Black-Eyed Susans

– Tessie, age 10, reading aloud to her grandfather from “The Juniper Tree,” 1988

Tessa, present day

For better or worse, I am walking the crooked path to my childhood.

The house sits topsy-turvy on the crest of a hill, like a kid built it out of blocks and toilet paper rolls. The chimney tilts in a comical direction, and turrets shoot off each side like missiles about to take off. I used to sleep inside one of them on summer nights and pretend I was rocketing through space.

More than my little brother liked, I had climbed out one of the windows onto the tiled roof and inched my scrappy knees toward the widow’s peak, grabbing sharp gargoyle ears and window ledges for balance. At the top, I leaned against the curlicued railing to survey the flat, endless Texas landscape and the stars of my kingdom. I played my piccolo to the night birds. The air rustled my thin white cotton nightgown like I was a strange dove alit on the top of a castle. It sounds like a fairy tale, and it was.

My grandfather made his home in this crazy storybook house in the country, but he built it for my brother, Bobby, and me. It wasn’t a huge place, but I still have no idea how he could afford it. He presented each of us with a turret, a place where we could hide out from the world whenever we wanted to sneak away. It was his grand gesture, our personal Disney World, to make up for the fact that our mother had died.

Granny tried to get rid of the place shortly after Granddaddy died, but the house didn’t sell till years later, when she was lying in the ground between him and their daughter. Nobody wanted it. It was weird, people said. Cursed. Their ugly words made it so.

After I was found, the house had been pasted in all the papers, all over TV. The local newspapers dubbed it Grim’s Castle. I never knew if that was a typo. Texans spell things different. For instance, we don’t always add the ly.

People whispered that my grandfather must have had something to do with my disappearance, with the murder of all the Black-Eyed Susans, because of his freaky house. “Shades of Michael Jackson and his Neverland Ranch,” they muttered, even after the state sent a man to Death Row a little over a year later for the crimes. These were the same people who had driven up to the front door every Christmas so their kids could gawk at the lit-up gingerbread house and grab a candy cane from the basket on the front porch.

I press the bell. It no longer plays Ride of the Valkyries. I don’t know what to expect, so I am a little surprised when the older couple that open the door look perfectly suited to living here. The plump worn-down hausfrau with the kerchief on her head, the sharp nose, and the dust rag in her hand reminds me of the old woman in the shoe.

I stutter out my request. There’s an immediate glint of recognition by the woman, a slight softening of her mouth. She locates the small crescent-moon scar under my eye. The woman’s eyes say poor little girl, even though it’s been eighteen years, and I now have a girl of my own.

“I’m Bessie Wermuth,” she says. “And this is my husband, Herb. Come in, dear.” Herb is scowling and leaning on his cane. Suspicious, I can tell. I don’t blame him. I am a stranger, even though he knows exactly who I am. Everyone in a five-hundred-mile radius does. I am the Cartwright girl, dumped once upon a time with a strangled college student and a stack of human bones out past Highway 10, in an abandoned patch of field near the Jenkins property.

I am the star of screaming tabloid headlines and campfire ghost stories.

I am one of the four Black-Eyed Susans. The lucky one.

It will only take a few minutes, I promise. Mr. Wermuth frowns, but Mrs. Wermuth says, Yes, of course. It is clear that she makes the decisions about all of the important things, like the height of the grass and what to do with a redheaded, kissed-by-evil waif on their doorstep, asking to be let in.

“We won’t be able to go down there with you,” the man grumbles as he opens the door wider.

“Neither of us have been down there too much since we moved in,” Mrs. Wermuth says hurriedly. “Maybe once a year. It’s damp. And there’s a broken step. A busted hip could do either of us in. Break one little thing at this age, and you’re at the Pearly Gates in thirty days or less. If you don’t want to die, don’t step foot inside a hospital after you turn sixty-five.”

As she makes this grim pronouncement, I am frozen in the great room, flooded with memories, searching for things no longer there. The totem pole that Bobby and I sawed and carved one summer, completely unsupervised, with only one trip to the emergency room. Granddaddy’s painting of a tiny mouse riding a handkerchief sailboat in a wicked, boiling ocean.

Now a Thomas Kinkade hangs in its place. The room is home to two flowered couches and a dizzying display of knickknacks, crowded on shelves and tucked in shadow boxes. German beer steins and candlesticks, a Little Women doll set, crystal butterflies and frogs, at least fifty delicately etched English teacups, a porcelain clown with a single black tear rolling down. All of them, I suspect, wondering how in the hell they ended up in the same neighborhood.

The ticking is soothing. Ten antique clocks line one wall, two with twitching cat tails keeping perfect time with each other.

I can understand why Mrs. Wermuth chose our house. In her way, she is one of us.

“Here we go,” she says. I follow her obediently, navigating a passageway that snakes off the living room. I used to be able to take its turns in the pitch dark on my roller skates. She is flipping light switches as we go, and I suddenly feel like I am walking to the chamber of my death.

“TV says the execution is in a couple of months.” I jump. This is exactly where my mind is traveling. The scratchy male voice behind me is Mr. Wermuth’s, full of cigarette smoke.

I pause, swallowing the knot in my throat as I wait for him to ask whether I plan to sit front row and watch my attacker suck in his last breath. Instead, he pats my shoulder awkwardly. “I wouldn’t go. Don’t give him another damn second.”

I am wrong about Herb. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong, or the last.

My head knocks into an abrupt curve in the wall because I’m still turned toward Herb. “I’m fine,” I tell Mrs. Wermuth quickly. She lifts her hand but hesitates to touch my stinging cheek, because it is just a little too close to the scar, the permanent mark from a garnet ring dangling off a skeletal finger. A gift from a Susan who didn’t want me to forget her, ever. I push Mrs. Wermuth’s hand away gently. “I forgot that turn was coming up so soon.”

“Crazy damn house,” Herb says under his breath. “What in the hell is wrong with living in St. Pete?” He doesn’t seem to expect an answer. The spot on my cheek begins to complain and my scar echoes, a tiny ping, ping, ping.

The hallway has settled into a straight line. At the end, an ordinary door. Mrs. Wermuth pulls out a skeleton key from her apron pocket and twists it in the lock easily. There used to be twenty-five of those keys, all exactly the same, which could open any door in the place. An odd bit of practicality from my grandfather.

A chilly draft rushes at us. I smell things both dying and growing. I have my first moment of real doubt since I left home an hour ago. Mrs. Wermuth reaches up and yanks on a piece of kite string dancing above her head. The bare, dusty lightbulb flickers on.

“Take this.” Mr. Wermuth prods me with the small Maglite from his pocket. “I carry it around for reading. You know where the main light switch is?”

“Yes,” I say automatically. “Right at the bottom.”

“Watch the sixteenth step,” Mrs. Wermuth warns. “Some critter chewed a hole in it. I always count when I go down. You take as long as you like. I think I’ll make all of us a cup of tea and you can tell a bit of the history of the house after. We’d both find that fascinating. Right, Herb?” Herb grunts. He’s thinking of driving a little white ball two hundred yards into Florida’s deep blue sea.

I hesitate on the second step, and turn my head, unsure. If anyone shuts this door, I won’t be found for a hundred years. I’ve never had any doubt that death is still eager to catch up with a certain sixteen-year-old girl.

Mrs. Wermuth offers a tiny, silly wave. “I hope you find what you are looking for. It must be important.”

If this is an opening, I don’t take it.

I descend noisily, like a kid, jumping over step sixteen. At the bottom, I pull another dangling string, instantly washing the room with a harsh fluorescent glow.

It lights an empty tomb. This used to be a place where things were born, where easels stood with half-finished paintings, and strange, frightening tools hung on pegboards, where a curtained darkroom off to the side waited to bring photos to life, and dress mannequins held parties in the corners. Bobby and I would swear we had seen them move more than once.

A stack of old chests held ridiculous antique dress-up hats wrapped in tissue paper and my grandmother’s wedding dress with exactly 3,002 seed pearls and my grandfather’s World War II uniform with the brown spot on the sleeve that Bobby and I were sure was blood. My grandfather was a welder, a farmer, a historian, an artist, an Eagle Scout leader, a morgue photographer, a rifleman, a woodworker, a Republican, a yellow dog Democrat. A poet. He could never make up his mind, which is exactly what people say about me.

He ordered us never to come down here alone, and he never knew we did. But the temptation was too great. We were especially fascinated with a forbidden, dusty black album that held Granddaddy’s crime scene photographs from his brief career with the county morgue. A wide-eyed housewife with her brains splattered across her linoleum kitchen floor. A drowned, naked judge pulled to shore by his dog.

I stare at the mold greedily traveling up the brick walls on every side. The black lichen flourishing in a large crack zigzagging across the filthy concrete floor.

No one has loved this place since Granddaddy died. I quickly cross over to the far corner, sliding between the wall and the coal furnace that years ago had been abandoned as a bad idea. Something travels lightly across my ankle. A scorpion, a roach. I don’t flinch. Worse things have crawled across my face.

Behind the furnace, it is harder to see. I sweep the light down the wall until I find the grimy brick with the red heart, painted there to fool my brother. He had spied on me one day when I was exploring my options. I run my finger lightly around the edges of the heart three times.

Then I count ten bricks up from the red heart, and five bricks over. Too high for little Bobby to reach. I jam the screwdriver from my pocket into the crumbling mortar, and begin to pry. The first brick topples out, and clatters onto the floor. I work at three other bricks, tugging them out one at a time.

I flash the light into the hole.

Stringy cobwebs, like spin art. At the back, a gray, square lump.

Waiting, for seventeen years, in the crypt I made for it.

Tessie, 1995

“Tessie. Are you listening?”

He is asking stupid questions, like the others.

I glance up from the magazine, open in my lap, that I had conveniently found beside me on the couch. “I don’t see the point.”

I flip a page, just to irritate him. Of course he knows I’m not reading.

“Then why are you here?”

I let the air hang with thick silence. Silence is my only instrument of control in this parade of therapy sessions. Then I say, “You know why. I am here because my father wants me to be here.” Because I hated all the others. Because Daddy is so sad, and I can’t stand it. “My brother says I’ve changed.” Too much information. You’d think I’d learn.

His chair legs squeak on the hardwood floor, as he shifts positions. Ready to pounce. “Do you think you’ve changed?”

So obvious. Disgusted, I flip back to the magazine. The pages are cold and slick and stiff. They smell of cloying perfume. It’s the kind of magazine that I suspect is filled with bony, angry girls. I wonder: Is that what this man sees when he stares at me? I’d lost twenty pounds in the last year. Most of my track star muscle tone, gone. My right foot is wrapped in a new leaden cast, from the third surgery. Bitterness rises in my lungs like hot steam. I suck in a deep breath. My goal is to feel nothing.

“OK,” he says. “Dumb question.” I know that he’s watching me intently. “How about this one: Why did you pick me this time?”

I toss the magazine down. I try to remember that he is making an exception, probably doing the district attorney a favor. He rarely treats teen-age girls.

“You signed a legal document that said you will not prescribe drugs, that you will not ever, ever publish anything about our sessions or use me for research without my knowledge, that you will not tell a living soul you are treating the surviving Black-Eyed Susan. You told me you won’t use hypnosis.”

“Do you trust that I will not do any of those things?”

“No,” I snap back. “But at least I’ll be a millionaire if you do.”

“We have fifteen minutes left,” he says. “We can use the time however you like.”

“Great.” I pick up the magazine full of bony, angry girls.

Tessa, present day

Two hours after I leave Granddaddy’s, William James Hastings III arrives at my house, a 1920s bungalow in Fort Worth with somber black shutters and not a single curve or frill. A jungle of color and life thrives behind my front door, but outside, I choose anonymity.

I’ve never met the man with the baronial name settling in on my couch. He can’t be older than twenty-eight, and he is at least 6’3”, with long, loose arms and big hands. His knees bang up against the coffee table. William James Hastings III reminds me more of a professional pitcher in his prime than a lawyer, like his body’s awkwardness would disappear the second he picked up a ball. Boyish. Cute. Big nose that makes him just short of handsome. He has brought along a woman in a tailored white jacket, white-collared shirt, and black pants. The type who cares only vaguely about fashion, as professional utility. Short, natural blond hair. Ring-free fingers. Flat, clipped, unpolished nails. Her only adornment is a glittering gold chain with an expensive-looking charm, a familiar squiggly doodle, but I don’t have time to think about what it means. She’s a cop, maybe, although that doesn’t make sense.

The gray lump, still covered in dust and ancient spider threads, sits between us on the coffee table.

“I’m Bill,” he says. “Not William. And definitely not Willie.” He smiles. I wonder if he’s used this line on a jury. I think he needs a better one. “Tessa, as I said on the phone, we’re thrilled that you called. Surprised, but thrilled. I hope you don’t mind that Dr. Seger-Joanna-tagged along. We don’t have any time to waste. Joanna is the forensic scientist excavating the bones of the… Susans tomorrow. She’d like to take a quick sample of your saliva. For DNA. Because of the issues we face with lost evidence and junk science, she wants to do the swab herself. That is, if you’re really serious. Angie never thought-”

I clear my throat. “I’m serious.” I feel a sudden pang for Angela Rothschild. The tidy silver-haired woman hounded me for the past six years, insisting that Terrell Darcy Goodwin was an innocent man. Picking at each doubt until I was no longer sure.

Angie was a saint, a bulldog, a little bit of a martyr. She’d spent the last half of her life and most of her parents’ inheritance freeing prisoners who’d been bullied by the state of Texas into wrongful convictions. More than 1,500 convicted rapists and murderers begged for her services every year, so Angie had to be choosy. She told me that playing God with those calls and letters was the only thing that ever made her consider quitting. I’d been to her office once, the first time she contacted me. It was housed in an old church basement located on an unpleasant side of Dallas known best for its high fatality rate for cops. If her clients couldn’t see the light of day or catch a quick Starbucks, she said, then neither could she. Her company in that basement was a coffeepot, three more attorneys who also worked other paying jobs, and as many law students as would sign on.

Angie sat in the same spot on my couch nine months ago, in jeans and scuffed black cowboy boots, with one of Terrell’s letters in her hand. She begged me to read it. She had begged me to do a lot of things, like give one of her expert gurus a shot at retrieving my memory. Now she was dead of a heart attack, found facedown in a pile of documents about Goodwin’s case. The reporter who wrote her obituary found that poetic. My guilt in the week since she died has been almost unbearable. Angie, I realized too late, was one of my tethers. One of the few who never gave up on me.

“Is this… what you have for us?” Bill stares at the filthy plastic grocery bag from Granddaddy’s basement like it is stuffed with gold. It has left a trail of pebbly mortar across the glass, right beside a pink hair band twisted with a strand of my daughter Charlie’s auburn hair.

“You said on the phone that you had to go… find it,” he says. “That you’d told Angie about this… project… but you weren’t sure where it was.”

It isn’t really a question, and I don’t answer.

His eyes wander the living room, strewn with the detritus of an artist and a teen-ager. “I’d like to set up a meeting at the office in a few days. After I’ve… examined it. You and I will have to go over all of the old ground for the appeal.” For such a large guy, there is a gentleness about him. I wonder about his courtroom style, if gentleness is his weapon.

“Ready for the swab?” Dr. Seger interrupts abruptly, all business, already stretching on latex gloves. Maybe worried that I’ll change my mind.

“Sure.” We both stand up. She tickles the inside of my cheek and seals microscopic bits of me in a tube. I know she plans to add my DNA to the collection provided by three other Susans, two of whom still go by the more formal name of Jane Doe. I feel heat emanating from her. Anticipation.

I return my attention to the bag on the table, and Bill. “This was kind of an experiment suggested by one of my psychiatrists. It might be more valuable for what isn’t there than what is.” In other words, I didn’t draw a black man who looked like Terrell Darcy Goodwin.

My voice is calm, but my heart is lurching. I am giving Tessie to this man. I hope it is not a mistake.

“Angie… she would be so grateful. Is grateful.” Bill crooks a finger up, the Michelangelo kind of gesture that travels up to the sky. I find this comforting: a man who is bombarded by people blocking his path every day-half-decent people clinging stubbornly to their lies and deadly mistakes-and yet he still believes in God. Or, at least, still believes in something.

Dr. Seger’s phone buzzes in her pocket. She glances at the screen. “I’ve got to take this. One of my Ph.D. students. I’ll meet you in the car, Bill. Good job, girl. You’re doing the right thing.” Gurrl. A slight twang. Oklahoma, maybe. I smile automatically.

“Right behind you, Jo.” Bill is moving deliberately, shutting his briefcase, gingerly picking up the bag, in no apparent hurry. His hands grow still when she shuts the door. “You’ve just met greatness. Joanna is a mitochondrial DNA genius. She can work goddamn miracles with degraded bones. She rushed to 9/11 and didn’t leave for four years. Made history, helping identify thousands of victims out of charred bits. Lived at the YMCA at first. Took communal showers with the homeless. Worked fourteen-hour days. She didn’t have to, it wasn’t her job, but whenever she could, she sat down and explained the science to grieving families so they could be as sure as she was. She learned a smattering of Spanish so she could try to talk to the families of the Mexican dishwashers and waiters who worked in restaurants in the North Tower. She is one of the best forensic scientists on the planet, who happens to be one of the kindest human beings I’ve ever met, and she is giving Terrell a chance. I want you to understand the kind of people on our side. Tell me, Tessa, why are you? Why are you suddenly on our side?”

A slight edge has crept into his voice. He is gently telling me not to screw them.

“There are several reasons,” I say unsteadily. “I can show you one of them.”

“Tessa, I want to know everything.”

“It’s better if you see it.”

I lead him down our narrow hall without speaking, past Charlie’s messy purple womb, usually pulsing with music, and throw open the door at the end. This wasn’t in my plan, not today anyway.

Bill looms like a giant in my bedroom, his head knocking into the antique chandelier dangling with sea glass that Charlie and I scavenged last summer on the gray beaches of Galveston. He ducks away and brushes against the curve of my breast by accident. Apologizes. Embarrassed. For a second, I see this stranger’s legs tangled in my sheets. I can’t remember a time that I let a man in here.

I watch painfully as Bill absorbs intimate details about me: the cartoonish portrait of Granddaddy’s house, gold and silver jewelry littered across my dresser, the close-up of Charlie staring out of lavender eyes, a neat pile of freshly laundered white lace panties on the chair, which I wish to God were tucked in a drawer.

He is already edging himself backward, toward the door, clearly wondering what the hell he has gotten himself into. Whether he has pinned his hopes for poor Terrell Darcy Goodwin on a crazy woman who has led him straight to her bedroom. Bill’s expression makes me want to laugh out loud, even though I am not above entertaining a fantasy about an all-American guy with two degrees, when my type runs the opposite direction.

Even though what I’m about to show him keeps me up at night, reading the same paragraph of Anna Karenina over and over, listening to every creak of the house and finger of wind, every barefoot midnight step of my daughter, every sweet sleep sound that floats out of her mouth and down the hall.

“Don’t worry.” I force lightness into my voice. “I like my men rich and less altruistic. And you know… old enough to grow facial hair. Come over here. Please.”

“Cute.” But I can hear relief. He makes it in two strides. His eyes follow my finger, out the window.

I am not pointing to the sky, but to the dirt, where a nest of black-eyed Susans is still half-alive under the windowsill, teasing me with beady black eyes.

“It is February,” I say quietly. “Black-eyed Susans only bloom like this in summer.” I pause for this to sink in. “They were planted three days ago, on my birthday. Someone grew them especially for me, and put them under the window where I sleep.”

The abandoned field on the Jenkins property was licked to death by fire about two years before the Black-Eyed Susans were dumped there. A reckless match tossed by a lost car on a lonely dirt road cost a destitute old farmer his entire wheat crop and set the stage for the thousands and thousands of yellow flowers that covered the field like a giant, rumpled quilt.

The fire also carved out our grave, an uneven, loping ditch. Black-eyed Susans sprung up and decorated it brazenly long before we arrived. The Susans are a greedy plant, often the first to thrive in scorched, devastated earth. Pretty, but competitive, like cheerleaders. They live to crowd out the others.

One lit match, one careless toss, and our nicknames were embedded in serial killer lore forever.

Bill, still in my bedroom, has shot Joanna a lengthy text, maybe because he doesn’t want to answer her questions on the phone in front of me. We meet her outside my window in time to watch her dip a vial into the black speckled dirt. The squiggly charm on her necklace, glinting in the sun, brushes a petal as she bends over. I still can’t recall the symbol’s meaning. Religious, maybe. Ancient.

“He or she used something besides the dirt in the ground,” Joanna said. “Probably a common brand of potting soil, and seeds that can be picked up at Lowe’s. But you never know. You should call the cops.”

“And tell them someone is planting pretty flowers?” I don’t want to sound sarcastic, but there it is.

“It’s trespassing,” Bill says. “Harassment. You know, this doesn’t have to be the work of the killer. It could be any crazy who reads the papers.” It is unspoken, but I know. He is uncertain of my mental state. He hopes I have more than this patch of flowers under my window to bolster a judge’s belief in Terrell. A little part of him wonders whether I planted the flowers myself.

How much do I tell him?

I suck in a breath. “Every time I call the cops, it ends up on the Internet. We get calls and letters and Facebook crazies. Presents on the doorstep. Cookies. Bags of dog poop. Cookies made of dog poop. At least I hope it’s just dog poop. Any attention makes my daughter’s life at school a living hell. After a few years of beautiful peace, the execution is stirring everything up again.” Exactly why, for years, I told Angie no and no and no. Whatever doubts crept in, I had to push away. In the end, I understood Angie, and Angie understood me. I will find another way, she had assured me.

But things were different now. Angie was dead.

He’d stood under my window.

I brush away something whispery threading its way through my hair. I vaguely wonder whether it is a traveler from Granddaddy’s basement. I remember sticking my hand blindly into that musty hole a few hours ago, and turn my anger up a notch. “The look on your faces right now? That mixture of pity and uneasiness and misplaced understanding that I still need to be treated like the traumatized sixteen-year-old girl I used to be? I’ve been getting that look since I can remember. That’s how long I’ve been protecting myself, and so far, so good. I’m happy now. I am not that girl anymore.” I wrap my long brown sweater around me a little more tightly even though the late winter sun is a warm stroke across my face. “My daughter will be home any minute, and I’d rather she doesn’t meet the two of you until I’ve explained a few things. She doesn’t know yet that I called you. I want to keep her life as normal as possible.”

“Tessa.” Joanna ventures a step toward me and stops. “I get it.”

There is such a terrible weight in her voice. I get it. Bombs dropping one two three to the bottom of the ocean.

I scan her face. Tiny lines etched by other people’s sorrow. Blue-green eyes that have flashed on more horror than I could ever fathom. Smelled it. Touched it, breathed it, as it rained down in ashes from the sky.

“Do you?” My voice is soft. “I hope so. Because I am going to be there when you excavate those two graves.”

My daddy paid for their coffins.

Joanna is rubbing the charm between her fingers, like it is a holy cross.

I suddenly realize that, in her world, it is.

She is wearing a double helix made of gold.

The twisted ladder of life.

A strand of DNA.

Tessie, 1995

One week later. Tuesday, 10 A.M. sharp. I am back on the doctor’s plump couch, with company. Oscar rubs his wet nose against my hand reassuringly, then settles in on the floor beside me, alert. He’s been mine since last week, and I will go nowhere without him. Not that anyone argues. Oscar, sweet and protective, makes them hopeful.

“Tessie, the trial is in three months. Ninety days away. My most important job right now is to prepare you emotionally. I know the defense attorney, and he’s excellent. He’s even better when he truly believes he holds the life of an innocent man in his hands, which he does. Do you understand what that means? He will not take it easy on you.”

This time, right down to business.

My hands are folded primly in my lap. I’m wearing a short, blue-plaid pleated skirt, white lacy stockings, and black patent-leather boots. I’ve never been a prim girl, despite the reddish-gold hair and freckles my wonderfully corny grandfather claimed were fairy dust. Not then, not now. My best friend, Lydia, dressed me today. She burrowed into my messy drawers and closet, because she couldn’t stand the fact that I no longer make any effort to match. Lydia is one of the few friends who isn’t giving up on me. She is currently taking her fashion cues from the movie Clueless, but I haven’t seen it.

“OK,” I say. This is, after all, one of two reasons I am sitting here. I am afraid. Ever since they snatched Terrell Darcy Goodwin away from his Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast in Ohio eleven months ago and told me I would need to testify, I have counted the days like terrible pills. Today, we are eighty-seven days away, not ninety, but I do not bother to correct him.

“I remember nothing.” I am sticking with this.

“I’m sure the prosecutor has told you that doesn’t matter. You’re living, breathing evidence. Innocent girl vs. unspeakable monster. So let’s just begin with what you do remember. Tessie? Tessie? What are you thinking right now, this second? Spit it out… don’t look away, OK?”

I crane my neck around slowly, gazing at him out of two mossy gray pools of nothingness.

“I remember a crow trying to peck out my eyes,” I say flatly. “Tell me. What exactly is the point of looking, when you know I can’t see you?”

Tessa, present day

Technically, this is their third grave. The two Susans being exhumed tonight in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Fort Worth were his older kills. Dug up from their first hiding place and tossed in that field with me like chicken bones. Four of us in all, dumped in the same trip. I was thrown on top with a girl named Merry Sullivan, who the coroner determined had been dead for more than a day. I overheard Granddaddy mutter to my father, “The devil was cleaning out his closets.”

It is midnight, and I am at least three hundred feet away, under a tree. I have darted under the police tape that marks off the site. I wonder who the hell they think is walking a cemetery at this time of night but ghosts. Well, I guess I am.

They’ve erected a white tent over the two graves, and it glows with pale light, like a paper lantern. There are far more people here than I expected. Bill, of course. I recognize the district attorney from his picture in the paper. There’s a balding man beside him in an ill-fitting suit. At least five policemen, and another five human beings dressed like aliens in Tyvek suits, wandering in and out of the tent. I know that the medical examiner is among them. Careers ride on this one.

Did the reporter who wrote Angie’s obituary know that his words would pry loose the rusty lever of justice? Create a small public outcry in a state that executes men monthly? Change a judge’s mind about exhuming the bones and considering a new trial? Convince me once and for all to dial the phone?

The man in the suit suddenly pivots. I catch the flash of a priest’s collar before I duck behind the tree. My eyes sting for a second, struck by this furtive operation and the supreme effort to treat these girls with dignity and respect when no one has a clue who they are, when there is not a reporter in sight.

The girls rising out of the earth tonight were nothing but bones when they were transported to that old wheat field eighteen years ago. I was barely alive. They say that Merry had been dead at least thirty hours. By the time the cops got to us, Merry was pretty well scavenged. I tried to protect her, but at some point in the night I passed out. Sometimes, I can still hear the animated conversation of the field rats. I can’t tell anybody who loves me these things. It’s better if they think I don’t remember.

The doctors say my heart saved me. I was born with a heart genetically on the slow side to begin with. Add the fact that I was in peak running condition as one of the nation’s top high-school hurdlers. On a normal day, doing homework, eating a hamburger, or painting my nails, my pulse clicked along at a steady thirty-seven beats a minute and crawled as low as twenty-nine at night when I slept. The average heart rate for a teen-ager is about seventy. Daddy had a habit of waking up at two every morning and checking to see if I was breathing, even though a famous Houston cardiologist had told him to relax. For sure, my heart was a bit of a phenomenon, as was my speed. People whispered about the Olympics. Called me the Little Fireball because of my hair and my temper when I ran a bad time or a girl nudged me off a hurdle.

While I fought for life in that grave, the doctors say my heart wound down to around eighteen. An EMT at the scene even mistook me for dead.

The district attorney told the jury that I surprised the Black-Eyed Susan killer, not the other way around. Set off a panic in him, prompted him to get rid of the evidence. That the large bruise on Terrell Darcy Goodwin’s gut in the blown-up exhibit photograph, blue and green and yellow tie-dye, was my artwork. People appreciate pretty fantasies like this, where there is a feisty hero, even when there is no factual basis for it.

A dark van is slowly backing up to the tent. O. J. Simpson got off the same year I testified, and he massacred his wife and left his blood behind on her gate. There was no solid DNA evidence against Terrell Darcy Goodwin, except a tattered jacket mired in the mud a mile away with his blood type on the right cuff. The spot of blood was so tiny and degraded they couldn’t tackle DNA, still fairly new in criminal court. It was enough for me to hold on to back then, but not anymore. I pray that Joanna will work her high priestess magic, and we will finally know who these two girls are. I’m counting on them to lead all of us to peace.

I turn to go, and my toe catches the edge of something. I pitch forward, instantly breathless, palms out, onto an old broken gravestone. The roots have bullied the marker until it toppled over and broke in half.

Did anyone hear? I glance around quickly. The tent is half-down. Someone is laughing. Shadows moving, none of them my way. I push myself up, hands stinging, brushing off the death and grit clinging to my jeans. I tug my cell phone out of my back pocket, and it casts its friendly light when I press the button. I shine it over the gravestone. A red smear from my hands marks the sleeping lamb guarding over Christina Driskill.

Christina entered the world, and escaped it, on the same day. March 3, 1872.

My mind burrows into the rocky dirt, fighting its way to the small wooden box that rests under my feet, tilted, cracked open, strangled by roots.

I’m thinking of Lydia.

Tessie, 1995

“Do you cry often?” First question. Gentle.

“No,” I say. So much for Lydia’s beauty fix of sticking two frozen spoons under my eyes after my little jags.

“Tessie, I want you to tell me the very last thing you saw, before you went blind.” No lingering on my puffy face. Taking up right where we left off last time. Smart tactic, I think grudgingly. He actually used the word blind, which no one else would dare say to my face except Lydia, who also told me three days ago to get up and wash my hair because it looked like stale cotton candy.

This doctor has already figured out that a warm-up act with me was a complete waste of time.

I saw my mother’s face. Beautiful, kind, loving. That’s the last perfectly clear image that hung before me, except that my mother has been dead since I was eight, and my eyes were wide open. My mother’s face, and then nothing but a shimmering gray ocean. I often think it was kind of God to introduce me to blindness that way.

I clear my throat, determined to say something in today’s session, to appear more cooperative, so he will tell Daddy that I am making progress. Daddy, who takes off from his job every Tuesday morning to bring me here. For whatever reason, I don’t think this doctor will lie to him, like most of the others. The way this doctor asks his questions is not the same. Neither are my answers, and I’m not sure why.

“There were a bunch of cards on the windowsill in my hospital room,” I say casually. “One of them had a picture of a pig on the front. Wearing a bow tie and a top hat. It said, ‘I hope you squeal better soon.’ The pig-that’s the last thing I saw.”

“An unfortunate choice of wording on the card.”

“Ya think?”

“Did anything else bother you about that greeting card?”

“No one could read the signature.” An illegible squiggle, like a wire spring.

“So you didn’t know who it was from.”

“A lot of strangers sent cards from all over. And flowers and stuffed animals. There were so many, my father asked them to be sent on to the children’s cancer floor.” Eventually, the FBI got a clue and swept everything to a lab. I later worried about what they might have ripped out of a dying kid’s hands in return for not a scrap of useful evidence.

The pig held a daisy in his pink hoof. I had left that part out. At sixteen, drugged up in a hospital bed and scared out of my mind, I didn’t know the difference between a yellow daisy and a black-eyed Susan.

My cast is itching like crazy, and I reach into the slim gap between my calf and the cast with two fingers. Can’t get to the spot on my ankle. Oscar licks my leg with a sandpaper tongue, trying to help.

“OK, maybe that card was the trigger,” the doctor says. “Maybe not. It’s a start. Here’s my thinking. We’re going to talk about your conversion disorder before we move on to preparing you for court. In the interest of time, there was hope by… others… that I could work around it. But it is in the way.”

Ya think?

“As far as I’m concerned, time stands still in this room.” He’s telling me no pressure. That we’re sailing together in my gray ocean, and I control the wind. This is the first lie I know he’s told me.

Conversion disorder. The nice, fancy name for it.

Freud called it hysterical blindness.

All those expensive tests and nothing physically wrong.

All in her head.

Poor thing doesn’t want to see the world.

She will never be the same.

Why do people think I can’t hear them?

I tune back in to his voice. I’ve decided he sounds like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. Rough Texas drawl. Smart as hell, and knows it.

… it’s not that uncommon in young females who have endured a trauma like this. What is uncommon is that it’s lasted this long. Eleven months.”

Three hundred and twenty-six days, doctor. But I don’t correct him.

A slight squeak as he shifts in his chair, and Oscar rises up protectively. “There are exceptions,” he says. “I once treated a boy, a virtuoso pianist, who had practiced eight hours a day since he was five. He woke up one morning and his hands were frozen. Paralyzed. Couldn’t even hold a glass of milk. Doctors couldn’t find a cause. He began to wiggle his fingers exactly two years later, to the day.”

The doctor’s voice is closer. At my side. Oscar bangs my arm with his nose, to let me know. The doctor is sliding something thin and cool and smooth into my hand. “Try this,” he says.

A pencil. I grasp it. Dig it deep into the side of my cast. Feel intense, gratifying relief. A slight breeze as the doctor moves away, maybe the flap of his jacket. I’m certain he looks nothing like Tommy Lee Jones. But I can picture Oscar. White as fresh snow. Blue eyes that see everything. Red collar. Sharp little teeth if you bother me.

“Does this piano player know that you talk about him to other patients?” I ask. I can’t help myself. The sarcasm is a horsewhip I can’t put away. But on our third Tuesday morning together, I have to admit this doctor is starting to get to me. I’m feeling the first pinch of guilt. Like I need to try harder.

“As a matter of fact, yes. I was interviewed for a Cliburn documentary about him. The point is: I believe you will see again.”

“I’m not worried.” I blurt it out.

“That is often a symptom of conversion disorder. A lack of caring about whether you’ll ever go back to normal. But, in your case, I don’t think that’s true.”

His first direct confrontation. He waits silently. I feel my temper flare.

“I know the real reason why you made an exception to see me.” My voice cracks a little when I want it to sound defiant. “What you have in common with my father. I know you had a daughter who disappeared.”

Tessa, present day

Angie’s utilitarian metal desk looks exactly the way I remember, buried in mountains of paper and file folders. Shoved into a corner of an expansive, open basement room at St. Stephen’s, the stone-and-brick Catholic church that sits defiantly in the 2nd Avenue and Hatcher Street corridor of hell. Smack in the center of a Dallas neighborhood that made a Top 25 FBI list for most dangerous in the nation.

It is high Texas noon outside, but not in here. In here, it is gloomy and timeless, colored by the stains of a violent history, when this church was abandoned for eight years and this room was used as an execution factory for drug dealers.

The first and only time I’d been here, Angie told me that the hopeful young priest who rented her the space whitewashed the walls four times himself. The indentations and bullet holes in the walls, he told her, were going to be permanent, like the nails in the cross. Never forget.

Her desk lamp is the single thing glowing, casting faint light on the unframed print tacked above it. The Stoning of Saint Stephen. Rembrandt’s first known work, painted at nineteen. I had learned about the chiaroscuro technique in another basement, with my grandfather bent over his easel. Strong lights and heavy shadows. Rembrandt was a master of it. He made sure the brilliance of heaven was opening up for Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, murdered by a mob because evil people told lies about him. Three priests huddle in the upper corner. Watching him die. Doing nothing.

I wonder which came first to the basement: this print or Angie, who decided Saint Stephen’s fate was a most appropriate marker for her desk. The edges of the print are soft and furry. It is attached to the pockmarked wall by three scratched yellow thumbtacks and one red one. A small rip on the left side has been repaired with Scotch tape.

Two inches away is another vision of heaven. A drawing on lined notebook paper. Five stick figures with lopsided butterfly wings illuminated by a bright orange sunburst. A child’s crooked print tumbles across the sky: ANGIE’S ANGELS.

I learned in Angie’s obituary that this drawing was a long-ago gift from the six-year-old daughter of Dominicus Steele, an apprentice plumber accused of raping an SMU coed outside a Fort Worth bar in the ’80s. Dominicus was identified by the victim and two of her sorority sisters.

That night, he’d flirted with the victim up close. He was big and black, and a good dancer. The white college girls loved him until they decided he was the guy in the gray hooded sweatshirt running away from their drunk, crumpled friend in the alley. Dominicus was freed by DNA extracted from semen stored for twelve years in an evidence storage unit. Dominicus’s mother was the first to speak to reporters in terms of “Angie’s Angels,” and her sweet little moniker stuck.

I’d never describe Angie as an angel. She did whatever she had to. She was a very good liar when she needed to be. I know, because she had lied for Charlie and me.

