Heart-Shaped Box

“What?” he asked, but as he said it, he already knew and was yanking at the steering wheel, pulling the car to the curb, and jamming on the brake.

To the right of the Mustang was the vast sprawl of a car lot, brightly illuminated by sodium-vapor lights on thirty-foot-tall steel posts. They towered over the asphalt, like ranks of alien tripods, a silent invading army from another world. Lines had been strung between them, and a thousand blue and red pennants snapped in the wind, adding a carnival touch to the place. It was after 8 P.M., but they were still doing business. Couples moved among the cars, leaning toward windows to peer at price stickers pasted against the glass.

Georgia’s brow furrowed, and her mouth opened in a way that suggested she was about to ask him what in the hell he thought he was doing.

“Is this his place?” Jude asked.

“What place?”

“Don’t act stupid. The guy who molested you and treated you like a hooker.”

“He didn’t…It wasn’t…I wouldn’t exactly say he—”

“I would. Is this it?”

She looked at his hands clenched on the wheel, his white knuckles.

“He’s probably not even here,” she said.

Jude flung open the car door and heaved himself out. Cars blasted past, and the hot, exhaust-smelling slipstream snatched at his clothes. Georgia scrambled out on the other side and stared across the hood of the Mustang at him.

“Where are you goin’?”

“To look for the guy. What’s his name again?”

“Get in the car.”

“Who am I looking for? Don’t make me go around slugging used-car salesmen at random.”

“You’re not goin’ in there alone to beat the shit out of some guy you don’t even know.”

“No. I wouldn’t go alone. I’d take Angus.” He glanced into the Mustang. Angus’s head was already sticking into the gap between the two front seats, and he was staring out at Jude expectantly. “C’mon, Angus.”

The giant black dog leaped onto the driver’s seat and then into the road. Jude slammed the door, started around the front of the car, the dense, sleek weight of Angus’s torso pressed against his side.

“I’m not gonna tell you who,” she said.

“All right. I’ll ask around.”

She grabbed his arm. “What do you mean, you’ll ask around? What are you going to do? Start askin’ salesmen if they used to fuck thirteen-year-olds?”

Then it came back to him, popped into his head without any forewarning. He was thinking he’d like to stick a gun in the son of a bitch’s face, and he remembered. “Ruger. His name was Ruger. Like the gun.”

“You’re going to get arrested. You’re not goin’ in there.”

“This is why guys like him get away with it. Because people like you go on protecting them, even when they ought to know better.”

“I’m not protectin’ him, you asshole. I’m protectin’ you.”

He yanked his arm out of her grip and started to turn back, ready to give up and already seething about it—and that was when he noticed Angus was gone.

He cast a swift look around and spotted him an instant later, deep in the used-car lot, trotting between a row of pickups and then turning and disappearing behind one of them.

“Angus!” he shouted, but an eighteen-wheeler boomed past, and Jude’s voice was lost in the diesel roar.

Jude went after him. He glanced back and saw Georgia right behind him, her own face white, eyes wide with alarm. They were on a major highway, in a busy lot, and it would be a bad place to lose one of the dogs.

He reached the row of pickups where he’d last seen Angus and turned, and there he was—ten feet away, sitting on his haunches, allowing a skinny, bald man in a blue blazer to scratch him behind the ears. The bald man was one of the dealers. The tag on his breast pocket said RUGER. Ruger stood with a rotund family in promotional T-shirts, their ample bellies doing double duty as billboards. The father’s gut was selling Coors Silver Bullet; the mother’s breast made an unpersuasive pitch for Curves fitness; the son, about ten, had on a Hooters shirt, and probably could’ve fit into a C cup himself. Standing next to them, Ruger seemed almost elflike, an impression enhanced by his delicate, arched eyebrows and pointy ears with their fuzzy earlobes. His loafers had tassels on them. Jude despised loafers with tassels.

“There’s a good boy,” Ruger said. “Look at this good boy.”

Jude slowed, allowing Georgia to catch up. She was about to go past Jude but then saw Ruger and shrank back.

Ruger looked up, beaming politely. “Your dog, ma’am?” His eyes narrowed. Then a puzzled recognition passed across his face. “It’s little Marybeth Kimball, all grown up. Look at you! Are you down visiting? I heard you were in New York City these days.”

Georgia didn’t speak. She glanced sidelong at Jude, her eyes bright and stricken. Angus had led them right to him, as if he’d known just who they were looking for. Maybe Angus did know somehow. Maybe the dog of black smoke who lived inside Angus had known. Georgia began shaking her head at Jude—No, don’t—but he paid her no mind, stepped around her, closing in on Angus and Ruger.

Ruger shifted his gaze to Jude. His face came alive with amazement and pleasure. “Oh, my God! You’re Judas Coyne, the famous rock-and-roll fellow. My teenage son has every single one of your albums. I can’t say I quite care for the volume he plays them at”—digging a pinkie in one ear, as if his eardrums were still ringing from just such a recent encounter with Jude’s music—“but I’ll tell you what, you’ve made quite a mark on him.”

“I’m about to make quite a mark on you, asshole,” Jude said, and drove his right fist into Ruger’s face, heard his nose snap.

Ruger staggered, half doubled over, one hand cupping his nose. The roly-poly couple behind him parted to let him stumble past. Their son grinned and stood on his toes to watch the fight from around his father’s shoulder.

Jude sank a left into Ruger’s breadbasket, ignoring the burst of pain that shot through the gouge in his palm. He grabbed the car dealer as he started to drop to his knees, and threw him onto the hood of a Pontiac with a sign stuck inside the windshield:IT’S YOURS IF YOU WANT IT!!! CHEAP!!!

Ruger tried to sit up, and Jude grabbed him by the crotch, found his scrotum, and squeezed, felt the stiff jelly of Ruger’s balls crunch in his fist. Ruger sat bolt upright and shrieked, dark arterial blood gouting from his nostrils. His trousers were hiked up, and Angus jumped, snarling, and clamped his jaws on Ruger’s foot, then yanked, tearing off one of his loafers.

The fat woman covered her eyes but kept two fingers apart to peek between them.

Jude only had time to get a couple more licks in before Georgia had him by the elbow and was hauling him off. Halfway to the car she began to laugh, and as soon as they were packed back into the Mustang, she was all over him, chewing his earlobe, kissing him above his beard, shivering against his side.

Angus still had Ruger’s loafer, and once they were on the interstate, Georgia traded him a Slim Jim for it, then tied it from the rearview mirror by the tassels.

“Like it?” she asked.

“Better than fuzzy dice,” Jude said.

35

Jessica McDermott Price’s house was in a new development, an assortment of handsome Colonials and Capes with vinyl siding in various ice-cream-shop colors—vanilla, pistachio—laid out along streets that twisted and looped in the way of intestines. They drove by it twice before Georgia spotted the number on the mailbox. Home was a Day-Glo yellow, like mango sherbet, like the caution light, and it wasn’t in any particular architectural style, unless big, bland, American suburban was a style. Jude glided past it and continued down the block about a hundred yards. He turned into an unpaved driveway and rolled across dried red mud to an unfinished house.

The garage had only just been framed, beams of new pine sticking up from the cement foundation and more beams crisscrossing overhead, the roof covered in plastic sheeting. The house attached to it was only a little further along, plywood panels nailed up between the beams, with gaping rectangles to show where windows and doors belonged.

Jude turned the Mustang so the front end was facing the street and backed into the empty, doorless bay of the garage. From where they parked, they had a good view of the Price house. He switched off the engine. They sat for a while, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.

They had made good time coming south from Bammy’s. It was just going on one in the morning.

“Do we have a plan?” Georgia asked.

Jude pointed across the street, at a couple large trash cans on the curb. Then he gestured down the road, toward more green plastic barrels.

“Looks like tomorrow is garbage day,” Jude said. He nodded toward Jessica Price’s house. “She hasn’t brought her cans out yet.”

Georgia stared at him. A streetlight down the road cast a wan beam of light across her eyes, which glittered, like water at the bottom of a well. She didn’t say anything.

“We’ll wait until she carries out the trash, and then we’ll make her get in the car with us.”

“Make her.”

“We’ll drive around awhile. We’ll talk some—the three of us.”

“What if her husband brings out the trash?”

“He isn’t going to. He was in the reserves, and he got wiped out in Iraq. It’s one of the few things Anna told me about her sister.”

“Maybe she has a boyfriend now.”

“If she’s got a boyfriend, and he’s a lot bigger than me, we wait and look for another shot. But Anna never said anything about a boyfriend. The way I heard it, Jessica was just living here with their stepdad, Craddock, and her daughter.”

“Daughter?”

Jude looked meaningfully at a pink two-wheeler leaned against Price’s garage. Georgia followed his gaze.

Jude said, “That’s why we’re not going in tonight. But tomorrow is a school day. Sooner or later Jessica is going to be alone.”

“And then?”

“Then we can do what we need to do, and we don’t have to worry about her kid seeing.”

For a while they were both quiet. Insect song rose from the palms and the brush behind the unfinished house, a rhythmic, inhuman pulsing. Otherwise the street was quiet.

Georgia said, “What are we gonna do to her?”

“Whatever we have to.”

Georgia lowered the seat all the way back and stared into the dark at the ceiling. Bon leaned into the front and whined urgently in her ear. Georgia rubbed her head.

“These dogs are hungry, Jude.”

“They’ll have to wait,” he said, staring at Jessica Price’s house.

He was headachy and his knuckles were sore. He was overtired, too, and his exhaustion made it difficult to follow any one line of reasoning for long. His thoughts, instead, were black dogs that chased their own tails, going around and around in maddening circles without ever getting anywhere.

He had done some bad things in his life—putting Anna on that train, for starters, sending her back to her kin to die—but nothing like what he thought might be ahead of him. He wasn’t sure what he would have to do, if it would end in killing—it might end in killing—and he had Johnny Cash in his head singing “Folsom Prison Blues,” Momma told me be a good boy, don’t play with guns. He considered the gun he had left at home, his big John Wayne .44. It would be easier to get answers out of Jessica Price if he had the gun with him. Only, if he had the gun with him, Craddock would’ve persuaded him to shoot Georgia and himself by now, and the dogs, too, and Jude thought about guns he’d owned, and dogs he’d owned, and running barefoot with the dogs in the hillocky acres behind his father’s farm, the thrill of running with the dogs in the dawn light, and the clap of his father’s shotgun as he fired at ducks, and how his mother and Jude had run away from him together when Jude was nine, only at the Greyhound his mother lost her nerve and called her parents, and wept to them, and they told her to take the boy back to his father and try to make peace, make peace with her husband and with God, and his father was waiting with the shotgun on the porch when they returned, and he smashed her in the face with the gun stock and then put the barrel on her left breast and said he’d kill her if she ever tried to run away again, and so she never ran away again. When Jude—only he was Justin then—tried to walk inside the house, his father said, “I’m not mad at you, boy, this ain’t your fault,” and caught him in one arm and hugged him to his leg. He bent for a kiss and said he loved him, and Justin automatically said he loved him back, a memory he still flinched from, a morally repugnant act, an act so shameful he could not bear to be the person who had done it, so he had eventually needed to become someone else. Was that the worst thing he’d ever done, planted that Judas kiss on his father’s cheek while his mother bled, taken the worthless coin of his father’s affection? No worse than sending Anna away, and now he was back where he’d started, wondering about tomorrow morning, wondering if he could, when he had to, force Anna’s sister into the back of his car and take her away from her home and then do what needed to be done to make her talk.

Although it was not hot in the Mustang, he wiped at the sweat on his brow with the back of one arm, before it could drip into his eyes. He watched the house and the road. A police car went by once, but the Mustang was tucked well out of sight, in the shadows of the half-built garage, and the cruiser didn’t slow.

Georgia dozed beside him, her face turned away. A little after two in the morning, she began fighting something in her sleep. Her right hand came up, as if she were raising it to get the attention of a teacher. She had not rebandaged it, and it was white and wrinkled, as if it had been soaking in water for hours. White and wrinkled and terrible. She began to lash at the air, and she moaned, a cringing sound of terror. She tossed her head.

He leaned over her, saying her name, and firmly but gently took one shoulder to jostle her awake. She slapped at him with her bad hand. Then her eyes sprang open, and she stared at him without recognition, gazed up with complete, blind horror, and he knew in those first few moments she was seeing not his face but the dead man’s.

“Marybeth,” he said again. “It’s a dream. Shh. You’re all right. You’re all right now.”

The fog cleared from her eyes. Her body, which was clenched up and rigid, sagged, the tension going out of it. She gasped. He brushed back some hair that was stuck to the sweat on her cheek and was appalled at the heat coming off her.

“Thirsty,” she said.

He reached into the back, dug through a plastic bag of groceries they’d picked up at a gas station, found her a bottled water. Georgia unscrewed the top and drank a third of it in four big swallows.

“What if Anna’s sister can’t help us?” Georgia asked. “What if she can’t make him go away? Are we gonna kill her if she can’t make Craddock go away?”

“Why don’t you just rest? We’re going to be waiting awhile.”

“I don’t want to kill anyone, Jude. I don’t want to use my last hours on earth to murder anyone.”

“These aren’t your last hours on earth,” he said. He was careful not to include himself in that statement.

“I don’t want you to kill anyone either. I don’t want you to be that person. Besides, if we kill her, then we’ll have two ghosts hauntin’ us. I don’t think I can take any more ghosts after me.”

“You want some radio?”

“Promise me you won’t kill her, Jude. No matter what.”

He turned on the radio. Low on the FM dial, he found the Foo Fighters. David Grohl sang that he was hanging on, just hanging on. Jude turned the volume low, to the faintest of murmurs.

“Marybeth,” he began.

She shivered.

“You okay?”

“I like when you call me by my real name. Don’t call me Georgia anymore, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I wish you didn’t first see me takin’ my clothes off for drunks. I wish we didn’t meet in a strip club. I wish you could’ve known me before I started with that kind of thing. Before I got like I am. Before I did all the things I wish I could take back.”

“You know how people pay more money to buy furniture that’s been roughed up a little? What do they call it? Things that have been distressed? That’s because something that’s seen a little wear is just more interesting than something brand-new that hasn’t ever had a scuff on it.”

“That’s me,” she said. “Attractively distressed.” She was shivering again, steadily now.

“How you holding up?”

“Okay,” she said, voice trembling along with the rest of her.

They listened to the radio through the faint hiss of static. Jude felt himself settling, his head clearing, felt muscles he hadn’t known were knotted up beginning to loosen and relax. For the moment it didn’t matter what was ahead of them or what they would have to do come morning. It didn’t matter what was behind them either—the days of driving, the ghost of Craddock McDermott with his old truck and his scribbled-over eyes. Jude was somewhere in the South, in the Mustang, with the seat cranked back and Aerosmith on the radio.

Then Marybeth had to ruin it.

“If I die, Jude, and you’re still alive,” she said, “I’m gonna try to stop him. From the other side.”

“What are you talking about? You aren’t going to die.”

“I know. I’m just sayin’. If things don’t break our way, I’ll find Anna, and us girls will try and make him stop.”

“You aren’t going to die. I don’t care what the Ouija board said or what Anna showed you in the mirror either.” He had decided this very thing a few hours back down the road.

Marybeth frowned thoughtfully. “Once she started talking to us, it got cold in my room. I couldn’t stop shakin’. I couldn’t even feel my hand on the pointer. And then you’d ask Anna somethin’, and I’d just know how she was gonna answer. What she was tryin’ to say. I wasn’t hearin’ voices or anything. I just knew. It all made sense then, but it doesn’t now. I can’t remember what she wanted me to do or what she meant by bein’ a door. Except…I think she was saying that if Craddock can come back, so can she. With a little help. And somehow I can help. It’s just—and I got this loud and clear—I might have to die to do it.”

“You aren’t going to die. Not if I have any say in it.”

She smiled. It was a tired smile. “You don’t have any say in it.”

He didn’t know how to reply, not at first. It had crossed his mind already that there was one way he could assure her safety, but he wasn’t about to put it into words. It had occurred to him that if he died, Craddock would go away and Marybeth would live. That Craddock only wanted him, maybe only had a claim on this world as long as Jude was alive. After all, Jude had bought him, paid to own him and his dead man’s suit. Craddock had spent most of a week now trying to make Jude kill himself. Jude had been so busy resisting he hadn’t stopped to wonder if the price of surviving would be worse than giving the dead man what he wanted. That he was sure to lose, and that the longer he held out, the more likely he would drag Marybeth with him. Because the dead pull the living down.

Marybeth stared at him, her eyes a wet, lovely ink in the dark. He stroked the hair away from her forehead. She was very young and very beautiful, her brow damp with her fever sweat. The idea that her death should precede his was worse than intolerable, it was obscene.

He slid toward her, reached and took her hands in his. If her forehead was damp and too warm, her hands were damp and too cold. He turned them over in the gloom. What he saw was a nasty sort of shock. Both of her hands were pruned up, white and shriveled, not just the right one—although the right was more terrible, the entire pad of her thumb a glistening, rotted sore and the thumbnail itself gone, dropped off. On the surface of both palms, red lines of infection followed the delicate branches of her veins, down into her forearms, where they spread out, to etch diseased-looking crimson slashes across her wrists.

“What’s happening to you?” he asked, as if he didn’t already know. It was the story of Anna’s death, written on Marybeth’s skin.

“She’s a part of me somehow: Anna. I’m carryin’ her around inside me. I have been for a while, I think.” A statement that should’ve surprised but didn’t. He had sensed it, on some level, that Marybeth and Anna were coming together, merging somehow. He’d heard it in the way Marybeth’s accent had resurfaced, becoming so like Anna’s laconic, country-girl drawl. He had seen it in the way Marybeth played with her hair now, like Anna used to. Marybeth went on, “She wants me to help her back into our world, so she can stop him. I am the doorway—she told me that.”

“Marybeth,” he began, then couldn’t find anything else to say.

She closed her eyes and smiled. “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out. Actually. On second thought. Go ahead and wear it out. I like when you say it. The way you say all of it. Not just the Mary part.”

“Marybeth,” he said, and let go of her hands and kissed her just above the left eyebrow. “Marybeth.” He kissed her left cheekbone. She shivered—pleasantly this time. “Marybeth.” He kissed her mouth.

“That’s me. That’s who I am. That’s who I want to be. Mary. Beth. Like you’re gettin’ two girls for the price of one. Hey—maybe you really are gettin’ two girls now. If Anna’s inside of me.” She opened her eyes and found his gaze. “When you’re lovin’ me, maybe you’re lovin’ her, too. Isn’t that a good deal, Jude? Aren’t I one hell of a bargain? How can you resist?”

“Best deal I’ve ever had,” he said.

“Don’t you forget it,” she said, kissing him back.

He opened the door and told the dogs to get, and for a while Jude and Marybeth were alone in the Mustang, while the shepherds lay about on the cement floor of the garage.

36

He started awake, heart beating too fast, to the sound of the dogs barking, and his first thought was, It’s the ghost. The ghost is coming.

The dogs were back in the car, had slept in the rear. Angus and Bon stood on the backseat together, the both of them peering out the windows at an ugly yellow Labrador. The Lab stood with her back rigid and her tail up, yapping repetitively at the Mustang. Angus and Bon watched her with avid, anticipatory expressions and barked occasionally themselves, booming, harsh woofs that hurt Jude’s ears in the close confines of the Mustang. Marybeth twisted in the passenger seat, grimacing, not asleep anymore, but wishing she were.

Jude told them all to shut the fuck up. They didn’t listen.

He looked out the windshield and straight into the sun, a copper hole punched through the sky, a bright and merciless spotlight pointed into his face. He made a complaining sound at the glare, but before he could lift a hand to shade his eyes, a man stepped in front of the car, and his head blocked the sun.

