The Bone House

Chapter Forty-One

Hilary was near the city of Green Bay on Highway 57 when Katie called her.

'I wanted to make sure you were still coming,' the girl said. 'Are you getting close?'

Hilary squinted through the windshield at the highway signs. The road was slick, and visibility in the driving rain was poor. She'd already had a near-collision with a deer bounding across the highway lane. 'I'm about five miles from the university. Where should I find you?'

There was a long pause. 'I'm not actually on campus right now,' Katie admitted.

'Where are you?'

'I'm parked across the street from Gary Jensen's house.'

Hilary tensed and almost dropped her phone. 'What the hell are you doing there?'

'I'm sorry. I needed to do something, so I followed him. I'll explain when I see you.'

'Stay where you are, and I'll meet you. Where is this place?'

'If you're close to the university exit, you can't be far. You can take a right turn off the highway toward Wequiock Falls Park. That's where I am. Jensen's house is diagonally across from here.'

'I'll be there soon,' Hilary said.

She saw a sign for the county park two miles later, and she braked and turned sharply right. One long block from the highway, five roads came together at an intersection like a giant starburst. Telephone wires criss-crossed the sky overhead. The land around her was open; she was at the flat summit of a hill above the bay. A cornfield was on her left. The dead-end road into the park was on her right. On the opposite side of the intersection, she saw a two-story red-brick house shrouded by mammoth trees.

Jensen's house.

Hilary turned into the park and spotted a red sedan parked off the grass in the shelter of an oak grove. She pulled in behind it. When she got out, she peered through the rain-streaked driver's window and saw nothing inside. Her heart leaped with concern.

'Hey.'

Hilary heard a hushed call. Near the intersection, under the shelter of one of the trees bordering the crossroad, she saw a girl waving her arms. Before Hilary could move, the girl jogged across the wet grass and joined her by the cars.

'Katie?'

The girl nodded. Her short dark hair was plastered to her skin, and her glasses were dotted with rain. She was medium height and bony, with a nervous twitch to her limbs. She wore a black jacket zipped to her neck and black jeans. She smelled of fresh cigarette smoke.

'You're soaked,' Hilary said. 'Let's sit in the car.'

They got into the Taurus, which was warm. Hilary swung into a U-turn leading back toward the road that led to Highway 57. When she found another break in the trees on the shoulder of the park road, she pulled to her left and stopped. The car was mostly hidden by trees, but they had a view diagonally across the intersection to the brick house.

Beside her, the girl's fingers jerked in a nervous rhythm. 'Do you mind if I smoke? I'm so keyed up.'

'Put the window down,' Hilary said.

Katie did, and she extracted a damp cigarette pack from her jacket and lit up. She blew the smoke out the window. She calmed down as she inhaled, and she closed her eyes briefly.

'I'm so glad you came,' she said.

'What's going on? Why are you here?'

Katie tapped ash outside the car. 'I couldn't sit in the dorm and do nothing. I'm a reporter, so I figured I'd follow the story, you know? I went to the athletic department to find out if Gary was at work today.'

'Was he?'

The girl shook her head. 'He called in sick.' 'And you still haven't heard anything from Amy?'

'No, I've called and texted her, but nothing. I think he's got her, the bastard. Jeez, I was stupid.'

'How did Amy get involved in this?'

'We were in Florida with the dance team. Amy found out about the girl who was killed down there. She said on the bus that she saw Glory and Gary together, and she heard Gary going back to his room late the night she was killed. There are a lot of rumors around town about Gary's wife, too. She died in an accident, but some people aren't sure it was an accident. Anyway, Amy got it in her head that Gary may have been involved in Glory's death.'

Hilary nodded. 'Were you in Florida with Amy?'

'Yeah, I snuck along for the ride, but I didn't see anything weird down there. I hung out with the dancers during the competition so I could write a story for the paper.'

Hilary stared at the house tucked among the trees. She couldn't see lights inside.

'You said you knew Gary was inside,' Hilary said. 'Have you seen him?'

'Yeah, I told you I checked out the athletics department, right? He was sick? Well, when I got back to the dorm, I saw him coming out of the front door at Downham. That's our building. He didn't look sick.'

'Did you talk to him?'

'Sure. I played dumb, because I'm not sure if he knows that I'm Amy's roommate. I mean, I know him, and he knows me, because of my job at the paper, but that's it. At least I was able to ask him why he was at the dorm.'

'What did he say?'

'He had a good excuse. Like he'd been working on it. He said Amy came over to his house to talk about dance strategies, but she said she wasn't feeling well, and she left right after she arrived. So he came by to see if she was OK.'

'He could be telling the truth,' Hilary said.

'Yeah, or he could be giving himself an out.'

'Did you spot her car?'

'No, I drove around and looked. It's not here. He could have ditched it somewhere. Or maybe it's in his garage.'

Hilary frowned. 'Let's go to talk to the police, but I'm not sure they're going to do anything. Not yet.'

'We're running out of time,' Katie told her, grabbing Hilary's arm as she placed it on the wheel, if Amy's alive, we need to do something now.'

'What do you mean?'

The girl flicked her cigarette out the window into the wet ground. She took a deep breath and coughed into her sleeve. 'After I saw Gary at the dorm, I followed him. He made one stop, and then he came back here. That was an hour ago. If you didn't get here soon, I was going to go over there myself.'

'Don't be crazy,' Hilary said. She looked at Katie's face and then added, 'Where did he stop? What did he do?'

'He stopped at a hardware store,' the girl told her. 'He bought a large roll of plastic sheeting and a shovel.'

Delia grew nervous when Tresa didn't come home.

She dialed her daughter's cell phone number, but there was no answer. She called the store in Egg Harbor where she'd sent Tresa for groceries, and the manager told her it had been more than an hour since she left. Tresa should have been back long before now. It wasn't like her to be late without calling.

Delia stood outside on the porch, watching the empty driveway and the rain falling on the unkempt yard. She struggled with a horrible sense of anxiety. Part of it was her grief over Glory, which triggered an immediate, irrational fear when Tresa was overdue. Part of it was guilt, as she wondered what awful chain of events she had set in motion because of Troy.

Vengeance was so seductive. She was tired of the world taking things from her and offering no retribution. Mark Bradley deserved no mercy, not after what he had done to her and her family. Troy killing him would be a way to right the scales. One man would finally pay the price for the others who had escaped.

It was a simple thing, but she knew it wasn't simple at all. She could hardly breathe. Her mind cascaded through all the things that could go wrong before this was over. Troy was a fool. He would be caught before or after he'd used his gun; he'd go to jail for years. Or he'd be killed in the attempt. She didn't want the boy's life on her conscience. Too many people had died already.

Delia made a decision. She dialed Troy's phone. Wherever he was right now, on the boat or on the island, she had to get a message to him: Stop. Don't do this. She needed to end this craziness before it started, but her call went nowhere. Troy had switched off his phone or he was without signal. It was already too late; the wheels were grinding forward, and she couldn't stop them. She was in the middle of it now, leaving an electronic fingerprint that tied her and Troy together.

Her phone rang.

'Thank God,' Delia murmured. She assumed it was Troy calling back. Or it was Tresa. Either way, she felt a glimmer of hope. Maybe she could put the demons back in their box.

'Yes, hello, who is it?'

'Oh, hi, is this Delia? Delia Fischer?'

The voice was familiar, but she didn't recognize it. 'Yes, that's me.'

'Delia, hello, this is Bobby Larch. You know, up in Ellison Bay? Our daughters went to school together.'

Delia sighed and grew impatient. People were always calling about community activities. School meetings. Fundraisers. Right now, she didn't want to have anything to do with anyone. 'This isn't a very good time, Bobby.'

'I'm sorry to bother you, but this has been weighing on my mind. I'm a parent like you, and I figure I'd like to know if my daughter was doing something like this. It doesn't matter how old they are, they're still our kids, right?'

Delia was distracted, and she had trouble following his words, but then her brain caught up with him. Tresa.

'What is it, Bobby? What are you saying?'

'I work up in Northport at the ferry dock. The thing is, right as the five o'clock ferry was getting ready to go, your daughter Tresa came racing up, saying it was an emergency and she had to get on the boat. I suppose if I'd been thinking, I would have said no, but I let her drive on. It may not be anything important, but I also know that Mark Bradley's wife left the island on the previous boat, so the more I thought about it, the more I figured it was something you should know about, what with everything that happened last year and all. I know you'd want her to be safe.'

Delia struggled to find her voice. 'Yes. Yes, I do appreciate the call, Bobby. Thank you.'

She hung up without letting him say anything more. Her chest felt heavy, as if a fist were constricting her lungs. She should have guessed immediately. Tresa had seen Troy's truck. Her daughter must have crept inside and heard what they were discussing, and now she was there, on the island. With Mark Bradley. In the line of fire when Troy made his way to the house. Tresa, Tresa, what were you thinking?

Delia pulled at her hair in panic. She beat her forehead with closed fists, trying to decide what to do. She clutched her phone and dialed Tresa again, and then Troy, and both times she got nothing but the infuriating loop of voicemail. She was helpless. Cut off.

Just like Harris, she'd lit a fire, and now it was out of control.

There was only one option. One way to stop this. She had to get help. Delia dialed another number, and this time she felt a huge relief when the sheriff answered immediately.

'Felix? Oh, God, Felix, it's Delia. Are you back on the island yet?'

'Yes, I just got home. Why?'

'You have to help me. I've made a terrible mistake.'

Chapter Forty-Two

Most of the back roads on the northern tip of the peninsula dead-ended in the woods or at the lakeshore. Cab drove back and forth along narrow trails with names like Europe Bay, Lost Lane, Timberline, Juice Mill, and Wilderness, and he saw the same things: farm buildings, locked gates, boat launches, and hiking trails, all of them deserted. None of it meant anything to him, and all the while, it got darker around him. It was already night inside the trees. The relentless rain poured down over the car.

He parked on the road to the state park and turned off the engine. He knew he was wasting his time here, going around in circles. Running blind.

Cab glanced at his phone and saw that he had a single bar of signal. He didn't know how long it would last. Signal came and went with the wind here. Quickly, before the air currents switched directions, he called home to Florida. It was odd that his brain supplied the word. Home.

'Lala, it's Cab,' he said when she answered.

'Well, well,' she said. 'The tall blond stranger.'

Hearing her voice, he could picture her face. Her dark skin. Her fierce eyes. Ebony hair. The last time they'd talked, he'd been drinking, and this time, she was the one who sounded buzzed, with a mellowness in her voice. It was softly sensual. It reminded him of the one time they'd made love and how oddly vulnerable she'd been in his bed, not wild and uninhibited as he would have expected. He could picture her naked body and remember the tiny flaws — the freckles, the scar on her knee, the barest pooch — that made her not perfect but more beautiful for being that way. They had danced around that night ever since, with Cab doing what he did best. Running blind.

'Where are you?' he asked.

'I'm in your condo,' she told him. 'I hope you don't mind.'

He was surprised but pleased. 'Not at all. I told you to go there.'

'My air conditioner still isn't working. I felt like I was back in Havana. I had to do something.'

'It's fine.'

'I'm drinking your wine.'

'Good.'

'It's really, really good wine.'

'I know.'

'I've had a lot of it.'

'That's why it's there.'

'I suppose you want to talk about the case,' she said, drawing out the word with a snarl.

He did, but he didn't. He needed her help, and he didn't know how long his cell signal would last before it evaporated into the sky. Even so, he simply liked hearing her voice out here, in the middle of nowhere. 'What else did you want to talk about?' he asked.

'I did something bad,' she said.

'I doubt that.'

'No, no, I did. I went through your nightstand drawer. I told myself I was looking for a rubber band for my hair, but I was just snooping.'

'What did you find?' he asked.

'A picture.'

Cab knew which one. 'OK.'

'She's pretty.'

'Was.'

'Was. Sorry.'

'Her name was Vivian,' he said.

'You want to tell me about her?'

Cab took a long time to reply, and Lala let him off the hook.

'Never mind, you don't owe me your life story. I like the idea that some woman was able to get to you. I sure couldn't.'

'Not true,' he said.

This time Lala was the one who was slow to answer. 'Did she break your heart, Catch-a-Cab?' 'Something like that.'

'And now all of us have to pay, huh?'

'Something like that,' he repeated.

'That's pretty screwed up.'

'Yeah.'

'I'm saying things I shouldn't,' she said. 'I'm sorry. It's the wine. I better shut up.'

'Don't.'

Lala hesitated anyway. 'There's something I never told you.' 'What?'

'Shit, what am I doing?' she murmured.

'Tell me.'

'I don't hook up,' she said.

Cab tensed. 'I don't understand.'

'I don't do it. Some women do. Not me.'

'I'm still not sure—'

'Couldn't you tell?' she interrupted him. 'I've made love to three men in ten years. I was engaged to one. I thought I was in love with another. And then there's you.'

She'd been right. He wasn't ready for this. 'Lala.'

'You don't have to say anything.'

That was a lie. She wanted him to say something. He needed to say something. He kept looking for a door. Looking for a key. That was the irony, because he had a key in his pocket, and he needed a lock to go with it. Say something. But he didn't, and he waited too long.

'I'm going to press the reset button on this conversation,' Lala told him, sounding more sober and sad. 'OK? Reset. Beep. This is Mosqueda. Is that Detective Bolton? What can I do for you, Detective Bolton?'

'Lala,' he repeated lamely.

'A report? You want a report? Because I have information for you.'

Cab sighed and played the game. 'What did you find out?'

'Enough to think that something's not adding up. Enough to think we have a problem.'

'Go on. Tell me.'

'I started thinking about Glory on Friday night,' Lala continued. 'When she ran into our bartender friend, Ronnie Trask. I tried to nail down the exact time it happened. Trask said he took his break before stopping at the hotel restaurant to stock up on wine for the bar. Then he went straight from his near-collision with Glory back to the pool bar. He figures he served a drink within two or three minutes of getting back. I checked the invoices and was able to calculate what I think was his first sale. Based on that, I have a window of about five minutes or so when Glory came running from the event center.'

'Good work, but I'm not sure where you're going with this,' Cab told her.

'Hang on. I called the woman who coordinated the entire dance competition and had her check that time against the performance schedules. Here's what I found. Tresa Fischer would have been in the line-up immediately before that time window. Makes sense, huh? Glory would have been in the arena to watch her sister.'

'Sure. Mark Bradley was there, too, so Glory could have bumped into him during the break.'

'Yes, but the next scheduled performance after Tresa's team was the team from Green Bay. So there were a lot of people with Wisconsin connections hanging around the event center. I started calling people from Green Bay who were staying in the hotel to see if anyone remembered Glory freaking out. I talked to a parent of one of the dancers, and damned if she didn't tell me she remembered a girl losing it outside the event center and go running off.'

'Did she know why?'

'No. She said that Glory was standing in front of a window in the corridor and suddenly she screamed and bolted.'

'What's on the other side of the window?'

'A patio.'

'I don't suppose we have any idea who was out on the patio.'

'Actually, we do. This woman's daughter was out there, along with the whole Green Bay team. They were getting a pep talk from their coach, who happens to be Gary Jensen. Ring a bell?'

'Oh, shit,' Cab said. 'Our witness?'

'That's him. Call me cynical, but I don't like the coincidence.'

Cab didn't like it either. 'Are you digging into Jensen's background?'

'I'm doing that right now.'

'Could there be a connection between Jensen and Glory?' Cab asked.

'That's the million-dollar question.'

'Could Gary Jensen be this missing fugitive from Door County? Harris Bone?' 'That was my first thought, too,' Lala said, 'but no. Unless Bone managed one hell of a sophisticated identity theft, Jensen's got a paper trail that goes back for years. Of course, there could be some other connection between him and Harris that we haven't found yet.'

