What the Night Knows

48

NICOLETTE SAT AT JOHN’S DESK, READING ALTON TURNER Blackwood’s journal in a hologrammatic format on the computer, at first with academic interest but then with grim fascination. As she turned the electronic pages, a steadily intensifying dread gripped her. Her respect grew for the formidable threat that the malformed man had been during his lifetime and might still be in death.

She had not expected to be so rattled. Yes, she believed every word John told her. And she’d had uncanny experiences of her own. And Stephanie’s worried phone call on the night of the nineteenth, six days earlier, must have been something like a heads-up warning from Providence. Yet Nicky hoped that in reading the journal she would be relieved to find that, like most sociopathic killers, Blackwood was essentially a bug intelligence, bright perhaps and dangerous, but as narrowly focused as a praying mantis stalking prey, as a spider whose world was limited to its web. If his inner landscape was like those of uncounted butchering maniacs before him, it would be harder to credit the notion that he, of all such bloody-minded bugs in human form, should be the one empowered to return from Beyond, with or without demonic assistance.

She was a woman of faith but in a modern sense that until now allowed for Heaven but doubted Hades, that welcomed the notion of angels but relegated devils to cartoons and horror movies. After half an hour of reading Blackwood’s lurid account of his origins, however, she knew in her bones that she needed to take seriously the idea of his enduring spirit. He wasn’t as easy to dismiss as Big Foot or vampires, or the Loch Ness monster. He was like the presence you felt in the dark when you woke past midnight, that was still there but not visible when you switched on the lamp. He was akin to the thing that pricked your intuition at twilight in a lonely place, pricked it so sharply that you felt something like flukes twitching in your blood.

Beyond the computer screen, at the other end of the room, she half saw someone hurry past the window, through the snow, across the back terrace. Maybe Walter and Imogene hadn’t left yet, and he was tending to some final task before heading home to beat the worst of the storm.

A minute later a door closed so quietly that Nicky almost didn’t hear it. Then quick soft footsteps along the hallway.

She looked up, expecting someone to push open the study door, which was three-quarters closed. As the footsteps passed and then receded, she called out, “John?”

Whoever it might be, he evidently hadn’t heard her. He didn’t double back to see if she wanted something.

Although Blackwood’s journal fascinated her in a deeply morbid way, she was spending too much time on the early pages. She could go back later and read with more care if she wished. Now she skimmed through the seemingly endless lines of painstaking penmanship, in search of what the killer had written about his reasons for switching from single murders to the destruction of entire families.

Preston Nash is sitting alone in his basement apartment, eating corn chips with salsa, drinking beer, and playing Grand Theft Auto, really living the action, when suddenly for no reason at all, he says out loud, “Come to me.”

The next thing he knows, he’s got the key to the Calvino house in a pants pocket, and he’s driving his parents’ second car, which he is forbidden to operate even though he’s thirty-six and a grown man. Preston has suffered fugues in the past, when because of drugs or booze he slips into a dissociative state. Then he does things of which he’s less than half aware, hours of activity that later he dimly remembers or can’t recall at all. But he hasn’t chugged enough beer or popped enough pills to be in that condition now.

Besides, this is different from a fugue. Weirder. He’s acutely aware of what he’s doing, and he doesn’t want to be doing it, but he can’t stop. He’s compelled to get to the Calvino house. He feels as if his life depends on it, but he doesn’t know why. In spite of the storm, the world around him isn’t blurred and remote. It is black-and-white, which has nothing to do with the snow and the bare trees, because all the other vehicles on the road are either black or white, or a shade of gray, as are all the signs for businesses and all the clothes that the pedestrians are wearing. The only color in the world right now seems to be Preston, what he wears, and the car he drives.

He isn’t frightened. He thinks he ought to be in a fear sweat, vibrating like one of those coin-operated massaging beds in a cheesy motel, but something tells him that he should remain calm, that he’s all right. The times he’s ever been afraid, he’s always been sober. This thing that’s happening to him isn’t like being drunk, yet it’s just enough like being drunk to keep the tangles combed out of his nerves.

