know when he leaves. I can hear his footsteps. I can hear his voice. I keep a map of the house in my head.” She stared at Maggie, willing her to understand. “So I know where he is all the time.”
“I understand,” Maggie said, taking the girl’s hand and holding it gently. “Does he spend most of his time down there?”
She shook her head. “Not all of it. He likes to go out at night.”
Maggie stiffened. “How often?”
She shrugged. “Three, maybe four times a week. Sometimes every night.”
“When was the last time he did that?” Maggie asked.
“Last week,” Sarah said. “He was gone every night. Once he didn’t come home for breakfast. It was nice. Elena made me latkes. He doesn’t like them. He only eats one thing for breakfast, that crunchy hard cereal, and we’re not allowed to cook anything else in the mornings if he’s here. He says he doesn’t like the smell of cooking in the morning. It makes him nauseous.”
Maggie and Morty were looking at one another: last week. When Vicky Meeks had gone missing.
“Do you know where he goes when he’s not here?” Maggie asked the girl.
Sarah shook her head. “I don’t want to know,” she said.
“Have you ever been in the basement with him?” Maggie asked.
The girl turned scarlet and her hands folded automatically over her stomach.
“You can tell me,” Maggie whispered. She waited as the girl thought it over. As the silence built, I felt the room around me shift in temperature. The air grew cool. I smelled lilies. I felt a presence enter the room—and then Alissa Hayes was there with us. She had forced herself to enter the house. She had faced the lingering evil inside, to be at her little sister’s side.
She stood just behind Sarah Hayes, visible only to me, and placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder, lending her whatever strength she had to give. Sarah needed it. I could feel the fear in Sarah’s young mind, her yearning to be saved conflicting with her need to be safe, her desire to trust Maggie at odds with what she had learned about trusting other people in her life, her wanting to tell Maggie all about it at war with her certainty that some secrets had to be kept because they had the power to destroy you.
Alissa Hayes would not be enough to break through all that fear. I moved to Sarah’s side and placed my hand on her other shoulder, willing my strength to flow into her, trying to ease the turmoil inside her. I wanted to help. I needed to help. I had to right the terrible wrong I had made possible. And as I stood next to Sarah Hayes, willing myself to be an instrument of good, I believe that the first faint stirrings of my own salvation came into being. I felt connected to the child by a channel of pure, white light, by a chord of love so strong I cannot explain it except to say that it did not come from me, it only came through me, and in serving as its vessel, I had bound us together forever. Did Alissa Hayes feel the power, too? Would the two of us be enough to save her sister?
I felt the young girl’s fears and dark memories receding. I felt the flickering of courage rise in her, fueled by a faint glow of hope, dousing the power of past threats and allowing her to tap into the heroic strength I had learned that almost every human being possessed inside of them.
She would do it. She would tell. Or at least, show Maggie.
In the end, Sarah did not explain what had been done to her in the basement by her father, at least not in words. She lifted up the pajama top she was wearing and showed Maggie the neatly arrayed rows of parallel lines crisscrossing her stomach. The cuts looked as if they had been made just deep enough to scar, but not deep enough to cause her to bleed profusely. They were controlled, they were calculated—they were her father’s way of marking her as his. They were not the fatal cuts the dead girls had suffered. But they were clearly made by the same hand.
“My stepmother has them, too,” Sarah whispered to Maggie. “Only I think hers are all over her body. I think that’s why she wears all that . . . fabric.”
“I can take you to a place that’s safe,” Maggie promised