The moment we were out of sight of the devastation, I pulled the truck over to check Cyndra. Her pupils were slightly dilated, and her pulse on the slow side of acceptable. When I dropped her wrist, it settled back into her lap, not fully limp, not conscious of motion. It wasn’t shock keeping her numb, or at least not only that. She’d been doped.
I guessed that Boule and the hunters had stuck to their weapon of choice and brought tranquilizers with them to subdue Joe. Slattery had seized the opportunity and dosed Cyndra with some brand of opiate. To keep her compliant, while the madman had his sick fun with Ingrid.
Cyndra stirred. Her eyes closed completely and her breathing deepened. She looked very much like she must have years ago, before her father went to prison.
Maybe Cyndra had been so drugged she wouldn’t remember the night’s horrors. I’d never prayed. But if I had, sparing the girl those memories would have been worth every word.
Addy was awake, sitting in the front room. I carried Cyndra inside and ignored Addy’s exclamations and questions until we had the girl tucked under the red-and-white checkerboard quilt in the spare bed. I checked her pulse and eyes one more time. Stanley vacillated in the hall, toenails tapping nervously on the hardwood. He chose to stay with Cyndra as we retreated.
I went to the kitchen and took down the rum left from last winter. Addy had placed the bottle out of her way on the cereal shelf after I’d moved out. I took a glass from the dish rack and filled it. Drank a mouthful. It poured pepper-hot down my raw throat to settle into my belly. The second drink was less of a gulp.
Addy was talking. I tried to focus.
“—she hurt?”
I shook my head.
“Thank the Lord. Her father’s in Virginia Mason. He collapsed while he was downtown, without any ID. The hospital called me after he regained consciousness.”
“Will he make it?”
“Yes. He’s very weak. They’re keeping him for a day or two, while he gets back on medication. What happened to you and Cyndra?”
Addy followed me out to the backyard. It was so far into the night that even the insects were quiet. I stood and inhaled rotting bark and far-off car exhaust and the rose bush that had somehow survived Stanley’s rampages.
“Can you talk about it?” Addy said.
Once I started, I could do nothing but. I told her about the gold. About EverCon. The rabid dogs from Sledge City. The dead men in the back room of Pacific Pearl. I spared nothing. If Addy had any positive opinions left about my character, I tore them right down to the ground. Theft, coercion, assault, or murder. Everything was copy.
My throat dried and it never occurred to me to drink. Gar Slattery. Ingrid Ekby. Cyndra, in the hands of monsters. And Joe, whose scarred and grinning face seemed to beam horribly from my last blinding, blazing sight of him. Consumed.
Addy listened to it all, until the stars had faded in the eastern sky. When my words ran out she quietly asked about Corcoran and his family. More about Cyndra, and what she may have endured.
I answered her questions. Then Addy got up to walk to the kitchen and brought back a ceramic mixing bowl filled with rags and water. Instead of setting the bowl down, she cradled it with both arms.
“You’ve done a lot of wrong. It’s inexcusable.” Addy took a deep breath and shivered. “But without you, Cyndra might still have followed her father here to Seattle. Without you, she would certainly have died tonight. And right now I don’t have enough in me to give a good goddamn about anything or anyone else but that little girl. So clean yourself up, and then leave her to me.”
She went inside.
I washed the crusted filth from my arms and face and neck. My body felt like I’d spent the night in a threshing machine. The next time I sat down I would not be getting up for a long while. I wrung the last rag out over my head, over and over, letting the drips sluice through my hair and sting the lacerations on my scalp.
The sun cut its first flaxen slice out of the horizon. Every room in Addy’s home had gone dark and quiet. I walked around the side yard to the street, and on up the block.
High above, the empty framework of Dono’s house stretched toward a cloudless heaven. Dew hung expectantly from the beams. Sunlight finally touched the upper rafters and seeped rapidly down to the lower floors, stilling the nascent drops as it touched them.
Before ten minutes had passed, the wooden skeleton of the house was blanched dry and rigid. The day would be a hot one.
Hours later, after Granddad had sent Hollis home, we sat together in the front room. Granddad in his usual wingback leather chair, and me on the short sofa. I’d fallen asleep there, not meaning to, while Granddad had been out. Setting things right, as he called it.
He’d said that, like whatever was wrong wasn’t my fault, and that it would be simple to fix. I knew at least one of those was a lie. His car—well, the car he had been driving—had killed Trey dead. Granddad had dragged the body off into the trees almost immediately, right after he had bundled me into the backseat. We were out of the arboretum before another car passed.
That wasn’t going to be easy to clean up. Was it?
