Kin

-13-

For an eternity she lives in a world of dreams, and there is no pain. She is vaguely aware of figures dressed in white constantly shifting in and out of the twilit world between waking and sleeping, but most of the time she does not fear them. Their presence soothes her, represents a reprieve from the pain. Sometimes there are voices but when she tries to focus on the speaker, she sees only blurry shapes sitting on her bed, figures cut from the daylight pouring in through the large veiled window. They tell her things about her body, about her progress, but the words mean nothing. Sometimes there are others, voices she knows, familiar voices that make her heart ache as they weep beside her, and hold her. She does not like to be held, feels her skin crawl as their hands alight on her tender flesh, but she knows they do not mean to harm her, and so she says nothing, even as she withdraws a little more inside her shell. For a long time she says nothing. For a long time she lives inside her head, crouched in the dark peering out at the light, at the endless parade of unclear faces, not yet ready to accept them but glad they are there.

She does not want to be alone.

Alone, the nightmares come unbidden. The men put their dirty hands on her naked body; crush her beneath their weight. She smells their sweat, a stench she will remember for the rest of her life, feels the piercing pain in her groin as they roughly enter her—no romance, no desire—just rape, taking what they want, what they have no right to take, delighting in her objection, relishing the violation over and over again, stealing a little piece of her every time. Then their smiles as they step back to appraise her, crooked yellow teeth gleaming, eyes like polished stones, studying her, taking in every bead of sweat, every hair, every part of her bare battered body. In their hands they hold dirty blades as they turn away like magicians waiting to spring a surprise on the audience. Though she has transcended pain of the physical kind, she wishes for death, for sleep, for escape. Most of all, she yearns for the chance to turn back time, to contest Daniel’s decision to shun the highway in favor of a merry jaunt through the backwoods. But she’d been outvoted, and a little drunk, a little high, and so had kept her mouth shut as they headed off down the narrow path marked by a signpost that told them they were three miles from a town called Elkwood.

This is where the nightmare began in real life, and in the realm of turbulent sleep, it does not deviate from the script, though sometimes the scenes are rearranged at the hands of a deranged editor.

The four of them, toting backpacks, a colorful bunch: Daniel in a gray Old Navy T-shirt, knee-length jean shorts with frayed hems and sandals; Stu in an appropriately loud lemon T-shirt and red and green floral-patterned Bermuda shorts, his shades hanging around his neck, a NY Mets cap pulled backwards on his head; Katy, more conservative in a khaki “skort” and a lime green polo shirt marred by slight sweat stains beneath the armpits, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, one thick lock of it following the curve of her cheek; and Claire, wearing denim shorts and a white cutoff shirt that displays her toned stomach and the belly-button piercing she’d had done before they left Columbus. She remembers that ring most of all— a silver circlet running through a small fake diamond—because it was the first thing the men ripped from her body.

Her mind skips to this scene:

She is still dressed, but tied to the stake. She screams against the oil-stained gag as the man she will later attack with the wooden spur laughs through his teeth and pulls the ring from her navel, then holds it up to show her. There is a little speck of her skin still attached. And as he brings it close, she recalls the courage it took to get it done, and the complete absence of that same courage every time she thought of having to show it to her mother.

Then back to the carefree wanderers: Daniel and Stu walking ahead on the shaded road, trading memories of the last drunken night in Sandestin and chuckling while the canopies of oak leaves allowed golden pools of sun to warm their backs, Katy and Claire following, Katy strangely quiet. Bug spray doesn’t dissuade the clouds of mosquitos that hang around them like stars around the moon.

Are you worried? Claire asks her friend when the guys are far enough ahead of them.

About what?

I don’t know. You’re not saying much.

Katy shrugs, smiles just a little. Just thinking. About us.

You and me? Or…

Yeah, Katy replies. Or.

He seems to be all right, Claire tells her, with a nod in Stu’s direction. You don’t think so?

Another shrug. Seems to be is exactly the point. He hasn’t said a thing. Not a damn thing.

Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe it’s his way of letting you know it’s over and done with, water under the bridge.

Katy looks at her then. If you cheated on Danny, you think you’d take him being quiet as forgiveness?

In the dream, before Claire gets a chance to answer, a disembodied hand appears before Katy, dirt under its nails, grime covering the skin, as it drives a rusted metal spike upward, penetrating the soft skin underneath her friend’s chin. Blood spurts, Katy’s eyes widen in horror, but she keeps talking, keeps trying to explain why she did what she did, why she betrayed her boyfriend with someone she had no feelings for, but the words keep getting harder and harder to get out as the spike appears inside her mouth, still traveling upward, puncturing her tongue and driving it toward the roof of her mouth. And now Katy is speaking as if she has never learned the right way to do it, as if she’s been deaf since birth and will never be sure if the words are produced the right way. I… hink… I wanhed… to… hurt him… buh I hon’t knowww why… Then, as the spike continues its passage through her skull, Katy’s eyes roll and bulge, begin to leak blood.

Claire screams.

Ahead of her, in the middle of the road, Daniel and Stu turn, but the movement is not theirs. They are tied to stakes driven deep into the crumbling asphalt, their hands bound behind them, and when they turn, it is at the behest of the wind, as if they are little more than extravagant weathervanes. They are both naked. The skin has been removed from Daniel’s face; Stu’s head is gone, severed at the neck. And yet, somehow they continue to speak, permitted by the skewed logic of dreams to say what they once said in life.

We should have just driven, Stu says. Why the fuck would anyone want to walk in this heat?

You’re missing the point, man, Daniel tells him. Everybody drives everywhere. Unless you’re willing to spend a fortune on some goddamn guided trail in the Rockies, your options are limited. We got where we needed to go, had our fun, now it’s time to get back to nature, see things as people used to see them. It could be our last summer together, so why not draw it out a little?

You’re a fruit, you know that?

Maybe, but you’ll thank me later. We’re going to see things no tourist ever sees.

Claire looks away. The light fades. She is no longer on the road, but back in the woodshed that smells of waste matter, of blood and decay and sweat and oil. There is a window in the wall to her left that she does not recall ever seeing. Through the dirty glass Daniel stands there, once more dressed, his face returned to him but wearing a somber expression as he looks in her direction.

And, I’m losing him, she thinks, as she thought earlier that day. Things are changing. We both feel it. I’m losing him.

She opens her mouth to call out to him, to plead with him to save her, to save them both, but her words are obliterated by the filthy probing fingers that have found their way inside, forcing her to look away from the window and into the face of her nightmare.

Here she wakes, the smell of blood and dirt clinging to her, and she thrashes against it, against the arms that appear to hold her down, to tell her that everything will be okay, that she’s safe now.

But she isn’t, and she knows it. The killers may be gone, but they have planted something inside her with their fingers, their tongues, and their cocks. She feels it all the time now and its getting worse, drawing nourishment from her, waiting until she relaxes, believes those who are telling her there is nothing left to fear before it claws its way out of her to prove them wrong.

“Claire?”

“Yes.”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital.”

“That’s right. You know why?”

She nodded, slowly, but still refused to turn her myopic gaze on the man sitting in a chair to the left of the bed. With him came an air of importance, authority. Police, she suspected.

“Can you look at me, Claire?”

She ignored him.

“My name is Sheriff Todd. Marshall Todd. I’m with the state police.”

“Hi Sheriff Todd Marshall Todd,” she said, and the policeman laughed, but it was practiced laughter, a preprogrammed response, the slush left behind by the icebreaker. His voice sounded gritty, worn, and she guessed he wasn’t a young man.

“Let’s just keep it to Marshall then, okay?”

He was trying to be friendly with her, keeping his tone light, but behind it she could sense his impatience to unburden himself of something. Perhaps he wasn’t sure how much she knew, how much of the horror she had seen before she got away. And she wondered how much she could stand to hear. She knew a considerable amount of time had passed. It had felt like years, but the last time she’d been fully awake, the kindly patrician doctor had told her it had been over nine weeks. Countless times over that long stretch of terrible nights and days marked by pain, she’d imagined a convoy of police cruisers cars kicking up dirt, overseen by black helicopters, doors being thrust open, voices shouting as men wearing mirrored shades ran toward a sagging house, guns drawn. She imagined the media helicopters whirling above the organized calamity, flashing lights and camera lights as dirty men in overalls were led out in handcuffs squinting up, then out at a crowd of men and women who were eager to be at them for different reasons. Some just wanted the scoop; others to see the face of pure evil for themselves; and then there were those among them, the quieter ones, who wanted nothing more than ten minutes alone in a dark room with these depraved monsters.

And none of it would bring her friends back.

“How are you feelin’?” Marshall asked.

“Tired. Sore.”

“Doctor Newell says you might be able to check out by the weekend. I’ll bet you’re anxious to be home with your family again.”

“Yes,” she replied, but wasn’t entirely sure that was true. She dreaded the thought of what awaited her outside of this place—the reserves of energy she would be required to draw upon to satisfy the concern and curiosity of her well-wishers, the ill-concealed looks of resentment and accusation she expected to see in the eyes of the her friends’ parents, the ones who had no child to welcome home. She was safe from the men now, for however long, their power over her limited to dreams and the occasional waking nightmare, but little could protect her from the maelstrom of emotions that would come crashing down upon her as soon as she stepped foot outside this place. The mere thought of it exhausted her, made her want to cry.

“Well,” the Sheriff said. “Your Mom and sister are eager to see you. They’ve been stayin’ in a motel close by, checkin’ in on you often as they can.”

Claire exhaled. She recalled their visits, how relieved she had been to see her mother and Kara, the agony reflected in their faces, the uncertainty of not knowing for sure how much she had suffered, and unprepared to accept any of it. But she was alive, and in their eyes had glimmered the joy of that simple undeniable truth. She was alive, back with them, when so many others had perished.

“Is there anythin’ you need?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay. I just wanted to have a little talk with you today, check on your progress, make sure you ain’t wantin’ for nothin’.”

She nodded slightly, her bandages chafing against the pillow. “Thank you.”

“And I wanted to let you know that the man who did this to you and your friends is dead. Not how we’d have wished for it to go, but I’m guessin’ he’s facin’ justice of another kind now.”

She started to respond, then stopped. Surely she’d misheard. The man who did this…

“What did you say?” she asked, and finally looked directly at him. She saw she’d been right; he was old, his hat resting on his lap, held there by thin wrinkled fingers. He had a generous head of gray hair, which the hat had all but tempered flat against his skull, and kind brown eyes, which seemed designed for sympathy. His face was lean, and deep wrinkles ran from the corners of his mouth down past his chin.

He leaned forward a little. “How much do you remember?”

She stared at him for a long moment, then licked her lips. “I remember what happened, what they did to us. I remember getting away, but not much more.” Her eye widened as a fragment of memory returned, though she wasn’t sure how reliable it might be. “There was a guy, about my age, maybe a little younger, a black kid. His name was…” She struggled to pluck the memory from the swamp her mind had become. “Pete. That was it. I was in the truck with him.”

Marshall nodded. “Pete, that’s right. Pete Lowell.”

“Is he here?”

“’Fraid not. He took off soon’s he brought you in and saw you were in good hands. We sent a patrol car out to bring him back, but turned up nothin’. We found his house burned up though, and his daddy…” He waved a hand. “We can talk about all that some other time.”

Claire planted her hands on the mattress and started to ease herself into a sitting position. Immediately her body became a combat zone, the pain exploding in various parts of her, a stern reminder that she was not yet fit enough to be attempting such hasty and ambitious movements. She squinted against the discomfort and when next she looked, Marshall was at her side, strong hands beneath her armpits, pulling her up as she dug her heels into the bed and pushed to assist him. “Easy. Hold on now,” he said, and arranged the pillows so that she could lay back. She did, out of breath, her body humming with the exertion. Her joints were stiff and stubborn, her skin taut like dried leather. She was perspiring and when she raised her left hand to wipe her brow, she saw the source of at least some of the pain. It was missing two fingers—the pinky and the ring finger, and where they’d been nothing remained but twin half-inch nubs of smooth flesh. Staring in a kind of grim disassociated fashion, she withdrew her right hand from beneath the covers, and released a breath, relieved to see that aside from some angry looking pink scars, possibly self-inflicted during her escape, it was not mutilated. She raised her watery gaze to the Sheriff, who wore the expression of a man suddenly very much aware of the limitations of his job.

“You’re gonna be fine. All kinds of surgery nowadays can fix you right up good as new,” he said softly, but it was a weak effort at consolation and they both knew it. It wouldn’t matter if they found her fingers, or her eye lying in a ditch somewhere, remarkably preserved, and sewed them back. It wouldn’t matter if between now and her time of discharge they discovered a cure for rape, a way to give a sexually abused woman back her dignity, and in Claire’s case, her virginity, the fact was that the violence had been done, its impact irreversible, and some vital part of her had been destroyed in the process, a part of her she hadn’t known existed until it was stolen. Her friends were dead and gone, brutally tugged from life. Nothing they could do for Claire would repair that horrifying reality, or fill that dark gaping rent in her world and the worlds of their families.

Dark spots speckled her vision and she had to take a moment to steady herself, to anchor her consciousness. When at last her vision settled, she said to the Sheriff, “You said ‘the man who did this is dead’. Who were you talking about?”

“Garrett Wellman.”

Claire shook her head and frowned. “Doctor Wellman?”

“He was the town doctor, yes, or as near as they had to one. Some of the folks in Elkwood said he always seemed real nice, but started keepin’ to himself after his wife passed on. Cancer. She didn’t go quietly they say, and after her funeral, Wellman all but shut himself up in his house just outside of town. Took to drinkin’ hard. No one knew what he got up to out there all by himself. Looks like it weren’t anythin’ good.”

“Sheriff—”

“When we got there, he’d burned the place down around himself.”

“Sheriff, listen to me. More than one man attacked us. There were at least three, and they were young, the oldest about eighteen, maybe, and the youngest not more than eleven or twelve. You’ve got this all wrong. Wellman helped me.”

He smiled uncertainly. “We found remains, Claire. Your friends. In Wellman’s basement. And he had access to all kind of—”

Claire stopped listening. She felt that old familiar panic rising in her chest. If there had been some kind of mistake, if the authorities were pinning this on the wrong man as it seemed they had, it meant the real murderers were still out there and the police weren’t even looking for them.

But maybe they’ll be looking for me.

Suddenly, the room began to tilt, the dark spots returning, bigger now, like black holes in her vision. Shadows pooled in the corners of the room and began to reach toward the ceiling, dimming the light. Nausea whirled through her. “Oh God…”

“Claire?” Marshall put out a hand to her.

Imagination gave it a knife.

“Oh G—” She turned away from him and vomited over the side of the bed.

-14-

“Goddamn it, Ty. Keep your hands to yourself.”

The three workmen in the booth grinned at the fourth, an overweight black man in a padded check shirt and worn navy baseball cap with an M embroidered in the middle. Beneath it, Ty Rogers’s broad face settled into one of apology though his large yellow teeth were bared in a grin as he raised his sap-stained hands in a gesture of placation.

“Not my fault, Louise. You keep shaking that fine ass in our faces every time you walk away.”

Louise tucked the pencil she’d used to jot down the men’s orders into the breast pocket of her pink and white striped shirt and folded her arms.

“Wouldn’t mind being that pencil,” another of the men muttered and his coworkers sniggered.

Louise, more tired than offended, glared at each of them in turn, until only Ty was looking at her directly.

“Maybe I should give your wife a call,” she said, and at his nonchalant shrug, addressed the rest of them. “All of your wives. I’m sure they’d be real interested to hear what you boys get up to on your lunch break.”

Ty pouted. It made her want to slap him.

“Aw c’mon now, girl. We were just playing witcha. You should be flattered. I mean, look at the rest of the girls in here.” He nodded pointedly toward the counter where the other waitresses, Yvonne and Marcia, hugely overweight and looking forever unhappy about it, scowled over steaming plates of homemade fries, hash, eggs and sausage. In the warming light above the stainless steel counter, they looked like operatic villains.

“Flattered? I should punch you in your fat head,” Louise told him and the men erupted into laughter. But Ty’s smile faded, just a little. It was enough for Louise to see that she’d gotten to him, hit him where he didn’t like to be hit, especially not in front of his friends. Though she’d seen him in here almost every day over the past month, had weathered his innuendo, crude passes, and vulgarity and thought him a pig, she hadn’t been afforded this intimate glimpse of the man he most likely was at home. Dirty, abusive. Worse than a pig, she thought. A pig with a violent streak. She was more than familiar with the type.

“Talk like that,” he said, “I should put you over my knee.”

“With knees like yours, you could put me and everyone else in here on ’em and there’d still be room for a grand piano.”

Ty’s smile didn’t drop any further, but it was frozen in place, as if the muscles responsible for relaxing it had gone into arrest.

“Got an awful smart mouth on you,” he said coldly.

“And you got awfully twitchy hands. Keep ’em to yourself from now on you won’t have to listen to my smart mouth or any other.” She gave him a final withering look, then went to put in their order. Behind her she sensed the man’s icy stare, but it wasn’t hard to ignore. He could glare and grumble all he wanted and it would never bother her. She had bigger problems, and as The Overrail Diner was her sole solace from a life gone bad, not to mention her only source of income, she was more than willing to deal with whatever took place within its plate glass walls and acoustic-tile ceilings.

She reached the counter, ripped the order free and slid it across to Marcia, who snatched it up and deposited it behind her in the little square hole in the wall separating the business area from the kitchen.

“He giving you trouble?” Marcia asked, though Louise knew she’d seen and heard it all from behind the counter.

“It’s no big deal. Pinched my ass, is all. Isn’t the first time; won’t be the last. I dealt with it.”

Marcia glanced over her shoulder. “Way he’s looking at you, you might want to watch your back.”

Louise leaned against the counter and sighed. “Don’t worry about it. Guy got his feelings hurt. He’ll get over it.”

“Probably,” Marcia said, in a tone that said she wasn’t convinced. “But be careful is all I’m saying. That’s a big bull to have on your tail. And he isn’t used to having the girls in here do anything but flirt with him, or at least take it a little better than you did.”

Louise found the thought of that nauseating. She was about to say as much when Chet, the cook, appeared at the hatch and cried out in his irritating nasally voice, “Order up!”

Marcia waggled her eyebrows in an “I’m just saying” gesture before she turned and grabbed the two plates Chet had set there. A pair of mushroom omelets threaded steam as the waitress beamed her way down to the booth by the front door.

Outside, the snow had robbed the streets of color, reducing them to a monochrome depiction of quiet streets and tall silent buildings framed by a lead-colored sky. Dirty slush had gathered by the curbs, and what little life moved through that drab watercolor did so wrapped up tight in warm clothing, heads bowed to watch booted feet traversing treacherous ice-limned sidewalks.

This is not my world, Louise thought, but felt a pang of frustration when it came to her that though she’d had that same thought innumerable times over the years, she had yet to find a place that was. She was adrift and always had been, in a sea of other people’s unhappiness, seemingly incapable of finding that single tributary that would lead her away to the place she sought and couldn’t name, or even imagine to any encouraging degree. Elsewhere, she decided. Anywhere but here. But how often had she thought that too? And every single time, she’d picked up her life and moved, buoyed by the promise of light at the end of the tunnel, gold at the end of the rainbow, only to find herself in the same situation again and again and again. Stuck, miserable, and as good as alone, with a view of the future that never extended beyond the next paycheck.

Tomorrow, she decided, repeating the mantra that kept her from losing her mind. Tomorrow it’ll be better.

Chet hailed her and she moved around the counter to pick up the order. There were four plates, each loaded with enough cholesterol to kill a horse, and that was before the men doctored their fries with catsup, salt and vinegar, and whatever else they could find to smother the taste. The smell of the food made her stomach turn. She stuffed some knives and forks in napkins, then expertly balanced the plates in both hands and headed for Ty’s table.

“Damn that smells good,” one of the men said, and rubbed his hands briskly together. “I’m starving here.” And while the other men nodded their thanks, or smiled at her in appreciation, hunger bringing back the manners their Mommas had taught them, Ty, his face close to hers as she set the plates down, continued to stare. If he was indeed as pissed as Marcia had seemed to think he was, there was nothing to stop him making it known now through violence. She was all but presenting herself to him, and he could do plenty of damage by the time anyone realized what was happening.

“Somethin’ you want to say to me, Ty?” she asked quietly, as she set down the napkin swaddled knives and forks.

“Just looking at that bruise around your eye,” he said, his voice equally calm. His tone threw her a little. It was almost one of concern, as if he was preparing to make a conciliatory speech on behalf of his fellow swine.

“What about it?” she asked, and felt her cheeks redden, suddenly self-conscious.

“How’d you get it?”

“That ain’t none of your business.”

“Well,” he said, leaning closer. She could smell cigarettes on his breath. “You should tell your man that his fists aren’t doing the trick. You still haven’t got no respect.”

She felt her face grow hot, and the eyes of the men on her, waiting for a reaction. They said not a word, forks held close to their mouths, still loaded with food as they absorbed what had just occurred. A line had been crossed they would never have crossed themselves it seemed, but perhaps out of fear, they weren’t about to point that out to their boss, who showed not the slightest sign that he regretted what he’d said. Louise straightened slowly and brushed absently at some imaginary wrinkles in her skirt. She looked from Ty, and the satisfied smile on his thick rubbery lips, to the cutlery she’d just set down before him, the tips of the knife and fork catching the fluorescent light, and she knew she was going to kill him. The awareness came without fear, or anxiety, or concern for the future she would be denying herself by plunging that knife into his throat. There was no future to squander. There was only now.

“Now get me some A1 sauce for my meat, okay?” Ty said sweetly around his victorious sneer.

She saw herself doing it. Though the fantasy seemed to last forever, she knew the moment itself would not. It would be quick. Pick up the knife, drive it forward into his throat, step back to avoid the worst of the blood.

“You hear me?”

Then sit down with a cup of coffee and wait for the cops to come write your future for you, takin’ the choice out of your hands for good.

There had been many men in Louise’s life. Too many, she sometimes thought, and yet still not enough to balance out the investment she had put into them. From Louisiana to Alabama to West Virginia and now Michigan, the path to her present could be found by following the trail of shattered dreams, empty promises, buckled pride and heartache. She’d been the sole burlesque performer in a theater filled with dead-eyed men.

And though she had never unlocked her most secret desires for the hulk sitting before her now, his eyes were just as lifeless, reflecting only inward, studying the desires and dreams of the self, incapable of recognizing those of others.

Her hand found the knife. Ty glanced down.

“What do you think you’re going to do with that?”

“Is there a problem here?” a voice said, and Louise jerked, her hand splaying, releasing the knife. She felt her muscles relax, even as some other part of her tensed in disappointment. The invisible strings that had been tugging at her heart, her mind, and her arms, encouraging her to cut loose from them in the same swoop that would see the knifepoint piercing the sagging black flesh beneath Ty’s double chin, released her. She had to struggle not to collapse from the recession of that furious impulse.

“I said is there a problem here?”

Louise glanced to her right, into the face of Robbie Way, her manager. He was at least ten years her junior and seemed condemned to use his authority to compensate for his lack of good looks, charm, and physique. His skin was pale and supple, slack around the dull gray eyes, and speckled with angry red pimples around the chin and nose. Now those eyes were narrowed, and fixed on Louise.

“There ain’t no trouble.”

“What?”

“I said there ain’t no trouble here.”

Robbie turned his attention to the men at the table. All but Ty had resumed eating. The manager watched them for a moment, then sidled up to the big man. “Everything all right, sir?”

Louise felt her guts coil.

Ty, armed with his most winning smile, nodded once and held up a flaccid cheeseburger seething with grease. “Sure is,” he said, beaming. “We were just asking Miss Daltry here if she could get us some A1 sauce. Not sure she heard me properly though. It’s what I get for eating with my mouth full, I guess.” He chuckled, and Robbie smiled. Nobody seemed compelled to point out that the burger was untouched, and that there was no food in Ty’s mouth.

“I’ll take care of that for you right away,” Robbie said, and turned, his thin fingers squeezing Louise’s arm as he led her away from the table toward the counter. “What’s going on?”

“Nothin’,” she replied, sourly.

“Didn’t look like nothing.” They reached the counter and he plucked a bottle of A-1 from beside the cash register, then looked squarely at her. “This can’t keep happening, you know.”

“I know.”

“No… I don’t think you do. This isn’t some sleazy bar where you get to back-talk the customers for ogling you, or get up in their faces because they were staring at your tits. This is a restaurant, Louise. We serve food. We get kids and old folks in here. Last thing we need is for the place to be in the newspaper because a waitress decked a regular. Case you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly roping them in as it is.”

Louise felt like a child, but couldn’t summon the will to raise her head and look the manager in the eye, opting instead to just stare at the floor, and the still-wet boot prints from whomever had come in last.

“Problem is,” Robbie went on, “Half the guys we get in here only come to look at you anyway. We all know the food is crap, and Elmo’s Pizza is only two blocks from here, but have you seen the waitresses over there?” He shuddered. “They’ve got some kind of faux Italian thing going on, which would be fine if their ancestors didn’t all hail from Montreal.”

She smiled at that, and nodded. Robbie chose to take it as an encouraging sign. “You’re a good looking woman, Louise. You gotta expect to have to take some shit from these guys, and learn to let it go right over your head. It’s the only way you’re going to last in this business.”

Louise sighed and offered him the smile of understanding she knew he was waiting for. Unfortunately, Robbie was another dreamless wonder. He assumed anyone who worked under him entertained the same grand notions of one day opening up a restaurant of their very own as he did. Somewhere along the crooked road of his life, the young man before her had considered his options and found but a single route still open to him. He’d hurried down that road, his mind fixated on the one thing that would allow him to retain his pride, and had done so with such veracity that it had brainwashed him, consumed him, and now anything beyond that single well-trodden path seemed incomprehensible, perhaps even threatening to him because it was a facet of life of which he would never get a taste. Louise imagined his apartment dark, damp and empty, with Robbie in the bathroom, still dressed in his trademark white shirt, red tie and black pants with the razor sharp creases, practicing the many expressions of authority and stern speeches he needed to excel at his job.

It was this summation of his character in Louise’s mind that negated his words to her now. Everything he told her was trite, pulled straight from The Idiot’s Guide to Diner Management or some other textbook dedicated to showing you what you already knew but needed to see in writing.

“Thank you,” she said, and exhaled heavily.

“You’re welcome,” Robbie replied, obviously pleased with himself. “Now bring this bottle down to that gentleman’s table.” He slid the A-1 into her palm and watched her carefully.

