Black-Eyed Susans

“According to the L.A. Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to take ‘a harder stance’ on the death penalty. What’s a harder stance on the death penalty? We’re already killing the guy. How do you take a harder stance on the death penalty? What, are you going to tickle him first? Give him itching powder? Put a thumbtack on the electric chair?”-Jay Leno

– Tessa, listening to The Tonight Show in bed, 2004

September 1995

MR. VEGA: I know that this has been a very difficult day of testifying, Tessie. I appreciate your willingness to speak for all of the victims and I know the jury does, too. I have just one more question for now. What was the worst part of lying in that grave?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Knowing that if I gave up and died, my father and little brother would have to live without knowing what happened. That they would think things were more horrible than they were. I wanted to tell them that it wasn’t that bad.

MR. VEGA: You were lying near-comatose with a shattered ankle in a grave with a dead girl and the bones of other victims-and you wanted to tell your family that it wasn’t that bad?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Well, it was bad. But imagining what happened for the rest of your life is worse. You know, letting your mind fill all that in, like, a million different ways. That’s what I thought about a lot… how they’d have to do that. When the rescuers came, I was, like, so relieved that I could tell my dad it wasn’t that bad.

29 days until the execution

In a month, Terrell’s coffin, black and shiny as a new Mustang, will be hitched on a wagon to the back of a John Deere tractor. He will sink into the ground with the bodies of thousands of rapists and killers rotting in the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery. Most of these men lived violently on the surface but they are interred on a pretty little hill in East Texas summoned out of Walt Whitman’s dreams. These were men officially unclaimed in death. In Terrell’s case, people claim him, love him-they just don’t have the money to bury him. The state of Texas will do that with $2,000 of taxpayer money and surprising grace.

Inmates will rumble that tractor. They will be his pallbearers and bow their heads. They will chisel out his stone. Stencil on his inmate number. Maybe misspell his name.

They will use a shovel like the one in my hand.

My stomach churns for Terrell as I stare at the patch of black earth that my grandfather used to till behind his fairy tale house. At the very place where, twelve years ago on a hot July day, I found a suspicious patch of black-eyed Susans. It is the last place I’d ever want to dig for a gift from my monster, and so that’s what I’ve done. Left it for last. My stomach boiled in a sick stew that day, too.

I was twenty-two. Aunt Hilda and I had banged a For Sale sign onto the front lawn a few hours earlier. Granny had died eight months before. She was buried beside her daughter and husband in a small country cemetery, eight miles down the road from their fantastical house.

That day, I’d gone outside to breathe after opening a drawer in Granny’s jewelry box and sucking in a powerful hit of her church perfume. Charlie was almost three, and she’d slammed the screen door to the back porch ahead of me a few minutes earlier. When I opened the door, my beaming daughter stood several feet from the bottom of the steps, hands behind her back. She thrust out the handful of black-eyed Susans that she was strangling in her sweaty fist. Behind her, a hundred feet away, their sisters danced in flouncy yellow skirts-pretty little bullies hanging out near a row of sickly beans and a bonsai-like fig tree.

I poured a pot of boiling water into their eyes while Charlie stared from the porch. When my aunt called out from the house and asked what I was doing, I told her I was getting rid of a vicious pile of fire ants, which was just a bonus. Don’t want Charlie to get stung. A few ants were already carting the dead away on their backs.

I’m jolted back to the present as Herb Wermuth lets the screen door slam behind him. It echoes like a tinny symbol. More than a decade later, it’s his castle, not my grandfather’s. He’s gone inside, abandoning Lucas and me with little instruction to the devious winter sun and the garden that he says his wife, Bessie, chews up with a tiller twice a year. Good luck finding anything. Herb has made it clear he couldn’t care less where we are digging as long as it is not for a dead body and the media isn’t involved. He did ask us to try to get our business done before his wife returned in a couple of hours from a session with her new personal trainer.

At first, when we showed up on his front porch, Herb hadn’t been so accommodating. “I listen to the news,” he’d said grimly. “After all this time, you’re not sure they got the right killer. You’re working with his lawyer.” His eyes had raked over the shovel hanging from my hand. “Do you actually think one of his girls is buried out back?”

“No, no, of course not.” I had rushed to reassure him while hiding my revulsion at the use of the pronoun. His. Like the monster owns us. Owns me. “The cops would be here if that was the case. As I said, I’ve just always thought that it was possible that the mon… killer buried… something for me in the garden.”

Herb couldn’t hide it on his face-he believes, like most people around here, that the Cartwright girl had never been right in the head again.

“You’ve got to promise,” he insisted. “No media. I got rid of some tabloid photographer yesterday asking to snap a picture of the room where the Black-Eyed Susan slept. And some guy called the other day from Texas Monthly wanting permission to get a portrait of you in front of the house. Said you hadn’t called him back. It’s so bad I’m taking Bessie to a condo in Florida until this execution thing passes over.”

“No media.” Lucas had responded firmly. “Tessa only needs to ease her mind.” Patronizing. It sent a trickle of annoyance up my neck, but it did the trick for Herb. He even retrieved a shiny new shovel out of the garage for Lucas.

So Herb has left us to it. Except Lucas and I haven’t budged since the screen door ricocheted on its hinges a minute ago. Instead of investigating the garden, Lucas is casting watchful eyes up the walls and windows of my grandfather’s mythical house. He has never been here before, even though it’s just an hour’s drive from Fort Worth. By the time Lucas and I were wrestling in the backseats of cars, my grandfather was half-blind and permanently propped in bed.

It is comforting to know that Lucas is so focused. Protecting me from my monster, even if he has always believed, no matter what I say, that the monster is mostly confined to my head.

The house has cast a cool, dark arm across my shoulders. I know this house like it is my own body, and it knows me. Every hidden crevice, every crooked tooth, every false front. Every clever trick from my grandfather’s imagination.

I start a little when Lucas steps beside me, armed with his shovel and ready to go.

The Susan times her warning to my first squishy step into the soil.

Maybe he did bury one of our sisters here.

If it weren’t for the fig tree standing there like an arthritic crone, I wouldn’t know where to dig. The garden is twice as large as when my grandmother grew her precise rows of Early Girl tomatoes and Kentucky Wonder beans and orange habanero peppers, which she turned to jelly that ran on my tongue like lava. This morning, other than the fig tree climbing out of it, the plot is a flat brown rectangle.

I used to stand in this garden and pretend. The blackbirds stringing across the sky were really wicked witches on brooms. The distant fringes of wheat were the blond bangs of a sleeping giant. The black, mountainous clouds on the horizon were the magical kind that could twirl me to Oz. The exceptions were brutal summer days when there was no movement. No color. Nothingness so infinite and dull it made my heart ache. Before the monster, I would always rather be scared than bored.

“This is a very open area, Tessa,” Lucas observes. “Anyone who looked out a window on the west side of the house could have seen him plant the flowers. That’s pretty brazen for a guy you think has managed to fool everybody into thinking he doesn’t exist.” He shades his eyes to look up. “Is that a naked woman up there on the roof? Never mind. It is.”

“She’s a replica of The Little Mermaid statue that gazes over the harbor in Copenhagen,” I say. “The Hans Christian Andersen one-not the Disney version.”

“I get that. Definitely not G-rated.”

“My grandfather cast it himself. He had to rent a crane to lift it up there.” I take three carefully measured steps north from the fig tree. “About here,” I say.

Lucas thrusts the glistening metal of Herb’s shovel with crisp, clean determination into the dirt. My own rusty shovel is leaning against a tree. I’ve brought a stack of newspapers, an old metal sieve from the kitchen, and a pair of work gloves. I plunk myself down and begin to sift through the first chunks of overturned soil. I hear Jo’s voice in my head insisting that this isn’t the way.

I glance up, and for a second, see a little Charlie on the porch. I blink, and she’s gone.

It isn’t long before Lucas has stripped off his shirt. I keep sifting, averting my eyes from the muscles rippling across his back.

“Tell me a story,” he says.

“Really? Now?” A black bug is skittering down my jeans. I blink, and it’s gone.

“Sure,” Lucas says. “I miss your stories. Tell me all about the girl up there on the roof with the nice boobs.”

I pull out a rough piece of old metal. Think about how many layers to leave out of a multi-layered fable. Lucas has a short attention span. I know that he is just trying to distract me.

“A long time ago, a mermaid fell madly in love with a prince she rescued from the sea. But they were from different worlds.”

“I’m already sensing an unhappy ending. She looks lonely up there.”

“The prince didn’t know it was the mermaid who rescued him.” I pause from breaking apart a large chunk of soil. “She had kissed him and laid him on the beach, unconscious, and swum back out to sea. But she desperately wanted to be with him. So she swallowed a witch’s potion that burned away her beautiful singing voice but in return carved out two human legs. The witch told the mermaid that she would be the most graceful dancer on earth, yet every single step would feel like she was walking on knives. The mermaid didn’t care. She sought out the prince and danced for him, mute, unable to speak her love. He was mesmerized. So she danced and danced for him, even though it was excruciating.”

“This is a horrible story.”

“There’s lovely imagery when it’s read aloud. It loses a lot in my retelling.” I raise my eyes to the window in the turret of my old bedroom. The partly drawn shade makes it appear like a half-closed eye. I imagine the muffled sound of my grandfather reciting on the other side of the stained glass. An ocean as blue as the prettiest cornflower. Icebergs like pearls. The sky, a bell of glass.

“And did this a-hole of a prince love her back?” Lucas asks.

“No. Which means the mermaid was cursed to die unless she stabbed the prince and let his blood drip on her feet, fusing her legs back into fins.”

At this point, I stop. Lucas has already produced an impressive hole the circumference of a small plastic swimming pool and about as deep. I’m way behind on sifting through his piles of earth. All I have to show for my efforts are a stack of rocks, the ribbon of rusted metal, and two plastic pansy markers.

Lucas drops the shovel and falls to his knees beside me. “Need some help?” he asks. I know him well enough to translate. He thinks this is futile. My heart isn’t really in it, either.

I hear the creak of a door opening, punctuated by a noisy slam. Bessie Wermuth is trotting our way in fire-engine-red workout gear that clings to two narrow inner tubes of fat around her waist. She’s carrying tall yellow Tupperware cups chunked with ice and amber liquid.

“Good morning, Tessa.” She beams. “So nice to see you and… your friend.”

“I’m Lucas, ma’am. Let me help you with those glasses.” He picks one and swallows a quarter of it in the first swig. “Delicious tea. Thank you.”

Bessie’s eyes are fastened on Lucas’s snake tattoo, which starts around his belly button and disappears into his jeans.

“Have you found anything yet?” She raises her eyes from Lucas’s belt buckle.

“A few fossils, a plastic plant marker, a rusty piece of metal.”

Bessie barely acknowledges my stash. “I wanted to tell you about my box. Herb said he didn’t tell you about my box.”

“Your box?” A curl of uneasiness.

“It’s a bunch of junk, really,” she says. “I’ve even labeled it, Stuff Nobody Wants But Mom. You know, so my kids don’t have to add it to the crap they’re cleaning out when we die. There might be something in there you’re interested in, though.”

The sweat under my arms is icy. What is wrong with me? It’s just Stuff Nobody Wants.

“I’m going inside to get it,” she says. “I couldn’t carry the box and the tea. Meet me at the picnic table.”

“Are you all right? You don’t look right.” Lucas pulls me up. “We need a little break anyway.”

“Yes. Fine.” I don’t say what I’m thinking-that I have a bad feeling about Bessie and her relentless tilling. We walk thirty yards and plant ourselves on the bench of an old picnic table slopped carelessly with green paint.

Lucas nods toward the house. “Here she comes.”

Bessie is hauling an old U-Haul box across the yard, breathing with furious intention. Lucas jumps up and meets her halfway, relieving her of the box. He sets it in front of me, but I don’t reach. I’m mesmerized by Bessie’s large bold print, which says exactly what she declared it did, thereby assuring that this will be the one box her grieving, surely sentimental kids will never throw away no matter what.

“This holds all the odds and ends I’ve found on the outdoor property since we moved in.” Bessie pops open flaps. “Useless archaeology, really. Except the old bottles. I got those on the kitchen windowsill. But if it comes out of the earth and isn’t wriggling or biting me, I keep it in here. I don’t organize it by year or location. It’s all dumped together. So I have no idea what came out of the garden and what got kicked up by the mower.”

Lucas is bending over the box, pawing through it.

“Just dump it,” Bessie says. “Can’t hurt anything. Then Tessa can see, too.”

Before I can prepare, the contents are rolling recklessly across the table. Wire springs and rusty nails, an old, half-crushed yellow-and-red-striped Dr Pepper can, and a blue Matchbox car with no wheels. A tiny tin for Bayer aspirin, a chewed dog bone, a large white rock streaked with gold, a broken arrowhead, fossils of cephalopods that once skulked around with tentacles and eyes like cameras.

Lucas is fingering through pieces of broken red glass. He’s pushed aside a tiny brown object with a point.

“This is a tooth,” he says.

“That’s what I thought!” Bessie exclaims. “Herb told me it was a candy corn.”

But I’m staring at something that lies all alone at the edge of the table.

“I think that was Lydia’s.” The words catch in my throat.

“Spooky.” Bessie picks up the little pink barrette, frowns at it. I pull off my gloves and take it with unsteady fingers.

