“You should have left that inside me,” Richard Weal said. “Poor Billy.”
Jeremy Parr stood under the hot spray of the shower in his bathroom at Parr House and thought about his life.
It had begun here in this town and had been shaped by forces beyond his control. As soon as he had been old enough to control his own life, he’d fled.
Elliot had called him a coward for leaving, but leaving was his first completely courageous act. While he would have liked to think that there had been many other courageous acts in his life, he realized that returning to this place with Christina and Morgan was very likely only his second completely courageous act.
He’d returned here for them, for Christina and Morgan-to be the man he knew Jack would have wanted him to be. When he had fled from Parr’s Landing and Adeline, his brother had taken him in and protected him, keeping him safe until Jeremy was strong enough to take care of himself.
As Jeremy saw it, the best way to honour Jack had been to return the kindness-to take care of his wife and daughter. It still was, which was why he was taking them away tonight, whether they liked it or not. He was already packed, and it would take Christina and Morgan no time to follow suit.
All he needed was the money from Adeline’s dressing table drawer; the thousand dollars that would get them home to Toronto and away from this awful place. It was past time. They would take Finn with them if they had to, drop him off in the care of some hospital or other, or even a police station-anywhere other than Parr’s Landing. Finn wasn’t safe here, either. No one was.
Jeremy stepped out of the shower and dried himself off. He wrapped a thin white towel around his waist, then opened the bathroom door and stepped out into the dim hall.
From downstairs in Christina’s room, he heard the television-a comforting sound, since he couldn’t ever remember Adeline allowing it to be turned on when she was in the house, all through his childhood years. Tonight, the sound recalled the living room in Jack and Christina’s house in Toronto, which made him smile.
Jeremy walked quickly down the hallway to his mother’s room and pushed open the door. The room was dim, but there was enough light from the hallway behind him.
He was surprised to see the snow on his mother’s bedroom windows-he hadn’t even noticed the change in weather. He crossed to Adeline’s dressing table and pulled open the bottom drawer, where he knew the money was carefully hidden underneath the neat bundle of letters and file folders.
The drawer was empty.
Outside, the wind and the snow hissed against the glass of Adeline’s bedroom window.
Jeremy felt a cold hand on the small of his back, tugging once. The towel around his waist fell to the floor. In the reflection of his mother’s dressing table mirror, Jeremy was alone, naked. Behind him was reflected the entire bedroom and doorway leading to the hallway, where light and safety was, where Christina and Morgan were. He felt the cold hand slip under his buttocks, between his legs.
Directly behind him, he heard his mother’s dead voice. “Jeremy,” she said. “My son.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Of the three of them, only Finn had grown used to the sound of screaming.
Consequently, when Jeremy’s high-pitched shrieks ripped through the preternatural silence of Parr House, Finn didn’t startle, or even flinch. He just looked up at the ceiling, pointed, and said, “They’re here in this house, too. They’re real. I told you.”
Christina’s head snapped forward and jerked upwards to the place Finn was pointing.
She jumped up from the chair next to her bed where Finn was still buried under the blankets. Morgan had been lying across the foot of the bed. She raised herself to a sitting position and instinctively moved closer to Finn and her mother, and away from the screaming, which had risen in pitch since Finn first spoke.
Uncle Jeremy sounded the way Morgan had always imagined an animal being slaughtered would sound.
“Stay here!” Christina commanded, pointing her finger at Morgan and Finn. “Do not move from this spot, do you understand me?”
“Mommy,” she whispered. “It’s Uncle Jeremy.”
“Morgan, stay here with Finn! Promise me!”
White-faced, Morgan nodded her head in assent. Finn, also pale, nodded briefly but with much less conviction. He squeezed Morgan’s hand.
Christina took the stairs two at a time, shouting, “Jeremy, I’m coming! I’m coming!”
She reached Jeremy’s bedroom and pushed the door open. The room was empty, his suitcase on the bed, half- packed. The rest of his clothing was folded in neat piles. The screaming wasn’t coming from his bedroom; it was coming from Adeline’s room.
Christina ran down the hallway. She threw open Adeline’s bedroom door. The room was dark. Instinctively, she groped for a light switch and stepped inside.
At first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. There were three figures in the room, arrayed in a tableau that made Christina think of the ecclesiastical paintings of Christ’s crucifixion she’d seen in books-not the Passion itself, but the taking-down from the cross.
Jeremy was lying nude, spread-eagled on Adeline’s yellow silk bedspread, arms outstretched in a posture of martyrdom. The blood from his throat wound streamed down his broken neck, soaking the yellow silk pillowcases upon which his head lay at a terrible angle.
An old man with white hair, wearing some sort of cassock, was crouched at the head of the bed, his face buried under Jeremy’s jaw. And Adeline knelt at the foot of the bed, head bowed like Mary, mother of Christ.
From somewhere outside her own body, Christina idly noted that her mother-in-law was-ostentatiously, even for Adeline-wearing a fur coat indoors. Underneath the coat, Christina saw the grimy hem of a nightgown. Adeline’s bare feet on the immaculate carpet were black with filth, and there were dirty footprints leading to-no, back from- the window.
Adeline’s back was to Christina, her arms extended, her hands clamped on Jeremy’s drenched thighs, holding them apart as implacably as if they were secured in an iron grapple. The yellow silk bedspread was sodden with Jeremy’s blood, which had started to pool on the carpet in an outward-spreading stain.
Christina made a sound high in her throat, somewhere between the whine of a trapped animal and a moan. “Adeline…”
Adeline turned her crimson-smeared face towards Christina. She smiled as casually as a hostess who’d been disturbed in her embroidery, and spat her son’s penis out of her mouth like an hors d’oeuvre. “MOMMY!” Morgan stood in the doorway to Adeline’s room, her mouth an open circle of horror. Behind her, one hand on her shoulder, Finn stared, likewise open-mouthed.
“Oh my God, Morgan!” Christina wailed, turning around. “I told you to stay downstairs! Get downstairs
Adeline rose jerkily to her feet, looking from Christina to Morgan. Her mouthful of teeth was stained and needle-like in the overhead light.
“Whore,” Adeline croaked. “Dirty, dirty
“Get away, Adeline, goddamn you!” Christina shouted. “Get away from my daughter!”
“Or else what, Christina?” Adeline crooned. “This is my house. I come and go as I please, and do as I like. Haven’t you learned your place here yet?”
Adeline reached out with one hand and slapped Christina across the face, sending her crashing into the polished maple Philadelphia highboy next to the doorway. Agony sang through Christina’s shoulder. She felt blood trickling down the back of her scalp where she’d cut it on the edge of the dresser, and she groaned.
Adeline turned her blazing eyes on Morgan and said, “Morgan, come here to your grandmother. Come and give me a kiss. You’re a real Parr. You’re the only real Parr in this house except for me. All of this is for you-this house, this town, and everything in it. It’s your birthright.
Morgan flinched. Then her arms dropped limply to her sides. Her eyes glazed over and went blank. She took a blind, stumbling step towards Adeline, who crooked her arms and opened them in a grotesque parody of grand-
