Free Trauma by Graham Masterton Page A

“You’re serious, aren’t you? You don’t think that this larva could have had anything to do with your trauma scene?”
    â€œI don’t know. Not really. It was so tragic, that’s all. I can’t understand how a loving father could have murdered his children like that.”
    â€œWell, I’m not a psychologist. I’m still just a bug boy.”
    â€œWhat reputation?”
    â€œIt’s a legend, Bonnie. Forget it.”
    â€œ
What
reputation?”
    â€œOkay … the Clouded Apollo butterfly was supposed to be the daytime disguise of an Aztec demon called Itzpapalotl. She was the most dreaded of allAztec demons, a combination of insect and monster. She had butterfly wings edged all around with obsidian knives, and her tongue was a sacrificial knife, too.
    â€œSometimes she wore magic clothes—a
naualli
or cloak that enabled her to transform herself into an innocent-looking butterfly.
    â€œShe was the patroness of witches and hideous human sacrifices. She presided over the thirteen unlucky signs of the Aztec calendar. On those days she used to fly through towns and forests at the head of an army of dead witches, all returned from the underworld in the shape of butterflies.”
    â€œAnd what? What did she do?”
    â€œShe drove people mad so that they killed the people they loved the most.”
    Bonnie stared down at her cup of coffee as if she didn’t know what it was.
    â€œCookie?” asked Howard. “I have some terrific pecan crunch.”

The Wild and the Wayward
    Around 11:30 she drove to Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica to give a quotation on a suicide pact. She was supposed to meet the family lawyer outside the house, but he called her almost as soon as she drew up to the curb to say that he was delayed. He had one of those voices that sounded as if he were wearing a swimmer’s nose clip.
    â€œDelayed?” asked Bonnie. “How long?”
    â€œI can be there in twenty minutes.”
    â€œOkay. But if it’s twenty-one minutes I won’t be here. If it’s twenty-and-a-
half
minutes I won’t be here.”
    She sat in the car listening to country music and tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. She wondered if she ought to visit her mother. She always felt guilty about her mother even if she visited hertwice a week. Bonnie always felt that there was an unspoken question between herself and her mother—a question that was never answered—and the trouble was, she didn’t even know what it was. Their relationship was like one of those cryptic crosswords that don’t give you any clue numbers.
    She dialed her mother’s number, but she pressed the clear button as soon as her mother snapped, “
Hello
?” It would be better if she visited her by surprise. It would be even better if she didn’t visit her at all. No, it wouldn’t. She had to.
    The house where the suicide pact had taken place stood on a corner plot of the 500 block—a two-story frame building with peeling white paint. It was deeply overshadowed on one side by a tall cedar tree, which gave it an almost unearthly gloom, and it had all the telltale signs of recent tragedy. An untended lawn, sagging drapes, and a Ralph’s supermarket cart tipped over by the front door.
    Not only that, but two of the upstairs windows were boarded up, and there was a smoke smudge just above the left-hand window, shaped like a waving black chiffon scarf. Bonnie didn’t know the full details, but Lieutenant Munoz had told her that a forty-seven-year-old widow had been having an affair with her fifteen-year-old nephew. When her brother found out, he had called the police and threatened to have her prosecuted for child abuse. The same night the widow and the boy had lain on her four-poster bed together and doused themselves with three-and-a-half gallons of premium-grade gasoline. Clinging tightly together, they had set themselves