“Well, showing you didn’t fucking work either, did it? Because here you are.”

She turned away from the mirror now, and he saw her eyes were gleaming with tears. One rolled down a cracked, brown cheek, washing the dirt clean and revealing pink skin beneath. “But you called me back, Nick. Why did you do that? If you really didn’t want me anymore?”

“Just because I remember you doesn’t mean I want you.”

She was crying now, crying for real, and as the tears swept down her dirty cheeks, they wiped away the dry, encrusted dirt, and she was under there, her true face. Those round cheeks, the full, gentle mouth. Why would anyone have ever hurt her? When all she knew was how to love?

“Maybe you called me back for another reason? Maybe you had second thoughts?” She was walking backwards through the bathroom door, back into the house, her hands supplicating in front of her. “Maybe you really did want everyone to know about us?”

He was following her back into the living room, as if magnetized to her. He could not tell a lie: he remembered now how much he’d loved her, how, in the beginning, when they lived in that house together, he would have done anything for her. Why the heart runs out of fuel for loving was a mystery that had evaded him over and over in his life. He’d always been one to lose heart, to see his passions fade, and he’d never known why.

“Because you’ve never really made anything of yourself,” she said. She was standing over the tarp, and she was whole and unclothed, the way she was that night, that last night. She tilted her head at him and her luxuriant bronze hair fell over one breast. “But you had your chance, didn’t you?”

“I should have burned you up, so there was nothing left of you. I should have chopped you into little pieces -”

“Why didn’t you, Nick? Why didn’t you just have done with me and no one would ever have found me?”

“I won’t make that mistake again,” he said and he wheeled and strode into the kitchen to find his weapon. It was lying on its side on the counter beside the stove, and he snatched it up and then went down the hall to his office. A sheaf of paper lay on his desk, months’ worth of work, and he strode back down the hall, brandishing it in front of him. In his other hand, he held the lighter.

She saw him and laughed. “It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it, Nick? I mean, it’s like you conjured me out of thin air and now you want to make me vanish again? Again? You’re just not that good, honey.”

He lit the paper and it flared in his hands like a magician’s trick. And then, just as quickly, it was ash at his feet and he was alone. The room was empty. The walls were blank. He was standing in a room with no windows and just a single closed door in one wall. The light flooded in and he looked up and she was standing above him now, towering over him, a giant, and she leaned her face down into the light, her angry, tearful face, and she almost blotted out the light. “You better hope they learn the truth about me before it’s too late, Nick.”

“Where am I?” he said, a note of fear finally creeping into his voice.

“Why, honey, you’re caught in a lie,” she said, and then she closed the lid of the box. In the deep, awful dark, he heard the door in the wall open.

A voice said, “You’re inside it now, aren’t you, Wise?”

Nick looked around. “Who… me?”

“Draw closer.”

He waited to hear more, but there was only silence and darkness.

Costamides flipped the last page of the story, in case there was more, but she looked up at them shrugging, and laid the papers aside. “Well, if you were wondering how your friend on the internet ended up in that basement -”

“We know as little now as we did twenty minutes ago,” Hazel said.

Fraser was staring down at the pages. “And we’re thinking of letting the Record run this shit?”

“Is that our prime concern right now?” asked Wingate. “Whether they run it or not, we have to decide what it means to us and what our next move is going to be.” He held up his sheaf of papers. Hazel had noticed he’d been underlining words on it. “If I understand this correctly, we’re being alerted to a murder, as well as a suspect.”

“Or someone wants to watch us dance like marionettes,” said Fraser.

“If we’re marionettes,” said Hazel, “I think we better learn our parts. Whoever this is, they want people to see everything. Which is why they want this in the paper.”

“I don’t care what the fuck they want,” said Fraser. “Who’s in charge here?”

“You’re forgetting about their collateral,” she said to him. “We have to at least give the appearance of cooperation. Or we’re going to find a body on our doorstep, and I’m not sure it would stop there.” She jutted her chin at Wingate’s copy of the story. “What were you writing?”

He flipped back to the first page. “I don’t know what you’re all thinking, but I read chapters one and two, like, ten times, and I don’t think three through five were written by the same person. The beginning was, well, it was bad. This isn’t exactly…”

“Dickens?” said Hazel.

He smiled at her, a little shyly. “Yeah. But it’s better than what preceded it.”

“Practice makes perfect,” said Costamides.

“No,” said Hazel, “the agenda has changed since those first chapters. It’s not a story anymore. It’s… it’s a map of some kind.”

“If we choose to believe it,” said Fraser, harshly. “And mind you, even if we do, how the hell do we know exactly what we’re believing in?”

“We’re being asked to figure that out,” said Wingate. He spread his fingertips on top of the pages, making a bridge over them. “The story is our guide. The stuff on the internet is for us to keep track of how we’re doing.”

“And how are we doing?” asked Costamides.

“We fall any further behind,” said Fraser, “they might start to run out of body parts to send us.”

Wingate ignored him. “Well, I noticed that he uses the word damage a lot. He says it when he’s sitting at the table, and then he talks about the water damaging the floor. And he does it somewhere else too, but I can’t find it.”

“The box he digs up in the backyard is ‘damaged,’” said Hazel. “It might mean something.”

“He’s doing the crossword at the beginning, isn’t he?” said Costamides. They all flipped back to the first page of chapter four. “‘Damaged’ is in the clue.” She looked up. “What’s a word that means ‘damaged’?”

“Broken,” said Wingate. “Smashed.”

“Something that’s ‘damaged’ isn’t necessarily completely ruined.”

“Damn it,” said Hazel. “I know what it is.” They all looked at her. “It’s a cryptic clue, like for a crossword. Damaged or broken or messy – words like that – they signal anagrams.”

They all turned their eyes back on the page. “Surely we’re not thinking this whole thing is, like, a palindrome?” said Fraser.

“No,” she said. “But something has to be rearranged before it makes sense. A detail or a word.”

“Fine. What, though?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel.

The four of them stared at the pages. To Hazel’s eyes, the longer she looked, the more the letters and words seemed like meaningless marks against a vast, empty field.

Her phone rang and she picked it up. It was Melanie. “I’m putting him on speakerphone,” she said.

It was Spere. “It’s official, people. The hand in Deacon’s freezer once held that computer mouse.” There was silence from the room. “We had to digitize the layers of prints, but we were able to separate and collate. We have a match.”

“Well, I guess that means I don’t have to play the rabid fan up at the missus’s house to shake loose a drinking glass,” said Fraser. “Good work, Howard.”

“Yeah, good work,” said Hazel. She reached forward and punched the disconnect. For the first time in this case, something was as it seemed. Her eyes were drawn to the computer screen, which continued to show its plea in blood. “What did you do?” she said quietly to it and then she slowly turned her gaze on the others. “What did Colin Eldwin do?”