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better?
    Even someone as cruel and… implacable as Howard.
    Even if they got away with it.
    Which, for all their planning and precautions she couldn’t help but feel was very much in doubt. There was Lieutenant Rule for one thing. Rule or someone like him. And her as yet untested ability to make herself over into a world-class liar.
    They were crazy.
    The timer buzzed on the microwave.
    She sipped the coffee. Either it was stale or her mouth was stale. Probably both. She carried it into the living room and sat on the sofa and cradled the cup in herhands, feeling its warmth. The warmth helped stop the shaking.
    She sat back and stared and drank the coffee until her mind went blank and empty—until it felt like there was nothing at all left inside her—just externals. Soft couch and warm cup and the morning birds on the lawn outside the window.
    She wanted to shower alone, without Lee.
    Somehow that was necessary.
    It wasn’t his fault. She didn’t think it was.
    He had only been reacting to her pain.
    Though the idea to kill him—if you could even dignify it with the word idea, born as it was on a night of utter blinding rage after what, finally, Howard had seen fit to do to her—the actual utterance had been Lee’s.
    We’ve got to kill him. He’ll never go away. You know that. He’s got to die.
    She had never disagreed. Not by then.
    By then Howard had made her a believer.
    But now she needed to grasp and hold the morning without Lee the same way she was holding this cup of coffee here, to be alone with the morning, to get used to the sheer cold fact of morning and listen to the familiar sound of the shower drowning out everything else, feel it pound across her body as hot as possible and soap herself until she was cleaner than anyone would ever need or want to be, soap her body over and over just like she’d needed to yesterday but couldn’t because first they had to stop at Jim Clarke’s service station as soon as they got off the mountain to fill up the BMW and pass some time talking with Jim so that he’d remember them, then make their seven o’clock dinner reservations at Foxfire. They had to be seen in public as close to the time of Howard’sdeath as possible. So that by the time she got to shower last night it had been nine. By then her anxiety was so intense she could barely stand the spray on her nerve ends, could barely stand to towel dry—or after that, the feel of the fine silk teddy against her skin.
    Do it now, she thought. Before he wakes and wants company. Before he needs to talk again.
    She dropped the robe off her shoulders to the marble bathroom floor and stood gazing at herself naked in the mirror.
    Her flesh looked exactly the same to her.
    It was amazing.
    As though it and she had gone through nothing extraordinary whatsoever.
    It would have been much more appropriate to find some new scarring there next to the old.
    To find stigmata.
    She reached down and turned on the water— hot —and stepped into the scorching spray.
    “I’d suggest a movie,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Seriously. We’ve got to get our minds off this. Wait it out. Be patient. We’re not going to hear anything today.” He hesitated. “Not unless…”
    “Not unless they find him.”
    “That’s right. And I don’t think they will. Do you?”
    She shrugged. His question was meant to be rhetorical but it also had an edge to it.
    Reassure me.
    She’d showered and brushed her teeth until her gums were sore and the coffee still tasted foul and chalky.
    “Look,” he said. “Tomorrow’s what we’ve got to thinkabout. When he doesn’t show up at the office first thing Monday morning like they’re used to. Sooner or later the police are going to get around to questioning us and it could be as early as, say, tomorrow afternoon. We’ve got to be up for that, Carole. Physically and mentally. So what are we supposed to do all day, keep drinking?”
    She stared at him blankly across the table. “So you’re