He yanked her to her feet, backhanded her across the face. She heard the cartilage crack, pop. Blood gushed from her nose. She staggered back, instinctively protecting her stomach as she fell to her knees.

A gun fired.

Leni heard the loud craaaack and smelled the shot. Glass shattered.

Dad stood there, his legs braced wide, his right hand still curled into a fist. For a second nothing happened; no one moved. Then Dad stumbled forward, toward Leni. Blood pulsed from a wound in his chest, stained his shirt. He looked confused, surprised. “Cora?”

Mama stood behind him, the gun still pointed at him. “Not Leni,” she said, her voice steady. “Not my Leni.”

She shot him again.

Chapter Twenty-Four

TWENTY-FOUR

“He’s dead,” Leni said. Not that there was much doubt. The gun Mama had chosen could kill a bull moose.

Leni realized she was kneeling in a pool of gore. Bits of bone and cartilage looked like maggots in the blood. Ice-cold air swept into the room through the broken window.

Mama dropped the weapon. She moved toward Dad, her eyes wide, her mouth trembling. She scratched nervously at her throat, turned the pale skin red in streaks.

Leni climbed woodenly to her feet and walked into the kitchen. She ought to be thinking, We’re fine, he’s gone, but she felt nothing, not even relief.

Her face hurt so much it made her sick to her stomach. The taste of blood was making her gag, and with every breath her nose made a whistling sound. She got a rag wet and pressed it to her face, wiped blood away.

How had Mama endured this pain over and over?

She rinsed the rag, twisted out the pink water of her blood, and dampened it again, then returned to the living room, which smelled of gun smoke and gore and blood.

Mama knelt on the floor. She’d pulled Dad into her lap and was rocking him back and forth, crying. There was blood everywhere: on her hands, her knees. She’d smeared it across her eyes.

“Mama?” Leni leaned down, touched her mother’s shoulder.

Her mother looked up, blinking groggily. “I didn’t know how else to stop him.”

“What do we do?” Leni said.

“Get on the ham radio. Call the police,” Mama said in a lifeless voice.

The police. Finally. After all these years, they would get some help. “We will be okay, Mama. You’ll see.”

“No, we won’t, Leni.”

Leni wiped blood from her mother’s face, just as she’d done so often before. Mama didn’t even flinch. “What do you mean?”

“They’ll call it murder.”

“Murder? But he was beating us. You saved my life.”