KALYN

I PASS ROW after row of rust-eaten automobiles and imagine Gus’s eyes peering out of every black trunk.

Grandma’s little house smells so musty that I’m coughing. I want to go right to bed, maybe vomit for good measure—Eli’s tongue was like any other boy’s tongue in that I didn’t actually want it in my mouth.

But they’re waiting for me. Mom sits across from Grandma, who’s pulling threads from her sweater. Mom’s eyes are fixed on papers spread across the table like poorly shuffled cards.

They don’t ask where I’ve been, or why my fist is bloody, or why my makeup is smeared. Mom’s crying, in that particular way she cries, like she’s storing just enough fluid on her cheeks to put her cigarette out against her skin if she feels like it.

I am this close to screaming. “What’d I do?”

Grandma waves me closer. “Big papers. Very big papers.”

“Honey.” Mom lays her palms flat on the big papers. “We’ve got news.”

“What?”

And holy shit, now she’s smiling. “It’s amazing. It’s the Innocence Fighters. They’re taking our case. They’re going to prove your dad’s innocence.”

“But Dad confessed.” The reply’s automatic.

“He confessed, sweetie, but I married an innocent man. I knew that, no matter what. Last year, I contacted the IFA. They did some digging. Kalyn-Rose, they agree with me. We’re gonna bring him home.”

Grandma’s crying now, too.

I take a damn seat.

This was our story:

The night that James Ellis got killed, he was shot not once, but twice, at distant range by a 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson semiautomatic.

The first bullet entered through his rib cage on the lower right side and exited his back just below his left shoulder blade, shattering three ribs and fracturing another two.

The second bullet entered through his right eye socket and exited the back of his skull at what experts estimated was a thirty-three-degree angle.

Those experts weren’t sure whether he was dead after the first shot or the second, and maybe it doesn’t matter.

The tricky thing about confessions is they tend to halt investigations. The moment Dad said he’d shot James Ellis, no “maybes” about it, forensic experts didn’t have to try so hard to confirm evidence. The boys disliked each other—a dozen witnesses said so. A dozen witnesses talked about bullying, although most painted Dad as the instigator.

Again, it didn’t matter. Dad confessed; case closed.

The gun was his, too. Not on paper—Dad was barely eighteen, and the pistol was licensed under Grandma’s name—but she’d gifted it to him on his sixteenth birthday, as per Spence tradition. Dad brought the gun to the station when he turned himself in.

James Ellis harassed the Spences for years, and when he appeared at the salvage yard with a knife in his hand, Dad snapped.

There’s one section of the taped confession that people love to ridicule: a policeman in the interrogation room asks, white-hot angry, “What did you think would happen when you killed the quarterback?”

Dad answers, “James was the running back.”

I’ve watched a hundred video clips. Here’s the sobbing family on one side, and on the other, there’s Dad sitting with terrible posture in a wrinkled suit. The whole damn trial, Dad keeps his eyes closed. I think he looks sad, but critics say he’s indifferent. He’s a monster, heartless, another sociopath, et cetera.

To make the case stronger and put James Ellis in the shiniest light possible, Mortimer Ellis and family denied any trespassing. They accused Dad of kidnapping.

Dad shrugged at that. He shrugged in court. They could have accused him of starting a nuclear war and he’d have shrugged. His defense attorney hated his guts.

Dad must have looked sad to Mom, too. The day after the trial finished airing, she sat down in her Wisconsin cabin and wrote him her first letter.

My whole life, Mom hinted at Dad’s innocence, but Dad never has. I thought she did it to make me feel better, but I wasn’t ashamed. Dad just got sick of rich bullies getting away with shit. He dealt his own justice. I understood it fine.

But our story’s changing.

At the card table, Mom tells me how right after we moved to Samsboro she tore through Grandma’s storage shed in a frenzied fit of tidying.

“I figured we could put that shed to better use.”

“How?”

“Believe me, the shit I got up to in high school, I’d’ve loved my own room.”

It’s nice of her, really. Mom, trying to give me something she didn’t have.

When I think of Gus’s mom, watching him like a terrifying hawk-monster, hiding teeth behind cobweb-thin smiles, I know I’ve been lucky in the parent department.

