The Secrets We Hide

Prologue

Allison Vickery throws clothes into the open suitcase on her bed: underwear, bras, shirts, jeans. She doesn't give herself time to think about what she is taking. She has to keep moving forward, ignore the voice in her head that says she could wait another minute, another hour, another day. They can buy whatever else they need on the road. There are hundreds of shady motels between North Falls and Atlanta, but she has to get out of the state. Florida, maybe. Alabama or Mississippi, possibly. Skirt up to Arkansas, Oklahoma, maybe disappear into the vastness of Texas. She will keep under the radar, pay cash, use the fake IDs, make sure she is constantly moving forward, never looking back. Every time they think they have caught up with her, she will be on to the next place, and then the next, and then a month will have passed and she will be home free. They will be home free.

She checks her watch. No more delays. They have to leave now.

In the bathroom, tears fill her eyes. Her mind starts to race, not with things she needs to pack, but with everything she is leaving behind. Everyone she loves. The friends she can always count on. The neighbors who always check to make sure she is okay. The other moms, the other cops, the countless people she cherishes. Allison has given so much of herself to so many, but she has always gotten more than she deserves in return. Is she really going to leave them all behind?

She abandons the bathroom and walks down the hall to the guest room. At the window, she looks out at the street that has been her home for so many years. Gorgeous fall flowers in the yards. Neatly trimmed grass. Gentle swaying trees that have stood through ice storms and flooding and once, a long time ago, a tornado that leveled several houses and a farm. She looks down at her own yard. Mandy has abandoned her bike on the front lawn. They will get her a new one in another town once they are settled. Once they are safe. That is the only thing that matters right now. Keeping Mandy safe.

Allison has to stop making stupid mistakes. Like leaving the damn trunk open and her other suitcase in the driveway. Anybody passing by would know they are going somewhere. She has to stop letting fear and anxiety overtake rational decisions. But is it rational? Can she really leave? She bites her lip hard enough to taste blood. She uses the pain to focus her thinking. There is no more time for second-guessing. She lets her instinct take over. Check the perimeter. Secure the area.

She studies the neighboring houses. Johna Patel’s Subaru. Lynne Emory’s Honda. Darla Bell’s Camry. Window shades and curtains all open to the afternoon sun. No strangers lurking on the sidewalks. Nothing looks out of place, but that is hardly a comfort. Everything Allison knows as a cop, every corner she sees around, every move she anticipates, will be mirrored on the other side. Loud music booms out of a Hyundai as the young man from two streets over barrels past the house. Ginny Saddler’s grown son is just as reckless as his alcoholic mother. He is going to end up killing somebody one day.

Allison walks down the hallway and grabs Mandy’s textbooks off her desk. There is no reason her daughter can’t study on the road. They will have to leave all their electronics behind. Phones, laptops, tablets. Mandy will be livid, but she isn’t unreasonable. She knows these things can be tracked. She will know their lives will be in jeopardy if they are found. Won’t she? Allison shakes her head. No more letting herself get caught up in questions she has already answered. She will deal with Mandy’s anger later. She grabs a backpack, shoves in the textbooks, and heads back into the hallway.

Allison bypasses the back stairs that lead to the den and takes the curved grand staircase so she can make sure the deadbolt on the front door is locked. Her foot is coming off the last tread when she sees the gun. Her gun. Glock 19 with a fifteen-round magazine and one in the chamber. Allison has carried the backup weapon since before Mandy was born. She keeps it tucked inside a Crown Royal bag in her purse, but the purple velvet bag is on the floor and the gun is aimed at her chest.

There is no time to talk, to plead, to reason, to de-escalate. She sees the tip of the muzzle flash. Hears the crack of the bullet splitting the air. Feels the shock of what is happening. A decade on patrol pulling over speeders with expired license plates. Another decade of clearing warehouses full of drug dealers. Searching stash houses. Raiding shooting galleries. Every single time she entered the unknown, she expected to catch a bullet. But not now. Not in her own home. Not from someone she loved.

