14

I willed my jangling nerves to be still. I said, “Tommy, I’m hurt.”

I held up my arms so he could see the blood running down from my elbows, smeared everywhere because of the rain mixing in. “I fell. My knees are really banged up.”

He relaxed his grip and then let go. I slipped out of the poncho. “My knees.” They were bleeding harder than my elbows.

He said, “Come.”

I followed him into his kitchen. He couldn’t have had time to kill Christen. Then where was she? Maybe he had overpowered her with a remote control, with an acoustic laser. Maybe Auerbach was right. Maybe there were zebras. In the kitchen, Tommy turned to me. I smiled at him.

Tommy had me sit at his table. He went to the sink, opened the cupboard beneath, took out a bottle from a cardboard box, and came back to me. It was a gallon jug, three-quarters full of a greenish-yellow liquid. He put it on the table and went to another cupboard and got a basin. He placed the basin on the table and put my elbow into it. Then he poured his green soap down my arm. I yelped. He did the other arm. He didn’t hear my yelps. His sensory cells, at least a good number of them, had disintegrated when he was a small boy. He went to the sink and filled an empty bottle with water, came back, and rinsed my arms. He was firm but gentle, just as he was with Jake, whose screams he couldn’t hear.

Then he got down on his knees the way he had when he’d studied Dana Ganzi, one of the girls he’d killed, the one I’d found lying in the middle of Coonymus Road.

He said, “Your knees aren’t as bad as they look,” and he dabbed them with a cloth soaked in his green soap.

There was a bumping sound from overhead. Tommy didn’t hear that either. It had to be Christen. She’d heard me yelp.

“Tommy, I came because another girl is missing. We have to find her.”

“She can’t go anywhere in this weather. She’s found shelter.”

“Tommy, she must be with the man who killed her friends.”

I stood up.

The bumping from above was much louder. Tommy tilted his head. He’d sensed it. He stood too, and he looked into my eyes. He grabbed my wrist again.

Tommy had a grip stronger than any I’d ever been subjected to. He twisted me around so that my back and the arm he’d immobilized were crushed up against his rock-hard chest. His free arm he held tight across my upper body. The pain from my jerked-back shoulder felt worse than the one in my crushed wrist. I did all that I was taught except screaming. Screaming was useless. No one outside would hear me except maybe Jake, and Jake was impotent. So I saved that element of my strength. As ferociously as possible, I alternated between kicking back at his shins and stomping on his feet. But he was wearing boots and I had on soaking wet sneakers. I tried bashing the back of my head against his chest, but he only held me tighter.

He dragged me out of the kitchen. I saw a baseball bat lying in the hallway. The name LANCELOT was painted across it in red. Christen had brought her weapon just as she’d told her friends she would.

Tommy pulled me backward down a hallway. He wilted for just a second when I decided screaming at the top of my lungs couldn’t hurt after all. Maybe screaming would make me stronger, a theory some held. The theory was false. But with my screams there came a stronger thumping now, directly above us. He never paused. He hadn’t felt it this time, he was concentrating too hard on pulling me across the floor. And then I heard my name called out, muffled. He hadn’t heard that either—hadn’t heard Christen, secured in the room over our heads, calling my name.

I shouted, “Christen, it’s Poppy! Try to get out! Try!” I didn’t know if Tommy could make out any of it. I didn’t know the extent of his hearing loss. But sometimes, someone who is hard of hearing can’t understand the words if they’re spoken at a loud pitch.

In the lightning flashes, I could see a painting on the wall. Esther’s. He hadn’t killed Esther. She was his friend, trying to help him in her own way, trusting him with a picture. The wind was picking up and the rain flew horizontally into his windows as loud as bullets. I stopped struggling. I turned my head to the side, my lips near his ear. I said to him in a normal voice, “Tommy, don’t do this. I understand what happened to you. But the girl upstairs isn’t the one who did it. The girls from the camp did nothing. They did nothing.”

