Rise the Dark

1

The snow had been falling for three days above six thousand feet, but it had been gentle and the lines stayed up. At this point in the season, after a long Montana winter that showed no signs of breaking, Sabrina Baldwin considered that a gift.

Then, on the fourth day, the wind rose.

And the lights blinked.

They were both awake, listening to that howling, shrieking wind. When the omnipresent hum of electrical appliances in the house vanished and the glow of the alarm clock went with it only to return a few seconds later, they both said, “One,” in unison, and laughed.

It was a lesson she’d learned in their first home in Billings, watching the lights take two hard blinks during a storm, Jay explaining that the system would respond to trouble by opening and closing circuits, automatically testing the significance of the fault before shutting things down altogether. You’d get maybe one blink, maybe two, but never three. Not on that system, at least.

In their new home in Red Lodge, the glow and hum of an electrified existence went off once more, then came back on.

“Two,” they said.

Everything was as it should be-the alarm clock blinked, waiting to be reset, but the power stayed on and the furnace came back to life. Sabrina slid her hands over Jay’s chest and arms. For five fleeting seconds, it seemed the system had healed itself, that all would be well, and no one would need to travel out into the storm.

Then the electricity went out again, and they both groaned. The problems of the world outside had just moved inside, announcing themselves through the staggered blinks like knocks on the door.

“The phone will ring now,” Jay said. “Damn it.”

Sabrina shifted her chest onto his and kissed his throat. “Then let’s not waste time.”

They didn’t. The phone rang before they were finished, but they ignored it. She would remember that moment with odd clarity for the rest of her life-the unique silence of the house in the power outage, the cold howling wind working outside, the warmth of her husband’s neck as she pressed her face against it, each of them so lost in the other that even the shrill sound of the phone caused no interruption.

The phone rang again when they were done, and he swore under his breath, kissed her, and then slipped out from under the covers, leaving her alone and still breathless in their bed.

A new bed, new sheets, new everything. She was grateful for the simplicity of Jay’s scent, the only thing that was not new, not different. They’d moved to Red Lodge only two months ago, and while everyone told her she’d appreciate its beauty, she still found the mountains menacing rather than enticing.

When winter finally yielded to spring, her view of the place would improve. She had to believe that. Right now, all she knew was that they’d managed to move somewhere that made Billings seem like a big city, and that wasn’t an easy feat.

She could hear his side of the conversation, providing a strange blend of breaking news and the customary-storms, lines down, substations, circuits. Even the bad pun was familiar: We sure don’t want the hospital to lose patience.

A joke that he’d told, and his father had told, and his grandfather. It gave her a sense of the situation, though. The outages were bad enough that the hospital was running on backup generators. This meant he’d be gone for a while. In weather like this, the repairs were rarely quick fixes. Not in Montana.

She followed him downstairs and brewed coffee while he explained what was going on, his eyes far away. She knew he was thinking of the map and the grid, trying to orient the issues before he rolled out. One of his greatest concerns lately was that he wasn’t familiar enough with the regional grid. In Billings, he’d known every substation, every step-down transformer, probably every insulator.

“It’ll be a long day,” he said. He pulled on his insulated boots while sitting in the kitchen that still felt foreign enough to Sabrina that she often reached for the wrong drawer or opened the wrong cupboard. It was a lovely home, though, with a gorgeous view of the mountains. Or at least, it would be gorgeous in the summer. The windows that Jay loved so much because they looked out at the breathtaking Beartooth Mountains were facing the wrong direction as far as Sabrina was concerned. The worst of the storms blew down out of those mountains, and here they could see them coming. She wished the kitchen windows faced east, catching the sunrise instead of the oncoming storms.

She was so sick of the storms.

Jay, meanwhile, was looking out the windows right now, and damned if he wasn’t smiling. The peaks were invisible, cloaked with low-lying clouds, and the wind rattled a snow-and-ice mixture off the glass.

“Enjoy that snow while you’ve got it,” she said. “This may be the last one of the season.”

“Brett told me that last year they closed the pass in mid-June for fourteen inches.”

“Tremendous.”

She struggled to keep her tone light, to use the good-natured kind of sarcasm, not the biting kind. They’d moved here for her, after all. Had left Billings because Jay was willing to give up the job he loved for her peace of mind. Out there, he’d been a member of a barehanding crew, an elite high-voltage repair team that worked on live lines up in the flash zone, perching like birds on wires pulsing with deadly current. In November, they’d learned just how deadly.

Sabrina had met Jay through her brother, Tim. They’d been coworkers, although that term wasn’t strong enough. They were more like Special Ops team members than colleagues. Every call-out was a mission where death waited. The bonds were different in that kind of work, ran deeper, and her always-protective older brother voiced nothing but approval of Jay. She’d met Jay at a barbecue, had their first date a week later, and were married a year after that. Someone put tiny high-voltage poles next to the bride and groom on their wedding cake, and they assumed that was the extent of the prank. It wasn’t. The miniature lines actually carried a low-voltage current that Tim energized just as Jay went to cut the cake. Jay had jumped nearly a foot in the air, and the rest of the crew fell to the floor laughing.

For several years, that was how it went. Tim and Jay were closer than most brothers. Then came November. A routine call-out. Tim on the line making a simple repair, confident that it wasn’t energized. What he didn’t know was that less than a mile away, someone was firing up a massive gas generator, unwilling to wait on the repairs. The generator, improperly installed, a home-wired job, created a back feed. For an instant, as Tim held the wire in his hands, the harmless line went live again.

He’d died at the top of the pole. Jay had climbed up to bring his body down.

Three weeks after the funeral, Jay told Sabrina he was done with the barehanding work. There was a foreman’s job open in Red Lodge, and taking it meant he’d stay on the ground, always, and she would never have to think of him climbing a pole again, never have to worry about the job claiming her husband as well as her brother.

“Love you,” he said, rising from the table.

She kissed him one last time. “Love you too.”

He went into the garage and she heard his truck start and then she pulled open the front door and stood in the howling wind so she could wave good-bye. He tapped the horn twice, the Road Runner good-bye-beep-beep-and was gone. She shut the door feeling both annoyed and guilty, as she always did when he went out in weather like this, torn between the fear of what waited out there for him and the knowledge that she should be proud of the work he did.

She was proud too. She really was. This winter had been worse than most, that was all. The pain of losing Tim compounded by the tumult of moving-those things were to blame for her discontent, not Red Lodge. The snow would melt and summer would come. The coffee shop she’d owned in Billings wouldn’t have lasted anyhow. The landlord had been ready to sell, Sabrina hadn’t found a good replacement location, and so summer in Billings had loomed ominously. Now summer was promising; she’d already found good real estate for a new location, and she had the peace of knowing that, whatever happened out there today, her husband would stay on the ground.

Red Lodge was a fresh start.

He called the first time at noon. She was outside shoveling the walk, out of breath when she answered.

“We lost a sixty-nine kV line just off the highway,” he reported.

That translated to 69 kilovolts, which meant 69,000 volts. A standard home ran on 110 or 220 volts.

“The work is going fast so far, though, and the forecasts are good,” Jay said.

She’d seen that. An Alberta clipper was blowing down out of Canada, drying out the air. The snow had tapered off and the roads were passable. At least up to Red Lodge, they were passable. Beyond, as the highway snaked toward eleven thousand feet, the pass had been closed for six months and would be for another two.

“Maybe there’s a chance of a normal dinner,” she said.

“Maybe.” His voice held optimism.

A few hours later, it didn’t.

The call at five was shorter than the first, and he was distressed.

“Definitely going to be a late one.”

“Really?” She was surprised, because the storm had died off around one, and their power was back on.

“Never seen anything like it. Somebody’s cutting trees so they fall into the lines. We’re getting faults farther and farther up into the mountains, and they’re cut trees, every time. Chain saws and some asshole on a snowmobile having himself a hell of a time, dropping trees onto the lines, keeping just out in front of us like some kid playing tag. We put one up, he cuts one down.”

“Are the police there?”

“Haven’t seen them yet. I’d tell you I’m almost done, but right now, I don’t have any idea. They’re fresh cuts; I could still see the sawdust in the snow on the last one. It’s the damnedest thing…they’ve got a pattern, pulling us farther out of town. Whoever’s doing it is probably watching me send my crew up on the poles and having a laugh.”

Fatigue was often a factor in deaths on the lines, and the idea of Jay’s team, men like her brother, climbing pole after pole in a snowstorm, gradually wearing down, all because of someone’s vandalism was infuriating.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “Hopefully this asshole’s chain saw is about out of gas. Actually, I hope his snowmobile is. I’d like to meet this guy.”

She wished him luck, hung up, and, sweaty and tired, went upstairs to take a shower. At the top of the steps, she turned and looked back at the mountains, wondering where in them he was. They were already dark.

What’s the point? she thought. Mindless behavior, drunk boys with powerful toys. But dangerous.

She wanted it to be mindless, at least. But as the water heated up and the room filled with steam and she stepped into the shower, she found that Jay’s words were unsettling her more than the actual facts. It was how he’d described the fallen trees as pulling us farther out of town.