Jude squinted at a young man wearing a leather tool belt. He was a literal redneck, skin cooked to a fine, deep shade of carmine. He frowned at Jude. Jude waved and nodded to him and started the Mustang. When the clock on the radio face lit up, he saw it was seven in the morning.

The carpenter stepped aside, and Jude rolled out of the garage and around the carpenter’s parked pickup. The yellow Lab chased them down the driveway, still yapping, then stopped at the edge of the yard. Bon woofed back at her one last time as they pulled away. Jude eased past the Price house. No one had put the garbage out yet.

He decided there was still time and drove out of Jessica Price’s little corner of suburbia. He walked first Angus, then Bon, in the town square, and got tea and doughnuts at a Honey Dew Drive-Thru. Marybeth rebandaged her right hand with some gauze from the dwindling supplies in the first-aid kit. She left her other hand, which at least had no visible sores, as it was. He gassed up the car at a Mobil, and then they parked at one edge of the concrete apron and snacked. He tossed plain crullers to the dogs.

Jude steered them back to Jessica Price’s. He parked on the corner, half a block from her house, on the opposite side of the street and a long walk down the road from the construction site. He didn’t want to take a chance on being seen by the laborer who’d been hovering over the car when they woke up.

It was after seven-thirty, and he hoped Jessica would bring the garbage out soon. The longer they sat, the more likely they were to draw attention, the two of them in their black Mustang, dressed in their black leather and black jeans, with their visible wounds and their tattoos. They looked like what they were: two dangerous lowlifes staking out a place where they planned to commit a crime. A NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sign on a nearby lamppost stared them in the face.

By then his blood was flowing and his head was clear. He was ready, but there was nothing to do except wait. He wondered if the carpenter had recognized him, what he would say to the other men when they arrived on-site. I still can’t believe it. This guy who looks just like Judas Coyne, sleepin’ it off in the garage. Him and some amazingly hot chick. He looked so much like the real guy, I almost asked him if he was takin’ requests. And then Jude thought that the carpenter was also one more person who could positively identify them, after they were done doing whatever it was they were about to do. It was hard to live the outlaw life when you were famous.

He wondered idly who among rock stars had spent the most time in jail. Rick James, maybe. He did—what?—three years? Two? Ike Turner had done a couple years at least. Leadbelly had been in for murder, broke rocks for ten years, then was pardoned after putting on a good show for the governor and his family. Well. Jude thought if he played his cards right, he could do more time than all three of them put together.

Prison didn’t frighten him especially. He had a lot of fans in there.

The garage door at the end of Jessica McDermott Price’s concrete driveway rumbled open. A weedy girl, about eleven or twelve years old, her golden hair clipped into a short, flouncy bob, hauled a garbage can down to the side of the road. The sight of her gave him a tingle of surprise, the resemblance to Anna was so close. With her strong, pointy chin, towhead, and wide-spaced blue eyes, it was as if Anna had stepped out of her childhood in the eighties and straight into the bright, full morning of today.

She left the trash can, crossed the yard to the front door, and let herself in. Her mother met her just inside. The girl left the door open, allowing Jude and Marybeth to watch mother and daughter together.

Jessica McDermott Price was taller than Anna had been, her hair a shade darker, and her mouth bracketed by frown lines. She wore a peasant blouse, with loose, frilly cuffs, and a crinkly flower-print skirt, an outfit that Jude surmised was meant to make her look like a free spirit, an earthy and empathic Gypsy. But her face had been too carefully and professionally made up, and what he could see of the house was all dark, oiled, expensive-looking furniture and seasoned wood paneling. It was the home and the face of an investment banker, not a seer.

Jessica handed her little girl a backpack—a shiny purple-and-pink thing that matched her windbreaker and sneakers as well as the bike outdoors—and air-kissed her daughter’s forehead. The girl tripped out, slammed the door, and hurried over the yard, pulling the pack onto her shoulders. She was across the street from Jude and Marybeth, and on her way by she shot them a look, measuring them up. She wrinkled her nose, as if they were some litter she’d spotted in someone’s yard, and then she was around the corner and gone.

The moment she was out of sight, Jude’s sides began to prickle, under his arms, and he became aware of the tacky sweat gluing his shirt to his back.

“Here we go,” he said.

He knew it would be dangerous to hesitate, to give himself time to think. He climbed out of the car. Angus bounded after him. Marybeth got out on the other side.

“Wait here,” Jude said.

“Hell, no.”

Jude walked around to the trunk.

“How we goin’ in?” Marybeth asked. “Were we just gonna knock on the front door? Hi, we’ve come to kill you?”

He opened the trunk and pulled out the tire iron. He pointed it at the garage, which had been left open. Then he slammed the trunk and started across the street. Angus dashed ahead, came back, raced ahead again, lifted a leg, and pissed on someone’s mailbox.

It was still early, the sun hot on the back of Jude’s neck. He held one end of the tire iron in his fist, the socket-wrench end, and clasped the rest of it against the inner part of his forearm, trying to hide it alongside his body. Behind him a car door slammed. Bon lunged past him. Then Marybeth was at his side, short of breath and trotting to keep up.

“Jude. Jude. What if we just…just try and talk to her? Maybe we can…persuade her to help us willingly. Tell her you never…never wanted to hurt Anna. Never wanted her to kill herself.”

“Anna didn’t kill herself, and her sister knows it. That’s not what this is about. Never has been.” Jude glanced at Marybeth and saw she had fallen a few steps behind him, was regarding him with a look of unhappy shock. “There’s always been more to this than we figured at first. I’m not so sure we’re the bad guys in this story.”

He walked up the driveway, the dogs loping along, one on either side of him, like an honor guard. He took a passing glance at the front of the house, at windows with white lace curtains in them and shadows behind. If she was watching them, he couldn’t tell. Then they were in the gloom of the garage, where a cherry two-door convertible with a vanity plate that read HYPNOIT was parked on the clean-swept concrete floor.

He found the inside door, put his hand on the knob, tilted his head toward the house, and listened. The radio was on. The most boring voice in the world said blue chips were down, tech stocks were down, futures all across the spectrum were looking down. Then he heard heels clicking across tile, just on the other side of the door, and he instinctively leaped back, but it was too late, the door was opening and Jessica McDermott Price was coming through.

She almost walked right into him. She wasn’t looking. She had her car keys in one hand and a garishly colored purse of some kind in the other. As she glanced up, Jude grabbed the front of her blouse, gathering a bunch of silky fabric in his fist, and shoved her back through the door.

Jessica reeled backward, tottering in her heels, then twisted an ankle, her foot coming out of one shoe. She let go of her small, unlikely purse. It fell at their feet, and Jude kicked it aside, kept going.

He drove her across the mudroom and into a sun-splashed kitchen in the rear of the house, and that was when her legs gave out. The blouse tore as she went down, buttons popping off and ricocheting around the room. One of them nailed Jude in the left eye—a black spoke of pain. The eye watered over, and he blinked furiously to clear it.

She slammed hard against the island in the center of the kitchen and grabbed the edge to stop her fall. Plates rattled. The counter was at her back—she was still turned to face Jude—and she reached behind her without looking and grabbed one of the plates and broke it over Jude’s head as he came at her.

He didn’t feel it. It was a dirty plate, and toast crusts and curds of scrambled egg went flying. Jude shot out his right arm, let the tire iron slip down, grabbed the upper end, and, holding it like a club, swatted her across her left kneecap, just below the hem of her skirt.

She dropped, as if both legs had been jerked out from under her. Started to shove herself up, and then Angus flattened her again, climbed on top of her, paws scrabbling against her chest.

“Get off her,” Marybeth said, and grabbed Angus by the collar, wrenched him back so hard he flipped over, rolling in one of those faintly ridiculous doggy somersaults, his legs kicking in the air for an instant before getting up on his paws again.

Angus heaved himself at Jessica once more, but Marybeth held him back. Bon ambled into the room, shot a guilty-nervous look at Jessica Price, then stepped over pieces of shattered plate and began snarfing up a toast crust.

The droning voice on the radio, a small pink boom box on the counter, said, “Book clubs for kids are a hit with parents, who look to the written word as a place to shelter their children from the gratuitous sexual content and explicit violence that saturate video games, television programs, and movies.”

Jessica’s blouse was torn open to the waist. She wore a lacy peach-colored bra that left the tops of her breasts exposed, and they shuddered and fell with her breath. She bared her teeth—was she grinning?—and they were stained with blood.

She said, “If you came to kill me, you ought to know I’m not afraid of dying. My stepfather will be on the other side to receive me with open arms.”

“I bet you’re looking forward to that,” Jude said. “I get the picture you and him were pretty close. Least until Anna was old enough and he started fucking her instead of you.”

37

One of Jessica McDermott Price’s eyelids twitched irregularly, a drop of sweat in her lashes, ready to fall. Her lips, which were painted the deep, almost black red of bing cherries, were still stretched wide to show her teeth, but it wasn’t a grin anymore. It was a grimace of rage and confusion.

“You aren’t fit to speak of him. He scraped uglier messes than you off the heel of his boot.”

“You got that about half right,” Jude said. He was also breathing fast, but a little surprised by the evenness of his own voice. “You both stepped in a pile when you screwed with me. Tell me something, did you help him kill her, to keep her from talking about what he did? Did you watch while your own sister bled to death?”

“The girl who came back to this house wasn’t my sister. She wasn’t anything like her. My sister was already dead by the time you got through with her. You ruined her. The girl who came back to us was poison inside. The things she said. The threats she made. Send our stepdaddy to prison. Send me to prison. And Craddock didn’t harm a hair on her goddam disloyal head. Craddock loved her. He was the best, the best man.”

“Your stepdaddy liked to fuck little girls. First you, then Anna. It was right in front of me the whole time.”

He was bending over her now. He felt a little dizzy. Sunlight slashed through the windows above the sink, and the air was warm and close, smelled overpoweringly of her perfume, a jasmine-flavored scent. Just beyond the kitchen, a sliding glass door was partly open and looking out onto an enclosed back porch, floored in seasoned redwood and dominated by a table covered in a lace cloth. A gray longhaired cat was out there, watching fearfully from up on the table, fur bristling. The radio voice was droning now about downloadable content. It was like bees humming in a hive. A voice like that could hum you right to sleep.

Jude looked around at the radio, wanting to give it a whack with the tire iron, shut it off. Then he saw the photograph next to it and forgot about taking out the radio. It was an eight-by-ten picture in a silver frame, and Craddock grinned out from it. He wore his black suit, the silver-dollar-size buttons gleaming down the front, and one hand was on his fedora, as if he were about to lift it in greeting. His other hand was on the shoulder of the little girl, Jessica’s daughter, who so resembled Anna, with her broad forehead and wide-set blue eyes. Her sunburned face, in the picture, was an unsmiling, unreadable blank, the face of someone waiting to get off a slow elevator, a look that was entirely empty of feeling. That expression caused the girl to resemble Anna more than anything, Anna at the height of one of her depressions. Jude found the similarity disturbing.

Jessica was squirming back over the floor, using his distraction to try to get some distance between them. He grabbed her blouse again as she pulled away, and another button flew. Her shirt was hanging off her shoulders now, open to the waist. With the back of one arm, Jude wiped at the sweat on his forehead. He wasn’t done talking yet.

“Anna never came right out and said she’d been molested as a kid, but she worked so hard to avoid being asked it was kind of obvious. Then, in her last letter to me, she wrote that she was tired of keeping secrets, couldn’t stand it anymore. On the face of it, sounds like a suicidal statement. It took me a while to figure out what she really meant by it, that she wanted to get the truth off her chest. About how her stepfather used to put her into trances so he could do what he liked with her. He was good—he could make her forget for a while, but he couldn’t completely wipe out the memories of what he’d done. It kept resurfacing, whenever she’d have one of her emotional crack-ups. Eventually, in her teens, I guess, she tipped to it, understood what he’d been up to. Anna spent a lot of years running from it. Running from him. Only I put her on a train and sent her back, and she wound up facing him again. And saw how old he was and how close to dying. And maybe decided she didn’t need to run from anything anymore.

“So she threatened to tell what Craddock did to her. Is that right? She said she’d tell everyone, get the law after him. That’s why he killed her. He put her in one more trance and cut her wrists in the bath. He fucked with her head and put her in the bath and slashed her open and watched her bleed out, sat there and watched—”

“You shut up about him,” Jessica said, her voice spiking, high-pitched and harsh. “That last night was awful. The things she said and did to him were awful. She spat on him. She tried to kill him, tried to shove him down the stairs, a weak old man. She threatened us, all of us. She said she was going to take Reese away from us. She said she’d use you and your money and your lawyers and send him to jail.”

“He was only doing what he had to, huh?” Jude said. “It was practically self-defense.”

An expression flickered across Jessica’s features, there and gone so quickly Jude half thought he’d imagined it. But for an instant the corners of her mouth seemed to twitch, in a dirty, knowing, appalling sort of smile. She sat up a little straighter. When she spoke again, her tone both lectured and crooned. “My sister was sick. She was confused. She’d been suicidal for a long time. Anna cut her wrists in the bath like everyone always knew she was going to, and there isn’t anyone who can say different.”

“Anna says different,” Jude said, and when he saw the confusion on Jessica’s face, he added, “I been hearing from all kinds of dead folks lately. You know, it never did make sense. If you wanted to send a ghost to haunt me, why not her? If her death was my fault, why send Craddock? But your stepfather isn’t after me because of what I did. It’s because of what he did.”

“Who do you think you are, anyway, calling him a child molester? How many years you got on that whore behind you? Thirty? Forty?”

“Take care,” Jude said, hand tightening on the tire iron.

“My stepfather deserved anything he asked of us,” Jessica went on, couldn’t shut up now. “I always understood that. My daughter understood it, too. But Anna made everything dirty and horrible and treated him like a rapist, when he didn’t do anything to Reese she didn’t like. She would’ve spoiled Craddock’s last days on this earth, just to win favor with you, to make you care about her again. And now you see where it gets you, turning people against their families. Sticking your nose in.”

“Oh, my God,” Marybeth said. “If she’s sayin’ what I think she’s sayin’, this is about the most wrong fuckin’ conversation I ever heard.”

Jude put his knee between Jessica’s legs and forced her back against the floor with his bad left hand. “That’s enough. I hear any more about what your stepdaddy deserved and how much he loved all of you, I’m going to puke. How do I get rid of him? Tell me how to make him go away, and we’ll walk out of here, and that’ll be the end of it.” Saying it without knowing if it was really true.

“What happened to the suit?” Jessica asked.

“What the fuck does it matter?”

“It’s gone, isn’t it? You bought the dead man’s suit, and now it’s gone, and there’s no getting rid of him. All sales are final. No returns, especially not after the merchandise has been damaged. It’s over. You’re dead. You and that whore with you. He won’t stop until you’re both in the ground.”

Jude leaned forward, set the tire iron across her neck, and applied some weight. She began to choke. Jude said, “No. I do not accept that. There better be another fucking way, or—Get the fuck off me.” Her hands were tugging at his belt buckle. He recoiled from her touch, drawing the tire iron off her throat, and she began to laugh.

“Come on. You already got my shirt pulled off. Haven’t you ever wanted to say you fucked sisters?” she asked. “I bet your girlfriend would like to watch.”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Listen to you. Big tough man. Big rock star. You’re afraid of me, you’re afraid of my father, you’re afraid of yourself. Good. You ought to be. You’re going to die. By your own hand. I can see the death marks on your eyes.” She flicked her glance at Marybeth. “They’re on you, too, honey. Your boyfriend is going to kill you before he kills himself, you know. I wish I could be there to see it happen. I’d like to see how he does it. I hope he cuts you, I hope he cuts your little hooker face—”

Then the tire iron was back across Jessica’s throat and he was squeezing as hard as he could. Jessica’s eyes popped open wide, and her tongue poked out of her mouth. She tried to sit up on her elbows. He slammed her back down, banging her skull on the floor.

“Jude,” Marybeth said. “Don’t, Jude.”

He relaxed the pressure on the tire iron, allowed her to take a breath—and Jessica screamed. It was the first time she’d screamed. He pushed down again, cutting off the sound.

“The garage,” Jude said.

“Jude.”

“Close the door to the garage. The whole fucking street is going to hear.”

Jessica raked at his face. His reach was longer than hers, and he leaned back from her hands, which were bent into claws. He rapped her skull against the floor a second time.

“You scream again, I’ll beat you to death right here. I’m going to ease this thing off your throat, and you better start talking, and you better be telling me how to make him go away. What about if you communicate with him directly? With a Ouija board or something? Can you call him off yourself?”

He relaxed the pressure again, and she screamed a second time—a long, piercing note, that dissolved into a cackle of laughter. He drove a fist into her solar plexus and knocked the air out of her, shut her up.

“Jude,” Marybeth said again, from behind him. She had gone to shut the garage door but was back now.

“Later.”

“Jude.”

“What?” he said, twisting at the waist to glare at her.

In one hand Marybeth held Jessica Price’s shiny, squarish, brightly colored purse, holding it up for him to look at. Only it wasn’t a purse at all. It was a lunch box, with a glossy photo of Hilary Duff on the side.

He was still staring at Marybeth and the lunch box in confusion—didn’t understand why she wanted him to see it, why it mattered—when Bon began to bark, a full, booming bark that came from the deepest part of her chest. As Jude turned his head to see what she was barking at, he heard another noise, a sharp, steely click, the unmistakable sound of someone snapping back the hammer of a pistol.

The girl, Jessica Price’s daughter, had entered through the sliding glass door of the porch. Where the revolver had come from, Jude didn’t know. It was an enormous Colt .45, with ivory inlays and a long barrel, so heavy she could barely hold it up. She peered intently out from beneath her bangs. A dew of sweat brightened her upper lip. When she spoke, it was in Anna’s voice, although the really shocking thing was how calm she sounded.

“Get away from my mother,” she said.

38

The man on the radio said, “What’s Florida’s number one export? You might say oranges—but if you did, you’d be mistaken.”

For a moment his was the only voice in the room. Marybeth had Angus by the collar again and was holding him back, no easy task. He strained forward with all his considerable will and muscle, and Marybeth had to keep both heels planted to prevent him going anywhere. Angus began to growl, a low, choked rumble, a wordless yet perfectly articulate message of threat. The sound of him got Bon barking again, one explosive yawp after another.

Marybeth was the first to speak. “You don’t need to use that. We’ll go. Come on, Jude. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get the dogs and go.”

“Watch ’em, Reese!” Jessica cried. “They came here to kill us!”

Jude met Marybeth’s gaze, tossed his head in the direction of the garage door. “Get out of here.” He rose, one knee popping—old joints—put a hand on the counter to steady himself. Then he looked at the girl, making good eye contact, staring right over the .45 pointed into his face.

“I just want to get my dog,” he said. “And we won’t trouble you anymore. Bon, come here.”

Bon barked, on and on, in the space between Jude and Reese. Jude took a step toward her to grab for Bon’s collar.

“Don’t let him get too close to you!” Jessica screamed. “He’ll try and take the gun!”

“Stay back,” the little girl said.

“Reese,” he said, using her name to soothe and to create trust. Jude was a man who knew a thing or two about psychological persuasion himself. “I’m putting this down.” He held up the tire iron so she could see it, then set it on the counter. “There. Now you have a gun and I’m unarmed. I just want my dog.”

“Let’s go, Jude,” Marybeth said. “Bonnie will follow us. Let’s just get out of here.”

Marybeth was in the garage now, staring back through the doorway. Angus barked for the first time. The sound of it rang off the concrete floor and high ceiling.

“Come to me, Bon,” Jude said, but Bon ignored him, actually made a nervous half jump at Reese instead.

Reese’s shoulders twitched in a startled shrug. She swung the gun toward the dog for a moment, then back to Jude.

Jude took another shuffling step toward Bon, was almost close enough to reach her collar.

“Get away from her!” Jessica screamed, and Jude saw a flash of movement at the edge of his vision.

