That was the answer.
She would fall, and Amanda would take care of her.
As the voices closed in around her, shouted to her, Michelle Pendleton stepped off the bluff.
But Amanda didn’t come to take care of her. Just before she hit the rocks, she knew.
Amanda was never going to come again. The rocks reached out to her, as they had in the dream. Only this time, she didn’t scream.
This time, Michelle welcomed their embrace.
There was a quiet in the living room of the Pendletons’ house, but the silence offered no peace to the four people who sat stiffly around the fireplace. June seemed almost impassive, her eyes fixed on the fire that she had lit early in the day, lit only so that she could burn the doll. And burn it she had, and then, as if by unspoken consent, the fire had been kept alive.
They still didn’t know what had happened.
Josiah Carson had gone home, refusing to tell any of them what he had been talking about in the studio. Cal had tried to repeat Josiah’s garbled mumblings, but they seemed to make no sense, and finally, sometime in the afternoon, Tim had gone out to the studio. He had stared at the strange painting for a long time, then begun searching, not knowing exactly what he was looking for, but knowing that somewhere there would be something — something that would give him an answer.
He had found the sketches and taken them into the house. They had studied them, and seen with their own eyes how Susan Peterson had died, and how Billy Evans had died.
And each of them, at one time or another, had drifted out to the studio to look once more at the crimson-streaked painting that still rested on the easel, a mysterious link with a past they didn’t understand.
It was Corinne who first noticed the shadow.
It was indistinct, nearly lost in the vivid violence of the picture, but once she had pointed it out to them, they all saw it From one corner of the picture, a shadow appeared to project across the floor toward the dying Louise Carson.
It was a silhouette, really. A silhouette of a young girl, wearing an old-fashioned dress, and a bonnet. One of her arms was raised, and in her hand there seemed to be some kind of an object.
To each of them it was clear that the object in the child’s hand was a knife.
They all knew that Michelle had done the sketches and the painting. Tim insisted that it was the dark side of her personality expressing itself. She must have seen a picture of Louise Carson somewhere, and the image had remained in her mind. And then, as she began to invent “Amanda,” she had begun to take the stories of Paradise Point, the legends of that other, long-dead Amanda, and weave them together. For her, the ghost had truly been real. Even though it existed only in her own mind, it had been real.
Lisa Hartwick had been given a sedative and put to bed. When she woke up she felt confused, then remembered where she was.
She was in Michelle Pendleton’s bed, in Michelle Pendleton’s house.
She got out of bed, and went to the door. She listened, and heard the sound of voices murmuring downstairs. She opened the door and called to her father.
“Daddy?”
A moment later Tim appeared at the foot of the stairs.
“I can’t sleep,” Lisa complained. “Well, that’s all right.
We’ll be going home soon, anyway.”
“Can we go now?” Lisa asked. “I don’t like it here.”
“Right away, honey,” Tim promised, “You get dressed, then we’ll go.”
Lisa returned to the bedroom, and began dressing. She knew what they were talking about downstairs.
They were talking about Michelle Pendleton.
Lisa wanted to talk about her too, and tell everyone what she had seen on the beach.
But she was afraid to.
She was sure that if she told them, they would think she was crazy, too.
As she started down the stairs, she decided that she would never tell them what she had seen. Besides, maybe she hadn’t really seen it at all.
Maybe there really hadn’t been anybody up there with Michelle. Maybe what she’d seen hadn’t been a little girl in a black dress, wearing a bonnet.
Maybe it had only been a shadow.
EPILOGUE
It was Jennifer Pendleton’s twelfth birthday.
Jenny had grown into a beautiful girl, tall, blond, and blue-eyed like her parents, with a finely chiseled face that belied her youth. People meeting her for the first time seldom realized how young she was, and Jenny enjoyed pretending to be older than her years. If it worried June and Cal when boys seven or eight years older than their daughter called Jenny for dates, they tried not to show it: Jennifer was not only beautiful, but she was bright, and if she thought she could get away with it, she delighted in watching her parents worry about her.
June Pendleton had become something of an anomaly in Paradise Point. As the years passed, those twelve years since the Pendletons had come from Boston hoping for a better life and found, instead, a nightmare that had, finally, been beyond their comprehension, June had turned more and more to her art. She had found it difficult to make friends in Paradise Point — first because she was a stranger, and later, though it was never said to her face, because certain people in town had never forgiven her for her daughter’s madness. Even as Michelle and her strange insanity passed into the lore of the Point, her mother still lived with it, was reminded of it every day.
At first, she had wanted to leave and return to Boston. But Cal had refused. Through it all, his love for the house had never wavered. And, though he never spoke of it, not even to his wife, he had never forgotten Josiah Carson’s strange words in the studio that day. Whether Carson had spoken the truth or not, Cal chose to believe him. He was, at last, free of the guilt that had plagued him since the day Alan Hanley had died. He hadn’t killed Alan — Amanda had done that, as she had killed them all, including his own daughter. So he had stayed in Paradise Point, ignored the talk, and thrived.
Josiah Carson had left the Point almost immediately after Michelle died. Nearly everyone in the village had thought that something had gone wrong with Carson’s mind — he had spent his last few days in Paradise Point rambling about the “vengeance of the past,” but nobody had paid too much attention to him. Instead, Carson’s vague mumblings only built sympathy for Cal. Slowly at first, but inevitably, they had begun to accept him as the village doctor. There was, after all, no one else.
Neither Cal nor June ever talked about the events of twelve years ago, and when they talked of Michelle, which was seldom, they talked about Michelle as she had been before they had come to Paradise Point. Those first two months in Paradise Point, the months that had nearly torn their family apart, they preferred to ignore.
June didn’t mind; the memories were too painful.
And so the Pendletons lived quietly in the old house above the sea, Cal happily tending to his small practice, and June quietly working in her studio, on her darkly threatening seascapes.
And through it all, Jennifer had grown up, carefully shielded from the tragedies of the first weeks of her life. She heard rumors, of course — it would have been impossible for her not to have. But whenever she had asked her parents about the rumors, they assured her that she mustn’t believe everything she heard from her schoolmates. Stories, they told her, had a way of getting exaggerated.
That Jennifer could rarely convince any of her friends to come to her house had stopped bothering her years earlier — she simply attributed it to the fact that she lived too far out of town.
But then, for her twelfth birthday, she had asked if she could have a party.
June had opposed the idea, sure that the mothers of Paradise Point would never allow their children to come out to the house, but Jennifer had, as always, gone to her father. Cal had overruled June, telling her that he thought it was time Jenny began having a social life.