Read Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 for Free Online

is the devil?"
    He rubbed his forefinger down his daughter's soft, freckled nose. When he'd finished making arrangements with Jennifer, he held his daughter in his arms and let her misshapen heart thump irregularly against his chest.
    * * * *
    After dinner, Caitlin forgot all her fear in the happiness of a mid-week sleepover. They walked hand in hand across the wooded cul-de-sac. Jennifer answered the door wearing a tight, low-cut red satin blouse and black skirt, the sexy style oddly de rigueur at her fundamentalist church.
    "Don't let them scare each other too much talking about it,” Scott said, as Caitlin disappeared toward Laurel's room.
    "Oh, no, don't worry about that,” Jennifer said. “I'll have them watch Veggie Tales. "
    These were Christian cartoons, but Scott didn't mind; Veggie Tales were funny and very well done.
    When Scott stepped back outside, he wondered for the hundredth time why Jennifer and Michael even bothered to live in the country. They'd cleared all the trees off their lot and planted some fragile strain of grass that needed constant defense to survive. And while everyone else let their dogs run free—the RiverPark Housing Association didn't enforce a leash law—Jennifer considered the practice uncivilized and kept their Great Dane perpetually confined in a minuscule dog run.
    Scott listened to the wind blow through the tops of the Douglas firs and imagined he heard the swishing flight of the flying squirrels that lived invisibly among them. Each house in the River Park had five acres of woods and meadow around it, and strolling around the neighborhood felt a lot like walking through a campground at night. Only there weren't any bears or mountain lions—there were too many dogs around (and Caitlin was on a first name basis with each one). The most serious wildlife here was the neighbors.
    Semi-rural living attracted a peculiar mixture of people. Scott passed Bruce Smith's tawdry mobile home, where he lived with his Ph.D. wife and periodically tided himself over by pawning his gun collection. The wife almost never left the house, and Scott had a bad feeling about what went on inside there. Still, Bruce was a loyal neighbor in his own way. If a foreign army ever invaded Olympia, Washington, he'd come in handy.
    Scott walked past Carol and Judy's cabin of lesbian iniquity and reached the Carsons’ place at the bottom of the hill. The Carsons had bordered their lawn with lime-green plastic foliage, strangely discordant among the evergreens, and though the main RiverPark street itself remained unpaved they annually poured fresh asphalt on their driveway to keep it smooth and black.
    Light streaming from a streetlight in the Carsons’ yard reached out toward the home of the man with horns and lost itself among the cedars, hemlocks and Douglas firs. Scott made out a dirt driveway striking off between two cedar stumps, crossed the street and, after some hesitation, stepped onto it.
    After ten feet, he could hardly see the way. He pushed the button that lit the dial on his watch. Nine-fifteen. A little late to show up at someone's door unannounced. When the road turned to gravel, he let his boots crunch as loudly as possible. It didn't pay to surprise someone with horns.
    The house had a light on above the door, and another light in the living room shone through scarlet curtains. A black station wagon parked in a gap between dense trees turned out to be a new model Mercedes. Whoever he was, he had money.
    Scott heard a sharp cry and a groan. He wished that he had a gun, or at least a heavy walking stick. A second groan filled his mind with images of half-dead bodies hanging neatly from meat hooks, bound women pleading for mercy. Maybe he should turn back. Caitlin had only one parent.
    But there wasn't any real risk knocking on a neighbor's door.
    He knocked twice, and heard a voice respond, “Coming ..... just a second."
    Footsteps rattled the mobile. The door opened, and an obese man dressed in a