Black Creek Crossing (8 page)

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.
Ten minutes,
he thought.
I’ll just think about something else, and when we get there, I won’t have to sit down anymore at all.

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.”

“They cut enough others down that they could afford to save these,” Ed observed dryly. “And it didn’t hurt that they put the whole thing in a trust for the club either.” He shook his head as he scanned the forest, and though he said nothing, both his wife and son knew exactly what he was thinking: how many houses he could have put on the property, if only his great-grandfather hadn’t been so shortsighted as to turn the property over to what had then been the Roundtree Golf, Croquet, and Lawn Tennis Club. Ed suspected that his great-grandfather had founded the organization not so much out of love for any of those three games, but because he wanted his property preserved in the condition in which he’d inherited it, even though he could no longer afford to maintain it. Thus the trust, allowing what was now the Roundtree Country Club to hold the land and every structure on it in perpetuity, so long as they preserved certain acreage—including the Maple Grove—as wilderness.

Or, at least, his great-grandfather’s definition of wilderness, which wasn’t exactly the kind of untamed forest most people associated with that word. The Maple Grove—which had come to be capitalized at least in the members’ minds, if not in any of the legal documents that pertained to the small forest—was kept free of anything that might distract from the magnificence of the trees themselves. No undergrowth was allowed to sprout from the soil around their roots, no twig or branch was allowed to lie where it fell for more than a day or two. Only the leaves could stay on the ground, for one of old Thaddeus Fletcher’s few pleasures in life had come from scuffling through them in the fall, listening to them rustle around his feet.

Given the hard-eyed, angry scowl that adorned the portrait of Thaddeus that hung over the fireplace in the club’s main dining room, Ed Fletcher suspected it more likely that he liked crushing the leaves under his boots. Still, whatever his great-grandfather’s motivations, the Roundtree Country Club was a magnificent place that was open to everyone in Roundtree, assuming, of course, that they could afford the initiation fee and the annual dues. The irony was not lost on Ed that Thaddeus Fletcher himself probably wouldn’t have been able to afford the fee and dues had he not managed to unload the property onto the club in the first place, but it wasn’t something either he or any of the other members ever talked about.

He pulled the Mercedes up to the front door, turned it over to the valet, and followed Joni and Zack into the clubhouse. At least a hundred people had already gathered there, the men dressed in perfectly pressed khaki pants and Ralph Lauren shirts, the women in the kind of peasant skirts that real peasants never would have been able to afford.

“I’m going to go find Heather Dunne and Chad Jackson,” Zack announced, heading for the French doors that led out to the terrace and the swimming pool beyond.

“You and Heather stay out of the bushes,” his father said with a wink that earned him a warning look from his wife. “Hey, you can’t stop them from growing up,” he said when Zack was gone.

“Why don’t I think that ‘growing up’ and ‘seducing innocent girls in the bushes behind the pool house’ are synonymous?”

“It worked with you,” Ed teased. “Wouldn’t you say you grew up that night?”

Joni lifted an eyebrow. “Me?” she countered. “As I recall, exploring those bushes was my idea, not yours.” Glancing around to see if anyone was watching them, she licked her lips lasciviously. “And I wasn’t any more innocent then than I am now. Myra was always the religious one. Want to go back there again?” She reached out and stroked his chest, slipping her finger between the buttons to touch his bare flesh. “Just for old times’ sake? Let yourself be seduced by the poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks one more time?”

“I think we’d better leave it to the kids,” Ed replied. “Let’s go get a drink and see who’s here.” He’d started toward the bar when Joni put a hand on his arm, stopping him. When he turned back to her, the mischief of a moment ago had vanished.

“I know you didn’t really want to hire Marty,” she said quietly.

Ed shrugged. “Hey, I promised, didn’t I?” His expression clouded. “But if it doesn’t work out, I’m not promising to keep him on.”

“It’ll work out,” Joni said. “Myra’s the only family I have left, and . . .” Her voice trailed off, then she added, “I just want her closer to me, that’s all. Everything’s going to be perfect—I can just feel it.”

Ed turned away, but not quickly enough to keep his wife from seeing the doubt in his eyes.

Seth Baker saw Zack Fletcher coming out of the clubhouse, and in response he found himself moving toward the shelter of the pool house before he even realized it. Then, his skin prickling with the sensation of someone watching him, he stopped short. But when he turned around, Zack was talking to Heather Dunne and Chad Jackson, and most of the rest of the kids seemed to be gathering around them like iron filings drawn to a magnet. And no one was looking at him.