The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle

Daniel drove the snow-go toward Cane's house and turned off the ignition. Then he got off the vehicle and stood with his hand on Trixie's shoulder.

When you loved someone, you did whatever you thought was in her best interests, even if - at the time - it looked utterly wrong. Men did this for women; mothers did it for sons. And Daniel knew he'd do it for Trixie. He'd do anything. What made a hero a hero? Was it winning all the time, like Superman? Or was it taking on the task reluctantly, like Spider-Man? Was it learning, like the X-Men had, that at any moment you might fall from grace to become a villain? Or, like Alan Moore's Rorschach, was it being human enough to enjoy watching people die, if they deserved it?

The policeman approached. “Trixie Stone,” he said, “you're under arrest for the murder of Jason Underhill.”

“You can't arrest her,” Daniel insisted.

“Mr. Stone, I've got a warrant”

Daniel didn't take his eyes off his daughter's face. “Yes,” he said. “But I'm the one who killed him.”

* * *

Trixie couldn't talk, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't think. She was frozen, rooted to the permafrost like the policeman. Her father had just confessed to murder.

She stared at him, stunned. “Daddy,” she whispered.

“Trixie, I told you. Not a word.”

Trixie thought of how, when she was tiny, he used to carry her on his shoulders. She, like her mother, got dizzy up high - but her father would anchor her legs in his hands. / won't let you fall, he said, and because he never did, the world from that vantage point stopped being so scary.

She thought of this and a thousand other things: how for one entire year, he'd cut her lunch box sandwiches into letters so that they spelled out a different word each week: BRAVE, SMART, SWEET. How he'd always hide a caricature of her in one of the pages of his comic books. How she would rummage in her backpack and find, tucked in a pocket, peanut M&M's that she knew he'd left for her.

Her eyes filled with tears. “But you're lying,” she whispered. The policeman sighed. “Well,” he said, “somebody is.” He glanced toward the truck, where Trixie's mother already sat in the passenger seat, staring at them through the glass.

* * *

It had been almost comical, getting the call. The state troopers in Alaska had served the arrest warrant for Trixie Stone, they told Bartholemew. But in doing so, two other people had confessed to the crime. What did they want him to do?

Short of getting governor's warrants, the detective had to fly out there himself, interview the Stones, and decide who - if anyone - he wanted to arrest.

Daniel Stone had been brought into the conference room at the Bethel Police Station, where he and his wife had been taken following their individual confessions. Trixie, a minor, was in custody at the Bethel Youth Center, a juvenile detention facility. A radiator belched out erratic heat, stirring tinsel that had been draped above

its casing.

Tomorrow, he realized, was Christmas.

“You know this doesn't change anything,” Bartholemew said. “We still have to hold your daughter as a delinquent.” “What does that mean?”

“After we go back to Maine, she stays at a juvy lockup until she's certified to be tried as an adult for murder. Then if she doesn't get bail - which she won't, given the severity of the charge - she'll be sent back there after the arraignment.”

“You can't hold her if I'm the one who committed the crime,” Daniel pointed out.

“I know what you're doing, Mr. Stone,” Bartholemew said. “I don't even blame you, really. Did I ever tell you about the last conversation I had with my daughter? She came downstairs and told me she was going to watch a high school football game. I told her to have a good time. Thing is, it was May. Nobody was playing football. And I knew that,” Bartholemew said. "The people who were at the

scene said she never even braked as she went around the curve, that the car went straight over at full speed. They said it rolled three, maybe four times. When the medical examiner told me she'd OD'd before she went over the railing, I actually said thank God. I wanted to know she didn't have to feel any of that.“ Bartholemew crossed his arms. ”Do you know what else I did? I went home, and I tossed her room, until I found her stash, and the needles she used. I buried them in the bottom of the trash and drove

to the dump. She was already dead, and I still was trying to protect her."

Stone just stared at him. “You can't prosecute all of us. Eventually, you'll let her go.”

“I've got evidence that puts her at the bridge.”

