by John Saul
Her chest felt as though it was going to burst, and she struggled against the chill weight of the darkness, struggled to breathe against the watery night.
Now she couldn’t even scream anymore, couldn’t fight the monsters anymore, couldn’t escape the black abyss of the Bad Place.…
She opened her eyes, a scream welling in her throat.
The blackness was gone.
Hands were touching her. Warm hands.
But not her daddy’s hands.
She blinked, the scream dying in her throat.
Warmth was all around her, and she felt herself being held close to the softness of a body.
When she looked up, there was a face above her.
Not her mother’s face.
A face she had never seen before, but a woman’s face.
And then she heard the voice, a low, crooning voice.
“You are mine now. You’ve come to me, and now you will belong to me. Forevermore you will belong to me.”
Chapter 1
Cassie Winslow stood quietly in the heat of the April afternoon, doing her best to focus her mind on the casket suspended over the open grave. The machinery that would lower it into the ground in a few more minutes was only partially concealed by the flowers that her mother’s friends had sent, and even the largest bouquet—the one from her father—looked tiny in its position of honor on top of the coffin. There was a numbness in Cassie’s mind—the same numbness that had settled over her three days ago when the police had arrived at the little apartment in North Hollywood she and her mother had shared to tell her that her mother wouldn’t be coming home. Now, no matter how often she reminded herself that it was her mother they were about to bury, she couldn’t bring herself to accept the idea. Indeed, she half expected to feel her mother’s elbow nudging her ribs and hear her mother’s voice admonishing her to stand up straight and pay attention.
I’m almost sixteen! Why can’t she leave me alone?
She felt herself flush guiltily at the thought, and glanced around to see if anyone was staring at her. But who would there be to stare? Except for the minister and herself, the only other person who had come to the funeral was the lawyer who had arrived the day after her mother had died to tell her that he was taking care of everything; the day after the funeral—tomorrow—she would be flying to Boston, where her father would pick her up.
Pick her up in Boston! If her father really cared about her, why hadn’t he come out for the funeral?
But Cassie knew the answer to that—her father was too busy taking care of his new family to bother about the one he’d dumped almost the minute she was born. So why would he fly all the way to California just for a funeral? As if she were still alive, her mother’s voice rang in Cassie’s ears: “He’s no good! None of them is any good—your father, your stepfather—none of them! In the end they always run out on you. Never trust a man, Cassie! Never trust any of them!”
Cassie decided her mother had been right, for her stepfather, who had always made such a big deal about how much he loved her, hadn’t shown up at the funeral either. In fact she hadn’t heard from him since the day he’d walked out of the apartment almost five years ago.
It had been almost that long since she’d heard anything from her father.
The minister’s voice droned on, uttering the words of prayers Cassie hadn’t heard since the last time she’d gone to church—about ten years ago, she thought, before her mother had gotten mad at the minister. Her attention drifted away from the gravesite, and she looked out over the broad expanse of the San Fernando Valley. Her home had been here for so long that she couldn’t remember anything else. It was a clear day, and on the far side of the Valley, the barren mountains were etched sharply against a deep blue sky. It was the kind of day when everyone always said, “This is why I came to California. Isn’t it great?” By tomorrow the smog would close in again and the mountains would disappear behind the brown stinging morass that would choke the Valley all summer long.
As the machine began whirring softly, and the coffin was slowly lowered into the ground, Cassie Winslow wondered if they had smog on Cape Cod.
Then the funeral was over and the lawyer was leading her down the hill to put her into the limousine the funeral home had provided. As they drove out of the huge cemetery that seemed to roll over mile after mile of carefully watered green hills, Cassie wondered if she would ever come back here again.
She knew that a lot of people went to cemeteries to visit their dead parents, but somehow she didn’t think she would.
For as long as she could remember, she’d always had a fantasy that perhaps her mother wasn’t really her mother at all. Sometimes, late at night in the dark security of her bedroom, she’d let herself dream of another woman—a woman she saw only in her mind—who never yelled at her, never corrected her, never soured her with bitter words. Never—
She shut the thought out of her mind, unwilling even to remember the other things her mother had done to her.
She concentrated once more on the woman in the fantasy. This woman—the woman she wished were her mother—always understood her, even when she didn’t understand herself.
But that wasn’t the woman they had just buried, and in the deepest place within her heart, Cassie knew she would never return here. But would she ever find that other woman, the woman who existed only in her dreams, who would truly be her mother?
Eric Cavanaugh watched the ball hurtle toward him, tensed his grip on the bat, squinted slightly into the afternoon sun, then swung.
Crack!
The wood connected with the horsehide of the baseball, and Eric swore softly as he felt the bat itself splitting in his hands. Then, as the ball arced off toward right field, he dropped the bat and began sprinting toward first base. If the bat hadn’t splintered, it would have been a home run for sure. As it was, he’d still get a base out of it, unless Jeff Maynard managed to snag it.
There was little chance that Jeff would make the catch. That was the reason Eric had hit it to him in the first place. He rounded first easily and, fifteen feet before he got to second base, he plunged headfirst into a slide and felt his uniform tear away at the shoulder.