'Keep at it,' Cab said, 'and keep me posted. That's great work.'

'Thanks.'

'You've earned the wine,' he said.

'I thought so.'

'Listen, about what you said,' he began. 'Before.'

'Forget it.'

'Lala, you took me by surprise. It's not that I don't—'

'Forget it,' she insisted. She added, 'Why did you call, Cab? You obviously wanted something.'

I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to bear your voice. He didn't tell her that; instead, he explained where he was and what he was doing. The map. The key. The roads that led nowhere. What he didn't say was that he was tired and lonely, and he'd run out of ideas, it's dark,' he said finally. 'There's no point in doing anything more tonight. I'm heading back to the apartment. I'll call you in the morning.'

Lala didn't let him go. He wondered if she wanted to hear his voice, too. 'Have you checked property records in the area?'

Cab glanced around at the dark parkland. There were no houses to be seen. There were hardly any houses anywhere among the roads he'd travelled here. He hadn't thought about people owning the land, because there seemed to be nothing to own. 'No, I don't have a laptop with me.'

'I can run some searches for you. Give me a second.' He heard the clink of crystal as Lala put down her wine glass, then seconds later, the tapping of keys. 'OK, hang on a second. Here we go, Door County Real Estate Records. All nicely online. You want to give me some street names?'

'Europe Bay Road,' Cab said.

'Sounds rustic. I'm getting about a dozen parcels and owners. You want names? Two parcels for Waters, then Petschel, Clark, Moore, Barrick, Sawyer, Lenius, Haines, Mikel, Knoll, Heinz. Any of those mean anything to you?'

'No.'

'Next?' 'Wilderness Lane.'

'You're kidding.'

'No.'

'Wilderness. Lots of parcels, one owner. Royston.'

'Lost Lane.'

'Where the hell are you, Cab?'

'Lost.'

Lala was quiet. Finally, he heard her typing. 'No parcels on that one.'

'Juice Mill.'

'I've got the Nature Conservancy owning a parcel, then individual owners Gunn, Kolberg, Dane, and Hoffman.'

Cab had closed his eyes, and now they sprang open. He straightened up in the car and banged his head on the roof. 'Did you say Hoffman?'

'Yes.'

'Peter Hoffman?'

'That's him. The fire address is 11105 Juice Mill Lane.'

'Anything about the property?'

'I can tell you what he pays in taxes, the value of the land, and the value of the improvements.'

'Improvements?' Cab asked. 'There's a house there?'

'Something's there, but the improvements don't even total ten thousand dollars. The land around it is worth a lot more.'

'OK, I'll see what I can see. Thanks, Lala.'

'Call me tomorrow, and I'll tell you what else we know about Gary Jensen.'

'Good.' He added, 'Hey, you want to know something?'

Lala didn't answer. He took her silence as an invitation.

'I miss you,' he said.

She still didn't answer. He heard nothing from her at all. He wondered if he'd crossed the line, or if she simply didn't know whether he was serious. When Lala was still silent, he glanced at the phone and realized that the wind had changed, and his signal had vanished into the frigid air. She was gone.

Chapter Forty-Three

Mark followed his headlights into the driveway and immediately realized that something was wrong. He'd switched on a lamp in the living room before he left the house, but there was no light shining behind the curtains now. The house was dark.

He climbed out of the Explorer and waited next to his truck. He couldn't see. Rain trickled through the tree branches, splattering on the dirt and covering up other noises in the woods. He ran his hands along the damp metal of the chassis, hunting for the handle of the rear door. When he found it, he opened the door and leaned inside and searched on the floor. His fingers closed over the forked head of a hammer. He grabbed the tool by its wooden handle and shut the door quietly.

Mark felt as if he was blindfolded. Night on the island was black under the hood of trees, and the thick clouds made the sky moonless and starless. He made his way with his hands, creeping toward the house. He felt flagstones under his feet, marking the path. When his outstretched fingers found the front door, he turned the handle, which twisted easily; the door was open. He shoved the door inward and clutched the hammer tightly. Squatting, staying low, he crept into the hallway of his house.

He left the lights off. Light painted him as a target. He peered around the wall that led to the living room and could make out the shapes of the furniture. The walls still smelled like fresh paint. The room was empty. He sidestepped down the hallway, his knees bent, and passed the open door to their bedroom on his left. He lingered there, watching and listening, before he continued to the kitchen and then the den. He ducked into the porch and checked the door leading outside, but it was locked and deadbolted. He began to relax, but as he did, a noise startled him. It sounded like the casters of their bed scraping across the hardwood floor, the way it did when he banged the frame with his knee.

Mark retreated toward their bedroom but stayed in the hallway. In the glow of the clock on his nightstand, he could see that their closet door was ajar, which wasn't how he'd left it. He gripped the hammer and sprang off his knees and charged. He leaped across the short space and threw himself past the door into the belly of the tiny closet. His shoulder slammed the wall, cushioned by the fabric of Hilary's dresses.

He heard running feet and twisted around in time to see someone rolling across the bed on their way from the bathroom to the bedroom door. He jumped, and the two of them collided, landing together in a heap on the floor. Something metallic skidded away into the wall. He expected a fight and didn't get one. The person in his arms was bony and fragile. He smelled girlish perfume. He held her shoulders to the ground, and she whimpered as his weight overwhelmed her.

'Don't hurt me, don't hurt me. Christ, Troy, it's me, Tresa.'

Mark couldn't see her face, but he recognized the shape of her body and her familiar long hair. 'Tresa? What the hell are you doing here?'

She almost seemed to be holding her breath as he spoke. It took her a moment to say anything. 'Mark? Is that you?'

'Of course it is.'

Tresa threw her arms around his neck. 'Oh, thank God you're OK. I've been waiting forever. Where were you?'

'I went out to dinner,' he replied. 'Tresa, what's going on?'

She breathed heavily, still holding him. When he peeled away her arms, she touched his face in the darkness with her fingertips. Her perfume filled his nose as she leaned in and pressed her lips to his.

'Tresa, stop,' he said.

She backed away. 'I'm sorry. I'm just so glad it's you.'

'I'll turn a light on,' Mark said.

Tresa grabbed his shoulder. 'No. Don't. Leave it dark.'

'Why?'

'He could be out there. We can't let him see us.'

'Who?' He thought about what she had said as he landed on her. 'Why did you think I was Troy?'

Tresa leaned against the bed. She held his hand, and her skin was moist. 'I overheard Troy talking to my mom. He has a gun, the stupid bastard. He knew Hilary was gone tonight. He said he was going to sail over here and kill you.'

Mark swore to himself. 'Did you see the gun? Are you sure he really has one?'

'I saw it.'

'Do you know when he was planning to come here?'

'No, but he must be here by now. He must be close by. If he saw you come home—'

'Take it easy, Tresa,' Mark told her. 'I'm not sure Troy's got what it takes to pull this off. It's one thing to think you can shoot someone, but it's different to actually pull the trigger.'

'He'll do it, Mark. You should have seen his face.'

'I understand, but you shouldn't have come here. You should have called and told me.'

'I know, but I thought — I wanted — that is, I figured maybe Troy would listen to me.'

Mark heard guilty embarrassment in her voice. It wasn't just that she was afraid of what Troy would do, or that she thought she could talk him out of it. Mark realized that she wanted to be the one to save him. She wanted to rescue him. That was what you did for someone you loved.

'How did you get here?' he asked.

'I drove my mom's car. I parked it down the road. I didn't think you'd want anyone to see it in your driveway — you know, because of what people would think. I mean, Hilary's not home, and here I am.'

He knew she believed it. See? I'm trying to protect you. Even so, her voice had a breathless quality to it, and he was conscious of the warmth of her body pressed against him.

'Do you know anyone else on the island?' he asked.

'No.'

'I'll take you to one of the motels. You can spend the night there, and you'll be safe.'

Tresa clung to him fiercely. 'No way. I'm not leaving you alone.'

'I'll be fine.'

'No, Mark. I'm staying here.'

She had a childish determination. Part of him wondered if the story about Troy was really true, or if she had made it up as a way to bring them together. He didn't know how far Tresa would go. She'd taken the ferry to be here on a night when Hilary was gone, and he'd found her hiding in his bedroom. He couldn't help but wonder if this was a fantasy, like the sexual encounters in her diary. A fairy tale. It started with him being in danger, and it ended with her seducing him.

Or was she telling him the truth?

'Did you call the police?' he asked.

'I couldn't do that. I don't want my mom getting in trouble.'

Don't call the police. Mark wondered: did she really want to protect Delia? Or did she want to protect herself from another lie? He'd been fooled by this girl and her desires before. He liked her, he felt sorry for her, but he had to keep reminding himself that she'd nearly destroyed his life once already.

'Let's go, Tresa,' he said.

'Wait! Did you hear that?'

Mark listened. The rain beat on the roof. That was all he heard. 'There's no one outside,' he said, but he had the same feeling he'd had earlier. Something was wrong. He looked around the bedroom, trying to pinpoint his anxiety, and realized that the clock on the nightstand was dark. Moments earlier, it had glowed with white numbers.

'Stay right there,' he told her.

He pushed himself off the floor, but despite his warning, Tresa got up with him and clung to his side. Her arm wrapped around his waist. He felt the speed of her breathing as her chest rose and fell like a scared animal. She wasn't acting. This was real.

Mark groped for the light switch on the wall, and when he found it, he flicked it upward and downward several times. Nothing happened.

'The power's out.'

'Oh, shit,' Tresa murmured. 'He's here.'

Chapter Forty-Four

Cab found an old steel gate at the dead end of Juice Mill Lane, where it butted up against the western land of the state park. He examined the gate in the darkness with the beam of a Mag-Lite. Two dented signs hung over the top rail, tied with rusted wire. One said No Trespassing. The other was a number stamped like a license plate in faded white letters: 11105.

This was Peter Hoffman's land.

He studied the rutted road beyond the gate that disappeared into the thick of the forest. The ground was a muddy mess of dirt and grass. He didn't see footprints, which told him that no one had been here in the rainy hours since Peter Hoffman's death. That was good. If Hoffman had a secret that had got him killed, and if this land was part of that secret, then Cab didn't want to wait until morning and give someone else a chance to visit overnight.

The rain kept on like Chinese music, making a plink-plink rhythm on the roof of the forest. He walked around the gate. The ground had a damp, wormy smell. He saw one fat worm in the light, stretched out like pink candy among the old leaves. He picked his way along the path, noting Private Property signs with reflective letters shining among the wet, glistening trees. Far from the old gate, he spotted vines draped over a narrow trail, where an ash had fallen, blocking the way with a mossy trunk. He stepped over the tree and followed the trail away from the road, sweeping the dirt with a back-and-forth arc of his flashlight. Fifty yards inside the forest, he spotted a glint of glass reflecting from the ground. Standing over it, he saw an open, empty bottle of Jameson's whiskey. The glass was clean; it hadn't been lying here for long. It was the same brand he'd found on the kitchen table at Peter Hoffman's house.

Hoffman had been here recently.

Cab lifted the flashlight and saw the remains of a cabin in front of him.

The dilapidated structure was quickly disappearing back into the arms of nature. Snow and rain had punched the roof downward, leaving gaping holes. The walls bowed inward, specked with remnants of red paint. Popped, rusty nails lined the beams like broken teeth. The door hung open, rotting away from its top hinge, and the chambered windows were broken into jagged fragments. Shredded yellow curtains billowed into the rain. Weeds grew as high as the gutters.

Cab walked up to the door and exposed the interior of the ruins to his light, scattering red-eyed mice. He saw an old stove, its door hanging open, with a rusted grate still inside. Two wooden chairs lay in broken slats on the floor, and bricks from the chimney had crumbled forward into scattered rubble. Rain splattered into puddles through the open roof, and he saw black pellets of feces. Old spiderwebs hung like lace across the windows. Other than the animal presence, the cabin had been unoccupied for many seasons, left to fend for itself in a losing battle against the elements.

Peter Hoffman had been planning to send Cab here to this spot with the section of map in his pocket. Cab was sure of it.

Why?

He followed the damaged walls of the ruins. When he'd made a complete circle, he took a cautious step inside. Debris sprinkled from the gaps in the roof. His foot sank through a rotting beam, trapping his ankle between jagged spikes until he bent down and pushed aside the splintered wood to free himself. He cast his light upward into the rafters, where he saw deserted bird's nests and wasp hives.

Cab backed out of the cabin. He studied the trail, which petered out amid a solid grove of pines. In the cone of light, he spotted the empty bottle of Jameson's again, and he made his way there to stand where Peter Hoffman would have stood. Near the bottle, he spotted a small square of dirt where nothing grew. It was almost invisible among the tall weeds. He pushed through the grass into the bare space, and when he kicked at the mud with his toe, he found that the ground at his feet was actually metal. He bent down and scraped aside the dirt until his fingers were black and found a corrugated metal door, two feet by two feet, built into the earth inside a concrete border. It was a tornado shelter.

He saw thick hinges where the door was secured to the concrete foundation. Opposite the hinges, he saw a heavy padlock that kept the hasp of the steel door clamped shut.

The padlock needed a key.

Cab dug in his pocket. He extracted the key he'd taken from Peter Hoffman's body and got down on all fours. He didn't care about the knees of his suit getting sodden and dirty. He balanced the flashlight on the ground and took hold of the lock and used his thumb to clean the key slot, which was caked with grime. When he saw the opening, he inserted the key and twisted.

The lock snapped open.

'I'll be damned,' he said aloud.

Cab crouched there, breathing heavily, not daring to move. His wet hair was pasted to his forehead. He turned the shackle sideways and squeezed it out of the staple and put it aside on the ground. With the edge of his fingers, he pried at the hasp, but it had rusted shut with disuse and wouldn't move. He grimaced, tugging harder. When it resisted, he dug out his own keys and wedged one of them under the hasp and yanked again. This time, it sprang open with a bang, scraping Cab's fingers and drawing blood.

He forced his nails under the edge of the metal door. He lifted, but it was heavier than he expected, and it slipped out of his wet grasp and clanged shut. He tried again. The hinges, which hadn't moved in years, groaned and refused to turn. He worked his palm under the narrow opening and pushed, winning a few more inches. This time he used both hands, breaking through the accumulated rust bonding the steel together and forcing the lid open. It fell backward, and Cab fell with it, nearly tumbling down into the shelter.

He righted himself and stared into the blackness of the square opening. A metal ladder disappeared below. Pent-up smells of must and decay bloomed out of the hole. When he pointed his flashlight downward, he saw a dirty concrete floor ten feet below him, where the shelter opened into a larger space. He couldn't see anything beyond the tunnel leading into the cellar.

Cab laid his flashlight on the ground. He took hold of the metal ladder and tested his weight on it. The braces clamping it to the concrete wall wobbled but held. The steps felt secure. He turned off the light and shoved it in his pocket, and he was blind as he took the next step down into the hole. It was dark above him, around him, and below him.

He descended into the belly where Peter Hoffman kept his secrets.

He supposed everyone had such a place, real or imagined, a black cave where you buried the things you wanted to forget.

His feet landed on the concrete floor of the storm cellar. Spiderwebs clung with sticky fingers to his skin and his hair, and he spat strands from his mouth. He felt the dampness of the earth in the porous walls and rain dropping through the hole into a pool where he stood. The opening at the top of the ladder looked small above him.

He switched on his flashlight.

The space was tight. No more than ten feet separated him from the opposite wall. As he shifted the beam of light, he saw metal shelves lined with canned goods buried in thick dust and plastic jugs of water. Bottles of beer, too, cloudy and stale. Black mold covered the wall like burnt eggs. He saw hundreds of worms, most of them dead on the floor. More cobwebs sagged from the ceiling, clinging to the corpses of bugs like treasure.