I take a step, and the hollow sound of my boot echoes on the cheap yellow linoleum that covers up God knows what. The four other desks that are scattered around the floor, in similar states of paper chaos, are also empty. Where is everybody?

There’s a blue door on the far side of the room that’s impossible to miss. I venture over. Knock lightly. Nothing. Maybe I should just hunker down in Angie’s chair for a while. Swerve it around on the cranky roller wheels she complained about and stare into Rembrandt’s heaven. Ponder the role of the martyr.

Instead, I twist the knob and open the door a crack. Knock again. Hear animated voices. Push the door all the way. A long conference table. Blazing overhead lights. Bill’s startled face. Another woman, jumping out of her chair abruptly, knocking over her cup of coffee.

My eyes, traveling down the table, follow the river of amber liquid.

Head thrumming.

Copies of drawings, stretched edge to edge across the scratched surface.

Tessie’s drawings.

The real ones. And the ones that aren’t.

I am staring at the score, 12-28, scrawled in white chalk on a blackboard. A lopsided Little League game, maybe, or a bad day for the Dallas Cowboys. It is clear from the chart’s wording that these are the twelve men who have been freed over the years by Angie and her rotating legal crew, and the twenty-eight who have not.

The woman who tipped over the coffee, introduced to me as a third-year University of Texas law student named Sheila Dunning, has left us. William quickly swept up the copies of my drawings, tucked them out of the way, and set a fresh mug of hot coffee in front of me. He’s apologized multiple times, and I’ve said over and over, It’s OK, it’s OK, I have to see those drawings again sometime and I should have knocked louder.

Sometimes I long for the Tessie in me, who would have just spit out the unvarnished, angry truth: You’re a jerk. You knew I was coming. You knew I hadn’t looked at these since I dug them out of a wall.

“Thanks for driving all the way down here.” He slides into a chair beside me and slaps a new yellow legal pad on the table. He is wearing jeans, Nikes, and a slightly pilled green pullover sweater that is too short for his frame, the curse of a broad-shouldered man. “Are you still in the mood to do this?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Tessie, retorting. Still in there, after all.

“We don’t have to talk here. In this room.” He gazes at me intently. “This is our war room. Generally off limits to clients.”

My eyes linger over the walls. Beside the chalkboard, enlarged snapshots of five men. Current cases, I assume. Four of the men are African-American. A young Terrell Darcy Goodwin stars in the center photograph. His arm is tossed around a guy in a red-and-gray high school baseball uniform, a little brother, maybe. Same good looks, wide-spaced eyes, chiseled cheekbones, café latte skin.

On the opposite wall: Crime scenes. Gaping mouths. Blank eyes. Confused limbs. I don’t linger.

I flick my head around to a giant erase board that is scribbled with some sort of timeline.

I see my name. Merry’s.

I open my mouth to speak and find his eyes glued to my crossed legs and the patch of bare white thigh above my black boots. I keep meaning to let out the hem of this skirt. I scoot my legs under the table. He resumes a professional mask.

“I’m not a client.” I swallow a sip of bitter liquid, read the words on the side of the mug. Lawyers Get You Off.

William follows my eyes. Rolls his. “Most of our cups are dirty. Could use a good washing out.” Joking. Letting the other moment, the curiosity about what’s under my skirt, pass.

“I’m fine in here, William.”

“Bill,” he reminds me. “Only people over seventy get to call me William.”

“Did the exhumation Tuesday go as planned?” I ask. “They kept it quiet. It didn’t even make the papers.”

“You should know the answer to that.”

“You saw me by the tree.”

“That hair of yours is hard to miss, even in the dark.”

So he’s a liar, too. My hair is down today, long, curling loosely past my shoulders. Still the same burnt color as the sixteen-year-old me. Two nights ago, at the cemetery, it was tucked up tight in my daughter Charlie’s black baseball cap.

“You tricked me,” I say. “Nice.”

I shift uncomfortably in the chair. I’m talking to a lawyer, one I haven’t paid a cent to keep my confidences. Sure, he could be the boy next door with those doe-y brown eyes and clean-cut hair and ears that stick out a little and enormous hands that could cover a grapefruit. The funny best friend of the guy you really want, until you realize… oh, shit.

He grins. “You look like my little sister does right before she slaps me. In answer to your question, a forensic anthropologist is getting a look at the bones first. Then Jo and her people step in. She would like both of us to watch her techs work the Black-Eyed Susan case next week. Asked me to invite you personally. Kind of as a peace offering since she ordered you not to be present at the exhumation. She really did feel bad about it.”

I shiver slightly. There’s no vent, no visible source of heat in here. My father used to say that February in Texas is a cold, bitter lady. March is when she loses her virginity.

“Bones are processed every Monday morning,” he continues. “Jo had to pull some strings to push the Susans to the head of the line. I can pick you up, if you like. The lab’s about twenty minutes from your place.”

“No worry this time about contamination?” This had been Joanna’s concern about me officially attending the exhuming of the bodies. She didn’t want even the slightest hint of broken protocol.

“We’ll be watching the process through a glass window. The new lab is set up as a teaching facility. State-of-the-art. Bones are flown in from all over the world. So are students and scientists who want to see Jo’s techniques firsthand.” He smiles tightly and picks up his pen. “Want to get started? I’ve got to be somewhere by two. For my job that pays the bills.” A corporate mediator, whatever the hell that is, according to his law firm’s website. I wonder where he is hiding his suit.

“Yep. Go ahead.” Spoken much more casually than I felt.

“Your testimony in ’95. Has anything changed? Have you remembered anything else in the last seventeen years about the attack or your attacker?”

“No.” I say it firmly. I am willing to help, I remind myself, but only to a point. I have two teen-agers to protect, the one I was and the one who sleeps in that purple room.

“Just to be sure, I’m going to ask a few specifics anyway, OK?”

I nod.

“Can you describe the face of your attacker?”

“No.”

“Do you remember where you met up with him?”

“No.”

“Do you have any memory of being dumped in that field?”

“No.”

“Do you ever remember seeing our client-Terrell Goodwin-before the day you testified?”

“No. Not to my knowledge.”

“No is a nice simple answer,” he says. “If that’s the truth.”

“It is. The truth.”

“Do you remember a single thing that happened in those hours you were missing?”

“No.”

“The last thing you remember is buying… tampons… at Walgreens?”

“And a Snickers bar. Yes.” The wrapper was found in the grave.

“You’ve heard your 911 call that night but do not recall making it?”

“Right. Yes.”

“Tessa, I have to ask again. Is there any way you will change your mind and undergo light hypnosis? See if there’s anything you can remember from those lost hours? Or examine the drawings you gave me with an expert? If we jog something, anything, loose it might help us get a new hearing in front of the judge.”

“Absolutely no to hypnosis.” I say it quietly. “I’ve read enough about it to know that I can be directed to false memories. But examining my drawings from therapy? Yes. I think so. I have no idea whether it will help.”

“Great. Great. I have someone in mind. Someone who has worked with me in the past. I think you’ll like her.” I almost laugh. If he only knew how many times I’d heard that.

He lays his pen at a perfect 90-degree angle. Twirls it. Stops it. Twirls it. William knows how to use a big, fat pause. I’m beginning to see that he might be a very clever boy in court.

“There’s a reason you’re sitting here, Tessa. Something you aren’t saying. I really need to know what it is. Because based on those answers, you might still think Terrell Darcy Goodwin is guilty as hell.”

I couldn’t sleep last night wondering exactly how I’d answer this question. “I feel like I hurt… Terrell… on the stand.” Slow, I tell myself. “That I was manipulated by a lot of people. For years. Angie eventually satisfied me that there is no convincing physical evidence against him. And I showed you the black-eyed Susans. Under my window.” Still keeping tabs.

“Yes.” His lips have stretched into a tight line. “But a judge will write off those flowers to your imagination, or just a random lunatic. He might infer that you did it yourself. Are you prepared for that?”

“Is that what you think? That I’m making it up?”

His gaze is direct, unbothered. Irritating as hell. Maybe William doesn’t deserve to know all of it. He certainly isn’t asking the right question.

I’m beginning to think he planned for me to stumble into this room all along. Slam me back into the past. Poke something sharp into my uncooperative brain.

“My drawings aren’t your magic bullet,” I say abruptly. “Don’t pin your hopes on an angry girl with a paintbrush.”

Tessie, 1995

Thursday. Only two days after our last meeting.

The doctor cut the Tuesday session short by twenty minutes, shortly after my outburst. He called twenty-four hours later to reschedule. I don’t know whether he was angry about me bringing up his daughter, or just unprepared to hear it. If I’ve learned anything about psychiatrists in the last year, it’s that they don’t like surprises from the guests. They want to be the one to scatter the path of stale bread crumbs, even if it leads into a dense forest where you can’t see at all.

“Good morning, Tessa.” Formal. “You caught me off guard the other day. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how to handle it. For you, or me.”

“I almost didn’t come back today. Or ever.” Not really true. For the first time in months, I feel like I own a small shred of power. I blow the bangs out of my eyes. Lydia took me to the mall for a new haircut yesterday. Cut, cut, cut, I insisted. I could almost hear my hair fall, soft and sad, to the floor. I wanted to change myself. Look more like a boy. My best friend appraised me critically when it was over. Informed me that I achieved the opposite. Short hair made me prettier, she said. Emphasized my small straight nose that I should thank the Lord Jesus for every day. Drew my eyes out like flying saucers in a big Texas sky. Lydia was practicing her similes for the SAT. She’d announced the very first time we linked arms in second grade that she was going to Princeton. I thought Princeton was a small town filled with eligible princes.

I think the doctor is pacing. Traveling the room. Oscar is not alerting me. He’s sleepy, maybe because he got his shots an hour ago. My latest worry is that Daddy considers Oscar a first step to a Seeing Eye dog, and faithful, untrained Oscar will be sent away.

“I’m not surprised you feel that way.” His voice is behind me. “I should have been straight from the beginning. About my daughter. Even though she has nothing to do with why I took your case.” His second lie. “It was a very long time ago.”

It bothers me, his voice bouncing at me from different places, a game of dodge ball in the dark.

I count two seconds before his chair creaks gently. Not a heavy man, not a skinny one. “Did your father tell you about my daughter?”

“No.”

“Did you… overhear something, then?” His question is almost timid. Like something an insecure normal person would ask. But this is pretty uncharted territory for him, I guess.

“I overhear things all the time,” I evade. “I guess my other senses are super-enlightened now.” This last part is not actually true at all. All my senses have gone haywire. Granny’s recipe for fried green beans with bacon dressing tastes like soggy cigarettes; my sweet little brother’s voice is like Aunt Hilda’s fake red fingernails scraping glass. I suddenly cry along to country music, which I always secretly thought was for dumb people.

I’m not telling this doctor any of that yet. Let him think I’m suddenly hyperaware. I’m not about to rat out Lydia, who has read me every word of every story on Terrell Darcy Goodwin and the Black-Eyed Susan investigation that she can get her hands on. Researched every shrink who has tried to tunnel into my brain.

All I know is that when I am lying on Lydia’s pink down comforter, with Alanis Morissette moaning, and my best friend reading animatedly from her stack of library printouts… those are the minutes and hours that I feel the safest. Lydia is the only one who still treats me exactly the same.

She’s relying on some innate seventeen-year-old certainty that I might die if I live in a silent cocoon, curled up and fragile. That handling me with care is not going to make me better.

For some reason, I think this doctor might be the second person to understand. He lost a daughter. He’s got to be a close personal friend with pain. I hold out hope for that.

Tessa, present day

I snap off one more picture with my iPhone. Three images in all. I should have done it five days ago, before their stems bowed and their eyes stared dejectedly at the ground.

I’ve told only Angie the whole story, I think. Now she’s dead.

I am not fooled by the fainting Susans under my windowsill. I know that each of the thirty-four eyes hoards enough seeds to carpet my whole yard, come spring. I slide on my gardening gloves and pick up the can of herbicide I’ve retrieved from the garage. I wonder whether he likes to watch this part of the process. I’ve learned that poison is the best method. Not since I was seventeen have I torn up the Susans by their roots.

A breeze flutters, scattering the spray. I taste it, bitter and metallic.

If I don’t hurry, I’m going to be late to pick up Charlie. I smother on one last cancerous coat. I strip off my gloves, leave them with the spray can, run to grab the keys off the kitchen counter, hop in the Jeep, and drive the ten minutes to the freshman gym. Home of the Fighting Colts. Chattering, texting girls stream onto the sidewalk, in ponytails and obscenely tight mandatory red gym shorts that mothers should officially complain about but don’t.

The backseat door pops open, startling me, like it does every time. “Hi, Mom.” Charlie tosses in a blue Nike duffle that always holds smelly surprises and a backpack of books that lands like a chunk of concrete. She jumps in and slams the door.

Smooth, angelic face. Sexy legs. Tight muscles not mature enough to fight back. Innocent, and not. I don’t want to be aware of these things, but I’ve trained myself to see her as he might.

“My laptop sucks,” she says.

“How was school? Practice?”

“I’m starved. Really, Mom. I couldn’t print my homework last night. I had to use your computer.”

This beautiful girl, the love of my life, the one I missed all day long, is already firing up my nerves.

“McDonald’s?” I ask.

“Surrrrre.”

I’ve stopped feeling guilty about the after-practice drive-through runs. It doesn’t keep my daughter from devouring a healthy full-course dinner two hours later. Charlie eats at least four times a day and remains a tall, slender rail. She has my old runner’s appetite and red hair and her father’s mood-changing eyes. Purplish is happy; gray is tired. Black is thoroughly pissed off.

Not for the first time, I wish that Charlie’s father weren’t thousands of miles away on an Army base in Afghanistan. I wish he weren’t just a serious fling fifteen years ago that went awry a month before I realized I was pregnant. Not that Charlie seems to care a whit that we never married. Lt. Col. Lucas Cox sends money like clockwork and stays in constant touch. I think a Skype session with Charlie is on tap for tonight.

“We will talk about the computer later, OK?”

No answer. She’s texting, I’m sure. I pull out from the curb and decide to let her decompress from the eight fluorescent-lighted hours she has spent constructing triangular prisms and deconstructing Charlotte Brontë. After Charlie abandoned Jane Eyre on the couch last night for Facebook, I noticed that the heroine gazing off the cover was sporting a new mustache and devil horns. She’s so whiny, Charlie whined this morning, while stuffing her mouth with bacon.

A few minutes later, we roll up to the drive-through.

“What do you want?” I ask her.

“Uhhhh.”

“Charlie, stop with the phone. You need to order.”

“OK.” Cheerful. “I would like a Big Mac, and a MacBook Pro.”

“Very funny.”

Truth is, I love this about her-the cocky sense of humor and confidence, her ability to make me laugh out loud when I don’t want to. I wait until I think Charlie is about halfway through her Big Mac to start The Conversation. In the Jeep, just us, there is always more of a chance my words will end up in her brain.

“I’ve changed my mind and decided to get involved in the Terrell Goodwin execution,” I say. “I’ve spoken with the new attorney on the case. A famous forensic scientist is going to reexamine the evidence. She swabbed my DNA this week.”

A short silence. “That’s good, Mom. You need to be absolutely sure. You’ve been worrying about this a lot lately. People are getting released on DNA stuff all the time now. Our science teacher told us that Dallas has freed more innocent people from Death Row than almost every other state. People just think we kill everybody.” I hear her crumple up the hamburger wrapper.

“Don’t toss that on the floor,” I say automatically. To myself, I think: Is that because we have more innocent people on Death Row?

“And Angie,” Charlie adds. “She was nice. She was, like, totally convinced. And she said that none of it was your fault.”

“I’ll be in the news again.” Meaning, Charlie won’t be immune.

“I’ve been through it before. My friends will take care of me. I got this, Mom.”

The naivete of it almost makes me want to cry. At the same time, it is hard to believe that Charlie is three years younger than I was when I testified. She seems so much more prepared.

I pull into our driveway and switch off the ignition. Charlie is rustling to get her stuff, but I don’t turn around. “Never, ever get in a car with someone you don’t know. Never walk alone. Don’t talk to reporters.” My voice sounds sharper than I’d like in the tiny, closed-up space. “If I’m not home, turn the security system on as soon as you close the door.”

It’s ridiculous to deliver these worn-out instructions for the thousandth time, but I’d become too complacent. I have vowed ever since Angie’s wake to know where Charlie is every single second. A few days ago, I turned down a freelance design project in Los Angeles to build a staircase out of old cars and recycled glass. It would have carried our finances for the next two years.

“Mom.” She packs as much teen-age patronization in those three letters as will fit. “I got this.”

Before I can respond, she’s tumbling out of the car, loaded up like a soldier entering battle, jogging to the front door with her house key in hand. She’s in the house in seconds. Prepared, like I taught her. Innocent, and not.

The question that neither of us ever asks out loud: But if not him, then who?

I follow her slowly, fiddling with my phone. I almost trip over the duffle she dumped in the foyer, think about calling out to her, stop myself. I head to the small desk in the living room where my laptop sits, call up the email I just sent to my own address, download, hit print. Listening to it regurgitate a couple of feet away, I think Charlie’s right-our house needs a more efficient grasp on technology.

The printer spits out three grainy pictures of wilting flowers. Charlie’s door is already closed when I pass by.

A few seconds later, I am on my tiptoes, pulling from the top shelf of my bedroom closet the shoebox boldly marked, Tax Documents.

The killer has planted black-eyed Susans for me six times. It didn’t matter where I was living. He likes to keep me guessing. I’m sure about this now.

He waited so long between plantings sometimes that, before Angie, I was able to convince myself on most days that the right killer sat in jail. That the first black-eyed Susans were the work of a random stalker, and the other times the whims of the wind.

This box, made for ASICS running shoes, size 7, marked Tax Documents, contains the photographs I snapped every time anyway. Just in case.

I set the box on the bed and lift the lid. Right on top, the one taken with my granddaddy’s old Polaroid Instant camera.

That first time, right after the trial, I had thought either I was crazy or that black-eyed Susans had suddenly sprung up in October under the live oak in our back yard because of a bizarre weather pattern. Except the ground looked disturbed. I dug up the wildflowers by myself a little frantically with an old kitchen spoon.

I didn’t want to tell anybody because life in my house was returning to some semblance of normal. I was done with therapy. Terrell Darcy Goodwin sat in jail. My dad was dating for the first time.

The spoon struck another surprise in the dirt that day-something hard, orange, and plastic. An old prescription bottle. The label ripped off. Childproof cap.

Charlie has turned up her music. It strains through the wall, but can’t drown out the words on a scrap of paper curled up in a little orange bottle.

Oh Susan, Susan, lovely dear

My vows shall ever true remain

Let me kiss off that falling tear

I never want to hurt you again

But if you tell, I will make

Lydia

A Susan, too

Tessie, 1995

After he leaves the office, my fingers brush over three stubby charcoal crayons; the cool metal coil binding a drawing pad; a Dixie cup of water; a few brushes, a narrow paint box with a squeaky hinge. The doctor has repeated the order of the paint colors four times, left to right. Black, blue, red, green, yellow, white.

As if what colors I choose will make a significant difference. I am already thinking of swirling the colors to make purple and gray, orange and aqua. The colors of bruises, and sunsets.

This is not the first time I have drawn blind. Right after Mom died, Granddaddy was constantly trying to distract me from grief.

We sat at his old cedar picnic table. He punched a No. 2 pencil through the center of a paper plate, a de facto umbrella, so that I could grasp the pencil but not watch my hand draw. “Making pictures in your head is primal,” he said. “You don’t need your eyes to do it. Start with the edges.”

I remember the faint blue flower border that etched the paper plate, that my fingers were sticky with sweat and chocolate, but not what I drew that day.

“Memories aren’t like compost,” the doctor had said, as he guided me over to his desk. “They don’t decay.”

I knew exactly what he wanted out of this little exercise. The priority was not to cure my blindness. He wanted to know why my ankle shattered into pieces, what implement etched the pink half-moon that hung under my eye. He wanted me to draw a face.

He didn’t say any of this, but I knew.

“There’s infinite storage space up here.” He tapped my head. “You simply have to dig into every box.”

One more self-help bite from him before he shut the door, and I would have screamed.

I can hear my father outside the door, droning blurry words, like a dull pencil. Oscar has settled into the cave under the desk, his head resting on my cast. Pressure, but nice pressure, like my mother’s hand on my back. The doctor’s voice floats through the door. They are talking about box scores, like the world is running along just fine.

My head is blank when the charcoal begins to rub insistently against the paper.

The click of the door opening startles me, and I jump, and Oscar jumps, and my pad slides and clunks to the floor. I have no idea how much time has passed, which is new, because ever since I went blind, I can guess the time of day within five minutes. Lydia attributes it to a primitive internal clock, like the one that reminds hibernating animals to wake up in the black isolation of their caves and venture back into the world.

I smell him, the same Tommy cologne that Bobby always liberally sprays on himself at Dillard’s. My doctor wears Tommy Hilfiger, sounds like Tommy Lee Jones. Everything Tommy.

“Just checking to see how it’s going,” he says.

He is at my side, reaching down, picking up the pad from the floor, placing it gently on the desk in front of me. My drawings, except for the one on the pad, are ripped out and scattered across his desk. My head pounds, and I press a finger into my right temple like there’s a pause button.

“May I?” he asks, which is ridiculous because I’m certain his eyes are already greedily scanning. He picks up a sheet, puts it down, picks up another.

The air is thick with the heat of his disappointment; he’s a teacher with a second-rate student who he has hoped will surprise him.

“It’s just the first time,” he says. Awkward silence. “You didn’t use any paint.” A hint of reproach?

He stiffens. Leans in closer, tickling my shoulder, turning my pad, which was apparently upside down. “Who is this?”

“I’m not done.”

“Tessie, who is this?”

I had scrubbed the charcoal against the page until it was black. I had dug into his desk drawer for the No. 2 pencil eraser that I used to swirl a chaotic nest of hair around her head. My fingernail carefully scratched out big eyes, delicate cheekbones and nose, full lips rounded into a frightened O.

I thought about the edges. No neck anchored her in the blackness. She floated in outer space, a silent, screaming constellation. I had drawn a face, but not the one he wanted.

“It’s your daughter.” Why I felt the urge to torture him, I do not know. I could have said it was Lydia. Or my mother. Or me. But I didn’t.

I feel a slight whoosh of air as he abruptly draws back. I wonder whether he wants to strike me. Oscar is whining way back in his throat.

“It looks nothing like her.” There is a slight crack in his voice. A picture forms in my head of a perfect black egg with a white hairline fracture.

I know that his reply is inappropriate, even silly. I am a skilled artist at seventeen, but this drawing is surely distorted, even childish. Of course it looks nothing like her. I’ve never met her. I’m blind.

He’s a doctor. He shouldn’t allow me to make any of this personal for him.

When did I become capable of such cruelty?

Tessa, present day

I’m thinking of Lydia as I shove a digger deep into the loose soil under my windowsill, pulling out the poisoned Susans, stacking them in a neat, weedy pile beside me. The metal of the digger is stained with traces of bloody rust, but the shiny part glints in the light filtering out the screen of my bedroom window.

The yellow curtains blow white in the moonlight, billowing and retracting. While I’d waited for Charlie to conk out, I plopped on the couch, flipped on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and scratched out a list on the back of a grocery slip, as if that somehow made the contents more harmless.

I wanted to see them neatly written down. Every single place I’d found a patch of black-eyed Susans in the years since the trial. The big question, which I already knew the answer to: Should I go back to each one of them alone? With Bill? With Joanna? Wouldn’t it just waste their time, make them think I was even crazier than they already did?

It seemed highly unlikely that I’d be able to find things he might have buried for me in the ground all these years later, or that I’d hit the right spot to dig, even with the photographs. Rain gushes, the earth moves.

Now, down on my hands and knees in the inky night, sifting my hand through the dirt, I wonder if I am wrong. I find an errant screw dropped from a worker’s hand when the windows were replaced two years ago. A scrap of paper. The stubborn roots of a vine that appeared like a white bone.

Lydia always knew what to do in these situations. She was the one with the scientific and logical mind, able to shove aside emotion and examine everything with the clinical detachment I didn’t possess. The summer we were eight, she stayed inside the lines of her coloring books, while I tried to invent a new color by melting crayons together on the sidewalk in the brutal Texas sun.

In elementary school, I liked to run against the wind for the battle of it; Lydia waited for me cross-legged on a blanket, reading something way too old for her. The Great Gatsby. Hamlet. 1984. Afterward, as I lay panting on the ground, she pressed cool fingers to my wrist and counted the beats of my pulse.

I knew that I would not die on Lydia’s watch. She’s the one who whispered in my ear while I stared at a waxy yellow version of my mother in the casket. She is not in there. She was unusually drawn to death, from the beginning.

When we were assigned a world history project on “a fascinating moment in British history,” two-thirds of Mrs. Baker’s freshman class wrote about the Beatles. I carefully etched a replica of the medieval London Bridge and pondered the miracle of God that kept the shops and houses crammed on top from crashing into the mighty Thames.

Lydia chose a river of evil so black and swirling you couldn’t see the bottom. Mrs. Baker asked her to read her report out loud to the class, probably because she knew it would keep us awake at our desks.

I’ll never forget Lydia’s chilling delivery of her opening lines, stolen from the coroner’s report.

The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek.

While most of her classmates were contemplating whether “I Am the Walrus” was just one big John Lennon acid trip, Lydia had buried herself in the story of Jack the Ripper’s final victim.

Mary Kelly met her grisly death at the 26 Dorset Street boardinghouse, room 13. She was 5’7”, twenty-five years old, a buxom prostitute, and owed twenty-seven shillings on her rent.

She was heard singing in her room hours before she died.

It doesn’t take a memory expert to figure out why I remember such details so many years later and very little about the medieval London Bridge. Lydia had turned on a British accent during her presentation. At one point, her fist thumped her chest three times in a dramatization of the first knife strikes.

Silly. Creepy.

To write that report, Lydia had immersed herself for two weekends in the Texas Christian University library, reading dissertations and nineteenth-century medical reports and essays from self-proclaimed “Ripperologists.” She tucked it in a plastic binder and told me to flip to the last page before she was supposed to turn it in.

I was gripped by horror porn: a black-and-white photograph of Mary Kelly lying in her flophouse bed, her insides ripped out. I never knew where Lydia found this, in the days before Google. Only that Lydia was always a relentless digger.

Why am I thinking about this now? I rub my hand across my forehead, wiping away sweat, leaving crumbs of dirt. I’m back in the kitchen, my foot on the trashcan pedal, dropping my collection into the trash. And then it hits me.

I had dismissed the scrap of paper because it didn’t bear a sadistic poem. Now I’m picking it out of the bin, examining it more closely. It could be part of a candy bar wrapper. Was it the kind of candy bar I bought at Walgreens the night I disappeared? The kind I bought every Tuesday for Roosevelt?

Roosevelt was a fixture on my Wednesday running route, nicknamed because at straight-up noon every single day, he stood on top of an old red bucket and spouted the entirety of FDR’s first inaugural speech.

By the time I flew by on Wednesdays after school, he was always long done with his diatribe. We had worked out a routine. I tossed a Snickers bar, his favorite, into the air without slowing my pace. He never failed to catch it and shoot me a big, toothy grin. It became a ritual of good luck during track season and a pact I kept up when summer started. I never lost a race after meeting Roosevelt.

And so it was decided. Every Tuesday night, I bought a Snickers bar. I didn’t buy two or three or four at a time. I didn’t buy them on Mondays or Saturdays. I bought one every Tuesday night, and he caught it on Wednesday afternoon, and I won and won and won.

But in those missing hours, I apparently did something I would never, ever consider doing. I ate his candy bar. There were traces of it in my vomit at the hospital.

I was committed to my ritual with Roosevelt. To winning. Did I eat the candy bar that night because I thought that I would never run a race again?

I grab a plastic snack bag out of the pantry shelf and seal the wrapper inside. Did he touch this? Did he stand under my window, snacking? My cell phone rings out from the living room couch, disturbing the silence that is everywhere except my chest.

Hastings, William.

“It’s late, Bill.” No hello.

“The day got away from me,” he says. “I just want to be sure you remember to be at the UNT lab tomorrow by 9:45, fifteen minutes before the techs start the process on the bones.”

How could I forget? I want to shout it at him, but instead say: “I’m driving myself.” This has to be the reason he called. He seems determined to pick me up.

Bill lets a couple of seconds elapse. “Joanna wouldn’t tell me what over the phone, but she says the forensic anthropologist has already found something.”

Tessie, 1995

“How is the drawing at home going?” He asks this before my butt hits the cushion.

“I forgot to bring any of them with me.” A lie. The drawings, nine new ones, are right where I want them-in a red Macy’s shirt box in my closet labeled Xtra Tampons, sure to dissuade my nosy little brother.

The phone on his desk suddenly buzzes. The emergency buzz, one of my favorite sounds in the world because it sucks minutes away from me.

“I’m sorry, Tessie,” he says. “Excuse me for just a moment. I’ve just checked in a patient at the hospital and was expecting a few questions from the nurse.”

The doctor’s voice travels over from the other side of the room. I can make out a few words. Elavil. Klonopin. Shouldn’t he be doing this privately? I’m really trying hard not to hear because I don’t want to imagine a person like me on the other end and get emotionally involved. So I focus on other things, like trying to match the doctor’s lazy drawl with Lydia’s description of him.

It was Lydia’s idea. Yesterday, with my blessing, she had hopped the bus to the TCU campus and sneaked into one of the doctor’s late afternoon summer classes: Anastasia Meets Agatha Christie: Exploring the Gray Matter About Amnesia.

When she told me the class title, I cringed a little. Too gimmicky. But then, I was looking for reasons to be critical.

If Lydia stuck on the big rounded plastic frames she wore when her contacts itched, she could easily disappear into a crowd of college students. Lydia’s father told her once that she was one of those people born thirty, and repeated it often, which Lydia carried around like a mortal wound. Me, well… I can’t tell Lydia but I feel a little uncomfortable around her dad these days.

Through our formative years, Mr. Bell concocted a kick-ass chili recipe, and hauled us to the shooting range, and whipped us around Lake Texoma in the unsinkable Molly every Labor Day and July 4th. But he was moody and known to strike out. And, since I turned fourteen, his eyes sometimes hesitated in the wrong places. Maybe he was just being more honest than most men greeted with puberty in bloom. Probably better to know, I reasoned, and wear longer shorts at her house.

Last night, after her successful day of spying and some of my dad’s leftover Frito pie, Lydia had been in especially good spirits. “Did you know that Agatha Christie went missing for eleven days in 1926 and no one had a clue where she was?” she had asked me breathlessly, from the corner of my bed.

I had her pictured in the usual position: legs pretzeled into an easy lotus, her pink-flowered Doc Martens lost somewhere on the floor, a hot pink scrunchy holding up a mountain of black hair. Pink was Lydia’s color.

A recap of the day’s events in the O.J. trial buzzed in our ears as background. It was impossible to get away from it. Daddy didn’t like a TV perched on top of my dresser, certainly didn’t like a bloody soundtrack, but he had relented instantly when I told him the constant noise made me feel less alone. That I wasn’t really listening to it.

It was only a half-lie. I found something soothing about Marcia Clark’s methodical voice. How could anyone not believe her?

“Agatha kissed her daughter goodnight and disappeared,” Lydia had continued. “They thought she maybe drowned herself in this pond called the Silent Pool because that’s where they found her wrecked car.”

“The Silent Pool?” I was skeptical. It was how anyone sane had to be with Lydia at least part of the time.

“Really. You can read it yourself.” She thrust a piece of paper at me. If it had been anyone else, this would have seemed like a mean poke. But it was Lydia. My vision was less gray when she was around. Lighter, like I was splayed flat on the tickly grass, staring up into late summer dusk. I let my fingers grasp her tangible proof that Agatha Christie lived out a page in her novels, as if it were important.

“Anyway, that’s where they found her car,” Lydia repeated. “The other thought was that her a-hole of a cheating husband killed her and abandoned the car there. While all of this was going on, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even took one of her gloves to a medium to try to figure out where she’d gone. It was on the front of The New York Times.” More rustling of paper. “But she showed up. It turned out she had amnesia. For eleven days.”

“This was the focus of his lecture?” It was comforting, and somehow not.

“Uh-huh. I was intrigued by the class title, so I stopped off at the library before. When I got to class, your doctor was talking about the etiology of the fugue state and how it’s related to dissociative amnesia.”

It would be very hard to live in Lydia’s head. I imagined it blindingly bright and chaotic, like an exploding star. Both sides of her brain constantly at war. Because brilliant, steady Lydia was an addict when it came to murder and celebrities. The O.J. trial, her LSD. Any inane detail got her high. Like the other night, giggling about how O. J. Simpson had asked the cops for a glass of orange juice after the Bronco chase, followed up by ten minutes of her railing about the jury not getting the concept of restriction fragment length polymorphism.

“So what happened to her?” Trying to shuttle things along because I was curious, but wanting to know whether my doctor appeared to be a manipulative asshole.

“She was found in a spa hotel under an assumed name. She claimed not to recognize pictures of herself in the newspaper. Some doctors said she was suicidal, in a psychogenic trance. That’s like a fugue state, thus the title of your doctor’s class.”

“I’d rather think of her as a nice old lady writing cozy mysteries by the fire.”

“I know. It’s kind of like finding out that Edna St. Vincent Millay slept around and was a morphine addict. Ednas and Agathas should be true to their names.”

I’d laughed, something close to the way I used to, and imagined it drifting under the bedroom door, smoothing out a tight wrinkle in my father’s face.

“A mystery novelist with a cheating husband, gone missing. Sounds like a publicity stunt.”

“Some people might say that about you,” my best friend retorted. A rare slip, for her. It had hit its mark, a sharp pain to the right side of my stomach.

“Sorry, Tessie, it just came out. Of course that’s not true, either. He’s the kind of professor you could get a real crush on, you know, because he has that brain. He’s not a fake.” She sat silently for a second. “I like him. I think you can trust him. Don’t you?”

Smacked again. Fifteen hours later, back on the doctor’s couch, I’m fully absorbing the repercussions of this turn of events. Now, Lydia, my objective, loyal friend, would give my doctor the benefit of the doubt. I wondered if she’d been crazy enough to raise her hand. Ask a question. Get noticed. I should have thought this through.

The doctor has just excused himself and left the room. The longer he’s gone, the darker it gets. You wouldn’t think it would make any difference when you’re blind, but it does. The air-conditioning is noisily blowing through the vents, but it’s harder and harder to breathe. I’ve drawn my knees up tight and crossed my arms around them. My tongue tastes like a dead trout. There is growing dread that no one will find me and pull me out in time. That I will suffocate in here.

Is this one of your tests, doctor?

The second I decide I can’t take it any longer, he strides into the room. His chair creaks with his weight as he settles in. I fight the surge of gratefulness. You came back.

“That took longer than I thought. We can make up the time in our next session. We have about a half-hour left. I’d like to talk about your mother this week, if that’s OK.”

“That’s not why I’m here.” My response is quick. “I went over and over that years ago. Lots of people have mothers who die.” A fog drools at the corners of my vision. Frenetic pricks of light everywhere, like a swarm of frightened fireflies. New guests in my head. I wonder if this means I am about to faint. How would I know the difference? My lips contort, and I almost giggle.

“So you shouldn’t mind talking about it,” he says reasonably. “Catch me up. Where were you the day she died?” Like you don’t already know. Like there isn’t a big fat file on your desk that you don’t even have to bother to hide from a blind girl.

My ankle throbs and sends a message to the crescent scar on my face and to the three-inch pink line drawn carefully under my left collarbone. Can he not see how upset I am? That he should back off?

The pieces of his face spin around, stubborn, refusing to lock in place. Gray-blue eyes, brown hair, wire-rim glasses. Not at all like Tommy Lee Jones, Lydia had said. Still, no picture falling together for me. No way to draw him blind.

This is the worst session yet, and we are just getting started.

“I was playing in the tree house,” I tell him, while the fireflies do their panicked dance.

Tessa, present day

The first Susan has arrived, bundled in white cloth, like she is dressed for a holy baptism. The woman holding her is covered in head-to-toe white, too, her mouth and nose masked, so that all I can see are brown eyes. They look kind.

She unbinds the cloth and raises Susan carefully up to the window. Most of the small group gathered in the hall on the other side eagerly raise their iPhones. Susan is bathed in brief flashes, like a movie star.

