The Night Visitors

Chapter Seventeen Alice

THE MINUTE I step outside I realize this is probably not such a good idea. It’s snowing really hard, and not the soft pretty flakes like before; this is like having buckets of ice pellets thrown in your face. I duck my head down to keep the ice out of my eyes, and when I do look up I see I’m heading right past the barn into the woods.

I remember one of the foster parents I lived with telling us kids a story about a boy who went out to check on the cows during a blizzard and got lost between the house and the barn. His parents found him frozen to death in a drift not two feet from his own back door. The story was supposed to be about how hard it was in the olden days and how good we had it now. Like we were lucky to have a washing machine to use when it was our turn to do the enormous bags of dirty laundry, which included our foster father’s gross stained boxers. Or we should be thankful we didn’t have to haul coal from the cellar to heat the stove. As if Lisa (that was that foster mother’s name, I remember now) had grown up as a pioneer, when really she came from suburban Long Island and had bought this old broken-down farm because she had some hippie idea of living in a commune. Only she and her alcoholic deadbeat husband (Travis, I recall, Travis and Lisa) couldn’t make a go of it, so they took in foster kids for the state subsidy and cheap labor.

The story about the frozen boy was also supposed to keep us from running away. It gave the younger kids nightmares. At night when the branches knocked on the windows the little kids said it was the frozen boy trying to get in.

And now that could be me. When I turn around to go back to the house I can’t see it. It’s like the storm has blown the house away, leaving me out here to turn into the scary ghost that knocks on the window. Always on the outside trying to get in—

I bump right into the fucking barn.

Couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, Davis would say when I tried to throw a ball for Oren. But at least my failed attempts would make him come out and toss the ball around with Oren for a while. For half an hour we were a real family. Father and son, tossing a ball on the front lawn while Mom watches on.

Stupid. Like that made a family any more than pretending Travis and Lisa were going to be real parents.

I feel my way around the corner of the barn to the door—and suddenly I remember why I’m out here and it seems like the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. If there’s someone in the barn what am I going to do about it? I feel for the knife in my pocket and grip the handle. If it’s Davis in there do I have the nerve to kill him? When it came down to it back in New Jersey, I froze. I let Oren do it. What kind of mother does that? If I had any true maternal instincts wouldn’t I have protected Oren?

I bet Mattie would have. She’s got the whole mom thing down, with her pancakes and make-believe games. You can see Oren’s already crazy about her. The way he’s glommed on to her . . . well, it’s the way I glommed on to each new foster parent. Every time, I’d think, Wow! This is going to be the one! I’d fallen especially hard for Lisa because she had the whole earth-mother-granola vibe and talked about our being a family. But then it turned out she just wanted a bunch of kids to do her laundry and haul manure for her “organic” garden.

The barn door is open about six inches. I sidle in, careful not to jostle the door. Stepping into the dark from the blinding snowstorm, I can’t make out anything right away. It’s not completely dark, though. What’s left of the day is filtering in through gaps between the slatted walls and holes in the roof.

As my eyes adjust, I can see that like the rest of Mattie’s property, the barn’s falling apart. And it’s full of junk. There are stacks of cardboard cartons splitting at the seams, old rusty farm equipment standing around like dinosaur skeletons, the carcass of an old rusted-out Chevy pickup truck that Davis would give his eyeteeth for, and, hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the barn, a huge iron hook that looks like something from a slasher movie. That’s where the stupid teenage girl who went exploring (that’s me) would find a dead body hanging—

Something stirs behind the truck. I grip the knife handle in my pocket and take a step forward. “Davis?” I call. “Is that you?” Like he’d answer if it were. I take another step, my eyes on the shadows behind the truck. There’s a ray of light coming from a hole in the roof. It’s hard to take my eyes off it, but I try to look in the shadows instead. “Hey, I’m sorry we ran like that. Oren was so scared—he thought he killed you. He’ll be so glad to know he didn’t. You know he didn’t mean anything by it. He was just trying to keep you from doing something you’d be sorry about later . . .” As I step around the front of the truck something moves. I pull the knife out of my pocket and lunge for it, stepping into the beam of light. Something hits my head and I bring up my arm to protect myself, cowering against the next blow, already pleading for him to stop—

But all that comes is a cascade of feathers. It was only a bird: I watch as it flies up to land on a long chain that runs the length of the barn and sets that goddamned hook to swaying. The sound the hook makes is awful, like a puppy dying, but even worse is the smell that comes off it. It smells like . . . rot and blood. It smells like death. Maybe it was where the farmers slaughtered their cows and hung them up to bleed out. Like Travis did with a deer one time. Ugh.

