The car was finally warm; I could take off my mittens, which were cumbersome for driving, and head north. I needed to stop at Mary Ann’s; I had groceries in my trunk for her, and I wanted to talk to her about Julia and April. I wondered, too, if she might have an inkling where Josie would choose to go to ground.

It was seven-thirty. Overhead, the traffic was moving fast, but the streets around me were deserted again—anyone who crossed them to get home was long gone. My route took me near the corner where the Czernins lived, but I couldn’t see their bungalow. My heart ached for April, lying in bed with her bear, her daddy dead, her own heart doing something unknown and frightening inside her body.

My mother had died when I was only a year older, and it had been a terrible loss, one that still haunts me in difficult ways, but at least no one had killed Gabriella; she hadn’t died in a pit next to a foreign lover. And the father who stayed behind had adored her, and adored me—an easier journey than April was going to make, with her mother’s relentless anger scorching the house. I would have to talk to April’s teachers, see what could be done to get her academics up to a standard where she’d have a chance at college—if there were even a way she could afford college.

Sandra’s demand that I prove Bron had been on the job when he died was April’s only hope, either for her heart or her education, and I wasn’t optimistic. William had made it clear that the company would fight a comp claim to the bitterest possible limit. If I had Carnifice’s resources, maybe I could track down just where Bron had been at those odd times Grobian had quoted to me, ten-oh-something in Crown Point, Indiana, prove that he died on the job, but I didn’t even know where to look for his truck. For all I knew, it was in that pound over on 103rd Street, along with the Miata, or simply mingled with a lot of other By-Smart semis anywhere from South Chicago to South Carolina.

It made my head hurt, thinking about the number of things that needed to be done if I were going to figure anything out down here. And I still didn’t know where Billy and Josie could have gone. I’d wasted an hour in a landfill, and all I had to show for it was two religious books and a child’s drawing of a frog sitting on a—I slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the curb.