He was too involved with getting me through his house to pay attention to what I was saying even if he could hear me. Tommy made the most of my attempt to calm myself, to speak rationally to him. He hauled me through a door. I felt desperate. Now I screamed Jake’s name—“Jake!”—over and over again, screamed for him to help as Tommy dragged me down a stairway into his cellar. Tommy was the man with the picnic, and Kate thought she had seen another person in the picnic-man’s truck. It had to have been Jake.

There was light in the cellar, a bare bulb in the ceiling with a string hanging from it just like the one in each of the Camp Guinevere barracks.

I kicked Tommy with a vengeance. I could survive a fall better than he could. Still, he was strong, a big man, and he hung on to me all the way down the rest of the stairs. I was unable to trip him. I threw my head back and caught his chin. He jerked me harder into the vise of his arms and body, and I felt the incredible shock of my shoulder separating. Now I didn’t shout deliberately, I screamed in pain indiscriminately.

He’d felt the fight go out of me. He released some of the pressure of his arm across my chest while he pulled back a large bookcase standing against a wall. There was a door in the wall and a small window next to it. Under the window, a console, a board with toggles and switches and wires jury-rigged from the insides of radios. Jake’s doing.

He opened the door and pushed me through it. I came down on my knees onto a cement floor. I could make out nothing but the one window where the bit of light came through. No light at all slipped past the outside edge of the door. It was fully sealed. The room was about eight feet square. The walls were poured cement except for the new wall with the door and window, which was lined with soundproofing wallboard, as was the ceiling. There was an open drain in the middle of the cement floor. This was the place where the girls vomited the contents of their stomachs and where he washed it away.

Pain was shooting out in all directions from my shoulder, down my arm, across my back, becoming worse. The one thing I had to do that took precedence over anything else was to fix the shoulder. I cradled my arm, got to my feet, and walked till I was close to the wallboard. Then I took a tight hold of my elbow, grit my teeth, and smashed my injured shoulder into the wall. My head filled with black dots and I went to my knees again in a faint that lasted just a moment; the burden of pain fleeing my shoulder acted like a shot of morphine. I stood up again and right then bright lights came on in the little room.

Tommy’s face was in the window. He was looking down at his control panel. Then he looked up at me. His face was as hard as granite. I was in a place he’d intended for Christen, the place where he’d killed the other girls and so harmed Kate.

I smiled at him, the same smile I gave him when I ran into him on the street, at Richard’s Patio, and yesterday when I’d asked him for help. Whenever I’d spoken to Tommy he’d looked intently into my face. Now I understood why; he’d been reading my lips. The psychiatrist who raised him must have taught him to do that. I spoke to him slowly and deliberately. “Tommy, I’m Joe’s friend. Your friend. You don’t want to hurt me. It’s too late to hurt me. The little girl with the doll—she’s alive. You know that. You know we saved her. She’s told the doctors what happened. They know.” But his gaze had left my lips. He chose not to see what I was saying. He was looking down again.

I went to the window and touched the glass. His face came up, inches from mine. “Tommy, we want to help you. We found out the terrible thing that happened to you when you were just a child.”

His eyes glittered and he said something. He pointed up. He was talking about Christen, but I couldn’t hear him and I did not know how to read lips. So I guessed.

I said, “No, she’s not the one who did it to you.” But he cast his eyes down again.

I banged on the glass with my fist. “I’m hurt, Tommy. Please.” He raised his eyes and I said it again. “I’m hurt, Tommy.”

This time I could tell what he said to me. He said, “I’m sorry.”

And the sound of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue filled the room. No piece has been played by more pop orchestras than this one. A bit of trivia I’d read. After just a few bars, though, the music stopped. It was how he tested the system. That’s what he’d used to test his mechanism on Dana, and Rachel, and the girl who’d arrived early—the first girl, Erin—and Kate, too, and maybe Christen, before I interrupted and he’d had to get her up two flights of stairs. Maybe she’d gotten treated with the same diabolical method of torture that I was about to get, only I knew what to expect and she hadn’t.

