Up in the attic, the wind poured in at the hole under the eaves with a high fluttering wail like a fox or a banshee. I squinted up into the open hatch. For an instant I thought I saw something move—a shifting and coalescing of the black, a deliberate muscled ripple—but when I blinked, there was only darkness and the flood of cold air.

The next day, once the case was closed, I would send Richie’s tech back out to collect the camera, inspect every frame of the footage and write me a report in triplicate about anything he saw. There was no reason why I shouldn’t have flipped up the little built-in monitor and fast-forwarded through the footage myself, kneeling there on the landing, but I didn’t do it. I already knew there was nothing there.

*

Fiona was leaning against the passenger door, staring blankly at the skeleton house where we had talked to her that first day, with a cigarette sending up a thin thread of smoke between her fingers. As I reached her she threw the cigarette into a pothole half full of murky water.

“Here are your sister’s things,” I said, holding up the bin-liner. “Are these what you had in mind, or would you like anything different?”

“That stuff’s fine. Thanks.”

She hadn’t even glanced over. For a dizzy second I thought she had changed her mind. I said, “Are you all right?”

Fiona said, “Looking at the house reminded me. The day we found them—Jenny and Pat and the kids—I picked this up.”

She brought her hand out of her pocket, curled as if she were holding something. I held out my palm, cupped close around the bracelet to shield it from watchers and from the wind, and she opened her empty one above it.

I said, “You should touch it, just in case.”

She clasped her hand around the bracelet, tight, for a moment. Even through my gloves, I could feel the cold of her fingers.

I said, “Where did you get this?”

“When the policemen went in the house, that morning, I followed them. I wanted to know what was going on. I saw this at the bottom of the stairs, like right up against the bottom stair. I picked it up—Jenny wouldn’t want it getting kicked around the floor. I put it in my coat pocket. There’s a hole in my pocket; this went down into the lining. I forgot about it, till now.”

Her voice was thin and flat; the ceaseless roar of the wind scudded it away, into the raw concrete and rusted metal. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll look into it.”

I went round to the driver’s side and opened the door. Fiona didn’t move. It wasn’t until I had put the bracelet into an evidence envelope, labeled it carefully and tucked it into my coat pocket that she straightened up and got into the car. She still didn’t look at me.

I started the car and drove us out of Broken Harbor, maneuvering around the potholes and the straggles of wire, with the wind still slamming against the windows like a wrecking ball. It was that easy.