Black Out

31

Something awful happened today. I died. A terrible accident. Something went wrong during my open-water certification. She was prone to panicking, the girl who taught me in the pool will remember. She was afraid of the water. She wasn’t qualified for a dive like that.

Ella will recall our conversation at the mall when I joked about my baptism by fire. She’ll experience a moment of pointless self-blame when she’ll wonder if she might have stopped me.

Neither my body nor the body of the dive master will be recovered. They’ll find my street clothes, keys, and wallet in the dry bag in the backseat of my car near the entrance to the sinkhole where I began my dive. It will be parked beside an old Dodge minivan registered to Blake Woods from Odessa, Florida. The van will be cluttered with all manner of run-down dive gear-wetsuits with tears, BCDs with torn straps, regulators in need of repair. But Blake Woods does not exist. The address on his driver’s license is false; his dive-master identification card is a fake.

Eventually, as the rescue divers search the sinkhole, explore the long caves and narrow passages looking for our bodies, they’ll recover a fin, top of the line and brand-new, matching the type I bought from a local dive shop a few weeks ago. Shortly after this they will call off the search.

Why would someone terrified of the water take scuba-diving lessons? Who was the man posing as her instructor? Why would he take her for her open-water certification in a sinkhole? There will be lots of questions and no answers. But it happens all the time in Florida, to people far more experienced than I. People descend into the limestone caves and don’t come out again. Cave diving is the deadliest possible hobby. Not for beginners. Suspicious, the police will say. And senseless. So sad. Annie, why?

As I lie in the dark, the taste of blood metallic and bitter in my mouth, I wonder if finally, after all the false deaths I have died, I really am dead this time. Maybe this is what death is like, a long, dark wondering, an eternal sorting through the deeds of your life, trying to discern between dream and reality. I find myself pondering, if I’m dead, which of my lives was real. My life as Ophelia? Or my life as Annie?

I try to move but vomit instead. My body racks with it until I’m dry-heaving, blood and bile burning my throat. I am on a wet metal surface. I am freezing cold, starting to shiver uncontrollably. With the pain and nausea, I figure I’m probably alive. I imagine death would be somehow less physical.

The darkness around me is total, not a pinprick of light. I can’t see my hand in front of my face. The sound of my breathing echoes off metal above and around me. There’s nothing on my body that doesn’t hurt, as if I’ve been in a terrible car wreck, no bone unshaken. I try to orient myself, try to sort through what has happened to me and how I have come to wherever I am. Then I remember the boat. I remember Dax racing off in the Boston Whaler. I remember the men who died trying to protect me, men whose wives I’ve met at dinner parties and award ceremonies, all of them employed by Powers and Powers. I remember the shroud over my head and the blow to my skull.

I’m just getting used to the totality of the darkness around me when in floods the harshest white light. I’m as blind in its brightness as I was in the dark. Maybe it’s God, I think. But somehow I doubt I warrant a personal appearance. I feel He’d probably send a lackey to deal with me.

“Ophelia March.” The voice roars, seems to come from everywhere. It’s as painful to my ears as the light is to my eyes. I find myself in a fetal position, wrapping my head with my arms.

“Where is he, Ophelia?”

I can’t find my voice but manage to emit some type of guttural wail of pain and misery.

“Where is Marlowe Geary?”

At first I don’t think I’ve heard correctly. Then the question booms again.

I realize with a sinking dread that I have made a terrible mistake. It started to dawn on me on the ship when I was taken in my cabin. But now I truly understand how badly I have screwed up. I have shed my life and fled my daughter, believing in my deepest heart-or at least fearing-that Marlowe Geary has returned for me. I let Annie die so that Ophelia could face him once and for all. I understand suddenly and with a brilliant clarity that it hasn’t been Marlowe chasing me at all. It never has been.

Annie believed that Marlowe Geary was dead and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in a New Mexico cemetery reserved for indigents, John Does, and the incarcerated whom no one claimed upon their deaths. She thought of him there in a plain pine box, under pounds of earth, and she was comforted. She believed the lies everyone told because she wanted to believe them. But Ophelia March knew better. And she has been chasing him. I understand this now, finally. All those times I woke up on buses or trains heading for parts unknown-she was trying to get back to him.

32

Detective Harrison was feeling like a man who’d escaped a terminal diagnosis; he was positively giddy with relief. Since Gray had paid off Harrison’s debtors and he’d enrolled himself in Gamblers Anonymous, he felt lighter than he had in years. The threatening phone calls ceased, and the terrifying photographs of his wife and child stopped arriving on his desk. He’d stopped puking up blood from his ulcer.

A year ago if anyone had told him he’d be in a twelve-step program, he’d have punched that person in the jaw. But the weekly confessions in the meeting room of a local church by the beach cleansed him. He could say the things he’d done (most of them, anyway), and he could listen to others who’d done much, much worse, who’d hit rock bottom so hard they barely got back up. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t even the worst of the bunch.

He could make love to his wife again for the first time in months. He didn’t feel that awful clenching of guilt and fear in his stomach every time he looked into the face of his infant daughter, Emily. And more than all of this, he remembered what it was like to be a cop, a good cop, the only thing he had ever wanted to be. He approached his job now with the zeal of the converted. And indeed he felt baptized, renewed.

He was experiencing the euphoria of someone snatched from the consequences of his actions. And if he still had the itch to gamble, if he still felt a restless agitation at the sound of a game, any game, in progress-on the radio, on the station-house television-if he still hadn’t been quite able to delete his bookie’s number from his cell phone, he told himself these things could take a while.

In the meantime he had the biggest case of his career to occupy his attention, the one he’d decided would be his redemption as a police officer. Two grisly homicides connected by one woman who was lying about her identity. Of course, that was the part he had to keep to himself, as per his arrangement with Gray. So Harrison was working overtime to find another connection between Simon Briggs and Paul Brown. He knew he’d find it. He was a dog with a bone.

And then I died. When he heard the news and was called to investigate the scene of the diving accident, he enjoyed a secret smile inside. Not that he’d hated me or wished me ill-quite the opposite. In spite of everything, he’d liked me quite a bit. Even so, Detective Harrison didn’t grieve for me as he investigated my suspicious death. Somehow he knew better.

Like the good cop he wanted to be, he walked the grid around the sinkhole, searched my belongings and my car. But when he found the envelope I’d taken from Briggs’s car, he never entered it into evidence. He shoved it inside his jacket and then hid it beneath the seat of his own car without anyone seeing.

He dutifully interviewed my bereft family and friends.

“I don’t know why she would do it,” Ella wept to him at her kitchen table. “She was terrified of the water. I wish I’d tried to stop her. I was trying to be supportive.”

Detective Harrison offered her a comforting pat on the shoulder, thinking that, even upset, she was a very attractive woman.

“She was my friend, you know. My friend. That means something in this awful world. It means a lot.”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Singer. I really am.”

“Do you think they’ll find her body?” she asked, wiping her eyes. She was having trouble speaking between shuddering breaths. “I couldn’t stand it if they never found her.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. It’s hard to say with those caves. The divers haven’t found anything yet.”

“Doesn’t it seem like there’s nothing to it but pain and disappointment?” she asked him. “Sometimes doesn’t it seem that way?”

“What do you mean?” he asked gently, thinking she was too beautiful and rich to be so unhappy.

“I mean life, Detective. Sometimes it’s all too hard.”

She lost it then, folded her arms across the table and laid her head upon them and sobbed. My poor, dear friend. He sat with her, a hand on her back. He’d been there before so many, many times. He didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable. He empathized, and he stayed until she was better.

Ella’s grief, her self-blame, the pain she was in-these were all palpable, completely sincere in his estimation. My husband, on the other hand, was not as convincing, though he looked drawn and tired when Detective Harrison paid him a visit in the days after my car was found.

“Why would she dive like that if she was so afraid of the water?” the detective asked Gray. “Everyone-her friend, even her instructor-says how afraid she was of the water. Scuba diving seems like an odd choice of hobby for someone who wasn’t even comfortable in the pool.”

Gray shook his head. “Annie was a stubborn woman. She got it into her head that she wanted to conquer her fear of the water, for Victory. She didn’t want Victory to see her giving in to her fear. When she got something into her head, there was no getting it out.”

The detective nodded. The whole interview was a charade, of course, both of them knowing that Harrison’s hands were tied by what had passed between them. This went unspoken, each of them playing his role.

Harrison looked around the house just to say he did, poking through the dark, empty rooms with Gray right behind him. What he was looking for, he wasn’t sure.

“Where’s your daughter?” Harrison asked as he was leaving.

Gray issued a sigh and rubbed his eyes. “I sent her away with her grandparents. They’re on a cruise to the Caribbean. I don’t want her to be touched by this yet. I don’t know how to tell her.”

It seemed like a reasonable thing to do. But Detective Harrison knew a liar when he saw one. Gray Powers was a man with a lot to hide, and the strain on him was obvious. But he was not a man grieving the loss of a wife. The death of a loved one hollows people out, leaves them with an empty, dazed look that’s hard to fake. People mourning a loss might weep inconsolably like Ella, or rage and scream, or they might sink into themselves, go blank. As their minds are scrambling to process the meaning of death, they act in all kinds of crazy and unpredictable ways. But in Detective Harrison’s opinion, Gray didn’t have that confused, unhinged quality he’d seen so many times before.

“Wasn’t there a maid?” asked the detective as he stepped out the front door.

“I gave her some time off while Victory is away.”

“I’d like to talk to her.”

“Of course,” said Gray. He disappeared for a minute, then returned with a number and address scribbled on a sticky note. “She’s staying with her sister.”

In the doorway the two men faced each other.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Powers,” the detective said with a half smile, just the lightest hint of sarcasm in his voice. But if Gray registered the detective’s expression or tone, he didn’t acknowledge it at all.

“Thank you,” Gray said with a nod, and closed the door.

“Where’d you go, Ophelia? Who are you running from?” Harrison said aloud to himself as he drove through the gated community where I used to live, admiring the houses he could never dream of affording. He watched the neighborhood kids riding on their expensive bikes. He noted the gleaming bodies of the late-model Benzes and Beemers. He felt a tiny itch he wouldn’t dare acknowledge. He focused instead on the matter at hand, the fact that he had not for one second believed I was dead. He was certain I was still alive. If he were still a betting man, he’d have staked his life on it.

33

I am pain. I am nothing but the agony of my body and mind. I don’t know how long I’ve been alternating between total darkness and blinding white light, silence and the booming voice asking questions I can’t answer. I might have been here for hours or days. It’s dark now, and I take comfort in it, though my body is numb from the inch of freezing water in which I lie. I am shivering uncontrollably, my jaw clenched.

A rectangle of light opens in the wall and a man, small and lean, walks through a doorway I didn’t know was there. His footfalls echo off the metal surfaces, and he comes to a stop about an inch from my body. I can’t see his face. The lights come up then, less harsh than before, but still I have to close my eyes, open them to slits, then close them again. I do this several times before I am acclimated to the light.

His face is distantly familiar, angular and deeply lined. His eyes are small and watery, his lips dry and pulled tight. But he’s not Marlowe.

“This can end. It can be over for you,” he says to the wall. He doesn’t want to look at me, out of either pity or disgust. I struggle to stand, and I feel a wave of light-headedness so severe I almost black out.

“Just tell me where he is, Ophelia,” he says, his voice reasonable and tired.

I am confused, disoriented. I don’t know why he thinks I know where Marlowe Geary is. But I can’t say any of this. I just can’t make the words come out. He stands there for I don’t know how long, looking at the wall. I think he’ll move to hurt me, to kick me where I lie. But he doesn’t. He just stands there.

“I don’t know,” I finally manage. “I swear to you. I don’t know where he is.” My voice is little more than a desperate croak.

He rubs his temples in a gesture of fatigue. I am straining to remember his face.

“Annie Fowler may not know. But Ophelia March does,” he says softly, almost kindly. His eyes are flint. “She knows.”

“No,” I say. “No. I don’t remember.” I try to keep myself from sobbing in front of him, but I can’t. I am desperately searching my newly recovered memories. Is it possible that somewhere inside the maze of my shattered psyche I know where Marlowe has been all these years? I chase it, but it turns corners fast, slips away from me. If I could catch it, I would. I would.

“I don’t want to hurt you any more, Ophelia,” he says.

“Don’t,” I answer, more out of desperation than anything else.

His whole body goes rigid. He drops to his knees into the cold water and puts his face, red and pulled like taffy with his rage, next to mine. I can smell his breath as he whispers ferociously in my ear, “Then tell me what I want to know, Ophelia.”

I recognize him then. He’s the Angry Man, one of the protesters that waited on the road outside the horse farm, the one that threw a rock at our car that day. My brain doesn’t know what to do with this. I struggle to get up, to get away from him, even as my mind is struggling to put this piece of information into one of the blank spaces of my life. But it’s too much. I black out.

When I come to again, the Angry Man is gone. The lights are still on. I sit up with effort and look around the room. There’s nothing to see but metal walls and a photograph left by my feet. I pick it up. It’s a picture of Victory, my baby, my little girl. Her eyes are closed, her face a ghostly white. Her blond curls fan around her face like the light cast from a halo. There’s a piece of black tape over her mouth, and her hands are bound behind her. She looks impossibly small and fragile.

Every rational thought I have left in my head deserts me, and I start to scream. It’s a guttural wail that seems to come from someplace primal within me; it’s involuntary, rips through me. I’ve heard this sound before so many times in my worst nightmares, my memories of Janet Parker. I pull myself from the floor and go over to pound on the door.

The voice booms through the speakers I can see now on the ceiling.

“Let’s start again. Where’s Marlowe Geary?”

34

Ray Harrison lived another life after his wife and daughter went to bed. When they were awake, he was centered, rooted in his life by his love for them. But when they both slept, a strange restlessness awoke within him, an almost physical tingling in his hands and legs. It was something he wouldn’t have been able to explain, even if he wanted to. And he didn’t.

The silence of the nighttime house, as Sarah called it-the dimmed lights in the kitchen, the hum of the baby monitor, the television volume so low he could barely hear it-caused him to connect with a hole inside himself, a place that needed to be filled. These were the hours when he had first found himself on the phone to his bookie, betting ridiculous sums on games he was assured were a lock. These were the hours when he sat riveted to the screen-always with the same feeling of stunned incredulity-as the quarterback with the bad knee made the impossible touchdown, as the horse who couldn’t lose stumbled and fell, as the pitcher with the bad arm threw a perfect game. It felt personal sometimes, it really did. As if something were conspiring on a cosmic level to fuck him until he bled.

So many nights he almost woke Sarah to tell her what he’d done to their life. But then he’d go to her and see that she was asleep so soundly, so peacefully, that he’d lose his nerve and just get into bed beside her. Her trust in him was total. She wasn’t one of those wives who called the station to see if he really was working overtime, who went over his pay stubs to check his hours against the tally she was keeping on the sly. She let him handle all their money, all the business of their life together. She never even looked at the accounts online. She wasn’t a woman who needed control. She was a woman who’d needed a baby and a home and a husband she trusted. He’d been able to give her all those things, easily, willingly.

Then he’d almost destroyed her, without her ever even suspecting. Every time he thought about it, a shudder moved through him and his face would flush with shame. His escape from the total decimation of his life was narrow. He came so close he could feel it like the rush of a freight train.

He found himself oddly grateful for me, the woman he knew as Annie Powers. If it hadn’t been for me, he strongly suspected that he’d be dead or that he would have lost the only two people who meant anything to him. And now he found himself using those hours, that terrible restlessness, to work his case, to find out what happened to the mysterious woman who, without meaning to, had saved him.

He kept a cramped office off the kitchen where the large walk-in pantry used to be. There was a small desk, a creaky chair, and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling that he turned off and on with a string. He had an old computer that was slow and loud and badly needed replacing, but he could still use it to access the Internet through his dialup connection.

On the night after he’d talked to Gray, while Sarah and Emily slept, he sifted through the contents of the envelope he’d found in my car. He had known immediately that it had belonged to Simon Briggs; his handwriting was a distinctive loopy cursive that looked like it belonged to a child-a deranged and very stupid child. He’d seen it on other items recovered from Briggs’s car. With its big, faltering O’s and wobbly L’s, his handwriting was oddly precise, as though he had copied each letter from a chalkboard in front of him. The envelope also carried an odor of cigar smoke, a scent that had permeated Briggs’s other belongings.

It contained mainly printouts from articles Harrison himself had already read on the Internet. They were arranged neatly in chronological order, beginning with the article about the fire and murder at the horse ranch. Then there were articles detailing our flight across the country, the crimes Marlowe was suspected of committing, and our eventual death.

There were photographs, stills taken by security cameras at convenience stores and gas stations across the country. Some of them were grisly, some of them grainy and with blurry images impossible to discern. And so many of them were of Ophelia, a haunted, broken-looking young woman. Harrison could barely connect her to me. One shot in particular moved him, disturbed him more than any other. Marlowe and I were captured in conversation, a woman’s body on the floor beside us, violated and damaged in ways too unspeakable to describe. Harrison looked at my face and saw an expression he recognized; he’d seen the expression on Sarah’s face when she looked at him. It was a look of the purest and most profound love, a love that stood witness to every sin and endured just the same.

I’m still lying in a pool of water, but I’ve stopped feeling the cold.

“The notion of romantic love is wrongheaded,” the doctor tells me. He sits cross-legged in the corner of my metal room. His voice echoes, wet and tinny, off the walls and ceiling.

“Human beings love the thing that tells them what they want to believe about themselves. If at your core you believe that you are worthless, you will love the person who treats you that way. That’s why you were able to love Marlowe the way you did.”

“Because I thought I was worthless?”

“Didn’t you? Isn’t that what your parents taught you by word or by deed? If not worthless, then at least negligible?”

“But he didn’t treat me as though I was worthless.”

“Not at first. They never do at first. Few people hate themselves so much, or so close to the surface, that they accept abuse right off the bat. If he’d treated you badly at first, you’d have walked away from him. He wouldn’t have been able to control you the way he did. That’s the trick of the abuser. He builds you up so that he can tear you down, piece by piece.”

I conceded, even though this didn’t feel like the truth. But I have come to understand that in some cases the truth doesn’t seem like the truth at all. I had judged my mother harshly for loving a killer; I had hated her for her weakness, for the fact that she’d do anything to keep even the cheapest brand of love. But Ophelia was just like her.

“When you’ve completely lost touch with your own self-worth, your very identity, he convinces you that he’s the only one who could ever love someone so wretched. The love he first gave you is a high you remember, and like a junkie you keep doing the drug, waiting for that first rush again. But it never comes. Unfortunately, though, it’s too late. You’re hooked.”

“He loved me,” I say pathetically.

My doctor gives a sad, slow shake of his head. “Ophelia, he was a psychopath. They don’t love.”

“No wonder they took your license away.” My words come back at me sharp and hateful. “You’re a goddamn quack.” The truth can make us turn ugly like that.

He smiles patiently, gives a gentle cluck of his tongue. “Temper, temper.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He lifts a hand. “That’s all right. You’re under a little stress. I understand.”

“I can’t tell him what he wants to know.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“I don’t know where he is,” I say, my voice climbing an octave.

“You do know. Somewhere inside, you know.”

I am startled awake. The doctor, my dead doctor, is not here in the room with me. I am alone, clutching the now torn and wrinkled picture of my daughter. It looks as though I have clenched and clawed at the image, trying to climb through to save her. I smooth it out now.

“Victory,” I say out loud, just to taste her name. I have done this to her. The things we fear the most are always visited upon us; it’s the way of the universe. I rock with her picture, hating Marlowe Geary, hating the Angry Man, and hating myself most of all.

Of course my dream doctor is right. Marlowe was a sociopath and a killer like his father. And no, of course he never loved me. But that didn’t stop me from loving him, from giving myself over the way only an abused and neglected teenage girl can give herself over, like a virgin on an altar, gratefully willing to be sacrificed. He manipulated and used me, but I laid myself down for him. Every time he killed and I did nothing, something vital within me died, until I was little more than a walking corpse.

Now, strangely, I am resurrected in this place. I am neither the girl I was nor the woman I became. I am both of them.

I think of all those flights from my life, my fugue states. I wonder where Ophelia was going, what she knew that Annie didn’t. I suspect now that she was going to find him. I remembered what Vivian said during our last conversation: You were haunted by him… Part of you, maybe the part that couldn’t remember so much, was still connected to him.

The question is, why? Was she trying to go back to him, wanting to be with him again? Was she that desperate, that stupid, that miserably in love? I don’t know the answer. But I am sure of one thing: Ophelia knows where Marlowe is. I just have to get her to tell me.

“Can you hear me?” I yell into the air.

The silence seems to hum, but it’s just the fluorescent light burning above my head, flickering almost imperceptibly. They’ve shut off the spotlight they’ve been shining on me-I see it mounted in the far corner of the room. I’m glad they’ve given up on that technique. In the other corner, there’s a security camera, a red light blinking beneath its lens.

“Where is my daughter?” I yell, louder this time, looking at the camera. More silence, and then I hear the buzz of a speaker.

