Don't Be Afraid

by Rebecca Drake

Genres: Horror; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Be Afraid.  .  . It's a beautiful house--a perfect place to live. To dream. To start a life together. It's the perfect place for so many things, he thinks as he puts on the gloves and reaches for her, enjoying her screams. But today, it's a perfect place to die. Be Very Afraid.  .  . Steerforth, Connecticut, was once an idyllic, sleepy New England town. But now, the leafy streets and picture-perfect houses have turned shadowy and menacing, every small detail suddenly becoming suspect: lost toys placed carefully on back porches, lights blazing in a house that should be empty, closet doors standing slightly ajar, mysterious flowers wrapped in black tissue paper. And the bodies... Or Else You're As Good As Dead.  .  . A serial killer has come to Connecticut. He is watching, honing his skills, waiting, for the perfect time to make them pay for what they've done. And when he's through, home will never be sweet again...

Release date: November 19, 2014

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 401

Sample

Empty houses scared Amy Moran. They seemed to hold the lives and secrets in their walls of all the families who’d ever lived in them and there was something otherworldly, almost ghostly about that. Houses needed people in them to come alive. They needed voices and laughter and light, otherwise they were a shell of something and that something wasn’t pleasant.

It was ironic that she’d become a real estate agent, spending her workdays traipsing through the echoing hallways of vacant homes. Sometimes she wondered if their very walls could sense her desperation.

The farmhouse sat back from the road, hidden from the probing eyes of motorists by a grove of hemlocks. Amy turned into the gravel drive and sped up the wide lane, her Camry crunching along beneath the trees, until the house came into view. A classic New England colonial, originally as plain and spare on the outside as its Congregationalist builders. The years and increasingly affluent owners had not been kind. It was now a mishmash of architectural styles. Federalist fanlights, Greek Revival columns, and Victorian gingerbread, all unified by sunflower yellow paint and black trim, gave it the appearance of a giant bumblebee. Strangely enough, it was always featured on design shows about the area.

The buyer, a hale-and-hearty banker with too much money and far too little time to enjoy any of it, hadn’t wanted to do the walk-through. “That’s what I’m paying you for,” he’d told Amy and Sheila. His third wife enjoyed it, though. She wanted the house for weekend parties, though she complained about the location as if Sheila and Amy had done wrong by her.

“I really wanted something on the water,” she’d remind them every chance she got. She conveniently forgot that she hadn’t wanted the half-a-billion-dollar price tag that went along with property fronting Long Island Sound.

Sheila’s large, silver Range Rover wasn’t on the drive. Had she gone on to the closing? Why hadn’t she called?

Amy picked her cell phone off the passenger seat where she’d tossed it after trying Sheila at the last traffic light. At the same time she had been applying makeup and attempting to get her hair to stay in a hastily formed French twist.

She’d formed the apology in her mind, trying to reduce a chaotic morning and the demands of an asthmatic five-year-old into a simple explanation of how she could possibly be late for this, her first big closing. Not that she’d anticipated any sympathy. Sheila was a single mother, too, though her boys were older now.

Four rings, five, and still there’d been no answer. The light turned green and Amy had tossed the lipstick aside and accelerated with the phone still to her ear.

Seven rings, eight. Finally she’d hung up. Maybe Sheila had her phone off. Maybe she’d be waiting outside the house for Amy.

Only she wasn’t.

Amy put the car in park and ran as quickly as her heels allowed up the short flight of wide steps to the large black door. The lock box was still attached to the brass knob, but it was open and the door stood slightly ajar.

Amy pushed it open and stepped inside calling, “Sheila? Are you here?”

There was no answering shout. Amy’s shoes clicked loudly on the vast flagstone floor. The curtains were drawn in the large barren rooms adjoining the front hall and the foyer itself was gloomy. She turned on the light switch for the chandelier overhead, but nothing happened.

Swallowing hard, Amy moved forward, trying not to think about how dark it was, taking deep breaths to calm nerves already frazzled by being late.

“Sheila?”

Her voice seemed to echo in the empty hall and then it was swallowed up as she sank into the plush carpeting of the family room that adjoined the kitchen. The rooms were empty of furniture, devoid of everything but the sheer draperies blanketing the windows left by the soon-to-be previous owners.

