As he was handing her license and insurance card back, he leaned in close and said, “I ought to give you a ticket for public indecency, too.”

  She looked down at herself, at the loose blue jeans, the sweatshirt, the tennis shoes. Up into his face, where his eyes had taken on a bright, glassy shine.

  “Why?”

  “It ever occur to you that when you call a man on his cellular phone people can intercept it? I got a police scanner at home. There I was, minding my own business, and I hear you telling John Lee to come in your mouth. Now, is that fitting talk for a lady that teaches kids?”

  The shock burned down her spine, all the way to her feet. Her mind went furiously blank, and a horrible feeling of violation blossomed in her stomach. She couldn’t look away from the magnetic pull of his eyes, his full lips smiling at her.

  “I got the whole thing on tape. It’s pretty steamy. I been listening to it, on and off, when I’m feeling lonely. You got a real nice telephone voice, Miss Rhodes.”

  Blood rushed into her cheeks, hot enough to boil. She fought to keep her voice even.

  “Are we done here?”

  “Here“—he nodded—“I expect so. You want to talk about that tape, you give me a call, ma’am.”

  He dug a card out of his pocket and handed it to her. She let it flutter into the darkness of the floor. He touched the brim of his hat, an ironic salute, and switched the flashlight off. She was trapped in a darkness so thick it threatened to drown her, blinking furiously to clear the ghostly dots from her eyes, by the time she’d managed it he was gone, and the cruiser was pulling out, flashers dying away, and heading back the way it had come.

  She rested her forehead against the soothing cool plastic of the steering wheel. She knew what it was in Terry’s eyes now, though she hadn’t been able to recognize it in the shock of the moment.

  She’d turned him on.

  Accelerando: December 14, 1994

  She’d expected John Lee to be waiting for her at her apartment, but she’d been wrong-just Carlton, glad to see her as always, mostly because she needed to take him out to deposit fertilizer. She did it with a newfound wariness, watching shadows, flinching at sudden movements. She wasn’t honestly sure who it was she was scared of, John Lee or Terry.

  She slept fitfully, listening for noises and interpreting every creak and doggy shuffle as an intruder. Karma in action, she thought as she lay alone in the dark, staring at the spackling overhead. What was it Benny had said? Secret messages in the ceiling? Maybe this one said, Act like a complete asshole.

  She threw her arms over her face and gave in to the misery, let it drag tears up out of the hurt in her stomach. Carlton climbed up on the bed and flopped down next to her, whining unhappily, licking the back of her neck to comfort her. She turned and threw her arms around him, petting his head, until she felt better. She sat up and looked at the clock-four-thirty in the morning. For some people, the workday was starting.

  She got up and made hot tea with honey from a squeezable plastic bear and lemon concentrate from a plastic lemon, and sat on the couch staring at the blank TV screen. Damn, she wished Maria were back, but then Maria was never back, not really; when she was in town, which was seldom, she was shopping or dating or visiting, and the only time she ever spent in the apartment was conducted mostly in her bedroom. Usually that was a fine arrangement, but not now. Now she needed somebody to talk to.

  She looked over at the phone and thought about calling John Lee, but it was a stupid idea, instantly dismissable. Impossible to have anything to say to him right now.

  She finished her tea and stretched out on the couch to stare up at the ceiling. More spackling. She tried to figure out the messages, finally turned on her side and growled at Carlton, who was sitting patiently watching her. He growled back.

  The door vibrated under a strong series of knocks. Abby sat up, staring, as Carlton launched into ferocious barking at smoke-alarm levels. She grabbed his collar and held him back, looked through the peephole.

  John Lee. Oh, God.

  She took a deep breath and swung the door open. Carlton immediately fell silent and licked his chops, received a quick rough rub on the head as John Lee came inside. Abby shut the door and locked it without ever looking directly at him.

  “I know it’s early,” John Lee said. His voice sounded fuzzy and difficult. She glanced at him and saw the wet shine of his eyes, the loose set of his lips. “I been drinking.”

