Morgan, who usually slept like the dead, was the first person to be woken by the sound of Finn banging on the front door of Parr House half an hour before dawn.
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and squinted at the clock beside her bed. It was six forty-five. Outside her window, there was a barely perceptible sense of lightening in the sky, but the darkness was still nearly absolute.
The banging came again. Morgan swung her feet over the side of her bed and picked up her bathrobe where it lay on the chair beside her nightstand. Then she went into the hallway and started down the stairs.
Jeremy’s sleepy voice carried from the landing above. “Morgan? Is that you? What’s going on? Who’s at the door?”
“I don’t know, Uncle Jeremy. I just heard it now. It woke me up.”
“Wait for me,” he said. “Don’t open the door. I’ll do it, hopefully before your grandmother hears it and makes Beatrice dish up whoever’s pulverizing that door for breakfast.”
Christina’s door opened. “Morgan? Jeremy? What’s going on? Who’s at the door?” She belted her own bathrobe and ran her fingers through her hair, less through vanity than by reflex.
Jeremy hurried down the stairs past both Christina and Morgan. “I don’t know, Chris,” he said over his shoulder. “But whoever it is, he’s playing with his life if my mother gets to him first.”
Jeremy stared at the boy standing in the doorway. He’d never seen him before. The boy’s fist was poised as if to bang on the door again. His face was puffy and pale, his hair askew. Like them, he wore pyjamas, but his were muddy and ripped at the ankle as though he had torn them running. Clutched tightly in the boy’s other hand was a jar full of some sort of clear liquid that looked like water.
“Hi,” Jeremy said, confused. “Can I help you?”
“I need to see Morgan,” the boy said. “Please?”
“Morgan?” Jeremy glanced at the staircase where Christina and Morgan stood waiting for him to identify who had woken them. “Morgan, honey, there’s a . . . you have a visitor. Uh, come in, kid.”
Jeremy looked from Christina to Morgan, and then back at the boy, who took a few tentative steps across the threshold, onto the marble floor. Jeremy noticed that his feet were bare and bleeding.
Morgan hurried down the stairs and stopped in front of the doorway. “Finn? What are you doing here? Are you OK?” She stared at him blankly, as though trying to reconcile Finn’s bedraggled appearance in the foyer of Parr House before dawn. Morgan looked at her mother. “Mom, this is Finn Miller, my friend. The one I told you about? The one who walked me home?”
Christina stared at the dirty, half-dressed boy in the foyer. “Of course,” she said automatically, extending he hand. He stared at it blankly. “Hi, Finn,” she said. “I’m Morgan’s mom. This is her uncle, Jeremy. Come inside where it’s warm.
Then Christina took his full, unkempt, tattered measure with instinctive maternal tenderheartedness. She was horrified by what she saw—dirt, blood, dried tear-tracks on his cheeks sluicing through the grime. “Are you OK, Finn? What happened? Where are your clothes? Why are you in your pyjamas? Where’s your mom?”
The last question turned the key in the lock of Finn’s composure. He stumbled into Christina’s arms and collapsed there, weeping. Again, instinctively, Christina gathered Finn in her arms and held him tightly while he sobbed. She could barely understand what the boy was saying, but she made out the words Mommy, my father, Sadie, window broke, and dead. Then there were more sobs, even more wracking this time than before.
“What’s going on?” Jeremy whispered to Morgan. “Who is this kid? Where are his parents?”
Morgan shrugged and shook her head. “He’s Finn. He’s my friend. He lives over on Childs Drive. He lost his dog a couple of days ago.”
“Sadie died.” Finn turned his wet face away from Christina’s shoulder. “She burned up. We were going for a walk and she went to catch a ball I threw, then she burned up.”
Jeremy said, “What do you mean ‘she burned up’? Finn? That doesn’t make sense. What are you saying?”
“Hush, Jeremy, let him talk,” Christina said over the top of Finn’s head. Then, to Finn, “Sadie is your dog, is she? Did she get lost?”
“No, she’s dead. She burned up.” His voice was calm now, and matter-of-fact.
Shock, Christina thought. Just like my voice when I first heard about Jack’s car crash. Whatever has happened to this little boy is obviously very, very bad.
