“We didn’t do anything wrong, Ryan,” she said. “It was a misunderstanding. We all just assumed that man was Kyle Dornan. And the police believe he killed Jennifer. This doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. He was involved with her. It’s always someone who was involved with the victim. We have to remember that. The suspicion always falls on those men who are involved with the murder victim.”

“Usually it works that way.”

“That’s because usually it’s some idiot man doing something to a woman. Usually.”

We still didn’t even know exactly how Kyle had died. What he had done to bring down the wrath of the police. Where he’d been or why. But I felt acutely responsible for his death.

I felt the urge to take out my phone and check Twitter, but I knew Amanda would find that rude.

“If we hadn’t said he was at our house, the police might not have been so hot to talk to him,” I said. “Maybe he would have just left town. Or surrendered.”

“He broke into Blake’s house too. He threatened you. You just said he used that broken bottle. He had a record. And you know that was Kyle Dornan. They can still close the case against him.”

Her words made complete sense. As much sense as anything else. But they brought little comfort.

“This means someone else came to our house,” I said, working through the crazy news. “Someone else wanted to break in and do us harm. Someone else said it was a shame the girl was killed.”

“It’s terrifying.” Amanda held the phone out to me. “Do you want to call Rountree? Or should I?”

I took out my phone and called the detective.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

It took fifteen minutes to get ahold of Rountree. We sat in the car while we called her and left messages. Karen came out only one more time, an umbrella opened over her perfectly coiffed short hair, and received a firm but polite brush-off from Amanda. When Rountree finally answered, and Amanda told her about the man at the back door not being Kyle Dornan, the detective promised she would come over to Karen and Bill’s house as soon as she could.

But as soon as she could might turn into an hour or more.

So we waited inside the house. While Henry slept, we sat around the dining room table, the remains of lunch long gone, and Amanda filled her parents in on the latest about Kyle Dornan, that he wasn’t the man who had come to the house looking for Blake and me.

Karen and Bill listened to the new information with their hands raised to their chests. While it didn’t take Amanda long to tell them, they both managed to gasp and exclaim three or four times as she spoke.