When Jason Underhill’s ghost showed up that night, Trixie was expecting him. He was transparent and white faced, with a gash in the back of his skull. She stared through him and pretended not to notice that he had materialized out of nowhere.

He was the first person Trixie knew who’d died. Technically, that wasn’t quite accurate - her grandmother had died in Alaska when Trixie was four, but Trixie had never met her. She remembered her father sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone still in his hand even though the person on the other end had hung up, and silence landing on the house like a fat black crow.

Jason kept glancing at the ground, as if he needed to keep track of his footsteps. Trixie tried not to look at the bruises on his face or the blood on his collar. “I’m not scared of you,” she said, although she was not telling the truth. “You can’t do anything to me.” She wondered if ghosts had the powers of superheroes, if they could see through linen and flannel to spot her legs shaking, if they could swallow her words and spit her lie back out like a bullet.

Jason leaned so close that his hand went right through Trixie.

It felt like winter. He was able to draw her forward, as if he were magnetic and she had dissolved into a thousand metal filings.

Pulling her upright in her bed, he kissed her full on the mouth. He tasted of dark soil and muddy currents. I’m not through with you, Jason vowed, and then he disappeared bit by bit, the pressure against her lips the last thing to go.

Afterward, Trixie lay in bed, shaking. She thought about the bitter cold that had taken up residence under her breastbone, like a second heart made of ice. She thought about what Jason had said and wondered why he’d had to die before he felt the same way she had felt about him all along.

Mike Bartholemew crouched in front of the boot prints that led up to the railing of the bridge from which Jason had jumped, a cryptic choreography of the boy’s last steps. Placing a ruler next to the best boot print, he took a digital photo. Then he lifted an aerosol can and sprayed light layers of red wax over the area. The wax froze the snow, so that when he took the mixture of dental stone and water he’d prepared to make a cast, it wouldn’t melt any of the ridge details.

While he waited for his cast to dry, he hiked down the slippery bank to the spot being combed by crime scene investigators. In his own tenure as a detective, he’d presided over two suicides in this very spot, one of the few in Bethel where you could actually fall far enough to do serious damage.

Jason Underhill had landed on his side. His head had cracked ‘he ice on the river and was partially submerged. His hand was covered with dirt and matted leaves. The snow was still stained pink with blood that had pooled beneath his head.

For all intents and purposes, Jason had done the taxpayers a favor by saving them the cost of a trial and possible incarceration. Being tried as an adult for rape made the stakes higher - and more potentially devastating. Bartholemew had seen lesser motives that caused folks to take their own lives.

He knelt beside Jerry, one of the forensic cops. “What have you got?”

“Maria DeSantos, only seventy degrees colder.”

Maria DeSantos had been their last suicide plunger in this location, but she had been missing for three weeks in the heat of the summer before the stench of the decomposing body had attracted a kayaker on the river. “Find anything?”

“A wallet and a cell phone. There could be more, but the snow’s pretty deep.” Jerry glanced up from his collection of blood on the body. “You see the kid play in the exhibition game last night in town?”

“I was on duty.”

“I heard he was hammered . . . and that he was still a hell of a player.” Jerry shook his head. “Damn shame, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t,” Bartholomew said, and he stood up. He had already been to the Underhill house, to bring them the news of their son’s death. Greta Underhill had opened the door, looked at his face, and burst into tears. Her husband had been only superficially composed. He thanked Bartholemew for bringing the information and said he’d like to see Jason now. Then he’d walked outside into the snow, without a coat, barefoot.

Bartholemew’s own boss had brought him the news about Holly.

He’d known that the worst had happened when he saw the chief of police standing on his porch in the middle of the night. He remembered demanding to be driven to the scene, where he stood at the guardrail her car had smashed through. He remembered, too, going to identify Holly’s body in the hospital morgue. Bartholemew had pulled aside the sheet to see the tracks on her arms, the ones he’d been blind to as a parent. He’d put his hand over Holly’s heart, just to make sure.

The Underhills wanted to see Jason; they’d be given that privilege before the autopsy began. In this sense, accidents, suicides, and murders were all the same - any death that occurred without someone there to witness it was automatically brought to the medical examiner for a determination of cause. It wasn’t police procedure as much as human nature. We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn’t really an answer to that question.

The Monday after Jason Underhill’s suicide, two psychologists were called to the high school to help students who needed to grieve. The hockey team took to wearing black armbands and fought, vowing to take the state title in homage to their fallen teammate.

One entire page of the Portland paper’s sports section was dedicated to a memorial of Jason’s athletic achievements.

That same day, Laura went out for groceries. She moved aimessly through the store, picking up things like ugli fruit and bags of pitted prunes, slivered almonds, and balls of buffalo mozzarella. Somewhere in her purse she knew she had a list - ordinary items like bread and milk and dishwashing detergent - but there was a part of her that felt normal things didn’t apply anymore and therefore there was no point in buying them. Eventually, she found herself in front of the freezer section, the door open and the cold spilling over the toes of her boots. There must have been a hundred different ice cream flavors. How could you pick, knowing that you’d have to go home and live with the choice you’d made? She was reading the ingredients on a peach sorbet when she heard two women talking one aisle over, hidden by the freezers. “What a tragedy,” one said. “That boy was going places.” “I heard that Greta Underhill can’t get out of bed,” the second woman added. “My pastor was told by her pastor that she might not even make it to the funeral.”

A week ago, in spite of the rape accusations, Jason had still been a hero to most of this town. But now death had swelled him to epic proportions.

Laura curled her hands around the front bar of her grocery cart, navigated around the corner, until she was face to face with the women who’d been talking. “Do you know who I am?” The ladies glanced at each other, shook their heads. “I’m the mother of the girl Jason Underhill raped.”

She said it for the shock value. She said it on the off chance that these ladies might, out of sudden shame, apologize. But neither of them said a word.

Laura guided her shopping cart around the corner and toward an empty checkout line. The cashier had a skunk-streak of blue hair and a ring through her bottom lip. Laura reached into the basket and held up a box of plastic knives - when had she taken those off a shelf? “You know,” she said to the cashier, “I actually don’t need those.”

“No biggie. We can reshelve them.”

