His face changed, in an instant, to that of a hard-eyed, soulless predator, closing in on its prey. “Mom was going to send me away to some school,” he said. “She called it a school, but it was really a hospital. A place where they could help ‘boys like me.’ That’s what she said. ‘Boys like you.’ Like I was some kind of freak.”

He’d shot a four-year-old’s cat with a bow and arrow, and God knew what else he’d done, before and since. Mom had known, though. She’d probably had a list of atrocities running mercilessly through her head, things she’d tried to ignore, or explain away, and finally had to face. She’d thought the situation was serious enough that her son needed help.

“The hospital would have been better than prison, Geoff.”

“Prison,” Geoff rasped. “Do you know what Barbara paid me for going to that hellhole? Twenty-five thousand dollars. I was a kid. It sounded like so much money.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police—or someone—what really happened?”

He grabbed my hair, on either side, and gave it a hard pull. The pain made my sinuses burn. “I told a counselor once, on the inside. I told him what they were doing to me in that place. And he laughed at me, Mary Jo. He laughed. After that, I didn’t tell anybody anything!”

I closed my eyes, took a breath, girded myself to look into his face again. It was like being nose-to-nose with the devil.

“You look like her, you know. Mom, I mean,” Geoff mused.

I swallowed. “But I’m not Mom, Geoff,” I said, very quietly and very carefully. “I’m Mary Jo Mayhugh. I’m your half sister. And I never did anything to you.”

Geoff raised one eyebrow. “How shall I kill you?” he asked, in a tone more suited to someone reading a menu, deciding what to have for dinner. Red wine, or white? Fries, or mashed potatoes?

Bludgeoning, or strangling?

Decisions, decisions.

“First tell me why you killed Lillian,” I said.

He smiled again, and it was more terrible than I would ever have believed a smile could be. “Because she was old and sick and ugly. Because I could.”

“How many others have there been?” I pressed.

He shrugged, spreading his hands. “Who knows?” he asked merrily. “It’s a rush, killing somebody. I like it.”

It’s a rush.

I like it.

“Especially when it hurts a lot,” he added. “I like that best of all.”

I must have paled. The truth is, I wasn’t all that scared of death itself, because I knew there was something beyond it. Nick and Chester were proof of that. On the other hand, I was really scared of the way I might die.

Trapped in a burning car, for instance.

The victim of some painful, incurable disease.