Livia stood frozen with indecision. She wanted to grab Megan and run up the stairs, but she couldn’t bring herself to abandon the lost girl on the bed. She heard a hiss, and the acidic odor of ammonia filled her nostrils even before her eyes registered the pain. She tried to shield herself in the dark cellar, bringing her hands in front of her as the pepper spray covered her face. The burning was immediate and intense and it drove her backward.
She felt him grab her by the hair, and Livia let out a gothic scream as he launched her through the air. She landed on the table by the wall and crashed into the corner of the cellar. Her eyes bled burning tears and her lungs wheezed as the irritant entered her system. Against protests, she raised her eyelids. The flashlight Livia had dropped lay still on the floor, pointing to the spot next to Livia and brightening her hip and the concrete and the thing she had felt when she careened across the table. It was a bottle of spray paint. Livia’s mind flashed to the two strange symbols painted onto the wall. In a single motion, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the Bic lighter Kent Chapple had given her when he swore off smoking during his visit to her house the other night. She picked up the paint can with her right hand and lit the Bic with her left. Just as Terry McDonald reached her, she depressed the aerosol cap on the paint can and sprayed it through the flame. A giant fireball erupted, as if the canister itself were filled with flames. The horizontal blaze struck Terry McDonald in the face, igniting his hair. He recoiled immediately, turning away from the flame, but it was too late. First his hair, then his shirt took to flames. They were violent orange and lit the cellar brightly as the three girls watched his burning body stumble and turn. His screams were prehistoric and sickening.
He stumbled across the room, shrieking and moaning and slapping his face and head and chest. Megan ran to her father, pulling the blanket from the bed and throwing it onto his burning torso and head. He collapsed to the ground and she smothered the flames.
Semiconscious, he lay panting in the far corner. The smell of burnt flesh mixed with ammonia was worse than anything Livia had encountered in the morgue. Livia lifted the heavy flashlight that had landed in the corner. It provided all the light needed to see Megan staring at her incapacitated father, his face and chest burned black and greasy.
Livia worked hard to keep her burning eyes open as Megan unhooked her father’s gun from the holster. For an instant Livia, lying in the corner, raised her hand and tried to speak no. But before she was able, Megan adjusted the gun, both hands playing over its surface until it clicked and clattered. Then she carried it to Livia.
“Here,” Megan said. “Safety is off. Shoot him if he moves.”
Megan went back to her father and pulled the radio from his shoulder. She twisted and adjusted the knobs, tricks of the trade, Livia guessed, learned from watching her father over the years. Megan pressed a button on the side of the mouthpiece and placed it to her lips. She knew the quickest way to draw police to a scene.
“Officer down at Stellar Heights.”
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It took the first squad car six minutes to arrive. But soon after they surveyed the scene, the ghost town of Stellar Heights was alive with red-and-blue flashing lights, scores of headlights, ambulances, and fire trucks. After an hour, detectives arrived with stadium lights that brought the abandoned subdivision to life as if it were high noon. News helicopters hovered overhead as word spread.
Elizabeth Jennings was placed in an ambulance and brought to Emerson Bay Memorial. Terry McDonald was airlifted to Raleigh to be treated by the Duke burn unit. Megan was taken, under the supervision of Dr. Mattingly, to a private treatment facility undisclosed to the press. Livia, after being treated by paramedics who flushed her eyes with saline, stuck around Stellar Heights, refusing the suggestion of scans and observation.
They searched all six houses. Three appeared unused. The others showed signs of life, at one point in time. Each had similar characteristics of boarded-up basement windows with filthy living conditions in the cellars. The furnishings were consistent between all the spaces, and shared a common floor plan of a bed, a dresser, and a small table where it was determined meals had been placed. Each basement wall was graffitied with dual X’s.
Livia relayed to the police and the detectives Elizabeth Jennings’s claim that she had been in contact through the ventilation system with a girl named Nicole. She was sure it was her sister, missing for nearly a year and a half. Livia showed the detectives the second-story bedroom where similar living conditions were found—bed, dresser, and shackle. Yellow tape went across the doorway and detectives waited for the crime scene unit to pick through the room.
The search for Nicole Cutty continued.
*
It was a week before Terry McDonald was able to answer detectives’ questions. He was mummified in heavy white bandages, so that only his mouth and eyes were visible during questioning. It took three days at the hospital for detectives to put together the last three years. They found that Megan McDonald’s father wanted to talk. Was eager, in fact, to rid his soul of sin. He confirmed all the facts Livia had brought to the detective’s attention about Nancy Dee and Paula D’Amato. Elizabeth Jennings was pieced into the puzzle and tied with what Megan was beginning to divulge.
The only missing link, which they got to at the end of the third day, was the whereabouts of Nicole Cutty. Under tremendous pressure, he told them, with the coming destruction of Stellar Heights, he worked feverishly to find a new “home” for the girls who remained—Elizabeth and Nicole. But as pressure mounted and his ailing daughter began her nightmares, he was certain her memory would betray him. So instead of moving the remaining two “Loves,” he disposed of them. Nicole first, Elizabeth Jennings meant to be next.
Two weeks of excavation, however, by the Montgomery County police force, who used donated Bobcats to dig up the forest where Terry McDonald had buried Nicole, produced no body. Pressed hard for details and location, he told detectives through tears that he was certain of the locale. He had, he confessed, in his haste buried Nicole without the protection of a body bag. Perhaps, it was suspected, animals had taken her remains.
When this news reached Livia, she listened with a stoic expression as detectives and social workers explained their theory. Livia tuned out after a moment. All she could concentrate on was that Nicole’s body was no longer waiting to be discovered. There was no longer the chance that her sister’s remains would come to her morgue and beg Livia to uncover the answers they held.
Livia slept that night under the red fan of her childhood bedroom, finding in her slumber both peace and angst that this opportunity was gone.
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