The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle

Her father's office door was closed. Trixie took a deep breath, crept, slid, and hopped her way silently down the stairs. The floor of the mudroom looked like the scene of a dismemberment: a mess of

scattered boots and discarded jackets and tossed gloves. Trixie pulled what she needed from the pile, wrapped a scarf around the lower half of her face, and gingerly opened the door. Her father was sitting in his truck with the motor running, as if he'd been waiting for her all along. As soon as he saw her exiting the house, he unrolled the power window. “Hop in.” Trixie approached the truck and peered inside. “Where are you going?”

Her father reached over and opened the door for her. “Same place you are.” As he twisted in his seat to back out of the driveway, Trixie could see the collared shirt and tie he was wearing under his winter jacket.

They drove in silence for two blocks. Then, finally, she asked,

“How come you want to go?”

“I don't.”

Trixie watched the swirling snow run away from their tires to settle in the safe center of the divided highway. Dots between painted dashes, they spelled out in Morse code the unspoken rest of her father's sentence: But you do.

* * *

Laura sat in the student center, wishing she was even an eighth as smart as the advice ladies who wrote “Annie's Mailbox.” They knew all the answers, it seemed, without even trying. In the days after Jason's death, she'd become addicted to the column, craving it as much as her morning cup of coffee. My daughterin-law started her marriage as a size four, and now she's plus plus plus. She's a wonderful person, but her health is a concern for me. I've given her books and exercise videos, but none of it helps. What can I do? Skinny in Savannah

My 14-year-old son has started replacing his boxer shorts with silky thong underwear he found in a catalog. Is this a style that hasn't hit my hometown yet, or should I be worried about cross-dressing? Nervous in Nevada

On her deathbed, my great-aunt just confided a secret to me that my mother was born as the result of an extramarital affair. Do I tell my mother I know the truth? Confused in California Lauras obsession grew in part from the fact that she was not the only one walking around with questions. Some of the letters were frivolous, some cut through her heart. All of them hinted at a universal truth: At any crossroads in life, half of us are destined to take a

wrong turn.

She opened the newspaper to the right page, skimming past the Marmaduke cartoon and the crossword puzzle to find the advice column, and nearly spilled her cup of coffee. I've been having an affair. It's over, and I'm sorry it ever happened. I want to tell my husband so that I can start fresh. Should I? Repentant in Rochester

Laura had to remind herself to breathe.

We can't say this enough, the advice columnists answered. What people don't know can't hurt them. You've already done your spouse a great disservice. Do you really think it's fair to cause him pain, just so you can clear your conscience? Be a big girl, they wrote. Actions have consequences.

Her heart was pounding so hard she looked up, certain that everyone in the room would be staring.

She had been careful not to ask herself the question she should have: If Trixie hadn't gotten raped, if Daniel hadn't called her office the night she'd been breaking off her affair with Seth would she ever have confessed? Would she have kept it to herself, a stone in her soul, a cancer clouding her memory?

What people don't know can't hurt them.

The problem with coming clean was that you thought you were clearing the slate, starting over, but it never quite worked that way. You didn't erase what you'd done. As Laura knew now, the stain would still be there, every time he looked at you, before he remembered to hide the disappointment in his eyes.

Laura thought of what she had not told Daniel, the things he had not told her. The best decisions in a marriage were based not on honesty but on the number of casualties that the truth might cause, versus the number saved by ignorance.

With great care, she folded the edge of the newspaper and ripped it gently along the crease. She did this until the advice column had been entirely cut out. Then she folded the article and slipped it under the strap of her bra. The ink smudged on Laura's fingers, the way it sometimes did when she read the paper. She imagined a tattoo that might go through flesh and bone and blood to reach her heart - a warning, a reminder not to make the same mistake.

* * *

“Ready?” Daniel asked.

Trixie had been sitting in the truck for five minutes, watching townspeople crowd into the tiny Methodist church. The principal had gone in, as well as the town manager and the selectmen. Two local television stations were broadcasting from the steps of the church, with anchors Daniel recognized from the evening news.

“Yes,” Trixie said, but she made no move to get out of the truck. Daniel pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out of the truck. He walked around to the passenger door and opened it, unbuckling Trixie's seat belt just like he used to when she was a baby. He held her hand as she stepped out, into the shock of the cold.

They took three steps. “Daddy,” she said, stopping, “what if I can't do this?”

Her hesitation made him want to carry her back to the truck, hide her so securely that no one would ever hurt her again. But as he'd learned the hard way - that wasn't possible. He slid an arm around her waist. “Then I'll do it for you,” he said, and he guided her up the steps of the church, past the shocked wide eyes of the television cameras, through an obstacle course of hissed whispers, to the place where she needed to be. For a single moment, the focus of everyone in the church swung from the boy in the lily-draped coffin to the girl walking through the double doors.

* * *

Outside, left alone, Mike Bartholemew emerged from behind a potbellied oak and crouched beside the trail of boot prints that Daniel and Trixie Stone had left in the snow. He lay a ruler down beside the best print of the smaller track and took a camera from his pocket for a few snapshots. Then he sprayed the print with aerosol wax and let the red skin dry on the snow before he spread dental stone to make a cast.

By the time the mourners adjourned to their cars to caravan to the cemetery for the interment service, Bartholemew was headed back to the police department, hoping to match Trixie Stone's boot to the mystery print left in the snow on the bridge where Jason Underhill had died.