“And then my dad went to look for Sadie last night,” Finn continued. “He didn’t come home for dinner, or even later. My mom was so sad, and she waited up for him. She was worried. She called the police. Then she told me to go to bed. And then . . . and then my dad came home. He killed my mom. He came in through the window. He broke it. There was glass all over the place, and then he . . . then he bit my mom and he . . . he . . . took her with him. Out. Out the window!”
“Finn,” Christina said carefully, looking only at him. “Were you in the house all night? When this . . . well, when this happened—whatever happened to your mom and dad? Were you there all night, in the house?”
“No,” he said in a hushed voice. “I got away—I hid.”
“Where did you hide, Finn?”
He hesitated. “I went to the church. I went to St. Bart’s. I got in through the basement window. I waited there till I knew grownups would be awake. When the sun was going to come up.”
He held out his hand, still clutching the jar full of liquid. When Christina tried to take it out of his hand to examine it, he held on more tightly. But when she said, “Shhhh, let me look,” and gave him another little squeeze, he let her take the jar.
Christina held it up. “What is this, Finn? What’s in here?”
“Holy water,” Finn said. “It’s holy water. In case my dad comes back.”
“The phone’s out at Finn’s house,” Jeremy said, replacing the receiver in its cradle.
“Are you sure you got the right number, Uncle Jeremy?” Morgan looked down at the open Parr’s Landing directory on the table. “Do you want me to read the number to you again?”
“No, sweetie—I’ve tried it twice now. No answer. His folks aren’t picking up.”
Morgan’s voice quavered. “What if it means they—what if it means they’re hurt or something?”
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Jeremy said. Even has he spoke, he realized how ridiculously adult and fake-rational he sounded. Yes, of course, by all means—a little boy stumbles through the door of Parr House at seven in the morning and says his dog burst into flames and that his father broke through a window and murdered his mother, and you assure your fifteen-year-old niece that you’re “sure” they’re “fine.” You sound like your mother right now, Jeremy Parr. “I’ll take a run over there in a few minutes, Morgan. I’ll knock on the door and see what’s what.”
“OK,” she said. “Can I come?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “You stay here with your mother and your friend. I’ll be right back. And Morgan?”
“What?”
“Go on upstairs and knock—very gently—on your grandmother’s bedroom door and tell her we have a bit of an emergency situation going on here.”
“What’ll I say?”
“Tell her . . . tell her you have a friend who got hurt.” When he saw the trepidation on Morgan’s face, he smiled comfortingly and said, “It’ll be all right. She’s not going to bite your head off. You’re the one she loves, even if she doesn’t like the rest of us much.”
“Yeah, right,” Morgan said. “She hates me, too. Why can’t Beatrice do it?”
It suddenly occurred to Jeremy that there were none of the usual pre-breakfast sounds coming from inside the kitchen—no cutlery being laid out, and no clatter of china plates being placed on the mahogany sideboard in the dining room. Where was Beatrice? He’d never known her to be late—not in a lifetime of meticulously orchestrated breakfasts at Parr House.
“I don’t think Beatrice is here yet,” he said slowly. “And no, your grandmother doesn’t hate you. Now, wait till five minutes after I leave, then knock on her door.”
Morgan sighed. “OK, Uncle Jeremy. I will.”
“Good girl. Now, go wait in the sitting room with your mother and your friend. I’m going to run upstairs and get dressed, then go and check out his story. Go see if your mom needs anything for Finn.”
The Miller house on Childs Drive was exactly as Finn had described it— entirely nondescript except for the fact that the picture window facing the street was shattered.
When Jeremy entered the house—trying the door handle and finding it unlocked and, indeed, empty—he saw that the broken glass from the window was sprayed all over the carpet. There was none on the scrubby lawn outside. In other words, whoever had broken it had done so by smashing it from the outside.
Jeremy looked dubiously at the lawn. How did he get in here, assuming someone had? On a trampoline? Did he pole-vault in? He examined the glass on the floor, nudging it with his foot. Under an orange corduroy cushion he saw that the carpet was stained a brownish-red. He reached down and touched it. The carpet was still sticky, and his finger came away smeared red. Uh-oh, Jeremy thought. This isn’t good. Not good at all.
