She loved children. She’d not yet been able to have her own. A child being harmed … the thought sickened and outraged her.
After a shower, when she stepped out of the stall and saw Bob naked and ready for his turn under the hot water, she was overcome by a sudden desire for him. Sex was best in the morning, before the day wore them down. She put her arms around him and kissed him.
But then she realized how inappropriate it was to be making love when a five-year-old child’s life depended on them. She thought of herself as a flawed but basically good person whose experience of tragedy had fine-tuned her conscience. Until this morning, however, her conscience hadn’t actually spoken to her, as it did now in a faint voice to confirm Bob’s insistence that participating in the search was the right thing: You know what you need to do. Get on with what you need to do, and you will be useful and happy.
As if Bob heard that same voice, he went to the shower without comment.
Useful. At eighteen, Minette had been a frivolous girl, but she had become a serious adult almost overnight. For the past fifteen years, her happiness had depended on doing penance in one way or another. She needed to be useful. She earned a living as a teacher but spent nearly as much time in volunteer activities—counseling troubled children and working with organizations that served people with disabilities.
Her freshman year in college, on her own for the first time, she had slipped the belaying lines of family. She dated a guy named Mace Mackey, who was in the first year of the master’s program. Mace fancied himself bad to the bone, although in truth he possessed no moral substance, either bad or good, deeper than his skin. She found him so exciting that she didn’t go home for the three-month break before her sophomore year, but told her parents that she’d landed a good summer job with the university. There was no job; there was Mace, who came from a wealthy family and took care of Minette’s finances, while she took care of his even more basic needs.
Minette and her younger sister, Glynis, had always been close. Glynis missed Minette. Sixteen that summer, she wanted to come visit for a week. Minette, who thought of herself as sophisticated, looked forward to showing off her cute apartment and older boyfriend. The second night of the visit, the three were returning from a death-metal concert when unearned sophistication proved to have a high price. Behind the wheel of his Maserati, Mace was flying on some pills he’d been popping all day. Minette didn’t insist on driving because that would annoy him; he was no fun when annoyed. Anyway, she had a bit of a buzz on herself, from a joint and from sipping chocolate-flavored vodka. Mace totaled the Maserati. Fate proved to have a cruel sense of humor when he walked away without a scratch, Minette broke a finger—and Glynis, the only innocent among them, suffered a spinal injury that left her a paraplegic for life.
Minette, who had felt enchained by her parents’ old-fashioned middle-class ways, discovered that the chain of deserved guilt came with an immense anchor at the end and couldn’t be cast off as easily as bourgeois values. Fifteen years later it still encumbered her.
Useful. After the accident, she’d found happiness again only when she was useful, helping Glynis and then others, always giving more than she received. Now she could be useful by helping the authorities find the endangered boy.
In the bedroom, after Minette pulled on a pair of panties, as she was shrugging into a bra, she saw the bruise in the crook of her right arm. The diameter of a bottle cap. Somewhat red, too, inflamed and swollen. When touched, the spot proved tender. She looked closer and saw a puncture centered in the discoloration, directly over a vein, as if she’d had blood drawn, which she hadn’t.
Maybe a spider bite. A spider or some other insect. Nothing serious. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Forget about it.
After she dressed and went into the kitchen and fired up the coffeemaker, while she waited for Bob, she walked down the hall to the guest room to make the bed. At the threshold, as she began to open the door, she realized no guest was in residence at the moment.
Puzzled by her confusion, she pulled the door shut and turned away from it—and felt the terrible pull of that enduring anchor chain of guilt. Something was wrong. Something awful had happened. She must do the right thing. She must be useful. And somehow … being useful in this case required her to go into the guest room.
She turned to the door. Opened it. The room lay in darkness except for a few thin blades of light with which the sharp sun of the desert pierced the venetian blinds.
She stepped across the threshold and stood tense and blinkless in the gloom, listening. Then she flipped up the wall switch, and a nightstand lamp brightened the space.
To her left, the bedclothes were in disarray. Someone had spent the night here, after all.
Perplexed, she took another step into the room, turned to her right, and saw a dead woman in a wheelchair. Oh God, her face. It was less a face than a wound, ravaged flesh and shattered bone, her skull misshapen. But … not just a woman, not a stranger, Glynis.
Minette’s heart—
As Minette took a mug from a kitchen cabinet, her heart was suddenly thudding as if she had run a race. She put the mug on the counter, pressed a hand to her breast, and felt the systole of that vital pump. She detected no irregularity, only a healthy rhythm.
Frowning, she raised her eyes from the mug to the cabinet door. She could not remember opening it.
The kitchen was richly scented with the aroma of a fine Jamaica blend.
Minette turned her attention to the burbling coffeemaker. It was nearly finished brewing, having filled the Pyrex pot almost to the eight-cup line.
Disquieted but unsure why, she crossed the kitchen to the swinging door, which stood open.
She went into the dining room, from there into the living room, and the house was less than entirely familiar to her, as though its angles and dimensions had subtly changed.
On the brink of the hallway, she stared at the farther end.
Her racing heart still could not find a calmer rhythm.
As she moved along the hallway, she felt almost weightless, drawn inexorably toward the room at the end, which seemed to have the gravity of an entire planet contained within its walls.
Halfway to the guest bedroom, Minette was halted by a vivid memory: the Maserati fishtailing at high speed, the back end jumping a curb, the car airborne, slamming into the oak, rebounding with the violence of the impact. Shaken, she tries the front passenger door, surprised to find it still works. She gets out, stumbles a few feet from the vehicle before regaining her balance, and turns.… The rear passenger-side door is crumpled like cardboard, jammed into the backseat; beyond the cocked and glassless window, Glynis’s face rises moon-white, and blood sprays on her breath when she screams.
Minette stands trembling in the hallway, wondering why this horrendous memory should recur to her now in such graphic detail.
Something was wrong with her. She wasn’t herself, moving past perplexity toward a frightening bewilderment.
She was also moving along the hall again. The guest-room door. She opened it. Stepped into the room. She flipped the light switch.
The bedclothes were tangled and spilling off the mattress. Someone had slept here last night.
Other signs of a visitor were to the right of the door: carpet stains and small pieces of debris. In the deep-pile forest-green carpet, the stains appeared black. Although the debris resisted identification, Minette became queasy at the sight of it, and she looked away.