Burn by Nevada Barr

Author:Nevada Barr [Barr, Nevada]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781410432612
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2010-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

What now? Clare echoed Anna's question in her mind as she rose from the ashes of Jordan to the misery that was Clare Sullivan. What could they do? How could they proceed? Picturing Vee, then Dana, on the knee of the man in the picture, their sweet faces caked with paint, the supple little bodies tarted into a sick fantasy, she felt she could claw her way through walls to get them--but crazy murdering mothers were never even allowed near those walls. Crooked cops, velvet-voiced boys who jerked off over corpses, all the machinery of a man's world stood between her and her children. If they were still alive.

They're alive, she told herself. If they were dead I would know it. That had been her mantra since the night of the fire, and it was growing thin, sounding more and more like a pathetic lie.

Shaking herself the way Mackie did when his fur was wet, she blasted apart that train of thought. That way madness lay. Her eyes slewed toward her tablemate.

Sitting in the sun, the shadows of the leaves flickering hypnotically, the ranger was playing footsie with Mack like there was all the time in the world. Pink flannel pajamas, red and white hair falling in witch waves around a face that had been left out in the sun too long, didn't strike Clare as much of a federal agent.

Clare felt a bubble of hate and fear boil up inside her and looked away, resting her eyes on Geneva's French doors, so Officer Pigeon wouldn't see it. Whatever else the woman's faults were, she saw things. She saw Jordan when he was invisible to everyone else, saw the hatred people felt for him, saw the demons and the wrongness in everything he did.

She saw it, but she wasn't smart enough to figure it out, Clare thought. The possibility that she was a good enough actress that no one, regardless of IQ, would have figured it out didn't cross her mind. There had been a time she had pride and a sense of self, a sense of achievement, but that time was so impossibly long ago Clare had forgotten she no longer remembered it.

Clare knew she ought to be grateful: grateful that maybe the pigeon wasn't going to be a stool pigeon and call the police, grateful that Ms. Pigeon promised not only to remain silent but to help, grateful that she was no longer alone, that someone believed she didn't kill her children. But she wasn't.

Anna Pigeon had allowed in an evil so virulent that it could scatter Clare's mental house of cards to the edges of the universe: hope. When Anna said she would help, Clare had felt hope. It weakened her, made her afraid. If she could hope, she could lose hope. Better to be Jordan running on adrenaline and revenge; better to be a man who had no children, only a dog. A man who might not believe Dana and Vee were still living but had

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