“What do you think it means?” she wants to know. “Do you figure it’s a clue?” Bessie isn’t breathing fast because she’s old, or because Lucas is a sweaty god. Bessie is a junkie. She’s probably devoured everything ever written on the Black-Eyed Susans. How could I not have seen this? She bought my grandfather’s house when no one else would. She apparently knows exactly who Lydia is without explanation.

Lucas has placed his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll borrow the tooth and the… hair thing, if that’s OK,” he tells Bessie.

“Of course, of course. Whatever Herb and I can do.”

I rub my finger absently over the yellow smiley face etched into the plastic. This means nothing, I scold myself. It was probably tugged out of Lydia’s hair by a cornstalk during a game of hide-and-seek back when we thought monsters were imaginary.

And yet. The pink barrette with the smiley face. The Victorian ring, the Poe book, the key. Why do I feel like Lydia is the one playing a game with me, planned cunningly in advance?

Lucas scans my face, and there’s no discussion of whether to sift through the rest of the dirt.

I look up. On the roof, the flash of two girls. One with fiery red hair. I blink, and they’re gone.

Lydia’s barrette is wrapped in a tissue in my purse. The tooth is in Lucas’s pocket. About fifteen miles down the road, Lucas clears his throat and breaks the silence. “Are you going to tell me what happened to that mermaid chick?”

My passenger window swims with blue and brown. The Texas sky, a bell of glass; the rolling farmland, once buried under an unfathomable sea. Sun so powerful that the mermaid was often obliged to dive under the water to cool her burning face.

I still my grandfather’s voice. Place my hands on burning cheeks. Turn to Lucas’s profile, a rock to cling to.

“The mermaid can’t bring herself to murder the prince,” I say. “She throws herself into the sea, sacrificing herself, and dissolves into sea foam. But a miracle happens-her spirit floats above the water. She has transformed into a daughter of the air. She can now earn her immortal soul and go to live with God.”

Daughters of the air. Like us, like us, like us, breathe the Susans.

“The Baptist in your grandfather must have loved that one,” Lucas says.

“Not really. Baptists believe you can’t earn heaven. The only way to save yourself is to repent. Then you’re good to go, even if you turn sweet mermaids to sea foam.”

Or girls to bones.

September 1995

MR. LINCOLN: Tessie, do you love your grandfather?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. Of course.

MR. LINCOLN: It would be very hard to think something terrible about him, right?

MR. VEGA: Objection.

JUDGE WATERS: I’ll give you a little leeway here, Mr. Lincoln, but not much.

MR. LINCOLN: Did the police search your grandfather’s house the day after you were found?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. But he let them.

MR. LINCOLN: Did they take anything away?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Some of his art. A shovel. His truck. But they gave it all back.

MR. LINCOLN: And the shovel had just been washed, correct?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes, my grandmother had run the hose over it the day before.

MR. LINCOLN: Where is your grandfather today?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: He’s home with my grandmother. He’s sick. He had a stroke.

MR. LINCOLN: He had a stroke about two weeks after you were found, right?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. He was very upset about… me. He wanted to hunt down whoever did this and kill him. He said the death penalty wasn’t good enough.

MR. LINCOLN: He told you that?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: I overheard him talking to my aunt.

MR. LINCOLN: Interesting.

MS. CARTWRIGHT: No one thought I could hear while I was blind.

MR. LINCOLN: I’d like to get to your episode of blindness a little later. Did you ever think your grandfather was odd?

MR. VEGA: Objection. Tessie’s grandfather isn’t on trial here.

MR. LINCOLN: Judge, I’m almost done with this line of questioning.

JUDGE WATERS: You can answer the question, Ms. Cartwright.

MS. CARTWRIGHT: I’m not sure what he means.

MR. LINCOLN: Your grandfather painted some grisly images, didn’t he?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: I mean, yes, when he was imitating Salvador Dalí or Picasso or something. He was an artist. He experimented all the time.

MR. LINCOLN: Did he ever tell you scary stories?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: He read fairy tales to me when I was little.

MR. LINCOLN: The Robber Bridegroom who kidnaps a girl, chops her up, and turns her to stew? The Girl Without Hands, whose own father cuts them off?

MR. VEGA: Oh, come on, your honor.

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Her hands grow back. Seven years later, her hands grow back.

26 days until the execution

I wonder if Jo is in a freezing lab scraping enamel off a tooth that looks like a candy corn while I fold and stack clothes still warm from the dryer. If Terrell is sitting on his rock hard cot, composing his last words, drinking water that tastes like raw turnips, while I sip my $12 pinot and decide to throw out Charlie’s pink socks with the hole in the left heel. If Lydia is out there somewhere laughing at me, or missing me, or up in heaven pestering dead authors while her body rots in a place only my monster knows about. I wonder if the tooth from the ground at Granddaddy’s could be hers.

For three days, I debated about whether to turn the tooth over to Jo. I couldn’t explain to Lucas why I waited. It made perfect sense to try every unlikely thing, to hold nothing back unless what I really wanted was not to know. Jo had met us in the parking lot of the North Texas Health Science Center a few hours ago. She was still wearing white shoe covers from the lab. She had listened in taut silence to my rambling about drowning Black-Eyed Susans in boiling water and a box of useless objects that no one cared about but Bessie. I didn’t mention Lydia’s pink barrette with the smiley face. Jo accepted the tooth from Lucas. Said little in return.

I wonder if Jo will forgive me for not bringing her with us, although it doesn’t seem all that important right now. Nothing does. Numbness grips me, a slow-acting poison that drugs the Susans to sleep and yet still allows my hands to build perfectly tidy little towers of clothes. Clothes that have mingled intimately in the washer-Lucas’s Army underwear, Charlie’s flannel pajamas with the pink cotton-candy sheep, my neon running shorts.

Lucas is slugging a beer at the end of the couch, watching CNN and rolling his briefs into tiny eggrolls, Army Ranger-style, then aiming and tossing them at my head, my butt, whatever is a good target. We’re pretending to be just fine while the clock ticks the seconds off my sanity. Because after Terrell dies, then what?

Keep folding. The doorbell rings, and Lucas is up, opening the door. Probably Effie dropping off a food bomb. I glance at my watch: 4:22 P.M.-a couple of hours before I have to pick up Charlie from practice.

“Is Tessa home?” A nerve, plucked like a guitar string, as soon as I hear his voice.

Lucas’s feet are planted deliberately, blocking my view of the door. “And this would be regarding what?” The drawl pulls out every bit of the West Texas in him. In slow motion, I see Lucas’s left hand, the support hand, casually rise and rest on his upper chest. The fingers on his right hand, clinching. The ready position for the fastest way to yank a gun out of your pants. He’d demonstrated for me in the back yard not an hour before.

“Lucas!” I jolt myself away from the couch, toppling three of the piles. “This is Bill, the lawyer I’ve told you about who is handling Terrell’s appeal. Angie’s friend.” All I can see beyond Lucas is the tip of a Boston Red Sox cap. I’m behind Lucas, pushing uselessly against hard muscle. I feel around his waist for a gun that isn’t there. His movements a few seconds ago, just the reflex of a wary man. I realize that while Bill can’t see my face, he has a perfect view of my hand curled intimately near Lucas’s crotch.

Old resentment flushes heat into my face. This macho idiocy from Lucas is the primary reason we were drawn to each other when I was a scared, hormonal eighteen-year-old, and the primary reason we broke up. He descended from a generation of men who sent hearts skittering in terror with the one-two clunk of their boots. Who lived life like everyone was about to quick-draw. Lucas leaps eagerly at cat screeches, car backfires, knocks on the door. He’s a good man and a terrific soldier, the best, but as an everyday life partner, he electrocutes the roots of every hair on my skin.

“Lucas, move.” I shove a little harder.

Lucas steps aside slightly so I can wriggle beside him.

“Bill, Lucas,” I say. “Lucas, Bill.”

Bill sticks out a hand. Lucas ignores it. “Hello there, Bill. I’ve been wanting to meet you. I’ve been wanting to ask how involving Tessa at this very late date is a good thing. Don’t you think it’s time to step away? Ride off in your BMW out there? Give Tessa and my daughter the peace they deserve?”

For a moment, I’m speechless. I had no idea Lucas was pulsing with this kind of anger. We were melting down, every one of us. I step firmly onto the porch. “Lucas. Butt out of this, OK? Whatever I’m doing, it’s my call. Bill isn’t forcing me.”

I shut the door in Lucas’s face, not for the first time. “You can wipe off that expression, Bill.” Not exactly what I meant to say. Not, I miss you.

“So that’s your soldier?” Bill asks.

“If you mean Charlie’s father, yes.”

“He’s living here?”

“On a short leave. Long story, but Charlie was scared after that night of the… vandal. She Skyped Lucas about it and shortly after that he showed up on my doorstep. He has an understanding boss and was overdue for a leave to visit Charlie anyway. I didn’t invite him, but I’m not sorry he came. He’s on… the couch.”

“That doesn’t seem like a very long story.” Bill’s voice is cool. “If you’re still in love with him, just say so.”

My arms are crossed tight against my thin sweater. I have no interest in inviting Bill inside and refereeing between the two of them.

“This isn’t a conversation… we need to have,” I say. “You and me… we can’t be a thing. We slept together for the wrong reasons. It’s not like me to do something that impulsive. I’m not that girl.”

“You didn’t answer the question.” I meet his eyes. Flinch. The intensity is almost unbearable. Lucas had never looked at me like that. Lucas was all hands and instinct.

“I’m not in love with Lucas. He’s a good guy. You just caught him at a bad moment.” Already I’m wondering if Bill’s laser gaze is for real, or if it’s method acting with an on/off switch. Useful for withering a witness, or stripping a girl down to her scars.

Lydia had always sworn no one could reach her vagina with his eyes but Paul Newman, “Even though he’s ancient.” She hadn’t met Bill. I wouldn’t want her to meet Bill. To tarnish this, whatever this is.

Why am I thinking about Lydia right now?

Bill plunks himself down in the swing, clearly not going anywhere. I reluctantly position myself on the other end. For the first time, I notice a large manila envelope about two inches thick, in his hand.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“I brought you something. Have you ever read any of your testimony from the trial?”

“It never occurred to me.” A lie. I’d thought about it plenty. The jury ogling me like I was an alien and the sketch artist scratching long, swift pencil strokes for my hair. My father, sitting in the front row of a packed room, petrified for me, and Terrell, in a cheap blue tie with gold stripes, keeping his eyes glued to a blank piece of notebook paper in front of him, the one for his notes. He never once looked at me or took a note. The jury interpreted it as guilt.

So did I.

“I’ve pulled out a few sections for you,” Bill says.

“Why?”

“Because you feel such guilt about your testimony.” Bill halts the swing abruptly. He taps the envelope that now rests between us. “Please read this. It might help. You are not the reason Terrell sits in prison.”

I cross my arms tighter. “Maybe you’re just thinking that the more I take myself back there, the more I might remember something that would help Terrell.”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

My heart begins to pound, hating this. “No. Of course not.”

He pushes himself up and the swing bounces and jerks in protest. “Jo told me about the tooth. I wish you’d let us know you were going to your grandfather’s. I wish you weren’t so intent on shutting me out. Are you planning to dig somewhere else?” He’s stilling the swing with his hand while I get up.

“No. It was the last place. Is Jo… mad?”

“You’d have to ask her.”

He’s moving away, bristling with frustration. At life. At me. I grab the envelope off the swing and follow him to the steps. “Tell me the truth. Is there any hope at all for Terrell?”

He starts to step off the porch before swiveling halfway around, almost knocking me back. I am already there, only inches away. “There are a few more appeals to file,” he says. “I’m driving to Huntsville to see him for the last time next week.”

I grip his arm. “The last time? That doesn’t sound good. Will you tell Terrell… that I’m still trying very hard to remember?”

Bill’s eyes are glued to my fingernails gripping his sweatshirt, always unpolished and cut short, still crumbed with dirt from my grandfather’s garden. “Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

“You can’t be serious! I’d be one of the last people he’d want to see.”

Bill removes my hand deliberately. He might as well have shoved me down.

“It isn’t my idea,” he says. “It’s his.”

“Doesn’t Terrell… hate me?”

“Terrell is not a hater, Tessa. Not bitter. He’s one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met. He believes you have it the worst. For a long time, he said he could hear your weeping at night over the other sounds of Death Row. He says a prayer for you before he goes to sleep. He’s told me not to push you.”

Terrell has heard me crying on Death Row. I’m keeping him awake. I’m an echo in his head, like the Susans are in mine.

“Why in the hell didn’t you tell me this before?”

“There’s no human touch. Can you imagine that? Twenty-three hours a day in a tiny cage with a narrow slot for food. A tiny Plexiglas window that’s so high he has to ball up his mattress and stand on it to see out, for a fuzzy view of nothing. One hour a day to briskly walk around another small cage for exercise. Every second to think about dying. You know what he says is the worst part? More than the sounds of men screaming, or trying to choke themselves, or arguing over imaginary chess games, or incessantly tapping typewriters? The smell. The stench of fear and hopelessness oozing from five hundred men. Terrell never takes deep breaths on Death Row. He thinks he might suffocate or go insane if he does. I can’t swig a deep breath without thinking of Terrell. Why didn’t I tell you before, Tessa? Because you have enough to carry around.”

He taps the envelope I’m holding. “Read this.”

