And in my best behavior
I am really just like him.
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid
– SUFJAN STEVENS,
“JOHN WAYNE GACY, JR.”
I rang the doorbell of Rebecca Clay’s house. I could hear the waves breaking in the darkness. Jackie Garner and the Fulcis were long gone, now that Merrick was dead. I had called ahead and filled her in on what had happened. She told me that the police had called her after I admitted that I had lied about Jerry Legere, and she had made a formal identification of his body earlier that day. They had interviewed her about her ex-husband’s death, but there was little that she could add to what they already knew. She and Legere had been completely estranged, and she had neither seen nor heard from him in a long time until I had begun asking questions, and he had called her a couple of nights before his death, drunk, and demanding to know what she thought she was doing by setting a private eye on him. She had hung up, and he had not called back.
She answered the door wearing an old sweater and a pair of loose-fitting jeans. Her feet were bare. I could hear the TV in the living room, and through the open door I saw Jenna seated on the floor, watching an animated movie. She looked up to see who had entered, decided that I wasn’t anyone for whom it was worth missing anything, and returned to her viewing.
I followed Rebecca into the kitchen. She offered me coffee or a drink, but I declined both. Legere, she said, would be released for burial the following day. Apparently, he had a half brother down in North Carolina who was flying up to take care of the arrangements. She told me that she would be attending the funeral for the half brother’s sake, but that she wouldn’t be taking her daughter along. “It’s not something that she needs to see,” she said. She sat at the kitchen table and fiddled with an empty cup. “So it’s all over,” she said.
“In a way. Frank Merrick is dead. Your ex-husband is dead. Ricky Demarcian and Raymon Lang are dead. Otis Caswell is dead. Mason Dubus is dead. The Somerset County Sheriff ’s Department and the ME’s office are digging for the remains of Lucy Merrick and Jim Poole up at Gilead. That’s a lot of dead people, but I suppose you’re right: it’s over for all of them.”
“You sound sick of it.”
I was. I had wanted answers, and the truth about what had happened to Lucy Merrick and Andy Kellog and the other children who had been abused by men masked as birds. Instead, I was left with the sense that, the girl named Anya apart, and the removal of a little evil from the world, it had all been for nothing. I had few answers, and at least one of the abusers remained at large: the man with the eagle tattoo. I also knew that I had been lied to all along, lied to in particular by the woman who now sat before me, and yet I could not find it in my heart to blame her.
I reached into my pocket and removed the photograph that I had taken from Raymon Lang’s album. The little girl’s face was almost hidden by the body of the man who knelt above her on the bed, and he himself was visible only from the neck down. His body was almost absurdly thin, the bones visible through the skin of his arms and legs, every muscle and sinew standing out upon his frame. The photo had been taken more than a quarter of a century before, judging by the age of the girl. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Beside her, jammed between two pillows, was a doll with long red hair and dressed in a blue pinafore. It was the same doll that Rebecca Clay’s daughter now carried around with her, a doll passed on to her by her mother, a doll that had given Rebecca comfort during the years of her abuse.
Rebecca looked at the photograph, but she did not touch it. Her eyes grew glassy, then damp with tears, as she stared at the little girl that she once was.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“In Raymon Lang’s trailer.”
“Were there others?”
“Yes, but none like this one. This was the only one in which the doll was visible.”
She pressed her hand against the picture, blotting out the form of the man who towered above her younger self, covering the naked body of Daniel Clay.
“Rebecca,” I asked, “where is your father?”
She stood and walked to a door behind the kitchen table. She opened it and flicked a switch. Light shone on a set of wooden steps that led down to the basement. Without looking back at me, she began to descend, and I followed.
The basement was used for storage. There was a bicycle, now too small for her daughter, and assorted boxes and cartons, but there was nothing that looked as if it had been moved or used in a long time. It smelled of dust, and the concrete floor had begun to crack in places, long dark lines extending like veins from a spot in the center. Rebecca Clay extended a bare foot and pointed its painted toes at the floor.
“He’s down there,” she said. “That’s where I put him.”
