KnockOut

us, it makes my head ache.”
    “What we already know about them is remarkable enough. Truth be told, I don’t know why they haven’t tried to take over the world. What Blessed alone can do—why isn’t he president? Or dictator small country?”
    “I’m thinking he’s got to have limits. Maybe he can stymie only a couple of people at a time. Maybe the hypnosis fades after a day, two days, whatever. Maybe there are a whole lot of people he can’t stymie—both Dillon and Autumn can resist him, after all.”
    Ethan said, “Limits—that sounds reasonable, if anything can be considered reasonable about what Blessed does.”
    “And Grace. We don’t even know what he can do. It’s interesting the Backmans never moved out of Bricker’s Bowl to look for a larger canvas. Mr. Backman left but always came back, again and again It’s like they’re somehow tied to Bricker’s Bowl, they’re afraid to leave, or can’t leave.”
    Ethan poured them each another half-cup of coffee. “That’s the end of it. Do you like it?”
    “It’s the best coffee I’ve had today.”
    He chuckled and raised his cup to hers in a toast. He paused a moment, then said, “I meant to tell you, Joanna, I really like your freckles.”
    Her hands immediately went to her cheeks. “Freckles, the bane of my existence. You said you like them?”
    “Yeah, I do.”
    “They breed in the sun.”
    Her dark brown hair was pulled to the back of her head and held in a big clip. Hanks of thick hair fell around her face. He would have told her he liked her mouth too, and how her smile filled the very air with pleasure, but it really wasn’t the time. He prayed there would be a time. He couldn’t remember a more dangerous situation, and he knew he couldn’t fail. It wasn’t an option. Ethan watched her pull out the clip, smooth her fingers through her tangled hair, gather it all up again, and hook the clip back in. He said, “Autumn is the picture of you.”
    “What? Oh, no, she’s beautiful. I’ve always thought she looked more like my mother.”
    “Nope, she’s a copy of you. There’s nothing of her father in her?”
    “She’ll look at you sometimes with her head tilted to one side, like she knows what you’re going to say and is waiting for you to get on with it. That’s her father. And when she’s mad, her cheeks turn redder than a sunset. That’s her father too.”
    “Ready to tell me about Martin Backman?”
    She swallowed, shook her head.
    Ethan waited, saying nothing more, and sipped his coffee, so thick with grounds now it was probably growing hair on his tongue.
    “He was a mean drunk, that’s what he told me when we dated, and that was why he didn’t drink. He said something snapped inside him when he drank, and he lost it. He hadn’t had a drink in seven years. I admired him because he’d recognized the problem and dealt with it.
    “I was visiting some friends in Boston when I met him. I fell in love, married him right after I graduated from Bryn Mawr, and moved to the big bad city of Boston. Became a Patriots fan, and the Red Sox—you can’t help but love them. Then Autumn came into our lives.”
    “What did your husband do?”
    “Martin was in advertising.”
    “TV commercials?”
    “Yes—television, primarily. People, humor, screwy situations, mostly. He was very good at it, very intuitive. He had a knack for knowing what would and what wouldn’t appeal to people, and he was usually right. Not long after we married, he was made the head of the agency branch in Boston—he was only twenty-eight.”
    “Do you think his gift somehow played into this? Gave him an edge?”
    “You’re probably right. Sometimes it was scary how right-on he was. Autumn was four years old when his company wanted to bring him to New York—a big promotion, more money than you can imagine.”
    “What happened?”
    “He went out with people from the firm in New York to celebrate and, without thinking, he drank a toast. He didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, I guess. He hit a man in a brawl with a chair, and the man died. He plea-bargained down to manslaughter and went off to jail to serve minimum of nine years.” She shrugged, staring down into her empty cup. “He was murdered in prison, stabbed by an inmate in the shower who turned out to be related to the man Martin killed in that bar.
    “You want to know what was strange, Ethan? Autumn knew her father was dead before I told her. Not dead, necessarily, but that he