Later she thought of the look on Pat’s face. It reminded Mrs. Mitchell of the Tin Woodman from the movie The Wizard of Oz— disarmingly lovely and greasy with expectation. In the book version she bought for Miguel she’d read that the Woodman had once been real, but his ax kept slipping and he’d dismembered himself, slowly exchanging his flesh piece by piece for hollow metal. Mrs. Mitchell thought Pat’s body would rattle with the same kind of emptiness, but it didn’t; it fell with the heavy tone of meat. As she waited for the echo, Mrs. Mitchell heard a small cough from the kitchen, the kind a person does in polite society to remind someone else that they are there. She followed it and found Clyde in his slippers, the knife in the roast.

Hello. I just killed your wife. And when she said it, she knew she’d have to shoot Clyde too. The beans were boiling, the water frothing over the sides of the pan and sizzling into the low flame beneath. Mrs. Mitchell turned off the oven and spun all the burners to zero.

The aunts never married. They still lived in the house where they raised their niece. Occasionally they sent her photographs, recipes, information on the NRA, or obituaries of people she had known clipped from the local newspaper. When a reporter called Mrs. Mitchell, asking questions about Pat and Clyde, she thought back to all the notices her aunts had sent over the years, and said: They were good neighbors and wonderful people. I don’t know who would have done something like this. They will be greatly missed. The truth was that she felt very little for Pat. It was hard to forgive herself for this, so she didn’t try. Instead she did her best to forget how Clyde had looked, the surprise on his face, as if he were about to offer her a drink before he crumpled to the floor.