Joyce’s voice was a thread drawn too tight. “What did I say about twenty-seven?”

  With a flinch, Kirsta bobbed, almost a curtsy, and hurried toward the swinging doors that led to the kitchen.

  Hazard didn’t actually say anything, but the nonverbal equivalent of mother of fuck was etched in his expression. For a moment, Somers had to fight a grin, and he was surprised at how much better he felt. To Joyce, he said, “If we could find somewhere quieter—”

  “I don’t think so.” Joyce straightened. “I don’t have anything to hide. I’d like to have this conversation here, where there are witnesses. We live in a great country; I wish I could say that about our town. There’s a lot of room for improvement, and we have to start by making sure that the people we put in positions of power are good, decent, Christian men and women.”

  “And, presumably,” Hazard said with a note that almost sounded droll, “not faggots.”

  Joyce’s eyes stayed on Somers. “You wanted to talk about something? Well, Chief, go ahead and talk.”

  The men and women lining the bar were still doing their best polite pretending, but more than a few heads turned, and some of the conversations died down. Somers put on a professional smile and said evenly, “I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Loretta Ames was killed last night.”

  “Oh my God,” Joyce said. She touched something—a necklace, it looked like, tucked beneath the button-up. “That’s awful.”

  “Really?” Hazard put his hands on his hips. “Because your feelings about Ms. Ames were pretty clear at the school board meeting.”

  “I didn’t want her books in our school. And I didn’t want her speaking to our children. I still feel that way; the content in those books is pornographic and not appropriate for minors. But I didn’t want her dead.”

  Somers nodded. “Could you account for your whereabouts last night, Mrs. Sturgis?”

  Joyce’s hand froze, still touching the necklace under her shirt. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean any—”

  “You think I killed her?”

  The words rang out like a shot in the dining room. A leaden silence dropped over everything. Then a glass clinked against a plate, and a woman made a sharp, distressed noise and pulled a little girl onto her lap.

  “I did not kill that woman,” Joyce said, her voice rising.

  “Nobody said—” Hazard began.

  “And I won’t stand here and be framed for murder!”

  “Mrs. Sturgis,” Somers said quietly, even though he could feel the heat starting in his face. “This is why I asked to speak with you in private. No one is accusing you of anything. If we could move this conversation—”

  “I was at home,” Joyce announced, the words ringing up among the exposed rafters. “Alone. There, does that make you happy? I have no alibi, Chief Somerset. My husband was here, closing the Ace.”

  “That’s true.” The words came from a kid who must have been barely out of high school, and he flinched and stepped back when Somers looked at him, but he said, “I closed with Derrick.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Hazard muttered.

  “And I was with my mom!” Kirsta shouted from the swinging door to the kitchen. “I was downstairs, Mom. Remember? We were home all night.”

  Joyce blinked a few times. “That’s right. Kirsta was with me; we were home all night.”

  “Did you have any interaction with Ms. Ames—” Hazard began.

  “Leave my mom alone!” Kirsta screamed over him. “Leave her alone, you—you nasty fag!”

  Somers made himself count to five. “I think we should finish this conversation later—”

  “This is the problem with America. This, right here.” Joyce looked around the room, and a murmur of voices picked up. “Because I had the courage to stand up for my beliefs—because I had the courage to try to protect our children—I’m the bad guy. Well, let me tell you something, Chief Somerset. I’m not a bad person.” She stopped, voice catching, and touched the corner of her eye. When she spoke again, her voice was thick with emotion. “And I’m tired of being treated like I’m some sort of monster because I’m willing to stand up for my beliefs.”

  “You’re a monster because you hate anyone different from you,” Hazard said, a scarlet fringe on his cheekbones. “You wish anyone who isn’t straight, white, and cis would crawl back wherever they came from and stop messing up your perfect little bubble. Well, I’ve got news for you, lady. Nobody’s going away, so you’d better learn how to live with the rest of us deviants.”

