She was too busy recalling the look on Daniel's face when he'd finished his first serving, after hearing of his mother's death. How the deep vertical lines between his eyes smoothed clear, how his hands stopped shaking. She was thinking of how many helpings this family would need to come close to approximating normal. She was wondering how her mother never thought it important enough to tell her that missing a step might have grave consequences, not only for the person dining but also for the chef.
The phone rang when they had just finished putting the top crust on the pie and painting their initials across it in vanilla.
“It's Zeph,” Trixie told Laura. “Can you hang up while I go upstairs?”
She handed Laura the phone, and moments later, Laura heard her pick up an extension. As tempted as Laura was to listen, she hung up. When she turned around, she noticed the pie, ready and waiting to be baked.
It was as if it had been dropped down onto the counter from above. “Well,” she said out loud, and she shrugged. She lifted it up to slide it into the oven.
An hour later, when the pie was cooling, Laura hovered in front of it. She had intended this to be supper but found herself digging for a fork. What was just a taste became a bite; what started as a bite turned into a mouthful. She stuffed her cheeks; she burned her tongue. She ate until there were no crumbs left in the baking dish, until every last carrot and clove and butter bean had disappeared. And still she was hungry.
Until that moment, she'd forgotten this about Sorrow Pie, too: No matter how much you consumed, you would not have your fill.
* * *
When Venice Prudhomme saw Bartholemew walking into her lab, she told him no before he'd even asked his question. Whatever he wanted, she couldn't do it. She'd rushed the date rape drug test for him, and that was difficult enough, but the lab was in transition, moving from an eight-locus DNA system to a sixteen-locus system, and their usual backlog had grown to enormous proportions.
Just hear me out, he'd said, and he started begging. Venice had listened, arms crossed. I thought this was a rape case.
It was. Until the rapist died, and suicide didn't check out. What makes you think you 've got the right perp ?
It's the rape victim's father, Bartholemew had said. If your kid was raped, what would you want to do to the guy who did it?
In the end, Venice still said no. It would take a while for her to do a full DNA test, even one that she put at the top of the pile. But something in his desperation must have struck her, because she told him that she could at least give him a head start. She'd been part of the validation team for a portion of the sixteen-locus system and still had some leftovers from her kit. The DNA extraction process was the same; she'd be able to use that sample to run the other loci once the lab came up for some air. Bartholemew fell asleep waiting for her to complete the test. At four in the morning, Venice knelt beside him and shook him awake. “You want the good news or the bad news?” He sighed. “Good.”
“I got your results.”
That was excellent news. The medical examiner had already told Bartholemew that the dirt and river silt on the victim's hand might have contaminated the blood to the point where DNA testing was impossible due to dropout. “What's the bad news?”
“You've got the wrong suspect.”
Mike stared at her. “How can you tell? I haven't even given you a control sample from Daniel Stone yet.”
“Maybe the kid who got raped wanted revenge even more than her dad did.” Venice pushed the results toward him. “I did an amelogenin test . . . it's the one we run on nuclear DNA to determine gender. And the guy who left your drop of blood behind?” Venice glanced up. “He's a girl.”
* * *
Zephyr gave Trixie the details. The service was at two o'clock at the Bethel Methodist Church, followed by an interment ceremony at the Westwind Cemetery. She said that school was closing early, that's how many people were planning on attending. The six juniors on the hockey team had been asked to serve as pallbearers. In memoriam, three senior girls had dyed their hair black. Trixie's plan was simple: She was going to sleep through Jason's funeral, even if she had to swallow a whole bottle of NyQuil to do it. She pulled the shades in her room, creating an artificial night, and crawled under her covers - only to have them yanked down a moment later.
You don't think I'm going to let you off the hook, do you?
She knew he was standing there before she even opened her eyes. Jason leaned against her dresser, one elbow already morphing through the wood. His eyes had faded almost entirely; all Trixie could see were holes as deep as the sky.
“The whole town's going,” Trixie whispered. “You won't notice if I'm not there.”
Jason sat down on top of the covers. What about you, Trix? Will you notice when I'm not here?
She turned onto her side, willing him to go away. But instead she felt him curl up behind her, spooning, his words falling over her ear like frost. If you don't come, he whispered, how will you know I'm really gone?
She felt him disappear a little while after that, taking all the extra air in the room. Finally, gasping, Trixie got out of bed and threw open the three windows in her bedroom. It was twenty degrees outside, and the wind whipped at the curtains. She stood in front of one
window and watched people in dark suits and black dresses exit their houses, their cars being drawn like magnets past Trixie's house.
Trixie peeled off her clothes and stood shivering in her closet. What was the right outfit to wear to the funeral of the only boy you'd ever loved? Sackcloth and ashes, a ring of thorns, regret? What she needed was an invisibility cloak, like the kind her father sometimes drew for his comic book heroes, something sheer that would keep everyone from pointing fingers and whispering that this was all her fault.
The only dress Trixie owned in a dark color had short sleeves, so she picked out a pair of black pants and paired it with a navy cardigan. She'd have to wear boots anyway, because of all the snow, and they'd look stupid with a skirt. She didn't know if she could do this - stand at Jason's grave while people passed his name around like a box of sweets - but she did know that if she stayed in her room during this funeral, as she'd planned to, it would all come back to haunt her.
She glanced around her room again, checking the top of the dresser and under the bed and in her desk drawers for something she knew was missing, but in the end, she had to leave without her courage or risk being late.
During her studies of rebellion, Trixie had learned which floorboards in the hallway screamed like traitors and which ones would keep a secret. The trickiest one was right in front of her father's office door - she sometimes wondered if he'd had the builder do that on purpose, thinking ahead. To get past him without making any noise, Trixie had to edge along the inside wall of the house, then slide in a diagonal and hope she didn't crash into the banister. From there, it was just a matter of avoiding the third and seventh stairs, and she was home free. She could take the bus that stopped three blocks away from her house, ride it downtown, and then walk to the church.
The Tenth Circle
Her father's office door was closed. Trixie took a deep breath, crept, slid, and hopped her way silently down the stairs. The floor of the mudroom looked like the scene of a dismemberment: a mess of
scattered boots and discarded jackets and tossed gloves. Trixie pulled what she needed from the pile, wrapped a scarf around the lower half of her face, and gingerly opened the door. Her father was sitting in his truck with the motor running, as if he'd been waiting for her all along. As soon as he saw her exiting the house, he unrolled the power window. “Hop in.” Trixie approached the truck and peered inside. “Where are you going?”