“I couldn’t get there to see him yesterday. I promised him I would be there and I would bring him something special if he did his writing assignment.”

“That doesn’t give him an excuse to set the hospital on fire.”

“Everybody in his life has let him down. I was trying to be the one person who wouldn’t do that to him.”

She shook her head and swore under breath. Her thoughts tumbled like kaleidoscope pieces. “What do we do now?”

“The sheriff’s office has been notified. They’re looking for him. I don’t think you should do anything.”

“Yeah.” Anne sighed. “I’ve done enough already, haven’t I? The court wanted to send him to a juvenile facility after the first incident. I begged for that not to happen.”

“You were trying to do what you thought was best for the child, Anne. That’s all you can do.”

“He’ll be going there now.”

“There’s no getting around that.”

“No.”

“You did the best you could, girl,” Willa said, patting her hand.

“I know,” Anne said. “I just wish it could have been good enough.”

Dennis had walked what seemed like most of the night before getting to his old house, careful not to let anybody see him. He was good at that. He used to roam all over town in the night, looking in people’s windows and watching them have sex and stuff. Once he had seen a man fucking a blow-up doll. That had been crazy.

He didn’t know what had happened to his family’s house or any of their stuff. With his mother dead and his father dead and himself stuck wherever the court put him, his stupid half-sisters had gone away to live with some relative who didn’t want anything to do with him.

Ha! They’d be surprised when they saw his picture in the paper.

To his shock, when Dennis had finally gotten to the house, practically everything had been ripped out of it—walls and floors and carpets. A big, huge trash bin was parked in the driveway, and it was full of junk like old drywall and linoleum and a broken toilet.

Dennis decided it didn’t really matter to him that all the Farman stuff was gone. They hadn’t had anything very nice anyway. And most of Dennis’s prized possessions had been in his backpack that the detectives had taken away from him. They had probably divvied up the good stuff, like the pocketknife he had stolen from his father’s dresser, and the cigarette lighter he had taken from his mother’s purse. Probably nobody had wanted the dried-up rattlesnake head.