House of Reckoning Read Free

face, and he stumbled as he fished in his pocket for his keys. He didn’t want to go home—home was nothing but emptiness and sadness and terrible loneliness.
    The Fireside Tavern—or any other bar—was warmth and distraction.
    “She was a whore!” the guy in the overalls yelled at him from a few steps down the block. “You should be glad she’s dead!”
    In an instant Ed Crane’s long-suppressed rage at the loss of his wife flared inside him. Fueled by hours of drinking, the fury erupted and he charged toward the man, again grabbed him by the bib of his overalls and hurled him against the brick wall of the building at the mouth of the alley he’d been passing.
    “Don’t say that!” Ed said, the words twisted by the alcohol in his blood and strangled by the grief that had overwhelmed his soul. Barely aware of what he was doing, he slammed the man’s head into the brick wall.
    “Hey, I’m—”
    “Don’t!” Ed commanded. Then, while smashing the man’s headagain and again, as if to punctuate every word, he said, “Do. Not. Say. That.” The man’s knees buckled, and Ed let him sink to the ground. “Idiot,” he muttered, barely noticing the blood that began to pool beneath the man’s head. “You don’t know nothin’.”
    Ed stumbled back to his old truck, held on to the door handle while he pulled the keys from his pocket, dropped them, groped in the gutter until he found them, and eventually hauled himself into the cab. After a half-dozen tries he fit the key into the ignition and started the truck.
    “Idiot,” he muttered again, revving the engine. He ground the gears, trying to find reverse, then spit gravel from the tires as he popped the clutch and shot out onto the dark, lonely road that would take him to his equally dark and lonely home.
    Sarah Crane woke up with a start, her heart pounding. The image from the nightmare she’d been having since her mother died was fading rapidly, and all she remembered was that in the dream she was in a house—a huge house—and even though it was filled with people, she couldn’t see or hear them.
    But she knew they were there.
    And they were as lonely and frightened as she was.
    Now she lay still in her bed, her pulse slowly returning to normal as the last images from the nightmare faded away. She was about to turn over and try to go back to sleep when she suddenly had a feeling that something wasn’t right.
    She listened, but heard nothing.
    The house was silent, as silent as the great mansion in her nightmare.
    A clouded moon cast soft shadows across her bed in the stillness. She hugged the worn plush rabbit that had been her nighttime companion for as long as she could remember, and listened again.
    Nothing.
    The house was quiet. Too quiet.
    Her mom used to say that her father could snore the paint off the barn, but tonight Sarah heard no snoring from the next room, nor anything from anywhere else in the house.
    Which meant one thing: he’d gone out drinking at the Fireside.
    Hoping, wishing, even praying that it might not be true, Sarah slipped out of bed and peeked into her parents’ bedroom. But the bed hadn’t been slept in. She crept quietly down the stairs, but even before she got there, she knew she was alone in the house.
    She could actually feel the emptiness.
    The sofa, too, was vacant, the crocheted afghan still stretched cleanly over its back. A dozen beer bottles littered the kitchen table, and a glance out the kitchen window showed her that her father’s truck was not in its usual place in front of the garage.
    Which told her that he was indeed at the Fireside, where he’d gone more and more often, and drinking more and more every time he went. And last time he’d come home drunk, he almost rammed the truck into the barn, and she’d decided that the next time it happened, she would go to the bar and bring him home herself.
    And tonight was “next time.”
    She didn’t have a driver’s license yet but had driven the truck all