She had been working down in Saco that Friday, and there had been a message on her answering machine when she got back to her apartment. Her babysitter, Ellen, who looked after three or four kids each day, had been taken to the hospital following a heart scare, and Ellen’s husband had called to say that, obviously, she would be unable to pick up any of her charges from the school. Rebecca checked her cell and found that the battery had run down while she was in Saco. She had been so busy that she had failed to notice. For a moment, she felt utter panic. Where was Jenna? She called the school, but everyone had gone home. She then called Ellen’s husband, but he didn’t know who had taken Jenna after school. He suggested that she call the principal, or the school secretary, for both had been informed that Jenna would not be picked up that day. Instead, Rebecca called her best friend, April, whose daughter, Carole, was in Jenna’s class at school. Jenna wasn’t with her either, but April knew where she was.
“Your father collected her,” she said. “Seems the school found his number in the book and called him when they heard about Ellen and couldn’t get in touch with you. He came by and took her back to his house. I saw him at the school when he came to collect her. She’s fine, Rebecca.”
But Rebecca thought that nothing would ever be fine again. She was so scared that she threw up on her way to the car, and threw up again as she drove to her father’s house, coughing up bread and bile into an empty convenience store bag as she waited at the lights. When she got to the house, her father was out in the garden, raking dead leaves, and the front door was open. She rushed past him without speaking and found her daughter in the living room, doing just what she was doing now: watching TV from the floor, and eating ice cream. She couldn’t understand why her mommy was so upset, why she was hugging her and crying and scolding her for being with Grandpa. She had been with Grandpa before, after all, although never alone and always with her mommy. It was Grandpa. He had bought her fries and a hot dog and a soda. He had taken her to the beach, and they had collected seashells. Then he had given her a big bowl of chocolate ice cream and left her to watch TV. She’d had a nice day, she told her mommy, although it would have been even better if her mommy had been there with her.
And then Daniel Clay was at the living room door, asking her what was wrong, as though he was just a regular grandfather and a regular father and not the man who had taken his daughter to his bed from the age of six until fifteen, always being gentle and kind, trying not to hurt her, and, sometimes, when he was sad or when he had been drinking, apologizing for the night that he had let another man touch her. Because he loved her, you see. That was what he always told her: “I’m your father, and I love you, and I’ll never let that happen to you again.”
I could hear the bass notes of the television vibrating above our heads. Then it went silent, and there were footsteps as Jenna headed upstairs.
“It’s her bedtime,” said Rebecca. “I never have to tell her when to go. She just heads up to bed all by herself. She likes her sleep. I’ll leave her to clean her teeth and read, then I’ll kiss her good night. I always try to kiss her good night, because then I know that she’s safe.”
She leaned back against the brick wall of the basement and ran the fingers of her hand through her hair, pushing it back from her forehead and exposing her face.
“He hadn’t touched her,” she said. “He’d done just what she said he’d done, but I understood what was happening. There was a moment, just before I brushed past him and took Jenna home, when I could see it in his eyes, and he knew that I saw it. He was tempted by her. It was starting again. It wasn’t his fault. It was an illness. He was sick. It was like a disease that had been in remission, and now it was returning.”
“Why didn’t you tell someone?” I asked.
“Because he was my father, and I loved him,” she replied. She didn’t look at me as she spoke. “I suppose that sounds ridiculous to you, after what he did to me.”
“No,” I said. “Nothing sounds ridiculous to me anymore.”
She worried at the floor with her foot. “Well, it’s the truth, for what it’s worth. I loved him. I loved him so much that I went back to the house that night. I left Jenna with April. I told her that I had some work to do at home, and asked if she’d mind letting Jenna sleep over with Carole. They often did that, so it was no big deal. Then I came here. My father answered the door, and I told him that we needed to talk about what had happened that day. He tried to laugh it off. He was doing some work in the basement and I followed him down here. He was going to lay a new floor, and he had already started breaking up the old concrete. The rumors had started, by that point, and he’d virtually been forced to cancel all of his appointments. He was already becoming a pariah, and he knew it. He tried to hide his unhappiness about it. He said it would give him the time to do all kinds of jobs around the house that he’d been threatening to do for so long.
“So he just kept breaking the floor while I screamed at him. He wouldn’t listen. It was as though I was making it all up, all the things that had happened to me, all the things that he’d done and that I believed he wanted to do again, but this time with Jenna. He would only say that whatever he had done, he’d done out of love. ‘You’re my daughter,’ he said. ‘I love you. I’ve always loved you. And I love Jenna too.’
