“Where am I supposed to go?” I ask. My own house was a crime scene, and now Bear’s is as well.

“Shit,” Kateri mutters.

They wouldn’t let me see Baby Jane. I only knew he was in the same line of cells I had been in. The same metal bed. The same cold walls.

Kateri holds up her finger for me to wait and then steps down the hall to another office, where she leans in. When she comes back, she hands me her house key. “Cemetery Road,” she says.

She apologized this afternoon. When she told me, she said it generically: “Bear has been shot.” Passive. The first thing I asked her was, how? And then, by who? And then, why?

She told me in her office, where I had my regular clothes back on. She had Hurt wait outside her door.

I felt my head fill up with cotton, muffling other sounds. I thought of him struggling, writhing in pain, and I could barely picture it. He seemed so strong, so invincible. My feet and hands went cold and numb.

“You did it?” I asked her.

“I did it,” she said. “I am so very sorry to tell you.”

“Did he …” I started.

“He grabbed my gun,” she said. “It’s what I was trained to do.” Then, “Your mother has identified her attacker as Kyle Metzger.”

“Fuck Kyle Metzger,” I said. It was nearly a howl. “Why?” I said. “Did she owe him money?”

Kateri holds up her hand, asking me to wait. “He’d been hired,” Kateri said. “By Bear.”

“Fuck,” I said. “Did you shoot Kyle?”

“No. Kyle is in custody.”

It was all I could do to stand up and walk out of there. Outside her door, Hurt was standing with his hands behind him, looking at his feet.

“Did you know?” she asked me at the door.

I shook my head. She just blinked, like she believed me.

I leave there on foot with my plastic bag of things and Kateri’s key. The justice center sits on the edge of town, and I walk toward town, through the center of the village and past the Hub and then up Cemetery Road, maybe five or seven miles altogether. The village square and the storefronts have been decorated for Halloween, the town filled with skeletons and tombstones. Part of the park is made up like a fake graveyard, with hands coming up out of the dirt. A straw body in a stuffed flannel shirt lies on the lawn of the bed-and-breakfast, its head in a chair beside it. Rubber bats hang from the trees.

But I’m the one who feels like a monster. Like at any moment the villagers might come after me with torches.

I wake up with Birdie in The Nest. I’m curled on my side on Kateri’s couch, and Birdie is sitting in the triangle of my bent legs, happily watching TV, singing, playing with a stuffed bear. My body jolts, and then when I notice her, I settle. I reach for her arm and wrap my hand around it. She pushes my hand away like everything is normal.