A bell clanged louder than any noise I have ever experienced. It clanged again, louder still, and then it clanged nonstop. I put my hands over my ears and looked up at the amplifier perched in the corner of the ceiling. The loudspeaker sticking out from it seemed to be alive, to become a face, a menacing face, a face from a horror movie taunting me—clanging and clanging and clanging. There were three other amplifiers in the other corners of the room. The second one came alive too, a shattering piercing whistle. I made the same shocked sound I screamed when my shoulder ripped apart.

I went to the door, turned the doorknob, and pushed at it. He had a bolt thrown across the jamb. I threw all my weight against it and all but dislocated my other shoulder. The door frame was reinforced. There was no give at all.

I could see Tommy move a little to his left, and the third amplifier came on. I think the noise was the sound of a train, a helicopter, I couldn’t be sure. The pounding inside my head prevented me from being able to differentiate between the noises anymore. I never heard the fourth one come on but it must have. The noise was so insufferable I suppose I did what the girls did. I was against the other wall now, the concrete wall, banging my head into it. Then, without knowing it, I rolled across the floor in some involuntary attempt to get away from the noise. That roll across the floor saved me from losing all reason because another pain struck me—a normal pain coming from the injured shoulder that my roll had caused. I didn’t want my muscles to spasm, my eardrums to burst, my lungs to collapse and my heart to give out. I looked at the window. Tommy wasn’t watching me. He’d watched the others, I knew, but with me … he was sorry.

But then I began to hallucinate. I thought trucks were bearing down on me, crashing into me, big tandem trucks, their enormous wheels crushing my bones. And I could hear the moaning of the foghorns back and forth across the sea too. I began rolling again and my injured shoulder brought me back once more. I was the one who was moaning, not the foghorns.

I forced myself up and over to the window. I banged on it. I tried to speak but I couldn’t. I was crying hysterically. I couldn’t breathe. I thought my head would explode, and a new pain was coming from my wracked eardrums, an unbearable, excruciating throbbing.

I pulled off my T-shirt. I tried to wrap it around my head. Then I did what the dead girls had done. I ripped off pieces of it with my teeth as they had ripped off pieces of theirs. I stuffed the shreds of the shirt into my ears. Immediately, the sound was muffled. I tried to see, and it took me a moment to understand that I couldn’t see because my eyes were squeezed shut. I opened them. The light in the room had dimmed. On the other side of the window, Tommy was moving about frantically, trying to get his power up. The noise had diminished, was now no louder than a smoke alarm. I could bear it. The pieces of the shirt hadn’t muffled the noise; it was the storm that had done it.

There had to be a tree somewhere lying across the electric wires leading to Tommy’s house. But there were no trees on Block Island. Maybe a branch from one of those scrubby pines I’d seen sprawled across Esther’s roof had ripped off and blown into a wire. The branch hadn’t broken all the way through the wires though. I thought of Joe’s complaints about the frequent Block Island brownouts.

I took off my sneaker. I went to the window and bashed at it. I knew it was futile. It was still a sneaker, not a boot. But Tommy looked up, and when he did I thought maybe he was more than Esther’s friend. Now he was watching me. He was not androgynous. I took off my bra. I put my hands on my hips. I felt perspiration trickling down between my breasts. And Tommy stared.

I unzipped my jeans and peeled them off. They were soaked through.

The sounds around me grew a little stronger. So did the light. The power was returning. I slid off my underpants and held out my arms to him. I said, “Tommy. Come and get me out.”

The light flared and the din bowled me over. I was down again, rolling, holding my ears, stopped by the wall, banging my head into it. I threw up.

