Then, Shelley drew doodles of pig snouts and tails in the margin to keep herself alert while the judge called a recess. Two little things gave the man away. Two little errors. There was a scrap of paper and there was a blouse, both found by the woman who discovered the dead girl. Harvey’s head is full of local kid tales about how she now haunts the little drive-in on the way to the beach. Her favorite hot dog was the Chihuahua, Harvey has said. It has salsa and guacamole on it. “She was nekked,” Harvey said. “Naked,” Shelley told him. Even she has never said “nekked,” even though she certainly grew up with plenty of people who did. “She had matches,” Harvey said. “She burned all the evidence.”

But there was evidence, and the woman who found her also took note of the label of the blouse hanging on the chair, a blouse the woman had seen her young friend wearing earlier in the day, surprised by how out of character such a blouse was for her. And that is the kind of detail that always breaks a case: a wrapper for peanut-butter crackers in a nut-free kitchen, a cigarette butt where no one smokes, a receipt for that chest freezer that happens to coincide with someone disappearing.

And there was a note in the playpen of the young woman’s apartment, in square neat print: Go home. Dinner is waiting. The woman who found her was smart enough to have taken photos of both the label and the note, and the handwriting expert said the bearing down of the letters showed tension and aggression. The dishonest person tries hard not to reveal something, but they always do, and you did not need to be a rocket scientist to know this if you looked over and saw the murderer there in his orange outfit. The woman on the stand said that she knew immediately that her friend would never have killed herself. “She loved her little boy more than anything on earth,” the woman said, and Shelley knows that, yes, that was absolutely true. You would protect that child with every ounce of strength even if there was no father around to help you. Even if you were filled with fears that something or someone was haunting you, creeping into your life in ways that were disturbing and upsetting, you would take care of your baby. It has been impossible not to imagine herself there, naked in a chair and looking out the window, the needle in her arm thickening her thoughts of her son—her son—or perhaps she was berating herself, thinking she should have known better. Oh, why didn’t I know, why didn’t I know?