“I don’t know,” Anne said, her mind going to the things Wendy had said, that Dennis had touched the dead woman. She thought about what she had seen in the woods—Frank Farman allowing his son to scamper around the crime scene like it was a playground, taking it all in with great interest. “You don’t think so?”

Cody shook his head, his gaze sliding away from her, his mouth turning down at the corners. It wasn’t the expression that would have accompanied hero worship, which she might have expected. It didn’t say Dennis is tough, Dennis doesn’t get scared, I wish I could be like Dennis.

“Why do you think that, Cody?”

He gave half a shrug.

She let it go for the moment. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me about what happened yesterday?”

He was thinking about it. He looked down at his bare feet, then pushed his glasses up on his nose.

“We talked about it in class this morning,” Anne said. “We talked about how sometimes bad things happen, really bad things. And that’s hard to understand—why one person would do something so terrible to another person.”

“ ’Cause they’re crazy,” Cody said.

“Sometimes. And when we hear about this scary, terrible stuff it makes us all feel like the world isn’t a safe place. You know what I mean?”

Cody nodded slowly. The fat terrier nosed its way into the room, jumped on the bed, sniffed the boy up and down, then went to the foot of the bed, and turned around five times before curling into a ball.

“Is that how you feel?” Anne asked. “Like if you go back out in the world something like that might happen to you?”

He thought about that one for a long time and chose not to answer her, which was an answer in itself. She couldn’t blame him. He had caught a glimpse of the worst thing one human being could do to another. Like ripples in a pond, that violence touched everyone who heard of it. Every woman in Oak Knoll would be locking her doors and windows tonight. How could Anne possibly convince a ten-year-old kid that violence couldn’t touch him?

And why would he trust her anyway? She barely knew him. If she had to admit it, she knew him less than she knew Tommy or Wendy. He wasn’t a good or enthusiastic student. The only attention he drew to himself was when he got caught up in Dennis Farman’s disruptive vortex. She felt guilty for not knowing him better, and wondered how many other kids she was seeing only in the periphery of her vision.

“That chicken smells really good,” she said, pushing to her feet. “Think you’ll eat some dinner?”