He saw a single wooden chair in the middle of the room, as if someone would come here to do nothing but sit and think about his life passing. He tried to imagine why Peter Hoffman came here.

Cab shifted his light and illuminated the last dark corner of the shelter.

'Son of a bitch,' he said.

Chapter Forty-Five

'We have to do something right now,' Katie said. Her breath, when she exhaled, reeked of nicotine. The window beside her was open, and rain sprayed across the girl's arm.

'There's someone I can call,' Hilary said.

'Who?'

'His name's Cab Bolton. He's the Florida detective who's investigating Glory's disappearance. The local police will listen to him. They'll send a car out here, and we can talk to them.'

Katie wiped steam from the glass with her elbow. 'They'll ring Gary's doorbell, and he'll give them a song and dance, just like he did for me at the dorm. Amy needs us now. You said you'd help me.'

'We can't deal with this alone. Cab's smart. He'll know why this is important.'

Hilary dug out her phone and hunted in her purse for the card with Cab Bolton's number. Before she could dial, Katie covered the phone with her hand and stopped her.

'I've got a better idea.'

'What is it?'

'Let's give the police a reason to go inside.'

'I don't understand,' Hilary said.

Katie pushed open the door of the Taurus and climbed out into the rain. Hilary reached across the seat and grabbed her arm.

'What do you think you're doing?'

'I'm going to Gary's house.'

'No way. Get back inside.'

Katie pulled free. Water dripped from her face and hair, if the police knock on Gary's door now, he can slam the door in their face, and they won't be able to do a thing about it. But he'll let me in. He has no reason to think I know anything.'

'What do you expect to accomplish?' Hilary asked.

'I'm going to force his hand.'

'How?'

'I'll tell him the truth. Amy thought he was a murderer. I'll say I'm going to the police.'

'You're not going to do that,' Hilary insisted, if he really has Amy, all that does is put you in danger.'

Katie's head bobbed. Her glasses slipped down her nose, if he grabs me, great. He doesn't know you're out here. If I'm not back in ten minutes, then you can call nine one one, and you've got an excuse for the police to storm the place. Otherwise, they have nothing, and we both know it.'

'In the meantime, you could be dead.'

'He won't do anything to me that fast.'

'You can't take the chance.'

'Too late,' Katie said. 'Give me ten minutes.'

The girl slammed the door and ran across the wet grass of the park. Hilary got out of the Taurus to chase her, but Katie was already too far away, running through the driving rain. Hilary wanted to shout after her, but she bit her lip and said nothing. As she clung to the top of the car door and watched her, the girl dashed across the empty intersection into the glow of the street light. Katie disappeared behind the towering maple trees that guarded the front of Gary Jensen's house.

Mark heard a muffled splintering of wood as someone forced open the door leading to the back porch. He clapped a hand over Tresa's mouth to squelch her scream. He put his lips against her ear and whispered.

'He's in back. We'll go out the front. Don't make a sound.'

He pulled Tresa toward the hallway, and with his body shielding her, he guided them toward the front door fifteen feet away. The distance felt long, and he was a big target if anyone took a chance by firing a shot from behind. He kept his hands firmly on Tresa's shoulders. The girl trembled, and he hoped she wouldn't panic and run, giving away their location.

The door was ajar. When the wind blew, he could taste the rain. He winced as the door moved an inch, its hinges making a sharp squeal. Ahead of him, Tresa froze and sucked in a breath. He put pressure on her back and bent down so that his face brushed her red hair.

'Keep going.'

They squeezed through the narrow gap. They were still blind, but the night air felt like freedom. Mark guided them toward his truck, feeling his way to the end of the wall where the living room jutted out beyond the front door. When they reached the driveway, he let go of Tresa's hand and stopped to slide his keys out of his pocket into his fist. He reached out to take Tresa's arm again.

She wasn't there.

He spread out both of his arms. The girl was gone.

'Tresa?' he hissed, as loud as he dared.

Mark heard the squish of her running footsteps. He turned, and she collided with him hard. She bounced off his chest and stumbled backward and fell. He bent down to reach for her, but she jumped up at the same time, and this time, she clutched at his arm, and his keys flew from his fingers. So did the hammer.

Twenty feet away, the car alarm of the Explorer whooped. The headlights flashed on and off like a strobe. The horn blared a warning. The light caught them in its blinking glare, exposed and vulnerable. Mark scanned the ground for the keys and didn't see them, and he didn't have time to search in the dirt. He grabbed Tresa and pulled her toward the far side of the house.

'Come on, we'll head for the beach.'

Beyond the wall, protected by the house, the night was pitch black again. The alarm wailed behind them. He didn't care about the noise they made. He charged through the trees, stumbling over rocks and roots, shielding his face with an outstretched hand as branches clawed for his skin. He clung to Tresa's hand, dragging her in his wake. Ahead of them, he could make out the paleness where the forest ended at the rocky beach near the half-moon bay. He burst from the trees with Tresa on his heels. The rain and wind found them. The water lapped at the shore.

Running on the rocks was loud and difficult. He turned west, and they tramped up the beach along the edge of the woods, using the shaggy branches of the evergreens for cover. He wrenched his ankle as he put his left foot wrong, but he didn't slow down. Shivers of pain shot up his leg as they ran. They reached the dirt road that led from the beach into the campground and then to the island cemetery.

'I know where to hide,' he told her.

He followed the road into the campground. The trees were tall here, and the land was flat, with straight narrow trunks blocking the way like soldiers. He guided them through the darkness and nearly collided with the cinder-block wall before he saw it. It was one of the changing rooms built for summer bathers, like a small cottage tucked among the trees and picnic benches. He felt for the wooden door and prayed that it was unlocked. When he tugged the wet handle, the door slid silently open. He and Tresa crept inside, and he closed the door behind them. Even in the winter season, the dank space smelled of sewage. He felt his way forward on the concrete floor, and his fingers brushed the metal wall of a toilet stall. He pulled Tresa inside, leaving the door unlatched.

The interior was cold and damp. The girl was shivering. He slid off his coat and draped it around her shoulders. Outside and inside, he heard water dripping.

'Now what?' Tresa whispered.

'Now we wait,' Mark said.

Chapter Forty-Six

After half an hour on the black, rolling water, the lights of the Washington Island harbor looked like salvation. Cab was green, but Bobby Larch looked unconcerned as he throttled back the engine of his fishing boat and drifted into the calm shelter past the breakwater. Cab could see the outline of the ferries where they were docked for the night. As they neared the shore, he heard something odd and out of place. Jazz music. Somewhere in a harbor-side restaurant, a live band drummed up applause from the crowd of locals.

Cab didn't think he had ever been happier than when the boat nudged gently against the pier. Larch saw it in his face.

'Hey, I said I'd get you here,' he said.

Cab stepped off the boat on to the dock, and his knees were wobbly as the ground stopped swaying under his feet. His skin was icy and wet. His suit and coat were thick with grime. 'Yeah.'

'So why'd you change your mind about coming over here tonight?'

'Long story,' Cab said.

A long story buried in a hole.

It was a story of vengeance and justice. Cab knew why Peter Hoffman was dead. He knew Mark Bradley would most likely be dead by morning, if he couldn't stop it. He knew things he wished he didn't know at all.

'I need a car,' Cab said. 'You know where I can get one?'

'You got a hundred bucks?'

'Yeah.'

'Then I know where you can get one.'

Cab peeled off a bill from the inside of his wallet, and Larch snapped it with a smile and strolled away from him down the dock. Cab followed as far as the parking lot. He saw Larch disappear inside the harbor restaurant, hearing the music get louder as the door opened and closed. Larch was gone for two minutes. When he returned, he flipped a set of keys through the air. Cab caught them.

'Here you go. It's a black Nissan around back. You'll have it back by morning, right?'

'Right.' Cab added, 'How much did you give your friend?'

'Fifty.'

'You're a good businessman, Bobby.'

Larch winked. 'Good luck, Detective.'

Cab had no trouble finding the Sentra parked behind the restaurant. It was old, crusted with road spray, and smelled like sweet pine thanks to a Christmas tree air freshener dangling from the mirror. He adjusted the driver's seat as far backward as it would go and shot down the harbor road. He switched on his high beams to light up the narrow lane between the trees.

The town was empty. The handful of year-round residents were down at the harbor listening to jazz, or guzzling beer at Bitters Pub. Heading north, he sped into the lonely land away from the shops. He almost missed the cemetery where he turned toward the water, and then he turned again on the dirt road toward Mark Bradley's house. He slowed to a crawl, scanning the woods for the man's driveway.

When he found it, he parked in front, blocking the way out.

Cab got out, bringing his flashlight with him. As he walked toward the house, he lit up the Ford Explorer parked diagonally on the edge of the clearing and then the ground surrounding the truck. His light glinted on something shiny, and he saw a set of keys dropped in the mud. He picked them up, shook off the dirt, and deposited them in his pocket. He saw a mess of footprints in and out of the house. When he turned the flashlight toward the front door, he saw it standing open.

'Shit,' Cab muttered.

He was too late. He reached inside his jacket pocket and slid his Glock into his hand.

He took a chance by shouting. 'Bradley!' Then a moment later, he called, 'Tresa!'

He listened, but no one answered. Water dripped through the trees, and wind rushed in whistles through the branches. He used the flashlight again, hunting on the ground and in the woods. He knew what he was looking for in the sodden earth. Bodies. He was relieved when he found none.

Cab called again. 'Bradley!'

He followed the perimeter of the house, tracking footsteps along the eastern wall. He came upon the screened porch at the rear of the house, and through the mesh, on the other wall, he saw another open door and the jagged splinters where the lock had been yanked out of the frame. He circled the porch and let himself inside through the broken door. The house was cold where the night air had been blowing through the open space. There was no smell of fresh blood. He checked the kitchen, then illuminated the hallway in the cone of light.

He spotted an open bedroom door and tightened his grip on his gun as he moved inside. He checked out the closet and saw clothes lying in piles on the floor. The bed was made, but the comforter was rumpled. On the wall, half under the bed, he spotted a cell phone, and he squatted down and flipped it open to look inside. The photo on the screen showed a girl in the wind, her long red hair blowing across her eyes, her face sad and contemplative.

Tresa.

Tresa had been here. In the bedroom. He half expected to smell the musk of sex lingering in the air, and he realized that the relationship between the two of them was still a mystery. He didn't know if the affair between them had been real or a product of the girl's erotic imagination. All he knew was that she'd come to the island as soon as she found out that Hilary was gone for the night.

Now Tresa and Mark Bradley were both gone.

He also wondered for the first time: where was Hilary? Why wasn't she here?

Cab slid the phone into his pocket and got to his feet.

As he turned, the air around his head whistled with motion. He flinched instinctively, knowing what was coming. Something rock solid hammered the base of his skull, where bone met muscle. The blackness of the night turned hot and orange behind his eyes. He had an instant of pain, and then he was falling, but he was unconscious before the weight of his body collapsed on the floor.

Ten minutes passed, and Katie hadn't returned.

Hilary got out of the Taurus and walked through the mushy grass to the trees near the road. She took cover and eyed the dark house across the street. She saw nothing. She heard nothing. She danced with impatience and indecision. When she checked her watch, more time had ticked away.

Katie might be inside, in danger. Or maybe, like the smart, manipulative girl that Hilary suspected she was, Katie had never gone inside at all. She might simply be hiding outside, waiting for Hilary to call the police.

Hilary started across the street. The light overhead cast a yellow glow in a pool on the asphalt and turned her shadow into a black giant. She passed through the light quickly. At the corner, under sagging telephone wires, she studied the brick house, which was almost invisible behind the trees. She sheltered herself under the low-hanging branches. On the front wall, a faint light glowed behind the curtains upstairs and downstairs.

'Katie,' she whispered.

If the girl was nearby, she was silent. Hilary fingered her phone.

She hiked toward the rear of the house. Beyond the bushy arms of a huge arborvitae, she found a gravel driveway and ducked into it, steps away from the downstairs windows. The curtains were drawn here, too; she couldn't see inside. She saw the garage ahead of her, its white door shut. The driveway was lit by a dim fluorescent bulb, and she felt exposed standing there. If anyone looked outside, she was visible.

Hilary crept around the side of the garage. The brick wall was built with a single window, tall and narrow, and she put her face close to the glass and peered inside. As she stood, framed by the window, the garage was flooded by light.

Gasping, Hilary threw herself to the ground. She heard the grinding of the garage door and the click of a car door as it opened and shut. An engine caught. She kept her chest tight to the wet ground, and she saw a Honda Civic back out of the garage toward the street. Its bright beams passed over her head. The car turned into the street, and as it headed east toward Highway 57, she heard the garage door groaning downward.

She acted on instinct before her brain could stop her. She pushed herself off the grass and ran for the corner of the house. Only six feet separated the bottom of the garage door from the concrete floor. She got to her knees and rolled under the door, scraping her hands on loose rock. The old door didn't have a safety mechanism. It slammed shut, nearly pinning her leg, which she scooted into the garage under the metal skirt at the last second.

Hilary was alone in the empty garage.

She hurried to the door leading to the interior of the house and turned the knob silently. She pushed it open and felt warm air and saw the darkness of the kitchen. She listened, not knowing if the house was empty. She didn't hear voices or the sound of a television, only the hum of the furnace. The kitchen smelled like burnt tomato sauce.

Hilary crept inside. A voice in her head screamed: What the hell are you doing?

She swallowed down her fear. She'd given herself an opportunity to see if Amy was in the house. Katie was right. That was something the police couldn't do.

Where was Katie?

Hilary had a sickening thought, as she considered the possibility that Katie was in the back of the Civic that had just left. Tied up. Or dead. She'd been a fool not to stop her. One domino fell, and suddenly the others began to fall, and you couldn't prevent them from tumbling down.

She left the kitchen through swinging doors and followed the hallway to the living room. The hearth smelled of a recent fire. The television was on, which made her freeze with concern, but the sound was muted, and the room was empty. It occurred to her: Jensen wasn't going to be long.

She rushed through the downstairs rooms. The dining room. The bathroom. The library. The pantry. It was a big house with odd corners and Victorian spaces. There were nooks and crannies where you could hide things. Everywhere she went, the curtains were closed. The house felt Gothic. Haunted. Even so, the rooms were empty and innocent, as if she'd made a mistake.

She found the basement. Her heart was in her mouth as she descended the wooden steps. Here, below ground, she felt comfortable enough to turn on a light. The sprawling underworld was twisted, with concrete block walls, pipes and ductwork nestled among pink insulation, and corners and turns that mirrored the layout of the house above it. She practically ran, conscious of time passing, of minutes ticking away before Jensen came back. The basement was like a maze, and she had to open steel doors and peer behind stacks of boxes and into crawl spaces to make sure he hadn't built a killing ground for himself in the cold dampness down here.

Nothing.

Hilary returned carefully to the main floor. She breathed heavily as she ran up the twisting staircase to the second story. There was a hallway that broke off like a Z in several directions, and the doors were all closed. Too many doors. All she could do was check them one by one. She went left and tore each door open and swung it shut. Bathroom. Linen closet. Nursery. Master bedroom.

She began to think this was all a fool's errand. A misunderstanding. She had to get out.

Hilary retraced her steps and quickly investigated the other side of the house. Bedroom. Bathroom. Bedroom. All of them empty and mostly unused. She found a spur hallway leading to a last bedroom that overlooked the rear of the house, and as she headed for the closed door, she heard a sickening noise.

The rumble of the garage door. Gary Jensen was back.

'Oh, no,' she murmured, freezing in her tracks.