“I don’t want to hurt her, Ophelia,” says the Angry Man, his voice, broken by static, sounding far away, as though he’s calling on an old overseas line. “I know what it is to lose a child. I don’t wish that on anyone. Not even on you.”

“Don’t hurt her,” I say quickly, feeling my chest tighten. “I’ll find him.”

The static from the speaker seems to fill the room. I should have demanded to hear her voice first before I agreed to help him. But I’m too desperate for those kinds of tricks.

“You remember?” he says finally. “You’ll lead me to him?”

“I’ll do anything you want,” I say, sounding as beaten as I am. “Just don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my baby.”

I realize then that I’m weeping again. I’m so beyond shame that I don’t even bother to wipe the tears from my eyes.

35

When Marlowe and I finally got to New York City, to my father’s shop near the Village, I was a fly in a web, stuck and drugged, not even trying to escape. I didn’t even ask for help. It was still relatively early in our flight, only about three weeks after the fire at the horse ranch, and the authorities hadn’t put two and two together. At that point we were just runaways. I didn’t realize this, of course. I believed that we were fugitives, wanted as Janet Parker’s accomplices for murder and for the fire. I was still deeply in denial about what had happened at the gas station; in fact, it was gone from my consciousness completely. In my dreams I saw a bloody halo of hair spread out across a linoleum floor.

My father asked no questions. He let us stay in the small spare room I used to sleep in when I’d stayed with him in the past, in the back of his apartment over the tattoo shop. There was a pink bedspread and a patchwork chair. The radiator cover was the same purple I’d painted it when I was twelve. There was an old doll made out of denim, with red yarn for hair and wearing a black Hells Angels T-shirt. One of my father’s old girlfriends had made her for me long ago. Predictably, I’d named her Harley.

“I ran away when I was your age,” my dad told me when he took us upstairs to the bedroom. We’d just wandered into the shop; he hadn’t seemed surprised to see me. I didn’t know when he got back from his trip or if he’d ever been gone at all. I didn’t ask. “Been on my own ever since.”

He said it with a kind of uncertain pride that filled me with disappointment. I wanted him to be angry, to scold me and help me find my way back from the downward spiral I knew I was in. But right away I saw he wasn’t going to do that.

Marlowe and my father seemed to bounce off each other. They didn’t look at each other after the first greeting, a stiff handshake that seemed more like a confrontation ending in stalemate. Marlowe towered over my father by a head; Dad seemed almost frail and shriveled beside him. Another disappointment: In my mind’s eye, my father was always a big man, powerful and strong. But I saw quickly that he was no match for Marlowe, physically or in any other way.

If I recall correctly, we were there three nights. All those days seem to run together in my mind. Marlowe and I did little but eat and sleep in that quiet, dim back room, we were so exhausted and worn down. I remember having trouble differentiating between being awake and being asleep. I have vague recall of conversations with my father that seemed like parts of a dream: He asked about the weather in Florida… He said he knew I was trying to reach him… He was sorry that he’d been away. We talked about the tattoo he’d agreed to do for Marlowe. He seemed uncomfortable and tentative around me, as though he wasn’t sure how to handle this recent wrinkle in my life. Something inside me was screaming for help, but he was deaf to it.

On the fourth morning, I heard a light rapping on the bedroom door before it pushed open a crack. I could see my father standing there, motioning for me. It was just after dawn, the sun leaking in through the slats of the drawn blinds.

“O,” he whispered. “Opie.”

I slipped out from beneath Marlowe’s arm and followed my father down the narrow hallway into his living room. The space was dominated by a large pool table surrounded by a couple of old metal folding chairs. It smelled so strongly of cigarette smoke that it made my sinuses ache. There was a small, dirty galley kitchen over by the door, with dishes in the tiny sink and rows of empty beer bottles lined up on the counter.

My father leaned against one of the windowsills. Behind him I could see the rooftop of the low brown building across the street; someone had made a little garden there, put out some lawn chairs and a striped umbrella. I could hear the sound of early-morning traffic moving on the street below. My father looked older than the way I saw him in my memory, the hard miles of his life etched on his face in deep lines. He had a stooped look to him, dark circles under his eyes.

I hopped up onto the pool table and sat there, wanting to run over and have him take me in his arms. But my father wasn’t affectionate like that. The most I ever got was a quick, awkward hug, or he might present his cheek for a kiss. That was all he seemed capable of where I was concerned.

“Your mom called, Opie.”

I looked down at my feet, noticed that the red nail polish was worn away to little dots on each toe.

“You told her I was here.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What did she tell you?”

He released a sigh. “About the fire. About her husband being killed. She’s in a bad way, Opie. And you two are in big trouble. Why didn’t you tell me about these things?”

I shrugged, examining my knees. They were bruised and dirty, unattractively knobby. “Doesn’t have anything to do with you, does it?”

He nodded toward the bedroom. “I don’t like that guy, Opie. He’s not right.”

But his voice sounded muffled and wobbly, as though I were hearing him through cotton in my ears. I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I knew that Marlowe was listening; I don’t know how, but I knew. My whole body was stiff with hope and fear-this was the moment I’d been waiting for, the moment my father would finally rescue me.

“You need to tell me one thing.” He walked over to me and put a finger gently beneath my chin, lifting my face so that he could look into my eyes.

“Okay,” I said. “What?” I wondered how he’d do it, how he’d get me away from Marlowe. I wondered if he’d already called the police, if they were waiting outside. I couldn’t believe how desperately I hoped this was the case. As much as I loved Marlowe, I was so deeply afraid of him, of the things he’d done, of how much worse it was going to get. These parts existed side by side within me, paralyzing me. I was a girl very much in need of help.

“You need to tell me everything is all right,” he said quietly. “Really all right.”

I look back on that moment now and try not to hate my father. It’s not just his weakness that I find so despicable, it’s that he wanted me to let him off the hook. He wanted me to ease his conscience.

I gave him what he asked for because that’s what I knew how to do. “I’m all right,” I said with a fake smile and a quick nod of my head. “We’ll find a place out west. I’ll get my GED and find a job. I’ll be eighteen soon, an adult. Older than you when you went out on your own.”

His relief was palpable. He let his hand drop to his side, and he released a sigh, gave me a weak smile. He wouldn’t have to be a father, to take the hard line, to step in and make difficult calls that I couldn’t make for myself. And anyway, he wouldn’t have known how.

He sat beside me on the pool table and held out a wad of cash, a thick, tight roll secured with a rubber band.

“There’s nearly a thousand dollars here,” he said quietly. He nodded toward the bedroom. “It’s for you. Not for him. This is your ‘screw you’ money. Things don’t go right, you find your way home with this.”

I wasn’t sure what home he was talking about. In that moment I knew that my only home now was with Marlowe. I took the cash from him. It was heavy in my hand. My heart sank with the weight of it.

“It’s only a matter of time before the police come here,” he said, keeping his voice low. His eyes were on the floor. “It probably won’t be today, but soon enough.”

I gave a quick nod. “You want us to leave.”

“If you don’t want them to take you back to Florida.”

I didn’t trust my voice as I battled the swell of despair in my chest.

“You swear you’re okay?” he said after a few minutes of silence.

I managed to look him in the eye and say, “I swear.”

He patted me gently on the back, placed a kiss on my forehead, and left the room as if he couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I heard his heavy boots descend the stairs outside the door. I sat a moment, allowing myself to dwell in a place of hope, waiting for him to burst back through the door or for the police to sweep in, but there was nothing except the sound of his footfalls getting more and more distant until I heard the street door slam closed downstairs.

“I told you he’d never come for you.” I turned to see Marlowe standing behind me. In his expression there was some mixture of triumph and pity. He walked over to me and put a hand on my arm. My flesh went cold beneath his touch.

The tattoo that started on his left pectoral swept over his shoulder. It was covered in antibiotic ointment, the lines swollen and raised, the visible skin red. It must have been painful, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

I gave him the money and he put it in his pocket; there wasn’t even a question that I would give it to him. I nuzzled my face against his good arm so he couldn’t look into my eyes. He stroked the back of my head and neck. I rested my hands on the tight, narrow expanse of his waist.

“You don’t need anyone else, Ophelia,” he said. “You belong to me.”

36

In spite of the fact that Simon Briggs had checked in to the dilapidated Sunshine Motel less than forty-eight hours prior to his death, his space was already as filthy a mess as his car. Less than twenty-four hours after my disappearance and presumed death, Detective Harrison stood in the middle of Room 206 and surveyed the area. Fast-food wrappers were strewn across the carpet like flowers on a meadow, two pizza boxes gaped greasy and empty on the bed, beer cans lined up like soldiers in crooked rows on the windowsills. There was a litter of candy wrappers by the toilet, atop the latest issue of the Economist.

Detective Harrison hated a mess; just the thought of Briggs made him want to take a shower. But for someone so sloppy, Briggs was surprisingly professional with his collection of articles, his copious notes about me in my various incarnations, his lack of phone usage at the motel or any information that might identify his employer. Amid the detritus of the motel room, Harrison found the empty packaging of a disposable cell phone. The phone itself was nowhere to be found in the room, in the car, or on Briggs’s person. He trashed it, thought Harrison, or someone took it. Briggs probably didn’t realize that with the packaging the police might be able to subpoena the call records under new federal regulations. This would, however, be a major pain in the ass and could take weeks. Detective Harrison knew on an instinctive level that he didn’t have weeks, that he might not even have days, if he cared what happened to me.

He put on a pair of gloves and sifted through the wastepaper basket near the front door. He could feel the watchful eyes of the woman who headed the CSI team. She probably was wondering how badly he was going to screw up their scene.

“Relax, Claire,” he said without looking at her. “I’m being careful.”

“It’s your case, Detective,” she said. “You botch it, it’s your problem.”

He ignored her as he inspected the contents of the basket. Toward the bottom he found a piece of paper that had been crumbled into a tight ball. He noticed it because of the quality of the paper, a heavy, expensive piece of stock. He unfurled it carefully, smoothed it out on the carpet. There was a doodle, a stick figure holding what appeared to be a gun, some scribbling that looked like someone trying to get a pen to work, and a telephone number that Briggs had tried to black out with a marker but was still legible. Embossed in blue at the top of the page was a company name, Grief Intervention Services, and a website address, nomorefear.biz.

“Find something?” Claire asked.

“Just more garbage,” he said, crumpling the paper back up.

“That’s what you usually find in a trash can,” she said. She laughed at her own joke, and he gave her a smile he didn’t feel.

When she turned away from him, he stuck the paper in his pocket, pretended to pick through the waste can for a few more minutes.

After he’d finished with the room and left the technicians to do their trace-evidence collection, Detective Harrison turned his attention to the helpful young Indian couple who owned and operated the motel. The husband was a reed of a man with thick glasses, an unfortunately large nose, and a diminutive chin. The wife was a vision in a kind of abbreviated hot pink-and-gold sari, which she wore over jeans, more of a fashion statement, he thought, than any compulsion to dress in traditional garb. With huge, almond-shaped eyes framed by long, dark lashes and a pleasing hourglass shape to her body, she caused the detective to look at her more than a few times out of the corner of his eye-in the most respectful possible way, of course. He noticed beauty, even though he’d never been unfaithful to his wife. He allowed himself the appreciation of lovely women.

The husband smiled a wide, goofy smile at Harrison. The wife frowned. She was nervous, upset by the presence of the police. The husband acted like it was the most exciting thing that had happened to him in months. They were totally wired in the technical sense, all their records computerized and a system of surveillance cameras that backed up to a hard drive. Briggs checked in to the motel as Buddy Starr about forty-eight hours before his body was found; he’d paid in cash and provided a New York State driver’s license that the hotel owners had diligently scanned into their system. He had not made any calls or used the Internet connection in his room.

The couple also ran an Indian restaurant attached to the hotel. The aroma of tandoori chicken and curry permeated the air, making Harrison’s stomach grumble as he sat in the office behind the reception area and scrolled through days of surveillance from the camera that monitored the landing outside Briggs’s door. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for, but when he found it-the dark, powerful figure of a man moving across the landing toward Room 206-it raised more questions than it answered. The man moved like a soldier, cautious but confident, was mindful of the security camera, keeping his face carefully averted from the lens. He didn’t need to jimmy the lock; he had a key card and let himself in easily. He was in the room for less than ten minutes and left as he entered, quietly and carrying nothing.

Though it would never hold up in court, Harrison recognized Gray right away by his bearing and his stride, by the intimidating musculature of his shoulders. Men noticed the size and build of other men more than they’d admit; it was how they identified their place in the pack. Harrison remembered those shoulders, remembered thinking how bad it would feel to be on the beating end of those fists.

According to the time imprint on the image, Gray had arrived at the hotel less than an hour after Briggs’s estimated time of death, with the key card to his room.

“Find anything?” the young hotel owner asked, coming up behind the detective.

“Leave him alone,” said his wife from her perch at the front desk. “Let him do his job so they can all get out of here.”

The man ignored her, still had that wide smile on his face. He seemed to find the whole thing very exciting, even though it couldn’t be good for business to have a room cordoned off by crime-scene tape and a CSI truck in your parking lot. These days, though, everyone thought they were living in a reality television show. People seemed to have trouble differentiating between what was really happening and what was happening on television. Harrison had noticed in the last few years that suddenly all crime, even the most violent, and its solving had become “cool.” For the hotel owner, the fact that a man staying in his hotel had been gunned down was not tragic or frightening, it was a subject of interest, something he’d e-mail his friends and family about, stay up late speculating on.

“Possibly,” said Harrison. “Is there some way I can get a copy of this surveillance footage, between the hours of nine-ten and nine-thirty P.M.?”

The young man nodded vigorously.

“I’ll make an MPEG, copy it onto a thumb drive for you. You just plug the drive into the USB port on your computer, and you can access the file that way. You can return the drive when you’ve downloaded it onto your computer, okay?”

“Great,” said the detective, having no idea what an MPEG was, or a thumb drive for that matter. “That’s great. Thanks.”

“So what’d you see?” the owner asked, still smiling, tapping a staccato on the keyboard in front of him. “You probably can’t tell me. That’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. I just think it’s so cool to be a detective. I really wanted to be a cop, you know, but my parents had other ideas. I still think about it-all the time. But Miranda, my wife, doesn’t like the idea any more than my parents-”

He went on, but Harrison wasn’t listening. He was thinking about the footage of Gray entering Briggs’s room right after Briggs’s murder. What is this worth? That’s the question he found himself asking a lot. Where does this have the most value? Does it help my case, my career? How much would Gray Powers pay to make this go away? Then he came back to himself and flushed with shame; that was an old way of thinking. This now was about me, about helping Annie Powers-or whatever my name was. But if he could do that and still help himself, wasn’t that even better?

I don’t know how long it was after we’d left my father’s place that I met Simon Briggs; it might have been six months or more. All the days and months during that period run together, and I have no markers for the passage of time. I know now that I’d had a total psychotic break and that even though much of my memory has returned, many of the day-to-day events are never coming back. I can’t say I’m sorry. But there must have been moments of lucidity, because when some of these memories return, they are painfully vivid.

The night I first saw Briggs, I was sitting in a diner with Marlowe. We’d both altered our appearances. I’d dyed my hair an awful black. With my pale skin, I looked like a ghoul. Marlowe had shaved his hair and had grown a goatee and mustache. He looked like a vampire skinhead. You’d think at this point we wouldn’t have been able to eat in public. In the movies a killer eats at a truck stop and his picture is posted behind the counter or randomly pops up on the television screen. Someone notices him, and the chase is on. But in the real world, people are oblivious, living in their own little heads. They barely see what’s going on around them, and when they do, they rarely believe their own eyes.

Marlowe went to the bathroom, and while I waited, staring into the depths of my coffee cup, a man walked past me too close and dropped a napkin onto the table. I turned to see his wide, heavy frame and the back of his bald head as he walked out the door.

I unfolded the napkin. There was a note: Bad things are about to happen to Marlowe Geary. Save yourself, if you still can.

I crushed the note in my hand and dropped it on the floor, adrenaline flooding my body.

“What’s wrong?” asked Marlowe when he returned and sat across from me.

I shook my head. “Nothing. I’m tired.”

“You’re always tired,” he said.

“Maybe it’s the company I keep,” I said, the words escaping before I could catch them. He looked at me, surprised. Then he leaned his face close to mine over the table. “Watch yourself.” His voice was tight with menace. There was a trail of brutally murdered women behind us, his tone said to me, and I could easily be next.

I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The bathroom was filthy, dirt gritty on the tile floor, graffiti scratched on the stalls, and it smelled of urine. I was unrecognizable to myself with my jet-black hair and pallid complexion; my reflection was frightening.

How can I explain myself? How can I explain my relationship to Marlowe Geary, who I loved and hated, feared and clung to? I can’t, not then, not now. Save yourself, if you still can.

When I walked back out, Marlowe had already left the restaurant. I knew he was outside waiting for me in the car. That’s how sure he was of me. There were two uniformed officers sitting at the counter. They hadn’t been there when I entered the bathroom, but now they sat, both drinking coffee from white ceramic mugs. Their radios chattered; large revolvers hung at their hips. Their shirts were bulky with the Kevlar they wore beneath. I think we were in Pennsylvania at the time. I remember that the uniforms were brown, light shirts with dark jackets and pants. One of them laughed at something the other said.

Everything around me slowed and warped as I approached the counter where they sat. Save yourself, if you still can. I imagined walking right up to them and turning myself in. Marlowe would have been able to get away. I would tell them he’d left me here, that he’d let me go, and they’d arrest me. They’d take me into the station in the back of their car. Maybe they’d call my father. He’d come get me. I’d finally tell him I wasn’t all right and that he needed to take care of me. And he would, this time he would.

But I didn’t stop. I walked right by the two men. Neither of them noticed me as I walked out the door into the cold night. Marlowe was waiting for me outside the door. I slipped into the car, a stolen Cadillac. The heat was cranking.

“Cops are so unbelievably stupid, man,” he said with a laugh, as he peeled out of the lot.

Save yourself, if you still can. I couldn’t.

I have abandoned and betrayed myself so many times, given so much over for any poor facsimile of love. I have never been true to Ophelia; I have locked her in a cage deep within myself, depriving her of light and air, and kept her from growing up. I have denied her. I have killed her. I have done all this because I judged her and found her unworthy. Of all the people who have wronged Ophelia, I am the worst offender. But now I have had to reclaim her and do right by her to save my daughter.

The irony of this is not lost on me as I walk quickly on wet concrete. I pass the glaring windows of a music store. The glowing album covers, lit from behind, feature the faces of too-thin, carefully grungy pop stars and cast a yellow light at my feet. People who buy and sell music albums are living in a different world from me; their lives seem frivolous and foreign. I wait on the corner in the rain as cars and taxis race past me. I can see my father’s shop across the street, and it’s all I can do not to race into traffic to get there. The shop is closed, but I can see the blue flickering light of a television screen in the windows above.

New York City. How did I get here? The truth is, I don’t quite know. Already I doubt my memories of the sinkhole, the ship and the man named Dax, the metal room and the Angry Man. But the picture of Victory in my pocket and the necklace I’m wearing make me think some of it might be close to the truth.

I woke up on a commuter train pulling into Grand Central Station. I was wearing fresh clothes I’ve never seen before and a long black raincoat. Leather boots. People around me chatted on cell phones, stared blankly at small handheld screens, headphones plugged into their ears. I gazed at my reflection in the window beside me, saw that my hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail at the base of my neck. I had dark circles under my eyes.

At the train station, I was swept into a current of people moving determinedly toward wherever they were going. I saw a bank of pay phones and wondered whom I could call now. I want desperately to call Gray or Vivian, but I can’t do that. There’s too much at stake, and I don’t know whom to trust.

The traffic clears now, and I cross the street. I stand in the vestibule and press the buzzer to my father’s apartment. I press it five, six times, hard, hoping to express my urgency this way. Finally I hear heavy boots on the stairs.

“Hold on, for crying out loud!” my father barks. “French, if that’s you, I’m going to beat your ass.”

An old man who looks like a badly aged version of my father bangs into view. It takes me a second to accept that it is him. He sees me then and stops in his tracks, leans a hand against the wall and closes his eyes.

“Dad,” I say, and my voice sounds scratchy and uncertain. He looks awful, ragged and overtired. His clothes are rumpled and hanging off him a bit, as though he’s lost a lot of weight recently and hasn’t bothered to replace them.

He reaches for the door, swings it open, and pulls me into a bear hug. He has never done that. Never. Even though it’s awkward to be embraced by him, this one thing almost makes up for all the ways he has screwed up as a father. I breathe in his scent of booze and cigarettes. It has been almost seven years since I’ve seen him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You’re supposed to be dead, Ophelia. Again.”

37

“I think I’m going to die out here.”

Marlowe said this matter-of-factly, as though he couldn’t care less. The thought of his death was something I couldn’t handle. It filled me with a perfect storm of hope and terror. We were in New Mexico, somewhere between Taos and Santa Fe. From the road he’d seen an old church, a tiny white adobe building, glowing like a beacon. He’d pulled over without a word, stepped out of the car, and starting walking toward it. I followed him, taking in the scent of sage and juniper that was heavy in the air.

