The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two Read Free Page B

their son. “I think your brother is happy for you,” she said to Jimmy.
    “With time, the whole family will be. They’re good people.”
    Hannah got up from the rocking chair and stretched out her lower back. A baby weighed so little and yet she sometimes felt she had been carrying a large suitcase all day long. The lake was barely visible now and the light from the cottage cast little squares of gold on the snow. The trees were slowly blending into one undifferentiated mass of darkness.
    A sudden movement outside made her jump.
    “What is it? A deer?”
    Another movement several feet away caught her eye.
    “I don’t think so. Come quick, Jimmy.”
    There were people, emerging slowly from the falling darkness into the parameter of light around the house. Two or three, at first. Then several more. Standing there like sentinels paralyzed by the cold. They kept coming, slowly, not talking, hardly moving, until more than a dozen had gathered in front of the house. Their faces bore no emotion, or rather an expression of dull curiosity, as if the temperature had robbed their features of their natural mobility.
    Jimmy grasped his wife’s hand and quietly slipped the bolt on the front door. For what seemed like minutes, the silent stand off continued – the strange visitors staring at the cottage with hollow eyes, as if awaiting orders to advance. “Who are they? What are they doing here?” Hannah’s whisper could not conceal the fear in her voice. Then a sharp moan wracked her body. “Oh, no! It’s him!”
    One of the figures had stepped forward, so that the front porch fixture clearly illuminated his face. It was Dr. Johanson. Teri had been right. He hadn’t died in the car accident. A deep scar now ran across his forehead, very nearly from ear to ear. But what distorted his features, normally so elegant and worldly, was the sense of desperate exaltation that burned in his eyes.
    How had she been taken in by him? The kindly obstetrician. Always ready with a quip or a compliment. He’d seemed so gentle and understanding, whenever she went for one of her checkups. But it had all been an act to fool her, and when she’d discovered the truth, he’d turned overnight into a murderous zealot. She realized she had never known this man, she’d known a performer. They were all performers, who’d tricked her into believing in a fraudulent world of home and motherhood.
    As Hannah’s eyes accustomed to the dimming light, she recognized the middle-aged woman with the braids piled on her head – Olga was what people called her. There was Dr. Johanson’s receptionist, always so welcoming, and the spiky haired man she’d met at the art gallery. Her heart skipped a beat. The women with the brown scarf wrapped tightly around her neck was Judith Kowalski, the one who recruited Hannah in the first place. She was supposed to be dead, too. Hadn’t she fallen and cracked her head on the icy porch steps in East Acton? Or had that been a performance, too, and the pool of dark blood, just so much stage blood? How easily she had been misled!
    And here they all were, together again, silent zombies, staring motionless, as if in a trance. Hannah knew instantly what they wanted. They wanted the baby that was sleeping peacefully in the wicker basket by the fireplace. It would be nothing for them to break down the door and kidnap the child. “Call the police, Jimmy,” she urged.
    “I don’t think we want to have to explain this to the police right now, if we don’t have to.”
    “But there are more than a dozen of them. They’re going to try to take him.”
    Jimmy slipped into the bedroom, reached into the back closet and pulled out the double-barreled shotgun his father had kept there ever since they’d started coming to the lake. It hadn’t been used in years, but he assumed it still worked. He slipped a couple of cartridges into the barrels.
    “No more dying, Jimmy, please,” Hannah pleaded.
    “It’s just a