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connected with the cut-glass vase on the nightstand by the bed. The leaded-glass vase that had been a baby gift from a family friend. The one she kept filled with pink tea roses. She closed her fingers around it and swung. It connected with the side of Adam’s head. He grunted with pain and eased the grip on her neck.
    Oxygen rushed into her lungs; they burned and she gasped for air. She swung the vase again. This time when it connected she heard a sickening crack. Blood flew. Grace screamed.
    Adam got to his feet. Red spilled down the side of his face and across his white dress shirt. He brought a hand to the side of his head, meeting Madeline’s eyes, his expression disbelieving. Then, as if in slow motion, he fell backward, hitting the floor with a heavy thud. Blood splattered Grace, who was still screaming, one piercing shriek after another, like a burglar alarm gone berserk.
    Madeline stumbled to her feet and across to Adam. He lay completely still, face deathly white, blood pooling around his head, matting his dark hair. She had killed him. Dear God, she had killed Adam Monarch.
    She reached out to him, intent on checking his pulse, then stopped, realization hitting her with the force of a blow. Her vision, the one from the library earlier and the one from five years before. Blood spilling across a gleaming floor. Madeline brought her hands to her mouth. Glittering ice and freezing water, a body being sucked down.
    It wasn’t over.
    With a cry, she snatched her hand back. She had to go, now; before someone discovered what she had done. Before Grace was taken away from her.
    Madeline scooped up her daughter, grabbed the suitcases and ran.

Part II
The Traveling Show

3
    Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,
1983
    T he countryside gently rolled. It was lush and green and fertile. Nineteenth-century farmhouses nestled amidst those rolling hills; corn silos and windmills dotted the landscape, horse-drawn buggies the roads.
    It was picturesque. Quaint and beautiful. Every day tourists flocked to Lancaster County to soak up the atmosphere and to relive—if only for an hour or two—the ways of an earlier century.
    Seventeen-year-old Chance McCord had experienced all of living in the nineteenth century that he could stand. Quaint and picturesque made him want to puke. He feared if he spent one more day in this all-for-one, one-for-all, plain-ways hell, he would go completely, fucking out of his mind.
    Chance strode across his sparsely furnished bedroom to the open window, stopping before it and gazing out at the evening. He wanted to wear his blue jeans. He wanted to listen to rock’n’roll and watch TV. He wanted to hang out with his friends—hell, or anyone else who thought and felt as he did. Dear God, he even longed for school. The Amish didn’t believe in schooling for children his age. By sixteen, Amish children were fulfilling their duty to the family and community by working on the farm. He had been fulfilling his duty for a year now; damn but he hated cows.
    Chance braced his hands on the windowsill and breathed in the mild, evening air. A year ago he wouldn’t have believed it possible to long for the big, rambling high school in north L.A. where he had always thought of himself as a prisoner. He wouldn’t have believed it possible to wish to be sitting in first-period English with old man Waterson droning on about some poet who had died long before the birth of the electric guitar.
    Now, Chance knew what it was to be a prisoner.
    If he didn’t escape, he would shrivel up and die.
    It wasn’t that his aunt Rebecca—his mother’s sister—or her husband, Jacob, were bad people. Quite the contrary, they were good ones—to a fault. They had taken him in when his mother had died and his wealthy father—if Chance could even call him that, he had never even acknowledged his existence—had refused to take him. They had made room for him in this house, though