“Okay.” She started to turn, then paused and looked back into his expectant face. “Can I take a five minute smoke break after that?”

Robbie frowned, shirked back his shirtsleeve and checked his watch, then sighed. “Five minutes. But do it around back. I don’t need smoke blasting in on people while they’re eating every time someone opens those doors.”

Louise nodded and headed away. As she approached Ty’s table, the large man looked up, mouth stuffed with cheeseburger, a smear of cheese on his lower lip.

Dead eyes, she thought.

“About time, sugar tits,” he mumbled around his food and reached out a hand for the bottle.

Breathing hard with anticipation, she grabbed his wrist with her left hand and quickly yanked it aside.

The men froze.

Ty’s eyes bugged. “The hell you think you’re d—?”

“Hey!” Robbie called, and she heard his perfectly polished shoes slapping the tiles.

“Sorry,” she said, aware it would not be clear to whom she’d been speaking as she swung the sauce bottle into the side of Ty’s head.

Later, she would wonder if it was possible that her thoughts had somehow summoned him, pulled his likeness from the ether, a mixture of memory and yearning designed to torment her further.

But he was real.

She took the long way home after spending three hours in a cafe, nursing a cup of scalding hot coffee and feeling sorry for herself until it was close to the time she’d normally be clocking out at the Overrail.

She felt no satisfaction from what she’d done to Ty Wilkinson, though she didn’t regret it. The son of a bitch had it coming, and God alone knew how many battered women in the man’s life she had struck a very literal blow for today. And yet she felt nothing but emptiness. Ty had been a victim by proxy, a piñata for all the pent-up anger, frustration, and self-hatred that had been gathering within her over the past few months.

As she turned the corner on East Pleasant Avenue, the hair prickled on the nape of her neck. She tugged up the collar of her fur-lined parka and shivered. It was cold, the sidewalks like polished glass, the wind dragging its ragged nails across her cheeks.

What the hell had she been thinking coming to Detroit?

It was a silly question of course, one she would have been better not asking herself again, for the answer never failed to further darken her thoughts.

She had come here because of Wayne, whom she’d loved, whom she feared she still loved, despite realizing long ago that every second word that spilled from his mouth was a lie, his promises glass birds destined to shatter sooner or later against the cold hard surface of reality. And the worst truth of all, the black knot in her heart that she couldn’t unravel, was that for this life, for this misery, she had abandoned with hardly a second thought a man and a child who had truly loved her, dumped them for a yellow brick road that had led her straight into a wasteland. She’d shut the door and driven away without looking back at the sad weathered man and his simple-minded boy, who would never understand the lure of her dreams, the hunger for ambition that drove her. Into Wayne’s car and out of their lives, headed for a recording studio in Detroit, where Wayne’s cousin Red was as eager as he to make her a star.

700 miles later, she’d realized her mistake.

There was the cold, a development she had anticipated but which still came as a shock to her system. Even so, her spirits held. She was prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of her career, and if singing her heart out in an icy room while the whole world got buried under six foot of snow outside was what it took, then so be it.

But there was no studio, and for all she knew never had been.

According to Red, he’d been forced to sell his studio a month before when the bank threatened to take his house for failure to make mortgage payments. From the look of the man—shifty eyes, shiny red leisure suit, hair in cornrows, smile so full of gold it made her wonder why he hadn’t sold them instead of the studio to save his house—they’d been had. Wayne would tell her later that he thought Red had a drug problem, that he was a habitual user and a compulsive liar. Three months of ever-worsening misery would pass before Louise would lose her cool enough to tell him that maybe he and Red had the latter attribute in common.

And Wayne would stun her, figuratively and literally, by responding with his fists, breaking her nose and two of her teeth in the process. It was the first time he’d hit her, and wouldn’t be the last.

And still she wouldn’t leave him. She couldn’t. Despite his infrequent bursts of violence, she was drawn to him by the other part of him, the part that held her in bed at night and sang songs in her ear, the part that told her everything was going to be all right and that she should never doubt that he loved her. The tender side of him that promised someday everything would work out, that he never meant to hurt her. It’s just that sometimes you shoot your mouth off a little, that’s all…

She supposed that today she had proven how hot-headed she herself could be. After all, didn’t what she had done to Ty for his ill-chosen remarks make her no better or worse than Wayne?

He was her anchor. That was it. Her anchor in a hurricane, the tether that kept her from being swept away in an ugly wind that might destroy her in a maelstrom of loneliness, of isolation and fear, a fear that was infinitely worse than her fear of him when his moods turned black.

He was all she had left.

Wayne, and the dreams that stubbornly refused to leave her be.

Dreams, hope, and her memories of better times.

Wincing against the bitter sting of the cold, she pictured Jack and his son standing at the door to their rundown old farmhouse, the red dust swirling about their feet then rising behind the tires of Wayne’s car to obscure them from view, leaving nothing but dark crooked smudges amid that cloud, over which the eave of the sagging roof cut a red triangle from the clear blue sky.

She blinked away tears, and stepped over a mound of slush to cross the street. Her apartment was close now, and a dull pang of unease passed through her. Wayne would not take too well the news of her being fired, and though Louise had no doubt she could pick up something else soon, he would be sure to make a production out of it, as if berating her was a ritual he had a religious obligation to fulfill. But she knew his tirade would be nothing more than a means of avoiding reality yet again. She had lost her job; he’d never had one, and probably figured if he gave her a hard enough time about getting fired, she wouldn’t think to point out his own insufficient contributions to their survival. He smoked too much, drank too much, and frequently vanished on late night walks she had long ago ceased believing were as benign as he made them out to be.

Sighing heavily, she told herself that at least Ty hadn’t pressed charges today, a development that had surprised her until she realized having her arrested might mean word would spread about what had precipitated the drama between them, and he would be understandably leery about such details hitting the streets where his wife might hear it. It was about the only positive she could find in another dismal day.

Someone was standing outside the apartment.

For a moment, she thought it might be Wayne, but as she drew closer, she saw that the body was too thin and a little too short. Only the jacket he wore looked the same. The man stood there, staring up at the windows on the second floor, alternating between stamping his feet on the sidewalk and blowing into his cupped and ungloved hands. She felt sorry for him being out here so ill-equipped for the harsh cold, but had no notion of stopping to tell him so or to offer him charity, which in this part of the city, was most likely what he wanted. The streets were too dangerous here, and if he wasn’t a bum hoping for a handout then chances were he was waiting for some unlucky sucker to rob.

Louise surreptitiously reached for her purse and unzipped it. Inside was the can of Mace Marcia at the Overrail had given her on her first day, after Louise told her she wasn’t driving home, but walking. Girl, Marcia had said, with a disapproving shake of her head, Around here, no one walks anywhere unless they’re carrying a gun. The threat was worse at night, which was why Louise had requested the day shift, but in winter, when the light faded early, there was little difference.

As she approached her building, stepping off the curb to avoid having to pass too close to the man, he stopped his bouncing and turned. His lower face was hidden by a threadbare black scarf, a wool cap pulled down almost to his eyes.

She saw that he was young, the visible part of his face unlined by the wringer through which all young men were passed as the dark secrets of life were eventually revealed to them.

Louise ducked her head and moved past him.

He mumbled something to her.

“Sorry,” she said, nerves jangling, and quickened her pace. It was not a question, but an apology that she could not stop to listen. She hadn’t been able to make out the words, but it had sounded like he’d said “Wanna sleep.” Trying hard not to think too much about what such a cryptic message might mean, she trotted up the steps of the building and quickly snatched her key from the jumbled guts of purse, her hands trembling from the day’s ardor as she drove it into the lock and turned. When the man spoke again, his voice was clearer and this time his words made her freeze, every hair on her body standing on end.

You’re dreamin’.

Eventually, she turned.

The man—the boy—had pulled down his scarf to reveal an uncertain, yet hopeful grin, and with him came a tsunami of emotion that crashed down on Louise, sucking the air from her lungs.

“Oh God.”

Her past approached her in small careful steps, wreathed in the smells of dust and leaves and forgotten warmth, but it was only a memory, as she feared was the boy standing before her.

It had to be a memory. Or a ghost.

His eyes were wide, and alive, as he came to her. “Mom… it’s me.”

-15-

Finch was there when they brought her home, though he tried not to let himself be seen.

The Lambert House was modest but attractive. A white-tract home with brown decorative shutters and dormer windows, it was set just far enough apart from its neighbors to avoid looking like part of a subdivision, which is exactly what it was—just one of thirty-nine buildings of similar design. The house was relatively new, had not yet conceded defeat to Ohio’s scorching summers or freezing winters. The roof looked pristine, the windows polished, the lines straight, the angles sharp. The lawn was neatly tended. But Finch knew that if there were any validity to the claim that houses absorbed the emotions of their owners, the Lambert home would soon begin to sag. The windows would darken even in sunlight, spots of dirt would speckle the siding, the bones beneath the skin of the house would weaken, and cracks would appear. There would be too much hurt and misery for the house to remain standing proud.

He watched as a gray SUV slowed and turned into the driveway. The windows were tinted, so he couldn’t see the passengers, only a darker version of a sky pregnant with rain, but he knew the car, had seen it many times before. It had spent its fair share of time in his own driveway over the years.

There were no reporters at the house. They had kept vigil there like hippies at a folk festival since the day the news broke about the murders, but as soon as the murderer was named and his death announced, they started to lose interest. Killers were always popular in the news, particularly one this savage, but dead ones weren’t worth the hassle, not when the space could be filled by the latest atrocity in the Middle East. Even at the height of the frenzy, coverage of the Alabama murders had paled in comparison to that of beheaded engineers and assassinated politicians in Iraq. Now, the farther away from the epicenter of the massacre you went, the further into the paper you had to look to find mention of what had happened in Elkwood. It was a different world these days, Finch realized. Since 9/11, society’s gaze had shifted outward in search of blame, to places unseen and seldom heard of except in grainy pictures on the news. Everyone was looking for the boogeyman. The worries of a nation were with their soldiers, no longer on their own stoops. And every day there was more cause for grief as word was sent home of another casualty. The internal corruption and strife of America went unnoticed, its troubles measured only by the amount of bodies and flag-draped coffins.

Finch sighed, shifted in the car seat and lit a cigarette. The smoke filled the Buick and he waved a hand through it.

He had been there, at the core of the unrest in Iraq, and had seen Hell firsthand. It had infiltrated him, possessed him, destroyed him, and they’d sent him home, promising he would be fine. But he hadn’t. He’d taken Hell home with him. The army, the government, some faceless son of a bitch in an expensive suit chomping on a cigar a thousand miles away from the conflict, had put him there and hadn’t been able to exorcise it from him when he’d returned. Despite the pride and strength he’d always claimed were his biggest assets, his turmoil was so great he’d sought assistance, but a series of stops at the VA center and hospital in Columbus yielded little help. He was put on a six-month waiting list and told to sit tight. And in that time, he read the papers and watched the news, and saw his fellow marines die of neglect, turned away by the very administration that had made so many promises. Die over there, or die at home, seemed to be the consensus, and in that respect, they held true to their word. Finch turned to alcohol, and briefly to drugs, but they only fed the horror inside him, fortified it, allowing his demons a legitimate stage from which to torment him. More marines had died. He quit watching the news, quit listening to the world.

Until it took his brother from him.

Danny.

The last he’d seen his face had been on the main evening news, his gangly arm thrown over the shoulders of his girlfriend Claire. Now he was dead, hacked to pieces by an insane doctor.

But of course, that wasn’t true. Not if Claire was to be believed, and why shouldn’t she be? Who else alive could tell the world the truth about what had happened down there in that dirty little town? Except, they refused to believe what she’d told them because they had already celebrated the end of their grisly case weeks before Claire was even conscious, buried it in the same pit with the remains of the old doctor, who they knew without a shadow of a doubt had, despite having no previous history of violence, gone berserk and hacked up a load of kids. Backs had been slapped, folders had been tossed into filing cabinets, and sudsy beers had been tossed back while they grinned at each other, dug into steaks and thick fries smothered in ketchup, before going home to their wives and girlfriends, maybe to sleep after a hard day’s work, maybe to make love to put the proper end to a case they hoped someday to tell their grandchildren about.

The Sheriff who’d seen to Claire in Birmingham, a man by the name of Marshall Todd, had called Finch’s mother to offer his condolences for the umpteenth time, to let them know Claire’s release was imminent, and that they might do well to prepare for all kinds of questions from left-field. The girl’s story, he informed them, ran contrary to what they knew to be true. He suspected she was out of it from the painkillers, was misremembering things as people do in the aftermath of such a terrible trauma. All it would take to inspire a story like that, he said, would be repressed memories and a shifting of the wrong ones. She could be remembering the scenes but superimposing things over them that hadn’t been there at all. He could understood completely how a woman forced to endure such an awful ordeal, crazy with pain, disorientated from the abuse she’d taken, would see phantoms where there had been none. Even so, he’d conceded, if it turns out Wellman had an accomplice, we’ll look into it, but the important thing to keep in mind is that the main figure at the center of this atrocity is dead, and I hope that brings you some little peace of mind.

Finch shook his head as rain beaded the glass and the SUV squeaked slightly to a stop close to the front door of the house.

It hadn’t brought them peace of mind, and, standing in the kitchen, trembling, his mother had yelled at the Sheriff, questioning his foolishness in thinking it might when her son was dead.

The driver side door of the SUV opened and Claire’s mother got out. A high school teacher at least two decades his senior, he nevertheless recalled fantasizing about her during those halcyon days back when everybody lived forever, and happiness was daydreaming about taking your teacher over the desk during detention, or asking a girl out and having her look at you like she thought you’d never ask. It was a basketball victory, a smoke behind the bleachers, a Friday night cruising with your friends, sipping beer outside Wal-Mart until the cops came, the smell of the air, electric with possibility.

Then the war had come, and he’d taken it home with him, only to find a worse one waiting.

He shuddered the smoke from his lungs and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then raised his head.

Mrs. Lambert didn’t look nearly so appealing now. Her face was wan and pale, her eyes liquid smudges peering out at a world she no longer took for granted, or trusted. Her long curly brown hair was in disarray, her clothes shabby and wrinkled from a long drive.

The year Finch graduated, Mrs. Lambert retired from Hayes High School after coming home one night to find her husband dead on the kitchen floor in a puddle of milk after his heart gave out while he was getting a drink. Surviving him had aged her considerably. Finch suspected what had happened to Claire would push her further to the grave than time alone could ever manage.

He watched Mrs. Lambert move to the side door of the SUV and, with visible effort, wrench it open. She looked like a scarecrow trying to throw wide a barn door. At the same time, the front passenger door slammed shut, and Kara emerged, looking like a younger but just as harried version of her mother. Finch felt something akin to excitement in his stomach, but it was immediately quelled by the memory of what had happened between them, how she had managed to move on with her life and he had gone to war to forget his, only to have bullets compound the fear that wherever he turned, he’d still be punished.

Unlike her mother’s, Kara’s hair had been cut short. Finch didn’t approve of the style, but figured that would hardly send her world careening out of orbit if she somehow got wind of it. Besides, when they’d been together, she’d had her hair long to suit him. The new cut was to suit someone else, or maybe just herself, as whenever he saw her around town she was alone, and not looking at all put out by it.

It made him ache to see her.

Now she joined her mother and reached in, pausing a moment to look around, probably to ensure no cameras were rolling. Finch guessed that the hospital might have leaked news of Claire’s discharge to the media, but the date would have been intentionally inaccurate, allowing the Lamberts to get Claire home a few days before the vultures descended. The reporters would figure it out, of course, but by then there’d be little they could do, assuming they’d care.

Kara’s gaze settled on his Buick, where he’d parked it facing out of a driveway two houses down on the opposite side of the road. He had to resist the urge to duck and felt his insides squirm the longer she watched him. She would recognize the car of course; he’d had it since their dating days, had driven her to Niagara Falls in it, made love to her in the back seat one drunken summer night then laughed about the immaturity of it, and the rearview mirror still held the memory of her standing at her front door six months later after she told him he scared her, that she couldn’t tolerate his moods or his temper any longer.

A pair of emaciated arms reached out from the darkness inside the SUV and Finch rolled his window down, just a little. The breeze snatched the smoke from the car, dragging it out into the rain.

Claire stepped out into the dim daylight and raised her face to the clouds, as if challenging God to throw his next unpleasant trial at her. She looked frail. Had Finch not known who she was, he might have thought her an elderly woman, some long-lost grandmother come to visit her relatives.

They raped her.

Slowly, one hand clamped on her mother’s arm, Kara’s hand on her back for support lest she should fall, they guided her toward the house and the shelter of the eave.

They cut out her eye.

Claire took the steps on her own, but paused at the top, as if the three stone steps had been enough to exhaust her.

They cut off her fingers.

Finch tossed his cigarette out the window. In the rearview, he was startled to see an old man in a check shirt and dungarees emerge from the house that belonged to the driveway and squint at the Buick as he started toward it. “Hey!”

Finch started the engine. He wasn’t going to think of this as a missed opportunity. After all, he’d had no intention of approaching the Lamberts. He’d only wanted to see Claire, to get as accurate a picture as he could of what they had done to her, so he could add it to the bloodstained collage he was developing in his own private darkroom.

They killed Danny.

He pulled out of the driveway and the old man slowed, then stopped as Finch turned out onto the road. He sped up, driving in the direction of the Lambert house but not stopping, the windshield wipers laboring to clear the glass of the strengthening rain. As he passed by, he looked and saw that Claire and her mother had already gone inside. Kara followed, but turned as she shut the door, and hesitated.

She saw him. There was no way she couldn’t have. But her expression remained the same.

Again, his stomach jumped.

Then she was gone.

Finch hit the gas.

Not today, he thought. Not now.

He would return, and when he did it would not be to offer his sympathy, or to torture himself by looking into the eyes of the only woman he’d ever loved.

It would be to see Claire.

-16-

Louise prayed he wasn’t home, but of course, considering the way the day had gone thus far, she wasn’t at all surprised when that prayer went unanswered. Upon entering the apartment, she found Wayne asleep on the sofa in front of the television, his bare feet propped up on the battered pine coffee table. A cigarette he’d set in the ashtray had burned itself out, a long worm of ash dipping down into a sea of its crumpled comrades. The apartment reeked of stale sweat and spoiled milk. Louise sighed and tossed her purse on the floor, inches from where Wayne dozed, his head to the side, a thin string of drool dangling from his jaw. He awoke at the sound, and yawned, then frowned and made as if to go back to sleep.

“Wayne.”

Sluggishly, he opened his eyes and straightened, squinting, struggling to make out who was standing before him.

“Hey,” he mumbled. A smile turned into another yawn and he stretched, sat up and reached for pack of cigarettes, but froze, his hand still in the air as he registered another presence in the room. “Who’s here?” He rose unsteadily, shaking himself alert. Louise thought she detected fear lurking in his eyes. What are you afraid of? she wondered, casting her mind back to all those nights when he’d jumped at sounds outside the apartment or on the street below, sounds she hadn’t even heard. His nocturnal walks did little to reassure her that he was not up to something. Lately, the caution she had initially interpreted from him as protectiveness had become something dangerously close to paranoia, and it worried her. She liked to assume he did nothing while she was at work. He had all day to himself but was always right there in his spot in front of the TV when she left and when she returned, so it was easy to pretend he hadn’t done much else. Now, she wondered.

But such concerns would have to wait.

She stepped aside, allowing Wayne to see the teenager who’d been standing between her and the door.

Wayne frowned. “Who the hell are you?”

Pete smiled and snatched off his wool cap, as if it might make recognition easier. The boy’s eyes were wide, desperate.

“Pete,” he answered. “Lowell.”

Still confused, Wayne looked to Louise.

“Jack Lowell’s boy,” she told him.

Recognition did not come. “Jack Lowell?”

“The man I was with before you. Back in Elkwood. The farmer. This is his boy.”

Wayne’s features softened. “Ah shit, right. I remember. Christ, you got tall.”

Pete’s smile held, but he looked uncomfortable.

“Well, come on in. Sit down. You look chilled to the bone, son.”

“Cold out there,” Pete told him, but waited for Louise to extend the invitation.

“Go on, sit,” she urged. “How about I make us some coffee? You drink coffee Pete?”

“You got any hot chocolate?”

“Sure.” She headed into the small kitchen, which was little bigger than a walk-in closet, the room further constricted by the cupboards and small table on one side, the sink on the other. As she set about making the drinks, she noticed how hard her hands were shaking. She clenched them and closed her eyes. It was going to be all right. It was. Pete’s arrival was an omen that there was still some hope for the future. Maybe he was just visiting; maybe he was here for money—in which case he would leave disappointed—or maybe he was here to stay, his father finally having given up on him. As Louise retrieved the container of hot chocolate from the cupboard, and rinsed out a chipped mug and a spoon from the sink, she realized that Pete might very well be part of a life she wanted after all, a life she hadn’t realized she’d yearned for until she’d walked out and left it to be erased by the dust from Wayne’s tires. Perhaps the boy was part of a grander picture she could not yet see, a picture that did not have Detroit as its background.

Listening to the shy monotone muttering of the boy as he answered Wayne’s cheerful queries, she tried not to think about what she had to tell Wayne later. Aside from everything else, Pete’s presence had bought her some time. Time to work out in her mind what she was going to tell him, if anything. Time to try to grasp those elusive threads and weave a better story in which she was the victim, not the villain.

But isn’t that the truth? she asked herself, and realized that she was no longer thinking about the diner and what had happened there.

With a deep breath, she hurriedly brushed her hair away from her face and took the hot chocolate and coffee into the living room. It was a mess, but Pete didn’t seem to notice. She supposed he wouldn’t. The farm had hardly been well maintained, inside or out.

“So,” she said, handing him the mug. “How on earth did you find me?”

Wayne took the coffee from her without looking away from the boy. “And what made you think of lookin’ for her now?”

This was going to be Louise’s next question, and she wished Wayne had let her ask it. She would have put it to the boy with less suspicion in her tone.

Pete looked from Wayne to Louise, then down into his hot chocolate. An expression of deep sadness came over his face and Louise felt her chest grow tight. Somethin’s happened. The boy confirmed this a moment later when, eyes still lowered, one gloved finger running circles around the top of the cup, he said, “My Pa’s dead.”

Louise gasped, a hand to her mouth, though in truth the shock was less potent than she pretended. Something about the boy’s posture once she’d recognized him outside the apartment had suggested loneliness, and his face when he removed the scarf seemed thinner than she remembered it, the light in his eyes dimmer than before.

“What happened?”

Knowing how close Pete had been to his father, despite the man’s utter inability to express any kind of love for the boy, she fully expected to watch him crumble, to see the tears flow as his face constricted into a mask of pain.

What she saw instead surprised her.

There was grief, and pain, but presiding over them all, was anger.

“They kilt him. The Doctor too.”

Wayne’s eyes widened. “Shiiit. I think I seen that on the news.”

Louise turned to look at him. “And you didn’t tell me?”

He shrugged. “It was half over and I was drunk when I switched it on. Didn’t get no names. All I remember thinkin’ is: ‘Damn, Louise used to live somewhere around there.’”

“We’ve talked about the farm, Wayne, don’t give me that shit. I must have mentioned Pete and his daddy a hundred times. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Wayne’s face darkened. “I said I didn’t hear the goddamn names, all right?”

Not now, she cautioned herself. The kid doesn’t need this, and I don’t either. She returned her attention to Pete who seemed to be preparing to withdraw into himself. She scooted close and put her hand on his wrist.

“Who killed them, Pete?”

“We found a girl, in the road. She was messed up pretty bad.”

“Messed up how?” Wayne asked.

“Beaten. Cut up. She were naked, all covered in blood. Me and Pa… we stopped to pick her up, brung her to the doctor’s house to get her fixed up.” There was no emotion in his voice now, as if this was a story he had grown weary of telling. “Pa told the doc it’d be better if he didn’t ask any kinda questions about it all. I didn’t understand that. Not then. I was worried about the girl. We went home, left her with the doc. But then my Pa… he got his rifle out and sat there like he were waitin’ for the devil to kick down the door, and he… he told me I needed to get in the truck and go to the doc’s house again, even though we’d just come from there. He said the doc would tell me what to do. So I went, and when I got there the doc said to me I needed to bring the girl to the hospital ’cuz she was in real trouble.”

“Who was the girl?” Louise asked. “Did you know her?”

Pete raised his head, shook it once. “Her name was Claire. She were pretty like you wouldn’t believe. Least I guessed she was. It was hard to tell because of all the blood and they had cut out one of her eyes.”

Wayne frowned. “Jesus.”

“You took her to the hospital?” Louise asked. “Why didn’t your Pa go with you?”

“He stayed home,” Pete said. “And he shot himself. Don’t know why, but I guess he were too afraid of what was comin’ to want to be there when it did.”

Louise buried her face in her hands. “Oh God.”

“I didn’t know, or I’d never have left him. Maybe if I was smarter I’d have known, but I ain’t, so I didn’t. I just drove the girl outta town to the hospital.” Something like a smile turned up the corners of his mouth. “She were real nice, though. The girl. We talked some on the way. Just a little because she was tired. But I liked her. Wished I could have stayed with her a while.” He dipped his head, sipped at his drink, and his smile grew. “This is real good. I always liked your hot chocolate.”

Louise’s vision blurred with tears, her throat tightening as she struggled to keep her composure. It’s not fair, she told herself. Not fair that I left them. Not fair that he died. And when a grimmer thought followed, What if I had stayed with them? Wouldn’t I have died there too? The answer was: Maybe you should have. Maybe that was where your true path ended and now you’re wanderin’ blindly ten miles farther along the same road ’cept now you know for sure it ain’t goin’ nowhere.

“You tell the cops what happened?” Wayne asked, his interest apparently sincere.

Pete frowned. “When?”

“When you got the girl to the hospital?”

The boy shook his head. “I didn’t want to answer no questions. I was afraid, so… so I just got the girl inside and let the hospital men take her away. One of them asked me my name and I told him, but then he told me to wait and I ran. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve.”

“You were scared,” Louise said.

