“I’m not saying that at all,” I respond impatiently. These men of Odette’s, they need to get a grip.

He’s up, pacing the tiny kitchen. “Do you know how tough she was? Do you know how hard she worked to be in top physical shape? Boxing, running, karate, hiking, seven years of weight lifting and swimming so she could feel comfortable going in the ocean? Can you imagine what kind of courage that takes? Relying on one good leg and upper body strength against currents? Who does that? Who does that and then disappears one night in the town where she grew up?”

Finn is still pacing in a circle around the table. I need him to stop or I might just lose it. The next time he brushes by, I jerk myself up and throw my arms around his waist. His arms stay flat at his sides.

“It’s going to be OK,” I whisper.

My good eye is trained on the wall, on our shadow people. I used to live in another world on the trailer wall after I came home from school. I’d throw my head back and toss up my arms like a ballerina. I curtsied like a princess. I became that black silhouette until she was more real than I was. She was beautiful, graceful, and you could never see her eyes.

I step back. Our shadows part like a knife sliced us in two. There’s just a sliver of light between us. His hand drifts up the wallpaper. It pauses at my waist. Moves up to my neck.

Finn rips his lips off mine. “What am I doing? You’re a kid.”

The kiss was electric. Talk about shame. I tell myself that if Odette is watching, she understands because she is in a place where she can see everything from beginning to end. She understands that for a moment, I became her.

“You were kissing Odette, not me. And I’m eighteen. Legal.”

“I’m thirty-seven. That’s nineteen years. I don’t know what the fuck is happening to me.”

“There were almost thirty years between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.”

“I think you just made my point.”

Finn has put a lot of space between us. The kiss is already beginning to feel like something I imagined. He is leaning on the refrigerator, next to the chalk figure on the message board. That’s when I realize: It’s not a drawing of a stick figure, half-erased. It’s a stick figure with a missing leg. Did Odette draw that? Did he?

“Odette had sex with Wyatt about a month before she died,” he says, interrupting my thoughts.

“What?” This wasn’t in any blog. Odette hadn’t written that in the Betty Crocker book.

“I was so angry. So hurt. I was making her wait. I’ll never forgive myself.”

I drop into a chair, pick up the Betty Crocker book, and flip to the back cover. I carefully untape the plastic bag of grass.

“Do you smoke pot?” I ask. “I’ve heard you can get really ripped on old stuff.”

“Pot’s not going to help things.”

“I think we should smoke Odette’s pot in her honor. Erase that kiss. We should all forgive each other.”

“How do you know that’s pot?”

“I’ve got the nose of a dog,” I say. “So says a Bunny I know. Hold on a second, OK?”

“What bunny?” I hear the words drift behind me as I disappear into the front hallway. I rip the tape off one of the boxes packed up for Goodwill.

In less than a minute, I am back at the kitchen table with a green-leather-bound mini Bible.

“What was Odette’s favorite Bible verse?” I ask Finn.

“I never asked. She had a complicated relationship with God. Yours?”

“Corinthians 13:4–8,” I reply automatically.

“Love is patient, love is kind … it keeps no record of wrongs,” he quotes. “Pretty traditional.”

“You’d be surprised. I’m a pretty ordinary girl. Do you believe in God?”

“I have to believe Odette is still somewhere.”

Like in this kitchen, watching.

I flip to Corinthians and tear out the page. The silky paper of the Bible is a decent substitute for rolling paper.

“This seems worse even than burning the flag,” he says. “And I’m not sure smoking ink is a very healthy idea.”

“Toxic ink is what you’re worried about killing you?” I train my eyes pointedly on the Betty Crocker cookbook. “Burning a page out of the Bible is what you are going to feel guilty about? Personally, I hope God is weighing my soul on the balance.”

“Give it to me,” he says, snatching the piece of paper. He rolls the joint. An expert. As he’s licking it closed, I force the book back into place on the shelf, between Baking with Julia and Kitchen Confidential. I think about all the times Odette must have done the same thing.

