Once all is well and done - in Gideon's eye, at least - they say their goodbyes - well, Gideon does - and make a hasty exit - actually, everyone except Gideon does; he lingers, makes small talk with Kathy, does everything that makes someone in need of an escape want to claw their eyes out of their own head just so they can pretend that they're somewhere, anywhere else. Dolly nearly drags him out by the collar, she could see it in her eyes, but she kept it cool, bit her lip, tapped her foot in wait at the front door. Eventually, he drives her home and drops her off. The ride is silent, except for his last interrogative: "When are you free to do this again?"

A quick shrug and then the woman's gone. That's a "never," then. Oh well. It's not like she's the warmest company in the world. Good riddance.

The two agree that they ought to take it easier and so they make a stop for food. Not at the diner this time. There's still too much of a mess, too much to clean up and repair before they can go back into business again. None of the fingers have found their way to them, but there's still time. It's kept Lacey more than a little on edge, knowing that at any second a cop could speed around the corner and take her away. And then her dad would have to walk in and see her behind bars and, oh, God, no, that'd be a mess and she buries all these hypothetical messes in the grease of their shared pizza.

By the time they return to the road, it's late afternoon, and the sky has grown dim, quiet. Gideon keeps a small slip of paper tucked between his fingers, both hands still on the wheel. He keeps referring to it. "I hope they're actually there. It'd suck if they were both at work still. Or with friends. Or doing shady cult things in the woods."

"I'm less worried about that and more concerned with them turning us away." Lacey straightens in the passenger seat. "The Fosters are weird. You know how much attention weird draws? A lot."

"You'd know, being a weirdo yourself," Gideon comments. There's amusement at the back of his throat.

"Shut up. I have your precious pecan pie in my lap. I can easily throw it out the window and feed a ravenous family of raccoons."

That shuts him up rather quickly. She looks down at the tinfoiled plate Kathy offered Gideon before they left. She picks at the aluminum with one hand and lets her other arm dangle out the window, catching the breeze on her fingers. Smells of incoming spring blast her in the face, like vegetation somewhere out there. It's a watered down smell, though. Everything about Carrick is watered down. It's unfortunate. And melancholy. But at least that faint, muffled smell is there, promise of change. Change is coming. Hopefully good change.

Ugh. This is some hippie shit.

Something hard smacks against her palm as they drive. Well, not hard. It's small, light. But whatever it is, it struck her hand with a great deal of force. Furrowing her brows, she carefully brings her hand back in the car and squints at the writhing insect nestled in the crook of her fingers. It's clearly dazed, but a beige wing twitches. Still alive.

Lacey doesn't know what to do or say or think, so instead she just watches the moth with great care, observing its every move. This shouldn't be out so early in the evening. What's the big idea?

Gideon doesn't notice her deep concentration. He's busy taking another back-way to avoid the flooding, no bridge this time, but down a dirt path that winds behind the small warehouse, down the side of the short cliff it stands on. The woods pass by, more green than the rest of Carrick. The moth crawls out of the crook and rests in one of the creases of her skin. Hm. Little guy.

They enter onto a cul-de-sac, and two houses down the street, the car slows to a stop. He parks on the curb. "We're here," he states. "Addle Road? Yup. Sign's right there. And this is..." He squints at the address they're parked in front of. "1073? This is it."

As though it heard Gideon's declaration of arrival, the moth flutters up into the air and out the window. Just like nothing ever happened. Lacey takes a deep breath. "Huh."

When they approach the house from the street, Lacey gets a nice look at the outside, soaking in all she can from this initial glimpse. It's small, one story, flat and short. The panelling is white, and in some places it seems like it could be new, but then smudges and marks of age make clear the deception. There's one large window at the front, but the blinds are drawn, clamped too tight. It is unremarkable and bare. Even a space up front meant for flowers is nothing but a square of dirt and desolation behind a few bricks. In a lot of ways, it's exactly what she expected Ro-Anne's house to be like. In a lot of ways, that's disappointing.

