Walt and Beatrice ascended the hill trail, the dog working ahead of him, swinging left and right in unpredictable patterns, her nose to the ground. The only discernible sounds were her huffing and snorting as she vacuumed the pine straw. He would never understand how the seemingly random nature of a dog’s scenting could produce results, but he’d witnessed it too many times to doubt its success. The only command he’d given her had been “Find it,” a birding command that had been honed and modified by trainers to have her search out a human scent, dead or alive. She could do so with laser precision. Given her current agitated state, she had not yet locked onto any scent of importance, a fact that had Walt looking over his shoulder back at the lights of the Engleton place, and up the slope toward the ridge that led to Hillabrand’s. Without Gilly’s silence, the more intelligent strategy would have been to work Beatrice up that ridge, attempting to pick up the intruder’s scent. But Gilly’s well-being trumped any such notion.

He pushed himself more quickly up the hill, burdened by the added weight and encumbrance of the emergency backpack and by carrying the shotgun in his right hand. His radio called him-backup was just arriving to the Cherokee, fifteen to twenty minutes behind him.

Beatrice stopped abruptly and lifted her head. Walt paused as well, watching her. She scented the air, looked back at him, her eyes iridescent in the glare of his headlamp, and then continued on. False alarm.

A quarter mile later he broke off trail and Beatrice extended her search area, ensuring they weren’t leaving a scent behind. Soon, she was working ahead of him again, her paws crunching, her nose sucking and snorting. She would disappear for a few minutes and then circle back to measure his pace and reestablish herself. He would cluck for her, letting her know he’d seen her. It was too dark, and he was in too big a hurry to do any tracking; he left all the work up to her.

His thoughts wandered back to Fiona and a series of mental photographs in his mind’s eye: the dark shape of her huddled on the couch; the chair misplaced in the center of the room; the absolute dark of the place-both the cottage and the main house without a single light inside, but the motion-sensing exterior lights working; the calm of the pond; the night sounds all around him. Had he seen her car? He thought it had been there, but couldn’t remember its exact location. Why had Kira been hiding behind that tree with a baseball bat?

Beatrice circled back from the dark and nudged his hand: she’d found something. How long had she been gone? One or two minutes. Walt picked up his pace, and in her excitement she rushed ahead of him and out of the glare of his headlamp.

Thirty seconds later, she reappeared and returned to nudge his hand, her tail beating furiously.

“Good girl! Find it! Find it!”

He was jogging now, the backpack bouncing, the funnel of light in front of him setting everything in the forest in motion as shadows stretched and danced. His boots crunched on the trail, his breathing was raspy and heightened.

He recognized his location. He was just below the level ground of the illegal campsite. Bea had led him around to the northern edge.

There, ahead of him, was the unmistakable shape of a human form, its back to a tree. Unmoving. He whistled Bea away-imagining it as a crime scene before he reached the corpse. She jerked as if a rope had been attached, returning to his side and heeling. He reached down and patted her head.

Gilly Menquez came into the beam of the headlamp. Something in his hand at his side. A gun?

A bottle of wine.

Empty.

Walt came to a stop in front of the man. Menquez was snoring. Passed out. Walt nudged him with the toe of his boot. Menquez snorted but didn’t awaken.

Walt’s eyes drifted back into the dark forest, imagining the lights of the Engleton place, the black pearl of the small pond cut into the hill. Anger welled up in him. He staggered back and slumped against a tree, his radio already in hand.

12

Fiona came awake to the rough sensation of Angel licking her hand.

The bird songs told her it was early morning. As she blinked repeatedly to clear her eyes, as her fingers uncurled and absentmindedly stroked Angel, she became acutely aware of a hangover headache, dry mouth, and blurred vision. She tried to sit up, but the pain in her head cautioned her to take her time. She reached back and felt a long horizontal knot along the base of her skull, then looked up to see the edge of her kitchen counter directly above and connected the two. To her left, the collapsible footstool was overturned, and this too fit into the picture.

Angel took the opportunity to climb onto her chest and settle into a deep and satisfied purr, and Fiona continued to scratch her behind the ears. She tried to think back, to solve the mystery of finding herself lying on the floor with a lump on her head, but nothing came to her. Only silence where an image should have been. From that silence came the sound of a car, but that had turned out to be Walt-or was that even the right night? Had there been a second car that same night, had it been an altogether different night?

She lifted Angel off and eased her to the floor and tried again to sit up, this time managing to wedge her elbows under her. Her vision woozy, she felt nauseated, on the verge of throwing up. And though the pain drummed intensely at the back of her skull, radiating down through her and provoking the urge to retch, she identified the vertigo and the unexplained silence as the source of her fear. For the fear overcame her like a wave and drowned her. As she vomited, she hoped the purge might clear her head and help her to reorient herself-to remember something, anything. But it was as if someone had placed her there on the floor, had played some awful trick on her, abandoning her with no hints or clues about the cause of her condition, that she was the object of a joke gone horribly awry.

The smell of the vomit disgusted her and made her move. She sat up, pushed away from it, and struggled forward onto hands and knees. If she hadn’t felt the bump she would have sworn she was severely hungover and wouldn’t have been surprised to find a near-empty bottle on the coffee table. A few times in her life she’d drunk herself into blackouts, although not since college. She couldn’t imagine she’d done this to herself, but at that point she would have welcomed any explanation. Anything would have been better than the mental silence that stretched as an empty bridge between her present condition and whatever had come before.

She struggled to her feet and, keeping a hand out on the back of a stool, a wall, and a doorknob, found her way into the bathroom, where she undressed and showered. The blurriness of her vision came and went, and when she threw up for a second time, she told herself to get to the hospital. Not trusting her own ability to drive, she called over to the main house, hoping for Kira, but she never picked up.

With the hospital less than a mile away, she moved slowly toward her Subaru, only to realize she was wearing only her bathrobe. She turned and admired her cottage as if seeing it for the first time. The driveway of Mexican pavers formed a kind of courtyard between the main house and her cottage and there was something there, something that connected everything. Again she tried to fill the void of what had come before the fall-for having found no bottle or evidence of drink, she assumed she’d tripped over the footstool. Her brain was functioning enough to tell her that the only viable explanation for the knot on her head was that she’d been walking backward at the time. Away from something. And that it must have been something compelling to keep her attention off the footstool behind her.