The air felt breakable with cold, sharp on her exposed face but sweet on her tongue. She tasted a snowflake, caught another on the wool of her glove, and watched the lace dissolve into damp glitter. The sidewalk was padded with snow and scarred with two or three sets of footprints, going in the direction of the parking lot. She hauled Carlton—and was hauled by him—off to the softer snow that covered the grass. He scrambled awkwardly around a leafless powdered tree, led her in a complete circle around the base, and lifted his leg. His cheerful yellow stain was the only color in the world besides her blue coat. He sniffed the result and went on to the next spot, a patch of apartment wall that looked identical to everything around it. She passed the time by counting the number of apartments that had smoke coming out of their chimneys and estimating the number of mesquite trees being cut.

  Carlton made three more stops before running out of ammunition and informing her he’d like to go home. She detoured him to the parking lot to test the pavement—slippery, but acceptable. She’d driven in worse. There was still time to shop for her brother’s tie and finally find something for Benny.

  And, she decided, something for John Lee. She could take it over, as a peace offering. Explain about Terry, somehow. Fix things.

  She had no idea how to do that, but one thing at a time. First, a present.

  * * *

  John Lee had a visitor.

  Abby sat parked in the dim afternoon on a field of white, her heater blasting lukewarm dry air hard enough to ruffle her hair. His glass shop sign fluttered in the wind, and swirls of snow blurred the outline of the front door. John Lee’s car was parked in front, newly swept clean, and the falling snow landed on his hood and melted immediately. He’d driven far enough to get his engine good and hot.

  She saw him pass in front of the kitchen window again, where the bright lights were on. He had on a checked blue flannel shirt and his mouth moved as he talked to whoever it was in the room with him. He turned toward the stove and stood there. Making dinner, she thought. She remembered their first dinner with a pang, could almost taste the hamburgers and the honey beer and the wild dark flavor of his kisses.

  It had to be a friend, she thought. An old friend, surely. Someone he hadn’t seen in years, had come in for the holidays, maybe an old school buddy in town visiting relatives.

  She had to know.

  Outside of the car the wind was harsh and it whispered cold snowflakes into her ear; she pulled her ski hat farther down and hunched her shoulders and shuffled through the ankle-deep snow.

  John Lee moved away from the window and left a blank view. She pressed against the wall and edged carefully around to peek inside. She got a slice of the kitchen and the workshop brilliantly glittering beyond. Shifting her position, she saw John Lee’s elbows moving as he served something from a skillet to a plate.

  Another shift and she saw him smiling. She took a deep breath and prepared to shift another half step to see his guest, but then she saw the hand reaching out a spoon to ladle potatoes, and it wasn’t necessary to see her, wasn’t necessary at all.

  The nails were long and painted in screaming pink and neon orange stripes. The hand was strong and sturdy, the fingers long. The wrist jangled with about fifty different bracelets.

  She didn’t have to see the hair or the face or the clothes to recognize Benny. Her best friend was having dinner in John Lee’s kitchen, laughing like an old buddy, drawing that brilliant smile out of him. Maybe later he’d step up to her, slide those warm hands up her sides …

  Abby found herself sitting in the snow, her face cold where the tears were drying on her cheeks. On the snow in front of her a picture painted itself, warm yellow light and John Lee’s flickering shadow, a flash of movement that might have been Benny reaching for the salt or for John Lee. She remembered John Lee’s interested stare that day at her recital—staring not at her, but at Benny. She’d thought it was just shock, but it hadn’t been, had it? Had he called her up in Dallas and invited her down? Had she called him? Are you and Abby having troubles? Well, why don’t you tell me all about it. Let me kiss it and make it better.

  Oh, God. Goddamn them. Just like all the rest of them, all the rest of those women making eyes and flirting with every man they seen, trying to take Custer away from me—

  No. Abby pushed it away with all her strength, but it wouldn’t go away, not this time. She was too strong, too angry. Hurricane Pearl.

  You just going to let them do that to you? You going to let them lie to you and cheat on you and laugh behind your back?

  It isn’t like that. Benny isn’t like that.

