The Tenth Circle Read online

She realized that Trixie was staring at her, the same way she used to gaze hard at a math problem she simply couldn’t puzzle into an answer. “You mean…you and him…”

  Laura nodded. “Yeah.”

  Trixie ducked her head. “Did you guys ever talk about me?”

  “He knew you existed. He knew I was married.”

  “I can’t believe you’d do this to Daddy,” Trixie said, her voice rising. “He’s, like, my age. That’s disgusting.”

  Laura’s jaw clenched. Trixie deserved to have this moment of rage; it was owed to her as part of Laura’s reparation. But that didn’t make it any easier.

  “I wasn’t thinking, Trixie-”

  “Yeah, because you were too busy being a slut.”

  Laura raised her palm, coming just short of slapping Trixie across the face. Her hand shook inches away from Trixie’s cheek, rendering both of them speechless for a moment. “No,” Laura breathed. “Neither of us should do something we won’t be able to take back.”

  She stared Trixie down, until the fury dissolved and the tears came. Laura drew Trixie into her arms, rocked her. “Are you and Daddy going to get a divorce?” Her voice was small, childlike.

  “I hope not,” Laura said.

  “Did you…love him?”

  She closed her eyes and imagined Seth’s poetry, placed word by word onto her own tongue, a gourmet meal mixed with rhythm and description. She felt the immediacy of a single moment, when unlocking a door took too long, when buttons were popped instead of slipped open.

  But here was Trixie, who had nursed with her hand fisted in Laura’s hair. Trixie, who sucked her thumb until she was ten but only when no one could see. Trixie, who believed that the wind could sing and that you could learn the songs if you just listened carefully enough. Trixie, who was the proof that at one time, she and Daniel had achieved perfection together.

  Laura pressed her lips against her daughter’s temple. “I loved you more,” she said.

  She had nearly turned her back once on this family. Had she really been stupid enough to come close to doing it again? She was crying just as hard as Trixie was now, to the point where it was impossible to tell which one of them was clinging to the other. Laura felt, in that moment, like the survivor of the train wreck, the woman who steps outside the smoking wreckage to realize that her arms and legs still work, that she has somehow come through a catastrophe unscathed.

  Laura buried her face in the curve of her daughter’s neck. It was possible she’d been wrong on several counts. It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn’t.

  The first place it appeared was on the screen at the school library computer terminal where you could look books up by their Dewey decimal number. From there, it spread to the twenty iBooks and ten iMacs in the computer lab, while the ninth-graders were in the middle of taking their typing skills test. Within five more minutes, it was on the monitor of the desk of the school nurse.

  Trixie was in an elective, School Newspaper, when it happened. Although her parents had tried to talk her out of going to school, it turned out to be the lesser of two evils. Home was supposed to be a safe place, but had become a minefield full of explosions waiting to happen. School, she already knew, wouldn’t be comfortable at all. And right now, she really needed to function in a world where nothing took her by surprise.

  In class, Trixie was sitting beside a girl named Felice with acne and beaver breath, the only one who would volunteer these days to be her partner. They were using desktop-publishing software to move columns of text about the losing basketball team, when the computer blue-screened. “Mr. Watford,” Felice called out. “I think we crashed…”

  The teacher came over, reaching between the girls to hit Control-Alt-Delete a few times, but the machine wouldn’t reboot. “Hmm,” he said. “Why don’t you two edit the advice column by hand instead?”

  “No, wait, it’s coming back,” Felice said, as the screen blossomed into Technicolor. Smack in the middle was Trixie, standing half naked in Zephyr’s living room-the photo Moss had taken the night she was raped.

  “Oh,” Mr. Watford said faintly. “Well, then.”

  Trixie felt as if a pole had been driven through her lungs. She tore herself away from the computer screen, grabbed her backpack, and ran to the main office. There, she threw herself on the mercy of the secretary. “I need to talk to the principal-”

  Her voice snapped like an icicle, as she glanced down at the computer on the secretary’s desk and saw her own face staring back at her.

  Trixie flew out of the office, out the front doors of the school. She didn’t stop running until she was standing on the bridge over the river, the same bridge where she and Zephyr had stood the day before she became someone different. She dug in her backpack through loose pencils and crumpled papers and makeup compacts until she found the cell phone her father had given her-his own, for emergencies. “Daddy,” she sobbed, when he answered, “please come get me.”

  It wasn’t until her father assured her he would be there in two minutes flat that she hung up and noticed what she hadn’t when she first placed the call: Her father’s phone screen saver-once a graphic of Rogue, from the X-Men-was now the topless picture of Trixie that had spread to three-quarters of the cell phone users in Bethel, Maine.

  The knock on Bartholemew’s door caught him off guard. It was his day off-although he’d already been to Bethel High and back. He had just finished changing into pajama pants and an old police academy sweatshirt with a sleeve that Ernestine had chewed a hole through. “Coming,” he called out, and when he opened the door he found Daniel Stone standing on the other side of it.

  It wasn’t surprising to him that Stone was there, given what had happened at the school. It also wasn’t surprising that Stone knew where Bartholemew lived. Like most cops, he didn’t have a listed address and phone number, but Bethel was small enough for most people to know other people’s business. You could drive down the street and recognize folks by the cars they drove; you could pass a house and know who resided inside.

  He was aware, for example, even before Trixie Stone’s case came to his attention that a comic book artist of some national renown lived in the area. He hadn’t read the comics, but some of the other guys at the station had. Supposedly, unlike his violence-prone hero Wildclaw, Daniel Stone was a mild-mannered guy who didn’t mind signing an autograph if you stood behind him in the grocery store checkout line. In his few dealings with Stone so far, the guy had seemed protective of his daughter and frustrated beyond belief. Unlike some of the men Bartholemew had run across in his career, who put their fists through glass walls or drowned their wrath in alcohol, Daniel Stone seemed to have a handle on his emotions-until now. The man was standing at the threshold of Bartholemew’s door, literally shaking with rage.

  Stone thrust a printout of the now-infamous picture of Trixie into Bartholemew’s hand. “Have you seen this?”

  Bartholemew had. For about three straight hours this morning, at the high school, on the computers at the town offices, everywhere he looked.

  “Hasn’t my daughter been victimized enough?”

  Bartholemew instinctively went into calming mode, softening his voice. “I know you’re upset, but we’re doing everything we can.”

  Stone scraped his gaze over Bartholemew’s off-duty attire. “Yeah. You look like you’re working your ass off.” He looked up at the detective. “You told us that Underhill’s not supposed to have anything to do with Trixie.”

  “Our computer tech guys traced the photo to Moss Minton’s cell phone, not Jason Underhill’s.”

  “It doesn’t matter. My daughter’s not the one who’s supposed to be on trial.” Stone set his jaw. “I want the judge to know this happened.”

  “Then he’s also going to know that your daughter was the one who took off her clothes. He’s going to know that every eyewitness at that party I’ve interviewed says Trixie was coming on to a whole bunch of different guys that night,” Bartholemew said. “Look. I know you’re angry. But you don’t want to press this right now, when it might wind up backfiring.”

  D