The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle

Laura shook her head. “I don't understand ...”

“As a prosecutor, my job is to present facts to a jury that make it possible for them to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that your daughter was the victim of a rape perpetrated by Jason Underhill. However, the facts I'm presenting are the ones that your daughter presented to us. And that means our case is only as good as the information she's provided me with and as strong as the picture she paints on the stand.”

Daniel felt his jaw tighten. “I'd think that when a girl tries to kill herself, it's a pretty good indicator that she's suffering from trauma.”

“Either that, or mental instability.”

“So, you just give up?” Laura said, incredulous. “You don't try a case if you think it's going to be a tough sell?”

“I never said that, Mrs. Stone. But I do have an ethical obligation not to bring a case to court if even I'm unsure a crime happened.”

“You've got evidence,” Daniel said. “That rape kit.”

“Yes. The same rape kit that allowed a laboratory to find evidence of semen in Trixie's mouth, when by her own statement she did not have oral sex that night. On the other hand, Jason Underhill says that the intercourse was consensual . . . and was both oral and vaginal.” The DA turned over a page in a file.

"According to Trixie, she screamed no while she was being raped but said that her friend

Zephyr wouldn't have been able to hear her over the music. Yet according to other witnesses, no music was playing during the time of the assault."

“They're all lying,” Daniel said.

Marita stared at him. “Or Trixie is. She lied to you about going to her friend's house for a quiet sleepover that night. She lied about losing her virginity the night of the assault...”

“What?” Laura said, her jaw dropping, and at that moment Daniel remembered he'd never told her what the detective had said. Had he forgotten, or had he intended to forget all along?

“she lied to the ER physician about the cuts on her wrist, some of which were made long before that Friday night,” Marita continued. “Which begs the question: What else is Trixie lying about?”

“I want to speak to your boss,” Laura demanded.

“My boss will tell you that I have a hundred other cases to prosecute that could be commanding my attention. I don't have time for a victim who's crying wolf.”

Daniel couldn't look at Trixie. If he did, he thought he might break down. Where he'd grown up, a Yup'ik boy who cried wolf would simply turn into that animal forever. His relatives would say he had it coming. He'd spend the rest of his life watching his old family through yellow eyes, from a distance.

Daniel turned to the detective, who'd been doing a good job of trying to blend into the 1970s paneling. “Tell her about the photo.”

“He already has,” Marita said. “And I'm going to have my hands full trying to keep that out of the courtroom as it is.”

“It's a perfect example of how Trixie's being victimized . . .”

"It doesn't tell us anything about the night of the assault . .

. except that Trixie wasn't a choirgirl before it happened."

“Will you all just shut up!” At the sound of Trixie's voice, all eyes

turned. “I'm here, in case you hadn't noticed. So can you all stop talking about me like I'm not?”

“By all means, Trixie, we'd love to hear what you have to say. Today.”

Trixie swallowed. “I didn't mean to lie.”

“You're admitting you did?” the district attorney replied.

“There were so many . . . holes. I didn't think anyone would believe what happened if I couldn't remember the whole story.” She pulled her sleeves down farther over her wrists. Daniel had noticed her doing that in the past few days, and every time it made his heart pleat. “I remember going to Zephyr's, and all the people who were there. I didn't know most of them. A bunch of the girls were playing Rainbow”

“Rainbow?” Daniel said.

Trixie began to pick at the hem of her coat. “It's where everyone gets a different shade of lipstick, and the boys . . . you know, you go off with them .. .” She shook her head.

“The one with the most colorful penis at the end of the night wins,” Marita said flatly. “Is that about right?” Daniel heard Laura's intake of breath as Trixie nodded. “That's it,” she whispered. “I didn't do it, though. I thought I could - I wanted to make Jason jealous - but I couldn't. Everyone went home after that, except for Jason and Moss and me and Zephyr, and that's when we started playing poker. Moss took the picture of me, and Jason got mad at him, and that's when it all goes blank. I know I was in the bathroom when he found me, but I can't remember how we got to the living room. I can't remember anything, really, until he was on top of me. I thought if I waited long enough, it would all come back. But it hasn't.”

The district attorney and the detective exchanged a glance.

“Are you saying,” Marita clarified, “that you woke up to find him having intercourse with you?”

Trixie nodded.

“Do you remember any other details?”

“I had a really bad headache. I thought maybe he'd slammed my head on the floor or something.”

Bartholemew walked toward the district attorney. He stood behind her shoulder, flipping over the contents of the file until he reached a certain page and pointed. “The ER doc noted a seemingly dissociated mental state. And during her initial interview at the PD, she was unresponsive.”

“Mike,” the district attorney said, “give me a break.” “If it's true, it would turn this into gross sexual assault,” Bartholemew pressed. “And all of the inconsistencies in Trixie's story would actually work to the prosecution's advantage.”

“We'd need proof. Date rape drugs stay in the bloodstream for only seventy-two hours, tops.”

Bartholemew lifted a lab report out of the file folder. “Good thing you've got a sample, then, from six hours post.” Daniel was utterly lost. “What are you talking about?” The prosecutor turned. “Right now, this case is being tried as a juvenile sexually assaulting a juvenile. That changes, however, if the assault is committed either while Trixie was unconscious, or if she was given a substance that impaired her ability to appraise or control the sexual act. In that case, by law, Jason Underhill would have to be tried as an adult.”

“Are you saying Trixie was drugged?” Daniel said. The district attorney fixed her gaze on Trixie. “Either that,” she replied, “or your daughter is trying to dig herself out of yet another hole.”

