Suddenly frightened by her grandmother’s surge of power, Tracy twisted her arm loose from the old woman’s grip. As if she’d been disconnected from her source of strength, Abigail went limp, her arm falling by her side as she sank back into the pillows.
“Promise me,” she muttered softly as her eyes, clouded now with her years and infirmities, sought out Tracy’s.
Tracy began edging toward the door. “I … I promise,” she mumbled. Then she was gone, pulling the door closed behind her, wanting to shut out the image of the ancient woman in the bed.
As she left the hospital, she turned her grandmother’s words over in her mind, and decided that, after all, she had been right.
Her grandmother had seen someone in the basement of the mill last night, and whoever she had seen had tried to kill her.
And Tracy knew who the old woman had seen.
Beth Rogers.
She walked back along River Road until she came to Prospect Street, where she stopped to stare curiously at the old building that was suddenly coming back to life. What, she wondered, had really happened there so many years ago?
Nothing, she decided.
Her grandmother was old, and sick, and didn’t know what she was talking about.
And promises made to her, Tracy also decided, didn’t really count. In fact, Tracy had long ago figured out that promises didn’t mean anything. If you wanted something, you made promises in order to get it. Then you went ahead and did what you wanted, and nobody ever said anything. At least her father and her grandmother didn’t, and that was all that mattered.
If she felt like going into the mill and looking around, she would, and no one was going to stop her.
19
The somnolence of summer had settled into Westover, and by August the town had taken on a wilted look. People moved slowly in the damp warmth of July, and slower still as August’s heat closed oppressively down on them.
For Beth, life had taken on a strange routine, each day much like the day before.
At first it had all been terribly confusing. The memory of Patches dying while she watched was still fresh in her mind—etched indelibly there, still waking her up in the middle of the night sometimes.
But the rest of that day had taken on a dreamlike quality. The sudden arrival of her father; the explanation that it had been decided that for a while, at least, she should live with him; the hasty packing of her bags; her departure from Hilltop with her father, barely aware of what was happening while she tried to figure out why it had happened.
Her father had tried to explain it to her, tried to tell her that while no one was blaming her for what had happened to Patches, it had just seemed better to all of them for her to live with him for a while. Mrs. Sturgess would be coming home, and her mother was pregnant, and Tracy …
His voice had trailed off after he’d mentioned Tracy’s name, but Beth had known what he meant. Hilltop was Tracy’s house, not hers, and they both couldn’t live there anymore. So she had to move out.
It wasn’t fair, but it was the way things were, and even at her age, Beth already knew that life was not always fair.
But living with her father had not turned out to be quite what she’d thought it would be, either. Before she’d moved in with him, they’d always gone out to dinner on the evenings she’d spent with him, and he’d always seemed to have lots of time to spend with her.
But now, when she was there all the time, it was different. She understood why—he had to go to work every day, and he couldn’t afford to take them both to restaurants every night. So they stayed home most evenings, and he cooked dinner for them, and the food wasn’t as good as the food Hannah had fixed at Hilltop. And her room was a lot smaller, and didn’t look out over the whole village. Instead, it looked out over a parking lot, and only a little corner of the mill was visible through a gap between two buildings across Fourth Street.
But at least Tracy wasn’t there, and that was good.
What wasn’t good was what had happened when she’d gone to see Peggy Russell. Peggy had only opened the door a few inches, and she hadn’t invited Beth to come in. Instead she’d said that she couldn’t play