“Who is he?” Max whispers.

I roll up my window. “No one to be concerned about,” I say. I hate dismissing his question, but I don’t really know how else to answer. “Someone I know,” I add.

I see him processing, and then all his calculations get stuck as his mouth hangs open half an inch and his gaze goes out to the beyond. Max is having one of his moments, one of his fugues.

“You in there?” I ask.

He doesn’t reply, just stares out the windshield. Three months ago, this would have concerned me. Now, after a number of these spells, I know he’ll snap out of it in a moment or two. Were we at home, I’d sit next to him until he became responsive again.

Now I don’t. Now I have to talk to Pearson. Max will be fine.

I tell him to wait in the car and I’ll just be a few moments.

I get out, leaving the ignition running, heat blowing.

The Jeep is only feet away, and after I close the door of my car, I open the passenger door of Pearson’s.

Now I’m sitting next to him for no reason other than I made a promise to myself, and it needs to start now.

Sixty-Seven

Pearson looks worn, like he’s been a beat cop for thirty years and has seen the worst of humanity.

“Rose,” he says. “I’m on leave. Maybe I’m done with the department… I don’t know. But…but the point is, right now, I’m just a civilian. I can’t arrest you. I have no jurisdiction here. And I won’t blame you if you don’t believe this, but I’m more interested in the truth than any kind of justice. I just need some goddamned truth in my life. Some sense of black and white. Does that make sense?”

He looks at me with some kind of weak and anemic hope. It’s gut-wrenching.

“What are you trying to ask me, Colin?”

He thinks a bit, then says, “That’s the only time you’ve called me by my first name.”

“If not now, when?”

He bows his head a moment, nods it slowly up and down in agreement, then raises it again and locks in on me. His eyes are as bloodshot as an alcoholic on a three-day binge.

“I just need to know, Rose. Did you kill your husband?”

Sixty-Eight

Max iced for a time, as he’d been doing for months. He’d come to call these moments icing. He only called them this to himself. He didn’t talk about icing to anyone, not even his mom.

Icing was what happened when the darkness got so black he couldn’t do anything but be consumed by it. Didn’t matter time of day, didn’t matter sunlight or starlight. When it came on, somewhere deep inside, a cold blackness crawled out and devoured him, a billion ants bursting from a hole and covering him as completely as wraps on a mummy. It took only a second to happen, and then he’d be lost in it, unable to hear, speak, or even move. On the outside, he was paralyzed. On the inside, he was thrashing in terror.