  “I don’t hate anyone! What you people do in the privacy of your homes doesn’t matter to me! But I don’t have to stand by and watch our children corrupted with pornography that normalizes incest and pedophilia and homosexuality—”

  “Homosexuality is normal, you dumb bitch,” Hazard shouted over her.

  “Don’t talk to my mom like that!” Kirsta screamed.

  “—and I don’t have to sit back and watch while our school permits teachers to groom children for sexual predators.” A flush spangled Joyce’s throat and collarbone. “And I don’t have to sit back while—while our school installs litter boxes in the bathrooms because we have students who identify as cats now. I don’t care what you want to do at home, but teaching our children that’s normal is wrong, and I won’t pretend it’s ok!”

  Voices swelled in shock; apparently, word of the litter boxes hadn’t gotten around. One man crossed himself and, in a country-boy accent, muttered, “Jesus help those poor kids.”

  “That is the purest fucking bullshit,” Hazard said, but his voice was dead and low now. “This is classic scare tactics, inventing this kind of ridiculous story to make everyone afraid. John, are we done here?”

  “Do you know who you should talk to?” Joyce said, her voice trembling. Her face looked like wet clay under all that makeup, and Somers couldn’t tell if she was trying not to smile or trying not to cry. “Talk to that little pervert who tried to corrupt my daughter.”

  “Mom!” Kirsta shouted.

  “Evan Pawloski. Ask him about that book, the one you think we should have in our school library. Ask him what it did to him.” She looked around again, rallying the troops. “It made him have oral sex with a college boy, and now he’s a homosexual. He told Kirsta all about it. He thought she’d like it. Thank God I found out in time to save her. That’s what I mean when I say those teachers and those books are grooming our children for pedophiles. Evan walked right into the arms of an older man. That’s pedophilia. That’s statutory rape. And I feel sorry for that boy, I really do, because he can’t live with the shame of it, but I won’t keep quiet just to spare his feelings, not when it means endangering other children.”

  “Mrs. Sturgis, I’m going to ask you to come down to the station at another time and make a formal statement,” Somers said. The words sounded like they were coming off the page of a book, only someone was flipping the pages too fast for Somers to catch his breath. “You’re welcome to bring an attorney if that would make you more comfortable, but that’s up to you. We’ll be leaving now. And I’d recommend that you keep allegations about statutory rape—and, for that matter, about people’s personal lives—to yourself if you don’t have any evidence. You’re risking slander.”

  “I have the messages. I have the ones he sent my daughter, telling her all about it!”

  Kirsta let out a cry and dropped the bus tub. Glasses, plates, and flatware, along with a slurry of half-eaten food, spilled across the wood floor. She spun and ran through the swinging door.

  Joyce kept her gaze on Somers throughout the whole performance; she didn’t even flinch at the sound of something shattering. “Didn’t you wonder,” she asked, “why he went after that teacher at the meeting? Because he hates him. And he hates that woman. And he hates himself for what he’s been turned into. If you want to find who killed Loretta Ames, take a look at that boy who’s got nothing left to lose.”

  “Have a good day, Mrs. Sturgis,” Somers said; he was reading off those pages again, the words flicking by so fast that he had to remind himself to take a breath. He turned. The dining room had dissolved into a kind of snowdrift spin, and he bumped two chairs on his way out, only vaguely aware of muttering an apology to a woman in his path. When he pressed out into the parking lot, the sun dazzled him, and he had to shade his eyes and then, when the air brought the taste of gravel and diesel to him, clench his throat against his heaving stomach.

  “John?” Hazard asked, a hand at the small of his back. “Hey, what’s—”

  “Don’t!” Somers half-spun away from the touch, and when Hazard reached out, he knocked his hand away. “I said don’t!” A heartbeat passed. His vision was clearing, the world’s bits and pieces fitting together again: the enamel-hard blue of the sky, the mellow honey of the log siding, the crunch of the gravel under his sneakers, the air cool on his face. He took another breath and wiped his mouth. When he felt like he wasn’t fraying at both ends, he looked and saw the hurt submerged under the stoic emptiness of Hazard’s expression. “I’m sorry.”

