“And Sancia was mad when she learned that Diego hadn’t bought it for her. Secondhand goods, Sancia called it, and she didn’t want it, so she gave it back to Julia. Isn’t that right, Diego?”

Diego backed away from me in alarm, but another of the men caught his arm and dragged him back to the group, with a guttural command.

“So, Freddy,” I picked up my narrative in a bright, schoolteacher voice, “recently you changed your mind. And you went to the Dorrado place and took it back from Julia. Why did you do that?”

There wasn’t much light on the street, just what little was spilling out of the bar, and the one streetlamp across the road in front of the church, but I think Freddy was giving me a calculating look, as if to decide how big a story he could get me to swallow.

“I was sorry I treated her mean, man, she tried to do something nice for me, I shouldn’t have been so mean to her.”

“Yeah, Freddy, I believe in the Easter bunny and all those other warm cuddly stories, too. If you wanted it so bad, how did it end up at Fly the Flag?”

“I don’t know. Maybe someone stole it from me.”

“Yes, a three-dollar soap dish, that’s worth breaking and entering for, isn’t it? Here’s the problem.” I turned to the men from the bar, who were listening to me as closely as if I were telling their fortunes. “That soap dish was used to start the fire at Fly the Flag. Frank Zamar died in that fire, so the person who set it is guilty of murder. And it looks like that person was Freddy, here, maybe with Bron Czernin’s help, maybe with Diego’s.”

Shocked comments in Spanish rippled through the group. Had this gamberro and his cousin killed Frank Zamar? Destroyed the plant?

“Why, Freddy? Why you do this?” Celine’s uncle slapped him.

“I didn’t do nothing. I don’t know what she talking about!”

“How that soap dish start the fire?” one of the men asked.

I pulled the crude drawing of the frog from my pocket again. They crowded around to study it in the dim light.

“I don’t know who made this drawing—maybe Bron Czernin, maybe Freddy. But here’s how it worked.”

Pointing at the drawing, I explained my theory, about the nitric acid and the wires, and there was another buzz of talk. I caught Andrés’s name, and Diego, and “carro,” which at first I heard as the Italian “caro,” darling: Diego was some-body’s darling? No, the pastor had done something to Diego’s darling, no, to his—not his wagon, his truck, that’s what it was.