Hellfire

1

Rain at a funeral is a cliché, Carolyn Sturgess reflected as she gazed abstractedly out the window of the limousine that moved slowly through the streets of Westover. Though it was June, the day was chilly, with a dampness that seemed to seep into the bones. Ahead, through the divider window and the streaked windshield beyond, she could see the car carrying her husband, her mother-in-law, and her stepdaughter, and ahead of that — barely visible — the hearse bearing the body of her father-in-law. Carolyn shuddered, feeling chilled.

Barely visible.

The words, she realized, described Conrad Sturgess perfectly, at least in his last years. For more than a decade, he had seldom left the mansion on the hill above the town, seldom been seen in the streets of the village that his family had dominated for more than a century. But despite his reclusiveness, the old man had still been a presence in Westover, and Carolyn found herself wondering how the village would change, now that Conrad Sturgess was dead.

As the long black car turned left on Church Street, Carolyn glanced back at the small crowd that still lingered in front of the white-clapboard Episcopal church that stood facing the square, its sober New England facade seeming to glare with faint disapproval at the small business district that squatted defensively on the other side of the worn patch of lawn beyond the bronze statue of a long-forgotten Revolutionary hero that gazed out from the middle of the square.

“Will any of them come up to Hilltop for the other service?”

Her daughter’s voice interrupted her reverie, and Carolyn reached over to give Beth’s hand an affectionate squeeze. “The interment,” she automatically corrected.

“The interment,” Beth Rogers repeated, her brows furrowing as she concentrated on getting the word exactly right. She pictured the look of scorn she would get from Tracy Sturgess, her stepsister, if she mispronounced it later. Not, she told herself, that she cared what Tracy Sturgess thought, but she still hated it when Tracy and her friends laughed at her. Just because Tracy was almost thirteen, and went to private school, didn’t make her any better than Beth. After all, she was almost twelve herself. “How come they call it that? An … interment?”

“Because that’s what it is,” Carolyn explained. “Anyway, that’s what Abigail calls it, so that’s what we must call it, too. After all, we’re Sturgesses now, aren’t we?”

“I’m not,” Beth said, her brown eyes darkening in exactly the same way her father’s did when he got angry. “I’m still Beth Rogers, and I always will be. I don’t want to be a Sturgess!”

Oh, Lord, Carolyn thought. Here we go again. When would she learn to stop trying to convince her daughter to accept Phillip Sturgess as her father? And why, really, should Beth transfer her affection to her stepfather, when her real father still lived right here in Westover, and she saw him every day? She wished, though she’d never say it, that Alan Rogers would simply disappear from the face of the earth. Or at least from Westover, Massachusetts. “Of course you are,” she said aloud. “Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what you call it, because an interment and a burial are the same thing. Okay?”

“Well, are the other people from the church coming?”

Carolyn shook her head. “The service at Hilltop is only for family and our closest friends.”

“But we know everybody who was there,” Beth replied, her voice reflecting her puzzlement. “Why can’t they all come?”

“Because—” Carolyn floundered for a moment, knowing that whatever she said, Beth would immediately see through her words and grasp the truth of the matter. “Because they aren’t all friends of the Sturgesses,” she ventured.

“You mean they aren’t all rich,” Beth replied.

Bingo! Carolyn thought. And there was no point in trying to deny it, at least not to Beth.

The car turned again, and Carolyn glanced out the window to see the bleak form of the old shoe factory — the building everyone in Westover referred to as “the mill”—looming above Prospect Street, its soot-covered red bricks giving it an even more forbidding appearance than its bleak nineteenth-century architecture had intended.

Carolyn, as always, felt a slight shudder pass through her body at the sight of the mill, and quickly looked away. Then it was gone, and the village was left behind as the cortege moved out River Road to begin winding its way up the long narrow lane that led to Hilltop.

“Mom?” Beth suddenly asked, interrupting the silence that had fallen over the big car. “What’s going to happen, now that—” She hesitated for a moment, then used the term her mother had asked her to use. Until today she had refused to utter it. “—now that Uncle Conrad’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” Carolyn replied. “I suppose everything will go on just as it always has.”