* * *

“Blessed are those who mourn,” said the minister, “for they will be comforted.”

Trixie pressed herself more firmly against the back wall of the church. From here, she was completely blocked by the rest of the people who'd come for Jason's memorial service. She didn't have to stare at the gleaming coffin. She didn't have to see Mrs. Underhill, slumped against her husband.

"Friends, we gather here to comfort and support each other in this time of loss . . . but most of all we come here to remember and

celebrate the mortal life of Jason Adam Underhill and his blessed future at the side of our Lord Jesus Christ." The minister's words were punctuated by the tight coughs of men who'd promised themselves they wouldn't cry and the quicksilver hiccups of the women who'd known better than to make a promise they couldn't keep.

“Jason was one of those golden boys that the sun seemed to follow. Today, we remember him for the way he could make us laugh with a joke and the devotion he applied to everything he did. We remember him as a loving son and grandson, a caring cousin, a steadfast friend. We remember him as a gifted athlete and a diligent student. But most of all we remember him because Jason, in the short time we had with him, managed to touch each and every one of us.”

The first time Jason touched Trixie, they were in his car, and he was illegally teaching her how to drive. You have to let up on the clutch while you shift, he explained, as she'd jerked the little Toyota around an empty parking lot. Maybe I should just wait until I'm sixteen, Trixie had said when she'd stalled for the bazillionth time. Jason had laced his fingers between hers on the stick shift, guiding her through the motions, until all she could think about was the temperature of his hand heating hers. Then Jason had grinned at her. Why wait?

The minister's voice grew like a vine. “In Lamentations 3, we hear these words: My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, 'Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.' We, whom Jason left behind, must wonder if these were the thoughts that weighed heavy on his heart, that led him to believe there was no other way out.” Trixie closed her eyes. She had lost her virginity in a field of lupine behind the ice rink, where the Zamboni shavings were dumped, an artificial winter smack in the middle of the September flowers. Jason had borrowed the key from the rinkmaster and taken her skating after the rink was closed for the day. He'd laced up her skates and told her to close her eyes. Then he'd reached for her hands, skating backward so fast she felt like she was falling to earth. We're writing in cursive, he told her as he pulled in a straight line. Can you read it? Then he looped the breadth of the rink, skated a circle, a right angle, a tinier loop, finishing with a curl. I LOVE U? Trixie had recited, and Jason had laughed. Close enough, he'd said. Later, in that field, with the pile of snow hiding them from sight, Jason had again been moving at lightning speed, and Trixie could

not quite keep up. When he pushed inside her, she turned her head to watch the lupine tremble on their shivering stems, so that he wouldn't realize he'd hurt her.

“In the past few days, you who are Jason's family and friends have been struggling with the questions that surround his death. You are feeling a fraction of the pain, maybe, that Jason felt in those last, dark hours. You might be reliving the last time you spoke to him. You might be wondering, Is there anything I should have said or done that I didn't? That might have made a difference?”

Trixie suddenly saw Jason holding her down on Zephyr's white living room carpet. If she'd been brave enough to peek that night, would she have seen the bruises blooming on his jaw, the smile rotting off his face?

“Into your hands, O Savior, we commend your servant Jason Underhill. We pray for you to recognize this child of yours . . .” His breath fell onto her lips, but he tasted of worms. His fingers bit so hard into her wrists that she looked down and saw only his bones, as the flesh peeled away from him.

“Receive him into your never-ending mercy. Grant him everlasting peace, and eternal life in your light.” Trixie tried to swim back to the minister's words. She craved light, too, but all she could see were the black and blue stripes of the nights when Jason came to haunt her. Or maybe she was seeing the nights when she had gone to him willingly. It was all mixed up now. She couldn't separate the real Jason from the ghost; she couldn't untangle what she'd wanted from what she didn't.

Maybe it had always been like that.

The scream started so deep inside of her that she thought it was just a resonance, like a tuning fork that could not stop trembling Trixie didn't realize that the sound spilled through her seams, over flowing, bearing Jason's coffin like a tide and sweeping it off its stanchions. She didn't know that she'd fallen to her knees, and that every single eye in the congregation was on her, as it had been before the

service began. And she didn't trust herself to believe that the savior the minister had been summoning had reached through the very roof of the church and carried her outside where she could breathe

again - not until she found the courage to open her eyes and found herself safe and away, cradled in her father's arms.

* * *

Trixie's boot prints matched. Unfortunately, they were Sorels, which accounted for a large portion of all winter footwear sold in the state of Maine. They had no telltale crack of the sole, or a tack stuck into the rubber, to prove without any considerable doubt that it was Trixie's particular boot that had been on that bridge the night Jason Underhill had died, as opposed to anyone else who wore a size seven and happened to favor the same footwear.

As a rape victim, she had the motive to be a suspect. But a boot print alone - one that hundreds of townspeople shared wouldn't be enough probable cause to convince a judge to swear out a warrant for Trixie's arrest.

“Ernie, get out of there,” Bartholemew said, scolding the potbellied pig he'd brought out for a walk. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't wholly professional to bring a pig to a crime scene, but he'd been working round the clock and couldn't leave Ernestine at home alone any longer. He figured as long as he kept her away from the area that had been cordoned off by the techs, it was all right.

“Not near the water,” Bartholemew called. The pig glanced at him and scooted down the riverbank. “Fine,” he said. “Go drown. See if I care.”

