Free Right Hand of Evil by John Saul Page B

been more than mere gossip; that the horror that had befallen George and Cora Conway had somehow happened before. "'For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,'" he muttered softly to himself, quoting the fifth verse of the twentieth chapter of Exodus, "'visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.'" But how had it begun?
    He reached for the Bible once more, then stopped, his fingers trembling in midair. Did he really want to know? Loretta Conway had died a century ago-there was nothing he could do now except pray for her soul. But even that would do no good, for by her very act, Loretta-like George Conway-had condemned herself to eternal damnation.
    The exhaustion of the day, along with his nearly ninety years, caught up with Father Devlin, and his hand dropped back to his lap.
    Some other day.
    Perhaps some other day he would pursue the matter further. But for now his energy was gone, and his cot beckoned to him. Putting Cora Conway's Bible away, he surrendered himself to the oblivion of sleep.

CHAPTER 7
    You guys really gonna live here?" The voice startled Jared so much he dropped his end of the mattress he and Kim were wrestling out of the rented U-Haul, eliciting a howl of outrage from his sister. As she struggled to get a grip on the mattress, she looked up in annoyance at the boy who had just spoken. He looked to be about the same age as Jared, but was a couple of inches shorter, wiry almost to the point of scrawniness, and had a thatch of light brown hair falling over his forehead. The boy grinned at her and grabbed one corner of the unwieldy object. He was wearing torn jeans and a sweatshirt that had had the sleeves torn off. "I'm Luke Roberts," he said. "You want me to help you get this up on the porch?"
    "How about all the way up to my room?" Jared countered. When Luke cast a quick glance at the house before answering, Jared asked, "What's wrong? You're not scared, are you?"
    " 'Course I'm not," Luke replied a little too quickly.
    "You ever been inside the house?"
    Again Luke glanced at the looming shape of the huge Victorian. He shook his head. "I got an uncle who says he was in it once," he offered.
    "You want to see it?" Jared put just enough of a challenge in his voice to be certain Luke would be unable to refuse.
    "Sure," the other boy replied.
    Together, the three teenagers wrestled the mattress up to the second floor, where they dropped it onto the box spring that Kim and Jared had already brought up.
    "How many rooms does it have?" Luke asked.
    Jared shrugged. "I don't know-maybe twenty, I guess. We're going to turn it into a hotel."
    They were back out on the landing, and Luke gazed down into the vast entry hall below. "Who'd want to stay here?"
    "Well, it's not going to look like this," Kim replied. "Dad says it won't be ready for at least six months."
    "I still bet nobody'll stay," Luke said. "Not after everything that's happened." Jared and Kim eyed each other uneasily, reading each other's thoughts:
Do we really want to hear?
But before either of them could reply, Luke was already telling them, "Sometimes you can hear a baby crying. And lots of people have seen that guy who hung himself."
    "That was my dad's uncle," Jared said.
    If Luke heard the hint of warning in Jared's voice, he chose to ignore it. "They say he's still here. Looking for the baby."
    Kim and Jared exchanged another quick glance, both of them remembering the words they'd overheard at the funeral that morning. "Father MacNeill says nobody knows if it was even true that my dad's aunt was pregnant."
    Luke Roberts rolled his eyes scornfully. "Father Mack wouldn't even admit his own mother was ever pregnant! And he sure wouldn't ever believe a woman would kill her own baby."
    Kim's fingers flew involuntarily to the cross that hung from her neck, clutching it tightly. "How do you know Aunt Cora did that?" she asked.
    "Everybody knows it," Luke Roberts replied. "Just because they never found the