“Sure was,” Pete agreed. “More scared than I’ve ever been in my life. I drove home pretty fast. But when I got there, the house were burnin’ and weren’t no one tryin’ to put it out. I tried to do it myself but couldn’t.” A single tear welled in his left eye. “I told myself Pa got hisself out. Told myself a piece of burnin’ wood had tumbled out of the fireplace and Pa had tried to put out the flames, but then run when it got the better of him. Told myself he was out there somewhere in the dark past the fire, waitin’ for me, and I just couldn’t see him. So I looked.” He drew the back of his glove across his nose and blinked, freeing the tear to run down his cheek. “That’s when I found all the blood. In the barn. It was burnin’, but only the roof. I went inside, to see if Pa was in there maybe tryin’ to free the animals—” He glanced at Louise. “That’s what I’d have done.” Then he lowered his head again. “They was gone, but there was a whole lotta blood in there, all over the place, great big puddles on the floor and splashed up the walls like it had come outta a hose. There were plastic there too, bits and pieces of it, like someone might’ve wrapped up the pigs before cuttin’ on ’em.”

“Are you sure your Pa didn’t—”

“No. He wouldn’t’ve. They was all we had left in the world, ’sides each other.”

Louise moved close, put her arm around him and let her chin rest against his head. “Why would anyone take the pigs?” she asked quietly, and felt him shrug against her.

“Horse was gone too. Cora.”

“Cora?”

“That was the mare’s name. Good horse too. But she weren’t hurt. I found her on my way into town after I gave up tryin’ to find Pa.”

“What did you do?” Wayne asked, his elbows braced on his knees, fists propping up his chin like a child watching Saturday morning cartoons.

“Rode ’er to Sheriff McKindrey’s, but he weren’t there. The lady at his office said he was down at The Red Man Tavern, so I went there. The Sheriff was pretty drunk, but when I mentioned the fire, whole buncha folks ran out and got in their cars and went out to the farm. They got the fire out pretty quick and found my Pa in there, all burned up.”

“How do you know it wasn’t just an accident?”

“Heard a few of the men talkin’ to the Sheriff. They said they found some canisters of kerosene that we always kept in the barn. They were inside the house. Said they thought someone set the fire.”

Wayne scratched his chin. “Maybe… and I know this ain’t gonna be easy to hear, but…”

Louise shot him a glare. “Don’t.”

Wayne shrugged, but said no more.

“S’all right,” Pete said softly. “I know what you was gonna say, but Pa didn’t burn himself up. Not unless him and the doc had the same idea at the same time, cuz the doc’s place was all burnt up too.”

“Yeah,” Wayne chimed in. “That’s what I saw on the news. They found all those pieces of bodies there. Doctor went mad or somethin’, didn’t he?”

Louise spoke before Pete could answer. “Who do you think hurt all those people, Pete? Who do you think did this to your Pa?”

“It weren’t the doc,” he said. “It weren’t him, no matter what they’re sayin’. He wanted to help that girl real bad and when he sent us away, I could see he was afraid of somethin’, just like my daddy was. They were waitin’ for bad folk to come.”

Louise kissed his head, suddenly reminded of the nights she’d spent in this same pose with the boy while they looked at the stars, and that one night in particular as they watched one fall from the sky when he asked her, “Are you gonna leave us too?” She’d been unable to reply, unable to lie to him, and so had distracted him with talk of the Heavens. Then she had left him, and now his world had been obliterated, leaving him in the company, however temporary, of a woman he had to believe didn’t care.

“How did you find me?” she asked in a whisper, unsure whether the question was a rhetorical one.

“They had your address at Jo’s Diner. Said you called them with it so they could send you a paycheck they owed you or somethin’. After the funeral, the Sheriff organized a collection and they gave me some money. I used some of it to take the bus here.”

“So you’ve still got some left?” Wayne asked.

Louise stared at him. It wasn’t clear whether he was asking because he didn’t think they could afford to keep the boy for long, or because he planned to relieve the child of his money. Again she was struck by the unpleasant feeling that he was hiding something from her, that his paranoia might have its roots in something very real, and very troubling.

“Some,” Pete said. “Not much.”

“Well,” Louise said with a sigh, “We need to get you cleaned up, fed and bedded down if you’re going to be stayin’ with us for a while.”

She stood.

Pete frowned up at her. “I don’t want to stay with you,” he said, and Wayne couldn’t restrain a small sigh of relief.

Louise raised her eyebrows. “I don’t understand. I thought that’s why you were here.”

“No,” said the boy. “I came here to tell you what happened to daddy, because I know he loved you and would want you to know.”

“Well, I’m glad you did. I’m glad—”

Pete set his hot chocolate down and rose. Wayne was right. The boy had grown. He was now as tall as Louise. When she’d left him, he’d barely been up to her shoulders.

“And I came to tell you,” he said, his face impassive, a queer light in his eyes. His hands had begun to tremble and she reached out to hold them in her own. His skin was cold. “That I aim to find those folks and make ’em sorry for what they done.”

-17-

It was a Tuesday night, and McClellan’s Bar was mercifully free of the rowdy crowds it entertained on the weekends. There were no businessmen with their ties slung back over their shoulders, shirts unbuttoned as they spoke to each other in roars; no manicured women in short dresses trying not to look desperate as they eyed the men who appeared drunkest, and wealthiest; no underage teens balancing false courage with crippling nerves as they waited to be asked for their fake I.D’s; no couples canoodling in the red leather booths beneath veils of smoke, their hands touching as they preserved a blissful moment sure to be destroyed out there in the world where uncontaminated love was a thing of fairytale and film; no loud music as young men and women fed the jukebox in the corner by the restrooms; no girls dancing on tables, cheered on by their equally inebriated girlfriends; no aggravated men looking to start a fight with the first guy unfortunate enough to nudge against them while pushing through the crowd.

Tonight there was only the tired-looking barman polishing glasses that were already clean, a lone woman with long, tousled yellow-gray hair smoking a cigarette and staring at her own unhappy reflection in the mirror behind the bar, and Finch, who sat at the far end of the long narrow counter, away from the door but facing it, so he could see whoever entered. Kara had thought this habit—his refusal to sit with his back to any door in any establishment—a dangerously paranoid one, the behavior of a criminal, or a mafia soldier. He had never disagreed, or tried to explain it, but was glad that they had already broken up by the time he returned from Iraq, because it was much worse now. He had never admitted to her that his caution had been an affected thing, taken from some gangster movie he’d seen once in which one of the characters had professed an unwillingness to sit with his back to the door because one of his friends had been ‘clipped’ that way. Finch had liked that movie, though he couldn’t remember much about it now, and so had secretly justified his wariness as good sense in a world full of unseen danger. Nowadays, the paranoia he’d feigned had mutated, become real. Nowadays he sat facing the door because he was afraid something dangerous might at any moment explode through it.

A woman in an abaya perhaps, a scared smile on her face as her hands moved to her waist, to the wires…

Elbows on the bar, he brought his hands to his face and scrubbed away the memory of blood and smoke. He could still smell it on his skin, all of it mingled with the scent of fear that forever clung to him. And when finally he lowered them, he sensed the woman at the other end of the bar watching him, and there was a presence to his right, standing unsteadily between Finch and the door.

“Whassup?” said the man, and smiled. He had short blonde hair, a tanned youthful face, and was obviously drunk, his eyes bloodshot, Abercrombie & Fitch clothes slightly wrinkled, his shirt untucked. Finch figured him for a sole survivor of a bachelor party, or an escapee from a frat house where the celebrations had been defused, leaving this guy to seek out any excuse to perpetuate his immaturity. An oddly feminine hand with delicate fingers was braced on the bar, and seemed to be the only thing delaying his inevitable appointment with the floor.

Finch nodded, and went back to his drink. There was only the woman in the bar with them, and given the lack of aesthetic appeal she would have in Frat Boy’s eyes, he expected more shallow conversation to come. He was not disappointed.

“You look pissed off,” the guy said. “Lighten up, man!” He brushed a hand against Finch’s elbow. “S’early!”

Finch ignored him.

The barman materialized. “What can I get ya?” he asked the wobbling man.

“You got Sambuca?”

“No.”

Finch noticed with amusement the bottle of Sambuca on the shelf behind the barman.

“Shit then, I’ll have a beer. Make it cold though, okay, man?” He laughed at this, and turned to Finch. “Three fridges in the goddamn place, and not one cold beer. Ended up drinking vodka instead. Vodka. Russian pisswater, my friend.”

Again, Finch said nothing, hoping it would be enough to carry a message through the drunken padding in the other man’s brain that he was in no mood for company, at least of this kind. But instead, the guy moved close enough that Finch could smell his breath. He’d heard it said that vodka, once ingested, didn’t give off a smell, a quality that, along with gin, made it the yuppie drink of choice, but he could smell it on this guy, which pretty much confirmed his theory that saying liquor of any kind didn’t come with its own stench was akin to claiming no one would know you pissed yourself if you were wearing rubber trousers.

“You in the war or something?” he asked now, and surprised at his perceptiveness, Finch looked at him.

“Yeah. I was.”

“Figured.”

“What gave it away?” he asked.

The other man shrugged. “You’re not the first guy I’ve seen tonight that got himself all messed up over there. The other guy didn’t even have legs. Said he got them blown off in…” He struggled to recall the name, but gave up with a wave of his hand. “Over there.”

Finch bridled. “What do you mean ‘messed up’?”

The barman reappeared and slid a Budweiser before Frat Boy. There were still flecks of ice on the bottle. He nodded approvingly and dropped a ten on the counter.

“Besides,” he continued, ignoring Finch’s question and the tone with which it had been delivered. “My older bro was there.”

“In Iraq?”

“Yep.”

Finch pictured the type: Rebellious, conscientious rich kid, eager to prove he was worth more than Forbes would estimate in two decades time, eager to show his loveless father that he was his own man and not afraid to step outside the protective bubble his family’s wealth afforded him. A casualty of wealth would become a casualty of war, one way or another.

“Can’t understand it myself,” Frat Boy went on. “No need for him to do that shit, know what I’m sayin’. Plenty other guys out there fighting the good fight. No offense.”

“None taken,” Finch lied. His perception of how indifferent and selfish society could be had been heightened by his time away from it. The kids coming up these days, and most of their parents, had no idea what the world was waiting to do to their children, no concept of the depth of evil that permeated the world ready to corrupt the naive.

The door squeaked open, and a tall, well-built black man entered. He was dressed in a red OSU sweatshirt, navy sweatpants and sneakers, and though he didn’t look big enough to play football, he was too large to be mistaken for a basketball player. His head was shaved, and the gold stud in his ear glinted in the light. In his right hand he held a large manila envelope.

“Huh,” Frat Boy said. “Lookit Billy Badass.”

Finch grinned. While the wariness in the guy’s tone undoubtedly stemmed from his stereotypical view of men bigger than him, it might have cowed him further to know he was right. The man at the door’s name wasn’t Billy, but “Badass” was right on the money.

Finch leaned back in his seat, so Frat Boy wasn’t shielding him from view. The black man spotted him immediately and his lips spread in a winning smile, exposing large perfectly straight white teeth. He jabbed a finger at the booths lining the wall opposite the bar and Finch nodded.

“Friend of yours?” Frat Boy sounded disappointed.

“Yep.”

“Huh.”

Finch grabbed his beer, and headed for the booth halfway down. It was far enough from the door and Frat Boy to give them a little privacy, unless of course the guy decided to invite himself into the conversation. Finch hoped he wouldn’t. It might force Billy Badass to live up to the name he had just been given—a name he might have liked, as it was infinitely better than his unwieldy real name, which was Chester “Beau” Beaumont.

“Orange juice if you got any,” Beau told the barman and turned his back on him, leaning against the bar as he appraised Finch, who had just slid into the booth. “Slummin’, are we?”

“Hey, I like this place.”

“Wasn’t talkin’ ’bout the place, man.” He looked pointedly up the bar at Frat Boy, who quickly looked away and started muttering to his beer.

“Just one of those kids in the middle of a transitional period,” Finch said. “Going from idiot to asshole, though someday he’ll probably end up owning half the city.”

“He’s welcome to it,” Beau said, and nodded his thanks to the barman, took his drink and joined Finch in the booth. “I swear,” he continued, as he settled himself and set the large envelope between them. “Every time I walk these streets I think we made some kinda bet with God and lost. I was down this way over the weekend and you know what I saw?”

Finch shook his head.

“Two guys in the alley, up by that clothes store with the funny name?”

“Deetos?”

“Yeah. Reminds me of chips. Well, here were these two guys right? One’s down on his knees with the other guy’s dick in his mouth. Nothin’ funny ’bout that if that’s your thing, but get this… the guy gettin’ lubed is slappin’ the other guy in the side of his head. Hard. Over and over again. Now, maybe I’m gettin’ old or somethin’, but if I got some babe workin’ me down there, I ain’t doin’ shit to break her concentration, know m’sayin’?”

Finch grinned. “Yeah.”

“Damn, I don’t know if it’s some shit I missed in all those porno’s growin’ up but I can’t understand it. And hey, let’s just say for argument’s sake I’m the one doin’ the lubin. Strictly for argument’s sake, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, I ain’t lettin’ the guy privileged enough to have me down there in the first place smack on my skull. One time is all it’d take and I’d have that motherfucker mulched.”

Though enjoying the camaraderie and Beau’s banter, Finch was eager to get down to business. He looked down at the envelope. “That what you got in there? Pictures of the one time you experimented?”

Beau smiled. “Naw. Any mother took pictures of my dick, they’d need a tapestry, not a camera.”

Finch nodded. “I’m sure there’s a whole wall in the Metropolitan reserved for it.”

Beau slid the envelope to him. “I figure everythin’ you need is in there. Sorry it took so long. Hard to find shit out if no one talkin’. You may as well be askin’ what happened to a white supremacist in Compton.”

Fingers trembling slightly, and aware that Beau’s eyes were on him, Finch turned the envelope over. It wasn’t sealed. He opened it and withdrew a sheaf of paper.

The barman, apparently bored of listening to Frat Boy complaining and the inaudible conversation from their booth, ducked down behind the bar. A moment later, soft bluesy music rose up and danced with the smoke.

“Looks like a lot of info,” Finch said, examining the papers. He nodded appreciatively. “Hell of a lot more than I was able to find on my own.”

“Yeah, there’s some readin’, but I don’t think you gonna find everythin’ you need to know. Lot more about the victims than the villains. Got names for them, but no faces and that was hard enough. They’re like ghosts, man.”

“Well, thanks. I know what you’re risking here.”

Beau looked around the bar. “I ain’t riskin’ nothin’. I’m a good liar if it comes to it. You, on the other hand, lookin’ to get into a whole world of hurt if you’re plannin’ any Charles Bronson shit.”

“My gun’s a lot smaller.”

“Yeah, and Chuck was a whole lot better lookin’ but you get what I’m sayin’ right?”

“Sure, and it’s duly noted, but I can look after myself.”

Beau gave a rueful shake of his head. “Wish I had a dollar for every time some dumb white boy said that to me. I’d be drivin’ a Cutlass Supreme with Lexani alloys by now instead of a piece a’ shit Toyota.” He leaned forward. “And if I remember correctly, you were damn glad to have my ass coverin’ yours back in the desert.”

Finch didn’t look at him. “I can handle it.”

“Not what I’m sayin’.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying ain’t no man tough enough to fight a war on his own, especially if it’s a personal one and he’s outnumbered. You need my help, you ask.”

“I did ask.” Finch tapped a forefinger on the stack of paper.

“Don’t play dumb with me, man. This ain’t the first time I been sittin’ across from a guy who looked ready to jump headfirst into Hell without an asbestos swimsuit. I knew when I was puttin’ that file together what you were gonna use it for. Think I’m dumb? And I also knew what would happen if I gave it to you.”

“But you gave it to me anyway.”

“Wouldn’t have if I didn’t think you’d just find some other guy to dig it up for you, or go and dig it up yourself. Might have taken a while longer, but the end result would’ve been the same. Besides, like I always said, we look out for each other, and I guess I should be grateful you trusted me with this.” He sighed. “Though somethin’ tells me you callin’ me up has less to do with trust and more to do with convenience.”

Finch shrugged. “Told you in the desert if you went through with the crazy idea of trying to become a P.I. I’d drum up some work for you.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think it’d be this kinda work. Work that could get your ass killed. Shit, if I’d known you had a death wish, I’d have let you die over there and saved us all a lot of trouble.”

It was a joke, and both men knew it, but nevertheless Finch had to suppress the memory it evoked.

“You get your license yet?” he asked.

“Workin’ on it.”

“Should be a cinch. You were always nosy.”

“I prefer to call it curiosity. You know what though? I thought it’d be just a case of applyin’ like you do for a fishin’ license or some shit. Turns out I gotta take classes man. Get myself a diploma. Can you see me tied to a desk listening to some uptight sonofabitch tellin’ me what I already know?”

Finch couldn’t. Beau had a real problem with authority, as evidenced by the amount of sergeants whose blood pressure had suffered an astronomical rise while he’d served under them. “Well, I’ll wait to read these files before I give you my professional opinion on whether or not it’s wise to pursue it.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll try to contain myself until then. ’Course, chances are you’ll be in itty bitty pieces and not worth the price of the bag they stuff you in and all my anxiety will be for nothin’.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Beau laced his fingers together, all trace of humor gone from his voice now. “You gettin’ a clear enough picture here? This ain’t your fight, man.”

Finch appraised him. “They killed my little brother.”

Beau unclasped his large hands and joined them again around the glass of OJ, then brought it to his lips. After a small sip, he lowered it and studied Finch.

“I know they did, and I’m sorry as hell, but—”

“Save it.”

“It’s true.”

“I know it’s true, but I don’t want to hear it. Not from you.” Finch sighed heavily, his fingers caressing the flap of the now empty envelope. “It’s not about bringing him back.”

“Then what is it about? You even know? This here’s a little more than punchin’ out the bullies who been pickin’ on your brother, man. You go down there with your head all muddied up, you ain’t comin’ back in one piece. Or if you do come back alive, you got blood on your hands and you’re lookin’ at hard time. Life, man.”

“If I get caught.”

Beau shook his head. “Prison ain’t the only kinda life sentence. You know that well as I do.”

At the bar, Frat Boy began to argue with himself. The barman told him to keep it down. The gray-haired woman chuckled. Finch decided to use to distraction. “You want a drink?”

Beau nodded at his OJ. “Got one.”

“I meant a real drink.”

“Naw. I ain’t touched it since I got back. Don’t need any help gettin’ fucked up these days. Nice way to change the subject though.”

“There isn’t a whole lot to talk about.”

“You’re shittin’ me, right?”

Finch met his stare. “You know how it goes, Beau. If by some miracle someone decides to look into this, to entertain the possibility that they were wrong about the doctor, and they find out they pinned it on the wrong guy, what happens next?”

“They go after the right guys, and if they catch ’em, they go to jail for a very long time.”

“Exactly: if they catch them. And say they do, say they go to jail, those bastards will probably end up with better lives than they have now. Three square meals a day, rest and exercise, TV—”

“Man, you ain’t never been in one of those shitholes, have you?”

“That’s not the point—”

Again Beau cut him off. “Sure it is. Some of the joints we got over here make Abu Ghraib look like the Waldorf Astoria. A bunch of murderin’ rednecks ain’t gonna have any kind of peace in no jail, man, not after what they did.”

“It’s not enough,” Finch said.

“So what if you kill these motherfuckers and it still ain’t enough. What then?”

“It won’t come to that.”

Beau sat back and sighed. “Whole lotta folks said that same thing before they went to the desert, Finch. All of us said it, and if we weren’t sayin’ it we were thinkin’ it. ‘Not gonna happen to me, man.’ Remember?”

Finch glanced at the bar to avoid the weight of the other man’s gaze. When at last he looked back, Beau had drained his drink and was rising.

“Danny was a good kid,” Beau told him. “A real good kid. Had his head screwed on right.”

Finch nodded his agreement.

Beau stepped out, and took one last look around the bar. “Do yourself a favor though, and don’t use him as an excuse to let loose some of that hate the desert put into you. We saw some real cruel shit over there, and what’s happened here ain’t a whole lot better, but you in danger of dyin’ or spendin’ the rest of your life behind bars or lookin’ for targets if you go through with it.”

Finch started to protest, but Beau raised a hand to silence him.

“I put some other stuff in that file you might want to take a look out before you go headin’ off playin’ Rambo. Read it. See what you think. It ain’t subtle, but hey…you know me. I’ll be down at Rita’s on Third this Sunday after eight. It’s my cousin Kevin’s 21st birthday. We’re throwin’ a little shindig. You ain’t invited because if I see you there I’ll know you’re gonna see this thing through to the end.”

“And if I can’t resist the urge to gatecrash?”

“Then I guess because it’s you and I don’t want to be lookin’ at your ass cut up on the main evenin’ news, I’ll help you, whatever you need. But just so you know: I’ll be hopin’ for a night of family and friends, not vigilantes. Catch you later.”

He walked away, and all faces present turned to watch him go. The gray-haired woman offered him a smile and he returned it, then eased himself out into the street. The door swung shut behind him.

On some level, Finch knew Beau was right, about everything. There were risks here he hadn’t considered, repercussions he couldn’t yet see. But none of it mattered. Reason had no hand in what was going to happen. Rage dictated it all, and no amount of good sense or logical argument was going to change his plans.

“See you Sunday,” he said quietly and turned his attention back to the file.

-18-

“Claire, there’s someone here to see you.”

Sitting with her back against the headboard, legs folded beneath her, Claire looked up from the photo album. Her face was damp from tears and now she rubbed at it as her mother watched from the doorway.

“I can tell him to go away if you’re not up to it.”

Claire shook her head. It had been almost two weeks since she’d seen anyone outside of Kara and her mother, and as much as she loved them for what they were trying to do, she was beginning to feel suffocated by their constant worry. They were treating her as if she’d turned to fragile glass, as if the slightest touch might shatter her. She knew it was silly and selfish to expect anything different from them, or anyone else after what she’d gone through, and yet she yearned for normality, no matter how forced, longed to come downstairs and not have them look at her like a wounded dog that had just limped into the house. In their faces she saw empathy and a reflection of her own pain. In their eyes, she saw a victim, and nothing more.

“Who is it?”

“Ted Craddick.”

Claire’s breathing slowed. Her yearning to see a face outside of her family’s own faded a little upon hearing the name of her dead friend’s father. She had spent the past hour or so torturing herself by looking through her photo albums at countless pictures not marred by awareness of death, nothing but sunshine and smiles, eyes bright with the promise of the future. There had even been a few of Ted, his bald head catching the summer sun as he stood on the porch of the house he’d shared with his son and Stu’s younger sister Sally, arms around them both, all of them grinning, Sally somewhat self-consciously as she tried to draw her lips down enough to conceal her new braces. In another, Daniel and Stu mugged for the camera, Claire and Katy looking on in faux disapproval. In the background, Ted had his forefingers in his mouth, stretching his lips wide in a comical grimace, his tongue lolling. There were others, but already Claire couldn’t recall which of them she’d seen him in. Ted Craddick had always been a peripheral figure in her life. She had spoken to him occasionally, but it had never graduated beyond idle conversation and pleasantries.

Hi Mr. Craddick.

Hi Claire. Stu’s upstairs with Katy. And please, call me Ted.

Okay… Ted. Thanks.

Of course she had never called him “Ted” outside of those few occasions when he requested she do so, and even then it had felt awkward.

“Tell him come up,” she told her mother, who lingered, uncertain.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

“He’ll have questions.”

“I know,” Claire replied. “Tell him come up.”

With a final dubious glance, her mother disappeared from the doorway. Claire listened to her heels clacking on the stairsteps, heard the reverent mutter of voices, then the front door closing. While she waited, Claire shut the photo album and slid it beneath her pillow. Her joints still ached in protest with every move, but it was not enough to bother her. It was what they represented that bothered her. Every twinge, every dull throb of discomfort jerked loose another unpleasant memory, and made her skin crawl at the thought of what she had endured.

Stop it, she told herself. You can’t think like that. You can’t. Not if you ever want to get better.

Better. She almost laughed at the thought, but was interrupted by movement in the doorway. It was her mother again, moving as if sound itself might harm her daughter.

“Claire?”

Her mother stepped aside, and Ted Craddick entered the room. Claire felt a jolt. She had expected a lesser version of the man in the pictures, but nothing like this. It was as if she was seeing his reflection, leached of color in a dark window. His clothes looked two sizes too large for his sagging frame, the gut that had always forced his shirts to stretch to accommodate it now gone, his jeans hanging loose on his hips. The smiling face from the photographs was drawn down like a theater mask of sadness, his green eyes lost in puffy sockets. The man carried about him an air of desperation, as if he had come here not for consolation, or empathy, but to be told that there had been a terrible mistake, and that only Claire could confirm it. He looked like he wanted to be told Stu was alive and well and due home at any second, that it had all been a misunderstanding.

“Hi Mr. Craddick,” Claire said, sliding from the bed and coming to him. They hugged awkwardly, death and mutual suffering not enough to force a connection where there had never been one. His body felt like a live wire, humming beneath the skin. She released him and stepped back, then gestured for him to join her on the bed, where she sat, hands folded in her lap. He eased himself down with some effort and tried to smile. It was a wretched thing to behold.

“Thanks for agreeing to see me,” he said.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” Claire told him. “I’m sorry about Stu. He was one of my best friends, and I miss him.”

Ted nodded slowly, and looked up. Claire’s mother offered him a weak smile and then moved away from the door, leaving them alone. Claire didn’t hear her descending the stairs, and knew she was still out there on the landing, listening.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Ted said, staring down at his hands. “When the news first broke, we thought all of you…” He frowned. “Why did they do this?”

“I don’t know,” Claire said truthfully. She had asked herself that same question many times over the past few weeks, and no answers had presented themselves.

“I mean… you were just kids. Why would anyone want to hurt you like that?”

“We were in the wrong place,” Claire said softly. “We crossed the wrong people.” ‘Crossed’ wasn’t exactly the right word though and it felt wrong to say it. They hadn’t crossed anyone. They’d been minding their own business when Stu and Daniel had stopped walking, their eyes on the woods that ran along the road on both sides. Someone had been moving in there, a ragged looking shape, moving closer as they watched. If this guy’s got no teeth and a banjo, I’m running. Try to keep up, Stu had joked.

Stu, shut up, Katy had told him, with just the slightest quaver in her voice, and then all of them had frozen as the sound of laughter cut through the trees, not from the shape before them, but from somewhere in the woods behind them.

Stu, a man’s voice had said mockingly.

They turned as one, and there were children there, grubby, mean-looking kids standing in the road behind them.

Hey there, Katy had said, trying to be her usual pleasant self.

