Because when I’d gone to him about the snake last year, before he’d declared it harmless, he’d come over with a shotgun. Tried to give it to me after, with his shaking hand. Said he was too slow to get to it should he need it now, inside the locked case, and anyway, he had another. I couldn’t take it; didn’t know how to use it.

  But Rick’s house was safety. He would know what to do.

  And when he opened the door, he did, right away. He took one look at me, and I peered over my shoulder to try to get him to understand. “There’s a man—outside—”

  I held up my palms; the red was so bright in the open doorway. His eyes scanned over me quickly, and he looked at my hands again, at my mouth—“Rick, help”—and he seemed to understand then that it wasn’t me who was hurt. He took me by the sleeve and pulled me across the threshold, and he closed and locked the door, and it was too warm inside, but I was safe.

  I was shaken and dirty, and Rick looked out the front window. Looked hard into the darkness, his fingers trembling against the window frame, his breath fogging up the glass. He stared for a long time, not going for the gun, not going for the phone, and I waited, because he would know what to do.

  Rick turned around, eyes glazed. But he seemed to be looking beyond me, somewhere.

  And he said, in a voice I’d never heard before, “Wash your hands.”

  TRANSCRIPT FROM INTERVIEW WITH DR. PAUL PARSONS, DIRECTOR OF LONGBRANCH SLEEP CLINIC

  OCTOBER 19, 2000

  It’s a common occurrence in children. Most will outgrow it. For parents, if you witness or suspect that your child is sleepwalking, there are some things you can do to protect them.

  Put a bell on their door, something to wake you. Try to limit the amount of furniture or fragile items in the room with them, so they won’t accidentally get hurt.

  What happened to the Maynor girl was an accident. A tragic accident. And sometimes, despite our best intentions, accidents happen anyway.

  Most times an episode passes with no incident. There are, of course, other disorders to be aware of. Episodes that veer more actively and dangerously than merely walking in your sleep. True sleepwalking mostly tends to mimic basic things you have already done.

  But if your child seems to be acting out their dreams, running, fighting… that’s not sleepwalking. That’s evidence of another type of disorder.

  That’s when you should be concerned. That’s when they could be a danger to themselves or others.

  CHAPTER 7

  Saturday, 2 a.m.

  RICK LEFT WITH A yellow flashlight and nothing else. No knife, no gun, no means of protection. Just a look over his shoulder and a glance toward my hands: “Now,” he said.

  I stumbled toward the hall bathroom, which I had used only once before.

  There was peeling yellow wallpaper behind the mirror, the green stems of the flowers gone gray from humidity. The shower faucet behind the curtain was dripping, and the second door connecting the bathroom to the bedroom was slightly ajar.

  In the silence, I tallied the ways out: the door I’d just come through; the door leading to his bedroom, the windows beyond the bed—which was made. Insomnia, I was guessing. The pale light always shining from his house, even in the dead of night.

  In the garish bathroom light, my hands looked almost comical. Theatrical. And I had to use my elbow to turn on the faucet. My hands were shaking, even though the water was on hot, the red swirling down. I couldn’t feel the temperature until it was already scalding, and I yanked my hands back—a baby pink.

  As the water circled, I imagined the shadow again. The shape of the body. The stillness. What Rick might see.

  The beam of the flashlight sweeping the earth. His footsteps approaching—

  I closed my eyes. Maybe I was wrong, the scene too dark and fractured. Maybe whoever lay out there was just injured, bleeding. Passed out drunk.

  I waited as the water ran cooler, rubbed soap up my arms to my elbows, scraped my fingernails against one another. Until there was no more visible blood, just the scent of vanilla, so thick it was almost cloying.

  I scanned the rest of my body for signs; my hands were clean. Turning them over: a small nick near my wrist, barely visible. Clean shirt. Dark pants. A tear at the knee; stiffness settling in. I sat on the edge of the tub, rolling up the leg of my loose pajama pants. A gash running down the kneecap.

