John Lee had gotten out of the car and opened her door before she’d even realized they’d stopped. She locked eyes with him and wondered if he saw the fear in her, the dread, the longing to know, once a for all, if she was crazy or not.

  The steps had been repaired—no more crumbled concrete, no more chicken-wire webbing showing through on the sides. There was a welcome mat outside the door; it was printed with a cheery Dutch house and stylized tulips. She wiped her feet on it, feeling ever more distant. Not even the cold wind seemed real now.

  The new screen door made a hissing sound as John Lee pulled it open. She closed her eyes for a second, fighting back the dreams, and opened her eyes as he turned the knob.

  She passed into memory.

  The dusty old couch was gone, hauled away with its tattered matching chairs. Carpet covered the cold wooden floor she remembered. The new sofa was delicate beige with pastel flowered pillows. She froze when she saw the bookcase, glass-fronted, now holding a full collection of hardcovers and paperbacks. The broken pane she remembered on the bottom had been replaced.

  The room was too dark. She remembered the blazing, relentless glow of Daddy’s naked light bulbs, casting harsh shadows. This room was dim and soothing and airy, too open for safety.

  From the kitchen, a voice called, “John Lee? Honey?”

  He must have answered her but Abby didn’t hear, couldn’t hear anything but the sound of that voice, older now, thinned with age, but she knew it in her guts like a stab wound knew the knife. She swayed and braced herself with both hands on the smooth rounded corner of her mother’s bookcase—no, not her mother’s, why was she thinking—and in some strange part of herself she was glad, glad, as if she’d been waiting to hear it all her life.

  John Lee had turned to look at her. She managed to force her lips into a smile.

  “I feel dizzy,” she said, which was nothing but the truth. He must have read it in her face because his arm slipped around her waist to help her. She leaned into his warmth, needy as a child.

  I can’t be here, she thought. The words came crystal and hammered at her with the weight of fact. I can’t be here and know these things. I have to go.

  “I have to go,” she said aloud. John Lee’s protest was noise. She pulled away from him, looking toward the safety of the doorway, the world outside that could be just the same as she’d left it, if only she left now—

  “Are you all right, dear?”

  She turned toward the voice even though she knew it was the end of everything, the end of herself, the end of John Lee, because this thing could not be happening.

  The old woman smiled at her in concern and said, “Abby?” The right side of her face was a network of pale scars. Her right eye was covered with a black satin patch. Her right arm was twisted and withered, and she had it in a clean white sling, strapped close to her body.

  Her left eye was the same warm, welcoming brown as John Lee’s.

  “Hello,” Abby said in a pale whisper. The woman frowned in concern. She reached out to steady her but Abby flinched away into John Lee’s close embrace. He guided her over to the new, clean sofa—wrong, it should feel coarse and lumpy and have the bitter taste of tears and dust—and said something about cold water. His hand covered her forehead with warmth but it wasn’t real, nothing was real except that face, aged so many years.

  Memory waited until she closed her eyes and then, she fell into the dark, a cold hand around her ankle, and the face loomed out of the shadows, broken and ruined and bloody. All the wounds. So many wounds.

  Abby opened her eyes and said, “I’m fine. Really. Just some water.”

  John Lee’s mother hurried off to the kitchen, quick steps with a peculiar limp-shuffle rhythm. John Lee stayed where he was. His fingers traced light, soothing lines across Abby’s forehead.

  “Abby, I’m calling that doctor of yours,” he said. She reached up to grab his wrist. “Damn, woman, don’t argue with me, you’re gray as a ghost. Just stay there.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said, and poured all of her intensity, her desperation, into the words. “Please, John, don’t. Go help your mother. I’ll be just fine.”

  He drew back, frowning.

  “One more spell and I’m driving you to the emergency room myself.”

  “Deal.”

  He watched her for another few seconds and finally, reluctantly, went to help his mother when she called his name. In the cold absence of him, she closed her eyes and breathed in the smell.

  Home.

  She was home again.

  Nobody was going to take it away from her.

