Chapter 41

We spent the next day lazily, if you can call pumping iron for two hours "lazy," for that's what Cecelia did in the morning. She's been lifting weights most of her life, and it shows – she's the most muscular woman I've ever met, even if she is still so skinny that it would take three of her to throw a shadow – but this session was, I thought, a way to work off a lot of stress and energy. We still hadn't gone shooting, which is how I like to do that – you can send a lot of stress downrange with your rounds – and so after lunch we went and did that. As always I tried for speed. The Hollywood quick draw didn't exist until the 1950s when someone thought of lining the holster with a thin sheet of metal to prevent the leather from binding on the pistol, and none of the famous gunfighters – Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bill Hickock, Bill Tilghman, and others – were quick draw artists. Earp in fact said that the key to living through a fight is taking your time in a hurry – not getting the pistol out at blazing speed and putting your first round into the dirt two inches in front of your toe, but taking enough time to get it out and pointed in the right direction without dawdling. Just yanking the gun out and jerking the trigger will send wild rounds everywhere, and in modern times video has proved conclusively that even trained police officers still miss more than they hit in actual combat, even at a range of 10 feet. So that's what I do – I try to get my gun out and aimed in a hurry, rather than just jerking it out of the holster and scattering lead everywhere.

Cecelia, on the other hand, focuses on accuracy – and she is astoundingly accurate. A pistol is a short range weapon, pure and simple. Anyone who thinks you can take a pistol and successfully and consistently shoot people 50 yards away is so ignorant I wouldn't know where to start educating him. But Cecelia can hit reliably at that range – not in the 10 ring with every shot, but certainly in the target. She likes to start at a range of five yards, and work out at five yard increments until she's shooting at 30 yards or so. At the closer ranges I can shoot as well as she can, but at 30 yards she can still get most of her 15 rounds in the 10 ring, while I have to settle for getting most of them in the target. I don't know whether she's capable of match shooting, for she's never tried it, but it wouldn't surprise me. As with so many things, I got her started, and then she took off and displayed superlative skill. I'm immensely proud of how well she does so many things, shooting among them.

Darlia wasn't with us to police the brass, so we did that ourselves. Though she doesn't do it as assiduously as she did when she was younger, she still collects our brass a lot of the time, keeping it in a series of coffee cans in her closet. Why she started, and why she's kept all that metal, I don't know – just as she doesn't know, probably, why I like to have so many copies of the Bible in my library, even though most of them I wind up using only now and then when I'm studying.

And Darlia came home that afternoon from school. When we were done shooting it was that time, so we called her and we called Sara, and picked our daughter up ourselves. A lot of her friends have become stereotypical teenagers – though no one, not even a teenager, is exactly like anyone else – but she still loves to give us a hug and a kiss, especially when she hasn't seen us for a while. She did that, and got into the Blazer, buckling into her customary seat behind the driver. It doesn't matter who's driving, she likes to sit behind him or her as the case might be.

Cecelia fixed her patented BLTs for supper, frying the slices of bread in the bacon grease. It makes for messy sandwiches, but we love 'em that way. She started doing that in college, when she had to make everything count – two or three times if she could – and refused to just dump the grease. She tells me that she followed the old custom, which I haven't seen anyone doing in years, not even her, of pouring excess grease into an old coffee can and using it instead of oil or shortening when she next needed to fry anything, but her BLTs she took to frying right in the bacon grease. I'm glad she did.

Darlia started in on her homework after supper, while I settled down with my latest book on the sofa - The Glass Rainbow, one of the Dave Robicheaux mysteries. But neither of us had gotten very far when she got up from the table and plopped down beside me on the sofa. "Dad," she said, "everyone at school is talking about this serial killer."

I internally grimaced at her use of killer – I get so tired of everyone overusing that one word. But Darlia likes sloppy English as much as I do, without the few points on which I'm as finicky as Cecelia is about the whole language. It wasn't the time to remind her of synonyms, and so I didn't. I said, "I'm not surprised."

"Nobody knows the answer to one question."

I looked at her, where she sat to my left. She was looking at her shoes where she'd propped them on the coffee table, or at least in that general direction, and while her hair, unbraided that day, had shifted forward I could still see most of her profile. She looked serious, as though she were thinking about something. "What question's that?" I asked.

"Why do they do it?"

"That's the one question nobody wants to talk about, because most people either can't or won't believe the person who could honestly give it. Everyone – even in the church, where people ought to know better – believes or wants to believe that we're all naturally good, that there's no such thing as a congenitally and completely evil person, and so they don't want the only valid answer." I paused. "You know where my copy of Interview With the Vampire is?"