As for his sister, Alyssa, there are a few fourth grade girls who, a week ago, would have described her as a snob, but her best friends knew her as shy, uncertain yet of how to wear and carry and contain her burgeoning beauty. She appears to have sat up at the last instant, for the blood that spurted from her throat sprayed not only across the pillow, but also well below it, spilled down over her chest before she fell back onto her side. Did she understand the message of that gurgling gush of breath in her final moments of consciousness? Did she, as blood soaked into the faded pink flannel of her pajama shirt, lift her gaze to her father’s eyes as he leaned away from her bed?
And little David Ryan Huston, asleep on his back in his crib—what dreams danced through his toddler’s brain in its last quivers of sentience? Did his father first pause to listen to the susurrus breath? Did he calm himself with its sibilance? The blade on its initial thrust missed the toddler’s heart and slid along the still-soft sternum. The second thrust found the pulsing muscle and nearly sliced it in half.
The perfect family. The perfect house. The perfect life. All gone now. Snap your fingers five times, that’s how long it took. Five soft taps on the door. Five steel-edged scrapes across the tender flesh of night.
Two
DeMarco took the call at home just a few minutes after kickoff on Sunday afternoon. He was halfway through his first bottle of Corona. The Browns, after only four plays, had already driven inside the red zone. Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain appeared made of aluminum foil. DeMarco was settling in for an afternoon of mumbling and cursing when the call came in from Trooper Lipinski, who was working the desk at the State Police barracks.
The bodies of the Huston family had been discovered approximately twenty minutes earlier. Claire’s mother and father had driven up from nearby Oniontown, just as they did every Sunday through the fall and early winter, “to watch the Steelers beat themselves,” as Ed O’Patchen liked to say that season. The O’Patchens went up the walk and onto the covered porch as they always had, Ed lugging two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Rosemary cradling her Crock-Pot of cheese and sausage dip. As always, they walked inside without knocking. Rosemary went searching for the silent family upstairs while Ed tried to figure out how to work the remote on the new wide-screen Sony.
The Browns scored while DeMarco was taking the call. He saw no more of the game.
Later that day, DeMarco and three other troopers began interviewing the Hustons’ neighbors up and down Mayfield Road. Not a single resident along the tree-lined street had anything negative to say about the family, and none were aware of any financial or other marital problems between Thomas and Claire. All were stunned, most were grief-stricken.
Two residents, however, a homemaker and an elderly man, reported that they had seen a man who might or might not have been Thomas Huston walking through the neighborhood in the weak light of false dawn. “Kind of shuffling along,” the homemaker said. “Looking confused,” said the elderly man.
Both witnesses had been standing close to their own homes while keeping an eye on their dogs as they sniffed through dewy yards and saw the man from the rear as he was walking away from them. The woman hadn’t yet put in her contact lenses and saw the man as “Just a shape, you know? Just the shape of a man.” The elderly gentleman, who saw the man at a nearer distance, reported that the man who might have been Huston stopped twice, paused with his head down, and once turned fully around to look back down the street. The elderly gentleman asked from two houses away, “You lost?” But the man in question did not respond, and eventually he continued moving away again.
Four women traveling north on Interstate 79 at around eight thirty Sunday morning, on their way to breakfast at Bob Evans and then a day of shopping at the Millcreek Mall, telephoned 911 at around ten that morning to report passing a man as he leaned over the low concrete bridge abutment where the highway spans a spindly extension of Lake Wilhelm. He was staring into the dark water, they said. They agreed with the other witnesses as to what Huston was wearing: khaki trousers, a dark blue knit shirt, brown belt, and brown loafers or moccasins. They could not agree as to whether the man looked as if he were about to jump into the water or if perhaps he were watching something as it fell and disappeared beneath the surface. Only one woman claimed to have seen the object in his hand before it disappeared into the lake. “It was shiny,” she said. “Like a knife. But a big knife.” They would have called sooner but had come up from New Castle and weren’t aware of the tragedy until a salesclerk mentioned it to one of them.