Halcyon E-Book

Rio Youers

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 624

Beschreibung

Nightmarishly compelling and flawlessly told horror for fans of Paul Tremblay and Joe Hill.Halcyon is the answer for all Americans who want to escape, but paradise isn't what it seems. A beautiful self-sustaining community made up of people who want to live without fear, crime, or greed, Halcyon is run by Valerie Kemp, aka Mother Moon, benevolent and altruistic on the outside, but hiding an unimaginable darkness inside. She has dedicated her life to the pursuit of Glam Moon, a place of eternal beauty and healing. And she believes the pathway there can only be found at the end of pleasure.On the heels of tragedy, Martin Lovegrove moves his family to Halcyon. A couple of months, he tells himself, to retreat from the chaos and grind. He soon begins to suspect there is something beneath Halcyon's perfect veneer and sets out to discover the truth, however terrible it might be, behind the island and its mysterious founder.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Rio Youers and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I: Pavor Nocturnus

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

Part II: Halcyon

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Part III: Derevaun Seraun

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

Eight Months Later: Getting Closer

Acknowledgments

About the Author

HALCYON

Also by Rio Youers and available from Titan Books

The Forgotten Girl

HALCYON

RIO YOUERS

TITAN BOOKS

Halcyon

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659836

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan electronic edition: July 2018

Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2018 Rio Youers

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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For Christopher Golden

In this boat together…

PART I

PAVOR NOCTURNUS

1

She saw the man with no hands first. He lay screaming in the road, caught in the shimmer of something burning. His skin was blackened and smoke corkscrewed from his hair. It was his wrists, though—the raw stumps of his wrists—that made Edith close her eyes. Not that she could unsee, of course, or even turn away.

His shirt had been burned from his body.

Edith Lovegrove, ten years old, clapped a hand across her mouth and managed, with colossal effort, not to scream. Her throat ballooned, dark with pressure. Her ears rang and popped. As if in response, the window expanded. It showed more terrible things. The worst she’d ever seen.

Here was a dead woman slumped across a trashcan.

Here was a parking lot—no, it was a street—jammed with burning cars.

Edith rose from her bed and stumbled to her work desk, where she usually made friendship bracelets and birthday cards, and as a little kid had written letters to a certain jolly old elf in the North Pole. Now she opened the drawer where she kept her markers (the grownup kind, not the washable kind) and grabbed the first one her fingers happened upon: Aquarius Blue. Stepping away from the desk, she heard a dull, crumpling sound like a wall collapsing. Her eyes—also Aquarius Blue—rolled back into her skull and saliva beaded at the corners of her mouth.

“Draw,” she mumbled, because that’s all she could do. “Out.”

She would normally reach for Shirley, her sister, but Shirley had slammed that door, burned that bridge. “No more,” Shirley had said, and she’d been adamant. “Never again.”

Edith saw the front end of a burnt-out vehicle, its wheels blown from their axles and its hood folded like an envelope.

The marker trembled in her hand.

“Shirley . . .”

It was hard not to reach for her sister, like not reaching for a rope when being dragged out to sea. And maybe, Edith thought, she should. This was bigger and more terrible than anything she’d seen before, and she was certain Shirley wouldn’t want her to be alone, despite what she’d said. She would—

Edith saw bodies—eight, maybe nine of them—recognizable by their shoes, their postures, but otherwise charred and dripping. She pulled her box of toys to one side, tore down her Rihanna and Minions posters, and used the marker to reproduce the images in her mind. They were hurriedly drawn, wild loops and lines, a kind of psychic shorthand.

The red and blue lights of a fire truck pulsed along a city street already lit by flame. Edith expected them to flash across her bedroom walls. She heard a woman screaming and saw a buckled street sign: W. CHIPPEWA ST.

“Out,” Edith said again, and scrawled what looked like a W on its side with a swirl beneath it. She started on a second symbol and felt an increment of relief, but not enough.

It was all too big. Too much.

“Bottletop,” she blurted, and touched her sister’s mind.

Shirley, I’m so scared.

* * *

Martin Lovegrove reflected that, when he was a kid, the best part of the day was that magical couple of hours between dinner and bedtime. That was when his family gathered in the living room to watch TV, and even though they were individually absorbed in shows like Quantum Leap and Roseanne, they were still together. They laughed and cheered in all the same places. And sometimes, the TV stayed off and they played board games or listened to music. It was family time. A Lovegrove observance. Martin remembered it with fondness.

He slouched now in his favorite armchair with one leg cocked on the arm, much like the teenager who’d religiously watched The Wonder Years, because that’s how he always sat; that’s how he was comfortable. He had the TV remote in his left hand, scrolling through options on Netflix. Laura lay on the sofa, watching Jimmy Fallon highlights on the iPad. Her headphones blotted out all sound.

“As if,” Shirley, their oldest daughter, said suddenly. She wasn’t even aware she’d spoken out loud, Martin thought. She was brain-deep in her phone, texting one of her girlfriends. “Like, nooooo.” Her thumbs tapped the screen without pausing. Martin wondered if they twitched in her sleep.

Fifteen years old. She’d said maybe ten words to him since he’d rolled home from work. Three of them were Love you, Dad, which more than made up for the half a dozen or so other monosyllabic grunts.

Family time wasn’t what it used to be.

“We’ll go to the zoo on Sunday,” Martin said. It came from nowhere—boom—into his head and out of his mouth.

“What?” Shirley didn’t look up from her phone. She didn’t even complete the word: Wha?

“The zoo,” Martin repeated. “You know . . . exotic animals held in captivity for the viewing pleasure of overfed Westerners. We’ll go. The four of us. We’ll eat ice cream and pretend we have a fulfilling life.”

“When?”

“Sunday.”

“It’s Claudette’s birthday this weekend.” Shirley’s eyes flicked up briefly. “She turns sixteen. I’m not missing it.”

“What? Her birthday lasts the whole weekend?”

“Her party is Sunday. I totally told you.”

Martin rolled his eyes. “Oh, right. I totally forgot.” He selected Lost and hit play. A crappy show, no doubt, but a guilty pleasure. He sometimes liked to imagine he was marooned on an island, hundreds of miles from civilization, with nothing but a mysterious smoke beast and countless plot holes for company.

