He tore a bite of meat off a rib, then sucked the thick sauce off his fingers. “Now that is what I call good,” he sighed.
On the other side of the table, a baby — probably just a year old and still in its mother’s arms — seemed to sense his mood. Gurgling and smiling, it stretched out its hand toward Ruston, offering him the remains of a potato chip that was clutched in its tiny fingers.
“Why, thank you,” Rusty said, reaching out to take the chip from the baby. “Don’t mind if I do. Don’t mind at all.”
The baby giggled happily, and Ruston decided that, at least for now, all was, indeed, right with the world.
RILEY LOGAN STUMBLED out of the carriage house door into the gathering dark of the evening.
At the top of the lawn, the house was still quiet, still deserted.
But inside Logan’s head, the voices still whispered. Now, though, one of them had risen above the others.
A woman’s voice.
A woman who was speaking to him, telling him what he must do.
“Not here,” she said. “I want to go where there are people.”
Logan’s grip tightened on the axe.
“I need to finish,” the voice whispered. “I need to finish it all.”
Logan moved toward the path through the woods that would take him to town.
In the distance, somewhere beyond the treetops, he could see a glow in the sky.
Lights.
Lots of lights.
All the people would be there.
As many as she wanted.
“Yes,” the woman sighed as he began moving toward the lights. “Oh, yes.”
ERIC BREWSTER WISHED he could sink into the pleasure of having Cherie Stevens next to him on the quilt his mother had brought from Pinecrest, and where they now sat with his family. He’d felt a pang of jealousy a couple of hours ago when he first spotted her talking with Adam Mosler, as well as a terrible feeling of disappointment that she was still hanging around with him. In fact, he’d felt a lot more jealousy, and a lot more disappointment, than he’d either expected or been willing to admit to Tad and Kent when they saw how he was looking at Cherie and started teasing him about it.
And he’d been even more surprised by how good he felt when she’d spotted him, cut her conversation with Mosler short, and come over to say hi, then stayed with him all afternoon, even as Adam Mosler started burning with visible anger. Indeed, he felt good enough about it that he didn’t even mind the leers Tad and Kent were giving him from the blankets they and their parents had spread next to the Brewsters’ quilt.
But even Cherie’s presence couldn’t quite dispel the dark sense of foreboding that had hung over him all day, the strange feeling that there was something he was supposed to have done that he had failed to do.
Or — possibly even worse — done something he shouldn’t have.
The problem was, he couldn’t quite remember what he and Tad and Kent had done the last time they’d gone into the room that was hidden behind the storeroom in the carriage house.
He remembered clearly what they’d intended to do — that was easy. They were going to go into the room, take apart everything they’d put together, and be done with it.
But he couldn’t remember taking anything apart.
Not the lamp, or the hacksaw.
Not even the scalpels from the medical bag.
But so what? It wasn’t like anything that had happened was their fault! Certainly he hadn’t killed Tippy, and Tad hadn’t killed Ellis Langstrom, and Kent hadn’t made a lamp shade out of the skin from Ellis’s arm!
All that happened was that they’d dreamed about those things.
But how could they have dreamed things they didn’t even know had happened?
And that, he knew, was what had been wrong all day: he had a strange feeling that something else was going to happen, something that he and Tad and Kent could have prevented if only they’d done what they went into the hidden room to do. But had they done it? Had they done anything at all?
Or, even worse, had they done the wrong thing?
That was the thought that had been hanging over him all day, and now, as the dark of the night gathered around him, that thought was getting heavier and heavier.
“Hey,” Cherie said, breaking into his reverie. “I know a great place to watch the fireworks from. You know the footbridge over the marsh? The one that leads to the path to The Pines?”
Eric nodded, and as he saw the sparkle in her eyes, his mood lifted slightly. Maybe, if they were alone in the dark…His spirits lifted even more as he considered the possibilities. “I know the bridge,” he said.
“My dad helps put on the fireworks, and they always put the platform off the bridge, so it’s the best place to watch from. Want to go?”
Once again Eric nodded, but out of the corner of his eye he could see his mother already shaking her head.
“But we should all be together,” Merrill began. “I don’t want to lose—”
“It’ll be okay,” Dan cut in, cutting off Merrill’s worries even before she’d finished voicing them. Then, certain her real fear was that Adam and his friends might gang up on Eric if they spotted him alone with Cherie, he said to Eric, “Why don’t you take Kent and Tad, too? With all four of you kids gone, there might be enough space on the blankets for the rest of us to actually stretch out.”
Eric looked at Cherie, who hesitated only a second before nodding, which was just enough to tell him she’d been hoping to be alone with him as much as he was hoping to be alone with her. Still, Tad and Kent would give them plenty of space, and at least nobody had suggested that they take Marci along, too. “Just make sure you come back here right after the fireworks are over,” his father went on as he and Cherie stood up.
“No problem,” Eric said as Kent and Tad got up, too. A moment later Cherie’s warm hand was holding his own as she led them all across the sea of people and blankets toward the path that would take them to the footbridge.
RILEY LOGAN MOVED silently along the path toward town, hearing nothing but the voices that seemed to come not only from within his own mind, but from all around him as well.
The woman’s voice was the clearest, rising above all the others.
“They never understood,” she was saying. “They never knew why I did it. They didn’t care. It didn’t matter about me. All that mattered was Father. Father and Mother. But they didn’t care about me, either. Nobody ever cared about me.”
Logan didn’t know if she was talking to him or to herself, but it didn’t matter.
She was talking, and he had to listen.
Had to listen, and had to obey.
She fell silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, the tone of her voice had changed. She said a single word: “Stop!”
Then all the others fell silent, and Logan froze in his tracks and for a moment heard nothing at all.
Then a different sound came to his ears.
A sound from directly ahead.
Someone on the path.
A man.
A man who was singing tunelessly to himself.
Logan crouched low to the ground, hunkered down in the brush at the side of the path.
He smelled the man before he came into sight.
“Drunk!” the woman whispered. “Just like Father!”
The man came into view, his stumbling gait telling Logan the woman had been right.
“Stand up to him!” the woman commanded. “Stand up and face him!”
Logan listened and obeyed.