“And you’ll go to your bed, and find solace with your darling husband. And you’ll sleep and sleep.”
“I’ll sleep and sleep,” she agreed, “for the first time since Shawna left.”
“Yes. And tomorrow, you will still grieve, but you will start to imagine that perhaps someday, there will be something to live for again. It won’t seem like a far-off impossibility.”
“Someday there might be something to live for. Lots of kids need good homes.” Then she added doubtfully, “But I doubt it. Shawna’s death is too big. It takes over everything.”
“Yes, but not forever. Go to bed, now, madam.” Sophie stood on her toes and kissed the older woman on the cheek. “Shawna sees you.”
The woman turned around without another word and shuffled toward the back of the house.
Sophie burst into tears, startling Liam. He put a clumsy arm around her and she leaned against him. She smelled like sweet, fresh straw. “Oh, the poor thing,” she wept. “Did you see the pictures? Their only girl, dead. And for what?”
“I guess,” he said slowly, “for a mean trick.”
Sophie stopped crying at once—though there had been no tears, just a kind of hoarse sobbing—and her eyes took on a hard shine he had never seen before. It was dumb, but he almost felt like taking a step back from her. “That’s right, Liam. That’s just right. A mean trick. And we’re going to stop his clock. We’re going to gut him like a trout and take his head and bury it with the garlic bulbs. That’s what we’re going to do.”
“All right,” he replied. “Sounds like a good deal. But I gotta gas up the truck first.”
She smiled at that, as he had meant for her to do. “Fair enough. Let’s leave this place. Can we be in Minneapolis before dawn?”
“You bet.”
She tucked her small hand into his and followed him back to the truck.
6
“I’M sorry,” the reservations clerk at the Radisson told them. “The only rooms we have left have a king-sized bed in them. Non-smoking,” he added helpfully.
“That will be fine,” Sophie replied. Liam was his usual expressionless self, but she assumed he wouldn’t mind, either. In fact, the thought of sharing a bed with him caused a pleasant tingle low in her stomach, usually the sort of tingle caused by strolling through a blood bank. If Liam did mind, she could always sleep under the bed. Or in the closet. “Do you take American Express?”
When the clerk, a short man with a freckled, egg-shaped, shaved head, turned away to run the card, Liam muttered, “You got a credit card?”
“You know all those ‘Cardholder for ten years,’ ‘Cardholder for twenty years’ ads?” she whispered back.
“Don’t even tell me.”
“Well, I’ve had one for a long time.”
He snickered and, when the clerk came back, said, “Can we get a window facing west?”
The clerk blinked. “Oh, sure.”
“Got to take care of my skin,” Liam said, totally straight-faced. Sophie almost laughed; Liam looked like a farmer, which was to say he was deeply tanned, with wrinkles around his eyes and hands like leather blocks. He was the SPF association’s nightmare.
“Oh, really,” Sophie said, rolling her eyes a minute later when they were in the elevator.
“Well, didn’t think it was too good to tell him the truth.”
“Hotel employees have heard it all. He likely wouldn’t have batted an eye.”
Liam grunted and glanced down at the key card, which looked almost tiny in his large, capable hand. “We’ll draw the drapes, should do the trick, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Or you can sleep with your whole self under the covers.”
She almost laughed at the mental image of her deeply unconscious self swaddled in covers deep in the middle of a king-sized hotel bed. “I think closing the curtains will be fine.” She followed him out of the elevator and down the hall. “But you don’t…ah…I needn’t…I don’t have to sleep in the bed. With you.”