I fall hard and noisy, slamming into the wall. I push myself into a sitting position and peel a photograph off my cheek.
My uncle’s arms are tossed in the air, face to the sky, in the throes of a holy baptism. My father, half-consumed by the lake, is staring straight at the camera, right at me, like he knew this moment between us would come.
He’s telling me to get the hell up.
Save yourself.
I get up.
I take the boots.
I leave the memories.
As the door shuts behind me, I catch the edge of Finn’s voice calling my name.
I peel out of the driveway for the lake, fingering the silver chain around my neck, worrying it across my lips, sucking the key. It tastes like blood. Or blood tastes like it.
I used to have the same bad habit with another necklace, one with a silver heart. Wyatt gave it to me. It used to drip out of my mouth any time I studied, watched TV, stressed out because I heard shots fired on the radio in my bedroom and my father wasn’t home yet.
I was wearing the necklace the night of the crash. Every time I hooked it around my throat afterward, it licked like fire.
I did what Maggie told me to. I dropped the necklace in a red velvet pew at Sacred Heart of Mary on Church Street.
Maggie and I both agreed that the kindly, red-faced Catholic priest in town was the best man for the job of disposing of a delicate chain possessed by something evil. Not my uncle. He would call us silly girls. Tell us we were just giving the devil more power than he deserved.
I have no idea what Father Dennis did with the necklace, but I’m not sure even he could get the devil out of what’s riding in my backseat.
My father’s boots. Angel’s glittery gold scarf.
I don’t care. All I want is for them to give me answers.
Dr. Camila Perez is waiting on the park bench, like she promised, the lake stretching out behind her, tepid and dull, like it has no secrets.
In her orange shirt and bright yellow pants, Dr. Perez is an out-of-place bird—a very cheerful dresser for someone who spends most of her life examining scraps of people that no longer look human.
She’s critically eyeing the two brown bags I’m carrying, one in each hand.
“Have you been careful about contamination?” she asks when I’m a few feet from her. “Wait. Have you been … crying?”
“I’m fine,” I say, brushing off the concern in her face. “And I’ve been careful. Look, I want to say what I should have said on the phone … this isn’t quid pro quo. Help me, or don’t help me. No hard feelings. You owe me nothing.”
“I will owe you for the rest of my life.” Dr. Perez pats the bench for me to sit beside her. “My daughter is settled back at UT. Because of you, because of that letter you wrote to the judge on sentencing, that boy has at least another three years behind bars. It’s still a surreal dream—that he pushed my baby out of a car on the highway in the middle of the night because she wanted to break up. I don’t want to think what would have happened if you and your partner hadn’t found her. When that boy does get out, I can’t promise her brothers aren’t going for him.”
“Stop there. I never heard that.”
“What do you have for me?”
I hold up the bag with Angel’s things. “Case No. 1. This contains a water bottle and a sequined gold scarf. The scarf is filthy and was out in a field. Dust and particles from God knows where, maybe the beginning of time. Only one girl drank out of the water bottle so it should be pretty clean. I know this because I gave it to her. I’m looking for her DNA on the bottle and whatever you can find on the scarf.”
“This girl—she’s alive?”
“I need an ID. Please don’t ask me anything else.”
I set the bag on the bench and hold up the other one. “Case No. 2. A pair of boots. Again, I’m looking for DNA. Maybe more than one person’s. And again, anything else. Dirt analysis, cow dung, bug bits, anything that would indicate where these boots have been.”
She clears her throat. “The crime lab I work for now is private so I have a little leeway but not as much as you may think. I know other forensic scientists who help their friends off the books all the time. But they’re helping with little things. Affairs of the heart. Wayward seeds. Not major cases.” She pauses, training her eyes on my leg. “The short of it is, if any of this evidence has to do with Trumanell Branson, I don’t want to know. I want to remain anonymous. I’ve seen what the media does to anyone in my profession who brushes up against that case.”
Her eyes, softening, travel back up to my face. “I know it has to obsess you. My daughter and I watched the documentary together. We thought it was unfair—that FBI agent’s implication that you saw what happened to that poor girl and are covering up for someone. And whoever leaked those pictures of you at the accident scene … there’s a place in hell for them.”
A picture flashes in my head of a girl I don’t recognize. Blood painting her face. Eyes on their way to dead.
I can’t go there. I can’t be pulled under by this woman’s sympathy, by Wyatt, by a mute girl, by my father’s fucking boots.
“I understand,” I say quickly. “Strictly between you and me. No one else.”
“What’s the priority?” she asks abruptly.
“All of it.”
She rolls her eyes.
“How long will it take?” I persist.
“Don’t die waiting for me.”
“Seriously?”
“Give me a week, and I’ll have something preliminary.”
Her finger reaches out and drifts across the black mark on my shirt.
“I think I have wipes. Do you want me to try to get that out?”
While she digs in her purse, bugs are beginning to crawl, frenzied, all over my thigh, where leg attaches to metal. That’s how it feels, but I know that if I tore off my pants, I would see my pale skin, untouched. I fight an extraordinary urge to jump in the lake and shoot down to the cold at the bottom that never feels the sun.
The water is rippling, a slight breeze making it nervous. Memories are rippling, too. About four hundred yards to the west, in those trees, is where Trumanell found a boy raping a girl.
A mile past it, Wyatt was found wandering, out of his mind, the night his sister and father disappeared. My father was baptized here, born again and again. I threw a handful of his ashes into this water and they floated like goldfish food.
This park has always been a meeting ground for good and evil, for firsts and lasts.
23
I’m a mile from town when I swerve off for a rest stop bathroom. I rip off my jeans and shirt in the bathroom stall. I strip off the protective sleeve on my leg and bare it to the metal. With every body contortion, I’m trying to avoid touching anything. I feel like I’m getting naked in one of those bug traps where every side of the box is sticky.
It is pitiful, manic, but I scratch at the invisible bugs on my thigh and my prosthesis until a fingernail breaks.
I take a shaky breath. And another.
While a woman gets high in the bathroom stall to my left and a little girl throws up in the one on my right, I sit on the lid of a toilet in my underwear and massage my stump.