“Well, you certainly were right,” Angel heard her mother saying as she came back down from the second floor. “It would do just fine for us.” Angel paused at the bottom of the stairs as she felt a tingle of anticipation, then her mother spoke again, with a wistful tone that made her excitement fade as quickly as it had come. “But I just don’t see how we can afford it.”
“For heaven’s sakes, Myra,” Joni Fletcher replied, her tone that of a big sister patiently explaining something to a deliberately dense younger sibling. “Don’t be a defeatist — where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Myra sighed. “I wish I could see how. I suppose the price might be fine for someone else, but I don’t see how we can swing it with Marty out of work and—” Her words died on her lips as Angel entered the room. “Maybe we should talk about this later,” she suggested, her eyes darting pointedly toward her daughter.
“I’m not a baby, Mom,” Angel said, flushing. “I know Dad doesn’t have a job right now.”
“I can get a job,” Marty Sullivan said, his eyes fixing on his daughter almost as if he thought it was her fault that he wasn’t working. “But I’m not gonna work for some ass—”
“Marty!” Myra broke in, her lips compressing in disapproval.
“Jeez, Myra—” Marty began, but seeing his wife’s expression turn even cooler, he quickly changed the subject. “This is a good house,” he declared, reaching out to gently touch the oak of the mantel, much as Joni Fletcher had earlier. “And a hell of a price.”
For a moment Myra seemed about to complain about her husband’s language yet again, but then decided there was a more pressing problem at hand. “But it’s still too much for us,” she reminded him.
“I told you, the price isn’t fixed,” Joni said, a little too quickly.
Myra eyed her sister suspiciously. “Why would that be? It’s already so far below anything else on the market…” Her voice trailed off as she tried to read her sister’s face, and realized it was the same expression she’d had when they were kids and there was something Joni didn’t want to tell their parents. “What is it, Joni?” she asked. “You might as well tell me what’s going on now — I can see by your face you’re going to have to do it sooner or later anyway.”
Joni Fletcher licked her lips nervously, then took a deep breath. “You’re right — I do have to tell you. It seems that — well, something happened here a few years ago, and—”
“What?” Myra interrupted. “The way you look, someone must have gotten killed, or—” Her voice died abruptly as she realized she’d come very close to the truth. “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she whispered, her right hand quickly tracing the four points of the cross on herself. “What happened?”
Joni Fletcher bit her lower lip, searching for the right words, but knowing there really weren’t any. Still, there was no way she could legally avoid telling any prospective buyer what had happened in this house, and sooner or later they would hear it anyway. “It was actually quite some time ago,” she began, the fingers of her 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.”