He doesn’t wave goodbye as he backs out of the driveway.

When I walk inside, Lucas is facing the door, leaning against the back of the couch, dragging on his beer. Waiting. “What’s wrong?” He’s already restacked the piles of clothes that toppled over, a Lucas-style apology. “What did he want?”

“Nothing important. I think I’m going to take a nap before I pick up Charlie.”

“You’re sleeping with him.” A statement, not a question.

“I’m going to take a nap.” I brush past him toward the hall.

“He could be using you, Tess.”

I close my bedroom door and slide down its back to the floor. Lucas is still calling after me. Tears prick at the corners of my eyes.

I run my nail under the flap of the envelope and pull out the tidy stack of court documents.

Bill might not think Tessie’s guilty. But I know she is.

September 1995

MR. LINCOLN: Tessie, would you say that you played unusual games as a child?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: I’m not sure what you mean.

MR. LINCOLN: Let me put it this way. You have a pretty big imagination, right?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: I guess so. Yes.

MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play a game called Anne Boleyn?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes.

MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play a game called Amelia Earhart?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes.

MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play a game called Marie Antoinette? Did you lay your head on a tree stump and let someone pretend to lop off your head?

MR. VEGA: Your honor, once more, Mr. Lincoln’s questioning is simply designed to distract the jury from anything meaningful and from the man who sits in that chair on trial.

MR. LINCOLN: On the contrary, your honor, I’m trying to help the jury understand the environment where Tessa grew up. I find that very meaningful.

MR. VEGA: In that case, let me enter into the record that Tessa also played checkers, dolls, tea party, thumb wars, and Red Rover.

JUDGE WATERS: Mr. Vega, sit down. You’re bugging me. I’ll let you know when you’re bugging me, Mr. Lincoln, but you’re close.

MR. LINCOLN: Thank you, your honor. Tessa, would you like a drink of water before we continue?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: No.

MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play Buried Treasure?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes.

MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play Jack the Ripper?

MR. VEGA: Your honor…

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. No. We started the game but I didn’t like it.

MR. LINCOLN: We, meaning you and your best friend, Lydia Bell, whom you mentioned earlier?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. And my brother. And other kids in the neighborhood who were around. It was a super-hot day. A bunch of us were bored. But none of the girls wanted to be the victims after one of the boys brought out a ketchup bottle. Maybe it was Lydia. We decided to do a Kool-Aid stand instead.

MR. VEGA: Your honor, I used to dissect live tadpoles by the river when I was six.

What does that say about me? I’d like to remind him and the jury that Tessa is the victim here. It’s been a very long day for this witness already.

MR. LINCOLN: Mr. Vega, I have a really good answer for your tadpole question. But right now, I just want to note that Tessie’s childhood involved games about violent deaths, missing people, and buried objects. That art imitated life long before she was found in the grave. Why is that?

MR. VEGA: Jesus Christ, you are actually testifying. Are you calling what happened to Tessa “art”? Are you suggesting it was some kind of divine karma? You’re a son of a bitch.

JUDGE WATERS: Up here, boys.

19 days until the execution

Terrell and I are not breathing the same air. That’s the first thing I think. I wonder how many puckered lips of mothers and lovers have kissed the cloudy window that divides us.

The first thing I feel is shame. Until this moment, I’ve never really examined his face. Not in the courtroom when he was twenty feet away, not on the television when it blared our names like a celebrity marriage, not in a grainy image in the newspaper.

His eyes are bloodshot holes. His skin is shiny black paint. Pockmarked. A line drawn by a knife drizzles like milk down his chin. I stare at his scar and he stares at mine. More than a minute passes before he reaches for the phone on his side of the wall. He gestures for me to do the same.

I pick it up and press it hard against my ear so Terrell Darcy Goodwin can’t see my hand shaking. He sits in a tiny cubicle on the other side of the glass. The small vent above my head is pumping cold air and drying my throat into brittle paper.

“Billy said you’d come,” he says.

“Billy?” I croak out involuntarily.

“Yeah, he hates that. But somebody’s got to give him shit, don’t you think?”

Terrell, loosening me up. I attempt a smile.

“How did you get yours?” My fingernail raking my chin feels like the soft edge of a knife, the taunt before a killer draws blood.

“I got this scar by making the wrong friends when I was thirteen,” Terrell says easily. “I stepped off God’s path early on. Here I am.”

Two minutes in, the conversation already at God.

“Do you believe in our savior Jesus Christ?” he asks.

“Sometimes.”

“Well, Jesus and I’ve gotten real close in here. Jesus and I have plenty of time every day to chat about how I screwed up my life. How I screwed up my family’s life. My daughters, my son, my wife will all be paying the price for a night I got high again and didn’t know where I was.” His forehead is now almost touching the glass. “Look, it took guts for you to come here and we don’t have much time. I got something to say. I need to cross you off my list. You need to accept that my dying isn’t your fault. I don’t want to die being anybody’s burden, OK?”

“I shouldn’t have testified,” I protest. “I didn’t remember anything. I was just a prop. It was all hocus-pocus. The jury couldn’t look at me without seeing their daughters.”

“And the big black boogeyman who got her.” Astonishingly, he says this without rancor. “I had to let go of that years ago. It ate me alive. Every night, I hear the ones who’ve gone crazy. They chatter away to folks who aren’t there. That, or they’re so quiet for weeks you wonder if their brains just flew out of their heads and there’s a big hole there. I made up my mind not to go crazy like that. I meditate. Read the Bible and Mr. Martin Luther King. Play a lot of chess in my head. Work on my case. Write my kids.”

He’s trying to reassure me. “Terrell, I thought years ago you might be innocent. And I did nothing. You have every right to hate me.”

“If you can’t remember, why are you so sure it wasn’t me who took you that night?”

“The killer keeps planting black-eyed Susans for me. The first time was three days after you were convicted.” I offer Terrell a pretend smile. “It’s OK if you think I’m crazy. I would.” I do.

“I don’t think you’re crazy. Evil sneaks up on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches. I know that ain’t the way the poem goes. It’s supposed to be fog on little cat feet. Fog. Evil. It works either way. You usually can’t see the headlights comin’ at you until it’s too late.”

I blink away the image of this giant on a cot reciting a Carl Sandburg poem, trying not to listen to men scratching up the walls like cats.

“When I first saw you,” Terrell is saying, “you were sitting in the box in that pretty blue dress, shaking so hard I thought you might shatter to pieces. I saw my daughters sitting there.”

“That’s why you didn’t look at me,” I say slowly. There had been such debating back and forth over The Blue Dress. Everyone had an opinion. Mr. Vega, Benita, the doctor, Lydia, even Aunt Hilda. The lace was itchy, but I never told anybody. When I testified, I had to casually flick my hand at my neck and my shoulders to make sure I wasn’t really crawling with bugs. The Blue Dress was nothing Tessie would ever wear in real life. The hem should hit her just slightly above the knees so the jury can see the brace on her ankle. Not too sexy. She’s going to wear the brace, right? Can we gather in the waist to emphasize that she’s still pretty much skin and bones? The color makes her look a little bit yellow, but I think that’s good.

“I wasn’t going to make it worse for you.” Terrell’s voice brings me back. He’s grinning. “I’m a pretty ugly man.”

A guard rattles the cage at Terrell’s back. “Gotta go, Terrell. Closing early.”

“A man’s going down tonight,” Terrell tells me matter-of-factly. “The Row’s always extra-tense when a man’s going down. This is the second time this month.” Terrell is rising while he speaks into the receiver. His broad body fills the window, softer and rounder than I expected. “It took real guts for you to come here, Tessie. I know you’re tied up about this. Remember what I said. When I die, let it go.”

My stomach dances with sudden panic. This is it.

The words are boiling up in a desperate rush. “I’m going to testify again if they’ll give you a hearing. Bill is a terrific lawyer. He really believes there is… some hope. Especially now, with the DNA results on the red hair. It’s not mine, of course.” I pull a copper strand over my ear.

Terrell knows every bit of this already. Bill has already spent an hour with him. He’s nearby, finishing up the habeas appeal on his laptop. All the other things Bill hoped might come through to bolster the appeal haven’t.

“Yeah, Billy’s a good boy. Never met a more Lord-guided man who doesn’t believe one inch in the Lord. I’ve still got a little time to change his mind.” Terrell winks. “Take care of yourself, Tessie. Let it go.” And he hangs up.

I’m frozen to the plastic chair. It seems like everything has been neatly decided with that final click of the receiver. Terrell’s fate. Mine.

He leans over and touches a finger to the glass in a direct line with my moon scar. It begins to throb. A Susan, tapping. He’s too good to be true, too good to be true.

His mouth is moving. I’m panicking. I can’t hear through the glass.

He repeats it a second time, carefully forming the words.

“You know who it is.”

Bill didn’t want to bring me here tonight, but I insisted. We are only a few hundred yards from the infamous Death House unit known as “The Walls,” where Terrell informed me just hours earlier that a man was going down. The Walls is a quaint, stately old building too tired to sigh. It’s been witnessing death by rope and electricity, gunfire and poison, for more than a century.

Next door, there’s a small white frame house with a neatly covered barbecue grill on the front porch. Embracing the other side, a church.

Terrell is lying in his cell a few miles away in the Wynne Unit on Death Row, about to put away his reading. Bill has told me that even with lockdown and lights out, Terrell will know before we do if tonight’s execution has been carried out.

When I ask how that can be, he shrugs. The prisoners have their ways.

Tiny ice pellets crackle on my jacket. I pull up my hood. We won’t be allowed inside. We are merely voyeurs.

I’ve breathed in the dust of my premature grave, but I’ve never felt anything as oppressive as the weight of this air. It’s as if a dying factory threw up death, spewing plumes of grief and misery, hope and inevitability. The hope is what makes it seethe. I wonder how far I’d have to run to get away from this toxic cloud. Where its filmy edges end. Two blocks from the death chamber? A mile? If I peered down from space, would it be smothering the whole town?

Huntsville is a mythical place that I had all wrong. In my mind, Huntsville was a single house of horrors. A giant slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere where the state of Texas locks up Things that deserve to die. Where stuff happens that you don’t ever, ever need to know about unless it’s on a big screen with Tom Hanks.

That’s what Lydia’s father, a big fan of Tom Hanks and the revengeful philosophy of Deuteronomy, always told us.

I was badly misinformed. Huntsville is not just one badass prison but seven scattered around the area. The death house that looms in front of us in the waning light doesn’t sit in the middle of nowhere.

It’s a 150-year-old redbrick building with a clock tower where time has literally stopped. It’s located two blocks off the quaint courthouse square, in the middle of town. People are downing chicken-fried steak and strawberry cake right now at the city’s best restaurant, within easy eyesight of The Walls.

The cops are casually roping off the front of the prison with crime scene tape. We are within shouting distance of a windowless corner of the building, where the execution will take place.

I’m trying not to let Bill know how bothered I am by all of this matter-of-fact efficiency. It started right away, when Bill easily slid his car into a spot at the side of the brick prison wall and shouted up to the guard on the roof to ask if it was OK to park there. She shouted back, “Sure,” like it was a middle school basketball game.

The Fors and the Againsts are obediently positioning themselves on opposite sides of the building, with four hundred yards between them, fighters in a ring who will never meet.

So civilized. So uncivilized. So casual.

A few Texas Rangers stand idly by, watching the small but slowly gathering crowd. No one appears concerned there will be trouble. Two Spanish television crews are setting up for live shots, while the rest of the press corps is composed of dark heads in a lit building across from the prison. A group of Mexican women are kneeling beside a blown-up portrait of the condemned, singing in Spanish. Two-thirds of the anti-death-penalty crowd is Mexican. The other third is mostly white, old, resigned, and quiet.

Tonight, a Mexican national is going to be executed for pumping three bullets into the head of a Houston cop. And then, in nineteen days, it’s Terrell. And then a guy who hit his pizza delivery girl in the head with a baseball bat, and then a man who participated in the gang rape and murder of a mentally challenged girl on a lonely road. And on and on.

Every few minutes or so, Blue Knights are rounding the corners on their Harleys. They are former police officers avenging their own, who would maybe like to push the syringe themselves. I watch them position themselves on the far side of the prison, the pro side, near the execution chamber. The police and guards have sprung to life, and are directing them to park a little farther away.

“Are you sure you want to be here?” Bill asks one more time. We are hovering in a little bit of no-man’s-land, in between both camps. “I’m not sure there’s a point.”

Of course there’s a point. The point is, I don’t know what I believe. I just know what I want to believe.

I don’t say it, though. The less emotion, the better. We agreed to an uneasy détente as soon as I called and asked him to please take me with him to Huntsville to meet Terrell. I promised I wouldn’t flake out. My eyes drift across the street to a man holding a battery-operated Christmas candle. He’s leaning against a railing backed up to a gas station billboard that tells newly sprung prisoners to cash their checks here. He’s comfortably packaged between two women with the peaceful countenance of nuns, and two men, all riding past sixty.

Bill follows my gaze. “That’s Dennis. He never misses. Sometimes, he’s the only guy out here.”

“I thought there would be more people. Where are all the people who scream on Facebook?”

“On the couch. Screaming.”

“When will it start?”

