Stay

CHAPTER NINE

Fever is a fairground, full of garish colors and grotesque rides and the sense that the fun will turn to terror any moment. I whirled brightly from one amusement to another. Julia, sitting on my lap, smiling at me while she nodded and talked on the phone. Diving into a glacier lake as a man lifted a rifle to his shoulder. Tammy, feeling my forehead and shouting at me. The sickening creak of Karp’s shoulder joint. Steel at my throat. Julia lying in a pool of blood on an Oslo street. Tammy saying, “Aud? Aud? Can you hear me? You have to take these.” Julia lying in a white-tiled room on a white hospital bed hooked up to white machines. Her mother sitting there, cradling her hand, cradling her with love. My mother sitting by my bed, telling me the story of how trolls always win. A terrible thumping and grinding in my head. Swallowing shiny beetles, purple and green. Back at the glacier again, choking as the lake closed over my head, except somehow I was in a bed at the same time and some woman was trying to drown me in a glass of water. Crawling: crawling on grass, on leaves, on a hard road, underwater, crawling away. Trying to hide. But bright light followed me everywhere, into every corner, under every bed, hunting, until it pinned me down and I opened my eyes. Daylight.

“Open,” Tammy said, as though I were a baby, and pushed something between my lips. I struggled weakly. Her grip on the back of my neck tightened. “Nice pills. Make you feel better. Come on, open up, just one.” I let her get it between my lips, then spat it onto the bed. She sighed wearily. “Your mother must have had fun when you were sick.”

The only time I remembered my mother being with me when I was ill was when I was seven or eight. I had tonsillitis. She told me the story about trolls; the only story, ever.

She picked up the pill. It was purple and green.

“What are you feeding me?” It sounded querulous.

“Aud?”

“Yes,” I said, cross. “What’s the pill?”

She sat on the bed, studied me a moment, then pulled a pill bottle from her jeans pocket. “You’ve been out of your mind with fever. I found these with your other first aid stuff.” She handed them to me. “They seem to work. Your fever’s down, anyway.”

I squinted at the bottle. Augmentin: antibiotics. “I should have thought of that.”

She snatched the bottle back. “Gee thanks, Tammy, for probably saving my life. Hey, Aud, no problem: I get such a kick out of nursing crazy people with a death wish who threaten to kill me every five minutes.”

“To kill you?”

“Well, hey Tammy, sorry for any inconvenience, sorry for scaring the shit out of you.” She turned away and wiped at her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “Ungrateful asshole.”

I was too tired for this. “Tammy.” She wouldn’t turn around. “I’m sorry.” I looked out of the window. Early afternoon. But what day? “I really said I’d kill you?”

She turned round. “A hundred times. You never shut up.”

“What did I say?”

“A lot of things. To do with the girl, mostly.”

“Julia’s not a girl.”

“Not Julia, the kid. The girl.”

At my blank look, she slid off the bed, and retrieved a folder from the table. She wore a thick cable-knit sweater, blue: mine. I realized it was cold in the trailer. She held out the folder. Bloody glove print on the cover.

“Luz. Her. It was in the car.”

I touched it with a fingertip but didn’t take it. Nine years old and being trained like a dog. “I’ll have to do something about her.”

Tammy dropped the folder back on the table. “Like what?”

I hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “I don’t know.” Nine years old. No one to love her. “What else did I say?”

“Bunch of stuff about glaciers and hospitals. Didn’t make much sense. You cried a lot. And sort of snarled like you were fighting someone. And at me when I said I was calling 911. ‘White!’ you shouted. ‘White!’ And you got out of bed and started to crawl to the door. I had to practically swear on the Bible I wouldn’t call a doctor before I could get you back to bed. But by then the antibiotics had started to work, anyhow. And then you started snarling again, only this time it was different. It—Is that what you’re like when—Was what you said before true? Did you kill him?”

“I don’t know.” I would have to do something about that, too.

When I woke, it was late afternoon.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better.” The fever was more or less gone. My neck and knee hurt, I was thirsty. The folder was still on the table. Nine years old. I sat up. It was still cold. “Give me the phone.”

“Who are you calling?”

I just looked at her. She gave me the phone.

My head ached, and I couldn’t remember Eddie’s number at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, so I had to scroll through the names menu. When it rang, the man who answered was not Eddie. After a moment’s confusion, I discovered Eddie had been promoted to late-shift manager of the weekend edition. I was put through.

“Aud!” His voice was textured and rich, like nineteenth-century brocade. “Delightful to hear from you, as always. Where have you been?”

I’ve been up to London to visit the queen. “Renovating an old cabin in the woods. I need a favor.”

“But of course. Though you and your latest client’s expense account still owe me a dinner at the Horseradish Grill.”

“I’ll buy you two, just as soon as I’m back in town. But if you could get on the wires for me and find out if a man called George Karp was hurt or killed in New York, SoHo, three or four days ago, I’d be grateful.”

“And I suppose you need this information yesterday?” I could hear him clicking on the keyboard as we spoke.

“Even the day before.”

“Well. I seem to recall that last time I looked someone up for you, he turned up dead a month or so later, in a public bathroom.”

“Nothing to do with me.”

“On this particular occasion, I believe you. Ah ha. Here we go. George Karp, white male, assaulted by unknown assailants inside his own home, a fashionable loft in—How much detail do you want?”

“The extent of his injuries, whether or not he’s dead.”

“As good as, according to this. ‘Deep coma.’ Somebody really did a number on him. Cervical vertebrae fractured in two places, spinal cord disrupted. Left eye ruptured—associated orbital fractures. Both shoulders dislocated, some muscles torn out. Ruptured spleen, both kidneys severely damaged. Ribs splintered, which probably caused the pneumothorax and liver laceration. Jaw broken, and teeth. Legs more or less untouched, strangely enough. Cranial fracture—that’s what did the damage, they think, although it’s possible that the injury to the larynx, and one to the spinal cord, led to oxygen deprivation before the head trauma. Police are looking for two assailants, white male and white female. From the descriptions you’d think they were brother and sister. Description one is from a group of young men and women passing the loft just after the incident: male, six-two, blond hair, possibly something wrong with his eyes. Description two is from a woman who was apparently accompanying Karp home from a restaurant, who says the attacker was female—still tall, though, another six-footer, and blond hair again, very pale blue…” His voice trailed off. “Aud, is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Always,” I said lightly. It was an effort. “Any other details?”

Click click click. “Ah. Now this is interesting. Tabloid stuff, though. Want to hear it?”

“Yes.”

“After the news hit the real papers—apparently this Karp is some kind of minor celebrity in the retail universe—a woman talked to the Daily Post, said Karp abused her so much he drove her insane and she ended up in a psychiatric facility. She says, and I quote, ‘He’s a perv and a wacko.’ ” The colloquialisms sounded alien in his smooth diction. “Though, of course, she herself is certifiably insane, so it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black.” He clicked away. “Lurid tale of kink and coercion follows. According to the tabloid, her statement is corroborated by videotapes found in Karp’s apartment. Although they were all erased somehow, the labeling is apparently suggestive. The tabloid hints that the police now believe this to be some kind of revenge attack.” More tapping. “Officially, the police will say only that they’re pursuing leads.”

“No mention of anything missing?”

“Not that I can see, although a few items of obvious value were left untouched.” A few more clicks. “No. Nothing. Anything else I can do for you?”

A sudden picture of Eddie in his cubicle, smiling down the phone, relaxed and calm, made my eyes smart. “Just keep being yourself.”

There was a startled pause. “Is everything all right with you?”

“Fine. And thank you. I’ll buy you that dinner very soon.”

I folded the phone and dropped it on the bed. Tammy put it on the table with the folder.

“He’s still alive, isn’t he?”

“In a coma. A deep coma. He’s not going to recover.”

“He would hate that,” she said, “lying there totally helpless,” and her whole face curved in a predatory smile: the old Tammy coming out to play.

I pushed away the blanket and swang my legs off the couch bed. Instead of lead, my bones felt filled with polystyrene.

“Now what are you doing?” she said.

“There’s still Luz to take care of.”

She stood in front of me. “You’re joking, right?”

I stood on the second try, and shivered. It was definitely cold in the trailer, and I was still naked.

“Jesus, you’re not, are you?” I ignored her and concentrated on moving. Styrofoam was not reliable construction material. “What are you going to do? You can’t even drive with that knee.”

Seven feet from the foldout bed, I couldn’t seem to move anymore. I leaned dizzily against the kitchen counter.

“You’ve still got some fever,” Tammy said from behind me. “You haven’t really eaten for a couple of days. You’ve lost blood.”

I tried to straighten up and the pain in my knee bloomed like a fireball. I didn’t dare let go of the counter. If someone knows you need them, it gives them a weapon to hurt you over and over again. But the counter began to tilt and slide. “Help me.”

I thought for a moment she was going to fold her arms and say, Pretty please, but her response was a neutral “Back to bed?”

“Bathroom first.”

She took my arm and some of my weight. “You really are a stubborn asshole,” but the hard look had faded, and while I was balancing carefully on the toilet she went and got me one of the oversize T-shirts she slept in. It wasn’t easy to get it over the bandages on my head and neck.

By the time I got back to bed my knee felt as though someone had poured molten tin in the joint.

“You shouldn’t have gotten up,” Tammy said as she lifted my leg onto the bed for me.

“No.”

“Probably needs more ice.”

“Heat would be better,” I said. “There’s a hot pack in one of the storage bays. Stick it in the microwave.” She pulled the blanket up to my chest. “Why is it so cold in here?”

“Because there’s not a lot of propane left, and I didn’t know how long you were going to be sick.”

“What about the solar panels?”

She just gestured at the window: heavy overcast.

I nodded. “When you get the hot pack, bring the first aid kit, too. Please.”

She raised her eyebrows at the “Please,” but brought the kit back with the hot pack. “I turned the heat up.” We unbandaged the knee. “Looks painful.”

“It is,” I said shortly, then swore as she nudged it positioning the hot pack.

“You hold it, then.” I did. She brought me a glass of water and two pills.

“No more Vicodin.”

“They’ll help with the pain.”

“I don’t want any more Vicodin.” Pain reduces everyone to childishness. It reduces, full stop.

She put pills and glass on the table and gave me a look that said, You’re crazy.

“I do want to take a look at my throat, though.”

I told her what I needed, and when she had the warm water and Band-Aids and mirror assembled, I put the hot pack aside and unwrapped the thin towel around my neck.

The cut was about three inches long, not deep, but wide. When I turned my head this way and that, it gaped and seeped at the center. I set about the grim business of cleaning it.

“Are you going to leave it unwrapped like that?”

“I’m letting the skin around it dry so I can put some Band-Aids on.” Steri-Strips would have been better, but I didn’t have any. I picked up the scissors and cut chunks out of two sides of a Band-Aid so that what was left looked a bit like a very short dumbbell. I peeled away the sterile backing and put it over the slash in my neck so that the edges of the cut were pulled together. Instant butterfly suture. I did it all twice more. It shouldn’t scar too badly. Then I smeared antibiotic ointment over the seam and dabbed some on my face, and the backs of my hands.

“I don’t see why you don’t just go to the doctor.”

“Hospitals are… they have bad associations for me.”

She gave me a jaded look. “Like they don’t for everyone else?”

After a moment I said, “I didn’t take that last antibiotic you were trying to give me, did I?”

“No.” She brought the glass of water back and pulled the bottle out of her pocket again. “How did you get all this stuff, anyway?”

“I asked my doctor.”

“You said, ‘Hey, doc, I kill people for a living and sometimes they fight back, so can I have pills and stuff, in case?’ ”

“I don’t, and he didn’t. Fight back.”

“Then—”

“It was later. I got careless.” Which wouldn’t happen when I went to Arkansas for the girl. That trip would be planned down to the last detail, no more mistakes. No one would ever know I’d been there, until the girl went missing. I wrapped my neck again.

“So? How did you get her to give you the drugs?”

“Him.”

“Whatever.”

“I travel all over, sometimes to remote areas. If you’re somewhere like Kamchatka and get a compound fracture, you can’t just phone a pharmacy. There might not be a doctor for several hundred miles. He gives me prescriptions so I’ll always have antibiotics, and morphine, and a few other things.”

“You’ve got morphine in there?”

“I used it up, in Norway.”

“Norway again.”

I blinked. Pain might chew away at your defenses until you said whatever came into your head, but obviously the narcotic-based Vicodin had been worse. “Pass the heating pad, please.” She did.

“Doesn’t look like it’s helping much.”

It wasn’t.

“Changed your mind about the Vicodin?”

I started to shake my head, hissed as my neck pulled and the throbbing in my scalp started up again.

“Right, what was I thinking? Of course it’s better to grind your teeth and make the veins in your forehead stick out in pain than to take a couple of pills. Great. Fantastic. Especially the part where you start to get mean and shout at me again. Can’t wait.”

I didn’t want to babble my head off again about Julia. Julia was mine. Had been mine. Julia?

Tammy stood up. “I’ll make us something to eat.”

Julia?

Tammy banged and clattered resentfully in the kitchen. The pain in my knee slid like a superficial warm layer over the terrible ache deep in a part of me I couldn’t reach, couldn’t even name.

“Listen,” I said.

Bang, clatter.

“Tammy—”

She turned, snapped “I’m doing soup,” and went back to stirring.

“Listen. I need you to listen. We met in Atlanta. They were trying to kill her but I said I’d keep her safe. She was paying me to help her find out who killed her friend. But that wasn’t why I was doing it, although I didn’t know that. Well, I did, but I’d never loved anyone before. We went to Norway—”

Tammy looked up from her soup. “Norway?”

“—I thought it would be safer there.” Home was supposed to be safe. “She had business in Oslo, but when we went to Lustrafjord, it wasn’t business anymore.”

Tammy left her soup and sat on the foot of the bed.

I tried to explain how I’d shown Julia who I was by taking her to the seter, the farm where I’d spent my childhood summers, but it came out sounding like a bad romance: boats on the fjord, sun on the water, flowers on the fjell. “She went back to Oslo for a meeting. One of the killers came for me by the glacier lake. He shot me.”

I rolled up the left sleeve of my T-shirt. The bullet had hit my shoulder blade, bounced a bit, and traveled down the underside of my arm. The scar was pink and puckered, no longer an ugly purple red.

She looked at it. “You could have that fixed.”

“He shot me, so I broke his legs and left him to die. There was no choice because I couldn’t call the police to help him, or to help Julia, because if they found him they’d detain me, stop me from helping her.” I’ll protect you, I’d said. “So I did it, left him without a second thought.”

But I didn’t help her. I went to the blue place, forgot that it wasn’t just me against them. Forgot that Julia was in the middle.

“I killed the ones in Oslo, too. They weren’t real people. No one is. Was. So I killed them, but not before they—Anyway, she died. And I haven’t thought about them, the killers that I killed, not really.” I ran my fingers down the bullet track. Physical pain was easy to deal with. “The people I’ve killed were just objects, things to be removed. They only mattered as far as how they affected me. Everything, everyone used to be like that. Not anymore. Do you understand?”

She shook her head.

“She opened me, and now it’s all different. I feel different. I do things differently, like with Karp.”

“You still haven’t told me about that.”

“I don’t understand why I did it. I don’t understand it at all. Rage. I’ve never felt it before, not really.”

She looked skeptical.

“Mostly I would feel a kind of disgust, and irritation. I would look at them and think, You’re in my way, and I’d move them aside. Like moving a chair.” I thought about it. “Or like twisting the barrel of a rifle, breaking it so it can’t be used against you. I felt some annoyance, maybe. Not rage. People weren’t worth getting angry about.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute. It should have been getting warmer by now.

“You’re not wearing your watch,” I said.

She glanced at the pale band around her wrist. “No.” Silence. “So I still don’t know what happened with Karp.”

“It was Julia. A woman who looked like her. Except she didn’t, not really. It just—I was thinking about her, then I came out of his loft, and there they were. She ran. I hit him so he couldn’t breathe, took all the fight from him, then dragged him into the elevator and hit him again. Beat him. Hands, elbows, knees, feet.” My bones began to fill with lead again. I felt heavy enough to sink through the bed, through the floor of the trailer, into the dirt.

After a moment she said, “Did it hurt him?”

“Yes.” My knee hurt so much I couldn’t think. “Something’s burning.”

She jumped up, ran into the kitchen. “Shit.” She turned off the stove and came and sat down again. “That’s it for the soup.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Knee?”

“Yes.”

“There’s always the Vicodin.”

I was talking anyway. I nodded tiredly. The bed shifted as she leaned, handed me pills and glass.

The water was cold, and ached all the way down my gullet. “She loved me. She wouldn’t now, not like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like this.” I thumped the mattress. “If she were here she’d say he was a monster who would have just kept hurting people, and that he deserved what he got. She’d probably even try to believe it, but—” If I wanted, I could remember every creak and pop and spatter.

“So now you’re saying he wasn’t a monster?”

“No, he was. Is.”

“Okay. Then you think he wouldn’t have kept hurting people?”

“Of course he would have kept doing it!”

“Don’t yell. I told you you’d get mean if you didn’t take those pills. I’m just trying to figure this out. Geordie Karp was a sick son of a bitch and I’m glad you hurt him. He probably deserved everything he got.”

“Yes, but how do you stand it, every day, not being sure? Even you’re saying ‘probably.’ I never used to feel this way.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You used to kill people and not care about it much one way or another. But you’re upset about Geordie—even though he’s not dead, and even though you hurt him for a good reason. Yes? You’re upset that you feel when you practically kill someone?” She waited for my nod. “You don’t think that’s an improvement?”

“She said that I was like Karp.” That I used to be. That I pretended to be.

“She said—?” She cleared her throat. “So she died, when?”

“Five months and four days ago.” And a few hours: it had been midafternoon.

“And you saw Geordie for the first time in New York just this week.”

I nodded, shivered.

“But you said she told you—That she said you were like Geordie.” I shook my head. “Someone else said that?”

“No. She just asked me who he reminded me of.”

“And that was… when?”

“Three days ago.” Or two, or four, or whenever I’d been under the trees.

“That’s who was in the woods, wasn’t it? You see Julia.”

“Yes.”

Silence. Then she said, “What’s that like?” and my muscles locked up. Nothing worked, except my eyes. I wept soundlessly. I couldn’t even turn away.

She got up, sat down again, stared some more, and after a while hitched herself closer and pulled me awkwardly to her chest. She didn’t say anything, just stroked my head. The touch of her hand was like someone taking an axe to a dam; I wrapped my arms around her waist and keened. I hated her for not being Julia, but I couldn’t let go, and I couldn’t stop. Her hand went on stroking my head, and I wanted to shout, Stop! No! This is mine!, but that touch just kept widening the breach.

“She’ll never see this place,” I said. “You have, but she never will. I’ve never seen her grave. I should have stayed, in Atlanta. Should have helped her mother. Seen to her things.” Her clothes still lying on the floor in front of my washing machine.

It was getting dark out, and quiet. Tammy shifted, the couch creaked; her shoulders looked tight and tired. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, smearing the ointment. I didn’t want to talk anymore.

“I think I can make it to my own bed, if you help. The bathroom first.”

I used the toilet again, brushed my teeth, paused in the middle of wiping my mouth with the towel. It wasn’t my face anymore. It wasn’t just the smudges under my eyes, the smears of antibiotic, the scab. The muscles moved differently, as though someone else’s bones were trying to emerge.

CHAPTER TEN

Morning. I hobbled out of bed, made coffee, took it and the blood-stained folder to the table. Tammy was still asleep. I leafed through the documents. The pictures. The medical evaluation. The passport, the birth certificate and certificate of adoption. Karp was the legal adoptive father. No mention of permanent residency application, and the visitor’s visa had expired. I had no idea what the INS would make of that. No mention of the Arkansas couple on any official paperwork, though I found check stubs I had missed the first time around, records of bimonthly payments to J. Carpenter. There was no photo of either Jud or Adeline Carpenter, no hint of their age or anything but the fact that they were “good Christians who believed in old-fashioned family values,” and some details about the congregation they belonged to. What would they do now that Karp was permanently out of the picture and the money supply dried up? What would happen to the child?

I pushed it all to one side, took my coffee to the door, and opened it. It was a bright, cold morning. The season had shifted. The vibrant color of a week ago had faded and everywhere I looked bare branches poked through the threadbare tapestry. Careful of my strapped and swollen knee, I propped myself more securely against the doorframe. My coffee and breath steamed. During the night, fog had frozen on the fallen leaves and spiky turf, riming the world in sparkling hoarfrost. Something small had left tracks across the gray carpet, and while I watched the tracks expanded as the sun warmed the ground. Where a bird had hopped about on the hood of the rented Neon, bright green showed through.

“How’s your knee?”

I turned awkwardly. Tammy looked tired and frowsy in her pile of blankets.

“It’ll take my weight. But I’ll have to keep it strapped for a while. Coffee’s hot.”

“What I really liked about you being away was being able to sleep past dawn.”

We silently contemplated everything that had happened since I left: Tammy writhing on tape; my hands red and dripping; telling her what I’d told no one about Julia; asking for help—and getting it from a most unlikely and mostly unliked person.

“Stay in bed,” I said. “I’ll bring you a cup.” I closed the door, stumped into the galley, poured and stirred, and stumped more slowly back.

She nodded her thanks. I took my coffee back to the table and sat. Neither of us said anything for a while.

“So,” she said. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know.” It would take some time to understand the shape of the change between us, so I ignored it for now. “I have to make some phone calls. You may as well stay in bed and enjoy your coffee.”

The first person I called was my lawyer. Her personal assistant picked up.

“Ms. Torvingen! Ms. Fleishman’s been trying to get in touch with you for a couple of weeks now. Hold just one moment and I’ll get her on the line.” A click, followed by Bette Fleishman’s velvety, young-sounding voice. A great voice, especially if you were really sixty-two and as brittle as a praying mantis. “Aud Torvingen, the original mysterious disappearing woman. How are you, girl? I’ve been calling your machine and leaving messages for a month it feels like. There’s some few year-end matters that need to be taken care of before—”

“Are they urgent?”

“If you mean urgent as in life-or-death, hell no, but they might save you a dime or two if you could get them tidied up before the end of the tax year.”

“Just use your best judgment, Bette. I’ll be in before the end of the year to sign anything you think I should. But for now I need some information about adoption and immigration law.”

“Outside my area of competence.”

“Yes, but—”

“But if you let me finish my thought, I know just the person you should talk to. Great guy, crackerjack, a real immigration hotshot.” I imagined Bette flipping through her Rolodex, which she swore was faster and more reliable than a computer. “Name of Solomon C. Poorway. Believe he goes by Chuck.” She gave me the number. “Make sure he knows I sent you. And Aud, I know you’re in a hellfire rush, but don’t forget about coming in before year-end.”

I dialed the number she’d given me and was soon speaking to a contained, careful-sounding man. I outlined Luz’s situation: her age, visa status, the fact that she was in private, unofficial foster care and her adoptive parent was dead—or as good as. Poorway asked me a few questions about nationality, date of entry, and so forth. “Not an ideal situation,” he said, with lawyerly understatement. “With the visitor’s visa expired, adoptive father dead, and no permanent residency applied for, she is technically an illegal alien. If her existence is called to the attention of the INS, they’ll deport her.”

“Any suggestions?”

“She needs to be adopted by someone else. Then have the adoptive parents and child live together for two years, after which you can apply for permanent residency—the green card—and social security number.”

“How do I do that if she’s an illegal alien?”

“That will take some thinking about.”

Tammy got up and headed for the shower.

“What about citizenship?” I asked him.

“Once the child has permanent residency, the adoptive adult can apply for naturalization.”

“So what you’re saying is we really have to find a way to get her adopted.”

“Essentially, yes.”

I had the original adoption certificate. A template. I knew some creative people. “And how carefully is such documentation scrutinized?”

A pause. A long pause. “It’s not so much the physical documentation as the electronic trail.” A diplomatic way of saying that forging the certificate won’t do you much good unless you can hack State Department computers.

Perhaps the problem could be tackled from the other end. “Suppose the adoptive parent had applied for the green card for the child before he died. What would happen to the application then?”

“There’s no reason for it not to go through if all other conditions have been met. Especially if the adoptive parent had also left a will specifying legal guardianship for the child in the interim.”

“Mr. Poorway, will you take me as a client?”

Another of those long pauses. “I’m assuming we’re now speaking to the issue of client-attorney privilege?”

“Yes.”

“Give me your number, please, and I’ll call you back in a few minutes.” I agreed, gave him the number, and folded the phone. It wasn’t hard to guess who he’d be calling now.

Tammy wandered through wrapped in a towel, drying her hair. “Done already?”

“Waiting for him to call back.”

“How about waiting somewhere else?” She gestured at her near-nakedness.

I hauled myself up the two steps to my bed. I’d lost count of the times I’d seen Tammy naked, both live and on tape. I wasn’t the only one pretending the last few days had never happened.

The phone rang. “Yes, I’ll take you as a client,” Solomon Poorway said. Bette Fleishman must have persuaded him I wasn’t a mass murderer. I smiled bleakly. “Ms. Torvingen?”

“Aud,” I said.

“Very well, Aud.” No offer to be called Chuck. “Our conversation is now privileged. However, I would prefer that you not test my ethics too severely.”

“Thank you for your candor. Here’s another hypothetical question. If the INS should receive a packet dated before the adoptive father died, a signed and dated application for permanent residence, and if there was an addendum to his will giving, say, me guardianship, then I would be her legal guardian until she became a legal resident, yes? Then once she got her green card, I could get her a social security number, and apply for citizenship on her behalf?”