One of the children, the closest one to her, answered by carving an arc through the air with a wickedly sharp looking blade they hadn’t realized up until that moment he’d been holding. Katy had said, “Oh,” and looked down at herself. A wide slit had opened in her right leg just above the knee, dark blood already pooling in the wound. Before the attack had fully registered, a spike was driven through her skull.

Claire shook off the memory, aware that Ted was looking at her.

“My sister,” Ted said, pausing a moment to swallow. “She’s in the hospital.”

“Is she okay?”

He shook his head. “She and Stu were real close. Up until a few years ago, y’know, until Stu got too cool for it, they used to go horse riding together. She has a little ranch up in Delaware. When she heard what had happened, she shut herself up in her house. I dropped by yesterday and found the back door open. She was upstairs, out cold, an empty bottle of Scotch and a pill bottle beside her. She’d tried to kill herself.”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry.” A stone dropped in a pond, Claire thought, forever making ripples. And it would never stop. There was no bank for it to break against. Instead, like a shockwave, it would continue on until there was no one left to feel it.

“She’s a good girl, Yvonne,” Ted told her, picking at a patch of raw sore-looking skin under his thumbnail. “She loved Stu.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“Doctors say she’ll be fine. I’m thinking maybe I should get her and Sally away for a while. Maybe take them on a cruise.”

“That’d be nice.”

“Yeah.”

Claire smiled, but wondered if Ted knew the distraction didn’t exist that was powerful enough to stop them from feeling what they’d lost. She guessed he did, that he was grasping at straws in an effort not to cave in on himself, and lose all he had left in the process. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying.

“How is Sally?”

He shrugged. “Holding up, best as she can I suppose. Worst thing is, she keeps coming to me to tell her everything’s going to be all right, or to make sense for her of what happened, and I can’t seem to find the words. Everything sounds…forced, as if I’m lying to her. But I’m not, you know? I just don’t know what to say.”

Claire did know. It was exactly what she was doing now with the father of her dead friend.

“There isn’t much you can say,” she said. “I still, even with everything that’s happened, have trouble believing it.”

Ted looked at her for so long she had to resist the urge to stand and busy herself with anything that would get her out from under his gaze. At length, he sighed. “I’m sorry for what they did to you.”

In that moment Claire knew how Sally Craddick had felt, seeking comfort from her father only to suspect his words were empty. There was no emotion in his voice, and she wondered just how much this man hated her for coming back alive when his son had died a horrible death.

His hand found hers and his skin was cold. “Tell me,” he said.

She looked at him, trying to read his will in the lines on his sallow face.

“Tell me how he died. Tell me what they did to my boy.”

Images passed through Claire’s mind, some of them taken from the photographs, others from the equally vivid vault of memory. She saw Stu standing on a jetty with Katy, him in black swim trunks, her in a cute peach-colored bikini, both of them wearing sunglasses as they posed, their skin beaded with water, hair wet from swimming. Then Stu drunk at the bar at the hotel in Sandestin, chatting up the barmaid, who looked completely uninterested, Katy sitting at a table with Claire and Daniel, all of them watching. Think I should tell her he has a tiny dick? Katy had said, and they’d laughed, but after several shots of tequila, she hadn’t been able to disguise the hurt in her voice. Thank Christ for college next year, she’d added, raising her glass. No more men with the maturity of a dragonfly. Daniel had frowned at her, puzzled by the analogy, then laughed so hard he’d almost choked on his beer. They all had, the sound of it enough to draw Stu back from the bar. What’s the joke? he’d asked, prepared to join in if he deemed it worthy. But then Katy’s smile had vanished as she’d looked away and told him, You are.

“He tried to protect us,” Claire told Stu’s father. “He tried to fight them off.”

This was a lie, but a necessary one. The truth would almost certainly destroy him.

“That’s my boy,” Ted said with pride, his eyes watering.

Claire smiled. He ran, she thought. He ran and left us there. Left Katy dead. Left Daniel and me to fight them on our own. He ran, and he might have made it if one of them hadn’t been waiting for him in the woods.

“Did he… was it quick?”

“I don’t know. They took us to different rooms, sheds, away from each other.” But I saw them dragging him in, and couldn’t see his face for all the blood.

Ted nodded gravely. “He was a brave boy, my son. I taught him to be a fighter. Told him he’d need to be, the way this world has gone.”

Claire squeezed his hand. “He did all he could for us.”

“Have you spoken to the other parents?”

“No. Not yet.” The thought of it turned her stomach, and after this encounter, she decided she might not.

“They’ll want to see you. They’ll want to know what you know about what happened.”

“Of course.” But she knew none of them would want to know that, not ever. Not if they wanted the truth. She could not give them the peace they sought unless she lied to them as she had lied to Ted, because the end, what she’d seen of it, had not been pretty, or dignified or heroic, and that wasn’t what they wanted to hear. The deaths of their children had been horrendous, violent, and messy.

“Did he say anything?” Ted asked.

“What?”

“Stu. Did he say anything before…?” He shook his head. A tear ran down his unshaven cheek.

“He was happy,” she said. “He was with Katy, and they were in love.”

This sounded utterly false, but Ted smiled slightly. “Good. That’s good. I liked Katy. She was a nice girl.”

“Yes she was.” Claire felt her throat constrict as the memories assailed her. How many times had Katy sat on this very bed with her, discussing their ambitions, their fears, laughing like idiots over something that might not have been that funny until Katy let loose her strange oddly manlike laugh, which would set Claire off every time she heard it? She recalled the night Katy had slept in the bed with her, wracked by sobs as she confessed that she had missed her period and was deathly afraid she was pregnant. If I am, she’d moaned, it wont be Stu’s. We haven’t slept together in over four months. Claire had held her, told her it would be all right, and it had been. Katy wasn’t pregnant. Six months later she would say those same words as she held her on the road to Elkwood, her friend’s blood pooling around her. Except it hadn’t been all right, not then, and now Katy was dead, her body cut up into pieces and scattered in poor Doctor Wellman’s basement.

“I think I need to move,” Ted said. “I think I need to get out of this town.”

Claire said nothing. Had Stu died at home, moving away from the scene and the awful memories they conjured up might not be such a bad idea. But Stu had been murdered miles away from there, in some place he’d never been before, a place Ted Craddick had never, and likely never would, see with his own eyes. The worst of the pain would be inside Ted’s own mind, and there was no moving away from that. The agony would follow him no matter where he went.

Abruptly he rose, releasing her hand. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said again. “And I’m sorry about what happened to you, and my boy, and your friends. It’s not right.” He lowered his gaze to the floor. “It’s not right what happened to you.” His winced as if the tears that were now flowing freely scalded him. Then his face relaxed and he tried to smile. “He never said anything but good things about you,” he told her and Claire guessed maybe that was Ted’s own untruth. She and Stu had had their share of run-ins, the unavoidable result of personalities too dissimilar to ever fully jibe. They’d both been stubborn, unwilling to back down, a stalemate seldom helped by Claire’s protectiveness toward Katy, who Stu had frequently hurt, whether he meant to or not.

“I loved him,” she told his father. “They were my life.”

She half-expected him to say, “A life you still have,” and spit on the floor as he stormed out, but instead he nodded, and put a hand on the door. He was almost in the hall before he turned, looking more troubled than she’d yet seen him. “Has Danny’s brother been to see you?”

“No.”

“He will,” Ted told her. “He’s calling on all the parents, and he mentioned wanting to see you too.”

“Why?”

A curious look passed over the man’s face. It was almost relief. “It’s better if he explains it to you himself.”

Any further questions she might have asked died in her mouth as he exited the room. She heard him talking to her mother as she escorted him downstairs, then he was gone, and once more the house was quiet.

In the photo album, beside a picture of Daniel in his football uniform, was a scrap of yellow notepaper riddled with creases. On it was written his cell phone number and beneath that, his barely legible scrawl tangled into the words “Call Me!”

Claire smiled and ran a finger over the clear plastic sheet holding it in place beside the photograph. In her old life, the happy, unthreatening one she’d known before the men had taken it from her, she’d been a packrat. There were no empty spaces in her room, and her closet was filled with old boxes, each of them containing memories and keepsakes from her years spent wandering through the minefield of teenage life. There were rolled up posters of football games, victories made memorable by the mischief perpetrated later beyond the sidelines. There were ticket stubs and receipts, kept to remind her of special moments with old boyfriends, most of whom she still cared for in some small way, but seldom thought about anymore. Pennants and flyers, old high school and even middle school notebooks, branded with scribbles of trivial significance now, but which had had monumental import back then; love letters from nervous young boys on the threshold of puberty; report cards which had earned her $50 a piece from her father, allowing her to save up and be the first of her group of friends to own a car; the police report of the drunk-driving incident that had seen that car totaled; video cassettes of long gone birthdays and Christmases her mother had wanted to throw away after her father died, too pained by the memory of his prominent role in them; brochures from vacations with her family, getaways with Daniel and her friends; the audio CD Daniel had given her of love songs for Valentine’s day. She hadn’t cared for most of the songs, but had appreciated the sentiment.

And of course, there were the photo albums.

She looked at the slip of paper bearing Daniel’s cell phone number and felt a tightening in her throat.

Then she thought of Muriel Hynes, and though her face was hard to recall, Claire remembered she’d been a mousy, shy girl with glasses, lank brown hair, and a prominent overbite. She remembered feeling sorry for the girl, then being ashamed that she had. It was not her place to pity anyone, and by doing so was subconsciously assuming herself on a higher position on the social ladder. But as wrong as it felt to think it, she realized it was true. Claire had always been popular, blessed (and often cursed) with long blonde hair, generous breasts, and a trim figure. It had made her passage through high school much easier for the most part, despite the disdain her appearance and the company she kept instilled in the other cliques. The Goths had viewed her as a stuck-up rich girl, though she’d been neither. The art students and rockers had sneered at her as if though one day she might provide them inspiration for their work, they wouldn’t be seen dead with her. The “nerds” worshipped but never dared approach her, conscious of their appearance and the stigma long-associated with the intelligent. Among them had wandered the painfully demure Muriel Hynes, but only for one semester. By the next, she’d already been interred in Oak Grove Cemetery after slashing her wrists in the bathtub. She’d been dead for over four hours before her father kicked in the door and found her.

Claire looked down at her own wrists, at the angry red lines carved into the flesh, and thought of Muriel, of the picture hanging in the hall at school. The girl in the portrait was smiling, but only just, as close to an imitation of the Mona Lisa as Claire had ever seen. In that moment, forever frozen in time, it seemed as if Muriel had been privy to knowledge that the Goths, for all their posturing and claims to the contrary, didn’t know: Living is hard; Death is easy. And there are no answers on either side.

The night of Muriel’s funeral, Claire had booted up her computer, logged on to the Internet and checked her old email folder until she found what she was looking for. It was the one and only communication she’d ever had from the dead girl. Eight weeks before her suicide, the girl had written to Claire with one odd simple message: “I like ur hair.” Confused, Claire hadn’t written back, but that night, as she reread those four words in an attempt to derive some greater meaning from them, some hidden significance that might help her understand why Muriel had taken her life, she wished she had. And then a strange and not entirely pleasant thought had occurred to her as she looked from the message to the girl’s email address.

What if I answer now?

And even more unsettling: What if she replies?

The uneasiness these thoughts summoned had been enough to make her shut down the computer in a hurry.

Now, looking at the picture of Daniel, and the number scrawled on that small piece of paper—Call Me!—it came to her again.

What if I called?

What if he answered?

She struggled to remember what had become of Daniel’s cell phone during the attack. Panic had blinded her, of course. She’d only been aware of the impossibility of what was happening, sure, right up until Katy was stabbed, that it had all been some kind of sick joke. She did not recall seeing Daniel reach into his pocket for his phone, and later, did not see their attackers take it.

But she’d heard it ringing.

In her prison, as the strength tried to leave her, consciousness flickering like a candle flame in a draft, she’d been pulled back into the cold horror of her circumstances by the distant sound of a computer circuit’s attempt to replicate Mozart’s “Symphony Number 9”—the familiar sound of Daniel’s phone as someone tried to call him. Then his agonized scream had drowned it out.

Claire peeled the protective plastic away from the page of the photo album, and gently removed the yellow slip of paper. She held it in her trembling hands for a moment, then looked at the photograph of her dead boyfriend.

I loved you, she said. Did you love me?

She had only memories from which to draw an answer, but even they betrayed her, for Daniel had never told her he’d loved her, and so she would never know.

Unless she asked.

She turned her head.

The phone, girly pink like the rest of the room, sat on her nightstand, silent.

Don’t be silly, she cautioned herself. This is madness. It won’t do anything but aggravate the pain. She smiled grimly at that. She could not imagine a pain worse than this, no suffering worse than that of the sole survivor.

She pushed the photo album aside, eased herself across the bed, and picked up the phone, then set the number beside it, under the tasseled pink lampshade.

Her heart began to race.

What am I doing?

Carefully, breath held, she dialed.

The digits, registering as dull beeps in her ear.

Silence. The faint hum of the connection racing through space, running through wires. Then silence again. Time seemed to stretch interminably.

Stop now while you still—

A crackle, a click…

Then the connection was made.

Claire’s stomach contracted. She thought she was going to be sick. Bile filled her mouth as panic seized her.

Stop this. Stop this now, oh Jesus what am I doing?

Beep beep. Silence.

Beep beep. Silence.

She imagined the sound of Mozart, playing his music with none of the beauty or fervor or passion it had been written to convey.

She imagined hearing it out there in the night, a thousand miles away and yet still audible, carried to her by her desperate need to hear it, to know her boyfriend was alive and would answer at any moment.

Beep beep. Silence.

Then Kara at the door, gently easing it open, her look of concern quickly turning to curiosity as she stepped inside.

“Claire?”

No. Go away.

Beep beep. Silence.

“Claire? Who are you calling?”

“No one. I’ll…”

Kara approached her, slowly, but urgently.

It will ring out, Claire knew. I’ll hear his voice on the message service and it will kill me.

But what she heard was: Beep beep. Click.

She felt every hair on her body rise, began to tremble uncontrollably.

Kara: “What’s wrong?”

From the phone, silence, but it was not dead, not empty.

Someone had answered.

Someone was listening.

-19-

Despite the fact that he was in his late fifties and had recently buried his only daughter, the man who answered the door was well dressed and healthy looking. He wore a light blue shirt with the top button unfastened, and a pair of dark pants, the creases sharp above a freshly polished pair of shoes. His dark hair had been recently barbered, and was streaked with gray, which made him look distinguished rather than old.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Mr. Kaplan?”

A curt nod. “Who are you?” He looked slightly annoyed as he appraised the man on his stoop, as if Finch had pulled him away from an important business meeting or a football game.

“My name is Thomas Finch.”

“Finch?”

“Daniel’s brother.”

Anyone who believed the theory that death forged a bond between those left to grieve had obviously never met John Kaplan. With a sigh he stepped back into the hall. “I suppose you want to come in?”

“I won’t take up too much of your time,” Finch said and entered the house.

Everything about the Kaplans spoke of money: from the gleaming silver Mercedes in the driveway and Tudor house set at the end of a long winding flower-bordered drive, itself a half-mile from the main road, to the sprawling yards, which looked vigilantly maintained, as if Kaplan feared his competitors would take the first trace of overgrowth as a sign of weakness. And then of course, there was John Kaplan himself. As he led him through a short, oak-paneled hallway with polished floors, Finch detected an air of intolerance about the man, as if he reserved his interest only for people who could benefit him or his bank account. He wondered if what he had come to say might change that, but then for a man supposed to be grieving, Kaplan looked awfully composed.

The hall ended and opened out into a large foyer stuffed to bursting with vegetation. Planters hung on chains hung from the vaulted ceiling, spidery green legs trailing down to meet the explosion of growth from what looked like a variety of wild and frenzied shrubs anchored in a huge rectangular marble tomb. Tall thin plants with glossy spade-shaped leaves and bamboo sticks lashed to their stems stood guard in the corners, struggling upward to where a segmented glass window threw squares of light against the wall.

Kaplan didn’t spare the jungle a glance as he turned left into another narrow hall. Finch followed close behind.

“Take a seat,” John said, as they entered a small but impressive lounge. In here sat a brown leather armchair, positioned at a right angle to a matching leather couch, as if the Kaplan’s interior decorator had aspirations of becoming a psychiatrist, or specialized in decorating for them. Sports and hunting magazines sat in a tidy pile atop a glass coffee table. The walls were lined with oak bookshelves, but Finch didn’t bother to scan the titles. He wasn’t much of a reader, and doubted anything he’d see there would be of interest.

“You’ll have a drink,” Kaplan said, and although it sounded more like a statement of fact than a request, Finch nodded and took a seat on the couch. The cushions yielded beneath him with a soft hiss. The lounge smelled faintly of cigar smoke.

“Scotch?”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

As Kaplan poured the drink from a crystal decanter into two smoked glass tumblers, Finch wondered how rehearsed and tired this whole practice was for the guy. How many people interested or connected in some way to the murders had stopped by here to console, or seek comfort in a kindred spirit over the past couple of months? Finch envisioned Kaplan leading the latter kind to this room, perhaps with the intent to numb them enough with alcohol that they’d be left with the false impression that he had somehow eased their pain for a time.

Kaplan set Finch’s drink down on the coffee table, then took a seat in the armchair. He sighed and took a sizable draw from his glass before studying his guest. “So, Mr. Finch. What can I do for you?”

Finch sat forward and clasped his hands. “I’m here to talk about what happened to the kids. To my brother, and your daughter, and their friends.”

“Why?”

“Because we need to.”

“I disagree.”

“That so?”

“It is.”

“Well if it’s all the same—”

Kaplan sat back and crossed his legs. He held up his glass, examining its contents as if it was something he had never seen before. “Mr. Finch—”

“Thomas.”

“All right, Thomas. It’s not my intent to be rude—though you’d be far from the first person to leave this house with such an impression of me—but I’m a busy man. If you’ve come here to reminisce about how great our kids were and how they had such a good time together, and to tell me as if it’s breaking news how goddamned awful it was what happened to them, I’m afraid all I can say is amen to it all and see you out. Does that seem cold?”

Finch set down his drink. “Until I can see my breath, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Kaplan smiled tightly. “I have to meet with my attorney at noon, Thomas,” he said, making the name sound like punctuation, “so the sooner you cut to the chase, the better your chance of a less terse reception.”

“I’m here to tell you my plans, so you know what they are, and to hear what you think. Maybe even to get your blessing.”

“Almost sounds like your asking for my daughter’s hand,” Kaplan said. “But as you know, I’m all out of those. My wife will be coming on the market soon though, if you’re interested.”

That explains the attorney, Finch thought, his estimation of Kaplan dropping the longer he listened to the man speak. There was no emotion in his voice, none at all. Even the words he chose—I’m all out of those—suggested a man who either wasn’t too torn up about his daughter’s death, or wasn’t yet fully aware of it, his mind protected from the horror by an impenetrable wall of shock. But no, Finch decided. This didn’t look like shock. The man appeared fully in control, and eerily calm.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Finch said.

“Don’t be,” Kaplan replied with a dismissive wave of his hand. “This has made an addict out of her. If she’s not popping Valium, she’s out fucking the gardener. This has been a long time coming. At least something good came of Katy’s death.”

Finch frowned, embarrassed by the man’s candor, and quickly scooped up his drink.

“See your breath yet?” Kaplan asked, amused.

Finch ignored him.

“My wife and I haven’t loved each other in over ten years. In all that time she stayed with me for my money, fully aware that if we divorced she’d stand to get very rich very quickly and have her freedom on top of it. I stayed with her for Katy. But now Katy’s gone, and I can afford to lose millions.”

“Why?”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t yet know what it’s like to have the person you swore to love until the end of your days become your enemy overnight, to watch them with other men as they plot to destroy you. In my line of work, you expect to come up against predators and backstabbers every single day. But you expect to leave it there when you come home. Instead, it becomes everything. You get paranoid and you seek out the only thing you’ve got left. For me, that was my Katy. She resisted every effort Linda made to corrupt her. She stayed loyal to me, and I loved her for that.”

He leaned forward and put down his drink. “Now she’s gone, so what else is there to lose? Money? I can afford to lose it if it means getting that bitch out of my life. The only reason to keep this pretense, this sham, going is dead and buried.”

“And what about you?”

He seemed surprised by the question, but considered it. After a moment he sighed. When he sat back again, the cuffs of his pants rode up a little and Finch noticed something odd. Despite the man’s apparently flawless dress and perfectly manicured appearance, his socks didn’t match. It seemed significant somehow, as if he was being shown the man’s true nature, a glimpse behind the facade at the frightened and slowly crumbling creature that cowered behind the armor.

“I’ll do what I always do,” Kaplan replied. “Persevere.”

Finch imagined this man at night, alone and weeping, his eyes bloodshot from a cocktail of barbiturates and alcohol as he looked down at a picture of his daughter. Even when he’d professed his love for Katy, his voice had retained the same lack of emotion that seemed to characterize him, but Finch was no longer so sure that’s who he really was. The other parents he’d met had all displayed the expected pallor and vulnerability that death leaves in its wake, and he had recognized it as an accurate reflection of his own, but though Kaplan stood out in his apparent callousness and calm, Finch guessed that, even though it might take a year, or ten years, sooner or later the grief would claim him, if it hadn’t already. And the longer he looked, the more he saw in Kaplan’s eyes the defiance, the struggle to remain standing as currents of suffering tried to sweep his legs out from under him.

“So, what’s your plan?” he asked Finch, after a moment of contemplating something beyond the arched window at the far side of the room.

Finch drained his glass. “I’m not letting it go,” he said. “What they did to the kids. I’m not letting it die.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

“What are you going to do?”

Finch told him.

Afterward, Kaplan did not offer to see him out, so Finch left him sitting in a chair that suddenly seemed bigger, as if it had gorged itself on the man’s restrained emotions, and made his way out. Before he exited the lounge, however, Kaplan mumbled something.

Finch hesitated at the doorway and looked back at him. “What?”

“I said you let me know if you need anything.” Then he added, “My vampire bride hasn’t drained me yet. I still have money.”

Finch nodded. And no amount of it is going to buy you back what you’ve lost, he thought, but said, “Thank you,” and left.

As he sat into his car, his cell phone chirped, startling him. He hated the goddamn things and had successfully avoided them all his life, but had realized the need to have one almost as soon as he’d spoken to Beau about the plan. With a sigh, he removed his hand from the car keys, reached into his inside pocket and grabbed the phone, fully expecting to see Beau’s name and number displayed on the small rectangular LCD screen as he flipped it open.

But it wasn’t Beau calling, and Finch felt himself go numb, a not entirely unpleasant tingling capering through him as he studied with feverish interest and a modicum of disbelief the name that flashed on the display.

Gray letters against glowing green.

He told himself to be calm, just be cool hoss, and pressed the small round button to answer the call.

“Hey you,” he said, immediately wincing at how forced the casual tone had sounded.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Kara asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know goddamn well what I mean. I saw you outside our house the other day. Are you stalking me or something?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then what were you doing there?”

Excuses were appallingly slow to present themselves, so he opted for the truth. “I wanted to see Claire.”

“Why?”

“To see what they’d done to her. To see how she looked.”

“Who are they?”

“The men who did this to her.”

Her sigh sounded like thunder in his ear. “There is no they, Finch. The man who did this to her is dead and buried. Don’t you dare try to make us believe anything different.”

“Who said I was going to?”

She laughed dryly. “Your door-to-door conspiracy meetings. Ted Craddick was here last night and we heard all about your little crusade.”

Finch nodded to himself. He was not at all put out by this, had expected it in fact, and welcomed the word spreading among the families as a means of giving everyone a heads up, so his visits would not come as a cold hard slap across the face when they already had enough to worry about. He hadn’t relished the thought of dispelling the illusion the police had given them, but so far they had greeted the revelation with grim resignation rather than rage. Though they were of course eager to see the true culprits held responsible for the murders, the fact remained that their children were still gone, and no amount of justice would ever return them. There were no hysterics, only silent assent at what he had proposed, or as in Kaplan’s case, offers of financing.

It would work as long as no one decided the police needed to be let in on things. This was his concern now. That Kara had no love for him was painfully obvious, so she might have no bones about calling the cops to thwart him if it meant shielding her sister from further trauma. If nothing else, he had to appeal to the woman he’d known and hoped was still there beneath the hard shell she’d developed in the years since leaving him.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re not a fool. We both know that. And I’m no fool either, so don’t pretend Claire hasn’t talked to you about what happened to her down there. As soon as she was able she told the Sheriff they’d blamed the wrong man, that the doctor tried to help her get away from a bunch of lunatics. They didn’t listen to her. I guess they were afraid after all their bluster and mutual glad-handing they’d look like morons. I mean, they’d managed to pin a bunch of unsolved murders on a guy who wasn’t in a position to object, right? They took the easy route, and with no one left alive to corroborate her story, they just baby-talked Claire until she was out of their way. What about forensics? Did you see any reports? Me neither. The cops say anything about DNA extracted from the scene, or Claire’s body? No. Someone did a thorough job of tidying things up. Case closed and the circle-jerk goes on. ”

Kara was silent, which he took as a positive sign, but quickly continued just to be safe.

“A friend of mine is an investigator, sort of, and he did some digging for me. We found reports of people going missing down in Elkwood and the surrounding area going back twenty, thirty years. That was the mistake the police made. In their statements to the media they played up the part about Doctor Wellman going crazy and cutting people to bits because his wife died a sad and painful death.”

“So?”

“So his wife died in ’92. If he wigged out and went postal after her death, who snatched all those people for the twenty-odd years before that?”

“That was just a theory,” Kara said. “Who’s to say he wasn’t dabbling in a little psychotic surgery from the moment he got his degree? You said he couldn’t speak for himself now that he’s dead, and you’re right. He can’t protest his innocence, but he can’t confess his guilt either. So for all you know, maybe they did get the right man. Maybe that town has been harboring The Demon Barber of Fleet Street for thirty years. We don’t know, and you sure as hell don’t either. ”

“Wrong.”

“Oh?”

“What did Claire tell you?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“How the hell do you know? Were you there?”

“No. I wasn’t. But someone else was.”

She fell silent, but he could hear her breathing. Then she said, “Who?”

“There was a kid. The one who brought Claire to the hospital. He took off as soon as the orderlies tried to talk to him. I called them, got a description, then called the Sheriff down in Elkwood. The kid’s name is Pete Lowell. His father died the same night all this went down. Suicide apparently, and it happened shortly after he sent his boy off to Wellman’s. So explain to me why a father would send his son off to the town lunatic and then kill himself.”

