I walk the house and pull up every blind, letting in the sun. I’m relieved that somebody has cleaned up the bloody bathroom floor, removed my “weapon,” eliminated any fingerprint dust, stripped the white cloud off Odette’s bed.

I take the house square inch by square inch, room by room. I pack up an old typewriter tin of bobby pins, Victoria’s Secret underwear and Epsom salts, a prosthetic leg with purple toenail polish, and five boxes of bullets I find under a loose floorboard.

Every night, Bunny calls. Every night, I tell her it’s going fine.

Every night, I sleep in the closet and dive right back into the lake with Odette and Trumanell. I call Rusty and wake him up. He assures me the lake has been dragged once a year since Trumanell disappeared and asks if I’d like to come over for burgers on the grill.

On the third morning, I dethrone the old man on the wall at the front door. It’s empowering, deciding whether he is trash or treasure. I decide he’s neither, which is a problem with a third of the items in the house.

I flip over the frame. The paper on the back is brown and crumbly. Someone has written: Sheriff Reginald “Reggie” Hornback. 1829–1898.

So that’s who this grumpy asshole is.

Rusty had mentioned this guy in one of his campaign interviews. He is running for mayor on a platform to reform the town’s image, railing against “the historic mafia of the Blue House,” suggesting that “corn and kindness” be the town legacy.

There is a faint diagram sketched in pen below the old man’s name. A rip runs through the middle. I press the edges together. It’s so faded I can barely make it out. Various rectangles, all assigned numbers. A street called “Mourning Dove.”

It takes me a minute to realize I’m looking at a map of graves. One of them is marked with a T.

Dandelions are growing around the old headstone, little yellow pops of resurrection. Just like on my mother’s.

I want to think this has profound meaning—that God planted them for a reason. I can’t ever think like that, or I’d wonder why he sent two seeds of buckshot directly into my left eye.

I looked it up once—a single dandelion plant can produce two thousand seeds. Two thousand wishes. I know that if all those billions of wishes came true, if dandelions really held any power at all, I wouldn’t be watching forensic archaeologists carefully dig up a grave to find Trumanell.

Rusty said that finding a grave by using the dirt on a pair of boots might be a needle in a million haystacks. It’s a lot easier if one of the two men who dug it draws you a map.

When I hear the shout about a metal leg, I feel my own legs go out.

Two bodies. Not one.

I’m still sitting on the ground when they tentatively confirm that the remains of Trumanell Branson and Odette Tucker are side by side on top of Sheriff Reginald Hornback’s coffin. Faces up, in very different stages of decay, within sight of their commemorative statue.

An old man in a faded blue jumpsuit limps over to help me up. Rusty had pointed him out earlier as the cemetery caretaker. Ever since the Korean War, Rusty said, the man had struggled with a limp and insomnia that made him troll the cemetery at night. Rusty was just trying to distract me from the sickening moment; he didn’t know he had slid in another piece.

He’s insisting I don’t get too close to the grid that’s been set up around the plot. But I can see the brush that is carefully sweeping out the dirt from the sockets of Odette’s eyes.

I can see enough.

It had to be an ugly job for the reverend to dig up this grave alone a second time, push aside Trumanell’s remains, and make room for Odette. I have to wonder if he had help setting her body in the hole, if this is another lie that will go on and on.

Odette and Trumanell were placed side by side, like they are having a sleepover. The reverend covered them with a white sheet before he shoveled the dirt back in.

And then, I guess, he worked on a sermon.

Part Five

* * *

FOUND

67

I’m staring up at the dorm room ceiling, listening to my roommate breathe in the dark.

An hour ago, she was crying, her face to the Billie Eilish poster on the wall. She’s finally asleep. I am spooned against her back, my arm around her stomach. When the heat of her body is so close it raises the temperature of my own, that is when my secret bangs the loudest.

We’ve been friends for four semesters, since freshman year. We share the same bathroom. We talk about guys, family, music, poetry, parties, problems. She is the person who first convinced me to shoot a selfie. I know her dose of antidepressants like I’m taking it myself. We cocoon on a bed like this when we are feeling sad, bingeing TV, cramming for tests. But I’ve never told her about my eye. I’ve never led her down the ladder into my own black place.

I ask myself why all the time. Why do I feel like my eye is more unspeakable than her depression? If everybody’s holes were as obvious as a missing body part, what would the word disabled even mean? Would we erase disabled from the dictionary? Would the word not even exist, because all of us are both broken and whole?

The little girl in the mirror says so. She is keeping me awake. Making me remember.

Six hours after it happened, I saw two things.

A black hole where my eye used to be.

The face of a nurse.

At ten years old, I knew instantly.

I was the most terrible thing she’d ever seen.

I want to tell her, We are all the same in the dark.

I think of the dark a lot.

The chink of a shovel digging a grave.

Rusty hiding behind sunglasses.

Odette scribbling her pain under the covers with Betty Crocker.

Trumanell whispering stories in a moonlit field of sleeping flowers.

My father, in prison for good, afraid to shut his eyes.

Wyatt still sleeping in the Branson place with a ghost.

The reverend in the black seconds after he hung himself.

Dandelions digging in for winter.

So they can carpet all the graves.

So little girls can make wishes.

So they can prove resurrection.

I wouldn’t call myself a conspiracy theorist. I’m just a guy who sells paint. Ever since they found Trumanell, my bestseller is Chantilly Lace white. That’s a clear-as-hell sign to me that this town won’t ever let that girl go. I personally don’t believe that color of paint keeps the devil out of your house. Or that shit about how Trumanell’s ghost scatters a lot of dandelions in your field on June 7 as a curse if she don’t want your crops to grow. Or that the cemetery statue of her and Odette moves around at night like something out of Harry Potter. But there are plenty of legitimate questions. Like why did that boy Wyatt get off with a year of community service with a crap romantic excuse about how he didn’t tell for fifteen years because he didn’t want to rip out Odette’s heart? Odette Tucker could take it. Odette Tucker was a tough son of a bitch. Nobody said it out loud, but when you dialed 911 in this town, you hoped she was the one who showed up. So how did that old preacher get the jump on her? You have to wonder what’s being covered up. Some people even think Frank Branson is still alive—that the late, great cop Marshall Tucker fired a wild shot in the field that night and just let him run. They think Frank Branson is lying on some beach in Mexico drinking Corona. My friends and me, we hold with a different theory. We think Frank Branson is lying under the Blue House. We think he ain’t alone. We think there’s a whole cemetery under there of real bad guys that our cops took care of through the years. And you know what? That’s all right with us.

—Dicky Thompson, owner of Dicky’s Hardware,

interviewed for the bestselling true crime book

The Girls Never Left by psychiatrist Andrea Greco