“Maybe a tool like a screwdriver or something that rolls around, gets caught on something, then rolls around some more.”

“I don’t see how,” I reply and the noise suddenly stops again.

“Well it’s giving me a creepy feeling and fraying my last nerve.”

He cracks open his window to smoke, to calm his creepy feeling and soothe his fraying last nerve, and water spatters the inside of the door and the dash. I tell him I don’t mind his cigarettes but I don’t want the windows fogging up. I adjust the fan and that helps some but I can take only so much frigid air, and Marino complains about that too. He’s hot and sweating and I don’t want to get chilled. I’m keeping the temperature barely above tepid. I make constant adjustments, clearing the glass and getting cold, then warming up and unable to see.

This is stressful and uncomfortable, and it’s almost impossible not to be edgy and rather frantic. My clothes are wet. I’m sticky and wilted. My leg aches miserably. I feel sick about Lucy, sick about the secrets I keep, and the debate inside me rages nonstop. Should I tell Marino about the Depraved Heart videos? I honestly don’t know what to do, and as we drive farther away from Concord past flooded road construction and soupy woods shrouded in mist I force myself to concentrate on my new rule:

Pay attention even when you think you already are.

It’s a new rule that used to be an old one but I got lax. I got lulled into a false sense of safety, and as I try to retrace my steps I see the pattern. I see it plainly, and a part of me is unforgiving while another part understands how it happened. No one can be vigilant every minute of every day. Time passes and some things get harder. I’m relentless about keeping up my scan for enemies but the ones from the past are the most treacherous. We know too much about them. We start re-creating them in our own image, assigning attributes and motivations they don’t have. We form relationships with them. We delude ourselves into believing they don’t want to kill us.

The same thought continues to nag at me. If I hadn’t assumed that Carrie Grethen was no longer on this planet would I have stopped looking for her anyway? I worry that I might have. It’s the path of least resistance to relegate nightmarish people to a cold file, to tuck them so far back in your mind that you don’t think about them. You expect nothing from them. You don’t fear them or anticipate or predict or worry. I dismissed Carrie long ago. I didn’t do it simply because I was convinced she’d died in a helicopter crash. I couldn’t stand to live with her anymore.