Clean-up was impossible. Anjulie had taken her kids home and returned to help. She'd convinced Helen to stay at the house because Danielle was in no condition to be alone, and though upon her return Anjulie had told Helen she could leave, Helen and her daughter had decided to stay and help as well. (Joanna, on the other hand, had bolted the moment the old woman died; none of them could get ahold of her.)

When Anjulie re-entered the house, she was reminded just how disgusting the whole event had been. The old woman's casing was a pile of flesh and clothing resting near a floor lamp; no one had touched it. Red and pink and brown bits spattered across the room, over the furniture, on the floor and ceiling. Surely much of it had made up larger organs, but everything was too torn up, too pulverized to definitively identify, just moist goo. How any of it could've composed a human being was difficult to make out. Anjulie had been sick viewing it for a second time, the sight somehow more difficult after being away for a bit, and the smell—it was . . . pungent. Bowels and stomach contents, things that shouldn't be exposed now leaving bloody trails down the walls. Anjulie had to cover her nose and mouth to calm her nausea.

Helen had managed to soothe Danielle a bit since Anjulie had left her shivering and wet in the front yard, had pulled her into the den at the back of the house and convinced her to sit down.

"Junie gave the baby a bath," Helen now told Anjulie in a low voice. The two of them stood in the kitchen, eyes on the shell-shocked Danielle in the next room. Helen's daughter stood over the portable crib and rubbed Evangeline's back as she lay on her tummy and drifted into sleep.

Anjulie sighed. She'd hastily changed her clothing when dropping off Silas and Bijou, and it appeared Helen and Juniper had scrounged up some alternative attire as well, whether from Danielle's or someone else's closet within the building. Pushing some of her crisping hair behind her ears before crossing her arms, Anjulie mused, "How in the world are we supposed to clean that?"

"We can't," was Helen's immediate response. "It's un-cleanable."

"Helen, I—I can't. I just . . . Emmett was—oh God." Anjulie rubbed her eyes, remembering. "He was neater, if that makes sense. Just sort of, laid out. Nothing like this." She thought for a moment. "Should we call the police?"

"No!" Helen turned toward her. "Absolutely not!"

"But if we can't deal with this—"

"How can we possibly explain what happened? I'm pretty sure telling them this woman spontaneously combusted is not going to fly. Who was she, anyway?"

Anjulie shrugged. "I don't know. Some crackpot, probably. We've had all kinds of weirdos coming to the Inn since what happened. She just came up to me and said she could help. I figured it couldn't hurt to try."

They stared at Danielle, who in turn stared absently at Juniper comforting her baby. There was an odd peacefulness to the scene, and yet beneath it ran a deep undercurrent of unease, of understanding that nothing could get better until it got worse.

"I always thought she was invincible," Helen quietly remarked, nodding almost imperceptibly in Danielle's direction. "She's always been in control of everything."

"No," Anjulie's lip quirked up at one corner. "People like Danielle have no control; that's why they try to exert it where they can." She turned to face Helen. "I think I always knew it about her, but I played along."

Helen laughed bitterly. "We all did."

A moment of silence passed, but then Anjulie regrouped. "All right, so for real—we have to do something about that mess."

Not even moving, Helen said with absolute certainty, "We're going to light it on fire."

Anjulie found no reason to protest.

Within ten minutes, the two women had lit as many candles as they could find and placed them throughout that front room. If anyone asked (and surely someone would ask after the fact) they'd offer a partial truth: they'd been holding a cleansing ritual and someone had tipped a candle. They hoped if the fire burned long and hard enough, Zelda's scattered remains would be consumed beyond recognition. There'd be no reason to suspect foul play or arson; they'd keep crossed fingers that no one would push for an investigation.

As for Danielle—well, they didn't tell her about their plan. There'd have been no point. The woman was in no place to process the gravity and urgency of figuring out what to do with that mess, and she'd have surely been against the notion of destroying her parents' home. But while Helen and Anjulie allowed the wax pillars and tapers to burn and infuse the building with myriad sickening fragrances, the latter grabbed a couple of whatever beers were in the refrigerator and approached the shell-shocked woman in the den, sitting next to her on the sofa. Helen's daughter was holding the baby up against her shoulder, now, pacing near the windows and patting the fussing infant's back.

Anjulie passed an open can to Danielle. "Hey. It's going to be all right. Helen and I are figuring it out."

Danielle took the proffered beer but didn't drink, just held it on her lap as she gazed into nothing. "I get it, now," she said softly, cryptically.

Furrowing her brow, Anjulie thought of what to reply but came up with nothing.

"She was waiting," Danielle went on. "All this time, she was waiting. She knew what would get to us. She knew that we were already too far gone, that we wouldn't feel sorry for her anymore."

"Are you talking about . . . Emily?"

Danielle licked her lips and looked at the beer she held before lifting it to her mouth and taking several gulps. The simple action relieved Anjulie. "Obviously I'm talking about Emily."