He heard creaking from upstairs: the sound of small footfalls across the floorboards. His finger jabbed the pause button and he looked at the ceiling. Edith had retired to bed after dinner—which she hadn’t eaten—with a mild fever. Nothing to worry about. Martin was more concerned about the possibility of a night terror. Edith had suffered terribly between the ages of five and eight. Their family doctor had assured them that night terrors were not cause for concern, and did not suggest a deeper psychological condition. “Think of them as temporary disruptions while her central nervous system is maturing,” she’d said. “Yes, they can appear quite upsetting, but there is no lasting damage, and Edith will have no recollection of them come morning. Just keep her from harming herself, or others, if she’s thrashing around.”

Edith rarely thrashed. She’d trembled and screamed, and often spoke phrases that should not have been in a child’s vocabulary. Martin had written some of them down, underscoring those that appeared most extraneous. “Blunt force trauma,” she’d muttered once. She was six years old. On another occasion she wailed, “He oído disparos y corrió.” Martin ran this through Google Translate and it came back with, “I heard gunshots and ran.” To the best of his knowledge, this was not a phrase she’d picked up watching Sesame Street.

Laura suggested that Edith could be drawing on events from a previous life, but then Laura was susceptible to spiritual fancy. Martin thought it more likely Edith had heard these things on the evening news, but agreed to take her to a hypnotherapist. He—a wildly bearded man with Star Wars collectibles dotted around his office—didn’t explore the past-life route, but instead introduced Edith to a visualization exercise that brought an end to her night terrors. It didn’t happen overnight, of course, and maybe the disruptions would have ceased anyway, but whatever the reason, they were twenty-three months without incident.

Good, yeah. Positively bueno. Martin still thought about it, though, whenever he tucked her in at night. And maybe that would never go away. Not completely. She was his baby, after all.

Another creak from upstairs. Edith was definitely up and moving around, obviously feeling better. Martin smiled and turned his attention back to Lost, where Hurley was currently bouncing through the jungle. Oh Hurley . . . four and a half seasons without Kentucky Fried Chicken and still a goddamn lard-ass.

* * *

Laura muttered, “He does Dylan better than Dylan,” and Martin snapped out of his show. That was when he noticed the clicking. It wasn’t the rhythmic clicking he associated with Shirley’s texting. This was constant. A purr. He looked up, expecting to see her zoned out. And she was, but not in the usual way. Her head was angled awkwardly and her eyelids fluttered. Her thumbs blurred off the screen.

“Shirley?”

She was having some kind of seizure. Martin drew his leg off the arm and sprang from his chair. He got Laura’s attention by waving a hand in front of her eyes, then crossed the room to where Shirley reclined in the other armchair. He cradled the back of her head in one hand and gently tilted her jaw to keep her airway open. She garbled something. The veins across her throat bulged.

“What’s happening to her?” Laura asked, crouching beside the armchair. She tried removing the cell phone from Shirley’s hands but Shirley held tight, her thumbs still working.

“Seizure, I think,” Martin said. “Maybe she was looking at flashing images.”

“Should I call nine-one-one?”

Martin looked from Shirley to Laura, then down at the cell phone’s screen as Laura tried to free it from their daughter’s clasp. He glimpsed what she’d typed: a string of random letters, symbols, and emojis, but with several full words interspersed in all the nonsense. Martin barely logged them before Laura pried the phone away. He definitely saw SCARED and CHIPPEWA and perhaps BOTTLECAP, or maybe it was BOTTLETOP.

“Martin?” Laura snapped. She threw the cell phone on the floor and clutched Shirley’s hands. “Nine-one-one?”

“Wait,” he said. He eased Shirley onto her side and peeled damp strands of hair from her brow. “It’s okay, baby. Mom and Dad are here.” Her eyes flashed open and closed. Her mouth moved silently. Martin pressed the cool back of his hand to her cheek and she whimpered. A moment later, she screwed her face up and started to cry. It was like a pressure release. The tightness left her body at once. Her trembling first lessened, then stopped altogether.

“Mom . . . ?”

“Okay, sweetie,” Laura said. “It’s okay.”

Martin wiped her tears away. She blinked, took deep breaths, and looked into her empty hands for her phone. Her expression switched from confusion to fear.

“Edith,” she said.

“What about Edith?” Martin asked.

Shirley shook her head and groaned. More tears spilled from her eyes.

“She’s screaming inside,” she said.

* * *

Martin didn’t run anymore. A wobbly jog was the best he could manage—wobbly because the muscles he’d displayed in his twenties, and even into his thirties, had softened, and at forty-one he sported what the magazines kindly called a dad-bod. He didn’t put this down to being a busy family man, or to working fifty-plus hours a week, but to a torn ACL he’d suffered playing racquetball with his brother. He’d played football and basketball through high school, and amateur league baseball for most of his adult life, all without injury. But five minutes on a racquetball court with Jimmy (three years older, thirty pounds heavier) and he felt his left knee go pop. The operation to repair it was straightforward enough, but his work insurance plan didn’t cover sporting injuries . . . and even if he could afford to pay for it himself, it wasn’t like he had time to go under the knife.

He took the stairs quickly, though, and with his heart clamoring. As he rounded the newel post, he felt the injury fire a warning shot, and managed only three more lumbering steps before his knee gave out. He slumped against the wall—“Ah, fuck!”—and limped the rest of the way to Edith’s room. Shirley’s words accompanied him. She’s screaming inside. Martin had no idea what he’d find when he opened Edith’s door. There was no way Shirley could know what was happening to her sister, but the whole seizure thing was undeniably eerie.

She spooked you, is all, he thought, grasping the doorknob and pushing the door open. There’ll be a solid explanation for this. They were probably watching the same—

The thought broke. It didn’t fade or even simply end. It broke, and with a tiny shattering sound, like someone stepping on a microscope slide.

“Edith?”

Another night terror, certainly, but not like any he’d seen before. Deeper, was the word that came to mind. Edith stood in the middle of the room, her face a cracked oval, a thread of drool hanging from her lip. She looked at Martin. Her eyes caught the light like sparking flints.

“It’s all flashy now,” she said. “And loud. Whoop-whoop.”

Martin stumbled toward her, meaning to scoop her into his arms and cradle her until the storm had passed and she was dreaming sweetly. The shock in her expression knocked him back a step, though. Whatever was making her scream inside . . . she wasn’t just seeing it, she was living it.

“Edith . . . honey, it’s—”

She clutched a blue marker in her right hand and used it to point at the wall, where the posters had been removed and she’d drawn a series of symbols. They were esoteric, nonsensical, though apparently not without meaning.

“The whoop-whoop,” Edith said, pointing to a diamond with sunrays shooting from it. The marker toppled from her hand. “It all went boom, Daddy.”

“Edith—”

“Everything went boom.”