“Yes.” He didn’t sound happy about it.

“And it wouldn’t be necessary for the child to live with the legal guardian.” I would send checks. I didn’t particularly want to meet her, but I could at least make sure she had warm clothes, enough to eat, and someone to look after the basics.

“No.”

I wanted to ask what kind of wording would be necessary on the addendum about guardianship, but no doubt that would be pushing his ethics too far, so I thanked him and hung up. Tammy was now dressed. I limped back down to the table and reopened the folder.

“You want breakfast?” Tammy asked.

“Um.”

“Well, don’t jump up and down with gratitude or anything.”

I looked up. Not pretending quite everything away, then. “Jumping up and down would be a bit tricky at the moment.”

“Is that a joke, Aud Torvingen?”

The old Tammy had not been pleasant, but this new one was unfathomable. I turned back to the folder and riffled through its contents, thinking. I spread out the information on the Carpenters, including the black-and-white photograph of a house, surrounded by farmland; it looked fairly isolated. I picked up the fact sheet again, read it more carefully. Church of Christ. New Testament literalists. Not technophobic, exactly, but disapproving of frivolity; a phone would be fine, and a car, but definitely no music—apart from the human voice in praise to His glory; modern medicine would be acceptable, as long as it was absolutely necessary—no antidepressants, no Valium, no sleeping pills. Nothing about dancing, one way or the other. Jud Carpenter was a deacon of the Plaume City Church of Christ congregation. I found an atlas, and paper and pencil, and took notes.

Tammy made toast and eggs and tea. I ate the eggs, crunched my way through the half-burnt bread, sipped at the overbrewed tea, still thinking. It might work, but I’d have to check a few details. No carelessness this time. I touched my neck.

“Hurt?”

“Um? No.”

“Good. So, you decided how to handle it?”

I had never talked to anyone about my methods before. Julia had never had the chance to see me work.

“They live in an isolated house in the middle of Nowhere, Arkansas,” I said. “Which is good, in the sense that I should be able to snoop about unseen because there’ll be hardly anyone around. But it’s bad because if there is anyone about, I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. But the best thing is, they’re big-time churchgoers.”

“Sunday,” she said, nodding. “The whole family.” Smarter than she looked. “All day. All that preaching and singing. Hours and hours to get into their house and take a look around.” She grinned at me, then remembered and turned away.

I turned on my laptop and while it warmed up Tammy pulled on a sweatshirt and went outside. I hooked up my cell phone, got online and started searching the web. After a few minutes, I heard the chunk-and-scatter of wood being chopped into kindling. For the next hour, I clicked my way through web pages, and Tammy got a real rhythm going with the hatchet; she had peeled down to her T-shirt and the wood was piling up. We didn’t need it. I watched for a while, then picked up the phone book and turned to electronics suppliers.

Tammy came back in just as I finished organizing my notes. The exercise had done her good; she looked bigger, stronger, more relaxed.

“Tea?”

“Thank you,” she said, and smiled tentatively. “It’s great out there, real fresh and clean-smelling.” I smiled back, then got up to fill the kettle. Tammy looked at my neat pile of notes. “You look all set.”

“I’ve worked out a beginning. But there’s nothing I can do for a while.” In New York both knees had been whole, and I’d still had my throat slit by a scarecrow with a razor.

A house is more likely to be inhabitable in the long term if you approach it as a spaceship. Think of the walls and roof and windows as hull integrity; electrical, heating, and sewage systems as life support; floors and interior walls as decorated bulkheads. I had walls and a roof but would need to get the windows glazed before there was perfect hull integrity. I’d dug and installed the septic system months ago, but still needed to install toilet, bath, sinks, and shower. The electrical system could wait. Heating couldn’t. I needed glass, I needed a wood-burning stove, and I needed to check and repoint the chimney and flue. We would have to go to town for the glass and the stove, which for now left the chimney and flue.

The cabin smelled of cold stone and raw wood, and my breath steamed. I stood in the middle of the unfinished floor and studied the massive fieldstone fireplace.

“How are you with heights?” I asked Tammy.

“Depends,” she said warily. “What did you have in mind?”

It seemed that Tammy could climb a ladder up to the roof and the chimney, but not let go of it once she was there, which made the whole exercise rather pointless. I would have to wait a few days before I could get up a ladder and do the chimney repairs myself. Meanwhile, I took a look at the flue and inside stonework. Apart from a few minor repairs, the flue looked solid and well designed, and we didn’t need ladders for the first stage of interior pointwork.

Under my direction, Tammy carried the bags of cement and buckets of water and mixed the two in the right proportions until I was satisfied. Then I showed her how to slap the mortar between the stone with an upward stroke, slice the excess off with the downstroke, and shape what was left with a fast right-to-left horizontal swipe.

“The trick is to not get mortar all over the face of the stone because then you have to chip it off bit by bit when it’s dry, which is tedious and time-consuming.”

Slap, chop, scrape. Slap, chop, scrape. Stretch, bend, sigh. Mindless rhythm of stone and mortar and steel, dusty scent of mortar and wet mixing board. It was probably not much over fifty degrees outside, and a breeze blew through the open door, but Tammy’s face grew lightly sheened with sweat, and my knee ached.

I woke in the early hours. I took the phone outside and called Eddie’s number at the Journal-Constitution. I had to leave a message.

“It’s me. I need follow-up on that George Karp story, whatever comes over the wires: new leads, witness statements, police activity, Karp’s condition. I’m particularly interested in what evidence the police think they have. You’ve got my number.”

The first two days, we worked only until lunch because I was still too tired to do a full day. When my knee got strong enough to lighten the strapping, and limber enough to climb cautiously up the ladder to repoint the chimney, I spent an hour every afternoon in the woods. There wouldn’t be many of these days left, and it gave me time to think about Karp and what might happen if he woke up and gave the police a good description; what might happen if the police took that description to the local cafés, talked to the waitress in the second café, where I’d left the book. I tried to think about moving money to a Swiss account and how I could build a new identity, but each time found myself wondering instead how I could make sure nothing went wrong in Arkansas, or contemplating what still had to be done at the cabin.

Tammy and I didn’t speak much during the day, but at night, over food and coffee, we talked of this and that. I told her about Dree, the hairdresser, about Asheville, what I could remember of the history of the place. She told me of her undergraduate years at the University of Georgia, the friends she had lost touch with. We didn’t drink. We didn’t read. We would climb into our respective beds and sleep like stones, or at least Tammy did. I woke up suddenly, at all hours, thinking of Karp—I should have killed him, should have made sure; I shouldn’t have hurt him in the first place—wondering what was wrong with me, why I wasn’t already running, and where a nine-year-old girl might go to hide, if she could.

One morning I woke before dawn. The air was still and cool and humid, the way it gets in an airtight metal box, no matter how nicely you disguise the interior with leather upholstery and good carpets, and I wanted to walk. I dressed quietly and crept out into the clearing. My breath bloomed before me like the thought balloon of an empty-headed cartoon character. There were no tracks in the hoarfrost. The predawn sky was like lead, with barely enough light to see. I was glad of my thick jacket.

Amid the trees, leaves fell, gray and silent, like something filmed in the early days of cinema. The air was crisp enough to slice at the warm mucus membranes of my nose and throat, and smelled of iron. Autumn. This is where new life begins, with the seed falling on hard ground, being buried by dead leaves. The old life had to die first.

Tammy was dressed and on what looked like her third cup of coffee by the time I got back. The bright interior of the trailer seemed garish after the cold clarity of the woods.

“I was trying not to get worried,” she said.

“I woke up this morning and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen or heard a groundhog in days, that they’ve begun to hibernate, and I went out into the woods and saw the first gouged tree of the season—from deer, rubbing the velvet off their new antlers—and I realized it’s November.”

“Okay. Let’s pretend I don’t understand what you’re talking about and need a few hints.”

“Today is the second of November. My birthday.”

“Your birth—”

“And I was thinking, there are a few things we need, and I should return that Neon.”

“Wait. Back up. How old are you?”

“Thirty-two. And you were saying only yesterday that your hair needs cutting. We could go into Asheville. Maybe have something to eat, something to drink.”

She blinked. Maybe it was her first cup of coffee after all. Then she smiled. “When do you want to leave, birthday girl?”

We dropped the Neon off first, then I drove the truck to the salon, where there were already two people waiting; I stayed long enough to say hello to Dree and tell Tammy that if I wasn’t back by the time she was done I’d meet her in the café next door.

On Church Street, I hesitated, engine running, outside the Asheville Savings Bank, while I thought, I can’t, I’m not ready, but had no idea what I meant. Eventually I parked.

The manager’s office, white shelves holding books and plants surrounding her door, light wood desk, medium window, was as relaxed as she was. At my suggestion, she called Lawrence, my banker in Atlanta, and decided as a result that she would be very happy to attend to my every need as far as local business dealings were concerned. She came round to my side of the desk, shook hands, and prepared to escort me back into the public space and the care of a trusted teller.

By the door, I noticed the bonsai tree. A perfect oak, ancient and stately, and only six inches high.

“Eighty years old,” she said. “It was an anniversary present from my husband. Beautiful, isn’t it? It came with a book—”

When I had tried to talk to her about setting up a Swiss account, my mouth had dried up, and I imagined a nine-year-old in a foreign country, with no love, no one to rely on. I don’t care, I told myself, I’ve never even met her—and what use would I be to her in jail? But I still hadn’t opened my mouth.

“—torture it: prune the roots, clip out new limb growth, and wire the branches to achieve the desired shape. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just let it grow.”

The manager shook herself from contemplation of the tree and asked if, apart from facilitating an immediate account, there was anything else she could do to help.

She gave me directions to Architectural Glass, two different hardware stores, and a place called Bathed in Light.

Bathed in Light had exactly what I needed. I arranged to go back later that afternoon to pick up the bathtub, sinks, and other fixtures I had picked out. Thoughts of Karp and fingerprints got muddled up with stainless steel faucets and brass-accented showerheads.

Architectural Glass was harder to find and there was nowhere nearby to park—unusual in Asheville. The woman who tried to answer my questions was one of those transplants from the Northeast who believe they are far, far better than anyone who has ever lived in any of the southern states. She smiled patronizingly while I explained what I wanted, then explained to me why that wouldn’t be possible. I asked to see the manager. She told me she hardly thought that would be necessary. I told her she was right, she hardly thought, which was why I wanted to see the manager. Now. It turned out I couldn’t have the glass until the day after tomorrow.

By the time I got back in the truck, I’d been gone from Dree’s for two and a half hours. The hardware store and Radio Shack would have to wait. I parked outside the café and went in. No Tammy.

“Aud!” she said from Dree’s station as I pushed open the door of the salon, “we were just wondering where you’d got to! Sorry it’s taking so long but Dree had three people in front of me.” She pointed at three bags lined up in the waiting area. “I even had time to do some shopping.” But then she turned around to the mirror again and she and Dree went back to talking a mile a minute about Dree’s mother, who according to Dree seemed to be getting weird in her old age, I mean like different, and Tammy totally agreed: that seemed to happen to moms at a certain age, they forgot they were old. It amazed me how people could bring out different facets of each other’s personalities. It looked as though they would be a while.

“I’ll be next door, in the café, if—”

“Oh, I’ll be through in just a minute,” Dree sang. “Why don’t you wait?”

So I sighed and stayed and watched as the damp tangle around Tammy’s ears turned into beautifully shaped hair, and they talked about some upcoming party or other. Then they were both standing, swatting chunks of hair off the nylon robe, dusting at Tammy’s neck, admiring Dree’s handiwork in the mirror.

“Tammy’s been telling me all about your cabin!” Dree said. “You didn’t tell me you were doing the work yourself.”

“No. It’s—”

“That’s thirty-five dollars,” she said to Tammy, then back at me, “Your cut’s holding up well, but don’t leave it more than another two weeks before you come in again.”

“All my cash is gone,” Tammy said. It had been my cash to start with. I handed over two twenties and two ones.

Dree put them in the till, then said, “Why don’t you come tonight, too? It’s your birthday after all, right?”

I stared at Tammy, but she didn’t even look apologetic. “Dree’s mother is having a party tonight. Dree wanted to know if I’d go with her.”

“Yeah,” Dree said, “everyone else will be fifty.”

You don’t know us, I wanted to say, What would your mother think? But then I remembered her mother was an ex-hippie woman-on-the-land feminist who had named her daughter after some Hindu earth mother figure, and it seemed clear that Tammy really wanted to go, and it was one way to not think about the New York police gathering clues, or a nine-year-old girl lying in bed alone at night wondering why no one loved her.

“It’s just outside town,” Tammy said. “Closer to the cabin.”

“Come about seven,” Dree said.

“What should we bring?” I asked her.

“Something to drink?” She didn’t sound too sure.

“Perhaps if I knew what the party’s for…”

“Well, you know. To have fun?”

“It’s something they do every year,” Tammy said. “Dree’s mother and her old friends—about forty. Some bring guests, some don’t. They like meeting new people, right Dree?”

Dree looked amazed at Tammy’s summary, but I should have trusted Tammy to know everything she needed in order to bring, wear, and talk about the appropriate things.

“About seven then?” Tammy said to Dree. “And thanks for the cut.”

She didn’t thank me for paying for it, just picked up two of the bags and left the third for me to carry. It was the heavy one.

Tammy dropped the high school senior act as soon as we’d stowed the bags and entered the café. “What’s good here?”

“I have no idea.” But the chili and corn bread looked worth trying. Tammy decided on Caribbean quesadillas with avocado and pineapple.

I told her about the glass showroom, that we wouldn’t be able to fit the windows for at least two days, and then tried to describe the bathroom fixtures I’d chosen. I found I wasn’t very good at it. In the end, I got up and brought the catalogue from the truck.

“Very you,” she said as she looked over the simple, turn-of-the-nineteenth-century reproductions, the lever taps with white porcelain handles, the deep, claw-footed tub, the wide, white-enameled kitchen sink. “Modern faucets for the kitchen, though, right?”

I nodded. “You can take authenticity too far.”

We talked about bathrooms, how as a child she had longed for one like a pink palace, pink quartz floor, red gold taps with ruby inserts, pink fur rugs… “I’m not sure when the pink thing faded. A couple of years ago I wanted one of those industrial-looking places, you know: all steel and glass and straight lines. Black floor tiles, white porcelain.”

Like a hospital room.

“Now I’m thinking something warmer: terra-cotta tile, plants, big old tub.”

“Did you and Dornan…” I didn’t finish the question. I had no idea why I’d begun it.

“Talk about setting up house? No. He wanted to but he never brought it up. I’d have run a mile. Did you and Julia?”

“No. It…” I shook my head. “No. It seemed so obvious we’d spend the rest of our lives together that we didn’t even discuss it.”

“So, you would have got back from Norway and argued about bathroom furniture.”

I picked up the catalogue and traced the picture of the tub with my finger. “She might not have liked this.”

“Who would have won?” Tammy was smiling, and just for a moment my memories of Julia were happy ones—watching her face in the Oslo art gallery as she explained Norwegian neo-Romanticism; pulling her to me when I was in the tub; frying freshly caught fish—free of a hovering sense of doom, free of guilt, free of anything but happiness, and I was able to smile back.

“She would.”

“You want more coffee?”

I didn’t, there was still the hardware store and Radio Shack to visit and the fixtures to load, but the sense of lightness and gladness, of being able to remember Julia without guilt, persisted, on and off, all afternoon: the perfect birthday gift.

I took another sip of the Woodward Canyon Reserve chardonnay—Tammy’s choice; mine was rioja—and its smoky oak flavor distracted me for a minute from what the man standing opposite me near the fireplace was saying. His name was Henry something or other, an old-fashioned name for a man wearing aggressively fashionable glasses, slits that didn’t seem big enough to see through.

“… those days, not like Adrian”—Dree’s mother—“and the rest of us.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Not as long as the women’s land collective. I came in ’79. We started with nothing, not even common sense.” He smiled as if to say, You know what it’s like to be young and foolish, and I realized that I had not thought about Karp or New York for at least an hour.

“So how do you know Adrian?”

“Oh, I’ve known of her for about twenty years, but she and the others were rabid lesbian separatists until the mid-eighties.” He gave the woman sitting on the tapestried couch on the other side of the room an affectionate look. Adrian was in her mid-fifties; her hand rested on the thigh of a man who appeared to be ten years her junior, and the looks they exchanged were frankly sexual. Now I understood Dree thinking her mother was getting, like, weird. “She’s changed a lot then?”

“We all have.”

There were about fifty people at the party, ranging in age from early sixties to early twenties, the older crowd’s children. The atmosphere was one of village get-together: people who had known each other for decades, and been through economic, political, and emotional change. I tried to imagine them in tie-dye and beards, or working naked on the land, getting stoned and talking about the power of the patriarchal military-industrial complex, but all I could see were accountants and psychotherapists, the sons and daughters of middle America finally leading the kind of lives their parents would at least have understood, if not wholly approved. For that there would have to have been more wedding rings, more socks, and some meat among the Brie and smoked salmon and vegetable dip in the dining room.

I excused myself, and refilled my glass. Tammy stood to the right of Adrian’s couch, talking to a man and woman in their twenties who were hand in hand. The man’s blue eyes seemed vaguely familiar. I watched Tammy for a while; she wasn’t touching the man on the arm, or giving him extra big smiles, or arching her back so that her breasts pressed against her thin sweater; she wasn’t canting her hips and shoulders so that the woman was cut out of the conversation; she wasn’t just a couple of inches too close. I stepped forward and she saw me.

“Aud!” She opened the circle. “This is Shari, and Ken, Dree’s brother.” That explained the eyes. I swapped my wine to my left hand and we exchanged handshakes and pleased-to-meet-you’s. “Ken works for a construction company—”

“McCann, right?”

He smiled. “How did you know that?”

I pointed to my haircut. “Dree.”

He smiled some more, but I saw how his hand stiffened in Shari’s and thought he must get tired of Dree talking about him and his affairs to all and sundry.

“Like I was saying, Ken works for a construction company. I told him about the cabin and what kind of stove we were looking for, and he thinks he knows where we can find one. I told him we’d already tried that place on Merrimon.”

Since when had there been a we?

“Tammy tells us you want something you can cook with,” Shari said. She had long, honey-colored hair and beautifully shaped nails. “Maybe a wood-burning range is the way to go.”

“Just a plain stove,” I said. “Something along the lines of an old Intrepid, that’ll heat the cabin—”

“—and boil a pan of water if necessary.” Now Ken’s smile was real. “We had one of those our first couple years up the mountain. That’s all we had. Wonderful thing. Dree was just starting to crawl. I was seven. It was my job, while Mom was in endless collective meetings, to make sure Dree didn’t stick her hand on it. Those puppies get hot when they’re going! Wonder what happened to it.” He literally shook himself, like a dog trying to get dry. “There are a couple places along Emma Road you might try. They supply me when I do independent contracting. Tell them I sent you and they might give you a discount.”

“I will. But I don’t know your last name.”

“Johnson.”

Son of John. “Bet Adrian didn’t like that.”

He grinned. “She changed our names to Moon for a while after she left Dad and dragged us up here, but never got around to making it legal, so at school Dree and I were always Johnson, and it just crept back. How about you? You sound British.”

“Norwegian. Aud Torvingen.”

Shari’s mother, it turned out, was originally from Denmark. Shari had visited Copenhagen for the first time last year. Wonderful city. Did I know it?

At midnight, we were the only vehicle on the road.

“I liked that,” Tammy said.

“Good.”

“Did you?”

I thought about it. “Yes.”

“I liked it a lot,” she said. “I liked the people, the way it felt. It must be cool to live with people you’ve known for twenty or thirty years, to work in the same town where people went to school with your parents. Wonder what that feels like.”

Stifling, probably.

She said wistfully, “They seemed like a real community.”

“I didn’t know you yearned for community.”

“It just seemed… I don’t know. Nice. Like they were really in each other’s lives. It wasn’t just that they all belonged to the same gym or something. They’ve got history together. These people know each other: they remember when which kid had what illness, when who split up with who in junior high and why. Ken told me stories about how they had to share everything the first few years. How they still do, sort of. They grew up together. I can’t even remember the names of people I went to college with.”

A community of necessity and proximity would probably drive her screaming into the sunset. “Most real community comes from shared hardship.”

“Still. I think I could live here.”

If it hadn’t been such a narrow road, and dark, I would have turned to look at her. “I wouldn’t have thought there were a lot of business development opportunities here.”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong. Asheville is hot. Did you meet Jonas? Tall guy, gangly, beaky nose? He’s a VP at Sonopress, and he was saying that the company gives money to the town, for stuff like the annual Bele Chere festival, and WCQS, and the local Arts Alliance, but that they want to do more, give the company a higher profile in the community. It sounds like a job I could do: get to know people, find out what people want, find a way to give it to them so everyone’s happy.”

“Yes. You’d be good at that.”

“And”—she sounded as though she were smiling—“Sonopress is part of Bertelsmann.”

“So if you get bored you can move up the parental corporate chain?” It began to make a bit more sense.

“Right. But it’s not just that. I could really do that job, and I’d like it. I could get them to expand the community liaison stuff to other things—getting some of the bands whose CDs they press, or stars whose movies they put on DVD, to come to the festivals, maybe persuading some of the software writers to donate time to local schools. Whatever. It wouldn’t be just about money.”

“But meeting all those big names would be fun.”

“Fun is good.” Definitely smiling. “And it would be fun to get to know people who live here. Business development is lots of smiles and promises, but when you’ve got them to sign that deal, phht, that’s it, you fly to another city and smile at someone else. This would be different, it would be the same people over and over. I’d be part of something. Yes”—out of the corner of my eye I saw her nodding to herself—“yes, I could live here.”

Could I? Even if the police let me? I made the turn onto the ungraded mountain track. Stay in the world, Aud, she had said, and I had promised. I just wasn’t sure which part.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The rain beat steadily on the new windows and washed in a sheet over the handmade glass. Wavy water on wavy glass.

“Makes me seasick to watch it,” Tammy said. “I still don’t see why you paid so much money for bad glass.”

We’d been over it; I wanted the cabin to be as close as possible to the way it might originally have been built, using handmade materials where possible. But glass had improved in the last ninety years, and I was beginning to think she might be right. At least we were weathertight.

“We should light a fire,” I said.

“We don’t have the stove yet.”

“It would test the chimney.”

While I built the fire Tammy watched, standing by the long counter and dry sink of what at some point would become the kitchen. The tub and pedestal sink leaned against the wall of what would be the bathroom, once I’d installed a pump house and a combination of solar panels and generator to power it. If Eddie didn’t call. If Karp didn’t wake up.

Smoke eeled up the chimney and disappeared satisfactorily. I added more kindling to the ancient cast-iron grate, waited for it to catch, and began to lay on logs. Four walls, a roof, sturdy door, glazed windows, and now heat. Almost livable. The flames grew, turned from blue to red at their center.

“It works.”

I nodded. So far.

“Hey, we could eat here tonight, instead of the trailer. I’ll go see what there is to cook.”

The door squeaked as she closed it behind her. It might be that the hinges were slightly out of true, or just that they needed oiling, and at some point I would have to fix it, but at this moment I was more interested in the fire; I wanted it to be perfect: symmetrical, lively, just the right shape and color.

Tammy came back carrying the laundry basket; it was full of sacks of flour, and butter, some milk and bread and wine and what looked like my two cast-iron frying pans.

“It’s a surprise,” she said. She set to work, flouring the kitchen counter, pouring and measuring and kneading.

The fire roared. I used the tongs to unfold the iron bar hinged to the sidewall of the fireplace, and pulled it out across the flames. Like the fire, it gave me deep satisfaction. It had been a tricky bit of mortaring but now it was positioned just right to hang a pot or kettle over the flames—not that I’d need it once the kitchen had a range, or even when the stove was in place.

Tammy seemed to be making some kind of flat cake. “How much longer until the coals are hot enough to cook with?”

“Half an hour.”

Runnel of rain on the roof, pop and hiss of green wood on the fire, slap and whisper of dough. I stretched out on the unfinished floor and let myself drift for a while. Noises from the kitchen counter changed: Tammy had half a dozen cakes lined up and had moved on to wrapping a variety of vegetables in aluminum foil.

Hot yellow nuggets piled above and below the grate. I raked a few onto the front hearth. They began to cool to orange and go gray around the edges. I raked them back. “Ready when you are.”

The vegetables went in first. She held up the silvery packages one by one, “Corn, onions, butternut squash, sweet peppers,” and put them in the fire. She got up again and brought back one of the skillets, covered with a wet cloth.

“That’s my pillowcase.”

“I had to get creative. I needed wet cloth.”

Get creative. I could find out which hospital Karp was in. Go make sure he wouldn’t wake up.

Tammy wrapped the cakes in the pillowcase, put them in the skillet, put the skillet to one side in the hearth, then raked a handful of coals and ash over the lot, just like something out of a Foxfire book.

“The cakes and the vegetables should cook a bit before the bacon goes on,” she said. “I thought we’d have some wine.”

I got up and found the bottle and glasses and corkscrew and brought them back to the fireplace. It was a good rioja. Tammy had been paying attention; it no longer surprised me.

The smell of applewood and roasting corn mingled with red wine as I poured. I handed Tammy her glass.

“To your cabin,” she said. “May you have many dinners in front of this fire, with people you care for.”

I couldn’t see it, but I raised my glass, and drank.

