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“Little bit.”

With a soft sleepy laugh, Lindsey curls up against my chest. It’s less than five minutes before she’s out.

I don’t move. My jacket is on the hook by her door, next to her keys. Marisol Alvarez’s number has been in the phone in that jacket pocket for six years.

Tonight is the first night I think about using it.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I make a face at the pumpkin.

I say, “That is a crime.”

Travis looks down at his jack-o’-lantern. It’s sitting on the steel table in my workroom on a pile of newspaper, surrounded by pumpkin guts, with a carving knife sticking out of the top of it like a flag.

It has one triangle eye, one round eye, and a mouth that looks like a seismograph reading.

“It’s abstract,” he says.

“It looks like it’s screaming. Like, for real. It looks like it’s screaming for help.”

“Maybe it is.”

“Travis. You can field-strip a rifle in the dark. Rob says you once built a bridge out of rope and a log in Afghanistan.”

“That was different.”

“How?”

“The log didn’t have a face. I don’t do faces. This thing’s a pain in the ass.”

It’s the week before Halloween, and the shop is full of orange stuff. Pumpkins on the front steps. Mums in every color in buckets by the door. Bittersweet vines and corn stalks and little ornamental gourds with warts on them, which Novak bought six of yesterday for reasons he would not explain.

The station is having its Halloween party Saturday, and Cassia has informed everybody that costumes are mandatory and Rob is going as a sexy Smokey Bear, which Rob has not agreed to.

It’s been twelve days since Hank mailed his letter.

I check my phone every time a text notification comes in even though Hank doesn’t have a cell phone and swears he never will.

Not only that, I jump every time the bell rings over the shop door.

Travis brings me coffee in the workroom every morning and builds a fire in my woodstove every night. Best of all, he doesn’t make me talk about any of it.

“You’re humming the four notes,” he says, breaking into my thoughts.

“What four notes?”

“The worried ones.” He sets down the carving knife and comes over and leans on the steel table next to my stool. He has orange goo on his arms and a dead-serious expression. “Twelve days isn’t long. Mail’s slow. She’s got to read it. She’s got to think.”

“I know.”

“Hank said a week. Maybe two.”

“I know,” I say, frowning. I can’t help it. This feels like forever.

“You want to carve the other eye?”

I look past him at the screaming pumpkin. The one triangle eye. The one round eye.