There were tracks in the carpeting from the vacuuming done by the professional cleaning service, but a thin film of dust had already settled on the bare mantel sunk in the fieldstone fireplace.

The lights were on in the kitchen, a blazing swath across black granite countertops and a gleaming Viking range. Sheila must have been here, Amy thought, looking around for some sign of the older woman. Only there wasn’t one. A single drip of water came from the tap and splashed far below in the old-fashioned soapstone sink. The repetitive plink was the only sound.

She must have given up on Amy and headed for the office, but would she really have forgotten to close the door on her way out? That wasn’t like her. Amy pulled out her cell phone again and dialed Sheila’s number, walking out of the kitchen as she did so and back toward the front of the house.

She checked the front door and the floor, looking for a note, but didn’t find one. There was a short gap between punching in the number and the dull ring as it connected. A split second later, a muffled ringing echoed within the house.

Startled, Amy almost dropped the phone. It rang again and again and the ringing echoed back. Only it wasn’t the same ring at all. Amy moved toward the sound. It was coming from upstairs.

“Sheila?” she called again, mounting the carpeted steps. The ringing was louder once she was on the second floor. She tried to follow the sound, peering into open bedrooms. From one of the windows she caught a glimpse of something silver. It was Sheila’s Range Rover parked behind the house.

Amy stared down at it in shock for a moment while the phone continued its shrill beckoning. Then she tore herself away, following the sound. Not the next bedroom nor the one after that. It was coming from the room at the end of the hall. The one with the closed door.

The knob slipped in her palm, which was suddenly clammy, but the door swung open and there was the phone, practically vibrating on the windowsill. But Sheila hadn’t left it behind, because Sheila hadn’t left.

She was lying in the center of the floor where a bed had been, her arms stretched out to the sides, with her palms facing the ceiling as if they were catching the small pools of blood they held. Her legs were bound with what looked like her own nylons. Her eyes, or what had been her eyes, stared blankly at the ceiling as if looking for answers.

Amy stumbled backward, her mouth opening in a scream that came out like a siren, gathering momentum. She tripped in the doorway, struggled up and ran, hurling down the stairs and across the hallway, racing from the house as if she were being chased, the ringing of the phone echoing behind her. She didn’t stop running until she’d gotten out the front door and made it across the driveway and then she fell to her knees in the clean, sweet grass and threw up her breakfast.

Detective Mark Juarez was getting his second cup of coffee in the squad room when the call came. The throbbing in his head had reduced itself to a dull roar and with this cup, he hoped to banish it at least until the afternoon.

If anyone had asked him if he’d had too much to drink the night before, he would have answered honestly: yes. Nobody did ask him, though, and nobody would because he was clean-shaven, his shirt was pressed and none of these officers knew the difference between this man and his less hungover self.

“Hey, Juarez,” his partner called to him, drawing the name out as if it was unfamiliar to him, and hadn’t been the name of the desk sergeant, Mark’s father, who’d sat downstairs for more than twenty years running the front show.

Mark turned to look inquiringly at Detective Emmett Black, stirring the coffee with a calmness that he knew irritated the older man. They looked like a study in contrasts, or as another detective had commented, like the before and after on one of those extreme makeover shows. Emmett Black was forty-two and five feet, nine inches, if he stood up straight. Paunchy around the middle and jowly around the face, he tried to comb the remaining strands of his thin blond hair to cover as much of his dome-shaped head as he could. His surname belied the color of his skin, which was a pasty white, and he hid his small, watery-blue eyes behind glasses frames that had gone out of style ten years before.

Mark was twenty-six and six foot, three inches, and hard-muscled from hitting the department gym at the end of every shift. His skin was olive-colored, his jaw was firm, his eyes were a large, dark brown and he was convinced that he could have earned his partner’s animosity solely because of his full head of dark brown hair.

“We’ve got a call, let’s go.” Black didn’t give him any information, as usual treating Juarez like he was a raw recruit. And Juarez responded as he usually did, purposely taking an extra sip of coffee, slowing down just to aggravate the older man. Each knew what the other was doing; it was an unspoken standoff they’d been engaged in since Juarez transferred from the NYPD six months ago.

He grabbed his jacket and followed Black out of the station at a sedate pace, taking the passenger seat in the unmarked because Black needed the testosterone boost that came with being behind the wheel.

