Hold Tight

Her family tried to console him. They had “faith” and explained again that he had been “blessed” to have her at all and that she would be waiting for him in some beautiful place for all eternity. They needed it, he guessed. The family had already picked up after another tragedy—her oldest brother, Curtis, had been killed three years before in some sort of robbery gone bad—but at least, in that case, Curtis had lived a life of trouble. Cassandra had been crushed when her brother died, had cried for days until Nash wanted to let the crazy out just to find a way to ease her pain, but in the end, those who had faith could rationalize Curtis’s death. Faith let them explain it as part of some grand scheme.

But how do you explain losing someone as loving and warm as Cassandra?

You can’t. So her parents talked about the hereafter, but they didn’t really believe that. No one else did. Why cry at death if you believe that you will spend eternity in bliss? Why mourn the loss of someone when that person was now in a better place? Wasn’t that horribly selfish of you—keeping a loved one from someplace better? And if you did believe that you spent eternity in paradise with the loved one, there would never be anything to fear—life is not even one breath next to eternity.

You cry and mourn, Nash knew, because deep inside, you knew it was a crock.

Cassandra wasn’t with her brother Curtis, bathing in white light. What was left of her, what hadn’t been taken by the cancer and the chemo, was rotting away in the ground.

At the funeral, her family talked about fate and plans and all that nonsense too. That this had been his beloved’s fate—to live briefly, touch everyone who saw her, raise him to a wonderful height, let him drop to the ground with a splat. This has been his fate too. He wondered about that. Even when he was with her, there had been moments where containing his true nature—his honest, most godlike state of nature—had been difficult. Would he have been able to maintain the peace inside? Or had he been hardwired from day one to go back to the dark place and cause destruction, even if Cassandra had survived?

It was impossible to know. But either way this was his fate.

Pietra said, “She would have never said anything.”

He knew that she was talking about Reba.

“We don’t know that.”

Pietra looked out the side window.

“Eventually the police will get an ID on Marianne,” he said. “Or someone will realize that she’s missing. The police will look into it. They’ll talk to her friends. Reba would have told them then for certain.”

“You are sacrificing many lives.”

“Two so far.”

“And the survivors. Their lives are altered.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Are you going to claim Marianne started it?”

“Started is not the right word. She changed the dynamics.”

“So she dies?”

“She made a decision that altered and could potentially destroy lives.”

“So she dies?” Pietra repeated.

“All our decisions carry weight, Pietra. We all play God every day. When a woman buys a new pair of expensive shoes, she could have spent that same money feeding someone who was starving. In a sense, those shoes mean more to her than a life. We all kill to make our lives more comfortable. We don’t put it in those terms. But we do.”

She didn’t argue.

“What’s going on, Pietra?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“I promised Cassandra.”

“Yes. So you said.”

“We need to keep this contained, Pietra.”

“Do you think we can?”

“I do.”

“So how many more will we kill?”

He was puzzled by the question. “Do you really care? Have you had enough?”

“I’m just asking about now. Today. With this. How many more will we kill?”

Nash thought about it. He realized now that perhaps Marianne had told him the truth in the beginning. In that case, he needed to go back to square one and snuff out the problem at its source.

“With a little luck,” he said, “only one.”

“WOW,” Loren Muse said. “Could this woman be more boring?”

Clarence smiled. They were going through the credit card receipts for Reba Cordova. There were absolutely no surprises. She bought groceries and school supplies and kid clothes. She bought a vacuum at Sears and returned it. She bought a microwave at P.C. Richard. Her credit card was on file at a Chinese restaurant called Baumgarts, where she ordered takeout every Tuesday night.

Her e-mails were equally dull. She wrote to other parents about playdates. She kept in touch with one daughter’s dance instructor and the other’s soccer coach. She received the Willard School e-mail. She kept up with her tennis group about scheduling and filling in when one of them couldn’t make it. She was on the Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and PetSmart newsletter lists. She wrote to her sister asking her for the name of a reading specialist because one of her daughters, Sarah, was having trouble.

“I didn’t know people like this really existed,” Muse said.

But she did. She saw them at Starbucks, the harried, doe-eyed women who thought a coffee shop was the perfect place for Mommy and Me hour, what with Brittany and Madison and Kyle in tow, all running around while the mommies—college graduates, former intellectuals—gabbed incessantly about their offspring as if no other child had ever existed. They gabbed about their poopies—yes, for real, their bowel movements!—and their first word and their social skills and their Montessori schools and their gymnastics and their Baby Einstein DVDs and they all had this brain-gone smile, like some alien had sucked their head dry, and Muse despised them on one level, pitied them on another and tried so damn hard not to be envious.

Loren Muse swore, of course, that she would never be like those mommies if she ever did have children. But who knew? Blanket declarations like that reminded her of the people who said that when they were old they’d rather be dead than end up in a nursing home or be a burden to their grown children—and now almost everyone she knew had parents who were either in a nursing home or a burden and none of those old people wanted to die.

If you look at anything from the outside, it is easy to make sweeping ungenerous judgments.

“How is the husband’s alibi?” she asked.

“The Livingston police questioned Cordova. It seems pretty solid.”