“And when he said that, something fell apart inside of me. He had a pickax in his hands, and he was trying to lever up a slab of concrete. There was a hammer on the shelf beside me. He had his back to me, and I hit him on the crown of the head. He didn’t fall down, not at first. He just bent over and put his hand to his scalp, like he’d smacked it against a beam. I hit him again, and he fell down. I think I hit him twice more. He started to bleed into the dirt, and I left him there. I went upstairs to the kitchen. Blood had splashed on my face and hands, and I washed it off. I cleaned the hammer too. There was hair caught in it, I remember, and I had to pick at it with my fingers. I heard him moving down in the basement, and I thought he tried to say something. I couldn’t go back down, though. I just couldn’t. Instead, I locked the door and sat in the kitchen until it got dark, and I couldn’t hear him moving around any longer. When I unlocked the door, he had crawled to the bottom of the stairs, but he hadn’t been able to climb up. I went down to him then, and he was dead.
“I found some plastic sheeting in the garage and I wrapped him in it. There used to be a greenhouse in the back garden. It had a dirt floor. It was dark by then, and I dragged him out there. That was the hardest part: getting him up from the basement. He didn’t look like he weighed a lot, but it was all muscle and bone. I dug a hole and put him in, then covered him up again. I suppose I was already planning, already thinking ahead. It never crossed my mind to call the police or to confess to what I’d done. I just knew that I didn’t want to be separated from Jenna. She was everything to me.
“When it was all done, I went home. The next night, I waited until dark then drove my father’s car up to Jackman and left it there. I reported him missing once the car was taken care of. The police came. Some detectives looked at the basement floor, like I knew they would, but my father had only just started tearing it up, and it was clear that there was nothing underneath it. They knew all about my father, and when they found the car up in Jackman, they figured he’d fled.
“After a couple of days, I came back and moved the body. I’d been lucky. It had been wicked cold that month. I guess it kept him, well, you know, from rotting too much, so there wasn’t a smell, not really. I started to dig in the basement. It took me most of the night, but he had taught me what to do. He always said that a girl should know how to take care of a house, how to fix things and keep them in order. I cleared a space of rubble and dug down until there was a hole big enough to take him. I covered him up, then I went upstairs and fell asleep in my old room. You wouldn’t think that someone could just fall asleep after doing something like that, but I slept straight through until midday. I slept so peacefully, better than I could ever remember doing before. Then I went back down and kept working. Everything that I needed was down there, even a little mixer for the cement. Getting the rubble up took some time, and my back ached for weeks after, but once that was done, it was all pretty easy. It took me a day or two over the weekend, all told. Jenna stayed with April. Everything just worked out.”
“And then you moved into this house.”
“I couldn’t sell it because it wasn’t mine to sell, and anyway I would have been afraid to do that even if it had been, just in case someone decided to renovate the basement and found what was there. It seemed better to move in. Then we just stayed here. You know what the strange thing is, though? You see those cracks in the floor? They’re new. They only started appearing in the last couple of weeks, ever since Frank Merrick came around causing trouble. It’s like he awakened something down there, as if my father heard him asking questions and tried to find a way back into the world. I’ve started to have nightmares. I dream that I hear noises from the basement, and when I open the door, my father is climbing the steps, hauling himself up from the dirt to make me pay for what I’ve done, because he loved me, and I’d hurt him. In my dream, he ignores me and starts crawling toward Jenna’s room, and I keep hitting him, over and over, but he won’t stop. He just keeps crawling, like a bug that won’t die.”
Her toe had begun to explore one of the cracks in the floor. She withdrew it quickly when she became aware of what she was doing, the description of her nightmares reminding her of what lay below.
“Who helped you with all of this?” I asked.
“Nobody,” she said. “I did it alone.”
“You drove your father’s car up to Jackman. How did you get back down after you’d abandoned it?”
“I hitched a ride.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
But I knew that she was lying. After all that she had done, she wouldn’t have taken a chance like that. Someone followed her up to Jackman, then drove her back east again. I thought it might have been the woman, April. I remembered the way they had looked at each other that night after Merrick had broken the window. Something had passed between them, a gesture of complicity, an acknowledgment of a shared understanding. It didn’t matter. None of it really mattered.
“Who was the other man, Rebecca, the one who took the photograph?”