But all the same, Bartholemew leaned over the railing of the bridge to watch the pig walk along the edge of the river. The spot where Jason's body had broken the ice was frozen again, more translucent than the rest. A fluorescent orange flag stapled to a stake marked the northern edge of the crime scene.

Laura Stone's alibi had checked out: Phone records put her at the college, and then back at her residence. But several witnesses had

noticed both Daniel and Trixie Stone at the Winterfest. One driver

had even seen them both, in a parking lot, with Jason Underhill.

Trixie could have murdered Jason, in spite of the size difference between them. Jason had been drunk, and a well-placed shove might have tumbled him over the bridge. It wouldn't account for Jason's bruised and fractured face, but Bartholemew didn't hold Trixie responsible for that. Most likely, it had gone down this way: Jason saw Trixie in town and started to talk to her, but Daniel Stone stumbled onto their encounter. He beat the guy to a pulp, Jason ran off, and Trixie followed him to the bridge. Bartholemew had believed, initially, that Daniel had lied about not seeing Jason in town that night, and that Trixie had told him about the fight to cover for her father. But what if it had been the other way around? What if Trixie had told the truth, and Daniel - knowing that his daughter had been in contact with Jason already that night - had lied to protect her?

Suddenly Ernestine began to root, her snout burrowing. God only knew what she'd found - the most she'd ever turned up was a dead mouse that had crawled under the foundation of his garage. He watched with mild interest as she created a pile of dirty snow behind her.

Then something winked at him.

Bartholemew slid down the steep grade of the riverbank, slipped on a plastic glove from his pocket, and pulled a man's wristwatch out of the snow behind Ernestine.

It was an Eddie Bauer watch with a royal blue face and a woven canvas band. The buckle was missing. Bartholemew squinted up at the bridge, trying to imagine the trajectory and the distance from there to here. Could Jason's arm have struck the railing and snapped the buckle? The medical examiner had found splinters in the boy's fingers - had he lost his watch while he was desperately trying to hang on?

He took out his cell phone and dialed the medical examiner's number. “It's Bartholemew,” he said when Anjali answered. “Did Jason Underhill wear a watch?”

“He wasn't brought in wearing one.”

“I just found one at the crime scene. Is there any way to tell if it's his?”

“Hang on.” Bartholemew heard her rummage through papers. “I've got the autopsy photos here. On the left wrist, there's a band of skin that's a bit lighter than the rest of his arm's skin tone. Why don't you see if the parents recognize it?”

“That's my next stop,” Bartholemew said. “Thanks.” As he hung up and started to slide the watch into a plastic evidence bag, he noticed something he hadn't seen at first - a hair had gotten caught around the little knob used to set the time. It was about an inch long, and coarse. There seemed to be a root attached, as if it had been yanked out.

Mike thought of Jason's all-American good looks, of his dark hair and blue eyes. He held the watch up against the white canvas of his own dress shirt sleeve for comparison. In such stark relief, the hair was as red as a sunset, as red as shame, as red as any other hair on Trixie Stone's head.

* * *

“Twice in one week?” Daniel said, opening the door to find Detective Bartholemew standing on the porch again. “I must have won the lottery.”

Daniel was still wearing his button-down shirt from the funeral, although he'd stripped off the tie and left it noosed around one of the kitchen chairs. He could feel the detective surveying the house over his right shoulder.

“You got a minute, Mr. Stone?” Bartholemew asked. "And actually

... is Trixie here? It would be great if she could sit down with us."

“She's asleep,” Daniel said. “We went to Jason's funeral, and she got pretty upset there. When we got home, she went straight to bed.”

“What about your wife?”

“She's at the college. Guess I'm it for right now.” He led Bartholemew into the living room and sat across from him. “I wouldn't have expected you to attend Jason Underhill's funeral,” the detective said.

“It was Trixie's idea. I think she was looking for closure.”

“You said she got upset during the service?”

“I think it was too much for her, emotionally.” Daniel hesitated. “You didn't come here to ask about this, did you?” The detective shook his head. “Mr. Stone, on the night of the Winterfest, you said you never ran into Jason. But Trixie told me that you and Jason had a fistfight.”

Daniel felt the blood drain from his face. When had Bartholemew talked to Trixie?

“Am I supposed to assume that your daughter was lying?”

“No, I was,” Daniel said. “I was afraid you'd charge me with assault.”

“Trixie also told me that Jason ran off.”

“That's right.”

“Did she follow him, Mr. Stone?”

Daniel blinked. “What?”

“Did she follow Jason Underhill to the bridge?” He pictured the light of the turning car washing over them, and the minute Jason wrenched away. He heard himself calling for Trixie and realizing she wasn't there. “Of course not,” he said.

“That's interesting. Because I've got boot prints, and blood, and hair that puts her at the crime scene.”

“What crime scene?” Daniel said. “Jason Underhill committed suicide.”

The detective just lifted his gaze. Daniel thought of the hour he'd spent searching for Trixie after she'd run away. He remembered the cuts he'd seen on Trixie's arms the day she was washing the dishes, scratches he'd assumed had been made by her own hand, and not someone else's, trying desperately to hold on. Daniel had bequeathed Trixie his dimples, his long fingers, his photographic memory. But what about the other markers of heredity?

Could a parent pass along the gene for revenge, for rage, for escape? Could a trait he'd buried so long ago resurface where he least expected it: in his daughter?

“I'd really like to speak to Trixie,” Bartholemew said.

“She didn't kill Jason.”

