The Tenth Circle Read online

She turned at the sound of her name, wiping her cheeks. “I’m sorry…it’s wrong, I know…but I keep thinking about him.”

  Him. Daniel’s heart turned over. How long would it be until he could hear a sentence like that and not feel as if he’d been punched?

  “It’s just…” She wiped her eyes. “It’s just that he was someone’s child, too.”

  Jason. The immediate relief Daniel felt to know that Laura wasn’t crying over the nameless man she’d slept with evaporated as he realized that she was crying, instead, for someone who didn’t merit that kind of mercy.

  “I’ve been so lucky, Daniel,” Laura said. “What if Trixie had died last week? What if…what if you’d told me to move out?”

  Daniel reached out to tuck Laura’s hair behind her ear. Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value. Maybe it would be like that for the two of them. “I would never have let you go.”

  Laura shuddered, as if his words had sent a shock through her. “Daniel, I-”

  “You don’t need to cry for us,” he said, squeezing her shoulder, “because we’re all going to be fine.”

  He felt Laura nod against him.

  “And you don’t have to cry for Jason,” Daniel said. “Because Jason deserves to be dead.”

  He hadn’t spoken the words aloud, the ones he’d been thinking ever since Laura had taken that phone call days before. But this was exactly the sort of world he drew: one where actions had consequences, where revenge and retribution were the heartbeat of a story. Jason had hurt Trixie; therefore, Jason deserved to be punished.

  Laura drew back and stared at him, wide-eyed.

  “What?” Daniel said, defiant. “Are you shocked that I would think that?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “No,” Laura admitted. “Just that you said it out loud.”

 

  The minute Bartholemew entered the digital photo of the footprints on the bridge into his software program and compared it to an inking of Jason’s boot, he got a match. However, there was another footprint with a tread on the sole that was different from Jason’s, possibly from their suspect’s shoe.

  With a sigh, Bartholemew turned off his computer screen and took out the bag of evidence collected from the crime scene. He rummaged for the cell phone that Jerry had found near the victim. A Motorola, identical to the one Bartholemew carried-up here in Maine, you just didn’t have all the cellular options available in a big city. Jason had probably bought it from the same store where he’d bought his. The same sales rep had probably programmed it for him.

  Bartholemew started punching buttons. There were no messages, text or voice. But there was a memo.

  He hit the shortcut button, *8, and suddenly the sound of a fight filled the room. There were punches being landed, and grunts and moans. He heard Jason’s voice, pleas that broke off at their edges. And another familiar voice: If you ever, ever come near my daughter again, I will kill you.

  Bartholemew stood up, grabbed his coat, and headed out to find Daniel Stone.

  “What do you think happens when you die?” Zephyr asked.

  Trixie was lying on her stomach on her bed, flipping through the pages of Allure magazine and looking at purses and shoes that she would never be able to afford. She didn’t get purses, anyway. She didn’t want to ever be the kind of person who couldn’t carry what she needed in her back pocket. “You decompose,” Trixie said, and she turned to the next ad.

  “That is so totally disgusting,” Zephyr said. “I wonder how long it takes.”

  Trixie had wondered that too, but she wasn’t going to admit it to Zephyr. Every night since his death, Jason had visited her in her bedroom in the darkest part of the night. Sometimes he just stared until she woke up; sometimes he talked to her. Finally he left by blasting through her middle.

  She knew that he hadn’t been buried yet, and maybe that was why he kept coming. Maybe once his body began to break down inside its coffin, he wouldn’t show up at the foot of her bed.

  Since Trixie had returned from the hospital, it had been like old times-Zephyr would come over after school and tell her everything she was missing: the catfight between two cheerleaders who liked the same guy, the substitute teacher in French who couldn’t speak a single word of the language, the sophomore who got hospitalized for anorexia. Zephyr had also been her source of information about how Bethel High was processing Jason’s death. The guidance counselors had led an assembly about teen depression; the principal had gotten on the PA during homeroom announcements to have a moment of memorial silence; Jason’s locker had become a shrine, decorated with notes and stickers and Beanie Babies. It was, Trixie realized, as if Jason had grown larger than life after his death, as if it was going to be even harder now for her to avoid him.

  Zephyr rolled over. “Do you think it hurts to die?”

  Not as much as it hurts to live, Trixie thought.

  “Do you think we go somewhere…after?” Zephyr asked.

  Trixie closed her magazine. “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder if it’s like it is here. If there are popular dead people and geeky dead people. You know.”

  That sounded like high school, and the way Trixie figured it, that was more likely to be hell. “I guess it’s different for different people,” she said. “Like, if you died, there’d be an endless supply of Sephora makeup. For Jason, it’s one big hockey rink.”

  “But do people ever cross over? Do the hockey players ever get to hang out with the people who eat only chocolate? Or the ones who play Nintendo twenty-four/seven?”

  “Maybe there are dances or something,” Trixie said. “Or a bulletin board, so you know what everyone else is up to, and you can join in if you want and blow it off if you don’t.”

  “I bet when you eat chocolate in heaven it’s no big deal,” Zephyr said. “If you can have it whenever you want it, it probably doesn’t taste as good.” She shrugged. “I bet they all watch us down here, because they know we’ve got it better than them and we’re too stupid to realize it.” She glanced sideways at Trixie. “Guess what I heard.”

  “What?”

  “His whole head was bashed in.”

  Trixie felt her stomach turn over. “That’s just a rumor.”

  “It’s totally not. Marcia Breen’s brother’s girlfriend is a nurse, and she saw Jason being brought into the hospital.” She popped a bubble with her gum. “I hope that if he went to heaven, he got a big old bandage or plastic surgery or something.”

  “What makes you think he’s going to heaven?” Trixie asked.

  Zephyr froze. “I didn’t mean…I just…” Her gaze slid toward Trixie. “Trix, are you truly glad he’s dead?”

  Trixie stared at her hands in her lap. For a moment, they looked like they belonged to someone else-still, pale, too heavy for the rest of her. She forced herself to open her magazine again, and she pretended she was engrossed in an ad about tampons so that she didn’t have to give Zephyr a reply. Maybe after reading for a while, they would both forget what Zephyr had asked. Maybe after a while, Trixie wouldn’t be afraid of her answer.

  According to Dante, the deeper you got into hell, the colder it was. When Daniel imagined hell, he saw the vast white wasteland of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta where he’d grown up. Standing on the frozen river, you might see smoke rising in the distance. A Yup’ik Eskimo would know it was open water, steaming where it hit the frigid air, but a trick of the light could make you believe otherwise. You might think you see the breath of the devil.

  When Daniel drew the ninth circle of hell, it was a world of planes and angles, a synchronicity of white lines, a land made of ice. It was a place where the greater effort you made to escape, the more deeply entrenched you were.

  Daniel had just put the finishing touches on the devil’s face when he heard a car pull into the driveway. From the window of his office, he watched Detective Bartholemew get out of his Taurus. He had known it was coming to this, hadn’t he? He had known it the minute he’d walked into that parking lot and found Jason Underhill with Trixie.

  Daniel opened up the front door before the detective could knock. “Well,” Bartholemew said. “Tha