“So you can’t kill him, though he deserves it,” Roselle pered as she
rocked her favorite child. She stared down intently into his eyes as he
looked up from her exposed breast.
“Instead what you have to do is take something from him as revenge for
the money he took from me, something precious to them. There’s a new
baby in the Salfont house. I read about it in the paper a few months
ago, a little girl baby they called Reb Elizabeth. What kind of name is
that for a girl, I ask you. Sounds highfalutin’ to me, the kind of name
a fancy lawyer and his wife would give a baby ’cause they think them and
theirs are better than other people. Elizabeth is a queen’s name, and
you just look up what Rebekah is in the Bible, see if you don’t think
they think way too much of themselves and their little Rebekah… she’s
almost six months now, they’ve had her long enough to miss her when
she’s gone, miss her bad. I’ll drive you past their house tomorrow, my
precious little Candy let you see where it is, and tomorrow night you’ll
go there visit the Lord’s vengeance on them, my vengeance. They’ll think
a rat got into the room, or something of the sort, and they’ll blame
themselves until the day they’re dead too.”
The throat of Rebekah Salfont had been tender, her blood salty. Candy
enjoyed the adventure of it, the thrill of being in the house of
strangers without their permission or knowledge Killing the girl while
grownups slept in the adjoining room unaware, filled him with a sense of
power. He was just a kid, yet he slipped past their defenses and struck
a blow for mother, which in a way made him the man of the Pollard house.
That heady feeling added an element of glory to the excitement of the
kill.
His mother’s requests for vengeance were thereafter irrevocable.
For the first few years of his mission, infants and very young children
were his only prey. Sometimes, in order not to create a pattern to the
police, he did not bite them but disposed of them in other ways, and
occasionally he took hold of them teleported out of the house with them,
so no body was found.
An so, if Roselle’s enemies had all been from in and around Santa
Barbara, the pattern could not have been hidden. But often she required
vengeance against people in far places, about whom she read in
newspapers and magazines.
He remembered, in particular, a family in New York State, who won
millions of dollars in the lottery. His mother had felt that their good
fortune had been at the expense of the Pollard family, and that they
were too greedy to be permitted to live. Candy had been fourteen at the
time, and he had not understood his mother’s reasoning-but he had not
questioned it, either. She was the only source of truth to him, and the
thought of disobedience had never crossed his mind. He had killed all
five members of that family in New York, then burned their house to the
ground with their bodies in it.
His mother’s thirst for vengeance followed a predictable cycle.
Immediately after Candy killed someone for her, she was happy, filled
with plans for the future; she would bake special treats for him and
sing melodically while she worked in the kitchen, and she would begin a
new quilt or an elaborate needlepoint project. But over the next four
weeks her happiness would dim like a light bulb on a rheostat, and
almost one month to the day after the killing, having lost interest in
baking and crafts, she would begin to talk about other people who had
wronged her and, by extension, the Pollard family. Within two to four
more weeks, she would have settled on a target, and Candy would be
dispatched to fulfill his mission. Consequently, he killed on only six
or seven occasions each year.
That frequency satisfied Roselle, but the older Candy got, the less it
satisfied him. He had not merely acquired a thirst for blood but a
craving that occasionally overwhelmed him. The thrill of the hunt also