Dark Rivers of the Heart

wasn't ready to use them. Like when he was struck by an idea for a painting, sometimes he'd think about it for years before the work began."
        She looked yellow in the glow of the bug light, but he sensed that she was as pale as bleached bone. She stared at the closed door that led from the vestibule to the basement stairs. Nodding at it, she said, "He considered that, down there, to be part of his work?"
        "Nobody knows for sure. That's what he seemed to imply. But he might have been playing games with the cops, the psychiatrists, just having his fun. He was an extremely intelligent man. He was able to manipulate people so easily. He enjoyed doing that. Who knows what was going through his mind… really? "
        "But when did he start this… this work?"
        "Five years after they married. When I was only four years old.
        And it was another four years before she discovered it… and had to die. The police figured it out by identifying the… remains of the earliest victims."
        Rocky had slipped around them to the basement entrance. He was sniffing pensively and unhappily along the narrow crack between the door and the threshold.
        "Sometimes," Spencer said, "in the middle of the night, when I can't sleep, I think of how he held me on his lap, wrestled with me on the floor when I was five or six, smoothed my hair…" His voice choked with emotion. He took a deep breath and forced himself to continue, for he had come here to continue to the end, to be finished with it at last. "Touching me… with those hands, those hands, after those same hands had… under the barn… doing those terrible things."
        "Oh," Ellie said softly, as if stricken by a small stab of pain.
        Spencer hoped that what he saw in her eyes was an understanding of what he'd carried with him all these years and a compass;on for him-not a deepening of her revulsion.
        He said, "Makes me sick… that my own father ever touched me.
        Worse… I think about how he might have left a fresh corpse down ill the darkness, a dead woman, how he might have come out of his catacombs with the scent of her blood still in his memory, up from that place and into the house… upstairs into my mother's bed… into her arms… touching her…
        "Oh, my god," Ellie said.
        She closed her eyes as though she couldn't bear to look at him.
        He knew he was part of the horror, even if he had been innocent.
        He was so inextricably associated with the monstrous brutality of his father that others couldn't know his name and look at him without seeing, in their mind's eye, young Michael himself standing in the corruption of the slaughterhouse. Through the chambers of his heart, despair and blood were pumped in equal measure.
        Then she opened her eyes. Tears glimmered in her lashes. She put her hand to his scar, touching him as tenderly as he had ever been touched.
        With five words she made clear to him that in her eyes he was free of all stain: "Oh, God, I'm so sorry."
        Even if he were to live one hundred years, Spencer knew he could never love her more than he loved her then. Her caring touch, at that moment of all moments, was the greatest act of kindness that he had ever known.
        He only wished that he was as sure of his utter innocence as Ellie was.
        He must recapture the missing moments of memory that he had come there again to find. But he prayed to God and to his own lost mother for mercy, because he was afraid he would discover that he was, in all ways, the son of his father.
        Ellie had given him the strength for whatever waited ahead.
        Before that courage could fade, he turned to the basement door.
        Rocky looked up at him and whimpered. He reached down, stroked the dog's head.
        The door was streaked with more grime than it had been when last he'd seen it. Paint had peeled off in places.
        "It was closed, but it was different from this," he said, going back to that far July. "Someone must have scrubbed away the stains, the hands."
        "Hands?"
        He raised his hand from the dog to the door. "Arcing from the knob across the upper part… ten or twelve overlapping prints made by a woman's hands, fingers spread… like the wings of birds… in fresh blood, still wet, so red."
        As Spencer moved his own hand across the cold wood, he saw the bloody prints reappear, glistening. They seemed as real as