“Mr. Yeboah,” I said casually, like I was looking for a friendly chat. Fear also turns men into liars, and I didn’t want to alarm Ned, not yet.

There was wariness in his eyes all the same. It turned the honeyed irises black. As he rose from his seat Abella did the same, the two of them twin puppets on a string. She looked up at his face, imploring him to stay. Abella was being truthful when she said she and Ned were close. Both were outsiders trying to navigate a family that doubled as an active minefield.

I have a method, as all investigators do, for interrogating witnesses. Rarely do I get straight to the point. I’ve learned it’s better to ease in and look for ways to make connections that coerce an interviewee into sharing everything. Back at the academy, someone once showed me the transcript from a police interview with Robert Pickton, the pig farmer turned serial killer who murdered dozens of women in western Canada. The detective spent hours chatting with Pickton in an effort to eke out the truth. The endurance that investigator displayed was a thing of beauty.

Right off the bat I could see that’s what it would take to get Ned to talk. He knew he was the last person to visit the library, and that put him on edge. I had to gain his confidence, but this posed a problem. The more I hacked away at the family’s tangled lives, the more rot I turned up. Everyone on the island was guilty of something, to the point where I didn’t know which trail to follow. And then there was Carson. I’d always thought of him as a touchstone for my sanity, but what he’d said about Tim and the way he said it threw me off. If I could sense Ned’s anxiety, he could surely feel mine.

The coffee stain was still conspicuously present on the library rug. It must have killed Norton that I sent him back to the parlor without allowing him to assess the damage. When the doors were closed behind me, I turned to Ned.

I started by asking about his family, steering as far from Jasper as I could. Ned was born in Ghana but grew up in the South Bronx, in a working-class family of six that still lived in the same two-bedroom Prospect Avenue apartment they’d rented upon their arrival. All the money Ned made stocking shelves at the bodega downstairs went toward paying a monthly rent that could have gotten the Yeboahs a four-bedroom new construction in Accra. When he wasn’t staying at Flynn’s place, Ned lived with his family even now. On the weekends, Ned told me, he still made time to volunteer at an animal rescue in Brooklyn. I couldn’t picture this buffed and polished man de-fleaing mutts and hosing down cages, but the skin around his eyes relaxed when he told me about the dogs he cared for, and I took him at his word.