* * *

"Special K, Vitamin K, Kit Kat, Blind Squid, Cat Valium, Purple

. . . it's got a dozen names on the street,“ Venice Prudhomme said, peeling off a pair of latex gloves and throwing them in the trash at Bartholemew's feet. ”Ketamine's a nonbarbiturate, rapid-acting anesthetic

used on both animals and humans . . . it's also allegedly a sexual stimulant. Kids like it as a club drug because, molecularly, it's very similar to angel dust - PCP. It produces a dissociative state, making them feel like their minds are separate from their bodies. We're talking hallucinations . . . amnesia." Mike had begged Venice to run the test at the state lab, in spite of

a two-month backlog of cases. He'd promised, in return, a pair of

club-level Bruins tickets. Venice was a single mom with a hockey-crazy son, a woman who didn't get paid enough to spend $85

per ticket; he knew she wouldn't be able to turn down the offer. Where he was going to actually get two club-level Bruins tickets on his own

salary, though, remained to be seen.

So far, Trixie had tested negative for GHB and Rohypnol, the two most common date rape drugs. At this point, Mike was close to conceding that Trixie had, again, duped them. He watched the computer screen, an incomprehensible run of numbers. “Who's dealing ketamine in Bethel, Maine?” he asked rhetorically.

“It's fully legal when it's Ketaset and sold to vets as a liquid. In that form, it's easy to use as a date rape drug. It's odorless and tasteless. You slip it into a girl's drink, and she's knocked out in less than a minute. For the next few hours, she's numb and willing ... and best of all, she won't remember what happened.” As the computer spit out the last analysis, Venice scanned it. “You say your victim's been lying to you?”

“Enough to make me wish I was working for the defense,” Mike replied.

She pulled a highlighter from her towering nest of braids and drew a yellow line across a field of results - a positive flag for ketamine. “Keep your day job,” Venice replied. “Trixie Stone was telling the truth.”

* * *

There were not, as most people believed, a hundred different words for snow. Boil down the roots of the Yup'ik language, and you'd only have fifteen: - qanuk (snowflake), kanevvluk (fine snow), natquik (drifting snow), nevluk (clinging snow), qanikcaq (snow on the ground), muruaneq (soft, deep snow on the ground), qetrar (crust on top of snow), nutaryuk (fresh fallen snow), qanisqineq (snow floating on water), qengaruk (snowbank), utvak (snow block), navcaq (snow cornice), pirta (snowstorm), cellallir (blizzard), andpirrelvag (severely storming). When it came to snow, Daniel thought in Yup'ik. He'd look out the window and one of these words, or its derivatives, would pop into his mind ahead of the English. There were snows here in Maine, though, that didn't have equivalent terms in Alaska. Like a nor'easter. Or the kind of snow that landed like goose down, during mud season. Or the ice storm that made the needles on the pines look like they were fashioned out of crystal. Times like those, Daniel's mind would simply go blank. Like now: There had to be a term for the kind of storm that he knew was going to be the first real measurable snow of the season. The flakes were the size of a toddler's fist and falling so fast that it seemed there was a rip in the seam of the gunmetal sky. It had snowed in October and November, but not like this. This was the sort of storm that would cause school superintendents to cancel afternoon basketball games, and create long lines at the Goodyear store; this was the kind of storm that made out-of-town drivers pull over on the highway and forced housewives to buy an extra gallon of milk.

It was the kind of snow that came so fast, it caught you unaware. You hadn't yet taken the shovels down from the attic where you'd put them last May; you didn't get a chance to cover the trembling rhododendrons with their ridiculous wooden tepees. It was the kind of snow, Daniel realized, where you didn't have time to put away the errant rake and the clippers you'd used to trim back the blackberry bushes, so you'd find yourself walking in circles, hoping you might trip over them before the blades rusted for good. But you never did. Instead, you were bound to lose the things you'd

been careless with, and your punishment was not seeing them again until the spring.

* * *

Trixie couldn't remember the last time she went out to play in the snow. When she was a kid, her father used to build a luge in the backyard that she'd slide down on a tube, but at some point it was no longer cool to look like a total spaz when she tipped over, and she'd traded her rubber-tread Sorels for fashionable stacked-heel boots.

She couldn't find her snow boots - they were buried under too much stuff in the closet. Instead, she borrowed her mother's, still drying in the mudroom, now that her mom had canceled her afternoon lecture in the wake of the storm. Trixie wrapped a scarf around her neck and jammed a hat onto her head that said DRAMA QUEEN across the front in red script. She pulled on a pair of her father's ski mittens and headed outside.

It was what her mother used to call snowman snow - the kind damp enough to stick together. Trixie packed it into a ball. She started to roll it across the lawn like a bandage, leaving behind a long brown tongue of matted grass.

After a while, she surveyed the damage. The yard looked like a crazy quilt, white stripes bordering triangles and squares made of lawn. Taking another handful of snow, Trixie began to roll a second snowball, and a third. A few minutes later, she was standing in the middle of them, wondering how they'd gotten so big so fast. There was no way she would be able to lift one onto the other. How had she managed to build a snowman when she was little?

Maybe she hadn't. Maybe someone else had always done it for her. Suddenly the door opened and her mother was standing there, screaming her name and trying to see through the flakes still coming down. She looked frantic, and it took Trixie a moment to understand: Her mother didn't know she'd come outside; her mother was still worried she'd kill herself.

