Nightshade

CHAPTER 11

THE HOUSE ON Burlington Avenue was silent, and she could feel its emptiness.

But that wasn’t right — her mother and sister should both have been there. Why weren’t they? Where had they gone? She got out of bed and crept to the closed door of her room. Pressing her ear against the wood, she strained to listen.

Silence.

Then something changed.

The room behind her seemed different.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end and she felt a rippling chill as goose bumps covered her skin. Unconsciously holding her breath, she struggled against the panic that threatened to overwhelm her, then forced herself to look back over her shoulder.

Empty!

The room was empty — her bed was gone, and so was the pretty white dresser the woman next door had given her last month for her tenth birthday. The pictures on the walls — the stuffed bear that had kept her company as long as she could remember — all of it was gone! A terrified squeal bursting from her lips, Joan jerked the door open and ran downstairs to the living room.

It was as empty as her room, stripped of its furniture, even the curtains gone from the windows.

In the kitchen, the familiar chipped enamel table had vanished, the cupboards were empty, and a gaping empty place was all that remained of the refrigerator.

Her heart thudding with the terror of abandonment, her cheeks wet with tears, she went back upstairs.

Her mother’s room was as empty as the rest of the house, but in her sister’s room one single piece of furniture remained.

Cynthia’s vanity table.

All her cosmetics were still there — all the wonderful things Cynthia liked to put on her face. Why had Cynthia left them?

Mesmerized by the sight of the bottles and boxes and pots and tubes, she took a step into the room, then another.

Could Cynthia have left them for her?

The terror of a moment ago now giving way to excitement, she went to the vanity and sat down. Opening a container of powder, she began patting it onto her face. Then, in the mirror, she saw her sister — Cynthia was standing right behind her, glowering at her.

“How dare you?” Cynthia demanded. Her arm lashed out, knocking the open powder container to the floor, its contents exploding into the air. Joan’s nostrils filled with talc and she began coughing and choking.

She heard another voice then — her mother’s voice. “What’s going on in here? What are you doing?”

“It’s Joan’s fault, Mama,” she heard Cynthia saying. “Look what she did! It’s all Joan’s fault!”

Now she was looking up into her mother’s angry face, and she knew what was about to happen. “No,” she whispered. Her mother’s arm rose, and she cowered away. “No,” she cried. “No!”

* * *

THE SOUND OF her own voice jerked Joan out of the nightmare, and she instinctively reached out to Bill, needing to feel his strength — his warmth — against her flesh.

But he wasn’t there, and as the vestiges of the bad dream faded away and she saw the gray light of dawn beginning to drive the night away, the terrible empty feeling of the house she’d dreamed about was replaced by the even worse emptiness that now imbued her.

Bill was truly gone, and would never lie next to her again.

He’d abandoned her, just as her mother and sister had abandoned her in the dream.

No! she reminded herself, unconsciously echoing the final protest she’d uttered before she woke up. No! He didn’t abandon me. It was an accident, and he would have come home! He would have come back!

She turned over, wanting to escape back into sleep, but even as the urge to retreat into unconsciousness came over her, she knew it would do no good. The dream would only reach out to her again.

And even if she managed a few more minutes of escape, the day — and reality — would still await her. Pulling on her robe, she went out into the corridor toward the head of the stairs. But as she passed the guest room and noticed that the door was ajar, she paused.

Why was the door open? Even now she could hear the echo of her mother’s voice. “Stay out of that room! That’s Cynthia’s room, and I won’t have you ruining her things!”

Cynthia’s room. Not the guest room at all anymore.

Suddenly the dream came back to her, and she moved into the doorway. The vanity table was exactly as she’d seen it in her dream. All her sister’s makeup laid out as if Cynthia had only stepped out for a minute or two and would soon be back. Joan’s eyes darted over the rest of the room — the pictures of Cynthia — her magazines, still open, as if she were in the midst of reading them — her favorite negligee still thrown over the end of the bed, as it had been for years, first in the house on Burlington Avenue, now here.

Here, in Cynthia’s room.

Cynthia’s room!

Joan’s eyes fixed on one of the images of her sister that covered the walls and stood in frames on every piece of furniture. “Leave us alone,” she whispered. “Why can’t you just leave us alone?”

