I drove past my parents’ graves and pulled over a stone’s throw from Lillian’s. I shut off my headlights, and realized for the first time that the moon was nearly full. The cemetery was bathed in an eerie light, shot through with shadows of tombstones and the occasional cottonwood.

I got out of the car, picked my way gingerly over the rocks at the side of the one-lane road, welcomed the cool softness of the grass.

A mound of raw dirt marked Lillian’s final resting place. Greer had ordered an elaborate Italian marble headstone off the Internet, but it would have to be carved and then shipped all the way from Carerra. Maybe by the time it arrived, the grass would have grown in like a green blanket over Lillian. Her grave wouldn’t seem so anonymous then, so new and exposed.

“Why didn’t you tell me I killed them?” I asked.

A night breeze played in the treetops, and I thought I heard the call of a mourning dove. Something else, too—maybe traffic out on the main highway.

I knelt next to the grave, sat on my haunches.

“You wanted to protect me. I understand that. But it didn’t work, because the one person I can’t run away from is myself.”

Another sound came then, so faint that I wasn’t sure I’d heard it at all.

I turned to look behind me, and saw nothing.

“Boomer?” I asked hopefully. Maybe he lived on the premises. That was it. He’d seen me drive in and, being the caretaker, come to investigate. Kids liked to party in cemeteries, and vandalism was probably a factor, too.

I turned back to the grave, and that was when I saw the figure standing on the other side.

Definitely not Boomer.

Moonlight caught on the barrel of a pistol.

“Geoff?”

Laughter. Female laughter, low and throaty.

I wondered crazily if my brother had turned transvestite during his years in the joint, but the shape wasn’t right. It was familiar, though.

Everything will look better in the morning.

“Barbara?”

She’d been wearing a dark scarf or a hat. Now, she pulled it off with her free hand, letting her blond hair show in the moonlight.

“You remembered,” she said. “I knew it for sure when I saw you on television today. You remembered.”

The truth was, I hadn’t remembered what happened the night my parents were killed, but now, facing what I knew would be my own death, the floodgates opened in a rush of crimson and black images, like a video tape on fast-forward.

I was five again.

It was an ordinary summer night.

I was lying on the floor, on my stomach, coloring in a mermaid’s tail in a book full of pictures.