that what Tracy knows doesn’t really matter right now. It’s what she feels. And she’s still very angry that her father married me. So she’s taking it out on you.”
“But … but that’s not fair,” Beth said, unconsciously echoing the words Tracy had used only a few moments before.
“I know it,” Carolyn agreed. “But that’s the way life is. It isn’t always fair, and it doesn’t always make sense. But we still have to do the best we can.” She smiled fondly at the little girl. “So why don’t we forget all this and get dressed and go down to breakfast. Okay?”
Beth nodded. She said nothing, but when her mother had gone, instead of going to her closet to begin dressing, she went to the window, and gazed down over the village to the mill.
In the depths of her mind, Tracy’s words still reverberated.
Was it possible? Was it possible that just as she had seen Amy in the dream last night, seen Amy pushing Jeff, making him fall on the pick …
She shuddered slightly, and turned away from the window.
But still the thought lurked in her mind. What if Tracy was right? What if there were no Amy?
But there had to be. If Amy wasn’t real, if she hadn’t heard her, if she hadn’t seen her in the dream, then that meant—
She shut the thought out of her mind, for if there were no Amy, then maybe Tracy was right.
Maybe she, Beth, really had killed Jeff.
But she wouldn’t have … she
Alan Rogers glanced at his watch, then signaled to the foreman to call the lunch hour. As the workmen moved from the heat of the day into the relative coolness of the mill itself, Alan began his normal twice-daily inspection of the job. He had found out long ago that it was impossible to hire workers with standards as high as his own, but he’d also understood that he couldn’t demand as much of his crews as he demanded of himself. They, after all, were working for an hourly wage, and didn’t share his fanaticism for getting things done right. To them, a job was a job, and what counted was the hours put in. For Alan, the work itself was more important than the money he earned. His satisfaction in getting the job done right usually outstripped his interest in squeezing out the last dollar of profit.
Today the work was going well. Already all the fence posts were in place, and by this afternoon, with any luck at all, the fence should be complete. It wouldn’t be pretty — nothing more than sheets of plywood hastily nailed to the posts and stringers, but it would be effective. Tomorrow they could get back to the real work — the reconstruction.
He had come to the last post, and was about to join the rest of the crew in the shadowy interior, when he heard Beth calling to him. He looked up to see his daughter pedaling her bicycle furiously along River Road, leaning into the turn at Prospect Street with a lot more courage than Alan himself would have had, then jumping it up the curb as she barreled onto the grounds of the mill itself. As he watched, the rear wheel of the bike lost its traction and began to skid out of control, but Beth merely put a foot down, pivoted the bicycle in a neat Brodie, and came to a stop in front of him, grinning.
“Pretty good, hunh?”
Alan nodded appreciatively. “Very neat. But if you break your neck, don’t coming whining to me. You’re nuts.”
“Didn’t you ever Brodie your bike when you were a kid?”
“Of course I did,” Alan agreed. “And I was nuts, too. So what brings you down here?”
“I came down to have lunch with you,” Beth replied, holding up a brown bag that she’d fished out of the pouch slung under the racing seat on the bike. “Hannah made me some sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly. Want one?”
“I might swap you for a tuna fish.”
Beth made a face. “I hate tuna fish. Is that all you have?”
Alan chuckled. “Don’t get picky. It may be tuna fish, but I made it myself.”
“Big deal,” Beth replied, rolling her eyes. “You probably icked it all up with mayonnaise, didn’t you?”
Alan regarded his daughter with mock exasperation. “If you only came down here to pick on me, you can go right back home. I don’t need any grief from any eleven-year-old smart-asses, thank you very much!”
Beth stuck out her tongue, but when Alan started back toward the mill, she followed along behind him. Grabbing a hard hat from the portable site shack, Alan dropped it over her head, then stepped aside to let her precede him through the door into the vast building. Beth promptly took the hat off, adjusted the headband so it wouldn’t sink down over her eyes, then put it back on.
As soon as she stepped inside, her eyes went to the stairs at the far end of the mill.
“No,” Alan said, as if reading her mind. “You can’t go down there.”
Beth’s brow furrowed. “Why not? I just want to look.”
“Because it’s morbid,” Alan told her. He opened his lunchbox and pulled out a sandwich, offering Beth half. She shook her head.
“But all I want to do is see where it happened,” she pressed. “What’s wrong with that?”
Alan sighed, knowing there was really no way to explain it to her. If he’d been her age, he’d have been dying to see the spot where the accident had happened, too. This morning, as he’d expected, there had been a steady stream of kids coming by the mill, some of them stopping to stare, others trying to look as though the last thing in the world they had come to see was the place where someone had died the day before. “There isn’t any reason for you to see it,” he said. “There’s nothing there, anyway.”
“Not even any blood?” Beth asked with innocent curiosity.
Alan swallowed, then concentrated on the sandwich, though he was suddenly losing his appetite for it. “Why don’t we talk about something else? How’s everybody up at your house?” Beth’s eyes clouded, and Alan immediately knew that something had gone wrong that morning. “Want to talk about it?”
His daughter glanced at him, then shrugged. “It wasn’t any big deal,” she said. “I just had a fight with Tracy, that’s all.”
“Is that why you came down here? ’Cause things got too rough up there?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, there isn’t anyone home. They went over to the Baileys’.”
“All of them?”
“Mom and Uncle Phillip. Tracy’s got some friends over. And they’re all talking about what happened to Jeff.”
So much for changing the subject, Alan thought. And then, suddenly, he thought he understood. “Might be kind of neat if you could go back and tell ’em all what the spot looks like, hunh?”
Beth’s eyes widened slightly. “Could I? Could I go down there just for a minute?”
Helplessly, Alan gave in. “All right. After lunch, I’ll take you down. But just for a minute. Promise?”
Beth nodded solemnly. “I promise.”
With the darkness washed away by the blazing worklights, the basement looked nothing like it had before. It was simply a vast expanse of space, very much like the main floor, except that down here the space was broken by the many columns that supported the floor above. As she looked out into the basement, Beth could hardly remember how terrifying it had been when it was dark. Now there was nothing frightening about it at all.
Except for the spot on the floor.
It was a slightly reddish brown, and spread from a spot a few yards from the bottom of the stairs. It looked to Beth as though someone had tried to clean it up, but there was still a lot left, soaked into the wooden floor.
Still, if her father hadn’t told her what it was, she wasn’t sure she would have known. Somehow, she had sort of expected it to be bright red, and glistening.
She stared at the spot for several long seconds, searching her mind for a memory.
But all that was there was the memory of the dream.
Surely, if she had killed Jeff herself, seeing the place where she had done it would have brought it all back.
And then, as she was about to turn away, her eyes scanned the rear wall, under the stairs. She frowned,
