Keegan shrugged. “Tomorrow probably,” he admitted. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve got a few days. A week at most.” He thought of the old oak trunk tied down to the city truck as it rumbled past the cottage and down the hill. He thought of Lieutenant Moore rising from his desk and pulling on his jacket, never taking his eyes off the silent phone. He’d probably given Keegan a little extra time, arriving home a half-hour late to a cooling dinner, all for old times’ sake. Again, he shook his head to clear it of the thoughts that crowded in on him like the press of hot strangers in a packed elevator.

“Why?” she asked him. “What happened?”

“The cops,” he said. “They took the tree stump we were shooting at. Sawed it off at the ground and hauled it away. The bullets they pull out of it are going to match the one that killed your uncle. When the ballistics report comes back, I get hauled in. Tag, I’m it.”

Again, it seemed to take a beat or two for the words to sink in, then Eve’s eyes went wider. “Oh, God,” she said. “Of course. The stump. What can we do?”

Keegan didn’t respond. There was no clear answer to her question, and his mind was swarmed with a million other nagging questions of his own. He squeezed his hands into fists. Goddammit. Goddamn Louis Moore and his goddamn theories. Keegan glanced at the drawn curtains a few seconds and then looked back at Eve. “That morning we went shooting,” he said. “Who do you figure called the cops on us?”

Eve’s eyes were still wide, glimmering in what little light that made it past the curtains from the quad outside. Her brow furrowed, as if his question made no sense to her. “I have no idea,” she said. “I don’t really know any of the neighbors. I just stay in the house. Why? Who do you think it was?”

He thought of how she’d looked that morning in the wonderful slant of early light, the sharp scent of gunpowder in the air. So innocent—yet so lethal. “I’m just wondering how anyone could have heard gunshots with all that noise down at your place,” Keegan said. “That mower was making a hell of a racket.”

Eve looked bewildered. She shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she told him. “I don’t know what you’re asking.”

Down a dark alley, the lieutenant had said, and you don’t have the good sense to strike a match. Goddamn him.