When she came out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a nightgown, a cloud of steam traveling through the door with her, she understood in an immediate, primal way exactly why it had disturbed her.

There was a man sitting on her bed wearing snowmobile clothes, goggles hanging around his neck and a pistol in his hand.

Sabrina didn’t scream, just reacted without thinking, recognition at warp speed-Threat is in the bedroom, phone is in the bedroom, escape is through the bedroom, so retreat is the only option-and she stumbled backward and slid the door shut. It was a pocket door, most of the interior doors in their new home were, and when they’d viewed the house she’d told the real estate agent how much she liked them. Now she hated them, because the pocket door had no real lock, just a flimsy latch that her frantic hands couldn’t maneuver, and she could hear the sound of the man leaving the bed and approaching. She barely got her hands out of the way before he kicked the door, and the lock turned into a twisted shard of metal as the door blew off its track and the frame splintered. A large, gloved hand reached in and grasped the edge of the door and shoved it backward and now Sabrina was out of options. Everything that could save her was beyond him, and she wouldn’t get beyond him. He was so large that he filled the door frame, and even though his clothing was unusually bulky, she could tell that he was massive beneath it. He had dark, emotionless eyes and his hair was shaved down to stubble against his thick skull.

“Who are you?” she said. It was the only question that mattered to her in that moment. His identity, not his intention, because the gun announced his intention.

“My name is Garland Webb.” His voice was deep, and the words came slow and echoed in the tiled room. “I am very tired. I had to make a long journey in a short time for you.”

“What do you want?”

“We harnessed air for this,” he said, as if that answered her question. “That’s all we need. People think they need so much more. People are wrong.”

Then he lifted the pistol and shot her.

There was a soft pop and hiss and then a stab of pain in her stomach. She screamed, finally, screamed high and loud and long and he let her do it, never moving from the doorway. He just lowered the pistol and watched with a half smile as she fell back against the wall, and her hands moved to her stomach, searching for the wound, the source of the pain. Her fingers brushed something strange, soft and almost friendly to the touch, and she looked down and saw the arrow sticking out of her belly just below her ribs. No, not an arrow. Too small. It had a metal shaft and a plastic tube that faded to small, angled pieces of soft, plastic-like feathers. A dart.

She felt warmth unfolding through her body and thought, Something was in that and now it’s in me, oh my God, what was in there? and she tried to pull it free from her stomach. It didn’t come loose, just stretched her skin and increased the pain and drew the first visible blood. The thin blue fabric of her nightgown kept her from seeing the point of the dart clearly, but she could feel what it was-there was a barb on the end, just like a fishhook, something to anchor it in her flesh.

“Air,” the big man with the dead eyes said again, sounding immensely pleased, and the unfolding warmth within Sabrina reached her brain, and her vision swam and there was a buzzing crescendo in her ears like the inside of a hornet’s nest. She looked up from the dart, trying to find the man, trying to ask why.

She slid down the wall and fell against the toilet, unconscious, with the question still on her lips.

2

The man who’d been accused of murdering Markus Novak’s wife was in prison for the sexual assault of another woman when a talented young public defender won his freedom by pointing out a series of legal errors that had robbed Garland Webb of his right to a fair trial.

Mark wasn’t present for the judge’s ruling. He was on a fishing charter out of Key West with his mentor and former employer, Jeff London. The fishing trip was London’s idea. Whatever happened in the appeal, he said, did not affect the case Mark was trying to build. Whether Garland Webb was in prison or out of prison, he still hadn’t been convicted of Lauren’s murder. That was the next step.

It all made good sense, but Mark knew the real reason that he’d been invited out on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico while Garland Webb learned his fate: He’d had a few too many conversations with Jeff on the topic and made a few too many promises. The promises involved bullets in Garland’s head, and Jeff believed them.

Upon winning appeal and earning his release, Garland Webb met one last time with his attorney, a young gun named John Graham who considered the case his most significant victory to date. The prosecutor had made a series of egregious errors en route to conviction, so Graham had always felt good about his legal argument, but you never could be sure of a win when the original conviction involved a heinous crime. At that point you needed more than the law on your side, you needed to be able to sell it, and John Graham had put all of his considerable powers of persuasion into the case. He also felt good about the appellate victory for the simple reason that it was right. His client had not been granted a fair trial, and John Graham believed deeply in the purity of the process.

All the same…

He was troubled by Garland Webb.

In their final meeting, John offered his best attempt at a warm smile and extended his hand to his client. “Sometimes, the system works,” he said. “How does it feel to be a free man, Garland?”

Webb regarded him with eyes so expressionless they seemed opaque. He was six four and weighed 230 pounds, and when he accepted the handshake, John felt a sick chill at the power in his grip.

“I guess you’re not the celebrating sort,” he said, because Garland still hadn’t uttered a word. “Do you have everything you need? There’s a release-assistance program that will-”

“I have everything I need.”

“All right. I’m sure it will be a relief to walk out of here.”

“Just back to business,” Garland Webb said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s time for me to get back to business. No more diversions.”

“Right,” John said, though he had no idea what Webb meant, and he was uncomfortable with what he might mean.

Webb fixed the flat-eyed stare on him and said, “I have a purpose, understand? This detour was unfortunate, but it did not remove my purpose.”

“Right,” John repeated. “I’m just supposed to let you know that if you need assistance finding a job or locating a-”

“I’m going back to the same job,” Webb said.

John fell silent. He’d spent several months on this case and he knew damn well that Garland Webb had been unemployed at the time of his arrest.

“Where will you be working?” he asked, and Garland Webb smiled. It was little more than a twitch of the lip, but it was more emotion than he’d displayed when the judge had announced the verdict in his favor.

“I’ve got opportunities,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“Great,” John said, and suddenly he was eager to get out of the room and away from this man. “Stay out of trouble, Garland.”

“You too, John.”

John Graham left before Garland did, although he’d initially intended to stay with him through the process all the way up to the point of escorting him out of the prison. That no longer felt right. In fact, winning the freedom of Garland Webb suddenly didn’t feel like much of a victory at all.

On the day Webb collected his belongings and walked to a bus station, before he left, he bribed a guard to send a message to another inmate at Coleman. The message got through, and the inmate requested a phone call. Seven miles off the southernmost shore of the United States, Markus Novak’s cell rang.

They’d been having a good day of it, but in the afternoon the fishing had slowed; the Gulf of Mexico began churning with high swells, and Jeff London turned a shade of green that matched the water.

“Bad sandwich,” he said, and Mark smiled and nodded.

“Bad sandwich, eh?”

“I don’t get seasick.”

“Of course not.”

When Jeff put his head in his hands, Mark laughed and set his rod down and moved to the bow, where he stood and stared at the horizon line, the endless expanse of water broken only by whitecapped waves. All of his memories of the sea were good, because all of them involved Lauren. Sometimes, though, when the light and the wind were right, the sea reminded him of other endless places. Expansive plains of the West; windblown wheat instead of water; storm-blasted buttes.

Not so many of those memories were good.

He’d been watching the water for a while when he heard the ring, a soft chime, and the charter captain, who was lounging with his feet up and a cigar in his mouth, said, “That’s yours, bud.”

Mark found the phone in his jacket pocket, and he remained relaxed, warm and comfortable and with his mind on this boat and this day, until he saw the caller ID: COLEMAN CORRECTIONAL.

For an instant he just stared, but then he realized he was about to lose the call to voice mail, so he hit Accept and put the phone to his ear.

He knew the voice on the other end. It was a man he’d spoken to many times, a snitch who’d contacted Mark for legal help, which Mark provided in exchange for a tip on who killed his wife. The police didn’t believe the story; the snitch held to it.

“He sent me a note, Novak. For you. For both of us. Here’s what it says: ‘Please tell Mr. Novak that his efforts were a disappointment, and every threat was only so much wasted breath. I’d hoped for more. Let him know that I’ll think of him outside this prison just as I thought of him inside it, and, more important, that I’ll think of her. The way she felt at the end. I’ll treasure that moment. It’s a shame he wasn’t there for it. She was so beautiful at the end.’”

The man on the phone had once beaten someone to death with an aluminum baseball bat, but his voice wavered as he read the last words. When he was done, he waited, and Mark didn’t speak. The silence built as the boat rose and fell on the waves, and finally the other man said, “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Yes,” Mark said. “I want to know. It is important that I know.” His voice was hollow, and Jeff London lifted his head with a concerned expression. “Is that all he had to say?”

“That’s all. He’s made some threats to me, you know that, but ain’t shit happened, so maybe he’s all talk. Maybe about…about this too, you know? Just one of them that likes to claim shit to make themselves feel hard. I’ve known them before.”

“You told me you didn’t think he was that kind,” Mark said. “You said you knew better. You said he was telling the truth.”

A pause; then: “I remember what I said.”

“Anything changed your opinion?”

“No.”

“All right. Thanks for the call. I’ll send money to your commissary account.”

“Don’t need to, not for this. I just thought…well, you needed to hear it.”

“I’ll send money,” Mark repeated, and then he hung up. Jeff was staring at him, and the charter captain was making a show of working with his tackle, his back to them.

“That was about Webb?” Jeff said.

