I dig through the Walmart bag for my flip-flops, abandon the crappy running shoes on Dexter’s slab, turn on my flashlight. This place is an obstacle course of gravestones, piles of dirt, waiting rectangular holes, trees trying to push up rotting dead people with their roots.

When my heel squishes into the muddy grass over the bones of a Sweet Baby Grace, age 4, it doesn’t bother me in the least. Cemeteries are where I think best. From ages ten to twelve, I liked to lie down on top of my mother’s grave and go to sleep. That’s where my aunt, drunk and pissed off, would sometimes find me at four in the morning.

My mother and I used to take walks in a different kind of cemetery, a field a couple of miles from our trailer. Cactus popped out of the ground as far as we could see. She’d say we were walking through the devil’s gravestones—that the yellow dandelions poking up around prickly evil were reminders of resurrection.

Wish big. That was what she told me, while we sat on rocks and blew dandelions. Her big wish was a black granite countertop.

I’m almost certain I passed this same shepherd with the broken nose a few minutes ago. I’ve been lost in enough cemeteries to know that it always feels like the graves are moving around, playing a sneaky game of chess.

On Sunday, the Bat Queen seemed to tower over everything. Now I’m coming up behind the shoulder of every angel and Virgin Mary like I’m looking for a lost friend in a dark club.

I’m about to give up when I almost trip over her.

A black-and-yellow blanket is draped like a Christmas tree skirt around her ankles. Presents are spread out underneath: stuffed animals, a baby doll with a hollow O for a mouth, a Batgirl figurine and a Princess Barbie still in their boxes, fake red carnations spray-glued with glitter, a crucifix stuck in the ground.

I run the flashlight up the stone folds of the dress to her face. Someone has shimmied up her and strung a silver broken-heart necklace around her neck.

All of these gifts are new, since the unveiling. After the memorial, cops were everywhere cleaning up stuffed animals and mementoes and sticking them in black garbage bags. A city worker had climbed a ladder to remove the pink lei and Mardi Gras beads that had been ring-tossed around her neck from the back of the crowd.

I pick up a sign knocked over on the ground and jam it back in place.

Leave Your Love Only. Thank You, The Mayor

This seems like permission to unwrap the blanket from around the Bat Queen’s ugly feet and use it for myself. I lay it out in front of her like a picnic blanket. A black bat is crocheted into a yellow oval in the center. The universal signal for distress. I sit in the middle of it and finish off the cold hamburger and onion rings. I lick the sugar off a sour gummy snake.

I reach over for the largest teddy bear, a white one holding a red heart in his paws, and stuff him under my head as a pillow. I close my eyes.

I see Odette the Warrior on her last night. The sharp outline of her shadow. The headlights of her truck smoking into the field.

I don’t think Odette was whacked on the back of the head or took a knife from behind. I think Odette fought. I think she saw her killer’s face before she died, and it was someone she knew.

I think she lost because she was a good person, not because she had only one leg.

Odette hesitated before deciding her killer should die, just like my mother did.

When my father raised his shotgun, my mother was focused on me. She hesitated, too, and that was her mistake.

I won’t hesitate.

It wouldn’t matter if Odette gave me a list with a hundred nice words.

I’m just not as good a person.

When my eyelids flip open, I’m flat on hard ground, staring straight up at the sky. One of the statue’s wings is stabbing a black triangle out of the moon. I’m not sure what woke me, but there’s a sense something did. I sit up. The moon is a full pie again.

A pair of headlights is weaving along the cemetery road, bouncing off the trees, maybe two hundred yards away. I flatten myself against the statue. As a longtime member of the midnight mourners, I know I’m not the only one to spend lonely nights by a grave. I wait for the lights to turn off, down another path.

They don’t. The lights are bouncing bigger, brighter, right at the statue. I don’t have time to pick up the blanket. I grab my plastic bag and roll my body into the shadow of a mausoleum. I crawl another fifty yards before picking a tree to hide behind.

