Tisha had never made a vow to anyone, anywhere. She hadn’t even made a vow to Jan-Mark at their wedding. She’d written the ceremony herself, and she’d been very careful about all that. Tisha had been very careful about almost everything in her life. She was forty years old and looked thirty, the result of decades of patiently taking care. Her thick red hair was the color of flame and only barely touched up. It floated out from her skull in the tight crimps of a natural wiriness. Her skin had the hard smoothness of good porcelain. In the winter it grew faintly pink with cold, but in the summer it wasn’t allowed to tan at all. She weighed ten pounds less and wore jeans two sizes smaller than she had at seventeen. The refrigerator was full of crudités and the basement was full of dumbbells to take care of that. Once upon a time, she had been a lumpy girl named Patty Feld, growing up unpopular in Dunbar, Illinois. She had made a promise to herself then about what she would become. She had made meticulous plans for taking elaborate revenge. In the years since, she had made herself into exactly what she had promised herself to make herself into, and every once in a while, she had indulged herself in a little revenge. Patricia Feld Verek had never been the sort of person it made sense to cross, not even as a child. At the age of five, she had put a snake in the lunchbox of the only mentally retarded girl in her class. At the age of twelve, she had told twenty-six people that Mary Jean Carmody was going all the way with Steven Marsh, which wasn’t true. The fact that it wasn’t true hadn’t helped Mary Jean Carmody any, because Steven was hardly going to deny it. Tisha had wanted Mary Jean off the junior cheerleading squad, and Mary Jean had been thrown off. Now what Tisha wanted was something definitive, a token of power, from the people of Bethlehem, Vermont. This was the morning on which she intended to get it. After all, it only made sense. This was a terrible place, a prison, a cesspool. This was the pit of hell dressed up to look like Santa’s Workshop. Tisha had been around long enough to know.
The house where Tisha and Jan-Mark lived was not an old farmhouse but a new log one, four levels high, stuck halfway up a mountain and surrounded by trees. The second level was a loft that served as their bedroom, screened from nature and the living room only by a thick built-in bookcase that acted as a headboard for the bed. Standing on this level, just past the bookcase on either side, Tisha could see down into the living room with its massive fieldstone fireplace and chimney. She could also see back into the bedroom, where Jan-Mark was lying fetuslike in the bed, smothering himself under four Hudson Bay point blankets and a down quilt. He was dead to the world, and Tisha didn’t blame him. He’d been up until two o’clock in the morning, drinking blended Scotch whiskey and singing along to ancient Beach Boys records.
There were a pair of cedar chests at the foot of their oversized, custom-made bed. Tisha opened one of them, pawed through the sweaters until she found one dyed a bright lime green, and pulled the sweater over her head. Tisha liked colors like lime green. They clashed with her hair and made people nervous. She liked Jan-Mark being asleep, too. Jan-Mark liked to épater la bourgeoisie, but only for Art and only when he started it. He hated it when she went off on her own, doing all kinds of things he didn’t understand, making people upset for no good reason he could see. Tisha didn’t care about that—in her opinion, Jan-Mark didn’t see much—but she didn’t like to argue, and if it was all over and done with by the time he found out about it, he wouldn’t bother to make a fuss. Back in New York, Jan-Mark had been legendary for his rages, but that was theater.
At the bottom of the cedar chest there was a stack of leg warmers. Tisha took out the ones that matched the sweater she was wearing, considered exchanging them for a pair in tangerine orange and decided against it. That sort of thing violated her sense of order. She pulled the leg warmers up over her knee socks, anchored her jeans to her ankles with them, and stood up.
“Son of a bitch,” Jan-Mark said from his nest of wool and feathers.
“Daughter of one, too,” Tisha said equably. Then she turned her back on him and walked away, around the bookcase, across the balcony, to the spiral stairs that led to the balcony above. She could hear him snoring after her as she went.
The balcony above was where their “offices” were—her office, really, and Jan-Mark’s studio. They were both simply large open spaces divided by a four-inch construction of good drywall. Tisha had to pass Jan-Mark’s studio to get where she wanted to go. She looked in on paints and canvases and easels and palettes and a life-sized poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Terminator II. Her office was much more organized, much more efficient. The Macintosh had its own hard-plastic work station in one corner. The corkboards that lined the walls were themselves lined with pictures, portraits of the people in her latest project. Tisha Verek was a “writer,” particulars undefined, but she was a “writer” with good connections. She had had four true-crime books published already and was now working on a fifth. This time, instead of writing about a single crime, putting the details together the way she’d put together a novel, she was working on a concept, on a theory. The photographic portraits on her corkboards were all of children between the ages of five and twelve years old. Each and every one of those children had committed at least one murder, and three had committed more than five.