Fighting rising panic, Jeremy called out, “Hello? Is anyone here? Mrs. Miller? Mr. Miller?”
There was no answer. Jeremy would have been surprised had he received one. In a corner of the dining room floor, he saw the wall telephone. The jack had been ripped out of the wall, the exposed wires protruding like bones. He thought of checking the rest of the rooms in the house, but he already knew they would empty and he didn’t want to spend one more minute here than he had to.
“OK,” Jeremy said aloud. The rawness of his own voice in the grey dawn light filling the living room from the broken window startled him. “OK,” he said again, trying to sound calm and reasonable, if only to himself.
“Morgan, I know what happened to Sadie,” Finn said weakly. “I know what happened to my parents.”
“What happened, Finn?”
They were seated together on a divan in Adeline’s sitting room off the foyer. Finn had calmed down somewhat, but was still shaking from head to toe. Little bodily earthquakes, unsettling him.
From the kitchen, Morgan heard Christina making breakfast in Adeline’s vast kitchen. Her grandmother was still not up, and Morgan had not gone up to check on her as Uncle Jeremy had asked. Instead, she’d sat in an uncomfortably spindly chair next to the divan where Finn sat.
Finn turned his face away as though he changed his mind. “You wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “No one will. You’ll just say I’m crazy, or fibbing. My mom didn’t believe me, and now she’s dead.”
“Finn, try me,” she prodded. “Tell me. I’m your friend. I’ll believe you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will,” she said urgently. “Just tell me.”
While Christina made breakfast in the kitchen, Finn, trusting her, told Morgan everything.
He told her about Sadie’s gruesome end in the sunlight two mornings ago above Bradley Lake. He told her of his father’s disappearance, and his return.
He told her about his mother’s murder, how he drove his father out of the living room with the Lord’s Prayer and the two pieces of smashed table leg in the shape of the cross. He told her how he crouched in his bedroom for an hour afterwards, watching his bedroom door, his pyjamas stained with gouts of his mother’s blood, clutching the two shards of broken wood, thinking he heard footsteps pacing the floorboards through the living room and the kitchen above him but not being sure, not daring to move from his spot to find out.
Finn told her about fleeing the house on his Schwinn, watching the skies as best he could, all the while knowing that if something came to carry him off, he would be powerless to stop it. He told her of spending the night crouched near a statue of the Virgin Mary near the baptismal font at St. Barthélemy and the Martyrs, only leaving when he was sure dawn was right around the corner, and that there would be adults awake in the houses around him, adults that might be able to protect him from whatever was surely hunting him even as he cycled like the wind all the way up the hill to Parr House, and the safety of Morgan.
Morgan was silent for a long moment. The she said, “Finn, this is like something out of one of your comic books. You realize that, don’t you?”
He raised himself on his elbow and said furiously, “I told you, you wouldn’t believe me! I said!”
“Finn—”
“Never mind! I mean it! Never . . . mind!” He stood up abruptly, almost knocking over his jar of water—holy water, Morgan supposed, since she believed him about having spent the night in the church.
“Finn, are you feeling better?” Christina stood in the doorway with a glass of orange juice. “I’ve made some breakfast. Are you hungry? Morgan’s uncle isn’t back yet, but he will be soon.” She extended the glass of juice, but he didn’t move to take it.
Finn looked from Morgan to Christina, then back again. His expression was hard for Christina to read—thwarted anger, longing, terror. Grief, definitely. But mostly, it seemed, terrible frustration.
Christina said, “Finn?”
He picked up his jar of holy water and ran out of the sitting room. They heard the sound of his bare feet on the marble foyer floor, then the sound of the front door being flung open, then slamming shut.
“Morgan, what happened? What did you say to him?”
“Nothing! He started telling me this story . . .”
“What story? What did he tell you?”
“Something about . . .” Morgan looked at her mother’s bewildered face, and faltered.
It was one thing for Morgan herself not to believe Finn. She was a kid, too—well, a teenager, but still. It would be something else to for her to tell her mother the crazy story and have Christina think Finn was crazy. It seemed disloyal, somehow.
