“When he heard I was one of Bellanger’s boys, Henley shut down. I told him what I knew about Lily-Anne’s death. He wouldn’t confirm any of it. He told me to stop sticking my nose into things that’d only come back to hurt me. ‘Things you don’t want to know,’ he kept saying.”
“So, an asshole,” I said. “No surprise there.” But my palms were damp with sweat.
“After that call, I went through some of my mom’s records again. I’d been using them for research. My mother kept them under lock and key, never let anyone else look at them. Something was bugging me about the autopsy report. My father’s and Fiona’s bodies after the fire. They were burned badly, pretty much unrecognizable.” I understood the effort it took to say this out loud. It had been a specific ache, the brutality of the loss. Wiping away their physical bodies until they weren’t merely dead, they were erased. Little handfuls of mineralized bones and teeth glowing out of the embers. “My mother kept a copy of the autopsy report,” Junior said. “But I was never able to really look at it closely—he’s my—”
“I know. I get it.” He was Junior’s father. Of course the details hurt. They hurt me too, even now.
“There were only six people on the Homestead grounds when the fire happened and the four of you escaped alive. You and your mother and Patricia and Isabelle. It made sense that the two bodies would belong to my father and Fiona. An adult and a child. But there was someone else making notes on the file—an assistant, I think—and there were all these little objections that Henley ultimately overrode. There’s a note that, uh, that the size of the girl’s femur suggested an older child. Just a year or so older than Fiona would’ve been. Does that make any sense to you? Was Fiona big for her age?”
In that film in the Bishops’ basement, Fiona had been petite, if anything, small-boned as a bird. My heart caught in my throat. “It doesn’t make sense, no,” I said. “Anything else?”
“There was a note about how the adult skull had a, let’s see, I wrote it down—a rounder ‘supraorbital ridge’ than expected, more often seen in female cadavers. It can vary a lot between individuals. But it’s weird. All these assistant’s notes, vetoed by Henley as meaningless.”
This tiny difference in the bone that had cradled Bellanger’s brain. A woman’s skull, lost among the flame-eaten wreckage. But the two adult women on the Homestead at the time had escaped—unless—
Something was building at the back of my mind. I couldn’t put it into words just yet. It was hovering on my tongue, hot and dangerous and precious, ready to change everything. “What else?” I asked, urgent.
“Nothing else in the autopsy reports. I know I might be grasping at straws here. Cate was right: I’ve focused too much on you Girls and not enough on the Bellangers.” A bitter laugh. “I want to find out whatever I can about my dad. I don’t want to look away this time.”
Cate was still sleeping behind me, but she turned, her side profile tipped toward me, her lips parted.
“I went through all our financial records,” Junior said. “There’s some property and assets my mom has had to sell off over the years. I noticed one particular piece of land was sold off before my dad died. About four months before the fire, actually, in February ’77. And then I noticed who it was sold to—”
“Henley,” I said.
“Exactly. My father sold this land to Henley not long before the fire for one dollar. Why would he do that? They were just colleagues, as far as I know. Barely acquaintances, except for knowing each other in med school. Maybe if I’d seen this a year ago I wouldn’t have thought much of it—my father selling off some land, nothing important. But it’s too much of a coincidence.”
“Patricia mentioned something about your family’s land,” I said. “Where was that?”
“Do you want to guess?”
“Vermont? No—Arizona, wasn’t it?”
He took a moment before he answered. “Utah.”
I understood at once. “Fuck,” I said. The maroon sedan that had been following us all along.
“I wanted you to know,” Junior said. “Nobody else could understand the—” He stopped, unable to put it into words, but I got it. The betrayal, the shock.
The motel room was still here around me. It still existed. I had to reach down one hand and grip the edge of the mattress, the scratchy sheets and quilted comforter. I had to look at each item in turn, the burnt orange of the drapes, the uninspired pink-and-teal abstract blocks framed on the wall. It was all here. I was here. And if I was here, in this motel, then the world beyond it existed, everything was the same, everything was continuing as normal.