For twenty days I crisscrossed the parish with my list, moving from houses to trailers to apartments in the hope of persuading a living Double Eagle or one of their children to talk to me. I wasn’t even sure what I most wanted to know; I simply had to poke at the hornet’s nest until something came swarming out. But nothing did. Going through the motions of my former career as an assistant district attorney partially restored my sense of order, and with it my connection to the world. But by the time the morning of the VK’s retaliation rolled around, I was still suffering from a fundamental sense of dislocation.

I awakened to the scent of coffee coming from the kitchen, which told me that Mia was up, and probably Annie, too. Most mornings I find Mia at the kitchen table, reading a novel or working at her MacBook while Annie takes her shower. That morning, Annie poked her mother’s face through my door and said, “Eggs and toast or oatmeal and blueberries?”

“You pick.”

“Both. You need to get some weight back.”

“How about some garlic cheese grits?” Mia called. “That’ll put some meat back on your bones.”

“I’ll give the oatmeal a shot, if you put brown sugar in it.”

With a groan I rolled out of bed, stretched, then went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the shower.

Keisha Harvin had fallen in love with Caitlin Masters’s house the first night she stayed in it, and in the months since, she’d only grown to love it more. A three-story Victorian on Washington Street, directly across from the mayor’s house, it was the kind of place Keisha might never be able to afford on her own. Every morning she awakened in the cavernous house, she smiled, then rose and padded like a princess across the hardwood floor and down the stairs to the gleaming kitchen, feeling all the while as though she were acting in a movie.

Sabrina, she thought sometimes. I’m the black Audrey Hepburn.

And yet . . . Keisha never could get quite comfortable in the house. Wherever she walked, she felt Caitlin’s unquiet ghost hovering nearby. Keisha had no sense of any malevolent spirit, only one that hated to let go of the world of light and life. Keisha told herself that since she devoted almost every waking hour to completing Caitlin’s work on the Double Eagle cases, Caitlin’s ghost would forgive a sister for trespassing in her home.