The child’s drawing, of a frog sitting on a piece of rubber. Like the frayed piece of wiring Bron had in his workshop behind the kitchen. A drawing of how to make a nitric acid circuit breaker. Put a rubber plug in a froggy soap dish. Put it on top of the intake cable at Fly the Flag. Pour in some nitric acid. Eventually, the acid would eat through the plug, eat through the rubber casing around the intake line, the exposed wires would short out, spark, ignite the fabric nearby.

I tried to imagine why Billy would have had this sketch when it was Bron who’d been experimenting with the wire. I couldn’t picture Billy committing sabotage at Fly the Flag—unless the pastor had told him to do it because it would somehow be good for the community. The pastor was the only person he could trust right now, Billy had said, but I still couldn’t see his stubborn, earnest young face hovering over a wire with a dish of acid.

Bron, yes, Bron could do it, but if he was constructing the thing would he have carried a diagram around with him when he left the house? How had he gotten hold of the wretched frog, anyway? Julia, Josie, April. Julia had bought the frog, she’d said, as a Christmas present for Sancia. I’d thought at the time she said it she was lying; now I was sure of it. Josie could have taken it from Julia and given it to April, although that didn’t quite make sense.

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. April, heartsore in every sense of the word, I didn’t want to push hard on her, but I did have the charger for Billy’s phone—I could question her while dropping it off, but I’d save that option for last. But Julia—Julia was another story. I turned the steering wheel hard to the left and made a U-turn back to South Chicago.

39

Painful Extraction

Rose Dorrado’s face was even duller than when I’d been here two nights ago. Like Sandra Czernin, she hadn’t washed, or even combed, her hair lately, and the red curls were matted and tangled, but she stepped aside to let me into the apartment. Betto and Samuel were on the couch, watching Spiderman. María Inés was propped up between them, cooing and clapping her hands aimlessly. She was wrapped in a little piece of red-and-white striped bunting. More of those flag remnants. I stared at it, wondering how many times I’d seen it without noticing it.

“Now what?” Rose was saying in a leaden voice. “You’ve found my Josie? She’s dead?”