Authors: Robin Wasserman
The guiding truth of Charlotte King’s life: cleanliness was next to godliness. And on this day, she ascended.
The clothes, the books, the flotsam and jetsam of two generations – photo albums and trophies and cookbooks and dishes – that was easy. Into the trash, first, until she got tired of tying the bags and discovered heaving them out the window was simpler. Her own clothes went as well, and it was better this way, with nothing to separate her from the deed. Clean mind, clean body, clean soul. The heap of discards grew, until, as the wedding china crashed to the driveway, she felt she would nearly explode with the radiance spilling out of her. The dog, which Ellie had dragged home one day and which her husband had insisted they keep, obviously had to go as well.
The furniture went next: Television. Computer. Chairs. Table.
Clutter.
Trash.
Filth.
It was not the first time she’d dragged her family out of the mud; it was not the first time she’d nearly acted too late. Surely the Lord could forgive her for not suspecting sooner that a fourteen-year-old could harbor so stained a soul. If she hadn’t been vigilant, if she hadn’t, in one of her periodic sweeps, found the diary, she might never have known, and Ellie might have followed her dark path to its inevitable end. Instead, Charlotte had caught the animals in the act. A bucket of cold water hadn’t been enough to wash away their sin, but it had been a start.
Of course, Ellie had never thanked her mother for the work done that day, for the gift Charlotte had bestowed on her, delivering her, still dripping with her shame, to the deacon’s doorstep. But Charlotte had mothered three teenage girls. She knew better than to expect gratitude.
All these years later, Charlotte had allowed her vigilance to wane, and she saw now her mistake. She hadn’t addressed the root of the problem. The taint remained. The dirt. The source of original sin. The seeds had been planted here, in this house, and as long as it remained, so would the danger.
The bare rooms were glorious, but the surfaces still screamed for purification. There was, in case of emergency, a stock of white paint in the garage, and Charlotte saw, as if by divine vision, that this would be next, and right. A home of lines and corners and nothing but unbroken stretches of white.
In an ecstasy of certitude, she began to paint.
Baz slammed his bruised shoulder into the tackling dummy, hard.
Again.
Again.
It wasn’t working. The red was still there.
That’s how he thought of it: the red.
It was both like and unlike living in a fog. Sometimes it was a mist so real he could touch it – was surprised that his hands weren’t slick and wet with condensation. Sometimes he could even see it, his world tinged with red. Other times it was less tangible: the
feeling
of red. Neither fury nor lust nor fear, not exactly, but somehow all of them together, paired with something else: a
need.
The red wasn’t content to just sit within him. He was its vessel, and when it woke, the only way to exorcise it was to let it feed.
The red had been with him since he was a child and, except for that time with the family cat, he’d managed to keep it under control. Football helped. So did tormenting the occasional loser at school. Always before, when it came over him, there was a simple supply-and-demand formula to banish it. The red demanded targets; Baz supplied them. Normally, a few runs at the tackling dummy or a misshapen face was enough to clear the mist for another few days or, if he was lucky, weeks.
Not anymore.
Not since the storm.
The red was with him all the time now. He would never be rid of it. He had never been in control. It had been toying with him all these years, and now it was tired of the game, and it was tired of waiting.
It was impatient, and it was hungry, and all the dummies in the world wouldn’t shut it up.
He knew what would.
He ditched the field, changed out of his sweat-soaked jersey, and gave in to the magnetic pull of the Porter house (now the Prevette house) and
her.
The hedges around the perimeter were tall enough to hide him, so long as he was careful.
He was careful. From the edge of the backyard, he could see into her window. At night, when she stood before it with the blinds open, he could see her strip, a private show just for him. Almost as if she knew he was watching. Sometimes he sat there for hours, thinking about what he would do to her. Thinking didn’t make the red go away. It only intensified it, to an almost painful degree, but there was pleasure in the pain. He could wait. At least until he was safe, from the Prevettes and anyone else who might want to nose into his business. Until they were alone.
