and unwanted, the better they feel. I’m sure you saw it a thousand times as a child, the way I did.”
“Don’t come near me,” I warned. The locking mechanism was between my wrists now. I gripped the loose end of the tie and started tightening the band, pulling as hard as I could. My fingers and hands were numb almost instantly. I yanked hard on the tie, cutting the plastic into my flesh.
“You don’t need to feel sorry for Vada, Harry. I gave her what she wanted. She thought she was helping me, and that made her happy.”
“Come any closer to me and I’ll fucking kick you,” I snapped.
He kept approaching, and with his every step, my body hardened, shook with rage and fear.
“I will bite your fingers off, I swear to God.”
He was pressed against me suddenly, my jaw in his hard, warm hand.
We both knew I wasn’t going to kick him. I was having enough trouble standing upright. His breath was on my face. I bared my teeth, prepared to bite him if he tried to kiss me. A smile fluttered at the corners of his mouth.
“You wouldn’t really hurt me, would you, Harry?” he asked.
“You wanna make a bet?” I thought about spitting at him, but my mouth was too dry. He squeezed my face so that my cheekbones ached, seemed to want to give in to his desire to hurt me. But this wasn’t the time. He’d brought me to this place, at this time, for a reason. He would play this out slowly, so that he could enjoy it. He had been waiting a long time for this. In a dark, awful way, I had too.
“You need to understand what happened here,” Regan said.
Chapter 100
THEY WERE ALL fresh starts for her. Fantastic adventures. Regan saw his mother’s face change with every new house they entered, as though she was actually taking on the features of the people who lived there. Heather Banks found the house-sitting jobs in the newspapers and arrived at the city apartment or country estate or isolated cabin ready to enjoy a little escape from reality. For a weekend, a couple of weeks, a few months, she would adventure through the lives of the people who owned the homes, caring for their pets and rearranging their bookshelves, while her husband, Ron, worked out in the fields or walked the streets, preferring to admire the different landscapes alone. Little Regan had been to every corner of the country, minding the houses of strangers he almost never met. Heather told other adults it was good for Regan to travel. He’d not fit in, the first time they’d enrolled him in school.
“He’s very intelligent,” she explained. “He gets bored.”
Regan was indeed always bored, but he was also aware that removing him from school and taking him on the road was his mother’s way of trying to make him a “good boy.” There were no other little boys and girls to bite and scratch and tug at here, no one to hear his screaming, squealing, convulsing tantrums that sometimes carried on for hours. They would arrive at a cheery farm and unpack their bags at the homestead, and she would turn him by the shoulders toward the fields and give him an encouraging shove, saying, “Now, be a good boy.” Would this be the place that brought out the goodness in him? Or would they have to keep searching? Highway by highway and house by house they searched, Regan curled in the back seat of the car sleeping as eucalypts rolled by the windows.
Bellbird Valley was no different. Regan had wandered the bushland around the house, determined to find a way to be a good boy. And he had found nothing but miles of tangled bush and animals that were afraid of him, birds that took flight before he could line them up in his slingshot and kangaroos that bounced away at the sound of his footsteps. He assumed that goodness was something he would feel, something that would make him smile the way his father smiled at his mother sometimes. Regan would watch the two of them as his father put his arm around her waist, and he’d hear him say, “Gee, you’re a good woman.”
The day that it happened, Heather had taken Regan out on the porch and sat with him, as she had every morning. They would watch the sun rise through the hole in the little stone formation on the top of