1 JONATHAN, JESSICA, AND I ROLLED OUR FATHER THROUGH THE DINING room and across the fancy Olde English kitchen. We had some trouble getting Father through the back door, because he was rather rigid.
This is no comment on his bearing or temperament, though he could be a chilly bastard when he wanted. Now he was stiff quite simply because rigor mortis had tightened his muscles and hardened his flesh. We were not, however, to be deterred. We kicked at him until he bent in the middle and popped through the door frame. We dragged him across the porch and down the six steps to the lawn. "He weighs a ton!" Jonathan said, mopping his sweat-streaked brow, huffing and puffing. "Not a ton," Jessica said. "Less than two hundred pounds." Although we are triplets and are surprisingly similar in many ways, we differ from one another in a host of minor details. For example, Jessica is by far the most pragmatic of us, while Jonathan likes to exaggerate, fantasize, and daydream. I am somewhere between their two extremes. A pragmatic daydreamer? "What now?" Jonathan asked, wrinkling his face in disgust and nodding toward the corpse on the grass. "Burn him," Jessica said. Her pretty lips made a thin pencil line on her face. Her long yellow hair caught the morning sun and glimmered. The day was perfect, and she was the most beautiful part of it. "Burn him all up." "Shouldn't we drag Mother out and burn the two of them at the same time?" Jonathan asked. "It would save work." "If we make a big pyre, the flames might dance too high," she said. "And we don't want a stray spark to catch the house on fire." "We have our choice of all the houses in the world!" Jonathan said, spreading his arms to indicate the beach resort around us, Massachusetts beyond the resort, the nation past the state's perimeters - the world. Jessica only glared at him. "Aren't I right, Jerry?" Jonathan asked me. "Don't we have the whole world to live in? Isn't it silly to worry about this one old house?"
"You're right," I said. "I like this house," Jessica said. Because Jessica liked this house, we stood fifteen feet back from the sprawled corpse and stared at it and thought of flames and ignited it in an instant. Fire burst out of nowhere and wrapped Father in a red-orange blanket. He burned well, blackened, popped, sizzled, and fell into ashes. "I feel as if I ought to be sad," Jonathan said. Jessica grimaced. "Well, he was our father," Jonathan said. "We're above cheap sentimentality." Jessica stared hard at each of us to be certain we understood this. "We're a new race with new emotions and new attitudes." "I guess so." But Jonathan was not fully convinced. "Now, let's get Mother," Jessica said. Although she is only ten years old - six minutes younger than Jonathan and three minutes younger than I - Jessica is the most forceful of us. She usually has her way. We went back into the house and got Mother.
2 THE GOVERNMENT HAD ASSIGNED A CONTINGENT OF TWELVE MARINES and eight plainclothes operatives to our house.