The red was a gift, he understood that now. A reward for good behavior, and he intended to live up to it.
He was going to make it hurt.
Deacon Barnes thought he had prepared himself for the pain, but he never knew there could be pain like this. He screamed. And then, because his faith was stronger than his flesh, and his love for the Lord stronger than all, he brought the hammer down again. This time, the nail went all the way through his palm.
“Praise be,” he managed to choke out, spots of black swimming across his vision and bile coating his tongue.
Praise be.
The Lord demanded sacrifice. A demonstration of fealty. Purification: all weakness, all temptation, all sin burned away. He would doubt himself no more, and no more would he doubt the Lord. Questions were for the weak. Envy, uncertainty, confusion, regret – these were the small concerns of small minds, impulses that stank of frail humanity. He had ascended beyond that. The pain would carry him to certainty.
This was the valley of darkness, but he would show no fear. He would be a beacon, and lead them to the light. Those who deserved to be led.
And so the nail, and so the palms, and so the pain.
It filled him up, and that was right. Satan would be left with nowhere to hide.
He smeared a finger through the blood and brought it to his tongue. This was the taste of salvation.
“Whatcha doing?” Milo asked.
Grace dropped another piece of paper into the burning waste bin. “Playing with matches,” she said. It probably wasn’t the best example to set for a bunch of small children, but the handful of kids who’d passed up the sudden field trip weren’t paying attention to her. Even if they were, the high school cheerleader hadn’t bothered to stick around after Ms. Tanner wandered off with the bulk of their charges, so who was left to complain?
“Can I?” Milo said.
“Why not?” She handed him a few of the crude wanted posters, each bearing a color photo of Cassandra Porter’s smiling face. It looked like a prom picture. She wore a pastel green dress. “Just one at a time, though. That’s important.”
“Why?”
She could have made up some kind of fire safety reason. Or told him the truth, that it was more satisfying that way, that she liked to watch the flames eat away at Cass’s face, singeing it into ash one perfect feature at a time, chin then lips then nose then eyes, curling in the heat and finally disappearing. She liked to imagine that she heard a tiny, paper-thin scream echoing up from the trash can. Cass was the one who’d told her about voodoo dolls one night, when they’d both gotten bored with whatever Disney trash her parents had planned they watch. Grace liked to imagine that each time she set the match to the photo, Cass, wherever she was, felt at least a tingle of heat across her scalp, along with a shiver of certainty that someone was out there, hunting. She could have told Milo that for some reason it seemed that if she set the whole stack on fire at once, it wouldn’t have the same effect. But Milo was eight, and so it was easy enough to just say “Because.”
He went with it.
“What do you think will happen if they find her?” he said, dropping a page into the fire. It wasn’t as satisfying as when she did it herself, but it was good enough.
“I think she’ll get what she deserves,” Grace said.
Lately, it was all she could think about.
When her parents had been around, there’d been plenty of other things to distract her. The strain of smiling just the right amount, as if everything were normal. The tense pause, after every line, waiting to see if it would set off another unpredictable bout of paternal tears; the struggle of attending school every day and, when that became too tedious, the additional struggle of keeping her parents from finding out how many days she’d skipped. The puzzle of how to fill that time, hours that shuffled past with all the ardor of a retirement-home escapee.
Now, alone in the house since the storm, she had no one to pretend for and no one to catch her in her lies. She had nothing to do but sleep and read and come to the church basement faithfully every day and play with the children, Milo especially. The torture of being around him – of pretending to laugh at his dumb little-kid jokes and tolerating his dumb little-kid questions and suffering through the farce of a worshipful little brother – seemed like a reasonable penance. She hadn’t managed to protect her own little brother – let her put up with someone else’s.
It wasn’t a terribly demanding schedule, and it offered plenty of time to focus on the only thing left that seemed to matter: Cassandra Porter. Where she would find Cassandra Porter. What she would do when she found her.