“What’s the call?”

“Homicide. Out off Tepley Road.”

“Victim?”

“White female.”

“Domestic?”

“Probably.”

They drove in silence for several miles, leaving Steerforth’s town center behind them and heading out past the clusters of older frame houses into the Connecticut countryside.

It was a gray, damp morning and Mark couldn’t help but contrast the rain-soaked rolling lawns and low stone walls with the city neighborhoods he used to travel. He knew that most people would say that this was prettier, but he missed the encompassing feeling of all those tall buildings of concrete and brick and limestone and the way the streetlights would be reflected in puddles on rain-slicked streets.

Not that there wasn’t a city center in Steerforth. There was, after a fashion. Converted colonial boxes turned into high-end office space sitting next to modern corporate headquarters of brick and steel and a state-of-the-art courthouse. It was a small area. The rest of it was residential housing and countryside swiftly being converted into bigger residential housing.

“Shit, that’s it.” Black passed a driveway occluded by trees and screeched to a halt, backing up and turning into it. At first there was nothing but a long canopy of green, but then Juarez could see an updated farmhouse ahead. One of the properties that the wealthy seemed to cherish for its historical value, paying fortunes to preserve rotting frames and sinking extra money into securing the foundation so it could hold their whirlpool tubs. A real estate sign was leaning askew on the front lawn, a little swinging SOLD sign attached to it. They parked behind two black-and-whites that were blocking in a small blue Toyota Camry.

An ashen-faced woman in a black skirt and white blouse was huddled on the front steps talking to one of the uniforms. October wind was whipping strands of her long, black hair around her face. As Juarez and Black approached, she moved one trembling hand from its grip on her waist to push it back.

Another uniform stopped wrapping yellow tape around the front of the house and intercepted them. He was young, probably no more than twenty, moon-faced and acne-scarred, his gray eyes alight with excitement under the brim of his cap.

“Body’s on the second floor. Shot. No sign of the weapon or the perp. Victim’s friend found her.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the witness.

“Her name, Officer Feeney?” Black asked.

Feeney took a notebook out of his back pocket. “Moran,” he recited. “Amy Moran.”

“I’ll go on up, you talk to the woman,” Black said, moving up the steps without waiting for an answer. He gave the woman an appraising look as he passed her. Mark introduced himself and she extended a trembling hand to shake and he saw that she was very pretty, even sick to her stomach as she clearly was.

“You knew the victim, Ms. Moran?”

The woman nodded, opened her mouth to speak and closed it again, struggling for composure. “Sheila Sylvester,” she managed after a minute. “She’s a real estate agent. Was a real estate agent.” The past tense made tears well in the already red-rimmed blue eyes. “We were supposed to meet here to do a walk-through and I was late—” She stopped and blinked rapidly to hold back the tears.

Juarez asked if she’d go through the house with him, and show him exactly what had happened. They started with the door and she showed him how it was open, the lock box still there but not closed.

She walked him through the house, trying to remember what she’d done. But when she got to the part where she described how she’d found her friend by following the ringing of her phone, she hesitated halfway up the stairs and settled for pointing in the direction he should go.

Every homicide scene required a few seconds for Mark to adjust. Always, there were warring emotions coursing through him of revulsion and excitement. Here was a dead body, someone’s sibling, spouse or child. But here, also, was a puzzle, a set of clues that he had to connect to find the bad guy.

A woman’s body was lying in the center of an empty bedroom, her skirt hitched up, her panties ripped off and left on one thigh. She’d been arranged face up, her arms carefully out to the sides, her legs tight together, ankles bound by nylons. Her clothes were on, but everything was in disarray: the blouse ripped open, the bra cut open, the breasts spilling out, and the nipples strangely red at the tips.

Juarez pulled on a pair of latex gloves, took a few deep breaths, and joined Black, squatting on the far side of the body near the woman’s head. The older cop waited until the crime photographer had taken his pictures and then he used one gloved hand and the tip of a capped pen to gently turn the victim’s head to the side.

“Does this look like a gunshot entry to you?” he asked, nodding at a small dark hole with dark red blood surrounding it.

Juarez squatted next to him and peered at the wound. “No. Edges aren’t frayed. Ice pick?”

“Maybe, but you’d think there’d be more blood.”

