The Night Visitors

Chapter Twenty-Eight Mattie

THE GUN—THE ONE Davis took off Jason—has slid underneath the bookcase and Davis is crawling toward it. There’s another explosion of glass and a concussive thud as half the desk shatters in a spray of woodchips and paper. Sawdust rains down on my head.

I crawl under the desk, hoping that Frank will stop shooting. I hear glass breaking but no gunshot; Frank must be clearing enough glass to get inside. I wriggle toward the bookcase beside Davis. The floor is slick with his blood, which, disgusting as it sounds, makes me go faster. I reach under the bookcase at the same time he does, our hands touching over the cold metal of the gun, and before he can grab it away from me I slip my other hand in my pocket, take out the knife, and jab it into his arm, aiming for the open bullet wound.

Davis lets out a howl that barely sounds human and lets go of the gun. I grab it and pull it out from under the bookcase. Something comes with it that scrapes and skitters across the floor but I don’t have time to worry about that. I roll away from Davis, out from under the desk, and come up in a crouch, bracing the gun with two hands. I take the safety off and point it at Davis. “All I can reach from this angle is your groin,” I say, “so you can either lie still or lose your balls.”

“I’d listen to her,” Frank says as he steps across the sill and picks up Davis’s gun from the desk. He points his own gun at Davis’s head. “I’ve been calling her a ballbuster for years and I wasn’t being metaphorical.”

I smile in spite of myself.

“The cunt stabbed me right in my wound!”

Frank kicks Davis in the stomach. “Don’t use that language around a lady,” he says as Davis screams and rolls into a ball. “Or I’ll stick this gun up your ass.”

“Do you want me to get tape to bind his hands?” I ask. “There’s some in the dining room.”

“Yeah,” Frank says to me. Then to Davis: “Roll over, asshole, hands behind your back.”

“Oh man, don’t tie them behind my back. That will hurt like a mother—”

Frank lands another kick in Davis’s side. I turn and go for the tape. The sooner we’ve got Davis bound the better. For us—and maybe for Davis too. I’ve glimpsed this violent side of Frank once or twice before. I blame the boot camp my father sent him to, and then the military school his father sent him to after that. He’s never really been the same since.

I grab the roll of packing tape from the dining room and turn back to the study. Frank has hauled Davis into my father’s chair. His arms are wrenched behind his back, which really does look painful, and his face has gone chalk white. I secure his hands with the packing tape and then his torso to the chair. I have to put down the gun, but I’m careful to put it on top of the bookcase, next to the hurricane lamp, far away from Davis.

“Get his feet too,” Frank tells me.

When we’ve got him secured, Frank spins the chair around and jabs the gun into the middle of Davis’s chest. “What the fuck were you thinking, asshole?”

“I was only trying to get my son back, man. My crazy-ass girlfriend kidnapped him. And this cu—woman was hiding them. That can’t be legal, man, can it?”

“He also killed a man downstairs,” I offer. “That guy Jason who was bothering Atefeh at Stewart’s the other night. He followed us here and Davis shot him after we tied him up.”

Frank looks at me and shakes his head. “Damn, Mattie, you sure as hell know how to make enemies. Anyone else you pissed off I should know about?”

I take a deep breath. Frank’s gruff ribbing has calmed my racing heart. “I don’t think our Republican congressman is too fond of me after my last email to his office, but since he can’t even be bothered to show up at our town halls, I don’t think he’ll be making an appearance here.”

Frank smiles—the first real smile he’s given me in thirty-four years—and, God help me, I feel the stirring of an unaccustomed hope. Doreen always says that out of our darkest moments come our greatest gifts. I’ve always thought that was bullshit, but if Frank and I can come out of this night . . . friends, well then it won’t have been a total loss.

Frank’s smile vanishes when he looks down at the desk. The gunfire has scattered some of the files and papers to the floor but there’s still a few stacks on the desk. He picks up one of the files and gives it a puzzled look. “What’s all this?”

I think about the last thing that Davis was showing Alice and feel a quiver of dread. I am not ready for Frank to see that. “Davis nosed around in here and found some files that were locked in the bottom drawer . . .” I look down at the files, but I don’t see the birth certificate anywhere on the desk. “The files my father was looking at the night he died. Davis thought he could blackmail me by threatening to expose him. As if I care who knows about that now. Sometimes . . .” I look up at Frank and find that he’s staring at me. “Sometimes I think it would have been better if we’d come clean about it all back then.”

