“I’m not going to yell at you, little cousin,” I said softly, stroking her dirty hair, “when it’s my hot temper that made you too scared to trust me.”

“They told me if I talked to anyone, they’d shoot Mom and the girls and Daddy would go to prison, I didn’t know what to do. They said you wanted Daddy to go to prison, you were just using me, and if I didn’t help them, if I talked to you about what I was doing, you’d punish me and him and Mom and everyone.”

“Who are they? Les Strangwell? Dornick?”

She swallowed a sob and nodded.

Mosquitoes were swarming into the shack, biting us through our clothes. I had to close the door, although there wasn’t much air in the small space. With the door shut, it smelled of damp river mud and stale sweat. The only light came from a couple of makeshift skylights Elton had created by cutting squares in the roof and filling them with discarded windowpanes. Outside, the sun was starting to set. I could just make out my cousin’s bleached, frightened face.

“It started with the Nellie Fox baseball, didn’t it?” I said. “The day you found it in my trunk, you talked about it in the office.”

“Me and my ultra-big mouth! It was only partly the ball. Everything started at the fundraiser when I talked about Johnny Merton in front of that creepy Judge Coleman. I heard him tell Uncle Harvey that you’d better not be screwing around in the Harmony case, which at first I thought was funny. I thought he was saying something about you and music, or your mom, or something. And Uncle Harvey said they’d nailed the Anacondas for that, and he didn’t want this to be some snake coming back to life after its head got chopped off. And then, the day after the fundraiser, when Mr. Strangwell brought me in to work for him, he told me it was top secret because you wanted to sabotage Brian’s campaign.”

“I see. So he told you I had some kind of evidence that would destroy the campaign and you had to find it?”

A train thundered overhead, shaking the shack. We had to wait for it to pass before we could talk. When the noise finally died away, we could hear the ordinary sweet sounds of a summer’s evening, the birds’ last songs, the little insects chirruping.

“The evidence?” I prodded my cousin when she remained silent.