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and one I’ve turned to so often for help. Just two cells down from where I write these words, there’s an inmate who says there are no atheists on death row.
    It’s easy to see why.
    When I got to Dale Drive I didn’t even bother to put the car in the garage. I left it in the driveway, open and with the keys in place. I dashed into the house in a beat. I stood breathless in the hallway, more because of tension than the rush, in a complete muddle and covering the mat in mud, until a new text lit up.
    GO TO THE BASEMENT.
    The doorway was between the hall and the kitchen, papered in the same pattern as the rest of the wall. I had to pull hard because it always jams a bit.
    I went down the stairs very slowly. The steps creaked underfoot because the wood was very old, probably the same wood the house was originally made from. We never had the time or money to change them, and we didn’t go down there often, anyway. Something hit me in the face, halfway down. It was the pull chain. I tugged it and a yellowy light filled the basement, casting long shadows and illuminating gloomy nooks, where before there had only been a pall of darkness.
    I went on down, aware that hours before, when I had looked for Julia, I had barely stuck my head through the basement door, hollered and closed it again, but had failed to go down. Shivers ran down my spine. Perhaps I had made a fatal mistake.
    When I reached the bottom of the stairs, the light blinked twice, went out and left me in the dark. There was a box of lightbulbs on a shelf at the back, but I couldn’t grope my way through the cavernous basement in the dark without breaking a leg. I decided to run the app that turns my phone into a flashlight.
    â€œJulia?” I called out, in a bid to calm myself. I didn’t know what I expected to find, but I was scared, very scared. Not only for my daughter, but because I have a deep-seated fear of the dark. The faint light beam from the phone did little to allay that fear.
    I got close to the metal shelving where we kept electrical supplies and other seldom-used clutter. I met with an obstacle. It was Rachel’s bike, which was flat on the ground. I thought that strange, because nobody had ridden it in more than a year, and it should have been on its rack by the wall. There were some boxes behind the bike, so I couldn’t hop over it. I had to go around and skirt the boiler instead.
    What I saw then took my breath away.
    She was there.
    Neither blood nor death has ever fazed me. I would even say they have come to draw me in a way others would deem unhealthy.The clearest memory I have of that attraction goes back to when I was eleven. It was summer 1989 and the kids on our block were scuttling back and forth in their bat masks and T-shirts, in the belief it was really cool to be a crime-fighting orphan superhero. I could have told them a thing or two about having no parents, but I was minding my own business.
    Dr. Roger Evans, my adoptive father, felt strongly about interacting with other kids, and that afternoon he came into the backyard to share them.
    â€œDavid, why don’t you go out to pl—?”
    He broke off midsentence, most surprised.
    I was squatting on the ground. A dead cat lay at my feet, one that had belonged to Mrs. Palandri, who lived at end of the block. I had a stick in my hand and was busy hauling out a good length of the poor creature’s large intestine with it.
    The doctor appeared neither horrified nor appalled. Merely surprised.
    Someone else in his situation—myself included, had it been Julia—might have yelled, acted on gut instinct, whatever. But not Doc Evans. He was a patient man whose greatest pleasure consisted of getting himself over to Nalgansett Creek with a fishing pole and sitting still hour after hour.
    I had had occasion to try his patience to the limit after I had moved into his home two years before. At first it didn’t work out. I broke stuff, valuable