  “I see that,” she said. “Come in and sit down.”

  He made it to the couch and flopped, head bouncing against the cushions as if it had come loose from his spine. He sighed and closed his eyes.

  “You didn’t drive here, did you?”

  “Taxi,” he said. “My first time. Wasn’t much fun.”

  She sat down cautiously on the other end of the sofa, knees drawn up under her. He looked so tired, so vulnerable.

  “Why’re you doing this?” he asked, voice soft and indistinct. His eyes struggled open. “You enjoy scaring her, Abby? That it?”

  “No.” She looked down, away from the obvious misery on his face. “I didn’t think she’d ever know I was there. I just wanted … I wanted to look around.”

  “And what if she did find you? What if she came in on you in some dark room? She’s an old woman, Abby, she’s just an old, tired woman who’s been through hell in her lifetime, and she don’t need you bringing any more.”

  “John—”

  “She never told me how it happened but I read the police reports, Terry showed ’em to me. Custer Grady knew they was coming for him so he came over to hide out, and when she wouldn’t help him he beat the shit out of her, beat her so bad he broke her arm in four places and shattered her knee and cut up her face with a broken bottle. And then he left her there to bleed to death.” His breath came in uneven, hitching sobs. He sat up and leaned forward, hands covering his face. “I expect that’s when he raped her, too, but I don’t know that.”

  Such a huge burden for a little boy, the monster-father, the disfigured, disabled mother, a town turned against them both. Abby inched closer to him and touched his tensed back with the flat of her hand.

  “Don’t you do it to her again,” he said, and took his hands away to show her the tears in his eyes. “Abby, I know you, I know you’re a good woman. Please, let her be.”

  She touched his cheek, wiped away a tear, kissed his soft damp lips. He tasted smoky and dark, like whiskey.

  “I have to know,” she said, and rested her forehead against the beard-rough skin of his cheek.

  His arm went around her and pulled her into his embrace and they stayed that way for long slow minutes, two hurting people aching for the warmth. She felt that she could have stayed there forever, safe in his arms, but then he let her go.

  “You seeing that doctor?” he asked. She nodded but the chill had settled in between them and she retreated to her own end of the couch.

  “All right.” He tried to stand up, failed, tried again, body loose as an unstrung puppet’s. “I don’t guess I’ll be back for a while, until you get things straight.”

  He tried again to get up and collapsed back to the soft cushions, eyes flickering shut. She sighed and grabbed his legs to stretch him out full length.

  “Go to sleep,” she said, and grabbed a discarded afghan to drape over him. He had already taken her advice by the time she’d finished tucking the afghan around him; she took the opportunity to smooth his hair back, to take one last look at the lines of his face. She kissed the spot he liked, right under his ear, and put her hand to her mouth to hold in the tears as she walked back to her dark, empty bedroom.

  John Lee said softly, muzzily, “Please don’t hurt her, Abby, Please.”

  She stopped where she was, tears sliding cold down her face, and waited for him to say something else, anything, but instead she heard a light, muffled snore. In spite of herself, she felt a smile twist at her lips.

  “I’ll try not to,” she said.

  He was gone before she woke up, but he’d left a note on the couch. She sank down on the cushions and pulled the afghan over her lap before unfolding the paper. She smiled at the sight of his neat, rounded handwriting. His teachers would have been proud.

  I don’t know when I’ll see you again, it said. Be careful and don’t do anything stupid.

  I love you.

  She read the note over and over until her eyes blurred with tears, then she carefully folded it and pressed it to her forehead. After a while, when she felt able, she got up and took it to her bedroom and put it in the drawer next to her satin bra and panties.

  And then took Terry’s business card out of her purse, where she’d stuffed it the night before. Terry had handwritten a number on the bottom—square block numbers, readable but strangely childish. She settled herself on the couch with the afghan wrapped around her—an echo of John Lee’s embrace—and set the phone on the cushion next to her. It took her three tries to dial the number correctly.

  Terry sounded rusty, clogged with sleep; she was viciously happy about it.

