One Last Scream. Kevin O'Brien

scared the hell out of me….”

      A hand on the doorknob, Ina pressed her ear to the door. She could hear undecipherable whispering. But one thing she could make out was Mark saying. “Okay, okay, I’m sitting down….” Obviously, he knew the person who was downstairs. There was more murmuring, and then Mark raised his voice. “Hey, no! Wait a minute, no—”

      A loud gunshot went off.

      Ina reeled back from the door.

      She heard her sister’s footsteps along the hallway. Someone else was charging up the stairs. “Oh, God, no, no!” Jenna screamed.

      Ina’s stomach lurched at the sound of a second blast. She heard someone collapse right outside her bedroom door.

      God, please. This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening.

      Ducking into her closet, she closed the door and curled up on the floor. She was shaking uncontrollably. She heard footsteps. She couldn’t tell if they were coming toward her bedroom or moving away from it. She felt dizzy, and couldn’t breathe. The dark closet seemed to be shrinking in around her. Ina’s whole body started to shut down.

      She wasn’t sure what had happened, if she’d fainted or gone into a kind of shock, but Ina suddenly realized some time had elapsed. The house was still, and a very faint light sliced through the crack under the closet door. Dawn was breaking.

      Was it all a nightmare? As she tried to move, every joint inside her ached. She felt as if she’d been beaten up. Her body was reacting to the trauma. This was no nightmare. It was real.

      Ina managed to get to her feet and open the closet door. But she was shaking. The bedroom was still dark with only a murky, early dawn light seeping through the dormer windows. Nothing had been disturbed in the room. The door was still closed.

      Ina swallowed hard, and then reached for the doorknob. As she opened the door, she saw the blood and bits of brain on the hallway wall. Only a few feet in front of her, Jenna lay dead on the floor facing that blood-splattered wall.

      Ina let out a gasp. Tears stung her eyes, but she didn’t stare at her dead sister for too long. She staggered back toward the stairs. She shook so violently she could barely make it down the steps. She clutched the banister to keep from falling—or fainting.

      In the dim light she could see only certain areas of the living room. Other spots were still shrouded in darkness. She glimpsed Mark in his robe, sitting in the rocker by the fireplace. But his face was swallowed up in the shadows, and he wasn’t moving at all. As Ina warily approached him, she saw that his wavy brown hair was matted down with blood on one side. He stared back at her with open dead eyes and a bewildered expression. The top left side of his head had been blown off.

      “Oh, no,” Ina whispered, a hand over her mouth. “No, no, no…”

      Someone emerged from the darkness beyond the kitchen door.

      Ina gasped again. She saw Mark’s hunting rifle—aimed at her.

      Tears streamed down Ina’s face as she gazed at the person who was about to kill her. “Oh, my God, honey,” she whispered, shaking her head. “What have you done?”

      The shotgun went off.

      Chapter Three

      Her aunt was staring at her, and asking, “What have you done?” And that was when Amelia shot her in the chest.

      All at once, she bolted up and accidentally banged her knee against the steering wheel of Shane’s Volkswagen Golf. Amelia barely noticed the pain. She was just glad to be awake—and out of that nightmare. It seemed so horribly real. She’d even felt the blood splattering on her face as she’d shot her parents and Aunt Ina at close range.

      Now Amelia anxiously checked her reflection in the rearview mirror. She touched her hair. Not a drop of blood anywhere. If she’d washed it off, she certainly would remember. It was a dream—vivid and frightening, but still just a dream.

      Shivering from the cold, Amelia looked around. It took her a moment to realize she’d fallen asleep in the front seat of the VW. She’d parked in the small, desolate lot of a boarded-up hot dog stand. The unlit, cracked sign had a cartoon of a smiling dachshund. It read: WIENER WORLD! HOT DOG EMPORIUM—WIENERS, FRIES, & COLD DRINKS!

      Amelia wasn’t sure where she was, but she could hear cars zooming along on the other side of some evergreen trees across the street from Wiener World. She had to be somewhere close to a highway. She squinted at her wristwatch: 11:15 A.M.

      Her head was throbbing and she felt so thirsty she could hardly swallow. She hadn’t had a hangover in several weeks, and this was a painful reminder of what it had been like during her drinking days. Now Amelia remembered the party last night, and how she’d treated Shane so shabbily. She remembered grabbing that bottle of tequila and driving off toward Wenatchee. She’d had this sudden urge to get to the family cabin, and make certain her parents and her Aunt Ina were all right. She’d been convinced some harm would come to them.

      Amelia felt around under the car seat for that bottle of tequila. There was still some left, and she took a swig from the bottle. But even the jolt of alcohol didn’t erase the violent images lingering from that nightmare. Something had happened at the Lake Wenatchee house; she was sure of it.

      Amelia wished she could remember, but everything was a blank from the time she’d sped away from that party on fraternity row to when she’d woken up here just moments ago. She suffered from occasional blackouts—lost time. It usually happened when she was drinking, but she’d experienced these memory lapses other times, too. On several occasions, people claimed they’d seen her here or there, and Amelia didn’t remember it at all. It was almost as if she were sleepwalking some of the time.

      Had she killed her parents and her aunt during one of these sleepwalking episodes? Was it possible?

      Amelia put down the tequila bottle, then dug her cell phone from her purse. Squinting at it, she dialed her mother’s cell number. But if they were still at the cabin, the call wouldn’t get through. Sure enough, just as she thought, no luck. Biting her lip, Amelia dialed her Aunt Ina and Uncle George’s house in Seattle. Her Uncle George had stayed home with her cousins this weekend. If something had really happened, he might know about it.

      “Could you please make that announcement again?” George McMillan asked the woman at the concierge desk in the Pacific Place Shopping Center.

      Nodding, the pretty concierge with curly auburn hair and cocoa-colored skin gave him a pained, sympathetic smile. She picked up her phone and pushed a couple of numbers.

      “Stephanie McMillan, attention, Stephanie McMillan.” Her voice interrupted the music on the public address system. “Please meet your father by the first-floor escalators.” She repeated the announcement.

      “Thank you,” George said, nervously tapping his fingers on the edge of the desk. He gazed up at the people passing by the railings on all four shopping levels of the vast skylit atrium. No sign of Steffie. He scanned the faces of the shoppers lined up on the escalators. He still didn’t see her. His stomach felt as tight as a fist.

      His daughter had wandered off about fifteen minutes ago. Already, George had sweated through his shirt. He imagined every horrifying scenario of what might have happened to her. He saw Stephanie’s face on milk cartons. He thought about the call from the police, asking him to come identify the corpse of a pretty, freckled-faced, auburn-haired five-year-old. He imagined looking for the little strawberry mark on her arm—just to make sure it wasn’t Stephanie’s double. As if there was another like her.

      His son, Jody, eleven, was supposed to have been keeping an eye on her. George had taken the kids to Old Navy in downtown Seattle this morning. His wife, Ina, had made out a shopping list that included the kids’ clothes and some other things she wanted him to get. After Old Navy, he’d stopped by Pottery Barn in the Pacific Place Shopping Center to pick up candles—specifically, “eight-inch pillars in fig.” George had had a big bag