“Oh, I dunno. Maybe a year ago? I was in Keene, like usual, and there he was. Just walkin’ in the street.”

“And the fire was still burning?” he asked, digesting how the commonplaces and coincidences of small-town living could trump the detachment of a larger world.

She flashed a little slyness. “It didn’t take long to relight.”

“But…,” he suggested.

She sighed. “Yeah. Wasn’t the same.”

“What went wrong?”

“What didn’t? Donny, Lem’s wife, life’s complications. You name it.”

“Seems like things got more than just complicated between Don and the Shaws,” Joe said.

The look of reverie slipped from her features, replaced by the hardness he was used to. “No shit. The one thing I forgot about Lemuel was why we broke up the first time.”

“Which was…”

She stabbed the cigarette out angrily onto the wooden floor. “He was one of the meanest pricks I ever knew. Whatever he saw, he wanted, and whatever he wanted, he got.”

Joe suggested, “And you fell for it twice?”

She gave him a nod and admitted, “I know. Stupid. You wouldn’t understand. You’re a guy. You get to do whatever you like. But Lemuel could be like a hot pan to butter. I didn’t remember any of his crap when we met again. I was rarin’ to go—the old days, all over again. He had a hold over me that made me feel like I had no control.”

“So what did he take from you this time?”

She looked surprised by the question, if less by its nature than the enormity it represented. She caught her breath briefly, passed a hand across her forehead, and half opened her mouth at the depth of the recollection. It seemed as if she’d held off putting her loss in true perspective until this moment.

“Everything,” she finally got out, before beginning to weep.

Joe waited, using the time to sort through not just his inventory of loose threads and its implications, but the enormity of some of the betrayals he’d recently been exposed to. From the snatching of young boys to the creation of an assembly line of sexual abuse and murder, Joe and his colleagues had been witnesses to a landslide of depravity, none of which they’d had time to absorb and process.

After Cheri had calmed enough to wipe her nose on her sleeve and free up another cigarette, he asked, “What was behind Don’s argument with Shaw at the strip club?”

She stopped in mid-gesture. “You know about that?”

“Like I said, Cheri.”

Without lighting up, she leaned her head against the wall. “Oh, hell. Two cocks in a henhouse. Where better? I told you how grabby Lemuel is. He’d been buggin’ me to cut into Donny’s business.”

Joe hid his surprise by asking, “Oh, yeah—you said you’d stopped all that. Were you and Donny still working together?”

“Kinda,” she began, tacking on, “not really.” She waved her hand before putting her lighter to the cigarette and taking a drag. “I went along on trips sometimes, for old times’ sake. I really loved those days, and Donny and I were still a good match.”