“And she came down on the slope down to the river,” Connor said, in a matter-of-fact way. “I went down there to check.”

“Because you wanted to see what had happened?” Fiji said, having to struggle to get the words out of her throat.

“Yeah, well . . . yeah. Because that’s the moment, you know, the great moment. She wasn’t quite dead.”

“Did you kill her?” Fiji said. Tears were streaming down the witch’s face.

“We keep an old poker in the truck for dealing with snakes,” he said. “Not the same one I used on Mrs. Ames,” he added in a careful aside.

No one spoke.

“Her chest bones were all cracked. I poked a hole in one of the cracks,” he added, by way of explanation. He seemed lost in his reminiscence of the big moment. “But it did look like she’d been shot.”

“So you got the gun Bobo had used for target shooting,” Fiji said.

“Well, he’d left it in his truck, and the truck wasn’t locked,” Connor said. “But that was days later.”

Creek squatted down as if her knees could not hold her any longer.

“I washed the truck,” the boy said. “That same day.”

“Who did he kill before? This Mrs. Ames?” Fiji asked Shawn. But Shawn did not answer. He’d looked at the Gorgon’s face; it was his son’s.

But Creek answered. “Three-plus years ago he killed our next-door neighbor,” she said. “My mom had just died. Connor was really not talking to anyone, and we were pretty worried about him. While Dad and I were in the backyard raking leaves, Mrs. Ames came over with yet another casserole. Connor had got it in his head that she wanted to marry Dad and replace Mom. So he hit her with the fireplace poker. She must have had a thin skull.”

Fiji thought, I knew it. Thin skull. Connor had a bad history with fireplace pokers.

“And you covered it up.” Bobo was angry; not as angry as he would be later on, probably.

“No, we called the police!” Creek said, and she was a little angry, too. “Since he was a minor, they never tried him. The court psych evaluation said he was mentally disturbed, and his mother had just died, so they put him in a home for kids like him. He got therapy,” she added defensively. “I mean, we tried.”