“The execution?” He glances at his watch. “It’s eight now. Probably in about fifteen minutes. Usually, it’s set for six and it’s done by seven. There was a delay tonight while the federal court was debating a last-minute appeal that the condemned was mentally deficient.” He gestures back across the street. “Dennis and that core group of four over there show up more as a vigil than protest. I mean, at this point, the writing’s on the wall. Dennis is the one who always stays until the bitter end, even on the rare occasion when appeals go on until midnight. He waits until the family of the executed walks out. Wants them to know someone is out here for them.”

I picture it-a skinny old Santa, his Christmas candle, a lonely corner by a Stop sign, and the night.

“The woman with the bullhorn is Gloria.” He redirects my attention to the sign-wielding protesters in the street, who are oddly silent. No chanting. “She’s a fixture, too. She pretty much believes everyone on Death Row is innocent. Of course, most of them are guilty as hell. She’s much beloved for dedication, however. She’ll start counting it down soon.”

“Where are the families now?”

“The family of the victim, if any of them want to be there, is already inside the prison. The family of the prisoner is in the building across the street. I’ve heard Gutierrez has asked his mother not to watch. Whoever is witnessing for him will walk across with a few reporters as soon as all appeals have expired. That’s the high sign.” He is directing my eyes under the clock tower, where there are steps that lead up and inside.

A young television reporter in a brand-new blue suit and a bright lavender camera-ready tie has appeared to my right. He’s thrusting his microphone into the face of a woman carrying a sign that declares the governor is a serial killer. The camera casts eerie light on both of their faces.

The protester’s shoulders are hunched in an arthritic mountain. She’s traveling on red cowboy boots anyway. She drawls her answers to the reporter a little cynically, as if she’s seen a hundred of him. Yes, the lights of the whole town used to dim for a second every time a prisoner was electrocuted. Yes, this is a typical crowd. Yes, Karla Faye Tucker was the biggest zoo, being a woman. Someone on the square even advertised “Killer Prices.”

The reporter cuts her off abruptly.

Bill nudges my shoulder. Gloria has raised the bullhorn to her lips.

Shadows are moving across the street. Ice keeps shooting out of the sky.

The air suddenly vibrates with the roar of a hundred angry tigers, so loud and so fierce that it rattles my brain, the balls of my feet, the pit of my stomach.

The thunderous noise drowns out Gloria shouting into her bullhorn and the hymn of the women, whose mouths continue to open and close like hungry birds.

The Blue Knights are revving their motorcycles in unison, so he can hear.

Kill him.

September 1995

MR. VEGA: Will you please state your full name for the record?

MR. BOYD: Ural Russell Boyd. People call me You-All. Ever since I played basketball in high school. The cheerleaders turned it into one of their yells.

MR. VEGA: How would you like me to address you today?

MR. BOYD: You-All’s fine. I’m a little nervous.

MR. VEGA: No need to be nervous. You’re doing just fine. You own four hundred acres of land approximately fifteen miles northwest of Fort Worth, correct?

MR. BOYD: Yes, sir. In my family for sixty years. But everybody still calls it the Jenkins property.

MR. VEGA: Will you please tell us what happened on the morning of June 23, 1994?

MR. BOYD: Yes, sir. My hound dog went missing. We were supposed to go bird hunting that morning real early. When I couldn’t find him, I set out with Ramona.

MR. LINCOLN: Ramona is…?

MR. BOYD: My daughter’s horse. Ramona was the most in the mood for a ride that morning.

MR. LINCOLN: And what happened after that?

MR. BOYD: Almost right away I heard Harley start to howl near the west pasture. I thought maybe he met a copperhead. I’ve had some problems with copperheads.

MR. VEGA: You followed his howl?

MR. BOYD: Yes, sir. Once he started he wouldn’t stop. I think he felt the vibration of Ramona’s hooves and could feel us coming. He’s a real smart dog.

MR. LINCOLN: Approximately what time was this?

MR. BOYD: About 4:30 A.M.

MR. LINCOLN: How long did it take to find Harley?

MR. BOYD: Ten minutes. It was dark. He was at the far corner of the property, about a half-mile off the highway. He was keeping watch.

MR. VEGA: What was he keeping watch over?

MR. BOYD: Two dead girls. I didn’t know that the one girl was alive. She didn’t look alive.

MR. VEGA: Will you please describe to the jury exactly what you saw when you came upon the grave?

MR. BOYD: First, I flashed my light on Harley. He was flat down in a bunch of flowers in a ditch. He didn’t move. I didn’t see the hand at first because his nose was lying on it. I knew it was a girl’s hand because of the blue fingernail polish. Sir, I’d like to take a minute.

MR. VEGA: Certainly.

MR. BOYD: (inaudible)

MR. VEGA: Take all the time you need.

MR. BOYD: It was a bad moment. My daughter picks those flowers all the time. I hadn’t checked her bed before I left the house.

18 days until the execution

While Bill and I waited for Manuel Abel Gutierrez to die, a light freezing rain had transformed the highway home into a ribbon of glistening ice. It’s the kind of storm that Yankees make fun of on Facebook with a picture of a spilled cup of ice on the sidewalk that shuts down schools or a cartoon that depicts massive car pileups with one culprit snowflake. It would be funny, if a tenth of an inch of ice in Texas wasn’t deadly.

Bill had announced six minutes onto I-45 that he wasn’t about to skate the four-hour trek back, and swung the car around. So here we are, locked in a Victorian ice castle two blocks from the death chamber and its dissipating cloud. We were lucky that Mrs. Munson, the eighty-seven-year-old B &B proprietor, picked up her phone at 11:26 P.M. Every other hotel that lined the highway was booked solid, their parking lots crammed with cars frosted like petits fours.

Bill is running the water in his bathroom. The sound rushes through the wall and under the one-inch gap beneath the connecting door. Mrs. Munson had called up to us three times as we climbed the stairs to say that the whole house was replumbed and wired with central heat, as if we might not understand the $300 price tag per room. I bounce lightly on the bed, running my fingers over the path of tiny stitches of red and yellow tulip quilt. I want to tell Mrs. Munson that her accommodations are worth every penny.

Lydia would love this room with the cheery lemon walls and the grim faces of dead people staring off the dresser. The iron lamp with a gold-fringed shade that glows like a tiny fire. The ice chips clicking against the window, chattering teeth.

She would lie on this bed and construct a doomed romance for the gauzy antique wedding dress that hangs like a ghost in the half-open wardrobe, and a more terrifying tale about the door to another dimension that hides in the shadows behind it. Maybe she’d combine the stories into one. This night would race ahead, a splendid, radiant adventure. We would be girls again, before monsters and devastating words, our imaginations locked together.

There’s a short knock on the connecting door.

“Come on in, Bill,” I say immediately.

Bill hesitates on the threshold, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that must have been hidden under his button-down. “I found toothbrushes in a cabinet in my bathroom. Want one?” I slide off the bed and walk over.

“Thanks.” I pick blue over yellow. “I could use a glass of wine, too. Maybe a shot of tequila.”

“I don’t think that’s stocked in the bathroom cabinet. I’m getting a bottle of water from the little fridge in the hall. Want one?”

“Sure.”

He disappears into his room before I can tell him to use my door to the outside hall. We are being so very polite. Earlier tonight, before we headed to the execution, Bill had punched a button on his computer and officially filed Terrell’s habeas corpus appeal with the federal court. It emphasizes the “junk science” DNA results on the red hair, the overwhelming statistics on faulty witness ID, and a statement from me, the living victim who thinks the real Black-Eyed Susan killer might still be stalking her and is willing to testify to it.

No mention of mysterious black-eyed Susan plantings or a buried book of Poe in Lydia’s back yard or a tooth in an old U-Haul box.

I have wished, more than once, that I had kept the sick piece of poetry I found under my tree house instead of ripping it to shreds and throwing away the pill bottle it came in. It might have been impossible to retrieve DNA or fingerprints from the paper or plastic all these years later, but it was tangible proof that I wasn’t making it up.

Bill’s habeas petition is far short of what he wanted to file at this point, but he is hoping it is enough for the judge to grant a hearing. He’s hoping that Jo will shake more loose from the bones in the meantime.

“Here you go,” Bill says. “I see you’ve got cable TV, too. It’s just a little hard to see around these tree trunk bedposts. Did you reach Lucas?”

“It’s all good. He’s got it covered. Charlie’s asleep.”

“Can I sit down for a second?”

“Sure.”

He pulls the straight-back chair from beside the dresser and sits on a needlepointed seat of roses. I reassume my position on the corner of the bed.

“You asked the other day if there’s hope,” Bill says. “After today… I just think it’s better if I’m honest. I think it is likely that Terrell is going to die. He’s on a runaway train. I know today was tough. Meeting Terrell. The execution. It doesn’t matter how you feel about the death penalty. I was all for the death penalty five years ago and it’s just as fucking grim either way.”

I’m stunned by this admission. I had never imagined him with a single doubt.

“Two things happened for me to change my mind. The duh lawyer moment when I realized that you’re never going to find a rich white guy on that gurney. And the Angie moment. She made me get to know a couple of guys on Death Row. Guilty ones, like a guy who broke in to a back yard high on meth and shot an elderly woman sitting in the garden in her wheelchair, so he could run inside and steal her purse. Angie didn’t think I could do this job to her satisfaction until I understood that it wasn’t just about proving innocence. That I needed to be all in. To understand that men on Death Row were human beings who did horrible things but that didn’t mean they were horrible things. The men that I’ve met who are sitting on Death Row are not the same men who committed those crimes. They are sober. Born again. Repentant. Or bat-shit crazy.” He eases back in the chair. “Occasionally, but not often, innocent.”

I wonder how long he’s been holding in this speech and why he chose tonight to give it. “I don’t know where I am on the death penalty,” I say. “I’m just… not… there.” I have promises to keep.

“And Terrell?”

“I can’t talk about Terrell.”

He nods. “I’ll let you get some sleep.”

As soon as he shuts the door between us, I’m desperate to wash away everything about this day. I enter a bathroom both bygone and modernly appointed, strip off all of my clothes, and lay them on the counter. I dread putting them on in the morning. They’re tainted by death. But I’d brought nothing else in my backpack-just a couple of PowerBars, a water bottle, a spool of silk thread and needles for an experiment in lace-making. And, at the last minute, I’d tossed the testimony inside, mostly in case Bill asked if I’d read it. I hadn’t. I’d opened the envelope, pulled out the papers, and stuck them right back in.

I push aside the shower curtain and crank the knob. The hot water responds, silky, hot, and immediate. I wash everything three times before stepping onto slick white subway tile and reluctantly tugging on the day’s underwear and a white cotton tank that had been my ineffective effort at winter layering. I towel-dry my hair into a frenzy of curls, too exhausted to use the expensive ceramic blow dryer on the counter.

I slip into chilly sheets, shivering, trying not to think about the grieving mother who raced to a morgue tonight. Who hoped, for the first time in years, to touch the body of her son, a killer, while it was still warm.

At 4:02 A.M., my eyes pop open. I’m gasping for breath as if someone just snatched a pillow from my face.

Lydia.

Cool light streams through the windows. The winter storm, asleep. My mind, racing.

To Charlie, safe at home, tangled in her comforter. I picture her breathing softly, in and out, and I breathe in rhythm with her. To Lydia, holding the paper bag to my face after a race, telling me to breathe, and I do. In and out.

Lydia, Lydia, Lydia. She’s invaded this room. The old Lydia, who checked my pulse, and the other one, who is scratching to get out of Bill’s envelope in my backpack.

Did I just miss the clues? Or are all of us just one betrayal, even one sentence, away from never speaking to each other again? I always, always defended my best friend. Even Granddaddy, a fan of her rabid imagination, wasn’t completely sure.

He asked once: “What do you see in Lydia?”

“She’s like no one else,” I had replied, a little defensively. “And loyal.”

She changed in the month before the trial. The old Lydia made fun of the push-up Wonderbra. She stuck her hands under her breasts, arranged them into little mountains and mocked the Eva Herzigova billboards. Look me in the eyes and tell me that you love me. She cocked her knee, planted her hands on her hips, thrust out her chest, and drawled: Who cares if it’s a bad hair day?

The new Lydia bought a Wonderbra and strapped it on. She complained that all high school boys wanted was a blank slate to draw their pencil on. Her grades dipped into the A minuses. She renounced Dr Peppers and Sonic cheese tots, and worst of all, she stopped her incessant, encyclopedic chatter. I knew I should press her, but I was trapped in my own head.

Old Lydia kept all of my secrets.

New Lydia told my secrets to the world.

I’m standing over his bed. The covers are a rumpled drift, like snow is falling through the ceiling. Bill is facing the other way. His body, rising and falling, slow and steady.

It isn’t like me to do this, I think, as I shed my T-shirt and it falls soundlessly to the floor. I don’t play games. I’m not impulsive. I’m not that girl. I lift up the quilt and slide in. Press my bare skin against the heat of his back. His breathing stills. He waits pregnant seconds before turning over to face me. He’s left a few inches of distance between us.

“Hey,” he says. It’s too dark to read his expression.

This was a mistake, I think. He’s already mentally moved on. He’s reaching out now to push me away.

Instead, his finger travels my cheek, the side without the scar. I’m suddenly aware that my face is wet.

“You OK?” His voice, husky. He’s being chivalrous, offering me a last chance to escape, even as I make a naked present of myself in his bed.

“I’m not that kind of girl.” I lean in. Drift my tongue along his ear.