He could hear the shrug in her voice. “Guilt? Maybe he wanted to kill them both but didn’t have the heart to pull the trigger on his boy, so sent him to—”

“C’mon, Kara,” he interrupted. “You don’t buy that shit, do you? If you’re going to kill yourself and you want your kid to die too, are you telling me that instead of giving him sleeping pills or something quick and quiet, you send him off to be tortured and chopped to pieces by a homicidal maniac? You’re reaching and you know it.”

“Reach—” She scoffed. “Reaching for what, Finch? This is a closed case. You can spin all the theories you want and it won’t change what happened down there.”

He frowned. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t matter.”

He had his mouth open, ready to tell her what he thought of that, especially coming from someone whose sibling had survived, but she continued as if aware of how he would take what she’d said.

“It doesn’t matter because what happened happened. Claire was raped and beaten and damn near killed. She won’t ever be the same girl she was before. You lost Danny, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that. I loved him; you know I did. But he’s gone, Finch. He’s gone and you have to let this go. It doesn’t matter if that doctor did this to them, or some bunch of carnival freaks. Nothing will change the fact that it happened, and now its over.”

Now it’s over. Abruptly, Finch realized he didn’t know who he was talking to, didn’t recognize this woman as anyone he had ever known. He had fully expected a change from the If You’re Going To Hell, I’m Ridin’ Shotgun girl he’d loved, still loved, but this…this was like talking to a stranger.

“Tell me what Claire said,” he told her, his voice flat, and cold.

“No.”

“I have a right to know.”

“She hasn’t told me anything.”

“You’re lying. Kara, I—”

“I don’t want you coming by here again, Finch. I mean it. If I see your car outside or your face at our door, I’ll call the cops and let them in on your little game plan, understand?”

He said nothing for a moment, felt the anger colonize him. He reached up a hand and grabbed the steering wheel until his knuckles were white as bone.

“Look…just listen to me, okay? I need your help with this, if only to let me see her, just to talk, that’s all, just to—”

“Stay away from here. I’m sorry about Danny, you have to believe that. But nothing can come of this but more hurt and grief and we can’t take any more of that. We can’t, Finch, so don’t bring it down on us.”

“The Merrill family,” he said, as he let his gaze rove over the austere facade of the Kaplan house, and dropped his hand to the keys.

“Goodbye, Finch.”

“That’s their name. Merrill. That’s who did this to Claire, and Danny, and Katy, and Stu. That’s who—”

A drone in his ear told him she’d hung up.

“—hurt us,” he finished, then snapped the phone shut so hard it sounded like a bone breaking.

Teeth clenched, he started the car.

-20-

Despite what the boy had said earlier, after talking long into the night, Louise convinced him to stay. The later it got, the less tolerant Wayne seemed to grow. Aware that she had yet to tell him about getting fired from her job, she advised him to go to bed with a promise to follow soon after. Then she cleared the coffee table of their cups and trash and dragged it to the far wall, exposing the stained narrow space of carpet between the sofa and the TV.

All the while, Pete stared at her.

Louise sighed. “I know you’re hurtin’,” she told him. “But I’m not sure this is such a good idea. Do you know how dangerous this is? You’re just a boy. And what if you’re wrong and it really was the doctor? You might just end up hurtin’ innocent folk.”

“It weren’t the doctor,” he replied. “It weren’t. That much I know for sure.”

She shook her head. “Why not just go to the police? Tell them to talk to the girl. Surely if you’re right, she can tell them what she knows and back you up.”

“I’m guessin’ she don’t remember much, not after what they did to her. I’m guessin’ her mind didn’t let her see all of what happened, so she’d be protected, like when you have a real bad dream but soon’s you wake up it starts goin’ away until you can’t remember it no more?”

Louise nodded, and smoothed a hand over the cushions. She felt helpless, as if of a sudden she was being given a chance to do something right but for the life of her couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. All she did know was that she could not let this child go through with what he had in mind. If it turned out he was right, then he would almost certainly get himself hurt, or worse. As bad as it had been to have to live with the guilt of abandoning him, she would not survive long knowing she had let him go to his death. But what could she do?

“I’m goin’ to get you some blankets. I’ll be right back.”

He nodded, and lowered his gaze.

He was not going to stay here just because she begged him to, of that she was certain. He owed her nothing, not after what she’d done to him. So what were the alternatives? She could alert the police, tell them what the boy had told her. But then they’d want to see him, talk to him, find out what he knew. They might take him in and try to control what became of him. Courts might become involved, the social services people. Sure, he was of age, but his slow development might be the trump card the courts used to ensure Louise was not granted guardianship. And if not that, then they would use her unstable past and unreliable present against her. She had no job, no prospects, no way of taking care of him.

So no, the police were out.

Take him to see the girl?

What would that achieve? Fueling his murderous, and quite possibly misguided fantasies could only lead to disaster in the long run. And who was to say the girl wouldn’t react negatively, even violently, to his presence? If she had succeeded even a little in creating some small semblance of a life for herself after the incident, in fabricating a new world from denial and necessity, wouldn’t Pete’s visit cause that to come crashing down around her?

She entered the bedroom. Wayne was already asleep, or was pretending to be as he sometimes did when he didn’t want to talk. He was lying on his back, one arm draped over his face, his mouth open slightly. Quietly, she reached down and gathered up the thick woolen blanket on the floor at the foot of the bed, then returned to the living room.

“I saw them once,” Pete said, before she had the bedroom door fully shut behind her.

“What?”

“The people who done this. I saw them once, but thought it was a dream.”

She came to him and sat on the edge of the armchair, one arm around his shoulders, the blanket on her lap.

“There was a tall man,” he said. “Mean lookin’. And a boy, ’bout the same age as I was back then. They was in our house, in my Pa’s room. The mean lookin’ man was tellin’ my father he’d do best to stay outta their business. He was holdin’ a big blade. Looked like a lawnmower blade, I think. I always figured I’d dreamed it, but the way Pa was that night before he died…I knew I’d seen him look like that before but couldn’t remember when. It came to me though. He was real afraid of those people, and I ain’t hardly never seen him scared of nothin’ or no one.”

Louise nodded, then stood and set the blanket down upon the cushions. “You better get some sleep now, and rest yourself,” she said. “We’ll try to figure out what to do tomorrow, all right?”

He didn’t answer, just scooted forward off the couch and dropped to his knees on the cushions.

“If you need anythin’ in the night, you come get me, you hear? I’m just in that room back there.”

He nodded, and set about unrolling the blanket.

After a moment spent searching for some words of comfort to offer him, Louise gave up. “Good night,” she told him and headed for her bedroom. She had one handle on the door when Pete said, “You gonna come with me to see the girl?”

“I thought you didn’t want my help,” she said.

“Not with what’s gotta be done later. I don’t want you nowhere near that. But I need to find the girl. She told me the street, but I ain’t sure I can find it on my own.”

She looked at him for a moment, at the vulnerability peering out at her from behind a mask of hurt and smoldering anger, and she nodded.

“I’ll help you. However I can.”

Satisfied, and still wearing his jacket, he wriggled down under the blanket. “Good night then.”

“Good night.”

With one last lingering look at the boy, she turned off the light.

A sound jerked him from sleep. For a moment, in the dark with only the pale glow from a streetlight filtered through the snow and the grimy window across from him, Pete was unsure where he was. The shapes that rose around him as his eyes adjusted were unfamiliar ones, and for a moment fear rippled through him. Gradually, he remembered and allowed a long slow breath of relief to escape him. He relaxed, but only a little. These days, tension seemed to have made taut ropes of his muscles and resting only eased the discomfort they caused him for a short time.

He shivered.

It was freezing outside, and though the apartment was warm and he was still dressed, a chill threaded through him.

At last he sat up, and rubbed his eyes, then squinted into the dark until he made out the faint outline of the TV. Atop it, the time on the VCR read 4:30 in glowing green numerals. Pete got to his feet and kicked his shoes free of the blankets, which, though warm, had felt scratchy on the exposed skin of his hands. He grabbed one of the cushions, replacing it on the sofa before dropping heavily onto it.

I shouldn’t’ve come here.

Since stepping off the bus at the station, he’d felt out of place. Part of it was the fact that he could count on one hand the amount of times he’d been in a big city, but mostly it was because he felt alone, and isolated, as if no matter where he went or with whom, he would still feel as if he journeyed by himself. The death of his father had awoken terrible, frightening feelings in him that frequently debilitated him and left him weeping. He had no mother. He had no father. The farm was gone. Death had cut him loose and set him adrift in an alien world that had never seemed more threatening. Every shadow, every face, every street was a potential threat, and Pete felt in constant danger.

And there was the anger, the awful consuming hatred whenever he tried to picture the face of the man who he’d seen standing in his father’s bedroom that night, or when he felt the phantom touch of the child who’d stood by his side, smiling. And though it had taken him some time, he’d finally understood why his father had been afraid, and why Pete had sensed hesitation in him the day they’d picked up the girl. Pa had known what he was calling down upon them by helping Claire, but he’d done it anyway. In Pete’s book, that made his Pa a hero, and from what he’d gleaned from comic books and TV shows over the years, the death of heroes was always celebrated, and avenged.

Pete had never wanted to be a hero, only happy. For a long time, and due in no part to his father, and Louise in the brief time in which she had been content to be his mother, he’d managed the latter quite well. He’d wanted for nothing, though he hadn’t wanted much. He’d worked and he’d played, and though his future had always been a latent concern, he’d always figured he could cross that bridge when he came to it.

But now someone had shoved him over that bridge and burned it down behind him, taking everything he knew along with it, and forcing him to confront an uncertain future. He was alone, his father murdered, a hero dead. And then there was the girl, who’d been hurt too, left barely alive and lucky to escape. Who knew how many others had had their lives destroyed by these evil men?

They’ll hurt you, maybe even kill you too, he told himself when the fear and doubt overwhelmed him. And no one will ever know. But he learned to counter this with steely determination and whatever courage he could draw up from the dark well of pain inside him. I have to set things right. And if I die, then all that means is I’ll be with Pa again. This was the simple truth and he embraced it. The people who had done these terrible things to Doc Wellman, his Pa, and the girl, needed to be punished. It was only fair. And he would go alone, for to take anyone with him, as comforting as the thought might seem, would only be putting them in danger, and he was unwilling to bear such a burden.

He looked again at the clock. Only a minute had passed. He wondered when Louise would wake, or if he should leave and come back later when she was likely to be up and ready to face the day.

On the street outside, a dog barked.

It was followed by low murmuring.

The dog barked a second time, then yelped.

Pete rose and went to the window, wiped away the cloud of his own breath and peered down.

There were three men in the street, all of them dressed the same. They were talking animatedly, but keeping their voices low so they would not wake the tenants in the buildings around them.

He strained to hear what they were saying, but they were being too quiet.

He returned to the sofa and sat, his head turned toward the window.

Claire’s face swam to the surface of his thoughts, and he felt his nerves twitch. He hoped more than anything she didn’t hate him for leaving her alone at the hospital, and made a note to tell her that he wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t been frightened by the amount of people suddenly rushing toward him at once, all speaking at the same time, the look in their eyes serious, demanding answers. He’d fled, and hadn’t made it a whole mile down the road before he’d regretted it.

There was still time to set things right. That’s why he was here. There would be ample opportunity to explain himself to her in person. The thought made him smile. He imagined her as he’d seen her on the news—scarred and bruised but cleaner and healthier looking than she’d been in Elkwood. Her eye was still gone though, and he ached at the thought of how much pain it must have caused her, both in having it torn out, and waking to find it gone. The picture he’d seen had shown her looking exhausted, the lids of her missing eye stitched together with black thread so that it looked as if she might only have been in a serious fight. Her hair had been combed, her lips colored a little. The sight of her had made his heart beat faster.

Down in the street, there came the rumble of a car engine, the slight squeak of brakes. One of the men raised his voice, but his words were no clearer. He sounded annoyed.

Though Pete had long abandoned the idea that Claire would fall madly in love with him just because he’d had a hand in rescuing her, he hoped more than anything she would be glad to see him. He wondered what she would say when he told her that he was going back to Elkwood to punish the men who had done such horrible things to her. Would she think him a hero, or a crazy fool? Would she try and stop him? It’s too dangerous, she might say, and he would have no words to argue, because it was true.

The men down there might hurt him. They might kill him. These things he knew, and it saddened him to think that all he might find back in Elkwood was failure. His father would go unavenged, and he would never see Claire again. And then of course, there was Louise, who he had never dared believe he would find, and yet here he was now, sitting on her sofa while she slept in the other room.

He worried that she might try to stop him, that she might lie to him and lure him to the police station where she would tell them what he was planning to do and they would throw him in jail to prevent it. This sudden concern was so strong he almost leapt to his feet and bolted. But then he thought of the cold, and of the men in the street, and stayed where he was.

A car door slammed shut.

Someone cursed loudly.

Pete sighed, suddenly feeling more alone and more frightened than he’d ever been. Tears leaked from his eyes as he pictured his father as he had last seen him. Fear in his eyes. The terror. The desperation. Why had he left him alone? Why hadn’t he known there was something terribly wrong and stayed to help his Pa deal with the men?

Because you’re none too clever, he heard his father say. And you never was.

In truth, he had known something was wrong, but the fear of his father if he disobeyed him had been greater, and so he’d taken the truck and headed out to Wellman’s. But it wasn’t only that and he knew it. He’d wanted to see the girl so bad it had muddied his instincts, made him reluctant to stay with the old man.

And now his father was dead.

Behind him, the bedroom door opened. He turned and saw in the doorway the vague shape of the man who lived here with his second mother. His eyes were dark hollows in the gloom. For a moment he lingered there, watching Pete, then slowly eased out into the room, pulling the door almost shut, but not quite. Then he quietly crossed the room, stopping by the sofa where Pete sat looking up at him.

“What you doin’ up?” Wayne whispered.

“Somethin’ woke me,” Pete whispered back.

Wayne glanced toward the window, nodded pointedly.

“Those men out there?”

Pete shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Well, you just forget all about them, now, you hear me?”

There was a hard edge to his voice that Pete didn’t like, so he nodded. He knew it was wrong to judge a man he hardly knew, but he couldn’t help it. ‘Wayne’ had driven the car that had spirited his mother out of his life all those years ago and the pain that came with that memory made it impossible to think of the man as anything other than mean. And now the tone of his voice—conspiratorial, vaguely threatening—only added to Pete’s disdain for him.

“I’m just goin’ for a walk is all. To get some air.”

Again, Pete nodded.

“If Louise wakes up, you tell her I couldn’t sleep and went down to the All-Night store for cigarettes.” He rose, but continued to stare at him. “I’ll be back soon.”

Curiosity, as it had so often in his life, got the better of Pete and he asked, though he knew he shouldn’t, “Where are you really goin’?”

“That ain’t none of your business, boy.”

Wayne watched him for a moment longer, but then the voices from the street drifted up as if summoning him and he sighed and headed for the door. “Remember what I said,” he told Pete, and exited the apartment.

As Wayne’s footsteps echoed in the corridor outside, Pete turned his head toward the window and listened to the voices from down below.

-21-

Distant thunder rumbled on the horizon as Papa-in-Gray stared at the wall. Before him was a chipped mug full of some kind of murky brown liquid he had as yet failed to identify, but it smelled like toilet water. He shoved it away from him and stared at the wall. There was little to see there but cobwebs and flaking paint. Jeremiah Krall hadn’t bothered decorating the place, though he’d been living here for years. Every surface was coated with a thick layer of dust. A stone fireplace held nothing but a shroud of spider webs speckled with small brown egg sacs. Broken wood littered the place, as if rather than venture into the surrounding woods for firewood, Krall had smashed up his furniture, sparing only one rickety table and two wobbly chairs for comfort. He was a capable hunter, and hunted often, and yet the cabin remained utterly devoid of trophies, skins, or prize animal heads. His living room was just that, a room for living in, nothing more. Still, Papa wished there was something other than the stained surface of the table and that crumbling wall to focus on, because while they might be living in this room, he had come to talk about death, and one he feared Krall was not going to take too well.

He looked down at his fingers, at the faint maroon stains on his skin. It seemed he always had blood on his hands no matter how hard or how often he washed them. He wanted to believe it was a sign from God—stigmata of a sort—that he was doing His work, and doing it well. This would have encouraged Papa, though he secretly wished for more than some ambiguous rusty stains on his skin as acknowledgment of his commitment, reassurance perhaps, however slight, that a life spent worshipping and serving God hadn’t been in vain, and that in the end, the Men of the World would not be victorious.

“Gimme strength,” he whispered to the room.

As a child, he had questioned the existence of God, reasoning that the beauty of the world was not proof enough, that there had to be something else, something more. Something a child could look to for solace, and hope, for in his world there was little beauty, even less when his mother took the old belt to him for daring to doubt their Lord. She would punish him, and then order him to pray for forgiveness. Over time, he learned to view his fervent whisperings in the dark as penance he should not have to give for simply expressing his curiosity, and learned to resent the god for whom they were intended.

Then, one night, everything changed.

He was not yet eleven years old, but he had learned to stop questioning, his doubt a secret rebellion against the mother who had forced him to associate faith with pain. But not believing did not reduce the agony. His mother’s big city boyfriend saw to that, and between them they rendered for the boy an adequate picture of Hell.

That night, early in the summer, as he lay in bed eyes screwed shut, tears streaming down his cheeks, the wounds from the belt raw and sore and burning but not nearly as much as the sharp thrusting of the grunting, drunken man atop him, something happened. A particularly vicious tearing sent red pain shooting through him. He gasped, convulsed in the bed and opened his eyes.

There was light, and within it he glimpsed angels, redolent in shimmering muslin robes that did not bind their wings, allowing them to beat at the air, cooling him. Their hair seemed made of frost, eyes a liquid blue, and in them he saw the answer to the questions his mother had refused to answer. Abruptly, adrift on a sea of pain that had carried him to the shores of epiphany, he knew why she had not sated his curiosity. She had been afraid of the power that might be bestowed upon him if God deemed him worthy.

She feared wrath.

The pain ebbed away, became a dull throbbing that kept time with his rapidly beating heart, and he felt a longing for the light as it faded, retreated into the walls.

But what he had seen had been enough.

In that room, bathed in sweat not his own, the stench of alcohol suffocating him, his mother’s boyfriend hissing curses down upon his prone form, he had found God, or rather, God had found him, and bestowed upon him a great gift, a gift he quickly used.

To the man’s surprise, the boy had risen up from the bed of his torment, a crude homemade hunting knife gripped tightly in his hand, fire in his soul. He remembered the days spent making that knife, but could not recall secreting it beneath his mattress. Not that it mattered, for though they had appeared to leave him, the angels still sang in his ear, advising him to do what needed to be done before it was too late.

“You git yer ass back down in that bed,” the man had commanded, and slapped him hard across the face.

Kill him, cried the angels, and the boy obeyed, earning his freedom with just a few short slashes aimed at the man’s face, neck and crotch. And when it was done, he had wept, but not for the depraved big city man, and not for his mother, who had rushed into the room—lured by sounds very different from those she’d grown accustomed to ignoring—and straight into his waiting blade. No. They were headed for Hades where they belonged.

He was weeping with joy.

God had answered.

God had saved him, and as he packed up his things and headed out into the night, the stars became His eyes, the wind His whisper, and he finally saw in the world the beauty he had refused to believe was there. He had been reborn, as all wayward souls must, or die screaming.

But as he sat at the rickety table staring at stains that might only be rust, or dirt ingrained in his skin, he realized that ever since the girl had escaped them, the same doubt that had corrupted his youth had begun to creep back in again, dulling the light that burned in his heart. In the years since his rebirth, he had lived off the land as God intended, and taught his kin to do the same. Theirs had been a humble life, modest and meek.

And every step of the way, they were challenged, if not by those corrupted souls seeking to destroy them, then by God himself, who made the crops go bad, tainted the water, and sent ferocious winds to tear down their home. Papa had chosen to interpret these things as punishment for something they had done of which they were not yet aware, the slight missteps that made a man deviate from the chosen path without him being aware he was doing so. Perhaps it was the cussing, his fondness for a tipple, or the things he liked to do with Momma-In-Bed on those fine summer evenings when the children were playing in the woods. Maybe they were getting lazy and not being vigilant or efficient enough in their hunting. He didn’t know, but stepped up his efforts accordingly. He was harder on the kids, and though he was affectionate with Momma, he stopped laying with her. Instead he sat with her and talked, or read from the Bible. Every morning at sunup, the family congregated in her room and they prayed until noon, then again before bed. He told the children they would no longer wait for strangers to come wandering onto their property. They would expand the hunt, culling sinners from the roads and the land beyond.

For a time, it seemed his efforts were appreciated.

Then his daughter, his own flesh and blood had turned against him, and he had been forced against his will to offer her as a sacrifice to placate a God he worshipped but feared greatly. He had wept for her passing, but greater was his terror at the power the Men of the World had to project their disease into one of his own. Afterward, they did not eat her, for her flesh was corrupt.

From then on, the children were made to bathe in scalding hot holy water, then scrubbed mercilessly with steel wool before bed. The diseases that ran rampant in the outside world could be sent to them on the air, he told them, for when sick people breathe, the corruption travels. If one of their own died, they would eat them to preserve and absorb their strengths, as Papa had been taught by the old man he had met and befriended on a logging trail during his adolescent travels. The man had taken him to a cabin in the Appalachians, where he died, but not before imparting his wisdom to the impressionable boy. Eat the flesh and drink the marrow, he’d said, If’n you want to know all I know.

The children learned, as he had learned, to look upon the Men of the World, the coyotes, as emissaries from Hell who poisoned everything they touched. He had taught them that the very earth such creatures walked upon could turn black underfoot. He supervised their prayers, and often their slumber, periodically checking to see if they were touching themselves or each other. If they did so, even in their sleep, he would haul them from bed and beat them severely, punctuating the blows with quotations from the bible, so they would understand what they had done, and why the punishment was necessary.

For a year, he withdrew his focus from the outside world and all its dangers to his own house and the potential for evil that hung like a cloud around his kin. Punishment became pain. Transgressions were paid for in flesh. It was the only way. The children grew to fear him as much as he feared God.

And though he had never admitted it aloud, not even to Momma, he feared Luke, who he had caught in congress with his sister. How much of the poison had she transferred to her brother?

At night, in the quiet, he sought Momma’s counsel. She was his sole source of comfort in a world that seemed determined to destroy them all. She listened to his concerns, her manner eternally light despite the ever-increasing weight of her flesh, and the first obvious signs that her docility had not made her immune from God’s wrath. She was stricken with aches in her joints, stabbing pains in her chest (which Papa feared might be God’s way of reminding him of the night he had found his faith), and lethargy. Then came the sores, the rashes, and the angry welts across her back, so much like the wounds from a belt.

“This is what becomes of us if we lie still for too long,” she told him. “I guess God’s tryin’ to make us see that we better not get too content with things. We gotta keep pushin’ ’till we’re as close to His grace as we can get short of bein’ by his side.”

He’d considered that for a moment, then leaned forward until his lips were pressed against her ear, and “What if I can’t?” he’d whispered, as softly as he could, even though he knew there could be no secrets from the Almighty.

Momma closed her eyes and shook her head. “Givin’ up’s a sin in itself when you’ve been blessed with His light,” she said. “Now pray with me and forget your weaknesses before you’re made to pay for ’em.”

But pay for them he had. His daughter was dead, a sinner had escaped them, and Luke had been poisoned. The rest of them had been forced to move, to seek out a man Papa despised in the hope that he would offer them sanctuary.

An hour passed before the front door swung wide and Jeremiah Krall stomped into the cabin. His enormous gut strained against his tattered plaid logging shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing meaty forearms dark with coarse hair. Dirt and blood stained his faded jeans. His large boots were untied and left muddy prints on the floor.

Papa rose from his seat and nodded in greeting.

In the dim light from the room’s bare bulb, Krall appraised him as he might a snake, and spat tobacco juice on the floor. His eyes were the color of old bark, and glared from a small clearing in the frenzy of wild dark brown hair that smothered his skull and face.

When they’d pulled up earlier, Krall had been leaving. He’d scarcely acknowledged them, but nodded at the cabin, which Papa took as an indication that he should wait. Now he hoped he hadn’t misinterpreted the signal.

“What’s in your truck?” Krall asked, and unslung a burlap sack from his shoulder. The sack was cinched at the neck with dirty cord. It made a dull thump, suggesting weight, as it hit the floor. Blood pooled around the bottom.

Papa started to speak, but Krall interrupted him.

“Got your goddamn kids sittin’ out there lookin’ like sledge-hammered sows. Big tarp in the back looks like you got somethin’ wrapped up. You bring me a present?”

Again, Papa started to speak, but this time he forced himself to wait. Blurting out that Krall’s only remaining connection to the world was dead might not be the best introduction. Not when he considered where he was. The cabin stood in the shadow of Hood Mountain, at least a half a day’s ride to the nearest town. It was remote, and that suited Krall, especially after killing with his bare hands three men who had jokingly called him a fibber when he claimed to have killed a buck that was roughly the same size as himself. As bold as Krall was known to be, the murders alone might not have inspired him to self-imposed exile, but finding out one of the men he’d killed was the brother of a Sheriff did.

“We need a place to hole up for a while,” Papa said, and regained his seat, figuring that if he appeared relaxed, Krall might do the same.

He didn’t.

“This is my place,” he said coldly. “You got your own damn house. Go stay there.”

Papa knew Krall was not a stupid man, and that he was only being obtuse simply to make what Papa had to say all the more difficult.

“We can’t,” Papa told him. “There’s been some trouble.”

“Kinda trouble?”

“We caught some kids in our woods. Wanted to teach ’em a lesson. They kilt my boy Matt.”

It was hard to see if the news affected Krall any, given that only his eyes and the bridge of his nose were visible beneath his unkempt hair and above the undergrowth of his beard, but Papa doubted it.

“Which one’s he?” Krall asked, sounding disinterested.

It was not a question that required an answer, rather Krall’s way of ensuring Papa knew he was not welcome, no matter who he had lost.

“You still goin’ on with all that God work?” he asked then. “Preachin’ and huntin’ up people you think’s sinners?”