“Oh, Mattie,” he says, hanging his head. “What’s the use of going over all that? We did what we thought best. We were only trying to protect you. You need to let it go—you need”—he gestures at all the papers—“to get rid of all this. I can’t believe you held on to it all.”

He’s right; I never have let it go. Ever since that night I’ve blamed myself for what happened to Caleb. And although it had made sense when Frank’s father said they could make my family’s death look like an accident, it had felt dirty. I had felt dirty. “I thought . . . I thought that someday I might be able to make amends to all these kids”—I wave at the papers on the desk and those that have spilled over the floor—“all the kids my father sent away.”

“Haven’t you done that by building Sanctuary?” Frank says. “And by starting the home for at-risk youth? The battered women’s shelter? All financed by your parents’ estate.”

“It’s not enough. Those kids’ lives were ruined. Look at what it did to us.”

“Actually, I think getting sent to boot camp was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Frank says, anger sharpening his voice. “It wiped clean all my illusions. I saw the world for what it really was. And as for all those kids your father sent to Pine Crest, hell, most of them were thugs who were better off for the experience. I know because my father arrested most of them—”

A low chuckle from Davis stops Frank cold. I think we’d both forgotten he was there. “What are you laughing at, asshole?” Frank demands.

“Oh, not you, buddy, her. She doesn’t know, does she?”

“Know what?” I ask, and then mentally kick myself for playing into his game.

“His father wasn’t the arresting officer on most of the cases in that stack. He was the arresting officer on all of them. I noticed it right away. He was probably in on the whole thing.”

Frank’s jaw is clenched and his eyes are narrowing, looking at me as if I’m the dangerous criminal. I take a step toward him to reassure him and my foot lands on something . . . a metal button, which I see, when I kneel down and pick it up, has the same pattern as the one Alice found in the basement, the seal of New York State. Did it fall out of my pocket? But when I check, the other button is still there.

I glance up from the button to Frank, and my eye catches on his uniform. On the buttons. New York State police officer buttons emblazoned with the state seal. Well, sure. Frank’s father sat in this office a thousand times and could have lost a button any of those times—

But how did he lose one in the crawl space behind the furnace?

“Frank? Is that true? Was your father involved in putting those kids away at Pine Crest?”

“And what if he was?” Frank snaps, all the softness gone from his voice now. “Those kids needed a firm hand. I see it all the time now—kids getting away with too much, their parents going too easy on them. Your father knew that, but he was too high-minded to understand what it took to make a place like Pine Crest work. When he found out a few details that weren’t up to his standards he was going to turn my father in. Can you blame my father for wanting to stop him?”

“Stop him?” I ask, appalled. “By killing him? What about my mother? What about Caleb?”

“My father said they would be all right. He planned to come by and rescue Caleb and your mother, but then you came home. You were supposed to be with me but then we fought and you came back here. When you came down the stairs with Caleb, your father revived and came out of the study, and Caleb ran and saw my father.”

I replay the scene in my head: my father stumbling out of his study, waving his gun . . . not at me and Caleb, but at Hank Barnes standing in the doorway behind me. “I heard a shot . . .”

“Your father fired at my dad. You were turning. If you had seen my dad we would have had to kill you too, so I hit you over the head.”

I feel like I’ve been hit over the head now. “You let your father kill Caleb?”

“I didn’t know that’s what he was going to do until it was done. What could I do about it then, Mattie? If I said anything my father would have killed you too. I kept quiet to save you. All these years . . . I could barely look you in the eye because of Caleb, but I knew that I had saved you.”

“Aw,” Davis says, “that’s really kind of sweet . . .”

“If you don’t shut the fuck up,” Frank says, pointing the gun at Davis, “I will shut you up.”

He’s just trying to scare him, I think. The Frank I know wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man. But then the Frank I knew wouldn’t have gone along with covering up Caleb’s death.

“Like father like son, eh?” Davis says.

Maybe, I think as I see Frank’s finger tighten on the trigger, I never knew him at all.

Davis’s head jerks back and seems to vanish in a red cloud. I hear a scream and turn to find Alice and Oren, openmouthed and wide-eyed, standing in the doorway.

“Run,” I tell them.