11.

The walk to Jude's car is uncomfortably silent, because Indy did not expect to be here, and thus she has no idea what to say. The discomfort seems to be only on her part, though. Jude hums an obscure song under his breath and twirls his keys around his index finger like he's going for a casual stroll.

He stops at a burnt orange, cube-shaped SUV which looks like it either rightfully belongs to a soccer mom or a cross-country hiker; Indy can't quite decide. There's a suspicious dent in the backseat door and a window decal that proudly advises, LESS HONKIN', MORE TONKIN.

Jude knocks a fist against the car's side, the metal thudding dully in response. "She used to be my dad's before I bought her off him. She's old and makes a lot of weird noises, but she runs well enough."

Indy's mouth quirks in amusement. "Does she have a name?"

"Dog."

"The car's name is Dog?"

Jude shrugs, yanking the door open, which appears to take some considerable force. "I always wanted one."

She can't believe it. The key to obtaining her first real lead is in the hands of an indie rock band's drummer who named his car Dog.

As dated as Dog's exterior may have appeared, inside the car is clean, the seats polished gray leather, cinnamon air freshener clipped to the vent above the stereo system. Indy is on edge for the first part of the drive, sitting straight up in her seat and watching everything on the road with rapt attention. Sometime later—whether it's after ten minutes or fifteen or twenty, she isn't exactly sure—she finds herself relaxing, however. She's let go of the sides of her seat and instead leans back into it, her head almost against the window. The synth beats and groovy bass riffs echoing from Jude's speakers are syrupy, dynamic, luring her off to a world of dreams.

"Not falling asleep over there, are you?" Jude says, and wags a finger. "I have a strict no sleeping policy in this car."

Indy feigns an obnoxious yawn. Then: "Jude?"

"Hm?"

"I don't know anything about you."

His eyes, a shimmering, almost unnatural gold in the glow of the afternoon, never leave the road. "I'm really not a serial killer, I swear. It was just one person."

Indy says nothing.

"That's a joke. Ha ha ha. I'm joking, see?"

Indy still says nothing, but she sweeps her jacket open, wide enough that he can see the hot pink bottle of mace she always has on her person.

"Okay. Terrible joke, my bad," Jude says. He pulls up to a stoplight, then turns, opening his hands. "What do you wanna know?"

Granted, Indy didn't think she would get this far. In truth there are so many things she wants to know that she finds it difficult to even figure out where to start, and now she's panicking, sifting through her mountain of questions and trying to find the least odd one to say.

"Neurogoblin's the name of your band?"

"Uh-huh."

"Who chose that? What's it mean?"

"It was a mutual decision between the three of us," Jude answers smoothly. Green highlights his face; he eases his foot onto the gas. "And I don't know what the fuck it means. It's not a mission statement or anything. It's more like an—I don't know—a feeling we were going for."

"The feeling of goblins in your brain?"

Jude grins, suddenly, genuinely. "Hell yeah. Goblins in your brain. Brain goblins."

Indy sighs and at last lets her head fall against the window, eyeing the Virginia scenery as it passes her: long straight roads, fringed by impenetrable walls of green trees. The sun is a fuzzy blot in the heather gray sky. "I have another question."

"Shoot."

"Why'd you even agree to this? This has nothing to do with you."

Indy's not sure where the bite of anger came from in her voice, but she's already spoken, and she can't take it back now.

"I want to help," Jude says, and he seems confused, wary, like he can't trace where Indy's going with this. "I told you it seemed ambitious because it does. Because most people take what they're given and don't try to change it. But talking to you, I don't know—I just felt that if there was something, anything I could do, then I had to at least try. For Mr. Pine's sake if no one else."

"Makes you feel good, doesn't it?" Indy murmurs. "Helping us out. Like you're one of the good ones now? An ally?"

To Indy's surprise, Jude scoffs, brushing the accusation off entirely. "That's what you think, huh?"

