He shifts. “She should have thought of that before she hired me.”

“You’re really an ass.”

“That’s what I get paid for.”

“Then for all intents and purposes, you ought to be in a different tax bracket.” I narrow my gaze. “You and I know you’re not getting rich off this case. So what do you get out of it?”

“The truth.”

“For Jenna?” I ask. “Or for you, because you were too lazy to find it out ten years ago?”

A muscle tics in his jaw. For a second I think I’ve crossed the line, that he is going to get up and storm off. Before he can, though, Jenna reappears. “No sunglasses,” she says. She is still holding the stone, still fastened around her neck.

I know that some neurologists think that autistic kids have brain synapses so close together and firing in such quick succession that they cause hyperawareness; that one of the reasons children on the spectrum rock or stim is to help them focus instead of having all sensations bombard them at once. I think clairvoyance isn’t really all that much different. In all probability, neither is mental illness. I asked Gita, once, about her imaginary friends. Imaginary? she repeated, as if I were the one who was crazy, for not seeing them. And here’s the kicker—I understood what she was talking about, because I’d been there. If you notice someone talking to a person you can’t see, she may be a paranoid schizophrenic. But she may also just be psychic. The fact that you can’t see the other half of the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not truly happening.

That’s the other reason I don’t particularly want to visit Thomas Metcalf in a psychiatric facility: I just may be coming face-to-face with people who can’t control a natural gift I’d kill to have once again.

“You know how to get to the institution?” Virgil asks.

“Really,” Jenna says, “it’s really not such a great idea to visit my dad. He doesn’t always react well to people he doesn’t know.”

“I thought you said he doesn’t even recognize you sometimes. So who’s to say we’re not just old friends he’s forgotten?”

I see Jenna trying to work through Virgil’s logic, deciding if she should be protecting her father or trying to take advantage of his weak defenses.

“He’s right,” I say.

Virgil and Jenna are both shocked by my statement. “You agree with him?” Jenna asks.

I nod. “If your dad has anything to contribute about why your mother left that night, it might point us in the right direction.”

“It’s up to you,” Virgil says, noncommittal.

After a long moment, Jenna says, “The truth is, my mother’s all he ever talks about. How they met. What she looked like. When he knew he was going to ask her to get married.” She bites her lower lip. “The reason I said I didn’t want you to go to the institution is because I didn’t want to share that with you. With anyone. It’s, like, the only connection I have with my dad. He’s the one person who misses her as much as I do.”

When the universe calls, you don’t place it on hold. There is a reason I keep circling back to this girl. It’s either because of her gravitational pull or because she’s a drain I’m bound to be sucked down.

I offer my brightest smile. “Sugar,” I say, “I’m a sucker for a good love story.”

ALICE

The matriarch had died.

It was Mmaabo, who had slipped to the back of her herd yesterday, her movements laborious and jerky, before she sank down on her front knees and then toppled over. I had been up for thirty-six straight hours, observing. I noted how Mmaabo’s herd—her daughter Onalenna, who was her closest companion—had tried to lift her mother with her tusks and had managed to prop her on her feet, only to have Mmaabo fall over for good. How her trunk had reached toward Onalenna one last time before unfurling on the ground, like a skein of ribbon. How Onalenna and the others in the herd had made sounds of distress, had tried to prod their leader with their trunks and their bodies, pushing and pulling at Mmaabo’s corpse.

After six hours, the herd left the body. But almost immediately, another elephant approached. I thought it was a trailing member of Mmaabo’s herd but recognized the notched triangle on the left ear and the freckled feet of Sethunya, the matriarch of a different, smaller herd. Sethunya and Mmaabo were not related, but as Sethunya approached, she, too, got quieter, softer in her movements. Her head bowed, her ears drooped. She touched Mmaabo’s body with her trunk. She lifted her left rear foot and held it above Mmaabo’s body. Then she stepped over Mmaabo, so that her front legs and back legs straddled the fallen elephant. She began to sway back and forth. I timed this for six minutes. It felt like a dance, though there was no music. A silent dirge.

What did it mean? Why was an elephant not related to Mmaabo so profoundly affected by her death?

It had been two months since the death of Kenosi, the young bull who’d been caught in the snare, two months since I’d officially narrowed the focus of my postdoctoral work. While other colleagues working at the game reserve were studying the migration patterns of Tuli Block elephants and how they affected the ecosystem; or the effects of drought on the reproductive rate of elephants; or musth and male seasonality, my science was cognitive. It could not be measured with a geographic tracking device; it was not in the DNA. No matter how many times I recorded instances of elephants touching another elephant’s skull, or returning to the site where a former herd member died, the moment I interpreted that as grief, I was crossing a line animal researchers were not supposed to cross. I was attributing emotion to a nonhuman creature.