The Tenth Circle Read online

Her father had been gone for three minutes when she started to actively panic. It didn’t take much longer than that to buy some stupid cheese, did it? What if someone else came to this parking lot and saw her sitting there? How long before a crowd gathered, calling her a slut and a whore? Who would save her if they decided to pound on the windows, start a witch hunt, lynch her?

  She peered out the windshield. It would take fifteen seconds, tops, to make it to the door of the grocery store. By now her father would be in line. She might run into someone she knew there, but at least she wouldn’t be alone.

  Trixie got out of the car and started to race across the parking lot. She could see the buttery windows of the grocery mart and the line of wire shopping carts shivering against its outer wall.

  Someone was coming. She couldn’t see whether it was her father-the figure seemed big enough, but the streetlamp was behind him, obscuring the features. If it was her father, he’d see her first, Trixie realized. And if it wasn’t her father, then she was going to move past the stranger at the speed of light.

  But as Trixie broke into a sprint, she hit a patch of black ice and her feet gave out from underneath her. One leg twisted, and she could feel herself falling. The moment before her left hip struck the pavement, she was wrenched upright by the very person she’d been trying to avoid. “You okay?” he said, and she looked up to find Jason holding her upper arm.

  He let go almost as quickly as he’d grabbed her. Trixie’s mother had said that Jason couldn’t come near her, couldn’t cross paths with her-if he did, he’d be shipped off to a juvenile detention center before the trial. But either her mother had been wrong or Jason had forgotten, because he shook off whatever fear had made him release her and began advancing on her instead. He smelled like a distillery, and his voice was raw. “What did you tell them? What are you trying to do to me?”

  Trixie fought for breath. The cold was seeping through the back of her jeans and there was water in her boot where it had gone through the ice into a puddle. “I didn’t…I’m not…”

  “You have to tell them the truth,” Jason begged. “They don’t believe me.”

  This was news to Trixie and cut clean as a knife through her fear. If they didn’t believe Jason, and they didn’t believe her, who did they believe?

  He crouched in front of her, and that was all it took for Trixie to be whipped back to then. It was as if the rape was happening all over again, as if she couldn’t control a single inch of her own body.

  “Trixie,” Jason said.

  His hands on her thighs, as she tried to pull away.

  “You have to.”

  His body rising over hers, pinning her at the hips.

  “Now.”

  Now, he had said, throwing his head back as he pulled out and spilled hot across her belly. Now, he had said, but by then it was already too late.

  Trixie drew in a deep breath and screamed at the top of her lungs.

  Suddenly Jason wasn’t leaning over her anymore. Trixie glanced up to see him wrestling, trying to dodge her father’s punches. “Daddy!” she screamed. “Stop!”

  Her father turned, bleeding from a split lip. “Trixie, get in the car.”

  She didn’t get in the car. She scrambled away from their brawl and stood in the halo of the streetlamp, watching as her father-the same man who caught the spiders in her bedroom and carried them outside in a Dixie cup, the same man who had never in his life spanked her-pummeled Jason. She was horrified and fascinated all at once. It was like meeting someone she’d never seen before and finding out that all this time, he’d been living next door.

  The sound of flesh smacking flesh reminded Trixie of the blue-fish that got slapped hard against the docks in Portland by the fishermen, to still them before they were filleted. She covered her ears and looked down at the ground, at the plastic bag of shredded mozzarella that had fallen and been torn open under their boots during the fight.

  “If you ever,” her father panted, “ever…”

  He landed a punch to Jason’s gut.

  “…ever come near my daughter again…”

  A blow across the right jaw.

  “I will kill you.” But just as he reared back his hand to strike again, a car drove past the parking lot, illuminating everything.

  The last man Daniel had beaten up had already been dead. In the high school gym in Akiak, Daniel had slammed Cane against the floor, although his head already had a bullet hole in it. He’d done it because he wanted Cane to tell him to stop. He’d wanted Cane to sit up and take a swing back at him.

  The principal had tiptoed gingerly into this nightmare, absorbing Daniel’s sobs and the discarded rifle and the blood sprayed across the bleachers. Daniel, the principal had said, shocked. What did you do?

  Daniel had run, because he was faster than the principal and faster than the police. For a few days he was a murder suspect, and he liked that. If Daniel had meant to kill Cane, then he couldn’t feel as guilty about not keeping it from happening.

  By the time he left town, the rumors surrounding Daniel had died down. Everyone knew it was Cane’s hunting rifle, and Daniel’s fingerprints hadn’t been on it. Cane had not left a suicide note-that was rare, in the village-but he’d left his basketball jersey on the table for his little sister. Daniel had been cleared as a suspect, but he left Alaska anyway. It wasn’t that he’d been scared of his future; it was that he couldn’t see one, period.

  Every now and then, he still woke up with one thought caught like cotton on the roof of his mouth: Dead men don’t bruise.

  Tonight, he’d been stuck behind an old woman paying with pennies at the grocery mart. The whole time, he was second-guessing himself. At first, after the suicide attempt, Trixie had been distant and silent, but over the past few days her personality would bob to the surface every now and then. However, the minute they’d reached town, Trixie had gone still and blank-a relapse. Daniel hadn’t wanted to leave her alone in the car but couldn’t stand the thought of forcing her to leave that safety zone either. How long could it take to buy a single item? He’d hurried into the store, thinking only of Trixie and getting her back home as quickly as possible.

  It was when he’d stepped under the streetlamp that he’d seen it: that bastard’s hand on his daughter’s arm.

  For someone who has never given himself over to rage, it would be hard to understand. But for Daniel, it felt like shrugging on an old, soft suede coat that had been buried so deep in his closet he was certain it had long ago been given away to someone else who needed the cover. Lucid thought gave way to utter feeling. His body started to burn; his own anger buzzed in his ears. He saw through a crimson haze, he tasted his own blood, and still he knew he could not stop. As he gloried in the scrape of his knuckles and the adrenaline that kept him one step ahead, Daniel began to remember who he used to be.

  Every brawl with a bully in Akiak, every fistfight with a drunk outside a bar, every window he’d smashed to get inside a locked door-it was as if Daniel had stepped completely outside his body and was watching the tornado that had taken up residence there instead. In the ferocity, he lost himself, which was what he’d hoped for all along.

  By the time he was finished, Jason was shaking so hard that Daniel knew only his own hand at the boy’s throat was keeping him upright. “If you ever…ever come near my daughter again,” Daniel said, “I will kill you.”

  He stared at Jason, trying to commit to memory the way the boy looked when he knew he was defeated, because Daniel wanted to see it on his face again on the day they handed down a verdict in the courtroom. He drew back his arm, focusing his sights on the spot just under the boy’s jaw-the spot where a good, strong blow would knock him unconscious-when suddenly the high beams of an oncoming car washed over him.

  It was the opportunity Jason needed to throw Daniel off balance. He pushed away and took off at a dead run. Daniel blinked, his concentration shattered. Now that it was over, he could not stop his hands from trembling. He turned to the truck, where he’d told Trixie to wait, and he opened the door. “I’m sorry you had to see-” Daniel said,