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Yes, Al said. I was scared.

Of your brother? Tess asked, either unbelieving or not wanting to believe. Scared of your kid brother?

Not him, Al Strehlke said. Her. 39 -

When Tess got back in her car and started the motor, Tom said: There was no way you could know, Tess. And it all happened so fast.

That was true, but it ignored the central looming fact: by going after her rapist like a vigilante in a movie, she had sent herself to hell.

She raised the gun to her temple, then lowered it again. She couldnt, not now. She still had an obligation to the women in the pipe, and any other women who might join them if Lester Strehlke escaped. And after what she had just done, it was more important than ever that he not escape.

She had one more stop to make. But not in her Expedition. 40 -

The driveway at 101 Township Road wasnt long, and it wasnt paved. It was just a pair of ruts with bushes growing close enough to scrape the sides of the blue F-150 pickup truck as she drove it up to the little house. Nothing neat about this one; this one was a huddled old creep-manse that could have been straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How life did imitate art, sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation.

Tess made no attempt at stealth-why bother to kill the headlights when Lester Strehlke would know the sound of his brothers truck almost as well as the sound of his brothers voice?

She was still wearing the bleach-splattered brown cap Big Driver wore when he wasnt on the road, the lucky cap that turned out to be unlucky in the end. The ring with the fake ruby stone was far too big for any of her fingers, so she had put it into the left front pocket of her cargo pants. Little Driver had dressed and driven as his big brother when he went out hunting, and while he might never have time enough (or brains enough) to appreciate the irony of his last victim coming to him with the same accessories, Tess did.

She parked by the back door, turned off the engine, and got out. She carried the gun in one hand. The door was unlocked. She stepped into a shed that smelled of beer and spoiled food. A single sixty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling on a length of dirty cord. Straight ahead were four overflowing plastic garbage cans, the thirty-two-gallon kind you could buy at Walmart. Behind them, stacked against the shed wall, were what looked like five years worth of Uncle Henrys swap guide. To the left was another door, up a single step. It would lead to the kitchen. It had an old-fashioned latch rather than a knob. The door squalled on unoiled hinges when she depressed the latch and pushed it open. An hour ago, such a squall would have terrified her into immobility. Now it didnt bother her in the slightest. She had work to do. That was all it came down to, and it was a relief to be free of all that emotional baggage. She stepped into the smell of whatever greasy meat Little Driver had fried for his supper. She could hear a TV laugh-track. Some sitcom. Seinfeld, she thought.

What the hell are you doing here? Lester Strehlke called from the vicinity of the laugh-track. I aint got but a beer and a half left, if thats what you came for. Im gonna drink up and then go to bed. She followed the sound of his voice. If youda called, I coulda saved you the tr-

She came into the room. He saw her. Tess hadnt speculated on what his reaction might be to the reappearance of his last victim, carrying a gun and wearing the hat Lester himself wore when his urges came over him. Even if she had, she could never have predicted the extremity of the one she saw. His mouth dropped open, and then his entire face froze. The can of beer he was holding dropped from his hand and fell into his lap, spraying foam onto his only article of clothing, a pair of yellowing Jockey shorts.

Hes seeing a ghost, she thought as she walked toward him, raising the gun. Good.

There was time to see that, although the living room was a bachelor mess and there were no snowglobes or cutie-poo figurines, the TV-watching setup was the same as the one at his mothers house on Lacemaker Lane: the La-Z-Boy, the TV tray (here holding a final unopened can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a bag of Doritos instead of Diet Coke and Cheez Doodles), the same TV Guide, the one with Simon Cowell on it.

Youre dead, he whispered.

No, Tess replied. She put the barrel of the Lemon Squeezer against the side of his head. He made one feeble effort to grab her wrist, but it was far too little and much too late. Thats you.

