” Trixie said

“Okay,” Trixie said, “but could we go inside?”
It was weird, leading the detective into their mudroom. She felt like he was boring holes in the back of her shirt with his eyes, like he knew something about Trixie she didn’t know about herself yet.
“How are you feeling?” Detective Bartholemew asked. Trixie instinctively pulled her sleeves lower, concealing the fresh cuts she’d made in the shower. “I’m okay.”
Detective Bartholemew sat down on a teak bench. “What happened to Jason ... don’t blame yourself.” | Tears sprang into her throat, dark and bitter.
“You know, you remind me a little of my daughter,” the detective said. He smiled at Trixie, then shook his head,replica mont blanc pens. “Being here... it didn’t come easy to her, either.”
Trixie ducked her head. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
She pictured Jason’s ghost: blued by the moon, bloody and distant. “Did it hurt? How he died?”
“No. It was fast.”
He was lying - Trixie knew it. She hadn’t realized that a policeman might lie. He didn’t say anything else for such a long time that Trixie looked up at him, and that’s when she realized he was waiting for her to do just that. “Is there something you want to tell me, Trixie? About Friday night?”
Once, Trixie had been in the car when her father ran over a squirrel. It came out of nowhere, and the instant before impact Trixie had seen the animal look at them with the understanding that there was ? nowhere left to go. “What about Friday night?”
“Something happened between your father and Jason, didn’t it.”
“No.”
The detective sighed. “Trixie, we already know about the fight.”
Had her father told him? Trixie glanced up at the ceiling, wishing she were Superman, with X-ray vision, or able to communicate telepathically like Professor Xavier from the X-Men. She wanted to know what her father had said; she wanted to know what she should say. “Jason started it,” she explained, and once she began, the words tumbled out of her. “He grabbed me. My father pulled him away. They fought with each other.”
“What happened after that,Designer Handbags?”
“Jason ran away . . . and we went home.” She hesitated. “Were we the last people to see him . . . you know . . . alive?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
It was possible that this was why Jason kept coming back to her now. Because if Trixie could still see him, then maybe he wouldn’t be gone. She looked up at Bartholemew. “My father was just protecting me. You know that, right?” “Yeah,” the detective said. “Yeah, I do.”
Trixie waited for him to say something else, but Bartholemew seemed to be in a different place, staring at the bricks on the floor of the mudroom. “Are we . . . done,LINK?”
Detective Bartholemew nodded,replica gucci handbags. “Yes. Thanks, Trixie. I’ll let myself out.”
Trixie didn’t know what else there was to say, so she opened the door that led into the house and closed it behind her, leaving the de tective alone in the mudroom. She was halfway upstairs when Bartholemew reached for her father’s boot, stamped the sole on an in1 pad he’d taken from his pocket, and pressed it firmly onto a piece of blank white paper.