Emily Kindler had been home alone at the time her boyfriend was believed to have been killed, which meant that she didn’t have an alibi, but that counted for half of the town too. The gas in the Faraday house had been turned on sometime after midnight and before 2 A.M., at best reckoning. Again, most of the people in town were home in bed at that time.

But the chief didn’t really suspect the Kindler girl of any involvement in Bobby Faraday’s death and, by extension, any suspicions that he had about how Bobby’s parents had met their end did not center on her, even though he considered the possibility of her involvement out of due diligence. When the chief had quietly mentioned Emily as a suspect to Homer Lockwood, the assistant ME, who was a resident in the town and knew both Emily and the Faradays by sight, the old man had just laughed.

“She doesn’t have the strength, not to do what was done to Bobby Faraday,” he told the chief. “Those aren’t arms of steel.”

So when Emily told the chief that she planned to leave town, he could hardly have blamed her. He did request that she notify him when she settled down somewhere, and keep him apprised of her movements for a time, and she agreed to do so, but he had no reason to prevent her from going. She gave the chief a cell phone number at which she could be contacted, and the address of a resort hotel in Miami where she intended to seek work as a waitress, and told him that she would be willing to return at any time if she could be of help in the investigation, but when Dashut eventually tried to contact her, the cell phone number was no longer in use, and the manager of the Miami resort told him that she had never taken up his offer of a job.

Emily Kindler, it seemed, had vanished.

Emily headed northeast. She wanted to smell the sea, to clear her senses. She wanted to try to shake whatever was shadowing her. It had found her in that small midwestern town, though, and it had taken the Faradays. It would find her again, she knew, but she wasn’t prepared simply to lie down in a dark corner and wait for it to happen. In the distance, Canada beckoned.

Men looked at her as she sat on the Greyhound bus, watching the monotonous flat landscape gradually transform into gentle hills, snow still thick upon them. A guy in a worn leather jacket who smelled of sweat and pheromones tried to talk to her at one of the rest stops, but she turned away from him and resumed her seat behind the driver, a man in his late fifties who sensed her vulnerability but, unlike others, had no intention of exploiting it. Instead, he had taken her under his wing, and glared balefully at any male below the age of seventy who threatened to take the empty seat beside the girl. When the man in the leather jacket got back on the bus and seemed intent on changing seats to be closer to the object of his interest, the driver told him to sit his ass back down and not to move again until they hit Boston.

Still, the man’s attentions made Emily think of Bobby, and she felt tears well. She had not loved him, but she had liked him. He was funny and sweet and awkward, at least until he started drinking, when some of his anger and frustration at his father, the small town, even her, would bubble to the surface.

Bupond

She had never been entirely sure what she wanted in a man. Sometimes, she thought that she caught some inkling of it, a brief flash of what she sought, like a light briefly glimpsed in the darkness. She would respond to it, and then the man would respond in turn. Sometimes it had been too late for her to retreat, and she had suffered the consequences: verbal abuse, sometimes even physical violence, and, on one occasion, very nearly worse than that.

Like some young men and women her age, she had struggled to find a sense of purpose. The path that she wanted her life to take had not yet become clear to her. She thought that she might become an artist, or a writer, for she loved books and paintings and music. In big cities, she would while away hours in museums and galleries, standing before the great canvases as though she hoped that by doing so she might be absorbed into them, becoming one with their world. When she could afford it, she would buy books. When money was not so freely available, she would go to a library, although the experience of reading a book that she could not call her own was not the same. Still, they gave her a sense of possibility so that she did not feel so lost, so adrift in the world. Others had struggled with some of the same problems that she had, and they had endured.

She did not make it as far as Canada, but stopped off at a town in New Hampshire. She could not have said why, but she had learned to trust her instincts. After a week there, she still had developed no fondness for it, but she stayed despite herself. This was not a community of art or culture. It had one tiny museum, a mishmash of history, most of it local, and art, most of that local too. Any other acquisitions felt like an afterthought, the impulse of those who did not have the funds to match their taste, or, perhaps, the taste to match their funds, in a town that felt a museum was appropriate, even necessary, without fully understanding why. This attitude seemed to have permeated all of its strata, and she could not recall another environment in which creativity was so stifled; or, at least, she could not until she remembered the small town she had once called home. Art and beauty had no place there either, and the house in which she had grown up was barren of all such fripperies. Even magazines had no part to play, unless one counted her father’s stash of porn.

She had not thought of him in so long. Her mother had left when she was still a child, promising to return for her, but she never came back, and in time word came that she had died somewhere in Canada, and had been buried by her new boyfriend’s family. Emily’s father did what was necessary for her education and survival, but little more. She went to school, and always had money for books. They ate adequately, but only at home and never in restaurants. Some money was put aside in a jar for household expenses, and he gave her a little for herself, but she did not know where the rest of his money went. He did not drink to excess, and he did not take drugs. Neither did he ever lay a hand upon her in affection or anger and, as she grew older and her body matured, he was careful never to do or say anything that might be deemed inappropriate or suggestive. For this, she was more grateful than he would ever know. She had heard the tales told by some of the other girls in her school, stories of fathers and stepfathers, of brothers and uncles, of the new boyfriends of tired, lonely mothers. Her father was not such a man. Instead, he merely kept his distance, and his conversations with her to a minimum.

Yet she had never regarded herself as neglected. When she began having trouble at school-acting up in class, crying in the restrooms-as she entered adolescence, her father spoke to the principal and arranged for Bnlys n Emily to see a psychologist, although she chose to share as little with the kindly, soft-spoken man in the rimless glasses as she did with her father. She did not want to speak with a psychologist. She did not want to be perceived as different in any way, and so she did not tell him of the headaches, or the blackouts, or the strange dreams that she had in which something was emerging from a dark pit in the ground, a thing with teeth that gnawed at her soul. She did not speak of her paranoia, or the sense that her identity was a fragile thing that could be lost and broken at any time. After ten sessions, the psychologist concluded that she was what she appeared to be: a normal, if sensitive, girl who would, in time, find her place in the world. There was the possibility that her difficulties presaged something more serious, a form of schizophrenia, perhaps, and he advised both her and, particularly, her father to be aware of any significant changes in her behavior. Her father had looked at her differently after that, and twice in the months that followed she had woken to find him standing in his robe at the door to her room. When she’d asked what was wrong, he told her that she had been shouting in her sleep, and she wondered if he had heard what she might have said.