But of course she knew it wasn’t true. She knew that without Conrad Sturgess silently controlling his family’s interests from the privacy of his den, everything in Westover was going to change.

And she knew that she, at least, wasn’t going to like the changes. As the limousine pulled through the gates of Hilltop, she remembered the old adage about sleeping dogs.

Her husband, she knew, had no intention of letting them lie.

The six pallbearers carried the casket containing Conrad Sturgess’s body slowly up a narrow path through the forest. Behind the casket, Abigail Sturgess walked alone, head held high, unmindful of the rain that still fell in a dense drizzle. Though she leaned heavily on a cane, her back was as stiffly erect as ever. Behind her walked her son, Phillip, with Carolyn on his arm. Following the couple were their two children, Beth Rogers and Tracy Sturgess. Then, bringing up the rear of the short procession, came the mourners: the Kilpatricks and the Baileys, the Babcocks and the Adamses — the old families whose ties to the Sturgesses went back through the generations.

The cortege rounded a bend in the trail, and came to a sudden stop as Abigail Sturgess paused for a moment to gaze at the wrought-iron grillwork that arched over the path.

Two words were worked into the pattern:

ETERNAL VIGILANCE

She seemed to consider the words for a few moments, then walked on. A few minutes later, Conrad Sturgess, followed by his family and friends, arrived at the spot he had always known would be his final resting place.

Worked carefully into the earth, and covered with moss, there was a short flight of stone steps. At the top of the steps, looming out of the forest like some sort of strange temple, stood the Sturgess-family mausoleum.

The structure was circular, and made entirely of pale pink marble. There were seven columns, each of them nearly twenty feet high, topped by a marble ring that was almost fifty feet across. All around, the forest seemed to be crowding in on the strange edifice, and only a few rays of sunlight ever glinted on the polished marble. Today the lowering skies seemed to hover only a few feet above the strange monument, and the stone, slick with rain, seemed to have had its color washed away.

Six of the columns were in perfect condition.

The seventh pillar was broken; all that remained of it was its base, and the top two feet, hanging oddly from the surmounting marble drum.

In the center of the circle of columns, on a marble floor, stood a large round marble table, with space around it for seven marble chairs.

Six of the chairs were there.

The seventh place at the table, the place with the broken pillar behind it, was empty.

Beth, her eyes glued to her mother’s back, climbed the steps uncertainly. She’d been here before, but always before the mausoleum had seemed to her to be nothing more than some strange ruin from the past. But today it was different, and she felt a chill pass through her as she stepped between two of the columns and found herself inside the stone ring.

She glanced nervously around, but everyone else seemed to know exactly what to do. The mourners, all of them clad in black, the women’s faces veiled, had spread themselves in a semicircle around the chairs. The pallbearers placed the coffin carefully on a bier that stood at the empty seventh place. Abigail Sturgess, her face impassive, stood behind the coffin, gazing at the massive stone chair that stood opposite.

Beth’s eyes shifted to the back of the marble chair upon which the old woman’s eyes were fixed.

On the back of the chair, chiseled deep into the marble, was an inscription:

SAMUEL PRUETT STURGESS

MAY 3, 1822–AUGUST 12, 1890

Beth’s hand reached out and took her mother’s. She tugged gently, and when Carolyn leaned down, the little girl whispered in her ear.

“What’s she doing?” she asked.

“She’s presenting Conrad to his grandfather,” Carolyn whispered back.

“Why?”

“It’s a tradition, sweetheart,” Carolyn replied, glancing nervously around. But it was all right — no one seemed to notice them at all.

Beth frowned slightly. Why were they “presenting” Uncle Conrad to old Mr. Sturgess? It didn’t make any sense to her. She tugged at her mother’s hand once more, but this time her mother only looked down at her, holding a finger to her lips and shaking her head.

