A schematic drawing. A diagram.

A fucking blueprint.

Faded, crisscrossed with lines, even a layman able to discern the shape and function of the thing being built.

The core. The fuel rods. The shell.

A real blueprint. As opposed to fake ones they’d trotted out at Lloyd Steiner’s trial.

Yes, Anna, your father did give something to Wren.

Something he must’ve held on to all those years. Hid away-a kind of legacy. For you, maybe. So you’d know who he really was. That he might’ve gone to jail, but he was never guilty. Not really. No guiltier than anyone else who’d helped build a nuclear reactor out in the desert and kept their mouth shut after it blew sky-high.

Wren’s Rule Number One.

Back up your notes for protection.

He had.

Sooner or later, he’d told Anna, someone would bring it into the light.

Literally.

Unfortunately, he’d made one mistake.

He’d anointed Seth Bishop the protector.

Seth Bishop, who, hearing neither hide nor hair of Wren for two weeks, was supposed to rip two hundred front pages of the Littleton Journal out of a wall and, even with his limited intellectual curiosity, understand that someone needed to see them. That its three-inch headlines were screaming bloody murder.

Only Seth adhered to the credo of the dedicated stoner. No need to do the work if you’ve already got the cash-no doubt already blown on some primo Panama Red and six-packs of Coors Light.

ON MY WAY OUT OF LITTLETON, I HEARD A SIREN GOING IN THE OPPOSITE direction.

The sheriff on his way to make the climactic arrest, I supposed. Perpetrator and gun, nabbed red-handed.

He’d find an empty house with an empty drawer.

I made one stop before I pulled onto Highway 45.

Mrs. Weitz opened the door, then continued to stand there-all three hundred or so pounds of her.

“Is Sam home?” I asked her.

She appeared to be on the verge of lying to me, but then Sam yelled from the kitchen, asking her where the damn Yodels were, so she had no choice but to let me in.

“It’s okay,” I told her, as she moved aside, barely, to let me through. “I won’t be staying long.”

Sam was more hospitable than his wife. Though he did surreptitiously peek through both study windows before pulling the shades, wondering, I imagine, if there was about to be a major guns-drawn bust in his front yard.

“Jesus.” Sam’s first word to me. “You have no idea what they’ve been saying about you.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Is any of it true?”

“Not much.”

“Okay-good enough for me. Anything for a bowling team member. You need some help?”

“Just a little.”

“Shoot.” Then he blushed and said, “Poor choice of words.” He’d noticed the gun peeking out of my waistband.

“How long have you been trying to sell me some insurance, Sam?”

“What? Wait, come on. You mean to tell me you came all the way here for insurance?”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

FIFTY-FIVE

I am here.

In room four of the roach motel.

Disgraced journalists check in, but they don’t check out.

I am almost done. Nearly. Just about.

Have you got it all?

Have I sufficiently illuminated? Enlightened? Made clear?

Do I need to regurgitate the whole enchilada?

What don’t you get?

What they did? What they constructed? What they cobbled together, like a movie assembled scene by scene, as if by screenwriter by committee?

What did Wren say over the phone? The faux Wren, of course, one of several in a crucial cast of players. If I had to guess, another actor hired from that Web site, and told what to say-a simple voice-over job this time.

It reads like a bad movie, he said.

Don’t you get it? Don’t you see?

It was supposed to.

That was the whole point.

It was its whole raison d’être.

Back in New York, when I was down to borrowing the conventions of a cheap thriller:

Anagrams.

Clandestine meetings in the ruins of destroyed towns.

Con men actors.

Auto Tag.

The works.

I read them. Your canon of deceit, he said to me.

I read them.

Of course they read them. But they did more than read them. They studied them. Then they re-borrowed them, those hackneyed conventions, wove them together into a veritable masterpiece of Valle’s greatest hits.

Remember how he’d goaded me over the phone-never went five minutes without reminding me what a disgrace I’d been. How I’d dishonored an entire profession. How I’d set journalism back fifty years.

Fifty years exactly.

All the way back to 1954.

Why?

Why goad? Why needle? Why prod?

Why was he such a font of useful information?

It was part of the script.

They told me about Lloyd Steiner.

They sent Anna Graham into Belinda’s birthday party, then into the parking lot of Muhammed Alley, where she scrawled that anagram into my fuselage.

Kara Bolka, my muse, my siren.

And the plumber. When I first woke up, strapped down and shot up.

How helpful was he? What a chatterbox. What a blabbermouth.

Why?

You still don’t grasp it?

They were trying to hide something, you say? Weren’t they?

Yes.

And no.

You can’t put the water back in the bottle. It’s spilled, I told the plumber that day.

He hadn’t disagreed with me.

He couldn’t.

Plumbers fix leaks, sure.

But sometimes, they do exactly the opposite. They flush those old and leaky pipes; they send all that rotten water shooting out at a hundred miles an hour. They cleanse the system.

You can only keep a secret so long, Wren had told Anna, and then you can’t.

It’s a fact.

Two people can keep a secret, someone once said, if one of them is dead.

One of them was. Wren. He was dead. And Eddie Bronson-him too, I imagined. Not to mention that poor gas-station clerk, who was simply caught in the crossfire, metaphorically speaking.

And Benjy Washington.

Who’d flown the coop and headed back to Littleton.

Which must’ve sent them all into a dither.

He’d made it into the nursing home. He’d seen his mom. He’d called the sheriff’s office. Who else had he talked to? Who else had he sat down with and told the story to?

First Bronson flies the coop. Now him.

Where would it end?

After all, Wren might be as dead as a doornail, but they were still scared stiff of him. Scared of a corpse.

Why?

Because he’d told Anna, plain as day:

The story was protected.

The story. The secret.

Protected.

The story was someplace they couldn’t get to it.

But somewhere someone else could. The story would be brought into the light.

What did he mean?

They’d ripped his house apart to find out. They’d ripped his cabin apart.

They’d sent the plumber back into my house three times after Benjy made it back to Littleton.

Here’s the irony.

If they’d really ripped his house apart, taken that Sheetrock by the hands and pulled the walls down, they would’ve found exactly what they were looking for.

Nestled there behind the Sheetrock. The story Wren had painstakingly pursued and put together and paginated in the dead of night, too paranoid by then to share it with someone like Hinch. He didn’t know whom to trust anymore. Littleton loco, and for good reason.

Only they didn’t rip his house apart.

The sword of Damocles was still hanging over their heads.

Wren had put it there.

What’s a plumber to do?

Easy.

You set up a Web site for desperate actors who, if they aren’t willing to kill for a part, won’t care if you do.