“In your vision, you said Mom’s wheel fell off, right?” said Murphy. “Like it had been loosened or something?”

“Yes.”

I looked back and forth between the tire iron and the adoption papers. We were both thinking it, but only Murphy was brave enough to ask.

“Does that mean Horace killed our mom?” said Murphy. “So he could have all the money to himself?”

That’s when I realized Horace was standing right behind us.

“The fuck do you kids think you’re doing?” he snarled.

Murphy whipped Horace’s tire iron from the trunk and whacked him across the skull with it. There he lay, facedown on the floor, a red, swelling, dripping welt on his bald head.

“What do we do now?” I said.

Murphy looked up at me, eyes all sad and scared and full of wonder. “Run, I guess.”

I know what you’re thinking. If you found a folder full of forged adoption documents in your shitty stepfather’s trunk, not to mention the tire iron he probably used to sabotage your mom’s car, why wouldn’t you go straight to the sheriff with it?

Well, I’ll tell you: It’s hard to report your stepfather to the county sheriff when the county sheriff is your stepfather.

We had no choice. We ran.

We took Horace’s trans am, the only non-government-issue vehicle on the premises. We made it about thirty miles out of town before Murphy finally spoke up.

“Shit,” said Murphy. “I forgot my phone. I must have left it back in the garage. And goddammit, I got blood on me.”

It was true. It looked thick and scabby against the black of her dress. I handed her a tissue out of my left pocket, and she dabbed at it, but the stain was there for good.

“I hate this dress,” she said, her eyes watering. “I hate funerals.”

“Me too,” I said.

I kept the car steady on the highway, trying not to cry, the sunset like a gaping wound up in the sky.

“Oh god,” she said. “What did I do?”

“You did something smart, that’s what you did,” I said. “You saved both of our hides.”

“But what happens now? You have another vision or something? The cosmos tells us where to go next?”

“You remember how I saw Mom in my vision that night, but an older version of her? I think maybe that was Grandma. I think we’re supposed to go and find her.”

“Are you kidding me? She didn’t even come to the funeral.”

“But you saw all the letters she wrote, right? Grandma’s been trying to talk to us forever. She has to take us in now. We need her.”

We’d never been to Grandma’s before, of course, but Mom had sometimes talked about the house where she grew up in Benign, Louisiana, this placed called “the Farm.” None of the letters I had seen had a return address on them, but I was pretty sure Grandma still lived there.