The Right Hand of Evil

CHAPTER 17

The jangling of the bell signaling the end of the school day startled Kim so badly she almost jumped out of the cramped school desk at which she'd been trying to unsnarl a seemingly unsolvable quadratic equation. With each period of the day, she'd felt more and more as if some terrible mistake had been made and she'd been put in the wrong classes. But all the rest of the kids were her age, and none of them appeared to be as unprepared as she felt. Was it possible that the public school she and Jared had gone to was as far behind the Catholic school as it seemed? But it must be, to judge from her classmates, at least as far as math, science, and French were concerned. The rest of it wasn't so bad-she'd always been good at history and English. But the hard classes-or those that had always been difficult for her-were nearly impossible. As she stuffed her books into her backpack and headed for her locker, she wondered if Jared felt as lost. If he did, they were both going to be in trouble. At least in school they'd always had different talents and were able to help each other out.

At her locker, halfway along the narrow main corridor on the second floor of the building, she worked the combination, and had a sinking sensation in her stomach when the handle refused to budge. It wasn't until the third try that she realized what was wrong-she was using the combination from the old school. As her fingers rotated the dial one more time, she sensed someone standing behind her.

Someone who made her feel oddly nervous. She tried to concentrate on working the combination, but after the first number her mind went blank.

How many turns was it? Two? Three?

And what number was she supposed to stop at? Then it came to her: twenty-six!

Or was it eight?

No! Eight was the last number!

She started over again, but could sense that whoever was behind her had moved closer, and now the hairs on the back of her neck were standing up.

What did he want?

He was very close to her now. So close she could hear him breathing, almost feel his breath on the back of her neck.

He was going to touch her!

Her skin crawled. At any moment she would feel his fingers on her. Unable to stand it any longer, she whirled around to confront the person behind her. "What do you-" she began, and abruptly stopped. Jared! It was just Jared! "My God," she breathed, sagging against her locker. "You scared me! How come you didn't say anything?"

His eyes darted in one direction and then the other. Was he looking for someone? Kim scanned the corridor, seeing several faces she recognized, even some she could put names to. But who would Jared be worried about? "Who are you looking for?" she asked.

He frowned. "No one. But I think some of the nuns are looking for me," he said, his voice barely audible.

Kim stared at her brother. First he'd walked out without eating breakfast, not even waiting for her. Then she'd hardly seen him all day. She'd looked for him at lunchtime, but he hadn't been in the cafeteria, and so finally she sat with a girl named Sandy Engstrom and some of her friends. But she'd spent most of the hour keeping an eye out for Jared, and hadn't been able to concentrate on anything they were saying. "Why would they be looking for you?" she asked now. "Did you do something wrong?"

Jared shook his head. "They just don't like me."

Kim rolled her eyes impatiently. "What do you mean, they don't like you? They act like they don't like anyone."

Jared's expression hardened. "I'm telling you, they don't like me! All day, they've been watching me."

"Watching you?" Kim echoed. Why would the nuns be watching him? But then she thought she knew-he was feeling the same thing she was, that everything was going to be harder here. For some reason he was taking it personally. "It doesn't have anything to do with you," she protested. "It's just different here, that's all." She turned back to her locker, her fingers once again working at the combination, and finally the lock snapped open. "I've been feeling like some kind of retard all day, but it doesn't have anything to do with the sisters. It's just-"

But Jared wasn't listening to her anymore.

In fact, he wasn't even behind her. As she closed her locker, she saw him disappearing down the stairs at the end of the hall. She stared after him.

What was going on? Why was he acting so strange today?

But it wasn't just that he was acting strange. It was something else-something more.

It was the Twin Thing. She remembered noticing it this morning, when she felt the odd sensation of being alone, as if the mental connection she and Jared had always shared had suddenly been severed. At first she'd attributed it to Jared's moodiness, and was certain that by the time she got to school, their link would be mended. But it hadn't been, and all day she'd felt an unfamiliar loneliness, which she'd never experienced before.

Just now, when he was standing right behind her-less than a foot away-she'd had no idea it was him. That had never happened before. All her life, she'd always known when Jared was nearby, always known when he came into a room she was in. When they were really little, they'd even made a game of it, trying to fool each other, to sneak up on one another, each hoping to catch the other off guard. But neither of them had succeeded.

Until today.

And then she understood why Jared was feeling so strange. The same thing had happened to him! Of course! That had to be it. She hurried after her brother, threading her way through the crowd of students that milled in the hallway, then skipping down the stairs two at a time. Bursting out the front door, she looked around for Jared and spotted him half a block away, talking to Luke Roberts. She hurried toward them, calling out his name. But as she approached, both boys went silent, and when Jared looked at her, she had the impression that he wasn't glad to see her. His words confirmed it: "Can't you just leave me alone?"

Kim stopped short. "I-I just-" She floundered, unable to find the words she was looking for. Jared continued to stare at her, and now, in sunlight that seemed even brighter than normal in the wake of the storm that had passed through that morning, she saw that something in his eyes was different. Where before she'd always felt that she could see right into her brother through his eyes, now she sensed a curtain between them, as if there was something he didn't want her to know.