The building was dark, the wood and wrought-iron doors locked tight. I looked in the window and saw the flickering rows of votive candles inside twinkling like fireflies. He lay down on the small patch of grass inside the fence around the church, and I came to sit beside him. He folded his arms behind his head and took a long, deep breath, released it slowly. The desert air was cool, the sky above alive with stars. I was a city girl. I didn’t even know there were that many stars in the heavens.

“If it looks like we’re going to get caught, I’m going to die.”

I let the words hang in the air for a few breaths.

“You’re going to kill yourself?” I asked.

He shook his head, turned those dark eyes on me, and I looked away. I couldn’t stand to look at his face anymore. Every time I did, I heard screaming, saw a river of blood.

“No,” he said. “I’m going to make it look like I was killed. Everyone will think I’m dead, but I’ll be alive, in hiding.”

He sounded like a child then, a kid fantasizing about his life. We were kids; that’s what I always forget. When I think about Marlowe, he’s a titan, this powerhouse I turned myself over to for the various reasons that one does such a thing. But he wasn’t even twenty-one.

He put a hand on my leg. “I’ll have to stay away from you for a while-a few years, maybe. Without the body they’ll always be watching you, waiting for you to come to me or me to come for you. But when the time is right, I’ll find you and you’ll be waiting. That’s our karma, our bond.”

“Where will you go?” I asked, playing the game with him, knowing how fast he’d turn ugly if I didn’t.

He shrugged. “I can’t tell you. They’ll torture you to find me. You’re weak. You’ll give in.”

I started to cry then. I hid my face in the crook of my arm so he wouldn’t see, but I couldn’t keep my shoulders from shaking.

“Don’t worry, Ophelia,” he said, sitting up and wrapping his arms around me. His voice was sweet and soft. “I’ll come for you. I promise.”

But of course that wasn’t why I succumbed to the crushing sadness that lived in my chest. I knew in that moment that I would never be free from him. That for the rest of my life, he’d live under my skin, in my nightmares, just around the next corner.

“When it’s time for us to be together again,” he said, “I’ll leave my necklace somewhere for you to find. That’s how you’ll know I’ve come for you. That’ll be our signal.”

He was enjoying himself, the drama of it all, making me cry. It fed into his fantasy of who we were and what was happening to us. At the time I was as sick and delusional as he was, playing my role in his fantasy, casting myself as victim.

We sat there in silence for a time. My tears dried up, and I listened to a coyote howling at the moon somewhere far off in the distance. Then…

“There’s something I want you to know, Ophelia. I need someone to know.” His voice sounded thick and strange.

“What?”

He looked out into the vast flatness all around us for so long I thought he’d decided not to go on. I didn’t press. Inside, I cringed at what he might tell me.

“Those women,” he said with an odd laugh and a shake of his head. “They didn’t matter, you know. They were nothing to anyone.”

“Who?” I asked, even though my shoulders were so tense they ached, my fist clenched so hard I could feel my nails digging into my palms.

“The women my father brought home. Most of them, even their own parents had abandoned them. No one mourned them, not really.”

I thought of Janet Parker howling at our trailer door. “That’s not true,” I said.

“It is true,” he snapped, baring his teeth at me like the dog that he was.

I didn’t argue again. Just listened as he told me again how they were looking for a way out of their shit lives, looking for the punishment they knew they deserved. How death was mercy, how they were noticed more in their absence from the world than they were in their presence.

“Marlowe,” I said finally, when he’d gone silent. I tried to keep my voice soft the way he liked it. “What are you telling me?”

The night seemed to stretch, the seconds were hours as the coyotes sang in the distance.

“My father didn’t kill those women,” he said. His words lofted above us, looped, then floated off into the night sky. His skin was ghastly white, his eyes the dark empty holes in a dime-store mask. “Not all of them.”

“Who then?” I asked, though of course I knew the answer.

“I watched him kill her,” he said, not answering my question. “I never told you. She didn’t leave us. She didn’t run away. She burned the English muffin she was making for his breakfast. He slapped her so hard she staggered back and hit her head against the edge of the counter. There was, like, this horrible noise, some cross between a thud and a snap. The way she fell to the floor, so heavy, her neck at this terrible angle-she was dead before she hit the ground.”

He paused here, and I listened to his breathing, which seemed suddenly labored, though his face was expressionless, his eyes dry. “It didn’t seem real. It seemed like something I was watching on TV. My mother was stupid and weak, I remember her cowering around my father, living her life walking on eggshells. But I loved her, anyway. I didn’t want her to die.”

I was afraid to say anything. Afraid to move a muscle.

“Later I lied for him. I didn’t want him to go to jail. When the people she worked with sent the police, he told them she ran off. Withdrew some money from the bank and stole the car. They believed him. They believed me when I said I saw her leaving in the night. I told them she said, ‘Marlowe, honey, go back to sleep. I’m going to get some milk for your breakfast.’”

There’s a rustling somewhere near us. Some creature making its way over the desert floor, something small.

“I never forgave him, though. A few years later, he brought someone home. A pasty blonde-a quivering, nervous waste of bones.” He gave a disgusted laugh, kept looking off at that same spot in the distance. “There was no way I was going to allow him to replace her. I couldn’t have another mother, so he wasn’t going to have another whore.”

He went on then to tell me with no emotion whatsoever about the women he’d killed, somehow managing to paint himself as the victim, the little boy who missed his mother so much, who sought to avenge her. But I was only half listening. Inside, I was screaming.

Frank, in his guilt, helped Marlowe to hide his crimes and eventually took the blame for the murders-because he loved his son so much, Marlowe claimed. I had no way of knowing if what he said was true, but it didn’t much matter. I had disappeared from that place. On the sound of Marlowe’s voice, I had drifted up into the stars and floated high above our bodies. I looked down to see two people sitting on the lawn of a small white church, one of them talking quietly about murder, the other wishing for death.

I follow my father up the stairs and into his apartment. It is exactly the same as it was the last time I was here, except older and dirtier. It doesn’t seem like the cool, freewheeling bachelor pad it once did. It looks like the run-down apartment of an old man who doesn’t know how to take care of himself. His party days are behind him, and he never built anything-a home, a family-that endured.

I notice he has added a recliner and a large television set on a glass-and-chrome stand over by the window. The pool table has been pushed over to the far wall to accommodate these additions. There’s a sweating beer can on the floor by the chair, a rerun of Baywatch on the screen. All the lights are out. He has been sitting here in the dark watching television alone.

He shrugs when he sees me looking at the screen. “I used to date her,” he says, indicating the bleached blonde on the set.

“Dad,” I say, shaking my head. This seems to be the only word I can get out. He sits down in the recliner, stares blankly at the television. I go over and stand in front of him.

“Dad, no more lies,” I say. “I love you, but you’ve been a really terrible father.”

His body seems to sag with the weight of my words, and I think he might be crying. But I don’t have time to comfort him. “I need you to help me now. I need you to be a better grandfather than you were a dad.”

I take the picture from my pocket and hold it out for him to see. “Oh, Christ,” he says when he looks at it. “Oh, God.”

“Marlowe Geary is still alive. Someone’s looking for him, they have Victory, and I need to lead them to Marlowe or they’re going to hurt her.” As the words tumble out of my mouth, I hear how crazy they sound. I suddenly feel very bad for Victory. This is her rescue team: a beat-up old pathological liar and a nutcase mother.

In a mad rush, the rest of it pours out of me, everything that’s happened since the dark figure on the beach. “Somewhere inside me, I know where he is,” I tell him finally. “I just don’t have access to that information yet.”

“Opie,” he responds gently, “no offense, but are you sure you haven’t lost your mind?”

I think about this for a second. “No, Dad,” I admit. “I’m not sure at all.”

Looking at me from beneath raised eyebrows, he says, “What do you need me to do?”

38

Less than a week after my disappearance, my memorial service was held at a small chapel by the beach. Neighbors, friends, colleagues crowded into the space. It was a hot day, and the air-conditioning was not up to the task. People were sweating, fanning themselves, shedding tears as Gray gave a heartfelt eulogy about how he’d loved me, how I’d changed his life and made him a better person. He said I’d left all the best parts of myself behind in Victory, our daughter.

Detective Harrison stayed in the back and watched the crowd. Conspicuous by their absence were Vivian, Drew, and Victory. It’s a show, he thought. No one would have a memorial service for a woman who was still classified as missing unless he was invested in making it appear to someone that she was dead. Gray seemed sunken and hollowed out; to everyone else he seemed like a man suffering with terrible grief. To Harrison he seemed like a man struggling under the burden of terrible lies.

A woman sat in the front of the chapel and wept with abandon. He recognized her even from behind. It was Ella, beautifully coiffed in her grief, of course-hair swept in a perfect chignon, impeccably dressed in a simple black sheath, her nails done.

After the service Harrison stood off to the side in the trees watching people leave. He watched for someone alone, someone who seemed out of place. He guessed that most of the men were colleagues of Gray’s-they all had that paramilitary look to them, built and secretive, ever aware of their surroundings. He recognized some of the older people as neighbors he’d seen the night of the intruder on the beach. He didn’t see anyone who aroused his interest.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Ella said, approaching him. “You weren’t her friend.”

Her breath smelled lightly of alcohol. He regarded her, sized her up. She was handling things badly, seemed unsteady on her feet. Her eyes were rimmed with red.

“Do you have someone to drive you home?” he asked gently.

“None of these people were her friends,” she said too loudly. People turned to stare as they moved toward their cars. “I’ve never seen any of them in my life.”

He put a hand on her arm. “Let me take you home, Mrs. Singer.”

“I have my own car, thank you,” she said primly.

“You can get it later,” he said, more firmly.

She surprised him by not arguing. “I mean, who are these people?” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, leaning her weight against him as he led her to his Explorer.

“Where is her daughter? Where are Drew and Vivian? I asked Gray. He told me that it was none of my business.” She paused and shook her head. “Something’s just not right.”

He opened the door for her, and she climbed inside with a little help. He got in on the other side, turned on the engine, and pulled in to the line of cars exiting the parking lot of the chapel. The blue sky was going gray; heavy dark clouds were moving in from the sea.

“Someone killed her, didn’t they?” she said, looking out the window.

“Why would you say something like that?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “The man on the beach that night. Since then, she wasn’t the same. She seemed-I don’t know-not herself. Maybe she was afraid of someone? I don’t know.”

“Did she ever talk to you about her past?” he asked, pulling in to our neighborhood. The line at the gate was long, with people heading back to our house for the reception. Ella pointed the way to her house and shook her head slowly.

“You know what? No. I knew that Annie was raised in Central Florida and that both her parents were dead. She didn’t have any family at all except for Gray and Victory. She never talked about her past. I had the sense she didn’t want anyone asking, either. So I never did.”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her that Annie wasn’t even my real name, that most things I’d told her about myself were lies.

“How’d she get along with her in-laws?” he asked instead.

“She loved Vivian. But Drew…bad blood there, if you ask me.”

“Oh?”

“He hated her, or so she thought. He didn’t think she was good enough for Gray. She didn’t talk much about that, either. So I didn’t press.”

“What did you talk about?”

She let a beat pass. “Shoes,” she said, then let go a peal of hysterical laughter that ended in a sob. He thought she was going to lose it. But she pulled herself together relatively quickly. After a moment she wiped her tears away, careful not to smear her mascara. “I was a terrible friend, wasn’t I? I didn’t know anything about Annie.”

He pulled in to her driveway. “You accepted her for who she was in the present, Mrs. Singer. We only know about people what they want to show us. You respected her privacy and shared good times with her. I think that makes you an excellent friend. I really do.”

Detective Harrison was a wise man; I would have told her the same thing.

She took a tissue from her clutch and wiped her nose. “Thanks,” she said, nodding. “She did that for me, too.”

They sat like that for a minute in her drive. The wind was blowing the high palm fronds around, and they whispered, gossiping about all they knew and wouldn’t tell. The sky had gone from blue to gray to black and was ready to erupt.

“That night on the beach?” Ella said, leaning forward and looking up at the sky. Harrison noticed her beauty again, the delicate line of her jaw, the regal length of her neck.

“What about it?”

“At the party she thought she saw someone that she recognized. A young girl, wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

“Who was it?”

She gave him a quick shrug. “No idea. I knew everyone there that night, even all the servers who have worked for me before. She seemed really unsettled by it and left pretty soon after that.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying there was no one at my house who looked like that, no one under forty, and certainly no one wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

He remembered the night at the rest stop. He remembered how my gaze kept moving behind him as though I’d been watching someone or something. He’d seen fear on my face that night, so clearly that it had caused him to reach for his gun. “You think Annie imagined her?”

She looked surprised for a second, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her. Then, “I don’t know. She had an expression on her face that stayed with me. I think I’d seen it before in flashes, but not like that. She looked haunted. I think she was, in some ways.” She smiled nervously, ran a self-conscious hand along her jaw. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It doesn’t help you any, does it?”

“You were right to tell me,” he said. “You never know what helps.” After a pause he added, “Did she ever mention her doctor to you?”

She shook her head. “No. What kind of doctor?”

“How about an organization called Grief Intervention Services?”

She raised her eyebrows, thought about it for a second. “No,” she said, bringing her hand to rub her temple. He’d seen Volkswagens that were smaller than the ring on her finger. “I never heard her mention anything like that.”

“Did you get the sense that she was someone who would take off? You know, just run away from her life? Did she seem like she might be capable of that?”

She shook her head vigorously, without hesitation. “No way. Not without Victory. She worships that little girl.” Then, “That’s not what you think, is it? That she just took off?”

“I’m just trying to be thorough. Without a body, we need to examine every possibility.”

“Well, that’s not a possibility. She wouldn’t leave without her daughter.”

“Okay,” he said, giving her a smile he thought she needed. “You’ve been a big help. You really have.”

She offered him a grateful look. “So is this a murder investigation? You showing up at the memorial like that? Isn’t that what they do on television?”

“I’m just trying to be thorough,” he said again, purposely vague.

She nodded, seemed to think about saying something else but then thanked him for the ride instead. Then she dashed from the car to the house as a heavy rain started to fall. He watched until she let herself in the front door and shut it behind her.

Harrison drove up the street and parked near my house. As he watched the mourners come and go, he thought about me, about Marlowe Geary, and all the desperate things people become for love. He began to realize as the rain turned to hail, causing people to dash from car to house or house to car, covering their heads with their jackets or purses, that if he wanted to know what had happened to me, he was going to have to go back to go forward.

I tell my father how I dropped into the earth, followed my “dive master” through a long, narrow limestone tunnel for what seemed like hours, and emerged from another sinkhole. There a man whose name I never learned and whose face I barely saw was waiting for me in a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I stripped out of my wetsuit, dried off, and put on the clothes he had for me. I checked the contents of the bag he’d retrieved from my locker with the key I gave to Gray. I lay down on the floor of the backseat and stayed there, uncomfortable and gripped by self-doubt, as we drove for hours. I drifted off, only to be jerked awake by some bump in the road, or by the thought that I’d left my daughter behind and that in a few hours everyone who knew would think I had drowned in a diving accident.

By nightfall I had boarded a cargo ship in the Port of Miami, headed for Mexico, where I was supposed to stay until Gray came for me.

“Whoever it is,” my father says. “They found you pretty fast.”

“It’s true,” I say. I can’t seem to stop moving. I’m pacing the small room, my whole body electric with tension, this physical pain I’ll have until I can get to Victory. Every mother knows that feeling in her body when her child cries. It’s as if every nerve ending, every cell, aches until you can hold and comfort your child. I felt that now, but with a kind of terrified desperation underlying it.

“Something not right about that,” my father says. I can’t help but stare at him, his skin gray-white, his beard ragged, deep lines around eyes that seem sunken in his face. His long gray hair, pulled back with a rubber band, looks dry and brittle. I wonder if he’s sick, but I can’t stand to ask that question now. I don’t want to know the answer.

“I mean,” he goes on, “who knew where you were going? Who knew you were on the ship?”

“No one knew-except Gray and the people from his company who were tasked with protecting me and getting me safely to my destination.”

“Then how did that guy-the one you called the Angry Man-how did he find you like that? In a boat in the middle of the sea?”

I don’t know the answer. “They must have been watching or following me?”

“Possible,” he says, cocking his head. He seems to be considering something, but he doesn’t say anything else.

It’s something that never occurred to me, how the Angry Man found me there so quickly. I wasn’t even surprised when I saw the other boat that night. It was almost as though I’d been waiting for it, so sure was I that Marlowe had returned for me.

“I need a computer,” I tell my father.

“In the shop.”

He leads me downstairs, and I sit behind the reception desk and surf the Web, trying to find the identity of the Angry Man. I search for the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary and begin sifting through the entries I find. Meanwhile, I have this sense of a ticking clock, a tightness in my chest. I wonder where the Angry Man is now and how he’s tracking my progress. I know enough about Gray’s work to know that the technology is so advanced now that he or whomever is charged with following me could be blocks or even miles away and still have complete audio and visual surveillance. Still, it seems questionable that they’ve given me such a wide berth, such latitude. But maybe they know that they’ve got me by a chain connected to my own heart. I’ll do what they want; I don’t think there’s any question about that.

But of all the places they could have left me, why did they leave me here? They must have known I’d come to my father. Was there some reason they wanted me to?

I look for images of the man I saw, hoping to find a name attached. But I find the same old articles I’ve read a hundred times before, maybe a thousand times. I stare at the screen and resist the urge to take it and throw it on the floor, to stomp on it screaming in my rage and frustration.

My father comes over and lays a large book on the desk in front of me. The computer screen casts it in an eerie blue glow. The book is turned to an eight-by-ten shot of Marlowe’s tattoo. The sight of it sends a cold shock through me. I have seen this image again and again in my dreams, in my dark imaginings. But to see the photograph of it on his skin reminds me that he was just a man, flesh and bone, not a monster from a nightmare I had. He is real and possibly still alive.

I stare at the dark lines of the tattoo. I see a churning ocean crashing over jutting rocks; I see my face hidden within the image. There’s a wolf etched in the face of one of the rocks. Two birds circle above it all. It is as beautiful and as detailed as I have seen it in my memory. In my dreams of it, it pulses and moves, the ocean crashes, the birds cry mournfully. But on the page it’s flat and dead, like some map to Marlowe’s mind.

“Why are you showing me this?” I ask.

“Look closely,” he says, tapping the picture with his finger.

After a few seconds of staring, I see. If you didn’t examine it closely, you’d never notice it. In the lines that form the crags of the rocks lies a hidden image: the barn at Frank’s horse farm.

39

Deep in the dark, wild swamps of Florida amid the lush black-green foliage and through the still, teeming waters, wild orchids grow. Over the last century, orchid hunters, breeders, and poachers have donned their waders and raped the swamplands of these delicate flowers, filling trucks with the once-plentiful plants and shipping them for huge profits all over the world. Now they are so rare in the wild that environmentalists are struggling to rescue the waning populations, and the search for wild orchids is ever more desperate. Most legendary among them is the elusive ghost orchid. Snow white with delicately furled petals, the leafless epiphyte never touches the earth and seems to float like a specter, hence its name. In the history of Florida, people have lied and stolen, fought and died in their quest for the ghost orchid, which flowers only once a year.

Detective Harrison always liked the idea of this, the idea of men who risked their lives in pursuit of the single fragile object of their passion. At the best of times, Harrison considered himself to be one of these men. Through the hinterland of lies, in the decaying marsh of murder, he searched for the fresh white thing that was pure, elevated above the murk, drawing its nourishment from the air.

Like the orchid hunters, he didn’t mind the trek through the dark and shadowy spaces, his goal moving him toward places where, less motivated, others wouldn’t dare to go. He could sit at his computer until his eyes stung and his head ached; he could make a hundred fruitless calls, drive hundreds of miles, talk to dozens of surly, uncooperative lackeys, and never think of giving up. It just never occurred to him that he might not find what he was looking for.

He felt like a hunter the evening after my memorial service and his conversation with Ella. He was alone in his office in the station house. Everyone else on the detectives’ floor had gone home for the evening. Somewhere he could hear a phone ringing, and somewhere else a radio played some hip-hop crap he couldn’t name. Someone was working out in the gym upstairs; he could hear the weights landing heavily on the floor above him.

He didn’t have much to go on. He had a website address, the name of a murdered shrink operating without a license, the meticulous notes and collection of articles from a dead bounty hunter, a missing woman with a false identity who also happened to be the ex-girlfriend (or captive, depending on whom you talked to) of a serial killer. Then, of course, there was her husband, a former military man, now owner of a privatized military company, who for some reason had visited Simon Briggs’s motel room just an hour after Briggs’s murder.

Harrison had made the call to his wife, Sarah, telling her not to expect him and to lock up the house for the night and that he’d see her in the morning. Then he popped up his Internet browser and began the long, lonely slog through the marsh, searching for his ghost orchid.