“Over here,” Trixie said.

Not that death-by-blizzard was a bad idea. When Trixie was tiny, she used to dig a hideout in the mountain of snow left behind by the plow. She called it her igloo, even though her father had told her that Eskimos in America did not and never had lived in those. But then

she read a newspaper article about a kid in Charlotte, Vermont, who had done the same exact thing and the roof had collapsed on his head and smothered him before his parents even knew he was missing, and she never did it again.

Her mother walked outside and immediately sank ankle-deep in snow. She was wearing Trixie's boots, which she must have dug out of the closet wreckage after Trixie had commandeered her own Sorels. “You want help?” her mother asked. Trixie didn't. If she'd wanted help, she would have invited someone outside with her in the first place. But she couldn't for the life of her imagine how she was going to get that stupid belly on top of the snowman's base. “All right,” she conceded. Her mother got on one side of the ball and pushed, while Trixie tried to pull it from the front. Even together, they couldn't budge the weight. “Welcome to the Fourth Circle,” her mother said, laughing.

Trixie fell onto her butt on the snow. Leave it to her mother to

turn this into a classics lesson.

“You've got your tightwads on one side and your greedy folks on the other,” her mother said. “They shove boulders at each other for all eternity.”

“I was kind of hoping to finish this up before then.” Her mother turned. “Why, Trixie Stone. Was that a joke?” Since coming home from the hospital, there had been precious few of those in the household. When a television sitcom came on, the channel was immediately changed. When you felt a smile coming on, you squelched it. Feeling happy didn't seem particularly appropriate, not with everything that had gone on lately. It was as if,

Trixie thought, they were all waiting for someone to wave a magic wand and say, It's okay, now. Carry on.

What if she was the one who was supposed to wave that wand?

Her mother began to sculpt a snow ramp. Trixie fell into place beside her, pushing the middle snowball higher and higher until it tipped onto the bigger base. She packed snow between the seams. Then she lifted the head and perched it at the very top. Her mother clapped... just as snowman listed and fell. His head rolled into one of the basement window gutters; his midsection cracked like an egg. Only the massive base sphere remained intact. Frustrated, Trixie slapped a snowball against the side of it. Her mother watched and then packed her own snowball. Within seconds they were both firing shots at the boulder until it cleaved down the center, until it succumbed to the assault and lay between them in fat iceberg chunks.

By then, Trixie was lying on her back, panting. She had not felt .. . . well, this normal . . . in some time. It occurred to her that had things ended differently a week ago, she might not be doing any of this. She'd been so focused on what she had wanted to get away from in this world she forgot to consider what she might miss.

When you die, you don't get to catch snowflakes on your tongue. You don't get to breathe winter in, deep in your lungs. You can't lie in bed and watch for the lights of the passing town plow. You can't suck on an icicle until your forehead hurts.

Trixie stared up at the dizzy flakes. “I'm kind of glad.”

“About what?”

“That it didn't.. . you know ... work out.” She felt her mother's hand reach over to grab her own. Their mittens were both soaked.

They'd go inside, stick their clothes inside the dryer. Ten minutes later, they'd be good as new.

* * *

Because of the storm, hockey practice had been canceled. Jason came home after school, as per the conditions of his bail, and holed himself up in his bedroom listening to the White Stripes on his iPod. He closed his eyes and executed mental passes to Moss, wrist shots and slapshots and pucks that hit the top shelf. One day, people would be talking about him, and not just because of this rape case. They'd say things like, Oh, Jason Underhill, we always knew he'd make it. They'd put up a replica jersey of his over the mirror behind the town bar, with his name facing out, and the Bruins games would take precedence over any other programming on the one TV mounted in the corner. Jason had a lot of work cut out ahead of him, but he could do it. A year or two postgrad, then some college hockey, and maybe he'd even be like Hugh Jessiman at Dartmouth and get signed in the first round of the NHL draft. Coach had told Jason that he'd never seen a forward with as much natural talent as Jason. He'd said that if you wanted something bad enough, all you had to learn was how to go out and take it.

He was living out his fantasy for the hundredth time when the door to his room burst open. Jason's father strode in, fuming, and yanked the iPod's headphones out of Jason's ears. “What the hell?” Jason said, sitting up.

“You want to tell me what you left out the first time? You want to tell me where you got the goddamned drugs?”

“I don't do drugs,” Jason said. “Why would I do something that's going to screw up my game?”

“Oh, I believe you,” his father said, sarcastic. “I believe you didn't take any of those drugs yourself.”

The conversation was spinning back and forth in directions Jason couldn't follow. “Then why are you flipping out?”

“Because Dutch Oosterhaus called me at work to discuss a little lab report he got today. The one they did on Trixie Stone's blood that proves someone knocked her out by slipping her a drug.” Heat climbed the ladder of Jason's spine.

“You know what else Dutch told me? Now that drugs are in the picture, the prosecutor's got enough evidence to try you as an adult.”

“I didn't . . .”

A vein pulsed in his father's temple. “You threw it all away, Jason. You fucking threw it all away for a small-town whore.”

“I didn't drug her. I didn't rape her. She must have fooled around with that blood sample, because ... because .,.” Jason's voice dropped off. “Jesus Christ... you don't believe me.”

“No one does,” his father said, weary. He reached into his back pocket for a letter that had already been opened and passed it to Jason before leaving the room.

