Free Nightshade by John Saul

bad as I was expecting.”
    Emily Moore, on the other hand, was even worse than Bill had been expecting, and now, as he lined up his drive, his eyes rested for a moment on the chimneys of his house, just visible above the grove of trees that stood at the far end of the fairway, beyond the dogleg.
    Maybe he should have gone back this morning, just to make certain things were all right. After all, if Emily could set fire to her own house, there was no reason she couldn’t do the same to his.
    But no — if he’d gone back so soon after leaving, Joan would take it as a sign that he might move back in, and until Emily was gone, that wasn’t going to happen. Not given the condition Matt had been in when he’d first moved from his grandmother’s house into Hapgood Farm. Even now, ten years later, Bill remembered how afraid Matt had been to go to sleep those first few nights. Though the boy had never been able to tell him exactly what his nightmares were about, Bill was certain he knew the cause: Emily. Though he suspected the woman had never exchanged more than a word or two with his grandfather in her life, she seemed to share W.H. Hapgood’s archaic ideas about lineage and breeding, even though she had none herself.
    None, at least, that anyone knew of.
    Joan’s bastard.
    That’s how she’d always referred to her grandson. And with her feeling that way, how could Matt not have nightmares? So Bill had come up with the Night-Knight, and stayed up with Matt, reading to him and reassuring him that there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, and afterward the nightmares that had plagued Matt in Emily Moore’s house had vanished.
    But with Emily in the house, how long would it be before they came back?
    Now, his hands clenched tightly on his driver, Bill began his downswing, and immediately knew that the shot would go wrong. As the ball curved off into the woods, cracked against two trees, then dropped into a thicket of mountain laurel, he heard Gerry Conroe chuckle.
    “Thought you said you were just fine,” the publisher of the
Granite Falls Ledger
said sardonically.
    “I am just fine,” Bill growled, sounding more like his grandfather than he would have liked.
    “That’s the third drive you’ve blown,” said Marty Holmes, who, along with Paul Arneson, made up the rest of their regular foursome. “A couple more drives like that and I might be able to retire early.”
    His jaw clenching, Bill teed up a second ball, told himself to relax, and swung again.
    As the second ball disappeared into the woods, he decided that Gerry Conroe was right.
    He was upset. He was very upset, and he was going to do something about it.
    The only question was what. But even as the question came into his mind, so did a possible answer.
    Maybe it was time to do what he’d been thinking about doing for two years.
    Fishing his cellular phone out of his golf bag, he dialed his lawyer’s number.
    “That better not be business,” Marty Holmes said as Bill began talking. “You know the club rule about discussing business on the course.”
    “And you know how often it’s enforced,” Bill replied as he waited for the attorney to come onto the line. “But it doesn’t matter. This is just about as personal as it gets.”
    As the other three started down the fairway, Bill hung back.
    No sense letting the whole town know what he was thinking of doing.
    *                                     *                                     *
    “JEEZ, MOORE! WHAT’S wrong with you today?”
    The anger in Pete Arneson’s voice grated on Matt, and his right hand clenched into a fist. What was Pete so pissed about? All he’d done was miss a catch!
    Except that it wasn’t just one catch. So far, he’d missed every pass Pete had thrown him, and on two of the plays he hadn’t even been able to remember which pattern he was supposed to run. On the last play, Eric Holmes had somehow