It’s a car, not a pickup, but I can’t make out what kind or color. Gray maybe? Green? The headlights blink out, which gives me a nice black bath. A car door shuts quietly. I slide over for a better view. A shadow is kneeling by the statue but definitely not praying. It’s busy. Picking up the presents and tossing them in a box.

A long arm is holding … a stick? It reaches up and yanks at the broken heart necklace. The chain sounds like water falling down the stone.

I can’t make out a face, or tell if it is a man or a woman.

It could be Finn. Or Wyatt. Or Rusty.

That’s what I think, until the shadow limps.

55

Finn’s convertible is in the driveway when I hobble up to the Blue House. It was a grueling three-hour walk from the cemetery in socks and flip-flops.

Every step, my whole body was yelling at me. Questions, beating away.

Should I retrieve the car out of the library lot? Probably not.

Was the limping shadow at the statue the killer or some random grave robber? I should have taken a risk. Tried harder to make out a face or a license plate or the make of the car.

On Day Four—how’s it going? Bunny says you never really know how it’s going until the end. It could always be a surprise.

The surprise I have to deal with right now is Finn. A faint light from the kitchen is spilling into the alley. All I want is to get naked and dump the Epsom salt I saw in Odette’s hall closet into a warm bathtub and drift away with the last of my pot.

The rest of the house is dark. Maybe Finn is sleeping in Odette’s bed and thinks I’m gone for good. Maybe his cellphone receptionist is snuggled up in Odette’s bed with him and they are not sleeping.

I try the knob on the kitchen door. Unlocked.

Finn is at the kitchen table with the Betty Crocker cookbook, waiting for me.

The cookbook is open to Trumanell’s bright red handprint. I’m trying to avert my eyes. Every time I look at it, there’s something new. Right now, it’s a drip running off the little finger, like a bloody raindrop.

I take the chair opposite him. It seems like the noncombative way to go. I’m so wrecked I couldn’t fight him if I tried. Even this tired, at two in the morning, I’m still thinking about how he looks like Emily Blunt’s husband but the version that hasn’t shaved, showered, or slept.

“Did you want me to find this?” he asks grimly. “Is that why you called?”

“No,” I say truthfully. “I hadn’t really read much of it at that point. I thought maybe it was some creepy little hobby of yours and you meant me to find it.”

“You thought this book was mine?” Incredulous. “You think I killed my wife?”

“I don’t know who killed your wife.” I clear my throat. “I’m sure you would agree this … book … is tough to look at. Better a little at a time, instead of all at once. Like not bingeing on Breaking Bad, because it sticks like something ugly.”

That’s why I have three seasons of Breaking Bad to go and haven’t finished every single page of Odette’s scrapbook. I skipped some of the confusing parts. The heart-ripping, psycho parts. The last page was almost indecipherable. Breaking Bad was a cakewalk with colored sprinkles compared to Bloody Betty.

“You look like shit,” he says abruptly. “Where the hell have you been? What happened to your arm and knee?”

“You look like shit, too. And, you know, none of your business.”

He has laid his hand flat on the photograph, long fingers spread, effectively covering up Trumanell’s. Possessively. I don’t like that.

“Odette didn’t tell me about this book. Why didn’t she tell me? I was a foot away from it every time I made coffee. How could she do that? How passive-aggressive is that? How angry at me did she have to be?”

I feel obligated to defend her. It’s not like, in the closet, I haven’t thought about it.

“Odette was so young when everything happened. Maybe it was a way for her brain to process the loss of both Trumanell and her leg. Maybe she could only handle one of those things at a time. She took Trumanell out of her head and put her in here. And then, when she was older, it was too late. Too tough to tell anybody. Maybe she was … ashamed.”

I’m babbling, talking about myself as much as Odette.

“What in the hell did she have to be ashamed of?”

“You don’t choose shame.” My voice cracks a little. “It makes you want to die sometimes. To disappear.”

“Are you saying you think that Odette set up her own disappearance? That she’s out there somewhere?”