“Thank God,” he replies, and tugs me to him.

A bird’s distress call slices the silence and jars me awake. It’s a high-pitched plea from a branch by the window. Why is my world frozen? Where did everybody go?

I crawl out of bed, away from the delicious heat of Bill’s body. His breathing, rhythmic.

I shut the connecting door, back on my side of it. I relive the intimacy of what just happened. Things I didn’t do unless I was in love. How can I ever be sure his attraction is to me, and not the shiny glitter of Black-Eyed Susan?

My red North Face jacket drips like blood off the closet doorknob. A fresh white orchid is stuck all alone in a slim vase, even though no one knew I was coming. A young woman in the antique frame on the dresser gazes at me coolly as if I have no place in her room.

She’s just a girl in this picture, about Charlie’s age. A thick, migraine-inducing braid is roped around her head. I imagine her with loosened braids and a little of Charlie’s MAC eye makeup. I pick up the picture and flip it over.

Mary Jane Whitford, born May 6, 1918, died March 16, 1934, when a convict roaming the sugarcane fields stepped in front of her carriage and startled the horses.

A tourist attraction. Like me.

It makes sense that Lydia would come to me here, in this room, embroidered like a doily in the dark fabric of this town. Where I’m reminded by a pretty girl in braids that we don’t get to choose.

I almost died three hours ago on I-45, halfway between Huntsville and Corsicana. What an ironic end that would have been-the lone survivor of the Black-Eyed Susan killer taken out by an eighteen-wheeler packed with baked goods. A truck driver a hundred feet in front of our car had skidded on a patch of ice into a perfect jackknife. If skidding were an Olympic sport, he’d win. All I could think for six seconds, while Bill and I hurled toward a picture of a giant pink confetti-sprinkled donut, was, Is it all going to come down to this?

Instead, it came down to me completely rethinking BMWs. Their drivers act superior for a reason.

Lucas is opening my front door before I can, a good thing because I don’t remember the new security code he insisted on, and a bad thing because Bill is still in the driveway making sure I get inside safely. I turn to wave but Bill is already backing the BMW onto the street. I hope he believed me when I said I wasn’t sleeping with Lucas.

Breakfast at the B&B was a little awkward. Bill sat across from me, at a table formally appointed with fragile crystal and an array of silverware, while Mrs. Munson sat at the head of the table and chattered on about how prisoners carved the intricate detail on the cupboard behind us. It was impossible to resist the work of art placed in front of us by Mrs. Munson’s daughter, a Dutch baby pancake with a strawberry fan on top and a spritz of powdered sugar.

Maybe Bill was upset that he woke up alone in bed. Later, in the car, we each seemed to be waiting for the other to bring up those thirty intimate minutes. It almost seemed like a dream conjured by a house that missed the noise and meaning of its old life-the people who wed on its lawn, gave birth in its beds, lay dead in their coffins in the front parlor. Except I can still feel his handprints on my skin.

After Bill avoided the near-accident, the silence in the car grew even more awkward. As if Bill was exhausted from saving lives.

Because I’m distracted by such boy-girl worries, still wearing death like a coat, still delirious not to be a Dutch baby pancake, it takes a second to register the expression on Lucas’s face.

“Welcome home.” He seems uneasy. He’s pulling the backpack off my shoulder as I walk the few steps into the living room.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Someone leaked your… feeling… that the Black-Eyed Susan killer has planted flowers for you over the years. A few quack experts on TV are chiming in on your mental state. There’s a shadowy picture going around of a woman with a shovel at the old Victorian house where you used to live. It’s supposed to be you. Well, it is you. But it’s hard to tell.”

“When did you find this out?”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’ve been sitting for hours.”

Lucas examines my face carefully. “Charlie texted me. It’s all over Twitter and Instagram.”

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”

He hesitates. “I had to turn off the ringer on the phone. Why do you even have a landline?”

“Is it OK if we don’t talk about this right now? It doesn’t really matter, does it? Terrell’s going to die. It’s impossible to protect Charlie.” I’ve moved over to the kitchen island, where Lucas has stacked the mail. He’s behind me, rubbing my shoulders. Kind. Concerned. But not helping. His fingers are grinding the death that clings to these clothes into my skin.

I try to be casual as I move away. “What’s this?” I’m fingering an opened cardboard box. A new paperback lies next to it on the counter.

“That came in the mail yesterday. Charlie opened the box because she thought it was Catch-22 and wanted to get going on it for an English class. She says she asked you to order it a week ago?”

“I forgot. I didn’t order Catch-22. Or any other books.”

“Your name is on the address label.” He turns the box over so I can see.

“Where’s the receipt?” I’m staring at the book cover. A filmy image of half-spirit, half-girl rising out of a rocky sea. Beautiful Ghost by Rose Mylett.

Rose Mylett. The name stirs something unpleasant at the back of my brain.

Lucas reaches inside the box. “Here’s the receipt. It looks like it was a gift. There’s a message. Hope you enjoy. Nothing else.”

Hope you enjoy. Ordinary words that crawl like three spiders up my back.

“Are you OK?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say dully. “It’s just a book. A gift. I need to get these clothes off.”

“One more thing. Your friend Jo dropped by for a second. You need to give her a call. That geochemist friend of hers is coming to town, the one who’s been working on the Susan bones. She wants you to meet him. Oh, and that tooth from your grandfather’s yard? It’s from a coyote.”

Twenty minutes until Charlie gets home from school. A little longer before Lucas returns from his hunt for Catch-22 and coffee with a “new friend”-Lucas code for “female.”

There’s no time to dry my hair. I wrap the belt of my robe more tightly around my waist, ransack Charlie’s drawer for some fuzzy socks, and plant myself on her unmade bed with my laptop. It had found a happy home in her sheets during my absence.

I am suffused with manic energy, pulsed back to life by the shower and the certainty that Rose Mylett means something. Her name is an insistent drill in my skull, more important than me, as the Grim Reaperette, skipping across Twitter right now, or calling Jo to hear about more hopeless efforts to pull names from dust. Those bones are stubborn.

I get an immediate hit. The first Rose Mylett that pops up isn’t a true crime writer. The image on my screen isn’t of an airbrushed author trying to look smart and beautiful and ten years younger.

This Rose Mylett is very dead. Murdered in 1888. A purported victim of Jack the Ripper. A prostitute also known as Catherine, Drunk Lizzie, and Fair Alice. She was wearing a lilac apron, a red flannel petticoat, and blue-and-red-striped socks when she was found with the imprint of a string around her neck.

For a second, I’m fourteen again, in the second row, smearing on Pink Lemonade Lip Smacker, listening to Lydia’s Jack the Ripper report that instilled nightmares in half of our class.

My fingers are still working in the present. They skip to the next page and, four links down, find Rose Mylett, author, Beautiful Ghost, What Elizabeth Bates is trying to tell us about her murder fifty years later. Yep, the same book as the one sitting on my kitchen counter. I read the plot summary quickly. This crime rings no bells whatsoever-the tale of a young English royal who vanished off the rugged coast of North Devon on her honeymoon-184 reviews, 4.6 stars. Published five years ago in the U.K. That.4 off of perfect would eat at Lydia. There’s no author bio. No other book by Rose Mylett. The site does politely suggest, “If you like this author, you might also like these books by Annie Farmer and Elizabeth Stride.” I Google quickly even though I already know. Two more Ripper victims. Clever, clever Lydia.

This has to be Lydia, right? Sending me flowers. Mail-ordering a book for my reading pleasure.

Still walking the earth after all. Still sticking her nose in evil. Stealing her pseudonyms off of pitiful dead whores. Making money off of excruciating sorrow. For some ungodly reason, she’s messing with me.

Why are you suddenly back, Lydia?

I snap the laptop shut.

My daughter is coming home.

For a few precious moments, I bask in the Bohemian essence of Charlie: the black chalkboard wall she painted herself last summer, now scribbled with Stephen Colbert quotes and skilled graffiti from her friends; her collection of moon-and-stars ornaments that hang on fishing line thumbtacked to the ceiling; the array of candles in various stages of melted life on the windowsill. The trophies she’s stuffed into the top shelf of her closet because they are “braggy.”

I’m hurriedly spilling detergent into the washing machine when I hear the click of the key in the lock.

“Mom?”

“In the laundry room!” I yell back. Three clunks. Her backpack, hitting the floor. One shoe off, and then the other. Good sounds.

Charlie wriggles her arms around me from behind just as I’m about to drop the lid on clothes that will probably never feel clean again.

“Why is it so freaking cold outside?” she asks. Not Why are you such a freak? The kind of mom who ends up on Twitter? I pull Charlie’s arms tighter.

“I missed you,” Charlie says. “What are we eating?” She releases me from our backward hug. I decide to throw some extra Biz into the washer.

“I missed you, too. I’m thinking of making eggala.”

“Awesome.” Eggala, short for egg a la goldenrod, our go-to comfort food. Hard-boiled egg whites chopped into a white sauce, slathered over white toast, sprinkled with powdery yolk. Lots of salt and pepper. Dr Pepper on the side. Aunt Hilda made it once a week for me when I was blind.

“I’m sorry about… today,” I say.

“No big deal. My friends don’t believe it. They are starting a campaign against it. Make some bacon, OK? Hey, don’t start the washer. I’ve got a ton of volleyball clothes. People forgot shi-stuff all week and Coach kept making us run. Everything stinks. Plus, some guy’s mom is losing it because he has this scabby thing going on with his foot. These people in Star Wars suits cleaned all the locker rooms and now every person in school smells like Lysol. Well, the guys smell like Lysol and Axe.”

“Hmm, not good.” I shut the lid. “Don’t worry, I’ll wash another load of your clothes after this.”

“But there’s hardly anything in there,” she protests. “I’ll go get the rest of it right now. I can’t forget anything tomorrow. The team can’t take any more running.”

She’s already stripped off her clothes. She’s standing there in her bra, panties, and knee-high socks, the cheerful, melodramatic all-American girl. Fourteen years ago, she was the adorable pink package with red fuzz sent to a teen-age girl named Tessie so she’d agree to stay on the earth.

“That’s OK.” I shut the washer lid firmly. “I don’t want these clothes to bleed on yours.”

I’m lying and telling the truth.

I’m in my pajamas when I remember to call Jo. She picks up on the first ring.

“Tessa?” she asks eagerly.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t call sooner.”

“It’s OK. I talked to Bill. He told me about your trip. Ice and sorrow and no tequila. Sounds grueling. Can you drop by my office tomorrow?”

“Yes. Sure.” My response is immediate even though all I really want is to lock the front door and never come out.

“I wanted to give you a heads-up before we meet because this will be part of his presentation.” Jo is rushing the words. “I’ve held something back from you because it just seemed… like a little too much. You know? A week and a half ago, one of my Ph.D. students was finishing up cataloging the remains of the Susans from the two caskets we exhumed. There was a lot of detritus, as you might imagine. Dirt, clay, dust, bits of bone. I just wanted to make sure every last piece of it was recorded after we figured out the original coroner missed that there was a third right femur. In fact, we’re looking back at some of the other cold cases he worked and have found other mistakes.”

“Just spit it out, Jo,” I say.

“My student had a hunch about a tiny piece of cartilage. I confirmed that hunch. The cartilage came from a fetus. One of the two unidentified girls was pregnant with a baby girl. We just tested the baby’s DNA against Terrell’s. There’s a 99.6 percent chance he isn’t the father. We’re throwing the baby’s DNA into criminal databases. Maybe we’ll get a hit. A new lead.”

Of course Terrell isn’t a match.

I’m counting in my head. Six girls in that grave. Merry and me. Hannah makes three. Two more unidentified sets of bones. And now a little girl. One of them is buzzing awake in my head, reminding me, just in case I forgot.

I’m the one with the answers.

September 1995

MR. VEGA: Tessie, can you tell us a little about Black-Eyed Susan glitter?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: It’s hard to explain. My friend Lydia came up with the name for it.

MR. VEGA: Just do your best. Maybe you could start by telling us about the time you stood outside in the middle of a bad storm and your father couldn’t get you to come in.

MS. CARTWRIGHT: I was thinking that if I stood out there long enough the rain would wash out all the Black-Eyed Susan glitter.

MR. VEGA: Can you see this glitter?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: No.

MR. VEGA: And when did you first notice it?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: The day I got home from the hospital. Again, I can’t see it. For a while, I decided it was in my conditioner. In the Ivory soap. In the detergent we put in the washer. I decided that’s why I could never get it out.

MR. VEGA: Do you have glitter on you now?

MS. CARTWRIGHT: Just a little. The worst time, it was in the Parmesan cheese I put on my spaghetti. I threw up all night.

17 days until the execution

There are no Susan bones on Jo’s conference table. Just that lonely brown Kleenex box. My heart feels like someone hammered a nail into it.

I was worried I would be late for Jo’s meeting, but it’s apparent as I open the door to the conference room that everyone else is even later. The room is empty except for the table and chairs, unless you count the requiem of pain that Hannah’s mother and brother left behind. If there were a black light to reveal grief and anger, it would surely be streaked in graffiti, Dalí-like, on these walls. Not only sucked from Hannah’s family, but all of the others who sat here waiting for their loved ones to be reduced to the stubborn rules of science.

The door clicks shut behind me. The fluorescent glare feels like it’s restricting the flow of blood to my head. I slide into the chair where Hannah’s brother sat at attention in his dress blues not so long ago and, for a few minutes, try not to think.