Forty-six minutes before the shooting.

Chapter One

Chapter One

Emmy Clifton watches in silence as her mother's casket is lowered into the ground. Her vision wavers, her chest tightens, and she cannot catch a full breath. The motor that lowers the casket ticks like a stopwatch, and she fights a rising current of anxiety: the fear that she has missed something important, said something wrong, done something stupid, and it is too late to fix any of it. Her mother is finally gone.

Myrna Joy Clifton outlived her husband Gerald by exactly six weeks. Theirs was not a great love story, but they respected each other, supported each other, raised four children, buried one son before he turned eighteen, denied the existence of another child for over forty years, and helped raise a grandson. Now their contradictions have been reduced to two caskets in two holes carved into the side of a hill. Gerald's headstone was placed only four days ago. Father Nate Trask eulogized Myrna in a way she herself would have called excessive and untruthful. She was not a warm woman. She was a steady presence, an unbending ally, intractable, irritating, funny, kind, and never without an opinion. For seven years, Alzheimer's stole Myrna's essence piece by piece.

The casket reaches its resting place with a sickening thud. Father Nate asks everyone to bow their heads. Emmy stares at the oaks in the corner of the North Falls Cemetery, surrounded by relatives. The Coleman cousins from up north wear heavy clothes because it was in the fifties when they left Maryland. Emmy's son Cole shifts beside her, head down, jaw clenched. At twenty-three, he has cried more in the last few weeks than he ever did as a child. Jude leans her shoulder against his, shoring him up. Emmy feels a flash of irritation with a chaser of gratitude, which sums up her feelings about her newly returned older sister. Her brother Tommy stands on the other side of the grave with the miserable look of a man held at gunpoint. His wife Celia winks at Emmy; they both know Myrna never approved of Celia, which never mattered because Celia never cared.

Father Nate gestures for Tommy to speak. Tommy doesn't speak. He bends down, scoops up a handful of dirt, holds it to his chest, bows his head, and then turns and limps toward the woods, still clutching the dirt. Celia doesn't follow. Father Nate turns to Emmy, and the request lodges a shard of glass in her throat. Before she can find words, Jude steps forward and recites Edgar Allan Poe. Cole smiles faintly; he grew up hearing his grandmother quote Poe. Father Nate mumbles amen, and the service is over.

The crowd mingles in the shade of a maple tree's red canopy. Cousin Taybee anxiously wrings her hands, silently panicked that people need to get moving to the spread waiting at her farm. Jude takes Cole aside, her hand on his arm; they seem to have their own language. Aunt Millie, ninety-four years old, clutches Emmy's leg and asks to be helped up. Once on her feet, Millie points out who came and who didn't. Emmy doesn't care about representatives from North Falls's leading families. There are mostly Cliftons here, poor and rich, city and farming, on the school board and at the prosecutor's office, and at the sheriff's department, where Emmy is acting sheriff until the election either makes it official or gives the job to Brett Temple, a man who is her subordinate in every way. Her father served as sheriff for sixty-three years. Emmy had been running the squad before he died, but only after his death did she learn the parts of the job he never told her about: the glad-handing, the horse trading, the looking the other way. She isn't sure she has the stomach for it.

Aunt Millie spots Ace and is horrified that he has the nerve to show up. She stomps away. Uncle Penley takes her place, pulls a leather-clad flask from his jacket, and takes a pull of Old Rip. He tells Emmy that her mother loved her. Then he reminds her that the election is a month away and that she needs to bring energy to the debate with Brett next week. Folks need to feel she isn't just coasting on her last name. "We both know it's what your daddy wanted." Emmy lets her silence linger until Penley gives up and walks away. The more people remind her that Gerald wanted her to take his job, the less she wants it. She is running only so Brett won't win. She refuses to answer to that jackass, and she refuses to let Cole answer to him either.

