“The cougar,” he said. “Daddy told me their mating calls are like a wild scream. I heard it just down the hill.”

“It must be something else,” I said.

“No,” he said, his face revealing a rare certainty. “It’s the cougar, I know it.”

“Then what are we to do?”

He didn’t answer me, but with all the sureness of his eight years he turned and led me into Father’s library, to the case mounted on the wall in which Christian stores his guns. It was locked but Kingsley reached beneath the case and pulled out the key. He stood on a chair and inserted the key into the lock. The glass door swung wide.

The gun he pulled off the rack was the largest of the four. It was Christian’s father’s gun. Kingsley cracked the barrel open and checked to be sure the cartridges were inside. Then he smacked it shut again. I shivered at the sound of the gun closing.

He led me back through the house to the doors leading to the portico and opened them to the night. The rain had grown heavy, drowning whatever light escaped from the house before it could touch beyond the patio. The night was preternaturally dark.

“Turn out the hall lights,” my son commanded and I did so.

“Shouldn’t we get Grandfather?” I asked when I had returned to my place behind him.

“He shakes too much,” he said simply.

“What about your father?”

“He’s out,” he said, and in those two short words there was not a note of judgment against the parent who had more and more absented himself from his family, who had betrayed it, abandoned it to the fearful felines of the night. “But if the cougar comes this way,” he said, his voice suddenly shaky, “Father taught me what to do.”

We waited there together inside the frame of those doors, just inches from the fierce rain, my son with the gun and I behind him, my hand tentatively on his shoulder. It felt wrong to me, being there with him and that gun, as if our positions were terribly reversed. It was I who should be protecting him, but I was too devastated to act on my feelings and was warmed into acquiescence by my son’s evident concern for my safety. We were a team, together, just the two of us, guarding the homestead from intruders, and I couldn’t break myself away from the delicious warmth I felt beside him, even as I could feel a shivering terror pass through his body to my hand. The minutes flicked away, one after another, flicked and died away and I couldn’t even begin to tell how many passed before I saw something crawl upon us in the rain-blanked night.

“What’s that?” I whispered.

A shadow flitted across the edge of the portico.

“There,” I said.

The boy swung the gun to his shoulder.

“Now,” I said.

The explosion tore the night, the light from the barrel blinding for a second before it disappeared, leaving the night darker than before. We were deafened to any sound, even the flat patter of the rain was swallowed by the burst of fire.

The boy steadied the gun and fired again and once again. The night tore apart. I screamed from the sheer beauty of the power and then a quiet descended.

The servants scuttled from their rooms and down the stairs and they saw us there, standing in the doorway, Kingsley with the gun. I explained to them what had happened and ordered them back to bed. Father was too sedated, I assume, to have even heard.

Kingsley wanted to go out and see if he had actually killed the cat but I refused to let him. “It will wait until tomorrow,” I said as I closed the portico doors. “I don’t want you outside in the dark until we’re sure it is dead.”

“I need to clean the shotgun,” said Kingsley. “Father told me to always clean it before I put it away.”

“Clean it tomorrow,” I said. “Everything tomorrow.”

I followed him as he went back into Father’s study and replaced the gun. When he locked the cabinet I took the key. It is beside me now as I write this. I can’t explain it, dear sisters, but I feel purged by the sudden explosions of this evening. I have regained my son, regained my power, suffered and survived the betrayals of the last twelve years. I can make everything whole, I believe. With our father’s strength and the deep desires of my soul I can heal our world

April 19, 1923

My Love,

It is ten days now since we found you and I still bear the agony of the sight. Our dear Kingsley has not left his bed for a week. I sit with him and feed him broth but he is insensible with longing and pain. How he will survive his misery and guilt I do not know, but he must, he absolutely must, or all our dreams and hopes are for naught. He is your legacy, dear husband, and you will live forever through him.

You will be warmed to know that the Pooles have left us for good. Mrs. Poole succumbed to the illness that had been plaguing her. Father attended the funeral, I could not. It was a lonely affair, I am told, and at the internment in the gravesite beside her husband only the daughter and my father were in attendance. Father offered, he said, to help the girl in whatever way he could, but she refused his proffer and has now disappeared. Their house is empty, all their possessions crated up and taken or abandoned. Just this morning I walked among the empty rooms, the floorboards creaking beneath my feet. It feels haunted, my love, inhabited by a drove of ghosts.

I am bereft without you. Every day I visit the statue where we passed our vows. I sit before it for hours at a time and think of you. I have not yet found the courage to enter your room and touch your things, to smell your precious smell as it has lingered on your shirts. For the rest of this life that the Lord has cursed me with, know that I will love you and honor you and do all I can to glorify your name. I pray for you, my darling, as I pray for our son, and I am confident now that the paws of tragedy which have pounced upon our family far too many times will no longer threaten us and that what is left of our future will be full of peace and love and redemption. I will do all in my power to make it so