A pen clicked behind me. I froze, heard nothing, felt nothing except fear that tricked the brain. Fear now at the base of my spine and between my shoulder blades. The sound of my own steps came to me from some great distance.

Suddenly I was tripped, falling forward, losing the knife. My palms hit as it clattered across the tile. I turned on my knees to fight.

Kris Ann’s shoes lay where I had stumbled. The knife slid against the far wall and stopped. I was dead if they heard me. I crawled sweating toward the knife, grasped it, rose again.

Still nothing.

I began up the dark staircase to the bedroom, breathing harder. Perhaps they would be there. I moved faster to the second floor, hurried down the dark hallway past empty bedrooms, toward ours. It was dark. I gripped the knife tighter, found the light switch, pushed down.

Our bed was made and inside there was no one dead or living. I went to Kris Ann’s nightstand and opened it.

The gun was missing. “Kris Ann,” my brain began chanting, faster and faster in a terrible rhythm. I went down the hallway to the stairs, holding the knife in my left hand, feeling and not feeling the smooth banister. “Kris Ann …”

Footfalls. I was trapped in mid-stairway. No trick of the nerve ends but footfalls moving from the kitchen below me toward the dining room, real as the acid in my mouth. Coming closer.

A shadow moved into the alcove. I raised the knife.

Something clicked. The lights turning on. Shock as the knife dropped from my hand. “Thank God,” I blurted. “You’re all right.”

I told them about Jason. Bast took notes. Rayfield asked questions. He seemed backed away from me, just a policeman, and his thumb stroked the pen without clicking it. I didn’t tell him about the Moorings, or Henry’s lover. Jason used a gun, I said: it had to be him.

Rayfield shrugged without comment. When I ventured that it couldn’t have been Lee, he answered coldly that I was wrong: my friend Nate Taylor had sprung Lee an hour after I had left. There wasn’t enough to hold him, Rayfield added: they’d just wanted to see what I’d do.

I stared at him. “Like get shot.”

This time it was Bast who shrugged. “If that’s what you want,” he said, and closed the notebook. Kris Ann watched in silence.

They went. A bespectacled doctor and two nurses came and went, leaving Kris Ann and me alone. Everything—the walls and sheets, even the bed frame—was white. Kris Ann still wore her white tennis dress.

“You shouldn’t have left,” I said. My voice sounded tinny. “He might have shot you.”

“I was too angry to wait.” She looked away. “And I had the revolver.”

“So you could drill Jason Cantwell at fifty paces.”

“Yes.” She didn’t smile.