He struggled against the nausea that rose in his gorge, then made himself kneel, and reach out to touch what was left of his daughter.
Tracy’s body lay curled tightly, as if she’d died trying to protect herself against the heat.
Around her neck there was a chain, and attached to the chain, clutched in the bony remains of Tracy’s right hand, was a jade pendant that he recognized as having been his mother’s.
If it had not been for the pendant, he was sure he wouldn’t have known which of the hideous, almost mummified bodies was Tracy’s.
His gaze shifted to Beth’s body. It was stretched prone on the floor, one hand up; its fleshless fingers seemed to be reaching toward the window.
Slowly, he became aware of the marks on the wall. At first they were only a blur, almost lost in the blackness on which they had been smeared. But as he stared at them, they gradually began to take shape, and he realized that before the girls had died, one of them—he couldn’t be sure which one—had left a message. Now the message was clear.
It consisted of only one word: AMY.
“It looks like blood,” he heard Norm Adcock say. “There’s some more on the floor.” Then his voice dropped. “Phillip?”
“I’m listening,” Phillip replied.
“I can’t be sure, but right now I’d say only Tracy died from the heat. I think Beth was already dead before the fire started. Look.”
Reluctantly, Phillip made his eyes follow Adcock’s pointing finger.
Despite the damage done by the fire, the seared skin and the shrunken flesh, the marks were clearly there.
Either before, or just after she’d died, Beth Rogers had been hacked nearly to pieces.
Phillip groaned as he realized what it must mean; then his mind rejected the knowledge, and his body finally rebelled. He could fight the nausea no longer. His stomach heaving, and his throat already filling with the sour taste of bile, he retreated to the far corner of the room.
Ten minutes later, pale and shaking, but once again in control of himself, he emerged from the little room into the daylight outside. Carolyn was still there, standing where he’d left her, waiting for him. She looked at him, her eyes asking him a silent question.
He took her in his arms, and held her close. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s all over now.”
Carolyn shuddered, and let her tears flow freely. She felt numb, empty, as if she’d lost everything that she had loved.
But that’s not true, she insisted to herself.
I still have Phillip, and we still have our baby.
And then, for the first time, she felt their unborn child stir within her.
We’ll get through it, she told herself. We’ll get through it all, and we’ll survive. Whatever’s happened, we’ll survive.
She took Phillip’s hand and pressed it to her belly. “It’s not over, darling,” she whispered. “We just have to begin again. And we can. I know we can.”
Once again, the tiny child within her moved, and this time Phillip felt it, too.
Epilogue
Almost a year had passed.
On the morning of July 4, Carolyn Sturgess started across the lawn toward the two stone lions that flanked the path to the mausoleum. She walked at an easy pace, enjoying the warmth of the sun. The sky was a deep blue that morning, and nowhere was there even a trace of a cloud that might foreshadow an afternoon shower. The day, she knew, would be perfect.
She wished Beth were there to share it with her.
The pain of her loss had eased with the passage of time, and as she remembered her daughter today, there was only a dull ache to remind her of the terrible days of the previous summer. And even that ache, she was finally beginning to believe, would someday fade away.
She stepped into the shade of the path, and started up the gentle grade toward the top of the hill and the marble structure that guarded the remains of her husband’s ancestors. The light was different here, filtered into a soft green by the leaves of the trees above her head. Here and there the sun shone through, its rays dancing on specks of dust that hung in the air. A squirrel paused in the path a few yards ahead of her, sat up, and examined her with bright inquisitive eyes before darting up a tree to chatter angrily at her from a perch twelve feet up. Carolyn stopped to chatter back at the squirrel, laughing softly at the indignant thrashings of its tail. When the