‘You think the ground is unstable?’

‘Might be. I’m no expert.’

I was no expert either, but this wasn’t karst terrain, not as far as I was aware. I hadn’t heard of any Florida-style sinkholes appearing in the area. The hole was curious, unsettling even, but that might have been a vague atavistic dread of small, enclosed places beneath the earth, and the fear of collapse they brought with them. I wasn’t claustrophobic, but then I’d never been trapped in a hole below the ground.

‘What made it?’

Euclid killed the flashlight.

‘Ah, that’s the interesting question, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ll leave that one with you. All I know is that I have meatloaf waiting, with a side of indigestion to follow. I’d ask you to join me, but I like you.’

He began to walk back to his car. I stayed by the fence. I could still make out the hole, a deeper blackness against the encroaching dark. I felt an itching in my scalp, as though bugs were crawling through my hair.

Euclid called back a final piece of advice when he reached his car. He was driving a beautiful old ‘57 Chevy Bel Air in red. ‘I like them to know I’m coming,’ he had told me. Now he stood beside its open door, a chill breeze toying with his wispy hair and his wide tie.

‘Good luck with those people up there,’ he said. ‘Just watch where you put your feet.’

He turned on the ignition and kept the Chevy’s lights trained on the ground in front of me until I was safely back at my own car. I followed him as far as his house, then continued south, and home.

On the outskirts of Prosperous, Lucas Morland and Harry Dixon were staring at another hole in the ground. At first Harry had been struck by the absurd yet terrible thought that the girl had actually dug herself out, just as he had dreamed, and what had crawled from that grave was something much worse than a wounded young woman who could name names. But then their flashlights had picked out the big paw prints on the scattered earth and the broken bones and the teeth marks upon them. They found the head under an old oak, most of the face gnawed away.

‘I told you,’ said Harry to Morland. ‘I told you I saw a wolf.’

Morland said nothing, but began gathering up what he could retrieve of the remains. Harry joined him. They couldn’t find all of the girl. The wolf, or some other scavenger, had carried parts of her away. There was an arm missing, and most of one leg.

Evidence, thought Morland. It’s evidence. It would have to be found. For now, all he could do was put what they could collect of the girl into more of the plastic sheeting, put it in the car and refill the grave. Nothing like this, nothing so terrible, so unlucky, had happened in Prosperous for generations. If the girl hadn’t run. If Dixon and his bitch wife hadn’t let her escape …

Morland wanted to punch Harry. He wanted to kill him. It was the Dixons’ fault, all of it. Even if Harry and Erin located a suitable girl, Morland would find a way to make them pay. Hell, if Erin herself wasn’t so fucking old and worn, they could have used her. But no, the town didn’t feed on its own. It never had. Those from within who transgressed had always been dealt with in a different way. There were rules.

They taped up the plastic, forming three packages of body parts. After that they drove north for an hour, far beyond Prosperous, and reburied what was left of the girl. The stench of her stayed with them both all the way to town. Later, back in their own homes, both men scrubbed and showered, but still they could smell her.

Erin Dixon knocked at the bathroom door fifteen minutes after the shower had stopped running and her husband had still not emerged. Bryan Joblin had fallen asleep in the armchair by the fire. She had thought about killing him. She was thinking about killing a lot lately.

‘Harry?’ she called. ‘Are you okay?’

From inside the bathroom she heard the sound of weeping. She tried the door. It was unlocked.

Her husband was sitting on the edge of the tub, a towel wrapped around his waist and his face buried in his hands. She sat beside him and held him to her.

‘Can you smell it?’ he asked her.

She sniffed him, smelling his hair and his skin. She detected only soap.

‘You smell fine,’ she said. ‘You want to tell me what happened?’

‘No.’

She went to the bathroom doorway and listened. She could still hear the sound of Joblin snoring. She closed the door and returned to her husband, but she kept her voice to a whisper, just in case.

‘Marie Nesbit called me earlier on my cell phone while that asshole was snoring his head off,’ she said.

Marie was Erin’s closest friend. She worked as a secretary at the town office, and was from one of the founding families, just like the Dixons. Her husband Art was an alcoholic, but gentle and sad for the most part rather than violent. Erin had long provided her with a sympathetic ear.

‘She told me that a detective came to town, asking about the girl.’

Harry had stopped weeping.

‘Police?’

‘No, a private investigator, like on TV.’

‘Did she say who had hired him?’

‘No. She only overheard the start of what he had to say. She didn’t want to be seen spying.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Parker. Charlie Parker. I googled him on my phone, then erased the history. He’s been in the newspapers.’

So that’s why Morland wanted the girl’s body moved. The detective had come, and Morland had gotten scared. No, not just Morland. He might have been chief, but Morland did what he was told to do by the board. The order to dig up the corpse had probably come from Hayley Conyer herself, but a wolf had reached it first. First the girl, then the detective, now the wolf. The town was starting to unravel.

‘Harry,’ said Erin. ‘I’ve decided: I’m not going to find them another girl.’

He nodded. How could they, after setting the last one free? How could a couple who had wished for, but never been given, their own daughter collude in the killing of someone else’s child?

‘They’ll be monitoring the detective,’ said Harry. ‘That’s how they work. We can’t contact him, not yet. Maybe not ever.’

‘So what will we do?’

‘It’s like I said. We’ll leave, and soon. After that we’ll decide.’

Erin gripped his hand. He squeezed it in return.

‘When?’

‘A couple of days. No more than that.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

She kissed him. His mouth opened beneath hers, but before they could go any further they were disturbed by a knocking on the door and Bryan Joblin said, ‘Hey, are you two in there?’

Erin went to the door and unlocked it. Joblin stood bleary-eyed before her, smelling of his cheap beer. He took in Erin, and Harry standing behind her, his towel around his waist, his body angled to hide his now diminishing hard-on.

‘Havin’ some fun?’ said Joblin. ‘Shit, you got a bedroom. We all got to use this room, and I need to piss …’

28

Chief Morland rarely dreamed. He was curious about this fact. He understood that everybody dreamed, even if they didn’t always remember their dreams when they woke, but they could retain details of some of them at least. His wife dreamed a lot, and she had a recall of her dreams that bordered on the exhaustive. Morland could only bring to mind a handful of occasions on which he had woken with some memory of his dreams. He couldn’t associate them with any particularly difficult or traumatic moments in his life. It wasn’t as though his father died, and that night he dreamed, or he was plagued by nightmares following the time he nearly sent his car into a ditch at high speed after sliding on black ice, and was certain that his moment had come. He couldn’t pinpoint that kind of cause and effect.