  The hell she ain’t. She’s turning the knife right now. Look. Go on and look.

  She couldn’t look. She felt sick but she swallowed it, swallowed hard and climbed up out of the snow, didn’t care how much noise she made now or whether or not they saw her. Her jeans felt heavy and waterlogged, clinging wet to her legs. She trudged back to the car and started it up with a roar.

  John Lee peered out the window. She flipped on her lights, on high, and saw him squint in surprise.

  Then she turned and spun snow in the air as she drove away. When she hit the main road and her tires slipped, his package tipped to the floor in a cascade of gold-flecked foil and silver angel bows. It slid into the darkness under the passenger seat of the car.

  She left it there, along with the empty soda cans and discarded fast-food bags and other rotten dreams.

  Fortissimo: December 24, 1994

  The next day, Fall Creek had a celebrity in town. It wasn’t hard to figure out where he was—all she had to do was follow the gawkers.

  Custer Grady was holding court in a peeling green leatherette booth at Josie’s Restaurant, sipping Coke from a pebbled yellow plastic glass. The remains of his dinner drowned in a swamp of off-color gravy. His immediate audience was two teenage boys wearing identical blank looks of adoration. The other gawkers ate their waffles and omelets and tried to look like they weren’t hanging on Custer Grady’s every word.

  It was a pathetic scene. Abby thought, from where she stood looking in the smudged front window, that Grady was having the time of his life.

  A faded-looking waitress was hovering near the coffeepot and watching the door—waiting for someone, Abby thought. Maybe the Fall Creek Police Department was on the way. Maybe Terry was strapping on his six-gun to make Fall Creek safe from seventy-year-old ex-cons.

  When she pushed open the door she heard Grady saying, “… taught him a lesson, boys, I can tell you—” just before the cowbell clapped tin hands over her head and the talking stopped. Chairs scooted. Dim smudges of shadowed faces turned, but by some perverse trick of the light Custer Grady was perfectly clear in a patch of watery sunlight, blue eyes gleaming as he studied her.

  “If it ain’t the pretty missy from Big Spring, Them girls, they just can’t leave me alone.” He grinned for the benefit of the two boys at the table, but his eyes were steady and focused. “Pull up a squat, honey.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  He leaned back and dropped his fork with a clatter, crossed his arms across his chest, and tipped his head to one side. Something about the position reminded her strongly of Terry, then—frighteningly, with a prickling along the back of her neck—John Lee.

  “Ain’t nothing stopping you,” he said. “Go on, if you’ve a mind. Always nice to talk to a pretty one.”

  She flicked a look toward the teenagers; the taller boy leaned forward, lips parted to show a metal gleam of braces. His 4-H jacket was coming apart at the shoulder seams, at least two sizes too small. His friend, Mutt to his Jeff, looked like he might smother in the oversized Dallas Cowboys parka draped around him. His eyes were huge behind smudged thick eyeglasses.

  “Ben. Zach.” Grady snapped his fingers like they were dogs and, sure enough, the boys snapped to attention. “Git.”

  The tall one—Ben, she realized; the yellow stitching of his name on his jacket was fraying so that it said only BE—scrambled up immediately, blushed a furious red, and slumped toward the door. Zach hesitated, coat dragging at him as if it had tackled him.

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said, all in a lisping rush, and hurried away as Ben stiff-armed the door and alarmed the cowbell again. Abby turned her gaze back to Grady and saw him staring after the boys.

  “Pearl Jordan,” he said flatly as he watched them cross the snowy street outside. “Ain’t that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Lazy good-for-nothing crazy woman, that’s what she was. Never did nothing nor meant nothing in this world. Her and her whole family.” He looked down at his silverware, picked up his fork, and felt the tines for sharpness.

  “Was,” Abby said.

  He looked up and smiled. “Pardon?”

  “Was. You said she was. Not she is.”

  “Oh.” He shrugged. “I figured she was dead, after all this time.”

  No, he hadn’t; she saw the perverse glitter in his eyes. Terry had warned her, Grady had made a career out of lying, claiming one thing and another. And he dearly loved controlling women.