Mark nodded. He found the horizon line again but couldn’t focus on it.

“He’s taunting me. He killed her, he knows that I know it, and he’s a free man. He wanted to let me know that he’ll be thinking of me, and her. From outside of a cell now.”

“It’s a dumb play. He’ll go back to prison.”

“Yeah?” Mark turned to him. “Where is he?”

“Don’t let this take you back to the dark side, brother. You’ve got to build a case, and you’ve got to-”

“Someone has to settle the score for her.”

Jeff’s face darkened. “There are lots of tombstones standing over men who made proclamations like that.”

“I don’t want a tombstone. When I’m gone, you take the ashes wherever you’d like. Just make sure there’s a strong wind blowing. I want to have a chance to travel.”

“That’s a bad joke.”

“It’s not a joke at all,” Mark said. “I hope you remember the request should the need ever arise.” He looked at the charter captain. “You mind bringing us in a couple hours early?”

The captain looked from Mark to Jeff and shook his head when no objection was raised. “It’s your nickel, bud.”

“Thanks,” Mark said. “We had a good run this morning. Sorry to cut it short. That’s just how it goes sometimes.”

Jeff’s voice was soft and sad when he said, “He won’t be in Cassadaga, Markus. You know that. He won’t go back there.”

“He could.”

Jeff shook his head. “You’re just feeding the darkness if you do that. Think about Lauren. What she believed, what she worked for! What she would want.”

“You’re asking me to consider what she would have wanted in her life. She’s dead, Jeff. Who’s to say what she wants now? In those last seconds of her life, maybe she formed some different opinions.”

3

The sun had barely been up when Jay left on the first call-out, but it had set and risen again by the time he made it home and found a stranger at his kitchen table.

Jay was so exhausted, so bone-tired, and the man was so relaxed, sitting with one leg crossed over the other and a polite smile, that Jay felt no threat. Just surprise, and only a modicum of that. He was confused by the stranger’s presence but unbothered by it because of the way he sat so calmly, with a cup of coffee, still steaming, close at hand. It was one of Jay’s mugs, and his perception was that his wife must have brewed the coffee. Everything that Jay didn’t understand about his visitor, Sabrina must know.

“How’s it going?” Jay said to the stranger as he shed his jacket and set to work unlacing his boots.

“Long day?” the stranger asked, genial and compassionate. He was a lean man with a narrow, pale face and long hair tied back in a tight topknot against his skull.

“A day so long it started yesterday,” Jay said, liking the stranger well enough. He walked past him, out of the kitchen and into the living room, and called for his wife.

“Sabrina isn’t home,” the stranger said. He took a drink of the coffee. He didn’t bother turning to face Jay.

“Pardon?” Jay’s next thought was that the man must be a neighbor unknown to him, because Sabrina hadn’t gone far-her car was in the garage. Sabrina was the more outgoing of the two of them, and she tended to the neighbors with an interest Jay had never been able to muster. His initial concern in Red Lodge had been getting to know the power grid, not the neighbors.

“She’s not in the house, is what I mean,” the stranger said.

Jay was standing in the living room, looking back at the man in the kitchen. The stranger set the coffee down, lifted a cell phone that was resting on the table, and beckoned to Jay.

“Come here. I’ll show you.”

Jay walked up beside him obediently. He wasn’t sure if the man had a message on the phone or if he intended to call Sabrina, wasn’t sure of anything but that the situation, however odd, was absent of menace.

Then he saw the phone’s display.

At first he thought the image on the screen was a still photo. For a few frozen, shocked seconds, he was convinced of it. Then his wife moved, and shackles rattled across her body, and he understood that it was a video.

“She’s unhurt, as you see,” the stranger said in an unfazed voice. “A bit groggy now, but physically unharmed. She’ll remain in that condition as long as you desire. Everything in Sabrina’s future belongs to your choices, Mr. Baldwin.”

On the screen, Sabrina shifted again. She was wearing a pale blue nightgown that Jay had given her two Christmases ago and there was a handcuff on her wrist that was fastened to long links of a chain that trailed offscreen. Jay was numbly aware of the floor beneath her-unvarnished boards, clean and showing no blood. He was looking for blood already. As Jay stood in his kitchen and watched, Sabrina glanced down at her wrist and cocked her head from side to side, as if she didn’t understand the meaning of the handcuff and was trying to make sense of it.

Jay started to shout something then. A question, a threat. Maybe just a scream. He didn’t know, exactly, because when he turned from the phone’s display and gave the stranger in his house his full attention for the first time, he saw that the man now had a short-barreled revolver in his right hand that was pointing at Jay’s belly. The genial expression was gone, and his eyes were empty.

“Her future belongs to your choices,” he repeated.

Jay tried to focus on the man in front of him, on the tangible threat, but his mind was still on that image of Sabrina. He stood and trembled in silence, like a frightened dog.

“Let’s not waste time,” the stranger said. “You have many questions, I know. You’ll have answers soon. But I can’t give them here. We’ll need to relocate. You’ll drive. It’s not so far. We can talk on the way.”

“Why?” Jay said. Just one word, but one that carried the weight of all his terror.

“You’ve been selected, Mr. Baldwin. Consider it an honor. You’re about to be part of something historic.”

The stranger held the gun close to Jay’s skull as Jay put his boots back on. While his head was bowed, Jay let his eyes drift to the stranger’s feet, and he saw something there that bothered him.

He was wearing what looked like everyday construction boots, built for hard work, but they had unusually thick rubber soles, and none of the eyes or grommets were metal. Everything was leather or rubber. It was the kind of boot you wore when you worked around high-voltage equipment and knew that any trace of metal could kill you.

4

On the day he visited Cassadaga to see the place where his wife had died, Mark began by taking the same run she had made on the last morning of her life.

Lauren’s route through St. Petersburg’s bay front took him down Fifth Avenue and past Straub Park, facing Tampa Bay. There he angled left and ran alongside the seawall as it curved toward the bridge between Old Northeast and Snell Isle. At the bridge he stopped running and then walked back, letting his breathing settle. Once, during an early run here, he’d seen a shadow in the water and loudly announced the presence of a shark. It was actually a dolphin. Lauren, born and bred on the Gulf Coast, a scuba diver from the age most kids learn to ride bikes, laughed so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Mark thought of that moment often-Lauren in running shorts and tank top, soaked with sweat, looking fit and impossibly young, doubled over and gasping with laughter she didn’t have the air for, her ponytail bobbing as if to count off the wheezes of her silent laughs.

“I know you’re from the mountains,” she’d said when she could finally speak, “but I have never heard anyone yell ‘Shark!’ like that in my life. Outside of the movie Jaws, that is. It tells me things about you, babe-you see Flipper and you scream ‘Shark!’ That tells me things.”

He told her that he hadn’t screamed anything, he’d just announced what he thought he’d seen. Announced it a little loudly, maybe, for clarity’s sake. That only made her laugh harder. She’d ended up on her butt on the sidewalk, arms wrapped around her knees and tears in her eyes, fighting for air.

Following today’s run he stopped for a cup of coffee at Kahwa, the little coffee shop on his building’s ground floor, then went upstairs, entered his condo, and walked out onto the deck. There he sipped the coffee, shook a single cigarette loose from a pack of American Spirits, and lit it. This was the last part of the routine, and the one he liked least. He had hated his wife’s cigarette habit. It was the only consistent fight they ever had-he told her it was selfish to those who loved her because it could take her from them young.

Funny, the things you could be so strident about. So convicted of.

When she died and left a pack behind, he couldn’t bring himself to throw them out. He smoked them instead, like a Catholic lighting candles for the dead. Then he bought another pack, continuing the one-a-day ritual. There in the morning on the deck, in the smell of sweat and cigarettes, he could close his eyes and, for an instant, feel as if she were at his side.

Today he stubbed out the cigarette early and headed for the shower. He had a drive to make, and he’d been waiting too long on it already.

Lauren’s car had been returned to Mark nine weeks after she was buried. The title was in both of their names, so he was the rightful owner and the police couldn’t claim it was a crime scene any longer. No evidence was in the car.

Their condo building in St. Petersburg had been designed to feel spacious despite the constraints of reality, and the garage featured an admirable attempt to fit two cars into a single parking space. Hydraulic lifts hoisted one vehicle in the air so another could be parked below it. A seamless system-provided that you and your spouse worked in strict military shifts or were indifferent to which car you drove. Lauren was not indifferent. She loved the Infiniti, its look, speed, and handling. It was her car. Mark’s old Jeep-filled with empty coffee cups and notepads and the gym clothes he inevitably forgot to bring up and put in the laundry-was not an acceptable substitute. When she wanted to go somewhere, she was going to go in her own car.

He parked on the street. Problem solved.

Neither of them ever used the lift, but when the police returned the car to Mark, he put it up there. Lauren’s pearl-white Infiniti coupe had been sitting on the top of the lift, untouched, for nearly two years when he turned the key that operated the hydraulics. The system hummed and groaned and then lowered the car slowly, like pallbearers easing a casket into the ground. The tires were low, and the battery was dead. He used a portable generator to air up the tires, pulled his Jeep in the garage long enough to jump the battery, and then got behind the wheel, closed the door, and waited for the profound wash of memories.

