face. Apparently her own father had never spoken that way to her.
“Of course you’re right,” Phillip said quietly, his shoulders slumping. “Mother’s treated Beth shamefully — and Carolyn too, for that matter. And perhaps I should have simply told her it was out of the question.” He turned to Beth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have even brought it up.”
“I don’t see why Grandmother even wants to talk to Beth at all,” Tracy said as her father fell silent.
Beth, who had been sitting silently as the others talked, turned to face her stepsister. “Why not?” she asked. “Why wouldn’t she want to talk to me?”
Tracy glared malevolently at Beth. “Because you’re nothing but trash,” she said, her voice quivering with anger. “You should be living with your stupid father in that crummy apartment, and you never should have come to Hilltop in the first place.”
“Tracy!” Phillip interrupted. He put his napkin aside, and for a split second, Alan thought he might actually be about to strike the girl. But suddenly Carolyn, her voice low, stopped him.
“Leave her alone, Phillip,” she said. “We might as well let her speak her piece.” She turned to Tracy. “Go on,” she said.
The reasonableness of Carolyn’s voice only seemed to fuel Tracy’s fury, and her eyes flashed dangerously. “Don’t you talk to my father like that,” she said, her voice rising to fill the room so that people at other tables turned to stare. “All you ever do is try to tell us what to do. Well, why don’t you do something about Beth, instead of picking on me all the time? She’s the one who’s crazy, and everybody knows it!”
A deathly silence fell over the entire restaurant. After a moment Alan laid his napkin aside and stood up. “Come on, sweetheart,” he said to his daughter. “I think we’ve heard all we need to hear.”
But Beth didn’t move. Instead she stared silently at Tracy for a moment, then shook her head. “It’s all right,” she said quietly. “I’ll go see Mrs. Sturgess. And I don’t care what you think, Tracy. I don’t care what you think, and I don’t care what you say. I’m not crazy, and your grandmother knows it.” She said the words with as much bravado as she could summon up, but it wasn’t enough to still the pain Tracy’s words had caused her.
The only way she could shut out that pain was to concentrate on something else, on something that wouldn’t hurt her.
And right now, the only thing that wouldn’t hurt her was Amy.
From now on, she would concentrate on Amy, and then she would be safe from whatever Tracy might say or do.
Beth glanced nervously down the corridor to the waiting room where her mother, Phillip, and Tracy were waiting. Phillip nodded to her, and her mother gave her an encouraging smile, and she reached out and shyly knocked at the closed door. From inside, Abigail Sturgess’s voice weakly called out for her to come in. She opened the door, and slipped inside.
The room was much bigger than she’d thought it would be, and there were flowers everywhere. It seemed as if there should have been a second bed in the room, but it wasn’t there. She wondered if they’d really taken it out just for Mrs. Sturgess. Finally, after taking in the room, she made her eyes go to the bed. There, propped up against two pillows, and looking much smaller than Beth remembered her, was the old woman.
For her own part, Abigail surveyed the child with more interest than she ever had before. Until today, Beth had been nothing more to her than an unwelcome intrusion in her life, one best ignored until such time as Phillip finally came to his senses and left Carolyn.
Now, as she studied the girl, she slowly came to realize what a pretty child she truly was. Not that she wasn’t perfectly familiar with Beth’s features; she was. But today, for the first time, she really looked at Beth. There was a softness to her face, she realized, that was totally lacking in Tracy’s face. Indeed, there was an innocence in Beth’s eyes that she couldn’t remember having seen in a child for years. Until now, she’d simply attributed the sophistication of Tracy and her friends to the hardening effect of growing up in the modern world. But in Beth, there was no trace of a knowing glint in her eyes. Rather, they appeared to be totally guileless.
“Come here, Beth,” she said softly, patting the edge of the bed. “I—” She hesitated, almost unable to speak the words. “I want to thank you for coming to see a sick old lady,” she finally managed.
Slowly, like a nervous animal, Beth approached the bed, but stopped short before she was within range of Abigail’s hands. “I’m sorry you’re sick,” she offered shyly, then stood as if waiting to have her sympathy rebuffed.
“Well, perhaps I’m not that sick,” Abigail replied. Then she twisted her lips into a grimace that was intended to be a warm smile. “Don’t you want to know why I asked that you be brought here?”
Beth hesitated, then nodded silently.
“I want to talk to you about your friend,” Abigail went on. She searched Beth’s face for a reaction, but saw none. “Amy,” she added.
For a moment, she thought Beth was going to turn around and flee from the room. But instead, Beth’s eyes only showed the hurt of betrayal. “Tracy shouldn’t have told you,” she said. “She wasn’t even supposed to know about Amy.”
“I agree with you,” Abigail said evenly, then watched carefully to see what Beth’s reaction would be. As she’d hoped, Beth’s eyes brightened slightly. “But since she did tell me about Amy, I thought we might talk about her.” When Beth’s forehead creased into a worried frown, Abigail hastened to reassure her. “It will be our secret. I promise not to tell anyone else about Amy, unless you say it’s all right.”
Beth chewed thoughtfully on her lip, then looked warily at the old woman in the bed. “Wh-what do you want to know about her?” she stammered.
Abigail let herself relax. It was going to be all right. “Well, to start with, how old is she?”
Beth hesitated. She wasn’t quite sure. “My age,” she said at last. “I think she’s eleven, going on twelve.”
“Eleven,” Abigail repeated. “And do you know what she looks like?”
Beth shook her head.
“But I thought she was your friend,” Abigail pressed. “Haven’t you ever seen her?”
“Y-yes—”
“Then you must know what she looks like, mustn’t you?”
“It … it was dark.”
“Dark. Like it is in the mill?”
Beth nodded.
“And is that where you saw her? In the mill?” Once more, Beth nodded. “What does she do there?”
“She … she lives there,” Beth replied, then stepped back almost as if she expected to be punished for what she’d said.
“But I thought — I thought she was dead,” Abigail said.
Beth’s eyes widened once more, and again Abigail was afraid she was going to run from the room. But instead, she swallowed hard, and stood her ground.
“She
“I see,” Abigail breathed. “Do you know what happened to her?”
Beth thought, and then remembered the smell she’d noticed when she’d been in the basement of the mill with her father. “I think there was a fire,” she whispered. “I think there was a fire, and she couldn’t get out.”
Abigail gasped, suddenly sitting up in the bed. Her hand shot out, clutching Beth’s arm. “How do you know that?” she demanded. “How do you know there was a fire?”
Beth, suddenly terrified, wrenched herself loose from Abigail’s grip, and ran to the door. Then she turned back to face the old woman once again,
“I know!” she said, her voice reflecting her sudden desperation. She wished she hadn’t come here after all, wished she hadn’t agreed to come and see this old woman who hated her for reasons she couldn’t understand at all. “I just know, that’s all!” she repeated.
She reached for the door handle, but just as she was about to pull on it and run from the room, Abigail spoke again.
“I can tell you about Amy,” the old woman said. “I can tell you everything about her that you want to know.”
