Columbia, South Carolina, was making national news, and the usual man-in-the-street interviews were bringing out every undereducated redneck in town. Most talked about shooting a kidnapper on sight. The more educated and culturally responsible responses were probably left on the cutting room floor. Not sensational enough for New York or the West Coast.

  One local reporter with sources in the police department suggested that a poem had been found in the shirt pocket of the latest girl, the one brought to the ED yesterday. I figured Emma Simmons would have a hissy fit at that being released to the media.

  After my bath, I checked on my daughter and Topaz again and found both girls packing snacks for school. Satisfied that they were able to repeat back orders about personal safety, and far less satisfied that they had enough sleep to drive, I nevertheless saw them out, called Nana to report in and hit the sack.

  Six hours later, I woke to find my hair defying gravity on one side and sheet wrinkles on my face. I looked like a six-year-old—or like a woman facing middle age. I didn’t know why my age had put such a lock on me, but I wasn’t enjoying my remaining years as a forty something, even though I wouldn’t be hitting fifty anytime real soon.

  I showered, dressed, considered going to the Clip N Curl for highlights, and decided to go to the barn instead. I knew Nana needed help with the farm, and I hadn’t offered much in the way of assistance in the last few days. I mucked out a few stalls, then put in four full hours in a field, overseeing a crew of migrant workers who were making hay while the sun shone. By dark, we had two bare fields studded with this year’s first, huge, round hay bales. I was sweaty and tired and feeling a lot better about life.

  Following a quick shower, I started up the grill and put steaks on to cook, while potatoes baked and I tore up more lettuce. Jim had left a message that he was heading this way. I figured I could repay him for the opening rosebud on the kitchen table. Anyway, I was in the mood to stay home. So I set the table on the porch and lit candles for ambience.

  When Jim arrived, I was sitting in the porch swing, watching the night sky, which was a deep purple velvet, and listening to early mosquitoes buzz around the screened porch.

  Jim parked his ugly gray Crown Victoria—the unmarked car of choice for most law-enforcement departments—and climbed the short steps to the deck. He moved as if he hadn’t slept in days, though I saw his face was cleanly shaven when the porch light hit it and he was dressed in fresh clothes. He had at least been home to clean up, or maybe he kept clothes at feeb headquarters.

  He sat in a chair at the table—fell into it, actually. “Evening, Miz Ash. If that’s a steak I smell cooking, I’m your eternal slave.”

  “Hope you like them medium rare or rare. I don’t burn good meat.”

  Jasmine and Topaz roared up in the drive before he could reply, slammed doors and ran squealing onto the porch.

  “We passed the midterms!”

  “Both of us. I got a ninety-three and Paz got ninety-seven.” Jas stuck out her tongue at her cousin. “Teacher’s pet.”

  “Not me. I’m just smarter than you. Do I smell steaks? And double-stuffed potatoes? Oh-ho yeah!”

  They grabbed plates and began to load them up, chatting about a friend who had been shot. Elroy, but of course, I couldn’t say that I already knew all about it. Nor could I correct the inaccuracies they had heard through the gossip lines. El had been shot five times. He was near death. The shooter had been a jealous ex-girlfriend. I kept my expression bland and let them babble.

  As they chatted, I handed Jim a plate and indicated the rapidly diminishing food. He dished up salad and took two of the remaining three potatoes. I always made more food than I needed, as I never knew who Jas would bring home.

  “Gimme some salad. Mamash makes the best salad in the state.”

  “Hey, Mr. Cop.” Jasmine kicked his foot lightly. “You found that assho—that evil excuse for a human being that’s killing those girls? Sorry, Mama.”

  Topaz snorted and reached into the bowl of ice, withdrawing two diet drinks. “I bet your mama heard the term before.”

  “Not from my girls, I haven’t. I’m glad you did so well on the exams and made it home in one piece. Now go on in the rec room and eat. I’m too tired for your energy.”

  “Yeah. We got music to listen to.” Topaz slid her eyes at me. “So, you and Mr. Cop can smooch.”

  “Paz!” I said.

