Chapter Thirty-One

On the way to Monty’s house that afternoon, I get two calls from the same Indiana area code—Shariah, I assume, has found my note. Joe’s face pops up cartoonish in my head, saying focus, saying this is about what’s happening now, but I send the calls to voicemail instead.

The water results have bought us all the time in the world. We have nothing but time now: years of litigation, of grunt work, of remediation and blame-casting and bureaucratic red tape.

But I let Kaycee disappear once before. I can’t let her disappear again—not when I’m closer than ever to finding the truth.

Cora’s words play again and again in my head.

Her daddy used to be too fond of her, if you know what I mean.

Always running some scheme.

She’s right about some of it. Even as a kid, Kaycee stole things—little things, trinkets from other people’s houses, stuff from the cubbies at school. She was never sorry about it afterward. I remember when Morgan Crawley cried until her nose bubbled with snot over a pair of mittens her grandmother had knitted her—mittens Kaycee had showed me, gloating, at the bottom of her bag the day before.

“Then she shouldn’t have been so careless with them,” she said, when I confronted her about it. “If you love something, you have to take care of it and keep it safe.” She was so angry at me that she took the mittens and threw them in a storm drain, and I’ll never forget how she looked then, standing in the street while a rush of rainwater roared the mittens down into the sewer. “Look. Now they’re not stolen anymore. Now no one has them.” As if it had been my fault all along.

Nothing was ever her fault. She was immune to guilt, and her memory worked like one of those old gold sifting pans, shaking away all the dirt, all the bad stuff, leaving intact only the things she really wanted to remember, the things that made her look good.

That’s why the thing with Chestnut’s collar has always puzzled me, too. What made her keep the collar and then, so many years later, give it back? Why was that so important to her? It was as if Chestnut’s death wasn’t proof of something terrible she’d done, but proof of something terrible done to her.

But what? It didn’t make any sense.

Your problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw. It’s that you can’t see.

—

I follow the school bus right to Monty’s doorstep, expecting to see him pour out through the open door, all six feet of him. But only a girl disembarks, bent nearly double beneath the weight of an enormous backpack, and trudges across a browning yard to a neighboring house.

Maybe Monty caught a ride home with his mom: she works in the cafeteria at the high school and part-time in one of the tollbooths on Interstate 70, which runs between Columbus and St. Louis. She told me once she liked to wear her hairnet there, too, tried to dress herself down and look as plain as possible, so the late-night drivers coming through would be less tempted to stroke her palm when she was giving change or whisper dirty things to her.