A seven-year-old girl told the desk officer, “Daddy put something inside my sister’s belly.” Then she clarified, “He made her swallow it and told her not to tell anyone.”

It was two o’clock on Sunday morning.

Detective Lena Ortiz, a woman who had spent fifteen years working child fatalities for the state police before taking the special victims unit in Blackwood, sat on a green steel stool with a wire-bound notebook open on her knee. Her coffee was cold, a gray film coating the surface.

Paul Hayes sat in the corner by the water pipe, still in his wet uniform trousers, his heavy woolen socks drying on the radiator.

On the other side of the double-paned observation window sat Nora.

She was wearing a pair of blue scrub pants three sizes too large, rolled up five times at the ankles, and an oversized gray fleece sweatshirt from the hospital auxiliary shop that had PEDIATRIC VOLUNTEERS stamped across the front in red felt. She had a plate of graham crackers in front of her on the low laminate table, but she hadn’t touched them.

Beside her sat Dr. Evelyn Vance, the state’s senior forensic child psychologist, a woman with graying hair gathered in a silver comb and eyes that never moved faster than a second hand on an electric clock.

Dr. Vance wasn’t holding a notepad. She had a set of twelve colored felt-tip pens and a pad of watercolor paper laid between them.

“Nora,” Dr. Vance said, her voice coming through the ceiling intercom with the soft, scratchy quality of an old record. “Did your daddy have a special name for the medicine in the garage?”

The girl looked at the pens. She picked up the black one, took the cap off with her teeth, and set the cap upright on the table like a little chess pawn.

“He called it the sleep-water,” she said. Her voice didn’t waver. “He said Mommy drank it when she went to the long garden. He said when people have the bad legs, they have to drink the sleep-water so their bones don’t turn into stone.”

Through the glass, Ortiz let her head drop against her hand, her knuckles rubbing hard into the bridge of her nose.

“Did you drink the sleep-water, Nora?”

“No,” Nora said. She drew a line across the paper—a single, straight, thick black stroke that went from the left margin all the way to the right without a break. “Violet was first because she cried when he dropped her drawing book in the burn barrel. He held her chin with his two fingers. Like this.”

The girl put her thumb and forefinger against the sides of her own small jaw, squeezing until the skin turned white around her teeth.

“He said, ‘Be a sweet bird, Violet. It just tastes like wild cherries.’ But it didn’t smell like cherries. It smelled like the stuff he uses to clean the fishing knives.”

“And what did you do, Nora?”

“I hid behind the big tool chest,” she whispered, her gray eyes staring through the glass at the wall where the green clock was ticking. “I saw him put the other tube in the paper. I knew he was going to come back for me after he put Violet in the back seat with the blanket. So I took the one from the bucket and I ran through the hedge into Mrs. Miller’s garden.”

“Why did you put it in your shoe, sweetheart?”

Nora looked down at her feet. She was wearing a pair of yellow paper hospital slippers with white foam treads that made no sound on the floor.

“Because Daddy always checks the pockets,” she said simply. “He checks the hood. He checks the socks. He told us that little girls don’t have secrets from their doctor.”

In the observation room, Ortiz turned the page of her legal pad.

“The search team finished at Westmoreland an hour ago,” Ortiz murmured, her voice stripped of everything except clinical rage. “In the basement fruit cellar, behind the false drywall where the water meter enters, they found forty-eight multidose vials of concentrated hydromorphone, midazolam, and fentanyl. All diverted from the hospice ward at St. Jude’s over the last twenty-four months. All signed out under the names of terminal patients who died forty-eight hours before the audit cycles.”

Paul didn’t look up from his socks. “And Eleanor?”

“The exhumation warrant was signed by Judge Miller at midnight,” Ortiz said. “The toxicology screen from her hair follicles is already being expedited to the state lab in Harrisburg. If there’s hydromorphone in the keratin layers from fourteen months ago… it isn’t child endangerment anymore, Paul. It’s capital murder.”

The sun that rose over the borough on Monday was the pale, scrubbed yellow of an old horn spoon.

The rain had cleared out during the third watch, leaving the streets smelling of wet leaves, diesel exhaust, and the sharp, mineral tang of cold mountain limestone. Along North Main, the shopkeepers were out with their push brooms, sweeping the wet red twigs of the hemlock trees into the gutter before the morning trade arrived.

Paul sat on the front steps of the substation, a cardboard cup of black coffee cooling between his knees.

His boots were cleaned, the dried mud scraped from the welts with his penknife, his wool jacket brushed until the gold thread of his shoulder patch was bright in the morning slant. His tour was over; he had been off the clock for four hours, but he hadn’t gone down to the locker room to change into his civilian corduroys.

A green Volvo station wagon pulled up to the granite curb.

The car was eleven years old, its rear quarter panel dented and patched with gray primer, a sticker on the bumper that said SAVE THE SCHUYLKILL.

The woman who got out of the driver’s side was thirty-five, her coat mismatched with her trousers, her hair pulled back into a quick, practical knot. Sarah Hayes—Eleanor’s younger sister, who taught sixth-grade earth science at the middle school three counties north in Bloomsburg. She looked like Eleanor had looked before the sickness began: broad-shouldered, quiet-eyed, her knuckles red from the wind.