The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

Joseph D’Agnese Harm and hammer From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

once a month the man parks his car at the top of her cul-de-sac. He sits behind his steering wheel and plays with his phone until she arrives. She takes no obvious note of him as she drives home from the mall. No looking. No waves. She simply parks in the driveway of her crappy townhouse rental and heads inside, leaving her front door unlocked. She kicks off her shoes, runs to the kitchen, and turns the oven to 350 degrees. Then she dashes upstairs to her bedroom and strips off everything but her bra and panties and slips into the little black dress or sometimes the cute red one. She steps into her Mary Janes, puts on her earrings, and checks her hair and makeup in the mirror. By the time she pops the disks of cookie dough into the oven and begins heating the kettle, the man is already making the rounds of her small backyard. It isn’t much of a yard, but he always likes to check the perimeter and that makes her think sweetly of him.

Eventually he raps his knuckles on the door as he enters. He sits at the table while she serves him tea and cookies. Green tea because he once said it’s good for his cholesterol and he’s trying to cut down. He’s not heavy, but he can easily blow his good looks if he doesn’t watch out. She knows he and his wife have recently split, that his wife has taken the kids, that her lawyer is riding him hard.

She knows that she and he can never have a future. But that’s not the point. Thinking about him is a nice fantasy for her at this point in her life. And she trusts him. She likes the way he treats her. Like she’s a good person. Like she was simply caught up in something she didn’t know how to get out of.

Which is only half true.

Marshal Fred is good and kind, with somewhat sad eyes. He probably has a million cases like hers, but he behaves as if she is the only one in whom he can confide. She enjoys their time together, even if it comes only once a month.

But today, it’s not his voice she hears coming from the open doorway.

“Callie? Callie Rustan?”

A woman’s voice.

A woman calling her by that name. The name she’ll never get used to.

Fear grips her as she stands at the stove. Her eyes flick to the wooden block. She reaches for the chef’s knife.

“Drop it,” the voice says.

The dead, distorted faces of the women and children flash before her, and she thinks, Oh, my God — they found me.

She whirls to face a short, squat woman in a pantsuit who’s got her hand on her holstered weapon and is holding aloft the shield of a federal marshal.

“Where’s Fred?” is all Callie can think to say.

Callie sips her green tea alone because Federal Marshal Margaret Bryan coldly declines a cup. Already Callie can feel her spirits sinking.

“He’s been reassigned? To where?”

“That’s none of your concern, is it?”

This woman knows Callie all of two minutes and she’s already showing her who’s in charge. Fred was never this way.

“So I’m dealing with you now?”

“That’s right.”

“You read the file?”

The marshal nods.

“So you know I was coerced.”

The woman’s blouse is a little tight. She must be in her mid-thirties, Callie thinks. She’s the kind of slightly older woman Callie and her girlfriends would have mocked when they hit the clubs at night, back when she lived in the city. She regrets that now. Indeed, with each passing day she is beginning to hate the girl, the child, she was only months ago. Especially since the woman in ill-fitting clothes has the power to make Callie’s new life miserable.

“Let me ask you a question,” Bryan says. As she says this, she points at Callie’s teacup. Not so much accusing her as the cup of tea. “Did you know it was wrong?”

Did she know it was wrong to take a briefcase of cash each week from the tieless man in the Armani suit and beautiful chocolate shoes, and run them through the system, and credit each fresh infusion, minus Timball’s cut, into one of the client’s nine accounts? Sort of, yes. She didn’t need an accounting degree to know that. But she had trusted Eddie Timball. He was one of the top men at the brokerage firm, and she’d been rather flattered and awed by the attention he’d paid her when she first came to work for them. He was a slightly older, handsome man, not her direct supervisor. The other girls had said he was divorced but still played the field. The rumors about his wealth, his cars, his apartment, and his homes had seemed so enticing. It was true, of course. The rumor mill just hadn’t factored in that Eddie was in debt up to his slightly receding scalp.

