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the bare-shoulders publicity shot her part-time assistant routinely sent out. She wrinkled her nose and went back to Google, not sure why she wanted to look at Ramona again, only knowing that she did.

When she final y found a photo of the librarian, she saw what her subconscious might already have suspected, at least judging by Tom’s comments on the ride back to her house.

It was in a story from the August 3 issue of the Weekly Reminder. BROWN BAGGERS ANNOUNCE SPEAKING SCHEDULE FOR FALL, the headline read. Below it, Ramona Norvil e stood on the

library steps, smiling and squinting into the sun. A bad photograph, taken by a part-timer without much talent, and a bad (but probably typical) choice of clothes on Norvil e’s part. The man-tailored blazer made her look as wide in the chest as a pro footbal tackle. Her shoes were ugly brown flatboats. A pair of too-tight gray slacks showcased what Tess and her friends back in middle school had cal ed

“thunder thighs.”

“Holy fucking shit, Fritzy,” she said. Her voice was watery with dismay. “Look at this.” Fritzy didn’t come over to look and didn’t reply—how could he, when she was too upset to make his voice?

Make sure of what you’re seeing, she told herself. You’ve had a terrible shock, Tessa Jean, maybe the biggest shock a woman can have, short of a mortal diagnosis in a doctor’s office. So make sure.

She closed her eyes and summoned the image of the man from the old Ford pickup truck with the Bondo around the headlights. He had seemed so friendly at first. Didn’t think you were going to

meet the Jolly Green Giant out here in the williwags, didja?

Only he hadn’t been green, he’d been a tanned hulk of a man who didn’t ride in his pickup but wore it.

Ramona Norvil e, not a Big Driver but certainly a Big Librarian, was too old to be his sister. And if she was a lesbian now, she hadn’t always been one, because the resemblance was unmistakable.

Unless I’m badly mistaken, I’m looking at a picture of my rapist’s mother.

- 29 -

She went to the kitchen and had a drink of water, but water wasn’t getting it. An old half-fil ed bottle of tequila had been brooding in a back corner of a kitchen cabinet for donkey’s years. She took it out, considered a glass, then nipped directly from the bottle. It stung her mouth and throat, but had a positive effect otherwise. She helped herself to more—a sip rather than a nip—and then put the bottle back. She had no intention of getting drunk. If she had ever needed her wits about her, she needed them about her today.

Rage—the biggest, truest rage of her adult life—had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn’t like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear. Clearer since she’d had the tequila, actual y.

She paced a series of rapid circles around the kitchen, head down, one hand massaging the ring of bruises around her throat. It did not occur to her that she was circling her kitchen as she had

circled the deserted store after crawling out of the pipe Big Driver had meant for her tomb. Did she real y think Ramona Norvil e had sent her, Tess, to her psychotic son like some kind of sacrifice? Was that likely? It was not. Could she even be sure that the two of them were mother and son, based on one bad photograph and her own memory?

But my memory’s good. Especially my memory for faces.

Wel , so she thought, but probably everyone did. Right?

Yes, and the whole idea’s crazy. You have to admit it is.

She did admit it, but she had seen crazier things on true-crime programs (which she did watch). The ladies with the apartment house in San Francisco who had spent years kil ing their elderly tenants for their Social Security checks and burying them in the backyard. The airline pilot who murdered his wife, then froze the body so he could run her through the woodchipper behind the garage. The man

who had doused his own children with gasoline and cooked them like Cornish game hens to make sure his wife never got the custody the courts had awarded her. A woman sending victims to her own

son was shocking and unlikely… but not impossible. When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit.

“Oh boy,” she heard herself saying in a voice that combined dismay and anger. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.”

Find out. Find out for sure. If you can.