"I—"

"I don't know anything about you either, Indy, besides the fact that you're a friend of Sylvie's," Jude says. "Yet I'm still here."

"Whether you know me or not doesn't have to do with it. Do you think those black Instagram squares were personal?"

Jude goes silent. The tires whir and a throaty voice croons from the radio's speakers as he pulls the car up a shallow concrete driveway. The house in front of them is single-level, utterly American-suburban-nondescript, so low and flat it resembles a pat of clay someone has flattened beneath the heel of their palm.

Indy's spoken out of turn. She's opened her mouth without thinking, the one thing she must never do, and now she will be angry and aggressive and irrational and he will never listen to her at best and be afraid of her at worst.

"I'm sorry," Indy stammers, as if there's anything to salvage.

"Don't be," says Jude. "You're right."

"No, Jude, I was assuming—"

"You're right not to trust me, Indy, so don't." Jude yanks the keys from the engine, and steps out, his back to Indy. There's a moment before he turns where she's sure she's going to find anger in his face, even disgust. But he turns with a smile. "Use me. I'm just a pawn."

He bumps the door shut with his hip, twirls his keys again. An awkward moment later, Indy climbs from the car and follows him up to the front door.

Jude has told Indy and the rest of them very little about Maryna Chernenko. The most Indy knows is she was born in Ukraine and came to America in her twenties, where she met her husband, Jude's grandfather. After her husband died, Maryna stayed in Erskine, and she's lived here in this house with her aging poodle ever since. Jude comes back to visit her every week, just so she's not alone. He doesn't mention his parents, his father of course being Maryna's son, and Indy knows better than to ask.

Indy's first thought upon meeting Maryna is that she is extremely small. Indy herself doesn't reach much higher than 5 foot 4 in flat shoes, and Maryna is still significantly shorter, her narrow shoulders hidden in the soft cascade of her woven cardigan. Grayish hair strung with white is cut short above her ears, her hands finely-lined and sun-spotted as she laces her fingers together in front of them. Watery blue eyes regard Indy for an uncomfortable moment, before switching to her grandson's. "Judie," she says. She asks him something in a syrupy-sounding language Indy guesses must be Ukrainian. She wonders in the back of her head if it's one of the several languages Gatz knows. She wishes Gatz were here.

Jude replies to her. He adds in English afterwards: "She's a friend of mine."

Indy raises an eyebrow.

"She wants to know about Lamar Pine. Remember? I mentioned it to you?"

"Yes, you did," Maryna allows. She still looks uncomfortable for a moment, her round, deep-set eyes watchful, almost childishly innocent, but then she steps back, clearing their path through the door. "Sit at the kitchen table. I've just made cookies; help yourself."

The house is a snapshot of the past. Ornate armoires rest against the vibrant green walls, left open to display their wallpapered shelves filled with trinkets and hand-painted china plates. The rugs are long and shaggy and the television is a gray box sitting upon its stand, rows and rows of DVD movies and something Indy believes to be a VCR sitting beneath it. It smells like an old house does, or at least like a house owned by an old person: like splintered wood, lavender scent packets, mothballs. The kitchen table is painted with a scene of a serene meadow, goats and deer prancing happily across the wood. Indy takes her seat.

"Judie did tell me about you," Maryna starts, chair squeaking across the linoleum as Jude pulls it out for her. "He told me you wanted to set Mr. Pine free. But I don't get it. Why him? Why now?"

"Because—" and Indy stops, considering, unable to formulate an answer that makes sense of the tangle of feelings in her chest, that gives a proper name to that strange emotion that came over her when she sat before Pine at the state penitentiary. "Because I saw him, and I spoke to him, and I can't be a passive observer anymore—I have to do something. Because no one else will."

"It was an assignment or something first, wasn't it?" Jude asks.

Indy looks at him, not sure what makes that detail relevant, but whatever qualms she has she saves them for later. "It was. But the assignment was just how I came to find out about Pine. That's not—that's not why I want to do this."