He had said he could not trust just anyone with this, and that if she helped him she would be... rolling in commissions. His words. He also let her know that if she helped him, she could not breathe a word of this task to anyone. She had seen it as an opportunity. A way to advance. A way to shuck herself of her roommate and get a place of her own. A way to buy nice things for herself. By the time she had figured out what was really going on, she was in too deep. Only later did she realize that the mere act of Eddie’s asking had doomed her. She could not refuse. She was sentenced the second the words left the glib fellow’s lips.

“Yes, I knew,” she tells Margaret Bryan.

“But you did it anyway. You did it and you hid it for three years.”

Fred had never been like this. He had a way of making it all seem like some vast, unfortunate tragedy in which she was merely a bit player. Eight months ago, when he’d first confronted her in his office, he’d laid out those terrible photos on the table and pointed to each of the faces of the dead. “People always say that they’re victimless crimes. You slip them some cash. They give you something. You snort it, shoot it, or smoke it. What’s the harm, right? The harm is, it’s funding people who do this. And this. And this.”

One by one, he carefully pronounced the names of the beaten or bullet-ridden men, women, and children in the photos. Most of them foreigners.

Even when she’d accepted, even when she’d said yes to save her own life, Fred had never treated her like a criminal. He had never once suggested that her actions had led to what happened to the people in those photographs. But she had made the leap. It was only logical. He’d tucked those images away almost immediately. But she saw them still. She was sure she always would.

And later, when they had relocated her to someplace in the southeast, Fred had sat her down and spoken to her as if she were just a kid at a new school. He read her the rules. Don’t call attention to yourself. Try to fit in. Join groups, but don’t become a leader. Stay off the Internet. Avoid social media. Don’t make waves. Above all, don’t contact friends and family. They’re dead to you.

Fred had sat with her at this table only last month, one hand on a cookie, his other just grazing hers.

She had trusted Eddie Timball. She had trusted Fred. And now both of them were gone.

“In all that time,” Bryan says now, “you could have called someone. You could have notified the authorities.”

“So that’s how it’s going to be, huh?” Callie says. She wants to sound tough, but she’s out of her league.

“Honey, that’s the way it is,” Bryan says. “Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s...”

She pauses now, lifting her nose to the ceiling.

The smoke detector screams. Persistent, angry, accusatory.

The cookies are burning.

Fred used to say it’s all about trade-offs.

Back home in New York, she could buy whatever she wanted, once the infusions of Eddie Timball’s commissions started rolling in. She’d had the apartment on the Upper East Side. She had grown accustomed to the clothes, the shoes, the parties, and the guys. And all the freedom in the world.

Now she has less freedom. She is staying put for the foreseeable future. She works a desk job in the management office of a department store in a mall in the middle of nowhere. She tries to do as Fred advised: fit in. She has always been a good student. Always. And so she earnestly tries to do this. She studies the sales circulars that the store she’s never heard of puts out, and decides on a new look. She can dress like a young mom, in that outdated preppy look. Loafers and chinos and a bland, sensible sweater. She doesn’t like any of these clothes, but she can stomach them.

There are no clubs here. At least, nothing like the ones she frequented in the city. Nothing like the tapas and downtown wine bars and the chic lounges lorded over by bouncers who sized you up to see if you merited entrance. There are no restaurants here run by celebrity chefs. No places where the music thumps so hard that you can feel it in your heart and a round of champagne costs you and your girlfriends seventy, easy. No — instead they have brew pubs and Irish-themed hangouts and honky-tonk roadhouses she wouldn’t be caught dead in. The main drag in the center of town is populated with women who dress the way she now does, and who prowl the gift shops on weekends in search of ceramic teddy bears and quilted handbags and scented candles.

There are no cute guys. But more and more, she finds she doesn’t even think about this. It’s as if she has banned pleasure from her heart. She cannot bear to think about having a man close to her. How can she? How could she let a man into her bed and tell him that her name is Callie? She can’t.