  Giggling, the girls raced inside and slammed the door. Not that it did much good in terms of noise. Jim laughed softly and popped the tops on drinks for us as the stereo came on and John Mayer floated out to us. At least they had good taste in music.

  “I like rare,” Jim said, picking up our last conversation. I placed a steak on his plate and took one, leaving two for steak sandwiches tomorrow, finally sitting down to his left. We ate in silence as owls hooted back and forth, their territorial calls floating on the night air from somewhere near Nana’s house and the back forty. Near my ancestors’ family graves.

  When we had eaten, he stood and took a seat in the swing, his long legs moving the creaking chain. I just waited. I may not be psychic, but I know when a man has something on his mind. Finally he said, “The poems the girls have on them when we find them?”

  “On the homemade paper.”

  “Yeah. They’re weird.”

  “Want to tell me how weird?”

  “Yeah. I do. But Emma would take me off the case if she knew I was talking to you.”

  “But she knows you’re here now.” I made it a statement, but I had a bad feeling about where this was going.

  “She knows.”

  I got up and poured us both a glass of wine. That he took it let me know he wasn’t on duty. Not exactly. But he was here for something other than my great steaks. “Let me guess,” I said. I retook my chair, though there was a lot of empty seat on the swing, and his arm stretched out across the wood back looked awfully inviting. “Despite the possibility—no, the likelihood—that the killer may be of no relation to the Chadwicks at all, she wants you to question me, unofficially, about who in my family might be a killer.” He nodded. “People don’t look like killers, Jim. They don’t go around with marks of Cain tattooed on their foreheads that says, Child Killer. They look just like anyone else.”

  “Seen a lot of killers, have you?” Humor laced his voice.

  “Enough. Where do you think they come for patching up when they get hurt being arrested or in jail? To hospitals.”

  Jim leaned forward, sensing there was more I wasn’t saying. I had never told him about the night I’d nearly died. The night a man had shot me. The night I’d shot him back and killed him, his blood all over my kitchen floor. I thought for a long silent moment, the owls falling quiet, the stillness broken by horses snorting and the sounds of hooves milling. Could I tell him this? Did I want to? Did I want to go off with this man, get to know him better? Maybe intimately? Did I trust him?

  Ahhh. That was it. Did I trust him? Had I healed from Jack’s infidelity and death or was I still twitching mentally from the wound.

  I studied Jim across the porch, his face illuminated by flickering candles. His eyes were steady, determined, caring. Something slid into place inside me, some indefinable tiny something that had been out of place or missing. Or maybe just waiting for the right moment, the right stimulus.

  Damn. Damn, damn, double damn. I did trust the man. I sipped my wine to moisten my unexpectedly dry throat. “My husband, Jack, got into some really bad business dealings. When he died, they came back to haunt me. A man named Alan Mathison shot me.” I watched Jim’s eyes in the night. “Emma wants you to ask me about that night, doesn’t she?”

  Jim nodded. “But I won’t. I will listen, though, if you want to tell me.” His voice was firm, and I realized that he’d tell Emma some cock-and-bull story about it to protect me, if he had to.

  “Have you read the official reports?” I asked.

  He nodded again. “Simmons dropped them on my desk today.”

  I drank, the merlot an astringent, biting tang, and held the glass up to the light, concentrating on the way the wine swirled and clung to the glass. Far too casually, I said, “Made some snarky comment about me, too, didn’t she?”

  Jim just grinned and drank his wine.

  “He was a business partner of Jack’s. He had already killed a man to cover up a problem on a development project,” I said. “A multimillion-dollar problem. He tried to kill me. To save myself, to keep him away from my child who was due home within minutes, I stabbed him with a pitchfork.” Jim didn’t react. He was wearing his cop face, giving nothing away. “I left him in the barn, after knocking him into Mabel’s stall.”

  I half smiled in the night, but it was laced with sorrow. “Mabel was Jack’s horse. She never really cared much for other men. I heard her when she went at him.” I remembered that night, remembered the smells of the barn, the faint taint of human bowel on the air, the sounds of Mabel snorting and striking out at him to protect her last foal.