Taybee loops her arm through Emmy's, pats her hand three times, and apologizes that her daughter Kaitlynn can't make it because she's about to give birth. She asks if Emmy saw Cousin Ace and hopes he isn't here to make a fuss. The barrage is too much. Emmy looks for Cole; he is talking to Celia. Jude is being dragged away by Aunt Millie, who goes tight-lipped when anyone asks about Jude. There is clearly a history between them that neither shares.

Taybee fans herself and says the heat doesn't feel a bit like fall. She suggests shooing people down the hill. Emmy agrees and starts toward the zigzagging sidewalk to the parking lot. She has no memory of making this same trek on the day they buried her father, when law enforcement officers covered the cemetery in uniforms and the governor attended. She felt like an imposter wearing her father's sheriff's star. Now she feels wobbly in high heels borrowed from a cousin, chafed by a scratchy polyester dress, and bitten by a zipper at the back of her neck.

Her ex-husband appears. Jonah Lang wears a navy suit with a stained blue tie and black cowboy boots, the same outfit he wore to her father's funeral, the same suit that was hanging in the closet when she left him twelve years ago. His smile has the slippery ease of a man who is stoned. Emmy asks if he drove. He says he showed up for their son like he always does, leaving out that he was three hours late. Then he says Cole loved the old bitch. Emmy bites her tongue. Jonah tells her she cleaned up nice, that it's good to see her dressing like a woman for a change. Emmy tastes blood. The horrible part is that she knows he means it as a compliment. Even worse, for almost the entirety of their marriage, she would have seen it that way too.

She tells him Cole is back up the hill and continues toward the parking lot. The feeling of wrongness flows back into her body. She is missing something. Doing something wrong. Forgetting something important. She is forty-two years old, sleeping in her childhood bedroom with her son down the hall and her sister on the couch, and she is worried about losing her job to a man who thinks his Y chromosome makes him more qualified than the woman already doing the work.

She detours from the parking lot toward the stand of oaks. She caught a flash of strawberry-blond hair during the service, and now she sees Hannah Collier sitting on the ground with her back against a tree, dressed in black with Nikes instead of heels, a wadded tissue in her hand, eyes bloodshot from crying. Hannah sees Emmy and laughs: "Fucking Myrna. She finally found a way to make you wear a dress." Emmy laughs too and sits on the ground across from her. She lets out a long breath, her shoulders relax, her heart stops shaking, and some of the wrongness seeps away.

They have known each other since the first day of kindergarten, were instant best friends, practically lived at each other's houses. Hannah was the first person to hold Cole, and Emmy was the first to hold Davey, Hannah's son. Then Emmy made a huge mistake and years later Hannah made a huge mistake of her own, and now they sit on either side of a rift neither knows how to heal. Hannah asks who Father Nate was talking about, because the woman sounded so gentle. Emmy laughs. They trade memories. Water under the bridge.

Hannah asks about Big Dyl. Emmy explains the end of her eight-year relationship with Dylan Alvarez simply: she pushed him away when Myrna started to spiral, tried to go back, but he couldn't trust her to stay. Hannah looks surprised by the candor. She tells Emmy she hooked up with a guy she met in the self-help section at the bookstore. Emmy grins. Hannah complains about his breathing, his heat, and then the conversation turns to perimenopause and hormones. Hannah suggests Emmy talk to Jude, since Jude is at least sixty and must be on the other side of it. Emmy shakes her head: "She has a tone." The banter continues, and Emmy lets herself enjoy the ease between them before the awkwardness tears at the edges. There is a reason Hannah wasn't at Myrna's graveside. She didn't just make a mistake. Her husband is about to be sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Gerald Clifton.

Emmy stands, brushes dirt off her dress, touches Hannah's shoulder, and walks toward the parking lot. Cliftons have bottlenecked the exit, as happens when entitled morons are used to getting their parking tickets fixed. Cole has Aunt Millie on his arm, walking her slowly to her ancient baby blue Cadillac. Emmy enjoys the sight of her son in a

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Emmy's brain glitches, unable to comprehend what her eyes are seeing. A white sock on a slender foot, a purple Nike on the other, blue running shorts, a matching top with white piping, streaks of pale flesh curtained by blood. It's Allison Vickery's sixteen-year-old daughter, Mandy, shot in the head. The bullet has opened a furrow on the left side of her skull. Blood pulses from the entry wound with every heartbeat, slow and erratic.

