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replied, laughing. “She’ll eat you for supper!”
    An hour later, when he was ready to take his overnight bag and portable computer out to the car, Bill’s earlier uneasiness returned. “Maybe I better not go,” he said. “Maybe I can do it all over the phone.”
    “You know you can’t,” Elizabeth said firmly. “Go on! Nothing’s going to happen to us.”
    But even as he drove away from the house, Bill found himself looking back at it.
    Looking back, and still feeling that something was wrong.

Chapter 5
    E lizabeth was holding her baby—a perfect, tiny boy—cradling him gently against her breast. She was sitting on the porch, in a rocking chair, but it wasn’t the porch of the house in Blackstone, nor, oddly, was the day nearly as cold as it should have been, with Christmas only three weeks away.
    The summer mists seemed to part, and she realized where she was—back home in Port Arbello, on the porch of the old house on Conger’s Point, and it was a perfect July day. A cool wind was blowing in off the sea, and the sound of surf breaking against the base of the bluff was lulling her baby into a contented sleep. She began humming softly, just loud enough so her baby could hear her, but quietly enough not to disturb him.
    “Rockabye baby,
In the tree tops,
When the wind blows,
The cradle will rock …”
    The words died away to nothing more than a murmuring hum, and Elizabeth began to feel drowsy, her eyelids heavy. But then, just as the song faded completely from her lips, a movement caught her eye.
    A child was emerging from the woods across the field.
    Megan.
    Elizabeth was about to call out to her daughter, but asthe child grew closer, she realized this little girl wasn’t blond, sunny Megan at all.
    It was her sister.
    It was Sarah!
    But that wasn’t possible, for Sarah looked no older now than she had on that day so many years ago when she’d been taken away to the hospital.
    Yet as the little girl drew closer, walking steadily across the field, directly toward her, Elizabeth felt a terrible chill.
    Sarah was carrying something cradled in her arms. She was holding it out now, offering it to her, and Elizabeth recognized it instantly.
    An arm.
    Jimmy Tyler’s arm …
    Reflexively, Elizabeth looked down at her baby.
    Her son was no longer sleeping. Instead, his eyes were wide open, and he was screaming, though no sound came out of his mouth. But worse than the silent scream, worse than the terror in the infant’s eyes, was the blood spurting from her child’s left shoulder, where the arm had been hacked away.
    Elizabeth felt a scream rise from her lungs, but at the same time a terrible constriction closed her throat, and her howl of anguish stayed trapped within her, filling her up, making her feel as if she might explode into a million fragmented pieces. There was blood everywhere now, and Sarah, still holding the bloody arm that had been torn from the baby’s body, was drawing closer and closer.
    Elizabeth tried to turn away; could not. Finally, with an effort that seemed to sap every ounce of her energy, she hurled herself out of the chair and—
    Elizabeth jerked awake. For an instant the terrible vision still hung before her. Her heart was pounding and she was gasping for breath. But as the dream quickly retreated, and as the hammering of her heart eased andher breathing returned to normal, she realized she wasn’t back in Port Arbello at all.
    She was in her room in Blackstone, on a December afternoon, and her baby was still safe in her womb. Yet, as if from a great distance, she once again heard the lullaby she had been crooning in the dream.
    “When the bough breaks,
The cradle will fall,
And down will go baby,
Cradle and all …”
    Elizabeth rose from the chaise on which she’d been sleeping and stepped out into the hall. The lullaby was louder now, and coming from Megan’s room. Moving silently down the wide corridor that ran two-thirds of the length of the second floor, Elizabeth