And there was them. The remains of the Peterson family. Fred had closed his eyes around six and drifted off to sleep, but Ollie only sat, staring at the elevator into which his mother had disappeared, sure that if he dozed, she would die. “Could you not have watched with me one hour?” Jesus had asked Peter, and that was a very good question, one you couldn’t answer.

At ten minutes past nine, the door of that elevator slid open and the doctor they had spoken to shortly after arriving stepped out. He was wearing blue scrubs and a sweat-stained blue surgical cap decorated with dancing red hearts. He looked very tired, and when he saw them, he turned to one side, as if wishing he could retreat. Ollie only had to see that involuntary flinch to know. He wished he could let his father sleep through the initial blast of bad news, but that would be wrong. Dad had known and loved her longer than Ollie had been alive, after all.

“Huh!” Fred said, sitting up when Ollie shook his shoulder. “What?”

Then he saw the doctor, who was removing his cap to expose a thatch of sweaty brown hair. “Gentlemen, I’m sorry to tell you that Mrs. Peterson has passed away. We tried hard to save her, and at first I thought we were going to be successful, but the damage was simply too great. Again, I’m very, very sorry.”

Fred stared at him unbelievingly for a moment, then let out a cry. The girl with the frizzy hair opened her eyes and stared at him. The feverish toddler cringed.

Sorry, Ollie thought. That’s the word of the day. Last week we were a family, now there’s just Dad and me. Sorry’s the word for that, all right. The very one, there is no other.

Fred was weeping with his hands over his face. Ollie took him in his arms and held him.

13

After lunch, which Marcy and her girls only picked at, Marcy went into the bedroom to explore Terry’s side of the closet. He was half of their partnership, but his clothes only took up a quarter of the space. Terry was an English teacher, a baseball and football coach, a fund-raiser when funds were required—which was like always—a husband, and a father. He was good at all of those jobs, but only the teaching gig paid, and he wasn’t overloaded with dressy clothes. The blue suit was the best, it brought out the color of his eyes, but it was showing signs of wear, and no one with an eye for men’s fashions was going to mistake it for Brioni. It was Men’s Wearhouse, and four years old. She sighed, took it down, added a white shirt and a dark blue tie. She was putting them in a suit bag when the doorbell rang.

It was Howie, dressed in duds much nicer than the ones Marcy had just bagged up. He gave the girls a quick hug and bussed Marcy on the cheek.

“Are you going to bring my daddy home?” Gracie asked.

“Not today, but soon,” he said, taking the suit bag. “What about a pair of shoes, Marcy?”

“Oh, God,” she said. “I’m such a klutz.”

The black ones were okay, but they needed a polish. No time for that now, though. She put them in a bag and went back into the living room. “Okay, I’m ready.”

“All right. Step lively and pay no attention to the coyotes. Girls, keep the doors locked until your mom gets back, and don’t answer the phone unless you recognize the number. Got it?”

“We’ll be okay,” Sarah said. She didn’t look okay. Neither of them did. Marcy wondered if it was possible for preteen girls to lose weight overnight. Surely not.

“Here we go,” Howie said. He was bubbling over, cheerful.

They left the house with Howie carrying the suit and Marcy carrying the shoes. The reporters once more surged to the edge of the lawn. Mrs. Maitland, have you talked to your husband? What have the police told you? Mr. Gold, has Terry Maitland responded to the charges? Are you going to request bail?

“We have nothing to say at this time,” Howie said, stone-faced, escorting Marcy to his Escalade through a glare of television lights (surely not necessary on this brilliant July day, Marcy thought). At the foot of the driveway, Howie powered down his window and leaned out to speak to one of the two cops on duty. “The Maitland girls are inside. You guys are responsible for seeing they’re not bothered, right?”

Neither responded, only looked at Howie with expressions that were either blank or hostile. Marcy couldn’t tell which, but she leaned toward the latter.

The joy and relief she’d felt after looking at that video—God bless Channel 81—hadn’t left her, but there were still TV trucks and microphone-waving reporters in front of her house. Terry was still locked up—“in county,” as Howie had put it, and what a terrible phrase that was, like something out of a lonesome country-and-western song. Strangers had searched their house and taken anything they pleased. The wooden faces of the policemen and their lack of response were the worst, though, far more unsettling than the TV lights and the shouted questions. A machine had swallowed her family. Howie said they would get out of it unharmed, but it hadn’t happened yet.

No, not yet.

14

Marcy was given a quick patdown by a sleepy-eyed female officer, who told her to dump her purse in the plastic basket provided and step through the metal detector. The officer also took their driver’s licenses, put them in a Baggie, and tacked it to a bulletin board with many others. “Also the suit and shoes, missus.”

Marcy handed them over.

“I want to see him in that suit and looking sharp when I come for him tomorrow morning,” Howie said, and walked through the metal detector, which went off.

“We’ll be sure to tell his butler,” said the officer on the far side of the detector. “Now get rid of whatever you’ve still got in your pockets and try again.”

The problem turned out to be his keyring. Howie handed it to the female officer and went through the detector a second time. “I’ve been here at least five thousand times, and I always forget my keys,” he told Marcy. “It must be some kind of Freudian thing.”

She smiled nervously and made no reply. Her throat was dry, and she thought anything she said would come out in a croak.

Another officer led them through one door, then another. Marcy heard laughing children and a buzz of adult conversation. They passed through a visiting area with brown industrial carpet on the floor. Children were playing. Prisoners in brown jumpsuits were talking with their wives, sweethearts, mothers. A large man with a purple birthmark dripping down one side of his face and a healing cut on the other was helping his young daughter rearrange the furniture in a dollhouse.

This is all a dream, Marcy thought. An incredibly vivid one. I’ll wake up with Terry beside me and tell him how I had a nightmare that he’d been arrested for murder. We’ll laugh about it.

One of the inmates pointed her out, with no attempt made to hide the gesture. The woman beside him stared, round-eyed, then whispered to another woman. The officer who was guiding them seemed to be having some trouble with the key-card that opened the door on the far side of the visiting area, and Marcy couldn’t quite dismiss the idea that he was lollygagging on purpose. Before the lock clunked and he led them through, it seemed that everyone was staring at them. Even the kids.

On the far side of the door was a hallway lined with small rooms divided by what looked like cloudy glass. Terry was sitting in one of these. At the sight of him, floating inside a brown jumpsuit that was far too big, Marcy began to cry. She stepped into her side of the booth and looked at her husband through what was not glass at all but a thick sheet of Perspex. She put a hand up, fingers splayed, and he put his up against it. There was a circle of small holes, like those in an old-fashioned telephone receiver, to talk through. “Stop crying, honey. If you don’t, I’ll start. And sit down.”