I no longer felt the pain in my shoulder. The hallucinations returned. I was outside in the storm. The thunder and lightning were nonstop, piercing my ears, stabbing at my eyes, right through them and into my brain, filling my head. I was in a boat on the water, tossed up and down, back and forth by the waves. I tried to throw myself into the sea. I did and I went under, under the cruel seas of Esther’s paintings—down, down, down to the rocky bottom strewn with bones—and then everything stopped, all the horrendous clanging and whistling and smashing. I was dead.

I was dead and a new sound, a familiar one, came from deep inside me. I listened carefully and then I recognized it. It was the beating of my heart. I had survived the shipwreck, I hadn’t drowned. I heard Esther’s words, I read her description of the courage of Dutchy Kitten, twelve years old, half dead, frozen, unable to understand what people were saying to her, unable to get them to repeat her name, and so I made the same effort she had once made to crawl out of the surf. I pulled myself along and I felt the tide helping me, the waves washing me onto the shore. All was quiet and still. It was pitch dark. But I knew my eyes were open and then a thought came to me, a rational thought instead of the ones I’d just been having, one that reflected reality. Another pine branch just heavy enough to do more than lean onto a wire had severed it. Or maybe the transformer at the start of Tughole Way had been hit by lightning. Toppled over.

The electric power to Tommy’s house was cut off.

My body was shaking so hard, I couldn’t move. Instead of the noise of the amplifiers, I heard echoes of that noise reverberating through my skull. The pain in my ears was a dull, deep ache, the terrible throbbing gone. And then I saw a small pinprick of light outside the little window, a steady one that remained on, nothing to do with lightning. Tommy had turned on a flashlight. I could see my bare skin. I snapped my fingers but I couldn’t hear the sound. I was deaf. Tommy and I were even.

I willed myself to a spot next to the window and flattened my body up against the wall. He had to be deciding whether to wait it out or get rid of Christen and me now. But he knew what I knew—even if the transformer had burnt out, the islanders didn’t mind going without electricity because they all had generators in place. But not a generator strong enough to create the kind of power necessary to run Tommy’s torture machine.

He did have a genius, though, at his beck and call—Jake. Jake could probably build a generator to service all of Block Island, but obviously he hadn’t. At that moment I felt such a vast hatred for Tommy, for what he’d put Jake up to, I wanted to kill him, to beat his head with a rock, to make his head feel just the way my head had. And then I felt shame.

I remembered Tommy already knew what my head felt like. I didn’t want to kill him at all. I wanted to rescue him. I understood now exactly what Tommy had gone through when he was a boy. His injuries had left him with a severe hearing loss, his brain had been damaged, and he had been left with a propensity to madness. But I had to save myself. And I had to get to Christen.

Through the little viewing window, his flashlight’s beam roamed the floor of the room and then the walls, but I was huddled under the window and Tommy never saw me. Then the beam disappeared for a few seconds before it reappeared in a long thin line. Tommy had opened the door a crack. I’d never heard the bolt slide or the door open. I could only hear the pounding inside my head.

I slid along the wall until I was behind the door. It opened halfway. The beam of the light came into the room, and behind it a hand I knew was there but couldn’t make out. Joe had taken me crabbing once on the Chesapeake Bay. Joe said crabbing was an art. Fingering the line, you can feel when the blue crab begins to tamper with the rotted chicken leg at the other end. You can feel when he takes hold of the bait, settles in to eat, one claw holding fast to the bait, the other forking pieces of the chicken into his mouth. Then you lift him very slowly, just off the bottom, a few inches at a time, stopping each time the line feels slack, continuing when you feel him holding firm again; then, near the surface, you have to guess where he is and scoop swiftly upward with your long-handled net. Took practice, Joe told me, especially the guessing part. I’d practiced until I reached a point where I could feel a crab on my line before Joe could feel one on his, and I would lift the bait, lift the line a half inch at a time, lift just a little bit more, then yank the net up out of the water—always with a glistening wet blue crab struggling inside.

So I deliberated for half a second and guessed as to where exactly Tommy’s wrist was. I made my hand rigid and lifted it high. With all the power I could muster, I sliced down through the air behind the light.

