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“I don’t know, but she must have wondered how faithful he was, especially on the nights when he
came in late and shitfaced. I’m sure she knew that drunks don’t limit their bad behavior to betting the
ponies or tucking five-spots into the cleavages of the waitresses down at the Twist and Shout.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Are you all right? You look exhausted.”
“I’m okay. But you’re not the only one who’s trying to process all this.”
“She died in a car accident,” Lucy said. She had turned from Dan and was looking fixedly at the
bulletin board on the fridge. In the middle was a photograph of Concetta and Abra, who looked about
four, walking hand in hand through a field of daisies. “The man with her was a lot older. And drunk.
They were going fast. Momo didn’t want to tell me, but around the time I turned eighteen, I got
curious and nagged her into giving me at least some of the details. When I asked if my mother was
drunk, too, Chetta said she didn’t know. She said the police have no reason to test passengers who are
killed in fatal accidents, only the driver.” She sighed. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll leave the family stories
for another day. Tell me what’s happened to my daughter.”
He did. At some point, he turned around and saw Dave Stone standing in the doorway, tucking his
shirt into his pants and watching him.
12
Dan started with how Abra had gotten in touch with him, first using Tony as a kind of intermediary.
Then how Abra had come in contact with the True Knot: a nightmare vision of the one she called “the
baseball boy.”
“I remember that nightmare,” Lucy said. “She woke me up, screaming. It had happened before, but
it was the first time in two or three years.”
Dave frowned. “I don’t remember that at all.”
“You were in Boston, at a conference.” She turned to Dan. “Let me see if I’ve got this. These people
aren’t people, they’re . . . what? Some kind of vampires?”
“In a way, I suppose. They don’t sleep in coffins during the day or turn into bats by moonlight, and
I doubt if crosses and garlic bother them, but they’re parasites, and they’re certainly not human.”
“Human beings don’t disappear when they die,” John said flatly.
“You really saw that happen?”
“We did. All three of us.”
“In any case,” Dan said, “the True Knot isn’t interested in ordinary children, only those who have
the shining.”
“Children like Abra,” Lucy said.
“Yes. They torture them before killing them—to purify the steam, Abra says. I keep picturing
moonshiners making white lightning.”
“They want to . . . inhale her,” Lucy said. Still trying to get it straight in her head. “Because she
has the shining.”
“Not just the shining, but a great shining. I’m a flashlight. She’s a lighthouse. And she knows about
them. She knows what they are.”
“There’s more,” John said. “What we did to those men at Cloud Gap . . . as far as this Rose is
concerned, that’s down to Abra, no matter who actually did the killing.”
“What else could she expect?” Lucy asked indignantly. “Don’t they understand self-defense?
Survival?”
“What Rose understands,” Dan said, “is that there’s a little girl who has challenged her.”
“Challenged—?”