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On another page Search Engine hunted for a way through a maze of towering candy canes. Vic remembered drawing that—drawing in a sweet, lazy trance, swaying to the Black Keys. She did not remember drawing the children who hid in corners and side alleys, holding scissors. She did not remember drawing little Bonnie staggering about blind, her hands clapped over her eyes. They’re playing scissors-for-the-drifter, she thought randomly.

“I don’t see how,” Vic said. “No one has seen these pages.”

Hutter raced her thumb down one edge of the stack of paper and said, “It struck me as a bit surprising that you’d be drawing Christmas scenes in the middle of the summer. Try to think. Is there any chance what you’ve been working on could tie in to—”

“In to Charlie Manx’s decision to pay me back for sending him to jail?” Vic asked. “I don’t think so. I think it’s pretty straightforward. I crossed him, and now it’s get-even time. If we’re all done, I’d like to lie down.”

“Yes. You must be tired. And who knows? Maybe if you have a chance to rest, something else will come to you.”

Hutter’s tone was calm enough, but Vic thought she heard an insinuation in this last statement, the suggestion that they both understood that Vic had more to tell.

Vic didn’t know her own house. There were magnetic whiteboards leaning against the couches in her living room. One of them had a map showing the Northeast; another had a timeline written in red marker. Folders crammed full of printouts were stacked on every available surface. Hutter’s geek squad was squeezed together on the couch like college students in front of an Xbox; one of them was talking into a Bluetooth earpiece while the others worked on laptops. No one looked at her. She didn’t matter.

Lou was in the bedroom, in the rocking chair in the corner. She eased the door shut behind her and crept to him through the dark. The curtains were drawn, the room gloomy and airless.

His shirt was smeared with black fingerprints. He smelled of the bike and the carriage house—a not-unpleasant cologne. There was a sheet of brown paper taped to his chest. His round, heavy face was gray in the dim light, and with that note hanging off him he looked like a daguerreotype of a dead gunslinger: THIS IS WHAT WE DO TO OUTLAWS.

Vic looked at him, at first with concern, then alarm. She was reaching for his chubby forearm, to see if she could find his pulse—she was sure he wasn’t breathing—when he inhaled suddenly, one nostril whistling. Just asleep. He had dropped off to sleep in his boots.

She drew her hand back. She had never seen him look so fatigued or so sick. There was gray in his stubble. It seemed somehow wrong that Lou, who loved comics, and his son, and boobies, and beer, and birthday parties, should ever get old.

She squinted at the note, which read:

“Bike still isn’t right. Needs parts that will take weeks to order. Wake me up when you want to talk about it.”

Reading those four words—“bike still isn’t right”—was nearly as bad as reading “Wayne found dead.” She felt they were dangerously close to the same thing.

Not for the first time in her life, she wished that Lou had never picked her up on his motorcycle that day, wished that she had slipped and dropped to the bottom of the laundry chute and smothered to death there, sparing her the trouble of dragging her ass through the rest of her sorry life. She would not have lost Wayne to Manx, because there would be no Wayne. Choking to death on smoke was easier than feeling what she felt now, a kind of tearing inside that never stopped. She was a bedsheet, being ripped this way and that, and soon enough would be nothing but rags.

She sat on the edge of the bed, staring vacantly into the darkness and seeing her own drawings, the pages Tabitha Hutter had shown her from the new Search Engine. She did not know how anyone could look at such work and suspect her of innocence: all those drowned children, all those drifts of snow, all those candy canes, all that hopelessness. They were going to lock her up soon, and then it would be too late to do anything for Wayne. They were going to lock her up, and she couldn’t blame them in the slightest; she suspected Tabitha Hutter of weakness for not putting her in handcuffs already.

Her weight creased the mattress. Lou had dumped his money and his cell phone in the center of the quilt, and now they slid toward her, came to rest against her hip. She wished there were someone to call, to tell her what to do, to tell her that everything would be all right. Then it came to her that there was.

She took Lou’s phone and slipped into the bathroom and shut the door. There was another door at the opposite end of the bathroom that looked into Wayne’s bedroom. Vic moved toward this door to close it, then hesitated.

He was there: Wayne was there, in his room, under his bed, staring out at her, his face pale and frightened. She felt as if she’d been kicked in the chest by a mule, her heart galumphing hard behind her breastbone, and she looked again, and it was just a stuffed monkey, lying on its side. Its brown eyes were glassy and despairing. She clicked the door to his room shut, then stood with her forehead resting against it, waiting to get her breath back.

With her eyes closed, she could see Maggie’s phone number: the Iowa 319 area code, followed by Vic’s own birthday, and the letters FUFU. Maggie had paid good money for that number, Vic felt sure—because she knew that Vic would remember it. Maybe she knew that Vic would need to remember it. Maybe she knew that Vic would turn her away when they first met. All kinds of maybes, but only one that Vic cared about: Was her son maybe alive?