The moon now is just as it was that night. It feels as if it’s tearing something loose. I cannot cure myself, can’t face the truth. Eclipse within my chest obscures the light.

Izzy and Ever both loved someone else; maybe they had made love to someone else last night. But it didn’t matter. Even if she never saw Ever again, Izzy felt changed, somehow. Her purpose now was to begin to find herself.

Long Snake Moan

Long Snake Moan

The text came just a few nights later, sending a toxic pang of adrenalin through Izzy’s body. She’d signed up for local alerts right after he’d gone missing, telling herself it was because she wanted to make sure she didn’t miss anything about Cyrus:

Advisory:

#SBCSD Homicide Investigates Discovery of Poss.

Human Remains, San Bernardino County

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department homicide detectives are continuing their investigation into the circumstances surrounding found partial human skeletal remains discovered by an environmental study crew Thursday at approximately 11:23 am, in the Red Sand Gold Mine’s 100-foot vertical mine shaft southeast of Twentynine Palms. The abandoned gold mine was last worked on in the 1970s.

Homicide detectives and San Bernardino County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner personnel have concluded a search for additional human remains and recovery efforts.

What is believed to be an adult male vertebral column was found and recovered in the cave. Investigators collected and transported the remains to the San Bernardino County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner’s office, where they will be examined to determine if they are human and for possible identification of the deceased.

There is no further information at this time.

Anyone with information about this incident is encouraged to contact the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s Homicide Bureau.

Izzy’s whole body seized with a pang of adrenalin like those death-throe rabbits that Larry used to slice through both jugulars for dinner.

Even if the remains were not Cyrus’s, even if he had gone to Miracle Manor with someone else, something inside her now knew with a wave of that old, familiar darkness, that she had mostly fought off until now—he had not simply left her. And even if he had betrayed her, he had loved her. He had loved her once.

Cyrus, my Cyrus. Why did I give up on you?

Once, she’d read about a psychic, although he didn’t like that word—he called himself an intuitive—who helped police with murder cases. Walking past a concrete wall, he started to feel sick, queasy, started to sweat. He examined the wall and thought he saw the jagged shape of a tooth in the concrete. The police tore out the wall but found nothing. The intuitive received a message, something about jewels. This led him to the murderer—an ex-detective, who was fired for pawning stolen jewelry and now owned a construction company, had ground up his victim into the cement.