Outrun the Dark Author:Cecilia Bartholomew A four year old boy is dead. His eight year old sister, Billyjean, is accused of murder. Here is the story of Billyjean thirteen years later-the powerful portrait of a young woman's journey from madness back to reality. — Billyjean lives in an unreal world where terror resides in the next room. Billyjean has returned home after thirteen years... more » in a mental asylum. She has listened carefully to her kindly, patient psychiatrist about what to expect. She looks at her new life with a unique, completely personal logic, and the clarity of a child discovering a new alphabet. But understanding, for Billyjean, is a matter of the most urgent necessity, for someone is determined to send her back to the asylum-or silence her some other way.
Billyjean perceives that she holds the key to a murder-the murder of her younger brother, Bubber, which she had confessed to as a child. Her own memory of the fatal day has been completely blocked and the garage where the murder took place is locked. She cannot trust her mother, who has made clear her hatred; nor her father, with his wild temper and peculiar sexual needs; nor the seemingly friendly Bernhards, whose disturbing warnings might be meant to trick her; nor even Michael, the handsome childhood companion who claims to love her. Her only friends are two precocious young neighbors who persuade Billyjean to open her own investigation into the murder.
As Billyjean gradually pieces together the terrifying truth, the real killer makes his move in a heart-stopping climax set against the surreal backdrop of an abandoned slaughterhouse.« less