House of Reckoning by John Saul Read Free Book Online

snatching the little dog off the floor. “You can’t just jump all over people, especially our Sarah here.”
    Kate put out a hand to help steady Sarah, but Sarah stepped forward and held out her hands. “Can I hold him?”
    Angie hesitated a moment, then handed the wiggling little dog to her. Sarah let Pepper lick her all over her face, and though Kate laughed, Angie Garvey pursed her lips disapprovingly.
    “He likes you,” Kate said.
    “But you don’t know where that tongue has been,” Angie countered. “Maybe you should put him down.”
    But Sarah clung to the warm little dog. If she could just cuddle Pepper every day, maybe she could actually survive four years in this house.
    Maybe.

    Silence.
    The kind of silence Nick Dunnigan could barely even remember.
    All the voices in Nick’s head had fallen completely silent, and he knew exactly when it had happened: the moment when he’d first seen the girl with the bad limp getting out of the car and making her way slowly up the Garveys’ walk.
    He’d stopped and stared, and it took him a moment before he realized the voices had stopped. And then he found himself engulfed in a silence so profound, so welcome, so completely glorious, that he’d felt light-headed, almost dizzy.
    He felt as if he’d been touched by something special.
    An angel, perhaps, if such things actually existed.
    He’d watched as a woman carried a suitcase—one he was sure belonged to the girl—up to the Garveys’ house.
    The girl would be staying for a while.
    Maybe she’d even be going to school here.
    And maybe—just maybe—she’d be his friend. Even though he knew he shouldn’t be thinking it, memories of the way he’d been teased flooded his mind, and as he watched the girl limping painfully up the sidewalk, he knew that the same kids who had shut him out for as long as he could remember would shut this girl out, too.
    He could already hear them whispering to each other, see them pointing at her, and giggling at the way she walked.
    Maybe if he was nice to her—tried to befriend her—she wouldn’t turn away from him the way all the other kids did.
    He was still gazing at her when she turned around on the stoop almost as if she knew what he’d been thinking. Their eyes met for an instant, and then Nick dropped his head and hurried away, ashamed at even hoping the other kids might be mean enough to her that she’d have to become his friend.
    But as he started home, the voices began to protest. Yet they were different now. Instead of whispering to him to do the kind of terrible things he hated even to think about, it now sounded as if they were crying out for help.
    As if they thought this girl could help them.
    Was it possible? Of course not! They were just voices! It wasn’t as if they were real. They couldn’t be.
    Could they?
    Unable to stop himself, Nick turned back for one more look at the Garvey house before he turned the corner. The girl was gone; she had already disappeared inside the house, and the storm door was still settling in its catch, its pane of clouded Plexiglas still vibrating.
    Then one voice, louder than the rest, shrieked through Nick’s head and a great red streak appeared on the front of the Garveys’ house.
    He blinked, shook his head and looked away, trying to erase the hallucination.
    But when he looked again, it was still there. A huge red streak that ran across the entire front of the house.
    A streak the color of blood.

Chapter Four
    “T his is where you’ll sleep,” Angie Garvey said as she pushed open the door to one of the bedrooms on the second floor of the house, and stood aside to let Sarah enter first. “My Tiffany is only a few months older than you, and she’s been so looking forward to having you share her room.”
    Her hip was burning from the struggle to climb the stairs, but Sarah managed to show none of her pain as she stepped into the room, where she felt a chill that belied the words her foster mother had just