by Janet E. Irvin

Ellis lived alone now. He still wore his wedding ring, but the picture of him and Nell rested in his sock drawer. His daughters lived too far away to do more than fret about his withdrawal from the social commerce of the world. He’d sold the town home, donated all the extra furniture to a charitable cause, and demoted his favorite pastimes—hunting and playing poker—to scrapbooks and stories told at Thanksgiving. Although he no longer saw a use for them, he kept his guns and playing cards, markers against a future need, in the shed behind the house. Some days he missed the young minds, the sharing of Aeschylus and Caesar, the sense of making a difference, but he believed the students didn’t miss him. He suffered under the self-induced stigma of irrelevance and hated it.

During the daytime hours Ellis read or played fetch with the dog. At night he dreamed about food, recalling favorite dinners in places he and Nell had traveled: Istanbul, Prague, Athens, Rome. He passed the darkest hours poring through accumulated recipes in search of the perfect meal. Today he intended to duplicate the rabbit stew Nell had made the last time she was here. Settling more firmly into the rusted porch rocker, the taste of meat and potatoes on his mind, Ellis gathered his ghosts around his shoulders and started peeling. Down by the creek a branch snapped. Deer, he thought. Ellis looked up.

A boy stepped out of the tree stand that bordered the creek and limped toward the house. He swung a stick in low, tight circles ahead of each step, looking for snakes hidden among the thistles and rye grass. Ellis placed one large hand on Cato’s collar. In the other he cradled his paring knife. The potato slipped loose and disappeared, forgotten, into the creases of his lap. Just west of the giant beech, a stray slant of sun caught the boy from behind, firing his short white-blond hair into a halo of brightness. Ellis rolled his shoulders slow and easy to release their tension. “Ecce homo,” he whispered. “Behold the man.” Cato thumped his tail once, his eyes and muzzle centered on the stranger.

The boy moved like a wounded animal, stumbling through the rutted field. He startled at the whine of a truck along the road, lifting his nose, turning his head toward the noise. Ellis turned, too, the grind of shifting gears and the drone of an engine just this side of a tune-up fragmenting the still moment into shards of sound. The truck noise faded and the boy returned to beating the weeds. Ellis returned to watching.

Carrying his shoulders like they ached, the boy came on. He startled a second time at the whir of birds breaking cover. The doves flew up in smoke gray circles, filling the space above the boy’s head. Cato grumbled. Ellis, certain he still held his camouflage in the shadow of the porch, hissed the dog quiet. Cautious and silent, the boy drifted closer, stepping from the weeds to the bare dirt patch of yard. He licked his lips at the sight of the hose and the bucket waiting on the lip of the garden wall. That’s when Ellis noticed the dark stains that streaked the boy’s hands, his face, and the clothes he wore. And Ellis noticed something else. The boy wasn’t a boy after all.

Cato raised up, the fur on his neck bristling. Ellis patted him down. “Stay,” he said. The boy who wasn’t a boy dropped the bucket, spilling water over the worn hiking boots that peeked out beneath the cuffs of the tight, frayed jeans. She shook her head, and her hair gathered in thin strands around her wet mouth. She put up one hand. “Where’d you come from?” she said, drawing her breath in one long pull.

“Where’d you?” Ellis answered.

“I don’t want no trouble.” Her voice was a low burr of anxiety and bravado. She raised the stick. “I don’t want to hurt your dog.”

Ellis and Cato stared at the girl. She stared back. Out on the road, the echo of the same truck passing, grinding its way along. The girl crouched lower, grunting with the effort of balancing on the leg that limped.

“I don’t want to hurt your dog,” she repeated, wiping the hair away from her lips, brandishing the stick like a shield.

“And he doesn’t want to hurt you. Absit invidia.”

The girl scowled. “What’d you call me?”

Ellis heaved himself off the rocker. His body, heavy from wear and sorrow, objected, needling him with small pains. One foot had gone to sleep. The potato in his lap leaped out, bounced down the single step, and plopped in the dirt. Ellis gestured with the knife. “No offense intended is what I said. In Latin. It’s a dead language.” He shrugged.

She looked at the sagging porch roof, the trees empty of leaves, the garden plot lined with dried up plants and fallen tree limbs arranged in small tepees waiting to be burned.

