly, and it’s gawky, and nobody else will ever like it. But she would. It would be her room, and she’d love it. And it would love her.

“Well, you certainly were right,” Angel heard her mother saying as she came back down from the second floor. “It would do just fine for us.” Angel paused at the bottom of the stairs as she felt a tingle of anticipation, then her mother spoke again, with a wistful tone that made her excitement fade as quickly as it had come. “But I just don’t see how we can afford it.”

“For heaven’s sakes, Myra,” Joni Fletcher replied, her tone that of a big sister patiently explaining something to a deliberately dense younger sibling. “Don’t be a defeatist — where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Myra sighed. “I wish I could see how. I suppose the price might be fine for someone else, but I don’t see how we can swing it with Marty out of work and—” Her words died on her lips as Angel entered the room. “Maybe we should talk about this later,” she suggested, her eyes darting pointedly toward her daughter.

“I’m not a baby, Mom,” Angel said, flushing. “I know Dad doesn’t have a job right now.”

“I can get a job,” Marty Sullivan said, his eyes fixing on his daughter almost as if he thought it was her fault that he wasn’t working. “But I’m not gonna work for some ass—”

“Marty!” Myra broke in, her lips compressing in disapproval.

“Jeez, Myra—” Marty began, but seeing his wife’s expression turn even cooler, he quickly changed the subject. “This is a good house,” he declared, reaching out to gently touch the oak of the mantel, much as Joni Fletcher had earlier. “And a hell of a price.”

For a moment Myra seemed about to complain about her husband’s language yet again, but then decided there was a more pressing problem at hand. “But it’s still too much for us,” she reminded him.

“I told you, the price isn’t fixed,” Joni said, a little too quickly.

Myra eyed her sister suspiciously. “Why would that be? It’s already so far below anything else on the market…” Her voice trailed off as she tried to read her sister’s face, and realized it was the same expression she’d had when they were kids and there was something Joni didn’t want to tell their parents. “What is it, Joni?” she asked. “You might as well tell me what’s going on now — I can see by your face you’re going to have to do it sooner or later anyway.”

Joni Fletcher licked her lips nervously, then took a deep breath. “You’re right — I do have to tell you. It seems that — well, something happened here a few years ago, and—”

“What?” Myra interrupted. “The way you look, someone must have gotten killed, or—” Her voice died abruptly as she realized she’d come very close to the truth. “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she whispered, her right hand quickly tracing the four points of the cross on herself. “What happened?”

Joni Fletcher bit her lower lip, searching for the right words, but knowing there really weren’t any. Still, there was no way she could legally avoid telling any prospective buyer what had happened in this house, and sooner or later they would hear it anyway. “It was actually quite some time ago,” she began, the fingers of her right hand toying nervously with the tab on the zipper of her shoulder bag. “One of those domestic things.”

Myra’s expression tightened. “ ‘One of those domestic things,’ ” she repeated. “I think you’re going to have to be a little clearer, Joni.”

Joni took a deep breath, and then her words came in a rush. “A man went crazy, Myra. No one really knows exactly what happened, but — well, apparently he killed his wife and daughter while they were asleep.”

Myra Sullivan gaped at her sister, the words stunning her into complete immobility. As their meaning slowly sank in, she turned to her daughter. But instead of looking as horrified as her mother felt, Angel was looking at her aunt as if waiting for the story to go on. It left Myra feeling disoriented, and as she looked once more around the living room of the house on Black Creek Road, she was certain that somehow — in the light of what she’d just heard — it would look different.

But it didn’t.

It looked exactly the same.

Yet how could it? After what had happened here, shouldn’t the house look like someplace a murder would have occurred?

Shouldn’t it reflect the horror that had taken place within its walls?

Then she thought: Why would it look any different? After all, it was just a house. Only in movies did they make places where terrible crimes had occurred look foreboding.

Stupid, Myra told herself. Just find out what happened, and don’t read anything into it. In an unconscious imitation of her sister, she took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “Maybe you’d better tell us exactly what you do know about it,” she said. When Joni’s eyes flicked warningly toward Angel, Myra shook her head. “If we should happen to buy this place — which I seriously doubt — Angel’s going to be living here too. So I think she has a right to know what happened, at least if she wants to.” She smiled thinly at her daughter. “Do you want to hear, Angel? If you don’t want to, you certainly don’t have to. In fact,” she added, shuddering and glancing around the room one more time, as if searching for ghosts, “we can leave right now and just forget this place.”

Angel’s eyes, too, prowled the room for a moment. Then she shook her head. “It’s okay — it’s not like I’ve never seen people get murdered on TV.”

“The thing is, we don’t actually know it was a murder,” Joni said.

“Seems to me like it couldn’t have been much else,” Marty Sullivan grumbled. “You don’t kill your wife and kid by accident.”

“It’s hardly that simple, Marty,” Joni went on. “There were only the three of them living here when it happened — a couple in their thirties, who’d only moved to town a few months earlier, and their daughter. She was about eleven, I think. Anyway, they’d barely had a chance to get to know anyone yet, and then…” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head, shrugging helplessly. “He called the police one night — actually, early one morning — and told them something terrible had happened. When they got here, they found him sitting upstairs with his wife.” She bit her lower lip, then went on. “She’d been stabbed several times — I don’t really know how many — and he was covered with blood. And the knife was on the floor, right by the chair he was sitting on. The little girl was in the next room. She was—” Joni choked on her own words, tried to speak again, but couldn’t.

A silence fell over the little group, and then Myra said, “Show me,” her voice little more than a whisper. “I think I need to see where it happened.”

Joni hesitated, then led them up to the second floor and into the large room that occupied the entire south side of the house. “The bed was at the back,” she explained, nodding to the spot where Angel had placed it in her mind earlier. “There was a table and two chairs, I think. Anyway, Nate Rogers — that was his name — was sitting in one of them, and the knife was lying on the floor next to him.”