My wounded ears felt the vibrations of a scream. The flashlight hit the floor and went rolling. Tommy was in the light for just a second. In his other hand he held a short metal pipe.

He took a swing at me. The pipe glanced my bad shoulder. I didn’t see black dots, I saw flashing stars, so I knew I wouldn’t faint. I had the advantage. My shoulder hurt but it was back in position. Tommy’s broken wrist would stay broken.

There was no strength in my left hand but at least I could use it. I grabbed at the iron pipe and tried to wrench it away. I couldn’t. We both went down. He went for the flashlight, which was not a cheap plastic one but was metal and solid, and he swung it at me. He swung it and swung it, and on his third swing I pulled the pipe from his grip just as the flashlight hit me in the jaw. The blood filling up my mouth gave me what I needed. I felt a rush of adrenaline surge through my veins.

I went for the door, opened it, ran through, and slammed it shut. I threw the bolt just as Tommy flung himself against it. He flung himself at the door again and then again. He had no chance. I spit the blood out and I took a few deep breaths. Icy hands touched my back. I swung around and screamed a scream I couldn’t hear.

Christen was in front of me. In the light that came from the flashlight I could see her face; her mouth gagged the way Kate’s had been, but she’d managed to loosen it and yell. I got the gag off. She said something to me.

“Christen, I can’t hear you.”

She yelled into my ear, “My hands are tied!”

She turned around and I untied her wrists.

Tommy was smashing his boot against the window. The window wouldn’t be broken. It had to be hurricane glass; it would take a lot of pounding. He stopped and threw his body against the door yet again. Christen yelled into my face, “The bolt is wiggling!”

I said, “Get the bookcase.”

She didn’t need me to help her; she was a strong girl. She pushed the bookcase back into position. She dragged a workbench across the cellar floor and shoved it up against the bookcase. The lightning was still coming through the crack in the black curtains covering Tommy’s cellar windows, not such sharp flashes anymore, distant glows. The storm was moving offshore.

Christen was staring at me. She shouted, “Can you hear me now?”

I could, as though she were talking to me from the hallucinations I’d had just a few minutes earlier. “Yes. I can.”

“You’re naked.”

She pulled off her sweatshirt. I went to put it on but I’d forgotten about my left shoulder. A pain shot through it when I lifted my arm.

Christen said, “Omigod, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I hurt my shoulder. It’s okay.”

She said something else.

“Louder, Christen.”

“Is your arm broken?”

“No.”

“I broke my arm once. It really killed. When I was nine.…”

While she shouted the story of falling out of a tree, I eased my sore arm into the sleeve of the sweatshirt, got the other arm in the other sleeve, and pulled it down over my head. The sweatshirt came down to my knees.

She stopped her story. She smiled. “You’re warm now, right?”

She’d thought I must have been cold. It was such a childlike voice. But I heard it and that was all that mattered. I wouldn’t be deaf forever, like Tommy.

I put my good arm around her. “Don’t hug me back, Christen, it’ll hurt. What about you, are you okay?”

“Yes. I snuck up to Tommy’s house. But I tripped over something. Then he was right there and he grabbed me and tied my wrists. He put me in there, in that room.”

Christen looked toward the bookcase, hiding the window with the room behind. She said, “I heard this music and then this really loud bell. Really, really loud. But then red lights started flashing outside the window, in the cellar. He came and got me out and made me go upstairs. He was going to hit me with a pipe. He said to me he wanted to watch me just like I’d watched him. I tried to tell him I didn’t know what he meant. I never watched him. He really scared me, Poppy.”

“I know.”

“He locked me in a bedroom and tied me to a hanger screwed in the door. It took me a long time but I ripped it out. I broke down the bedroom door just now.”

I sensed a noise, a crack. Christen’s eyes went wide. Tommy had cracked the window. “He can’t break it, Christen. It’s hurricane glass. It’ll only crack. You’ve trapped him. There is no way for him to escape that room. We’ve got to get out of here and go find someone to come and see to him.” She was still as a statue. “Now.”