So he parks a block from the Calvino house. He walks to their place as briskly as a punctual man with an important appointment to keep. He is not a graceful guy. Most of the time, the world seems to Preston to be the deck of a ship in a storm, and he is pleased with himself if he can just stay on his feet and not be washed overboard. But now he strides along the snow-covered sidewalk without a misstep. Onto the lawn and along the north side of the handsome white-brick house. Across the back terrace to a windowless door. It’s locked. He uses his key.

Taken.

The rider mounts this horse for the first time since the fifth of October, and though it rode Preston secretly back then, it makes itself known to him now. He submits to control instantly, even more obedient to his master than an avatar in a video game is obedient to whoever holds the joystick, and color floods back into the world around him.

Leaving his key in the door, Preston enters the mud room. The girls’ boots stand on a rubber mat that glistens with snowmelt, and their coats hang from wall hooks. Preston closes the door behind him. Along one wall is a utility cabinet with upper doors, drawers below. Preston, who has never been here before, opens exactly the right drawer and removes from it a claw hammer.

Two inner doors lead out of the mud room, one to the kitchen, one to the ground-floor hallway. Preston enters the hall and hurries as quietly as possible toward the front of the house.

As he passes a nearly closed door, Nicolette Calvino calls out, “John?”

He could stride into the study and smash her skull to mush. But he understands that she is a most desirable bitch and therefore must be used first. Later, when she’s begging for death, it might then be fun to hammer her face.

Preston has no problem with that if it’s what his rider wants. It’ll just be like one of his porn films crossed with one of the Saw movies except that it’ll be fully 3-D and more intimate.

The foyer features a small walk-in closet. Preston steps into it and quietly closes the door behind him.

Using Preston’s voice, the rider tells him “Stay,” as if he were a well-trained dog. In this condition, he’s more like a car than like a dog, a reliable Honda left in park with the engine idling. He is just Preston now, not Preston and Alton and Ruin, but he’s Preston in stasis, like a guy in a movie on the TV after the viewer presses the pause button. He knows he’s Preston, and he knows that he’s in a coat closet, and he is aware of holding a claw hammer. He also knows that, whatever happens, he won’t really be responsible for it, more of an observer than a participant, although a keenly interested and easily entertained observer. Preston has been an observer all of his life, rather than a participant, so there is nothing new about his current circumstances, except that he can’t go get a beer anytime he wants one.

Minnie stood in her room, beside her play table, staring at the LEGO thing. White, about three inches thick, six inches in diameter, it resembled a big rice cake, except smooth, and stood on edge like a coin. It shouldn’t hold together. It should spill apart into a bunch of pieces, but it didn’t.

For two years, she had been doing this LEGO thing; she didn’t know why. It started when she got home from the hospital after being so sick everyone thought she was dying.

Well, in a way, it started while she was in the hospital.…

She had a high fever that the usual drugs couldn’t lower. Fever but also chills, drenching sweats, terrible headaches. The thirst was almost the worst of it. Sometimes she was so thirsty, as though she’d eaten a pound of salt, and she couldn’t get enough water. Most of the time, they were giving her fluids through a needle stuck in a vein in her arm, but that didn’t relieve the thirst. They had to monitor her water intake because sometimes she would drink until her belly bloated painfully, and in spite of the pain, she desperately wanted to drink still more—even in her dreams.

She had a lot of strange dreams in the intensive-care unit, some of them while she was awake. Before she went into the hospital, she didn’t know what the word delirium meant, but she sure could define it by the time she got well and came home. The dreams, whether she was awake or asleep, often had to do with thirst: deserts where every promise of water turned out to be a mirage; pitchers and spigots from which poured only sand; being chased by some kind of monster on a hot day along dry riverbeds; a forest of parched dead trees surrounding a dusty clearing where brittle bones were scattered in the withered grass, where the only water was pooled at the bottom of an open grave, but when she scrambled into the grave, that water proved to be a mirage, as well, and something started shoveling spadefuls of chalky dirt onto her, the same half-seen monster who had chased her along the waterless river.