Her skull is a horror show. Her eyes are holes going to the bottom of the ocean. Most of the lower half of her jaw, gone. A few rotten teeth hanging like stalactites in an abandoned cave. It is the emptiness, those two gaping, awful holes that remind me she was once human. That she could once stare back.

Remember? Her hollow, toothless voice bubbles up in my ear. An unspent grenade erupts in my chest. It’s a shock, but it shouldn’t be. The Susans had been silent for more than a year this time. It had been foolish to think they were gone.

Not now. I imagine my hand clamped over her mouth. I screech out “The Star-Spangled Banner” in my head.

Bombs bursting in air. Jo is squeezing my arm.

“Sorry I’m late.” I gulp in her quirky normalness. White lab coat, khaki pants, purple Nikes, plastic badge hanging off a skull-and-crossbone-printed lanyard around her neck. A whiff of something chemical, but not unpleasant.

Deep breath. I’m on this side of the glass. This side of hell.

She nods casually to the group. Besides Bill and me, four other people are cleared for this event: three Ph.D. students-one from Oxford, two from the University of North Texas-and a beautiful, unbottled blond scientist from Sweden named Britta.

We’d spent the last fifteen minutes together, strangers pretending we weren’t about to observe death at its most sadistic. The students’ eyes flicked to me with interest, but no one was asking questions.

Before Jo arrived, we had settled on discussing the three places in Dallas and Fort Worth that Britta should not miss seeing before returning home to her Stockholm lab in two weeks: the Amon Carter for its muscled bronze Russells and Remingtons, and for the beautiful black boy in the newspaper hat; the Kimbell for the silvery light cascading on buxom masterpieces and for the ill-fated young man in the company of wicked sixteenth-century cardsharps; the Sixth Floor Museum, where Oswald angled his rifle, and a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist defiantly roamed the sidewalk, saying, Nope, not like that.

As Britta eyes Bill, I am thinking it is more likely she will end up in his bed. I’d gotten a curt smile from him this morning.

“Stephen King researched part of his Kennedy time-travel opus at the Sixth Floor Museum archives,” Bill is telling them.

“Great book,” Jo says. “King’s a genius. But he never really got Texas. And I’m saying that as an Oklahoman. Hi, Bill. Tessa. Sarita. John and Gretchen. Britta, glad you could make it today. Looks like they are just getting started.”

The skull is now facing us, leering from its spot on the counter. The woman in white is still unwrapping puzzle pieces. A long, pearly leg bone, and then another in much worse shape, like a tree branch snapped off in winter.

“Tammy’s in charge today,” Jo says. “Running the room.” The two exchange a brief wave. Four other women dressed in sterile suits are taking their places in the lab in front of clear glass hoods. The fluorescent light is brutal, and cold.

“Looking into a serial killer’s refrigerator,” Bill mutters in my ear.

Jo glances our way, but I can’t tell if she heard. “Each forensic analyst has a specific job,” she explains. “Margaret will cut a small piece out of the bone. Toneesha will clean it with bleach, ethanol, and water. Jen will pulverize it to a fine powder, from which we extract the DNA. Bessie’s only role is to spray down the surfaces as we go, to keep things as sterile as possible. It’s protocol. Always.”

Her eyes are focused on the activity behind the window. Jo’s in her element. Brilliant, without ego. Empathetic, without cynicism.

I am thinking that Jo remembers every single person by name on both sides of the glass. I am thinking, she could be talking about how to refine sugar.

“Never forget protocol.” Suddenly stern. “Never get sloppy. Somebody accused me of that once. Worst time of my life.”

She doesn’t extrapolate. So far, no talk of the actual case-who these bones represent, why they are special.

“We like the skull and the denser bones, particularly femurs,” she continues. “Gives us the longest string of mitochondrial DNA and the best chance at retrieving information on our way to finding out who they are. We’re lucky we’ve got these three specimens, considering the bones have been scavenged and moved at least once.”

The skull is being tucked under one of the hoods. The buzzing of the saw drifts through glass, like it is floating down the street on a lazy Saturday.

When the first Susan returns to the counter, a new one-inch-square hole glares out of the top of her head.

One more degradation in an endless string of them.

I’m sorry, I say silently. But there is no toothless, hollow answer in my head.

The Dremel saw drills a leg bone while the piece of skull is scrubbed raw in the second station. The technicians have forgotten us, slipping into a comfortable rhythm. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not this surreal, matter-of-fact routine.

“It must be especially exciting to work on the Black-Eyed Susans,” Sarita says brightly. The student from Oxford. Her voice is British, clipped. Her black heels are too high. “It must be an honor for these techs. These must be your best.”

I can feel Jo’s body go taut as if it is my own. “To them,” she says. “And to me, this case… these bones… are no different than any other bone entrusted to us. Each one represents the same thing. A family, waiting.”

Admonished. All of us.

“Why are there three bones?” Bill shifts the conversation abruptly. “For two unidentified skeletons? I thought you only tried one bone from a victim at a time.”

“Now, there’s the question I’ve been waiting for.” Still an edge to Jo’s voice. “The girls’ skeletons were ransacked by critters over time. Moved by their killer at least once. The old case file documents foreign soil along with the red clay mixture in that field. So, of course, not every bone was there. Our forensic anthropologist laid out what was exhumed from the two caskets, and counted. He counted three right femurs.”

I hear someone suck in a strangled breath. It takes a second to realize it’s me.

“Three skeletons, not two,” Bill whispers, as if I can’t do the math.

Five Susans in all, not four. One dead girl named Merry, three gnawed-on nobodies, and me. Another member of my tribe. Another family, waiting.

I’m the one, a Susan says conspiratorially. I’m the one with the answers.

Jo shoots me an odd look, even though I know I am the only one who can hear.

Tessie, 1995

I wonder what he is looking at first.

The girl without a mouth. The girl with a red blindfold. The spider’s web with the trapped swallowtail. The faceless runner on the beach. The roaring bear, my personal favorite. I’d worked hard on the teeth.

“Did you remember to bring your drawings today?” he had asked first thing.

Anything was preferable to talking about the day of my mother’s death. Last time, he might as well have taken a hot poker and stuck it in my belly button.

And what did he learn? That I heard nothing. Saw nothing. That all I remember is a vague image of blood, but that was dead wrong, because the police told me there was no blood. All of it seemed so freakin’ off point. Another way to clutter up my head.

So, yes, I brought drawings today. As soon as he asked, I handed Doc a white cardboard poster-mailing tube. It once held the Pulp Fiction poster now hanging over Lydia’s bed. Lydia had rolled up my drawings carefully after our three-hour session sprawled on the rough Berber of her bedroom floor surrounded by a kindergarten chaos of paper and crayons and markers.

She didn’t like my idea when I sprang it on her two days ago, but I begged. More than anyone else, she understood my fear-that someone else would find out my secrets before I did.

So she’d ridden the bus back to the TCU library. Skimmed The Clinical Application of Projective Drawings. The Childhood Hand That Disturbs. And, because she was Lydia: L’Imagination dans la Folie, which translates to Imagination in Madness, some random tome that studied the drawings of insane people in 1846. She had educated me on the principle of the House-Tree-Person test. House, how I see my family. Tree, how I see my world. Person, how I see myself.

When it was all over, the black crayon worn to a flat nub, I thought we’d faked it pretty well. Lydia was even inspired to draw a picture herself, which she described to me as an army of giant black-and-yellow flowers with angry faces.

The doctor is sitting directly across from me, not saying a word. I can hear the crisp rustle of paper as he flips from one sheet to the next.

The silence has to be something they teach all these manipulative bastards.

Finally, he clears his throat. “Technically excellent, especially since you have no vision. But, mostly, cliché.” No emotion in his words, just a statement of fact.

My scars begin to thrum. Thank God, I didn’t give him my real drawings.

“This is why I don’t like you.” I speak stiffly.

“I didn’t know you didn’t like me.”

“You don’t know? You’re like all of the others. You don’t give a flip.”

“I give a flip, Tessie. I care very much about what happens to you. So much that I’m not going to lie to you. You obviously spent some time on these drawings. You are a very smart, talented girl. The thing is, I don’t believe them. The angry animal. The girl who has no voice. The idea of running along the ocean’s abyss. These Jackson Pollock black and red swirls. They’re all just a little too pretty. Too pat. There is no single emotion that connects these drawings to one another. They stand alone. That isn’t how trauma works. Whatever emotions you are feeling right now… they connect everything.”

His chair creaks as he leans over, placing a sheet in front of me. “Except for this one. This one is different.”

“Am I supposed to guess?” Trying to be sarcastic. Trying to figure out how he saw through me so fast. Which drawing he found meaningful.

“Can you?” he asks. “Guess?”

“Are you really going to make me play this game?” I grip Oscar’s leash like a lifeline, letting it bite into my flesh. Oscar obediently clambers up. “I’m going home.”

“You can go home anytime you like. But I think you want to know.”

My stillness says everything.

“Tell me.” I barely croak it out, suffused with rage.

“The field of strangled flowers. Leering. The little girl cowering. It’s terrifying. Messy. Real.”

Lydia’s drawing. She’d spent two hours on it while singing along to Alanis. Got a plastic smile on a plastic face.

Lydia used to laugh about the fact that she couldn’t even draw Snoopy.

She hadn’t told me about the little girl. I wanted to see.

I dropped the leash and scooted myself to the edge of the cushion, words rushing up my throat before I could stop them.

“What would you say if I told you that the main thing I’ve been drawing…” I suck in a breath. “Is a curtain. Over and over, until I want to crawl out of my skin?”

“I’d say, it’s a start.”

A slightly higher pitch to his voice. Is it hope?

Tessa, present day

I jiggle the key into the first of two locks on the front door. My mind is dwelling on pristine white laboratories and trees made of brittle bones and the fraction of statistical hope that one of the three tiny pieces of dead girl will lead somewhere. All the way home, there was blessed silence from the Susans. While the lock refuses to cooperate, a shadow clobbers into mine, making me gasp.

“What are you so damn jumpy for, Sue?”

Euphemia Outler, right-hand neighbor. Known to me as Effie, to Charlie as Miss Effie (despite a marriage or two) and to a few mean boys on the block as Miss Effing Crazy. She is an ex-science professor, a self-employed suburban spy, and an early dementia patient who regularly calls me Sue-not because of my past, but because it is her only daughter’s name, the one who lives in New Jersey, who had decided when her mother turned eighty, What the hell, out of sight, out of mind.

“Hey, you snuck up on me,” I say. “How’s it going today?”

In her right hand, Effie proffers a small, oblong item wrapped in aluminum foil so crinkled that it could have been reused since the Depression. In her left hand, a vase of flowers, in the tight professional array of a florist. None of the flowers are yellow and black. On her head, the floppy blue-checked sun hat that Charlie and I bought from a beach vendor in Galveston four summers ago as a gift. Effie’s eyes, still those of a provocative teen, peer out of a face toughened by sun.

“I made you some banana bread. Threw some bulgur in it. And I brought in these flowers for you this morning. I saw the guy plop them on your front porch. Thought the wind might blow ’em over. Plus, I’ve got a problem to discuss with you.”

“That was so nice. Thank you.” I twist the second lock. The deadbolt is a little cranky, too. Need to take care of that. Maybe add a third lock. I shove open the door and Effie tramples after me in her battered green Crocs without invitation.

“Let me stick these groceries away.” I avert my eyes from the flowers. “Go ahead and put the flowers and bread here on the counter, and then you can tell me about your… problem. I have iced tea in the fridge. Charlie brewed it last night. Caffeine, sugar, mint, lemon-the works. Charlie stole the mint from your garden after dark.”

“I put bulgur in the bread because I know Charlie especially likes it. And I’ll take that tea.”

I am pretty sure my daughter has no idea what bulgur is, but this is likely a step up from last week’s offering of oatmeal and carob cookies that Charlie cheerfully likened to eating cow manure.

Effie fancies herself as something of a chef. The problem is, she thinks like a scientist. For instance, deciding it would be a good idea to boil fresh pumpkin for pumpkin pie rather than using a time-tested can of Libby’s puree. Chunks and pumpkin strings and a lot of canned whipped cream are what I will remember about last year’s Thanksgiving dinner. But that’s OK: Most Thanksgivings just flow into a dull, pleasant river, and Charlie and I will laugh about that one forever.

“The New York Times called bulgur ‘a wheat to remember,’” Effie informs me. “They try to make everything so damn profound. I’d stop reading the paper if it weren’t for the science section and if I didn’t think the crossword puzzles were reviving my dead brain cells. What the hell do they know? Dead isn’t necessarily dead. Do you think they know a four-letter word for Levantine coffee cup?” They generally referred to her neurologist.

“Zarf,” I say automatically.

“Well, you’re the damn exception to a damn lot of things.” She wanders from the black granite bar that divides the tiny kitchen from the living room and surveys the industrial Bernina sewing machine on the dining room table, draped like a bride in white tulle. “What’s this week’s project? Something else for one of those damn rich ladies?”

I kick the refrigerator door shut. “For one of those damn rich ladies’ little girls. A tutu. For competition. Tulle underpinning, lavender appliqué. Swarovski crystals.”

“Fancy-pantsy. I bet she’s paying you a fortune.”

In fact, she isn’t paying me a fortune, because it’s a sad fact that most damn rich ladies no longer appreciate the cost of things made by exacting, artful hands. Not when everything can be purchased from China with the click of a mouse.

“It’s a little side job,” I say. “The costume designer for a Boston ballet company has asked me to dress the leads for its spring production. I want to make sure I know what I’m doing before I say yes.”

“They’d be lucky to have you. You’re getting quite global. I thought you were leaving this week to design a staircase for that crazy actor fellow in California, the one who farts through his movies. Doesn’t he want it made out of an old Camaro or some damn thing? And wasn’t Charlie’s soldier daddy flying in to stay with her while you were gone? The one who promised to patch that spot on my roof. What’s his name? Lucifer?”

“Lucas. That California job’s on hold for now.” No explanation, because my past is never discussed. Effie knows about that part of me, or she doesn’t. I have no idea and want to keep it like that. Either way, it isn’t important to her.

I can always tell by the way someone looks at me the first time, like I’m a distressing piece of modern art. As an added piece of luck for me, Effie had mostly cut the newspaper out of her life because it made her think the world was “going to damn hell in a damn rocket ship.”

That didn’t mean she canceled her subscription. During the four years we’d lived in this house, she had dropped The New York Times on our stoop with random regularity, unread, minus the puzzle. No iPad crosswords for Effie, despite Charlie’s best efforts. Effie was certain the device was controlling her, instead of the other way around.

I nudge her over to the couch. “Sit. What’s the problem?”

“Aren’t you going to open the card on those flowers? What’s the occasion? Belated birthday?” Her eyes are lit with curiosity.

“No occasion I’m aware of. Did you say you saw who left them?” I drop the question as casually as I can. Flowers always punched a little panic button, because anyone who liked me well enough to send them, wouldn’t.

“Cute fellow in a Lilybud’s Florist outfit. His shorts hung off his bottom. Gave me an eyeful.”

Effie could have seen that bottom today. Or yesterday. Or a month ago. Time is a dull, pleasant river for Miss Effie.

I tap her on the shoulder; I’d need to pick up Charlie from volleyball practice soon and she would be craving something besides bulgur-infused banana bread. “So what’s the problem?” I repeat. “Shoot.”

“There’s a digger snatcher.” She waves a small garden trowel, which I hadn’t noticed until now. “I’m going to take it up with the neighborhood watch.”

“Digger… snatcher?”

“I just drove to Walmart to buy this one-$2.99 plus tax. Been going on for six months. I buy a digger, and it disappears. I can’t keep buying diggers. Do you know where your digger is? I’m thinking of taking a block digger survey.”

“Um.” I have to think about whether I want to answer. “Behind the house. I think I left it there when I was… doing a little weeding.” Stuck upright in the ground, like a grave marker.

“I’m warning you, you might as well be leaving out a crisp $100 bill.”

“I’ll keep an eye out. Do you have a place… you regularly put your digger?” I ask this cautiously, knowing that organization is a sensitive topic for Effie.

Things in her house have a way of dancing around: a Scientific American on genetic engineering stashed in the freezer, the extra house key taped to the bottom of the butter dish, a bottle of Stoli vodka crammed under the bathroom sink with the rusty can of Comet from 1972.

“Well, back to sorting my seedpods.” Effie stands. “The grubs ate my beans something terrible last year. I’m going to try putting out a bowl of beer for them this year. I’m sure that’s pure bunk but it seems like a happier way to go than me stomping their guts out. I wouldn’t mind drowning in a bowl of beer when it’s my time.”

I laugh. Reach over and give her a hug. “Thanks for making my life… normal,” I say.

“Honey, I’m a sweaty mess.” She meekly returns my hug. “Most people think I’m pretty weird.” Most people generally meant her daughter.

“Well, I can relate. What kind of person builds staircases for farting actors?” What kind of person suppresses the flutter in her chest every time the sun goes behind a cloud, afraid she’s going blind? Or when she opens a jar of peanut butter? When someone yells “Susan!” across a playground?

On her way to the door, Effie pauses. “Can you send Charlie over in about a half-hour to help me and my hysterical society lady friend move some stuff? I mean, historical. Although she is a bit hysterical. These ladies need to get their heads out of their damn bustles, if you get my drift.”

“Of course.” I grin. “I’ll tell Charlie.”

From the stoop, I watch her navigate across the thick carpet of golden brown Bermuda, disappearing into her overgrown front garden until all that’s visible is her hat bobbing like a bluebird above a mound of fountain grass.

For sixty-one years, Effie has occupied the frilly yellow house next door, a Queen Anne cottage that, like our 1920s Arts and Crafts bungalow, sits in the middle of Fort Worth’s famous historical Fairmount District. Effie can’t remember the exact number of paint colors she’s slapped on her spindlework and fish scale shingles over time, but she dates things by saying, When the house was lilac, or When the house was in its awful brown period. Effie still pulls her Cadillac boat out of the garage to attend the neighborhood monthly historic preservation meeting. She revels in dragging Charlie, one eyeball at a time, away from her iPhone and assaulting her with neighborhood history. The trolley once rumbled down our street, which is why it is wider than most of the others. Over on Hemphill, there used to be a fantastical mansion with a life-size windmill on top, until it mysteriously burned to the ground.

When the phone inevitably reasserts its magnetic force on Charlie, Effie just brings out the hard stuff: tales about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who lived in Hell’s Half Acre only three miles from here, or the creepy, boarded-up pig tunnels that run under the city. “That’s how Judas goats got their name,” Effie asserts. “By herding pigs to slaughter to spare themselves. Back when, goats herded as many as ten thousand pigs a day through Fort Worth’s underground tunnels to their miserable fates in the Stockyards. Like New Yorkers in the subway.”

Generally, when it came down to Effie vs. Twitter, Effie won. “Kids need a sense of place,” she liked to admonish me. “A sense that they all aren’t living and talking in outer space.”

Back in the kitchen, I firmly root myself in the uncomfortable present, on the one kitchen stool that obediently twirls little half-circles. I sip my tea and stare at the card on the flowers. It begs to be opened. I reach over, tug it off its plastic holder, lift the tiny flap, and pull out a flat cardboard square decorated with a cartoon spray of balloons.

I miss you.

Love, Lydia

The card slips from my hand onto the counter. The corner begins melting into the ring of sweat left by my iced-tea glass. Lydia’s name blurs into a purple stain. Not the handwriting I remembered, but maybe it isn’t hers. Maybe it is the florist’s.

Why would Lydia casually send me flowers? Wouldn’t she understand that I’m still in mortal daily combat with them? That I’m hanging on to the bitter shreds of our fight after the trial? We hadn’t talked for seventeen years, since her family up and left without a word. The flowers seem like a taunt.

I yank the arrangement out of the vase, splashing my jeans in the process, and slide open the glass door to the back yard. Within seconds, pink Gerbers and purple orchids are scattered on top of the funeral pyre of my compost. I carry the vase to the recycling bin sitting empty outside the two-car garage that backs up along our fence line. Bemoan that Charlie should have taken in the recycling bin two days ago.

No reason to panic and think my monster sent these and signed Lydia’s name. I open the gate to the slim ribbon of grass that is our side yard. SpongeBob’s squeaky voice wafts from an open window next door. That means the babysitter is inside, not the fussy lawyer parents with matching Tesla sedans.

I learned a long time ago to pay attention to what is usual, and what is not.

To retrieve an encyclopedia from the smallest sound.

I round the corner. No one has planted any more black-eyed Susans under my bedroom windowsill. The ground is smoothed flat and swirled, like a pan of chocolate cake batter. The thing is, I hadn’t done any smoothing or swirling.

And my digger is gone.

Tessie, 1995

“If you had three wishes, what would they be?” he repeats.

His latest game.

The curtain had gotten us nowhere last time. I had no clue why I was drawing it. I had told him that it was an ordinary curtain. Still, like there was no breeze. When I didn’t bring in my drawings today, he didn’t bring it up. He noted my boundaries, unlike the others, but he’s irritating me in whole new ways. For instance, now insisting I show up for his little interrogations twice a week.

“Really?” I ask. “Let me see. Do you want me to say that I wish my mother would come down from her puffy cloud and give me a hug? That I wish I wasn’t living in some kind of Edgar Allan Poe poem? That I wish my three-year-old cousin would stop snapping his fingers in my face to see if he can magically make me see? That I wish my father would yell at the TV again? I need a whole lot more wishes than three. How about this: I wish I weren’t answering this stupid question.”

“Why do you want your father to yell at the TV?” A trace of amusement in his voice. I relax a little. He isn’t mad.

“It was his favorite thing. Yelling at Bobby Witt when he makes one of his wild throws. Or walks somebody. Now Dad just sits there like a zombie when the Rangers play.”

“And do you think that’s your fault?”

The answer to this is too freakin’ obvious.

I wish I’d never met Roosevelt, so I wouldn’t have needed to buy a Snickers bar, so I wouldn’t have been walking out of that drugstore at 8:03 P . M . on June 21, 1994. I wish I never cared about winning, winning, winning.

“It’s interesting that you bring up Poe.” Already moving on.

I’d bite on that one. “Why?”

“Because most people on that couch who’ve endured a psychic trauma compare their experiences to something in more current pop culture. Horror movies. Crime shows. I get a lot of Stephen King. And John Paul. When did you start reading Poe?”

I shrug. “After my grandfather died. I inherited a lot of his books. My best friend and I got into them for a while. We read Moby-Dick that summer, too. So don’t go there, OK? It doesn’t mean anything. I was a happy person before this happened. Don’t focus on things that don’t mean anything.”

“Poe was mired in his lifelong fear of premature burial,” he persists. “The reanimation of the dead. His mother died when he was young. Don’t you think that could be more than coincidence?”

A hammer is pounding my brain. How did he know? Just when I thought he was an idiot, he surprised me. He was always going somewhere.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asks.

Oscar picks that moment to readjust himself. He licks my bare knee on the way back down. Aunt Hilda yells at him idiotically all the time, “No lick! No LICK!” but I love his slobber. And right now, it is like he is saying, Go ahead, take a chance with this one. I want you to throw the Frisbee to me someday.

“The college girl from East Texas… Merry or Meredith or whatever.” I speak haltingly. “She was alive when they dumped us in that grave. She talked to me. I remember her both ways. Dead and alive.” With eyes like blue diamonds and with eyes like cloudy sea glass. Maggots hanging out in the corners, twitchy pieces of rice.

He doesn’t answer immediately. I realize this is not at all what he was expecting.

“And the police have told you that’s not possible,” he says slowly. “That she was already dead when you were in that grave. That she’d likely been dead for hours before you were dumped.”

How carefully my doctor had read everything about this case.

“Yes. But she was alive in the field. She was nice. I could feel her breath in my face. She sang. And she was in the church choir, remember?” Begging him to believe me, and I am only telling him the least crazy part. “She told me her mother’s name. She told me all of their mothers’ names.”

I wish I remembered them.

Tessa, present day

I am waiting for the morning bomb to go off. Or not. I have made coffee and buttered a piece of bulgur-banana bread, listened to Charlie blast music in the shower, loosely sketched an appliqué design for the tutu, thought about how lucky I am.

Because, make no mistake, I am terrifically lucky. If I ever forget, the Susans remind me, in chorus. And the bread isn’t half-bad.

“Mom!” Charlie’s shriek carries easily from inside her room. “Where’s my blue jersey?”

I find Charlie in her underwear, hair slapping around like wet red string. She is tossing her room, a rabbit’s nest of dirty clothes.

“Which jersey?” I ask patiently. She owns two practice uniforms and four game uniforms. The uniforms were “required to play,” cost $435, and three of them looked exactly alike to me.

“Blue, blue, blue, didn’t you hear me? If I don’t have it for the scrimmage, Coach will make me run. He might make the whole team run because of me.” Coach. No last name necessary. Like God.

“Yesterday, he threw Katlyn out of practice for forgetting her red socks. She was so embarrassed. And it was just because her mom washed them and accidentally stuck them in her brother’s baseball basket. He’s on a team called the Red Sox. Duh.”

I pull something blue out of the tangle of clothes on the floor. “Is this it?”

Charlie is now spread-eagled and lying faceup on her unmade bed, deciding whether the world is ending. She cranes her neck slightly in my direction. I note that her backpack is open on the desk, unpacked, biology homework still flayed out. The digital clock on her dresser says nineteen minutes to go before my friend Sasha and her daughter pick her up for school.

“Mom! No! It’s the one with the white number and that cool edging at the bottom. The practice jersey.”

“Yes, I should have read your mind. Have you looked in the washer? Dryer? Floor of the car?”

“Why does this have to happen to me?” Still staring at the ceiling. Not moving. I could say, I’m done. Good luck. Walk out. When I shouted that very same question of the world at the tender age of sixteen, “Coach” would have seemed like a wasp to swat. Hard to believe I’d only been two years older than Charlie is now.

The very best thing about landing in that grave? Perspective.

So I peer through this morning’s prism: a science test looming in second period, an a-hole of a coach who probably could have used more childhood therapy than I got, and a telltale tampon under my foot.

I consider the clawed tiger on the bed, the one wearing the zebra-printed sports bra-the same tiger that every Sunday night transforms into the girl who voluntarily walks next door to help sort Miss Effie’s medicine into her days-of-the-week pill container. The one who pretended her ankle hurt one day last week so the backup setter on her volleyball team would get to play on her birthday.

“It was a really kind gesture,” I had told her that night when she explained why she did not need the ice pack. “But I’m not sure it was such a good idea.”

Charlie had performed her usual eye roll. “Mom, you can’t let the wrong stuff happen all the time. There is no way Coach would have ever let her play. And she set three points right after that. She’s just as good as me. I’m just two inches taller.”

I can’t count the times that Charlie has offered me her bits of tempered wisdom along with a little frightening Texas grammar.

“Dry your hair, get dressed, pack up,” I order. “You have a little over fifteen minutes. I’ll find the jersey.”

“What if you don’t?” But her legs are in motion, swinging over the side of the bed.

Eight minutes later, I find the jersey behind her hamper. White number 10 on the back, nearly invisible edging along the bottom. Strong odor of sweat and deodorant. Apparently, she’d made a half-hearted effort to put it where it belonged. No wonder we hadn’t found it.

I stick it in her duffle by the front door and check for red socks. Two short honks chirp from outside.

Charlie appears. “Did you find it?”

“Yep.” She looks so perfect to me that it hurts. Damp curls that hadn’t been sacrificed to a Chi Ultra flat iron springing up like tiny flames. Lip gloss only, so the freckles are out. Jeans, plain white T-shirt, the St. Michael charm that she never takes off nestled in her throat. Her father mailed it last Christmas from overseas, a design from James Avery, the kingpin of tasteful Christian fashion accessories. He started selling his stuff out of a two-car garage in the Texas Hill Country in 1954. Now, six decades later, his jewelry is both holy and pricey.

But for Charlie, this piece of metal out of a Kerrville factory isn’t a status symbol. It is a talisman, a sign that her daddy, in the guise of a sword-carrying saint around her neck, will keep her safe. Keep all of us safe. Lucas had worn the good luck charm as long as I’d known him, a gift from his own mother the first time he went to war.

“You’re good to go,” I say. “You look especially pretty. Good luck on your test.”

She slings the duffle over her shoulder and glances over my breakfast offerings on the table by the door.

“Nice try, but not takin’ the booger bread.” She slips the granola bar and the banana into the side pocket of her backpack. Another toot of the horn. Effie will be peering out her living room window at this point.

“This day sucks.” Charlie spins out the door, leaving the air charged and a chaotic trail from the bathroom floor to her room.

I catch the slamming screen in time to toss a wave to Sasha, whose face is hidden by the harsh glint of sun off the windshield of the familiar blue minivan. The glass is black, impenetrable. I can’t tell if she is waving back.

That doesn’t mean I need to run out and check that she isn’t bleeding on the ground, out of sight, behind the live oak, tossed out of the vehicle while she waited patiently for Charlie. That a stranger, with all of Effie’s stolen diggers stacked in the trunk, isn’t necessarily behind the wheel, about to drive my fire-breathing angel off to hell.

I shut the door and lean back against smooth, cool wood. Breathe in deep. Hope that other, more normal moms harbor similar out-of-control thoughts about their children’s safety.

I wrap up the rejected slice of Effie’s bread, generously lathered in strawberry cream cheese, and stick it in the refrigerator. Lunch, maybe. Wash up my coffee cup and set it to drain.

For the next ten minutes, the erratic whirring of the sewing machine breaks the silence. My foot, pressing the pedal. Fingers manipulating satin. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. The background noise of my childhood before Mama died.

Not the scrape of saw against bone.

My mind is not traveling in a row of tiny perfect stitches. It is skipping, out of order, to the places he has planted black-eyed Susans. My eyes close for a second and the stitches derail and zigzag like a train off track.

The list I’d made a couple of days ago is taped to the bottom of the vegetable drawer. Shades of Miss Effie.

In forty-five minutes, I am pressing the pedal of my Jeep.

Long after Lydia and I broke apart, I had returned to this place. Again and again. Maybe hoping a little bit that she would, too.

Until I stopped.

It is different, and the same. The ducks sail on the shivering glass. Aimless. Waiting for the day’s first crust of bread to hit the pond.

My car is slung, alone, by the side of the road. Lydia and I had usually ridden the bus here, from Hemphill to West Seventh.

My feet are soundless on the earth. About here is when they used to pick up speed, ready for takeoff.

Lydia was always talking, laughing, talking while we traveled this path. Telling me what library book she’d dragged along with her dad’s soft old green hunting blanket and an already lukewarm can of Diet Dr Pepper.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Diana: Her True Story.

There’s a slight breeze rustling things. Half of the leaves on the hackberries and pecans are still trying to make up their minds. Is it winter or not? When Lydia and I walked here, the trees were leafy and thick. They blocked the blazing sun like a tight football huddle, casting a dark, intimate comfort that I wonder if only a Southerner can understand.

Anybody watching would think I was up to no good. If it were two hours later, when bread crusts were flying through the air, parents would tug their children away from the strange lady walking around with the rusty shovel. They might even press the non-emergency police number tucked in their contacts that they’d never used before.

On days like these, I wondered if they’d be right. Whether just two or three brain cells were deciding if I was eligible to join the woman by the tracks who lived in a tent crafted of black garbage bags and old broom handles.

This is why I brought no one with me. Not Jo, who would make no mistakes as she sealed the evidence. Not Bill, who would be worried we should have brought Jo. I am sane, and I am not, and I don’t want anyone to know.

What was that Poe quote that Lydia liked so much? I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.

The ducks and the pond are well behind me now. I hear the rush of the ocean. Of course, it is not the ocean. It’s just what Lydia and I closed our eyes and pretended. The only nearby route to the ocean is the Trinity River, which threads by the park on the other side and flows on for hundreds of miles, all the way to Galveston. La Santisima Trinidad-The Most Holy Trinity. Christened by Alonso de León in 1690.

Sense of place, Effie says.

I begin to count the pillars. One, two, three, four. Five. The ocean is above me now. I keep striding, toward a red cow in a purple dunce hat. He’s new.

It takes a second to realize that he’s a unicorn, not a stupid cow. The mermaid who keeps him company a few feet away has red hair that flows like mine and Charlie’s. Her bright green tail floats in a sea of fish with upturned mouths that wouldn’t think of biting. Peace, love, understanding.

None of this hopeful art was here all those years ago, when Lydia laid out her blanket under pillar No. 5 of the Lancaster Bridge. Now childlike graffiti covers every single concrete pier of the bridge as far as I can see. The pillars used to be splotched with ugly green paint and strangled with the kind of weedy vines that seem to need nothing to live.

The rush and rumble of traffic overhead.

The knowledge of a secret underground world.

The thrilling fear that all that throbbing chaos could crash down on you at any second, but probably wouldn’t.

The worry about what might lurch out of the big thicket of woods nearby.

The same, the same, the same. The same.

I survey the parched dirt floor beneath the behemoth steel and concrete structure. Still unforgiving. Hard and bare. But he didn’t plant the black-eyed Susans under the bridge at pillar No. 5, where I used to meet up with Lydia after my runs on the twisty running trails. He planted them here-a few feet away, under a large cedar elm at the edge of the woods. They appeared at a time of year when black-eyed Susans flourish, so I couldn’t be sure. I just never came back after I found them. I was twenty-four, and Lydia and I had been estranged for seven years.

A slight rustle behind me. I jerk around. A man has emerged from behind the pillar. I grip the shovel, suddenly a weapon.

But he is not a man. He is tall and lanky, but no more than fourteen. Pale skin, slouchy jeans, faded Jack Johnson T-shirt. A black mini-backpack slung over his shoulder. There’s a phone with a desert camouflage case clipped at his waist and what I’m pretty sure is a metal detector in his right hand.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I blurt out.

“I’m home-schooled. What are you doing? You can’t take plants out of here. It’s still the park. You can only clip their leaves.”

“Shouldn’t you be home, then? Being schooled? I’m not sure your mother would like you along this side of the park.” My nerves, no longer on high alert.

“I’m on a scavenger hunt. It’s National Botany Celebration Day. Or something. My mom is over at the pond with my sister. Teaching her the wonders of duck vision. They see, like, four times farther than us or something.”

His mother is close by. A home-schooling mother who probably has used the non-emergency police number in her phone many, many times. I have no desire to attract her attention.

There is no evidence of gathered botany anywhere on his person. “I didn’t realize that botanists use metal detectors these days,” I say.

“Funny.” He surveys me while chewing a nail. “That’s a really old shovel.”

He isn’t going away.

“What are you doing?” he repeats.

“I’m looking for something that… somebody might have left for me when I was younger. I would never steal plants on National Botany Day.”

A mistake. Too friendly. Too truthful. The first light of curiosity in his eyes. He has pushed aside a brown tail of hair so I can see them. He is a nice-looking kid. Cute, even, if he adjusted the angle of his mouth a little more.

“Want me to help? Is there metal in it? A ring or something? I can run my wand. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve found in this park.” He is already at my side, practically stepping on my feet, eager, the red light on his device blinking. Before I realize it, he is casually running the detector along my leg. Then the other one. Now he is roving up, toward my waist.

“Hey. Stop that.” I jump backward.

“Sorry. Just wanted to be sure you weren’t carrying. Knife, gun. You’d be surprised who I’ve met up with around here.”

“What’s your name?” I ask. My heart is beating hard, but I’m pretty sure his gadget did not roam high enough to disturb the metal device in my chest.

I’m beginning to wonder about the mother story. About the home-schooling.

“My name’s Carl,” he says lazily. “What’s yours?”

“Sue,” I lie.

He takes this brief exchange of names as a sign of collusion. With a professional air, he runs the detector over the area where there is the evidence of my feet trampling the weeds.

“Here?” he asks.

“About. I was going to dig in a two-foot area.” How do I get out of this? If I leave, he is sure to search on his own.

“Whatever you’re looking for… did an old boyfriend leave it?”

I shiver. “No. Not a boyfriend.”

“The alarm ain’t firing. There’s nothing here.” He sounds disappointed. “You want me to dig for you anyway?”

Great. I have become the highlight of National Botany Celebration Day.

“No. I need the exercise. But thank you.”

He leans against a tree, texting. I can only hope it is not about me. In a few minutes, he wanders off without saying goodbye.

A half-hour later, I have hacked through the ancient piping of tree roots and dug a square hole about half the size of a baby crib, and a foot deep.

Carl is right.

There’s nothing here.

I can’t help but wonder whether he is watching. Not Carl. My monster.

On my knees, I rush to push the crumbly black earth back in place. It now looks like an animal’s grave.

My phone chirps, a silly sound, but my heart lurches anyway.

