“Damn good,” Willy Burke said. He sat up.
“My God,” Reed Barrows said. “He looks twenty years younger.”
“I ain’t been kissed like that since I was in high school,” said Willy. “If ever. Ma’am, I think you saved my life. I thank you for that, but I think the kiss was even better.”
Evie began to smile. “I’m glad you enjoyed it. I rather liked it myself, although it wasn’t as good as beating Boom Town.”
Clint’s blood was no longer up; exhaustion and Evie’s latest miracle had cooled it. He looked on the rage he had felt so recently like a man looking at a stranger who has broken into his house and cluttered the kitchen while making himself an extravagant and gluttonous breakfast. He felt sad and regretful and terribly tired. He wished he could just go home, sit beside his wife, share space with her, and not have to say a word.
“Geary,” Clint said.
Frank was slow to look at him, like a man shaking off a daze.
“Let her go. It’s the only way.”
“Maybe, but even that’s not sure, is it?”
“No,” Clint agreed. “What in this fucked-up life is?”
Angel spoke up then. “Bad times and good times,” she said. “Bad times and good. All the rest is just horseshit in the barn.”
“I thought it would take at least until Thursday, but…” Evie laughed, a sound like tinkling bells. “I forgot how fast men can move when they set their minds to a thing.”
“Sure,” Michaela said. “Just think of the Manhattan Project.”
At ten minutes past eight on that fine morning, a line of six vehicles drove down West Lavin Road, while behind them the prison smoldered like a discarded cigar butt in an ashtray. They turned onto Ball’s Hill Road. Unit Two led the way with its flashers turning slowly. Frank was behind the wheel. Clint was in the shotgun seat. Behind them sat Evie Black, exactly where she had been sitting after Lila arrested her. Then she had been half-naked. On this return trip, she was wearing a Dooling Correctional red top.
“How we’re ever going to explain this to the state police, I don’t know,” Frank said. “Lot of men dead, lot of men wounded.”
“Right now everyone’s got their hands full with Aurora,” Clint said, “and probably half of them aren’t even showing up. When all the women come back—if they come back—no one will care.”
From behind them, Evie spoke quietly. “The mothers will. The wives. The daughters. Who do you think cleans up the battlefields after the shooting stops?”
Unit Two stopped in the lane leading to Truman Mayweather’s trailer, where yellow CRIME SCENE tape still fluttered. The other vehicles—two more police cruisers, two civilian cars, and Carson Struthers’s pickup truck—pulled up behind them. “Now what?” Clint asked.
“Now we’ll see,” Evie said. “If one of these men doesn’t change his mind and shoot me after all, that is.”
“That won’t happen,” Clint replied, not nearly as confident as he sounded.
Doors slammed. For the moment, the trio in Unit Two sat where they were.
“Tell me something, Evie,” Frank said. “If you’re just the emissary, who’s in charge of this rodeo? Some… I don’t know… life force? Big Mama Earth, maybe, hitting the reset button?”
“Do you mean the Great Lesbian in the sky?” Evie asked. “A short, heavyset deity wearing a mauve pantsuit and sensible shoes? Isn’t that the image most men get when they think a woman is trying to run their lives?”
“I don’t know.” Frank felt listless, done up. He missed his daughter. He even missed Elaine. He didn’t know what had happened to his anger. It was like his pocket had torn, and it had fallen out somewhere along the way. “What comes to mind when you think about men, smartass?”
“Guns,” she said. “Clint, there appear to be no doorhandles back here.”
“Don’t let that stop you,” he said.
She didn’t. One of the back doors opened, and Evie Black stepped out. Clint and Frank joined her, one on each side, and Clint was reminded of the Bible classes he’d been forced to attend at one foster home or another: Jesus on the cross, with the disbelieving bad guy on one side and the good thief on the other—the one who would, according to the dying messiah, shortly join him in paradise. Clint remembered thinking that the poor guy probably would have settled for parole and a chicken dinner.
“I don’t know what force sent me here,” she said. “I only know I was called, and—”
“You came,” Clint finished.
“Yes. And now I’ll go back.”
“What do we do?” asked Frank.
Evie turned to him, and she was no longer smiling. “You’ll do the job usually reserved for women. You’ll wait.” She drew in a deep breath. “Oh, the air smells so fresh after that prison.”
She walked past the clustered men as if they weren’t there, and took Angel by the shoulders. Angel looked up at her with shining eyes. “You did well,” Evie said, “and I thank you from my heart.”
Angel blurted, “I love you, Evie!”
“I love you, too,” said Evie, and kissed her lips.
Evie walked toward the ruins of the meth shed. Beyond it sat the fox, its brush curled around its paws, panting and looking at her with bright eyes. She followed it, and then the men followed her.
“Dad,” Jared said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “Do you see it? Tell me you see it.”
“Oh my God,” Deputy Treat said. “What is that?”
They stared at the Tree with its many twisting trunks and its flocks of exotic birds. It rose so high that the top could not be seen. Clint could feel a force radiating out from it like a strong electric current. The peacock spread his tail for their admiration, and when the white tiger appeared from the other side, its belly swishing in the high grass, several guns were raised.
“Lower those weapons!” Frank shouted.
The tiger lay down, its remarkable eyes peering at them through the high grass. The guns were lowered. All but one.
“Wait here,” Evie said.
“If the women of Dooling come back, all the women of earth come back?” Clint asked. “That’s how it works?”
“Yes. The women of this town stand for all women, and it must be all of your women who come back. Through there.” She pointed at a split in the Tree. “If even one refuses…” She didn’t have to finish. Moths flew and fluttered around her head in a kind of diadem.
“Why would they want to stay?” Reed Barrows asked, sounding honestly bewildered.
Angel’s laugh was as harsh as a crow’s caw. “I got a better question—if they built up a good thing, like Evie says, why would they want to leave?”
Evie started toward the Tree, the long grass whickering against her red pants, but stopped when she heard the snap-clack of someone racking a shell into the chamber of a rifle. A Weatherby, as it happened. Drew T. Barry was the only man who hadn’t lowered his gun at Frank’s command, but he wasn’t pointing it at Evie. He was pointing it at Michaela.
“You go with her,” he said.
“Put it down, Drew,” said Frank.
“No.”
Michaela looked at Evie. “Can I go with you to wherever it is? Without being in one of the cocoons?”
“Of course,” Evie said.
Michaela returned her attention to Barry. She no longer looked afraid; her brow was furrowed in puzzlement. “But why?”
“Call it insurance,” said Drew T. Barry. “If she’s telling the truth, maybe you can persuade your mother, and your mother can persuade the rest of them. I’m a strong believer in insurance.”