There's one spot of color against it all, though. Barely. A woman sits on the threshold between the front door and the porch, shoulder pressed to one, back pressed to the open screen. She's got a willowy build and it stretches out, one knee bent up in the doorframe, and the other stretched out with her foot laying in the wet grass, bare. The sandals lay discarded to the side. Not neatly. They look flung.

The woman keeps her eyes on them as they approach, but despite the way they drill into them, they're tired. Uninterested. Her coppery hair lays mousy over her shoulders and some of it falls into her eye. She doesn't bother to nudge it aside. This is definitely the woman who arrived and left the funeral like a ghost herself, but she's more unhinged here. No pretty lace and pinned hairstyles here. Just a droopy middle-aged woman, sucking on a cigarette.

Gideon stops a good distance away from her. "Janie Foster?"

The disinterest in her eyes doesn't change. She blows smoke through her nose. Despite the nod of affirmation, she still says, "Who's asking?" Her voice is petite and fragile.

Gideon glances at Lacey, as if to ask, You want this one? She shakes her head. The good boy takes the reigns. "Some friendlies. We're interested in figuring out what happened to your daughter, Missus Foster. We think that if we can figure out that much, we can still find my friend, my uh, Erie. Mott. Erie Mott. He's the other-"

"I know who the boy is." Her eyes fall to her foot in the grass and she stares blankly at a blade stuck to her ankle.

An uncomfortable silence passes among the three. Gideon tries again. "Is it okay if we talk to you about her and what she was up to in the weeks leading up to her going missing?"

"I've told the story before. Everything I know. An officer interrogated me and my husband. Nothing happened. If the cop didn't get anything out of it, I doubt two kids can." She frowns. "I'm sorry. I don't mean any offense. But I'm just not in the mood right now. Probably won't ever be." She takes another drawl and the tip of her cigarette burns red in the dying light of the day.

Gideon visibly deflates, shoulders slumped. Janie is defeated; he's defeated; she won't let it catch up to her, now. She steps forward. "Ma'am, we can all agree the police haven't been up to par. I think I can say with confidence that we've made more progress than they have." Janie continues staring at nothing. She's losing her, so she starts digging into her pocket, searching hastily for cool metal. But she doesn't show the mirror. Not yet. This woman's still a suspect. If she knows it's with me, she might just up and take it. She removes her hand. "We found something of Ro-Anne's in the house of someone we think had something to do with it. A compact mirror with her initials."

The sharp attention that this grabs is enough to tell Lacey she's on the right track. Janie scans her up and down, a quick flash of blue eyes. She presses onward. "If you can tell us anything about Ro, we can keep connecting the pieces. We're desperate here. It'll only take ten minutes of your time. No more than that, I swear."

Janie's eye twitches, and her lips part in hesitation, but eventually she allows a sharp nod. "I wish I could be useful. But I'm not useful, not at all. She was such a private girl. I feel just as in the dark as strangers who didn't even know her." She brings her outstretched leg closer to her body, curling into herself. "Must've learned by example from us," she mutters before taking another heavy drawl. Her breath sizzles on the way out. In that breath, the air tightens. It's something like she felt around Elijah, when his soul had broken into a million tiny pieces and tried to reconnect itself. But this one is different. Like the woman exhales a piece of herself in a bubble of rage and sucks it back in, losing part of herself with every breath just for it to slam back into her with a splashing boil.

It splatters back in her face, and she sucks in a deep breath, ragged. "I wish she'd come talk to us about what was going on every now and then. She'd come back from school and go straight to her room. She read a lot, got caught up in different worlds. Maybe too much. And more than I wish she'd talk to us, I wish we'd asked. Maybe if we monitored more...or opened that line of communication up...I don't know, maybe things would be different. But they're not and there's nothing I can do now. I let her do what she pleased. Let her go out with people I didn't know at night. Let her come home at three, four in the morning. Never asked questions." Sizzling exhale; pained inhale. "I don't know what she was doing before she went away. I won't ever know. And that's something I have to live with now. People condemn me and rightly so. I was a bad mother."

