His fists were clenching and unclenching at his side, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. Tess worried that she had pushed him too far. She wanted him to feel cornered but not desperate.

“Daniel, I don’t know how much money you need, but Whitney, Crow, and I together couldn’t get more than nine hundred dollars. ATM accounts have three-hundred-dollar limits, and the banks are closed.”

“But Whitney is rich,” he said.

“Her family is rich. It’s not like they have big boxes of cash sitting around.”

Daniel looked surprised, as if he had assumed wealthy people did have currency scattered around the house-stuffed in the upholstery, brimming out of wastebaskets.

“I’ll settle for the locket and a head start. Bring me the locket and I’ll go; then I’ll call you within an hour, from the road, to tell you where she is.”

“I can’t do that, Daniel. How do I know you’ll keep your word? I won’t even risk leaving you alone.”

“Then call Crow and tell him to bring the dog here. Once I have the locket, I’ll tell you where she is.”

Tess shook her head. “No deal. Look, you killed Bobby on impulse. Even Yeager’s death can be manslaughter, if your lawyer’s smart enough. It’s Cecilia’s death that will get you death by lethal injection in this state.”

“Frankly, I don’t care if some dyke suffocates.”

“I know,” Tess said. “You don’t care about anyone. But I know what you do care about.”

She switched her gun to her left hand. She had been foolish to think she could bully Daniel or scare him. His regard for human life was so low he didn’t even value his own. She walked over to the shelves, trying to remember where he kept his Poe books.

“This poetry book, the one you consulted the other night.” She found it on the shelf. “It’s stamped enoch pratt. Did you steal it?”

“Not necessarily,” Daniel said, licking his lips, his face pale. “Many of my books were obtained legitimately, when they were discarded or put up for sale.”

“Well, I guess there’s only one way to know.” Tess threw the book in the fireplace flames. Daniel kept his seat, although it appeared to take some effort. He was literally holding on to the chair, keeping himself in place.

“Hmmm, I guess that wasn’t a rare one. I’ll have to keep tossing volumes until you tell me what I want to know.” She ran her fingers along the spines of the old books, slightly sick to her stomach about what she intended to do. She found a book so dusty and cracked that it either had to be extremely valuable or practically worthless, except for the words inside. She chucked that one into the fire and it almost smothered the flames, then caught and went up in a blast that was more blue than orange, as if the fire were consuming the old ink. Daniel didn’t move. She picked another Poe book, an old copy of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. This one burned red. Still Daniel sat, his face so full of hate she was almost scared to look at him, lest he turn her into stone.

Her fingers closed on a slender book, really more of a pamphlet, with a single story printed inside, “MS in a Bottle.” It appeared to be a special printing of that first award-winning story, or perhaps the pages had been taken from the Saturday Visiter and bound in leather on some later occasion. It was small and light, and tossing it into the fire was as easy as throwing a Frisbee.

“You bitch!” Daniel plunged into the fire headfirst, trying to grab the book before it ignited, and his sweater seemed to explode with flames. Indifferent, he yanked the book out and rolled back and forth on the floor. It wasn’t clear to Tess if he had the presence of mind to remember the old rule for how to put out a fire or if he was in some childish tantrum.

“She’s under us, okay?” he said, sobbing. “She’s been here all along, under the floorboards. I wish I had killed her. I wish I had killed you.”

“Beneath the floorboards? Where, Daniel? How?”

He didn’t reply, just continued rolling frenziedly It was impossible to know if the low, keening sound he made was for his own pain or for the singed book he held to his chest. Tess looked around wildly, and her glance fell on the Winans pike in the corner. With great deliberation, she drove the pointed end into one of the gaps between the planks and used it as a pry. The pine boards came up easily. After all, they had already come up once that day. She found Cecilia beneath the table where she had pretended to eat. Her eyes were wide, her features stretched with a strange combination of terror and relief. If she had been drugged, the effects had worn off long ago. She must have heard everything. She had probably feared that Tess was going to leave her here or allow the house to burn with her in it.

Tess ripped the handkerchief from Cecilia’s mouth and began to untie her limbs, rubbing her wrists and ankles to stimulate circulation. After a few choked breaths, Cecilia looked over at Daniel, still rolled in a ball, and shook her head.

“Why?”

Tess echoed the answer Daniel had given earlier, when asked about Yeager’s death.

“Because he could.”

“So you were right?”

“And you too, in your way.”

Everyone had been right, Tess realized. Cecilia had been right that Hayes had been attacked by someone who was intensely homophobic. But Yeager had been right when he guessed Hayes’s attacker was driven by envy as much as anything else-he had just named the wrong man. Together, they had all the pieces. Even Mi-ata had known something all along.

Gretchen let herself into the house. “It’s been thirty minutes, so I called Rainer as you told me to and they’re en route. Jesus, he had a lot of fucking books,” she added, looking around the room, doing a double take on Daniel, rolling and babbling, and at the wide-eyed Cecilia, as ethereal as any of Poe’s necrophiliac objects of love. “Why would anyone want to have this many books? They’re dust catchers. So, what’d you do, torture him with a hot poker? Did he give it up?”

“In his own fashion,” Tess said. “He gave it up because he couldn’t give it up, if that makes any sense.”

Now all three women stared at the man, whose skin seemed to blister before their eyes. The room was heavy with horrible smells-burnt hair, burnt wool, burnt paper, burnt flesh. The only sound was Daniel Clary’s rough sobs, and those were horrible, too.

He wept like a wounded animal, like a mother crying for a child. He wept, but not for himself and not for his pain. He cried for the damaged book in his arms.

Chapter 33

The last note-and Tess never doubted it would be the last-arrived a month to the day after that night. It was direct and simple, incapable of misinterpretation.

Please meet me at 1 p.m. today in Green Mount Cemetery, behind the obelisk. You’ll know it when you see it.

She wondered if the March date had any significance. Was it yet another Poe allusion destined to fly over her head, or under her radar, or wherever it was that such things flew? She was only beginning to grasp the geometry lessons that had perplexed her in junior high, the revelation that the world was full of infinite planes that never intersect.

The day was fair, almost warm. The year’s stepchildren-March, November-had shown signs of surprisingly sweet temperaments lately, while the once-reliable months of May and September had become unruly and bratty. She found a groundskeeper sitting on a bench, eating a sub, and he rolled his eyes at her interruption but pointed the way.

“No dogs allowed,” he called after her.

“She’s a Seeing Eye dog,” Tess said, of the Doberman by her side.

“You don’t look blind.”

“Visually impaired,” she corrected.

“That either,” he said. But he let her go, rather than disturb his lunch.

The grave behind the obelisk turned out to be where John Wilkes Booth was buried. This gave Tess a moment of trepidation-it was an assassin’s grave, after all-and she felt for the comforting shape of the gun in her coat pocket. She had been doing that a lot lately. Her gun was turning into a grown-up version of a child’s “blankie,” one of those tiny scraps of cloth carried far too long. She wondered if her gun would become similarly worn in spots, from all this talismanic touching.