The door opens, and all of them spill into the conference room at once. Bill; Lieutenant Myron; Jo; and her Russian friend, Dr. Igor Aristov, the genius from Galveston.

“Igor, as in Igor Stravinsky,” Jo had told me last night on the phone, knowing that I was, of course, imagining the hunchbacked Frankenstein one and not the one who composed The Rite of Spring.

This Igor, though, is not hunched, or wearing a black hood, or creeping me out with white golf ball eyes. He is tall and fit, wearing khakis and a red Polo. His eyes are warm and hazel. Fine wrinkles run out of the corner of his eyes and stop short. There are the tiniest shreds of gray at his temples.

He immediately crosses the room to take my hand first. “You must be Tessa. It is a pleasure.” His accent is thick as paste, and most women would want him to say their names over and to never let go of their hands. Not me. I’m only in this room as a conciliatory gesture to Jo. I don’t want to hear Igor’s maybes and ifs. Unless this lab genius is about to pull a miracle out of his ass, I need to listen to Bill. I need to come to terms with Terrell’s fate.

Lieutenant Myron is the first to slide into a chair. I wonder if I look as raw as she does. “Everybody, sit,” Jo says. “We’re going to make this as quick as possible. Ellen had a rough night.”

“A cop and his bride of six months,” Lieutenant Myron explains. “He fired a shot into her face for every month of marriage. Go ahead, Jo.”

Jo nods. Her hands are agitated with no place to go. I’ve never seen her this visibly on edge. “Usually,” she says, “I will send Igor samples of powder from the bones and he emails his findings to me. But that’s white paper between two scientists. I want the three of you to hear everything straight from his mouth just in case some detail tickles your brain.” She is careful not to look at me. It is obvious I am the one whose brain needs the most tickling.

Igor has settled himself at the head of the table. “I am a geochemist. A forensic geologist. Do any of you understand the basics of isotope analysis?

“I will keep it as simple as possible,” Igor continues, without waiting for an answer. “I will refer to each case as Susan One and Susan Two. I received samples from the femur of Susan One and from the skull and teeth of Susan Two. I also received a scraping from a fetus that belongs to Susan Two. I was able to determine that one of the women lived much of her life in Tennessee, and the other was most certainly from Mexico.”

“What?” Bill’s surprise pops the tension in the room. “How can you possibly know that?”

Igor shifts a level gaze to Bill. “Your bones absorb the distinct chemical markers in the soil where you live. Some of it has retained the same ratio of elements-oxygen, lead, zinc, et cetera-for hundreds of thousands of years, all the way back to when rivers and mountains formed. And then there are more modern markers. It’s easy to tell that Susan One is American, not European, because America and Europe used different refinery sources for leaded gas.”

“We’re soaking crap from the air into our bones?” Lieutenant Myron is pressing forward, suddenly engaged. “Regardless, we don’t use leaded gas for cars anymore.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he replies patiently. “The residue from leaded gas, even though it’s been banned for years, still clings to our soil and soaks into our bones. Susan One’s markers also indicate that for a significant portion of her life she lived near a specific set of mines, probably near Knoxville, Tennessee. I can’t tell you how long exactly. Or specifically where she died. I might have been able to if I had a rib bone. Ribs are constantly growing and remodeling and absorbing the environment. We can usually use them to guess at a victim’s residency for the last eight to ten years of life. And, of course, a lot of the bones were lost, so the grave only provided random puzzle pieces.”

“Mexico. Tennessee.” Bill’s eyes are trained on Lieutenant Myron. “Your killer could be a traveler. Terrell was a homebody.”

“He’s not my killer.” Lieutenant Myron’s sarcasm gets zero reaction from Bill, who continues tapping notes into his phone.

“Come on, guys, let him talk,” Jo says.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Igor says. “It’s thrilling to be out of the lab, frankly. To meet you, especially, Tessa. I rarely meet any victims. It makes my science… alive. And this case is particularly interesting. I was able to discern even more from Susan Two and her unborn fetus. Susan Two’s bones reflect a corn-based diet and the elements of volcanic soil. If I could hazard a guess, I’d say she was born in or near Mexico City. I concur with Jo that she was in her early twenties when she died.”

“What else?” Bill asks.

Igor lays his palms flat on the table. “There was only one skull in that grave, which belonged to Susan Two. I asked Jo to send me scrapings of very specific teeth because the teeth can give us a timeline.” His voice, so far in college lecture mode, has picked up a little excitement. “It’s fascinating, really, what this science reveals. As children, we put things in our mouths. The teeth enamel absorbs the dust. The first molar forms when a person is three, and freezes the isotope signal for that period of time. So I can say that Susan Two’s first molar tells us she was living in Mexico as a toddler. The incisors close at age six to seven. The chemical markers in one of her incisors indicate she was still living in Mexico. The third molar’s signal shuts down in the teen-age years. For Susan Two, still Mexico. After that, I don’t know. Sometime in her late teens or early twenties, she moved, or was kidnapped.”

“This is remarkable.” Lieutenant Myron glances around the table. “Isn’t this remarkable?” I can’t tell whether she is genuinely engaged or giddy from lack of sleep and a steady diet of savagery.

“How are you certain she left Mexico alive?” Bill asks. “We know the bones were moved at least once because they didn’t originate in that field of flowers where Tessa was dumped.” He flicks a look up at me, as if remembering I’m in the room. “Sorry, Tessa. My point is, maybe her bones were simply moved across the border.”

“Her baby tells that part of the story,” Igor says quickly. “This young woman lived in Texas for at least the last few months leading up to her death. I know this because fetal bones are the most current marker we can get. They were still developing and therefore still absorbing the current environment at the time of death.”

Lieutenant Myron shoves fingers through her uprooted hair. “If she was an illegal immigrant, or kidnapped, that makes our job nearly impossible. Her family wouldn’t want to reveal its illegal status and certainly wouldn’t stick their DNA in a database. If they thought a drug cartel grabbed their daughter, there’s even less of a chance-they wouldn’t want to piss them off. Those guys hang headless bodies from bridges. The family would need to protect their other daughters if they have them.”

Jo nods her head in agreement. “She’s right. I’ve worked on some of the bones of girls and women who have been murdered and buried in the desert near Juarez. Talked to the families. They’re scared shitless. There are hundreds of girls in that desert. More every year.”

“I can only share my science.” Igor shrugs. “And, frankly, I drummed up a lot more than is usual in cold cases like this. This is a fairly new strategy in forensic science. We are lucky these women lived in places where we have established soil databases. My dream is that we can map out a good portion of the geological world in the next decade, but it’s spotty as hell at the moment.”

Bill’s face is inscrutable, but I know what he’s thinking. It’s too late for this. Someday, science may give the Susans back their names, but not in time for Terrell.

It’s Lieutenant Myron who jumps up, newly animated. She walks over and gives Bill a playful punch in the shoulder. “Cheer up. You’re one of those Texans who believes in evolution, aren’t you?” She turns to the rest of us.

“We’ll get busy with missing person and newspaper databases,” she says. “In an hour, we’ll be looking for missing girls in their late teens or early twenties from Tennessee and Mexico that fit our time frames. I’m most hopeful on the Tennessee angle. Good job, Dr. Frankenstein. This is something real. Y’all think I don’t care? I care. I just like real.”

She wouldn’t want to be in my head. I’m wondering why none of the Susans speak to me in Spanish.

I enter the house quietly and see my Death Row clothes folded and stacked neatly in a kitchen chair. I wonder if Charlie or Lucas alienated them from the others; it’s a toss-up as to which one sees through me better.

Charlie’s volleyball clothes are piled on the coffee table. A vacuum cleaner has swallowed up the popcorn crumbs in front of the couch. Lucas has been taking care of the mundane, important details of my life while I’ve been trying to fathom how we are so deeply connected to the earth and wind that it is cooked into our bones.

I have no problem believing Dr. Igor. It wasn’t exactly science, but there was a period when I believed that if someone brushed my shoulder by accident or shook my hand that black-eyed Susan pollen would rub off like a sticky curse. People had thought I was obsessive-compulsive because I ignored outstretched hands. I was just protecting them.

I’m a big girl now. I offer strangers the firm grip of my grandfather and swallow my daughter in a hug twice a day and let friends take a sip from my Route 44 Sonic iced tea, all without breaking out in a sweat. That doesn’t mean Black-Eyed Susan isn’t still who I am. It’s a brand. Like schizophrenic. Fat. ADD.

Lucas rises briefly from the couch, then falls back down when he sees me. He’s already asleep again, a soldier grabbing zzz’s while he can, so I don’t call out for Charlie. She’s probably in her room doing her complicated dance. Jane Austen, calculus, Snapchat. Repeat.

It’s at moments like these that I find it hard to explain to myself and to Charlie why Lucas and I don’t work as a permanent team. How many lieutenant colonels would fold girls’ underwear? I smell potato soup gurgling in the Crockpot because that is about the sum total of Lucas’s dinner repertoire. Potatoes, onions, milk, salt, pepper, butter. Bacon bits, for Charlie. If pressed, he can also kick out a pretty mean bologna and mustard sandwich.

Normal always tries to cuddle up with me but I tend to push it away. My mother was making brownies one second and then she was dead on the kitchen floor. That is my baseline for normal. After that, it’s a very jagged graph.

I set my purse on the kitchen counter. Beautiful Ghost has been shoved off to the side with some unopened mail. I want to read it, and I can’t bear to touch it. It will hold answers about Lydia I can’t fathom knowing, or I’ll prick my finger on its paper and fall into a cursed sleep. My fingers absently examine the foil-wrapped brick on the counter, which wasn’t there this morning. The scrawl on the masking tape label declares it to be Effie’s Carob Fig Bread Surprise. Almost all of Effie’s recipes have the word Surprise tacked to the end, and if they don’t, they should.

I wonder if her daughter is next door right now trying to politely chew and swallow. As I pulled in the driveway, I noted the Ford Focus with New Jersey plates parked at Effie’s. She had told me last week in excited tones that her daughter was venturing down South for a visit. I discounted it, thinking she was confused with the time that Sue made that false promise a year ago, or even three years ago. I don’t know what her arrival means after years of staying away, but I hope it’s good for Effie. Maybe Sue got a peek of the digger snatcher who lives in Effie’s brain, too. He’s a first-class thief all right, just not the kind Effie thinks. The sight of all those diggers lined up in a row still sends a chill through me.

I toss an afghan over Lucas and decide to check on Charlie. Her bedroom door is shut tight. I knock. No response. I knock again a little harder before turning the knob. The white lights strung around the ceiling are twinkling, a sign she was planning to be camped out here for a while. But no Charlie.

A slight noise on the other side of the wall, in my room. A sniffle? Is she sick? Seeking comfort in my bed while I’m off on a field trip with the Susans? Guilt washes over me. Lucas should have called to let me know. Maybe the flu shot didn’t take, or her allergies are acting up, or Coach scratched her fragile teen-age heart with an offhand remark.

No. Not sick. Charlie’s cross-legged on my bed like Lydia used to be, her curls falling forward, intent on what she’s reading. There’s a frenzy of paper everywhere, littering the bed, the old antique rug on the floor. My backpack rests against the pillow behind her. It’s unzipped for the first time since I returned from Huntsville. I want to scream No, but it’s way too late.

Charlie’s cheeks are slick with tears. “I was looking for a highlighter.”

She holds up a piece of paper.

I know in that instant that our relationship will never be the same.

“Is this why you won’t eat Snickers bars?” she asks.

Before I can utter a word, Lucas is there. He’s holding out my phone, which I’d left on the kitchen counter with my purse.

“It’s Jo. She says that you have to come back to her office. Immediately.”

September 1995

MR. LINCOLN: Lydia… I can call you Lydia, right?

MS. BELL: Yes.

MR. LINCOLN: Exactly how long have you known Tessa Cartwright?

MS. BELL: Since second grade. Our desks were in alphabetical order. Tessie’s aunt used to say that God made out that seating chart.

MR. LINCOLN: And you’ve been best friends since? For ten years?

MS. BELL: Yes.

MR. LINCOLN: So when Tessie went missing you must have been terrified?

MS. BELL: I had a really bad feeling right away. We had like a secret way of letting each other know we were OK. We’d call the other one and let the phone ring twice. And then we’d wait five minutes and let the phone ring twice again. It was kind of a silly thing we did when we were little. But I stayed home and waited.

MR. LINCOLN: Tessie didn’t call? And you never left the house?

MS. BELL: No. Well, I left for about ten minutes to check her tree house.

MR. LINCOLN: Check the tree house for… Tessa?

MS. BELL: We used to leave notes in this little crack.

MR. LINCOLN: And there was no note?

MS. BELL: No note.

MR. LINCOLN: Were your father and mother home during this period of waiting while Tessa was missing?

MS. BELL: Yes. My mom was. My dad had some emergency at work. A car’s engine exploded or something. He came home later.

MR. LINCOLN: Yes, we’ll get back to that. In an earlier deposition, you mentioned that you have had nightmares since Tessa’s attack. Is that right?

MS. BELL: Yes. But not as terrible as Tessie’s.

MR. LINCOLN: Can you describe some of yours?

MS. BELL: There’s really just one. I get it practically every night. I’m standing on the bottom of the lake. It’s cliché. Freud wouldn’t be too interested, you know?

