Somebody decided to lock that door, and then somebody decided to bury her before you got home, so that no one would ever ask the questions you’re asking now.”

Chapter 12 — The Van

While we were still in that side room, word came that Rowena was gone — that she had left my house during the chaos in one of her funeral-home vans, with two heavy black plastic bags taken down from the third floor.

State troopers traced the van to the crematorium behind her funeral home.

They got there in time.

Inside an incineration drum they recovered what she had not managed to finish destroying: scraps of fabric, a broken clasp from a necklace I had given Odile on our first anniversary, a torn door-hinge screw that matched exactly the ones stripped from our bedroom frame.

The security footage from the funeral home showed Rowena arriving at four in the morning with the two bags while my brother stood watch at the gate.

One of her own employees, when the troopers sat him down, folded almost at once: he said Rowena had ordered him to burn a bundle of clothing and bedding, that she had wiped the drive that held her building’s own camera logs, that she had called a man she knew at a cemetery to get a grave opened without the paperwork a death is supposed to require, that she had rushed everything, all of it, on a timeline built around one fact — getting my wife into the ground before I got home.

They had tried very hard to erase what had been done to Odile.

They had been sloppy, and they had been rushed, and they had been working against a dead woman who had hidden a recorder behind a mirror and an SD card under a paralyzed man’s cushion.