“I abandoned Miranda years ago,” Claire said. “When she turned up with Katie, I couldn’t say no. And Don didn’t say no, either.”

He rubbed his unshaven face again, shrugged. Don was probably in his early thirties, but he seemed older, and wiser than his years would suggest.

“And that’s why I couldn’t have my picture in the paper,” Trixie said. “Worst fears realized and all that.”

“I saw Merker’s mother, in Canborough,” I said.

“Isn’t she a treat?” Trixie said.

“She said one of Gary’s old friends had called him, said he’d seen the picture in the Oakwood paper. She passed the message on.”

“A real darling.”

“About that night,” I said. “When the three bikers were shot. Did you see Gary do it?”

Trixie hesitated, shook her head. “No.”

“But he thinks you did? You said he’d be wanting to talk to you about that.”

Trixie was about to say something when Katie ran in, her curly-haired head not reaching the top of the kitchen table. “I’m hungry,” she said. She sidled up to Trixie and pressed her head into her side.

“It is getting to be dinnertime,” Claire said.

“Are you going to live here now?” Katie asked Trixie.

“Well, sweetheart, I’ll stay here as long as I can, but you know I can never stay for a long, long time.”

Katie gave Trixie a squeeze, and then said to me, “Do you have two moms?”

“No,” I said.

“I do,” Katie said, beaming.

“You’re very lucky. I just had the one.”

“Does she come and visit you all the time?”

“Not anymore,” I said.

“Is she dead?” Katie’s eyes danced.

“Yes,” I said.

“You must be sad,” Katie said. “I don’t want any of my moms to die.”

No one could think of anything to say to that.

“Are we going to have hamburgers?” Katie asked.

“Chicken,” Claire said.

“Is it with the icky sauce?” Katie asked.

“No. It’s the sauce you like.”

“Okay,” Katie said, and ran back into the living room.

I looked at Trixie, and I guess she could sense a question. She said, “We’ve told her the truth, at least some of it. That I’m her mother, but I’m the mommy who can only come to visit once in a while. But Claire, even though she’s her aunt, is really more like her everyday mother, so she calls her that.”

“Okay,” I said. My next question for Trixie I blurted out before I considered its implications: “If your problems with Merker disappeared, would you become her everyday mommy?”

Claire’s head went up, and I saw something in her face at that moment. Fear, maybe. Fear of giving up a child she’d come to love as if she were her very own, in every way.

“Well,” said Trixie, “I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I think, the way my life seems to be going lately, one threat just gets replaced by another. The thing is, I could never be any better a mother to her than my sister has been.”

And some of the fear bled away from Claire’s face. Maybe this was best for her, that her sister have a life of uncertainty, so that she could keep raising Katie in relative normalcy.

Trixie tapped my arm. “Let’s you and me take a walk. Claire, you okay for dinner, I take a walk with Zack?”

“Sure, go ahead. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

Trixie motioned for me to follow her out the front door, onto the porch. We leaned against the posts that straddled the steps. I chose the one I’d not whacked my head against. We crossed our arms and looked at each other.

“I’m glad you found me,” Trixie said.

“I’m a regular Sherlock,” I said.

“Didn’t even need Lawrence’s help,” she said. “You’re good.”

“I hate to call him for everything.”

“Come on.” We went down the steps, walked around the house and toward the barn. As we passed it, I saw my car, the Virtue, parked around back, where it couldn’t be seen from the highway.

“That car of yours,” Trixie said, “has been nothing but a pain in the ass.”

“I’m sorry. I never would have let you steal it had I known. Yours, by the way, has been trouble-free, despite your bundle of recall notices.”

Trixie made a face that said Go figure. She pointed to mine and said, “Sometimes you try to start it, it won’t go.”

“It hasn’t been doing that for a long time. I thought it was all fixed. I’ll have to get it looked at.”

“Good on gas, though,” she said.

Two dirt ruts with a strip of grass down the middle carried on beyond the barn and into the field. I took the left rut, Trixie the right.

“How’s Sarah?” she asked.

I grimaced. “Things could be better.”

“How much of it’s my fault?”

I appeared to be doing calculations in my head. “I was going to say about seventy-five percent, but that’s not fair. The fault is all mine. I have to accept responsibility for the decisions I’ve made, including those to help you.”

“But those are the ones that have landed you in the doghouse.”

I smiled. “Pretty much.”

“I’ve told you more than once that Sarah’s lucky to have you, even though, at times, I’d have to concede, you are a bit of an asshole.”

“Yeah, well, all the polling we’ve done would seem to indicate that.”

We walked a bit further, and I stopped and looked back at the house in the distance, so tranquil.

Reading my mind, Trixie said, “I wish I could stay here forever.”

I looked up at the sky, and a large bird caught my eye. “Look at the wingspan on that one,” I said, pointing. “That’s a huge bird.”

“What is it?”

“I think it’s a hawk,” I said.

“Looking for field mice, anything else it can find,” Trixie said.

We stood out there a few more moments, not saying anything to each other. Finally, I said, “You have to come back, you know.”

“You think?” Her response was laced with sarcasm.

“The police, I’m not sure they’re convinced you killed Martin Benson. They told me he’d probably been zapped by some sort of stun gun before his neck was slit. We know it was Merker, and we know he’s got stun guns. He’s been trying to sell them to the cops.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got reasons for your actions. I’m sure, you get a good lawyer, you can work things out.”

“I’ve got one,” Trixie said. “Guy named Niles Wagland. He’s pretty good.”

“Okay,” I said. “I mean, look at your situation. You were scared for your daughter’s life. Running away, making sure she was safe, it’s not totally unreasonable. And there’s got to be plenty of evidence against Merker. The note he wrote, for one thing. They’ll test it for prints, do handwriting analysis, who knows, but they’ll be able to figure out it was him. And once they’ve got him in custody, they’ll reopen those murders in Canborough. The guy’ll spend the rest of his life in jail. And then you’ll be able to get on with yours.”

“I don’t know, Zack. There’s a small matter of five hundred thousand dollars.”

“Is Merker going to tell the cops about that? Could he even prove it’s his? That you took it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trixie, you can’t keep running. From Merker, from the police. You need to face these things, sort them out. You need to do it for Katie.”

Trixie stepped over the grass median and into my rut. “Maybe,” she said, “if I could spend my life with someone like you, I’d think about it.”

I said nothing.

“All I’ve ever known are bad men. My father was a bad man. Even Katie’s father-he tried, you know? There was a lot of goodness in him. But he was no poster boy for stability. If he hadn’t ended up getting killed by Gary, he’d have died some other way before long. You can’t live that kind of life and expect it to go on forever. My sister, she got a good one. But my luck, it doesn’t run in that direction.”

“I’m sure there’s someone out there for you. Someone who’d treat you right. Treat you with the respect you deserve.”

“What can I really expect, Zack? Look what I do. I’m a step up from a hooker. I torture men. You know why I think I do that?”