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Sara tries to dig the hard-packed dirt.

Megan is still tugging on Stone’s shirt, sliding her arms around him from behind. “It’s safe,” she croons. “We’re here on the farm and we’re safe. Let’s calm down.”

Stone’s is the grating voice of madness, coming from a hollow gourd: “Direct action is nothing to take lightly. Government lackeys have to die.”

My hands still grip the shovel. “Government lackeys like Herbert Laumann?”

“I want Laumann to die like a pig. Cut his throat, cut it like a pig’s—”

“He can’t hear you,” Megan gasps, wild-eyed.

Stone’s manic desperation short-circuits my ability to think. I have to fix it, take it in, do what it takes to relieve his confusion and pain, as I always did with my grandfather, Poppy.

“All right, all right. You want Herbert Laumann dead. You’re mad at Slammer because he didn’t kill him. It’s not his fault. Leave the kid alone. He can’t do it, but I can. I’ll do it for you, Allfather. I will shoot the guy, okay? I’ll shoot him fifty-two times, until he’s dead, really dead, okay? Give it to me! I can do it.”

He jerks the shovel away from me and raises it to strike, throwing Megan back.

“Darcy, watch out!”

“You’re a liar, too!” Stone tells me.

“I will. I promise! I know what it’s like. I once killed a man.”

Panting, we eye each other in the screaming headlights.

“And I’ll tell you something else!” I’m pointing the finger, dancing with a kind of hysteria. “You think Slammer betrayed your trust? You are not the only one, pal. I know what that’s like, too. When someone you are stupid enough to fall in love with turns on you and completely undermines you and destroys your life and there’s no way back and you have to kill him.”

Even through the blinding paranoid rage, he can see the truth of what I’ve done. What Darcy’s done. Stone lets the shovel drop.

“Come on, baby,” Megan whispers. “I have you, safe and sound. Come on now. You’re with me,” and she guides him through the shadows.

Sara and I dig Slammer out. Encrusted in damp earth for long, torturous hours, he has fouled himself.

We help him to his feet.

Sara is crying. Slammer’s arms are around us both, leaning heavily on our shoulders. As he walks, he sheds loose rocks and torn roots, a man so debased, he is made of dirt.

“We can’t stay here,” Sara whispers, but then she hears the kitten crying from where it is hiding under the truck, and thinks of the orchard of hazelnut trees, and the rescued ducks and goats, and Sirocco and the white foal, Geronimo, all living peacefully on the farm. She can’t understand the contradictions.

“God—I’m so sorry—I couldn’t see you until the last minute.” My voice is genuinely shaking. “What was he doing?”

“He said it was a test. Of fire and ice.”

A light is on upstairs. We move toward the house.

Twenty-seven

A trial of fire and ice. That’s the way you might describe my grandfather’s visit, when he flew out from California to attend my swearing-in as a new agent from the FBI Academy. Steve Crawford and I were in the same graduating class, of course, and had naïvely planned to announce to our families that we were getting married, anticipating that our excitement, on top of graduation, would make it one hell of a bang-up weekend celebration for all.

My grandfather was booked into the Days Inn at the very same mall where I would play out Darcy’s first contact with the counterfeiters when I returned more than ten years later for undercover school. Back when Poppy stayed there, the motel was newly built and did not smell of urine under the stairs, and behind the property there was just the Dairy Queen, where I would devour that memorable double cheeseburger—not a full-blown shopping strip with a multiplex and gym.

I spotted Poppy from the pool area, striding along the upper deck of the motel. You could tell he was in law enforcement by his sporty disregard of the surroundings (I’m here; get out of my way), an authority he always carried, licensed or not in that particular locality, as if the special nature of his calling extended worldwide supremacy to Everett Morgan Grey.