Fragile

will be amenable to a deal, because, you know, of the things he did to me. Mitigating circumstances or whatever.”

Jones didn’t know what to say to this girl. So many awful things had happened to her, so many people had hurt and used her. He wanted to put a comforting hand on her, but he hesitated to touch her. She seemed skittish and delicate.

“I better get back to the computer,” said Charlene. “I’m going to school on Monday, and I want to have everything done by then.”

“Sounds like a plan, kid.”

“Hey, Mr. Cooper? Thanks for asking.” She didn’t wait around for him to answer.

He nodded to himself, looked out into the backyard. The pool had been covered for the winter that had closed in on them, and the maple trees had shed their leaves. He really had to get out there and clean up. Of course, now there was plenty of time.

No sooner had he settled into a silent zone of peace, preparing to contemplate his future, than he heard the shuffle-shuffle-thump that heralded the approach of his mother-in-law, another unwanted semi-permanent guest.

“Stripped of his badge and his gun, the retired cop has to contemplate what lies ahead,” she said, putting a pot on the stove.

“Hello, Elizabeth.”

They’d fought out the worst of it. But her recriminations and his were on the table, ready to leap up at any given moment. The truth of it was that they were both guilty of keeping quiet when they should have been raising alarms. The only reason you’re both so angry at each other is because you’re guilty of the same failure to act. Forgive yourselves and maybe you’ll be able to forgive each other. Elizabeth didn’t like to be “shrinked” any more than he did, so when Maggie was around, they both put on happy faces. But Maggie was in session.

“So when do you think you’ll be leaving?”

“Not soon enough, Detective. Oh, that’s right. It’s just Jones now. Mr. Cooper.”

She came to sit across from him, shuffle-shuffle-thump. She looked frail and tired; she didn’t have the same vigor since her last accident. Her weakened state did take a little of the fun out of fighting with her.

“What’s it going to take to bury the hatchet, Elizabeth?”

She leaned back in her chair and looked at him. “I just can’t get over that those things were in my attic. That you hid them there.”

Jones, on Maggie’s insistence, was seeing a therapist a few towns away. He drove there weekly with a brew of dread and resentment in his belly, returning exhausted in a way he’d never experienced before. He’d grab a big cup of coffee at a drive-through Starbucks, blast some classic rock like Led Zeppelin or Van Morrison to try to shake off that bone-deep fatigue. But it lived in him for at least a day after each session, lashing him to the couch. His therapist was a man about his age, a soft-spoken guy with a thick head of ink black hair, always in crisply pressed chinos and a colorful shirt. Dr. Black. They talked a lot about the items Jones had kept, why he’d kept them, what they meant, why he’d chosen Elizabeth’s attic to hide them in recent years.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was a violation of our trust. It felt like a safe place to hide that part of myself.”

She looked down at her hands, twisted the gold wedding band on the finger of her left hand.

“A few days after I went to see Tommy Delano in prison, I went to see the chief,” she said. “He was such a weasel, that man. Not a kind or compassionate thought ever entered his tiny, little mind.”

She hadn’t told him this before. He took a sip of his coffee, waited for her to go on. But she didn’t.

“What did he tell you?” he asked, finally. He looked out at the backyard, a view he’d gazed upon for almost twenty years. But everything out there-the covered pool, the patio furniture, the ivy-covered pergola-looked different, brighter somehow, more solid.

“He told me something I’ve never told anyone. It was part of the reason that psychic had such an impact on me.”

“I’m listening.” And he was; he felt the palms of his hands start to tingle.

“They found other pictures in his room-yearbook pictures, some snapshots-of other girls at the school. One of those girls was Maggie.”

Jones let the information sink in, taking in a deep breath and letting it out slowly, trying not to imagine Tommy Delano with a picture of a young and innocent Maggie in his grease-stained hands.

“I was wrong about Tommy Delano,” Elizabeth said. “And the chief? He didn’t lie. What he said Tommy Delano had done, he’d done. He probably would have done worse to another girl somewhere down the line. Maybe…” She let the thought go unfinished.

“‘I was wrong,’” he said, as if testing the words on the air. He had the urge to make light, to not focus on the horror of what she was saying. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you utter that statement.”

She gave him a wan smile. “I’ve never had to.”

“Hmm,” he said. He offered a deferential nod.

“After I saw the chief, I was angry and unsatisfied-and frightened. Still not convinced I had the whole story from Crosby-which, of course, I didn’t. So I went to see that woman, that psychic, Eloise Montgomery. I went there to blast her, to force her to tell me that she was a fraud.”

They hadn’t talked like this before, not really. The words they’d exchanged over the last couple of weeks had been loud and angry, designed to deflect blame and hurt each other. But sitting with her now, Jones found that Maggie was right, as usual. He wasn’t mad at Elizabeth. She’d acted out of fear, just as he had.

“But there in her kitchen, she made me a cup of tea and told me what she saw. And I believed her. Something about her voice, her eyes, filled me with horror and awe. I’ll never forget what she said. She told me, ‘If you don’t stop asking questions, if you don’t let this rest, you’ll lose your daughter.’ I can’t describe the way her words made me feel. They cut me to the bone.”

He reached for her hand, and she didn’t pull away. Her skin was soft and papery in his grasp. “I asked her what she meant, and she said she didn’t know. But, of course, I just kept seeing Sarah lying there, stiff and unnatural, those horrible gashes filled with putty. Thinking of Maggie’s pictures in his room. And the thought of losing my daughter like that was enough to bind and gag me for good.”

A single tear trailed down her face, and she withdrew her hand from his to remove a tissue from her pocket and angrily dab her cheek dry.

“But now I think that maybe it was about you,” Elizabeth went on. That maybe she meant you wouldn’t be here to bring her back to The Hollows. It would have changed your life if the truth had been revealed about that night. Maybe for the better. Maybe you would have left this place. But I don’t know.”

“We don’t know,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter. All that matters is how things are right now.”

“My husband used to say, ‘The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.’”

“He was a wise man.”

“I miss him every day.”

“I know you do.”

She reached out to touch his face. “You always were a good boy, Jones Cooper.”

He didn’t know if his mother-in-law was being sarcastic or not, but he supposed it didn’t much matter.

Maggie slipped back through the door that led to her office and closed it quietly. She’d been headed to the kitchen to see if Jones was back from picking up his things, and overheard him talking to her mother. She decided to give them some space to finish their conversation.

She’d stayed out of sight and eavesdropped like a kid. She was feeling bad about it when she looked up to the top landing to see Ricky and Charlene listening, too. They all exchanged guilty glances, but none of them moved. Maggie and Ricky locked eyes as Elizabeth told Jones what she’d been keeping to herself for decades.

Now she sank into the leather chair behind her desk and looked at the flock of unopened e-mail messages on her screen-Angie Crosby checking on Marshall’s progress; Henry Ivy wanting to get coffee; a referral from a friend who practiced in the next town. But she found she couldn’t really focus. Her mother’s conversation with Jones had triggered a flash flood of memory. And suddenly, she was remembering the thing that had been nagging at her