He swept toward Edith and lifted her into his arms. Effortless, with her being so delicate. The muscles across his chest barely flexed. His injured knee reacted otherwise, buckling under him, spilling him to the floor. He never let go of Edith, though, and she looked at him through ribbons of dark blond hair, her mouth a wavering circle, one hand reaching, not to touch his face, as he thought, but to point at another symbol on the wall behind him, this a broken swirl, and she whispered in the frailest, sweetest voice imaginable:

“The man with no hands is crying.”

2

On the evening of Saturday April 14, 2018—three days after Edith Lovegrove scrawled numerous symbols across her bedroom wall—a gray Nissan Altima left a storage unit in Rochester, New York, and took the I-90 west to Buffalo. Its first stop was a gas station on Genesee Street, where its eighteen-gallon tank was filled to capacity. Its second stop was the Whole Hog drive-thru on Broadway, where the driver—thirty-four-year-old Garrett Riley—ordered the last meal he would ever eat: an OMG piggy burger, a large curly fries, and an XL cola. The drive-thru attendant’s name was Imani Johnson, and Imani would later tell Autumn McKenzie from Fox 29 News that she noticed nothing suspicious about Garrett or the car he was driving, and that when she said “oink-oink” to him—as all Whole Hog employees were required to do—he smiled and said “oink-oink” right back.

Garrett left the drive-thru and headed west on Broadway. He parked behind a music store near the intersection of Elm Street, where he ate his final meal and listened to the radio. The music and commercials muffled the voice in his mind, but couldn’t silence it.

The voice tick-tocked. It lulled.

At 11:03 p.m., Garrett turned the radio off and drove to West Chippewa Street.

* * *

The older woman held him. Her hands were as soft as freshly laundered towels and her hair smelled of tree bark—an earthy, good smell, evoking strength and kindliness. Garrett rested his head against her bosom and his doubts slipped away. They would return, of course—those tenacious, wolfish doubts—but here, now, in this moment of wakefulness and light, they were subdued. The woman stroked his face and her heartbeat had the soothing rhythm of waves. She spoke his name again and again. She sang to him.

There was a small wooden box on the table beside them and inside that box, apparently, was a watch. The only watch, or clock, on the island. “The only people who mark off time are prisoners,” she’d said on the day he arrived. “But if you feel the need”—she tapped the top of the box—“come see me and I’ll show you what you’ve been missing.” Garrett had never taken her up on the offer, and didn’t know anybody who had.

“Would you like to put your hand inside my shirt, Garrett?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I mean yes.”

She popped a button on her shirt and he adjusted his position to slide his hand more easily inside. He felt doughy, wrinkled skin, then the thick material of her bra.

“There,” she said. “How does that feel?”

“Good.”

“You’ve the hand of a strong man,” she said a moment later. “I remember the shriveled, darkened boy. The broken thing.”

“I get stronger every day,” Garrett said.

“I’m awed by how far you’ve come.”

“You’ve been like a mother to me.” Her breast felt like a pouch of warm gel. “You truly live up to your name.”

She smiled, held him closer, while he considered the paradox: to feel both strong, here, on the island, and childlike, here, in her arms. His old life—a brother, a construction worker, marking weeks and months and years like a prisoner—had never seemed so far away.

“I get scared sometimes.”

“I know, sugar.”

“But mostly I feel . . . empowered.”

“Empowered?” She grinned. “Why?”

“It’s quite a feat,” he said, “to burn what was weak to the ground, and rebuild with strong materials. That’s what I’ve done with my life. Thanks to you.”

She nodded, kissed the top of his head. Her nipple throbbed against his palm.

“You belong here,” she said. “We value you.”

“Yes.”

“You are giving and intelligent and resolute.” She squeezed his upper arm with every compliment. “And certainly you know—and this is perhaps your most agreeable quality— that these traits, if not utilized, mean nothing at all. They are the pages of a book no one will ever read.”

“I’ll make them read,” Garrett said.

She kissed the top of his head again and said in her loving, motherly tone, “That’s the quickest way to Glam Moon.”

“Sometimes I think I’m already there.”

“Oh no, Garrett. You’ve a long way to go.”

She removed his hand, popped two more buttons, then dragged her heavy right breast from inside her shirt. He saw the scars and veins across her chest and had to hide his disgust. “Sugar,” she said, and pulled down the front of her bra to reveal a blunt, leathery nipple, broad as a penny.

He averted his eyes. He looked at the box with the watch inside—the watch, replicating an average American life: a complex but ultimately robotic device, ticking off seconds and minutes, doing the same thing 24/7.

She said, “Your legacy will be not determined by who you are, but by what you do.”

“Yes,” he said. And then, “I should go.”

“Not yet. Pop this bitter old thing into your mouth.” She curled one hand around the back of his head and ushered him close. “You’ve nowhere else to be.”

* * *

West Chippewa Street was a circus. Thinly dressed twenty-somethings thronged the sidewalks. They crowded veneered establishments with names like Platform Eleven and Absolution—weekend superstars, one and all, drinking and dancing, uploading their memories to Instagram. This was young America, adorned and exuberant. The night was an oil spill of color.

Garrett parked on the road between two streetlights, mostly in shadow, and watched from behind a darkened windshield.

Around and around their little lives go. Tick-tock. But where’s the progress, Garrett? Where’s the ambition?

He saw none. He saw waste and taint and indifference.

Ambition relies on moving forward. So tell me . . . how do you turn a circle into a straight line?

Garrett caressed the control box resting in the center console: a homemade device comprised of a toggle switch, a safety cover, and two nine-volt batteries. Two wires—one red, one black—led from the box to the trunk.

“To begin with,” he said, “you break the circle.”

He’d left the island just after 4 p.m. with his directive sounding in his mind. It had a hypnotic quality not unlike (and yes, he’d noted the irony) a clock ticking. Nolan Thorne had taken him to the mainland, then driven him to Rochester. Nolan—the island’s second-in-command—had handled all the final details. The precision work, he’d called it. This amounted to gathering and storing the necessary materials, and assembling the IED.