She cannot bear to think of her family. Her brother out west. Her sister up north. Her two nieces. She cannot bear to think of her mother, who had been growing weaker and weaker, and relying more on her chair to get around. Never again can the girl the feds call Callie escape to Connecticut to regress into childhood for a long weekend, to eat Dad’s chili, to play the baby grand Knabe in the sunroom and watch for the smile to return to her mother’s face.

The MS had eroded her mother’s ability to play. She and her siblings had been close in age, and all three of them had studied business. All three of them had aped their father in this respect. But the other two were already far more accomplished than she, weren’t they? They possessed, perhaps, far more rigorous minds and a slavish knack for industry. While she — well, every time she looked into her brother’s or sister’s eyes, she sensed that they knew exactly what she was: a vapid, unambitious party girl from the suburbs.

But neither her brother nor her sister had ever learned to play. So the piano would one day pass to her. Or it would have, before her name became Callie Rustan.

So: No apartment. No money. No clothes. No clubs. No guys. No family. No music.

It’s as if the world she knows has been annihilated.

She feels like a nun.

But it’s a trade-off, right, Fred? In exchange for all this, I get to live.

There’s a town about forty minutes north of here, high in the mountains, where tourists prowl and locals flee when the heat gets miserable. It’s home to a historic farm with formal gardens and a bike path. In her old life, she would have turned her nose up at such a place, but she’s now beginning to appreciate that her choices are limited. She wants to be a model witness. She doesn’t want to give Bryan grief.

Both marshals have alluded to having counselors available if she ever wants to talk about her situation. She’s tempted. She could use a shrink badly. But she dares not take them up on it. The marshals always speak of reassignment, making it seem as if you can behave yourself into a better city. She is beginning to suspect that this promise is a ploy to extract compliance, but she can’t risk having her mental health issues — her loneliness, her anger, her guilt — on the record. She wants to do this right. She wants to be well thought of. She wants to put the past behind her.

She wants to be good.

So she works out. She runs the paths and rides the bikes and paddles kayaks down frothy rivers. And one afternoon, she leaves the bike off at the rental barn and wanders through the historic farm area, watching ladies churn butter, printers crank presses, and bakers turn loaves. Inside the blacksmith’s shop, an emaciated old man is showing tourists how he makes decorative coat hooks. He pumps the bellows and extracts the glowing iron rod and lays it across his anvil.

Pound pound pound, the hammer beats red iron.

His audience watches transfixed as the rod yields to the old man’s imagination. Here’s the curl of iron. Here, the grooves that denote a tiny leaf. Here, pincers pluck a tiny gargoyle’s face from the rod.

The old man spins the hammer like a gunslinger twirling a six-gun.

The audience ahhs adoringly.

She feels as if she’s seen something like this as a girl, but she cannot remember when or where. She longs to call her mom right now: Hi, I know you think I’m dead, but—

But she can never do this.

The smithy tells how his mentor used to play the anvil like a musical instrument. And then, just like that, he raises his hammers to the anvil and begins to tap out a tune.

The audience is rapt.

Amazing grace...

Something shifts in her, and she remembers how and why she came to study the piano.

How sweet the sound...

She remembers how she’d played in a bell chorus through two Christmas seasons when she was in elementary school. How she’d loved that sound so much — clear, high, tinkling, beautiful.

But her mother hadn’t thought it wise to study the bells. It wasn’t a skill one could be proud of. What was a bell, really? A novelty instrument, good for showing off once a year. No, if she wanted to learn music, she would learn the piano. And so she had, and it had contented her until she’d gotten to high school and began to see that her choice meant she’d never be able to play in the marching band. Back then, she would have gladly switched to the steel drum. God, how she’d loved that high, plunking sound. But her enthusiasm had struck her mother as strange. In their home it was always understood that music was something a young woman did as part of her overall education. The piano was not an end, not a calling, unto itself. At least not for someone like her. Not for someone possessed of such coldly practical parents.

That sav’d a wretch like me...

My God, she thinks: The voice of the anvil is like the voice of a bell.