He wanted to be able to smell her, feel her, taste her. He had a million memories of the car, and Lauren was in all of them, and he felt as if the vehicle should have held on to some of her. Instead, all he smelled was warm dust and all he felt was heat blasting from the air vents. It had been a warm day when she’d died but a cold one when he’d driven the car back onto the lift.

After he had listened to the engine purr for a few seconds, he backed out of the garage and drove toward Cassadaga.

Mark had never known anyone who was more emphatically opposed to capital punishment than his wife. For many years, as they lived and worked together, Mark had shared her beliefs. He preached them, and he practiced them. When Lauren was killed, he continued to do so-publicly.

He wasn’t sure exactly when he parted with them in his soul.

Maybe her funeral. Maybe when he saw the crime scene photographs. Maybe the very moment the sheriff’s deputy arrived to tell him the news.

It was hard to be sure of a thing like that.

The thing he was sure of now? The game was over. It had ended with Garland Webb’s parting words. And it was time to be honest-he’d never really believed in it like Lauren did. He’d wanted to, and maybe even convinced himself that he did, because it was the ideology of the woman he loved. He often assured her of his understanding of the world: No man should kill another, no matter the circumstances, no matter the sins. He’d meant it then, and he thought that was important-he’d meant the words when he’d said them.

Back then, he had a wife he was deeply in love with, a job that fulfilled him, and no reason to wish death on anyone.

Things change.

In the three months that had passed since Mark resigned from Innocence Incorporated, the death penalty-defense firm where he’d worked as an investigator and where Lauren had worked as an attorney, he’d been focused on only two things: regaining his health after injuries he’d suffered during a brutal case in Indiana, and replacing the rumors about Garland Webb with hard evidence.

He’d come along a lot better with the first task than the second. He felt as good physically as he had in a long time. As for Webb’s guilt, Mark had succeeded only in producing evidence that he could have been in Cassadaga, Florida, on the day that Lauren was killed there.

Evidence of any kind in Lauren’s murder had been hard to come by. She’d been working a case that-on the surface-didn’t appear to threaten anyone who lived within five hundred miles of Cassadaga, and her final notes supported that. There was no fresh information, no new names, nothing unexplained save for a three-word phrase she’d scrawled in the notebook that she’d left in the passenger seat of her car. Those words, rise the dark, had intrigued detectives initially, but nobody, Mark included, had ever been able to make any sense of them. As for Garland Webb, who’d allegedly claimed her killing, all Mark had was possibility. He didn’t yet have any proof that Webb had been there when Lauren pulled her car to the side of a lonely country road, stepped out, and began to walk along a trail lined with tall oaks and thick stands of bamboo. She was shot twice in the head sometime after that. The person who found her could say only that the car’s hood was still warm. The coroner said that Lauren was too. Dead, but still warm.

Whatever happened, happened fast.

Nobody knew why she’d stepped out of the car. A threat, maybe. Trust, perhaps. That’s how close the police were to ascertaining the truth of her murder: somewhere between trust and threat.

The last indisputable fact of Lauren’s life was where it had ended.

Mark had stayed away from that place for a long time. Too long.

5

While never allowing himself to see the actual spot, limiting his exposure to her death scene to the study of photographs and maps because he believed to see it would be too powerful, too devastating, Mark felt like he knew it well. Felt like he could give guided tours, in fact, of the strange little town that he’d never seen.

Turn your heads to the right, ladies and gentlemen, and you’ll see the Colby Memorial Temple. In New York in 1888, a Spiritualist named George Colby claimed he had been given a directive from a spirit guide named Seneca: Colby was to move south and start his own Spiritualist colony. So it had been decreed. Colby moved.

He settled in Volusia County, Florida. And the colony lasted. More than a hundred years later, the residents of the Cassadaga camp maintain the Spiritualist faith, and most are registered mediums…

There he would begin to struggle, because there he would be confronted with all that he hated about the place. His mother had been a con artist in the West, and pretending to have access to the dead was one of her go-to moves for extra dollars. The idea of an entire group endorsing such behavior, of a town filled with “registered” mediums, seers of the past and future, repulsed him.

He parked in front of the Cassadaga Hotel, a Spanish-looking stone structure where people could make appointments with many of the area’s mediums, including the woman who was the last known person to see his wife alive and who had once rented a room to a man named Garland Webb.

The hotel operated as sort of a central dispatch for the mediums. Some worked in the hotel, covering hours in shifts, while others met clients in their homes. The psychic Lauren had come to see was named Dixie Witte, and Lauren had gone to the hotel first, so that was how Mark approached it.

He had a gun on under a light soft-shell jacket. He usually carried a nine-millimeter, but today he had a.38-caliber revolver. That was the caliber of gun that had killed Lauren, and Mark wanted to return the favor accurately. He also had a small digital recorder in one pocket and a tactical flashlight in the other.

Once he was inside the hotel, though, the idea of needing any of these things seemed laughable. It was an open, charming place with a wine bar and a coffee shop. A sign indicated that appointments with mediums could be made inside the gift shop, which was tended by a woman in her fifties dressed in a swirl of loose fabric, everything flowing and brightly patterned and billowing around her. She told him cheerfully that of course she could set up an appointment with Dixie. Bracelets with heavy stones adorned her left wrist; he saw she wore rings on every finger when she dialed the phone. The little gift shop sold the kind of cheap trinkets that did not seem likely to promote anyone’s belief in the legitimacy of the camp, making it feel more like a tourist trap than a place of heightened communication. He listened to the woman’s side of the conversation, and then she put the phone to her chest and said, “Are there any special issues you’d like to discuss? She’ll spend some time channeling the proper energy if she knows what to be open for.”

Mark nodded as if that made perfect sense, thought about it for a moment, and then said, “Tenants.”

The cheerful woman frowned. “Tenants?”

“Yes. I have some questions about tenants.”

“Can you specify an emotional connection you have to this question about tenants?”

“Rage.”

Her eyes narrowed and she seemed about to ask him something, but she held off, lifted the phone again, and said, “Mr. Novak has questions about…um, tenants, and he has issues with anger.” She listened for a few seconds, then said, “Good,” and hung up.

“Dixie will see you this evening at seven.”

“That’s great.”

She took out a map and drew a circle and a square on it. “The square is us, and you’re headed to the circle. It’s easy to find, but there are two houses on the property. You’ll want forty-nine A, not forty-nine B.”

Garland Webb had rented 49B once. Fortunately for Garland, Dixie Witte didn’t like record-keeping, and she dealt in cash. She’d never been able to recall whether he was present on the day in question. She also hadn’t volunteered his existence as a tenant until after the prison snitch turned up with his report.

“I’m sure I’ll find the right place,” Mark said. “I assume the neighbors all have an uncanny sense of direction.”

It was his first slip, the sarcasm bubbling forth already when he’d promised himself to contain it, promised himself that he would take them seriously, as Lauren had. Five minutes in town, and he was losing his footing.

“This is a place of healing, Mr. Novak,” the woman said. “It’s not the place you think it is, which I can see in your eyes. You have much scorn for us. That’s fine, but it won’t help you. If you wish to open yourself to possibility here, you’ll be rewarded.”

“I’ve seen some of this town’s rewards,” Mark said.

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be a skeptic. But the reading will help, whether you’re open or closed to it. A skeptic walks out of a reading with doubt intact, but also with echoes.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mark said, and then he left the gift shop and walked through the hotel lobby and back into the humid day, glad to be out of the place. The breezes were gone and the sky was a flat gray and when a truck passed by, the dust it lifted fell swiftly back to earth.

The woman in the hotel had felt too familiar to him, had stirred old angers. She was the sort who peddled bullshit statements that people could easily mold to fit their own situations. The crime of it, Mark thought, was that those people believed they’d been granted insight, not a fortune cookie. Mark’s mother had been good enough at that. Her favorite role was Snow Creek Maiden of the Nez Perce, a white woman passing herself off as an American Indian because so many white people believed that Indians were more spiritually in tune, never sensing the inherent racism there. She would dye her hair and skin and don traditional garb. The tourists would look into her eyes-they were blue but shielded with dark contacts-and nod with amazement because whatever generality she tossed at them connected with something in their pasts. They made the connections themselves, but they credited her for it. And paid for the joke.

It was this experience that had left Mark with scorn for the people who practiced their games in a place like this, and it was that scorn that led his wife to take an assignment that had been headed for his desk and claim it as her own. The interview with Dixie Witte had been Mark’s job. Lauren didn’t think he’d be able to approach it with sincerity, thought that he was biased against anyone who claimed psychic gifts, and so she’d interceded and come to Cassadaga herself.

Never left.

Thunder, long and loud, chased Mark as he walked away from the hotel and through the camp. The air was thick with humidity and scented with jasmine and honeysuckle. There was only one paved street, the road that ran through the center of the camp, and the rest of the homes were built off narrow lanes of crushed stone and hard-packed earth. The lanes were framed by tall oaks that were cobwebbed with Spanish moss.