Something he was hiding from her.

Muffin! That must be it-he must have found out what happened to her cat, and didn't want to tell her. Which meant… Kim's heart sank when it occurred to her why Jared wouldn't tell her if he'd found her pet. "It's Muffin, isn't it?" she asked. Jared's face remained impassive. "You found her, didn't you?" She thought she saw something flicker in his eyes, but it was gone so fast she wasn't sure she'd seen it at all. And once again the Twin Thing was telling her nothing. But somehow, even though Jared had betrayed nothing, she was certain she was right.

Muffin wasn't coming home. She felt her eyes sting with tears, but managed to hold them back. "I-I just thought we could walk home together," she finally stammered, for the first time in her life feeling unwilling to share her emotions with her brother. Before he spoke, she knew what he was going to say, and this time it didn't have anything to do with the Twin Thing, or with Muffin. This time she could read it in the expression on his face.

"I'm gonna hang with Luke for a while," he told her. "You go ahead."

Suddenly all the uneasiness, all the worry Kim had been feeling, coalesced into something else.

Anger.

If that was the way he felt-if he just wanted to cut her off-fine!

Without another word, she turned and walked quickly away, her head high, her back straight, determined that Jared wouldn't see the tears that glistened in her eyes.

When his sister was gone, Jared turned back to Luke Roberts. "Well, what about it?" he asked. "If I show you where the cabin is, will you tell me who lives in it?"

Luke uneasily shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "How come you want to know?" he hedged. "When'd you see this place?"

Jared's voice hardened. "Someone killed my sister's cat," he told Luke. "He nailed its skin to the back wall of our carriage house." Luke's eyes narrowed. "My dog tracked him back to a cabin, but there were a couple of hounds guarding it."

"Maybe you oughta just forget about it," Luke suggested. "Can't your sister just get another cat?"

Jared's gaze fixed steadily on Luke. "You chicken?" he asked, his voice low, his eyes boring into Luke's. The other boy's jaw tightened and his right hand clenched into a fist. But Jared held his gaze steady on Luke, and finally the clenched fist relaxed.

"Okay," Luke said. "Let's go."

Kim was so totally preoccupied with the confrontation she'd just had with Jared that she barely noticed the pungent scent of smoke in the air. But when she turned the corner, she saw it-a great cloud of smoke was billowing up from-

The house!

Her heart pounding, she broke into a run, then slowed as she realized it wasn't the house that was on fire at all. There was a huge bonfire burning behind the house, a fire that was sending up clouds of steam and smoke so large they all but hid the building from her view. As she approached, her father came around the side of the house, into her line of sight. He was stripped to the waist, his skin glistening with sweat, as he pulled kudzu off the magnolia tree. As she came into the yard, he hurled a great armful of the tangled vines onto the fire. The flames leaped upon the leafy offering like a voracious beast, spitting new plumes of smoke and steam into the sky and filling the afternoon with hissing and crackling as it devoured the tangled green mass. Kim stopped and hung back, staying well away from the ravening flames. Even when the fire began to die back, she still watched the scene warily.

Was her father drunk? But he didn't look like he was, and when she scanned the area for the drink he invariably had with him whenever he was home, she saw no sign of anything-not even a beer. But the kudzu had all but vanished. The carriage house had been stripped of it, as had the house, and even the mounds of it that had overgrown the yard were all but gone. Where this morning the grounds had been an almost unbroken sea of the invading vine, now she could recognize the remnants of what had once been a lawn, along with the skeletons of shrubs that the kudzu had long since choked to death.

"It's not quite as bad as it looks," she heard her father say. Startled, Kim turned to find him standing only a few feet away from her. Instinctively, she drew back to distance herself from the alcoholic fumes he usually exhaled. "Take it easy, Princess," he said, smiling at her and using the pet name she hadn't heard for years. "Believe it or not, I'm not drunk."

His words startled Kim almost as much as the way he'd addressed her. She tried to remember the last time he'd even admitted to drinking too much, let alone being drunk, and the answer came to her almost as quickly as she asked the question.

Never.

In her entire memory, Kim could not recall her father doing anything but insist that he didn't have a drinking problem. "I didn't think you were," she blurted out so quickly he couldn't help but know it was exactly what she'd been thinking. She braced herself against the wave of fury she was certain was about to break over her. But to her amazement, her father kept smiling.

"Of course you were," he said. "Let's face it-it's been a few years since you've seen me when I wasn't drunk."

Kim's mind spun. What on earth had happened today? "I-I didn't mean-I mean, I meant-" she stammered.