Delirium was funny, not ha-ha funny, but weird funny. Delirious, you were sure that not only were monsters trying to kill you but so were some people who were actually trying to help you, like Kaylin Amhurst, the intensive-care nurse. In Minnie’s hallucinations and nightmares, while in the ICU, she thought Nurse Amhurst was trying to poison her.

Sometimes, usually near the end of Minnie’s worst nightmares and hallucinations, Father Albright appeared. She loved Father Albright very much. He was the super-best person she knew besides Mom, Daddy, Naomi, and Zach. He retired not long before Minnie became ill, and Father Bill took his place, so maybe she gave Father Albright a role in her fever dreams because it was the only way she could see him anymore. He was the one good thing in the dreams. He always gave her water, and it never turned out to be salt or sand.

That was a bad year, not just because of her illness. A month before Father Albright retired and went away, Willard died. Daddy and Lionel Timmins were almost killed by a bad guy, too, and though they got an award for valor, Daddy was nevertheless nearly killed, which scared Minnie for a long time. Maybe the only good thing that year was Zach deciding he just had to become a marine.

Minnie didn’t know whether the LEGO shapes were a good or a bad thing. She first saw them in her fever dreams, except they weren’t made of LEGO blocks. They were just shapes seen from a distance; then she found herself walking around on them, as if they were buildings, and eventually she was walking around inside of them. On these tours, she knew that she had shrunk like Alice in Wonderland, until she was the tiniest thing in all of creation, and that the strange shapes she explored were what lay at the bottom of the universe, holding it up.

Her mother said that three great powers kept the universe going. The first and strongest was God. Each of the two additional powers was as strong as the other: love and imagination. Of the three, God and love were always good. Imagination, however, could be good or bad. Mozart imagined great music into existence. Hitler imagined death camps and built them. Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret. Everything in the universe was an idea before it was real. Walking inside the shapes in her delirium dreams, Minnie knew they were the ideas from which everything had started, although she didn’t know then—or now—what that meant. After all, she was only eight.

Turning away from the LEGO construction, she went to the window and watched the snow falling through the bare limbs of the scarlet oak. The weather forecast was wrong. They would get more than a foot of snow, not six inches. She didn’t know from where this certainty came, but she was confident about her prediction. It was just one of those things she knew.

Since shortly after coming in from the snow with Naomi, Minnie had been in a spooky mood. This was one of those times she sensed unseen presences so strongly that she knew sooner rather than later, they would become visible to her, like at the convenience store, the guy with half his face shot off. This time would be worse than that.

Something moved on the south lawn, at first partly screened by the branches of the oak. Then it came into the open, and she saw that it was Willard. He looked up at her in the window.

“Good old dog,” she whispered. “Good old Willard.”

Willard stood looking up through the falling snow for a long moment, and then he approached the house.

Minnie lost sight of him. She wondered if he had come inside.

Roger Hodd, reporter for the Daily Post, has a date to meet his wife, Georgia, for dinner after she gets off work. She has suggested his favorite restaurant, though it isn’t a place she particularly likes. From this, Hodd infers that she intends to ask for a divorce over dessert. She has long desired her freedom from him. Because of his temper and caustic wit, she hopes that she will be less verbally abused in a public place than in a private one. She won’t be abused at all because Hodd is going to let her sit in the restaurant alone until she realizes she’s been stood up. He’ll give her a divorce, but only after he’s made her desperate for it.

He’s in a hotel room with a hooker, whom he’s paid in advance, and he’s undressed only so far as unbuttoning one cuff of his shirt, when he says, “Come to me.” The girl on the bed is wearing nothing but her panties, and she says with all the seductive allure of Miss Piggy the Muppet, “Why don’t you come to me? I’m really ready.” He’s already buttoned his cuff and snatched his heavy leather coat off the armchair. He says, “I’ve just discovered I’ve got a lower tolerance for ugly than I thought,” and she curses him as he leaves the room.