“Terrific,” the detective replied. “Then she won't mind giving us a blood sample to compare with the physical evidence, so that we can rule her out.” He clasped his hands together between his knees. “Why don't you see if she's about ready to wake up?” Although Daniel knew life didn't work this way, he truly believed that he had the chance to save his daughter the way he hadn't been able to save her the night she was raped, as if there were some running cosmic tally of victory and defeat. He could get a lawyer. He could spirit her away to Fiji or Guadalcanal or somewhere they'd never be found. He could do whatever was necessary; he just needed to formulate a plan.

The first step was to talk to her before the detective did. After convincing Bartholemew to wait in the living room Trixie was, after all, still scared of her own shadow half the time - Daniel headed upstairs. He was shaking, terrified with what he would say to Trixie, even more terrified to hear her response. With every step up the stairs, he thought of escape routes: the attic, his bedroom balcony. Sheets knotted together and tossed out a window.

Daniel decided he'd ask her point-blank, when she was too wrapped in the silver veil of sleep to dissemble. Depending on her answer, he'd either take her down to Bartholemew to prove the detective wrong, or he'd carry Trixie to the far ends of the earth himself.

The door to Trixie's room was still closed; with his ear pressed against it, Daniel heard nothing but silence. After they had come home from the funeral, Daniel had sat on Trixie's bed with her curled in his lap, the way he had once held her during bouts of stomach flu, rubbing her belly or her back until she slipped over the fine line of sleep. Now he turned the knob slowly, hoping to wake Trixie up by degrees.

The first thing Daniel noticed was how cold it was. The second was the window, wide open.

The room looked like the aftermath of a tropical storm. Clothes lay trampled on the floor. Sheets were balled at the foot of the bed. Makeup, looseleaf papers, and magazines had been dumped - the contents of a missing knapsack. Her toothbrush and hairbrush were gone. And the little clay jar where Trixie kept her cash was empty.

Had Trixie heard the detective downstairs? Had she left before Bartholemew even arrived? She was only a teenager; how far could she get?

Daniel moved to the window and traced the zigzag track of her flight on the snow from her room to the sloped roof, to the maple tree's outstretched arm, across the lawn to bare pavement, at which point she simply disappeared. He thought of her words to him, a day before, when he'd seen the cuts on her arm: It's how I run away.

Frantic, he stared at the icy roof. She could have killed herself.

And on the heels of that thought: She still might.

What if Trixie managed to get someplace where, when she tried to swallow pills or cut her wrists or sleep in a cloud of carbon monoxide, nobody stopped her?

A person was never who you thought he was. It was true for him; maybe it was true for Trixie too. Maybe - in spite of what he wanted to believe, in spite of what he hoped - she had killed Jason.

What if Daniel wasn't the first one to find her?

What if he was?

6

It was late enough in December that all the radio stations played only Christmas carols. Trixie's hiding place was directly over the driver's seat, in the little jut of the box truck that sat over the cab. She had seen the truck at the dairy farm just past the high school athletic fields. With the doors wide open and no one around, she had climbed inside and hidden in that upper nook, drawing hay over

herself for camouflage.

They'd loaded two calves into the truck - not down in the bottom, like Trixie had figured, but nearly on top of her in the narrow space where she was curled. This way, she supposed, they wouldn't stand up during the trip. Once they'd started under way, Trixie had poked her head out from the straw and looked at one calf. It had eyes as large as planets, and when she held out her finger, the calf sucked hard on it.

At the next stop, another farm not ten minutes down the road, an enormous Holstein limped up the ramp into the back of the truck. It ^tared right at Trixie and mooed. “Damn shame,” the trucker said, as the farmer shoved the cow from behind.

“Ayuh, she went down on some ice,” he said. “In you go, now.” Then the door swung shut and everything went black. She didn't know where they were headed and didn't particularly care. Prior to this, the farthest Trixie had ever been by herself was the Mall of Maine. She wondered if her father was looking for her yet. She wished she could phone him and tell him she was all right but under the circumstances, she couldn't call. She might never.

She lay down on one calf's smooth side. It smelled of grass and grain and daylight, and with every breath, she felt herself rising and falling. She wondered why the cows were in transit. Maybe they were going to a new farm for Christmas. Or to be part of a Nativity play. She pictured the doors swinging open and farmhands in crisp overalls coming to lift down the calves. They would find Trixie and would give her fresh milk and homemade ice cream and they wouldn't even think to ask her how she'd wound up in the back of a livestock truck.

In a way, it was a mystery to Trixie, too. She had seen the detective at Jason's funeral, although he thought he'd been hiding. And then, when everyone thought she was asleep, she'd stood on the balcony and heard what he'd said to her father. Enough to know that she had to get out of there.

She was, in a way, a little proud of herself. Who knew that she'd be able to run away without a car, with only two hundred bucks in her pocket? She'd never considered herself to be the kind of person who was cool in the face of crisis - and yet, you never knew what you were capable of until you arrived at that given moment. Life was just a whole string of spots where you continued to surprise yourself.

She must have fallen asleep for a while, sandwiched between the knobby knees and globe bellies of the two calves, but when the truck stopped again they struggled to stand - impossible in that cramped space. Below them, the cow began to bellow, one low note that ricocheted. There was the sound of a seal being breached, a mighty creak, and then the doors to the back of the truck swung open.