“Lots of dead things around here,” Ellis said. She almost smiled. Ellis thought it was his voice that did it, broke the ice, opened a path to communion. His voice and the potato. Maybe. He hadn’t always believed in his power to put people at ease. Then he met Nell, and she taught him the way of it. She accepted the contradiction of the country boy inside the university professor, the romantic buried beneath his bulk and his deliberation. She used to say that his way with words could tame a human same as a dog. Cato was proof of her philosophy when it came to animals, but Ellis didn’t know about this girl standing in his back yard, the water from the hose dripping down her chest, smearing the red from her hands across the denim of her pant legs. Dripping blood in watery circles on the dust of the yard.

“That yours?” He used the knife again to emphasize his question. Best she know up front he’d use it if he had to. Ellis had reason to fear strangers. Just this morning he heard on the news about a woman whose car was stolen in Columbus last week and then whoever stole it came back here, all the way to MacArthur, not exactly on the way to anywhere, and broke into the woman’s house and killed her. Only two country blocks away. Five miles, give or take, but still close. And for what? A CD player and a handful of coins? Paper said she didn’t even know the man. How’d they know that, that she didn’t know the man? Ellis wondered, while the boy who was a girl stood shaking in the angle of sun peering from the west like a witness.

“Not mine,” she said, flinging the water from her fingers and running her hands down her pants, shifting the stick back and forth as she worked. Caught in another blaze of sunlight, she torched up and shone so bright Ellis had to squint his eyes more than half shut just to look at her. Sixteen, maybe. Slender hands and arms. Hard to tell with the loose T-shirt, but Ellis thought he detected a woman’s softness to her chest and hips. He’d watched his own girls growing up, seen their subtle shifting from girl to woman. Cleaned up, she might be something.

“I shouldn’t stay.” She lifted her shoulders then and stared straight at Ellis, her eyes dark and smeary with sweat and something else, something furtive. Ellis thought it looked like shame. Or dismissal. He hated that.

Beside him, Cato panted. Ellis released him and the chocolate Lab slipped down the steps, moving in a cautious line around the girl’s still figure. She followed the dog with her eyes, holding the stick in both hands. Making up his mind, Cato barked once, but he didn’t wag his tail. He stayed well clear of the blood patch, sniffing at the backs of her legs and pushing his muzzle against her elbow.

“He won’t bite, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I should leave,” she said.

Cato flopped in the dirt behind her. If she took a big step back, she’d land right on him. Ellis wiped his face with the back of his hand. How’d that dog get to be so smart? Same as you. He heard Nell’s voice, spooling out the kitchen window like it did before her heart did a double take and quit trying to outrun fate. Training. He had to rub his face again to guard against his tendency to speak out loud to the spirit of his dead wife. Ah, Nell.

“Got some place to go then?” Ellis lowered himself back down, picked up another Yukon Gold, and spiraled his way around the spud. When she didn’t answer, he lifted his eyes from his work. She still held the stick, but her attention had turned to the road.

Ellis stayed seated and steady, his mind calculating the facts before him, but he couldn’t make much sense of it. Teenage girls with bloodstained hands didn’t wander across his land very often. He felt like a man anted up, unwilling and unconsulted, in a game of chance. What cards had he been dealt here? What cards were still to come?

“You that professor guy?” The girl’s voice caught him thinking. He nicked his thumb with the blade. “The one used to teach at that college? Hocking Hills? Rio Grande?”

“Shawnee State.” Ellis sucked at the cut.

“Yeah. I heard you used to live here.”

“Still do,” Ellis said.

The girl blushed. “It’s late for tourists,” she said.

“I live here year round now.” Ellis paused. He didn’t owe her any more than that. Careful, Nell’s voice prodded. And then the words slipped out. He pinched his lips together to keep them in, but some perverse remnant of hospitality remained to taunt his reclusivity. “You hungry?” Ellis asked.

She settled the stick like a walking cane and hobbled two steps closer. “I just want some water.”

“Help yourself.” Ellis whistled a tune he and Nell used to sing to the girls when they were so small each one could fit in the palms of his large farmer’s hands. He looked at the girl slurping at the cool, spring-fed water and thought he should call the police. His own children would chastise him for taking chances, but he sensed a mystery here and the novelty of it brushed up against his solitude. He felt an invitation extended to ante up. When a man reaches toward the end of things, Ellis rationalized, he’s entitled to a little sport.