She pulled the trigger. Blood came out of his ear and his head snapped briskly to the side. He looked like a man trying to free up a kink in his neck. On the TV, George Costanza said, I was in the pool, I was in the pool. The audience laughed. 41 -

It was almost midnight, and the wind was blowing harder than ever. When it gusted, Lester Strehlkes whole house shook, and each time Tess thought of the little pig who had built his house out of sticks.

The little piggy who had lived in this one would never have to worry about his shitty house blowing away, because he was dead in his La-Z-Boy. And he wasnt a little piggy, anyway, Tess thought. He was a big bad wolf.

She was sitting in the kitchen, writing on the pages of a grimy Blue Horse tablet she had found in Strehlkes upstairs bedroom. There were four rooms on the second floor, but the bedroom was the only one not stuffed with junk, everything from iron bedsteads to an Evinrude boat-motor that looked as if it might have been dropped from the top of a five-story building. Because it would take weeks or months to go through those caches of the useless, the worthless, and the pointless, Tess turned all her attention on Strehlkes bedroom and searched it carefully. The Blue Horse tablet was a bonus. She had found what she was looking for in an old travel-tote pushed to the very back of the closet shelf, where it had been camouflaged-not very successfully-with old issues of National Geographic. In it was a tangle of womens underwear. Her own panties were on top. Tess put them in her pocket and, packrat-like, replaced them with the coil of yellow boat-line. Nobody would be surprised to find rope in a rapist-killers suitcase of trophy lingerie. Besides, she would not be needing it.

Tonto, said the Lone Ranger, our work here is done.

What she wrote, as Seinfeld gave way to Frasier and Frasier gave way to the local news (one Chicopee resident had won the lottery and another had suffered a broken back after falling from a scaffolding, so that balanced out), was a confession in the form of a letter. As she reached page five, the TV news gave way to an apparently endless commercial for Almighty Cleanse. Danny Vierra was saying, Some Americans have a bowel movement only once every two or three days, and because this has gone on for years, they believe its normal! Any doctor worth his salt will tell you its not!

The letter was headed TO THE PROPER AUTHORITIES, and the first four pages consisted of a single paragraph. In her head it sounded like a scream. Her hand was tired, and the ballpoint pen shed found in a kitchen drawer (RED HAWK TRUCKING printed in fading gilt on the barrel) was showing signs of drying up, but she was, thank God, almost done. While Little Driver went on not watching TV from where he sat in his La-Z-Boy, she at last started a new paragraph at the top of page five.

I will not make excuses for what I have done. Nor can I say that I did it while of unsound mind. I was furious and I made a mistake. Its that simple. Under other circumstances-those less terrible, I mean-I might say, It was a natural mistake, the two of them look almost enough alike to be twins. But these are not other circumstances.

I have thought of atonement as I sat here, writing these pages and listening to his television and to the wind-not because I hope for forgiveness, but because it seems wrong to do wrong without at least trying to balance it out with something right. (Here Tess thought of how the lottery winner and the man with the broken back evened out, but the concept would be difficult to express when she was so tired, and she wasnt sure it was germane, anyway.) I thought of going to Africa and working with AIDS victims. I thought about going down to New Orleans and volunteering at a homeless shelter or a food bank. I thought about going to the Gulf to clean oil off birds. I thought of donating the million dollars or so I have put away for my retirement to some group that works to end violence against women. There must be such a society in Connecticut, perhaps even several of them.

But then I thought of Doreen Marquis, from the Knitting Society, and what she says once in every book

What Doreen said at least once in every book was murderers always overlook the obvious. You may depend on it, dears. And even as Tess wrote about atonement, she realized it would be impossible. Because Doreen was absolutely right.

Tess had worn a cap so that she wouldnt leave hair that could be analyzed for DNA. She had worn gloves which she had never taken off, even while driving Alvin Strehlkes pickup. It was not too late to burn this confession in Lesters kitchen woodstove, drive to Brother Alvins considerably nicer house (house of bricks instead of house of sticks), get into her Expedition, and head back to Connecticut. She could go home, where Fritzy was waiting. At first glance she looked clear, and it might take the police a few days to get to her, but get to her they would. Because while she had been concentrating on the forensic molehills, she had overlooked the obvious mountain, exactly like the killers in the Knitting Society books.

