Blood lure

"They started having huge fights. Not the big ones in front of me. Always after I went to bed. My room was upstairs and way at the back of the house but I could still hear them. Not words, just shouting. Crashes. Crying. In the morning sometimes things would be broken. I was older by this time, I must've been twelve because I remember Mrs. Dent, my sixth-grade teacher, sending me to a counselor because I kept falling asleep in class. The counselor was okay but sort of fixated on drugs, like I was a junkie. I didn't tell him anything."

Rory looked at A

The question was pushed out with such intensity A

"Did you ever ask him?" she said instead.

Rory was disappointed. He slumped back against the wall and his gaze slipped away again to other times. "Once," he replied. "He said she didn't mean it. He said she was high-strung. He said it was hard for her to be married to an older man. He said he could be pretty aggravating sometimes." Rory was silent for a minute and A

"Did she ever hit you?" A

"Not really. She started to get after me once when I was thirteen or fourteen. I was in the backyard hitting a ball into the fence and something set her off. She came out and headed for me. It scared me so bad I raised the bat. I think I'd have used it too. By then I'd pretty much figured out why Dad was always bruised or limping-she'd already put him in the hospital twice, once for a broken collarbone and the other time for a ruptured eardrum, I think-anyway, her coming at me like that was scary. When she saw I meant to fight she just stopped. Then she laughed and said, 'That's right, Rory, don't take any shit. Not from anybody.' "

"She never knocked you around when you were little? Slapped you, shook you, anything like that?"

"Just Dad," Rory said.

In a sick sort of way it made sense. Carolyn wasn't into child abuse, just the abuse of men. At fourteen Rory had been becoming a man.

Maybe in Carolyn's world there were only two kinds of men: those whom you beat and those who beat you.

"You seemed to get along with her well enough," A

"Yeah. Well. At least she didn't let anybody beat on her."

That pretty much summed it up. Rory'd gotten lost between a stepmother he feared and a father he'd been ashamed of. A child's natural survival instincts kicked in and he aligned himself with the stronger caregiver, learned from her to scorn his father. A

"Ever get so frustrated with Les you wanted to smack him upside the head yourself?" she asked sympathetically.

"Sometimes," Rory admitted. Anger animated his voice as he elaborated. "How could anyone not? He'd get like those little yippy dogs that squeal and tuck their tails between their legs before you've even kicked them. Then you wantto kick them."

A

"Hit Dad?" He thought about what, on the surface, was a simple question for a long time. Too long to be fabricating a lie. A

At length Rory spoke. "I wanted to," he admitted. "But I never did. Mom-my real mom-wouldn't have liked it. I wanted Dad to fight back. At least I did at first. Sometimes I was glad when Carolyn hurt him. He was so… so pathetic. It made me sick."

Rory looked sick. A

A

Rory'd been sitting, head back against the wood siding, eyes closed. The sun touched the down on his cheeks, lighting the fine golden hairs, giving him an ethereal, unfinished look. He opened his eyes at A

"More or less," A

"I believe you," she said. If he was telling the truth, her lie couldn't hurt. If he wasn't, it might put him off his guard. "Is this why you were blackmailing me?" she asked. "So I wouldn't find out your dad was beaten?"

Rory nodded wordlessly. "Is that bullshit over?" "It's over," he said. "It sucked, Rory. Really sucked." "I know." "I've got to go." She levered herself up from the porch floor. "You go

Sudden light-headedness reminded A

Rarely did A

Houses, trees, cars, gopher holes and thimbleberry bushes flowed by externally. Internally A

His natural mother had abandoned him via death when he was five. According to Rory's account, Les had abandoned him over the next two years via depression. Then Carolyn came on the scene and the neuroses and psychoses really started to roll.

That sort of thing didn't make people into murderers. But it was bound to help. The circumstances of Rory's thirty-six hours missing had, at first, seemed to make his murdering Carolyn remote to the point of ludicrousness. Taken with this new information, A