Gingerbread Man

out. Hubey yelled at them as they left. "Come on, now, you dragged me all the way down here. The least you can do is visit with me. Come on, honey, I promise I'll be nice."
    Ignoring the shouts, Vince took Holly with him back to his car. She sat like a statue as he began to drive them home. Still, and stiff, and silent.
    Finally, he said, "Holly, how can you be sure?"
    She turned her head to face him. She seemed so bleak, so lost. "His eyes," she said. "I remember looking right into his eyes. Hubey Welles has brown eyes. They're small and dark. Round. When he lunged at me like that, I remembered. I looked into the eyes of the man who took my sister. Those aren't the eyes I remember. They were blue. A very pretty blue, like the earliest ice on the lake, when it's so thin the color of the water still shows through. I remember that now," she whispered.
    "I believe you."
    Her eyes remained on him, riveted to him. "Do you?"
    "Why shouldn't I?"
    She stared at him a moment longer, then sighed and leaned her head against the seat "Because no one else will."
    "Why won't they?"
    She glanced sideways at him, very briefly, then shook her head. "I have a history, Vince. Come on, you read my records. You know."
    "What I know is that for a kid to have gone through what you did and to still be functioning right now is pretty damned incredible."
    "You call this functioning? I'm counting half the time, inside my head. The panic attacks are coming back. That one the other day at your place was just the beginning. There will be more. I can feel it. The nightmares are back...."
    "Yeah, but there's a difference now, Red."
    She looked skeptical, but waited for him to elaborate.
    "When all this stuff hit you before, you were a little girl. A helpless little girl. You're not anymore. You're a grown-up woman now."
    She shook her head. "You think that's going to make a difference?"
    "You're stronger than the past is, Holly. You can break its hold on you this time. But you have to turn around and face it first. You can't keep running from it."
    "Don't bet the farm on that."
    "You telling me you're giving up? Even now that you know your sister's killer is still out there somewhere?"
    "What the hell do you want from me?"
    She was no longer speaking in a normal tone. She'd raised her voice, and he knew she probably needed to. To vent and yell and get some of the turmoil that prison visit had brought to life off her chest.
    "I want you to stop being a victim, Red. I want you to stand up and fight the way I know you can. The way you did today when you insisted on looking that bastard in the eyes so you could know the truth."
    "You give me one good reason why I should put myself through any more of this hell, and I'll think about it. Because I'll tell you, Vince, I can only think of one. And that would be if it could bring my little sister back to me. But it can't, can it?"
    He couldn't lie to her. "No."
    "Then, what is the point?"
    "You want to know the point? You want the fucking point?" He pulled over to the shoulder and stopped the car. He then leaned forward, reached past her, and yanked open the glove compartment. He jerked the silver frame out of it and dropped it into her lap.
    She glanced down at it. It was folded shut.
    "Go on, look at it.
Look
at it, dammit."
    Her hand was shaking when she reached for the frame, opened it like a book. She stared down at the angelic little faces. "Who ... who ... ?"
    "Bobby and Kara Prague," he said.
    Holly gaped at him, then back at the photo again, and then she burst into tears. Noisy, messy tears. But he didn't let up on her. "They're dead, and I'm pretty goddamn sure the guy who killed them is the same man who killed your kid sister. He's been killing little kids for eighteen years, and he's gonna keep right on killing them until somebody does something to stop him. And
that,
Red, is the point."
    He had lost it with her. He hadn't meant to. She wasn't tough enough to endure his anger, and she hadn't done a damn thing to deserve it—except show signs of backing down. And why the hell did that set him off? It wasn't as if he hadn't expected it.
    Or maybe it was. Maybe he'd been starting to think she wasn't one of those helpless, needy women that got him into so much trouble. Maybe he was starting to believe— or maybe to hope—she was more. That she was strong, able to fix her own life and not depend on him to do it for her. Because if she was, then what he was starting to feel toward her wasn't just a