  The lunch was baked turkey and combread dressing, smooth giblet gravy, sweet whole-cranberry sauce. Mrs. Jordan was a pie maker. She set out a coconut meringue, the top dusted delicate brown, and a refrigerated cocoa pie with thin shaved chocolate curls nested in whipped cream. Abby turned her dessert fork over and over in her fingers. She remembered the ornate flowered pattern, the old, heavy feel of it. This had been her mother’s silver, obsessively polished and hoarded for special occasions. Daddy had sold most of it off, one piece at a time, to pay for Mama’s treatments.

  The plates were old, too, bone china turned delicate ivory with age, the winding rose pattern faded. Her dessert plate had a chip on the edge. She rubbed it with a thoughtful finger.

  “Abby, honey, would you like some pie?”

  She looked up into that ruined, age-softened face and wanted to leap up and stab her mother’s fork into the deceptive, hypocritical smile. Instead, she said “Yes, please, the coconut looks great,” and held out her plate for a slice.

  The food tasted like dust on her tongue but she smiled and ate. The woman filled up her own plate with chocolate pie.

  “John Lee tells me you’re quite a musician,” she said. “I used to love music, but I never was any good at it myself. How long have you been playing?”

  “Since I was about twelve years old. Excuse me, do you have any more coffee?”

  “Oh, lands, yes. Just one minute, I’ll get it.” Pearl pushed her chair back and started to rise. John Lee, mouth full of pie, shook his head and got up for her. Once he was turned away, Abby let her smile drop.

  “I know,” she said. Pearl looked up, a vague concern on her scarred face. “I know what you did.”

  The smile burned to ash. Pearl’s skin turned a sudden dirty gray, and there was something terrible in her eyes, like death staring out. That was what she remembered, that death-face, coming out of the dark. In a flash it was gone, replaced by a brave, nearly convincing smile. Why did the woman have to look so old, so vulnerable?

  “Why, honey, I don’t know what you—”

  “Let’s go see. Why don’t we go see.” Abby shoved her chair back and stood up. The kitchen hadn’t changed much, except for gleaming new appliances and a clean white floor; the door at the far end hadn’t changed at all. The crystal doorknob glimmered like a diamond where the weak winter sunlight struck it.

  “Abby?” John Lee turned away from the coffeepot, staring, a Pyrex beaker in his hand. “What’re you talking about?”

  She came around the table and pushed by him. As she reached for the doorknob, she heard Pearl’s uncertain shuffling step behind her.

  “Honey, if you’re not well, why don’t you lie down? There’s nothing down there but—”

  “But what?” Abby put her hand on the crystal. It was blood-warm, smooth as skin where her fingers touched it. “Did you tell him all about it? Is he protecting you?”

  “Damn it, that’s enough.” John Lee left the coffee on the counter and came to rest his hands protectively on his mother’s shoulders. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  She opened the door. Cool, dark air breathed out, crawled over her skin.

  “Pearl Jordan,” she said, and stared into the woman’s one good eye. “Isn’t that right? I’m talking about Pearl Jordan.”

  The old woman fell back against John Lee, clutching at his hands. Her face twisted into a shape of pain.

  “She’s still down there, isn’t she?” Abby demanded, and let go of the doorknob to take a step toward the old woman. John Lee held out his hand to stop her but she ignored it, intent on the ashen terror in the woman’s face. “Rotting in the root cellar, isn’t that right? Dead and rotting, and all this time you’ve been living her life—”

  “I didn’t,” the woman whispered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please—”

  “Please? That’s what she said, please, please don’t kill me!” That face. It wasn’t fair that she’d survived, that she’d had a son, that she’d lived so many good years that had rightfully belonged to someone else. Abby reached out in a white-hot fury, willing to kick, to punch, anything to get the truth out of her, but John Lee came between them. He grabbed her and slammed her back against the root cellar door. The crystal doorknob dug into her spine. She tore at his hands, leaving long scratches on his arms, but he held her there until she went limp.

