Free Nightshade by John Saul Page B

grandmother had moved in with his own family, the house had already taken on a look of abandonment.
    “It’s weird, isn’t it?”
    Matt turned to see Becky Adams smiling at him. Before Matt’s mother had married his stepfather and they’d moved away from Burlington Avenue, Becky had been his best friend. Now, ten years later, he wasn’t sure if they were friends at all; it wasn’t just his family and address that had changed, but the crowd he hung out with as well. And there was Becky’s mother too. His eyes automatically flicked across the street toward the Adams house as he wondered if Becky’s mother was drunk, but a second later he pulled his gaze self-consciously away. Then he relaxed: even if Becky had noticed his glance, she couldn’t know what he was thinking.
    “What’s weird?” Matt countered. “It’s just a house.” But even as he spoke the words, he knew it wasn’t “just a house” at all. It was the house of the nightmares and nameless terrors of his early childhood, along with the frightening woman who was his grandmother. Now, as he gazed at it, a thought crept into his head.
    Why couldn’t it have burned to the ground? And why couldn’t she have been in it?
    “All the little kids on the block think it’s haunted,” Becky said.
    “I bet they think my grandmother’s a witch too.”
    Though Becky shook her head, her blush told him the truth.
    “Well, she’s not,” he went on. “She’s just — ” He fell silent as fragments of the last few days flitted through his memory.
Crazy,
he wanted to say.
She’s just crazy.
But when he spoke, his words were carefully tempered: “She’s just sick, that’s all.”
    “How come your mom didn’t put her in a nursing home?”
    “Why would she?” Matt countered.
    Becky Adams’s flush deepened. “Well, I mean — ” she stammered. “Like — everyone knows how she treats your mom. And my mom said — ”
    “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” Matt said, his voice harsh enough to make Becky flinch. “Look, Becky, I’m sorry,” he quickly went on when he saw her reaction. “It’s just — oh, Jeez, I don’t know . . .”
    His voice trailed off and he turned away, suddenly wanting to be by himself.
    “Matt?” Becky called.
    He turned back.
    “If there’s anything I can do . . . I mean to help . . .”
    “There’s not,” Matt said. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

    CHAPTER 5
             
    BILL HAPGOOD SLOWED his car to a stop as he came to the black wrought-iron gates of the home he’d left almost three weeks earlier. This would be the first time he’d set foot on the property since the night he packed his suitcase and moved into the Granite Falls Inn. He was still there, camping out in the two-room suite on the second floor whose main attraction, for him, was that it faced away from his own house. Even tonight he was reluctant to go back; indeed, he’d almost called Joan an hour ago to tell her he wouldn’t be there after all. In the end, though, he succumbed to his mother’s social dictum that the only valid excuse not to attend a dinner party is death. “People like us do not ruin someone’s evening merely because we don’t feel well, or are out of sorts,” she’d instructed him when he was a child. “We attend the dinners we’ve accepted, and eat whatever is put before us. And we expect no less of others.”
    Aside from his mother’s rule, tonight’s dinner party was a special event that had been on the calendar for months. In truth, the dinner had been on the calendar for years, for every Hapgood boy was given a formal dinner on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, and it had never occurred to Bill not to continue the tradition for Matt simply because his name was Moore instead of Hapgood. “I raised him,” he said when Gerry Conroe suggested that perhaps the dinner was inappropriate for a stepson. “I’ve brought him up to be a Hapgood, and I’m proud to be able to say that I’ve