something? Did her eyes open?

“They left her, for now,” Dill continued. “The master bedroom opened onto the long hallway. One started through the doorway first. They apparently hadn’t made any noise that had alerted the others in the house. They looked back.” Dill looked over his shoulder. “The French doors were wide open, letting in whatever sounds out in the night there were, possibly masking any of the sounds of violence.”

Jimmy thought, Mary closed her eyes. It was nothing.

“The man, David Fifthian, never woke up,” Dill said next. “He was alone in the first small bedroom off the hallway. On his stomach. He was killed the same way, though facedown. Feathers were found all the way into his lungs, from the comforter, from trying to pull in what air he could. Both of them handled his neck.” Dill made his two hands into an open circle. “One pair of hands on top of the other. He wore just a V-neck sweater. He had had sexual relations in the bed in the master bedroom and then left his partner there to come to this room. They wrapped his ankles with a leather belt from a pair of trousers on the floor near the door and used it as a strap to pull him off the bed and out into the hallway, once he was dead.”

Stay asleep, Jimmy thought, as if he was standing over Mary.

“The third, April . . .”

Jimmy wanted to make him stop. What he wanted was to take Mary out of there, lift her off the couch, out of Dill’s narration, before one more thing happened. He wanted to cut her out of the story, let all this happen to strangers, with no connection to him.

“. . . April Joules. She was awake. Reading. In the second small bedroom. She couldn’t have heard them. She was in a chair, beside a table with a gooseneck lamp, beside an open window.”

Jimmy remembered something he should have remembered before. He interrupted, “Was his daughter there?”

It was the only interruption. Dill shook his head. “Vancouver.”

It made Jimmy realize how little he and Mary had said about the whole thing over the three days, how little he had asked or she had offered.

“Because April Joules was awake, they stabbed her in the chest,” Dill finished. “There was a different blood pattern.”

Jimmy looked across at Angel. He had his head bowed. His lips were moving, mumbling a prayer. Or a curse.

“All of the bodies then were dragged into the living room for the desecration, and the body of at least one, probably the man, was dragged out the front door. The bodies of the women were likely packaged and carried out.”

Did the wind blow the door shut? Once they’d left? Is that what woke her? Is that what brought Mary out into it, too late, or exactly late enough?

When it was finished, they talked a little more, about each other. “How are you doing?” was a question Sailors asked each other frequently, and it meant more than to the rest of us. And then, in the empty foyer, behind the closed front door, they formed a circle and held hands, like a prayer circle, only they didn’t bow their heads but rather looked straight at each other, a scene someone from the outside world would never have understood.

Jimmy dropped Angel off at home in Silver Lake. It was six in the morning by then. Some of Angel’s neighbors were breaking the day, loading tools into their trucks. (They couldn’t leave the trucks loaded on the streets all night.) They’d gotten used to seeing Jimmy in the old Cadillac, Angel’s friend. A couple of them waved. They were even used to them being out all night together. They probably thought they were just partying.

Mary wasn’t in the house when Jimmy got back.

The light was full then, bright and hot, coming in through the east-facing windows. He looked for her in every room. He looked in the closets. He looked under the bed, feeling foolish on top of his sense of panic. He tried to tell himself maybe she’d gone for a walk, gone to a friend’s.

He circled the base of the house, calling her name.

She was in the storage room beneath the kitchen. She was covered with dirt. There was no floor. She cowered in the corner, in a jail of rakes and hoes and shovels. In as much dark as she could find.

“They came back after me,” she said before he could say