burn.
Marcus.
I was wondering if you bad any idea what your husband may have been looking for in Regan's files.
Valerie stared at the hospital envelope. She had unearthed it from the drawer of lingerie in her dresser and brought it with her, unopened, to the living room. A gleaming pair of oversized silver scissors sat next to her. She could snip off the end of the envelope and extract what was inside, or she could cut it into miniature pieces and add them to the fire, where they would dissolve into the only real ash ever to burn there. She could know the truth, or she could cover it up.
She thought: this is what you were looking for at Regan's house, isn't it? Tell me, Marcus. This is what you so desperately wanted to find. What could be worth so much? What do you not want me to know? Regan laughed at the idea that I didn't know already. She thought I was a fool. And maybe I am.
Did you kill Regan, Marcus? Is the secret so terrible that you had to silence her? But you're too late.
All she had to do was pick up the envelope, but she couldn't bring herself to touch it. Instead, she picked up the scissors. They were hefty and sharp. She nestled them in her hand and spread the blades wide. They formed her initial, V, in a mirror finish. The blades reminded her of other things, too. They were the mouth of a fish, gasping for air on the floor of a boat. They were legs opening wide, inviting a man to make love to her.
She took the edges of the envelope with her other hand and lifted it in the air. Held it. Felt its weight. She couldn't imagine how a single sheet of paper could change a life, or be worth the price of a life.
Some sins, some secrets, are not worth knowing. She wanted to cut it up, put it in the fire, pretend, forget, grieve, move on.
But no. She had to know.
Valerie wielded the scissors and in a single motion slit the side of the envelope open. She made an oval of the envelope and let the paper inside fall out into her hand. It was folded. The truth was inside. She separated the folds, turned it over, and tried to make sense of what she was holding.
It was a dirty Xerox copy, hard to read. A medical form, heavy with codes and scribbled over in a doctor's unintelligible writing. The first thing she saw that she understood was a date stamped in the corner from nearly five years earlier. The paper was old. How could something so old have any relevance to her today? Five years was a lifetime ago. Five years was the time when she had sat in this very room at two in the morning, with the fake fire glowing and her husband asleep upstairs, and she had poured the tablets of aspirin into her palm.
It was that same month, she realized. The month of her despair and rebirth.
The form was dated two weeks after she had tried to kill herself.
She studied the codes, the handwriting, the notes in the margin, and tried to interpret it, as if it were a foreign language. And then one word jumped out at her. It was a medical term she didn't really understand, but it didn't matter, because she knew. Other words began to make sense. The timing, the implications, everything was clear.
She knew how a single sheet of paper could rewrite history.
It hit her like a rogue wave. Her mouth fell open in a silent scream, so deep and anguished that no real sound could emerge. The form dropped from her hand. She toppled slowly, sideways, sinking like a fallen statue into the carpet. Her knees drew up to her chest, and she wrapped her arms around them. The outside world escaped. The wailing pierced her ears, but only inside her head. Her tears flowed, but they stayed inside her eyes. Like a child, she rocked back and forth, willing away the knowledge and drowning in her grief.
The snow began to fall.
The flakes navigated the web of branches like silver balls in a Pachinko game, ultimately landing and melting on Stride's skin. The white bed on the forest ground was thin now, and bare in patches, but as the night stretched on, the blanket would deepen. After decades in Minnesota, he was still amazed that snow could be so insubstantial and yet gather into drifts that brought the entire world to a halt. The calendar said autumn, but November here meant winter.
The three of them stopped in the woods. They were only thirty yards from the slope of the cemetery, and he could see the lights of the police cars revolving on the dirt road beyond the graves. Stride shone his flashlight beam ahead of him and watched Migdalia Vega, who looked uneasy as her eyes studied the trees. The beam illuminated streams of snow. He directed the cone of light at the ground and swept it back and forth.
'Are we close?' he asked Micki.
'Everything looks alike,' she said.
'Five minutes ago, you said we were almost there.'
'I'm not sure now.'
Stride frowned. He thought she was stalling.
Beside them, Craig Hickey restrained his beagle, whose tongue lolled out of its mouth as it bit at the snowflakes. The squat handler wore heavy gloves and a red wool cap yanked down over his ears. The frigid wind raised a rosy glow on his face.
'Bitch of a night,' Hickey said, stamping his feet in the pine needles littering the ground. 'Don't know why we can't wait until daylight to do this.'
'It won't be any warmer in the morning,' Stride replied, 'and there'll be a foot of snow covering up everything.'
Hickey shivered. He chewed gum and worked his jaw like a teeter-totter. 'My Cujo don't care about snow. She'll sniff through it.'
Stride didn't ask why anyone would name a cadaver dog Cujo. He wanted to move the search forward quickly. Part of it was practical; he didn't want to be shoveling into a crime scene through deep snow. Part of it was human; he knew this was going to be the longest night of Valerie Glenn's life.
'Maybe he's right,' Micki said. 'It looks different in the dark. Maybe we should try again tomorrow.'
'The snow will erase all the landmarks by then.'
'Well, I don't know if I can find it again.'
Stride noticed the stubborn bulge of her lower lip as she pouted. He nodded his head at Craig Hickey. 'Give us a minute, OK?'
'Yeah, whatever.'
Hickey dragged Cujo back through the tangle of brush growing between the birch trees, leaving Stride and Micki alone.
'What's going on?' Stride asked her.
Micki kicked at the ground. 'Nothing. You try finding anything in these woods at night. I'm lost. I got turned around.'
'You saw Marcus Glenn back there,' Stride said. 'I think you're having second thoughts about helping us.'
She rubbed her runny nose with the back of her glove. 'I know how it works. You find something, you're going to arrest him.'
'Not necessarily.'
'Yeah, like I can trust anything you say. I'm fucking cold. Let's get out of here and try again in the morning. I don't know where I am.'
Stride shook his head. Snow sprayed off his damp hair. 'I saw your face a couple minutes ago, Micki. You know exactly where you are. You know every inch of these woods by heart. Are we close? Is that it?'
'I thought so, but now I'm not sure.'
He switched off his flashlight, and they stood in darkness. Over his shoulder, he could make out the lights of Micki's trailer not far away. 'You knew the significance of that toy horn as soon as you found it, didn't you? You knew what it meant. I think you studied the landmarks in the forest. Maybe you even left yourself a clue to find the place again. You knew we'd be here sooner or later.'
She said nothing.
'Tell me something,' Stride continued. 'Do you visit your own child?'
'Yes. Sure I do. All the time.'
'It's nice that you know where to find him,' he said, turning on his flashlight again and directing it ahead of