Jessica was crawling across the floor, and when Jude turned, she shoved herself to her feet and fell upon him. He saw a gleam of something smooth and white in one hand, didn’t know what it was until it was in his face—a dagger of china, a wide shard of broken plate. She drove it at his eye, but he turned his head and she stabbed it into his cheek instead.

He brought his left arm up and clipped her across the jaw with one elbow. He pulled the spike of broken plate out of his face and threw it away. His other hand found the tire iron on the counter, and he swung it into the side of Jessica’s neck, felt it connect with a solid, meaty thud, saw her eyes straining from their sockets.

“No, Jude, no!” Marybeth screamed.

He pivoted and ducked as she shouted. He had a glimpse of the girl, her face startled and her eyes wide and stricken, and then the cannon in her hands went off. The sound of it was deafening. A vase, filled with white pebbles and with a few waxy fake orchids sticking out of it, exploded on the kitchen counter. Splinters of glass and pieces of rock flailed through the air around him.

The little girl stumbled backward. Her heel caught on the edge of a carpet, and she almost fell. Bon jumped at her, but Reese righted herself, and as the dog hit her—crashing into her hard enough to sweep her off her feet—the gun went off again.

The bullet struck Bon low, in the abdomen, and flipped her rear end into the air, so she did a twisting, head-over-heels somersault. She slammed into the cabinet doors beneath the sink. Her eyes were turned up to show the whites, and her mouth lolled open, and then the black dog of smoke that was inside her leaped out from between her jaws, like a genie spilling from the spout of an Arabian lamp, and rushed across the room, past the little girl, out onto the porch.

The cat that was crouched on the table saw it coming and screeched, her gray hair spiking up along her spine. She dived to the right as the dog of black smoke bounded lightly onto the table. The shadow Bon took a playful snap at the cat’s tail, then leaped after her. As Bon’s spirit dropped toward the floor, she passed through a beam of intense, early-morning sunshine and winked out of being.

Jude stared at the place where the impossible dog of black shadow had vanished, too stunned for a moment to act, to do anything but feel. And what he felt was a thrill of wonder, so intense it was a kind of galvanic shock. He felt he had been honored with a glimpse of something beautiful and eternal.

And then he looked over at Bon’s dead, empty body. The wound in her stomach was a horror show, a bloody maw, a blue knot of intestines spilling out of it. The long pink strip of her tongue hung obscenely from her mouth. It didn’t seem possible that she could be blown so completely open, so it seemed she had not been shot but eviscerated. The blood was everywhere, on the walls, the cabinets, on him, spreading out across the floor in a dark pool. Bon had been dead when she hit the ground. The sight of her was another kind of galvanic shock, a jolt to his nerve endings.

Jude returned his disbelieving gaze to the little girl. He wondered if she had seen the dog of black smoke when it ran past her. He almost wanted to ask but couldn’t speak, was momentarily at a loss for words. Reese sat up on her elbows, pointing the Colt .45 at him with one hand.

No one spoke or moved, and into the stillness came the droning voice on the radio: “Wild stallions in Yosemite Park are starving after months of drought, and experts fear many will die if there isn’t swift action. Your mother will die if you don’t shoot him. You will die.”

Reese gave no sign that she heard what the man on the radio was saying. Maybe she didn’t, not consciously. Jude glanced toward the radio. In the photograph next to the boom box, Craddock still stood with his hand on Reese’s shoulder, but now his eyes had been blotched out with death marks.

“Don’t let him get any closer. He’s here to kill you both,” said the radio voice. “Shoot him, Reese. Shoot him.”

He needed to silence the radio, should’ve followed his impulse to smash it earlier. He turned toward the counter, moving a little too quickly, and his heel shot out from under him, slipping in the blood underfoot with a high-pitched squeak. He tottered and took a lunging, off-balance step back in Reese’s direction. Her eyes widened in alarm as he lurched toward her. He raised his right hand, in a gesture he meant to calm, to reassure, then realized at the last instant that he was holding the tire iron and that it would look to her as if he were lifting it to swing.

She pulled the trigger, and the bullet struck the tire iron with a ringing bong, corkscrewed up, and took off his index finger. A hot spray of blood hit him in the face. He turned his head and gaped at his own hand, as stunned by the wonder of his vanishing finger as he’d been by the miracle of the vanishing black dog. The hand that made the chords. Almost the whole finger was gone. He was still gripping the tire iron with his remaining fingers. He let it go. It clanged to the floor.

Marybeth screamed his name, but her voice was so far away she might’ve been out on the street. He could barely hear it through the whine in his ears. He felt dangerously light in the head, needed to sit down. He did not sit down. He put his left hand on the kitchen counter and began backpedaling, retreating slowly in the direction of Marybeth and the garage.

The kitchen stank of burnt cordite, hot metal. He held his right hand up, pointing at the ceiling. The stump of his index finger wasn’t bleeding too badly. Blood wetted his palm, dribbled down the inside of his arm, but it was a slow dribble, and that surprised him. Nor was the pain so bad. What he felt was more an uncomfortable sensation of weight, of pressure concentrated in the stump. He could not feel his slashed face at all. He glanced at the floor and saw he was leaving a trail of fat drops of blood and red boot prints.

His vision seemed both magnified and distorted, as if he wore a fishbowl on his head. Jessica Price was on her knees, clutching her throat. Her face was crimson and swollen, as if she were suffering a severe allergic reaction. He almost laughed. Who wasn’t allergic to a pipe across the neck? Then he thought he’d managed to mutilate both hands in the space of barely three days and fought an almost convulsive need to giggle. He’d have to learn to play guitar with his feet.

Reese stared at him through the pall of filthy gunsmoke, her eyes wide and shocked—and somehow apologetic—the revolver on the floor next to her. He flapped his bandaged left hand at her, although what this gesture meant, even he wasn’t sure. He had an idea he was trying to reassure her he was okay. He was worried about how pale she looked. The kid was never going to be right after this, and none of it was her fault.

Then Marybeth had him by the arm. They were in the garage. No, they were out of the garage and into the white blaze of the sun. Angus put his front paws on his chest, and Jude was almost knocked flat.

“Get off him!” Marybeth screamed, but she still sounded a long distance away.

Jude really did want to sit down—right here in the driveway, where he could have the sun on his face.

“Don’t,” Marybeth said as he began to sink to the concrete. “No. The car. Come on.” She hauled on his arm with both hands to keep him on his heels.

He swayed forward, staggered into her, got an arm over her shoulder, and the two of them reeled down the incline of the driveway, a pair of stoned teenagers at the prom, trying to dance to “Stairway.” He did laugh this time. Marybeth looked at him with fright.

“Jude. You have to help. I can’t carry you. We won’t make it if you fall.”

The need in her voice concerned him, made him want to do better. He drew a deep, steadying breath and stared at his Doc Martens. He concentrated on shuffling them forward. The blacktop underfoot was tricky stuff. He felt a little as if he were trying to walk across a trampoline while drunk. The ground seemed to flex and wobble beneath him, and the sky tilted dangerously.

“Hospital,” she said.

“No. You know why.”

“Got to—”

“Don’t have to. I’ll stop the bleeding.” Who was replying to her? It sounded like his own, surprisingly reasonable voice.

He looked up, saw the Mustang. The world wheeled around him, a kaleidoscope of too-bright green yards, flower gardens, Marybeth’s chalky, horrified face. She was so close that his nose was practically stuck into the dark, floating swirl of her hair. He inhaled deeply, to breathe in her sweet, reassuring scent, then flinched at the stink of cordite and dead dog.

They went around the car, and she dumped him in on the passenger side. Then she hurried around the front of the Mustang, caught Angus by the collar, and began to haul him toward the driver’s-side door.

She was fumbling it open when Craddock’s pickup screamed out of the garage, tires spinning on concrete, greasy smoke roiling, and Craddock behind the wheel. The truck jumped the side of the driveway and thudded across the lawn. It hit the picket fence with a crack, swatted it flat, slammed over sidewalk, banged into the road.

Marybeth let go of Angus and threw herself across the hood of the car, sliding on her belly, just before Craddock’s truck nailed the side of the Mustang. The force of the impact threw Jude into the passenger-side door. The collision spun the Mustang, so the rear end swung into the road and the front was shoved up over the curb, with such suddenness that Marybeth was catapulted off the hood and thrown to earth. The pickup struck their car with a strangely plastic crunch, mixed with a piercing yelp.

Broken glass fell tinkling into the road. Jude looked and saw Jessica McDermott Price’s cherry convertible in the street next to the Mustang. The truck was gone. It had never been there in the first place. The white egg of the airbag had exploded from the steering wheel, and Jessica sat holding her head in both hands.

Jude knew he should be feeling something—some urgency, some alarm—but was instead dreamy and dull-witted. His ears were plugged up, and he swallowed a few times to clear them, make them pop.

He peeled himself off the passenger-side door, looked to see what had happened to Marybeth. She was sitting up on the sidewalk. There was no reason to worry. She was all right. She looked as dazed as Jude felt, blinking in the sunlight, a wide scrape on the point of her chin and her hair in her eyes. He glanced back at the convertible. The driver’s-side window was down—or had fallen into the road—and Jessica’s hand hung limply out of it. The rest of her had slumped down out of sight.

Somewhere, someone began to scream. It sounded like a little girl. She was screaming for her mother.

Sweat, or maybe blood, dripped into Jude’s right eye and stung. He lifted his right hand, without thinking, to wipe at it and brushed the stump of his index finger across his brow. It felt as if he had stuck his hand against a hot grill. The pain shot all the way up his arm and into his chest, where it bloomed into something else, a shortness of breath and an icy tingling behind his breastbone—a sensation both dreadful and somehow fascinating.

Marybeth walked unsteadily around the front of the Mustang and pulled the driver’s-side door open with a screech of bent metal. She stood with what looked like a giant black duffel bag in her arms. The bag was dripping. No—not a duffel bag. Angus. She pulled the driver’s seat forward and slung him into the back before getting in.

Jude turned as she started the car, both needing and desperately not wanting to look back at his dog. Angus lifted his head to stare at him with wet, glazed, bloodshot eyes. He whined softly. His rear legs were smashed. A red bone stuck through the fur of one of them, just above the joint.

Judas looked from Angus to Marybeth, her scraped jaw set, her lips a thin, grim line. The wraps around her dreadful, shriveled right hand were soaked through. Them and their hands. They’d be hugging each other with hooks before this was over.

“Look at the three of us,” Jude said. “Aren’t we a picture?” He coughed. The pins-and-needles feeling in his chest was subsiding…but only slowly.

“I’ll find a hospital.”

“No hospital. Get on the highway.”

“You could die without a hospital.”

“If we go to a hospital, I’m going to die for sure, and you, too. Craddock will finish us off easy. As long as Angus is alive, we got a chance.”

“What’s Angus going to—”

“Craddock’s not scared of the dog. He’s scared of the dog inside the dog.”

“What are you talking about, Jude? I don’t understand.”

“Get going. I can stop my finger bleeding. It’s only one finger. Just get on the highway. Go west.” He held his right hand up in the air, by the side of his head, to slow the bleeding. He was beginning to think now. Not that he needed to think to know where they were going. The only place they could go.

“What the fuck is west?” Marybeth asked.

“Louisiana,” he said. “Home.”

39

The first-aid kit that had accompanied them from New York was on the floor of the backseat. There was one small roll of gauze left, and pins, and Motrin in shiny, difficult-to-open pouches. He took the Motrin first, tearing the packets open with his teeth and dry-swallowing them, six in all, 1,200 milligrams. It wasn’t enough. His hand still felt as if it were a lump of hot iron resting on an anvil, where it was slowly but methodically being pounded flat.

At the same time, the pain kept the mental cloudiness at bay, was an anchor for his consciousness, a tether holding him to the world of the real: the highway, the green mile-marker signs zipping past, the rattling air conditioner.

Jude wasn’t sure how long he would remain clear in the head, and he wanted to use whatever time he had to explain things. He spoke haltingly, through clenched teeth, as he rolled the bandage around and around the ruined hand.

“My father’s farm is just across the Louisiana line, in Moore’s Corner. We can be there in less than three hours. I’m not going to bleed out in three hours. He’s sick, rarely conscious. There’s an old woman there, an aunt by marriage, a registered nurse. She looks after him. She’s on the payroll. There’s morphine. For his pain. And he’ll have dogs. I think he’s got—Oh, motherfucker. Oh, Mother. Fucker. Two dogs. Shepherds, like mine. Savage fuckin’ animals.”

When the gauze was gone, he pinned it tight with alligator clips. He used his toes to force off his boots. He pulled a sock over his right hand. He wound the other sock around his wrist and knotted it tight enough to slow, but not cut off, the circulation. He stared at the sock puppet of his hand and tried to think if he could learn to make chords without the index finger. He could always play slide. Or he could switch back to his left hand, like he’d done when he was a kid. At the thought he began to laugh again.

“Quit that,” Marybeth said.

He clenched his back teeth together, forced himself to stop, had to admit he sounded hysterical, even to himself.

“You don’t think she’ll call the cops on us? This old auntie of yours? You don’t think she’d want to get a doctor for you?”

“She’s not going to do that.”

“Why not?”

“We aren’t going to let her.”

Marybeth didn’t say anything for a while after that. She drove smoothly, automatically, slipping by people in the passing lane, then sliding back into the cruising lane, keeping at a steady seventy. She held the steering wheel gingerly with her white, wrinkled, sick left hand, and she didn’t touch it with the infected right hand at all.

At last she said, “How do you see all this endin’?”

Jude didn’t have an answer for that. Angus replied instead—a soft, miserable whine.

40

He tried to keep an eye on the road behind them, watching for police, or the dead man’s truck, but in the early afternoon Jude laid his head against the side window and closed his eyes for a moment. The tires made a hypnotic sound on the road, a monotonous thum-thum-thum. The air conditioner, which had never rattled before, rattled in sudden bursts. That had something of a hypnotic effect as well, the cyclical way the fans vibrated furiously and fell silent, vibrated and fell silent.

He had spent months rebuilding the Mustang, and Jessica McDermott Price had made it junk again in a single instant. She’d done things to him he thought only happened to characters in country-western songs, laying waste to his car, his dogs, driving him from his home, and making an outlaw of him. It was almost funny. And who knew that getting a finger blown off and losing half a pint of blood could be so good for your sense of humor?

No. It wasn’t funny. It was important not to laugh again. He didn’t want to frighten Marybeth, didn’t want her thinking he was drifting out of his head.

“You’re out of your head,” Jessica Price said. “You aren’t going anywhere. You need to calm down. Let me get something to relax you, and we’ll talk.”

At the sound of her voice, Jude opened his eyes.

He sat in a wicker chair, against the wall, in the dim upstairs hallway of Jessica Price’s house. He’d never seen the upstairs, had not got that far into her home, but knew immediately where he was all the same. He could tell from the photographs, the large framed portraits that hung from the walls of dark-paneled hardwood. One was a soft-focus school picture of Reese, about age eight, posing in front of a blue curtain and grinning to show braces. Her ears stuck out: goofy-cute.

The other portrait was older, the colors slightly faded. It showed a ramrod-straight, square-shouldered captain who, with his long, narrow face, cerulean eyes, and wide, thin-lipped mouth, bore more than a passing resemblance to Charlton Heston. Craddock’s stare in this picture was faraway and arrogant at the same time. Drop and give me twenty.

Down the corridor to Jude’s left was the wide central staircase, leading up from the foyer. Anna was halfway up the steps, with Jessica close behind her. Anna was flushed, too thin, the knobs of her wrists and elbows protruding under her skin and her clothes hanging loose on her. She wasn’t a Goth anymore. No makeup, no black fingernail polish, no earrings or nose rings. She wore a white tunic, faded pink gym shorts, and untied tennis sneakers. It was possible her hair hadn’t been brushed or combed in weeks. She should’ve looked terrible, bedraggled and starved, but she wasn’t. She was as beautiful now as she ever had been the summer they spent out in the barn working on the Mustang with the dogs underfoot.

At the sight of her, Jude felt an almost overwhelming throb of emotion: shock and loss and adoration all together. He could hardly bear to feel so much at once. Maybe it was more feeling than the reality around him could bear as well—the world bent at the edges of his vision, became blurred and distorted. The hall turned into a corridor out of Alice in Wonderland, too small at one end, with little doors only a house cat could fit through, and too big at the other, the portrait of Craddock stretching until he was life-size. The voices of the women on the stairs deepened and dragged to the point of incoherence. It was like listening to a record slow down after the record player has been abruptly unplugged.

Jude had been about to cry out to Anna, wanted more than anything to go to her—but when the world warped all out of shape, he pressed himself back into the chair, his heartbeat racing. In another moment his vision cleared, the hallway straightened out, and he could hear Anna and Jessica clearly again. He grasped, then, that the vision surrounding him was fragile and that he could not put much strain on it. It was important to be still, to take no rash action. To do and feel as little as possible; to simply watch.

Anna’s hands were closed into small, bony fists, and she went up the steps in an aggressive rush, so her sister stumbled trying to keep up, catching the banister to avoid a pratfall down the staircase.

“Wait—Anna—stop!” Jessica said, steadying herself, then lunging up the stairs to catch at her sister’s shirtsleeve. “You’re hysterical—”

“No I’m not don’t touch me,” Anna said, all one sentence, no punctuation. She yanked her arm away.

Anna reached the landing and turned toward her older sister, who stood rigid two steps below her, in a pale silk skirt and a silk blouse the color of black coffee. Jessica’s calves were bunched up, and the tendons showed in her neck. She was grimacing, and in that moment she looked old—not a woman of about thirty but one approaching fifty—and afraid. Her pallor, especially at her temples, was gray, and the corners of her mouth were pinched, webbed with crow’s-feet.

“You are. You’re imagining things, having one of your terrible fantasies. You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. You can’t go anywhere like you are.”

Anna said, “Are these imaginary?” Holding up the envelope in her hand. “These pictures?” Taking out Polaroids, fanning them in one hand to show Jessica, then throwing them at her. “Jesus! It’s your daughter. She’s eleven.”

Jessica Price flinched from the flying snapshots. They fell on the steps, around her feet. Jude noticed that Anna still held one of them, which she shoved back into the envelope.

“I know what’s real,” Anna said. “First time ever, maybe.”

“Craddock,” Jessica said, her voice weak, small.

Anna went on, “I’m going. Next time you see me, I’ll be back with his lawyers. To get Reese.”

“You think he’ll help you?” Jessica said, her voice a tremulous whisper. He? His? It took Jude a moment to process that they were talking about him. His right hand was beginning to itch. It felt puffy and hot and insect-bitten.

“Sure he will.”

“Craddock,” Jessica said again, her voice louder now, wavering.

A door popped open, down the dark hallway to Jude’s right. He glanced toward it, expecting to see Craddock, but it was Reese instead. She peeked around the edge of the doorframe, a kid with Anna’s pale golden hair, a long strand of it hanging across one of her eyes. Jude was sorry to see her, felt a twinge of pain at the sight of her large, stricken eyes. The things some children had to see. Still—it was not as bad as some of what had been done to her, he supposed.

“It’s going to come out, Jessie. All of it,” Anna said. “I’m glad. I want to talk about it. I hope he goes to jail.”

“Craddock!” Jessica screamed.

And then the door directly across from Reese’s room opened, and a tall, gaunt, angular figure stepped into the hallway. Craddock was a black cutout in the shadows, featureless except for his horn-rimmed spectacles, the ones he seemed to put on only every now and then. The lenses of his glasses caught and focused the available light, so they glowed, a faint, livid rose in the gloom. Behind him, back in his room, an air conditioner was rattling, a steady, cyclical buzzing sound, curiously familiar.

“What’s the racket?” Craddock asked, his voice a honeyed rasp.

