She walked the streets with confidence, her black clothing and hair like armor, and she never let her guard down. Britta always focused on her surroundings, checking behind her and across the street. It ate away at me that she walked around, living her life as if the world hadn’t changed. The night I climbed the bunk ladder and looked into her eyes decades ago, my life had changed.

I learned what my father was capable of. What I was capable of.

I’d noticed after the Verbeek murders that my father was normal for several months. Even throwing a ball with us kids and smiling at my mother. He’d exorcised some demons that night.

My personal demon had pale-blue eyes and now sported black hair.

I needed her out of my head.

Her dog was always at her side, a four-legged guard. One time I’d approached her at the hardware store and admired the dog and asked to pet it. She’d refused, stating the dog didn’t like people and might bite.

But she never leashed it.

The encounter bolstered my confidence and the need to purge the voices and urges in my brain. I pledged to finish what my father had started. It was the only way I’d find peace. Getting close to her and speaking to her had made it worse. The desire swelled inside me, and I felt unstoppable; I needed to take action, prove my strength.

My father had had strength, but he used it in the wrong ways. Like with his fists on my mother.

When I was eighteen, I took action for the first time. As usual he had passed out in his bed after leaving my mother black and blue. I stared at him from the doorway for a long moment, hating the stink of alcohol and body odor. I strode in and yanked open the drawer next to his bed. He’d shown the weapon to me many times, lovingly stroking it as he speculated about the soldiers who’d fired it half a century earlier.

The gun was always there and was always loaded.

I didn’t stop to think. I wrapped his hand around the butt, moved the barrel to his mouth, and pressed his finger against the trigger.

The spray from his skull covered the pillow and headboard. Bits of matter hit me in the face, but I didn’t care. I left his hand and gun where they naturally fell on his chest and stepped back, examining my handiwork. A gasp sounded behind me.

I turned and met my mother’s gaze.

Relief. Understanding. Accusation. Fear. They all flickered across her face, and I knew she’d dreamed of doing what I had just done.

Probably wished it a thousand times.

My father had been diagnosed with PTSD. He’d visited dozens of doctors and tried every medication. No one would be surprised at his final action.

My brother appeared beside my mother, and the same conflicting emotions shone in his eyes.

“I’ll call the police,” he said in a monotone. “You’d better wash up and get rid of those clothes.”

The police came. The detective came. They looked sideways at my mother, noting her black eye and the two sons who stood firmly beside her.

It was ruled a suicide.

We never spoke of it.

For a long time, his death was enough for me. My burdens evaporated and life was good. But years later, I started to have nightmares. My brother urged me to talk to a shrink, but I refused. There was no statute of limitations on murder, and I feared I’d spill my secret about killing my father. The incident had bubbled up to the surface of my inner thoughts and fought to escape. I yanked it back down, locking it away, but it kept coming back. Bigger and louder each time.

Then my father began to speak to me from the skull.

His favorite keepsake of Vietnam. The one I couldn’t bring myself to sell or store away with his other treasures.

I moved the skull to the safe, but I still heard his voice.

Is this what happened to him? Did he hear these voices too?

I remembered how he would drunkenly talk to inanimate objects and the one phrase I could make out: Stop talking to me.

Were they talking back to him? Is that what he was trying to escape from all those years?

That is why he battered their mouths. To stop the voices.

For the first time I understood my father’s rage and confusion.

How did he combat it?

Then I saw Britta. It was a sign. Finish my father’s work and find my peace again. The voice will stop.

But I couldn’t get close enough to her. I tried and tried. She was always prepared.

Someone else would have to do.

The first time, I came home and confessed to my brother what had happened. I cried and raged as I told him our father had taken over my thoughts and I suspected his soul had entered me after I shot him. Why else would I feel the need to kill?

In a panic my brother helped me hide the bodies in the dead of night, telling me everything would be fine, that we’d never talk again about the incident, that it would simply go away. I shattered the teeth of the cursed skull from Vietnam and then added it to the pile of bodies under the road, convinced that would quiet the voice in my head.

It did.

Until it didn’t.

FORTY-THREE

I see my breath in the fading day’s light as I wait.

I know she is coming soon. I’ve watched her enough times to know her routine. Every late afternoon, she runs. Rain or shine. She and that dog head west for several miles and then return. On the way back they run by a small rock formation about a hundred yards from her house. It’s where I now hide. The rain and wind have picked up, and far away the thunder sounds, but I keep my ears open for the sound of her feet. I am confident in her habits.

