In the Dark of the Night

head.

“But we should all be together,” Merrill began. “I don’t want to lose—”

“It’ll be okay,” Dan cut in, cutting off Merrill’s worries even before she’d finished voicing them. Then, certain her real fear was that Adam and his friends might gang up on Eric if they spotted him alone with Cherie, he said to Eric, “Why don’t you take Kent and Tad, too? With all four of you kids gone, there might be enough space on the blankets for the rest of us to actually stretch out.”

Eric looked at Cherie, who hesitated only a second before nodding, which was just enough to tell him she’d been hoping to be alone with him as much as he was hoping to be alone with her. Still, Tad and Kent would give them plenty of space, and at least nobody had suggested that they take Marci along, too. “Just make sure you come back here right after the fireworks are over,” his father went on as he and Cherie stood up.

“No problem,” Eric said as Kent and Tad got up, too. A moment later Cherie’s warm hand was holding his own as she led them all across the sea of people and blankets toward the path that would take them to the footbridge.

RILEY LOGAN MOVED silently along the path toward town, hearing nothing but the voices that seemed to come not only from within his own mind, but from all around him as well.

The woman’s voice was the clearest, rising above all the others.

“They never understood,” she was saying. “They never knew why I did it. They didn’t care. It didn’t matter about me. All that mattered was Father. Father and Mother. But they didn’t care about me, either. Nobody ever cared about me.”

Logan didn’t know if she was talking to him or to herself, but it didn’t matter.

She was talking, and he had to listen.

Had to listen, and had to obey.

She fell silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, the tone of her voice had changed. She said a single word: “Stop!”

Then all the others fell silent, and Logan froze in his tracks and for a moment heard nothing at all.

Then a different sound came to his ears.

A sound from directly ahead.

Someone on the path.

A man.

A man who was singing tunelessly to himself.

Logan crouched low to the ground, hunkered down in the brush at the side of the path.

He smelled the man before he came into sight.

“Drunk!” the woman whispered. “Just like Father!”

The man came into view, his stumbling gait telling Logan the woman had been right.

“Stand up to him!” the woman commanded. “Stand up and face him!”

Logan listened and obeyed.

He rose to his feet and stepped into the middle of the path just as the man approached.

Startled, the man dropped the bottle of beer he held in his hand.

“Kill him!”

Needing nothing more than the softly spoken order to spur him into action, Logan swung the axe.

Its edge — honed razor sharp by Logan himself only a little while ago — sliced cleanly through the man’s neck.

His head fell to the ground, the eyelids twitching, the mouth gaping open in surprise and shock.

Then the corpse’s knees buckled and it sank to the ground, blood spraying the trees, the path, even Logan himself.

Logan gazed down at the body, not quite certain what had just happened.

“Yes,” the woman whispered. “Very good. Perfect. That’s one. But there are more. So very many more…”

“One,” Logan repeated, and now the entire chorus of voices came back and rose, washing over him and bathing him in ecstasy.

His hands tightening on the axe, he moved forward a few steps, guided by the voice of the woman.

Then he heard more voices approaching, young voices, and the hollow sound of footsteps on wood.

People were on the bridge!

Logan ducked into the woods and slipped down the bank to the dark, cold water of the marsh.

Quietly, he waded through the tangled reeds until he was directly beneath the bridge.

He stood silently, listening for the woman’s voice, waiting for her to tell him what to do about the feet that were now scuffling on the wooden planks above his head.

KENT AND TAD sat perched on the bridge railing, facing the fireworks platform, while Eric leaned back against it with Cherie leaning on his chest. His arms were around her, his nose buried in her hair, taking in her fragrance with every breath.

Then, out of nowhere, he heard a voice: “Not them. Not here. Not yet.”

Eric turned to look at Kent, his brow furrowing. “Did you hear something?” The look on Kent’s face told him the answer to his question even before the other boy spoke.

But it was Tad who said, “A voice,” and slipped off the railing to stand next to Eric. “A woman’s voice.”

Now Kent, too, was off the railing and peering away into the darkness.

“I didn’t hear anything at all,” Cherie said.

“Hurry! I want to do it! I want to do it now!”

“Oh, Jesus,” Tad whispered. “Where’s it coming from?”

“What are you guys talking about?” Cherie demanded.

The three boys only looked at one another, a terrible dread falling over them as the voices — the voices they’d never before heard outside of the secret room in the carriage house — grew louder.

Louder, and more demanding.

• • •

LOGAN SLIPPED THROUGH the water as silently as he had moved through the woods, and only when the bridge was well behind him did he finally climb the bank to stand at the edge of the lawn.

The lighted pavilion — and a thousand people — lay before him like a scene from a dream.

“Yes,” the woman whispered. “There they are. All the fathers and all the mothers! It’s time. It’s time to make them pay for not caring about me!”

Logan’s grip once more tightened on the axe.

With Lizzie Borden’s spirit guiding him, he would, indeed, make them pay.

Chapter 34

THE SPIRALING LIGHT of the first salvo of fireworks glittered into the sky, and a moment later the darkness of the night was shattered by the blindingly white petals of a sparkling chrysanthemum, its brilliance in the darkness punctuated by the thundering boom of the rocket’s explosion.

But Eric Brewster barely noticed.

Something terrible had happened!

He could feel it — feel the pain of it almost as if a blade had been plunged deep into his own belly. And yet the pain wasn’t inside him — it was somewhere else, somewhere nearby.

As the second rocket exploded in the sky, another stab of agony slashed through him, and for an instant he froze, every muscle in his body going rigid in response to the searing pain.

Next to him, he heard Tad Sparks gasp, but it wasn’t the kind of ecstatic sigh that was rising from Cherie Stevens’s throat. Tad’s gasp was the sound of shock, and when Eric turned to look at him, Tad’s eyes were wide