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“What I said about hope…I still hope you’ll find your paradise. Entirely and absolutely.”
Saint
That first week he did not leave the old house, just removed the dust sheets and opened each window wide to air so frigid he took to wearing his father’s gabardine overcoat, deerstalker, and fingerless gloves.
So Patch is back in Monta Clare
“I’m not strong enough to save you. I’m not strong enough to do any of this without you.”
Grace
And he had almost forgotten how Misty Meyer’s smile could slow his world.
Of course she returned
He sipped his coffee, and she smelled caramel and flowers and bitter smoke. “I ask for understanding.” “For what?” “The bad things I do.”
Nix and Saint. Maybe Nix was involved in the missing girls? What bad things has he done?
Himes told her of double helix, genetic instructions, and molecular markers.
DNA research and technology
“Why can’t I feel her…here. Why can’t I feel anything at all?” “Circadian desynchrony. A failure of light information. The blind don’t have heightened senses.” “I was blind down there.”
Patch and Saint
“Grace wasn’t here either,” he said.
“Sure, Mist. We loved each other.”
But did you?
“Then he can’t have buried her here,” Patch said. “No other way into this area. The next trail is an hour north. He’d risk driving that with a body in the trunk?” Misty said, the words not sounding quite real as they left her mouth.
Saint had done similar, though her belief waned, certain that Tooms had killed the girl and enjoyed toying with them, the last vestige of power for a man who had been stripped back to bone.
munificence,
A gift more generous than necessary
“The day I give a fuck what people think about me is the day I see hard proof that karma is real. That good things do happen to the good.”
“They’re showing Grease at the old Palace 7,” Misty said, at least a dozen times on their next hike.
Oh no lol
With gloved hands she carefully removed the rosary beads.
“You remember Summer Reynolds?” she said.
Missing girl
And there, through it, he saw her. And he saw who she was with. There was a moment before the pieces aligned. Before the world once again turned without him.
Is she with Chuck?
The girl’s name was Charlotte, and she stood in front of a large television set. Her hair was gold and reached her waist. Misty left them. Patch looked at his daughter, and she stared back coldly.
Oh shit, Charlotte is his daughter with Misty
“The girl you’re searching for, maybe she isn’t real.
Charlotte
“Your rainbow connection.” “What’s that?” She rolled her eyes in a move that echoed her mother. “Everyone on this earth is placed here for someone else. You follow your dreams and find them, and you make a match and nothing else matters. Haven’t you heard the frog sing it?”
Patch and Charlotte?
Sammy drank. “You do. You’re just afraid to let go.”
He is, Sammy's right
lathe,
A machine for shaping wood
He would not let Grace go, but he would prove to Misty that he would always return.
When the framing was completed and the stucco dried, he spent an entire week painting it white, the shutters a shade of Aegean that changed each time he lay in the darkness and plucked memories like peacock feathers that fanned his craze.
So he's building Grace's houss
She looked at the fine detail. The metal blues, the pardon crucifix. The beads larger at intervals. “Same guy?” the deputy asked.
The reporter was young and stood before the tragedy in a shock that quavered her words, but in them he heard something so familiar he held transfixed till Charlotte yelled at him to fetch her grandmother as Misty’s fever spiked.
“I’ll never want you as my father.”
Charlotte
“You should know I’ll never hold your hand. I’ll never hug you. I’ll never be yours in any way at all.”
Charlotte to Patch
“Charlotte Mary Grace Meyer will be left in the sole custody of Joseph Henry Macauley.”
“You don’t cry because it’s over, you smile that it happened,” she said.
Charlotte
“But your old self, who I used to come see sometimes…Maybe it was him you left in the dark. And only him.”
Nix
“You think people are good?” Nix said, and there was nothing mocking in his tone. “We’re all capable of goodness.” “Yin and yang were born out of chaos to exist in perfect harmony.”
Nix and Patch
“People think maybe the good and bad find a way to coexist, to keep balance, the bad reminding everyone of the need for a line.”
Nix
In time they would find out the girl’s name was Crystal Wright.
Missing girl
“Time changes our ability to view the things that hurt us.”
Misty's mother
“The girl,” Charlotte said, without turning. He settled onto the floor beside her. Above he noticed Polaris a little out, throwing off The Bear. “You remind me of her,” he said.
Yeah, Charlotte does seem similar to Grace
“She said your heart only has room for so much love, because once it gets damaged it shrinks.”
Charlotte to Patch
“You have to purge before nirvana can be obtained,” she said,
Lol Charlotte
“These…the missing, they’re like a flicker of light on a map of the dark. I see one and I head toward it, but it blinks out before I arrive. And then another. And they’re just…”
Patch
“You have a daughter. You drag her from state to state because you need absolution.” He looked at the lime basin, smelled hard water, the room bereft. “How do you figure that?” “You ever hear of survivor’s guilt?” she said, her voice a note quieter.
Saint and Patch
Right then he knew he had found his daughter. And he had lost Grace.
Lake Altus-Lugert
Saint marked the Quartz Mountain State Park and the burial site of Sky Jones.
Colorado’s Kingdom.
Saint marked Breckenridge. Summer Reynolds.
Misty Moon
Saint marked the Tensleep Creek. Fed from Cloud Peak. Angela Rossi.
“I’m standing on a north shore, pink beneath my feet because nor’easters strip rhyolite so pretty I can’t even bear it. Maybe it’ll preserve me or something. Forty-two miles down with the crystals. Mummified in pink. I hope to hell I keep my looks.”
Saint marked mile forty-two of the North Shore scenic drive. By the pink beach. Crystal Wright.
“Grace.” “What about her?” he said. “She was leading us to the other girls.” He took the news with maddening evenness. “How many?” “Four. So far. But I still have a couple hours of tape.”
Saint and Himes