“Who’d like to give it a try?” the blacksmith says.

Already his eyes are upon her.

The complex where she lives was built in the eighties, and everything here is a little run down. The garage door opener should probably be replaced, but she dreads calling the maintenance office. It takes her forever to get the door open so the delivery-men can back the truck in. When they lift the antique anvil from the back of their truck, she can see the muscles straining under their shirts and overalls. Her empty garage suddenly smells of their sweat, of the Appalachian hills themselves, of the barn where she found and bought the relic, of manure and gasoline. They set the blackened object on top of a tree stump. One of them asks if her husband really is intending to do his blacksmithing in such a small space. There just isn’t enough roof clearance, another explains.

“I’m not married,” she says. “It’s for me.”

This shushes them. They accept their tips and shuffle out with smiles on their faces and perhaps their tongues in their cheeks.

It’s not as easy as you’d think to buy an anvil. The cheap ones she can afford at the big-box stores are made of cast iron, and every one of the ironworker websites warns against them. But buying a new, unblemished one made of steel can easily consume more than half her monthly income. They are just that expensive. But she soon learns that most smithies buy their tools at auctions or barter with other collectors or craftsmen. And this is what she does, follows one local lead after another until she finds a retired farm auctioneer who sells antiquated tools out of his barn.

Everyone she meets — everyone — assumes she is taking up smithing, because that’s what so many of the artistic young people of the region seem to be doing these days. They’re returning in droves to the old folkways. Part of her thinks that’s actually a fine cover. Fred would probably be proud of her for exploiting such a misdirection.

But she only wants to hear that sound again. Her confidence is robust for someone so young, but she knows she has a few things going for her. She knows music, she can sight-read, and she has a good ear. Every instructor she’s ever had has told her this, and she has no reason to doubt them. Of course she has a good ear. She is a good student. She will work as hard as she can. She will not fail.

But the anvil is tough.

She has no way of knowing if the assortment of hammers she’s bought at the big-box store are appropriate. On the subject of playing the anvil as a musical instrument, the Internet is largely silent. She finds countless videos of Verdi’s Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore, of leather-aproned men or women pounding out that famous melody as the chorus of gypsies sings along. But she longs to conjure a sound that is wholly different.

More delicate, elegant, and purer.

For a long time, the sound emanating from the steel seems flat and dull. There is none of the distinct loveliness she heard that day in the old smithy’s barn.

But she tries. Oh, she tries.

The music store at the mall coughs up some decent sheet music, which she uses as a guide only. And strangely, she discovers that she only wants to play church music. “Amazing Grace,” of course. “Ave Maria.” “How Great Thou Art.” At the tractor store — she cannot believe the day she walks into it — she finds a pair of roomy overalls that sprout loops at her hips and promise to give her thighs the requisite range of movement.

Each night that summer she sucks down her dinner and retires to the garage to squat over the thing and play. The anvil sounds again and again, and each night, after a few hours, her ears ring and her hands hurt and her palms stiffen.

At work, while she files paperwork, she hears it still.

The sound is good. Just not good enough.

Like her.

If the smithy is surprised to see a woman so young dressed in overalls and work boots and so closely quizzing him on this particular sideline of his craft, he doesn’t show it. He listens to her story as he sits at the picnic table behind his shop and tears into a pulled pork sandwich doused with smoky orange sauce. His voice is gravelly, his teeth bad, his glasses distinctly unstylish.

He is plainly ugly.

But the second she thinks this, she begs his silent forgiveness. Am I such a bad person? she wonders. Was the old me really that bad?

“You’re lucky buying an old one,” he tells her. “Most of the anvils made today are just not going to give you that ringing sound. They really don’t make them the way they used to. The rest is just practice.” He cocks his head, crowlike, and asks, “How are you holding the hammers?”

Good question. She holds them as if she is about to drive a nail, but he scoffs when she tells him this. He looks at his scuffed Timex.

“You want it to be like a drumstick. Firm, but loose and gentle-like. You want to cultivate muscle memory. You know what that is?”

