Of course, Allison knew a bit more. That she’d given Mick McMunchun LSD. She’d been amazingly blithe about it the night it happened. She had also been far more clever than anyone should have been able to be with the police, given her condition and the circumstances. She’d maintained that she was in too much shock to talk. Even better, she maintained that she was just fourteen, so the police couldn’t lean on her without the presence of a parent or legal guardian.

It wasn’t until the next day that the waves of reality, guilt, remorse, culpability, began bouncing her up, down, and around. I did my best, by telephone, to be reassuring, that McMunchun had no one but himself to blame. He was showing off a car that had no business on real mountain roads, he’d been at the wheel, he’d unfastened his seat belt.

She did, of course, have to go back to the police to be reinter-viewed. We’d gone over her story. She now said, right up front, that she’d been there, hired by me, on behalf of Mrs. McMunchun, to determine if the husband was a genuine danger to underage girls. To do so, she’d masqueraded as fourteen, which was completely legal, done by police and by TV shows, to catch a predator. She claimed that she had maintained the masquerade because the accident had put her too deep in shock to stop.

Yes, she had seen McMunchun drink and do cocaine. His own. She’d done neither. They were welcome to do urine and blood tests. Though it was now too late for anything to show. We agreed that she was not to mention LSD. If it showed up in his postmortem tox screen, and if she was asked about it, she was to say she knew nothing about that. She was a smart girl. An exceedingly smart girl. She got that it was the only thing that could harm her. Therefore, her silence shouldn’t be limited to police interviews, it better be universal. So long as it was, she was safe, then I was safe, which would keep Elizabeth and Madelaine safe.

“And we’re safe?” Madelaine asked, coming close to me, asking for reassurance.

“Yes.”

She took each of my hands in her own, held them, looked in my eyes with her own worried eyes.

I said, “Unless one of you, or both of you, have done something that I don’t know about, you’re safe.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. You’re safe.”

It was as if her tension had been a carapace, a shell that kept her soft and yielding body upright. It dissolved. She came forward, melted forward, as if she needed me to support her.