Wyatt is driving fast, one hand on the midnight position, blasting the kind of shallow pop song he hates. It means we are not going to talk about what just happened. Wyatt has always been a man of few words, unless he is making something up. He told me once that the lies are in the adverbs.

I roll down the window and lose myself in the blur of road even though the road almost swallowed me whole.

I’m sixteen again. Two good legs. Grass tickling my knees.

I’m pursing my lips and blowing with all the breath I can. A hundred fluffy helicopter seeds are flying, ready to populate the earth like bunnies. Wyatt stands inches away, ignoring me. His head’s swiveling, searching the field, on alert, like always.

One stubborn dandelion seed is left, like the holdout juror in a trial. I want Wyatt to love me forever. I blow again, even though I’ve already lost.

The seed trembles. But it stays. Certain. My wish, denied.

That’s when Wyatt turns around and sees. He slaps the stem out of my hand, angry.

I’ve never known why.

I jerk my head back in the window of the truck, not wanting to remember.

When we pull up to the Branson place, the windows are square black eyes, opaque and shiny in the headlights. Wyatt turns off the ignition, slides out with me still in the passenger seat, and closes the door. I struggle to make out his path in the dimness. Not a single light goes on in the house.

A sharp rap at my window. I jerk my head. Wyatt’s face. He’s gesturing, something gripped in one hand.

He wants me to roll down the window. I do, halfway.

He pushes a paper bag through. “This is Angel’s,” he says. “Let’s make this goodbye, Odette. The last one.”

“What is your fucking deal with dandelions?” It’s out of my mouth before I can think.

“Goodbye, Odette.” He’s melting into the dark.

I throw open the truck door, furious. He doesn’t get to decide.

“Did you kill Trumanell?” I shout. “Did you kill your father? What in the hell were you going to do with Angel?”

I don’t expect a response. I stalk over to the driver’s side and slam the door. It vibrates in my gut, like it used to when we slammed doors and fought about lesser things than murder.

My hands grip the wheel. I don’t touch the ignition. I wait for a light to go on in the house because that’s what polite people in small towns do after they drop someone off.

Five minutes turns to ten. Fifteen.

The house, still pitch black.

Is he OK?

Am I OK?

I reach for the bag in the passenger seat. I tug out a scarf. Its cheap glamour shimmers like hot coals.

Gold sequins. One missing for every three that stayed. I picture Angel in the doorway at Maggie’s, with the blue scarf tied over her eye. I know what this is for, and it hurts.

This scarf is every mini-skirt I never wore. I examine the scarf’s flip side, made of black polyester, and feel around until I find the tag. Too faded to read. What did I expect? Her name in marker? An address?

The windows of the old Branson place are suddenly going yellow, one at a time. In a few minutes, the downstairs and upstairs are brimming with light, as if something’s wrong that woke up the whole house. Too much light or too much dark—a cop knows they carry the same silent alarm.

Has Wyatt walked every room, flipped each switch, calling for Trumanell? I think about what he was, a tough kid who pretended he didn’t live in terror, and what he is now, an enigmatic man who does the same, who lost everything, including me, maybe his mind, and how none of it should have been.

I start up the truck, flushed and ready.

I’m no longer a passenger in his life.

I’m the driver in mine.

Whatever Wyatt thinks, we are not finished.

11

My fingers linger for a second on Trumanell’s face.

In this town, it’s every cop’s compulsive ritual to glance their fingers off her poster when they walk through the door of the police station, as if the town’s missing queen is a good luck charm.

My grandmother’s two words for Trumanell? Bone China. Her nose, cheeks, neck, shoulders—all carved by a delicate chisel. It’s why Trumanell looked so striking with her hair in a bun, when for the rest of us, pretty or not, pulling our hair away from our faces just emphasized the flaws. The witchy nose, the weak chin, the Bozo the Clown ears, the swelling pimple, the angst.