Jude moves first, dropping to her knees and rolling the girl onto her back. She grabs a shirt from the bed and uses it to staunch the wound. Emmy drops the shotgun and kneels down, gripping Mandy's hand, telling her to hold on. Cole appears breathless in the doorway. Emmy orders him outside to flag down the ambulance, seal off the crime scene, and get teams searching the woods.

Jude presses her ear to the girl's chest. Mandy has stopped breathing. They move in tandem. Jude tilts back the head, pinches the nose, seals her mouth over Mandy's. Emmy laces her fingers, rests her palms on the chest, locks her elbows. She feels Mandy's chest rise as Jude gives the first breath, then lower, then rise again. Mandy does not breathe on her own. Emmy starts compressions.

CPR is an act of brutality. Emmy feels one of Mandy's ribs dislocate on the next compression, but she keeps pushing to a two-inch depth, counting off each reset until she reaches thirty. Jude forces two more deep breaths. Emmy pushes again and feels the sharp snap of a rib fracturing. She pushes again and again. Thirty times. Jude takes over. The process repeats.

They're on the nineteenth round of CPR when Emmy finally hears the blessed howl of overlapping sirens. Sweat pours off her body. Her shoulders ache. Two paramedics rush in with a backboard and medic kits. Equipment comes out: syringes, shears, a breathing tube, packets of gauze, gloves, a portable defibrillator. Emmy's hearing feels muffled as Jude tells them what happened, what they did, what isn't working.

Emmy wipes grit from her face. She's covered in white dust from the Sheetrock. Her black dress shows dark spots where she knelt in blood. She reaches for the windowsill to help herself stand, but Jude grabs her wrist. "No." She was about to contaminate the crime scene with her own bloodstained fingerprints. Jude pulls her up, drags her into the hallway, leans her back against the wall. She braces her hands on Emmy's arms, looks her in the eye, strokes back a strand of her hair, cups her hand to Emmy's face. It's the most intimate thing that has ever happened between them, and despite the young girl bleeding out five feet away, the paramedics shouting, and Cole running back up the stairs, Emmy wants nothing more than to put her head on Jude's shoulder and cry.

Instead, she walks toward the curving staircase. Cole shoots her a questioning look. Emmy turns away, going into the front bedroom on her left. She can't leave Allison's child alone in the house to die with strangers. She looks out the window into the front yard. Her vision does that shaky thing again, her hands still vibrating with the sensation of breaking bone. From the back bedroom, the sound of the portable defibrillator charging up reminds her of an emergency flare whistling into the air.

She silently swears at herself and tries to snap out of it. This is an active crime scene. A killer is on the loose. A cop is dead. A young girl is just as good as. She pulls her fingers into fists, blinks her eyes clear. Police vehicles are angled like pick-up sticks. An ambulance is in the driveway. Brett Temple is leaning against his cruiser, phone to his ear, as casual as if he's ordering pizza.

She hears the hard punch of the defibrillator delivering a charge. Emmy lets her eyes close, conjures the image of Mandy's body arcing into the air, the electric shock miraculously pulling her back to the living. The loud wail of the flatline snatches away the fantasy.

She goes back into the hallway. Cole's eyes carefully track her approach. Dried blood lines Jude's face where the bullet nearly killed her. Emmy forces strength into her voice and demands a report. Cole reluctantly obeys. The crime scene is taped off. The neighborhood is being locked down. Cruisers are at all entrances and exits. Brett is coordinating the house-to-house and the search of the woods. Cole requested a forensics team from the GBI, called the other cities for support, and alerted Highway Patrol.

