A dry, rattling gasp came from the darkness behind the plaster. Mommy... it hurts.
The voice was thin, reedy, and distinct. It was the voice of a six-year-old child whose throat had been parched by dust and time, yet it possessed a strange, rhythmic cadence that didn't sound human at all. It sounded like an imitation of a child’s voice played through an old, warping cassette tape.
I didn't think. I lunged at my father.
I am not a small woman, and the ten years of grief had turned my sorrow into a hard, knotted core of functional rage. I hit him square in the chest, my fingers clawing for the key. He didn't expect the violence of it. He staggered backward into the narrow hallway, his head cracking against a framed portrait of my grandmother—old Eleanor Vance, smiling her sharp, bloodless smile from 1984. The glass shattered against his shoulder.
"Mark, hold him!" I shrieked, turning back to the wall.
But Mark didn't move. He was staring at my mother, who had opened her purse. She didn't pull out a gun or a knife. She pulled out a small, amber glass bottle with a rubber dropper and a heavy iron padlock that matched the key in my father’s hand.
"He can't hold him, Rachel," my mother said, her voice dropping into a flat, monotone drone that sounded exactly like the humming from the vent. "Because Mark knows what happened at the mall. Mark was the one who drove the car."