“I still believe, yes,” Papa answered, but felt the color rise slightly as he recalled what he had been thinking only a few moments before. “Our work is needed now more than ev—”

Krall raised a massive hand. “Don’t you go preachin’ to me now. God ain’t here or anywheres around me, and I ain’t one for any of that bible-thumpin’ bullshit.”

“It’s not—”

“Why’d you come here?”

Papa felt flustered. He had rehearsed what he was going to say and how he intended to deliver it, but realized he should have known from the few conversations he’d had with Krall in the past, that the exchange would go entirely Krall’s way. He would hear what he wanted to hear, and that was all there was to it, and if he decided Papa and the boys needed to go, then they’d go. No one ever argued with Krall and came out the better of it.

“I told you,” he said. “We had some trouble.”

“I got plenty trouble of my own without you bringin’ more.”

“They won’t come lookin’ for us here.”

“Who’s they?”

“Coyotes. They killed my boy, and turned another one against me.”

Teeth appeared in the dark tangle of beard as Krall smiled. “Weren’t them turned your boy against you, I reckon.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means you a goddamn hypocrite, and a loon. And that ain’t the first time I’ve told you that neither, so quit lookin’ surprised. You was standin’ in my woodshed the day I told my sister the same thing. Told her she were makin’ a mistake runnin’ off with the likes of you. Saw it on your face every time you turned up, knew you’d be nothin’ but trouble, and here you are tellin’ me you lost your boys on account’ve someone else.” He shook his head. “You ain’t no man,” he said. “You ain’t nothin’. Way I see it, no God in his right mind’d have anythin’ to do with you.”

The frustration was gone in an instant. Papa grit his teeth. In a fight, he’d die at this man’s hands, but at that moment he felt his temper flaring, heating his skin from the inside out until he was sure it made the air shimmer between them. He wasn’t accustomed to being insulted, but then, there were a lot of things happening lately he wasn’t accustomed to, none of them good. Mama-In-Bed had whispered that it meant the end was coming, the end of times, if only theirs, but to Papa that meant the same thing. He lived for his kin, except when they got themselves poisoned and turned against him. Then the coyotes could tear them asunder for all he cared. Otherwise, he was prepared to kill, and die for them until God reached down and plucked them up to face His judgment, and when that happened, Papa knew they’d be celebrated as angels for the work they’d done on a world gone to hell.

In years past he might have attempted to convert Krall to his way of thinking, to guide him in painstakingly slow steps into the light. But there was no salvation for a man so full of hate and loathing. Krall was ignorant, stuck in exile but closer than most to the eyes of God and yet he forever stood with his back to Him. Such disdain spoke volumes, and Papa decided the only thing left to do was tell the man the other reason he’d come, and see what happened next.

He watched as Krall scooped up the burlap sack and jerked open the tie.

“The tarp you seen before you came in,” Papa said.

Krall did not look up as he spoke. Instead he frowned and yanked a skinned fox out of the bag by its hind legs. Drops of blood speckled the floor. “What is it if ain’t a present?”

Papa exhaled slowly, his body tense. “Your sister,” he said.

-22-

He didn’t know how long he’d been listening to the men in the street. Occasionally he was able to make out their words, but not enough for him to be able to figure out what could be so important that they would need to gather down there in the cold at this time of night. But although the subject remained a mystery to him, the tone did not. Someone among them was angry, and when Pete finally tired of listening and returned to his mattress of cushions on the floor, that anger culminated in a gunshot that rattled the windows and startled a cry out of him.

Immediately he was on his feet and back at the window but his frightened breath occluded his view. Nevertheless he got the impression of scattering bodies as the car once more rumbled to life. The echo of the shot had not yet faded before he heard the bedroom door open behind him.

“Wayne, that you?”

Pete turned and saw Louise standing in the doorway of her room, the light from the streetlamps showing the concern etched on her face.

“No,” he told her. “It’s me.”

“Pete. Did you hear that shot? Where’s Wayne?”

He nodded. “He told me to tell you he went for cigarettes.”

She brushed past him and hurried to the window. Despite his curiosity, he stayed where he was, watching as she blocked out the light and rubbed the ghosts of his breath from the glass.

“There’s someone down there,” she said, a note of panic making her voice high and tremulous. “I think someone’s been shot.”

Pete stood dumb, waiting for whatever was to happen next. Louise turned and looked at him, wringing her hands together. In her haste she hadn’t tied the robe properly, and now it slid open. Though she was now backlit by the window and therefore all but cloaked in shadow, Pete averted his eyes anyway.

“When did he leave?”

“I dunno,” he told her. “Maybe an hour ago. Your robe’s come opened.”

She seemed to take a minute to register this, then cursed and when next he looked, she’d cinched it tight around herself and was rushing toward him. “I want you to call 911. There’s a phone in the bedroom. Can you do that for me?”

He nodded, because he was knew he was supposed to, but he had never had to call 911 before and wasn’t entirely sure what it might entail beyond dialing the numbers.

“Tell them someone’s been shot at 663 Harrison Avenue. Can you remember that?”

He watched her dig her feet into slippers. “Yes.”

“Good. Give me your coat.”

“My coat?”

“Yes, I need it. Quickly.”

“You ain’t goin’ down there, are you?”

“Pete…”

He did as she asked and handed it over.

“You want me to come with you?”

“No.” Shrugging on his jacket, she hurried to the door. “Stay here,” she said without looking back, then jerked open the door of the apartment.

A shadow stepped in front of her, blocking her path, but she was still looking back at Pete and hadn’t yet noticed.

The boy froze, felt a word of warning rush up his throat but it died before it hit the air, drowned out by Louise’s scream as the man pushed his way into the apartment and slammed the door shut behind him.

“Please…don’t…” Louise said, her voice brittle with panic.

“Shut your goddamn mouth,” the man said, and as Pete’s eyes adjusted, he could see that his initial assumption that it was Wayne he was looking at, perhaps angry because of something the men down in the street had said to him, was wrong. This man was shorter, thinner, and his voice higher in pitch than Wayne’s had been. Also, though Pete hadn’t studied Wayne too closely, he was sure he hadn’t had a gun.

“Red,” Louise said, cinching her robe even tighter and hugging herself. “Wayne ain’t here.”

Red looked furtively around the darkened apartment, as if following the path of an agitated bird. “I know he ain’t,” he said tersely. “Your boy’s down there in the street with a big hole in his chest.

Louise said nothing, but started to shake her head.

Pete stood rooted to the spot with fear. He was unable to register what he’d just heard. Wayne, the man who had taken his mother away from him had gone out to buy cigarettes, or to talk to those men, and now he was lying down there shot? He couldn’t quite understand how or why that had happened, and wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about it if it was true. His attention was fixed on the man with the gun, and Louise, who looked terrified.

“The fuck’s this?” the gunman said, jerking the weapon in Pete’s direction.

Louise didn’t answer.

“The fuck’re you?” he asked again, looking at Pete.

“I… Louise is my second Mom.”

“Dayum,” said Red, and raised the hand holding the gun to chuckle into his wrist before leveling it at Pete. “You think you’re some kind of hero? You thinkin’ about messin’ my shit up in here?”

Pete shook his head. “No, sir.”

Red smiled, his teeth gleaming a dull metallic color in the gloom. “That’s right. Yes sir. You don’t fuck with me, we all be cool, geddit?”

“Why are you doin’ this?” Louise asked between sobs. Her head was lowered. “Why are you here?”

Red turned his attention back to her. “Take a seat. You and the kid. Sit down on that sofa and get comfortable. Wayne’s got somethin’ I need. Once I get it, I’ll be on my way, and then you can go back to playin’ house with my little homeboy here.”

Louise didn’t move.

“Hey babe?” Red said, leaning in close.

Slowly she raised her head to look at him.

“Do what I fuckin’ tell you to do,” he said, and in a flash, his hand was in her hair. He pulled hard and sent her sprawling across the arm of the couch. Instinctively, Pete made to move forward, whether to help her or tackle the man who had hurt her, he wasn’t sure. His insides were on fire, his whole body quaking with the need to do something. And that something was fueled by anger at what he had just seen.

“Don’t hurt her,” he told Red. “Don’t you put your hands on her again.”

Red smiled and raised his hands. “Easy there, Shaft. Just helpin’ her out is all. She don’t hear too good. You know how bitches are. All mouth.”

“Don’t touch her,” Pete said again. “She ain’t done nothin’ to you.”

“Not yet,” Red said, and began to move toward where Pete still stood fists clenched by his sides, trembling. “But who knows where the night might lead.”

As the man approached him, Pete tensed himself for the same pain he had managed to forgive when it came from the fists of his father, and was surprised when the man veered away and stopped before the television set.

“Let’s see what’s on,” Red said, and took a step back. Pete’s eyes fell to the man’s gun, which was now close enough for him to grab if he wanted to. But as if sensing his intention, the man looked over his shoulder at him. “Go help your Momma, kid, or I’ll put so many holes in you you’ll look like a salt shaker.”

Pete did as he was told. He sat down on the couch and watched as the man reared back and launched a kick at the TV screen. It toppled from its stand but did not shatter. Red kicked it again, harder this time, and the glass exploded under his heel with a dull whump. Blue sparks sizzled and hissed. A thin wreath of smoke rose from the exposed hole in the front of the TV.

From his pocket, Red produced a small pen-sized object, thumbed it and a thin ray of light pierced the smoke. Despite his fear and anger, Pete was curious. He’d never seen such a small flashlight before, and immediately felt the urge to ask the man to let him see it. An urge he quickly repressed. Instead, he put his hand on Louise’s back as she straightened and sat on the arm of the couch. She was sniffling and rubbing her nose. He wanted to tell her it was going to be all right, that any minute now the man would leave them alone, but he wasn’t sure that was true, and didn’t want to lie. So he said nothing, and watched as the man fished something out of the guts of the TV.

“All right,” Red said appreciatively, and quickly pocketed the item, which had looked to Pete like a small pouch of some kind. Then once more, the man’s attention turned to them.

“See, now that wasn’t such a big deal, right?” Red asked as he approached them, stepping over Pete’s long legs to get to Louise. “Hey,” he said, and she raised her head to look at him. Her mascara had run, making her eyes seem hollow and empty.

“Wayne told me you said he was lazy. That made him feel real bad, you know.” He smiled, revealing the lie in his words. “So he came to me, and I hooked the brother up. He made some good money.” He patted his pocket. “Trouble with that piece of shit was he was greedy, and the boys he workin’ for don’t tolerate that, know what I’m sayin?”

“He was your cousin,” Louise said.

Red shrugged. “Yeah, but shit, I didn’t cap ’im. I ain’t that cold, Louise.”

“So what now? You just goin’ to walk outta here after what you’ve done. You just goin’ to leave us here to talk to the cops?” Her voice, though unsteady, was rising, as anger told hold. “Or are you gonna do what the other thugs told you to do and kill us both?”

Red stared at her for a moment, then glanced at Pete. “Get your ass up for a sec.” He waggled the gun and Pete rose from the couch and moved back toward the shattered TV, which was still trailing smoke. Red sat in his place and put his hand on Louise’s knee. Instantly, she snatched it and shoved it away. In response, he shoved the muzzle of the gun up under her chin, forcing her head back. Louise bared her teeth, the muscles in her neck visible even in the feeble light. Again, instinct propelled Pete toward them, but Red spoke without looking at him. “Lot easier for me to pull this trigger than it will be for you to try to fight me, kid.”

Pete stopped, agonized by helplessness.

Louise grunted against the strain, her eyes fixed on Pete. Stay where you are. Do as he says and we’ll be fine. But nothing was going to be fine. She knew it, and she knew Pete knew it. Here, in this cold dank apartment in a frozen city she hated, she was going to die, along with the boy who’d escaped his own misery to find her.

Still holding the gun under her chin, Red brought his other hand up and slipped it inside her robe. She flinched. His hands were cold, his skin rough. She closed her eyes. “Stop,” she pleaded, weakly. The urge to strike out at him was great, but she knew she would not get very far before he pulled the trigger and ended her life.

“Told you I ain’t gonna hurt you,” Red said as he massaged her breast. “But today, maybe tomorrow, someone you don’t know’s probably gonna stop by and do what I ain’t got it in me to do, know what I’m sayin’? Wayne was a fuck-up, honey. Real loser. He made enemies faster than most folks make spit. Made a whole lot of people out there mad as hell. Tonight they took care of one problem. You, and I guess the boy now, are another one. Talk to the cops all you like, is what I’m sayin’ here. Won’t make no difference.”

He checked over his shoulder, to be sure Pete wasn’t up to anything, and satisfied that he wasn’t, cocked the hammer on the gun. “Don’t,” she whispered.

Where are the police? she thought, panicked. The gunshot was like thunder. Why aren’t they comin’? She couldn’t even hear them in the distance. Her heart sank further as it occurred to her that maybe they lived in one of those places the police preferred to ignore.

Red’s attention on her body increased. “That no-good son of a bitch didn’t deserve a fine hunny like you,” he said. “Soon’s he brought you up here and showed you to me, I told him he’d make more money if he put you on the streets. But he was the jealous type, as I’m sure you know.” He slid his hand down her chest, parting her robe with his thumb.

“Please don’t.”

“He didn’t want nobody havin’ his woman,” Red continued. “Which don’t make no sense considerin’ he liked to brag about whuppin’ you. Man didn’t know how to treat a lady. But I do.”

His hand slid down over her stomach and lower, but Louise kept her knees pressed tightly together. It was no use. Red’s insistence came with the threat of death if she denied him. She winced as his rough fingers dug between them.

“Red, stop… I don’t want the boy to see this. He’s been through enough.”

“Shit,” Red replied. “We’ve all been through enough, ain’t we?” he said with a grin as he slipped his fingers inside her, turned his head and smiled at Pete, who Louise realized was suddenly standing very close behind him, his face lost in shadow.

Red grunted. “Now what the f—?”

Abruptly, Louise realized the boy’s intent and immediately grabbed Red’s hand, jerking the gun away from beneath her chin. It went off, deafening her and blowing a hole in the wall by the door as the light from the muzzle filled the room, just long enough for her to see Pete drive a shard of the broken TV screen into Red’s eye.

-23-

Finch couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so drunk. If not for the alley wall, he knew he’d be on his face right now, perhaps singing into a puddle or laughing at some half-remembered joke. Very carefully he let himself slide down until he was on his haunches, his back pressed against the red brick wall of Rita’s Bar. A light breeze played with his hair, and crept down the back of his neck into his jacket. He shivered, momentarily thankful for the numbing effects of alcohol.

The buildings around the cobblestone alley were too tall for him to be able to see if there was a moon tonight. Not that he cared. The moon was for romantics, and even if he’d been one in his younger days, he’d long forgotten how to be one now. He turned his head and looked to the mouth of the alley, where Beau, who had remained perfectly sober thanks to a night spent sipping orange juice, was holding open the door of a taxi as a tall black woman touched his cheek and smiled the kind of smile Finch had only ever known once in his life and now could scarcely recall. It made him feel suddenly isolated and terribly alone, and he wished Beau would either hurry up and say his goodbyes to the woman—Georgia, her name was—or else jump in the cab with her and take off, so Finch at least would know the score.

A moment later, her feet lost in a writhing red-tinged river of exhaust fumes, Georgia kissed Beau long and hard, then vanished into the darkness inside the cab. Beau stood for a moment, hands in his pockets, and watched as it pulled away. Then he turned and started back up the alley toward Finch.

“You still with me?” he called out.

“Barely.”

“Well, don’t quit on me just yet. We got things to discuss.”

Finch knew he was right, but at that moment he found himself wishing that his friend had accompanied the woman home. He didn’t want to think anymore. Didn’t want to talk anymore. He just wanted to sleep. At home. In the alley. Wherever. He was tired of thinking. Tired of feeling as if his head was going to explode from all the anger inside it, and the sorrow. The sorrow was worse because it came unbidden, and unlike the anger, which demanded action, pain, a release of any kind, sorrow asked nothing but for him to just be still while it spread through him like a cancer and drained his resolve, his will to do anything but sleep and feel sorry for himself.

“Hey.” Beau nudged him with his foot, and Finch looked up, startled. Without knowing it, he’d started to doze off, and now, like stop-motion animation, his friend had somehow moved from the alley entrance and materialized right in front of him.

“Jesus,” Finch said and rubbed a hand over his face. “What a lightweight, huh?”

“We ain’t kids anymore, man.”

“No shit. Too bad, too. I had a lot of fun as a kid.”

“Most folks do until they get saddled with responsibility.”

Beau plucked two beer crates from beside the dumpster to their right, and set them down—one for himself, one for Finch. Glad to take the pressure off his aching knees, Finch nodded his thanks and lowered himself onto the crate, one hand against the wall to steady himself.

“Man, you’re in bad shape,” Beau said, laughing.

“You mean because of the beer, or otherwise?”

Beau joined him, their shoulders touching. “The beer,” he replied. “Not that I don’t think you ain’t messed up enough without it.”

Finch had to narrow his eyes to dissuade double vision. He hated being this drunk, and had only allowed himself to reach this point because of the euphoria it had promised, and which, for a brief spell, had delivered. Now though, he was sad, angry, and more than a little miserable, every speck of those feelings directed inward despite the availability of much better, more reasonable targets.

“I’m going to kill them, Beau,” he said, nodding slowly. “Every fucking one of them. And I don’t care what happens because of it. They had no right to do what they did.”

Beau sighed. “No, they didn’t. But if you’re hell-bent on lookin’ for fairness, you’re on the wrong damn planet.”

Finch squinted at him. “The fuck’s that mean? I know what the world’s like. Doesn’t make a goddamn bit of difference. Look at the World Trade Center. Thing comes down, the whole nation gets mad and demands justice. The President sends us in to kick the shit out of them. Now all of a sudden people are complaining about his choices, and no one’s demanding anything anymore other than that he wise the hell up.”

“What’s your point?”

“Point is, I’ve never seen a bigger tragedy than 9/11, and yet everybody not directly related to the victims seemed to get over it real quick.”

Beau shrugged. “It’s the nature of people, I guess. We’re designed to grieve and mourn, and do what we can to move on.”

Finch scowled. “Yeah? Well, not me.”

“Not you,” Beau echoed. He sounded resigned.

“Let me ask you something,” Finch said, straightening so he could appraise him. “If those terrorists hadn’t used planes…if instead they’d sat in their cars a few blocks away…say a dozen of them, and used remote detonators to set bombs off to bring those buildings down…”

“Yeah?”

“And after it was done…people discovered those guys sitting in their cars congratulating each other.”

Beau said nothing, waited for him to continue.

Finch did. “What do you think would have happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Aw c’mon,” Finch said, throwing his hands up in disgust. “You know exactly what I mean. There wouldn’t be a cop within a thousand miles would raise an eyebrow over what would happen to those terrorists. Those fuckers would have been torn asunder by the people who found them, torn to goddamn ribbons like those poor bastards in Somalia last year, and not a judge in the whole country would make them accountable for it.”

“I don’t know about that, man.”

“Sure you do.”

“Okay, so say I do. Where are you goin’ with this?”

“A man catches someone attacking his wife. How does he react?”

“Gets pissed.”

“Yeah, he gets pissed, even if the attacker is twice his size and built like a tank, and even if he knows it will mean his death. Hell, if you were married, had kids, and found out someone was sleeping with your wife, or messing with your kids, you’d want to beat the living shit out of that guy, right?”

“Right.”

“And if those terrorists had been caught, instead of doing the kamikaze thing, the people there would have murdered them without a second thought. And why? Because they were there when it happened. They saw their world being violated, threatened, plundered in a day and age when we’re supposed to be safe, when everybody is supposed to be your friend and those who aren’t are too far away to be a danger. But if those enemies hurt you, threaten you, shatter your world and you see them do it with your own two eyes, or you can reach out and touch them, tell me, Beau, that you wouldn’t do what instinct told you to do before weighing up the consequences.”

He was out of breath, and incensed, the blood rushing through him, warming him against the cold. A dull ache throbbed in his temple.

After a moment, Beau sat back. “Yeah,” he said.

Finch looked at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’d tear ’em to pieces, along with anyone who tried to stop me, probably.”

“Then why, knowing what those guys did to Danny, are you trying to keep me from doing what needs to be done?”

It took Beau a long time to reply, but when he did, he looked squarely at Finch. “Because you’re my friend.”

Despite his inebriation, Finch was surprised. Not by the sentiment, but by the fact that Beau, a characteristically stoic man, had said it out loud. It moved him, perhaps a little more than it might have because he was drunk, but nevertheless he appreciated it.

“All the more reason for you to be behind me on this then.”

“I am behind you on it. You know that. I told you—”

“I know what you told me,” Finch interrupted. “And I know what you said, but I want you behind me one-hundred percent. Not because you know I think it’s the right thing to do, but because you agree with me.”

Beau looked annoyed. “So you want me to validate what you’re doin’, is that it? You want me to tell you I think murderin’ a bunch of people and maybe gettin’ yourself killed or sent to prison for the rest of your life is a spectacular idea I can’t wait to be a part of?”

Finch smiled grimly. “Something like that, but without the sarcasm.”

“Can’t do it,” Beau told him. “And if you really believed in what you aim to do, you wouldn’t need my approval, or care what I think.”

“Yeah, well…I do.”

“Why?”

Finch smiled. “Because you’re my friend.”

“Asshole. You read those printouts I put in the folder with the other stuff?”

“Sure. Veterans suffering from PTSD.”

“And?”

“And they came home, didn’t get the help they needed and went apeshit, shot a bunch of people before killing themselves. Is there a moral there I’m missing?”

“It fucks you up. War. Chews you up and spits you out. It’s one of the few places where you’re given free reign to act like a psychopath and then one day you’re standin’ on your lawn, maybe pickin’ up the mornin’ paper and suddenly you find yourself back there, lookin’ at the world through crosshairs. And you either run screamin’ for help you probably won’t get because there’s a mighty long queue, or go get your gun so you can keep fightin’.”

“Jesus… you need your own talk show, man. Seriously.”

Beau ran his palms over his bald head and sighed heavily. “I’ll go, all right? That’s as good as I’m givin’ you. I got your back. Whatever you need. But I’m not holdin’ your hand down there and I’m not going to be your goddamn cheerleader.”

Finch pursed his lips and nodded. “Too bad. You’d look good in the outfit.”

Beau rose. “No wonder half my brothers are on crack. Bet it makes it easier to listen to crazy white guys.”

There was silence then, but for the late night sound of slow traffic sizzling through the wet streets, water running down a drain, distant laughter as revelers headed home, the far-off drone of a plane delivering bodies eager for a night of sleep without turbulence. Beau stood there staring at the mouth of the alley, as if trying to decide whether or not it was time to leave. Instead, he turned, looked at Finch, and folded his arms.

“How are you goin’ to do it?”

“We need guns,” Finch said flatly.

“Covered. My uncle Leroy has a gun shop over in Powell. He’ll give us whatever we need, as long as we don’t tell him we’re goin’ on a huntin’ trip and then ask for a bazooka, and as long as we got the money. He ain’t big on family discounts.”

“Katy Kaplan’s father is going to cover the expenses.”

“Nice, how d’you swing that?”

“He offered. I’m guessing he’s the kind of guy who approves of my idea but prefers to stay well clear of the war zone.”

“So he’s a politician?”

Finch smiled. “We’re gonna need maps. And we’re going to need to know everything that happened from the moment the kids stepped foot in Elkwood until the time Claire was found. We need to talk to the Sheriff down there.”

“The Sheriff? Why? You think he’s goin’ to help?”

“We’re not going to give him a choice. Someone down there did a good job covering things up so the trail would lead away from the killers and right to Wellman’s door. Tell me how a Sheriff can live a few miles from a bunch of murdering lunatics for years and not know anything about it.”

Beau thought about this. “Maybe they threatened him.”

“Yeah, probably. But if you’re living in fear for your life in a town with a bunch of maniacs, you don’t stick around. You move, and then you tell people all you know.”

“So you think this guy’s a rotten apple.”

“That, or a coward. But we need him. And Claire. I want to know all she knows. The more information we have about who, or what we’re going up against, the better prepared we can be.”

“What makes you think she’ll tell you anythin’? You know what it’s like to walk through Hell. It isn’t somethin’ you enjoy talkin’ about, right?”

“Like I said, when someone you love has been killed, there’s a whole lot of rage. And she loved Danny. She’ll want justice as much as I do.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Worst case scenario, we work with what the Sheriff gives us.”

“Assuming he’ll talk.”

Finch gave him a dark look. “Beau, you’re not hearing me. I said we’re not going to give him a choice.”

Beau began to pace. “So when we leavin’?”

“Friday night.”

Beau stopped. “This Friday?”

“Yeah. We got two days to get our shit together.”

“Why so soon?”

Finch looked annoyed. “It isn’t soon, man. It’s been eleven goddamn weeks. As it stands it’ll be a miracle if that family hasn’t already pulled up stakes and moved on. If they have, our job is going to be a whole lot harder. We need to do this now before they vanish off the face of the earth forever.”

-24-

“I once beat a man until he cried like a baby just for looking at my sister the wrong way,” Jeremiah Krall said. “What makes you think I won’t chop your goddamn head off for deliverin’ her to me dead?”

Papa shook his head. “Because it ain’t my doin’, that’s why. I can understand what you must be feelin’ right now: hurt, anger, sadness, but you’re quarrel ain’t with me. Outsiders done this, and if what Momma said before she died has any truth to it, then it won’t be long before they send folks to try to get us. I figure you might appreciate bein’ here to see their murderin’ faces when they do.”

They were standing at the back of the battered truck they had bought from Lawrence Hall, the old mechanic back in Elkwood. Stricken by fear at the sight of Papa-In-Gray limping into his garage, he’d sold the vehicle for a song and eschewed the paperwork in an effort to be clear of him quicker. But from the start, the truck hadn’t run right. It didn’t much favor steep inclines and spluttered a lot, but it was better than nothing, and they’d only needed it to get them as far as Radner County, and Krall’s place. Once they got settled, assuming Krall allowed them to stay, they could seek out a replacement and dispose of Hall’s junker.

In the bed of the truck was an enormous dirty white tarp they had once used to drag bodies from one shed to another and to cover logs in winter. It was raised up enough to obscure the small window at the back of the truck’s cab, but Papa sensed the three boys watching.

“What happened to her?” Krall asked. There had been no discernible change in his tone since he’d first stepped foot into the cabin. Even the news of his sister’s death hadn’t appeared to rattle him, but Papa guessed he should be glad of that. Another man might have used his grief as an excuse to kill the messenger.