Emmy looks down at the floor. Her bare feet are stained red. She left bloody footprints across the wide-plank floorboards. She tells them that the victim downstairs is Allison Vickery, a former detective with the Clayville Police Department who took her full retirement last year and was doing PI work. Another defibrillator charge hits. Then the flatline screams out their failure.

Jude asks about Mandy's father. Never been in the picture. Allison married a man named Bill Garrison six years ago, dated him four years before that. Emmy tells Cole to have Brett peel away two deputies to locate Bill, keeping it off the radio so no jackass from Clayville goes in hot. Jude pushes back: the husband is the top suspect and they need to go in hot before he destroys evidence or covers his tracks. Emmy bristles. "You want me to perp walk him in front of the entire town? We're not in San Francisco, Dr. Archer. I'm not gonna ruin a man's reputation because I've seen too many Datelines."

Jude asks what Emmy isn't telling her. Their eyes meet. Another flare goes up, a long, deafening whistle of the machine recharging. Jude recalibrates. "This is an expensive neighborhood on a detective's salary." Bill is North Falls people. Garrison Supply. The name goes back to Jude's time, and North Falls people has its own connotations: wealthy, connected, and mostly untouchable.

"Clear!" Another hard punch. Emmy holds her breath. Hopes. Even prays.

A short, sharp beep comes from the machine. Then another. Then another. "We've got her back!" Emmy finally fills her lungs. Jude bends at the waist, hands on her knees, taking a deep breath of her own. The paramedics rush past with Mandy lifted on a backboard, her shirt cut open, her arms and legs strapped down, intubated, blood already staining the bandage around her head. The Ambu bag makes a hard hissing sound as air is squeezed into her lungs. The silence they leave behind has an ominous feel, like none of this is over.

Jude looks like she's going to ask Emmy if she's okay again. Emmy changes the subject. "Did you see the shooter?" Jude says no, but she was standing over there when the gun fired. Emmy studies the spot Jude indicates, the center of the hallway between the two back bedrooms. From the fine mist of blood, she guesses the shooter was standing in Allison's doorway when he fired at Jude. Emmy can't let herself think about her sister almost dying, or the fact that Jude seems more worried about Emmy than herself.

She walks back into Mandy's bedroom and tries to follow the probable trajectory. After grazing Jude, the bullet punched a hole in the wall directly behind her, blew through the Sheetrock, crossed the room, and chunked into the wall near the headboard. Emmy can see a glimmer of brass inside the dark insulation where it finally came to rest. She looks back across the hallway, straight through to the broken window overlooking the backyard. She asks Jude if Allison's bedroom door was open or closed. Jude has no idea. She's blanking on details. She remembers falling, her elbow and hip feeling sore. The next thing she remembers is seeing Emmy with the shotgun.

Jude's hands go to her hips the same way Myrna's used to when she was about to spout off a lecture. She diagnoses herself: the kinetic energy from a bullet often causes damage remote to its path. No loss of consciousness, but temporary amnesia is an indicator of concussion. Emmy isn't going to ask if she needs the hospital. There's a more important question on both their minds. "How did Mandy get into the attic?"

Emmy walks back into the hallway and looks up. She spots the panel for the attic pull-down stairs between the two front bedrooms. There's no cord, just an eyehook. You'd need a pole with an open hook to pull down the stairs, and the strength to pull them down and back up. Jude states the obvious: there must be another point of access.

Emmy walks into Allison's bedroom. She fans her hand in front of her face to disperse the debris. The air conditioner has turned on. A breeze comes in through the broken glass. Particles of blown insulation swirl. Jude uses her elbow to turn on the lights. Between the busted ceiling and the detritus left by the paramedics, the space looks more like a war zone than a crime scene. Blood spatter mixes with white dust. Empty gauze packets, exam gloves, trauma shears. A purple Nike running shoe sits on the other side of the bed. Left foot. The matching right shoe is still on Mandy's foot when she's carried from the room. Emmy's shotgun

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Emmy holds her phone to her ear as Gregg drives her cruiser to the baseball park. Dr. Layla Paulson, medical director of the Evelyn Gilchrist Trauma Center in Albany, is personally overseeing Mandy's care. The girl went straight into surgery. The prognosis sounds grim: the bullet's pathway is shallow through the left side of her head, and controlling the bleeding is the main concern. She is still losing more than they can replace. When Emmy presses for odds, Layla admits it's hard to guess, but Mandy's youth matters a hell of a lot in trauma cases. Layla promises they will do everything they can.

