One boot at a time. That’s what my father always said to the girl I used to be.

I miss that girl’s tidiness and courage, her way of tuning chaos and fear to the low hum of planes flying overhead. Every day, waking up, choosing life over death, making a daily list of instructions. Now those planes are casting shadow clouds on the ground that I can’t outrun.

My body is begging me to fall onto the bed, but I drag myself to the kitchen. I pull Betty Crocker from the shelf, thumb to the back, and scribble faster and faster down the last page until even I can’t read it.

At the bottom, I write in bold block print, Don’t give up.

My eyes fly open. I barely catch the echo of the chiming sound that woke me up. My brain feels heavy, disengaged, like I’ve slept for five minutes.

I reach over to turn off my phone alarm, set for 11:30 P.M. Except my phone is silent. 11:02 is pasted over a picture of Lola’s big grin. I’ve been out for four hours.

The dinging wasn’t the alarm.

A coin dropping? A key jingling? The tip of a gun brushing against a doorknob?

My leg is off.

The panic, unreasonable. Unstoppable. I’m tugging at my other leg, the good one, but it’s tangled in the sheets that I felt such a compulsion to mess up.

And then I hear it again, loud and identifiable. The doorbell. A finger pressing in rapid, urgent succession. Four times. Six. It better not be Finn. Or Wyatt.

I will kill them.

I’ve tugged my good leg free of the covers. I grab my gun off the bedside table. Reach for my crutches. Stop. Think. I drop to the floor and crawl.

In the closet, I feel around in the dark for my leg. The only sound, my choppy breath. I slide my leg on in record time.

There’s no peephole in the front door. No window with a view of the porch. I only have two choices.

Sneak out the back door and maneuver around from behind.

Or open the front door with a smile and a gun in my hand, like my father always did when it was the middle of the night.

I crack the front door. Nothing. I shove it open all the way. The light on the porch, faithful as always, is beaming on the Texas flag.

It’s also shining on something else, propped against one of the white columns.

A new shovel. Blade up.

A math equation is painted neatly in red on the aluminum.

70X7

What does that mean?

Standing here half-dressed, gun drawn, I think it’s nothing good.

28

Lights and sirens at the Blue House.

By now, it’s all over the police radio, Twitter, the local Facebook mom group that Rusty says should be hired to track terrorism.

I called Rusty, told him about a shovel on my porch that appeared to be decorated in blood, and Rusty didn’t hold back.

“You OK?” Rusty has asked me three times. “You look like you’re still shivering. And it’s warm as sweet fuck out here.”

“I feel like I seriously overreacted to a little multiplication I could do in my head at age seven and a shovel that turned out to be painted with red fingernail polish.”

We’ve obscured ourselves under the drooping branches of the old oak that commands my front yard, its fat roots snaking deep under the foundation of the house. Up high, a branch still holds a knotted drip of rope from my childhood swing.

“We’re all on edge, Odette,” he says. “Give yourself a break. To be honest, I don’t like this, either. I’m glad you called it in.”

In every direction, neighbors in sweatpants and robes group on their front lawns in tight shadowy pairs and triplets. While cops dust my porch for prints, cars roll by in a parade like they’re looking at a gaudy Christmas light display.

Gabriel is bagging up the shovel, and doing a careful job of it. Almost every cop in town roused himself from bed and showed up for me. Maybe I should try a little harder with Gabriel. Look past his blowhard personality and the time he planted a kiss on Trumanell’s poster lips and laughed.

“You’ve really got no idea who left this?” Rusty asks. “What ‘70X7’ means?”

“No, but it has a familiar ring, like I should.”

“The number 490 has no significance to you?”

“Same.”

“If the town wasn’t in such a twaddle, I’d think it was one of these neighbors giving you a friendly hint about your front landscaping. You’ve probably got about 70X7 square feet out here to mow. Do you even own an edger?”

He takes a hit off a vape pen, which, inexplicably, he still thinks is safer than smoking. “The whole thing has that kind of juvenile feel. But my instinct says it wasn’t kids. Anything else going on I should know about?”

