One was a cassette tape I’d thought I’d lost, a bootleg of Muddy Waters playing live with Mick Jagger and the Red Devils. Another was a book Angie had loaned me, which I’d given up on after fifty pages and stuffed back there in hopes she’d forget it. The third item was a roll of electrical tape I’d tossed up there last summer when I slapped some around a fraying cord and was too lazy to walk it back to my toolbox.

I picked up the cassette, tossed the book back into the darkness, and reached for the electrical tape.

But I never touched it. Instead, I sat back on the floor and stared at it.

And, finally, I saw the whole board.

37

“Mr. Kenzie,” Wesley said when I found him down by the pond at the back of his father’s property, “what a pleasure to see you.”

“Did you push her?” I asked.

“What? Who?”

“Naomi,” I said.

He jerked his head back, gave me a confused smile. “What are you talking about?”

“She chased a ball out onto this pond,” I said. “That was the story, right? But how’d the ball get out there? Did you throw it, Wes?”

He gave me a small, strange smile, pained, I think, lonely. He turned his head and looked out at the pond. His gaze grew distant. He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back slightly, his shoulders tightening, thin body rippling with a slow shudder.

“Naomi threw the ball,” he said softly. “I don’t know why. I’d walked on ahead.” He tilted his head to the right. “Up that way. Lost in thought, I suppose, though I can’t remember what I was thinking about.” He shrugged. “I walked on, and my sister threw the ball and it got ahead of her. Maybe it took an odd bounce off a rock. Maybe she threw it out onto the ice to see what would happen. It doesn’t really matter why. The ball went out on the ice, and she followed it. I heard her footsteps on the ice, all of a sudden, as if someone had, on a whim, flicked on a sound track. One moment I was locked in my fucked-up head as usual, the next I could hear a squirrel pawing the frozen grass twenty yards away. I could hear snow melt. I could hear Naomi’s feet on the ice. And I turned my head in time to see the ice break under her. It was so quiet, that sound.” He turned back to me, cocked an eyebrow. “You’d think not, wouldn’t you? But it sounded as if you were crumpling tinfoil in your hand. And she,” he smiled, “she had this look on her face of utter joy. What a new experience this was going to be! She never made a noise. Didn’t cry out. She just dropped. And she was gone.”