He finished the potatoes. Rinsing them in the bowl at his feet, he signed Cato to his side and pulled open the back door. “There’s more than enough for two,” he said. He looked at the sky. The sunset coming on flung gauzy red streamers over the arc of the western horizon. Red sky at night, he remembered, sailor’s delight. Tonight would be cold but no frost yet here at autumn’s tail end.

The door banged shut. He looked over his shoulder. The girl still stood by the wall, shaking now with cold and whatever adrenaline rush had sent her into the rugged southern Ohio hills in mid October. He raised his voice to carry through the glass storm door. “You’re welcome to come in, use the bathroom before you go on. I’ll just feed Cato.” He lumbered back out and whistled and the Lab came to his side. They left together, Ellis huffing under the weight of the new bag of dog food. He’d store it in the shed next to the doghouse. Not that Cato spent much time there. Since Nell’s passing, he’d become an inside dog.

Ellis lifted the key off the nail and fitted it in the padlock chest high on the shed door. Peering into the gloom, he acknowledged the garden tools, the snow shovel, the cold frames where Nell used to plant her impatiens, the rifle and shotguns anchored next to the rake, his skeet trophies lined up on the shelf at eye height. He picked up a box of cards and slipped them into his pocket. Perhaps she’d like to play a hand or two before they ate. He put his fingers on the ledge again and felt along its length until he touched the forty-five, its crosshatched handle rough against his palm. Lifting it down, Ellis checked the safety, placed it back, grip out, the same ritual every time. Then he filled Cato’s dish and crouched, straining to lower his bulk, to pet the dog. He kept one eye on the girl.

Across the yard she stood, storklike and brooding, on one leg, calculating the distance between the shed and the squat, tidy ranch house. He thought she had made up her mind to go when he heard the truck passing once more. This time Ellis fancied the driver slowing, then speeding up, like he was sighting down the lanes of the neighbors’ farms, of Ellis’s place. That’s when she bolted, hop-stepping, dragging her hurt leg up the steps and through the door. He waited five minutes. She didn’t come back out.

Shuffling his way to the side of the house, Ellis stared over the cornfield that covered the front two acres. The stalks, dried out and rustling now in the pre-twilight breeze, waited to be cut. Manchester would come by tomorrow or the next day with his harvester, mow them down, till them under. Until then, it would be hard to see the house from the road during the day. Nighttime, however, anyone passing could see the barn light, the lamps in the windows. Now why, Ellis wondered, did I think of that?

Cato finished his dinner, did a long body stretch, farted, and hustled to Ellis’s side. When he and the dog entered the house, the girl was washing her face at the sink. Her stick leaned against the counter. The paring knife rested by the dish towel, taking up space. Ellis felt a cold prickle along his neck. Goose bumps. Gravewalking. Scary stories by flashlight when Tammy turned ten and Sarah, eight, called Scooter, begged him to tell them a story. Instead of boogeymen or monsters under the bed, he told of Beowulf and Frankenstein and the picture of Dorian Gray. Nell said he was the best at making them all scared. Now he was scaring himself. Over the aroma of the stew, he detected the odor of the girl’s sweat and the metallic blood smell from the stains on her shirt and jeans.

The girl dried her face and hands. She limped to the table and flopped onto one of the chairs. “I used to like stew,” she said, wrinkling her forehead. “Before.” She fiddled with the yellow place mat, rolling and unrolling the edge. When she raised her eyes, Ellis thought he saw tears. To distract her, he plunked the box of cards on the table and patted them with his hand. “Maybe we could play,” he said.

The girl poked at the deck and pushed it away. “You don’t want to play games with me,” she said, tossing her head and hiking up her jeans. “I always win.”

Ellis didn’t like the way she cut her eyes at him, the way her lip curled when she said win. “Well,” he said, “got an hour to go. Television’s in there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the den. Recliner. Small sofa. Books and magazines scattered like popcorn across the floor. Old model color TV with rabbit ears for when the cable went out. His refuge whenever the emptiness of the house sought to drown him. He waited until she reached the doorway. “Someone I can call?”

Ellis watched the girl’s shoulders hunch forward. Her hands curled into fists before she made the effort to open them up. She looked over her shoulder and shook her head.

“Not now. What about you?” she said. She surveyed the walls, the odd tables settled in the corners, waiting to be filled with magazines or picture frames. Ellis willed the picture of him and Nell back in its former spot, their smiling faces proof that he had loved and been loved, but there was no way to get it back now. The girl nodded and slipped out of sight.