Riding in the car, I had told him—between wiping my eyes, so embarrassing—about Trey and Kassie and Quincey, and that I had been at the mansion when they had burgled it. He had turned from the winding road to look at me.
“Fucking hell,” he’d said. And he hardly ever talked like that.
I had a lot of questions, but Granddad had told me there would be time later. Hollis was at the house minutes after we arrived, which I didn’t understand, but I was too groggy to ask how.
Now I was rested and sitting on the hearth in front of the fire Granddad had built, and eating leftover fried chicken from the fridge. Life was weird.
Granddad took the bloodstained plastic knife out of his pocket. The sight of it made me stop chewing.
“You know what this is?” he said.
I nodded. “Trey used it to kill Quincey.”
“I expect so. I found it on the hill in front of the house, right there.”
“I must’ve dropped it. I’m sorry.”
The corner of his mouth twisted up. “Now that’s the last time you’ll apologize tonight, Van. Yeah?”
I nodded.
“You’re not in trouble. If anything, I’m more to blame. For one, I stupidly left my burner phone in my car back here in Seattle. That’s why you haven’t been able to reach me. And then there’s this.” He tapped the knife. “You know that in prison, men have to defend themselves. I made this—started making it—in jail.”
“A shank,” I said.
“Where’d you hear that? Television, of course. A little old, that word, but yes. It’s a blade. I started making it in the shop from a piece of plastic I’d traded cigarettes for.” He turned the knife over, considering it. “Making something like this can be a slow process. A few passes on the belt sander each day, while the guards and other cons are distracted. I would hide it in the shop in between.” He tossed the knife onto the coffee table. “And then hardly before I’d started, the damn thing went missing.”
“Somebody stole it?”
“I wasn’t sure. But it worried me, because my fingerprints would be on the plastic. It would be simple for someone to finish the job, make it into a weapon and use it in jail, and I’d be sunk. Then somebody popped to me that our friend Trey was the one who had it. That was bad news.”
“He didn’t like you?”
“Liking didn’t enter into it. Trey is mad. Crazy, not angry. You understand?”
“Yeah.”
“If Trey had the blade, then he would find a way to use it. To manipulate the situation. Some men are like that. They see a weakness and they can’t help themselves. They have to sink their teeth into it.”
I was definitely done with the chicken now.
“Trey was released before I could do anything about the problem,” Granddad said, in a tone that made me think it was very lucky for Trey that he hadn’t stayed in jail. “After I got out—the night of, in fact—he and Quincey got hold of me and said they wanted to meet to discuss a job. They needed my contacts to sell the artwork from the mansion. That’s when I had a small idea of what Trey intended.”
“To frame you for the mansion. And Quincey.”
Granddad chuckled. “I wasn’t that clever. I thought he was going to use the blade to force me to give up my share. Buy the damn thing back from him.” He shook his dark head. “The man was a thief, and sometimes violent. I knew that much. But he was much worse besides. A psychopath. You know that word from TV, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, it’s often used wrong. Not every psychopath kills people. Trey figured he could tie me to the burglary with our screwdriver, and frame me for Quincey with the blade. You see the tape he wrapped around the handle? I will wager you that under that tape are my prints, clean as ever. If the case ever got that far, the forensics lot could find them. No one would ever connect Trey with either crime.”
“But if you were arrested, you could tell—” The look on Granddad’s face stopped me. I knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“There would be no arrest,” Granddad said. “I would just disappear. That’s why Trey was here tonight. He knew I was due back from Portland with the money, after fencing the artwork.”
“He was going to kill both of us,” I said. Wow, my voice sounded calm for something like that.
Granddad nodded. “That’s why I was upset when Trey saw you, here at the house. You were something I cared about.”
A weakness he could sink his teeth into. I shivered.
“He’s dead, right?” I said.
“You don’t have to worry.”
“I’m not. Not about him coming back, I mean. What about his . . .”
“I’ve moved him. And Quincey.”
“Where?”
“That doesn’t matter,” he said, standing up, and I could tell sharing time was about over. “I want you to get some sleep.”
There was one more thing, and I asked it, knowing it might tick Granddad off. “Why were you casing Trey’s house?”
That twist of a smile again. “Saw me there, did you? I was waiting for a time when he and the girl wouldn’t be home. I went in and searched the place carefully. No blade. So”—he stretched and yawned, his arms nearly reaching the ceiling—“Plan B. Carry out the burglary—Trey wasn’t a fool, it was a good score—and then Hollis and Willard and I had planned to have a long talk with the man when I got back from Portland.”
Which explained how Hollis had been here so fast. After Trey had been—Ugh. I was pretty sure the sound of Granddad’s car hitting Trey would be bouncing around my head for a long time. Worst earworm ever.
