“Mama, why does Daddy hit you?”
She’d been seven when she’d asked that question. She was rocking Dani to sleep in her mother’s chair in their bedroom, cooing sweet nothings into the baby’s ear.
Her mother dropped her hairbrush on the vanity table. “Why would you ask such a thing?”
“I-I’m sorry.”
She rocked Dani, hoping her mother wasn’t angry with her. She’d never spanked her. Her father had, twice. Once when she broke the crystal cake plate that had been her mama’s favorite. Then last year when she’d run away. She’d moved all her things into the shed.
Because of Bobby. He scared her.
“Honey,” her mother said, coming over to them. She kneeled in front of the chair, stopped the rocking. Forced Lily to look into her mother’s eyes.
Such pretty eyes, Lily thought. Daddy said they were like sisters. She only hoped she grew up as beautiful as her mama.
“Honey, you’re too young to understand. Daddy doesn’t mean to hurt me. And-and it doesn’t really hurt.”
Mama glanced down at Dani and Lily knew, but didn’t understand, why her mama was lying.
“Okay,” she said, her voice small and shaking.
Mama squeezed her hand. “Sometimes I say or do the wrong thing. Daddy gets upset. He works very, very hard, you know. Very hard. Six kids cost a lot of money, you know.” She was speaking fast.
“Okay, Mama.”
“But Daddy loves me. Very, very much. And I love him. And it isn’t all the time, just sometimes. Rarely.”
Mama wasn’t making sense. Then she leaned over and kissed Lily on the head and the world got a little better.
“Rowan?”
John’s voice was soft but urgent.
“Rowan, are you okay?”
“Just thinking.” She took a deep breath. He knew everything already. Only one more secret to share. “My father abused my mother. Hit her. She always justified it. Said it was her fault. When I asked her about it once, she just said she did things wrong. Stood up for him.”
Her knuckles were white from clenching her hands into fists. She consciously worked out the tension in her muscles.
“I didn’t think killing her came out of nowhere,” John said. “You know, it’s a pattern. Abusive relationships often end in death.”
“They’d been married nineteen years. Six kids. And-and she stayed with him the whole time, no matter what he did.” She remembered the flowers he always brought. The kisses he bestowed on her when he came in at night. “It was like Jekyll and Hyde. He hit her. They argued so much. But I couldn’t believe he killed her. Didn’t want to believe. He used to call her his queen.”
She took a deep breath. She didn’t realize she’d been crying until John wiped the tears from her cheeks.
“I loved my father and hated him. He could be so wonderful-playing games, taking us to the park, out for ice cream-but he hit my mother.” Her voice hitched. “I was so confused. Then seeing him so-so-so empty.” She took a deep breath. “That, I didn’t know how to accept. Not then.”
“You were a child, Rowan. A child forced to grow up very fast.”
“Bobby was different.”
Rowan never forgot Bobby’s cruelty. The silent terror he’d inflicted on all of them. Even Mama.
“Some people are just born evil,” John said.
She didn’t disagree. “I think Bobby took the worst of Daddy and twisted it. I mean, he was the oldest. He knew what was going on. He used to push Mel and Rachel around just like Daddy did to Mama. He’d hit them.”
“And no one did anything.” John’s voice was full of shock. Not a surprise. After all, he had had a perfect childhood.
“Once Mel went to Daddy. Told him that Bobby had hit Rachel so hard she fell down the stairs. Daddy and Bobby had a huge fight in the garage. Bobby left for days. And I was glad. So glad.
“But he came back.”
With a vengeance, Rowan thought. That was a year before the murders. When he turned eighteen, she had hoped he’d move out for good. But he didn’t.
“Bobby called my father weak and pussy-whipped. I didn’t know what that meant at the time. But he never challenged him to his face, except that one time. It was when Daddy wasn’t home that Bobby terrorized us. He broke Peter’s arm when he was a toddler. I saw him do it. But he told me if I told the truth, he would kill me. I believed him and told Mama it was an accident.”
“No one would blame you, Rowan,” John said.
“Would anything have been different if I’d told the truth then?” she continued, almost as if she hadn’t heard him. “Would Bobby have been sent away? Punished? Anything?”
She shook her head and released a deep, weary sigh. “I’ll never know.” She laughed, but felt no humor. Only a deep, pervading emptiness. She wondered if she’d ever feel whole again.
John squeezed her hand, held on with both of his. She felt cold to the touch. His throat was raw and scratchy. Tears of anger and rage threatened and he swallowed them down. No child should ever have to go through what Rowan did. The senselessness, the horror of everything she’d endured stabbed at his heart.
But what really angered him was not simply young Bobby’s evil. It was her parents. What had they been doing living with an abusive son, a young man who tormented them and their other children? How could they do nothing? How could her mother sit in the house, let her children witness her abuse, and not get them out of there?
There were two older girls. Couldn’t one of them have gone to the authorities? Surely they witnessed Bobby’s anger; they’d obviously been subject to it themselves. Yet Rowan placed everything on her own shoulders, as if she were the only one who could have done something yet had failed to act.
If only he could explain to her, reassure her, that her actions and inactions had nothing to do with what happened.
“Rowan, none of it was your fault,” John said quietly.
She shrugged. Had she even registered what he’d said? “I guess what I’m saying is that I expected Bobby to do something bad. Real bad.”
“Why do you think your father broke?”
“I just don’t know. It’s why I studied criminal psychology in college. It’s why I joined the FBI. For answers. And I found answers. But not about my daddy. Just the standard: Abusive spouses often kill or are killed.”
John pulled her to him. He couldn’t stand to hear the self-torture in her voice. Evil knew no bounds. Rich or poor, male or female, old or young. He didn’t know what made Robert MacIntosh kill his wife, but it had broken him forever. Twenty-three years without speaking, without even acknowledging the presence of another human being.
But Bobby MacIntosh was another story. If he was right and Rowan’s brother was the cause of the three-week, premeditated, expertly plotted killing spree, then his evil heart was more twisted, and far saner, than his father’s.
Roger Collins paced the waiting room of Beaumont, the maximum-security prison where Bobby MacIntosh had been incarcerated for the past year. The warden was transferring him into a private conference room, but Roger waited for Rowan.
He wanted to strangle John Flynn, but at the same time feared his theory was right. That Bobby MacIntosh was not in Beaumont, but instead was free and terrorizing Rowan.
Good intentions aside, he’d made a big mistake. A mistake that cost seven people their lives. And maybe more.
Bobby MacIntosh at eighteen-hardly a man-was more dangerous than most hardened criminals with decades of assaults under their belts. No remorse, and he certainly took a special glee in his killing night.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Special Agent Roger Collins,” Bobby MacIntosh had said twenty-three years ago when Roger interviewed him in a Boston jail cell.