MR. LINCOLN: Is Tessie in this dream?

MS. BELL: No. I can see my face but it’s not my face. My father is reaching his hand down from his boat. He was always freaked one of us was going to go under. Anyway, his college ring falls into the water and starts sinking. He was always freaked about that happening, too, and never wore it on the boat. He went to Ohio State for a year. He’s really proud of that. He loves that ring. He bought it at some garage sale.

MR. LINCOLN: I know this is hard but try to keep your answers just a bit simpler, OK? Tell me this: Was Tessa ever afraid of your father?

16 days until the execution

This time, I’m not the first one there. It’s a little past midnight. The Kleenex box on the conference room table has been disturbed. Moved to the very far edge of the table. Jo is pulling on latex gloves. She’d told me on the phone that I needed to drive over, now, but I couldn’t leave Charlie in a paper bed of my testimony. We had to talk. Charlie is a little Tessie, sometimes. Too quick to reassure adults that she’s OK.

Jo wouldn’t tell me why I had to come. It was maddening. Drive carefully, she urged. Once I unwrapped myself from Charlie, I drove at warp speed, through two red light cameras, wondering what waited for me. My monster in handcuffs. More Susan skeletons grinning in ugly glee.

There is one other person in the room. A young girl by the window who is very much alive. A silky black ponytail trails down her back. She is gazing out the window at silvery trees, lit by pale moonlight, on the lawn of the Modern Art Museum across the street. Two stainless steel trees, their branches intricately, tediously soldered, pulling toward each other as if by magnetic force. That is how I feel about this girl, as if she can’t turn toward me fast enough. When she does, I have an immediate impression of familiarity. Of longing.

“This young woman is Aurora Leigh,” Jo says. “She says she is Lydia Bell’s daughter.”

It’s not like it wouldn’t have been my first guess. The hair is darker, the skin even more ivory, but the eyes, full of dreamy blue intelligence, unmistakable.

And her name. Aurora Leigh. The epic heroine of Lydia’s favorite poem.

“Hello, Aurora,” I say. I’m trying to tamp down the words being silently pelted at Aurora by the Susans. Liar, screams one. Imposter.

Jo is drumming her fingers on the table, drawing my attention back. “Aurora went to the police station first. They called Lieutenant Myron, who is off duty. She told the front desk to call me.”

“I was making a scene.” Aurora plops into the nearest chair and drops a handful of crumpled tissue onto the table. Her nose is shiny and red and pierced by a tiny silver ring. Her lovely eyes are bloodshot. “I’m sorry. I’m calmer now.”

“You sit, too, Tessa.” She turns to Aurora. “Do you want me to explain?” She touches Aurora’s shoulder, and she flinches.

“No,” says Aurora. “That’s OK. I’ll do it. I’m OK. Really. I just wanted someone to listen to me. You listened.” She turns to me with eagerness. “I saw a story on Fox about the box that was dug up. It’s my mom’s stuff. It belongs to me.”

“But I explained to Aurora that it is still evidence,” Jo says. “That she can maybe get it back later.”

“I don’t want it later. I want to see it now.” Matter-of-fact and petulant at the same time. Reminds me of Charlie. This girl couldn’t be more than two years older. Sixteen. Seventeen, at most.

“I didn’t know Lydia had a daughter.” My voice sounds surprisingly calm. “Where is your mother right now?”

“I’ve never met her.” Aurora’s words are an assault. Accusatory, even.

Jo forms her face into a professional mask. “Aurora tells me she has lived with her grandparents since she was born. Mr. and Mrs. Bell. Although Aurora says she just learned that they changed their last name. They told her that her mother was dead and they had no idea who her father was. She had no reason to doubt them. Then her grandmother died. Her grandfather had a stroke last year and was moved to a full-term care facility. Aurora has been living with a foster family in Florida. I’ve already called them to let them know she’s OK.”

“So…” I begin.

“So a lawyer cleaned out her grandparents’ safe deposit box a month ago. Birth certificates. Tax documents. It’s all there in Aurora’s bag.” She points to a stuffed, pink-flowered tote.

“They lied to me. Every single day, they lied to me. I’m not Aurora Leigh Green. I’m Aurora Leigh Bell.” Aurora pulls out another Kleenex. “I was saving money for a private investigator. I was Googling around in the meantime. It freaked me out when Lydia Bell’s name came up a couple of times. You know, in those Black-Eyed Susan stories. But I didn’t know if it was the same Lydia Bell. I didn’t want it to be. And then I saw that story about the police digging at my grandparents’ old house. They said their real names on the air. So I knew. I couldn’t wait anymore. I stole some money out of my foster mom’s purse for the bus.” Tears are lurking again. “She’s going to kill me. She probably won’t take me back. She’s not that bad really.”

“She’s just happy that you’re OK, Aurora. Remember, I talked to her and she told you not to worry.” Jo, reassuring. “Aurora is worried that her mother was a victim of the Black-Eyed Susan killer and that’s the reason her grandparents went into hiding. I told her there is absolutely no evidence that she was. I explained that you could tell her the most about her mother. What she was like. Who she was dating.”

I open my mouth, and close it.

As far as I knew, Lydia only made it as far as third base one time, with our school’s star third baseman. Lydia reveled in the literalness of it. She even told me she was considering similar conquests with the first and second basemen. It made me ache for her. When it came to Lydia, boys just wanted a cheap thrill: to meet a beautiful, crazy girl in the dark and hope she didn’t bring an axe.

Aurora’s face is twisting with impatience. Here she is, defiant, flesh and blood evidence that I never dreamed existed. I feel ineptly unable to answer without hurting her. Aurora’s eyes are incandescent holes despite the harsh light of the conference room. Even with the nose ring and a scowl, she’s a stunning replica of her mother.

“Jo, why are you gloved?” I ask.

“I was about to swab Aurora’s DNA. I told her I can’t give her the evidence, but I can run her DNA through all of the databases.”

“So that maybe she can find my father. That was blank on my birth certificate.” Aurora is so hopeful. Innocent. “Maybe he didn’t know about me.”

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Sixteen.”

So Lydia was pregnant when she hurtled out of town. The picture is a little clearer. Why the Bells might flee. Mrs. Bell believed brides should bring their hymens to the altar intact. Sperms and eggs instantly make microscopic people. A pregnant daughter would be the ultimate humiliation in her world. Abortion, not an option. But changing their names?

“Jo says you were best friends.” Lydia’s daughter is begging me. For anything.

Aurora’s arrival seems a little too pat.

She might be telling the truth. Or she might be a pawn of her mother’s.

“She was loyal,” I lie. “Like no one else.”

September 1995

MS. BELL: No. Tessie is not afraid of my dad. He could be a little mean after a few beers but he never bothered Tessie. She was so tough sometimes. Stood up for everybody. One time I told her that I could never handle it if I’d been the one to wake up in that grave. Don’t get me wrong. She’s messed up. Or maybe she’s just mortal now like the rest of us. But I’d be totally nuts. And you know what she said? She said, that’s why it happened to me and not you. Not to make me feel guilty or anything, or be martyr-y, just because she really can’t stand to see anybody else hurt. You need to know something… Tessie is the best.

MR. LINCOLN: Again, try to keep your answers short and confine them to my questions. I’m sure Mr. Vega has told you this, too.

MR. VEGA: I’m not objecting.

MR. LINCOLN: Lydia, let me ask you this. Are you ever afraid of your dad?

MS. BELL: Only sometimes. When he drinks. But he’s getting help for that now.

MR. LINCOLN: Lydia, your dream sounds pretty scary to me. At the bottom of a lake with no one coming to your rescue.

MS. BELL: I never said that no one comes to the rescue. My dad always dives in after me.

MR. LINCOLN: Interesting that you never mentioned that ending when I took your deposition. How can you be sure your father wasn’t going for that college ring he loved so much?

MR. VEGA: OK, your honor, now I’m objecting.

12 days until the execution

“Reconstructing memory doesn’t work this way,” Dr. Giles says. “It’s not a magic act. And I’m not the expert on light hypnosis. I’ve told you that.”

I’m staring down the same empty velour chair as last time, the one where Dr. Giles suggested I picture my monster and give him a pop quiz. There’s a frizzy blond Barbie nestled in the corner, her arms confirming a touchdown. “So tell me how it works,” I beg.

“Some therapists use the imagery of a rope or ladder. Or tell you to watch a painful event from above, as a voyeur. There’s a famous quote-that traumatic memory is a series of still snapshots or a silent movie and the role of therapy is to find the music and words.”

“So, let’s find the music,” I say. “And the pictures. I pick… watching from above. Let’s make my movie.”

I don’t tell her about Aurora, who is safely back in Florida with her foster mom.

I don’t tell her that I’m giving Lydia the starring role today. She always wanted it, and I was always snatching it away. I was the little girl with the dead mommy. I was the Black-Eyed Susan.

I’m hoping Lydia will appear in that chair and tell me something I don’t know. She usually does.

“If you really want to try hypnosis, I’ll recommend another therapist. I’m not on board here. This is not what I do. I thought you understood this.”

“I don’t want another therapist.”

My forehead begins to sweat. I’m hanging from the ceiling, a bat in the dark.

There I am. In the back of the parking lot. Tying my Adidas shoe with the pink laces that were in my Christmas stocking. Glancing up. There’s Merry, gagged with something, pressing her face against a backseat window of a blue van. Me, running. Clinging to a sticky pay phone. Praying the silhouette turning the ignition in the van didn’t see me. Sudden, excruciating pain in my ankle. Concrete slamming up. His face, looming. Strong arms, lifting me. Black.

“Tessa. Are you seeing something?”

Not now. I can’t stop the movie to talk. I want more. I close my eyes into a light so bright it burns. There’s Lydia, dancing with the Susans. Pushing them off the floor. Voguing to Madonna in my kitchen. Brushing my hair until my scalp tingles. Imitating Coach Winkle’s sex talk: Every time you think about doing it, I want a picture of my head to pop up. I’ll be saying: “Genital warts, genital warts!”

Images, smashing into my brain. Lydia’s drawing of the red-haired girl and the angry flowers. Mr. Bell, drunk. The dogs yipping and spinning in crazy circles. Mrs. Bell crying. Lydia and I pedaling our bikes to my house with our bodies slung low and forward, feet churning as fast as they can. Mr. Bell’s Ford Mustang breathing like a nasty dragon in the driveway while we hide in the flower garden. My father talking to him in calm tones on the porch. Sending him away. It was one night, and a hundred nights.

Me, the protector. A sob catches in my throat.

Cut. New scene. Here comes the doctor. Right on cue. I’ve seen this part of the movie before. There’s Lydia. And over there, under that tree, are Oscar and me. Such a pretty campus to take a walk. If I’d let Oscar tug me the other way, I never would have seen them.

The camera weaves in close. I can almost read the titles of the library books crammed in Lydia’s arms. Lydia, the pretend college girl. Yammering up at the doctor in her usual, earnest frenzy. The doctor, hurried, trying to be polite, looking like he wants nothing more than to get away.

September 1995

MR. LINCOLN: Your honor, permission to treat the witness as hostile. I’ve been patient but I’m in the home stretch here. This witness has skirted around my last five questions.

JUDGE WATERS: Mr. Lincoln, I see nothing hostile about a hundred-pound girl wearing glasses unless it’s that her IQ is larger than yours.

MR. LINCOLN: Objection… to you… your honor.

JUDGE WATERS: Ms. Bell. You need to answer. Did Tessie lie about anything related to this case?

MS. BELL: Yes, your honor.

MR. LINCOLN: OK, let’s go over this one more time. Tessie lied about the drawings?

MS. BELL: Yes.

MR. LINCOLN: And she lied about when she could see again?

MS. BELL: Yes.

MR. LINCOLN: And before the attack, she lied about where she was going running?

MS. BELL: Yes. Sometimes.

MR. LINCOLN: And your father also lied about where he was going sometimes?

MR. VEGA: Your honor, objection.

9 days until the execution

A little more than a week before Terrell is scheduled to die, and I’m cleaning out Effie’s freezer.

The judge rejected Terrell’s habeas corpus appeal five hours ago, news leached to the bottom of my stomach. Bill delivered the announcement by phone. I could barely listen after I heard the word rejected. Something about how the judge felt it was a tough call but there was no convincing evidence that Terrell was innocent and the jury got it wrong.

It’s not like the police aren’t still plugging away with Igor’s new theories. They’ve turned up sixty-eight names, all females in their late teens to early twenties from Mexico and Tennessee who went missing in the mid-to-late ’80s-Jo’s best estimate on the age of the bones.

The problem is, that list of sixty-eight translates to hundreds of searches for family members who have moved or died or who don’t answer their phones or who simply won’t give up their DNA to help identify the Susans. At least fifteen people contacted by the police are family members still listed as suspects in some of those cases. Some of them are probably killers, just not the one we’re looking for. Eleven girls on the list turned out to be runaways found alive but never removed from the missing persons database. It’s a slog that could take months or years, all of it surmised from an ancient code from the earth. It seems impossible. I can’t even figure out the best way to scrape purple Popsicle juice out of Effie’s freezer.

“Effie, keep or toss?” I know the answer-it’s been my mantra for the last hour-but I’m asking anyway. I’m holding up a plastic bag that contains the battered paperback copy of Lonesome Dove. Gus McCrae and Pea Eye Parker had been freezing to death for years behind several foil-wrapped items furry with ice crystals. Those have solidly hit the trashcan outside without Effie’s knowledge.

