Chapter 14: Get Out

Oz stood in the doorway holding a box of donuts and looking from my face to Jonas's.

"What did I miss?" he said.

Nobody answered him.

He set the box down on the dresser very slowly.

"Tell him," I said.

Jonas had not moved from the middle of the room.

"Melinda."

"You told me. Tell him. He's the one who thinks you're a legend."

Jonas turned to Oz, and I watched him make himself do it.

"You know what I wrote," he said. "One of the eleven was Melinda's father."

Oz laughed, one high wrong note.

"No," he said. "You were basically a kid."

"I was twenty-seven."

"No. It's a mistake. Tell him it's a mistake, Mel."

I did not say anything.

I took the laptop from the table and carried it out to the car.

Oz drove us home because I could not make my hands hold a wheel.

Jonas sat in the back seat with his face to the window.

None of us said a word for the whole length of Sandy Boulevard.

The duplex was exactly as I had left it Monday evening, with two cereal bowls in the sink.

I walked past the kitchen without taking off my coat and went into my bedroom.

The wall was there, floor to ceiling.

The map with its eleven red pins, the fishing photo, the clippings gone soft at the corners.

I took the pinned printout of the worm off its tack and carried it back to the kitchen.

I laid it on the counter beside the laptop and turned the screen so the two sat together.

"Look at the end of the functions," I said.

Oz leaned over the paper.

In the scan, the speckles were there, right where the screen showed a clean line.

Once I knew what to look for, I could see the shape of a k under every one.

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