Black Creek Crossing

right hand toying nervously with the tab on the zipper of her shoulder bag. “One of those domestic things.”

Myra’s expression tightened. “ ‘One of those domestic things,’ ” she repeated. “I think you’re going to have to be a little clearer, Joni.”

Joni took a deep breath, and then her words came in a rush. “A man went crazy, Myra. No one really knows exactly what happened, but — well, apparently he killed his wife and daughter while they were asleep.”

Myra Sullivan gaped at her sister, the words stunning her into complete immobility. As their meaning slowly sank in, she turned to her daughter. But instead of looking as horrified as her mother felt, Angel was looking at her aunt as if waiting for the story to go on. It left Myra feeling disoriented, and as she looked once more around the living room of the house on Black Creek Road, she was certain that somehow — in the light of what she’d just heard — it would look different.

But it didn’t.

It looked exactly the same.

Yet how could it? After what had happened here, shouldn’t the house look like someplace a murder would have occurred?

Shouldn’t it reflect the horror that had taken place within its walls?

Then she thought: Why would it look any different? After all, it was just a house. Only in movies did they make places where terrible crimes had occurred look foreboding.

Stupid, Myra told herself. Just find out what happened, and don’t read anything into it. In an unconscious imitation of her sister, she took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “Maybe you’d better tell us exactly what you do know about it,” she said. When Joni’s eyes flicked warningly toward Angel, Myra shook her head. “If we should happen to buy this place — which I seriously doubt — Angel’s going to be living here too. So I think she has a right to know what happened, at least if she wants to.” She smiled thinly at her daughter. “Do you want to hear, Angel? If you don’t want to, you certainly don’t have to. In fact,” she added, shuddering and glancing around the room one more time, as if searching for ghosts, “we can leave right now and just forget this place.”

Angel’s eyes, too, prowled the room for a moment. Then she shook her head. “It’s okay — it’s not like I’ve never seen people get murdered on TV.”

“The thing is, we don’t actually know it was a murder,” Joni said.

“Seems to me like it couldn’t have been much else,” Marty Sullivan grumbled. “You don’t kill your wife and kid by accident.”

“It’s hardly that simple, Marty,” Joni went on. “There were only the three of them living here when it happened — a couple in their thirties, who’d only moved to town a few months earlier, and their daughter. She was about eleven, I think. Anyway, they’d barely had a chance to get to know anyone yet, and then…” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head, shrugging helplessly. “He called the police one night — actually, early one morning — and told them something terrible had happened. When they got here, they found him sitting upstairs with his wife.” She bit her lower lip, then went on. “She’d been stabbed several times — I don’t really know how many — and he was covered with blood. And the knife was on the floor, right by the chair he was sitting on. The little girl was in the next room. She was—” Joni choked on her own words, tried to speak again, but couldn’t.

A silence fell over the little group, and then Myra said, “Show me,” her voice little more than a whisper. “I think I need to see where it happened.”

Joni hesitated, then led them up to the second floor and into the large room that occupied the entire south side of the house. “The bed was at the back,” she explained, nodding to the spot where Angel had placed it in her mind earlier. “There was a table and two chairs, I think. Anyway, Nate Rogers — that was his name — was sitting in one of them, and the knife was lying on the floor next to him.”

“Nate Rogers,” Myra breathed softly. “I remember hearing about him.” She turned and looked directly at her sister. “Wasn’t there something about him saying he couldn’t remember what happened?”

Joni nodded, and Marty Sullivan snorted in derision. “Yeah, right—‘couldn’t remember.’ Amazing how these guys kill their wives and kids and ‘can’t remember.’ Like it means they didn’t do it or something.”

“Nate Rogers never said he didn’t do it,” Joni said. “That’s the strange thing — he always said he must have done it but he just couldn’t remember. All he could recall was a voice whispering to him, but he couldn’t even remember what the voice said. He went through hypnosis and those truth drugs — lie detectors and everything else — and nobody could ever get anything else out of him. Even the doctors finally said that if he did it, he’d blotted the memory out so completely that they doubted it would ever come back to him.”

“Maybe he really didn’t do it,” Angel suggested. “Maybe—”

But before she could even formulate what might have happened, her aunt shook her head. “Oh, he did it, all right. They got enough experts in here to make sure, and by the time they were done, there wasn’t any question at all.” She frowned, recalling the reports she’d read that were in the papers at the time of the trial. “They found blood spatters on his face and clothes and hands that were only consistent with what would have happened if he’d—” Again she hesitated, but forced herself to go on. “Well, if he’d done it all himself. And there was a lot else — I can’t really remember it all. But there wasn’t any sign of anyone else having been in the house — I mean, not since the day they’d moved in.”

Myra Sullivan said nothing, scanning the bedroom, trying to picture it as it must have been the day its last occupant died. Her eyes roved over the floor, searching for bloodstains.

She looked at the walls as if seeking something — anything — that might give some physical sign of what had happened here. But there was nothing. “Did they ever find out why he did it?” she finally asked.

Joni Fletcher shook her head. “That was another of the weird things — there didn’t seem to be a motive. Everyone who knew them — their families, their friends from before they came here — said they were crazy about each other and had a terrific kid. No problems. But I guess you never know, do you?”

“So what happened to him?” Marty Sullivan asked. “They burn him?”

Joni chose to ignore the callousness of her brother-in-law’s tone. “In the end they sent him to a hospital for the criminally insane. I guess he’ll be there for the rest of his life.” She fell silent, then tugged at her sleeve and fingered the top button of the blue blazer she always wore when she was working.

“At any rate, that’s the story, and it’s why the price is negotiable. The bank took it over after Nate Rogers went into default on the mortgage, and the thing is, it appears that nobody wants to live in it. The bank keeps dropping the price, but it doesn’t seem to matter. So here it sits, and I think if you can deal with what happened, you can pretty much name your price — the bank just wants to get rid of it.”

“How come no one’s just bought it and torn it down?” Marty asked.

“Someone already tried,” Joni told him. “But as you saw from the beams downstairs and the fireplace and mantel, this is one of the oldest houses in the area — parts of it might date from the seventeenth century. So the Historical Society made sure it was protected years ago.”

Marty was quiet, as if turning it all over in his mind. Finally, he turned to Myra. “What do you think? If we really go in low and wind up getting it for next to nothing…” He let his voice trail off, leaving temptation hanging in the air.

No, Myra thought. It’s too awful. But even as she thought it, her eyes were again wandering over the room, examining every corner, searching the walls and ceiling, trying to find any trace of what had taken place here.

And then, in one of the filthy windows, she saw something. A face… the face of the Holy Mother… the Holy Mother smiling at her … As quickly as the fleeting vision came, it was gone, but it was enough for Myra. She’d seen the Holy Mother before — not often, but enough times — and knew that whenever the Virgin appeared to her, it was a sign of something good.

Something good. But what was it? Why had she appeared here, in this house?

A second later, when her husband spoke, she knew.

“Come on, Myra,” Marty said as they went back downstairs. “You’ve been talking about wanting a house for years, and maybe it’s just what we both need.”

With the vision of the Holy Mother still in her memory, Myra looked into her husband’s eyes, and for the first time in years saw the warm, gentle look he used to give her when they were dating and he could never do enough for her.

“A place of our own — a new beginning,” he said. “Maybe it’s what we all need. I can do most of the fix-up myself. You know I can.”