  “What do you want for the tape?” she asked. There was a long silence, indistinct background noise that might have been his throat clearing, the sheets rustling, a gun loading, anything,

  “Miss Rhodes?”

  “Are you blackmailing a long list of people?”

  He coughed, an explosive wet sound so close she imagined spit hitting her ear and had to pull the phone away to swipe at it.

  “Well, now, I wouldn’t exactly call it blackmail,” he said. He was back on track again, smooth and cool. “Blackmail’s against the law.”

  “So’s harassment. And I’m pretty damned sure feeling me up like that the other day was illegal, too.”

  “I’ll bet you took some of those law classes in college, right? In between philosophy and art appreciation and all them other things they don’t teach in the public school system out here in the dust. Tell me something, Miss Lawyer, they teach you the Latin word for blow job in college?”

  “Fellatio,” she said. “Want me to spell it?”

  He laughed. It took her by surprise, the laugh; she hadn’t expected to hear genuine amusement in it. “Hell, no, I’ll take your word for it. What the hell are you doing with John Lee?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Oh, it is my business,” he said softly. “You just don’t know what kind of a beehive you’ve stuck your hand in. Ol’ John Lee, there, he’s a couple cards short of a full house, and his mama ain’t no better. One of these days he’s gonna turn around and wham!, you’ll be wishing you’d made a few more friends ’round here. Or a few less.”

  It occurred to her, unwillingly, that she really didn’t know anything about Terry except what John Lee had told her. Or, for that matter, anything about John Lee from an outside source. She said, “Why should I believe anything you have to say about it? You’re the one who’s acting crazy.”

  He gave it a full fifteen seconds of silence before he answered. “Yeah, I suppose it’d look like that, all right. You ever hear of a girl named Marlene Hargist?”

  “No.”

  “Look it up in the Midland papers, if you want. August 1986.”

  “Why?”

  “You look it up, then you ask me why.”

  She sensed from his tone that he was about to hang up. “Wait! Terry—what about the tape?”

  “Think I’ll hang on to it for a while,” he said, and she could almost hear the smile. “I wasn’t lying. You got a real nice telephone voice.”

  She hung up before he could and sat staring at the phone. As she picked it up to move it back to the coffee table, it rang, vibrating in her hands like a living thing. She dropped it in surprise, fumbled the receiver up from the floor, and said, “Hello?”

  “Caller ID,” Terry said. “Ain’t technology wonderful?”

  On Thursday she went to the library and was talked through the microfiche procedures by a helpful librarian. It wasn’t hard to find the article on Marlene Hargist; it took up half of page one of the paper on August 16, 1986.

  FALL CREEK HONOR STUDENT MISSING.

  Marlene had disappeared from behind the counter of the same 7-Eleven Abby had noticed on her way through Fall Creek; she’d been working the graveyard shift. The article was full of grief and pain from family and friends. Her mother pleaded for Marlene’s safe return.

  Her eyes were drawn to a paragraph near the bottom: Hargist, 21, recently became engaged to Officer Terry Bollinger of the Fall Creek Police Department. They plan to be married in September after her graduation from the University of Texas at Austin. There was a grainy black-and-white photograph of Sheriff Hayes laying a comforting hand on a seated Terry Bollinger’s shoulder. Terry’s face was eerily blank.

  August 19’s headline was LOCAL MAN QUESTIONED IN DISAPPEARANCE. Terry, she thought immediately, but it wasn’t Terry. In the accompanying photo, Terry held the elbow of the suspect as he guided him past cameras. The suspect’s hands were up to shield his face. She skipped down to the caption:

  Local glassmaker John Lee Jordan is escorted to questioning by Officer Terry Bollinger, fiancé of the victim.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered, and sat back in her chair. The warmth of the research room clung to her like sweat.

  She advanced pages to August 20. Nothing but a rehash of previous events. August 21:

  JORDAN CLEARED BY POUCE IN HARGIST DISAPPEARANCE.

