One Cold Night

enjoying this.
    He was close enough. Now.
    “I can see those keys behind your back,” he said coolly, almost laughing. “Did you really think that would work?”
    The mirrors.
    She brought them forward anyway, aimed at his muddy green eyes and the dripping tear of that pink scar.
    His left hand pressed her down with a physical strength she had never before experienced, completely overpowering her and buckling her knees. In the mirrors she watched dozens of his right hand sweeping dozens of glinting silver knives through theair, while his face registered an intensity of almost sexual fervor.
    From above, part of Susan’s mind heard an unlatching sound, while from below she watched frames of her life scroll by on an inner screen. Scenes she hadn’t known were still lodged in her memory now gleamed like pearls on a strand, each one complete and perfect. Curled on the couch, under a blanket, clutching her favorite doll with its plastic face and sealed-shut eyes. Popping into the air at the high end of a seesaw. The blunt tip of her pencil stopping at the end bell of an important sixth-grade English test, half the questions unanswered. The impossibly soft feel of Peter’s lips as his tongue slid into her mouth the very first time. Lisa’s tiny newborn face, screwed into agitation after the shock of birth. Dave opening a shopping bag and putting his favorite coffee grounds on the top shelf of the freezer door when they were dating. A hangnail on Dave’s thumb as he flipped channels and her desire to reach over and pull it off. A stranger in brown ankle boots and a long black skirt triggering a sensation that there was something Susan needed to remember but couldn’t. Lisa’s mouth pulling away from a slice of pizza, trailing a long ribbon of cheese. And yesterday: the unfinished line of yellow paint. This speeding filament of Susan’s life passed through her mind with the relentlessness of a runaway train. And she knew: It was over.
    But before the thought could crystallize, an explosion blasted into the elevator from above.
    The knife fell, his right arm swung down and his left hand released her suddenly. He flailed backward, crashing to the elevator floor. Blood quickly soakedhis blond head and dripped into the collar of his denim jacket as his lifeless eyes stagnated: dead green pools.
    Susan froze, petrified; she was still gripping her keys and only now felt the pain of their metal edges cutting into her fingers.
    Then, in the mirror directly across from her, she saw a series of familiar, identical faces. Framed in a repetition of the elevator’s open escape hatch was Detective Lupe Ramos — or many of her. Copies of one small, pink-nailed hand held many reflections of a black gun.
    Susan looked up, away from the mirrors, reducing the kaleidoscopic Lupe Ramos to just one woman leaning out of the gloom of the elevator shaft into the diamond brightness of the mirrored cube. Her face glittered with perspiration. Her cherry-pink lipstick was perfect.
    “I’d say, ‘Sorry I’m late,’” Lupe said, “but baby, it looks like I made it just in time.”

Chapter 29
    Wednesday, 8:45 p.m.
    Dave had forgotten how dark darkness could be. In the city, there was always an ambient glow from somewhere else. But here, in the woods in deep night, the moon was blocked by trees and nothing shone. Shapes swallowed the darkness and darkened further still. There was no reflection, or resonance of reflection, anywhere.
    Soon the Gardiner police produced a set of klieg lights that illuminated the small orchard with harsh intensity. Generator motors could be heard buzzing nearby. But Dave took no comfort in the familiarity of artificial light and noise. The seeing he had to do now was inward, and for that he craved a solitude he wouldn’t find for many hours. In the meantime, he waited and watched as a body was exhumed from the older, overgrown grave.
    He had heard the news from home: the groom had been there all along. He had gone after Susan. Susan. Dave’s mind still couldn’t land on the reality of the groom getting so close to his wife. The horror of whatmight have happened... and he hadn’t been there to help her.
    Another piece of news was a name that had turned up on Peter Adkins’s roster of patients: Theo Childress.
    Images floated through Dave’s unprocessed memory of that day. The innocent face of a boy framed on his parents’ wall, green eyes narrowed in a partial smile, slashed cheekbone. And the gnarled