Jason sank down onto his bed. The letter was embossed with a return address for Bethel Academy; the name of the hockey coach had been scrawled above it in pen. He began to read: In lieu of recent circumstances . . . withdrawing its initial offer of a scholarship for a postgraduate year. . . sure you understand our position and its reflection on the academy.

The letter dropped from his hands, fluttering to land on the carpet. The iPod, without its headphones, glowed a mute blue. Who would have imagined that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence?

Jason buried his face in his hands and, for the first time since all this had begun, started to cry.

* * *

Once the storm had stopped and the streets were cleared, the storekeepers in Bethel came out to shovel their walkways and talk about how lucky they were that this latest blizzard hadn't caused the town manager to cancel the annual Winterfest.

It was always held the Friday before Christmas and was a direct ploy to boost the local economy. Main Street was blocked off by the spinning blue lights of police cars. Shops stayed open late, and hot cider was served for free in the inn. Christmas lights winked like fireflies in the bare branches of the trees. Some enterprising farmer carted in a sickly looking reindeer and set up portable fencing around it: a North Pole petting zoo. The bookstore owner, dressed as Santa, arrived at seven o'clock and stayed as long as it took to hear the holiday requests of all the children waiting in line.

This year, in an effort to connect local sports heroes to the community, the square in front of the town offices had been sealed and flooded to create a makeshift ice rink. The Ice CaBabes, a local cornpetitive figure-skating team, had done an exhibition routine earlier that evening. Now the championship Bethel High School hockey team was slated to play pickup hockey with a local group of Boy Scouts.

After everything that had happened, Jason hadn't planned to go

- until Coach called up and said he had an obligation to the team. What Coach hadn't done, however, was specify in what condition Jason had to arrive. It was a fifteen-minute ride downtown, and he drank a fifth of his dad's Jack Daniel's on the way. Moss was already on the ice when Jason sat down on a bench and pulled out his skates. “You're late,” Moss said. Jason double-knotted the laces, grabbed his stick, and shoved hard past Moss. “You here to talk or play hockey?” He skated so fast down the center of the rink that he had to slalom around some of the

wobbling kids. Moss met him and they passed the puck in a series of complicated handoffs. On the sidelines, the parents cheered, thinking this was all part of the exhibition. Coach called for a face-off, and Jason skated into position. The kid he was opposing on the scout team came up as high as his hip. The puck was dropped, and the high school team let the kids win it. But Jason stick-checked the boy who was skating down the ice, stole

the puck, and carried it down to the goal. He lifted it to the upper right corner of the net, where there was no chance of the tiny goalie being able to stop it. He pumped his stick in the air and looked around for his other teammates, but they were hanging back, and the crowd wasn't cheering anymore. “Aren't we supposed to score?” he yelled out, his words slurring. “Did the rules change here, too?”

Moss led Jason to the side of the rink. “Dude. It's just pond hockey, and they're just kids.”

Jason nodded, shook it off. They met for another face-off, and this time when the kids took the puck Jason skated backward slowly, making no move to go after it. Unused to playing without the boards, he tripped over the plastic edge of the rink liner and fell into the arms of the crowd. He noticed Zephyr

Santorelli-Weinstein's face, and a half-dozen others from school.

“Sorry,” he muttered, staggering to his feet. When he stepped onto the ice again, Jason headed for the puck, hip-checking a player to get him out of the way. Except this time, his opponent was half his size and a third of his weight, and went flying.

The boy banged into his goalie, who slid into the net in a heap, crying. Jason watched the kid's father hurry onto the ice in his street shoes.

“What is wrong with you today?” Moss said, skating close.

“It was an accident,” Jason answered, and his friend reared back, smelling the alcohol.

“Coach is going to rip you a new asshole. Get out of here. I'll cover for you.”

Jason stared at him.

“Go,” Moss said.

Jason took one last look at the boy and his father, then skated hard to the spot where he'd left his boots.

* * *

I did not die, and yet I lost life's breath: imagine for yourself what I became, deprived at once of both my life and death.

Laura read Lucifer's lines in the last canto of the Inferno, then closed the book. Hands down, Lucifer was the most fascinating character in the poem: waist-deep in the lake of ice, with his three heads gnawing on a feast of sinners. Having once been an archangel, he certainly had the freedom of choice - in fact, it was what got him to pick a fight with God in the first place. So if Lucifer had willingly chosen his course, had he known beforehand that he was going to end up suffering?

Did he think, on some level, that he deserved it? Did anyone, who was cast in the role opposite the hero? It occurred to Laura that she had sinned in every single circle. She'd committed adultery. She'd betrayed her benefactor - the university - by seducing a student. . . which could also be considered treachery, if you classified Seth as an innocent pawn in the game. She'd defied God by ignoring her wedding vows: She'd defied her family by distancing herself from Trixie when Trixie needed her most. She'd lied to her husband, she'd been angry and wrathful, she'd sowed discord, and she'd been a fraudulent counselor to a student who came looking for a mentor and wound up with a lover. About the only thing Laura hadn't done was kill someone. She reached behind her desk for an antique china human head she had found at a garage sale. It was smooth and white and divided into calligraphed subsections across the brain area: wit, glory, revenge, bliss. Over the skull she'd put a headband sporting two red devil horns, a gift from a student one Halloween. Now she took the headband off and tried it on for size.

There was a knock on her door, and a moment later Seth stepped into her office. “Are those horns on your head,” he said, “or are you just happy to see me?”

I

She yanked off the headband.

“Five minutes.” He closed the door, locked it. “You owe me that much.”

