“Hey,” Gallagher whispered as he closed the door softly behind him. “I didn’t intend to wake you. Go back to sleep.”
I rolled onto my side, then pushed myself upright. “Can’t.” Not without a trip to the bathroom. I threw back the covers and swung my feet over the side of the mattress.
“Delilah! What happened?” Gallagher crossed the floor in three steps and dropped onto his knees in front of me. He took my hands in both of his—for once touching me without hesitation—and that’s when I saw the blood.
“Oh my God.” The underside of the soft white sheet was streaked with dry smudges of it. My nightgown was stained with arcing splatters of it. My hands were caked with it, crusted into the cracks of my knuckles and beneath my nails.
“Delilah. Is it the baby?” Gallagher demanded, his strong hands open and useless at his sides, without an enemy to rip apart.
“I don’t know. Nothing hurts.” I let him help me carefully out of the bed, one hand supporting the swollen mass of my belly, and I stared down at the sheets, expecting to find a puddle of blood on the mattress from the onset of labor gone terribly wrong. Having had no prenatal care, that was my biggest fear in the world.
Yet there was no pool of blood. In fact, the mess seemed concentrated on my hands and the upper curve of my stomach, as if rather than bleeding I had been bled on.
I felt around on my stomach, just to be sure, and found no injury or soreness, other than the usual numbness in my lower rib cage.
Relief settled over me with the certainty that I was neither injured nor in labor. But eliminating the most obvious source of the blood left an even more terrifying possibility.
The world seemed to shrink around me until nothing existed but the breath wheezing in and out of my lungs, the blood on my hands and the utter terror shining in Gallagher’s dark, dark eyes.
“Delilah!” He ran his hands down my arms and over my skull, frantically searching for the injury. “Tell me who did this, and I’ll rip him limb from limb.” His voice carried the gravelly threat of true violence, and deep inside me, thefuriaepurred like a cat being stroked.
Tears filled my eyes as I pulled out of his grip. “Gallagher, I thinkIdid this.”
August 24, 1986
Grandma Janice wasn’t one to dwell on the dark side of things. That had always been one of the things Rebecca liked most about her mother’s mother. Normally that optimism meant focusing on all the ice cream she’d gotten to eat after having her tonsils out at the undignified age of fifty-five, rather than on the pain of recovery. Or on the fun she’d had playing in the mud with her grandchildren, when the aboveground pool in her backyard had sprung a leak.
But picking up her bloodstained granddaughters from the police station in the middle of the night had stretched even her ability to look on the bright side.
“Erica, you can have your mom’s old bed for tonight, and, Becca, I thought you’d enjoy the trundle!” Grandma Janice knelt on creaking knees and pulled out a twin-size mattress-in-a-drawer made up with a light blue sheet, tucked around the corners with military precision.
The first grader’s hair was a tangled mess from having slept on Rebecca’s lap all the way from the police station. It was nearly 3:00 a.m., and she could hardly hold her eyes open, so, still clutching the teddy bear the paramedic had given her, Erica climbed onto the bed. Her right foot left a rust-colored smudge on the pale pink comforter.
“Oh, sweetie, let’s clean you off a little first!” Grandma Janice hurried across the hall into the lime-green tiled bathroom and came back seconds later with a damp washcloth. Rebecca leaned against the rose-patterned wallpaper, numb from physical and emotional exhaustion, while her grandmother sank onto the mattress and lifted the child’s small legs into her lap.
Erica giggled and curled her ticklish toes as their grandmother scrubbed the bottoms of her bare feet. “What on earth have you been into?”
“Blood,” Rebecca said, and Grandma Janice’s hand clenched around the soiled rag. Her typically relentless smile suddenly seemed frozen in place.
Rebecca headed down the hall to the living room, where she sank into her grandfather’s armchair and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. And tried to turn off her brain.
“Becca, honey, don’t you think you should get some sleep?”
She dragged her gaze away from the cracks in the ceiling to find her grandfather standing in the kitchen doorway in his thick brown robe, leaning on his cane.
“Can’t.”
“Well, you should try, for Erica’s sake.” Grandma Janice crossed the living room into the kitchen, where she ran water into the coffeepot at the sink. “She’s probably terrified in there by herself.”
But Rebecca could already hear her sister snoring softly.
“Can I just sleep in here, please?” She leaned forward and ran her fingers into her hair at the temples, then cradled her forehead in both palms, her elbows propped on her knees. “On the couch? I can’t be in there. In Mom’s old room.”
Grandma Janice turned from the sink, still holding the full coffeepot, a look of utter consternation on her face. “Becca, honey, your mother didn’t... She couldn’t have...”
“She did.” Rebecca moved from the armchair to the couch, where she curled up on her side with the scratchy, crocheted pillow beneath her head. “Erica saw it all. I heard her tell the psychologist at the police station.” She pulled the coordinating throw blanket from the back of the couch and draped it over herself, up to her shoulders. “She and Dad... They just let Erica watch. Like it was a game.”
Dr. Emory’s horrified expression flashed behind Rebecca’s eyes as she stared at the brown shag carpet. Erica’s voice played in her mind, matter-of-factly telling them how her parents had stabbed John to death in his bed. Then Laura...