  I pressed a stack of toilet paper against the cut, trying to stop the blood, then opened the cabinet under the sink, looking for a bandage. An amber prescription bottle, a pair of nail clippers, a pile of towels. A small trash can and something wedged beside it, in the corner. Something black and metal—

  I leaned closer, nudging the garbage can aside.

  The metal fell with a clunk, and I jumped back, pulse racing.

  A gun.

  A gun, hidden. Not one of his shotguns, locked up in a safe down the hall. But kept here. Four steps from his bedroom. Three steps from his living room. So he could get to it fast, should he need it.

  I heard Rick’s footsteps coming up the porch again, slow and steady. Behind the trash can, there was a roll of black electrical tape. I tore off a piece with my teeth, wrapped it over my knee, pulled the fabric back down my leg.

  I looked fine. Everything was fine.

  The sound of the front door opening and closing, footsteps pausing for a moment at the entrance. Like the danger had passed.

  Had he nudged the man with his toe, gotten him to wake, gotten him back on his feet, walking him to his car—

  Had there been a car?

  I hadn’t noticed. Had I even looked?

  I remembered the light from Rick’s, the darkness of my own house. The open doorway. I didn’t remember a car…

  Footsteps again, and then a tap at the bathroom door.

  “Liv? You okay?”

  “Just a minute,” I said. I eased the cabinet door closed, holding my breath.

  “Liv. I’m going to have to call the police now.”

  A pause. And then: “Okay,” I said, speaking to my own reflection. Not a call for help. The police, he said.

  He was dead.

  Everything slowed. My breathing, my thoughts, my movements.

  His steps retreating. Images flashing and lingering—the phone, the body, the blood. The feeling of pins and needles in my fingertips. A sour taste in my mouth—the walls were too close, and the drip of the faucet behind me grew louder, more insistent. I couldn’t get a deep breath.

  I pulled the door open, desperate for air.

  * * *

  I HEARD RICK ON the phone from where I waited in the living room. He was pacing in the kitchen as he talked. “Yes, there’s the body of a man at the edge of my property. Deceased, yes. No, I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t know.”

  He spent a while in the kitchen, even after the conversation stopped. And he didn’t look my way at first when he came back to the living room. Stared, instead, out the front windows. Eyes slightly narrowed, a twitch at the corner.

  “It takes so long,” he said, “for help to get here. For the police to make it out this far.”

  “Rick, did you see? Who it was, I mean?”

  He turned in my direction, blinking slowly. “Never saw him before, that I could tell. There was a lot of blood, though.” Eyes drifting away again. Drifting straight to the cabinet beside the television, to the bottle of liquor sitting on top. Then he turned back to me, glancing at my hands, my pants, my bare feet. “Sit down, Liv. Sit down and take a breath.”

  I walked to the couch, though the stiffness in my left leg, and the electrical-tape bandage, turned my walk to a slight limp.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “My knee,” I said, sitting on the edge of his sofa. “I cut it. On a root, I think.”

  He frowned at the tear in the fabric. “You tripped out there,” he said, but he said it like a statement, not a question.

  “Yes,” I said, and he nodded once. And I realized he was saying it like it was a story, my story, something I had to cover up. “Rick, I tripped over the… over the body.” I couldn’t say the name. Who I imagined might be out there. Couldn’t even think it.

  “Okay,” he said. And then, “They’re here.” Even before a flash of light cut through the front curtains. “Stay in here. I’ll show them.”

  A man was dead, and how many men could it be, lurking outside my house? That phone I’d heard must’ve belonged to whoever was out there. My mind kept drifting back to Jonah, to the text I had sent him—Thinking of you, too—and the one he had sent back, seconds later:

  What are you thinking?

  Because that was Jonah, always digging deeper, to find the heart of the meaning. Always asking it of others but not himself. The dynamic of his classroom carrying over, seeming like a natural extension—though it wasn’t.

