She didn’t look at me this time. “No.”
I nodded and stepped in a little closer. “We’re looking for your daughter—we’re looking for Connie.” She said nothing. “Mrs. Holman?”
“She’s not here.”
“Her car is parked out front.”
Her hands shook as she spoke. “She’s not here.”
“There’s also a half cup of coffee on your kitchen counter with lipstick traces.”
“That’s my cup.”
“You and I both know you never left a cup on a counter in your life.” I took a deep breath and slowly let it out with my words. “It would be nice if life weren’t so messy, but that’s just not the nature of things; we want things to be perfect, but most of the time we just spend our existence cleaning up the messes we make—and sometimes the messes of other people, people about whom we care most in the world.”
Her eyes came up slow, and the words came from her mouth in a staccato of verbal bursts. “Can’t. You. Just. Go. Away?”
“You know we can’t.” I waited a moment and then continued. “That’s what happened with Gerald, wasn’t it? When he found out what your daughter was guilty of and that it was something that he couldn’t clean up—at least not without breaking the law, which was something he’d never do—he punished himself.”
“Go away.”
“That’s the problem with guilt, it’s a two-way street; our children have to live with the things we do, and sometimes we have to live with their actions.” I moved in closer. “We tell them that we can protect them, but we can’t even protect ourselves from the mistakes we make—that’s why I’m here.”
“I told you—go away.”
“He didn’t tell you what she was doing, did he? He thought he could protect you if he killed himself and took the knowledge with him, but these things often can’t be hidden. We found the report that he didn’t file, the one where he talked to a woman by the name of Izzy. It took me a long time to put it together, but then I remembered that Lucian had referred to your daughter as Izzy, the nickname Gerald had used for her. I don’t think your daughter is a bad person, Mrs. Holman. I don’t know how she got involved in all this, but she’s made some terrible mistakes and she’s going to have to answer for them.”
She finally looked at me, the words striking out like a machete. “I hired you.”
“No, ma’am, you didn’t. You requested my help and I came, but nobody’s paying me.” I stood there with her glaring at me. “We’ve got a warrant, and there are about a half-dozen police officers out in front of your house right now, but I don’t really want it to happen like that.”
Her chin dropped to her chest, and she began fussing with the blanket that hid her legs, and I wasn’t surprised when she pulled a small Smith & Wesson revolver from the folds and held it there pointed at the floor.
I sighed deeply and then placed my hand in my pocket and waited.
The sobs that wracked her body were horrifying to listen to and watch, and all I could think was that this poor woman had paid enough in one life.
I glanced at the door to our right. “Where is Connie?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this . . .”
“I know.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong; we were good parents.” Her eyes came up to mine. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m sure you didn’t, but people have been hurt and people are dead.”
She raised the pistol a little higher and looked at it.
“Where is Connie?”
She pointed the .32 at me, and all I felt was tired.
“Go away.”
I shook my head. “You know I can’t do that.”
She pulled the hammer back. “I said, go away.”
“That’s not how this is going to end, all these horrible things, with one more horrible act . . .” I held out my hand. “It’s just going to end quietly and with dignity.”
There we were, the two of us staring at each other, neither of us wanting to be where we were, doing what we were doing, facing what we were facing. I tried to imagine how far I would go to protect my child, but I was just too tired to measure that kind of infinite distance.
Phyllis Holman held the .32 on me until her hand began to shake and then carefully lowered the hammer, turned the thing sideways, and held it out to me.
I took it and then turned to see Lucian holding his own sidearm hidden along his leg as I passed him and headed toward the door to the right. “I thought you were unarmed.”
He countered to the left and approached Phyllis as I continued on. “I ain’t ever unarmed.”
I turned the knob and swung it open to reveal a lonely room with only a single bed, a nightstand, and an old dresser. The wallpaper was peeling, and the carpet was stained, an anomaly in the otherwise pristine Holman house—a room to be used and forgotten, shunned and shut away, a cell. There were narrow windows above, two of them, choked with snow, and an old door in the far corner.
There was no one in the room, but the covers of the bed were pulled to one side where someone had been sitting, hiding, waiting. I looked behind the door to make sure there was no one there, stuffed the Smith into my pocket, and tried the other door. I pried it open to find stairs leading to a set of cellar doors, one of them pushed back, the fog rolling down the steps.
I launched up them as fast as my exhausted legs could carry me and stood in the backyard; there were prints leading toward the side of the house, and it looked like she’d started for her car but had seen the constabulary out front and had doubled back toward a small gate in a chain-link fence. Did she really think she had a chance of getting away? I thought about calling in the troops but figured she was probably tired, cold, and afraid and that I would rather try and talk her in myself.
Lifting the clasp, I stepped through and closed the gate behind me, turning to follow the prints as they made their way through an abandoned lot and then down a slope to a flat area. There were a few cottonwoods, bare and stark in the frozen fog, and it was almost as if I were rushing across a white desert.
There was a shape in the distance that looked human, but as I got closer, it seemed to fade away. I thought I could hear something coming, but sound was muffled and seemed to resonate from all directions. I thought about the buffalo in Custer State Park, and what Virgil had said, and it seemed like the natural world was closing in around me. Unconsciously, my hand drifted down to the confiscated .32 in my pocket; evidently, I never went unarmed either.
When I got to the edge of the hill, I looked to the west and could see the sheriff’s department’s light bar rotating blue onto the front of the Holman house. When I turned east I saw the figure again, just barely within my field of vision. I stepped and half slid down the hillside and started jogging down a path. After a moment, in one of those patches of clarity that happen on a foggy night, I could see her striding along Echeta Road, parallel with the train tracks, and eventually the highway.
Being in the state she was in, I suppose she thought she could just walk away into the fog.
I continued after her as she headed back toward the center of town, walking alongside the twelve-foot chain-link fence that guarded the railroad tracks, the spiraled razor wire making it seem as if we were in a prison.
In the distance, I could hear the horn of an oncoming train, possibly the one that Jone Urrecha and I had escaped from.
Hurrying my pace, I got within fifty yards of her and called out. “Connie!”
She stopped and turned to look at me, the slight wind pulling at her hair and long wool coat as if we were in some Brontë novel. She stood there like an unfinished phrase.
We looked at each other. I guess it was the most hopeful moment I had had, but I ruined it by starting toward her again. When I did, she turned and began running.