Trixie blinked into the light and saw what she hadn't earlier: The cow had a lesion on her right foreleg, one that made it buckle beneath her. The Holstein calves on either side of her were males, no good for producing milk. She peered out the double doors and squinted so that she could read the sign at the end of the driveway: LaRue and Sons Beef, Berlin, NH.

This was not a petting zoo or Old MacDonald's Farm, as Trixie had imagined. This was a slaughterhouse.

She scrambled down from her ledge, startling the animals - not to mention the truck driver who was unhooking the tether of the cow - and took off like a shot down the long gravel driveway. Trixie ran until her lungs were on fire, until she had reached what passed for a town, with a Burger King and a gas station. The Burger King made her think of the calves, which made her think that she was going to be a vegetarian, if she ever got through the other side of this nightmare.

Suddenly, there was a siren. Trixie went still as stone, her eyes trained on the circling blue lights of the advancing police cruiser.

The car went screaming past her, on to someone else's emergency.

Wiping her hand across her mouth, Trixie took a deep breath and started to walk.

* * *

“She's gone,” Daniel Stone said, frantic. Bartholemew's eyes narrowed. “Gone?”

He followed Stone upstairs and stood in the doorway of Trixie's room, which looked as if a bomb had cut a swath through its middle. “I don't know where she is,” Stone said, his voice breaking. “I don't know when she left.”

It took Bartholemew less than a second to determine that this wasn't a lie. In the first place, Stone had been out of his sight for less

than a minute, hardly long enough to tip off his daughter that she was under suspicion. In the second place, Daniel Stone seemed just as surprised as Bartholemew was to find Trixie missing, and he was skating the knife edge of panic.

For only a heartbeat, Bartholemew let himself wonder why a teenage girl who had nothing to hide would suddenly disappear. But in the next breath, he remembered what it felt like to discover that your daughter was not where you'd thought she was, and he switched gears. “When did you last see her?”

“Before she went to take a nap . . . about three-thirty?” The detective took a notepad out of his pocket. “What was she wearing?”

“I'm not sure. She probably changed after the funeral.”

“Have you got a recent photo?”

Bartholemew followed Stone downstairs again, watching him run a finger along the vertebrae of books on a living room shelf, finally pulling down an eighth-grade yearbook from Bethel Middle School. He turned pages until they fell open to the S's. A folio of snapshots - a 5-by-7 and some wallet-sized - spilled out. “We never got around to framing them,” Stone murmured. In the photographs, Trixie's smiling face repeated like an Andy Warhol print. The girl in the picture had long red hair held back with clips. Her smile was just a little too wide, and a tooth in front was crooked. The girl in that picture had never been raped. Maybe she had never even been kissed.

Bartholemew had to pry the pictures of Trixie from her father's hand. Both men were painfully aware that Stone was struggling not to break down. The tears you shed over a child were not the same as any others. They burned your throat and your corneas. They left you blind.

Daniel Stone stared at him. “She didn't do anything wrong.”

“Sit tight,” Bartholemew replied, aware that it was not an answer. “I'll find her.”

* * *

The last lecture Laura gave before Christmas vacation was about the half-life of transgression. “Are there any sins Dante left out?” Laura asked. “Or any really bad modern-day behaviors that weren't around in the year 1300?”

One girl nodded. “Drug addiction. There's, like, no bolgia for crackheads.”

“It's the same as gluttony,” a second student said.

“Addiction's addiction. It doesn't matter what the substance is.”

“Cannibalism?”

“Nope, Dante's got that in there,” Laura said. “Count Uggolino. He lumps it in with bestiality.”

“Driving to endanger?”

“Filippo drives his horses recklessly. Early Italian road rage.” Laura glanced around the silent hall. "Maybe the question we need to ask isn't whether there's any fresh

twenty-first-century sin ... but whether the people who define sin have changed, because of the times."

“Well, the world's completely different,” a student pointed out.

“Sure, but look at how it's still the same. Avarice, cowardice, depravity, a need to control other people . . . these have all been around forever. Maybe nowadays a pedophile will start a kiddie-porn site instead of flashing in the subway tunnels, or a murderer will choose to use an electric chain saw to kill, instead of his bare hands ... Technology helps us be more creative in the way we sin, but it doesn't mean that the basic sin is different.” A boy shook his head. “Seems like there ought to be a whole different circle for someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, you know?”

“Or the people who come up with reality TV shows,” someone else interjected, and the class laughed.

“It's sort of interesting,” Laura said, “to think that Dante wouldn't have put Jeffrey Dahmer as deep in hell as he would Macbeth. Why is that?”

“Because the skiwiest thing you can do is be disloyal to someone. Macbeth killed his own king, man. That would be like Eminem taking down Dr. Dre.”

The student was, at a literal level, correct. In the Inferno, sins of passion and despair weren't nearly as damning as sins of treachery. Sinners in the upper circles of hell were guilty of indulging their own appetites, but without malice toward others. Sinners in the middle levels of hell had committed acts of violence toward themselves or others. The deepest level of hell, though, was reserved for fraud - what Dante felt was the worst sin of all. There was betrayal to family - those who killed kin. There was betrayal to country - for the double agents and spies of the world. There was betrayal to benefactor - Judas, Brutus, Cassius, and Lucifer, all of whom had turned against their mentors.

“Does Dante's hierarchy still work?” Laura asked. “Or do you think that in our world, the order of the damned should be shaken up?”

“I think it's worse to keep someone's head in your freezer than to sell national security secrets to the Chinese,” a girl said,

“but that's just me.”

