Dangerous Women. Джордж Р. Р. Мартин

look for lawn mowers and the thick tug of grass under his feet would not feel so heavy and all this loneliness would end.

      He put his hand on the shed’s cool, crooked handle and tugged it open.

      Instead of the lawn mower, he saw a small black sack on the floor of the shed.

      He thought to himself in the way you do in dreams: I must have left the cuttings in here. They must be covered with mold and that must be the smell so strong it—

      Grabbing for the sack, it slipped open, and the bag itself began to come apart in his hands.

      There was the sound, the feeling of something heavy dropping to the floor of the shed.

      It was too dark to see what was slipping over his feet, tickling his ankles.

      Too dark to be sure, but it felt like the sweet floss of his daughter’s hair.

      He woke already sitting up. A voice was hissing in his head: Will you look in the shed? Will you?

      And that was when he remembered there was no shed in the backyard anymore. They’d torn it down when Lorie was pregnant because she said the smell of rot was giving her headaches, making her sick.

      The next day the front page of the paper had a series of articles marking the two-month anniversary of Shelby’s disappearance.

      They had the picture of Lorie under the headline: What Does She Know? There was a picture of him, head down, walking from the police station yesterday. The caption read: “More unanswered questions.”

      He couldn’t read any of it, and when his mother called he didn’t pick up.

      All day at work, he couldn’t concentrate. He felt everyone looking at him.

      When his boss came to his desk, he could feel the careful way he was being talked to.

      “Tom, if you want to leave early,” he said, “that’s fine.”

      Several times he caught the administrative assistant staring at his screen saver, the snapshot of Lorie with ten-month-old Shelby in her Halloween costume, a black spider with soft spider legs.

      Finally he did leave, at three o’clock.

      Lorie wasn’t in the house and he was standing at the kitchen sink, drinking a glass of water, when he saw her through the window.

      Though it was barely seventy degrees, she was lying on one of the summer loungers.

      Headphones on, she was in a bright orange bikini with gold hoops in the straps and on either hip.

      She had pushed the purple playhouse against the back fence, where it tilted under the elm tree.

      He had never seen the bikini before, but he recognized the sunglasses, large ones with white frames she had bought on a trip Mexico she had taken with an old girlfriend right before she got pregnant.

      Gleaming in the center of her slicked torso was a gold belly ring.

      She was smiling, singing along to whatever music was playing in her head.

      That night he couldn’t bring himself to go to bed. He watched TV for hours without watching any of it. He drank four beers in a row, which he had not done since he was twenty years old.

      Finally, the beer pulled on him, and the Benadryl he took after, and he found himself sinking at last onto their mattress.

      At some point in the middle of the night, there was a stirring next to him, her body shifting hard. It felt like something was happening.

      “Kirsten,” she mumbled.

      “What?” he asked. “What?”

      Suddenly she half sat up, her elbows beneath her, looking straight ahead.

      “Her daughter’s name was Kirsten,” she said, her voice soft and tentative. “I just remembered. Once, when we were talking, she said her daughter’s name was Kirsten. Because she liked how it sounded with Krusie.”

      He felt something loosen inside him, then tighten again. What was this?

      “Her last name was Krusie with a K,” she said, her face growing more animated, her voice more urgent. “I don’t know how it was spelled, but it was with a K. I can’t believe I just remembered. It was a long time ago. She said she liked the two Ks. Because she was two Ks. Katie Krusie. That’s her name.”

      He looked at her and didn’t say anything.

      “Katie Krusie,” she said. “The woman at the coffee place. That’s her name.”

      He couldn’t seem to speak or even move.

      “Are you going to call?” she said. “The police?”

      He found he couldn’t move. He was afraid somehow. So afraid he couldn’t breathe.

      She looked at him, paused, and then reached across him, grabbing for the phone herself.

      As she talked to the police, told them, her voice now clear and firm, what she’d remembered, as she told them she would come to the station, would leave in five minutes, he watched her, his hand over his own heart, feeling it beating so hard it hurt.

      “We believe we have located the Krusie woman,” the female detective said. “We have officers heading there now.”

      He looked at both of them. He could feel Lorie beside him, breathing hard. It had been less than a day since Lorie first called.

      “What are you saying?” he said, or tried to. No words came out.

      Katie-Ann Krusie had no children, but told people she did, all the time. After a long history of emotional problems, she had spent a fourteen-month stint at the state hospital following a miscarriage.

      For the past eight weeks she had been living in a rental in Torring, forty miles away with a little blond girl she called Kirsten.

      After the police released a photo of Katie-Ann Krusie on Amber Alert, a woman who worked at a coffee chain in Torring recognized her as a regular customer, always ordering extra milk for her babies.

      “She sure sounded like she loved her kids,” the woman said. “Just talking about them made her so happy.”

      The first time he saw Shelby again, he couldn’t speak at all.

      She was wearing a shirt he’d never seen and shoes that didn’t fit and she was holding a juice box the policeman had given her.

      She watched him as he ran down the hall toward her.

      There was something in her face that he had never seen before, knew hadn’t been there before, and he knew in an instant he had to do everything he could to make it gone.

      That was all he would do, if it took him the rest of his life to do it.

      The next morning, after calling everyone, one by one, he walked into the kitchen to see Lorie sitting next to Shelby, who was eating apple slices, her pinkie finger curled out in that way she had.

      He sat and watched her and Shelby asked him why he was shaking and he said because he was glad to see her.

      It was hard to leave the room, even to answer the door when his mother and sister came, when everyone started coming.

      Three nights later, at the big family dinner, the Welcome Home dinner for Shelby, Lorie drank a lot of wine and who could blame her, everyone was saying.

      He couldn’t either, and he watched her.

      As the evening carried on, as his mother brought out an ice cream cake for Shelby, as everyone huddled around Shelby, who seemed confused and shy at first and slowly burst into something beautiful that made him want to cry again—as all these things were occurring—he had one eye on Lorie, her quiet, still face. On the smile there, which never grew or receded, even when she held Shelby in her lap, Shelby nuzzling her mother’s wine-flushed neck.

      At