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Port Norfolk, Dorchester. February 1951

SNOW HAD FALLEN during the night, and in the gray-blue before dawn it shrouded the street with a glittering mica that caught the glow of street lamps and reflected the light like shards of glass. Holding tight to the dog’s leash, the children—two girls and their young brother between them—closed the screen door to the house softly behind them so as not to awaken their father, who worked the second shift at the Edison plant across the bay in South Boston. They whispered to the straining dog, telling him to be quiet, to stop making such a racket, that there would be hell to pay and the back of Daddy’s belt if he didn’t quiet down.

The children shuffled down the steps from the porch, fine flakes of snow swirling from their boots, and made their way down the street toward Neponset and Tenean Beach, where the dog liked to run, chasing gulls across the frost-packed sand. As they came down Pope’s Hill, they could see a few cars and tractor-trailers moving like dark shadows on the highway, motors rumbling, headlights pushing against the darkness. The dog, familiar with their route, lifted his snout and, nostrils piqued by the scent of brine and bird, scrabbled at the snowfall beneath his paws.

“Dammit! Be still!” the elder girl shouted and yanked on the leash. With her other hand she held tight to her young brother, who trudged so slowly that both sisters had to drag him along the pathway to the beach. Saw grass and spindly gorse shuddered at the path’s edges as they passed the dark façades of sleeping triple-deckers from which, here and there, a single kitchen or bedroom light blazed against the dark, and then the silent, abandoned marina, the crumbling wooden pylons and spars of the deserted marine salvage and boatyard.

The children paused for a moment, their breath smoking the air. A great sheet of ice stretched a hundred yards out into the bay, and there lay a second shore, a ragged border against which the sea hissed and boiled in dark waves, pressing the ice back in large, sharp-looking spears. Points of light pulsated in the sky, and then a plane emerged from the dark bound for Logan. As the plane passed overhead, the children craned their necks to look at its markings, the eldest calling them out and the others nodding and then watching the blinking wing lights receding over the Calf Pasture and into darkness.

A mist swirled in off the ice pack and drifted here and there, a pale silver sheen fogging the beach. Distantly, buoys clanged; boats sounded their horns in the passage and narrows beyond the beach. The dog lunged forward, breaking the girl’s hold upon his leash, and raced toward the pylons before the salvage yards where the saw grass bunched and curled in frozen spikes and the ice lay smashed against the spars and throbbed with the current. There was something there and the dog was at it.

“Sam!” she called after him, “leave that alone!” and pulled on her brother’s arm as she ran ahead. And then they paused. A few yards before them, half-submerged in the muck yet frozen erect, was the naked body of a woman. They stared at her blue-hued, rigid limbs, her silvering skin, the jut of her hips, and the prominence of her rib cage, her bare, mottled breasts.

They stared at her open mouth, parted as if in surprise, and at her wide-eyed gaze, clouded pupils looking beyond them at some invisible and inevitable horror. And then there was the other mouth: the gaping, torn folds of her neck from which blood hung in thin frozen ropes down to her chest. The children stood there, holding one another’s hands, as the morning mist swirled about them. Strakes of snow whirled, snakelike, across the frozen shoreline, and the dog continued to bound about them, sniffing the body and then barking again, the sharp sound of it roiling out across the empty bay to the giant Boston Gas tanks, toward Savin Hill, and the lights of the city blinking in the distance beyond.