“I want to go to the hospital.” The request seemed a simple one. Logical. Of course she was going to deliver in a hospital. How else was her baby going to come into the world? But Gypsy shook her head from behind the wheel.
“Hospitals are full of demons,” she said. “Men and women who want to inoculate unborn children into a system of unhappiness and pain.”
“It’s where the pain starts,” Clover murmured, though she kept her eyes straight ahead. “It’s where the downfall begins. Doctors. Drugs. The system.”
“School,” Gypsy cut in. “Work. Taxes. Death.”
“Lack of enlightenment,” Jeffrey said, calmer now, more to himself than to any of the girls. “A life, wasted. But this life won’t be wasted. This life will be spared of pain and suffering the minute it comes into the world. It will spare us the same pain and suffering.”
“Faith will prevail,” Gypsy and Clover echoed back in unison.
“Now is our time,” Jeff said.
“Patience will prevail,” the girls called back.
“What are you talking about?” Audra felt ready to choke, somehow unable to pull in air despite the cold wind drifting in through the partially rolled-down window. “I want to go to the hospital,” she repeated. “I’m having my baby at a hospital.”
“You’re having my baby,” Jeffrey said, his tone eerily composed. “That’s all that’s important. The where of it is of my choosing, of my making. You are the vessel. I am the father.”
She wanted to scream.
What’s happening?
Had the hatchback had rear doors, she would have yanked on the handle, tried to get out, thrown herself onto the unspooling road.
“We sacrifice ourselves for each other,” Jeff told her, not bothering to twist in his seat to look her way. Reassurance was gone. Comfort was but a shadow of a memory. “Our lives mean nothing separately. Together, we are eternal.”
Those words reverberated in her head. She’d heard them before, moments before Jeff had guided the blade of a knife involuntarily clasped in her own hand across Claire Stephenson’s throat.
A strained cry squeaked out of Audra’s throat.
“Who are you?” she whispered, her words all but obliterated by her own strangled sobs.
“Fear is to be expected,” Jeff said. “You’re weak. The weak are afraid of everything.”
56
* * *
LUCAS COULDN’T BRING himself to believe what he was seeing. A young Jeffrey Halcomb stood at the top of the stairs. And despite Lucas thinking through all the possibilities, the crazy fucking possibilities, seeing Halcomb on the second-floor landing undid every scrap of remaining logic in Lucas’s head. He wanted to accept it, but, staring twelve feet up at a rejuvenated dead man, his brain rebelled. A stubborn denial.
But his refusal to acknowledge the warped reality that had somehow taken over his life was rebutted by Echo twisting to look at him from where she stood. She craned her neck and gave Halcomb a wide, delirious smile.
She can see him, too.
It meant Lucas wasn’t imagining things. Except that when he looked away from Echo and back to where Halcomb was standing—directly in front of Jeanie’s door—Jeff was gone and Jeanie had replaced him. She stood motionless at the upstairs banister, her face blank, her eyes empty.
Something about her stasis kept Lucas cemented in place. There was something different about his daughter, something he couldn’t put his finger on. Like when Caroline had dyed her hair a half shade lighter and expected him to notice, waiting for him to pick up on the minuscule change.
“Vivi,” Echo murmured from the couch.
“My Vivi,” Jeffery Halcomb said, nearly making Lucas jump out of his skin.
His gaze darted from his daughter to the dead man now on his left. Halcomb looked like he’d stepped out of the thirty-year-old photographs tucked into Lucas’s desk drawer.
“As in, ‘long live,’ ” Jeffrey mused. “A perfect moniker to reflect her true purpose, don’t you think?”
Lucas opened his mouth to speak but he couldn’t find his breath. If he had breath, there would have been no words. Halcomb looked so real. So alive. So young.
“You look surprised, Lou,” Halcomb said, a wry half grin tugging at one corner of his mouth. “I’d think that you, a true-crime writer with such an imagination, would have expected this. You, Lucas Graham, the man who knows so much about me and my little family.” The ghost of a smile faded. Halcomb frowned, as if disappointed. “It always surprises me. For what if some were without faith? Will their lack of faith nullify the faithfulness of God?”
Faith.
The word rolled around in his head.
Faith.
His eyes darted back to the stairs.
Jeanie was descending the staircase with a weird sort of slowness, like a VHS tape running at half speed. Halcomb’s cross was in her hand. How the hell had she gotten ahold of it? He’d stuck it in his desk drawer, had seen it just hours before.
That was when the memory of being locked in his study hit him; the way he hadn’t been able to open the door. The way it had burst open and shut on its own only moments later, as though some unseen force had run inside and locked their self in with him. He remembered the drawers of his desk flying open, the top one with the broken rails crashing to the floor. It was the drawer he’d dumped Halcomb’s cross into among a myriad of paperwork and Post-it Notes. Lucas swallowed against the possibility.
It had been Jeanie all along.