It was a strange little place. Some of the homes were neat and well kept, recently restored in a few cases, and others looked like they’d been built by someone using the wrong end of the hammer. Mark walked by a man who was doing clean and jerks with a barbell and a pair of forty-five-pound plates in the middle of his front yard. He was shirtless and had a thick mat of black hair across his chest and stomach, shining with sweat, and he called out the reps in a grunting voice as he powered the weights up. Who needs a gym when you’ve got a front yard? Or a shirt when you could grow your own? Ten feet to his side, chickens clucked and scratched their way around a coop that had been made out of an old truck’s camper shell. The local power-lifter seemed to be of the waste-not, want-not mind-set.

Each street sign included a bold white 911 inside a green circle. Mark had never seen anything like it. The idea probably had something to do with giving emergency services a firm address on roads that had previously been unmarked or unnamed, but the effect was disconcerting, seeming to cry out that a disaster waited down each winding lane.

Mr. Novak? I’m afraid I have some difficult news to share. It’s about your wife.

The deputy who’d come for him that night, who’d found Mark waiting at the Siesta Key beach house where he and Lauren were supposed to have a romantic weekend escape, had never heard of Cassadaga. That night, Mark had heard of it only from his wife.

Since then, he’d spent much of his time in the place, in mind if not in body.

Mr. Novak? I’m afraid I have some difficult news to share. It’s about your wife.

The day after their engagement, Lauren’s father had invited Mark over for a beer, just the two of them. Mark was expecting the typical “Now, you take good care of my baby girl” speech, and while he received a version of it, he wasn’t prepared for the depth of pain in the other man’s eyes. It was the first time he’d understood the fear that lived like a heartbeat within a parent. A good parent, at least.

“Having a child,” Lauren’s father had said, “is to spend your life swimming with sharks. You think I’m joking, but it’s only because you don’t know yet. You haven’t seen one grow up and walk off into the world, and when you do, you’ll think about all the things that could be waiting out there; you’ll think of car accidents and cancer and kidnappings and all the other horrors in a way you didn’t before you had a child. You always knew they were out there, but you didn’t care in the same way. Then you have a daughter, and…well, then you see the sharks. They’ll start circling in your mind, and they’ll never leave. You’ll just pray they keep circling forever. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m not a shark,” Mark had said, and then he’d smiled, because he had no children and so he didn’t understand what the water here was like. Lauren’s father hadn’t returned the smile. He’d searched Mark’s eyes for a long time before he nodded. They drank their beers and talked football, boats, and movies, everything lighthearted and casual, but Mark was uneasy the rest of the night, because what he’d seen in the other man’s eyes was something he’d never known himself. It had been many years since he’d last wondered who his own father was, but that night he did. He wondered whether that man had ever thought of the sharks. Even once.

More thunder. A stillness to the western edge of town, as if the trees were lying low, trying not to attract the attention of the oncoming bullying clouds.

Though Mark hadn’t been in the town before, he knew exactly how to find Dixie Witte’s home. He’d spent plenty of time looking at it on maps. The second story of the house leaned away from the foundation like a drunk trying to balance on one leg; the front-porch windows were cracked or had plastic where glass belonged; the ferns in the yard had grown so high they were nearly to the roof of a rusted-out Ford Taurus. The undergrowth was thick, so Mark couldn’t tell for sure, but he would have laid a high-dollar bet that the car no longer had wheels. Might not even have an engine. A shed beside the house had a caved-in roof, and the blue plastic tarp that had been pulled across the hole was bowed with trapped rainwater. It was the sort of place that made you think you might catch a viral disease if you stood downwind of it.

Mark had lived in a lot of shitholes in his childhood, and in a truck for a time, but even his mother wouldn’t have considered moving into this house.

This was where Garland Webb had lived for a two-month period before he moved on to Daytona Beach and was finally arrested for sexual assault.

There was a truck in the drive. A red Dodge lifted high on an aftermarket suspension with knobby terrain tires that were probably worth as much as the house. The truck was freshly washed and the red paint shone even in the gloom. Mark had met a few people who cared more about their trucks than their homes. It usually didn’t suggest good things. He walked around the main house, and a guesthouse at the rear of the property came into view. A small but well-kept little home painted blue with clean white trim. It was an incongruous pairing-the large home gone to hell, the small one lovingly maintained. The flowering bushes that bordered it were neatly clipped, and a stepladder stood beside an orange tree just in front of the house. A barefoot blond boy in overalls, no shirt underneath, was picking oranges. He couldn’t have been much more than seven years old, and he wobbled precariously as he reached for one.

“Careful,” Mark said, stepping to brace the ladder.

The boy plucked the orange free, set it in a basket that was balanced on the top step of the ladder, and turned to Mark. He was incredibly pale for Florida, with bright blue eyes.

“Hiya.”

“Hiya. Don’t lose your balance up there.”

“Don’t lose your balance down there.”

Mark grinned. “Fair enough. Is Dixie around?”

The boy shrugged. “She hasn’t paid me yet. When I’m done she’ll pay me. Fifty cents if I do the whole tree.”

“You need to adjust for inflation, kid. You’re getting taken.”

Another shrug.

Mark said, “You know most people in this town?”

“I know everybody.”

“You had the look of a connected man. Ever hear of a guy named Garland?”

“Nope.”

“What about a Mr. Webb? That mean anything to you?”

The boy shook his head. “They come and they go, though.”

“Who does?”

“People in the big house.” The boy pointed at the decrepit structure behind Mark. “They don’t stay long, and they don’t talk much.”

“What kind of people are they, would you say?”

“People like you.”

“Like me? What’s that mean?”

“Angry people,” the boy said, and Mark’s grin wavered. The clouds were shifting fast, and Mark was in shadow now, but the boy was in sunlight, his white skin bright beneath the grimy overalls. Only his bare feet, covered in dust, were dulled.

“I’m not angry,” Mark said.

Another shrug. “Don’t matter to me.”

“Okay. But I’m not angry, and you don’t need to worry about me.”

“I’m not worried about you at all. If you were bad, Walter would tell me.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “Walter?”

“He’s the man who used to own this house.”

Now Mark’s interest was genuine, because all he’d been told was that the home had belonged to Dixie Witte’s family for generations, and if anyone had dealt with Garland Webb, it would have been her.

“Someone else owned this place? This man, Walter, he sold it to Dixie?”

The boy shook his head. “Nah. He’s been dead almost since forever. He built the house way back during the Depression. But then he was murdered. The story I heard, someone cut off his hands. Put them in a cigar box. You ever seen something like that?”

Mark felt sick. Who in the hell was raising this kid, telling him that? What was the matter with the people in this town?

“Don’t listen to those stories,” he said. “Kids shouldn’t hear things like that.”

“It’s just what happened,” the boy said, indifferent. “But Walter likes you. He’s been walking with you ever since the gate. And Walter don’t leave the porch much.”

Mark had heard enough. He said, “Okay, kid. Thanks for the help. Don’t believe all the stories you’re told. And don’t fall off that ladder.”

“I never do.”

Holy shit, what a freak show this place is, Mark thought, and he was ashamed of the graveyard prickle he felt along his spine, as if there were really something to fear, when he walked back through the overgrown yard and out to the street. It was just because the weirdness had come from a child, that was all. If it had been only the woman in the hotel and others like her, the ones who made money shilling for clairvoyants and selling spook stories, fine. But to hear it from a child was disturbing.

The story I heard, someone cut off his hands. Put them in a cigar box. You ever seen something like that?

Freak show. Lauren had been right-there was no chance that Mark could have come to this place and conducted an interview without telegraphing his scorn. Not then, and not now. He didn’t need to hear the spirit talk; he needed to hear the facts. When did Garland Webb move in, when did he leave, what did he do in between, whom did he speak to, who came to visit? That was where the focus would remain with Dixie Witte. No visions necessary, thanks, just the truth-if she even knew how to tell that.

He’d reached the end of the dirt lane. He turned right on Kicklighter Road and headed south, toward the place where his wife had died.

6

Jay Baldwin drove east out of Red Lodge with a gun pressed to the back of his head. The stranger instructed Jay to take I-90 away from the mountains and back toward Billings. The man had his wrist balanced on the seat just beside the headrest, and Jay thought that eventually his hand would begin to ache and he’d lower the gun.

He didn’t.

For a few miles, Jay attempted to talk to him. He asked what the man wanted, told him that they had more money than the house suggested-he and Sabrina were savers, always had been.

The stranger didn’t speak.

Jay changed approaches then and went from offers to pleas. To outright begging. He said that his wife was the only thing that mattered to him in the world, talked about the kind of woman she was, strong and smart and, above all, forgiving. If she had any weakness, it was an excess of empathy, a desire to believe the best of everyone at all times, a tendency to forgive what should have been unforgivable. If she was released, she would forgive this man for these sins. So would Jay.

The stranger never answered.

They were thirty miles out of Red Lodge, the last traces of the mountain snow falling behind them, when Jay finally asked a question that broke the silence.

“What is your name?”

“Eli Pate.” This came conversationally enough, said with the same cordial manner he’d demonstrated in the house. Jay thought that it was a pointless question, because of course the man would lie. Still, he wanted something to call him.

