‘Then—’

His mother closed her eyes. For a moment he thought that she might have fallen asleep, but as he watched a tear crept from her right eye and her body began to shake. She was crying, and he had never seen his mother cry, not even when his father had died. She was a hard woman. She was old Prosperous stock, and they didn’t show frailty. If they had been frail, the town would not have survived.

Survived, and bloomed.

‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Mom.’

He took her right hand in his, but she shook it away, and only then did he realize that she was not crying but laughing, giggling at the memory of what she had witnessed. He hated her for it. Even in her slow dying, she had the capacity to horrify him. She stared at him, and she could see by his face how appalled he was.

‘You were always weak,’ she said. ‘Had your brother lived, he would have been stronger. He would have become a selectman. The best of your father’s seed went into him. Whatever was left dribbled into you.’

His brother had died in the womb three years before Harry was born. There had been a spate of miscarriages, stillbirths and crib deaths during the same period, a terrible blight upon the town. But the board of selectmen had taken action, and since then Prosperous had been blessed with only healthy, live children for many years thereafter. But his mother had never ceased to speak of Harry’s dead brother. Earl: that was the name she had given him, a melancholy echo of the status he might have attained had he lived. He was the Lost Earl. His royal line had died with him.

There were times in her dotage when Harry’s mother called him Earl, imagining, in her madness, a life for a son who had never existed, a litany of achievements, a great song of his triumphs. Harry suffered them in silence, just as he had endured them throughout his life. That was why, when his mother’s end approached at last, he had left Erin in bed, put on his clothes and driven for two hours to get to the hospice on a miserable fall night to be with his mother. He simply wanted to be certain that she was dead, and few things in their relationship had given him greater pleasure than feeling the warmth leave her body until just the withered husk of her remained. Only consigning her to the flames of the crematorium had been more rewarding.

‘You still awake there?’ said Morland.

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘I’m awake.’

He didn’t look at the chief as he spoke. He saw only his reflection in the glass.

I look like my mother, he thought. In Prosperous, we all look like our parents, and sometimes we look like the children of other folks’ parents too. It’s the gene pool. It’s too small. By rights it shouldn’t be deep enough to drown a kitten, and every family should have a drooling relative locked away in an attic. I guess we’re just blessed, and he smiled so hard, and so bleakly, at his choice of the word ‘blessed’ that he felt his bottom lip crack.

‘You’re very quiet,’ said the chief.

‘I never had to bury anyone before.’

‘Me neither.’

Now Harry did look at him.

‘You serious?’ he said.

‘I’m a cop, not an undertaker.’

‘You mean nothing like this has ever happened before?’

‘Not to my knowledge. Seems this may be the first time.’

It didn’t make Harry feel any better. There would be repercussions. This trip with the chief was only the beginning.

‘You didn’t tell me what happened to the girl,’ said Harry.

‘No, I didn’t.’ The chief didn’t speak again for a time, stringing Harry along. Then: ‘Ben Pearson had to shoot her.’

‘Had to?’

‘There was a truck coming. If she’d stopped it, well, we would have had an even more difficult situation than the one we’re currently in.’

‘What would you have done?’ asked Harry.

The chief considered the question.

‘I’d have tried to stop the truck, and I’d have been forced to kill the driver.’

He turned his gray eyes on Harry for a moment.

‘And then I’d have killed you, and your wife too.’

Harry wanted to vomit, but he fought the urge. He could taste it at the back of his throat, though. For the first time since he had gotten in the car with Morland, he felt frightened. They were in the darkness out by Tabart’s Pond, just one of many locations around Prosperous named after the original English settlers. There were no Tabarts left now in Prosperous. No Tabarts, no Mabsons, no Quartons, no Poyds. They’d all died early in the history of the settlement, and the rest had seemed set to follow them before the accommodation was reached. Now Harry was about to dig a grave in a place named after the departed, the lost, and a grave could accommodate two as easily as one.

‘Why?’ said Harry. ‘Why would you have killed us?’

‘For forcing me to do something that I didn’t want to do. For making life harder than it already is. For screwing up. As an example to others. You take your pick.’

The chief made a right turn onto a dirt road.

‘Maybe I’ll have another look at that lock on your basement when we’re done,’ he said. ‘Something about all this doesn’t sit quite right with me. Kinda like the lock itself, it seems.’

He grinned emptily at Harry. The beams of the headlights caught bare trees, and icy snow and—

‘What was that?’ said Harry. He was looking back over his right shoulder.

‘Huh? I didn’t see nothing.’

‘There was something there. It was big, like an animal of some kind. I saw its eyes shining.’

But the chief was paying him no attention. As far as Morland was concerned, Harry’s ‘something’ was just a ruse, a clumsy attempt to distract him from the business of the basement door. But Morland wasn’t a man to be turned so easily. He planned to walk both Harry and his wife through their versions of the escape. He’d do it over and over again until he was either satisfied with their innocence or convinced of their guilt. He was against entrusting the girl to them from the start, but he’d been overruled. He wasn’t a selectman, even though he could sit in on the board’s meetings. No chief of police had ever been a selectman. It was always felt that it was better to have the law as an instrument of the board’s will.

The board had wanted to test Harry and Erin Dixon. Concerns were being raised about them – justifiable concerns, it now appeared. But it was a big step from doubting the commitment of citizens of Prosperous to taking direct action against them. In all of the town’s history, only a handful of occasions had arisen when it became necessary to kill one of their own. Such acts were dangerous, and risked sowing discontent and fear among those who had doubts, or were vulnerable to outside influence.

Morland now regretted telling Harry Dixon that he might have killed his wife and him. He didn’t like Dixon, and didn’t trust him. He’d wanted to goad him, but it was a foolish move. He’d have to reassure him. He might even have to apologize and put his words down to his justifiable anger and frustration.

But the test wasn’t over. The test had only just begun. Harry Dixon would have to make amends for his failings, and Morland was pretty sure that Harry Dixon wouldn’t like what that would entail, not one little bit.

‘So what was it that you thought you saw?’ said Morland.

‘I believe I saw a wolf.’

8

The ground was hard. Not that Harry should have been surprised: he’d lived in Penobscot County for long enough to have no illusions about winter. On the other hand, he’d never had to dig a grave, not in any season, and this was like breaking rocks.

Morland left him to his own devices at the start. The chief sat in his car, the driver’s door open but the heat on full blast, and smoked a series of cigarettes, carefully stubbing each one out in the ashtray. After a while, though, it became clear that Harry would be hacking at the ground until summer if he was forced to make the grave alone, and so Morland opened the trunk of his car and removed a pickax from it. From where he was standing, Harry caught a glimpse of something wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting, but he didn’t look for long. He figured he’d have seen more than enough of it by the time this night was over.