Silently, wishing she were somewhere else — anywhere else — Beth watched the rest of the service. The minister’s voice droned on, repeating everything he’d said about Conrad Sturgess in the church only half an hour ago, and Beth wondered if this time he was telling Samuel Pruett Sturgess about Uncle Conrad. Then she began looking around at all the unfamiliar faces of the people around her.

None of them were the people she’d known all her life, the people she’d known when her mother and father were married. They were all strangers, and she knew that they were somehow different from her.

It wasn’t that they were rich, even though she knew they were. They all lived in big houses, like Hilltop, though none was quite so grand as Hilltop itself.

It was the way they acted.

Like this morning, before the funeral, when she’d been sitting by herself in the breakfast room, and one of them — she thought it was Mrs. Kilpatrick — had come in, and smiled at her. It had been a nice smile, and for a minute Beth had hoped she and the woman might be friends.

“And a good morning to you, young lady,” the woman had said. “I don’t believe we’ve met, have we?”

Beth had shaken her head shyly, and offered the woman her hand. “I’m Beth Rogers.”

“Rogers?” the woman had repeated. “I don’t believe I know any Rogerses. Where are you from? Do I know your mother?”

Beth had nodded. “I live here. My mother’s—”

And then she’d seen the woman’s smile disappear, and her eyes, the eyes that had been so warm and sparkling a minute before, had suddenly turned cold. “Oh,” she’d said. “You’re Carolyn’s little girl, aren’t you? How nice.” Before Beth could say anything else, the woman had turned and silently left the room.

Now, Beth realized she must have been staring at the woman, for the woman — she was almost sure it was Mrs. Kilpatrick — was glaring at her. She felt her mother tugging at her arm, and realized that the service was over.

The pallbearers were carrying the casket down another flight of steps, and as Beth, walking beside her mother, followed Tracy and Phillip Sturgess — at old Abigail’s side now — she saw that there was a tiny cemetery in the forest behind the mausoleum. An open grave awaited, and Conrad Sturgess’s coffin was slowly lowered into it. Abigail Sturgess stepped forward, reached stiffly down to pick up a clod of sodden earth, and dropped it into the grave. Then she turned away, and began making her way back through the mausoleum, and down the path that led to the house.

Beth noticed that Abigail Sturgess, once she had turned away from her husband’s grave, never looked back. It was very much like Mrs. Kilpatrick this morning. Beth wasn’t sure why, but for some reason it bothered her.

Carolyn Sturgess stood uncomfortably in the walnut-paneled library doing her best to chat with Elaine Kilpatrick. She was finding it difficult. It wasn’t anything that Elaine said, really; the woman was perfectly polite. It was just that there seemed to be a chasm between them, and Carolyn had no idea of how to bridge that chasm. It wasn’t that she had no interest in the things Elaine talked about; indeed, one of the things that had attracted her to Phillip Sturgess when she’d first met him a year before had been his own interest in all the things Elaine Kilpatrick seemed to know everything about.

And that, of course, was the trouble. Elaine seemed to know everything about everything, and Carolyn was feeling, once again, like an uneducated, provincial fool.

Carolyn Rogers Sturgess was no fool. She’d graduated from Boston University with a degree in art, and even though it wasn’t Smith, and the degree wasn’t cum laude, Carolyn was proud of it.

And she and Alan had done their share of traveling, too. Of course it hadn’t been Paris and London, nor had she seen the museums in Florence, but she had certainly done her share of galleries in New York.

“But of course we don’t really appreciate art in this country, do we?” she heard Elaine asking earnestly, and silently chided herself for wondering if she detected a note of condescension in the other woman’s tone. Certainly if it was there, it wasn’t reflected in Elaine’s luminous brown eyes, which seemed to concentrate on her with undivided attention.

And yet, as she nearly always did when she was with Phillip’s friends, she had a feeling she was being talked down to.

“No,” she said lamely, “I don’t suppose we do.” Then she offered Elaine what she hoped was a radiant smile. “Do excuse me, won’t you?” she asked. “I see Francis Babcock over there, and there’s something I have to talk to her about.”

