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  Marie opened her mouth, and a sound came out. She screamed and screamed and screamed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  That night seemed unusually cold. If Grim Marie had friends, they could have come to stay with her while she worried and fretted over Aleta’s disappearance. They would have discussed how the thermos came out of her pack. Was it torn open? Did she open it herself? Was she perhaps willing to share the soup, which meant that perhaps the person was kindly? Was this just a misunderstanding? Perhaps she took the wrong bus. Or got off and wandered away to something a little more exciting than a sick grandmother. Maybe there was a boy.

  Marie desperately, desperately hoped there was a boy.

  The friends she didn’t have would have surrounded her and offered their assurances.

  “It’ll be fine,” they would have said. “She’ll come home. Oh, how you’ll tan her hide when she does!”

  But there were no friends. Nobody to help and comfort, guide and muse. Nobody to tuck Marie in when it became too much. Nobody to brush her hair and make sure she took something to calm her nerves. Nobody to stand in the doorway after she went to bed, or to discuss the situations in low voices around the table.

  There was only her mother, her dear, sick, dying mother, who didn’t know that her only grandchild had disappeared while bringing her a basket of goodies. And Marie, all alone, who was the woman who had sent her daughter off alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The second she saw the policeman, the look in his dark eyes, her hand flew to her mouth.

  “Ma’am, we believe we found your daughter.”

  Two months had passed. Two months of looking out the window and doors and standing on the front porch in the wind and rain and sunshine, just in case Aleta forgot what home looked like. If her little girl happened to wander by, confused, looking at houses and front porches and trying to remember which apartment had been hers, why, there would be her mother! To love and hold and greet her. To smooth her hair back from her eyes and promise she’d love her always, no matter what had happened, no matter what she had been forced to do. There was Grim Marie, who would become Benevolent and Joyful Marie, and her little Aleta would be safe.

  But the eyes of this man, of the way he held her gaze far too carefully while his partner couldn’t manage to hold her gaze at all, told her she had no need to stand in that doorway ever again.

  “Oh,” she said. She didn’t remove her hand from her mouth. It was far too comforting. “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  His mouth moved some more, but his words meant nothing. They were strange sounds made by an animal that didn’t understand how to communicate. She watched his mouth move, watched his lips stretch and bend and press themselves together. She was reminded of caterpillars. His tongue was pink and wet and somehow earnest, and that earnestness made the muscles of her mouth pull up at the corners, made her want to hold out her arms to him like he was a baby. When Aleta was just a wee one and was learning how to talk . . .

  The thought. Aleta’s face. The glint of silver in her dimples, the shine of her eyes that set off the wary hardness there. Marie felt a sharp pain in her stomach, like a baby’s foot placing itself firmly in her ribs, and she felt the blood run from her face into other places in her body. Her eyes, mostly, because they began to leak.

  “ . . . scraps of fabric. She was identified by dental records, because by the time we . . . we came upon her, there really wasn’t much left . . . ”

  “Yes, she had very nice teeth,” Marie said dreamily, and it was true. Aleta brushed them at least twice a day, and used a certain type of mouthwash, because she would never taste man in her mouth again, never ever ever, and Marie made sure that even when the money ran out, the mouthwash never did.

  “Such a little thing to do, really,” she said conversationally, and saw the policemen glance at each other. One reached out to take her hand. The other put his arms around her shoulder and guided her to the steps.

  “Is there somebody I could call?”

  The second policeman was meeting her gaze now, and his eyes were warm and light and nearly suspiciously wet. Marie put her hand up to his cheek and patted it as if he were a little boy. And he was. Look at this man. Look at the way his skin hangs on his frame as if it belongs there. Muscles bunching under his uniform, she saw that he was distressed, that he wanted to take it all away, that he wanted to physically run down some monster and take him apart with an axe. For vengeance. For justice. For sweet little girls who were only trying to help their mothers.

  “You have children, don’t you?” she asked him, and that was all it took. The bone structure under his jaw shaped and changed and formed, and she wasn’t looking at a man anymore; she was looking at a wolf. A wolf who knew somebody in the pack had reason to be cast out. A wolf who would find that offender and rip out his throat as he had snuffed a little girl.

  You’ll find him, she said, but then realized her lips hadn’t moved. Her hand had dropped from his face. Her fingers fluttered on the ground, useless.

  Broken butterflies.

  Shredded sparrows.

  “Ma’am,” the first officer said again, and his voice was so kindly that it hurt her. Be cruel to her. Yell and scream at her for losing her child. Tell her all of the things she told herself every day, but please don’t be kind. Nobody can stand up to that kind of thing.

  “Ma’am, do you understand what we’re saying? Are you able to process the information I just gave you?”

  Your lips remind me of young puppies and your white teeth nip at your wife’s neck. Your tongue will taste ice cream and my little girl was identified by dental records.

  That was what she thought. This is what she said.

  “You’re telling me my daughter was found. In pieces.”

  The first policeman drew back as if the words were verbal cat-o-nine-tails lashing his skin. They had pieces of metal, girls’ jump ropes, and tiny facial piercings wrapped into them.