She almost quit right there. She almost didn't open the door, so she could run downstairs and let herself out the front of the house before Jensen made his way inside through the kitchen. Instead, she twisted the knob and pushed her way into the last bedroom, and immediately something was different.

She smelled a pungent mix of sweat, urine, and perfume. It all added up to fear. Someone was here in the darkness.

Hilary turned on the light, and her hands flew to her mouth. She was there. Spread-eagled, tied to the bed. Gagged. Eyes wide. Pleading. Awake. Alive.

Amy.

Chapter Forty-Seven

In the dark shelter, Mark heard only the hushed in-and-out of Tresa breathing and the rustle of her clothes as she shivered. They were both wet and freezing. Sharp pain shot from his ankle to his calf the longer he stood, and when he couldn't lean against the metal wall anymore, Tresa got up and forced him to sit down. She sat down again too, balanced on his knee. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her head in his chest. He couldn't see her at all. She was invisible. He could only feel her huddled against him, her fingers clinging tightly to his skin, her damp hair nestled against his chin.

'I'm sorry,' she whispered. 'This is my fault.'

'Don't say that.'

He didn't think anyone would hear their low voices through the stone walls. They were in a black cocoon, just the two of them.

Tresa was silent, and then she said, 'I still think about it, you know. You and me. On the beach.'

Mark knew exactly what she meant. Weeks before Delia Fischer found her daughter's diary, before his life began to crash down, there had been the kiss. It had happened not far from here. They'd been on the beach in the moonlight behind his house, warmed by flames licking from a fire pit. Hilary had left them there as it got late and gone to bed. She trusted him, the way she always did, more than he trusted himself. He and Tresa had talked for two more hours, well past midnight, although Tresa was the one who did most of the talking. She told him about her dreams, fantasies, life, guilt, hopes, fears, and loneliness. Then, as they stood up and he poured dirt on the fire, she'd stood on tiptoe and kissed him, not a girl's kiss, not an innocent kiss, but a kiss with all the eroticism a teenager could bring to it.

She'd said what she wanted: 'Will you make love to me?'

Now, holding her, he could feel her arousal again, the heat through her clothes. This was romance to her, not life and death. Her rescuing him. Him rescuing her. He felt her shift on his lap, and though he couldn't see her face even an inch away from his own, he knew that her cool lips were about to find him with the same urgency, the same passion, as they had a year earlier. She wanted him to touch her. Undress her. She wanted to be the heroine in the novel.

He stopped her with a gentle pressure on her cheek. 'We can't.'

Tresa tensed. He felt her disappointment. She eased away from him and stood up in the cramped space.

'I've tried not to love you,' she murmured, 'but I can't help myself.'

'Tresa, don't.'

'I'm not a kid. This isn't a crush. I know I can't have you, and I know I'm a fool, OK? I never meant to hurt you and Hilary. That was the last thing I wanted. Really. Except here I am, doing the same thing all over again.'

Mark said nothing.

'At least tell me you were tempted, huh?' she went on. 'A little?'

'Tresa, there isn't any way that I would have let something happen between us. It's not just that I love my wife, and it's not because you aren't a sweet, beautiful, amazing girl. It's because I care about you too much. A girl like you falling in love with your teacher is absolutely innocent. A teacher who perverts that love for his own ends is sick. I wouldn't do that to you.'

'Oh, shit, you think I'm a child,' Tresa murmured, with a grievous hurt in her voice, as if it were the worst thing he could have told her.

'That's not what I mean.'

'You're wrong,' she told him. 'I'm not innocent. Do you think I didn't know exactly what I wanted on the beach with you?'

Her voice grew loud and he worried she would be heard outside.

'You read what I wrote in my diary,' she said. 'I know the positions, OK? I know where things go. I know I was asking you to cheat on your wife. I still am, and I hate myself for it. I don't care. I'd take off my clothes for you right now and get on my knees. That's me being innocent, Mark.'

He realized he was making the same mistake with Tresa all over again — treating her like a girl in woman's clothes when it was the other way around. She could be naive and seductive all at the same time. Just like Glory.

'All right, yes, of course, I was tempted,' he told her. 'I'm human, but I wasn't going to wreck both of our lives. OK?'

'Say yes now.'

'You know I can't do that.'

'It doesn't have to be anything more than right now. One night.'

'Tresa, no.'

He felt her bitterness and disappointment emanating out of the darkness. When she spoke, her voice was thick with betrayal. 'Were you human with Glory?'

'What?'

'Did you say yes to her?'

Mark heard the echo of Glory whispering to him on the beach. No one will ever know.

'Nothing happened between me and her.'

'You were out there with her, though, weren't you? Just like everybody said. You and Glory. Together.'

'It wasn't like that.'

'Be honest with me.'

'Yes, I saw her on the beach,' he admitted. 'That's all.'

'Did you arrange to meet her?'

'No. It was an accident. I went for a walk, and I found her there.'

'Did she try to seduce you?' Tresa asked quietly.

Mark hesitated. 'Yes.'

'That bitch. I knew it.'

'She was drunk. She was upset. It wasn't deliberate.'

'What did she do to you?'

'It doesn't matter.'

'Did she kiss you? Did she go down on you? What?'

'No, nothing like that.'

He could hear the rattle in her voice as she battled between anger and tears. 'You know what, Mark? You know what I really think? I think you fucked her, and you don't want to admit it to me.'

'That's crazy.'

'You're lying, aren't you?' she demanded breathlessly. 'Glory got whatever she wanted. It's true, isn't it? Everybody's right. You had sex with her, and then you killed her to cover it up.'

'No.'

'I don't know what's worse. The idea of you killing my sister, or the idea that you wanted to have sex with her, not me.'

'Tresa, listen to me. Stop and listen. You're wrong. I didn't have sex with Glory. I didn't kill her.'

'So what happened to her?'

'I don't know.'

'Do you think I killed her myself? Are you trying to protect me?'

'You didn't kill her.'

'If I saw the two of you having sex, I swear I would have strangled her.'

'I know you, Tresa,' Mark said. 'I know you didn't do this.'

Tresa sobbed quietly. She shuffled closer, bent down, and threw her skinny arms around his chest. 'I'm sorry. I'm such a complete fool. I'm saying whatever comes into my head.'

'Tresa, you have to believe me. I didn't kill Glory.'

'I know. I'm just as bad as everyone else. I'm the one who's supposed to trust you, and I was ready to say you did it, too.'

'I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,' Mark said. 'That makes me the only suspect, at least until Hilary gets back from Green Bay.'

Tresa stiffened and pushed away. It was as if she hadn't heard him. 'What did you say? Why is Hilary in Green Bay?'

'There's a man there who was in Florida last week. Apparently he's got a sexual history with teenagers, and he may be involved in a girl's disappearance. Hilary thinks the police should be looking at him.'

'He's in Green Bay?'

'That's right.'

Tresa climbed off his lap and paced between the tight walls of the stall.

'What's wrong?' Mark asked.

'I don't know. I guess it's just a creepy coincidence.'

'What is?'

Tresa stopped and squatted in front of him and held on to his knees. He could feel her entire body trembling. 'A girl disappeared there? What's her name? Who is she?' 'Amy Leigh. Hilary coached her in high school in Chicago.'

'Amy Leigh,' Tresa repeated, rolling out the name as if she was searching her memory and coming up with nothing.

'Do you know her?'

'No, I've never heard of her.'

'Tresa, tell me what's wrong.'

'Nothing. I just can't believe—'

'What?'

Tresa reared back so hard and fast that she stumbled against the metal door. 'Wait a minute, you said Hilary coached her? This girl's a dancer?'

'That's right.'

'Was she in Florida?'

'Yes, she's on the Green Bay team.'

He heard Tresa breathing open-mouthed.

'Oh, shit,' she murmured, it has to be her.'

'What are you talking about?'

Tresa ignored him. 'How did Hilary get mixed up in this? Please, tell me what happened.'

'Amy called Hilary yesterday. It sounded like she thought her coach might have had something to do with Glory's death. Now Amy's missing, so Hilary drove down there to talk to the police. She's worried this guy may have grabbed her.'

'This guy you're talking about, is he the Green Bay dance coach?'

'I think he is, why?'

'What's his name? Do you know? Is it like Jerry something?'

'It's Gary Jensen.'

'Oh, shit, that's him, that's him. I forgot all about it. I'm so stupid! Peter Hoffman said I'd want to see it because I was a dancer. Shit!'

'Tresa, you're not making any sense.'

Her voice was urgent. 'Mark, we have to get out of here. Please, we need to go. We have to warn Hilary.'

He felt his adrenaline and fear accelerate as he heard Hilary's name. 'Warn her about what?'

'She has to stay away from there,' Tresa moaned. She crumbled, losing control.

'Tresa, Hilary's not going anywhere near Gary Jensen.'

'No! No, no, no, you don't understand. What have I done?'

The metal door swung open, and Tresa rushed out of the stall. Her panicked sobs bounced between the concrete walls as she stumbled for the way out. When she found it, she tore open the outer door and let it bang shut behind her. Mark chased blindly in her wake, heading into the woods outside the shelter, where the rain and wind swallowed the noise.

'Tresa, stop!' he hissed, it's not safe.'

For a moment, somewhere close by, he heard her running footsteps and the choked gasp of her cries, but he couldn't see through the darkness to follow her. Soon he didn't hear anything at all.

'Tresa,' he called again, as loud as he dared.

She was gone.

Cab awoke with his blood dripping from his face to the floor. It made a pool around the tips of his fingers. The pain in his head was like a nail hammered through the back of his skull and driven out between his eyes. When he pushed himself up on his forearms, a wave of dizziness and nausea almost made him vomit and collapse. He stayed on his hands and knees until his head cleared, then he stood up slowly, supporting himself against the bedroom wall. He touched the back of his head tenderly and winced as he felt the swollen bump, which was damp with blood. He had no idea if he'd been unconscious for a minute or an hour, but his flashlight was still lit, shooting a tunnel of light toward the bed. He squatted carefully and retrieved it.

When he listened to the cold, quiet house around him, he concluded that the assailant was gone. So was his Glock. It was missing.

He staggered toward the bathroom and turned on the water at the sink. He grabbed a hand towel from the rack, soaked it under the water, and dabbed it against his skull, wiping the blood. He opened the vanity cabinet under the sink and used the flashlight to find a box of gauze bandages and medical tape. Positioning a pad at the base of his skull, he added tape until the mesh stayed tight against his hair and skin. It was a crude job, but he didn't have time to waste.

Before he left the bathroom, he opened a bottle of Advil and took five of them to battle his monster headache.

Cab made his way out of Mark Bradley's house and tramped through the muddy driveway to the black Nissan, which was parked where he'd left it. He leaned against the car, letting the waves of pain in his head dissipate. Whoever had assaulted him couldn't be far. Neither could Mark Bradley and Tresa Fischer. He just didn't know where to find them. They could be anywhere, hidden by the night.

He opened the car door.

That was when he heard it. A sharp crack sizzled through the noise of the rain. The echoes bounced around him, but the ripples of sound started at the beach.

A gunshot.

The world spun as Cab ran for the water.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Hilary ran to Amy on the bed.

As she did, her cell phone rang, and the music was jarringly loud in the silence of Gary Jensen's house. She fumbled with the buttons to answer the call before the coach heard the ringing downstairs.

'It's Katie,' Amy's roommate whispered as Hilary pressed the phone to her ear. 'Gary's back! Where are you? Are you inside?'

'Call nine one one,' Hilary hissed. 'I found Amy. Get the police here right now.'

She slapped the phone shut before Katie said another word. She didn't have time to wait. At the bed, she cupped Amy's cheek and then clawed with her fingernails at the tape that bound the girl's wrists. The tape was tightly wound in layers and was slow to fray as she picked at it and pulled it away from the down on the girl's skin. Behind the gag, Amy whimpered, partly in pain and partly in relief, but Hilary quieted her with a gentle hand at her mouth. 'Shhh.'

Hilary succeeded in freeing Amy's right wrist, and the girl's arm flew around her neck and pulled her close. They couldn't stop for emotion. Hilary disentangled herself and set to work immediately on Amy's other wrist. This time, her progress was faster, and in less than a minute, Amy's arms were both free, and the girl immediately ripped off the tape from her mouth with a gasp and dug out the cloth bandage that had been stuffed inside, choking her. Her face was blistered and red.

Amy sat up and again hugged Hilary in an embrace so strong she could barely breathe. 'Thank God, thank God, oh, Hilary, thank you,' she murmured in a rush of words.

Hilary peeled the girl's arms firmly away. 'I know, kiddo, but keep quiet, he's downstairs. We have to hurry. Help's on the way.'

Hilary grabbed her car keys out of her pocket and sawed at the tape on Amy's left leg with the jagged edge of one key. The threads split apart, and she tore it away, making the girl's skin bleed. Amy winced and bent her leg at the knee to jump-start her circulation.

Hilary quickly freed her other leg.

'Let's go,' she whispered. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'

Amy swung her legs off the bed, but her knees gave way as she stood up, and she collapsed heavily into Hilary's arms.

'I'm dizzy,' Amy said.

'I know. Try again.'

Hilary slid an arm around the girl's waist, and Amy draped her left arm around Hilary's shoulder. Amy swayed as the two of them took a step together, but she didn't fall.

'Stay quiet,' Hilary whispered. 'The front door is at the bottom of the stairs. We'll go straight down and out, OK?'

'Hell yeah.'

With each step, the girl grew stronger. Her young body shrugged off the after-effects of the drug and the long stretch spent prone on the bed. She let go of Hilary, balancing one hand on the wall of the hallway. They reached the stairs leading back to the ground floor, and Hilary went first, with Amy at her heels. Freedom felt close; she could almost smell the rain and pine outside. The staircase wound like a corkscrew, and as they followed the iron railing round the curve, the front door beckoned to them from across the marble tile of the foyer.

She wanted to run. In ten seconds, they could be through the door and safe. She reached behind and took hold of Amy's hand.

Hilary glanced back at the girl. Their eyes met. She gave Amy an encouraging smile, and the girl's face glowed with confidence as she smiled back. Then, as Hilary watched, the smile vanished, and Amy's expression bled into terror. Hilary looked downstairs and understood why.

Gary Jensen stood at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for them. Hilary's eyes followed the length of his right arm and saw that he was holding a gun.

Amy screamed in panic, yanking Hilary's hand and dragging both of them back up the twisting staircase. The girl's speed took Jensen by surprise, but they were only a handful of steps ahead of him as he charged in pursuit. At the top of the stairs, Amy sped left through the open door to the master bedroom. Hilary cleared the doorway behind her, slammed the door shut, and pushed the surface bolt into place just as Jensen's shoulder collided with the heavy door.

Hilary longed for the sound of sirens, but she heard nothing outside. She dug out her phone and punched in 911 on the keypad. On the other side of the door, Jensen hammered and kicked. The lock shivered under the impact, the screws loosening. She heard the phone ring once, twice, then three times, with excruciating slowness.

Jensen kicked again.

'Nine one one emergency,' the operator finally answered.

'Get the police here, we've got a man trying to kill us.'

Her panic didn't rattle the operator. 'Ma'am, this is a mobile phone. I'm showing this phone registered to an address in Washington Island, Wisconsin. What is your current location?'

Jensen kicked again, and this time the lock exploded off the door, and the door itself spun on its hinges and banged into the wall. He surged through the doorway with his gun extended and his finger on the trigger. He pointed the barrel at Hilary's head.

'Ma'am, what is your location?' the operator repeated.

'Hang up!' Jensen whispered.

Hilary hesitated. The operator spoke urgently into her ear. 'Ma'am? Are you OK? Are you still there? Ma'am, what is your location?'

Jensen shifted and pointed the gun at Amy's head, not even two feet away. 'Hang up!'

