But, he confesses, he has always loved Jenny and could not bring himself to kill her, only to critically injure her.Ĭlick on a plot link to find similar books! Plot & Themes Composition of Book descript. He returned downstairs and tried to do as Jenny asked, seeing no other solution. Conor ran upstairs to check on the kids and found that Jenny had already killed them. Horrified, Conor ran to the Spain house and found Jenny in a desperate state, having terribly injured, but not killed her husband. She had obviously decided to put her entire family out of their misery. Instead, Jenny found Pat like this, wrestled the knife from his grip and stabbed him. In his other hand, Pat held a large knife, apparently planning to kill the animal when it came. He observed Pat holding one hand through a hole in the wall, apparently to entice the possibly imaginary animal to bite him. Scorcher pressures Conor to tell the truth about the night of the murder and Conor does, admitting that he was watching the house that night and is a witness to what happened. The detectives begin to believe that Pat Spain was paranoid and depressed, and eventually snapped under pressure and attempted to kill his family, then stabbed himself to death. The more time he spent at home, the more focused he became on the animal in the walls. Bills went unpaid and while at first Pat made an intense effort to find new work, it looks like he eventually gave up. The detectives also look into the family's financial records and see a downward spiral that began with Pat losing his job. His posts indicate that he had been hearing some sort of animal within the walls of his home. Scorcher goes through Pat Spain's internet activity and finds that he spent a lot of his time on chat boards, asking questions about vermin. The detectives' first theory is that the couple was afraid of break ins or being menaced. Holes have been cut in many of the walls and baby monitors and video cameras have been placed in the house. Scorcher and Richie find some very strange things in the Spain home.

Broken harbor