A text. Charlie.

Sorry I was grouchy Mommy

Charlie has passed her biology test.

I tuck the phone into my pocket and step into the deep shadows under the bridge. I think of the two girls who listened to the drone of traffic and imagined an ocean. Girls who had nothing more important to do than argue whether Jurassic Park could really happen and extol the virtues of Sonic drive-ins because they have hands-down the best ice for chewing. All of that, of course, before one of them ended up in a hole and the other one tried to pull her out.

Time to move on.

When I reach the pond, I see a mother kneeling beside a small child with a pink beret. The girl is pointing at a pair of ducks beak to beak in a staring contest.

Her delighted laugh trickles across the pond, rippling the water as it pulls more ducks her way. I see an old crazy quilt spread out behind her. A blue Igloo cooler.

What I don’t see is Carl.

Tessie, 1995

He’s jabbering.

Blah, blah. Jabber, jabber.

Apparently, it isn’t that unusual to experience something paranormal after an event.

Other people talk to the dead, too. No big deal. He doesn’t say it out loud, but I’m a cliché.

“The paranormal experience can happen during the event,” he is saying. “Or afterward.” The event. Like it is a royal wedding or the UT-OU football game. “The victims who survive sometimes believe that a person who died in the event is still speaking to them.” If he says event one more time, I am going to scream. The only thing holding me back is Oscar. He is sleeping, and I don’t want to freak him out.

“A patient of mine watched her best friend die in a tubing accident. It was especially traumatic because she never saw her surface the water. They didn’t find her body. She was convinced her friend was controlling things in her life from heaven. Ordinary things. Like whether it would rain on her. People in circumstances similar to yours suddenly see ghosts in broad daylight. Predict the future. They believe in omens, so much so that some of them can’t leave their houses.”

Circumstances similar to mine? Is he saying that with a straight face? Surely, he is smirking. And, surely, it isn’t a good idea right now to hold my head underwater with tangled fishing lines and human-eating tree stumps and silky, streaming strands of another girl’s hair. Lydia’s dad always warns us about what lies beneath the murky surface of the lake. Makes us wear scratchy nylon lifejackets in 103-degree heat no matter how much we sweat and whine.

“That’s crazy,” I say. “The rain thing. I’m not crazy. It happened. I mean I know it happened. She spoke to me.”

I wait for him to say it. I believe you think it happened, Tessie. Emphasis on believe. Emphasis on think.

He doesn’t say it. “Did you think she was alive or dead when she spoke to you?”

“Alive. Dead. I don’t know.” I hesitate, deciding how far to go. “I remember her eyes as really blue, but the paper said they were brown. But then, in my dreams they sometimes change colors.”

“Do you dream often?”

“A little.” Not going there.

“Tell me exactly what Meredith said to you.”

“Merry. Her mother calls her Merry.”

“OK, Merry, then. What’s the first thing Merry said to you in the grave?”

“She said she was hungry.” My mouth suddenly tastes like stale peanuts. I run my tongue over my teeth, trying not to gag.

“Did you give her something to eat?”

“That isn’t important. I don’t remember.”

Oh my God, it’s like I brushed my teeth with peanut butter. I feel like throwing up. I picture the space around me. If I throw up sideways, I spray the leather couch. Head down, it hits Oscar. Straight across, no holds barred, the doctor gets it.

“Merry was upset that her mother would be worried about her. So she told me her mother’s name. Dawna. With an a and a w. I remember, like, being frantic about getting to Merry’s mother. I wanted more than anything to climb out of there so I could tell her mom that she was safe. But I couldn’t move. My head, legs, arms. It was like a truck was crushing my chest.”

I didn’t know whether Merry was alive, and I was dead.

“The thing is, I know how to spell her mother’s name.” I’m insistent. “D-a-w-n-a, not D-o-n-n-a. So it must have happened. Otherwise, how would I know?”

“I have to ask you this, Tessie. You mentioned the paper. Has someone been reading you the newspaper reports?”

I don’t answer. It would get Lydia in a lot of trouble with Dad. With the lawyers, too, probably, who want me to testify “untainted” by media chatter. I overheard one of the assistants say, “If we have to, we can make this blind thing work in our favor.”

I don’t want anyone to take Lydia away.

“It is possible that you transposed time,” the doctor says. “That you know the detail of her mother’s name, how it was spelled, but found it out afterward.”

“Is that common, too?” Sarcastic.

“Not uncommon.”

He’s checking off all the little crazy boxes, and I’m making a hundred.

The toe of my boot is furiously knocking against the table leg. My foot slips and accidentally kicks Oscar, who lets out a cry. I think that nothing in the past month has felt as awful as this tiny hurt sound from Oscar. I lean down and bury my face in his fur. So sorry, so sorry. Oscar immediately slaps his tongue on my arm, the first thing he can reach.

“My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.” I murmur this into Oscar’s warm body again and again, calming Oscar. Calming myself.

“Tessie.” Concern. Not smirking now. He thinks he’s pushed me too far. I titter, and it sounds loony. It’s weird, because I really feel pretty good today. I just feel bad about kicking Oscar.

I raise my head, and Oscar resettles himself across my feet. His busy tail whacks like a broom against my leg. He’s fine. We’re fine.

“It’s a mnemonic device,” I say. “For remembering the planetary order.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars… My Very Energetic Mother…”

“I get that. But what does it have to do with Merry?” He’s sounding really worried.

“Merry thought we should come up with a code to help me remember the names of the mothers of the other Susans. So I could find them later. Tell them that their girls were OK, too.”

“And it had something to do… with the planets?”

“No,” I say impatiently. “I was repeating the planet thing in the grave, trying to, you know, stay sane. Not black out. Everything was kind of spinning. I could see the stars and stuff.” The moon, a tiny, thin smile. Don’t give up. “Anyway, it made Merry think of the idea for a mnemonic device so I wouldn’t forget the names of the other mothers. So I wouldn’t forget. N-U-S, a letter for each mother. Nasty Used Snot. Or something. I remember snot was part of it. But I flipped the letters around and made a real word. SUN.”

I’ve shocked him into silence again.

“And the other mothers’ names? What are they?”

“I don’t remember. Yet.” It pains me to say this out loud. “Just the three letters. Just SUN. But I’m working on it.” Determined. I run through names every night in bed. The U’s are the hardest. Ursula? Uni? I will not let Merry down. I will find the mother of every single Susan.

The doctor is twisting his mind around this.

I’m not such a cliché anymore.

“There were the bones of two other girls in the grave, not three,” he says finally, as if logic has anything to do with this.

Tessa, present day

The three of us barely fit in the famous Dr. Joanna Seger’s office. It isn’t at all what I expect for a rock star scientist. The large window showcases a lovely view of the Fort Worth skyline, but Jo faces the door, welcoming the living. Her desk, a modern black chunk that almost swallows the whole space, is littered with forensic journals and paper. It reminds me of Angie’s desktop in the church basement. The kind of desktop where passion is screwing organization and nobody’s making the bed.

The signature piece rising out of the chaos: a Goliath computer running $100,000 worth of software. The HD screen displays a roller coaster of lime green and black bar codes. It’s the rare spot of color except for the grinning Mexican death masks and the skeleton bride leering off a shelf like a grisly Barbie. The Mexicans, bless them, have always had a less squeamish, more realistic view of death. I’m guessing Jo can relate.

I’m afraid to peer too closely at what looks like a heart suspended in a glass box, because I’m pretty sure it is a heart suspended in a glass box. Preserved, somehow, with a putty hue. Its dull sheen reminds me of my trip to Dallas with Charlie to tour the Body Worlds exhibit, where dead humans are plasticized in polymer so we can gawk at our complex inner beauty. Charlie fought nightmares for a week after learning that this multi-million-dollar road show might be using corpses of prisoners executed in China.

I’m certain, certain, certain I do not want to know where this heart came from, either.

Lots of commendation plaques on the wall. Is that President Bush’s signature?

Bill is scrolling through the email on his phone, ignoring me. He has pushed his chair so far back to accommodate his legs that he is almost in the doorway. My own knees are crammed against the desk, probably turning pink under my cotton skirt.

This is Jo’s show, and we are waiting.

She is notched into her little cranny on the other side of the desk with her ear to the phone. She had the chance to say, “Sit, please,” before it buzzed. “Uh-huh,” she is saying now, after several minutes of listening. “Great. Let me know when you’ve finished up.”

“Very good news,” Jo announces as she replaces the receiver. “We have successfully extracted mitochondrial DNA from the bones of two of the girls. The femurs. We didn’t have luck with the skull. We’re going to have to try again, probably with a femur this time, although it was seriously degraded. We’ll keep going at it. We won’t give up. We’ll find the right bone.” She hesitates. “We’ve also decided we’re going to pull DNA from some other bones. Just to be sure there weren’t additional mistakes.”

I can’t think about this. More girls. The Susan cacophony in my head is loud enough.

I can, however, appreciate Jo’s tenacity. My iPad has been very busy since I witnessed the bone cutting. This high-tech forensic lab might be a well-kept secret in Fort Worth, but not to crime fighters around the world. The building protrudes off Camp Bowie like a silver ship hull, with a cache of grim treasure: baby teeth and skulls and hip bones and jawbones that have traveled across state lines and oceans hoping for a last shot at being identified. This lab gets results when no one else does.

“That’s great, Jo.” There is weary relief in Bill’s voice.

His tone reminds me that he is pushing a truck of bricks uphill every day with one hand and dragging me behind him with the other. This morning, I’d reluctantly agreed to ride along to meet the “expert” who is poring over my teen-age drawings. The detour to Jo’s office was a last-minute surprise, and welcome. I could breathe freely for a few more minutes before I started inspecting the swirls in a curtain for a face. That is, I could breathe if my eyes stopped wandering to that heart in a box.

“That was my boss on the phone,” Jo continues. “As we speak, the DNA of those two girls is being input into the national missing persons database. I don’t want to get your hopes up. It’s a useless hunt, obviously, if the families of the victims haven’t also placed their DNA into the system for a match. The database wasn’t even around when these girls went missing. Their families have to be ones who haven’t given up hope, who are still bugging police and on their knees praying every night. You two are most definitely not on a movie set with Angelina Jolie, and please don’t forget it.”

I wonder how many times she has repeated this. Hundreds. Thousands.

Her left hand is doodling a drawing on the edge of a magazine. A DNA strand. It has tiny shoes. I think it is jogging. Or dancing.

“Six weeks until D-Day,” Bill says. “But I’ve had less at this point with other cases and landed on top. Tell everybody thanks for persevering. Any detail about those girls’ identities could provide more reasonable doubt. I want to pile it on at the hearing.”

Jo’s hand pauses. “Tessa, do you know anything about the forensic use of mitochondrial DNA? I’d like you to understand what we do here.”

“A little,” I say. “It comes only from the maternal side. Mother. Grandmother. I… read… that you were able to use it to identify the bones of one of John Wayne Gacy’s victims thirty years later.”

“Not me specifically, but this lab, yes. William Bundy. Otherwise known as Victim No. 19, because he was the nineteenth victim pulled from the crawl space under Gacy’s house in Chicago. That was a very good day for his family. And science.”

John Wayne Gacy. Put to death by lethal injection in 1994, a month and a half before my attack.

Jo’s pen is moving again. Dancing DNA guy now has a partner. With high heels. Jo sticks the pen behind her ear. “Let me give you the twenty-five-cent science lesson I deliver to my sixth-grade tour groups. There are two kinds of DNA in our cells: nuclear and mitochondrial. Nuclear DNA was the kind used way back in the O.J. trial, and, by the way, if you have a scintilla of doubt, they had him dead to rights. But that was a fresh crime scene. For older bones, we have come to depend on mitochondrial DNA, which hangs around longer. It is tougher to extract, but we’re getting better all the time. You’re exactly right: It remains identical in ancestors for decades. Which makes it perfect for cold cases, like this one. And really cold cases, like, say, the Romanovs, where forensic work finally disproved the myth that Princess Anastasia escaped from that cellar where her family was slaughtered. Science was able to prove that anyone who claimed to be her, or descended from her, was a liar. Another great case. It rewrites history.”

I nod. I know plenty about Anastasia. Lydia had been fascinated with all of the romantic conspiracy theories-the ten women who claimed to be the only surviving daughter of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, who were executed with their children by the Bolsheviks, like dogs. I’d also watched the convoluted, sanitized, entirely imagined, happily-ever-after Disney version of Anastasia while babysitting my six-year-old cousin, Ella. “Are you a princess, too?” Ella had asked when it was over. “Weren’t you the girl who forgot?”

Bill moves restlessly. Impatient. “What about the hair, Jo?”

“Still in process. A little more red tape than we thought before we got the police to turn it over. Separate evidence box.”

“The hair?” I ask. “What hair?”

“Do you really still not know the details of the case?” Bill asks impatiently. “The hair is one of two pieces of physical evidence used to convict Terrell. They found it on the muddy jacket on the farm road.” Muddy jacket. Bloody glove. Suddenly I was back in O.J. Land.

“I’ve made it a point not to read much about the case,” I say stiffly. His frustration with me hurts. “It was a long time ago. I was only in that courtroom when I testified. I don’t remember a hair.”

Jo is examining me carefully, her pen stilled. “The hair was red.”

My hair.

“It was brought up at the last minute at trial. The prosecution expert examined it under a microscope and testified that it belonged to you. He was just one hundred percent damn sure it came off your head. It was the kind of junk science used back then. It is impossible to match a hair to a specific person by looking at it under a microscope. The only way is through DNA analysis. Which we are now doing.”

Yet… only 2 percent of the population has red hair. My grandmother had drilled that into me. First, after she caught me hacking off my orange locks with scissors at age four and then again six years later when I tried to dye it gold by squeezing thirteen lemons over my head and sitting like a piece of salmon in the Texas sun.

Red hair was something else that made me lucky. Special.

“I know about the jacket, of course,” I say steadily. “I know about the ID from the person who saw… Terrell… hitchhiking by the field. I just didn’t know about the hair.” Or I forgot.

Bill stands abruptly. “Maybe you also don’t know that seventy percent of wrongful convictions overturned on DNA involve eyewitness misidentification. That the jacket found on the road was a size too small for Terrell. And the red hair on the jacket? It was stick straight. If your school pictures are any indication, you looked like you were growing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos curls. It could have been a poodle hair, for Christ’s sake.”

Poodles have curly hair. And I don’t think red poodles exist. Although Aunt Hilda once dyed hers blue.

But I understand his anger. The need to lay it on.

I know what he’s thinking, although he isn’t saying it out loud. The real reason Terrell Darcy Goodwin lost the last seventeen years of his life isn’t because of a red hair or a jacket tossed carelessly by the side of the road or a woman who thought she could see in the dark while she was whizzing by in her Mercedes.

The real reason Terrell Darcy Goodwin sits on Death Row is because of the Black-Eyed Susan who testified, scared out of her mind.

Tessie, 1995

I can’t wait to tell him.

“I know that last week was rough,” he begins. “But there are only a couple of months left before the trial begins. That’s a very short time to learn what you do or do not know, and help you feel prepared.”

Fifty-nine days, to be exact.

“We should reconsider light hypnosis,” he says. “I know how you feel about it, but there are things lying in the shadows. Just inches away, Tessie. Inches.”

We had a deal. No drugs. No hypnosis.

My heart is slamming, my breath rapid, like a hot cat on the driveway. Like the time I ran three miles full out in the park last August, and Lydia had to yank the emergency paper bag out of her backpack.

Lydia, always there, always calm. Breathe. In and out. In and out. The paper bag, crickling and crackling, puffing and collapsing.

“What do you think?” he persists. “I’ve talked with your father about this.”

The silence between this threat and his next sentence is going to kill me. I’m trying to remember where I usually focus my eyes. Down? Up? At his voice? It’s important.

“Your father says he won’t support hypnosis unless you want it,” he says finally. “So this is between us.”

I’ve never loved my father more than this moment. I am filled with the relief of it, this simple, profound gesture of respect from the man who has watched his flame-haired daughter who believed she could beat the wind shrink to skin and bones and bitterness. My father holds up my future like a banged-up trophy that still means something, no matter how heavy it gets.

He is sitting outside this door, fighting for me. Every single day, fighting for me. I want to run out there and throw myself in his arms. I want to apologize for every silent night, every carefully prepared meal not eaten, every tentative invitation I have refused: to rock on the front porch swing or go for a walk or head up to Dairy Queen for a dipped cone.

“Our goals are the same, Tessie,” the doctor says. “For you to heal. Justice is part of the package.”

I haven’t uttered a word since I walked in the door. And I had planned to say so much. Tears hang in my eyes. What they mean, I don’t know. I refuse to let them fall.

“Tessie.” Going in for the kill. Corrupting my name into an order. Reminding me that he knows better than I do.

“This could help you see again,” he says.

Oh.

I want to laugh.

What he doesn’t know, what nobody knows yet, is that I already can.

Tessa, present day

I could have lived very happily with the idea of never, ever again. Never again plunking down on a therapist’s couch. Never again thinking about my manipulative drawings of the girl running in the sand and the girl without the mouth. Never again fighting this sick feeling that the other person in the room wants to take a paring knife and slowly carve out my secrets.

Dr. Nancy Giles almost immediately ushered Bill out the door, politely telling him he would be in the way. Actually it wasn’t all that polite. The fact that she is a beautiful gazelle-like creature probably took the edge off. Bill grumbled about being banned in such a little-boy manner that it made me think the two of them had known each other intimately for a long time, although he failed to mention it on the ride over.

My grandfather once told me that God puts pieces in the wrong places to keep us busy solving puzzles, and in the perfect places so that we never forget there is a God. At the time, we were standing on a remote stretch of Big Bend that was like a strange and wondrous moon.

Dr. Giles’s face may be the human equivalent, a glorious landscape of its own. Velvet brown skin with eyes dropped in like glittering lakes. Her nose, lips, cheekbones-all chiseled by a very talented angel. She understands her beauty and keeps things simple. Hair cropped into a bob. A well-cut blue suit with a skirt that strikes her mid-knee. Gold strings dangle from her ears, with a single large antique pearl at the end of each that dances every time she moves her head. I guess her age to be creeping toward seventy.

Her office, though, is like the favorite fat uncle who wears loud shirts and offers up a slightly smashed Twinkie from his pocket. Walls the color of egg yolk. A red velour couch, with a stuffed elephant plunked in the corner for a pillow. Two comfy plaid chairs. Low-slung shelves shooting out a riot of color, crammed with picture books and Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket, American Girl dolls of every ethnicity, trucks and plastic tools and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. A table topped with a tray of markers and crayons. An iMac at i-am-a-Child level. A refrigerator door riddled with the graffiti of children’s awkward, happy signatures. Off to the side, a basket loaded with snacks both forbidden and polyunsaturated, and no mother to smack your hand.

My eyes linger on the framed prints-not your usual doc-in-a-box muted abstractions. Instead, Chagall’s magical, musical animals and the loveliest blue ever imagined. Magritte’s steam engine shooting out of a fireplace, and his giant green apple, and men in bowler hats floating up like Mary Poppins.

Perfect, I think. If anything is surreal, it is childhood.

“My usual customer is a little younger.” Dr. Giles says it with good humor. She has misinterpreted my roving eyes, still on the hunt for my own grim artwork. I tell my nerves to shut up, but they don’t. My sweaty hands are probably stickier than the five-year-old who skipped out of the room with a dripping green Popsicle right before I stepped in.

“I’m not sure we can accomplish exactly what William wants, are you?” She has placed herself on the other side of the couch, crossing one knee over the other, her skirt inching up slightly.

Relaxed. Informal.

Or purposeful. Rehearsed.

“William has always set near-impossible goals, even when he was a boy,” she continues. “The older I get, and the more horrors I’ve seen, my goals have become… less specific. More flexible. More patient. I like to think that is because I am wiser, not tired.”

“And yet… he brought me to you,” I say. “With a deadline. For very specific reasons.”

“And yet he brought you to me.” Her lips curve up again. I realize how easily that smile could melt a child, but I am no longer a child.

“So your plan is not for us to look at my drawings together.”

“Do we need them? This is going to disappoint William, but I don’t think you wrote the killer’s name in the waves in the ocean. Do you?”

“No.” I clear my throat. “I do not.” I wasn’t sure whether this was true. One of the first things I did the night after my sight returned was to examine every swirl of the brush. Just in case. Who knows what the unconscious mind will paint? Lydia had asked rather dramatically.

“I find that drawings after a trauma like yours are often widely misinterpreted.” Dr. Giles reaches for the stuffed elephant tucked behind her, which is preventing her from leaning back. “There is a lot attached to the use of color, and the vigor of the pen. But a child may use blood red in his drawing simply because it’s his favorite color. The drawing only represents the feeling on that day, at that very moment in time. We all hate our parents on some days, right? A scratchy, angry version of a father doesn’t mean he is an abuser, and I’ll never testify to things like that. So I use the drawing technique, but mostly as a way to allow young patients to get out their emotions so they don’t eat away at them. It is much, much harder to say the words. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Dr. Giles…”

“Please. Nancy.”

“Nancy, then. Not to be rude… but why exactly did you take Bill up on this request? If you don’t believe there is really anything there to talk about.” Does she know that more than half of my drawings are faked? Do I need to tell her?

Jo’s chilling, detached lesson on bones, that damn heart in a box, the pink elephant perched beside us who knows way too much about the terrible, terrible things people do-it’s about all the reality I can take today.

In an hour and a half, I will be planted in the stands at Charlie’s volleyball game, surrounded by weary moms who will scream their throats raw, where the most important thing isn’t worrying about the Middle East’s urgent signs of Armageddon, or the 150 million orphans in the world, or glaciers melting, or the fate of all the innocent men on Death Row.

It will be whether a ball touches the ground.

Afterward, I will pull a bag of carrot sticks out of the refrigerator, throw four Ham & Cheese Hot Pockets in the microwave, one for me and three for Charlie, toss in a load of clothes, and attach white gauze to lavender silk. These are the pricks of light that have kept me mostly sane, mostly happy, day after day.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Nancy is saying. “I’m not at all sure your drawings are meaningless. Your case is… complicated. I very much appreciate your permission to view the doctors’ notes on your sessions. It was helpful, although the notes from your last doctor were a little sparse. You were blind when you created many of those pictures, correct? Your doctor at the time clearly thought you were faking most of them.” So she knows. Good. “He also believed that the two of you explored every avenue when it came to figuring out the drawings of the curtain. The drawings that were, essentially, the ones that you declared spontaneous and genuine.”

She glances down at the beeper vibrating at her waist, checks the number, silences it. “So there are many reasons to discount the drawings. At least that was your doctor’s assessment. Would you agree?”

“Yes.” My throat is dry. Where was this going? And a random thought, Should I have ever asked to see the doctor’s notes?

A Susan quickly chimes: You don’t want to know what he said.

“Of course, it’s always a little hard to know exactly what we are faking,” Dr. Giles continues. “The subconscious is busy. The truth tends to creep through. I am, of course, drawn to the curtain. It reminded me of a famous case history that I thought would be worthwhile to share. It’s ironic, or a sign if you believe in those, but the girl’s name in this other case history is also Tessa. Her name has probably been changed and her story is far different, of course. She was a young girl who had been sexually abused in her home but was far too traumatized to name her abuser. The young girl drew a cutaway picture of her two-story house, so her therapist could see inside. She drew a number of beds on the top floor. The child said the beds were for all the many people living in the house. She drew a living room downstairs, and a kitchen with an oversized teakettle. But instead of asking the girl about the beds, the therapist asked the girl about the teakettle and why it was important. The girl told her that every morning, each member of the house would pour hot water out of that kettle for instant coffee as they left for school or work. So, using the teakettle, the therapist took the little girl through that awful day of the abuse. Tessa remembered, one at a time, who had used the teakettle that morning before leaving the house. The one person remaining, who didn’t use it, is the one who stayed alone in the house with her. The abuser. The girl was then able to tell the story of what happened to her.”

Against my will, this woman has mesmerized me.

“I can’t know for sure,” she says gently. “But I believe your ordinary object could be a similarly powerful tool. It belongs somewhere. We need to look around that place. If you like, we can try some exercises.”

My head pounds. I want to say yes, but I’m not sure I can. Nothing, nothing, is ever what I expect.

She accurately interprets my silence. “Not today. But maybe soon?”

“Yes, yes. Soon.”

“May I give you a homework assignment? I would like you to draw the curtain again from memory. Then call me. I’ll make time.” She pats my knee. “Excuse me for a minute.”

She walks toward the closed door at the back of the room. I notice a slight arthritic limp. As the door cracks open, I glimpse her personal refuge-warm light and a large antique desk.

She is back quickly, proffering a business card. Nothing else in her hands. She is not returning my drawings-at least, not today. No cheating.

“I scribbled my cell number on the bottom,” she says. “I did have one more question before you go, if that’s OK.”

“Sure.”

“The drawing of the field. The giant flowers leering like monsters over the two girls.”

Girls. Plural. Two.

“It means nothing,” I say. “I didn’t draw it. A friend of mine did. We drew together. She was in on my… deception. My partner in crime.” I laugh awkwardly.

Nancy shoots me a strange look. “Is your friend OK?”

It seems like an unusual question. So many, many years have passed. Why does it matter?

“I haven’t seen her since we were seniors in high school. She left town before we graduated, right after the trial.” She just disappeared.

“That must have been hard.” Every word is careful. “To lose a good friend so soon after the trauma.”

“Yes.” For more reasons than I want to explain. I am inching toward the door. Lydia is not a place I will go. Not today.

Yet Dr. Giles won’t let me leave, not yet.

“Tessa, I believe the girl who drew that scene, your friend Lydia, was genuinely terrified.”

“You said there were… two girls in that picture. I always thought there was one girl. Bleeding.” A tiny, tiny red tornado.

“At first, so did I,” she says. “The shapes are not distinct. But if you look closely, you can see four hands. Two heads. I believe one of the girls is a protector, crouching over the other one. I don’t think that is blood from the attack of the flower monsters. I think the protector has red hair.”

Tessie, 1995

It is hard, pretending not to see. It has been two days. I know that I can’t keep it up very long, especially with my dad. I need some time to observe, to analyze body language. To know what everyone is really feeling about me when they think I’m not looking.

The doctor scribbles away at his desk, a scritch-scratching sound that makes me want to scream.

He glances up with a concerned frown to see if I might have changed my mind about talking. Or my pose. Arms crossed, staring straight ahead. I had marched in the room at our appointed time and told him that I was done. Done, done, done.

We had a deal, I’d reminded him.

No freakin’ way was I doing hypnosis, where I float along like a dizzy bluebird and tell him secret things. I set out my rules from the beginning, and if it was so easy to erase this one from his mind, what else might he do? Offer up a happy cocktail? I’d read Prozac Nation. That girl was sad. So messed up. She wasn’t me.

I didn’t want to be like her, or Randy, the guy with the locker next to mine, wearing an Alice in Chains T-shirt every day, popping Xanax between classes and sleeping through high school. I had heard that his mother has breast cancer. I don’t want to ask, but I am always sure to smile at him when we meet at the lockers. I get it. Randy sent me a cute card at the hospital with a thermometer sticking out of a cat’s mouth. He wrote inside, Sometimes life is so unkind. I wonder how long it took him to find that lyric. Alanis is plastered inside my locker, so he had to know. He probably couldn’t find any Alice in Chains tunes that wouldn’t tell me to go kill myself or something.

Lydia had caught on right away. Tiny clues. My Bible on the dresser opened to Isaiah instead of Matthew. The TV ever so slightly more angled toward my spot on the bed. The pink-and-green T-shirt that matched the leggings, and the brown and peach Maybelline eye shadow that I hadn’t put on for a year. It wasn’t just one thing, she said. It was all of them.

There were surprises, everywhere. My face in the bathroom mirror, for one. Everything about me, more angular. My nose juts out like the notch on my grandfather’s old sundial. The half-moon scar under my eye is fading, more pink than red, less noticeable. Dad tentatively suggested a few weeks ago that we could talk to a plastic surgeon if I wanted, but the idea of lying there like Sleeping Beauty while a man with a knife stands over me… not ever gonna happen. I would rather people stare.

Oscar is even whiter than I imagined, although maybe that’s just because everything seems a little blinding at the moment. He’s the first thing I saw at the end of my bed the morning I opened my eyes for real-a pile of dove feathers with a head. I had called out his name softly. When his tongue slapped my nose, I knew for sure I wasn’t dreaming.

There was no drama to my sudden transformation. I went to sleep, I woke up, and I could see again. The world had crept back into sharp and excruciating focus.

The doctor’s still at it with the scritch-scratching at the desk. I twitch my eyes over to the clock on the wall. Nine minutes left. Oscar’s sleeping at my feet, but his ears are flicking around. Maybe an evil squirrel dream. I kick off my sneaker and run my foot back and forth across his warm back.

The doctor notices my movement, hesitates, and puts down his pen. He makes his way slowly over to the chair across from me. I think again what an excellent job Lydia had done of describing him.

“Tessie, I want to tell you how sorry I am,” he begins. “I didn’t honor our agreement. I pushed you. It is everything a good therapist should not do, regardless of the circumstances.”

I greet him with silence but keep my gaze locked over his shoulder. Tears, barely under the surface.

Because there are things I’d still rather not see. My brother’s face after my dad talked to him quietly last night about his grades, which used to be straight A’s. The medical insurance forms scattered all over the table like someone lost at poker and tossed the deck. The sad, bare state of the refrigerator, weeds choking the cracks in the driveway, tight lines curved around my father’s mouth.

All of this, because of me.

I need to keep trying. I want to get better. I can see. Isn’t that better?

Didn’t this man asking for forgiveness right now probably have something to do with that? Shouldn’t I let him score that victory? Don’t we all make mistakes?

“What else can I say, Tessie, that might begin to restore your trust in me?”

I think he knows that I can see.

“You can tell me about your daughter,” I say. “The one you lost.”

Tessa, present day

The tutu is finished.

I steam it gently, even though it doesn’t really need it. Charlie makes fun of me and my Rowenta IS6300 Garment Steamer. But Rowenta has probably been my best and most faithful therapist. She pops out of the closet about once a month and never asks a single question. She’s mindless. Magic. I borrow her wand and all of the wrinkles disappear. Results are instant, and certain.

Except for today.

Today, a mobile spins in my head, dangled by an unseen hand. I’m transfixed by the pictures whizzing by. Lydia’s face is on one. Terrell’s is on another. They dance among yellow flowers and black eyes and rusty shovels and plastic hearts. All of them, strung together with brittle bone.

It has been two days since Dr. Nancy Giles of Vanderbilt/Oxford/Harvard interpreted Lydia’s drawing, right after she had announced in no uncertain terms that she didn’t put too much stock in Freudian crap.

Dr. Giles thinks something was wrong with Lydia. That Lydia perceived me as the protector. Which can’t be. I never told anyone about the poem he left me in the ground by the live oak. Lydia drew the picture before the poem. I would have died without Lydia back then, not the other way around.

I need to see this drawing again, dammit. Why didn’t Dr. Giles offer to show it to me? Did she think I was a liar? That I knew something I wasn’t telling? As always, as soon as I left a therapist’s office, the doubts wriggled out like slimy worms.

I miss you. That’s what Lydia wrote on the flowers delivered to my home after all those years of silence. Unless she wasn’t the one who sent them. What if they are from my monster? What if my silence killed her? What if, because I didn’t warn her, he carried out the poetic threat so coyly buried by my tree house? If you tell, I will make Lydia a Susan, too. What if my denial and stupidity sacrificed both Terrell and her?

Terrell. I think about him all the time now. I wonder if he hates me, if his arms are thick from push-ups on concrete, if he has already thought about his last meal, just in case. Then I remember, he can’t ask for a last meal. One of the guys who chained James Byrd Jr. to a pickup and dragged him to death ruined that for everybody. He requested two chicken-fried steaks, a pound of barbecue, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a meat-lover’s pizza, an omelet, a bowl of okra, a pint of Blue Bell, peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts, and three root beers. It was delivered before his execution. And then he didn’t eat it. Texas said, no more.

I can rattle off this menu ordered by a racist freak, but can’t remember the day my world blew apart. I can’t remember a single thing that will save Terrell.

I glance out to my studio window, glinting at the top of the two-story garage in the corner of the back yard. I should go up there. Shut the blinds. Pull out my pencils and paints, and draw the curtain. Begin my homework.

The garage was renovated from crumbling disaster two years ago. Effie gave the plan her historical stamp of approval. Blue window boxes and straggly red geraniums for her, Internet and a security system connected to the house for me.

Cheerful. Safe.

The bottom level, which once housed the previous owner’s blue 1954 Dodge, is jammed with my table saw and biscuit joiner, router and drills, nail gun and orbital sander, vacuum press and welder. The tools that curve cabinet doors like sand dunes and solder master staircases into a dizzy spiral. Machines that make my muscles ache and reassure me that I can take on a man, or a monster.

The top level was designed just for me. My space. For the quieter arts. It seemed so important-a real home for my drawing table, easels, paints, paintbrushes, and sewing machines. I splurged on a Pottery Barn couch and a Breville tea maker and a Pella picture window so that I could spy into the upper floors of our live oak.

The week after the nail pounding stopped, as I sat and sipped tea bathed in the studio’s white, clean, new-smell glory, I realized that I didn’t want my space. I didn’t want isolation, or to miss Charlie’s burst through the door after school. So I stuck with the living room. The studio turned into the place my little brother, Bobby, hangs out to write when he visits from his home in Los Angeles twice a year and where Charlie goes on the occasion when every word out of my mouth sets her nerves on fire. I don’t know why, Mom. It’s not what you’re saying. It’s just that you’re talking.

This is the reason that the living room is piled with brocade fabric and designer dress patterns and bead carousels that mingle with Charlie’s flip-flops and textbooks and misplaced earrings and itsy-bitsy “seahorse” rubber bands for braces. Why my daughter and I have an unspoken agreement not to speak about the state of the living room, unless it involves ants and crumbs. We clean it together every other Sunday night. It’s a happy place, where we create and argue and refine our love.

The studio is crowded. My ghosts moved in right away, when I did, after the last stroke of linen white on the walls. The Susans feel free to talk as loudly as they want, sometimes arguing like silly girls at a sleepover.

I should climb the steps. Greet them with civility.

Draw the curtain. Find out whether it swings from a window in the mansion in my head where the Susans sleep. Let them help.

But I can’t. Not yet. I have to dig.

I’m staring into a gaping hole again. This time, a swimming pool, empty except for a chocolate slurry of leaves and rainwater.

Feeling ridiculous. Disappointed. And cold. I pull up the hood of Charlie’s Army sweatshirt. It’s 5:27. I haven’t stood in this place since Charlie and I lived here when she was two. Charlie has already texted the word hungry while I was driving the wrong direction on I-30 with a red pickup on my tail, and twenty minutes after that, home, and five minutes after that, cool tutu, and one minute after that um?????

I tried calling back, but no answer. Now the phone in my pocket is buzzing. The sun is dropping lower every second, a big orange ball going somewhere else to play. The apartment windows wink fire with the fading light, so I can’t see in. I hope no one is staring down at the hooded figure in the shadows armed with a shovel.

“Why aren’t you at Anna’s?” I blurt into the phone, instead of hello. “You are supposed to be at Anna’s.” As if that would make it so.

“Her mom got sick,” Charlie says. “Her dad picked us up. I told him it was OK to bring me home. Where are you? Why didn’t you answer my texts?”

“I just tried to call you. I was driving. I got lost. Now I’m on… a job. In Dallas. Did you lock the doors?”

“Mom. Food.”

“Order a pizza from Sweet Mama’s. There’s money in the envelope under the phone. Ask if Paul can deliver it. And look through the peephole before you answer to make sure it’s him. And lock the door when he leaves and punch in the code.”

“What’s the number?”

“Charlie. You know the security code.”

“Not that number. The number for Sweet Mama’s.”

This from the girl who last night Googled that Simon Cowell was the young assistant who polished Jack Nicholson’s axe in The Shining.

“Charlie, really? I’ll be on my way home soon. I’m late because… I thought I’d remember the way.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Pizza, Charlie. Peephole. Don’t forget.” But Charlie has already hung up.

She’ll be fine. Was that me, or a Susan? Which of us would know better?

“Hey.” A man with a weed eater is quickly approaching from the other side of the house. Busted. I lean the shovel against a tree, too late. Even at this distance, something about the way he carries himself stirs a memory.

“This is private property!” he shouts. “What do you think you’re doing here with that shovel at dinnertime?” A drawl mixed with a threat and a reprimand about proper mealtime etiquette. A perfect Texas cocktail.