“Eli…whatever you want from me, it’s-”

“Stay eastbound. Continue the conversation if you wish, but I have nothing to say. When I have something to say, you’ll hear it.”

For the remainder of the drive, there were no words exchanged beyond Eli’s curt instructions. They crossed the plains and cut through the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. It was wide-open country, the famous Montana sky hanging above them unbroken and endless. In a one-stoplight town called Lame Deer, Eli ordered Jay to turn north. They passed the reservation school, an institution named Chief Dull Knife College, and drove alongside a creek. From the time they’d set out, Jay had hoped he was being taken to the same place as his wife. The farther they’d gotten from his home and the deeper into the desolate land, the more he’d believed this would be the case. While he still didn’t understand the purpose behind it all, he took some solace in the idea that they would be reunited, no matter how awful the circumstances.

It wasn’t until he saw the plumes of bone-white smoke that he began to fear he was wrong about the reunion and to suspect for the first time why he’d been selected for the day’s horrors. As they pulled into the small town of Chill River, Jay was praying that Eli would send him farther north, toward someplace unknown. The unknown suddenly sounded better than turning east.

“Right on Willow Avenue and head east,” Eli Pate commanded him.

Jay understood now.

They followed Willow Avenue outside of town and soon the source of the smoke appeared on their right-four mammoth stacks protruding into the sky like spires, clouds foaming out of them. A sign in front cheerfully welcomed them to Chill River. TOMORROW’S TOWN…TODAY!

“Pull over for a moment.”

Jay put the truck on the shoulder of the road.

“You have an idea what you’re looking at, I assume?” Eli Pate said.

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“You already know.”

Eli Pate shifted in the seat and used his right hand to produce his cell phone. He kept the gun to Jay’s head with the left, then extended the phone so that they both could see the display. No video feed this time, just a still image. Sabrina, bleary-eyed and confused, looking at the shackle on her wrist as if she couldn’t make sense of it. Jay had to remind himself how to breathe.

“Tell me,” Eli Pate said again. His voice was very low.

“A generating station.” The words croaked from Jay’s constricted throat. He couldn’t look away from the image of Sabrina. When Eli Pate pocketed the phone, Jay was torn between relief and sorrow. He didn’t want to see his wife like that, but he also couldn’t bear not to see her at all.

“What generating station?” Eli Pate said. “Give me some detail. I’m nothing but a rube, Jay. You’re an expert.”

Jay stared at the place where the smoke met the sky.

“The Chill River generation station,” he said. “We’re looking at a coal-fired power plant.”

“Sounds impressive. Do you happen to know how much power it generates?”

“Peak output is more than two thousand megawatts.”

“Is that a lot?”

“Second-largest coal-fired station west of the Mississippi.” The gun was still against Jay’s skull, but he’d stopped noticing the sensation. All of his physical attention was now on those stacks and the snaking high-voltage lines that led away from the power plant. All of his mental attention was on the way his wife looked in that picture.

“Quantify that for me, Jay. How many people are fed by this operation?”

“Nearly a million.”

“That seems hard to believe, considering how far out in the sticks we are.”

“The power goes two hundred and fifty miles west of here. There it’s distributed into different grids, different transmission systems. All the way to the West Coast.” His words came in a monotone, his mind on Sabrina. Where did this man have her? The frame of the camera was too tight to indicate anything about her location. Only her condition.

“Fascinating stuff,” Eli Pate said. “One more question: How does it move to those different grids?”

“Through the five-hundred-kV transmission lines.”

“And how many of those lines are required to move all that electricity from here?”

Jay didn’t want to tell the truth, but the man already knew it, so there was no point in lying. “Two,” he said.

Eli Pate whistled between his teeth. “Goodness. How oddly vulnerable, don’t you think? Imagine if the public knew! Why, the fear it would conjure…that would be something to behold. I’ve been told something about you, and please correct me if I’m wrong-did you once work on those lines? Before the move to Red Lodge?”

“Yes.”

“Dangerous work. There’s a technique, I understand, called barehanding. It requires very brave men, very specialized training, very sophisticated equipment. Helicopters, even, and sometimes high rope work. That’s you, correct?”

Jay didn’t speak. Eli tapped the gun lightly on his skull. “Do you know why you’re here now, my friend?”

“No.”

“Sure you do. But I’ll humor you, because you’ve humored me. You’re here, Jay, to shut this show down. You’re here to turn off the lights.”

7

In the last minutes of her life, Lauren had driven out of Cassadaga on Kicklighter Road, headed away from the interstate. That intrigued and confused the homicide detectives. No one was aware of any destination she might have had other than Siesta Key, where Mark waited for her with steaks on the grill as the sun settled behind the Gulf of Mexico. That route called for her to take I-4 West, crossing central Florida the same way she’d come, and I-4 was north of Cassadaga. She’d headed south instead, but she hadn’t made it far before she pulled off the road. The investigators theorized that she’d stopped to get her bearings, realizing she’d made a mistake and not wanting to continue in the wrong direction down the wrong road.

The investigators didn’t know Lauren, though. This was a woman who, when Mark had asked her if she knew what state was west of Montana, had looked at him suspiciously, as if it were a trick question, and said, “Well, am I standing up in it or lying down?” He had great fun with that one, but it was a bizarre illustration of the way she considered maps: one-dimensionally; the only directions that mattered to her were right, left, and straight. Tell her to drive northwest and you’d get a blank stare in response. She’d graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida and aced the bar exam, but she had no interest in compasses.

All of this was part of the explanation for how she’d ended up driving southbound out of Cassadaga, according to the police. But again, you had to know her. One of the reasons Lauren was so bad with directions was that she’d always relied on technology as a crutch. Her Infiniti was equipped with a navigation system that she used constantly. If she was walking, she used the GPS on her phone. She’d do this even in St. Pete, let alone in a rural location she’d never been to before. A review of the GPS proved that she’d entered the address of the Cassadaga Hotel. When she’d headed south on Kicklighter, driving away from an unfamiliar town on an unfamiliar road, she’d had no guidance from the GPS, no programmed destination.

But she’d had a purpose. What was it?

Mark kept walking, passed an empty park beside a small lake, and then an opening appeared in the dense trees to his right. A path leading away from the road and into the woods.

His throat thickened and he felt pressure behind his eyes and heard a sound that seemed to come from inside his skull, a sound like a rubber band popping, stretched to its limits and about to snap. It was strange, disturbing. He blinked and rubbed his temples and the sensation faded and vanished. He stood there for a long time and looked at the road and the trees as if they would produce something, as if the dust would rise and swirl and materialize into a figure, someone with answers.

Not even the air moved, though.

It took him fifty paces to reach the spot. Her body had been found in a ditch just off the trail. The bamboo grew thick and tall around it, creating a jungle feel, a place of children’s nightmares, of dares to pass through alone at midnight. Up ahead, the trail curved to the right and opened up, and the world seemed brighter and welcoming and just out of reach.

The rain was falling steadily now, a silent soaking, the thunder gone. He looked at the dark water in the ditch for a long time, and he felt as if there was some gesture he should make, some words he should say. Nothing came, though. He turned from the ditch and walked back the way he’d come.

Directly across the road was a lake with a shelter house built at the end of a pier. He walked down the pier until he was beneath the roof and out of the rain. The lake’s surface was pebbled by raindrops, and trees bordered it in all directions. Close to the bank, thick layers of algae covered the water, giving it a swamplike look. Trash floated among the weeds, chip bags and plastic rings from six-packs and a stretched-out condom that looked like a sodden snakeskin. A beer can rode the water like a fisherman’s bobber.

He was leaning on the railing with his back to the road when he heard the truck. First the engine, then the crunch of the oversize tires on the gravel. The red truck from Dixie Witte’s property.

Next to the pier was a narrow ramp where you could put in a canoe or a johnboat. The lake wasn’t big enough to call for anything larger. The driver brought the truck all the way down the ramp until the front tires stood in at least a foot of water, although that didn’t even come up to the center of the hubcaps.

Mark didn’t turn away from the lake. The water was so dark it looked like a pool of oil. You couldn’t track the stems of the cattails for more than an inch beneath the surface. It was water that whispered of barely submerged alligators and slant-eyed cottonmouths curled around stumps, of rattling dredging chains, of men with badges and sunglasses working flat-bottomed boats, searching for bodies. In the rain, the lake’s surface looked like hammered metal.

When Mark finally turned to the truck, the driver rolled down the passenger window so he could see Mark clearly. Or, based on his stare and body language, so Mark could see him clearly. A big bastard with a wide jaw and a close-trimmed beard and a sleeveless shirt that facilitated the opportunity to appreciate his muscles and his tattoos. He sat there with his arm looped around the steering wheel, his triceps flexing and popping against his skin, the truck’s exhaust system growling like a tiger in a circus cage.

“Everything all right, bud?” he said.

“Just fine.”

“You want to tell me why you were walking around my property? Neighbor said you seemed mighty interested in my shit.”

Instead of answering, Mark watched the beer can bobbing among the green weeds and tried to match his breaths to it. He used to do the same thing with Lauren during sleepless nights. Match his breaths to hers until they were one. Sleep usually came fast for him then, but he never cared if it did. That was a good and peaceful feeling.