Hilary clapped the phone shut. She let it fall from her hand to the ground.

'Don't be stupid,' she told Jensen. 'The police are already coming. You may as well let us go.'

She watched his face. His eyes darted between them, and his hand squirmed on the gun, which slipped in his sweaty fingers. She realized he was paralyzed. He didn't know what to do.

'Give it up,' she urged him. if you harm us, you only make it worse.'

At Hilary's feet, her cell phone began ringing.

'See?' she said. 'They know we're here. They're already tracking the pings on the phone. It won't take long.'

Jensen squatted and took the phone in his hand. He flipped it open, not taking his eyes off the two of them, and switched the phone off.

'Get on your knees,' he said. 'Both of you.'

Amy glanced at Hilary, who nodded. They slid down to their knees on the bedroom floor, next to each other. Jensen towered over them, shifting the gun back and forth between their faces.

'You killed Glory, didn't you?' Hilary asked, stalling for time, praying for the police to hurry. 'That's what this is all about.'

Jensen laughed, but it was manic and strangled, like a man who laughs at things he can't see in the darkness. Things that scare him. He pointed the gun at Hilary's head.

'Please don't do this,' she said.

The gun trembled in his hand. His finger moved on to the trigger, and she knew she had to jump for the gun. If she jumped, if she got in his face, then she gave Amy a chance to survive.

Hilary thought about Mark. She saw his face and felt his touch, as real as if he were here with her. She thought about the faces of the children they would never have. She thought about how you can go from life to death in an instant.

She readied herself to leap, but before she did, she spotted movement in the hallway behind Gary Jensen. She didn't dare look away from Jensen's eyes, but in the dim light beyond the doorway, she realized that someone was creeping down the hallway toward them. A teenage girl stalked Jensen's back with a finger pressed over her lips for silence.

It was Katie.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The shot went wild, careening into the treetops.

Troy cursed silently to himself. He'd heard Bradley's voice in the woods above the beach, but he was aiming like a blind man. His nerves made him careless. Now, with a foolish shot, he'd warned Bradley away.

He hiked up the dirt road away from the beach. He hoped the patter of the rain covered the slow crunch of his footfalls. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched, but he couldn't see anything in the darkness, and he was confident that no one could see him. Even so, he didn't feel alone. The woods seemed alive. He told himself that it was his imagination creating monsters in his head, but every scrape of tree branches as the wind blew made him twitch with fear.

He wanted to quit. He wanted to hike to the main road and call his buddy Keith, who would pick him up and smuggle him on to the ferry in the morning. They could spend the night in Keith's basement, drinking beer and playing pool and surfing porn. Forget about Mark Bradley. Forget about the gun in his hand.

He thought: Glory's laughing at me.

Maybe she was the one watching him; she was the spirit he felt. Her ghost. If he listened, he could hear her voice. You can't do anything right.

He was angry at Glory. Angry at himself. All of that anger still had a focus that made him stay where he was, rooted to the ground. Mark Bradley. He wasn't going to give up while Bradley was alive.

'Where are you, you bastard?' he murmured aloud.

Like the answer to a prayer, Bradley revealed his location. No more than two hundred yards away, Troy saw a stream of light splash through the woods. It was deep in the trees in the campground between the beach and the cemetery. He stayed on the road and hustled, eating up the space between them. Based on the direction of the light, Bradley was heading toward the graveyard, and Troy realized he could get there ahead of him and be waiting for him when he emerged into the open ground.

Troy splashed through huge puddles in the road, sprinting south. A quarter-mile further, he broke from the trees and found himself in the sprawling grass of the cemetery. He had enough light under the open sky to see rows of stones poking out of the earth. He bent low, moving from tomb to tomb, eyeing the woods. The telltale light came and went, flashing on and off, and Troy was directly in its path. Mark Bradley was heading straight for him.

He stopped behind a grave marked with black marble only fifteen yards from the brush where the forest ended. It was slick with rain, and the grass was sodden as he crouched near the tomb. He clutched his gun, smelling burnt powder on his hands. He watched the trees, hunting for the shadow of a man arriving at the long carpet of headstones. His heart thumped so fast he thought he would die before he sprang up and pulled the trigger.

Troy took a deep breath. He lifted the gun.

Mark couldn't find Tresa. She'd been swallowed up by the night. After the boom of the gunshot rose above the rain, he knew that Troy was out there, firing blindly at anything that moved. The boy was a menace, and if he wasn't stopped, someone was going to get killed. Mark picked his way through the forest, breaking branches, not caring about the noise he made. If Troy was here, he wanted the boy to hear him and follow him. He wanted to draw him away from Tresa.

His ankle was swollen where he had twisted it. Each time his heel landed on the uneven ground, he grimaced. He headed south, but it was nearly impossible to keep a sense of direction inside the trees. He wished he had a flashlight to guide his path. Where the forest ended, he planned to cut across the cemetery ground to the main road. He had little hope of flagging down a car on a deserted night, but he could follow the road toward the center of town until he reached the house of one of the year-round residents, and then he could finally use a phone.

Call the police. Call Hilary.

To his left, he spied a beam of light in the maze of trees. It came and went, on and off, as someone maneuvered through the forest. It had to be Troy. They were on parallel paths, both heading toward the cemetery.

Mark pushed past the trees at the border of the graveyard, and a moment later, he was free of the dense, grasping grip of the woods. The sky opened up over his head. Rain swooped down in sheets, and he wiped his eyes with his sleeve so that he could see. Triangle-shaped pines and skeletal oaks dotted the land. He looked for the warning glow of the light he'd seen before, but the forest was dark. He eyed the trees and graves for a moving silhouette, but as far as he could tell, he was alone.

'Troy!' he shouted.

His voice fought with the storm.

'Troy, it's Mark Bradley. I know you're here. I want to talk to you.'

He wandered deeper into the cemetery land. He looked down, but he couldn't see the names on the stones.

'Troy, listen to me. Tresa's here too. Neither one of us wants her to get hurt.'

Forty yards away, not far from the woods, Mark saw a headstone grow into a large shadow, as if a ghost were rising from the earth. The silhouette detached itself from the grave and walked toward him. Mark recognized the bulky outline of Troy Geier, and he saw that the boy had a gun in his outstretched hand. Troy marched closer until he was no more than ten feet away. The gun was pointed at Mark's heart.

'I'm here,' Troy said.

'So am I,' Mark replied.

'Where's Tresa?'

'I don't know. She ran. I didn't want you shooting her accidentally.'

'I wouldn't hurt her. This is between you and me.'

'I understand.'

Troy was silent. Mark could see his gun arm shivering.

'Listen, Troy,' he went on, 'Tresa knows you're here. If you kill me, you'll go to jail. You'll be throwing away your life.'

'I don't care.'

'I know you think you're doing this for Glory.'

'That's right. I'm doing it for her and for Mrs Fischer and for Peter

Hoffman and for Tresa, too. You're going to pay the price. I'm not letting you get away with everything you did.'

'What did I do?' Mark asked.

'You killed Glory.'

'No.'

'You killed Peter Hoffman.'

'No.'

'You think I believe you?' Troy demanded loudly. 'You're a liar trying to save his skin.'

'Troy, listen to me. I didn't do those things.'

'Bullshit. Everybody knows you did.'

Mark spread his arms wide. If Troy wanted to be a man, then Mark would treat him like one. 'OK, you better shoot me. If I really killed them, I'm a monster, and I have to be stopped.'

Troy hesitated. 'You don't think I can do it, do you?' he asked, his voice puffed up with nervous bravado.

'I know you can,' Mark told him. 'If you really believe that I could do those things — that I could strangle your girlfriend on a beach in Florida, that I could take a shotgun and blow off an old man's head — then you need to shoot me now.'

Mark could barely see the boy's face in the darkness. He couldn't see if he was reaching him. He watched the gun, which was still aimed at his chest at point-blank range. One pulse, one twitch of Troy's finger, and the bullet would sear through Mark's body.

'I–I don't know,' Troy murmured.

'This is what men do, Troy. We do what's right. We take responsibility. You need to look into my eyes and tell me you know that I'm guilty. After that, it's easy. After that, you won't have any doubts.'

'Mrs Fischer, she said—'

'I don't want to know what Delia thinks,' Mark told him firmly. 'This is between you and me. What do you think?'

'It had to be you. It had to be.'

'If that's true, then pull the trigger.'

Troy's arm fluttered as if he couldn't hold it steady in the wind. He took a step toward Mark. 'I'm going to do this.'

'I know.'

Mark couldn't take his eyes off the barrel of the gun. He wondered if he would see the flame or if he would hear the explosion, or if it would all happen in silence and darkness before his brain could process the shot. He would simply be standing here in one instant and lying on his back in the next instant, unable to draw a breath, feeling the warmth of blood on his chest.

Troy was crying. Mark could see the boy's chest heave.

'I have to do this,' Troy said.

'I'm not going to stop you.'

There were no easy choices. If Mark moved, he died. If he stayed where he was, he died. Troy tightened his grip on the slippery butt of the gun. As he hesitated, poised to fire, a bright beam of light speared through the night and caught the two of them in its glare like deer on the highway. Mark instinctively shielded his eyes with his palm. Troy spun in shock, taking the gun with him.

'Troy, put that gun down right now,' a man barked.

Like a child, Troy complied. His arm sagged; the gun pointed at the ground.

Mark recognized the voice and saw the man's squared shoulders and squat legs in the light that bounced off the dirt.

Sheriff Reich marched toward them from the edge of the forest.

Tresa huddled in the trees above Schoolhouse Beach. She shivered, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her red hair was plastered to her face. She could barely feel her fingers and toes. She felt paralyzed by what was happening. By the gunshot. By everything that Mark had told her. By her fears of what was about to happen.

By the past.

She'd kept the secret for too many years. She'd willed it out of her mind as if it had never happened. She'd told herself that she was wrong, but now Glory was dead, and Mark and Hilary were both in danger, and it was all because she'd pretended she didn't know anything at all. She'd allowed everyone around her to believe a lie.

She should have known what had really happened in Florida. She should have suspected the truth.

Tresa stared at the water, which was a black sheet merging into white rocks. Part of her wanted to walk down into the lake's cold embrace and keep walking until the waves closed over her head and she was numb. Her guilt overwhelmed her, and she wanted to drown in it. Her eyes got lost in the dimpled surface of the bay. The raindrops hypnotized her. Only the silhouette of the man hiking on the beach awakened her from her trance. He came from the east near Mark's house. He hugged the woods, twenty feet from where Tresa was hiding. At first, she saw only that he was absurdly tall and lean, but then, as he drew near, she recognized Cab Bolton.

Gathering her courage, Tresa bolted from her hiding place. 'Detective!'

He didn't look surprised to see her. 'Tresa, are you OK?'

'Yes.' She saw ribbons of blood on the detective's neck. 'You're hurt.'

'I'm fine,' he said, but his face was ashen. 'Where's Mark Bradley?'

'He's in the campground. We were hiding from Troy.'

'What the hell is Troy doing here?'

Tresa hesitated, but she was done hiding and pretending. 'He came here to kill Mark. I tried to stop it, but I've made a mess of everything. I don't know what to do.'

Cab put an arm around her shoulder. 'Come on, stay with me. We have to find them. Troy isn't our only problem right now.'

He pulled her along the fringe of the beach, but Tresa stopped and held Cab's arm. 'Wait.'

'What is it?'

She tried to breathe. She tried to get the words out.

'I know who killed Glory,' Tresa told him.

'Troy, you stupid ass,' Reich snapped. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'

Troy shrank like a wilted flower in front of the sheriff. The boy opened his hand, and the gun dropped to the wet ground of the cemetery. It may as well have been on fire. 'I just — I mean, I thought I could make things right for Glory, you know?'

'You?'

'Yeah. I thought if no one else could stop him, then I could.'

The sheriff marched so close to the boy that he was practically in his face. 'Then do it already,' Reich told him.

Troy cocked his head in confusion. 'What?'

'Shoot the fucker.'

Mark wasn't sure he'd heard the words come out of Reich's mouth. Reich wasn't joking. He was dead serious. When Troy stood frozen in disbelief, Reich squatted and retrieved the gun and stuffed it back into the boy's hand. Like a robot following orders, Troy turned back toward Mark, but he could barely hold the butt of the gun steady. Panic and fear made his entire body quake.

'Do it,' Reich ordered him. 'You pussy, get something right for once in your life. We'll ditch your boat, and you can go hide in my basement, and we can figure out what to do with you. We're going to have to get you seriously lost.'

'Sheriff, what are you doing?' Mark asked.

'Shut up, Bradley. I'm waiting, Troy. Pull the trigger. Do it now.'

'I don't — I don't think I can,' Troy murmured, his voice broken.

Reich stepped in front of Troy impatiently and stripped the gun out of the boy's hands. 'Like I thought, no balls. Jesus, what a waste.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Get the hell out of here,' Reich told him.

'Where do I go?' Troy asked plaintively.

'My truck is on the highway. It's parked off the shoulder a hundred yards east of here. Climb inside and stay out of sight. Stay right there until I get back, got it? Do not move.'

Troy did as he was told. He ran, tripping over the ground like a clown, through the cemetery, land. He never looked back. Reich followed Troy's progress until he couldn't see the boy anymore, and then he re-aimed Troy's gun at Bradley's chest. Unlike Troy's wobbly hand, Reich's grip was solid and assured, and his arm was rigid.

'Now it's just you and me, Bradley,' Reich said.

'Sheriff, are you out of your mind?'

'Where's Tresa?' Reich asked.

'I don't know. She ran. Sheriff, if this is a joke, it's not funny.'

'It's no joke.'

Mark could see that it wasn't. Reich's intentions were deadly.

'Why are you doing this?' Mark asked.

'Because as long as you're alive, people are going to keep digging up ghosts. Once you're gone, you can take the blame for everything. If you'd died in that car accident like you were supposed to, the case would already be closed.'

'I can't believe you'd kill an innocent man,' Mark told him.

'I've killed plenty of men. They were innocent. You're not. Don't bother pleading for your life. I'm fresh out of mercy.'

'I didn't kill Glory.'

'Now you're just making me mad,' Reich growled.

'I don't care. I didn't do it.'

'Pete knew you were a liar.'

'I didn't kill Peter Hoffman either.'

Reich nodded grimly. 'That's the first true thing you said, Bradley, but it doesn't matter. I killed Pete. You gave me no choice.'

Mark felt the breath leave his chest. He knew with a terrible clarity that there was really no hope now. No chance of this ending well, of him walking away alive and free. Reich was no immature kid like

Troy who was in over his head. When the sheriff ran out of bile, the gun in his hand would spit a bullet into Mark's heart.

'He was your best friend,' Mark said.

'That's right, I killed my best friend because of you.'

'Because of me?'

'Because you're a liar,' Reich told him. 'Because you had to hide behind a ghost in order to cover up your own crime. Pete was willing to give up everything to make sure you paid the price. I couldn't let him do that, but I'll make sure you pay. That's what Pete would want. That's why I can live with what I've done.'

Mark shook his head and slowly held up his hands. 'Sheriff, I swear I don't know what the hell you're talking about.'

'He's talking about Harris Bone,' Cab Bolton said.

Reich whipped his light toward the voice that rose from the cemetery graves, but he didn't take his eyes off Mark or lower the gun even an inch. In the beam, Mark saw Cab Bolton ten feet away, next to the gray tower of a bell-shaped tombstone. Tresa huddled next to him, her face red with anger and tears.

'Bolton,' Reich hissed.

'What now, Sheriff?' Cab demanded. 'Are you going to kill me, too? First Hoffman, then Bradley, then me?'

Reich's eyes darted furiously between Mark and Cab. He was a man looking for a way out and not finding one.

