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justice.
    “Please sit down, Miss Sherred,” Captain Rand said. He smiled, showing perfect white teeth. Elaine recognized it as a professional, not a genuine smile, a relative of the smile she learned to produce when she needed it in her job. She supposed there were times that a policeman, just like a nurse, had absolutely nothing to smile about but was forced to for the benefit of those around him. It was difficult to smile and be cheerful to a man dying of cancer when he was ignorant of his deterioration, but it was necessary. For Captain Rand, it must have been unpleasant to smile in the face of blood and a badly wounded girl and knives and darkness and unexplained madness. But it was expected of him, and he smiled.
    She sat on the couch, next to Gordon Matherly. It was an unconscious move that she could not have explained. There were other chairs available. She just felt safer beside Gordon.
    “Miss Sherred,” Captain Rand said, “we've heard everyone's account of what happened this evening, except yours. We'd like you to tell us what you remember of the-uh, the incident.”
    “There's really little to tell,” she said.
    “Nevertheless, we'd like to hear,” he said. He smiled again. Smiled with his lips. His eyes were hard, perhaps hardened by too many years of this sort of thing. “It's always possible that one witness will have noticed something none of the others did, some bit of a thing which will make all the pieces fit together.” But his tone of voice, the infinite weariness behind that smile, said he didn't hope for any such miracle.
    She told him the story, up to the point where she left the scene to check on Jacob Matherly. She did not feel it was her place to add Jacob's story of family madness, partly because she was not of the family and did not have the right to talk about them and partly because she did not yet know how much of the old man's tales to believe.
    When she finished, Rand said, “When you heard the scream, did you think there were words to it?”
    “It was just a scream,” she replied.
    “Think hard, Miss Sherred.”
    “Just a scream,” she repeated.
    “Often,” Rand said, pacing back and forth before the assembled witnesses, “a victim will pronounce the name of his attacker at the last moment. Could the scream have been a drawn out name, a Christian name or perhaps a surname?”
    She thought about it for a moment. “No. Definitely not.”
    Rand seemed disappointed. For a moment, his calm expression and the gentle, professional smile slipped away.
    In the pause, she asked, “Is Celia still alive?”
    “She's comatose,” Rand said. “She lost a great deal of blood and suffered severe shock. The lining of her stomach has been twice punctured, though no other organs received the blade. A vein in her thigh was severed. They've already begun work on that and on the abdominal wounds. She's still in surgery and will be, I'd say, for some time yet.”
    In the easy chair next to the desk, Lee Matherly leaned forward and cupped his face in his hands. He did not say anything.
    “Did you see a knife anywhere near the body, Miss Sherred?” Captain Rand asked.
    “Not that I remember.”
    “Anything like a knife-a letter opener, a gardening tool?”
    “No.”
    “I believe you were the one who elevated the girl's legs and tried to staunch the blood flow from her abdomen.”
    “I'm a nurse.”
    He nodded, aware of that. “Did she, while you were attending her, ever regain consciousness?”
    “She was too weak,” Elaine said.
    “She did not speak even a word?”
    “Nothing.”
    “You would have noticed if she had opened her eyes? You were not too distraught to fail to notice a moment of sensibility in her?”
    “I'm a nurse,” she said. “I do not become distraught over illness or injury or death.” She was beginning to dislike the way Captain Rand was questioning her, forcing each point again and again, as if she were a child who could not be expected to remember properly, except with prodding. She supposed that it was