He’s hurrying along the hotel corridor before he fully realizes what he has just done, and he has no idea why he did it. She wasn’t ugly. And even if she was, he’s got a reasonably high tolerance for ugly if the rest of the package is okay. He’s been drinking since eleven this morning, but not heavily. Sipping. He’s not drunk. He’s been drinking so long that he hardly ever gets drunk anymore, not that he realizes.

By the time he’s in his car, piloting through billowing waves of snow, he feels like Richard Dreyfuss in that old science-fiction movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’s obsessed with getting somewhere, not to some remote butte in Wyoming where the mother ship is going to land, but somewhere he can’t name. He ought to be afraid, but he’s not. For one thing, he’s never afraid. He’s one tough sonofabitch. Anyway, he’s been trying to slow-kill himself with booze and neurotic women for years, which is a far more gruesome way to go than setting yourself on fire. For another thing, every time the weirdness of this compulsion makes him breathe fast and his heart races, this soothing voice in his head sort of croons a wordless lullaby, and he grows calm once more.

He parks in an upscale neighborhood, near a white-brick house, which is apparently his destination. He walks around the back of the place, through the snow-covered yard, across a terrace to a door in which a key sticks out of the deadbolt lock. As he opens the door and extracts the key from the lock, a cold black something slams into his head, or at least that’s how it feels. Then it’s inside his head but his skull is intact. He screams, but it’s a silent scream because he doesn’t control his own voice anymore.

As he steps into a mud room and closes the door behind him, he keeps trying to scream, because he’s terrified as he never was during the trip here. Fright overwhelms him as he proceeds out of the mud room into a kitchen, through a dining room, toward the front of the house, and a cold sea of horror rises over him because he’s not hard-assed Roger Hodd anymore, he’s now somebody’s bitch.

Naomi stepped out of the walk-in closet in the guest bedroom and offered the attaché case to Melody. “You’ll see everything’s exactly the same as when you gave it to me. So the eggs—what’re they about, with our names on them? And there’s something in them, I couldn’t figure what it is. Eggs are very symbolic, they can symbolize about a thousand things. Are these symbolic? What’s magic about them, how do they work? Is the frost still on the briar rose, and what does that mean, anyway?”

“M’lady, all your questions will be answered soon. Tonight we travel on the storm.”

“On the storm?” Naomi said, liking the sound of that—travelers on the storm.

Melody’s pretty-enough face was so animated now that she became truly beautiful, much more full of life than she’d been before. Her molasses eyes were amazing, bright and quick, as if shining with an inner light. And her voice, always captivating, always musical and positively dripping with mystery, sounded more enchanting than ever:

“This is not a natural storm, m’lady. This is a conjured snow that falls hereabout but also accumulates in the lonely space between worlds, drifting sideways across time until it bridges this place to your kingdom, so we can glide home as smoothly as oil on glass, as quick as quicksilver.”

Naomi thrilled to every word but one. “Glide? I thought we were going to fly between the worlds?”

“We do both at once, m’lady, as you’ll understand when you see the cross-time sleigh with all its great sails filled and taut with the winds of time.”

Naomi was so dizzy with language and fantasy and possibilities that she couldn’t speak. Then she remembered a word that a kind of witless girl in The Tale of Despereaux often said when bewildered, and it amused Naomi to use it to express her stupefaction: “Gar!”

“Now you must accompany me at once to the top of the house to make further preparations, m’lady. Come, let’s go, while there is no cat afoot to espy our destination.”

Melody flew to the guest-bedroom door, and Naomi hurried after her, wondering if she would ever be able to speak as fabulously as did, apparently, all the people of her kingdom.

They dashed along the second-floor hallway to the back stairs, hastened to the third floor, breezed across Mother’s studio, darted through another door onto the landing at the head of the main stairs.