“Got a name?” he called, catching hold of the paring knife, looking over at the cutlery holder to see if anything was missing. He heard the TV hum on, listened to audience laughter from one of the talk shows, thought he heard the girl mumbling under the canned laugh track. He tried to match voices to the names of actors in a sitcom rerun when she changed the channel. The local news anchor welcomed them to the five o’clock edition. “And now to our major story. Police have few leads in the investigation of the murder of Lila Ashcroft and the disappearance of—” The girl flipped channels again. Ellis shrugged. No worse than what his own girls did when they came to visit. But Nell never could stand him fidgeting from one show to another. He’d broken the habit not long before she passed away. He stirred the stew, inhaling the fragrance of garlic and Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice, the memories of all the long lost suppers, just he and Nell and their fall ritual. Esse quam videri. To be, to be alive rather than pretend to live.

“Hey!”

Ellis dropped the wooden spoon, surprised at the sudden strength of the girl’s voice. How had she crept up without him hearing her footsteps? She held the remote in one hand, the stick in the other.

“Something’s wrong with this thing,” she said. “I can’t get any channels.”

“Maybe it needs batteries,” Ellis said. He paused. The girl’s smell drifted to him. “You should take off your clothes.”

The girl arched backward. Ellis hurried on. “My girls always leave spare tops and pants in the closet in their old room. Second door on the right.” He pointed down the hallway half obscured by the refrigerator. “Go on. Have a look.”

She held her shirt away from her chest and sniffed. In the corner Cato sniffed too. The girl made a face at the dog. She looked back at Ellis as she sidled past him. That furtive look was back in the dark eyes that held his glance.

Ellis coughed, stepping back until he felt the counter behind him. The girl pounded the stick as she passed, humming some wild tune under her breath. Her voice floated back to him.

“You’re pretty fat, you know.” Her voice hollowed out as she turned into the girls’ bedroom. “Maybe you should go on Oprah.”

Ellis heard giggling just before she closed the door. He tightened his grip on the knife and set to work on the carrots. Maybe he heard wrong. The timer went off. Ellis dropped the vegetables into the pot, sliced the bread, set out silverware and napkins. He added flour and water to the stew to thicken it up. Nell used cornstarch but he never could get it to work that way. Before he could call to the girl, the bedroom door opened. She limped back to the kitchen, wearing Tammy’s old Pink T-shirt and a pair of cutoffs. He could see her right knee swollen to twice its size. No wonder she limped.

Ellis told himself to forget the hateful words. Teenage girls were like that. Absit invidia. He pointed to her knee. “You fall?”

The girl leaned over and tugged at the edge of the cutoffs to cover the swelling. “Time to eat?” she said.

The phone rang, an indistinct chime in the confines of the galley kitchen. Ellis recognized the ring Scooter had programmed to identify her calls. He looked at the top of the refrigerator. His cell phone was gone. The phone kept chiming, its tone muffled. He looked at the girl. She stood at the end of the table, one hand on the stick, the other settled protectively over the front pocket of her borrowed jeans. Ellis stuck out his hand.

“Oh,” she said, lifting one eyebrow and pulling the phone from her pocket. “I just wanted to see if it worked.” She held it out. Ellis reached. The phone dropped between them, cracking the edge of the table, banging from the chair onto the linoleum floor. Something broke off and skidded under the table. “Dad?” Scooter’s voice barked up at them. “Dad, are you there? Dad?” Ellis leaned over. The girl watched him, frowning. Using the table to steady himself, Ellis lifted the phone and hugged it to his ear. “I’m here, Scooter. How are you?” Lowering himself into the chair, Ellis waited while Scooter asked if they’d caught the man who killed that woman. If they’d found her daughter yet. Ellis tried not to look at the girl, but he couldn’t help it. This then was the missing game piece, the flop, the river card. That poor murdered woman had a daughter. He answered in monosyllables, trying to sound reassuring. Scooter said she’d fly down, tomorrow, if he needed her.

The girl picked at the frayed hem of the jeans with two fingers. She shook the cards out of the box and fanned them across the table. Dealt him three. Slapped them down one after the other. Dealt herself three. Ellis mouthed the words, “It’s all right. Don’t worry.” He swallowed hard. When the call ended, he sat and stared at the phone, trying to piece together the parts of the story he didn’t know.

“Pick up your hand,” the girl said. Ellis coughed again. He picked up the cards. An eight of diamonds, a ten of hearts, another eight, this one a club. “Ready?” she said. The front doorbell rang.

