Delia Gaskin, in Jonquil's opinion, needed to be taken down a few notches. The upstart b.i.t.c.h in whites had far too lofty an opinion of herself.

"The horror of that night," the nurse said, "will haunt us for the rest of our lives. But going over the ground again may make it in some sense manageable."

With that, she and Futzy launched into a retelling of the events of prom night.

Like obedient little androids, the others, everyone but Jonquil, chimed in with one part of the story or another.

Jonquil clinked and sipped, remarking what odd ducks she had fallen in with. Between bouts of savage f.u.c.king in the supply closet, she liked to regale Benji Rubblerum, the new head janitor, with stories about her colleagues and how very odd they were.

Then the weird thing happened.

Futzy and the school nurse, caught up in their tale, came to the killing of Pesky and Flense in the faculty lounge.

Jonquil saw seeds of worry sprout in Trilby Donner's eyes.

Her little girl looked up from her playing cards, listening and staring.

Jonquil might have jumped in to deflect the telling. But she loved to witness the fruits of violence, especially violence inflicted in all innocence.

"Then," said the nurse, who wore a stylish denim dress, long-sleeved, with embroidery that suggested cowboy motifs, "it's my guess that old Gerber took a pellet of dry ice in his gloved fist and forced the poor girl to swallow it."

Her hands ill.u.s.trated as she spoke.

"Miss Gaskin!" said Trilby, ever the mom.

Then Pill's eyes bugged out. Her eyelids fluttered and she keeled over. No one was near enough to break her fall.

But the girl, on her knees already, did not fall far. In a glancing blow, her scalp knocked against the futon frame. The cards she cupped in her hands fanned out over the carpet, a sprawl of red and black and white.

Jonquil observed it all coolly.

She clinked her ice.

It looked as if the poor girl was choking on her tongue.

She would die if no one helped.

But the nurse barreled in to clear the girl's pa.s.sageway, hovering like a benevolent angel. She rubbed Pill's hands vigorously, feeling for pulse and heartbeat, moving deft fingers everywhere on her body. "She'll be all right, I think. Claude, do you have maybe a day bed Pill can lie down on?"

"There's the guest room upstairs, with the coats. Just shove them aside."

"Trilby, why don't you stay with her, out of earshot of the rest of this?" Delia said.

Upstart b.i.t.c.h.

Granted, Little Miss Nursiepoo was caught up in a minicrisis. But that gave her no excuse for addressing Claude as Claude, for calling Trilby Trilby. It ought to have been Mr. Versailles and Ms. Donner, even outside working hours.

In the privacy of her threesome, the b.i.t.c.h could use first names all she liked. But in mixed company, it was unseemly, an affront to all decent Americans.

The two women took Pill upstairs.

Delia Gaskin returned and the tale continued. But no one was into it much any more.

Jonquil, when she wasn't mulling how best to puncture the nurse's inflated ego, saw that Pill's fainting spell had brought back the terror of that night in everyone here.

Jenna Megrim, a sweet senior whose prom would occur six months from now, who had lost her father and almost her sister as well, seemed most upset.

But the pall lay upon them all.

Delicious.

When they stood up to disperse, Brest checked with Trilby and Pill upstairs.

Then she left with Delia Gaskin.

It saved time, lots of time, Jonquil later realized, that the rest of them were still mixing and milling when Pill, holding her mother's hand, appeared on the stairs and began to tell them why she had fainted.

When Pill awoke, she didn't know at first where she was. Mommy was holding her hand and feeling her forehead, and Mommy's new secret sort-of-wife Delia was standing over her, saying, "I think she's coming out of it."

A huge turned-away snoozing bear lay beside Pill on the bed.

Coats.

A lamp with a frilly green shade cast a soft glow from the nightstand. The overhead light had been switched off.

Then Pill remembered.

But she managed not to show it, not even when Delia stared right into her eyes.

"You okay, Pill?" Mommy asked.

"Uh huh."

Delia said, "You gave us a scare."

"I'm sorry, Delia," she said.

Mommy bent and laughed and kissed Pill on the cheek and told her not to worry, that she was just delighted to have her back among the living.

Delia examined her, holding her wrist tight with a concentrated frown, and then moving Pill's head in strange ways by the neck and jaw.

Pill didn't much like Delia. She hadn't much liked her since Daddy died, or even before. But her two mommies seemed to like her a whole bunch, especially Brest.

So Pill only shared the way she really felt with Gigi the goat. In whispers, late at night, under the covers.

But now, she especially didn't like Delia.

Luckily Delia left and Mommy stayed behind.

"Mommy?" Pill said.

"Yes, dear?"

"I need to tell you something."

The telling was hard. At one point, Mommy began to cry and Pill almost wished she hadn't told her anything at all.

