“In the movie. When Cyrus was a kid.”

“Sky?”

“Who?”

“Her name is Sky.”

“I don’t know her name,” Jody said. She cupped her palms over her face. “I don’t even know where he came from.”

“What do you mean by that, Jody? That you don’t know where he came from.”

Jody’s eyes flicked up at her. “Cyrus just appeared one day. Del brought him home.”

“You mean you adopted him. Right?”

“No, no. Something else. I don’t know what it was but something else was going on.”

“Jody,” Izzy said, “you have to tell me everything you know. It’s really important. Cyrus is dead. Someone killed him.”

Cyrus’s mother took a shuddery breath. “That woman. From the movie. She used to watch him play.”

Cold ran through Izzy’s limbs, wind rifling the branches of a dead tree in Bombay Beach.

“You have to tell me more.”

“That’s all I know.” Jody’s eyes glittered like paillettes sewn on burlap—large, flat, wet spangles in her wide, dry face. “You have to find her.”

Izzy looked all around. The crowd had started to disperse. She grabbed onto a man’s arm as he rushed past her. “Who brought that film?” she said.

He shrugged her off.

She left Jody and began to walk among the parked vehicles, shining her flashlight inside. Most had emptied out by now. A couple was making out in one of the cars. She shone her light on them and they glared at her, the guy giving her the finger; no one she recognized.

Izzy felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Ever.

“What happened?” he asked. “Why was Sky in the film?”

“I have no idea. Jody says that she used to come see Cyrus when he was a kid.”

“What? Makes no sense.”

“I want to find out who brought the video.”

They both stopped and looked around in the darkness, but almost everyone had left. Where would she and Ever even begin?

She crossed the dirt road to the blue windmill house, opened the gate, went through the yard to the door, and knocked, but no one answered.

“What are you doing?” Ever asked, coming up behind her.

“I don’t know. Those kids were laughing. Maybe they—”

A woman opened the door—the woman with the stroller Izzy had seen in front of her shack after the discovery in the mine. The woman was tapping her forehead and mumbling to herself. The four reedy, red-haired boys and girls peered out from behind her.

“Did you bring the video?” Izzy asked.

They didn’t move. The woman kept tapping her forehead.

“Was that your video?” Izzy asked.

Then a man—over six feet tall, huge shoulders, red hair, and beard—appeared in the doorway. “Get back inside, kids.”

“It was all for nothing,” the woman said.

“What’s going on here?” said the man.