“How do they hurt people, Emily?”

Silence.

“Emily, why would you say your mommy and daddy hurt people?”

“’Cause I seen ’em. In the basement. That’s where they take ’em. That’s where they do things to ’em.”

++++

Timothy still had another forty-five minutes or so before he needed to leave to meet up with Julianne at the river.

In truth, he was nervous about finding out from her if he might have been responsible for Miranda Walsh’s disappearance—well, her murder—and he needed something to distract himself from thinking about all that. So he looked again at the opening scene of his work in progress.

Since he wrote intuitively, allowing the narrative to unfurl as he was writing it rather than trying to storyboard it or plot it out beforehand, he wasn’t exactly sure where the story was heading.

For him, part of the adventure of writing a novel was seeing the new directions that the story took as it emerged, and then following the twists and turns to their logical conclusion—even if that ended up being a place you never would’ve anticipated the book would go when you first set out to write it.

Which was what almost always happened with him.

As Robert Frost wrote, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

So it was for the poet.

So it was for the novelist.

Timothy liked that opening line: “My mommy and daddy, they hurt people.”

But where would it lead? Where would it take him?

He often found that writing freehand in a journal rather than typing helped him uncover the story, one word leading him to the next.

And so now, that was what he did.

++++

Detective Gary Hendrix shifted in his seat and watched the tawny-haired eight-year-old girl sitting across the table from him.

“Tell me what you saw, Emily. Tell me what happened.”

“They bring the people in the side door. Over by the garage. Daddy carries ’em. Mommy holds the door. Then they go downstairs.”

“You’ve seen them do this?”

Emily nodded. “Sometimes I play down there. One time I was there the whole time when it happened, and they didn’t even know.”

Gary felt his heart squeezing tightly in his chest. “You were in the basement?”

Emily nodded again. “Under the steps. Back in the corner. That’s how I seen ’em bring the boy down without anyone knowing.”

Every one of the victims had been drugged before they were killed. Muscle relaxants, not enough to stop their hearts. No, the victims were conscious when it happened, they just couldn’t move. Couldn’t try to get free.

“Can you tell me what happened that day? What you saw?”

Emily was quiet for a long time before she finally said, “They hurt him.”