Six packets of powdered hollandaise sauce, suntan lotion, and wart remover medicine. “Actually,” Laura said, “I’m going to pass on these, too.”

She emptied the rest of her shopping cart: bacon bits and baby food and Thai coconut milk; a sippy cup and hair elastics and two pounds of green jalapenos; the peach sorbet. She stared at the items on the conveyor belt as if she were seeing them for the first time. “I don’t want any of this,” Laura said, surprised, as if it were anyone’s fault but her own.

Dr. Anjali Mukherjee spent most of her time in the morgue, not just because she was the county medical examiner but also because when she ventured abovestairs at the hospital, she was continually mistaken for a med student or, worse, a candy striper. She was five feet tall, with the small, delicate features of a child, but Mike Bartholemew had seen her elbow-deep in a Y-shaped incision, determining the cause of death of the person who lay on her examination table.

“The subject had a blood alcohol level of point one two,”

Anjali said, as she rifled through a series of X-rays and headed toward the light box on the wall.

Legal intoxication was .10; that meant Jason Underhill was considerably trashed when he went over the railing of the bridge.

At least he wasn’t driving, Bartholomew thought. At least he only killed himself.

“There,” the medical examiner said, pointing at an X-ray. “What do you see?” “Afoot?”

“That’s why they pay you the big bucks. Come over here for a second.” Anjali cleared off a lab table and patted it. “Climb up.”

“I don’t want . . .”

“Climb up, Bartholemew.”

Grudgingly, he stood on top of the table. He glanced down at the top of Anjali’s head. “And I’m doing this why?”

“Jump.”

Bartholemew hopped a little.

“I meant jump off.”

He swung his arms, then went airborne, landing in a crouch.

“Goddamn, I still can’t fly.”

“You landed on your feet,” Anjali said. “Like most people who jump. When we see suicides like this, the X-rays show heel fractures and vertical compressions of the spine, which aren’t present on this victim.”

“Are you telling me he didn’t fall?”

“No, he fell. There’s contrecoup damage to the brain that suggests acceleration. When someone lands on the back of the skull, you’ll see injury to the front of the brain, because it continues to fall after the skull stops and hits it hard.”

“Maybe he jumped and landed on his head,” Bartholemew suggested.

“Interestingly, I didn’t see the types of fractures associated with that either. Let me show you what I did find, though.” Anjali handed him two photographs, both of Jason Underhill’s face. They were identical, except for the black eye and bruising along the temple and jaw of the second one.

“You been beating up the subjects, Angie?”

“That only works premortem,” Anjali replied. “I took these ten hours apart. When you brought him in, he didn’t have bruises . . .

except for a subtle hemorrhage in the facial area that could have been caused by the fall. But he was lying on that side of his face when found, and the pooling of the blood might have obscured the contusions. When he was brought to the morgue and placed sunny-side up, the blood redistributed.” She removed the X-ray they’d been examining. “When I was doing an FP fellowship, we had a Jane Doe come in with no apparent external trauma, except for a slight hemorrhage in the strap muscles of the neck. By the time the autopsy was over, there were two obvious handprints on her throat.”

“Couldn’t he have banged himself up when he fell?”

“I thought you’d say that. Take a look at this.” Anjali slid another X-ray onto the light box.

Bartholemew whistled softly. “That’s his face, huh?”

“It was.”

He pointed to a crack along the temple of the skull. “That looks like a fracture.”

“That’s where he landed,” Anjali said. “But look closer.”

Bartholemew squinted. On the cheekbone and the jaw were smaller, fainter fault lines.

“In the case of a blow and a subsequent fall, the fracture lines caused by the fall are blocked by those caused by the initial blow. An injury to the head caused by a fall is usually found around the level of the brim of a hat. However, a hard punch to the face usually hits below that.”

The fracture at Underhills temple radiated out toward the eye socket and the cheekbone but stopped abruptly at one of these hairline cracks.

“The subject also had extravasation of red blood cells on tissues around his jaw and ribs.”

“Which means what?”

“It’s a bruise that didn’t get to happen. Meaning there was trauma to that tissue, but before that blood could break down and go black and blue, the subject died.”

“So maybe he was in a fight before he decided to jump,”

Bartholemew said, his mind running fast with possibilities.

“You might also be interested in this.” Anjali passed him a microscopic slide with tiny filings on it. “We dug them out of the subject’s fingertips.”

“What are they?”

“Splinters consistent with the railing of the bridge. There were some wood slivers caught in the tails of his jacket, too.”

Anjali glanced at Bartholemew. “I don’t think this kid killed himself by jumping off a bridge,” she said. “I think he was pushed.”

When Daniel heard sobbing, he immediately assumed it was Trixie. In the days since they’d heard the news about Jason, she would dissolve without any provocationat the dinner table, while brushing her teeth, staring at a commercial on television. She was so firmly entrenched in memory that Daniel didn’t know how to pry her loose and bring her back to the real world.

Sometimes he held her. Sometimes he just sat down next to her.

He never tried to stop her tears; he didn’t think he had that right. He just wanted her to know that he was there if she needed him.

This time, when the crying began, Daniel followed the sound upstairs. But instead of finding Trixie sobbing, he turned into his own bedroom to find his wife sitting on the floor, hugging a knot of clean laundry against her. “Laura?”

She turned at the sound of her name, wiping her cheeks. “I’m sorry . . . it’s wrong, I know . . . but I keep thinking about him.”

Him. Daniel’s heart turned over. How long would it be until he could hear a sentence like that and not feel as if he’d been punched? “It’s just...” She wiped her eyes. “It’s just that he was someone’s child, too.”

Jason. The immediate relief Daniel felt to know that Laura wasn’t crying over the nameless man she’d slept with evaporated as he realized that she was crying, instead, for someone who didn’t merit that kind of mercy.

“I’ve been so lucky, Daniel,” Laura said. “What if Trixie had died last week? What if... what if you’d told me to move out?”

Daniel reached out to tuck Laura’s hair behind her ear. Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value. Maybe it would be like that for the two of them. “I would never have let you go.”

Laura shuddered, as if his words had sent a shock through her.

“Daniel, I . . .”

