“Why are you letting me go?” My voice is no louder than a whisper.

“Because I believe you. I believe in justice, too, but I know that sometimes it is not delivered in the way it should be. Sometimes it is not delivered at all, and the evil man walks free.”

A vein in his neck is pulsing faintly and I detect a slight sheen misting over his eyes. Deputy Logan has been wronged by evil, as I have been. He lost someone he loved because of it, as I have. Perhaps more than one person.

But his loss was not vindicated by the forces of nature, as twice mine were.

“Take them,” he says, and the glistening in his eyes is blinked away.

I reach for the papers. I place them atop one another, quarter-fold them, and place them in my handbag.

“Take the handkerchief, too.”

I look up from the handbag. “What?”

He nods toward his handkerchief, which smells of him and is wet with my tears.

“Why?”

“So that you do not forget.”

He says nothing else and I realize that he is asking me to remember this transaction we are making, he and I. I am to take the handkerchief and keep it as a token of our covenant of silence. He will never reveal what I did, and I likewise will never expose him for letting me go. I reach for the handkerchief and place it in my handbag next to the folded papers.

“I am going to ask Mrs. Fielding to return so that we can finish. I will be quick. You will answer as if I had shown you none of those documents. Agreed?”

“Yes.”

“I am going to file a report stating that Clyde Merriman was in San Francisco on April 18, went missing during the earthquake and fire, and is quite likely a casualty of the disaster. The police here will likely declare him dead in time. The name Clyde Merriman is surely dead. If he is indeed still alive, he will take advantage of being declared deceased and will likely resurface as someone else and I will have to start over. You, on the other hand, surely have nothing to worry about. He will think you’ve done him a favor if he indeed survived.”

The thought of that disgusts me. “He didn’t. He couldn’t have!” I say.

“I hope you are right.”

I say nothing as I push past any doubts that Martin didn’t crawl out of that house alive.

“Are you ready for me to bring Mrs. Fielding back in?” Deputy Logan says a second later.

I rub away lingering remnants of tears, pinch my cheeks for a bit of color, and smooth my hair. “Yes.”

The deputy stands, walks over to the door, and opens it. He calls for the recorder to return, and Mrs. Fielding enters the room and takes her chair again.

“Mrs. Fielding, can you tell us please where we left off?”

The woman looks at the little scroll of paper in her strange machine. “Question: And yet how can I believe you, Mrs. Hocking, when I know for a fact you have lied to me with regard to other matters? Answer: I haven’t. Question: But you have. You’ve been lying to me since the moment you sat down. Answer: That’s not true. I— Question: Since the moment you told me your name.”