Whether Clem would actually do the deed or not, Howard wasn’t so sure. He was simple, easily swayed, but he had a conscience. In the end, it didn’t really matter, Howard thought. Yes, it would be better to have the child out of the way. But if it lived, he’d deal with that. They’d find a home for it somewhere far away, where its resemblance to Howard would never be noticed. In the end, all that really mattered was Clem. And for this part of the plot, Howard needed a witness.

Upstairs in the foyer, he found one. His sister Margaret.

“The rest of them haven’t come back yet,” she reported, wringing her hands. “They haven’t found Clem.”

“Well, I have,” Howard said. “I just saw him sneak into the basement.”

“Oh!” Margaret held a lace handkerchief up to her face. “He’s returning to the scene of the crime! All the mystery magazines say murderers always do that.”

“Did Papa take his gun?” Howard asked.

“He and Douglas took the rifles from the parlor,” Margaret replied.

Howard nodded. “So his revolver is still in his desk in the study.”

“Oh, yes, it must be, Howard! Get it! Or Clem could come up here and kill us all!”

It was all working perfectly. Fetching his father’s revolver, Howard returned to the basement. Margaret tagged along, terrified but also feverishly excited. She followed a few feet behind, uttering little sounds every few feet. Howard was glad she was with him. He wanted her to witness the little scene he was about to act out.

There, in Beatrice’s doorway, stood Clem with little Malcolm in his arms. Margaret screamed.

“Put the child down!” Howard shouted. “Do not harm him!”

“But I did as you-”

Howard pulled the trigger of the revolver. The bullet ripped through Clem’s chest. Blood spurted from the bullet hole, and the big, lumbering man staggered once, then fell backward like a great oak. Beatrice’s blood on the floor splashed as he made contact.

Margaret screamed again.

Howard stood over Clem’s dead body. “I was too late,” he announced. “He had already broken the baby’s neck.”

“Oh,” Margaret cried. “We must call the sheriff.”

“No,” came a voice.

They looked up. Their father had come in from the servants’ entrance. He looked down at the three dead bodies on the floor.

“I have never allowed scandal to touch this family, and I am not about to begin now.” He looked over at Howard with cold, hard eyes. “The sheriff will not be called until this room is cleaned up, and Clem and the baby are buried on the estate.”

The other sons came back into the house at that point, each of them gasping in new horror when they saw the latest atrocities.

“Douglas, Samuel,” Desmond Young commanded, “you take the bodies out for burial. Make sure there is no evidence of your work. Leave Beatrice’s body here. Remove her from the wall.” Again his eyes found Howard. “She should be brought to the barn and placed there with the pitchfork. She fell from the loft and impaled herself. The sheriff will be told it was a terrible accident.”

Howard recoiled from the idea of touching Beatrice’s body, of having to clean up her blood. “Can’t we simply tell the sheriff that she went away? Does he need to know she died?”

“Too many questions will be asked if we don’t report her death,” Desmond explained. “We can get away with saying that Clem took off, but the other servants would know Beatrice would never go with him. We can say Clem was distraught because of her death, and if suspicions arise that he killed her, so be it. But we cannot make the claim ourselves, because I do not want the sheriff here on the estate nosing around in an investigation.”

Howard was now certain that his father knew he had committed the crime. He was protecting him by keeping the authorities away.

“The sheriff has always done what I have told him,” the elder Mr. Young said. “He appreciates the donations I make to his office four times a year. He wouldn’t want to jeopardize that.”

Margaret was crying. “But what of the baby?”

“We will say that we gave the baby to a good home,” Desmond explained. “Beatrice has no family who will come wanting to claim him. So we say that we found a good home for the child in Boston. No one will question what I say.”

So they got to work. The brothers carried the corpses of Clem and Malcolm out the back entrance, burying them in unmarked graves in the private family cemetery. It was left to Howard, as his father intended, to take down Beatrice’s body from the wall, and to carry it out to the barn. He did this stoically, without any feeling or conscious thought. It was simply a chore to be completed. Never once did he look down at her face.

But when he returned to the room and began the grisly task of mopping up her blood, he suddenly broke down. He turned to his sister Margaret, standing in the doorway, and gestured pitifully. Beatrice’s blood was literally on his hands.

“What have I done?” he cried. “Oh, what have I done?”

Her eyes widened as she realized the truth.

“I was frightened,” Howard said. “Mad with fear and desperation. How is it possible that I could do something so terrible?”

“I’d advise you to say no more, Howard,” his sister said icily. “No more. Never again. After tonight, none of this exists.”

The sheriff came an hour later. As Desmond had predicted, he accepted the story that she had fallen. The official report of her death said she had died of an accident. Nothing more was recorded. Desmond even saw to it that no death certificate was ever signed. After all, Beatrice Swan was just a servant girl.

But Margaret’s assertion that the night would put an end to the horror was wrong. No one slept that night. At the breakfast table the next morning the family was solemn. The day passed without anything being spoken. But that night, as they fell into exhausted, restless sleep, the horrors that had taken place twenty-four hours earlier came roaring back to vivid, terrible life.

Howard sat bolt upright in his bed, sweat dripping from his face. And without even needing to wonder, he knew why his father was banging on his door in the middle of the night.

“You had the dream, too,” Howard said, getting out of bed and letting his father into his room.

“She will have revenge on us,” Desmond said.

“Yes,” Howard said, trembling. “That is what she said in the dream.”

Beatrice was not gone. She had vowed she would not leave. And so she had come back, appearing in a dream shared by both Howard and his father, a dream that told them their own chance to avoid her full wrath was to sacrifice one of their own every ten years. The exact particulars of the dream were vague and inchoate, fading as both men awoke. But the terms remained clear. A lottery was to be held the next night consisting of every blood family member aged sixteen and over. Whoever was chosen would spend a night in the room where Beatrice, Clem, and Malcolm had died. If this was not done, the entire family would be killed.

“That is absurd,” Douglas proclaimed when his father announced the plan.

Samuel echoed his brother’s disbelief. “You’re both just unnerved by the horror of it all,” he said.

Desmond slammed his fist down on the table. “Then tell me how both of us could have had the same exact dream! The lottery must be held!”

“Well, I want no part of it,” Douglas said.

“Neither do I,” Samuel agreed.

Margaret stood up. “We had best heed the dream. There is more here than we know.”

Her eyes shot accusation at Howard. He simply looked down at the floor.

And so the lottery was held that night. The brothers went along grudgingly, not really believing in the need for it, or in their father’s crazy dream. But no one could overrule a direct command from Desmond. When sixteen-year-old Jacob’s name was chosen, his father decreed he would enter the room in his place. Howard protested that they shouldn’t tamper with the results of the lottery. But Desmond simply could not bear the thought of sending his son into that room.