He loved the Internet, loved the way you could follow a piece of information down a rabbit hole and chase it through tunnels and around bends and come up for air in a place you’d never have imagined when you started.

He started with the website nomorefear.biz. There wasn’t much to it, just a black screen with a simple quote: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” When he clicked on the sentence, he was taken to another page, featuring the image of a man embracing a weeping woman and a paragraph:

Maybe you’ve lost someone to violence, or perhaps you have been the victim of a violent crime. Either way, your life has been altered and a hole has been punched open in your world. Through it comes the most malignant, destructive monster of all: FEAR. More vicious than any violent criminal, more evil than the deeds of any killer, fear will rob you of what’s left of your life. There’s only one way out of the haunted forest: You must go through. You must face what you most fear. We can show you how.

There was a number to call, and he was surprised to see that the area code was local. He cast about for a street address but didn’t find anything listed in the online Yellow Pages or in the reverse directory and soon realized that the number he had was a cellular line. He dialed the number from his cell phone, which had a blocked ID; voice mail picked up before there was even a ring tone.

“Congratulations. You’ve taken the first step. Leave your name and number here, and someone will get back to you. If you’re not ready to do that, you’re not ready for this.”

“Hi,” he said, trying to make his voice sound shaky and tentative. “I’m Ray, and I’m interested in learning more about your program.” He ended the call with an odd feeling in the base of his stomach.

After searching for more information on the organization and finding nothing, he shot an e-mail to Mike Keene, a friend of his who worked at the FBI, to see if there was anything on the radar about Grief Intervention Services. Then a couple more hours of coffee, eyestrain, aching shoulders, walking down virtual corridors and opening doors, looking for people who don’t want to be found. Around midnight his concept of himself as an orchid hunter was less appealing, less romantic.

He remembered the thoughts he had outside my memorial service, that he’d need to go back to go forward. So he entered the name Frank Geary. As he scrolled through old news articles about Frank’s trial, conviction, and sentence to death row, about my mother’s crusade, his new trial and release, then subsequent murder at the hands of Janet Parker, Harrison thought what a nightmare my life must have been.

The trail lead him to an old South Florida Sun-Sentinel piece about new DNA evidence proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Frank Geary was guilty of at least two of the murders of which he’d been originally accused.

The article went on to say that other DNA evidence added a new wrinkle, that it was possible Marlowe Geary might have either colluded in or been responsible for several of the other murders. Evidence collected during Marlowe Geary’s cross-country killing spree matched evidence collected at the scenes of murders attributed to Frank Geary.

There was a quote from Alan Parker, husband of Janet Parker and father of victim Melissa Parker: “The new evidence is disturbing. One wants justice in a case like this. One wants to face the person who killed his daughter.”

Harrison read on that Alan Parker was the founder of the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary, the group that lobbied to have the evidence in these murders reexamined as new technology became available.

The phone rang then, startling him. He jerked his arm and knocked his empty mug off the desk as he reached for the phone. It landed with a thud on the floor but didn’t break. The display screen on his phone flashed blue and read, UNAVAILABLE.

He answered. “Hello?”

But there was nothing but static on the line. “Hello,” he said again. He started to feel his heart thump; he hadn’t thought of what he’d say if the Grief Intervention people called back.

“Harrison.” A thick, male voice on the line. “It’s Mike Keene. Just got your e-mail.”

Harrison felt a cool rush of relief. He looked at the clock, nearly 1:00 A.M. “Working late?” he said.

“Yeah, always,” Mike said. “You, too?”

“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his eyes. They exchanged a few pleasantries, polite questions about wives and kids. Then, “So…Grief Intervention Services?”

“It sounded familiar, so I did a little digging around. They’re incorporated in the state of Florida. But their address is a P.O. box.”

“Who’s the founding member?” Harrison asked, writing down the address Mike gave him.

He heard Mike tapping on a computer keyboard. “Someone by the name of Alan Parker. He founded the organization about five years ago. They’re listed as grief counselors. No complaints against them in the years they’ve been operating. No profit, either. They’re not on anyone’s watch list-officially.”

“Officially?”

“Well, a couple of years ago, there was an incident in South Florida. A man who’d been accused of molesting two boys while coaching a school soccer team and served some time for it-six years-was murdered in his home. Brutally murdered, castrated, skull bashed in…you know, overkill.”

“So the cops looked to the victims and their families,” guessed Harrison.

“That’s right. But there was no evidence to link anyone to the scene. So no one was ever charged. It came to light, however, that the father of one of the victims was in touch with Grief Intervention Services about six months before his son’s molester was released. The father said he needed counseling to deal with his rage and fear for his son’s safety. There was no evidence to the contrary.”

“So…”

“The weird thing about the crime was that the break-in was a textbook military entry, that the victim was bound and gagged in the way military personnel are trained to subdue an enemy. So there was this precise entry and apprehension of the victim, followed by this out-of-control rage killing. It was just bizarre.” Mike paused, and Harrison could hear him chewing on something. The chewing went on for longer than Harrison thought polite.

“I don’t understand. There’s some kind of military connection to Grief Intervention Services?” Harrison prodded finally.

“Hmm,” Mike said, mouth still full. “Sorry, I haven’t eaten all day. Alan Parker was a former Navy SEAL. One of his daughters was the victim of a serial killer by the name of Frank Geary. He and his wife, Janet Parker, founded an organization called the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary, after Geary was released in what many considered to be a travesty of justice. Then Janet Parker lost it and killed Frank Geary, burned down his house.”

Harrison could almost smell the scent on the wind.

“The organization disbanded, but Alan Parker kept lobbying for evidence retesting,” Mike went on. “Eventually it came to light that it might have been Marlowe Geary, Frank’s son, who killed Parker’s daughter. Parker disappeared for a while after that, then reappeared as the founder of GIS.

“Given his military background and his wife’s murder of Frank Geary, police were concerned that GIS was some kind of vigilante organization, so the FBI was informed. There was a cursory investigation that yielded no evidence to support any wrongdoing and was quickly dropped.”

Suddenly Detective Harrison pushed through the last of the fecund overgrowth and moved into a clearing where bright fingers of sun shone through the canopy of trees. Illuminated by the rays, the ghost orchid floated there, white and quivering, where it had been waiting all along.

I see a girl. She is lying beneath a field of stars. She is wishing, wishing she were high above the earth, an explosion from a millennium ago, that she were as white and untouchable as that. A young man lies beside her. He is pure beauty, his features finely wrought, his body sculpted from marble. His eyes are supernovas; nothing escapes them. They are lovers, yes. She loves him. But in a truer sense, she is his prisoner. The thing that binds her is this terrible void she has inside, a sick fear that he is the only home she will ever know. And this is enough.

They leave the safety of the New Mexico church, climb into their stolen car, and drive on an empty dark road that winds through mountains. She rests her tired head against the glass and listens to the hum of the engine, the rush of tires on asphalt, the song on the radio, “Crazy,” sung by Patsy Cline. I’m crazy for lovin’ you.

She becomes aware of something in the distance: Far behind them she can see the orange eyes of the headlights from another car. She can see them in the sideview mirror. If he notices, he doesn’t seem concerned. But that’s only because he doesn’t know what she knows. He doesn’t know about the man who dropped the note on their table.

Save yourself, if you still can.

With his recent ugly confessions worming their way through her brain, she finds, beyond all hope, that she can. And in the small way she is still able, she does. She says nothing.

I do not remember shooting Gray. This memory has, thankfully, never returned to me. In fact, I don’t remember Texas at all. But I do remember the next time I saw Briggs, even though I didn’t know his name at the time.

Another awful hotel, off another highway, still in New Mexico. I emerged from the shower and found him sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigar. Marlowe had left over an hour before; where he went and how long he’d be gone, I had no way of knowing. But I’d wait for him. He knew that.

“You didn’t tell him about the note,” the man said, releasing a series of noxious gray circles from the O of his mouth. “I’m surprised. And pleased.”

I stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether he was real or not. I’d had “visits” prior to this from my mother, my father, and one of the girls Marlowe had killed. The girl had a barrette with tiny silk roses glued along its length; you could tell she really liked it, the way she kept lifting her hand to touch its surface, hoping to draw your eye. But I was distracted by the gaping red wound in her throat. She asked me, as she bled upon the bed, how I could let him do this to her. But when I closed my eyes and opened them again, she was gone. Since then I had stopped trusting my eyes and ears when it came to people appearing in my motel room.

“Someone has paid me a lot of money to find Geary before the police do,” he said, looking at the wall in front of him. “And they’re going to pay me a whole lot more when I hand him over.”

He turned and looked at me. His brow was heavy, his eyes deeply set, like two caves beneath a canopy of rock. His nose was a broken crag of flesh and cartilage. He had thick, full, candy-colored lips and girlishly long lashes. I wanted to look away, but I was fascinated by the pocked landscape of his face.

“The thing is, I need him alive. And I’ll be honest, I’m a lover, not a fighter. I need a clean catch, no blood or mess. He’s a big guy, stronger than me, in better shape,” he said, patting his huge gut and giving a little cough for emphasis. “I’ll have to surprise him or take him while he sleeps. This is where you come in, if you decide to help me. And I’ll make the decision easy for you.”

He took out a big gun and rested it tenderly on his lap. “You help me and I help you. I’ll give you a cut of my earnings, and I’ll help you run. You don’t help me?” he said with a shrug and a quick cock of his head. “I’ll still get Geary. And I’ll turn you over to the police. You’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.”

He blew a big cloud of smoke my way, then seemed to really examine me for the first time.

“What are you doing with yourself, anyway, huh?” he went on. “Are you crazy or what? You don’t look like you’re all there, Ophelia. That’s why I’m willing to help you. No one wants you to get hurt-any worse than you’ve been hurt already.”

I tightened the towel around myself, edged closer to the wall. I couldn’t think of how to respond.

“I’ll be waiting, watching,” he said, and got up with a groan from the bed and took the DO NOT DISTURB sign from the door and laid it on the table. “All I need you to do is unlock the door and hang this sign outside when he falls asleep. Then go in the bathroom and lie down in the tub. I’ll knock when it’s safe to come out.” With his free hand, he took a thick packet of cash from his pocket. “I’ll give you this, and I’ll drop you off at a bus station.”

“What makes you think I’ll do any of this?” I asked him finally. “What keeps me from telling him and then leaving that sign on the door, having him surprise you?”

“She speaks,” he said with a slow smile. He took a big drag on his cigar. “Because you hate him, Ophelia. I saw it on your face in that diner. You think you love him, but you know how evil he is, that one day he’s going to kill you, too. That you’re going to be a body someone finds in a motel just like this one.”

I felt a shudder move through me.

“Or the police are going to catch up with you at some point, some hotel clerk who’s not high on methamphetamine is going to recognize you and make a call. And there’s someone else tailing you, too.”

“Who?”

“I have no idea, but there’s someone else out there looking for you. I don’t know who he is or what he wants. It doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is, time’s up. You don’t help me, the next person to walk through that door or one just like it may not give you a choice at all.”

My whole body was shivering now.

“Put on some clothes,” he told me, moving toward the door. “You’ll catch a cold.” Before he left, he looked back and said, “Christ, kid, where are your parents?”

“She’s going to be okay,” my father says, bringing me back to the present. There was something grave about his tone, something off.

I turn to look at him. He is driving fast on the Long Island Expressway, headed for a small private airport where he says he has a friend with a plane who owes him a favor. He made a quick call at some point back at the shop that I didn’t hear, and the next thing I knew, we were on our way. I didn’t even know he had a car. Unbelievably, it’s a rather nice late-model Lincoln Town Car. There’s a lot I don’t know about my father, I guess.

“A guy I know, we used to ride together when we were kids,” he explained as we got ready to leave. “He went straight, got a job. Now he’s this big-time real-estate developer. He said anytime I need the plane day or night, it’s mine.”

“That’s a pretty big favor,” I said, skeptically.

“Trust me, it’s nothing compared to what I did for him.”

“Spare me the details.” I’m not in the mood for one of my father’s crazy stories. I don’t even know if there will be a plane waiting for us when we get to this supposed airport on Long Island. But I have no choice. My stomach is an acid brew; the image of my daughter bound and gagged is seared in my mind.

I look over at my father now. I can see he’s itching to tell me his story, but he manages to keep his mouth shut. I lean my head against the window and watch the trees whip past us. I wonder about the other cars on the road, envy them their mundane journeys-to a late shift or home from one, back from a party or a date. I never got to live a life like that, not really. Even my normal life as Annie was undercut by all my lies. You can hide from the things you’ve done, tamp them down, make them disappear from your day-to-day, but they’re always with you. I know that now, too late. You cannot cage the demons-they just rattle and scream and thrash until you can’t ignore them any longer. You must face them eventually. They demand it.

We pull off the highway and drive along a dark, empty access road. I see a field of hangars with small planes parked in neat rows. Off in the distance, there’s a small tower, then a line of lights that I imagine is a runway. I am relieved that there’s really an airport.

“He said that one of the gates would be open,” my father says, slowing down.

And so it is.

“How did you know I wasn’t really dead?” I ask my father as he turns off the road and drives through the open gate. I’m not sure why the question comes to me at the moment. Seems like there are other things to discuss. I can see lights up ahead, the figure of a man moving back and forth between a small craft and a hangar.

“Gray sent someone to let me know. Some kid. He gave me a note, explained everything that’s been happening. I guess he didn’t want me hearing about it some other way.”

It’s like Gray to cover all the bases that way. I wish he were here now, but at the same time it’s right that I’m on my own. My father comes to a stop, and we sit for a minute in the dark. The man by the plane quits what he’s doing to look at us.

My father stares straight ahead for a second, then lowers his head and releases a long, slow breath. We both know he’s not coming with me. I don’t know the reasons, but I know he’s not capable of going any further. He has always done only what he was able to do. Maybe that’s true of all of us. Maybe it’s just that when it’s your parents, their shortfalls are so much more heartbreaking.

“Look, kid,” he says, and then stops. I hope he’s not going to launch into some monologue about how he’s failed as a father and how sorry he is. I don’t have time, and I don’t want to hear it. We sit in silence while he seems to be striking up the courage to say something.

“It doesn’t have to be like this, you know?” he says finally. “How about we just call the cops?”

“They have my daughter.”

“Ophelia-” he says, then stops again. Whatever he wanted to say he has changed his mind. “I know. You’re right. Go get your girl. But be careful.”

I watch his face, the muscle working in his jaw, a vein throbbing at his temple. As ever, I am not privy to what kind of battle he’s fighting inside himself.

“I love you, Opie. Always have,” he says, not looking at me.

“I know that, Dad.” And I do. I really do.

There’s no embrace, no tearful good-bye, no words of wisdom or encouragement. I leave the car, and within fifteen minutes I’m in a Cirrus Design SR20 aircraft on my way back-of all places-to Frank’s ranch, where this journey began.

I sit in the rear of the plane, strapped into the harness with headphones around my ears. The pilot, a stocky guy with a crew cut, greeted me and gave me some safety instructions, but he has not said another word since he helped me strap in. He doesn’t seem interested in me or what my story is; he is a man who is paid to do what he was told and not ask questions. I noticed that he barely glanced at my face, as if he didn’t want to be able to identify it later.

The noise from the engines is oddly hypnotic, restful in its relentlessness. As the plane rockets down the runway and lifts into the air, I think about Victory.

I delivered her naturally, no drugs. I wanted to be present for her entry into this world, wanted to feel her pass through me. Those crashing waves of consciousness-altering pain, I allowed them to carry me to another place within myself. I let them take me moaning and sighing to motherhood. I felt my daughter move through my body and begin her life. Our eyes locked when I put her on my breast, and we knew each other. We’d known each other all along.

I’d never seen Gray cry before. But he did as he held her in his arms for the first time. In that moment she was his daughter. The fact that she had Marlowe’s blood running through her veins never occurred to him or me. She belonged to us. And even more than that, she belonged to herself. I could see her purity, her innocence, all the possibilities before her. She would be defined by our family, not by the evil deeds of Marlowe and his father. I swore to myself that she’d never be touched by them or by Ophelia and her shameful past.

“What do you want to name her?” Gray asked.

“I want to call her Victory,” I said, because the moment of her birth was a victory for all of us. I felt that Ophelia, Marlowe, Frank, and my mother were all far behind me now. I was Annie Powers, Gray’s wife, and, most important, I was Victory’s mother. I had thrown off my ugly past, forgotten it both literally and figuratively. My whole body was shaking from the effort of childbirth, the surge of hormones and emotion rattling through my frame.

“Victory,” he said with a wide smile. He was mesmerized by her, staring at her tiny face. “She’s perfect.”

He sat beside me with our daughter in his arms. “Victory,” he said again. And it was her name.

I’m trying to recapture the feeling I had that day, the power I felt in the knowledge that I was Victory’s mother, the certainty I had in my heart that I could protect her from every awful thing in my past. But the feeling is gone. As the plane takes off and the world below me gets smaller and smaller, I think that the path of my life has always been like this-an ugly, frightening maze. No matter how hard and fast I run, no matter how badly I want to escape its passages, ultimately they lead back to where I started.

40

Sarah had read something, some book about food, that made her think they should stop eating red meat. So there was a lot of stir-frying going on at the Harrison home, lots of tofu and fish and poultry being prepared with vegetables and brown rice. But somehow everything seemed to taste like soy sauce, no matter what the ingredients. The house was starting to reek of it. But Harrison never complained about his wife’s cooking; he always ate what she prepared and showered her with compliments. He appreciated that she cooked at all, that she made a point of having something ready for him when he came home, that she waited and ate with him most of the time, unless it was very late.

Even though he’d called and told her not to wait up, he found her on the couch when he walked through the front door. She was watching some movie with the sound down low, huddled under a blanket. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were tearing up a house on the screen, shooting at each other with big guns. He could see the blond crown of Sarah’s head and heard her sigh as he shut the door and rearmed the alarm system.

She sat up quickly, looking startled, as if she’d been dozing.

“What are you doing up?” he asked.

“I was up with the baby,” she said through a yawn. She lifted her long, graceful arms above her head in a stretch. “I thought I’d wait awhile and see if you came home.”

He came to sit beside her. He took her into his arms and felt the sleepy warmth of her body. She smelled of raspberries, something in her shampoo.

“I made a stir-fry. Want me to heat it up?” He noticed that there was something shaky about her voice.

“No thanks,” he said. “I ate. A big, juicy hamburger dripping with fat, with ketchup and mayonnaise.” He held out his hands to indicate the enormousness of the burger. “And fries, soaked in oil.”

She wrinkled her nose and made a sound of disgust. “If you only knew,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “Poison.”

“I’ll die happy,” he said, shedding his jacket.

His eyes fell upon it then. On the end table by the couch was a stack of their bank statements. The sight of it made his stomach bottom out. He turned to see her watching his face.

“I never look at these things, you know?” she said with a light laugh. She rubbed her temple, then wrapped her arms around her middle. She bit her lip the way she did before she was about to cry. “But I saw this interview on CNN. Some finance expert who said that women are disempowered in a marriage by being ignorant regarding their finances. It seemed obvious, but then I realized I don’t even know how much money we have in the bank.”

She took a deep breath. “And I thought, we have a daughter now and I don’t want her to see her mother as this helpless woman who doesn’t even know how to pay her bills online. If anything ever happened to you, I wouldn’t know anything about our money. And you’re a cop, you know. Something could happen.”

He kept his eyes on her face. He watched her eyes widen and rim with tears.

“Sarah-”

“We got married so young,” she said quickly, interrupting him. “I literally came right from my parents’ house into our marriage. Someone’s always taken care of me, Ray. But now there’s a person who needs me to take care of her.”

He started to talk again, but she lifted up her hand.

“I don’t understand all these huge withdrawals from our savings. And then this deposit,” she said, picking up the pile. He saw her handwriting and some highlighted entries. The papers quivered in her grasp. Over the baby monitor, he heard his daughter sigh and shift in her sleep. “Can you explain this to me, Ray?”

His mind raced through a hundred lies he could tell, a hundred different techniques he could use to manipulate her in this moment to make her feel bad or wrong for confronting him this way. This is what he was good at, after all, molding himself, his tone, his words, to make people do and say and think what he wanted. But he didn’t have the heart for any more lies, any more secrets. As he sat in their comfortable home and told her every wrong thing he’d done, wasn’t it also true that in some secret part of himself he was glad? Glad that, for better or worse, she would finally know all of him?

It looks as if the plane is landing in a sea of black, except for the tiniest strip of lights along what I’m hoping is the ground. The ride has been turbulent, and I’m not sure how much more my stomach can take as we hurtle downward. The plane pitches and lofts, and I’m wondering if it’s normal, if, after all this, the tiny plane I’m in is going to crash. What would happen to Victory then? I try not to think about it during the white-knuckle journey to the ground. But when we touch down, it’s surprisingly gentle.

“They said there will be someone to greet you,” the pilot says through the headphones. “Someone waiting.”

“Who?” I ask. “Who’s waiting?”