When Naomi realized that Melody intended to enter the master bedroom, she said, “Wait! That’s my parents’ private space. You need an invitation to enter.”

“We must make the preparations at the top of the house, m’lady. Later, we can only leave from the top of the house.”

“The studio is also at the top of the house.”

“But the studio is inadequate.” Indicating the master-suite door, she said, “Anyway, there’s no one within.”

“How do you know?”

“I know as I know.”

“At least we have to knock,” Naomi said. “It’s the rule.”

Melody smiled mischievously, fisted her right hand, and rapped silently on the air. Before them, the door swung open magically.

Against her better judgment and in violation of the rules, but giggling with delight, Naomi followed Melody into the master suite and closed the door behind them.

Here at the end of the afternoon, with twilight nearing, the world outside was white with whirling snow, but the master bedroom lay mostly in shadows. As Melody approached the bed with the attaché case, both nightstand lamps switched on as though attended by an invisible chambermaid, and there was just enough lovely soft light.

“You’re going to have to teach me stuff like that,” Naomi said.

“Your powers will return when your memory is restored, m’lady. And this evening you will learn many things. Many amazing things. You’ll learn more this evening than you have learned all your life so far.”

Melody put the attaché case on the bedspread and then patted the spot beside it, indicating that Naomi should sit there.

Naomi perched on the edge of the bed, legs dangling. “Now what?”

“Now you will wait here, right there exactly where you’re sitting, while I go downstairs and manifest quite dramatically to each member of your family, convince them that this is a night of magic, and bring them here one at a time.”

“Can’t I go? I want to see you manifest quite dramatically.”

“I must do this as it is written it must be done,” Melody said with a faint note of admonition. “All must be done according to the guidance of the royal mage.”

With that, she stepped lively across the room, exited onto the landing, and closed the door, leaving Naomi alone.

Naomi wished that she could shut off her overloaded mind for five minutes and allow her legions of spinning thoughts to slow to a speed that wouldn’t dizzy her. At least a thousand thoughts were in motion, each rotating on its axis but also revolving around the center of her mind like planets around a sun. All of them were such dazzling thoughts, too, all of them wonderful, except two or three fraidy-cat thoughts that simply weren’t worthy of her, compliments of Minnie’s infectious pessimism. Naomi was determined not to let those yeah-buts or what-ifs grow into ugly little mind warts that would spoil the mood and the magic. She was a positive person, a believer in believing, a first-chair flautist, and though she didn’t know much about math, she knew an enormous amount about magic.

She watched the snow falling diagonally past the window. The wind had gentled to an easy breeze. The ceaselessly unraveling snow was a calming sight.

A deep quiet filled the master suite. Naomi tried to let the quiet seep into her noisy mind.

With a growing disquiet, John roamed the ground floor and the basement, not exactly searching for anything, but half expecting to find something important or even ominous, though he had no idea what that might be.

Eventually, in the kitchen again, he used the security-system keypad beside the back door to set the perimeter alarm. Night lay almost an hour away, but none of them had a reason to go out in this weather. He had told the girls to stay inside. Zach had seemed happily occupied with his drawing tablet. John felt better with the alarm on. He didn’t allow himself the illusion that they were now perfectly safe. No one anywhere was ever perfectly safe.

Forty-seven days remained before the tenth of December. John should not yet feel that a countdown clock was urgently ticking—but he felt it anyway. He could almost hear it.

When darkfall came, the lighted house would be a fishbowl to anyone outside in the night. He decided to close all the draperies and pleated shades, starting in the kitchen. As he went, he checked to be sure that the door locks and window latches were engaged.

This was the anniversary of the worst night of his life, and each window he inspected reminded him that his parents and sisters perished while he lived because of his selfishness and weakness.

On school nights, Marnie and Giselle went upstairs to bed at nine o’clock. John’s parents were teachers, early to rise, and they were usually asleep by ten.