  The second one, the man of the wolves, simply nodded once.

  Yes. That was what was said, the nod told her. You understand. I’m so terribly sorry, but you understand.

  “I know all about wolves,” she said aloud, and then she couldn’t say anything more.

  CHAPTER SIX

  They held a funeral for the bits and pieces of Aleta they could find. It wasn’t much. Marie chose to have her cremated and then there was even less.

  She kept her in a jar in the living room. She had always believed in burial, but had dreams of wolves digging Aleta’s bones up at night, gnawing on them and taking them away off to some dark magical forest. Night after night. So in the jar she went, and the jar was placed high, and when her mother died she cremated her as well and set them side-by-side.

  “Hello, family,” she greeted them once, and then she was unable to get out of bed for three days straight.

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” she said again, once she was standing in front of the jars again. “You died because I wanted the selfish luxury of a bath.”

  She was in bed for six days after that, unable to move or speak or sit, and when the young second officer couldn’t get a hold of her, he managed to break down her door.

  “We don’t need all of you lined up in a neat little row on that shelf,” he told her. He patted her hands gently, a man used to holding the hand of a woman, and she looked at him with eyes that were already dead.

  “Why not?” she asked, but then the sirens were heard and the ambulance was there to take her to a place that pumped her full of liquid food and questions and synthetic hope.

  The nice officer brought her a bouquet of flowers that his daughter had picked out (although he certainly wouldn’t tell her that) and told her that he sat up at night, trying to find this man who slaughtered small children.

  Then Christmas came and she was released, but the officer and his beautiful and kind wife came by on Christmas Eve with a small tree and some decorations and gifts and an eye for anything out
of place, like a pair of too-sharp scissors or a knife with the serrated blade turned toward a mourning woman’s throat.

  “May I use your bathroom?” the officer’s wife asked, and The Grimmest of Maries told her of course, that she was more than welcome. The officer’s wife took a discreet peek in the medicine cabinet to make sure the razor blades were all properly blunt. Then she returned and hugged Marie.

  “There’s nothing I can say that will make this any better,” she said, but the fact that she was saying it really did make it better. “But we think of you all of the time. Will here is working tirelessly on the case. And even though I haven’t met you before this, I feel as though I know you. You really are loved."

  “Do you believe in angels?” Marie asked, and the officer’s wife smiled at her.

  “Of course I do. I have to.”

  “Do you think my daughter is looking down on me as an angel, or as a headless corpse? If I burned away the knife marks and sexual abuse, do you think it will help her in the afterlife? If I find this man, this Wolf and spill his blood, will that cleanse her like the blood of Christ is supposed to have done for all of us? Because,” she said, and her eyes glittered in a way that should have made Will’s wife step back, only it didn’t, “I think the Wolf’s blood on my hands would erase any infraction I ever made. Do you?”

  The officer’s wife didn’t blink or wrinkle her nose or any of these things. She simply looked Marie dead in the eye and said solemnly, “Darling, you are going through something no mother should ever have to go through. I see my husband pouring over papers and pictures and chasing after every scrap of information and evidence he can. He’s done things that keep him awake at night. But he’s a good man, and I love him.” Her eyes glittered in a way that reminded Marie of sharpened cutlery. It was the soft, sexy, slow slide of blade against skin. “If such things could absolve a person, then I would advise him, or her, to do as much as possible to make sure that tainted blood flows. Make it flow, dear one.”

  There were kisses on cheeks and Marie spent that evening staring at the tinsel star on top of her new Christmas tree. The star, like Marie’s heart and that silent blade wedged within in, glittered, flashed and spun.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Part of Aleta’s favorite red hoodie turned up in some bramble outside of the city. It was cut, shredded, and stained. Animals had been gnawing and tearing at it, pulling it apart thread by thread by thread with their canines and incisors and grinding molars.

  From what they recovered of Aleta’s body, she had also been gnawed and ripped, but the animals pulling her apart had been a different sort.

  Angry Marie made a decision, then, and the impact of that decision would way heavy in her soul for the rest of her life. But seeing as her soul was pretty much tattered beyond recognition anyway, it didn’t seem like that much of a leap.

  She combed her hair that day, but that was because Marie was a neat and cleanly sort of woman. This was for herself, not for anybody else. She didn’t blacken her lashes. She didn’t outline her mouth. She hoped her frown lines were frownier than ever. And Marie hopped on the bus.

  The ride went on for hours, but it still wasn’t long enough. On the final leg of the journey, she found herself glancing longingly at the countryside, at the other passengers, at anything that she could think about wistfully. She did not want to be where she was going to be. She didn’t want to see the original monster.

  Marie carried a tiny scrap of red hoodie that the police said she could have. It was cut out of the original and hemmed neatly around the edges. No fraying. No sawing of blood and bone and fabric and darling little girls.

  She kept this little red square of riding hood in her purse, and found her fingers testing the fabric time and time again.

  She could do this.

  More importantly, she would do this.

  It had been years since she had walked through these doors. She gave her name, provided her ID. She was patted and searched and opened her purse. She was instructed and given the same recitation of rules that she remembered from forever ago.