  “The story is that you beat her nearly to death the day they arrested you for murder,” she said. Behind her somebody’s fork clattered loudly on a plate. Somebody else coughed and scraped a chair across the floor. “What do you say?”

  “Why the hell should I have anything to say to you, missy?” He leaned his chair back on two legs, raised his voice, and said, “Jayleen! Get me a slice of that good old pumpkin pie you got on the counter, there. One for my friend, here, too.”

  The waitress sullenly pulled the pie out from the display and attacked it with a knife. She squirted whipped cream on top and slapped plates down on the table after shoving aside Grady’s congealing platter of gravy. Her hand rested briefly on Abby’s shoulder, and the long red fingernails reminded her, painfully, of Benny. Of John Lee.

  “Coffee?” the waitress asked, in the tone she probably reserved for long-haired hippies and circus freaks. After a second too long, she added, “Ma’am?”

  “No.” All at once Abby felt tired and claustrophobic, sickened by the stares and the dry hot air and people always watching and judging and God, hadn’t she asked for it, coming here? She was sick at the sight of Custer Grady, sick at heart for all the stupid people in this stupid town who would rather have a monster for a celebrity than no celebrity at all. “I don’t want any pie.”

  Jayleen looked down uncomprehendingly at the plate in Abby’s hand and frowned as if it were a misbehaving pet. “Fresh this morning,” she said huffily. “Nothing wrong with it.”

  “Then you eat it,” Abby said, and shoved it hard against Jayleen’s soft middle so that Jayleen, in simple self-defense, had to take it. Whipped cream gave Jayleen’s Santa apron a mustache. She backed away, glaring, and looked around the restaurant for support. Satisfied she had a consensus on her side, she said “Well, I never,” and retreated back to the coffeepot. She pasted on a too-wide smile and made a circuit of the room filling cups from her Pyrex beaker and pointedly ignoring Abby.

  “Forgot about that,” Grady said nonsensically, and chewed a thick cud of pumpkin pie. “Pearl had a hell of a temper, too. Hotter than a two-dollar whore at a Baptist convention. Wouldn’t a thought it, looking at her. She weren’t much to look at, even in her younger days.”

  “Did you beat her up? The day you were arrested?” When he didn’t answer, Abby shrugged and reached down to pick up her purse. “Whatever. I just thought you’d want to get the story straight.”

  Grady said, too casually, “You some kind of reporter?”

  It was her turn to smile and wait. He licked white foam from his fork, took a sip of coffee, ate another mouthful of pie. Then he said, “Pretty girl came to see me few years back, said she could sell my story and make me some money. You gonna make me some money?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Have to do better than just a maybe.”

  “Maybe’s all you get until I hear the story.”

  He threw his head back and brayed like a mule, showing molars brown as chocolates with black sticky cavity middles. She caught a whiff of his breath and nearly gagged.

  “That’s just what the other one said,” he wheezed. “Well, well. Don’t suppose you’d like to go off someplace private for a little conversation, just the two of us?”

  He pumped his eyebrows up and down, in case she’d missed the innuendo. She swallowed a hard lump of disgust and shook her head.

  Grady leaned forward. She hesitated but didn’t see any way around it; she leaned forward, too, and entered the swampy atmosphere of his bad breath.

  “Never hit her the day I was taken in,” he said. Most of the exaggerated Texas drawl had dropped out of his voice, leaving it clipped and rough. “Never even saw her. Went by her house but she weren’t there.”

  He was holding something back, waiting; she saw it lurking in the hard smile, the harder eyes.

  “Somebody was,” she guessed. “Who?”

  “You’re a damn sight cleverer than them yahoos went poking around my farm back in the fifties, ain’t you? You think I’m gonna tell you?”

  “I don’t think you have a reason not to tell me.”

  He wasn’t frightening, not the way she remembered him from Pearl’s point of view. Not physically threatening. It was all control now, manipulation, games. That didn’t mean that the games couldn’t be dangerous, of course. She still wouldn’t want to be alone with him, even for a moment.

  He clearly thought she did.

