When he burst through the door of the Branson place, Wyatt was setting out the Scrabble board for a date. Trumanell was coming down the stairs, looking especially pretty, something gold and glittery holding back her hair. Frank Branson was washing his face in the downstairs bathroom after a day in the field.

The reverend held the three of them hostage in the living room with a gun and a sermon. He swore Maggie was his daughter even if his wife said she was Frank Branson’s. Deceit. Adultery. Hellfire. The Rev. Tucker was at his raving best.

When Odette’s pickup drove up, her uncle told Wyatt to get rid of her or he’d shoot them all.

The whole time, the gun was trained on Frank Branson. Except Frank Branson had his arms wrapped tight around Trumanell. She was face forward, held to him like a shield.

As soon as Odette roared off, Wyatt made a split-second decision. He threw himself at the pastor, wrestling for the gun.

There was a shot, a wild one. The reverend couldn’t remember hearing it. Wyatt said it sounded like the end of the world.

Trumanell pressed a hand to her chest, trying to hold in the blood. She stumbled out of the house, calling for Odette. She didn’t get far. She placed her hand flat on the front door, and then she sat down.

Somebody had to clean it all up. The pastor called his brother, because it had always been that way. The boys of the Blue House never let each other down even when a badge and God did.

While Wyatt rocked beside his sister’s body, the police officer and the preacher had squeezed his sixteen-year-old mind until something broke. You’re the reason she’s dead. Your prints are on the gun, too. Who do you think people will believe? A Branson or a preacher? A Branson or the town’s top cop? A Branson or the Blue House brothers? We can protect you or we can take you down.

Frank Branson observed the two men work over his son. He leaned against the porch railing and ripped off his shirt and poked his finger in the hole. The bullet had snuck its way through Trumanell’s body into his. He was bleeding out, or he was just grazed. He pretended to faint, or he really fainted.

Odette’s father hauled Frank Branson up. He grabbed his brother’s gun from his hands. To Wyatt and his brother, he said: I’m about to do you both a big favor.

Wyatt watched Odette’s father drag his across the yard. He saw them disappear into the same field where he had blown a dandelion like a trumpet.

The gunshot, when it came, sounded much quieter.

Odette’s father would forever believe that God’s price for killing Frank Branson was his daughter’s leg.

That’s because the reverend, his baby brother, told him so.

I relay all of this to the reporter in a monotone, as emotionless as possible. I can tell the story by heart at this point.

I’m not sure why a reporter needs to hear this from me. He’s read the same sworn statements that I have from Wyatt, Maggie, and the Reverend Tucker.

The reporter says it’s so he can understand everyone’s perception of the facts, to form a truthful story, like anybody cares about those anymore.

I think it’s so he can sneak in his other questions, which My Lawyer Finn is suggesting I don’t answer. How did I get so obsessed with a woman I barely knew? How did it feel when I slammed Odette’s leg into her killer? What do I think about solving Odette’s mystery—being the hero of the story—when it was meant to be the other way around?

“What do you mean by meant?” I’d spit back at him before Finn could stop me. “She is the hero of this story.”

I remind myself that Rusty trusts this reporter. He says that if I confirm facts for a major newspaper, even off the record, I’ll be helping this town heal. He has asked it as a favor, and says that, in return, he will make good on his big, fat favor regarding my father.

The reporter swears he will not use my name. He has assured me I’ll be the tough young woman who got swept up in the heart of the Odette Tucker case, not the poor little one-eyed girl found in a field.

He’s pushing the recorder closer. Asking about Maggie.

That’s tough.

Because she almost got me killed.

Maggie made her nightly 9 P.M. call to her mother in the nursing home while I sat on her couch, cuddling her children. As usual, the nurse put the call on speaker and walked out of the room.

Maggie was crying. She told her mother that Odette sent me to remind her of all the things she should have done. She wanted someone who loved her to listen, even knowing that tomorrow her mother would forget.