She started to turn away, but the silence that followed her words was broken by a sound.

An impossible sound.

The sound of her sister laughing.

Laughing at her.

Mocking her.

Joan whirled back to face the room, almost expecting to see Cynthia sitting at the vanity, her eyes sparkling with mischief as she gazed at the shock on Joan’s face. But there was nothing.

Nothing except the laughter that had echoed out of the past.

Turning away from the room — and everything in it — Joan started once more toward the stairs, but again paused, this time outside her mother’s room. She listened, knowing that if she heard the deep sound of her mother’s snoring, she would have a few minutes to herself before her mother awoke. But if her mother was already awake, she would begin calling for her the moment Emily heard her going down the stairs.

She listened, but heard nothing.

Joan’s breath caught as she realized what the silence might mean, and for a moment she was almost afraid to open the door.

If her mother had died —

Steeling herself, she turned the knob and opened the door.

Empty!

Her mother’s bed was empty.

Joan hurried across the room to the door leading to the small bathroom between her mother’s room and Cynthia’s.

Empty!

Downstairs.

Her mother must have gotten up early and gone down to the kitchen! Hurrying down the stairs, she searched the lower floor, calling out her mother’s name.

The rooms were silent and empty.

Her mother was no longer in the house.

We’ll find her, she told herself as she rushed back up the stairs. Matt and I will find her! She can’t be far away! At the top of the stairs Joan started toward Matt’s room, but as she passed the open door to Cynthia’s room, her eye was caught by the portrait of her sister that hung over the fireplace.

She stopped short.

The portrait, like the laughter she’d heard earlier, seemed to be mocking her. Then she remembered the nights when she heard her mother inside that room, talking to Cynthia.

Talking to her as if she were still alive.

“What have you done with her?” Joan whispered, her eyes locking on her sister’s. “What have you done with Mother?”

This time she heard no laughter.

This time she heard nothing at all.

* * *

“MATT? MATT, WAKE up!”

Wide-awake in an instant, Matt knew by the look on his mother’s face that something had happened, and even before she said anything, he was certain he knew what it was.

“Mother’s gone,” Joan said, confirming the thought that had gripped him.

“You mean she isn’t in the house at all?”

“Just get dressed and come help me.”

Five minutes later he joined his mother in the kitchen, and together they searched the entire house, even going up into the dusty attic beneath the steeply pitched roof. After they’d searched the basement as well, they came back to the kitchen.

“What are we going to do?” Matt asked.

“Look outside. If we only knew how long she’s been gone — ” Her anxious eyes fixed on Matt. “Did you hear anything last night? Anything at all?”

Matt hesitated. He’d dreamed about his aunt Cynthia again, dreamed that she came to him in the night and crept into his bed and — He shuddered at the memory, trying to force it out of his mind. But there was something else as well…

Then it came back to him! He’d had another dream. A dream about his grandmother. He’d heard her talking, and gone to look out into the hall. And he’d seen something…

For a second he wasn’t sure what it was — just a sort of hazy figure, almost invisible in the darkness. But then he’d known — it was a ghost.

The ghost of his aunt, her long blond hair flowing down her back, wearing the same white nightgown she always wore when he dreamed about her. Frozen by terror, his heart pounding, he’d watched as the ghostly figure disappeared down the stairs. Then his grandmother appeared in the hall and started after his aunt. He tried to call out to her but had barely been able to utter a word, and when he was finally able to make himself go to the top of the stairs and look down, he had seen…

Nothing!

Nothing but the empty entrance hall.

Nor had he heard anything, for a silence had fallen over the house that seemed somehow unnatural. Finally he retreated to his room and back to his bed. He’d lain in the darkness for a long time, listening, but he heard nothing else. Certain that what had happened must have been a dream, he tried to put it out of his mind.

But then the other dream came, and once again his aunt was in his room, in his bed, touching him, caressing him.

“No,” he said, finally replying to his mother’s question. “I didn’t hear anything. I just had a dream, that’s all.”

Though he wasn’t looking quite at her, he felt his mother’s eyes on him.

She thinks I’m lying!

But he wasn’t lying — it had only been a dream! He was sure it had! There was no such thing as ghosts.

Were there?

No!