Relationships always sounded so physically painful: You fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars? The problem with a marriage - or maybe its strength - was that it spanned a distance, and you were never the same person you started out being. If you were lucky, you could still recognize each other years later. If you weren't, you wound up in your office with a boy fifteen years younger than you were, pouring his heart into your open hands.

All right. If she was going to be honest, she had loved the way Seth knew what an anapest was, and a canzone. She loved seeing their reflection in a pane of glass as they passed a storefront and being surprised every time. She loved playing Scrabble on a rainy afternoon when she should have been grading papers or attending a departmental meeting. But just because she had called in sick that day didn't mean she wasn't still a professor. Just because she abandoned her family didn't mean she wasn't still a wife, a mother. Her biggest sin, when you got right down to it, was forgetting all that in the first place.

“Seth,” she said, “I don't know how to make this any easier. But . . .”

She broke off, realizing the words she was about to say: But I love my husband. I always have.

“We need to talk,” Seth said quietly. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and tossed a rolled newspaper onto the table. Laura had seen it. The front page chronicled the newly filed charge by the district attorney. Jason Underhill would be tried as an adult, due to the presence of date rape drugs in the victim's bloodstream.

“Ketamine,” Seth said.

Laura blinked at him. From what the prosecutor had said, the drug found in Trixie's system hadn't even been one of the more popular date rape drugs. It hadn't been listed in the newspaper, either. “How would you know that?”

Seth sat down on the edge of her desk. “There's something I have to tell you,” he said.

* * *

“I'm coming!” Trixie yelled through the open door, as her father honked the horn for the third time. Jesus. It wasn't like she wanted to go into town right now, and it wasn't her fault that the pizza cheese he was using to cook dinner had grown enough mold to be classified as an antibiotic. She hadn't been doing anything earthshattering that she couldn't interrupt, but it was the principle that was upsetting her; Neither parent felt comfortable letting Trixie out of sight.

She stomped into the first pair of boots she could find and headed outside to his idling truck. “Can't we just have soup?” Trixie said, slouching down in her seat, when what she really meant was: What will it take to make you trust me again?

Her father put the truck into first gear to go down a long hill. “I know you want me to leave you home alone. But I hope you also know why I can't do that.”

Trixie rolled her eyes toward the window. “Whatever.” As they approached town, there was a glut of cars. People in bright parkas and scarves spilled across the street like a stream of

confetti. Trixie felt her stomach turn over. “What's the date?” she

murmured. She'd seen the signs all over school: ICE = NICE.

Text file converted with freeware AcroPad - www.dreamscape.it

DON'T BE

A SNOWFLAKECOME TO WINTERFEST.

Trixie shrank back in her seat as three girls she recognized from school came so close to the car they brushed the front bumper. Everyone came to the Winterfest. When she was little, her parents would take her to pat the sorry old reindeer idling near the camera

store. She could remember seeing ordinary teachers and doctors and waitresses become Victorian carolers for a night. Last year, Trixie had been an elf along with Zephyr, the two of them wearing double layers of skating tights and handing out candy canes to the kids who sat on Santa's lap.

This year, walking down Main Street would be totally different. At first, no one would see her, because it was dark out. But then, someone would bump into her by accident. Sorry, they'd say, and then they'd realize who it was. They'd tap their friends. They would point. They'd lean close and whisper about how Trixie wasn't wearing any makeup and how her hair looked like it hadn't been washed in a week. Before she had made it to the other end of Main Street, their stares would have burned into the back of her coat like sunlight through a looking glass, starting a flash fire that reduced her to a pile of ashes.

“Daddy,” she said, “can't we just go home?” Her father glanced at her. He'd had to detour around Main Street and was now parked in a lot behind the grocery store. Trixie could see he was weighing the cost of reaching his destination against Trixie's extreme discomfort. . . and factoring in her suicide attempt to boot. “You stay in the car,” her father conceded. “I'll be right back.”

Trixie nodded and watched him cross the parking lot. She closed her eyes and counted to fifty. She listened to the sound of her own pulse.

Yet as it turned out, what Trixie had thought she wanted most of

all - being left alone - turned out to be absolutely terrifying. When the door of the car beside her slammed, she jumped. The headlights swept over her as the car backed out, and she ducked her face against the collar of her coat so that the driver couldn't see.

Her father had been gone for three minutes when she started to really panic. It didn't take much longer than that to buy some stupid cheese, did it? What if someone else came to this parking lot and

saw her sitting there? How long before a crowd gathered, calling her a slut and a whore? Who would save her if they decided to pound on the windows, start a witch hunt, lynch her?

She peered out the windshield. It would take fifteen seconds, tops, to make it to the door of the grocery store. By now her father would be in line. She might run into someone she knew there, but at least she wouldn't be alone.

Trixie got out of the car and started to race across the parking lot. She could see the buttery windows of the grocery mart and the line of wire shopping carts shivering against its outer wall.

Someone was coming. She couldn't see whether it was her father

- the figure seemed big enough, but the streetlamp was behind him, obscuring the features. If it was her father, he'd see her first, Trixie realized. And if it wasn't her father, then she was going to move past the stranger at the speed of light.

But as Trixie broke into a sprint, she hit a patch of black ice and her feet gave out from underneath her. One leg twisted, and she could feel herself falling. The moment before her left hip struck the pavement, she was wrenched upright by the very person she'd been trying to avoid. “You okay?” he said, and she looked up to find Jason holding her upper arm.