I see the pilot shrug. He doesn’t turn around. Again I have the thought that he doesn’t want to see my face, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t want me to see his. As it is, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.

“I don’t know,” he says, his tone flat and not inviting further questions.

When the engines are off, I thank him, exit the plane, and step into a humid Florida night. The tree frogs are singing and the mosquitoes start biting as soon as I strip off my coat, which I won’t need here. I can already feel beads of sweat make their debut on my forehead.

In the distance I see the dark, lean form of a man standing beside a vehicle. Its headlights are the only thing illuminating the blackness except for the light coming from the small control tower above us. I don’t see anyone up there.

I approach the vehicle for lack of any alternatives, and I realize that it’s the Angry Man.

“Do you know who I am?” he asks as I draw near.

I shake my head. The situation takes on a surreal quality. “I remember you,” I say. “But I don’t know your name.”

“My name’s Alan Parker, father of Melissa, husband of Janet.”

The words hit as though he’s thrown stones at me. I feel that the knowledge should illuminate what’s happening to me, but it doesn’t.

“Once upon a time,” he goes on, “my wife and I believed that Frank Geary murdered our daughter.”

He is dressed in dark pants and a heavy flannel shirt, with a jacket over that. It is far too hot for all those clothes, but he doesn’t appear uncomfortable. Instead he seems to hunch himself in as if bracing against the cold. And is he shivering just slightly? He seems out of place in this moment of my life, as though he has no business being there.

“Our rage was the driving force in our lives for years. It consumed us.” He releases a throaty cough, then pulls a pack of Marlboro reds from his pocket, lights one with a Zippo, and takes a long, deep drag. He has the look of a lifelong smoker, gray and drawn.

“You know, the thing was, I was a terrible father. Absent a lot, distant when I was around. I never so much as held my daughter or told her I loved her in all the years she was alive. I provided for her, sure, roof over her head, nice things, college. That’s what I knew how to do. That’s all I thought a father had to do. The point is, I never devoted much of myself to her until after she’d been taken from me. But I was a berserker in the crusade for justice against Frank Geary. I think Melissa would have been surprised by my devotion. I think she died believing I didn’t love her.”

I don’t know what to say to him. I’m not sure why he’s telling me this or what we’re doing here. But I listen because I don’t have any choice, and I figure as long as he’s talking, my daughter is safe. My whole body tingles with the desire to be moving, to be anywhere else but here.

“Of course,” he says, “it was all much harder on Janet. The mother-daughter thing, man, you can’t get inside that. I was filled with rage, with the desire for revenge. It was like rocket fuel in my veins. But when Melissa died, Janet died, too. Simple as that. She was still walking around, but she never lived another day of her life. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she did what she did. But I never saw it coming; I wouldn’t have thought her capable.”

He is racked suddenly by a fit of coughing so intense, it’s embarrassing to watch. He takes a wad of tissues from his pants and covers his mouth until the coughing subsides. When he pulls it back from his mouth, I can see that the tissues are dark with blood. My mind is filled now with the memories of the night Janet Parker killed Frank and then herself. I can hear the gunshots and smell the smoke. I never asked myself who started that fire, but I imagine it was Marlowe. I think he intended for my mother to die that night, too. He didn’t expect me to run back in and drag her outside. I am thinking about this as Alan Parker recovers himself and starts to talk again.

“Even as I mourned Janet, I was happy for her in a way. I knew how good it must have felt to pull that trigger. I know she died at peace.” He has a sad smile on his face that reminds me of how Janet Parker looked that night, as though she’d laid down a great burden. I don’t tell him this. I don’t know if he realizes I watched her die, and I’m not sure what good it will do to tell him.

“But Frank Geary didn’t kill Melissa,” I say, really just guessing.

He shook his head. “He may not have, no. I had Melissa’s body exhumed when we won the first round of evidence retesting. And the DNA samples found were similar to Frank Geary’s without being identical. So the conclusion was that Marlowe Geary played some role in her torture and death.”

There’s flash lightning in the clouds above us and the deep rumble of distant thunder, but it’s not raining. Every few minutes the sky illuminates and then goes dark again, as if someone is turning it on and off with a switch.

“To be honest,” he says, “I’d suspected this early on. In my life I’ve been around enough killers-in Vietnam-to know one when I saw one. At the trial, Marlowe seemed as dead inside as his father. As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

I realize something then. The lights start to come on inside, illuminating places within me that have been dark for so long. “Briggs worked for you. You sent him to find Marlowe after we ran.”

He nods. “I wasn’t sure what Marlowe had to do with Melissa’s death. But I knew he’d used Janet to kill his father. And when I realized he was killing other women, taking other people’s daughters away, I wanted to stop him. I was filled with a sick rage-it was something living inside me. But I didn’t want him arrested and in prison. I didn’t want that kind of justice. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to suffer and die the way his victims did. And I knew plenty of people to help with that-the military is good at turning out merciless killers.”

“Why didn’t you come yourself?”

“After Janet died, I started coughing up blood. The sickness of fear and anger, you can’t carry it forever. It starts to kill you. In my case, cancer.”

More of that horrible coughing. I hate, am repulsed by him, and pity him in equal measure.

“After you and Marlowe were ‘killed’ in your car accident, I had an epiphany. I realized that my and Janet’s rage and desire for revenge had cost us everything. We might have had some years together, we might have touched happiness again, if only we had faced down our fears, our regrets, our hatred for Frank Geary. But instead we let the rip he’d opened in the fabric of our life suck us in like a black hole. We let him destroy all three of us.”

He looks at me as though trying to decide if I’m listening to him. Whatever he sees on my face makes the corners of his mouth turn up slightly.

“I decided I’d fight my cancer and live for Janet and Melissa rather than die for them. As I fought that war, I realized that the rage I’d directed at Frank and Marlowe Geary was really directed at myself, for all the ways I’d failed as father and husband. If I’d been present for them while they lived, maybe I wouldn’t have had so many regrets when they died.”

I notice how still he is. There was so much anxiety and adrenaline living inside me that I couldn’t keep myself from fidgeting, shifting my weight from foot to foot, pacing a few steps away, then back toward him. But he is fixed and solid. He keeps his hands in his pockets, his eyes locked on some spot off in the distance. All there is to him is his raspy voice and the story he tells.

“When I went into remission, I started an organization called Grief Intervention Services with some friends of mine to help other victims and families of victims face their fear and heal.”

I draw in a sharp breath as I remember. “Your website. I visited it after I heard about you on television.”

He nods. “The website captured your IP address. It was only a matter of days before we traced it to Gray Powers. It was only a little while longer before we connected him to you. Just one visit confirmed that you were Ophelia March.”

I stare at his pale face and think how ill he looks. There is a distance to his stare. He is already on his way somewhere else.

“Naturally, I started to wonder. If Ophelia survived, what about Marlowe Geary? And, if so, where is he?”

“But you’d given up your quest for revenge,” I say, putting my hand on the hood of his car. I am feeling weak now, wobbly. The frenetic energy I had is abandoning me.

He offers a thin smile. “I’ve always remembered you, Ophelia. You were the saddest-looking child I’d ever seen. I remember you coming and going from that farm, the circles under your eyes, the way you hunched your shoulders and hung your head. You were living in a pit of snakes; I was never sure which of them would be first to squeeze the life out of you, then swallow you whole. I should have guessed it would be Marlowe.”

I don’t know what to say.

“The man you knew as Dr. Paul Brown believed that somewhere inside you, you might know where Marlowe Geary was. He suspected that your fugue states, the flights you made from your life as Annie Powers, were Ophelia’s attempts to return to him. He also felt you were on the cusp of remembering a lot of the things you had forgotten. So he devised ways to jog your memory a bit.”

“Wait,” I say, lifting a hand. “Dr. Brown worked for you? So the encounter on the beach, the necklace-those were his ideas on how to jog my memory? So that you could find Marlowe Geary and exact your revenge?”

“This is not only about me and what I want.”

“No?”

“No. It’s about both of us. I’m trying to help you.”

I confided those things to my doctor, and he used them to manipulate my memory. It seems a relatively small violation in comparison to everything, but I feel my face go hot with anger. I realize that I have grown uncomfortable with rage. Ophelia used to rant and scream and weep. But Annie is always dead calm.

“But Vivian brought me to Dr. Brown,” I say. I remember then that Gray told me that the doctor was someone Drew knew. And suddenly I feel sick, realizing how everything fits together.

Parker gives me a sympathetic grimace; for a second he looks as though he might reach to comfort me, but I take a quick step back from him. “They thought they were helping you, Ophelia. They thought they were helping you to face your fears so that you could be well again. For Victory.”

At first I think he means my husband, too. But it doesn’t sound like Gray. He’s too upright, too honest. He loves me too much. I can’t imagine him being a part of something like this. And if he were, why would he kill Briggs?

“Gray didn’t know what was happening,” I say. “He was afraid, too, that Marlowe-or someone from the past-had come for me. That’s why he killed Briggs.”

Parker offers a slow, sad nod. “You’re right. He never would have been a part of it. He would never deceive you or cause you so much pain. In fact, in his way, though only because he loves you, he has been enabling you. Maybe part of him doesn’t want you to remember.”

“So who then? Who thought they were helping me then?” I yell, nearly shriek. I am startled by my own emotion. He seems startled, too, as though he didn’t expect any of this to upset me. He raises a calming hand.

“Your in-laws, Drew and Vivian. A representative approached Vivian, told her that you’d contacted us for help and then changed your mind. She and Drew agreed to our plan to help you confront your past.”

I think of Vivian taking me to Dr. Brown, of the fear on her face when I confronted her with the things that were happening to me. I struggle with this, trying to recast her as the liar and the manipulator she had to be to do that. I want to think I know her well enough to know that she was trying to help me. I hope that’s true, at least.

“No,” I say, drawing in a breath to calm myself. Something is wrong. “They’d never let you hurt Victory. They’d die first.” I am as sure of this as I have ever been of anything.

“Admittedly,” he says with a mild shrug, “they weren’t aware the lengths to which we’d go to accomplish our goals. No one ever is.”

He seems empty then, vacant, and I see that Alan Parker is a man who has been gutted by grief and rage, filled up again by a quest for revenge that he could never quite release, even when he knew better. I feel a sob rise up, a great tide moving inside my chest.

“They were so sure you were helpless, so devastated by the events of your life that you would never be whole. They resorted to these tactics to help you. Well, really to help Victory, I think, so that she would have a strong and healthy mother. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that now you’re the one to help them.”

I feel that adrenaline pump again as my heart starts to thud.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s all up to you now, Ophelia.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, moving closer to him. My voice has taken on the quality of a plea. “Where are we? Where’s my daughter?”

I’ve never felt so frightened or so desperate, but he just moves away from the car. I see he is going to leave me here. “The keys are in the ignition. There’s a gun in the glove box. At the end of the road, you make a right. You’ll know where you are once you’re driving.”

He starts walking away from me then, moving toward the trees that surround the airfield. “You need to be strong now, Ophelia. Stronger than you’ve ever been. For yourself, for your daughter, for me.”

“You never needed me to lead you to Marlowe,” I call after him. “You knew where he was. Why are you doing this?”

I see him lift the wad of tissues to his mouth, see his shoulders hunch into a cough. That sob that’s been living in my chest escapes through my throat.

“What do you want me to do?” I cry out. “What do I need to do to get my daughter back?”

Just then the tower lights go out. I look up, and as I do, the runway lights go dark. The plane is gone; the pilot must have moved into the hangar, because I never heard it take off again. The only lights come from the headlights of the car beside me.

“Tell me!” I yell into the darkness. But the Angry Man is gone. I am alone. The air around me is thick with silence. Out of sheer desperation, I get into the car and start to drive. I turn onto the road, and he’s right-I do know where I am. The farm is less than ten miles away.

“They are not here,” said Esperanza at the door to my house. She blocked the small opening she’d created and was peering at Detective Harrison worriedly through the crack.

“I need to know where they are, Esperanza,” he said sternly. “This isn’t a social call.”

She looked at him blankly, opened the door a little wider. She was shaking her head and seemed close to tears.

“Miss Victory is with her abuela,” she said. “Mr. Gray, he left en la noche. Nothing. He say nothing. Mrs. Annie, she’s-” That’s where she started to cry. “They’re all gone.”

“Let me in, Esperanza,” he said more gently, giving her what he hoped was a look of compassion. His “I’m a really good guy and I only want to help” look. It worked: She opened the door, and he stepped inside. She started talking fast, her tears coming harder now.

“Mr. Gray, he call me the other day, say Victory is coming home, can I come back? I come back but no Victory,” she said.

Harrison took her by the elbow, led her over to the couch, and stood beside her until she managed to stop crying and looked up.

“We wait and wait,” she said. “In the night a call come. Mr. Gray leaves. He just told me go home and no worry. But he was very afraid.” She motioned at her face, to tell him she read Powers’s expression. “So I stay. I wait for them to come home.”

“When was this?” he asked her.

“Two nights I wait.”

“And you haven’t heard anything else?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing. I call Mr. Drew. No answer; no one call back.”

He walked over to the phone and scrolled through the numbers on the caller ID, looking for what, he didn’t know. “The call came on this phone?”

She shook her head. “No. His cell phone.”

Harrison felt like he was trying to hold on to a fistful of sand-the tighter his grasp, the faster it slipped away. His desperation was compounded by the promises he’d made to his wife. She didn’t care about the money, she said. She accepted his addiction. What she couldn’t understand and wasn’t sure she could forgive were the lies, the blackmail, the secrets he’d kept from her. She couldn’t understand what he’d done to me.

“Why, Ray? Why didn’t you come to me? We could have asked my parents for money, taken out a loan. How could you let yourself go so low? It’s not you.”

But that’s what she didn’t quite get. It was him. Part of him was in fact that low. Money and the things he thought it could give him-not possessions necessarily, but freedom, ease of living, a certain power he’d lacked all his life-obsessed him. That’s how he could risk the small amount they had in the hope of making more, that’s how he could blackmail us not just for the money to pay off his gambling debts but a hundred thousand dollars besides. And Gray had paid it-paid it without a word, because he loved me that much, because he wanted to protect me.

“You need to make it right, Ray,” Sarah said.

“How? How do I make it right?” he asked. He reached for her, but she moved away from him. She shifted over to the corner of their modular unit and sat there with her arms wrapped around herself in a protective hug.

“You can start by paying him back everything you didn’t give the bookie and making a plan to pay back the rest,” she said gently.

The thought filled him with dread. He couldn’t stand the idea that their savings account would be empty, that they’d go back to living paycheck to paycheck. That he’d always be worried about the next time the car broke down or the refrigerator started to leak. He wasn’t sure he could do it.

“Sarah…” he started, but found he couldn’t finish.

“Find a way to make things right, Ray.” She didn’t issue any threats or ultimatums; she didn’t ask him to leave the house. But he heard in her tone what she never said: Find a way to make things right, Ray, or I won’t ever be able to look at you the same way again.

She must have seen the despair on his face, because she moved back over to him and placed a hand on his leg. He couldn’t even look at her.

“Everybody makes mistakes, Ray,” she said, her voice very low and gentle. He’d heard her talk to the baby in this tone. “Everybody stumbles. It’s what you do then that makes or breaks your life. It’s what you do after you fall that’s the measure of who you are.”

He left the room then. She called after him quietly, but he kept walking. He walked out onto his back porch and gazed up at the sky. He didn’t want to be in the same room with her. He couldn’t stand for her to see him cry.

“What’s going on?” Harrison was snapped back to the present by Ella’s voice. She stood in the open doorway looking different somehow, a little angry maybe. She looked fit and strong dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, sneakers on her feet. She didn’t seem primped and coiffed in the usual way. He found himself staring at her, trying to figure out why she looked so different. She frowned at him and then walked over to Esperanza.

“Where’s Gray?” Ella said, taking her by the shoulders.

“Gone,” Esperanza said, starting to weep again. Ella embraced her. “I don’t know where.”

Ella glanced back over at Harrison. “What’s he doing here?”

“This is none of your business, Mrs. Singer. Go home,” he said.

She gave him a dark look, released Esperanza, and walked over to him, got in his face. “Don’t tell me that. First Annie disappears. Then Drew and Vivian take off with Victory. There’s a memorial service-pretty premature, if you ask me. The woman’s only been missing two weeks. Now Gray’s gone. Someone needs to tell me what’s going on. It is my business. These people are my friends.”

“Go home, Mrs. Singer,” he said again, walking over toward the door and holding it open for her. He saw color rise on her neck and cheeks, but she didn’t move.

“I can get you into his office upstairs,” she said after a beat. “Maybe you’ll find some of the answers you’re looking for up there.”

He remembered the door with the keypad lock from his previous visits. “You know the code,” he said, not even bothering to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

She nodded. “Ophelia let it slip.”

“She let it slip?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Seems unlikely.”

“Maybe she just got a little careless around her friends,” she said with a shrug.

He didn’t quite believe her, but he was out of luck and out of time.

“Okay, so what is it?”

“You tell me what’s happening and I’ll tell you the code.”

He released a sigh and rolled his eyes. “You’re not helping her by slowing me down. You know that.”

“Just tell me.”

He was desperate enough to do it. He told her everything he knew, starting with my fake identity and my history with Marlowe Geary and ending with Alan Parker and Grief Intervention Services.

“You think she’s alive?”

“I do. And I think she needs some help. I just don’t know how to give it to her.”

Ella gave him a nod; he thought she looked a little sad. “It’s VICTORY, with a five for the V and a zero for the O.”

He took the stairs to the office with Ella right behind him and punched in the code. The door unlocked, and he pushed it open. The room was dark, and when he stepped inside, he realized something that caused his stomach to bottom out.

“You called her Ophelia,” he said, turning around.

“Sorry, Detective Harrison, nothing personal. You should have taken your money and disappeared.”

She held something in her hand that he didn’t recognize until the prongs shot into his body and electricity started to rocket through him. A horrific scream escaped him; he barely recognized it as his own voice. The room around him spiraled as the pain seemed to ratchet higher and higher until he could hardly form a thought in his mind. Before everything went black, he remembered his wife coming up behind him on the porch and wrapping her arms around him as he wept. He remembered feeling a terrible mingling of deep shame in himself, gratitude for her love, and the fervent hope that he could be worthy of her again.

“You can fix this, Ray,” she said, squeezing hard. “I know you can.”

I drive up beside the old gate that blocks the drive to the horse farm. I am a wreck, sweating with fear and the urgency to do what Parker wants me to do-even though I’m not totally sure what that is. I pull the car over onto the shoulder near the thick tree cover. When I turn off the engine, I am swallowed by the sounds of the Florida night. The property is a huge yawning darkness, and for a second I don’t think I can bring myself to enter. But of course I have to go. My daughter needs me. It is that thought that impels me from the car and brings me to the locked gate.

The lock seems old and rusted through, as though it hasn’t been used in years. This can’t be so, I know that. I pick up a rock and start banging on it hard, hoping it will fall to pieces as it would in the movies. But I can’t get it open. I’ll have to leave my car on the road and go around the gate, which is suitable only to keep vehicles from moving up the drive and not really designed to keep out intruders.

The thought of walking that long, dark road alone is almost too much. I remember the gun then and return to the car for it. I open the glove box and find a.38 Special, just your standard revolver. It’ll do. With the gun heavy in my hand, I feel slightly better, not like a girl afraid of the dark. I feel like what I need to be: a woman intent on doing whatever it is she must to protect her child or die trying.

I walk around the gate and begin heading toward the horse farm. The last time I walked this road, I was seventeen years old with nothing to lose. What I wouldn’t give now for some of the empty numbness I felt that night, that ignorance of consequences.

I am washed over by memory as I make the trek. I remember Janet Parker’s car gliding past me in the dark. I remember the clicking of its cooling engine when I saw it a while later. I remember the smell of smoke, the percussion of the gunshot. I see the halo of blond hair soaked in blood, the first time I knew Marlowe was a killer. I hear his confessions beneath the New Mexico sky. Suddenly I am thinking of Gray.

I never saw Briggs again after he made his offer that night in the motel room-or if I did, I don’t remember. I don’t think there was time for me to do what he asked. I think it was just another night or maybe two before Gray caught up with us. All I recall is suddenly seeing this mammoth form in the doorway of yet another miserable motel. I’d seen him before, I knew that much. But for some reason a deep relief mingled with my fear when I saw him standing there. He strode into the room, and it was a second before I saw the needle in his hand.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, jabbing the needle into my arm. I don’t think I even struggled. “Your father sent me for you.”

“It’s just a sedative,” he said, and he was already floating away as the substance flooded through my veins. “I can’t have you shooting me again, can I?”

The next thing I knew, I was bound in the back of his car. He burst through the driver’s door. I could see St. Francis Cathedral before I blacked out again.

I know only Gray’s version of what happened that night. How he went back to the motel and waited in the dark for Marlowe to return. How he surprised Marlowe, as Briggs had planned to do. How Gray had overpowered him in a fight, managed to knock him unconscious and bind him. His plan had been to take the car to the police station on the other side of the square, abandon it with Marlowe inside, return to the Suburban parked just a few blocks away, and make an anonymous call from a pay phone when we were far enough away.