'The girl, too?' Cab went on. 'Could you shoot the girl? How many more people are you willing to kill to keep the secret?'

'Get the hell out of here,' Reich ordered him. 'Take Tresa with you. You have no idea what this is about.'

'Harris Bone,' Cab repeated. 'That's what this is about. Peter Hoffman couldn't handle the guilt anymore, could he? When he thought Bradley was hiding behind Harris to get away with murder; he decided to tell the truth. Hoffman wasn't about to let Delia Fischer get robbed of justice. He wasn't going to let some defense attorney use Harris to get an acquittal. He knew Glory didn't come face to face with Harris Bone in Florida. That was a lie. That's what he wanted to tell me.'

'Goddamn you, Bolton,' Reich said. 'You couldn't let it go, could you? What the hell did you do?'

'I found him, Sheriff,' Cab replied, i found him in that hole where the two of you left him to rot. Harris Bone never escaped. He never ran. You and Peter Hoffman killed him.'

In the miles since they left the county courthouse in Sturgeon Bay, Harris Bone hadn't said a word. He sat silently in the back of the squad car, his balding head hung forward, his hands and ankles cuffed. His jail clothes were baggy on his frame. Harris had never been a large man, but he'd shrunk inside his skin in the months since the fire, until he was almost a skeleton.

Reich watched his headlights tunneling through the night. He was south of Kewaunee in the midst of flat, dormant farmlands. It was January, during one of the frigid winter stretches, with temperatures falling into the teens below zero when the sun went down. The season had been mostly snowless, leaving the ground barren and hard, swept clean by the bitter wind.

He glanced in the mirror with hard eyes.

'You should look outside, Harris. You won't be seeing open country again for the rest of your life. Just eighty square feet of concrete for twenty-three hours a day.'

Harris didn't acknowledge him.

'I'd watch my back in there if I were you. Big-ass gang killers don't like a man who burns up his wife and family.'

Harris finally looked up with sunken eyes. 'Shut the hell up, Felix.'

'Oh, don't start mouthing off. That's a bad lesson. You shoot off your mouth in there, and bad things are likely to happen.'

'Thanks for the advice.'

Reich heard the sarcasm, and he didn't care. 'A lot of people think you're getting off easy, sitting on the taxpayer's dime for the next forty years. That doesn't feel like justice.'

'Is that right? What do you think, Felix?'

'If it were up to me, we'd gather volunteers and stone you.'

'Too bad it's not up to you.'

Reich nodded and studied the empty highway. 'Yeah. Too bad.'

Behind him, Harris closed his eyes, and his head fell back against the seat.

'I always felt sorry for you, Harris,' Reich called to him. 'Nettie was a bitch. Not that I'd ever say so to Pete. But there are some lines a man doesn't cross, no matter how much he hates his life. There are some things that when you do them, you stop being human.'

Harris leaned forward until his weary face was pressed against the steel mesh. 'What does that make you, Felix? How many babies did you kill during the war?'

Reich gripped the wheel fiercely. His lip curled into a snarl. 'Are you suggesting I'm the same as you? Is that really what you want to say to me?'

'I'm saying you can spare me the morality shit. I don't need it.'

Harris sank back and pretended to sleep. Reich studied the man's face and saw tears slipping down his cheeks. It didn't matter. He felt nothing for him. It was just as he'd said: there were lines a man doesn't cross. There were also things a man had to do when justice demanded it.

He was close to the rendezvous. Through the headlights, he spied the intersection at the county road, and he checked the odometer to count off one point seven miles. There was nothing but frozen land on either side of the vehicle. He and Pete had scouted the terrain weeks earlier as they made their plans.

Where to meet. Where to stage the escape.

Reich spotted the driveway leading to the farmhouse, miles from anything else around it. He slowed sharply and turned. In the back seat, Harris felt the change in direction and opened his eyes.

'What's going on?'

Reich said nothing. He drove into the rutted cornfield bordering the house and steered around the rear of the detached garage, where he parked the squad car with its right-hand door butted against the wall. From the highway, the car was invisible. It would be days before anyone found it.

'What the hell are you doing, Felix?'

Reich heard it in Harris's voice. The first tremors of fear. The first horrified realization of what was about to happen to him.

Justice.

Reich got out of the car. The wind was ferocious, and the cold bit through his coat like a maneater. He opened the rear door and dragged Harris Bone into the night by the cuff of his shirt. Harris, who wore nothing except his prison scrubs, howled as the frozen air knifed his skin. The bound man hunched his limbs together. Reich yanked a billy club from his belt and swung it across the man's skull. Harris collapsed to his knees. Reich laid a boot on the man's back and crushed him forward on to the rock-hard dirt, where he twitched from the pain and cold. Harris tried to crawl, but Reich held him down.

'Hello, Felix,' Peter Hoffman said. He was waiting for them beside the garage.

'No mercy tonight,' Reich replied.

'None.'

The house and land belonged to a retired couple who were away in the sunshine of Mesa and wouldn't be back in Wisconsin until after Easter. Reich had checked the house and garage three weeks earlier and found the couple's Accord parked inside for the season. Keys on a peg board by the door. He loved Midwesterners.

'Let's get it over with,' Pete said.

Reich marched to the side door of the garage. He didn't notice the cold, other than the prickly bite of ice crystals in his nose when he breathed. He cocked his leg and smashed the door inward with a swing of his boot. Just like Harris Bone would do. Inside, he pushed through spiderwebs and heard the scurry of rats in the rafters. He returned to find Harris on the ground, curled into a ball, and he lifted him bodily with both hands and threw him toward the garage door. Harris tripped in the shackles and fell with a whimper. Pete stepped over him into the garage, started the engine of the Accord, and popped the trunk. Reich grabbed Harris, pulled him on his heels, and dumped him into the rear of the car.

He slammed the trunk shut, locking Harris inside.

'Come on,' Reich said. He dug in his pocket for the keys to his squad car and threw them on the ground. He held out the keys to the cuffs and shackles to Pete, who stood by the driver's door with his hands in his pockets. 'You having second thoughts?' he asked.

'You know me better than that, Felix.' He took the keys.

Reich stared into his friend's face for a long time in the shadows. 'OK then.'

Pete drove. They headed north on the deserted roads, back toward Door County. Ten miles from the farmhouse, they passed a bar with a handful of pickups parked outside the door. Pete continued past the bar for a quarter-mile until no one who ventured into the winter air would see them, and then he pulled on to the shoulder. Both men got out.

The wind poured over their bodies with an unforgiving fury. Pete dug his chin into his neck and pulled down his wool hat. Reich simply walked down the gully from the road into the dirt of the field. He wasn't even wearing a hat to cover the steel wool of his hair. His skin was already numb and white, but he didn't care.

Pete followed. 'You sure about this, Felix?'

'Just do it.' Reich squatted and found a fist-sized clump of earth that had frozen into jagged edges. 'Here.'

'I wish there was some other way,' Pete said.

'Hit me. Hard. You only get one try.'

Pete reared back with the rock and swung his gloved hand into his friend's forehead. The frozen spikes cut through Reich's skin, erupting in blood. Reich stumbled back at the force of the blow and nearly fell. He staggered. Pete dropped the rock and reached for his friend, but Reich shrugged him away.

'Get the hell out of here.'

'Can you make it to the bar?'

Reich touched his hand to his cheek, where the warm blood was already freezing. He felt his words slurring as he tried to talk. He tasted copper on his lips. 'Just go. I'll join you as soon as I can, and we'll finish this. It's for Nettie and the boys, remember?'

Reich stayed where he was, bleeding in the field, until Pete climbed the shoulder and drove away. The car disappeared, its tail lights winking out, leaving Reich alone. He was losing blood fast. He took two clumsy steps toward the bar, which looked impossibly far. Briefly, he wondered if it would be better to lie down among the broken cornstalks and give himself up to the winter. He had a vision of his future, and it wasn't pretty. He had been the one to cross the line tonight, and there was no going back.

Even so, he quashed his doubts and marched for rescue like a wounded soldier.

'I saw what was left of him, Sheriff,' Cab said. 'The two of you didn't just kill him. You tortured him.'

'Torture is burning to death,' Reich replied. 'I've seen it happen to people I considered my enemies, and I didn't even wish it on them.'

'I saw the broken bones. The bullet holes.'

Reich shrugged. 'I don't regret what I did. Sometimes you have to take justice into your own hands.'

'Peter Hoffman regretted it, though, didn't he?'

'Pete got soft,' Reich said. 'He got old. The booze took over.'

'Or maybe he finally realized the two of you had become the monsters you were trying to destroy.'

'We did what we had to do,' Reich said.

'If you're so sure about that, why kill Hoffman to cover it up? Why not tell the world?'

'People like you don't understand,' he snapped. 'They don't appreciate the tough decisions that others make for them.'

Tresa pulled away from Cab and marched toward Reich through the wet ground. She swept the red hair from her face. 'You son of a bitch,' she hissed.

'Tresa, stay out of this,' Reich told her.

'All this time I thought Harris was alive. That made it OK. And now I find out you killed him. You bastard!'

'This doesn't concern you.'

'Who else knew?' she demanded. 'Did my mother know?'

'No one knew. Look, Tresa, you were a kid. Your father was dead, and Harris was there for you. That doesn't change what he did.'

Tresa pushed in close enough to spit in Reich's face. 'You're always right, aren't you? You're right about everything. You didn't believe me about Mark either. You wouldn't listen when I told you that nothing happened between us. Instead, you had to go about ruining his life.'

Reich wiped his face with his free hand. 'I'm sorry you had to find out about Harris, but if there's one good thing to come out of this, at least now you know what kind of a man Mark Bradley really is.' He jabbed a finger at Mark across the dark space between the graves. 'He wanted you to think Harris Bone killed your sister, didn't he? Now you know that's a lie. He was the one out on the beach with her. He was the one who killed Glory.'

Tresa shook her head. 'You stupid macho jerk. All of you. You. Troy. Peter Hoffman. Everybody.'

She walked toward Mark. Reich shouted to stop her, and Mark put his hands up to warn her away, but Tresa put herself squarely between

Mark and the sheriff, in the path of his gun, and spread her arms wide, if you want to kill him, now you'll need to kill me, too.'

Reich's face pulsed with fury and frustration. 'He's as evil as Harris was, Tresa. Don't be fooled.'

'You're the evil one,' Tresa said. 'You're the one who murdered an innocent man.'

'What the hell are you talking about?' Reich growled.

'Don't you get it?' Tresa screamed at him. 'Harris Bone didn't kill his family. It wasn't him. He didn't start the fire.'

Chapter Fifty-One

Gary Jensen heard Katie in the hallway.

His shoulders swiveled, and his eyes flicked away. That was Hilary's chance. She charged from her knees and leaped across the space between them, driving Jensen backward into the wall. Her knee spiked into Jensen's groin, and he doubled over. She dove for his gun hand, but he swung the butt of the gun and caught her on the bottom of her chin. The impact of metal on bone ricocheted in her brain. She staggered backward, tripping on the bed and falling as her left leg gave way beneath her.

Jensen, still bent over, aimed the barrel at her chest. Hilary was dizzy, but she saw his finger slide over the trigger. Just as he fired, she heard a shout and saw a blur of motion. Amy threw herself into Jensen's body, and as they collided, the gun went off with a deafening blast. The bullet tore into the wall over the bed, blasting through Sheetrock and kicking up a cloud of white dust. Amy and Jensen toppled on to the floor. They rolled over each other into the doorway, and Amy clutched Jensen's gun arm with both hands, holding it down. Jensen pummeled the girl's kidneys with his other fist, and Amy, who was still weak, lost her grip. Hilary climbed to her feet as Jensen broke free. She dodged sideways just as a second bullet narrowly roared past her ear, so close she felt a searing heat on her hair.

Jensen tried to get up, but Amy threw her dancer's leg backward, landing her heel on his wrist. His fingers went numb. The gun spilled from his hand and twirled as it skidded down the hallway. It landed in front of Katie, who picked it up. The coach threw an arm around Amy's neck and yanked the girl into his chest, squeezing off her air.

'Stop!' Katie screamed.

She stood over them, the gun in her hand. Jensen loosened his grip. Coughing, Amy crawled away and pushed herself to her feet. Jensen stood up too, and fell heavily against the bedroom wall. He looked bruised and beaten.

Amy limped for Katie and threw her arms around her neck. She hugged her roommate with a smile of relief and then turned back toward Hilary.

'The two of you saved—' Amy began, but she never finished.

Katie lifted the gun and brought the butt down solidly on to the back of Amy's skull. Amy took two shaken steps in confused disbelief, crumpled to her knees, and pitched forward on to her face, unconscious.

'Katie!' Hilary screamed.

The girl quickly aimed the gun at her.

'Don't move. Stay right there.'

Katie slid an arm around Gary Jensen's waist as he stretched his stiff muscles and twisted his neck. She pressed a quick, passionate kiss on his lips. 'You OK?'

'I'm fine.'

'Katie, you're being a fool,' Hilary warned her. 'Don't trust this man. I don't know what he's told you, but he's dangerous.'

The girl gave her a peaceful smile. 'You've got Gary all wrong.'

'He's using you.'

'No, he's protecting me,' she said.

'Protecting you from what?'

Katie stared at Amy on the floor, and the smile washed away from her face. 'From who I was.'

Jensen checked his watch and tugged Katie's arm. 'The police will be here soon,' he said. 'We should go.'

'There's something we need to do first,' she told him.

Jensen stiffened with unease, and Hilary tried to read his face. She realized for the first time that she had it wrong. Jensen wasn't the one in control. He was in thrall to this girl. It was Katie whose eyes betrayed a terrible detachment. It was Katie who looked like fragile china, riven with cracks, ready to break apart.

'Katie, we don't have to do this,' Jensen said. 'Not now.'

'We don't have a choice.' 'Yes, we do. Forget about them. We can run.'

The girl's lips tightened into an angry line. 'I've been running my whole life. I'm done with it.'

'Give me the gun. I can protect us.'

'No, you can't.' Katie kissed Jensen again and pushed him toward the bedroom door. 'Don't lose your nerve now. We've come too far. Go downstairs and grab every alcohol bottle you can carry.'

'Katie, stop.'

'You know what we've been through. It's just one last thing. Then it's over. Then we're free.'

Hilary saw something in Jensen's eyes. Self-awareness. Self-hatred. He couldn't say no to this girl. A man who had destroyed his first marriage seducing teenagers had been seduced and manipulated himself.

'Hurry,' Katie told him, her voice insistent.

Jensen vanished toward the stairs without further protest. Amy remained motionless on the floor. Hilary was alone with Katie. The girl cradled the gun loosely in one hand and chewed a fingernail on her other hand. Her glasses slipped down her nose, and she stared at Hilary through the rain-dotted lenses.

'What's this all about?' Hilary asked.

Katie shrugged. 'Glory saw me in Florida.'

'Glory saw yow?'

Her head bobbed. 'She started to remember everything. I knew she wouldn't let it go. She'd tell someone. Gary didn't want me to do it, but I couldn't take the risk. I had to stop her.'

'You killed Glory? Katie, why?'

The girl got a faraway look in her eyes. 'Everyone used to call me Jen back then, but my father always called me Katie. That was my grandmother's name. I was Jennifer Katherine. That's the only part of me I have left from those days.'

Hilary's throat went dry with despair. 'You're Jen Bone. Harris's daughter.'

'I was. I stopped being that girl that night in Door County. I thought I would never have to be her again. Really. It was over and done. But then Glory saw me, and it all came back to her. She remembered being in the garage that night. She saw me light the fire.'

Chapter Fifty-Two

'I never wanted to believe it,' Tresa said. 'I convinced myself I was wrong, you know? Everybody said Harris did it. He confessed. The thing is, I knew he would have done anything for Jen. He must have known she did it, but he took the blame. To protect her.'