“I don’t know. It was late. I heard someone drinking with my father, then they came to my room. They both smelled pretty bad. I can still recall it. It’s why I’ve never been able to drink whiskey. They turned on the bedside light. The man had a mask on, an old Halloween mask of a ghost that my father used to wear to frighten the trick-or-treaters. My father told me that the man was a friend of his, and that I should do the same things that I did for him. I didn’t want to, but…” She stopped for a moment. “I was seven years old,” she whispered. “That’s all. I was seven. They took pictures. It was like it was a game, a big joke. It was the only time it ever happened. The next day, my father cried and told me he was sorry. He told me again that he loved me, and that he never wanted to share me with anyone else. And he never did.”
“And you’ve no idea who it might have been?”
She shook her head, but she would not look at me.
“There were more pictures of that night in Raymon Lang’s trailer. Your father’s drinking buddy was in them, but his head wasn’t visible. He had a tattoo of an eagle on his arm. Do you remember it?”
“No. It was dark. If I did see it, I’ve forgotten it over the years.”
“One of the other children who was abused mentioned the same tattoo. Someone suggested to me that it might be a military tattoo. Do you know if any of your father’s friends served in the army?”
“Elwin Stark, he did,” she said. “I think Eddie Haver might have been in the army too. They’re the only ones, but I don’t think either of them had a tattoo like that on his arm. They came on vacation with us sometimes. I saw them on the beach. I would have noticed.”
I let it go. I didn’t see what else I could do.
“Your father betrayed those children, didn’t he?” I asked.
She nodded. “I think so. They had those pictures of him with me. I guess that’s how they made him do what he did.”
“How did they get them?”
“I suppose the other man from that night passed them on to them. But, you know, my father really did care about the kids he treated. He tried to look out for them. Those men made him choose the ones that he gave to them, made him pick children to be abused, but he seemed to work twice as hard for the rest because of it. I know it makes no sense at all, but it was almost like there were two Daniel Clays, the bad one and the good one. There was the one who abused his daughter and betrayed children to save his reputation, and the one who fought tooth and nail to save other kids from abuse. Maybe that was the only way he could survive without going insane: by separating the two parts, and by taking all of the bad stuff and calling it ‘love.’”
“And Jerry Legere? You suspected him after you found him with Jenna, didn’t you?”
“I saw something of what I had seen in my father in him,” she said, “but I didn’t know he was involved, not until the police came and told me how he had died. I think I hate him more than anyone. I mean, he must have known about me. He knew what my father had done and, somehow, it made me more attractive to him.” She shuddered. “It was like, when he was fucking me, he was fucking the child I was as well.”
She sank down on the floor and laid her forehead on her arms. I could barely hear her when she spoke again.
“What happens now?” she asked. “Will they take Jenna away from me? Will I go to jail?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing happens.”
She lifted her head. “You’re not going to tell the police?”
“No.”
There was no more to say. I left her in the basement, sitting at the foot of the grave she had dug for her father. I got in my car and I drove away to the susurration of the sea, like an infinite number of voices offering quiet consolation. It was the last time I would ever hear the sea in that place, for I never returned there again.
There was one more link, one more connection that remained to be explored. After Gilead, I knew what connected Legere to Lang, and what in turn connected Lang to Gilead and to Daniel Clay. It wasn’t merely a personal link, but a professional one: the security firm, A-Secure.
Joel Harmon was in his garden when I arrived, and it was Todd who answered the door and escorted me through the house to see him.
“You look like you might have spent time in the army, Todd,” I said.
“I ought to bust your ass for that,” he replied good-humoredly. “Navy. Five years. I was a signalman, a damned good one too.”
“You get all tattooed up in the navy?”
“Damn straight,” he said. He rolled up the right sleeve of his jacket, revealing a twisted mass of anchors and mermaids. “I’m real traditional,” he said. He let the sleeve fall. “You got a reason for asking?”
“Just curious. I saw how you handled your gun on the night of the party. It looked like you’d held one before.”
“Yeah, well, Mr. Harmon’s a wealthy man. He wanted someone who could look out for him.”
“You ever have to look out for him, Todd?” I asked.
He stopped as we reached the garden, and stared at me. “Not yet,” he said. “Not like that.”
Harmon’s son and daughter were both home that day, and halfway down the lawn Harmon was pointing out changes to them that he hoped to make to the flowers and shrubs come the spring.
“He loves the garden,” said Todd, following the direction of my gaze and seemingly anxious to move the subject away from his gun and his obligations, real or potential, to Harmon. “Everything out there he planted himself, or helped to plant. The kids lent a hand too. It’s their garden as much as his.”
