She is putting away the files—she has to go home sometime, after all—when she hears the elevator again. She waits to see if it will go past the fifth floor, but it stops. Probably Jerome, but she still opens the second drawer of her desk and loosely grips the can there. It has two buttons. One blares an earsplitting horn. The other dispenses pepper spray.

It’s him. She lets go of the IntruderGuard and closes the drawer. She marvels (and not for the first time since he came back from Harvard) at how tall and handsome he’s become. She dislikes that fur around his mouth, what he calls “the goat,” but would never tell him so. Tonight his usual energetic walk is slow and a little slumped. He gives her a perfunctory “Yo, Hollyberry,” and drops into the chair that in business hours is reserved for clients.

Usually she would admonish him about how much she dislikes that childish nickname—it’s their form of call-and-response—but not tonight. They are friends, and because she’s a person who has never had many, Holly tries her best to deserve the ones she has. “You look very tired.”

“Long drive. Heard the news about the school? It’s all over the sat radio.”

“I was watching John Law when they broke in. Since then I’ve been avoiding it. How bad?”

“They’re saying twenty-seven dead so far, twenty-three of them kids between twelve and fourteen. But it’ll go higher. There are still a few kids and two teachers they haven’t been able to account for, and a dozen or so in critical condition. It’s worse than Parkland. Make you think of Brady Hartsfield?”

“Of course.”

“Yeah, me too. The ones he got at City Center and the ones he could have gotten if we’d been just a few minutes slower that night at the ’Round Here concert. I try not to think about that, tell myself we won that one, because when my mind goes to it I get the willies.”

Holly knows all about the willies. She has them often.

Jerome rubs a hand slowly down one cheek and in the quiet she can hear the scritch-scritch of his fingers on the day’s new bristles. “Sophomore year at Harvard I took a philosophy course. Did I ever mention that to you?”

Holly shakes her head.

“It was called—” Jerome makes finger-quotes. “—‘The Problem of Evil.’ In it, we talked a lot about concepts called inside evil and outside evil. We . . . Holly, you okay?”

“Yes,” she says, and she is . . . but at the mention of outside evil, her mind immediately turns to the monster she and Ralph tracked to his final lair. The monster had gone under many names and worn many faces, but she had always thought of him simply as the outsider, and the outsider had been as evil as they come. She’s never told Jerome about what happened in the cave known as the Marysville Hole, although she supposes he knows something pretty dire went on there—a lot more than made it into the newspapers.

He’s looking at her uncertainly. “Go on,” she tells him. “This is very interesting to me.” It’s the truth.

“Well . . . the class consensus was there’s outside evil if you believe in outside good—”

“God,” Holly says.

“Yes. Then you can believe there really are demons, and exorcism is a valid response to them, there really are malevolent spirits—”

“Ghosts,” Holly says.

“Right. Not to mention curses that really work, and witches, and dybbuks, and who knows what else. But in college, all that stuff pretty much gets laughed out of court. God Himself mostly gets laughed out of court.”

“Or Herself,” Holly says primly.

“Yeah, whatever, if God doesn’t exist, I guess the pronouns don’t matter. So that leaves inside evil. Moron stuff. Guys who beat their children to death, serial killers like Brady fucking Hartsfield, ethnic cleansing, genocide, 9/11, mass shootings, terrorist attacks like the one today.”

“Is that what they’re saying?” Holly asks. “A terrorist attack, maybe ISIS?”

“That’s what they’re assuming, but no one’s claimed responsibility yet.”

Now his other hand on his other cheek, scritch-scritch, and are those tears in Jerome’s eyes? She thinks they are, and if he cries, she will, too, she won’t be able to help it. Sadness is catching, and how poopy is that?

“But see, here’s the deal about inside and outside evil, Holly—I don’t think there’s any difference. Do you?”

She considers everything she knows, and everything she’s been through with this young man, and Bill, and Ralph Anderson. “No,” she says. “I don’t.”

“I think it’s a bird,” Jerome says. “A big bird, all frowsy and frosty gray. It flies here, there, and everywhere. It flew into Brady Hartsfield’s head. It flew into the head of the guy who shot all those people in Las Vegas. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, they got the bird. Hitler. Pol Pot. It flies into their heads, and when the wetwork’s done, it flies away again. I’d like to catch that bird.” He clenches his hands and looks at her and yes, those are tears. “Catch it and wring its fucking neck.”

Holly comes around the desk, kneels beside him, and puts her arms around him. It’s a clumsy hug with him sitting in the chair, but it does the job. The dam breaks. When he speaks against her cheek, she feels the scratch of his stubble.

“The dog’s dead.”

“What?” She can barely make out what he’s saying through his sobs.

“Lucky. The golden. When whoever stole him didn’t get the ransom, the bastard cut him open and threw him in a ditch. Somebody spotted him—still alive, barely—and took him to the Ebert Animal Hospital in Youngstown. Where he lived for maybe half an hour. Nothing they could do. Not so lucky after all, huh?”

“All right,” Holly says, patting his back. Her own tears are flowing, and there’s snot, too. She can feel it running out of her nose. Oough. “All right, Jerome. It’s okay.”

“It’s not. You know it’s not.” He pulls back and looks at her, cheeks wet and shining, goatee damp. “Cut that nice dog’s belly open, and threw him in the ditch with his intestines hanging out, and you know what happened then?”

Holly knows but shakes her head.

“The bird flew away.” He wipes his sleeve across his eyes. “Now it’s in someone else’s head, it’s better than ever, and on we fucking go.”

4

Just before ten o’clock, Holly gives up the book she’s trying to read and turns on the TV. She takes a look at the talking heads on CNN, but can’t bear their chatter. Hard news is what she wants. She switches to NBC, where a graphic, complete with grim music, reads SPECIAL REPORT: TRAGEDY IN PENNSYLVANIA. Andrea Mitchell is now anchoring in New York. She begins by telling America that the president has tweeted his “thoughts and prayers,” as he does after each of these horror shows: Pulse, Las Vegas, Parkland. This meaningless twaddle is followed by the updated score: thirty-one dead, seventy-three (oh God, so many) wounded, nine in critical condition. If Jerome was right, that means at least three of the criticals have died.

“Two terrorist organizations, Houthi Jihad and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, have claimed responsibility for the bombing,” Mitchell says, “but sources in the State Department say neither claim is credible. They are leaning toward the idea that the bombing may have been a lone-wolf attack, similar to that perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh, who set off a huge blast at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. That explosion took a hundred and sixty-eight lives.”