The ninety-minute drive from Fisherman’s Point to Rochester had been a blur. Nolan said nothing. It was only when they reached the storage unit in Rochester that he spoke. He handed Garrett the keys to the Altima and told him what was in the trunk. “If you’re compromised, the authorities need to believe you were acting alone. This’ll only happen if you can detail what you’re carrying.” He showed Garrett the red and black wires running from the trunk to the control box in the center console. “This is a two-position toggle switch. Off and on. The safety cover will prevent you from flipping the switch before you’re ready.” Garrett had looked at the control box and nodded, his brain still engaged by that hypnotic ticking sound. “You get into position, lift the cover, flip the switch. Eighteen volts will only a provide a small spark, but that’s all you need.” Then Nolan did something he’d never done in all the time Garrett had known him: pulled Garrett into a clumsy embrace. It lasted no more than five seconds—long enough for Garrett to smell Nolan’s vinegary sweat and feel the moth-like fluttering in his chest. They’d separated to an awkward silence, then Nolan intoned with affected vigor, “I’ll see you in the Glam.”

They’d said their farewells. Garrett’s was lackluster. Dazed, almost. What he wanted to say was, Would you do it, Nolan? For all your loyalty and expertise . . . would you flip the switch? But every time a negative or resistant thought entered his mind, it was suffocated by that ticking sound.

Live music thumped from a bar called the Bottletop. It was huge, glass-fronted, with a rooftop terrace that bled color into the night. Kids howled and danced, hands in the air. Their silhouettes moved sinuously. Garrett focused on the front windows. Four of them, each as high and wide as a city bus. Garrett saw the people inside, like so many fish in an aquarium. They were as beautiful as fish, too. They dipped and winnowed.

It’s time, he thought, except he didn’t think it; the voice was not his own. He wiped a collar of sweat from the back of his neck and took a photograph from his shirt pocket. It was of a handsome young man with a reddish brush cut and kind green eyes. Jefferson, his brother. More than that: his hero—his world—after their parents died. Garrett’s eyes blurred with tears. It wasn’t Jefferson’s voice, either.

“I’m so confused, Jeff,” Garrett mumbled. “Everything has gone to—”

It’s TIME.

Garrett’s mouth closed with a dry click. He drew his shoulders inward—could almost feel her close to him. If he looked into the rearview, he thought for sure he’d see her there, hovering, her eyes alight.

He slipped the photograph back into his pocket and started the car. One glance at the control box, then he rammed the transmission into drive. He didn’t pull away gradually; he stomped on the gas and the Altima jumped forward. The tires whinnied and smoked and the back end dragged just a little—not surprising considering what was in the trunk.

“These two wires,” Nolan had said, showing how they snaked beneath the driver’s seat, beneath the rear passenger seat, and into the trunk, “are connected to an igniter fashioned from a Christmas tree light. The igniter is inside a thin plastic tube packed with mercury fulminate and potassium chlorate. This is your detonator. The detonator is pushed inside six pounds of a black-market plastic explosive called Kerna-H4. There’s a five-gallon jerry can filled with gasoline on either side of the explosive, but make sure you fill up because that’ll put another eighteen gallons in the tank. That’s quite the fireball, but it doesn’t stop there; the cans are secured by two fifty-pound bags of ANFO: a cocktail of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. This is the payload, Garrett. The shock and the awe. Anyone within a hundred yards is going to get blown into the goddamn stratosphere.”

* * *

Garrett Riley was born in Indianola, Mississippi in the fall of 1983. The younger of two children, his upbringing was—for the first thirteen years of his life, at least—perfectly normal. His parents were upstanding Americans, former college sweethearts. Daddy was a track superstar who’d missed making the US Olympic team by the narrowest of margins. He went on to start his own adhesive label business, which flourished in the Reagan era. Mama was a reporter for Sunflower County’s Rapid News team. She had aspirations of anchoring at one of the bigger stations, but the arrival of Jefferson, then Garrett, derailed those plans. Not with any regret. Friends of the Rileys maintained that Lynda Riley was an unselfish, caring sweetheart of a mother, who raised those boys with open-hearted, Christian love and unwavering American principles.

For all the digging in the dirt, for all the right-wing and antiestablishment ties the media endeavored to make, the worst that could be said of young Garrett Riley was that he tried too hard to please, and that he was easily led. This fueled speculation that he was led on the night of April 14, 2018—that somebody else was pulling the strings. There was no evidence to support this, however, and Garrett marched alone into infamy. He wasn’t alone once he got there, of course. The New York Times likened Garrett’s crime to that of Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh’s, who’d bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168. The Boston Globe drew comparisons to Andrew Kehoe and the Bath School disaster of 1927, in which forty-four people—including thirty-eight children—were killed in a series of devastating explosions. A Christian fundamentalist website declared with absolute earnestness that Garrett Riley had been possessed by the “hateful spirit” of Osama bin Laden. Further comparisons were made to Ted Kaczynski, Ramzi Yousef, and the devil.

With no connections to known terror organizations—domestic or foreign—investigators looked to Garrett’s mental stability, and here, particularly in later life, the weaknesses were evident. He and Jefferson were orphaned in 1997 when a drunk driver bounced his Chevy Silverado across the median on I-55, slamming head-on into the Lincoln being driven by Hank Riley. He and Lynda—returning home from a friend’s birthday party—were killed instantly. The brothers went to live with an uncle in Louisiana. Letters from Jefferson to his girlfriend in Mississippi, revealed that neither boy was happy there, and it went beyond being taken away from everything they knew. We’re not abused, or anything, Jefferson wrote. We’re just ignored . . . unloved, which is a kind of abuse, when you think about it. In subsequent correspondence, Jefferson wrote how Garrett begged Jefferson to run away with him. He’s been reading all these books about surviving in the wild. He’s got this idea we’d live like bears, maybe speak some secret language and scare away hikers. I told him we’d be more like Yogi and Boo-Boo.

Jefferson joined the armed forces in 2000, cutting the apron strings tethering him to his little brother. The people who knew Garrett at that time said he was more like a ghost than a person. “He’d just float in the background,” Aunt Bea said. “Wouldn’t say nothing to nobody. Randy called him Balloon Boy—just bobbing around, waiting to go pop.”

This detachment only deepened with Jefferson’s deployment to Afghanistan in 2002. Garrett was eighteen at the time. Other kids his age were going to parties, getting drunk, getting laid. Garrett’s interests were limited to reading European literature and writing angry poetry. In a 2004 email to Jefferson, he asked why Jefferson—by then on his second deployment—would want to be a part of such a dishonest war. Because I love my country, Jefferson replied. America has taken its share of knocks recently and we need to move some mighty big pieces to get things back the way they were. One person can’t do that. It’s the work of MANY people, pushing in the same direction. And that’s what I am, Garr . . . I’m one man pushing.

