Nightshade

drive, his eyes rested for a moment on the chimneys of his house, just visible above the grove of trees that stood at the far end of the fairway, beyond the dogleg.

Maybe he should have gone back this morning, just to make certain things were all right. After all, if Emily could set fire to her own house, there was no reason she couldn’t do the same to his.

But no — if he’d gone back so soon after leaving, Joan would take it as a sign that he might move back in, and until Emily was gone, that wasn’t going to happen. Not given the condition Matt had been in when he’d first moved from his grandmother’s house into Hapgood Farm. Even now, ten years later, Bill remembered how afraid Matt had been to go to sleep those first few nights. Though the boy had never been able to tell him exactly what his nightmares were about, Bill was certain he knew the cause: Emily. Though he suspected the woman had never exchanged more than a word or two with his grandfather in her life, she seemed to share W.H. Hapgood’s archaic ideas about lineage and breeding, even though she had none herself.

None, at least, that anyone knew of.

Joan’s bastard.

That’s how she’d always referred to her grandson. And with her feeling that way, how could Matt not have nightmares? So Bill had come up with the Night-Knight, and stayed up with Matt, reading to him and reassuring him that there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, and afterward the nightmares that had plagued Matt in Emily Moore’s house had vanished.

But with Emily in the house, how long would it be before they came back?

Now, his hands clenched tightly on his driver, Bill began his downswing, and immediately knew that the shot would go wrong. As the ball curved off into the woods, cracked against two trees, then dropped into a thicket of mountain laurel, he heard Gerry Conroe chuckle.

“Thought you said you were just fine,” the publisher of the Granite Falls Ledger said sardonically.

“I am just fine,” Bill growled, sounding more like his grandfather than he would have liked.

“That’s the third drive you’ve blown,” said Marty Holmes, who, along with Paul Arneson, made up the rest of their regular foursome. “A couple more drives like that and I might be able to retire early.”

His jaw clenching, Bill teed up a second ball, told himself to relax, and swung again.

As the second ball disappeared into the woods, he decided that Gerry Conroe was right.

He was upset. He was very upset, and he was going to do something about it.

The only question was what. But even as the question came into his mind, so did a possible answer.

Maybe it was time to do what he’d been thinking about doing for two years.

Fishing his cellular phone out of his golf bag, he dialed his lawyer’s number.

“That better not be business,” Marty Holmes said as Bill began talking. “You know the club rule about discussing business on the course.”

“And you know how often it’s enforced,” Bill replied as he waited for the attorney to come onto the line. “But it doesn’t matter. This is just about as personal as it gets.”

As the other three started down the fairway, Bill hung back.

No sense letting the whole town know what he was thinking of doing.

* * *

“JEEZ, MOORE! WHAT’S wrong with you today?”

The anger in Pete Arneson’s voice grated on Matt, and his right hand clenched into a fist. What was Pete so pissed about? All he’d done was miss a catch!

Except that it wasn’t just one catch. So far, he’d missed every pass Pete had thrown him, and on two of the plays he hadn’t even been able to remember which pattern he was supposed to run. On the last play, Eric Holmes had somehow managed to knock him off stride as he began to run, and that had never happened before. But long before he was ready to receive Pete’s pass, the ball sailed over his head, dropping to the ground near the goal post.

Fifteen lousy yards, and he hadn’t even come close to hitting his mark!

“Screw you,” he snarled.

Pete’s eyes widened. “ ‘Screw you’?” he repeated. “That’s all you’ve got to say? Then fine, Moore — screw you too.” He turned to Kent Stackworth. “After that last play, they’ll expect me to try to run this time. So I’m passing to you.”

“Me?” Stackworth repeated. What was going on? Pete always passed to Matt — they were like a team within a team.

“Yes, you,” Arneson shot back. “You can’t do any worse than Moore, can you? As for you, Moore, you’re blocking on this play.”

A few seconds later Matt, seething, was back on the line, facing Eric Holmes.

Concentrate, he told himself. Just forget about everything else and focus. But as he crouched down, Pete Arneson’s words kept running through his mind, and when he heard the last number of the count, something happened.

Instead of launching himself into Eric Holmes and blocking him, Matt spun out to the right, letting Eric lunge past him. A second later he heard Pete Arneson’s outraged howl as Eric took him down, but it didn’t matter.

Matt was already off the field.

“Moore!” he heard the coach shouting as he started toward the locker room.

Matt kept walking.

“Moore! Hold it right there!”

Matt hesitated, but then turned to face the coach, who was walking quickly toward him.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Ted Stevens asked. “Since when do you just walk off the field in the middle of a play?”

Matt’s jaw tightened and his right hand clenched into a fist.

The coach’s tone changed when he saw the uncharacteristic anger in Matt’s face. “What is it, Matt?” he asked. “What’s going on?” For a moment Matt’s expression didn’t change, but then, as if he’d made a decision, Matt unclenched his fist and his shoulders slumped.

“I just don’t feel very good today.”

“You sick?”

Matt shrugged. “I didn’t sleep very well last night.” He hesitated, then: “And my dad left.”

Suddenly, Ted Stevens understood. No wonder the boy’s game had been off. “You want to talk about it?” he offered. “It can be pretty rough when your folks split up.”

“He’s not my father,” Matt said, a little too quickly. “He’s just my stepfather.”

Stevens knew better than to challenge the defensiveness in Matt’s words, but instead slung a friendly arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you call it a day and hit the showers? And if you want to talk, I’ll be in my office. Okay?”

Matt shrugged the coach’s arm off. “Hey, it’s no big deal,” he said. “Everybody’s folks split up, right?”

Again the coach knew better than to try to argue. “I’ll be in my office,” he repeated. “The door’s always open.”

Right, Matt thought as he went to his locker, stripped out of his jersey and padding, then headed for the showers. Everybody wants to talk about it.

He turned the hot water up until the needle spray was nearly scalding and stepped under it, letting it sluice the sweat off his body. But even the stream of hot water could do nothing to ease the tension that had been building in him all through last night and then the long day at school. He finally shut off the shower, toweled himself dry, and pulled on his clothes.

As he headed for the door he didn’t even glance in the direction of the coach’s office.

Nor did he head out Manchester Road toward Hapgood Farm.

Instead he found himself walking toward Burlington Avenue.

Five minutes later he was standing in front of his grandmother’s house. From where he stood, there was no sign of the fire at all, but even though it had been only a week since his grandmother had moved in with his own family, the house had already taken on a look of abandonment.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?”

Matt turned to see Becky Adams smiling at him. Before Matt’s mother had married his stepfather and they’d