‘I’m familiar with the term.’ Darby rolled on to her side, picked up the phone from the nightstand and placed it on the side of her mattress.

‘You can make your call after I finish up here.’ Dr Mathis reached for the phone.

Darby gently grabbed the woman’s wrist. ‘Go tend to your other patients.’

54

Darby was about to dial information for the number of Brewster General when she felt a sick fluttering inside her chest.

The gunshot victim was transported to Brewster General and is in critical condition, the doctor had told her. The others are dead.

She had been speaking to Coop when the first gunshot went off.

Please, God, don’t let him be dead.

That inner voice spoke up: You need to prepare yourself.

But you couldn’t prepare yourself for something like this, even when you had time to prepare. She had been thirteen years old when her father had been shot. She’d insisted on going with her mother to the hospital. When the surgeon came into the ICU’s waiting room, she saw the expression on the man’s face and knew right then her father was going to die.

And then there was her mother who, at fifty-eight, had developed a stage four melanoma. A mole the size of a pinprick on Sheila McCormick’s back had quietly turned malignant. The surgeon had excised the mole but the cancer had already spread past the lymph nodes and into her bloodstream; it had been greedily feasting on her healthy organs for months. You need to prepare yourself, the doctor had told Darby. She’d been thirty-three.

And Darby had tried to prepare herself. Every day she reminded herself that, in an odd way, she had been handed a gift: her mother was going to die – it wasn’t a matter of if so much as when – but at least this time there was time to come to grips with what was happening. She’d spent every available moment in her mother’s company.

But another part of her had, with a childish stubbornness, refused to give up hope. Her mother’s immune system was incredibly robust, the doctors said, so the special chemotherapy cocktail might work. That new, experimental skin cancer vaccine being tested in Baltimore might save her mother – and there was a chance Sheila McCormick might survive long enough to be a part of the clinical trials. Darby still remembered those long days, scouring the internet for doctors who specialized in melanoma, phoning offices all over the country and believing some sort of magic bullet existed, that all she had to do was to find it.

That was the danger of hope. It made you believe endless possibilities existed.

In its own way, hope was a form of cancer. A disease that could be eradicated only when presented with an immutable truth: death. Until that moment, hope would remain alive, even flourish, because there was always a chance, no matter how slim or remote, that the overwhelming truth you were facing was, in fact, wrong. Darby had learned that hard lesson first-hand.

She summoned the courage to dial directory assistance and ask for the number for Brewster General. The operator connected her and, after wading through the automated options, Darby finally got a live voice on the line. She explained who she was and what she wanted, and she was transferred to patient care.

Darby was on hold, waiting for someone to pick up, when Coop walked into her room.

She blinked as though he were a mirage produced by her fear. But he was there, looking real in the sunlight. His overcoat was torn in several places and spotted with dried blood along the lapels – Hoder’s blood – but he had changed into a new suit.

Darby hung up and stared at him, her eyes wet.

When Coop sat on the side of her bed, his eyes bloodshot, the skin under them bruised from exhaustion, she leaned forward, wrapped her arms around him and, clutching him close to her, sobbed into his chest.

55

When Darby’s tears subsided, Coop gently pried himself away from her. She tried to grab him again, not wanting to let him go, but he was already shuffling towards the bathroom.

Darby heard running water. A moment later he came back and handed her a cold, damp facecloth. She wiped her eyes, careful of the wound and staples.

Coop slid out of his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. Then he returned to the warm spot he’d left on her bed. Darby stared down at the blood-stained facecloth in her hands, afraid to ask any questions.

Coop provided answers without her having to say a word. ‘Hoder is in critical condition at Brewster General,’ he said in quiet, weary voice. ‘Fortunately Robinson had ambulances standing by. I stemmed the bleeding in his shoulder as much as I could before they arrived. Otto and Hayes are dead. As best we can tell right now, it looks like someone set fire to the trailer before it exploded.’

‘The shooter?’

‘Still in the wind. The explosion at the French home came from a propane tank that was sitting on the side of the house.’

‘Tracer rounds,’ she said.

‘How do you know he was using tracer ammo?’

‘I thought I saw a bright, burning white round just before it hit Hoder.’ Because tracers had small pyrotechnic charges built into their base, they burned brightly when fired, which allowed the shooter to follow the projectile’s trajectory and make aiming corrections. ‘I heard one of the rounds strike metal, but I thought it was one of the cars.’

Coop sighed. Nodded. ‘It makes sense,’ he said. ‘An ordinary round could pierce the tank without making it explode. A tracer, though, would.’

The room took on the sober silence of a funeral home.

‘The owners of the house, the parents, Luther and Carla French, were pronounced dead at the scene along with Sebastian, their 23-year-old son. The couple also have a 26-year-old daughter, Rita. She’s a ski instructor living in Aspen. Williams talked with her. She’s on her way down to Red Hill to identify the bodies.’

Darby didn’t want to say the next part, but she had to. Her throat burned and her eyes filled with fresh tears.

‘You were right. About the interview stirring him up.’

Coop got back to his feet.

‘It was my idea,’ she said. ‘I’m the one who pressed Hoder to –’

‘It’s done.’

His words echoed inside the room. Darby remained quiet.

‘There’s no rewind button,’ Coop said. He stood by the chair and, leaning forward, picked up his jacket. ‘There’s no way we can fix it. Hoder is as much to blame for this as –’

Then he cut himself off, the unsaid you hanging in the air between them.

‘Hoder could have put a stop to it and he didn’t,’ Coop said. ‘I gave him ample opportunity.’

Me too, Darby thought.

Coop removed a thick stack of paper that had been folded so it could fit inside his inner jacket pocket. He came back to the bed and handed the pages to her.

The first page contained a laser-printed copy of a photograph from another time – an ancient Polaroid of almost blurred colours showing a Caucasian girl of around seven or eight. She wore a white tank top stained with what looked like spaghetti sauce, her stringy blonde hair spilling across her tanned shoulders. The camera had captured her big blue eyes and her broad, gap-toothed smile.

Darby’s scalp tightened. The skin on her face flexed and her muscles constricted, and, as her stomach went into free fall, the photograph went out of focus and her mind snapped back to her own childhood, a time when children rode their bikes after dark and wandered through neighbourhoods, malls and stores freely, without adult supervision, secure in the knowledge that the world was a good place and that monsters were nothing more than creatures relegated to bad dreams and not kindly seeming men who hunted with smiles in broad daylight.

56

It happened on the morning of 15 August 1983. A Monday. At half past eight, Joan Hubbard loaded her seven-year-old daughter into the family’s station wagon and made the 22-mile drive from her small but pleasant ranch home in El Dorado, Kansas, to the North Colony Shopping Mall in Wichita. The Carter & Sullivan circular in Sunday’s paper had advertised its annual overstock sale of bed linen. Joan wanted new sheets and a comforter, maybe even a couple of decorative throw pillows, to replace the hand-me-downs given to her by her older sister.