Whichever it was, ignorance or a free pass, Friday night’s impromptu visit was spent discussing her new life as a forensics fellow and never touched on her absence over the past year. None of Livia’s concerns or suspicions about Casey Delevan came to fruition Friday night. Having aged greatly in the last year, her parents shouldered the heavy burden of their missing daughter, and it would be unfair for Livia to present any of these developments before meaning could be assigned to them.

Before bed, Livia had ducked her head into her parents’ room. They sat up in bed reading the way she always remembered them doing as a child. She wished them both good night and, backing out of the doorway, noticed Megan McDonald’s book on her mother’s nightstand.

She sat now in the dark hours of night when sleep would not come, and watched that red ceiling fan spin and soothe her sweaty skin. Her parents had never believed in air-conditioning, and Livia carried memories of her and Nicole sleeping on damp sheets with windows yawning and box fans humming through the night. Warm Septembers saw her off to school with red cheeks and sweaty strands of stray hair plastered to her forehead. October now and unseasonably warm, Livia’s bedroom was the same as it had always been.

As the grandfather clock in the downstairs foyer chimed to indicate two hours past midnight, Livia sat up in bed. The room had not changed since she left for college more than ten years ago. Pictures of her youth still stood on her dresser, and stuffed animals hung in a net in the corner. Her old beanbag chair where she used to do her homework sat deflated next to the bed. The room looked like that of a dead child her parents didn’t want to forget. Nicole’s room next door was the real thing, and Livia sensed why she hated coming home.

At her old desk, Livia pulled out her MacBook and sat in the subtle glow of the screen. She typed Megan McDonald into the search engine and found thousands of hits. She pulled up articles from 2016 when Megan and Nicole went missing. The stories exhaustively covered Megan’s background. Her shining future was known to the world. The reporters loved that such an all-American girl had been kidnapped. It made for great reading, how such a smart young girl had outfoxed her abductor, escaped from the unsettling bunker the entire country got to know so well through pictures and tours on the morning talk shows, whose journalists had all converged onto the small town of Emerson Bay. Livia found a video of Dante Campbell clambering out of the bunker in a skirt and high heels and looking like a complete fool.

The country fell in love with Megan McDonald. She was the girl who made it home. Megan became a star. She was the brightest of Emerson Bay High, and after the abduction she was the doll of the country. That Nicole Cutty was also a part of the story was only news initially. That Nicole’s abandoned car was found down the road from the beach party where both the girls had gone missing was only newsworthy until Megan McDonald resurfaced. Megan’s stunning return home and heroic escape overshadowed everything else. Eclipsed the fact that Nicole was still gone.

As Livia sat in her childhood bedroom, she realized how much had changed in the last year, and how much had stayed the same. Her room. Her parents’ love of humid, stuffy homes. And Livia’s unwavering guilt that during her sister’s time of need, she had turned her back on Nicole.

Livia typed the name Casey Delevan into the search engine and hoped for more luck than she had earlier in the day. Mr. Delevan was a twenty-five-year-old construction worker reported missing by his landlord in November of 2016. Estranged from his mother, and with an MIA father, he had no family looking for him and no one who ever knew he was gone. The article stated that Casey Delevan’s mother lived in a town outside of Atlanta called Burlington. Livia checked the map. I-95 to I-20, about eight hours.

The drive looked easy. A straight shot and a good place to start.

CHAPTER 10

With her parents still sleeping, Livia snuck out of the house at six a.m. By noon, she entered Georgia. Bald cypress trees stretched into the afternoon sky, and river birch shadowed the road. The last two hours of the drive were easy, and Livia allowed the GPS to guide her through the town of Burlington.

Casey Delevan’s mother lived in a dilapidated house with peeling paint and dirty windows. There was no garage, but a rusted-out Toyota Corolla was parked in the gravel driveway. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday. Three hours earlier Mrs. Delevan had answered the phone when Livia called and asked if she were interested in purchasing a magazine subscription. Now Livia parked in the street and walked to the house. The doorbell made no audible sound and after the second try Livia knocked instead. A moment later, a middle-aged woman answered the door.

