The real Ashley had been the Ashley across the table from him, drinking and laughing at his jokes, but mesmerizing as she slid along the route of loose invitation. The real Ashley had connected with him, both physically and emotionally, in a way far deeper than he had ever thought possible. The real Ashley had invited him into her life, even if only briefly, and it was his duty to find that person again.
He would set her free.
O’Connell knew that the Ashley her parents and lesbian stepmother thought existed was a shadow Ashley. The student, artist, museum-drone Ashley was all fiction, created by a bunch of wimpy, liberal, middle-class nonentities who only wanted her to be like them, to grow up and have the same stupidly insignificant lives they did. The real Ashley was waiting for him to arrive like some fairy-tale knight and show her a different life. She was the Ashley who longed for adventure, an existence on the edge. The Bonnie to his Clyde, an Ashley who would operate right beside him, outside the rules of life. That she was reluctant, afraid of the freedom that he represented, was only to be expected. The excitement that he was bringing to her was bound to be frightening.
It was just a matter of showing her.
Michael O’Connell smiled to himself. He was confident. It might not be easy. It was likely to be tricky. But she would eventually see.
Feeling a renewed sense of excitement, O’Connell punched at the gas and felt the car leap forward. Within a few seconds he was out in the left-hand lane, accelerating hard. He knew there would be no one to stop him. Not that night.
Not far to go, he thought. Not far to go, at all.
Hope let the night wrap around her, cloaking her misery in shadows. She had let Sally drive home. Hope’s silence seemed pale, ghostlike, as if she were only some spectral part of herself.
Sally had the good sense to simply steer the car and leave Hope alone with her thoughts. She felt a little guilty that she didn’t feel as bad as she probably should have. But thoughts were rushing toward her, and as awful as the loss of Nameless might be, how he died and what that all meant were far greater considerations. She had an undeniable need to take some action, as she tried to piece together what had really taken place that night.
The car crunched to a halt in their driveway, and Sally said, “I am so sorry, Hope. I know what he meant to you.”
It seemed to Hope that those were the first soft words she’d heard from her partner in months. She breathed in deeply and wordlessly got out of the car and walked across the lawn, fallen leaves kicking up around her feet. She stopped at the front door and took a second to examine it before she turned back to Sally. “Not here,” she said with a deep sigh. “Unless whoever it was can pick a lock, which he probably can. But someone, like one of the neighbors or a delivery guy or someone, would have seen him out front.”
Sally had joined her. “Around back. By the basement. Or maybe one of the side windows.”
Hope nodded. “I’ll check the back. You check the windows, especially over by the library.”
It did not take Hope long to find the shredded doorjamb. She stood for a moment, simply staring at the shards of wood that littered the cement basement floor. “Sally, down here!”
There was only a single bare overhead bulb, which cast odd shapes into the musty corners of the old house’s basement. Hope remembered that when Ashley was young, she was always scared to come downstairs alone to do her laundry, as if the corners and cobwebs hid trolls or ghosts. Nameless had been her preferred companion on those occasions. Even as a teenager, when Ashley knew she was far too sophisticated to believe in such things, she would collect all her too-tight jeans and skimpy underwear she didn’t want her mother to know she was wearing, then grab a dog biscuit and hold the basement door open for Nameless. The dog would clatter eagerly down the stairs, making enough of a racket to scare away any lingering demon, and wait for Ashley, already sitting, his tail sweeping half-moons of enthusiasm on the floor.
Hope turned when Sally came down the stairs. “This is where he got in.”
Sally eyed the splinters and nodded. She stepped aside as Hope moved past her.
“Then he would have come up the stairs. He probably had one of those little miniflashlights. Then into the kitchen.”
“That’s where Nameless must have heard him. Or smelled him,” Sally said.
Hope took a breath. “Nameless liked to wait for us in the vestibule, so he would have reacted to the sound behind him and known right away it wasn’t you or me or even Ashley coming home.”
Hope glanced around the kitchen. “This is where he made his stand,” she said softly. Last stand, she thought to herself. She could see the old dog, the gray hairs on the back of the neck raised, worn teeth bared. His home, his family. No one was getting past him, even if his eyesight was weak and his hearing almost gone. Not without paying a price, this she knew. She coughed back some more tears and dropped down to the floor, inspecting the area carefully. “See,” she said after a few seconds. “Right here.”
Sally looked down. “What is it?”
“Blood. Got to be blood. And not Nameless’s either.”
“I think you’re right,” Sally said. Then softer: “Good dog.”
“But whoever it was that broke in, what was he looking for?”
This time it was Sally who inhaled sharply. “It was him,” she said quietly.
“Him? You mean…”
“The creep. O’Connell.”
“But I thought…you said he was out of our lives. The private eye told you…”
“The private eye, Murphy, was killed. Murdered. Yesterday.”
Hope’s eyes widened.
“I was going to tell you, right when we got home.” Sally didn’t need to continue.
“Murdered? How? Where?”
“On a street in Springfield. Execution-style, or so the paper said.”
“What the hell does ‘execution-style’ mean?” Hope asked, her voice rising.
“It means someone walked up behind him and put two small-caliber bullets into the back of his brain.” Sally’s voice was cold, mingling detail with fear.
“You think it was him? Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I can’t tell. A lot of people hated Murphy. Any one of them…”
“We’re not interested in anyone else. I mean, do you think…” Hope stared down at the splatters of blood on the floor. “So, it might have been anybody in Springfield. But you think this break-in was…”
“Who else?”
“Well, it could have been any burglar. It’s not like it’s unheard-of in this neighborhood.”
“It’s still pretty unusual. And even when there is a break-in, it’s usually just teenage kids, anyway. This doesn’t feel like that. Do you see anything stolen?”
“No.”
“Then who else?”
“If it was O’Connell, that means…”
“He’s back after Ashley. Obviously.”
“But why here?” Hope finally said.
Sally shuddered. “He was searching for information.”
“But I thought Scott had invented this story and sold it to the creep. You know, Italy. Studying Renaissance art. Long gone and out of reach.”
Sally shook her head. “We don’t know,” she said coldly. “We have no idea what O’Connell knows, or what he thinks, or what he’s learned. Or what he’s done. We know Murphy was killed and we know Nameless was killed. Are the two the same? We’re the ones in the dark.” She sighed, then clenched her fists and pushed one up against her head in frustration. “We don’t know anything for sure.”
Hope looked down at the floor and thought she saw another droplet or two of blood, by the
