Nightshade by John Saul Read Free Book Online Page A

continued down the wide hallway to the door and pushed it open.
    Except for the basics — the wallpaper, carpet, and upholstery — the room had completely changed. The four-poster bed, the Queen Anne chair by the window, the Chippendale chiffonier — all were gone, replaced by a cheap set of painted furniture that Bill didn’t quite recognize, though it looked vaguely familiar.
    Then it came to him.
    Cynthia’s room.
    Everything that had been in his wife’s sister’s room — the room that his mother-in-law had always kept in readiness for her long-dead daughter’s return — was now in this room.
    In this house.
    In
his
house.
    The pictures that had hung on the walls — three original Currier and Ives prints — were gone, replaced with the hodgepodge of posters and snapshots that had been plastered on the walls of the little house on Burlington Avenue.
    The Winslow Homer — minor, but original — that had hung over the mantel of the room’s small fireplace had been replaced with the large portrait of Cynthia that in Emily’s house had hung on the wall opposite her beloved daughter’s bed.
    And his entire family — his wife, his stepson, his mother-in-law — were all gathered in that room.
    “What’s going on?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully modulated so it betrayed nothing of his suddenly churning emotions.
    Joan, reacting as if she’d been stung, whirled to face him. The color drained from her face, and her eyes flicked back and forth between her husband and her mother, as if she were unable to decide where her safety lay.
    Matt, who was standing on a stool adjusting the portrait of his aunt, dropped to the floor. “We were just helping Gra — ” he began, but Bill cut him off before he could finish.
    “I thought we decided all of this would stay where it was,” he said to Joan, still managing to keep his voice from betraying his feelings.
    “I know, but Mother — ” Again Joan’s eyes darted toward her mother, who was now glowering at Bill. When his wife spoke again, her voice was trembling. “She said she wouldn’t stay here without Cynthia’s things. They mean so much to her, and I thought — ”
    “I see,” Bill said.
    Matt, sensing the storm that was suddenly brewing between his mother and his stepfather, slipped out of the room, retreating to his own at the far end of the hall.
    Joan tilted her head almost imperceptibly toward her mother. “Can’t we talk about this later?”
    Bill hesitated. Fragments of conversations flicked through his head:
    His wife’s voice:
Nothing I do is ever good enough.
    His own:
She’s always been that way. That’s one of the reasons she can’t live with us — she’ll destroy this family.
    His stepson’s voice:
How come she’s so mean to you, Mom?
    And once again, his wife’s voice:
She doesn’t mean it. She’s just old. And she’s my mother.
    Every night that week they’d waited until Emily — and Matt too — had gone to bed, and then tried to talk about it. Or, to be honest, they talked about it the first two nights.
    Then they started fighting about it, and no matter how hard each of them tried, the fight had grown steadily more bitter.
    This morning at breakfast the atmosphere had been so tense that none of them talked at all. Matt, pleading unfinished homework, had escaped from the house half an hour earlier than he ever left, and Joan, on the pretext of feeding her mother, had disappeared upstairs. But the simple fact was that what he feared had come true.
    His home was no longer what it had been all his life, no longer offered shelter and comfort.
    Not for him.
    Not for his family.
    Instead it had become a battle zone under the control of a woman whose disease had robbed her of any regard for anything but the preservation of her own delusions.
    Hapgood Farm was no longer his home.
    “Maybe we can talk about it a lot later,” Bill finally said, his voice reflecting the sadness and pain in his soul as he answered his