  “Miss High-and-Mighty Evalyn Doderman,” he said, and leaned back. She grabbed a grateful breath of fresh air. “She was there. Told me Pearl had gone out. Gone out! In a pig’s eye. Pearl never did go out past her own fence, scared to death of everything and everyone.”

  Evvy Doderman. Pearl-memories bobbed to the surface, too many to push away—Evvy the sweater girl, Evvy the popular, Evvy the beautiful. Pearl had hated her perfectly, despairingly, emptily. Evvy had never been in the house. Not while Pearl was alive.

  “What did Evvy say?” she asked.

  Grady laced his hands behind his head and grinned. “We was too busy to talk much, missy. Me and Evvy, we were real good friends. Had us a fine old time right there on Pearl’s daddy’s couch.”

  Whether she wanted to or not. Everything had been half true, after all—Terry was Custer Grady’s son, child of rape just like John Lee. That was why Evvy Bollinger spent her afternoons in Dr. Urdiales’ office in Midland, quietly desperate. That was why she kept up the obsessive fiction about Terry’s truckdriver father.

  Pearl hadn’t lied to John Lee, at least. And both of the boys knew, didn’t they? Terry knew. It showed in his rage, his fear, his terrorizing of John Lee.

  She felt ill again, the world a crushing weight on her chest. She pushed back her chair and stood up, glad her knees held her. Everyone stared.

  “Ain’t much of a story yet,” Grady said as she turned away. “Gets better.”

  She looked around the diner, the rapt faces, Jayleen’s hard, triumphant smile.

  “Why don’t you tell them?” she shot back, and yanked the zipper up on her coat as she started for the door.

  Outside the window, a car nosed into the snow and parked. Gold emblems flashed on the doors as two men got out. They wore thick blue parkas, gray slacks, and gray felt Stetsons. The taller one had on silvered aviator glasses.

  Abby stopped halfway, trapped between Grady and the approaching disaster, watching as Terry held the door open for an older man who had to be Sheriff Hayes. Hayes made a show of brushing snow off his coat, stamping his feet, blowing on his chapped hands.

  She didn’t know why she found it such a surprise that Sheriff Hayes was black. Difficult to imagine Terry working for—having respect for—a black man, she supposed. And she certainly hadn’t expected such a round, friendly-looking face on a man who’d sent Terry to terrorize an old man.

  “Whoo-ee, I’m froze up like an ice cube. Jayleen, honey, how about a couple of cups of that fine coffee?” Hayes had an apple face, shiny and cheerful. His eyes were quick and, Abby thought, frighteningly aware. He favored her with a smile as sweet as a streetcorner Santa’s. “Hey, there, Miss Rhodes, how are you? You looking forward to Christmas?”

  She nodded in shock, less surprised that he knew her name than that he knew her on sight. He turned and greeted a couple more people by name, nodded hellos to three or four more, and sat down at one of the rickety tables near where Abby stood.

  Terry waited by the door, leaning against the wall, head tilted down so his hat hid his face. She couldn’t leave without passing him, close enough to touch. That alone held her where she was, waiting while Sheriff Hayes was served his coffee, asked for cream and sugar. While he stirred his cup, staring down at it, he said blandly, “Can’t say it’s nice to see you again, Custer.”

  “Now, hold on, Sheriff. I’m a reformed man!” Grady said, and leaned back in the booth. Plastic creaked like old wood. “Been nearly forty years since you saw me, don’t you think a man can change?”

  “Jayleen, let me have a slice of that apple pie, there, if you please. And some of that whipped cream. Grady, I expect any man can change except you. You’re a lying, murdering, black-hearted son of a bitch.” The sheriff lifted his gaze from the coffee and smiled, but it wasn’t the jolly Santa smile from before. “Fall Creek’s turned into a nice little town while you been gone, and it’s full of nice folks. I don’t think those nice folks want you back, Grady.”

  Grady slouched his shoulders and looked down in his lap and said, “Don’t want no trouble with the law, Al, you know that.”

  The words were right but everything else was wrong, a parody of a submissive ex-con, a nasty grin half hidden on his lips. Abby pulled in a deep breath and looked over at Terry; the rim of his hat raised just enough that she felt him looking at her, too.