“Enough of that,” Granddad said. “Go to bed. Happy Christmas.”
It was Christmas now. Past midnight.
Kassie.
“Go,” Granddad said.
I went upstairs and stripped down to my shorts. Halfway through brushing my teeth, I heard Granddad go out the front door and down the porch to the steps. Toothbrush still in my mouth, I walked into his bedroom to look out his window to the street. Almost all of our neighbors had unplugged their Christmas lights for the night, and our block was back to its usual weak yellow color under the streetlamps.
Granddad stood on the sidewalk. A dull brown panel van was parked in front of our driveway. Its door opened and Mr. Willard got out. Easy to recognize him; he looked almost as large as the van itself.
The bodies are in the van, I thought, and shivered again. And then I realized: That was the van Trey had chased me in. He would have had to put me and Granddad somewhere, after—
Nope. Definitely not thinking about that anymore tonight.
In the morning, after breakfast, I told Granddad I was going to Davey’s. He had rescued my bike from the bushes sometime during the night; I found it leaning on the front porch, with a few new scrapes. I jumped on and pedaled up to Kassie’s house.
There was another car in their driveway, a Cadillac. Not an old convertible one like Hollis drove, but new and wine-colored with a white leather roof.
I went up and knocked on the door, hoping Kassie would answer. When it swung open an older lady in red glasses and a red polo shirt with green Christmas trees on it blinked her eyes at me.
“Um,” I said. “Is Kassie home?”
She looked a little puzzled, but called for Kassie and kept looking at me while we waited.
“Are you a friend of hers?” the lady said.
I nodded, and then remembered manners. “I’m Van.”
“How do you do,” she said, like we were at tea or something.
Kassie came running up. “Van!” she said. Her face looked happy, right then, but her eyes were a little red. “Come in.”
“Merry Christmas,” the lady prompted.
“Right. Merry Christmas.” Kassie grabbed my arm and tugged me inside. The house smelled of bacon and muffins, and even though I’d eaten, my mouth watered. The lady shut the door and followed us, almost hovering.
A tall old man with white hair and freckles stood cutting celery at the kitchen counter. I got creeped out. The man looked a lot like Trey, same height and everything. Plus the carving knife.
“Van, this is my grandpa and grandma, Earl and Liesl,” Kassie said, very formally. I guess she got that from the grandma. I said hi.
“Merry Christmas, Van,” said Earl. “How do you two know each other?”
Even his questions sounded like Trey’s. Coming here was a bad idea.
“Our schools meet,” Kassie said smoothly, “for sports.”
“What do you play?” Liesl said.
I remembered what we’d told Trey about Balewood playing Hovick. “I write about the basketball games. Girls’ and boys’. For the paper.”
“We’ve been trying to get to one of those games,” said Liesl.
“Since Trey can’t. Or won’t,” Earl said, muttering.
Kassie tugged again at my arm. “Let’s go out back.”
It was freezing outside but I didn’t mind at all. At least I wasn’t in that kitchen.
“Did you and your grandfather already open presents?” Kassie said. “What’d you get?”
“Money, mostly. Granddad never knows what to buy.” Then, in case that sounded ungrateful, “I got a couple of Game Boy games I asked for. And a multi-tool.”
“What’s that?”
I pulled it out of my pocket and showed off the pliers and files and screwdriver and other things. Kassie loved how it all folded up. She said it was like a boy’s version of Polly Pocket, and then she had to explain what the heck that was.
“What did you get?” I said.
Kassie’s face crumpled. “We haven’t opened yet. We’re waiting for Dad.”
Right. I felt stupid.
“He’s coming,” Kassie said. “He said he’d be late, last night. But he’s coming.”
Trey wouldn’t be, of course. I knew so many things that Kassie and her grandparents didn’t, I wasn’t even sure what I could talk about. If I should talk about anything at all.
I hadn’t told Granddad I was going to see Kassie. He would have ordered me to stay away for good. Too risky, he would have said. No connections.
So why had I come?
“Let’s play something,” I said. “You pick which.”
She smiled, and tucked her hair behind her ear, like when after she’d kissed me. “I’d like that.”
It felt cruel somehow, keeping my mouth shut. This Christmas would just get tougher for her, the longer her father didn’t show. And the really bad news about him would arrive soon enough, I guessed. I knew what was coming, couldn’t help it, couldn’t ever tell.
But I could be here. Try and make right now a little better.
“Six to two,” I reminded her. “I’ll let you win today. My gift.”
Kassie laughed. “You are so mean.”
Sometimes I was. Not today.