“You’re gonna break your neck doing that someday,” he heard Kevin Smythe say, and knew from the second baseman’s tone that he’d made it. Safe! Grinning, he got to his feet, and began scraping mud from his torn jersey. But then, as his eyes swept the field, his smile faded.
Beyond the fence, parked by the curb on Bay Street, was the old white pickup truck with CAVANAUGH FISH emblazoned in cobalt blue on its side. Leaning against the truck was his father, his arms folded over his chest, his head shaking slowly as he muttered something to the coach, who nodded in apparent agreement from his place just inside the fence.
Eric’s heart sank. Why couldn’t his father have shown up half an hour before, when he’d put the ball over the left field fence? But that was the way it always seemed to happen: if he was going to make a mistake, his father was going to see it, and over dinner tonight Ed Cavanaugh would want to talk about it. Since this mistake had come on the baseball diamond, it meant that after dinner he and his father would be back here on the high school diamond, going through batting practice until the light got so bad neither of them could see. Even then Ed would insist on “just a couple more,” so Eric wouldn’t be able to get to his homework until after eight o’clock.
Unless his father got drunk. That was always a possibility. But when his father was drunk, things were always even worse than when his father was sober.
The coach’s whistle signaled an end to the practice session, and Eric, after waiting for Jeff Maynard to catch up with him, started toward the locker room, wondering if he should skip the four-thirty student council meeting. If he weren’t the president of the council, he wouldn’t even be thinking twice about it. The council, he knew, didn’t really mean anything at all. Being on it just gave him one more opportunity to have his picture in the yearbook, and gave hi
s father one more thing to brag about when he was out getting drunk. But Eric was the president, and if he didn’t go, his dad would be sure to hear about it. Coach Simms would make sure of that. Then there would be a long speech about “living up to what I expect of you” to go with the extra batting practice.
“That woulda been another homer if the bat hadn’t busted,” Jeff observed as he caught up. “How come you always hit those to me? You know I can’t catch ’em.”
Eric’s grin came back, and his blue eyes sparkled with quick good humor. “You don’t care if you catch ’em or not. If I hit ’em to you, I know I’m gonna get a base, and I know you’re not gonna worry about it.”
Jeff shrugged his indifference, but his eyes clouded slightly. “Your dad saw what happened,” he said quietly. “You gonna get in trouble?”
“I always do, don’t I?” Eric replied. He tried to make his voice sound as if his father’s wrath didn’t mean any more to him than a missed fly ball meant to Jeff. Except that Jeff had been his best friend almost as long as he could remember, and Jeff always seemed to know what was going on in his head, no matter what he said out loud. Now, he proved it once again.
“Wanta cut the council meeting? If we did, we could get the trig assignment out of the way before you’ve gotta be home. Or we could cut the trig, too, and go down to the beach,” he added hopefully.
Eric thought about it, then shook his head as he pulled open the heavy locker-room door and stepped inside. “Can’t. If I don’t get an A on the test next week, I won’t get an A in the course. And you know what that means.”
Jeff rolled his eyes. “How would I know? And you don’t either, since you’ve never gotten anything but A’s. Besides, your dad won’t kill you, will he?”
“I don’t—” Eric began, but was immediately cut off by the coach yelling at him from the equipment cage next to the showers.
“That’s two bats this week, Cavanaugh! One more and you start paying for them! Got that?”
“I didn’t mean—”
Simms’s voice grew louder, and his words seemed to echo the lecture Eric heard from his father so often: “I don’t care about what you meant. All I care about is what you do!”
Eric felt a sudden surge of anger flood up through his body, and struggled against it. Getting mad would only make things worse. What the hell was the big deal about a broken bat anyway? Except it wasn’t just the bat—it was everything. And it had been that way as long as he could remember. No matter what he did, it never seemed to be good enough—not for his father, not for his teachers, not for anyone. Always they seemed to think he wasn’t trying hard enough, that he ought to do better. But he was already doing the best he could. What more did they want?
Once again Jeff Maynard seemed to read his mind. “Forget it,” he heard his best friend say so softly that he knew no one else could hear. “If you say anything else, he’ll tell your dad you mouthed off and make you run laps. Then you’ll miss the meeting and flunk the test too! ’Course,” Jeff couldn’t resist adding, “it might be fun to watch Mr. Perfect fall on his face just once!” Then, as Eric swung around to punch him on the arm, Jeff darted off and disappeared around the corner toward his locker.
Eric glanced at the big clock on the wall, and realized he only had ten minutes to get to the council meeting. He began stripping off his stained jersey, shoving it into his book bag for his mother to wash that night.
He would mend it himself.
It was five-thirty when Eric finally left Memorial High and started home. The streets of False Harbor were nearly empty, since the summer season wouldn’t start for another six weeks and most of the small fishing fleet was out to sea. The summer shops along Bay Street were still boarded up, and the town wore the strangely deserted look it took on every winter after the summer people were gone and the seasonal shopkeepers had closed their stores, heading south to bask in the sun and sell the same merchandise to the Florida vacationers that they sold on Cape Cod all summer. Though the town had an oddly forlorn appearance, the off-season was still Eric’s favorite time of year. It was only then that he could go off by himself sometimes, hiking across the dunes and combing the beach, alone with the pounding sea and the stormy winter skies.