Sheila Sylvester had been in her late thirties or early forties, a woman struggling with her weight, Juarez thought, noticing the tight fit of the gray suit she wore. Making good money, or just liked to spend it if the designer label in the jacket flap was anything to go by. Expensive shoes, too, and a nice collection of jewelry—several gold rings with precious stones, large gold hoops in the ears, a chain of some sort just visible around the neck.

“None of the jewelry’s been taken,” he said. Black grunted.

“Purse is here, too.” Black pointed and Juarez saw a black handbag underneath the window. A cell phone was resting on the sill above it and Juarez made a mental note to make sure that it got checked for recent calls. He looked back down at the victim and saw something else. The ring finger of the left hand was missing. The only sign that it had been there was the bloody hole left behind. That was weird. That didn’t fit with a typical domestic.

“Did you see this?” Mark pointed at the hand.

Black groaned as he stood up just as the crime scene investigators walked in with their cases. “Getting too old for this, Black?” one of them said as he set his case on the floor and knelt to open it. He had hair plugs and a lime-green shirt and had fashion victim written all over him. Black just gave him a sharklike grin.

“You dress up for your date, Dubow?” he said, nodding at the woman’s body.

“No, that’s for later when he meets your old lady,” one of the other guys said.

They continued the banter, rude jokes about each other and the victim. From the outside it looked insensitive, unkind. Some of it was unkind, certainly disrespectful of the dead. But they had to do something to deal with what was in front of them. It wasn’t so much the body that they had to distance themselves from, it was the voices inside that compared this victim to their wives, sisters, daughters, mothers. The fear that came with the job was what had to be kept at bay.

It shocked outsiders if they heard it, which they were never supposed to. But there was the woman in the doorway, still looking green around the gills, her lips pressed tightly together as if she was willing herself to be there.

“Shut up,” Black barked at the other men. He walked over to her, took her arm. “You don’t need to be here, ma’am.”

She resisted being turned away. “I-I need to see her. I need to say goodbye.”

“Not now, not like this,” Black said with uncharacteristic gentleness.

“But I have to.” She pulled out of his grasp, moving across the room, her eyes on the victim. “I was afraid,” she said in a whisper, voice apologetic. “I’m so sorry, Sheila.”

Juarez stepped in before Black could react, stopping her forward progress, but not impeding her view. “How did you know Ms. Sylvester?”

“She was my friend. I mean, we worked together. We’re both agents with Braxton Realty, but we were friends first.”

Her gaze kept stealing from Juarez’s face to the body and then jumping back again.

“Do you know of anybody who wanted to harm Ms. Sylvester?”

“No, nobody.” She shook her head, hair falling forward again and tucked it back. “Everybody loves Sheila.”

This was a standard answer, but Juarez had been a cop long enough to know that nobody is universally loved. “What about her husband?”

“Ex-husband.” Recognition dawned; he could see it in her blue eyes. “Okay, I’ll grant you that Trevor didn’t love her. He was abusive, but that was a long time ago. She doesn’t have dealings with him anymore, not since she gave up all claims for child support.”

“She had children?”

“Two boys. They’re teenagers. Oh, God, what are Michael and Jason going to do?”

The coroner’s arrival interrupted them. Rail-thin, with aristocratic features and a manner to match, Dr. Wallace Crane strode into the room clearly fresh from the links, sparing barely a glance at Juarez and Ms. Moran, his interest solely on the body. Juarez turned his own attention toward the coroner long enough to see Black puff up like an angry cock at Crane’s arrival. Their mutual antipathy began years before when Black was a rookie and had inadvertently disturbed a body at a crime scene. Crane had treated him like a rank amateur ever since, according to Juarez’s father.

“Do you know Trevor’s address?” Juarez turned his attention back to the victim’s friend.

“No. I know he lives in a nearby town. Lewiston?”

Juarez jotted that down in a small notebook. “What about Ms. Sylvester’s address?”

She rattled it off and gave him the address of the realty office as well. Her face was still pale and she was crying again, swiping at the tears in an impatient way. Juarez thought she should be treated for shock, and over her protests had one of the paramedics take her pulse.

“Is there someone I can call? A spouse?”

“No, I’m separated.” A blush stained her face as she said it. “I’ll be okay.”

