When they’d spotted the crappy SUV under the thin canopy of trees, her hand had come up to cover her face as if she’d gasped it straight off the steering wheel. The truck was nearly hidden in the shade next to the falling-apart barn at the end of the blue line on the map in the picture.

Carly’s face had marked the spot. The idea slithered like snakes. She wanted to delete the screenshot from her phone.

Emma’s car limped and rolled across the rutted lot, then rocked to a stop in the lush, knee-high weeds.

The man from the foyer was in the driver’s seat. A curve of green garden hose looped from around the back of the truck into the front window.

Carly had slept a good bit of the drive over, wrung out and helpless to resist the whooshing lullaby of the road under the tires. The brief nap had left her numb. She was horrified, but it felt far away, as if the caring part of her brain was still asleep. She did care, but her mind would deliver that package later.

Emma unbuckled her seat belt. “Stay here, okay?”

“Okay.” It wasn’t difficult. She knew what she needed to know. She’d already seen him dead once.

There wasn’t much to read in Emma’s (not-Emma) body language as she walked to the truck. She’d gone pale and quiet at the story of what had happened at the house the night before—the broken glass and wrecked stuff off the walls, the ragged-looking man who flopped as if he were boneless, John not calling the ambulance, and all of that. She’d said little since she agreed to come out and see what was at the end of the track on the app.

She stopped halfway across the field, then turned and shaded her eyes from the sun. She looked back to Carly and to the road beyond. Then Emma walked on, slowly, to the stand of trees. Carly saw her arms come up to steeple her hands over her nose and mouth when she got up beside the truck, her back settled down into a contemplative curve. She lowered her head, totally still for long enough that Carly wondered if Emma was praying. Or crying.

Emma used the hem of her shirt to pull up the garden hose and to cover the door handle when she opened the driver’s-side door. She leaned in, looked, closed the door again. She tucked the hose back into the window. She walked around to the passenger side for a similar routine. She spent some time looking in the back, crawling in partway and coming out with something in her hand.

She came back, grim faced, to Carly’s side of the car first and opened the glove box to put in a black gun.