“Like I know it but don’t know I know it.”

“Yep. Like your hands just know what to do. Look, I don’t have much time, but I can show you a few things. If you were looking to apprentice, I got to say no. I just don’t do that anymore. I’m just putting on a show for the tourists here.”

“I just want to make it sing.”

“Well, okay then. I can show you a few things. But you mind my asking something? Why in the heck would a pretty girl like yourself want to do such a thing?”

She is appalled that she doesn’t have an answer.

It’s only later, when the weather turns and the mall grows ever busier, that she begins to get the first glimmer of an answer. But it is not an answer she can articulate clearly. She can only feel it building within her when she plays. Only then do the faces of the dead recede and seem to bear witness to her concerts.

So much of her life is on autopilot now. In the back of her mind as she works the day job is the thrum of sound, the plink and patter of the hammer. Up, dress, work, lunch, work, back home — and then the steel. On weekends when she can, she prowls the flea markets on Old Highway 6, looking for various types of hammers and chisels she can use to produce different sounds. At night sometimes when she collapses in front of the TV she can feel herself running the notes the way she used to do when she was studying the piano.

Amazing grace...

Her closed fist taps out the melody on empty air.

How sweet the sound...

And this is why she doesn’t quite know how to respond to the question the smithy asked her a month ago now. If pushed, she will only say that she wants to make music. Beautiful music. She needs it to be beautiful. But that alone is not enough. She cannot deny that when she’s beating out a melody against that steel, she derives a pleasure she never felt when she played the piano, or even the bells.

You knew, didn’t you? You knew all along that it was wrong.

Yes, I knew. But damn you for saying so.

Tink.

Damn you, Eddie, for asking me to do it.

Tink, tink, tink. Smack.

Damn the feds for making her life so banal and lonely.

Oh, really? Poor you. People died.

All she wants to do is strike the hammer. To crush and pound it until it reverberates in her soul. Her life this past year has massed itself into a ball of anguish. Each night, as she makes the journey from the flat to the horn, she imagines she is chasing the pain away, nattering it, worrying it to the edge of the steel until it drops away into space.

She hopes too that the steel is changing her. God help her for saying so, but that smithy is an ugly man. She despises herself for thinking such a thing, but it’s so. And yet, when he bends to the anvil and plays, he becomes something else. She wants that. But she worries sometimes that she has more anger bound up inside her than the hammers will ever be able to chase away. Anger at herself. Her parents. Eddie Timball. The feds. Margaret Bryan. Maybe even dear, kind Fred.

No wonder my music isn’t beautiful.

Around Christmas that year the smithy looks up from his work when the next round of tourists leave. There’s a light snow falling outside. Framed in the doorway is the young woman dressed in a Carhartt jacket. Two hammers hang from the loops at her hips like sidearms.

“So you’re a cowboy now, is that it?” he says.

She smiles, draws, and flawlessly executes the blacksmith’s own gesture: twirls the hammers like six-guns before catching them. She loves doing this now. Loves feeling the heft of the handles as they swing back home to her grasp.

“Can I show you something?” she says.

He nods his assent. As she comes behind the railing, stripping off her jacket, his eyes take in the muscles along her arms. He sips from his flask.

He is taller than she is, so she has to bend lower to reach his anvil. The second her hammers bite steel, she thinks, My God, his is so much clearer, so much purer. Must be the construction.

But she pushes these thoughts from her mind and plays “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time.”

The old man stops sipping at his flask.

She plays a good long while. She remembers Blake’s song from childhood, but back then she never thought about the words. In the last month that’s all she has done.

Bring me my Bow of burning gold...

Bring me my Arrows of desire...

Today she tortures herself for not paying better attention when she was younger. How could I have been so thoughtless? The dead poet’s words touch her now.

I will not cease from Mental Fight...

The words speak to every striving instinct she has for something better. She wants to be good. She craves it.

Her eyes are moist when she looks up. But the old man has a smile on his face.

