“She doesn’t want to talk about what happened.”
“I understand that. But, your daughter’s not the only one who came out of that basement changed. Perhaps, others grieve as well. Perhaps, there are larger issues.”
“My responsibility is to my daughter.”
“Yet, it’s not a zero-sum game, is it?” Beckett closed the second book on shooting, riffled through another, then leaned into the shelf where a Kama Sutra manual caught his eye.
“Detective Black is your partner?”
“She is.”
“Family of a sort.” Beckett nodded, and Mr. Shore put down his glass. “Your partner killed the men who took my daughter, and part of me will always love her for that. But even she doesn’t talk to Channing. Not her. Not the state cops. Not you. Do I make myself clear?”
The stare between them held. Big men. Serious egos.
Beckett blinked first. “The state police will compel her testimony. It’s only a mater of time. You know that, right?”
“I know they’ll try.”
“Do you know what she’ll say when the subpoena comes?”
“She’s the victim, Detective. She has nothing to hide.”
“And yet truth, I’ve learned, can be a fluid business.”
“In this case, you’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
Beckett opened three of the shooting manuals and left them spread on the desk. The inside jacket of each one showed Channing’s signature, beautifully made.
“Those are my books.”
The father choked as he said it, and Beckett nodded sadly.
That was a lie, too.
*
Elizabeth woke unable to remember the dream that haunted her; only that it was dark and hot and close. The basement, she guessed.
Or prison.
Or hell.
She shrugged off a weight of blankets and felt cool wood under her feet. At the window, she saw trees like an army in the fog. It was early, barely light. The road ran off into the mist, black and still, then fading, then gone. The stillness reminded her of a morning with Gideon six years ago. He’d called her after midnight. The father was out, the boy alone and sick. I’m scared, he’d said, so she’d collected him from the porch of that tumbledown house, brought him home, and put him between clean sheets. He was feverish and shaking, said he’d heard voices in the dark beyond the creek, and that they’d kept him awake and made him afraid. She gave him aspirin and a cool cloth for his forehead. It took hours for him to fall asleep, and as he drifted, his eyes opened a final time. I wish you were my mother, he’d said; and the words were light, as if raised from a dream. She’d slept in a chair after that and woke to an empty bed and wet, gray light. The boy was on the porch watching fog roll through the trees and down the long, black road. His eyes were dark when he looked up, his arms wrapped across his narrow chest. He was shivering in the cool air so she sat on the step and pulled him against her side.
I meant what I said. His cheek found her shoulder, and she felt the warm spot of his tears. I never meant nothing so much in all my life.
He’d cried hard after that, but it was still a favorite memory, and Elizabeth kept it close every day of her life. He never said the words again, but the morning was a special thing between them, and it was hard to look at fog without feeling love of Gideon like a pain in her chest. But this was a different day, so she shook off the emotion and focused on what was coming in the next few hours. Adrian would face court, and that meant media, questions, familiar faces from better times. She wondered if he would seem as torn, and if the cops would have enough to hold him. The trespass charge was weak. Could they charge him with murder? She rolled the footage of his life and knew what she was doing as she did it, that it was easier to worry about Adrian’s future than her own. Large as he stood in the halls of memory, his suffering would remain his alone, at least until she faced her own conviction. Yet, that risk was out there, too, and it could happen now: cars in the mist, cops with weapons drawn. What would she say if Hamilton and Marsh suddenly appeared? What would she do?
“You should run.”
Elizabeth turned and found Channing awake. “What did you say?”
The girl pushed up in the bed, her eyes catching light from the window, the rest of her dim and shapeless in the gloom. “If we’re not going to tell the truth about what I did, then you should leave. Maybe, we should leave together.”
“Where would we go?”
“The desert,” Channing said. “Some place we could see forever.”
Elizabeth sat on the bed. The girl’s eyes looked so kaleidoscopic that anything seemed possible. Escape. The desert. Even a future. “Did you know what I was thinking just now?”
“How would I know that?”
Elizabeth waited half a beat, thinking the girl had known. “Go back to sleep, Channing.”
“Okay.”