“Heart, I reckon. She’s had problems for a while.”

“You reckon?”

“We didn’t have no time to get her seen to, and there weren’t much sense in it. She was gone, and we needed to be quick about leavin’.”

The tarp moved. Papa saw it and was not surprised, but he saw Krall frown and look around, as if expecting to find the wind had risen suddenly. It hadn’t, and he drew his gaze back to the truck.

The tarp moved again, rising in the middle as if the body underneath was struggling to get up.

“Now what the hell is this?” Krall said, and despite his apparent fearlessness, moved back a step. “You sure she’s dead?”

Papa nodded a single time. “I’m sure.”

This time something seemed to punch at the tarp from underneath. Rainwater that had puddled in the folds ran down the material.

“If’n you let varmints get at her, ’ol man, you ain’t drawin’ another breath,” Krall told Papa. Now that the initial surprise had abated, the man’s gruff tone had returned, though it was laced with a note of confusion.

Without a word, but not without effort, Papa grabbed the edge of the truck bed and hauled himself up. Krall watched impassively as the old man began to untie the cords that were restraining the now pulsating corpse. Rain made the sound of fingernails drumming against the material as Papa hunkered down with a wince—his leg had been bothering him since the night Luke had clipped him with the fender of the truck, and it was not showing any signs of getting better—and grabbed the upper hem of the tarp. He paused, both for effect, and to look up at the boys. Aaron, Isaac and Joshua had their faces pressed against the cab window, their features misted by their breath against the glass. He offered them a faint smile. All the way here Aaron had chatted excitedly to his silent brothers about the unveiling Papa had promised them once they reached Krall’s cabin, and now Papa was keeping that promise.

The old man glanced over his shoulder at Krall, who stood in the rain looking as fierce as always, but now he looked curious too.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Papa told him. “And mine too. But it’s times like these we got to think about rebirth, about the good that can come from tragedy. Momma-In-Bed asked me to make her a promise and to let you know it was her wish.”

He began to unroll the tarp. Maggots spilled out onto the truck bed. Noxious fumes rose from the corpulent remains, but they did not bother Papa. To him it was a sweet perfume and one he would miss once they put his wife in the ground. He took a moment to whisper a short prayer over the body, then rose and tugged the covering away from her. Underneath, she was naked, the enormous mounds of skin a bluish gray.

“Goddamn maggots,” Krall said in disgust and waved a hand. “It’s them that’s makin’ her move.”

Papa looked at him serenely. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.” With a nod he indicated the thick black stitching that ran from the base of Momma’s throat to her groin. Some of the stitches had ripped. Krall stepped up onto the bed to get a better look, though there was scarcely room, and the truck was in danger of flipping over backward under his weight. He stooped forward a little and shook his head, then looked coldly at Papa.

“You said you didn’t bring her to a doctor.”

“Correct.”

“So who cut her opened?”

“We did. At her request.”

“The hell for?” Krall was outraged.

Suddenly Momma’s midsection lurched upward, pushed from within, sending maggots tumbling, and he took another involuntary step back. The truck rocked on its wheels.

Papa reached into his coat and produced from within a pocketknife, the edge well maintained and razor-sharp. “Momma died from fear, Jeremiah,” he said. “She knew our world was comin’ to an end, and couldn’t bear the thought of us bein’ claimed. They already poisoned our baby girl, and then Luke. She loved that boy and wanted to take him back. To give him another chance.” He smiled. “So that’s what we done.”

He bent low, stuck the blade between two of the stitches, and began to saw at them. The pressure from within the corpse subsided. It took only a moment for the thread to snap, the flesh to gape, and when it did Krall joined him in looking down.

“Jesus Christ Almighty,” Krall whispered in horror.

“Rebirth,” Papa said simply, as both men stared down at the fingers slowly wriggling out from inside Momma-In-Bed’s corpse.

-25-

“What are you doing up?” Kara asked. “It’s late.”

Claire shrugged, and fingered the cell phone on the kitchen table, setting it spinning. She watched the slow revolutions until it came to a stop, then did it again. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, you should try. I have some pills.”

“I don’t need pills. I’m sick of pills.”

Kara, dressed in a pair of red silk pajamas, came around the table and sat down opposite her sister. Claire’s eye was swollen from crying, the lid puffy, and there were dark bags beneath both sockets. Her hair, always so lustrous, was lank and tousled. Kara didn’t imagine she herself looked any better. She had slept a little, but not much. Worry for her sister, and the memory of her conversation with Finch had kept her awake.

She looked around the kitchen, quiet but for the sound of Claire playing with the phone. It seemed odd seeing the room like this. Ordinarily such a hodge-podge of activity, for both girls and their mother loved—or had loved, at least—to cook, in the early morning hours, it seemed abandoned despite their presence, the sun not yet risen to give it the cheery glow they were used to seeing. The clock on the microwave told her dawn was still an hour or so away.

“We should make breakfast for Mom,” Kara suggested. “It’ll be nice.”

“I don’t feel up to it,” Claire said. She continued to stare at the phone until Kara felt compelled to do the same. Earlier, she had walked in on her sister and found her on the phone, her dead boyfriend’s number on the nightstand, and had quickly deduced what she was up to. Saddened, and more than a little frightened, she had attempted to talk some sense into Claire, then watched as her sister went rigid with shock as she hung up the phone, dropped it on the floor and began to sob into her hands. There was someone on the line, she’d said, and though Kara had no doubt Claire had imagined it, it still broke her heart to see her sister this way.

She’s broken, she thought. And I don’t know how to fix her.

Maybe Finch does, another part of her suggested, but she quickly overruled it. Finch was handling his grief the way he had handled every other trial in his life, the way he had handled her—with anger. Whatever he did, short of therapy, would solve nothing. All she could do now was protect her sister from his obsession.

“Maybe I’ll make us something,” she said, to get away from the same incessant badgering of her thoughts that had denied her a good night’s sleep. “Maybe a ham and cheese omelet? Some onions, peppers…”

“I’m not hungry,” Claire said.

Since she’d joined her, Claire had yet to make eye contact. She was so fixated on that damn cell phone, Kara had to resist the urge to snatch it away from her.

“Somebody answered,” her sister said now, surprising her, as if they’d both been tuned in to the same mental frequency.

“What?”

“Somebody answered when I called Daniel’s phone.”

Kara exhaled slowly. “I know you think—”

Claire continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Somebody answered. Whoever it was didn’t say anything. They just listened.”

The strength of the sincerity in her voice, coupled with the eerie look of intense concentration sent a shiver through Kara. “Honey…”

“I wonder if it was enough.”

“Enough? For what?”

And now Claire did look up. Her eyes were free of tears, of sleep, and startlingly clear. “Enough to trace the signal,” she said.

She didn’t expect Kara to believe her, and didn’t care. She loved her sister, but her presence here, now, while Claire was lost in her thoughts, meant that she was good only as a sounding board for her own. And it had worked. She knew from the movies that signals could be traced when someone made a call from a cell phone, but not if the phone being answered was traceable. But she was determined to find out. There was little sense in sharing this idea with Kara; she had done so only to hear it spoken aloud, and it still sounded reasonable. The killers had Daniel’s phone. Tonight they had answered it. If she could get that information to someone who would believe her, someone who could use that information, then it might make all the difference.

She looked at her sister.

“I don’t…” Kara said, looking helpless, frustrated.

“I’ve changed my mind. Let’s make the omelet,” Claire said, to deny Kara another chance to make her doubt herself. Relief washed over her sister’s face and she reached over and squeezed Claire’s hand. Claire forced a smile to placate her further, but behind her eyes she was remembering what Ted Craddick had said earlier. Has Danny’s brother been to see you? He’s calling on all the parents, and he mentioned wanting to see you too.

She studied the name displayed in black against the cell phone’s glowing green LCD background:

Red was still alive, and wailing like a child with a cut knee, though of course his injuries were a lot worse than that. He was on his back on the floor, rolling over and back. Louise stood by the couch, a trembling hand to her mouth, alternating horrified glances from the writhing form of Red to Pete, who watched her, eyes wide, his whole body shaking violently.

Get it together, she told herself, but for most of her life, that secret, inner voice had tried to guide her and she had seldom heeded its advice. Don’t go with Wayne, it had said, or believe for one second what he’s promisin’ you. You’re smarter than that. Don’t leave the boy. Don’t leave Jack, the only man who didn’t hit you and never would for one who probably will. Again and again, she had refused to listen to reason, opting instead for spontaneity and gut instinct to lead her to greener pastures and ultimately, the fulfillment of ambitions she’d harbored since childhood. And not a single one of those gambles had paid off. Now, she intended to pay attention, and to do what good sense was telling her.

“Pete,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

He simply stared dumbly at her.

Quickly, she stepped around the fallen man. The end of the shard jutted from his ruined eye, his hands weaving around it as if desperate to pull it out but afraid what might happen if he did. Occasionally the heel of one palm would bump the shard and he would convulse and cry out. His right cheek was drenched in blood.

“Pete,” she said, louder now as she came to him. He continued to stare at her. The boy had saved them both from certain death. For now. But he was young, and the guilt and horror of what he’d just done to another human being would no doubt override all others. All he would see was that shard, slicing through a man’s eyeball, over and over again.

She clamped her hands on his shoulder and brought her face close to his. “Thank you,” she told him. “Thank you for helpin’ me. He would have hurt us both before he was through. You know that, don’t you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Look… I know you feel bad, but we’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to run, and I can’t do that on my own. I’m gonna need your help. Are you with me, Pete?”

Expressionless now, his eyes on hers, lips parted slightly, she feared she might have lost him again, this time to himself and not as a casualty of her selfishness, though both incidences were, at the back of it all, her fault. Had she not left him in the first place, he wouldn’t have had to track her down, and wouldn’t have—

Stop it, she chided herself. Just stop. This is gettin’ you nowhere. You start thinkin’ about blame and in a few minutes both of you are goin’ to be walkin’ out of here in handcuffs because you lost the will to move.

“Shit.” She struggled against tears. “Will you do this with me? Will you do this for your Momma?”

At that, a small light reentered his eyes. He blinked but his expression remained the same.

“He was goin’ to rape me, Pete. You had to stop him. And now we gotta get goin’ or they’ll throw us both in jail.”

He wouldn’t, or couldn’t speak.

With rising urgency, Louise noted the faintest strains of red peering through the buildings beyond her window like blood in the cracks between tiles. They were out of time.

On the floor, Red was muttering curses. “Fuggin’…. kill youuu…. they’ll….”

“C’mon,” Louise said, and clumsily guided Pete toward the door, shielding him with her body as best she could from the sight of the wounded man. At the apartment door, she put her hand to his cheek. “I want you to wait for me outside.”

He looked at her.

“I want you to wait outside,” she repeated. “Don’t talk to no one. Don’t go nowhere. I’m just goin’ to be a few minutes. Gotta get dressed, okay?”

She didn’t wait for a response, doubted he had one, so she opened the door and gently pushed him over the threshold. A quick check showed no one in the hall. Satisfied, she stepped back into the apartment, leaving him alone. “Wait,” she told him, with a look of pleading, and closed the door behind her.

“Fuggin… bitch… My eye….” Red moaned. He was up on one elbow, struggling to get up. Louise watched him from the door, her hummingbird heart threatening to stall under the weight of panic.

You can’t leave him like this. You know that.

Red dug his heels into the carpet and after a moment, managed to get to his knees. He swallowed, and glared at her, the ruined eye only adding to the malevolence. “Gonna kill you,” he said hoarsely. “Wasn’t gonna, but now…” He sneered, blood trickling over his lips, streaking his cheeks. Breath rattled from his lungs.

“I’m sorry,” Louise said, and meant it. This was not part of any plan. No one had promised her this. It had happened all on its own, and now it would have to continue.

“Bitch,” Red said, swaying slightly.

Louise took a deep breath and in three short strides was across the room and standing before him. She saw him tense to strike her despite the extent of his injuries, but he never had the chance. She was crouching down and in his face, one hand grabbing a handful of his hair and yanking his head back before he could even draw back a fist. Then, eyes narrowed so she might be spared the full extent of her actions when the memory of them came back to haunt her, opened her free hand and drove her palm against the shard, slicing her own skin and forcing the thick glass into Red’s brain.

He was dead in an instant, his remaining eye wide in surprise as he fell awkwardly back on his legs. As his lungs expelled a breath meant for a scream, or a plea he had not lived to deliver, she reached into his coat pocket and withdrew the pouch Red had retrieved from the guts of the destroyed television. It felt heavy in her hand, and when she opened it and angled it toward the light, she saw what was inside and her own breath left her.

Diamonds.

Swallowing back the terror, she hurried into the bathroom, quickly washed the gash on her hand and bandaged it, then moved to the bedroom where she tugged on whatever clothes she could find, and checked her face in the closet mirror for blood, or any evidence of what had happened here tonight. Satisfied that she did not look too conspicuous, she hurried out to join Pete.

Diamonds, she thought, stunned by the implications of everything that had just transpired in her roach-ridden fleapit of an apartment. But there would be time to think later, if they weren’t apprehended before they even reached the front door of the building. In the forefront of her mind for now, was the fear that Pete had already fled, that his own turmoil had propelled him away from her and she would never find him. His guilt might lead him directly to the police.

But he was there, waiting where she’d left him, and she couldn’t restrain a heavy sigh of relief.

She led him out of the apartment into the cold street, where she was stunned to see that though there was plenty of blood on the pavement amid the stubbed out cigarette butts and beer bottles, there was no body. The grief too, would come later, she knew, but was now glad that there was nothing to see here, nothing to distract her from what she planned to do.

As she hailed a cab and waited for it to slow, Pete finally spoke.

“Where we goin’?” he asked quietly.

Bolstered by this small sign that he was returning to himself, she brushed a hand against his cheek and summoned a smile.

“Home,” she told him.

Finch’s alarm clock showed 8:55 a.m. He sat up, groaning at the immediate assault of pain in his skull, and rubbed his eyes. The phone had dragged him from sleep without consideration for the amount of alcohol he had put away mere hours before, and he was not pleased with the interruption.

Grumbling, he blinked a few times and reached across the bed to the phone and snatched it up, muscles aching.

“What?” he snapped into the receiver.

The voice that came back at him did not alleviate his suffering, but it chased away all thought of sleep.

“Finch?”

He smiled, despite the shock. “Claire?”

“Hi.”

“Where are you?” he asked. Her voice was low, as if fearing she might be overheard.

“Out in the yard. Told them I was going for some air. I’m stuck behind a goddamn bush right now in my pajamas.”

“Well, I’m glad you called.”

“Me too. I wasn’t sure what to do.”

“About what?”

“Ted Craddick told me you’re visiting all the families.”

“Trying to at least,” he admitted.

“Why?”

“To talk about what happened.”

“Is that all?”

“No. No, it’s not all. I told them what I planned to do.”

“And what are you planning to do?”

“I’m going back down there, Claire. To Elkwood.”

“Why?” The tone of her voice told him she already knew, and just wanted to hear him say it.

“To stop the men who did this from ever doing it again.”

“How do you know it was them and not the doctor? Everybody else seems to think he did it.”

“Did he?”

“No,” Claire said. “No, he helped get me out of there. I’d be dead if not for him.”

She was silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, there was no emotion in her voice. “I can’t stay long. I’ll try to call back later if I can. We need to find some way to meet.”

“You’re a grown woman, Claire. They can’t keep you a prisoner in that house.”

“Yeah. Tell them that.” Her sigh rumbled over the phone. “When are you going?”

“Friday.”

“Okay.”

“Why did you call, Claire?”

“Because I can help you. I think I have a way of finding out where they are.”

Finch experienced something akin to a jolt of nervous excitement in his guts. Since making his decision to go after the killers, he had dreaded the notion that maybe he would get there and they’d have vanished underground, or hidden themselves away in a place not found on any map. The chance that someone in Elkwood would know where the Merrill family had gone was a slim one. Getting them to tell him even if they did know would be even harder. But it was all he had. That, and whatever Claire was willing to share. But now she was offering him more than he had dared expect.

“How about tonight?” he asked.

“Sure, but how?”

“I’ll call you. You can tell them it’s Ted Craddick, and that he wants to see you to reminisce about his boy. If they object, throw a fit. Accuse them of smothering you with their attention. Say you’re old enough to make your own decisions. Call your sister a bitch or something.”

“You would say that.”

He smiled. “Head for Ted’s house. I’ll be parked outside.”

“Okay. But I gotta go now. Kara’s calling me.”

“Sure. I’ll call later.”

She was gone. Finch stared at the phone in his hand for a long time before hanging it up. Though his hangover was severe, it almost didn’t matter. He was elated. As he headed for the shower, he felt that same nervous excitement course through him like adrenaline, diluted by the slightest undercurrent of fear.

In the bathroom he paused before the mirror and studied his wan, unshaven face. His eyes were like ice chips anchored in place by dark red threads.

We’re coming for you.

He was readying himself for war against a foe he’d never seen, in a place he’d never been.

It would not be the first time.

-26-

Kara lit a cigarette and through the smoke and the rain-speckled windshield, watched her sister cross the street, her progress slowing as she scanned the other cars parked alongside the curb for the occupied one. Finch was parked somewhere among them, Kara knew, so Claire was unlikely to look down the row of vehicles far enough to spot her. She watched, fiery anger demanding she put a stop to this immediately, before any further damage was done. But for the moment, she resisted and dragged deeply on her cigarette—a habit she had managed to keep secret from her mother for ten years until the night they’d brought Claire home. Even then, it had been her mother lighting up first that had triggered her confession.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she admitted to her mother, aghast. Her mother had shrugged. “Didn’t know you did either.” And they’d smiled weakly and lit up. It had helped eased the tension that had existed between them ever since the night her father had died and Kara, in an inexplicable and uncharacteristic moment of frightening rage, had struck her mother, when it was clear the woman wanted nothing more than to join her husband in death. They hadn’t exactly been friends since, and her mother’s contention that what had happened to Claire in Alabama was their fault, the result of not being caring or vigilant enough with her, hadn’t helped. Throughout their vigils, sitting in antiseptic-smelling waiting rooms, corridors, and starkly furnished hotel rooms waiting to see how much the ordeal had affected Claire, Kara had had to listen silently to her mother’s allocation of blame, the self-flagellation, the expressions of guilt, and it had almost driven her out of her mind. We should have known, her mother had said, though of course there had been no way of knowing. I felt it in my gut. I just knew something had happened to her. A mother knows. Kara had recognized this last for what it was—misremembered maternal instinct fabricated to perpetuate the self-punishment her mother seemed to need, so she’d ignored it and gritted her teeth and tried not to be infected by it.

For Kara’s part, she’d been sick with worry for Claire, but as strained as her relationship with her mother had been, her relationship with Claire had—and still was, she supposed—even more fragile. And for this, she did blame herself. After their father died, their mother had lost something of herself, had grown distant and stayed in that gloomy place which rendered every smile false, every kind word forced. With every passing year, it seemed as if her only goal was to find a state of consciousness that would allow her to get closer to the husband she’d lost, until her body felt compelled to follow. It wasn’t fair, but it was fact, and so Kara had, without being aware she was doing so, adopted the role as guardian to Claire.

I tried, she told herself as she rolled down the window a crack to let the smoke out. Five cars ahead, Claire smiled slightly, tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, and opened a car door, then slid inside and shut it behind her. The cars parked between them blocked Kara’s view of the vehicle, but it didn’t matter. She knew who her sister was meeting here.

That bastard. Again the anger tugged at her, tried to force her hand to the door, but she stayed where she was. Not yet. The longer she thought about it, however, the more uncertainty gained a foothold in her mind. Why was she here? To protect Claire from Finch? It didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense now that she studied her motives more closely. Finch wouldn’t harm Claire, and what harm there was to be done, had been done over two months ago in that backwoods town. Claire had survived a nightmare that had claimed her friends. She was alive, if not altogether recovered, but that would come with time. Why then, was she sitting here, overwhelmed by the urge to rip Claire from the car and smash Finch’s face in for luring her out to meet him? It was too late to protect Claire. The damage had been done, and the measure of compensation didn’t exist that could ever again make her feel safe. So again: Why was she here? The answer when it came, was simple, and heavy with truth.

She was here to keep her from Finch.

He might not hurt her, but nor was he a presence she wanted in her sister’s life. She had taken that one for the team, thank you very much, and there was no valid reason why he should have contact with anyone she cared about ever again. The man she had once, and foolishly, loved with all her heart, had almost destroyed her so driven was he by the compulsion to destroy himself. For him, happiness was an elusive thing, a concept infrequently understood and mistrusted when it came. He had told her stories of his past that had made her skin crawl—the abusive father, the bullying at school, the shyness he had eventually managed to cast off during his unsteady journey through puberty, the hunting trips with his father in later life which had invariably ended in arguments, and in one case, a mutual threat of murder, the alcoholism, the drugs, the fistfights. She had not been surprised when he’d accepted the call to war. He was not a happy man, nor was he even remotely patriotic. Finch was his own country, the government unstable, the population volatile. Often during their six month relationship, she had seen glimpses of the man she wished he could be, the man she suspected Finch himself wished he could be, but they were transient and towards the end, vanished altogether, leaving only the anger and the cruelty behind. She would never deny that a part of her still loved him, but it was a small part, a speck on the great wide-open plain of her hatred. He had hurt her, and he would keep going until he had hurt everyone around him.

And she would not let him do that to Claire.

“I’m glad you came,” Finch said. “Wasn’t sure the jailbreak would work.”

In the passenger seat, Claire smiled. There were slight wrinkles around her mouth that did not belong on the face of someone so young, but Finch knew that no matter how old it might say she was on her I.D., what those men had done to her had shoved her headlong into adulthood. They had taken her innocence, her friends, her spirit, and left her as good as dead, for he had known Claire before the trip, had often kidded around with her while he waited for Kara outside the house, and he saw now that the light that had always danced in her eyes had gone out. Had been snuffed out. Her once lustrous blonde hair was now jet black and greasy, as if she’d dipped it in oil—a clear indication of her prevalent mood. Or perhaps it was meant to compliment the black pirate-style patch she wore to hide the scarring from where they had gouged out her eye. Either way, she did not look herself, did not look familiar to him.

“Kara was in the shower,” Claire told him, looking down at her hands, absently rubbing the smooth pink nubs where two of the fingers on her left hand should have been. “So I left a note. My mother was…my mother. I’m not sure it even registered that I was leaving.”

Finch thought of his own mother, at home, watching game shows and alternating between cursing the world and weeping while she reached down beside her rocking chair for one of the many vials of pills that stood like attentive soldiers around the runners.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” he told her, because she appeared as if she was waiting for him to say it. He draped his arm over her shoulder, gently, as he was not yet sure how she might react to a man’s touch. She stiffened slightly, but did not move away, and when she looked up at him, he saw the pain in her face.

“You’re going to kill them, right?” she asked, so matter-of-factly, she might have been asking a quarterback about an upcoming game.

He nodded. “That’s the plan.”

“Good.” She went back to looking at her fingers. “I want to go with you.”

“No.”

She turned in the seat and glared at him. “What?”

“I said no.”

“I don’t care. I said I want to go, and you don’t get to tell me I can’t.”

“Jesus, Claire… why would you want to go back? If what we uncovered is true, then these guys have been snatching people and murdering them for years. You might be the only person who ever lived to tell the tale.”

“A tale nobody believed,” she said flatly.

“I believed it. But that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to say is that I can take care of this. I’m going to. There’s no need for you to be there to see it. When it’s over, I’ll come see you, and we can talk. I’ll tell you everything. But for now you need to stay here where you’re safe.”

She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Safe? Here? Finch…” She gestured at the world outside the car. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter where I go. Here, back there, France, the North Pole, it doesn’t matter. I’ll never be safe again. You could build a castle around me and seal it up and I’d still be what I am. And what I am is scared. What I’m afraid of…” Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat, then looked at him with fiery resolve. “What I’m afraid of isn’t out there. It’s in here,” she said, tapping a forefinger against her temple. “And no matter where I run, it’ll follow me, whether you kill those men or not.”

“Why do you want to come if it won’t change anything for you?”

“I’m alive and I shouldn’t be,” she said sadly. “And I don’t know how long I’ll be able to last with that voice telling me I should be with my friends, but in that time I’d like to see those men, and those children, understand what they did to us. To feel the pain and the fear they were so fucking eager to inflict on us. “ Her eyes shimmered with tears. “I want to know they’re dead. Maybe it will change things, maybe it won’t, but I need to be there. I need to see the world put back on its axis, things put right, even if I don’t belong in it anymore.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

“You still have people, Claire.”

“Who? You?”

“No. Your Mom, and Kara. You still have people who care about you and who’ll protect you. The rest of us have been left with nothing.”

She looked squarely at him. “Do you blame me?”

“What?”

“For what happened? Do you blame me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course not. You didn’t make it happen.”

“But does it make you mad that I lived and Danny didn’t?”

He avoided her eyes for a moment. The truth was, in the beginning, he had been mad at her. He might even have hated her a little for being the sole survivor, questioned fate as to why she had been chosen above the others. But it had been a passing thing, the hate quickly redirected to the proper target, where it deepened, grew potent, became rage.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said to his silence and he quickly drew her close.

“No,” he said. “I’m not mad that you survived. Not mad at you. I blame them because that’s where the blame belongs.”

Head resting against his shoulder, she asked, “Do you think it will go away when you’ve killed them? The pain?”

“No,” he answered truthfully. “I don’t think that’ll ever go away. Not fully. Not after what you’ve gone through.”

“I wasn’t talking about me.”

He smiled tightly, her hair tickling his chin. “I don’t suppose it’ll go away for either of us.”

“Then why bother?”

“Because it’s how it needs to be.”

She pulled away from him, folded her arms. “So can I come?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’m spoiled for reasons, Claire. Firstly, forget about those fucking lunatics down there for a minute. What do you think Kara will do if she finds out I’ve taken you back?”

“Who cares?”

“I care, and you will too because she’ll have the cops on our asses so fast we won’t even see their lights before I’m in jail and you’re back under house arrest. Christ, you know as well as I do that Kara wouldn’t stand for it. She’d make my life a living hell.”

Though she shook her head, Finch could see in her face that she knew he was right. “Plus,” he went on, “You’ve been through enough bad shit. You don’t need to be put back in harm’s way after escaping it once just to see more bad shit.”