Anjulie didn't want to probe for fear of sending Danielle back into her stupor, but she didn't quite understand what the woman was getting at, either. "Right. Helen says we have to go outside, okay? She's going to clean up, and we can't be in here."

For the first time since Anjulie had sat down, Danielle turned and looked at her, narrowing her eyes. "Why?"

"Just trust me."

"Fine. But I have to do something first."

Danielle's concession proved she knew they were going to do something drastic, Anjulie realized, and that was a good sign. She'd thought Danielle might have broken down too far to pull herself back together, but this was hopeful.

As Danielle left the room to go take care of whatever she'd wanted to take care of, Anjulie looked to Helen's daughter, whose back was to her. She could see the baby's plump, drowsy little face over the teen's shoulder. "Juniper, right?" The girl twisted slowly away from the windows, a strange lethargy to her movement—but maybe Anjulie only imagined that. Juniper's features resembled those of her mother: fluffy brown hair she hadn't yet figured out how to tame, moody brown eyes, a bit of her child-self still hovering in the roundness of her cheeks and the slight unevenness of her front teeth, visible in her hung-open mouth. She was not a woman, not a little girl, but something in between, some passing phase, an ephemerality of delight and tears and desire and confusion, a paradox of personhood. Anjulie had been like that, once—they all had—and in that brief segment of their lives, they'd devoured themselves and preyed upon one another for no other reason than that it'd been the way of things. The passage to adulthood was made difficult only because they made it so; they added the spike pits and the swinging scythes and the poison barbs to an inherently unfair and nearly impossible obstacle course of their own design. It didn't have to be that way, and yet, Anjulie thought, studying her friend's daughter, it did. For the ones in the midst of it, it always would.

"Junie," the girl replied simply.

"I like that name." Anjulie tried to smile but struggled with the sincerity of it. "I need you to head into the backyard, all right, Junie? Can you take the baby?" Crossing the den to the windows, Anjulie looked beyond into a poorly-kept yard with an array of mismatched patio furniture. Though half of it was rusting, the rest looked solid enough. "It's not super nice, but find somewhere to sit with Evangeline. Your mother and I will join you in a few minutes."

Juniper picked up a thin blanket from the crib. "All right." Anjulie opened the back door for her, and the girl would've slipped out, but she stopped, suddenly, and looked to the woman. "She's not wrong, that lady," Junie asserted.

Anjulie tilted her head to one side. "Not wrong about what?"

"It waited until we were here. That's why it took so long, because it had to wait for the baby."

It? The girl was talking about Kitty, Anjulie realized, and her meaning made some sense—it would explain why that thing they'd brought into the world so many years ago had only now returned—and yet Junie's explanation didn't exactly match up with what Danielle had said. "That lady, her name is Danielle. And she's a little confused. She's mixing up whatever this is with someone we knew a long time ago, when we were about your age."

Junie appeared to want to say something but instead looked askance and snapped shut her mouth.

"That chair doesn't look too spider-webby," the woman noted, pointing into the backyard. "We'll be out, soon."

Juniper stepped from the house onto the patio bricks, draping the heart-dappled blanket over Evangeline's little nugget of a body, but before Anjulie could close the door behind her, Juniper jumped to speak: "I know what she means. You can't let it in—that's the thing. Once you do, it's over." The girl inhaled a deep, trembling breath, then exhaled almost defiantly. "But I won't. I promise. It's tried me, but I won't."

Taken aback, Anjulie found herself wanting to push for more, to pry, but the girl walked away and began singing softly to herself, and the woman remembered they were about to start a fire. There'd be plenty of time to speak with Juniper later. She pressed back into the house, through the kitchen and into that foul living room at the front. Dusk hadn't quite fallen, but a premonition of night's approach was in the gloom magnified by the potpourri of flickering candles. Somehow, the milieu put Anjulie slightly more at ease. The golden light—those burnished discs around the flames—they were so different from the other lights that had plagued her past, those shifting orbs and motes.

Danielle stood whispering with Helen near the coffee table. In her arms she held what looked like several French baguettes; the lighting distorted them. But when Anjlie approached, she saw the long, stiff things had fur, and faces—they were ferrets.

"Had to get them out of the freezer," Danielle interrupted her conversation with Helen to explain. Then, rather than discuss what they'd been doing in the freezer, Danielle began tossing them about the room, saying, "We'll tell them these fuckers got loose and knocked over a candle. Better than blaming one of the kids, don't you think?"

Helen and Anjulie could only shrug, both at a loss for words.

About fifteen minutes later, the three women stood assembled on the back patio, waiting for the flames they'd created to begin showing through the windows. The late summer sky was at last beginning to darken, and there was hushed conversation amongst the three as to when exactly they should call 9-1-1. But before they could quite agree on a time, two things happened:

First, Helen realized after an increasingly desperate search that her and Danielle's daughters were nowhere to be found.

And second, Anjulie's phone rang. When she answered it, distracted by the gold and red flares and increasing black smoke, she found it was Joanna, who said only, "Listen. I'm going to jail. I need you to find my son. He's in the park in our old neighborhood, and Anjulie, when you find him, I need you to kill him."