When the muscled-up man cut the engine, the loss of the big truck’s motor turned the lake quiet, the only sound the soft drumming of the rain on the metal roof of the shelter. It was falling slower now, and the air wasn’t stirring.

The driver’s door opened and then banged shut and there were twin splashes as his feet landed in the water, as if he hadn’t remembered how far into the lake he’d driven. Mark might have laughed about that, but as the big man rounded the back of the truck, he reached into the bed and grabbed a piece of rebar. It was about three feet long and had to weigh fifteen pounds. Swung with force, it would break a man’s leg.

Let’s not go this way, Mark thought, because he had worked so hard for so many years to bury this part of himself, to not be one of those grown men who fought like children for children’s reasons, almost all of them boiling down to egos in the end, and usually fueled by liquor. There had been a time when he believed he’d succeeded, that the lessons instilled by his uncles had been overridden by willpower and wisdom.

But then Lauren had died and occasionally the darkness would rise, and rise with a smile, because a taste for fighting was like a taste for whiskey-once you developed it, you didn’t rid yourself of it. Only controlled it.

The big man advanced, holding the rebar with strength and familiarity. Mark moved his hands from the dock railing, reached inside his jacket, and drew the.38.

The muscle-bound man came to a stop about two paces out on the pier, the rebar held in both hands and hovering in the air behind his right shoulder like he was a player in the on-deck circle taking practice cuts with a weighted bat.

“Right,” Mark said. “You’re already thinking maybe you should have been a touch more patient, aren’t you?”

He lowered the rebar. The free end banged off the pier. Mark could feel the shudder of impact through his feet.

“This seems stupid to you now, doesn’t it?” Mark said. “You’re thinking that it would be dumb to die just because you got all butt-hurt over someone walking around your yard and looking at your house. You’re right. But now that you’ve come this far, let’s talk. What’s your name?”

“Get fucked.”

“Your parents weren’t any more fond of you than I am, then. No surprise. Let’s try another one. How long have you lived in that house?”

This time he showed his middle finger.

“Does that mean one year?” Mark said.

“You’re lucky you were carrying today. Luckier that I wasn’t. Next time-”

“You will be,” Mark finished for him. “Sure. I believe it too. But the thing is? I wasn’t lucky to be carrying. I was prepared. Not everyone who’s passed through here in the past has been.”

The big man seemed confused by that message, but he didn’t have much room in his head for anything beyond hate right then.

“You really get that upset about me looking your house over?” Mark said. “Because to a rational mind, this seems like an overreaction.”

“I don’t know who in the hell you are. But I don’t want you on my property.”

“Duly noted. And my name is Markus Novak.”

The big man smiled, and Mark’s blood seemed to slow in his veins.

“That name amuses you?”

“You’re a little late,” the man said. “I wasn’t here when she got popped, bud, but I’ve heard the stories.”

When she got popped. Mark’s mouth had gone dry and each breath felt hot and dusty. The man was gathering confidence, pleased that he’d rattled Mark.

“That gun makes you feel pretty tough. Lucky you had it.”

“We’ve been over this,” Mark said as he started toward him through the gentle rain, and the part of him that did not want the fight was gone now, vanishing with the man’s smile as he’d said when she got popped, and the decision-making that came from above Mark’s shoulders had been subverted by the old memories that filled his blood and bones like a genetic code, a promise.

“It’s not luck,” he said. “My uncles taught me about guns. They had some hard-and-fast rules. One of them, well, it’s not particularly unique. Lots of people have the same rule. If you ever go so far as to draw the gun, you damn well better be ready to use it. You ever heard that one?”

The big man didn’t answer. His eyes were on Mark’s hand, and he was taking comfort in the fact that Mark’s index finger wasn’t near the trigger, and his thumb wasn’t near the hammer.

“It’s a good rule,” Mark said, and then he swung the barrel of the.38 into the center of the big man’s face.

Blood was flowing by the time he fell. He caught himself on the railing, went down on one knee, and the rebar dropped and rolled across the dock. He reached for it, but this time Mark did pull the hammer back.

“Technically, I just kept the rule,” he said. “We can let this count, or you can push for more.”

The big man sucked air in through his teeth as blood ran down his lips and splashed shining and red over the dock boards.

“You shouldn’t have smiled when you spoke of my wife,” Mark said. “That was a very bad decision. I’m going to give you the chance to make some better ones now. What’s your name?”

“Pate.” The word came from the back of his throat. He was fighting the pain hard, and fighting it well, and Mark knew it would be prudent to remember that.

“Full name.”

“Myron Pate.”

“Okay, Myron. How long have you lived in that gem up the road?”

He hawked blood into his mouth and spit it at Mark’s shoes. Mark pushed the muzzle of the gun hard against his forehead and drove his skull back until his chin was tilted up and Mark could see his eyes.

“How long?”

“Nine months.”

“If that’s a lie, I’m going to learn it fast.”

“Nine months.”

“Who was there before you?”

“Dunno.”

“Don’t believe you.”

He shrugged.

“Garland Webb,” Mark said.

“Don’t know him.”

“I’m going to find out if that’s the truth.”

He shrugged again. Mark couldn’t see a lie in his face, couldn’t see anything but hate, but there was a problem with a man like Myron occupying a house previously rented by Garland Webb and coming on so strong with Mark now, ready to swing a piece of rebar at him for wandering the property. Coincidences happen, yes, but causation happens more often.

Myron Pate spit more blood. There were tears in his eyes now, but it wasn’t because he was scared. He was hurting. Myron was going to need doctors, and depending on what he said to them, Mark could end the day in jail. His gut told him that Myron wasn’t the type who was real interested in calling the police.

Mark stepped farther from him and used his foot to roll the rebar off the dock and into the water. It landed with a gulping sound, as if the lake were eager for it. He walked down the pier and around to the red truck, used his phone to take a picture of the license plate, then opened the driver’s door and removed the keys from the ignition. He carried them back and stood by the water’s edge and watched Myron struggle to his feet. He needed to use both hands and the railing to make it.

“I thought about shooting those stupid tires out,” Mark said. “But they probably cost you three months’ pay, and I’m in a generous mood. You can take two key points from today, Myron. One is that it is very unwise to take pleasure in someone else’s pain. Show some respect for the dead if you don’t want to join them. The second is that if you know Garland Webb, you can tell him I’m coming.”

He holstered the.38, jingled Myron’s keys as if calling a dog for a car ride, and then tossed them out into the shallows of the lake.

“While you’re getting those,” he said, “pick up the chip bags, the beer can, and the used rubber. This is a beautiful place, Myron, but somebody’s letting it go to hell.”

8

Awareness flickered in Sabrina’s mind like matches in a deep, dark valley. Snapped to life, then snuffed out. She knew that she should have wanted more of them, that the light was the part of the world she needed, the part to which she belonged, but as the matches multiplied and their glows lingered, she was more afraid of them than the dark.

This is not my home. I do not know where I am. I was taken from my home. I am alone. Where am I, and why am I alone? What happened?

Snap and burn, snap and burn. Eventually the match glows began to blend together and flame came with it and then light and for the first time Sabrina felt the weight on her wrist and looked at it with uncomprehending eyes.

There was a metal bracelet on her wrist. No. Not a bracelet. There was a word for it, and the word was scary. The word was terrible, the word was-

Handcuff.

It was in that moment of recognition that she slipped fully out of the dark fog and into understanding, and her fear poured forth like blood filling an open wound.

She cried out then. Said the only word that came to mind: Help. She cried it again and again, and her mouth was dry and her tongue felt strange, hard to maneuver, but the effort of shouting and the intensity of her fear were scrubbing the haze from her brain and she saw more of her surroundings, or at least understood more of them.

She was on a cold wooden floor, and the chain of the handcuff on her right wrist ran to an anchor bolt in the log wall, where the other cuff was clipped, holding her fast. The room was dim and though she could make out shapes, it was hard to get a sense of the place beyond the floor, the wall, and the chain between them. She turned her attention to herself then and saw her bare legs and felt the light fabric over them and understood that she was wearing her nightgown. She’d gotten out of the shower and put on her nightgown and she’d been ready to go to bed early, expecting to fall asleep alone, knowing that Jay might be many hours at work yet because the power was out in a lot of places and there was no telling how quickly he’d get it back on.

And then?

The large man. An intruder. He’d spoken to her. Said something about air, though she couldn’t remember exactly what, just that it had been strange. She didn’t have any clear memory of him, just knew that he’d been there, that there had been an intruder and she had been afraid. The lack of clarity in the situation told her that this should be a dream.

But it wasn’t. The cold floor was real, and the prickling flesh of her bare legs under the nightgown was real, and, more than anything, the biting weight of that handcuff was real.

She pulled at the cuff, using her free hand to get a grip on the links of chain that led to the wall. She tugged with all her might, rotated so that she could use her feet to push against the wall, and all she achieved for her efforts was pain.

She was curled against the wall and crying softly when there was the sound of a lock working and then a door opened and light spilled into the room. It fell across the floor to Sabrina like an extended hand.

A figure stepped in and blocked the light.

