Her expression was so distant, I was afraid she wouldn’t answer. But after a minute, she said, “No. Not me.” She put her hands over her mouth. “A little boy. I think he killed a little boy.”

My eyes slammed shut in a feeble attempt to block the mental image her words had conjured.

“Mrs. Beecher found Dewey. He was trying to wake the little boy up, but he couldn’t. That’s when she saw me.”

I looked back at her. “Mrs. Beecher? She saw you nearby?”

“Yes. We were playing hide-and-seek in the barn, but Dewey got mad when the little boy found him. I’m not really sure what happened, but they started wrestling. Dewey got him down and sat on him until he stopped struggling. Stopped breathing.” Harper shut her own eyes, and tears spilled out from them. Then she jumped, remembering more. “I came here. I came to ask Mrs. Beecher why she did it. Why she covered it up.”

Mrs. Beecher had apparently found what she’d been looking for. She was headed back our way. I had to hurry. “Harper, what did she do? What did Mrs. Beecher do that day when you were in that barn?”

“She grabbed me.” Harper refocused on her arms. “She had sharp nails and she shook me. Said that Dewey had accidently killed a rabbit. A white rabbit. And that if I ever told anyone, he would do the same to me. Then she put the rabbit in a suitcase and brought him back to the city with us.”

My shock must have shown.

Harper nodded as sadness welled in her eyes. “But it wasn’t a rabbit. I remember now. That little boy is buried somewhere on our property. In a red suitcase.”

My lungs seized. Cookie told me there’d been a missing child from Peralta around that time, and Peralta and Bosque Farms sat back to back. It was hard to tell where one stopped and the other began. The case had never been solved.

Well, it was certainly about to be.

Still pretending to be unconscious, I lowered my lashes to slits as Mrs. Beecher ambled near. I could see just enough to make out her image as she shuffled into view. Carrying an ice pick. An ice pick. What the hell? This woman was cold. Harper gasped and huddled over me protectively. It was one of the sweetest things anyone had ever done for me.

The door above us opened, and heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs. Sadly, it couldn’t have been Uncle Bob. Not enough time. And Uncle Bob almost always yelled things like, APD! Get your hands up! This guy didn’t yell anything.

I cringed as the guy from the pictures stepped beside me. Partly because he was ginormous, almost twice the height of Mrs. Beecher, but mostly because shit just got real. Now I’d have to outrun both of them with Barbara oozing out of Fred.

“Who are you?” he asked me. He apparently talked to spaghetti, as I was doing my best impression of a wet noodle.

“This woman wants to take you away from me. We’re going to have to plant her in the ground so she can grow.”

He lowered his head. “I don’t think I want to do that anymore.”

“I don’t want to either, but I need you here with me, honeybun. Who else is going to do the yard work?”

The yard work?

“I know, Grandma, but—”

The f**king yard work?

“No buts. Now, you take care of her like you did Miss Harper.”

He looked over into a dark corner of the basement. Toward a fresh mound of dirt. “Harper was nice to me.”

I’d mow her lawn, for f**k’s sake. This was honestly about yard work?

She reached up and patted his big shoulder. “I know. I know. But she was going to turn you in to the police. They would have taken you to jail, sugar britches. What would I do without you?”

He shrugged and she cackled in delight, pinching his cheek as if he were four. I was in so much trouble.

Gripping the ice pick like her life depended on it, she looked down at me. “Hold on, though. I have to make sure she’s dead first.”

She bent to one knee beside me, a laborious act that took her enough time for me to ponder what would happen if the polar ice caps melted. After that played out, I wondered if I should make a run for it or try to reason with Dewey. He seemed to be slightly saner than his counterpart.

“Now, where do you suppose her heart is?” said counterpart asked.

Betty White? She was going for Betty?

Instinctively, my hands shot up to cover her. She was so fragile. So vulnerable. And Mrs. Beecher wanted to jab her with an ice pick? Not on my watch.

The woman jumped back in surprise, and I started to scramble toward the stairs when a weight comparable to a cement mixer landed on my back.

“Oh, that’s good, sugar pie. You hold her there. Now, where’d that ice pick go?”

Harper lunged forward, intending to knock Dewey off me, and was surprised when she flew right through him.

Damn. I should have told her. It was hard when people didn’t know they were dead. The realization sent them into a state of shock, and sometimes I wouldn’t see them again for years. But I really should have told her, because the stunned expression on her face as she turned back and reached through Dewey’s head broke my heart.

She locked gazes with me. “I’m dead?” she asked, her voice hoarse with emotion. She sank to the ground, her expression a thousand miles away.

I strained against the weight of Dewey, wondering what the heck his grandmother fed him but thrilled she’d lost the ice pick. “I’m sorry, Harper.” I could barely get out the words. “I wanted to tell you.”

“What?” Mrs. Beecher asked.