code. The door unlocked, and he pushed it open. The room was dark, and when he stepped inside, he realized something that caused his stomach to bottom out.
“You called her Ophelia,” he said, turning around.
“Sorry, Detective Harrison, nothing personal. You should have taken your money and disappeared.”
She held something in her hand that he didn’t recognize until the prongs shot into his body and electricity started to rocket through him. A horrific scream escaped him; he barely recognized it as his own voice. The room around him spiraled as the pain seemed to ratchet higher and higher until he could hardly form a thought in his mind. Before everything went black, he remembered his wife coming up behind him on the porch and wrapping her arms around him as he wept. He remembered feeling a terrible mingling of deep shame in himself, gratitude for her love, and the fervent hope that he could be worthy of her again.
“You can fix this, Ray,” she said, squeezing hard. “I know you can.”
I drive up beside the old gate that blocks the drive to the horse farm. I am a wreck, sweating with fear and the urgency to do what Parker wants me to do—even though I’m not totally sure what that is. I pull the car over onto the shoulder near the thick tree cover. When I turn off the engine, I am swallowed by the sounds of the Florida night. The property is a huge yawning darkness, and for a second I don’t think I can bring myself to enter. But of course I have to go. My daughter needs me. It is that thought that impels me from the car and brings me to the locked gate.
The lock seems old and rusted through, as though it hasn’t been used in years. This can’t be so, I know that. I pick up a rock and start banging on it hard, hoping it will fall to pieces as it would in the movies. But I can’t get it open. I’ll have to leave my car on the road and go around the gate, which is suitable only to keep vehicles from moving up the drive and not really designed to keep out intruders.
The thought of walking that long, dark road alone is almost too much. I remember the gun then and return to the car for it. I open the glove box and find a .38 Special, just your standard revolver. It’ll do. With the gun heavy in my hand, I feel slightly better, not like a girl afraid of the dark. I feel like what I need to be: a woman intent on doing whatever it is she must to protect her child or die trying.
I walk around the gate and begin heading toward the horse farm. The last time I walked this road, I was seventeen years old with nothing to lose. What I wouldn’t give now for some of the empty numbness I felt that night, that ignorance of consequences.
I am washed over by memory as I make the trek. I remember Janet Parker’s car gliding past me in the dark. I remember the clicking of its cooling engine when I saw it a while later. I remember the smell of smoke, the percussion of the gunshot. I see the halo of blond hair soaked in blood, the first time I knew Marlowe was a killer. I hear his confessions beneath the New Mexico sky. Suddenly I am thinking of Gray.
I never saw Briggs again after he made his offer that night in the motel room—or if I did, I don’t remember. I don’t think there was time for me to do what he asked. I think it was just another night or maybe two before Gray caught up with us. All I recall is suddenly seeing this mammoth form in the doorway of yet another miserable motel. I’d seen him before, I knew that much. But for some reason a deep relief mingled with my fear when I saw him standing there. He strode into the room, and it was a second before I saw the needle in his hand.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, jabbing the needle into my arm. I don’t think I even struggled. “Your father sent me for you.”
“It’s just a sedative,” he said, and he was already floating away as the substance flooded through my veins. “I can’t have you shooting me again, can I?”
The next thing I knew, I was