Tell them your father took care of you.”
Maya looked at him through the sheets of falling rain.
Her yellow raincoat fluttered in the draft from the cruisers’ engines.
Her face was as smooth, as calm, and as unyielding as the granite markers in the churchyard on the hill.
“My name isn’t Maya, Mr.
Vance,” the ten-year-old child said, her voice clear, musical, and utterly without mercy.
“My name is Clara.”
She turned her back on him, slipped her hand deeper into my coat pocket, and pulled me gently toward the warm, bright lights of the lead cruiser.
Behind us, the heavy steel handcuffs clicked shut around Mark Vance’s wrists with a sound that was small, final, and absolute.
The rain continued to fall over Meadowbrook, washing away the green lawn, the blue slate, and the hundred-thousand-dollar lies, until there was nothing left between our boots and the ancient, waiting earth but the sweet, clean smell of river mud.