  Hazard shook his head.

  Cars whipped past in both directions. At the other end of the lot, a heavy woman was using two canes to lower herself from a Honda Pilot, laughing good naturedly as a boy who must have been her grandson held her arm. The inside of Somers’s mouth was fuzzy, and for a moment, his thoughts were crystal clear: it’s two miles to the XpressMart, and then not even words, just the feeling of crawling into the amber eye of a bottle of Jose Cuervo, all the shitty parts of himself dissolving.

  “Ree, I—”

  But Hazard was already turning away. Then he stopped and drew out his phone. He answered, and then he listened, swore, and said, “We’ll be right there.”

  Somers wiped flop sweat from his forehead and tilted his head back, facing to the sun. One minute. He just needed one minute before the next stop on this fucked-up ride.

  “We need to go,” Hazard said, his voice growing distant; he was already drawing away, headed for the van. “Colt and his friends just blew up Theo’s mailbox.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MAY 16

  SATURDAY

  1:10 PM

  ADJUST THE VENTS. Bump down the air. Sound system on; a podcast, the words a meaningless drone that Hazard couldn’t parse. Check the windows. Check the mirrors. Check his speed. Keep as many balls in the air as possible, that was the key. Things to do meant things to occupy himself. And if Hazard kept himself occupied, he wouldn’t have to think about what the fuck was going on.

  It wasn’t just Colt, although his mind shied back from Ramona and the reality of that situation. It was Somers. The encounter with Joyce Sturgis had been bad; Hazard wasn’t going to deny that. It had been public, it had been ugly, and Joyce had staged it in a way that had put Somers and the Wahredua PD in the worst possible light. After the last few days, with the trouble that Hazard and Colt had already caused for Somers, Hazard could understand the I’m-at-shit’s-end reaction he’d seen building in his husband.

  But then, somewhere along the line, it had turned into something much, much worse than that. Now Somers leaned against the passenger window, shadows around his eyes, looking pale and worn—rubbed out, Hazard thought, like paper that had seen a cheap eraser too many times. And at the end, the way he had moved, the way he had struck out. That wasn’t the John-Henry Somerset Hazard knew; Hazard had seen him in a lot of bad spots, and Hazard had been responsible for some of the awful ones, but he honestly couldn’t remember seeing his husband ever before on the brink of a panic attack.

  “It’s my head,” Somers said, touching the bandage as though it were proof.

  “I can call—”

  “No. I’m fine.” The silence grew tangled with his struggle. Then he added, “Thank you.”

  They drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Theo and his boyfriend-partner-whatever they were calling it, Auggie, lived in an older part of town along the river. The houses were set far back on their lots, screened by thick stands of pine and split-rail fences, and the effect was one of isolation, as though Hazard and Somers were driving through some remote wilderness.

  Some of that illusion ended when the mangled mailbox came into view. Hazard slowed the van and then stopped on the shoulder. He got out and inspected the mailbox. The door had been completely blown off its hinges, and in places, the mailbox bulged outward where the force of the explosion had been enough to distort the metal. Small pieces of plastic lay inside the mailbox and on the ground.

  When Hazard got back in the van, Somers was sitting up straight again, trying for that look of easy cool that he wore so naturally. “Dry-ice bomb,” Hazard said, pulling the door shut. “That’s what it looks like, anyway.”

  “Pretty standard teenager stuff.”

  “I’m sure that will be a great consolation when our son loses a finger and has to have extensive surgery on an eye because a shard of plastic embedded itself there.”

  Somers buzzed down the window. “Can you let off some of the steam now? I’m not saying Colt shouldn’t feel bad about this, but it’ll be easier for everyone if you can lower the pressure before we start.”

