CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
It was turning out to be quite the Wednesday, and Wednesday’s child was likely filled with woe. Lots and lots of woe, Emmaline Perenais Foster thought to herself. The thought filled her with great comfort. Other people’s woe would become her pleasure.
Pulling a fresh white blouse from her closet, she drew it over her shoulders, stretched her arms and then tugged on the bottom until it felt comfortable. She hadn’t worn it in a long while, and her old clothes just didn’t feel the same way on her body that they used to. She wasn’t invited to many social engagements these days, so her wardrobe was meager and dated. Not that this was strange. The Perenais family had never been embraced with open arms, even though they’d been among those families that founded this town.
She looked in the mirror and buttoned the first of four buttons that would close the blouse up to her neckline if she chose. She left the last buttons open, though, offering a glimpse of cleavage. Just for fun. Emmaline was fifty-seven years old and thrice her girlhood girth, but she still prided herself on her bosom. It had helped her get what she wanted on many occasions.
Leaning close to the mirror, she drew a smooth line of deepest red across her lips and then pursed those lips. Her deep brown eyes and cutely slanted nose still offered an attractiveness that would seduce the world, she believed, a world that would never know what wickedness lived beneath. Her painted lips split into a satisfied smile. The townsfolk may have shunned her as a Perenais, but they really would have choked had they known it all.
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” she murmured to herself. And it was. Most of the things the town believed of the Perenais family were simply fiction. Oh, they thought the Perenais clan was bad news. Generations upon generations of bad seeds. They had no idea.
Emmaline slipped a long tartan skirt over her tan hose and tucked in her blouse, then slipped on a pair of black flats; she’d outgrown the masochism of heels twenty-five years ago. She chose a small handbag, picked out a small key from her jewelry box and then walked out of her bedroom and down the hall. At the back stairs, she unlocked a door and flipped a light switch.
Down she went, one gray plank at a time, until she stood on the soft earth of the fruit cellar. Most of the homes in River’s End were without basements; when half a town is built into the side of a cliff, it’s difficult to excavate too far down without hitting solid stone. But Harry and a friend of his had worked like dogs one summer when she and he first married, and together they’d build this cellar she’d told him she’d always wanted. Little did he know he was digging his own grave.
The fruit cellar wasn’t as grandiose as the dark chapel beneath the Perenais family estate, but it served her purposes. Emmaline picked up the old, hand-bound book set reverently on a small table near the brick wall, and flipped to page sixty-nine. She knew the page by heart, because she turned to it almost every day when she descended the stairs and made her visitation. It contained words handwritten in the blood of a virgin drained and drunk by her ancestor three centuries before atop the bones of Maldita. The Perenais family had drunk the souls of virgins for centuries.
She looked up at the shriveled skin of the sallow nude body that leaned against the far corner of the cellar. In some ways, the years hadn’t aged him; his hair remained black, where hers was salted with gray. He’d always had a weakness for beer, and it showed in the rounded sag of his gut, though his paunch looked small compared to the panniculus she had nurtured over the years. She had always been one to indulge. Indulgence was something of a Perenais religion.
His face. She wished it had preserved better. The eyelids and surrounding skin were sunken in a strange way around the marbles she’d used to replace his eyes, which now hung suspended in a jar on the shelves behind her. And the rictus of his lips looked painfully drawn against yellowed teeth that jutted forward much more than they had in life. They looked crude, animalistic. Death did not become him, Emmaline decided. Perhaps he would have survived the years better if she’d been able to remove him from his burial plot sooner than she had all those years ago.
“I’m going out for the evening, Harry,” she said to her husband’s corpse. Then, before she left, she read the words she pronounced over his dead flesh every day. It still made her tingle inside.
To hell, I commend you.
In blood, I love you.
In sex, I kill you.
An evil prayer, the credo of Family Perenais.
CHAPTER
FORTY
Something bad was going to happen, Captain Jones could feel it in his bones.
He stood on the cliff overlooking the Russian River estuary and listened to the twilight cries of the sea lions; they slipped off the embankment and swam away with hoarse, barking echoes to wherever sea lions go when the sun goes down. He stood and worried that, with the coming of the night, something horrible was due back in town, a tide of evil that no small-town cop with a gun and a green deputy was going to dissuade. He could scare the high school shoplifters and put the fear of a life behind bars into the wife beaters, but what could he do against a force that slipped in and killed, and carved, and killed again, always unseen in the darkness? The circle was broken. The devil was again on the loose.
When he was younger, the Pumpkin Man had come to town and taken the souls of children. Nobody quite knew why, but they presumed the horror stopped because of the murder of George Perenais, the last male heir of the founding family that occupied the house overlooking the town for more than 150 years. They’d become smug and certain that the evil was snuffed out, that his widow from Chicago was powerless to carry on the traditions of the family, whether those traditions were paranormal or simply sociopathic. The Pumpkin Man had been relegated to the position of urban myth. Kids whispered his name in the dark, half expecting the boogeyman to jump out when they said “Pumpkin Man” three times in a dark mirror, but it never happened. Then he—or his evil twin—reappeared a few months ago, decimating the remaining parents of the children killed two decades ago.
Jones had been powerless to intervene. He’d seen the pattern quickly enough, and he’d posted close watches on the likely victims, but that vigilance hadn’t done anything but give Officer Barkiewicz the start of a doughnut gut from sitting in squad cars outside of dark homes for hours every night. Jones had been on that watch as well, but neither he nor Scott had ever seen anyone enter the homes of the victims, even though Scott was on the curb near her house the night Teri Hawkins was killed.
A part of him had felt that the relentless slaughter of those parents was unstoppable, to be honest, vigilante justice in reverse. With the death of Teri, he’d thought the spree was done because there were no more parents to kill aside from Emmaline—and, being a Perenais, he had always assumed she’d be immune to whatever evil the family culled in the ancient graveyard behind their house. Then the killer branched out and took down the friend of Jennica Murphy, and Jones’s stomach had sunk lower than it had in years. It had made him just plain afraid.
Afraid that the evil on the loose would never stop. Afraid that he was always going to be powerless to stop it.
He stared first at the red glow of the sun on the horizon and then behind him to the deep blue night that crept in from the east, cloaking everything in mystery. Would tonight be the night? Would the Pumpkin Man take another innocent soul from River’s End and leave a jack-o’-lantern in place of its head? Jones cringed at the thought. And that he was powerless to stop it.
He lifted a coffee purchased a half hour ago from Dana’s Diner to his lips and sipped. He’d need the jolt of