“You don’t need to cry for us,” he said, squeezing her shoulder, “because we’re all going to be fine.”

He felt Laura nod against him.

“And you don’t have to cry for Jason,” Daniel said. “Because Jason deserves to be dead.”

He hadn’t spoken the words aloud, the ones he’d been thinking ever since Laura had taken that phone call days before. But this was exactly the sort of world he drew: one where actions had consequences, where revenge and retribution were the heartbeat of a story. Jason had hurt Trixie; therefore, Jason deserved to be punished.

Laura drew back and stared at him, wide-eyed.

“What?” Daniel said, defiant. “Are you shocked that I would think that?”

She was quiet for a moment. “No,” Laura admitted. “Just that you said it out loud.”

The minute Bartholemew entered the digital photo of the footprints on the bridge into his software program and compared it to an inking of Jason’s boot, he got a match. However, there was another footprint with a tread on the sole that was different from Jason’s, possibly from their suspect’s shoe.

With a sigh, Bartholemew turned off his computer screen and took out the bag of evidence collected from the crime scene. He rummaged for the cell phone that Jerry had found near the victim.

A Motorola, identical to the one Bartholemew carried - up here in Maine, you just didn’t have all the cellular options available in a big city. Jason had probably bought it from the same store where he’d bought his. The same sales rep had probably programmed it for him.

Bartholemew started punching buttons. There were no messages, text or voice. But there was a memo.

He hit the shortcut button, *8, and suddenly the sound of a fight filled the room. There were punches being landed, and grunts and moans. He heard Jason’s voice, pleas that broke off at their edges. And another familiar voice: If you ever, ever come near my daughter again, I will kill you.

Bartholemew stood up, grabbed his coat, and headed out to find Daniel Stone.

“What do you think happens when you die?” Zephyr asked.

Trixie was lying on her stomach on her bed, flipping through the pages of Allure magazine and looking at purses and shoes that she would never be able to afford. She didn’t get purses, anyway.

She didn’t want to ever be the kind of person who couldn’t carry what she needed in her back pocket. “You decompose,” Trixie said, and she turned to the next ad.

“That is so totally disgusting,” Zephyr said. “I wonder how long it takes.”

Trixie had wondered that too, but she wasn’t going to admit it to Zephyr. Every night since his death, Jason had visited her in her bedroom in the darkest part of the night. Sometimes he just stared until she woke up; sometimes he talked to her. Finally he left by blasting through her middle.

She knew that he hadn’t been buried yet, and maybe that was why he kept coming. Maybe once his body began to break down inside its coffin, he wouldn’t show up at the foot of her bed.

Since Trixie had returned from the hospital, it had been like old times - Zephyr would come over after school and tell her everything she was missing: the catfight between two cheerleaders who liked the same guy, the substitute teacher in French who couldn’t speak a single word of the language, the sophomore who got hospitalized for anorexia. Zephyr had also been her source of information about how Bethel High was processing Jason’s death.

The guidance counselors had led an assembly about teen depression; the principal had gotten on the PA during homeroom announcements to have a moment of memorial silence; Jason’s locker had become a shrine, decorated with notes and stickers and Beanie Babies. It was, Trixie realized, as if Jason had grown larger than life after his death, as if it was going to be even harder now for her to avoid him. Zephyr rolled over. “Do you think it hurts to die?” Not as much as it hurts to live, Trixie thought. “Do you think we go somewhere .. . after?” Zephyr asked. Trixie closed her magazine.

“I don’t know.” “I wonder if it’s like it is here. If there are popular dead people and geeky dead people. You know.”

That sounded like high school, and the way Trixie figured it, that was more likely to be hell. “I guess it’s different for different people,” she said. “Like, if you died, there’d be an endless supply of Sephora makeup. For Jason, it’s one big hockey rink.”

“But do people ever cross over? Do the hockey players ever get to hang out with the people who eat only chocolate? Or the ones who play Nintendo twenty-four/seven?”

“Maybe there are dances or something,” Trixie said. “Or a bulletin board, so you know what everyone else is up to, and you can join in if you want and blow it off if you don’t.”

“I bet when you eat chocolate in heaven it’s no big deal,”

Zephyr said. “If you can have it whenever you want it, it probably doesn’t taste as good.” She shrugged. “I bet they all watch us down here, because they know we’ve got it better than them and we’re too stupid to realize it.” She glanced sideways at Trixie.

“Guess what I heard.”

“What?”

“His whole head was bashed in.”

Trixie felt her stomach turn over. “That’s just a rumor.”

“It’s totally not. Marcia Breen’s brother’s girlfriend is a nurse, and she saw Jason being brought into the hospital.” She popped a bubble with her gum. “I hope that if he went to heaven, he got a big old bandage or plastic surgery or something.”

“What makes you think he’s going to heaven?” Trixie asked.

Zephyr froze. “I didn’t mean ... I just. ..” Her gaze slid toward Trixie. “Trix, are you truly glad he’s dead?”

Trixie stared at her hands in her lap. For a moment, they looked like they belonged to someone else - still, pale, too heavy for the rest of her. She forced herself to open her magazine again, and she pretended she was engrossed in an ad about tampons so that she didn’t have to give Zephyr a reply. Maybe after reading for a while, they would both forget what Zephyr had asked.

Maybe after a while, Trixie wouldn’t be afraid of her answer.

According to Dante, the deeper you got into hell, the colder it was. When Daniel imagined hell, he saw the vast white wasteland of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta where he’d grown up. Standing on the frozen river, you might see smoke rising in the distance. A Yup’ik Eskimo would know it was open water, steaming where it hit the frigid air, but a trick of the light could make you believe otherwise. You might think you see the breath of the devil.

When Daniel drew the ninth circle of hell, it was a world of planes and angles, a synchronicity of white lines, a land made of ice. It was a place where the greater effort you made to escape, the more deeply entrenched you were.

Daniel had just put the finishing touches on the devil’s face when he heard a car pull into the driveway. From the window of his office he watched Detective Bartholemew get out of his Taurus. He had known it was coming to this, hadn’t he? He had known it the minute he’d walked into that parking lot and found Jason Underhill with Trixie.

Daniel opened up the front door before the detective could knock. “Well,” Bartholemew said. “That’s what I call service.”

