Booker nods, solemnly casting his gaze downward. ‘The two days that followed were hell on earth. I stayed in bed all day on Saturday. Tried to convince myself I’d dreamt it. For a while I actually believed that. But then Archie came over wanting to talk it all through and everything came back. I will say one thing, though – Mary always seemed strangely calm about the whole thing. Meanwhile Archie and I were having a really hard time, but she was … What I mean is, when she said she was upset, it still never really showed behind her eyes. Y’see? Think some people handle the stress of situations like that differently, you know.’

‘Sure,’ I say.

‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘I went back to the woods on Sunday to try and bury her, but I couldn’t –’ he chokes up here – ‘find her. I couldn’t find her anywhere. I thought I’d remembered where we’d been but I figured I probably wasn’t looking in the right spot … Well, I was, because I found the jacket she’d been wearing, all torn up.’

‘Only the jacket.’

‘I figured, uh, animals, must have got to her. There’re all sorts out here: foxes, coyotes. Thought they must have dragged her off. Anyway, I, uh, buried the jacket, built a little gravestone with rocks and twigs and things …’

He looks sort of pathetic.

‘And then Sunday was the day Frank found the guitar in the bay.’

‘But the note, it –’

‘That’s it.’ His eyes have a new fire in them now that I can’t place. ‘I swear to you, to God, to anyone who’s listening – we did not leave that letter in her car. Neither of us put that note in her car. I swear on my life, on my mother, that I didn’t do it and I made Archie swear he didn’t either.’

‘Didn’t she ever tell you? It was Mary Anne.’

‘Mary? Why would she have –’

‘I don’t know yet.’

The weather is terrible. Wind whips past and the sky is so much darker than it ought to be at this time of day.

‘Why didn’t you do anything?’ I ask.

‘Archie was my friend. Him and Mary were gonna have a life together, and Roxy was troubled, so troubled, and it was Sandown’s belief that she was gonna do something like this anyways, and they already decided that that was how they wanted her story to go.’

I felt vaguely like an adult consoling a child. ‘Her story? You think that warrants no investigation? What you all decided she was?’