“Oh, shit,” Paul said, and his voice wavered. “Oh, no, no. Goddamn!”
“What?”
“You know how Carol is on that day,” he said shakily. “The day her baby was born, the baby she gave up. She’s different from the way she is every other day of the year. Depressed, withdrawn. It’s always such a bad day for her that the date’s engraved on my memory.”
“On mine, too,” Grace said.
“It’s tomorrow,” he said. “If Jane is Carol’s child, she’ll be sixteen tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“And she’ll try to kill Carol today.”
* * *
Sheets of dark rain rippled and flapped like wind-whipped canvas tents.
Carol stood on the soggy lawn, unable to move, numbed by fear, frozen by the cold rain.
Twenty feet away, the girl stood with the ax, gripping it in both hands. Her drenched hair hung straight to her shoulders, and her clothes were pasted to her.
She appeared to be oblivious to the storm and the chilly air. Her eyes were owlish, as if she were high on amphetamine, and her face was distorted by rage.
“Laura?” Carol said at last. “Listen to me. You will listen to me. You will drop the ax.”
“You stinking, rotten bitch,” the girl said through tightly clenched teeth.
Lightning cracked open the sky, and the falling rain glittered for a moment in the stroboscopic flashes that came through from the other side of the heavens.
When the subsequent thunder rolled away and Carol could be heard, she said, “Laura, I want you to—”
“I hate you!” the girl said, She took one step toward Carol.
“Stop this right now,” Carol said, refusing to retreat. “You will be calm. You will relax.”
The girl took another step.
“Drop the ax,” Carol insisted. “Honey, listen to me. You will listen to me. You are only in a trance. You are—”
“I’m going to get you this time, Mama. This time I’m not going to lose.”
“I’m not your mother,” Carol said. “Laura, you are—”
“I’m going to cut your goddamn head off this time, you bitch!”
The voice had changed.
It wasn’t Laura’s now.
It belonged to Linda Bektermann, the third identity.
“I’m going to cut your goddamn head off and put it on the kitchen table with Daddy’s.”
With a jolt, Carol recalled last week’s nightmare.
There had been a moment in the dream when she had stepped into the kitchen and had encountered two severed heads on the table, a man’s and a woman’s. But how could Jane know what had been in that nightmare?
Carol finally took a step backwards, then another. Although the rain was cold, she began to sweat.
“I’m only going to tell you one more time, Linda. You must put the ax down and—”
“I’m going to cut your head off and chop you into a thousand little pieces,” the girl said.
And the voice now belonged to Jane.
It wasn’t the voice of an identity heretofore only evident in a trance. This was Jane’s voice. She had come out of the trance on her own power. She knew who she was. She knew who Carol was. And she still wanted to use the ax.
Carol edged toward the back porch steps.
The girl quickly circled in that direction, blocking access to the cabin. Then she started toward Carol, moving fast, grinning.
Carol turned and ran toward the meadow.
In spite of the pounding rain, which snapped with bulletlike power into the windshield, in spite of the dirty mist that hung over the road, in spite of the treacherously greasy pavement, Paul slowly pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor and swung the Pontiac into the passing lane.
“It’s a mask,” he said.
Grace said, “What do you mean?”
“The Jane Doe identity, the Linda Bektermann and Millie Parker identities—each of them was just a mask. A very real, very convincing mask. But a mask nonetheless. Behind the mask there was always the same face, the same person. Laura.”
“And we’ve got to put an end to the masquerade once and for all,” Grace said. “If I can just talk to her as her Aunt Rachael, I’ll be able to stop this madness. I’m sure I will, She’ll listen to me… to Rachael. That’s who she was closest to. Closer than she was to her mother. I can make her understand that her mother, Willa, didn’t intentionally or even accidentally start that fire back in 1865. At last she’ll understand. She’ll see that there’s no justification for revenge. The cycle will come to an end.”