  They’d caught John Lee looking up in the flash of the photograph, eyes blank, face tensed. Terry Bollinger was nowhere in the picture. Instead, John Lee was being guided down the steps by a portly, awkward-looking man who must have been a lawyer. He had one hand out to fend off the photographers.

  We don’t have any evidence to hold him. That was a quote from Sheriff Hayes, and it had all the warmth of a pit bull’s growl. Terry Bollinger had made no comment at all.

  The story hung around for a few more days, getting shorter and shorter column space, and finally dropped off altogether by September. She couldn’t find any mention of an arrest, and none at all of Marlene Hargist being found, dead or alive.

  That night, she dialed Terry’s number at eight o’clock. When he answered, she said, “Did you ever find her?”

  “You ever think about saying ‘hello’ or something friendly?” he asked. “She’s dead. Marlene’s been dead since the night she disappeared, I know it. And I know John Lee did it.”

  “Why?”

  “He’d always had a hunger for Marlene, but she never would go near him. He used to hang around the store when she was working, stare at her. She told me it made her nervous but I told her she was just being crazy, he wasn’t going to hurt her, not with me around.” He cleared his throat. “Yeah, I know he did it. And with the least little opportunity, I think he’ll do it again.”

  “It’s been almost ten years. If she was dead, wouldn’t you have found a body by now?”

  “Out here?” Terry snorted. “Miles and miles of unmarked graves out here, teacher. America’s dumping ground.”

  “Even if that’s true, what makes John Lee part of it?”

  “Bad fruit of a rotten tree, my mother always said. Custer Grady’s kid. I guess you know about old Custer.”

  She took a deep breath and said, “I know he’s your father, too.”

  The response was immediate—laughter. Genuine, derisive laughter. “Don’t have to ask who the hell told you that. Hell, lady, my daddy’s a truck driver from Tulsa named Jake Fry. I even got a picture of him. John Lee’s been pretending that little lie for so long I guess he believes it now. He tell you about his daddy?”

  “Enough.”

  “Oh, I doubt that. Big news, back in the fifties. They dug up four graves on his farmland, probably could’ve dug up a few more if they’d looked harder. I think they were scared to look. Custer was a mean, snake-cold son of a bitch, and John Lee’s the spitting image of him, ’cept for the eyes. Grady’s got eyes so blue they’re like water—closer you get, the less color they have. He ain’t any daddy of mine, all you have to do is look at me to know that. I wouldn’t be any kind of a cop if my daddy was a killer,” Terry paused. In the background, she heard a cop show on television, sirens screaming, guns blazing. A lot of protest for something you believe in, Terry. Or is that why you became a cop? To prove Custer couldn’t be your father? “You want that tape back?”

  “Yes,” she said immediately.

  “Stop seeing John Lee.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Hell I am. You stop seeing him, I’ll send you your tape.” He sighed gustily. “I’m trying to save your life, stupid. John Lee ain’t no kind of catch, believe me.”

  “Forget it,” she snapped.

  “Then I hope you’re ready to explain to that tight-assed principal of yours why you’re moonlighting on phone sex. Or maybe I’ll just send a copy to all the parents of the kids you teach. Which one you prefer?”

  She closed her eyes, felt the stairs under her feet, the dizzy fall into darkness. If what she remembered was true, she and John Lee were doomed, anyway. If it wasn’t true, she was crazy and they were doomed.

  The promise didn’t mean anything, one way or another.

  “One thing,” she said. Her voice didn’t seem to be her own; it was cold, hard, and certain. “You help me get into Pearl Jordan’s house. I need to look for something.”

  “You’re just one surprise after another,” he said. “Come to think of it, you were tearing out of Fall Creek awful quick the other night. Wouldn’t have been you that set off that alarm at her house, would it?”

  Caught, she said nothing. After a second or two his chuckle throbbed through the phone. “Don’t make me have to arrest you, Abby. That’d be a damn shame.”

  She hung up. She didn’t mean to; it was a sudden convulsion of muscles. The phone slammed down hard, and she was left gaping at it in surprise. She expected it to ring back but he’d made his point. Vividly.