  She sat down on one side of a big plastic barrier. The chair was uncomfortable and the yellow paint of the room was embarrassing in its eagerness to be cheerful.

  A thin man in scrubs, his arms poking from the sleeves, shuffled over to her. He picked up his oversized corded phone and waited for Marie to do the same to hers.

  She swallowed, then held the receiver to her ear.

  “Darlin’,” he said. “So good to see you.”

  “I need to ask you a question, Lowell.”

  Her ex-husband snorted. “That’s it? You need to ask me a question? After all of these years?”

  “It’s an important one.”

  Her voice was even. Level and professional. He didn’t hear her shrieking inside. Didn’t hear the way her heart bang bang banged against her ribs, didn’t see her skin physically retracting away from his presence.

  “It about the girl?”

  The girl. The girl.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know her name.”

  Lowell stretched, sounding weary and tired. An old man. “Don’t act like this, Marie.”

  The voice of a husband fed up with his wife’s shenanigans. A hard-working soul used to going home and being unappreciated. Nagged at, even! Such disrespect!

  “Did you hear? What happened?”

  Marie’s voice cracked. She was Broken Marie. She tried to keep her lips from trembling, but she felt them turn down at the corners. They quivered. Such betrayal, those lips of hers, but she couldn’t stop the tremors.

  Lowell let the act go. It slipped through his fingers and from his skin like a soul. He tipped his head to the side, watching her quietly, and the pretense was gone.

  “I’m sorry, love. I’d never wish anything like that on you. Or her.”

  He meant it. His sincerity felt uncomfortable and painful, like biting on the prongs of a fork. Marie studied her fingernails. How worn they were. How she had started biting them after so many years.

  “Thank you,” she said, and the terseness of it, that same glancing blow of sincerity, that was her gift to him. The most she could give, the most she had ever given. She thought she heard his heart beat loud for a second, strong, and remembered how she had loved him once until she discovered that his heart was as hollow as his bird bones.

  “I came to ask you why,” she said, and was proud to hear her voice loud and clear. “Why would somebody do this to her?”

  “Listen, baby, I’m a lover, not a . . . ”

  “Don’t you dare,” she whispered, and Lowell cut off in mid word. He stared at his ex-wife, whose face had changed and elongated as she snarled, her nose nearly touching the thick plastic between them.

  “Don’t you dare. You tell me. You tell me right now, because I am going to hunt that monster down and I’m going to kill him. I’ll skin him alive. I’ll beat him with every heavy object I can find until his bones are shards held together by a bag of skin. And then I’m going to really make him suffer. So you tell me. You were the original Wolf, the original monster. You tell me what he saw in her and why he chose my little girl. You owe me this much, you filthy piece of human trash. Help me now or I swear to you . . . ”

  She didn’t have to finish. The shining radiance of her countenance did it for her.

  “You’re crazy enough to do this,” he said. There was wonder and something that almost tasted like pride in his voice.

  “I put you behind bars. He won’t be so lucky.”

  Lowell grinned, and again she could see the happy beginning of the relationship years before she realized he had bedded both mother and daughter on the same night.

  “I believe you. And she deserves it. She’s a good girl. None of this is her fault. Or yours.”

  She looked away again. Lowell tapped on the glass.

  “It isn’t, Marie. Guys like us? As much as I’d like to deny it, we’re no good. Straight wicked since the day we were born. S
ome part of us is all twisted up, and not even the loving of a good woman such as yourself can fix it.”

  He was telling the truth. She could see it. See how much it took out of him, how hard it was to say. She almost wanted to put her hand on the glass, to have him do the same, but she still hated him so incredibly much.

  “That’s what ya gotta know,” he continued. “It ain’t you, but we’ll swear up and down that it is. You made us do it. Your baby girl enticed us. You were cold. She was young and her body was hot. It’s how we get things done, you understand. How we live with ourselves. Because if you or she didn’t drive us to it, then what does it mean? It means we’re monsters. It means we’re sick, dirty old men who prey on lovely young girls. And nobody wants to be that. Nobody. I don’t care how rotten you are, what you’ve done. Nobody wants to be that low.”

  This time he put his hand against the glass. She didn’t raise hers to his, and he nodded to her.

  “I’ll tell you everything I know. How I felt about her. How this guy maybe felt about her. Everything about creeps like me. I hope you bring him down, Marie. She was a real good girl. You’d better get him. And if somehow he manages to live through you, put him in here with me. The guys here don’t like baby killers. I get reamed every day and all I did was mess with a little girl. Someone actually kills one? He won’t last long.”

  He talked. He talked. Marie nodded and took notes and swallowed the bile back down and nodded some more. Her stomach hurt and her eyes burned. Her throat felt too big, too tight, like there wasn’t enough air. And there wasn’t because she kept breathing it in with every gasp, with every painful expansion of her greedy lungs, that tried to hold onto the air that was sucked from the room while he went on and on about his sweet Aleta. The opportunities he took when she wasn’t looking. The way his eyes roved around the room until they fell on her. She was a light. Dappled sunshine in a storm. Something bright and pure to treasure and corrupt and own forever.