Long Hunt (9781101559208) Read Online Free Page A

lucky.
    There had been little enough evidence of luck in the early life of Molly Reese, beyond the fortunate accident of familial affluence. Raised in a landed family, Molly was brought up without benefit of her mother, who had died during Molly’s birth. It was said that her father harbored some related resentment toward Molly, while others believed the man simply to be especially perverse and cruel.
    In any case, at around a decade of age, Molly began to fall victim to mistreatment and abuse by her father, who drank heavily. Initially his treatment of her was simple meanness, striking her with his fists at the slightest provocations or hitting her with such objects as fireplace pokers, kitchen implements, and the like. As the girl grew, though, his abuse achieved a darker, depraved aspect, and Molly became the victim of treatment her own narrative euphemistically called “invasions of the most harsh and lewd variety.” Yet the more he misused the girl, the more her father seemed to despise her.
    At length Molly’s father came to realize that his actions put him at great risk of exposure, because Molly was a highly intelligent and articulate girl. A whisper to a sympathetic domestic servant, a neighbor, a constable, or clergyman, and Molly could easily bring destructive public humiliation and punishment upon her sire. When Molly’s father realized this, his molestations ceased for a time. Then came an inevitable renewal of his perverse passions, bolstered by the weakening effect of liquor on his moral character. Molly Reese was placed in her most dangerous circumstance yet, though she was too young to fully comprehend the depth of her danger.
    There had been a time when John Reese had been a decent man and citizen, and even, in the earliest days of his daughter’s life, an occasionally tender father. But alcohol did terrible things to the man, corrupting him body, soul, and mind. His thinking became irrational, his reasoning addled—so much so that he actually became able to believe, one night when he was drunker and more irrational even than usual, that rendering his daughter physically unable to speak would keep his sins hidden forever. He persuaded himself that he could protect his secrets without taking such an extreme step as murdering his own child, an action he had been pondering secretly. Ruined as it was by his drinking, his mind was actually able to fully accept the fallacious notion as not only sensible, but clever.
    Thus came the horror that changed the life of Molly Reese forever. Alone one evening in the house with her father, she was caught by him in an upper hallway and dragged into his dark bedchamber, where he clouted her severely with a heavy brass candlestick and knocked her unconscious. He drew out a thin-bladed knife, pried open the senseless girl’s mouth . . . and began cruel and bloody work.
    It was only afterward, standing over his profusely bleeding daughter with her severed tongue in his hand, that he comprehended the flaw in his plan. He might have rendered it hard for Molly to betray him with spoken words, but the girl was able to read and write. A simple scrawled note passed to a constable or dropped in the charity box at a nearby church, and he would be as fully betrayed as if she’d shouted the truth about him from atop a cathedral. Furthermore, the way he had maimed his daughter could not go unnoticed, and would in itself rouse questions and investigation.
    So he had failed. He had mutilated his daughter in a beastly act of cruelty, and still he was in danger.
    So she had to die after all. He knew it then, and while he still possessed the will do to it, lowered himself beside her to put the knife to her throat. . . .
    Then came the miracle, the divine intervention. Or so it was described in Molly’s famous broadside narrative.
    From out of the shadows in the room, a figure bolted forth, lean, lithe, and fast, and came upon John Reese with swift