Because I’m scared of the dark. Because I think there are plenty of people with itchy fingers in this neighborhood who have a gun tucked in a drawer. I know I did.

“I used to live here,” I say.

“The shovel? What’s that for?”

I’ve suddenly figured out who he is, and I’m a little astonished. The handyman. The very same one who worked here more than a decade ago, who swore every day he was quitting. As I recall, he was a distant cousin of the grouchy woman who owned the place, a converted Victorian in East Dallas advertised as a four-plex with character. Translated: ornate crown molding that dropped white crumbs in my hair like dandruff, windows requiring Hercules to open them, and hot showers lasting two and a half minutes if I was lucky enough to beat the exercise freak on the first floor who woke up at 5 A.M.

The windows were why I took the place. No one crawling up and in. That, and the listing’s promise of Girls Only.

“When did the owner take out the parking spaces and dig this swimming pool?” I ask. “Marvin? Is it Marvin?”

“You remember old Marvin, do ya? Most of the girls do. Pool went in about three years ago. It used to be a gravel lot with numbered signs where everybody had a spot. But then, you’d know that. Now everybody complains they have to fight it out in the street. And Gertie has stopped filling the pool. Says it’s not worth the money and that Marvin don’t keep the leaves out. Old Marvin’s doing the best he can. When did you say you lived here?”

“Ten years ago. Or so.” Vague. I’d forgotten his habit of addressing himself in the third person. It partly explains why he never found another job.

“Ah, the good old days, when these whiney college brats didn’t call Marvin at 2 A.M. about how their Apples ain’t connectin’ to the Universe.”

I shove the laugh back down in my throat and don’t correct him. I pull the hood off so I can see better, and instantly realize the mistake. I toss my hair, trying to cover the side of my face with the scar. The toss is enough for Marvin to take renewed interest in me even though I’m in roomy black sweats and running shoes and not wearing a stitch of makeup. It must have been a slow day for him at the Girls Only House, which is the real reason I’m guessing he stays.

“I’m curious,” I say hesitantly. “Did they find anything when they dug up the pool?”

“Ya mean like a dead body? Whoa, you should see your face. No bodies, sweetheart. Are you missing one?”

“No. No. Of course not.”

Marvin is shaking his head. “You’re just like those damn kids. Or maybe you’re a scout for one of those ghost shows?”

“What kids?”

“The sorority that rents the apartment right up there on the left-hand corner every fall, thinking it is haunted. Use it to scare the shit out of their pledges. Drape skeletons dressed in see-through nighties out the window. Invite their rich frat boys and serve black-eyed-pea dip and trashcan punch, the stuff they vomit up on the front porch for me to clean up. Gertie started charging a premium to rent that apartment. But do you think she pays Marvin more? Nope. Marvin just has to suck it up and clean it up.”

“Why do they think… there are ghosts?” As soon as the question rolls off my tongue, I regret it. You know the answer.

“Because of the girl who lived there a long time ago. The one who got away from the Black-Eyed Susan killer. We didn’t even know it was her until a year and a half after she moved in. She was nice enough. Worked at a little design firm downtown. She complained a few times that we wouldn’t let her gate up the staircase for her little girl. Gertie said it would take away the old house charm.”

Suddenly, his face freezes.

“Jesus, you’re that girl, ain’t ya? You’re the Susan that lived up there.”

“My name isn’t Susan.”

“Shoulda known soon as I saw your red hair. Crap, no one is gonna believe this. Can Marvin take a picture? You’re for real, right? Not a ghost?” For a second, he seems to be truly considering this.

Before I can think, the phone is out of his pocket, the button pressed. I am recorded, with flash, for all time, into infinity, about to be passed from phone to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram-Marvin’s Universe and beyond.

“Great,” he says to himself, peering at his phone. “Got the shovel in the background.”

If my monster didn’t know already, he will soon.

I am on the hunt.

A light blares from every window as I swing into our driveway around 7. Not a sign that Charlie is scared, I remind myself, just her habit of flipping lights on as she goes and never bothering to turn them off.

I spoke with Charlie about half an hour ago. A pizza with Canadian bacon and black olives had, indeed, been delivered, eaten, and deemed “solid.” Everything seemed so normal on the other end of the line. Far, far removed from my disturbing encounter with Marvin. So much so that I had stopped at Tom Thumb to fill Charlie’s texted list of special requests for her lunch: yelo cheez, BF (nt honey) ham, Mrs. B’s white brd, grapes, hummus, pretz, mini Os.

“I’m home,” I yell, kicking the door closed behind me. The security system is switched on. Check. Charlie had even cleaned up the pizza box from the coffee table in front of the TV, where I assumed she’d been sneaking in a Netflix rerun of something on my waffle-y I don’t really like you to watch shows like that list.

But no Charlie. No backpack. The TV, warm. I pass through the living room and set the bag of groceries on the counter with my keys.

“Charlie?” Probably in her room, living inside Bose headphones while reluctantly tramping around nineteenth-century England with Jane Austen.

I knock, because Aunt Hilda never did. No answer. I crack her door. Shove it wide open. Bed unmade. Pride and Prejudice operating as a coaster for a water bottle. Clothes strewn everywhere. Her underwear drawer dumped on the bed. A streak of mud across the floor.

Pretty much as she left it this morning. But no Charlie.

The rest of the house sweep takes about a minute, plenty of time for sickening waves of panic to roll in. I thrust open the sliding glass doors to the back yard, yelling her name. She’s not in the hammock along the back fence line, jerry-rigged from the thick trunk of the live oak to an ancient horse post that Effie had saved from a carpenter’s axe. The studio windows gleam black above me; the garage doors are shut tight.

My phone. I need my phone.

I rush back inside and fumble for it in my purse. Clumsily punch in the new security code that I had to choose after the software update yesterday. Locked out. Shit, shit, shit. Try the four numbers one more time, slowly. Promise myself that I will never, ever update my phone again. Hit the icon.

And there it is, my one-word, God-sent reprieve.

@ Effie’s

In seconds, I am banging wildly on Effie’s door. It seems to take forever for her to answer it. She’s cloaked in a long white nightgown with lace that strangles her neck. Gray hair, sprung from its usual braided bun, rains down to her waist. I’d peg her as a runaway from Pemberley if she were clutching a candle instead of the largest laminated periodic table I’ve ever seen.

“What in heaven’s name is wrong?” Effie asks.

Be patient, be patient, be patient.

“Is Charlie here?” Breathless.

“Of course she is.” Effie steps aside, and there’s my girl, the most beautiful sight in the world, cross-legged on the floor by the coffee table, scribbling in a notebook. I pick up every detail: hair fanned out around her face like red turkey feathers, swept up by a chip clip; the volleyball shorts she’s still wearing even though it’s 50 degrees outside; the fuzzy pink pig slippers; the chipped gold glitter fingernail polish. Her lips are moving, exaggerated, like a silent film star. Save me.

“I was sitting a bit on the front porch swing and I saw a man roaming around our yards,” Effie begins.

Pizza guy, Charlie is mouthing now. Her eyes are rolling and Effie’s still chattering while all my brain can do is pound out, He doesn’t have her.

“… I thought about how your car was gone but the lights in the house were on. Got me concerned. I called and Charlie answered and I went right over and got her. I was just helping her with a little early chemistry prep for next year.”

Charlie points to a plate on the coffee table that holds either very burnt or dark chocolate cookies, arranged in a smiley-face pattern. The smiley face is Charlie’s work, I’m sure. She picks up two of the cookies and holds them over her face like eyes. Definitely burnt.

Charlie’s antics, Effie’s sincerity, the inedible cookies. Charlie and I will talk later about breaking one of my hard and fast rules. An @ symbol and a single digital word do not yet replace an old-fashioned, handwritten note and a piece of Scotch tape. Which means I might as well have just stepped out of Pemberley myself.

“That’s very considerate of you, Effie,” I say.

“Charlie thinks it was the pizza deliveryman,” Effie says, “but I thought he had a stealthy air about him. We both know you can’t be too careful.”

My mind is basking in a warm cocoon of relief when this registers. Is Effie hinting at what we never talk about? Is she, too, on high alert for my monster?

“You know who I think it was?” Effie asks.

I shake my head, numbly pondering all the things she might say that I don’t want Charlie to hear.

“I think,” she says, “it was the digger snatcher.”

Tessie, 1995

I know a few things about the doctor’s daughter now. Her name is Rebecca. She was sixteen. Not because he told me. Because Lydia is a digger.

She disappeared the same year that a madman robbed the world of John Lennon and Alfred Hitchcock died less violently than he deserved. Lydia and I found out that much as we carefully spun the microfiche of a local newspaper until it landed on a two-year-old profile of my doctor, produced right after he won a prestigious international award for research into normal people and paranoia.

Who the hell is normal, Lydia had muttered. Then she spun a few pages and read Hitchcock’s obit aloud to me. She was especially riveted by the revelation that he tortured his own daughter during the filming of one of Lydia’s favorite movies, Strangers on a Train. He stuck her on a Ferris wheel, halted her car at the top, turned off all the lights on the set, and abandoned her all alone in the dark. By the time some crew person brought her down, she was hysterical. Lydia clicked a button on the machine and copied both the doctor’s interview and the Hitchcock obit, which she deemed worthy of adding to the personal files of weirdness she kept in the box under her bed.

In fact, on the bus ride home from the library, she was more distracted by the fate of Hitchcock’s daughter than by how little she’d learned about Rebecca. He was a freaking sadist, she announced, while everyone seated near us stared at my little moon scar.

Rebecca was a single paragraph in the feature story summing up my doctor’s life, which makes me unbelievably sad. My guess? He told the reporter that the subject of his daughter’s disappearance was off the table.

He certainly made it clear it was off the table for us at our last session. A nice long silence followed my question about Rebecca. So I announced I liked the print of The Reaper hanging over his desk. “My grandfather went through a Winslow Homer wheat period,” I said. And, oh yeah, I’m not blind anymore.

I couldn’t tell if he was faking his surprise. The doctor appeared genuinely thrilled about what he declared a “major, major breakthrough.” He had fiddled around with a silly old-fashioned eye test that involved a pencil and my nose. Asked me to close my eyes and describe his face in the greatest detail possible.

He reassured me again that even though he wouldn’t discuss it with me, his daughter had absolutely nothing to do with the Black-Eyed Susan case. I had never asked that, but even if she does, I’m not at all sure at this point I want to know.

It’s hard not to be a little happy. I’ve gained three pounds in five days. My dad and brother squeezed me so hard in a three-way hug when they found out I could see again that I thought my heart would burst in my chest. Aunt Hilda hustled over a three-layer German chocolate cake, gooey with her famous coconut pecan frosting, and I’m pretty sure it was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.

Last night, a brand-new hardback copy of The Horse Whisperer appeared on my bedside table, in a house where it is unheard of not to wait until a book comes out in paperback.

The trial is fifty-two days away. That means twelve more sessions or so, if I count a couple extra to wrap things up after the trial. The end is near. I really don’t want to drag distractions, like Rebecca, into things. It was kind of a mean thing for me to bring up.

Unfortunately, Rebecca is now Lydia’s latest obsession, and she’s on a mission to hunt down more about her in other newspapers. Whatever she finds, I tell her, will be meaningless. Rebecca was pretty, with a lot of friends. She was such a nice girl and It was such a nice family and blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to sound cold, but there it is.

I know, because I’ve read every possible exaggeration about my life since I became a Black-Eyed Susan. My mother died under “suspicious” circumstances and my grandfather built a creepy house and I am practically perfect. The truth? My mother was struck by a rare stroke, my grandmother was the crazier one, and I am not and never will be a heroine out of a fairy tale. Even though they were all victims first, too. Snow White poisoned. Cinderella enslaved. Rapunzel locked up. Tessie, dumped with bones.

Some monster’s twisted fantasy.

Bet the doctor would like me to talk about that, I think, as he settles into his chair.

He smiles. “Fire away, Tessie.”

Last week, he had agreed to let me lead in this session. He also promised he wouldn’t tell my dad I’d faked blindness for a little bit. A promise kept so far. I wondered if he bargained with all of his patients. If this was appropriate.

It doesn’t matter. Today I am prepared to offer him something real.

“I’m afraid every time the lights dim… that I am going blind again,” I say. “Like when my family went to Olive Garden and some waitress turned the lights down for dinner mood or whatever. Or when my brother shut the living room blinds behind me so he could see the TV better.”

“When this happens, instead of thinking you are going blind again, why don’t you just tell yourself emphatically that you aren’t?”

“Seriously?” Ay yi yi. My dad was paying for this?

“Because you want to see, Tessie. It’s not like a little goblin is sitting inside your head manning a light switch. You are in control. Statistically, the chances of this ever happening again are almost nil.”

OK, kind of useful. At least encouraging. Even though chances of this happening to me were almost nil to begin with.

“What else is going on in there?” He taps his skull with a finger.

“I’m worried… about O. J. Simpson.”

“What exactly are you worried about?”

“That he might fool the jury and get off.” I don’t tell him that Lydia had soaked one of her own red leather gloves in V8 juice, dried it in the sun, and demonstrated how she could spread her hand wide and get the same effect as O.J.

The doctor crosses one long leg over the other. He’s much more of a conservative dresser than I’d imagined. Starched white shirt, black dress pants with a stand-up crease, loosened blue tie with tiny red diamonds, black shoes grinning with polish. No wedding ring.

“I think the chances of that happening are also practically zero,” he says. “You are simply worried that your own attacker will be set free. I’d advise you not to watch any of the O.J. coverage and ratchet things up in your head.”

Aunt Hilda offered this same advice for free, and tempered it by handing me a plate of fried okra fresh out of her skillet while snapping off my TV.

“Tessie, today is supposed to be all your show, but we need to divert for a second. The prosecutor called right before you arrived. He wants to meet one-on-one with you before the trial. I could ask to sit in on the interviews if you’d feel more comfortable. He’s thinking about conducting the first interview next Tuesday. We can even do it in our regular session if you like.”

He uncrosses his leg and leans toward me. My stomach wads itself into a hard ball, a roly-poly beetle protecting itself.

“Getting your sight back is huge. Meeting the prosecutor and getting over your fear of the trial is a logical next step. It might even help… jog your memory. Think of your brain as a sieve or a colander, with only the tiniest, safest bits getting through at first.”

I’m barely listening to his psycho mumbo-jumbo about kitchen gadgets.

Seven days away.

“I hope you don’t mind that I told him the good news,” he says.

“Of course not,” I lie.

I’m thinking about the little bag, packed and ready for months, wedged into the far back corner of my closet.

Wondering if it’s too late to run.

Tessa, present day

Charlie and I are playing an old game on the front porch swing. Rain drills steadily on the roof.

We’re pretending to be tiny dolls rocking to and fro. A little girl is pushing our swing with her finger. She’s locked up her big yellow cat, so he can’t paw at us. She’s baking a tiny plastic cake for us in the oven, and she’s made all the beds and arranged all the tiny dishes in the cabinet. She’s used a toothbrush to sweep the carpet. There are no monsters in the closet, because there are no closets.

For just this moment, everything is perfect. Nothing can get to us. We are in the dollhouse.

My daughter’s head is warm in my lap. She lies sideways on the front porch swing with me, her knees bent because she isn’t three years old anymore with room to spare. I’ve covered her bare legs with my jacket for when the wind shifts and spits at us between the brick columns.

She wiggles into a more comfortable position and turns her face up to me. Her violet eyes are rimmed with black eyeliner, which makes them even bigger and lovelier, but so much more cynical. Two silver studs are punched in each ear, one slightly smaller than the other.

The eye makeup can be washed off; the extra holes will close up. I try not to get too worked up about these things. She’d just point out the tattoo on my right hip, a butterfly among the scars.

When Charlie’s braces come off in three months, that’s when I’ll worry. “Mom, you seemed a little crazy last night at Miss Effie’s. Like, I know you were worried, but still. I’d never seen you like that. Is it because you’re afraid you can’t stop that guy from getting executed?”

“Partly.” I fiddle with a lock of her hair, and she allows it. “Charlie, we’ve never talked much about what happened to me.”

“You never want to.” A statement, not a reproach.

“I’ve just never wanted you to be a part of it.” Never wanted her innocence disturbed with more than the straight facts, and a sanitized version of those.

“So you still think about… those girls?” Tentative. “I dreamed about one of them once. Merry. She had a cool name. Someone taped a People magazine story to my bike a while back. It was about her mom. She said she wants a front row seat to Terrell Goodwin’s execution. Have you decided for sure he didn’t do it?”

I will myself to stay put instead of leaping up, to keep my foot pushing firmly and steadily against the concrete floor. A stranger left Charlie a gift. A Susan crept from my head into hers. Worse, she is just telling me about this now. I don’t want to think that Charlie carries these secrets around because she is afraid to bring them up, and yet I know that is exactly why.

“Yes,” I say. “Of course I think about those girls. About how they died, and who hurts for them. Especially right now. The forensic scientist I told you about has extracted DNA from the girls’ bones. It’s a long shot, and involves a lot of luck, but if their families are still looking, maybe we can find out who they are.”

“You would still be looking for me. You would never give up.”

I blink back tears. “Never, never. Honey, do you mind telling me what your dream was about? The one with Su-Merry?”

“We took a walk on this island. She never said anything. It was nice. Not scary.”

Thank you, Merry.

“So you’re sure Terrell’s innocent?” she asks again.

“Yes, I’m pretty sure. The physical evidence isn’t there.” I leave out the seventeen-year trail of black-eyed Susans. The voices in my head, amplifying my doubts.

“Whoever the real killer is, he’s not coming back, Mom.” She says it earnestly. “He was smart enough not to get caught the first time. He isn’t going to risk it. And if he was going to do anything, it would have happened years ago. Maybe he’s in prison for another crime. I’ve heard that happens all the time.”

My daughter’s clearly given this a lot of thought. How could I be so stupid to think her teen-age brain wasn’t as wired as Lydia’s and mine? I don’t tell her one of Jo’s shocking statistics-that of 300 active serial killers roaming the United States, most of them will never be caught.

“Listen to me, Charlie. More than anything, I want to give you a normal life. I don’t want you to live in fear, but I need you to be very careful right now, until we know what’s happening to… Terrell. My job is to protect you, and you need to give in and let me for a while.”

Charlie pushes herself up. “We’re, like, more normal than half the people I know. Melissa Childers’s mom drove the cheerleaders around one Saturday night and they stuck raw chicken inside mailboxes of these girls they don’t like. Like, her mom’s mug shot is on Facebook. And Anna’s mom didn’t get sick the other night when she was supposed to pick us up. She was drunk. Anna says she puts vodka in that Big Gulp Diet Coke in her car cup holder. Kids know things, Mom. You can’t hide stuff.” A rare, unfettered stream of information.

“I’m not going to ride with Anna’s mom anymore,” Charlie announces.

The swing. Hypnotic. Keep talking.

Her phone starts to blare a song I don’t recognize. Instantly, Charlie stretches for it.

“Can I spend the night with Marley?”

She’s already edging off the swing, away from me.

“I love this place. Nothing like Saturday night at the Flying Fish.” Jo is lifting a giant frosty schooner of beer to her lips. She’s sporting old Levi’s and a red Oklahoma Sooners T-shirt and the gold DNA charm at her neck that goes with everything.

Bill has just returned from the counter with a basket of fried oysters and hush puppies for us to share. He’s loose, in old jeans, more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him. His shirt is untucked. He needs a haircut. He scoots across a giant schooner of St. Pauli Girl for me. His fingers linger longer than they need to, which I decide to chalk up to the beer. This schooner is going to make my drive home a little tricky.

“One size fits all.” He grins and slips in beside Jo on the opposite side of the booth, right below a crowded bulletin board with a photograph of a guy brandishing a fish on steroids.

“Is that for real?” I point at the sea monster, about as long as Charlie.

“It’s the Liar’s Wall.” Bill pops a hush puppy in his mouth without turning around. “I’ve been pushing for one of those in the DA’s office for years.”

“That’s really not fair,” Jo says, frowning. “For example, for at least ten years, Dallas County has been a machine at exonerating more people through DNA than just about anyone else.” An echo of Charlie.

“Ah, Jo, you’re always getting mired in optimism,” Bill says. “If I get Terrell a new hearing, then we’ll talk.”

The restaurant’s picnic tables and booths are loud and packed. A line snakes by us on the way to the counter, a cowboyand baseball-hat crowd with a Texas fetish for crispy crusts on everything. The state’s collective orgasm occurs at the state fair, where even Nutella, Twinkies, and butter get dunked in the fryers.

Almost as soon as Charlie bounced out the door for her sleepover, Bill had texted, asking if I’d join the two of them here for a beer. He didn’t say why.

So I hesitated, but not for long. It was either that or a sleepover with the Susans and a bottle of merlot while the thunder rumbled and lightning transformed every tree and bush into a human silhouette. I yanked my rainy day frizz into a ponytail, threw on an old jean jacket, and shot over here in my Jeep, windshield wipers slashing all the way.

Bill and Jo were at least one beer in and engaged in a heated exchange about the Sooners’ quarterback when I showed up looking like I’d been making out under a waterfall. Jo tossed me the roll of paper towels on the table to dry my head and wipe off a mascara smudge she pointed out under my left eye. The conversation drifted not toward Terrell but to one of Jo’s new cases, the bones of a three-or four-year-old girl that had been discovered in a field in Ohio, and then to me.

“What is it, exactly, that you do for a living?” Bill asks.

“I’m not sure there’s a name for it. I’m a… problem solver, I guess. People imagine something they’ve never seen before, and I make it. It can be little, like designing a wedding crown embedded with jewels from a grandmother’s ring, or big, like a floating staircase I built for a hotel in Santa Fe. Sunday Morning did a piece on the staircase in a series on female craftswomen, which has really helped. The host was classy enough not to mention the Black-Eyed Susan… thing. I can pick and choose now. Charge more.”

“Is that your favorite thing you’ve built so far? The staircase?”

“No. Hands-down my favorite thing is the pumpkin catapult for Charlie’s Field Day competition last year. We beat the school’s record by sixty feet.” I take another drag on my beer. “My father had a minor in physics and taught me a few things.” I should have eaten more than two crackers with pimiento cheese for lunch. Bill is looking more boyish than usual in a soft gray T-shirt that clings to taut muscle. I wonder whether he and Swedish Girl have hit it off officially yet.

I decide to shift the spotlight off of me, where it always feels too hot and too bright. I debate whether to ask if they’re getting me drunk to deliver bad news. My eyes linger on Jo. She could be anybody tonight-a housekeeper, a bank teller, a first-grade teacher. Her daily relationship with horror is well hidden under that Sooners T-shirt and clear blue eyes that indicate she sleeps pretty well. No one would ever pick her out as the scientist who stood in the middle of hell, running mathematical equations in her head, while the Twin Towers smoked.

“Jo, how do you keep doing what you do… day after day?” I ask. “Not letting it affect you.”

She sets down her beer. “My gift from God is that I can look at the grotesque and not be grossed out by it. The finger. The guts. But I’m not going to tell you that I don’t go home and think about the semen on the Little Mermaid nightgown. Or the bullet in the jaw of the POW that didn’t kill the guy. How he must have been tortured. I wonder things like, ‘Did this young mother live through the airplane crash or did she die right away?’ I think about who these people are. When I stop doing that, it’s the day I should quit this job.”

The last part sounded a little drunk and also like the most sincere thing I’d ever heard.

“This is the only thing I’m good at,” she says. “I’m a forensic scientist. It’s all I know.”

“You are just too damn nice.” Bill clinks her mug with his. “I spend most days wanting to punch someone in the face.”

She grins and toasts the air. “I’m from Oklahoma. We’re the nicest people in the world. And we also love to punch people in the face. And, now and then, I have a day like today.”

“If you hadn’t noticed, Jo and I are celebrating,” Bill tells me. “We just wanted to give you a chance to catch up first.”

“And?” I ask. Jo gives him a nod, the OK sign.

“We got a match on one of the DNA samples.”

His words aren’t registering. He can’t be talking about the Susans. Not this soon.

“We’ve made an ID on one of the Black-Eyed Susans through the national missing persons database,” Jo confirms matter-of-factly. “One of the femur extractions.”

“Are you OK, Tessie?” Bill’s face is twisted in concern. I don’t know if he’s realized what he’s done. Called me Tessie. This time his hand covers mine and doesn’t let go. It stirs yet another feeling I’m not prepared for at the moment. I snatch my fingers away and tuck a wet strand of hair behind my ear.

“I’m… fine. Sorry. It’s just a shock. After all this time. After everything you said about statistics, I just didn’t expect it. Who… is she?” I need to hear her name.

“Hannah,” Jo says. “Hannah Stein. Twenty years old. She disappeared from her job as a waitress in Georgetown twenty-five years ago. Her younger brother’s a Houston cop now. We got lucky. He insisted that his family enter DNA into the CODIS database a few months ago after he took a required course on missing persons investigations. Hannah’s mito-DNA is a match to Rachel and Sharon Stein. Her mom and her sister. Remember, mitochondrial DNA is one hundred percent from the maternal side.”

“If I can prove Terrell was nowhere near Georgetown the day she disappeared… well, it will help.” Bill’s voice carries a triumphant note.

“There’s one thing.” Jo’s eyes rest on me carefully. “The mother wants you to be there.”

“Be where?” This Susan is no longer a pile of teeth and bones and a disembodied voice in my head. Her name is Hannah. She’s a shadow darting out into the lightning, about to let me see her face.

“The mother is driving in from Austin with her son so we can formally give the family the ID. She specifically asked to meet you. She always suspected a cousin of theirs had something to do with Hannah’s disappearance. She… we… the cops… want to know if you recognize him.”

“The thing is,” Bill says. “He’s dead.”

Tessie, 1995

Two of them show up in the doctor’s office. A man and a woman.

The man is the prosecutor. Mr. Vega. Short, compact, around forty. Firm handshake, direct eye contact. Lots of Italian machismo. He reminds me of the football coach who hurled half our school into the gym during an impromptu tornado last year. He walks down the hall, and you know it.

The woman could pass for a high school senior. She seems like she’d be way more at home in something less uptight than whatever Ann Taylor thing she has on. I’m on the couch, and she’s sitting where the doctor usually does, tapping her left heel, nervous, like maybe I’m her first big case. She says she’s here as a child advocacy therapist, but I’m pretty sure she is mostly a chaperone to make sure I don’t accuse the prosecutor of anything creepy.

I’m feeling remarkably who-cares about all of it, because I took two Benadryl an hour ago. This is generally not my thing, but Lydia suggested it when she heard I was meeting the prosecutor for the first time. She pokes down a couple when her parents light off into one of their three-day screaming matches. Once more, Lydia has made the right call. The air is tense and thick, but I’m drifting through it in a cushy bubble.

The doctor isn’t happy. First, I haven’t begged him to stay. It just doesn’t seem to matter much at the moment and would require some energy on my part to make happen. Mr. Vega most definitely wants him out of the room. I am impressed that he has so quickly manipulated the doctor all the way to the doorway of his own office, because the doctor’s no slouch in the manipulator department himself.

They are talking in low, urgent tones that carry. The woman, Benita, and I can overhear every word. It’s awkward. I can tell she isn’t sure what to do, because she’s already told me we don’t have to talk. I feel sorry for her.

“I like your hair,” I say, because I do. It’s black with a few shiny red streaks. I wonder if she does it herself.

“I like your boots,” she says.

It’s not like we still aren’t listening to every word they’re saying.

“Don’t ask her any questions that begin with why,” the doctor is instructing the lawyer.

“Just give us about thirty minutes, sir. You have nothing to worry about.” This is the kind of “sir” that Mr. Vega probably also uses with judges and hostile witnesses. I’ve seen enough of Christopher Darden and Johnnie Cochran at this point.

I feel kind of sorry for the doctor now, too, being tossed out of his own space.

The Benadryl is making me so freaking nice.

While this tussle is going on at the door, I decide to give Benita her first test. She’s already announced that she’s here just for me and to ask her anything. Or ask her nothing. It’s entirely up to me. Of course, I’ve heard this so many times at this point I could vomit. It must be, like, Chapter One in the dysfunctional witness/victim textbook.

“Why is there a problem with asking me questions with the word why?” I ask her.

She glances at the prosecutor, who isn’t paying attention to us at all. I’m sure she’s worried about delivering inside information to a teen-age subject. Probably not addressed in the textbook at all.

“Because it implies that you are to blame,” she answers. “You know, like ‘Why did you do such and such?’ Or ‘Why do you think this happened to you?’ Mr. Vega would not ask you a why question. You are not to blame for anything.”

This interests me. I try to remember if the doctor has ever asked me a why question and decide he hasn’t. It never occurred to me that there is doctoring going on by omission, which is bothersome, and a whole new thing to worry about.

The door shuts with a crisp click, and the doctor is on the other side of it. The prosecutor rolls over the doctor’s desk chair, facing me intently.

“OK, Tessie. Sorry about that. I am not at all interested in discussing the case today, so you can relax if that’s on your mind. We probably won’t discuss it next time, either.” He nods at Benita. “Neither of us believes that it’s a good idea to ask you questions about something this traumatic and deeply personal when we have no relationship whatsoever with you yet. So first, we’ll get to know each other. I also want to assure you that I am completely prepared to go into court with your memory exactly as it is.”

This is not the impression I have from the doctor at all. He’s a seesaw, for sure, but always subtly pushing. Sometimes I think he is purposely trying to confuse me.

Now I have to wonder who is telling the truth. It makes my head hurt. I decide to turn the tables and ask Mr. Vega a question. He’s clearly a control freak, too.

The Benadryl has set me free. I just don’t care.

“Why,” I ask, “are you so sure this man is guilty?”

Tessa, present day

I’m staring at the stupid plastic heart again, half-expecting it to start beating.

It’s just Jo and me. I’m the first to arrive even though it took two frantic hours to decide the appropriate outfit to wear to meet Hannah’s grieving mother, who probably hopes part of her dead daughter is now living inside me. Of course, it turns out that she is living in me, but I don’t want to tell her that. It also turns out that the proper outfit for this event is a crocheted sweater, brown leather skirt, boots, and my mother’s dangling pearls, which I have never hooked around my neck before today.

“The heart is cool, huh?” Jo pulls it off the shelf, snaps open the box, and hands it to me like it is a rubber dog toy. It feels like a rubber dog toy. My instinct to take it was automatic, as is the one to fling it across the room. I hand it back gingerly.

“Is it real?”

“Yes. Preserved through plastination. I did it myself.”

So I wasn’t wrong about that part. Still, I can’t believe that Jo, my hero, my good guy, is being so cavalier.

“Want to hear the story?” She glances at her watch. This is apparently her idea of a good way to distract me for the next ten minutes.

I shake my head, but her head is bent down while she’s placing the heart back in its little customized stand. “My grandmother and I were driving to my aunt’s the night before Thanksgiving on a dark county road in Oklahoma. The deer darted out before I could slam on the brakes.”

A deer. OK. Feeling better.

“It was a nasty clunk,” she continues. “My grandmother and I were both OK. But I wanted to make sure the deer was dead before we drove off. I wasn’t going to leave him on the side of the road dying. But when I got to him, it was pretty clear the car did the job. Before I could decide what to do with the deer, three different pickups had pulled over to the side of the road. Three good ole boys passing by, and all three of them want to take the deer off my hands. I notice one of them has a sharp knife hanging off his belt.”

A distressing turn of events. The heart, back to being a question mark.

“I told the guy with the knife that I’d choose him to keep the deer if he let me borrow his knife. So he hands over the knife and I cut out the deer’s heart.”

Grimm’s fairy tale, Oklahoma-style. I’m nauseated and relieved at the same time.

“Did these truckers… have any idea you are a forensic scientist?” I interject. “Did they know why you wanted the heart?” Did you know why you wanted the heart?

“I don’t remember if it came up. They were focused on deer meat.”

“And you brought the heart… back to your grandmother in the car and put it… where?”

“A cooler.”

“And you brought it to… Thanksgiving?” I didn’t ask if the pumpkin pie and Cool Whip had to make room.

“My aunt was pretty distressed when she ran out to welcome us and saw the bashed-in hood and blood all over me. We had a good laugh about it.”

There’s something else niggling at me. “How were you going to kill the deer if he was alive?”

“I didn’t know. Maybe strangle him with my shoelace. No matter what, he was going to be dead when I left him.”

This is the Jo I know. And another one I didn’t.

There’s a knock on the door, and a student in a lab coat pokes her head in.

“Dr. Jo, the cops are here. I put them in the conference room. The front desk is sending up the family now. Bill called to say that the Stein family has officially rejected his request to be there but wanted to be sure you and Tessa knew the mother is bringing a psychic along with them.”

None of this appears to ruffle Jo in the least. After all, left alone on a black Oklahoma road with her grandmother, three hulking strangers, and a knife, all she’s thinking about is cutting out the heart of a deer.

“You ready?” Jo asks me.

Two detectives, one brother cop, one mother, one psychic-all waiting in grim silence around a conference table in a claustrophobic room whose only adornments are a stained coffeepot, a stack of Styrofoam cups, and a brown box of Kleenex that sits untouched in the middle of the table. The fresh-paint smell is so strong it stings my throat. Except for the brother, painfully young and official in full dress uniform, I couldn’t in a million years distinguish who was who. No weepy red eyes. No crystal balls or flowing peasant shirts. No other uniforms or badges.

A man in Wrangler’s and a tie immediately stands to shake Jo’s hand, as does a woman around fifty, with the most motherly, kind face in the room. Detective No. 1 and Detective No. 2.

I drop into a chair, wishing to be anywhere else on earth.

I turn my attention to the woman across from me, who immediately reaches over to cover my hands. Her hair is stiff with hair spray, and aggravated with bold blond streaks. Her eyes are the bluest I’ve ever seen. Rachel Stein, I assume. Except I can tell from a frown on Detective No. 2’s face that she isn’t.

“Ma’am, we’ve asked that you not participate in this meeting unless asked to. You are here strictly as a courtesy to the family.”

She draws her hands back reluctantly and winks, as if we are on the same team. I am repulsed. I want back whatever she thinks she has snatched out of me with her moist psychic paw.

The detective is droning out introductions while my eyes are now fixed, by process of elimination, on Hannah’s mother-a pale, sharp-faced woman in her sixties. Jo had told me she was a middle school English teacher. She has that no-nonsense air about her. Except she brought a psychic.

For a split second, as our eyes meet, I glimpse horror, as if I’d just crawled out of her daughter’s grave, like a mud monster.

The Steins have already met the coroner this morning to receive the official identification. Jo’s job is strictly to help them believe it beyond a doubt. She is explaining the basics of mitochondrial DNA, the careful lab work, the mind-blowing genetic probabilities, within half a percent, that this is her daughter. It takes about ten minutes.

“Mrs. Stein, your daughter has been handled with the greatest of care,” Jo says. “I am terribly sorry this has happened to your family.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your time with us. I believe this is Hannah.” She directs her gaze to the police. It is obvious she is having a hard time looking at me.

“Tessa.” Detective No. 2, the woman, is speaking. I heard her name but I can’t remember it. “Can I call you Tessa?”

“Of course.” It comes out scratchy, and I clear my throat.

“Since there is some… speculation… in the media about whether the right man was convicted for their daughter’s death, the Steins are curious if you can pick out a photo of a relative who took an unusual interest in their daughter. A suspect at the time. He is no longer alive, so you don’t need to be afraid of any kind of retaliation. They are simply seeking peace of mind. No one wants the wrong man executed.” She says this without rancor, but I wonder what’s really in her head.

I suddenly want Bill to be here. I want him to smother my hand with his again. “That’s fine.”

“You remind me of my daughter,” Mrs. Stein says. “Not the red hair, of course. But you give off that same… free spirit.”

The detective slides two sheets of mug shots flat in front of me. The brother, up until now a silent, poker-straight soldier, leans in. It occurs to me that he wasn’t even born when his sister disappeared. He was the recovery baby.

“He was an awful person,” Mrs. Stein tells me brokenly. The twelve men on the table swim before me. Bald, white, middle-aged.

“I believe God sent that deer in front of his car.” The brother’s first words are a cold, hard slap. “Put him in a coma so we could yank the plug. So I didn’t have to shoot the bastard myself.”

I’m bewildered. Seriously? A deer? I want to meet Jo’s eyes but don’t. Too much deer metaphor for one day. Too much coincidence. Too much anger and certainty about God’s wrath, when sometimes everything is just pointless.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally. “I just don’t know. There is so much I don’t remember.” At the same time, I realize that I am remembering something. Fabric. A pattern. I know where I’ve seen it before, but I don’t know what it means.

