August 24, 1986
Rebecca Essig had a stomachache.
Truth be told, she’d gotten her period a couple of days ahead of schedule, and that was reason enough to leave Cindy Ruger’s slumber party at one in the morning as the others were digging into bowls of Rocky Road. Cindy’s new friends from the freshman volleyball team were like hyenas, ready to devour the weakest member of the pack, and if they found out Becca’s mom thought fourteen was too young to use tampons, that humiliating bit of trivia would be all over the school before Monday. She’d be ruined, one week into the school year.
Best just to go home.
Rebecca walked half a mile of neighborhood sidewalks in the dark, humming Belinda Carlisle’s “Mad About You” as she passed in and out of the glow from a series of streetlamps. When she got to her house, she dug her key from beneath her shirt, where it hung from a length of blue yarn around her neck, and let herself in through the front door.
All the lights were out, except the soft glow of the night-light from the room her younger sisters shared at the end of the hall.
Rebecca kicked her sandals off next to the door, beside her brother’s grimy football cleats, and dropped her overnight bag on the coffee table. Then she fixed herself a bowl of chocolate ice cream by the moonlight shining in through the window over the sink, to make up for the snack she’d missed at the slumber party.
As usual, her father was snoring loudly, so as she passed her parents’ room in the dark hallway, carrying the cold bowl in one hand, she pulled their door closed.
Two steps later, her bare foot landed in something warm and wet on the carpet.
Rebecca groaned, then took a bite of her ice cream and kept walking. She felt no obligation to clean up cat urine. She wasn’t even supposed to be home yet.
In front of her brother’s open bedroom door, she stepped in a second puddle. This time, Rebecca stopped and felt around on the wall for a light switch. The cat was old and had bladder control issues, but she’d never urinated in two different places in one night.
Becca’s fingers brushed the switch and she flipped it up. Light flooded the hallway, illuminating not one puddle of cat urine, but an entire trail of wet, brownish footprints.
There weresomany tracks. As if someone had gone up and down the hall, in and out of every bedroom except Becca’s, spreading the dark stain with every step.
Hands shaking, Rebecca knelt in the hall and pressed her fingers into the nearest footprint. They came away smeared with bright red.
Blood.
The footprints wereblood.
Rebecca stood and backed toward the wall. Her bowl thumped to the floor and a scoop of chocolate ice cream rolled onto the soiled carpet, shiny and wet, and already melting into a footprint too big to belong to a child.
But her parents were asleep. She could still hear her dad snoring through his bedroom door. If he knew there was blood in the hallway, he would not have gone to bed without finding the source. Her mother wouldn’t have gone to sleep without cleaning it up.
And neither of them would have tracked it up and down the hallway.
Trembling, Rebecca followed the trail of bloody footprints past the bathroom and her own bedroom to the room shared by her ten-and six-year-old sisters. She took a deep breath, then flipped the light switch on.
Laura’s bed was unmade but empty, one corner of the covers thrown back.
Against the opposite wall, six-year-old Erica was asleep in her bed, her chubby left cheek pressed into the brightly striped pillowcase, her chest rising and falling with every breath. Rebecca exhaled and started to turn off the light—until she noticed a set of small, bloody footprints leading to her youngest sister’s bed from the hallway.
Erica had walked through the blood on the way to her bed.
Heart pounding, Rebecca turned off the light and closed the door. Careful not to step in any of the stains, she headed for her brother’s room, where the concentration of blood was so heavy she couldn’t distinguish individual footprints.
Unwilling to go in, she reached around the door frame and fumbled with the switch. Light flared from overhead.
Rebecca choked on shock, a scream trapped in her throat. Her arms fell slack at her sides, and for one interminable moment, her brain refused to process the carnage as anything more than a tableau of meaningless crimson arcs and pools, and a tangle of pale limbs splayed out on the carpet.
Then she found Laura’s face, her mouth open, her eyes staring blankly at the far wall, and the entire scene came into horrifying clarity. Beyond her sister’s body, her brother’s bed was—
Don’t look at the bed. Don’t look at the bed.
Terrified, Rebecca spun toward her parents’ room—then froze again. She could still hear her father snoring through the door. The footprints leading beneath it were still wet. As little sense as it made—as unthinkable as it was—the conclusion was obvious.
Rebecca raced down the bloody hall into the last room, where she threw back the covers and scooped her little sister up in both arms.
