The Tenth Circle Read online

What if he was?

 

 

 

 

 

  6

  I t was late enough in December that all the radio stations played only Christmas carols. Trixie’s hiding place was directly over the driver’s seat, in the little jut of the box truck that sat over the cab. She had seen the truck at the dairy farm just past the high school athletic fields. With the doors wide open and no one around, she had climbed inside and hidden in that upper nook, drawing hay over herself for camouflage.

  They’d loaded two calves into the truck-not down in the bottom, like Trixie had figured, but nearly on top of her in the narrow space where she was curled. This way, she supposed, they wouldn’t stand up during the trip. Once they’d started under way, Trixie had poked her head out from the straw and looked at one calf. It had eyes as large as planets, and when she held out her finger, the calf sucked hard on it.

  At the next stop, another farm not ten minutes down the road, an enormous Holstein limped up the ramp into the back of the truck. It stared right at Trixie and mooed. “Damn shame,” the trucker said, as the farmer shoved the cow from behind.

  “Ayuh, she went down on some ice,” he said. “In you go, now.” Then the door swung shut and everything went black.

  She didn’t know where they were headed and didn’t particularly care. Prior to this, the farthest Trixie had ever been by herself was the Mall of Maine. She wondered if her father was looking for her yet. She wished she could phone him and tell him she was all right-but under the circumstances, she couldn’t call. She might never.

  She lay down on one calf’s smooth side. It smelled of grass and grain and daylight, and with every breath, she felt herself rising and falling. She wondered why the cows were in transit. Maybe they were going to a new farm for Christmas. Or to be part of a Nativity play. She pictured the doors swinging open and farmhands in crisp overalls coming to lift down the calves. They would find Trixie and would give her fresh milk and homemade ice cream and they wouldn’t even think to ask her how she’d wound up in the back of a livestock truck.

  In a way, it was a mystery to Trixie, too. She had seen the detective at Jason’s funeral, although he thought he’d been hiding. And then, when everyone thought she was asleep, she’d stood on the balcony and heard what he’d said to her father.

  Enough to know that she had to get out of there.

  She was, in a way, a little proud of herself. Who knew that she’d be able to run away without a car, with only two hundred bucks in her pocket? She’d never considered herself to be the kind of person who was cool in the face of crisis-and yet, you never knew what you were capable of until you arrived at that given moment. Life was just a whole string of spots where you continued to surprise yourself.

  She must have fallen asleep for a while, sandwiched between the knobby knees and globe bellies of the two calves, but when the truck stopped again they struggled to stand-impossible in that cramped space. Below them, the cow began to bellow, one low note that ricocheted. There was the sound of a seal being breached, a mighty creak, and then the doors to the back of the truck swung open.

  Trixie blinked into the light and saw what she hadn’t earlier: The cow had a lesion on her right foreleg, one that made it buckle beneath her. The Holstein calves on either side of her were males, no good for producing milk. She peered out the double doors and squinted so that she could read the sign at the end of the driveway: LaRue and Sons Beef, Berlin, NH.

  This was not a petting zoo or Old MacDonald’s Farm, as Trixie had imagined. This was a slaughterhouse.

  She scrambled down from her ledge, startling the animals-not to mention the truck driver who was unhooking the tether of the cow-and took off like a shot down the long gravel driveway. Trixie ran until her lungs were on fire, until she had reached what passed for a town, with a Burger King and a gas station. The Burger King made her think of the calves, which made her think that she was going to be a vegetarian, if she ever got through the other side of this nightmare.

  Suddenly, there was a siren. Trixie went still as stone, her eyes trained on the circling blue lights of the advancing police cruiser.

  The car went screaming past her, on to someone else’s emergency.

  Wiping her hand across her mouth, Trixie took a deep breath and started to walk.

  “She’s gone,” Daniel Stone said, frantic.

  Bartholemew’s eyes narrowed. “Gone?”

  He followed Stone upstairs and stood in the doorway of Trixie’s room, which looked as if a bomb had cut a swath through its middle. “I don’t know where she is,” Stone said, his voice breaking. “I don’t know when she left.”

  It took Bartholemew less than a second to determine that this wasn’t a lie. In the first place, Stone had been out of his sight for less than a minute, hardly long enough to tip off his daughter that she was under suspicion. In the second place, Daniel Stone seemed just as surprised as Bartholemew was to find Trixie missing, and he was skating the knife edge of panic.

  For only a heartbeat, Bartholemew let himself wonder why a teenage girl who had nothing to hide would suddenly disappear. But in the next breath, he remembered what it felt like to discover that your daughter was not where you’d thought she was, and he switched gears. “When did you last see her?”

  “Before she went to take a nap…about three-thirty?”

  The detective took a notepad out of his pocket. “What was she wearing?”

  “I’m not sure. She probably changed after the funeral.”

  “Have you got a recent photo?”

  Bartholemew followed Stone downstairs again, watching him run a finger along the vertebrae of books on a living room shelf, finally pulling down an eighth-grade yearbook from Bethel Middle School. He turned pages until they fell open to the S’s. A folio of snapshots-a 5-by-7 and some wallet-sized-spilled out. “We never got around to framing them,” Stone murmured.

  In the photographs, Trixie’s smiling face repeated like an Andy Warhol print. The girl in the picture had long red hair held back with clips. Her smile was just a little too wide, and a tooth in front was crooked. The girl in that picture had never been raped. Maybe she had never even been kissed.

  Bartholemew had to pry the pictures of Trixie from her father’s hand. Both men were painfully aware that Stone was struggling not to break down. The tears you shed over a child were not the same as any others. They burned your throat and your corneas. They left you blind.

  Daniel Stone stared at him. “She didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Sit tight,” Bartholemew replied, aware that it was not an answer. “I’ll find her.”

 

  The last lecture Laura gave before Christmas vacation was about the half-life of transgression. “Are there any sins Dante left out?” Laura asked. “Or any really bad modern-day behaviors that weren’t around in the year 1300?”

  One girl nodded. “Drug addiction. There’s, like, no bolgia for crackheads.”

  “It’s the same as gluttony,” a second student said. “Addiction’s addiction. It doesn’t matter what the substance is.”

  “Cannibalism?”

  “Nope, Dante’s got that in there,” Laura said. “Count Uggolino. He lumps it in with bestiality.”

  “Driving to endanger?”

  “Filippo drives his horses recklessly. Early Italian road rage.” Laura glanced around the silent hall. “Maybe the question we need to ask isn’t whether there’s any fresh twenty-first-century sin…but whether the people who define sin have changed, because of the times.”

  “Well, the world’s completely different,” a student pointed out.

  “Sure, but look at how it’s still the same. Avarice, cowardice, depravity, a need to control other people-these have all been around forever. Maybe nowadays a pedophile will start a kiddie-porn site instead of flashing in the subway tunnels, or a murderer will choose to use an electric chain saw to kill, instead of his bare hands…Technology helps us be more creative in the way we sin, but it doesn’t mean that the basic sin is different.”

  A boy