I fought off a ferocious urge to jump in my car, shoot back up to Phoenix, and slam into Sunset Villa like a one-woman army in invasion mode. The desire to take Lillian by the shoulders and shake the truth out of her was visceral, as well as insane.

Did I do it? I would scream at her. Did I get hold of a gun somehow, and shoot my parents? Did I?

I gulped. “Do you think I could have killed them, Boomer?” I couldn’t bring myself to look at him—my gaze was fixed on the pair of headstones marking the final resting places of two people who hadn’t deserved to die—but I felt him stiffen beside me, on the bench.

“It was Geoff that done it,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”

“Do they?” I mused. I remembered the blood, warm and already congealing. So much blood. I didn’t remember Geoff, or any sense of his presence in that room, on that night.

“Your brother was found wanderin’ the streets, with blood all over him,” Boomer reasoned quietly. “And he confessed.”

“Immediately?” I asked.

Boomer paused, probably to recollect the general shape of the incident and its aftermath. A double murder. It must have been the biggest thing that ever happened in otherwise unremarkable Cactus Bend, Arizona. “As I recall, the police took him in for questioning right away. I reckon a day or two went by before he said anything at all. My brother-in-law was a dispatcher, back then, with the sheriff’s office, so I might have heard it from him. Could have read it in the papers, too. It was all over the news.”

“Nobody questioned me?”

Boomer made an executive decision and reached out to pat my hand tentatively. “They tried, but you was in shock. And you was real little, too, don’t forget. What do they call it when somebody just stares into space and won’t say nothin’?”

“Catatonic,” I supplied dismally. My first conscious memory, after curling up inside the dryer after the murders, was finding myself in that motel room, with Lillian. I remembered the cool, soothing feel of that washcloth on my face, and the worried tenderness in her eyes. I’d been confused, and frightened.

“You’re safe now, baby,” Lillian had said, though I’d still thought of her as Doris then. Doris, my trusted babysitter. Doris, the woman across the street. My mother’s friend, and mine. “I won’t let anybody hurt you, ever.”

She’d kept that promise, too. Until Nick came along, anyway—he’d been a different kind of threat. Even then, she’d tried to warn me.

And now the memories were beginning to force their way to the surface. I didn’t have Lillian to protect me. I didn’t really have anyone but myself.

I drew a deep breath.

I would have to do.

I gathered myself to stand.