I’m considering all the ways to answer, how dramatic and specific to be. I’m secretly attached to a lost girl with only one eye. My husband left me. My father lied about a bloody, muddy pair of boots. Betty Crocker and I have regular girls’ nights with Trumanell.

The rough bark of the tree scratches against my back. “I got a weird call early this morning. A blocked number. Someone sobbing. They said ‘Trumanell.’ Or maybe I misheard. Maybe it was go to hell? Either way, the crying was a little … psychotic. He hung up within seconds.”

“He?”

“Yes. I think it was a he.”

“Think, not know?”

“Think, not know,” I confirm.

Rusty scribbles on his pad even though he has the sharpest and most proficient memory of anyone I’ve ever known. He usually holds the pad as a prop, something that unsettles suspects who know there isn’t a delete key on a piece of paper.

“We’ll try to track the number. Your private cell?”

I nod.

“OK, what else happened today?”

“I had a somewhat unpleasant visit from a woman named Gretchen McBride. Do you know who she is?”

“I know her husband. I’d call us dove-hunting friends. He gives me a deal on my trucks. I give him a deal on his speeding tickets. I know him well enough to sense that he’ll be scouting a fourth McBride in the near future.” He drawls hard on the bride.

I don’t offer up the satisfaction of a smile. No need to mess up a little nine-year-old girl’s life before it’s necessary. Or announce to Rusty that his truck dealer friend had a big, fat motive to kill Frank Branson when my guess is he already knows it.

“Ms. McBride wanted a personal favor of sorts,” I say. “I don’t think this shovel has anything to do with her. She’s into the less traditional nail polishes.”

Rusty flips over the cover of his notebook and tucks his pen in his pocket.

“We let Wyatt Branson go,” he says.

“I heard.”

“Chief made the call. It wouldn’t have been mine. I’m not looking for anyone out there to finish my job. I want you to know that. I believe in the law.”

“Noted.”

Across the yard, Gabriel is tucking the wrapped shovel in the back of a cop car, waving us over.

Rusty is his sovereign leader, but when we’re two feet away, it’s me that Gabriel is looking at with a question.

“I guess somebody wants your forgiveness real bad,” Gabriel says, grinning. “You in some kind of domestic dispute?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I ask grimly.

“Come on, a good Baptist girl like you has to know.”

I stare at him blankly.

“The shovel. Matthew 18. ‘How often shall I let my brother sin against me? Seven times? And Jesus replied, not seven. Seventy times seven.’”

Of course.

He slams the trunk. “See you back at the station, Rusty.”

Rusty waits until Gabriel is backing out of my driveway. “He’s kind of a shit stirrer,” he drawls, “but he has a mind for detail.”

“I don’t like him.”

“Just painting in some perspective. I’ll go back and write this up. I’m still down for our chat, but let’s not have it at the station. The boss is getting a little hinky about you being involved with Wyatt Branson. He’s happy you’re on vacation. Meet me at our usual place. An hour. Just you, me, and the trees.”

I lurch my truck along the pitch-black road, my second visit to the park in twenty-four hours.

It’s a whole new stage without the floodlight of sun. A papery half-moon has hiked into a black sky. Branches are drawn in fine detail, arms and fingers crawling up. Whatever I cannot see, which is almost everything, feels like an audience in the dark, waiting.

Somewhere along this road, Rusty has pulled the patrol car over in a shallow ditch and turned off his lights, a sleeping predator. Bad luck for anyone else who makes the mistake of wandering this way tonight, maybe even me. I’m always wary about what Rusty will think up next.

Lately, he has a habit of leaving me gifts, like a cat drops a slack-eyed rat. He says it’s not him, but I know it is.

I’ll pull out my desk chair to find an old psychiatric report that describes a teenage Wyatt as schizophrenic and unstable.

A photograph of a stalk of corn smeared with Trumanell’s blood.

A report on unidentified DNA on the shirt Wyatt was wearing that night when they found him wandering a country road, hysterical.