But in spite of her crying, Mommy was a tough lady. Pill knew that already, from the rough love her mommy sometimes shared with Daddy and Brest. She knew it from her limps and winces and from the way moonlight lit her bruises when she came in late at night to kiss Pill on the cheek, and Pill pretended to be sleeping.

Mommy cried and sighed and blew her nose.

But when Brest came up and said she and Delia would be off and asked was Pill okay, Mommy said, "She's fine."

Then her face got all dark. She added, "Make some excuse. Drop Delia off at her place and come back without her."

"I don't understand," Pill's second mommy said. "Is therea""

"I'll explain when you come back."

Pill was proud of her mother.

"Don't let on that anything's out of the ordinary, okay?"

Brest said she wouldn't. She found her coat in the pile on the bed, Delia's too, and left the room.

Mommy held Pill. She told her she was her sweet pumpkin. "We'll give them five minutes," she said. "Then we'll go downstairs."

But Mommy kept looking at her watch and Pill knew that nowhere near five minutes had pa.s.sed when Mommy told her it was time, hustle her buns, chop-chop.

It felt strange, like being in a fishbowl, to leave the bedroom holding Mommy's hand and see all the grown-ups standing in clumps downstairs.

They stopped when Mommy said something. They all looked up.

Then Pill told them.

Just like she told Mommy.

It was really hard this time. It felt as if she were back in that closet again, but this time Mommy was with her.

It was okay to see the hand moving again, Delia's hand in that same gesture, the dry ice pellet in her glove.

And it was okay to hear Miss Gaskin!.

Pill worried at first that she wouldn't be able to tell it the way it happened, so the grown-ups would get a clear picture. But she saw from their faces that they did.

They got it clear all right, Mr. b.u.t.tweiler, the princ.i.p.al, most of all. Pill could see that in the blush of his blotchy skin.

And in what came next.

Futzy looked at little Pill on the landing, listening as she drew the correct conclusion from that terrible night. She was an angel, and this was her annunciation.

If he tried, he could hear her voice deepen into his slain daughter's voice. He could see her sprout a foot taller, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s plump out, her first lobebag being slipped over her lovelobe when she came of age. She was Kitty all over again.

Kitty had come back, his beloved girl, to set things right.

Adora had enriched his homelife.

Now his daughter had returned to fix the rest of it.

When Pill finished, she gazed up at her mom.

"Oh wow," said Jenna Megrim.

Heads turned.

"What is it, Jenna?" Futzy asked.

"I was parking cars that night. I remember, after it was all over, wondering why the janitor's car was parked in the faculty and staff lot. But then I figured he knew the combination into the backways and didn't need to drive into the so-called, not-really-secret garage everybody knows about and use the underground elevator.

"What I didn't see, until Pill was talking just now, was thata"and I've gone over this a hundred times in my heada"the nurse's blue clunker was never in the parking lot, at least not up to the moment the school was padlocked shut."

"She was inside long before then," Jonquil said coolly.

Futzy recalled how quickly Delia had left that night, not through the front door like floods of relieved seniors did. Ten minutes later, when Jonquil, Adora, Winnie, and Bray joined him in exploring the backways, Matthew Megrim had been discovered. Soon after, they found the hapless history teacher's car by the elevator. Hints of gas fumes suggested that the motor had recently been on, though that made no sense.

It hadn't been his fumes at all.

It had been Delia's.

So Futzy told the gathering of survivors.

"Something else," Winnie said from the couch, holding Claude's hand and Bray's. "The coroner's report repeatedly mentioned right-handed stabs to the bodies. Now I remember the janitor at the light bank lifting a hand to adjust the lights just before the music started. Did anyone else see that?"

Tweed spoke up. "We were on the bandstand. Me and Dex." She looked up to recapture it. "The janitor was raising his left hand, kinda drifting it hazily over the switches, struggling to recall which ones he was supposed to throw."

Futzy brought back other scenes. Gerber Waddell s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g in lightbulbs, triangulating an American flag, weeding flower beds in front of the school. He saw Gerber's left hand moving, ever moving, his right hand idle or thumb-tucked into his belt.

Futzy looked at Trilby Donner's little girl. "Pill," he said, "which hand did you see holding that dry ice pellet? Can you remember?"

"I think so," the little girl said.

Gripping the oak railing, she brought the scene back with a squinch and a twist to her face. The narrow crack through which she had seen the killer's arm.

Her hands let go, shaping a slow fog before her. First the left rose, then stopped, falling back into place. Then with increasing certainty, the other, the right, lifted, finding its fixed place in the air, holding the invisible pellet, the arm, the hand, a gesture of strength mixed with delicacy.