CHAPTER 16

In a small town, unexplained tragedy can only go so long before it grows teeth, sprouts sharp claws, and turns, snarling, on its own self. Before fragments of gossip become rumors, and the rumors become suspicions. Before neighbors start eyeing each other with the mistrustful narrowness of oft-kicked dogs. Inside the safe shelter of their homes, husbands and wives draw the blinds tight and turn to each other, worrying at small bits of information and wondering who, who among their shrinking circle of trusted friends, might still know something he isn’t telling.

The police had waited until there was no other option, no other explanation, no other lead to pursue. They had kept it quiet, repeating as needed that there was little evidence about the killer, and even less about the girl.

But little was not the same as none.

* * *

They had found just enough to know that he had come, and left, on foot. Had carved a path back through the roadside brush, through the trees, disappearing into the thick of the forest that climbed the hillside and then gave way to poorly maintained fences that bordered sprawling, woodsy backyards. He had stepped in her blood as he left, dipping the chunky tread of his instep into the fast-flooding pool of red, not seeing in the dark that even in death, she had managed one tiny victory against him.

“D’you see this, boys?” said the chief, tapping his finger against a glossy photograph that showed a barely there cut in the brush. “That, right there, that’s how he left.”

Jack Francis and Stan Murray, shifting nervously from side to side, squinted at the gap. Jack coughed, restless at the thought of a murderer passing through the forest there, only a mile south of the Point, where so many kids—where he, so long ago it seemed like another life—gathered at night to light a fire, to drink cheap beer in the moist dark. Stan, preoccupied by the sensation of his belt buckle digging into his gut and the related, urgent need to pee, jumped into the silence without thinking.

“But that’s a deer trail,” he blurted. “If you follow it long enough, it goes practically out to the Point.”

Stan looked to Jack, who immediately got interested in a small clump of dirt that had settled on the linoleum near his toe. The chief fought against the urge to pity them, to guide them away from the board and into the small kitchen, where he’d pat their shoulders with paternal assurance and tell them not to worry, that he’d handle it, that it would all be fine. Together, the younger men were two kids playing dress-up—holstered and buttoned into uniforms that hung in stiff folds from their not-broad-enough shoulders. They had signed up for traffic stops, for small-town disputes, for the occasional call from a wife whose husband had cracked her across the cheek one time too many. They had expected to get fat on doughnuts and flash their badges for fun at the local bar.

Neither of them, for all their swagger, had signed up to stand face-to-face with the reaper. All summer, Jack had been waking up just before dawn with cold sweat prickling on his temples and soaking the sheets beneath him, remembering the milk-blue glaze of her dead eyes, the skin that draped like parchment on her alabaster bones.

The silence broke when the older man tapped the board again.

“I think we have to face facts: there’s no chance, none at all, that our guy found a deer trail, in the dark, by accident.”

Stan only blinked, but in Jack’s eyes, there was dawning horror.

“He knew it was there.”

The chief’s nod was slow and deliberate. “Yes. Yes, he did. So the person who did this knows our back roads, and he knows our woods, and that means he knows too much to be anything but a local.”

And he did. He knew. He had stepped through the brush and into the dark, disappeared up the hillside, where the thick trees gave way to small homes bordered by the forest. Small, lonely homes where people could come and go in privacy. Homes that were owned by dead old ladies, where the front yard was littered with tossed trash and car parts. Homes that sheltered men who nobody loved, hard-drinking and hard-hitting and willing to hurt.

Men who liked to watch things burn. Men who knew our roads and forests but who weren’t, who would never be, one of us.

That night, Jack would have another dream. In it, he walked the familiar streets of his forever-hometown, stepping cautiously around corners, peering up at houses that peered back at him with locked-and-shuttered suspicion. Knowing that in a dark room, behind dark windows, something was pressing its face to the glass and watching him with cold and loveless eyes. And from somewhere, from every direction, faint but growing louder, came the sound of someone sobbing.

When Jack woke up in the dark, he realized it was him.