There was more. He remembered his promise that we would contact Kelly Wilkerson once this was all over. He now thought we shouldn’t. Kelly was no longer a person of interest; we’d told the police that Coral had taken Geoff, though no body had been found. I wondered what explanation her husband would offer. How well would it match Trey’s? He wouldn’t make himself the villain, surely. In his story would he follow Trey and Spence upstairs at all? We agreed there was no need to bother Kelly. She had grief enough, and whatever her husband’s story, I didn’t want to hear it.

Depressing topic, but I wanted to keep talking. Marshall had gotten Robert back. Listening to his voice, even as we discussed these awful things, was the safest I’d felt since we got home. But he needed to call Trey and update him, too. I let him go and went back inside to check on Robert, though I’d scarcely been away from him five minutes.

I went to the kitchen to sort out bills and put the junk mail in recycling, thinking. Coral had mailed her letter from in-state. It should come in the next day or two. I hadn’t told anyone about it. Not Trey, or the police, or Gabrielle, or even Leticia, who insisted that she was my lawyer and I should tell her everything. I hadn’t even told Marshall.

I had a decision to make first. Would I open it or burn it?

No story that Coral would tell could possibly match Trey’s. How could it, considering the source? Coral could know only what Lexie had shared with her. By all accounts Coral Lee Pine had been a strict and difficult parent. In the expurgated-for-Mother version, Lexie would not have confessed that she was the source for the drugs, or about the first threesome with Spence and Bonnie, or that she’d been the one to suggest another one with Trey. Nothing Lexie told her mother would mitigate what those three boys had done.

I hoped that I would burn it. The letter would not contain anything I could believe. Why give Coral’s version any space inside my head? Coral Lee Pine was a poisoner, and she had dripped enough darkness into me already. And yet I could still feel the cord of our strange connection. She’d written to me. I wanted to read it.