As confused as her husband, Carolyn slipped her hand into his, and let him guide her out of the reception room onto the street.
In their preoccupation with Abigail’s strange request, neither of them noticed the look of pure hatred that came into Tracy’s eyes as soon as her stepsister’s name was spoken.
16
“What do you say we have supper at the Red Hen?” Alan asked dolefully as he stared into the nearly empty refrigerator. He hadn’t expected to have Beth with him that evening, so hadn’t stocked up on the food he knew she liked. Nor had he bothered to stop at the store on the way back to his apartment from the hospital. He was too tired, and he’d known from Beth’s silence that something was wrong. Now, when she didn’t answer his question, he decided to face the issue directly.
“You might as well tell me what’s up,” he said, closing the refrigerator door and moving into the tiny living room of the apartment. He dropped down onto the sofa next to Beth, and slipped his arm around her. “If you can’t tell your old dad, who can you tell?”
Beth looked up at him, her eyes filled with worry.
“I … I think I know what happened to Mrs. Sturgess,” she said after a silence that had threatened to stretch into minutes. “I think Amy must have done something to her, just like she did to Jeff Bailey.”
Alan frowned thoughtfully, and wished—not for the first time—that he knew more about psychology. Then he reminded himself that parents had dealt with children for centuries before psychologists had ever invented themselves, and decided that his own instincts were all he needed. Right now, his instincts told him not to challenge the existence of Beth’s imaginary friend. “Why would Amy want to do something to Mrs. Sturgess?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Beth replied. “I think she hates the Sturgesses, though. And I think she hates all their friends, too.”
“But why?” Alan pressed. “That doesn’t really make sense, does it?” But of course he knew that it did. Amy, as Beth’s “friend,” would be angry at all the people who had hurt Beth, but whom Beth would not let herself hate. But how could he explain that to his daughter now, after what had happened that morning? She was already feeling friendless, and taking Amy away from her—trying to explain to her that the child didn’t exist outside her own imagination—seemed to him as if it would be too much.
He’d heard about what had happened up on the hill that morning. At least he’d heard what Peggy Russell had had to say when she’d come bursting into the Red Hen while Alan was having lunch that afternoon.
But he hadn’t, he now realized ruefully, connected Peggy’s wild tale with Abigail Sturgess’s unexpected visit to the mill. He should have, especially when the old woman insisted on going into the basement, but he hadn’t.
Beth, obviously, had, and now it was up to him to try to find a way to convince his daughter that what had happened to Abigail was nothing more than a heart attack brought on only by her age. But it was certainly not connected to the presence in the mill of any sort of being, either real or imaginary. He was trying to figure out how to explain this to Beth when the doorbell rang. To his surprise, he found Phillip and Carolyn, with Tracy between them, standing in the hall.
Instinctively, he stepped out of the apartment and closed the door behind him, rather than invite them all inside. As Phillip began to explain the reason they were there, Alan’s feeling of apprehension grew. There could only be one possible reason why Abigail wanted to talk to Beth, and the last thing he wanted to do was discuss that subject in front of Tracy. Why, he wondered, couldn’t they have left her at home?
“Beth and I were just going out for supper,” he said at last, not really intending the statement as anything more than an attempt to buy some time to think. But Phillip immediately suggested that they all go together, and Alan, taken off guard, was unable to invent a polite way to refuse.
It was a mistake.
Alan realized it was a mistake even as he pulled into the parking lot at the Red Hen, to be greeted warmly a few moments later by Eileen Russell. When the Sturgesses appeared behind him, Eileen’s welcoming smile all but disappeared, and