why you’re still here.”
“They get into an argument.”
“Bullets fly.”
“A few. Must be a cop in the area. Suddenly there’s a siren.”
“So they split?”
“They split so fast they’re peeling rubber. And they don’t stop to pick up all they spilled when the shooting started.”
“Some of which was money,” she guesses.
“Enough was.”
She sighs. “It’s always nice and quiet here in Broderick’s.”
Her birth name is Daisy Jean Sims. Now she is known to the world as Amity Onawa.
Two years before, her hair was long and blond, eyes sapphire-blue. Her eyes are still blue, but her hair is short and black.
In a more ordinary time, she had a father, a mother, and a younger brother named Michael. One night they were all murdered in their beds.…
On the night, the baby-faced murderer spares only her. Without her knowledge, he has for some time been watching her from afar.
Vestmented with her family’s blood, he switches on her bedside lamp and wakes her with the eerily tender request that she put on a dress that he has purchased just for her. A modest dress with aPeter Pan collar and a midcalf skirt. Also a pair of white ankle socks, saddle shoes, and a lace mantilla.
She understands, without being told, that he wants her to wear these things so that he can tear them off her.
Shaking as much with grief as with terror, she does as he asks, which includes changing in her small walk-in closet to ensure that the thrill of anticipation will not be diminished for him by seeing her naked before the moment that he violently disrobes her.
Because she is a handy girl who mends her own clothes, she keeps sewing supplies in a closet drawer. When she presents herself attired as he desires, she surprises him with a pair of scissors.
The wound she inflicts is far from fatal, but he staggers and falls, giving her a chance to run. Dressed as if for church followed by a sock hop, she escapes, aware that he’s getting to his feet and cursing.
If not for what happens when she’s holding the scissors with the blades sunk in the killer, she would scream into the night and seek help from neighbors. But in that instant when she and the psychopath are linked by blood and steel, she has a flash vision of herself perhaps a year older, in a house that belongs to her aunt and uncle, both of them on the floor, their faces disarranged by bullets. She sees herself, too, on her knees in that carnage, begging for her life as this same lunatic presents her with a fresh costume that he wants her to wear.
Mind, heart, and soul, she knows that this premonition is true, that the police will not catch him, that continuing to be Daisy Jean Sims will be the death of her and the death of still more people whom she loves.
Racing down the front-porch steps, the mantilla flying off her head, she does the last thing the killer will expect: runs not away from the house but instead around it. Occasionally her father sits on the back porch to have a beer before bed. He isn’t much of a drinking man, and if he has two, he sometimes forgets to lock the door when he retires for the night. Sure enough, it’s unlocked, ajar, suggesting that the killer entered the house this way.
She crosses the kitchen and warily peers into the downstairs hall. At the farther end of the house, the psychopath leaves by the front door.
Now she proves that her mettle is second to none. Shuddering with terror, wrenched by grief, she makes her way to her parents’ bedroom, where in the company of the beloved dead, she locates her father’s wallet and her mother’s purse, taking what money they contain. Like many people in these uncertain times, her parents have purchased some gold coins, which are kept under the false bottom of a desk drawer in the den. She takes those eight Canadian Maple Leafs as well, and then returns to her bedroom.
Either she is half insane and reckless with anguish, therefore not thinking clearly, or she is thinking more clearly
“They get into an argument.”
“Bullets fly.”
“A few. Must be a cop in the area. Suddenly there’s a siren.”
“So they split?”
“They split so fast they’re peeling rubber. And they don’t stop to pick up all they spilled when the shooting started.”
“Some of which was money,” she guesses.
“Enough was.”
She sighs. “It’s always nice and quiet here in Broderick’s.”
Her birth name is Daisy Jean Sims. Now she is known to the world as Amity Onawa.
Two years before, her hair was long and blond, eyes sapphire-blue. Her eyes are still blue, but her hair is short and black.
In a more ordinary time, she had a father, a mother, and a younger brother named Michael. One night they were all murdered in their beds.…
On the night, the baby-faced murderer spares only her. Without her knowledge, he has for some time been watching her from afar.
Vestmented with her family’s blood, he switches on her bedside lamp and wakes her with the eerily tender request that she put on a dress that he has purchased just for her. A modest dress with aPeter Pan collar and a midcalf skirt. Also a pair of white ankle socks, saddle shoes, and a lace mantilla.
She understands, without being told, that he wants her to wear these things so that he can tear them off her.
Shaking as much with grief as with terror, she does as he asks, which includes changing in her small walk-in closet to ensure that the thrill of anticipation will not be diminished for him by seeing her naked before the moment that he violently disrobes her.
Because she is a handy girl who mends her own clothes, she keeps sewing supplies in a closet drawer. When she presents herself attired as he desires, she surprises him with a pair of scissors.
The wound she inflicts is far from fatal, but he staggers and falls, giving her a chance to run. Dressed as if for church followed by a sock hop, she escapes, aware that he’s getting to his feet and cursing.
If not for what happens when she’s holding the scissors with the blades sunk in the killer, she would scream into the night and seek help from neighbors. But in that instant when she and the psychopath are linked by blood and steel, she has a flash vision of herself perhaps a year older, in a house that belongs to her aunt and uncle, both of them on the floor, their faces disarranged by bullets. She sees herself, too, on her knees in that carnage, begging for her life as this same lunatic presents her with a fresh costume that he wants her to wear.
Mind, heart, and soul, she knows that this premonition is true, that the police will not catch him, that continuing to be Daisy Jean Sims will be the death of her and the death of still more people whom she loves.
Racing down the front-porch steps, the mantilla flying off her head, she does the last thing the killer will expect: runs not away from the house but instead around it. Occasionally her father sits on the back porch to have a beer before bed. He isn’t much of a drinking man, and if he has two, he sometimes forgets to lock the door when he retires for the night. Sure enough, it’s unlocked, ajar, suggesting that the killer entered the house this way.
She crosses the kitchen and warily peers into the downstairs hall. At the farther end of the house, the psychopath leaves by the front door.
Now she proves that her mettle is second to none. Shuddering with terror, wrenched by grief, she makes her way to her parents’ bedroom, where in the company of the beloved dead, she locates her father’s wallet and her mother’s purse, taking what money they contain. Like many people in these uncertain times, her parents have purchased some gold coins, which are kept under the false bottom of a desk drawer in the den. She takes those eight Canadian Maple Leafs as well, and then returns to her bedroom.
Either she is half insane and reckless with anguish, therefore not thinking clearly, or she is thinking more clearly
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