“I hear you,” Tucker said, dropping his tone, as if to de-escalate the tension. I drew in a shaky breath, trying to calm myself. “But what I don’t understand is why no one we’ve interviewed so far can confirm a single thing you’ve just told us. Avril tells me you and she have become quite close, yet she didn’t mention a thing about this potential—what, assault by dinner plate? Or a break-in? Or Henry Davis lingering outside your house? If any of that really happened, Mrs. Rhodes, you must have been distressed—why didn’t you tell anyone? We even asked Klaus Schmidt and some of your other neighbors if they’d noticed anything unusual at your house. They all told us about the graffiti and that scene you caused at the Redstone Arsenal picnic, but had nothing else to report.”

“When Jürgen wakes up, he’ll tell you,” I whispered fiercely.

“If he wakes up,” Johnson said flatly. “I got the impression that was far from a sure thing when I spoke to the hospital earlier.”

I stared at them helplessly, but then a thought struck me. There were other people who knew at least part of what had been going on.

“Talk to Lizzie or Calvin Miller.”

After that, they moved me back to the cell.

46

Lizzie

Huntsville, Alabama
1950

“Henry left last night,” I said brightly. I was carrying a basket of linen, freshly stripped from Henry’s bed. Calvin liked to sleep in on Saturdays, then usually went into the office for a few hours to catch up on some paperwork while the place was quiet. By the time he emerged from his room, I’d torn through Henry’s apartment and stripped the place down to its bones. I tore Henry’s notes up into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. The rest of his bullets and a tin of red paint I found in his closet were in a cardboard box in my laundry, along with Sofie Rhodes’s photographs, tucked safely in an envelope I’d already stamped and addressed to her home.

There was nothing I could do about the gun, since Henry wasn’t sure where he’d dropped it. I just had to hope that since he’d bought it months ago and likely in another city, the police couldn’t trace it back to him.

“He left last night?” Calvin repeated, frowning. “He didn’t even say goodbye?”

“He had a falling-out with Walt at the lumberyard,” I said, lying on the fly and hating every second of it. I’d never lied to Cal before. “But Henry heard about a job up north. He just had to be there to start today. So I encouraged him to go.”

“You were so worried about him…” Cal said, bewildered. “We were going to talk to him about seeing a doctor today. You just let him leave instead?”