“I don’t know that, Lee. And there’s no way I’ll believe it until I figure out what in the hell is going on around here. I know Grandma’s hiding something. Like what the fuck is that grave in the woods? Why was she bashing her head into it? Lee, the lady is a psychopath. Maybe someone in town can give us answers.”

“How? We can’t take the car. Grandma will definitely hear that.”

“I found some old bikes in the toolshed out back. The tires have to be twenty years old, but I found a pump, and they’re holding air okay. We’ll be fine for a night.”

“You want to ride cracked, mangly old tires on these old roads?” I said. “That’s a horrible idea.”

“Got a better one?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s just get back to work and be grateful that we have a nice place to live and forget about all this shit.”

“Lee?”

“Yeah?”

“There were three bikes in the shed. Not two. And from the looks of it, the third one belonged to a boy. It was just Mom and Grandma living here, right? Who was the other bike for?”

Well, damn. Maybe there were some things I needed to find out too. But for myself, not for Murphy. I didn’t think she would understand them anyway.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

Murphy smiled big at me, and for a minute it felt great not to let her down. As if there wasn’t this ocean of secrets inside of me—the tapes and the prophecies and what George Urquhart had said about my great-grandfather—all of it roiling and churning, a storm roaring in my heart.

Later that night, after dinner and a couple of hours of waiting around, we snuck out of the house and grabbed the bikes from where Murphy had stashed them away. Everything was still wet from the afternoon storm, and the ground glistened jewel-like where the moonlight struck it.

Riding the rickety old bike through the dirt and muck was hard, but it was fun too. The hot night was alive with bugs and night birds and creatures all over. I caught flashes of eyes from the woods on either side, big-antlered deer and scurrying possums, and it was like all of them were our guardian angels, watching over us on the road. And man, what a moon we had, near-full and high and wild, the kind of moon that seems alive with fire, a giant pulsing heartbeat of light.

It was good to be free and off in the night, just a kid with my sister, sneaking out. It was beautiful, really, me taking part in normal teenager stuff.