It had taken a while, but finally he did it: Waiting in the tree house one night last week, Carlos had watched in shock as his Aunt Judith snuck out of the house, right about this same time, and placed a bouquet of black roses on the doorstep of the cabana before running back in. Knowing no one would believe him, Carlos didn’t say anything to anyone. Instead, he decided to wait until after his weekend at the soccer tournament and then catch her on videotape. That was what brought him to the tree on this night. As he talked, I thought of the paintbrush I had found in Judith’s closet, and I knew unquestionably that it must’ve been used to paint the fake blood on Sidra’s window sills.

“I have to wait until Mom is asleep before I can sneak out,” he said. “Tonight she was up really late.”

“What makes you think Judith will do something tonight?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just a hunch.”

I waited with him, thinking how difficult this must be for a young boy. Despite Ian Quinn’s elegant quote about families keeping things private, I couldn’t understand why the Smythes—as moneyed as they were—hadn’t set up some surveillance cameras of their own. I finally decided their reasoning was twofold: For one, the perp was surely some member of the family; sometimes it seemed better not to know things like that. The second reason was more complicated; for Derek, at least, it probably felt easier to let the marriage slip away than to get out there and do something about it.

“Callie, look!” Carlos whispered. I followed his gaze to see someone stepping out of the door of the house—someone who looked a lot like Judith. She was dressed in black, and in her hand she carried some sort of bottle.

She crept past the pool and the cabana until she was no longer in our sights.

“Go, go, go!” Carlos said as he struggled to slip through the hole of the tree house with the camcorder in his hand. He jumped the last five steps and then ran; I followed more carefully, just catching up to him as he passed the greenhouse and rounded the corner near the garage. We both froze along the side of the building, catching sight of Judith as she stepped inside the garage.

There was no way to see inside the garage without being seen, no windows except a small one on the door. I took a chance and peeked inside, but in the darkness all I could see was Judith standing at the far corner of the four-car garage, waving her arms, her back to me.

“What do we do?” Carlos whispered, the camera still whirring quietly in his hands. We crept back to the shadows together.