She turned her head just a little bit. “No,” she said, “let’s not. Let’s not tell anyone. Let’s let him just stay there until … until he starves to death.”

“Christen, he’s ill. Psychotic. He’s—”

“I don’t care what he is.” She whirled around, came back to me. “Oh, no! Poppy, I can hear the door shaking.”

He’d loosened the bolt. “He can’t get through that door. We’ll get someone here to guard him until the police come.”

“But what if he does get out?”

“He won’t. Believe me, you’ve seen to that. Let’s go, Christen. Let’s go right now.”

We went up Tommy’s cellar steps, through his kitchen and his living room, and out the front door.

I could hear our footsteps and I could hear Tommy’s bashing. The little sensory cells in my ears were rising up again. I could feel it happening because of Auerbach, who’d made it sound so real, so alive. The tiny sensory cells were collecting sound waves once more.

Outside, the storm had lost its violence. Flashes flew in the far black distance. The rain still fell in sheets, but it wasn’t flying horizontally. A candle burned in Jake’s window. I said, “Christen, I want to see if Jake is all right.”

She grabbed me. “Jake will let him out.”

“He won’t do anything unless he’s told to do it.” I went into Jake’s shack through his unlocked door. Christen was a weight, hanging on to the back of the sweatshirt she’d given me. But Jake wasn’t inside. “He’s not here, Christen. Let’s get the van and drive to the clinic, get the doctor.”

“The van’s out of gas.” She looked up into the sky, the rain pelting her face, a face so innocent, hiding her instinct, her insight.

“Christen?”

“What?”

“How did you know it was Tommy?”

Her face came to mine. “He’d stare at us. He didn’t laugh at us, but he stared. He seemed, I don’t know, it was like we made him nervous or uncomfortable or something. That’s how things are, though, with some people. I figured he just didn’t like fat people. Or, you know, judged us. But Stupid would always say, No, he’s just very serious. Because he’s like a sheriff. Stupid said he reminded her of her grandpa. Her grandpa was gruff but he had a kind heart, she’d say. That’s how I knew she would trust the constable.” And then she turned her face away again. She was listening to something. “Poppy, what’s that?” I tried to hear. She said, “I think there’s a plane coming.”

I heard it too. “That’s Joe’s plane.”

“How do you know?”

“Because no one else is fool enough to fly in this weather. C’mon, the airstrip is less than half a mile.”

“Okay.”

We hurried along, past the dead van as we went splashing through the puddles, trying to be careful and not fall. I heard the sound of the plane land. Christen and I went faster, helping each other stay upright. I was getting winded. She wasn’t. Christen was capable of enormous endurance. And then the lights of Fitzy’s car came at us. Christen began waving wildly. I remembered to wave with my right arm, not my aching left one.

The car had barely stopped before Joe and Fitzy were out of it. They ran toward us. I stopped in my tracks. When they reached us, I said, “Joe, don’t touch me.”

Christen said, “She’s hurt.”

He stopped.

“A little. It’s nothing. My shoulder…”

“Jesus, Poppy, are you all right?”

“Yes.”

We all stood facing one another. It was Fitzy who took a step forward. “You stumbled on him.”

I couldn’t respond. I felt myself blinking back tears, tears of terror—delayed reaction—and I suddenly knew how lucky I was to be alive. Yes, I had stumbled on him.

“And you got him, didn’t you?”

Christen was the one to throw her arms around someone. Around Fitzy. She said, “Yes! We got him! We fucking got him.”

He pulled her away so he could face her. “Tell me where he is.”

“He’s—” And right then Christen came back to earth just moments after my own descent. “He’s—” What had hit me hit her. She started to cry, and her crying became a wail the way children will wail when they’re in total despair, the sound of absolute heartbreak.

Big girls do cry, but it takes a hell of a lot.

