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"I don't know." Even if they did, Jackson doubted it would bring them any comfort. Nothing would bring
back their beloved son.
* * *
"He's dead. He'll never hurt anyone else." Her father's blunt words echoed in her head, but Jessica Croft
didn't feel safe. What did he know? He didn't know about the bad man who came to her at night, terrorized her
in the dark, an arm like a tree branch around her dead brother's neck. The vicious, snarling brute that made her
wake up in the dead of night in sopping wet sheets.
She couldn't tell him. After Cameron died, no one spoke about the murder. No one spoke about anything to
do with the murder, or the trial. Instead, the fractured family withdrew into themselves, withdrew from life, the
parents dragging their scared, confused children into a bizarre existence that rarely strayed past the walls of their
small, two-story home.
* * *
One chilly evening in late November, twelve months after Cameron's death, Jackson got another call that
horrified him. "You're kidding me?" he said to the dispatcher when she gave him the address.
"I'm afraid not. The neighbor reported hearing a gunshot. You better get over there."
Did Bodie have someone on the outside who'd gone back to the Croft's to settle a score? Had someone
murdered the rest of the family? Hurt the other children? "Jeez, I hope not," he muttered, gunning the engine of
his black and white.
* * *
The twins had been in bed for hours. Sometime earlier, Jessica had woken, hair stuck flat against her sweaty
forehead, nightdress stuck fast to her clammy legs. Only babies wet their beds. At eight-years-old, she felt like a
baby. The moon's illumination cut a sliver of light through the blackness of her room, and she used it to chase
shadows while her eyes focused. Out of her sodden bed, she pulled the wet nightdress over her head and felt
around in her dresser for another. Once she'd put it on, she closed the creaky drawer slowly, and did what she
did almost every night.
With Bear, her beloved, scruffy, brown teddy, under her arm, she made her way out of her own creamcolored
room, that never seemed so terrifying in the daylight, and inched along the hall toward her brother's
room, and his dry bed. His bed would be safe. The bad man never ventured into Judd's room. The evil in her
nightmares had no face, yet she knew it well. Always at the core, she saw her dead brother, a massive, tattooed
arm tight around his neck, his chest muscles open, mouth drawn back, teeth exposed. He made no noise as the
scream originating in his diaphragm lost its tone in his throat, and died on his lips. Trapped forever in the inky
darkness of her dead brother's eyes and the horror that filled her nights, she wondered how, if Bodie was dead,
he could still get to her in the night?
Judd barely moved when she slipped into the bed beside him, so familiar had the ritual become. Gradually,
Jessica slipped into a fretful sleep.
The ominous boom jolted them awake. A deep, loud crack bounced off the walls, creating a rumbling, evil
echo. Terrified, Jessica clung to Judd. "What was that?" she whispered.
Before he could answer, a chilling scream filled the night air, and then a strange sound came, a kind of
wailing; the sound of insanity.
"Come on," Judd urged, sliding out from under the sheets.
Against all her eight-year-old instincts, Jessica climbed out of the warm bed behind him, shivering in the cold
night air, and clinging to his old, blue-flannel pajamas. At the door, he craned his neck and peered into the hall.
When he stepped out, she followed. Together they crept toward the stairs.
"Who's down there?"
"I don't know," Judd whispered, "but something's happening. Something bad." From the top of the stairs
they heard another low wail. "Mom." As soon as Judd said it, Jessica began to sob. "We've got to go down
there," he said.
"No, I'm too scared."