Hellfire

“It won’t!” she said, her voice suddenly strong. “We don’t need the money, and I told your father to close it. I intend to see that he does!”

Tracy grinned to herself. “But why?” she asked. “Why should he close it?”

Abigail’s head swung slowly around, and her eyes fixed on Tracy’s, but Tracy had the eerie feeling that her grandmother wasn’t really seeing her.

“Because she’s evil,” the old woman whispered, almost to herself. “She killed my son, and she killed Jeff Bailey, and she tried to kill me!”

Tracy’s heart beat faster. It was exactly what she’d wanted to hear, even though her grandmother was confused. Beth couldn’t possibly have killed Uncle Conrad — she hadn’t even been born yet. But it didn’t matter. So what if her grandmother had part of it wrong? She did her best not to show her excitement. “She tried to kill you?” she whispered. “Who?” Then, when her grandmother made no reply, she decided to gamble. “You saw her, didn’t you?” she asked. “You saw her down there, and she did something to you, didn’t she?”

Abigail’s eyes widened, and she felt her heart constrict as her mind suddenly opened and the memories of the previous night flooded back to her. Again her hand reached out to Tracy, but now that hand was a claw, and when she grasped the girl’s wrist, Tracy felt a stab of pain.

“The children,” Abigail gasped. “Yes … I saw the children.”

“Beth,” Tracy whispered excitedly. “You saw Beth Rogers, didn’t you?”

Abigail was nodding now, and her jaw began working as she struggled to speak again. “Children,” she repeated. “I saw them. I saw them just as if they were really there.…”

Tracy’s heart was thumping now. “You did, Grandmother,” she said. “You saw her, and she tried to kill you.”

“Dead,” Abigail whispered. “She’s dead, and she wants to kill us.” Her grip on Tracy’s arm tightened, and the girl winced with pain. “She wants to kill us all, Tracy. She hates us, because of what we did to her. She hates us, and she’ll kill us if we let her.”

Tracy tried to pull away, but Abigail seemed to find new strength as her words rambled on. “Stay away, Tracy. Stay away from there. Promise me, Tracy. Promise me you’ll stay away.”

Suddenly frightened by her grandmother’s surge of power, Tracy twisted her arm loose from the old woman’s grip. As if she’d been disconnected from her source of strength, Abigail went limp, her arm falling by her side as she sank back into the pillows.

“Promise me,” she muttered softly as her eyes, clouded now with her years and infirmities, sought out Tracy’s.

Tracy began edging toward the door. “I … I promise,” she mumbled. Then she was gone, pulling the door closed behind her, wanting to shut out the image of the ancient woman in the bed.

As she left the hospital, she turned her grandmother’s words over in her mind, and decided that, after all, she had been right.

Her grandmother had seen someone in the basement of the mill last night, and whoever she had seen had tried to kill her.

And Tracy knew who the old woman had seen.

Beth Rogers.

She walked back along River Road until she came to Prospect Street, where she stopped to stare curiously at the old building that was suddenly coming back to life. What, she wondered, had really happened there so many years ago?

Nothing, she decided.

Her grandmother was old, and sick, and didn’t know what she was talking about.

And promises made to her, Tracy also decided, didn’t really count. In fact, Tracy had long ago figured out that promises didn’t mean anything. If you wanted something, you made promises in order to get it. Then you went ahead and did what you wanted, and nobody ever said anything. At least her father and her grandmother didn’t, and that was all that mattered.

If she felt like going into the mill and looking around, she would, and no one was going to stop her.

19

The somnolence of summer had settled into Westover, and by August the town had taken on a wilted look. People moved slowly in the damp warmth of July, and slower still as August’s heat closed oppressively down on them.

For Beth, life had taken on a strange routine, each day much like the day before.

At first it had all been terribly confusing. The memory of Patches dying while she watched was still fresh in her mind — etched indelibly there, still waking her up in the middle of the night sometimes.

But the rest of that day had taken on a dreamlike quality. The sudden arrival of her father; the explanation that it had been decided that for a while, at least, she should live with him; the hasty packing of her bags; her departure from Hilltop with her father, barely aware of what was happening while she tried to figure out why it had happened.

Her father had tried to explain it to her, tried to tell her that while no one was blaming her for what had happened to Patches, it had just seemed better to all of them for her to live with him for a while. Mrs. Sturgess would be coming home, and her mother was pregnant, and Tracy …

His voice had trailed off after he’d mentioned Tracy’s name, but Beth had known what he meant. Hilltop was Tracy’s house, not hers, and they both couldn’t live there anymore. So she had to move out.

It wasn’t fair, but it was the way things were, and even at her age, Beth already knew that life was not always fair.

But living with her father had not turned out to be quite what she’d thought it would be, either. Before she’d moved in with him, they’d always gone out to dinner on the evenings she’d spent with him, and he’d always seemed to have lots of time to spend with her.

But now, when she was there all the time, it was different. She understood why — he had to go to work every day, and he couldn’t afford to take them both to restaurants every night. So they stayed home most evenings, and he cooked dinner for them, and the food wasn’t as good as the food Hannah had fixed at Hilltop. And her room was a lot smaller, and didn’t look out over the whole village. Instead, it looked out over a parking lot, and only a little corner of the mill was visible through a gap between two buildings across Fourth Street.

But at least Tracy wasn’t there, and that was good.

What wasn’t good was what had happened when she’d gone to see Peggy Russell. Peggy had only opened the door a few inches, and she hadn’t invited Beth to come in. Instead she’d said that she couldn’t play with Beth anymore, and that Beth better stay away from her house.

Beth, her eyes blurred with tears, had gone back home, but the emptiness of her father’s little apartment had made her feel even more lonesome than Peggy’s rejection. So she’d gone down to the mill, and spent the rest of the day there.

As the days had turned into weeks she’d tried to make friends again with the kids she’d known before she moved up to the top of the hill, but it hadn’t worked. All of them had heard about what had happened to Patches, and all of them had heard Peggy’s story about the grave up on the hillside, and about the fact that Beth thought the person who was buried there still lived in the mill. At first, they’d simply ignored her when she tried to make friends with them, but when she’d persisted, they’d started calling her names, and invented a nickname for her.

Crazy Bethy.

They called it out at her when she walked down the street, and if their parents were with them, and they couldn’t yell it out loud, they’d whisper to each other, and point at her.

Her father told her not to worry about it — that in a few weeks something else would come along, and the kids would forget all about it.