Free House of Reckoning by John Saul Page A

so covered with moss and lichen that the inscription carved into them when they were new was now illegible. Sighing softly at the decay, Bettina downshifted and gunned the little car up the long curving driveway toward the house she’d lived in all her life.
    When she was little, a gardener had been employed for almost half the year in an attempt to keep the grounds of the old mansion up to her grandfather’s exacting standards, but after he died, the gardener was the first expense to be cut, but hardly the last. And Shutters—as the house had always been known—fell into worse disrepair every year since. Bettina did what she could to try to keep the place up, but just paying the heating bill in the winter was beyond her meager salary, and when the shortest and coldest days came, she retreated to the kitchen and her studio, letting the rest of the house freeze.
    Someday the historical society would make her an offer she couldn’t refuse, hopefully before the manse was beyond repair.
    She parked in the garage, entered the house through the kitchen door, and called to her two dogs and three cats, but as usual none ofthem came to greet her. That was all right; one by one they’d eventually show themselves, eyeing her suspiciously and looking vaguely guilty, as if they had been up to no good while she was at work.
    She moved on through the big kitchen and through the huge dining room and the salon beyond, coming finally to the north side of the house, where she had turned her great-great-grandfather’s old conservatory into an art studio.
    As was her ritual, Bettina took a moment to look out the back windows, across the terrace, and down the broad lawn to the shore of Shutters Lake. The waterfowl had long ago flown south, but the lake still held its ethereal beauty, looking different every day of every season. Now, in late fall, the lake was rippled with a northern breeze, a precursor of the bitter cold to come. What was left of the cattails drooped in the fading afternoon sun. Soon, the lake would be frozen over and snow would cover everything, and the eerie silence of winter would fall over not only the lake, but the house as well.
    Bettina took a deep breath, unzipped the portfolio containing her students’ work for the day, and laid its contents on her worktable. The top drawing was the one done by Sarah Crane, the new girl with the crippled leg.
    Sarah had done a study of a stone house, using a single brown pastel crayon, which gave the drawing an old, sepia-toned mood. Her talent was evident in every stroke of the sketch. Her perspective was precisely correct, from the artful shadows on the gabled, multilevel roof to the corresponding aspects of the roofline with the shutters on the front and side. She’d accomplished a lot in a very limited amount of time, even adding touches—more like indications, actually—of landscaping and shading on some of the stones around the heavy, double front door.
    The door.
    Bettina stood back and looked at the drawing again.
    Shutters?
    She moved the drawing under the light and looked more closely. Sarah’s drawing looked much like a smaller version of her own house. The house in the drawing had a gabled roof and a circular drive similar to hers and oversized shutters very much like the ones that had not only given her house its name, but the lake upon whose shores it had been built as well.
    But Shutters had a carriage house—now her garage—to the east, and servants’ quarters to the west. An enormous maple tree, the leaves of which were now falling fast and blowing into the angles of the house and roof, stood in the center of the circular drive.
    Still, despite the differences, the similarities could not be denied.
    Bettina looked up through the conservatory’s enormous roof of glass. Daylight was fading, but if she went out now, she’d still have time to see the front of the house clearly before it was obscured by dusk. She hurried across the large marble-floored foyer,