Daniel tried to channel the easy repartee of social intercourse but it was like he was fresh out of the village again, bombarded by sensations he didn’t understand: colors and sights and speech he’d never seen or heard before. “What can I do for you?” he asked finally.

“I was wondering if we could talk for a minute,” Bartholemew said.

No, Daniel thought. But he led the detective inside to the living room and offered him a seat.

“Where’s the rest of the family?”

“Laura’s teaching,” Daniel said. “Trixie’s upstairs with a friend.”

“How’d she take the news about Jason Underhill?”

Was there a right answer to that question? Daniel found himself replaying possible responses in his head before he balanced them on his tongue. “She was pretty upset. I think she feels partially responsible.”

“What about you, Mr. Stone?” the detective asked.

He thought about the conversation he’d had with Laura just that morning. “I wanted him to be punished for what he did,” Daniel said. “But I never wished him dead.”

The detective stared at him for a long minute. “Is that so?”

There was a thump overhead; Daniel glanced up. Trixie and Zephyr had been upstairs for about an hour. When Daniel had last checked on them, they were reading magazines and eating Goldfish crackers.

“Did you see Jason Friday night?” Detective Bartholemew asked.

“Why?”

“We’re just trying to piece together the approximate time of the suicide.”

Daniel’s mind spiraled backward. Had Jason said something to the cops about the incident in the woods? Had the guy who’d driven by the parking lot during their fistfight gotten a good look at Daniel? Had there been other witnesses? “No, I didn’t see Jason,” Daniel lied.

“Huh. I could have sworn I saw you in town.”

“Maybe you did. I took Trixie to the minimart to get some cheese. We were making a pizza for dinner.”

“About when was that?”

The detective pulled a pad and pencil out of his pocket; it momentarily stopped Daniel cold. “Seven,” he said. “Maybe seven-thirty. We just drove to the store and then we left.”

“What about your wife?”

“Laura? She was working at the college, and then she came home.”

Bartholemew made a note on his pad. “So none of you ran into Jason?”

Daniel shook his head.

Bartholemew put his pad back into his breast pocket. “Well,” he said, “then that’s that.”

“Sorry I couldn’t help you,” Daniel answered, standing up.

The detective stood too. “You must be relieved. Obviously your daughter won’t have to testify as a witness now.”

Daniel didn’t know how to respond. Just because the rape case wouldn’t proceed didn’t mean that Trixie’s slate would be wiped clean as well. Maybe she wouldn’t testify, but she wouldn’t get back to who she used to be, either.

Bartholemew headed toward the front door. “It was pretty crazy in town Friday night, with the Winterfest and all,” he said. “Did you get what you wanted?”

Daniel went still. “I beg your pardon?”

“The cheese. For your pizza.”

He forced a smile. “It turned out perfect,” Daniel said.

When Zephyr left a little while later, Trixie offered to walk her out. She stood on the driveway, shivering, not having bothered with a coat. The sound of Zephyr’s heels faded, and then Trixie couldn’t even see her anymore. She was about to head back inside when a voice spoke from behind. “It’s good to have someone watching over you, isn’t it?”

Trixie whirled around to find Detective Bartholemew standing in the front yard. He looked like he was freezing, like he’d been waiting for a while. “You scared me,” she said.

The detective nodded down the block. “I see you and your friend are on speaking terms again.”

“Yeah. It’s nice.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Did you, um, come to talk to my dad?”

“I already did that. I was sort of hoping to talk to you.”

Trixie glanced at the window upstairs, glowing yellow, where she knew her father was still working. She wished he was here with her right now. He’d know what to say. And what not to.

You had to talk to a policeman if he wanted to talk to you, didn’t you? If you said no, he’d immediately know there was something wrong.

“Okay,” Trixie said, “but could we go inside?”

It was weird, leading the detective into their mudroom. She felt like he was boring holes in the back of her shirt with his eyes, like he knew something about Trixie she didn’t know about herself yet.

“How are you feeling?” Detective Bartholemew asked. Trixie instinctively pulled her sleeves lower, concealing the fresh cuts she’d made in the shower. “I’m okay.”

Detective Bartholemew sat down on a teak bench. “What happened to Jason ... don’t blame yourself.” | Tears sprang into her throat, dark and bitter.

“You know, you remind me a little of my daughter,” the detective said. He smiled at Trixie, then shook his head. “Being here... it didn’t come easy to her, either.”

Trixie ducked her head. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

She pictured Jason’s ghost: blued by the moon, bloody and distant. “Did it hurt? How he died?”

“No. It was fast.”

He was lying - Trixie knew it. She hadn’t realized that a policeman might lie. He didn’t say anything else for such a long time that Trixie looked up at him, and that’s when she realized he was waiting for her to do just that. “Is there something you want to tell me, Trixie? About Friday night?”

Once, Trixie had been in the car when her father ran over a squirrel. It came out of nowhere, and the instant before impact Trixie had seen the animal look at them with the understanding that there was ? nowhere left to go. “What about Friday night?”

“Something happened between your father and Jason, didn’t it.”

“No.”

The detective sighed. “Trixie, we already know about the fight.”

Had her father told him? Trixie glanced up at the ceiling, wishing she were Superman, with X-ray vision, or able to communicate telepathically like Professor Xavier from the X-Men. She wanted to know what her father had said; she wanted to know what she should say. “Jason started it,” she explained, and once she began, the words tumbled out of her. “He grabbed me. My father pulled him away. They fought with each other.”

“What happened after that?”

“Jason ran away . . . and we went home.” She hesitated. “Were we the last people to see him . . . you know . . . alive?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

It was possible that this was why Jason kept coming back to her now. Because if Trixie could still see him, then maybe he wouldn’t be gone. She looked up at Bartholemew. “My father was just protecting me. You know that, right?” “Yeah,” the detective said. “Yeah, I do.”

Trixie waited for him to say something else, but Bartholemew seemed to be in a different place, staring at the bricks on the floor of the mudroom. “Are we . . . done?”

Detective Bartholemew nodded. “Yes. Thanks, Trixie. I’ll let myself out.”

