This book, I tell myself, is proof of nothing. It is more a scrapbook of years of personal anguish than of objective professional effort. I never showed it to Finn because I knew he would never look at me the same way again. I never showed it to my father because I was afraid it would be the grenade that blew us up.

The coffeepot is spitting out a last death rattle. I need to leave for the meeting at the lake soon. But I want to shore up last night with a kiss goodbye. I want to make us work. I don’t understand my marriage but neither do I understand anybody else’s.

The longer Finn takes, the more it feels like the room is creeping in on me. Betty Crocker, incognito on the shelf. Santa, leering from the lid of Daddy’s box. Jesus, conducting The Last Supper on the wall.

The least I can do for Finn is get rid of the painting he hated. I lift it off its hook, laying it facedown on the table.

Finn doesn’t know that this painting and I have a very personal history. My father always chose this chair and the view of this wall when he thought I needed to think about what I had done.

I had plenty of hours to memorize every stroke of this da Vinci, down to the salt Judas knocked over, making it forever bad luck to spill salt.

One of my uncle’s most effective sermons was called “Devil and Salt.” He preached that when you spill salt, the noise wakes the devil, who sleeps on your left shoulder. But if you throw a little extra salt over your shoulder, the devil is blinded. Just don’t forget which shoulder he sits on. And don’t miss. After that sermon, my uncle bragged that half of the congregation gave up salt for a month.

To this day, I toss salt over my left shoulder without thinking. More than once, I’ve hit Finn in the eye.

My father called da Vinci one of the great detectives. He told me I’d learn everything I’d ever need to know about body language in the brushstrokes that captured this second after Jesus told his apostles he would be betrayed. A head turn, a quirk of the lip, a betrayer’s jerk of an elbow.

While I recuperated from the accident, da Vinci hovered in my bed. I read about his obsession with the human body while I obsessed over mine. Drawing after drawing, autopsy after autopsy. Da Vinci was documenting the physical puzzle of man long before a drop of blood could tell us the color of skin and eyes, the shape of a nose.

“When a man sits down, the distance from his seat to the top part of his head will be half of his height plus the thickness and length of the testicles.”

Finn and I tested that out once after a few margaritas.

In the bedroom, he swishes a broom across wood. Glass clanks into a trash can. A window glide squeaks. The mattress whines like a knee is punched into it, like Finn’s making the bed, even though he never does.

I restlessly flip through my voicemails. Rusty is asking me to meet up outside the station house around ten tonight so we can talk. Maggie is going to take Lola and Angel to the movies and orders me to get some more sleep.

No more sounds from the bedroom. In my own house, I absorb the humiliating feeling of a one-night stand. Finn is waiting for me to leave.

“Sometimes, I think Odette is all titanium.” I overheard Finn say that once.

But I’m not.

I telegraph my goodbye as loudly as possible. I rinse and clank my coffee cup into the rack, “accidentally” set off the alarm on my iPad before I plug it in to recharge, slam a cabinet shut. On the chalk message board, I squeak out a one-legged stick figure blowing a kiss, my private signature for him only.

I tuck the painting of The Last Supper under one arm and use the other hand to grab the Santa box. In the hall by the front door, I yank open the coat closet, still crammed with my father’s old uniforms and hunting jackets. I slide The Last Supper upright against the side of the closet wall and let a coattail fall over it. Kneeling, I shove the Santa box as far as I can to the back, but something’s in the way.

It was Maggie who stormed through the closets in this house after the funeral. She insisted. Every pocket, every box. But my father’s uniforms—I couldn’t bear to get rid of them. I insisted Maggie put them back exactly as she found them.

Ever since, I’ve used this closet as a place for what I want to throw away but can’t. It’s not a surprise that the closet is finally fighting back. My cheek brushes up against rough wool, a brass button, as I reach back to see what the problem is.

I pull out a boot from the back corner. It takes the second boot for me to register. These used to be my father’s favorite boots. Rattlesnake. He loved wearing things he killed.

