With luck, Dylan could be out in a couple of years.

Good old Phil.

Richard’s mouth tightened. He wished he could be the one to help his brother, but Phil Maris must have moved up the food chain since he’d been fired. He evidently had connections in high places now. Maybe he’d had some even then. The whole incident of the firing from Drummond had been swept under the rug. Nobody but Richard, Drummond’s warden, and maybe Dylan knew he’d gotten canned. The official story was that he got a better position in St. Cloud.

Richard dismissed Phil from his mind.

In the mirror, the image of his face softened, saddened. “Sara was good to me; we were good for each other. I shall miss her,” he whispered. Shrugging into his new coat, he took a last look in the glass. Satisfied, he headed downstairs to the waiting limousine.

Valhalla Cemetery was outside of town, situated on gentle rolling hills, wooded at the crests, with the headstones filling the valleys. There wasn’t a nicer place to be dead than Valhalla. The plot had cost a bundle, but it came with perpetual care, and Richard knew it would please Sara’s friends. They would believe her to be resting easier there than in a more crowded, less scenic graveyard in the old part of town.

It was January; the trees were black and wiry and the hillsides dun colored. An early thaw warmed the temperature to near fifty. Muddy remnants of snow were shrinking, filling the narrow lanes with running water. Richard winced as it ran over his new dress shoes but held steady to help Ellen and Sara’s other best friend, Opal, from of the back of the limousine.

Across the dead grass a clot of people waited at the gravesite, standing on three sides of the hole, staring expectantly into it as if it were giving instead of receiving today. On the fourth side of the grave, incongruously kelly green under a covering of fake grass, was the soil that had been removed. It was oozing back into the earth in drips and drabs as the ice melted.

Dr. Ravi, not yet American enough to know he didn’t have to show his respect for the dead if they didn’t have an MD, stood alone and to one side. In a tight group at the opposite end stood Dylan and two “counselors.” Discounting the psychiatrists and high school teachers, Richard doubted if there were half a dozen college degrees in all of Drummond.

“Brother,” he said and left Sara’s friends looking daggers after him, past him, toward Dylan. Richard hugged his brother and was startled to feel hard muscle where a boy should have been.

Dylan leaned awkwardly into him and Richard realized they had him in handcuffs. Anger flashed through him like klieg lights coming on in a dimly lit theater; suddenly every corner was thrown into stark relief. Illusion was destroyed, stark reality exposed.

The men who had brought his brother to his adopted mother’s funeral in shackles had no more original thought than dumb animals. Far from stirring compassion in his breast, it made him want to bludgeon them with a sledgehammer the way they felled cattle at slaughter houses. For a brief moment, time enough for the guards to see the darkness behind his gaze and shift uncomfortably without knowing why they did, he considered them as dead meat. With the barest of nods, he released them. It would be inappropriate to make a scene at a funeral.

Dylan smiled, shrugging off the embarrassment of the manacles. Clumsily, he clasped Richard’s arm in lieu of a hug. “Whoa,” Dylan said and banged gently on his brother’s arm, pretending to listen as if to ringing steel. “Been working out, huh?”

Richard was inordinately pleased by the compliment. Though he courted admiration, he didn’t really care much about it. But when it came from Dylan, Richard basked in it. He was Dylan’s best friend. And Dylan was his.

“You, too, buddy,” he returned the compliment sincerely. “Pumping iron? Don’t go cliché on me. I don’t want you coming out looking like Bluto.”

For a moment they grinned at each other, foolish as puppies. Then, “Hey, man, I’m sorry about Sara,” Dylan said quietly.

Remembering where they were, Richard sobered up as well. “Sara was good to me; we were good for each other. I’m going to miss her. It’s my fault… ” he began and was surprised to feel tears welling up.

“You can’t take that on yourself. You took care of her as well as she took care of you,” Dylan said. “You remember that. You carry the weight of the world, brother. Put some of it down. This one isn’t yours.”

The minister made come-to-order noises. Richard stepped away from his brother to share himself with Opal and Ellen. Ellen, the closer of the two, took his arm possessively and glared at Dylan as if he was going to murder them all.

After the service was read and Richard had dropped a clump of mud onto the casket’s lid-there wasn’t a dry handful of dirt to be had in all of Valhalla at that moment-the two brothers, two elderly ladies, and two prison guards watched the pastor leave, hurrying over the wet sod, picking and hopping like a water bird trying to scare up lunch.

“I wish we could have had Father Probst,” Ellen said sadly.

Richard groaned softly. Opal hissed, “Ellen!”

Ellen, looking older than she had on the drive out to the cemetery, her nose reddened with the chill, her eyes with crying, grabbed the breast over her heart as if stricken. “Honey, I am so sorry. I just meant… ”

“I know what you meant,” Richard said kindly and tucked her strong, chapped fingers under his arm. “I wish she could have had her priest as well. Mass was a comfort to her. I just wish I could have helped. I knew she didn’t want to move back into that house. Being there preyed on her mind. Jesus.” Tears had come again. Richard dropped Ellen’s hand to fumble under his coat for a handkerchief.

Opal snatched his arm. “There was nothing you could do, honey,” she insisted. “Sara’d been depressed for so long. Since her divorce really and then, well, you know, her son and all. You gave her more happiness than she would ever have had. Don’t you think different. Sara wouldn’t allow it,” she said trying for cheer.

“Sara spoiled me rotten,” Richard admitted. “Whatever I wanted, she let me have.”

“She couldn’t say no to you, could she?” Ellen said, and then she started to cry again.

“I think she was spoiled herself!” Opal said in sudden startling anger. “This was a rotten, selfish thing if you ask me. Doing like that! What did she think it was going to do to her friends? To you? I don’t think I’ll ever forgive her for letting you find her like she did.”

“Rich?”

Dylan’s voice cut through the outpouring of emotion that was choking Richard. He was glad of an excuse to move away from the women. Opal’s hand pulled out from the crook of his arm, catching and dragging at him like a strangling vine. It was all he could do not to jerk free.

“Bad day, brother,” he said smiling sheepishly at Dylan.

“No shit. Look, I’ve got to go. Sorry. You know I’d stay if I could. Those biddies are liable to feed you to death on casseroles and cake without somebody to back you up.”

“Let my brother come home for a bite,” Richard said winningly to the smartest-looking guard.

“Sorry. The service is all,” the man replied stoutly.

His nose was redder than the fifty-degree temperature and pleasant breeze could account for. This guy liked his booze.

“Come on,” Richard urged. “You and your partner could use a little stiffener, a little something to take off the chill. What do you say? I get the comfort of family; you get a break from routine.” Richard’s smile was a beauty. When it came to dentistry, Sara made sure he spent money on himself.

Rudolf the Red-nosed looked at his cohort. “Whaddyasay?” He could already taste the booze, Richard could tell. The other guard probably had his own addictions but Richard guessed they had nothing to do with drugs and all to do with the boys he “counseled.”