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either.”
    Lane's face wore a look of relief as he heard those words. Someone else had seen the same flesh and blood ghost he had. Color returned to his cheeks as he let out his breath, filling his lungs with new air.
    “I'm glad to hear it's not just me.”
    “Nope, she's one of a kind, all right. I can't quite tell what it means, but she's certainly not your average woman.”
    “But is she a murderer?”
    “That's the question. I could read her a dozen different ways, and they'd all make sense. It's almost like she's a blank canvas upon which we can project whatever we want to think about her.”
    “That could be dangerous.”
    “For her, and for us.”
    “I just hope the daughter isn't the same way. I don't think I could survive another one of them.”
     
    * * *
     
    Tory Hobbes was not her mother's daughter, not at all the steely, stoic creature she was born from. Unlike her mother, Tory was a free spirit, who let the winds of life push her in whatever direction they chose, not questioning where fate was taking her. Living for the moment was all that mattered to her, and she had set out to squeeze as much experience as possible from the time she had. Nothing was too crazy to try, no thought too mad to consider.
    Detective Knox sat across the table from her, watching her fidget and twitch with the impatience of someone with too much living to do. Sitting still made her nervous, and that was comforting to him. This was familiar, what he expected.
    “How are you feeling? You look nervous.”
    “How am I supposed to be feeling? My father's dead, and I'm sitting in this drab little box. Just this room is enough to bring me down.”
    Knox had never thought about the décor before, he never thought it an important detail. But hearing her comment, he couldn't help but be drawn to the oppressive beige that surrounded him, the aggressive blandness that absorbed and hid any sense of life within the walls. They did not reflect the reality of the circumstances the people sitting in that room were dealing with, and perhaps, he thought, they forced people into the wrong frame of mind to be cooperative.
    “I understand this is a difficult time for you, but we need to ask you some questions.”
    “Whatever. Let's just get it over with.”
    “How would you describe your relationship with your father?”
    Tory tilted her head to one side, as if shaking the dust off the gears as her mind struggled to move the pieces. She hadn't given much thought to how to describe her life. Giving freely of herself was easy, but prying details about anyone else from her was a different story. It was something Detective Knox could appreciate.
    “Don't all kids have difficult relationships with their parents at my age?”
    “You tell me.”
    Frustration was building in her, not because of what she might say, but because she was feeling the itch to escape. She needed to be doing things, not talking about them. There was a whole world out there calling to her to act, and while she understood why she had to endure the interview, that didn't mean she had to be happy about it.
    “I don't know what you want me to say. I can sit here and tell you everything was just fine between us, that we sat on a rainbow every afternoon and ate unicorn hearts, but you'd get as sick of the lie as I would.”
    “So why not just tell me the truth?”
    “No one wants to hear the truth.”
    Knox found the remark funny, because it was, in a strange way, the truth. People, he had found, wanted to hear their own beliefs reaffirmed far more than they wanted to know what really happened. The truth could be an inconvenient reminder of their own fallibility, and while it sounded great in theory, in practice it was an elixir that stirred with the violent concoction of emotions we carry inside.
    “That may be true, but tell me anyway.”
    “Fine. The truth is that my father and I didn't get along. We hadn't for a very long time. He could never accept that I wasn't his