The detective and I walked through the gap between Sophia’s convertible and the store. Warren T. Fox’s house lay about five hundred feet behind the store in back of a copse of maple and oak trees. A creek ribboned around one side of the house. The rain had made it fat and swollen, like a snake that had swallowed more than it could comfortably hold. The rush of water drowned out the sound of the rain slapping against the tin roof.

I’d come back here this afternoon to check out the structure, but I was once again struck by how much the clapboard building resembled Fletcher Lane’s house.

Both featured the same white boards, the same kind of shutters, the same sloping tin roof. And it wasn’t just the house that reminded me of Fletcher—it was everything about Warren T. Fox. The blue work clothes he wore, his grumpy nature, the old-fashioned store he ran. It was almost like Fletcher and Warren were identical twins separated at birth. The kind you read about who built separate, but almost identical, lives for themselves. Once again, I felt that faint softness stir in my chest. Because everything about Warren made me remember Fletcher and the love I’d had for him.

Lights blazed in several of the first-floor windows. I stepped up onto the porch and knocked on the front door.

“Hmph?” Sophia grunted through the heavy wood.

“It’s Gin.”

A lock clicked, and the Goth dwarf opened the door.

Sophia clenched an aluminum baseball bat in one hand.

Her black eyes flicked over my oversize clothes, and she stepped back to let us inside. Sophia crooked her finger at us, and we followed her deeper into the house. For a moment, I felt like I was coming home to Fletcher’s after a long day at the Pork Pit. Because the inside of Warren T. Fox’s house could have been an exact duplicate of Fletcher Lane’s. Same sort of well-worn, overstuffed furniture, same clutter of knickknacks, same piles of odds and ends that made a house a home. I blinked, and the illusion vanished.

The others were in a large den. Violet huddled on the sofa, a heavy textbook in her lap, a notepad and pen by her side. Studying. Jo-Jo perched on the other end of the sofa and flipped through a beauty magazine. Several more sat stacked at her bare feet. The dwarf had come prepared.

Warren rocked back and forth in an oversize recliner that made him seem older and more frail than he really was. The television was tuned to the Weather Channel.

Warren’s brown eyes focused intently on the storm-front graphics on the flickering screen. Finn relaxed in a similar chair, which he’d reclined all the way back. His laptop drowsed on his lap. Finn was doing the same in the chair itself. Soft snores drifted out of his open mouth.