As he drove through the gently sloping farm fields, Lee thought about each victim, and what they had in common. On the surface, they had very little in common, but there was some thread connecting them. There had to be-there always was. Once you saw the pattern, and how the pieces connected, you had a clearer insight into the killer's personality.
But this murderer might as well be a ghost. He was hiding his pattern, his victimology, so well… but what if the lack of a pattern was in itself a pattern? What if they could somehow connect the seeming randomness of the crimes to a particular type of person?
As he pulled into the driveway of his mother's house, Lee saw purple and white balloons festooned on the lamppost at the end of the drive. He smiled-purple was Kylie's new favorite color. She had given up pink as "too girlie" a few months ago. As he pulled up onto the patch of lawn that served as a parking space, the front door of the house was flung open and his niece came rushing out, trailed by two other little girls.
"Uncle Leeeee!" she cried as he opened the car door, throwing herself at him.
Her two friends followed suit. "Uncle Leeee!" they yelled gleefully, wrapping their arms around his legs. He pretended not to notice and tried to walk, a girl clinging to each leg, as Kylie peeled off and hopped up and down alongside him.
"You look so funny!" she hooted as he pretended to be unaware of the clinging girls, struggling to move his legs forward. After a couple of minutes of this, all three of the children dissolved into laughter, and the two hanging onto him were forced to let go.
"You're funny!" the smaller one said. She was a pixie with olive skin and straight jet black hair cut short with long bangs over large dark eyes.
"Aren't you going to introduce me?" Lee asked Kylie as they all headed toward the house.
"This is Angelica," said Kylie, stroking the pixie's shiny black hair, "and this is Meredith."
Meredith was not a pretty child-much taller than Angelica and Kylie, she was very pale with bushy red hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a long, serious face. "Hello," she said, studying Lee as though he were a laboratory specimen or object d'art. "You're the criminal profiler, right?
Lee thought Meredith was entirely too precocious for her age.
"I'm in law enforcement, that's right."
Meredith walked backward so she could look up at him, as Kylie and Angelica skipped hand in hand alongside them, humming.
"I've read about the kind of work you do. It's very interesting," Meredith said, trying to skip backward. It was an awkward gait, and she was an ungainly child. "Is that how you hurt your arm?"
"Kind of."
"I think I want to do what you do when I grow up."
Lee smiled. "Well, you're young-there's plenty of time to change your mind."
Meredith shook her head. "No, I'm very focused-I know that's what I want to do." She looked at him, her face serious. "I have a very high IQ, you know."
"Well, that's great," he said as they reached the house.
"Don't pay any attention to her," Kylie said, taking Meredith by the hand and pulling her down the grassy slope toward the springhouse. "She thinks she's all that."
"No, I don't," said Meredith, "I just-" But at that moment Kylie threw herself onto the ground and began rolling down the grassy hillside. Angelica quickly followed suit, giggling all the way. Meredith stood for a moment with her hands at her sides, then said, "Oh, what the heck," and rolled down after them.
Watching them, Lee remembered all the times he and Laura had rolled down that same hill-or, in winter, sledded down it and across the frozen stream at the bottom. He looked at his mother's house: there were a good number of old stone houses in this river valley, and some of them had connections to the Revolutionary War, but his mother's house practically oozed history. The massive gray river stones were bulky and uneven and looked as if they had been hewn from the sides of mountains by giants. When Lee was a child he thought they were the most wonderful thing he had ever seen.
The sound of giggling bubbled up from the bottom of the hill, where the three girls lay on their backs, breathless and laughing, their hair and clothes covered with grass and bits of twigs. The lazy August sun fell on the girls' hair-blond, black, and red-and Lee was reminded of seeing a herd of horses in a field when he was a child, and how pleasing he found the different-colored manes.
Looking at them, it was hard once again to imagine anything was wrong in the world, or ever would be.
He heard the familiar sound of the front screen door slamming and turned his head toward the house. For one painful instant, he expected his sister to be coming out onto the stone porch to wave at him. He had to blink to clear his eyes when he realized that it was, of course, his mother.
"Hi," she called, shielding her eyes from the sun. "Where's the birthday girl?"
