We reached my house at half past five, and the slanted rays of the sun were hot and bright, the sky hazy blue but cloudless. I carried in newspapers from the front steps and was sickened again by this morning’s front-page headline about Benton’s death. Although identification was tentative, it was believed he had died in a fire under very suspicious circumstances while assisting the FBI in the nationwide hunt for the escaped killer Carrie Grethen. Investigators would not say why Benton had been inside the small grocery store that had burned, or if he might have been lured there.
‘What do you want to do with this?’ Marino asked.
He had opened the car trunk, where three large brown paper bags contained the personal effects collected from Benton’s hotel room. I could not decide.
‘Want me to just put them in your office?’ he asked. ‘Or I can go through them if you want, Doc.’
‘No, no, just leave them,’ I said.
Stiff paper crackled as he carried the bags into the house and down the hall. His footsteps were burdened and slow, and when he returned to the front of the house, I was still standing by the open door.
‘I’ll talk to you later,’ he said. ‘And don’t go leaving this door open, you hear me? The alarm stays on and you and Lucy shouldn’t go out anywhere.’
‘I don’t think you have a worry.’
Lucy had dropped her luggage in her bedroom near the kitchen and was staring out the window at Marino driving away. I came behind her and gently put my hands on her shoulders.
‘Don’t quit,’ I said, and I leaned my forehead against the back of her neck.
She did not turn around, and I felt grief shudder through her.
‘We’re in this together, Lucy,’ I went on quietly. ‘We’re all that’s left, really. Just you and me. Benton would want us united in this. He wouldn’t want you giving up. Then what will I do, huh? If you give up, you’ll be giving up on me, too.’
She began to sob.
‘I need you.’ I could barely talk. ‘More than ever.’
She turned around and clung to me the way she used to when she was a frightened child starved for someone who cared. Her tears wet my neck, and for a while we stood in the middle of a room still packed with computer equipment and school books, and plastered with posters of her adolescent heroes.
‘It’s my fault, Aunt Kay. It’s all my fault. I killed him!’ she cried out.
‘No,’ I said, holding her tight as my own tears flowed.
‘How can you ever forgive me? I took him away from you!’
‘That’s not the way it is. You did nothing, Lucy.’
‘I can’t live with this.’
‘You can and you will. We need to help each other live with this.’
‘I loved him, too. Everything he did for me. Getting me started with the Bureau, giving me a chance. Being supportive. About everything.’
‘It’s going to be all right,’ I said.
She pulled away from me and collapsed on the edge of the bed, wiping her face with the tail of her sooty blue shirt. She rested her elbows on her knees and hung her head, staring at her own tears falling like rain on the hardwood floor.
‘I’m telling you, and you’ve got to listen,’ she said in a low, hard voice. ‘I’m not sure I can go on, Aunt Kay. Everybody has a point. Where it begins and ends.’ Her breath shook. ‘Where they can’t go on. I wish she had killed me instead. Maybe she would have done me a favor.’
I watched her with gathering resolve as she willed herself to die before my eyes.
‘If I don’t go on, Aunt Kay, you’ve got to understand and not blame yourself or anything,’ she muttered, wiping her face with her sleeve.
I went over to her and lifted her chin. She was hot and smoky, her breath and body odor bad.
‘You listen to me,’ I said with an intensity that would have frightened her in the past. ‘You get this goddamn notion out of your head right now. You are glad you didn’t die, and you aren’t committing suicide, if that’s what you’re implying, and I believe it is. You know what suicide is all about, Lucy? It’s about anger, about payback. It’s the final fuck-you. You will do that to Benton? You will do that to Marino? You will do that to me?’