his groin, and a sudden wave of fear washed over him. His entire body broke out in an icy sweat.
What was happening to him wasn’t possible.
The ironwork had all been examined, the badly rusted pieces replaced weeks ago.
And yet, somehow, this piece had been missed. This very piece on which he had depended today.
His fingers, acting independently from his brain, clutched desperately at the broken piece for a moment, then, too late, dropped the fragment and reached for the solid bar that was suddenly just out of his reach.
He felt himself teeter, and slowly arc away from the I-beam.
Then he was plunging downward, his eyes wide open, his arms stretched out as if to break his fall.
He opened his mouth, and screamed.
It was the scream that jerked Beth back into the present. For just the smallest instant she was sure it was Amy’s scream, that last, horrible sound as she’d died, but then Beth knew it was more. For a second she could still hear it, even now that the vision was gone, and she was once more alone in the cool darkness of the room behind the stairs.
And then the scream was cut short by a loud thumping noise, followed by the kind of empty silence that Beth had never experienced before.
The silence of death happening suddenly, unexpectedly.
She sat frozen, and slowly the silence was intruded upon by her own heartbeat.
“Daddy?” she whispered softly. Even as she spoke the word, she knew instinctively there would be no answer.
She rose slowly to her feet. The pleasant cool of the room had shifted to a bone-chilling cold, and she reached down without thinking, picked up the blanket, and wrapped it around herself.
She moved slowly toward the door, but then hesitated, something in her not wanting to leave the safety and isolation of the little room, wanting rather to stay there in the darkness and isolation, as if that alone could protect her from whatever waited for her outside.
But she had to go out, had to go and see for herself what had happened.
She slid the door open just far enough to slip through, then slid it closed again behind her. Then, using the flashlight to guide her even though she knew the steps by rote, she crept out from under the stairs and started upward.
She could see him as soon as her head came above floor level.
He lay in the center of the mill, beneath the stained-glass dome. Sunlight, streaming in from one of the high side windows, illuminated his body, and motes of dust danced in the air above him.
He was very still, lying facedown, his arms outstretched as if he was reaching for something.
Beth froze.
It couldn’t be real.
She was imagining it. Or she was seeing something else, something out of the past like the things Amy had shown her.
It wasn’t her father on the floor. It was someone else—someone she didn’t know—someone she didn’t care about.
As she forced herself to move slowly forward, she kept repeating it to herself.
It isn’t Daddy.
It isn’t Daddy, and it isn’t even real.
It’s only a dream.
It’s only a dream, and I’ll wake up.
But then she was there, standing beneath the dome, her father’s body at her feet. Beneath his head, a pool of blood had formed.
She knew it was real, and that she wasn’t going to wake up.
She felt her body go numb as her mind tried to reject it all. But that was impossible. He lay there, no moving, not breathing, with the stillness that only death could produce.
And slowly, almost against her will, the connections in her mind began to form.
It was Amy.
Amy had killed her father.
It had happened at the same time, to the very instant.
She’d been in that room with Amy, been there when the fire broke out, been there when Amy died.
She had felt Amy die, felt as though she was dying with her. She’d felt the heat of the flames, felt the despair when she knew there would be no escape.
And she’d felt the fury—Amy’s fury—in that final moment when she’d heard again the words of her father, and seen his face.
Not my father. Amy’s father.
But the wish—the dying wish for vengeance—had been hers as well as Amy’s.
And now her own father was dead.
She pulled the blanket, filthy with soot, closer around her body as if its warmth could shut out the chill she was feeling, and sank slowly to her knees. She reached out with one arm, the tips of her fingers touching the flesh of her