The obvious mountain had a name: Betsy Neal. A pretty woman with an oval face, mismatched Picasso eyes, and a cloud of dark hair. She had recognized Tess, had even gotten her autograph, but that wasnt the clincher. The clincher was going to be the bruises on her face (I hope that didnt happen here, Neal had said), and the fact that Tess had asked about Alvin Strehlke, describing his truck and recognizing the ring when Neal mentioned it. Like a ruby, Tess had agreed.

Neal would see the story on TV or read it in the newspaper-with three dead from the same family, how could she avoid it?-and she would go to the police. The police would come to Tess. They would check the Connecticut gun-registration records as a matter of course and discover that Tess owned a.38 Smith amp; Wesson revolver known as a Lemon Squeezer. They would ask her to produce it so they could test-fire it and do comparisons to the bullets found in the three victims. And what was she going to say? Was she going to look at them from her blackened eyes and say (in a voice still hoarse from the choking Lester Strehlke had given her) that she lost it? Would she continue to stick to that story even after the dead women were found in the culvert pipe?

Tess picked up her borrowed pen and began writing again.

what she says once in every book: murderers always overlook the obvious. Doreen also once took a leaf from Dorothy Sayerss book and left a murderer with a loaded gun, telling him to take the honorable way out. I have a gun. My brother Mike is my only surviving close relative. He lives in Taos, New Mexico. I suppose he may inherit my estate. It depends on the legal ramifications of my crimes. If he does, I hope the authorities who find this letter will show it to him, and convey my wish that he donate the bulk to some charitable organization that works with women who have been sexually abused.

I am sorry about Big Driver-Alvin Strehlke. He was not the man who raped me, and Doreen is sure he didnt rape and kill those other women, either.

Doreen? No, her. Doreen wasnt real. But Tess was too tired to go back and change it. And what the hell-she was near the end, anyway.

For Ramona and that piece of garbage in the other room, I make no apologies. They are better off dead.

So, of course, am I.

She paused long enough to look back over the pages and see if there was anything she had forgotten. There didnt appear to be, so she signed her name-her final autograph. The pen ran dry on the last letter and she put it aside.

Got anything to say, Lester? she asked.

Only the wind replied, gusting hard enough to make the little house groan in its joints and puff drafts of cold air.

She went back into the living room. She put the hat on his head and the ring on his finger. That was the way she wanted them to find him. There was a framed photo on the TV. In it, Lester and his mother stood with their arms around each other. They were smiling. Just a boy and his mum. She looked at it for awhile, then left. 42 -

She felt that she should go back to the deserted store where it had happened and finish her business there. She could sit for awhile in the weedy lot, listen to the wind ticking the old sign (YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU), thinking about whatever people think about in the final moments of a life. In her case that would probably be Fritzy. She guessed Patsy would take him, and that would be fine. Cats were survivors. They didnt much care who fed them, as long as the bowl was full.

It wouldnt take long to get to the store at this hour, but it still seemed too far. She was very tired. She decided she would get into Al Strehlkes old truck and do it there. But she didnt want to splatter her painfully written confession with her blood, that seemed very wrong considering all the bloodshed detailed within it, and so She took the pages from the Blue Horse tablet into the living room, where the TV played on (a young man who looked like a criminal was now selling a robot floorwasher), and dropped them in Strehlkes lap. Hold that for me, Les, she said.

No problem, he replied. She noted that a portion of his diseased brains was now drying on his bony naked shoulder. That was all right.

Tess went out into the windy dark and slowly climbed behind the wheel of the pickup truck. The scream of the hinge when the drivers door swung shut was oddly familiar. But no, not so odd; hadnt she heard it at the store? Yes. She had been trying to do him a favor, because he was going to do her one-he was going to change her tire so she could go home and feed her cat. I didnt want his battery to run down, she said, and laughed.