One more night. One more night. Everyone had said she couldn’t stay in the hospital beyond today, but she’d gotten one more night out of them, which just proved what she had always believed: Everybody lied, all the time. One more night. There had been a hideous pop song with that title, years ago, a spurned lover begging for a final bout of lovemaking. It was a frequent motif in pop music, come to think of it. Touch me in the morning. I can’t make you love me if you don’t . She had never understood this. When she was younger, still trying to date-and, big surprise, failing miserably time and time again-the men usually ended up leaving her a few months in, almost as if they could smell the rottenness coming off her, as if they had found her secret sell-by date and realized how ruined she was. At any rate, when a man broke off with her, the last thing she wanted from him was one more night. Sometimes she threw things, and sometimes she cried. Sometimes she laughed, relieved. But she never resorted to begging for one more night, a touch in the morning, a pity fuck however you sliced or diced it. You took your pride where you could find it.

She eased herself out of the bed, everything aching, her body already sensing that the left arm was not to be counted on, not for a while, that the right arm had to pick up the slack. Amazing how quickly the body adjusted, much faster than the mind. Her mind was far from reliable these days. Did I see a boy and think he was a girl, or was there never a face at the window at all? She went to the window, pulled aside the curtain, and studied the landscape-the parking lot, the smudge of city skyline in the distance, the clogged lanes of I-95 at rush hour. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! A line of poetry stuck in her head, a legacy of the nuns, who believed you could memorize your way to intelligence. The highway was near, not even a mile away. Could she get there, put out her thumb and hitch a ride home? No, she’d be a fugitive twice over then. She had to tough this out. But how?

It wasn’t the lies that worried her. She could keep track of the lies. It was the bits of truths that put her at risk. A good liar survives by using as little truth as possible, because the truth trips you up far more often. Back when she’d been in the habit of changing names, she had learned to create each new identity fresh, to carry nothing forward. But the threat of jail this afternoon, just like the possibility of arrest that first night, had freaked her out. She had to say something. It had seemed pretty inspired, telling them about the cop, throwing Karl Malden into the mix. Odd, tangential details like that made everything else sound authentic. But they weren’t going to settle for Karl Malden. They were clamoring for a real name, and she was going to have to give them something, someone.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the night sky.

She wasn’t sure who worried her more, the dead or the living, who posed the most risk. But at least you could bluff the living. You couldn’t put anything over on the dead.

Agnihotra mantras are to be uttered in their original form in Sanskrit.

They are not to be translated into any other language…

Agnihotra mantras are to be uttered in rhythmically balanced tone so the sound vibrates throughout the entire household. The tone should not be too loud or too weak nor should it be done in a hurry… The feeling of total surrender is developed through the utterance of these mantras.

– Adapted from instructions on how to perform the Agnihotra, the sunrise/sunset ritual central to the practice of the Fivefold Path

Sunset fast approaching, Dave grabbed the ghee from the refrigerator and headed into the study, leaving Chet at the kitchen table with Miriam and their mugs of tea. They weren’t even trying to speak, just sipping herbal tea and staring off into space. Everyone was exhausted and hoarse after the full day of interviews, although Dave had done most of the talking. Miriam deferred to Dave, and the detective seldom spoke at all. Sometimes Dave found Willoughby ’s silence comforting. Men of action should be laconic. Other times he suspected that these still waters didn’t run particularly deep. But Chet was familiar to them now, like a dignified stray they had adopted after years of saying they didn’t want the bother of a dog.

In his study he sat cross-legged on his rug, not a proper prayer rug-other than the copper pot for the offering, the Agnihotra did not require ritual objects, which was a large part of its charm-but a dhurrie he’d found in an Indian market years ago, when he was traveling after college. His mother had still lived in Baltimore then, and he’d shipped his treasures to her apartment, despite her complaints and suspicions. “What’s in these boxes?” she had berated him upon his homecoming. “Drugs? If the police come to my door, I am not lying for you.”

He put a dung cake in the pot, adding a piece of ghee-soaked camphor, followed by the rest of the dung and the rice grains, checking his watch to see if the exact moment of sunset had arrived.

“Agnaye Svaha,” he said, offering the first part of the ghee-smeared rice grains. “Agnaye Idam Na Mama.”

People often assumed that the Fivefold Path was another souvenir from his travels, but Dave was married to Miriam and working for the state when he first heard about it, at a party in Northwest Baltimore. The Fivefold Path turned out to be the nexus for most of the people at the party, held at a beautiful Victorian in Old Sudbrook. Dave had not known such houses existed when he was growing up in Pikesville, much less such people, yet Herb and Estelle Turner lived less than two miles from his mother’s former apartment. The Turners were at once warm and reserved, and Dave assumed that their grave dignity derived from the Fivefold Path. It would be some time before he knew about their troubles with their daughter, or Estelle’s fragile health. And although Miriam had always been skeptical of the couple, claiming they’d been fishing for converts that night, they only brought up the Fivefold Path when Dave asked about the house’s sweet, smoky smell, so unexpected on a warm spring night. He had suspected, hoped for, grass, which he and Miriam were anxious to try. But the fragrance was from the sunrise/sunset ritual of the Agnihotra, and it was almost as if it had baked its way into the bones of the house. As Estelle Turner explained the smell, and its connection to the Fivefold Path, Dave saw it as a way to be the Turners-gracious, poised, living in a beautiful yet unostentatious house.

For her part, Miriam said the Agnihotra made the house smell like shit, literally. Once they moved to Algonquin Lane, she had been adamant that Dave confine the practice to his study, with the doors closed. Even then she had despaired at the greasy residue the ghee left on the walls, a filmy sheen that resisted any and all cleaning methods. Now, Dave suspected, he could set up the ’Hotra on the dining room table and Miriam wouldn’t make a peep. She never reproached him anymore. He almost missed it. Almost.

Still your mind, he urged himself. Focus on your mantra. There was no point to the practice if he couldn’t lose himself in it.

“Prajapataye Svaha,” he said, making the second offering. “Prajapataye Idam Na Mama.”

Now he must meditate until the fire was out.

THE REPORTERS HAD come in threes-three newspapers, three television stations, three radio stations, three wire services. In each group there had been one reporter who pushed for an exclusive, a private chat with Dave and Miriam, but those young comers professed to understand when Chet told them that the Bethanys preferred to tell the story only so many times, once to each medium. The reporters were uniformly polite and kind, wiping their feet on the welcome mat, expressing admiration for the remodeled farmhouse, not that any work had been done in the past year. Their voices were gentle, their questions circumspect. One young woman, from Channel 13, teared up prettily while looking at the girls’ photos. These were not the school photos, the head shots against the sky-blue background. The television types explained to Dave and Miriam that these photos had been shown so many times that they had “lost their impact,” and it would be helpful to use new ones. They chose candid snapshots that Dave kept in his study, souvenirs of a trip to the Enchanted Forest on Route 40. Heather was sitting on a toadstool, cross-legged, while Sunny stood with arms akimbo, trying to pretend she wasn’t having a good time. But it had been a wonderful day, as Dave remembered it, with Sunny’s adolescent moodiness barely in evidence, everyone tender and sweet with each other.