Demon Child

unconventional, that doesn't mean I am insane.”
        “You want that land,” Richard said.
        “Every inch of it,” Hobarth affirmed.
        “But why, man?” Richard asked. “Whatever you could gain on it-none of that would pay for murder, for all the other things you've done. We'd ask a stiff price, knowing this will be developed land soon, worth a good bit. Your eventual profit would not be that great.”
        Hobarth laughed. “Again, I am more clever than you think.” It seemed that he had to prove to them that he was a formidable man, a man of wit and great cunning. “We would never have embarked on so complicated and potentially a dangerous plan if we expected only moderate profits. But it seems that a friend of Malmont's, a business executive in Boston, called the good doctor some months ago and asked him to look around for a small farm near the new interstate exchange and to negotiate purchase of it. When Malmont found a farm for sale, he thought the price exhorbitant. He phoned his Boston friend and told him that the going price was too high to allow a profit, even considering how land values would soar once the road was completed. But his friend snapped the land up, just the same. This made Malmont suspicious. In time, he forced his friend to tell him that a major resort-center hotel chain has been cautiously negotiating purchase of the Briaryoke Mountain and surrounding foothills since late last year. They plan to install a luxury ski resort with mineral water facilities, a lake and beach to permit year-round operation. This area will become one of the largest resort centers in the United States. Land tripled in value when the exchange was announced. But when this news breaks, shortly, it will skyrocket. If land is worth five thousand an acre now, it will be worth thirty thousand an acre then, along access roadways, at least. Malmont and I, buying through a third party-the man constantly bothering Cora with offers, by the way-stand to realize anywhere from one and half to two million profit inside of a year.”
        Richard whistled. Whether it was an involuntary reaction or whether he had planned to make it as part of some plan to put Walter off balance, Jenny did not know.
        “Yes,” Hobarth said. “Not as large as the Brucker fortune, perhaps, but not a bad second to it, I suppose.”
        “But what about that horrible session I sat through, when Freya told you in detail about what it was like to be a werewolf and what the wolf wanted to do next?” Jenny still felt as if she must prove that Hobarth was not the only evil afoot-and that, therefore, he might be somehow good as well as bad. Desperate reasoning, but all she was capable of at the moment.
        He laughed, enjoying himself. “I implanted all those notions in her head the day before, when she was tranced.”
        “That's disgusting!” she hissed.
        “You're letting sentiment creep in again,” Hobarth said. “You'd never make a good businessman.”
        “Or madman.”
        Again, the smile disappeared. For a moment, he looked at her with deadly intent. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Think what you wish,” he said.
        How could she have thought that she loved him? How could she ever have been fooled by a man such as this? She saw that his gentility, his surface good humor, was only a thin veneer. Below all that crust, he was evil as a man could be. What had distracted her from those qualities and had lead her to believe that he was so saintly?
        Lightning cracked across the sky.
        The horses stamped the ground, restless.
        To think that she had worried what he would think of her, that she would not look pretty enough to suit him or talk intelligently enough to engage his interest. She had worried that he would notice her chipped nails. And all the time, she had not seen that he was far worse; he was a cold, cruel operator intent only on his own benefit. Where had her danger alarm been all that while? Why hadn't the voices of the dead warned her about him with the same clarity they used when telling her to be cautious of Richard?
        “I see that you are wrestling with yourself,” Hobarth said, watching Jenny closely. “May I analyze you?”
        “Why? What's the point? We're going to be chewed up by that wolf of yours or shot with your gun, aren't we?”
        “With Richard's gun,” he said. “I'd prefer to use that if I have to. Make the police less