I prowl the length of the barn, stomping my feet to shake off the cold and disrupting a family of mice from their home in a filing cabinet, but find no human intruder. Nothing valuable or pawnable either. Aside from the rusting farm equipment, the barn seems mostly full of paper. File folders, fat bound documents with big state seals on their covers, and like a century’s worth of old newspapers. These have blown around and plastered the whole barn. I pick up one and read the date: August 17, 1953.

Whoa. That’s old even for Mattie. Hoarding must run in the family. I pick up one of the legal documents and check out the judge’s name. The Honorable Matthew T. Lane. I bet that was Mattie’s father. No wonder they had this big old house; he was a judge.

Something moves behind me and I spin around, my heart in my throat, picturing Davis. But it’s only a stack of newspapers sliding down from the top of the filing cabinet. I must have jarred it when I opened the drawer. The avalanche of papers reaches my feet, one paper lapping up over the toe of my boot like an overfriendly lapdog. I reach down and pick it up. It’s a Poughkeepsie paper, yellow, from the eighties. On the front is a picture of an old man in a judge’s robes, looking smug and pleased with himself the way judges do, like he’s won an award for something or he just sent some lowlife scum to juvie because she stole a couple of dollars from her cheap-ass foster parents. I recognize that look—and I recognize that face. He looks just like Mattie.

I start to kick the paper away—I don’t need to read about how great Mattie’s family was—but then I catch a bit of the caption. “Respected judge dies . . .”

I snatch up the paper and read the story.

Judge Matthew T. Lane was found dead in his home in Delphi, New York, along with his wife and ten-year-old son. Police suspect accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. The only remaining family member, Judge Lane’s 25-year-old daughter, Mattea Lane, discovered the bodies when she came home—

“If you wanted some reading material there’s plenty in the house.”

I nearly piss my pants, she startles me so bad. Mattie is standing not three feet from me, arms folded over her ample chest, with that same smug look on her face as her father’s.

I toss the newspaper onto the pile at my feet. “I thought I saw someone out here and I came to check it out. A bunch of newspapers fell over and I was just picking them up.”

My hand itches to grab the knife, but if I do Mattie could say I was threatening her, so I don’t. Mattie smirks and looks around the barn. “Because you wanted to leave things neat?”

“Yeah, it’s a mess in here. A fire hazard. You really should clear it out . . . and what the hell is that hook for? It looks like something out of a horror movie.”

She gives me a look like I’m an idiot, the way that Lisa used to look at me when I didn’t know something about living in the country. City kid, she’d call me, even though I’d spent most of my childhood in foster homes in upstate New York. “It’s a hay pulley that was used for lifting hay bales into the loft,” Mattie says, then she points at the knife I laid on the filing cabinet. “Did you scare off the intruder with that?”

“There wasn’t anyone out here, but they could have gotten away before I reached the barn.” I suddenly remember that Oren’s alone in the house.

Mattie must realize the same thing. “Let’s get back,” she says, reaching past me to pick up the knife. “We shouldn’t leave Oren alone.” She puts the knife in the pocket of her baggy old cardigan, like she’s used to carrying weapons in there, and turns around. But then her eyes snag on the newspaper I let drop to the floor and she flinches like someone’s hit her. She walks out of the barn quick then, like she doesn’t even have to check on whether I’m following her.

I hurry to catch up with her, stopping only to pick up the newspaper and stuff it in my coat pocket. Mattie’s a pretty cool customer. I’d like to know what made her flinch like that.