around my back as her wet face burrows into my neck. I have a sensation very like falling, but falling through time rather than space, and even as I hold her I feel her kick her way under the covers and mold herself to me. Fear and guilt and arousal surge through me in a flood.
“Erin,” I whisper. “Erin-”
“Shhh,” she says, her weight pressing down on me, against me, the heat of her long legs electrifying my skin. “I just want it all to go away. Make him go away.”
“Erin-”
“I
I take a deep breath and try to stay calm. I haven’t held her like this since Chicago, not even hugs at family dinners. Now, only hours after I tried in vain to describe her unique sensuality to Lenz, the elusive has become all too tangible. Erin is crying softly, her face still buried in the hollow of my neck. With a shaking hand I stroke the silky hair above her ear, as I would a child’s. “It’s going to be okay,” I murmur, even as a taut wire of fear sets to thrumming in my chest.
She sobs, her breast heaving with irregular breaths. It’s already hot enough under the covers that I’m sweating. I’m about to try to pull back the bedspread when she lifts her head and looks down into my eyes.
“I’m not going back,” she whispers, her mouth inches from mine. “I can’t.”
“Erin, you-”
She puts a finger to my lips and shakes her head. I feel her other hand slip into the hair at the back of my neck.
“Mama?”
I freeze.
It’s Holly. She’s awakened alone in a strange bed.
Erin jerks upright, her head alert and rigid like that of a doe sensing danger.
Erin slides off the bed with fluid swiftness, her sheer white nightgown flashing across the room. She stops at the door, hovering like a veil. Then she’s moving back toward me, quickly, but seemingly uncertain of direction. A bright scythe of light slices across my floor. The hall light.
Drewe.
Daddy? I grope under the mattress for my.38 while Erin stops in the middle of the floor, obviously torn between protecting her child and being caught in the dark with her sister’s husband. Has Patrick broken into the house? Or is Holly calling for him out of habit?
I hear footsteps in the hall.
As I stand with the pistol, Erin vanishes through the door. Seconds later, Holly stops crying. I press my ear to the wall and hear Drewe say, “Everything’s okay, punkin. Mama must be in the bathroom.” Then Holly’s higher voice, crusted with sleep: “Mama went to tee tee, Aunt Drewe?”
As though in answer, the commode flushes down the hall. I hear a quick beat of footsteps, then Erin’s voice through the wall: “I’m sorry she woke you up. I had to pee. I didn’t think she’d wake up. I guess it’s the strange house.”
“I didn’t see the bathroom light,” Drewe replies, ever logical. “I thought something was wrong.”
A pause. “I’m used to finding strange bathrooms in the dark.”
A longer pause, then, “That makes me sad, Erin.”
The shell of my ear aches from the pressure of the wall, but I’m not about to miss this exchange. After a long silence, Drewe says, “Are you okay? Is this all going to work out?”
“I hope so. Let’s don’t talk about it anymore.”
“Talk about what?” Holly asks in a bleary voice.
“Work stuff, honey.”
“Tell me a story, Mama.”
“We’re going back to sleep, punkin.”
“I want a story!”
“Lie down,” Drewe says. “I’ll tell you a story.”
And she makes one up on the spot. It is a tale of a king with two daughters, both beautiful and smart, but each of whom believes she lacks one of the two qualities. We all listen spellbound, recognizing the allegory of Drewe and Erin as they struggle through myriad trials, all of us knowing Drewe will ultimately weave the threads into one of the happy endings she so fervently believes in, and all of us glad for it. This is my wife’s transcendent gift, her optimism, and in the predawn shadows it is proof against despair. As she speaks, her voice like a lantern in the dark, I realize that Drewe is a living archetype of maternal love. Erin and I struggle in states of arrested growth, uncertain of our natures or fighting acceptance of them. But Drewe radiates heat and nurturing love like a warm spring flowing through bedrock, even without a natural object for her affections. I am the only obstacle to the fulfillment of her dreams, and at the deepest level, I know that if I have a duty to anything in this world, it is to bring those dreams to fruition.
After the two princesses have laid their parents to rest and agreed to jointly rule the “queendom”-a concept of which Hans Christian Andersen was apparently ignorant-Drewe says “night-night” to Holly. I expect her to go back to the master bedroom, but instead she appears at my door, a flannel-clad silhouette against the hall light.
“You back?” she asks softly.
“Yeah. Just got here. Everything’s okay. For you and me, anyway. But not Erin. Patrick’s outside.”
“He’s parked on the road. I don’t think he’ll do anything crazy. But wake me up if you hear anything weird.”
“This has got to stop,” Drewe says with conviction. “I don’t think I can get back to sleep now. You want to come in and give me the play-by-play on your trip? I’m going to make coffee.”
I have no intention of letting my wife peer into my eyes after the events of the last ten minutes. “I’m pretty wiped out,” I tell her. “I should probably get some sleep.”
She remains at the door. “I’ll throw together some lunch for you,” she says finally. “I’m going to try to talk Erin into going home this morning.”
“Thanks. Good luck.”
“You forgot to close your blinds.”
“I’m so tired it doesn’t matter.”
“’Night,” she says. Then she reaches across the invisible border between our lives and pulls the door shut after her.
Lying motionless in the pale dawn, I am overcome by a terrible certainty that, barring divine intervention, we are all moving toward an explosive revelation of the true and tragic state of affairs. And I am not one to look for divine intervention, at least of the positive sort. Retribution is the only cosmic principle I have ever found the capacity to believe in.
I sleep with the gun under my pillow.
CHAPTER 24
I slept ten hours last night. When I blinked myself awake at three-thirty this afternoon, I felt like I was stepping out of a recompression chamber after a mild case of the bends. Finding the house empty, I walked out to the road-ostensibly to check our mail box-and verified that Patrick’s Jeep had disappeared as well.
I can hardly believe it’s been only four days since I saw the CNN report of Karin Wheat’s death. Only three days since I faced the police in New Orleans, and Detective Mayeux ushered me into the fast-forward world of the FBI and its Investigative Support Unit.
Karin’s body must be in the ground by now. God only knows where her head is. Her burial was probably a
