Chapter 5

Kendra made bond two days later. The prosecutor asked for conditions: no contact with Gus, no contact with Jo, no return to the house on Levee Street. She moved in with Priss. The church board suspended her from the Wednesday children’s program pending review, then quietly removed her name from the sign. The canned-food drive went on. The sign just didn’t have her on it anymore.

People in town talked. That was its own weather. The woman at the grocery store touched Grady’s arm and said she was praying for his boy. The school secretary asked if Gus needed anything. A neighbor Grady had never spoken to stood at the end of his driveway one morning and just watched the house, like he was trying to see the porch from the street.

Grady didn’t have answers for any of them. He had a lawyer from the county seat. He had an emergency custody order for Gus. For Jo, the juvenile office placed her with him temporarily while the case was open. She didn’t ask to see her mother. She asked if Gus could have the bottom bunk, and if she could keep the night light plugged in.

The sheriff’s office built the case slow. They didn’t need a doctor to point to anything. They had the notebook. They had Jo’s statement about the porch bulb and the bolted door. They had Gus’s bare feet in photographs. They had Tyler Ray.

Tyler Ray’s father sent a picture of his son’s old milk crate. It had the same initials in the same corner, scratched deep. Tyler Ray talked to a detective for two hours. He said Kendra used to put him out at night when his father worked swing shift. He said she told him it was a game. He said Priss used to bring him hot chocolate in the morning and tell him not to upset his stepmother. He said he thought he was bad. He was seven.

Seven years old. Same as Jo.

Grady sat with that for a long time. He sat on the back steps of the house on Levee Street, looking at the porch. The cot was still there. The dead heater. The milk crate was gone, tagged into evidence. He hadn’t replaced it. He hadn’t turned on the porch bulb either, because the socket still had no bulb in it. Kendra had taken it out. Jo said she did it the first night.

He put a new bulb in that afternoon. He screwed it in and flipped the switch. The porch lit up yellow and ordinary.

Gus came out with his new notebook. He had filled three pages with drawings of the truck, the sheriff’s substation, Jo’s star light. On the last page, he drew a sun. Big, uneven, with careful rays.

“What’s that?” Grady asked.

“Morning,” Gus said. “Inside morning.”

Jo came out and plugged her star night light into the porch outlet. She didn’t need to. It was daylight. But she did it anyway, and neither of them told her not to.

Kendra called once. Grady didn’t answer. She left a voicemail. He listened to it in the truck, alone. She said she was sorry. She said she didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. She said Gus had always been difficult, and she had only been trying to help, and Priss had told her it was the right thing. Then she said, “You know he likes it out there.” Grady deleted it.

Priss sent a letter. Two pages, front and back, in her careful retired-medical-assistant handwriting. She wrote that she had only ever tried to keep the family together. She wrote that Tyler Ray had been a troubled child. She wrote that Kendra had a good heart. She wrote that Grady should think about what this was doing to Jo. She didn’t write Tyler Ray’s name. Not once. The detective called that “consistent.”

The criminal case moved to the county circuit court in December. Kendra pleaded not guilty. The prosecutor had the notebook, the crate, the photos, Jo’s interview, Gus’s interview, Tyler Ray’s interview. She had Priss’s recorded phone call from the driveway, where she said the same sentence Kendra always said, and then said Tyler Ray’s name out loud while Kendra stood six feet away. That was the moment the town remembered. Not the porch. The driveway. Priss explaining, soft and reasonable, while her daughter stood in slippers and listened.

The trial was set for spring. Grady didn’t know what would happen. He knew Kendra wouldn’t be running any children’s programs. He knew Priss had stopped going to church. He knew Tyler Ray was seeing a counselor in Oklahoma and had asked his father if he could visit Missouri to meet Gus. Grady told the detective to tell him yes. Whenever he was ready.

On the last night of November, Grady locked the back door from the inside. He checked the bolt. It turned easy. Then he went down the hall and stood in the doorway of the kids’ room.

Gus was asleep in the bottom bunk. Jo was in the top, one arm hanging over the rail. The star night light glowed from the outlet by the door, small and yellow. The house was warm. The porch light was on outside, spilling through the window, but nobody was out there.

Grady stood there until his feet got cold. Then he pulled the door mostly shut, leaving it open a hand’s width, and went to make coffee for his shift.

He wasn’t going to work. He’d taken leave. But old habits.

He sat at the kitchen table where Kendra used to log in, and he opened Gus’s new notebook. On the last page, under the sun, he wrote one line in his own handwriting, blocky and neat:

Tonight, inside.

Then he closed it and set it on the counter, where Gus would find it in the morning.