The road spray battered the roof of the SUV like a handful of gravel.
“Why wouldn’t she tell me?”
My voice broke, cracking into a ragged, pathetic squeak that sounded like a wounded animal.
“I’m her mother.
I would have died for her!
I spent the last six months thinking I had early-onset dementia because Mark kept moving the car keys and telling me I was forgetting to pay the water bill!
I was sitting on the bathroom floor every night swallowing Lexapro because I thought my brain was turning to mush!
Why didn’t she give me the phone two years ago?”
Morris didn’t answer right away.
She slowed the Explorer as we approached the exit for the Trenton Transit Center, the red taillights of the state police cruisers reflecting against the wet concrete barriers of the overpass.
“Maybe she knew you’d confront him,” Morris said quietly.
“And maybe she knew what happened to Brenda Holloway when Brenda tried to confront him.”
The breath caught in my throat like a fishhook.
“The fire,” I whispered.
“The fire in Scranton was logged as an electrical short in an unmonitored commercial unit,” Morris said, turning the steering wheel sharply into the station’s long-term parking deck.
“Brenda Holloway’s car was found two blocks away with her purse on the passenger seat and her suitcase in the trunk.
The medical examiner found traces of a veterinary sedative in her liver tissue before the flames took her.
A sedative commonly used on horses, Claire.”
She cut the engine.
The silence in the concrete parking garage was suffocating, dripping with the sound of water echoing from the drainpipes: *drip… drip… drip.*
“Your daughter rides horses at the Meadowbrook Hunt Club twice a week,” Morris said, turning to look at me in the shadows of the cabin.
“Her instructor is Mark’s second cousin.
The stable pharmacy logged four missing vials of xylazine eighteen months ago.”
I looked back over my seat.
Maya was still sleeping, her small chest rising and falling in perfect, peaceful symmetry, her little hand resting loosely over the stuffed raccoon’s ear.
In the greenish glow of the garage lights, her eyelashes cast long, delicate shadows over her cheeks.
She looked like an angel in a Renaissance fresco.
She looked like the baby I had rocked through three bouts of croup in our first drafty apartment off Route 1.
*A life or a lie.*
My hand tightened around the brass key until the metal felt like it would snap between my knuckles.
***
The Trenton Transit Center at two-thirty in the morning smelled of diesel exhaust, burnt coffee from the closed Dunkin’ counter, and the damp, oily grease of steel tracks vibrating under the weight of passing freight trains.
The station floor was a wide, echoing desert of gray granite, swept clean by an old janitor who pushed his yellow mop bucket with agonizing slowness fifty yards away near the Amtrak ticketing kiosks.
Deputy Alvarez stayed outside the glass doors by the taxi stand, her hand resting on the snap of her holster, her eyes scanning the empty platform where a lone cargo train with thirty black tankers was rumbling slowly north toward New Brunswick.
Agent Morris and I walked side-by-side down the corridor leading to the lower-level baggage lockers, our footsteps echoing against the glazed ceramic tiles: *clack, clack, clack.*
Maya walked between us, holding my left hand.
She had insisted on carrying her small backpack herself, slung over both shoulders with the chest strap clicked securely across her navy dress.
She wasn’t sleepy anymore.
Her eyes were bright, clear, darting from the schedule boards to the security cameras mounted in the corners of the ceiling with the quiet, calculating assessment of an architect inspecting a foundation.
“Locker 714,” Morris said, stopping at the third row of brushed-steel lockers set into the alcove beneath the west staircase.
The locker was at eye level for a child—four feet off the floor.
The steel around the keyhole was scratched, as if someone had inserted the key many times in the dark with small, hurried fingers.
“Maya,” Morris said, pulling a pair of disposable nitrile gloves from her pocket and snapping them over her fingers.
“Did your father ever give you a combination, or is it just the key?”
“Just the key,” Maya said, looking up at Morris.
“You have to turn it to the left first, until it clicks twice, then push the door in before you turn it to the right.
The latch is sticky because the roof leaked last winter.”
Morris looked down at the key in my palm.
I handed it to her.
My skin felt clammy, cold, as if I were handing an officer a loaded pistol.
Morris stepped up to the locker.
She inserted the key. *Click.
Click.*
She pushed the brushed-steel door inward with her thumb, then turned the brass cylinder hard to the right.
The heavy locking pins disengaged with a solid, mechanical *clunk* that echoed through the empty alcove.
The door swung open four inches.
Morris didn’t pull it wide immediately.
She pulled a penlight from her pocket, clicked it on with her teeth, and directed the narrow white beam through the crack, checking the edges of the frame for trip wires, pressure switches, or commercial tampering seals.
