Both Hope and Scott had listened intently to Sally’s speech. She had writhed about in her chair, as if tortured by every word she spoke, until finally coming to a frozen halt.

“What’s that?” Hope asked cautiously.

“Ashley will be safe.”

Again they were all silent.

Sally caught her breath with a sharp gasping sound.

“This is assuming one critical detail,” she said almost in a whisper.

“What detail is that?” Scott demanded.

“That we can get away with it.”

Night had descended, and we sat in two wooden Adirondack chairs on her stone patio. Hard seats for hard thoughts. I was flush with questions, more insistent than ever about speaking with the principals, or, at the very least, one of them who could fill me in on the moment when they changed from victims to conspirators. But infuriatingly, she wasn’t willing to be bulldozed. Instead, she stared out into the humid summer darkness.

“Remarkable, isn’t it, what one will consider doing, when pushed to a limit?” she said.

“Well,” I replied cautiously, “when one’s back is up against the wall…”

She laughed, but humorlessly. “But that’s just it,” she said abruptly. “They thought their backs were up against that proverbial wall. How can you be certain?”

“They had legitimate fears. The threat O’Connell posed was obvious. They just didn’t know. And so given the choice between unknowns, they took charge of their own circumstances.”

She smiled again. “You make it sound so easy and so convincing. Why don’t you turn it around?”

“How?”

“Well, imagine looking at the problem from the law enforcement point of view. You have a young man who has fallen in love, pursuing the girl of his dreams. Happens all the time. You and I know that his pursuit is truly an obsession-but what could a police detective actually prove? Do you not think that Michael O’Connell effectively hid his computer sorties into all their lives so they couldn’t be traced? And what had they done in response? Tried to bribe him. Tried to threaten him. Had him beaten up. If you were a policeman, coming upon this situation, which do you think would be the easier case to prosecute? My guess is, Scott, Sally, and even Hope. They have already lied. They have already been duplicitous. Even Ashley has skirted the law, with the revolver she obtained. And now they were conspiring to commit murder. Of an innocent man. Perhaps he wasn’t innocent in some psychological or moral sense, but still…And they wanted to get away with it. What claim did they have for the ethical high ground?”

I didn’t answer this question.

My own imagination was churning: How did they manage?

“Do you remember who told them that saying and doing are different things altogether? Who pointed out how hard it actually is to pull a trigger?”

I smiled. “Yes. It was O’Connell.”

She laughed bitterly. “Yes. That was what he said to the toughest of them all, the one with the least to lose by firing that shotgun’s load into his chest, who had seen most of her life already pass by and would be risking the least by shooting. At that critical moment, she failed, didn’t she?”

She paused, staring up into the darkness. “But someone would have to be brave enough.”

Sally spoke first. “We will need to identify and divide up the responsibilities. We must create a plan. And then we must stick to it. Religiously.”

She was surprised by the words coming out of her mouth. They were so harshly calculating, it sounded to her as if they were being spoken by someone she didn’t know. The three of them seemed to be the least likely of murderers, she thought. She had immense doubts whether they could actually pull off something like what she had proposed.

Hope looked up. “I don’t know anything about this. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket. I hardly ever read mystery novels or thrillers, except back when I was in college I read Crime and Punishment in one course, and In Cold Blood in another.”

Scott laughed a little uncomfortably. “Great,” he said. “In the first, the killer is driven near mad by guilt and finally confesses, and in the other, well, the bad guys get caught because they are clueless and then they go to the gallows. Maybe we ought to not use those books as models.”

This, he thought, was probably funny, but no one even smiled.

Sally waved a hand in the air. “You know, forget it,” she said archly. “We’re not killers. We shouldn’t even be thinking this way.”

Scott broke the momentary silence. “In other words, wait for something to happen, and then hope that it isn’t a disaster?”

“No. Yes. I’m not sure.” Sally was suddenly unsteady, both in what she said out loud and what she felt inside. “Perhaps we are not giving the legal channels enough credence. Maybe we go get the restraining order. Sometimes they work fine.”

“I fail to see how that is a solution,” Scott said. “It resolves nothing. It leaves us, and more critically Ashley, in a perpetual state of fear. How can anyone live that way? And even if it causes O’Connell to back off, every day that passes, every day that he appears to be out of her life, all that reassurance really just builds into more and more uncertainty. It solves nothing! It creates an illusion of safety. Even if it were to create real safety, how would we ever know? For sure?”

Sally sighed deeply. “You’re very good at arguing things that cannot be debated, Scott. Tell me, will you pull the trigger and kill someone?”

“Yes,” he blurted out.

“Easy, quick answer. Passion speaking, not sense. How about you, Hope? Would you kill someone, a stranger, to protect Ashley-or maybe, at that crucial moment, wouldn’t you suddenly say to yourself, ‘What am I doing? She’s not my child.’ ”

“No. Of course not,” Hope replied.

“Again, we’re awfully quick with our answers.”

Scott felt a surge of frustration. “So, devil’s advocate, what about you? Will you do it?”

Sally frowned. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

Scott leaned back in his seat. “Let me ask you this. When Ashley was little, and when she got sick, do you ever remember praying ‘I’d rather it was me. Make me sick. Make her well.’ ”

Sally nodded. “Every mother, I guess, has felt that.”

“Would you give your life for your child?”

Sally could feel her throat closing with emotion. She nodded. She swallowed hard, to regain control.

“I can do it,” she said slowly. “I can design a crime. I know enough about it. And maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t. But even if we all go to prison, we will at least have tried to defend her. And that’s something.”

“Yes, but not enough.” Scott was a little surprised at how stiff he sounded. “Tell me what you are thinking.”

Sally shifted about. “What do we suppose is O’Connell’s greatest weakness?”

“It must have something to do with the father,” Scott said.

“Actually,” Sally continued, “their bad relationship. That sort of hate is something I suspect O’Connell won’t be able to control.”

Scott and Hope both went quiet.

“It’s where he seems vulnerable. Just like he managed to find out things about us where we were vulnerable, that’s what we need to use against him. Hasn’t he taught us some of the things we need to know? He found out where we were weakest, and then he exploited that. He has done the same with Ashley. He turns everything upside down so that he can control things. Why are we here? Because we think he is going to hurt her. Maybe even kill her, if his frustration grows uncontrollable. So, if we step back, think a little, it seems to me that we merely do to him what he’s been doing to us. We create havoc, without leaving a trail.”

Again, the two others remained silent, but everything Sally said seemed to make sense. Both Scott and Hope stared at the woman that they had once loved or continued to love and saw someone they barely recognized.