There are no images of Garrett burning the flag. He never sent threatening letters to his congressman or subscribed to hate propaganda. His response to Jefferson’s estimable patriotism—If you get killed over there (KILLED FOR NO GODDAMN REASON!) then I’m going to do some pushing of my own—was the only indication of a potentially violent temperament. It was jumped on by the media, sensationalized first and analyzed second.

“Here’s a man,” said Dr. Clyde Brisk, a noted forensic psychiatrist and author of Murder Nation: A History of Mass Murder in the USA, “who is clearly depressed and angry, but who is not, at this time, displaying signs of sociopathic behavior. He is on the precipice. With the right help, he can turn his life around and engage agreeably with society. Conversely, with a nudge in the opposite direction, or even in the absence of help, he can lose whatever grip he has and become incredibly dangerous.”

Jefferson left the army in 2010 and returned to Louisiana, where he started his own truck repair business. He bought a house in Lafayette and Garrett moved in with him. This was no doubt a happier time for Garrett. He landed a job in construction and even had a string of girlfriends. None were particularly serious, but it was evidence that Garrett had retreated from the precipice. The photographs of him from this time showed a smiling young man who appeared to be enjoying life. His Facebook profile picture was of him and Jefferson, arms slung around one another, clutching bottles of Budweiser. Ninety percent of the photos he posted were of him and Jefferson: fishing on Spanish Lake; riding the Flyin’ Tiger at Dixie Landin’; standing shirtless in the rain at some washed-out barbecue. He loved his big brother, no doubt about it. But it was more than that. Jefferson was his stabilizing force. His center of gravity.

Dr. Brisk said, “Any level of dependency is a double-edged sword; what happens when the person you’re leaning on is no longer there? Ultimately, Garrett Riley needed to stand on his own two feet, and he was never able to do that.”

On October 6, 2016, Jefferson went to the Eezy-Mart on the corner of his street to buy milk and cookies for his pregnant fiancée. Moments later, a man wearing a Ninja Turtles mask entered the store and leveled a double-action revolver at the cashier. Instead of emptying the register, the cashier leveled a gun of her own. Shots were fired. The assailant fled the scene with the cashier in pursuit, while Jefferson lay facedown in a puddle of milk and blood. He’d taken a bullet to the throat and died before his cookies hit the floor.

Garrett disappeared a short time later.

“Gone,” Madeline Burns—Jefferson’s fiancée—said blankly. “I figured he’d taken a dive off the Horace Wilkinson Bridge and his body was never recovered. Can’t say I missed him. He was like a rag after Jeff died, just laying around all gray and limp. I only realized he was AWOL after his boss called my house looking for him.”

Garrett spent at least a portion of the next eighteen months in New York City. He’d used his credit card to purchase a Greyhound ticket from Lafayette to Port Authority, and made three sizable cash withdrawals from the First Pioneer Bank in Brooklyn Heights. Other than that, his electronic footprint was nonexistent.

“He removed himself from the system,” senior FBI agent James Wilding said. “No online presence. No known address or place of employment. On record, he disappeared. In reality, he was likely working for cash and sleeping on a friend’s couch. Suffice to say, Garrett Riley’s whereabouts during this period, along with the identities of any known associates, is of great interest to us.”

The common theory was that the cash withdrawals (totaling $22,800 of Garrett’s inheritance money) went toward securing the bomb-building materials. Garrett’s electronic footprint next appeared in March 2018 when he used his credit card to rent a storage unit in Rochester, New York, and again a month later when he rented a Nissan Altima from Meridian Car & Truck, also in Rochester.

Footage from security cameras showed the Altima striking the plate glass windows of the Bottletop bar in downtown Buffalo at 23:48 on Saturday April 14, 2018. Within ninety minutes, authorities had infiltrated the storage unit in Rochester, where they recovered snippets of multi-strand wire, a small amount of scattered ANFO prills, and a USB flash drive. The eighty-three second video on the flash drive showed Garrett standing in front of a plain white wall. The recording was steady and in focus, suggesting use of a tripod or other stabilizing device. Forensic audiologists confirmed no ambient sound to indicate the presence of a third party.

Garrett introduced himself: full name, date, and city of birth. His eyes were glazed and there was a robotic stiffness to his voice. He appeared sedated.

“My brother was a true and valiant American,” he said after a moment. His empty gaze wavered and he took an unsteady breath. “He served his country for ten years, including two yearlong deployments to Afghanistan. He didn’t die at the hands of Taliban insurgents. His transport helicopter wasn’t shot down over Kabul, and he didn’t step on a landmine. He was killed in a convenience store in Lafayette, Louisiana, while buying cookies for his pregnant fiancée. That’s right . . . ’Murica: a different kind of warzone, where repetition and lack of progress are the enemy, and everyone’s got blood on their hands.”

He wiped his eyes and stared at the camera for a full twenty seconds. Here he appeared most haunted, and haunting. Of all the photographs of Garrett, it was a still from this portion of the video that was used most widely by media sources.

“He used to bark at me when I’d call him a hero.” The slightest of smiles cracked his face, there and gone in a second. “Garr, he’d bark. I ain’t no hero. I’m just one man pushing. That’s what he always called himself: one man pushing. Well, that didn’t work out too good for him, did it? So maybe the secret is you’ve got to push a little bit harder.”

The blast from Garrett’s rolling IED punched a hole the size of a football field into downtown Buffalo. It obliterated the Bottletop and several of its neighbors, with structural damage reaching to within a three-block radius. It wasn’t as large in scale as the truck bomb that rocked Oklahoma City in 1995, but had it beat in terms of casualties: 228 killed and 406 injured, making it the second-deadliest terrorist attack within the United States.

It being an act of terrorism was never debated, despite Garrett (apparently) being a lone wolf, declaring no affiliation to known terror organizations, or taking any real political stance. He did have an axe to grind: the “repetition and lack of progress” that he held accountable for his brother’s death. But this was no act of revenge. As the president himself said: “If your grievance—however vague—is against a system or ideology and you’re killing innocent civilians, then make no mistake, you are a terrorist.”

“It’s difficult for people to quantify a disaster of this magnitude with one person,” Dr. Clyde Brisk said to Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room. “We associate terrorism with antiestablishment organizations . . . with resources, money, people. That one man, with his own set of grievances, could have done this is terrifying. As a psychiatrist, I’m interested in why, and so we go back to the precipice. How does someone go from being depressed and disillusioned to being one of the most hated figures in American history? The answer lies in the eighteen months that Garrett Riley was absent from society. He encountered something during this period that had a profound effect on him.”

“And ultimately caused him to snap,” Wolf added.

