The Tenth Circle Read online

“The last time I talked to Trixie was last night,” Zephyr said, leaning across the glass counter of the toy store. “I called her around ten o’clock to talk about the funeral.”

  “Did she tell you that she had somewhere to go after that?”

  “Trixie isn’t really into going out these days.” As if her father didn’t already know that.

  “It’s really important, Zephyr, that you tell me the truth.”

  “Mr. Stone,” she said, “why would I lie to you?”

  An unspoken answer hovered between them: because you have before. They were both thinking about what she’d told the police after the night of the rape. They both knew that jealousy could rise like a tide, erasing events that had been scratched into the shore of your memory.

  Mr. Stone took a deep breath. “If she calls you…will you tell her I’m trying to find her…and that everything’s going to be okay?”

  “Is she in trouble?” Zephyr asked, but by then Trixie’s father was already walking out of the toy store.

  Zephyr watched him go. She didn’t care that he thought she was a lousy friend. In fact, she was just the opposite. It was because she’d already wronged Trixie once that she’d done what she had.

  Zephyr punched the key on the cash register that made the drawer open. Three hours had passed since she’d stolen all the twenty-dollar bills and had given them to Trixie. Three hours, Zephyr thought, was a damn good head start.

  HAVE GONE TO LOOK FOR TRIXIE, the note said. BRB.

  Laura wandered up to Trixie’s room, as if this was bound to be a big mistake, as if she might open the door and find Trixie there, silently nodding to the beat of her iPod as she wrestled with an algebraic equation. But she wasn’t there, of course, and the small space had been overturned. She wondered if that had been Trixie or the police.

  Daniel had said on the phone that this was suddenly a homicide investigation. That Jason’s death had not been accidental after all. And that Trixie had run away.

  There was so much that had to be fixed that Laura didn’t know where to start. Her hands shook as she sorted through the leftovers of her daughter’s life-an archaeologist, looking over the artifacts and trying to piece together an understanding of the young woman who’d used them. The Koosh ball and the Lisa Frank pencil-these belonged to the Trixie she thought she had known. It was the other items that she couldn’t make sense of: the CD with lyrics that made Laura’s jaw drop, the sterling silver ring shaped like a skull, the condom hidden inside a makeup compact. Maybe she and Trixie still had a lot in common: Apparently, while Laura was turning into a woman she could barely recognize, her daughter had been, too.

  She sat down on Trixie’s bed and lifted the receiver of the phone. How many times had Laura cut in on the line between her and Jason, telling her that she had to say good night and go to bed? Five more minutes, Trixie would beg.

  If she’d given Trixie those minutes, all those nights, would it have added up to another day for Jason? If she took five minutes now, could she right everything that had gone wrong?

  It took Laura three tries to dial the number of the police station, and she was holding for Detective Bartholemew when Daniel stepped into the room. “What are you doing?”

  “Calling the police,” she said.

  He crossed in two strides and took the receiver from her hand, hung up the phone. “Don’t.”

  “Daniel-”

  “Laura, I know why she ran away. I was accused of murder when I was eighteen, and I took off, too.”

  At this confession, Laura completely lost her train of thought. How could you live with a man for fifteen years, feel him move inside you, have his child, and not know something as fundamental about him as this?

  He sat down at Trixie’s desk. “I was still living in Alaska. The victim was my best friend, Cane.”

  “Did you…did you do it?”

  Daniel hesitated. “Not the way they thought I did.”

  Laura stared at him. She thought of Trixie, God knows where right now, on the run for a crime she could not have committed. “If you weren’t guilty…then why-”

  “Because Cane was still dead.”

  In Daniel’s eyes, Laura could suddenly see the most surprising things: the blood of a thousand salmon slit throat to tail, the blue-veined crack of ice so thick it made the bottoms of your feet hurt, the profile of a raven sitting on a roof. In Daniel’s eyes she understood something she hadn’t been willing to admit to herself before: In spite of everything, or maybe because of it, he understood their daughter better than she did.

  He shifted, hitting the computer mouse with his elbow. The screen hummed to life, revealing several open windows: Google, iTunes, Sephora.com, and the heartbreaking rapesurvivor.com, full of poetry by girls like Trixie. But MapQuest? When Trixie wasn’t even old enough to drive?

  Laura leaned over Daniel’s shoulder to grasp the mouse. FIND IT! the site promised. There were empty boxes to fill in: address, city, state, zip code. And at the bottom, in bright blue: We are having trouble finding a route for your location.

  “Oh, Christ,” Daniel said. “I know where she is.”

  Trixie’s father used to take her out into the woods and teach her how to read the world so that she’d always know where she was going. He’d quiz her on the identification of trees: the fairy-tale spray of needles on a hemlock, the narrow grooves of an ash, the paper-wrapped birch, the gnarled arms of a sugar maple. One day, when they were examining a tree with barbed wire running through the middle of its trunk-how long do you think that took?-Trixie’s eye had been caught by something in the forest: sun glinting off metal.

  The abandoned car sat behind an oak tree that had been split by lightning. Two of the windows had been broken; some animal had made its home in the tufted stuffing of the backseat. A vine had grown from the bottom of the forest floor through the window, wrapping around the steering wheel.

  Where do you think the driver is? Trixie had asked.

  I don’t know, her father replied. But he’s been gone for a long time.

  He said that the person who’d left the car behind most likely didn’t want to bother with having it towed away. But that didn’t keep Trixie from making up more extravagant explanations: The man had suffered a head wound and started walking, only to wander up a mountain and die of exposure, and even now the bones were bleaching south of her backyard. The man was on the run from the Mob and had eluded hit men in a car chase. The man had wandered into town with amnesia and spent the next ten years completely unaware of who he used to be.

  Trixie was dreaming of the abandoned car when someone slammed the door of the bathroom stall beside her. She woke up with a start and glanced down at her watch-surely if you left this stuff in your hair too long it would fall out by the roots or turn purple or something. She heard the flush of the toilet, running water, and then the busy slice of life as the door opened. When it fell quiet again, she crept out of the stall and rinsed her hair in the sink.

  There were streaks on her forehead and her neck, but her hair-her red hair, the hair that had inspired her father to call her his chili pepper when she was only a baby-was now the color of a thicket’s thorns, of a rosebush past recovery.

  As she stuffed the ruined sweatshirt into the bottom of the trash can, a mother came in with two little boys. Trixie held her breath, but the woman didn’t look twice at her. Maybe it was really that easy. She walked out of the bathroom, past a new Santa who’d come on duty, toward the parking lot. She thought of the man who’d left his car in the woods: Maybe he had staged his own death. Maybe he’d done it for the sole purpose of starting over.

  If a teenager wants to disappear, chances are he or she will succeed. It was why runaways were so difficult to track-until they were rounded up in a drug or prostitution ring. Most teens who vanished did so for independence, or to get away from abuse. Unlike an adult, however, who could be traced by a paper trail of ATM withdrawals and rental car agreements and airline passenger lists, a kid was more likely to pay in cash, to hitchhike, to go unnoticed by bystanders.

  For the second t