Phillip shook his head tiredly, feeling the exhaustion of the conflicting emotions that had been boiling within him over the last hour. “It wasn’t the horse she loved,” he said. “It was having the horse. I… I’m not sure Tracy is really capable of loving anything or anyone. This afternoon—” He fell silent for a moment; then made himself tell Carolyn what had happened in front of the mill that day. “She didn’t care about Alan being dead,” he finished, his own eyes flooding with tears now. “All she cared about was that it might be blamed on Beth. And she hoped it would be. I could see it in her eyes.”
Carolyn groaned softly, her eyes fixed on the floor as her hand unconsciously kneaded the limp handkerchief. Then, finally, she looked up.
“But what do we do?” she asked. “What can we possibly do?”
“I don’t know,” Phillip confessed. “But we can take Beth home, and try to make it up to her some way. Somehow, we have to make her understand that she’s not alone. We have to make her know that we love her very much.”
Carolyn nodded mutely. And then, after a long moment she spoke the other question, the question that was in both their minds.
“What about Tracy? What do we do about her?”
Phillip had no answer.
22
Phillip left the hospital a few minutes later. Carolyn, unwilling to leave her daughter alone that night, had asked for a cot to be brought into Beth’s room, and phoned Hannah to pack an overnight case for her.
Phillip walked slowly along Prospect Street, feeling the aura of tension in the village around him. There was still a crowd of people gathered in front of the mill, talking quietly among themselves, but they fell silent as he approached. There was something condemnatory in their glances, though none of them seemed willing to look directly at him. But he was all too aware of the eyes that raked over him, then quickly looked away. He wondered if he should stop and talk with them, then decided there was nothing he could say.
As he made his way quickly through the small crowd, and came to the north side of the old brick structure, his instincts told him to walk on, leaving the mill and all thoughts of it until tomorrow. But he couldn’t do that. There were decisions that had to be made, and he couldn’t allow himself to put them off. At the corner of the building, he turned left, starting once more toward the side entrance.
He used his key to open the construction shack, then rummaged around in Alan’s battered desk until he found a spare set of keys to the building. In the darkness of the evening, he opened the door and slipped inside the mill itself. He stood still for several seconds, rejecting once more the strange urge to turn his back on the old building and simply walk away.
He told himself that the anxiety he was suddenly feeling meant nothing. It wasn’t the building itself he was reacting to, but rather the tragedy that had occurred there only a few hours ago. The mill was only a building, and there were practical decisions to be made.
And yet his anxiousness began to congeal into something like fear, gathering around him, challenging him. He answered the challenge by reaching for the switch by the door that would turn on the naked bulbs of the worklights, certain that by banishing the darkness he would alleviate the irrational panic that was threatening to overwhelm him now.
At first it worked. Harsh white light flooded the building, and the familiar forms of the new construction reassured him. There was, after all, nothing to fear.
As his eyes scanned the progress Alan had made, Phillip realized immediately that there could be no reasonable argument for abandoning the project now. It was all but complete, needing little more than a few days’ work on the mezzanine level.
And yet he still had an uneasy feeling that there was something here that he had yet to fully comprehend. Even with the worklights on, it was as if some dark shadow lingered in the vast spaces beneath the roof.
He moved forward to the spot where Alan Rogers had died only a few hours before. Though the floor had already been washed clean, and there was no evidence of the tragedy that had occurred there, still he could see Alan’s broken body all too clearly in his mind’s eye, and see Beth, her face ashen, crouching brokenly over the corpse, keening her grief into the echoing spaces above.
He paused for a moment, then, almost against his will, turned to face the front of the mill. On the steps, separated from him by the glass of the front doors, were the curious people of Westover, watching him with what he imagined to be suspicion. Suddenly he felt like an actor on a stage, caught unexpectedly in the spotlight without having rehearsed his role.
And then, as he stood alone in the mill, he realized that he had not come here tonight simply to make a decison about the future of the mill.
It was something else.
There was something he was looking for.
He turned away, and started toward the back of the mill, pausing at the enormous lighting panel that had been completed only a week ago. A moment later every light in the mill blazed into life, washing the shadows cast by the worklights away, suffusing the entire building with the even illumination of hundreds of fluorescent tubes.
When he looked down the stairs into the basement, the darkness there was gone too, driven away by the surge of electricity.
He started down the stairs, moving slowly, for still the light had not completely freed him from the nearpanic that had threatened him when he’d first entered the building.
At the bottom of the stairs he gazed out into the far reaches of the basement, but there was nothing there that seemed the least bit unusual. It was as it had always been, nothing more than a vast expanse of space interrupted at regular intervals by the huge wooden columns that supported the floor above. There was nothing that Phillip could see that would induce the unease that was again growing within him.
He looked down at his feet, at the spot where his brother had died, and Jeff Bailey had died, and his mother had nearly died.
This, he realized, was the true reason he’d come here tonight. To stand alone at this spot, waiting to see if the fear his mother had described to him six weeks ago would come to him now, threaten him as it had threatened her.
Was it the same fear that had killed his brother?
He had to know.
And yet, as the seconds stretched into minutes, there was nothing.
He turned finally, and for the first time saw the little room tucked away behind the stairs. Its door stood slightly agape, but beyond the door there was only darkness.
It was from that darkness that tentacles of true fear finally began to reach out to him.
He told himself that what he was feeling was irrational, that there was nothing beyond that door but an empty room. And yet, as he approached the door he found himself stepping to one side so that the door itself separated him from whatever might lie beyond. His pulse rate suddenly rising, he reached out, grasped the door, and began sliding it to the left until it was fully open. Now the space was nearly six feet wide, and the light from the basement spilled into the room, only to be swallowed up by the blackness of the walls beyond.
There seemed to Phillip to be nothing unusual about the room. A simple rectangle, with a single small window high up on the far wall, and barren of furniture. The only sign that anyone had been in here in years was the area on the floor where the accumulated dust of a century had been recently disturbed.
All that set the room apart from the rest of the basement was its smell.
Emanating from the room was a strong odor of smoke, as if there had recently been a fire here.
As the smoky odor filled his lungs, Phillip began to feel a strange roiling of emotions that seemed to come not from within himself, but from the room.
