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"I did."

"What did he take, River?"

For a moment he said nothing. His eyes searched my face, and I wondered whether he was deciding how much truth he could give me without opening the door he had just managed to shut.

Then one corner of his mouth lifted. "I don't know, Firefly. That's rather the point with him, isn't it."

Behind us the boat slipped off the shore, and Charon went with it, his shape dissolving into the strange light above the water until the coin in his eye socket was the last thing left of him.

"Come back, Byrne child," he called, both voices carrying easily over a river that made no sound at all. "Bring better questions. You are becoming quite interesting."

Chapter Seventeen

Neither of us said a word on the drive back.

It wasn't the bad kind of silence. We'd spent four days doing that one, the kind with a wall erected between us, and this felt nothing like that. We were both still trying to make sense of what Charon had told us, and every time I thought about opening my mouth, I realized I didn't have the first clue what to say.

I drove because my hands needed something to do. River sat with his knees against the dash and his head turned toward the window, watching Ohio disappear into the dark. Every few miles one of us shifted and the other noticed, and that was the whole conversation.

My mother had never crossed the River of Souls. His mother had never arrived there.

I kept those two facts separate because Charon had already taught me what happened when I took one of his answers and added something he hadn't actually said. Neither fact proved our mothers were alive. Neither told us where they were or what had happened to them. They only tore holes through everything River and I had believed about two women who should have been dead by every rule anyone had ever bothered to teach us.

Somewhere in the back of my mind was a cold spot where a kitchen that smelled like cinnamon used to be. I went looking for it three times and found nothing. No missing image, no half-remembered voice, not even the shape of the hole Charon had left behind.

By the fourth attempt, I stopped trying.

The STARLIT came out of the darkness at seven-forty, its E still hanging sideways over the parking lot. The pop machine glowed beside the office like a small underwater disaster, and somebody had parked a horse trailer across three spaces without any visible evidence of a horse.

Normally, I would have needed answers.

Tonight, the horse could keep its secrets.

River turned his head toward me. "Hazel."

I tightened my fingers around the keys. "If you're about to ask if I'm all right, don't. I don't have a convincing lie left in me tonight."

His lips twitched at one corner. "I was going to ask if you planned to sleep in the truck."

I looked at him.

"But your answer to the other question has been noted."

"You're irritating, you know that?"

"So, I've been told once or twice."

A tired laugh escaped me before I could stop it, and somehow that was enough to get me moving. I pulled the key from the ignition and opened my door. "Come on, Blackman."

Unit seven smelled exactly as we'd left it: bleach, old menthol, and somebody else's shampoo. Housekeeping had been through while we were gone. The beds were made, the trash was empty, and two towels had been folded into shapes that had clearly aspired to swans and achieved something closer to a half-plucked chicken.

I carried my mother's tin under one arm and the library book under the other and set them both on the credenza. Once they were out of my hands, my fingers curled uselessly against my palms.

Behind me, River closed the door. He didn't lock it. I noticed, because River always locked doors. "You should eat something."

"I should do a lot of things but have energy for none of them." I turned around to find him watching me from afar. "Are you planning to spend the rest of the night standing by that door?"

He leaned against it with his hands loose at his sides, watching me. The cold around him had banked down to almost nothing, although the lamp on the nightstand between the beds was doing cruel things to the shadows beneath his eyes.