She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. “It got warm fast.”

“Wood’s a good insulator.” Now that the windows were glazed and the fire working, the place was more or less livable as it stood. Hook up the toilet to the septic system, flush it using buckets filled at the pump outside. You’d have to leave before the snows, though, or stay until spring…

Karp’s hospital room might be guarded.

“Tell me about those cakes you’re cooking.”

“Ash cakes. Ken was telling me about them at the party. Some old toothless woman showed Adrian how, and Adrian showed Ken as soon as he could be trusted not to set the house on fire. That was when he was eight, he said. Or maybe nine. Anyhow, they’re supposed to taste good—if they don’t burn to a crisp. Which is where the wet pillowcase comes in. It sort of steams them at the same time, he said. Poor old Ken, keeping house at eight.”

There were worse things. “What were you doing at that age?”

“Eight? Eight was when I learned to ride a bike. And how to fall off a pony.” She laughed. “God, I wanted a pony so bad. Then my father took me to this riding school, where I found out that horses are big scary animals that stink and won’t do as they’re told, and it’s a long way down if you fall off.” She sighed. “I was Daddy’s princess. That’s what he called me, his princess. I think he liked it that I couldn’t ride. It kept me his on some level. What about you?”

Self-analysis from Tammy. “I learned to ride when I was nine. In England. With the daughter of one of my mother’s friends.” Galloping over the Yorkshire moors, wild as a lynx, with Christie Horley. Another life I had left.

“You looked quite nostalgic for a while there.”

“Nine is a good age,” I said. By then I had realized that although my mother behaved as if she loved me, and maybe even wished that she did, she didn’t. My father had been in Chicago that summer.

Tammy was studying me.

“What?”

“You used to scare me. You always scared me, even when Dornan was there. Always judging, and usually not in other people’s favor. Not in mine, anyhow. But since you got back from—Since you got back, you’ve been different. That night, when—” She squirmed and glanced away. “It was a pretty sad seduction attempt, I know, totally embarrassing, but the way you reacted… I thought you were going to strangle me. You looked crazy. Not the kind of person you could ever imagine being nine years old. You seem more human now. And now I’ve embarrassed myself again. Jesus, it’s hot in here.” She put her glass down and pulled off her sweater. When she picked up her glass again, the wine was a rich red against the cream of her bodysuit—which, like the sweater and the wine, she had bought that morning in Asheville. It was strange, seeing her in clothes I had not bought or lent her, drinking wine she had selected without my advice, without needing me there.

“You’re different, too.”

“Yep. Since I—Well, I’ve learned plenty. The world can be big, and stink, and it hurts if you fall off, but hey, it’s worth trying, mostly, and what doesn’t kill you… Well, it doesn’t kill you.” She lifted her glass. “To learning experiences, even though they suck.”

“To not being nine years old and at the mercy of the world.” Like Luz.

She got up, came back with the second skillet. “Time to fry that bacon.”

The bacon hissed and shrank and turned translucent, and when it browned we filled our plates with it, and corn and squash and onion, and the doughy-looking things that were the ash cakes. I tried one. It tasted of cinders. “It’s good,” I said. It’s easy to lie to people you’re leaving.

I ate deliberately: onion sweet and smoky and soft, corn bursting rich and yellow under my teeth, and the bacon melting in places but chewy in others. And then the plate was clean.

It didn’t matter about Luz. She was nothing to do with me. Sending money was as much as I needed to do. More. I hadn’t put her with the foster parents in Arkansas. I didn’t have to help her, or any of the others—because, oh, suddenly it was so clear that there were others. Many, many others.

I stood up. “Wait there,” I told Tammy.

Outside it was raining harder than ever, thick drops the size of raisins, but cold and hard, and it was quite dark. On the way back, I stuck the file in my shirt to keep it dry.

“You’re dripping,” she said when I returned.

I sat closer to the fire and pulled out the folder. She recognized it, but made no comment.

I opened it. “They’ve been very careful.”

“Who?”

“The agency who handled all this.” I fanned the sheaf of papers on the floor. “Not one mention of the agency name, not a single letter or fax or printed e-mail with a person’s signature.”

“Then how do you know there’s an agency involved?”

“The bar code. The brochure. They’re professionals. Someone is doing this a lot.”

“They could be, you know, just a regular adoption agency.”

“Adoption agencies don’t usually farm out the adopted to foster parents.”

“Jesus.” She stared at the documents. “How many kids do you suppose there are?”

“I don’t know.” Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?

I looked at the photograph. Only nine, learning that there was no love in the world. By now the agency might have heard about Karp. It’s likely they would hand the girl over to some other pervert, for more money. That or leave her with the foster parents, who would dump her on social services once the regular checks dried up. All about money.

Tammy poured us both more wine. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

The wine was warm now from being by the fire, its taste as rounded and familiar as the roof of my mouth. It would be very easy to just finish this bottle, then start another, sleep soundly, and get up in the morning and go about my business, rebuilding this cabin, pretending to turn it into a home. Why had I hurt Karp? Why wouldn’t he just die? I laughed. I couldn’t even make up my mind about that.

“I don’t think it’s funny,” she said.

I didn’t really care what she thought. I drained my glass and filled it with what was left in the bottle, ignoring her glass. I looked around at the cabin: the fire without its stove, the unconnected toilet, the dry kitchen. “We have to speed up the work here. I’ll be taking the truck and trailer. If you want to stay out here, you’ll need this place to be livable.”

“What are you going to do? You don’t have to rush. You can’t. What about your knee?”

“My knee will be fine.” I shoved the poker in the fire, stirred it about. Put the poker down. Picked it up again.

“I don’t want to be here alone. I want you to stay.”

“People don’t stay just because you want them to.” They never stayed.

“And why are you in such a rush anyhow? You could wait until spring. Why do you want to do it now?”

“I don’t want to do it at all.” I stood up, paced restlessly to the sink, the fireplace, back to the sink. “She’s just some nine-year-old. Why should I care?” Back and forth. Back and forth. I stopped, standing over her. “Why the fuck should I care?”

She flinched, then glared at me. “So if you don’t care, why are you shouting? Why don’t you just run off in your trailer someplace and live happily ever after?”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

Because running would mean closing up seamlessly, leaving everything behind, again. It would mean breaking my promise, acting as though Julia had never existed. I sat down hard, scrubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have shouted.”

“You keep saying you’re sorry and you keep shouting at me.”

I stared into the fire. Stay in the world, she had said, and this was the world I had made.

“Aud?” She touched my hand to make me look up. “I’m sorry I got you into all this.”

“You didn’t,” I said tiredly. “Dornan did. Or Julia did, by dying. Or maybe I did, by loving her. It’s all connected.” Irony is rarely amusing. “Just one big happy human ecosystem, like the woods, with some trees trying to grow too fast and smother the rest.”

“And you’re the axe,” she said.

The fire popped. An axe, cold and unlovely. “Is that really how you see me?”

The old Tammy would have smiled and said, No, of course not! and tried to reassure me, soothe my ruffled feathers, but though a fleeting regret showed in her sigh, she nodded. “You can use an axe to bang in nails, but that doesn’t make it a hammer. It’s still an axe. Cutting is still what it’s made for.”

The rain washed down the windows in an undulating sheet.

“Remember when you asked me why I didn’t hit Geordie? It was because I don’t know how. That little girl in Arkansas doesn’t, either. You do. I know that. But do you have to go yourself? Or if there’s no one else to send, do you have to go now? You could wait until I—”

She wrestled the old Tammy to silence. “I guess you want to leave as soon as you can.”

Tammy had just gone into the bathroom to brush her teeth and I was already in bed when my phone rang.

“Congratulations,” Eddie said. “Your boy’s case has made it to the front page. Give me your number and I’ll fax it.”

“Just read it out.”

“Very well. It’s the usual tabloid banner—”

“Tabloid?”

“Just so. Not at all the sort of thing a respectable paper would lead with. Did I misunderstand your request for follow-up?”

“No. What’s the headline?”

“ ‘Avenger Twins Out For Blood,’ with a crime scene photo filling the remainder of the page.”

They wouldn’t print a picture of Karp in that state. What had I left? “Describe it.”

“Bloody handprints in a nice arc up the wall, body draped in a stained sheet and half covered in videocassettes, some of which are rather artistically unspooled over the victim’s eyes.”

A mock-up.

“The story itself is quite delightful. Another interview with the unbalanced young woman who claims to have been abused by the victim, this time with some interesting detail. Let’s see. They’re now calling Karp a serial abuser. Quotes from anonymous victims. A sick man, says one. An evil psychopath, says another. All very breathless. The real focus of the piece, however, seems to be these twins. At least on first pass. There’s a sidebar—two sidebars. One headed ‘Angels of Vengeance?’ and the other ‘Well-Versed Agents.’ Two rather unattractive artists’ impressions.”

“What do they look like?”

“Sweet but moronic thugs: corn-fed football players who have found god.”

“Even the woman?”

“Especially the woman.”

“Police comment?”

“Just the official statement: ‘We continue to pursue a variety of leads with all due diligence.’ However, reading between the lines I’d say the Daily Post has an unofficially sanctioned source inside the department. They have a lot of hard information disguised as tabloidese. In sidebar one, that’s the angel argument, if one can dignify such sloppy prose with that label, we’re told that all the tapes have been wiped clean, as though by a powerful magnetic source ‘not unlike that which could be produced by the healing auras said to emanate from saints.’ There is said to be no sign of a struggle, and no blood visible to the naked eye except on the victim and his immediate surroundings. It contradicts the crime scene photo, of course, but no doubt they’re assuming their readers have the average IQ of a second grader. But that’s a very specific qualification, ‘visible to the naked eye.’ The kind of phrasing used by a careful police press liaison.”

Or a prosecuting attorney.

“The second sidebar is equally informative. No fingerprints, they say, or, rather, four or five different sets, but none bloodstained.”

I’d worn gloves every time.

“No sign of forced entry. Evidence of information theft: the photocopier was on, and when the police arrived, the laptop—which is supposed to switch to sleep mode after sixty minutes’ nonuse—was fully powered.” I’d missed that. “Evidence, too, of prior surveillance of the victim—a café waitress and a gallery owner apparently remember someone who could fit the description. There is some speculation—”

“When was the suspect seen in the café?”

“The day of the assault, apparently. The morning. Ah, now this is interesting, fuel for the angel argument, perhaps—no earthly sustenance, and so on. According to the witness, she drank only water.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. Not the café where I had left the book, then, the book with the shiny cover that would hold fingerprints so well. “You were saying something about speculation.”

“Indeed. Professionals, they think: the surveillance, the wiped tapes, no fingerprints, and the laptop. ‘Sensitive documents,’ they say darkly. In other words, industrial espionage.”

Industrial espionage. That wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other to the official NYPD investigation. It might involve some of Karp’s corporate clients who would be anxious to discover whether confidential information about their retail operations had been leaked to the big wide world. A corporate security team would have more money and more time.

The toilet flushed. I didn’t really want to talk about this in front of Tammy.

“I don’t see what the Post’s interest is in all this.” There were literally dozens of more sensational stories in New York every week.

“Do you remember the original witness, the woman who was with the victim?”

“I remember that there was one.” And the shine and swing of her hair.

“Her name rang a bell, so I ran a search.”

I waited grimly. There was no point trying to hurry Eddie when he was in this kind of mood.

“She’s the daughter of the GOP’s next senatorial candidate for the state of New York.”

He paused, so I obliged. “And what’s the Post’s editorial stance?”

“Oh, very good. As yet uncommitted.”

“I see.”

“Precisely. One suspects the entire story—espionage flimflam, avenging angels, juicy hints of sexual perversion and all—is being built to keep reader interest alive, without annoying either the Democrats or Republicans, until the Post’s publisher makes up his mind which way to jump—that is, until he can work out which party could do him more favors on the Hill. Was she consorting with an evil abuser, and therefore probably a pervert herself, in which case what does that say about her father? Or was she an innocent involved with a sweet man who—”

Politics. Nothing to do with me.

“—all vastly entertaining.”

Unless, of course, the police had evidence they weren’t talking about: if they had found the book, or Karp had woken up. “Any information on a change in Karp’s—the victim’s—condition?”

“I don’t—Ah, here we go. He is now in a persistent vegetative state, which they helpfully translate for the reader as ‘a permanent vegetable.’ The patient’s doctors won’t comment on his condition in any detail, but ‘a consultant hired by the paper’ to review information already in the public domain says he would be surprised if the man lived another week, even with all the artificial assistance, which in his view is a needless waste of… yadda yadda yadda… oh, and he seems to think that as soon as the hospital finds a relative they’ll see if they can get permission to switch him off. He won’t survive that, the expert says, and even if he does, and I quote—where do they come up with these people?—he’d have the mental capacity of a Twinkie.”

Another metal bed in another white room.

We drove to Asheville the next morning, Tammy chattering, me answering in monosyllables.

I bought bedding, and a bed, plus armoire and dresser, and a couch, and mirror, shelving, a garbage can, and half a hundred other items.

“You don’t have to do this just for me,” she said, not meaning a word of it, but they were all things I’d need to get at some point.

On the way back we stopped at a car rental place, where I suggested something with four-wheel drive, enough horsepower to carry her up and down the mountain roads, and the weight to keep her safe if the snow came early.

“Why, how long do you think you’ll be gone?”

“I don’t know. A week or two. It’s hard to say.” Hard to say because apart from the fact that I would drive to Arkansas and learn how the girl was being treated, I had no idea what I was going to do. Tammy said nothing but she got that pinched look that meant she was afraid.

“You know people here now,” I reminded her. “Now, how about a Subaru wagon?”

The bed and chest went up into the loft easily enough, but the armoire took some maneuvering up the narrow stairs. Tammy grunted in satisfaction when we lifted it into place. “I’ve never been so strong.” She flexed her right biceps, then looked around. “Needs a rug.”

We stayed up late that night, Coleman lamps burning, while Tammy hammered up shelves and I hooked up the toilet and stove. By the time I carried in a bucket of water and flushed the toilet successfully, Tammy was wiping down the shelves and arranging food and crockery to her satisfaction. The bears would be hibernating about now and wouldn’t cause any trouble.

Dinner was canned split pea soup heated on the stove, and crookedly cut bread. Tammy had a way to go before becoming a domestic goddess. We opened the stove door and pulled the couch up to dine in comfort. We ate silently until Tammy was wiping the inside of her bowl with a hunk of bread. She wouldn’t have been caught dead doing that six months ago. A new Tammy, the tentative beginnings of a new life. But there were still a few threads from the old that needed to be dealt with.

“You’ll have to call Dornan sooner or later,” I said. “You should have called him days ago.”

“I know.”

“What will you tell him?”

“What will you tell him?”

“That I found you in SoHo and brought you back. Anything else is up to you.”

She nodded, and we watched the tiny, captive flames.

It’s a thousand-mile drive from Asheville to the Arkansas River Valley; I would have liked an early start, but I slept like the dead in the prewinter quiet and woke late, and then it took three hours to make the trailer ready for a long drive. And when all that was done, I found myself still unwilling to leave.

“If you decide to go,” I said to Tammy over one last cup of coffee in the cabin, “make sure the place is clean, and leave a note so I know where you’ve gone, and when.” I didn’t want to be worrying that she had got herself into trouble again.

“Or I could just call,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed, but I knew she wouldn’t. Notes left to be discovered were easier. She shivered. “And don’t stint yourself on firewood. There’s plenty. And if you need anything else, I’ve left some money—”

“In the top drawer of the dresser. I know.”

Then there was nothing to do but wash the coffee mugs and climb into the truck. As before, Tammy directed me out so I didn’t end up in the ditch. The truck pointed down the track, the trailer was straight behind me, Tammy waved. I waved back, then leaned out of the window.

“Call him, Tammy.” She nodded noncommittally. I wound the window up and put the truck in gear.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I headed west on I-40 at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, through the rounded hills of Tennessee, and the town names tolled in my head—Knoxville, Crossville, Cookeville. Before I got to the country-western smugness of Nashville I began to wonder if -ville was a not-so-secret indicator of poverty and a particular lack of taste, or at least zoning control, as evidenced by billboards crowded up against the interstate like long-legged cockroaches swarming a line of molasses.

“Ah, Tennessee, it never changes,” Julia said from the passenger seat. She looked around, shook her head, faced me. “So, what’s the plan?”

I squeezed the steering wheel. “Just like that, what’s the plan?”

She tilted her head. “You sound angry.”

“Yes.” And I was, and it frightened me, because I was angry with her. “You left me. And when you come back, instead of helping me, you say I’m a borderline, not a real person inside.”

“I didn’t call you a borderline—”

“ ‘Who does he remind you of?’ you said.”

“—I asked you to ask yourself, honestly, how you used to see yourself, before you met me.”

“Before you came along and worked your magic and turned me into a real human being?” It came out sounding half angry, half desperate.

“You know better than that.”

“I don’t know what I know anymore. I’m so… Everything’s changed.”

“You’ve changed. That’s what I wanted you to realize the other night.”

“What if I want to change back?”

Her smile was sad. “Doesn’t work that way.”

She reached out as if to touch me, and for a second I thought I felt her fingers on my cheek, then realized I was crying. “It’s so hard, without you.” Help me, I wanted to say, stop this terrible ache.

“Road,” she said, and nodded at the CAUTION signs and the grooved road where the surface had been ripped off to prepare for a new layer of asphalt. Tires roared over the striations. I had to concentrate to keep the trailer in its lane.

“Why did you bring that thing, anyway?” she said.

“Cheaper than motels.”

“Since when have you worried about money?”

I just shook my head. The roadworks ended and we were now on velvety new blacktop. The wheel noise faded to a smooth hum.

“So,” she said. “Tell me what the plan is when you get to Arkansas.”

“I won’t know. Not until I see how they—the Carpenters—are treating her.” I made an effort. “As far as I know, she’s not on anyone’s radar. No one is looking for her, no one even knows she exists, except the Carpenters and whoever placed her with them. If I decide to take her out of there, no one will complain.”

“So what will you do with her, if you take her?”

I hadn’t the faintest idea.

“Would you keep her?”

“What for, target practice?” Silence. “No, I wouldn’t keep her. Not even if she was a normal, well-adjusted child—and what she’s been through has probably left her essentially broken. Broken people, as we both know, don’t mend.”

She studied me for a moment. “Pull over. There’s a rest stop ahead.”

When the engine was quiet I rolled down the window; it was cold. A hardy chickadee sang from the pines alongside the rest stop. The place smelled of freshly sawn wood. She swiveled to face me.

“Self-pity doesn’t suit you.”

“No?”

“You are not broken.”

“Normal people don’t hurt others in elevat—”

“Let me finish. You’re not broken, you’re grieving. You’re grieving because you can feel. No, your mother didn’t love you, and yes, you pretended you didn’t care, but pretending doesn’t make it true.”

“Then—”

“Don’t be dense. You were protecting yourself. You wrapped yourself in armor and pretended to be invulnerable. Growing up inside that armor twisted you a bit out of true, but it doesn’t matter. The essentials are all there.”

She searched my face.

“The armor’s getting too small, Aud. You have to choose.”

Tennessee had not exactly oozed wealth, but when I pulled off the interstate west of the river for something to eat, eastern Arkansas under the winter-pale late afternoon sun—the gas stations, the shacks with TV antennae, other vehicles on the road, even the dirt—sighed tiredly with poverty, worn and faded as though it had been through too many summers without shade, too many growing seasons without replenishment, too great a workload with no relief. Perhaps it was my mood, but I felt heavier just driving through it.

Once I was back on the interstate, the road became bland and boring. Towns like truckstops punctuated some fallow farmland and a few plowed fields. A hundred miles west of Memphis, the towns gave way to the river valley. I left I-40 twenty-five miles past Little Rock and wound west through backcountry roads, where settlement grew a little less dense and the countryside hillier, shrouded here and there with clumps of pine. For a seven-year-old fresh from the color and noise of Mexico City, it must have looked bleak.

But seven-year-olds are plastic, almost endlessly adaptable. Perhaps Luz no longer remembered much about Mexico; perhaps she no longer spoke Spanish; perhaps she was dull and content to follow her fate. Perhaps I should have stayed in North Carolina instead of driving out here in what was probably a hopeless cause.

The yellow lines slipping beneath my wheels dimmed to lemon, then dust, then disappeared altogether. The wheels hissed on loose gravel, and something in the trailer began to rattle rhythmically. Should have run, should have run, should have run. After an hour the pine and white oak grew thick and I was in the corner of a state park. I turned onto the first track I saw, and bumped along at twenty miles an hour until it grew dark enough to need headlights. Then I pulled over and turned the engine off.

The forest was still and quiet and smelled of pine needles. My breath sounded soft and even. I had the overwhelming urge to put my head on my arms and sleep. It wouldn’t solve anything but it would make the questions go away for a while.

Who had the right to choose for a nine-year-old girl? Her parents? There had been no mention of a father, and her mother had already lost her, in all probability had given her away, exchanged her for money—even assuming she was still alive. Her adoptive father? He had forfeited any rights he might have had. Her foster parents? They were doing it for money. The state? They could offer nothing but deportation or a children’s home, and I had seen jails and psychiatric units and emergency rooms full of the product of the latter. And the girl herself? I had no idea.

I had to go see for myself. And if I saw she was being mistreated, I would not be able to simply turn around and leave and pretend none of this had ever happened. I would always wonder what I could have done, and inevitably I’d imagine Karp on his hospital bed and remember all those things I didn’t want to ever have to think about again.

Luz existed, a responsibility I didn’t want, resulting directly from my own actions. Perhaps my mother had felt the same way. I imagined a little brown-haired girl skipping along the pavement, holding the hands of her parents: me on one side, Geordie Karp on the other.

On the way to the Carpenters’ address, I passed two other vehicles, both full-size pickups. Both drivers stared for a moment, then raised an index finger from the steering wheel in acknowledgment. Big rigs were probably common in this part of the world. I could have been coming from anywhere, heading for anywhere else; I wasn’t worried. The road, graded and graveled by the county, wound through low hills. I saw no more vehicles. The turnoff to the Carpenter place was nothing but a dirt road, marked by a wooden board—their name and an arrow—that looked freshly repainted. I drove past and up a rise, and pulled into a stand of trees.

Some of the Carpenters’ fields lay bare, but judging from the neat rows of stubble, they were hayfields, bales long since sold. Clover and redtop stippled the field nearest the house, which looked tidy and cared for. It was painted light tan, probably three or four bedrooms, the kind of thing families had begun in the twenties and added to when time and money allowed.

From around the side three people—one large and two small, carrying bundles—came into view and climbed into the cab of a pale blue pickup. A Ford. I lifted a pair of field glasses and watched them jounce down the dirt track towards the county road. One adult and two children, all on the bench seat in the front. The early morning sun slanting in from the east and south turned their windscreen to fire, making it hard to be sure, but as they came over the slight rise I thought the one in the middle might be Luz. Yes. She was smiling while the boy on her right, whose face was lower down than hers, talked a mile a minute. It was a good smile.

I couldn’t get in the house because Adeline Carpenter was still there, and you can’t tail a vehicle when you’re towing several tons of fifth-wheel, but tomorrow was Sunday.

The next morning I left the trailer at a campsite and drove back to the Carpenters’, where I parked my truck off the road, just below the rise, invisible from the house. I put what I needed in a pack and climbed the hill. It was a mild day for November, in the high fifties. I unrolled my camping mat, poured tea from the thermos, and opened a Sara Wheeler book about Antarctica. Read, relax, and wait. Everything was planned, every eventuality taken into consideration; I had nothing to worry about. After a while I closed the book and watched the sky.

The sound of a truck engine blew like dust into my daydream of mariachi bands and black-haired, snapping-eyed Mexican girls parading their finery in the town square. I rolled onto my stomach. The field glasses showed four people on the bench seat of the Carpenters’ pickup. Five minutes after they drove by, I was pulling up on the bare dirt in front of their house. Up close, I saw that although the siding wasn’t exactly peeling, it wouldn’t hurt to retouch the paint, at least on the southern side. Pink chrysanthemums brightened the doorstep in tubs to either side. I put on my new gloves; they smelled of leather.

No dogs. I called out, waited. Nothing. The first farm I’d ever been to without animals. The lock took less than a minute. I took my pack inside.

The hallway was wide and warm. An embroidery sampler hung behind glass on the wall opposite the stairs. Do unto others… The colors on the lower left had faded, as though it had once hung in strong sunlight. There was no scriptural attribution—something I would have expected in a fundamentalist household—and the unfinished phrase seemed sinister. The kitchen was in the back. Watery winter sunlight glittered on the still-wet white enamel sink; the last time I’d seen one of those had been more than twenty years ago, in a poor town in Yorkshire. Beef and vegetable stew with dumplings simmered in a crock pot next to the stove. A bright red coffee mug stood half full on a large sixties dining table that was topped with yellow-and-blue Formica. It was the kind of kitchen where a lot of family conversations happen. I stuck the first receiver to the underside of the table.

