“I was where I wanted to be,” she whispered.
“What happened to him?” Apollo asked. “I mean after you found us. I’m sure he wouldn’t just apologize and walk away.”
“You think a man is going to hurt my child and I’ll just see him to the door?”
“Did you call the cops?” Apollo asked.
“No,” she said. “They weren’t needed. I stepped into that bathroom, and I saw my son in danger and I…turned into something else.” She went silent.
“Where is he now? Do you have any idea?”
“I know exactly where Brian West is,” Lillian said. “He’s where I left him.”
Apollo held the phone to his ear, expecting her to reveal more, but instead she said, “You sound tired. Are you eating? Do you want to come over and I’ll make you dinner?”
He laughed hoarsely. “I’ll eat something soon,” he said. “But I do want to come over, very soon.”
Apollo began to form the words—Emma is here with me—but before he could say them, he realized how cold the first floor felt, even here by the den’s door. He told his mother he had to go, hung up, and opened the door. The room looked exactly as it had a day ago, but that didn’t mean the room was unchanged. He walked inside, shivering.
The space heaters weren’t on.
No heat. No sparking, sputtering, rattling clatter.
He stooped in front of them. All three were cool to the touch. Maybe a fuse had blown. But when he turned the dials, each one lit up and hummed. The fuses were fine. That meant last night someone had come into this house and turned the heaters off.
APOLLO KNELT IN front of the space heaters, and Emma stood behind him. She’d pulled the top sheet off the bed as she came down the stairs behind him, and now she coiled it around one shoulder and draped it over the other so it looked as if she wore an off-white sari.
“If they turned this off, then they must’ve seen Jorgen, right?”
It seemed impossible someone would miss a seventy-year-old man with a knife lodged in his throat.
“He’s in the kitchen,” Emma said. “And down on the floor. So maybe not.”
“But the blood,” Apollo said.
She put a hand on the back of Apollo’s neck and the touch soothed him. “If they didn’t come in through the back, they might not even know he was there.”
“But that would mean Kinder Garten came in here just to turn off the space heaters,” Apollo said. “Why would he do that?”
“What?”
Apollo waved an arm. “William Wheeler, I mean.”
“And who’s William Wheeler?” Emma asked.
Apollo actually laughed when she said this, like maybe she’d just been fucking with him. But of course, how would she know? Good God, the man at the center of all their misery might as well be a phantom to her. An avatar on a screen and nothing more.
“He’s the man who sent those texts to your phone, then made them disappear.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t imagine it.”
Apollo explained as much as he could, as quickly as he could, right there in the den. How Kinder Garten had even infiltrated Patrice’s machine, hidden inside the hard drive, lurking.
“He’s a troll, too,” Emma said.
Her face tightened with anger, and she threw one arm out. She needed to strike something just then, and the only opportune targets were the Japanese panels in the middle of the room. She hit one, and when it fell, the other panel fell, too. They landed with two muted thumps because of the shag carpeting, but they raked the far wall and brought down twenty or thirty of the children’s portraits hanging there.
Emma pointed. “What is all this?” she asked. Though she had been haunting Jorgen’s head, she hadn’t ever been in his home.
Apollo didn’t know where to begin, so he walked to the far end of the room and pointed at the small ink rendering. “This is Agnes Knudsdatter,” he began. “She was the first. I don’t know the names of most of these other kids, but Kinder Garten’s daughter must be here. Her name was Agnes, too.”
She stepped closer to the wall. She brought a hand to her mouth and scanned every face. Then she looked down and saw the frames that had fallen. She bent and picked up two, hung them back on the wall, then dropped her hands.
“All those mothers,” she whispered. “This is an evil home.”
Emma went to the space heaters and turned all three back on. Once their coils glowed orange, she tipped each one over, facedown on the shag carpeting.
“That’s going to start a fire,” Apollo said.
“I hope so,” she said.
Jorgen’s home stood alone on its lot, driveways between it and the houses on either side. Room enough, he hoped, to prevent a blaze from spreading before the fire department would arrive. Quickly they moved through the rest of the first floor, shutting all the windows. They used the months—years—worth of newspapers and circulars on the dining room table like kindling, crowding the papers around the space heaters, then placing more around the two rooms so the fire would spread. Then back to the den.
She pointed at the suitcase. “Show me the clothes you brought me,” she said.
Apollo set them out on the carpet as Emma undid the sheet she wore. After dressing she raided a closet in the hall and found a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood. She had to fold each sleeve up twice, and the bottom of the parka came down just past her knees. Now she wore Jorgen’s clothes, and Apollo wore William’s. They had become the Knudsens, burning down the ancestral home.
Already the carpet beneath them stank as it singed. The first traces of smoke could be seen in the den. Now the suitcase had nearly emptied. The only things left were the mattock and Brian’s outfit. Apollo took the former, Emma the latter. They left the den and walked through the kitchen. Jorgen’s body remained pinned to the cabinet like a butterfly in a display.
“When this house goes up in flames, he’s going to get a Viking funeral,” Apollo said.
“Better than he deserves,” Emma said.
Apollo set down the mattock and leaned close to the body one last time, but he wasn’t planning some sentimental goodbye. His fingerprints were on the handle of the knife. The house might burn, but who knew what might survive? At the very least he should take the murder weapon. He grabbed it and tugged, but the tip had lodged deep. Apollo had to plant a foot against the dead man’s chest to yank it free. Jorgen’s body flopped down on its side making a dull thud. Emma had already gone out the back entrance.