"I'm sure you were great," Gideon rushes, coming to the rescue. He moves closer in an attempt to comfort her, but she holds her hand up. He softens further. "Young teens like Ro, it's important to give them privacy, to give them room to grow into themselves. It's not your fault what happened. The Almeidas were close to Stella, but she was still... It can happen to anybody. Don't blame yourself."

Janie seems to take comfort in this, albeit small, and with comfort comes a deeper exhaustion than Lacey would like to see right now. She'll start shutting down. So before that point comes, she takes a shot in the dark. "Can we take a look at her room? We won't take anything, I just think maybe we can find something that might help us a little more."

She's reluctant, clearly. Still, she nods. "Sure. It's more than the police ever did."

"They never searched?"

"They never saw a reason to. They thought she was a runaway. Then this Stella girl showed up and everything changed but they still kept the focus on that other girl, not mine." She keeps her lips parted like she wants to say more, but eventually settles on, "Just do what you have to do."

They wait for her to stand, which she does, and push open the front door, which she does, and step aside while holding it open so they can enter, which she does and they do. It's dark inside, the curtains drawn, the lights all off. There's no semblance of life inside except warmth from the heater. The pair that live here, they must live like cave rats, settling in the humid corners and staying there until something encourages them to leave. Like a need for air, to breathe. It must be why Janie doesn't stay in the dark for long; she heads straight for the back door and throws herself headfirst into the backyard.

Gideon and Lacey share a look - at least, she thinks they do since she can't really see him in the dark - and walk down the nearest hall. They peep into a couple of rooms before they finally find the one that must be Ro's at the back of the house. The starry sign on the door with her name on it is the most telling in this discovery. It's left ajar. From here, a slim rectangle of light emerges, the only light in the house. They both place a hand on the wood and push it open.

The room itself is just as unremarkable as the outside. The walls are white, but at least there's a few splashes of color, a few curled watercolor pages taped up next to other fun pictures, koalas and songbirds and butterflies. The bed in the corner sits made, undisturbed. Dusty, though. There's a window in the back, the curtain swept back to let in as much light as possible. A blinding amount of light, almost. Shelves sit stocked with jars and knick-knacks. There's a dresser, a bookshelf. A desk.

Something draws her towards it once her eyes settle there. She takes a few sure steps forward and Gideon steps aside. He must know that she has to take the lead here and now, moved by her own paranormal intuition in the same way she'd been moved in that sickeningly pink room in Isaac's house. She zeroes in on this desk like a shark to blood in the water, but there's no sign of blood anywhere, everything painted a pretty white. Her hands drift over the surface and there are a few scratches, but nothing of importance. Her hands drift to the main drawer. She tugs it open, the knob especially cold, searing.

A musty scent wafts up but she continues shuffling through the contents anyhow, which only throws up more of the old odor. It's all crammed together in there but her hands still hum with warmth the closer she gets to what she must be meant to find. Her finger scrapes the edge of a notebook with a sudden zap of ice. She flinches and yelps, but still yanks the spiral notebook from its place and lets it slap the surface of the desk. It's thin, like pages have been torn out, but it also doesn't appear to be all that important. It's like something you'd take algebra notes in. There's gotta be more to it.

Her fingers drift over the worn red cover. Some of the color's been rubbed away. Before she knows it, she's rubbing away at it too, without much thought. Sounds around her grow muffled, then strong and clear. Birds whistling to one another. The hum of insects. The rustle of trees, lush and full. It smells of outside, like sap and creek water and petals, and maybe deer shit somewhere, but it's faint enough to not be too much of a bother. Under her hands she feels bark, and curling around her feet are warm blades of grass. They're not wet.

It becomes immediately apparent that this isn't Carrick, Iowa. Not how it is now, at least, and this isn't her body either, is it?

"I feel your heart beating," a set of thin lips whisper. The tip of her pointed nose brushes lightly against the elephant-grey whorls of bark that supports most of her weight. Her bare feet readjust over the thick roots for purchase. And it's true, what she says: beneath her careful touch, life seems to thrive underneath, juxtaposed with the pulse of her own blood.

