"You're fucking with me. I can never tell when you're fucking with me."

She pushes past him and knocks on the door.

"I'm not touching anything in there," he says. "I don't want to ingest particles of cat shit and have cat worms reprogram my brain."

Harriet knocks again, more forcefully.

They hear something within; a bump, a shuffle. Then, footsteps. The locks rattle one after the other: one, then three, then six. The inside door opens, and an older woman's head peeks out, her nose pressing against the mesh of the screen door. A tube snakes up her nose. An oxygen tank on wheels sits at her feet.

"Go away," she rasps. "I don't want your damn magazine. I told you that. I don't want to hear any nonsense about 144,000 seats in Heaven – that doesn't make any damn sense! Billions of people have come and gone on God's Green Earth, but he only likes 144,000 of them? What kind of crazy god is that? Answer me!"

"We're not Jehovah's Witnesses," Harriet says.

"Like hell. What are you, then?"

"FBI," Frankie says, and flips his ID and badge like they do in the movies. The woman squints at it. Harriet shows hers, too, with a less ostentatious gesture.

"FBI? Whatever for?"

"It's about your son," Harriet says. "We'd like to talk to you about Ashley."

Harriet can see the channels in which the old woman moves; the woman is a hoarder, albeit an organized one, and her rooms are formed of canyons carved through the piles of debris. National Geographic stacks form mountains, each peak capped with a potted violet. The tops of furniture peek out over a laundry basket and an ironing board and mounds of paperback books – it's like wreckage floating atop a sea of more wreckage.

The smells of mold and dust comingle in her nose. It doesn't bother her. It does bother Frankie, from what Harriet can tell – he slides past twin magazine towers to find a chaise lounge, on which he sits, his gangly limbs giving him the look of a Daddy Long Legs failing to find comfort amid the ordered chaos.

His eyes dart to and from a distant staircase, where golden eyes peer out from between the railing bars. Another mangy cat sits ill-concealed behind one of the magazine stacks.

The woman, Eleanor Gaynes, sits in a chair, her hand curled around the top handle of her oxygen tank. "This is about Ashley, you say."

Harriet doesn't sit. She stands, but doesn't pace. She remains stock still.

"That's right. Have you seen him?"

"No."

"No contact with him?"

"I told you, no. Haven't heard hide nor hair from him. Not a peep. He's gone. Flown the roost years back when I got emphysema, and I guess he's never coming back. We done?"

The old bitch is lying. It's only partly true that people have certain universal hooks that indicate when they're lying, but everybody has individual tells. It takes a certain instinct to know when someone is slinging a lie. Harriet has that instinct. It's no one thing that tells her. It's in the woman's inflection, how she blurts out the information, as if she doth protest too much. It's in the way her hand curls tighter around the top of the oxygen tank, pulling it closer. Harriet has an animal's sense. She can practically smell the deception.