She feels a headache begin behind her eyes. “Doctor, we have not recovered a body,” she says. “This girl is what, forty pounds?”

“I’m just telling you what I saw,” he says.

“Maybe we can concentrate on our own roles in this,” Kateri says. “Unless you want me to conduct the medical testing? And you can investigate the crime scene?”

He sets his jaw.

“When can I talk to her?”

“Tomorrow,” he says, cold. He takes a step back from Kateri. “She’s resting,” he says. He clips his pen onto his coat pocket. “Good night, Detective Fisher.”

She watches him disappear down the hall, walking into the light, tall, thin, like a skeleton wearing clothes. She takes her phone out and calls Hurt.

“We haven’t found anything,” he says. “I shut it down for the night. It’s getting dark. We’ll resume at first light. How’s the kid?” he asks.

“Covered in blood,” Kateri answers.

“Injured?” he asks.

“Nothing apparent.”

“Interesting,” Hurt says. “If she were older, we’d arrest her.”

“She couldn’t have locked herself in that closet,” Kateri says. “It was locked from the outside.”

“I’d like to know what she saw,” he says.

“Me too.”

Before she goes, she asks the nurse if she can peek in on the child they have labeled Jane Doe. An officer has come to stand guard by her room. A kid, she thinks, just out of training.

“You are?” the nurse asks.

Kateri shows her badge. “I’m the lead detective,” she says. “I won’t disturb her,” she adds.

The nurse goes ahead of her and opens the door, as if it was locked, and stands in the doorway while Kateri goes in to the girl’s bedside. She sleeps sound, small in the bed, tucked in, her hair around her like a halo. The nurse waits. In the hall, a clattering cart goes by, but the girl doesn’t stir. Kateri lays her hand on the girl’s head, her skin cool, her hairline damp, and then leans in to peck her forehead.

“Try to remember,” she says.

FOUR: SHANNON

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5

I tried to remember when it was better, when anything was normal. I longed to live somewhere where no one knew who we were. Where no one made jokes about the tiny homemade tattoo on my mother’s face, a blue crescent moon where her widow’s peak met her forehead. Where the cops didn’t come question me about a barn set on fire.

“Arson’s my father’s crime,” I’d tell them. “Look it up.” And when they finally accepted that I’d been where I’d said I’d been, at work, at home, or nowhere near whatever it was that had burned, they’d give me that flat look of unwilling acceptance. Just checking.

Everything changed with the baby. My mother didn’t tell me, and I didn’t know for a long time. But when I started to notice, it was unmistakable. The swell of her belly. The way she walked like her hips were unhinged.

“Listen,” she said to me on the porch.