It fills her with wonder, at first, but then she remembers the true purpose of seeking out this life, and the smile falls. A piece of copper falls in her face and she tucks it behind her ear. "I don't want to hurt you. This might be the lesser of two evils but it's still an evil."

She pauses, waiting for a response, but from what? It becomes apparent with the whistle of air through the canopies above. The trees sing, and moss chatters, and a comforting squeeze of forgiveness takes the oxygen out of her lungs for a moment. "I s'pose you're right. Just rip it off like a band-aid. I'm sorry."

The girl presses her palms flat against the tree, keeping them close together to minimize the damage, and lets her eyes flutter to a close. The previous calm and warmth in the air spikes into an icy chill and she hears a rough scream of agony, not in her ears, but in her bones. She works as quickly as she can to make the pain stop. Her eyes open. There is a thin layer of bark that peels away and lays across her hands much like a fresh linen. There are hand prints burned into the trunk, but at least now the screams have stopped, and now the air around her simply throbs and pants.

She carries this odd feat of nature towards a point deeper in the woods. Guilt weighs heavily on her shoulders, but she steps over a log and sets her sights on the reason for all this: there, curled in the grass, head buried in the dirt, lay a fox, small and slight and heaving against the large break in its fur, skin, flesh. Its entire back is slick with blood, and in one spot, she can see the bone. It whimpers, but that's about all it can muster.

The girl settles down beside the fox, and with tender care, lays nature's silk across the wound, patting it down. She lets her fingers drift atop it, and the fox kicks its leg out in fear, but she hushes it, gentle. A flurry of indecipherable words leave her mouth. She lifts the bandaging to see how well it fares now.

Nothing. She frowns, lays it back down, utters the incantation again. Checks. Nothing. "No. I've practiced this before. This should work, c'mon now." She tries again, with similar results, and again, and again, and the fox yelps out once, but eventually it stops moving altogether, and the girl is left to sit there, fingertips stained with blood. She sits on her knees, shoulders slumped, entirely deflated. The fox is dead. But she could've fixed it. She should've been able to fix it.

"You play a dangerous game, Little Ro. Moths and birds are one thing, but anything more is another story. The balance of life and death is tricky and I'm afraid this little guy was already marked for the latter."

Ro cranes her head back with lethargy, exhausted from failed attempts and too accustomed to voices coming out of nowhere to be surprised now. A little girl stands behind her - too little - and carries herself like she's not little at all. Like an old woman trapped behind a toddler's face. "It's not fair."

"Life isn't fair," the girl says, crossing her arms defiantly over her chest. There it is, the signature snotty youth. "But if you really care about fairness, you'll help me."

Ro shakes her head, and with the movement, tears fling from her chin. "Who are you this time?"

"My name is Darcy and I need you to find out who made me dead."

She blinks out of it and when she does, she's tilting. Gideon's hand on her back steadies her again. For a while, there's only disorientation, the aftermath of being ripped out of a different life so suddenly. The room spins. Her nail scratches at a small picture of a papaya in the corner of the notebook. Gideon waits as long as he must. Then, "What happened?"

"It was like when I visited Stella's house. I had a vision in her room. Of her life. Part of it, anyways. She was...Oh, shit, the fates weren't kidding. It all goes way beyond clairvoyance and what I can do, there's, listen. Ro-Anne was doing some witchy shit. I could, she could hear the trees and everything. Tried to heal an animal. It didn't work. Then Darcy showed up-"

"You're kidding?"

"I'm dead serious, no pun intended. But then I came out of it." Lacey turns to Gideon, the notebook caught in her fingers, eyes wide. "She either said no to Darcy and it fucked her over or she said yes to Darcy and it fucked her over. I don't know which." Her eye twitches, and then her fingers do, flipping through the notebook rapidly. There's a great deal of drawings and chicken scratch and notes in the margins and at the top of one page her eye catches the word "Seance." She squints at the page. Instructions. We might need this later.

"Is it time to find Janie again?"