Cato bounded up and raced forward, his barking gruff and frenzied. Ellis pushed his chair away from the table and moved forward too. The girl put one hand on his chest. “Stay,” she said, her face pointed at the noises around the corner. “Call your dog, or he’s dead.”

Ellis cleared his throat and called, “Cato. Come.” He heard the door open, then a thud and a whimper, and Cato, still growling, backed his way into the kitchen.

Ellis heard the girl speak. “Brad.”

“You’re here,” Brad said.

“Where’s the truck?”

“Where you told me to put it, in that old abandoned barn.” They stopped talking. Ellis waited.

“So, let’s go then.”

“Wait a minute, will you? I’m thirsty. I had to walk at least a mile to find you here.”

“We should go,” the girl said, but her voice sounded smaller, swallowed up by the shuffling of their bodies in the hall. Ellis saw the barrel of the shotgun before he saw the boy who held it. Not quite six feet. Scruffy beard, quilted vest over a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to display an anchor on one sweaty forearm, a skull on the other.

“Something smells good,” Brad said. He jutted his face toward Ellis and smacked his lips. “What’s for dinner?”

Cato growled and lunged for the gun. He caught Brad’s free arm and pulled at his jacket. The girl raised the stick and slammed it down, grazing Cato’s muzzle and smashing it across the dog’s left foreleg. Cato released his hold, yelping and backing away from the girl.

“I told you,” she said.

Ellis grabbed for the stick. The roughness of the bark scratched at his hands, but he held on, bending his knees to brace his feet. The girl tugged hard and he tugged back. They wrestled the stick between them until, with a laugh, the girl released her hold. Ellis fell back, cracking his head on the cabinet door behind him. The stick skittered loose and came to rest at the girl’s feet.

“We should go, Brad. Now,” the girl said. She picked up her cards, set them down again.

Brad stared into the girl’s pouting face. “Whyn’t you come with me before? I wasted a whole day looking for you.”

“Well, now you found me.” The girl waved her finger in Brad’s face. “In spite of everything, she was my mom.”

“Shut up!” Brad pointed the gun at Ellis. “You said she wouldn’t be home.”

Cato moved in front of Ellis again, his ears laid back. He held his front paw out at an angle. Maybe his leg was broken. Ellis put his hand on the dog’s head. “You didn’t have to hit him,” he said.

The girl flipped her head back. Brad grabbed the girl and pulled her toward him. “How’s your leg?”

The girl yanked on her pant leg, exposing the swollen kneecap to the overhead kitchen lights. “She caught me good,” she said.

“Well, why’d you run?” He shook her. The girl sucked at her bottom lip. Sneaking a look at Ellis, she crossed her arms and pulled away from Brad.

“I don’t know.” She picked at her sleeve. “I guess I had second thoughts.”

“Yeah, well,” he stuttered a little as he looked around the house, poking at the magazines and newspapers piled in the corner with the butt of the shotgun. “What’s done is done.” He opened the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, and popped the tab with his thumb. He swallowed three times, wiped his mouth with his shirt cuff, and turned to stare at Ellis. “What’re you looking at?” he said.

“A hungry man,” Ellis said. He hauled himself up, pushing through the pain in his back and neck, and laid a third place at the table. “Stew’s ready.” He didn’t wait for them but ladled a portion on each plate. He set the pan back on the stove, covered the paring knife with the towel he used for a hot pad and slipped the blade into the folds of his belly. Brad jittered back and forth between the window and the door before settling in a chair. He propped the shotgun against his knee. The girl picked up a fork and pushed at her food.

“We should go,” she said.

Brad wiped at his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt. “What about him?”

“No worries there,” the girl said. She flashed Brad a quick smile. She raised her head to Ellis. “He’s just some fat old man living in the country. All alone in the country.”

“He’s seen us.” Brad’s eyes had the flat gaze of a tiger shark. Ellis recalled a moment at a table in Vegas, the one where the players bet for big stakes, where every move was an opening for a kill. Ellis never played for that much money, but he knew that move, the decision to go all in.

The girl stared at her hands. She lifted a finger to her mouth and chewed on the nail. “We could put him in the shed,” she said.

“There’s a shed?”

Cato, snugged up against Ellis’s thigh, whimpered. Ellis wanted to kneel and cradle the dog, but Brad would see that as weakness. Rubbing his hand over his stomach, he felt for the knife hidden there.

