Bobo felt terrible. He ran his fingers through his hair and looked down at the floor for a minute, gathering his thoughts. “I never wanted anyone to use them,” he said, trying to explain. “And I never wanted law enforcement to have them, because that would mean it was for sure that my grandfather had done more terrible stuff than he was even charged with.” He sighed, and the big intake and exhalation of breath helped him steady his voice. “Mostly, I didn’t want any right-wing militia types to use them, and I didn’t want anyone else to know about them. I’d rented a storage unit under another name in Oklahoma. I left them there for a long time, making sure to keep my payments up. But when I came here, and it felt so—so doable . . . I knew I could learn the business, and Lemuel didn’t throw me any . . .”

“How did you find the secret closet?” Lemuel asked, and he didn’t sound happy.

“I just held my hand up to see if warm air was coming out. You remember, I moved here in the cold weather, in November. I was taking inventory in here, and I thought it felt kind of cold, and I thought it was strange since there was a heat register in here, and then I thought it was strange that it was way up there, and then I started fooling around with it . . .”

“What was in here, instead of the guns?” Olivia nodded her head toward the guns.

“Just some old books. I carried them up to my apartment and hid them in that old TV console that I have under the front windows.”

“Old books,” Lemuel said, as if he couldn’t believe it. “The old books I’ve been looking for, all these years.”

“Seriously? If I’d known, I would have told you,” Bobo said, honestly surprised. I found something a vampire didn’t find, he told himself, and tried not to smile.

“And you went to get the rifles?” Joe said.

“Yeah, I took a Sunday and Monday and drove over to load them up. I sweated bullets all the way back, thinking a state trooper would stop me and find all those guns.” He looked at Fiji. “Hey. Sweated bullets?”

“I got it,” Fiji said, with half of an unhappy smile.

He was used to Fiji giving him the full smile, all the wattage. He knew he’d screwed up. “Okay, I get that I should have told you all either before this or never,” he said. “I just couldn’t take the secrets anymore. My grandfather was a shitty human being. I hate that the world knows our family as the kind of people who think bombing a church is a good idea. I hate having a secret to keep. Since I realized what a—what kind of person he was, I’ve lived to refute that.”