He let go almost as quickly as he'd grabbed her. Trixie's mother had said that Jason couldn't come near her, couldn't cross paths with her - if he did, he'd be shipped off to a juvenile detention center before the trial. But either her mother had been wrong or Jason had forgotten, because he shook off whatever fear had made him release her and began advancing on her instead. He smelled like a distillery, and his voice was raw. “What did you tell them? What are you trying to do to me?”

Trixie fought for breath. The cold was seeping through the back of her jeans and there was water in her boot where it had gone through the ice into a puddle. “I didn't... I'm not...”

“You have to tell them the truth,” Jason begged. “They don't believe me.”

This was news to Trixie and cut clean as a knife through her fear. If they didn't believe Jason, and they didn't believe her, who did they believe?

He crouched in front of her, and that was all it took for Trixie to be whipped back to then. It was as if the rape was happening all over again, as if she couldn't control a single inch of her own body.

“Trixie,” Jason said.

His hands on her thighs, as she tried to pull away.

“You have to.”

His body rising over hers, pinning her at the hips.

“Now.”

Now, he had said, throwing his head back as he putted out and spitted hot across her belly. Now, he had said, but by then it was already too late.

Trixie drew in a deep breath and screamed at the top of her lungs.

Suddenly Jason wasn't leaning over her anymore. Trixie glanced up to see him wrestling, trying to dodge her father's punches.

“Daddy!” she screamed. “Stop!”

Her father turned, bleeding from a split lip. “Trixie, get in the car.”

She didn't get in the car. She scrambled away from their brawl and stood in the halo of the streetlamp, watching as her father the same man who caught the spiders in her bedroom and carried them outside in a Dixie cup, the same man who had never in his life spanked her - pummeled Jason. She was horrified and fascinated all at once. It was like meeting someone she'd never seen before and finding out that all this time, he'd been living next door.

The sound of flesh smacking flesh reminded Trixie of the bluefish that got slapped hard against the docks in Portland by the fishermen, to still them before they were filleted. She covered her ears and looked down at the ground, at the plastic bag of shredded mozzarella that had fallen and been torn open under their boots during the fight.

“If you ever,” her father panted, “ever ...” He landed a punch to Jason's gut. “. . . ever come near my daughter again . . .” A blow across the right jaw. “I will kill you.” But just as he reared back his hand to strike again, a car drove past the parking lot, illuminating everything.

* * *

The last man Daniel had beaten up had already been dead. In the high school gym in Akiak, Daniel had slammed Cane against the floor, although his head already had a bullet hole in it. He'd done it because he wanted Cane to tell him to stop. He'd wanted Cane to sit up and take a swing back at him.

The principal had tiptoed gingerly into this nightmare, absorbing Daniel's sobs and the discarded rifle and the blood sprayed across the bleachers. Daniel, the principal had said, shocked. "What did you do?

Daniel had run, because he was faster than the principal and faster than the police. For a few days he was a murder suspect, and he liked that. If Daniel had meant to kill Cane, then he couldn't feel as guilty about not keeping it from happening. By the time he left town, the rumors surrounding Daniel had died down. Everyone knew it was Cane's hunting rifle, and Daniel's fingerprints hadn't been on it. Cane had not left a suicide note that was rare, in the village - but he'd left his basketball jersey on the. table for his little sister. Daniel had been cleared as a suspect, but he left Alaska anyway. It wasn't that he'd been scared of his future, it was that he couldn't see one, period.

Every now and then, he still woke up with one thought caught like cotton on the roof of his mouth: Dead men don't bruise. Tonight, he'd been stuck behind an old woman paying with pennies at the grocery mart. The whole time, he was second-guessing himself. At first, after the suicide attempt, Trixie had been distant and silent, but over the past few days her personality would bob to the surface every now and then. However, the minute they'd reached town, Trixie had gone still and blank a relapse. Daniel hadn't wanted to leave her alone in the car but couldn't stand the thought of forcing her to leave that safety zone either. How long could it take to buy a single item? He'd hurried into the store, thinking only of Trixie and getting her back home as quickly as possible.

It was when he'd stepped under the streetlamp that he'd seen it: that bastard's hand on his daughter's arm.

For someone who has never given himself over to rage, it would be hard to understand. But for Daniel, it felt like shrugging on an old, soft suede coat that had been buried so deep in his closet he was certain it had long ago been given away to someone else who needed the cover. Lucid thought gave way to utter feeling. His body started to burn; his own anger buzzed in his ears. He saw through a crimson haze, he tasted his own blood, and still he knew he could not stop. As he gloried in the scrape of his knuckles and the adrenaline that kept him one step ahead, Daniel began to remember who he used to be.

Every brawl with a bully in Akiak, every fistfight with a drunk outside a bar, every window he'd smashed to get inside a locked door . . . it was as if Daniel had stepped completely outside his body and was watching the tornado that had taken up residence there instead. In the ferocity, he lost himself, which was what he'd hoped for all along.

By the time he was finished, Jason was shaking so hard that Daniel knew only his own hand at the boy's throat was keeping him upright. “If you ever ... ever come near my daughter again,” Daniel said, “I will kill you.”

He stared at Jason, trying to commit to memory the way the boy looked when he knew he was defeated, because Daniel wanted to see it on his face again on the day they handed down a verdict in the courtroom. He drew back his arm, focusing his sights on the spot just under the boy's jaw - the spot where a good, strong blow would knock him unconsciouswhen suddenly the high beams of an oncoming car washed over him.