“Nate Rogers,” Myra breathed softly. “I remember hearing about him.” She turned and looked directly at her sister. “Wasn’t there something about him saying he couldn’t remember what happened?”

Joni nodded, and Marty Sullivan snorted in derision. “Yeah, right—‘couldn’t remember.’ Amazing how these guys kill their wives and kids and ‘can’t remember.’ Like it means they didn’t do it or something.”

“Nate Rogers never said he didn’t do it,” Joni said. “That’s the strange thing — he always said he must have done it but he just couldn’t remember. All he could recall was a voice whispering to him, but he couldn’t even remember what the voice said. He went through hypnosis and those truth drugs — lie detectors and everything else — and nobody could ever get anything else out of him. Even the doctors finally said that if he did it, he’d blotted the memory out so completely that they doubted it would ever come back to him.”

“Maybe he really didn’t do it,” Angel suggested. “Maybe—”

But before she could even formulate what might have happened, her aunt shook her head. “Oh, he did it, all right. They got enough experts in here to make sure, and by the time they were done, there wasn’t any question at all.” She frowned, recalling the reports she’d read that were in the papers at the time of the trial. “They found blood spatters on his face and clothes and hands that were only consistent with what would have happened if he’d—” Again she hesitated, but forced herself to go on. “Well, if he’d done it all himself. And there was a lot else — I can’t really remember it all. But there wasn’t any sign of anyone else having been in the house — I mean, not since the day they’d moved in.”

Myra Sullivan said nothing, scanning the bedroom, trying to picture it as it must have been the day its last occupant died. Her eyes roved over the floor, searching for bloodstains.

She looked at the walls as if seeking something — anything — that might give some physical sign of what had happened here. But there was nothing. “Did they ever find out why he did it?” she finally asked.

Joni Fletcher shook her head. “That was another of the weird things — there didn’t seem to be a motive. Everyone who knew them — their families, their friends from before they came here — said they were crazy about each other and had a terrific kid. No problems. But I guess you never know, do you?”

“So what happened to him?” Marty Sullivan asked. “They burn him?”

Joni chose to ignore the callousness of her brother-in-law’s tone. “In the end they sent him to a hospital for the criminally insane. I guess he’ll be there for the rest of his life.” She fell silent, then tugged at her sleeve and fingered the top button of the blue blazer she always wore when she was working.

“At any rate, that’s the story, and it’s why the price is negotiable. The bank took it over after Nate Rogers went into default on the mortgage, and the thing is, it appears that nobody wants to live in it. The bank keeps dropping the price, but it doesn’t seem to matter. So here it sits, and I think if you can deal with what happened, you can pretty much name your price — the bank just wants to get rid of it.”

“How come no one’s just bought it and torn it down?” Marty asked.

“Someone already tried,” Joni told him. “But as you saw from the beams downstairs and the fireplace and mantel, this is one of the oldest houses in the area — parts of it might date from the seventeenth century. So the Historical Society made sure it was protected years ago.”

Marty was quiet, as if turning it all over in his mind. Finally, he turned to Myra. “What do you think? If we really go in low and wind up getting it for next to nothing…” He let his voice trail off, leaving temptation hanging in the air.

No, Myra thought. It’s too awful. But even as she thought it, her eyes were again wandering over the room, examining every corner, searching the walls and ceiling, trying to find any trace of what had taken place here.

And then, in one of the filthy windows, she saw something. A face… the face of the Holy Mother… the Holy Mother smiling at her … As quickly as the fleeting vision came, it was gone, but it was enough for Myra. She’d seen the Holy Mother before — not often, but enough times — and knew that whenever the Virgin appeared to her, it was a sign of something good.

Something good. But what was it? Why had she appeared here, in this house?

A second later, when her husband spoke, she knew.

“Come on, Myra,” Marty said as they went back downstairs. “You’ve been talking about wanting a house for years, and maybe it’s just what we both need.”

With the vision of the Holy Mother still in her memory, Myra looked into her husband’s eyes, and for the first time in years saw the warm, gentle look he used to give her when they were dating and he could never do enough for her.

“A place of our own — a new beginning,” he said. “Maybe it’s what we all need. I can do most of the fix-up myself. You know I can.”

You can if you will, Myra thought, and instantly regretted the unspoken words. “Charity begins at home,” Father Raphaello had admonished her only a week ago. “You must be as charitable and forgiving toward your husband as God is toward you.” That must have been why the Virgin had appeared — to give her a new beginning.

“But how will we qualify for a loan?” Myra asked. “With you not working—”

“Ed’s very busy right now,” Joni Fletcher broke in. “He can use Marty. I know he can.”

Myra saw her husband’s expression darken, but then he shrugged. “If he’s got a job, I’ll take it. I say we go for it.”

Angel, her heart suddenly racing, turned to her mother, waiting.

Once again Myra moved through the rooms of the house, even going upstairs for one more look at the rooms on the second floor. At last she came back down and spread her arms in submission. “Okay,” she said. “If we can figure a way to swing it, I don’t suppose I should object. It’s not like we have anything to lose, is it?”

Five minutes later they were back in the old Chevelle, getting ready to follow Joni Fletcher back to her office to work out the details of making an offer. Angel, alone in the backseat, peered out the window at the little house at 122 Black Creek Road. Now that it might actually be theirs, it seemed to look different — as if it knew someone was coming to live in it again.

Just as her father pulled away from the curb, she looked up at the window of the room that would be her own. And for just an instant she thought she saw someone looking back at her.

So distracted was she by what she thought she’d seen in the window that Angel didn’t notice Seth Baker, standing in the shelter of the tree across the street from the house, taking pictures.