She checked her phone. Messages from Nephy and Seth asking if she’d heard from Cyrus, if she needed their help. She texted back saying she could use help putting up flyers, but they both had to work that day, so she told them she’d go on her own.

Come for dinner later, Nephy texted. You really have to eat. I know you don’t eat when you’re stressed. And bring flyers!

Izzy texted back Thank you, then picked up Cyrus’s phone, considered entering some random numbers to try and unlock it but decided against this. She couldn’t risk any extra tries without some clue. So, she got out of bed, grabbed the flyers, and left, wearing the same clothes she’d put on the morning before.

The temperature had crept up, over one hundred, and the truck seemed to simmer and fizz with heat—she had to sit on a towel and use a T-shirt to touch the steering wheel. Burning like my love for him. Burning like the end of the world.

◆◆◆

Izzy spent the day putting up more flyers—the post office, the liquor store, the mini-mart, the gas station, the bank, traffic lights, on the walls of a crumbling, abandoned, graffiti-strewn motel by the highway on the outskirts of town.

To try to calm herself, she stopped at Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain monument. Beneath the cross and the words “God is Love,” thick layers of pastel paint shone in the light of the setting sun, almost blinding. She climbed, slipping on paint, up and over. Below her lay the monument like bright fabric. Three young Japanese tourists, wearing polka-dot mini dresses, silk flower crowns, and flip-flops, changed into high heels and tottered out to pose for a photo shoot in the center of the painted quilt.

Izzy went back down the mountain and entered a grotto where the artist had painted blue and purple birds, pink and red roses, green and brown trees, white clouds and messages from the Bible on the plaster walls and columns. Inside the grotto was a shrine where people placed laminated photographs of their beloved deceased. An older white woman with a sweet smile and a Christmas sweater. A woman from Mexico with a wrinkle-stitched face. A middle-aged Asian man in a suit. A high school portrait of a girl with blonde hair. A young, bearded hiker. Izzy saw them all rising up in that grotto, after the sun had set, shambling out into the desert searching for their families. So much for finding solace here. She wasn’t going to post a flyer in the grotto, this shrine to the dead, but she tacked up a few pictures of Cyrus by the roadside and left.

◆◆◆

Salvation Mountain wasn’t too far from Head Hunters, so Izzy stopped to see if she could find Larry, since Leanne mentioned he’d been drinking again. The place was more like an outdoor campground with lights, beads, and fish net strung over a makeshift structure among some Airstreams. Tiki heads stared at her from the depths of their carved-out, humanoid eyes. Locals and a few tourists lounged around with their “bring your own” liquor. Larry was there all right.