He offers up the toke.

I tap out a match from a box on the stove, strike it against one of the old burners, and watch God’s words go up in flames.

That’s when I remember what 70X7 means.

I lift my head. The room is swimming. My mouth tastes like I ate a pinecone. Finn is laid out in the chair across from me, fully clothed, snoring. A killer wouldn’t act like this, would he?

My brain is telling me it’s urgent to get up. I have the distinct feeling I have remembered something important, but I don’t remember what that was. I don’t remember if it was about Finn. I try so hard to keep my eyes open. I’ll close them for a second.

The next time I wake up, Finn is gone.

So is the Betty Crocker cookbook.

56

“How are things going, Harriet?”

I’m still trying to shake the pot out of my brain.

“You have the wrong number,” I mumble into the phone.

This call makes the third time I’ve opened my eyes in as many hours. At some point, I managed to make it back to Odette’s cloud bed.

Morning light is streaming in through a crack in the blind, and it has a nine-or ten-ish tint to it. I pull a stuck gummy worm off my cheek. A smear of blood is running across the sheet, probably from the barbed wire gash on my arm.

“Oh, I have the right number.” And then I recognize his voice—when he adds the tinge of sarcasm. Rusty. He tracked down my cell number. Is he watching a computer screen with a dot blinking over the Blue House? Is he sitting out front?

But who is Harriet? Has all his research on me led him to the wrong name?

“My twins and I are reading Harriet the Spy,” he explains. “She is their hero. They’ve informed me they want to grow up to be spies, not cops. I told them that I’m dealing with an amateur spy right now, a real live Harriet, and she’s in way over her head.”

“I’m with the twins. Harriet the Spy is a hero. An early persister.” I’m peeking out the curtains. No cruiser.

“I called to let you know your car is ready. New battery, all set. Delivered last night. I drove by this morning and saw it was still parked at the library. I was concerned.”

I bet. “Great,” I say. “Thank you. I got a little distracted.” Now I need to distract him. “I do have some more information for you from Odette. Can you meet again today at the park?”

“Sure,” he says.

“Two this afternoon,” I confirm. “It goes without saying, if you bring your partner, you get nothing.”

I hang up. The first thing I do is dig my mud-crusted Asics and the little green Bible out of the trash.

I’m already dangling high in a tree when Rusty’s tires crawl down the park road twenty minutes early. My knife is underneath my jeans, strapped to my leg.

I taped almost a whole box of Band-Aids to my feet, rolled on two pairs of socks, and ran the 5.3 miles here, the opposite direction from the cemetery. I knew the route by now—basically all flat county highway—and had turned off my phone.

To my relief, only one head is visible in the cruiser. I wait a full twenty minutes plus ten more before climbing off my limb, making sure no one else is coming to our party.

I slide in beside him. “I know what the message on the shovel on Odette’s porch meant,” I say abruptly. “Jesus to Peter: Forgive not seven times but seventy times seven.”

“Did Odette tell you that from heaven? Or did you discover it’s the No. 2 result on a Google search?”

“I remembered it on my own, actually. A preacher had a route through the trailer park where I used to live. I was dragged to plenty of tent revivals as a kid. My soul is exhausted from being saved. But you’ve known what it means for years. You have to think Odette was killed by someone she knew. That the killer followed Odette out to the field and took both her and whatever she was digging up. I think it had something to do with Trumanell.”

“That’s a lot of thinking from a little Bible verse.”

“Odette mentioned to me that Trumanell’s father screwed his way around town.”

“You could have read that rumor in any tabloid. On Twitter. A blog.”

“I’m trying to have a conversation, not prove anything.”

“Fire away.”

“Lizzie Raymond looked so eerily like Trumanell that everyone was sure she was Frank Branson’s daughter,” I continue determinedly. “She wasn’t. That’s proven. But Odette knew about someone else. A girl named Martina McBride, the kid whose father owns the big car dealership here.”