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“You wouldn’t. We didn’t want you or anyone to know. I’m not well. I wasn’t well then either, but I was functioning okay, and your father understood me. We were good at keeping it a secret. We wanted to see how it would go before we wanted you to even know we were good friends. We didn’t want you to be further hurt if we couldn’t be happy together. We thought that if we could … well, we thought that you and everyone would eventually understand. But what would be the point of putting anyone through that if we couldn’t be sure?” She paused. “But in truth, I know we could never have gone forward. It would have been too much. I would have ruined it all at some point anyway.”

“I …” Not only had I not expected to hear what she was telling me, but also I couldn’t quite understand why she was telling me now. She read my mind.

“You need to know. It’s important to the rest of the story, Hazel. There would be no reason for me to have been … around if not for my feelings for Wilmot.”

I swallowed away the shock that was old news but brand spanking new to me. “Okay. Tell me.”

“That class. Your father wanted someone else nearby because there were teenagers involved and he trusted me to help if needed. Only me, Hazel.”

“Even if you weren’t well?”

Susan didn’t hesitate to nod. “Yes, even if I wasn’t well. The responsibility helped me too. Besides, who else was he going to ask?”

I thought about it. The first two possibilities that came to mind were Jerry Smoot or Sheriff Calloway, and neither of those made sense. Neither did Susan, really, but if my father had feelings for her, perhaps he thought she could handle it.

“Okay,” I said again.

“Right. So I was there during the classes, not in the room but the kitchen or upstairs.” Her eyes suddenly seemed to shadow and then tears fell down her cheeks. “That day … was horrible.”

“Susan?” David pleaded.

“I’m fine. Let me finish this, David.”

He nodded.

Susan continued, “After everybody started freaking out about the … thing, and Silas threw that blood, I took the girls to the patio. I went back inside to ask Wilmot what we should do next. That boy … Johnny. He was so upset because Silas was so upset. The boys were more upset than anyone. Wilmot was trying to calm them down. I tried too, but Johnny just wanted Silas to shut up. Johnny was so much bigger. I can still see his fists balled at his side as he towered over Silas and berated him, calling him messed up, sick, a loser, those sorts of things. Silas grabbed a knife from the table—none of us even noticed it before that—and stabbed Johnny. He fell and hit his head on the edge of a table as he went down. We tried to stop the bleeding. We tried everything, but the boy was gone so quickly. We didn’t know what killed him, the stab or hitting his head, but he was dead. Gone in an instant.”

Susan took a ragged breath and wiped away some tears. “Wilmot told me to get myself together and take care of the girls, get them cleaned up and home, that he would take care of Silas and Johnny’s body.” She looked at me. “He left with the body in the back of that Jeep you still drive. He … took them home, I guess. I don’t know. We didn’t speak about it again. It was … too much.”

I suddenly remembered seeing what I thought was dirt stains on the back-seat floorboard as he drove me to school a morning shortly before he disappeared. It wasn’t much, but it got my attention. In retrospect it must have been dried blood. I’d asked Wilmot about it. He’d said he didn’t know where it came from, but I didn’t need to worry about it. The stains had been gone when I’d taken the time to look again later. That’s what must have been trying to come back to me. Blood in the Jeep wasn’t normal, even if Wilmot behaved as if it was no big deal, and even if it took me all this time to understand what it had truly been.

“Susan,” I said, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. “Susan.”

She nodded. “The day Wilmot left, he came to see me—”

“He left, of his own accord?”

She lifted a hand, asking for a moment. I gave it to her.

“I lived up in Sahuarita back then. He hitchhiked up to my house, telling me he was going to run away because of … it all. I told him to go home, go back to you, that it wasn’t fair for you to lose both parents. I told him I loved him. He told me he loved me. I said that if he really did love me, he would face the consequences, he would be your father. He was stronger than that, I knew he was. He …” Susan let out a sob.

David ran to her side and put his hands on her shoulders, but she gathered herself and wanted to go on.

“He asked me if I would come with him back to Black Vulture. We would tell you about us and be a family.” She sniffed. “I told him no, Hazel. I told him that wasn’t fair to you either. That he should be the one to talk to you first. Maybe it would have been better for me to go.”

“We can’t know . . ,” I said.

“That’s true.” She sat up straighter now. Maybe the worst of it was out now. “Anyway, he promised me that he’d go back to you, that he’d be the father you needed. I offered to drive him, but he said he’d hitchhike home.”

“He lied to you?”

“I don’t believe that, but I have no idea what happened to him.” She nodded toward the freeway. “I-19 has seen bad stuff. Maybe something terrible happened to him on the way. He wouldn’t have lied to me.”

I wasn’t so sure.

What I was sure of was that though I had a million more answers, some to questions I didn’t even know until just now, and I still didn’t know what had happened to Wilmot. No one did, including Susan, but it seemed like some cobwebs of mysteries had been wiped away. The truth wasn’t completely clear yet, but it wasn’t as murky.

The man who’d attacked me hadn’t been found, and George claimed not to know anything about him. I’d managed to get a good read on the inside of the boot, and it hadn’t been Wilmot’s, but some guy named Frederick Renner. Frederick had died five years earlier.