Lanny doesn’t want to say anything. She sits silently, head down, and nods or shakes her head but won’t speak until the detective finally turns to me in exasperation. I put a hand on her shoulder and say, “Sweetheart, it’s okay. He’s not here to hurt anybody. Just tell him anything you might know, okay?” I say that, of course, confident that she doesn’t know anything, no more than Connor or I do.

Lanny shoots me a doubtful look from a veil of dark hair and says, “I saw a boat last night.”

I am rooted to the spot in shock. I shiver a little, even though the day’s air is warm, the birds singing. No, I think. No, this can’t be happening. My daughter can’t be a witness. A sick abyss opens at my feet, and I imagine her on the stand, testifying. Cameras flashing. Pictures in newspapers, and immediately, the headlines.

SERIAL KILLER’S DAUGHTER WITNESS IN MURDER TRIAL

We’ll never get away again.

“What kind of boat?” Detective Prester asks. “How big was it? What color?”

“It wasn’t very big. A small fishing boat, like—” She thinks, then points to one that’s bobbing at a dock not far away. “Like that one. White, I could see it from my window.”

“Can you recognize it if you see it again?”

She’s already shaking her head by the time he finishes. “No, no, it was just a boat, like a hundred other ones. I didn’t see it real well.” She shrugs. “Looked like every other one around here, honestly.”

If Prester is disappointed, he doesn’t look it. Doesn’t look excited, either. “So, you saw the boat. Good. Let’s back up. What made you look outside?”

Lanny sits for a moment, thinking, then says, “I guess it was the splash?”

That gets his attention, and mine. My mouth goes dry. Prester leans forward a bit. “Tell me about that.”

“Well, I mean, it was a big splash. Big enough that I heard it. But my room faces the lake, you know, at the corner of the house. I had my window open. So I heard a splash when the engine cut out. I thought maybe somebody fell in, or jumped in. People go skinny-dipping out there sometimes.”

“And you looked out?”

“Yeah. But all I saw was the boat. It was just sitting there. There was somebody in it, I guess, because after a couple of minutes the engine started up again. I couldn’t really see them.” She takes in a deep breath. “Did I see somebody dumping a body?”

Prester doesn’t answer that. He’s busy writing in his notebook, fast scratches of pen on paper. He says, “Did you see where the boat went after the engine started?”

“No. I shut the window; it was getting too windy outside. I pulled the curtain and went back to reading.”

“Okay. How long would you say you heard the engine run before it was turned off again?”

“I don’t know. I put my earbuds in. I fell asleep and they were still in. My ears were sore this morning. My music played all night.”

God. I can’t swallow. I stare at Prester, willing him to say something comforting, something like, It’s okay, kid, nothing happened, it’s all just a mistake, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t confirm or deny. He just clicks his pen, puts it back in his pocket with the notebook, and stands up. “Thank you, Atlanta. That’s real helpful. Ms. Proctor.”

I can’t say anything to him. I just nod, like Lanny does, and we watch as he and Graham rendezvous back at the dust-filmed black sedan parked in our driveway. They talk, but I can’t make out a word, and they’re positioned so we can’t see their faces. I sit down and put my arm around my daughter, and for once, she doesn’t shrug it off and move away.

I gently rub my palm back and forth across her shoulder, and she sighs. “This isn’t good, Mom. Not good. I should have said I didn’t see anything. I thought about lying, I really did.”

I think that’s probably true; I don’t see how what she saw advances the investigation at all. She couldn’t identify the boat, hadn’t seen anyone to recognize, and telling Prester anything just means that he’ll check us out in more detail. I pray that Absalom’s work on our new identities will hold up. I can’t be absolutely sure of that, and any scrutiny, any leaks could have dire consequences.

We should get out of here before something happens. I think about that. I vividly imagine the flurry of packing. We have a fair amount of stuff now, and I can’t ask my kids to continue to abandon everything they love; we have to take things, and that means more room than the Jeep can provide. We’d need something larger. A van, probably. I can trade for one, but my cash supply isn’t unlimited, and my credit is carefully managed under my new identity, with only one card, and only to prop up the illusion. We can’t just pull out at a moment’s notice, drift away without a trace. It will take a day, at least, to get everything organized. I realize with a shock that for all my paranoia, I haven’t considered this worst-case scenario: how to pull us safely and quickly out of this home, this place. A day’s delay might be nothing to most people, but it could mean the difference between life and death to us.

The Jeep—too small for an immediate evacuation—was a sign I’m putting down roots and getting comfortable, and it’s the wrong time for that. Dammit.

Lanny, I realize, has been watching me. Watching my face as I think this through. She says nothing until Officer Graham and Detective Prester are in the sedan and backing down the drive in a whisper of pale dust, and then she says in a dead little voice, “So I guess we pack, right? Just what we can carry?”

I hear the damage I’ve done to them both in her flat intonation. She’s become resigned to the terrible, inhuman idea that she can never have friends, or family, or even favorite things, and she’s learned to live with that at the tender age of fourteen, and I can’t. I can’t do it to her again.

This time we won’t run. This time I will trust Absalom’s false identities. This time I will bet on normal life for once, and not rip my children’s souls apart to save their physical bodies.

I don’t like it. But that has to be my decision.

“No, sweetheart,” I tell her. “We stay.”

Whatever comes, I tell myself, we aren’t running away from it.

I avoid any encounters for the next few days, quite successfully. Our runs around the lake are done at a pace that discourages others from chatting, and I don’t do any neighborly visiting. I’m not the cookie-baking kind of mother on my best days—not anymore. That was Gina, God rest her soul.

Lanny goes back to school, and though I wait tensely for the phone to ring, she isn’t in trouble again in the first few days. Or the next. The police don’t return for another chat, and slowly, slowly, my anxiety levels begin to gear down.

It’s the following Wednesday that I get a text from Absalom, marked with his standard Å as a signature. It’s just a web address, and I type it into the browser on my computer.

It’s a newspaper story from Knoxville, quite a bit distant from us, but it’s about Stillhouse Lake.

MURDER AT ISOLATED LAKE COMMUNITY STUNS RESIDENTS

My mouth goes dry, and I shut my eyes for a moment. The letters glow randomly against my eyelids, and I can’t seem to banish them, so I open and look again. The headline’s still there. Beneath, with no reporter byline, sits a story that must have been cribbed from a wire service, and I slowly scroll down past blinking reminders to subscribe, to read the weather, to buy a heating pad and a pair of high-heeled shoes. I finally arrive at the text of the story. It isn’t much.

When residents of the small town of Norton, Tennessee, woke to the news of a body in local Stillhouse Lake, no one expected it to be a murder. “We just thought it was a boating accident,” said Matt Ryder, manager of the local McDonald’s restaurant. “Maybe a swimmer who had a cramp and drowned. I mean, that happens. But this? Just can’t believe it. This is a good little town.”

“Good little town” describes Norton well. It’s typical of the area, a sleepy village struggling to reinvent itself for the modern age, where the Old Tyme Soda Palace occupies space next to SpaceTime, an Internet café and coffee bar. One caters to nostalgia for a time gone by. The other strives for all the conveniences of a much larger town. On the surface, Norton looks successful, but digging deeper reveals a problem facing many rural areas: opioid addiction. Norton, by best estimates of local law enforcement, has a significant addiction problem, and drug trafficking is common. “We do our best to control the spread of it,” said Chief of Police Orville Stamps. “Used to be meth cooking was the worst of it, but this Oxy and heroin problem is something else. Harder to find, and harder to stop.”