Now Fitzy hugged her back, took her into his arms. “You’re okay, kid. And your little friend in the hospital’s doing a lot better. Her grandfather came. That was all she needed. She doesn’t remember anything that happened to her. She’ll never remember, either.” He looked past Christen and into my eyes. He kept talking. “She asked about you and Sam and all the girls at the camp. The nurses are bringing Elijah Leonard rice pudding. Now you have to try and stop crying so you and Poppy can tell me everything I need to know.”

I said, “It was Tommy. That’s all there is to know and you already know it.”

Fitzy said, “The psychiatrist never worked again. She brought him to Block Island where he’d be safe. Anonymous.”

Now Joe had something to say. “I’m sorry.”

I was getting really sick of his being sorry.

Fitzy said, “Block Island had been the psychiatrist’s home. She was descended from one of the founding fathers. No one questioned her widowhood, which is what she told them. It was the psychiatrist’s stuff that was left at Esther’s years ago. Esther found the clippings in one of the bags.”

Suddenly, something was not right. Christen startled. Fitzy and Joe looked around. Then I was able to hear it—a strange whirring sound. Joe looked over my head toward town. I turned to see what he was staring at. One after the other, the harborside buildings came aglow; one after another the houses and inns in the center of town filled with flickering lights muted by the drizzle—all that was left of the storm. The power was reaching the million-dollar cottages, one at a time in a line coming toward us, electricity passing from one to the next.

Fitzy said, “Well, that should help.”

And Joe stared at me. “Poppy, what’s the matter?”

Two strips of tiny blue lights came on at the landing strip just as electricity surged through the wires leading to Tommy’s house, releasing an enormous cacophany of bells and whistles and infernal crashes that resounded through the night. Tommy had managed to break the window, after all.

Christen stared at me. She put her hands over her ears. We all did. And then Christen smiled and said, “Yes!”

Dogs began to bark, babies were crying, and gulls in great numbers rose from nowhere into the sky. Their screeching could not overpower the noise coming from Tommy’s house. We ran to Fitzy’s car and were at Tommy’s in minutes. I told Christen to stay where she was. She did not protest; she was bent over, her hands still covering her ears.

Joe didn’t move. “I’ll stay with her.”

Fitzy followed me into the house and ran with me across the kitchen, through the hall, and down the cellar stairs. The noise was no less shocking than before, even though it was now dispersed into a much larger space. We pulled at the tool table and then the bookcase, exposing the window and the circuit board beneath. The window was smashed. I stared at the circuit board, a row of little glowing red lights. I began pushing switches. Splinters of glass cut my fingers. Fitzy stepped in front of me, grabbed the entire board and ripped it out. But one wire remained connected. And we listened to all that was left of the deadly recordings—strains of Rhapsody in Blue.

In the little window, jagged shards stuck up from its bent frame. We could see Tommy on the floor, rolled into a ball, moaning. There was blood everywhere. He had used a piece of the glass to slice his wrists.

We pulled and pushed at the bookcase until we could get into the room. The bolt on the door had been ripped away, but Tommy hadn’t been able to push himself past Christen’s barrier.

I sank down beside Tommy, pulled his hands from his ears, and cradled his head in my lap. Fitzy squatted down beside him too, picking up my T-shirt and my underwear from the floor to tie his gushing wrists.

Tommy’s face was bone-white and soft, again the ghost of the child he’d been. I brushed a few wisps of hair from his forehead, just the way I had Kate’s. His eyes opened. He said something, very softly; Fitzy told me later what it was. He’d said, “I didn’t want to hurt you, miss.” But I couldn’t hear him. I’d responded all the same. I said, “It’s all right now, Tommy.”

He spoke again, his lips barely moving. Fitzy told me the rest of what he’d said. “That last one. She was just a little child. I didn’t know.”

He shut his eyes. I said to him, “Tommy, it’s all over now.”

It wasn’t quite over, though. He said “Jake” before he died. I was able to read that word on his lips.