“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I am so, so sorry.”

She felt him take her hand across the table. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

She flung it off. “Of course you did! But do you think I haven’t been? Do you think I haven’t been, you… you nosy old man?”

He chuckled, revealing those sparkling dentures. “No. I don’t think that at all. Saw it as soon as you opened the door.” He paused, then said deliberately: “I saw everything.”

“And what do you see now?”

He got up, staggered a little, then found his balance. “I see a courageous woman who should be left alone to get after her housework. Not to mention the rest of her life.”

She also got up. “And the families of the victims? The ones who deserve closure?” She paused, not wanting to say the rest. But she had to. This man had fought considerable pain-maybe even excruciating pain-to come here, and now he was giving her a pass. At least, she thought he was. “Robert Shaverstone’s father?”

“The Shaverstone boy is dead, and his father’s as good as.” Ramsey spoke in a calm, assessing tone Darcy recognized. It was a tone Bob used when he knew a client of the firm was about to be hauled before the IRS, and the meeting would go badly. “Never takes his mouth off the whiskey bottle from morning til night. Would knowing that his son’s killer-his son’s mutilator -was dead change that? I don’t think so. Would it bring any of the victims back? Nawp. Is the killer burning in the fires of hell for his crimes right now, suffering his own mutilations that will bleed for all of eternity? The Bible says he is. The Old Testament part of it, anyway, and since that’s where our laws come from, it’s good enough for me. Thanks for the coffee. I’ll have to stop at every rest area between here and Augusta going back, but it was worth it. You make a good cup.”

Walking him to the door, Darcy realized she felt on the right side of the mirror for the first time since she had stumbled over that carton in the garage. It was good to know he had been close to being caught. That he hadn’t been as smart as he’d assumed he was.

“Thank you for coming to visit,” she said as he set his hat squarely on his head. She opened the door, letting in a breeze of cold air. She didn’t mind. It felt good on her skin. “Will I see you again?”

“Nawp. I’m done as of next week. Full retirement. Going to Florida. I won’t be there long, according to my doctor.”

“I’m sorry to hear th-”

He abruptly pulled her into his arms. They were thin, but sinewy and surprisingly strong. Darcy was startled but not frightened. The brim of his Homburg bumped her temple as he whispered in her ear. “You did the right thing.”

And kissed her cheek. – 20 -

He went slowly and carefully down the path, minding the ice. An old man’s walk. He should really have a cane, Darcy thought. He was going around the front of his car, still looking down for ice patches, when she called his name. He turned back, bushy eyebrows raised.

“When my husband was a boy, he had a friend who was killed in an accident.”

“Is that so?” The words came out in a puff of winter white.

“Yes,” Darcy said. “You could look up what happened. It was very tragic, even though he wasn’t a very nice boy, according to my husband.”

“No?”

“No. He was the sort of boy who harbors dangerous fantasies. His name was Brian Delahanty, but when they were kids, Bob called him BD.”

Ramsey stood by his car for several seconds, working it through. Then he nodded his head. “That’s very interesting. I might have a look at the stories about it on my computer. Or maybe not; it was all a long time ago. Thank you for the coffee.”

“Thank you for the conversation.”

She watched him drive down the street (he drove with the confidence of a much younger man, she noticed-probably because his eyes were still so sharp) and then went inside. She felt younger, lighter. She went to the mirror in the hall. In it she saw nothing but her own reflection, and that was good.

AFTERWORD

The stories in this book are harsh. You may have found them hard to read in places. If so, be assured that I found them equally hard to write in places. When people ask me about my work, I have developed a habit of skirting the subject with jokes and humorous personal anecdotes (which you can’t quite trust; never trust anything a fiction writer says about himself). It’s a form of deflection, and a little more diplomatic than the way my Yankee forebears might have answered such questions: It’s none of your business, chummy. But beneath the jokes, I take what I do very seriously, and have since I wrote my first novel, The Long Walk, at the age of eighteen.

I have little patience with writers who don’t take the job seriously, and none at all with those who see the art of story-fiction as essentially worn out. It’s not worn out, and it’s not a literary game. It’s one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives, and the often terrible world we see around us. It’s the way we answer the question, How can such things be? Stories suggest that sometimes-not always, but sometimes-there’s a reason.

From the start-even before a young man I can now hardly comprehend started writing The Long Walk in his college dormitory room-I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive. It gets in your face. Sometimes it shouts in your face. I have no quarrel with literary fiction, which usually concerns itself with extraordinary people in ordinary situations, but as both a reader and a writer, I’m much more interested by ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I want to provoke an emotional, even visceral, reaction in my readers. Making them think as they read is not my deal. I put that in italics, because if the tale is good enough and the characters vivid enough, thinking will supplant emotion when the tale has been told and the book set aside (sometimes with relief). I can remember reading George Orwell’s 1984 at the age of thirteen or so with growing dismay, anger, and outrage, charging through the pages and gobbling up the story as fast as I could, and what’s wrong with that? Especially since I continue to think about it to this day when some politician (I’m thinking of Sarah Palin and her scurrilous “death-panel” remarks) has some success in convincing the public that white is really black, or vice-versa.

Here’s something else I believe: if you’re going into a very dark place-like Wilf James’s Nebraska farmhouse in “1922”-then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don’t want to see, why in God’s name would you dare the dark at all? The great naturalist writer Frank Norris has always been one of my literary idols, and I’ve kept what he said on this subject in mind for over forty years: “I never truckled; I never took off my hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth.”

But Steve, you say, you’ve made a great many pennies during your career, and as for truth… that’s variable, isn’t it? Yes, I’ve made a good amount of money writing my stories, but the money was a side effect, never the goal. Writing fiction for money is a mug’s game. And sure, truth is in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to fiction, the writer’s only responsibility is to look for the truth inside his own heart. It won’t always be the reader’s truth, or the critic’s truth, but as long as it’s the writer ’s truth-as long as he or she doesn’t truckle, or hold out his or her hat to Fashion-all is well. For writers who knowingly lie, for those who substitute unbelievable human behavior for the way people really act, I have nothing but contempt. Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do-to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.