Also in the closet: a smashed ugly Santa shirt box, four large and cheap vases that I bet held funeral flowers, two Alabama license plates, hundreds of gun pellets spilled from a burst box. And scrapbook stuff, tossed in like salad. Letters, photos, a medal, childhood drawings signed with a crooked Odette. I stack anything sentimental and made of paper in the same pile.

I read through all of it, look at every picture and try to honor it. Odette with two pretty legs. Odette and what looks like a young Maggie, holding hands.

Family grouped around a picnic table, a Christmas tree, a birthday cake. Some full-dunk baptism shots taken in a lake or river, faces not clear enough to make out, that reminded me of home. The river that ran by my Oklahoma trailer park was filthy with washed-off sins.

In the end, I’m ruthless, like Finn asked. Except for the medal, which I place on the hall table, all the photos and letters go in the garbage bags. I shove both the boxes and bags into a corner of the living room, feeling like I wasted three good hours of Day Two. I temporarily stack the pennies and dimes and quarters from all the coat pockets on the coffee table.

This is definitely not what I’m here to do. Finn wants me distracted. I’m sure now. I bet he knows that what’s in this house is perfectly harmless and will lead nowhere.

I flip off the man on the wall, but I’m including Finn, too.

I’m showered, hair still wet, lying on the cloud, watching the whip of the ceiling fan, and eating potato chips out of the bag. I’m trying to get up the energy to make chicken and dumplings so I can eat on it the rest of the week.

While the blades spin, I’m getting madder and madder and madder about Rusty, Finn, and Wyatt.

They all claim to have loved her. So what have they been doing for five years? Drinking? Whining? Grieving? Laying land mines? Is their jealousy of each other getting in the way of finding Odette and Trumanell? Does each of them hold a piece they won’t give the others? Should I stage an intervention in Odette’s living room? Can’t they be the adults?

I reach for my phone to call up the chicken and dumplings recipe, wondering how much work it is. It seemed like a lot of work when I was six, but that was long before Bunny taught me to make her grandmother’s chipotle pork tamales from scratch, a two-day deal.

Phone battery, dead.

I swing my legs over the mattress and head to the kitchen for my charger. I consider bringing the Betty Crocker cookbook back with me. I haven’t opened a Betty Crocker cookbook since my mom died. I decide it would be too sad.

I’m almost in the bedroom when I turn around.

Betty is pulling at me.

50

A bloody handprint is the first silent scream, a photo located in the same section of the cookbook where I remember the beige blob of chicken and dumplings that looked like someone threw up.

I’m going to throw up. I’m staring at words slowly coming into focus.

Crime scene photo, June 7, 2005, Trumanell Branson’s handprint, DNA match. Front door. I’d seen versions of this handprint at the Branson place but blurrier and taken much farther away, from the yard. Like, on the door, it could have been a smudge of pizza sauce from a delivery boy.

It takes three tries to turn the page because my hand is shaking so much. A drop of my spit makes a tiny bubble on the sheet of plastic. It has landed on a close-up shot of a round wad of blond-brown hair with shiny bits of something mixed in. Crime scene photo, June 7, 2005, Trumanell Branson’s hair (unconfirmed), gold glitter, unidentified blood, possibly menstrual. Removed from downstairs bathtub drain, Branson house.

I almost don’t make it to the kitchen sink. I turn on the faucet and watch my vomit wash down the drain, which makes me throw up again. I scrub wet paper towels across my cheeks and lips until it feels like I used sandpaper.

I know this feeling well—the grit collecting under my skin and in my throat. It’s the same itch and burn that set up camp in the hole in my eye the day I saw my father murder my mother. The itch stayed so long that doctors eventually told me it was all in my head and could not be cured with one of their drops.

I’d seen many photographs of the Branson place crime scene online but nothing that was taken with such a calculating eye, nothing that reduced Trumanell to a wad of bathtub hair. And by extension, Odette. And my mother. This photo unlocked a place in my head where their beloved faces are no longer human and everything is meaningless, meaningless decay.

I drink a glass of water. It doesn’t help. My mouth still feels like I swallowed sandpaper. I force myself to sit down again at the table. I skip through the book with my fingertips, staying nowhere long.

