There’s a long pause, and for a second I wonder if she made that story up. Then she says, ‘If I hear anything even resembling a rumour that you’re helping the police look into my business, then what’s happening to this guy will happen to you. And you don’t want to know what’s happening to this guy.’

‘Understood,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

Another pause. I hate talking on the phone. I can’t read her at all.

‘Are we done?’ I ask finally.

‘We’re done.’

The line goes dead.

I exhale. That went well.

I check the pickling corpses—still too solid to go down the drain—and then walk out my front door and triple-lock it behind me. I stroll over and knock on my neighbour’s front door. The dog starts barking immediately.

Eventually the door opens a crack. Shawn looks out. ‘Uh, hi.’

I smile. ‘I’m doing an early New Year’s resolution,’ I say. ‘Feel like going for a run?’

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 36

What word looks the same upside down and backwards?

‘So it’s like a fax machine?’ I ask.

Shawn just laughs. ‘Man, you’re old.’

Actually, we’re both in our early thirties, although you wouldn’t know it to watch us run together. Shawn can jog uphill and hold a conversation at the same time. I can only talk on the downhill stretches, and even then I feel like I’m going to suffocate. Plus, my throat still hurts from the bleach. This was a terrible idea.

‘I grew up,’ I pant. ‘In a house. With a fax machine.’

‘Really? Did you have a typewriter, too?’

Actually, we did. There was a typewriter at the group home, although it was missing the letter L. I had to fill it in every time I typed my name.

I guess one of the rare benefits of poverty is the way it connects you to the past. The poor kids of today live like the rich kids of the nineties, the poor of the nineties lived like the rich of the seventies, and so on.

‘So it’s not,’ I pant, ‘like a fax?’

‘It’s not just like that,’ Shawn says, with the smoothness of someone who’s explained this a lot of times before. ‘Yes, you could use the app that way—take a picture of a document, type in the recipient’s address, hit the “print and mail” button. But it has all sorts of applications. It’s a fast, easy way to send custom postcards. Newsletters. Family photos. Christmas cards.’

This came up because I had asked Shawn if he used nTangle. Apparently he hasn’t, but he works in app development too.

‘Does anyone,’ I gasp. ‘Still send. Christmas cards?’

‘My family does. Not yours?’

‘No family,’ I say, and spit on the ground. Then I remember the camping trip with my ‘cousin’.