The rusted metal gate protested as it clanked open. The requisite junkyard dog made his leisurely appearance. Unlike his snarling, territorial brethren, Huck the bloodhound gave Bowie’s pant leg a sniff and then meandered off in search of a warm bed or a biscuit.

“Mornin’ there, deputy.” Buddy Foster, Jr., junkyard entrepreneur extraordinaire, spat his tobacco in the direction of a 1980 Ford Granada on cinder blocks. There was a small cherry tree growing out of the engine block.

“Mornin’, Buddy. Thanks for letting us come out,” I said. I’d dressed casually in jeans and a heavy coat, not wanting to attract any unnecessary attention.

“Sure. Sure,” Buddy said. His red-and-black checked flannel coat was older than I was. “Got a map for y’all.” He handed over a hand sketched version of the junkyard that looked like Mother Nature was trying to reclaim. “It’s thereabouts,” he said pointing at a circle in the northwest corner.

“Appreciate it.”

Bowie was quiet next to me. He’d been quiet, cold since last night. Since I’d shared.

Was he worried we’d find something?

Was I worried we wouldn’t?

I didn’t have high hopes that there’d be answers awaiting us here. But it was one more piece of the puzzle. Something even Connelly couldn’t ignore.

Buddy waved us on and told us we could find him in the office trailer if we needed anything.

“You can wait in the car if you want,” I told Bowie. It had been ten years since Connie had passed. But sometimes all it took was one memory to make those ten years disappear.

“Let’s go,” Bowie said briskly.

We walked the sloping, frozen ground, heading toward the area Buddy indicated. It was a crisp, cold winter morning just days before Christmas, and I was making my boyfriend check out the car his mother died in. This wasn’t sharing. This was torturing.

I stopped. “You know what, maybe you should wait in the car,” I said.

He didn’t look at me, but he stopped walking. “I get that you feel ownership of this whole investigation, but this is my family. My mother. You don’t own that.”

I flinched. “Bowie, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

“I can see it from here,” he said flatly, pointing ahead of us. There tucked in between the rusted-out corpses of family cars and broken-down pickup trucks was a white Pontiac 6000. Its front end was smashed all the way back to the dash. There were wispy tendrils of blue tarp fluttering in the winter wind out the broken driver side window. It was the kind of tarp we put over fatalities. I felt my blood go cold.

Days ago we’d been decorating cookies and hanging Christmas lights. He’d helped me put up a tree and chased the cats out of it the first six dozen times. And I’d marched him right on up to his mother’s death.

“What are we looking for?” Bowie asked, stuffing his hands in his pockets. He was watching the tarp flutter.

“Dunno.” I approached the car. It was free on the driver side, a grassy path dividing patches of wrecks from each other ran alongside it. The back door was missing. Dead weeds choked out the car all the way around. The tires were long gone. There was no way I was trying to crawl under the wreck and look at the undercarriage. That would be up to Connelly if we pulled the car for some forensics team to take a crack at. If he thought it might offer some hint at what had happened to Callie or if it was just another piece to ignore.

The quarter panel on the passenger side was missing. The rear bumper had fallen off on one side but was still attached on the other. The rear fender was scraped up. There was rust on every single surface, but the interior was remarkably intact aside from a decade of leaves and dirt and nature’s debris. After snapping a few pictures of the exterior with my phone, I pulled the latex gloves out of my coat pocket and put them on. I ducked down and climbed into the back seat.

“Cassidy,” Bowie warned.

“It’s fine. I’ll be a second,” I said. My throat tightened when I saw the rusty brown stains on the driver seat. Old blood. So much blood.

I thought of my father being called to the scene and seeing Connie’s lifeless body limp behind the wheel.

I thought of him keeping his concerns to himself to protect the family.

I’d known Connie. About as well as a teenager could know her best friend’s mom. Suicide didn’t make sense. She was stubborn, like Scarlett. I could see her deciding to live to ninety just to displease her husband. But accidents happened every damn day, stealing people away from their loved ones.

“Move over,” Bowie said gruffly.

“Bow, you don’t have to—”

But he was sliding in next to me.

“We used to fight over who got to ride up front,” he said, patting the disintegrating blue cloth that sagged from the roof of the car. “Gibs was the tallest and needed the most leg room. But I had an inch on Jameson. Of course, then Scarlett started pretending to get carsick and got the front seat all the time.”

“Diabolical, that sister of yours,” I said.

