The Tenth Circle Read online

What people don’t know can’t hurt them.

  The problem with coming clean was that you thought you were clearing the slate, starting over, but it never quite worked that way. You didn’t erase what you’d done. As Laura knew now, the stain would still be there, every time he looked at you, before he remembered to hide the disappointment in his eyes.

  Laura thought of what she had not told Daniel, the things he had not told her. The best decisions in a marriage were based not on honesty but on the number of casualties that the truth might cause, versus the number saved by ignorance.

  With great care, she folded the edge of the newspaper and ripped it gently along the crease. She did this until the advice column had been entirely cut out. Then she folded the article and slipped it under the strap of her bra. The ink smudged on Laura’s fingers, the way it sometimes did when she read the paper. She imagined a tattoo that might go through flesh and bone and blood to reach her heart-a warning, a reminder not to make the same mistake.

  “Ready?” Daniel asked.

  Trixie had been sitting in the truck for five minutes, watching townspeople crowd into the tiny Methodist church. The principal had gone in, as well as the town manager and the selectmen. Two local television stations were broadcasting from the steps of the church, with anchors Daniel recognized from the evening news. “Yes,” Trixie said, but she made no move to get out of the truck.

  Daniel pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out of the truck. He walked around to the passenger door and opened it, unbuckling Trixie’s seat belt just like he used to when she was a baby. He held her hand as she stepped out, into the shock of the cold.

  They took three steps. “Daddy,” she said, stopping, “what if I can’t do this?”

  Her hesitation made him want to carry her back to the truck, hide her so securely that no one would ever hurt her again. But-as he’d learned the hard way-that wasn’t possible.

  He slid an arm around her waist. “Then I’ll do it for you,” he said, and he guided her up the steps of the church, past the shocked wide eyes of the television cameras, through an obstacle course of hissed whispers, to the place where she needed to be.

 

  For a single moment, the focus of everyone in the church swung from the boy in the lily-draped coffin to the girl walking through the double doors. Outside, left alone, Mike Bartholemew emerged from behind a potbellied oak and crouched beside the trail of boot prints that Daniel and Trixie Stone had left in the snow. He lay a ruler down beside the best print of the smaller track and took a camera from his pocket for a few snapshots. Then he sprayed the print with aerosol wax and let the red skin dry on the snow before he spread dental stone to make a cast.

  By the time the mourners adjourned to their cars to caravan to the cemetery for the interment service, Bartholemew was headed back to the police department, hoping to match Trixie Stone’s boot to the mystery print left in the snow on the bridge where Jason Underhill had died.

  “Blessed are those who mourn,” said the minister, “for they will be comforted.”

  Trixie pressed herself more firmly against the back wall of the church. From here, she was completely blocked by the rest of the people who’d come for Jason’s memorial service. She didn’t have to stare at the gleaming coffin. She didn’t have to see Mrs. Underhill, slumped against her husband.

  “Friends, we gather here to comfort and support each other in this time of loss…but most of all we come here to remember and celebrate the mortal life of Jason Adam Underhill and his blessed future at the side of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  The minister’s words were punctuated by the tight coughs of men who’d promised themselves they wouldn’t cry and the quicksilver hiccups of the women who’d known better than to make a promise they couldn’t keep.

  “Jason was one of those golden boys that the sun seemed to follow. Today, we remember him for the way he could make us laugh with a joke and the devotion he applied to everything he did. We remember him as a loving son and grandson, a caring cousin, a steadfast friend. We remember him as a gifted athlete and a diligent student. But most of all we remember him because Jason, in the short time we had with him, managed to touch each and every one of us.”

  The first time Jason touched Trixie, they were in his car, and he was illegally teaching her how to drive. You have to let up on the clutch while you shift, he explained, as she’d jerked the little Toyota around an empty parking lot. Maybe I should just wait until I’m sixteen, Trixie had said when she’d stalled for the bazillionth time. Jason had laced his fingers between hers on the stick shift, guiding her through the motions, until all she could think about was the temperature of his hand heating hers. Then Jason had grinned at her. Why wait?

  The minister’s voice grew like a vine. “In Lamentations 3, we hear these words: My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, ‘Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.’ We, whom Jason left behind, must wonder if these were the thoughts that weighed heavy on his heart, that led him to believe there was no other way out.”

  Trixie closed her eyes. She had lost her virginity in a field of lupine behind the ice rink, where the Zamboni shavings were dumped, an artificial winter smack in the middle of the September flowers. Jason had borrowed the key from the rinkmaster and taken her skating after the rink was closed for the day. He’d laced up her skates and told her to close her eyes. Then he’d reached for her hands, skating backward so fast she felt like she was falling to earth. We’re writing in cursive, he told her as he pulled in a straight line. Can you read it? Then he looped the breadth of the rink, skated a circle, a right angle, a tinier loop, finishing with a curl. I LOVE O? Trixie had recited, and Jason had laughed. Close enough, he’d said. Later, in that field, with the pile of snow hiding them from sight, Jason had again been moving at lightning speed, and Trixie could not quite keep up. When he pushed inside her, she turned her head to watch the lupine tremble on their shivering stems, so that he wouldn’t realize he’d hurt her.

  “In the past few days, you who are Jason’s family and friends have been struggling with the questions that surround his death. You are feeling a fraction of the pain, maybe, that Jason felt in those last, dark hours. You might be reliving the last time you spoke to him. You might be wondering, Is there anything I should have said or done that I didn’t? That might have made a difference?”

  Trixie suddenly saw Jason holding her down on Zephyr’s white living room carpet. If she’d been brave enough to peek that night, would she have seen the bruises blooming on his jaw, the smile rotting off his face?

  “Into your hands, O Savior, we commend your servant Jason Underhill. We pray for you to recognize this child of yours…”

  His breath fell onto her lips, but he tasted of worms. His fingers bit so hard into her wrists that she looked down and saw only his bones, as the flesh peeled away from him.

  “Receive him into your never-ending mercy. Grant him everlasting peace, and eternal life in your light.”

  Trixie tried to swim back to the minister’s words. She craved light, too, but all she could see were the black and blue stripes of the nights when Jason came to haunt her. Or maybe she was seeing the nights when she had gone to him willingly. It was all mixed up now. She couldn’t separate the real Jason from the ghost; she couldn’t untangle what she’d wanted from what she didn’t.

  Maybe it had always been like that.

  The scream started so deep inside of her that she thought it was just a resonance, like a tuning fork that could not stop trembling. Trixie didn’t realize that the sound spilled through her seams, overflowing, bearing Jason’s coffin like a tide and sweeping it off its stanchions. She didn’t know that she’d fallen to her knees, and that every single eye in the congregation was on her, as it had been before the service began. And she didn’t trust herself to believe that the savior the minister had been summoning had reached through the very roof of the church and carried her outside where she could breathe again-not until she found the courage to open her eyes and found herself safe and away