Free House of Reckoning by John Saul Page B

an orange tabby cat scuttling out of her way and ducking under the massive round table.
    Bettina opened the great front door and took the drawing out into the cold twilight. Crisp brown leaves swirled around her ankles in the wind and she shivered in her light sweater, but there wasn’t time to go back for a jacket.
    Holding the sketch high, she backed away from the house onto the big driveway and began working her way toward a point of view that might duplicate the one in Sarah Crane’s drawing.
    There wouldn’t be one, of course, since Sarah’s house existed only in her imagination, but even in the face of this impossibility, Bettina had a feeling she would find something close.
    Something very close.
    She found herself in front of the garage, the old servants’ quarters on the other side and to the rear of the house hidden by the house itself. Again she held the drawing up in front of her, blocking off the view of the garage, and there it was.
    With the leaves stripped from the enormous trees, she could see that the complex, multilevel roofline on Sarah Crane’s drawing perfectly matched that of the old house. The windows were all in the same place, and though there were different details on the double front door, the shiver that ran up Bettina’s arms was not caused by the chill November air.
    Still, this couldn’t be; surely she was only imagining the similarities in the fading light. She went back in through the double front doors, started back down the length of the foyer toward the conservatory, then heard Rocky whining softly. The mottled terrier mix had been brought in from the woods as a tiny puppy by one of the cats half a dozen years ago. Now, he sat facing the door to her grandfather’s study, twisting his neck so he could look back at her.
    Bettina moved toward the conservatory again, and Rocky barked, just once, but as he always did when he intended to get his way. And right now, apparently what he wanted was to get into her grandfather’s study. “Oh, all right,” she muttered, turning back. “God, I am such a pushover.” Rocky stood up as she approached, his tail wagging, and he slithered inside as soon as she opened the door.
    The room still smelled like brandy and cigars.
    Suddenly, Bettina felt like a little girl, looking around at book-lined walls, the leather chairs, and enormous desk. Not only did her grandfather’s spirit still seem to be in this room, but so did those of Harold Philips’s own father and grandfather. Rocky was now sniffing at the double doors of a cabinet below one of the bookcases, and Bettina, her curiosity aroused, knelt down and pulled open the cabinet’s doors.
    Dozens of identical dark leather photograph albums stood lined up on the shelves. Bettina pulled out the first one, took it to the big desk, turned on the desk lamp and opened the album as the dog curled up at her feet. The first few black pages held yellowed newspaper clippings from the
Warwick Sentinel
, announcing the appointment of Boone Philips as the superintendent of Shutters Lake Institute for the Criminally Insane, followed by formal photographs of her great-great-grandfather as a middle-aged man. In succeeding pages there were photographs of him in front of what the townspeople referred to as the old “retreat.”
    Bettina kept turning pages, and then, there it was: a sepia-toned photograph of Boone Philips standing next to the door of Shutters as it was when he’d first moved in.
    The enormous maple tree, then no more than a sapling, grew from the center of the circular drive.
    The photograph was taken from the west side of the driveway, and there were no servants’ quarters on that side of the house. If there was a carriage house on the east side, it was out of sight, but she could see nothing that indicated a roadway to that side.
    So the servants’ quarters had been added later, and most likely the carriage house as well.
    Bettina lifted the photograph from the little corners that held it