Closing her mind against her rising panic, as she had learned to close it against her life in the mill, she looked around for something to stand on.
A stool. In the corner, there was a stool.
She let go of Willie’s hand, and dragged the stool over until it stood beneath the window. Climbing up, she could barely reach the sill.
The window was locked.
And then one of the other children gave her a mallet, and, ignoring the pain in her arms and shoulders, she swung it at the glass.
As the glass shattered, she realized her mistake.
Fresh air rushed into the vacuum created by the fire, and, with new oxygen to feed on, the fire exploded with new life.
Instantly, the room filled with smoke and flames, and the screams of children who knew they were about to die.
For a moment, time seemed to stand still, and the girl watched as the fire came to consume her. Then, as her dress caught fire, and she began falling toward the floor, she heard Willie calling out her name.
“Amy!” he screamed. And then once more. “Aaaammyyyy!”
It was the last word Willie spoke, the last word Amy heard. And his was the last face she ever saw.
But the last memory that flashed through her mind, the memory she died with, was the memory of another voice, and another face.
A voice ordering the fire door to be closed.
A voice ordering her death.
A voice commanding that she never leave the mill.
And the face she saw, the face that went with that terrible voice that had ordered her death, was the face of the man she knew was her father.
As Amy died, she knew that she never would leave the mill. But as it had killed her, so would she kill others.
She would have her revenge.
20
For Alan Rogers, that late-August afternoon had been the day on which, for the first time, he’d finally begun to see the results of the summer’s labors. The outside of the mill was finished. Its surfaces, stripped clean of their layers of grime, were now the warm dark red of old brick, set off with white trim around the windows. The windows themselves, formerly no more than symmetrically placed holes in the otherwise blank facade of the building, had been widened with shutters, and now gave the building a vaguely colonial look.
The fence, no longer serving any useful purpose, had been torn down a week ago.
The main entrance on Prospect Street was done, a broad flight of steps leading to a rank of glass doors that opened directly onto the main concourse of the first floor. Halfway down, the concourse widened into a huge skylit atrium, above which a rainbow-hued dome of stained glass had been installed. Beyond the atrium, the concourse continued to the end of the building, where a waterfall would eventually cascade down to a small pool. The old offices had long since been torn out, but the staircase to the basement still remained—one of the last vestiges of the original structure still to be replaced.
Above him, the construction of the open mezzanine was two weeks ahead of schedule, and already the dividing walls of the second-level shops were in place. Their facades, like those on the main level, would not be completed until the tenants had signed their leases and submitted designs for completion of their storefronts. All of them would be different, but there were strict guidelines within which the tenants could exercise their imaginations. In the end, Alan was now certain, the mill would look exactly as Phillip had hoped it would—an ornate nineteenth-century arcade of the sort one would be likely to run across in London, but that one could scarcely hope to discover in a fading industrial town fifty miles outside of Boston.
Until today, Alan had not been certain that the September 1 deadline would be met. Even now he wasn’t positive that every detail would have been completed. But it would be close enough for the Labor Day dedication ceremony to take place, and for the Old Mill to be opened to the public. Some of the stores would be occupied, and the rest of them would have intriguingly painted wooden fronts, announcing the names of their future tenants, and hinting at what the contents of the shops might eventually be.
The construction crew was gone, and silence hung over the building. But in his mind, Alan could almost hear the murmur of a crowd of shoppers, and the