“That’s a churchly hymn now, isn’t it? Well, I’d say you done the good Lord proud today,” he says.

She hears applause and is stunned to see that another round of tourists have come in from out of the cold. A bunch of them in the barn, clapping. Moms, dads, grandmas, kids.

She smiles and twirls the hammer in her right hand. Then the left. And slings them both in the loops of her overalls.

It’s nice. She feels good. Real good. Maybe not beautiful, but close.

Then she notices that three of the dads have video cameras. All of them pointed at her.

She doesn’t notice the truck until the Friday after Christmas, when it seems as if the whole world has descended on the mall to lob returns or cash in gift cards. The black Chevrolet truck following her as she pulls out of the mall looks a lot like the one she saw on the cul-de-sac this morning. She peels out ahead of it at the turn signal and tries to put the vehicle out of her mind. She figures she’s imagining things.

The truth is, the videos have spooked her. For weeks now, ever since she showed off at the farm, she’s been surfing all the amateur video websites in search of them, without any luck. That’s a good thing. Maybe the tourists who filmed her didn’t feel moved to post their videos. Maybe it’s not what they do. Maybe the footage didn’t turn out that well. Or maybe they’ve been distracted by Christmas.

She needs the steel badly tonight. And as soon as she gets into the garage — the space heater throwing out some BTUs, the hammers and chisels arrayed on the concrete to her right — she is able to finally tap out the notes that will bring her to the “Ave Maria.”

She doesn’t know the original words, and that’s part of the problem. If you don’t know how to pronounce the words, you don’t know how the syllables break. She’s translating from some sheet music for drums that sits on a music stand to the left.

Gratia plena. Full of grace.

She never had the chance to study Latin, but now the pings against steel bring her to tears.

Ora... ora pro nobis... peccatoribus.

Pray for us sinners...

She pauses. Drops the hammers. Braces her hands against the anvil and lets the tears come. Behind the garage door she can hear the insistent ringing of her phone. Let it ring. But then it beeps. Message left.

She dries her eyes and goes to check it in the kitchen. MB has called a half-dozen times. Margaret Bryan. Dammit. When she last saw Maggie, Callie hadn’t mentioned the videos to her. No way was she going to give the fed any reason to play the bad cop. The videos were gone. Bullets dodged. End of story.

She listens to the first message.

Anxiety in the woman’s voice: “You have to call me, okay?”

Callie begins to dial, but as she does, Bryan calls again.

“Are you there?” Margaret says. “Where are you?”

Where would I be on a Friday night, Maggie?

“At home, why?”

“I need you to listen to me, okay? You need to get out of there. Get out of the house and get to the police station. Just go inside. Don’t say a word to them. You just sit there. I don’t care who comes in asking for you. You just refuse to leave, you hear me?”

“What is this? Am I in trouble?”

“I’m driving up with another agent, okay? But the roads are bad. We’re hitting some snow outside Atlanta. But I will be there, Callie. You just need to listen to me.”

“Just level with me, okay? Is this because of the videos?”

“What?”

Dammit — she didn’t know. And you just went ahead and told her.

Callie steps to the window of the townhouse and nudges the curtains. At the top of the cul-de-sac, a large shape. The truck?

“I’m going,” she says into the phone. “I’m going right now.”

She hangs up. She turns to get her car keys when the knock comes at the door. She pads back to the living room to look out the window. The large shape is now parked in her driveway.

The knock now more insistent. The knob turning. “Dammit, Callie,” a voice says. “Open the damn door. I know you’re there.”

Relief floods her. She knows that voice. She opens the door to find Marshal Fred standing there. Fred the fed, dressed in street clothes, not the suit. Sneakers on his feet. Dark sweatshirt. As his eyes slide down her overalls, she senses his confusion. She is not the witless child she was months ago. She is not even a girl anymore. And he has changed too. He looks heavier, stressed, exhausted.

“Why didn’t she tell me you were coming?” Callie says.

“Who?” he says, stepping into the room.

“Margaret.”

