heartburn because her brain was exploding.
Lisa Sharpe. In the photo, she was wearing a red-striped dress, her blond hair up in a ponytail. She held a ragged-looking Barbie doll up to her face for the picture, head tilted toward the doll, smiling sweetly. She had been two years old, taken from her front yard in 2008. The toddler had been in her swing when her mother stepped inside to get her cell phone. When she returned, no less than sixty seconds later (or so she said), Lisa was gone.
Winnie read through the articles, her confusion mounting—but not nearly as high as her fear. Why would Nigel look up this child? This Lisa Sharpe? She could think of only one reason her husband would be interested in a case like this, and that was something she didn’t want to think about.
Lisa was never found. Twelve years later, and her mother still held Facebook Live vigils for her every Sunday. Winnie stood abruptly, ripping the sheet of paper from the notepad and crumpling it in her fist. No, no, no, she wanted to say, but her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth, dry and useless. How could he? Or more importantly; why was he? And why now?
15
JUNO
Juno spent the next forty-eight hours confined to the crawl space as the Crouches passed around the stomach flu. It wasn’t the longest she’d been down there, but she was less prepared this time. With Nigel sleeping in the den downstairs, she hadn’t been able to risk sneaking up to replenish her supplies. Her waste bucket was in bad need of emptying, and last she counted, she had just five water bottles leaning against the wall opposite her bed.
The weather dropped to thirty-nine degrees, and all she had left for food was a sleeve of saltines. She’d been careless; her focus—her obsession, she corrected herself—had been finding out the truth about Sam, and in the meantime, she’d forgotten to take care of herself. Again.
Her side was aching, despite the layers she’d put beneath her sleeping bag. She rolled onto her back, groaning. She tried to change her position every twenty minutes; it helped with the pain. Years ago, Juno had a patient with lupus—Cynnie Gerwyn. And who could forget a name like that? But what Juno remembered most about Cynnie was the butterfly mark on her face and the way her thirty-year-old frame was bent and warbled like a wire hanger. She distinctly remembered feeling sorry for the woman. It would be years before Juno was diagnosed herself.
Cynnie had gone on to have a kidney transplant, and Juno had seen her twice weekly after that as she worked her way through a depression brought on by her disease. Back then, Cynnie had been just a client, a woman who paid Juno to listen to her talk, but she’d thought about her more and more since her own diagnosis, wondering what Cynnie had done with her life since the fresh kidney.
Juno moved her hands from where they were pressed between her knees to keep warm and held them close to her face; they were blue. Not from the cold—not yet, anyway. The swollen, blue hands were a sign of her sickness. She bent them at the knuckles and flinched when her joints popped painfully. Juno didn’t have so much as an aspirin down in her cave, not with the entire Crouch family quarantined.
She returned her hands to their place between her knees and wished she were already dead. And she might be by the end of the week: her immune system worked like a bunch of fat old ladies with gout. There was nothing to do but think as she lay underneath the Crouches’ house, below the humming bodies of the family who owned it. She wasn’t ashamed of what she was doing. When it came to survival, in Juno’s opinion, anything was acceptable. She’d watched them, wanted them, and found a home with them.
By the time the Crouches purged the virus and left the Turlin Street house to return to their outside worlds, Juno hadn’t eaten anything in three days. She wasn’t hungry; she wasn’t anything, really—barely existing outside of the pain in her body. She had to talk herself into sitting up, and then slowly she crawled forward, the exertion of leaving her nest enough to leave her gasping for breath. The smell of her body made her gag, and she realized that at some point she’d wet herself, probably in