What is it about your life that is so great that it shouldn’t be sacrificed?

This made some sense to her. She didn’t really love her work, she was filled with doubts about her relationship with Hope. It had been weeks, maybe months, since she’d felt joy about who she was, and what she stood for. Meaning in life? She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t bring herself to do so. She was a middle-aged, small-town lawyer, growing old, watching the lines of worry take root in the skin of her face every day. She thought the only mark she’d ever made in life was Ashley. Her daughter might have been the result of a lie of love, but there was no denying that she was categorically the best thing that Sally and Scott had managed in their brief time together.

Her future is worth dying for. Yours isn’t.

Again Sally was shocked at what her imagination insisted. This is madness. But it was madness that made sense.

Kill him, she told herself.

And then she had another, even more bizarre thought.

Or find a way to make sure he kills you.

And then pays for it.

She leaned back and stared at the books and texts surrounding her.

Someone had to die. Of this she suddenly became completely convinced.

I had nightmares for the first time since I’d started in on the story.

They arrived unbidden and kept me spinning in my bed, sweat-drenched in sleep. I awakened once deep in the night, staggered into the bathroom for a drink of water, and stared at myself in the mirror. I slipped from the room, padding down the carpeted hallway and peering in on my children, reassuring myself that their sleep wasn’t as troubled as my own. When I returned, my wife muttered, “Everything okay?” but had dropped off again before I could answer. I dropped my head to the pillow and peered up into the endless edges of darkness.

The next day, I called her on the phone.

“I think I need to speak with some of the principals in this little drama now,” I said roughly. “I’ve been putting that off for far too long.”

“Yes. I’ve been expecting that eventually you would make that demand. I’m just not sure who would be willing to speak with you at this point.”

“They are willing to have their story told, but not willing to speak with me?” I asked incredulously.

When she spoke, I could sense some distant turmoil within her; some events in the story were turning more critical. I was getting closer.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“Afraid of what?”

“So many things are in balance. A life balances a death. Chance balances against despair. So much is at stake.”

“I can find them,” I said abruptly. “I don’t have to play this cat-and-mouse game with you. I could hunt down faculty lists. Search legal databases. Go to student websites. Gay-women websites. Psychopath chat rooms. I don’t know. One of them will have enough information so that I’ll be able to assign real names, real places, and truths to what you’ve told me.”

“You don’t think I have been telling you the truth?”

“I do. I’m just saying that I know enough so that I could pursue all this on my own.”

“You could do that, but that would cause me to stop taking your calls. And perhaps you would never know what really happened. You might know some fact, or you might be able to piece together the details, so that you had the flesh of the story. But not the bones. Never the organs beneath the surface, telling you the why. Would you risk that?”

“No.” I said. “I would not.”

“I did not think so.”

“I will play by your rules. But not much longer. I’m reaching the end of my rope.”

“Yes. I can hear that in your voice.” But it did not sound as if this had the slightest impact on her. And with that, she hung up the phone.

36

Ashley was still angry, and sulking about being excluded from the most crucial decision she would ever have to make. Catherine was a little less stymied by Hope, Scott, and Sally’s unreasonable exclusions. She spent an hour on the telephone, dialing numbers, speaking in low tones, before collecting Ashley and saying, “There’s something you and I need to do.”

Ashley was standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, staring over at the corner where Nameless’s bowl-now empty-remained. No one had had the heart to move it. She felt knotted, tied to a mast while around her things were happening that she was intimately involved in, but she could not see.

“What?”

“Well,” Catherine said softly, “I don’t exactly like being on the outside looking in.”

“Neither do I.”

“I think we should take a few steps. Steps I’m not sure anyone in this family has ever considered before.” Catherine held up her car keys. “Let’s get going,” she said briskly.

“Where are we headed?”

“Going to meet a man,” Catherine replied breezily. “A most unsavory character, I suspect.”

Ashley must have looked slightly surprised, because the older woman smiled. “That is what we need. Someone distasteful.” She turned and, with Ashley in tow, headed out to her car. “We won’t be telling your parents or Hope about this trip,” she said as she pulled out onto the street. Ashley remained quiet as Catherine accelerated the car, checking the rearview mirror repeatedly, to make sure they were not being followed. “We need some help from someone from a different world. With different values. Luckily,” she sighed, “I know a few folks up near my home who knew someone who filled that particular bill.”

Ashley had several more questions but sat back, assuming she would find out what she needed to know soon enough. She lifted her eyebrows when Catherine steered the car out of the side streets onto a main boulevard, then turned toward the entrance ramp to the interstate, heading back in the direction they had fled from only a few days earlier.

“Where are we going?”

“A little spot just about forty-five minutes north of here,” Catherine said breezily. “Perhaps two hundred yards from the line separating the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from the great state of Vermont.”

“And what will we find there?”

Catherine smiled. “A man, like I said. The sort of man I doubt either of us has ever met before.” Her smile faded, and she spoke a little more harshly. “And perhaps some security.”

She did not explain this, nor did Ashley ask her to, although the younger woman doubted security was so easily found, even just over the border in Vermont.

Scott left the town library hurriedly.

What he had heard was an unsettling story-a small-town-America story that mixed rumor, innuendo, jealousy, and exaggeration together with some truths, some facts, and some possibilities. Stories such as the one he’d just heard have a certain radioactivity. They may not be clear to the naked eye, but they generate infectious power.

“The thing you need to know,” the librarian had told him, “was just how messy the death of Michael O’Connell’s mother truly was.”

Messy, in Scott’s mind, hardly captured the situation.

Some relationships are volatile from the start and should never form, but for some curious and hellish reason, take root and create a deadly ballet. That was the home life that Michael O’Connell was born into: a father who was abusive, more often than not drunk, who maintained a household riveted together by bolts of anger; and a mother who had once been a high school valedictorian, who had tossed away her promise on the man who’d seduced her in her first year at community college. His Elvis good looks, dark hair, muscled body, good job in the shipyards, fast car, and ready laugh had all hidden his harsher side.

The police visits at the O’Connell household had been a regular Saturday-night event. A broken arm, teeth knocked out, bruises, social workers, trips to the emergency room, had been her wedding gifts. In turn he’d received a broken nose that spoiled his handsome face when it was set improperly and more than once had to stare down his wife when she waved a kitchen knife in his direction. It was a steady and all-too-familiar pattern of abuse, violence, and forgiveness that would have continued forever, except for two events: the father fell, and the mother grew sick.