Upstairs, there were four bedrooms, one large and one small on each side of the hallway. In the large one on the front side of the house, a sewing table and Singer were pushed up against the wall under the window. Someone was making a pair of child-sized pajamas from blue-and-white-checked flannel. A long, plain table with two wooden chairs faced another, smaller table and single chair. Home schooling. A map of the world, still depicting the USSR and Ceylon, hung behind the teacher’s chair, and the rest of the walls were covered in bright children’s pictures. Some were huge, incomprehensible splashes of orange and brown and yellow, but many were careful pencil drawings—a house with a picket fence, a church, a lopsided rose, a cat, a cow—and still others neat, geometric patterns drawn in felt-tip pen, painstakingly colored between the lines. Which were done by which child? There was one painting in the same careful style as the pencil drawings: a river with bright birds in stiff-looking trees and hills with tiny buildings in the background. One of the buildings had the arched windows and big doors, the sloping roof of a Catholic church. So. A bookcase contained several versions of the Bible, and a variety of children’s Christian books. The Young Lady’s Guide to House and Home. What God Hath Wrought, which seemed to be an earnest explanation of the Creation. There were also reading primers, and several fiction books with Plaume City Library stamps, such as volumes two and three of the Narnia series. C. S. Lewis seemed a bit exotic for a Church of Christ household. On a high shelf, out of a child’s reach, sat a set of Collier’s encyclopediae. I checked the copyright date: 1961. The first volume seemed to be missing. A small cupboard next to the sewing machine was locked.

Down the hall, with a view of fields, I was greeted in the smaller room by a wallful of cheerful young-boy motifs: cartoon steam trains and cowboys and Indians. The bedside lamp could not be reached from the bed, and a small wire cage made it impossible to tug the plug from the socket. Not the usual precautions for a seven- or eight-year-old. The armchair next to the single bed looked old and well used. The drawers did not spill clothes; no toys or gadgets cluttered the floor; no stacked music system or computer sat on shelves against the wall. Poverty, or perhaps just an empty mind. Next door, the parents’ room held a double bed with a mattress that should have been replaced years ago, and an unremarkable, cheap dresser. Like the boy’s room, it was clean and neat, with one of every necessity, but everything was worn, or old-fashioned, and the only luxury was a silver-backed dresser set of hairbrush, comb, and mirror, whose perfect centering before the mirror made them treasured possessions. The design was something from the seventies, perhaps a wedding present. The rag rug was relatively new: handmade. I imagined Adeline Carpenter sitting in front of the mirror, brushing out her hair before bed, talking, and I put the second receiver under the lip of the dresser.

Luz had a tiny room, with a narrow bed that faced the window with its view of scrubby Arkansas countryside and minor road. No chair here for a mother sitting in the dark, watching over her child. On the bedside table sat the fourth Narnia book. The lamp next to them worked. The long nightdress folded neatly on the pillow was made of the same blue-and-white check I’d seen in the schoolroom. The foster daughter may have got the worst room, but she had the first nightclothes. Interesting. I put the third receiver behind the headboard; maybe Luz sometimes talked to herself.

I found the missing encyclopedia under the mattress. A scrap of paper divided atlatl (an implement used for hurling spear or lance) from atmosphere (the gaseous envelope surrounding the earth). I thought of all the households in this country that would rejoice at a child’s ferocious need to learn, of the fact that this book had been hidden away, and wanted to push Adeline Carpenter’s face into the stew to boil along with her dumplings.

The booster transceiver went in the pot of chrysanthemums by the front door. On the way back to the trailer, I threw the barbiturate-saturated hamburger into a convenience store Dumpster.

According to the Arkansas Church of Christ’s website, Sunday services in Plaume City ran from ten-thirty to one. It seemed like a long time to expect children to sit still, but it gave me the opportunity to change and drive the twelve miles to the church well before the end of services. Small communities tend to be suspicious of outsiders, and while my conservative clothes might escape casual attention while I was on church property, a woman on her own driving such a truck would not. Once everything was in place, it wouldn’t matter; until then, I couldn’t be too careful. I parked half a mile down the deserted road and walked the rest of the way with my oversize gas can and plastic tubing. If I saw anyone, they might assume I’d run out of gas and was walking to the nearest service station.

I have lived more than a third of my life in this country, but still, to me, the word “church” conjures images of tenth-century Norwegian stave churches, taller than they are long, or the Gothic cathedrals of England and France with their soaring stone buttresses and tall, slitted windows, and naves echoing with history. The red-brick, one-story Plaume City Church of Christ stood by the side of a road running from nowhere to nowhere, and, with its square windows and orderly parking lot, looked more like a library or care facility for the elderly than a church.

The parking lot was half full: as many midsize American sedans as pickups. I found the Carpenters’ pale blue Ford and left the gas can and tubing in its cargo bed.

The congregation was singing a cappella, but they stopped just before I reached the entrance. The main doors stood wide, so did the inner doors, probably because of the overefficient heating system: even in the vestibule it was too hot. It looked like a full house, eighty or ninety people in their Sunday best, nodding every now and again, with the occasional “Amen!” or “Yes, Lord!” when the preacher hammered on his lectern for emphasis.

He was on a roll, voice following the rise-and-fall, call-and-response cadence first brought to this country by Africans torn from their homeland and now used by fundamentalists of all colors. It wasn’t easy to follow, but after a while, amid the litany of biblical references, I found that he was preaching a modern version of the Good Samaritan, only in his version it seemed that the Good Lord saw nothing wrong in the Samaritan getting paid for his kindness. “Now when the Lord says ‘Do unto others as you would be done by,’ He’s not sayin’ you should give away your pension, He’s not sayin’ take that money you saved to help out your son’s new wife who is in the family way and hand it over to some homeless person, no, He’s sayin’ play nicely with the other folks. You have to use your judgment, your God-given wisdom. Maybe that man is homeless for a reason, maybe it’s a punishment from God. Maybe he has some lessons to learn. And charity begins at home, with your own flesh and blood.”

I looked at the congregation, the nodding heads with their careful parts and poverty-dulled hair, and doubted more than five percent had the kind of job that came with a pension. It seemed more likely that the preacher was trying to convince himself; maybe when he counted up the takings every Sunday his conscience bothered him.

But I’d seen all I needed to see. If they were only as far along as the sermon, they would be there at least another thirty minutes. I only needed ten.

The Carpenters’ pickup was fifteen years old, made long before Detroit started building in all the electronic antitheft details that make modern vehicles a challenge to break into. It took less than ten seconds to pop the door, then the gas tank, and another five to feed in the thin hose. I always forgot how long it takes to suck, suck, suck on the tube and get the gas moving. At least with the clear plastic you could see the gas when it welled up; if you were quick and skilled, you didn’t get that stinging mouthful. While the can filled, I looked through the pickup’s cab and the toolbox in the bed: all my preparation would come to nothing if Jud had a can full of gas stowed away.

I’d brought a seven-gallon container but the gas kept coming. It crept past the three-quarters mark. I didn’t want to leave any in the tank, but I couldn’t just let it spill on the asphalt because the Carpenters would smell it, and the first thing they’d do was check the fuel gauge. I had begun to wonder if I’d have to break into the tan Chrysler next to the pickup and siphon the remaining gas into that tank when the flow stopped with an inch or two to spare. I moved the tube around a bit in the tank, just in case it sloped, and sucked again, but it was more or less dry. The old Fords were gas-guzzlers. The Carpenters wouldn’t get more than three or four miles before the engine gave out.

The full can probably weighed about forty pounds. I lugged it around the back of the church and hid it and the tubing by the Dumpster, where it was sure to be found in a day or so. By the time I was done, my knee had begun to ache.

I touched my throat through its concealing scarf. This was not New York. Everything would go smoothly, according to plan.

The blue pickup made it further than I’d expected before it sputtered and jerked and died: nearly five miles. A minor detail. I watched through the field glasses as Jud unscrewed the cap to the gas tank and peered in. Then he walked the two hundred yards they’d just covered, and back again, looking at the road. Then he got down on his hands and knees and peered up at the undercarriage. He did that for a long time. By the time he had the hood up, I was pulling in beside them and rolling down my window.

“Afternoon,” I said.

His face looked like a piece of old hardwood left too long in the sun, his eyes pools of baked tar. His suit was at least ten years old, and made for a wider man.

“Looks like you might be having a problem. Anything I can help with?”

Perhaps he found it hard to talk up to a woman in a big truck.

“Gas,” he said, eventually.

I climbed down, careful to let my legs bend a little to minimize my height. I nodded at Adeline and the two children, who peered at me from the truck. Luz, in a dark green dress that didn’t suit her, watched me steadily, but the boy’s eyes wandered after a moment. “Lonely out here. Not the best place to get stranded with your family.”

Adeline stuck her head out of the window. “He filled the tank just yesterday,” she said.

“I could run you or your wife to the nearest gas station, if that would help.” Jud looked at me with his dark, sticky eyes. “Or if you live nearby I could drive you home. If that would be easier.” If I read him right, he didn’t want his wife to be alone with a stranger, or to leave his family stranded in the middle of nowhere. But he didn’t say anything. Us standing in the middle of the road staring at each other was not part of the plan.

Adeline got out. “Luz, stay in the truck with Button.” She stepped between me and her husband. Like her husband’s, her clothes were old-fashioned, a matching dress and shoes in aquamarine: bought years ago, rarely worn, and looked after with care. Her bright red lipstick couldn’t hide the fatigue in her smile. “We live six, seven miles north and west of here, off of Route 10. We would be sorely grateful if you would give us all a ride back.”

“I’d be more than happy.”

She smiled again briefly. “Luz, bring my purse. Button, come on out. Into the nice lady’s truck. No, in the back, scoot up, leave room for me. Your daddy will sit in the front.”

Jud, moving very deliberately, dropped the hood, retrieved the ignition key, shut but didn’t lock the pickup doors, and got in next to me. I started the truck.

“Mile down the road,” he said. “Then take a right.” He laid both hands palm down on his thighs and stared steadily ahead, like the seated pharaonic statues at Luxor. His hands were tan on the back, with the flat tendons and knobbed joints of hard physical labor, and there was a trace of oil under two of his fingernails. When I glanced down again, he had put them in his lap, right hand uppermost; the knuckle on the third finger was crushed, long ago by the looks of it—the kind of thing that happens if you punch someone in the head, or hit a wall with your bare fist.

I drove. Two minutes later Jud said, “Here,” and we made the turn. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Nor, it seemed, could anyone else. The next ten minutes passed in silence, until I pulled up in front of their house. I turned the engine off.

“Obliged,” Jud said, and got out, and went into the house without another word.

Adeline paused, half out of her door. “It’s just his way,” she said, apologetic. “I hope you’ll still be willing to give him a ride to a gas station.”

“I’d be happy to.”

She hesitated, and I thought she was about to introduce herself, but then she said, “He might be a minute or two. Would the wait be too much trouble? You’ve been so kind.”

“It’s a nice enough day and I can’t say I’m in a hurry.” And the Good Samaritan will demand payment.

She got out and the children scrambled after her. “You go change your clothes and play in back,” she told them, and went into the house. But the boy seemed unable to tear himself away from the truck. He patted the paintwork, then squatted down to look at something. Luz hung back, not wanting to get too close to me, unwilling to leave Button alone.

I got out and stretched. The boy was unscrewing the dust caps from my tires.

“I’m Button,” he said in a shiny voice, looking up at me. “What are these for?”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Button.” His teeth looked huge, adult teeth in a child-sized mouth. Just like any seven-year-old. “They’re to stop dust from getting in the air valve and clogging it up. I’ll need them back.” But he wasn’t listening; his eyes were wandering again, gaze alighting on this, flitting to that. “Button—”

“That’s not his real name.” I turned to the girl with the quiet, precise voice. “His real name is Burton, only he can’t say it right, so now we call him Button. He’s eight. Nearly nine,” she said carefully, waiting to see how I’d react: a nine-year-old should be able to say Burton.

“I’m surprised,” I said. She turned her head slightly, to examine me out of each eye, as though each saw a different world but only one could be trusted. Her straight, shoulder-length hair was a dense, matte chocolate brown, and would have looked better without the amateur cut. Delicate bones contrasted with the stance; she stood the way a Theban might at Thermopylae. Nine years old. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance also,” I told her, “though I don’t know your name.”

“I’m Luz. It’s Spanish. It’s not short for Lucy.”

“My name is Aud, rhymes with loud. It’s Norwegian. It’s not short for Audrey.”

“Aud,” she said, trying it out. I blinked at the perfect Norwegian pronunciation. “Aud.”

“You say it very well.”

She accepted the praise as her due, and opened her mouth to say something, but shut it when the front door opened.

Adeline had wiped away her lipstick and swapped her pumps for tennis shoes. An apron covered the dress. Judging by her hair—blond going gray, and pulled back in a short but thick tail—and the smile lines around mouth and eyes, other lines in neck and forehead, she was in her early fifties. Her eyes were not strange, but she was recognizably Button’s mother. Or grandmother. “Button, in the house.” Button wasn’t listening. “Luz, take Button in and get yourselves changed.”

“Yes, Aba.”

We both watched them go inside. “Now,” she said, turning to me. I got the impression she had spent some time thinking about what to say. “My husband is getting out of his Sunday clothes and will be back down directly. It’s his way to be a bit wary of strangers, but he would be most obliged for a ride to a gas station. I can’t tell you how thankful we are for your kindness. The name’s Carpenter. Adeline and Jud.” She held out her hand. Plain, thin wedding ring; straight-edged nails with no polish. Hardworking hands, but not overworked.

“Aud,” I said, giving it a deliberate American pronunciation: sounds like god. I took off my gloves. “Aud Thomas.” We shook hands. I put the gloves in my pocket.

“Now, Aud Thomas, although men make fun of us women and the time it takes to change, I think my husband might be a minute or two.” She patted the pocket of her apron nervously. “Is there something I can bring out for you meanwhile?”

Being parked on the doorstep was not what I had planned.

“If I’m to wait a minute or two, I’d like to borrow the use of your facilities if I may.”

Natural suspicion warred with Christian charity. She patted her pocket again. A weapon? It would have to be a small one. I shivered a little. That and the morning’s sermon turned the tide. She stood to one side and motioned me across the threshold. “Upstairs, first on your right.” Then, in a rush of overcompensation, “When you’re done I’m in the kitchen. In back.”

The bathroom was what I think of as southern feminine: clean, decorated in pastels, and with a shower curtain depicting sunrise over a perfect valley, complete with Bambi look-alike and rabbits. I used the toilet, washed my hands, and ran my fingers through my hair. What did someone like Adeline Carpenter see when she looked at me? No way to know, just as I didn’t know why I had used my real name with Luz.

I turned away, then back again, and opened the bathroom cabinet. On the top shelf lay the explanation for the lack of pets: asthma medication. Pills, and two kinds of inhaler. Adeline’s.

I used a towel to wipe down everything I’d touched.

“Poured you some coffee,” Adeline said as I went into the kitchen. The same red mug, steaming now, stood at one end of the Formica table. At the other end, Luz and Button, now in identical worn corduroy pants, ate from already half-empty bowls of beef and vegetable stew. Adeline patted at her apron, utterly unconscious of the gesture. Asthma medication.

I sipped. “Tastes good.” Luz looked up and studied me for a moment, then turned her attention back to her lunch.

“That’s a big truck you’ve got there,” Adeline Carpenter said.

“Only thing big enough to pull my trailer, a fifth-wheel. I’d planned to vacation up around Petit Jean, or maybe Lake Maumelle.”

“Awful late for a vacation.” Suspicion seemed to be winning again.

I touched my throat, just enough to show the healing gash, and then my waistband, which hung more loosely than it had. “I’ve… I spent some time this summer in the hospital.” Poor pitiful Aud Thomas, probably has the cancer, yet she still takes time to play Good Samaritan to those in need.

The children finished their stew. Button wiggled in his chair, but Luz, although she looked down at a chip in the Formica as though it fascinated her, was listening to our conversation.

“Luz, take Button out back.”

“Yes, Aba.”

Aba. Some weird fundamentalist title? “Great kids,” I said.

“Jud and I had Button late in life. He’s… he’s not quite right, but he’s a blessing from the Lord.”

“His sister, too.”

Adeline Carpenter smiled. “She’s as good as gold with that boy.” She sounded proud, as if she really cared. If I hadn’t known how she was being paid to train this girl, I might have believed her. Her smile disappeared suddenly as she remembered she was talking to a stranger. She drummed her fingers on the table, blushed when she caught me watching. Maybe that was something good Christian ladies weren’t supposed to do. “Well, Miz Thomas, I don’t know what’s keeping my husband, but if you want to take your coffee outside and sit in the sun, I’ll go see if I can find him.”

I left by the front door, but walked around to the back. It must have been nearly sixty degrees outside, and the sunshine was a little bolder. The cabin in the clearing would be lit by sun, too, but probably fifteen or twenty degrees cooler. Be present. Pay attention. I breathed deeply, exhaled, breathed in: Arkansas soil; the thin, crumbly smell of mold formed on hay stalks that have been sodden but are now dry; and, faint in the still air, the pine scent of the woods. Luz and Button were nowhere in sight.

The barn was big and old and the right-hand side was cluttered with farm machinery: half modern, half the broken, rusting remains of seventy years of automated progress. Sunlight streamed in through the open door and through chinks in the eaves. A child’s steady voice, and another, interrupting, came from behind a truck of forties vintage. I moved closer. The truck had no wheels, and was filthy with rust and dirt and rodent droppings, but its headlights were intact, round and clean and shining. Luz spoke in Spanish.

“—y por eso la Virgen María fue una reina que vivía en una catedral. Ella fue la reina de cielo, y ella fue linda, con una vestimenta azul junto con diamantes en el dobladillo—”

And so the Virgin Mary was a queen who lived in a cathedral. She was the queen of heaven, and she was pretty, with a blue dress that had diamonds on the hem.

I moved quietly until I could see Button sitting with legs splayed before him, playing with something on the floor. The words meant nothing to him; perhaps he found the rhythm soothing. Luz’s eyes seemed far away, but every now and again she glanced at the boy to make sure he was close by.

“It’s a horse!” Button said, holding up what looked like an ancient threaded bolt.

“Yes,” Luz said in English, and patted him on the head. He went back to playing. She resumed her tale. “Y la virgen reina escucha en caso que rezas. Y cuando mueras vas a su palacio en cielo, que tiene tantos colores lindas y lo huele a… a flores. Y cirios se quemarsen en grutes, y huelen bien también.”

And the virgin queen listens if you pray. And when you die you go to her palace in heaven, which is such pretty colors, and smells like flowers. And there are candles in grottoes, and they smell good too.

It was a six- or seven-year-old’s vocabulary, apart from grotto. Her native tongue. I couldn’t understand how she had retained so much. Adeline Carpenter would not approve of the Virgin Mary being called the queen of heaven, nor of any talk of cathedrals and incense and diamonds.

“El palacio es—Button, put that down.” She sounded so much older speaking English. Button had found something on the floor he liked. He stood up and carried it into the closest column of sunlight. It glittered. “That’s very pretty. Let me see.” She held out her hand. He handed it over reluctantly. A piece of old bottle glass. She sighed, just like Adeline. “Glass, Button. Glass. What did Aba tell you about glass? It might hurt you. If you see it on the floor, don’t pick it up.”

“Glass,” he muttered, unconvinced, but then something else caught his eye, and Luz sighed again.

“Fue un relato agradable,” I said—it was a nice story—and her head whipped round. “You don’t need to be afraid.”

“I don’t understand you,” she said in English.

“Yes you do,” I said, still in Spanish. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise. Not even Aba.”

She opened her mouth, then thought better of it and shut it again. Her eyes narrowed. I’d seen that look on a hundred suspects’ faces: I would get nothing from her.

She was still studying me. “You talk different when no one else is around.”

Careless again. The child was smart; pointless trying to lie to her now. “So do you.”

“Why?”

“Why do you?”

I watched her work out that we both had things to hide. She decided she wanted to keep it that way. “Button!” she called. “How about we go indoors for some milk?”

“Milk?”

“Milk,” she said firmly, with a look at me. I was briefly tempted to wring her neck.

“But I want to stay out here!” His face began to crumple. “Want to stay here!”

The next step would be a full-blown tantrum. I knew when I was beaten; there were other ways to get the information.

Jud and Adeline found me sitting on the front step. I stood, drained the last of the coffee, and handed the mug to Adeline. It would be washed and free of fingerprints in minutes. “Perfect timing,” I said. I put my gloves back on.

“Thank you again,” she said. “The gas station’s just two miles north on 10, then it’ll be a four-, five-mile drive back to the truck.”

Jud said nothing at all.

“Shall we?” I gestured at the truck. He nodded.

He sat as before, though this time his hands rested on dark blue denim, and his shoes were sturdy work boots. Perhaps it was my imagination but he seemed a little less stiff.

At the gas station, the attendant seemed to know who Jud was and filled a cheap plastic gas can without comment. I went in and bought myself coffee in a go cup. Jud settled his bill in cash. He counted his change so carefully that I felt guilty about the ten dollars’ worth of gas I’d siphoned off earlier. I shook my head as we walked separately back to the truck. These people were profiting from the abuse of a young child. I wasn’t here to feel sorry for them.

We drove to the stranded pickup without exchanging a word. He climbed out, then leaned forward to speak through the open window. “Wife tells me you’ve been sick.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be in our prayers.” And he nodded once again, and walked away.

I parked in what was by now the familiar off-road spot behind the rise and took my mat, field glasses, receiver, and go cup to the top of the hill. No movement outside. I extended the receiver’s aerial, plugged in the headphones, and put them on. I had to take my gloves off for fine-tuning the receiver, but then I had it: running water, dishes banging, a drawer opening and shutting. From only three or four hundred yards, there was little distortion. I made a slow sweep with the field glasses. Inside the house a door opened, then closed. Then nothing.

I sipped at the coffee. All I had achieved with my visit so far was the discovery that the situation was complicated. I wondered what Tammy was doing, whether she had called Dornan yet, and what would happen then: to her, to Dornan. To me.

Adeline started to hum. It wasn’t a hymn but an old show tune. Fringed buckskin, white teeth, blond hair… and then I had it: Doris Day in Calamity Jane, singing about the windy city. When her husband wasn’t around, did Adeline dream of being transformed by a big-city suitor?

After a while I heard Jud’s pickup. I wondered what had taken him so long. Maybe he’d been giving thanks for the gas. He drove round the back of the house. Two minutes later, the back door slammed.

“Sit,” came Adeline’s voice, loud and tinny from the receiver. “We’ll eat.”

Scraping of a chair, chink of cutlery on crockery. Scrape of another chair. Moment’s silence. Then, “Dear Lord, we’re thankful for this food. Amen.” Jud’s voice. “Amen,” Adeline’s voice. Food sounds: lighter tink of spoons on bowls.

Adeline’s voice: “Truck all right?”

Pause, while I imagined Jud nodding. “Drove her to the gas station, had John put her up on the blocks. No leak as I could see.” Eating noises. Pause. “Gas come to near nineteen dollars.” Audible sigh: Adeline. “Children fine?” Jud asked.

“Out back. Right as rain.” Which was more than Adeline sounded. “Jud?” Eating noises. “Jud, why haven’t we heard?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“We should have heard by now. How can we manage without that money?”

“We’ll hear soon enough.” Definite tones in his voice of I-don’t-want-to-think-about-it-right-now.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have written to Miz Goulay, maybe it’ll make him mad. But that check should’ve come a week ago, more. He’s never missed before. We need that money.”

Chair scraping. “Tractor needs work,” Jud said. The door closed behind him. Adeline sighed and started collecting the dishes, then stopped, and it took me a moment to identify the strange sounds: she was crying.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I had finished the coffee and refilled the cup with lukewarm tea from my flask when I saw movement in my peripheral vision: a car moving down the road to the Carpenters’ house. I put down the cup and focused the field glasses. My adrenal system switched from standby to power mode. A dark gray Maxima, a man driving and a woman in the back. Not the configuration for a social call.

The Maxima parked three or four yards from the Carpenters’ front door, and the man took just long enough to remove the keys and open his door to tell me the car was probably a rental. He climbed out, looked around. Sloppy training. He should have looked around before he parked, and again before he left the car. He should have familiarized himself with his vehicle. He should have looked up. He closed his door, checked around one more time before opening the woman’s door.

The woman who got out of the car wore expensive, beautifully draped trousers, handmade boots, and a cashmere twinset under a camel-hair overcoat. Gold earrings gleamed below her short blond hair. Subtle cosmetics; a touch of color on a strong, straight mouth. No purse. One in the car? Even royalty must show ID to board a scheduled flight. Her clothes were good, but not private plane level.

They approached the door, him walking a yard ahead and a little to her left. Small steps, and slightly pigeon-toed, like an amateur weight lifter or college football player. Haircut from somewhere north and east of Arkansas. Gray suit, from one of the better department stores by its looks, and cleverly tailored around the shoulders and chest. The cleverness was wasted: the swing of his left arm was a little careful, a little self-conscious. Not a cop, though. Cops have to carry their guns all the time.

My heart began to hum like a turbine.

He knocked on the door, then stepped aside for the woman. I measured him against the doorframe: an inch or two taller than me and much, much wider. Not a good idea to get within closing distance of those arms. But maybe this had nothing to do with Luz. I finished my tea, crumpled the cup one-handed.

The door opened. From the expression on Adeline Carpenter’s face it was plain that her visitors were not strangers but that their arrival was a surprise, and worrying.

Adeline said something. The woman said something. Adeline stepped to one side and the woman, then the man, went in. The door closed. Muffled noise from the kitchen transmitter. Maybe they were talking in the hall. More noise. Definitely voices. I should have thought to put a bug in the hallway. Or the living room. It had seemed unused, not a good choice for my limited resources, but it was just the place Adeline would take guests, especially well-dressed ones. I flexed my knee, scanned the windows. Nothing.