  Hazard answered by shifting into drive with unnecessary force; the handle at the end of the gear shift made a distressed, squeaking noise, as though some plastic part had been forced beyond its limits, but Hazard refused to look over at his husband. Somers propped an elbow in the open window and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  The driveway switchbacked down a surprisingly sharp slope before leveling out at the bottom. The pines grew thick down here, and instead of a lawn, most of the ground had been given over to the litter of old needles and patchy undergrowth. The house was a Tudor-style cottage: a steep, gabled roof, the façade part brick and part timber framing filled with stucco. It had the typical tall, narrow Tudor windows, curtains pulled back on the other side so that the glass looked like dark water.

  They parked and made their way to the porch, and Theo answered on the first knock. He wore joggers and a Wroxall sweatshirt, and his strawberry-blond hair was tied back in what Somers would have called—just to annoy Hazard—a man bun. He smiled, but it was a social reflex, and it went as soon as it came. When he stepped back, they followed him inside.

  “I was doing some yardwork,” Theo said quietly as he motioned them after him and started deeper into the house. “So, I was right there when it went off. They pretty much froze when I confronted them, and after I stopped shouting, I figured they didn’t know what to do, so I told them to come inside.”

  “Wonderful,” Hazard said. “It’ll make it easier to dispose of my son’s body after I murder him.”

  Theo grimaced. “Actually, Emery, I get the impression Colt was just tagging along—”

  “Wonderful,” Hazard grated out again. “I can add ‘imbecile follower without one fucking ounce of his own brains’ to the list of talking points.”

  Theo opened his mouth and shut it again.

  “Yeah,” Somers said from behind Hazard. “This is going to be fun.”

  “I thought you had a headache,” Hazard snapped without looking back. “Go wait in the car.”

  “Do you have a safe room?” Somers asked. “A bomb shelter? A private airstrip?”

  Theo slowed, turning and stretching out a hand. “Emery, maybe you’d like to take a minute to collect yourself—”

  “I’m perfectly fucking collected, thanks,” Hazard said as he brushed past.

  Theo sighed.

  “Yeah,” Somers said. “That.”

  Inside, the front portion of the house matched the exterior’s Tudor design: the first few rooms were small, the walls whitewashed, the exposed timbers and wood trim stained dark. But as Hazard progressed toward the back of the house, he saw where the addition began. The ceiling was higher, and transition pieces marked the shift from the old structure’s lath-and-plaster to the addition’s drywall. The hallway ended at a large, open room, with a wall of windows looking out on the Grand Rivere. One side of the room was given over to a kitchen, with lots of stainless steel and granite, copper pots hanging over the stove. The other side was the living room—mid-century furniture updated with combinations of textures and fabrics that Somers was probably coveting right that minute. What held Hazard’s attention, though, were the books. Books filled the built-in shelves on the far wall. Books were stacked on the end tables, the coffee table, the back of the sofa. And it looked like someone had read—or maybe was currently reading—all of them. Hazard made a mental note to figure which of the two men it was and then consider promoting him to personal friend.

  The thought lasted half a second before his gaze settled on the teenagers clustered on the sofa. Colt met Hazard’s gaze for a second before breaking, his shoulders pulling up to his ears as he stared at the slice of pizza in his hand. Ashley didn’t look over, but he was clearly aware of Hazard; he was currently trying to hide in Colt’s silhouette by shrinking down and turning in profile. The only one who could meet his gaze was the girl—Hazard thought he remembered Colt calling her Gwen. She had her dark hair up in a ponytail, and her dark eyes met Hazard’s with something he might have called amusement.

  Auggie was in the process of opening up another box of pizza—something laden with processed animal products, probably the custom combination that Colt and Ashley had concocted during a sleepover and which they now called ‘meat slayer.’ He looked up and smiled, but whatever he saw in Hazard’s face made the expression ash away.

  “Uh, Emery, I thought they might be hungry—”

  “Wonderful.” There was that word again. “You’re rewarding their criminal behavior. But, I’m sure you’re right. Vandalism and a fucking federal offense do give one an appetite.”

  “Ree,” Somers said quietly at his side.

  “Pops, we didn’t know it was Dr. Stratford’s mailbox—”