Her father reached out as if to pull her close, but stopped himself. "Consider yourself hugged," he said, eyeing his own filthy hands and sweaty torso. "If I really did hug you, I think you could consider it absolute proof that I've been drinking. But I really haven't. At least not since last night." Kim's eyes flickered toward the house, and her father's next words told her he again had guessed what she was thinking. "Your mother's giving me one last chance," he said. "We had a long talk this morning-not a fight," he added quickly, reading the expression on her face. "A real, genuine talk." He hesitated, and Kim had the feeling he was trying to decide how much to tell her. Then he went on, and again his words surprised her. "I know I haven't been the best father," he said. "And I'm not going to make up any excuses. I'm not going to try to blame my failures on anyone but myself…"

He continued to talk directly, honestly, to her for five minutes, and concluded, "I'm not asking you to forgive me, and I'm sure not asking you to forget. All I can do is apologize for what I've put you and everyone else in this family through. I know there's no way I can make it up to you, but I'm going to be better from now on." As Kim's eyes flooded with tears, her father smiled, his face lighting up. "Of course, practically anything would be better than what I've been, wouldn't it?"

Kim hesitated, then nodded. Part of her wanted to throw her arms around her father's neck and feel him wrap her up in the kind of hug she hadn't felt since she was a little girl. But another part of her-the part that had learned not to trust what her father said-held back. As she was sorting out her emotions, trying to decide what she wanted to say, her father seemed to read her mind the same way her brother always had.

"Don't say anything," he said. "In fact, if I were you, I think I'd be pretty suspicious right now."

She looked up at him, gazing into his eyes for the first time in years. Was he telling the truth? She wanted to believe him, wanted more than anything to trust what he was saying. Unconsciously, her fingers went to the small golden cross her great-aunt had given her, as if somehow the amulet might guide her.

"It's okay," her father told her. "Why don't you go in and talk to your mother?" He glanced up at the sun. "I've got about three more hours to get this mess cleaned up, and if I hurry, I just might make it."

Kim watched as her father went back to work, hacking at the thick vines that were still wound around a few of the old oak and willow trees that shaded the grounds, and hauling the vines down from the lower branches. The kudzu fought him, reluctant to give up its hold on the trees, but in the end it crashed in a jumble around his feet and was fed to the consuming fire. Watching until the flames had devoured the vines, Kim finally turned away and went into the house.

She saw the change as soon as she entered the kitchen: the boxes stacked against the far wall this morning were gone; their contents, she would discover, had been put away in the cupboards above the long counters. The kitchen itself was scrubbed clean, the rust stains gone from the sink. The tired refrigerator they'd brought from Shreveport was gone; in its place was a gleaming new one, and the old-fashioned range on which her mother had somehow managed to cook dinner the night before had vanished as well, replaced by an immense double-ovened, six-burner affair that looked like it should have been in a restaurant.

"Mom?" she called out. "You here?"

"In the studio," her mother called back.

The studio, too, had been transformed since yesterday. The rest of the windows had been cleaned, and everything unpacked and put away. Molly was in her playpen, playing with a doll. Her mother was perched on a stool, a stick of charcoal in her right hand, carefully eyeing a canvas on the easel before her. When her mother turned to look at her, Kim instantly understood that the changes she'd already witnessed weren't confined to the yard, the house, and her father.

The strain, the misery, she'd seen in her mother's face was gone. Everything about her was different. Her eyes, which had looked so exhausted this morning, were sparkling, and she seemed somehow to have gotten younger.

"Come and look," her mother said before Kim could speak. "Tell me what you think!"

Almost warily, Kim approached the canvas, not sure what to expect. As she gazed at it, she realized that whatever she might have guessed her mother was working on, it would not have been what she was looking at.

It was a sketch of an outdoor scene, but it bore no resemblance to the ruined landscape that lay beyond the windows. Drawn onto the canvas was a formal garden. Although it was still little more than a charcoal sketch, the composition her mother had limned gave Kim the eerie feeling that she was somehow looking into the past. It was as if her mother had imagined the garden as it might have looked a century ago. There was only one human figure in the garden, and even though it, too, had been realized with a few quick strokes, Kim recognized it as her father.

But not the father she'd known most of her life.

This was the father she'd met outside a few minutes ago, his expression open, his eyes seeming to smile though the image was barely developed.

So it wasn't just toward her that he'd changed, Kim thought. Her mother had seen it, too. "What happened?" she asked quietly, her eyes remaining on the figure as she waited for her mother to answer. "Would you please tell me what's going on? This morning-"

"This morning seems like a lifetime ago," Janet replied. She moved closer to Kim, looking at the image of Ted over her daughter's shoulder. "Something happened to him last night," she said. "It's like-" She hesitated, searching for the right words. "It's like he finally woke up," she said. Choosing her words carefully, she related the day's events. "He's been working all day," she eventually finished. "A truck showed up with the new stove and refrigerator, and after he helped me with the kitchen, he went to work outside, and-well, you saw for yourself what he's been doing."

When she went up to her room a few minutes later, Kim tried to pull it all together in her mind. Only this morning the house had been filled with tension.

Her father had been gone.

Her mother had been ready to leave him-had even told her she was going to.

And now everything was different.

But how long would it last?

Despite what her mother and her father had both told her, she still wasn't ready to believe it.

Something, she was sure, was wrong.

Very wrong.