KnockOut

there as if frozen, as if her words were stuck in her throat.
    He said quietly, “Your husband never told you about his family, You never asked?”
    “Yes, of course I was curious, but Martin refused to talk about them. They are not the sort of people you want to know, Jo. Neither do I. I ask you to accept that. I remember he once said unwittingly that he’d managed to escape them, that they didn’t know where he was. I didn’t know what he’d meant about escaping them, and he never told me. I suppose I thought it was a runaway-kid sort of thing.”
    “He didn’t change his name? He kept Martin Backman?”
    “Yes.”
    “I wonder why he didn’t change his name. With the Internet, you could probably find a missing pet. Didn’t he care if they found him? Bigger question—why didn’t they find him? They found you and Autumn, didn’t they? Real fast.”
    She nodded. “They did find us fast, but I don’t understand how they did it.”
    “You must have talked to them some about your own family. Did you mention Titusville?”
    “I’m sure I didn’t, not directly. When I first met him, married him, I simply let it all go as not being important to me, important to us. I loved him, found him fascinating and funny. But now—it’s obvious I didn’t know him, didn’t know a big part of him at all. Who was the man I married? Believe me, I would really like to know.”
    She lowered her face into her hands.
    “I’m sorry, Joanna.”
    She jerked up and Ethan saw sudden anger and pain radiating off her, like waves of heat laced with poison.

18
    HE ROSE . “I’m going to lock us in for the night, Joanna, then we can go on.”
    She followed him out to the foyer, watched him lock and dead-bolt the front door, and turn on the alarm.
    They checked Autumn. She was curled up asleep on his bed, Mackie in her arms. Ethan covered her with an afghan.
    He got them two mugs of tea and motioned her back to the living room.
    “You started to tell me about his mother when you first arrived in Bricker’s Bowl.”
    She nodded. “His mother was alone when we drove up. At first I thought she was his grandmother, but she wasn’t. Like I told you, Martin was born long after Grace.
    “She was very nice, showed me the Backman cemetery, but I knew she was upset that I’d cremated Martin and brought him in an urn, not in a casket as she obviously expected. There were a lot of graves in the cemetery, maybe upwards of forty, maybe more. Must be an old family, I thought, looking out over it. I remember all the graves were set in overlapping triangles, so there were no rows or paths. I asked her about all these triangles, and she said her husband’s grand-parents designed it that way when they’d moved to this spot from the other end of the bowl, and had all the caskets moved here. Then she said the weirdest thing: ‘They knew to keep the old ones with them, because the old ones know how to draw the power from the earth.’ I was so surprised—so creeped out, really—that I didn’t pursue what that meant.
    “There were all these oak trees, nearly growing together, some branches pushing down on others, vying for space, and they seemed to huddle over the graves as if trying to protect them, or hide them.
    “But then, the next morning, I thought I’d overreacted because it was peaceful and warm, a sun bright overhead—serene, even. It felt right that Martin would end up being buried with his family. His grave was already dug. It hadn’t been there when we’d arrived the day before, so I guessed Blessed and Grace dug it out after Autumn and I went to bed. She told me the space was meant for her, but she could always move, now, couldn’t she? I remember watching her wrap the urn in a lace tablecloth she said her mother had made herself. I watched Blessed climb down a small ladder and lay the urn on a wooden platform at the bottom of the grave. It looked so small in that deep hole. Then she handed Blessed a wood-framed mesh sort of thing that looked like a chicken coop and he set it over the wrapped urn. Grace climbed down and smoothed another white tablecloth over that. Both Blessed and Grace were wearing shiny black suits, and they took turns filling in the grave. It was just the five of us, no one else, not even a minister. Blessed read from an ancient Bible—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—read on and on for quite a while, in a low drone. When I realized no one was going to say a prayer, I did. Then we all stood