Beauty Queen

had drifted off to Marion again. Buying the china was one of those motions of making white magic, of trying to make a thing happen. If he bought the china for their future life together, maybe he and Marion could get back to the old feeling again.
    "What did you say?" he said, looking up from his checkbook.
    Mary Ellen and Liv were driving up Route 7, north through Connecticut, along the Housatonic River. Her father's old place was on the river, just over the Connecticut-Massachusetts line.
    Mary Ellen was driving the Vega, and she looked over at Liv, then back at the road. Kikan and Sam were in a cat carrier in the back—Kikan was asleep and Sam was yelling his head off.
    Liv was definitely unhappy about things. She sat there looking straight ahead, her hands folded with uncommon prissiness on her shorts-bared thighs. Mary Ellen was positive that Liv did not know anything about the Beretta hidden in Mary Ellen's knapsack, yet Liv was unhappy with something in the vibes that she picked up from her lover.
    Mary Ellen let her thoughts range back over the past couple of weeks.
    Aside from Liv, other things were going pretty well. She had settled into her job, and she was adjusting to the pace, which was more frenetic than her old patrol job. She did not have regular weekends off, but she would have agreed days off. Liv was going to spend her two weeks' vacation at the cabin, as she was yearning to be in the country, and that was just as well—Mary Ellen had given the Colter organization her real address, and she didn't want them nosing around there and finding she lived with another woman.
    As to the salary, it was more than she had earned in the police force. She had felt financially reckless enough to stop by that antique shop on Christopher Street and work out an affordable payment-plan deal with them for the primitive cat painting.
    Liv's birthday was coming up, and Mary Ellen was hoping that the gift would soften Liv's unease.
    She was learning things fast about Jeannie Colter's life, and about the organization, and saw that there were several situations of which she could take advantage. She hadn't talked to Armando yet, because she was still unsure which situation was best to exploit.
    One thing was sure, though: she doubted that her faith in the American political system would survive the close exposure to a political campaign. It was all as phony and as stagy as a nightclub show—the speechwriting, the advertising, the polling, the carefully managed PR. Other candidates probably didn't do things any differently. Where was truth, where was sincerity? It all made her sick.
    Now and then, she felt uneasy in her resolve to end this woman's life. But then she saw or heard something in the
    Colter office that showed her, once again, how all this phoniness was being used against gay people, and she got angry all over again, and eager for the kill.
    She had the gun hidden deep in her knapsack, and she was driving very carefully. She knew very well how the police sometimes pulled cars over for traffic violations, and then went on to search without warrants.
    "Well, we're getting there," she said.
    They were now in Massachusetts. Mary Ellen turned off Route 7, onto a road called Furnace Woods Road. They went winding up the bluffs that overlooked the Housa-tonic River, higher and higher, among the crags of rock and the clumps of birch trees, and beech, and mountain laurel.
    On the top, Mary Ellen looked for the little hidden drive, and finally saw it. She remembered the way as well as if it were yesterday. One tree by the drive still had the board nailed to it, where her father had hung one of the NO HUNTING notices that posted his land.
    She turned into the drive, which was just a tiny dirt road. They lurched slowly through the sun-splashed woods of birch and aspen. Mary Ellen had a lump in her throat— it was just as beautiful as she remembered it.
    Liv had roused from her lethargy. "I loooove it," she breathed. "Oh, it is like the place where we used to spend the summer when I was a little girl. . .
    The woods opened out into an immense wild meadow. To the west, the meadow sloped away to the edge of the bluff, and they could see the blue river far below, and the bluffs on the other side, and the ancient rounded mountains rolling softly away into a hazy horizon. To the east, on the high side of the meadow, she could see the cabin at the edge of the woods.
    As they neared the cabin, Mary Ellen strained her eyes,