Page 121 of The Furies

“Meaning?”

“She won’t do time,” said Moxie, “not as long as her story stands up. And it will, won’t it?”

He attended me closely.

“Yes,” I said, “it will.”

* * *

IT WAS CLOSE TO 3 a.m. by the time I got home. I’d missed four calls from Sharon Macy, the last only moments before I’d left the Packard house. I called her back as I was taking off my shoes.

“That’s a hell of a night you’ve had,” she said. “Two bodies across two cases is a lot, even for you.”

“If you’re going to give me a chewing out,” I said, “can it wait until morning?”

She relented.

“I suppose so,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said, because I really wasn’t.

“Do you want some company?”

“I think I just need to sleep. Tomorrow, though, if the offer still holds.”

“It should be good for twenty-four hours—the promise of a lecture, too. Good night.”

I turned off the lights and went to my room, but I didn’t sleep, not for hours. I tried to catch up with the news on my laptop, but all the talk was of viruses and death, and after a time I could take no more of it. Instead I sat at my window and stared out at the marshes. Doing wrong, even in the name of a greater good, had stolen my peace. I’d done it too often. It was becoming habitual. I feared that it would cost me in the end.

At last I hid my face from the dark, and waited for the dawn.

3

The starlings wandered

Till three hawks took them

And now my agents

Have caught the cripple.

—Les Murray, “Property”

CHAPTER LII

Sarah Abelli sat on the floor by her bedroom window, the vintage cookie tin by her side, its contents spread around her. She was weeping, because she was about to say goodbye.

Behind her, the child danced, but it made barely a sound and cast no shadow. Her grief had willed it into being, summoning it from another place, but what had come to her was no longer entirely her daughter. It was a vestige, and an adumbral one. Sarah would not have called it malevolent, because that was not a word she was capable of applying to her child, but it had lost its grace. What remained was a creature of unbridled will.

But now she was about to send it back, and afterward she would mourn her loss in a different fashion.

“I have to let you go,” she said to the child.

The child ceased its capering. She felt it draw close. She looked to the window and it was there, its reflected face all bedimmed.

“When those men had you,” Sarah continued, “I thought I would die. I can’t go through that again. If the other one were to return, if he were to succeed again, I don’t know what I would do. I kept you here out of selfishness, because I couldn’t bear to be without you, but I will have to find a way, for both our sakes. I love you very much, and I will see you again very, very soon.”

Her body contorted with the pain of parting. She wondered how she could even begin to live with such emptiness.

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