The Husband

electric razor but a bit larger. The business end featured a four-inch-wide gap between two gleaming metal pegs.
    He hesitated, then picked it up. On the side of the thing was a seesaw switch. When he pressed it, a jagged white arc of electricity snapped between the metal pegs, the poles.
    This was a Taser, a self-defense weapon. Chances were that Daniel and Kathy had not used it to defend themselves.
    More likely, Anson had brought it with him and had assaulted them with it. A jolt from a Taser can disable a man for minutes, leave him helpless, muscles spasming as his nerves misfire.
    Although Mitch knew where he must go, he delayed the terrible moment and went instead to the master bedroom.
    The lights were on except for a nightstand lamp that had been knocked to the floor in a struggle, the bulb broken. The sheets were tangled. Pillows had slid off the bed.
    The sleepers had been literally shocked awake.
    Daniel owned a large collection of neckties, and perhaps a score were scattered across the carpet. Bright serpents of silk.
    Glancing through other doors but not taking the time to inspect fully the spaces beyond, Mitch moved more purposefully to the room at the end of the shorter of the two upstairs halls.
    Here the door was like all the others, but when he opened it, another door faced him. This one was heavily padded and covered with a black fabric.
    Shaking badly, he hesitated. He had expected never to return here, never to cross this threshold again.
    The inner door could be opened only from the hall, not from the chamber beyond. He turned the latch release. The well-fitted channels of an interlocking rubber seal parted with a sucking sound as he pushed the door inward.
    Inside, there were no lamps, no ceiling fixture. He switched on the flashlight.
    After Daniel himself had layered floor, walls, and ceiling with eighteen inches of various soundproofing materials, the room had been reduced to a windowless nine-foot square. The ceiling was six feet.
    The black material that upholstered every surface, densely woven and without sheen, soaked up the beam of the flashlight.
    Modified sensory deprivation. They had said it was a tool for discipline, not a punishment, a method to focus the mind inward toward self-discovery—a technique, not a torture. Numerous studies had been published about the wonders of one degree or another of sensory deprivation.
    Daniel and Kathy lay side by side: she in her pajamas, he in his underwear. Their hands and ankles had been bound with neckties. The knots were cruelly tight, biting the flesh.
    The bindings between the wrists and those between the ankles had been connected with another necktie, drawn taut, to further limit each victim's movement.
    They had not been gagged. Perhaps Anson had wanted to have a conversation with them.
    And screams could not escape the learning room.
    Although Mitch stooped just inside the door, the aggressive silence pulled at him, as quicksand pulls what it snares, as gravity the falling object. His rapid, ragged breathing was muffled to a whispery wheeze.
    He could not hear the windstorm anymore, but he was sure that the wind abided.
    Looking at Kathy was harder than looking at Daniel, though not as difficult as Mitch had expected. If he could have prevented this, he would have stood between them and his brother. But now that it was done...it was done. And the heart sank rather than recoiled, and the mind fell into despondency but not into despair.
    Daniel's face, eyes open, was wrenched by terror, but there was clearly puzzlement in it as well. At the penultimate moment, he must have wondered how this could be—how Anson, his one success, could be the death of him.
    Systems of child-rearing and education were numberless, and no one ever died because of them, or at least not the men and women who dedicated themselves to conceiving and refining the theories.
    Tasered, tied, and perhaps following a conversation, Daniel and Kathy had been stabbed. Mitch did not dwell upon the wounds.
    The weapons were a pair of gardening shears and a hand trowel.
    Mitch recognized them as having come from the rack of tools in his garage.

Chapter 38

     
    Mitch closed the bodies in the learning room, and he sat at the top of the stairs to think. Fear and shock and one Red Bull weren't sufficient to clear his thoughts as fully as four hours of sleep would have done.
    Battalions of wind threw themselves against the house, and the walls shuddered but withstood the