Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(2)

Daniel and Abigail Banning didn’t do that for me.

Instead they taught me that all living things could be broken up into three groups. Those that provided us with something—the cows and their milk, for instance. Those that provided us with nothing and could be extinguished without thought—like the bluebird whose neck Abigail broke with her bare hands while she and Daniel studied my reaction. And then there was a third group: the corrupters. The living things who would try to steal from us, take from us, turn us against our better selves. Like the people who came in the night to take the cows, the ones who dropped their watches and purses in their haste to get away.

It was their job as my mother and father, they said, to teach me how to deal with all three.

In some respects they were like other parents. They masked what they thought to be hard truth inside a fabric of comforting lies. In their view, the corrupters were not cow thieves. They were the women Daniel Banning blamed for his abominable appetites.

Women like Lilah Turlington. They followed Lilah and her boyfriend, Eddie Stevens, for two days as the couple backpacked along the Appalachian Trail before approaching their campground around dusk, posing as two hikers in search of company, earning their trust, before beating Eddie to death with a large rock and binding Lilah with nylon rope. Women like Cassie Murdoch and Jane Blaire, the two road-tripping University of Georgia students they struck up a conversation with at a roadside diner so they could find out which motel cabin they were spending the night in. They broke into their room while they slept and beat Cassie and Jane so swiftly and savagely the poor girls might have mistaken the first few seconds of the assault for a nightmare before they were knocked unconscious.

These were the real corrupters they sought to cleanse from the earth, the women Daniel Banning had an overwhelming desire to rape, a desire Abigail would allow him to indulge for three days before she went down to the root cellar with a knife and cut his victim’s throat. But not before whispering in her ear, “You are now nothing.”

Today Cassie and Jane are buried almost side by side at Oaklawn Cemetery in New Orleans, their hometown; Eddie and Lilah are in a small, woodsy cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina. I’ve visited them at least twice.

I’ve been to visit all the victims at least once, all the people they killed during my time at the farm.



To prepare me for my first kill, they set bird traps through the branches that surrounded the path we took on our sunset walks—small steel cages that glinted amid the foliage. Because I had watched them kill four birds with their bare hands, I now saw birds as a nuisance, their skittish flight evidence of some mania or disease. But when Abigail reached inside one of the traps and placed the chirping creature in my tiny hands, cautioning me to grip it tightly so it wouldn’t fly away, a resistance rose in me, as primal and fundamental as thirst.

At least that’s how I choose to remember it. That something deep within me, something untouched by the Bannings and their evil, was still alive, and that this fundamental goodness prevented me from taking that bird’s life.

But truth be told, I’ll never know for sure.

For that was the precise moment when men dressed entirely in black, their goggles and helmets reflecting the evening sun, burst from the woods on all sides of us, ordering us to hit the ground, facedown, hands up. For an instant their long guns were like fingers of darkness sprouting from the shadows. Daniel and Abigail made sounds I’d never heard them make before. Not just cries of alarm but furious wails and profanity I wouldn’t learn the meaning of until later.

A boot heel pressed Abigail’s face to the leaf-strewn soil. Daniel made a run for it before he was tackled to the ground. I was knocked backward and dragged away, the bluebird alighting from my suddenly open hands. What saved its life? My refusal to kill, or chance?

I wish I knew for sure.





I





In light of the conflicting and in many cases inaccurate press accounts of a recent event in the Burnham College Talks Series, the program coordinators have decided to post both a partial and a full transcript of the event to their website. The partial transcript appears below.

“OF HUMAN MONSTERS,” A TALK WITH LOWELL PIERCE AND HIS DAUGHTER, TRINA PIERCE, DISCUSSING THEIR BESTSELLING BOOK OF THE SAME TITLE AS WELL AS THE SAVAGE WOODS FILMS THE BOOK INSPIRED—BURNHAM COLLEGE, COLORADO SPRINGS, CO

(Excerpt)

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Mr. Pierce, we’ve certainly heard a lot from you today, but we haven’t heard much from your daughter, and so I’d like to direct this question to her.

LP: Sure. Of course.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: So this week the fifth film in the Savage Woods franchise was released, and while it’s common knowledge these films are based on your exp— TP: They’re not based on my experiences.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Right. But . . . I mean, not literally, but they’re inspired by—I guess what I’m saying is if you’d been forced, I mean . . . they were holding you hostage, so it’s not like people wouldn’t understand if they made you— TP: Are you asking me if I killed someone on that farm?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: I’m asking you if what we saw in the first Savage Woods film might have some more basis in reality than you’ve been willing to discuss.

TP: So you’re asking me if I shoved someone into an incinerator while they were alive? When I was seven?