“Why?” I repeated. I’d gone past elemental fear now, into a rage black enough to kill from. “Why did you kill my parents?”

“Because they were going to ruin everything,” Barbara said tersely. “Your father had come across some incriminating paperwork and made copies of it.” The night lay silent and weighted around us. I guessed I’d heard the siren in the other place, the long-gone trailer where Barbara Larimer had murdered my mother and father.

I lunged at her. The gun went off.

If I’d been shot, I didn’t feel it.

We struggled.

I heard the siren again, closer now.

Barbara was strong for a woman who used a wheelchair most of the time, but I was stronger. I was straddling Barbara, and my hands were around her throat. I let go long enough to retrieve the pistol with my right hand. I pressed it into her forehead.

“Tell. Me. Why.”

Barbara swallowed. Maybe she was hoping the cops were on the way. And when they got there, I’d be the one arrested. It would be her word against mine, and it was no great leap to predict the winner.

I cocked the pistol, which was a gamble, because I didn’t know enough about guns to be sure it wouldn’t go off. At the time, I didn’t give a damn.

“Trash,” she choked out, “all of you. Money, money, money—that was all any of you cared about! And now that criminal is blackmailing me—”

“Geoff,” I said. My ears were ringing, and my vision blurred. My voice seemed to come from somewhere other than my own throat. “You must have paid him to take the blame for the killings. Then he wanted more. They always want more, don’t they, Auntie Barbara? Those nasty poor people?”

I don’t know why, but suddenly, I snapped again. Just like that, I was back in the trailer.

Geoff and Barbara were gone.

I crept out from behind the easy chair, knelt beside my mother, tried to wake her up. When that failed, I threw myself on her, sobbing soundlessly. I came away bloody.

I heard a noise. They were coming back, my brother and my aunt.

They’d remembered the gun.

They’d remembered me.

They would shoot me, the same way they’d shot Mommy and Daddy.

I half crawled, half scrambled to the middle of the floor, where the gun lay.

Picked it up. I didn’t know how it worked.

“Hello?” a man’s voice, coming from the front door.

I dropped the gun for the second time, fled along a dark corridor, through the kitchen, onto the covered back porch. I opened the dryer and curled up inside it.

My back slammed hard into the ground, and I was in the graveyard again, only this time, Barbara was on top, and the barrel of the pistol dug hard into the base of my throat.