Because he was fourteen, John was permitted to stay up later, but that night he pled weariness and retired when his sisters did, at nine. He sat in the dark until he heard his dad and mom close their door at nine-forty.

His room lay on the opposite side of the hall from his parents’ room. His window looked onto the front-porch roof.

He slipped out of the house through the window and slid shut the well-waxed bottom sash. Because it wasn’t latched, he could open it without difficulty when he returned.

During the past few months, he had sneaked out often. He was so practiced at it that a cat couldn’t have split the scene any more quietly than John did.

The thick limb of a tree overhung the north end of the porch. He reached up, grabbed it, lifted his feet off the roof, and went hand over hand just far enough to be away from the house. Then he dropped to the grass. When he came back, he would climb the tree to the porch roof and enter his room, so ready for sleep that he would pass out as his head hit the pillow.

Her name was Cindy Shooner. She lived two blocks away, and he could be at her place three minutes after leaving home.

Mr. and Mrs. Shooner were dysfunctional, Cindy said. They hated their jobs, they hated their relatives, and they weren’t that fond of each other, either. When they didn’t drink, they fought, so because neither of them was a mean drunk, they started drinking early each evening as a way to have some peace in the house. Most nights by ten o’clock, they were either about to pass out, already passed out, or in bed watching wrestling on cable channels because muscle-bound men in brief costumes appealed to both of them.

Their bedroom was on the second floor, and Cindy’s was on the ground floor. She could escape her house even more easily than John could slip out of his.

In early August, when this started, they would take a blanket into a nearby meadow and lie under the stars.

Then Mr. Bellingham, who lived two doors from the Shooner place, was asked by his company to take a nine-month assignment in another state, to help turn around a problem factory there. Mrs. Bellingham decided to go with him. They didn’t want to rent their house, so they closed it up and paid Cindy a little money to look after the place, to do some dusting and vacuuming every couple of weeks.

After that, she and John didn’t need the meadow anymore. They could have candlelight, music, and a real bed.

She was sixteen, a year and a half older than John. She was the first girl he’d been with. He wasn’t her first guy. Although still a girl, Cindy was in some ways a woman by then. She had assurance, attitude, appetite, and birth-control pills that her mother got for her because her mother hated the idea of a grandchild more than she hated her job or her husband.

Cindy was bad for John, though he didn’t think so at that time. In fact, if the wrong person had told him that she was bad for him, he would have had his fists up in an instant.

In truth, he was bad for her, too. He liked her well enough, and he definitely liked being with her, but he didn’t love her. If a girl wasn’t loved a little bit, without the depth of affection that might at least be mistaken for love, she was being used, and no one was the better for being used.

He stayed with her that night from shortly before ten o’clock until later than usual, until three forty-five. After making love, they drifted off to sleep in the Bellingham place.

By the time he said good-bye, hurried home, climbed the tree, and returned to his room, it was four o’clock.

He might have stripped, dropped into bed, and fallen instantly asleep. He might have awakened in the morning, self-satisfied with his secret escapade, only to find that he had been sleeping in the house of the dead.

As he quietly slid shut the lower sash of his window, he heard bells ringing somewhere on the second floor. Silvery, eerie, alien to this place. After a pause, they rang again. In the dark, he moved to his door to listen just as the bells rang a third time.

Easing open the door, he saw light in the hallway. Issuing from his parents’ and his sisters’ rooms.

On the hallway floor stood a black satchel. Beside it lay a pistol.

John knew guns. His father, a good marksman, hunted deer in season and taught his son. This wasn’t his father’s weapon.

A homemade silencer was fitted to the barrel. He removed it.

Odd noises in his sisters’ bedroom told him where the intruder must be.

The noises were not weeping or screaming, and he knew what the silence of the girls had to mean. If he thought about that, he would freeze or he would not have the strength to act, so he focused on the pistol and what he needed to do with it.

Weapon in hand, he eased to the open door to his parents’ room. They were lying in the bloody bed. Shot in their sleep. Something on their eyes. Something in their hands.

