After that, his only comfort is the matchbook in his pocket. A few times during his shift, he steps outside to strike a match, lets it burn down until he feels a sting on his fingers. The craving for heat is huge, total. It fills him up, hollows out where other things used to be. But every time he closes his eyes, he sees the women again. Arranged, as though they are animals who have been hunted. In the back hall he tears the drawing into strips, feeling a rack of guilt as he looks at the ruined picture, the tears like additional wounds to the women’s bodies. He shoves the scraps into the garbage near the coffeemaker, pushes them below the wet coffee grounds and greasy napkins and orange peels.

There are two more hours left on his shift, but for the first time in his life, he cuts out of work early. It shocks him, how easy it is. To simply walk across the parking lot behind the casino, past the dumpsters filled with the waste from the buffets: half-gnawed cobs of corns, the bones of rotting fish, a thousand crumpled paper napkins dark with grease. Past the marina, a few motorboats tied up, bobbing alongside the docks, and the overgrown bushes near the valet. The day feels both damned and filled with renewed potential. He can’t save those women. Their open eyes will follow him wherever he goes. But he can set a fire, a signal. Something larger, more ruinous than ever before, that will show everyone just how cruel, how ugly and wrong this city has become.

LILY

ON FRIDAY MORNING, I GOT to the library before it opened, waited for someone to come and raise the metal grate at the front door. I wasn’t the only one lingering—a woman with a cart full of plastic grocery store bags and crumpled newspapers waited with me. I shifted from foot to foot until someone came and rolled the grate up and unlocked the door.

The woman who worked on the archives, Sue, was small and tidy-looking with a neat crop of silvery hair. Once she arrived and settled in, I showed her the pictures of the paintings on my phone. At one—the diving girl done in blue—she reached out and held my wrist.

“That one. We have a photograph like that. Give me a few minutes.”

She left me at a linoleum table rutted with gouged-out initials. Mil had texted me on Wednesday to say she hadn’t had any luck with her husband’s papers, but she hadn’t gone through everything (PACK RAT!!! she wrote, accompanied by a frowning emoji) and would let me know if she found anything at all about the paintings. I knew Mil was doing what she could, but it seemed less and less likely that she might find something useful in her husband’s notes.