But then the kitchen door creaked, and Adeline’s voice came clearly.

“—in the oven. Please, take a seat.”

“You don’t seem pleased to see us, Adeline.” The woman’s voice was smooth and light, but with the occasional metallic Boston vowel.

“I thought maybe you would write. Or call.”

“Yes, well, I have the kind of news best delivered in person. I’m sorry to tell you that Mr. Karp is dead.” My hands tightened on the field glasses and I lost the focus for a moment. “—sending any more checks.”

“Dead?”

“At least so far as the courts would see it. He’s in a coma that he won’t be coming back out of. A vegetable. I can make up this month’s arrears from my own account, that’s only fair. But I have to tell you there won’t be any more to come.”

“But I need…” The rest of Adeline’s soft voice was lost. Or maybe she just trailed off. She cleared her throat. “Hay prices were down this fall. With two children we depend on that money.”

“Which is why I’ve come to take Luz off your hands.”

Three hundred yards. With this knee it would take at least two minutes to get down there. Another two to disable the car. Two more to get back out of sight. I scanned for hiding places closer to the house.

Someone shifted noisily in their chair. Probably the man. “Take Luz?” Adeline sounded bewildered.

“It’s for the best,” the woman said. “Her sponsor can’t help her anymore, and there’s no provision in his will for her maintenance.” She couldn’t know that; he wasn’t dead yet.

“But what—”

“We’ve found another sponsor.”

The hum in my chest climbed a note.

“We could—”

“He wants Luz to be fostered closer to his residence. Now, Adeline, I know you and Jud have done a fine job, and I’m prepared to offer you a bonus, something to help you redecorate her room, perhaps, after she’s gone. Where is the child?”

“She’s out back.” Her voice got stronger. “On the land. Might not be back till suppertime.”

“Then you’d better start looking for her now. Mike here would be glad to help. These things are best done quickly.”

“But her things…”

“Not necessary. Her new sponsor will see to it that she has everything she—”

A crash. The stew dishes? The hum in my chest rose to a whine. Someone was saying something quietly, over and over again, softly at first, but then loud enough for me to hear. “… not right. That’s not right.” Adeline. Her voice grew thick and stubborn. “We’ve cared for that child for close on two years, me and Jud. She’s like our—”

The woman talked right over her. “But she’s not. She’s your paying guest, no more. And now I think we’ve wasted enough time on this. Any more argument and you won’t get that check I mentioned. Mike, go find the girl.”

Scrape of chair. Creak and soft slam of door. I waited, but there was no shriek of pain as Adeline threw her boiling stew in the woman’s face, no solid crack of plate on self-satisfied Boston skull, nothing but silence. Adeline would do nothing to stop this woman bundling Luz into the rented Maxima and driving away. Because I don’t know how, Tammy had said.

My breath poured in and out, in and out.

Choose, Julia had said.

I swore viciously, rolled up the mat around my gear, picked it up with one hand, and ran for the truck.

I drove fast, yanking the truck through the turns. The man and woman would be leaving soon, with the girl. The man had a gun and I did not. I would need a diversion. On the way to the trailer I watched for turnoffs and side roads, looking for hedges or trees or other potential screens for a roadblock. Nothing big enough.

I slammed into the campground in a cloud of dust. The trailer wasn’t hooked up to power or sewage, but it still took precious minutes to get it hitched to the truck. There was no time for precautions; anything loose would just have to break. Halfway down the dirt road, I braked hard, found the thermos, and got out. I kicked a hole in the dirt with my heel, poured in the tea, and scrabbled it about with a stick until it was mud. I picked up a double handful: one went on the truck’s front license plate, the other on the trailer’s. It would dry on the way.

Driving more than sixty on a narrow Arkansas road while pulling six and a half tons of trailer behind you is not fun but I was all out of options. When the familiar rise came into view I didn’t slow: six hundred yards, five hundred, four, and at three hundred yards I stood on the brakes and pulled a long, curving skid, fighting the wheel, feeling the trailer begin to catch up with the truck, easing the brakes and goosing the engine just enough to stay ahead of a disastrous jackknife, hanging on, braking again, until I heard a sharp crack and the rig juddered to a halt, slewed right across both lanes, blocking them. I jumped down from the cab, swore at the spike of pain in my knee. The rubber burn was long, and stank of danger only just averted. It looked convincing, at least at first glance, which was all I’d need.

But that crack had not been part of the plan. A quick look under the chassis showed no ominous leaking of fluid. I couldn’t see anything when I walked around the trailer and truck. Could be the hitch. But this wasn’t the time to find out. I got back in the cab, made sure the truck would still start, turned it off, and climbed out again with the field glasses. I hurried, but with my knee it took nearly two minutes to work myself around the rise without the possibility of being seen from the house. The car was still there. I lay on my belly and focused on the front door.

The door opened. Mike came out first, carrying a child’s suitcase. Luz’s. She’d get to take some of her things after all. It looked ridiculously small and light, or perhaps Mike just made it seem so. He put the case in the trunk of the car. He turned, and even from this distance I saw his surprise. I pulled back on the focus: Jud stood immobile and as far as I could see unspeaking on the far right of the house. Then he walked off around the back. Mike shrugged to himself, then leaned against the car, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded, lifting his face to the weak afternoon sunlight. I focused back in. He stood up and unfolded his arms when the woman stepped through the door, her hand on Luz’s shoulder. Luz’s face was very pale. She kept twisting her head to look back, and now Adeline appeared in the doorway. Adult and child stretched their hands to each other. I couldn’t imagine what Adeline was saying. They didn’t touch. Adeline followed Luz and the woman to the Maxima. Mike lifted his hands and spread them as though he was about to step in front of Adeline and take her by the arms, stop her from going any further, when suddenly everything changed. They were all looking to the right. I pulled out again: Jud stood by the side of the house, a shotgun at his shoulder. His cheeks glittered in the sun.

Nobody moved for two or three seconds, then Mike lifted both hands as if to say, Hey, I’m harmless, and Adeline stepped in front of her husband. She touched Jud’s cheek, said something. Not this way, maybe. Or perhaps, It’s not worth it. Or even, I don’t want to lose you, too. Whatever it was, it worked. He lowered the gun. Mike started forward, but the woman said something and he stopped. The woman spoke again, and he opened the back door of the car. The woman put one hand on the handle and gestured to Luz with the other: Get in. Luz shook her head, and looked at Adeline. Adeline tried to smile, tried to blow a kiss to Luz, but her mouth wouldn’t shape it properly. Instead she nodded. Luz climbed in. The woman slammed the door. She smiled pleasantly at the Carpenters, then walked around to the other side of the car. Mike started the engine. The woman got in the back and closed the door, and the car pulled onto the road.

Watching in dumb show and from a distance made the whole thing look like some strange puppet performance, utterly divorced from me and my life.

When the car came over the rise, I was standing between truck and trailer, looking in fake feminine annoyance at the hitch. Mike braked, and I prayed that Luz was either too smart or too much in shock to speak. I waved in that awkward, windscreen wiper way people with no physical coordination do, and smiled, and then threw my hands up as if to say, It just broke! Mike looked back at the woman and said something. She nodded. He climbed out of the car, already wearing that tolerant, capable-urban-man-approaching-silly-rural-woman expression I had counted on.

“I am so glad to see you!” I said. “If this just doesn’t beat all. I had to put the brake on so hard I thought that was it, time to visit Jesus. You’re just the man I want to see. See here? Around this side?” I walked around the truck so that the hitch was between us. He followed. We were now out of the woman’s line of sight. “I’m just not strong enough to lift this thingie back on.”

I pointed, and when he leaned forward I stepped behind him, shoved him against the side of the truck bed, and yanked his belt up with my right hand so his pants crushed his scrotum. While he concentrated on not fainting I slipped my left hand inside his jacket and slid out the gun. A Glock with the seventeen-shot magazine. Oversize, like his muscles. I thumbed off the safety and pressed the snout under his left ear. “Take out your wallet.”

“I don’t have much—”

A hard upward yank cut him off mid-sentence. “Now.” Didn’t he understand it would be easier to just shoot him, then shoot the woman and drive away?

He reached behind him and lifted it from his back right-hand pocket. He didn’t try to drop it. Good. Still in the first phase of shock.

I’d left my gloves in the truck.

“Open it.”

His hands shook as he unfolded it.

“Not the money. Your driver’s license and insurance card. Put them on the bed so I can see them.” He did. It had been about fifteen seconds. He would start to recover his wits very soon. “Don’t even think about trying anything.”

I scanned the cards over his shoulder. Michael Turner, a White Plains, New York, address. Social security number on the insurance card.

“Tip out the rest of the wallet. Spread it all apart.”

American Express, MasterCard, debit card, frequent flyer cards, AAA card, an emergency contact number card.

His muscles tensed but I dropped his belt, punched him irritably over the right kidney, and had hold of the leather again before he could translate thought to action. He went limp and the rhythm of his breathing broke. No concealed weapons permit for this or any other state. No private investigator license.

“I know your name, address, and social security number.” I glanced at the emergency contact card: the name Nicki Taormino, the designation fiancée, and a phone number in the person-to-be-contacted slot. “And I have your girlfriend’s number. Do exactly as I tell you and I won’t ever have to use any of that information. Upset me and I’ll shoot you in the gut. Walk two paces to your left and kneel down.”

I let go of his belt and he did as he was told.

I made sure he could see the gun trained on him. “Do you have a handkerchief? Good. Throw it to me.” He tossed me a clean, folded square, still warm from his pocket. “And your tie.” He obeyed silently. I put the tie and hankie on the truck bed with his wallet. “Now take off your belt.” He took off the belt. “Make a big loop.” It took him a moment to understand that I wanted him to thread the tongue through the buckle. The brain does not work well when the system is adrenaline-charged. “Hold it in your left hand, put that hand behind you.” His reaction time was getting slower as his system began to shut down. In three or four minutes it would rev back up, but by then he’d be helpless. “Now the right hand. Wrists together.”

I stepped behind him and yanked the loop tight.

“Lean back, as though you’re reaching for your heels.”

Good thing his waist was so big; there was enough leather to wrap around his ankles, tuck under the loop, pull tight, then knot.

“I’m going to tip you over.” I gave him a second to brace himself, then pushed one shoulder with my foot. I stepped over him to the truck bed, retrieved the hankie and tie. “Open your mouth.” He knew what was coming and began to thrash. I racked the slide on the Glock, pointed the muzzle at his stomach. “Gag or gun.” He opened his mouth. I stuffed the hankie in, then pulled the tie over his mouth to keep the gag in place and knotted it behind his head. He’d probably be able to work it loose in an hour or so, but I wouldn’t take nearly that long. I went back to the truck, fished the driver’s license and insurance card from the pile, and slipped them in my pocket. I needed a minute to stop, to think, but I didn’t have a minute.

I slid the safety back on, tucked the gun in the back of my waistband, and stepped into view of the Maxima. When the woman saw me I waved, opened my mouth to speak, then shut it again with an apologetic smile, as though remembering it wasn’t ladylike to shout.

The woman watched me calmly as I approached, though her shoulders and back looked tight. Her window slid down, but instead of speaking to her I leaned in the driver’s side and took the keys. That bothered her. I smiled at Luz and shook my head slightly, hoping she would understand. She didn’t smile back, just watched me the way you’d watch a rabid dog.

“Step out of the car please, ma’am,” I said to the woman, and the tension in her spine eased a little: law enforcement generally pay attention to well-paid lawyers. Hijackers and thugs don’t. She got out of the car.

I closed her door and window, then used the master control on the driver’s side to lock the car up. I didn’t want Luz running off.

“Well, officer,” she said, “or is it agent? I’d say prior knowledge of my travel plans means some kind of wiretap, which rules out local involvement.” She didn’t look worried. “FBI or INS? Not that it matters. I’ve been through this before. It’s a waste of my time and yours. You have nothing in the way of documentation.”

My eyes felt hot and a little too big for their sockets. This was all her fault. “I don’t need proof.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Since when—” Then she got it. She took a step back. “Where’s my driver? What do you want?”

“Your purse.”

Like Mike Turner, she immediately assumed I wanted to rob her and turned to the car with relief, but unlike him, she realized within a second or two that no one would go to such trouble for a few bucks and a handful of credit cards, and her hand dropped before it touched the handle. “Who are you?”

I got out the gun and pointed it at her. “Someone who is getting more irritated every second.” There was no one here to stop me. Aud rhymes with allowed. I used the key remote and her door lock thunked open. I nodded at the car. “Your purse.”

Luz suddenly wriggled out of her seat belt and lunged to the front of the car, reaching for the horn. She managed to hit it once, just enough for a light pap that no one would hear, before I got the door open and yanked her out with one arm.

I stood her up on the pavement. “Don’t.” I switched to Spanish. “Estoy salvando te de esta mujer. En unos minutos, te devolvere a… a Aba.” And in the middle of explaining to her I was rescuing her, that I would take her back to Adeline, she gave me that bird-eyed look again, and I understood, then, why I recognized it. I had looked at my own mother the same way all those times she had said, Yes, Aud, this time I will be there for the school sports day, or, Of course I don’t have to work on your birthday.

The woman was edging towards the car. I pointed the gun again until she stopped, then turned back to Luz. “I will explain very soon, but I need you to be very quiet and very still, just for five minutes. No one will hurt you. Do you understand?” She nodded, amenable but uncommitted. “Get back in the car.”

She shook her head.

There was no time to argue. “Then stand right here, next to me, and don’t move.”

She crept to my side.

I turned back to the woman. “Su bolso.”

“Ella no comprende,” Luz said.

“Your purse,” I said again, in English.

“I could get it,” Luz said. If you please Mummy, she might do as she promised. And I wanted to pistol-whip this smug woman, this panderer of children, until her blood seeped into the Arkansas dirt.

Luz climbed into the backseat, felt around the floor, and emerged with the purse. “It’s heavy,” she said, and held it out to me.

I made myself breathe. In and out. “Find her wallet,” I said. I locked the car again and put the key in my pocket.

Luz rooted around and came up with a slim, calfskin billfold.

“Open it. I want her driver’s license and insurance card. Read them to me.”

Luz did. Jean Goulay, an address in upstate New York.

“Any business cards in there?”

“What’s a business card?”

I didn’t take my eyes off Goulay. Any minute now she was going to realize she was in even deeper trouble than she thought. People don’t avoid leaving their fingerprints if they mean you well. “Tip the purse out onto the road.” Luz did, and looked at me nervously. I forced what I hoped was an encouraging smile. “There, those pieces of cardboard with phone numbers and e-mail addresses.” Maybe she didn’t know what an e-mail address was, either. “Lift one up so I can read it.” I read it aloud. “Goulay Adoption Agency: specializing in difficult cases. Discreet. Established in 1987.” Nineteen eighty-seven. Fifteen years of processing children like imported grain. Some of them would be old enough to already be married.

“This will stop,” I said to Goulay. Terrible heat was building in my bones and it was hard to get the words out; the hinges of my jaw felt dry and swollen. I put the gun back in my waistband.

“Nothing I’ve done is illegal.” Perhaps it was seeing me put the gun away, but Goulay had relaxed again, on surer ground. She looked almost smug.

My stomach squeezed. I took a step towards her. She would break so easily under my hands. “ ‘Illegal’ doesn’t interest me. If you import one more child, I will hurt you.”

“What is it to you? They’re better off here. They’re well fed and well taken care of. Over there this girl would be a prostitute, like her mother. She’d probably be dead by now; her sister is. Her brother already has AIDS.”

Well fed. Well taken care of. It wasn’t enough. I took half a step towards her.

“You can’t touch me. You think I run a business like this without the best lawyers money can buy?”

My arm came up, and as she realized her lawyers couldn’t stop me smashing my fist into her well-bred face her mouth fell open and her pupils dilated, and it reminded me of Karp’s fear; I remembered the animal noises I had made, and the vomit, and I didn’t want to do that, didn’t want to be that anymore. I lowered my hand, and the way the color rushed back into her face and the sweat started at her hairline made me think of one of those dolls that cry or wet their underwear when you press a button, and I laughed. My laughter made her change color again, which was even funnier.

Eventually I sobered. “As of today, you are out of business.” I nodded at her purse. “I have your name and social security number. I know your face and where you live. You, on the other hand, know nothing about me. Not my name, not where I’m from, not even how I found out about you. If you do this again, even once, I’ll find out, and I’ll come for you, and you will spend the rest of your life in pain. Now put your belongings back in your purse and get back in the car.”

And that’s when everything went wrong, when Goulay smiled instead of looking scared, and bent to pick up her purse.

It’s heavy…

I understood why at the same moment I understood that I could not move in two directions at once, and that, here, Luz was the point, just as in Norway Julia had been the point, only I had forgotten.

When Goulay straightened with the purse in one hand—gaping as though disemboweled where the previously concealed compartment now lay open—and a nickel-plated Ruger .38 five-shot in the other, I was standing in front of the child. Luz inhaled sharply. The hand holding the Ruger didn’t waver.

All the heat had burned from my bones, leaving them light and strong. A fly hummed a few feet from Luz’s head. I felt dense and supple and utterly relaxed. “Luz.” I reached behind me, put a hand on her shoulder. “Está bien.”

She had been so brave all this time, but now I felt the tremble deep in her little bones.

“It’s all right,” I said again.

“Child, get the car keys and bring them to me.”

“They’re in my right-hand pocket,” I told Luz, not taking my eyes off Goulay. The child was the point. This time I would not forget.

Luz groped in my pocket for a moment and came out with the keys. The Glock hung in my waistband, but there would be no time to use it.

“Bring them here.” Goulay held out her left hand, the gun in her right still trained on my stomach. The gun’s vanity plating meant it was probably the cheap model Ruger had taken off the market a few years ago, because there wasn’t much demand for a pretty weapon with a stiff trigger. And it wasn’t cocked.

My head filled with humming. It wasn’t the fly. I breathed in, deep and slow, until the world took on a dreamy blue edge. All the time in the world. Luz moved in slow motion towards Goulay with the small unsteady steps of a terrified nine-year-old. One step. Two. On three her hand lifted and dropped the keys into Goulay’s palm.

The human body is densely studded with nerve endings which constantly send information to both our conscious and subconscious minds. Generally the brain does a superb job of traffic control, and training can improve this, but an untrained person cannot focus on two important and unfamiliar things at once. When those keys touched the sensitive skin of Goulay’s hand, for a split second her attention was divided: her right arm still pointed at me, her index finger still rested on the trigger, but for that moment, just a hitch in time—the space between a breath, the time it takes for an electrical impulse to leap a nerve synapse—her body knew more about her left hand than her right. And it takes more pressure than the untrained realize to pull the trigger of an uncocked gun.

Remember the child. Oh yes. This is who I am. This is what I do.

I took one sliding step with my right leg, slapped the gun away with my left hand, and hit her neatly under the ear with my right elbow. She folded without a sound. I smiled at Luz, picked up the gun, broke open the cylinder, and tipped out the bullets. Dry-fired it. Just as I thought. Stiff. Cheap. I wiped the gun clean on my sweatshirt and dropped it into Goulay’s coat pocket. The bullets went in mine. Luz stared at me, lips pale.

“She’ll be fine,” I said. “Can you be brave just a bit longer?”

She nodded jerkily.

“Good. I’m going to need your help to tidy up a bit.” I bent and plucked the keys from Goulay’s white hand. “If you open the back door, I’ll put her inside where she’ll be more comfortable until she wakes up.” My knee flared when I bent to pick up Goulay. Pain is just a message, information about an injury. If the structural damage isn’t enough to stop you, the message can be ignored. Goulay was heavier than she looked and it took me a while to make sure all her flopping limbs were safely inside before I could slam the door. “We have to move the rig, too.” I pointed at the trailer and truck.

“Where’s the man?”

Mike. Right. “He’s… You’ll have to help me with him, too. He’s tied up behind the truck, but he’s not unconscious, so we’ll have to bring the car to him to make it easier to get inside. Okay? Come on. You can sit in the front.”

Like all rental cars, the Maxima smelled new and unblemished. The tank was still two-thirds full. I drove the few feet to the rig so that the back door was as close as possible. “Open the door. I’ll go get him.” She slid out and went to the back door. I left the engine running.

Mike’s face was livid. He writhed as much as he was able and grunted explosively as I pulled out his gun.

“Two choices. One, I drag you to the car, face down, which will rip your skin up quite a bit, might even damage your eyes. Two, I untie your feet and you get into the car without a struggle. If you struggle, I shoot you. Dead people are just as easy to move.” Easier. But it would probably upset Luz. “Should I untie you?”

More grunts.

“Should I untie you?” I asked again, patiently.

He nodded.

I loosened the belt so he could free his feet but pulled it back tight on his hands. “Stand—”

Luz’s scream sliced my sentence in half. I whipped around just in time to see Goulay, now in the front seat, one arm around Luz’s neck, her own head craning to see behind her, before the car screeched away in reverse. I lifted the Glock, and that’s when Mike hit me on the back of the neck with his clubbed fists.

How did he do that? I thought stupidly, as the strength drained from my legs and my hands went numb. I staggered, the Glock fell from my fingers, and Mike hurled himself at me. I went down face first, him on top. One of my ribs popped with the long, leisurely sound a cork makes coming out of a particularly anticipated bottle of port. The gravel under my cheek should have felt cold but didn’t, though the metal at the corner of my eye did. Somewhere a child was screaming. Someone grabbed my right wrist and pinned it to the road by my head, so that I pointed after the reversing car, which was only a few yards away and moving terribly slowly. Dust and that scream hung in the air as though someone had stopped the world.

The man on top of me shifted, dropping his whole weight down and forward on his hands to pin me more securely. My cheek tore on gravel as I smiled. Give me a long enough lever and I will move the world.

The child had stopped screaming. I put it from my mind.

For the Chinese, it is the source of chi, for the Japanese, ki, for dancers and gymnasts, it is the center of gravity: the fulcrum around which the body moves. Shift your balance, and everything changes. Balance is also psychological. If your opponent expects you to pull in one direction, he sets his muscles to resist. Mike had put all his weight over my wrist: he was balancing on it; he expected me to pull my hand in instinctively and protect my torso. So I did, but slowly, so he had time to resist, and when he began to push the other way—which pleased me so much I laughed, which startled him, which made it even easier—I thrust both hands up over my head, simple as stretching. His balance followed my wrists, sliding as smoothly as the bubble in a tilting spirit level, and as he fell forward, I pulled both legs under me and bucked. Thigh muscles are enormously powerful. He soared, upturned face comical, and I was scrambling after him on all fours like a strange, bloodied train, Glock in hand—where had that come from?—before he hit the ground. He was lovely and fast, already up on one knee before I pistoned right elbow into his neck, left fist into his solar plexus, and arced the Glock into the back of his skull. He collapsed. I smiled, and stood. Staggered. Pain is just a message.

The Maxima was now forty yards away, veering wildly, jerking, driving again, still in reverse. I wiped the blood from my face, squinted. The child had stopped screaming because she had her teeth buried in the woman’s wrist. I lurched forward. My knee buckled and I almost went down again. Just a message. I ran. In another fifty yards, the Maxima would reach the crossroads where there would be room to turn around. Once it was out of reverse, I’d have no hope of catching it.

The woman slapped the child. The child hung on. The car slowed almost to a stop. I ran. Thirty yards. The woman hit the child again. Twenty-five yards. The child let go. Twenty yards. Now or never. I lifted the Glock, sighted, breathed out, held it, and shot out the left front tire. I moved the gun slightly, sighted on the woman’s chest. Neither of us moved. Slowly, she raised both hands.

I limped as fast as I could to the car. “Out,” I said to the woman. “Now.” Even in rural Arkansas a shot might not go unnoticed. She climbed out warily. There was blood on her right wrist. I could smell her fear. “Turn around. Hands on the roof of the car.” Before she’d even turned around properly I whipped the Glock across the back of her head. I caught her before she fell.

The child had squeezed herself up against the passenger door, as far away from me as she could get. “Open the back door,” I said. She didn’t move. I ignored my knee, ignored the terrible need to hurry, and dredged up her name. “Luz. I need you to open the back door.” She stared at the gun, then my face. The gun, my face. I couldn’t put the gun down without letting go of the woman. Another child… shiny eyes… “Button needs you,” I said. “We have to hurry.” There was no more time. I slung the woman as best I could over my left arm and tucked the Glock back in my waistband out of sight. That’s when I remembered the noise my rib cage had made. I cursed softly, then put that message aside, too. I could just reach the door handle. I got it open and stuffed the woman in. She left a smear of blood on the upholstery. I slammed the door, got in the driver’s seat.

Luz still hadn’t moved or spoken. I picked her up bodily—she was practically catatonic—put her in her seat, and pulled the seat belt round her. The pain was making it hard to breathe.

The tire rim ground on the gravel as I drove the hundred yards back to the rig and the sprawled lump in the road.

Out of the car, open the back door, drag the man to the car, lift and prop, fold and push him on top of the woman. Close rear door. Use remote to lock all four doors. Open door of truck, sigh, walk back to car, open passenger door. “I’m going to move the rig—the truck and trailer—so we can drive past. I’m coming back.” I’m going to pass out. “Stay there.” This time she nodded cautiously.

I got in the truck, turned it on. I could just drive away and never come back. I checked my throat in the mirror: red, but not reopened.

