“For me too.” She grabbed another handful of photographs out of the box. “Let’s see if we can find some other ones.”

“There’s one more thing,” Josh said slowly.

Laurie looked up, and she realized that she was already holding her breath.

“I’ve never told this to anyone before, and I don’t know if it really happened or if I just dreamed it or…” He trailed off.

“What?”

“I might’ve just imagined it.”

“What?”

“I think I watched your mother kill a lamb.”

She shook her head, confused. “I don’t… I don’t understand. You watched her slaughter a lamb?”

“No. The lamb was in my room. I don’t know why. It wasn’t night, it was daytime, but it was always dark inside that house and there wasn’t much difference. I’d just come in from outside and I was going to… I don’t know, get a comic book out of my suitcase or something. I ran upstairs as fast as I could because I wanted to get back down to where Mom and Dad were as quickly as possible, and there was this lamb in my bed. Just standing there on the mattress. The covers were pulled down, and it was just… baaing. It couldn’t really move because it was heavy and the mattress wasn’t that stable, and it looked at me and cried.

“And then your mom came out of my closet and told me she was sorry, the lamb wasn’t supposed to be in my room, and she lifted it off the bed and… slammed it onto the ground.”

Laurie could not believe she’d heard right. “What?”

“She lifted the lamb over her head, like a weight lifter or something, and threw it down on the floor as hard as she could and… killed it. It didn’t move, didn’t make any noise, and she picked it up and smiled at me and apologized again and carried it out of the room. There was blood dribbling out of its mouth, but the carpeting was dark red already and you couldn’t really see where it dripped. Like I said, I don’t know if that was a nightmare and I imagined it or if it really happened, but I never told Mom and Dad and I never said a word about it to anyone until now.”

Laurie picked up the photo again, looked at the face of the grim woman who had been her mother.

She could see her throwing a lamb down hard enough to kill it.

“I dreamed about Dawn and a butcher. You saw my mom slaughter a lamb. This is just too close for comfort.”

Josh nodded. “I agree.”

“I want to see the house,” Laurie said. “I want to go there. You said you’d recognize the name of the town if you saw it?”

“I just need something to jog my memory.”