Rusty twists the knob. He cracks the door a couple of inches. “Unlocked,” he says. “Unusual?”

I shake my head. He knows this without asking. People here still leave their doors unlocked no matter what explodes in the America outside this town’s borders. They tuck their firepower in tampon boxes and Bran Flakes, where their kids won’t look, because by the time they think to, those kids are handy at shooting guns themselves. If there’s terror in their lives, it shares their bed or their DNA. Odds are, they’ll keep it a secret until it’s wrinkled and dead. Even then, they might eulogize it with buttery words.

Rusty nudges the door open farther. “Wyatt Branson! Police! I got Odette with me. We’re doing a welfare check. Just want to make sure you’re OK. Not here to make trouble.”

More words than Rusty usually offers when his gun is drawn.

No shout back. The forks and spoons have changed their tune, grating over my head like rusty fingernails.

“What’s the call, Odette?”

My flashlight strobes across the fire-engine red hood of Wyatt’s rig, parked behind us. “His rig is here, and his pickup’s still in impound. He should be here.”

I push past Rusty into the living room. “Wyatt, it’s Odette!” I yell.

The air is thick and rank, no air conditioner going. Rotting water drifts from a vase overstuffed with wildflowers. I slam open a window, gulping shallow breaths.

If Wyatt was unaware we were here, he surely isn’t now.

“You OK?” Rusty asks. “We can call backup.”

“No. I’m fine.” I fumble with the table lamp beside me. Not working. I try a light switch on the wall. The same.

Rusty is dancing his flashlight across the living room, over the couch where Angel was lying not that long ago. His beam halts at the wall of quotes.

“What the hell?” Rusty steps over an ottoman to get closer. “Looks like a bag of fucking fortune cookies exploded. Have you seen this?”

Billy Graham, Emily Dickinson, Buddha, Harry Potter, John Irving, Dale Carnegie, Plato, Jesus Christ, Ignatius J. Reilly, Snoopy, Mister Rogers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Shakespeare. Trumanell herself.

I’ve read them all.

“Goddamn serial killer wallpaper straight out of goddamn serial killer Netflix,” Rusty mutters. “Are you going to answer, Odette? You know what these quotes are?”

“Survival tips,” I reply.

Rusty rips one off the wall. I flinch like it was torn off my skin. “Years of love have been forgot in the hatred of a minute. That would have been good to know before I married my first wife.”

The shred of paper drifts out of his fingers. He tears off another.

It’s like he’s peeling the wings from a moth. I can’t imagine how Wyatt feels. I can only pray Wyatt isn’t watching—that he won’t take Rusty’s bait.

“Violence can only be concealed by a lie,” Rusty reads, “and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Sounds like a confession to me.”

“Stop,” I hiss. “Leave the wall alone. You take the hall.”

My light is already roaming the corners of the connecting dining room. A grandfather clock stands in one of them, always stuck at three forty-one.

When Wyatt was little, three-four-one was the silent hand signal Trumanell would flash to her brother across the room, under the table, through the window.

It meant go. Run. Hide. In the dung of a barn stall, in the neat pantry that was his Mama Pat’s jelly museum, inside the intestines of this clock.

Until he was three, there was just enough space behind the small door for him to fold up and pull it to.

He told me this at the State Fair of Texas, while we were locked like two doves in a Ferris wheel cage, our stomachs about to reject Deep Fried Butter and Twisted Yam on a Stick.

My hip knocks into the corner of the maple dining table, a long, shiny stretch, like a coffin top. The chairs are tucked neatly underneath.

Two polished silver candlesticks rise like London spires in the middle of the table. Frank Branson liked things exact.

I cross over to the kitchen doorway. I’d forgotten how much the floor slants in here, the victim of a piece of earth that turns over in its sleep. Wyatt and I used to race marbles down it.

