and brute force as surely as could money.
A few days earlier, Reese came to visit in the early afternoon of a school holiday, when Jack and Brenda were at work. Only Davinia and Lenny were home. He came with comic books and candy for Lenny, a wristwatch set with diamonds for Davinia. Never before had he been alone with the kids and never had he brought them anything. Davinia knew the wristwatch was an inappropriate gift, too expensive, its very value an improper insinuation. Reese played at being a loving uncle, which he had never been before, and found every excuse to press close to Davinia. He held her hand, his touch lingered over her bare arms, admiringly he smoothed her hair away from her face. Instead of kissing her chastely on the cheek, he kissed the corner of her mouth, and his lips would have brushed across hers if she had not pulled away.
Davinia was a bright but inexperienced girl who dated little and then only boys as innocent as she. Her beauty was enchanting, especially because it was a beauty equally of body, mind, and soul—and because in her humility she didn’t understand the power of her appearance. She was capable of finding joy in small things, in the flight of a bird or a cup of tea, and she had told her parents that she might choose a religious life in one sisterhood or another.
Brenda wondered what horror might have occurred during Reese’s unannounced visit if, shortly after his arrival, Jack’s sister Lois had not stopped by unexpectedly. Davinia was his niece, but that relationship meant nothing to a man who considered his little sister to be fair game and drove her to self-destruction. Brenda had seen him watch Davinia with lascivious interest, but she had been in denial of the possibility that he might act on his desire. Davinia was not as delicate as she looked, not emotionally fragile; but rape might do more than devastate her, might destroy her. Brenda was at times physically ill with the thought of it.
She and Jack were currently deciding whether she should give up her job to be sure the kids were never alone in the house. They had taken other steps to prevent the unthinkable. But Reese was clever, cunning, bold, without moral constraints, and unpredictable.
A slight draft motivated Brenda to get another afghan from a chair across the room. As she passed a window, Reese’s Mercedes pulled in to their driveway. He drove too fast, stopping with a bark of brakes.
At once, Brenda suspected her brother intended to cause some kind of trouble. If he didn’t intend it, he would foment it anyway. She shouted toward the kitchen, “
She hurried Lenny to his sister’s room and told them to lock the door. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe Reese had come back only to get the diamond wristwatch that he refused to take when Davinia tried to return it to him.
Reese Salsetto—more accurately, the rider that owns him now—raps lightly on one of the four windowpanes in the back door, and waves at Jack, who is doing women’s work in the kitchen, preparing something for the oven. Wiping his hands on his apron, Jack frowns as he approaches the door, but Reese gives him a sheepish grin and tries to look as if he has come to apologize for something, because Jack and Brenda are the kind of self-righteous prigs who at any one time have a thousand reasons why they should receive apologies.
Jack opens the door and says, “Reese, we’ve got to talk about some things,” and Reese says, “No, we don’t,” and shoots him twice with the silencer-equipped pistol. As if the muffled shots require an equally discreet response, Jack drops as quietly as a sack of laundry, and Reese steps over the body, closing the door behind him. This is the Sollenburgs redux, husband and wife and son shot dead, and then the daughter used in ways that she has never comprehended that she might be used. Although the assault begins on the evening of the thirty-second day after the Lucas murders, Reese and his rider will not be done with Davinia Woburn until well into the morning of October fifth, six or eight hours from now.
Brenda, succulent mother of the much-desired piglet, hurries into the kitchen, and Reese, speaking for himself
Brenda is a good woman who would have rescued her sister, Jean, if she had known what Reese intended, but her failure to save her sister has left her with a settled anger that has simmered in her for all these years. The bitter anger is the stirrup that might allow her to be mounted, and because she curses Reese as she kills him, the way into her is through the mouth.
She feels the rider enter and struggles fiercely to resist, reeling backward against a bank of cabinets, door pulls gouging at her back and buttocks. The rider encourages her anger, for if anger can be raised to fury, and if fury and terror crowd out all other feelings, she can be taken. Unlike many others who do not fully understand the nature of their rider, this woman knows it, not by name but for what it is. She sees at once the consequences of being taken, that it will ride her to her children and force her to abuse, torture, and murder them, and last of all to degrade herself in as many ways as its rich imagination can invent.
Just as her spine begins to feel like an accommodating saddle, she finds another emotion besides rage and terror, and she recalls the prayer of Saint Michael, which she hasn’t said since adolescence.
This sudden vomitous spew of pious words will not repel her new master, because it now rules her spine and will soon have control of her bones down to the marrow. The rider is moments away from using her voice for a cry of triumph when she turns the revolver on herself and squeezes off a round that punches through her chest, past her heart, ricochets off her sternum, off a clavicle, and lodges under her left scapular. White-hot pain magnifies her terror but entirely evaporates her rage. And as she falls to the floor, in the humble recognition of her mortality, she casts off her rider.
Recklessly, the son and the exquisitely ripe daughter respond to the shots, as though even weaponless they can halt the violence, perhaps with—what?—his guileless tears and with her pure heart. They are naive, helpless, the colt and filly, thinking meat machines that think too little. The rider wants the boy, for with the boy, the juicy piglet can still be reduced to a ferociously used, broken, despairing
No ride exists here, nothing to be taken but the house itself, its fleshless bones a poor substitute for a living host. A haunt is never a fraction as sweet as a possession, but soon other possible hosts will arrive, and there is no danger that this house will become a prison. Furious, the spirit takes the house with such force that a loud
32
DETECTIVE LIONEL TIMMINS KNEW THAT SOME IN THE DEPARTMENT, among themselves, called him the Walking Chest, and still others called him the Dog, because he had a bulldog face and he was difficult to shake loose when he got his teeth in a case. He had his teeth in this one, and he didn’t like the taste of it.
Because this was Homicide South, within the Lake District and only two blocks from his home, he caught the call and arrived behind the ambulance as its siren wound down to silence and the paramedics threw open their doors, the earliest he had ever arrived at a crime scene.
The medics stabilized the wounded—the husband critical, the wife less serious but not good—and took them away as four uniforms arrived to secure the scene. Lionel managed to ask a few questions and get answers from the woman before they carried her out.
The girl, Davinia, had called an aunt to take her and Lenny to the hospital. Lionel waited with them in the living room.
Wrenched with grief but determined to be brave, the boy held fast to his sister’s hand, so innocent of evil until now that his sudden education was a painful thing to see.
The girl was remarkable, a delicate rock. Although slender and only about five feet four, she seemed tall, strong, sure. Although her eyes, like her brother’s, glistened with tears, hers didn’t spill as his did. Lionel well knew that beauty was power, but her power had a deeper source.
Davinia provided the identity of the dead man in the kitchen and spoke frankly but not angrily about his visit five days earlier. She produced the unwanted diamond wristwatch, which looked like a year’s wages.
