CHAPTER 5
WREN
I don’t sleep.
This is not new; I am, by long and bitter practice, a woman who does not sleep, but there is a difference between the insomnia of a person who is alone and the insomnia of a person who knows, to the foot, exactly how far away the wolf is lying down.
Six hundred and forty. I lie in the dark and I do the math I swore I’d never do again and I listen to the wall the way I trained myself out of listening years ago, and the worst thing, the thing I will take to my grave, is that some animal part of me is doing it on purpose.
Reaching. Checking the line. Making sure he’s still there.
He’s still there. I can feel it the way you feel weather coming in your bad knee. Up the hill, in a house I can’t see, a man who hasn’t slept in six years is lying awake listening for my light to go out, and we are both pretending we are not doing the exact same thing.
I get up at five and I go to work in the dark because work is the only place the math doesn’t follow me.
By seven I’ve broken and driven to the sheriff’s station instead.
The deputy on the desk is new since I stopped coming to places like this.
Eli Marsh. I know his name because everyone in Hartsend knows everyone’s name within a week, it’s that kind of town, the kind where your business is communal property, and he’s the good kind of new, the kind that hasn’t learned yet to look at a woman across a counter and decide in advance how much of her to believe.
He’s got a kind, plain, open face, the face of a man who coaches a kids’ team and means it, and when I say the name Lazarus Frost he doesn’t flinch or smirk or go careful behind the eyes the way the old guard would. He just gets a pad.
“He was in my house last night,” I tell him. “There’s a protective order. Five hundred feet.”
Eli writes. “Did he force entry?”
And there it is. The first tooth of the trap I walked into with my own two feet.
“No,” I say. “The door was unlocked.”
“Did you let him in?”
“I —” I came to you, little lamb. Same as always. Tell the nice judge that part. “No. He was already inside when I got home. I didn’t see him come or go.”
“Any damage? Anything taken?” Eli’s pen has slowed.
He’s not unkind about it. He’s just running the same arithmetic the law always runs, the arithmetic that comes out, every single time, in favor of the patient man and against the frightened woman.
“Witnesses? Camera, neighbor, anything that puts him at the residence?”
“He turned my lights on.” I hear how it sounds. “He turned the heat up. He, he touched my wrist.”
Eli looks up. To his credit, he doesn’t laugh.
To his credit, something in his jaw tightens, like he wants the story to have more in it so he could do something with it.
“Ms. Mercer,” he says gently, “I believe you. I want you to hear me say that, because I don’t think you’ve had a lot of people say it.
I believe you. But a man who’s done six years knows exactly where the lines are.
Turning on a light isn’t a crime. Being in a town isn’t a crime.
He’s got every right to live up that hill, and if it comes down to your word that he was inside against his word that he was home in bed —” He stops.
Starts over, softer. “He served his sentence. As far as the county’s concerned, he’s the one who paid.
You understand what I’m telling you. People are going to want to give him his second chance more than they’re going to want to give you your fear. ”
People are going to want to give him his second chance.
The redemption story. The Frost boy who went away a monster and came back quiet and rehabilitated and wronged, maybe, a little, by the unstable foster girl who’s still telling tales six years later.
I can see it assembling itself already, in Eli’s decent uncertain face, in the whole shape of the town behind him.
I built that monster myself, on a witness stand, in a grey dress, and now the town’s going to hand him back his halo and there’s nothing I can do about it without telling them why I lied, and the why is the one thing I can never, ever say out loud, because the why is a confession, and the confession has a cell in it with my name on the door.
This is the box he’s put me in. This is what six years bought him: not a way to hurt me. A way to make sure no one else can help me.
“Thank you,” I say, and I stand up, and Eli stands too, fast, like he’s not ready to let the conversation be this useless.
“Hey.” He comes around the counter. Up close he smells like coffee and cold air and ordinary life, and I have a sudden vicious want for that, for ordinary, for a man who smells like the surface of the world instead of the bottom of it.