“Of course,” Elaine said smoothly, immediately turning to Chip Bailey and plunging into another conversation.

As Carolyn started toward Frances Babcock, whom she secretly loathed, she wondered how Elaine did it. And worse, she wondered if she would ever learn the trick of it, or whether these women had simply been born with all the social graces bred into them over the generations. But whatever it was they had, she knew she lacked it. She lacked it, and her daughter lacked it.

She realized then that she hadn’t seen Beth for more than an hour, not since the receiving line had broken up and the family had come into the library to join their guests. Beth, in fact, had not come into the library at all. Veering away from Frances Babcock, Carolyn slipped out of the library, and glanced down the broad corridor that ran through this wing of the house. It was empty.

But coming out of the living room, she saw her stepdaughter.

“Tracy?”

The girl, her blond hair twisted up in a French knot that Carolyn thought was too old for her, paused at the bottom of the broad staircase that swept from the entry hall up to the second floor. She glanced around furtively, then glared at Carolyn when she saw that they were alone. “What do you want?”

Carolyn felt a twinge of anger. If Phillip had been there, Tracy’s reply would have been guardedly polite. But when they were alone, no matter what Tracy said to her, it always contained a note of challenge, as if she were daring Carolyn to try to exercise any form of control over her.

“I was looking for Beth,” Carolyn replied evenly, refusing to let Tracy see her anger. “I thought she was coming into the library with the rest of us.”

“Well, if she’s not there, then obviously she didn’t, did she?” Tracy countered.

“Have you seen her?”

“No.”

“Well, if you do see her, will you tell her I’m looking for her?”

Tracy’s eyes narrowed, and her lips curled in what should have been a smile, but wasn’t. “Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t,” she said. Then she started up the stairs, disappearing from Carolyn’s sight.

Ignore it, Carolyn told herself. She’s not used to you yet, and she’s not used to Beth, and you have to give her time. Then, guiltily, she found herself wishing that it were not June, and that Tracy were not home for the summer. It had been bad enough at Christmas, when she and Phillip had gotten married, and Tracy had refused to speak to her at all, and worse during the spring break, when Tracy had furiously demanded that she and Beth leave, telling them they had no place in this house. Tracy had been careful to deliver her ultimatum when her father wasn’t around, and Carolyn had finally decided not to tell Phillip about the incident at all. But now the girl was home for the summer, and though there had been no major scenes yet, Carolyn could feel one building. The only question, she was sure, was when Tracy’s anger at her father’s second marriage would boil over once more. She hoped that when it did, she would bear the brunt of it, not Beth. Beth, she knew, was having a hard enough time of it already. Sighing, she started up the stairs. Perhaps, as she often did, Beth had retreated to her room.

As she reached the second floor, the imperious voice of her mother-in-law stopped her.

“Carolyn? Where are you going?”

Carolyn turned, and fleetingly wondered how Abigail Sturgess had managed to materialize so suddenly. But there she stood, her ebony cane gripped firmly in her right hand, her head tipped back as she surveyed Carolyn with her blue eyes — the same eyes she had passed on to her son and her granddaughter.

Except that Phillip’s eyes were as warm as a tropical sea.

Abigail’s and Tracy’s were chipped from ice.

And now, as they were so often, those eyes were fixed disapprovingly on Carolyn.

“I was just looking for Beth, Abigail,” Carolyn replied.

Abigail offered her a wintry smile. “I’m sure Beth is perfectly capable of taking care of herself. And a good hostess doesn’t leave her guests by themselves, does she? Come. There are some people with whom I wish you to speak.”

Carolyn hesitated, then, with a quick glance up the stairs, followed Abigail back to the library.

No one but Abigail seemed to have noticed that she had left.

No one but Phillip, who, spotting her from his position next to the fireplace, offered her a smile.

Suddenly she felt better, felt that perhaps, after all, she did belong here. At least Phillip seemed to think she did.