“There were a thousand people there that night.”

“They didn't leave behind blood. They didn't get their hair caught in Jason Underhill's watchband.”

Stone shook his head. “Trixie and Jason were arguing, near the convenience store parking lot. That's when her hair must have gotten caught. But I showed up just as he grabbed Trixie, and I went after him. I was already a suspect once. I told you I got into a fight with the kid. I just didn't tell you what happened afterward.”

“I'm listening,” Bartholemew said.

“After he ran off, I tracked him to the bridge.”

“And then?”

“Then I killed him.”

“How? Did you sock him in the jaw? Hit him from behind? Give him a good shove?” When the other man remained silent, Bartholemew shook his head. “You can't tell me, Mr. Stone, because you weren't there. You're excluded by the physical evidence.. . and Trixie isn't.” He met Stone's gaze. “She's done things before that she couldn't tell you about. Maybe this is one more.” Daniel Stone glanced down at the table.

Bartholemew sighed. “Being a cop isn't all that different from being a father, you know. You do your damnedest, and it's still not good enough to keep the people you care about from hurting themselves.”

“You're making a mistake,” Stone said, but there was a thread of desperation in his voice.

“You're free to go,” Bartholemew replied.

* * *

In juvenile jail, the lights did not go out. In juvenile jail, you weren't in cells. You all slept single-sex in a dormitory that reminded Trixie of the orphans in Annie.

There were girls in here who'd stolen cash from the stores where they worked, and one who had thrown a knife at her principal. There were drug addicts and battered girlfriends and even an eight-year-old who was everyone's mascot - a kid who had hit her stepfather in the head with a baseball bat after he finished raping her.

Because it was Christmas Eve, they had a special dinner: turkey with cranberry sauce, gravy, mashed potatoes. Trixie sat next to a girl who had tattoos up and down her arms. “What's your story?” she asked.

“I don't have one,” Trixie said.

After dinner, a church group came to give the girls presents. The ones who'd been in the longest got the biggest packages. Trixie got a colored pencil set with Hello Kitty on the plastic cover. She took them out, one by one, and drew on her fingernails. If she were at home now, they'd have turned off all the lights in the house except for the ones on the Christmas tree. They'd open one present - that was the tradition - and then Trixie would go to bed and fake being asleep while her parents traipsed up and down the attic stairs with her gifts, the semblance of Santa for a girl who'd grown up years before they wanted her to. She wondered what the fake Santa at the amusement park in New Hampshire was doing tonight. Probably it was the only day of the year he got off.

After lights out, someone in the dorm started to sing “Silent Night.” It was thready at first, a reed on the wind, but then another girl joined in, and another. Trixie heard her own voice, disembodied, floating away from her like a balloon. All is calm. All is bright.

She thought she would cry her first night in juvenile jail, but it turned out she didn't have any tears left. Instead, when everyone forgot the extra verses, she listened to the eight-year-old who sobbed herself to sleep. She wondered how trees became petrified, if the same process worked with a human heart.

* * *

In the small holding cell where Laura had been for the past four hours, there was nothing soft, only cement and steel, and right angles. She'd found herself dozing off, dreaming of rain and cirrus clouds, of angel food cake and snowflakes - things that gave way the moment you touched them.

She wondered how Trixie was, where they'd sent her. She wondered if Daniel was on the other side of this thick wall, if they had come to question him as they had questioned her. When Daniel came into the room, on the heels of a policeman, Laura stood up. She pressed herself against the bars and reached out to him. He waited until the policeman left, then walked up to the bars and reached inside to Laura. “Are you okay?”

“They let you go,” she breathed.

He nodded and rested his forehead against hers.

“What about Trixie?”

“They've got her at a juvenile center down the road.” Laura let go of him. “You didn't need to cover for Trixie,” she said.

“I don't think either one of us was about to let her get sent to jail.”

“She won't be,” Laura said. “Because I'm the one who killed Jason.”