“We’ll get an officer to escort you home,” he said. “You’ve had a shock and probably aren’t safe to drive.”

At last he got her to concede to having one of the uniforms drive her car home while a black-and-white followed. He walked her to the door and handed her over to the uniforms. Officer Janice Kingston was warm, putting an arm around her, walking to the patrol car slowly. Feeney was clearly disappointed to be given the job of driving the witness’s car, but he left his post without arguing.

Juarez looked at the front door. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign that anyone but Sheila Sylvester had been in the house, which didn’t mean much. If it was the ex, then she might have let him in, or he might have forced his way in as she was getting the key from the lock box.

He thought about that for a few minutes and spent some time studying the front door, but there were no scuffmarks, no impressions in the wood frame, nothing that gave any indication that a struggle had taken place. He traced what could have been her journey through the house and back upstairs.

“Missing ring finger,” Crane intoned in his microcassette recorder. “Signs of vaginal penetration. Bruising.” He moved through the stages of his preliminary examination.

Juarez plucked the leather handbag from the wall and began going through its contents, bagging each item separately. Most of it was standard stuff—wallet, keys, Kleenex, breath mints, a train pass, reading glasses and hand lotion. There was a PDA, too, and to this he gave particular attention.

It took only a few seconds to find the address book and then a quick scroll through the listings to reveal that there was no Trevor Sylvester. Of course there wasn’t. Did he really expect to see the ex’s name in here? He scrolled back up, pausing when he saw Amy Moran’s name, and noting her address before he continued.

It was likely to be the ex, despite what Ms. Moran said. It usually was the spouse or the ex-spouse or a neighbor or friend who’d been jilted. Much of police work was paint-by-the-numbers: predictable domestic situations, known-to-victim homicides, break-ins prompted by drug habits, shoplifting, car heists and the occasional ill-conceived bank robbery.

It was the same here as in the city. Oh, the domestic situations were a bit different, say, from what he’d witnessed in housing projects in the city. More muted, sometimes, but otherwise virtually identical. Alcoholic husbands who beat their wives looked pretty much the same everywhere, even if the assailants wore hand-tailored suits and drove BMWs instead of riding the city bus to low-paying jobs.

Most police work involved getting enough evidence to arrest and convict the sons-of-bitches who committed these crimes. It wasn’t particularly glamorous, but it sure was satisfying to lock up some of these excuses for human beings.

Still, there was something niggling him about this killing. Something that didn’t fit with the usual sort of homicide. That snipped-off finger kept coming to mind.

“Entry point at the base of the head centered near the spinal column,” Crane intoned. “Entry wound not consistent with a gunshot. Wound approximately one-eighth in diameter. Perfectly cylindrical suggesting a single thrust that must have impacted with the brain stem. Death probably instantaneous. Limited discharge from the wound, also inconsistent with gunshot.”

Black held up a hand to interrupt and Crane switched off his machine. “What about an unusual gun—Japanese model or something high-powered?”

Crane shook his head. “It’s just not consistent.”

“Ice pick?”

“Possibly. I won’t rule that out at this stage.”

“Well, what else could it be? It’s pretty damn round.”

“I’m assuming you’ll keep looking for a murder weapon, detective,” Crane said. “Now let me do my job.”

Black stepped back, arms folded. Juarez moved beside him. “What about the finger?”

Black turned his glare on him. “What about the finger?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“Doesn’t fit the angry ex-spouse.”

“Why? He’s pissed, he wants the ring back, and he cuts it off. It’s a show of power.”

“Then why not leave it. And why so clean? It doesn’t look bitten off or hacked off. It looks snipped off. Too neat.”

Black grunted. “Well, you can ask this bastard Sylvester that when we catch him. You get the number?”

Juarez shook his head. “General idea of where he lives, though. And that’s another thing. Why here, in this house? Wouldn’t he confront her in her own house?”

“Christ, Juarez, I’m not this poor woman’s drunken ex, how the hell should I know? People do stupid things all the time. It’s the reason you and I have a job.”

Crane finished describing what he could about the injuries to the victim’s hands and shut off the recorder for a moment, stepping to one side to allow Black to bag them.

“Be careful not to lose the blood,” he said to Black, who growled in response. Juarez hid a smile.

