Reading my mind, Trixie said, “I wish I could stay here forever.”

I looked up at the sky, and a large bird caught my eye. “Look at the wingspan on that one,” I said, pointing. “That’s a huge bird.”

“What is it?”

“I think it’s a hawk,” I said.

“Looking for field mice, anything else it can find,” Trixie said.

We stood out there a few more moments, not saying anything to each other. Finally, I said, “You have to come back, you know.”

“You think?” Her response was laced with sarcasm.

“The police, I’m not sure they’re convinced you killed Martin Benson. They told me he’d probably been zapped by some sort of stun gun before his neck was slit. We know it was Merker, and we know he’s got stun guns. He’s been trying to sell them to the cops.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got reasons for your actions. I’m sure, you get a good lawyer, you can work things out.”

“I’ve got one,” Trixie said. “Guy named Niles Wagland. He’s pretty good.”

“Okay,” I said. “I mean, look at your situation. You were scared for your daughter’s life. Running away, making sure she was safe, it’s not totally unreasonable. And there’s got to be plenty of evidence against Merker. The note he wrote, for one thing. They’ll test it for prints, do handwriting analysis, who knows, but they’ll be able to figure out it was him. And once they’ve got him in custody, they’ll reopen those murders in Canborough. The guy’ll spend the rest of his life in jail. And then you’ll be able to get on with yours.”

“I don’t know, Zack. There’s a small matter of five hundred thousand dollars.”

“Is Merker going to tell the cops about that? Could he even prove it’s his? That you took it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trixie, you can’t keep running. From Merker, from the police. You need to face these things, sort them out. You need to do it for Katie.”

Trixie stepped over the grass median and into my rut. “Maybe,” she said, “if I could spend my life with someone like you, I’d think about it.”

I said nothing.

“All I’ve ever known are bad men. My father was a bad man. Even Katie’s father—he tried, you know? There was a lot of goodness in him. But he was no poster boy for stability. If he hadn’t ended up getting killed by Gary, he’d have died some other way before long. You can’t live that kind of life and expect it to go on forever. My sister, she got a good one. But my luck, it doesn’t run in that direction.”

“I’m sure there’s someone out there for you. Someone who’d treat you right. Treat you with the respect you deserve.”