“Barbara Delevan?”

“Yes?”

“Hi, ma’am. My name is Dr. Livia Cutty. I’m here to talk to you about your son.”

The woman regarded Livia through the screen door, then pushed it open and held it for Livia to enter. “C’mon in.”

Livia walked through the door, which led directly to the living room. On a sunny autumn day, Mrs. Delevan’s home was dark and drab. A forced blackness brought by drawn shades that allowed only an outline of boxed light to enter. No lamps helped Livia’s vision, and the result was a dingy brown glow her eyes needed time adjusting to.

“Can I get you something? Water or soda?”

“No, thank you.”

“Beer, or something?”

“I’m fine.”

“C’mon in and have a seat.”

Livia walked into the living room and took a seat in the recliner. The couch, Livia could tell, was Mrs. Delevan’s domain. It was split into three sections, and the middle cushion was well worn, trampled down and stained with various colors—food and coffee. Mrs. Delevan fell into the spot and brought her feet up onto the coffee table. There, too, was evidence of a sedentary life. The finish on the table was absent from where the woman’s feet constantly rested as she watched television—a giant monstrosity that stood in the corner and predated flat panels, it was the very definition of a “large screen” television. It was blaring an episode of Housewives from somewhere, and in the same movement that Mrs. Delevan sat down, she muted the television.

The cushion to her right was stacked with papers—Livia guessed they were bills or financials of some sort, organized roughly in piles and by a slider where envelopes rested upright. Covering the cushion to her left was food and beverages. Cartons of takeout and plastic bottles of Coke, the current one wedged between the cushions. A bottle of vodka stood in the corner of the couch and a white Styrofoam coffee cup, the rim bitten and marred, rested on the table.

Mrs. Delevan slopped some vodka into the coffee cup and topped it with Coke, then looked at Livia.

“If you’re here to talk about Casey, I’m gonna need one of these. Sure you don’t want nothin’?”

“Yes, thank you.” Livia looked around the small home. “You live here alone, Mrs. Delevan?”

“Call me Barb. Yeah, it’s just me. Alan down at the store thinks he lives here sometimes, till I set him straight.” She smiled to reveal a set of rickety teeth and necrotic gums.

Livia noticed a pack of Marlboros on the end table and had smelled the stale odor of nicotine as soon as she walked in the door. The last years of Livia’s life had been spent analyzing the lifeless human body, its tissue and cells, and witnessing the destructive nature of the world—the things the human race does to one another and to themselves, the substances that are ingested, the air that is breathed, and the manner in which our organs malfunction as a result of it all. The consequence of this education and the postmortems she’d conducted was that Dr. Livia Cutty saw death before it arrived.

She watched Barb take a gulp of vodka and Coke and imagined the fatty liver that sat inside the woman’s body. Livia knew exactly what that organ would feel like in her hands, bloated and greasy with hardening vessels snaking along its surface, abused for so long by the toxins that washed through it. When Barb reached for the Marlboros and put one between her lips, pinching her lips together as she ignited the tobacco, Livia watched in her mind’s eye as the smoke traveled through the trachea and into the lungs. She imagined the epithelial cells and goblet cells lining the airway, streaked now with yellow soot and slowly dying. She saw the small bronchioles of Mrs. Delevan’s lungs already stenosed from years of abuse, and the tiny clusters of alveoli tight from necrosis and unable to expand and transfer oxygen into the bloodstream. Put this woman on a treadmill and Livia could see her heart working in overdrive to push oxygen into those dying lungs.

“You have one of those?” Barb asked. “A guy who thinks he can come and go as he pleases?”

“Can’t say I do, ma’am.”

Barb waved her hand to dismiss the thought. “You with the police?”

“No, not exactly. I’m with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina. I was the one who performed the autopsy on your son.”

“Oh yeah? Cops said I could call you if I had any questions.” Mrs. Delevan turned and paged through the papers to her right, gave up after a minute. “They gave me a card, it’s in here somewhere.”