easily killed the young man, and for a moment, she thought he would. Instead, the darkness dissipated; he wiped the spit from his face, released the frightened young man, and said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”
They had married three days after he graduated from the Academy. It was a fairy tale wedding in the West Point chapel; afterward, still wearing her white wedding dress, she was escorted by Lieutenant Ben Brice in his dress white uniform through the saber arch, an Army tradition. Her fairy tale marriage lasted exactly three weeks. Twenty-one days a married woman, her husband left her for Fort Bragg and Special Forces school. Ben Brice was going to war. He deployed the day after Thanksgiving 1968. She saw him off at the airport; she never saw that man again.
That damn war destroyed the fairy tale marriage she had dreamed of as a girl. She is praying for a fresh start today.
There! She sees a green beret above a sea of heads… and now his face, tanned and angular, and so handsome. He sees her and smiles.
Ben turned back to her now: the same face, still tanned and angular, and still so handsome. But the smile was gone. He had been walking out to the pool house when she called to him. He came back to her, and they sat on the back porch.
“When will you leave?” she asked.
“When I know where she is.”
Kate studied her husband’s face. “Gracie?”
He nodded.
“You believe that psychic?”
He nodded again.
“Ben, that was odd that she knew your name, but-”
“She’s alive, Kate.”
She calls out for someone named Ben, the psychic said. Why not me? Why not her mother?
But with Grace, it had always been Ben. And Elizabeth had always hated Ben Brice because he shared a bond with Grace that she did not. Now, sitting alone in her bedroom, her thoughts were not angry; her thoughts were of her father and the bond they had shared.
Her memories were of their time together.
Arthur Austin had been a lawyer, but he did not sell his life by the billable hour, so he had time for his daughter. During their last year together, when she was ten, he had taken her to at least one Mets’ game a week, often leaving the office early to make a weekday game. Mother wasn’t good in the heat, so it was just the two of them. She had been so proud to sit next to her handsome father in his suit and tie, his sharp features and head of thick black hair attracting the eyes of other women. But he belonged to her. Those were glorious days she thought would never end.
How could a thirty-five-year-old man be murdered?
She could still close her eyes and see him lying in the hospital bed at St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital, his eyes shut, the white sheets pulled up to his chin (to conceal his wounds, she realized years later), his skin pale and cold, and Mother saying it was time to say goodbye. But Elizabeth Austin, the good Catholic girl, had said, “No, God will save him.” She had knelt next to his bed and held his cold hand; she had prayed to God to save her father. But God had refused. He had ignored her prayers. He had forsaken her. “I will never forgive you,” she had said to God that day. And she never had.
She had missed her father terribly. But somehow she had gone on with her life, always thinking of everything they would never do together. That was before evil had come into her life. Afterward, she had been relieved her father hadn’t been there; it would have broken his heart to see what his happy ten-year-old daughter had become: a forty-year-old rage-filled lunatic forever haunted by her encounter with evil. Just as it was breaking her heart to imagine what her happy ten-year-old daughter would become-if she survived her encounter with evil.
What if she didn’t?
How could this child’s life story end this way? After the way her story had begun? She had given this child life, and this child had saved her life. How was she now supposed to go on with her life without this child? Without Grace? How was Elizabeth Brice supposed to get up one day- when, next week or the week after? — drive to the office, and again care about guilty clients? How was getting a rich white-collar criminal off supposed to fill the empty space inside her?
Her private phone line rang. It was her mother, offering to help in any way she could-which was in no way. It took only a few minutes of pleading to get her to stay in New York.
Mother had been only twenty-nine when Father had died. She had married him right out of high school, while he was in law school. He was her life. After his death, Mother had retreated into her own world, seldom leaving the house, helpless in a harsh world. For all intents and purposes, her mother had died with her father.
And Elizabeth Austin had grown up alone.
“I don’t want to be an only child.”
John squeezed Sam’s shoulder and fought back tears. He had come into Sam’s room to comfort his five- year-old son. Sam had finally begun to grasp the reality that he might never see Gracie again. As had his father.
“I don’t want her room or her stuff,” Sam said. “I just want her to come back. I miss her.” He wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve. “That guy on TV, he said she’s probably dead.”
“She’s not dead,” John said, trying to sound convincing. “She’ll be back soon, buddy.”
“But you don’t know that for a fact, do you?”
“Huh? Well, no, Sam, I don’t know that for a fact.”
“So you’re just saying that to make me feel better ’cause I’m just a stupid kid.”
John beheld his kindergartner son, indisputable evidence that cloning works.
“Sam, A, you’ve got a one-sixty IQ, so you’re not stupid, and B, I’m saying that because I believe Gracie will come home.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you believe she’ll come home?”
Cripes, Sam was like Microsoft after a competitor!
“Uh, well, because I have faith.”
“In God?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s it.”
“So you believe in God?”
John hesitated. Fact is, he wasn’t sure he did believe in God. As a kid, Little Johnny Brice had often begged God to save him from the bullies’ beatings, but God never did. And John R. Brice hadn’t spent much adult time thinking about God, what with getting the Ph. D., hacking code for a killer app, and now working the IPO. And he went to church with the kids only because Mom would be disappointed in him if he didn’t. A week ago, if Sam had asked such a question, he would have automatically clicked into avoidance mode and responded to Sam like a big brother: “Hey, buddy, God is one of those deep philosophical choices that each humanoid must make for himself or herself, kind of like whether to go Windows or Mac. But look, man, don’t worry about that serious stuff now, wait till you’re older, you know, after your own IPO. Hey, let’s go to the kitchen and get down on some Rocky Road ice cream, dude.”
And that was the role he had played all these years for the kids, which was, in fact, the role he preferred: big brother, pal, buddy. Nothing more had been required of him. And besides, with Elizabeth around, the man-of-the- house role had already been taken.
But now, looking into Sam’s eyes, he could see that Sam needed something more from him. At the office, John was the Big Kahuna because he always had the answers to the toughest technical queries posed by his employees. But their questions paled next to Sam’s: Is there a God? The answer couldn’t be found in the online Help menu. John wanted to say, Shit, dude, I don’t have a freaking clue! But his five-year-old son didn’t need the big brother mode; he needed the mature adult fatherly mode. So John lied.
“Of course I believe in God.”
“But you don’t know if there really is a God, do you? I mean, like, you don’t have any evidence that proves He exists beyond a reasonable doubt, right?”