It took four minutes of slow and careful backing and filling before I had the rig on the side of the road, pointing south. Each time I twisted, each time I moved my right arm to change gear, I thought I might throw up. Just a message. The hitch didn’t feel right, but there wasn’t time to check it properly. Somewhere a sharp-eared neighbor might be dialing the sheriff. I turned off the engine, climbed down, went back to the car. The child was so quiet I could hear the two in the back breathing slowly but steadily. The child—Luz, her name is Luz—had unfastened her seat belt.

“Fasten it back up.”

Luz looked at me. “Button?”

“We have a short drive to make first.”

She looked over her shoulder at the woman Goulay and Mike, but didn’t speak. Probably thought I’d shoot her if she did.

I had to slow for every curve. With that tire gone, the car tilted to one side and the front wheels had a tendency to skate. I checked the rearview mirror often. No pursuing traffic. “How far can you walk?”

Now the look I got was full of incomprehension, as though I were speaking Urdu. How many nine-year-olds would know how far they could walk? She could probably manage three or four miles without any lasting damage, and I could always carry her. “There’s a map in the glove compartment,” I said. “Pass it to me please.” I slowed, one hand on the wheel, the other tracing tiny lines. Brink Creek campground was about four miles. The woods there would be dense enough to confuse most city people, and there wouldn’t be much traffic. I handed the map back to Luz, who refolded it and put it back in the glove compartment without being asked. Remarkable adaptation to circumstances. Her early life must have been interesting. Or perhaps all nine-year-olds were this resilient.

The campground was empty. I pulled in under the trees, parked, and pocketed the keys. Luz seemed to listen to the silence.

“Now you have to help me wipe the car down.” I eased Goulay’s heavy coat off her shoulders and ripped away one of her cardigan sleeves. “Take this and rub it all around the steering wheel. It’s very important that you rub every single bit of the surface.”

“Why?”

It wasn’t her fault the Carpenters didn’t have a television. I forced myself to breathe through the pain in ribs and knee, and managed to speak without growling. “Fingerprints.”

While she scrubbed industriously at the wheel and gear stick I tore off the other sleeve and wiped at the doors and roof where I might have touched the metal inadvertently. Then I tackled the shiny vinyl on the backs of the seats and inside windows.

I remembered the belt and wiped that down, too—after I’d retied it around Mike’s ankles. He must be more supple than I’d thought. Just as I was finishing that, he woke. “Don’t,” I said in his ear. “Keep still and you’ll be fine. She’ll wake up in a few hours and untie you.” It would be dark and cold by then. I tucked Goulay’s arms back into her coat.

I motioned Luz away from the car, gave the wheel and stick a quick wipe myself, then threw the ragged sleeve on the front seat.

“Now we walk back to the trailer. It’s a long way.” She didn’t move. “What?”

“My stuff.”

The suitcase, in the trunk.

At first she insisted on carrying the case herself. She carried it two-handed, in front of her, bumping her knees. I tried not to wince.

“When you get tired, let me know.”

I matched my pace to hers, but even at two miles an hour my knee burned. The back of my neck throbbed and every now and then my hands tingled. Some kind of nerve bruise. I felt at my ribs gently as I walked; no obvious splintering. Cracked, perhaps, or maybe just soft-tissue injury at the sternum. Cartilage probably.

I had no idea what to do with this child. I had seen the look on her face as Goulay tried to take her away from the Carpenters. But a dog will bond even with a cruel owner, one who beats it and starves it.

We walked on. Luz began to lag. I slowed even more. She hung on to the case with grim determination. I had no idea what nine-year-olds talked about.

“What’s in there, then? Gold and jewels?”

“Stuff.”

“We can buy you more stuff. More clothes.”

“Not just clothes.”

Of course. Books. “You know what one of my favorite books used to be? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Have you read that?”

On an adult, her expression would have meant, Don’t tell me you love me if you don’t mean it. I plowed on, glad I didn’t have to lie. “I’ve read all of them.”

“There are seven!”

“Yes. I’ve read them all. But I think The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is my favorite. Or maybe Prince Caspian.” A bloody thirty-two-year-old Norwegian discussing 1950s English novels with a nine-year-old Mexican girl in backwoods Arkansas.

The absurdity of the situation didn’t seem to bother her. “I like it best when they have supper with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver,” she said. Safety, warmth, food. Tenderness. Every child should have them. “And I like it when Edmund is in the sleigh in the snow with the White Witch eating Turkish delight.” She swang the suitcase to one hand, then changed her mind and tried the other.

“You want me to carry that for a bit?”

“Okay. Just for a bit.”

All her worldly possessions. It weighed about eight pounds. Not much, but eight pounds more than I wanted to carry.

“I like it too that Edmund was good in the end and that his sisters and brother were nice to him.” She frowned. “But I don’t know what Turkish delight is. Aba doesn’t know, either. She said maybe it’s kind of like chocolate.”

“Real Turkish delight is soft and squashy and sweet. It comes in round boxes. The pieces are pale yellow or pink cubes, and all dusted with powdered sugar.”

“Is it nice?”

Being in the rig, being out of sight, and getting my ribs taped would be nice. “It’s a bit perfumey, like eating roses. Sickly. I’ll buy you some if you like, then you can tell me.”

“Aba doesn’t like me to eat sweet things.” A slitted, sideways glance.

Aud Torvingen, White Witch. “Did you know that they made a film based on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?”

She gave me that look that said I was speaking Urdu again, and I remembered she didn’t go to school, where children are exposed to other children talking about cartoons and movies and gross-out videos.

“So what books do you have in here?” She shook her head and flushed, which I hadn’t seen her do before. “Must be a heavy one.”

She actually hung her head. I imagined her poring over a book of knowledge in tiny type with black-and-white illustrations that was forty years out of date and smelled of mildew, imagined her agony of indecision when it came time to pack her things: she would have wanted it so, but known it was stealing.

“I could buy you encyclopedias, too. New ones.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re better.” But that wasn’t what she meant. She stumbled, but pulled away when I tried to help her.

“How far is it?”

“Another two miles.”

She nodded wearily.

“I could carry you, if you like.” Even if she didn’t like. We were already conspicuous; I wanted to be back at the trailer before dark.

“Like a baby!” Enough energy for scorn.

“Aslan carried Lucy.”

“You’re not a lion.”

“No, but I can talk, not like a horse or a car.”

She considered that. “Okay. But piggyback.”

“Of course.” I shifted the Glock to the front of my waistband and squatted. My knee was visibly swollen. She climbed onto my back. “Wrap your legs tightly because I need one hand for—No!” I pulled her legs down a little. “No,” I said again, more softly, “not there.”

We set off again, her arms around my neck tightly enough to choke. If Mike’s weight hadn’t reopened the wound, hers probably wouldn’t. After a while she relaxed. A little while after that, the pain in my knee notched up from burning to searing.

Now that she wasn’t walking, Luz was more talkative. She talked about Button a lot.

“He’s okay. Not as smart as me but he’s good, I mean he’s good when he can be. When Aba tells him, Don’t leave the yard, he doesn’t leave the yard on purpose, he just forgets. So it’s my job to remind him.”

“But he has tantrums.” I was getting very thirsty.

“When he’s upset. Because he doesn’t always understand things.”

“Does he ever hit you?”

“On purpose? No! But once when I was little he was wiggling about and I tried to hold his hands and he knocked one of my teeth out. But it was just a baby tooth so it was okay. It was falling out already.”

“Does anyone else ever hit you?”

“Like who?”

“Like anyone. Like Aba, or Mr. Carpenter.”

“Why would they hit me?”

“Sometimes adults hit children when they’re not good.”

“I’m always good.”

“Always?”

She squirmed. “Mostly.”

“And what do they do when they find out you haven’t been good?”

She squirmed again. “Make me say more prayers.”

“Prayers are boring,” I said.

“Sometimes.”

“Always.”

“No, sometimes they’re nice. They make me feel…” Her arms tightened a bit while she thought about it. “Like someone’s looking after me the same way I look after Button.”

“Don’t Aba and Mr. Carpenter look after you?”

“Aba does. Mr. Carpenter…” I felt her shrug. “He does things like drive the truck and cut the wood and do the farm stuff, and he takes us swimming sometimes, and Aba leans on his arm when we go to church. But…”

She didn’t have the vocabulary, in Spanish or English, to talk about the inability to deal with the outside world, with strangers and hard moral choices. Jud Carpenter seemed like a good man who belonged in a simpler time. “But he didn’t stop that woman from taking you away.”

“He wanted to. Aba stopped him. But I’m going back, aren’t I, so I guess Brother Jerry was right. God works in mysterious ways.” Brother Jerry? “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s not far now.”

My neck hurt, my ribs hurt, I was beginning to imagine I could hear the bones in my knee grinding together, but more than that I didn’t want to see her face when we got in the rig and I drove her away. I walked on, right foot left foot.

“Aud.” That perfect pronunciation. “Aud? There is something wrong, isn’t there? Am I too heavy? We could leave my stuff here and get Mr. Carpenter to come back for it in the truck, later.”

“Luz, would you like to live somewhere else? I mean, live in a big city where you could have everything you wanted, watch TV and read books and talk Spanish and play with other girls?” Would I have left the care of my mother, such as it was, if a stranger had asked?

“Could Button and Aba come, too?”

“Luz, do you remember your life before Aba, when you lived in another country?”

“No.”

“You don’t remember a big church with pretty-colored glass, or your mother and brother and sister? Where everyone talked Spanish?”

“No.” Her voice had an edge to it.

“You were telling Button about it.”

“That was just a story.” Loudly now.

“But if the story were real, about a real place and a real time, would you like to go back there?”

“No! It was a story! I want to go home. I don’t want Turkish delight or cyclopedias, I want to go home to Aba and Button and Mr. Carpenter!”

I gritted my teeth and kept walking. How do you persuade the beaten dog it would be better off with someone else? Perhaps you couldn’t. Perhaps it wouldn’t.

It was about six o’clock by the time we saw the truck and trailer. “I can walk now,” Luz said. I didn’t say anything. “Let me down, Aud.”

Stay in the world, Julia had said, but there were so many different worlds. There was one where I put Luz in my truck and we drove off to Little Rock, where I placed her with social services. There was one where I took her to Atlanta and she lived with me. There was one where we stopped by the truck and I got in and she kept walking, back to Jud and Adeline.

I set Luz down. “You can walk to the truck.”

“I don’t want to get in the truck. I want to go home.”

“I’m very tired, and I don’t want to leave the truck out here. If you get in, I’ll turn it round and take you home.”

“Swear on the Holy Bible?”

“I don’t have a Bible.” I switched to Spanish. “But I swear on my own name that if you get in this truck, I will drive you home to Aba.” Aud rhymes with vowed. Another promise hanging around my neck.

“Today?” English. The language of mistrust.

“Right now.”

“And you won’t lock the doors?”

I should never have offered to buy her Turkish delight. “No. No one is going to lock a door on you ever again.”

As soon as we pulled up outside the farmhouse, she tore into the house and slammed the door behind her. I switched off the headlights and the engine, turned on the dome light. It seemed very bright. I pulled the Glock from my waistband and put it in the glove compartment. After a while I opened the glove compartment again and took out a folder and my phone. I looked at the phone. There was no one to call. The engine ticked.

The front door opened again. Adeline Carpenter. She took one step out and stopped. I turned the light off, put the phone back, picked up the folder, and climbed down. The pain was constant now. I could hang on perhaps another hour.

“Luz says… well, I can’t make head nor tail of it, but she’s here, and you’re here…” She waved vaguely with her left hand, and her eyes were brilliant and glassy. “And your face…” She pulled an inhaler from her apron pocket and sucked hard. I thought for a moment she might pass out.

“Mrs. Carpenter, may I come in? We have a lot to talk about.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We sat at the kitchen table, on our third cup of coffee. The same stew still simmered by the stove but the room looked flatter and harsher in electric light. Luz was with Button, watching Jud work on the truck. Adeline had watched while I cleaned the grit and blood from my face and smeared the graze with antibiotic ointment. She gave me ibuprofen for the pain. Her breathing improved as I washed away the evidence of violence. I hadn’t mentioned my knee or ribs.

I had given Adeline an edited version of what had happened, up to the point where Luz and I walked back from the woods, and her confusion was mounting.

“So Miz Goulay’s in a car in the woods?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s not coming back?”

“When she wakes up, she’ll untie Mike, and they’ll both spend a fair amount of time searching for the car keys, which they won’t find, after which they’ll have to walk out. They might walk the wrong way, but it shouldn’t be cold enough tonight to do them any harm.”

“But she won’t…” She took a moment to breathe. “She won’t be coming back after Luz?”

“No.”

“And…” She used her inhaler again. Breathed. Another snort. The color came back to her face. “She won’t go to the police?”

“No. If the police were called, she would have a lot of explaining to do.” The list of charges a good lawyer could level at Goulay would be long, beginning with kidnap of a minor, trafficking in illegal immigrants, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit… “Jean Goulay will never bother you again. Luz will stay here, with you and your husband and Button. If that’s what you want.”

“Yes! And her… Mr. Karp?”

“He’s in a persistent vegetative state, the kind of coma from which you never wake. He’ll get weaker and weaker and then die.”

“She told the truth about that, then.”

I opened the folder, spread out Luz’s birth and adoption certificates, her passport and medical reports. “The only people on this earth now responsible for Luz are you and your husband. And me.”

She frowned. “Where did you get those?”

“From George Karp’s apartment.”

She reached out and touched the birth certificate with a fingertip. “In New York. Miz Goulay said he was beaten half to death, but she didn’t say who by.”

“George Karp was not a good man.”

She nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she was agreeing or simply acknowledging what I’d said. “You weren’t here on vacation, were you?” she said.

“No.”

“And it wasn’t just chance that you came by when we ran out of gas.” She was breathing fast, but this time it wasn’t asthma. “You told a pack of lies to get into my house.”

“I had good reason.”

“You lied, just like that Goulay woman. You even lied about having cancer.”

“I never said I had cancer.”

“Don’t you get clever with me! You know what you meant for me to think.”

“Listen to—”

“No, Miz Aud Thomas or whoever the heck you are, I’ve had my fill today of being bullied and lied to. You’re sitting in my kitchen. I don’t have to listen to one word you say.” She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. Adeline discovers strength through righteous anger. Shame she hadn’t been able to break free of the Kind Christian Lady persona a little earlier.

The stew simmered peacefully for a while. The dishes on display were a willow pattern; one had a carefully mended crack. Under the table, my knee was swelling.

Eventually she couldn’t stand it. “Just what is it you want with us?”

“A bargain. You don’t want Luz to go, and Luz doesn’t want to go, but you can’t afford to keep her. I can help.”

“Why would you want to do that? What’s Luz to you?”

“My motives have no bearing on the matter.”

“They do for me.”

If I sat here another hour, I wouldn’t be able to drive. “Did you know that the legal age for marriage is fourteen in Georgia, and just twelve in Delaware?” She kept her arms folded, but now she looked uncomfortable. “Wasn’t too hard to put two and two together, was it? Don’t get righteous with me. You have no moral leg to stand on.”

Another pause. “What do you mean, help?”

“Luz stays here. I pay you and untangle the immigration situation. When she’s eighteen she gets to choose her own life.”

She half unfolded her arms, bewildered now. “But why?”

I ignored that. “We’ll come to an agreement, write a contract, a covenant. For the money I send I’ll expect certain things.”

“Why should I trust you? I don’t know you. I don’t even like you.” Heady stuff, freedom. But her timing was inconvenient.

“You don’t have to like me. I don’t have to like you. We simply have to abide by an agreement. For example, one of my conditions would be that she goes to school. A good school.”

A long, cautious pause. “She’s got to attend church.”

“Fine. On the condition that when I set up health and other insurance, you take her in for regular checkups—physical, dental, optical—to medical professionals we agree on beforehand.” She did not say yes or no to that. “If you break the terms of the agreement, I come and take Luz away. If I break them, I give you the documents.” It would be easy enough to take them back again. “All we have to do is make the agreement, and all communication between us will thereafter be through my lawyer, who will hold the documents until Luz is eighteen. Agreed?”

“If you tell me who you are, and why you’re doing this.”

“No.”

“Then we’re done talking.”

“You don’t need my name.”

“I might not be Miss College Mouth Audrey Thomas or whoever the hell you are, but I know a woman who’s hiding something pretty big when I see her. Checks and insurance and doctors. We aren’t talking pin money here. So I want to know who you are and what Luz is to you.”

The key to negotiation lies in ensuring the other party needs to reach an agreement more than you do, my mother told me once when I was twelve. If you’re willing to walk away, you will win. When I asked her what to do if it was something you really, really wanted, she said, If you have a personal stake, get someone else to negotiate on your behalf. That only works if you have someone else.

If you’re willing to walk away… But, Choose, Julia had said, and she had loved me. “I won’t tell you my name.”

“Then—”

“But I will tell you this. I used to be something like that man, like Geordie Karp, but I’ve changed. I’ve—I’ve seen the error of my ways.” I remembered the sampler. “Now I want to do unto others as I would be done by. I want to atone for the past. Helping Luz, helping you all—Luz and you and your husband, and Button—is the only way I know to make it even partway right.”

Long silence. “I met that man but once,” Adeline said meditatively, “and I didn’t like him. Not one bit. He wasn’t the kind to give anyone anything—especially not something like this.” She leaned forward and tapped Luz’s documents. “So I reckon you took them, or maybe made him give you them. So I’m thinking that maybe it’s not a coincidence that he’s in the hospital mostly dead and you’re sitting here talking to me about his daughter. No, close your mouth, I haven’t finished. You had something to do with his hurt. It might be that you hired some roughnecks to settle his hash. It might be that you had good reason. But I don’t much care. He was a bad man. A very bad man. You say you used to be like him. Now, you don’t seem that way to me, except for all your lying, but how can I tell for sure? The way it looks to me, Miss Walk-in-Here-with-a-Big-Checkbook, is that I could be getting myself into just the same mess I got myself into before. There’s a lot I don’t understand and don’t know, and that means maybe one day someone, maybe you, could show up at my door and take Luz, take my child away. And she is mine. She may not have come from my loins in blood and sweat and tears like Button did, but she’s in here.” She thumped her breastbone. “And I need something—some kind of guarantee that’s more than a lawyer’s paper—and I reckon that’s your name.”

I was sipping air carefully, trying to protect my ribs. “What will you give me in return?”

“The time of day.” She folded her arms again.

I stared past her for almost a minute, then reached into my pocket for my wallet. Moving, even my right arm, was getting harder. I pulled out my license and stared at it. The face in the picture seemed naked and defenseless.

“I’ll show you this license on two conditions. One, that you never write my name down anywhere, ever. Two, that you tell no one what it is, not even Jud.” And that you treat her like a daughter. That you love her, because she’s only nine years old.

She considered, nodded, and held out her hand. I gave her the license.

“Aud Torvingen. What kind of name is that?”

“Norwegian.”

She nodded again, mouthed the name to herself a couple of times, and handed it back.

Now she had my name. And a woman in New York had seen my face. One chance phone call could put them together.

“Aud? Miz Torvingen?”

I wrenched my attention back to the table. “Yes.”

“Your color isn’t so good.” Kind Christian Lady returns, magnanimous in victory.

“I’m fine.”

“Yes, well.” She picked up her coffee mug. “Get you a refill?”

I shook my head, paid scant attention as she got up and poured for herself. What was it like to care so fiercely for a scrap of humanity you could carry as easily as a small sack of potatoes? What was it like to be the one so cared for? “Why does Luz call you Aba?”

She cleared her throat and made a production of adding sugar and cream. She cleared her throat again. “She called me that from the beginning. Two years now. It’s from Abuela, Spanish for grandmother. I looked it up,” she added defiantly.

“That’s not all you taught her that you weren’t supposed to, is it?”

“No.”

“I’d like to hear about it, about Luz. Will you tell me?”

She turned and sat. “She was such a sad little thing, always weeping and talking in Spanish. Wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t talk English, wouldn’t take any comfort. I didn’t know what to do, until one day I took Jud’s truck to the library and borrowed a cassette and a book. Had to buy a cassette player too. Had to hide it from Jud. But, oh, you should have seen her sweet face when I put that tape on!” She wiped absently at her eyes. “A flood of words! What with the book and everything, I learned to say Hello and Eat this, and after an hour or two, she was eating pretty as you please and calling me Aba.”

“And you two talk Spanish to each other.”

“God gave her her own language and I don’t see anything wrong in having it spoken in this house.”

“Mrs.—Adeline, I’m not criticizing. Just the opposite. But there’s more, isn’t there?”

She twisted her wedding ring. “Math. She could add and subtract if she did it in Spanish, so I didn’t see the harm of showing her how in English. And you can’t get much done in the house if you don’t know how to multiply and divide. And then… Well, you’ve talked to her, she’s a curious little thing. Once she had the bit between her teeth she had to know more. So I bought some encyclopedias at a yard sale and I taught her, and after a while I started sneaking to the library for extra books when Jud had them both off swimming or suchlike. He doesn’t know. I thought it best.”

“How much of an obstacle is he likely to be?”

“Mostly I worried, before, about following the agreement we had with Miz Goulay. Jud’s stubborn about such things. A man’s word is his bond.” She gave me a complicit woman-to-woman smile that congealed suddenly: no doubt remembering I was nothing like a good Christian wife and mother.

“Perhaps it would be best for you to speak to him privately.”

“I can speak of it some,” she said slowly. “You’ll have to do the money talk.”

“Yes. But perhaps you could give me an idea of what he might think was fair.” I gathered the documents. “How much did Karp send you a month?”

“Five hundred dollars.”

According to his records, it had been four hundred. “And do you think that’s fair? Take a moment to think it through.”

“Six hundred?” she hazarded.

“Let’s begin with seven-fifty, and review the situation after three months.” By my estimate, they would need at least fifteen hundred a month to give Luz what I thought she needed, but for the Carpenters, especially Jud, that might be an immoral sum, easily confused with a temptation of Mammon.

“We could manage with that.” She got a determined look on her face. “There’s her food, and clothes, and things for her room, not to mention all the extra trouble of teaching her good English. It won’t be long before she’s a teen, eating us out of house and home, growing out of all her clothes. Then there’s the books…”

She was rehearsing her argument for Jud. I felt around under the table until I found the transmitter. It peeled off easily and dropped into my hand.

“… thousand and one other things a man doesn’t pay any attention to…”

Once they were used to the arrangement, I would buy items such as a television and computer and music system. I’d provide the money for private tuition so Luz could catch up on those subjects Adeline might not have covered. I’d pay to send her to interesting places on vacation, make—

All money and no love. The way my mother had been with me.

No. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t. I wasn’t Luz’s mother—she already had one, or at least someone who loved her.

I stood carefully. “You’ll talk to Jud tonight? Then I’ll take my leave. I’ll talk to my lawyer and get a preliminary agreement drafted. I’ll come back tomorrow. Afternoon.” I was sweating; the bug cut into my palm.

There was still the booster unit in the tub of flowers by the door, which would be easy enough to retrieve on my way out, and the transmitters upstairs.

“If I may, I’ll go up and use your facilities before I leave.”

I used both hands on the stair rail, and counted backwards from two thousand in sevens as I climbed. Pain is just a message.

In the Carpenters’ room, the back window was open. Faint voices—Button chattering, Jud answering, one short phrase from Luz, an acknowledgment from Jud—drifted up on the night air. The bug was exactly where I’d left it.

Luz’s room looked different without the books on the bedside table. Maybe the suitcase was still downstairs. My heart felt too big for my rib cage, and my lungs too small. I had to sit on the bed for a minute before I could lean forward and reach for the transmitter. When I stood, my face felt cold. The door seemed a million miles away.

I dragged myself to the bathroom, telling myself I did not have concussion, that if I could just drink some water, splash some on my face, I’d be all right, but when I got there my good leg started to fold under me, and I half fell, half sat on the toilet. I shivered, swallowed. I just needed a few minutes, and some water.

A child thundered up the stairs. The bathroom door slammed all the way open. Luz. She stared.

“I have to use the bathroom,” she said.

I didn’t move.

“What are you doing?”

“I was going to get some water,” I said. She looked at the sink, then at me. “My leg hurts.”

She absorbed that. “Would you like me to bring you some?”

“Yes. Please.”

She tipped the toothbrushes out of a glass, rinsed it, and filled it to the brim. She carried it from the sink with great deliberation. When I reached for it, she said, “Use both hands. If you spill it, it’ll make the floor slippery.”

I sipped. “Thank you.” My breathing steadied.

“What did you do to your leg? Did you fall down?”

“I hurt my knee.”

“Aba helps me if I hurt myself, she helps Mr. Carpenter, too. But most people don’t have an Aba. Most people have a mom.”

“Mine is a long, long way away.”

She nodded, unsurprised. “What about your brother?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Button’s not really my brother. Mr. Carpenter isn’t really my daddy, either. My daddy’s dead.”

A child skipping along the pavement, holding my hand on one side, Karp’s on the other. “Mine too.”

She looked worried. “Then who’s going to kiss you better?”

The bathroom walls wavered. A little hand took the glass from mine.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “I can do it. See?” She kissed my cheek, light as a cricket. “There. All better. Only I hope it works. I don’t think you’re supposed to be older than me.”

Her tenderness was unbearable. She was nine years old. She knew how to kiss me better: a simple thing, but one I could never have taught her. And I had come here to save her.

“Aud? I have to go to the bathroom now.”

“Yes,” I said, “of course,” and hauled myself to my feet.

She closed the door behind me.

On the way down the stairs, climbing into the truck, putting the engine in gear, I kept feeling that cricket kiss on my cheek.