“Yeah, be careful,” he said under his breath, but loud enough for Black to hear him. The older detective shot him the finger and Juarez laughed.

Lab technicians moved in to help. Black attempted to pick up one hand and immediately stopped. “What the hell?” he muttered. Dubow tried to lift the other hand and also stopped.

“What’s the matter?” Crane said.

“We can’t move her,” Black said with astonishment in his voice. “She’s nailed to the fucking floor.”

The finger was a beauty. Guy smiled at the cleanly severed bone and removed the ring, careful not to damage the skin around it. The jewelry interested him less, but he polished the band nonetheless, admiring the cut of the marquis diamond before setting it aside.

He attached the finger, nail up, to a small padded clamp, suspending it so that any blood that hadn’t been soaked up by the white cheesecloth would spill into a glass bowl. The skin was already changing color and becoming waxy.

He pulled out a small tin box he kept in a drawer and carefully arranged the seven colors of nail polish it held on the desk’s surface. The newest, an orangey shade called “Tangerine Mist” was still unopened. He didn’t know why Violet had never worn it. Perhaps she’d regretted the purchase, but he opened it now before adjusting the clamp so the nail was horizontal.

Applying the polish evenly took a steady hand and he hummed a little Mozart under his breath. While he waited for the first coat to dry, he fixed a drink.

He tended to follow a very similar routine when he got home: take care of souvenirs, have a drink, shower, change and eat something light that wouldn’t upset his stomach before going to bed. Sometimes he was so excited that he skipped the eating, but he always had the drink.

He fixed a vodka tonic and took a couple of sips before sitting back down to finish his work. A second coat of varnish and the nail was a lovely shimmery orange. As soon as it was dry, he carefully undid the clamps and laid the finger on a bed of cotton in a small cardboard box. He sealed the box and marked it with the name and date and then he opened the small freezer and moved it in next to the others. Things were getting crowded. He might have to invest in bigger storage.

The ring went in a separate box, large, flat and velvet-lined, that he kept in the bottom drawer in his desk. He took a moment to play with the other pieces he’d collected, trying to conjure up tangible memories as he held them in his hands, but there was nothing beyond a pleasant sensation. It had been this way for several years now. He needed to touch flesh to relive those glorious moments.

When everything was away and his drink finished, he retired to the bathroom and took a long, leisurely shower. Violet hated that. She used to hammer on the door to hurry him along. As always when he thought of her, there was a dull pain, like his stomach was being pinched from the inside out. He took a casual measure of it as he toweled off and realized that the ache of that loss was still there, but not nearly as strong as it had been even a week ago.

There was still a picture of her on the nightstand, one of the few things she’d left behind. She was smiling in it, openmouthed, as if she’d been laughing at something funny, just as she’d been when he first met her. He first spotted her at the movies, caught by the sound of laughter as the lights came up, turning to see hair like a cascade of rippling black water, eyes a shade of blue that made him think of violets and a smile of welcome that seemed brighter when she talked to him.

He called her “Violet” and she called him “Guy.” These were their private names for each other. From the beginning he knew that she was his destiny and he proposed on their third date.

She laughed. Afterwards, he would think about that laugh and wonder what it meant, whether it was a warning he should have heeded. At the time he was mesmerized by her and incapable of doing anything but begging for her response. “Yes, Guy,” she said finally with a deliberation that told him she was careful. Later he would think she was calculating. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

When he got his next paycheck, he spent it all on a spectacular diamond engagement ring. He planned the wedding with her down to every detail, including what sort of flowers they should have: cascades of violets.

He didn’t share his avocation with her. Not initially. Like any artist, he was sensitive about opening himself to the public’s criticism. Plus, he knew that it would frighten her. Someday, she would be ready, but until then he would practice his skills in private so that it wouldn’t disturb her, waiting until she’d gone to sleep before slipping out of their bed to watch the neighbors.

Except she caught him at it. Surprising him one night when he was fingering the jewelry he’d taken, misinterpreting this and his obvious absence from their bed. She thought he was cheating on her and resisted his efforts to explain, albeit obliquely.

She didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand. Was this the moment he knew it wouldn’t work? Certainly, it was a moment of great disappointment. He’d anticipated being able to share the experience with her, but she wasn’t open to it. He began thinking of her less as a flower and more as a closed bud.

The dream of the house ti