Twice more his father’s belt lashed his backside, and though each lash sent a spasm of pain through him, Seth bore it in near silence, and let only a single tear slide down his cheek.
“Two minutes,” Blake Baker said as he slid his belt back through the loops of his pants. “Be dressed and downstairs, or we’ll go without you. And believe me when I tell you that you don’t want that to happen.”
Exactly 115 seconds later, Seth appeared at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a clean blue shirt stuffed into equally clean khaki pants. His bare feet had been shoved into the loafers he hated, but that his mother always insisted he wear when they went to the country club. The welts on his buttocks still stung and had already begun to swell, but at least they weren’t bleeding. In silence, he followed his parents out to the Lexus. He hesitated before getting into the backseat, but knew better than to stall too long.
Better to just get it over with.
Climbing into the car, he lowered himself gingerly onto the seat, and thought he would scream out loud as the pain radiated from his bruises. But no sound escaped his lips, and he held back his tears through the sheer force of his will.
Turning his mind away from the sting of the whipping his father had given him, he summoned up the image that had been on his computer screen.
The image of the house at Black Creek Crossing.
The image of the window on the second floor.
And the face — or at least something that looked like a face — that seemed to be peering out the window, watching as Mrs. Fletcher and the people she’d shown the house to drove away.
The face that had seemed so clear when he’d seen it in person that afternoon, yet showed up on his camera as nothing more than an indistinct blur, almost as if there was nothing there at all.
Chapter 8
T WAS GOING TO HAPPEN, ANGEL TOLD HERSELF. IT WAS really going to happen. All afternoon, ever since they’d arrived at Aunt Joni’s house and her parents had begun filling out the forms to buy the house on Black Creek Road, she’d been certain that something was going to go wrong. And there were so many things that could go wrong.
Her parents could suddenly get in a fight.
Or her father could suddenly change his mind for no reason at all. She couldn’t remember how many times that had happened — how many times they’d been planning to go to a movie, or go to the lake for a picnic, or just to McDonald’s for lunch on Saturday, and all of a sudden, for no reason at all, her father would decide they weren’t going to do it. When she was younger, she’d always thought it was her fault, that she had done something to make her father angry, and finally one day she burst into tears and told her mother she was sorry, that she didn’t know what she’d done.
Her mother assured her that she hadn’t done anything at all, that it was just something about her father she would have to get used to. “It doesn’t mean a thing,” her mother had said, her voice sounding even more tired than usual. “It’s just the way he is.”
But he hadn’t changed his mind about the house on Black Creek Road, even when her uncle Ed didn’t look happy about giving her father a job. In fact, that had been the worst moment of the whole day, and she found herself holding her breath as she waited to see what Uncle Ed would say when her father asked him about a job.
There was a long silence before her uncle responded. Finally, he said, “I’m not sure hiring family is a good idea,” and Angel’s heart had sunk. Her eyes shifted from her uncle to her aunt, but her aunt hadn’t said anything. “On the other hand,” Uncle Ed went on — and she felt a twinge of hope—“I gave Joni and Myra my word, and I won’t go back on that.” Angel started to relax, but then her uncle added, “But there are a couple of things you’d better understand, Marty. You’re going to be working for me, not with me, and I’m going to be giving the orders, not you.”
Angel had waited, once more holding her breath. Her father’s jaw tightened the way it did when he got mad, and her mother shot her father a look of warning. “I guess I can live with that,” her father replied. “At least till you see what I can do.”
Her uncle’s eyes had narrowed, and Angel was afraid he would change his mind, but he’d only shrugged. “Then I guess we’ll see what you can do, won’t we?” he said, and smiled. But Angel could see he didn’t really mean it. “Want a drink, Marty?” he asked, and Angel saw her mother shoot her father another warning.
To Angel’s relief, her father shook his head, picked up a pen, and signed all the papers her aunt had spread out on the table. Aunt Joni then went into another room for a few minutes, and when she came back, she was smiling.
“That’s that,” she said. “You’ve bought a house.”
Her mother had looked stunned. “Just like that?”
“Just like that,” her aunt replied. “I told the bank’s rep I might have an offer over the weekend, and he gave me his home number. It’s done.”
Her aunt invited them to go to a party at the country club with them, but her mother declined. “We’re not dressed for a country club,” she said, “and we wouldn’t fit in, anyway.”
“But it would be such a wonderful opportunity for Zack to introduce Angel to his friends,” her aunt said, though Angel had seen Zack glaring at her. Not that it mattered to her if Zack didn’t want her to meet his friends, because he was a year older and she wouldn’t be in his class anyway.
Afterward, in the backseat of the car as they drove back through the center of Roundtree on their way home, the scenery looked different to Angel.
She was going to live here, she thought, gazing out at the little town. If it had had horses and carriages instead of cars, it would look as if it came out of another century. There was a small square in the center of town, a black wrought-iron fence surrounding it, and neatly trimmed hedges lining the paths that wound through it. There was a bandstand in the center, and an old wooden teeter-totter stood near a swing hung from a branch of an enormous maple that spread its limbs over a quarter of the square.
At one end of the square was the library, a wonderful old stone building that was nothing at all like the ugly modern Eastbury Library, and at the other end was a large church with what looked like a cemetery behind it, and all the shops around the square were in buildings that looked at least as old as the library.
It would be wonderful, Angel told herself as they left town on the long drive back to Eastbury. They were going to live in their own house, and she would have friends, and she’d be in a new school, and everything was going to be perfect.
Chapter 9
HE ROUNDTREE COUNTRY CLUB WAS SPRAWLED OVER more than two hundred acres on the south side of the town. As Ed Fletcher turned his Mercedes through the gates and started up the long drive that wound through the maple forest toward the clubhouse that generations ago had been the home of his great-great-grandfather, he heard a small sigh of happiness escape his wife’s lips.
“Aren’t they glorious?” she asked, gazing at the trees with the same wonder he’d seen in her eyes the first time he brought her to the club, when they were still teenagers. And it was true — the maples were glorious, their foliage just beginning to take on the blaze of color that would build steadily for the next few weeks. On the day of the annual Maple Cup father-son golf tournament — which Ed and Zack had won last year — the area around the club would shimmer with the golden light reflecting off the leaves of the ancient trees. “It’s just so wonderful that your family never cut them down.”
