Dark Rivers of the Heart

attorney to a Mafia don."
        "The only way out was to go public, blow the whole dirty business wide open. Secretly Danny prepared his own file of Mama's software and a history of the cover-ups the agency was involved with."
        "You realized the danger?"
        "On one level. But deep down inside, I think both of us, to different degrees, had trouble believing Tom would have Danny killed.
        We were twenty-eight, for God's sake. Death was an abstract concept to us. At twenty-eight, who really believes he's ever going to die?"
        "And then the hit men showed up."
        "No SWAT team. More subtle. Three men on Thanksgiving evening.
        The year before last. My folks' place in Connecticut. My dad is.
        .. was a doctor. A doctor's life, especially in a small town, isn't his own. Even on Thanksgiving. So… near the end of dinner, I was in the kitchen… getting the pumpkin pie… when the doorbell rang. …"
        For once, Spencer didn't want to look at her lovely face. He closed his eyes.
        Ellie took a deep breath and went on: "The kitchen was at the end of the hall from the foyer. I pushed the swinging door aside to see who our visitor was, just as my mother opened… just as she opened the front door."
        Spencer waited for her to tell it at her own pace. If he had made the correct assumptions about the sequence of events since that door had been opened, fourteen months in the past, this was the first time that she had described those murders to anyone. Between then and now, she had been on the run, unable to fully trust another human being and unwilling to risk the lives of innocent people by involving them in her personal tragedy.
        "Two men at the front door. Nothing special about them. Could have been Dad's patients, for all I knew. First one was wearing a red-plaid hunting jacket. He said something to Mom, then came inside, pushing her back, a gun in his hand. Never heard a shot. Silencer.
        But I saw… a spray of blood… the back of her head blowing out."
        With his eyes closed against the sight of Ellie's face, Spencer could clearly visualize that Connecticut foyer and the horror that she described.
        "Dad and Danny were in the dining room. I screamed, 'Run, get away."
        I knew it was the agency. I didn't go out the rear door.
        Instinct, maybe. I'd have been killed on the back porch. Ran into the laundry room off the kitchen, then into the garage and out the side garage door. The house is on two acres, lots of lawn, but I got to the fence between our place and the Doyle house. I was going over it, almost over it, when a bullet ricocheted off the wrought iron.
        Somebody shooting from behind our house. Another silencer. No sound but the slug smacking iron. I was frantic, ran across the I Doyles'yard. Nobody home, away at their kids'place for the holiday, windows dark. I ran through a gate, into St. George's Wood.
        Presbyterian church sits on six or eight acres, surrounded by woods-mostly pines, sycamores. Ran a ways. Stopped in the trees.
        Looked back. Thought one of them would be after me. But I was alone. I guess I'd been too fast or maybe they didn't want to chase me in public, waving guns. And just then snow started falling, just then, big fat flakes…"
        Behind his closed eyes, Spencer could see her on that distant night, in that faraway place: alone in darkness, without a coat, shivering, breathless, terrified. Abruptly, torrents of white flakes spiraled through the bare limbs of the sycamores, and the timing made the snow seem more than merely a sudden change of weather, gave it the significance of an omen.
        "There was something uncanny about it… sort of eerie… "
        Ellie had confirming what Spencer sensed that she had felt and what he himsal self might have felt under those circumstances. "I don't know … can't explain it… the snow was like a curtain coming down, a stage curtain, the end of an act, end of something. I knew then they were all dead. Not just my mother. Dad and Danny too."
        Her voice trembled with grief. Talking for the first time about those killings, she had reopened the scabs that had formed over her raw pain, as he had known she would.
        Reluctantly he opened his eyes and looked at her.
        She was beyond pale now. Ashen. Tears shimmered in her eyes, but her cheeks were still dry.
        "Want me to drive?" he