The room where she questions Shannon Jenkins is an office, with a cheap desk from Walmart and a blue overstuffed chair, the kind you’d find in an old lady’s living room. There’s a lamp, and a bookcase filled with odd reference books: a dictionary, a thesaurus, a set of World Book Encyclopedias from the 1960s, three or four different Bibles, and one Reader’s Digest Condensed that includes The Count of Monte Cristo.

Kateri leans on the edge of the desk and lets Shannon sit in the blue chair. He juts his head toward the book and says, “Funny.”

“Is it?” Kateri asks. “I haven’t read it.”

“It’s about prison escape,” Shannon says, dry, as if the joke is obvious.

“Can I get you something?” Kateri asks. “Water? Coffee?”

He still has his shoulders hunched the way he did in the parking lot yesterday, a different sweat shirt on today with the hood closed up underneath his chin. She wonders if this is a normal posture for him. Or what he’s hiding.

She tries again. “Pepsi?” she asks.

He rubs his eye. “I’ll take a Pepsi if you have it,” he says.

She opens a small fridge next to the desk and pulls out a cold bottle.

“I keep my own stash,” she says. “They occasionally save my life.”

Like today, she thinks. She has had a steady intake of Pepsi and Excedrin. Earlier, she ate a bag of potato chips from the vending machine, which she never does. But she’s been fighting sweaty nausea all day.

Shannon drinks, and his foot bounces.

“How long have you lived here?” Kateri asks him.

“My whole life,” he says, with the tragic flair of a teenager.

“Always in the house on Hidden Drive?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “We used to live in a farmhouse on Cemetery Road.”

She knows the road. Her apartment is on Cemetery Road, a road that does indeed end in a large nineteenth-century graveyard. The same goes for Mill Road, which leads to the empty hulk of the former paper mill, and Mount Snow Road, which leads to Mount Snow.

She has the information about the fire from his father’s file. The house was a total loss, the perimeter doused with accelerant, the framework old, dry wood. It went up fast and hot, and it was a miracle anyone got out. But she asks, “When did you move?”

“When I was three,” Shannon says. “After it burned down.”

“That’s quite traumatic,” Kateri says. “Do you remember it?”

“You know all this, right?” he says. “You can see it in the file.”

“I know what’s in the file,” she says. “Since then, it’s been just you and your mother.” She looks down at the folder. “Pearl Jenkins, in the house on Hidden Drive.”

“Yes,” he says.

“That house originally belonged to your grandparents?” Kateri asks.

“Yes.”

“I grew up with my grandparents,” Kateri says.

“Lucky you,” Shannon answers. “Does your mother still live there?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “My mother is dead. She died when I was sixteen,” she says.