Another student shook her head. “I don't get why being unfaithful to your king is worse than being unfaithful to your husband. If you have an affair, you wind up only in the second level of hell. That's, like, getting off easy.”

“Nice choice of words,” the kid beside her joked.

“It's about intention,” a student added. “Like manslaughter versus murder. It's almost as if you do something in the heat of the moment, Dante excuses you. But if you've got this whole premeditated scheme going on, you're in deep trouble.” In that moment, although she'd been a professor for this particular course - even this particular class topic - for a decade, Laura realized that there was a sin that Dante had left out, one that belonged in the very deepest pit of hell. If the worst sin of all was betraying others, then what about people who lied to themselves?

There should have been a tenth circle, a tiny spot the size of the head of a pin, with room for infinite masses. It would be overcrowded with professors who hid in ivy-covered towers instead of facing their broken families. With little girls who had grown up overnight. With husbands who didn't speak of their past but instead poured it out onto a blank white page. With women who pretended they could be the wife of one and the lover of another and keep the two selves distinct. With anyone who told himself he was living the perfect life, despite all evidence to the contrary. A voice swam toward her. “Professor Stone? Are you okay?” Laura focused on the girl in the front row who'd asked the question. “No,” she said quietly. “I'm not. You can all... you can all go home a little early for vacation.”

As the students disbanded, delighted with this windfall, Laura gathered her briefcase and her coat. She walked to the parking lot, got into her car, and began to drive.

The women who wrote “Annie's Mailbox” were wrong, Laura realized. Just because you didn't speak the facts out loud didn't erase their existence. Silence was just a quieter way to lie. She knew where she was headed, but before she got there, her cell phone rang. “It's Trixie,” Daniel said, and suddenly what he had to say was far more important than what she did.

* * *

Santa's Village in Jefferson, New Hampshire, was full of lies. There were transplanted reindeer languishing in a fake barn and phony elves hammering in a workshop and a counterfeit Santa sitting on a throne with a bazillion kids lined up to tell him what they wanted on the big day. There were parents pretending this was totally real, even the animatronic Rudolph. And then there was Trixie herself, trying to act like she was normal, when in fact she was the biggest liar of all.

Trixie watched a little girl climb onto Fake Santa's lap and pull his beard so hard that it ripped off. You'd think that a kid, even one

so young, would get suspicious, but it never worked that way. People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was in front of their eyes.

That's why she was here, wasn't it?

As a kid, of course, Trixie had believed in Santa. For years, Zephyr - who was half Jewish and fully practical - pointed out the discrepancies to Trixie: How could Santa be in both Filene's and the BonTon at the same time? If he really was Santa, shouldn't he know what she wanted without having to ask? Trixie wished she could round up the kids in this building and save them, like Holden Caulfield in the last book she'd read for English. Reality check, she would say. Santa's a phony. Your parents lied to you. And, she might add, they'll do it again. Her own parents had said she was beautiful, when in fact she was all angles and bowlegs. They'd promised that she'd find her Prince Charming, but he'd dumped Trixie. They said if she came home by her curfew and picked up her room and held up her end of the bargain, they'd keep her safe - yet look at what had happened.

She stepped out from behind a fir tree that belched Christmas carols and glanced around to see if anyone was watching her. In a way, it would have been easier to get caught. It was hard to look over your shoulder every other second, expecting to be recognized. She'd worried that the truck driver who'd given her a lift would radio her whereabouts to the state police. She'd been sure that the man selling tickets at Santa's Village had glanced down to compare her face to the one on a Wanted poster.

Trixie slipped into the bathroom, where she splashed water on her face and tried to take deep, even, social-disaster-avoidance breaths, the way she'd done in science class when they were dissecting a frog and she was sure she would throw up on her lab partner. She pretended to have something in her eye and squinted into the mirror until she was the only person left in the restroom.

Then Trixie stuck her head under the faucet. It was the kind you

had to push down to get the water going, so she had to keep pounding the knob for a continuous stream. She took off her sweatshirt and wrapped it around her hair, then went into a stall and sat on the toilet, shivering in her T-shirt while she rummaged through her backpack.

She'd bought the dye at Wal-Mart when the trucker stopped for cigarettes. The color was called Night in Shining Armor, but it looked plain old black to Trixie. She opened the box and read the instructions.

With any luck no one would think it weird that she was sitting in the bathroom for thirty minutes. Then again, no one else should be in the bathroom for thirty minutes. Trixie slipped on the plastic gloves and mixed the dye with the peroxide, shook, and squirted the solution onto her hair. She rubbed it around a little and pulled the plastic bag over her scalp.

Was she supposed to dye her eyebrows, too? Was that even possible?

She and Zephyr used to talk about how you could be an adult way before you hit twenty-one. The age wasn't as important as the milestones: taking a trip sans parents, buying beer without getting carded, having sex. She wished she could tell Zeph that it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.

Trixie wondered if, like her father, she'd never go back home again. She wondered how big the world was, really, when you crossed it, instead of traced it with your finger on a map. A little rivulet of liquid ran down her neck; she smeared it with a finger before it reached the collar of her shirt. The dye came away as dark as motor oil. For just a moment she pretended she was bleeding. It would be no surprise to her if inside she'd gone as black as everyone suspected.

