Fragile

as much pain as regret.

The cane stood against the wall. If she could reach it, maybe she could pull herself up. But her limbs suddenly felt full of sand, so she just rested her head on her arm and let the tears come.

It seemed like a hundred years ago that Elizabeth had gone to see Tommy Delano, left work early to drive the hour and a half to the facility where he was being held until his sentencing hearing. She didn’t-couldn’t, really-tell anyone where she was going. The parents of her students wouldn’t have liked it. And even she had to admit that it would have been unseemly. He’d already been tried and convicted in the minds of all the citizens of The Hollows, thanks to Chief Crosby blabbing to everyone who’d listen about the boy’s gruesome and depraved confession. There was no room for compassion or sympathy where Tommy Delano was concerned. He was a confessed child killer. End of the worst story told in The Hollows.

But it wasn’t some grand capacity for sympathy or compassion that compelled her to drive out of town, to take the highway four exits and cover the desolate miles to a squat gray building in the middle of nowhere surrounded by razor wire, its perimeter guarded by armed men in turrets.

The thing was that she’d always really liked Tom, which was not something she could say about all of her students. He was a skinny kid, with a drawn face and watery brown eyes. His clothes, always the wrong size, cuffs ending at his forearms or hems dragging on the floor, were never quite clean. He was a straight-C student, though Elizabeth suspected he could do better. He wasn’t funny or charming. But he had a sweet smile, spoke in soft, respectful tones. When she looked at him, she saw kindness, something purely good, even a quiet, twinkling sense of humor.

Once, many years before Sarah’s murder, when Tommy had been a student at Hollows High, she’d driven him home. So terrified had he been of the bullies on his bus, that he’d lingered until the bus was gone.

“Dad,” she’d overheard him say from the pay phone in the school office. “I had detention and missed the late bus.” She knew he hadn’t had detention.

“Okay. I’ll wait in the library. I’m sorry, Dad. Yes. I’m sorry.”

She just couldn’t reconcile the boy who’d rather tell his father he had detention than ride the bus with bullies with the image of Sarah’s killer, the knowledge of what had been done to her.

“I’ll speak to those boys,” she’d told him as she drove him that late afternoon to save his father the trip. It was right on her way.

“No,” he’d said quickly. “Please, Mrs. Monroe. You’ll just make it worse.”

She’d stared at the road ahead, not knowing what to say to that.

“Thanks, Mrs. Monroe. But there’s really nothing you can do. It’s just the way it is.”

Of course, that was years before Sarah’s murder. A lot can happen to a person in a decade. Maybe a lifetime of torment and misery, the festering wounds left by his mother’s death, could transform a timid, quiet person into a killer. But she just couldn’t see it. Could she have been that wrong about him?

At the prison, she’d waited alone in a gray, cold room before Tommy appeared behind the glass in an orange jumpsuit with his hands cuffed. When he sat, the guard who’d escorted him removed his handcuffs. Tommy looked at her with a sad, confused frown.

“Fifteen minutes,” the guard said.

Each picked up a receiver.

“Mrs. Monroe, what are you doing here?”

What was she doing here? Coming had been a foolish thing to do. Had she come to ask him if he’d really killed Sarah? Had she come to prove herself right about him? To prove that she really did recognize the difference between good and bad? She found herself at a loss for words, stared down at her wedding ring and twisted it for a second.

“I wanted to see you, Tommy,” she said finally. “I just can’t believe you killed Sarah.”

His body seemed to sag. He turned his face from her and rubbed at his neck as if it was itching. When he looked back at her, there was something blank, something cold on his face.

“Well, you’re the only one in The Hollows who doesn’t believe that,” he said. His tone was at once bitter and resigned. His voice had gone much deeper in adulthood, a bit gravelly from smoking. She realized that even though he was in the office regularly, she hadn’t really spoken to him in years-maybe just a quick hello or good- bye. She still saw him as a boy, a student at her school. She hadn’t updated the picture in her mind’s eye. She fixated on his hands. They were cleaner than she’d ever seen them. Usually they were black at the nails, grease caked into his calluses. She tried to imagine those hands, those dirty, hardworking hands, doing terrible things, dipped in blood. She couldn’t.

“You confessed,” she said.

“Yes.” She was a little surprised to hear it. Maybe she had expected him to tell her that he hadn’t confessed, that it was a mistake or a lie.

“And you confessed because you did-,” she said, stumbling over the phrasing. “Because you killed her.”

“Because I-,” he started, then didn’t finish. He just stood up and hung up the phone. He called for the guard. When the handcuffs were around his wrists, he raised them to her-in a gesture of resignation or farewell, she never did find out.

She hadn’t known what to say when he left her so abruptly. She’d had the urge to call after him, to press him. In the end, she’d just watched him go and then left as well, feeling selfish and wrong about the visit. But she’d also left convinced that she’d been right about him, that he didn’t have it in him to torture, mutilate, rape, and kill a young girl. And she’d vowed to do something about it, though she didn’t know what.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

She’d drifted off on the floor; she didn’t know for how long. Now that the door to the attic was open, she wasn’t even sure the sound was coming from up there. It seemed to come from the air all around her, inside her own head. She wondered how long she’d have to lie here like this before someone found her. She thought she’d try for the cane again when she felt less tired. But for now, she found herself content to wander through the attic of her life. She wanted, no needed, to visit those dark places and examine all the things she’d done and hadn’t done, and to make amends where she could-before she lost what fragile hold she still had on it all.

21

Travis opened the door for Jones and offered him a beer, which Jones declined in spite of really, really wanting one. There was a yellow light glowing over the kitchen sink, a nearly full ashtray and an open bottle of beer on a table in the room’s center, as if Travis had been just sitting there, smoking and drinking, staring off into space. The room was devoid of decoration, just clean Formica countertops and old appliances. The only decorative touch was an old calendar hanging on the fridge, still on December of the year before, every square blank, a topless woman stretching over the hood of a Cadillac.

“Marshall home?”

A quick shake of his head. “What’s he done?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I just want to talk to him.”

Jones told Travis about Charlene, about the message she’d sent to Marshall, about the witness who’d spotted the car. Travis took a seat at the table, lit a cigarette. The smell made Jones sick, but he didn’t say anything. Cigarette smoke reminded him of Abigail. He barely had a memory of her that didn’t include a cigarette in her hand or dangling from her mouth. More brand cigarettes-long and brown like shrunken dead fingers, crooked and pointing, piles of them in ashtrays all over the house. When she died and he sold the house, the real estate agent had made him strip the curtains and the wallpaper, even rip up the carpet. Everything was yellowed and stiff, reeking of smoke.

“He said he took some girl for a ride the other night. But that was early in the evening,” Travis said. “Anyway, I didn’t believe him. He lives in his head on that computer upstairs.”

He said it without heat. Jones nodded, walked over to the refrigerator, saw a magnet from Pop’s Pizza. He thought about his own kitchen, cluttered with every possible gadget, colorful ceramic bowls, at least one pile of