Kateri looks again at the file photo. A thin man with dark hair and deep-set blue eyes, a bluish five o’clock shadow, a sharp jaw. He holds his mouth in a hard, straight line, and still his lips are soft looking, pinkish.

“Any indication of arson?” Kateri asks. When she closes her eyes, she sees the pieces of bones, smoked and broken, splayed on Dr. Diaz’s exam table. “There was accelerant on the bones,” she says.

“I left a message with Ferris,” Hurt says. “I’ll ask.” Then he looks up at her, his fingers still on the touch pad of the laptop. “This address is less than a mile from the Jenkins property,” Hurt says.

Kateri’s scalp prickles. “Do we have a phone number for him?”

“No,” Hurt says. “But I bet it’s an unregistered track phone.”

FOURTEEN: SHANNON

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

I couldn’t quite look Terri in the eye when I told her, “I can’t stay at work today.” I hunched up my shoulders to my ears, and when Terri noticed, she put her hand on my back, rubbing in a circle. Terri was good to me. She knew my mom, and for a brief time had dated Park. Her kids were younger than me.

“What’s the problem?” she asked me.

“I have to take my mother to a lawyer,” I said.

“Today?”

“Yes, at one.”

They’d all gone to Jefferson High School together. We never ever talked about it. Not Park, not school, not the fire. But she had escaped what my mother had not. Normal. Unscathed.

She peered into the kitchen through the round window on the swinging door. “I’ll tell Junior,” she said. “Go if you have to. We’ll deal.”

It was a decent-weather day, and there were people at the park with dogs and babies, birders with spyglasses, runners looking at the changing leaves. I tried to see what anyone might see. Why we would try to save this place. The weathered siding. The slanted porch. The camp chairs with cigarette holes burned into them. Beer cans around the fire pit. I hoped my mother and sister weren’t outside. I was glad it wasn’t summer. Sometimes my mother let Birdie run around naked, in sneakers, in the hot weather. She was a miracle, I thought. I had never felt either that sturdy or that free.

Inside, I found Birdie at the kitchen table, doing letters, a whole line of cursive capital Bs in a row. Her tongue licking her top lip.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked her, but then my mother came down the hall in an orange T-shirt that was too small and a long hippie skirt, barefoot. She was dirty—no one had washed much without water—but her hair was braided to one side, and it didn’t look terrible.

“Mom,” I said, trying to sound light and open. “We can fix the power.”

“Oh, Shannon,” she said, and clapped her hands together in thanks. I wondered if we looked alike. I wondered if this was what I was headed for, fifteen, twenty years down the road, barefoot in a dirty house, with a tattoo on my brow.