* * *

Daniel parked in front of the wide-eyed windows of the toy store and watched Zephyr hand some bills and small change back to an elderly woman. Zephyr's hair was in braids, and she was wearing two longsleeved shirts, one layered over the next, as if she'd planned to be cold no matter what. Through the shadows and the stream of the glass, it was almost possible to pretend that she was Trixie.

There was no way Daniel planned to sit inside his house and wait for the police to find Trixie and bully an explanation out of her. To that end, the minute Bartholemew had gone - and Daniel checked to make sure he wasn't just lurking at the end of the block - Daniel had begun to consider what he knew about Trixie that the cops didn't. Where she might go, whom she might trust. Right now, there were precious few people who fell into that category.

The customer left the store, and Zephyr noticed him waiting outside. “Hey, Mr. S,” she said, waving.

She wore purple nail polish on her fingers. It was the same color Trixie had been wearing this morning; Daniel realized that they must have put it on together the last time Zephyr was over at the house. Just seeing it on Zephyr, when he so badly wanted to see it on Trixie, made it hard to breathe.

Zephyr was looking over his shoulder. “Is Trixie with you?” Daniel tried to shake his head, but somewhere between the thought and the action the intent vanished. He stared at the girl who knew his daughter maybe better than he'd ever known her himself, as much as it hurt to admit it. “Zephyr,” he said, “have you got a minute?”

* * *

For an old guy, Daniel Stone was hot. Zephyr had even said that to Trixie once or twice, although it totally freaked her out, what with him being her father and everything. But beyond that, Mr. Stone had always fascinated Zephyr. In all the years she'd known Trixie, she had never seen him lose his temper. Not when they spilled nail polish

remover on Mrs. S's bedroom bureau, not when Trixie failed her math test, not even when they were caught sneaking cigarettes in Trixie's garage. It was against human nature to be that calm, like he was some kind of Stepford dad who couldn't be provoked. Take Zephyr's own mother, for example. Zephyr had once found her hurling all of their dinner plates against the backyard fence, when she found out that this loser she was dating was two-timing her. Zephyr and her mom had screaming matches. In fact, her mother had been the one to teach her the best curse words. On the other hand, Trixie had learned them from Zephyr. Zephyr had even tried to lure Trixie into objectionable behaviors simply for the purpose of trying to get a rise out of Mr. Stone, but nothing had ever worked. He was like some kind of soap opera actor whose tragic story line you fell madly for: beautiful to look at, but all the same, you knew what you were seeing wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Today, though, something was different. Mr. Stone couldn't concentrate; even as he grilled Zephyr, his eyes kept darting around. He was so far from the even-keeled, friendly father figure she'd envied her whole life that if Zephyr didn't know better, she would have assumed it wasn't Daniel Stone standing across from her at all.

“The last time I talked to Trixie was last night,” Zephyr said, leaning across the glass counter of the toy store. “I called her around ten o'clock to talk about the funeral.”

“Did she tell you that she had somewhere to go after that?”

“Trixie isn't really into going out these days.” As if her father didn't already know that.

“It's really important, Zephyr, that you tell me the truth.”

“Mr. Stone,” she said, “why would I lie to you?” An unspoken answer hovered between them: because you have before. They were both thinking about what she'd told the police after the night of the rape. They both knew that jealousy could rise like a tide, erasing events that had been scratched into the shore of

your memory.

Mr. Stone took a deep breath. “If she calls you . . . will you tell her I'm trying to find her . . . and that everything's going to be okay?”

“Is she in trouble?” Zephyr asked, but by then Trixie's father was already walking out of the toy store.

Zephyr watched him go. She didn't care that he thought she was a lousy friend. In fact, she was just the opposite. It was because she'd already wronged Trixie once that she'd done what she had. Zephyr punched the key on the cash register that made the drawer open. Three hours had passed since she'd stolen all the twenty-dollar bills and had given them to Trixie. Three hours, Zephyr thought, was a damn good head start.

* * *

HAVE GONE TO LOOK FOR TRIXIE, the note said. BRB.

Laura wandered up to Trixie's room, as if this was bound to be a big mistake, as if she might open the door and find Trixie there, silently nodding to the beat of her iPod as she wrestled with an algebraic equation. But she wasn't there, of course, and the small space had been overturned. She wondered if that had been Trixie or the police.

Daniel had said on the phone that this was suddenly a homicide investigation. That Jason's death had not been accidental after all. And that Trixie had run away.

There was so much that had to be fixed that Laura didn't know where to start. Her hands shook as she sorted through the leftovers of her daughter's life - an archaeologist, looking over the artifacts and trying to piece together an understanding of the young woman who'd used them. The Koosh ball and the Lisa Frank pencil - these belonged to the Trixie she thought she had known. It was the other items that she couldn't make sense of: the CD with

lyrics that made Laura's jaw drop, the sterling silver ring shaped like a skull, the condom hidden inside a makeup compact. Maybe she and Trixie still had a lot in common: Apparently, while Laura

was turning into a woman she could barely recognize, her daughter had been, too.

She sat down on Trixie's bed and lifted the receiver of the phone. How many times had Laura cut in on the line between her and Jason, telling her that she had to say good night and go to bed?

Five more minutes, Trixie would beg.

If she'd given Trixie those minutes, all those nights, would it have added up to another day for Jason? If she took five minutes now, could she right everything that had gone wrong?

It took Laura three tries to dial the number of the police station, and she was holding for Detective Bartholemew when Daniel stepped into the room. “What are you doing?”

“Calling the police,” she said.

He crossed in two strides and took the receiver from her hand, hung up the phone. “Don't.”

