By now the woman was digging through his car, throwing doors open and rooting around on the floorboards, her skinny ass in the air while her baby howled. She emerged with the bottle of tequila—now empty. She grimaced and flung it to the dirt.

“You got more, right?”

Was this a dream? Was this woman really begging him for booze while her kids went hungry?

He stared at the lady and her kids on the cinder-block steps, and he wondered which was worse: losing the mother who glued your family together or growing up with a mother like this one. The answer came to him instantly, along with a sour wave of tequila that landed on the dirt by his feet.

These kids. These poor, miserable kids had it so much worse than Jax ever could.

And this was how Jax knew he couldn’t be saved, why a hundred baptisms by Pamela’s crazy pastor into the waters of Lake Crosby couldn’t save his black and evil soul—because looking at that scraggly girl and her wailing baby brother made him want nothing more than that second bottle of tequila.

30

The good thing about living in a house of glass in the woods is that you know when someone’s coming. You hear the whir of a motor as they steer around a curve in the drive, murmured voices carried on the wind, the way the birds and chipmunks go still and quiet. It gives you just enough time to pat down your hair and slap on a smile before they step up to a door or a window.

The bad thing is there’s no hiding from the two strangers, peering through the glass.

A man and woman, both in their late fifties or early sixties, their faces far too grim and somber for a sunny Saturday afternoon. They could be anyone, and yet my gut knows exactly who they are.

I freeze at the edge of the foyer, taking in the woman’s white-blond hair, her birdlike build, her full lips and pale skin behind dark sunglasses. She clutches flowers to her chest, a spray of big white buds that falls over an arm.

Funeral flowers.

I open the door, and she nudges her husband with an elbow.

“My name is John Sterling, and this is my wife, Sharon. We’re looking for the owner of this house. I understand his name is Mr. Keller?”

He has an accomplished air about him—a doctor, an accountant, the owner of a chain of shoe stores—but with clenched fists and a sharp, angry edge. Grief in the form of fury, and I don’t blame him. If I were in his shoes, standing on the doorstep where my daughter washed up dead, I’d be pissed off, too.