The small woman frowns and clears her throat, one timid hand pressed over her heart. "It is certainly a nice thought, but it's—"

"I know it's unlikely," Indy says. She hates to interrupt but she can't hear it anymore, the doubt; she's afraid that if one more person tells her it's impossible, she may simply start to believe them. "But nothing's going to happen at all if I don't try. Please. You lived next to Elizabeth Dobbs; you knew Pine. There's gotta be something you can tell me."

"Nobody knew much about Elizabeth," Maryna answers with a sigh. She takes a cookie—sugar cookies, they look like, and the yellow zest nestled in the light icing makes Indy figure they're lemon-flavored—and breaks it half, but doesn't touch either portion. "I saw her garage door go up, and then I saw it go down again. We invited her to neighborhood events and everything, but she rarely showed."

Indy frowns. So she had already been a ghost before she'd become one. Idly, she taps her fingers against her temple before she asks, "What did she do for a living?"

Maryna nibbles at her cookie, starting from the edges. "The one time we spoke—just after she moved in—I remember her mentioning a new law firm she was starting at. She seemed excited."

Indy scrambles to make a note of it while at once trying to maintain her appearance of calm. A potential place of work—something concrete, at last, she can look into. Perhaps it's not specific, but it's at least somewhere to start. The branches of a tree stretch out in front of her, dense and boundless and intriguing.

"I don't think she was a happy woman, though," Maryna murmurs.

Jude asks, his voice matching the low volume of hers, "What makes you say that?"

"She didn't have visitors often, but when she did, I heard yelling," Maryna answers. She leans over, affectionately pinching the back of her grandson's neck. "Not like you, Judie. You yell because you like yelling. You're loud because it's fun, because it's music. But this—this was not happy yelling."

That alone opens an avenue brimming with another one thousand questions Indy is begging to ask, but she slows herself, forces herself to start with one. "Mrs. Chernenko," she begins, "I know this was a while back, but please try to remember if you can. The night they found Dobbs dead, after Pine's truck drove off, did anyone else visit her house that night?"

The air feels as though it's thickened, enough that it itself becomes a physical obstacle Indy must breathe around. Her gaze leaves Maryna's, just for a second, and she finds Jude is already looking at her.

"Yes," Maryna says at last. "I think—another car drove up not long after Pine left."

Indy holds her breath. "A black sedan?"

"That sounds right."

She releases it, barely fighting the urge to collapse over the table. "Why didn't you ever tell the police about this?"

Maryna looks at her, stone-faced. In her low, timid voice, she answers: "They never asked."

"Someone else was there," Indy gasps once she's learned all she can from the old woman, and they're heading back to Jude's car. She didn't realize how much time they had just spent talking until she stepped outside; the sky is pink now, a perfect peachy hue, the sun's parting gift as it leaves them for a night of rest.

But she can't rest now. "That blows a massive hole in their case, doesn't it?" Indy goes on. "Because now the timing doesn't line up. If Pine had killed her than surely whoever was in that black sedan would've found her, would've called it in earlier. Someone else did it."

"Indy—"

"This alone could prove Pine's innocence to any rational person, but I'm not foolish enough to believe any of these people are rational, you know? We need to find out who was in that sedan, to get as much information as possible before we—"

"Indy!" She turns at Jude's raised voice, finds him standing at the edge of the walk with Dobbs's journal open across his palm, fluttering in the wind. "You dropped this."

"I...oh," Indy says, turning to retrace her steps.

"Is it yours?"

Indy takes it from him, not answering, instead just giving him a weird look.

"Sorry," Jude says with a frown. "It's just—your handwriting doesn't match your face. Is it an address book or something?"

"Why does that sound like an insult?" Indy says, and she doesn't understand Jude's second question at all until her eyes lower to the page currently resting beneath her finger, its edge fluttering up and down again in the soft wind.

Sure enough, there's an address written there, on a page she swore—better than that, she knew—was blank before.

17 Ovenshine Drive