  What I was really thinking: That I knew it was a mistake as soon as he responded. That I was smart enough this time to see him clearly, not as Professor Lowell, the thrill of his extra interest, but as a forty-one-year-old man trapped in a perpetual state of late adolescence, in danger of trapping me there, too.

  When I didn’t respond, falling into my bed instead, into a sleep I couldn’t find the beginning of—a haze of wine and adrenaline and exhaustion—had he driven out this way?

  Or had I texted him to come? Had I responded in my sleep?

  The blackout I’d had from drinking during that episode at the end of sophomore year in college was the closest I’d ever felt to sleepwalking. Knowing, after, that something had happened, seeing the evidence, hearing others talk about it, but never able to get there myself. Another thing forever lost to me.

  The night and the rain; the drainage pipe. The cold earth and stagnant water.

  It had been only one glass of wine last night, but Dr. Cal’s words echoed in my head, faintly accusing.

  The voices of several people out front carried through the thin window, and the sound of footsteps made me sit upright, unsure what to do with my hands. I folded them awkwardly in my lap until my fingers felt numb, hooked together unnaturally.

  A woman followed Rick inside. “Liv, this is Nina,” he said. He introduced her so casually, I couldn’t tell at first what her role was. Whether this was someone he had called to the house personally; whether this was someone on our side.

  Nina stepped inside carefully, her gaze roaming the room—she was smaller than I was, wearing gray slacks and a black windbreaker. Boots that seemed in contrast to her dress pants. She had light brown skin and sleek dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail.

  Her face gave away nothing. “Nina Rigby,” she said. “I’m with the police department. Mr. Aimes said you’re the one who found the body?”

  Her face was completely delicate, as if made of glass—tiny upturned nose, gently sloping cheekbones, rounded chin, like I could fit her entire face in my hand. But it was unlined and expressionless, even now, when discussing a body just steps away. And when her brown eyes set on me, I changed my mind: stone, not glass.

  “Yes. Do you know who it is?” I asked, the words scraping against my throat, wondering if she could hear my heartbeat from there. I concentrated on slowing my breaths, counting the seconds, in and out.

  She paused, sat beside me on the couch, barely making an indentation. “We’re not sure just yet. But what I’d like to do right now is get your statement while it’s all still fresh. Why don’t you tell me what happened. How you found him.”

  I took a second deciding what to say; I had spent my life telling lies by omission. Excising the irrelevant, the past, becoming someone with a different history or none at all. And so it was instinct. To tell the truth without all the facts. The details coming in an odd, detached way, in response to each question. I heard a noise. I found him outside. Yes, I touched him. I’m sure, I touched him. No, I can’t remember how. I can’t remember.

  “What did you hear?” she asked, homing in on specific details.

  “A phone.” The truth. It had woken me from the haze. Let her think it had carried across the yard.

  “Who did you think it was out there?”

  Jonah, at his desk, reading my text. Feet up, in his worn jeans, bourbon in a glass—

  “I didn’t. I didn’t know. I just heard the ringing, and it was coming from the direction of Rick’s house, and—”

  “Liv keeps an eye on me, Nina. She checks in,” Rick said. This, too, was not a lie. In the last few months, I’d started to notice that tremor in his hand—I worried about him. I worried about him driving. So I picked up groceries if I was going to the store, and I knocked on his door if I hadn’t seen him out all day.

  Nina Rigby looked at him closely, like she was reading between the lines: Did I head outside because I thought it was Rick needing help? A good story that emerged between the details, whether it was true or not. Couldn’t it be true? Couldn’t Rick believe that, too?

  Except Rick knew I had been sleepwalking outside yesterday. He knew, and he was covering now.

  “Did you know he was dead?” she asked.

  “I, I shook him.” Hands out in front of me, pushing at something that was no longer there. “I put my hands on his body. It was dark. I just shook him, and… he didn’t feel right. He was in the bushes. There was blood. Even in the dark, I could feel it.” Sticky, viscous, as I leaned against the tree. “I touched a tree out there, too.”

