Honey had kept her eyes on the book at first. She was supposed to keep her eyes on the book. The note was evidence, and she was not supposed to see it. She leaned over but did not touch it. There was a drawing on it, inked carefully in Phineas's neat scholar's hand. A grey tabby in profile, plain and round, sitting up the way Quill sat up when he was paying attention. Behind Quill, half-hidden behind his shoulder, the line of a second cat. Older. Thinner. No more than an outline. Below the drawing, three lines in careful black ink.
Watch the cats and catch the lies.
The cats never lie.
But the lies are in the cats.
Honey did not move. Her eyes went back to the page in front of her, searching the pages the swamp witch had written. She flipped a page. She tilted the book slightly on the table, so the page caught the kitchen light alongside the note. She read the book, then the note. Back to the book, back to the note. She turned a page. She turned another.
And there it was.
The drawing was crude and certain, sketched in the same hand that had drawn the stitched mouth and the opened mouth: a row of cats lined up in grass, sitting unevenly like the cats on the front lawn of FACTS & FIBS. Beneath them, in red ink, a single word.
Lies.
And on the facing page, in the swamp witch's slanting cadence:
The cats don't lie, child. The catsnever lie. But the lies, the lies are the cats. They come up where the lie is. They count themselves. They come for the liar.
One hand came up to her mouth. "Oh my god."
"What?" Roam said.
"Roam." She pointed at the book. She did not touch the note. "Look here."
He looked at the book, then at the note, then at her. "How did Phineas know," he said, and shook his head.
"I don't know." She wiped a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand. "He knew the whole thing. And he was trying to tell my mother."
Roam looked at the note again. He looked at the book. He looked back at her. "You know what I'm thinking," he said. "But I might need to see to make sure."
Honey looked at him. "Okay," she said. "Let's look."
She closed her eyes. Then she opened her hand on the kitchen table, and the pink glitter came up off her palm in a slow, soft fountain. It rose into the air and laid itself, like an old film, across the kitchen wall above the stove.
Her memories played. Two days of them. The porch. The parlor. The dining room. The map. A mouth at the edges. A mouth at the center. A mouth moving, soundless, again, again, and again. And every time the mouth moved, Honey slowed the frame, and the pan went to a window or the front lawn, and a cat or cats had appeared.
Roam watched and did not speak until the wall went dim. Then he reached over, took her face in his hands, and kissed her.
The pink glitter sifted back down into her palm and went still.
"My brilliant witch," he breathed into her.
"Roam." She smiled.
"Get some rest." He stood and pulled her up by the hand. "I've got a plan. I'm meeting Sean at first light."
Honey closed the book and slid it into the drawer of the sideboard. Roam folded the note back into its paper square, tucked it inside the evidence bag, and slid it into his coat. They went up the back stairs together.
In the kitchen, where she had been since long before they came in, Duchess stepped out of the shadow under the sideboard. She looked at the kitchen door they had gone through, the drawer the bayou book had gone into, the wall above the stove where the pink glitter had played. Her blue eye blinked once. She slipped down the back hall the way a Himalayan slips through the night.
Upstairs in the east wing, behind the second door of three, Rhoda Hadwin stirred. A sound, small and distant. The wrong kind of sound for a house that had finally gone quiet. She had been sleeping very deep and did not entirely come up. Her hand drifted across the sheet and found her husband's shoulder.
"Edgar."
"Mm."
"Do you hear that? It's cats…cats fighting."
