He stayed with her that night from shortly before ten o’clock until later than usual, until three forty-five. After making love, they drifted off to sleep in the Bellingham place.
By the time he said good-bye, hurried home, climbed the tree, and returned to his room, it was four o’clock.
He might have stripped, dropped into bed, and fallen instantly asleep. He might have awakened in the morning, self-satisfied with his secret escapade, only to find that he had been sleeping in the house of the dead.
As he quietly slid shut the lower sash of his window, he heard bells ringing somewhere on the second floor. Silvery, eerie, alien to this place. After a pause, they rang again. In the dark, he moved to his door to listen just as the bells rang a third time.
Easing open the door, he saw light in the hallway. Issuing from his parents’ and his sisters’ rooms.
On the hallway floor stood a black satchel. Beside it lay a pistol.
John knew guns. His father, a good marksman, hunted deer in season and taught his son. This wasn’t his father’s weapon.
A homemade silencer was fitted to the barrel. He removed it.
Odd noises in his sisters’ bedroom told him where the intruder must be.
The noises were not weeping or screaming, and he knew what the silence of the girls had to mean. If he thought about that, he would freeze or he would not have the strength to act, so he focused on the pistol and what he needed to do with it.
Weapon in hand, he eased to the open door to his parents’ room. They were lying in the bloody bed. Shot in their sleep. Something on their eyes. Something in their hands.
His rabbit heart, fast and timid. But no going back.
After a silence, the bells rang again.
John sidled along the hallway, holding the pistol in a two-hand grip. He hesitated a step short of the girls’ room.
Again the bells.
He stepped into the doorway, the light, the bleak future.
Giselle on the floor. Dead. Worse than dead. Marnie. Little Marnie. The suffering. Beyond comprehension. Blindness would be a blessing, to have been born without eyes.
John wanted death. Cover each girl with a blanket, lie down between them, and die.
Crouched over Giselle, the killer rang the bells one more time. Tall, as strange as a cockroach, quivering in his excitement. All bones and hands. Brute bones and greedy hands.
As bell-cry echoes still sang faintly off the walls, the beast raised his head, looking up from Giselle’s body, his freak-show face boiled bright by a hideous rapture, his mouth smeared red from cruel kisses, those black-hole eyes that drew entire worlds to destruction in their crushing depths.
The sinister voice shattered John with words: “This little girl said you were gone to Grandma’s for a week.”
Had he known that John would be coming back, the killer would have been waiting in his dark bedroom. Even in her terror, Giselle had the presence of mind to save her brother with a clever lie. She died that John might live.
Rising from his crouch, folded bones unfolding into pterodactyl ghastliness, the killer said, “Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.”
John’s arms were straight in front of him, elbows locked, pistol in a good tight grip, but his slamming heart shook him, and the gun shook with him, the sight jumping, jumping on the target.
Taking a step toward John, the killer said, “You’ll be a daddy someday. Then I’ll come back and use your wife and kids harder than I used your slutty sisters here tonight.”
The sound of the first shot was huge and hammer-hard in that confined space, a cannon blast, concussion waves bouncing wall to wall to wall, and the bullet sucked the splintered cartilage of the nose backward into the fevered brain as the killer staggered, stumbled, fell.
John stepped into the bedroom, stood over the fallen beast, and emptied the pistol’s magazine into the hateful face, obliterating the eyes that had seen his sisters in their agony and despair, shredding the mouth that had profaned them. He heard no shot after the first, but watched, seemingly in silence, as the demented face dissolved from miscreation into chaos.
John had no memory of going downstairs to the den. The next thing he knew, he was loading one of his father’s handguns with the intention of putting a single round through the roof of his mouth, that his shame and grief might be blown out with his brains.
His sister died with no hope but that John might live by virtue of her lie about his visit to a grandmother. He could not repay her love with a coward’s exit. His penance could be nothing less than that he must go on living.
The taste and the weight of cold steel were on his tongue when he heard the sirens that the gunshots had summoned.
They found him on his knees, and sobbing.
In the dayroom, where Walter and Imogene Nash ate their lunch and did their planning, John was lowering the pleated shades when Nicolette located him.
She had been on the computer, reading Alton Turner Blackwood’s journal. Her face was as pale as the white-gesso ground with which she prepared a new canvas before painting.
“Your family shouldn’t have been the fourth. He meant to kill the Calvinos third, the Paxtons fourth.”
He stared at her, not fully comprehending what she said but instinctively alarmed.
“The therapist who read it. He never told you. Yours was the third family on Blackwood’s list. When he came to your house that night, a police patrol car happened to be parked on your street. Two officers in it. Probably just taking a break. Blackwood spooked. He went to the Paxton place instead. Thirty-three days later, he came back for your family.”
John felt targeted. In someone’s gun sight at this very moment. The bullet in the barrel.
“If we’re
“But why would he revert to the original order?”
“Why not? He wants to do it like it should have been done. But John … my God.”
“What?”
“If he can change the order, why stick with thirty-three days?”
“Serial-killer periodicity. Who knows why? They don’t understand it themselves.”
She shook her head. “But today.
