The safest place was right here. Together. Whether they wanted to be here or not.

We're caught in a trap, she thought, absently patting his back.

10

Glammers

MARTIN SAT ON the oval rug in his old bedroom and pulled down one of the musty old cardboard boxes he'd pushed up against the wall earlier in the day. After the call from Lumsden he was feeling maudlin. As an eligible male on the Manhattan dating scene with a reputation for promiscuity, he'd had several brushes with pregnancy. Broken condoms. Drunken sex without them. Close calls and dodged bullets.

This time was different.

This time he was the direct cause of the termination of a child in utero. He supposed Tish might have gone to prison for her involvement in Barclay's escape, whatever it was. She was a nurse, though he supposed Lumsden and the investigators would know by now if she'd worked at the psychiatric facility in Marcy—if she'd been the one to let him free.

She might have been allowed to carry the child to term in prison, and he supposed he might have been allowed certain rights to it, even if she didn't want him to. For all he knew, Barclay himself was the father, though he suspected the killer wouldn't have been so cavalier about it if it had been his. The man was a lunatic but Martin doubted he would have nailed his own unborn child to the wall—however recently conceived—just to serve as a threat. He had a code of ethics, however warped. He'd proudly proclaimed his virginity during the trial and would definitely have abstained from sex with Tish.

His "mission from God" was to murder the Devil's spawn, according to Sheila. Aborting his own seed would have been outside of his M.O.

Shows how much he thinks of me, Martin thought. The Devil's spawn. Fucking psycho.

He opened the flaps of the box he'd pulled down. It was filled with framed photos, stacks of paper twenty years old or more. Some appeared to be his stuff, report cards, awards and drawings, and some belonged to Aunt Norma and Ruby.

He lifted the box off the stack—slightly heavy, the weight lopsided, its contents rattling, making him wince at the thought of waking his mother, woe betide him—and he sat down cross-legged on the rug with it.

The first thing that piqued his interest was a photo of Ruby's bowling club. The fact that she'd been a bowler and had won at least one tournament was surprising in itself. Seeing her and her friends all decked out in their matching team shirts was another thing entirely.

One woman wore her hair in a beehive, another had a kerchief covering her head, a third wore white gloves, the fourth had sunglasses and a cane. And there in the middle stood his dear mother, smiling to beat the band.

The woman with the sunglasses stood with her back to the photographer, her face turned slightly toward the camera. Would they even let a blind woman bowl back then? he wondered, then he considered she might have been there for moral support, their mascot. The team name was emblazoned in pink letters on her black bowling shirt, in the same font as the girl gang from Grease. Only these letters spelled out THE BABY SPLITS.