“It’s my house, and I’ll yell if I want to!”
“Where are the kids?”
“School,” she said, but she couldn’t help glancing at the clock. Three-ten. They’d be home in twenty minutes.
“Look, I admit it’s not the most comforting thought in the world, but we’re stuck here—for the short term, at least—and we’re going to have to make the best of it. I suggest we don’t tell the kids—”
“Of course we’re not going to tell the kids,” she snapped. “But since our family seems to be the only one in town that doesn’t know what happened here, I’m sure someone, sometime, will tell them.”
“And when they ask, we’ll explain that there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Isn’t there?”
Gregory looked at her. “You honestly believe Bill Megan’s ghost is going to try to murder us in our sleep?”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
He wiped his forehead. “Jesus,” he sighed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, I’m just a stupid little backward Molokan girl, huh? Let me remind you, mister, that I’m the one from L.A. You’re the one from Hicksville here. So don’t try to pull any more-sophisticated-than-thou crap on me.”
“Just shut up,” he said.
“What?” she demanded.
He turned away. “We’ll talk about this when you’re more rational.”
“We’ll talk about it now!”
“No,” he said levelly. “We won’t.”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you.”
“Go to hell!” she said, but he was already walking down the hallway toward the bathroom. She turned her back on him and stormed into the kitchen. She was shaking, with fury and frustration and some emotion she could not identify, and she poured herself a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table, breathing deeply, drinking slowly, trying not to think about Gregory, trying not to think about the house or the murders, trying to calm down before the kids came home.
2
Sasha stood on the corner of Malachite Avenue, finishing her cigarette before turning onto her own street. She might be an adult, but she still didn’t want her parents to catch her. Her father would shit a brick if he ever caught her smoking, and while she wasn’t afraid to stand up to her parents, she didn’t want to go through all the hassle. It was better to avoid any conflict with the family and just pretend that things were going along the way they always had.
She took one last deep drag, then dropped the butt and ground it into the gravel with the toe of her shoe.
She popped a couple of Tic Tacs into her mouth and headed up the street toward home.
Adam assaulted her the moment she walked through the door. “What’s twelve base six?”
“What?”
“We’re doing base six in math. What’s twelve base six?”
Sasha pushed past him. “I don’t know.”
In the living room, her father put down his paper and looked coldly at her. “I thought I told you to be nice to your brother.”
“I am being nice. I just don’t know the answer to his question.”
“You were short, brusque, and rude. I told you before, you may be almost eighteen, but as long as you are living in this house I expect you to abide by our rules. I expect you to treat your family with decency and respect. And that includes Adam. Now I want you to help your brother with his homework.”
“Why don’t you help him, Father? Or don’t you know how?”
He stood up, his already red face growing livid. “I will not be spoken to that way in my own house!”
She thought he was going to hit her, and she stepped back, suddenly afraid. Neither of her parents had ever hit any of them before, aside from small slaps on the bottom when they were younger, and this new, threatening authoritarianism took her by surprise.
“You… help… Adam… with… his… homework,” her father said evenly.
Sasha glanced at her brother, and he seemed just as unnerved as she was.
That little shit Teo started laughing, but Sasha silenced her with a look.
“Do you understand me?” her father said.
“Yeah,” Sasha told him, but she did not stay around to prolong the discussion. She stomped up the stairs to her bedroom, half-expecting to hear her father’s footsteps following behind, but no one came after her, and she walked into the room and boldly slammed the door.
She threw her books on the bed. Everyone was acting fucking weird these days. Her father was all pissed off, her mother was all silent, Babunya seemed like she was getting ready to die. Everyone was freaked.
They should never have moved here.
She herself was behaving strangely—she certainly wasn’t the same person she had been back in California—but while she recognized that fact, she did not really care. She was happy with the new Sasha, happy with the way things were going, and if she had to live here in this dumpy little rathole of a town, at least she would do it on her own terms.
There was a tentative knock on her door, and she heard Adam’s voice. “Sasha?”
“Go away!” she said.
“You’re supposed to help me with—”
“Fuck off!” she yelled.
“You’re in trouble now.” Her brother’s footsteps receded down the short hallway and retreated down the stairs.
Sasha moved over to the door, locked it, then sat down on her bed.
And waited for her father.
3
The storm hit an hour out of Tucson.
Gregory had picked up replacement relays for the café’s soundboard at an electronics warehouse on the south side of the city, loaded them into the van, and headed immediately back toward McGuane, hoping to stay ahead of the weather, but the storm caught up to him just past the turnoff to Cochise Stronghold. There was only rain at first, and wind, but by the time he’d gotten off the interstate and was driving down the two-lane McGuane Highway, there were thunder and flashes of far-off lightning.
He sped up. Save for an occasional saguaro or paloverde tree, his vehicle was the tallest thing on this stretch of desert, and as he saw a jagged flash of lightning touch ground a couple of miles to his left, he increased his speed. The seconds between the increasingly deafening thunderclaps and the slashing blue-white bolts of lightning were steadily shrinking, and he wanted to make it to the mountains before the full force of the storm reached him.
Ordinarily, he would have been able to see for untold miles in every direction, but clouds and rain hemmed in the horizon, and though the lightning illuminated specific sections of desert, the land for the most part remained dark. Darkest of all was the highway before him, and though he knew the mountains were close, he could see nothing ahead save swaths of gray.
A whipcrack of thunder exploded nearby, so loud that it sounded as though a cannonball had shattered the van’s windows, and Gregory jumped, unintentionally swerving to the left. He saw no accompanying lightning, but his ears were still ringing and he knew that the hit had been close. The road was slick and dangerous, but he pushed the van up to eighty, wanting just to get out of this flat area before lightning hit the van.
Directly ahead and off to his left, a bolt of lightning so perfectly defined that it looked like it had been digitized by some Hollywood special-effects house hit a paloverde tree. The paloverde exploded, flying limbs on fire as they fell to the ground and bounced in the roadway. A deafening peal of thunder sounded at the precise instant of the hit, and it was the suddenness of the sound as much as anything else that caused Gregory to swerve out of the way and avoid the burning debris.