'It wasn't my fault. I didn't call the cops. What do you want me to do?'
'Bring the money to the place. Sunday. Six P.M. No police. No detective. Only you.'
'How much?'
'Bring the money to the place. Sunday. Six P.M. No police. No detective. Only you. You broke the rules. The girl will pay the price. You broke the rules. The girl will pay the price.'
The line went dead.
Molly clicked the phone off, clicked the recorder off. She was shaking so hard, she thought she might get sick. You broke the rules. The girl will pay the price. The words played over and over, so loud, she wanted to slam her hands over her ears to drown them out, but the sound was inside her head.
It was all her fault. She had thought she was doing the right thing, the smart thing. She had thought she was the only one who would do anything to save Erin. She had taken action. She had gone for help. Now Erin could die. And it was her fault.
Her fault and Elena's.
You broke the rules. The girl will pay the price.
28
In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of the interminable night
Strange the things we remember and the reasons we remember them. I remember those lines from a T. S. Eliot poem because at eighteen, as a headstrong freshman at Duke, I had an obsessive crush on my literature professor, Antony Terrell. I remember a passionate discussion of Eliot's works over cappuccino at a local coffeehouse, and Terrell's contention that Four Quartets was Eliot's exploration of issues of time and spiritual renewal, and my argument that Eliot was the root cause of the Broadway musical Cats and therefore full of shit.
I would have argued the sun was blue just to spend time with Antony Terrell. Debate: my brand of flirtation.
I didn't think of Antony as I sat curled in the corner of the sofa, chewing on my thumbnail, staring out the window at the darkness before dawn. I thought about uncertainty and what would come at the end of the unending night. I didn't allow myself to contemplate issues of spiritual renewal. Probably because I thought I may have blown my chance to hell.
A tremor went through me and I shivered violently. I didn't know how I would live with myself if my getting caught at Van Zandt's caused the loss of evidence that could prove him to be a murderer. If he was somehow tied to Erin Seabright's disappearance, and I had blown the chance for him to be charged with something, and in charging him pressure him to give up Erin…
Funny. Before I had ever heard of Erin Seabright, I hadn't known how I would live with myself because Hector Ramirez had died as a consequence of my actions. The difference was that now it mattered to me.
Somewhere in all this, hope had snuck in the back door. If it had come knocking, I would have turned it away as quickly as I would turn away a door-to-door missionary. No, thanks. I don't want what you're selling.
'Hope' is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings without the words
And never stops-at all
Emily Dickinson
I didn't want to have hope for myself. I wanted to simply exist.
Existence is uncomplicated. One foot in front of the other. Eat, sleep, function. Living, truly living, with all the emotion and risk that entails, is hard work. Every risk presents the possibility of both success and failure. Every emotion has a counterbalance. Fear cannot exist without hope, nor hope without fear. I wanted neither. I had both.
The horizon turned pink as I stared out the window, and a white egret flew along that pink strip between the darkness and the earth. Before I could take it for a sign of something, I went to my bedroom and changed into riding clothes.
No deputies had come knocking on my door in the dead of night to question me about my jacket and the break-in at Lorinda Carlton's/Tomas Van Zandt's town house. My question was: if the deputies didn't have my jacket, who did? Had the dog dragged it back to Lorinda Carlton? His trophy for his efforts. Had Carlton or Van Zandt followed my trail and found it? If ultimately Van Zandt had possession of the prescription with my name on it, what would happen?
Uncertainty is always the hell of undercover work. I had built a house of cards, presenting myself as one thing to one group of people and something else to another group. I didn't regret the decision to do that. I knew the risks. The trick was getting the payoff before I was found out and the cards came tumbling down. But I felt no nearer to getting Erin Seabright back, and if I lost my cover with the horse people, then I was well and truly out of it, and I would have failed Molly.
I fed the horses and wondered if I should call Landry or wait to see if he would come to me. I wanted to know how Van Zandt's interview had gone, and whether or not the autopsy had been performed on Jill Morone. What made me think he would tell me any of that after what he had done the night before, I didn't know.
I stood in front of Feliki's stall as she finished her breakfast. The mare was small in stature and had a rather large, unfeminine head, but she had a heart and an ego as big as an elephant's, and attitude to spare. She regularly trounced fancier horses in the showring, and if she had been able to, I had no doubt she would have given her rivals the finger as she came out of the ring.
She pinned her ears and glared at me and shook her head as if to say, what are you looking at?
A chuckle bubbled out of me, a pleasant surprise in the midst of too much unpleasantness. I dug a peppermint out of my pocket. Her ears went up at the crackling of the wrapper and she put her head over the door, wearing her prettiest expression.
'Some tough cookie, you are,' I said. She picked the treat delicately from my palm and crunched on it. I scratched her under her jaw and she melted.
'Yeah,' I murmured, as she nuzzled, looking for another treat. 'You remind me of me. Only I don't have anybody giving me anything but grief.'
The sound of tires on the driveway drew my attention out the door. A silver Grand Am pulled in at the end of the barn.
'Case in point,' I said to the mare. She looked at Landry's car, ears pricked. Like all alpha mares, Feliki was ever on the alert for intruders and danger. She spun around in her stall, squealed and kicked the wall.
I didn't go out to meet Landry. He could damn well come to me. Instead, I went to D'Artagnon, took him out of his stall, and led him to a grooming bay. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Landry approach. He was dressed for work. The morning breeze flipped his red tie over his shoulder.
'You're up bright and early for someone who was out prowling last night,' he said.
'I don't know what you're talking about.' I chose a brush from the cabinet and started a cursory grooming job that would have made Irina scowl at me and mutter in Russian if it had not been her day off.
Landry leaned sideways against a pillar, his hands in his pockets. 'You don't know anything about a B amp;E at the town house of Lorinda Carlton-the town house where Tomas Van Zandt is living?'
'Nope. What about it?'
'We got a nine-one-one call last night claiming there was a piece of evidence there that would lock Van Zandt into the murder of Jill Morone.'
'Terrific. Did you find it?'
'No.'
My heart sank. There was only one piece of news that would have been worse, and that would have been that
