Somewhere Beneath Those Waves by Sarah Monette

I’ll deal with it.” Then he appeared in the doorway.
    “ What the hell is going on here ?” he demanded, in a roar like that of a beast, set his foot on the first step, and started down.
    At the same moment that Lilah realized the white, watching presence was no longer beside Butch, she saw it, as clearly as she ever did, on the cellar stairs just below Cranmer Stark. Its back was to her, but she saw its child shape, saw the tilt of its head. It was looking at Cranmer Stark.
    She didn’t think he saw it fully. He saw something ; he shouted wordlessly, tried (she thought) to dodge it, and pitched headfirst down the stairs. She was close enough to hear the crack when his neck broke.
    Lilah, who only realized later that she was screaming, flung herself up the basement stairs, slammed and bolted the door behind her, and half-scrambled, half-fell into the kitchen to call Sheriff Patterson.
    When they unearthed Jonathan Stark’s body, they found his toy bunny clutched under one arm.
    Lilah was in Sheriff Patterson’s car again. He’d taken her statement, tried to talk to the hysterically weeping Sidonia Stark, got his deputies started on the basement. Then he’d come back to the kitchen and said, “Mrs. Collier, would you care to come with me?”
    “Am I under arrest?” she asked when he opened the door for her.
    “Nope.” He got in the car, started it, said, “I believe you. I busted up enough fights with Butch Collier somewhere near the middle to know what he was like. And I was in that house today. I believe it happened just like you said.” He turned left at the end of the Starks’ street, away from the middle of town. “But, and I hate to say this, there’s a bunch of folks in Hyperion who ain’t gonna see it like I do. They’re gonna see one woman and two men in a cellar, and only the woman comes out, and they’re gonna say, we don’t know nothing about who put that little boy down there, but we know what two men end up dead over when there’s a woman in the room. They’re gonna like it better than the truth. Now, those folks can’t make me arrest you, but I can’t keep them from lynching you, neither. You understand?”
    “Oh, yeah,” said Lilah. “I hear you, sheriff.”
    “So I was thinking—I got your testimony, and I think when Sidonia calms down some, she maybe is gonna tell us the truth. And the man who needed prosecuting is dead, besides. So if you was to just . . . vanish, people could think what they liked and nobody’d get hurt. And I can’t believe you’ll be sorry to see the last of this town.”
    “I’ll be grateful,” Lilah said. “I mean, it’s a nice town and all, but . . . ”
    “I know,” he said as they passed the city limits sign. “You’d always be thinking about whether you had to go past the Stark house on your way home.”
    “Yeah.”
    They drove in silence for a long time. He said at last, “Near as I can make Sidonia out, Cranmer was carrying on with Miss Baldwin. She says she knew it and didn’t care, and whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But the way I figure it, the little boy got out of bed and saw something he shouldn’t’ve—or said something he shouldn’t’ve, maybe—and his daddy . . . ”
    “Made him be quiet,” Lilah said. “That’s about all I ever heard the man say to the little boy. ‘Be quiet.’ ”
    “He might not’ve meant to,” the sheriff offered after a cold moment.
    “Maybe. But he still must’ve meant to hurt him.”
    “So,” said the sheriff. “I hear you, Mrs. Collier. And the rest of it, he planned out like a snake. Buried the little boy in the basement, worked up that lie for his wife to tell, bullied her into telling it—I can tell you one thing, Sidonia was scared clean out of her mind by her husband. And it was a good lie. There wasn’t nothing we could check, nothing to say it wasn’t true. They didn’t go to the Magnolia Tree—I got that nailed down this afternoon—but that