Sally could feel her pulse racing. They were at some crossroads moment, but she was as yet unsure what paths were available.

She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

I have screwed everything up, she thought to herself. I have made a mess of everything.

She sighed and went across the room to a desk where they kept scrapbooks and old photos, memorabilia too valuable to throw out, not significant enough to frame. She opened a large drawer and pawed through the piles until she found what she was looking for: a picture of her mother and father. They both had died far too young, one in a car accident, the other from a heart condition. Sally wasn’t sure why she needed to look at them, but she was almost overcome with the need to see their eyes, looking toward her, as if to reassure her. They had left her alone, and she had seized upon Scott-with all her misgivings about who she was and what she was going to become-because she had told herself that he would be consistent. It was probably the same sense that had driven her to law school, filled with a determination to make sure that she was never a victim of events again. She shook her head at this thought and reminded herself how foolish this was. Anyone can be victimized. At any time.

As this rancid thought coursed around inside her, she heard Ashley stirring upstairs.

She took a deep breath. There is one truth, she thought: a mother will do anything to protect her child.

“Ashley! Is that you? Are you up?”

There was a momentary pause, then a reply, preceded by a long, drawn-out groan. “Yeah. Hi, Mom. I’ll be down right after I brush my teeth.”

She was about to respond when the telephone rang.

The sound chilled her.

She checked the caller identification, but it merely said private caller.

Sally reached out, bit down on her lip, and picked up the receiver.

“Yes, who is it, please?” she said with as much lawyer frost as she could manage.

There was no reply.

“Who is it!” she demanded sharply.

The line remained quiet. She couldn’t even hear breathing.

“God damn it, leave us alone!” she whispered. Her words drove like nails into the silence and she slammed down the phone.

“Mom? Who was it?” Ashley called out from upstairs. Sally could hear a momentary tremble in her daughter’s voice.

“Nothing,” she called back. “Just a damn telephone solicitor, pitching magazine subscriptions.” As quickly as the words were out of her mouth, she wondered why she had failed to tell the truth. “You coming down?”

“Be right there.” Sally heard the bedroom door close. She picked up the receiver and dialed*69. In a moment, a recorded voice came on the line. “The number 413-555-0987 is a pay telephone in Greenfield, Massachusetts.”

Close, she thought. Less than an hour’s drive away.

When Michael O’Connell hung up the pay phone, his first instinct was to head south, where he knew Ashley was waiting for him, and try to take advantage of the moment. Every word he’d heard from Sally had told him how weak she was. He leaned back, closing his eyes, envisioning Ashley. He could feel blood racing through his body, almost as if every vein and artery had become electric. He breathed in slow, shallow breaths, like a swimmer hyperventilating before taking a plunge, and told himself that following her to her own home would be precisely what they would expect.

They will be preparing, he thought. Inventing some scheme to prevent him from getting close to her. Designing a defense, building walls. They cannot beat me.

This was the simplest, most obvious, nonnegotiable fact.

Again he breathed in. They will think that I’m on my way there.

But then, what’s the rush?

Let them worry. Let them lose some sleep. Let them startle at every night noise.

And, he thought, when their defenses were thin from exhaustion and tension and doubt, he would arrive. When they least expected it.

O’Connell tapped his foot against the sidewalk, like a dancer finding the rhythm.

I am there, at their side, even when I’m not there, he told himself.

Michael O’Connell decided that on this day, he wasn’t in any hurry. The love he felt for Ashley could also be exceedingly patient.

This time she told me to meet her at midnight outside the emergency room of a hospital in Springfield. When I asked her why midnight, she informed me that she did volunteer work at the hospital two nights a week, and that the witching hour was when she customarily took her break.

“What sort of volunteer work?” I asked.

“Counseling. Battered wives. Beaten children. Neglected elderly. They all show up at the hospital, and someone has to be on hand to steer them into the right channels for the state to help out.” Her voice had seemed coldly patient, despite the images that she suggested. “What I do is find the proper paperwork to accompany broken teeth, black eyes, razor slashes, and fractured ribs.”

She was waiting for me, smoking a cigarette, taking deep drags, down to the filter. I pointed at the cigarette as I walked through the parking-lot shadows toward her.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t.” She took another long pull. “Except here. Two nights a week. One cigarette at the midnight break. No more. When I return home, I throw the rest of the pack away. Buy a new pack each week.”

She smiled, her face partially hidden by shadow. “Smoking seems like a modest sin, compared with what I see here. A child, perhaps, with his fingers systematically fractured by a cracked-out stepfather. Or a mother in her eighth month, beaten with a metal coat hanger. That sort of thing. Very routine. Very ordinary. Very cruel. Just the usual sort of ugliness that passes for life. Remarkable, isn’t it, how cruel we can be to one another?”

“Yes.”

“So, what more do you need to know?” she asked.

“Scott and Sally and Hope weren’t willing to risk uncertainty, were they?”

She shook her head. A high-pitched, caterwauling ambulance siren cut through the night. Urgency arrives with many different sounds.

32

When they gathered, later that evening, a sense of helplessness was in the air. Ashley, in particular, seemed crippled by events. She huddled beneath a blanket in an armchair, her feet tucked up under her, clutching an ancient stuffed brown bear whose ear had been partially shredded by Nameless.

Ashley looked around the room and realized that she had created the mess she was in, but then, she couldn’t exactly see what she had done to have it reach this point. Long forgotten was the single, slightly drunken night that had landed her in bed with Michael O’Connell. Even more distant was the conversation when she’d agreed to go out with him that one time, thinking then that O’Connell was different from all the college boys that she had come to know.

Now, she only thought herself naïve and stupid. And she had absolutely no idea what she was going to do. When she looked up and let her eyes fasten on Catherine and Hope and her mother and father, one after the other, she realized that she had endangered all of them; in different ways, certainly, but still, they were all in jeopardy. She wanted to apologize, and so, that was where she started.

“This is all my fault. I’m to blame.”

Sally responded quickly, “No you’re not. And punishing yourself won’t do any of us any good.”

“Well, if I hadn’t-”

Scott stepped in. “You made a mistake. We’ve been all over this before, and we should leave that mistake behind. We all managed to compound that mistake by thinking we were dealing with someone reasonable. So, perhaps you were wrong once, Ashley, but O’Connell managed to get all of us involved pretty quickly, and we’re all guilty of underestimating what he is capable of. Recriminations and blame are really stupid avenues to pursue now. Your mother is right; the only issue in front of us is, what do we do next?”