“I am the below-average cousin,” she said. “At least if you ask the other ones. Personally, I think it’s Ralph.”

“What does he do?”

“Electrical outlet magnate. Like, the plastic covers for outlets,” she added at our blank stares.

“He’s a magnate, though,” Theo pointed out. “That implies a certain level of success.”

“If you care about financial resources, well, sure.” Petra growled, pulled out a smaller screen, began tapping. “I’ll work on this with Armin—the mathematician. And let you know.”

That would have to work for now.

Gwen stepped into the doorway. Theo stood up, straightened his jacket, which was adorable.

“Hey,” he said. “What brings you by?”

“So, I did some thinking about Rosantine,” she said. “And about Edentown. And I did some research.”

“We’re listening,” I said.

“So,” Gwen said, “while I was looking through the land records, I started thinking about Edentown.” She glanced at me. “Had you ever been to Edentown before you picked her up?”

“I had not,” I said.

“Me neither,” Theo said.

Gwen nodded. “The town’s only a few miles from Chicago, but if you search decades of stories from the Tribune and Sun-Times archives—which I did—you know how many times Edentown is mentioned?”

“No clue,” Theo said.

“Six. In all those years.”

Roger moved closer. “That seems low. Especially if it was supposed to be a bedroom community for people who work in Chicago.”

Gwen nodded. “Exactly. And that’s not all.” She gestured to the overhead screen. “Can I—”

“Sure,” Petra said, and fiddled with the controls. “Go for it.”

Gwen swiped her own screen, and a series of headlines appeared overhead:

fire burns edentown city hall and records

sinkhole kills new housing development

chemical spill empties town

locusts destroy crops for fourth consecutive year

city council killed in fireworks tragedy

“Damn,” I said. “A city can have back luck, but all those tragedies happening to one relatively small town? That seems . . . very improbable.”

“Chaotic even,” Theo said.

“And then I found this.” Gwen swiped again, and the headlines were replaced by images of people. Some old, black-and-white, grainy. Women in high-necked Victorian garb like what Patience had worn, or in sleek flapper-style dresses from the 1920s. A color photograph of a social gathering in the 1950s. Hippies in the late 1960s.

A woman’s face had been circled in each one.

Petra sat straight up. “That’s her. In each picture.”

“Yup,” Gwen said. “We assumed she was hanging out on the edge of the city because she was waiting for her opportunity to break into Chicago. She was apparently there long enough to basically ruin the town. To keep anything from growing, to destroy everything. But even still, even when the town is toast, she stays there.”

“So why didn’t she just leave?” I asked. “That’s the question, right? Why did she stay in Edentown for so long?”

“Oh snap,” Petra said, sitting up straight. “Because she didn’t have a choice.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Gwen said with a satisfied smile. “Maybe she didn’t leave—despite how crappy the town became—because she couldn’t.”