Renee exhaled heavily, twisted a piece of Kleenex between her fingers. Robin watched her, twisting it tighter and tighter. It was like watching a jack-in-the-box, waiting for it to pop open. “It was your father’s idea,” her mom finally said. “He bought it for me. He was going to a lot of conferences at the time, and he was worried about me being at home alone.”

Robin opened her mouth, but she couldn’t find the words. Mitchell Bloom had always despised guns, to the point of where he’d complained to Robin’s high school about the use of prop guns in a production of Hedda Gabler. He’d always said it was the thing that had bothered him most about Wards Island—not the murderers, but the armed guards, the ever-present firearms. The idea of her father buying a gun made even less sense than her mother buying one. But what could Robin say? Renee knew it as well as she did.

“I know it sounds strange,” Renee said. “That’s one reason why we never mentioned it to you.”

“It was Dad’s gun.”

“Yes.”

“He registered it to you.”

Renee met her gaze, her blue eyes steely. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Robin said. “Thank you for being honest.”

Renee’s eyes narrowed. “What is that supposed to mean?” She practically hissed it, her face hard and angry and unfamiliar, Robin feeling the way she’d felt as a kid when her mother had railed at her for watching a movie on TV. As though she’d suddenly dropped character, turning into someone Robin didn’t know, someone she couldn’t trust. Someone who scared her.

“Nothing,” Robin said. “I swear.”

Renee’s face relaxed. She ran a hand across her eyes and gave her daughter a kind smile and settled back into herself again, as though a mask had slipped off and she’d snapped it back in place. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “Sometimes, I don’t know who I am anymore.”

Twenty-Three

June 17, 1976

9:00 P.M.

Dear Aurora Grace,

He’s dead. The cop who pulled us over. His name was Officer Nelligan. He was probably just a few years older than Gabriel. I killed him.

He’s lying in the middle of some road we never learned the name of. He is a skinny guy with freckles, a gap between his front teeth, a Timex watch. A wedding ring. A name tag that says Officer Nelligan. I learned all those details about him after he was dead, and those details made him alive. When he actually was alive, he didn’t even have a name. He was just a shadow that yelled.

“What do you think you were doing back there?” Officer Nelligan yelled into our car. “Do you realize you were going eighty in a forty-mile-per-hour zone? What is wrong with you? Are you on drugs?”