The Tenth Circle Read online

But now, when she thought of Jason Underhill, she considered how persuasive those blue eyes might be. How strong an athlete was. She started to twist her thinking, boring it deep as a screw, so that it would truly take hold.

  If all the blame could be pinned on Jason Underhill, then it wasn’t Laura’s fault.

  Trixie had been awake now for twenty-eight hours straight. Her eyes burned, and her head was too heavy, and her throat was coated with the residue of the story she’d been telling over and over. Dr. Roth had given her a prescription for Xanax, telling her that no matter how exhausted Trixie was, she was most likely going to find it difficult to sleep, and that this was perfectly normal.

  She had, finally, wonderfully, been able to take a shower. She stayed in long enough to use an entire bar of soap. She had tried to scrub down there, but she couldn’t get all the way inside where she still felt dirty. When the doctor had said there was no internal trauma, Trixie had nearly asked her to check again. For a moment, she’d wondered if she’d dreamed the whole thing, if it had never really happened.

  “Hey,” her father said, poking his head into her bedroom door. “You ought to be in bed.”

  Trixie pulled back the covers-her mother had changed her sheets-and crawled inside. Before, getting into bed had been the highlight of her day; she’d always imagined it like some kind of cloud or gentle nest where she could just let go of all the stress of acting cool and looking perfect and saying the right things. But now, it loomed like a torture device, a place where she’d close her eyes and have to replay what had happened over and over, like a closed-circuit TV.

  Her mother had left her old stuffed moose on top of the pillows. Trixie squeezed it against her chest. “Daddy?” she asked. “Can you tuck me in?”

  He had to work at it, but he managed to smile. “Sure.”

  When Trixie was little, her father had always left her a riddle to fall asleep on, and then he’d give her the answer at breakfast. What gets bigger the more you take away from it? A hole. What’s black when you buy it, red when you use it, and gray when you throw it away? Charcoal.

  “Could you maybe talk to me for a little while?” Trixie asked.

  It wasn’t that she wanted to talk, really. It was that she didn’t want to be left alone in this room with only herself for company.

  Trixie’s father smoothed back her hair. “Don’t tell me you’re not exhausted.”

  Don’t tell me you don’t want this, Jason had said.

  She suddenly remembered one of her father’s nighttime riddles: The answer is yes, but what I mean is no. What is the question?

  And the solution: Do you mind?

  Her father notched the covers beneath her chin. “I’ll send Mom in to say good night,” he promised, and he reached over to turn off the lamp.

  “Leave it on,” Trixie said, panicking. “Please.”

  He stopped abruptly, his hand hovering in the air. Trixie stared at the bulb, until she couldn’t see anything but the kind of brilliant light everyone says comes for you when you’re about to die.

  The absolute worst job, if you asked Mike Bartholemew, was having to go tell a parent that his or her kid had been in a fatal car crash or had committed suicide or OD’d. There just weren’t words to hold up that kind of pain, and the recipient of the news would stand there, staring at him, certain she’d heard wrong. The second absolute worst job, in his opinion, was dealing with rape victims. He couldn’t listen to any of their statements without feeling guilty for sharing the same gender as the perp. And even if he could collect enough evidence to merit a trial, and even if there was a conviction, you could bet it wouldn’t be for very long. In most cases, the victim was still in therapy when the rapist got done serving his sentence.

  The thing that most people didn’t understand, if they weren’t in his line of work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone, forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

  He climbed the stairs over the smoothie bar to the interim apartment he’d rented after the divorce, the one he swore he’d live in for only six months but that had turned out to be his home for six years. It wasn’t furnished-the less appealing it was, the easier Mike figured it would be to get motivated to leave it-but he had a futon that he usually left open as a bed, and a beanbag chair and a TV that he left running 24/7 so that Ernestine would have something to listen to when he was at work.

  “Ernie?” he called out as soon as his keys turned in the lock. “I’m back.”

  She wasn’t on the futon, where he’d left her when the call came in this morning. Mike stripped off his tie and walked toward the bathroom. He drew back the shower curtain to find the potbellied pig asleep in the bottom of the tub. “Miss me?” he asked.

  The pig opened one eye and grunted.

  “You know, the only reason I came home was to take you for a walk,” Mike said, but the pig had fallen back asleep.

  He had a warrant in his pocket-Trixie’s statement, plus the presence of semen, was enough probable cause to arrest Jason Underhill. He even knew where the kid was, just like everyone in the town who was following the high school hockey team’s stellar exploits. But he had to come home first to let Ernie out. At least that’s what he’d told himself.

  Do you have any kids? Daniel Stone had asked.

  Mike turned off the television and sat in silence for a few moments. Then he went to the one closet in the apartment and pulled down a cardboard box.

  Inside the box was a pillow from Mike’s daughter’s bed, one that he’d stuffed into an enormous plastic evidence bag. He broke the ziplocked seal and inhaled deeply. It hardly smelled like her anymore at all, in spite of the great care he had taken.

  Suddenly, Ernestine came running. She skidded across the floor, scrambling over to the futon where Mike sat. Her snout went into the plastic bag with the pillow, and Mike wondered if she could scent something he couldn’t. The pig looked up at Mike.

  “I know,” he said. “I miss her, too.”

  Daniel sat in the kitchen with a bottle of sherry in front of him. He hated sherry, but it was the only liquid with alcoholic content in this house right now. He had already burned through half the bottle, and it was a large one, something Laura liked to use when she made stir-fry chicken. He didn’t feel drunk, though. He only felt like a failure.

  Fatherhood was the entire foundation Daniel had reinvented himself upon. When he thought about being a parent, he saw a baby’s hand spread like a star on his chest. He saw the tightness between the kite and the spool of string that held it. Finding out that he’d fallen short of his responsibility for protecting his daughter made him wonder how he’d gone so long fooling himself into believing he had truly changed.

  The part of himself that he’d thought he’d exorcised turned out to have been only lying in the shallow grave where old personalities went to be discarded. With the sherry lighting his way, Daniel could see that now. He could feel anger building like steam.

  The new Daniel, the father Daniel, had answered the detective’s questions and trusted the police to do what they were supposed to, because that was the best way to ensure the safety of his child. But the old Daniel…well, he never would have trusted anyone else to complete a job that rightfully belonged to him. He would have fought back in revenge, kicking and screaming.

  In fact, he often had.

  Daniel stood up and shrugged on his jacket just as Laura walked into the kitchen. She took one look at the bottle of sherry on the table, and then at him. “You don’t drink.”

  Daniel stared at her. “Didn’t,” he corrected.

  “Where are you going?”

  He didn’t answer her. He didn’t owe her an explanation. He didn’t owe anyone anything. This was not about payment, it was about payback.

  Daniel opened the door and hurried out to his truck. Jason Underhill would be at the town rink, right now, getting dressed for the Saturday afternoon game.

 

  Because Trixie asked, Laura waited for her to fall asleep. She came downstairs in