“Babysitting, are we?”

Both women looked up at the sound of his voice. Neither of them had heard him coming.

“Oh, Mike.” Colleen smiled. Strands of her blonde hair were plastered to her high forehead with sweat. “Just giving Eileen a break. This little one,” she pressed one hand briefly to the baby’s cheek, “is teething, we think. Walking them about sometimes calms them down.”

“Bit of brandy in the milk works, too,” said the Bickerstaff woman. “That’s what our mother used to do.”

Colleen looked faintly scandalized. “Everyone’s a bit frazzled at the commune, so I thought we’d best take our walk where it’s quiet.” She grinned suddenly. “This is the second spring baby!”

Now that he was next to them, Michael peered down at the baby’s face; Colleen, pleased he was taking an interest, pulled the blanket back a little so he could see better. The small face was mottled and pink, and he could see a few curls of carroty hair sprouting from a downy scalp.

“Two babies and another on the way.” He looked up at the Bickerstaff woman. It was Lizbet. “Are you sure those contraceptive pills aren’t duds, lass?”

Lizbet scowled at him openly. “It’s not our fault that girls are forgetting to take them, is it? You should be grateful you don’t have to think about it, Michael. God knows where we would be if men had to take some responsibility for what they keep in their trousers, filthy beasts.”

Filthy. Beast.

Michael swallowed hard. Something about his demeanor must have changed, because he saw a look of pure alarm pass over Colleen’s face.

“She’s just joking, Mike, that’s all.”

He could do it. He could reach out and snap Lizbet’s neck like a twig; it would only take moments. His mother, who had called him dirty and monstrous had died in seconds, too, and then she had moldered away inside the ice house, her doughy flesh turning into brown sticks. But Lizbet was smiling at him, her eyes full of a knowledge she shouldn’t have, and the moment passed.

“Take the baby up by the stream,” he said eventually, not looking at either of them. “The sound of the water there makes it peaceful. That might calm her down.”

CHAPTER

38

IT WAS, HEATHER had to admit, a beautiful stretch of land. Gentle hills in the distance, clumps of wild, dark trees held apart by empty fields, alive with the movement of long grasses. In the summer, she imagined it was magnificent—and at this end of the year, with most of the red and gold leaves around their ankles rather than on the trees, there was a pleasing bleakness to it all. And there was the silence. If it weren’t for the constant calling of the birds, it might even have been possible for her to put aside the feeling that she was haunted—the sense that far from escaping the ghosts and horrors of her mother’s house, that she had simply brought it all with her.