But now I wasn’t looking at Harmon, or his children, or his garden. I was looking at the surveillance cameras that kept vigil on the lawn and the entrances to the house.
“It looks like an expensive system,” I said to Todd.
“It is. The cameras themselves switch from color output to black-and-white when the lighting conditions are poor. They’ve got focus and zoom capabilities, pan and tilt, and we have quad switchers that allow us to view all camera images simultaneously. There are monitors in the kitchen, Mr. Harmon’s office, the bedroom, and in my quarters. You can’t be too careful.”
“No, I guess not. Who installed the system?”
“A company called A-Secure, out of South Portland.”
“Uh-huh. That was the company Raymon Lang worked for, wasn’t it?”
Todd jerked like he’d just been hit with a mild electric shock.
“I-I suppose it was.” Lang’s shooting, and the discovery of the child beneath his trailer, had been big news. It would have been hard for Todd to have missed it.
“Was he ever out here, possibly to check the system? I’m sure it needs maintenance once or twice a year.”
“I couldn’t say,” said Todd. He was already going on the defensive, wondering if he’d said too much. “A-Secure sends someone out regularly as part of the contract, but it’s not always the same guy.”
“Sure. That figures. Maybe Jerry Legere came out here instead. I suppose the company will have to find someone else to take care of it, now that they’re both dead.”
Todd didn’t reply. He seemed about to walk me down to Harmon, but I told him it wasn’t necessary. He opened his mouth to protest, but I raised a hand, and he closed it again. He was smart enough to know that there was something going on that he didn’t fully understand, and the best thing to do might be to watch and listen, and intervene only if it became absolutely necessary. I left him on the porch and made my way across the grass. I passed Harmon’s kids on the way down as they headed back to the house. They looked at me curiously, and Harmon’s son seemed about to say something, but they both relaxed a little when I smiled at them in greeting. They were good-looking kids: tall, healthy, and neatly but casually dressed in various shades of Abercrombie amp;Fitch.
Harmon didn’t hear me approach. He was kneeling by an Alpine garden flower bed dotted with weathered limestone, the rocks sunk firmly into the ground, the grain running inward and the soil around them scattered with stone chips. Low plants poked through the gaps between the rocks, their foliage purple and green, silver and bronze.
My shadow fell across Harmon, and he looked up.
“Mr. Parker,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting company, and you sneaked up on my bad side. Nevertheless, now that you’re here, it gives me the chance to apologize for what I said to you on the telephone when last we spoke.”
He struggled a little to stand. I offered him my right hand and he took it. As I helped him up, I gripped his forearm with my left hand, forcing the sleeve of his shirt and his sweater up on his forearm. The claws of a bird were briefly revealed upon his skin.
“Thank you,” he said. He saw where my attention was directed, and moved to pull his sleeve back down.
“I never asked you how you damaged your hearing,” I said.
“It’s a little embarrassing,” he replied. “My left ear was always weaker than my right, the hearing just slightly worse. It wasn’t too serious, and it didn’t interfere any with my life. I wanted to serve in Vietnam. I didn’t want to wait for the draft. I was twenty, and full of fire. I was assigned to Fort Campbell for my basic training. I hoped to join the 173rd Airborne. You know, the 173rd was the only unit to make an airborne assault on an enemy position in Vietnam? Operation Junction City in sixty-seven. I might have made it over there too, except a shell exploded too close to my head during basic training. Shattered my eardrum. Left me near deaf in one ear and affected my balance. I was discharged, and that was as close as I ever got to combat. I was one week away from finishing basic.”
“Is that where you got the tattoo?”
Harmon rubbed his shirt against the place on his arm where the tattoo lay, but he did not expose the skin again.
“Yeah, I was overoptimistic. I put the cart before the horse. Never got to add any years of service underneath. I’m just embarrassed by it now. I don’t show it much.” He peered carefully at me. “You seem to have come here armed with a lot of questions.”
“I’ve got more. Did you know Raymon Lang, Mr. Harmon?”
I watched him think for a moment.
“Raymon Lang? Wasn’t he the guy who got shot up in Bath, the one who had the child stashed under his trailer? Why would I know him?”
“He worked for A-Secure, the company that installed your surveillance system. He did maintenance for them on cameras and monitors. I wondered if you might have met him in the course of his work.”