Bone China. Sometimes I dream of Trumanell’s bones shoved in a box like broken plates and saucers and buried so deep we’ll never find them. Once, after a dose of morphine, I dreamed that Daddy dug up her china skull, and we drank coffee from it at the kitchen table, the dirt crunching in our teeth like bitter coffee grounds.

Trumanell’s picture on the wall of the station is an enlarged version of her mug shot, a controversial choice for her missing poster. I’m in favor. It’s a lovely, quirky picture—a slight triumphant smile, hair ripped down, her homecoming queen crown crooked and tipped to the left. Usually in Texas mug shots, the crown comes off, whether it sparkles or says Make America Great Again. But this was Trumanell, so they let her keep it on.

For more than sixty years, the homecoming queen in this town has partied, waved from the back of a pickup, and ruled with her rhinestone crown until the sun rose. Trumanell wore it while practically beating a boy to death around 3 A.M., according to the police report that lauded her efforts. She singlehandedly stopped a senior linebacker from raping a 100-pound freshman girl at a post-game homecoming event at the lake.

This is the kind of story that our town loves to feed, just like they fed the legend of me as three-year-old Bat Girl. Like they would feed the story of a one-eyed girl found on the side of the road if I let them.

Trumanell got three weeks of community service, primarily because her beating was so thorough. The boy, already eighteen and charged as an adult, ended up in Huntsville with a plea deal after three other girls that he attacked told their fathers. In our town, girls are always daughters first, and that can make it very bad for the sons.

A thousand prints of DNA smudge the glass Trumanell smiles behind now—it’s unspoken in the station that it’s bad luck to Windex it—while every DNA sample sent off to the lab from her case has turned up nothing.

“Hey, Trumanell,” I say softly. “We know you fought.”

It’s an unusually empty room tonight. The gruff female officer on front desk duty, known as Mother-May-I, grunts out a Hey, girl when I pass by, barely looking up. The chief’s office is dark and locked. It’s 10:07 by the cheap clock with big numbers on the wall. Everybody’s out patrolling or home with their families, including Rusty, the partner I ride with most of the time.

I head to the far corner, to my desk, one of eight, the only one with my father’s portrait hanging over it. Sunburned face. White Stetson. A Medal of Valor pinned to his chest. The day I arrived as a rookie, Daddy’s old buddies welcomed me to this room with a Walmart sheet cake and shiny Batman balloons with pink ribbons tied to the legs of this desk—Daddy’s desk. Walmart didn’t sell a Batgirl.

They hung his portrait just for me. They told me they left his desk like a crime scene. Nothing, not a single piece of paper, disturbed. I didn’t believe that, not for a second.

Daddy had no desire to be chief, so he wasn’t, but everybody knew he was the ultimate decider, the godfather, especially on the Branson case. He determined what was shared with the public, what was shared with the FBI, what was shared with reporters, what went with him to the grave.

I drop the bag with Angel’s gold scarf on top of our desk, along with the clear sealed evidence bag with the water bottle she drank from in the backseat of my cop car.

I get to work with my father’s eyes on me.

I try every which way, but the database insists that no one-eyed girls were reported missing anywhere in the United States for the last fifteen years.

That’s not true, because one is sleeping in my cousin’s house. The results, of course, are only as good as the data input by the cops on the other end and the people desperate to find them. I trust most cops. I don’t trust most people. It says to me that the person or people missing Angel would like to find her first, or never.

I take out one eye and only use Angel’s basic description—Caucasian, five feet four, black hair, 90 to 110 pounds—and keep a wide filter on both her age and the year she might have gone missing. The program spits out tens of thousands of girls. I narrow it to Texas and get a thousand. I reduce it to the past year. Eighty-two. None of their faces match Angel’s. It’s far from a comprehensive effort, but I move on.

A search for the owner of the land where Angel was found is easy but not helpful. The owner is a corporation in Saudi Arabia. This isn’t suspicious. Water and oil rights in Texas go to the highest bidder. But it will make it near impossible to get surveillance footage from any cameras in the field, if there are any.