Back in the park, I managed to get out of the truck and into the trailer. The dizziness was passing; probably more long-delayed shock than concussion. I stripped, and probed at my ribs cautiously. There was no way to be sure without an X ray but I didn’t think anything was broken. I strapped myself up as well as I could, took more ibuprofen and some Vicodin—not much left—and forced down an apple, half a can of tuna, and two glasses of water. I propped myself on the couch with a bag of ice on either side of my knee. It hurt too much to lie down.

I dozed for a while.

When I woke, I felt shaky, but I could think. I forced myself to my feet, found a flashlight. My phone was in the truck. Might as well take a look at the hitch while I was out there.

The lever that unclamped the tongue had snapped off. Not dangerous, just a nuisance: I’d have to drag the trailer behind me for the rest of my stay in Arkansas because getting the hitch off would destroy it.

Back inside, I called Bette’s emergency number. It was an hour later in Atlanta, and she usually retired before nine, but she answered on the third ring and didn’t ask questions, just let me outline what I needed. I spelled out the exact terms: money, school attendance, home access to information, penalty for breaking the agreement. “Please e-mail me a draft as soon as you can.”

“Shouldn’t take long. Basically we’re talking about customizing a general child custody agreement. Do you want any visitation rights—her coming to you, you going to her? Vacations, weekends?”

I touched my cheek.

“Aud? Hello?”

When I had gone back to Norway as a child, speaking English with more fluency than Norwegian, my great-aunt Hjordis gave me books and helped me with the words I didn’t understand. When my mother was busy and my father out of town, she had wrapped me in a warm coat, taken me by the mittened hand, and walked with me through the city, pointing out the different buildings, telling me their history, funny stories about people who had lived there that weren’t written on the plaques or in books. She had helped me belong.

“Are you still there? Hello? Goddamn these cellular—”

“Sorry, Bette. Yes. Visitation rights. I don’t know yet. Can you keep the door open?”

“I could write a general clause about unsupervised access, to be mutually determined at some unspecified later date, permission not to be unreasonably withheld, etc. etc. Would that suit?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll get right on it.” She hung up.

Bette loved the unusual, the unexpected. She loved her work. I could see her pulling on her robe, walking barefoot down the carpeted hallway to her home office, sitting down, rubbing her hands. I’d have the draft within the hour.

There were other things to do, but I felt restless and unsettled, as though my skin didn’t fit. I managed half a bottle of beer and no food at all. Towards midnight I left the trailer and stood in the dark under the trees.

The afternoon sky above the Carpenters’ house was an ominous yellow gray and the air smelled metallic. If the temperature fell a few more degrees it would snow. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. I transferred the briefcase to my left hand and knocked. Adeline answered the door in a daffodil yellow apron, wiping flour from her hands. Julia and I had eaten homemade food once. It was at Aunt Hjordis’s house in Oslo. “A fine morning,” she said. Her faded blue eyes looked ten years younger. “Jud will be just a while.” She glanced at the briefcase.

“How long a while?”

“Oh, not long. An hour? He’s just… well, you know how he is. He’s just running through things in his mind, getting it all to hand, so to speak.” She looked past me. “I see you’ve brought that trailer again.”

“The hitch is broken.”

“Yes, well. Still, it’s a piece of good fortune. Button has been talking about nothing else since yesterday. Jud took them up to Conway for swimming first thing but the boy just won’t be distracted. He’d dearly love to see inside. I’ll send them out to you, shall I?” She smiled brightly, back to the Kind Christian Lady mode of getting her own way.

Aud rhymes with cowed.

“Luz!” Adeline called as she headed back into the house, “Button! Miz Thomas is here, and she says you can play in her trailer!”

I had barely dropped the briefcase on one of the recliners before Button was picking up the grapefruit knife I’d left in the drainer that morning. I took it away from him and asked Luz to sit for a moment while I made sure there was nothing else sharp lying within reach. She seemed fascinated by the luxury of the leather recliners; as I put away a bottle opener, I saw her furtively stroking the leather of her shoes and then the chairs, as if wondering how both could be the skin of an animal. She eyed the briefcase. My knee was less swollen today, but the pain was worse, as was the pain in my ribs. Stretching up to the higher cupboards hurt.

Eventually everything harmful was out of reach. Button found a paper clip and became absorbed in its shape, so I left him to it. I moved the briefcase from the chair opposite Luz and sat. My heart was beating faster than it should have been, and my mouth was dry. Perhaps it was a blood sugar problem.

“Is your knee better?” she said.

“Yes, thank you. The, ah, the kiss worked. For my knee.”

She nodded solemnly. “Aba always puts a Band-Aid on mine.”

“Good,” I said. Gentian violet. That’s what Hjordis had used on my cuts and scrapes.

I looked at Luz, she looked at me. She had seen me bludgeon two adults half to death with a gun. I had no idea how to begin, or even what I wanted to begin.

“How are you?” I said.

She shrugged. Her eyes were clear, no sign of a sleepless night, but it would come: the nightmares, the sweating, the fear that nothing around you is safe. Payment always came due.

“If you have bad dreams, you can talk to me. If you want.”

She shrugged again. I looked around the trailer. Maybe my mother hadn’t known what to do with a little girl, either.

“Would you like to see my computer?”

She didn’t say no, so I got out the laptop. The case was soft black leather. While I booted up and acted busy with screen and keyboard, she pulled the case onto her lap and stroked it with the back of her hand.

I swiveled the whole thing around on my knee so she could see the SimCity screen. “This is a game where you can build your own city.”

She gave me an uncertain look.

“Here,” I said. “Let’s put it back in the case, keep it safe while we play.” She handed over the case unwillingly, but once the laptop was snugged in place with the screen still up, I put it back on her lap, and now she paid attention. I couldn’t kneel, so I squatted next to her to type. Her hair smelled faintly of chlorine. “See, I can make factories, and parks, and farms.”

“Can you make churches?”

“Yes,” I lied, and put in a hotel.

“It doesn’t look like a church.”

“No,” I agreed. “It’s not a very good program.”

“Program,” she repeated under her breath.

“We could see if we can draw a better church.” She looked around, as if expecting crayons and paper to appear from thin air. “No, look, here.” I pulled up Photoshop. “This, here, works like a paintbrush, and this a bit like a spray can.” I sketched an outline of a cathedral. It looked like a derelict shed. She smiled politely. I erased it. “Or we could borrow someone else’s picture. From the web.” For once the connection worked first time. I went to the Library of Congress image database. And then I knew exactly what I wanted.

I worked quickly. It didn’t take long. “There,” I said, and sat back. It was the Mexico City cathedral. She was riveted. “If you like, we can copy that over, use the image, the picture, for cathedrals in the game.”

She nodded mutely. I kept a small window open in the top left of the screen for her to look at while I got back to SimCity.

“Now, see, we paste this into here, and look, there it is.” A tiny cathedral in the middle of downtown SimCity.

“Not there. Here,” she pointed to a park. Quick look to see what Button was up to. He had abandoned the paper clip and was examining the hinge on a cabinet door. “It should go there, on this side. And there should be government edificios on the other side.”

Just like Mexico City, where the Catholic cathedral, built on the ruins of an Aztec temple, faced government buildings across a huge plaza. Maybe one day I’d tell her about Montezuma’s palace.

“You do it,” I said. I showed her how to work the touch pad. Her fingers weren’t used to machine ways, but after a while she got the hang of it. She moved the cathedral.

Button was trying to dismantle the stove, but I had disconnected the propane before leaving North Carolina, so I didn’t worry.

“How do I make buildings?”

“You have to pay for them.” I showed her how, and she set to work with a curiously bland face, no frowns of concentration or lip caught in her teeth.

Button started in on the fridge. I distracted him with the remote for the TV, and while he sat, fascinated with the changing pictures, Luz played god, or at least mayor.

“What are taxes?” she asked after a while.

I thought for a minute. “The government’s tithe.”

“Oh.” Ten minutes’ silence while she put in too many parks, stroked the leather carrying case absently, hummed tonelessly under her breath, checked once or twice to make sure Button was still amused by his own toy, and finally turned to me for help. “There’s no money left.”

“You’ll have to demolish some of those parks.”

She frowned. “Parks are nice.”

“Yes. But there’s no point having them if everyone’s leaving.”

Fidget. Check on Button again. Sideways look. I just waited. “So what should I do?”

“Hard choice. Demolish the parks or have an empty city.” I knew which I’d choose.

“No.”

“They’re your only choices.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Well then, you’ll have to cheat.”

Consternation. Cheating was probably not much encouraged by the Plaume City Church of Christ congregation. Aud as devil’s advocate.

“You don’t like that idea?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Cheating’s bad.”

“Who says?”

“God.”

“Where does it say that in the Bible?”

Thoughtful look.

“Is there a commandment against it?”

She ran through the commandments in her head. “Thou shalt not bear false witness?”

“You don’t actually have to lie. You just sort of step around what everyone expects. It depends, of course, on what you want from the game.”

“People and parks.”

“Yes, but do the ends justify the means?” Incomprehension. How old did children have to be before you could talk to them as real human beings? I tried again. “Sometimes people play this game to test how clever they are: to see how many people and parks they can make without cheating. And sometimes people use it to just play, to have fun, not as any kind of test: just to build things, to see how they look.” All about perspective.

“People and parks,” she said again.

“Then watch.” I tapped in call cousin vinnie. “Now, you see that window—that man offering free money if you’ll just sign his petition?” She nodded. “If you go ahead and take that money, it’s yours, no strings attached.”

“For nothing?” Not so much a question as an expression of skepticism.

“Yes and no. Now watch, see what happens if you don’t take the money and type in this extra code.”

I entered zyxwvu.

“Oh!” she said as the beautiful SimCity castle appeared.

“That boosts land prices, which—”

The trailer filled with the blatting of a sell-sell-sell commercial for cheap furniture: Button had discovered the volume control. I had to get up to turn it down manually. I swapped to a channel with strangely colored cartoon characters running about doing impossible things, and recorded three minutes of it. Then I showed him how to play back: freeze frame, slow motion forwards, backwards, jump back to real time. He loved that, making the characters go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. He giggled: a strange, grown-up sound.

Luz was looking fixedly at the screen again. “What’s that?” She pointed to a farm on the outside of her city.

“Ah. Crop circles.”

Before I had to try explain to a nine-year-old Christian fundamentalist some computer geek’s in joke about alien visitors and crop circles, Adeline knocked on the trailer wall and called, “Miz Thomas? If you’d send the children out, then step into the house when convenient, I’d be grateful.”

Hjordis’s house in Oslo is filled in the afternoons with sunlight. In the evenings and during winter, she burns a score of candles to soften and lift the dark that flattens even the best artificial light. Her living room feels alive; it seems to dance. By contrast the Carpenters’ front room, with its thick brown curtains, umber wool rug, and heavy furniture, felt stiff and formal, but Hjordis would have understood immediately the ritual aspects of the gathering: to the right of the fireplace, Jud sat in a wing-backed chair turned slightly to face the upholstered sofa, where I sat in a carefully nonconfrontational pose, briefcase tucked out of sight. Adeline’s chair faced Jud’s across the fire, turned to give him all her support.

Jud wore his Sunday best for a second day in a row. I don’t know what Adeline had told him about me and my reasons for wanting to give them money every month, but he treated me as though I were the nineteenth-century son of his employer, come to ask for the hand of his daughter in marriage. He was not in a position to say no, but the forms must be observed.

He cleared his throat. “Miz Thomas,” then stopped. I could feel Adeline willing him on. “Be obliged if you would listen.” I nodded. He took a handwritten document from his inside breast pocket and stood, and began to read, as though it were a church lesson: seven hundred and fifty dollars a month, payable to J. Carpenter, in advance, on the first of every month; a day school to be agreed upon, Luz to attend, extra items such as uniforms and school equipment to be paid for by me; Luz to be kept clean, well fed and clothed, and happy, “loved as best we’re able, as if she were family.” Luz’s legal documents to be kept by my lawyer, and a letter received from said lawyer confirming that fact. Luz to remain with the Carpenters while she was a minor. If my payments were more than thirty days late, the Carpenters were to receive the legal documents, and the agreement was rendered void. If they broke the agreement, they would surrender Luz.

He sat down, still holding the paper in both hands.

In my briefcase I had a sheaf of crisp photocopies and printouts, and Bette’s impregnable legal draft. None mentioned love or family or happiness.

“May I see the paper?” I said.

He stood, handed it to me, sat.

There were several blank spaces I was obviously meant to complete, and a place to sign at the bottom. Under name, “Aud Thomas” had already been filled in. It was a feminine hand, Adeline’s, though she was acting as if she had nothing to do with the proceedings, resolutely refusing to catch my eye when I looked at her. There was nothing about visitation rights, or lack of them.

“I agree with all these terms,” I said. He took a pen from his pocket, handed it to me. It was an old transparent Bic ballpoint. “However, before I sign, I’d like to discuss one more matter.” Adeline shifted but said nothing. Jud gestured for me to continue. “Your reassurance that I’m keeping my side of the bargain will come every month, with the money, but we haven’t talked about my reassurance. Mr. Karp received written reports, but I would prefer a more personal arrangement. I’d like to talk to Luz myself every now and again, in person or by phone.”

Adeline stared at her tightly clasped hands.

“You can’t take her from this house,” Jud said.

“Certainly not from the neighborhood,” I said. Not until she was older.

After a long pause, he nodded. His word is his bond, Adeline had said. I nodded back. I filled in the name of my lawyer, along with her address and phone number, signed, and returned the paper to him.

He put his signature under mine. He hesitated a moment, then stood and offered me his hand. I stood, too, and we shook. He seemed momentarily confused as his hard, dry palm encountered mine.

I sat, opened the briefcase, and took out the papers. I separated Bette’s draft, put it back in the case, and tapped the rest into a tidy pile. “These are copies of Luz’s documentation. Birth certificate, adoption, passport, and so on. You’ll need them to register her at school.” I laid them next to me on the sofa. “There’s also the matter of the first payment. In future months, of course, the funds can be wired directly to your account—though I will need the number of that account.” Adeline was trying to communicate something to Jud with her expression. “I have enough cash with me to cover the first payment, but as your cash flow has been interrupted recently you might well prefer to begin with a larger sum, say, three months’ worth. I could get that to you by tomorrow morning.” Hopefully he would prefer nice crisp greenbacks to a personal check, which, with all its personal information, was out of the question.

He cleared his throat. “Appears acceptable.” More frantic expression from Adeline. “The three-month sum. One month’s money now.” Adeline relaxed. “Rest tomorrow.”

I stood, he followed suit, and I counted out seven hundred-dollar bills, two twenties, and a ten—slowly, so he could watch, and not have to appear untrusting by counting it afterwards. I handed him the stack. He seemed unsure what to do with it. Adeline rose and crossed to his side.

“The coffee will be ready about now. Should I take that to the accounts, then fetch it here for you while you finish up with Miz Thomas?” Jud handed her the money gratefully. She scooped the photocopies from the sofa. “Now you two sit. I’ll be but a moment.”

So we had to sit. Jud laid his hands on his knees, nodded at me, as solemnly as if we were sitting on pews.

The silence was complete. No ticking of a clock on the mantel. “Mrs. Carpenter tells me the crop wasn’t too good this year,” I said.

“Been worse.”

“Yes,” I said. “Still, I’m sorry for it. Perhaps next year will be better.”

“Up to the good Lord.”

“As is everything.” I longed for the scent of rain-wet North Carolina dirt, of leaves slowly mulching beneath sturdy trunks. Or perhaps it would be snowing up there already. “But as my father used to say, God helps those who help themselves. And I think—”

Adeline came in with the coffee: not mugs this time but white china cups and matching saucers, decorated with tiny red roses, and a silver-plate set of pot, creamer, and sugar bowl. The teaspoons did not match. She poured, handed out the cups carefully. Once everyone was settled again, I went on.

“Mrs. Carpenter, I was just about to say to your husband that I think Luz is going to need your help. Yesterday was a very hard day. For you and Mr. Carpenter, yes, and Button, but especially for Luz.”

“Yes,” Adeline said, “but she does seem to have come through it nicely. She’s a hardy little thing.”

“She is,” I said. Jud turned his sticky eyes to mine. “But I think in a little while—maybe a few days, maybe as long as a few weeks or even months—she won’t be so fine.”

“Nightmares,” he said. “Had them when she first come.”

“Miz Thomas, there aren’t so many childish fears that a good hugging and a bit of prayer can’t fix.”

“Her fears aren’t so childish. A lot happened yesterday that she won’t have had time to tell you about yet.” I looked from her to Jud. “When she’s afraid, let her tell you what she’s afraid of. And don’t tell her it can’t happen because some of the things that will be in her nightmares have happened.” I would probably star in a few of those nightmares.

“They won’t happen again,” Jud said with certainty.

Adeline shook her head vehemently. “Not while there’s breath in our bodies.”

“No.” I sipped my coffee. “It might help, when she’s scared, to tell her that she’s very brave. She was very brave—very resourceful. There aren’t many children her age who would try to defend themselves against an adult.”

“Brother Jerry,” Jud said, nodding.

“Luz mentioned a Brother Jerry yesterday,” I said. “Apparently he told her that god works in mysterious ways.”

“Brother Jerry was in the army or the marines or some such—” Adeline began.

“Navy SEAL,” Jud said. “Doesn’t much hold with the notion of turning the other cheek. Mite troubling to begin with.”

After a startled pause, Adeline continued. “As my husband says, the elders didn’t share Brother Jerry’s point of view at first, but then after a lot of soul-searching, it was decided that Brother Jerry might have a point. Man, after all, only has two cheeks, and once you’ve turned both of them, it might be reasonable to fight back. So since September, the church has been sponsoring a self-defense class for the children. They seem to like it. I went to the old back field to watch once, lots of healthy yelling and kicking. Brother Jerry does nothing but good for those youngsters.”

“When he doesn’t try to teach scripture,” Jud said.

“Brother Jerry seems to believe that ‘Do unto others …’ means do unto others before they can do unto you,” Adeline explained. “More coffee?”

Early morning frost smells different in Arkansas: like cold straw. With Adeline’s permission, I invited the children to eat breakfast with me in the trailer before I left.

They arrived, brushed and scrubbed to within an inch of their lives. Luz seemed different. Not exactly hostile, but wary. When they were seated, I put the kedgeree on the table. She sniffed at her plate suspiciously.

“What is it?”

“Breakfast.” She stared at me, I stared back. “It’s kedgeree. Smoked fish and rice all mixed together,” and boiled egg and nutmeg, but she didn’t need to know that.

“Fish,” she said. Button was already tucking into his. She shook her head.

“Try it.”

She put a tiny amount on her fork and ate it. “It doesn’t taste like fish.”

It certainly didn’t taste like fish sticks. “That’s because it’s smoked. Try some more.” She did, a bigger portion this time. Button munched happily. Luz took another forkful.

When I put three mugs of Irish breakfast tea on the table, Luz looked but was too proud to ask. I let her suffer. It’s important to learn that if you want information you have to ask for it. I turned back to the bowl on the kitchen counter. I had made a fruit salad, but I could see how that would be received. I filled a plate for myself and sat down.

This time she couldn’t resist. “What’s all that?”

“This is papaya, this is litchi.” She watched each spoonful, from my plate to my mouth and back. “Do you want some?” She shook her head. “There’s also apple, and orange, and banana.”

“Banana!” said Button.

“Would you like some banana?”

“Banana!”

Luz smiled at him indulgently. “He likes banana.”

I got up again and chopped some banana into chunks and slid the plate in front of Button.

“Have you ever seen papaya before?”

She shook her head.

“You could look it up in your encyclopedia. But that wouldn’t tell you how it tastes.” I got up again and filled a small glass plate with fruit salad, which I put next to her bowl. “Just in case you want to try a bit.”

Button took a piece of banana in one hand and squashed it with the other, slowly, almost experimentally, and when it was mashed to pulp, he examined it with great deliberation and then licked it off. “Banana,” he decided, and calmly put another piece in his mouth. He chewed and nodded. “Banana.”

“Yes,” I said. “It tastes the same no matter what shape it is.” Luz gave me that birdlike look from one eye, then the other. I sipped my tea and applied myself to the fruit salad.

When everyone had eaten as much as they were going to, I stood to clear the table. Luz automatically picked up some dishes. “Thank you. I’ll do the rest.”

“Thank you for the breakfast it was very nice,” she said in one breath. “Please may we be excused?”

“No. I have a present for you, and for Button.”

“A present?” More wary than excited.

I had no idea what she was thinking. “Yes.” She perched on a recliner while I got the presents. The TV blared and chopped from one station to another: Button had found the remote again.

I’d bought four of the boxes in Little Rock yesterday morning; one, wrapped in heavy silver paper, I’d had shipped from San Francisco via Delta DASH at a cost that would have made Adeline pass out. One large box, two medium, and two small.

“This big one for Button first,” I said.

Luz and I watched while he ripped his open and pulled forth a scale model of a fire engine, with working ladder, unspoolable hose, and flashing light. “This,” I said, pointing to the tiny manual pump, “will actually suck up water and squirt it out here.” He seemed not to hear me, but I was beginning to suspect that Button heard and understood a lot more than I had at first thought. He touched everything methodically, and found that all the firefighters came off, too. It would keep him happy for a while.

I passed her a medium box. “This one’s for you.”

Although she opened the wrapping carefully along the seams, her chest was beginning to rise and fall more quickly. She lifted the lid. It was a cell phone and charger. “Oh,” she said, in the same tone she’d said “Fish.”

“This is a serious present, Luz.”

“It’s a phone. A funny phone.”

“Yes. But there’s something else in the box.”

She lifted out the phone and charger, and when she saw what lay beneath, her eyes positively glistened. A beautiful calfskin pouch, in natural brown, and a belt to go with it.

“It’s to hold the phone. You slide the belt through those slits at the back, and put the phone…” But she was already threading everything together, sliding the belt around the waist of her corduroys, closing and snapping open the pouch with an almost voluptuous satisfaction. “Don’t forget the phone.”

I showed her how to slide the battery in until it clicked, how to put the phone in the charger. She listened with half an ear while running her fingers back and forth on the smooth belt and kicking idly at the recliner.

“Pay attention. I want you to carry it with you everywhere.” I handed it to her.

“Even when I go swimming?”

“Not in the water, no. But everywhere else. Put it in the pouch.”

She slid it in, appeared to be delighted with the fit.

“And there’s a present that goes with it.” I gave her one of the small boxes.

She opened it and lifted out a thick metal bangle. She weighed it expertly on her palm and frowned at its heft. “Is it silver?”

“No. Look on the inside.”

“There’s some numbers.”

“They are secret numbers, just for you and me. Not even for Aba.” I would just have to hope. “That’s my cell phone number.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and flipped it open, turned it on, and showed her. “I carry it everywhere.” Or I would from now on. It beeped: three missed calls and one voice message. All from Dornan. Her wary look was back. Dornan could wait. “I want you to keep that bangle on your wrist, and the phone at your belt or in your pocket, and I want you to call me anytime you need me.”

“So you won’t get lonely,” she said.

“Yes. Yes, that’s right.” I recovered myself. “You can call me in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning, anytime, I won’t get—I’d like it.”

She was watching Button with his toy.

“Luz?”

“Is that why you want to be my tía, so you won’t be lonely?”

“Tía?”

“Aba says you’re going to be my auntie.”

“I—Ah, well—”

“Are you Button’s tía, too?” She still wasn’t looking at me. “I’ve never had an auntie before.”

And then I understood: she was afraid. For her, gaining a relative had always led to terrible change.

“I have an aunt,” I said. “Her name is Hjordis. She talks to me on the phone and sometimes buys me presents. That’s what aunts do.”

“She didn’t take you away, even when she was lonely?”

“Never.” I took her chin in my hand, turned her head so she was looking at me. “Luz, I’m going home today but you’ll stay here. A few things will be different—you’ll go to school, a nice school where you’ll make friends—but every day you’ll come home to Aba and Mr. Carpenter and Button. No one is ever going to take you away. I might talk to you on the phone sometimes, when… when I wish there was someone to kiss me better, and you can call me. If you don’t know what a word means, or if you get lost, or you think something Aba or Mr. Carpenter wants you to do is wrong, call that number. I’ll always answer and I’ll always listen. That’s what aunts do. Do you understand?”

She nodded, eyes enormous.

“Now I want you to take out the phone and learn how to use it.”

She put the bangle on the carpet and took the phone out of its pouch. It was as big as her nine-year-old hand.

“Open it up. That little button there, the round one, turns it on, you have to press that first. Then you dial the number.” She nodded. “Do it now. Dial my number.”

She read the number from the bangle, dialed it. “It’s not ringing.”

“When you dial the number, you have to press Send, the green one.” My phone shrilled. I flipped it open, put it to my ear. Luz lifted hers.

She blushed, hesitated. “Aud,” she said.

“Anytime,” I said into the phone, then closed it up. “You end the call by pressing that button, the red one.”

She pushed the button solemnly, put the phone back in its soft leather pouch, and picked up the bangle again. The fear seemed to be gone. “There’s two numbers.”

“The other one is my lawyer. If ever I don’t answer, if my phone breaks or something”—if I’m lying dead in a park with my throat cut—“you can call her and leave a message. She’s very nice. Keep the bangle safe, wear that all the time, even in the pool if you want. It’s white gold.”

Her expression didn’t change but she slid the bangle onto her left wrist and admired it for a while.