Harmon shrugged. “I might have. Why?”
I turned and looked back toward the house. Todd was talking with Harmon’s children. All three were watching me. I recalled a remark of Christian’s that a pedophile might prey on the children of others yet never make any approaches to his own children, that his family might remain entirely unaware of his urges, allowing him to preserve the image of a loving father and husband, an image that was, in a sense, simultaneously both the truth and a lie. When I had spoken to Christian, it was Daniel Clay whom I had in mind, but I had been wrong. Rebecca Clay knew exactly what her father was, but there were other children who did not. There might have been many men with tattoos of eagles on their left arms, even men who had abused children, but the links between Lang and Harmon and Clay, however tentative, could not be denied. How did it happen, I wondered? How did Lang and Harmon come to recognize something in each other, a similar weakness, a hunger that they both shared? When did they decide to approach Clay, using his access to target those who were particularly vulnerable, or those who might not be believed if they made allegations of abuse? Did Harmon bring up that drunken night when Clay had allowed him to abuse Rebecca as leverage against the psychiatrist, for Harmon had been the other man in the house on the night that Daniel Clay, for the first and last time, had shared his daughter with another, and had drunkenly allowed pictures to be taken of the encounter. If these were used carefully, Harmon could have destroyed Clay with them while making sure that his hands were clean. Even an anonymous mailing to the cops or the Board of Licensure would have been enough.
Or did Clay even have to be blackmailed? Did they share the evidence of their abuse with him? Was that how he fed his own hunger in those years after he ceased to torment his own daughter as she grew older, before the reemergence of those old urges that Rebecca saw in his face as her own child began to bloom?
I turned back to Harmon. His expression had changed. It was the face of a man who was calculating the odds, assessing his degree of risk and exposure.
“Mr. Parker,” he said, “I asked you a question.”
I ignored him. “How did you do it?” I continued. “What brought you together, you and Lang, and Caswell and Legere? Bad luck? Mutual admiration? What was it? Then, after Clay disappeared, your supply dried up, didn’t it? That was when you had to look elsewhere, and that brought you into contact with Demarcian and his friends in Boston, and maybe Mason Dubus too, or had you paid him a visit long before then, you and Clay both. Did you worship at his feet? Did you tell him about your ‘Project’: the systematic abuse of the most vulnerable children, the ones who were troubled, or whose stories were less likely to be believed, all targeted through Clay’s inside knowledge?”
“You be careful, now,” said Harmon. “You be real careful.”
“I saw a photograph,” I said. “It was in Lang’s trailer. It was a picture of a man abusing a little girl. I know who that girl was. The photo’s not much to go on, but it will be a start. I’ll bet the cops have all sorts of ways to compare a picture of a tattoo with an actual mark on skin.”
Harmon smiled. It was an ugly, malicious thing, like the opening of a wound upon his face.
“You ever find out what happened to Daniel Clay, Mr. Parker?” he said. “I always had my suspicions about his disappearance, but I never spoke them aloud out of respect for his daughter. Who knows what might turn up if I started poking around in corners? I might find pictures, too, and maybe I might recognize the little girl in them as well. If I looked hard enough, I might even recognize one of her abusers. Her father was a distinctive-looking man, all skin and bone. I discover something like that, and I might have to turn it in to the proper authorities. After all, that little girl would be a woman by now, a woman with troubles and torments of her own. She might need help, or counseling. All kinds of things might come out, all kinds. You start digging, Mr. Parker, and there’s no telling what skeletons could be exposed.”
I heard footsteps behind me, and a young man’s voice said: “Everything okay here, Dad?”
“Everything’s fine, son,” said Harmon. “Mr. Parker’s about to leave. I’d ask him to stay for lunch, but I know he has things to do. He’s a busy man. He has a lot to think about.”
I didn’t say anything more. I walked away, leaving Harmon and his son behind. His daughter was gone, but a figure stood at one of the upper windows, staring down at us all. It was Mrs. Harmon. She was wearing a green dress, and her nails were red against the white of the drape she held back from the glass. Todd followed me through the house to make sure that I left. I was almost at the front door when Mrs. Harmon appeared on the landing above my head. She smiled emptily at me, seemingly lost in a pharmaceutical haze, but the smile didn’t extend farther than her lips and her eyes were full of unspeakable things.