Rita walked down from the porch and stood within inches of Lucy. Her voice barely above a whisper, she said: “You’re breaking the law coming here like this. I don’t want to go back to prison.”

Lucy released a little laugh. “Look around. Who’s going to know?”

Staring into Lucy’s eyes sent Rita back through time, over an ocean of sorrow before returning her to the here and now. “Why did you come? What do you want?”

Lucy raised her hand and opened her palm to reveal a skull ring. “Take it.”

Rita leaned back and shook her head.

“Come on, it’s for you. Take it and we’ll talk.”

The sudden savage yapping of dogs carried across the park raising a prickling at the back of Rita’s neck.

“Take it, Rita, and I promise, together we’ll make everything right.”

The trailer was a twenty-five-year-old single-wide that smelled of cigarettes, beer and gloom.

It was clean. Barren and tidy with linoleum flooring and outdated paneled walls. They went to the living room with its coffee table and two small faux leather sofas. Rita set the ring on the table next to an ashtray, then sat on one sofa while Lucy sat on the other. A couple of canvas landscapes of the twenty-buck variety from Walmart were on the walls. No photos of people anywhere.

The place exuded an aching emptiness.

As the air conditioner rattled in one of the side windows, the two murderers took inventory of each other and what time had done.

“I’m sure you changed your name, too,” Rita said.

“That’s what people in our situation do.”

“What is it?”

“Lucy.”

“Lucy.” Rita reached over the sofa to the end table for a pack of Marlboros, took one out, lit it and turned the pack to Lucy, who accepted one and the book of matches. Fanning out the match and tossing it in the ashtray, Lucy’s gaze went to the pale scars on Rita’s inner wrists and lower forearms.

“Has life been kind to you, Rita?”

Rita blew out a stream of smoke. “What do you think?”

“How many times did you try?” Lucy nodded at the scars.

Tears stinging, Rita shook her head and searched the ceiling.

“Once after I got out. Then I was a flag woman working with a highway crew near Kicking Horse in British Columbia. Went out to a bar with the guys, and two of them raped me in the alley. Quit that job, lived on the street, got into drugs and tried once again in a shelter.”

She flicked ash in the tray.

“Then I drifted, crap job to crap job, met a trucker from Tulsa. Percy. He was nice. At first. Married him and moved to Oklahoma, even got citizenship. Then one night Percy beat me more than usual. I was in the process of leaving him when he was killed.”