Trixie didn’t know what else there was to say, so she opened the door that led into the house and closed it behind her, leaving the de tective alone in the mudroom. She was halfway upstairs when Bartholemew reached for her father’s boot, stamped the sole on an in1 pad he’d taken from his pocket, and pressed it firmly onto a piece of blank white paper.

The medical examiner called while Bartholemew was waiting for his order at the drive-through window of a Burger King. “Merry Christmas,” Anjali said when he answered his cell phone.

“You’re about a week early,” Bartholemew said.

The girl in the window blinked at him. “Ketchup mustard salt or pepper?”

“No, thanks.”

“I haven’t even told you what I’ve got yet,” Anjali said.

“I hope it’s a big fat evidentiary link to murder.”

In the window of the drive-through, the girl adjusted her paper hat. “That’s five thirty-three.”

“Where are you?” Anjali said.

Bartholemew opened his wallet and took out a twenty. “Clogging my arteries.”

“We started to clean off the body,” the medical examiner explained. “The dirt on the victim’s hand? Turns out it’s not dirt after all. It’s blood.”

“So he scraped his hand, trying to hold on?”

The girl at the counter leaned closer and snapped the bill out of his fingers.

“I can ABO type a dried stain at the lab, and this was O positive. Jason was B positive.” She let that sink in. “It was blood, Mike, but not Jason Underhill’s.”

Bartholemew’s mind started to race: If they had the murderer’s blood, they could link a suspect to the crime. It would be easy enough to get a DNA sample from Daniel Stone when he was least expecting it - saliva taken from an envelope he’d sealed or from the rim of a soda can tossed into the trash.

Stone’s boot print hadn’t been a match, but Bartholemew didn’t see that as any particular deterrent to an arrest. There had been hundreds of folks in town Friday night; the question wasn’t who had walked across the bridge, but who hadn’t. Blood evidence, on the other hand, could be damning. Bartholemew pictured Daniel Stone on the icy bridge, going after Jason Underhill. He imagined Jason trying to hold him off. He thought back to his conversation with Daniel, the Band-Aid covering the knuckles of his right hand. “I’m on my way,” Bartholemew told Anjali.

“Hey,” the Burger King girl said. “What about your food?”

“I’m not hungry,” he said, pulling out of the pickup line.

“Don’t you want change?” the girl called.

All the time, Mike thought, but he didn’t answer.

“Daddy,” Trixie asked, as she was elbow-deep in the sink washing dishes, “what were you like as a kid?”

Her father did not glance up from the kitchen table he was wiping with a sponge. “Nothing like you are,” he said. “Thank God.”

Trixie knew her father didn’t like to talk about growing up in Alaska, but she was starting to think that she needed to hear about it. She had been under the impression that her dad was of the typical suburban genus and species: the kind of guy who mowed his lawn every Saturday and read the sports section before the others, the type of father who was gentle enough to hold a monarch butterfly between his cupped palms so that Trixie could count the black spots on its wings. But that easygoing man would never have been capable of punching Jason repeatedly, even as Jason was bleeding and begging him to stop. That man had never been so consumed by fury that it twisted his features, made him unfamiliar.

Trixie decided the answer must be in the part of her father’s life that he never wanted to share. Maybe Daniel Stone had been a whole different person, one who vanished just as Trixie arrived.

She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Why am I so different from you?”

“It was a compliment. I was a pain in the ass at your age.”

“How?” Trixie asked.

She could see him weighing his words for an example he was willing to offer out loud. “Well, for one thing, I ran away a lot.”

Trixie had run away once, when she was little. She’d walked around the block twice and finally settled in the cool blue shadow beneath a hedgerow in her own backyard. Her father found her there less than an hour later. She expected him to get angry, but instead, he’d crawled underneath the bushes and sat beside her. He plucked a dozen of the red berries he was always telling her never to eat and mashed them in the palm of his hand. Then he’d painted a rose on her cheek and let her draw stripes across his own. He’d stayed there with her until the sun started to go down and then told her if she was still planning on running away, she might want to get a move on - even though they both knew that by that point, Trixie wasn’t going anywhere.

“When I was twelve,” her father said, “I stole a boat and decided to head down to Quinhagak. There aren’t any roads leading to the tundra . . . you come and go by plane or boat. It was October, getting really cold, the end of fishing season. The boat motor quit working, and I started drifting into the Bering Sea. I had no food, only a few matches, and a little bit of gas . . .

when all of a sudden I saw land. It was Nunivak Island, and if I missed it, the next stop was Russia.”

Trixie raised a brow. “You are totally making this up.”

“Swear to God. I paddled like crazy. And just when I realized I had a shot at reaching shore, I saw the breakers. If I made it to the island, the boat was going to get smashed. I duct-taped the gas tank to myself, so that when the boat busted up, I’d float.”

This sounded like some extravagant survival flashback Trixie’s father would write for one of his comic book characters - she’d read dozens. All this time, she had assumed they were the products of his imagination. After all, those daring deeds hardly matched the father she’d grown up with. But what if he was the superhero? What if the world her father created daily - full of unbelievable feats and derring-do and harsh survival - wasn’t something he’d dreamed up but someplace he’d actually lived? She tried to imagine her father bobbing in the world’s roughest, coldest sea, struggling to make it to shore. She tried to picture that boy and then imagine him fully grown, a few nights ago, pummeling Jason. “What happened?” Trixie asked.

“A Fish and Game guy who was taking one last look for the year spotted the fire I made after I washed up on the island and rescued me,” her father said. “I ran away one or two times each year after that, but I never managed to get very far. It’s like a black hole: People who go to the Alaskan bush disappear from the face of the earth.”

“Why did you want to leave so badly?”

Her father came up to the sink and wrung out the sponge. “There was nothing there for me.”

“Then you weren’t really running away,” Trixie said. “You were running toward.”

Her father, though, had stopped listening. He reached over to turn off the water in the sink and grasped her elbows, turning the insides of her arms up to the light.

She’d forgotten about the Band-Aids, which had peeled off in the soapy water. She’d forgotten to not hike up her sleeves. In addition to the gash at her wrist, which had webbed itself with healing skin, her father could see the new cuts she’d made in the shower, the ones that climbed her forearm like a ladder.