My light trails over a single coffee cup and a cereal bowl with a lightning crack, stacked neatly in the dish rack. I know that bowl, damaged in one of Frank Branson’s throw-downs. Trumanell was wearing her cheerleader uniform that day, the big L on her chest for Lions. The problem that morning was, she woke up late and hadn’t had the time to get her hair up. Her eyes were still red slits at the game that night.

Cereal is lined up neatly on the shelf above the sink. It’s Wyatt’s usual dinner rotation. Cheerios, Raisin Bran, Wheaties, Froot Loops, Special K, Cap’n Crunch. Lucky Charms, Trumanell’s favorite. After Mama Pat died, Trumanell had to churn out supper five days a week. Her father’s orders.

Milk in a pitcher, gravy in a boat, rolls in a basket. And lots of meat. Anything that used to have a face—pig, cow, chicken, deer, rabbit—stacked on a big platter that Trumanell called “the Funeral Pyre.”

Trumanell hated meat. She used to say the only animal she’d ever eat would be ostrich, out of revenge for the one that stormed their property and killed their puppy. The scar of a claw still ran down her leg, a white streak on tanned muscle. I used to think that’s how she’d be identified.

Rusty, wherever he is, has gone silent. The refrigerator, an old GE, mutters, drops a clunk of ice. The only other sound, the drip of a faucet.

I flash my light to the sink. It’s brimming over, water spilling noiselessly onto a thick mat. The floor glistens like a lake in moonlight. And pennies. At least two dozen of them, scattered, a copper glow against the dark linoleum.

There was something cruel about Wyatt’s father and pennies.

I can’t think about that now.

If Rusty’s Kryptonite is light, mine is water.

I can’t slip.

I lurch to the sink and wrench off the faucet. When I plunge in my hand to lift out the stopper, my fingers brush against something soft and spongy lying at the bottom.

Down the hall, Rusty has sprung to life. He’s shoving aside the plastic rings of the shower curtain in the downstairs bathroom.

It is the same shower where, ten years ago, police pulled a drain that held six strands of Trumanell’s hair, some of her blood, a minuscule piece of her skin, and a bit of gold glitter.

Wyatt told me once that it wasn’t a bad place to hide.

30

I wait for the sound of a gunshot.

Three seconds. Five.

“Clear!” I yell at the door of the kitchen, desperate for a response.

“Clear!” Rusty yells back.

No gunshot. No Wyatt.

Rusty and I meet in the middle, where we started. He nods to the staircase. Seven steps lead up to the first landing, before they disappear around the bend.

For the last five years, I’ve made casual, routine sweeps of the first floor of this house plenty of times, but I never pushed Wyatt too hard to let me up the stairs.

I heard sounds above us a couple of times. Wyatt always had explanations. A feral cat he’d taken in. A busted sewer pipe. A radio left on. I’d pushed him aside once. My foot was on the third step when a ragged furry head poked through the upstairs railing.

“Did you walk into a booby trap?” Rusty is tracing his flashlight over my wet boots and dripping arm.

Was it a booby trap? What could happen while standing in a wet floor of pennies?

“Just trying to think like I would if a bunch of rednecks wanted me dead,” Rusty continues. “Wyatt shut off the power. He’s obviously got a plan.”

“We don’t know who shut off the power. If Wyatt has a plan, believe me, you won’t see it coming.” I nod my head back toward the kitchen. “A faucet left on. An overflowing sink. A bunch of pennies on the floor. Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. What did you find in the tub?”

“A bottle of Suave Juicy Green Apple shampoo. Are we calling backup or not?”

So he’s going to let me make the call about whether to give Wyatt’s haters another light and sound show. We both know they’ll eat up whatever we find in here. Wyatt scared. Wyatt missing. Wyatt crucified. The cattle gate banner will spin across the Internet in an illiterate fury, coloring in all the answer bubbles for a jury pool. Guilty.

Your. A. Murderer.

I’d like to believe that Rusty is handing me control right now because what I decide here at the foot of this staircase matters.

It doesn’t.