Jessica said, “Anna’s leaving. She says she’s going back to New York, back to Judas Coyne, and she’s going to get his lawyers—”

Anna looked down the hall, toward her stepfather. She didn’t see Jude. Of course she didn’t. Her cheeks were a dark, angry red, with two spots of no color at all showing high on her cheekbones. She was shaking.

“—get lawyers, and police, and tell everyone that you and Reese—”

“Reese is right here, Jessie,” Craddock said. “Calm yourself. Calm down.”

“—and she…she found some pictures,” Jessica finished lamely, glancing at her daughter for the first time.

“Did she?” Craddock said, sounding perfectly at ease. “Anna, baby. I’m sorry you’re worked up. But this is no time of day to run off upset like you are. It’s late, girl. It’s almost nightfall. Why don’t you sit down with me, and we’ll talk about what’s bothering you. I’d like to see if I can’t put your mind at ease. You give me half a chance, I bet I can.”

Anna seemed to be having trouble finding her voice all of a sudden. Her eyes were flat and bright and frightened. She looked from Craddock to Reese and finally back to her sister.

“Keep him away from me,” Anna said. “Or so help me I’ll kill him.”

“She can’t go,” Jessica said to Craddock. “Not yet.”

Not yet? Jude wondered what that could mean. Did Jessica think there was more to talk about? It looked to him as if the conversation was already over.

Craddock glanced sidelong at Reese.

“Go to your room, Reese.” He reached out toward her as he spoke, to put a reassuring hand on her small head.

“Don’t touch her!” Anna screamed.

Craddock’s hand stopped moving, hung in the air, just above Reese’s head—then fell back to his side.

Something changed then. In the dark of the hall, Jude could not see Craddock’s features well, but he thought he detected some subtle shift in body language, in the set of his shoulders or the tilt of his head or the way his feet were planted. Jude thought of a man readying himself to grab a snake out of the weeds.

At last Craddock spoke to Reese again, without turning his gaze away from Anna. “Go on, sweetheart. You let the grown-ups talk now. It’s nightfall, and it’s time for the grown-ups to talk without little girls underfoot.”

Reese glanced down the hall at Anna and her mother. Anna met her gaze, moved her head in the slightest of nods.

“Go ahead, Reese,” Anna said. “Just grown-ups talkin’.”

The little girl ducked her head back into her room and pulled her door shut. A moment later the sound of her music came in a muffled blast through the door, a barrage of drums and a screech of train-coming-off-the-tracks guitar, followed by children jubilantly shrieking in rough harmony. It was the Kidz Bop version of Jude’s last Top 40 hit, “Put You in Yer Place.”

Craddock jerked at the sound of it, and his hands closed into fists.

“That man,” he whispered.

As he came toward Anna and Jessica, a curious thing happened. The landing at the top of the staircase was illuminated by the failing sunshine that shone through the big bay window at the front of the house, so that as Craddock approached his stepdaughters, the light rose into his face, etching fine details, the tilt of cheekbone, the deep-set brackets around his mouth. But the lenses of his spectacles darkened, hiding his eyes behind circles of blackness.

The old man said, “You haven’t been the same since you came home to us from living with that man. I can’t tell what’s got into you, Anna darling. You’ve had some bad times—no one knows that better than me—but it’s like that Coyne fella took your unhappiness and cranked up the volume on it. Cranked it up so loud you can’t hear my voice anymore when I try and talk to you. I hate to see you so miserable and mixed up.”

“I ain’t mixed up, and I ain’t your darlin’. And I am tellin’ you, if you come within four feet of me, you’ll be sorry.”

“Ten minutes,” Jessica said.

Craddock whisked his fingers at her, an impatient, silencing gesture.

Anna darted a look at her sister, then back to Craddock. “You are both wrong if you think you can keep me here by force.”

“No one is going to make you do anything you don’t want,” Craddock said, stepping past Jude.

His face was seamed and his color bad, his freckles standing out on his waxy-white flesh. He didn’t walk so much as shuffle, bent over with what Jude guessed was some permanent curvature of the spine. He looked better dead.

“You think Coyne is going to do you any favors?” Craddock went on. “I seem to recall he threw your ass out. I don’t think he even answers your letters anymore. He didn’t help you before—I don’t see why he will now.”

“He didn’t know how. I didn’t know myself. I do now. I’m gonna tell him what you did. I’m gonna tell him you belong in jail. And you know what? He’ll line up the lawyers to put you there.” She flicked a look at Jessica. “Her, too—if they don’t put her in the nut farm. Doesn’t make a difference to me, as long as they stick her a long way off from Reese.”

“Daddy!” Jessica cried, but Craddock gave his head a quick shake: Shut up.

“You think he’ll even see you? Open the door when you come knocking? I imagine he’s shacked up with someone else by now. There’s all sorts of pretty girls happy to lift their skirts for a rock star. It’s not like you have anything to offer him he can’t get elsewhere, minus the emotional headaches.”

At this a look of pain flickered across Anna’s features, and she sagged a little: A runner winded and sore from the race.

“It doesn’t matter whether he’s with someone else. He’s my friend,” she said in a small voice.

“He won’t believe you. No one will believe you, because it just isn’t true, dear. Not a word of it,” Craddock said, taking a step toward her. “You’re getting confused again, Anna.”

“That’s right,” Jessica said fervently.

“Even the pictures aren’t what you think. I can clear this up for you if you’ll let me. I can help you if—”

But he had gone too close. Anna leaped toward him. She put one hand on his face, snatching off his round, horn-rimmed spectacles and crushing them. She placed the other hand, which still clutched the envelope, in the center of his chest and shoved. He tottered, cried out. His left ankle folded, and he went down. He fell away from the steps, not toward them—Anna had come nowhere near throwing him down the staircase, no matter what Jessica had said about it.

Craddock landed on his scrawny rear with a thud that shook the whole corridor and jarred the portrait of him on the wall out of true. He started to sit up, and Anna put her heel on his shoulder and shoved, driving him down onto his back. She was shaking furiously.

Jessica squealed and dashed up the last few steps, swerving around Anna and dropping to one knee, to be by her stepfather’s side.

Jude found himself climbing to his feet. He couldn’t sit still any longer. He expected the world to get bent again, and it did, distending absurdly, like an image reflected in the side of an expanding soap bubble. His head felt a long way off from his feet—miles. And as he took his first step forward, he felt curiously buoyant, almost weightless, a scuba diver crossing the floor of the ocean. As he made his way down the hall, though, he willed the space around him to recover its proper shape and dimensions, and it did. His will meant something, then. It was possible to move through the soap-bubble world around him without popping it, if he took care.

His hands hurt, both of them, not only the right. It felt as if they were swollen to the size of boxing gloves. The pain came in steady, rhythmic waves, beating in time with his pulse, thum-thum-thum, like tires on blacktop. It mingled with the rattle and buzz of the air conditioner in Craddock’s room, to create an oddly soothing chorus of background nonsense sound.

He wanted desperately to tell Anna to get out, to get downstairs and out of the house. He had a strong sense, though, that he could not shove himself into the scene before him without tearing through the soft tissue of the dream. And anyway, past was past. He couldn’t change what was going to happen now any more than he’d been able to save Bammy’s sister, Ruth, by calling her name. You couldn’t change, but you could bear witness.

Jude wondered why Anna had even come upstairs, then thought that probably she wanted to throw some clothes in a bag before she left. She wasn’t afraid of her father and Jessica, didn’t think they had any power over her anymore—a beautiful, heartbreaking, fatal confidence in herself.

“I told you to stay away,” Anna said.

“You doin’ this for him?” Craddock asked. Until this moment, he had spoken with courtly southern inflections. There was nothing courtly about his voice now, though, his accent all harsh twang, a good ol’ boy with nothing good about him. “This all part of some crazy idea you have to win him back? You think you’re going to get his sympathy, you go crawlin’ off to him, with your sob story about how your pop made you do terrible things and it ruined you for life? I bet you can’t wait to boast to him ’bout how you told me off and shoved me down, an old man who cared for you in times of sickness and protected you from yourself when you were out of your mind. You think he’d be proud of you if he was standin’ here right now and saw you attack me?”

“No,” Anna said. “I think he’d be proud of me if he saw this.” She stepped forward and spat into his face.

Craddock flinched, then let out a strangled bellow, as if he’d caught an eyeful of some corrosive agent. Jessica started to haul herself to her feet, fingers hooked into claws, but Anna caught her by the shoulder and shoved her back down next to their stepfather.

Anna stood over them, trembling, but not as furiously as she had been a moment before. Jude reached tentatively for her shoulder, put his bandaged left hand on it, and squeezed lightly. Daring finally to touch her. Anna didn’t seem to notice. Reality warped itself out of shape for an instant when his hand settled upon her, but he thought everything back to normality by focusing on the background sounds, the music of the moment: thum-thum-thum, rattle and hum.

“Good for you, Florida,” he said. It was out before he could catch himself. The world didn’t end.

Anna wagged her head back and forth, a dismissive little shake. When she spoke, her tone was weary. “And I was scared of you.”

She turned, slipping out of Jude’s grasp, and went down the hall, to a room at the end. She closed the door behind her.

Jude heard something go plink, looked down. His right hand was in the sock, soaked through with blood and dripping on the floor. The silver buttons on the front of his Johnny Cash coat flashed in the very last of the salmon-colored light of day. He hadn’t noticed he was wearing the dead man’s suit until just now. It really was a hell of a good fit. Jude had not wondered for one second how it was possible he could be seeing the scene before him, but now an answer to that unasked question occurred. He had bought the dead man’s suit and the dead man, too—owned the ghost and the ghost’s past. These moments belonged to him, too, now.

Jessica crouched beside her stepfather, the both of them panting harshly, staring at the closed door to Anna’s room. Jude heard drawers opening and closing in there, a closet door thudding.

“Nightfall,” Jessica whispered. “Nightfall at last.”

Craddock nodded. He had a scratch on his face, directly below his left eye, where Anna had caught him with a fingernail as she tore off his glasses. A teardrop of blood trickled along his nose. He swiped at it with the back of his hand and made a red smear along his cheek.

Jude glanced toward the great bay window into the foyer. The sky was a deep, still blue, darkening toward night. Along the horizon, beyond the trees and rooftops on the other side of the street, was a line of deepest red, where the sun had only just disappeared.

“What’d you do?” Craddock asked. He spoke quietly, voice pitched just above a whisper, still tremulous with rage.

“She let me hypnotize her a couple times,” Jessica told him, speaking in the same hush. “To help her sleep at night. I made a suggestion.”

In Anna’s room there was a brief silence. Then Jude distinctly heard a glassy tink, a bottle tapping against glass, followed by a soft gurgling.

“What suggestion?” Craddock asked.

“I told her nightfall is a nice time for a drink. I said it’s her reward for getting through the day. She keeps a bottle in the top drawer.”

In Anna’s bedroom a lingering, dreadful quiet.

“What’s that going to do?”

“There’s phenobarbital in her gin,” Jessica said. “I got her sleeping like a champ these days.”

Something made a clunking sound on the hardwood floor in Anna’s room. A tumbler falling.

“Good girl,” Craddock breathed. “I knew you had something.”

Jessica said, “You need to make her forget—the photos, what she found, everything. Everything that just happened. You have to make it all go away.”

“I can’t do that,” Craddock said. “I haven’t been able to do that in a long while. When she was younger…when she trusted me more. Maybe you…”

Jessica was shaking her head. “I can’t take her deep like that. She won’t let me—I’ve tried. The last time I hypnotized her, to help with her insomnia, I tried to ask her questions about Judas Coyne, what she wrote in her letters to him, and if she ever said anything to him about…about you. But whenever I got too personal, whenever I’d ask her something she didn’t want to tell me, she’d start singing one of his songs. Holdin’ me back, like. I never seen anything like it.”

“Coyne did this,” Craddock said again, his upper lip curling. “He ruined her. Ruined her. Turned her against us. He used her for what he wanted, wrecked her whole world, and then sent her back to us to wreck ours. He might as well have sent us a bomb in the mail.”

“What are we going to do? There’s got to be a way to stop her. She can’t leave this house like she is. You heard her. She’ll take Reese away from me. She’ll take you, too. They’ll arrest you, and me, and we’ll never see each other again, except in courtrooms.”

Craddock was breathing slowly now, and all the feeling had drained from his face, leaving behind only a look of dull, saturnine hostility. “You’re right on one thing, girl. She can’t leave this house.”

It was a moment before this statement seemed to register with Jessica. She turned a startled, confused glance upon her stepfather.

“Everyone knows about Anna,” he went on. “How unhappy she’s always been. Everyone’s always known how she was going to wind up. That she was going to slit her wrists one of these days in the bath.”

Jessica began to shake her head. She made to rise to her feet, but Craddock caught her wrists, pulled her back to her knees.

“The gin and the drugs make sense. Lots of ’em knock back a couple drinks and some pills before they do it. Before they kill themselves. It’s how they quiet their fears and deaden the pain,” he said.

Jessica was still shaking her head, a little frantically, her eyes bright and terrified and blind, not seeing her stepfather anymore. Her breath came in short bursts—she was close to hyperventilating.

When Craddock spoke again, his voice was steady, calm. “You stop it, now. You want Anna to take Reese away? You want to spend ten years in a county home?” He tightened his hold on her wrists and drew her closer, so he was speaking directly into her face. And at last her eyes refocused on his and her head stopped wagging back and forth. Craddock said, “This isn’t our fault. It’s Coyne’s. He’s the one backed us into this corner, you hear? He’s the one sent us this stranger who wants to tear us down. I don’t know what happened to our Anna. I haven’t seen the real Anna since I can’t remember when. The Anna you grew up with is dead. Coyne saw to that. Far as I’m concerned, he finished her off. He might as well have cut her wrists himself. And he’s going to answer for it. Believe it. I’ll teach him to meddle with a man’s family. Shh, now. Catch your breath. Listen to my voice. We’ll get through this. I’m going to get you through this, same as I’ve got you through every other bad thing in your life. You trust in me now. Take one deep breath. Now take another. Better?”

Her blue-gray eyes were wide and avid: entranced. Her breath whistled, one long, slow exhalation, then another.

“You can do this,” Craddock said. “I know you can. For Reese, you can do whatever has to be done.”

Jessica said, “I’ll try. But you have to tell me. You have to say what to do. I can’t think.”

“That’s all right. I’ll think for both of us,” Craddock said. “And you don’t need to do anything except pick yourself up and go draw a warm bath.”

“Yes. Okay.”

Jessica started to rise again, but Craddock tugged at her wrists, held her beside him a moment longer.

“And when you’re done,” Craddock said, “run downstairs and get my old pendulum. I’ll need something for Anna’s wrists.”

At that he let her go. Jessica rose to her feet so quickly she stumbled and put a hand against the wall to steady herself. She stared at him for a moment, then turned in a kind of trance and opened a door just to her left, let herself into a white-tiled bathroom.

Craddock remained on the floor until there came the sound of water rushing into the tub. Then he helped himself to his feet and stood shoulder to shoulder with Jude.

“You old cocksucker,” Jude said. The soap-bubble world flexed and wobbled. Jude clenched his teeth together, pulled it back into shape.

Craddock’s lips were thin and pale, stretched back across his teeth in a bitter, ugly grimace. The old flesh on the backs of his arms wobbled. He made his slow way down to Anna’s room, reeling a little—getting shoved down had taken something out of him. He pushed the door in. Jude followed at his heels.

There were two windows in Anna’s room, but they both faced the back of the house, away from where the sun had gone down. It was already night in there, the room sunk into blue shadows. Anna sat at the very end of the bed, an empty tumbler on the floor between her sneakers. Her duffel bag was on the mattress behind her, some laundry hastily thrown into it, the sleeve of a red sweater hanging out. Anna’s face was a pleasant blank, her forearms resting on her knees, her eyes glassy and fixed on a point in the impossible distance. The cream-colored envelope with the Polaroid of Reese in it—her evidence—was in one hand, forgotten. The sight of her that way made Jude ill.

Judas sank onto the bed beside her. The mattress creaked beneath him, but no one—not Anna, not Craddock—seemed to notice. He put his left hand over Anna’s right. His left hand was bleeding again from the puncture wound, the bandages stained and loose. When had that started? He couldn’t even lift the right hand, which was too heavy now and too painful. The thought of moving it made him dizzy.

Craddock paused before his stepdaughter, bent to peer speculatively into her face.

“Anna? Can you hear me? Can you hear my voice?”

She went on smiling, did not reply at first. Then she blinked and said, “What? Did you say something, Craddock? I was listening to Jude. On the radio. This is my favorite song.”

His lips tightened until there was no color in them. “That man,” he said again, almost spitting it. He took one corner of the envelope and jerked it out of her hands.

Craddock straightened up, turned toward one of the windows to pull down the shade.

“I love you, Florida,” Jude said. The bedroom around him bulged when he spoke, the soap bubble swelling so that it threatened to explode, then shrank again.

“Love you, Jude,” Anna said softly.

At this, Craddock’s shoulders jumped in a startled shrug. He looked back, wondering. Then the old man said, “You and him are going to be back together soon. That’s what you wanted, and that’s what you’ll get. I’m going to see to it. I’m going to put you two together just as soon as I can.”

“Goddam you,” Jude said, and this time when the room bloated and stretched itself out of shape, he couldn’t, no matter how hard he concentrated on thum-thum-thum, make it go back the way it was supposed to be. The walls swelled and then sank inward, like bed linens hanging on a line and moving in a breeze.

The air in the room was warm and close and smelled of exhaust and dog. Jude heard a soft whining sound behind him and looked back at Angus, who lay on the bed where Anna’s duffel bag had been only a moment before. His breathing was labored, and his eyes were gummy and yellow. A sharp-tipped red bone stuck through one bent leg.

Jude looked back toward Anna, only to find that it was Marybeth sitting next to him on the bed now, face dirty, expression hard.

Craddock pulled down one of the shades, and the room darkened some more. Jude glanced out the other window and saw the greenery at the side of the interstate, palms, rubbish in the weeds, and then a green sign that said EXIT 9. His hands went thum-thum-thum. The air conditioner hummed, buzzed, hummed. Jude wondered for the first time how he could still be hearing Craddock’s air conditioner. The old man’s room was all the way down the hall. Something began to click, a sound as repetitive as a metronome: the turn signal.

Craddock moved to the other window, blocking Jude’s view of the highway, and he ran down that shade as well, plunging Anna’s room into darkness. Nightfall at last.

Jude looked back at Marybeth, her jaw set, one hand on the wheel. The blinker signal flashed repetitively on the dash, and he opened his mouth, to say something, he didn’t know what, something like…

41

What are you doin’?” His voice an unfamiliar croak. Marybeth was aiming the Mustang at an exit ramp, had almost reached it. “This ain’t it.”

“I was shakin’ you for about five minutes, and you wouldn’t wake up. I thought you were in a coma or somethin’. There’s a hospital here.”

“Keep going. I’m awake now.”

She swerved back onto the highway at the last moment, and a horn blared behind her.

“How you doin’, Angus?” Jude asked, and peeked back at him.

Jude reached between the seats and touched a paw, and for an instant Angus’s gaze sharpened a little. His jaws moved. His tongue found the back of Jude’s left hand and lapped at his fingers.

“Good boy,” Jude whispered. “Good boy.”

At last he turned away, settled back into his seat. The sock puppet on his right hand wore a red face. He was in dire need of a shot of something to dull the pain, thought he might find it on the radio: Skynyrd or, failing that, the Black Crows. He touched the power button and flipped rapidly from a burst of static to the Doppler pulse of a coded military transmission to Hank Williams III, or maybe just Hank Williams, Jude couldn’t tell because the signal was so faint, and then—

Then the tuner landed on a perfectly clear broadcast: Craddock.

