My aunt is brave. My aunt is tough.
Fuck chewing shattered glass.
Run a bed and breakfast with little help and no health insurance in the mountains of New Hampshire, where in January the daily temperature will start at negative twenty and most of your Boston guests will have forgotten to pack hats, scarves, and gloves and will consider it all your fault.
I thought of my aunt now, as Tulip and I slowed at an intersection, waited for the light to change, then sprinted through the crosswalk. I thought she deserved better than yet another life-changing phone call on January 21.
I thought, heart pounding from the exertion of my six-mile run, sweat pouring down my face, dog trotting beside me, gun quickly accessible in my fanny pack, that I was glad my aunt couldn’t see me now.
Because she’d have taken one look at me and understood that even if I was winning the battle, I’d lost the war: I’d become the spitting image of my mother, down to the bruised eyes, hollowed out cheeks, and hard-lined face.
The mountains had left me. My aunt had left me. Living in isolation, fighting paranoia in a big city, I had become everything I knew better than to be.
These days, I was my mother’s daughter.
Except I didn’t chew shattered glass anymore.
I carried a. 22 semiauto. And this evening, sometime after 7 P.M., I was going to prove once again that I knew how to use it.
Chapter 10
HELLO. My name is Abigail.
Have we met yet?
Don’t worry, we will.
Hello. My name is Abigail.
Chapter 11
RHODE ISLAND STATE POLICE DETECTIVE SERGEANT Roan Griffin had the voice of a bear and the build of a boulder. Big guy. Probably bench-pressed small automobiles after toppling sumo wrestlers and tackling linebackers. Good-looking guy, too. Officer Blue Eyes, the Providence Journal had dubbed him years ago, when he’d appeared on Dave Letterman to model the state police’s award-winning new uniforms.
Truth was, the Rhode Island State Police had a reputation for the best-looking cops in New England. No one knew how they did it. Maybe a special factory that chiseled out broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, square-jawed men. Either way, whenever there was an opportunity for cross training with their Rhode Island counterparts, the female officers of Massachusetts quickly signed up. Like, all three of them.
Currently, D.D. was on the phone with Griffin. A shame, really, because Rhode Island’s headquarters was only an hour south, and given the restaurants available for lunch in Providence’s Federal Hill…Missing out on sightseeing and Italian dining, D.D. thought with a sigh. So much for the new and improved lifestyle.
Griffin was a married man. Actually, his second marriage, as the first wife had died of cancer. Wife number two was a blond advertising executive named Jillian. D.D. had never met her, only knew her because of the press coverage. Jillian had survived the notorious College Hill Rapist about eight years back. Her younger sister hadn’t been so lucky. When they’d finally arrested a man for the attacks, Jillian had formed a group dubbed the Survivors Club in order to assist one another through the trial. Except there hadn’t been a trial, given that the suspect had been gunned down outside the courthouse and Jillian and her fellow club members had gone from sympathetic victims to prime suspects.
D.D. would be the first to admit she’d followed the case as zealously as Nancy Grace, especially when days after the alleged rapist’s murder, another woman was attacked. Seriously, there were days on this job when she thought not even a suspense novelist could make these things up.