“My, my,” said Maude. “I wonder what he did to earn this.”

“Maligning a possibly innocent man,” said Harry. “Did you know him?”

Polly wasn’t sure he was joking.

“Of course not,” snapped Maude. “Have you looked into people who’ve gone missing?”

“I will when I get him out of here. The coroner just left.”

“I imagine it’s been too long,” Maude said. “I imagine plenty of people are never identified, or never found. I knew a girl who simply disappeared, one day in the late twenties. Knocked up and never seen again.”

“She’ll turn up someday,” said Harry. “That messy human shell.”

Disappeared, Polly thought, looking at a long femur. Almost no one truly managed it. And now it came to her, all those hints of family murders wavering up for air.

“Maude, is this the man from the car? The man who killed Asta?”

“Why on earth would you think that?” asked Maude.

“Several reasons,” said Polly.

“I wish it was,” said Maude. “But sadly, no.”

Jane didn’t hear this; she’d run off after the children because Helen was screaming at Sam, enraged about some injustice.

“What if I said I’d cancel the party unless you told me about Asta?”

Maude smiled without futzing with her hair or another tell. “I’d say you were a manipulative little girl. The story is horribly simple,” she said. “Asta met a bad man and she died because of it.”

“Did she know him well? Or was it only chance that they died together?”

“Oh, he didn’t die for years,” she said. “Despite our hopes and dreams, as it were.”

Graham would probably live for decades, too, thought Polly bleakly. “So he was no better than the man who abandoned her? Please give me his name.”

Maude seemed to think about it, then shut her eyes. “Ask your mother. I will tell you that he was drunk and driving. He’d beaten her earlier that day and he left her to die in the water. He could have saved her, and he didn’t.” She opened her eyes again. “Just a bad man,” she said. “That’s all it takes.”

It was the Fourth of July, the night with the best fireworks. Ned and Drake put their shovels and brushes in the truck, and Harry stretched out his tarps while the rest of them bundled in blankets and watched the show in the river valley below. Merle held Sam, Helen was on Maude’s lap, and Jane bounced up and down to stay warm. Polly’s eyes went wonky with the first few explosions, and she backed up, as if ten feet would make a difference, until she was near Ned. A firework for every body in the river, she thought.