“What the hell are you doing to that kid?” one of the men yelled. This man’s buddy caught the little girl as she flew, bawling, out of the back.

“I’m trying to repair her shoe.”

The little girl was hysterical. Mr. Harvey was all reason and calm. But Claire had seen what I had – his look bearing down – his wanting something unspoken that to give him would equal our oblivion.

Hurriedly, as the men and woman stood confused, unable to see what Claire and I knew, Mr. Harvey handed the shoes to one of the men and said his goodbyes. He kept the heel. He liked to hold the small leather heel and rub it between his thumb and forefinger – a perfect worry stone.

I knew the darkest place in our house. I had climbed inside of it and stayed there for what I told Clarissa was a whole day but was really about forty-five minutes. It was the crawlspace in the basement. Inside ours there were pipes coming down that I could see with a flashlight and tons and tons of dust. That was it. There were no bugs. My mother, like her own, employed an exterminator for the slightest infestation of ants.

When the alarm had gone off to tell him to shut the blinds and then the next alarm, which told him to shut off most of the lights because the suburbs were asleep after that, Mr. Harvey would go down into the basement, where there were no cracks that light could peek through and people could point to, to say he was strange. By the time he killed me he had tired of visiting the crawlspace, but he still liked to hang out in the basement in an easy chair that faced the dark hole beginning halfway up the wall and reaching to the exposed baseboards of his kitchen floor. He would often drift off to sleep there, and there he was asleep when my father passed the green house at around 4:40 A.M.

Joe Ellis was an ugly little tough. He had pinched Lindsey and me under water in the pool and kept us from going to swim parties because we hated him so much. He had a dog that he dragged around no matter what the dog wanted. It was a small dog and couldn’t run very fast, but Ellis didn’t care. He would hit it or lift it painfully by the tail. Then one day it was gone, and so was a cat that Ellis had been seen taunting. And then animals from all over the neighborhood began disappearing.

What I discovered, when I followed Mr. Harvey’s stare to the crawlspace, were these animals that had gone missing for more than a year. People thought it stopped because the Ellis boy had been sent to military school. When they let their pets loose in the morning, they returned in the evening. This they held as proof. No one could imagine an appetite like the one in the green house. Someone who would spread quicklime on the bodies of cats and dogs, the sooner for him to have nothing left but their bones. By counting the bones and staying away from the sealed letter, the wedding ring, the bottle of perfume, he tried to stay away from what he wanted most – from going upstairs in the dark to sit in the straight chair and look out toward the high school, from imagining the bodies that matched the cheerleaders’ voices, which pulsated in waves on fall days during football games, or from watching the buses from the grammar school unload two houses down. Once he had taken a long look at Lindsey, the lone girl on the boys’ soccer team out running laps in our neighborhood near dark.

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child.

By August, Len wanted to establish some boundaries for his sake and for my father’s. My father had called the precinct too many times and frustrated the police into irritation, which wouldn’t help anyone be found and just might make the whole place turn against him.

The final straw had been a call that came in the first week of July. Jack Salmon had detailed to the operator how, on a morning walk, his dog had stopped in front of Mr. Harvey’s house and started howling. No matter what Salmon had done, went the story, the dog wouldn’t budge from the spot and wouldn’t stop howling. It became a joke at the station: Mr. Fish and his Huckleberry Hound.

Len stood on the stoop of our house to finish his cigarette. It was still early, but the humidity from the day before had intensified. All week rain had been promised, the kind of thunder and lightning rainstorm the area excelled at, but so far the only moisture of which Len was aware was that covering his body in a damp sweat. He had made his last easy visit to my parents’ house.

Now he heard humming – a female voice from inside. He stubbed out his cigarette against the cement under the hedge and lifted the heavy brass knocker. The door opened before he let go.

“I smelled your cigarette,” Lindsey said.

“Was that you humming?”

“Those things will kill you.”

“Is your father home?”

Lindsey stood aside to let him in.

“Dad!” my sister yelled into the house. “It’s Len!”

“You were away, weren’t you?” Len asked.

“I just got back.”

My sister was wearing Samuel’s softball shirt and a pair of strange sweatpants. My mother had accused her of returning home without one single item of her own clothing.

“I’m sure your parents missed you.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Lindsey said. “I think they were happy to have me out of their hair.”

Len knew she was right. He was certainly sure my mother had seemed less frantic when he had visited the house.

Lindsey said, “Buckley’s made you the head of the police squad in the town he built under his bed.”

“That’s a promotion.”

The two of them heard my father’s footsteps in the hallway above and then the sounds of Buckley begging. Lindsey could tell that whatever he’d asked for our father had finally granted.

My father and brother descended the stairs, all smiles.

“Len,” he said, and he shook Len’s hand.

“Good morning, Jack,” Len said. “And how are you this morning, Buckley?”

My father took Buckley’s hand and stood him in front of Len, who solemnly bent down to my brother.

“I hear you’ve made me chief of police,” Len said.

“Yes sir.”

“I don’t think I deserve the job.”

“You more than anyone,” my father said breezily. He loved it when Len Fenerman dropped by. Each time he did, it verified for my father that there was a consensus – a group behind him – that he wasn’t alone in all this.

“I need to talk to your father, kids.”

Lindsey took Buckley back into the kitchen with the promise of cereal. She herself was thinking of what Samuel had shown her; it was a drink called a jellyfish, which involved a maraschino cherry at the bottom of some sugar and gin. Samuel and Lindsey had sucked the cherries up through the sugar and booze until their heads hurt and their lips were stained red.

“Should I get Abigail? Can I make you some coffee or something?”

“Jack,” Len said, “I’m not here with any news – just the opposite. Can we sit?”

I watched my father and Len head into the living room. The living room seemed to be where no living ever actually occurred. Len sat on the edge of a chair and waited for my father to take a seat.

“Listen, Jack,” he said. “It’s about George Harvey.”

My father brightened. “I thought you said you had no news.”

“I don’t. I have something I need to say on behalf of the station and myself.”

“Yes.”

“We need you to stop making calls about George Harvey.”

“But…”

“I need you to stop. There is nothing, no matter how much we stretch it, to connect him to Susie’s death. Howling dogs and bridal tents are not evidence.”

“I know he did it,” my father said.

“He’s odd, I agree, but as far as we know he isn’t a killer.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

Len Fenerman talked, but all my father could hear was Ruana Singh saying what she had to him, and of standing outside Mr. Harvey’s house and feeling the energy radiating out to him, the coldness at the core of the man. Mr. Harvey was at once unknowable and the only person in the world who could have killed me. As Len denied it, my father grew more certain.