  “I thought Alan was dead, and I was bleeding pretty badly,” I touched my thigh. “Not thinking straight. But I made my way back to the house. I called 911 on my cell. I was in the kitchen, talking to the dispatcher, when I looked up and he was standing there.”

  I turned the wineglass around and around, the stem sliding in my fingers, my hands sweating with the remembered fear of the night. Oddly, what I remembered most clearly was the feel of my teeth that night, dry and rough when I tried to talk. Yet, I could see it all in my memory with a high-definition clarity, the clarity of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  “Alan was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, bleeding, clothes torn. There was a faint stench of feces from where I stabbed him in the abdomen with the pitchfork.” Had I said that part yet? I couldn’t remember. “The skin on the left side of his face was gone. Ripped away in a wide swath.” It was the face of a dead man, pale, bloodied, bruised. I blinked away the image, but the chill that it always brought shivered along my skin. “He wavered, bloody and trampled, holding the pitchfork in his left hand. He stepped into the room.”

  Terror again flooded through me, as sharp as if he stood there now. “Having him there alive meant that Jasmine was in danger, my baby who was due home soon.

  “I set the phone down. I could hear the dispatcher’s voice from the tabletop. I picked up the gun. It was Alan’s. I had carried it from the barn, I think. I rested it on the table. The blood on my hands made me clumsy and the gun was slick. I was fighting throwing up. I remember the taste of acid and bile.” It had been overpowering, a fresh, burning tang, the taste of old blood and vomit. Everything had moved so slowly.

  “The holes across Alan’s abdomen were down low. Evenly placed, two in the lower right quadrant. Two in the lower left. A neat row of them. There wasn’t much bleeding, just the scent of feces to tell me I had punctured his intestines, torn something inside. The blood came from his cut hand and the torn place on his face.

  “He said, ‘Remember, Ash. I never lose. Never.’ And he came at me, holding the pitchfork to kill me. But he stumbled and slipped in my blood.” I didn’t watch Jim, now. I stared out at the night. It had been nighttime when Alan had died. It had been a long time after that night before I had the guts to look into the dark again. “His feet left red smears. And I was going to die.

  “The room tilted and I knew I was falling. I fired the gun.”

  And though I knew I couldn’t have, I seemed to see the round leave the barrel, travel through the air in slow, slow motion and enter his body. Just below the sternum. I touched my own chest at the memory, mid center. I couldn’t have seen the round. Couldn’t have. But the memory was there, always in my mind, hard as stone.

  “I hit the floor and the gun went off again. The shot went wild.” Hit the cabinet, I found out later. “I landed on my bad leg. The pain was…”

  I took a breath that stuttered, and Jim pulled his legs under himself to stand, tenderness and compassion in his face, guilt for making me remember it all again. I held out a hand to stop him. He had wanted to hear this. Well, he’d hear it from across the porch. He slowly sat again.

  “It was bad, and I was passing out.” A slow-moving cloud of blackness, like the shadows in the night outside. I had wondered which would take me over first. The pain or the darkness. “Before I passed out, I saw him fall.” He had landed in this long, graceful tumble, bounced on the bloody floor and settled there, his eyes on mine.

  “The pitchfork fell beside him. I couldn’t hear the clatter, beneath the gun blasts. But he writhed there, his face close to mine, his body curled into a tight ball.” His eyes had been bewildered. Confused. And I still saw them in my nightmares, though I had less of them these days. “I saw his lips move and I’m sure he said, ‘I lost. I…I lost.’”

  The motion of the swing had stopped. “I’m sorry,” Jim said.

  He leaned in, placing his wineglass on the table, and he seemed to come to some decision. “The girl buried on your farm. She was a poet. A prodigy.” When I didn’t respond, he went on. “The poems that the girls have in their shirts are strange. This last one was titled something like ‘u-terp.’ One was titled a word for an accordion or merry-go-round. And none of them make any sense.”

  “Eu-ter-pe.”

  Jim looked up fast. Jas was leaning in the doorway, a cola can dangling from her fingers, her face blank, watching me. I knew she had been listening to me tell my story, but she didn’t refer to it. Instead, she said, “And it wasn’t an accordion, betcha. It was a Calliope.”

