Hellfire

supporting her while he caressed her gently with his left hand.

“It’s all right,” he whispered as he turned away and started back toward the door. “I’m here, and it’s going to be all right.”

In the shack, he picked up the phone and quickly dialed the number of the police station.

“There’s been an accident,” he said as soon as the phone was answered at the other end. “This is Phillip Sturgess. I’m at the mill, and we’ve had a terrible accident. Get some men and an ambulance down here right away.” Without waiting for an answer, he hung up the phone, then stepped out of the shack and sank to a sitting position on its steps.

In his arms, Beth continued sobbing, and for a moment that was all he could hear in the quiet of the afternoon.

Then, in the distance, he heard a siren begin wailing, then another, and another.

In less than a minute the sirens had reached a crescendo, then cut off abruptly as brakes squealed and dust rose up around him.

As if from nowhere, two police cars and an ambulance had appeared, and people seemed to be everywhere.

Two men in uniform, followed by a pair of white-clad paramedics, dashed past him, disappearing immediately into the cavernous interior of the mill.

Then there was someone beside him, and he looked up to see Norm Adcock’s craggy face gazing down at him.

“It’s Alan,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what happened to him. I—” He fell silent, unsure what else to say.

In his arms, Beth stirred, her sobbing having finally subsided a little. Then he felt her arms tighten around him once more, and heard her speak, her voice distorted, barely audible as it passed through a throat worn raw from her screams of a few moments ago. But still, the words themselves were clear.

“I killed him,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to — really I didn’t.”

Then, as Phillip Sturgess and Norm Adcock exchanged a long look, her sobs overtook her once more.

21

“Well?” Phillip Sturgess asked. “What do you think?”

It was past ten o’clock, but to look at the little Westover police station, anyone would have thought it was the middle of the day. Most of the force was there, and people filled the small lobby, asking questions of anyone whose attention they could get. But everyone on the force had been told to reply to all questions in the same way. Over and over again the answer was repeated: “We don’t know yet exactly what happened. As soon as we have some information, there will be an announcement.”

The rumors, of course, had been running rampant, feeding off one another, passed from person to person.

All of them, naturally, centered on Beth Rogers, and all of them were variations on the same theme.

“Mr. Sturgess found her right over the corpse. It wasn’t even cold yet, and she was covered with blood.” Then there would be a falsely sympathetic clucking of the tongue, and a heavy sigh. “She’s always been an odd child, though, and these last few weeks — well, I don’t like to repeat the stories I’ve heard.”

But of course the stories were repeated, and embellished, and exaggerated, until by nightfall there were few people in Westover who hadn’t heard that Beth had already killed Jeff Bailey, but had been protected by the power of the Sturgesses, who hadn’t wanted a scandal.

And, of course, there was the horse — Phillip Sturgess’s prize mare — that Beth had slaughtered in its stall. Would a sane person kill an innocent animal? Of course not.

And they’d all seen Beth, hadn’t they? Seen her wandering around town by herself? And talking to herself? Certainly they had.

The kids had known, of course, and their parents had been foolish not to have listened to them. Children always know when something’s wrong with someone — they have a sixth sense about those things. In a way, the more sanctimonious citizens declared, Alan’s death was the responsibility of them all, for they’d all seen the signs of Beth’s illness, but no one had done anything about it.

They came and went from the police station, gathering in the square to enjoy the warmth of the summer evening, and speculate on what would happen next. Some of them dropped in at the Red Hen to have a drink, and listened with serious faces as Eileen Russell repeated over and over again what had happened to Peggy the last time she had gone to visit Beth. All of them agreed that Peggy Russell had been lucky to escape with her life.

Bobby Golding, who was an orderly at the clinic, got off shift at eight, and went directly to the Red Hen, where he reported that Beth was currently being held in a locked room, where she was held into a bed with restraints, and would be transferred to the state mental hospital in the morning. And, he added, she would never stand trial for what she’d done, because schizophrenics never did.

And that, of course, wasn’t fair, someone argued. There wasn’t really anything crazy about Beth at all. She was just damned clever. All she really wanted to do was get back up to Hilltop, and she couldn’t do that as long as her father was still alive. So she’d pretended to be crazy, and killed him, knowing perfectly well that they’d just put her in a hospital for a couple of months, then let her go. And when she came back to Westover, then nobody would be safe.

And so it went, until by ten o’clock Beth had been charged, tried, and convicted.

Except by Norm Adcock, who now leaned back in his chair and rubbed his tired eyes, then tried to stretch the knots out of his aching shoulders. “Only way I can figure it is an accident,” he said in reply to Phillip’s question. He gestured to the reports that sat in a neat stack on his desk. “We found the broken brace three feet away, and there were traces of both paint and rust on Alan’s hands and shoes that match what we got off the girders. I suppose the rust could have come from anywhere, but the paint was only used on the struts supporting the roof. Couldn’t have come from anywhere else. Besides, we even found his fingerprints on the glass over the spot where that brace broke. He must have been up there checking the dome for something, and his own weight broke the brace.”

Phillip nodded. “And what about Beth? Is there any way she could have been up there, too?”

“I don’t see how. You know as well as I do that Alan wouldn’t have let her start climbing around up there. He wouldn’t have let anybody do that, let alone his own daughter.”

“But he’d do it himself,” Phillip commented, not really expecting a reply.

“That was Alan. He wouldn’t let anyone else take a risk like that, but he’d never think about it himself.”

There was a silence, while Phillip turned it over in his mind. “What if he was already up there, and she climbed up without his permission?”

“Already thought of that,” Adcock replied. “If traces of the paint showed up on Alan’s shoes, then they would have shown up on hers, too. And they didn’t. There’s no way she was up there, and no way she had anything to do with what happened to Alan.”

Phillip felt the tension he’d been unconsciously building up in his body suddenly ease. He hadn’t yet told Carolyn about the strange words Beth had uttered when she’d finally been able to speak that afternoon, and now he wouldn’t have to. But he still didn’t understand them.

“What do you think about what she said?” he asked.

“Not my department,” Adcock replied, shrugging. “You’ll have to ask the docs about that one. But offhand, I’d say it was nothing more than shock. She was the only one there, Mr. Sturgess, and she’s a little girl.” He stood up, stretched, and once more rubbed at his shoulders. “I’d better get out there and talk to the folks. Hope I can convince them that I’m telling them the truth. And you,” he added, “might want to think about going out the back way.”

Phillip frowned, wondering what the police chief was getting at. “Why?”

“Because if you’re with me, someone’s bound to suggest that you’ve pressured me to gloss over what happened.” He smiled bitterly. “People are like that. They don’t want a simple answer. They’d rather have a