“I’ve got some money in the shed,” Ellis said. “It’s not much, but it’ll buy you plane tickets to somewhere.”

Brad and the girl exchanged glances. Greed at war with caution. Ellis counted on that. “Aut viam inveniam aut faciam,” he muttered. I shall find a way or make one. He hoped he was right.

Brad lifted the shotgun and gestured toward the door. The girl turned over Ellis’s cards as she limped around the table.

“You have a pretty weak hand, old man,” the girl said. “I told you. I always win.”

Ellis prodded Cato ahead of him. When he stepped off the porch, he lifted the dog and carried him across the empty yard. His head throbbed. He blinked to clear his sight. Brad followed close enough to poke him in the back with the barrel of the gun. The girl tagged along two steps behind. When they reached the shed, Ellis lowered Cato to the ground. The dog was panting now, his muzzle lifted in supplication. Ellis winced. He straightened up, took the key from the nail, and unlocked the door.

“Now just let me get the light.” Straining, Ellis reached for the shelf with one hand while he felt for the knife with the other. He eased to his right, cursing his bulk. When Brad poked his face in past the doorframe, squinting to see inside the darkened structure, Ellis struck. He jammed the knife under Brad’s ribs, using his weight and his desperation to plant the knife in the soft tissue below the ribs, into the gut and then a twist upward to sever whatever lifelines rested there. The knife wasn’t long, but Ellis kept it sharp. Brad gasped. The shotgun slipped from his grasp, slid across the dirt, and landed by the girl’s feet.

“What did you do?” she shouted. Brad lunged for Ellis, clutching at his shirt as he fell to his knees. Ellis shrugged loose, let go of the knife and lifted the gun. Brad struggled to breathe, leaned back, then bent forward and lay still. Beyond, in the light streaming from the kitchen window, Ellis watched the girl set down her stick and lift the shotgun. She wobbled a bit on her hurt leg.

“Don’t,” Ellis said. He edged around Brad’s still form. Cato whined at his feet.

“That’s what my mom said.” The girl sighed. “I knew I should have left.” She snugged the gun to her shoulder.

Ellis counted his own heartbeats, steady now as they’d always been when he hunted. He could face her down. He could cripple her. She’d drop the gun then. But it was all about the moment. What would she say, dressed in his daughter’s clothes, when the police came? A girl who’d watched her own mother die. A girl who’d invited her boyfriend to her house to steal and kill. No. Ellis made up his mind. “I’m all in,” he said, pointing the gun at the girl, haloed now by the light of the kitchen window that framed her head.”Audaces fortuna iuvat.”

“What’d you call me?” The girl tightened her grip on the shotgun, fingered the trigger.

Ellis heard the click. Buckshot seared past his shoulder, creasing the roll of skin around his neck before splattering against the wall of the shed.

“Fortune,” he said, swiping at his neck with one hand, “favors the bold.” He lifted the gun with both hands.

“Are you going to shoot me now?” The girl stepped back. Her leg, the hurt one, buckled and she fell to one knee.

Ellis inhaled. Think, Nell’s voice cautioned. He counted his chips. The dead boy. The empty plates on the table. The wound on his neck. No matter what story she spun, she couldn’t win. Ellis sighted on the stick and pulled the trigger. The wood bucked and shattered, spewing splinters and chips across the yard, tattooing the girl’s arms and face. She screamed. Ellis gestured to the field behind him. “Go,” he said.

“You’re bluffing.” She pushed herself off the ground. She left the shotgun lie. “You don’t have the guts, old man.”

“You said you always win. Prove it.” He pointed toward the tree stand, indistinct and threatening in the dark. “Go.”

The girl put one hand out to steady herself. Then she rose and hop-stepped across the yard. By the time she reached the weeds, she was all but invisible, only her hair aglow with the reflection from the kitchen light and the moon above.

Ellis, alone with the boy’s dead body, settled his back against the wall of the shed. He struggled to hear the rustle of the girl’s passing. A gust of wind stirred the boy’s hair and poked at Ellis’s face. He waited for Nell’s voice to tell him what to do, but no words drifted toward him out of the darkness. Ellis shifted the gun in his lap and listened for the sound of a branch snapping. It was her call now. Somewhere out along the highway, a siren whined and a police car, summoned, no doubt, by Scooter, turned down Ellis’s lane.