Jiminy picked it up and tore open an end. A mound of bubble wrap slipped out into her lap. Buried within its many layers was the wooden doll she’d played with in her youth. The beautifully carved boy who’d once been her constant companion.

“It’s him,” she breathed.

He was accompanied by a note:

Cricket,

Remember this guy? You never lost him—he’s been with me—I take him on all my trips. He was mine first, you know. Edward made him for Jiminy, and Jiminy gave him to me. He was only on loan to you, but I figured you could use his company now.

Love, Mom

Jiminy let the note fall to her lap. Gazing at her long-lost little cohort triggered strange sensations of forgotten times when her brain had still been maturing and she’d thought wooden objects could spring to life. The sensations seemed pleasant at first, but they were unsettling, too. As she ran her fingers over the little wooden boy’s limbs, she felt as though she were regressing.

“He came back,” she said softly.

After all this time, now that she had a fully formed brain no longer comforted by magical thinking.

Gunshots interrupted her reunion. Jiminy jumped, but her grandmother stayed remarkably serene.

“It’s just Jean,” Willa said calmly. “She must’ve lost another game.”

Jiminy went to the window, where she saw Jean aiming her rifle at something she’d perched on the fence post. Jiminy squinted. Sure enough, it looked like one of the videogame consoles Jean had brought with her and hooked up to the television when she’d moved into Willa’s. She’d been playing tennis against the machine every day for exercise, but apparently the latest match hadn’t gone well.

“She really hates losing,” Willa explained.

Didn’t they all.

Carlos wasn’t at the courthouse like he’d said he’d be, so Jiminy decided to try his room at the Comfort Inn. She was eager to pursue the leads she’d uncovered, armed with the insight she’d acquired. As she rapped on Carlos’s door, she tried to calm her jiggling leg. She wondered if she wasn’t also a little excited to see Carlos himself.

From inside, she heard muffled murmurs and hurried rustling.

“One second,” Carlos called.

Perhaps she’d caught him napping. They’d been battling a sense of impatient frustration lately, haunted by the worry that they were running out of time. The car discovery had provided fresh momentum for their case, but unless they could come up with positive DNA matches, it wasn’t going to help them prosecute anyone.

Adding to their angst was the fact that Carlos had begun receiving a significant amount of pressure from people associated with Bobby Brayer’s gubernatorial campaign to back off the case altogether, and though he was impervious to such influence, he worried that the law enforcement agencies he relied on might not be. He had emphasized to Jiminy that they needed to crack something soon.

Jiminy knew that Carlos meditated to work through thorny problems, and that this practice often led to unplanned naps. She hadn’t meant to interrupt or embarrass him.

Sure enough, he was barefoot and rumpled when he cracked open his door a moment later. Jiminy had an unsettling urge to crawl into bed with him.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Everything’s great—I’m sorry to bother you,” Jiminy began.

“I gotta go anyway,” a woman’s voice said from behind Carlos.

She was tan with frosted blond hair. She looked familiar, but Jiminy couldn’t place where she’d previously seen her.

“I was just interviewing Gloria,” Carlos explained.

The woman laughed a smoker’s husky cackle.

“Yeah, I hope you got what you needed,” she said, swatting Carlos’s butt as she breezed out the door. She didn’t look at Jiminy as she passed. She just straightened the straps of her dress, donned her sunglasses, and strode toward the parking lot. Jiminy watched her go, still too surprised to speak.

Carlos cleared his throat.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Jiminy refocused her attention on him. He was leaning against the door frame, observing her. In his gray T-shirt, with his limbs akimbo, he reminded her of a spider. Jiminy thought of all the times she’d used a glass and a sheet of paper to trap in lieu of squashing.

“We need to get to Travis Brayer,” she said brusquely. “You seem busy, so I’ll give it a shot myself.”

Her voice sounded different to her—more solid and sure. She wondered if this new confidence also showed in her stance and posture, and in the look she was giving Carlos now. Appraising, rather than seeking or questioning. She was hardening into her actual self all on her own, she could feel it.

“That’ll be delicate,” Carlos said slowly. “I should be there. I’ve just got one more interview here and then I’m free. Wait for me.”

Jiminy heard a car easing into the Comfort Inn parking lot and turned to see the librarian parking, looking toward Carlos expectantly. Her hair was curled, and she was wearing bright red lipstick.

Jiminy took her Polaroid camera from her bag and snapped a photo of Carlos.

“I’ll let you know how it goes,” she said, before turning and walking away.

In her car as she was driving off, the picture of Carlos slowly came into focus. Jiminy contemplated it, and the road ahead, without looking back.

Chapter 17

From his perch at Grady’s Grill, Walton saw Willa’s car glide by, driven by Jiminy, who seemed in a hurry. Walton wondered what lives she was racing to upend next. He certainly recognized the role she’d played in rattling his. Without her, he never would have committed his darkest secrets to paper.

He stubbed out his cigarette, pleased at the symmetry of ending it along with his latest, most essential project, and gathered his manuscript as he pondered what to do. He’d written a definitive history of the Waters murders, complete with a confession. He’d determined to be painfully, importantly honest, and now he was done.

He might share this loaded document with the rest of the world, or he might burn it. He hadn’t made up his mind.

Outside, storm clouds were gathering to the north and the air felt charged. Walton glanced to his right and saw Carlos standing on the upper balcony of the Comfort Inn, staring off down the road. Nearby, Tortillas looked as though it had been shut down, and Walton felt his reawakened impulse to investigate. “Curiosity killed the cat,” ran through his head in the warning voice of his late father. “Satisfaction brought her back,” chimed the answer at its heels.

A short time later, Walton was yelling Carlos’s name as he limped hurriedly across the Comfort Inn parking lot. Carlos took the stairs down two at a time to meet him, concerned by the agitation in the old man’s voice.

When they got to Tortillas, the door was still ajar, the way Walton had left it. Inside, the place was a mix of orderliness and chaos. The chairs had been put up on the tables in preparation for the floor to be mopped, but there was nothing clean about what lay beneath them. For a moment, Carlos thought it was blood, but he was relieved to see a can of red spray paint discarded in a corner of the room. Whoever had done this must have used more than one can, though. The floor was covered with spray paint outlines of bodies, the kind that are normally drawn in chalk at crime scenes. There were dozens of them, covering every inch of Tortillas floor space. They even climbed up the walls with a splayed limb here or there, in a way that would have struck Carlos as artistic if the whole thing hadn’t been so grotesque.

Inside each of the bodies was a name. Carlos read some of them, unaware that he was pronouncing them aloud.