Alan Rogers leaned back in his desk chair and unconsciously ran his hand through the unruly mop of black hair that never, no matter how hard he tried, seemed to stay under control. He glanced out the window; the rain seemed finally to have stopped, at least for a while. He couldn’t help smiling to himself as he pictured the scene that must have been going on up at the Sturgesses’ an hour ago.

All of them dressed in black, standing in the rain, but regally ignoring it while they finally put the old bastard to rest.

If Conrad Sturgess would ever rest in peace. Alan Rogers sincerely hoped he wouldn’t.

Perhaps, he thought, he should have gone to the burial. No one, after all, would have told him to leave. That wasn’t their way. They would simply have looked down their patrician noses at him, and done their best to let him know, subtly, of course, that he wasn’t wanted there.

And if it hadn’t been for Beth, he might have done just that, and the hell with Carolyn.

She would have been furious with him, naturally, but that wouldn’t really have bothered him at all. After all these years, he was used to Carolyn’s fury. Indeed, sometimes he wasn’t sure he could remember a time when she had not been furious with him.

There must have been a time, though, when they had loved each other. Maybe the first couple of years of their marriage, before Carolyn’s ambitions for him had taken over their lives. Alan had been a carpenter and a good one, who took pride in practicing his craft, but that had not been enough. Carolyn had decided he should become a contractor, a businessman. He’d always refused, telling her he just didn’t want the responsibility.

The arguments grew more bitter and, finally, had broken up the marriage.

The irony was that two years after the divorce, he’d wound up getting his contractor’s license anyway. It had finally become an economic necessity. If he was going to support himself, along with Carolyn and Beth, he simply had to have more money coming in. And so he’d done what Carolyn had always wanted him to do in the first place.

And what had happened?

She’d upped and married Phillip Sturgess, and he was off the hook for everything except child support. For that matter, he didn’t suppose it would matter a whit to Carolyn anymore whether he sent the monthly support check or not. Phillip, he knew, would make up the balance, and do it cheerfully.

But it was a matter of principle. Beth was his daughter, and he wanted to support her, whether she needed his support or not.

The money, he suspected, was probably going into a trust fund for her. That would be very much like Phillip — children should have trust funds from their fathers, and he would see to it that Beth had one, whether Alan knew anything about it or not.

Grinning to himself, he wondered if Carolyn knew how well he and Phillip really got along together. In fact, if Carolyn hadn’t married Phillip, they would probably have become good friends, despite the difference in their backgrounds.

For Phillip, alone among the Sturgesses, had somehow managed to overcome the sense of superiority that had been bred into him from the day he was born.

He’d gone to the right schools, played with the right children, met the right women — even married one of them, the first time around — but no matter how hard his parents had tried, Phillip had never been able to put on the aristocratic airs the Sturgesses were renowned for. Now that Phillip had married Carolyn, the two men should have kept a wary distance, but, in fact, Alan could not help liking Phillip Sturgess. Now that Carolyn had what she wanted — position, money, all the comforts of life he had not been able to provide — he hoped the marriage would thrive. For one thing was certain, Phillip loved her — as much as Alan himself once had.

He wanted his ex-wife to be happy, if only for his daughter’s sake, knowing that if Phillip and Carolyn found it rough going, somehow Beth would get caught in the middle.

Whatever happened, Alan would never allow his daughter to be caught in it. It wasn’t Beth’s fault that things hadn’t worked out for him and Carolyn. In fact, if he really thought about it, it was probably the Sturgesses’ own fault.

For as long as he’d known Carolyn — and they’d grown up together — she had been fascinated by the Sturgess family.

Fascinated by them, and repulsed by them.

And yet she’d married Phillip.

So maybe the revulsion of them that she’d always professed had not been quite what she’d said.

Maybe it had been envy, and a wish that she’d been born one of them.

