“Pooky wanted to marry me. With the carriage and everything. But all he had was a bicycle and his daddy’s old mule. The night I got married for real”—Katy’s voice dropped to a whisper—“I thought about Pooky the whole time. Poor Poo. I knew he was gone, though.”

“Where did he go?”

Katy shook her head. “It’s too terrible,” she whispered.

“I need to know, Katy. For Pooky’s sake.”

Mrs. Regan looked around the room, paying special attention to the windows and the door, as though she expected to find white-coated attendants peering in at her. “There’s another place like … like the place I was. Another hole in the world. It’s for the dark people. A tree grows over it. A big twisted tree with branches that reach almost to the sky. And it’s filled with bones. The dark people who break the law are taken there.”

“Why are they taken there?”

Katy looked into her lap and spoke in the voice of a two-year-old. “To get punished.”

“Do they ever come back?”

Now Katy’s face held the sober concentration of a child given its first glimpse of human cruelty. “Never.”

Caitlin sensed she was on the verge of a revelation. All she could think about was a place described in Henry’s journals as the Bone Tree—a place where Indians and black men had been murdered for years, and dead bodies dumped to prevent their being found. “Who took Pooky to that tree?”

“I was always going to tell,” she said softly. “But I have to wait until Daddy passes. Then he can’t hurt me.”

“Katy—”

“Shh! He might hear us. Daddy can hear from miles away sometimes. You know … before Henry came and talked to me, all this was blank. Everything had fallen down Dr. Borgen’s hole. But then it started to come back. First the bathtub … Daddy killed Mama in the bath. Did you know that? I thought he was just talking to her—and he was. But later I figured it out. He was holding her head under the water while he talked.”

Every hair on Caitlin’s body was standing erect. She swallowed hard. She couldn’t find her voice.

“Then, when you called a few minutes ago,” Katy said, “I knew.”

“Knew what?”

The woman shook her head again. “It doesn’t matter. It’s too late.”

“What do you mean? Too late for what?”

Brody Royal’s daughter listed to the left in her chair. “For me. For Katy-Poo.”

“Katy,” Caitlin said firmly. “Whatever you were waiting to tell, you can tell me. Now. No one will hurt you anymore. I’ll make sure of that.”

The woman’s eyes rose and met Caitlin’s with conspiratorial slyness. “Will you promise not to tell?”

“Yes. I promise.”

A manicured fingernail rose to the red lips, its scarlet nail gleaming. “Cross your heart and hope to die?”