Hellfire

Abigail, framed in the door of her room, frowned in puzzlement. “Peter?” she asked. “But I thought you’d told him not to let Beth anywhere near the stable.”

“I did. But it’s not Peter — it’s Father! He’s down there with her, and he’s going to take her riding. Just like day before yesterday!”

Abigail’s brows arched, and she started toward Tracy, but Tracy had already turned away. And then, when Abigail was halfway to the landing, she heard a muffled thump and a scream. Hurrying forward, she reached the landing, and peered down over the railing.

Near the bottom of the stairs, Carolyn sat nearly doubled over, clutching herself in pain, while Tracy glared at her furiously.

“What were you doing there?” she heard Tracy demand. “You could see me coming down! Why didn’t you get out of my way?”

“And you could see me, too, couldn’t you?” Carolyn replied. “If you hadn’t been running, it wouldn’t have happened at all.”

“I can run if I want to,” Tracy said, fixing a malevolent stare on Carolyn now. “And you can’t stop me! You’d better just watch where you’re going.”

Carolyn pulled herself painfully to her feet, then reached out and grasped Tracy’s wrist just as the girl began to turn away. When she spoke again, her voice was level, but carried an edge that made Tracy turn back and face her.

“That will be quite enough, young lady. You may be thirteen years old today, but you’re not so old that I can’t turn you over my knee and give you a good spanking. I’ve put up with just about as much from you as I intend to tolerate, and I suggest you think long and hard before you speak to me again that way. Me, or anyone else. And as for running up and down the stairs, I don’t really care if you do it or not, so long as you don’t run into people. You could have hurt me very badly, you know. You might even have made me lose my baby.”

Tracy’s mouth quivered, and she suddenly twisted loose from Carolyn’s grip. “I wish I had hurt you,” she hissed. “I wish I’d killed you and your baby, too!” Then she spun around. She charged through the French doors at the rear of the foyer, and dashed across the lawn to push her way through the hedge to the paddock. But when she got there, it was too late.

The paddock was empty.

Carolyn, shocked at the hatred in Tracy’s voice, sank back down onto the stairs, burying her face in her hands.

Abigail remained where she was, watching her daughter-in-law silently. After nearly a minute had passed, she spoke.

“Carolyn? Carolyn, are you all right?”

Carolyn stiffened, then looked up to see Abigail gazing down at her from the landing above. She managed a weak smile, and got once more to her feet. “I’m all right, Abigail. I just had a bad moment, that’s all.”

The old woman’s lips curved into a tight line of disapproval. “I thought I heard a scream. You didn’t fall, did you?”

Carolyn hesitated, then shook her head. “No. No, I’m really perfectly all right.”

“Perhaps you’re trying to do too much,” Abigail suggested, her voice taking on the slight purring quality that Carolyn had long since learned to recognize as a danger signal. “Why don’t you spend the rest of the day in your room? After all, you’d never forgive yourself if something happened to the baby, would you? And I hate to think how Phillip would feel.”

She heard! Carolyn suddenly knew. She heard every word we said! And she doesn’t care. She knows what happened, and what could have happened, and she won’t say a word to Tracy, or a word to Phillip. She feels the same way as Tracy. She hopes I lose my baby.

Her heart was thumping now, and when she spoke she had to make an effort to keep her voice from trembling. “But nothing’s going to happen to my baby, Abigail. It’s going to be perfectly all right.”

The two women gazed at each other for a moment; then, at last, Abigail turned away, and started slowly back down the corridor toward her rooms.

Only when she was gone did Carolyn gingerly touch her abdomen once more, hoping to feel a movement that would tell her the baby was all right.

But it was too early to expect any movement from the life within her, and finally she moved painfully across the wide entry hall to the telephone and called the hospital. Despite the fact of Tracy’s party that afternoon, she made an appointment to see Dr. Blanchard at two o’clock.

Phillip and Beth dismounted, and Beth carefully tied Patches’s reins to a low branch before flopping down onto the soft grass of the little meadow. Then she sat up, and looked around, remembering the last time she’d been here.

“This is where Mom fainted, Uncle Phillip. Right over there by that big rock.”

Phillip’s eyes followed Beth’s pointing arm, then he stood up and wandered over to the rock on which Carolyn had been sitting that morning a few days earlier. A moment later Beth was beside him. “Remember what Mom said that morning? About it looking like the mill was on fire?”

Phillip glanced down at Beth, nodding. “And she asked you if you’d seen the same thing.”

“And I did,” Beth said, her voice suddenly shy. “At least, I think I did.” Slowly, trying to reconstruct the memory, she told Phillip what she’d seen that day from up at the mausoleum. “I thought it was an optical illusion at first,” she said when she was finished. “But Mom saw the same thing.”

“Maybe you both saw an illusion,” Phillip replied. “From up here, the sun can play funny tricks on you. It reflects off the roof of one building and lights up another. And sometimes when it catches the windows just right, it looks as though the whole village is on fire.”

“But it wasn’t the whole village,” Beth protested. “It was just the mill. And it couldn’t have been refleclions, because all the windows at the mill are boarded up.”

Phillip nodded thoughtfully, and looked once more at the old building at the far side of the town. Already it had changed. The boards were torn away from the windows now, and scaffolding had been constructed around it. Already the sandblasting had begun, and here and there areas of bright red brick were beginning to show through the thick layers of grime that had built up over the decades. In his mind’s eye, Phillip began to picture the mill as it would be in a few more months, with shutters softening the stark rows of evenly spaced windows, a porte cochere extending from the front entrance out over the sidewalk, and wrought-iron tracery decorating the roof line.

“How come it was closed?” he suddenly heard Beth ask. He glanced down once more, and saw her looking back at him with earnest curiosity.

“Economics,” he replied. “The place just wasn’t making any money anymore.”

“But what about all the stories?” Beth pressed.

“What stories are those?” Phillip countered, though he was fairly certain he knew.

“About the children that used to work there. I thought something happened, and they made your family close it up.”

“Well, those stories certainly aren’t anything new, are they? I’ve heard them all my life. And I suppose there’s some truth to them, too.”

“You mean children really did work in the mill?”

“Absolutely. And it wasn’t just this mill, either. There were mills and factories all over the Northeast where children worked. And it wasn’t much fun, either. Most of the children your age had to work as much as twelve hours a day, six days a week.”

“Th-that’s what Mom told me,” Beth stammered. “And she said that a lot of the children died.”

Phillip’s eyes clouded slightly. “Yes, I suppose that’s true, too. But it’s all over now, isn’t it? All that happened a hundred years ago.”

But Beth didn’t seem to be hearing him. Instead, she was once more looking out over the town. Even without following her gaze, Phillip knew that her eyes were fixed on the mill.

“Uncle Phillip? Did … did the mill ever catch on fire?”

“On fire?” Phillip echoed. “What on earth makes you think that?”

“It just — I don’t know,” Beth floundered. “I was just thinking about what Mom and I saw the other day,