“I never would’ve thought you had so much in the tank, boy.” His voice was genial and close, coming out of the speakers set in the doors. “You don’t have any quit in you. That usually counts for something with me. This ain’t usually, of course. You understand that.” He laughed. “Anyplace will do. You know, most people like to think they don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit,’ but it isn’t true. Most people, you put them under, put them under deep, maybe help ’em along with some good dope, sink them into a full trance state, and then tell them they’re burnin’ alive? They’ll scream for water till they got no voice left. They’ll do anything to make it stop. Anything you like. That’s just human nature. But some people—children and crazy folks, mostly—you can’t reason with, even when they’re in a trance. Anna was both, God love her. I tried to make her forget about all the things that made her feel so bad. She was a good girl. I hated the way she tore herself up over things—even over you. But I couldn’t ever really make her go all the way blank, even though it would’ve saved her pain. Some people would just rather suffer. No wonder she liked you. You’re the same way. I wanted to deal with you quick. But you had to go and drag this out. And now you got to wonder why. You got to ask yourself. You know, when that dog in the backseat stops breathing, so do you. And it ain’t going to be easy, like it could’ve been. You spent three days livin’ like a dog, and now you have to die like one, and so does that two-dollar bitch next to you—”

Marybeth thumbed the radio off. It came right back on again.

“—you think you could turn my own little girl against me and not have to answer for it—”

Jude lifted his foot and slammed the heel of his Doc Marten into the dash. It hit with a crunch of splintering plastic. Craddock’s voice was instantly lost in a sudden, deafening blast of bass. Jude kicked the radio again, shattering the face. It went silent.

“Remember when I said the dead man didn’t come for talk?” Jude told her. “I take it back. Lately I been thinking that’s all he came for.”

Marybeth didn’t reply. Thirty minutes later Jude spoke again, to tell her to get off at the next exit.

They drove on a two-lane state highway, with southern, semitropical forest growing right up to the sides of the road, leaning over it. They passed a drive-in that had been closed since Jude was a child. The giant movie screen towered over the road, holes torn in it, offering a view of the sky. This evening’s feature was a drifting pall of dirty smoke. They rolled by the New South Motel, long since shut up and being reclaimed by the jungle, windows boarded over. They glided past a filling station, the first place they’d seen that was open. Two deeply sunburned fat men sat out front and watched them go by. They did not smile or wave or acknowledge the passing car in any way, except that one leaned forward and spat in the dirt.

Jude directed her to take a left off the highway, and they followed a road up into the low hills. The afternoon light was strange, a dim, poisonous red, a stormy twilight color. It was the same color Jude saw when he shut his eyes, the color of his headache. It was not close to nightfall but looked it. The bellies of the clouds to the west were dark and threatening. The wind lashed the tops of the palms and shook the Spanish moss that straggled down from low-hanging oak branches.

“We’re here,” he said.

As Marybeth turned into the driveway, the long run-up to the house, the wind gusted with more force than usual and threw a burst of plump, hard raindrops across the windshield. They hit in a sudden, furious rattle, and Jude waited for more, but there was no more.

The house stood at the top of a low rise. Jude had not been here in more than three decades and had not realized until this moment how closely his home in New York resembled the home of his childhood. It was as if he had leaped ten years into the future and returned to New York to find his own farm neglected and disused, fallen to ruin. The great rambling place before him was the gray color of mouse, with a roof of black shingles, many of them crooked or missing, and as they drew closer, Jude actually saw the wind snag one, strip it loose, and propel the black square away into the sky.

The abandoned chicken coop was visible to one side of the house, and its screen door swung open, then banged shut with a crack like a gunshot. The glass was missing from a window on the first floor, and the wind rattled a sheet of semitransparent plastic stapled into the frame. This had always been their destination, Jude saw now. They had been headed toward this place from the moment they took to the road.

The dirt lane that led to the house ended in a loop. Marybeth followed it around, turning the Mustang to point back the way they’d come, before putting it into park. They were both staring down the drive when the floodlights of Craddock’s truck appeared at the bottom of the hill.

“Oh, God,” Marybeth said, and then she was out of the Mustang, going around the front to Jude’s side.

The pale truck at the foot of the drive seemed to pause for a moment, then began rolling up the hill toward them.

Marybeth jerked his door open. Jude almost fell out. She pulled on his arm.

“Get on your feet. Get in the house.”

“Angus…” he said, glancing into the back at his dog.

Angus’s head rested on his front paws. He stared wearily back at Jude, his eyes red-rimmed and wet.

“He’s dead.”

“No,” Jude said, sure she was mistaken. “How you doin’, boy?”

Angus regarded him mournfully, didn’t move. The wind got into the car, and an empty paper cup scooted around on the floor, rattling softly. The breeze stirred Angus’s fur, brushing it in the wrong direction. Angus paid it no mind.

It didn’t seem possible that Angus could just have died like that, with no fanfare. He’d been alive only a few minutes ago, Jude was convinced of it. Jude stood in the dirt next to the Mustang, sure if he just waited another moment, Angus would move, stretch his front paws, and lift his head. Then Marybeth was hauling on his arm again, and he didn’t have the strength to resist her, had to stagger along after or risk being toppled.

He fell to his knees a few feet from the front steps. He didn’t know why. He had an arm over Marybeth’s shoulders, and she had one looped around his waist, and she moaned through her clenched lips, dragging him back onto his heels. Behind him he heard the dead man’s pickup rolling to a stop in the turnaround. Gravel crunched under the tires.

Hey, boy, Craddock called from the open driver’s-side window, and at the door Jude and Marybeth stopped to look back.

The truck idled beside the Mustang. Craddock sat behind the wheel, in his stiff, formal black suit with the silver buttons. His left arm hung out the window. His face was hard to make out through the blue curve of glass.

This your place, son? Craddock said. He laughed. How could you ever stand to leave? He laughed again.

The razor shaped like a crescent moon fell from the hand hanging out the window, and swung from its gleaming chain.

You’re gonna cut her throat. And she’s goin’ to be glad when you do. Just to have it over with. You should’ve stayed away from my little girls, Jude.

Jude turned the doorknob, and Marybeth shouldered it inward, and they crashed through into the dark of the front hall. Marybeth kicked the door shut behind them. Jude threw a last glance out the window beside the door—and the truck was gone. The Mustang stood alone in the drive. Marybeth turned him and shoved him into motion again.

They started down the corridor, side by side, each holding the other up. Her hip caught a side table and overturned it, and it smashed to the floor. A phone that had been sitting on it toppled to the boards, and the receiver flew off the cradle.

At the end of the hall was a doorway, leading into the kitchen, where the lights were on. It was the only source of light they’d seen so far in the entire house. From the outside the windows had been dark, and once they were in, it was shadows in the front hall and a cavernous gloom waiting at the top of the stairs.

An old woman, in a pastel flower-print blouse, appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her hair was a white frizz, and her spectacles magnified her blue, amazed eyes to appear almost comically large. Jude knew Arlene Wade at a glance, although he could not have said how long it had been since he’d last seen her. Whenever it had been, she’d always been just as she was now—scrawny, perpetually startled-looking, old.

“What is this business?” she called out. Her right hand reached up to curl around the cross that hung at her throat. She stepped back as they reached the doorway to let them by. “My God, Justin. What in the name of Mary and Joseph happened to you?”

The kitchen was yellow. Yellow linoleum, yellow tile countertops, yellow-and-white-check curtains, daisy-patterned plates drying in the basket next to the sink, and as Jude took it all in, he heard that song in his head, the one that had been such a smash for Coldplay a few years before, the one about how everything was all yellow.

He was surprised, given the way the house looked from the outside, to find the kitchen so full of lively color, so well kept up. It had never been this cozy when he’d been a child. The kitchen was where his mother had spent most of her time, watching daytime TV in a stupor while she peeled potatoes or washed beans. Her mood of numb, emotional exhaustion had drained the color from the room and made it a place where it seemed important to speak in quiet voices, if at all, a private and unhappy space that you could no more run through than you could make a ruckus in a funeral parlor.

But his mother was thirty years dead, and the kitchen was Arlene Wade’s now. She had lived in the house for more than a year and very likely passed most of her waking hours in this room, which she’d warmed with the everyday business of being herself, an old woman with friends to talk to on the phone, pies to bake for relatives, a dying man to care for. In fact, it was a little too cozy. Jude felt dizzy at the warmth of it, at the suddenly close air. Marybeth turned him toward the kitchen table. He felt a bony claw sink into his right arm, Arlene grabbing his biceps, and was surprised at the rigid strength in her fingers.

“You got a sock on your hand,” she said.

“He got one of his fingers taken off,” Marybeth said.

“What are you doing here, then?” Arlene asked. “Shoulda drove him to the hospital.”

Jude fell into a chair. Curiously, even sitting still, he felt as if he were still moving, the walls of the room sliding slowly past him, the chair gliding forward like a car in a theme-park amusement: Mr. Jude’s Wild Ride. Marybeth sank into a chair next to him, her knees bumping his. She was shivering. Her face was oiled in sweat, and her hair had gone crazy, was snarled and twisted. Strands stuck to her temples, to the sweat on the sides of her face, to the back of her neck.

“Where are your dogs?” Marybeth asked.

Arlene began to untie the sock wound around Jude’s wrist, peering down her nose at it through the magnifying lenses of her glasses. If she found this question bizarre or startling, she showed no sign of it. She was intent on the work of her hands.

“My dog is over there,” she said, nodding at one corner of the room. “And as you can see, he’s quite protective of me. He’s a fierce old boy. Don’t want to cross him.”

Jude and Marybeth looked to the corner. A fat old rottweiler sat on a dog pillow in a wicker basket. He was too big for it, and his pink, hairless ass hung over the side. He weakly lifted his head, regarded them through rheumy, bloodshot eyes, then lowered his head again and sighed softly.

“Is that what happened to this hand?” Arlene asked. “Were you bit by a dog, Justin?”

“What happened to my father’s shepherds?” Jude asked.

“He hasn’t been up to takin’ care of a dog for a while now. I sent Clinton and Rather off to live with the Jeffery family.” Then she had the sock off his hand and drew a sharp breath when she saw the bandage beneath. It was soaked—saturated—with blood. “Are you in some kinda stupid race with your daddy to see who can die first?” She set his hand on the table without unwrapping the bandages to see more. Then she glanced at Jude’s bandaged left hand. “You missin’ any parts off that one?”

“No. That one I just gouged real good.”

“I’ll get you the ambulance,” Arlene said. She had lived in the South her whole life and she pronounced the word amble-lance.

She picked up the phone on the kitchen wall. It made a noisy, repetitive blatting at her, and she jerked her ear away from the receiver, then hung up.

“You crashed my phone off the hook in the hall,” she said, and disappeared into the front of the house to right it.

Marybeth stared at Jude’s hand. He lifted it—discovered he had left a wet red handprint on the table—and put it weakly back down.

“We shouldn’t have come here,” she said.

“Nowhere else to go.”

She turned her head, looked at Arlene’s fat rottie. “Tell me he’s gonna help us.”

“Okay. He’s going to help us.”

“You mean it?”

“No.”

Marybeth questioned him with a glance.

“Sorry,” Jude said. “I might’ve misled you a bit ’bout the dogs. Not just any dogs will do. They have to be mine. You know how every witch has a black cat? Bon and Angus were like that for me. They can’t be replaced.”

“When did you figure that out?”

“Four days ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was hoping to bleed to death before Angus went and croaked on us. Then you’d be okay. Then the ghost would have to leave you alone. His business with us would be done. If my head was clearer, I wouldn’t have bandaged myself up so well.”

“You think it’ll make it okay if you let yourself die? You think it’ll make it okay to give him what he wants? Goddam you. You think I came all this way to watch you kill yourself? Goddam you.”

Arlene stepped back through the kitchen doorway, frowning, eyebrows knitted together in a look of annoyance or deep thought or both.

“There’s somethin’ wrong with that phone. I can’t get a dial tone. All I do get, when I pick up, is some local AM station. Some farm program. Guy chatterin’ about how to cut open animals. Maybe the wind yanked down a line.”

“I have a cell phone—” Marybeth began.

“Me, too,” Arlene said. “But we don’t get no reception up in these parts. Let’s get Justin laid down, and I’ll see what I can do for his hand right now. Then I’ll drive down the road to the McGees and call from there.”

Without any forewarning she reached between them and snatched at Marybeth’s wrist, lifting her own bandaged hand for a moment. The wraps were stiff and brown with the dried bloodstains on them.

“What the hell have you two been doin’?” she asked.

“It’s my thumb,” Marybeth said.

“Did you try to trade it to him for his finger?”

“It’s just got an infection.”

Arlene set the bandaged hand down and looked at the unbandaged left hand, terribly white, the skin wrinkled. “I never seen any infection like this. It’s in both hands—is it anywhere else?”

“No.”

She felt Marybeth’s brow. “You’re burnin’ up. My God. The both of you. You can rest in my room, honey. I’ll put Justin in with his father. I shoved an extra bed in there two weeks ago, so I could nap in there and keep a closer eye on him. Come on, big boy. More walkin’ to do. Get yourself up.”

“If you want me to move, you better get the wheelbarrow and roll me,” Jude said.

“I got morphine in your daddy’s room.”

“Okay,” Jude said, and he put his left hand on the table and struggled to get to his feet.

Marybeth jumped up and took his elbow.

“You stay where you are,” Arlene said. She nodded in the direction of her rottweiler and the door beyond, which opened into what had once been a sewing room but was now a small bedroom. “Go on and rest in there. I can handle this one.”

“It’s all right,” Jude said to Marybeth. “Arlene’s got me.”

“What are we gonna do about Craddock?” Marybeth asked.

She was standing almost against him, and Jude leaned forward and put his face in her hair and kissed the crown of her head.

“I don’t know,” Jude said. “I wish like hell you weren’t in this with me. Why didn’t you get away from me when you still had the chance? Why you got to be such a stubborn ass about things?”

“I been hangin’ around you for nine months,” she said, and stood on tiptoe and put her arms around his neck, her mouth searching for his. “I guess it just rubbed off on me.”

And then for a while they stood rocking back and forth in each other’s arms.

42

When Jude stepped away from Marybeth, Arlene turned him around and started him walking. He expected her to march him back down the front hall, so they could go upstairs to the master bedroom, where he assumed his father lay. Instead, though, they continued along the length of the kitchen to the back hall, the one that led to Jude’s old bedroom.

Of course his father was there, on the first floor. Jude vaguely recalled that Arlene had told him, in one of their few phone conversations, that she was moving Martin downstairs and into Jude’s old bedroom, because it was easier than going up and down the stairs to tend to him.

Jude cast one last look back at Marybeth. She was watching him go, from where she stood in the doorway of Arlene’s bedroom, her eyes fever-bright and exhausted—and then Jude and Arlene were moving away, leaving her behind. He didn’t like the idea of being so far from Marybeth in the dark and decayed maze of his father’s house. It did not seem too unreasonable to think that they might never find their way back to each other.

The hall to his room was narrow and crooked, the walls visibly warped. They passed a screen door, the frame nailed shut, the screens rusty and bellied outward. It looked into a muddy hog pen, three medium-size pigs in it. The pigs peered at Jude and Arlene as they went by, their squashed-in faces benevolent and wise.

“There’s still pigs?” Jude said. “Who’s carin’ for them?”

“Who do you think?”

“Why didn’t you sell them?”

She shrugged, then said, “Your father took care of pigs all his life. He can hear them in where he’s layin’. I guess I thought it would help him know where he was. Who he was.” She looked up in Jude’s face. “You think I’m foolish?”

“No,” Jude said.

Arlene eased the door to Jude’s old bedroom inward, and they stepped into a suffocating warmth that smelled so strongly of menthol it made Jude’s eyes water.

“Hang on,” Arlene said. “Lemme move my sewin’.”

She left him leaning against the doorway and hastened to the little bed against the wall, to the left. Jude looked across the room to an identical cot. His father was in it.

Martin Cowzynski’s eyes were narrow slits, showing only glazed slivers of eyeball. His mouth yawned open. His hands were gaunt claws, curled against his chest, the nails crooked, yellow, sharp. He had always been lean and wiry. But he had lost, Jude guessed, maybe a third of his weight, and there was barely a hundred pounds of him left. He looked like he was already dead, although breath yet whined in his throat. There were streaks of white foam on his chin. Arlene had been shaving him. The bowl of hand-whipped foam was on the night table, a wood-handled brush sitting in it.

Jude had not seen his father in thirty-four years, and the sight of him—starved, hideous, lost in his own private dream of death—brought on a fresh wave of dizziness. Somehow it was more horrible that Martin was breathing. It would’ve been easier to look upon him, as he was now, if he were dead. Jude had hated him for so long that he was unprepared for any other emotion. For pity. For horror. Horror was rooted in sympathy, after all, in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst. Jude had not imagined he could feel either sympathy or understanding for the man in the bed across the room.

“Can he see me standing here?” Jude asked.

Arlene looked over her shoulder at Jude’s father.

“Doubt it. He hasn’t responded to the sight of anything in days. Course it’s been months since he could talk, but until just a little while ago he did sometimes make faces or give a sign when he wanted something. He enjoyed when I shaved him, so I still do that ever’ day. He liked the hot water on his face. Maybe some part of him still likes it. I don’t know.” She paused, considering the gaunt, rasping figure in the far bed. “It’s sorry to see him die this way, but it’s worse to keep a man going after a certain point. I believe that. There comes a time, the dead have a right to claim their own.”

Jude nodded. “The dead claim their own. They do.”

He looked at what Arlene held in her hands, the sewing kit she was moving off the other cot. It was his mother’s old kit, a collection of thimbles, needles, and thread, jumbled in one of the big yellow heart-shaped candy boxes his father used to get for her. Arlene squeezed the lid on it, closing it up, and set it on the floor between the cots. Jude eyed it warily, but it didn’t make any threatening moves.

Arlene returned and guided him by the elbow to the empty bed. There was a light on a mechanical arm, screwed to the side of the night table. She twisted the lamp around—it made a sproingy, creaking sound as the rusted coil stretched itself out—and clicked it on. He shut his eyes against the sudden brightness.

“Let’s look at that hand.”

She brought a low stool to the side of the bed and began to unwind the sopping gauze, using a pair of forceps. As she peeled the last layer away from his skin, a flush of icy tingling spread through his hand, and then the missing finger began, impossibly, to burn, as if it were crawling with biting fire ants.

She stuck a needle into the wound, injecting him here, and here, while he cursed. Then came a rush of intense and blessed cold, spreading through the hand and into his wrist, pumping along the veins, turning him into an iceman.

The room darkened, then brightened. The sweat on his body cooled rapidly. He was on his back. He didn’t remember lying down. He distantly felt a tugging on his right hand. When he realized that this tugging was Arlene doing something to the stump of his finger—clamping it, or putting hooks through it, or stitching it—he said, “Gonna puke.” He fought the urge to gag until she could place a rubber trough next to his cheek, then turned his head and vomited into it.

When Arlene was finished, she laid his right hand on his chest. Wrapped in layer upon layer of muffling bandage, it was three times the size it had been, a small pillow. He was groggy. His temples thudded. She turned the harsh, bright light into his eyes again and leaned over for a look at the slash in his cheek. She found a wide, flesh-colored bandage and carefully applied it to his face.

She said, “You been leakin’ pretty good. Do you know what type of motor oil you run on? I’ll make sure the amble-lance brings the right stuff.”

“Check on Marybeth. Please.”

“I was going to.”

She clicked off the light before she went. It was a relief to be joined to darkness once more.

He closed his eyes, and when they sprang open again, he did not know whether one minute had passed or sixty. His father’s house was a place of restful silence and stillness, no sound but for the sudden whoosh of the wind, lumber creaking, a burst of rain on the windows. He wondered if Arlene had gone for the amble-lance. He wondered if Marybeth was sleeping. He wondered if Craddock was in the house, sitting outside the door. Jude turned his head and found his father staring at him.

His father’s mouth hung agape, the few teeth that were left stained brown from nicotine exposure, the gums diseased. Martin stared, pale gray eyes confused. Four feet of bare floor separated the two men.