Then there was the marsh, flooded at high tide, that had given the town its name by making the harbor appear much larger and more easily accessible than it actually was. In the summer the dredged channel, which provided the only opening to the deeper harbor inland of the marsh, was choked with pleasure boats, and when the air took on the stillness of August, the acrid exhaust of their engines hung over the reeds like a poisonous haze. But in winter, with a northern wind howling, the marsh held a special magic for Eric, and he would sit for hours, his back to the village while gulls screamed and wheeled overhead. Once or twice he’d talked Jeff Maynard into exploring the marsh with him, but Jeff had only shivered in the cold for a few minutes, then suggested that they go bowling at the little six-lane alley on Providence Street, where at least it was warm. But that was all right with Eric—he didn’t have the opportunity to go to the marsh very often, and when he did, he preferred to be alone.
Today there was no time for a hike out to the marsh, but as Eric strode along Bay Street, his book bag slung over his right shoulder, he considered stopping at the wharf. A gull had built the first nest of the season on one of the pilings, and Eric had already checked it twice for eggs. So far there were none. Still, you could never tell.
When he reached Wharf Street and glanced up at the clock that stood atop an iron tower at the entrance to the marina, he changed his mind. If he wasn’t home by six, there would be hell to pay. So he turned left, starting toward the old common two blocks away.
It was only there, in the center of the town, that False Harbor began to look lived-in again, for it was in the long central strip—four blocks wide and eighteen long—stretching from the marsh at the western end of town to the rolling expanse of dunes that marked the far eastern boundary, that the year-round population lived. The residents of False Harbor had left both Cape Drive and Bay Street to the summer people. Indeed, once you left Bay Street there wasn’t much to set False Harbor apart from any other small New England village. It was built around a rectangular common that hadn’t seen a sheep grazing in more than a century, and the owners of the buildings facing the common had resisted the temptation to turn the village center into anything that might be called quaint by the tourist guides.
Yet quaint was exactly what it was, for many of the buildings were more than two centuries old. Once they had been private homes, but most had long since been converted into stores, remodeled by former owners in the days when Victorian architecture had been modern. The brick town hall still dominated the acre facing Commonwealth Avenue, which was bounded on the east by the common and on the west by High Street. Next to it stood the stone Carnegie library, which had replaced the town stables in the early twentieth century.
Eric turned away from the town hall as he emerged from Wharf Street, cutting diagonally to the point where Commonwealth picked up again after having been broken for a block by the square. Then, changing his mind, he veered south again, toward Ocean Street and the old Congregational Church which occupied its own acre between the common and Cambridge Street.
The church had always been Eric’s favorite building in False Harbor, though if anyone had asked him why, he would not have been able to say. A tall, narrow structure, its severe white clapboard side walls were broken at regular intervals by stained-glass windows which had only replaced the original flashing two hundred years after the church had been built and a hundred fifty years after the last of its puritan founders had been put to rest in the adjoining graveyard. Its steeply pitched slate roof was surmounted by a tall steeple in which the original bell still hung, though it was rung now only on Sundays and holidays. Eric paused again in front of the church, wondering if he dared take enough time to slip inside and watch the ancient clock in the vestibule strike six. Just as
he’d made up his mind to risk it, a horn sounded. He turned to see his father’s white truck idling at the curb. From the driver’s seat Ed Cavanaugh was waving impatiently.
Eric felt his stomach begin to knot up with a familiar tension as he hurried across the lawn and slid into the truck next to his father.
“Got time to waste hanging out in there?” Ed Cavanaugh growled as he shoved the truck into gear, then let out the clutch.
Eric said nothing. He looked straight ahead. He could feel his father’s eyes boring into him.
“Seems to me you could be spending your time a little more productively than standing around watching an old clock strike,” Ed Cavanaugh went on. His voice was dangerously soft, a certain sign to Eric that his father was angry.
“I wasn’t going to be there more than a couple of minutes—” he began, but got no further.
“Unless you want to end up in the gutter, I don’t think you’ve got a couple of minutes to waste,” the elder Cavanaugh replied. He glanced at the road as he turned into Cambridge Street, then shifted his attention back to his son. “And you can damn well look at me when I talk to you,” he added.
Eric felt the knot in his stomach tighten, but he was determined not to let his expression betray his fear. Obediently he turned to face his father.
“You think I’m too hard on you, don’t you?” Ed Cavanaugh asked, his voice edged with an acid whine. He was breathing harder now, and the heavy reek of whiskey on his breath made Eric shrink back slightly. When the boy made no reply, Ed shook his head. “Well, I’m not. All I want’s for you to do your best. And you can’t do that by dawdling your afternoons away.”
Like you can dawdle yours away in a bar? Eric thought, but didn’t dare voice the thought. “I was on my way home, and I just decided to stop at the church for a minute,” he ventured. “That’s all.”
“Should have been home studying,” Ed groused. “And it seems to me you and I better spend a couple hours on the diamond after supper. At sixteen you should be able to hold a bat right.”