Da Vinci reversed his own writing on his pages, a code to protect his brilliant secrets. I learned all about mirror writing in the documentary about him I watched a million years ago when I did not know that this dot in time would connect to that one.

He wrote in Italian, with crazy, genius flourishes. Odette wrote in English, in girly loops, like me. I press the page closer to my face. I think Odette was writing backward, too.

In seconds, I am holding the page up to the bathroom mirror.

Odette’s loopy writing. My bright green eyes. Both of us trapped in the bathroom mirror, trying to communicate.

The clank on the front porch this time is not my imagination.

Neither are the words in the mirror, now transformed like magic:

I do not want to die.

The page slips out of my hand.

This is the time of night when shovels are delivered to the Blue House.

When not a single sound is benign.

Think, Montana. Think before you move.

Those were my father’s orders when I struggled to climb a complicated tree. I hear him in my head as clearly as if he is hiding behind the shower curtain.

I whip it open.

I crawl on my hands and knees to the foyer, while the words in the mirror roll on a singsong loop in my head. I shove aside a few boxes and press my ear to the door. Nothing.

Plywood strips are hammered across the outside of the front door. No one is getting in that way.

In Odette’s room, I snap off the lamp, and, as quietly as possible, shove up the window. The air pours in, roses and velvet, the perfume of this town. It’s like some kind of drug. I’ve never smelled air like this anywhere else.

On a regular day, I would breathe in deep. But tonight, the smell is burning my throat. The words in the mirror, speaking my own terror.

I do not want to die.

My hero, Odette, wrote that down in unbearable agony. She was a girl, scrawling backward in a house of secrets.

Home Sweet Home. That’s the embroidery on the living room pillow. But the truth is always on the flip side—the messy mistakes and ugly knots, the trails that crisscross in places they shouldn’t, like my mother braided with my father.

I creep my way to the porch, hidden by the bushes. Not for long. I pull myself up the railing and expose myself in the light. I see no shovel. Nothing written in red fingernail polish. Just dead leaves and dirt and a mat so worn I can only make out half of the W.

The clang again. A breeze is rattling the chain of the porch swing against the window. Is that all I heard? I edge around the house in a counterclockwise circle, sticking close to the eaves, until I reach the back of the house. An empty clothesline, a shed, another old oak. I round the alley.

The kitchen door is open two inches.

My panic, about to tip over.

Did I pull it all the way shut? Lock it? My heart, faster and faster, is telling me I did.

I have to get my stuff. I have to.

My ID with my address. Bunny’s address.

My gun. Bunny’s gun.

I’d never forgive myself if something terrible showed up at her door because of me.

I fly through the dark kitchen, clumsy and wild. In Odette’s bedroom, I snap on the overhead light because light is good, light is fair.

The closet door is shoved wide open. Is that how I left it?

And what is lying on Odette’s pillow?

I step closer. Another plastic bag. Small. Maybe from the cookbook.

No. I haven’t seen it before. It’s clouded with brown-red stains.

I should call Rusty, right? This bag could be evidence that needs to be preserved.

It feels light as a seashell.

It feels like a trick.

I tell myself don’t as I dump what’s inside onto the soft, white cloud of Odette’s bed.

An eye stares back at me.

Not a real eye. Not the ugly, green, cheap, mismatched prosthetic eye that my aunt bought to cover up my hole. Not the one my father stole from the trailer bathroom to let me know he was no longer a prisoner of the state of Oklahoma but that now I was his.

The prosthetic eye on Odette’s bed is muddy brown. I’ve never seen it before.

This is the kind of game my father plays. Long before he shot out mine, he carved the eye from a largemouth bass and quietly dropped it in my mother’s iced tea. She almost swallowed it. And still, she let me fish with him because that seemed better than ever telling him no.

I have to make a call now before I can’t. A phone call. A gut call. Rusty? Finn? Wyatt? Maggie? Bunny? I fumble for my phone. It was off, to keep Rusty and his partner from tracking me. It is taking forever to power up. My fingers shake when it lights up, missing all the right numbers. The phone is tumbling out of my hand.

