There was only sunlight to brighten the dim room, and this single window’s glass was dirty, but the first thing he saw was the shape of the car seat with the small form blanketed snugly inside it. Robert. Alive. Not unhappy. He was stirring from a nap, yawning and stretching, bowing his small spine, eyes shut. Lexie was not there.

The second thing Marshall saw answered all his questions. Who else would help Coral take such a dark revenge? No one but Lexie’s own father. Who was dead. Who had long been dead. And yet. His hand was at work, here, too.

My husband had a good job in construction, Coral had told Bree. She’d been around the sites. Taking him his lunch each day. Mariah Denton had said, He worked demo for years. Marshall had filed that information away; he had not applied it.

The dynamite piled around the car seat was old. Very old. So old it was sweating, and the papery layers had begun peeling away. It must be as unstable as all hell, and there was a lot of it, stacked in a horseshoe around the baby.

Almost too scared to move, Marshall sucked in a shallow breath. He didn’t know shit about explosives. He wondered how much Coral knew. He didn’t see an obvious sleek black box with helpful numbers counting down in bright digital red. Instead he saw wires or cables or perhaps twisted fuses running in lines over and around the heaped dynamite.

Robert’s eyes were open now. He kicked one of his feet out from under the blanket, waving it around. The movement brought his puppy-covered sock quite near the old sweating explosives. Marshall’s mouth went dry.

He shielded his eyes with his hands, peering in, trying to make out details. The cabin was one room with a poured-concrete floor. There was a large camp stove next to a couple of folding chairs and a square table, plus a large, deep metal sink, like the kind in his laundry room. An ancient double bed sagged by the back wall, flanked by a sizable storage cabinet on one side and what looked a chest freezer on the other. That was all.

His gaze was pulled inexorably back to the explosives, his mouth too dry for him to swallow. One of the thick wires or cables ran in a looping coil that disappeared around the back of the pile of dynamite closest to Robert’s head.

What was at the end of that? A timer? A detonator? The baby was looking around now, awake, waving his limbs bare inches from the ancient, sweating stacks. It could all blow any second. If he were dumb enough to kick the door down, it would blow for sure. Even breaking out this window was a huge risk. Jesus.