“I get off at six. I could swing by, look at your locks. Off the clock. Just, a guy who knows about locks, looking at locks. That’s not against any rule I know of. ”
It’s such a small kindness. It’s such a normal kindness. And I watch myself reach for it, this lifeline thrown by a man who has no idea he’s standing at the edge of something with teeth, and I open my mouth to say yes —
— and that’s when I see, through the station’s front window, across the street, on the public sidewalk in front of the hardware store, a tall figure standing perfectly still in the falling snow with his hands in his pockets, not looking at me, looking at Eli, the way a wolf looks at a thing that has wandered between it and the only food in the world.
Five hundred feet. He’s measured it. He’s exactly far enough.
“No,” I say to Eli. Too sharp. He blinks. “No, thank you, but no. Please don’t come to my house. Please don’t —” I can’t explain it. Don’t be kind to me where he can see, you have no idea what kindness costs around me. “I have to go.”
I’m across the street before I’ve thought it through, because the only thing worse than being near Lazarus is the idea of him being near anyone I might want to keep.
He watches me come the whole way, and he’s smiling that fond, terrible, almost-smile, and up close in daylight for the first time in six years he is, God help me, he is just beautiful, worn down to something essential and patient, all the boy burned off him, snow caught in his dark hair and not melting, like even the weather knows better than to get too familiar.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say.
“I’m buying a shovel.” He doesn’t take his eyes off the station door behind me, off the shape of Eli still standing in the window.
“Snow’s bad. A man needs a shovel.” Then, mild as milk: “He likes you. The deputy. He coaches the under-tens, did you know? Tuesdays and Thursdays. Drives a green Bronco. Lives over the launderette on Bell Street, second window, leaves it cracked even in winter.” He finally looks at me, and the cold in his eyes is the cold of the lawn at Marrowfield, the snow nothing had walked across in years.
“I’ve had six years to get good at learning the people in a room, Wren.
I know everything about everyone you might reach for.
I learned them the way I learned you.” He says it without heat, which is what makes it unsurvivable.
“Don’t reach for him. I’d hate for the under-tens to lose their coach. ”
“You’re not allowed to threaten —”
“I didn’t threaten anyone. I gave you a man’s schedule and told you I’d hate to see him hurt.
That’s concern.” He pulls a hand out of his pocket.
“I brought you something. I’m allowed to leave a thing on public ground and walk away.
Checked with a lawyer. I have one now, turns out the wrongly sympathetic make excellent free counsel. ”
He crouches and sets a small object on the snowy ledge of the planter between us, and stands, and steps back, careful, lawful, five hundred feet always in his bones now like a second skeleton.
“You’ll tell me the truth eventually,” he says.
“Not because I’ll make you. Because you’re tired, little lamb.
I can hear it. You’ve been carrying it alone for six years and I’m the only person on this earth who already knows where the bodies are, so there’s nothing left to protect.
When you’re ready, the porch light’s the signal. Turn it on. I’ll come down.”
He turns and walks up the white street into the snow, and he doesn’t look back, and he doesn’t have to, because we both know he can hear me breathing from here.
I look down at what he left on the ledge.
It’s small. Tarnished. A child’s pull-cord music box, brass gone green at the seams, that I last saw in my hand on the worst night of my life and watched, I was certain, go into the fire with everything else.
My hand shakes when I pick it up. I don’t decide to pull the cord. My fingers do it on their own, the way they took off the glove, the way they walked me up the steps, traitors all of them.
And there, on a public sidewalk in Hartsend, in the falling snow, in broad and ordinary daylight, the little brass box begins to play the lullaby.
The same six notes scratched into the headboard of a dead girl’s bed.
The same six notes Augustus Frost hummed in the dark of the east wing the morning I understood why he’d brought me there.
The same six notes that were playing. I can hear it now, it’s all coming up the well at once, the smoke and the heat and the thing in my hands, the same six notes that were playing the night Augustus Frost died.
And only two people left alive know who really stopped them.