Renee’s legs suddenly crumpled. Her gun clattered past me on the stairs. I climbed the last three steps uncertainly. On the upper landing, Geraldine Graham was standing over Renee, the Gabonese mask clutched in her arthritic hands. She was trembling, and blood oozed through the towel on her left foot, but she was smiling grimly.

“Look to the children,” she said.

Benji and Catherine lay in a heap of coats and blood. Flowers of blood spread petals around them. I didn’t know at first which one was wounded, so closely were they entwined, but when I knelt to feel them, Catherine was warm and Benji’s fingers were ice, his pulse a thread. He opened his eyes, said something in Arabic, and then, in English, added, “I seeing Granny before one week. She driving thing like tonight, thing not car, like tonight I seeing from window, she putting man in water.”

“Hush. I know you did. You hush now. Catherine, let go of him, I’m going to carry him downstairs and take him to the hospital.”

I pried her fingers from his cold side. “You bring the coats so we can keep him warm.”

I picked him up, a slight youth, a feather in my arms. “Hold on. You hold on to me, Benji.”

Catherine followed me, leaning against me so she could keep her good hand on Benji’s body. In the kitchen, I kicked Renee’s gun in front of me, tipping it into the snow on my way out. Before we reached the Rover, Benji was dead in my arms.

CHAPTER 54

Unnatural Sleep

I longed for sleep more than I had wanted anything my whole life. I wanted a bath and a bed and oblivion, but instead I had the Eagle River cops and the Vilas County sheriff, as they tried to make sense of the senseless.

When Catherine and I returned to the house with Benji’s body, I laid him on the dining room table, a catafalque of sorts, a laying out in state. Catherine refused to leave him, even though she was shivering so violently that her hand couldn’t stay in place on Benji’s head.

I went to the living room for the blankets we’d wrapped Geraldine in earlier. When I brought them back to the dining room, Catherine had climbed up on the table beside Benji. She was cradling his head in her lap. I swathed her in blankets, but her shivering wouldn’t stop.

I took my cell phone from my bag and looped the mike around my neck. While I tracked down the local emergency services, I folded my arms around Catherine, trying to rub some warmth into her. By the time I was finally connected to the county dispatcher, the worst of her shaking had eased, but the room was filled with the sickly sweet scent of her fear, and her urine.

A shadow in the living room made me let go of her and run to the arched doorway. It was Geraldine, not Renee, drawing on her own formidable will to hobble down the stairs on her wounded foot. She looked from