Cab drew closer to the three of them, conscious of the gun in Reich's hand. He didn't know how far Reich would go to save himself. When he studied the sheriff's heavily shadowed face, he saw someone who was staring into the maw of a black hole, the way Cab himself had done in the storm cellar. He wondered whose face Reich saw looking up from the darkness. Harris Bone, screaming in agony for his life. Or Peter Hoffman, staring into the eyes of his friend as Reich shot him to death.

'Sheriff, put the gun down,' Cab said.

Reich ignored him. 'I don't believe this shit. Harris Bone was there. He admitted it. This is another of your fantasies, Tresa.'

'Jen was with me that night,' Tresa went on. 'We were up late writing our stories together. She was really keyed up. I'd never seen her so out of control. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I saw that she was gone. I figured she couldn't sleep, you know? Then I heard her come in. She was naked. She'd taken a shower, and her hair was wet, but I could still smell it.'

'Smell what?' Reich asked.

'Smoke.'

Reich's arm slowly sank, as if under a great weight. The gun slipped downward. He ran a hand over his bottlebrush hair, and his eyes were wide. 'Jesus,' he whispered.

'I didn't tell anyone. I mean, by morning, I wondered if I'd dreamed it. Everyone was saying Mr Bone was the one. I wanted to be wrong, you know? I did just what Mr Bone did. I protected Jen. Even after what Glory told me.'

'Glory?' Bradley asked her. 'What about Glory?'

Tresa nestled closer to him. 'We were in the hospital. Glory and me. She told me what she saw. It was Jen, through the window of the garage, lighting a cigarette. That was the only thing she remembered. And I knew she'd seen her. She'd seen Jen starting the fire.' The girl bowed her head and stared at her feet. 'I convinced Glory she'd imagined the whole thing. We never talked about it again. Not ever. Glory never talked about the fire or told anyone what she saw. It was like it had never happened, you know?'

'What about Florida?' Cab asked.

'Jen must have been there,' Tresa said. 'I never thought that was possible. I mean, she's not a dancer, you know? I never dreamed she would do something like that. I still don't know why.'

She saw someone she knew, Cab thought.

Jen Bone. Through the window at the hotel. The memories must have stormed back, carrying Glory away like a tsunami. He felt sorry for the girl, coming face to face with everything she'd spent six years trying to escape. Remembering what had really happened at the Bone house.

'When Mark said Hilary was in Green Bay, I knew,' Tresa murmured, 'I just knew. Jen goes to Green Bay. That man Gary Jensen, she wrote an article about him for the school paper last year. Peter Hoffman sent it to me. He thought I'd want to see it because it was about dancing. He told me Jen's roommate was a dancer just like me. It must be this girl Amy. The one you said disappeared.'

Bradley picked up Tresa under her shoulders and lifted the girl away from him, protecting her with his body. He was inches from Reich. 'Are you going to shoot me, Sheriff? If so, you better do it now, because if not, I'm leaving. I have to get the police to find my wife.'

Reich stared blankly at him and didn't move or raise the gun. He was in shock. Cab waved at Bradley, telling him to go, and he took off limping through the cemetery. Running for a phone. Cab beckoned to Tresa. He took her hand, and he put out his other hand toward Felix Reich.

'Bradley's right,' Cab said. 'We need to call the Green Bay Police right now. We don't have much time. Let's go, Sheriff.'

Reich said nothing at all. Cab gestured with his hand again.

'Sheriff? Come on, it's over. You're too honorable a man for more violence. It's time to surrender.'

'Take the girl and go.' Reich murmured. 'What?'

Reich looked up, and his face was as dark and dreadful as a corpse. Their eyes met. Cab saw that the sheriff wasn't staring down into the hole anymore. He was inside it, consumed by the mold, dampness, worms, and stench of the burial ground. Reich withdrew Cab's own gun from his pocket, the one he had stolen when he assaulted Cab at Bradley's house, and threw it at his feet.

'Take Tresa with you, Detective,' he repeated.

Cab wrestled with his conscience. Stay or go. 'Sheriff?' he murmured, his voice a question and a warning at the same time.

'The living are more important than the dead,' Reich told him.

Cab retrieved his gun. As he did, Reich deposited his flashlight on the flat stone top of the headstone beside him. He turned his back on Cab and Tresa without another word and marched away, heading back toward the thick curtain of the forest. He still had Troy's gun in his hand. The night swallowed him in seconds, and he disappeared, and so did the wet sucking noise of his boots in the grass. Cab tugged at Tresa's hand.

'We have to hurry,' he said, pulling her toward the road.

'Are you just going to let him go?' Tresa asked. 'He'll escape.'

'Nobody escapes,' Cab said.

Reich was right. The living mattered now. Hilary Bradley. Cab hoped they were in time. He grabbed the flashlight and ran, fighting down the waves of pain in his skull, and Tresa ran beside him, her young body quick and graceful. She guided him more than he guided her, urging him to go faster when he slowed down. They fought through the pools of standing water toward the bay. From there, when they could see the beach ahead of them, they followed in Mark Bradley's path on the dirt road toward his house.

That was when Cab heard the single gunshot behind them.

He'd been waiting for it. Expecting it. The noise was loud and sharp as it pierced the forest, growing softer with each successive echo. Tresa flinched and looked in the direction of the shot, but he dragged her away. The waves of sound took several seconds to fade completely away, which was long after the bullet had traveled through Felix Reich's brain and long after the sheriff had fallen where he stood, an old soldier dead in the jungle.

Chapter Fifty-Three

'I needed a cigarette,' Katie explained. 'I was on the patio with the Green Bay team while Gary gave one of his rah-rah speeches, and I wandered over by the hotel window and flicked my lighter. I heard a girl scream inside. Crazy. I knew Tresa was at the hotel, and I'd been avoiding her, but I never thought Glory would be there too. It must have triggered something when she saw me. The brain's a funny thing.'

Hilary watched this pretty young girl talk clinically about her crimes, as if they had sprung from someone else's hand.

'I never wanted this to happen,' she went on. 'I'm Katie Monroe now. I've spent six years trying to forget that I was Jen Bone or that I ever lived in that house.'

'You murdered your mother and your brothers,' Hilary said. 'You burned them all to death.'

Katie's eyes flashed. 'Did you live there? Do you know what it was like? Do you have any idea of the things they did to me? I wanted to erase them and that house and everything in it. I wanted it to be like none of it had ever existed. I didn't feel guilty. I still don't.'

'But you let your father take the blame.'

Katie's face went cloudy. That was the first real emotion Hilary had seen in her. 'Dad got home while I was watching the place burn. He acted like he was sorry. Can you believe it? I was doing both of us a favor. With them out of the way, it was finally going to be just the two of us, but Dad didn't understand. He sent me back to Tresa's house, and he stayed there to wait for the sheriff.'

'Has he contacted you?'

Katie shook her head. 'He's dead. If he wasn't dead, he would have gotten in touch with me. My aunt was always telling me I didn't have to be scared of my father coming back. Like she knew something. Like it was a secret I should keep.'

Hilary wanted the girl to keep talking. She wanted time for the police to find them. 'So is Gary Jensen supposed to take your father's place?'

'What does that mean?' Katie retorted. 'Do you think I was sleeping with my father? You think he was abusing me? Is that what you think?'

'I have no idea.'

'You're the one with the husband who screws teenage girls.'

'That's a lie.'

'Oh, you think so? You're like every wife, loyal and stupid. Gary's wife was the same way, until she found pictures of me on his phone. He convinced her he'd dumped me, but he dumped her instead. Off a cliff.'

'Mark's not Gary.'

'Yeah? I followed Glory out to the beach that night, but your husband got in the way. They put on a hell of a show.'

'Don't play games with me,' Hilary snapped.

'Glory took off her top, and then she got on her knees. Do I need to spell it out for you?'

'Shut up.'

Katie shrugged. 'You know I'm telling the truth.'

Hilary saw Gary Jensen reappear behind Katie. He had liter bottles of gin, tequila, and vodka in his hands, but his jaw was clenched with dismay. He hovered in the doorway, unwilling to enter the bedroom. Katie gestured at him, and her face betrayed a growing agitation and impatience. She was losing control.

'Pour the alcohol around the room,' Katie told him. 'Quickly.'

Gary didn't move. 'We don't need to do this.'

Katie reached out and caressed his cheek. 'There's no going back now. It's too late. If you'd gotten rid of Amy fast like I told you, then we would have been fine. But you let the cat out of the bag, lover. We could have contained the damage if it was just Amy, but not anymore. By the time the police sift through the ashes, we'll be in Canada.'

Jensen opened his mouth but said nothing. He crouched down and laid two bottles at his feet. He unscrewed the cap on a half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya and hesitated over the prone body of the girl on the floor.

'Pour it over Amy,' she instructed him. 'Do it.'

With a long glance at Katie, Jensen turned the vodka bottle upside down, letting the liquid spill out in spurts, covering Amy in strong-smelling alcohol. Her hair. Her shirt. Her arms. Her jeans. Her feet. As the fumes gathered in her nose, Amy began to stir. Hilary heard her moan, but the girl's eyes were still closed.

He poured until the bottle was empty.

'Now the rest,' Katie told him. 'Do the whole room. The curtains. The carpet. And don't forget Hilary here.'

Jensen's eyes awakened with a kind of shock. 'Jesus, how did this happen?'

'Hurry. We're running out of time.'

'My wife. That girl in Florida. Now we have to kill two more people?'

Katie picked up the bottle of Cuervo and shoved it into his hand. 'This is the only way.'

Jensen slowly twisted the cap. When the bottle was open, he dropped the cap to the floor and watched it bounce and roll. He took a stuttering step toward Hilary, and then he stopped and shook his head.

'No.'

Katie clenched her fist. 'Gary, please.'

'I won't do this.'

'I told you, this is the last time. Once it's done, we're free.'

'You said that about my wife. You said that about Glory.'

'I know. I never meant for any of this to happen.'

'Let's get out of here,' he said. 'You and me. Right now.'

Katie kissed his cheek and exhaled in a slow, sorrowful sigh. 'OK. You win. Sure.'

'Really?'

'Whatever you want, Gary. You know I love you.'

Katie gently pried the bottle from his hands. She upended the neck to her lips and took a long, burning swallow. When she was done, she wiped her mouth, pointed the gun at Gary Jensen, and fired into the center of his forehead.

Hilary screamed. The explosion sounded like a bomb, rattling her head. Blood and brain matter blew out the back of Jensen's skull in a chunky spray and painted the wall. Jensen's body dropped straight down like an imploding building with its columns knocked out. He crumpled into a dead pile. The smell of charred metal was like sulfur in Hilary's nose.

Katie bit her lip unhappily, staring down at his body. She blinked rapidly, as if even she was surprised at what she'd done. As if it was an impulse she couldn't resist, like scratching an itch. The echo of the shot died, and in the terrible silence, they all heard a rhythmic wailing, rising above the wind. In the distance, sirens grew louder and closer.

Multiple sirens, overlapping, from police vehicles racing toward them.

'It's over, Katie,' Hilary said softly.

Katie listened to the shrill sirens, her face stricken with indecision.

'It's over,' Hilary repeated, it's too late.' She pressed her hands into the bed and tried to stand up without alarming the girl.

Katie swung the gun, which was still smoking, and pointed it at Hilary's face. 'I swore to my mom I was going to burn the house down,' she said. 'She laughed. She didn't believe me.'

'Don't do this.'

Katie ignored her. Her mind was made up. She swung the vodka bottle into the corner of the door frame, and the neck of the bottle shattered across the floor in razor-sharp fragments. She jerked the open, jagged body of the bottle toward Hilary, letting the alcohol splash across Hilary's face and soak through her blouse to her chest.

Katie shoved a hand in her pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter.

'Don't worry,' the girl told her. 'I've done this before.'

Chapter Fifty-Four

On the floor, Amy Leigh's hand shot out.

Before Katie could react, Amy locked her fingers around her roommate's ankle and yanked Katie's leg into the air. Katie flew, crashing backward on to bottles and broken glass. Sharp fragments stabbed through her clothes and impaled themselves like arrowheads in her skin. The gun broke loose from her hand.

Amy lunged for Katie, leaping past Gary Jensen's corpse and landing on the girl's chest. She drove the air out of Katie's lungs, and Katie rasped for breath underneath her. Pinned, Katie's fingers twitched on the cigarette lighter. She cocked her elbow and pressed the lighter against Amy's alcohol-soaked clothes. Hilary shouted a warning, but before Amy could react, Katie's thumb flicked the wheel, spinning it, striking the metal against the flint.

Amy pushed Katie down with a shout. Her eyes locked on the purple plastic cylinder in Katie's hand. She waited for a cloud of flame to billow over her body as the flash ignited the alcohol, but Katie spun frantically in a series of empty clicks without triggering a spark. The mechanism was wet and useless.

Katie's fingers unclenched, and she dropped the lighter, but she reached out in the same instant and scooped the butt of the gun back into her hand. Amy grabbed the girl's arm and hung on. They rolled, scraping across glass, mingling alcohol and blood. Hilary saw the gun caught between the two girls and threw herself hard toward the wall as the flying barrel pointed toward her stomach. The gun didn't go off. Instead, as Katie squirmed away and aimed from her knees, Amy caught Katie's hand and grabbed her index finger before the girl could slide it on to the trigger. She bent back hard, snapping the bone. Katie screamed. The gun fell like a stone, and as the two girls struggled, Amy kicked it, and the gun slid across the floor and bumped into the far wall.

Hilary rolled across the bed and collected the gun. She pointed it at the ceiling and shouted at the two girls, who were entwined on the floor.

'Stop! Stop it now!'

Amy scrambled to her feet, pulling Katie with her. She threw Katie against the wall, and Katie landed with a groan, holding up her hands, crying with pain. Amy backed away toward Hilary, who trained the barrel on Katie as the girl bent over with her hands on her knees and tried to catch her breath.

Outside, the sirens soared in volume, seemingly from every direction. Police cars sped toward them down all of the side streets, converging on the house.

'That's it, Katie,' Hilary told her. 'No more.'

Amy slid an arm around Hilary's waist and leaned into her, weak and exhausted. She had enough strength to stare at her friend and the wreckage around her. The broken bottles. The blood-stained glass. The body of Gary Jensen, on his back, eyes open, a burnt red hole in his forehead.

'How could you do this?' Amy whispered.

The air wheezed in and out of Katie's lungs. The girl squatted and retrieved an unbroken, unopened bottle of gin, which was tipped on the floor at her feet. Hilary gestured at her with the gun.

'Stop.'

Katie picked up the bottle and shrugged. 'Go ahead, fire. One little spark will turn all of us into a fish boil.'

'Put the bottle down,' Hilary repeated.

Katie rested her head against the wall with her eyes closed. Her face was streaked with blood. Her clothes were torn. She twisted the cap off the bottle, breaking the paper seal, and drank, not caring as gin dripped out the sides of her mouth. When she stopped drinking, she hung on to the bottle by its neck, letting it dangle at her side.

'I heard them screaming,' Katie said. 'As the fire got them. You never forget.'

'Turn around, Katie. Start walking. We're leaving the house.'

'Dad said I should have killed him, too,' Katie said. 'I didn't understand back then. Now I do.'

Katie splashed gin at her feet and down her jeans and across her bare, bloody arms. She poured it over her head. She soaked the carpet, which was already sodden. Fumes rose in invisible waves around her; billowing into the shut-up room. The smell alone was enough to make Hilary's head swim.

The girl dug in her pocket and pulled out another cigarette lighter. 'I always have a backup.'

'Katie, don't do this,' Amy told her.

