John Saul - The Right Hand of Evil

Muffin wasn't coming home. She felt her eyes sting with tears, but managed to hold them back. "I-I just thought we could walk home together," she finally stammered, for the first time in her life feeling unwilling to share her emotions with her brother. Before he spoke, she knew what he was going to say, and this time it didn't have anything to do with the Twin Thing, or with Muffin. This time she could read it in the expression on his face.

"I'm gonna hang with Luke for a while," he told her. "You go ahead."

Suddenly all the uneasiness, all the worry Kim had been feeling, coalesced into something else.

Anger.

If that was the way he felt-if he just wanted to cut her off-fine!

Without another word, she turned and walked quickly away, her head high, her back straight, determined that Jared wouldn't see the tears that glistened in her eyes.

When his sister was gone, Jared turned back to Luke Roberts. "Well, what about it?" he asked. "If I show you where the cabin is, will you tell me who lives in it?"

Luke uneasily shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "How come you want to know?" he hedged. "When'd you see this place?"

Jared's voice hardened. "Someone killed my sister's cat," he told Luke. "He nailed its skin to the back wall of our carriage house." Luke's eyes narrowed. "My dog tracked him back to a cabin, but there were a couple of hounds guarding it."

"Maybe you oughta just forget about it," Luke suggested. "Can't your sister just get another cat?"

Jared's gaze fixed steadily on Luke. "You chicken?" he asked, his voice low, his eyes boring into Luke's. The other boy's jaw tightened and his right hand clenched into a fist. But Jared held his gaze steady on Luke, and finally the clenched fist relaxed.

"Okay," Luke said. "Let's go."

Kim was so totally preoccupied with the confrontation she'd just had with Jared that she barely noticed the pungent scent of smoke in the air. But when she turned the corner, she saw it-a great cloud of smoke was billowing up from-

The house!

Her heart pounding, she broke into a run, then slowed as she realized it wasn't the house that was on fire at all. There was a huge bonfire burning behind the house, a fire that was sending up clouds of steam and smoke so large they all but hid the building from her view. As she approached, her father came around the side of the house, into her line of sight. He was stripped to the waist, his skin glistening with sweat, as he pulled kudzu off the magnolia tree. As she came into the yard, he hurled a great armful of the tangled vines onto the fire. The flames leaped upon the leafy offering like a voracious beast, spitting new plumes of smoke and steam into the sky and filling the afternoon with hissing and crackling as it devoured the tangled green mass. Kim stopped and hung back, staying well away from the ravening flames. Even when the fire began to die back, she still watched the scene warily.

Was her father drunk? But he didn't look like he was, and when she scanned the area for the drink he invariably had with him whenever he was home, she saw no sign of anything-not even a beer. But the kudzu had all but vanished. The carriage house had been stripped of it, as had the house, and even the mounds of it that had overgrown the yard were all but gone. Where this morning the grounds had been an almost unbroken sea of the invading vine, now she could recognize the remnants of what had once been a lawn, along with the skeletons of shrubs that the kudzu had long since choked to death.

"It's not quite as bad as it looks," she heard her father say. Startled, Kim turned to find him standing only a few feet away from her. Instinctively, she drew back to distance herself from the alcoholic fumes he usually exhaled. "Take it easy, Princess," he said, smiling at her and using the pet name she hadn't heard for years. "Believe it or not, I'm not drunk."

His words startled Kim almost as much as the way he'd addressed her. She tried to remember the last time he'd even admitted to drinking too much, let alone being drunk, and the answer came to her almost as quickly as she asked the question.

Never.

In her entire memory, Kim could not recall her father doing anything but insist that he didn't have a drinking problem. "I didn't think you were," she blurted out so quickly he couldn't help but know it was exactly what she'd been thinking. She braced herself against the wave of fury she was certain was about to break over her. But to her amazement, her father kept smiling.

"Of course you were," he said. "Let's face it-it's been a few years since you've seen me when I wasn't drunk."

Kim's mind spun. What on earth had happened today? "I-I didn't mean-I mean, I meant-" she stammered.

Her father reached out as if to pull her close, but stopped himself. "Consider yourself hugged," he said, eyeing his own filthy hands and sweaty torso. "If I really did hug you, I think you could consider it absolute proof that I've been drinking. But I really haven't. At least not since last night." Kim's eyes flickered toward the house, and her father's next words told her he again had guessed what she was thinking. "Your mother's giving me one last chance," he said. "We had a long talk this morning-not a fight," he added quickly, reading the expression on her face. "A real, genuine talk." He hesitated, and Kim had the feeling he was trying to decide how much to tell her. Then he went on, and again his words surprised her. "I know I haven't been the best father," he said. "And I'm not going to make up any excuses. I'm not going to try to blame my failures on anyone but myself…"

He continued to talk directly, honestly, to her for five minutes, and concluded, "I'm not asking you to forgive me, and I'm sure not asking you to forget. All I can do is apologize for what I've put you and everyone else in this family through. I know there's no way I can make it up to you, but I'm going to be better from now on." As Kim's eyes flooded with tears, her father smiled, his face lighting up. "Of course, practically anything would be better than what I've been, wouldn't it?"

Kim hesitated, then nodded. Part of her wanted to throw her arms around her father's neck and feel him wrap her up in the kind of hug she hadn't felt since she was a little girl. But another part of her-the part that had learned not to trust what her father said-held back. As she was sorting out her emotions, trying to decide what she wanted to say, her father seemed to read her mind the same way her brother always had.

"Don't say anything," he said. "In fact, if I were you, I think I'd be pretty suspicious right now."

She looked up at him, gazing into his eyes for the first time in years. Was he telling the truth? She wanted to believe him, wanted more than anything to trust what he was saying. Unconsciously, her fingers went to the small golden cross her great-aunt had given her, as if somehow the amulet might guide her.

"It's okay," her father told her. "Why don't you go in and talk to your mother?" He glanced up at the sun. "I've got about three more hours to get this mess cleaned up, and if I hurry, I just might make it."

Kim watched as her father went back to work, hacking at the thick vines that were still wound around a few of the old oak and willow trees that shaded the grounds, and hauling the vines down from the lower branches. The kudzu fought him, reluctant to give up its hold on the trees, but in the end it crashed in a jumble around his feet and was fed to the consuming fire. Watching until the flames had devoured the vines, Kim finally turned away and went into the house.

She saw the change as soon as she entered the kitchen: the boxes stacked against the far wall this morning were gone; their contents, she would discover, had been put away in the cupboards above the long counters. The kitchen itself was scrubbed clean, the rust stains gone from the sink. The tired refrigerator they'd brought from Shreveport was gone; in its place was a gleaming new one, and the old-fashioned range on which her mother had somehow managed to cook dinner the night before had vanished as well, replaced by an immense double-ovened, six-burner affair that looked like it should have been in a restaurant.