I felt different. Tingling. Flushed. Powerful. As if maybe I was in the company of angels. The memories, I realized. I’d finally opened my mind. Allowed myself to know everything that I knew, and now it was as if I were back in the house that night, except this time my mother and siblings were beside me. We were united. Four against one.

And the images that filled my mind were both violent and painful.

“You don’t have the gun,” Andrew stated. “You failed.”

He took the first step forward, and I finally opened my eyes.

“Sheriff Wayne saved me,” I said, my voice strong. “My father didn’t kill himself that night. Sheriff Wayne killed him.”

“You … you spoke to him?” Andrew sounded bewildered. He paused, six steps away, knife pressed against his pant leg.

“My mother loved him. Have you seen her on the interplanes? Have you asked her about that? Sheriff Wayne was a good man, and she cherished him for that.”

Andrew became immediately agitated. It proved what I was beginning to suspect.

“She called the sheriff after I spoke to her, after my father came home. She wanted to kick my father out. But my father refused to go. So she called your father—her lover, Sheriff Wayne—to assist.”

“He shouldn’t have left his family,” Andrew snapped.

“Even a good man can be tempted,” I answered. “Even a good man can want something he shouldn’t have. Wayne came over as a man, not an officer of the law. He hoped to reason with my father, convince him to leave the property. Bullies crack under pressure, right? And everyone knew my father was a first-class bully.”

More agitation. The whap whap of the blade against Andrew’s pant leg.

“It didn’t go the way anyone planned. My father refused to budge from the bedroom, so Sheriff Wayne went upstairs to fetch him. They started to yell. Then my father spotted his gun, resting on the nightstand. He grabbed it, pointed it at Sheriff Wayne, just as my mother got between them. She took the bullet meant for her lover, dead before she hit the floor.”

Pictures again, like an old home movie streaming through my head. Had I crept out of my room that night, seen more than I’d known I’d seen? Or were the images from something else? The warmth caressing my cheek. The feel again—my mother, Natalie, Johnny. Four against one. The way it should’ve been that night, twenty-five years ago.

“My dad hesitated,” I whispered now, “shocked by my mother’s death. It gave Sheriff Wayne the time he needed to bolt from the house to his car. Service firearm, locked in the glove compartment. He had to work the key, hands trembling. Get the door open. Retrieve the nine-millimeter. Check the chamber.”

More images. A fourth presence, joining me in the hall.