“So it wasn’t Don who stole them?”

“Nah.” Another deep drag.

Joe was fighting the image of a lost-on-an-island reality show, where no one has a conscience, and everyone betrays everyone else. “That didn’t work out too well, did it?”

“Not really,” she conceded.

It was time to bring up one remaining key piece of missing knowledge. “Tell me about that last night,” he requested. “When you rode passenger with Don.”

Her cigarette had grown a long ash, which she flicked onto the floor before taking another drag. “That was Lem,” she began. “He said he needed to talk to Donny, to work things out with him.”

“You didn’t know what was going to happen?”

She shook her head, her gaze straight and unfocused. “Maybe I didn’t care. Things were getting too fucked up.”

“Why did you stay in the car? It was two against one.”

That caught her attention. She stared at him. “How did you…?”

“It was caught on tape, Cheri. From across the road.”

He stayed silent, letting his previous question come back to her.

“Lem told me to stay put.”

Joe pushed her. “So what? They were fightin’.”

She flared a little. “Donny had pissed me off, okay? He was being a prick about Lemuel. He’d already dumped me for that girl. He was treatin’ me like shit, even though I taught him everything—about stealin’ stuff and what to do in bed, even. Anyhow, he agreed to meet Lem at the pull-off, but he was being a horse’s ass about it. What did I care about the two of them gettin’ into it, finally? Male shit. Let them work it out. Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

“Lucy hit him with a two-by-four, Cheri,” Joe insisted, replacing his earlier affability with something sterner. “This wasn’t a schoolyard squabble. They killed him. They set him up and killed him, and you played along.”

She slowly closed her eyes, slumped her shoulders, and dropped her hands to the floor, where Joe reached out and removed the cigarette from her fingers. She seemed drained of energy, almost of life itself.

“They didn’t kill him,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I did.”

Joe had no counter to that. The experienced and stoic interviewer in him yielded to simple incredulity. “What do you mean?”

She explained without inflection. “We drove to Vermont to dump the Mercedes in that ditch. They’d already reported it missin’, so they couldn’t take it home. When we got there, Lem opened the trunk and forced me to look at Donny.”

She took a ragged breath. Once more, tears began coursing down her cheeks. “He was all bloody from where she’d hit him. Lem made me feel Donny’s pulse—the big one in the neck.”

“Why?”

“To prove he was still alive. And was breathin’, too. I could see it.”

Joe encouraged her gently, the final horrifying ingredient of an endless nightmare being added to the mixture. “Okay.”

“He told me Lucy had hit Donny to teach me a lesson. You steal from me; I steal from you. That’s how Lemuel put it. But she’d failed, and it was up to me to finish it. He said if I wanted him and me to be together, he’d take care of her if I did in Donny, right then. It would be the glue that kept us together.”