Katie slipped into her jeans and pulled a sweater on over her head. She tucked her feet into a pair of deck shoes, designed for grip on slippery boat decks. Katie didn’t exactly own an expensive yacht, but on Garrett Island, you might as well look as though you did.

She crept noiselessly down the hall, careful not to wake her mother or brother, and descended the stairs without making a sound. There was a set of binoculars in the family room that her mother kept to try and identify any unfamiliar birds that might be making a pit stop on the island. Katie grabbed them, went to a ground-floor window, and focused on Mr. Clifford’s garage door windows.

Nuts.

She saw faint shadows of someone moving around in there, but the windows were so heavily coated with dust she couldn’t make out anything. It looked as though the corners of a couple of the windows were free of enough grime that if you were standing right there, peeking in, you might see something.

As if she would do that.

Katie lowered the binoculars. Raised them again. Watched the shadow moving around.

“Fuck it,” she whispered. She thought of the line in that movie her dad had liked to watch over and over again, where the bank robber’s looking down the barrel of Dirty Harry’s gun, wondering if he’s got any bullets left.

I gots to know.

The light over the front door of the Montrose house was on, so she couldn’t slip out that way, and she couldn’t kill the light because that might draw attention. So she exited the house quietly through the side door, came up alongside her house, then tiptoed across the yard, not because it was any quieter, but because the grass was wet with dew.

She sprinted across the street and sought cover behind a tall hedge that divided Mr. Clifford’s house from his neighbor to the right. Heart hammering in her chest, she took a moment to compose herself. All she had to do now was creep up the driveway, crouching, get right up against the garage door, then slowly raise herself up until she could steal a glance through one of the two panes with clear spots in the corner.

The good news was that Mr. Clifford hadn’t left any outside lights on. The ones over the front and garage doors were dark. If he really was cutting up people’s bodies in there, Katie had to admit, that did kind of make sense.

Katie emerged from behind a hedge and made her way up the driveway. When she reached the garage door, she huddled below one of the windows and waited once again for her heart to stop beating so quickly. Katie feared it was making enough noise to be heard on the other side of the door.