  Jim’s whole body tensed. “How did you know that?”

  “I’ve been to college, Mr. Cop. I took a course in Greek mythology last year. Euterpe and Calliope are Muses.”

  “What the bleeding hell are Muses?” Jim asked.

  “Come on. I’ll show you.” Jas turned and walked away. Without speaking to me, Jim followed. I debated going, too, but the dirty dishes wouldn’t get clean by themselves. I stacked greasy plates and carried them inside, adding the girls’ dishes to the heap. When the kitchen was clean, I turned on the dishwasher and followed my daughter and my maybe-boyfriend to the rec room.

  19

  T hey were bent over Jasmine’s open laptop. “The Muses were the daughters of Zeus,” Jas said, her voice taking on a tone of teacher to student. My lips softened into a smile, but Jim was too tightly focused on the laptop to notice. “The number of Muses varied, but usually there were nine—Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania.”

  “I’ll never be able to pronounce all that,” Jim murmured.

  I curled onto the couch and watched Jim with my daughter. The sight brought a bittersweet sadness close to the surface. Jack should have been the one leaning over her, encouraging her, teasing her. Jack, who had died. And now Jim, who…I trusted him. It was a strange feeling.

  “Apollo became their leader in Delphi and Parnassus, which were their favorite places,” Jas said.

  “Man, I should have taken that course with you,” Paz said. “Does my cousin get a reward for this?”

  Jasmine laughed abruptly and turned to Jim. “Do I?”

  “I don’t know,” Jim said, nudging Jasmine aside and taking her seat. “Not very likely. This stuff is in the public domain. But it’s a big help to me. I’ll take you and your mom to dinner some day.”

  “Not as good as cash, but food is good,” Jas said.

  “Calliope was the eldest and most distinguished of the nine Muses,” Jim read. “Her emblems are a stylus and wax tablets.” He stopped and whispered, “Oh crap.”

  I remembered the melted candle found with the little girl on the farm. Not a melted candle. A piece of wood covered with wax, and a stylus. Jim scrolled down. “Clio, the Muse of history. Usually associated with a parchment scroll or a set of tablets. Erato, the muse of lyric poetry, particularly love and erotic poetry, and mimicry,” he read. “She is usually depicted with a lyre. Euterpe. Here she is,” he said, his voice growing excited. “The muse of music, she is also the muse of joy and of flute playing….” He paused.

  “Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore.” He stumbled through the names. “Thalia and Urania,” Jim continued, scrolling down and hitting Print. “Son of a bitch. There’s nine. Nine. I have to get back to the office. Wait. Who is Mnemosyne?” he asked.

  Jas looked at him, puzzled. “She was the mother of the Muses, the goddess of memory.”

  “It all fits. Son of a flaming duck, it all fits.” He stood and studied the screen as if memorizing it. He looked at the girls. “You can’t talk about this. Not until I give you permission. The lives of little girls depend on it.”

  “They’ll keep your secrets,” I said, spearing both girls with the “mother” look. They nodded, though I could see mental crossing of fingers taking place. We’d have to talk. “You going to give a Chadwick credit for this?” I asked Jim.

  “Yeah. I am.” He looked at me hard. “But not until I catch the guy.” He leaned down and gathered up the papers from the printer. “Jasmine Davenport? You are my hero.”

  “Dang skippy,” my daughter said.

  Jim’s car hadn’t reached the curve toward the street before Jas and Paz were back at the computer, searching out sites about Muses. I was surprised they waited that long.

  “Girls?” My voice was stern. When I had at least part of their attention, I said, “You may not speak of this to anyone but your parents and to me.”

  They exchanged a glance, bursting to tell the secret.

  “I mean it. This family is still considered the main suspect in the kidnapping and murder of more than one little girl. You’re nearly adults. You have a responsibility to protect the Chadwicks.” That caught their attention. Responsibility to family, church and community were pounded in to Chadwicks from the cradle up. “Make Nana, your Mama Moses and me proud.” I left the room, knowing I had guilted them into keeping the secret and not feeling remorseful about it at all.