The old cookbook has been completely torn apart and restuffed. Photographs, police reports, GPS coordinates, charts. Everywhere, scribbles and fine pencil drawings. Flowers, bats, a cross, Trumanell’s profile with her hair in a bun. Dated diary entries from beginning to end.

I reach a collection of four Ziploc bags. Is this evidence? I fumble open each one. I look but don’t touch. A bobby pin with a single blond strand, a handful of pot, a pinch of glitter, a tube of lipstick that I’m overwhelmingly relieved isn’t a finger.

I stop. Shove the chair back. What am I doing? Those thin pineapple curtains are all that separate me from someone watching. How could I possibly think it was OK to play house at Odette’s with chicken and dumplings? How high was I when I rolled my little orange Hook’em suitcase across the gravel?

No one should know I’m here. Not Finn. Not Wyatt. Not the woman planting petunias. What did that New York Times story call it? The Texas Town That Waits. Someone suddenly moving into the Blue House wouldn’t ever be anonymous—it would be big news, traveling fast. The killer would be more than curious. The media could show up. My father could show up.

Other questions are beating me in the head. Is this Odette’s book? Finn’s? Her killer’s? An obsession or a historical record? Proof of something?

I turn off every light in the house, check the locks on every window, pull each shade two inches past the sill, thrust all the boxes I packed with closet junk in front of the door, even though, outside, a piece of plywood is already nailed across it.

I tell myself that people as stupid as I am don’t deserve college scholarships, and that I should have at least left a goodbye note for Bunny under my pillow.

Trumanell, Odette, me. All of us, dead for no good reason, in our separate unmarked graves, mystery spots in the lake or a field. Fishermen, rowing over us. Hikers, never knowing their boots shake our bones. Dandelions, replicating and replicating and replicating.

My eye and Odette’s leg will be all that’s left hundreds of years from now when they brush off the dirt and we are finally found.

I tuck the cookbook back in the shelf, unfinished. My eye, aching, blurring, can’t read anymore. But my brain can’t stop processing. Bobby pins and glitter. Odd doodling. Trumanell’s bloody fingers.

For an hour and a half, I lie on Odette’s bed, the gun on the pillow beside me, and wait for it to get dark. The fan is perfectly still over my head, a dead propeller, so I can hear every little thing.

I feel ten years old.

Even then, I never gave up.

At 9 P.M. exactly, I slam the side door. I loudly roll my suitcase back across the gravel. I turn my headlights on and off several times. I “accidentally” set off the car alarm.

I’m doing all of this in the dark because I want people to know the stranger’s white car is leaving but I don’t want anyone to see my face. I screech out of the driveway, windows down, blaring Waylon Jennings.

The Girl in the Blue House is gone, people.

About a mile away, I slip the car into an open spot on a block lined with cars. A party, maybe. Middle-class families with driving teenagers and no room in the driveway. Whatever, it’s a good place for me to hide the car.

I punch in the number Finn left on the chalkboard. One ring. Two.

“Finn’s phone.” A woman’s voice. Light. Entitled. I almost hang up.

“Hi,” I say. “Is Finn around?”

A beat of silence. “He’s unavailable at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?” She emphasizes I, as if she’s running his life.

“Just tell him Angel called.” I slur Angel in a sexy stripper way, or the way I think a sexy stripper would slur things. I have no idea why I’m making the effort to torture this woman on the other end of the line.

I don’t have the sense that the woman will pass on my message to Finn even though she says, “I will be happy to relay the message.” After we hang up, I call every hotel in town, just in case. All of them reply with a recorded message that they are closed for roof and flooding repairs.

I consider dropping Betty in the mail to the FBI and heading for home, where my next list includes Twin XL sheets maybe blue for my dorm room.

Instead, I jog back to Odette’s house.

Willie Nelson singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” yanks my head off the pillow.

Groggy. Disoriented.

Crack of light under the door. Quilts under my body.

Odette’s legs.

Oh, yeah. Back in the closet. The Willie song I programmed for Finn’s number.

“What?” I say into the phone.

“You called me,” Finn says.

“What time is it?”