“That’s not true!” Carolyn objected. “I always had time for her, and you used to get up and take her riding.”
“Three times, maybe,” Phillip replied. “But you know as well as I do that we were both walking on eggs, trying to be fair to everyone. You were trying to fit in just as hard as Beth was. And then when Patches died, we were both willing to believe that she’d poisoned the oats.”
“We didn’t,” Carolyn breathed, but Phillip held up a hand in a silencing gesture.
“Maybe we didn’t. But we let it be the last straw, and we didn’t try too hard to find out what really happened. It was easier just to avoid the situation by letting Beth move in with Alan.”
“We thought it was best,” Carolyn insisted. “We talked it over, and we agreed that it would be best for all of us. It wasn’t just ourselves we were thinking about! It was Beth and Tracy, too!”
“Tracy,” Phillip breathed. He’d been standing at the window, looking out into the darkness, but now he turned and faced Carolyn. “It was Tracy who poisoned Patches,” he said.
Carolyn stared at him. “No … even Tracy wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t she? Try this—what if Tracy heard us talking the night before?” He knew he was guessing, but even as he spoke the words, he knew they were the truth. “What if she knew that if anything else happened—anything at all—we’d decided to let Beth go live with Alan? You know as well as I do that she’s always resented Beth.”
“But she loved that horse—”
Phillip shook his head tiredly, feeling the exhaustion of the conflicting emotions that had been boiling within him over the last hour. “It wasn’t the horse she loved,” he said. “It was having the horse. I… I’m not sure Tracy is really capable of loving anything or anyone. This afternoon—” He fell silent for a moment; then made himself tell Carolyn what had happened in front of the mill that day. “She didn’t care about Alan being dead,” he finished, his own eyes flooding with tears now. “All she cared about was that it might be blamed on Beth. And she hoped it would be. I could see it in her eyes.”
Carolyn groaned softly, her eyes fixed on the floor as her hand unconsciously kneaded the limp handkerchief. Then, finally, she looked up.
“But what do we do?” she asked. “What can we possibly do?”
“I don’t know,” Phillip confessed. “But we can take Beth home, and try to make it up to her some way. Somehow, we have to make her understand that she’s not alone. We have to make her know that we love her very much.”
Carolyn nodded mutely. And then, after a long moment she spoke the other question, the question that was in both their minds.
“What about Tracy? What do we do about her?”
Phillip had no answer.
22
Phillip left the hospital a few minutes later. Carolyn, unwilling to leave her daughter alone that night, had asked for a cot to be brought into Beth’s room, and phoned Hannah to pack an overnight case for her.
Phillip walked slowly along Prospect Street, feeling the aura of tension in the village around him. There was still a crowd of people gathered in front of the mill, talking quietly among themselves, but they fell silent as he approached. There was something condemnatory in their glances, though none of them seemed willing to look directly at him. But he was all too aware of the eyes that raked over him, then quickly looked away. He wondered if he should stop and talk with them, then decided there was nothing he could say.
As he made his way quickly through the small crowd, and came to the north side of the old brick structure, his instincts told him to walk on, leaving the mill and all thoughts of it until tomorrow. But he couldn’t do that. There were decisions that had to be made, and he couldn’t allow himself to put them off. At the corner of the building, he turned left, starting once more toward the side entrance.
He used his key to open the construction shack, then rummaged around in Alan’s battered desk until he found a spare set of keys to the building. In the darkness of the evening, he opened the door and slipped inside the mill itself. He stood still for several seconds, rejecting once more the strange urge to turn his back on the old building and simply