  He looked so scared. So scared of her. For a second she saw herself in his eyes and was terrified, too.

  Pearl gave a low moan of pain and sagged against the kitchen counter. John Lee let her go and spun away to help his mother to a chair, to brush her thin silver hair back from her face. Abby fumbled at her back for the doorknob.

  “Abby!” he shouted. She turned away from him into the dark, down the stairs, quick steps that turned slow and ceremonial on the fifth one. She paused and closed her eyes against the memory.

  The smells were all the same—damp earth, that faint, never-ending taint of decay. She took the rest of the steps with her eyes shut, the feeling of falling only barely averted. She felt a ghost-hand close cold around her ankle. When she’d reached the flat dirt floor she fell to her knees and pressed both hands against the damp cool earth. For an instant she imagined the dirt moved and she felt the scrape of bony fingers along her palms, and then John Lee said from the top of the stairs, “Abby?”

  She sat unmoving, staring into the darkness. The room was so quiet but it wasn’t dead, not at all. The fury trapped in it seethed under her hands like twisting worms.

  His weight made the steps creak. He flicked a switch and flooded the small room with bright light. On the shelves his mother kept canned goods with cheery bright labels, boxes neatly labeled and stacked. The floor was clean and even.

  She looked up to where he stood, one hand still on the light switch. His eyes were wide and dark, looking for explanations, for a reason to forgive.

  “Your mother isn’t Pearl Jordan,” she said. “Ask her. Ask her who she is.”

  He shifted his weight as if he thought about coming down to her, but he stayed where he was, watching her. The distance seemed more than a few wooden steps.

  “I think you’d better come on home now.”

  “Ask her!” she screamed. The sound of her voice ran around the walls like a trapped, wounded animal. “Ask her who she buried down here! She’s not Pearl Jordan, she never was, she’s lying to you, she’s been lying all along! You have to listen to me! You have to believe!”

  He came down the steps carefully, one at a time, never taking his eyes off her. He held out one hand to her, half invitation, half warning. She showed her teeth to him, but it wasn’t a smile. There was no smiling in this place.

  “Come on,” he said. He eased forward, gesturing her up. “Now, Abby, come on out of here. Right now.”

  She looked at the hand, the tense, wary face behind it.

  “I need you to believe me, John. I need that.”

  He touched her cheek cautiously. When she didn’t flinch away, his fingers closed around her arm and pulled her to her feet.

  “I’m taking you home,” he said. She closed her eyes and felt the fury seethe around her like invisible wind.

  “I am home.”

  They’d driven thirty minutes, in silence, before he said, “I never should have taken you there.”

  “That’s true.” She turned her face away toward the gloomy afternoon outside the passenger window. “I might never have known the truth.”

  He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. “Truth? What goddamn truth? You think my mother—who never did any harm to anybody in the whole goddamn world—killed somebody?”

  “Not somebody,” Abby said. “Pearl Jordan. The real Pearl Jordan. The one who had a mother who went insane and drowned her little boy and was committed to an asylum. The one whose father never turned off the lights. That Pearl.”

  He was quiet for so long that she thought she might have convinced him. When she looked she saw tears in his eyes, bright in a glimmer of sunshine.

  “I’m not crazy, John,” she said. “Please. I’m not crazy. She did kill her. She did take her place.”

  “When?”

  She hesitated, trying to remember, but it had come in such confusing, out-of-sequence blocks. “Before you were born, I think. Pearl was living alone in the house and this—this woman— hid in the cellar and killed her with a shovel when she came down the stairs. I saw it, John. God, I don’t want it to be true, I swear I don’t, but it is.”

  He scrubbed at his face with his hand, wiping away the tears. When he didn’t answer, she turned back to the road, the thin yellow ribbon of the highway divider unspooling on it. From time to time the ribbon wiggled, as if the painter had twitched.

  “Will you help me?” she asked. The tires hummed and whined on rutted truck tracks in the road. “All I’m asking for is the truth, I swear. Justice.”

