Why was he killing off Bettina and probably Ceran if they were his main characters? And what about his girl with the gold? He’d barely dealt with her.

Beneath the pier, the Hudson River roiled and churned. The water was so dark here, even on a sunny day. It wasn’t green or blue or brown or even black—it was just dark. And deep.

He thought of that poor woman, all in pieces, all over New York. Wendy had read the latest Brookliner column aloud to him from her iPad this morning: “Head Found!” They’d found it only yesterday, after weeks of searching and waiting. Thankfully there was no picture. Oddly, that annoyed Wendy.

Bettina and Ceran and Isabel were annoyed too. Not just because they were teenagers, but because they were being used. Bettina and Ceran were being used by the scientific establishment as guinea pigs, to see how teenagers develop in space. And Isabel, with her backpack full of gold, felt like life had handed her a backpack full of shit because her parents were cowardly crooks who’d left her on her own.

Roy continued to walk. He did like, or at least appreciate, the dichotomy between the teenagers in space and the one on earth, who were all lucky in their own way—lucky to see and experience what few had seen and experienced, or lucky to have their own island in the Bahamas and a backpack full of gold—but who truly felt that they were unlucky.

Lucky.

Unlucky.

Gold.

Or Red.

Every time Roy considered scrapping the whole bloody book, he began to wonder if maybe Peaches was right. If he just plodded on, he’d eventually break through the fog and all would become clear. There was something there—there had to be. Otherwise it was his head they were going to find floating in the river next.

Wendy was strangely excited about the head. Something about this particular murder had captured her imagination.

“Where does one even purchase a chain saw?” she’d asked him. “Do you have to plug it in, or does it run on batteries? Kerosene? Diesel?”

“I haven’t a clue,” Roy had answered.

“Aha.” She laughed. “Covering your tracks.”

Roy wasn’t sure why this was funny. It seemed unmotherly to be obsessed with the gruesome details of a local murder instead of worrying about the safety of one’s own children.

“I bet you can buy one on Amazon,” Shy had piped up. And then she and her mother had spent a good hour scrolling through pages and pages of chain saws, selecting the ones that might be best for dismemberment.

“I wish they could put her back together again so she could tell us what happened,” Wendy had said wistfully.

Roy had an inkling they were leaving him out on purpose so he could focus on his book, but he still felt a bit ignored.