There were three more tiny outbuildings, but they had all but collapsed. The black dog might be hiding in any one of them, but Dale had no intention of crawling in after him.

That left the barn.

Dale had planned to visit the barn at some point. It might as well be now. Holding the flashlight in one hand and the Louisville Slugger in the other, he approached the huge structure.

Dale had vague memories of being in Duane’s barn as a kid. Of all of Illinois’s glories, the giant barns might have been the most interesting to a kid. Some of the farms boasted barns big enough to play baseball in, the lofts thirty feet high and filled with sweet-smelling hay. Perfect places to play as a boy.

This barn had a main door on the east side, but it was chained and padlocked. The huge barn doors on the south side did not budge—locked from the inside or frozen on their metal tracks. Dale hesitated. He didn’t know if his rental agreement allowed him to wander around the barn and other outbuildings. He imagined that these were used for storage by Mr. Johnson.

Dale walked back to the Buick, ignored the waiting groceries, and traded the Louisville Slugger for the crowbar. He walked the sixty yards or so to the huge, looming barn, stuck the flashlight in his jeans pocket, forced the curve of the crowbar into the gap in the large doors, and struggled and cursed until something snapped—in the door, luckily, not in his back—and the doors squealed back on their rusted tracks.

Dale stepped into the darkness and then took a fast step back out into the light.

The huge harvesting combine all but filled the central space. Long, rust-mottled gatherer points thrust toward Dale from the thirty-foot-wide attached corn head. The glass-enclosed cab, seeming infinitely high above, was dark. Dale breathed through his open mouth, felt his heart pound, and was amazed that he remembered terms and details about the combine: corn head, snapper rolls, lugged chains, shields.

It can’t be the same machine.

His friend Duane had been chewed up and swallowed by a combine here, under circumstances no one had understood then or now. At night. When Duane was alone at the farm. Duane’s Old Man—Duane’s invariable term for his father—had a solid alibi (drunk, in Peoria, with half a dozen cronies), and no one had suspected the Old Man.

It can’t be the same machine. This combine was old enough to have been there then, but it was green. The machine, old even in 1960, that had killed Duane had been red. How did I remember that? thought Dale in something like wonder. But he did remember it.

And the metal shields over the gatherer points and snapping rolls had been off when they found the machine in the field and Duane’s remains in the works. Mr. McBride had removed them weeks or months earlier, meaning to repair the rolls. Now this huge green combine had its shields in place.

Dale shook his head and walked around the combine, running the flashlight beam over the empty glass cab and the maze of metal ladders and catwalks on the giant machine. As large as it was, the combine took up only a third of the floor space in the huge barn. Doors and gates led to side rooms off the central space, and wooden ladders ran up to not one but half a dozen lofts. Dale flicked the flashlight beam up toward the eaves fifty feet above, but he saw only darkness. But he heard the frenzied flutter of wings.

Bats, he thought, but another part of his mind said, No, sparrows. He remembered now. That was the first time he had been in Duane’s barn. A summer night when he and his brother, Lawrence, and their friend Mike O’Rourke had walked the gravel road from Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s farm and shot sparrows in Duane’s barn. First they froze the sparrows in the beams of their flashlights, and then they shot them with their BB guns. Not all of the sparrows had died. The BB guns were not that powerful. Duane had opened the barn doors for them, but he had not taken part. Dale remembered Duane’s ancient collie—Wittgenstein—hanging back with Duane in the dark doorway, the dog excited by the boys’ bloodlust and the wild fluttering of the sparrows but not leaving his friend’s side.

“To hell with this,” said Dale. He went out of the barn, pulled the screeching doors as shut as he could get them, and went back to unload his groceries.

On the way, he walked around the farmhouse, checking to see if there was another way anyone could have gotten to the second floor. The tall old farmhouse had no easy way to the six windows more than fifteen feet up there. The windows were all shut, most covered on the inside by drapes or curtains, or both. Someone with a tall ladder might have done it, but the dirt around the farmhouse was all mud after the night’s rain, and there were no footprints or marks from a ladder.

I guess whoever turned on the light lives up there, thought Dale. It was hard to scare himself in the bright daylight under the blue sky.

He set the crowbar and the baseball bat just inside the kitchen door and went out to ferry in his small-fortune’s worth of groceries, trying not to track in too much mud as he did so.

NINE

DRIVING to pick up his truck that afternoon, Dale took the Catton Road shortcut to Oak Hill Road. A few miles away from Duane’s farm—the dead zone, as he thought of it—his cell phone came alive again. The asphalt road was empty. The day was still warm. Dale drove with one hand on the wheel and punched in Sandy Whittaker’s real estate number.

“Heartland Realty.” It was Sandy answering. Dale identified himself, and there was the expected salvo of niceties. They both agreed that it was a beautiful fall day and very welcome after the cold and snow.

“Is everything all right, Mr. Stewart. . . Dale?” said Sandy.

Dale hesitated. He was tempted to ask about the upstairs light, but what could he say? “Say, Sandy, any reports of phantom lights on in the McBride farmhouse?” Instead, he said, “Yeah, I was just wondering if you knew anything about a dog hanging around the farm I’m renting.”

“A dog? What kind of dog?”

“A little one,” said Dale. “A black one.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Dale drove by clean white farms and large barns. The road stayed empty.

“Never mind,” said Dale. “Silly question.”

“No, no,” said Sandy Whittaker. “Have you seen a dog on the property?”

“In the house, actually.”

“In the house ?” said Sandy.

“I left the inside door open this afternoon. I guess the screen was open just enough to let a dog in. . . a little thing. It ran off and I just wondered who it might belong to. Duane’s aunt didn’t own a dog, did she?”

“Mrs. Brubaker?” said Sandy. “No. . . no, I’m sure she didn’t. No one saw her much, but everyone knew that Mrs. Brubaker was crazy about keeping things clean and tidy. I’m sure she didn’t own a dog.”

“Maybe it was a neighbor’s dog,” said Dale, already sorry that he’d called the woman. “Coming over to check me out.”

“Not if it was a small black dog,” said Sandy. “Mr. Johnson to your south owns two hounds for hunting, but they’re big and brown. The Bachmanns—the young family who moved into your aunt Lena and uncle Henry’s place over toward the cemetery—they had an Irish setter, but it was killed by the milk truck last summer.”

Christ,thought Dale, talk about small towns.

“What kind of dog was it?” Sandy asked again.

Dale sighed. Some cows in a muddy field looked up as he drove past, and he wondered if his expression was as vague as theirs. “I don’t really know dogs,” he said.

“I do,” said Sandy Whittaker. “I own five and subscribe to the AKC journal and watch the Westminster Dog Show on satellite every year. Describe the dog and I’ll tell you what kind it is.”