Except he told me he threw these boots away. He said they were destroyed the night he sloshed through the field hunting for Trumanell.

Mud cakes the soles. Brown stains color the toes, splash up and down the sides. I know mud. I know blood.

And on these boots, there are both.

Blood from a deer?

Trumanell?

Frank Branson?

I’ve hunted Frank Branson as long and hard as I’ve searched for Trumanell. I’ve wished him alive on every eyelash, every wishbone, every penny, every white horse, every rainbow, every fluffy fucking dandelion.

I’ve wished him alive so he can confess to all of it.

If Trumanell has to be dead, I want Frank Branson to be the one who killed her.

I pray for that while my father’s boots are dead weight in my arms.

22

I swipe at a crumb of mud on my shirt, mesmerized by the long black whisper it leaves across the blue.

Dirt from my father’s boot. Dirt, I think, from Trumanell’s grave.

I can’t think that. It makes no sense. My father wouldn’t bury Trumanell and let her rot. She was a beautiful, loving girl. My cheeks are wet. I try to shove the Santa box in the closet again, on the top shelf, but the lid pops open. Memories, raining onto the floor. I feel myself slipping through the paper, all because one of my feet is forever asleep.

I fall hard and noisy, slamming into the wall. I push myself into a sitting position and peel a photograph off my cheek.

My uncle’s arms are tossed in the air, face to the sky, in the throes of a holy baptism. My father, half-consumed by the lake, is staring straight at the camera, right at me, like he knew this moment between us would come.

He’s telling me to get the hell up.

Save yourself.

I get up.

I take the boots.

I leave the memories.

As the door shuts behind me, I catch the edge of Finn’s voice calling my name.

I peel out of the driveway for the lake, fingering the silver chain around my neck, worrying it across my lips, sucking the key. It tastes like blood. Or blood tastes like it.

I used to have the same bad habit with another necklace, one with a silver heart. Wyatt gave it to me. It used to drip out of my mouth any time I studied, watched TV, stressed out because I heard shots fired on the radio in my bedroom and my father wasn’t home yet.

I was wearing the necklace the night of the crash. Every time I hooked it around my throat afterward, it licked like fire.

I did what Maggie told me to. I dropped the necklace in a red velvet pew at Sacred Heart of Mary on Church Street.

Maggie and I both agreed that the kindly, red-faced Catholic priest in town was the best man for the job of disposing of a delicate chain possessed by something evil. Not my uncle. He would call us silly girls. Tell us we were just giving the devil more power than he deserved.

I have no idea what Father Dennis did with the necklace, but I’m not sure even he could get the devil out of what’s riding in my backseat.

My father’s boots. Angel’s glittery gold scarf.

I don’t care. All I want is for them to give me answers.

Dr. Camila Perez is waiting on the park bench, like she promised, the lake stretching out behind her, tepid and dull, like it has no secrets.

In her orange shirt and bright yellow pants, Dr. Perez is an out-of-place bird—a very cheerful dresser for someone who spends most of her life examining scraps of people that no longer look human.

She’s critically eyeing the two brown bags I’m carrying, one in each hand.

“Have you been careful about contamination?” she asks when I’m a few feet from her. “Wait. Have you been … crying?”

“I’m fine,” I say, brushing off the concern in her face. “And I’ve been careful. Look, I want to say what I should have said on the phone … this isn’t quid pro quo. Help me, or don’t help me. No hard feelings. You owe me nothing.”

“I will owe you for the rest of my life.” Dr. Perez pats the bench for me to sit beside her. “My daughter is settled back at UT. Because of you, because of that letter you wrote to the judge on sentencing, that boy has at least another three years behind bars. It’s still a surreal dream—that he pushed my baby out of a car on the highway in the middle of the night because she wanted to break up. I don’t want to think what would have happened if you and your partner hadn’t found her. When that boy does get out, I can’t promise her brothers aren’t going for him.”

“Stop there. I never heard that.”