His rabbit heart, fast and timid. But no going back.

After a silence, the bells rang again.

John sidled along the hallway, holding the pistol in a two-hand grip. He hesitated a step short of the girls’ room.

Again the bells.

He stepped into the doorway, the light, the bleak future.

Giselle on the floor. Dead. Worse than dead. Marnie. Little Marnie. The suffering. Beyond comprehension. Blindness would be a blessing, to have been born without eyes.

John wanted death. Cover each girl with a blanket, lie down between them, and die.

Crouched over Giselle, the killer rang the bells one more time. Tall, as strange as a cockroach, quivering in his excitement. All bones and hands. Brute bones and greedy hands.

As bell-cry echoes still sang faintly off the walls, the beast raised his head, looking up from Giselle’s body, his freak-show face boiled bright by a hideous rapture, his mouth smeared red from cruel kisses, those black-hole eyes that drew entire worlds to destruction in their crushing depths.

The sinister voice shattered John with words: “This little girl said you were gone to Grandma’s for a week.”

Had he known that John would be coming back, the killer would have been waiting in his dark bedroom. Even in her terror, Giselle had the presence of mind to save her brother with a clever lie. She died that John might live.

Rising from his crouch, folded bones unfolding into pterodactyl ghastliness, the killer said, “Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.”

John’s arms were straight in front of him, elbows locked, pistol in a good tight grip, but his slamming heart shook him, and the gun shook with him, the sight jumping, jumping on the target.

Taking a step toward John, the killer said, “You’ll be a daddy someday. Then I’ll come back and use your wife and kids harder than I used your slutty sisters here tonight.”

The sound of the first shot was huge and hammer-hard in that confined space, a cannon blast, concussion waves bouncing wall to wall to wall, and the bullet sucked the splintered cartilage of the nose backward into the fevered brain as the killer staggered, stumbled, fell.

John stepped into the bedroom, stood over the fallen beast, and emptied the pistol’s magazine into the hateful face, obliterating the eyes that had seen his sisters in their agony and despair, shredding the mouth that had profaned them. He heard no shot after the first, but watched, seemingly in silence, as the demented face dissolved from miscreation into chaos.

John had no memory of going downstairs to the den. The next thing he knew, he was loading one of his father’s handguns with the intention of putting a single round through the roof of his mouth, that his shame and grief might be blown out with his brains.

His sister died with no hope but that John might live by virtue of her lie about his visit to a grandmother. He could not repay her love with a coward’s exit. His penance could be nothing less than that he must go on living.

The taste and the weight of cold steel were on his tongue when he heard the sirens that the gunshots had summoned.

They found him on his knees, and sobbing.

In the dayroom, where Walter and Imogene Nash ate their lunch and did their planning, John was lowering the pleated shades when Nicolette located him.

She had been on the computer, reading Alton Turner Blackwood’s journal. Her face was as pale as the white-gesso ground with which she prepared a new canvas before painting.

“Your family shouldn’t have been the fourth. He meant to kill the Calvinos third, the Paxtons fourth.”

He stared at her, not fully comprehending what she said but instinctively alarmed.

“The therapist who read it. He never told you. Yours was the third family on Blackwood’s list. When he came to your house that night, a police patrol car happened to be parked on your street. Two officers in it. Probably just taking a break. Blackwood spooked. He went to the Paxton place instead. Thirty-three days later, he came back for your family.”

John felt targeted. In someone’s gun sight at this very moment. The bullet in the barrel.

“If we’re third,” Nicky said, “we don’t have until December tenth. We have just thirteen days.”

“But why would he revert to the original order?”

“Why not? He wants to do it like it should have been done. But John … my God.”

“What?”

“If he can change the order, why stick with thirty-three days?”

“Serial-killer periodicity. Who knows why? They don’t understand it themselves.”

She shook her head. “But today. Today, John. It was twenty years ago today. If he can change the order, put us third, he can change the day. This day might be sweeter to him than waiting.”