“You aren’t here,” Martin Cowzynski said, his voice a wheeze.

“Thought you couldn’t talk,” Jude said.

His father blinked slowly. Gave no sign he’d heard. “You’ll be gone when I wake up.” His tone was almost wishful. He began to cough weakly. Spit flew, and his chest seemed to go hollow, sinking inward, as if with each painful hack he were coughing up his insides, beginning to deflate.

“You got that wrong, old man,” Jude told him. “You’re my bad dream, not the other way around.”

Martin continued staring at him with that look of stupid wonder for a few moments longer, then turned his gaze to the ceiling once more. Jude watched him warily, the old man in his army cot, breath screaming from his throat, dried streaks of shaving cream on his face.

His father’s eyes gradually sank shut. In a while Jude’s eyes did the same.

43

He wasn’t sure what woke him, but later on Jude looked up, coming out of sleep in an instant, and found Arlene at the foot of the bed. He didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. She was wearing a bright red rain slicker with the hood pulled up. Droplets of rain glittered on the plastic. Her old, bony face was set in a blank, almost robotic expression that Jude did not at first recognize and which he needed several moments to interpret as fear. He wondered if she’d gone and come back or not yet left.

“We lost the power,” she said.

“Did we?”

“I went outside, and when I came back in, we lost the power.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s a truck in the driveway. Just settin’ there. Sort of no particular color. I can’t see who is settin’ in it. I started to walk out to it, to see if it was someone who could maybe drive somewhere and call emergency for us—but then I got scared. I got scared of who was in it, and I came back.”

“You want to stay away from him.”

She went on as if Jude had said nothing. “When I got back inside, we didn’t have power, and it’s still just some crazy talk radio on the telephone. Bunch of religious stuff about ridin’ the glory road. The TV was turned on in the front room. It was just runnin’. I know it couldn’t be, because there isn’t any power, but it was turned on anyway. There was a story on it. On the news. It was about you. It was about all of us. About how we was all dead. It showed a picture of the farmhouse and every-thin’. They were coverin’ my body with a sheet. They didn’t identify me, but I saw my hand stickin’ out and my bracelet. And policemen standin’ ever’where. And that yellow tape blockin’ the driveway. And Dennis Woltering said how you killed us all.”

“It’s a lie. None of that is really going to happen.”

“Finally I couldn’t stand it. I shut it off. The TV came right back on, but I shut it off again and jerked the plug out of the wall, and that fixed it.” She paused, then added, “I have to go, Justin. I’ll call for the amble-lance from the neighbors. I have to go…. Only I’m scared to try anddrive around that truck. Who drives the pale truck?”

“No one you want to meet. Take my Mustang. The keys are in it.”

“No thank you. I seen what was in the back.”

“Oh.”

“I got my car.”

“Just don’t mess with that truck. Drive right over the lawn and through the fence if you have to. Do what you need to do to stay away from it. Did you look in on Marybeth?”

Arlene nodded.

“How is she?”

“Sleepin’. Poor child.”

“You said it.”

“Good-bye, Justin.”

“Take care.”

“I’m bringin’ my dog with me.”

“All right.”

She took a sliding half step toward the door.

Then Arlene said, “Your uncle Pete and I took you to Disney when you were seven. Do you remember?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“In your whole life, I never once saw you smile until you were up in them elephants, goin’ ’round and ’round. That made me feel good. When I saw you smile, it made me feel like you had a chance to be happy. I was sorry about how you turned out. So miserable. Wearin’ black clothes and sayin’ all them terrible things in your songs. I was sick to death for you. Wherever did that boy go, the one who smiled on the elephant ride?”

“He starved to death. I’m his ghost.”

She nodded and backed away. Arlene raised one hand in a gesture of farewell, then turned and was gone.

Afterward Jude listened intently to the house, to the faint straining sounds it made in the wind and the splatter of the rain falling against it. A screen door banged sharply somewhere. It might have been Arlene leaving. It might have been the door swinging on the chicken coop outside.

Beyond a feeling of gritty heat in the side of his face, where Jessica Price had cut him, he was not in great pain. His breathing was slow and regular. He stared at the door, waiting for Craddock to appear. He didn’t look away from the door until he heard a soft tapping sound off to his right.

He peered over. The big yellow heart-shaped box sat on the floor. Something thumped inside. Then the box moved, as if jolted from beneath. It titched a few inches across the floor and jumped again. The lid was struck from within once more, and one corner was knocked up and loose.

Four gaunt fingers slipped out from inside the box. Another thump and the lid came free and then began to rise. Craddock pulled himself up from inside the box, as if it were a heart-shaped hole set in the floor. The lid rode on top of his head, a gay and foolish hat. He removed it, cast it aside, then hitched himself out of the box to the waist in a single, surprisingly athletic move for a man who was not only elderly but dead. He got a knee on the floor, climbed the rest of the way out, and stood up. The creases in the legs of his black trousers were perfect.

In the pen outside, the pigs began to shriek. Craddock reached a long arm back into the bottomless box, felt around, found his fedora, and set it on his head. The scribbles danced before his eyes. Craddock turned and smiled.

“What kept you?” Jude asked.

44

Here we are, you and me. All out of road, the dead man said. His lips were moving but making no sound, his voice existing only in Jude’s head. The silver buttons on his black suit coat glinted in the darkness.

“Yeah,” Jude said. “The fun had to stop sometime.”

Still full of fight. Isn’t that somethin’? Craddock placed one gaunt hand on Martin’s ankle and ran it over the sheet and up his leg. Martin’s eyes were closed, but his mouth hung open and breath still came and went in thin, pneumatic whistles. A thousand miles later, and you’re still singin’ the same song.

Craddock’s hand glided over Martin’s chest. It was something he seemed to be doing almost absentmindedly, did not once look at the old man fighting for his last breaths in the bed beside him.

I never did like your music. Anna used to play it so loud it’d make a normal person’s ears bleed. You know there’s a road between here and hell? I’ve driven it myself. Many times now. And I’ll tell you what, out on that road there’s only one station, and all they play is your music. I guess that’s the devil’s way of gettin’ straight to punishin’ the sinners. He laughed.

“Leave the girl.”

Oh, no. She’s going to sit right between us while we ride the nightroad. She’s come so far with you already. We can’t leave her behind now.

“I’m telling you Marybeth doesn’t have any part in this.”

But you don’t tell me, son. I tell you. You’re going to choke her to death, and I’m going to watch. Say it. Tell me how it’s going to be.

Jude thought, I won’t, but while he was thinking it, he said, “I’m going to choke her. You’re going to watch.”

Now you’re singin’ my kind of music.

Jude thought of the song he’d made up the other day, at the motel in Virginia, how his fingers had known where the right chords were and the feeling of stillness and calm that had come over him as he played them. A sensation of order and control, of the rest of the world being far away, kept back by his own invisible wall of sound. What had Bammy said to him? The dead win when you quit singing. And in his vision Jessica Price had said Anna would sing when she was in a trance, to keep from being made to do things she didn’t want to do, to block out voices she didn’t want to hear.

Get up, the dead man said. Stop lazin’ around, now. You have business in the other room. The girl is waitin’.

Jude wasn’t listening to him, though. He was focused intently on the music in his head, hearing it as it would sound when it had been recorded with a band, the soft clash of cymbal and snare, the deep, slow pulse of the bass. The old man was talking at him, but Jude found that when he fixed his mind on his new song, he could ignore him almost completely.

He thought of the radio in the Mustang, the old radio, the one he’d pulled out of the dash and replaced with XM and a DVD-Audio disc player. The original radio had been an AM receiver with a glass face that glowed an unearthly shade of green and lit up the cockpit of the car like the inside of an aquarium. In his imagination Jude could hear his own song playing from it, could hear his own voice crying out the lyrics over the shivery, echo-chamber sound of the guitar. That was on one station. The old man’s voice was on another, buried beneath it, a faraway, southern, late-night, let’s-hear-it-for-Jesus, talk-all-the-time station, the reception no good, so all that came through was a word or two at a time, the rest lost in waves of static.

Craddock had told him to sit up. It was a moment before Jude realized he hadn’t done it.

Get on your feet, I said.

Jude started to move—then stopped himself. In his mind he had the driver’s seat cranked back and his feet out the window and it was his song on the radio and the crickets hummed in the warm summer darkness. He was humming himself, and in the next moment he realized it. It was a soft, off-key humming, but recognizable, nonetheless, as the new song.

Do you hear me talkin’ to you, son? the dead man asked. Jude could tell that was what he said, because he saw his lips moving, his mouth shaping the words very clearly. But in fact Jude could not really hear him at all.

“No,” Jude said.

Craddock’s upper lip drew back in a sneer. He still had one hand on Jude’s father—it had moved up over Martin’s chest and now rested on his neck. The wind roared against the house, and raindrops rapped at the windowpanes. Then the gust abated, and in the hush that followed, Martin Cowzynski whimpered.

Jude had briefly forgotten his father—Jude’s thoughts pinned on the echoing loops of his own imagined song—but the sound drew his gaze. Martin’s eyes were open, wide and staring and horrified. He was gazing up at Craddock. Craddock turned his head toward him, the sneer fading, his gaunt and craggy face composing itself into an expression of quiet thought.

At last Jude’s father spoke, his voice a toneless wheeze. “It’s a messenger. It’s a messenger of death.”

The dead man seemed to look back at Jude, the black marks boiling in front of his eyes. Craddock’s lips moved, and for a moment his voice wavered and came clear, muted but audible beneath the sound of Jude’s private, inner song.

Maybe you can tune me out, Craddock said. But he can’t.

Craddock bent over Jude’s father and put his hands on Martin’s face, one on each cheek. Martin’s breath began to hitch and catch, each inhalation short, quick, and panicked. His eyelids fluttered. The dead man leaned forward and placed his mouth over Martin’s.

Jude’s father pressed himself back into his pillow, shoved his heels down into the bed, and pushed, as if he could force himself deeper into the mattress and away from Craddock. He drew a last, desperate breath—and sucked the dead man into him. It happened in an instant and was like watching a magician pull a scarf through his fist to make it disappear. Craddock crumpled, a wad of Saran Wrap sucked up into the tube of a vacuum cleaner. His polished black loafers were the last thing to go down Martin’s throat. Martin’s neck seemed, for a moment, to distend and swell—bulging the way a snake will bulge after swallowing a gerbil—but then he gulped Craddock down, and his throat shrank back to its normal, scrawny, loose-fleshed shape.

Jude’s father gagged, coughed, gagged again. His hips came up off the bed, his back arching. Jude could not help it, thought immediately of orgasm. Martin’s eyes strained from their sockets. The tip of his tongue flickered between his teeth.

“Spit it up, Dad,” Jude said.

His father didn’t seem to hear. He sank back into the bed, then bucked again, almost as if someone were sitting on top of him and Martin was trying to throw him off. He made wet, strangled sounds down in his throat. A blue artery stood out in the center of his forehead. His lips stretched back from his teeth in a doglike grimace.

Then he eased gently down onto the mattress once more. His hands, which had been clutching fistfuls of the sheets, slowly opened. His eyes were a vivid, hideous crimson—the blood vessels had erupted, staining the whites red. They stared blankly at the ceiling. Blood stained his teeth.

Jude watched him for movement, straining for some sound of breath. He heard the house settling in the wind. He heard rain spitting against the wall.

With great effort Jude sat up, then turned himself to set his feet on the floor. He had no doubt his father was dead, he who had smashed Jude’s hand in the cellar door and put a single-barreled shotgun to his mother’s breast, who had ruled this farmhouse with his knuckles and belt strap and laughing rages, and whom Jude had often daydreamed of killing himself. It had cost him something, though, to watch Martin die. Jude’s abdomen was sore, as if he had only just vomited again, as if something had been forced out of him, ejected from his body, something he didn’t want to give up. Rage, maybe.

“Dad?” Jude said, knowing no one would answer.

Jude rose to his feet, swaying, light-headed. He took a shuffling, old man’s step forward, put his bandaged left hand on the edge of the night table to support himself. It felt as if his legs might fold beneath him at any moment.

“Dad?” Jude said again.

His father jerked his head toward him and fixed his red, awful, fascinated eyes on Jude.

“Justin,” he said, his voice a strained whisper. He smiled, a horrifying thing to see upon his gaunt, harrowed face. “My boy. I’m all right. I’m fine. Come close. C’mon and put your arms around me.”

Jude did not step forward but took a staggering, unsteady step back. For a moment he had no air.

Then his breath returned, and he said, “You aren’t my father.”

Martin’s lips widened to show his poisoned gums and crooked yellow teeth, what were left of them. A teardrop of blood spilled from his left eye, ran in a jagged red line down the crag of his cheekbone. Craddock’s eye had seemed to drip red tears in almost just the same way, in Jude’s vision of Anna’s final night.

He sat up and reached past the bowl of shaving lather. Martin closed his hand on his old straight razor, the one with the hickory handle. Jude hadn’t known it was there, hadn’t seen it lying behind the white china bowl. Jude took another step away. The backs of his legs struck the edge of his cot, and he sat down on the mattress.

Then his father was up, the sheet slithering off him. He moved more quickly than Jude expected, like a lizard, frozen in place one moment, then lurching forward, almost too quick for the eye to follow. He was naked, except for a pair of stained white boxers. His breasts were little trembling sacks of flab, furred with curling, snow-white hairs. Martin stepped forward, planted his heel on the heart-shaped box, crushed it flat.

“Come here, son,” his father said, in Craddock’s voice. “Daddy’s going to show you how to shave.”

And he snapped his wrist, and the razor flipped out of the handle, a mirror in which Jude was briefly able to see his own astonished face.

Martin lunged at Jude, slashing at him with the straight razor, but Jude stuck out his foot, jammed it between the old man’s ankles. At the same time, he pitched himself to the side with an energy he didn’t know he had in him. Martin fell forward, and Jude felt the razor whicker through his shirt and the biceps beneath, with what seemed no resistance at all. Jude rolled over the rusted steel bar at the foot of his cot and crashed to the floor.

The room was almost silent except for their harsh gasps for breath and the shrieking of the wind under the eaves. His father scrambled to the end of the bed and leaped over the side—spry for a man who had suffered multiple strokes and not left his bed in three months. By then Jude was crawling backward, out the door.

He made it halfway down the hall, as far as the screen door that looked into the pigpen. The hogs crowded against it, jostling for the best view of the action. Their squeals of excitement drew his attention for a moment, and when he looked back, Martin was standing over him.

His father dropped onto him. He cocked his arm back to slash the razor across Jude’s face. Jude forgot himself and drove his bandaged right hand up into his father’s chin, hard enough to snap the old man’s head back. Jude screamed. A white-hot charge of pain stabbed through his ruined hand and raced up into his forearm, a sensation like an electrical pulse traveling right through the bone, withering in its intensity.

He caught his father flush and drove him into the screen door. Martin hit it with a splintering crunch and the tinny sound of springs snapping free. The lower screen tore clean out, and Martin fell through it. The pigs scattered. There were no steps below the door, and Martin dropped two feet, out of sight, hitting the ground with a dry thud.

The world wavered, darkened, almost disappeared. No, Jude thought, no no no. He struggled back toward consciousness, like a man pulled deep underwater, churning toward the surface before he ran out of breath.

The world brightened again, a drop of light that widened and spread, blurred gray ghost shapes appearing before him, then coming gradually into focus. The hall was still. Pigs grunted outside. An ill sweat cooled on Jude’s face.

He rested awhile, ears ringing. His hand ringing, too. When he was ready, he used his heels to push himself across the floor to the wall, then used the wall to work his way up into a sitting position. He rested again.

At last he shoved his way to his feet, sliding his back up the wall. He peered out the wreck of the screen door but still could not see his father. He had to be lying against the side of the house.

Jude swayed away from the wall, sagging toward the screen door. He grabbed the frame to keep from falling into the pigpen himself. His legs trembled furiously. He leaned forward to see if Martin was on the ground with a broken neck, and at that moment his father stood up and reached through the screen and grabbed for his leg.

Jude cried out, kicking at Martin’s hand and recoiling instinctively. Then he was a man losing his balance on a sheet of black ice, pinwheeling his arms foolishly, sailing back down the hall and into the kitchen, where he fell yet again.

Martin pulled himself up through the torn screen. He crawled toward Jude, made his way to him on all fours, until he was right on top of him. Martin’s hand rose, then fell, a glittering silver spark falling with it. Jude brought up his left arm, and the straight razor struck his forearm, scraping bone. Blood leaped into the air. More blood.

The palm of Jude’s left hand was bandaged, but the fingers were free, sticking out of the gauze as if it were a glove with the fingers snipped off. His father lifted the razor in the air to strike again, but before he could bring it down, Jude stuck his fingers in Martin’s glimmering red eyes. The old man cried out, twisting his head back, trying to get free of his son’s hand. The razor blade waved in front of Jude’s face without touching skin. Jude forced his father’s head back, and back, baring his scrawny throat, wondering if he could push hard enough to break the cocksucker’s spine.

He had Martin’s head back as far as it would go when the kitchen knife slammed into the side of his father’s neck.

Marybeth was ten feet away, standing at the kitchen counter, beside a magnetized strip on the wall with knives stuck to it. Her breath came in sobs. Jude’s father turned his head to stare at her. Air bubbles foamed in the blood that leaked from around the hilt of the knife. Martin reached for it with one hand, closed his fingers feebly about it, then made a sound, a rattling inhalation, like a child shaking a stone in a paper bag, and sagged to his side.

Marybeth snapped another wide-bladed knife off the magnetic rack, then another. She took the first by the tip of the blade and chucked it into Martin’s back as he slumped forward. It hit with a deep, hollow thunk, as if she’d driven the blade into a melon. Martin made no sound at this second blow, aside from a sharp huff of breath. Marybeth started to walk toward him, holding the last knife in front of her.

“Keep away,” Jude said to her. “He won’t lie down and die.” But she didn’t hear him.

In another moment she stood over Martin. Jude’s father looked up, and Marybeth whacked the knife across his face. It went in close to one corner of his lips and came out a little past the other corner, widening his mouth into a garish red slash.

As she struck at him, he struck at her, lashing out with his right hand, the hand that held the razor. The blade drew a red line across her thigh, above the right knee, and the leg buckled.

Martin pitched himself up off the floor as Marybeth started to go down, roaring as he rose to his feet. He caught her in the stomach in an almost perfect flying tackle, smashed Marybeth into the kitchen counter. She slammed her last knife into Martin’s shoulder, burying it to the hilt. She might’ve pounded it into a tree trunk for all the good it did.

She slipped to the floor, Jude’s father on top of her, blood still foaming from the knife planted in his neck. He slashed his straight razor toward her again.

Marybeth grabbed her neck, clutching it weakly with her bad hand. Blood pumped through her fingers. There was a crude black grin dug into the white flesh of her throat.

She slid onto her side. Her head banged the floor. She was staring past Martin at Jude. The side of her face lay in blood, a thick, scarlet puddle of it.

Jude’s father dropped to all fours. His free hand was still wrapped around the base of the knife in his own throat, fingers exploring it blindly, taking its measure, but doing nothing to pull it out. He was a pincushion, knife in the shoulder, knife in the back, but he was interested only in the one through his neck, didn’t seem to have noticed the other pieces of steel sticking into him.

Martin crawled unsteadily away from Marybeth, away from Jude. His arms gave out first, and his head dropped to the floor, his chin striking with enough force to make his teeth audibly click together. He tried to push himself up and almost made it, but then his right arm gave out, and he rolled onto his side instead. Away from Jude, a small relief. Jude wouldn’t have to look into his face while he died. Again.

Marybeth was trying to speak. Her tongue came out of her mouth, moved over her lips. Her eyes pleaded for Jude to come closer. Her pupils had shrunk to black dots.

