Just before eleven, I parked in front of the station, a one-story building a mile or so off the main strip.

It looked like it had been built in the fifties, and was nestled among a parking lot and woods. I parked near the back, hands trembling as I scanned the lot. Only one exit, the road I’d entered on. Again, I quelled the desire to escape, to drive off, become a shadow person, like John was supposed to be. Get the hell out of Dodge – and away from Davis. That would come soon, I told myself, only not just yet. I had to tread carefully. I knew this.

Grabbing my phone, I called Ellie again. But like each time I’d dialed her in the last twenty-four hours, the call went straight to voice mail. She wouldn’t recognize my new number – she was probably screening – only I hoped to catch her anyway, hear her indignant tone, the words I craved: No, I didn’t tell him. I promised you, didn’t I? Prove to myself I was only being paranoid, that Davis had nothing to do with John’s death, that it was someone else. Sam Alby, probably – or maybe even someone random, some crazed serial killer living deep in the woods like you always saw in movies, hiding away in John’s unlocked cabin. Wrong place, wrong time.

One more unanswered call, and I shoved the phone into my bag and traipsed across the parking lot.

Inside, the station was dead, nothing like the station in Brooklyn where I’d once filed a police report over a stolen delivery of high-end linens. In that station, there’d been a cacophony of buzzers and radios, bells and whistles. Here, it was pin-drop still. A woman in uniform at the counter tapped away at a PC begging to be put out of its misery. Parker was nowhere in sight, but of course she wouldn’t be. She was a DEC officer, concerned with business on state land, where the hike had been; not Ulster County, where John’s cabin was, only a few miles away but an entirely different jurisdiction.

The officer looked up. ‘Help you?’

‘I’m Lucy King,’ I managed. ‘Detective McKnight asked me to come in at eleven?’

She kept tapping away; then, without looking up, ‘You can have a seat, Miss King.’

It was fifteen minutes before he came out, giving me time to rehearse what I was about to say: I heard a scream and I stepped out into the clearing. I didn’t see John, but I saw his backpack and water bottle. That’s why I thought he had fallen. It wasn’t what I’d initially told Parker yesterday, but I figured hammering down that narrative wasn’t going to do me any good.