His mistake, as he saw it in hindsight, was twofold-not using the sedative he’d brought, because he thought Marlowe was out cold, and putting Marlowe into the backseat instead of into the trunk of the vehicle. Marlowe came to as Gray drove, got loose from his bindings, and attacked Gray. The struggle ended with Gray shooting Marlowe in the face and leaping from the car just before it dove over the side of the road into the Rio Grande Valley below.

I have heard this story so many times. I have asked Gray to tell it until it has taken on a mythic quality, like a story from childhood. As I near the end of the drive and see the roof of the house through the trees, I wonder how much of what he’s told me was true. I don’t know. After my conversation with Alan Parker, everything seems suspect.

When I step into the clearing where the house and the barn and the empty horse pen stand, I am surprised by the condition of the property. It is dilapidated in a way I hadn’t expected. I imagined it repaired after the fire, cared for by the women whom my mother supposedly sheltered during their crusade to save their husbands, lovers, and sons from death row. But two of the upstairs windows are blown out, and though it’s dark, I can see that there appears to be a hole in the roof. The front door hangs off its hinges, the porch has folded onto itself. I hear the mournful calling of an owl in the distance, along with a chorus of frogs. The barn stands intact, but the whole place has an air of desertion-the desertion of years.

There’s an escalation of tension in my chest; the darkness all around me feels like it’s closing in. How have I come to be here? Is this really happening? Was Alan Parker a figment of my imagination? Out of sheer desperation, I start to yell.

“Marlowe!”

I call his name again and again, each time my voice disappearing into the thick, humid air. All the night songs cease, and everything listens to my calls, the desperate baying of a wounded animal. I drop to my knees in the dirt.

I realize then that he’s not here. No one could live in this place, this dead, awful place, not even him. The despair that sweeps over me is so total I am physically weakened by it. I put my forehead to the ground.

And then, kneeling there, my past and present one at last, I remember. I pull myself to my feet. I know where Marlowe is. Alan Parker is right; I have always known. He did need me to find Marlowe-because I am the only person on earth who knows where he might have been all these years. He has not been pursuing me. He has been waiting for me, just where I knew he would be.

I walk into the trees. I remember the way as I move through the thick overgrowth, careless of lurking snakes, ignoring the mosquitoes that feed on my skin and hum in my ear. I’d run if I could, but my progress is slow, pushing aside branches and stepping in soft places where my ankles turn. It seems to take hours, but finally I hear the babbling of the creek ahead. I come to a stop at its banks, and I see it there: the trailer. There’s a light burning in the window.

“With provisions you could live out here forever,” Marlowe told me a lifetime ago. I never imagined I would be here again, not like this.

From the bank of the creek, I call his name. The sound of it fills the night. Silence is the only answer. I am about to call again when he emerges from the trees behind the trailer.

Though he is just a shape in the darkness, I know him. He is not the man I remember. He approaches me, leaning heavily upon a cane and dragging the right side of his body. He moves slowly, as though every step causes him pain. When he draws closer, I can see that he is hideously disfigured, the left side of his face little more than an explosion of skin. I find myself recoiling, moving backward as he moves forward. Those eyes are the same black sinkholes in which I have drowned again and again.

I realize that my entire body is quavering, every muscle tense, every nerve ending electrified. I can’t believe I am looking at him, that his flesh is solid, that he stands on the ground. For the past few years, he has been a specter, haunting every dark space inside my psyche. The realness of him, his physicality, now drains all his power.

“Ophelia,” he says. His voice has an odd, warped quality, but I can still hear the music of my name-O-feel-ya. “You’re home.”

I remember thinking he was the only home I’d ever know. How sad, how empty I must have been to think that. I know what a real home is now. I have one with Gray and Victory. I’ll do anything to go back there.

“No,” I say, unable to take my eyes from his horrible face. It doesn’t even look like skin, more like melted wax. He is a mangled facsimile of the man in my memories. But, amazingly, I still feel his pull, remember how I wanted to please him, how badly I craved his love.

“How did you survive?” I ask him, my voice just a whisper. “How did you come here?”

Something awful was happening to his mouth, a terrible twisting of his face. He was smiling.

“Back in New Mexico,” he says slowly, “someone found me by the side of the road, near death. I’d been shot in the face, but I still managed to get out of the car before it went off the road.” It seemed painful for him to speak; the words emerged long and slow. “I was taken to the hospital and treated as a John Doe. I was unrecognizable, claimed to have no memory of who I was or where I’d been. When I could move around again, I called your mother. She came for me and brought me back here, cared for me until she died last year.”

I feel a surprising wave of shock and grief to know that my mother has died. In my heart I thought I’d find her here alive and well, still trying to save the condemned. I guess the abused and neglected child is always hoping for a reckoning, some restitution, an embrace that never comes. And then there’s the pain, the anger that she cared for Marlowe all these years after what he’d done to me.

“How did she die?” I want to know.

“Car accident,” he said with a shrug. “Drunk. Luckily, I had enough provisions to last me.”

I’m struck that he doesn’t seem to care at all about her. I’m not sure why I’m surprised. Dr. Brown said once, “He was a psychopath, the worst kind of sociopath. They don’t love, Annie. They can’t.”

I have no way to determine if what he says is true. For all I know, he killed her as he did so many others. Or maybe she’s not dead at all. I don’t know. There’s no time to think about that now.

I can hear his labored breathing, feel his eyes on me. When I look at his face, he doesn’t even seem human. He is vacant. I take another step back from him. I have the thought that he’s not really as crippled as he seems, that maybe this is how he lures people now that his beauty is gone: pity. I imagine him living here on this property, alone, haunting its rooms, walking its woods. The thought of it chills me.

“Who takes care of you now?” I want to know this for some reason-how he’s been living here on this decimated property, this wasteland of my memories. I wonder if someone helps him, if even as he is, he is still able to lure and manipulate and cause people to do his bidding.

“I manage,” he says. “It’ll be easier now that you’re home. I’ve missed you so much, Ophelia.”

His words seem hollow, like lines he’s rehearsed so often they’ve lost meaning. I don’t believe he has thought of me except in the most passing moments. It is I who have been obsessed with him. It is I who have thought of him day and night, plotted my way back to him. He is my sickness, eating me alive like Alan Parker’s cancer.

“I’ve missed you so much,” he says again.

He thinks I’ve come back for him. My hand tightens around the gun. Sweat is dripping down my back, and I can hear blood rushing in my ears. I realize that I’m terrified of him, as though he could somehow force me to stay, as though I could be caught like a fly in a web again, too weak, too powerless to escape him.

“No,” I say, looking into those dead eyes. “No.”

“You belong to me, Ophelia,” he says quietly, moving closer, reaching out his hand.

This has been the truth for so long. Since the day I met him, I have been clinging to him or running from him. I have allowed him to control my heart and my mind. I have loved him madly, and I have lived in terror of his return. And yes, I have hated him. Briggs’s words come back to me: Because you hate him, Ophelia. I saw it on your face in that diner. You think you love him, but you know how evil he is, that one day he’s going to kill you, too. That you’re going to be a body someone finds in a motel just like this one.

Marlowe Geary did kill me, and I was his willing accomplice. Gray found my body in that New Mexico hotel room and brought me back to life. Now I am responsible for bringing myself back to wholeness, to heal myself so that I can be the mother my daughter deserves, the woman I deserve to be.

I remember then that he’s Victory’s father, that because of who we were together, she exists in this world. The union that has made me weakest has produced the union that has made me strongest. It seems a raw truth, so odd that it’s almost funny. The universe has a sense of humor, a taste for irony. But this is a private joke I don’t share. He has no right to know her; he has nothing to do with her.

“You belong to me, Ophelia.”

“Not anymore.” And I find I have nothing more to say. There is not a moment of hesitation, of conscience now that he is injured and unarmed. I do exactly what I have come here to do, what Ophelia has been trying to do for years. I take the gun from my waist and open fire. I see his body jerk and shake with the impact of the bullets. I keep firing until it is empty. When I’m done, he’s on the ground, his arms and legs spread wide and so still, an oval of blood spreading around him. I walk over to his body and see his staring eyes. A river of blood flows from his mouth. I stand there watching for I don’t know how long, until I’m certain beyond any doubt that he is finally dead.

In those moments I remember all the girls I watched him kill-I see their heart-shaped necklaces, and sparkle-painted nails, their miniskirts and cheap tattoos. I hear them screaming, hear them crying for their mothers. I couldn’t help them then. I can’t help them now. There’s only one little girl I can save. There’s only one cry I can answer. I feel a sharp pain that starts in my neck and spreads into my head. A bright, white star spreads across my vision then, and I am gone.

41

When they found Detective Harrison, everyone was shocked. He was such an upright man who’d done so much good in the community, a good husband and a father, a good cop. No one could believe that he’d picked up an underage hooker on the outskirts of the city, did some heroin with her, and then passed out in his car to be found by police responding to an anonymous tip made from a nearby pay phone.

How terrible, they said. Rumor has it that his wife threw him out. He must have had some kind of nervous breakdown; there was no history of this kind of behavior. No drugs, his friends were sure. Not even much of a drinker, they added. There were rumors of a gambling addiction. Suspect deposits in his bank account. How sad.

He ranted and raved as they took him in and processed him as they would any perpetrator. The cops who had been his friends were unable to meet his eyes. He told them the whole story about the gambling debts, my false identity, what he’d learned about Grief Intervention Services and Alan Parker, how Ella Singer had Tasered him at the Powers home. This was a frame-up, he yelled, to keep him from getting any closer. But he sounded like a maniac. No one listened. He just came unglued, the other cops whispered in locker rooms, in bars after shifts ended-it must have been the stress from the gambling addiction, problems with his wife, a new baby.

The judge went easy on him: drug treatment, community service. He had come to his senses, admitted to his drug problem as his PBA rep instructed him to do, admitted to his gambling addiction, too. He enrolled in a place they called “The Farm,” a facility outside town where cops with addictions are sent to get well. He was suspended without pay pending the results of treatment. The PBA rep said they couldn’t fire him because the department views addiction as a disease-treat, don’t punish. Of course, everyone knew that his career was over.

But Harrison found he could bear it all-the humiliation, the weeks of treatment for a drug addiction he didn’t have, and all that time to reflect on what was wrong with his life, the inevitable loss of the only job he’d ever wanted to do. Even in the throes of despair he experienced as he lay in the uncomfortable bed, missing his wife and baby, thinking about how badly he’d let them down, he found he could live with the things that were happening because Sarah believed him. She looked into his eyes and knew that he was telling the truth. And she still believed that somehow, together, they were going to make everything all right again.

42

I feel a small, warm body next to mine, smell the familiar scent of Johnson’s baby shampoo. I’m afraid that it’s a dream. I feel her shift and move, issue a little cough, and my heart fills with hope.

“Mommy, are you still sleeping?”

I’m in a room flooded with light, so bright I can’t see. I close and open my eyes until they adjust. I see Gray slumped in a chair, staring out the window. I hear the steady beeping of a heart monitor.

“Mommy.”

“Mommy’s sleeping, Victory,” says Gray, edgy, sad.

“No, she isn’t,” Victory says, annoyed. “Her eyes are open.”

He looks over at us quickly, then jumps up from his chair and comes over to the bed where I’m lying.

“Annie,” he says, putting his hand on my forehead. He releases a heavy sigh, and I see tears spring to his eyes before he covers them, embarrassed. My lungs feel heavy and my head aches, but I have never been happier to see any two people.

“He’s dead,” I try to tell Gray, but my throat feels thick and sore. My voice comes out in a croak. “He’s gone.”

He shakes his head and looks confused, as if he isn’t sure what I’m talking about. He kisses me on the forehead. “Try to relax,” he says.

“Mom, you’ve been sleeping for a long time,” Victory tells me. “Like days.”

I look at her perfect face-her saucer eyes and Cupid’s-bow mouth, the milky skin, the silky, golden puff of her hair-and lift my weak arms to hold her. I feel waves of relief pump through my body. She’s mine. She’s safe. Victory.

“Are you all right, Victory?” I ask when I can finally bring myself to release her. I examine her for signs of trauma or injury. But she’s perfect, seems as happy and healthy as ever.

“What happened?” I ask Gray over her head. “How did you get her back?”

But then the room is filled with doctors and nurses. Gray takes Victory from me, and they stand by the window as I am poked and prodded.

“How are you feeling, Annie?” asks the kind-faced Asian doctor. She is pretty and petite, with a light dusting of lavender on her eyelids, the blush of pink on her lips.

“My chest feels heavy,” I say.

“That’s the smoke inhalation,” she says, putting a stethoscope to my chest. “Breathe deeply for me.”

“Smoke?” I ask after I’ve drawn and released a breath with difficulty.

“From the fire,” she says, hand on my arm. “I’m afraid it will be a while before we know if the lung damage is permanent.”

“I don’t remember,” I say, looking over at Gray, who offers me a smile. There’s something funny on his face, something worried, anxious. I know this look. It makes me feel suddenly very uneasy.

“You will. Don’t worry,” says the doctor, patting my arm. “No rush. Let’s get you better first.”

The next few hours pass in a blur of tests and examinations. I gather that I’ve inhaled smoke from a fire. But I don’t remember a fire. Whenever I ask questions, I receive strange, elliptical answers. Finally I’m given something to help me “relax.” I drift off. When I wake again, it is dark outside. A dim light beside my bed glows, and Gray is dozing in the bedside chair. I reach for him, and he startles at my touch, then leans into me and holds on hard.

I tell him everything that’s happened, even though it hurts to talk so much-the men who were killed on the ship, Dax, my abduction, my father, my flight to Florida, the Angry Man, my confrontation with Marlowe. He listens, stays silent and focused on me. He lets everything tumble out of me without interruption.

“Where’s Victory?” I say suddenly. “I don’t understand. How did you get her back?”

“Annie-” says Gray, laying a hand on my head. But I’ve already interrupted him with another question.

“When did you realize she was gone?”

“Annie-”

“Is she all right?” I ask, sitting up with effort. “I mean really all right. He wouldn’t have hurt her, I don’t think. Are Drew and Vivian okay?”

“Everyone’s fine,” he says, getting up and sitting beside me on the bed, gently pushing me back against the pillows.

“You must have been so worried,” I say, taking in the lines on his face, the circles under his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“Annie, please,” he says then, in a tone that causes me to stop talking. “You have to listen to me.”

I am gripping the sheet hard, and I’m suddenly aware that my whole body is rigid, as though I’m bracing myself for a fall. The expression on Gray’s face-furrowed brow, thin line of a mouth, eyes averted-tells me something is very wrong. I can’t even bring myself to ask what it is.

He takes a deep breath, then, “Victory was never gone, Annie, never in danger. I sent her on a cruise with Drew and Vivian. She’s been with them all this time.”

“No,” I say, feeling my chest tighten. I need desperately for him to understand and believe me. “Listen. Drew and Vivian were in on this. They helped Alan Parker. I think they believed they were helping me. But Parker took it too far. Then I had to save them by leading him to Marlowe.”

Gray puts his head down and rubs his eyes before putting both hands on my shoulders and looking straight at me. “No, Annie. Nothing like that happened.”

“Yes,” I say, getting angry now. “It did. Drew and Vivian kept this from you because they knew you’d never be a part of it.”

He shakes his head slowly, keeping my gaze. “No,” he says gently.

“Explain then how all those men died on that ship. And Dax-the one who tried to save me-what happened to him?”

He shakes his head again, seems at a loss for words. There’s something like panic living in my chest. I hear a nurse laugh out in the hallway, and I am suddenly aware of the beeping and humming of a hundred machines designed to monitor and maintain life. Somewhere else on the floor, big-band music is playing, soft and tinny. My breathing feels ragged in my throat.

“I saw them.”

He takes my hand and looks at it, plays with the ring on my finger. “You never met the ship in Miami. You disappeared after the dive. You slipped the man who was supposed to take you to the boat.”

I hear his words, but I can’t believe he’s saying them. He doesn’t believe me.

“And no one named Dax has ever worked for me, Annie.”

My heart monitor is beeping fast-107, 108, 109. I hold out my arms so he can see the black-and-blue marks on my body from my struggle on the ship.

“How did I get all these marks?”

He rubs my arms tenderly. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know what happened to you out there. But you never made it to the ship that was waiting for you. I’ve been frantic looking for you since you got away from your escort. Finally I got a call from the police in the jurisdiction of Frank Geary’s farmhouse. They found you unconscious from smoke inhalation in the barn. The whole place was on fire. It’s been deserted for years. Locals think it’s haunted. Some kids out there on a dare saw it burning and called the police.”

“Burning.”

“You set it on fire.”

“No,” I say. “I killed Marlowe Geary. And then-” And then what? I find I don’t remember. I remember a flash of white before my eyes as Marlowe lay bleeding.

“Did they find his body?” I ask. “He was disfigured, injured. He walked with a cane.”

“No, Annie. You were alone there. There was no body.”

“But he wasn’t at the farm,” I say quickly. “He was in a trailer far out in the woods. No one else in the world knew about it but me. That’s why they needed me. Don’t you see?”

Gray looks stricken, grips my hand. “It’s okay, Annie.”

“Alan Parker must have arranged for his body to be removed,” I say. I realize then, because of the sad, frightened look on Gray’s face, that everything I’m saying sounds like the ravings of a madwoman.

“You don’t believe me,” I say, feeling the crushing weight of despair.

He puts his hand on my hair and rubs the back of my neck, brings his face close to mine. I wrap my arms around the wide expanse of his shoulders.

“I believe that you believe it,” he whispers. I hold on to him, rest my head against him.

“My father,” I say, trying again but sounding desperate. “He’s the one who figured out where Marlowe was hiding.”

He holds on to me tighter. “Your father said someone broke in to his tattoo shop and went through his albums of old tattoos. He found the book with the photograph of Marlowe’s tattoo open on the desk. He called me right away.”

“No,” I say. I pull away from Gray and force him to look into my face. “He helped me get back to Florida. A friend of his had a private plane.”

Gray doesn’t say anything. He just hangs his head again. And I start to weep.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I ask him. I feel so weak suddenly, so dizzy. My chest and throat ache with each sob. Gray reaches for me, and I cling to him.

“It’s okay, Annie,” he says, those words coiling around me like a snake. “It’s going to be okay.”

A psychotic break, the doctor says, brought on by the return of all the traumatic memories of my past-a reaction to the desire to merge the two parts of myself, the light and the dark, and maybe even a thirst for revenge against the person who laid waste to my childhood and to my life. All of it a fantasy my unhealthy mind created to make itself whole again. Where was I during the weeks I was missing? How did I get myself to that farm in the middle of Florida? No one knows.

My new doctor-a pretty blonde with a slight British accent and pouty lips-says she thinks that the germ for this fantasy took root when I saw my mother on television and heard about Grief Intervention Services. Something about their message of facing my fears resonated deeply, and I concocted an elaborate scenario in which I could do just that-flee the false life I’d constructed, pursue the man who I’d always believed was pursuing me, face him down and kill him. This fantasy lay dormant, a kind of psychological escape hatch-the items I kept in my box spring, the contact information for Oscar, my touchstones. My doctor thinks that it was the recent murder so heavily covered in the news, a murder that took place just miles from Frank Geary’s horse farm, that caused my recent spate of panic attacks. And when I learned from Vivian that they’d lied about Marlowe’s body, this knowledge set off the final chain reaction in my brain.

“The death of Annie Powers, leading to a journey and a battle where you had to fight your way back to Marlowe and destroy him to save your daughter,” she says in the quiet, thoughtful manner she has. “Only in this way did you believe you could reclaim Ophelia, save her from Marlowe as no one else was able. Only once you’d done this could you save your daughter.”

She is excited by her own theory; I can tell by the way she leans forward and looks at me with bright, wide eyes. “You never believed he was dead. We don’t, you know, we can’t really unless we see a body. That’s why we have funerals, to convince ourselves that death is real, that people have truly gone. Our instincts tell us that people can’t die; they can’t just be here one moment and then gone the next. Your family convinced you against your instincts. When you learned about their lies, you were sure that you’d been right all along. Marlowe’s threats from long ago lived in your subconscious. This was the trigger that brought on the whole episode.”

I don’t argue with her. I know that arguing only makes me seem insane.

“My guess is that even though this has been a traumatic event for you, you feel better than you have in years. Am I right?”

She is right. The ugliness that Marlowe brought into my life has been cleansed. I may have let him into my mother’s house, allowed him to slash through everything like a straight razor, but in the end I stood and defeated him. He is-finally-dead.

“It’s interesting, though, that he was injured, disfigured when you confronted him,” she says, musing. “It’s as if his influence over you had already started to weaken. All you had to do was deliver the final blow.”

I nod, slowly, thoughtfully. “I think you’re right.”

If she detects a lack of sincerity in my voice, she doesn’t say so. She scribbles something in her pad. I can tell she finds me an interesting case.