“Baby,” her father whispered, “what did you do?”

Trixie’s cheeks burned. The only person who knew about her cutting was Janice the rape counselor, who’d been ordered out of the house by Trixie’s father a week ago. Trixie had been grateful for that one small cosmic favor: With Janice out of the picture, her secret could stay one. “It’s not what you think. I wasn’t trying to kill myself again. It just... it’s just...” She glanced down at the floor. “It’s how I run away.”

When she finally gathered the courage to look up again, the expression on her father’s face nearly broke her. The monster she’d seen in the parking lot the other night was gone, replaced by the parent she’d trusted her whole life. Ashamed, she tried to pull away from his hold, but he wouldn’t let her. He waited until she tired herself out with her thrashing, the way he used to when she was a toddler. Then he wrapped his arms so tight around Trixie she could barely breathe. That was all it took: She began to cry like she had that morning in the shower, when she had heard about Jason.

“I’m sorry,” Trixie sobbed into her father’s shirt. “I’m really sorry.”

They stood together in the kitchen for what felt like hours, with soap bubbles rising around them and dishes as white as bones drying on the wire rack. It was possible, Trixie supposed, that everyone had two faces: Some of us just did a better job of hiding it than others.

 Trixie imagined her father jumping into water so cold it stole his breath. She pictured him watching his boat break to pieces around him. She bet that if he’d been asked - even when he was sitting on that island, soaking wet and freezing - he’d tell you he would have done it all over again.

Maybe she was more like her father than he thought.

The secret recipe for Sorrow Pie had been passed down from Laura’s _ great-grandmother to her grandmother to her mother, and although she had no actual recollection of the transfer of information to herself by the time she was eleven she knew the ingredients by heart, knew the careful procedure to make sure the crust didn’t burn and the carrots didn’t dissolve in the broth, and knew exactly how many bites it would take before the heaviness weighing on the diner’s heart disappeared. Laura knew that the shopping list in and of itself was nothing extraordinary: a chicken, four potatoes, leeks more white Han green, pearl onions and whipping cream, bay leaves and basil. it made Sorrow Pie a force to be reckoned with. It was the way you might find the unlikely in any spoonful - a burst of cinnamon mixed with common pepper, lemon peel and vinegar sobering the crust - not to mention the ritual of preparation, which required the cook to look into the cupboard for her ingredients, to cut shortening only with the left hand, and, of course, to season the mixture with a tear of her own.

Daniel was the one who usually cooked, but when desperate measures were called for, Laura would put on an apron and pull out her great-grandmother’s stoneware pie plate, the one that turned a different color each time it came out of an oven. She had baked Sorrow Pie for dinner the night Daniel got word of his mother’s death a funeral he would not attend and a woman he had, to Laura’s knowledge, never cried for. She made Sorrow Pie the afternoon Trixie’s parakeet flew into a bathroom mirror and drowned in the toilet. She made it the morning after she’d first slept with Seth.

Today, when she had gone to the grocery store to gather the ingredients, she found herself standing in the middle of the baking goods aisle with her mind blank. The recipe, which had always been as familiar to her as her own name, had been wiped out of her memory. She could not have said whether cardamom was part of the spice regimen, or if it was coriander. She completely forgot to buy eggs.

It was no easier when Laura came home and took out a stew pot.

only to find herself wondering what on earth she was supposed to put inside it. Frustrated, she made herself sit down at the kitchen table and write what she remembered of the recipe, aware that there were huge gaps and missing ingredients. Her mother, who’d died when Laura was twenty-two, had told her that writing the recipe down was a good way to have it stolen; Laura hated to think that this magic would end with her own carelessness.

It was while she was staring at the blanks on the page that Trixie came downstairs. “What are you making?” she asked, surveying the hodgepodge of ingredients on the kitchen counter. “Sorrow Pie,” Laura answered.

Trixie frowned. “You’re missing the vinegar. And the carrots.

At half the spices.” She backed into the pantry and began to pull jars. “Not to mention the chicken.” The chicken. How had Laura forgotten that? Trixie took a mixing bowl out and began to measure the flour and baking powder for the crust. “You don’t have Alzheimer’s, do you?” Laura couldn’t remember ever teaching her daughter the way to make Sorrow Pie, yet here Trixie was passing the whisk to her left hand and closing her eyes as she poured the milk. Laura got up from the kitchen table and started peeling the pearl onions she’d bought, only to forget why she’d begun when she was halfway through.

 

She was too busy recalling the look on Daniel’s face when he’d finished his first serving, after hearing of his mother’s death.

How the deep vertical lines between his eyes smoothed clear, how his hands stopped shaking. She was thinking of how many helpings this family would need to come close to approximating normal. She was wondering how her mother never thought it important enough to tell her that missing a step might have grave consequences, not only for the person dining but also for the chef.

The phone rang when they had just finished putting the top crust on the pie and painting their initials across it in vanilla.

“It’s Zeph,” Trixie told Laura. “Can you hang up while I go upstairs?” She handed Laura the phone, and moments later, Laura heard her pick up an extension. As tempted as Laura was to listen, she hung up. When she turned around, she noticed the pie, ready and waiting to be baked.

It was as if it had been dropped down onto the counter from above. “Well,” she said out loud, and she shrugged. She lifted it up to slide it into the oven.

An hour later, when the pie was cooling, Laura hovered in front of it. She had intended this to be supper but found herself digging for a fork. What was just a taste became a bite; what started as a bite turned into a mouthful. She stuffed her cheeks; she burned her tongue. She ate until there were no crumbs left in the baking dish, until every last carrot and clove and butter bean had disappeared. And still she was hungry.

Until that moment, she’d forgotten this about Sorrow Pie, too: No matter how much you consumed, you would not have your fill.

When Venice Prudhomme saw Bartholemew walking into her lab, she told him no before he’d even asked his question. Whatever he wanted, she couldn’t do it. She’d rushed the date rape drug test for him, and that was difficult enough, but the lab was in transition, moving from an eight-locus DNA system to a sixteen-locus system, and their usual backlog had grown to enormous proportions.

Just hear me out, he’d said, and he started begging.

Venice had listened, arms crossed. I thought this was a rape case.