Well. And I don’t have a murdered dad, either.

“The junk in that shed hadn’t been touched in decades. Hubcaps, old grease cans, tobacco from the seventies, and photographs and moldy newspapers and so much dirt. But I still found it. The mother—” She covers Grandma’s ears. “—fucking gold mine.”

“What?”

“I asked Grandma if they’d searched the whole property after the murder. Specifically, did anyone go through that old shed?”

“I bet they tore the place up.”

Grandma shakes her head. She puts a hand out like she doesn’t want Mom to go on. Mom doesn’t pay her any mind.

“She finally told me no, though it was like pulling teeth.”

Grandma glares at Mom with the side of her face that still glares properly. Maybe she’s still furious about the shoddy police work, even after all these years.

“They didn’t check it, Kalyn. After a confession, with a man and a gun in custody, why waste the energy? You know cops. They’ve got rolling stops to ticket people for, doughnuts to eat. Why bother investigating a damn redneck murder?”

I could pretend to be shocked. “What did you find?”

“A jacket. I found the denim jacket your dad wore the day of the murder. Stiff as an old washboard, shoved between two totes. There were smears on it down low on the front, like maybe he’d dragged a body. But there were other stains, too.”

Mom twists her cigarette out in the faux-tortoiseshell ashtray. She’s calm as Gus’s koi pond. She’s treating this success like a cool glass of sweet tea.

“There was spatter all over the top of the back, from say, the chest height up, like bloody freckles on the shoulders. I couldn’t figure out why those would be there. Couldn’t hurt to send it on down to the IFA. I didn’t tell your father a damn thing. I just sent it in, along with a bunch of photos and a letter.”

I frown. “If Dad shot James Ellis, how’d he get blood on his back? Unless it was some other kind of blood . . . ?”

“It wasn’t some other kind of blood, Kalyn. The DNA belongs to James Ellis. That’s what the IFA confirmed. And not just blood. There’s evidence of gray matter, too.” Mom lifts a paper from the lacy tablecloth and reads it verbatim: “. . . ​in a pattern ‘consistent with the trajectory of the exit wound in item C.’ Basically, the bullet that went right through James’s skull, Kalyn. This is that spatter. No doubt.”

“Dad couldn’t have shot James Ellis in the head if he was standing behind him.”

“Your dad was behind him. And facing the other way.”

I’ve only seen Dad’s back a handful of times, when he’s retreated to his cell after visitation, but it’s a broad one. Must have been a goddamn canvas for the IFA.

“Shit.”

“Kalyn. Your father didn’t shoot that boy in the eye. He couldn’t have.”

I swallow. “I . . . ​Couldn’t someone else have been wearing Dad’s jacket?”

Mom doesn’t wanna think this, and who could blame her. But she comes up with a counterpoint. “Say someone else was wearing his jacket. Even if that’s the case, there’s another witness out there somewhere. And that’s something.”

There are a million questions to ask. Why would Dad confess to a crime he didn’t commit? If Dad was standing behind James Ellis, wouldn’t that mean he saw the real killer? Why didn’t he say so? Did Dad shoot James the first time? What do we do now?

Who the fuck killed James Ellis?

There’s only one I can actually ask.

“When can I talk to Dad?”

Mom pauses. “He . . . ​well, he’s being funny about the IFA. Says he doesn’t want to dig up old graves. Got himself a martyr complex, and he’s been cooped up too long. He’ll come around.”

“Is that . . . is this enough to bring him home?”

“It’s a start. It’s enough to reopen the case and look properly this time.”

I remember the white dress and wedding, how the following week chocolate milk was dumped down the back of my shirt. It chilled my neck like the hand of death before I spun round and closed my own hand of death around the asshole who’d poured it.

“It’ll be enough to get the media started, too.”

“Well. That’s the thing about the IFA, Kalyn. They use public advocacy to draw attention and funding to their cases. Honey, they have to make news to make headway. We might go back to homeschooling, once this breaks.”

I should feel hopeful, but in some corner of my head, Rose isn’t taking this well. Dad’s back is so broad, but I can’t for the fucking life of me say why he thought that meant putting all this on his shoulders and ours, too.

What’s the point of being Spence if being Spence means being full of shit?