How easily it’s all explained away. Simon Briggs: He was a predator who discovered somehow that Ophelia still lived. He didn’t work for anyone else, and he needed money. He’d come back to blackmail us, knowing we had to keep my identity a secret. Who killed him? Of course we know it was Gray. As far as the police are concerned, it could have been any of a number of his enemies or dissatisfied clients. When you live a life like Briggs’s, there’s almost no other way to die than beneath a bridge with a bullet in your brain.

What about poor Dr. Brown? Authorities were just about to catch up with the unlicensed doctor. He was facing fines and jail time. He packed up his office and fled. He’d done it before, in New York and California. What I saw? Well…we can’t put much stock in that, can we? And who might have killed him? An angry patient, maybe-who knows what kind of associations a man like that might have?

The stalker on the beach could have been Briggs laying the groundwork for his blackmail by unsettling me. Or perhaps it was just my imagination. I saw an innocent stranger walking in the grass, and my sick brain did the rest. The necklace I claimed to have found. No one ever saw it but me, and it is gone. The other half heart, which I kept all these years, is also gone from its velvet box under my mattress. This leads my doctor and everyone else to believe that I never found another necklace on the beach.

“It was a symbol for you, an important one,” the doctor explains. “You were halved by Marlowe, separated from your true self. By thinking you’d found the other part of your necklace, you were committing yourself to a journey back to wholeness.”

My doctor is very pleased with this theory.

But my mother did in fact die just over a year ago in a drunk-driving accident for which she was responsible. So how was it that, in my fantasy, Marlowe relayed this information? I must have heard about it somehow, possibly read it on the Internet and, unable to accept it, pushed it deep down into my psyche. It resurfaced with all the other demons during my last episode.

And, finally, Grief Intervention Services, what about them? Just a grief-and victim-counseling organization known for such controversial techniques as hypnosis, immersion therapy, and other unconventional practices like forcing victims to return to the scene of their trauma, visiting their assailants in prison, watching executions-certainly not involving abduction, torture, murder, and such. And yes, it was founded and run until recently by Alan Parker, father of Melissa, husband of Janet. But he’s been living out of the country for several years, battling cancer, far too unwell to travel. Another piece of information I must have absorbed during my obsessive Internet searches and filed away for inclusion in the daddy of all psychotic episodes.

The good news is that my new doctor does not think I’m truly mentally ill-as in chronically or permanently. She doesn’t feel I have a chemical imbalance, something that will need to be treated with medication for the rest of my life. She believes that I am suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder that started the night I watched Janet Parker kill Frank Geary. The horrors I witnessed during my time with Marlowe deepened my trauma. The adoption of a false identity and my desire to be rid of Ophelia only made things worse. She believes that if I had turned myself over to the police, faced whatever punishment might have been doled out, sought therapy, and tried to move forward in my life as Ophelia March-I would have suffered less in the aftermath.

Of course I agree. I agree with everything they say. I do what I must to survive in my life as it is. I adapt, as I always have.

Because I’m so agreeable, I’m allowed to go home to my family. I will not face arson charges for Frank Geary’s farm. Technically, it belonged to me, anyway. This is one of the reasons my new doctor thinks I burned it down-because it was the last link to Frank and Marlowe Geary.

“Fire is very cleansing,” she says. She’s right. I am glad that the farm’s a pile of ash. I hope someone levels the whole place and builds a mall on it.

I have agreed to let the county sell the property and keep the proceeds. In exchange, they will not bring any charges against me. It has all been very cordial.

Likewise, Ophelia March will not be charged for her association to Marlowe Geary’s crimes. Because we crossed so many state lines and Marlowe committed multiple murders, it is a federal matter. So far no one at the FBI or the federal prosecutor’s office is sufficiently motivated to bring charges against me. I am widely regarded as a victim, not as an accomplice. I am generally pitied, not reviled. So far the information about Ophelia’s survival has managed not to make headline news. For this I am grateful, though I wonder if it is only a matter of time.

And somehow, with Drew and Gray’s connections, the identity theft of the real Annie has gone away as well. It’s all quite seamless.

I return to the quiet, empty days of my life. Ella comes every morning to be with me after Victory has gone to school. I talk to her about everything. She listens in a way that Gray cannot. He feels a certain anxiety, a need to fix and control, to comfort and soothe, especially regarding events he believes happened only in my mind. This is not what I need. I need an ear, someone to hear and understand that the things that happened have meaning and significance to me-whether they happened in my head or not. Ella seems to understand this. She is a patient and interested listener, not unlike my doctor.

“Do I call you Annie or Ophelia?” Ella wants to know this morning as we enjoy coffee on the pool deck. We lie on bright beach towels spread over the wide, comfortable lounge chairs. The air is warm with a light breeze. Over whispering waves, gulls screech, fighting in the air over a fish one of them has caught. I have been home for three weeks.

“I think Annie, you know?” I say. I have given this some thought, of course. “I decided I’m going to change my name to Annie Ophelia Powers. I’m not that girl anymore. But she’s still a part of who I am.”

She nods her understanding. “You know what, Annie?” she says, giving me a smile. “You seem well. Better than you’ve ever been. More solid, centered.”

“Whole,” I say.

“Yes.”

Marlowe Geary is dead. I shot him and watched as the life drained from him. Finally, I rescued Ophelia. She is safe. She has a home and a family who loves her. I don’t say any of this. There’s no point.

We sit in silence for a while, sipping coffee. In the kitchen I hear the new maid and nanny, a young woman named Brigit drop a glass; it shatters on the tile. She is someone Gray hired when Esperanza quit. She is cool where Esperanza was warm, thin where Esperanza was curvaceous, quiet where Esperanza was exuberant. She’s not bad, just different. I’ve wanted to call Esperanza, but apparently she has gone back to Mexico to care for her dying mother; there is no phone in her home there. She promised Gray to come back after her mother’s passing. I am afraid that she has left because of me. Victory misses her very much, and so do I. But in a way my daughter and I are closer for her absence.

I go in to see if Brigit is okay. She is, just flustered and apologetic. I try to put her at ease and think again how much we miss Esperanza.

When I return, Ella is reading the paper.

“Did you hear what happened to the police detective who was here that night?” she says.

“Ray Harrison?”

“Yeah.”

I don’t know if she knows about how he blackmailed us, and I can’t decide whether I should get into all that with her. I haven’t thought about him in a while. I remember our last encounter outside the pool where I took my diving lessons, how his conversation led me to Vivian, who told me about Marlowe’s body. She claims that she never said anything about Dr. Brown or made any cryptic statements like, “That’s what they told me to say.” She was fooled by him like everybody else, she claims. Needless to say, our relationship has cooled. She is nervous and uncomfortable around me. We keep up appearances for Victory’s sake. Drew has avoided me altogether.

“What happened to him?”

She hands me the paper, and I read the feature about the fallen cop, the hooker, the heroin, the gambling addiction, the mysterious money in his account. Ray Harrison looks beaten, dazed in the mug shot pictured. I notice that the white hair over his ear is gone. Strange. Maybe it’s a trick of the light.

I glance over at Ella, and she is watching me. She wrinkles her brow when our eyes meet.

“Crazy, huh?” she says, and there’s an odd brightness to her gaze, as if she takes some pleasure in the sensational nature of the story.

“Yeah,” I say, folding the paper, closing my eyes, and leaning my head back. I feel the sun on my face. I feel a sudden anxiety, a sense that something is not right about what I’ve read. But I can’t afford to dwell on Ray Harrison right now or worry about his problems. “Crazy.”

43

I am never alone, I start to realize after I’ve been home another week or so. Either Gray or Ella or Brigit is always with me. I am not even left alone with Victory except when I take her to school in the mornings. It’s not that anyone’s hovering, but someone is always in the house or out with us as we run errands. With what they think of me, I suppose I can’t blame them. I’ll go along with it for a while, but eventually it’s going to start to wear on me. Right now I’m on my best behavior, doing what I must to be home with my family and not locked up in a rubber room somewhere.

“Mommy,” Victory says in the car on the way to school this morning.

“Yeah, Victory?”

“Are you better?” She is looking at me through the rearview mirror. She’s frowning slightly.

“Yes, I am,” I answer. “A lot better.”

I see her smile, then put my eyes back to the road.

Then, “I don’t want to go away with Grandma and Grandpa anymore.” It’s an odd thing to say, and I look back into the mirror to see that her frown has returned.

“Why, baby?”

“I just don’t want to. I want to stay with you and Daddy. You shouldn’t go away, and they shouldn’t take me anywhere.” I can see she has given this some thought. My heart aches a little.

I give her a smile and decide not to press right now. “I’m not going anywhere. And you don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to. Okay?”

“Okay,” she says, but her smile doesn’t return.

The rest of the ride I am watching her face, wondering if I should urge her to talk more. But by the time I get her to school, she’s back to her old self, bubbly and chirping about show-and-tell today. She has brought Claude and Isabel. I am sure they’ll be a smashing success.

After I drop Victory off, I don’t go straight home. I just can’t face the rest of the day tiptoeing around Brigit, who, by the way, is an even worse cook and housekeeper than I am. I’m starting to suspect that she’s an operative from my husband’s company, hired to keep an eye on me.

I find myself at the Internet café by the beach. I order myself a latte and grab a spot in a booth toward the back, start browsing the Web on one of the laptops. I have thought about trying to find some proof of the things that happened to me. But, it turns out, I don’t really need anyone to believe me. I know what happened. I know I’m not crazy. I know that I faced Marlowe Geary and removed him from the world. I am healed by this knowledge. That should be enough. Whatever Alan Parker and Grief Intervention Services did to cover everything up is not my problem. I have tried to reach my father to talk to him about that night, without luck. I’m starting to worry about him.

My fingers hover over the keyboard. I think about searching for a way to contact Alan Parker, to look for stories of other people who have been involved with Grief Intervention Services, or to try to reach my father again without Gray around. There’s a pay phone over by the bathrooms. But in the end I don’t do any of these things. I have the sense that I’m being watched. Everyone is so pleased with my “progress.” I don’t want to set off any alarms. I need to be home for my daughter.

“They don’t want you to be alone, do they?” I turn to see a young woman sitting at the table behind me. She has a baby who is blissfully asleep in a stroller. The woman’s ash-blond hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, her face pale to the point of looking almost gray. The dark smudges of fatigue rim her eyes. I don’t recognize her.

“I’m sorry?” I say.

“I’ve been trying to get you alone for days,” she says.

“Do I know you?” I ask.

“No, you don’t know me, Ms. Powers. My name is Sarah Harrison. I’m Ray Harrison’s wife.”

I look at her face and try to decide what she wants. Is this going to be another attempt at blackmail? A desperate woman looking for money? But no, there’s something about her face. Her eyes are wide and earnest. There’s a strength and a presence to her. She’s not the criminal type. She’s scared, looking over at the door and then down at her baby. The baby looks a lot like Ray Harrison; the only way I know she’s a girl is because she’s wrapped in pink. I remember when Victory was that small and fragile. I can’t help myself-I reach in and touch the downy crown of her head. She releases a sigh but doesn’t wake.

“I need to talk to you,” Sarah says.

I turn away from her. If anyone is watching, I want them to think I was just admiring her baby. I look at my computer screen. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Harrison?”

“You heard what happened to my husband?”

I nod. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. And I am sorry, for all of them, especially for his little girl.

“What happened to him happened because he was trying to help you.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. I’m aware that I sound distant and cold. But I can’t afford to be anything else at the moment. She seems undaunted as she begins to tell me about the recent events of her husband’s life, the version I read about in the paper plus everything he learned in his investigation.

“They think he had a nervous breakdown relating to his gambling addiction. No one believes him about Grief Intervention Services, about the Taser attack. They think he’s crazy.”

“There must be marks on his body from the Taser, if it’s true.”

“There were marks,” she says. “But no one believed that’s where they came from. They questioned your friend, Ella Singer, just to say they had.” She pauses and issues a harsh laugh. “She and her husband were outraged. She helped in every way possible with his investigation, and this is what she gets from him, she said. Apparently, her husband plays golf with the mayor.” Her words are heavy with bitterness.

I remember the glint in Ella’s eyes when she handed me the paper. She’d made no mention of these allegations Sarah is describing, of course. There was nothing of it in the paper. If I confronted her, I’m sure she’d say she was trying to spare me any upset, that I had my own problems. And maybe that’s the truth. It’s difficult to think of Ella wielding a Taser gun, and yet somehow it isn’t impossible to imagine.

“Let’s just pretend that I believe what you’re saying,” I tell Sarah Harrison. “What can I do about it?”

“You don’t understand,” she says. “I’m not asking for your help. I’m trying to help you. They want you to think you’re crazy. You’re not. My husband wronged you, he knows that now. He wants to make it right, and so do I.”

“Okay,” I say. “Maybe that’s true. But what do you think you can do for me, Sarah?”

The baby releases a little sigh. I can see the little pink bundle out of the corner of my eye.

“Maybe nothing. I just thought you needed to know that you’re living in a pit of vipers. Your husband, your best friend, and your in-laws are all lying to you. They’re basically holding you prisoner, in the nicest possible cage.”

I don’t say anything, just take a sip of my coffee and hope she can’t see that my hand is shaking.

“This is an interesting thing my husband found out, the thing that brought him to your house in the first place. He learned that Grief Intervention Services is a client of Powers and Powers, Inc.”

When I still don’t say anything, she goes on.

“A friend of Ray’s at the FBI forwarded him a client list. The federal government keeps very close tabs on those privatized military companies, for obvious reasons. Let me ask you this: What kind of services might a military company provide to an organization established to help people with their grief?”

It’s a good question. So good that I’m not sure I want the answer. I drain my coffee cup.

“If these things are true, you’re putting yourself at great risk by coming here, Sarah,” I tell her. “You should think of your daughter.”

“I am thinking of my daughter,” she says sharply. “I want her to know that there’s more to life than just playing it safe. That when you make mistakes, part of the way you move on is by correcting what you can. My husband has made a lot of mistakes, some of them concerning you. But he tried to make things right, and he’s paying a very high price-his career, his reputation. There’s not a lot we can do about that. But we both feel we owe you the truth. Here’s my advice: Take your daughter and get as far away from that family as possible. Run. Don’t walk.”

I stand up then. I don’t want to listen to anything else. I pick up my bag and put it over my shoulder.

“You have access at home to Gray’s computer, right? Find the client list for Powers and Powers, Inc. See if I’m telling you the truth.”

I put some money on the table, a tip for service I didn’t get. And move toward the door.

“If you won’t do it for yourself, Annie, do it for your daughter.”

I leave her there. I don’t look back.

In a karst topography, there’s a feature called a disappearing stream. At a certain point in the flow, the water slips through the delicate pores of the limestone bedrock and winds its way beneath the ground through an intricate system of caves and caverns. It travels like any moving body of water and may connect with the flow of yet other streams, traveling swift and steady but in darkness, far beneath the world. Then, as if from nowhere, the stream percolates and resurfaces, sometimes hundreds of miles away from its origin.

In this subterranean environment, creatures called stygobites, animals perfectly adapted to the wet darkness, proliferate-spiders and flies, millipedes and lizards. Through evolution they have lost their eyes, their skin has become translucent. Even the most minimal exposure to the light would be lethal.

Ophelia dropped beneath the surface of the earth and then appeared again as Annie. The streams of their lives merged, continuing on together, only to dip into the darkness again. I thought I’d come into the light once and for all. But perhaps it’s true that I don’t even know the difference between light and dark anymore. Perhaps I am perfectly adapted to my life as it is.

I drive around for a while, my heart thrumming, my throat dry and painful. My lungs have not recovered from the smoke inhalation, and I’m having trouble getting a full breath of air. I drive up the beach, turn around, and wind through the streets of our quaint little ocean town, watch the tourists with their terrible sunburns; the teenagers with their lithe, perfect bodies strutting about in bathing suits and bare feet; the retirees with their silver hair and walking canes. After a while I am calmer, but Sarah Harrison’s words are still loud in my head. I want to go home, pretend I never saw her. I try to convince myself that she was a product of my demented mind, yet another fantasy on my part. But I can’t do this. It’s what she said about her daughter that echoes: I want her to know that there’s more to life than just playing it safe. That when you make mistakes, part of the way you move on is by correcting what you can. The simple truth of this hurts. I realize that I am betraying myself again, this time for my daughter.

44

That night we have plans to go to dinner at Drew and Vivian’s. I’m nervous and edgy because of this. I have not been comfortable around Vivian since my return. And I have not spoken to Drew at all. Having dinner at their place is the last thing I want to do. But Gray has convinced me that it’s a much-needed return to normalcy, the point from which we all move forward as a family. I don’t hate him for it, but almost.

I have snapped at Gray twice while we get ready, and now he’s avoiding me. Victory is cranky and fussy, maybe because of my mood, which is always contagious where she is concerned. But maybe for reasons of her own. She doesn’t want to go, has said as much, keeps angling for pizza and a movie. I ask her about it as I help her into the new outfit I bought for her after my encounter with Sarah Harrison today. I used it as an excuse for Brigit as to why I didn’t come straight home after dropping Victory off.

“You always love to go to Grandma’s,” I say, fastening the heart-shaped buttons on the back of the pink gingham dress she wears over her pink leggings. She holds up her hair for me.

“No I don’t,” she says stubbornly. “I like pizza and a video better.”

I can see the sad downturn of the corners of her mouth in the mirror across from us. I turn her around gently so that we are face-to-face. There’s nothing of Marlowe in her; her face is a mirror of my own.

“What’s wrong, Victory?” I ask her, almost whispering.

She drops her eyes to the floor. “Nothing,” she says, then leans into me and wraps her tiny arms around my neck. I wrap my arms around her and am about to ask her again, but then Gray’s at the door.

“How does a guy get in on that hug?” he asks.

Victory runs to him, her face bright now, no trace of the sadness I saw a moment ago. He lofts her into the air and then squeezes her. We smile at each other over Victory’s head as she giggles with delight. He puts her back down.

“Everybody ready? Dad just called. Vivian has the steaks on the grill.”

If he notices that Victory and I both lose our smiles, he doesn’t say anything.

The farce of it all sickens me. Sarah Harrison might as well be seated across from me at the long glass table where we have gathered for dinner. A wide orange sun is dropping toward the blue-pink horizon line over the Gulf. We feast on filet mignon and twice-baked potatoes, fat ears of corn. Drew and Gray knock back Coronas while Vivian and I drink chardonnay. Victory sips her milk from a plastic cup adorned with images of Hello Kitty. Anyone looking at us might feel a twinge of envy, the rich and happy family sharing a meal at their luxury home with a view of the ocean.

“Annie,” says Drew, breaking an awkward silence that has settled over the table once vague pleasantries and chatty questions for Victory have been exhausted. “You seem well.”

He is smiling at me in a way he never has before. There’s a satisfied benevolence to him, the king surveying his subjects. I thank him because it seems like the right thing to do in this context.

“I’m glad to see it,” he says. “It’s a blessing to be here as a family. It’s been a long journey to happiness-for all of us.”

“Yes,” says Vivian, looking at her plate. “A blessing.” She lifts her eyes to me then and takes my hand. I have the urge to snatch it away but I don’t. I smile at her and then over to Victory, who is sitting beside me, watching me intently.

“I have to admit,” Drew goes on, voice a little too loud, a little too bright, “when you first came to us, I didn’t think you were right for my son. You weren’t well, and I was afraid Gray was trying to rescue you in a way he could never rescue his mother.”

The words land like a fist on the table, everyone pauses mid-action-Vivian’s glass at her lips, my fork hovering over a tomato-to look at Drew. I’ve never heard him say anything like that; his candor makes heat rise to my cheeks.

“Dad,” says Gray with a frown, sliding forward in his chair. He throws a meaningful glance in Victory’s direction, and I can see the tension in his shoulders and his biceps.

“Let me finish,” says Drew sharply, lifting a hand.

I see then that Drew is drunk. He’s had at least four bottles of beer since we sat down at the table, and he has probably been drinking since before we arrived. There’s an unbecomingly loose, loquacious quality to him.

Gray casts me an uneasy look but leans back in his chair, still tense, still waiting. It’s not that he’s afraid to stand up to his father, just that even the smallest disagreement can turn into a battle. He prefers to bide his time.

“But you’re not like Gray’s mother,” says Drew. “There’s a mettle to you, Annie, that I never suspected. You make my son happy, and you’re a good mother to your daughter.”

A year ago I would have been weak with gratitude for this statement. Now I just want to put my fist through the rows of his perfect white teeth. My conversation with Sarah Harrison is bouncing around inside my head, and my heart rate is on the rise. It takes effort to keep the swelling tide of emotion off my face.

Vivian gets up from the table suddenly, pushing her chair back quickly, almost toppling it. She senses that the sky is about to open.

“Victory, let’s go upstairs and look at your dollhouse,” she says, moving toward the door leading inside. I expect Victory to bolt off after her, but she stays rooted.

“No,” says Victory sullenly. She takes hold of my hand. “I want to stay here.”

“Victory,” Vivian says so sternly that I’m startled by her tone, “let’s go.”

