“We have to stop meeting like this.”

“Goddamnit,” Hazel said, lowering the gun and leaning against the wall. “What are you doing down here?”

“You sure you don’t want to shoot me first?” said Martha. She turned sideways to allow her mother to answer her own question. There were boxes opened and in various states of being filled around the room. “Nanna gave me a job.”

Hazel descended the rest of the stairwell into the bedroom. Three finished boxes were closed up and taped shut against the wall by the back door. “I guess you’re in the mood to stick me in a box, huh?”

“You put me out of my house, I put you out of yours.”

“Ah,” said Hazel. “Karma.”

She crossed the room. It looked bigger with boxes of her stuff ranged around it. She didn’t think she and her mother had brought much with them, but Martha was on six boxes and counting. Hazel sat on the bed. “Any chance we can start over?”

“At what point?” said Martha, her fist on her hip. “1971?”

“You really want to redo your whole childhood?”

“Maybe the parts where you somehow communicated to me that I was a screw-up and the world wanted to eat me alive?”

Hazel lowered her head and measured how much further lightheartedness was going to get her. She said, “Some things get lost in translation, Martha. I never thought you were a screw-up, but as for the world part, every mother thinks that. I never meant to make you feel that I was protecting you from yourself.”

Martha tossed a pair of shoes into a box and leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. “So that’s it? I just accept I’ve built my entire world-view on a miscommunication and move on?”

“It wasn’t a miscommunication if it’s what you heard. I should have done a better job of correcting the impression.” She finally looked at her daughter. “But these kinds of things are hard to set straight, Martha. They go off true so gradually that by the time you realize you’re wrong, the error starts to look like you. Do you know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Belief is all we have,” Hazel said. “What we believe doesn’t weigh as much as a gram, but it’s what we are. A wrong belief can ruin everything.”

“You make it sound like you can just switch it off.”

“I know you can’t. It takes time, but you have to start.” Her daughter sighed heavily. “Come sit with me.” There was a pause, but then Martha pushed herself off the wall and came to sit beside Hazel on the bed. “There’s still time, you know. We don’t have to carry on thinking the same old wrong things about each other.”

“What will we think about each other then?”

“Some new wrong things,” Hazel said, and they both smiled. “I’ve only ever wanted you to feel loved. Everything else, no matter how misbegotten, was for that. I can’t promise I’ll be able to stop trying to protect you, Martha, but if you’re able to convince yourself it’s coming out of love and not fear, maybe it won’t feel so toxic to you.”

Martha shrugged. “Maybe.” She looked slantways at her mother. “Where’s this new Zen aspect coming from?” She closed one eye. “Is it the Percocets?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry, but I know about the pills. Nanna told me to keep an eye out for stashes when I packed up. She says you were developing a problem. Is that true?”

Who was protecting whom, Hazel wondered. “No,” she said. “Anyway, I’m off them now. It’s been six whole days.”

“Is it hard?”

She wanted to say no, she wanted to say it was none of her business. But if it was time to change the beliefs, she was going to have to do her part. “Yeah,” she said, at last. “It’s hard. It’s very hard. I still want them.”

“Why?”

She realized she was crying. “I like the way they make me feel, Martha. But I’m not me on them. It’s good that I stopped.”

“So this is really you?”

“I think so.”

Martha shifted a little closer and Hazel hesitantly lifted her arm off the bed and then settled it on the girl’s shoulders and they touched the sides of their heads together, like birds. “We’ll hardly recognize each other now,” Martha said.

Martha said she’d handle the rest of the packing on her own – it was good to have something to do, she said. Upstairs, the Camembert on the second slice of toast had begun to go waxy and Hazel tossed it into the garbage can. She imagined herself rummaging in her own fridge again, and she felt a frisson of excitement that might have had an undercurrent of fear in it as well. To be on her own again. To start over. What would it feel like?

It was one. The phone had not rung and she felt no particular urgency to return to the station. She thought of going back downstairs to have a rest, but she didn’t want to disturb the delicate peace she and Martha had begun to build, and she decided to use her mother’s “room.” The bed was neatly made, and rather than mussing the sheets, she just lay on top of them. Now the sounds from downstairs were even clearer, even under the noise of the rain rattling against the roof; had she listened more closely before unholstering her gun, she would have realized what was happening. She closed her eyes and then opened them and stared at the ceiling. Where was Eldwin? She’d instructed her officers to get their cars out and she had cruisers from Kehoe River, Fort Leonard, and Gilmore parked in various cul-de-sacs, side streets, and rural routes and no one had seen anything. Wherever they were, it had to be a place they knew, somewhere they felt safe, where they knew the lay of the land. But she’d been in Bellocque’s basement and she was sure it was not the site. Unless they were moving Eldwin back and forth to different places. That was a dangerous strategy and it was unlikely that Dana Goodman would ever go back to that ramshackle cottage. No, the most likely thing was that the ex-detective was trying to figure out a way to get rid of Eldwin. They were in endgame and time was running out.

She closed her eyes and began to drift off. The bed felt warm and she sank into it. She could smell the scent of her mother’s hair on the pillow. Her mother’s scent hadn’t changed in all her life; from childhood on, it had always been this perfume of warm flesh and washed hair, it rubbed off on anything her mother touched. Old people were supposed to go sour; Hazel felt that she, herself, was already like a pot of stale-dated yoghurt. But her mother had stayed young in her body somehow.

She began to dream. She was on a beach, alone under the sun. The water was blue and the sand was white. When was the last time she’d felt relaxed? When she’d had time for herself? She picked up a coconut and shook it. It rang. She shook it again and it rang a second time. She opened her eyes. “You going to get that?” Martha called from downstairs and Hazel picked up the extension beside the bed. It was Wingate. Claire Eldwin had come in.

More than Claire Eldwin was waiting for Hazel when she returned to the station house. Constable Childress had appeared at the front desk in a state of considerable distress, demanding to see Hazel. Wilton had kept her in the waiting area, where she’d paced angrily, talking occasionally on her cellphone to someone who seemed as upset as she was. Childress was containable, but when Gordon Sunderland had appeared at one in the afternoon, he added to an already combustible atmosphere. He, too, insisted on seeing Hazel the moment she got back from lunch. And when, at one-thirty, Mrs. Eldwin arrived, Wilton began to think he should lock the front doors.

Melanie intercepted Hazel at the back entrance. “How do you want to handle all this?”

“Put Childress in my office, Sunderland in interview 1, and put Claire Eldwin in 2 with Wingate.”

She stepped back in the corridor and waited to hear people moving about and doors shutting. No way she wanted to be in the middle of this bee swarm. If these people wanted each to tear her a new one, they were going to have to do it in an orderly fashion.