“It’s more sinister than that,” Dr. Brisk said. “These aren’t the actions of a weak-willed man who was pushed over the edge. Something—or somebody—got into his head and radically reshaped his way of thinking.”

“Are you suggesting he was brainwashed?” Wolf asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Brisk replied without hesitation. “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”

3

“We might have stopped it,” Laura said.

“Don’t say that.”

“I think we had enough information. Yes, it was haphazard. Yes, it was—”

“Illogical.”

“Yes, but we could have—should have—put the pieces together.” Laura stood up from the kitchen table. She made a frantic gesture with her hands, as if she wanted to grab something but couldn’t, then exhaled and shook her head. “Jesus, I haven’t slept much these past few nights.”

Martin went to her. He circled her waist with one arm, stroked her hair, the same color—honey gold—as the day they’d met, just as full of body and bounce, and not a shimmer of gray. She looked at him with what he called her flashlight expression: illuminating, but searching. It didn’t ask, How can you make this right? but rather, How can we make this right? We. Together. Every knot they’d untangled in their seventeen years of marriage, they’d untangled together.

“This isn’t ours to carry,” Martin said firmly. “It’s not like we had credible intel and chose to ignore it. We’re talking about an implausible event—a possible psychic occurrence.”

“Possible?”

“What can I say? I’m a rational man.” Martin tapped one finger off his skull. “I’m still struggling to make sense of this.”

“You saw it with your own eyes,” Laura said. “Forget the premonition, or possible premonition. Something happened between Edith and Shirley. A connection. A communication. And honey, it wasn’t normal.”

“We thought it was coincidence.” He took her hand and steadied it; she was making grabbing motions again. “We thought they’d watched the same shit on YouTube, or wherever, and it caused Shirley to have a seizure, and Edith to have a night terror. We could never have known it was more than that.”

“A paranormal event.”

“Yeah. Sure. Call it what you want.” Martin brought Laura’s trembling hand to his lips and kissed her fingers. “It was crazy shit, and it went beyond rational thinking.”

“Yes, but—”

“We can’t beat ourselves up for what happened, Laura.” Martin’s expression was more lead blanket than flashlight: serious and unwavering. “That way lies madness.”

* * *

Laura had gone to Edith’s room after making sure that Shirley was okay—that the seizure, or whatever it was, had passed. She’d bolted upstairs like Martin before her and found Martin on his knees with Edith in his arms. Their youngest daughter appeared on the cusp of sleep, mumbling something, drenched with sweat. Martin stroked her brow and soothed her.

“Jesus Christ,” Laura gasped. She started across the room, then noticed the wild scrawling on the wall and stopped dead. “What the hell?”

“That’s the whoop-whoop,” Martin said, gesturing at one of the strange symbols—a diamond with sunrays shooting from it. He looked at her with huge, questioning eyes. “I don’t know what’s going on here.”

They’d dressed Edith in fresh pajamas and put her in their bed for the night. She slept soundly, barely moving. Laura used her phone to take pictures of Edith’s bedroom wall. Then they talked to Shirley. “You told us she was screaming inside,” Martin said. “How could you know that?” Shirley shrugged and said she couldn’t remember, but they knew she wasn’t being entirely truthful. They’d pressed, but gently. Shirley admitted that she sometimes got a “feeling” from Edith. “I’ve read that some identical twins can feel each other’s pain,” she said, and shrugged again. “Maybe it’s like that.”

“Do these mean anything to you?” Laura asked, showing Shirley the symbols on her phone. “Something you saw on TV, or online, perhaps?”

“They’re kinda creepy,” Shirley replied. She shook her head quickly. “No. I’ve never seen them before.”

Later that night, Martin told Laura about the string of letters and emojis that Shirley had tapped into her phone. He might have dismissed it, he said, only the nonsense had been punctuated by several full words.

“Like what?” Laura asked.

“Chippewa,” Martin replied. “That’s the only one

I remember for certain. And bottle-something. Bottlecap, maybe?”

Edith remembered very little of the incident, which lent credence to Martin’s theory that she’d suffered a night terror after watching something violent online—something that she and Shirley wouldn’t admit to having watched. It was a theory that Laura, reluctantly, accepted.

She checked Shirley’s phone, looking for the string of nonsense that Martin had told her about (she wasn’t a bit surprised to find it had been erased), and then perusing the browsing history. There was nothing of a violent nature. Same with the iPad, the laptop, and the “Recently Watched” list on Netflix.

“So they deleted it,” Martin said. “Must’ve. Or maybe they watched it on a friend’s phone. Claudette’s, I bet. Her parents are nuts.”

Edith wasn’t able to explain her impromptu artwork, either. She stared at her bedroom wall with a flavorless expression. “I know why I did it,” she said. “To get the bad things out of my head. I just don’t remember what any of them mean.”

Martin scrubbed the wall, but the ghosts of the symbols remained. He rolled over them with a fresh lick of paint and put the posters back up.

“If only we could paint over it in our minds so easily,” Laura had said. “Shit, Martin, maybe we need to talk to someone about this.”

“Let’s not sign up for the family shrink package just yet,” Martin replied. “We can file this under ‘freak coincidence’ and move on.”

And they tried. For the next two days they acted as if life was just peachy, and then everything spiraled.

2:37 a.m. The ungodly hours of Sunday morning. Laura had given up on sleep. Not even two glasses of wine and some brief, tussle-like lovemaking could help. She got out of bed and went downstairs, made herself an herbal tea, and sat drinking it in the silence of her living room. The iPad was on the arm of the sofa, its screen smeared with greasy finger tracks. Unconsciously—like every twenty-first century automaton—she grabbed it and logged into her social media. She saw the hashtags #buffalostrong and #prayforbuffalo, scrolled through her feed, saw photographs of burning buildings and cars, of firefighters and police, of victims and body bags.

“Jesus Christ,” Laura said. As with every large-scale disaster from the past seventeen years, she envisioned a passenger plane hitting the World Trade Center and her mind punched out two words. Simple words, but filled with fear and pleading: Not again.

Western NY Alerts @WestNYAlerts

100s feared dead as car bomb explodes in downtown Buffalo. Entire buildings wiped off the map. Blast was heard up to forty miles away.

Kate Jacobs @kissieroo

Pls #pray for my daughter Queenie Jacobs celebrating job promotion with friends in #Buffalo.

Not answering cell. Call me Queenie please call Mommy.

NewsForce New York @newsforceny

W. Chippewa St. “heartbeat” of Buffalo nightlife.

Authorities say death toll could reach 500.