Something shifts inside me. “Don’t talk to her like that,” I find myself saying. “Ever.”

Then everyone turns to face me, as though I’m a marionette that has suddenly made a move of her own.

“I don’t want to play any of those games with you, Grandma,” says Victory. “I don’t like it.”

I turn to my daughter and think how much tougher, how much stronger, she already is than I have ever been.

“What kinds of games, Victory?” I ask her. She doesn’t answer me, but Victory and Vivian lock eyes. There’s a warning on Vivian’s face and fear on Victory’s. I feel the tightness of anger in my chest as I move my body between them.

“What kinds of games?” I ask her again.

That afternoon I did log on to Gray’s computer. And I discovered that Sarah Harrison has told me the truth about the connection between Powers and Powers and Grief Intervention Services. And since then my addled brain has been working overtime to fit together the pieces of the things that have happened to me. That look between Victory and Vivian, for some reason, causes everything to click into place.

“What is going on here?” asks Gray. He has moved forward again in his seat, looks as though he’s about to stand.

Victory shakes her head and gazes hard down at her knees. Her whole body is rigid; she has released my hand and grabbed onto both arms of the chair. I put my hand on her shoulder, lean into her, and whisper, “You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to go, Victory.” I watch the tension drain from her body.

Everyone is quiet a moment.

“The picture,” I say quietly, suddenly understanding. I feel the first rumblings of a volcanic rage, but somehow my voice is little more than a whisper. “You tied her up and took a picture of her. You told her it was a game.”

Victory looks at me with surprise, and then the tears start to fall. “Don’t hurt my mommy!” she yells suddenly, looking at Drew. There’s so much fear on her face my heart lurches. She grabs for my hand and starts to pull herself onto my lap. “I didn’t tell her! I didn’t tell!”

She is on me then, clinging and sobbing into my chest in a way she hasn’t since she was a toddler. I hold on to her tightly, bury my face in her hair.

“No one’s going to hurt me, Victory,” I whisper into her ear.

Gray is looking at his father, his face a mask of confused disappointment. “Dad?” he says. “What have you done?”

Drew takes a few deep breaths, seems to steel himself. “I did what I had to do for our family, so that we could all be together like this.”

Gray gets to his feet so fast that everything shakes. A piece of stemware falls to the floor and shatters, spraying wine and shards of glass at our ankles. No one moves to pick it up; everyone stays fixed, frozen. Gray’s face is red, a vein throbbing on his throat. I’ve never seen him so angry.

“What are you talking about, Dad?” Gray roars.

Drew is turning a shade of red to match, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Fucking answer me!”

Drew picks up his bottle of beer and takes a long, slow swallow. It’s clear that he doesn’t feel as though he needs to answer his son.

“Grief Intervention Services is a client of Powers and Powers, Inc.,” I say finally to Gray. I want to rage like him, to start picking up the china and glasses from the table and flinging them just to watch things break and crash, but my daughter is clinging, hysterical in my arms. I feel as if I owe it to her to keep myself together. “I looked up the client list on our computer this afternoon. It’s there.”

Gray’s eyes rest on me and then move back to his father. I can see that he doesn’t know what to believe.

All eyes are on Drew now, who still has said nothing, just puffed up his chest and pulled back his shoulders. He is the picture of self-satisfied arrogance, the man assured of his righteousness.

“So what?” he says simply. “What does that prove?”

Gray’s face falls; all the rage seems to leave him. I remember the expression from my time in the psychiatric hospital years ago when he talked about his father, how powerless he’d felt against his father’s will, his father’s desires for him. How he’d lived his life trying to please a man who would never be pleased. We hadn’t talked about that in so long, always wrapped up in whatever drama I had going on. I could see that nothing had changed. Maybe Gray had betrayed himself in the same way I had, living a fake life for what seems to be the greater good. Maybe he never wanted to go back to work with his father; maybe he just thought he had to, to make a life for us.

“You spent your whole childhood trying to save your mother,” says Drew, picking up his fork and knife and going to work on his steak. “I didn’t want you to spend your adulthood trying to save someone else you couldn’t save. I didn’t want another child in my care growing up with an unstable mother. We did what we had to do. We helped Annie, but ultimately she had to save herself. Our methods were unorthodox, sure. But it had to be that way. Annie knows that.”

He’s so cool, so matter-of-fact, he could be talking about anything-a risky business venture or a volatile investment that paid out after all. But he’s talking about me, my life, my daughter. Gray and I both stare at Drew while he eats. Victory is still crying quietly in my arms. Vivian stands at the head of the table, her hands resting on the chair where she sat during the meal. The sun has dropped below the horizon, and there’s an orange-blue glow over the ocean. Such a beautiful place to live such an ugly life.

“You were haunted, Annie,” Vivian says, her voice soft and earnest. “He was always going to haunt you.” But no one seems to hear.

I’m watching my husband, and I can see him working the problem, going over in his mind the story I told him, remembering the accusations I launched against Drew and Vivian, the things he told me were all a dream. “Alan Parker, Grief Intervention Services, everything he told her,” says Gray, not yelling anymore, not enraged. Just…sad. “It was all true?”

Drew carefully cuts another piece of steak and puts it in his mouth, begins to slowly chew. Gray and I stare at him, stunned by his calm, by his indifference, all our shock and anger just a breeze through the branches of a great old oak.

“Look,” he says finally, resting his silverware with a clang on his plate. “Alan Parker took Annie where she needed to go, and Annie did the rest. Didn’t you, girl?”

Gray’s gaze keeps shifting back and forth between me and his father. “Are you telling me he was there? Marlowe Geary? That she killed him?” His voice is a hard edge, tight with emotion; his fists are clenched at his side. “No. No fucking way.”

A wide, slow smile spreads across Drew’s face. It is almost kind, but it never reaches his eyes. In the gloaming he’s a monster. I find myself recoiling from him.

“What do you think, Annie?” Drew asks, giving me a hideous wink, like we’re in together on some kind of joke. “Is Marlowe Geary dead? Finally?”

And suddenly I realize we are in on the joke together. Because only Drew and I understand that I had to be the one to kill Marlowe Geary. No tale of his demise, no repeated phrases or articles on the Internet were ever going to convince me he was dead. I had to kill him and watch him die. That was the only way I would ever truly be free of him.

All my desire to rage at Drew drains, and I am filled again by the familiar numbness that has allowed me to survive so much horror. I feel a shutting down of anger, of fear, and I am mercifully blank. But I find I can’t bear the sight of Drew and Vivian anymore. I stand up with Victory in my arms and move away from the table, heading for the door. There are a lot of questions, but I don’t want the answers. Not from Drew and Vivian.

“Annie, please try to understand,” says Vivian. I can see that fear again on her face, but I am already gone.

“I need to understand what you did, Dad,” I hear Gray say behind me. I can tell he’s trying to keep his tone level. “I need you to tell me the truth.”

“Leave it be, son,” answers Drew, his tone as unyielding as a brick wall. I wait in the foyer, listening, rocking back and forth with Victory, who is quiet now.

“I can’t do that.”

“Yes,” says Drew. “If you know what’s good for your family, you can. Your wife is unwell. In my opinion not well enough to be caring for that child. And we all know you are not Victory’s biological father. What would happen to that girl if her mother wound up in a rubber room somewhere?”

“What is that?” asks Gray. “Some kind of threat?”

No one was supposed to know that Victory is Marlowe’s child. Only Gray and I knew. And my father. I start to feel weak. I have to put Victory down and kneel beside her on the cold marble floor of Drew and Vivian’s house. I look at her face. If she has heard, she doesn’t give any sign, just leans against me and rubs her eyes.

“Can we go home?” she asks.

“We’re going. Let’s wait for Daddy.”

“Okay,” she says. “But can he hurry? I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“Me neither.”

I hear Drew’s voice booming then. “I don’t have to tell you the kind of connections I have, the people I know. Your job, your home, your wife, even your child are yours because I have allowed you to have them. A few phone calls from me and it all goes away.”

“Drew-” I hear Vivian, her voice pleading.

“What did you do?” I hear something crash and break. Victory and I hold on to each other. I want to go to the car, but I can’t leave Gray here by himself. We huddle against the storm.

“I did what I needed to do so that we could be a family, so that Victory could have a healthy mother, so that you didn’t spend the rest of your life trying to save someone who couldn’t be saved. Don’t you see that?”

I don’t hear Gray’s answer. But in the strangest way, I see Drew’s point. I guess I’m as sick as he is.

“It was happening again,” says Drew. “Those panic attacks that she had before Victory was born. It always started with that. Then the next thing we knew, she was gone, on a bus to God knows where. What if she took Victory with her? Or worse, left her somewhere? It was one thing when she was just a danger to herself-”

“You’re sick, Dad,” Gray interrupted him, his tone thick with disdain. “You can’t use people, manipulate and control them so that they become who you think they should be. It didn’t work with Mom, and it’s not going to work with me and my family. I came back here hoping that we could be a family, learn to love and accept each other for all our differences. But that’s never going to happen, is it?”

“I do love you, son,” says Drew, his voice sounding weak suddenly, and so sad.

“You don’t even know what love is, Dad. You never have.”

Then Gray’s footsteps are heavy and fast behind me. He kneels beside us and helps me to my feet, lifts Victory into his arms.

She lies against him like a rag doll, exhausted. “Can we go now?”

He looks at me with his stormy eyes. “I’m sorry, Annie,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, putting my hand on his arm. I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to get out of this house, for good.

“I should have believed you.”

“You had no reason to believe me, Gray,” I say, pulling him toward the door.

“That’s not true,” he says. “I didn’t want to believe you.”

“Gray,” I say, as we walk out the door and head toward our car, “it’s okay. You can start believing me now.”

45

I walk through the rooms of our house and listen to the echoes of the life we lived here. The windows are open, the air is humid. I can hear the ocean and smell the salt. This is what I will miss most about this place, our proximity to the sea, the sand on our feet, the birds crying in the air, the sound of our wind chimes on the porch. But there’s a special kind of beauty to New York City, too. And in its way it is more my home than this place, no matter how beautiful, has ever been.

The few items of furniture that are coming with us are already on their way to be unloaded into a ridiculously expensive brownstone on the east side of Tompkins Square. It’s still a gritty neighborhood, to be sure. Nothing like the posh house we’re leaving, but it will be ours-our choice, our terms, our home. Everything else we’ll leave behind.

I walk from room to room, making sure that things are clean, that nothing we need has been forgotten. I feel a potent nostalgia I can’t explain. Gray and Victory have gone off together to do some errands-close a bank account, buy Victory her own carry-on suitcase for the trip tomorrow.

After I’ve been all through the house, I come to stand at the glass doors downstairs and stare at the Gulf until I sense someone behind me. I spin around to see Detective Harrison standing in my living room.

“The door was open,” he says apologetically.

He looks thin and pale but oddly solid-at peace in a way. I find myself grateful for him and for his wife, and I’m glad to see him now. I want to embrace him, but I don’t. I smile at him instead and hope I don’t seem cool, distant.

“Coffee?” I ask.

“Please,” he says.

I pour him a cup but abstain myself. I’m jittery already from too much caffeine this morning, and I feel a headache coming on. I sit on the couch, but he prefers to stand.

“How’s your family?” I ask.

“We’re okay, you know?” he says with a nod. “I think we’re going to be okay. I’ve hung out my own shingle: Ray Harrison, Private Investigations. I’ve even managed to find a few people who don’t mind having a junkie with a criminal record investigating their cases.” He laughs a little, and it washes away some of the bitterness in his words.

“Anyway, I came to bring you this,” he says. He walks over and hands me a folded piece of paper. I unfold it and look at it for a second. It’s a check in the amount of the money he blackmailed from us.

I try to give it back. “Keep it,” I say. “Pay us back when you’re on your feet.”

He raises a hand. “No. This is right. I need to do the right thing by you. I promised my wife.”

I nod my understanding, put the check down beside me. We are silent for a minute, awkward, neither of us knowing what to say. Our relationship is so bizarre we have no template for polite conversation.

“There are things I can tell you,” he says. He’s doing that rocking business he does, has stuffed his hands in his pockets. “But maybe you don’t want to know. Maybe you just want to move forward with your life from here.”

I haven’t spoken to Drew or Vivian since the night we left their home. Gray has asked his father to buy out his interest in Powers and Powers, and Drew has agreed. Drew has refused to talk any further about his relationship to Grief Intervention Services, how he knew about Victory’s paternity, or to offer any explanation of the things that have happened to me. Gray has tried to find some explanations through avenues of his own but has come up against wall after wall. We have both decided that for the sake of our family, of protecting Victory, there are things we’ll just have to live with never knowing.

“I thought I was going to be in the dark for the rest of my life,” Harrison says, pacing the room. “But I had a visitor the other day to my new office.”

“Who?”

“An old friend of yours,” he says with a wry smile. “She’s no friend of mine, of course. But she brought me this.”

“Ella?” I ask eagerly. “Where is she? The hurricane shutters are down on her house. She’s been gone for weeks. I haven’t had a call or an e-mail. We’re going to have to leave without saying good-bye.”

He gives a cryptic shake of his head. “I don’t know what her plans are. I’m sure you’ll hear from her, though, Annie. One of these days.”

As he takes another piece of paper from his pocket and gives it to me, my headache intensifies. This time it’s a picture, a blurry black-and-white photograph of two boys in fatigues, arms around each other’s shoulders, one smiling, one grim. It takes me a second to figure out who I’m looking at. For a second, I think one of the men is Gray. But then I recognize them-Drew Powers and Alan Parker, younger, thinner, barely resembling the men they became. Someone had scribbled in the corner, Bassac River, 1967, Vietnam.

“I don’t understand,” I say, feeling suddenly as though the ground has shifted beneath me. “What does this mean?”

“They served together on SEAL Team One in Vietnam. They’ve known each other most of their lives.”

I’m struggling with this information, trying to understand how everything fits together. But my head is aching so badly I can hardly concentrate.

“I have a theory,” he says. “Want to hear it?”

I don’t really, but I find myself giving a half nod.

“I think, years ago, when Alan Parker wanted revenge for the murder of his daughter, he came to Drew, his old war buddy. Drew had already founded Powers and Powers at that point, and it was a thriving private military firm. Based on some digging I’ve done, I think Drew hired out one of his men to Parker to track down Marlowe Geary-a man named Simon Briggs. Later, when Parker started Grief Intervention Services, Powers and Powers provided the muscle needed to help people face those who had injured them or their loved ones. Vigilantes, basically.”

I think about this. It makes sense somehow to me that they knew each other. I can see them, both controlling, arrogant men, thinking that what they did was motivated by love for their children, never understanding that love and control are two different things.

“Then it was just a coincidence that my father met with Gray and asked him to help me?” I say with a shake of my head. “No.”

Harrison hangs his head for a second. He seems to be debating whether to say what he wants to say. Then, “Your father, Teddy March, also known as Bear. He served on the same SEAL team in Vietnam.

I laugh at this. “No,” I say. “Not my father.”

But then I remember all the times he talked about the Navy SEALs, all his Vietnam stories. I thought they were lies. I never once believed him.

Detective Harrison has another photograph. In the picture I see my father, Drew, and some other men I don’t recognize sitting in a boat heading down a gray river surrounded by jungle. They are grim, intent, uncomfortable. My father is a boy with the stubble of a beard, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He is lithe, muscular, with dark eyes and square jaw. Drew looks like a heavier, less appealing version of my husband-like a young bulldog with a stern brow and mean eyes.

“These men, these fathers, all searching for their kids,” says Harrison, drifting over toward the glass doors leading to the deck. “Alan Parker’s daughter murdered by Frank Geary, Teddy March’s daughter held in the thrall of Marlowe Geary, Drew Powers’s son far from the fold, estranged for years. They all had a common purpose, to do right by their kids in the ways that they could.”

I think about this, the deviousness and planning, the deception that it took to make all this happen.

“And how was it that both you and Melissa fell prey to the Gearys? Coincidence, maybe. Or maybe it was their karma, their bond? I don’t know, but it’s poetic in its way, isn’t it?”

That’s our karma, our bond. Marlowe’s words come back to me.

Harrison goes on, “The only thing they didn’t plan for was Gray falling in love with you.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I say, even though, on a cellular level, it does. “There are too many variables, so many coincidences. Did my father go to Drew for help, too? Is that how he connected to Gray? They used me to draw Gray in, knowing he couldn’t resist the idea of rescuing a lost girl?”

“Paul Broward-your Dr. Brown-he had a lot of experience with manipulating people’s psyches. You should know that better than anyone.”

My emotions-a terrible alchemy of impotent anger, disbelief, and fear-must be playing on my face, because suddenly Harrison seems to regret coming. He looks over toward the door, then back at me, and raises his palms.

“I’m sorry, Annie. You know what? It’s just a theory. I’m talking out of my ass.”

“What about Briggs?” I ask quickly, still turning his words over, still trying to punch holes in his theories.

“A longtime employee of Powers and Powers, that much I do know for a fact. Maybe Gray wasn’t aware of that. When he couldn’t figure out who Briggs worked for, he killed him fearing for your safety.”

I feel exhausted, and my head is pounding now, accompanied by a terrible ringing in my ears. I try to think about what all this might mean, that we’ve been under the control of these men, my father included, since before Gray and I ever met. It hurts too much to think about, and I feel myself powering down emotionally. I’m grateful.

“As for me, I made a nuisance of myself,” Harrison said. “And they laid waste to my life.”

I think about what Sarah Harrison told me, how Ella attacked Ray with a Taser. I’ve hardly known what to do with that information. I’ve wanted to confront her, but she’s gone. Who was she, this woman I called a friend? I can feel my chest constricting. Ever since the smoke inhalation, my lungs ache when I get upset. I struggle to slow my breathing. Harrison seems to sense my discomfort.

“Look,” he says, moving toward the front door, “maybe you should consider yourself lucky at this point, Annie. Move on, you know? My life is a train wreck. But you, you’ve exorcised your demons-you’ve won. You can walk away with your family and start over.”

I laugh. It sounds harsh and bitter as it bounces back to me. “You mean just forget all this? I think we’ve seen how that works out.”

“Not a denial, Annie,” he says. “A rebirth.”

I get up and walk to the back glass doors, watch the waves lick the shore. I take the salt air into my lungs and wonder if Detective Harrison might be right.

“Is it possible?” I ask him. “Is it possible to cast it all off and start again-the new and improved Annie? Or will it come creeping after me again one day when I least expect it?”

I listen to my voice echo in the empty room. Harrison doesn’t answer me.

I keep looking at the shoreline. I lose myself in thought for a moment and notice that my headache is lifting.

“Maybe it is possible,” I say, answering my own question.

“Annie?”

I turn around to see Gray standing behind me with an odd expression, something between amusement and worry. We are alone.

“Who are you talking to?” he asks.

The headache I had is gone, but it is replaced with a rush of panic. As I walk past him, he reaches for my arm, but I slip by. I lift the three pieces of paper from the couch, two receipts from the grocery store and a baby picture of Victory. Not a check, not old pictures of Vietnam.

I sweep the room again with my eyes, wondering if Detective Harrison will come out of the kitchen with a fresh cup of coffee. But no. I crumple the papers and shove them into my pocket. I walk to the front window and see that Gray’s car has blocked the driveway. I can’t bring myself to ask if another car was parked on the street when he arrived.

“Annie,” Gray says, walking over to me. His tone is more insistent now. “Who were you talking to?”

I find it difficult to answer; the words won’t come. I’m in a tunnel of dawning, swallowed by a stone-cold understanding of my own twisted psyche, a realization that Ray Harrison was exactly who I needed him to be.

“Do you remember Ray Harrison?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level. I find I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes. I lean against the window’s edge for support.

He looks confused for a minute, seems to search his memory for the name. Then, “The cop? The one who answered the 911 call-the one with all the questions?”

I nod slowly. “Did you ever see him again-after he came that morning?”

Gray frowns. “Me? No. Why would I?”

I hear blood rushing in my ears. “Did you ever give him any money?”

Gray releases a little laugh. “No,” he says, surprised. “Of course not.”

I walk over to the back of the house, look at the ocean and the white sand. The ground beneath me seems soft, unstable.

“Annie, what’s this about?”

“The night-” I begin, then stop. I was going to say the night you killed Briggs but I don’t want to say those words out loud. “When you said all threats had been neutralized, you meant Briggs.”

Gray is behind me, his hands on my shoulders now. “Why are we talking about this?”

“Just answer me,” I say quickly.

I hear him release a breath. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”

I lean against him, my back to his front. “What’s happened?” he whispers.

But I can’t bring myself to say the words. I can’t bring myself to tell him about the Ray Harrison I knew. Not now, not when my husband has started to believe in my sanity for maybe the first time.

“Annie,” Gray says, insistent now as he spins me around to face him, lifts my face to his. He looks frightened; it’s not an expression I’m used to seeing on him. “What’s going on? Who were you talking to when I came in?”

I force a smile, a bright and happy one, and I see his fear start to melt away, his eyes brighten.

“I don’t know,” I say lightly. “I must have been talking to myself.”