Suddenly the walls of the kitchen — the whole house — seemed to be closing in on him.

He had to get outside!

“I’m going to look in the garage and the shed,” he said. “If she went outside, maybe she just got confused in the dark or something.” Without waiting for his mother to reply, he went out the back door. Pausing on the steps, he took a deep breath, then another.

What was happening to him?

Where were the dreams coming from?

What did they mean?

Nothing, he told himself. They don’t mean anything.

But what about his grandmother? If what he’d seen last night was only a dream, why hadn’t Gram been in her room this morning?

It was a coincidence. Just a coincidence. Wasn’t that one of the reasons his mother had moved her into the house? Because people with Alzheimer’s disease sometimes just wandered away from their homes, and got confused, and couldn’t find their way back? Of course! Gram was out here somewhere, in the carriage house, or the old stable. She had to be somewhere.

Except she wasn’t. Matt searched the buildings, then went through them again, calling out to his grandmother, opening every door, even climbing into the hayloft in the barn.

Nothing.

Finally he went back to the house, re-entering through the same door he’d come out of fifteen minutes earlier. As he stepped into the mud room, he heard his mother talking in the kitchen.

“Trip? I need you to come out — Mother’s gone.”

Mr. Wainwright? Why had she called him?

“I think she must have wandered off sometime in the middle of the night. If you’ll just come out and — ” Her voice broke off abruptly, then: “No, don’t call the police, Trip — at least not yet. The chances are she’s somewhere on the property and — ”

Once more his mother fell silent, and when she spoke again, her voice had dropped so he had to strain to hear her. “I really don’t think you should call Dan Pullman. Not after — well, not after what happened, and what they’re already thinking about Matt. Besides, we don’t really know that anything’s happened to Mother, do we?” Her voice took on a pleading note. “Please? Just come out, and then we can decide what to do.”

For an instant Matt felt an impulse to go back out the door, to get away from the house, to escape to —

To where?

Nowhere.

There was nowhere at all to go.

What was happening? Was he going crazy? How could his mother even think —

But then, before he could finish the thought, his mother was standing in the door of the mud room, looking worriedly at him. “Matt? What is it? You look — ”

“You think I did something to her, don’t you?” he whispered. Finally he managed to look at her. “You think I did something to Gram.”

The abject misery in her son’s face wrenching at her heart, Joan pulled Matt close, wrapping him in her arms.

“No,” she whispered. “Oh, no, Matt. Of course not! How could you even think such a thing?” But even as she spoke the words, Joan remembered the look on Matt’s face when she’d asked him if he’d heard anything last night.

She remembered the hesitation in his voice as he told her that he hadn’t heard anything at all.

* * *

TRIP WAINWRIGHT DIDN’T need to look at his watch to know that it was getting close to ten: if the angle of the sun hadn’t told him it was mid-morning, the gnawing in his belly would have; ever since he’d given up breakfast in the latest of his ongoing battles against an irreversibly expanding waistline, his stomach had begun demanding food — preferably an apple Danish — at exactly nine-thirty. By ten o’clock, when his teeth literally began to hurt and he was unconsciously snapping at his secretary, the need for a Danish usually became so overwhelming that he left his office and went next door to the bakery, promising himself that tomorrow morning he would find the strength to resist his stomach’s demands. So far his broken promises had resulted in five more pounds and an extra half inch on his waistline, and he was still only a month into the no-breakfast diet.

But it was more than his stomach that was gnawing at him right now, for during the nearly three hours he had spent helping Joan and Matt search for Emily Moore, they found no trace. They had started in the house, searching every room again, opening every closet. Then the lawyer retraced Matt’s route through the outbuildings, even climbing the ladder to the hayloft himself, though he knew by the third step that there was no way Emily Moore could have made it even as far as that.

Certain that the old woman wasn’t in any of the buildings, they searched the grounds. For an hour they had slowly moved back and forth in an ever-widening semicircle through the forest that half surrounded the house. But finally, half an hour ago, Wainwright had insisted that they give it up. They were in the midst of a thicket of underbrush which had twice nearly succeeded in immobilizing the attorney, whose hiking — for the last twenty years, anyway — had been confined to the neatly trimmed fairways of the Granite Falls Golf Club, which, if not exactly kept up to the standards of some of the wealthier country clubs down around Boston, were at least mown once a week.

