He leads her down into the center of the house. At the bottom of the stairs he unlocks a door made of something that looks like, but surely cannot be, granite. Dee shivers. Perhaps he will lock the door behind her and leave her in there.

A long gallery stretches ahead running the length of the house. There are no windows. The air is cool, controlled to a fraction of a degree. Display cases and framed photographs line the walls, each lit by a single low spotlight. This is his collection; the museum, he calls it. She has heard of it. It is well known, if your interests lie in that direction. The man obtains things that most people can’t. Things that no one should see. He collects the artifacts of death. Photographs, vials of blood stolen from evidence, letters in spiky Victorian copperplate, pieces of the unclaimed dead, the pieces the killer did not have time to eat before he was caught.

The room is a corridor of Dee’s nightmares. Each object is a relic of something terrible that could have been done to Lulu. Dee glances at the black-and-white image on the wall to her left. She quickly looks away again.

“You must look,” he says. “That’s the deal.” He knows precisely what she feels. She can hear it in his voice.

Dee walks down the gallery. She looks at each display for exactly three seconds before moving on. She makes her mind white static. He walks beside her, intimately close. His skin exudes a faint odor of tin. He doesn’t seem to breathe.

When Dee reaches the end of the dim corridor, she turns to him and holds out her hand. For a moment he is motionless, and his still blue gaze crawls all over her, head to foot. She understands that he is collecting her, and the moment. Not every memento can be housed in a glass case. She thinks, It’s going to happen now. I’m going to throw up. Then he gives a little nod and puts the envelope into her hand.

The light and the air are blinding. She wants to weep with gratitude at the sight of trees. But she refuses to give him anything else.

“Drive safe,” he says, and goes back into his wooden palace. He has taken what he wanted and she holds no more interest. She goes to her car slowly, puts the envelope casually on the passenger seat beside her. She forces herself to drive away through the trees at a leisurely pace. He might still be watching. Dee’s foot twitches on the gas, her breath comes fast.

As she turns out of the long forested drive, onto the road, she puts her foot down. The engine screams.