* * *

Daniel stared at her, all the breath leaving his body. “What?” She sank onto the metal bench in the cell and wiped her eyes.

“The night of the Winterfest, when Trixie disappeared, we said that I'd go home and wait there, in case she turned up. But when I headed back to my car, I saw someone on the bridge. I called out her name, and Jason turned around.”

She was crying in earnest now. “He was drunk. He said... he said that my bitch of a daughter was ruining his life. Ruining his life. He stood up and started coming toward me, and I... I got scared and pushed him away. But he lost his balance, and he went over the railing.”

Laura unconsciously brought her hand up to her ear as she spoke, and Daniel noticed that the small gold hoop earring she usually wore was gone. The blood. The red hair on the watchband. The boot prints in the snow. “It caught on his sweater. He ripped it out when he fell,” she said, following Daniel's gaze. “He was hanging on to the railing with one hand and reaching up with the other. Looking downI was so dizzy. He kept yelling for me to help. I started to reach for his hand . .. and then ...” Laura closed her eyes. “Then I let him go.”

It was no coincidence that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.

“I went home, and I waited for you and Trixie. I was sure the police were going to find me before you got there. I was going to tell you . . .”

“But you didn't,” Daniel said.

“I tried.”

Daniel remembered bringing Trixie home from the Winterfest, how Laura had been so shaken. Oh, Daniel, she had said. Something happened. He'd thought at the time that his wife was just as frantic about Trixie's disappearance as he had been. He thought Laura had been asking him a question when, in fact, she'd been trying to give him an answer.

She hugged her arms across her middle. “At first, they said it was a suicide, and I thought maybe I'd only dreamed it, that it hadn't happened the way I thought at all. But then Trixie ran away.”

And made herself look guilty, Daniel thought. Even to me.

“You should have told me, Laura. I could have . . .”

“Hated me.” She shook her head. “You used to stare at me like I'd hung the stars in the sky, Daniel. But after you found out about. . . you know, that I'd been with someone else ... it was different. You couldn't even look me in the eye.” When a Yup'ik Eskimo met another person, he averted his glance. It wasn't out of disrespect, but rather, the opposite. Sight was something to be conserved for the moments when you really needed it - when you were hunting, when you needed strength. It was only when you looked away from a person that you had the truest vision.

“I just wanted you to look at me like you used to,” Laura said, her voice breaking. “I just wanted it to be the way it used to be. That's why I couldn't tell you, no matter how many times I tried. I'd already been unfaithful to you. What would you have done if I'd told you I'd killed someone?”

“You didn't kill him,” Daniel said. “You didn't mean for that to happen.”

Laura shook her head, her lips pressed tightly together, as if she was afraid to speak out loud. And he understood, because he'd felt this himself: Sometimes what we wish for actually comes true. And sometimes that's the very worst thing that can happen. She buried her face in her hands. “I don't know what I meant and what I didn't. It's all mixed up. I don't even recognize myself anymore.”

Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons. But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.

“I do,” Daniel said.

It was possible, he decided, that even in today's day and age even thousands of miles away from the Yup'ik villages - people could still turn into animals, and vice versa. Just because you chose to leave a place did not mean you could escape taking it with you. A man and a woman who lived together long enough might swap traits, until they found parts of themselves in each other. Jettison a personality and you just might find it taking up residence in the heart of the person you loved most. Laura lifted her face to his. “What do you think is going to happen?”

He did not know the answer to that. He wasn't even certain he knew the right questions. But he would get Trixie, and they would go home. He'd find the best lawyer he could. And sooner or later, when Laura came back to them, they'd reinvent themselves. They might not be able to start over, but they could certainly start again.

Just then, a raven flew past the police station, soaring in the courtyard, imitating the sound of running water. Daniel watched carefully, the way he had learned to a lifetime ago. A raven could be many things - creator, trickster - depending on what form it felt like taking. But when it looped in a half circle and turned upside down, it could mean only one thing: It was dumping luck off its back - anyone's for the taking, if you happened to see where it landed.