#prayforbuffalo

Laura turned off the iPad. She grabbed the remote control and flicked on the TV. The story had hijacked scheduled programming; BREAKING NEWS adorned the lower third of every station she flipped to. CNN declared the death toll was at 120. CBS News had it at 150. Any degree of tiredness had vacated Laura’s system. She watched with massive, unblinking eyes and a loose jaw.

“—terrible scenes from downtown Buffalo as firefighters struggle to—”

“—advising people to stay in their homes—”

“—conflicting reports. Some say the vehicle was parked—”

“—hallmark of a terrorist attack, but as yet no—”

Aerial footage showed the scale of the devastation: a burning hole in the city, buildings ablaze, the damage extending several blocks. More intimate camera work offered the efforts of rescue workers digging through smoldering rubble; a triage nurse wiping ash and blood from a young man’s forehead; a high-heeled shoe abandoned on the sidewalk.

Laura covered her mouth. Tears pricked her eyes. The ticker announced PRESIDENT CALLS BOMBING “COWARDLY AND DESPICABLE.” A shot of a firefighter rolling a flattened hose across Franklin Street switched to footage of an ambulance bolting north on Main. Its lightbar cut through the smoky darkness. Its siren howled.

Laura imagined a diamond with sunrays beaming from it.

“Whoop-whoop,” she said.

She stiffened in her seat, a deep chill rising from the small of her back to her skull. With tears rolling down her face, she flipped channels until she found what she was looking for.

The ticker: POLICE CONFIRM VEHICLE DRIVEN THROUGH FRONT WINDOW OF CROWDED DOWNTOWN BAR BEFORE BOMB WAS DETONATED. A map of the area filled the screen, with a small red circle drawn around the Bottletop bar on West Chippewa Street, and a larger circle indicating the blast radius.

Chippewa, Martin had said the other night, referring to one of the few legible words that Shirley had keyed into her phone during her seizure. That’s the only one I remember for certain. And bottle-something. Bottlecap, maybe?

“Bottletop,” Laura said. She wanted to scream.

Instead she stood up and walked out of the living room, appearing oh-so-calm on the outside, while on the inside she was cold and shrieking. She went upstairs and shook Martin awake.

“Martin, hey . . .” She nudged him gently. She wanted to blast ice into his face and drag him from between the sheets. “Martin—”

“’Sup?” He blinked groggily.

“Get up. You need to see this.”

“Huh? What time—”

“You need to see this.”

He’d risen from bed with his hair erected in quills and his ass-crack popping from the top of his boxers. Moments later he was alert and bug-eyed, clutching Laura’s hand as they sat on the sofa and watched the news unfold. “Can’t be,” he kept saying. “It’s wild coincidence. Has to be.” His denial faltered when the Fox 29 news anchor somberly intoned, “The following report contains scenes of a graphic nature. Viewer discretion is advised,” and the screen displayed footage of a young man with no hands being loaded into the back of an ambulance. He was bandaged and sedated—one of the lucky ones, apparently, although the tears rolling down his face suggested he thought otherwise.

“Fuck.” Martin sprung off the sofa—nearly taking Laura with him—and glared at the TV. “The man with no hands is crying.”

Laura shook her head once and looked at him. She was almost too fractured to respond. Within the hour she would down a jigger of whiskey and go back to bed, sleep until late afternoon. For now she took a breath that rolled all the way to her toes, and on the exhale asked Martin to elaborate.

“Something Edith said.” Martin closed his eyes and touched his forehead, honing the memory. “One of her symbols. The man with no hands is crying.”

“She said that?”

“Yeah, but I figured it was just, you know . . . randomness.” He shrugged and sighed at the same time. “I’d pretty much forgotten about it. Until now.”

“Right,” Laura said, looking at the TV—at a photograph of Garrett Riley. THE FACE OF EVIL, according to the caption. She jabbed the red button on the remote and the screen went dark. It was heavenly. “And you still think this is all a coincidence?”

“It’s just . . . I don’t—”

“Martin. Come on, baby. Coffee beans—smell them.” She inhaled robustly. Her teeth flashed. “Edith didn’t have a night terror. It was a premonition.”

“Jesus Christ, Laura.”

“A fucking premonition.” Laura stood up, her hands balled into fists. She looked like she wanted to let loose—to punch the walls and throw shit. Instead she sunk to her knees and lowered her face into her hands, not crying, but exhausted. She didn’t move for a long time, and when she did it was to get the whiskey. Martin did nothing—said nothing—to comfort her, but she could tell he wanted to; they’d been together twenty years, married for seventeen. She knew his heart as well as her own. He just stood in his own void, though, looking sad and boyish in yesterday’s boxers.

* * *

“So what do we do?” Laura asked, still with the flashlight expression, although she’d stopped making the grabbing motions with her hands.

“We continue as normal,” Martin replied. “We try, at least.”

“Bullshit,” Laura said. “There is no normal. I admit that we couldn’t have assumed anything supernatural, but we can’t just plunge our heads in the sand. We need to talk to someone. If Edith has a condition—extrasensory or psychological—she needs to find a way to manage it, and that means getting expert help.”

“We took her to that hypnotherapist before,” Martin said. He removed his arm from around Laura’s waist, returned to the kitchen table, and dropped into his seat with a tired thump. “The Star Wars guy. He seemed to help.”

“Maybe,” Laura said. She crossed to the other counter, slid a half-full bottle of Merlot toward her. “I was thinking of someone more . . . sensitive to the paranormal angle.” She held up the bottle of wine. “Am I turning into an alcoholic?”

“This would be a good week to start.”

“Hmm. You want?”

“Yeah.”

Laura plucked two glasses from the cupboard, emptied the bottle into them, and joined Martin at the kitchen table. They drank and licked their lips at the same time, then Martin said:

“Sensitive?”

“What if all Edith’s night terrors were actually premonitions? It sounds crazy, but given what we know, we should consider it a possibility.”

“It would explain all the wild shit she came up with,” Martin admitted. “Things she could never know.”

“Right.”

“But she’s never drawn the symbols before.”

“True, but the bombing was on a different scale. It might have been too much for her mind to take.”

“So the drawings were overflow? Mental spillage?”

“Or some kind of release. She said she had to get the bad things out of her head, right?” Laura drank from her glass—not a sip but a glug, splashing wine on the table. She mopped it up with her sleeve. “Listen, when I was researching my dissertation, I remember reading about this psychiatrist who’d drawn comparisons between psychic ability and mental illness. He claimed that a small percentage of psychiatric patients had been misdiagnosed—that they actually had some form of extrasensory energy they couldn’t align with. He called it a paranormal coil or a psychic coil. Something like that.”