Impulsively, I reach my hands out to the psychic.

“Do you mind?” I ask the female detective.

“Not if you don’t.” Bemused.

Mrs. Stein is nodding animatedly, a doll brought to life. Her son is casting me a look of scathing disappointment.

I know I have to do this, whatever I believe. For Hannah. For her mom, eaten by grief. For her brother, who is probably a cop for all the wrong reasons. For her father, who is conspicuously absent.

“Something is coming back to me.” This is exquisitely true. “There’s a curtain. Can you help me see behind it?”

The psychic’s sweaty grip tightens. Her nails bite into my flesh. I feel like I’m being consumed by a slobbery shark.

“Of course.” Her eyes glisten like shards of ice, the first thing that reassures people she is special and a window to the netherworld.

“It’s a black man,” she says.

I remove my hands carefully and turn to Hannah’s mother. Rachel Stein’s eyes are not glistening. They are a boggy, open sinkhole, and I don’t want to stumble.

“Mrs. Stein, I lay in that grave with your daughter. Hannah will forever be a part of me, like we share the same DNA. Her monster is my monster. So please believe me when I say I know exactly what she would tell you right now. She would tell you she loves you. And she would tell you this woman will only hurt you. She’s a liar.”

Tessie, 1995

“Are you ready to nail a killer, Tessie?”

Mr. Vega is prowling, from desk to window to couch. “Because you need to be mentally tough. The defense attorney is going to try to screw with your head. I want to make sure you’re prepared for his little circus tricks.”

The doctor catches my eye and nods encouragement. He managed not to get kicked out of the room today. Mr. Vega and Benita have met with me two more times in the last week, once at a bowling alley and another time at a Starbucks. Mr. Vega introduced me to Mocha Frappuccinos and grilled jalapeños on hot dogs. He asked me why I like to run and why I like to draw and why I hated the Yankees so much. I went along with the “getting to know me” sessions because it was a lot less painful than hanging out on the couch with the doctor. Like Dad said, they were all just doing their jobs.

Things turned for me sometime during disco bowling on lane 16, while the lights flashed psychedelic and pins thundered and Sister Sledge got down. Mr. Vega and I were locked in a bowling duel. Benita was keeping score and yelling some crazy Spanish cheer from her high school days. Mr. Vega wasn’t cutting me any slack, even though I had to get my surgeon’s permission to temporarily strip off the boot brace to play. The man about to prosecute my monster threw a spare/strike/spare to win the game, even when I faked a limp at the end.

So maybe he was manipulative and maybe he was genuine and maybe he was a little of both. Regardless, when I sat down on the couch today to officially prepare for the trial, I was in the game-no longer on Mr. Vega’s team simply because there was no way out. I wanted to win.

“I know every play this guy has.” Mr. Vega is still roving the room, like he’s already in court.

“He likes to get kids on the yes-no train,” he continues. “Remember, the less narrative your answers, the less the jury can feel your pain. He will ask you a series of questions, where the answer is positively ‘yes.’ So you will answer, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Then he will slip in a question that is absolutely a ‘no’ answer, but you’ll be on the train, in the ‘yes’ rhythm. You’ll say ‘yes’ and when you are immediately flustered and change to ‘no,’ he’ll ask whether you are confused. And so it begins.”

I nod. This seems easy enough to handle.

“He will throw dates and numbers at you until your head spins. Whenever you are confused, ask him to explain himself again. Every. Single. Time. This makes him look more like a bully.” He steps toward me, and his face goes slack.

“If four times six equals twenty-four and twice that is forty-eight, what is fifty times that plus six?”

I stare at him, disbelieving. Begin to multiply.

He jams his finger in the air. “Fast, Tessie. Answer.”

“I can’t.”

“OK. That feeling right now, numb and slightly panicky? That’s it. That’s how it’s going to feel. Times four.” He is on the prowl again. I’m glad that Oscar isn’t here. He’d be going nuts. “This will be the toughest part. He will insinuate you are hiding things. Why is it that you can remember buying tampons on the day of the attack but not this man’s face? Why did you have a relationship with a crazy homeless man? Why did you run alone every day?”

“I run too fast for most of my friends to keep up,” I protest. “And Roosevelt isn’t that crazy.”

“Uh-uh, Tessie. Don’t just react. Think about the question. I always ran in the daylight hours on two routes approved by my father. Roosevelt has been sitting on the same corner for ten years, and is good friends with everyone, including the local cops. Matter-of-fact. Don’t let him get to you. You did nothing wrong.”

“Will he really bring up the… tampons?”

“I would bet on it. It’s another way to make you uncomfortable. A subtle move that the jury won’t notice. The tampons are a fact of life for them. For you, a teen-age girl, they are intimate and embarrassing. Believe me, Dick has no boundaries even when it comes to child victims of sexual abuse.”

His eyes are laser-focused on me again.

“Why did you get suspended from two track meets last year?”

The doctor shifts positions. He wants to interfere. Mr. Vega senses it and holds up his hand in his direction, a halt signal. He keeps his eyes trained on me.

Is this the Vega who is pretending, or the real one? Either way, this question really ticks me off. Anger always starts as a little tingle in the roots of my hair, and then spreads like spilled hot water.

“A girl on another track team pushed my friend Denise off a hurdle in a regional meet so she could win in the prelims. If you were watching, and you’re not a hurdler, you wouldn’t have noticed. But there are certain moves, and I know them. So I walked over to her after the race and told her that I knew she cheated. She shoved me to the ground. When the track officials ran over, she told them I’d shoved her first. We were both suspended for two meets.”

I straighten up. Level my gaze at him, and just him. Let him know I am mad, but under control. “It was totally worth it,” I say. “Because everyone will be watching her now. She won’t try it again.”

Nobody speaks. I wonder if they believe me. Everyone else who knows me did. Lydia even wrote an indignant letter to the UIL board. She signed it Sincerely, Ms. Lydia Frances Bell.

“Perfect,” Mr. Vega says. “Narrative. Calm. Perfect.” He takes a few steps and places his hand on my shoulder.

The hand on my shoulder-it feels good. Still, it is so hard to know whether I like this man, or whether I just like what he is giving back to me. Power. The thing that my monster snatched away and threw in the gutter at Walgreens.

Mr. Vega removes his hand. Picks up his briefcase, on the floor next to Benita. “A short session, but I think we’re done for the day. Benita’s going to show you the courtroom at some point. I recommend sitting in every seat. The jury’s. The judge’s-my personal favorite. I want to wait until closer to the trial to go over your own testimony. We’ll see whether you and the doc get any further in that time.”

All of them rise, except for me. I stay planted on the couch. “Twenty-four hundred and six.”

Mr. Vega stops at the door.

“That’s my girl,” he says. “You’ll always get to the right answer if you slow down and think about it.”

Tessa, present day

Of course, it’s been banging me in the head, ever since I learned her name.

Rachel Stein, Hannah’s mother, does not have a first name that begins with S or U or N. She does not fit neatly into the mnemonic device that I’ve put aside like a crossword puzzle I always planned to finish later. S-U-N. The letters that Merry provided while we chatted in the grave, to help me remember the names of all of the mothers and hunt them down.

Ever since the discovery of a third set of bones, I’ve been thinking that maybe my conversation with Merry wasn’t a hallucination. There were the bones of three other girls in that grave, not two, just like Merry told me. That couldn’t be a coincidence, right?

And yet. The black-and-white, driver’s license, DNA certainty of Rachel Stein’s name makes me wonder whether I was nuts back then, and just as nuts now. I actually had to restrain myself from peppering Mrs. Stein with questions: Is Rachel your nickname? Your middle name? Did you change your name?

I couldn’t mess with her head anymore-trade the psychic’s crazy for my crazy. Hannah’s mother drifted out of that hollow conference room as a more haggard spirit than when she entered. Closure is a myth, Jo told me afterward. But there is value in knowing. Mrs. Stein’s son had to carefully prop up his mother as they exited. She moved like she was a hundred years old.

Hannah’s brother and I made an unspoken pact that he would drop-kick the psychic to her altered universe. She was fuming and tripping at their heels on the way out. As soon as he had heard the word liar come out of my mouth, his head popped up and he shot me the most grateful look I’d ever received. As for the psychic… well, if I’m not cursed already, I’m sure she finished the job. My scars tingled for an hour afterward.

My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

Ever since I left that room, I can’t get this string of words out of my head. I imagine Merry punching a button on a jukebox, over and over. Each punch a little firmer, more frustrated. Remember.

My boots clunk out a rhythm as I climb the staircase. One step. My. Two steps. Very. Three steps. Energetic. Four steps. Mother. At the top, I throw open the door to my studio. Warm, stale air rushes out. I shove the picture window wide open and drink in air that is like an ice-cold tequila shot. A brave blue jay stares me down from his perch on a branch, and I blink first.

I pick up a few pages off the dusty hardwood, remnants of one of Bobby’s projects the last time he stayed for a weekend. My sweet, half-doomed little brother. Now he writes for movies that end in numerals and tries to heal himself with holotropic breath-work and a sexy production assistant with a nose ring. He left for college in California and basically never returned except for short visits and funerals, which is probably what I should have done. He even chopped his last name to Wright.

I draw hearts in the dust on my drawing table, until my finger is black. I pick a white tea from the selection in the cabinet and plug in the teakettle. Listen to its friendly hiss. Decide that the old honey in the cabinet smells a little like beer and watch two sugar cubes dissolve to sand in my mug instead. Merry gives the jukebox one last punch with her finger and disappears.

I have always loved this room. I just didn’t want to share it with the Susans. Today it seems that I don’t have to. I wipe off the drawing table with a paper towel and clip on a piece of paper with a sharp snap that scares the bird into an irritated flutter. I begin to loosely sketch the folds of fabric, a soft sound, like a rat under the floor. I’m in a hurry so I can get to the intricate, important work. A pattern had emerged in my head while I was staring at Mrs. Stein’s simple cotton blouse. At breasts that sagged with the weight of middle age.

Surprise. I am sketching flowers and it doesn’t bother me. An hour floats by. Then another. There are so many, many petals, and a leafy vine that meanders, connecting them all, like a demented family tree. I fill a Dixie cup with water and open up my watercolor box. Blue, pink, and green.

These flowers are not black-eyed Susans.

And these folds of fabric are not a curtain. They were never a curtain.

I’m drawing my mother’s apron. You can’t see me, but I am underneath, hiding my face. I can feel the cloth tickle my nose and cheeks. It is dark under here, but enough light sifts through the thin cotton that I am not scared. The warm cushion of my mother’s body is at my back.

I can’t see what is on the other side.

It reminds me of being blind.

Dr. Giles is holding my painting gingerly edge to edge because it isn’t completely dry.

It’s closing time. All the toys and books in the room are tidied up. A couple of table lamps are glowing, but the overhead lighting is flipped off. The elephant is tucked in for the night in a doll bed, the blanket pulled up to his ears.

“So what do you think?” I ask. “Is the apron the curtain? Does the curtain have nothing to do with me being dumped in that grave? Is it meaningless?” I’m feeling guilty about sounding so urgent.

“Nothing is meaningless,” she says. “The apron probably represents comfort to you. It would not be a surprise for you to connect some element of your first trauma-the death of your mother-to the other one. Tessa, the most important thing is for you to eliminate the unknown, which is frightening. If you came here and told me you could see the killer behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, well… that isn’t what you really expected, is it?”

Yes. That is exactly what I expected. I grew up in Oz.

I don’t tell her that, though. Or say that this painting of my mother’s apron leaves me as unsettled as the blank curtain I drew a hundred times.

Tessie, 1995

“How do you like Mr. Vega and Benita?”

Is it my imagination or does the doctor sound a little jealous?

“He’s nice,” I say carefully. “They’re both very nice.” Adults make things so complicated. Am I supposed to like the doctor better than them? Is this some kind of contest?

“If you have any questions or concerns, you can let me know. Al Vega can come on a little strong.”

And you don’t? “I’m good right now. But I will for sure if I do.” Lately, this need to reassure him has been taking the place of my desire to annoy the hell out of him. “I do have a question about… something else, though.”

Lydia says it’s ridiculous that I’m carrying this fear around and letting it devour me, although she also thinks what’s happening is kind of cool. “It isn’t just Merry who has spoken to me.”

“What do you mean?” the doctor asks. “Who else is speaking to you?”

“The other Susans… talk to me sometimes. The ones in the grave. Not all the time. I don’t think it’s a big deal. Lydia just thought I should bring it up.”

“Lydia seems like an extremely sensitive friend.”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s start this way. What’s the first thing you remember one of the other… Susans… saying to you?”

“It was in the hospital. When I first woke up. One of them told me the strawberry Jell-O sucked. And it did. It was sugar-free.”

“And what else?”

“Mostly warnings. Be careful. Like that.” We told you not to touch the pig-and-daisy card.

“When they speak, do you think they are trying to control you? Or make you do things you don’t want to?”

“No. Of course not. I think, like, they want to help. And I promised to help them. Sort of a pact.” It sounds absolutely insane when I say it out loud. I am rocked by the sudden terror he might convince my father to toss me in a loony bin. I am 100 percent certain that Lydia was wrong about her advice this time.

“So you talk back to them?”

“No. Not usually. I just hear them.” Careful.

“And they never suggest that you harm yourself?”

“Are you kidding? What the crap are you talking about? Do you think I’m suicidal? Possessed?” I waggle my fingers on either side of my head, like horns.

“Sorry, Tessie. I have to ask the question.”

“I have never once thought about killing myself.” Defensive. And a lie. “I have thought about killing him.”

“Normal,” he says. “I’d like to do it myself.” This does not seem at all like something a psychiatrist should say. I don’t want to feel warm and gushy about him right now. I want a freaking answer.

“So… the voices. Do you think I’m… schizophrenic? Maybe borderline?” It occurs to me that I’m opting to be schizophrenic rather than possessed by demons. Lydia absolutely refused to help me research anything about schizophrenia. Whatever knowledge I had about it up to that point was gleaned from Stephen King.

So Oscar and I ventured to the local library on our own. The eighty-five-year-old volunteer who can barely see was on duty so I thought it was safe to ask for her help. She didn’t recognize the Cartwright Girl, which is what old people call me instead of a Black-Eyed Susan.

After fifteen minutes, while the checkout line stacked up eight deep, she brought over An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and a Harlequin romance titled Kate of Outpatients, all published in the 1960s. The gist of the one by the existential psychologist was to let crazy people be crazy and stop bothering them. I reshelved it and Cuckoo and checked out Kate of Outpatients. Lydia and I are taking turns doing dramatic readings from it.

The doctor’s gaze is surprisingly kind and steady but he lets the silence stretch. Probably trying to figure out how to deliver the bad news to the poor little girl who’s soon going to be rocking and drooling in a room full of checker players.

“You are not a schizophrenic, Tessie. I know there is a set of psychiatrists out there who always think that voices indicate mental illness. There are an equal number of us who don’t. Lots of people hear voices. When a spouse or child dies, the people left sometimes talk to them on and off all day, and hear them respond. For the rest of their lives. It doesn’t make them dysfunctional. In fact, many of them claim these conversations make their lives better and more productive.”

I love this man. I love this man. He is not going to lock me up.

“The Susans don’t make my life better,” I say. “I think they are ghosts.”

“As we discussed previously, the paranormal is a normal temporary response.”

He isn’t getting it. “How do I get rid of them?” I don’t want to make them mad.

“How do you think you could get rid of them?”

In this case, my answer is immediate. “By sending the killer to prison.”

“You are well on the way to doing that.”

“And by finding out who the Susans are. Giving them real names.”

“What if that is not possible?”

“Then I don’t know if they’ll ever leave me.”

“Tessie, did your mother ever talk to you after she died? Like the Susans do?”

“No. Never.”

“I ask only because you have endured two terrible traumas for someone so young. Your mother’s death and the horror of that grave. Part of me thinks you are still grieving for your mother. Tell me, do you remember what you did at the wake?”

My mother again. I shrug. “We ate food people brought over and then my little brother and I played basketball on the driveway.” I let him win. We played H-O-R-S-E. The score was ten games to two.

“Children often play the day of the funeral as if it’s any other day. It’s deceptive. They grieve far longer and more deeply than adults.”

“I don’t think so.” I remembered the awful sounds of my dad and aunt weeping, like someone was peeling off my skin.

“Adults grieve harder in the beginning, but they move through it. Kids can get stuck in one stage… anger or denial… for years. It might be at the root of your symptoms-the memory loss, the blindness, the Susans, the code that you made up in the grave-”

“I’m not stuck,” I interrupt. “Merry and I didn’t make up a code in the grave. And I don’t want to talk about my mother. She’s gone. My problem is strictly with ghosts.”

Tessa, present day

It is only thirteen blocks from where I live now.

Lydia’s old house.

It might as well be a hundred miles. I’m standing in front of her childhood home for the first time in years. It is the second place he left black-eyed Susans, and the first time I turned and ran.

Lydia always described her house as a shotgun wedding cake, a two-story beige box with a last-minute white piping of scalloped trim. A lot has changed since our childhood. The icing is crumbling. What used to be a perfectly tended green square of lawn is now black dirt choked by hoodlum weeds. No more wooden stake poked in the ground with welcome y’all and a painted yellow sunflower. Lydia told me that her dad ripped the sign out of the ground before I came home from the hospital.

“Hey.” I didn’t hear his car pull up, but Bill is suddenly striding toward me, lankier and taller than I remember. Maybe it’s because his long legs are extending out of black Nike shorts and expensive athletic shoes. Everything about him is damp-hair, face, neck, arms. A triangle of sweat stains the front of a crimson Harvard T-shirt, so beloved that a few rips don’t matter. He finally got a haircut but it’s too short for his big ears. I want him to go the hell away. And stay.

“I said not to come,” I protest. “I thought you were playing basketball.” I’d regretted my impulsive phone call the second Bill answered. He was out of breath. I wondered whether I had interrupted acrobatic sex with a fellow do-gooding lawyer. He claimed he was playing a pickup game.

“All but over. My fellow law pals and I were getting creamed by a bunch of high-schoolers. Your call was a welcome distraction on the way to my parents’ house in Westover Hills, where I’ve unfortunately committed to dinner. Unless you’d like to invite me over. Or accompany me. So you said you had something to tell me. What’s up?”

I promptly burst into tears.

I’m unprepared for this, and by the look on his face, so is Bill. And, yet, the river is flowing like it hasn’t since my father died so swiftly four years ago of pancreatic cancer. He hugs me awkwardly, because what’s he going to do, which makes me sob harder.

“Oh, hell,” he says. “I’m too sweaty for this. Here, let’s sit.”

He guides me to a sitting position on the curb and curls his arm around my shoulders. The brace of solid muscle, his kindness, is waking up every hormone in my body. I need to pull out of this embrace immediately. No complications. Instead, my head falls sideways like a rock onto his chest and my shoulders heave.

“Uh, I don’t really recommend that you put your nose in that… underarm,” he says. But once he realizes how fully committed I am, he pulls me tighter.

After a few seconds, I lift my head slightly and let out a choke. “Hold on. I’m under control.”

“Yes, you definitely have things under control.” He pushes my head back down but not before I catch something hungry on his face that isn’t do-gooding at all.

I raise my chin again. Our lips are two inches apart.

He pulls back. “You’re red all over. Like a plum.”

I giggle and hiccup at the same time. I’m a giggling, hiccuping plum. I tug my skirt down. He averts his eyes and gestures to the house behind us, the one whose address he had plugged into his GPS at my behest only twenty minutes ago. “What’s up with this house? Who lives here?” It is an abrupt, purposeful shift.

God, I’m pitiful. I stand up.

“You, um, need to wipe your nose.”

Utter, utter humiliation. I use my sweater because at this point, it doesn’t matter. I suck in a deep breath as a test. It doesn’t trigger another tsunami. “Hear me out for a second first,” I say stiffly. “I think the Black-Eyed Susan killer has been leaving me flowers for years. Not just the other night at my house.”

“What? How many other places?”

“Six. If you include under my bedroom window.”

“Are you sure…”

“That they aren’t just growing up in places like God intended and I’m a lunatic? Of course not. That is why I said, I think. The first time, I was only seventeen. It was right after Terrell’s conviction. The killer left me a poem buried in an old prescription bottle. I found it when I dug up a little patch of black-eyed Susans, in the back yard of the house over there.” I point four houses down, at a yellow two-story on the opposite side of the street. “My childhood home. He planted the flowers by my tree house three days after the trial ended.” I watch for the awareness to set in. “That’s right, after Terrell was locked up.”

“Go on.”

“The… person who left it twisted a warning into a poem called ‘Black-Eyed Susan’ written by an eighteenth-century poet named John Gay. The poem indicated that Lydia would die if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.” Bill’s face is blank. I don’t know whether it’s because he doesn’t know who the hell John Gay is, or whether he is trying to contain his fury.

“I didn’t figure out who John Gay was until about ten years ago. He was most famous for The Beggar’s Opera. Have you heard of it? Captain Macheath? Polly Peachum? No? Well, more to the point, he also wrote a ballad about a black-eyed girl named Susan sending her lover off to sea. There’s some romantic theory that this is how the flower got its name…”

I begin to recite softly, as a mower revs up in a nearby back yard.

“Oh Susan, Susan, lovely dear

My vows shall ever true remain

Let me kiss off that falling tear

I never want to hurt you again

But if you tell, I will make Lydia

A Susan, too.”

“Jesus, Tessa. What did your father say?”

“I never told him. You’re the first person I have ever told, other than Angie. I just couldn’t… worry my father anymore.”

“And Lydia?”

“We weren’t speaking.”

Bill looks at me curiously.

“I told Angie right before she died,” I continue. “She was concerned for Charlie and me. At the end, she was considering leaving me completely out of things.”

“Why…”

“Why didn’t she tell you? Because she was protecting me. I think she was wrong, though. I can’t live with knowing I might be part of killing an innocent man. It wasn’t a hard decision at seventeen. The trial was over. I wanted everything to go back to normal. I figured it could be just another sick individual who was obsessed with the case. There were plenty of those. Which meant Terrell could still be guilty as hell. The prosecutor, Al Vega, was sure. And Lydia… I was furious with her, but I certainly didn’t want her life in danger.”

“Hold on, OK?”

Bill leaps up and jogs to his car, a small black BMW, three little letters that I think turn normally nice human beings into road demons. He disappears inside his fancy womb for so long, I wonder whether he is listening to Bach and contemplating whether to flip on the ignition and screech off. When he finally emerges, he holds a pen and pad in his left hand. He plops back down on the curb. He’s already written some notes, and I glimpse a few of the words.

John Gay. 1995.

“Keep going,” he orders.

“Lately, I’ve revisited a couple of the places I think he left flowers… on my own. In no particular order.”

“Whoa. Stop right there. You’ve been returning to these places. Why in the hell are you doing that?”

“I know, I know. Crazy. You see, after the first time, I never dug to see if he buried something else for me. It was like I couldn’t give him the satisfaction. I couldn’t let myself believe that much. I thought it could be some kid’s idea of a joke. Or a random freak. We were all over the newspaper, even Lydia.” She always pointed out her name to me. She was thrilled when she made The New York Times as Miss Cartwright’s neighbor and confidante.

“I survived on denial,” I continue. “And, yes, I realize it’s insane to think anything would still be there. And yet, what if? I just thought if I did find something, it might help… Terrell.”

And I promised the Susans.

“You’re digging? Alone? Have you found anything?”

“Nothing. It’s a relief, and it isn’t.”

“Why are we here, if your old house is there?”

“This is Lydia’s house. Well, it used to be. I found black-eyed Susans here, too, a few weeks after the trial.”

How much should I explain? I’d shown up at the door on a Friday afternoon with a cardboard box of her stuff. I was enacting a ritual goodbye, after our friendship imploded at the end of the trial. She hadn’t been at school for a week and a half. The box held two videotapes, The Last of the Mohicans and Cape Fear, the backup makeup bag she always left in my bathroom, her Mickey Mouse pajamas.

But the house was asleep at three in the afternoon, which was unusual. No cars. The living room shades were drawn for the first time ever. I could have dumped the box and run. Instead, I unlocked the back gate. Curious. When I glimpsed the small sea of yellow flowers, I was even angrier at Lydia, and I hadn’t thought that possible. How could she let them grow? I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Two weeks later, a For Sale sign went up, and the Bells were gone, like no one was worth a goodbye.

“Let her go,” my father had advised.

“I was in the back yard returning something to Lydia and saw them,” I tell Bill. I place my fingers at my temples and rub in concentric circles. “It’s OK if you think this is stupid. Let’s go. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

He stands and yanks me up. Then he surprises me. “We’re here. Might as well check it out.”

We knock three times before a pasty woman with short, frustrated black hair opens the door about six inches. She surveys us like we are Texas liberals and stabs a finger at the sign under the mailbox attached to the porch siding, a slight variation on a familiar plaque to ward off solicitors: WE’RE PISS POOR. WE DON’T VOTE. WE’VE FOUND JESUS. OUR GUN IS LOADED.

Bill ignores her warnings and sticks out his hand. “Hello, ma’am, I’m William Hastings. My friend Tessa here used to have a very good friend who lived in your house. Tessa has fond childhood memories of playing in the back yard. Would you mind if she took a quick look back there for old times’ sake?”

The door opens a little wider, but it’s clearly not an invitation. She swivels to shove her foot at a fat yellow cat that can’t make up its mind about going out. I’m guessing she’s around forty-five, wearing tight jean shorts that are the size she wore two sizes ago. She is carting around a lumpy rear end on skinny legs, and I’m figuring the legs are what she’s gauging her weight by as she sits on her ass and sucks down another beer.

No shoes. Band-Aids are wrapped around her big toes. Her breasts are generous flat pancakes, encased in a tank top. A tattoo of red roses snakes from her left shoulder to her elbow. The tattoo clearly required a lot of both time and clenching of teeth.

“Yeah, I mind.” The woman ignores Bill’s outstretched hand. She’s staring at the scar under my eye. I perceive a fleeting flash of respect in her eyes. She’s probably thinking bar fight.

“I’m curious, Mrs…?”

“Gibson. Not that it’s any of your damn business.”

Bill flashes his courthouse badge.

“I’m just curious, Mrs. Gibson, at 5216 Della Court, if you were a no-show to jury duty in the last five years. I have a few friends in the courthouse who would be happy to look that up for us.”

“Son of a bitch,” she fumes. “Five minutes. That’s it. Go around the side by the gate and be sure to shut it when you go. I have a dog.” She spits out the last four words like a threat and slams the door.

“Nice move,” I say.

“It’s not my first Mrs. Gibson.”

The same old chain link fence is standing guard around back, although several degrees rustier. The horseshoe catch on the side gate requires a good thump from Bill to lift. I think about how Lydia’s dad oiled it religiously.

It is a small, crunched yard with too many plastic buildings. A fake-shingled shed is shoved into the right corner, the “fancy” version with a flower box that was forgotten a long time ago. A filthy white doghouse with a red roof is plopped on the slab of concrete posing as a back porch.

A picnic table used to sit directly under a red oak tree that is now a four-foot stump topped by a statue of a bald eagle with outspread wings. The grass is long and tickly. It creeps up my leg, like a rambling daddy longlegs. Maybe it is. I almost trip over a toy plastic fire truck transformed into a weed planter.

Bill’s foot lands in an enormous pile of soft dog poop, and he lets out a loud “Shit.”

We halt, and stare more intently at the doghouse. It’s big enough for a two-year-old child to sleep in. Bill whistles. A dog starts a serious racket somewhere inside the house, and I wonder if Mrs. Gibson is loading her shotgun.

“OK, where?” Bill’s tone indicates he may be losing some faith in my treasure hunt. Once again, I regret involving him.

I point to the left side of the yard, at the very back. The weeds are a wild and shaggy carpet, but you can still make out the small hill that Mr. Bell used to call the Grassy Knoll. Lydia had inherited that need to nickname things.

Bill follows behind me, dragging his left shoe, trying to scrape off dog poop as he goes. I stop abruptly, lean over, and begin to yank at weeds.

“What the hell are you doing?” He glances back to the house. My weeding efforts have revealed a small metal door planted sideways into the rise of the tiny hill.

The rusty padlock that holds it closed would probably fall apart with a swift kick. I’m tempted.

“It’s an old storm cellar from the ’30s when the house was built. I don’t recall Lydia’s family ever using it. Mrs. Bell thought they were better off in the bathtub during tornado warnings than hanging out with poisonous spiders and beetles in a black hole.”

“Where were the flowers?”

“Planted across the top. There’s always been a layer of dirt above the concrete. Used to be grass.”

“You didn’t bring a shovel,” Bill says, almost to himself. He’s trying to fit the pieces together, and I’m holding back the big one. “You think he buried something for you… in the storm cellar?”

An image of Charlie flashes into my mind, crammed on a bus with shrieking volleyball girls, headed to Waco.

I’m missing her game for this.

“Yes.” I place two fingers on my wrist and feel my racing pulse, because Lydia always did. “Last night, I dreamed that Lydia is down there. That the flowers marked her grave.”

Tessie, 1995

“Do you ever have nightmares?”

The doctor’s demeanor today, all stiff and formal, suggests he has renewed purpose. I imagine him stabbing at a random page in his Book of Tricks right before I arrived. It is probably thick as a loaf of bread, with crackled yellow pages, a worn red velvet cover, and thousands of useless magic spells.

“Let me think,” I say. I’ve added this cheerful line to my arsenal of sure and sounds good, part of my campaign to get off this couch as soon as possible.

I could tell him that last night’s dream wasn’t exactly a nightmare, as my nightmares go, and that his daughter, Rebecca, was the guest star. I was camped out in the grave with the Susans, per usual. Rebecca peered down at us, pale and pretty, in one of my mother’s flowered church dresses. She fell to her knees and extended a hand. Her hair, wound in these goofy old-fashioned ringlets, tickled my cheek. Her fingers, when they reached me, were white-hot. I woke up, my arm on fire, choking for air.

I could tell him, but I won’t. It seems unkind to bring it up, and I am working on being kinder.

“I dream a lot about the grave.” This is the first time I’ve admitted this. It also happens to be true. “The dream is always exactly the same until the end.”

“Are you in the grave? Or hovering above it?”

“For most of the dream, I’m lying in it, waiting.”

“Until someone rescues you?”

“No one ever rescues us.”

“What do you hear?”

A truck engine. Thunder. Bones crackling like firewood. Someone cursing.

“It depends on the ending,” I say.

“If you don’t mind, tell me about the different endings.”

“It is pouring rain, and we drown in muddy water. Or snow falls until it covers our faces like a baby blanket, and we can’t see.” Or breathe. I swig out of the glass of water his secretary always leaves for me. It tastes a little like the lake smells.

“And to be clear… we means… Merry and… the bones.”

“It means the Susans.”

“Are there… other endings besides those?”

“A farmer doesn’t see us and shovels dirt into the hole with his tractor plow. Someone lights a match and drops it inside. A huge black bear decides the hole is the perfect place to hibernate and lies down on top of us. That’s one of the nicer endings. All of us just go to sleep. He snores. Anyway, you get the idea.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, sometimes he comes back and finishes the job. Buries us for real.” With bags and bags of manure.

“He… meaning the killer?”

I don’t answer, because once again, it seems obvious.

“Do you ever see a face?” he asks.

Come on, doesn’t he think I would have said if I saw his face? Still, I think about his question. Rebecca’s is the only face I’ve ever seen in this recurring event. She was lovely in her first appearance last night. Big, innocent eyes, dark corkscrew curls, skin like ivory silk.

She looked very much like Lillian Gish, probably because Lydia and I had just rented Birth of a Nation.

Lydia says that Lillian Gish loved to play tortured characters, as a rebellious counter to her devastating beauty. Lydia knows this because her dad has a huge crush on this actress, even though Lillian Gish is quite dead. She said her dad especially likes the finale of Way Down East, where Lillian floats unconscious on an ice floe toward a seething waterfall, while her long hair dangles in the water like a snake. Right after she told me, Lydia said she shouldn’t have. That it might provoke more nightmares while I was in this state.

It ticked me off. She hardly ever says things like that. It makes me worry. Am I looking in more of a state than usual? Isn’t she noticing I’m more cheerful? Aren’t I getting better?

Either way, it probably isn’t relevant to tell the doctor about his daughter showing up in my dream as a silent movie queen, wearing my mother’s clothes. It was certainly weird and random, like just about everything else.

“No,” I say. “I don’t see his face.”

Tessa, present day

Once again, I’m in the shadows. Watching.

My body is tucked under the eaves, pressed against the cold, dirty siding, hopefully out of camera range for the television van camped by the curb out front.

I’m trying to steady my nerves by picturing Lydia’s yard the way it used to be: green, neat, and shady with two giant clay pots of red and white impatiens on each of the front corners of the flat concrete porch. Always red and white, like the Christmas lights that Mr. Bell strung along the front roofline that every single year ended ten bulbs short on one side. It was tradition for my father to comment on it whenever we drove by.

Lucy and Ethel used to live back here. Mr. Bell’s hunting dogs. When he wasn’t around to call them off, their excited claws left little white streaks on my calves. The old boat was usually up on blocks in the back corner, perpetually waiting for July 4th. Lydia and I used to throw off the tarp when Mr. Bell wasn’t home so we could do our homework and work on our leg tans at the same time.

But there’s a circus assembling here today. And I’m responsible for it. My gut cramps. Bill and Jo are staking their reputations on me.

It took three days for Bill to retrieve the judge’s permission to dig at Lydia’s house and another twenty-four hours to set the time for 2 P.M., which is exactly fourteen minutes from now. The district attorney was surprisingly cooperative, probably because the police are getting killed in the media. A local newspaper editorial criticized the county for “an embarrassing lack of Texas frontier justice in not identifying the bones of the Black-Eyed Susans and returning them to their families.”

It wasn’t a particularly well-written or researched opinion, just fiery, something Southern journalists are good at pulling out of the air on a slow day. But it had worked a little magic on Judge Harold Waters, who still reads newspapers and has presided over the Black-Eyed Susan case from the beginning. He scribbled his signature and handed it down from his perch on top of his favorite cutting horse, Sal.

I barely remember Waters during the trial, just that Al Vega was worried he was too wishy-washy on the death penalty. A few years ago, I saw the judge on CNN giving an eyewitness account of a UFO hovering over Stephenville “like a twenty-four-hour Super Walmart in the sky.”

“Could have been a worse draw,” Bill had told me.

And so here we are, because of my dream about Lydia, and a judge who believes in flying saucers.

Two uniformed cops are squaring off the back yard with yellow crime tape. Jo is standing on top of the Grassy Knoll with the same female detective who attended the meeting with Hannah’s family. A SMU geology professor is rolling by with a high-tech ground-penetrating radar device on wheels that will never in a million years fit through the door to the cellar. It barely fit through the gate. His grim face says he’s figured this out.

Jo has told me that GPR is still more theoretical than practical when searching for old bones underground, but she and Bill decided it couldn’t hurt to add to the melodrama. The DA agreed. He’ll make hay out of it either way.

The professor is the acknowledged local expert in the complicated task of reading GPR imagery. Still, the ground is not a womb, and Jo tells me he will not be able to discern a skeletal face. He’ll be searching for evidence of soil disturbances that would suggest someone dug a grave once upon a time. He might be able to make out a human shape, but it’s doubtful. He’s mostly part of the show.

The yard is now buzzing with conversations, an impromptu lawn party that’s starting to gel. Bill is schmoozing the pretty assistant district attorney assigned to witness this latest crazy turn of events. Her real face is buried under a Southern coat of makeup. I’m calculating the distance between them. Two feet, now one.

Mr. and Mrs. Gibson are propped up in lawn chairs in their Sunday best Dallas Cowboys T-shirts, smoking like fiends, the only two people who appear to be enjoying themselves. One of them has mowed the weeds for the occasion.

The professor is suddenly making a beeline for them. He shakes their hands. From his wild gesticulating, I’ve deduced that the professor wants to run his device over both the front and back yards. The Gibsons are vigorously nodding yes.

Are they imagining movie rights? Is that what prompted Mrs. Gibson to wash her hair and stick on flip-flops and fresh toe Band-Aids? Is she hoping to add a plaque under her No Soliciting sign that declares this house a historical landmark, like Lizzie Borden’s?

The gate clanks behind me, and the back yard suddenly snaps to attention. Four more people are striding in. Two cops in jeans, hoisting shovels and a metal detector. Two women in CSI protective gear with an unlit lantern and a large camera. Their arrival signals that my tortured wait is almost over.

