I didn’t care about their exchanges of revenge. I wanted to get out of the water. I didn’t want to lose one another in the cold and the dark anymore.

I started thinking about the girls LeRoi had chopped up and put in the lake upstate. Divers collected them in a fried chicken bucket—a detail so absurd, so small and random, and yet it was repeated again and again.

“I’m crazy cold,” I said, moving toward the shore, with those slow-motion underwater steps. “And we should probably check on William.”

“You’re right,” Lonnie called, dashing out of the water behind me, still splashing and pushing Alex.

I set the stone on the dining room table and went to find towels. When I returned Lonnie was holding it, turning it over in the dim glow of the corner lamp. Her dress was pooling water on the wood floor. “Did you bring this in from the lake?”

I nodded, handed out the towels.

“I don’t think that’s a rock,” Alex said.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s somebody’s kneecap.”

Lonnie dropped it, and it banged down on the table next to the sad remainders of my homemade pizza. All that work and we’d hardly touched it. “It’s too small!” she said, but she stepped toward me like she was afraid.

“Look how white it is!” Alex said, picking it up. “And just the right shape.”

I didn’t know what my own kneecap looked like exactly. I reached a hand down, but touching it gave me a sick feeling. It wasn’t possible, was it? We couldn’t be anywhere near the LeRoi property? I tried to remember the name of that lake, but I don’t think the news story had specified. I longed to look it up on the Internet but the only service at the cabin was an old corded landline.

“Have you ever heard of Rev. LeRoi?” I found myself asking. When they shook their heads the whole story spilled out—the nuns, the church, the proliferation of offspring, the murders. I was nervous, or maybe just excited, to finally have a reason to talk about this thing I’d grown a little obsessed with. I could tell I was talking too fast. Lonnie’s eyes were getting wider and wider. “I don’t know where the lake was,” I said, “but I think it was in the Adirondacks.”

I thought for a moment she would share in my fascination but then she said, “Lonnie.” It took me a moment to understand she meant me. “Enough. Stop.”

Alex rubbed his hair until it stood up on end, either unperturbed by my story or acting macho for our sake. He looked so skinny and baby faced in the soft light. I’d assumed he was my age, but he could easily have been as young as twenty, the difference between those ages feeling very wide.