If August Jorgensen thought he’d figured out what he’d find inside the manila envelope and was prepared to deal with whatever irresistible emotional impact it was designed to have upon him, he couldn’t have been more mistaken. Slitting it open at one end - he had no patience for those little metal clips or those annoying red strings wrapped around cardboard circles in whichever direction you hadn’t counted on - he emptied the contents onto the table in front of him.

And in the process, surprised himself.

No haunting photograph of Wesley Boyd Davies stared back at him. No background study of his childhood years presented itself, no IQ test score revealing him as “borderline retarded.” No letters slipped out, attesting to his having become a born-again Christian in prison, or having taught himself to read or write. No recantations of witnesses, no regretful affidavits from jurors who would have voted differently if only they’d known this or that, no apologies from lawyers who hadn’t been up to the task.

None of that.

What slipped out of the envelope instead were four sheets of paper, nothing else. Each was a Xerox copy - Jorgensen could tell they were copies, the originals having been made on notebook paper, the kind they make you use in school. In the copying process, the ruled lines had faded some, grown wavy here and there, or disappeared altogether. No words adorned the sheets, except at the bottom right-hand corner, where the single letter “b” appeared.

What they were, were drawings. Drawings of trees, of pastures, of a meadow, of a clearing in the woods. Drawings made in pencil, or perhaps, as Jorgensen looked more closely and studied the details, pen and ink.

Extraordinary drawings.

Exquisite drawings.

And in that instant, as he sat immobilized and transfixed at his kitchen table, he knew that all his imagining, all his steeling, all his desensitizing, all his preparation had come to naught. August Jorgensen might not be sucked in yet, but in spite of everything, he found himself nibbling at the bait.

They came back a week later, as promised. As he let them in the door, Jorgensen thought he noticed just a hint of a smirk on Jessica Woodruff’s face, her way of letting him know that she’d been the culprit, that leaving the drawings had been her idea.

Even then, he tried to say no. But the drawings had done their work on him; he knew that, and they knew it, too; they must have been able to see it in his eyes.

The fog had rolled in, and even though it wasn’t actually raining, you got wet after a while if you stayed outside. And although Jorgensen was used to it and dressed for it and wouldn’t have minded, his guests had their city clothes on. So they went inside, pulled up chairs and gathered around his kitchen table once again, the four of them, and Jake went off to one side of the room, circled a small area a couple of times, and lay down. And they began to tell him the story of Wesley Boyd Davies.