She fell silent, almost sulking, but he understood her feelings. They were the same as his own. Behind all the pain in Claire’s face, he recognized the fear, the grief, and the kind of stark, utter hatred that could only be sated by vengeance.

“Did you bring your phone?”

Quietly, she nodded, and slid it out of her jeans pocket, then handed it over. Finch inspected the cell phone. A slim, silver Nokia. Nothing much different from the kind of phones most of the kids were carrying around these days. “Keep it,” she said.

“I don’t need it. Just the number. I have a friend who will know if we can use it to trace the signal to whoever answered it, or at least to where they were when they answered it. Danny’s phone needs to be on, I guess, for us to have any hope of tracking it. If it isn’t…” He shrugged.

“You didn’t need to see me for that. I called you. You already have my number.”

“I wanted to see you.” When she said nothing, he nudged her shoulder. “Hey.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, all right? I know why you need this. And I can’t stop you going alone. You just can’t come with me.”

A moment more of silence, then she cracked the door and stepped out of the car. She had grown so thin since Alabama he could see her shoulder blades pressing like incipient wings against the thin blue plastic of her raincoat. “Then who needs you,” she said and slammed it shut before he could say anything further.

In the rearview, he watched her—a nineteen-year-old girl once pretty and vibrant, now bitter and prematurely aged—as she walked back to where he knew her sister was waiting.

-27-

“Hello Miss Daltry, and isn’t it a fine morning?” the pawnbroker said cheerfully, his pudgy face molded around a large thick-lipped smile. Louise resisted the urge to look over her shoulder at the urban snowscape framed by the grimy storefront window behind her. It was a horrible day in almost every conceivable way, and as a result she had little tolerance for people like Rag Truman, who felt compelled to find the upside of everything and would probably keep on smiling even if he looked down at himself and realized he was on fire.

She hurried to the counter—a glass cabinet marred by greasy fingerprints, within which gold and silver jewelry on black velvet cushions sat next to nickel-plated revolvers, an assortment of cell phones, lighters, hunting knives, men’s ties and women’s silk scarves. Behind Rag was a blue steel door with a card reader to the left. A small red light showed that it was securely locked. A faded sign read: PRIVATE. All around were high metal shelves, packed with treasures for the undiscerning eye. There was so much of it in the musty room, it made Louise claustrophobic, but she acknowledged that a lot of that might not be the size of pawn shop, rather the feeling that a net was rapidly being cinched tight around her.

“I have somethin’ that might interest you,” she told the pawnbroker.

“Do you indeed?” He leaned closer, his hands braced on the cabinet, large ring-studded fingers smudging the glass. Evidently all the fingerprints there were his own.

Louise nodded, put her hand in her coat pocket, and then hesitated. Since taking the life of the man in her apartment, it was as if her senses had been enhanced. Her hearing, in particular, seemed to have strained itself, so that now the slightest sounds, once innocuous, registered as potential threats. As she stood there, frozen, fingers pressed against the soft material of the pouch in her pocket, she could hear the whistling of Rag’s breath through his nose, the moist click of his dentures as he poked at them with his tongue. And outside, on the street, every engine sounded menacing as cars carved channels in the slush. She expected sirens at any moment as the police came to take her in. The thought of them rushing at her, guns drawn, broke her paralysis. She withdrew the pouch from her pocket and tossed them onto the cabinet between Rag’s hands.

“And what’s this?” he asked, with a curious smile.

“Open it.”

He did. She expected him to be shocked, to whistle his appreciation, or pale at the sight of the diamonds, but reminded herself that in all his years of business, he’d probably seen more remarkable things. There were no exclamations as he upended the pouch into his palm and peered nearsightedly at the gems. If anything he seemed largely unimpressed, perhaps a trait he had adopted to keep his customers from overestimating the worth of their “treasures.”

“Interesting,” he said, and, spreading the sparkling diamonds out on the back of the pouch, fished beneath the counter and produced a small black loupe, which he screwed against his eye until it appeared affixed to it. Then he plucked a diamond from the pile and brought it close to the lens.

Time seemed to stretch interminably. Beneath her coat and despite the cold, Louise was sweating, could feel it trickling from her armpits, running like spiders down between her breasts. The world outside the shop seemed to be holding its breath, counting the seconds until it could release a scream of sirens. Controlling her breathing was an effort as panic squeezed her lungs.

At length, Rag finished his inspection of each and every one of the gems laid out before him, and he looked no more impressed than he had when he’d first seen them. Maybe they’re fakes. Louise felt her heart skip as she watched him carelessly tug the pouch out from under the diamonds, scattering them across the surface of the cabinet before picking them up one by one and putting them back into the bag.

“I won’t ask where you came by these,” he said calmly, and drew the drawstrings tight before placing the pouch down between them. “Because I already know.”

How? Louise thought in desperation. How could you know?

“There’s much talk on the street about a certain robbery at the LaSalle Bank over in Troy a few months back,” he said, folding his arms. “The cops have already been here three times, inconveniencing me greatly.” He smiled and a gold incisor gleamed. “You see, whomever you acquired these from would not, I suspect, have been foolish enough to try to pawn them. I imagine there would have been some kind of a deal between those who facilitated their removal from the LaSalle vault and someone with enough money to buy them without drawing undue attention to his or herself. This,” he said, with a dismissive gesture of his hand in the air above the pouch, “This would be the last place they’d try to offload them. Too many risks. They would have to be very desperate indeed to even attempt it.”

“So you don’t want them,” Louise said, her attempt at a calm tone falling short. She reached for the pouch, but Rag beat her to it, drawing the small sack toward him and raising a hand, palm out to halt her.

“I didn’t say that, exactly.”

“Then what are you sayin’?”

He sighed dramatically. “If I purchased these from you, it would convert me from a humble pawnbroker to an accessory in the eyes of the authorities. My livelihood would be at stake. In short, I could lose everything just by helping you.”

“So don’t,” she said, but made no move to retrieve the pouch. She simply glared at him, willing him to cut the crap and make his decision so she could be free to make her own.

Then she watched, incredulous as he picked up the pouch and slid them into the pocket of his soiled baggy slacks. “Here’s what I’m going to do,” he told her. “I’m going to hold onto these, for your sake. I’ll give you two thousand dollars—call it a loan, or a late payment on that pretty ring you sold me when you first hit town—to help you on your way, and I’ll turn these over to the police. I’ll fabricate the description of the seller, of course, and make it a very good one. It should give you a considerable head start before they pick up your scent. What do you think?”

“I think you’re a crook,” she replied. “I think you don’t have a goddamn notion of turnin’ those gems over to the cops. You know you have me over a barrel, so you figure there ain’t a goddamn thing I can do about it either, right?”

“I’m offended,” he said, and clearly wasn’t.

She stared at him for a long moment, watching the small smug smile play over his fat lips. She was not entirely surprised at this development, had known there was every chance he was going to rip her off, but with no money and a bag full of diamonds, he had been her only option. Her previous dealings with him—the first to pawn her grandmother’s engagement ring; then later, a brooch her mother had given her—had left her less than satisfied, but with Wayne unemployed and nothing ahead of her at the time but a few interviews for waitress jobs that might come to nothing, she’d had little choice. Now, the avenues available to her were even more limited. But she was not going to stand here and watch what little hope she had left being crushed by a man who, despite his claims, was in all likelihood as shady and crooked as the thugs who provided him his merchandise. She found herself wondering how much of his stock had come with clear evidence of how they’d been acquired. Probably pays less for bloodstained goods, she thought, disgusted.

Resolute, “Let me tell you how this is goin’ to go,” she said, and withdrew from her other pocket the gun Wayne’s cousin had used to keep her docile, and leveled it at him.

“Whoa now,” he said, and yet there was still no change in expression, as if facing a gun was something he endured daily.

She cocked the hammer. Rag didn’t blink.

“You’re goin’ to keep those diamonds,” Louise said. “You’re right about that part. I didn’t come here to rob you, and you need to understand that. So they’re yours. All I want is a fair price, that’s all. I have a boy that needs help and I can’t give it to him here, not with what’s happened, and not without money. Now those gems ain’t mine, but I figure after what I’ve been through today, maybe I deserve them. What I don’t deserve—” she said, stepping closer, so that her hip was pressed against the edge of the counter, the barrel of the gun scant inches from the bare spot between Rag’s tumultuous eyebrows, “—is to have everythin’ go to hell because of some greedy son of a bitch.”

Rag sighed, as he might have over any deal that was not going his way, and narrowed his eyes. “So what do you consider a fair price then?”

She took a moment to consider this. All the way here she’d told herself that ten grand would be a good start. Enough to get them away for a while until she could think things through. Without knowing how much the diamonds were worth, she saw it as a reasonable sum to hope for. Not any more. Rag might have found it disturbing if she told him that instead of disheartening her, his stoicism toward the gems had persuaded her they were worth even more than she’d guessed.

“How much do you think they’re worth?” she asked him. “And before you answer, keep in mind that I might already know. After all, I brought them to you, didn’t I? So if you lie to me, I’ll put a bullet in your skull.”

She had no intention of pulling the trigger, of course, and hadn’t even checked to see if it was loaded. Red had shot a hole in the apartment wall, but for all she knew that might have been his last bullet. The pawnbroker, however, didn’t know that.

“Maybe a million. I’d have to take another look,” he said.

“You don’t need another look. You can fondle them as much as you like once I’m gone.”

“Can you take that gun out of my face?”

“As soon as I have the money.”

“How much money?”

The words barreled up her throat and were out of her before she had a chance to consider them. “Hundred thousand. Do whatever the hell you like with the stones after that, but that’s what I want for them.”

Finally, Rag’s expression changed. He glowered at her, face flushed, blue-red veins visible under the bulbous flesh of his nose. “You’re out of your fucking mind. What makes you think I have that kind of money lying around here, or that I’d give it to you even if I had?”

“I guess because when you’re given the choice of makin’ a fair trade or havin’ your brains blown out, you take the easier route. Maybe I was wrong.” Pulling on all the crime shows she’d ever seen in her lifetime, she tightened her grip on the gun, leaned forward and pressed the muzzle between the pawnbroker’s eyes. Again, he defied expectation. Rather than pleading, or accepting the fate she’d promised him, he scowled, cursed at her and turned away. She watched, shaken by her own resolve, as he withdrew a slim white keycard from his back pocket and angrily jerked it down the slot in the reader by the metal door. The light on the display turned green. There came a short sharp electronic honk and Rag grabbed the door handle, about to yank it open. Louise stopped him.

“I’m comin’ around,” she said. “Leave the door open. You try anythin’…”

“Yeah,” Rag said, half-turning. His eyes were glassy with anger. “I know how it goes.”

He disappeared inside. Louise following close behind.

-28-

They buried Momma in stony earth on the summit of Hood Mountain. From where they stood, they could see the great dark bulk of the water treatment facility on the horizon. Between the plant and the mountain the land seemed sick, diseased, poisoned. The hue of the earth suggested it had been sustained by the blood of those who’d tried to farm it. Rough patches of overgrowth marked the boundaries of long-fallow fields. Here and there, small stands of trees, buckled by storm winds and infection in their roots, stood defeated and spiritless, their arms weak and hanging empty. The mountain had been sheared by mining, the east side oddly flat, almost smooth, veins of red hematite iron ore still threading its hide, adding to the impression of something living cut in half. Intermittent beds of shale and sandstone gave it a leprous hue.

At the foot of the mountain stood Krall’s cabin, its chimney threading smoke. It was surrounded on three sides by thinned out groups of pine trees. To Papa-In-Gray, it was hardly protection enough from invasive forces, but the mountain at its back would help limit the avenues of approach for their attackers. If they were vigilant, and kept their eyes open, his family would survive. They would be ready.

Though the weather was warm, the wind carried a chill to them, and with it, the scent of rain. For Papa-In-Gray, it seemed fitting, as Momma had loved the rain, the sound of it a lullaby that carried her to sleep.

Gently, he removed his hat, and bowed his head. The boys flanked him, their postures equally reverent. Jeremiah Krall stood opposite, at the foot of the grave, staring at the earth as if were a brown pond from which his sister might surface at any moment. The horror that he had witnessed had changed him, though how much Papa could not yet tell. He still appeared a character roughly carved from hard rock, his eyes wintry, his disposition hostile, but something had shifted within him. He looked like a walking battlefield, upon which wars were raging to determine which emotions should preside over the landscape. He had said little since witnessing Luke’s rebirth.

“Our Lord,” Papa began, his voice loud enough to carry the words halfway down the mountain. “Gather your faithful servant to your breast and keep her safe. Accept her into Heaven, and your glory. Recognize within her the light you so generously instilled in her, and which she did not waste. Just as she come into the world, so does she leave it, with an unspoiled soul.” He paused, and the boys murmured “Amen.”

“Guide us, good Jesus,” he continued, raising his face to the darkening sky. “Guide us in the ways in which we can strike the devil from your green earth and vanquish the defilers. Lend us your wrath so that we might turn the tide of corruption that even now laps at our shore. Give us the strength and the means so we can tear the skin from the sinners and cast them down into Hell.”

“Amen,” said the boys.

“We give you Momma, a good, proud, strong woman who loved you more’n anyone, and we will not weep. We give her to you so that you may in turn give us what we need to smite the Men of the World, the coyotes that sniff around our borders. We give our beloved wife, and mother, to you, so that you might make her a saint and return her to us as an angel who would instill in our veins the power we need to prevail. Hear us, our merciful God…Amen.”

“Amen.”

Papa lowered his gaze from the mercurial sky. You were a pure soul, he added in silence. And I’ll miss our talks, and your strength. He looked up, and wiped a hand over his eyes. The breeze dried quickly the dampness beneath them, and for this he was grateful. “Jeremiah,” he said. “Is there anythin’ you wish to add?”

The big man returned his gaze, held it for a moment, then looked back down at the grave. He did not reply.

Papa watched him carefully, then turned to Aaron, who stood solemnly by his side. “Go down. I want you to get all our weapons together. Feed your brothers, and see to Luke. Clean him up. We’ll need him. Then send Joshua up here to keep watch. Before it’s dark, I want you all ready and waitin’ for ’em to come.”

“How do you know they’re comin’, Papa?”

He thought about this for a moment, then ruffled the boy’s hair. “God sent an angel to whisper in my ear while I was sleepin’.”

“How many do you think will come?”

“Enough. Now you best get movin’ while the light’s with us.”

Aaron nodded, and set off down the mountain, herding the twins ahead of him. Papa waited until they were gone, then walked over to stand beside Krall.

“I know you’re hurtin’,” he told the big man. “And that’s only right. But if you don’t end up seein’ where all this is supposed to lead you, all that pain’s for nothin’.”

Krall continued to stare down at the ground. His lips moved slightly, but the words were lost to the wind, if indeed he was making any sound at all.

Papa studied him for a few moments, then clamped a hand on his shoulder. “The coyotes are comin’,” he said. “Just like Momma knew they would. They took her from you, and I’m sure she’d be proud to know you joined us in wipin’ them off the earth.”

Without another word, he turned his back and left Krall to his mourning. It would pass, Papa knew. And when it did, it would leave only the rage.

This at least, they could use.

“Get out of the car.”

Finch sighed, and rolled up the window. Stubbing out his cigarette, he was not entirely surprised when his door opened without him touching it. He would not have been any more surprised if Kara had reached in and slapped him. But she didn’t. Instead, she held the door and waited for him to step out into the rain before slamming it shut and poking a finger in his chest.

“What did I tell you? What did I say? Were you listening?”

He glanced back over his shoulder to her car, where inside, he saw the ghostly shape of Claire watching from behind the reflected sky. He turned back to Kara.

“I told her she couldn’t come. And she isn’t. At least, not with me.”

Kara’s eyes blazed. “That’s not enough.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to undo what’s already done. She can’t deal with this kind of shit. Now she thinks there’s some kind of merit to your suicide mission. Thinks maybe if she tags along it’ll help her make peace with being the only one to get out alive. She’s vulnerable, and looking for somewhere to put the anger.”

“So am I.”

“Oh fuck you,” Kara said, and this time he knew she was going to hit him. But he didn’t move, and the strike didn’t come. Inside she turned, cursed under her breath and walked a few steps, then turned.

“This is typical you.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Say nothing. Go home. Check yourself into a mental hospital. Do something other than this.”

“I can’t.”

She stepped close again, the fury making her face ugly. “No, you can’t, can you, and the last thing you’d ever consider would be getting help. It’s far easier for you to fuck up everybody else’s lives.”

Finch folded his arms. “Look, I’m sorry. I told you I wasn’t letting this go. I tried to talk some sense into Claire but—”

“Talk sense into Claire?” Kara raged. “How could that happen when you don’t have any sense yourself? Think your age and experience makes you wiser? Sorry, Finch, but you’re still a kid, a goddamn brat with a temper and everybody has to pay for it but you. Finch the Almighty versus the World.”

That annoyed him, and this time she couldn’t hang up on him before he got to defend himself. “Hey, I’ve already paid for it, all right?” he countered. “I lost my brother. You got Claire back, so don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t do, or what’s wrong with the way that I feel because you haven’t a fucking clue.”

She smiled bitterly. “Danny. I know you loved him, Finch, but if it weren’t Danny, it would be some other cause. Someone or something needs to be destroyed because God forbid you should look in instead of out for a change. Well,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Do what you have to do, I guess. But sooner or later you’re going to run out of mirrors to shoot at. Then what will you do?”

“Wow…watching Oprah again, are we?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know who you are, Finch. Not sure I ever did. But I recognize this part of you, and I should. It’s why I left you. That was something else you destroyed.”

“This isn’t about me, Kara.”

“Really? You sure about that?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded slowly, a grim smile on her lips. “I’m sure you believe it too.” She stepped past him, headed for her car. “Stay the hell away from Claire,” she said without looking back. “Or I’ll call the cops. And don’t think I won’t if it means protecting her from you.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but the glare she threw him before getting into the car dissuaded him, leaving him standing alone on the street. Only then did he find his voice.

“I’m not the bad guy,” he said, and wondered who he was trying to convince.

After a moment, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed Beau’s number. “Hey,” he said, when Beau answered. “We’re leaving.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Why?”

“I just spoke to Kara.”

“And?”

“And I don’t trust her not to put the kibosh on this whole gig just to piss me off.”

“Savin’ your life would piss you off?”

“You going to be ready to go, or what?”

“Give me an hour, okay? I’m standin’ here with my uncle Leroy. Negotiatin’ the acquisition of the tools we’ll need.”

“Remember, John Kaplan’s footing the bill so don’t feel obliged to be frugal.”

“Got it.”

“I’ll pick you up at your place in an hour.”

-29-

They were in the park.

Pete didn’t know what had gone wrong, or when, but the world in which he moved now was not one he recognized, or liked very much. It seemed everyone he loved had died, or was hurt, or walking through the same nightmare as he was, as if mere contact with him was enough to drag them into the dark. He didn’t want that for Louise, but it was already too late. In the time it had taken her to take care of her “private matter” at the pawnshop, it seemed she’d grown older. She looked sick, tired and old, and he knew it was his fault.

“You drive real good,” she said now, easing herself down onto the park bench beside him. “I’ve seen it, I know. Sometimes I think your daddy taught you to drive before he taught you to walk.”

The mention of his father pained him, and it seemed from her feeble smile that it pained her too. Pete wished she wouldn’t mention his Pa. He wished she wouldn’t mention anything but getting to the girl, so he could be sure what was coming next. So there was a set plan. Because something about her now didn’t sit right with him. It made him uneasy, because he couldn’t tell what it was. Had she called the police on him, or changed her mind about taking him to see the girl? She must have. Why else would she be talking about him driving?

“You can get yourself a car,” she said. “In that lot over there. I know the guy runs it. But I wanted to talk to you first.”

“What’s to talk about?” he asked. “We should just go before the police find us. If they do, I ain’t never gettin’ to the girl, and those folks who hurt my Pa’ll get away.”

“I know that,” she said, and winced as she took her hands in his. Light snow drifted down around them. She was shaking from the cold. Pete drew close, hoping the heat would be enough to warm them both. The park was empty but for the bare snow-laden branches of oak trees and narrow concrete paths rimed with frost.

He looked down at her fingers, her clothes. “You’re bleedin’.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not my blood.”

“What did you do?”

“There’s no time. You’re gonna have to go soon,” Louise told him. “It isn’t safe around here anymore.”

“You’re comin’ too,” he reminded her, the fear already seizing his heart. He could tell by the look on her weary face what she was saying, but refused to believe it until the words took away the choice.

“No, I’m not.”

“Why?”

“All you need to know is that I love you, and I would go with you if I could, but I can’t. It’s too late. Too much has happened, and I need to go where the road is takin’ me. Unfortunately, it ain’t the same road as yours.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Trust me on this, okay? Have I ever lied to you?”

He shook his head.

“Okay. Then please just do this for me. I’ll catch up with you in a few days time if I can. And here,” she said, withdrawing Red’s gun from her pocket. “Take this. You might need it, but I sure hope you don’t. Hasn’t exactly brought us much luck, has it?”

He did as she requested, though the weight of the gun felt ugly and unnatural.

Sirens pierced the chill, icy air and she flinched, looked around. Quickly, she turned back to face him, her eyes wide and imploring. “Here,” she said, digging into her coat pocket. Into his hand she stuffed a large wad of bills. Pete had never seen so much money in his life. “Take this, and get yourself a ride. Guy’s name is Mike. He was a regular of mine when I worked in the Overrail. Tell him Louise sent you. Tell him your story. He’ll believe you. You got an honest face. People like him…they recognize honesty, seein’ as how they got so little of it themselves.” She gave him a weak grin, and shivered.

Panicked, Pete grabbed her coat. “You left me before, ’member? Please… don’t do it again. Come with me. I can’t do this by myself. S’why I came to find you.”

She hugged him lightly and stroked his hair. “We’re outta time, Pete.”

The sirens increased in volume, and over her shoulder Pete saw a cruiser swing into view at the far end of the street, lights flashing. “They’re comin’.” He felt Louise nod, then she pushed him away.

“Hurry, now, but don’t run. You don’t want to draw them on you, okay?”

“They’ll follow me.”

“No. They won’t. The only two people around here who’ve seen you with me are dead. You won’t be involved.”

“Why can’t you come with me? I don’t understand.”

“Because I didn’t do things right. I never have, and like always, I gotta face the music now.”

“No, you don’t. Come with me. We can—”

“If I go, they’ll come after me and dog me for the rest of my days. I don’t want that, for either of us. If I stay, they won’t bother with you. There’ll be no reason to.”

Tears in his eyes, “Please come…” he said, one last time, but knew it would change nothing. The pain in her eyes hadn’t been there the first time she’d left him. It was there now and he knew it was because this time it was for good. He would never see her again, and the thought almost crippled him. But the police car was close enough now that he could hear its tires sizzling through the slush, so he bent low, kissed her, and without another word, crossed the street. As he walked, he looked down at his fingers, at the smudges of blood on the tips. It reminded him of the night they’d found Claire. He had held his hands out to the rain to cleanse them, and afterward it had made him feel bad, as if he’d washed a part of her away. Though it was snowing now and he could simply reach down into the slush to clean them, he closed his hands instead. This blood he wanted to keep for as long as he could because although Louise had said she’d never lied to him, he knew now in his heart that she had, just this once, and only to protect him from the hurt.

It’s not my blood.

As he started to turn the corner into the car lot, he cast a final glance back at her, and saw that she was rocking slightly.

In his head, he heard her singing him to sleep.

Despite what she had told the boy, Louise did not believe she had ever found her road. She had only found the end of the one she had stumbled blindly along her whole life. The wrong one. It saddened her to think of so many squandered chances and wasted possibilities. She could have been something, had always known she was meant to be something and had tried her damndest to show the world what she was made of. But in the end, she realized she would not be spoken of in the same breath as Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, or Joyce Brant, because none of them had been thieves and murderers. Her singing voice would not be remembered, only the violence, the death, and her frantic attempts to set a boy on the road that might turn out to be his own eventual end, simply because he’d asked her to. It was all he wanted and she had agreed, partly out of guilt, and partly because she’d wanted him to follow his goal to its finish, no matter how misguided a goal it might prove to be.

She began to hum, a sweet melancholy tune that had been with her since her mother had sung it to her as a child. The name seemed so important now, but the fog in her mind obscured it. As her vision grew dim, she raised her head, and wondered if the snow had grown heavier, or if her time was almost at an end. The cold was gradually giving way to warmth, and that at least was good. It allowed her to be calm and focused in whatever time she had left.

She heard the squeak of brakes and the whoop-whoop stutter of the siren as the police car pulled up alongside her. More wails rose in the streets and alleys, a thousand echoes like dogs howling at night. Doors cracked open. Holsters were unclipped, guns drawn. She did not acknowledge those sounds, or the voices that barked at her, filling her ears with commands. She was dying, and had no use for them.

“Ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to stand, real slow.”

Louise smiled, and opened her coat.

Momentary silence, then someone said: “Get the medic. Now.”

She shook her head. Too late.

Steam rose from the slash in her stomach where the pawnbroker had dug his boxcutter into her. The sudden shock of it had made her muscles tense, including the one in her trigger finger, and she’d left Rag with a bullet in his shoulder. The pain had made even the simplest of tasks seem monumentally difficult, and she feared grabbing fistfuls of money and padding the wound would deny her the time she needed to get back to Pete and set him on his way. She should have died quickly—the wound would not stop bleeding—but she’d refused. She had left the boy once before. She would not do it again. Not until she’d seen him off.

It seemed only right.

She laughed at that, but it was short and made her double over with pain. Nothing in her life had been right, and it had culminated in the sheer wrongness of the past few hours. She had killed two men, and lost the one she’d been betting on to free her. And her son, a boy who was not her blood, but shared her heart, she had sent away, to fight for all that remained.

“There’s a gun in her pocket,” a man said gruffly.

Arms grabbed her, stopping her from sliding to the frozen ground as her heels failed to find purchase on the slick concrete. But still the mirth leaked out in airless chuckles, trailing from her in clouds that swept around the hard faces of the men, diffusing them, making them unreal.

“Take it easy. She’s hurt bad.”

Maybe, she thought, this was my road. Maybe it was all I was supposed to do. Ain’t that a kick in the head?

She didn’t know, and was too tired to think about it any longer.

“Can you stand, Ma’am?”

Tired of trying to keep myself together.

All that was left were the colors.

The gray.

Tired of trying to hold myself in.

The white.

“She’s passing out.”

The red.

Then nothing.