“Daniel . . .”

“Laura, I know why she ran away. I was accused of murder when I was eighteen, and I took off, too.”

At this confession, Laura completely lost her train of thought. How could you live with a man for fifteen years, feel him move inside you, have his child, and not know something as fundamental about him as this?

He sat down at Trixie's desk. “I was still living in Alaska. The victim was my best friend, Cane.”

“Did you . . . did you do it?”

Daniel hesitated. “Not the way they thought I did.” Laura stared at him. She thought of Trixie, God knows where right now, on the run for a crime she could not have committed.

“If you weren't guilty . . . then why . . .”

“Because Cane was still dead.”

In Daniel's eyes, Laura could suddenly see the most surprising things: the blood of a thousand salmon slit throat to tail, the blueveined crack of ice so thick it made the bottoms of your feet hurt, the profile of a raven sitting on a roof. In Daniel's eyes she understood something she hadn't been willing to admit to herself before: In spite of everything, or maybe because of it, he understood their daughter better than she did.

He shifted, hitting the computer mouse with his elbow. The screen hummed to life, revealing several open windows: Google, iTunes, Sephora.com, and the heartbreaking rapesurvivor.com, full of poetry by girls like Trixie. But MapQuest? When Trixie wasn't even old enough to drive?

Laura leaned over Daniel's shoulder to grasp the mouse. FIND

IT' the site promised. There were empty boxes to fill in: address, city, state, zip code. And at the bottom, in bright blue: We are having trouble finding a route for your location.

“Oh, Christ,” Daniel said. “I know where she is.”

* * *

Trixie's father used to take her out into the woods and teach her how

to read the world so that she'd always know where she was going. He'd quiz her on the identification of trees: the fairy-tale spray of needles on a hemlock, the narrow grooves of an ash, the paper-wrapped birch, the gnarled arms of a sugar maple. One day, when they were examining a tree with barbed wire running through the middle of its trunk - how long do you think that took?

- Trixie's eye had been caught by something in the forest: sun glinting off metal.

The abandoned car sat behind an oak tree that had been split by lightning. Two of the windows had been broken; some animal had made its home in the tufted stuffing of the backseat. A vine had grown from the bottom of the forest floor through the window wrapping around the steering wheel.

Where do you think the driver is? Trixie had asked.

/ don't know, her father replied. But he's been gone for a long time

He said that the person who'd left the car behind most likely didn't want to bother with having it towed away. But that didn't keep Trixie from making up more extravagant explanations: The man had suffered a head wound and started walking, only to wander up a mountain and die of exposure, and even now the bones were bleaching south of her backyard. The man was on the run from the Mob and had eluded hit men in a car chase. The man had wandered into

town with amnesia and spent the next ten years completely unaware of who he used to be.

Trixie was dreaming of the abandoned car when someone slammed the door of the bathroom stall beside her. She woke up with a start and glanced down at her watch - surely if you left this stuff in your hair too long it would fall out by the roots or turn purple or something. She heard the flush of the toilet, running water, and then the busy slice of life as the door opened. When it fell quiet again, she crept out of the stall and rinsed her hair in the sink.

There were streaks on her forehead and her neck, but her hair her red hair, the hair that had inspired her father to call her his chili pepper when she was only a baby - was now the color of a thicket's thorns, of a rosebush past recovery.

As she stuffed the ruined sweatshirt into the bottom of the trash

can, a mother came in with two little boys. Trixie held her breath, but the woman didn't look twice at her. Maybe it was really that easy. She walked out of the bathroom, past a new Santa who'd come on duty, toward the parking lot. She thought of the man who'd left his car in the woods: Maybe he had staged his own death. Maybe he'd done it for the sole purpose of starting over.

* * *

If a teenager wants to disappear, chances are he or she will succeed. It was why runaways were so difficult to track - until they were rounded up in a drug or prostitution ring. Most teens who vanished did so for independence, or to get away from abuse. Unlike an adult, however, who could be traced by a paper trail of ATM withdrawals

and rental car agreements and airline passenger lists, a kid was more likely to pay in cash, to hitch-hike, to go unnoticed by bystanders.

For the second time in an hour, Bartholemew pulled into the neighborhood where the Stones lived. Trixie Stone was officially registered now as a missing person, not a fugitive from justice. That couldn't happen, not even if all signs pointed to the fact that the reason she'd left was because she knew she was about to be charged with murder.

In the American legal system, you could not use a suspect's disappearance as probable cause. Later on, during a trial, a prosecutor might hold up Trixie's flight as proof of guilt, but there was never going to be a trial if Bartholemew couldn't convince a judge to swear out a warrant for Trixie Stone's arrestso that at the moment she

was located, she could be taken into custody.

The problem was, had Trixie not fled, he wouldn't be arresting her yet. Christ, just two days ago, Bartholemew had been convinced that Daniel Stone was the perp . . . until the physical evidence started to prove otherwise. Prove, though, was a dubious term. He had a boot print that matched Trixie's footwear - and that of thousands of other town residents. He had blood on the victim that belonged to a female, which ruled out only half the population. He had a hair the same general color as Trixie's - a hair with a root on it full of uncontaminated DNA, but no known sample of Trixie's to compare it to and no imminent means of getting one. Any defense attorney would be able to drive a Hummer through the holes in that investigation. Bartholemew needed to physically find Trixie Stone, so that he could specifically link her to Jason Underhill's murder.