Just as it connects with the floor, the light blinks out.

The gunshot, immediate.

My shoulder, burning. A drip on my skin like warm syrup.

I hit the floor. I know it’s the floor, but it is also hard dirt. I am alone, but my mother is also lying with me inches away, my hand reaching for hers, a dot of blood on the amethyst birthstone ring she gave me for my birthday.

I am eighteen. But I am also ten.

The element of surprise. That’s the killer. Even when you know it’s coming, you are shocked when it does.

Odette did not want to die. But she did.

I roll under the impossibly low bed frame, shoulder screaming. Under the trailer with the spider and the rats, eye blazing.

I am the roach who folds flat into the cracks.

I pray that the man in the Blue House is confused. That he won’t drag his gun under the bed. That he will think I somehow slipped past him. When I hear the first rustle out in the hall, I scramble quietly. Until I slam the bathroom door.

One gunshot is nothing in a trailer park, and I’m guessing it’s the same on a small town street. It is a firecracker, an engine backfiring, a garbage can dropped hard by a man hanging off a truck, pissed off at his life. Two shots, and you get up and look out the window. Three or more, your ear picks up the trashy decay in the sound that means gun. That’s when you call the cops.

This man does not want anyone out there to call the cops.

He will not blast random shots through the bathroom door when he already has me trapped, when he can kick open the door, pull aside the shower curtain, and muffle a single fatal shot through a bunch of duck feathers. I know that’s his plan. He’s holding Odette’s white, white pillow in his arms.

Titanium hitting bone. It is almost the most terrible sound I have ever heard. It cracks the air and travels down my spine when I swing Odette’s leg from behind, slamming it into his hip. Once. Twice.

I wasn’t in the bathroom, you shit piece of Satan. I was in the closet, where I’ve had plenty of time to think about how I’d save myself.

He drops heavy, his head slamming on the tile. His gun skitters behind the toilet.

I can’t take my eye off of him.

Surprised I’ve won when Odette and Trumanell didn’t.

Surprised he is not my father.

Not Finn.

Not Rusty. Not Wyatt.

Not young. He smells like sweat and decay and the town’s sweet, terrible perfume. His eyes are closed so I can’t see their color. His leg is laid out funny and crooked.

If he didn’t limp before, he will now.

I hope I didn’t kill him.

I don’t want to tell Bunny I killed a man wearing a cross.

Part Four

* * *

CONFESSION

65

On June 5, 2005, the Sunday before Trumanell died, the Reverend Rodney Tucker delivered a particularly fiery sermon on confessing your sins.

His wife and thirteen-year-old daughter, Maggie, sat in their usual pew in the first row at First Baptist. The backs of their heads were as much a fixture to the congregation as the big white cross on the altar.

Maggie’s cousin, Odette, was six rows behind. From Wyatt’s view in the balcony, he couldn’t see his girlfriend’s face—just her two lovely, perfect legs, crossing and uncrossing. His sister, Trumanell, had to keep nudging him to pay attention to the sermon.

For Maggie, it was just another Sunday morning. The same screech from her father, slightly rearranged. Devil. Repent. Sin. Hell. The man up at the pulpit in the holy robe was the same one whose holey underwear she’d folded last night on the couch.

The reverend’s wife was listening harder than usual, not so much to his words, but to the guilt and resentment eating at her. She was so tired of opening her house to drifters who dirtied her sheets and bathtub. So tired of pretending she loved her husband. She’d realized her mistake ten months after she said I do, and yet here she was, still nodding amen.

Two days later, on Tuesday, June 7, 2005, she made sure Maggie was out of the house. She prepared a dinner of pork chops, scalloped potatoes, and creamed spinach, washed the dishes, and confessed the secret to her husband that she had stuffed down for fourteen years.

The Rev. Rodney Tucker didn’t say a word. He walked to his bookshelf and pulled out a Holy Bible with a hollowed-out hiding place for his gun.