Lee pointed to the bottom of the hill, where the girls had gotten up and were brushing the grass from their clothes, still laughing. He didn't want to disturb the sweetness of the moment, so he turned and joined his mother on the front porch.
Fiona Campbell greeted her only son with a quick, firm kiss on the cheek, then held him at arm's length, grasping his shoulders with her long, strong hands.
"So glad you could make it," she said. "It means a lot to Kylie." She would never say it meant something to her, too-that was not her style. "What on earth did you do to your arm?" she said, frowning.
"I ran into a door."
She raised a single eyebrow, but didn't say anything more about it. That was typical of her-the less said about unpleasantries, the better.
His mother was tall and straight, as lean as the day she was married to Lee's father. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a businesslike sweep of bangs, short in the back, just reaching the nape of her neck. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes a clear, piercing blue, and she walked with the unyielding step of a woman who has never known a moment's self-doubt.
Loss was the touchstone of his family's life, and his mother was both ridiculous and rather heroic in her refusal to bow down to it-indeed, to recognize its existence. The straightness of her spine, the clearness of her gaze in the face of disaster were both vexing and full of an odd grandeur, like a Greek tragic heroine.
Lee turned to see George Callahan emerge from the house. He was Kylie's father, and Lee believed that a kinder, more patient man had never walked the earth.
"Hi, George," he said, extending his left hand.
"Hey there, fella," George replied, grasping Lee's hand in his enormous paw, holding a beer in the other. George was big and blond and bluff, with a touching awkwardness around other people. When there was work to be done, he was your man-hardworking, honest, reliable-but in social situations he always seemed to be struggling to overcome his natural shyness. Big and broad-shouldered, he never really looked at home at the kind of cocktail parties Lee's parents had favored. He was much more comfortable in front of a grill, flipping steaks, spatula in one hand and beer in the other. He was wearing blue jeans and a freshly ironed white shirt on his generous frame, and wore his straight sandy hair slicked back. His square face was shiny and pink, as though he had spent the day in the sun.
"What'd chya do, get in a fight?" George asked, indicating Lee's injured arm.
"Yeah-but you should see the other guy."
George laughed. "Yeah, I'll bet!" He jerked a thumb in the direction of the kitchen. "Can I get you a beer?"
"Sure."
"Comin' right up," George said happily, lumbering back into the house. He loved waiting on people-it was talking to them that presented problems.
"So it'll just be the three of us and the three girls," Lee's mother said, sitting in one of the chaise longues on the porch. "Kylie will have another birthday party at school on Monday with all her classmates. George has already taken the morning off to bake cupcakes."
"He's a great dad," Lee said.
"Yes, he is," she replied.
A silence hung heavy in the air between them. What neither of them were saying, but Lee was sure they were both thinking, was how much they missed Laura and how they wished she were here now to see her daughter turn seven.
George reemerged from the house just as Kylie and her friends came up from the bottom of the hill. Kylie and Meredith walked side by side, carrying an enormous watermelon between them, as Angelica skipped along behind.
"Look what we found in the springhouse!" Kylie exclaimed.
"That's for after dinner," Fiona said sternly. "For dessert."
"But we have birthday cake for dessert," Kylie pointed out. "Why can't we have the watermelon now?"
Fiona started to answer, but George Callahan stepped in. "It's your birthday, right?" he said to his daughter.
"Right!" she said, grinning.
Angelica wiped some grass from her forehead and looked at them all wide-eyed. Meredith crossed her arms and did her best to regard the adults with an ironic gaze, but she just looked as though she had indigestion.
"Then I think you should have the watermelon whenever you want it," he said, with a challenging look at Fiona, who shook her head.
"George Callahan, you're going to spoil her," she said.
"Then she'll be spoiled. But it's her birthday and I say she should have the watermelon when she wants it."
"Yea!" the girls cried. They hopped up and down, chanting, "Wa-ter-me-lon! Wa-ter-me-lon!"
The three adults couldn't help laughing at the sight, though Fiona still shook her head, clicking her tongue in disapproval. Such things as watermelon on demand didn't exist in her world-but then, in her world, her only daughter was alive somewhere, not an undiscovered corpse slowly rotting in some lonely and abandoned corner of the world.