breathed.
Michael’s eyes followed her hand. “There was something sitting there not very long ago. Watch.” Using the palm of his own hand, he pressed down on the lawn, and when he lifted his hand away, its print remained clearly visible for a moment before the grass began to straighten up again, until, like the larger impression in front of the crypt, it was barely visible. Indeed, even as they watched, both of the faint impressions disappeared in the weak light of the moon.
Kelly looked up at him. “They took her, didn’t they?”
Michael nodded.
“What are we going to do?” Kelly asked as they both stood up, shivering despite the heat of the night.
The words came into Michael’s mind unbidden, as if they’d been there forever, waiting for the right moment to rise up into his consciousness. “Kill them,” he replied, his voice empty. “We’re going to kill them all.”
Abstractly, as if observing himself from afar, Michael wondered why he felt nothing as he uttered the words.
And then he remembered.
He felt nothing because he had no soul.
Long ago, right after he had been born, it had been stolen from him.
Now it was time to get it back.
• • •
Barbara Sheffield stared out the window at the silver crescent of the moon. Sleep would not come. She had lain awake for what seemed like hours, feeling the exhaustion of the day in every bone of her body, but her mind refused to let her rest.
Kelly’s words echoed in her mind.
Then Amelie Coulton’s:
But it was impossible. It
Yet the thought refused to be put aside. Barbara slipped out of bed. She went to Jenny’s room first, standing in the doorway, her vision blurring with tears as she looked once more at all of Jenny’s things.
Her stuffed animals, propped up on her bed the way Jenny always arranged them, were sitting against the wall so that they seemed to be staring at Barbara with their big sad eyes.
The closet door stood open, and Barbara could see the row of dresses hanging inside, and the shoes, set in neat pairs, beneath them.
Pictures covered the walls, the colorful scribblings that had always made Jenny so proud and which now made Barbara’s heart melt, knowing there would be no more.
A sob catching in her throat, Barbara turned out the light and went to the kitchen, where she put on a kettle of water to make herself a cup of coffee.
When she went to the living room and pulled the family picture album out of the bottom drawer of her mother’s antique sideboard, she told herself that she wanted nothing more than to look at some of the pictures of Jenny, to replace the haunting image of Jenny in her casket with one of her daughter when she’d been happy and full of life.
But a few minutes later, after she’d made her coffee and settled herself at the kitchen table, she found she couldn’t look at the pictures of Jenny — the wounds were still too fresh, the pain too sharp.
She paged slowly through the album and found herself stopping each time she came to a picture of Tisha.
She found herself studying the pictures of her niece carefully, comparing the images in the album to the one in her mind of Kelly Anderson.
Their resemblance was unquestionable.
The lips were the same, full and generously curved.
The same high cheekbones and arched brows.
And yet there were differences, too.
Tisha was much pudgier than Kelly, but then, her mother had always been heavier than Barbara.
And Tisha was short, like her father.
Still …
No! She was imagining it all, denying her grief by making up fantasies!
She turned the pages carefully back to the beginning of the album. But before she closed its cover, her eyes fell on the first picture she’d put into the book.
It was an eight-by-ten enlargement of a picture that had been taken at the Fourth of July picnic sixteen years earlier, which she’d captioned “Last Days of Freedom — Of course I can barely walk!” She smiled at the image of herself in the last days of her pregnancy with Sharon, sitting on the picnic table, Craig beside her.
They’d looked so young then, all of them.
She began looking at the people in the picture. Some of them had changed so much that she hardly recognized them.
There was Arlette Delong, wearing the same beehive hairdo then that she still wore today. Except in the picture, Arlette’s elaborate coiffure didn’t have the look of desperation about it that it had taken on lately. Back then Arlette had been a pretty young woman — now, sixteen years later, her figure had thickened, and her middle-aged features had hardened from the long hours in her cafe. But her hair had remained the same — teased and back- combed, then sprayed solid. The only thing missing in the picture was the pencil that Arlette was now in the habit of implanting in the platinum mass.
There, too, were Billy-Joe and Myrtle Hawkins, Myrtle almost as pregnant with Buddy as Barbara had been with Sharon. Billy-Joe’s handsome features had all but dissolved since then, his nose now puffy from the long years of drinking, his once-flat stomach having long ago given way to a beer belly.
Barbara frowned, her eyes coming to rest on Warren Phillips, who was standing with a group of other men under a pine tree to the left of the picnic table at which Barbara herself was sitting.
The doctor didn’t seem to have changed a bit. His strong chin was as well-defined now as it was in the picture, and his dark hair, shot through with gray, was unchanged as well.
Barbara paused, thinking.
Back then she had always thought of Dr. Phillips as being much older than she, but now, sixteen years later, they seemed to be closer to the same age.
But how old was he?
She studied the picture, finally getting a magnifying glass from the kitchen drawer.
If she’d had to guess, she’d have said he was around forty-five in the picture, fifty at the oldest.
Which would make him at least sixty-one now. Maybe older.
And yet he still looked forty-five.
She began looking at some of the other men in the group around Phillips.
Carl Anderson was instantly recognizable, for he, like Phillips, hadn’t changed at all in the last sixteen years.
Nor had Fred Childress, or Orrin Hatfield.
She found Judd Duval, lounging on a blanket.
He, too, looked exactly the same then as he did now.
She kept studying the picture, searching for more of the faces that seemed not to have changed in nearly two decades. She looked up as a shadow passed over the album.
Craig, his eyes worried, was looking down at her. “Honey? What is it?”
Barbara smiled wanly. “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “So I finally just gave up. Want a cup of coffee?”
Craig shook his head. “What are you looking at?”
“Pictures,” Barbara replied. “I–I just wanted to look at Jenny again. But I couldn’t.”
Craig reached over and closed the album, then pulled her up from the chair and held her close. “Things are going to be all right, honey,” he whispered into her ear. “I know it doesn’t seem like the pain will ever go away right now, but it will. I promise.”
Barbara let him lead her back to the bedroom, but as she tried once more to go to sleep, she knew he was