  “You going to get justice out of ruining a seventy-year-old woman?” he said. “Christ Almighty, you need help. More help than I can give you.”

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  “What the hell am I supposed to think?” He slowed for the turn that would take them into Midland. Five minutes to her apartment. “You listen to me, Abby. You leave my mother alone. You go to her house again, try to make trouble, I’ll call the police, I swear I will.”

  She smiled out at the clouds. “You going to call Terry into this? You really want to do that?”

  He reached out and put his hand on her knee, not a friendly grasp but one designed to get her attention. She looked at him and saw his face stony with determination.

  “I’ll do whatever you make me do to keep my mother safe, Abby. I don’t want to hurt you but I’m not going to let you come in and do this, I can’t. You put me in the middle, you know which way I’ve got to fall.”

  On Mom’s side, of course. Why believe anyone else’s story? No reason he should.

  Unless Abby could prove it to him, of course. But she had no doubt at all, looking at the barely suppressed anger in his eyes, that he meant what he said. If she came near the woman who called herself Pearl Jordan, he’d have to try to stop her.

  She couldn’t stay angry, not away from the house, away from her. The anger boiled away into grief thick as oil in her stomach. She watched the day float past, cold and bright, and tried to remember the perfection of that first morning, the vision of him turning in the shower, the taste of his skin.

  “You’re home,” he said, and stepped on the brakes. She blinked and realized they were in the apartment parking lot, surrounded by old pickups and new sedans. A bundled-up neighbor unloaded groceries farther down the row. She dropped a big plastic bottle of soda and chased it as it bounced and rolled down the slight hill toward the sidewalk. “Abby? You never asked about Carlton.”

  She heard the name with a jolt like a slap—gone two days, and she’d never even thought to ask about her dog. John Lee had promised to feed him but couldn’t keep him, of course, not in that house of his loaded down with breakable glass. “Isn’t he okay?”

  “He’s fine. I just figured you might ask.” He got out and popped the trunk on the car to retrieve her bag. She stepped out to the ground and took a deep breath of ice-cold air; it tasted of sharp burning mesquite and the not-quite-metallic tang of snow. She dug in her purse for her keys and heard him coming up the walk behind her.

  As she slotted the key in the lock she heard Carlton start to bark and the last of her—Pearl’s—anger bled away into affection. She opened the door and stepped in, ready for Carlton to leap on her and lick her face.

  Instead Carlton barked, loud, angry, snapping sounds. His claws clicked as he scrambled backward, watching her.

  “What’s wrong?” John Lee asked, and eased in behind her. “Hey, boy. Hey there.”

  “Two days and he forgets who I am. I never said he was really …” She held out her arms toward the dog, smiling, and his lips pulled back, showing strong, sharp teeth. She’d never heard him growl that way before, a cold, stomach-deep grinding sound.

  And then he lunged at her.

  She screamed and tipped backward, head slamming into the door. The impact with the floor seemed strangely soft, the cool wood against her cheek fluffy as a down mattress, John Lee’s legs moved in front of her. He had hold of Carlton’s collar, holding him back, and all of a sudden Carlton wasn’t the dogdemon anymore, he was whining in confusion and straining at John’s hold on him. He gave a short, yipping bark of alarm and squirmed to get free.

  “Abby?” It took her a second to realize John was saying her name. She, got her hands under her and pushed up from the floor; the world tilted strangely and she felt the door at her back. Sitting up. “How’s your head?”

  “Fine,” she said. Her ears felt stuffed with cotton. “Just a little dazed, that’s all. What the hell was that?”

  John Lee sat down, too, holding Carlton’s collar. Carlton, now calm, sank down to his haunches and started panting, long pink tongue lolling.

  “Maybe he didn’t recognize you,” John Lee said, and scratched Carlton’s head. The dog closed his eyes and whined in happiness. “Look at that. Good dog.”

  Abby leaned forward and made it to her hands and knees, felt the first twinges of pain along the back of her scalp. She crawled over to where John Lee sat and sank down next to him, leaning into his warmth.