“Keep,” Effie admonishes me. “Certainly. Lonesome Dove is my favorite book of all time. I put it in there so I’d know where it was.” I’m never sure with Effie if these explanations are truth or cover-up.

Two days after Terrell is scheduled to die, Effie is moving to live with her daughter in New Jersey. I can barely breathe thinking about the absence of Effie’s spirit in this house, but here I am, helping my friend load her life into boxes. At least that was the plan.

So far, she has not relinquished her hold on anything, including four iron skillets that are almost exactly alike except for the stories fried into their black history. In one, Effie made her husband’s favorite Blueberry Surprise pancakes on the day he died. The skillet with the slightly rusted handle belonged to her mother. Effie almost came to blows over it post-funeral with a sister who can’t cook a lick. The other two leave the best, crispest almost burnt crust on okra and cornbread, and you always have to have two pans of okra.

Effie is rather elegantly sprawled on the kitchen floor in a pair of old red silk pajamas, looking like an old Hollywood diva, if that’s possible sitting on yellowed black-and-white linoleum surrounded by sixty years of pots and pans. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, is a wreck. She has spent the last three days yanking every single thing out of the cabinets, shelves, and closets and tossing it onto the beds, the floor, the tables, any available open space. The effect is that of a tornado hitting an antiques store.

“Sue, you’re awfully quiet. Is it that damn Terrell Goodwin business?”

My fork stops its scraping. My head emerges from the freezer. Effie called me Sue, her daughter’s name, while asking me the most pointed question of our relationship.

“Don’t look so surprised. My mind’s not that far gone, hon. I thought you might finally bring it up after the police broke down my door that night and ripped off my earphones. But you didn’t, and that’s fine. It’s not even a smidgen of who you are, honey. Who you are-well, I’m going to miss who you are something terrible. And Charlie. I want to see that girl grow up. She’s going to teach me to do that Sky-hype thing. Did I tell you that Sue’s fiancé and I had a real good talk last night? He’s fifth-generation New Jersey Italian. He told me it’s always been an honor and privilege in his family to take care of the old. At least that’s what I think he said. I couldn’t understand half the conversation. I thought he had a speech impediment for the first fifteen minutes.”

I laugh because I’ve listened to Effie rattle off fluent French in her East Texas drawl, and it wasn’t as pretty as a Hoboken accent. It’s a slightly uneasy laugh, because I’m not interested in any heartfelt, tell-all goodbye with Effie. I’m going to leave her dreams alone. I don’t want her to see my eyes dilate into black holes or for her to walk endless fields of yellow flowers that hold the scent of death. I don’t want her to wake up still smelling it.

I’m relieved when my phone begins to buzz somewhere near a counter of jumbled spices. I dig it out from under yellowed directions for a Sunbeam Percolator and a recipe for Doc’s Gay Salad. I have no memory of placing my phone under anything; it’s like the kitchen is turning into some form of kudzu and growing over itself.

Jo’s name is on the screen. An instant sense of dread, pickled with hope.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hi, Tessa. Bill told me he let you know about the judge’s ruling. Sucks.”

“Yes, he called.” I want to say more, but there’s Effie.

“I’m a little worried about Bill. He looks like he hasn’t slept for days. I’ve never seen him quite like this with a case. I think it’s all tied up in his grief for Angie. Like he can’t let her down.”

If I start to feel something for Bill or Terrell right now, I will feel everything. I already sense the hot well building behind my eyes.

“There’s another reason I’m calling,” Jo continues. “The cops got the guy who stuck those signs in your yard. He was caught vandalizing the lawn of a Catholic priest in Boerne. I thought you might want to get a restraining order. He’s free on bond. His name is Jared Lester. He’ll probably end up with a severe fine and community service instead of jail time.”

“OK. Thanks. I’ll think about it.” I’ll think about not purposely pissing him off right now.

“One more thing. He claims, rather proudly, that he planted the black-eyed Susans under your windowsill several weeks ago. I’ve checked, and the potting soil in his garage has the same basic signature as what I sampled from your yard that day. I don’t think he’s lying. He brought it up voluntarily in the police interview. Here’s the deal. He’s only twenty-three.” Meaning, not my monster. I do the math. He was five when I was tossed in that grave.

Effie’s eying my throat, where my pulse drums. One of my tears drops onto the yellowed coffeepot instructions with the cartoon percolator with a Mr. Kool-Aid face. I begin to methodically stand the spices into efficient lines.

How long has Jo known? Long enough that the police have caught this man, interviewed him, and set his bail. Long enough to run tests on potting soil.

I should give Jo a break, of course. As she ran that test, she had to know the outcome couldn’t reassure me that much.

My monster is still out there.

This time, the door opens, and it’s me on the other side wanting in.

I search his face, and my heart cracks.

I silently beg him to see all of me. The Black-Eyed Susan who talks to dead people, and the artist with the half-moon scar who tortures paint and thread to make sure beauty exists somewhere inside her. The mother who named her daughter Charlie after her father’s favorite Texas knuckleball pitcher, and the runner who has never stopped running.

“You look like hell,” I say.

“What are you doing here?” As he says this, Bill is pulling me across the threshold into his arms.

We haven’t spoken much or texted in the last several days. Bill doesn’t appear to have showered for most of them. I don’t mind. He smells alive. His chin scrapes my cheek like sandpaper. Our lips connect and, for a very long time, that’s all there is.

“This is a bad idea,” he says, breaking us apart.

“That’s my line.”

“Seriously. I’m running on fumes. Let me get you a beer and we’ll talk.”

“I’m so sorry about Terrell,” I say, following him inside. “Sorry for everything.” My words, inadequate.

“Yes. Me, too.” His voice is grim.

“I didn’t mean to be so short on the phone. I was just… shocked.”

He shrugs. “Next stop, U.S. Court of Appeals. A bunch of buffoons with rubber stamps. The habeas appeal was our real shot. Have a seat and I’ll be back with your beer.”

He disappears through an archway, leaving me to glean what I can from the first encounter with his living space. I scour the art on the walls the way other people surreptitiously peer at bookshelves and CD collections. Or used to anyway. A few decent modern prints with reds, greens, and golds. Nothing that provides insight into Bill’s soul, and if it does, I don’t want that to pop my bubble.

I pick out a buttery white leather chair and wonder a little too late if I’d gotten a nice young law intern named Kayley into trouble by bullying her for Bill’s home address. When I showed up in Angie’s basement, Kayley dripped as much exhaustion as Bill. I wore her down with my red eyes, driver’s license, and a rambling dissertation on Saint Stephen, still being stoned to death over Angie’s shrine of a desk. Kayley spent much of the dissertation time trying not to gape at my scar, openly impressed that she was meeting the myth.

All of which led me to this 1960s-era converted garage, which I’m sure is worth about $600,000 plus. It nests in the winding waterways and trees of Turtle Creek, a famous, wealthy old Dallas neighborhood where Indians used to camp. I love the play of light on hardwoods, the gracious white brick fireplace with a grate covered in ash, even the concentric coffee rings near the open laptop on the coffee table. The art, not so much. It matches these pillows.

Bill appears with two St. Pauli Girls in his hands. I want to think this means he took note of my favorite beer and stocked it.

“In case you’re wondering,” he says, gesturing with his beer, “I’m a squatter. My dad enjoys flipping town homes after retirement, which I guess is better than playing baccarat at Choctaw. My mother decorates. So I’m just here making it look lived in until it sells.” He takes a swig and settles on the couch directly across from me.

“I have to confess,” he says. “Kayley called to warn me you were coming.”

“So you could get your gun out.” I smile.

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time,” he says.

I switch the subject back to Terrell. “How many times have you won a reprieve in a death penalty case?”

“A reprieve? Five or six. That’s the real goal most of the time. To extend life as long as possible, because if you’re sitting on Death Row in Texas, you are most likely going to die on that gurney. I’ve only worked one case with a Capra-esque ending. Angie was the lead. I don’t do this full time. But you know that.”

“That one time… you must have been… elated,” I say.

“Elated isn’t exactly the right word. It doesn’t change that the victim died a horrible death. There’s a family out there who might always feel like we set a killer free. So I’d say, more like very, very, very relieved. Angie insisted we did our high-fiving in private.” Bill pats the side of the couch. “Come here. You’re too far away.”

I get up very slowly. He pulls me down into his arms and drags a kiss along my mouth. “Lie down.”

“I thought this wasn’t a good idea.”

“This is a very good idea. We’re going to sleep.”

The fierce pounding rocks both of us upright and fully awake.

Bill jumps from the couch, leaving me gracelessly sprawled against the pillows. He’s already peering through the peephole before my feet touch the floor. In a second, I’m beside him. “Go into the kitchen,” he orders, “if you want to keep us a secret.”

I don’t budge, and he turns the knob.

I’m blinded by lime green. A ski jacket meant to stand out to rescue helicopters on a snowy slope. Jo’s head is sticking out of it. She pushes her way into the room like she’s been here before.

She’s quickly figuring out what my presence means. “Tessa? Why…?” She shakes her head. “Oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter. You should know, too.”

“Know what?” I’m awkwardly smoothing my hair.

“About Aurora.”

“Is something wrong? Is she hurt?” Or dead?

“No, no. It’s her DNA. We found a match. It’s bizarre.”

“Come on, Jo. What’s up?” Bill, impatient. Watching my face.

“We have a DNA match from Aurora to the fetal bone from the Black-Eyed Susan grave. They shared the same father. They would have been half-sisters.”

“A DNA match to… Lydia’s daughter?” Bill is asking the incredulous words while I’m trying to catch up. To let go of the picture of Lydia and a high school boy in a naked tangle.

Lydia slept with the killer. Or she was raped.

I’m the one with the answers, a Susan whispers.

Bill’s phone begins to bleat. He pulls it out of his pocket, annoyed, and glances at the screen. His face is suddenly locked down.

“I have to take this.” He points a finger at Jo and me. “Hold off saying more until I’m off the phone.”

Jo guides me by my elbow back to the couch. The Susans are whispering very low, like the wind humming through that tiny hole in my tree house.

That night, the Susans come to me in my sleep. They are frenzied, running around, a blur of youthful limbs and bright swirling skirts, more alive than I’ve ever seen them. They are searching for my monster in every nook and cranny as if their mansion in my head is about to explode. As if it is for the very last time.

They are shouting and cursing at each other, at me.

Wake up, Tessie! they are shrieking. Lydia knows something! They are spreading out like Army men. Opening and slamming closet doors, tearing off bedcovers, dusting cobwebs off chandeliers, ripping weeds out of the garden. Merry, sweet Merry, is falling to her knees to beg God’s mercy.

A Susan calls out. Over here! I’ve found the monster! She’s telling me to hurry, hurry, hurry because she can’t hold him down for long.

I teeter on the edge of consciousness. The Susan is planted on top of him, her red skirt swirled over his body like blood. She is using every last bit of strength to twist his neck around so that I can see. A worm is gyrating out of his mouth. His face is caked with mud.

I wake up sobbing.

My monster is still wearing a mask. And Lydia knows exactly who he is.

September 1995

MR. LINCOLN: I think we’re all done, Ms. Bell. Thank you for your testimony. I’m sorry it’s been a difficult day for you.

MS. BELL: It wasn’t difficult. I have one more thing. It’s about Tessie’s journal.

MR. LINCOLN: I wasn’t aware she had a journal.

MR. VEGA: Objection. I know nothing about this journal. It is not in evidence, your honor, and I don’t see its relevance.

JUDGE WATERS: Mr. Lincoln?

MR. LINCOLN: I’m thinking.

JUDGE WATERS: Well, while you’re thinking, I’m going to ask the witness a few questions.

MR. VEGA: Objection. I believe you are overstepping a little here, your honor. We only have this witness’s word that it exists.

MR. LINCOLN: I believe I have to object as well, your honor. I’m walking a ledge just like Mr. Vega here, not knowing its contents.

JUDGE WATERS: Thank you for your united interest in pursuing the truth, gentlemen. Look at me, Ms. Bell. I need you to speak very generally. Did you bring up the journal because you think there is something in it pertinent to this trial?

MS. BELL: Most of it was running times, personal stuff. Sometimes she’d read to me from it. A fairy tale she made up. Or show me a little sketch she did. Or…

JUDGE WATERS: Hold on, Ms. Bell. Did Ms. Cartwright let you read her journal?

MS. BELL: Not exactly. When she was acting funny, I would, though. And I’d go through her purse or drawers to make sure she wasn’t hoarding Benadryl and stuff. That’s what best friends do.

JUDGE WATERS: Ms. Bell, I need you to answer my question with a yes or a no. Do you believe there is something in the journal that is pertinent to this trial?

MS. BELL: That’s hard to say but, you know, like, I wonder. I never read the whole thing. I skimmed. We used to do our journals together. It was one of our things.

JUDGE WATERS: Do you know where Tessie’s journal is?

MS. BELL: Yes.

JUDGE WATERS: And where is that?

MS. BELL: I gave it to her psychiatrist.

JUDGE WATERS: And why did you do that?

MS. BELL: Because it had a picture she drew when she was blind of a red-haired mermaid jumping off her grandfather’s roof. You know, killing herself.