  Her eyes drifted to my hands. I could smell the soap from here. “I washed my hands. I didn’t want to get it on Rick’s things.” The truth.

  She nodded once, barely perceptible. “Did you feel for a pulse?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t think so. I just started running.”

  “For here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why’d you run here?”

  The open door behind me, in the dark. Instinct carrying me forward—“Something happened to that man, and I was scared.”

  “There’ve been animals,” Rick said. “We’ve seen them. Heard them.”

  Nina’s head turned swiftly, the first crack in the demeanor. “That was no animal, Mr. Aimes.”

  In the silence of the room, I could hear the crackle of a walkie-talkie in the distance; the low hum of voices outside; a car door closing. Nina inhaled sharply, turning to face me. “I’d like you to walk me through exactly how you found him.”

  I looked to the window. Didn’t understand what she was asking. Hadn’t I just done that?

  “From your house,” she added, standing. “Mr. Aimes, I’m going to have someone else come take your full statement. Ms. Meyer, I’d like you to walk me through where you were when you heard the phone. It could help us. Would be good to know whether he was closer to your house at first, or whether he was already incapacitated when you heard it.”

  I pushed myself to standing, unable to stop the wince as my leg bent.

  A tiny indentation formed in Nina’s forehead. “Are you okay?”

  “My knee,” I said. “I cut it.”

  “She tripped,” Rick said, and we both stared in his direction.

  “Cut it on a root, I think. It’s fine, though. I’m fine.”

  * * *

  EVEN THOUGH OUR HOMES were close, Nina and I were prevented from walking through the border of the property line. “We’re not sure how far the crime scene extends right now,” Nina explained. She turned on her flashlight as we started walking down the long drive to the main road, where we could then cut back to my driveway.

  But she immediately turned back, frowning at the way I was walking. “Let’s take my car,” she said. “These driveways are so dark, anyway.”

  She led me to her unmarked car, held the passenger door open for me before walking around to the driver’s side.

  Up close, Nina Rigby was captivating in her contradictions. Upturned nose and downturned mouth, giving her the simultaneous look of both aloofness and gravity. No makeup, as far as I could tell, but with her hands on the wheel, I saw that her short nails were painted a subtle pink.

  Out on the main road, I couldn’t see any other cars—no sign of how another person had arrived. We made a sharp turn into my driveway. Our mailboxes were positioned side by side, the individual driveways diverging from there.

  Just as we pulled in past my mailbox, bright lights lit up the space around the crime scene, white and unnatural. I could see gnats swarming in the glare.

  There was no car in the driveway but my own.

  She turned the car off, and without the headlights, the only glow was from the crime scene, the bushes lit up in an eerie glow between the properties. Shadows of men falling outward, stretching toward us.

  “Your house is completely dark,” she said.

  “Sorry, I need to get a new bulb for the porch light.”

  The car door slammed shut behind her, and by the time I climbed out, she was standing in front of my porch, looking straight ahead.

  But she wasn’t waiting for me to enter, I realized. She was staring at the open doorway. The darkness beckoning. She flicked on her flashlight, shining the beam over the front porch, lighting our way. “Did you leave the door that way?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  She led the way, and I gripped the banister, not wanting to bend my knee more than necessary.

  Nina looked back once, frowning at my steps. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Fine. I just don’t want to make it any worse.” But my entire body was on edge, practically thrumming. She could probably hear it in my voice.

  Nina stepped to the side at the entrance, like she was waiting for me. But she pushed the door farther open with her foot, shining the flashlight inside. Her shoulders were tense, and for a moment I flashed to all the things that could be waiting here, in the dark.

  My hand brushed against the light switches inside, until the living room lit up in an eerie glow. I breathed slowly, taking it in. The couch and the cushions, just as I’d left them. No evidence of someone else who had been here with me. But the air was cooler, from the front door left open. “Okay if I take a quick look around first?” she asked, and I nodded. Maybe she’d come back with me to make sure no one was hiding out here. To make sure it was safe.