Maggie didn’t know someone else was listening, too. The reverend, who visited his wife often, slipped in during the middle of the call. He sat quietly in a chair. He heard Maggie talk about a girl with one eye who’d been hiding in the Blue House. He learned that Odette kept a diary.

Then he slipped out. The nurse said he smiled at her when he said good night and asked if she’d bring his wife another blanket.

There were two things in his hollowed-out Bible when he opened it up a half hour later.

A pistol, which he loaded.

And a picture, one of a series.

A picture that Odette’s father had kept locked in his drawer at the police station, the key around his neck.

Odd angle, lit by moonlight.

A baptism, the sixth in a series.

Two men, my father and my uncle, washing off sins in the lake.

June 7, 2005, scrawled on the back.

I tell the reporter the story Maggie told me, about the day five years ago that Odette disappeared.

How she visited her mother in the nursing home to mourn. Her mother had touched the mole on the back of Maggie’s neck. Your father has one in the same place.

Maggie remembered no mole on her father’s neck. But the reverend had skin cancer when she was little. Maybe the mole had been burned off. Maybe her mother was just lost in dementia.

The first thing Maggie begged of Rusty was to look hard for a scar on the back of the reverend’s neck. There wasn’t one.

Maggie told Rusty that the worst thing was not that she had Frank Branson’s blood in her, but that she didn’t have Odette’s.

“I believe Maggie,” I repeat to the reporter. “I believe she didn’t know.”

“And the reverend? Will you be able to forgive him?”

Finn shifts in his chair. I know that he never will.

Even though the reverend owned up to a lot in his statement.

Leaving the shovel on the porch. Odette never did understand the nature of forgiveness.

Making a repentant, sobbing phone call. I was drunk. Almost told Odette the truth that night.

Following Odette to the field where Wyatt buried the gun that killed Trumanell and Frank Branson. That was Wyatt’s one job and he blew it.

“Let’s wrap this up.” Finn’s anger chops at the air.

“No,” I say quietly. “I want to answer.”

I draw in a tight breath. “The reverend said it was the Lord’s hand that led him to the Branson place. He said it was his hand that plucked the eye out of Frank Branson as a souvenir before he threw on the first shovelful of dirt. He said he would do it again if he had to, seventy times seven, no matter who died, and God would forgive him.”

I hold my hand in the air, fingers spread wide, like Trumanell’s.

“He said it was this hand, my hand—and the head slam into the bathroom floor—that wiped away his memory of exactly what happened to Odette that night. I’m not going to let him get away with that.”

I am no longer emotionless. My voice squeaks on the last line.

Finn jumps out of his chair in the corner. This is over.

The reporter nods. He shuts off his recorder and tucks it in his backpack. He says Thank you.

But I know what he thinks.

He thinks I’m just a trailer park girl from Oklahoma who got herself into a little trouble.

That my promise is just words.

Which it is. Six, to be exact.

In my pocket, I finger the soft edges of Odette’s piece of paper.

66

Two weeks before classes start, against Bunny’s wishes, I’m back at the Blue House. Finn isn’t too crazy about the idea, either.

Trumanell and Odette are still out there. So is Frank Branson, if anybody cares and nobody does.

I begged Finn. Let me finish cleaning out the house. I need an ending. I promised to work it 9 to 5, like a regular job, and sleep in a hotel, not the closet. If he was still worried about that accidental kiss, he didn’t even need to see me.

He said he’d leave the key under the mat and a $750 check for the job.

Of course, I’m not really looking for closure. That doesn’t exist for someone who has been trying to lick the envelope shut on her mother since age ten. I am looking for something thirty-eight cops and CSIs might have missed.

The second I walk into the kitchen, my eye goes to the empty slice out of the bookshelf. The Betty Crocker cookbook is gone for good, boxed up in an evidence trailer, every page searched and swabbed with no significant result. The kitchen feels a hundred times lighter for it.