One Cold Night

was getting closer to the voice.
    And then — it stopped.
    Now the only things Dave heard were the labor of his own breathing and the crunching of his feet over the leaf-covered earth.
    Until a single gunshot cracked the relative silence.
    Dave’s body kept running while his mind stopped on that moment, on the blast that echoed and echoed and echoed throughout him. He ran into the ominous silence of Lisa’s stopped voice. In the air was the smell of smoke, something burning.
    He was getting closer, sprinting toward what looked like a clearing just ahead.
    He raced along the final stretch of path, noticing apples on the ground, nested in leaves and moss to the side and also, increasingly, underfoot. He kicked one aside. Then he entered a grass clearing covered with apples in various states of decay. Apples and apple trees.
    Lisa stood in the middle of the clearing, pale and shaking, holding a gun.
    Seeing her, a river of raw, agonizing joy rushed through Dave. She was alive. She was safe. He had found her. But he hated that she held a gun in her young hands, and his next thought was to fear for her safety in a new, different way.
    Braithwaite and Childress ran into the clearingbehind Dave. Braithwaite gaped, apparently stunned by the physical reality of an actual girl. Childress hinged over at the waist, hands propped on his knees, struggling for breath.
    Dave’s eyes followed the direction of Lisa’s gun. There, across the clearing — amidst the crayon scribble of autumn colors, the greens and browns and reds and oranges and golds and yellows — sat Peter Adkins, leaning against a tree. There was a deep gash in the bark a yard above his head, where the gun’s backlash must have redirected Lisa’s inexperienced shot. From that, Dave could see what was happening here: Lisa had shot at Adkins and he had let her. She was preparing to shoot again.
    “Lisa!” Dave called. “Don’t do it!”
    She seemed terrified and frozen, stuck in her determination to finish what she had started, as if she had made a momentous decision and could not now turn back.
    “Lisa, honey, please listen to me.” Dave calibrated his tone to ease out the alarm he felt at the thought of Lisa shooting her birth father. It was possible the law might forgive her, in light of what she’d been through, but she would never forgive herself. He took a step toward her. “Sweetheart, listen to me, please. It’s over now. Over. ”
    With the gun still trained on Adkins, Lisa looked at Dave. There she was — their Lisa — and yet she almost looked like a different girl. Her blond hair was wild around a paper-white face. Her bloodshot green eyes considered him with a lack of mercy of which he would not have thought her capable. In that moment, he felt astounded by his love for this girl and frightened by the vulnerability he felt on her behalf.
    She gritted her teeth and shook her head. Tears filled her eyes. “I thought you were going to be him, ” she said, lowering the gun. She began to shake uncontrollably.
    Dave ran to her. She let her body buckle into his and he held her, hearing the swish and crunch of the gun falling from her hand onto the leafy ground at their feet.
    Braithwaite meanwhile hurried over and handcuffed Peter Adkins, who submitted without a fight. He lay on the ground like a trussed pig, weeping, and Dave actually felt a stab of remorse for this awful, tormented man. Yet at the same time he hated him as he had never hated anyone else — except the groom.
    Dave lowered his mouth to Lisa’s ear and whispered, “Who is him? ”
    “Some guy who put him up to all this,” Lisa cried.
    The Groom, Dave thought: Theo Childress. What if it had been Childress who had taken her? The near miss of that possibility sent a chill through Dave’s exhausted mind.
    “Are you okay?” he whispered.
    “I don’t know.” She nodded and shook her head and nodded. “I guess so.”
    “I love you,” he whispered. “And Susan loves you. We love you so much, Lisa.”
    “Just how many fathers do I have?” she asked in the tiniest of voices.
    “A bunch, I guess,” he answered.
    As they drifted into a warm, safe silence in each other’s arms, his mind began to process the possibilities. All it would take to prove that Theo Childress was the groom would be to match his fingerprints to those found on the phone handset from the Café Luxembourg, the letter Susan had received thatmorning, and the letter Marie Rothka had received last