Gregg doesn't ask questions when Emmy ends the call, which is exactly why he is driving her instead of another deputy. She instructed him to turn on the lights but not the siren. She silently runs through the tasks she assigned back at the scene: Brett pulled back the search of the woods and flooded the neighborhood with deputies going door-to-door; the closest license plate scanners are being scoured for unusual vehicles; they need witnesses who saw anything unusual on the street around the time the gun was fired; locate Ginny Saddler's son who drives with his music turned up too loud; check doorbell camera footage; find out whether anyone knows the name of Mandy's birth father. Sherry Robertson is looking for Mandy's birth certificate and Allison's will while the forensic team processes the house. Allison's parents died years ago, and she was an only child. If her daughter survives surgery, a legal guardian will need to make decisions about her care.

Then there is the task that only Emmy can perform: figure out a way to interrogate Reggie Wilder about his whereabouts at the time of the murder. Her stomach clenches. Nobody refuses to talk to the cops like a cop refuses to talk to the cops. There are all sorts of hoops to jump through just to schedule a formal interview, and Reggie will definitely bring a lawyer. On top of Miranda rights, Garrity rights come into play because Reggie went through an employment review for engaging in a sexual relationship with Allison while he was her superior officer. Government workers can be compelled to answer questions under threat of disciplinary action, but Garrity rights ensure that anything said as part of a formal hearing cannot be used against them in a criminal proceeding. It makes Emmy hope like hell Reggie isn't involved in Allison's murder.

Her phone vibrates with another text, then a second, then a third. Taybee has been peppering her screen with rows of question marks for the last twenty minutes. Emmy has somehow managed to push Myrna's funeral to the back of her mind, and she doesn't need it coming front and center right now. Her father always told her that the best thing to do when you feel like your life is falling apart is to put your head down and do your job. She swipes away the texts and pulls up Bill Garrison's Facebook page. Two of her more seasoned deputies were sent out to comb the streets for Allison's husband, but her twenty-three-year-old son found him online in under a minute.

Emmy scrolls through the page. Bill has posted hundreds of photos of him, Allison, and Mandy fishing and hiking, doing things that give the appearance of happiness, because if there is one thing the Garrisons are known for, it is pretending they are all one giant, happy family instead of miserable assholes who cheat on their spouses, let their children run around like hyenas, and aren't beneath using their fists when money doesn't get them what they want. Garrison Supply has been around for nearly a century. The family business started as a lumber yard, branched into building supplies, and eventually opened a high-end appliance division where Bill and his younger brother take orders for $5,000 coffee makers and $20,000 refrigerators from rich people all over the country. Two more brothers run the building supply side, while Bill's widowed mother juggles the accounting between attending mass, serving on the town council, and trying to get books banned from the library.

Bill's profile picture is a drawing of a tiger tossing a baseball into the air. That is how Cole located him. Garrison Supply sponsors the North Falls Tigers, a junior league ball team on the travel circuit, and Bill serves as head coach. One of his nephews plays third base. They are facing off against the Ocmulgee Panthers this afternoon. As alibis go, it is a pretty good cover: the game is scheduled to start at two o'clock, roughly forty-five minutes after Allison Vickery was murdered and Mandy was shot in the head. Brett was right about one thing—a man with Bill's resources doesn't run. He sticks around and fights it out.