“There aren’t even any trails, Joan. There isn’t any way your mother could have gotten in here — not even in the daylight, let alone in the middle of the night.”

For a moment he thought Joan would refuse to give up, would insist that they keep on pushing through the heavy undergrowth, but then her shoulders sagged and the hope had gone out of her eyes. “I know,” she sighed. “I know you’re right, but…” Her voice trailed off, and the defeated look in her eyes made him want to reach out and comfort her.

“We’ll find her, Mom,” Matt had said. “I know we will.”

Barely responding, Joan followed along as Matt started guiding them back toward the house.

They were at the edge of the forest now; the house was visible through the trees, and the low stone wall that edged the lawn was only a few yards ahead. Joan suddenly stopped short.

“What is it?” Wainwright asked, scanning the area but seeing nothing except a trail that would lead them to a gap in the wall, and the broad expanse of closely mown grass that surrounded the house.

“The river path,” Joan said, her voice hollow, her gaze fixed on the narrow path. “We never looked there.” She looked at Wainwright. “The trail leads to the falls. Mother always liked the falls.” Her eyes glistening with hope again, she started down the path. “That’s where she would have gone! I know it!”

Wainwright’s first instinct was to try to stop her, but the sudden buoyancy in her step made him abandon the impulse. Determinedly ignoring his growing hunger, he followed Joan down the trail, Matt behind him.

They were no more than two hundred yards from the falls, and starting to feel the chill of its mists in the air, when Joan stopped so abruptly that Trip Wainwright almost bumped into her.

“Look!” The word was more of a yelp than anything else, and when Wainwright followed her gaze, he at first saw nothing. But then he spotted it.

Half buried in the soft dirt of the path was a slipper.

A worn shearling slipper, the same kind that Wainwright himself liked to wear when he was home alone at night. “It’s a man’s slipper,” he said, starting forward.

Joan’s hand closed on his arm, stopping him. “Mother has a pair just like that,” she said, her voice trembling. Wainwright wasn’t sure whether the quaver in her voice was from fear or excitement, but her next words made it clear. “She came down here! I know she did!” Snatching up the slipper before the lawyer could stop her, Joan hurried down the trail, her step now quick and eager. “Mother?” she called out. “Mother, where are you?”

With Matt still following him, Wainwright started after Joan, but they’d gone no more than fifty yards when his own eye was caught by something.

A scrap of thin, white material was caught on the jagged end of a limb that someone had broken off to prevent it from blocking the trail. “Joan?” the lawyer called out. “Joan, look at this.” But before Joan could get back to the scrap of cloth, Matt had told him what he needed to know.

“Gram’s nightgown,” he said.

Now Joan was next to Wainwright, and he stopped her as she instinctively reached out to touch the scrap of cloth. “Let’s just leave it exactly where it is,” he said. Joan’s eyes met his, and for a moment he wasn’t sure she understood what he was saying. But then her eyes cleared.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “We’re going to find her — I know we are!” Turning away, she hurried on down the path.

They came to the last bend in the narrow trail, and a few yards farther stepped out onto the bare expanse of granite that surrounded the pool at the base of the falls. Forty yards away the cataract tumbled from an uneven crag that split it into three separate streams. The base of the falls was all but lost in the plume of mist that hung over the pool, and though the water was crystal clear, the roiling surface concealed anything that might lie on the pool’s floor.

It was at the very edge of the pool that they found Emily Moore’s other slipper. Joan’s breath caught as she spied it, and a strangled cry rose in her throat as she realized what it might mean. But even as she stared at the slipper, she refused to give up hope. “Mother?” she called out, her voice breaking. She tried to call once more, but this time her emotions overflowed, stifling her words.

Now Trip Wainwright put his arms around her, clumsily trying to soothe her. “We’d better call Dan Pullman,” he said. “I just don’t think we can wait any longer.”

For a moment he thought Joan might still object, and then she nodded. “But she’s all right,” she said. “I know she is.” She looked into his face, as if seeking confirmation of her own feelings. “If she was dead, I’d know, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I feel it?”

Though Trip Wainwright made no answer, he had a feeling of his own.

A feeling that was the exact opposite of Joan Hapgood’s.