We did not speak as a documentary about gangsters in the early days of Las Vegas played on. I stroked her hair and her skin felt feverish. I wondered what was going on inside that mind of hers. I worried greatly about it, too. Lucy’s thoughts were different. They were distinctly her own and not to be interpreted by any Rosetta stone of psychotherapy or intuition. But this much I had learned about her from the beginning of her life. What she didn’t say mattered most, and Lucy wasn’t talking about Janet anymore.

“Let’s go to bed so we can get an early start, Madame Pilot,” I said.

“I think I’ll just sleep in here.”

She pointed the remote control and turned down the volume.

“In your clothes?”

She shrugged.

“If we can get to HeloAir around nine, I’ll call Kirby from there.”

“What if they say don’t come?” my niece asked.

“I’ll tell them I’m on my way. New York City is Republican at the moment. If need be, I’ll get my friend Senator Lord involved, and he’ll get the health commissioner and mayor on the warpath, and I don’t think Kirby will want that. Easier to let us land, don’t you think?”

“They don’t have any ground-to-air missiles there, do they?”

“Yes, they’re called patients,” I said, and it was the first time we had laughed in days.

Why I slept as well as I did, I could not explain, but when my alarm clock went off at six A.M., I turned over in bed. I realized I had not gotten up once since shortly before midnight, and this hinted of a cure, of a renewing that I desperately needed. Depression was a veil I could almost see through, and I was beginning to feel hope. I was doing what Benton would expect me to do, not to avenge his murder, really, for he would not have wanted that.

His wish would have been to prevent harm to Marino, Lucy, or me. He would have wanted me to protect other lives I did not know, other unwitting individuals who worked in hospitals or as models and had been sentenced to a terrible death in the split second it took for a monster to notice them with evil eyes burning with envy.

Lucy went running as the sun was coming up, and although it unnerved me for her to be out alone, I knew she had a pistol in her butt pack, and neither of us could let our lives stop because of Carrie. It seemed she had such an advantage. If we went on as usual, we might die. If we aborted our lives because of fear, we still died, only in a way that was worse, really.

“I’m assuming everything was quiet out there?” I said when Lucy returned to the house and found me in the kitchen.