Hurt drops his pen on the table, and the clatter in the quiet room makes Kateri jump. “Did what to Park?” Hurt asks.

“Let him take the fall.”

“For what?” Hurt asks.

“The fire,” Pearl says. “The fire at the farmhouse when Shannon was little.” Hurt lets her wait, and Kateri watches her face closely. Her eyes well up finally, then, when she talks about her son. “I just wanted to end it,” she says. “I hated all of it. The shitty house, living with Park, and taking care of a baby. I was twenty years old,” Pearl says, “with a three-year-old. Shannon didn’t have shit to look forward to,” she says. “In this town, with no money. But then we made it out. He kept screaming for me, but it was Park who pulled him out, and I crawled after him, hurt but alive, and when the cops came to investigate, I … I blamed it on Park. I let him take the fall,” she says. “And let Shannon think it was Park who tried to kill us.”

“But it was you,” Kateri whispers.

“It was me,” Pearl says.

They find the man that Pearl calls Jane at his listed address. He opens the door without question, wearing a soft dress shirt, open at the collar, gray dress pants, and black shoes. He moves aside to let them into the kitchen, a small room, tidy and bright, with a bouquet of bird feathers on the table and some sun-bleached animal bones. Kateri recognizes the mandible of what looks like a deer and the stump of an antler. She nudges Hurt’s arm, juts her chin in that direction. Jane pauses; it seems to catch his breath, though he’s barely moving. Kateri thinks he looks weak, diminished. She noticed how thin his wrists are, how the bones of his face are all visible underneath his sallow skin.

She shouldn’t be here. She should have stayed home the way the chief instructed, but when Hurt left in a squad car to talk to Jane, she rushed after him.

“Fisher,” he warned.

“I have to,” she said. She slid into the car without asking.

Now, in Jane’s kitchen, she lets Hurt take the lead.

“Sir, we need to ask you some questions regarding the disappearance of Pearl Jenkins, the abduction of her daughter, Sparrow Annie Jenkins, and the murder of deputy Craig O’Neil.”

“None of this is Shannon’s fault,” Jane says.

“He’s being released,” Kateri says.

Jane sinks into a kitchen chair, deflated, exhausted. “Thank God,” he says.

Kateri sees Hurt jot something down on a plain white notepad, but she can’t make out what it is.

“You were released from Clinton Correctional in May,” Kateri says. “Did you come right to Spring Falls?”

“I don’t have any family,” Jane says.

“But you knew Park Jenkins,” Hurt says. “Did you know Park Jenkins before you were incarcerated at Clinton?”

“No.”

“You must have become quite close,” Hurt says. “To move to where his family lives. Were you expecting his release?”