"Porsche? Are you Porsche?"
The girl nodded, openmouthed with crying.
"Is this your baby? What's her name?"
The girl gasped. "Amari." Her voice was wet and shaking.
"Why don't you let me hold Amari for a sec while you catch your breath." Hadley scooped up the baby and ran her pinkie knuckle over its toothless gums. The baby stopped wailing, a startled look on its face. Then it clamped around Hadley's knuckle and began sucking with a vengeance. An old ploy, but it still worked. "Porsche." Hadley moved her face so she blocked the girl's line of sight. "Let's get these little ones out of here. They don't need to see this anymore."
"M-m-my aunt."
"The ambulance is on the way. The best thing you can do for her is help calm the children down."
The girl nodded. Wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Let Hadley slide the baby back in her arms. The girl copied her pinkie-nursing trick. "C'mon, everybody," she said, in a fake-calm voice that Hadley herself used when she was trying to keep it together in front of her kids. "We're going outside." She stepped into the kitchen, saw what was blocking the door, and whirled around. "No, Aston! Not that way! Out the front hall."
Hadley helped steer the kids toward the mercifully blood-free front hall. The little boy she had seen in the kitchen stopped beside the door to the front room, his eyes fixed on the unconscious woman. He looked up at Hadley. "Is Izzy gonna die, too?"
Hadley scooped him up in her arms. "An ambulance is coming to help her, sweetie. She'll have to go to the hospital, but she'll be fine." She prayed she wasn't lying. She took the last child's hand and followed Porsche out the front door and across the drive, to where a small grove of large maples cast a deep shade over the grass.
Kevin emerged from one of the squad cars. "Ambulances coming." He headed for the house. "Harlene called them in before we got here. Support team from emergency services and Children and Family, too."
Hadley shot a glance at the traumatized family, then followed Kevin.
Without the crying children, the farmhouse sank into the deep dreaming silence of a hot July afternoon. The only sounds were the clunk and rattle of cubes falling from the icemaker and a hoarse, wet churning as Russ Van Alstyne tried to breathe. MacAuley had folded one towel around the wound in the chief's thigh and cinched it tight with his belt. As Hadley watched, a pulse of blood appeared on its white surface. MacAuley pressed the other towel, already sodden, against the chief's chest. Flynn was dragging cushions off the couch, wedging them beneath the unconscious woman's legs, getting more blood flow to her injured head. Hadley scooped some ice cubes out of the freezer, knotted them into a dishrag, and laid the improvised ice bag over the woman's eyes and nose. None of them said anything, as if a single word would break open their pretense at composure.
A wracking, phlegmy sound split the silence.
"Can't… breathe." The chief's voice was a whisper. Flynn nearly tripped over himself getting to Van Alstyne's side.
"I think you've punctured a lung," MacAuley said. "The EMTs will set you to rights. Listen." Far away, a faint siren sounded. "They're almost here."
The chief inhaled. It was liquid, choking, horribly wrong. Hadley looked down. The towel around his thigh was crimson. Almost here, she realized, would not be fast enough.
"Lyle… tell Clare…"-the chief breathed in again-"tell her…"
"You can tell her yourself when you see her."
Hadley's stomach turned. She looked at Flynn. Tears smeared his sunburned cheeks. Without thinking, she reached over and grabbed his hand. The siren was louder now.
"Russ?" MacAuley sounded panicked, which was almost as scary as the chief's struggle to breathe. "Don't you die on me, Russ!"
The sucking, gurgling sound was louder, accompanied by a hiss, as if Russ Van Alstyne's air was pumping out of him along with his life's blood.
"Clare," he said. And then there was silence.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
THE SEASON AFTER EPIPHANY
January and February
I
Hadley pulled into the parking lot across the street from the church with a sense of relief she hadn't felt since she delivered Geneva. Maybe more. Three and a half days on the road with two kids under ten easily matched twenty-plus hours of labor in the awfulness sweepstakes.
She twisted around to check the backseat. Genny was asleep, her booster seat almost lost in a litter of stuffed animals, crayons, water bottles, and picture books. Hudson looked up from his Game Boy, his face pinched and tired. "Where are we, Mom?"
"We're here, lovey. Millers Kill. This is the church where your grampy works."
His eyes widened, giving him the appearance of a starving orphan. She kept stuffing food into him, but his jittery energy seemed to burn it all off before he could put any meat on his bones. The climate here was going to be hard on him.
"Why aren't we at Grampy's house?"
"I don't have a key to get in. We're here sooner than I thought, so Grampy's going to be surprised. C'mon, pull on your sweater and let's go say hi."
He looked doubtfully at his sister. "Are we gonna wake Genny up?"
Hadley unbuckled herself and twisted around to get a better look at her six-year-old. Out like the proverbial lightbulb. In LA, she wouldn't have even considered it-she never would have left one of the kids in the car. Here… she glanced at the ice-rimmed snowbanks framing the parking lot, the lead-colored snow-heavy clouds. Air weighted with chill slid in through her partly open window. "It's too cold," she said. "She'll have to come with us."
"Mo-om," he protested. "You could leave the car running. Nobody's going to steal it."
Wasn't that the truth. She opened her mouth. Transformed I've been smelling something since we left Ohio, and I'm afraid we have another exhaust leak into, "Fresh air will do her good."
"Fresh air," Hudson said, with all the scorn a nine-year-old could muster. "We've had two windows wide open since we got into New York."
"They're an inch open. Stop complaining." She leaned over the seat and shook Geneva gently. "Wake up, baby girl." Considered, as she wrestled her groggy daughter into her sweater, how much time and effort she took, every day, to avoid saying We can't afford that. The bag of toys and books from Goodwill. The Styrofoam box of sandwich fixings and no-name sodas. The tote filled with books on CD-which she had to mail back to the Glendale Public Library. All so that when she heard Can we go to Toys 'R' Us? Can I get a book? Can we stop at McDonalds? Can we rent a DVD player? she had a plausible answer. Something that wasn't we can't afford it.