"They started having huge fights. Not the big ones in front of me. Always after I went to bed. My room was upstairs and way at the back of the house but I could still hear them. Not words, just shouting. Crashes. Crying. In the morning sometimes things would be broken. I was older by this time, I must've been twelve because I remember Mrs. Dent, my sixth-grade teacher, sending me to a counselor because I kept falling asleep in class. The counselor was okay but sort of fixated on drugs, like I was a junkie. I didn't tell him anything."

Rory looked at Anna. It was the first time he'd dragged his eyes from visions of the past. "I thought it was Dad," he said clearly. "I thought Dad was beating Carolyn. They tell us about that stuff in school and you see movies about it on TV all the time. I didn't even know it could be the other way around. I mean, Dad was stronger than she was. Why didn't he stop her?"

The question was pushed out with such intensity Anna could tell he'd been living with it for a long time. Now, with childlike insistence, he was waiting for her to answer it, and she couldn't.

"Did you ever ask him?" she said instead.

Rory was disappointed. He slumped back against the wall and his gaze slipped away again to other times. "Once," he replied. "He said she didn't mean it. He said she was high-strung. He said it was hard for her to be married to an older man. He said he could be pretty aggravating sometimes." Rory was silent for a minute and Anna thought he'd finished. But he wasn't. In a voice constricted with rage and shame he said, "Then he told me he didn't mind.He was in the hospital when he said it. Carolyn had hit him in the face with this metal stool she kept in the kitchen to reach high shelves. The underside of the seat was real sharp. She nearly cut half his face off. You can still see the scar." Anna had seen it-the thin white line that marked off a semicircle of Lester's face. They'd been looking for a motive for the slicing off of Carolyn's brow, cheek and half her nose. This certainly fit the bill. For both father and son.

"Did she ever hit you?" Anna asked.

"Not really. She started to get after me once when I was thirteen or fourteen. I was in the backyard hitting a ball into the fence and something set her off. She came out and headed for me. It scared me so bad I raised the bat. I think I'd have used it too. By then I'd pretty much figured out why Dad was always bruised or limping-she'd already put him in the hospital twice, once for a broken collarbone and the other time for a ruptured eardrum, I think-anyway, her coming at me like that was scary. When she saw I meant to fight she just stopped. Then she laughed and said, 'That's right, Rory, don't take any shit. Not from anybody.' "

"She never knocked you around when you were little? Slapped you, shook you, anything like that?"

"Just Dad," Rory said.

In a sick sort of way it made sense. Carolyn wasn't into child abuse, just the abuse of men. At fourteen Rory had been becoming a man.

Maybe in Carolyn's world there were only two kinds of men: those whom you beat and those who beat you.

"You seemed to get along with her well enough," Anna said mildly.

"Yeah. Well. At least she didn't let anybody beat on her."

That pretty much summed it up. Rory'd gotten lost between a stepmother he feared and a father he'd been ashamed of. A child's natural survival instincts kicked in and he aligned himself with the stronger caregiver, learned from her to scorn his father. Anna had to wonder how far it had gone.

"Ever get so frustrated with Les you wanted to smack him upside the head yourself?" she asked sympathetically.

"Sometimes," Rory admitted. Anger animated his voice as he elaborated. "How could anyone not? He'd get like those little yippy dogs that squeal and tuck their tails between their legs before you've even kicked them. Then you wantto kick them."

Anna understood the phenomenon. "Ever do it? Ever kick them?"

"Hit Dad?" He thought about what, on the surface, was a simple question for a long time. Too long to be fabricating a lie. Anna guessed that on so many occasions over so many years Rory had wanted to strike out against the humiliation he felt in the person of his father, that he was either making sure he'd never actually done it or he was counting the number of strikes. Anna dearly hoped it was the former. To be beaten by one's own child must be a torment only Shakespeare and God could comprehend.

At length Rory spoke. "I wanted to," he admitted. "But I never did. Mom-my real mom-wouldn't have liked it. I wanted Dad to fight back. At least I did at first. Sometimes I was glad when Carolyn hurt him. He was so… so pathetic. It made me sick."

Rory looked sick. Anna felt sick. They sat in sick, wretched silence for a while, the ghosts of Rory's childhood twining about them.

Anna fought off the hopeless lethargy they exuded and asked, "Did you ever fight back for him?"

Rory'd been sitting, head back against the wood siding, eyes closed. The sun touched the down on his cheeks, lighting the fine golden hairs, giving him an ethereal, unfinished look. He opened his eyes at Anna's question and the lines of his face firmed up. "You mean did I kill Carolyn?" he asked without seeming much to care whether Anna thought him a murderer or not.

"More or less," Anna admitted. "I didn't," he said simply. "I was just plain lost." Anna couldn't tell if he was telling the truth or not. He'd closed his eyes again, gone away to someplace inside his head and she could read nothing but distance and weariness on his face.

"I believe you," she said. If he was telling the truth, her lie couldn't hurt. If he wasn't, it might put him off his guard. "Is this why you were blackmailing me?" she asked. "So I wouldn't find out your dad was beaten?"

Rory nodded wordlessly. "Is that bullshit over?" "It's over," he said. "It sucked, Rory. Really sucked." "I know." "I've got to go." She levered herself up from the porch floor. "You gonna talk to Dad?" Rory asked without opening his eyes. "I thought I would." "If Dad killed her I hope you never can prove it." Anna didn't say anything. Had it not been for the butchery, she might have shared the sentiment. The act of cutting away Carolyn's face was anger gone so insane its perpetrator had best be caught and removed from society.

Sudden light-headedness reminded Anna she'd not eaten since the night before, and she set off on foot to walk the half-mile to Joan's house. Expecting to spend the day in the resource management office, she'd not thought to ask Harry for the use of a vehicle. After food, transportation was next on her list.

Rarely did Anna find it a burden to walk instead of ride. This afternoon was no exception. The mere act of putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward completely on one's own will and strength, gave life a sense of purpose and control. And there was that adage about regular movement of the legs that stimulated orderly progression in the brain.

Houses, trees, cars, gopher holes and thimbleberry bushes flowed by externally. Internally Anna pondered borrowed shame-Rory's for his dad-abandonment, fear, self-worth, violence, childhood trauma, family roles: scapegoat, victim, hero, mascot. The bits and pieces of codependency theory that she'd picked up from listening to her sister, Molly, had a place in the shattered family dynamics that Rory had grown up in the midst of.

His natural mother had abandoned him via death when he was five. According to Rory's account, Les had abandoned him over the next two years via depression. Then Carolyn came on the scene and the neuroses and psychoses really started to roll.

That sort of thing didn't make people into murderers. But it was bound to help. The circumstances of Rory's thirty-six hours missing had, at first, seemed to make his murdering Carolyn remote to the point of ludicrousness. Taken with this new information, Anna was seeing it in a new light. Rory is traumatized by the attack of the bear slashing at a person-Joan-for whom he cares, and threatening, indirectly since the bear did not see or approach him, his own safety. Rory runs, panicked. Then, quite by accident, he meets another frightening figure, Carolyn, who for much of his life played the same role as the grizzly. Under the influence of fear, opportunism and post-traumatic-stress disorder, Rory strikes out, kills her.