CHAPTER 1

They found her just after dawn on June 24th, crumpled awkwardly by the side of the road with a rust-colored blossom drying in the dirt beneath her.

Grant Willard, a rough man who worked the overnight shift at the stationer’s plant outside of town, was the one who saw her first. Later, he told anyone who would listen that he’d thought someone had left a bag of clothes lying in the dirt there, where the snaking curves of County Road 128 crossed briefly over Route 9 and then veered off toward the swelling, distant Appalachians.

“Looked like a damn rag doll,” he announced to an enthralled crowd at the local bar later that night. He tugged on the scraggly beard that grew in burnt-orange patches on his chin. Drops of Bud Light accumulated in his mustache.

“Just all jumbled up together like that, looked like someone threw her out of a truck and kept right on going.”

“Was she naked?” another man asked. He pronounced it nekkid. The bartender, a woman with a home perm and a mouth that bled lipstick in cracked, radiating lines, rolled her eyes and snorted.

“No, man,” Grant said. “She had on some kind of dress thing. She looked all crumpled up, kinda boneless, like, in a pile.” He paused. “Yeah, like a boneless pile.”

He liked the sound of that and said it a few more times, smacking the top of the bar for emphasis, before one of the ladies on a neighboring stool turned to him and said, “Grant, shut the fuck up.”

Grant, a local celebrity for a few weeks after the incident, didn’t mention that he’d been near to falling asleep at the wheel, drifting toward the shoulder when he recognized a human form in the dust at the side of the road. He had jerked the wheel hard to the left and then skidded to a stop just past the body, with his truck straddling the faded yellow centerline, gaping in the rearview mirror at what was definitely a woman’s delicate arm outstretched toward the pavement. He told no one the full truth. He had seen her, sure, but seen her too late. He had run over her fingers. Breakable bones, the tiny phalanges and brittle carpals, splayed and splintered in the gravel. Ivory dust mixed with rough rock, but no blood. She was dry, dry inside like a ten-thousand-year-old tomb, with the last of her life barely dampening the dirt underneath.

* * *

Within twenty-four hours, there wasn’t a person in town who didn’t know the story: how the dead girl lay in the dirt, how the state police blocked the road and avoided looking at her while they worked, how the day turned so swiftly, blistering hot. Choking waves shimmered, rose in stifling S curves from the pavement while the men mopped their foreheads and guzzled water and professed exasperated bafflement over the dead body that lay at their feet. Before they came, just after dawn, the hometown cops—both just twenty years old, both local boys—stood awkwardly over her as they waited for someone with more experience to show up. They shuffled in the dirt, admonished each other by turns not to disturb anything, stole sidelong glances at the body.

“What the hell was she doing out here, anyway?” said Stan Murray, who was still trying to regain his credibility after leaping away from the corpse fifteen minutes earlier when a passing truck caused tiny vibrations in her dead fingers.

“Aaaagh!” he had screamed in a stunning soprano voice. “It’s moving!”

Jack Francis, his blue polyester policeman’s shirt unbuttoned as far as decency would allow, exposing the kinky, straw-colored hair that spilled over his undershirt collar, rubbed a dust-darkened finger against his chin.

“She bled out right here,” he said authoritatively, hands in pockets and indicating the rust-colored stain on the ground with one pointed toe. “Someone probably brought her out here just to do this. Premeditated, and all.”

“Who is she?” asked Stan, reaching toward the ragged skirt bunched around spindly, ashen legs, studiously ignoring the stains in his single-minded quest for identification. Jack swatted his hand away.

“That’s a skirt, Murray. She doesn’t have any fucking pockets. Get your fingers away from the evidence.”

Stan squatted dangerously close, more blue polyester straining against his ample backside, holster sticking awkwardly off his hip.

“Jack, you ever seen anything like this?”

“Dead body, you mean?”

“No, everyone’s seen a dead body, man, I mean like this.” Stan’s gesturing hand passed over the woman—the life wrung out in bruises beneath her eyes, soaking and blooming and drying in the dirt, as he waved his palm over her breasts and the curve of her hip and her delicate, motionless face. Rice-paper skin slack over hard, hard bone. Even like this, you could see that she’d been pretty.

Jack turned away and stared up the road, away from the strange intimacy of Stan’s hand making its slow journey through the air above the dead woman, up at the heat-distorted shape that would soon reveal itself to be a caravan of police cruisers.

“Never seen a dead body at all, to be honest,” he muttered, gritting his teeth against the swirling dust and squinting at the line of cars, slowly coming into focus.

Jittery chatter gave way to machismo posturing as the police chief’s cruiser pulled up. Beside it, crime scene workers disembarked from a van and made cautious circles in the dust, searching. One of them held up a cigarette butt. Jack Francis visibly stiffened next to him. He turned toward the younger man. “Officer, something wrong?”

“Sorry . . . that’s mine.”

The chief of police, a man with a deeply creased face and shiny, bald pate, who for twenty years had been fighting the urge to call younger officers “son,” beckoned Jack toward him.

“Son,” he said, “it’d be a good thing if you tried not to single-handedly mess up the entire crime scene.”

Jack reddened. “No, sir.”

Stan Murray, emboldened by the presence of the other men, sidled over to the place where Officer Jack Francis stood, red-faced and with hands still jammed into his pockets.

“That was smooth.”

Jack didn’t answer. Stan’s smile faded into a look of discomfort.

“Fuck you,” said Jack, finally, but without venom. The two stood together, looking lost, too young to buy booze or grow a beard. They shifted from left foot to right, hands finding purchase in pockets, groping for cigarettes, chain smoking and straddling the faded yellow line that was criss-crossed by the snaking skid marks of Grant Willard’s unfortunate truck. They turned together to watch the by-the-book movements of the state police as they circled, measured, photographed, lifted cold limbs and then let them fall. They stared toward the specter of death that lay in a heap on the side of the road.

Innocence can only last so long, especially that kind that comes from growing up sheltered by quiet neighborhoods, immaculate concrete sidewalks, so much nothingness for miles around. Kids riding plastic Big Wheel bikes too fast down dead-end streets; spills taken on sharp corners; asphalt picked out of knees and elbows that bleed, scab over, then heal. Same faces, same streets, day in and day out, eyes that never witness anything more desolate than those empty, gravel-strewn county roads. And then, one day and all at once, the veil lifts. Jack and Stan, looking miserably at their feet and each other, knew this.

The dead girl, whose name no one knew yet, lay still. Her wide-open eyes, glazed, dead eyes, fixed their milky gaze on the Appalachians, looked up to the last patch of asphalt where County Road 128 turned a corner and vanished. The mountains swallowed it. The men looked at her as she looked away from them. Seeing Amelia, who saw nothing at all.