He pulled himself across the floor, elbow over elbow, dragging himself to her. She was already whispering. It was hard to hear her over his father, who was making the cough-choking sounds again and kicking his heels loudly against the floor, in the throes of some kind of convulsion.

“He’s not…done,” Marybeth said. “He’s comin’…again. He’ll never…be done.”

Jude glanced around for something he could stick against the slash across her throat. He was close enough now so his hands were in the puddle of blood surrounding her, splashing in it. He spotted a dishrag hanging from the handle of the oven, pulled it down.

Marybeth was staring into his face, but Jude had an impression of not being seen—the sense that she was staring right through him and into some unknowable distance.

“I hear…Anna. I hear her…calling. We have…to make…a door. We have to…let her in. Make us a door. Make a door…and I’ll open it.”

“Stop talking.” He lifted her hand and pressed the rolled-up dish towel against her neck.

Marybeth caught at his wrist.

“Can’t open it…once I’m on…the other…side. It has to be now. I’m gone already. Anna is gone. You can’t…save…us,” she said. So much blood. “Let. Us. Save. You.”

Across the room Jude heard a fit of coughing, then his father gagging. He was choking something up. Jude knew what.

He stared at Marybeth with a disbelief more intense than grief. He found his hand cupping her face, which was cool to the touch. He had promised. He had promised himself, if not her, that he would take care of her, and here she was, with her throat cut, saying how she was going to take care of him. She was fighting for each breath, shivering helplessly.

“Do it, Jude,” she said. “Just do it.”

He lifted her hands and put them against the dish towel, to keep it pressed to her open throat. Then he turned and crawled through her blood, to the edge of the puddle. He heard himself humming again, his song, his new song, a melody like a southern hymn, a country dirge. How did you make a door for the dead? Would it be enough just to draw one? He was trying to think what to draw with, when he saw the red handprints he was leaving on the linoleum. He dipped a finger in her blood and began to draw a line along the floor.

When he judged he had made it long enough, he started a new line, at a right angle to the first. The blood on his fingertip thinned and ran dry. He shuffled slowly around, turning back to Marybeth and the wide, trembling pool of blood in which she lay.

He looked past her and saw Craddock, pulling himself out of his father’s gaping mouth. Craddock’s face was contorted with strain, his arms reaching down, one hand on Martin’s forehead, the other on Martin’s shoulder. At the point of his waist, his body was crushed into a thick rope—Jude thought again of a great mass of cellophane, wadded up and twisted into a cord—which filled Martin’s mouth and seemed to extend all the way down into his engorged throat. Craddock had gone in like a soldier leaping into a foxhole but was hauling himself out like a man sunk to his waist in sucking mud.

You will die, the dead man said. The bitch will die you will die we will all ride the nightroad together you want to sing la la la I’ll teach you to sing I’ll teach you.

Jude dipped his hand in Marybeth’s blood, wetting it entirely, turned away again. There was no thought in him. He was a machine that crawled stupidly forward as he began to draw once more. He finished the top of the door, shuffled around, and started a third line, working his way back to Marybeth. It was a crude, meandering line, thick in some places, barely a smear in others.

The bottom of the door was the puddle. As he reached it, he glanced into Marybeth’s face. The front of her T-shirt was soaked through. Her face was a pallid blank, and for a moment he thought it was too late, she was dead, but then her eyes moved, just slightly, watching him approach, through a dull glaze.

Craddock began to scream in frustration. He had pulled all of himself out except for one leg, was already trying to stand up, but his foot was stuck somewhere in Martin’s gullet, and it was unbalancing him. In Craddock’s hand was the blade shaped like a crescent moon, the chain hanging from it in a bright, swinging loop.

Jude turned his back on him once more and looked down at his uneven blood doorway. He stared stupidly at the long, crooked red frame, an empty box containing only a few scarlet handprints. It wasn’t right yet, and he tried to think what else it needed. Then it came to him that it wasn’t a door if there was no way to open it, and he crawled forward and painted a circle for a doorknob.

Craddock’s shadow fell over him. Ghosts could cast shadows? Jude wondered at it. He was tired. It was hard to think. He knelt on the door and felt something slam against the other side of it. It was as if the wind, which was still driving against the house in furious, steady gusts, were trying to come up through the linoleum.

A line of brightness appeared along the right-hand edge of the door, a vivid streak of radiant white. Something hit the other side again, a mountain lion trapped under the floor. It struck a third time, each impact producing a thunderous boom that shook the house, caused the plates to rattle in the plastic tray by the sink. Jude felt his elbows give a little, and decided there was no reason to stay on all fours anymore, and besides, it was too much effort. He fell to his side, let himself roll right off the door and onto his back.

Craddock stood over Marybeth in his black dead man’s suit, one side of his collar askew, hat gone. He wasn’t coming forward, though, had stopped in his tracks. He stared mistrustfully down at the hand-drawn door at his feet, as if it were a secret hatch and he had come close to stepping on it and falling through.

What is that? What did you do?

When Jude spoke, his voice seemed to come from a long distance off, as by some trick of ventriloquism. “The dead claim their own, Craddock. Sooner or later they claim their own.”

The misshapen door bulged, then receded into the floor. Swelled again. It seemed almost to be breathing. The line of light raced across the top of it, a beam of brightness so intense it couldn’t be looked at directly. It cornered and continued on down the other side of the door.

The wind keened, louder than ever, a high, piercing shriek. After a moment Jude realized it wasn’t the wind outside the house but a gale wailing around the edges of the door drawn in blood. It wasn’t blowing out but being sucked in, through those blinding white lines. Jude’s ears popped, and he thought of an airplane descending too rapidly. Papers ruffled, then lifted off the kitchen table and began to swirl above it, chasing one another. Delicate little wavelets raced across the wide pool of blood around Marybeth’s blank, staring face.

Marybeth’s left arm was stretched out, across the lake of blood, into the doorway. When Jude wasn’t looking, she had pulled herself over onto her side, reaching out with one arm. Her hand rested over the red circle he had drawn for a doorknob.

Somewhere a dog began to bark.

In the next instant, the door painted on the linoleum fell open. Marybeth should’ve dropped through it—half her body was stretched across it—but she didn’t. Instead she floated, as if sprawled on a sheet of polished glass. An uneven parallelogram filled the center of the floor, an open trap, flooded with an astonishing light, a blinding brilliance that rose all around her.

In the intensity of that light pouring from below, the room became a photographic negative, all stark whites and flat, impossible shadows. Marybeth was a black, featureless figure, suspended upon the sheet of light. Craddock, standing over her, arms flung up to protect his face, looked like one of the victims of the atom bomb at Hiroshima, an abstract life-size sketch of a man, drawn in ash on a black wall. Papers still whirled and spun above the kitchen table, only they had gone black and looked like a flock of crows.

Marybeth rolled over onto her side and lifted her head, only it wasn’t Marybeth anymore, it was Anna, and spokes of light filled her eyes, and her face was as stern as God’s own judgment.

Why? she asked.

Craddock hissed. Get away. Get back. He swung the gold chain of his pendulum in circles, the crescent blade whining in the air, tracing a ring of silver fire.

Then Anna was on her feet, at the base of the glowing door. Jude had not seen her rise. One moment she was prone, and in the next she was standing. Time had skipped, maybe. Time didn’t matter anymore. Jude held up a hand to shield his eyes from the worst of the glare, but the light was everywhere, and there was no blocking it out. He could see the bones in his hand, the skin over them the color and clarity of honey. His wounds, the slash in his face, the stump of his index finger, throbbed with a pain that was both profound and exhilarating, and he thought he might cry out, in fear, in joy, in shock, in all those things, in what was more than those things. In rapture.

Why? Anna said again as she approached Craddock. He whipped the chain at her, and the curved razor at the end drew a wide slash across her face, from the corner of her right eye, across her nose, and down to her mouth—but it only opened a fresh ray of brilliance, and where the light struck him, Craddock began to smoke. Anna reached for him. Why?

Craddock shrieked as she gathered him into her arms, shrieked and cut her again, across her breasts, and opened another seam in the eternal, and into his face poured the bountiful light, a light that burned away his features, that erased everything it touched. His wail was so loud Jude thought his eardrums would explode.

Why? Anna said, before she put her mouth on his, and from the door behind her leaped the black dogs, Jude’s dogs, giant dogs of smoke, of shadow, with fangs of ink.

Craddock McDermott struggled, trying to push her away, but she was falling backward with him, falling toward the door, and the dogs raced around his feet, and as they ran, they were stretched and pulled out of shape, unraveling like balls of yarn, becoming long scarves of darkness that wound around him, climbing his legs, lashing him about the waist, and binding the dead man to the dead girl. As he was pulled down, into the brightness of the other side, Jude saw the back of Craddock’s head come off, and a shaft of white light, so intense it was blue at the edges, slammed through and struck the ceiling, where it burnt the plaster, causing it to bubble and seethe.

They dropped through the open door and were gone.

45

The papers that had been swirling above the kitchen table settled with a faint rustle, collecting into a pile, in almost the exact same spot from which they’d risen. In the hush that followed, Jude became aware of a gentle humming sound, a deep, melodic pulse, which was not heard so much as felt in his bones. It rose and fell and rose again, a sort of inhuman music—inhuman, but not unpleasant. Jude had never heard any instrument produce sounds like it. It was more like the accidental music of tires droning on blacktop. That low, powerful music could be felt on the skin as well. The air throbbed with it. It seemed almost to be a property of the light, flooding in through the crooked rectangle on the floor. Jude blinked into the light and wondered where Marybeth had gone. The dead claim their own, he thought, and shivered.

No. She hadn’t been dead a moment ago when she opened the door. He did not accept that she could just be gone, no trace of her left on the earth. He crawled. He was the only thing moving in the room now. The stillness of the place, after what had just happened, seemed more jarring and incredible than a hole between worlds. He hurt, his hands hurt, his face hurt, and his chest tingled, a deadly icy-hot prickling, although he was fairly certain, if he was meant to have a heart attack this afternoon, it would’ve happened by now. Aside from the continuous humming that was all around him, there was no sound at all, except his sobs for breath, his hands scratching at the floor. Once he heard himself say Marybeth’s name.

The closer he came to the light, the harder it was to stare into it. He shut his eyes—and found himself still able to see the room before him, as if through a pale curtain of silver silk, the light penetrating his closed lids. The nerves behind his eyeballs throbbed in steady time with that ceaseless pulsing sound.

He couldn’t bear all the light, turned his head aside, kept crawling forward, and in that way Jude did not realize he had reached the edge of the open door until he put his hands down and there was nothing there to support him. Marybeth—or had it been Anna?—had hung suspended over the open door, as if on a sheet of glass, but Jude dropped like a condemned man through the hangman’s trap, did not even have time to cry out before plummeting into the light.

46

The sensation of falling—a weightless-sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and the roots of his hair—has hardly passed before he realizes that the light is not so intense now. He lifts a hand to shade his eyes and blinks into it, dusty yellow sunshine. He makes it midafternoon and can tell somehow, from the angle of the sun, that he’s in the South. Jude is in the Mustang again, sitting in the passenger seat. Anna has the wheel, is humming to herself as she drives. The engine is a low, controlled roar—the Mustang has made itself well. It might’ve just rolled off the showroom floor in 1965.

They travel a mile or so, neither of them speaking, before he finally identifies the road they’re on as State Highway 22.

“Where we goin’?” he asks at last.

Anna arches her back, stretching her spine. She keeps both hands on the wheel. “I don’t know. I thought we were just drivin’. Where do you wanna go?”

“Doesn’t matter. How about Chinchuba Landing?”

“What’s down there?”

“Nothing. Just a place to set and listen to the radio and look at the view. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds like heaven. We must be in heaven.”

When she says this, his left temple begins to ache. He wishes she hadn’t said that. They aren’t in heaven. He doesn’t want to hear talk like that.

For a time they roll on cracked, faded, two-lane blacktop. Then he sees the turnoff coming up on the right and points it out, and Marybeth turns the Mustang onto it without a word. The road is dirt, and trees grow close on either side and bend over it, making a tunnel of rich green light. Shadows and fluttering sunlight shift across Marybeth’s scrubbed, delicate features. She looks serene, at ease behind the wheel of the big muscle car, happy to have the afternoon ahead of her, and nothing particular to do in it except park someplace with Jude and listen to music. When did she become Marybeth?

It is as if he has spoken the question aloud, because she turns and gives him an embarrassed grin. “I tried to warn you, didn’t I? Two girls for the price of one.”

“You warned me.”

“I know what road we’re on,” Marybeth says, without any trace of the southern accent that has muddled up her own voice in the last few days.

“I told you. One that goes to Chinchuba Landing.”

She turns a knowing, amused, slightly pitying glance upon him. Then, as if he hadn’t said anything, Marybeth continues: “Hell. After all the stuff I’ve heard about this road, I expected worse. This isn’t bad. Kinda nice, actually. With a name like the nightroad you at least expect it to be night. Maybe it’s only night here for some people.”

He winces—another stab of pain in the head. He wants to think she’s mixed up, wrong about where they are. She could be wrong. Not only isn’t it night, it’s hardly a road.

In another minute they’re bumping along through two ruts in the dirt, narrow troughs with a wide bed of grass and wildflowers growing between them, swatting the fender and dragging against the undercarriage. They pass the wreck of a pale truck, parked under a willow, the hood open and weeds growing right up through it. Jude doesn’t give it more than a sidelong look.

The palms and the brush open up just around the next bend, but Marybeth slows, so the Mustang is barely rolling along, and for the moment anyway they’re still back in the cool shade of the trees bending overhead. Gravel crunches pleasantly under the tires, a sound Jude has always loved, a sound everyone loves. Out beyond the grassy clearing is the muddy brown sea of Lake Pontchartrain, the water ruffled up in the wind and the edges of the waves glinting like polished, new-minted steel. Jude is a little taken aback by the sky, which is bleached a uniform and blinding white. It is a sky so awash in light it’s impossible to look directly into it, to even know where the sun is. Jude turns his head away from the view, squinting and raising a hand to shield his eyes. The ache in his left temple intensifies, beating with his pulse.

“Damn,” he says. “That sky.”

“Isn’t it somethin’?” Anna says from inside Marybeth’s body. “You can see a long way. You can see into forever.”

“I can’t see shit.”

“No,” Anna says, but it’s still Marybeth behind the wheel, Marybeth’s mouth moving. “You need to protect your eyes from the sight. You can’t really look out there. Not yet. We have trouble lookin’ back into your world, for whatever it’s worth. You maybe noticed the black lines over our eyes. Think of them as the sunglasses of the livin’ dead.” A statement that starts her laughing, Marybeth’s husky, rude laughter.

She stops the car at the very edge of the clearing, puts it into park. The windows are down. The air that soughs in over him smells sweetly of the sun-baked brush and the unruly grass. Beneath that he can detect the subtle perfume of Lake Pontchartrain, a cool, marshy odor.

Marybeth leans toward him, puts her head on his shoulder, puts an arm across his waist, and when she speaks again, it is in her own voice. “I wish I was driving back with you, Jude.”

He breaks out in a sudden chill. “What’s that mean?”

She looks fondly up into his face. “Hey. We almost got it right. Didn’t we almost get it right, Jude?”

“Stop it,” Jude says. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying with me.”

“I don’t know,” Marybeth says. “I’m tired. It’s a long haul back, and I don’t think I could make it. I swear this car is using some part of me for gas, and I’m about all out.”

“Stop talking that way.”

“Were we going to have some music?”

He opens the glove compartment, fumbles for a tape. It’s a collection of demos, a private collection. His new songs. He wants Marybeth to hear them. He wants her to know he didn’t give up on himself. The first track begins to play. It is “Drink to the Dead.” The guitar chimes and rises in a country hymn, a sweet and lonely acoustic gospel, a song for grieving. Goddam, his head hurts, both temples now, a steady throbbing behind his eyes. Goddam that sky with its overpowering light.

Marybeth sits up, only it isn’t Marybeth anymore, it’s Anna. Her eyes are filled with light, are filled with sky. “All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together. This was nice. With that wind on my face. When you sing, I’m singin’ with you, honey. You know that, don’t you?”

“Stop it,” he says. Anna settles behind the wheel again and puts the car into drive. “What are you doing?”

Marybeth leans forward from the backseat and reaches for his hand. Anna and Marybeth are separate now—they are two distinct individuals maybe for the first time in days. “I have to go, Jude.” She bends over the seat to put her mouth on his. Her lips are cold and trembling. “This is where you get out.”

“We,” he says, and when she tries to withdraw her hand, he doesn’t let go, squeezes harder, until he can feel the bones flexing under the skin. He kisses her again, says into her mouth, “Where we get out. We. We.”

Gravel under the tires again. The Mustang rolls forward, out under the open sky. The front seat is filled with a blast of light, an incandescence that erases all the world beyond the car, leaving nothing but the interior, and even that Jude can hardly see, peering out through slitted eyes. The pain that flares behind his eyeballs is staggering, wonderful. He still has Marybeth by the hand. She can’t go if he doesn’t let her, and the light—oh, God, there is so much light. There’s something wrong with the car stereo, his song wavering in and out, drowning beneath a deep, low, pulsing harmonic, the same alien music he heard when he fell through the door between worlds. He wants to tell Marybeth something, he wants to tell her he is sorry he couldn’t keep his promises, the ones he made her and the ones he made himself, he wants to say how he loves her, loves her so, but cannot find his voice and cannot think with the light in his eyes and that humming in his head. Her hand. He still has her hand. He squeezes her hand again, and again, trying to tell her what he needs to tell her by touch, and she squeezes back.

And out in the light, he sees Anna, sees her shimmering, glowing like a firefly, watches her turn from the wheel, and smile, and reach toward him, putting her hand over his and Marybeth’s, and that’s when she says, “Hey, you guys, I think this hairy son of a bitch is trying to sit up.”

47

Jude blinked into the clear, painful white light of an ophthalmoscope pointed into his left eye. He was struggling to rise, but someone had a hand on his chest, holding him pinned to the floor. He gasped at the air, like a trout just hauled out of Lake Pontchartrain and thrown onto the shore. He had told Anna they might go fishing there, the two of them. Or had that been Marybeth? He didn’t know anymore.

The ophthalmoscope was removed, and he stared blankly up at the mold-spotted ceiling of the kitchen. The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads, to let the demons out, to relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow, felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples, punishing evidence of life.

A hog with a squashy pink face leaned over him, smiled obscenely down, and said, “Holy shit. You know who this is? It’s Judas Coyne.”

Someone else said, “Can we clear the fucking pigs out of the room?”

The pig was booted aside, with a shriek of indignation. A man with a neatly groomed, pale brown goatee and kind, watchful eyes, leaned into Jude’s field of view.

“Mr. Coyne? Just lie still. You’ve lost a lot of blood. We’re going to lift you onto a gurney.”

“Anna,” Jude said, his voice unsteady and wheezing.

A brief look of pain and something like an apology flickered in the young man’s light blue eyes. “Was that her name?”

No. No, Jude had said the wrong thing. That wasn’t her name, but Jude couldn’t find the breath to correct himself. Then it registered that the man leaning over him had referred to her in the past tense.

Arlene Wade spoke for him. “He told me her name was Marybeth.”

Arlene leaned in from the other side, peering down at him, her eyes comically huge behind her glasses. She was talking about Marybeth in the past tense, too. He tried to sit up again, but the goateed EMT firmly held him down.

“Don’t try and get up, dear,” Arlene said.

Something made a steely clatter nearby, and he looked down the length of his body and past his feet and saw a crowd of men rolling a gurney past him and into the hall. An IV bag, pregnant with blood, swung back and forth from a metal support rod attached to the cot. From his angle on the floor, Jude could not see anything of the person on the gurney, except for a hand hanging over the side. The infection that had made Marybeth’s palm shriveled and white was gone, no trace of it left. Her small, slender hand swung limply, jostled by the motion of the cart, and Jude thought of the girl in his obscene snuff movie, the way she had seemed to go boneless when the life went out of her. One of the EMTs pushing the gurney glanced down and saw Jude staring. He reached for Marybeth’s hand and tucked it back up against her side. The other men rolled the gurney on out of sight, all of them talking to one another in low, feverish voices.