“A unique take,” Martin said. “I’m sure that went down well with the American Psychiatric Association.”

“I’m not saying I believe it,” Laura added. “But it suggests a gray area—a lack of knowledge. I think we’d be smart to err on the side of caution. This is our daughter. I don’t want her analyzed, prodded, and labeled. And I for damn sure don’t want her institutionalized just because some shrink can’t think outside the box.”

“Agreed.”

“Good.” Laura reached across the table and clasped Martin’s hand. “So you don’t mind if I make some inquiries—see if I can find someone more . . . sympathetic?”

“Sure,” Martin said. “Let’s give it a shot.”

“Thank you,” Laura said, and found a smile. “Something else: I think we should all talk to someone. We’re going to need help carrying the load.”

“Therapy?”

“Let’s call it nonjudgmental conversation,” Laura said. “I’ve already booked an appointment with a spiritual advisor. You can take a more conventional route, of course. As John Lennon said: ‘Whatever gets you through the night.’”

“Okay,” Martin said. He’d barely touched his wine, but now he lifted the glass and drained two thirds. “Okay. Yeah. I can do that.”

“You’re a good man.”

He winked and tugged Laura’s hand, urging her across the table. And she obliged, shimmying on her stomach like a woman half her age, feet off the floor, lips red with wine. He leaned close and they kissed. Her honey-gold hair was the same as the day they’d met, and so was her mouth—her kiss. The love had changed, though. It was sky-broad and still growing. It was entwined with his. Not a her thing but a them thing.

“We’re going to get through this,” he said.

And she said, “You bet.”

* * *

Shirley stood up from the top stair, where she’d sat for the last fifteen minutes listening to her parents’ conversation. She didn’t have to strain her ears, either; when Mom and Dad had one of their powwows in the kitchen, their voices—even if they whispered—carried into the hallway and swirled around the ceiling above the stairway. A cool acoustic quirk. Her music teacher once told her there was an area inside Grand Central Station where you could whisper into a corner, and no matter how much noise and kerfuffle there was around (and Shirley figured there was always a good deal of noise and kerfuffle at Grand Central Station), the person standing in the opposite corner would hear your voice like you were standing next to them. This was similar to the way Edith sometimes communicated with her—a direct, secret method, bypassing traditional routes. It was fun to begin with, but it wasn’t normal, and Shirley knew it had to stop.

No good could come from it.

Shirley eavesdropped on her parents until they started smooching—totally gross—then snuck along the landing to Edith’s room. She inched the door open and crept inside.

“Edith? You awake?”

The bedclothes shuffled and Edith sat up, her eyes bright and owl-like in the glow of the nightlight. She clutched Paisley Rabbit to her breast. He squeaked companionably. She was too old for Paisley, but he made an appearance every now and then. A comfort thing.

“They’re talking about us again,” Shirley said, and perched on the edge of Edith’s bed. “About you, mostly.”

“What are they saying?”

“That thing in Buffalo. The bomb. They think you saw it in your mind before it happened in real life.”

“Oh. That doesn’t sound good.”

“How much do you remember?”

“Nothing really.” Several shallow lines crossed Edith’s brow. “Just . . . flashes. Like trying to remember a dream.”

They sat in silence for a moment, the only sounds coming from the other side of the blinds: the traffic coursing along Melon Road, a radio playing some catchy nerd-rock song, older kids shooting hoops beneath the lights in Oval Park Court. Just another cool spring evening in Flint Wood, New York.

“They’re worried about us.” Shirley looked at the wall where Edith had scrawled her symbols. Nothing there now but the fresh-paint tracks Dad had made with the roller. “Mom’s bringing in help. A specialist.”

“The Star Wars guy?”

“Not this time. It’ll be someone different.” She recalled her mom’s description. “Someone sympathetic.”

Edith gathered Paisley a little closer. She appeared to take all this on board, and accept it, then her brow furrowed more deeply and her upper lip quivered, and all at once her face scrunched. Tears jumped from her eyes and she used Paisley’s floppy ears to smudge them away.

“It’s not my fault,” she sniveled, trying to keep her voice down. “I didn’t ask for this.”

Shirley shuffled closer, threw an arm around her little sister, and kissed her clumsily on the cheek. “Shhh . . . hey, I never said it was your fault.”

“You’re mad at me. I can tell.”

“No, it’s just . . . I told you, Ede, I can’t hold your hand anymore. Not up here.” Shirley pressed a finger to her forehead. “I thought I was helping you, but I’m not. I’m making things worse.”

“I was scared,” Edith moaned, mopping more tears away. “I know you said not to, and I tried, but it was too big.”

“Yeah, but we freaked Mom and Dad the hell out. They’re bringing in a specialist. There’ll be questions, examinations. I’m worried it’ll lead to more questions—smelly old men in suits digging through your brain.”

Edith’s jaw fell. “You think?’

“Maybe,” Shirley said. “This thing . . . it’s not natural, Ede. It scares people.”

“It scares me.”

“Right, which is why you need to control it. And I’m going to help you.” Shirley touched her forehead again. “Just not up here.”

A barking dog joined the evening chorus. It was loud and insistent. Shirley listened for a moment, lost in thought.

“I’m going to take you somewhere over the weekend,” she said.

Edith looked at her curiously. “Where?”

“My special place.” Shirley leaned closer, lowering her voice. “But don’t tell Mom and Dad. We’re in enough trouble as it is.”

“Okay.”

Shirley smiled. Not a full smile, certainly not a happy one, but better than nothing. She kissed her sister on the cheek again, then stood up and started toward the door.

“Shirl?”

She stopped, turned around. Maybe it was the way Edith’s eyes shimmered in the nightlight’s bluish glow, or the stuffed toy secured faithfully in her arms, but she looked so young. Five years old, not ten.

“This place,” Edith said. “Is it bad?”

Shirley bristled. She tried to keep her voice even, but it quavered just a little. “You need to stay out of my mind, Ede.”

Edith shook her head. “I didn’t, Shirl. I promise. I . . .” The rabbit in her arms squeaked. “I didn’t.”

“Do you trust me?”

“You know I do.” Edith dabbed at her eyes again. “I love you.”

The kids on the court whooped and cheered—one of the them must have sunk a three-pointer. A truck boomed as it crossed the railroad tracks near Abraham Heights and one of their neighbors shouted to quit that goddamn dog barking.