She always follows the bank of the dry creek bed during the return part of her run but leaves it behind as she gets closer to her house and passes by my rocks. Today the creek is no longer dry; it is full of rushing water. When I first started watching her, I could see the dirt bottom of the creek bed and how the water had eaten away at its sides over the decades, digging deeper and deeper into the landscape, creating stunning small cliffs. During the winter I saw its dry bottom coated in snow. Only recently did it fill with the first water since last fall. It’s narrow and not too deep, but its noise interferes as I listen for her.

The dog is an unknown in the equation, the one factor I’m not confident about, but I’ve planned the best I can. It needs to be eliminated first. I’ve worn heavy boots and thick sleeves in preparation. I close my eyes and see myself kick the dog squarely in the face, enough to knock it senseless, and then I swing my hammer at Britta. She’ll be too stunned over the attack on her dog to react.

I have my rifle and pistol, but it is the hammer that is important. She needs to be eliminated the same way her family was.

Then my father’s voice will be silenced in my head.

I need it to end.

Clint had been about to betray me. After the Jorgensen family died, he refused to help me hide their bodies, and he begged me to turn myself in. I explained that it wasn’t my fault; I was driven the same way our father had been. But Clint pushed and pushed, claiming I needed help.

I’d agreed to go to the police in the morning, but I silenced Clint that night. It wasn’t my fault. He left me no choice.

I hear her coming.

She breathes hard, her feet making rhythmic sounds on the hard dirt. All our rain hasn’t softened that hard-packed ground.

My heart speeds up, and I hold my breath, gripping my hammer. I rise to a loaded crouch, ready to spring.

It’s almost over. My peace is at hand.

The dog’s black snout comes into view and I leap forward, planting my right foot and swinging my left with all my might. I’m too slow to hit its face and instead catch it in the ribs. Its body hurtles into the air and then slams into the dirt.

Its sharp yelp pleases me.

I spin toward Britta, expecting her to be stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of her immobile dog, but instead a tall black figure tackles me in the gut, knocking me backward to the ground, and I drop my hammer. I wheeze for breath, but my lungs won’t function. Britta scrambles to sit on my chest as I suffocate. Stars explode in my eyes as a blow knocks my jaw to the side.

And again.

This is wrong! It’s all going wrong!

I taste blood, and a high wail erupts from my throat as my lungs get air. Suddenly her weight is gone from my chest and I roll to my side, still struggling for normal breaths. She kicks me twice in the groin and the blinding pain shoots its way to my head and detonates. I curl into a ball, no breath left to scream. I try to close my jaw, and hot fire shoots from its joints into my brain.

My entire nervous system throbs as I lie in the rain.

I hate her. I hate my father. I hate everyone.

Coughs rack my body, nearly making me vomit, and I feel—and hear—my jaw slip back to the proper place in its joints, creating another explosion of pain that vanishes as quickly as it came.

Blessed sensation of nothing. In my jaw, anyway.

I’m still in a ball, waiting for the pounding in my groin to subside. I manage a blurry, wet look around me. Two feet away, my hammer taunts me from the dirt. At this moment, it might as well be a hundred feet away. Britta and her dog are gone.

I’m not giving up.

Time for plan B.

FORTY-FOUR

Mercy sat in her Tahoe, tapping her fingers on her steering wheel, waiting for Truman.

She had parked out of sight of Britta’s home on its long driveway, and the outside lights of the house were on, creating a glow around the bend of the drive. The rain pounded louder on her roof, and she spotted a flash of lightning in the darkening sky. She counted the seconds, waiting for the thunder.

The storm was five miles away.

More lightning flashed, and she saw Britta’s unmistakable figure running awkwardly across the flatland for her home. Something bulky was in her arms, and she ran out of Mercy’s view. Mercy closed her eyes, seeing Britta’s hunched silhouette in her mind. She’s scared.

Mercy started her vehicle, putting her promise to Truman out of her head.

Something is up.

She parked in front of the house just as Britta dashed through the front door and slammed it behind her. Mercy took the steps two at a time and pounded on the door. “Britta? What happened?”

The door flew open, and Britta grabbed Mercy’s arm and jerked her inside the house. She frantically slid the bolts of the door, her chest heaving.