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“Tell me again what you saw,” he said.

“A man, tied to a post in the middle of the barn,” said Britney—or maybe Paris, because they both looked the same to Wen: white blondes with perfect teeth, puffed-up lips, and the kind of makeup applied by the pound. Britney—or Paris; anyway, the one doing most of the talking—struck him as the smarter of the two, though even a rock might have given her buddy a run for her money. The latter had dull eyes that weren’t going to get any brighter as she grew older, just like her future. “He was naked, with blood all over him: his body, his mouth. And—”

“The flower,” said the other one. “Tell him about the flower.”

“Like, I was just going to. He had a flower stuck to his chest.”

“A flower?”

“An orange one.”

“Did you touch him?”

They both shook their heads, before the sharper one—Wen concluded it was definitely Britney—added: “We just went over to check. You know—”

“If he was, like, alive,” said Paris.

“But he wasn’t,” said Britney.

“Nuh-uh,” said Paris, shaking her head again. “He was dead for sure.”

She started to cry again. She’d been crying when the deputies arrived but stopped soon after, distracted by all the activity. Britney had remained dry-eyed throughout, but she was paler than her friend, even under all the makeup. Wen guessed that Paris would make a drama out of it the next day. Britney would be more subdued, and what she had witnessed in the barn would stay with her for longer.

“Did you recognize him?” asked Wen.

“No,” said Britney.

“He was all messed up,” said Paris.

“Why were you in the barn to begin with?”

“We just wanted to hang out,” said Paris, who had commenced a theatrical hiccuping hyperventilation.

“Somewhere that wasn’t home,” added Britney with feeling, and Wen made a mental note to check on Britney’s domestic situation when he had the chance.

“You go up there alone?”

Hesitation gave them away. Wen let them see there was no point in lying.

“We were meeting someone,” Britney admitted.

“A couple of someones,” Paris added.

“Guys?”

They nodded.

“You want to give me their names.”

They shook their heads.

“That wasn’t a question,” said Wen.

“Ah, hell,” said Britney. “They didn’t go inside the barn. They were slugging it, and by the time they got to us, we were already halfway to the car. We told them to make dust.”

“Slugging it” was local parlance for dragging one’s heels. Wen, being first-generation Virginian and raised by parents with aspirations—not to mention notions of superiority, if not quite on the FFV level—preferred not to use colloquialisms. He was already enough of a disappointment to his mother and father, who had groomed him for entry into a profession they could be proud of. As a teenager, when he’d told his father over dinner one evening that he wanted to be an actor, his old man turned to the rest of the table and said, “It’s spelled ‘doctor.’?” A life in the performing arts continued to remain out of Wen’s reach for the present, but to get himself through the bad days, he liked to think of himself as an actor temporarily moonlighting as a sheriff’s deputy.

“I’ll still need their names,” said Wen.