“Bryan called you?”

She nods. He swears under his breath. Hangs his head. Then he starts to close the door by feel and produces the weapon. Not his service weapon. Another one. Smaller, stubbier, older.

“What’s this all about?”

“I’m sorry, Callie,” he says, and for a moment she buys the hurt in his eyes and voice. “She’s bleeding me dry. I had to do something. I’m sorry,” he says again. “It was the only thing I could think of. It’s just... it’s just a transaction.”

And then it hits her. She knows the truth.

Oh God. This isn’t—

She backs away.

The ball-peen hammer hanging at her left hip comes to her hand almost without thinking. She flings it. The steel catches him in the chest. Knocks him back against the door and halfway out of the house. She’s not around to see it. She’s already down the hall, heading for the garage.

If she can get to the steel-clad security door.

But when she gets to the garage she realizes that the security door locks from inside the house. And when she hits the switch to raise the garage door, all she hears is a futile groan from the automatic door opener. Dammit. She has never gotten it fixed.

No time.

She hears him calling her. Trying to reassure her. Trying to reason with her.

She kills the lights.

When he enters the garage, his hair disheveled, his eyes wild, she hits him hard across the wrist with the music stand. He half drops. The gun clatters. She tries to leap over him to run inside. But he catches her and throws her to the concrete. Mounts her. Grabs her by the neck.

All light, all air, seems to shrink to pinpricks.

Her hands scrabble frantically to scratch his face, scratch his eyes. But he ably dodges her.

She tries to claw his arm with one hand.

Her other hand is over her head.

Reaching.

Her hand touches wood. It comes to her hand like an old friend.

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

She’s forgotten that the other tool is still in the loop at her hip. Her right hand reaches for it now. Her eyes are nearly blind, her ability to think is seconds from being squeezed away, but somehow she doesn’t have to think. Her hands do it all.

The hammers rise together in unison.

They drum their way down the man’s skull, chasing away sin, chasing away evil. The sound is nothing like a bell. It is terrible, awful, fatal. Not at all beautiful but immensely satisfying.

Sirens make terrible music. She lets that sound and the flashing lights wash over her when the authorities come to take the body. Later that night she is bundled in a blanket as the car rockets south toward Atlanta. Margaret Bryan sits close to her in the back seat, another marshal driving. Maggie is remarkably kind; keeps trying to explain to her what will happen next. A safe house for a few days. A debriefing. A reassignment, for sure.

Maggie’s voice is soft, tinged with anger. “I’m so sorry it took us so long to figure it out. We didn’t believe what we were seeing — hearing. He cut a deal with the guy who was looking for you and Timball. You probably didn’t know, but Fred had some... money problems. He and his wife, they’re going through some issues.”

The divorce. I know.

Callie thinks she has said these words but she has not. She has merely nodded. The words are echoing inside her.

He sold me out. For money.

The marshal is talking about making plans. About seeing the counselor in Atlanta. About needing to make new arrangements. About how it’s going to be fine. Like starting over again in a new school.

“I know you probably aren’t up for this right now,” Bryan says. “But I want to make this clear. We’re pulling you out. A new city. A new home. A new identity. Everything.”

Callie forces herself to speak. “I need my things. My tools.”

“We’ll get what we can. But make no mistake: you’re starting over, you understand? You can’t take anything from your old life.”

My new old life, you mean.

Once, she was a foolish young girl. Then she became a woman named Callie. But now she is not even that.

I’m starting over all over.

Again.

Beside her, Maggie relaxes. Looks at her quizzically. “Yeah. What was that back there? Did you take up woodworking or something?”

She wants to explain but can’t find the words. Maggie pats her blanket. She means it to be reassuring. Comforting. It’s a big gesture for her.

But the woman they once called Callie takes no comfort in any of it. She has lowered the volume on Maggie’s voice, the car engine, the road, the shush of the falling snow. She has hied herself over to an inviolable place. A cocoon of steel, where only the patient fall of the hammer can keep her safe.