It was. Until the rapist died, and suicide didn’t check out.

What makes you think you ‘ve got the right perp ? It’s the rape victim’s father, Bartholemew had said. If your kid was raped, what would you want to do to the guy who did it? In the end, Venice still said no. It would take a while for her to do a full DNA test, even one that she put at the top of the pile. But something in his desperation must have struck her, because she told him that she could at least give him a head start. She’d been part of the validation team for a portion of the sixteen-locus system and still had some leftovers from her kit.

The DNA extraction process was the same; she’d be able to use that sample to run the other loci once the lab came up for some air.

Bartholemew fell asleep waiting for her to complete the test.

At four in the morning, Venice knelt beside him and shook him awake. “You want the good news or the bad news?” He sighed. “Good.” “I got your results.” That was excellent news. The medical examiner had already told Bartholemew that the dirt and river silt on the victim’s hand might have contaminated the blood to the point where DNA testing was impossible due to dropout. “What’s the bad news?” “You’ve got the wrong suspect.” Mike stared at her. “How can you tell? I haven’t even given you a control sample from Daniel Stone yet.” “Maybe the kid who got raped wanted revenge even more than her dad did.” Venice pushed the results toward him. “I did an amelogenin test . . . it’s the one we run on nuclear DNA to determine gender. And the guy who left your drop of blood behind?” Venice glanced up. “He’s a girl.” Zephyr gave Trixie the details. The service was at two o’clock at the Bethel Methodist Church, followed by an interment ceremony at the Westwind Cemetery. She said that school was closing early, that’s how many people were planning on attending. The six juniors on the hockey team had been asked to serve as pallbearers. In memoriam, three senior girls had dyed their hair black.

Trixie’s plan was simple: She was going to sleep through Jason’s funeral, even if she had to swallow a whole bottle of NyQuil to do it. She pulled the shades in her room, creating an artificial night, and crawled under her covers - only to have them yanked down a moment later.

You don’t think I’m going to let you off the hook, do you? She knew he was standing there before she even opened her eyes.

Jason leaned against her dresser, one elbow already morphing through the wood. His eyes had faded almost entirely; all Trixie could see were holes as deep as the sky.

“The whole town’s going,” Trixie whispered. “You won’t notice if I’m not there.” Jason sat down on top of the covers. What about you, Trix? Will you notice when I’m not here? She turned onto her side, willing him to go away. But instead she felt him curl up behind her, spooning, his words falling over her ear like frost. If you don’t come, he whispered, how will you know I’m really gone? She felt him disappear a little while after that, taking all the extra air in the room. Finally, gasping, Trixie got out of bed and threw open the three windows in her bedroom. It was twenty degrees outside, and the wind whipped at the curtains. She stood in front of one window and watched people in dark suits and black dresses exit their houses, their cars being drawn like magnets past Trixie’s house.

Trixie peeled off her clothes and stood shivering in her closet. What was the right outfit to wear to the funeral of the only boy you’d ever loved? Sackcloth and ashes, a ring of thorns, regret? What she needed was an invisibility cloak, like the kind her father sometimes drew for his comic book heroes, something sheer that would keep everyone from pointing fingers and whispering that this was all her fault.

The only dress Trixie owned in a dark color had short sleeves, so she picked out a pair of black pants and paired it with a navy cardigan. She’d have to wear boots anyway, because of all the snow, and they’d look stupid with a skirt. She didn’t know if she could do this - stand at Jason’s grave while people passed his name around like a box of sweets - but she did know that if she stayed in her room during this funeral, as she’d planned to, it would all come back to haunt her.

She glanced around her room again, checking the top of the dresser and under the bed and in her desk drawers for something she knew was missing, but in the end, she had to leave without her courage or risk being late.

During her studies of rebellion, Trixie had learned which floorboards in the hallway screamed like traitors and which ones would keep a secret. The trickiest one was right in front of her father’s office door - she sometimes wondered if he’d had the builder do that on purpose, thinking ahead. To get past him without making any noise, Trixie had to edge along the inside wall of the house, then slide in a diagonal and hope she didn’t crash into the banister. From there, it was just a matter of avoiding the third and seventh stairs, and she was home free. She could take the bus that stopped three blocks away from her house, ride it downtown, and then walk to the church.

Her father’s office door was closed. Trixie took a deep breath, crept, slid, and hopped her way silently down the stairs. The floor of the mudroom looked like the scene of a dismemberment: a mess of scattered boots and discarded jackets and tossed gloves. Trixie pulled what she needed from the pile, wrapped a scarf around the lower half of her face, and gingerly opened the door.

Her father was sitting in his truck with the motor running, as if he’d been waiting for her all along. As soon as he saw her exiting the house, he unrolled the power window. “Hop in.” Trixie approached the truck and peered inside. “Where are you going?” Her father reached over and opened the door for her. “Same place you are.” As he twisted in his seat to back out of the driveway, Trixie could see the collared shirt and tie he was wearing under his winter jacket.

They drove in silence for two blocks. Then, finally, she asked, “How come you want to go?” “I don’t.” Trixie watched the swirling snow run away from their tires to settle in the safe center of the divided highway. Dots between painted dashes, they spelled out in Morse code the unspoken rest of her father’s sentence: But you do.

Laura sat in the student center, wishing she was even an eighth as smart as the advice ladies who wrote “Annie’s Mailbox.” They knew all the answers, it seemed, without even trying.

In the days after Jason’s death, she’d become addicted to the column, craving it as much as her morning cup of coffee. My daughterin-law started her marriage as a size four, and now she’s plus plus plus. She’s a wonderful person, but her health is a concern for me. I’ve given her books and exercise videos, but none of it helps. What can I do? Skinny in Savannah My 14-year-old son has started replacing his boxer shorts with silky thong underwear he found in a catalog. Is this a style that hasn’t hit my hometown yet, or should I be worried about cross-dressing? Nervous in Nevada On her deathbed, my great-aunt just confided a secret to me - that my mother was born as the result of an extramarital affair.

Do I tell my mother I know the truth? Confused in California Lauras obsession grew in part from the fact that she was not the only one walking around with questions. Some of the letters were frivolous, some cut through her heart. All of them hinted at a universal truth: At any crossroads in life, half of us are destined to take a wrong turn.