Bowie gave a non-committal grunt. I patted his knee. “There’s no need for you to be in here. I shouldn’t have dragged you out here. It’s gotta be hard for you.”

He reached into the seat back pocket with more bravery than me. Who knew what kind of tarantulas or fanged, poisonous wildlife had taken up residence.

“Here.” I shifted and pulled out a second pair of gloves.

Wordlessly, he snapped them on and dug back in. Not finding what he was looking for, he felt around with his feet on the floor.

“Still here,” he said, reaching down into a pile of leaves and twigs and pulling out a pink-and-purple striped umbrella.

It sparked a few dozen memories. Grumpy Gibson carting groceries to the car, Connie holding the umbrella over him. Me and Scarlett trying to use it as a lightsaber while Connie drove us to a junior high dance. Jameson taking a whack at the Canadian goose that tried to take a bite out of Bowie’s arm when Connie had dragged us out of the house for a rainy day walk.

“What’s that still doing in here?” I asked softly.

“Dad was supposed to come clean the car out after…after she died. Looks like he never did.”

There was a paper coffee cup still tucked in the cupholder. One of Scarlett’s flip-flops was in the door pocket.

“She used to have a whatchamacallit…a dreamcatcher,” Bowie said.

“On the rearview mirror.” I remembered it.

I peered between the seats. The windshield was cracked in a few thousand spidery veins. The driver’s seatbelt was still clipped, but the belt itself had been cut. The gas station coffee cup had brown spattered stains, and I wasn’t sure if it was spilled coffee or long dried blood.

Something glimmered through the dried, frozen muck on the passenger side floorboard, and I reached down.

“Anything up there?” Bowie asked. He sounded numb, and I was reminded that I was a gigantic ass for bringing him here.

I pawed carefully through the dead leaves and mud coating what had once been a Tasmanian devil floor mat. “Aha!” I plucked it out of the debris. The synthetic feathers were long gone, but the silver hoop and wire were mostly intact.

I handed it over my shoulder to Bowie. It wasn’t evidence. He could have this piece of his mother.

There were other things in the dirt. Bits and pieces of a life. A grocery receipt. A crushed soda bottle. I found one of Scarlett’s old Bonne Bell lip glosses and a guitar pick that could have been Gibson’s or Jonah’s. There were no folded maps with a convenient X marking the spot where Jonah had gone after the disappearance, nothing that said Callie Kendall was here.

I peered over at the driver side. Glass glittered amongst the leaves on the floor. The seat’s fabric had rotted through, and god knows what might be living in the sodden mess.

I tried the trunk release, but it didn’t work. As I was pulling my hand back, a yellow piece of paper caught my eye. It was wedged in a crack in the dashboard between two molded pieces of plastic.

With a hard tug, it came free.

It was some kind of ticket, faded and hard to read.

“Are you done yet?” Bowie’s voice had gone flat.

“Yeah. Yep,” I said, sliding back between the seats into the back. I followed him out, stuffing the ticket into my back pocket.

If there was any evidence of Callie in this car, it was either microscopic or she hadn’t ridden in it as a passenger. My eyes skated to the trunk.

It’s not like there would be blood-soaked tarps in there. But if Jonah had killed Callie, there was a chance that there was something back there. And it would be better to have forensics go over it rather than having me poke around.

Bowie was standing there in silence, watching me and holding a plastic grocery bag.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Some crap from the back seat. Family stuff.”

I looked back at the trunk for a moment. If there was anything inside, Connelly and his forensics team could find it. I had put Bowie through enough already.

I glanced at the rear fender, the broken taillight and stepped in to get a closer look. It was definitely scraped. There were streaks of blue paint mixed in with the dirty white and the rust.

“What are you looking at?”

“Did your mom back into anything that you remember or get hit?”

“I don’t remember, Cass.” I was losing him. I’d found the end of his infinite patience. “Why?”

“This.” I indicated the damage. I pulled out my phone and scrolled to the pictures I’d taken of the accident report. I found one of the drivers side of the car on the wrecker and zoomed in. It was grainy, but the car was much less rusty and the gouge was there.

“Maybe it happened during the accident.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But this looks like paint to me.” I needed to look at the original photos again. But it looked as though some blue paint had transferred onto the Pontiac.

“Why does it matter?” Bowie asked.

“I need to run a reconstruction on the accident,” I said mostly to myself.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to tell tales out of school, without doing some research. But this accident might not have been an accident.”

“Suicides usually aren’t accidents,” Bowie said bitterly.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “I mean it’s possible that someone hit your mom’s car.”