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These three roses, each a perfect specimen and obviously chosen with care, were more than a gift: They were a message. In their white sun-kissed splendor, they said goodbye.

Feeling as though she’d been pierced by every thorn on the bush, Micky turned away from a message that she was emotionally unable to accept, and stared at the house trailer next door. The place appeared to be deserted.

She had crossed the lawn to the fallen fence between properties before she quite realized that she’d begun to move. She was running by the time she reached the neighbors’ back door.

Impetuously, even though she hadn’t composed an excuse for the visit if Maddoc or Sinsemilla responded, Micky knocked with an urgency that she couldn’t quell. She rapped too long, too hard, and when she paused to rub her stinging knuckles against the palm of her other hand, the silence in the house abided as though she had never knocked at all.

As before, drapes shrouded the windows. Micky looked left and right, hoping to see a fold of fabric stir, any indication that she was being watched, that someone still resided here.

When she pounded on the door again and failed once more to draw a response, she tried the knob. Unlocked. The door opened.

Morning hadn’t fully arrived in the Maddoc kitchen, where heavy curtains filtered the early daylight. Even with the door open and sunshine streaming past Micky, shadows dominated.

The illuminated clock, brightest point in the room, seemed to float supernaturally upon the wall, as if it were the clock of fate counting down to death. She could hear nothing but the purr of its cat-quiet mechanism.

She shouted into the house: “Hello? Is anyone here? Is anyone home? Hello?”

Unanswered, she crossed the threshold.

The possibility of a trap occurred to her. She didn’t think that Maddoc would scheme to lure her farther by silence, and then bludgeon her with a hammer. She was undeniably a trespasser, however; and she could be easily framed for theft if, in answer to Maddoc’s call, the police suddenly arrived and found her here. With her prison record, any trumped-up charge might stick.

Dropping all pretense that she was looking for anyone but the girl, she called only Leilani’s name as, nervously, she moved deeper into the narrow house. The greasy drapes, the sagging furniture, the matted shag carpet absorbed her voice as effectively as would have the draped walls and the plush surfaces of a funeral home, and step by step she found herself in the steadily constricting embrace of claustrophobia.

As furnished rentals went, this was at the desperation end of the financial spectrum, leased by the week to tenants who more often than not were still scrambling to put together every Friday’s rent payment even after Friday had dawned. The contents, aside from being worn to the point of collapse, were utterly impersonaclass="underline" no souvenirs or knickknacks, no family photographs, not even any ten-dollar artworks on the walls.

In the kitchen and living room, Micky saw no possession that hadn’t come with the house, no indication that the Maddocs were in residence. Born to wealth, raised with fine things, the doom doctor could have paid for the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton, and surely would have preferred those accommodations. The fact that he had rented this place for the week, using the name Jordan Banks, seemed to prove that he not only wanted to keep a low profile these days but that, when eventually he was finished with Leilani and with her mother, he intended to have left behind little or no proof that he had ever traveled in their company.

The depressing nature of these digs and the lack of concern about his bride’s comfort, when better could so easily have been afforded, argued that Preston Maddoc’s reasons for marrying had nothing to do with love and affection, or with the desire to have a family of his own. Some mysterious need drove him, and not even all of Leilani’s colorful observations and bizarre speculations had come close to casting light upon his scabrous motives.

Venturing into the bedrooms and the bathroom required a greater degree of courage — or perhaps reckless stupidity — than she had needed to enter the back door. Night shadows, having fled here to escape the dawn, waited in a conclave for the sunset that would return the world to them, more numerous in these rooms than in the first two. Although she switched on the lights as she went, every lamp seemed fitted with a weak bulb, and gloom clung to every corner.

The shabby bathroom contained no toothbrushes, no shaving kit, no bottles of medicine, nothing to indicate the presence of tenants.

In the smaller of the two bedrooms, the closet was empty, as were the nightstand and the dresser. The bedclothes had been left in disarray.

In the larger bedroom, the closet stood open, and the rod held only empty wire hangers.

On the floor, visible from the doorway, stood a bottle of lemon-flavored vodka. Full. The seal unbroken.

At the sight of the booze, Micky began to shake uncontrollably, but not out of any desire for a drink.

Having seen Leilani’s gift of roses, Maddoc somehow knew that Micky would be drawn here immediately when she, too, saw the blooms. He’d left the back door unlocked for her.

He must have gone to an all-night market to purchase this gift of spirits, confident that Micky would venture to the last room in the house and discover what he’d left for her. The mocking bastard had attached a fancy stick-on bow to the neck of the bottle.

In one brief conversation, and after just a few minutes spent ransacking her bedroom, Maddoc understood her uncannily well.

As Micky considered his preternatural insight, she knew that Maddoc was a Goliath impervious to slingshots. The shakes that seized her at the sight of the bottle grew worse as she thought of Leilani on the road with this man, traveling faster than justice could move, speeding ever farther from hope, toward a death that would be called healing, toward an unmarked grave in which her small body would soon be rotting even if her spirit went to the stars.

By leaving the bottle, Maddoc was saying that he harbored no fear of Micky, that he trusted her to be weak, ineffectual, entirely predictable. Having appointed himself as her suicide counselor, he believed that she needed no more assistance than the simple direction provided by this bottle — and enough years — to destroy herself by degrees.

She left the house without touching the vodka.

Outside, the too-bright morning stung her eyes, sharp as grief, and everything in the August day looked hard, brittle, breakable, everything from the porcelain sky to the ground beneath her feet, in which quakes were stored as surely as the vodka in the bottle. Given time enough, all things passed away: the sky and the earth and the people caught between. She didn’t unduly fear the death that she had been born to meet, but now as never previously, she feared that she would keep her rendezvous with death before she had a chance to do what she had been put there to do, what she realized now that everyone had been put here to do — bring hope, grace, and love into the lives of others.

What twenty-eight years of suffering had never taught her, what she had stubbornly refused to learn from even the hardest knocks of life, had suddenly been taught to her in less than three days by one disabled girl whose articles of instruction were only these two: her great joy in Creation, her inextinguishable joy, and her unshakable faith that her small challenged life, however chaotic, nevertheless possessed meaning and an important purpose in the infinite scheme of things. The lesson Micky had learned from this dangerous young mutant, though plain and simple, rocked her now as she stood on the dead brown lawn where Sinsemilla had danced with the moon: None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.