She opened the newspaper to the right page, skimming past the Marmaduke cartoon and the crossword puzzle to find the advice column, and nearly spilled her cup of coffee. I’ve been having an affair. It’s over, and I’m sorry it ever happened. I want to tell my husband so that I can start fresh. Should I? Repentant in Rochester Laura had to remind herself to breathe.

We can’t say this enough, the advice columnists answered. What people don’t know can’t hurt them. You’ve already done your spouse a great disservice. Do you really think it’s fair to cause him pain, just so you can clear your conscience? Be a big girl, they wrote. Actions have consequences.

Her heart was pounding so hard she looked up, certain that everyone in the room would be staring.

She had been careful not to ask herself the question she should have: If Trixie hadn’t gotten raped, if Daniel hadn’t called her office the night she’d been breaking off her affair with Seth - would she ever have confessed? Would she have kept it to herself, a stone in her soul, a cancer clouding her memory? What people don’t know can’t hurt them.

The problem with coming clean was that you thought you were clearing the slate, starting over, but it never quite worked that way. You didn’t erase what you’d done. As Laura knew now, the stain would still be there, every time he looked at you, before he remembered to hide the disappointment in his eyes.

Laura thought of what she had not told Daniel, the things he had not told her. The best decisions in a marriage were based not on honesty but on the number of casualties that the truth might cause, versus the number saved by ignorance.

With great care, she folded the edge of the newspaper and ripped it gently along the crease. She did this until the advice column had been entirely cut out. Then she folded the article and slipped it under the strap of her bra. The ink smudged on Laura’s fingers, the way it sometimes did when she read the paper. She imagined a tattoo that might go through flesh and bone and blood to reach her heart - a warning, a reminder not to make the same mistake.

“Ready?” Daniel asked.

Trixie had been sitting in the truck for five minutes, watching townspeople crowd into the tiny Methodist church. The principal had gone in, as well as the town manager and the selectmen. Two local television stations were broadcasting from the steps of the church, with anchors Daniel recognized from the evening news.

“Yes,” Trixie said, but she made no move to get out of the truck.

Daniel pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out of the truck. He walked around to the passenger door and opened it, unbuckling Trixie’s seat belt just like he used to when she was a baby. He held her hand as she stepped out, into the shock of the cold.

They took three steps. “Daddy,” she said, stopping, “what if I can’t do this?” Her hesitation made him want to carry her back to the truck, hide her so securely that no one would ever hurt her again. But - as he’d learned the hard way - that wasn’t possible.

He slid an arm around her waist. “Then I’ll do it for you,” he said, and he guided her up the steps of the church, past the shocked wide eyes of the television cameras, through an obstacle course of hissed whispers, to the place where she needed to be.

For a single moment, the focus of everyone in the church swung from the boy in the lily-draped coffin to the girl walking through the double doors.

Outside, left alone, Mike Bartholemew emerged from behind a potbellied oak and crouched beside the trail of boot prints that Daniel and Trixie Stone had left in the snow. He lay a ruler down beside the best print of the smaller track and took a camera from his pocket for a few snapshots. Then he sprayed the print with aerosol wax and let the red skin dry on the snow before he spread dental stone to make a cast.

By the time the mourners adjourned to their cars to caravan to the cemetery for the interment service, Bartholemew was headed back to the police department, hoping to match Trixie Stone’s boot to the mystery print left in the snow on the bridge where Jason Underhill had died.

“Blessed are those who mourn,” said the minister, “for they will be comforted.” Trixie pressed herself more firmly against the back wall of the church. From here, she was completely blocked by the rest of the people who’d come for Jason’s memorial service. She didn’t have to stare at the gleaming coffin. She didn’t have to see Mrs.

Underhill, slumped against her husband.

“Friends, we gather here to comfort and support each other in this time of loss . . . but most of all we come here to remember and celebrate the mortal life of Jason Adam Underhill and his blessed future at the side of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The minister’s words were punctuated by the tight coughs of men who’d promised themselves they wouldn’t cry and the quicksilver hiccups of the women who’d known better than to make a promise they couldn’t keep.

“Jason was one of those golden boys that the sun seemed to follow. Today, we remember him for the way he could make us laugh with a joke and the devotion he applied to everything he did.

We remember him as a loving son and grandson, a caring cousin, a steadfast friend. We remember him as a gifted athlete and a diligent student. But most of all we remember him because Jason, in the short time we had with him, managed to touch each and every one of us.” The first time Jason touched Trixie, they were in his car, and he was illegally teaching her how to drive. You have to let up on the clutch while you shift, he explained, as she’d jerked the little Toyota around an empty parking lot. Maybe I should just wait until I’m sixteen, Trixie had said when she’d stalled for the bazillionth time. Jason had laced his fingers between hers on the stick shift, guiding her through the motions, until all she could think about was the temperature of his hand heating hers. Then Jason had grinned at her. Why wait? The minister’s voice grew like a vine. “In Lamentations 3, we hear these words: My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, ‘Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.’ We, whom Jason left behind, must wonder if these were the thoughts that weighed heavy on his heart, that led him to believe there was no other way out.” Trixie closed her eyes. She had lost her virginity in a field of lupine behind the ice rink, where the Zamboni shavings were dumped, an artificial winter smack in the middle of the September flowers. Jason had borrowed the key from the rinkmaster and taken her skating after the rink was closed for the day. He’d laced up her skates and told her to close her eyes. Then he’d reached for her hands, skating backward so fast she felt like she was falling to earth. We’re writing in cursive, he told her as he pulled in a straight line. Can you read it? Then he looped the breadth of the rink, skated a circle, a right angle, a tinier loop, finishing with a curl. I LOVE U? Trixie had recited, and Jason had laughed.

Close enough, he’d said. Later, in that field, with the pile of snow hiding them from sight, Jason had again been moving at lightning speed, and Trixie could not quite keep up. When he pushed inside her, she turned her head to watch the lupine tremble on their shivering stems, so that he wouldn’t realize he’d hurt her.

“In the past few days, you who are Jason’s family and friends have been struggling with the questions that surround his death.