Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)

Christopher Rice

I dreamed about the creek again last night.

Of the way Daniel Banning used to reach out and push aside the thick branches of the eastern hemlock trees that always intruded upon the rocky path. Even then, I thought they looked like Christmas trees.

Because yes, the two serial killers who raised me for seven years always made a point to get a Christmas tree. After I was rescued, and my father trotted me out to reporters whenever it could earn him a dime, my interviewers would all get stuck on this detail. They couldn’t believe the Christmas trees were decorated with reflective silver balls and bright red bows Abigail ordered from a catalog. Why not human bones?

Maybe if there’d been some warped religious motivation behind the Bannings’ crimes, the reporters could have bought it. But there was no religion in the Bannings’ house. Only their twisted brand of loyalty and their deep, abiding love of the natural landscape around their farm.

To hear Abigail tell it—and this is always challenging given that so much of what she’s said from prison has been a lie—the Bannings did what they did to make their marriage work. Not just work. Thrive. In other words, Abigail assisted with her husband’s abductions and rapes because it was the best way to hang on to her man. It wasn’t a grotesque hobby, or an addictive adrenaline rush. It was an essential ingredient of their marriage.

I believe that she believes this.

I also believe that when Abigail Banning entered the root cellar so she could cut the throat of their latest victim after her husband had defiled them for days, she took pleasure in it. But it was the pleasure of an avenger; she blamed those women for her husband’s sick, violent appetites, and so she stamped them out as if they were a pestilence. Women like my mother, who’d never met the Bannings until her car broke down one night on a rainy mountain road with me in the back seat.

Abigail’s motivation wasn’t religion, but loyalty; a disgusting version of it, to be sure.

I was never able to stomach watching any of her TV interviews until recently. Even now, I can only manage to get through a few minutes of each one. A few months ago—the eighteen-year anniversary of my rescue—Dateline ran a two-hour special about the murders, for which I, once again, refused to be interviewed. But I found it on the internet later, and I made it as far as Abigail’s preening assertion that Daniel could still make passionate, tender love to her even after raping their victims repeatedly; that he could do this because she allowed him to rape their victims for days on end.

Enough interviewers have jumped down her throat in the past that she’s learned to stop short of saying what she really means: let your man find a way to feed his worst appetites and he’ll be yours forever. Even worse, her words imply that every man, deep down, has appetites as sick and twisted as Daniel Banning’s.

This is the same woman I remember walking behind me, her arms out protectively, as I splashed through the pools of that creek. A woman who could develop that kind of motherly affection for the child of someone she’d murdered is capable of warping concepts like love and loyalty into something that makes decent people recoil in horror.

Everyone has their own definition of love, I guess.

I just wish I could forget Abigail’s.

After I was rescued from the Bannings’ farm, after my father sold the rights to my story to horror movie producers who would go on to imply I had participated in the murders, I would sometimes wish the Bannings had killed me, too.

Then I could have joined my mother as one of their beloved and cherished victims and not this grim survivor forever tainted by their warped paternal care of me. The country could have grieved for me instead of leering at me while my father lined his pockets.

I would have forever been little Trina Pierce, brutally snuffed out by the side of a mountain road, and not Burning Girl, who Abigail instructed to place the belongings of their victims into an incinerator and hit the “On” switch. Burning Girl, a living question—can you spend years receiving the loving attention of two brutal murderers and not be infected with their evil?

But it was selfish, I soon realized, to wish for my own murder.

It was selfish because in the end I was the reason the Bannings were caught.

If a deliveryman hadn’t recognized me from an age-progression photograph, who knows how much longer their killings would have continued?

So I’m glad I lived.

I’m glad they were caught.

And I’m glad I have a new purpose today.

While I’ve been stunned by the levels of secrecy Cole has been able to maintain so far, I’m still convinced that the work I’m doing is going to get out. Maybe it won’t be exposed all at once, but pieces of the truth might start to surface. And unlike the years I spent on that farm, I’m not going to let other people twist the story of my involvement.

If the time ever comes to tell this story, mine will be told in full, and by my own hand.

But that time won’t be coming anytime soon.

For now, the world has no idea what Burning Girl has become.

I

1

“Veg tanned, right?” the girl asks.

When Richard Davies nods, she smiles and goes back to running her index finger along the dark leather wallet’s burnished edges. Then she turns it over in her manicured hands, furrowing her brow.