Across the yard, one of the uniformed cops is already cutting through the lock on the storm cellar. He yanks on the door and it gives way easily. He leaps back and slaps a hand over his nose and mouth, as does every person within ten feet of the door. Even Jo, who told me that on the site of the 9/11 tragedy, she smelled things she will never forget.

Now everything is going too fast. One of the crime scene investigators is busily handing out masks. One of the cops in jeans disappears into the hole like an agile snake. The shovel and lantern are handed down to him. Next, a CSI disappears. The space must be tiny, because everyone else remains aboveground. Eager. Chattering into the hole.

Mr. Bell would never let us open that door. It’s nasty down there, girls.

Empty plastic evidence bags are dropped into the cellar. In fifteen minutes, two of the bags return to the surface, bulging. They are set alongside the back fence.

The CSI pokes her head out from the hole and she beckons for the cop with the metal detector. In case there is jewelry? I could tell them that Lydia always wore her grandmother’s thin gold wedding band with the pinprick red ruby. I wonder for the hundredth time in four days why the cops couldn’t find any of the Bell family in a search of public records. It’s as if they sailed off the face of the earth.

Jo is offering her hand to the CSI, covered with muck and filth, climbing up through the door. The cop with the metal detector descends to take her place. The Gibsons are munching potato chips and passing a plastic tub of ranch dip back and forth. The geologist is methodically rolling his device over the grounds like a wheelbarrow, pausing every now and then to read his screen.

A circus.

Another evidence bag is handed up from the hole. And another and another. All of them are set along the back fence line with the others. In the end, eight black bags, like the bodies of lumpy spiders, their legs ripped off. Finally, both cops emerge, black from the knees down, tearing off latex gloves. The group huddles for a short conversation.

Jo turns and searches the yard until her eyes land on me. She walks toward me, her face twisted with concern, the longest twenty yards of my life.

How could I have left Lydia down there for so long? Why did I not figure this out sooner?

Jo’s hand is heavy on my shoulder. “We didn’t find anything, Tessa. We’re going to go a little deeper, but they’ve already dug three feet and struck clay and limestone. It would have taken the killer forever to dig through it. Seems very unlikely that he did.”

“What… is in the bags?”

“Someone used the place as a root cellar. It was trashed with broken jars and rotting fruits and vegetables. And a couple of now-dead moles that burrowed in somehow for a last supper. There was plenty of moisture to keep it rancid. Cracks in the concrete.”

“I’m so sorry… that I wasted everyone’s time.”

Nothing inside me feels that sorry. Lydia could be alive. Those flowers might really be from her. I feel a rising tide of unexpected joy.

“We’ll still sift through the contents of those bags, back in the lab. We always knew this was a shot in the dark. Literally. And I like to leave no stone unturned. Or any cliché unturned.” Trying to make me smile.

Behind her, the professor has wheeled his device right below the gaping mouth of the cellar. A small crowd is gathering, including the Gibsons, who’ve ducked under the crime tape. Someone in the center of the circle gives a shout. The uniforms are pushing everyone back to make room for the cops and their shovels.

The crime scene investigators are talking to the professor like he’s an umpire about to make a critical decision. They turn to the cops and direct how wide to make the hole.

The men nod, and carefully crack the earth.

Tessie, 1995

The doctor is telling me a story about when he was twelve.

I’m sure there’s going to be a point, but I wish he’d get to it. Lately, he’s been a little all over the place.

I’m annoyed by that smudge on his glasses, by Lydia flushing all of my Benadryl down the toilet last night. I’m sorry, she said, but it seemed to be about much more than swirling away those pink pills. Something is going on with Lydia. For the last two weeks, she’s been late instead of exactly on time and sometimes cancels on me altogether. She makes vague excuses, her cheeks flush and she rakes her teeth across the pink lip gloss on her bottom lip. She is a terrible liar. Eventually, Lydia will tell me what is wrong, so I don’t bug her.

Of course, two sentences into the doctor’s tale, I’m wondering if he’s lying. He says he was a chubby boy and yet he’s got all that wiry muscle under the shirt with the collar that stands like a pinned white butterfly. I bumped up against his arm once. It was immovable, concrete, a runner’s leg extending from his shoulder.

“I’d come home every day after school to an empty house,” he is saying.

I’m suddenly scared for the boy in an empty house even though he’s sitting across from me alive and well with no visible scars.

“Tessie, do you want me to continue? Is this story bothering you?”

“Um, no. Go ahead.”

“In the winter, the house was always dark and cold. So the first thing I did after I unlocked the door, before I put down my books or took off my coat, was walk to the thermostat and turn up the heat. To this day, the thump of the furnace, the smell of heat coming on… is the smell of loneliness. Tessie, are you listening?”

“Yes. I’m just trying to figure out your lesson here. I thought you were about to tell me something terrible happened to you.” I’m disappointed. Relieved. Vaguely intrigued.

It occurs to me that I love all of the smells associated with heat. Fireplace smoke drifting my way on a chilly night run, barbecue coals declaring it Saturday afternoon. Sizzling pork chop grease, Banana Boat sunscreen, hot towels tumbled in our old Kenmore dryer. Especially after Mama died, I couldn’t get hot enough. I flipped my electric blanket on high so much that it streaked a black scorch mark on the blue fabric and Daddy took it away. I still stretch out by the heating vent in the floor of Mama’s walk-in closet and read. I’m not sure I would have survived the last year if I couldn’t slam the screen door behind me, sprawl on the back porch lounger, and let the brutal sun fry every black thought to ashes.

“Smell is the sense that is most instantly connected with memory. Do you know anything about Marcel Proust?”

“Am I failing this test if I say no?” I can’t wait to tell Lydia that the doctor is pulling a depressed French philosopher with a handlebar mustache out of his bag. It’s a big step up. Lydia christened my last therapist Chicken Little after the woman suggested I read Chicken Soup for the Soul.

“This isn’t a test. There is no way to fail in this room, Tessie.” His tone is plodding, predictable-and, I realize, a little tired. “One of Proust’s characters recalls an entire event from his childhood after smelling a tea-soaked biscuit. Science has been chasing this theory ever since-that smell retrieves deep memories. The olfactory bulb rests near, and instantly communicates with, the part of our brain that holds the past.”

“So this is a test. You are telling me I can retrieve my memory through smell.”

“Maybe. Are there any smells that… bother you since the event?”

Peanut butter, peanut butter, peanut butter. My dad interrogated Bobby and me last week about why an almost-full jar of Jif was in the trash. Bobby didn’t tell on me.

The muscles in my thighs and legs suddenly cramp.

“Tessie, what’s happening?”

I can’t breathe. I have drawn my knees up to my chin. My fingers are in my ears.

“Why can’t I remember? Why can’t I remember?”

His arm is around me. He’s saying something. My head falls onto his shoulder. I feel him stiffen slightly, and then relax. His body is warm, a hot water bottle, like Daddy’s. I do not know or care if this is appropriate behavior for a therapist.

He is heat.

Tessa, present day

I spend forty-five minutes in the shower, but it doesn’t help. I pace the house. Open the refrigerator, swig out of the orange juice bottle, slam the door shut. Pick up my phone on the counter. Consider calling Charlie. Bill. Jo. Stop myself.

Punch around on Facebook. Stick my daughter’s old iPod into the speakers, and turn it way, way up so that Kelly Clarkson full vibrato is massaging my brain. Rearrange the kitchen canisters, the magazines, the mail, Charlie’s scattered papers and notebooks. Fold and refold a leftover piece of satin on the floor. Obsess over neat, exacting edges in a house where things usually roll around at the whims of a churlish tide.

I want, need to know the contents of the box unearthed seven hours ago near Lydia’s storm cellar. From my vantage point under the eaves, I couldn’t tell anything other than it was metal, about twelve inches square, and easy for a CSI to carefully lift out with blue-latex-covered hands. At that point, the cops began the process of clearing the back yard of extraneous people like me. In the rising clatter of voices, Jo didn’t even look my way. Bill and the assistant DA had reappeared and stood together off to the side of the hole, arms crossed, observing.

The knock at the door, three short raps, snaps me to attention. I glance down to see whether I’m decent. The answer is no. Bare legs and feet. The only thing covering me is one of Lucas’s old camouflage Army T-shirts that hits about four inches below a patch of lace that Victoria’s Secret calls underwear. No bra. I grab a pair of shorts out of the pile of clean clothes on the couch and hurriedly hop into them, one leg at a time.

Two more urgent raps.

The shorts are Charlie’s, and they ride high under the T-shirt so that it still appears that I’m wearing nothing. But, good enough.

I thrust my eye up to the peephole. Bill.

He is perfectly framed in the oval, as if he is standing in a tiny, tiny picture from another era. His hair is wet and slicked back. I can almost smell the soap.

I know he is not here to talk about Lydia. We almost kissed on that curb. This silent debate has been going on between us ever since he brushed his head on the Galveston sea glass dangling from the ceiling in my bedroom.

I open the door. He’s wearing faded Levi’s, and an easy, tentative smile that is going to get me in trouble tonight. I cannot stop staring at his mouth. He’s carrying a bottle of wine in each hand. One red, one white. Considerate, because he doesn’t know my preference, which is neither. On a night like this, I’m a beer girl all the way. The heat in the few feet between us is unmistakable now, flushing my skin. Pretenses, denials, the fact that I’m a mom of fourteen years and he’s probably still getting carded-all of it undeniably stripped away after I fell apart in his arms. Bill has barely said an unnecessary word to me since.

At this moment, we are the same people we were before we sat down on that curb, and two very different ones.

“This isn’t a good idea,” I say.

“No,” he says, and I open the door wider.

I have three important rules when it comes to sex.

I have to be in a committed relationship.

It cannot happen in my house, in my bed.

It must be dark.

Bill abandons the wine bottles on the hall table and kicks the door closed without saying anything. He pushes me back against the wall. His body is still chilled with night air, but his fingers and lips on my skin are like drifting flames. My arms are up around his neck, and I’m pressing my body into his, craning my neck up. I have not felt this certain I should be alive in a very long time. It’s making me slightly woozy.

He cradles my chin in one hand. His gaze is long enough and deliberate enough to assure me that he knows exactly what he’s doing. I think, If I look away now, if I stop this, it will still be OK, almost like it never happened. But he bends to kiss me again, and I am lost. I want this intimate dance in my hallway to go on forever. His hands have slipped under my T-shirt and are sliding up my back.

I don’t protest when he lifts me and carries me down the hall. I wrap my legs around his waist and keep my mouth on his.

In my room, he sets me down gently. His head brushes the glass again, setting off a trickle of muted music. He strips off my shirt. His shirt. Pulls me down onto my soft, messy sheets. We are instantly coiled, like people who have made love to each other hundreds of times. I close my eyes and swirl to the bottom of the river.

“Tessa, you beautiful girl,” he groans, his breath on my neck. “You drive me crazy.”

Crazy.

Maybe another one of his lines. Perhaps a last-ditch plea for one of us to come to our senses.

I pull away slightly, but not enough that he can see the scar near my collarbone. He’s been too busy so far to notice. I’m always so careful about this. Never too drunk on love or lust to forget. My hand reaches for the switch on the lamp by my bed, and stops. The bulb has cast his face in half-glow, half-shadow. Every cliché pops into my head. Light and dark, life and death, true and false, comedy and tragedy, good and evil, yin and yang.

Golden boy lawyer and girl marked by the devil.

I use one hand to tug at the pins holding up my hair. I know exactly what I’m doing, too. There is a look on his face that I will never forget, that I will hold on to forever, no matter what happens after tonight.

No matter whether we fail Terrell.

No matter whether my monster eats us both alive.

I reach over, and snap off the light.

This is the one rule I will not break tonight.

Sex is the only time I worship the dark.

“This one?” he asks. His finger is tracing the faint line on my ankle, and I shiver.

“From surgery. You know that I broke my ankle… that night. Please, come up here.” I tug at his hair, and he ignores me.

“And this?” He’s smothering the tiny butterfly above my right hip bone with the tip of his finger.

“An impulse right before the trial,” I say. I’m suddenly flooded with the memory of the exquisite pain of the needle. When I encounter people smothered in tattoos, chattering eagerly about the next one, I understand the addiction.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Lydia’s voice is ringing in my head. She quoted that line from Bleak House to a tattoo artist at a carnival on the state fairgrounds. Lydia was lying facedown on a fresh towel on a metal cot. The flap of the tent was closed, making it an oven. Lydia’s jeans were unbuttoned and slightly pulled down over the curve of her smooth white hip. I’d gone first, oddly brave. The wings of my tattoo were stinging, even more as I watched this stranger carve out Lydia’s identical twin butterfly.

Bill’s fingers are urging me back to the present. He is inching his way up my body slowly, exploring, as if he is clinically gathering evidence for court. It is the first sign in the last hour and a half that my brain is working.

My hair is covering the three-inch line above my left collarbone. He pushes it aside. He knows.

“Tell me about this one,” he says.

It is the scar I am the most ashamed of. It feels like my monster’s work as much as if he’d inked it himself. In reality, he drew none of my scars with his own hand. “The ER doctors panicked a little the night I was… found. Everybody did. The EMT carried me in the emergency room door in his arms, screaming. Later, my cardiologist was furious. He said I would have needed a pacemaker eventually but not that night. Not that soon. They used wires that would be tough to extract so they left it in.” My body stiffens slightly as he nuzzles my neck. This can’t be a surprise to him. “Poor little pacemaker girl. Al Vega rammed it home on the stand. Don’t you remember from the transcript?”

“Yes, but I wanted to hear it from you.”

So Bill is on the clock. The love spell is settling like dull party glitter.

“Should we call Jo and ask what was in the box at Lydia’s?” Changing the subject. Trying not to sound hurt.

“Trust me, she’ll call. Try not to think about it.

“What about Charlie’s father?” he asks abruptly. “Is he in the picture? I like to know when there’s competition.”

His question sounds an off note for me. “Lucas would say no one could compete. He’s generally quite full of himself. He’s a soldier. His ego keeps him alive.” I touch Bill’s cheek. “We haven’t been together for years. Not like this.”

Bill and I are uncomfortably working backward. It’s wrong. This is why I generally follow my sensible rules for sex. I’m leaning over to grab for the T-shirt on the floor when it occurs to me that I should adopt another rule: Never wear the Army shirt of one man while making love to another.

“Don’t leave,” Bill says softly. “I’ll shut up. Stay with me.” He’s yanking me down again, spooning his warm body against my back and tossing the comforter over us. I can’t resist the heat.

Sleep isn’t coming.

I nestle into Bill’s back. Close my eyes and drift.

I’m back in the tent, watching Lydia’s butterfly get its wings. The tattoo artist isn’t that old. Maybe twenty-five. She’s wearing a red, white, and blue halter top that shows a lot of skin. Her back is laced with old white scars, probably from a belt.

A four-word tattoo is flushed defiantly against the damaged canvas.

I am still here.

Tessie, 1995

“Tessie, are you listening?”

Always with the listening.

My lips are glued to the pin-striped straw of a Dairy Queen Dr Pepper. The leaves brushing the office window have turned a brilliant red in the last week. I’ve never seen a tree so lit up in August, like Monet has picked it out and struck a match to it. I figure God is using this tree as a reminder to be grateful that I’m not still blind. But he’s a fickle God or I wouldn’t have gone blind in the first place.

I rub at a smudge of mascara sweat stinging my eye. Lydia has been obsessed with trying new cosmetics lately, while I am busy trying to be the blur that no one notices. She had experimented on me until she perfected the blend to hide my half-moon scar-Maybelline Fair Stick 10 combined with a tube of something puke green and Cover Girl Neutralizer 730. She wrote all of this down for me, including the order in which I was to apply it, and then she made up herself in my bathroom mirror. She looked amazing when she finished. My dad once said, not meanly, that if Lydia didn’t open her mouth, every boy in school would be after her. While she added a layer of clear mascara and smacked on pink lip gloss, she told me all about Erica Jong and the zipless fuck. It is the first time I ever heard her use the f-word and it was like she’d fired a shot that killed our remaining childhood.

“Sex with a stranger,” she had explained. “No remorse. No guilt.” More and more, I feel like I’m the wheel spinning in the mud, while Lydia’s foot is on the gas.

The doctor interrupts my train of thought. “Tessie, what’s with you today? What are you thinking about?”

Zipless fucks. Scar recipes.

“I’m hot. Kind of bored.”

“OK, how about this. What is the emotion you have felt most of the time since you were here two days ago?” Since you hugged me on the couch and acted like a person?

“I don’t know.” I squirm. I hate this odd habit of his-starting an intimate conversation while standing five feet away.

“I think you feel guilt. Almost all of the time. Ever since the event. We keep skirting around it.”

I suck slowly out of my Styrofoam cup and stare at him. The event. Yep, still drives me crazy when he says it.

“Why would I feel guilty?”

“Because you believe you could have prevented what happened to you. Maybe even what happened to Merry.”

“I was sixteen years old. An athlete. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m sure I could have prevented this if I’d been paying attention. It’s not like I’m a two-year-old who could be tossed in a car like a pillow.”

He finally sits down across from me. “You’ve hit right on the problem, Tessie. You aren’t two or four or ten, Tessie. You are a teen-ager, so you think you’re pretty smart. More perceptive than adults, even. Your father. Your teachers. Me. In fact, I hate to tell you, but this is the smartest you will ever feel in your whole life.” Lydia hates the no-socks loafer look on men, and right now, so do I. I stare at his pearly ankle with the bone jutting out and think about how we are just a bunch of ugly parts. I feel so many conflicting emotions about this man. About males in general right now. If he really wanted to get anywhere, he’d ask about that.

“Rebecca thought she was smarter, too,” he says.

His daughter’s name hits the humid air like a grenade. I’m not bored anymore, if that was his intent.

“There is a reason you feel the need to blame yourself,” he continues. “From all accounts, you were a very careful girl. If you accept the blame-decide you took a rare misstep-you can reassure yourself this was not a random event. If you blame yourself, you can believe that you are still in control of your universe. You’re not. You never will be.”

“And what about you?” I ask. “I bet you still think your daughter is alive, when she’s decomposing in the muck of a river or being snacked on by coyotes. Let me enlighten you. Rebecca is dead.”

Tessa, present day

The sunrise is painting the bedroom pink. The best time of day for talking to angels and taking photographs, according to my grandfather. For admiring clouds that drift like feathers off a flamingo, according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

For shoving midnight monsters to the back of the closet.

Bill is sliding a long, skinny leg into his jeans. His back is bare, broad, wired with muscle. It’s been a long time since I woke up on a Saturday morning with someone in my bed who wasn’t furry or sick. I’m trying to identify the emotion in my gut. Scared, maybe. Hopeful?

Charlie isn’t due back on the bus for another couple of hours but she’s delivered a series of texts that dinged through a third, lazy round of lovemaking. I’m propped up against the headboard and am thumbing through them, the sheet modestly pulled up to my chest.

Third place

. Coach got ejected.

Forgot need tub of blue hair gel for bio lab Monday. Soooorry.

What’s for dinner?

Bill’s cell phone rings on the bedside table while I’m thinking about where to buy a tub of blue hair gel without returning to 1965. I pick up his phone and toss it over but not before I see the caller ID.

Bone Doc.

My throw across the tumbled comforter falls short, but Bill leans in, catches the phone anyway. Winks.

I remember the first time a man winked at me. Lydia was blowing out eleven candles, one to grow on, while I watched her father’s eye open and shut under the ragged brow that never quite filled in after an auto shop accident.

Bone Doc. Jo calling, to divulge the secrets of the box? For hours, even with the distraction of Bill’s tongue, my mind has been prying the lid open and slamming it shut.

The box is filled with sand, silky enough to run through my fingers like a waterfall.

It is crammed with girls’ jawbones, grinning wickedly at every angle.

It holds a package tied up with glittering black tinsel made of Lydia’s hair.

“Hey.” Bill speaks low into the phone and glances back at me. He listens without interrupting for at least a minute. “Uh-huh. I can reach Tessa.”

He’s zipping up his jeans at this point, balancing the phone between his ear and shoulder.

The doctor had taught me in our sessions that I could have waited five years to sleep with this man, and never really known him. The doc was speaking generally, of course. He believed that a person’s most profound flaws or virtues emerge in great crisis, or they remain buried forever. I remember leaving his office that day thinking it was sad that ordinary, dull people die all the time without ever knowing they are heroes. All because a girl didn’t go under in the lake right in front of them, or a neighbor’s house didn’t catch fire.

“Be there in about an hour,” Bill is saying.

Five of us are stuffed into the tiny room, all looking like we’d come off a sleepless night.

Jo, in running shorts and a well-worn T-shirt that says Pray for Moore, OK. Bill, wearing the same clothes as the night before. Alice Finkel, the flirtatious assistant district attorney, hiding under a face made up with Mary Kay precision, so desperately interested in Bill that it hurts to watch. Lt. Ellen Myron, in Wrangler’s, a gun strapped to her hip.

I concentrate on the three plastic evidence bags, lying in a neat row.

My fingers itch to rip them open and get this grim party rolling.

Lieutenant Myron clears her throat.

“Tessa,” Lieutenant Myron says, “there were three items recovered from the box exhumed in the back yard of Lydia Bell’s childhood home. We’re hoping you can identify the items.”

“There were no… bones inside?” I ask. Just tell me, dammit. Tell me you found a piece of Lydia.

“No. Nothing like that.” Lieutenant Myron flips over one of the bags. I recognize the small book immediately. Gold, frayed cover. A design of yellow flowers with green shoots trickling up toward the title. Poe’s Stories and Poems.

“Can I pick it up?” I ask.

“No. Don’t touch. I’ll do it.”

“That’s Lydia’s,” I confirm. “I was with her when she bought it. Her dad drove us into Archer City to Larry McMurtry’s bookstores.”

Why would Lydia bury this book? After my kidnapping, she probably scourged her room of anything with a yellow flower on it. But Lydia wouldn’t be able to completely part with a treasured book. She’d romanticize it like this, in a time capsule to dig up later.

Except she never came back.

Lieutenant Myron sets the book aside and dangles another bag from her thumb and forefinger. “What about this?”

I swallow hard and peer closer. “A key? I don’t even recognize the random keys in my own junk drawer.”

“So that’s a no?”

“That’s a no.”

“Worth asking.”

Lieutenant Myron reaches for the third bag. She holds it up, six inches from my eyes.

The room is waiting for me.

Tick, tick, tick.

Can everyone hear that? I don’t know if it’s my pacemaker, which never makes a sound, or the deer heart trapped in that box.

At ten, I could recite every word of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Lydia was better at it, of course. Once, she hid a loud clock under my pillow.

“Tessa?” Bill grips my shoulders. I’m swaying. The ticking is louder. His watch, dammit, near my ear. Tick, tick. I push his arm away.

“I thought this was lost.” It’s the voice of a seething teen-ager. “She must have taken it.”

“Who took it?” The lieutenant’s voice is sharp.

“Lydia. Lydia took it.”

Tessa, 1995

The doctor is already seated in his chair right by the couch. He doesn’t bother to stand up and greet me. I can’t tell by his expression if he is still angry after last week, when I spewed that acid about his daughter being eaten by coyotes. He certainly hadn’t objected when I just got up and stalked out.

I throw my purse on the floor, flop back on the couch, and cross my legs, hiking the skirt so he can see to China. He’s not the slightest bit interested. I could be his eighty-year-old aunt. My face burns hot and angry, but I don’t know why. I twist the ring on my finger, wishing it were his neck.

“Your mother,” he says smoothly. “You found her on the day she died.”

Payback for conjuring his daughter. He’s wielding his sharpest knife today. It opens up a place where I store the exquisite pain of missing her. I want to scream, to shatter that pleasant, professional mask that he snaps on with an invisible rubber band. Sometimes I wonder if I died in that hole. If this room is hell’s purgatory, and everything else-Daddy, Bobby, Lydia, O.J. the Monster-is part of a dream when the devil lets me sleep. If this judge in a pin-striped shirt is deciding whether to throw me in a locked attic with a bunch of cackling Susans or set me free to haunt our killer for eternity.

“I’m leaving.” I say this yet remain planted on the couch. “I’m done with your dumb games.”

“That’s your decision, Tessie.”

I was in the tree house.

She had called my name from the kitchen window. I thought she wanted me to help with the dishes. She always made a mess. Grease and flour everywhere. Crusted pans. Dirty bowls in the sink. Daddy said it was the price for biscuits that crumbled in your mouth, fudge frosting, fried okra scramble with potatoes and tomatoes that we ate like popcorn, cold, as leftovers.

I was in the tree house. But I ignored her.

“You found her on the kitchen floor.”

My heart bangs against my chest.

“You were eight years old.”

Her face is blue.

“She died of a stroke,” he says.

I pull up the skirt of her apron. Cover her face.

“Are you angry that she isn’t here? That she left you?”

I was in the tree house.

I didn’t come when she called.

The guilt is roaming free now. Almost unbearable.

“Yes,” I breathe out.

Tessa, present day

The object in the third plastic evidence bag on Jo’s desk is tiny, probably never of importance to anyone but me and its first owner, a little girl in a frilly petticoat who is long dead and buried.

When I was fifteen, I found the ring in the bottom of a basket of junk in an antiques store in the Stockyards. It was so caked with filth that I didn’t see the inset pearl, like a microscopic spider’s egg, until I got it home. The ring fit perfectly on my pinky. The owner of the store told me it was a Victorian child’s ring from the 1800s, probably gold-filled, which is why she said she could give it to me for $35, but certainly not the $10 I suggested. Lydia countered to the woman that she wouldn’t have known the ring existed if we hadn’t wandered in. “Tessie could have just stuck it in her pocket,” Lydia spewed indignantly, at which point I slid an extra $25 of my Christmas money across the counter and dragged my best friend out the door.

Halfway down the block, Lydia decided that I had purchased the ring against the will of the universe and wanted me to return it. It’s bad luck to wear the jewelry of a dead stranger. Who knows what kind of terrible things happened to the girl who wore it? In Victorian times, children were raised by cruel nannies and saw their parents once a day by appointment. Winston Churchill said he could count the number of times he’d been hugged by his mother.

By the time we arrived at the bus stop, Lydia was even more insistent, to a higher degree of craziness than usual. She made the leap from the grubby little object on my pinky to the Hope Diamond. It grew in the ground for 1.1 billion years before it exploded out of the earth and then cursed almost everyone who touched it. Marie Antoinette got her head chopped off and her princess friend was hacked to death with axes and pikes. It even hexed the innocent mailman who delivered it to the Smithsonian. His family died, his leg got crushed, and his house burned down.

Say what you want about Lydia Frances Bell and her ridiculous chatter, she said things I never forgot. If she were standing here, she’d be alternately dismayed and thrilled to be starring in the kind of morbid tale she devoured and repeated over and over.

The lieutenant is holding the ring so the pearl faces me like a blind eye. Everyone is being courteously silent. The weight of their expectations is suffocating.

“Yes, that was mine,” I affirm. “It went missing right before I testified at the trial. Lydia thought the ring was bad luck and wanted me to stop wearing it.”

“Why did she think it was bad luck?”

Pearls bring tears. Suicides and insanity, murders and carriage crashes.

“She didn’t believe you should wear the jewelry of dead people unless it belonged to someone you once knew. History was important to her.” And she was right, a Susan chimes in my ear.

It’s true-the ring was on my finger when he threw me in that hole. Everything else I wore that night-my favorite black leggings, Dad’s Michigan T-shirt, the cross necklace that Aunt Hilda gave me at my confirmation-disappeared. The ER doctors cut off every bit of it and handed it over to the police.

The night nurse was the first to notice the ring while checking my IV, a couple of hours after my pacemaker surgery. I could feel her wriggling it off, her fingers floating like feathers across mine. Shhhhh. When I woke up, there was a pinched, untanned circle where the ring had been. A month later, at home, I discovered that someone had tucked a hospital Bible into a pocket in my suitcase. When I opened it up, an envelope was taped to Psalm 23, the ring tucked inside.

The first thing I think when I hear the thump is that Charlie has tumbled out of her crib. It takes an instant of consciousness to realize that Charlie has not slept in a crib in thirteen years. She’s tangled in the covers beside me, red hair splayed on the aqua pillowcase like she’s floating in an ocean. It’s coming back to me now: our late-night marathon of The Walking Dead, popcorn, and cheddar cheese chips. The antidote to identifying inexplicable objects dug out of your best friend’s back yard.

I’d shut off the TV in my bedroom around 1 A.M. That could have been thirty minutes or four hours ago. It’s pitch black outside the window. I reach over to touch Charlie’s bare shoulder to be sure I’m not dreaming. It feels velvety and cool, but I don’t make the usual move to cover her up.

A low hum of chatter, as the Susans gather in my head to confer. I feel for the phone in the bed, where it usually sleeps beside me: 3:33. Charlie’s breath is even, and I decide not to wake her. Not yet.

I hear it again. The leaden sound of something dropping, like the lid of a trunk. It’s outside, toward Charlie’s room, but definitely not in the house. I slip over to my closet. Drop to my knees to grope around the shoe rack that hangs over the door. Second row up, fourth pocket over. My fingers tighten around my.22. For three years after the trial, this pistol was tucked in my size 2 waistband. I considered a bigger weapon, but I didn’t want anyone to see the bulge against my bony hip. Especially not my dad. Lucas secretly taught me to shoot when we weren’t sneaking around accidentally making Charlie. He insisted on one thing when he pressed the.22 into my hand for the first time: Go to the gun range like it’s a church, at least fifty-two times a year.

I’ve always hoped it’s OK to shoot more than you pray, because that’s how it’s turned out. Lucas has urged me to trade up for the last ten years, but I can’t imagine any gun but this one in my hand.

I shake Charlie’s shoulder and she groans. “Not morning.”

“I hear something outside,” I whisper. “Put your slippers on. And this.” I toss over a sweatshirt, hanging out of my hamper.

“For real?”

“For real. Get up.”

“Why aren’t you calling the police?” The sound is muffled, as she tugs the hoodie over her face.

“Because I don’t want us to be on the evening news.”

“Is that your gun? Mom.”

“Please, Charlie, just do what I say. We’re going to slip out the back door.”

“That makes no sense. The… thing is out there. Isn’t this why we have an alarm system so freaking sensitive that it goes off every time I turn up Vampire Weekend? Shouldn’t we at least look out the window and make sure it’s not the garbage truck?”

It’s at times like this that I wish I had a daughter who wasn’t so wrapped in the confident armor of her beauty and intelligence and athletic grace. Instead, she is just like the Before Tessie. Both insisted strange noises outside the window were teen-age boys with soap and eggs, not monsters with rusty shovels and guns. Most of the time, they were right.

“Charlie, I just need you to do what I say. Follow me.”

Another thump. Now tapping.

“OK, I heard that. Weird.” Charlie is quickening her steps behind me as we navigate the darkened hall and living room. The shades are drawn as usual, but I don’t want to flip on any lights.

“Follow our fire drill plan,” I say. “Go to Miss Effie’s. Bang on her back door. Call her house if she doesn’t answer. Here’s my phone. If I’m not there in five minutes, dial 911.”

“Keep it. I already have my phone. What are you going to do?”

“Don’t worry, Charlie. Just go.” Run.

I push her out the back door, into utter blackness. The last thing I see is the fleeting deer flash of her pink-and-white polka-dot pajama bottoms between the pine trees that border our properties.

I creep toward the front yard, using my photinia bushes as a shield. The thumping hasn’t stopped, just moved inside me, to my chest. The gun is cocked in my hand. I want to be done with him. Tonight. Forever. I peer through a branch.

What the hell? Four gray squares are stuck in the middle of my yard like a row of gravestones. A small shadow hovers beside one of them, bathed in faint light. A time-traveling Victorian girl searching for her ring? I blink hard to make her go away. Instead, the shadow rises. The ghost child transforms into a man with a flashlight and a shiny gray nylon sweatshirt.

“Hey!” My reckless scream rips the air.

I make out a Nike swoosh, black hair, a wiry beard, before the man flips off his flashlight and runs.

If he’s running, dammit, so am I. Across the yard, down the street. Feet pounding. He’s too fast to be my monster. Young legs. Marathon legs. I am still fast, but not this fast. The slippers flop on my heels.

All of a sudden, he slows. Maybe he’s stepped in one of our historic potholes. He’s taking aim. I raise the.22 in warning just as he presses a car remote, triggering the taillights of a parked sedan. In seconds, a car door slams and he’s screeching off. I can’t make out the license plate.

I turn back. It’s not a cemetery in my yard. I’m staring at crude plywood signs. Hate shimmers off them.

BLACK-EYED BITCH

THOU SHALT NOT KILL

REPENT!!

TERRELL’S BLOOD, YOU’RE HANDS

Just one of the crazies.

I’m not relieved.

I have the sudden, certain feeling I’m being watched.

Charlie.

The house next door, still dark.

My feet tear up the ground to Effie’s. I bang hard enough on the front door that something inside clatters to the floor. There’s no answer.

I kick off my slippers on the porch and race to the back. I’m thinking of my monster, standing under my windowsill. Of my daughter, in her polka-dot pajamas.

I hurl my fist at Effie’s back door. More strangling silence. I survey the back yard, open my mouth again to scream Charlie’s name but nothing comes out.

My frantic gaze lands on Effie’s rickety garden shed in the back. In seconds, I am yanking open the door, ripping it half off its rusty hinges. Charlie is crouched in the corner by two bags of compost. The phone is pressed to her cheek, half-illuminating her face.

“Mom!” She is in my arms in seconds. A car has screeched to the curb. And another. Siren lights are filtering through the bushes.

A large shape is walking toward us, blinding us with his flashlight.

“I’m a police officer. Did one of you make a 911 call?”

“Yes, I’m Charlie. This is my mom. We’re OK.”

I nod, unable to speak. Gruff conversation floats from the front yard.

The policeman’s light continues to travel over us. When he’s apparently satisfied we aren’t hurt or dangerous, he turns it on the shed.

The light trickles like water into the corners, up and down the walls.

He sees nothing out of the ordinary because he thinks what he’s seeing is perfectly ordinary.

I’m seeing, but not understanding. I just know it’s not ordinary.

Row after row of garden diggers.

They hang neatly in every square inch of space.

Tessie, 1995

“Do you believe in the devil, Tessie?”

Great. Like I don’t get enough of this from Aunt Hilda.

“I mean it in a very metaphorical sense. I want to talk about the Black-Eyed Susan killer today. I think it would help when you’re testifying to understand him a little better. That he’s flesh and blood. Not mythic. Not Bluebeard. Not a troll under the bridge.”

My heart beats a little faster. My hand reflexively moves over the lump above my left breast, the metal chunk under my skin that keeps my heart beating at a minimum of sixty beats a minute. I run a nervous finger on the straight three-inch scar. Lydia is already looking for a bikini with a strap that will cover it up.

“We don’t know anything about the creep,” I say stiffly. “We never will. He isn’t talking. His family says he’s normal.” I don’t ever say his name out loud. Terrell Darcy Goodwin.

“I treated a serial killer once,” he says. “He was the smartest, most calculating person in the room. Could charm a million dollars out of an old lady, and did. He blended in, and stood out. He liked to get to know his victims and use that knowledge to scare them out of their minds.”

“The pig-and-daisy card at the hospital.” Out of nowhere.

“Do you think he sent that to you?” he asks.

“Yes. I think it made me go blind.”

“That’s good, Tessie. Excellent progress. Whether he sent it or not, it was a trigger for you. You control your mind, Tessie. Never forget it.”

I’m nodding. I’m flushing a little, embarrassed by his compliment.

“My patient understood right and wrong, he just didn’t care,” he continues. “He studied carefully how to behave. He was able to simulate empathy because he regularly sat in hospital waiting rooms and observed it. He spent a year selling suits at Brooks Brothers to figure out how to dress and speak. He used the newspaper to manufacture biographies about himself as he moved around. But serial killers make mistakes. This guy did. He carried the remains of his victims in the trunk of his car because he couldn’t help himself. The point is, they don’t think they are human, but they are.”

“I still don’t get… the why.”

“No one really knows. Maybe we will never know. For a while, doctors used to think it had something to do with phrenology. How many bumps you had on your skull. My patient turned out to be a cliché. He blamed his mother.”

“Because…”

“We’re getting a little off track here.”

“Were you trying to cure this guy?” I pester him. Or were you trying to figure out if he is the one who took your daughter?

“Yes, against all odds, against all the rules of psychiatry, I was trying to see if that was possible. But it didn’t turn out well. He is a psychopath, Tessie. He is perfectly happy the way he is.”