Finn had been the only friend she’d had since they arrived, and all he’d ever been was kind to her. And how had she repaid him? By doing the one thing she knew would hurt him—treating his vampire comic book obsession like a joke. She hadn’t intended to, of course, but he clearly believed what he had told her. The least she could have done was listen to Finn and trust that he believed what he was saying, and keep her big fat trap shut. She was such an idiot.
“Morgan Louise Parr, what did that boy say before he ran out of here? You tell me right now!”
“He said . . . he said something about his mom and dad.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t making sense. And then you . . . and then he just ran out of here. You saw him. I don’t know why, he just did.”
They heard the door click open again, then shut. Christina called out, “Finn?”
“No, it’s me.” Jeremy’s voice came from the foyer. He walked into the sitting room. From his face, Christina and Morgan knew the news wasn’t going to be good.
“Where’s Finn?” Jeremy said, looking blankly around the sitting room.
“He left,” Morgan said. “He just ran out of here.”
“What do you mean ‘he ran out of here’? Where did he go? His bicycle is gone, too. Weren’t you watching him?”
“Yes, we were watching him, Jeremy,” Christina snapped. “But he just jumped up and bolted out of here a few minutes ago. We couldn’t stop him. We tried.”
“Well, I went to his house. It’s not good, Chris. There’s glass everywhere, all over the floor. And I think . . . Morgan, would you excuse your mother and I for a minute?”
“I’m fifteen,” she said. “I’m not a baby.”
“You think what?” Christina snapped, ignoring them both.
“I think there’s blood on the carpet. It looks like something pretty awful did happen—maybe a fight between the mother and the father that went wrong. Got violent.”
Christina said, “Did you call the police?”
“The phone was ripped out of the wall. No way to call. I thought of finding a phone booth, but I decided to stop by the police station in person on the way back here and report it instead.”
“And? What did the police say? Are they going to check it out?”
“Well,” Jeremy said, “it was the damnedest thing. The station was empty.”
“What do you mean the police station was empty? How could it be empty? It’s a police station!”
“I don’t know how it could be empty, Christina. But it was. The lights were on and the front door was unlocked. It’s like they went out for coffee last night without even bothering to close up, then just didn’t come in for work today.”
Christina sat down heavily on the divan. “None of this makes any sense. And now that poor boy is running around outside in his pyjamas. He obviously saw something happen to his parents that upset him. Morgan, does he have any relatives in town, do you know? Or friends? Why did he come here?”
“I think he came here because I’m his . . . well, I think I’m his only friend,” she said. “He’s never mentioned anyone else. All Finn does is read Dracula comics and play with his dog. Her name’s Sadie. She ran away a couple of nights ago. Remember, I went over to see him? He was really upset about it. I wanted to go see him yesterday, too, on the way to school, but you were too busy to take me.” She added reproachfully, “Remember?”
Christina sighed. “Morgan, would you just stick to Finn? Did you see him again? Was he OK?”
“I went over his house at lunchtime. I knocked, but no one answered. That was the last time, until this morning.”
Christina took a deep breath and tried to marshal her thoughts. “All right. OK. One step at a time. Morgan, shouldn’t you be getting ready for school?”
“It’s Saturday, Mom.” Morgan rolled her eyes. “There’s no school today, even in Parr’s Landing.”
Jeremy frowned. “Morgan, did you check on your grandmother like I asked you to?
“No, Uncle Jeremy. I was talking to Finn. I’m sorry.”
“It’s almost nine and I haven’t seen her at all this morning. Have you, Chris?”
“No,” Christina said. “She hasn’t been down. And Beatrice didn’t come in this morning, either. I made breakfast, and no one came into the kitchen to tell me what a disaster I was, or how I was doing it wrong, or what a mess I was making.”
Jeremy smiled wanly, then sighed. “All right, I’ll go up and check on her.”
Jeremy rapped lightly on the door of Adeline’s bedroom and called out, “Mother? It’s me, Jeremy. Are you all right? It’s almost nine o’clock.”
He expected to hear a stinging rebuke of some sort issuing through the mahogany door, but there was only silence in the gloom of the upstairs hallway. He gently turned the cut glass doorknob and pushed. The door swung easily into the room. Jeremy blinked.
The bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in. The bedspread was smooth, the pillows—fluffed up every evening by Beatrice before she was allowed to leave for the day—were propped against the ornate headboard of Adeline Parr’s bed. Her perfumes and brushes were lined up on her dressing table the way they always were.
More, though—there was a sense of dry airlessness in the room, as though the door had been left shut for much longer than just the night.
“Mother?” he called out again, in case she was in her bathroom. But no, the door was open. He saw that the bathtub was dry, as were the sinks and the floor.
Glancing guiltily around him, Jeremy crossed to Adeline’s dressing table and opened the bottom left-hand drawer. He lifted up the file folders he found there and saw that the money he’d found yesterday— almost a thousand dollars, as he’d told Christina—was still in place.
Joy rose in him. The money was still there, which meant that they could leave whenever they wanted to. Adeline’s absence would have been completely fortuitous in this regard, except that now this Miller kid had disappeared and he doubted very much that he would be able to pry either Christina or Morgan away from the Landing until he surfaced again.
Jeremy only prayed that his mother didn’t return anytime soon from whatever errand or assignation had taken her away from the house so early this morning. It would just make stealing her money and escaping from her house that much easier. He considered pocketing the money now, but realized that if Adeline came home abruptly and saw that the money was missing, the consequences of her fury would be unthinkable. No, better to take it at the last possible minute, before Adeline had time to even realize it was gone.
In the least emotionally involved and most tangential way, Jeremy wondered where his mother was. But Jeremy was a child of Parr House, and he realized that the times when he could enjoy Adeline’s absence had been few enough in his years here that he should appreciate them when they occurred. Better not to risk breaking the spell by asking questions.
The three of them ate breakfast in the kitchen, not the dining room. They mostly ate in silence, each deep in his or her own thoughts.
Jeremy tried to signal with his eyes to Christina, to remind her about their escape plan, but she stared at her plate of scrambled eggs and barely touched them.
Morgan was thinking about betrayal and how her thoughtless dismissal of Finn at his most vulnerable had sent him fleeing from the house at the moment he needed Morgan the most. And now he was somewhere outside, afraid to go home, terrified that the vampires in his comic books were real, and that they had laid siege to his family and his dog.
Then Christina said, “I’m going to call Billy Lightning. I’m going to call him at the motel and meet him in town and talk about this.”
Jeremy looked surprised. He laid down his coffee cup. “You are?
Why?”
“Because I trust him, Jeremy. Aside from you and Morgan—who frankly don’t know any more than I do about what’s happening here—he’s the only person in this town I trust. He knows a lot about this town and the things that have happened here over the years. And he has a truck. We may need it to look for Finn later, especially if he’s gone into the woods to look for his dog or something.”
“Mom, I told you, his dog is dead,” Morgan said. “Finn said the dog burned up.”
“Morgan,” Christina said patiently. “Finn’s dog didn’t ‘burn up.’ Dogs don’t ‘burn up.’ He’s probably so rattled by what he saw last night—and I can’t believe we’re not talking to the police about this because the Parr’s Landing police detachment forgot to come in to work today—that he’s imagining it. He’s probably had a spell of some sort. Anyway, Billy might know what to do, so I’m going to call him.”
“Christina,” Jeremy said, rolling his eyes surreptitiously. “Remember what we talked about . . . ?” He mouthed today, his head angled in a way that Morgan couldn’t see his face. Christina shook her head almost imperceptibly and walked out of the room, towards the phone.
Morgan and Jeremy heard her dialling, then asking to be connected to Billy Lightning’s room. There was a brief, muffled conversation, then Christina returned to the dining room carrying her purse.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said. “Morgan, would you please stay here until we figure out what’s going on? Jeremy, would you keep an eye on her?”
“Mom! I’m not—”
“Yes, Morgan, I know you’re not a baby. So please, do as I ask and don’t leave the house until I get back. All right?”
Morgan sighed theatrically, then softened when she saw the fear on her mother’s face. “All right, Mom, don’t worry. I’ll stay here.”
“You can take advantage of your grandmother’s absence to do some exploring,” Jeremy said. “It’s a big house, and you haven’t seen much of it so far. With Adeline away, the mice can play.”
“Thanks, Jeremy,” Christina said gratefully. “I won’t be long.”