was whimpering. “No… please… get it away from me… ”
Stunned by what she’d seen, Myra remained rooted for a moment, her mind reeling as she tried to make sense of the apparition. But there was no sense to be made of it — the images that churned in her mind wouldn’t fit together.
A cat—
A girl—
A skeleton—
And now nothing! No trace anywhere in the room of the cat, or the girl, or the knife the girl had held. But a moment later, when Marty dropped his hands away from his face and looked up at her, she saw the deep slash in his cheek — a slash that began just beneath his eye and ran all the way down to his jaw — and she knew that no matter how impossible it had been, she had indeed seen something.
But what?
Then, from behind her, she heard a strangled voice and whirled around to see Angel standing in the door to the kitchen, her face as ashen as Marty’s, her eyes wide. It took no more than that single glance to understand that whatever it was she’d seen, her daughter had seen it too.
Mother and daughter gazed at each other, and the silence between them seemed to stretch to eternity. It was Angel who finally broke the silence, her eyes shifting from her mother to her father. “Is — Is Dad okay?”
Before Myra could say anything, Marty lurched to his feet. “That cat,” he rasped. “It tried to kill me.” His eyes fixed furiously on Myra. “And you saw it too, so don’t tell me it didn’t happen!”
“I–I saw something,” Myra breathed, her mind still reeling.
“It tried to kill me!” Marty repeated, wiping away the blood that was streaming from his wound.
Chapter 31
ELL, AT LEAST I DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT beating my biggest client,” Blake Baker sourly observed as he and Seth gazed at the list that had them matched up against Ed and Zack Fletcher. His eyes shifted from the list to Seth. “Just try not to look like too much of a damn fool out there, okay?”
The words stung almost as much as the lash of his father’s belt, but Seth stared straight ahead, trying to pretend he hadn’t heard them. Besides, it could have been worse, at least for him — he could have gotten matched up against Chad Jackson or Jared Woods, who made fun of him even more than Zack Fletcher did. They and their fathers had managed to get paired together, which Seth figured had a lot to do with the fact that Chad’s father was the chairman of the tournament committee, and Jared’s father was Chad’s father’s best friend. Not that it was supposed to matter who was paired with whom, since the father-son “tournament” wasn’t supposed to be a real tournament at all.
It was just supposed to be fun.
It wasn’t supposed to matter who won, and it wasn’t supposed to matter how good anyone was. Besides, it wasn’t even like a real tournament where everyone had to play their own ball. It was just a best-ball foursome of match play, where Seth and his father would take turns playing the same spot while Zack and Ed Fletcher took turns hitting from theirs, and in the end whoever won the most holes won the match. The total number of strokes wouldn’t even matter, and twenty minutes later no one would care who won. They’d all go have a barbecue, and everyone would have a good time, and that would be the end of it.
Except that wouldn’t be the end of it for him, because no matter how hard he tried, he wouldn’t be able to play well enough for his father, and even though his father didn’t want to win — at least not against his biggest client — he didn’t want to be embarrassed by his son either.
What his father wanted, Seth knew, was to lose, but only by a hole or maybe two at the most.
But not by the whole eighteen. If they lost every single hole, which Seth was pretty sure they would, he wasn’t the only one who would be teased about it. It would be his father too. And then, when they got home—
Seth felt the lash of his father’s belt rise out of his memory, and half an hour later when he shanked his first swing on the first tee and sent the ball flying off to the right, where it had rolled into the shrubbery around the tee box, he’d felt the lash yet again.
And heard Zack Fletcher snickering.
Then, to make it worse, Zack had stepped up to the tee, set up a ball, and driven it almost 250 yards straight down the fairway.
Seth felt like crying as he thought about what was to come, and as the afternoon wore on, it only got worse. The more Zack snickered at him, the worse he played. And the worse he played, the angrier his father grew. Hole after hole, the torture went on. It seemed that every ball he hit went either nowhere or in the wrong direction, and every time his father hit a good shot, Seth managed to spoil it with his own following shot. Zack and his father won hole after hole, usually by two or three strokes.
And Seth could feel his father’s rage building.
When they came to the eighth tee, Seth gazed dolefully at the green.
“Gee, too bad it isn’t Seth’s turn to drive,” Zack Fletcher said. “Didn’t he hit one almost that far, back on Five?” Then, as if just remembering, he slapped his forehead. “Oh, yeah! I forgot — it went in the water, didn’t it!”
Seth’s face burned with embarrassment.
And his father’s burned with fury.
Ed Fletcher teed up, took a couple of practice swings with his seven iron, and stepped up to the ball. He drew the club back, paused for a moment at the top of the backswing, then swept the iron downward.
Seth watched as the ball arced through the air and dropped onto the green about twenty feet from the pin. Turning, he bowed to his son with mock grandeur. “Just get it close, and we have another par.”
Then Blake Baker stepped onto the tee box, set up his ball, and after taking almost a dozen practice swings, finally took his shot.
The ball rose off the tee and rose toward the sky, heading directly toward the pin.
“Looks good,” Ed Fletcher said.
The ball struck the ground about ten feet in front of the green and bounced straight forward.
“Member’s bounce,” Ed said. “Looking even better!”
The ball rolled straight toward the hole, and suddenly both the Fletchers and the Bakers were standing still and silent, watching.
When the ball finally stopped rolling, it was only a foot from the cup.
“Another foot,” Blake Baker groaned as the four of them started from the tee box toward the green. “One lousy foot and I would have had an ace.”
“And if Seth weren’t putting, you’d have a sure birdie,” Zack said.
Seth felt a knot form in his stomach as his father laughed at the joke but said nothing. When they got to the green, he marked the ball his father had driven, then watched as Zack carefully circled around the green, studying the twenty-some-foot putt from every angle. There was a rise between the ball and the cup, and once the putt crested the rise, it would start to speed up. If Zack didn’t hit the ball hard enough, it wouldn’t make it over the rise, but if he hit it too hard and missed the hole, it might very well end up going ten feet past it. Finally Zack crouched down, cupped his hands over the bill of his cap, and peered at the line from the ball to the hole one more time. At last he stood up, squared the putter behind the ball, and swung.