It was the opportunity Jason needed to throw Daniel off balance. He pushed away and took off at a dead run. Daniel blinked, his concentration shattered. Now that it was over, he could not stop his hands from trembling. He turned to the truck, where he'd told Trixie to wait, and he opened the door. “I'm sorry you had to see . . .” Daniel said, breaking off as he realized his daughter wasn't there.

“Trixie!” he yelled, searching the parking lot. “Trixie, where are you?”

It was too goddamned dark - Daniel couldn't see - so he started running up and down the aisles among the cars. Could Trixie have been so upset, watching him turn into an animal, that she'd been willing to jump from the frying pan into the fire, to get as far away from him as possible, even if that meant she'd have to run into town?

Daniel started sprinting down Main Street, calling for her. Frantic passed for festive in the dark. He pushed aside knots of carolers and divided families joined together at the hands. He barreled into a table with a sugar-on-snow display, kids rolling long strings of candied maple syrup around popsicle sticks. He climbed onto a sidewalk bench so that he could tower over the milling crowd and look around.

There were hundreds of people, and Trixie wasn't one of them. He headed back to his car. It was possible that she had gone home, although it would take her a while to cover the four-mile distance on foot, in the snow. He could take his truck and start searching . . . but what if she hadn't left town? What if she came back looking for him, and he wasn't here?

Then again, what if she'd started home, and Jason found her first?

He reached into the glove compartment and fumbled for his cell phone. No one answered at the house. After a hesitation, he called Laura's office.

Last time he'd done this, she hadn't answered.

When she picked up on the first ring, Daniel's knees buckled with relief. “Trixie's missing.”

“What?” He could hear the bright blue edge of panic in Laura's voice.

“We're in town. . . she was in the car waiting ...” He was not making any sense, and he knew it.

“Where are you?”

“In the lot behind the grocery store.”

“I'm on my way.”

When the line went dead, Daniel slipped the phone into his coat pocket. Maybe Trixie would try to call him. He stood up and tried to replay the fight with Jason, but he could not dissect it: It could have been three minutes, it could have been thirty. Trixie might have run off at the first punch or after the last. He had been so single-minded about wanting to do harm that he'd lost sight of his daughter while she was still standing in front of him.

“Please,” he whispered to a God he'd given up on years ago.

“Please let her be all right.”

Suddenly a movement in the distance caught his eye. He turned to see a shadow crossing behind the brush at the far end of the parking lot. Daniel stepped out of the circle of light thrown by the streetlamp and walked toward the spot where he'd seen the dark overlap itself. “Trixie,” he called. “Is that you?”

* * 8

Jason Underhill stood with his hands braced on the wooden railing of the trestle bridge, trying to see if the river had completely iced over yet. His face hurt like hell from where Trixie's father had beaten the crap out of him, his ribs throbbed, and he didn't have any idea how he was going to explain his battered face in the morning without revealing that he'd broken the conditions of his bail and interacted with not one but two members of the Stone family.

If they were going to try him as an adult, did that affect the rest? Once they found out that he'd approached Trixie, would-he get sent to a real jail, instead of just some juvy facility?

Maybe it didn't matter, anyway. Bethel Academy didn't want him to play next year. His hopes to go professional one day were as good as dead. And why? Because he'd been considerate that night at Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein's house and had gone back to make sure that Trixie was all right.

Three weeks ago, he had been the number one ranked high school hockey player in the state of Maine. He had a 3.7 grade point average and a penchant for hat tricks, and even kids who didn't know him pretended they did. He could have had his pick of high school girls and maybe even some from the local college, but he'd been stupid enough to fall for Trixie Stone: a human black hole who camouflaged herself as a girl with a heart so clear you might look at it and see yourself.

He was seventeen, and his life was as good as over. Jason stared at the ice beneath the bridge. If his trial started before the spring came ... if he lost. . . how long would it be before he saw the river running again?

He leaned down, his elbows on the wooden railing, and pretended that he could see it now.

* * *

Daniel was sitting underneath the streetlamp when Laura came running up to him. “Did she come back?”

“No,” he said, getting slowly to his feet. “And she's not answering, if she's at the house.”

“Okay,” Laura said, pacing in a tight circle. “Okay.”

“It's not okay. I got into a fight with Jason Underhill. He had his hands on her. And I... I... I snapped. I beat him up, Laura. Trixie saw every minute of it.” Daniel took a deep breath. “Maybe we should call Bartholemew.”

Laura shook her head. “If you call the police, you have to tell them you were fighting with Jason,” she said flatly. “That's assault, Daniel. People get arrested for it.”

Daniel fell silent, thinking of his previous encounter with Jason - the one in the woods, with a knife. As far as he knew, the boy hadn't said anything to anyone about it. But if it came out that Daniel had beaten him up, that other incident was bound to surface.

And it wasn't just assault - it qualified as kidnapping, too. He turned to Laura. “So what do we do?”

She stepped closer, the light from the lamp falling over her shoulders like a cloak. “We find her ourselves,” she said.

* * *

Laura ran into the house, calling for Trixie, but there was no answer. Shaking, she walked into the dark kitchen, still wearing her coat. She turned on the tap and splashed cold water on her face.

This couldn't have happened.

She and Daniel had plotted a strategy: He would search the streets for Trixie, while Laura went home in case she showed up. You need to calm down, she told herself. This is all going to work out.

When the phone rang, she grabbed it. Trixie. But in the moment it took for her to bring the receiver to her ear, she had another thought - what if it was the police?

Laura swallowed. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Stone . . . this is Zephyr. Is Trixie there? I've got to talk to her.”

