We roar north and turn sharply, heading into the pitch and heave of the mountains. Soon we’re skidding up unpaved streets. Lelia and Rush slow down, down, down, until we’re crawling along a road with a few trailers lining it. And then we reach a farmhouse that stands both proud and ramshackle, painted a light blue that serves as a sky-like background for a thousand varieties of weeds and herbs and wildflowers.

I can picture them at home now. Lelia in one of those gorgeous glass-skinned houses that people in California seem to have instead of mansions. June in a nest of middle-class normalcy, brothers and sisters swirling around her. Hawthorn here, set among the brambles. The only ones I can’t see in their natural settings are Rush and Imogen.

When I picture them, they’re together, in one of the Tempest Gardens cottages, Rush’s cleaning products forgotten, Imogen poised over her in a brass bed, Imogen’s eyes not misty but perfectly clear. She dips low, red curls pooling as they kiss.

Rush brings the motorcycle to a stop just as I realize what I’m thinking about. I ease my arms off her waist. Slide away. Rush turns, still straddling the seat. “We’ll have to save the dowsing rod for another day.” She dismounts and heads into the knee-high weeds, singing to herself as she ruffles the flowers. The idea of Rush with a girl who is infinitely prettier and more powerful than I am should probably make me jealous, but mostly it makes me want to know more.

We leave the motorcycles on a dusty path and walk to one of the outbuildings. It takes me a second to realize that everyone else is following me. I know where Hawthorn’s going to be, or maybe my feet know.

I’ve brought us to a little shed, open to the elements on one side. We gather along that side, waiting for Hawthorn to notice. It feels like the bones are obvious, like she should be able to feel them. But she just keeps working over an honest-to-goodness cauldron, wearing a rubber apron.

“What are you making?” I ask, stepping forward to look into the depths of the black pot, crusted with age.

“Lemon-thyme soap,” she says, ladling the heated mixture into a cast-iron mold set on a sawhorse. “Ora sells it at the farmers’ market.”

“We have a problem,” Lelia says, her words weighted with the proper amount of We’re in deep shit. “Our dowser dug up something.”

“Not literally,” I add, because I want it to be clear to Hawthorn that I did not exhume these bones.

Lelia opens her messenger bag and holds out the skull. It’s exactly what every replica of a skull looks like, except it’s more solid and delicate at the exact same time. June gasps so hard that the butterflies in the weeds outside take off in a fluttering tide.