Risen (53 page)

"Mother?" she said.

Grandmother drove the knife home again and again. She would never have had the strength if it weren't for the blessing of Seth. As she plunged the knife into Evelyn's throat and felt the flesh give way so effortlessly, she wondered what Seth would fix about Evelyn when he brought her back. Aside from the stab wounds, that is. Her bunions, maybe, or that premature streak of gray in her hair.

Even before Evelyn fell still, Grandmother crossed to the side of the bed where Doug, true to form, still slept, mouth open, making a gurgling sound in his throat that was half snore and half garbage disposal. He woke when the knife bit his throat and tried to fend off Grandmother's second and third strokes, but soon he, too, collapsed into a dead and bloody heap.

Grandmother bathed the knife in Doug's blood and let it trickle as she left the bedroom. Blood pattered onto the hardwood floor of the hallway. Droplets stained the carpet in the family room where Jeffrey lay asleep on the convertible sofa, tangled in the sheets, arm jacked out over the edge.

She tilted the knife to drip blood on the boy's pajamas. She wrapped his fingers around the handle and folded his arm back over his bloody chest. She backed away slowly, making sure that he had not awoken, and tiptoed to the bathroom. She washed away the blood from her hands and body. She pulled on her old night dress and returned to her bed.

Within minutes she was asleep. She dreamed of Edgar. They were sitting on an asteroid that hurtled through a milky way of stars, and they were having a picnic.

***

The next morning, amid the hysteria surrounding the discovery of Evelyn and Doug's bodies, the boy was taken away and placed in a lock-down ward at Greenhaven Convalescent Center, the state mental asylum, in Junction City. He protested his innocence, but there was the knife and the blood, and the only other person in the house was Grandmother and she was obviously too ill to have committed such a strenuous crime. Neighbors verified that Grandmother didn't even have the strength to walk to the bathroom unaided, let alone all the way to Evelyn and Doug's bedroom, and what motive could she have to murder her own caregivers? Grandmother was taken to the hospital where she was at midnight when Evelyn and Doug returned from the dead, with Seth's blessing.

Thanks to the miracle resurrections, no charges were filed against the boy, but he would remain at Greenhaven for another few weeks under observation, as Grandmother had anticipated. Evelyn and Doug petitioned immediately for his release, but the system is like a well, easy to fall into, hard to climb out.

Grandmother had no need to feign illness with Evelyn and Doug. They knew what she had done and they understood, though it puzzled them why she had killed the two of them outright but hadn't taken out Jeffrey at the same time.

By the time they figured it out, she had the posters down and the plastic figures in boxes. A cut glass vase of flowers sat on the chest of drawers and her own knick-knacks decorated the shelves. For the next several weeks, until little Jeffrey was released, she would have a room of her own.

On the table beside her bed, she placed her favorite photograph of Edgar.