“Zephyr,” she repeated. “No. Trixie's not. Have you seen her tonight?”

“Me? Um. No.”

“Well.” Laura closed her eyes. “I'll tell her you called,” she said.

She hung up the phone, sat down at the kitchen table, and steeled herself to wait for whatever came next.

* * *

Every summer, traveling fairs came through Maine. They arrived in caravans that popped open to reveal the baseball throw, the ringtoss, the balloon darts. A massive white truck unfolded, like a sleeping deer getting to its feet, to turn into the Tilt-A-Whirl; another transformed into the Indiana Jones Adventure House. There were kiddie

rideshot-air balloons that never left the ground, giant frogs with pink plaster tongues that chased flies in small circles, a carousel fit for a princess. But the ride Trixie looked forward to, year after year, was the Dragon Coaster.

The roller coaster had the enormous painted head of a Chinese New Year's dragon, five cars, and then an arched tail with gold curlicues painted on it. It mutated from one of those folding trucks: a tight loop of steel track that swung into a waystation. The carney who ran the coaster had a long, thin ponytail and so many tattoos on his arms that you had to get close to see they weren't just sleeves.

Trixie always tried to get the first car, the one that put you behind the dragon's mouth. For a kiddie ride, the roller coaster was surprisingly fast, and the front car was quicker than any other - you whipped harder around the corners. You lurched to a more jarring stop.

The summer Trixie was eleven, she climbed into the front car as usual and realized something was wrong. She couldn't pull the safety bar down over her knees. She had to turn sideways and jam herself along the side of the car. Trixie was convinced that this wasn't the same roller coaster - that they'd gotten an upgrade and skimped on the proportions - but the carney said nothing had changed.

He was lying. She knew this, because even as he said it, and pushed his ponytail out of the way, he was staring at the writing on her T-shirt: BETHEL FARM “A” SOFTBALL scrawled across her chest.

Until that moment, Trixie had been looking forward to going to middle school and the privileges that came with it. She'd held the word adolescent on her tongue, enjoying the way it fizzed like a bath bomb. Until then, she hadn't considered that there was a tradeoff, that she might not fit anymore in places where she'd been comfortable.

The next summer, when Trixie was twelve, she got dropped off at the fair with Zephyr. Instead of going on the rides, they bought an onion blossom and trolled through the crowd to find kids they knew.

Trixie was thinking about all this as she stood, shivering, in front of the Bank of Bethel. It was midnight, now, and the Winterfest was a memory. The police barriers blocking Main Street had been removed; the Christmas lights had been unplugged. The trash cans were stuffed with paper cups, plastic cider jugs, and broken candy canes.

The bank had a large mirrored window that had always fascinated Trixie. These days, when she passed by, she'd check herself out, or look to see if anyone else was doing the same. But as a kid, the mirror had taken her by surprise. For years she kept the secret from her parents that there was a girl in Bethel who looked exactly like her.

In the reflection, Trixie watched her father approach. She looked at him or, really, at the twin of him, standing beside the twin of her. The moment he touched her, it was as if a spell had broken. She could barely stand on her feet, she was that tired. He caught her as she swayed. “Let's go home,” he said, and he lifted her into his arms.

Trixie rested her head on his shoulder. She watched the stars shimmer and wink in patterns, an alphabet everyone else seemed to know but that she could not for the life of her read.

* * *

Laura's car was in the driveway when Daniel came back. That had been the plan: She'd drive back home and wait in the house, in case

Trixie had made her way home. Daniel would walk the streets of Bethel, in case she hadn't. Trixie was sound asleep when he carried her out of the truck and brought her up to her bedroom. There, he unlaced her boots and unzipped her parka. He thought for a moment about helping her into pajamas but instead drew the covers up over Trixie, fully clothed.

When he stood up, Laura was standing in the doorway. Seeing Trixie, her eyes were wide, her face as white as chalk. “Oh, Daniel,” she whispered, guessing the worst. “Something happened.”

“Nothing happened,” Daniel said softly, putting his arms around her.

Laura - who always seemed to know the right thing to do and the right thing to say - was at a complete loss. She wrapped her arms around Daniel's waist and burst into tears. He led her into the darkened hallway and closed Trixie s bedroom door so that she wouldn't be disturbed. “She's home,” he said, forcing a smile, even though he could see the scrapes on his knuckles, could feel the bruises that bloomed beneath his skin. “That's all that counts.”

The next morning, Daniel assessed the damage in the bathroom mirror. His lip was split; he had a shiner on his right temple; the knuckles of his right hand were swollen and raw. But that inventory didn't even begin to address the harm done to his relationship with his daughter. Because she'd fallen asleep, exhausted, Daniel still hadn't had the chance to explain what had happened to him last night, what beast he'd turned into. He washed his face and toweled it dry. How did you go about explaining to your daughter - the victim of a rape, for God's sake

- that violence in a man was like energy: transformed, but never destroyed? How did you tell a girl who was trying so hard to start fresh that you couldn't ever obliterate your past?

It was going to be one of those days when the temperature didn't climb above zero. He could tell, just by the bone-deep chill of the

floorboards on his bare feet when he went downstairs and the way the icicles pointed like arrows from the outside overhang of the kitchen window. Trixie was standing at the refrigerator, wearing flannel pajama bottoms, a T-shirt that had gone missing from Daniel's own dresser, and a blue bathrobe that no longer fit. Her wrists and hands stuck out too far from the sleeves as she reached