‘Yeah,’ he said, giving up. ‘And you’re right. I don’t like him.’
‘You’re scared of him, too, aren’t you?’
After a long, long moment, Trent said: ‘Yeah. A little.’
‘Just a little?’
‘Maybe a little more than a little,’ Trent said. He winked at her, hoping for a smile, but Laurie only looked at him, and Trent gave up. She wasn’t going to be diverted, at least not tonight.
‘Why? Do you think he might hurt us?’
Lew shouted at them a lot, but he had never put his hands on them. No, Laurie suddenly remembered, that wasn’t quite true. One time when Brian had walked into his study without knocking, Lew had given him a spanking. A hard one. Brian had tried not to cry, but in the end he had. And Mom had cried, too, although she hadn’t tried to stop the spanking. But she must have said something to him later on, because Laurie had heard Lew shouting at her.
Still, it had been a spanking, not child abuse, and Brian could be an insufferable cheese-dog when he put his mind to it.
Had he been putting his mind to it that night? Laurie wondered now. Or had Lew spanked her brother and made him cry over something, which had only been an honest, little kid’s mistake?
She didn’t know, and had a sudden and unwelcome insight, the sort of thought that made her think Peter Pan had had the right idea about never wanting to grow up: she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. One thing she did know: who the real cheese-dog around here was.
She realized Trent hadn’t answered her question, and gave him a poke. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
‘Just thinking,’ he said. ‘It’s a toughie, you know?’
‘Yes,’ she said soberly. ‘I know.’
This time she let him think.
‘Nah,’ he said at last, and laced his hands together behind his head. ‘I don’t think so, Sprat.’ She hated to be called that, but tonight she decided to let it go. She couldn’t remember Trent ever speaking to her this carefully and seriously. ‘I don’t think he would . . . but I think he could.’ He got up on one elbow and looked at her even more seriously. ‘But I think he’s hurting Mom, and I think it gets a little worse for her every day.’
‘She’s sorry, isn’t she?’ Laurie asked. Suddenly she felt like crying. Why were adults so stupid sometimes about stuff kids could see right away? It made you want to kick them. ‘She never wanted to go to England in the first place . . . and there’s the way he shouts at her sometimes . . . ‘
‘Don’t forget the headaches,’ Trent said flatly. ‘The ones he says she talks herself into. Yeah, she’s sorry, all right.’
‘Would she ever . . . you know . . . ‘
‘Divorce him?’
‘Yes,’ Laurie said, relieved. She wasn’t sure she could have brought the word out herself, and had she realized how much she was her mother’s daughter in that regard, she could have answered her own question.
‘No,’ Trent said. ‘Not Mom.’
‘Then there’s nothing we can do,’ Laurie sighed.
Trent said in a voice so soft she almost couldn’t hear it: ‘Oh yeah?’
During the next week and a half, they drilled other small holes around the house when there was no one around to see them: holes behind posters in their various rooms, behind the refrigerator in the pantry (Brian was able to squeeze in and just had room to use the drill), in the downstairs closets. Trent even drilled one in a dining-room wall, high up in one corner where the shadows never quite left. He stood on top of the stepladder while Laurie held it steady.
There was no metal anywhere. Just lath.
The children forgot for a little while.
One day about a month later, after Lew had gone back to teaching full-time, Brian came to Trent and told him there was another crack in the plaster on the third floor, and that he could see more metal behind it. Trent and Lissa came at once. Laurie was still in school, at band practice.
As on the occasion of the first crack, their mother was lying down with a headache. Lew’s temper had improved once he was back at school (as Trent and Laurie had been sure it would), but he’d had a crackerjack argument with their mother the night before, about a party he wanted to have for fellow faculty members in the History Department. If there was anything the former Mrs. Bradbury hated and feared, it was playing hostess at faculty parties. Lew had insisted on this one, however, and she had finally given in. Now she was lying in the shadowy bedroom with a damp towel over her eyes and a bottle of Fiorinal on the night-table while Lew was presumably passing around invitations in the Faculty Lounge and clapping his colleagues on the back.
The new crack was on the west side of the hallway, between the study door and the stairwell.
‘You sure you saw metal in there?’ Trent asked. ‘We checked this side, Bri.’
‘Look for yourself,’ Brian said, and Trent did. There was no need of a flashlight; this crack was wider, and there was no question about the metal at the bottom of it.
After a long look, Trent told them he had to go to the hardware store, right away.
‘Why?’ Lissa asked.
‘I want to get some plaster. I don’t want him to see that crack.’ He hesitated, then added: ‘And I especially don’t want him to see the metal inside it.’
Lissa frowned at him. ‘Why not, Trent?”
But Trent didn’t exactly know. At least, not yet.
They started drilling again, and this time they found metal behind all the walls on the third floor, including Lew’s study. Trent snuck in there one afternoon with the drill while Lew was at the college and their mother was out shopping for the upcoming faculty party.
The former Mrs. Bradbury looked very pale and drawn these days — even Lissa had noticed
— but when any of the children asked her if she was okay, she always flashed a troubling, overbright smile and told them never better, in the pink, rolling in clover. Laurie, who could be blunt, told her she looked too thin. Oh no, her mother responded, Lew says I was turning into a blob over in England — all those rich teas. She was just trying to get back into fighting trim, that was all.
Laurie knew better, but not even Laurie was blunt enough to call her mother a liar to her face.
If all four of them had come to her at once — ganged up on her, so to speak — they might have gotten a different story. But not even Trent thought of doing that.
One of Lew’s advanced degrees was hanging on the wall over his desk in a frame. While the other children clustered outside the door, nearly vomiting with terror, Trent removed the framed degree from its hook, laid it on the desk, and drilled a pinhole in the center of the square where it had been. Two inches in, the drill hit metal.
Trent carefully rehung the degree — making very sure it wasn’t crooked — and came back out.
Lissa burst into tears of relief, and Brian quickly joined her; he looked disgusted but seemed unable to help himself. Laurie had to struggle very hard against her own tears.
They drilled holes at intervals along the stairs to the second floor and found metal behind these walls, too. It continued roughly halfway down the second-floor hallway as it proceeded toward the front of the house. There was metal behind the walls of Brian’s room, but behind only one wall of Laurie’s.
‘It hasn’t finished growing in here,’ Laurie said darkly.
Trent looked at her, surprised. ‘Huh?’
Before she could reply, Brian had a brainstorm.
‘Try the floor, Trent!’ he said. ‘See if it’s there, too.’
Trent thought it over, shrugged, and drilled into the floor of Laurie’s room. The drill went in all the way with no resistance, but when he peeled back the rug at the foot of his own bed and tried there, he soon encountered solid steel . . . or solid whatever-it-was.
Then, at Lissa’s insistence, he stood on a stool and drilled up into the ceiling, eyes slitted against the plaster-dust that sifted down into his face.
‘Boink,’ he said after a few moments. ‘More metal. Let’s quit for the day.’
Laurie was the only one who saw how deeply troubled Trent looked.
That night after lights-out, it was Trent who came to Laurie’s room, and Laurie didn’t even pretend to be sleepy. The truth was, neither of them had been sleeping very well for the last couple of weeks.
‘What did you mean?’ Trent whispered, sitting down beside her.