House of Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page A

call or anything.”
     
    “That was short-lived.”
     
    “Yeah, I guess,” he said. It was the last conversation they would ever have. It was summer the next time Teresa Boron saw the girl. Joey had decided to try to ask Stella Sexton out again. Teresa suggested he invite her to a family cookout. Teresa drove over to the house on Caroline Street to pick her up. Stella Sexton came walking out of the door with a baby in her arms. “Is that your sister?” Teresa asked in the car. “No,” she said. “It’s my baby.” Her name was Dawn, she said. Teresa didn’t probe. It was the girl’s business. She thought, kids sometimes made mistakes. Later, Joey told her about the father in the Navy. “The guy walked out on her,” he said. “He claimed it wasn’t his.” When Teresa looked at the baby, something seemed profound about the girl’s looks. What an uncanny resemblance to her mother she thought. At the cookout, Teresa tried engaging Stella in conversation.
    She spoke in a hardly audible voice. “Getting any information out of her was like pulling teeth,” Teresa later recalled.
     
    Teresa eventually put a few facts together. Like Joey, Stella had been held back one year in school, but it wasn’t because of her grades. She had a high B average in high school. She’d repeated the first grade after she’d been hurt in a cooking accident in the family home. She was hospitalized for two months, her arms and chest burned by hot grease. She’d studied culinary arts in high school, but dropped out of the co-op cooking program when she had the child. She’d worked at Pizza Hut and Frank’s Family Restaurant in Massilon “What does your father do?” she asked. “He has his own painting business,” she said.
    Estella May Sexton. That was her full name, exactly the same as her mother’s. Stella was the oldest girl in a family of 12 children.
    There were seven boys and five girls, ranging in age from 6 to 23. Her parents had given her a nickname. “At home, everyone calls me Pixie,”
    she said. Pixie Sexton said she had to be home by no later than eight.
    It was summer, daylight savings time. It wouldn’t even be dark.
    “That’s awfully early,” Teresa said. “My father wants me home by eight,” Pixie said.
     
    For the next date, Joey got his rusted Datsun working and drove over to see her. Then he began visiting her a couple of nights a week. “What do you guys do at Pixie’s?” Teresa asked. “We sit around and talk,”
     
    Joey said. “We watch TV. The baby really likes me.” He began bringing Pixie to their house on weekends, sometimes Pixie’s brother William in tow. They called him Willie. He was a dark-haired, gangly boy Joey’s age. He was as quiet as his sister. The three of them would sit in Teresa’s family room and watch TV. They had to be the quietest teenagers in Stark County, Teresa thought. The first time Teresa Boron heard the rumor, it came from a boy in the neighborhood who mowed their grass. He’d gone to school with the Sexton children.
    He claimed the family belonged to some kind of cult. “Cult?” Teresa asked. “What kind of cult?”
     
    “Some kind of strange rituals,” he said. “And the Sexton boys used to come to school looking like they’d been beat up and stuff.” She pressed him for details, but he had none. She tried to dismiss it, but as the weeks went by, it lay there in the back of her mind. Joey said one night, “I really like Pixie.” She thought, like wasn’t the word.
    He confirmed that when he added that he’d like to marry Pixie Sexton one day. She said, “You don’t know her. I mean, you don’t even know who her child’s father is?” Joey repeated the story about the father being in the Navy. Later she would get a more developed version, Pixie saying now that the baby’s father had died.
     
    Teresa Boron began to worry. The cult story kept coming to the front of her mind. It wasn’t just these mysterious Sexton kids, it was