It had been her birthday, the night her parents announced that Owen was on the way. They’d served up the news along with the cake, like it was supposed to be the best present of all. And because parents, even the good ones, never really get it, they’d been surprised when she burst into tears and fled to her room. She’d stayed awake all that night, imagining what it would be like to have a baby in the house, sucking up all her parents’ attention, all their love. A baby would be needy and cute and it would never talk back. It would lay claim to her parents, who were supposed to belong to her. Only to her.
Then the baby had come, and it had all come true… and she’d learned to deal. She’d even decided that the baby was cuter than expected, if not as cute as everyone else seemed to think. That, at least when her mother was tired and her father was busy and she had to hold Owen against her shoulder and rock him to sleep, she didn’t actually mind having him around. But she never quite got used to the fact that her parents belonged to him, too. And now he was gone, and he’d taken them away with him. They weren’t real anymore: they talked, they ate, they occasionally even smiled, but they were empty. It was all Cass’s fault. Cass had stolen her family, and left Grace all alone.
She was
alone.
Grace had promised herself, when Owen was still lying blue on the floor, that Cass would die. That Grace would do it herself. But she was a kid, and kids made idle promises all the time.
I
promise
not
to
lie. I promise to do my homework. I promise to be good forever if you let me have one last cookie.
A kid’s promise didn’t have to mean anything.
She didn’t feel like a kid anymore. Lately, she’d felt like making another promise. A real one. She was old enough to know that real life wasn’t anything like TV. Killing someone was probably harder than it looked. She had no idea whether she could actually pull a trigger or stab a knife or set a fire or do any of the hundred things that rushed into her mind whenever there was a vacant moment.
But she was starting to think maybe she could.
“What if she’s not so bad?” Milo said.
“She is.”
“Yeah, but what if she’s not?”
“But she
is.
” Be nice, she reminded herself. Nice like she’d never been to Owen.
“You don’t
know.
” Now he was whining.
“And you do?” She took the flyers back from him, dropped another one in the fire. Smoke was starting to billow. Soon some kind of fire alarm would probably go off and all hell would break loose. Let it. There was no one to punish her, and nothing to punish her with.
“So maybe I do,” he said.
“Do you know what that girl did?”
“She says she didn’t mean to,” he said.
She stopped, forcing her gaze away from the flame. “What?”
“I don’t think she’s a bad guy,” he said. “And I’m an expert.”
“You know her? Cassandra?”
Milo pressed his hands to his mouth, a cartoonish tableau of someone who’d said too much.
“Milo?”
He shook his head.
She wanted to shake
him.
“Do you know something, Milo? Something you’re not supposed to?”
“It’s a secret,” he said. “I promised not to tell anyone.”
“But I’m not ‘anyone.’ I’m Grace.”
“That’s true,” he admitted.
“And you trust me, don’t you?”
Milo nodded.
“We’re friends, right?”
“You’re my best friend,” he said, too solemnly for his age. “But her, too.”
“Cassandra. Who’s not a bad guy.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Best friends trust each other, Milo,” she said. Her hands were shaking. “And they really like to meet their friends’ other best friends.”
“You have to promise you won’t tell.”
“I promise.”
“No, you
really
have to promise. Shake on it,” he said.
They shook on it.
“You sure?” he asked. “You won’t say anything? To anyone?”
She nodded. “Best friend’s honor.”
He bent his lips toward her ear and told her a secret.
When it happened, Cass thought it was a dream, because that was how it always happened in her dreams. The door blowing open, men in uniforms yanking her to her feet, wresting her hands behind her back, and dragging her away.
But it wasn’t a dream, because in the dreams she fought back. Now she went willingly, bowing her head and offering her wrists for their handcuffs. She cooperated. At least, until the first blow landed. After that, she fought. It was of no use. Not with her hands chained. Not against three grown men with steel-tipped boots and metal batons. She screamed for Daniel, for anyone, even the Preacher with his guns. No one came. They got her on the ground and kicked her between them like a soccer ball, a rousing game of baby-killer-in-the-middle. When she hurt enough to cry uncontrollably but not enough to pass out, the shortest one said, “Save some for later,” and they did.