“Marybeth?” Jude managed, his voice the faintest of whispers, carried on a pained exhalation of breath.

“She’s got to go now,” Arlene said. “There’s another amble-lance comin’ for you, Justin,”

“Go?” Jude asked. He really didn’t understand.

“They can’t do any more for her in this place, that’s all. It’s just time to take her on.” Arlene patted his hand. “Her ride is here.”

ALIVE

48

Jude was in and out for twenty-four hours.

He woke once and saw his lawyer, Nan Shreve, standing in the door of his private room, talking with Jackson Browne. Jude had met him, years before, at the Grammys. Jude had slipped out midceremony to visit the men’s, and as he was taking a leak, he happened to look over to find Jackson Browne pissing in the urinal next to him. They had only nodded to each other, never even said hello, and so Jude couldn’t imagine what he was doing now in Louisiana. Maybe he had a gig in New Orleans, had heard about Jude nearly being killed, and had come to express his sympathies. Maybe Jude would now be visited by a procession of rock-and-roll luminaries, swinging through to tell him to keep on keepin’ on. Jackson Browne was dressed conservatively—blue blazer, tie—and he had a gold shield clipped to his belt, next to a holstered revolver. Jude allowed his eyelids to sink shut.

He had a dark, muffled sense of time passing. When he woke again, another rock star was sitting beside him: Dizzy, his eyes all black scribbles, his face still wasted with AIDS. He offered his hand, and Jude took it.

Had to come, man. You were there for me, Dizzy said.

“I’m glad to see you,” Jude told him. “I been missing you.”

“Excuse me?” said the nurse, standing on the other side of the bed. Jude glanced over at her, hadn’t known she was there. When he looked back for Dizzy, Jude discovered his hand hanging empty.

“Who you talkin’ to?” the nurse asked.

“Old friend. I haven’t seen him since he died.”

She sniffed. “We got to scale back your morphine, hon.”

Later Angus wandered through the room and disappeared under the bed. Jude called to him, but Angus never came out, just stayed under the cot, thumping his tail on the floor, a steady beat that kept time with Jude’s heart.

Jude wasn’t sure which dead or famous person to expect next and was surprised when he opened his eyes to find he had his room to himself. He was on the fourth or fifth floor of a hospital outside of Slidell. Beyond the window was Lake Pontchartrain, blue and wintry in the late-afternoon light, the shoreline crowded with cranes, a rusty oil tanker struggling into the east. For the first time, he realized he could smell it, the faint briny tang of the water. Jude wept.

When he’d managed to get control of himself, he paged the nurse. A doctor came instead, a cadaverous black man with sad, bloodshot eyes and a shaved head. In a soft, gravelly voice, he began to fill Jude in on his condition.

“Has anyone called Bammy?” Jude interrupted.

“Who’s that?”

“Marybeth’s grandma,” Jude said. “If no one’s called her, I want to be the one to tell her. Bammy ought to know what happened.”

“If you can provide us with her last name and a phone number or an address, I can have one of the nurses call her.”

“It ought to be me.”

“You’ve been through a lot. I think, in the emotional state you’re in, a call from you might alarm her.”

Jude stared at him. “Her granddaughter died. Person she loves most in the world. Do you think it will alarm her less getting the news from a stranger?”

“Exactly why we’d rather make the call,” the doctor said. “That’s the kind of thing we don’t want her family to hear. In a first phone call with relatives, we prefer to focus on the positive.”

It came to Jude that he was still sick. The conversation had an unreal tinge to it that he associated with a fever. He shook his head and began to laugh. Then he noticed he was crying again. He wiped at his face with trembling hands.

“Focus on what positive?” he asked.

“The news could be worse,” the doctor said. “At least she’s stable now. And her heart was only stopped for a few minutes. People have been dead for longer. There should be only minimal—”

But Jude didn’t hear the rest.

49

Then he was in the halls, a six-foot-tall, 240-pound man, fifty-four years of age, the great bush of his black beard in ratty tangles and his hospital johnny flapping open in the back to show the scrawny, hairless cheeks of his ass. The doctor jogged beside him, and nurses gathered about, trying to redirect him back to his room, but he strode on, his IV drip still in his arm and the bag rattling along beside him on its wheeled frame. He was clearheaded, all the way awake, his hands not bothering him, his breathing fine. As he made his way along, he began calling her name. He was in surprisingly good voice.

“Mr. Coyne,” said the doctor. “Mr. Coyne, she isn’t well enough—you aren’t well enough—”

Bon raced past Jude, down the hall, and hung a right at the next corner. He quickened his step. He reached the turn and looked down another corridor in time to see Bon slip through a pair of double doors, twenty feet away. They gasped shut behind her, closing on their pneumatic hinges. The glowing sign above the doors said ICU.

A short, dumpy security officer was in Jude’s way, but Jude went around him, and then the rent-a-cop had to jog and huff to keep up. He shoved through the doors and into the ICU. Bon was just disappearing into a darkened room on the left.

Jude went in right after her. Bon was nowhere in sight, but Marybeth was in the only bed, with black stitches across her throat, an air tube poked into her nostrils, and machines bleeping contentedly in the dark around her. Her eyes opened to puffy slits as Jude entered saying her name. Her face was battered, her complexion greasy and pale, and she seemed emaciated, and at the sight of her his heart contracted with a sweet tightness. Then he was next to her, on the edge of the mattress, and gathering her into his arms, her skin paper, her bones hollow sticks. He put his face against her wounded neck, into her hair, inhaling deeply, needing the smell of her, proof she was there, real, proof of life. One of her hands rose weakly to his side, slid up his back. Her lips, when he kissed them, were cold, and they trembled.

“Thought you were gone,” Jude said. “We were in the Mustang again with Anna, and I thought you were gone.”

“Aw, shit,” Marybeth whispered, in a voice hardly louder than breath. “I climbed out. Sick of being in cars all the time. Jude, you think when we go home we can just fly?”

50

He wasn’t asleep, but thinking he ought to be, when the door clicked open. He rolled over, wondering which dead person or rock legend or spirit animal might be visiting now, but it was only Nan Shreve, in a tan business skirt and suit jacket and nude-colored nylons. She carried her high heels in one hand and scuffled quickly along on tiptoe. She eased the door softly shut behind her.

“Snuck in,” she said, wrinkling her nose and throwing him a wink. “Not really supposed to be here yet.”

Nan was a little, wiry woman, whose head barely came to Jude’s chest. She was socially maladroit, didn’t know how to smile. Her grin was a rigid, painful fake that projected none of the things a smile was supposed to project: confidence, optimism, warmth, pleasure. She was forty-six and married and had two children and had been his attorney for almost a decade. Jude, though, had been her friend for longer than that, going back to when she was just twenty. She hadn’t known how to smile then either, and in those days she didn’t even try. Back then she was strung out and mean, and he had not called her Nan.

“Hey, Tennessee,” Jude said. “Why aren’t you supposed to be here?”

She had started toward the bed but hesitated at this. He hadn’t meant to call her Tennessee, it had just slipped out. He was tired. Her eyelashes fluttered, and for a moment her smile looked even more unhappy than usual. Then she found her step again, reached his cot, planted herself in a molded chair next to him.

“I made arrangements to meet Quinn in the lobby,” she said, wiggling her feet back into her heels. “He’s the detective in charge of nailing down what happened. Except he’s late. I passed a horrible wreck on the highway, and I thought I saw his car pulled over to the side of the road, so he must’ve stopped to help out the state troopers.”

“What am I charged with?”

“Why would you be charged with anything? Your father—Jude, your father attacked you. He attacked both of you. You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Quinn just wants a statement. Tell him what happened at your father’s house. Tell him the truth.” She met his gaze, and then she was speaking very carefully, a mother repeating simple but important instructions to a child. “Your father had a break with reality. It happens. They’ve even got a name for it: age rage. He attacked you and Marybeth Kimball, and she killed him saving the both of you. That’s all Quinn wants to hear. Just like it happened.” And in the last few moments, their conversation had ceased to be friendly and social in any way. Her plastered-on grin had disappeared, and he was back with Tennessee again—cold-eyed, sinewy, unbending Tennessee.

He nodded.

She said, “And Quinn might have some questions about the accident that took off your finger. And killed the dog. The dog in your car?”

“I don’t understand,” Jude said. “He doesn’t want to talk to me about what happened in Florida?”

Her eyelashes fluttered rapidly, and for a moment she was staring at him with unmistakable confusion. Then the cold-eyed look reasserted itself and became even colder. “Did something happen in Florida? Something I need to know about, Jude?”

So there was no warrant on him in Florida. That didn’t make sense. He had attacked a woman and her child, been shot, been in a collision—but if he was a wanted man in Florida, Nan would already know about it. She would already be planning his plea.

Nan went on, “You came south to see your father before he passed away. You were in an accident just before you reached his farm. Out walking the dog by the side of the road, and the two of you got hit. An unimaginable chain of events, but that’s what happened. Nothing else makes sense.”

The door opened, and Jackson Browne peeked into the room. Only he had a red birthmark on his neck that Jude hadn’t noticed before, a crimson splotch in the rough shape of a three-fingered hand, and when he spoke, it was in a clownish honk, his inflections soupy and Cajun.

“Mr. Coyne. Still with us?” His gaze darting from Jude to Nan Shreve beside him. “Your record company will be disappointed. I guess they were already planning the tribute album.” He laughed then, until he coughed, and blinked watering eyes. “Mrs. Shreve. I missed you in the lobby.” He said it jovially enough, but the way he looked at her, his eyes hooded and wondering, it sounded almost like an accusation. He added, “So did the nurse at the reception desk. She said she hadn’t seen you.”

“I waved on the way by,” Nan said.

“Come on in,” Jude said. “Nan said you’d like to talk to me.”

“I ought to place you under arrest,” said Detective Quinn.

Jude’s pulse quickened, but his voice, when he spoke, was smooth and untroubled. “For what?”

“Your last three albums,” Quinn said. “I got two daughters, and they play ’em and play ’em at top volume, until the walls shake and the dishes rattle and I feel I am close to perpetratin’ dough-mestic abuse, you understan’? And this is on my lovely, laughin’ daughters, who I wouldn’t under normal conditions want hurt for any reason nohow.” He sighed, used his tie to wipe his brow, made his way to the foot of the bed. He offered Jude his last stick of Juicy Fruit. When Jude declined, Quinn popped the stick into his mouth and began to chew. “You got to love ’em, somehow, no matter how crazy you feel sometimes.”

“That’s right,” Jude said.

“Just a few questions,” Quinn said, pulling a notebook out of an inner pocket of his jacket. “We want to start before you got to your father’s house. You were in a hit-and-run, is that it? Some awful kind of day for you and your lady friend, huh? And then attacked by your dad. Course, the way you look, and the condition he was in, he probably thought you were…I don’t know. A murderer come to loot his farm. An evil spirit. Still, I can’t think why you wouldn’t have gone to a hospital after the accident that took off your finger.”

“Well,” Jude said. “We weren’t far from my daddy’s place, and I knew my aunt was there. She’s a registered nurse.”

“That so? Tell me about the car that hit you.”

“A truck,” Jude said. “A pickup.” He glanced at Nan, who nodded, just slightly, eyes watchful and certain. Jude drew a deep breath and began to lie.

51

Before Nan left his room, she hesitated in the doorway and looked back at Jude. That grin was on her face again, the stretched, forced one that made Jude sad.

“She really is beautiful, Jude,” Nan said. “And she loves you. You can tell the way she talks about you. I spoke to her. Only for a moment, but…but you can tell. Georgia, is she?” Nan’s eyes were shy, and pained, and affectionate, all at once. She asked the question like she wasn’t sure if she really wanted to know.

“Marybeth,” Jude said firmly. “Her name is Marybeth.”

52

They were back in New York two weeks later for Danny’s memorial service. Marybeth wore a black scarf around her neck that matched her black lace gloves. The afternoon was windy and cold, but the gathering was well attended nonetheless. It seemed everyone Danny had ever chatted up, gossiped with, or blabbed to on the phone was there, and that was a lot, and none of them left early, not even when the rain began to fall.

53

In the spring Jude recorded an album, stripped down, mostly acoustic. He sang about the dead. He sang about roads at night. Other men played the guitar parts. He could handle rhythm, but that was all, had needed to switch back to making chords with the left, as he had in his childhood, and he wasn’t as good at it.

The new CD sold well. He did not tour. He had a triple bypass instead.

Marybeth taught dance at a tony gym in High Plains. Her classes were crowded.

54

Marybeth found a derelict Dodge Charger in a local auto graveyard, brought it home for three hundred dollars. Jude spent the next summer sweating in the yard with his shirt off, restoring it. He came in late each night, all of him tanned, except for the shiny silver scar down the center of his chest. Marybeth was always waiting just inside the door, with a glass of homemade lemonade. Sometimes they would trade a kiss that tasted of cold juice and motor oil. They were his favorite kisses.

55

One afternoon, close to the end of August, Jude wandered inside, sweating and sunburned, and found a message on the machine from Nan. She said she had some information for him and he could call her back anytime. Anytime was now, and he rang her in her office. He sat on the edge of Danny’s old desk while Nan’s receptionist patched him through.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a lot to tell you about this George Ruger person,” Nan said without any preamble. “You wanted to know if he’s been mentioned in any criminal proceedings in the last year, and the answer to that appears to be no. Maybe if I had more information from you, as to exactly what your interest in him is…”

“No. Don’t worry about it,” Jude said.

So Ruger hadn’t brought any kind of complaint to the authorities; no surprise. If he was going to bring a suit, or try to have Jude arrested, Jude would’ve known about it by now anyway. He hadn’t really expected Nan to come up with anything. Ruger couldn’t talk about what Jude had done to him without risking that it would come out about Marybeth, how he’d slept with her when she was still in junior high. He was, Jude remembered, an important figure in local politics. It was hard to run a really effective fund-raiser after you’d been accused of statutory rape.

“I had a little more luck concerning Jessica Price.”

“You did,” Jude said. Just hearing her name made his stomach knot up.

When Nan spoke again, it was in a falsely casual tone, a little too cool to be persuasive. “This Price is under investigation for child endangerment and sexual abuse. Her own daughter, if you can imagine. Apparently the police came to her home after someone called in an accident report. Price drove her car into someone else’s vehicle, right in front of her house, forty miles an hour. When the police got there, they found her unconscious behind the wheel. And her daughter was in the house with a gun and a dead dog on the floor.”

Nan paused to allow Jude a chance to comment, but Jude didn’t have anything to say.

Nan went on, “Whoever Price drove her car into took off. Never found.”

“Didn’t Price tell them? What’s her story?”

“No story. See, after the police calmed the little girl down, they took the gun away. When they went to put it back where it belonged, they found an envelope with photos in it, hidden in the velvet lining of the pistol’s case. Polaroids of the girl. Criminal stuff. Horrible. Apparently they can establish that the mother took them. Jessica Price could be looking at up to ten years. And I understand her girl is only just thirteen. Isn’t that the most terrible thing?”

“It is,” Jude said. “Just about.”

“Would you believe all of this happened—Jessica Price’s car accident, dead dog, photos—on the same day your daddy died in Louisiana?”

Again Jude did not reply—silence felt safer.

Nan went on, “Following her lawyer’s advice, Jessica Price has been exercising her legal right to remain silent ever since her arrest. Which makes sense for her. And is also a lucky break for whoever else was there. You know—with the dog.”

Jude held the receiver to his ear. Nan was silent for so long he began to wonder if they’d been cut off.

At last, just to find out if she was still on the line, he said, “That all?”

“One other thing,” Nan said. Her tone was perfectly bland. “A carpenter doing work down the street said he saw a suspicious pair in a black car lurking around earlier in the day. He said the driver was the spitting image of the lead singer of Metallica.”

Jude had to laugh.

56

On the second weekend of November, the Dodge Charger pulled out of a churchyard on a red clay dirt road in Georgia, cans rattling from the back. Bammy stuck her fingers in her mouth and blew rude whistles.

57

One fall they went to Fiji. The fall after, they visited Greece. Next October they went to Hawaii, spent ten hours a day on a beach of crushed black sand. Naples, the year following, was even better. They went for a week and stayed for a month.

In the autumn of their fifth anniversary, they didn’t go anywhere. Jude had bought puppies and didn’t want to leave them. One day, when it was chilly and wet, Jude walked with the new dogs down the driveway to collect the mail. As he was tugging the envelopes out of the box, just beyond the front gate, a pale pickup blasted by on the highway, throwing cold spray at his back, and when he turned to watch it go, he saw Anna staring at him from across the road. He felt a sharp twinge in the chest, which quickly abated, leaving him panting.

She pushed a yellow strand of hair back from her eyes, and he saw then that she was shorter, more athletically built than Anna, just a girl, eighteen at best. She lifted one hand in a tentative wave. He gestured for her to cross the road.

“Hi, Mr. Coyne,” she said.

“Reese, isn’t it?” he said.

She nodded. She didn’t have a hat, and her hair was wet. Her denim jacket was soaked through. The puppies leaped at her, and she twisted away from them, laughing.

“Jimmy,” Jude said. “Robert. Get down. Sorry. They’re an uncouth bunch, and I haven’t taught them their manners yet. Will you come in?” She was shivering just slightly. “You’re getting drenched. You’ll catch your death.”

“Is that catching?” Reese asked.

“Yeah,” Jude said. “There’s a wicked case going around. Sooner or later everyone gets it.”

He led her back to the house and into the darkened kitchen. He was just asking her how she’d made her way out to his place when Marybeth called down from the staircase and asked who was there.

“Reese Price,” Jude said back. “From Testament. In Florida. Jessica Price’s girl?”

For a moment there was no sound from the top of the stairs. Then Marybeth padded down the steps, stopped close to the bottom. Jude found the lights by the door, flipped them on.

In the sudden snap of brightness that followed, Marybeth and Reese regarded each other without speaking. Marybeth’s face was composed, hard to read. Her eyes searched. Reese looked from Marybeth’s face, to her neck, to the silvery white crescent of scar tissue around her throat. Reese pulled her arms out of the sleeves of her coat and hugged herself beneath it. Water dripped off her and puddled around her feet.

“Jesus Christ, Jude,” Marybeth said. “Go and get her a towel.”

Jude fetched a towel from the downstairs bathroom. When he returned to the kitchen with it, the kettle was on the stove and Reese was sitting at the center island, telling Marybeth about the Russian exchange students who had given her a ride from New York City and who kept talking about their visit to the Entire Steak Buildink.

Marybeth made her hot cocoa and a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich while Jude sat with Reese at the counter. Marybeth was relaxed and sisterly and laughed easily at Reese’s stories, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to play host to a girl who had shot off a piece of her husband’s hand.

The women did most of the talking. Reese was on her way to Buffalo, where she was going to meet up with friends and see 50 Cent and Eminem. Afterward they were traveling on to Niagara. One of the friends had put money down on an old houseboat. They were going to live in it, half a dozen of them. The boat needed work. They were planning to fix it up and sell it. Reese was in charge of painting it. She had a really cool idea for a mural she wanted to paint on the side. She had already done sketches. She took a sketchbook from her backpack and showed them some of her work. Her illustrations were unpracticed but eye-catching, pictures of nude ladies and eyeless old men and guitars, arranged in complicated interlocking patterns. If they couldn’t sell the boat, they were going to start a business in it, either pizza or tattoos. Reese knew a lot about tattoos and had practiced on herself. She lifted her shirt to show them a tattoo of a pale, slender snake making a circle around her bellybutton, eating its own tail.