At the Ballpark

Emmy tucks her phone into her shirt pocket as Gregg pulls onto a patch of grass in front of the ballpark. The lot is filled with SUVs and minivans with bumper stickers supporting either team. She identifies Bill Garrison's white Chevy Silverado by the license plate number. Pressing her hand to the hood, she finds the metal hot. She walks around the vehicle looking for blood or anything that might give probable cause for a warrant. A set of golf clubs lies in the bed of the truck, along with a tackle box and a lone kayak paddle. Windows are rolled up. Cupping her hands to the glass to see inside, she spots an empty McDonald's bag in the passenger seat, a plastic water bottle in the cup holder, and an iPhone hooked up to the charger, screen glowing. A notification from someone named Kirk pops up: "Where r u dude cops r all over ur hood"

Emmy starts toward the baseball field, where clapping and yelling kick off the game. In an ideal world she would have brought more deputies for backup, but she can't risk Reggie getting wind of Bill's location. Reggie already assaulted a fellow officer. There's no telling what he'd do to Bill. Not even Gregg knew where they were going until they got into the cruiser. The Clayville Police Department has multiple use-of-force violations on the books, and their SWAT team has faced numerous lawsuits. Emmy can easily envision Reggie taking matters into his own hands, either out of revenge for Allison or to frame Bill for murder. Either way, he is a man used to justifying casualties. She tells Gregg to post up beside the bleachers in case Bill runs: "Keep it cool. We don't want a panic. He's a person of interest, not a suspect."

She weaves between cars, her feet sliding in Sherry's HOKAs. Her plan is already set: halt the game, approach Bill, take him somewhere off the field and away from the kids, deliver the news, gauge his reaction, drive him to the station for a longer talk and turn up the heat. If Bill is not responsible for the murder of his wife and the shooting of his stepdaughter, he deserves respect. If he is responsible, she doesn't want to spook him so much that he lawyers up, or pulls out the murder weapon and shoots her in the face.

The smell of hot dogs and nachos swirls from the concession stand. The bleachers are full because there isn't much else to do in North Falls on a scorching Saturday afternoon. The scoreboard reads GARRISON SUPPLY in loopy cursive along the top. No hits, no runs, no errors. Bottom of the first. Two balls, no strikes. Twelve seconds on the clock. The game started eight minutes late.

She spots Bill Garrison in the Tigers' dugout: white shirt with the Garrison logo on the breast pocket, cargo shorts, sneakers, Tigers baseball hat. No sunglasses. No visible wounds or blood. No gun in sight, but his shirt is untucked, his shorts have a ridiculous number of pockets, and a zipped gym bag with the Garrison logo sits a few feet away. Emmy nods for Gregg to move in closer. Bill hasn't changed since the last time she saw him. Average height, bulging gut, receding hairline that he overcompensates for with a bushy mustache. His knees are bent, his focus trained on the player at bat. Swing and a miss. Bill claps his hands and calls out, "Good effort, Bailey. Let's go."

Emmy feels the heat of a few curious stares. Some fans in the bleachers have taken notice of her. She considers what they are seeing: the interim sheriff wearing a freshly starched uniform shirt over a bloodstained black dress, borrowed shoes sliding around her bare feet, wet hair looking dirty and lank despite her best efforts with the garden hose.

Then she sees Hannah sitting by herself, empty space cleared around her as if she has a disease nobody wants to catch. She changed out of her funeral clothes into jeans and a T-shirt. Large sunglasses shield her eyes, and her Tigers hat is pulled down low. Emmy shouldn't be surprised to see her here. Hannah's son has played ball since peewee.

Hannah's head turns toward Emmy. Emmy lifts her chin. Hannah stands up. People stare with open hostility as she walks down the bleachers. Emmy doesn't think it is because they loved Gerald Clifton so much as because they love having someone to hate.

Hannah's sunglasses come off. She gives Emmy's outfit a quick glance. "I heard about the shooting in Clifton Gardens."

"What'd you hear?"

"That a little girl found a gun lying around and accidentally shot herself."

Emmy guesses Coach Bell has started answering her phone. Hannah offers her hat to Emmy. Emmy twists her hair into a knot on the