Tessa, present day

Jo has asked me to meet her at Trinity Park, near one of the running trails, about a half-mile away from the duck pond. It seems a little strange. Too close to the bridge. Too much of a coincidence. Did someone besides a home-schooled juvenile delinquent see me digging? Is Bill reporting everything I say to Jo?

The Susans are quiet this morning. It happens that way sometimes, when my paranoia roils into such hurricane force that they can’t catch their breath.

My body hasn’t stopped jangling since Saturday night when I clutched my gun and pointed it toward the ghostly shape on the front lawn. On Sunday, I tried to rebound and put my daughter’s life back in a normal place. I called Bill and told him to please not show up again on my doorstep with alcoholic beverages. That it was a mistake, that we had let overwrought emotion sweep us into the bed, that Swedish Scientist Girl and Assistant DA Girl would be more apt partners for him.

There was sturdy silence before he said: “We didn’t touch the wine. And you’re pretty apt.”

Later, Charlie and I had swept the aisles at Walmart in search of blue hair gel, peppercorns, licorice, and lima beans for her 3-D re-creation of an animal cell. She chattered about turning Fruit Roll-Ups into a Golgi body. I listened to soothing snatches of nearby conversation that floated in the fluorescent light like a country western song. My brother just lost his house in frozen foods and God will find a way by the potato chips and Daddy’s going to kill him in front of the boxed wine. Soothing, because it seems like very few people at Walmart are pretending that things are OK, or that the world is going to end just because they aren’t OK. I wheeled my cart through this stew of misfortune and daily kicks-in-the-ass and plain old tenacity. No one at Walmart cared a whit who I was. I arrived home with ten potatoes for $1.99 and churned out my mother’s recipe for corn chowder. All of this effort at ordinary seemed to work: Charlie slipped under her fluffy comforter at the end of the night, full of starch and bacon bits and her belief that our bad guy was just a coward of a sign-maker with bad grammar.

Now it’s Monday morning, and I want to say no to meeting up with Jo, but I can’t. As soon as Charlie leaves for school, I strap on ASICS and yank my hair into a ponytail, every movement angry. I woke up with a deep, persistent need to run, to sweat out every bit of poison. Running is the one thing that always works. I can still manage four miles before my ankle begins to ache, and then two more miles to spite him. But, first, Jo.

The south side of the park is almost deserted when I swing the Jeep beside a shiny silver BMW. It’s the only other car in this lot, which serves a small picnic area. I glance inside the BMW as I slam my door shut. A Taco Bell bag and an empty Dr Pepper can are tossed on the floor. A handful of change is mingled in the console with a movie ticket stub. Innocent enough. As I circle behind the car, heading for the path, I glance down at the BMW’s license plate: DNA 4N6.

OK, so definitely Jo’s car. I say it out loud, “DNA 4N6.”

4N6? I try again. DNA Foreign Sex. Um, probably not, but it’s taking my mind off the gun riding at my hip and what things a bone doc might store in the trunk of her car.

On the horizon, a straight black line. The predicted cold front and 30-degree temperature drop by nightfall. A sixtyish woman in pink fast-walks past me, pumping her arms, hurrying away from it. I stop at a homeless man curled into a fetal position, asleep on a concrete picnic table near a shopping cart crammed with useful trash. I stick a $10 bill deep into the empty coffee cup he’s clutching. He doesn’t move.

I do that whenever I can. For Roosevelt. I made Lydia go visit Roosevelt on his street corner after they found me, because I knew he’d be worried. I never got to say goodbye myself. He was found dead leaning against a tree, like he fell asleep there, a week before the trial.

DNA 4N6. Four-en-six. Forensics! I’m an idiot.

I pick up the pace once I see Jo, who is right where she said she’d be-under a landmark live oak rumored to have once been a hanging tree. She’s cross-legged on a bench, sipping out of a green neoprene water bottle with a red biohazard sticker. Her black North Face windbreaker bears a CSI Texas logo. I’m figuring the bottle and the jacket are high-end graft from a forensic science conference.

“Thanks for meeting me here.” She unfolds her lean legs and pats the bench for me to sit beside her. “I worked in the lab all weekend and needed some air. I heard about what happened at your house. Have the police caught him?”

“No. I didn’t get a good look. There’s an anti-death-penalty newsletter that mentions me on a regular basis, so the cops are checking that email list. The editor posted my street address in her last blog that ranted about Terrell’s case. I’m not hopeful, though. I’ve been through this before.”

“It’s odd and scary… that these people would target you.” She doesn’t say it, but I know what she’s thinking. The victim.

I shrug, used to it. “The trial was a trigger for a lot of anger. And the jury foreman was very public in saying the case turned on my testimony.” Even though I was just painting in the scenery.

She nods sympathetically. I don’t really want to talk about what happened Saturday night. It’s bad enough that it’s rolling on an endless loop in my head: Charlie crouching in the shed under a compulsive array of garden diggers. The police, at my insistence, breaking down Effie’s back door. She had drifted off in her La-Z-Boy wearing noise-canceling headphones that she’d ordered off eBay. “You know, to maybe quiet the voices,” she had told me conspiratorially while a policeman searched her house. For a brief second, I thought she was also hinting at the ones in my own head, but her eyes had been darting around like a feral cat. It seems most likely that Miss Effie’s digger snatcher lives under her own roof. So I didn’t tell the cops, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to bring it up to Effie.

“I thought maybe you could use some good news,” Jo says. “The red hair on the jacket found near the field? The mitochondrial DNA analysis proves there is a 99.75 percent chance it didn’t come off your head. And there is no evidence of Terrell’s DNA on the jacket itself.”

“Is it enough to get Terrell a new trial?” I wonder if she’s told Bill.

“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s a relatively new law in Texas that allows prisoners to successfully appeal a case when scientific technology can shed light on old evidence. But I talked to Bill this morning. He’s been through this wringer before with Death Row clients and he’s pretty adamant that a single red hair and a sloppy expert who used junk science aren’t going to be enough to convince an appeals court to overturn anything. He wants to throw more than that at the judge. Unfortunately, Terrell only has his mom and sister as alibis for the time Hannah Stein disappeared. And the cops have been unable to draw a line between Merry Sullivan and Hannah. Of course, the cops aren’t exactly on Terrell’s side-they are mostly focused on getting the girls identified for the families and getting the media off their backs every time the anniversary rolls around. Working at the behest of the district attorney who wants a little TV time. Did you happen to catch his press conference on Hannah?” I can tell she’s not expecting an answer. “Ferreting out the real killer… well, that would just be a bonus for us.”

The bitterness from her surprises me. “Sorry.” She grimaces. “I’m usually the one assuming everyone’s doing the best they can. I wish Bill and Angie had pulled me in much sooner.” Her face turns more pensive. “I’m trying something else in an effort to identify the other two girls. I just don’t know if there’s time to do it.”

Despite my resolve to pull back from the case, I feel that relentless tug in my gut. I’m the one with the answers, a Susan had insisted that day in the lab. Was it the Susan who belonged to the chattering skull? Or the new girl, lost and found in the pile of bones?

“A forensic geologist I know in Galveston is examining the bone evidence,” Jo continues. “He might-a big might-be able to narrow down the area or areas where they lived. Then we could check out the cases of missing girls in those places.”

“I’ve seen websites where you can send in a sample of your DNA and they will decipher your ancestry. Is this anything like that?”

“It is nothing, nothing like that. My geologist will use isotope analysis to examine the elements in her bone and try to match it to a region. It’s a tool kind of in its infancy stages when it comes to forensic identification. It was first used on a boy whose torso was found floating in the Thames over a decade ago. Scientists were able to trace his origin to Nigeria.”

“And it helped them identify the boy? Catch his killer?”

“No. Not yet. It’s a process. When you’re trying out new technology, each case is a single step on a million-mile road.” Her voice is softening. “We are so much a part of the earth, Tessa. Of the ancient past. We store strontium isotopes in our bones, in the same ratio as in the rocks and soil and water and plants and animals where we live. Animals eat the plants and drink the water. Humans eat the animals and plants. The strontium is passed along, all stored in our bones in the same ratio unique to the region.” The simplicity of her explanations always astounds me, and I think what a good professor she must be. “The problem is, it’s a big world. And there is a relatively small database at this point when it comes to identifying geological regions. It’s another long shot.”

Jo has fallen silent. It still isn’t clear exactly why she’s asked me to the park.

“Tell me again how you deal with all of the dead ends,” I finally say. “There’s just so much futility. Don’t you ever think you can’t take it anymore?”

“I could ask you the same.”

“But you choose this.”

“I’d say it chose me. I’ve known since I was fourteen this is what I was supposed to do. That’s why, when a kid tells me he’s going to be a third baseman for the Yankees, I don’t doubt him. Did you ever hear about the Girl Scout Murders in Oklahoma?”

“No,” I say, although it stirs a vague memory. Lydia would know.

“Every scientist has a cold case that pulls at them for years. This Girl Scout case is mine. I was in high school when three Girl Scouts were pulled out of their tent in the middle of the night on a campout near Tulsa. They were raped and murdered and left out for show. A local man-who’d been a popular high school football player-was accused, tried, and declared not guilty. DNA evidence was collected at the time, but there was zero technology to examine it. And before you ask, the evidence is now too degraded to be useful. I’ve used my connections to see every single crime scene photo and read every single word on the police reports and forensic testing. The point is, if I could beam myself back to 1977, I could give those parents some answers. And it’s all because scientists in labs keep trying to do futile things. My work is as much in the future as the present.”

“I understand,” I say. “It’s possible there won’t be answers in my case. For years. Why exactly did you ask me to the park? Just to update me?” It comes out rudely, which I didn’t intend. I’m just so tired.

“No. I wanted to say… to make sure that you know that you can always come to me. I don’t want you to ever feel alone.”

She’s really saying, Don’t dig without me. Not at this park. Not anywhere.

“Tessa, have you ever thought that maybe I need you, too? That I’m not as tough as you think I am?”

The first whisper of the cold front is stirring the trees.

“Lori, Doris, Michele,” she says softly. “The names of the dead Girl Scouts. My Susans.”

Tessie, 1995

“I’m thinking of not testifying.”

It sounded way more defiant when I practiced in front of the mirror this morning with the toothbrush in my hand and aqua bubbles drizzling out of the corner of my mouth.

I’m NOT testifying, Mr. Vega.

There. That’s better.

I open my mouth again to say it more emphatically but the district attorney is on his tiger prowl around the office, not the slightest bit interested in what I think. The doc is bent over his desk with a pile of folders, certainly listening to every word. He’s the master of staying still.

“Did you hear me? I don’t think I have anything of value to add. I don’t have anything to add.” I’m stammering.

Benita offers a sympathetic smile that pretty much says I’m doomed. Both she and Mr. Vega are here to review my testimony. This is the first time they want to rehearse the gory details. They’ve waited this long because Mr. Vega wants me to sound as spontaneous as possible. The trial is less than two weeks away, so that’s pretty spontaneous.

“Tessie, I know this is hard,” Mr. Vega says. “What we need to do is put the jury in that grave with you. Even if you don’t remember details about the killer, you add context. You make it real. For instance, what did it smell like when you were lying there?”

My gag reflex is so strong that even he, the calloused prosecutor, reacts. I’m sure he did this on purpose, calibrating how this melodrama would play to the jury. I still think he’s the good guy. I’ve just changed my mind. I don’t want to testify for him. Cannot, will not, sit across from my monster.

“OK, we’ll come back to that. Close your eyes. You’re in the grave. Turn your head to the left. What do you see?”

I reluctantly turn my head, and there she is. “Merry.”

“Is she dead?”

I open my eyes and cast them to the doctor for help, but he’s busily tapping away on his computer at his desk. Do I lie? Or tell the prosecutor that dead Merry talked to me? Surely, that would hurt the case.

If I testify. Which I won’t.

“I don’t know whether she’s dead.” The truth. “Her lips are bluish gray… but some girls wear blue lipstick. It’s Goth.” I don’t know why I said that. Nothing about clarinet-playing, churchgoing Merry was Goth, except when she was lying next to me in a grave like a prop for a horror movie.

“What else?”

“Her eyes are open.” Things were eating her, except when they weren’t.

“What do you smell?”

I swallow hard. “Something spoiled.”

“Is it hard to breathe?”

“It’s like… breathing in a port-a-potty.”

“Are you cold? Hot? As best you can, narrative answers.”

“Sweating. My ankle hurts. I wonder if he chopped off my foot. I want to look but every time I lift my head up, things kind of explode in my head, you know? I’m scared I will faint.”

“Do you call out?”

“I can’t. There’s dirt in my throat.”

“Keep your eyes closed. Turn your head to the right. What do you see?”

It hurts to turn my head. But it’s easier to breathe. “I see… bones. My Pink Lemonade Lip Smacker. The lid is off. I don’t know where it is. A Snickers bar. A quarter. From 1978. Three pennies.”

The photograph in my head suddenly animates. Ants crawl in a delirious, sugar-fired frenzy on my lip gloss. A hand stretches out for the Snickers bar. I know it’s my hand because it’s sprinkled with pink freckles and the nails are short, trimmed, painted neatly blue with Hard Candy Sky polish. The color almost matches Merry’s lips. I taste blood and dirt, peanut butter and bile, when I rip open the wrapper with my teeth. The bones of the other Susans chatter encouragement. Keep up your strength. Stay strong.

“I remember eating the Snickers bar,” I say. “I didn’t want to.” But the Susans insisted.

“I don’t remember you mentioning some of this before. Are you recalling other details? Anything about him? His face? Hair color? Anything?” I can’t tell by Mr. Vega’s voice if he thinks this would be good or bad.

Why is this stuff coming back now? No one tells me to, but I shut my eyes again. Turn my face up to the night sky, except there are no stars. The sun is shining. I’m out of the grave. I’m somewhere else, in a light-filled space with Merry and the Susans. Merry sleeps, while the others are whispering, chattering excitedly, making a plan. One of them is bending over me. A ring dangles off her skeleton finger, but the stone is missing. She takes the gold prongs and carves a half-moon on my cheek, and it doesn’t hurt at all. There is no blood.

Get him, she says. Never forget us.

I know this isn’t real, although the lab found my blood type, not Merry’s, on the prongs of the ring locked on a Susan’s finger bone. They figure, with utmost logic, that I fell on it when I was dumped into the hole.

I have to stop this before I tumble into that hole again and can’t ever climb out.

“I’m not testifying. Not for you. Or them.”

Mr. Vega tilts his head, ready to fire his next question.

“You heard Tessie.” The doctor has raised his head from the desk. “This session is over.”

Tessa, present day

I watched until Jo vanished on the path and I was sure she was not coming back. I jogged past the sleeping homeless man curled with his back to the refrigerating wind. Fumbled my way into the Jeep. Locked it. Folded myself forward against the steering wheel and stunned myself by bursting into tears. Here’s what kindness and sympathy and an offer of partnership do to me.

I have driven to this office on autopilot, the last place I would have pictured myself this morning. The room is small, white-walled, and slightly chilly. A nervous woman in her thirties sits across from me, eager to start a conversation as soon as I stop pretending to read this magazine and finally make eye contact.

“It’s hard, isn’t it? When your kid is hurting? My kid is in there right now.” The woman needs something from me. I reluctantly lift my gaze and watch her take it all in. My eyes, red and swollen. The scar. I nod with agreement and empathy, hope that will be it, and return to the headline: Is it wrong to pay kids to eat their veggies?

“Dr. Giles is terrific… if you’re here for a first consult for your kid.” She’s not going to give up. “Lily’s been going to her for six months. I highly recommend her.”

I carefully close the magazine and tuck it back into the neat arc of reading material on the coffee table. “I’m the kid,” I say.

The woman’s face twists in confusion.

The girl who must be Lily pops out of the closed door, wearing a dizzying array of crayon-esque colors. The right side of her head is attached to a giant sparkly bow. Even with all the effort at distraction, I am drawn to the plain brown innocent eyes.

And the smile. I know that smile because I’ve worn it, the one that pulls at thirteen muscles and strikes a match for all the other smiles in the room and makes you appear perfectly normal and happy. Except I know Lily’s terrified.

Dr. Giles isn’t far behind Lily and, to her credit, does not act the slightest bit surprised to see me.

“Give me just a second, Tessa, OK? I’ll have about twenty minutes before my next appointment.”

“Yes. Certainly.” I feel the flush of heat in my face. This isn’t like me, to burst in on people, busy people, without warning. I remind myself that I have not yet paid her a cent.

Dr. Giles reaches out a hand to Lily’s mother. “Mrs. Tanger, we had an especially good morning. And, Lily, you’re going to draw me a picture for next time?” The little girl nods solemnly, and the doctor’s eyes meet her mother’s in a silent exchange. It’s like watching my father’s face all over again. Hope, worry, hope, worry, hope, worry.

Dr. Giles ushers me into the warm jungle of her office. I drop into one of her cushy chairs. I haven’t rehearsed what I’m going to say. I think that seeing Lily has sucked the selfish, hot anger out of me, but I’m wrong. My hands are suddenly shaking.

“I want closure.” Each word, staccato. A demand, as if Dr. Giles is somehow to blame.

“Closure doesn’t exist,” she responds smoothly. “Just… awareness. That you can’t ever go back. That you know a truth about life’s randomness that most other people don’t.”

She leans forward in her chair. “Maybe you still need to forgive him. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. Forgiveness is not for him. It is for you.” She might as well be raking her nails on the chalkboard behind her. It’s bugging me, the faint ghost of a stick figure still lingering there, half-erased. The happy sun. The flower with a center eye.

“I can’t ever imagine forgiving him.” My eyes are still glued to the flower on the chalkboard. I want to take the eraser and scrub away until everything is black. Make it clean.

“Then let’s say that there is a way for you to get closure. How do you see that happening? What if he… what do you call him?”

“My monster.” My voice is so low, ashamed, that I wonder if she can hear me. What grown-up, not-crazy woman still talks about monsters?

“OK. What if your monster opened the door right now and walked right in? Sat down. Confessed everything. You could see his face. Know his name, where he grew up, if his mother loved him, if his dad beat him, whether he was popular in high school, whether he loved his dog or killed his dog. Imagine he sat in that chair right over there, three feet away, and answered every single one of your questions. Would it really make any difference? Is there any answer that could satisfy you? Make you feel better?”

I stare at the chair.

The gun feels like a steel cookie cutter against my skin. I itch to fire it dead center into the fabric. Watch the white stuffing explode.

I don’t want to have a conversation with my monster. I just want him dead.

Tessie, 1995

“I’m nervous.” Benita’s voice is vibrating.

This is an emergency session. They’ve sent Benita in alone to do the dirty work. It’s been less than twenty-four hours since I announced that I would not be testifying.

She’s wearing no eye makeup, which is a sure sign something is very wrong. She’s just as pretty, but now she looks like the hot girl in middle school instead of the hot girl in high school. All I know is, I don’t want to be the thing that makes Benita scared. She’s been nothing but sweet and kind to me. Like, even her name means blessed.

Benita halts abruptly by the window. “I’m supposed to convince you to testify. Mr. Vega and your doctor think we have some sort of young female bond. To be honest, I’m not sure what you should do. I’m thinking about going into my uncle’s cabinet-making business.”

Wow. What a backfire.

“They want me to ask you what your worst fear is.” She plops in the doctor’s chair and meets my eyes for the first time. “They told me to sit here. Then I’m supposed to convince you that you will never live to regret testifying no matter how hard it is. So if you can tell me what you are most afraid of by going to court, that would be great. So they at least think I tried.”

Tears are brimming in her soft eyes. I’m thinking it’s not the first time she’s cried this morning. I want to get up and hug her but that might break another ethical code and she’s already smashed a few in this room.

“I hear that this defense attorney rips into people until there is nothing left but scraps.” I speak slowly. “That’s a quote my friend Lydia read about Richard Lincoln in the paper. And she overheard her dad tell her mom that everybody calls him Dick the Dick. He might get the jury to think I deserved this. Or that I’m making stuff up.”

“The defense attorney is an asshole,” Benita agrees. She is holding a finger horizontally under each eye, so the tears don’t spill.

Without looking at the box, I grab a Kleenex and hand it over. The box is always waiting for me on the little table by my elbow, never an inch out of place. “And I don’t want to be in the room with… the guy who did this,” I continue. “With him staring at me the whole time. I can’t imagine anything worse. I don’t want him to feel any power over me ever again.”

She dabs at her eyes. “Neither would I. It seems terrifying.”

“My dad will be there. I don’t want to lay out all the details, you know? Thinking about it, talking about it, makes me want to throw up. Like, I can see myself throwing up in the witness chair.”

She takes a deep breath. “I worked on this terrible case during an internship last year. A twelve-year-old girl had been molested by a sixty-five-year-old aunt who couldn’t get out of a wheelchair. It was a mess. Her own family was divided about believing the girl.”

She reluctantly shifts her eyes back to me. “See, you are already wondering yourself. Mr. Vega was the prosecutor. He’s brilliant. He had her talk about the details of maneuvering around the wheelchair during… the acts. No one doubted her when she got out of that witness chair.”

“So the jury convicted her aunt?”

“Yes. Texas is vicious with child molesters. She’ll die in prison.”

“Was the girl glad she testified?”

“I don’t know. She was pretty ripped up afterward.” Benita offers me a weak smile. “I’m thinking selling cabinets would be a lot simpler, you know? They open. They close.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But you’re good at this.”

Tessa, present day

“Why does Obama need to know my damn waistline?”

Effie, in Texas Rangers pajama pants and a pale pink silk blouse with ruffles, is trotting across the lawn, shouting, waving a piece of paper. Charlie and I have just arrived home after an early after-school dinner at the Ol’ South Pancake House. Some days, I wonder how long Effie stares out her window before we show up in our driveway, and if that time has any meaning for her. I’m really hoping it doesn’t.

I’m sure it’s been a long day of trying to remember for both of us. I’m not sure I’m up for Effie. My head hurts despite a confectioners’-sugar fix. She meets us on the porch, breathless, while her finger punches away at the typewritten letter. “It says right here that he wants me to tell him my weight, waistline, and whether I like to drink and smoke. It’s not like we’re courting. Although I do like a whiskey on the rocks and a smoke with a handsome black man every good now and then.” A skim of green eye shadow, two rosy circles of blush, and the large fake pearl clips in her ears are dead giveaways that Effie has made it out of the house today. The pearl clips pop out of the drawer for church every Sunday, but the glittering eyelids mean she’s been jousting with the ladies of the historical society. Effie regularly declares them “way too fix-y.”

I prop the door open for Effie. Charlie follows while carefully balancing a clear plastic box loaded with a sea of blue hair gel and precisely arranged food products.

Effie sniffs the air deliberately.

“It’s my 3-D animal cell project,” Charlie tells her. “Starting to rot.”

“Well, set it on the counter here and let’s take a look.” Animal cell and 3-D take the stink out of it for Effie, who lifts the edge of the Saran Wrap cover with enthusiasm. Charlie snatches the offending letter out of Effie’s other hand.

“Miss Effie, this letter is from your insurance company.” Charlie begins to skim. “They’re going to give you $100 off your deductible and a $25 Amazon card if you fill out this form and they approve your numbers. They also want your cholesterol.”

“Damn spies, all of them.” She pokes a finger into the blue cesspool. “Put 1984 on your reading list, Charlie dear. The man was a soothsayer. My waist used to be nineteen inches. Maybe I’ll write that in their little chart. And then I’ll call the cops and sue for sexual harassment when they send somebody around with a tape measure.” Her finger continues to poke away in the box. “Hair gel for cytoplasm. Clever girl. What grade did you make on this project?”

“A minus. Which is like, really good for this teacher. The average in her class for this project over her twenty-six-year career is a C plus.”

“Well, I’d say that’s the sign of a bad teacher. What was the minus for?”

“The nucleus. I used a clear plastic Christmas ornament from Hobby Lobby.”

“And the nuclear membrane isn’t rigid. Hmm. Gotta hand that one to her, I suppose.”

“Should I dump this in the compost, Mom? The jar said the hair gel is all-natural.”

“It seems like more of a biological weapon at this point. I will let you and our neighborhood scientist make the call. I’m going to change into some sweats.” And swig down a couple of aspirin.

I navigate the hall in the dark and flip on my bedroom light. There is a man, sleeping on my bed. Face turned away. And yet his reaction time is still better than mine. I’m looking down, fumbling for the gun in my waistband, and he’s already leapt the six feet across the bed, shoved a hand over my mouth, and stifled my scream.

I struggle against him. His other arm is pressing my back against a brutal chest. Charlie is in the house.

“Shh. OK?”

I stop squirming. Nod. He releases his grip and I flip away, stumbling. I find myself staring furiously at Charlie’s father.

“Jesus, Lucas,” I hiss. “You scared me. Where in the hell did you come from? Why can’t you knock on the door like a normal person?”

He shuts the door. “I’m sorry. I meant to text as soon as I got here. It was a twenty-nine-hour journey that involved turbulence and an Army pilot who enjoyed it a little too much. The cab dropped me off a couple of hours ago. Your bed was very comfy. I went right to sleep. Might have left some sand in your sheets.” His face is closer to mine than necessary. “You smell like strawberry crepes.” For a second, I remember what it was like to be wrapped in a burrito of solid Army muscle. And then I feel another little ping for Bill. He’d texted twice today. How’s your day? About two hours later: Come on, butterfly girl, talk to me.

“Why, again, are you here?” Trying to hold my ground in every way.

“I had a disturbing Skype session with Charlie. After your night with a domestic terrorist.”

“Oh.” I sit on the end of the bed. She hadn’t mentioned telling her dad, but why wouldn’t she?

Lucas plops beside me and tosses his arm around my shoulders. “I figured I might be needed, but you’d be afraid to ask. Also, I’m trying to be respectful of your parental boundaries. If you don’t think I should be here, I’ll go. Charlie doesn’t have to know. I can slip out the way I came in.”

“Which I assume is through the front door.”

“Well, yeah. You’re paranoid about everything but your security code. You should change it more than once every five years.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, I don’t want you to sneak out. Charlie should know you’re here.” That you’ll come for her.

I knew Lucas. It didn’t matter what had just rolled sweetly off his tongue-he wasn’t about to go quietly after traversing an ocean for his daughter.

He has dropped his hand to my waist. Distracting. He lifts up the bottom edge of my shirt, lets his finger drift, and tugs out the.22. “You could use a little practice on your quick draw. You shouldn’t carry a gun if you can’t get it out of your pants.”

I try to summon up a retort and fail.

“How about a little refresher tomorrow?” he asks.

My head is no longer pounding. If I still believed in them, I’d say this man was a godsend.

Lucas had never once judged my sanity, or told me no.

He slips the gun into my hand. “Put it up.”

“I need a favor tomorrow morning,” I say.

“Which involves?”

“Digging.”

My bedroom is dark, except for the glow of the iPad. I’m propped against a stack of pillows. A full glass of wine is within reaching distance on the nightstand. Lucas is sprawled snoring on the couch, the contents of his duffle spilled out on the living room floor. Charlie is texting under her covers. The evening’s competitive father-daughter game of Assassin’s Creed was a little too instructional for my comfort. I was relieved when Lucas snapped off the video game about half an hour ago and tucked his teen-ager into bed for the first time in months. She pretended to be too old for tucking in, but we all knew better.

The dark is friendly, for once. The man on our sofa has sifted all of the bad things from the night and stuffed them under his pillow.

Still, I’m not at rest. I’m determined to take a little trip into the past.

I hold the picture in my hand closer to the light, which makes her eyes dance. A trail of Spanish lace spills down her hair and across her shoulders. A tiny locket nestles in her throat. A modern girl transformed into a beautiful antique bride.

I had clipped Benita’s wedding picture out of the newspaper a very long time ago, about two summers after the trial. It contains only the most basic information. In the photo, Benita is beaming up at a very white man with a very white name. The bride’s parents are listed as Mr. and Mrs. Martin Alvarez and the groom’s as Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Smith Sr.

OK, Benita aka Ms. Joe Smith. I type Benita Smith into the iPad search bar and click on Images. The first twenty-five faces do not belong to my Benita Smith. The twenty-sixth picture is a red Mercedes, and the next is a shopping mall Christmas tree followed by a pearl bracelet and a baby’s foot. Farther down, a kitchen pantry with bright red rooster door handles. In case she really did go into her uncle’s cabinet business, I click to that page. No luck. I skip through endless, useless Benita Smith story links before I head to Facebook to search for Benita Alvarez Smith. Nothing. I delete her maiden name, and the Facebook screen rolls up hundreds of Benita Smiths.

Part of me doesn’t want to work too hard at this. Would she really know something that could help Terrell? Did she overhear something? Suspect something?

I had let Benita drift out of my life seventeen years ago. There has to be a good reason for that, right? We had met for coffee every Tuesday afternoon for a few months after I testified. The last time, she dropped all official pretenses. She entered the café in tight black jeans and a Remember Selena T-shirt, with her six-year-old sister in tow. Texas Monthly had made Selena its tragic cover girl that month instead of me, so I was still feeling the naive bliss of being old news.

Not long after Terrell was convicted, Selena’s killer had been sentenced and locked up in Gatesville. She was confined twenty-three hours a day to a tiny cell because of death threats. The Tejano music fans behind bars wanted Yolanda Saldivar to die for her sins. While Benita and I had whispered about that, her sister carefully strung plastic beads onto a shoelace. She had tied the bracelet to my wrist like a purple-and-yellow worm.

I doubt that Benita Alvarez looms boldly in the official records of the Black-Eyed Susans case. If her name is mentioned at all, Bill and Angie would have glanced right over it. She was never interviewed by the media. She didn’t testify and only attended the trial on the two days that I took the stand. She was a minor player to everyone but me, drowned out by the thunder of Al Vega-or Alfonso as he calls himself now. Mr. Vega, 100 percent Italian, picked up the fonso to court the Hispanic vote when he ran his first successful race for Texas Attorney General.

When a Terrell Darcy Goodwin question is sprung on him, Mr. Vega declares in no uncertain terms that he would not try the case any differently today. He sent a birthday card to me when I turned eighteen, and a sympathy card when my father died. On both, he scrawled his name and wrote underneath: I will always be there for you. The cynic in me wonders if those words are just part of his regular signature to victims he wrestled into the witness chair. But Tessie? Tessie believes she could pick up the phone and he’d be at her front door in seconds.

I clear the search bar. Hesitate, just for a second. Type. Most of my teen-age angst about my doctor is gone. I’m staring at links to an array of bombastic papers he’s written for online blogs and psychiatric journals. There’s a new one since I last searched: “The Colbert Love Affair: Why We See Ourselves in an Imaginary French Conservative Narcissist.”

I clear the search bar and type another name, even more reluctantly. Click on the link at the top for the very first time.

I’m staring at the weekly blog of Richard Lincoln aka Dick the Dick, instantly regretting that I just provided him with a hit, even the tiniest bit of incentive to carry on. Today’s post: “Gasping for air.” It’s hard to look away now that I’ve come this far. Angie always wanted me to talk to him. Thought it might bump something loose. He’s a changed man.

I can barely stomach the bio, so I skim. Richard Lincoln, crusader. Nationally renowned death penalty lawyer. Author of The New York Times best-selling book, My Black Eye.

My Black Eye. His confessional, a year after the trial. Whenever I’m in a bookstore, I turn the cover around, even though I’ve heard that he donates half the profits to the children of prisoners. Because why doesn’t he donate all of them?

There’s a YouTube video link beside his blog, which my fingers click without my brain’s permission. At once, his voice is jarring the silent house, rising and falling like a preacher’s, still a saw against my skin. I hurry my finger to turn him down. He’s an upright cockroach roving an anonymous stage. Lincoln-esque, is how his fans describe him. I failed Terrell, he’s saying. I destroyed that girl. The Black-Eyed Susan case was the turning point of my life.

I can’t listen to any more.

He didn’t just destroy me. He destroyed my grandparents. The police and Dick the Dick worked in odd concert in that regard. The police ransacked their castle and drove off with my grandfather’s beloved truck as evidence. Nobody in Texas took a man’s truck unless he was guilty as hell, so even his best and most stalwart farmer friends wondered. It didn’t matter that the police said “whoops” months before the trial. Dick the Dick still hammered away in court. A tabloid screamed, Could Grampa be the killer? No, I can’t offer Dick forgiveness despite the fact that, in the last thirteen years, Richard Lincoln has used DNA evidence to free three innocent men from Texas’s Death Row. I pull the cover over the iPad. Nudge a couple of extra pillows to the floor. Slip deeper into sheets rough with sand from a war zone. Squeeze my eyes shut. Imagine the doctor lounging in pajamas covered with ducks in front of a Colbert rerun. Hope that Benita’s life is strung like a party with purple and yellow beads.

I’m floating at the edge of consciousness when Lydia finds a tiny wormhole.

It’s not like I haven’t dragged the Internet for her a hundred times. Nothing. Not about her or Mr. and Mrs. Bell. It’s like they are tiptoeing around in invisible ink while everyone else is galloping in screaming neon. The Bells were odd. They had little family, and made very few deep connections in town. Both sets of Lydia’s grandparents were dead. I retain vague memories of a distant cousin of Mrs. Bell’s who sent a poinsettia at Christmas. But how could a family simply vanish? How could nobody really care?

Over the years, I’ve imagined all sorts of outrageous plotlines about their fate. Maybe my monster killed them because Lydia knew something. She was always clipping out articles about the Black-Eyed Susan case and pasting them in a scrapbook she didn’t think I knew about. Scribbling notes in the margins in her cramped, intelligent hand. My monster didn’t turn the storm cellar into a family mausoleum, but he could have scattered their bones across the West Texas desert.

Or their bodies could be lying miles and miles under the sea with ocean garbage. The whole family could have bounced off on a spontaneous vacation and sunk to the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle in a wayward craft piloted by Mr. Bell. He was always forgetting to buy a boating permit. They could have slipped, undocumented, under the waves.

My most logical theory was witness protection. Someone had to plant the For Sale sign. Mr. Bell dealt in recycled auto parts with Mexican mafia types in the salvage yards. He rushed off in the middle of the night all the time to meet them. Lydia had shown me his drawer full of hundred-dollar bills.

I do know this. If another family on the block had quietly slipped out of town right after the trial, and Lydia was the one speculating, she’d suggest that the father was the Black-Eyed Susan killer. His wife and daughter were in on it. They were spooked by my survival and now travel from town to town, changing their names as they go, killing girls.

That’s exactly the kind of story Lydia would have made up when we were under the blanket with our flashlights, and she was scaring the crap out of me.

Tessie, 1995

October third, nineteen hundred and ninety-five, 1 P.M.

O.J. was set free an hour ago, which makes me sick to my stomach.

In mere minutes, if I don’t screw this up, I will be, too.

This is my last session. The doctor is recommending a follow-up every six months for the next two years, and, of course, I should call before then if I’m ever feeling any distress. He’s taking a sabbatical in China, so he won’t be around, but he will recommend someone perfect for me. In fact, he already has someone in mind. There’s a little transfer paperwork to fill out, but he’ll take care of that before he leaves. How lucky, he says, that the trial only lasted a month. That the jury took only one day to reach a verdict.

Everyone is beaming. The doctor. My dad. I’m beaming back because otherwise I might explode. Almost free, almost free, almost free.

“I want to say again how brave you were to testify,” the doctor says. “You held your own. The bottom line: Because of you, a killer is on Death Row.”

“Yes. It’s a relief.” A lie. The only thing that’s a relief is the news that my doctor is moving to China.

He’s sitting there, so smug. I can’t let him get away with it. I won’t forgive myself.

“Dad, can you just give us one second alone to say goodbye?”

“Sure. Of course.” He plants a kiss on my head. Shakes the doctor’s hand.

Dad doesn’t pull the door shut hard enough when he leaves, so the doc gets up to close the two-inch gap. Click. Doctor-client confidentiality and all.

“Why wouldn’t you ever talk about Rebecca?” I ask, before he sits down.

“Tessie, it’s very painful. Surely you can understand that. And it would have been unprofessional of me to do so. I shouldn’t have even said what I did. You need to let this go. It can’t be a part of our professional relationship.”

“Which is ending. Right now.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t matter. You are still my patient until you walk out that door.”

“I saw you with her.”

“You’re really beginning to worry me, Tessie.” And, in fact, his face does look worried. “You were right. My daughter is most likely dead. She isn’t… talking to you, is she? Like the Susans?”

“I’m not talking about your daughter.”

“Then I have no idea what you mean,” he says.

I don’t say it out loud, because what’s the point?

We both know he’s lying.

“See you around,” I say.