Katie's face was blank, like a bone-white, empty page. She didn't even seem to be in the same room with them; she was in a different house, with her dead family. She extended her arm, her thumb poised over the sparkwheel. Hilary aimed the gun at her, but she couldn't risk pulling the trigger. Katie cocked her thumb without looking at them or seeing them. With a sad smile, she spun the wheel and lit the flow of butane with a single, deadly flick.

A tiny flame popped from the top of the lighter. There was an instant in which the entire room was nothing but that insignificant fire, no greater than the light of a candle. Then the flame found the gathering fumes, and the first fireball erupted, wispy and gaseous, burning itself out in an orange burst. Hilary and Amy leaped back. Katie held the lighter upright, still lit, and she tilted the neck of the gin bottle downward. The liquid streamed through the glass and became a silver waterfall splashing toward the flame.

'Get down!' Hilary screamed.

She threw herself and Amy toward the floor just as the alcohol struck the lighter. The flame defied gravity and shot upward in a burst of lightning into the bottle and turned it into a bomb. The heavy glass blew outward in a lethal explosion of needle-sharp shards. Katie's face and torso were instantly shredded. The fire latched on to the fuel on her clothes and skin and turned her into a column of flames. She spun like a dancer, her flesh charring, her body consumed. She screamed like a dying animal, but only until the fire sped down her throat and began eating her from inside out, choking off her voice as her lungs melted.

Hilary dragged Amy toward the windows on the opposite side of the room. She tore off the curtain rod, and the heavy fabric rippled to the ground. Outside, through the glass, the world glowed with the revolving red lights of police cars driving on to the lawn around them. Inside, the doorway leading out of the bedroom was engulfed in fire and impassable, as Katie's dying body became a pyre. Sparks arced toward the bed, smoldering on the linens.

Hilary tried to pry open the lock on the window, but it was painted shut and wouldn't move. She looked around the room and saw an antique brass lamp on the nightstand closest to her. She grabbed it with both arms, dragging the cord out of the socket and winding up as if she was holding a baseball bat.

'Duck!' she shouted at Amy.

The girl dropped to the floor. Hilary threw the lamp into the window, and it burst with a singing clatter. The lamp disappeared down to the ground below them, leaving jagged knives of glass clinging to the wooden frame. Air rushed in, feeding the fire, which gnawed closer to them as it spread across the bed and climbed the walls. Searing heat burned their faces. Sparks exploded like fireworks to the ceiling and fell inches away at their feet.

Hilary bunched the fallen curtains around her hands and knocked the remaining fragments from the window. She looked out through the open square, seeing lights and vehicles drawing closer, feeling the cold of the wind and the wet rain tease the heat of the fire, and seeing the waving branches of the nearest maple beckoning to her like a rescuer. The ground was a long distance below them.

She thrust Amy toward the window. 'Jump! Jump for the tree!'

'What about you?' Amy shouted as she squeezed her body into the frame.

'Jump!'

Amy leaped forward, arms outstretched, and disappeared into the arms of the air. Hilary glanced over her shoulder in time to see the entire room burst like a red ball and surge toward her. She forced her torso through the window opening and wedged her foot on the bottom of the frame. She felt a scorching heat erupt on her back, and she knew she was on fire. She didn't look down.

Hilary jumped.

She felt the tree branches stabbing her as they took her into their arms. Her fingers grasped like claws, and she found one thick branch with her hand, only to have it peeled away by gravity as she fell. She clung to another for a split second before her weight dislodged it, and it broke with a crack, sending her downward. Another branch stopped her with a hammering blow to her back, and she ricocheted forward, falling again, her clothes tearing, her skin pummeled with scrapes and punctures.

She landed hard on her side and rolled through the mud, and when she stopped, she found herself on her back, staring up at the web of branches that had saved her. Fire spat through the broken window overhead like the tongue of a devil. Rain gently poured through the light and cooled her and washed away the blood, and the mud and puddles stamped out the flames that had licked at her back. She tried to move, to pull herself away to a safe distance, but her pummeled muscles refused to budge. All she could do for now was lie on the ground and wait.

She felt a hand on her cheek. When she turned her head, she saw Amy hovering over her, propped on one elbow. The girl's face was dirty, but her eyes were bright and glassy with tears that streaked down her skin along with the rain.

'You OK?' Amy asked.

Hilary gave a weak smile. 'Yeah. You?'

'I'm all right.'

Amy sank against Hilary's shoulder and put an arm protectively around her and held on tight. The girl closed her eyes. Hilary did, too. Their chests rose and fell in unison as they breathed. Hilary heard the splash of boots as men drew closer and the comforting shouts of their voices. They talked to her like the angels in Mark's paintings, but she couldn't answer, even as she felt strong arms lifting her and carrying her. All she could do was give herself up to sleep.

Chapter Fifty-Five

As the ferry drew closer to the mainland, Cab felt the turbulent waters of the Death's Door passage settle into bobbing swells. The stubborn rain soaking the peninsula had broken up over the past three days and drifted east across the lake, leaving blue skies and mild temperatures in its wake. The magic of the view made him finally understand why there were people who would choose to live nowhere else but in this remote, beautiful land.

Cab's phone rang on his belt. It was Lala calling from Florida. He'd barely spoken to her since she guided him to the body buried on Peter Hoffman's property. They'd only had time for brief conversations as the local police wrapped up their investigations in Green Bay and on Washington Island.

'So what's the deal, Cab?' Lala said. 'Are the loose ends tied up?'

'Most of them.'

'No more dead bodies?'

'Not today.'

'That's good. Try to keep it that way, OK? You're making the lieutenant nervous.'

Cab smiled. 'I will.'

'I read your report. I guess you found what you were looking for. With the key. At the bottom of that hole.'

'Yeah, you're right. I did.' He added, 'It's scary what people keep hidden under the ground.'

'It is.'

He heard the unspoken questions in her voice. What about you, Cab? What are you hiding?

'So where do you go next?' Lala went on, with a casualness that sounded false. 'Do I win the bet?'

'What bet?' he asked, but he knew what she meant.

'The pool, remember? I figured this was the week that Catch-a-Cab Bolton would head for the horizon. I have a lot of money riding on you.'

'How much?'

'Ten whole bucks.'

'You must have been pretty confident.'

'No, I was pretty cynical. I'm actually starting to feel bad about that.'

'Don't.'

'It sounds like Door County needs a new sheriff,' Lala reminded him. 'Do you want the job?'

Cab laughed. 'This place is too cold for me. What's it like down there?'

'What else? Hot. Humid.'

'That actually sounds nice,' Cab admitted. 'I'll be back home tonight. I guess I owe you ten bucks.'

'Keep it,' Lala said. 'You've got a surprise waiting for you down here.'

'What is it?'

'I got out of your shower this morning, and guess who was waiting for me in the living room of your condo? Your mother.'

'My mother's in Florida?'

'Tarla Bolton in the flesh. Actually, I was the one in the flesh. We were both pretty damn surprised to see each other.'

Cab laughed again. It felt good. 'What did she say?'

'She said her son has good taste.'

'Well, that's true.'

'She also brought enough luggage to completely fill your second bedroom.'

'She's staying?'

'Looks that way. She said something about the mountain coming to Mohammed.'

'I guess I better hurry,' Cab said.

'I guess. I'll get my stuff out of your bedroom and rinse off your toothbrush.'

'You're funny. You know, there's no rush, Lala. Is your air conditioning fixed?'

'No.'

'So stick around a few days. Take a vacation. I need one too. Besides, my mother is more than any one person can take alone.'

'I'll think about that,' she said.

'Hey, do me a favor, OK?' he asked.

'What?'

'Take some cash from my nightstand and go get a very, very expensive bottle of red wine. Tonight, you, me, and my mother are going to drink it on the beach.'

'How often does a girl get a romantic offer like that?' Lala said.

'I'd like to tell you both a story.'

'What kind of story?'

'It's about a girl named Vivian,' Cab said.

There was a long silence from Lala on the line. 'I'll buy the wine.'

'Thanks.'

'Travel safe, Cab.'

'Bye, Lala.'

He hung up the phone and felt an odd heaviness in his heart.

It occurred to Cab that he had never known what homesickness was before, not about people, not about places. He felt restless as the boat nestled against the dock in Northport. He jogged down the steps to the lower deck, climbed into his car, and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel until the deck attendant waved him off the ferry. He was first in line. His Corvette growled with impatience.

As he drove with a thump on to solid land, he saw a long line of cars in the return line, waiting to head back across the blue waters under the blue skies toward Washington Island. That was how it always was here — people coming and going, heading in opposite directions. The lead car bound for the island, bound for home, belonged to Hilary Bradley. He recognized her, and she recognized him. She waved at him as if he was a friend.

Cab pulled off to the side of the pier, letting the other cars form a convoy away from the ferry. When there was a gap in the traffic, he ran on his stork-like legs to the car parked in front of the on-ramp to the boat.

Hilary rolled down the window and leaned out. The warm wind mussed her blond hair. 'Hello, Detective.'

'Mrs Bradley. How are you?'

'Better,' she said. 'Much better. So's Amy Leigh.'

'That's good.'

'The police in Green Bay treated us well.'

'My lieutenant and I made some calls to make sure they did.'

She took off her sunglasses and smiled at him. He could see cuts and bruises lingering on her face, but she still managed to look pretty. Her mood matched the lightness of the weather.

'Are you heading back to Florida?' she asked.

'I am.'

'I'm glad I had a chance to see you before you left. To say thank you for what you did. For going over to the island that night. Without you, I probably would have lost Mark.'

'I should be thanking you,' Cab told her. 'I feel guilty that it took a schoolteacher and a college girl to expose what really happened on that beach in Naples. I would have felt even worse if either of you had been seriously hurt.'

'That wasn't your fault.'

'You probably also owe me an "I told you so" for wrongly suspecting your husband. I'm sorry. I made a mistake.'

'You don't know him like I do,' Hilary said.

'Well, I told you before that I hoped you were right — and you were.'

'I've been wrong many times, but not about Mark. Trusting someone doesn't necessarily make you a fool, Detective.'

'I'll try to remember that,' Cab said.

He heard a whistle and saw that the belly of the ferry was empty. One journey was done; the next was in waiting. Hilary Bradley turned on the engine of her car, and he could see in her face the same impatience he felt. To finish the ride. To be home where you belonged with the ones you loved. He envied her for having things in her life he was just beginning to find.

'I have to go,' she said, extending a hand through the window. He shook it. Her grip was firm, but her skin was soft.

'Good luck in all things, Mrs Bradley.'

'Thank you, Detective. The same to you.'

She drove on to the ferry, and Cab returned to the Corvette. He gunned it and headed south without a backward look at the water and the island. He had a long drive ahead through the small towns of Door County, but it was a perfect day to travel back to reality. He could drive as fast or as slow as he liked on the empty roads. For the first time in a long time, he felt as if there was no one chasing him.

Even so, he had somewhere to go, and he was anxious to get there.

Hilary broke through the trees on to Schoolhouse Beach behind their house. Mark was waiting for her. So was Tresa, sitting on a bench beside him, her red hair tied in a ponytail. Sunshine spilled across the expanse of the horseshoe bay and left it flecked with gold. The season was still too early for tourists, and they had the rocky stretch of shoreline all to themselves.

When the two of them saw her at the crest of the slope, Tresa ran. Mark lingered on the bench by himself, letting the girl go first. Tresa greeted Hilary with a huge smile and threw her arms around her in a hug that seemed impossibly strong for her skinny arms.

'I'm so glad you're safe,' Tresa whispered.

'Me, too.'

'Mark told me you were coming home today. I really wanted to stay and see you.'

'I'm glad you did.'

Tresa leaned in, hugging her as fiercely as before. When she let go, she ducked her head into her neck. 'I'm so sorry about Jen. I mean Katie. I should have done something. I should have told someone about the fire.'

'You were a kid back then, Tresa,' Hilary said.

'I still feel like a kid.'

'You're not.'

'Mark thinks I am.'

Hilary didn't answer, and Tresa bit her lip and shoved her thumbs in the pockets of her jeans. 'Well, I'll leave you guys alone.'

The teenager brushed past her, but Hilary stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. 'Tresa, wait. There's something else.'

'What is it?'

'You did a brave thing by coming here that night like you did. You risked your own life. Thank you.'

'I couldn't let anything happen to Mark,' she said.

'I know that, and I'm grateful,' Hilary went on, 'but I also have to tell you something. Woman to woman.'

Tresa hesitated. 'OK.'

'You can't spend any more time alone with my husband,' Hilary said.

Tresa's eyes widened. 'What?' I mean, yeah, I–I understand. I'm sorry. He told you what happened, huh?'

'Of course he did.'

'I'm really sorry.'

'Girl crushes don't bother me, Tresa, but you're not a girl anymore.'

She nodded. 'Sure. You're right.'

'It doesn't mean we never want to see you again.'

'No, I get it.' Tresa took a long look over her shoulder at Mark. 'Thanks,' she told Hilary.

'For what?'

'For saying I could actually be a threat. That's cool.'

Hilary smiled. 'Take care of yourself, Tresa.'

'You too. You're lucky, you know?'

'I know.'

She watched Tresa disappear into the trees, and then she turned with a strange sense of anxiety and relief toward Mark, trying not to run. He climbed off the bench as she drew near. Their faces told the story. They didn't need to speak. His arms enfolded her, and she grabbed him hard, and they kissed with an outpouring of love and longing that left her fighting back tears. It was as if everything in her life had come within a breath of slipping away, and then, suddenly, miraculously, she had it all back in her grasp. They stood there in silence for long minutes, clinging to each other, still somehow afraid that they would be torn apart. When they finally let go, they walked back to the bench hand in hand and sat, still not speaking, listening to the steady beat of the water on the rocks.

'I thought I'd never—' Mark began, but she stopped him firmly with a hand over his lips.

'Don't. Don't say it.'

He nodded and let it go. She didn't want to talk about fears or nightmares. She didn't want to talk about what might have happened or how close they'd both come to the edge of the precipice. The only thing that mattered to her was that they were still here and still together.

'I got a call from the principal at the high school,' Hilary told him. 'Oh?'

'It sounds like the last few days have made a lot of people rethink what happened last year. Or maybe they got nervous and called their lawyers. I think they're going to offer you your teaching job back.'

Mark's head bobbed in surprise. 'Seriously?'

'Looks that way. Do you want it?'

'After everything that's happened?' He hesitated, and she assumed he was about to say no. Not ever. Not again. He surprised her.

'Actually, yeah,' he continued. 'I do. All I ever wanted was the life we had before.'

She smiled at her husband. He was the idealist between them. He thought things could be the way they were again, as if the horrors had never happened, as if the injustices had never been perpetrated. She wasn't so blindly optimistic. Life didn't go backwards. She prayed that she could look in the mirror one day and see the same two people who had come to this place to escape, that she could live in peace among the neighbors who had wronged them, that she could find a way to heal the wounds in her soul.

Something had been taken from her, and she didn't know how to get it back. She would never admit it to him or anyone else, but when she was alone, she still heard Katie taunting her. You're like every wife, loyal and stupid. Do I need to spell it out for you?

She saw Mark and Glory. On the beach. No one will ever know.

Hilary told herself for the thousandth time that nothing had happened between them. Mark was an honorable man, and Katie was a sociopath playing with her head. And yet she wondered. She was human. It was a seedling of doubt she wouldn't water, in the hope that it would wither and die. That was all she could do. You push aside your fears and hope there are no monsters waiting behind them. You live your life. You trust. You have faith.

'So do you want to stay here?' she asked.

'I do,' Mark said. 'Don't you?'

Hilary nodded. What they had, what they wanted, was worth fighting for.

'I don't want to be anywhere else,' she said.