At any rate, when Phillip Sturgess had suddenly reappeared in Westover a year ago after living abroad for nearly a decade, Carolyn had wasted no time in snaring him. Which, Alan realized, wasn’t really a fair thing to say. The two of them had met and fallen in love, and Carolyn had resigned her job in the local law office when she’d married Phillip, claiming that continuing as assistant to an attorney when she was marrying his major client involved a conflict of interest.

Perhaps it did; perhaps it didn’t. None of it mattered, not anymore. The fact was that Carolyn had married Phillip, and Alan hoped she would be happy. When Abigail followed Conrad to the grave, he thought, maybe she would have a chance at that. Until then, Alan was certain his former wife had an uphill battle ahead of her.

The door opened, and his secretary walked in. She dropped a stack of mail on his desk, then surveyed him critically. “Thoughtful,” she said. “Always a bad sign.”

“Just thinking about the Sturgesses, and hoping they didn’t all drown in Conrad’s grave.”

Judy Parkins snickered. “That would be something, wouldn’t it? And after Carolyn worked so hard to get Phillip, too.”

The smile faded from Alan’s face, and Judy immediately wished she hadn’t spoken. “I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean that.”

Alan shrugged wryly. “Well, let’s just hope they’re happy, and wish them well, all right?”

Judy regarded her employer with a raised brow. “How come you always manage to be so damned good? And if you are, how come Carolyn wanted to trade you in for Phillip Sturgess in the first place?”

“First, I’m not so damned good, and second, she didn’t trade me in. She chucked me. And it’s over and done with. All right?”

“Check.” Judy turned, but as she was about to leave the office, Beth burst in, her face blotched and streaked with tears. She threw herself into her father’s arms, sobbing. Judy Parkins, after offering Alan a sympathetic look, slipped out of the office, quietly closing the door behind her.

“Honey,” Alan crooned as he tried to calm his daughter. “What is it? What happened?”

“Th-they hate me,” Beth wailed. “I don’t belong there, and they all hate me!”

Alan hugged the unhappy child closer. “Oh, darling, that isn’t true. Your mother loves you very much, and so does Uncle Phillip—”

“He’s not my uncle,” Beth protested. “He’s Tracy’s father, and he hates me.”

“Now who told you that?”

“T-Tracy,” Beth stammered. She stared up into her father’s face, her eyes beseeching him. “She … she said her father hates me, and that by the end of the summer, I’ll have to go live somewhere else. Sh-she said he’s going to make me!”

“I see,” Alan replied. It was exactly the sort of thing that had happened in the spring, when Tracy had last been home from school. “And when did she tell you this?”

“A little while ago. Everyone was in … in the library, and I was by myself in the living room, and she came in, and she told me. She said that now that her grandfather’s dead, her father owns the house, and … and he’s going to make me go away!”

“And was anybody else there?”

Beth hesitated, then shook her head. “N-no …”

“Well, I’ll bet if Uncle Phillip had heard Tracy say that, he’d have turned her over his knee and given her a spanking. Maybe I’d better just give him a call, and tell him.”

Beth drew back, horrified. “No! If you call him, then Tracy will know I told, and it’ll just be worse than it already is!”

Alan nodded solemnly. “Then what do you think we ought to do?”

“Can’t I come and live with you, Daddy? Please?”

Alan sighed silently. This, too, was something they’d been through before, and he’d tried to explain over and over why it was best for Beth to live with her mother. But no matter how often he explained it to her, her reply never changed.

“But I don’t belong there,” she always said. “They’re different from me, and I just don’t belong. If you make me stay there, I’m going to die.”

And sometimes, when he looked into her huge brown eyes, and smoothed back her soft dark hair — the hair she’d inherited from Carolyn — he almost believed she was right.

He stood up, and took his daughter by the hand. “Come on, honey,” he said. “I’ll drive you home, and well talk about it on the way.”

“Home?” Beth asked, her eyes suddenly hopeful. “To your house?”

“No,” Alan replied. “I’ll drive you back to Hilltop. That’s where you live now, isn’t it?”

Though Beth said nothing, the eager light faded from her eyes.