I pushed the phone box over to her. “There’s an instruction book in there. It’s a bit hard to figure out, but eventually you’ll be able to program those numbers into the phone for speed dial.”

She mouthed speed dial to herself and looked determined. I filed that response away for future use. While she experimented with the pouch, sliding it back and forth until she found the most comfortable position, I opened the other small box.

“And this one’s for you, Button.”

“Button.” Luz tapped him on the hand until he looked up from his mostly dismantled fire engine. “Another present.”

I fastened the stainless steel ID bracelet around his right wrist. He looked at it, took it off, put it back on again, then went back to his engine.

“That has his name and address and phone number on it,” I said, and Luz nodded. She had her eyes on the last box, the silver one. “And this is a special present. I hope you like it.”

It was heavy for a nine-year-old, but she didn’t ask for help so I didn’t offer it. After a bit of a struggle—she refused to tear the paper—she had it unwrapped. She folded the paper with great care: putting off disappointment as long as possible. Eventually she contemplated the hinged wooden box.

“There’s a latch at the side,” I said.

She looked at me, looked at the box. I nodded. She lifted the lid. It opened like a book. Nested on green velvet were seven volumes bound in brown leather, each stamped in gold on the spine with the name C. S. Lewis and the title.

“For when you have to take the others back to the library,” I said. She was hardly breathing. “Take one out.”

“Which one?”

“Your favorite.”

“But I haven’t read them all.”

“Then my favorite, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

She lifted it reverently. Traced the lettering on the cover, turned it over. Opened it. Rubbed the maroon silk bookmark between her fingers, touched the gold-edged pages.

“There are illustrations,” I said.

She turned a few pages, studied the first picture. Turned another page and, two minutes later, another. She was reading.

I opened my phone quietly, dialed, and listened to Dornan’s message. “Aud? What’s happening? You said you’d call. Turn your bloody phone on! Call me.” He sounded angry and anxious, but not as though anything bad had happened. I closed the phone.

Luz read on, head bent. Her scalp gleamed at the part, very white, very vulnerable. So young. So much she didn’t know.

“Luz.” She looked up. The open inquiry in her toffee-colored eyes stopped me cold.

I cleared my throat. “When you’ve read them all, I want you to call me, tell me what you think. Which one’s your favorite. Will you do that?”

She nodded. Her eyes flicked back to the page for a moment. I leaned down so she had to focus on me.

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

They all stood in front of the house to wave me goodbye. Jud stood as though in church. Button moved restlessly, head turning this way and that. Adeline had one arm tight around his shoulders but her eyes rested on Luz. Mine, her gaze said, My girl. Lucky woman: to believe she’d lost her girl and to then get her back. She had never even said thank you.

Driving across the Mississippi, I was nearly blinded by the sun glinting off the buildings in downtown Memphis. Once on the other side, I hit drive-time traffic, so I found a strip mall with big parking lots, parked the rig, and went into a bar. It was small and long, just a dark oily bar down one side and a jukebox, currently silent, at the back, opposite the toilets. I took a seat on a stool with ripped red vinyl and asked the thin, balding bartender what they had in the way of imported beer on draft, which turned out to be Bass ale, chilled until flat and practically frozen when it should have been room temperature and aromatic.

At some point Luz would wonder who I was and why I paid for everything. I’d seen how stubborn she was; one day I might have to give her some answers.

I sipped my beer.

My mother had never given me any answers. Then again, I hadn’t asked her any questions, once I understood that the answers wouldn’t come from the place I wanted them to. Asking questions made you vulnerable. But I wasn’t Luz’s mother. I was a banker with the honorary title of aunt.

A woman with dyed black hair slid onto the stool next to me. “Fucking kids,” she said. “Fuckers took all my money, said they wanted some food for a change. Food my ass. Drugs. Only in seventh and eighth grade and already probably smoking and snorting and sticking it in their arm. Yo, Jim Beam here, Barney! Fuckers.” She turned to me. “You got kids?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What kind of answer is that? Do you got kids or don’t you?”

“Beats me.” My phone rang. “That’s probably her now.” But it was Dornan.

“Aud, where are you?”

“In a nasty little bar in Memphis drinking nasty beer.”

“Do you have Tammy with you?”

“No.”

“Only I’m here, in the clearing—”

“You were supposed to stay in Atlanta.”

“She didn’t call. You didn’t call. So I came out here, and the trailer’s gone, and there’s no sign of Tammy.”

“I see.”

“You see? What do you mean, you see? Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Christ. So she’s done another disappearing act?”

“She was fine when I saw her a few days ago.”

“If that bloody Karp—”

“She was fine. And Geordie Karp isn’t in any position to do anything anymore. She might only be gone for a few hours.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“What are you doing in Memphis?” I didn’t respond. “I’ll see you up at the cabin day after tomorrow then?”

“Yes.” He hung up.

“Yours sounds bad,” the woman with the Jim Beam said. “Fuckers. Here’s to kids.” We clinked glasses, I drained my beer, and left.

I was forty miles outside of Memphis when my phone rang again. I answered it cautiously.

“Hello?”

“Aud? Eddie.” The muscles in my belly went rigid. “The story has taken an amusing turn. In just the last week, apparently, our twin avenging angels have been spotted in two other states outside—”

This is what happened when you walked away from your armor. All it took was one phone call.

“—sylvania. It seems—”

“Where?”

“Two incidents in West Virginia and one in Pennsylvania. Is this not a very good line? Should I call you back?”

“No. I’m sorry. Go on.”

“It seems that the credulous readers have taken our entirely imaginary twin angels to heart. Apparently they have stricken a wife beater with terminal cancer and terrified the life half out of three seventh-grade bullies in the schoolyard at Chester Junior High, both up near Clarksburg. And in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, they appeared in the middle of the road and made a truck run off the pavement, killing the driver and one passenger. Another passenger survived. The two victims, according to the surviving witness—who, incidentally, on seeing the terrible twins glowing with wrath, has changed his evil ways forever—ran a dogfighting ring that local authorities have been trying to shut—”

West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Not Arkansas. Not Tennessee.

“—Post has substituted color paintings of the angel twins for last issue’s quick pencil sketches. Offhand I’d say that they intend to play this one for a while.”

“No police comment?”

“Oh, this story has moved way beyond the realm of such mundane concerns. Knowing of your interest, however, I did take the liberty of contacting the NYPD and asking for a quote on their progress with the Karp assault.”

“And?”

“ ‘No progress at this time.’ They made some noise about being happy to talk to any member of the public who wants to come forward with evidence, from any state, but they didn’t offer me an 800 number.”

“They’ve stopped looking, then.”

“I would agree. Unless, of course, a miracle happens.” He giggled at his own wit. “Oh, and Karp? They found some family. Cousins, I believe. The Post describes them as ‘estranged.’ They say, and I quote, ‘If his insurance won’t pay, turn him off. He’s not our problem.’ ”

I drove through the night.

An angel and aunt. Banker and devil’s advocate. Aud rhymes with crowd. My name is Legion.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Powdery snow dusted the road up the mountain but it was thin and would probably melt off by midafternoon. I would have been able to get the trailer up, after all. Tracks of two different vehicles striped the snow, one set very fresh.

Dornan’s Isuzu stood in the clearing, and thin gray smoke drifted from the cabin chimney. When I climbed down from the cab, my breath steamed, even though it was after midday, and the carrier bags I held in each hand crackled in the cold. The trees stood gaunt and bare against a gray sky streaked with blue. Winter had been late in coming this year, very late, but it had finally arrived.

My boots crunched on the frozen turf, and when I reached the cabin I paused to tap my heels on the stoop to knock away snow, making a mental note to buy a real doormat, before I opened the door.

Dornan sat on his heels by the hearth, poking at the logs in the stove. He spoke without looking up. “It’s different, trying to make a fire inside something.”

“You seem to be doing well enough.” I put down my bags, pulled off my jacket, and hung it on the banister. His lay over the couch in front of the fireplace.

He looked up. “Your face. And you’re limping.”

“Superficial. It’ll heal. I’ll make some tea.” He nodded, more to himself than me.

I carried the bags to the kitchen, filled a kettle, and brought it out to put on the stove. It would be a while. Back in the kitchen, I busied myself with pot and mugs, milk, sugar for Dornan, and the shortbread biscuits I’d bought in Asheville. I brought everything on a tray which I put on the hearth, and then I sat on the couch and Dornan stayed on the floor, and we watched the flames in silence, waiting for the kettle, and the tea, before he said what he had come to say.

The flames grew and rubbed like cats against the cold iron, which ticked and creaked as it expanded. After a few minutes, I heard the first rumble of water warming. I ate a piece of shortbread. It dissolved, rich and buttery, on my tongue.

At the first quavering whistle, I lifted the kettle from the stove using the front of my sweater as an oven mitt, and poured the water and curling steam into the pot. Heavier steam curled back out and I sniffed it. Aromatic.

“You always do that.”

“I know.”

I stirred deliberately, put the lid on the pot, and waited. After three minutes, I poured. Perfect color, like dark oak. I handed a mug to Dornan. He stood, added sugar, and sat again, cross-legged, facing me. His face was tired, but very still. When the worst has happened, there is a certain peace for a while.

“She came back, and now she’s gone again. She told me some of it.” He tasted his tea, added more sugar, stirred, sipped again, and added, “I’m glad you hurt him.”

I nodded but my heart squeezed. Annie had said almost the same thing while Julia lay fighting for her life: I’m glad you killed them.

Dornan stared at his tea. “Now we’ve both lost them.”

There didn’t seem much more to say.

After a while, I made more tea and Dornan added more wood to the stove. The cabin grew warm. The sun managed to break through the cloud and stream through the front windows. I watched the flickering flames and thought of nothing in particular. Eventually Dornan stirred.

“The forecast is for snow tonight, and I have to be in Atlanta by midmorning. I should start back now.”

“Dornan—”

“No. I’ll be all right. The sun won’t be down for another two hours and I’ll be safely onto the interstate by then.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“I know.” He smiled sadly. “But I don’t want to hear anything else. She’s gone. She said she’s sorry, that she always liked me, but that she should never have agreed to marry me in the first place.” He stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled something out. He opened his hand: Tammy’s engagement ring.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. I know, that’s not what you meant, either.” He stood, reached for his jacket. “I just stayed to tell you. And to thank you. For everything. For finding her and bringing her back, in more ways than one.”

He pulled on his jacket, a cheerful magenta-and-black waterproof, probably picked for him by Tammy, and moved towards the door. I put down my mug and followed him. When he put his hand on the latch, he smiled again. “We hung a good door, didn’t we?”

“We did.” He didn’t move. “I can show you my workshop, if you like, when I get back to Atlanta.”

“You’re coming back then?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Soon. Very soon. A day or two.”

“Good. Being out here alone is not good for a person. Grief, I find, is…” He shook his head. “Listen to me, talking as though I know it all.” He laughed shakily. “I thought it would be easier this time.” He looked so small and wounded in his bright jacket that I opened my arms and pulled him in. He wrapped his hands over my hips, leaned his forehead on my breastbone, and wept. He smelled of woodsmoke and tea.

Eventually he stopped. He tried to wipe his face on his jacket sleeve. I brought him a box of tissues. “As you said, every modern convenience, even in the middle of nowhere.”

A smile tried to break through his grief, but unlike the sun, it failed. He mopped and snorted for a minute or two, but turned down my offer of more tea. “I really have to get back, to stay busy. At least for a while. No,” he said as he opened the door, “don’t come out with me. Stay where it’s warm. I’ll be seeing you in a day or two.” He stepped onto the stoop, then turned and took my hand. Either his was very warm, or mine cold. “Friends help. Don’t forget that.” He patted my hand, then walked with that quick step of his over to his Isuzu, opened the door, slid in, turned on the engine and lights, and pulled away.

I carried the rest of my things from the truck—a few clothes, two folders of documents, some toiletries—to the cabin and took them upstairs. The bed was stripped, everything neatly washed and folded. I sniffed the linens: clean, but no longer smelling of laundry soap. It had been at least three days, then.

The weather forecast was wrong; the snow did not come. A little before nine that night I bundled up in jacket, hat, and gloves and went outside to stand under the cold magic of stars and listen to the huge attentiveness of dark. I stood for a long time.

An owl flew across the moon and from half a mile away the sound of a Subaru engine drifted up the mountain. It grew louder, and five minutes later Tammy pulled into the clearing.

When she climbed out of the car, I saw the difference, the sleekness, her buttocks ripe as mangoes, her arms and legs plump and muscled.

“What are you doing standing out here in the cold?”

“Looking at the stars. Thinking of Thomas Wolfe’s description of the night.”

“Oh. Right. Where’s the trailer?”

“In storage in Asheville. I thought there would be snow and I wouldn’t be able to get it up the track.”

We went inside. I lit two lamps, then sat on the couch. Tammy went straight to the stove and opened it so she could rub her hands in front of the naked flames. “Forgot my gloves. I forgot to buy gloves I’ve been so busy.”

That was my cue to ask what she’d been doing, but I felt out of sorts, grumpy on Dornan’s behalf, even though, rationally, I knew none of it was really her fault; it was just that she looked so good and he looked so bad.

“You don’t seem exactly thrilled to see me.”

“I’m not too happy with the world in general. Everything is so… complicated.”

“Things didn’t go so well in Arkansas, huh?”

“No. Well, yes, sort of.”

“Well, that’s clear.” Déjà vu. She shut the stove door. “Have you eaten? One thing I learned while you were gone: you can cook a whole meal in one pan if you just fry everything. How about steak, eggs, and fried potatoes? And then you can tell me all about it.”

She cooked. We drank coffee with our meal. In the mixed lamp- and firelight, Tammy’s rounded cheeks glowed like those of an ancient, burnished idol.

“You look good,” I said. She raised her eyebrows. “The mix of softness and strength suits you.”

“I feel pretty good. More at home with myself, you know what I mean?”

“Yes.” At least sometimes.

“So now I want to hear about Arkansas.”

I told her about the Carpenters, of Luz and her Spanish and Adeline’s covert fostering of it. Of Jud and his discomfort with strangers, of Button and his odd eyes. Of Goulay, and Mike.

“You tied him up like a pretzel?”

“He looked more like a pool triangle, actually.”

“I don’t get how he got his hands loose to hit you.”

“I was careless. I made an assumption—that he wouldn’t be flexible enough to step backwards through the belt and get his hands to the front.”

“Well, hey, you won in the end, even if you did get a few more dings to add to your collection. But the letting-them-go part doesn’t seem too smart.”

“I couldn’t turn them over to the police, because then I would have had to explain how I’d come by my information.” She gave me a crooked smile, and eventually I nodded. “Killing them would have upset Luz.”

“They might come and find you.”

“They can’t, and they won’t. They’re going to be only too glad to forget I exist.”

She gave me a look. “Oh, right. You said you’d be shutting down their business. That’s pretty easy to forget.”

“True. Except it’ll be my lawyer doing the watching.” Bette already had the preliminary information, and was busily amassing more. When we had sufficient hard evidence, she would—without using my name or Luz’s details—bring in the child welfare agencies, charities, and news organizations, the crusaders and rights groups, and INS. There had to be a way of helping these children without wholesale deportation. Meanwhile, if Goulay broke or even bent so much as a traffic ordinance, Bette would tie her up in knots.

Then I told Tammy about Luz. “So Adeline has told her I’m an honorary aunt. But I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, if I should have left her or taken her away. How can you tell if a child is getting what she needs?”

“Jesus, if you could answer that one you’d be pulling down the big bucks as a parenting guru.” She grinned. “Imagine the Oprah show: ‘Well, Oprah, you tell them what to do, and if they don’t, you kill them and buy another.’ No,” she said hastily, seeing the look on my face, “you’ll figure it out after a while. It’s like anything else: you get better with practice.”

“Do you think I’ll do a good job?”

She looked at me, fascinated. “Are you asking me for reassurance?”

Being vulnerable got easier with practice, too. “I suppose I am.”

“This has got to be a first. Okay. Well, you’re stubborn and smart, and you like to be the best, so whether you end up being Fairy Godmother or the Wicked Witch to that little girl, you’ll find a way to make sure she gets a good life.” She grinned again. “As long as you don’t fuck it up. Or as long as she doesn’t. It takes two, you know.”

It takes two. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

“I took that job at Sonopress—start Monday. I found an apartment in Asheville, it’s small but it’ll work for a while. I got the utilities turned on day before yesterday and the phone went in today.”

“I guessed. All your things were gone.” I paused. “Dornan was here. He told me you talked.”

“How is he?”

“About as you’d expect. Sad. But no blame.”

“I’m not sure I deserved him.”

“People aren’t merit badges.” Which is a good thing because I had never deserved Julia. People just… choose, and then leave, one way or another.

Tammy got up, went to her jacket, and pulled out her cell phone. “I don’t need this now.”

“Keep it, just transfer the account to your name.”

She nodded. Thanks would have been ridiculous. “I’m taking the car back tomorrow. I’ll make sure they run it on my plastic, now that I’ve got an address to bill things to. Here’s the new address and phone number.”

A three-by-five card with that strong black lettering I’d first noticed weeks ago when I had searched through her papers. I put the card in my pocket.

“Dree said she’ll introduce me around, and I’ll meet people just doing my job. It’ll be cool not being in the city for a while. You’re going back, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I was quiet for a few minutes. A year ago, Tammy would have been unable to bear the silence. Now she just got up and brought the coffeepot to give us both a refill, and settled back comfortably, happy to wait. “I don’t know. To be in the world. It’s home.”

My muscles lay lazy and loose on my bones, the food sat well in my stomach, the mug warmed my hand. I sighed and leaned back. Tammy’s weight shifted slightly with the couch cushion, touching me now at hip and thigh. As we breathed her jeans rubbed against mine, seam to seam, but there was no question being asked, and no answer needed. The tension was gone.

She kept her T-shirt on and climbed under the covers, and when I came to bed she took me in her arms and I rested my face on her breast, and we lay like that for half an hour, not talking, not moving, just holding and being held, until our hearts slowed, and our breathing softened, and we slept.

I didn’t wake in the middle of the night; I had no bad dreams; I slept, neither protector nor protected, just one human being next to another, mending.

When we woke, I made breakfast, and she left at first light.

By midday the yellow snow clouds began dropping their load and fat flakes sifted down in silence. The Subaru tracks were invisible within ten minutes. I packed the truck bed carefully, snow boots and shovel on top, just in case. The woodworking tools were well oiled and wrapped in tarps, the hogpen securely locked. I’d drained the pump so freezing water didn’t split the pipe while I was away, and the cabin, ashes raked, flue shut, food removed, and bed stripped once more, was as winterproof as I could make it. I had built well. It was sturdy. It would be here when I came back in spring.

I changed my mind about the snow shovel and boots, and threw them in the backseat instead.

I made one last circuit of the clearing, beginning with the cabin, checking the door and windows, then moving on to the heath bald at the south end. The trees would soon be hidden with snow folded down on the branches like meringue. If I stood here a month from now, all would be white, with nothing but animal tracks to indicate the massive fecundity beneath. It has been here two hundred million years, a climax forest, very stable, not changing, not in the middle of turning into anything. I envied it.

A wren flittered onto the boulder I had used as a seat a few weeks ago: a tiny mouthful of a bird, fluffed against the cold like a Viennese truffle. It tilted one bright eye at me, then another, just like Luz, and flew on over the snow. Six months from now, it would have three cheeping fledglings running it ragged.

“I’ll be back,” I told it, and crunched my way to the truck.

It started with a low rumble that suited the wintry quiet, like a bear grumbling in its sleep, but once I was at the top of the track I turned off the engine, took my foot off the brake, and coasted down the road in silence.

“Lovely,” said Julia. “Like Narnia. You mustn’t forget to send that child her Turkish delight.”

“What do you think of her?”

“She’s nine. It’s hard to tell. But she’ll probably grow up to be a Bible-spouting evangelist who thinks you’re Satan incarnate by the time she’s twenty. At least she’ll be a Bible-spouting evangelist who won’t be pushed around. Not if you have anything to do with it.”

“I’ll teach her how to fight.”

“You taught Ms. Tammy a thing or two, certainly.” She smiled privately. Snow began to build up on the windscreen. “You should probably turn the engine on now and get those windshield wipers going, or we’ll end up nose to nose with a tree.”

I did.

“If you teach her to fight, don’t be surprised if she fights you. Once she’s grown she might just leave.”

“People always leave.”

“Often. Not always.” I felt a ghostly touch just beneath my right eye. “Is that a tear?”

“Will you leave me eventually?”

She laughed, a round rich laugh full of good humor. “Aud. Look at me. Stop the car and look at me.” I braked and stopped but did not turn off the engine. I looked at her. “Reach out and touch me.”

“No.”

“No. Because you can’t. Because I’m dead. I can’t leave you, Aud, because I come from you. I am you. You know that.”

Tips of manicured but winter-pale Bermuda grass glittered in the frost under a hard blue sky and stinging lemon sun. Everyone wore sunglasses. Atlanta. I turned right off McClendon, and right again, and parked on the street. For some reason I was surprised to find the maple on my front lawn bare of leaves. I was even more surprised by the rose bushes, which had not been here in May, when I left. I got out of the truck and stretched.

Someone had cut the grass and cleared the leaves. I walked down the driveway, through the double gate, and into the back. No flowers now, in November, but the mystery gardener had been at work here, too: shrubs trimmed, grass neat, flower beds turned. I peered through the garage window. The Saab was still there.

My key still fit the front door. I closed it behind me. The soaring living room felt enormous after the cabin. The floors gleamed. I sniffed: Murphy’s wood soap, and recently split kindling. Someone had laid the fireplace. In the middle of the dining room table stood a vase of freshly cut carnations. And a note, on yellow, lined paper.

Still holding the note, I walked back outside to the mailbox. The brass key was there. No mail. No doubt yet another uninvited guest had brought that in and put it somewhere.

A dinged-up old VW Rabbit pulled up outside the house opposite and a man with a scraggly goatee and bright yellow fleece jacket got out and climbed the steps. No sudden barking. He let himself in. New neighbor. Deirdre and her two massive dogs must have moved. At least he didn’t seem interested in my business. I put the key and the note in my pocket and went back in.

The phone machine blinked green. Next to it lay a sheaf of carefully transcribed messages, all in Dornan’s hand. I read the top one, dated five months ago, at the end of May. Atlanta police: routine call (but isn’t that what they always say?) about some arson murder last week. I flipped forward a few pages—one from Philippe at the Spanish consulate, wanting me to take on another body-guarding job—and a few more, then back two. June 14th. Else Torvingen (your mum?), wanting to know if your friend was all right. Another caught my eye. Señor SomebodyorOther (heavy accent) saying something about how you owe Them (definitely capital T) a Favor (ditto) and they’re going to Collect. Some job or other they want you to do. You’re supposed to call. A Tijuana number. I went through the rest, page by page, dozens of them, until I came across another message from my mother, this one dated on my birthday. Else Torvingen again, sounding frosty. Something along the lines of “Hey, you didn’t call me back (you ungrateful cow), maybe you’ve gone off somewhere again without telling me, but Happy Birthday anyway.” I glanced absently at the rest.

Sometimes it takes two.

One new message. I pressed PLAY.

“Aud, it’s Annie. I have been so worried about you. Why didn’t you tell me where you’d gone? I finally managed to track down that nice young man who runs the coffeehouses and he was kind enough to lend me your key”—not even a Sherman tank would deter Mrs. Miclasz when she had decided on something—“so that I could make the house a bit more welcoming for you when you got back. There are some bits and bobs of food in the fridge, and I tidied up a little. Aud, don’t disappear again. I know you feel alone, but there are people here who love you. Call me.”

I walked numbly to the fridge: milk, bread, cheese, eggs, apples, pâté. Even beer.

People here who love me. I had helped Beatriz last year, and seen her blossom. I had forgotten she was coming back from Spain to work in a downtown advertising agency. Annie, whose daughter I had killed. People here who love me. Whether I liked it or not.

I wandered into my workroom. The chair I had been working on before Julia’s death gleamed. I pushed it with a fingertip and it rocked back and forth on its runners, wood against wood. In the bedroom there were more flowers, and the bed was freshly made. I stroked the silky antique quilt. I imagined Julia’s mother smoothing it with her hands. Julia had never seen it.

And then I couldn’t avoid it any longer: the laundry room, where I would find my clothes and Julia’s still on the floor where I had dropped them months ago, the day I got back from Norway. The clothes that still smelled of Julia.

I closed the bedroom door, trod through the kitchen, and stopped at the door. I smoothed back my hair, took a deep breath, and went in.

The clothes were gone.

I tidied up a little. Freshly laundered sheets…

I ran into the bathroom and yanked open the linen cupboard. No neatly folded clothes. Into the bedroom. Nothing in the closet. I jerked the top drawer of the dresser so hard it flew out, dumping underwear on the carpet. Nothing, nor in the second drawer, or the third. Nothing.

I ran into the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. Nothing. Nothing. She was really gone.

And then I laughed, and walked back to the laundry room, and to the dirty linen basket, and lifted the lid. There they were. I reached for the blue shirt but didn’t pull it out immediately, just ran my hand over it, touched the buttons, rubbed the cuff between my thumb and forefinger. Then I lifted it to my face and breathed.

Sunshine and musk and dusty violets, but so faint. I breathed again: her rich skin, and her hair, oh dear god her hair… Tears ran down my face, my neck, dripped on my hands, onto her shirt. All I had left of her. So faint. So very very faint.