Officer Graham takes diligent pictures of the damage. The red isn’t blood; it’s still vividly red, and blood would have oxidized to brown by now. Paint. Most of the words are spray-painted, the exception being Killer, which has extra-gothic drip from the vandal’s liberal dip of the paintbrush. I unlock the door and disarm the alarm, and Graham checks the whole place thoroughly. He finds nothing, but then again, I knew he wouldn’t.
“All right,” he says, settling his sidearm in its holster as he comes back to us in the living room. “I’m going to need your guns, Ms. Proctor.”
“You have a warrant for them?” I ask. He stares back at me. “That’s a no, then. I decline to cooperate. Get a warrant.”
His expression hasn’t changed, but his body language has; it’s shifted a little forward, become a touch more aggressive. I sense it more than see it. I remember what Connor said on the drive back: Graham’s boys were the ones who beat up my son. I wonder exactly what they learned from their father. I want to trust the man; he’s wearing a badge, he’s the only thing truly standing between me and the angry people coming at me right now. But looking at him, I’m not sure I can make the leap.
Maybe I can’t trust anyone anymore. My judgment’s been so off.
“Okay,” Graham says, though clearly he doesn’t think it is. “Keep the doors locked, alarm on. Does it ring at the station?”
Why, so you can ignore it? “It rings directly there,” I tell him. “If the power gets cut, it also goes off.”
“And what about the panic room . . . ?” I say nothing to that, just look at him. He shrugs. “Want to make sure you’ve got a way to get help if you’re inside there. Can’t help if we don’t know you’re in there.”
“It has a separate phone line,” I tell him. “We’ll be just fine.”
He can tell I’ve gone as far down this road as I’m going, and Graham finally nods and heads for the door. I open it and see him off, and try not to look at the damage to our front door. Once it’s shut, I can pretend, a little, that everything’s normal. I enter the alarm code, and the soft beep of the “Stay” signal soothes something inside me I didn’t know was trembling. I put all the locks on and turn to put my back to the door.
Lanny is sitting on the couch with her knees up, her arms circling them. Defensive again. Connor leans against her. There are smears of blood on my daughter’s chin, and I go into the kitchen, wet a hand towel, and come back to gently clean her off. Once I have, she takes the cloth and silently does the same for me. I haven’t even realized that I have so much on me; the white hand towel comes away with vivid red smears. Connor’s the only one who doesn’t need the cleanup, so I put the towel aside and sit with my kids, holding them and rocking with them slowly. None of us has anything to say.
None of us needs to.
Finally, I pick up the soiled towel and rinse it in cold water in the sink, and Lanny comes in to grab the orange juice carton and swig it down thirstily. Connor takes it when she’s done. I don’t even have the energy to tell them to use glasses. I just shake my head and have water, lots of it. “Do you want anything to eat?” I ask them. Both kids murmur no. “Okay. Go and get some sleep. If you need me, I’ll be in the shower, and I’m going to sleep out here tonight in the living room, okay?”
They’re not surprised. I think they must remember how, after my acquittal and before we left Kansas, I slept every night on the old sofa in the bare living room of the rented house with a gun right at my side. We had bricks smashed through the windows, and once a flaming bottle that guttered out without starting a fire. Vandalism was a constant fact of life before we’d moved for the second time.
And I’d known then, like now, that I couldn’t rely on the neighbors for help. Or the police.
The shower feels like heaven, like a sweet, normal, warm respite from the hell of the day. I towel-dry my hair and put on a fresh sports bra and underwear; then I find the softest pair of sweatpants I have, plus a microfiber shirt and socks. I want to be as fully dressed as possible, except for my running shoes, which I’ve rigged up with elastic ties so I can slip them on in an emergency. The couch is comfortable enough, and I keep my gun tucked just where I can reach it, pointed away from me. Too many paranoid people have failed to practice trigger safety.
To my surprise, I fall asleep, and I don’t even dream. Maybe I’m too tired. I wake up to the soft beep of the automatic coffeemaker as it brews the morning pot, and I make a groggy mental note to tell Lanny that if I get arrested again, to turn the damn thing off. It’s still dark outside. I find my shoulder holster and put it on over my shirt, tuck the gun inside, and go to pour my coffee. I’m in my stocking feet and very quiet, but even so, I hear the creak of a door opening down the hall.
It’s Lanny. I know at a glance she didn’t sleep much, because she’s already dressed in black cargo pants and a half-ripped gray T-shirt with a skull on it and a black tank showing through the gaps. Two years from now, I think, I’ll have to fight with her to keep the tank top on under it. She’s brushed out her hair but not straightened it, and the faint natural wave in it catches the light as she moves. The reddened bruising under her eyes has turned a rich crimson, verging on brown, and her nose is a little swollen but not as much as I’d feared.
Even with the damage, she’s beautiful, so beautiful, and I catch my breath on an unexpected pain and have to busy myself stirring sugar into my coffee so I don’t show her the emotion. I don’t even know why I’m feeling it. It comes as an overwhelming, warm wave that makes me want to destroy the world before it can hurt her again.
“Move,” Lanny says, annoyed, and I edge out of the way as she yanks a cup from the shelf. She checks it—an automatic thing for her, from the time she was twelve and found a cockroach in a cup in a rental house—and then splashes coffee in. She drinks hers black, not because she likes it but because she thinks she should. “So. We’re still alive.”
“Still alive,” I agree.
“You check the Sicko Patrol?”
I dread doing it, but she’s right. That’s the next step. “I will in a bit.”
She lets out a bitter laugh. “I guess I won’t be going to school.”
She isn’t dressed for it, I think, and of course she’s right. “No school. Maybe it’s time for homeschool.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s great. We’ll never get to leave the house ever again. Federal background checks on the UPS guy before we let him deliver a package.”
She’s in a foul mood, spoiling for a fight, and I raise my eyebrows. “Please don’t,” I tell her, which makes her glare. “I’m going to need your help, Lanny.”
That merits an eye roll on top of the glare, which is a neat trick I suspect only a teen girl can truly master. “Let me guess. You want me to take care of Connor. As per, Warden. Maybe you should give me a badge and you know . . .” She gestures at my shoulder holster, vaguely but significantly.
“No,” I tell her. “I want you to come with me and help me go through the e-mails. Get your laptop. I’ll show you what to do. And when we’re done with that, we’ll talk about next steps.”
She’s momentarily at a loss for words, which is a new thing, and then she puts her cup down, swallows, and says, “About time.”
“Yes,” I agree. “It is. But believe me, I wish I could keep it away from you forever.”
It’s a tough morning’s work, slowly acclimating her to the levels of depravity she’ll encounter, and showing her how to sort and categorize them. I prequalify what I send her; no rape porn or Photoshops of our faces onto murder victims. I can’t do that to her. She might see it soon enough, but only because I can’t help it, not because I allow it.