say about the mill was that it was evil, and should never be touched. Not restored, not converted to some other use, not even torn down. Just left to rot, for God’s sake! How can that be right?”
Carolyn shook her head unhappily. “I don’t know. But there have been so many stories. And you don’t know how everyone in town feels about the mill.”
“They feel the same way I feel about it,” Phillip declared. “That it’s a hideous old eyesore, and that something ought to be done with it.”
“But that’s not it,” Carolyn replied. “It’s something else. It’s a reminder of how things used to be here—” She stopped herself, not wanting to hurt her husband, but it was already too late: she could see the pain in Phillip’s eyes.
“You mean a reminder of the bad old days, when my family used to work children to death in the shoe factory?”
Mutely, Carolyn nodded.
Phillip stared at her for a moment, then flopped back down on his pillow, averting his eyes.
“I think that’s another reason to renovate it,” he said tiredly. “Perhaps the best reason. Maybe all those old stories will finally be forgotten if I do something with the mill and some people in Westover make some honest money from it.”
“But maybe … maybe the stories shouldn’t be forgotten, Phillip. Maybe we always need to remember what happened there.”
“My God,” Phillip groaned. “You sound just like Father. Except that he’d never say exactly what he was talking about. It was always vague references, and dark hints. But nothing I could ever put my finger on.” He propped himself up on one elbow, and his tone lightened. “And you know why I could never put my finger on any of it?” he asked.
Carolyn shook her head.
“Because maybe there was nothing to put my finger on! Just a bunch of stories and legends about terrible abuses in the shoe mill. But that sort of thing went on all over New England. Christ, child labor was our answer to slavery. But it’s all over now, Carolyn. Why should we keep torturing ourselves with it?”
“I don’t know,” Carolyn admitted. “But I just can’t help feeling that somehow your father was right about the mill.”
Phillip reached over and turned off his light again, then drew her close. “Well, he wasn’t,” he said. “He was as wrong about the mill as he was about everything else. He was my father, darling, but I have to confess I didn’t like him very much.”
Carolyn made no reply, and lay still in her husband’s arms. Here, in bed with Phillip, she felt secure and safe, and she would do nothing to threaten that security. But as Phillip drifted into sleep, and she lay awake, she couldn’t help feeling that Phillip was wrong about the mill, and that old Conrad Sturgess, whom they had buried that day, was right.
The mill should be left alone; left to crumble away until there was nothing left of it but dust.
3
Tracy Sturgess lay in her bed listening to the faint echoes of the old grandfather clock that had stood in the entry hall for as long as she could remember. She counted the chimes, then checked her tally against the little clock on her night table.
Eleven.
She threw the covers back, put on her robe, then went into the bathroom that adjoined her bedroom. Switching on the light, she inspected herself in the mirror.
She didn’t look quite right.
Carefully she mussed her hair until she was satisfied that it looked as though she’d been tossing in her bed for the last hour. Then she turned the bathroom light off and moved quickly through the darkness to her bedroom door. Opening it a crack, she peered out into the dimness of the corridor, lit only by a small night-light that sat on the marble-topped commode midway between the stairs and her grandmother’s rooms.
The hall was empty, and silence hung over the house. But at the far end of the hall, as she had known it would, light glowed from beneath her grandmother’s door.
Smiling, she hurried down the hall.
She paused outside her grandmother’s door, and listened. From within, she could hear the faint sounds of her grandmother moving restlessly around her sitting room, then a silence. Tracy smiled. Composing her face into a mask of worried unhappiness, she rapped softly at the door. For a moment there was no response from within, then she heard her grandmother’s voice.
“Come in.”
Tracy twisted the brass knob, and gently pushed the door open