“You may make all the noise you wish, but it won’t change your circumstances, and I would prefer not to hear it.” His voice was emotionless. She couldn’t see his face because the light was behind him.

She didn’t think he was the same man who had been in her home. He wasn’t large enough and his voice wasn’t deep enough. At first this seemed good, but then she realized what it meant-there were two of them. At least two.

“It seems bad now,” he said. “That was expected. That was understood. But you’ll begin to feel new things in this place soon, Sabrina. I promise that you will. You’ll begin to feel a sense of purpose stronger than any you’ve ever known. You’ll realize that you are a part of something larger than yourself, and it will please you. If you allow it to, it will please you.”

He paused, and behind him another figure shifted. Oh Lord, there were more of them.

“It’s a lonely predicament right now,” he said. “Don’t worry. You won’t be alone for long. We’ll have more guests soon, and I will expect you to demonstrate some leadership. You are, after all, the firstborn. Do you understand that?”

Sabrina didn’t speak.

“Consider it,” the faceless man said. “Consider that your old life was nothing but a womb, and a harsh, cold one at that. But now you’ve escaped it. Here you are, alive and well, your life preserved. This isn’t a bad place, Sabrina. Great things are being kept alive here, and soon they will flourish. This place is an incubator. That’s how you should think of it. As an incubator of the heart. Open your spirit and you’ll know the truth. You’ll know.”

He turned and left. All she could see of him was that he was of average height and whip-thin build with long hair tied back and pulled tight against his skull. His hands seemed unusually large for his size. He took three steps forward into the square of white light, and she thought she saw pines beyond him, and then he turned to the left and faded from view and was replaced by another figure, this one stepping in from the right and pulling the door shut. Sabrina was astonished to see this new one was a woman. Petite, with dark hair in a long braid and tanned skin. An attractive woman, probably in her fifties.

The woman said, “Baby girl, you’ll be just fine,” in a voice as tender as a mother speaking to her newborn. She knelt down, reached out, and brushed Sabrina’s hair away from her face.

“You’ll be just fine,” she said again. So kind.

“Help me,” Sabrina said. Her voice broke. “Please help me. Please let me go. I don’t know what you-”

“Shhh.” The woman put her fingers against Sabrina’s lips, softly. Her face was weathered but still pretty, and once it had surely been beautiful. “You’ll need to be quiet here, or the voices won’t find you. You’ll need to learn to put away all of that mental clutter. The fear and all the rest. Just listen. Now I’m going to get you some food and water and we’re going to make you more comfortable. When the tribes arrive, you’ll need your strength.”

She moved gracefully away, and Sabrina stared after her in horror and confusion. The man she’d expected, somehow. From the moment the handcuff became clear, the instant she’d understood even that much about her situation, she’d known that there would be a man.

She had not counted on the woman.

When the tribes arrive, you’ll need your strength.

The tribes? Sabrina worked saliva into her dry mouth and forced a swallow. She was dehydrated, and the crying hadn’t helped. Her eyes adjusting, she could see the woman moving about in the far corner. She heard the splashing of water, the rustling of plastic bags. Hopelessly, she looked back at the bolt in the log where the handcuff was anchored, but now something else caught her eye-farther down the log, maybe two feet, there was another bolt. Beyond that, another still.

We’ll have more guests soon.

9

Jay Baldwin sat at the kitchen table alone, no gun to his head. If he wanted a gun, in fact, he had only to go upstairs and take the nine-millimeter from his nightstand drawer.

The gun wasn’t going to produce Sabrina, though.

The police might. But calling the police was no longer the easy fix it would have been once. Before Eli Pate had dropped Jay off, he’d shown him an image on his phone: a map with a blinking red dot.

“That’s your truck,” Pate had said calmly, and then he’d offered Jay a small plastic square. “And this one is you. Now, I understand that this seems intrusive, but obviously you and I are a long way from developing trust. In the absence of trust, I have to monitor. You understand that, don’t you, Jay? It’s like any parent-child relationship.”

Jay took the small piece of plastic and ran his thumb over it and thought of how easy it would be to break, or microwave, or flush down a toilet. There were a million ways to destroy the signal this thing was putting out.

“There is no chance that battery will stop functioning,” Eli Pate said. “And you will not know when I will arrive. But when I do, you’d better have that with you. Just keep it in your pocket, Jay. But I’ll state this once, and very clearly: If I go to the place where the signal tells me you are, and you aren’t there? Well, I have your wife. And I’m not a kind man.”

They were the last words he offered. There was no overt threat, no guarantee of harm, but there didn’t have to be one. He had said all he needed to.

Jay had today off due to the extended stretch of repair work, and he wished that he didn’t. He’d rather be moving than sitting here alone. As he sat, he thought of every phone call he could make, of every type of law enforcement that he’d ever heard of, every agency that might come to Sabrina’s rescue.

He never reached for the phone. He turned the plastic chip over and over in his hands and went through every conceivable option, but he never reached for the phone.

I’m not a kind man.

No, Pate was not. And he wasn’t a bluffing man, Jay thought. The problem, then, was not all that different from Jay’s daily tasks. There were some simple but critical constants in high-voltage work, the most important being that before you attempted a fix, you had to understand where the power came from and how it was controlled.

Power source: Eli Pate.

System control: Jay’s tracking device.

He would stay at home today, he would not call for help, he would be at work on time tomorrow, and Eli Pate’s computers would see all of that. They would also see something else, something natural enough for a man in his position-they would see Jay spend a full hour pacing his living room. Over and over he walked the same route, reminding himself of the power source (Pate) and the system control (electronic tracking device), mimicking the routine of a sleep-starved, terrified man anguishing over the right choice to make for his wife’s safety. It was not hard to do. When Sabrina wasn’t occupying his mind, the specter of those massive transmission towers with their nearly a million volts and the ghost of his brother-in-law slipped right in. It had been a closed-casket funeral. The electricity cooked you in your own blood, leaving nothing but a blackened, shriveled shell behind, featureless and horrifying.

It was easy to pace and worry. Very easy.

He did not go upstairs, and he did not go outside. Just paced and hoped that Pate’s computers were recording it all. When Jay arrived at work the next morning, with no police called, no attempts made to destroy his tracking device, Pate would understand that when Jay was nervous, he paced the lower level of his house.

It was critical that Pate understood this.

10

When Mark returned to Cassadaga, the red truck was gone from the lake, and it wasn’t parked outside of Dixie’s house either.

Mark had spent the hours between his encounter with Myron and his appointment with Dixie Witte in DeLand, the nearest town of any size. It was only a fifteen-minute drive away but so unlike Cassadaga it could have been fifteen hundred miles. He was surprised by the relief he’d felt at the sight of things he usually hated about Florida, the strip malls and car lots and harsh lights. After only a few hours in Cassadaga, he found all of it reassuring, a reminder that contemporary society existed, that there were places where you wouldn’t come across barefoot boys picking oranges and talking casually about the dead.

You ever seen something like that?

He drank a few beers in DeLand and tried to prepare himself to take Dixie Witte seriously, to grant her the patience and respect that Lauren hadn’t believed he was capable of showing to someone who claimed psychic abilities.

You’ve got to let her be herself, Mark thought. Do not challenge her or dismiss her. Not at the start, at least. Just get her talking.

When he returned to Cassadaga it was past dusk, and the lack of streetlights enhanced that sense of driving out of one era and into another. He passed Dixie’s house, noted the continued absence of the red truck, and then checked the park by the lake, which also remained empty. He left the Infiniti there, not wanting to make it easy for Myron to find him if he came back loaded up on painkillers or meth or whatever the hell made a guy like him tick. When he was sure that nobody had followed him or was watching, he got out of the car and began the walk back to the property once owned by a man who’d had his hands severed and placed in a cigar box.

The streets were empty and the moon hung in a perfect crescent and you could see a good number of stars for inland Florida, but he’d never seen stars in his life the way he’d seen them growing up amid the high peaks and open plains. Once on a dive boat on open water, there’d been something close, perhaps. Lauren had been with him then. That was in the Saba National Marine Park. He still carried her dive permit from that trip with him, putting it in his pocket every day, a talisman.

The afternoon rain had been swept away by a steady western wind and though the sun was down the temperature continued to rise. The moist streets steamed. The main house, Myron’s den, was dark, but there were lights on inside the guesthouse where Dixie waited. When Mark stepped inside the fence, the wind seemed to die. He looked around and saw fronds moving in all directions, and overhead, a clump of Spanish moss that looked like a dead woman’s hair waved steadily, buffeted by a breeze that he could no longer feel. The air around him was as still as a tomb and he could hear again that odd sound that seemed to come from inside his own skull, the dull popping of a rubber band.

He shook his head, readjusted, and that was when he saw his dead wife on the porch of the main house.

For a moment, a long and fine moment, he was certain that it was Lauren. She was standing in a pool of moonlight that silhouetted her lean frame and behind her, banyan leaves threw shadows that climbed into the starlit sky. She wore jeans and a black sleeveless top, and her blond hair just reached her shoulders. The visual cues were close, yes, but they were also generic. The catch-your-breath quality was in presence. There was just something about the way she stood, about the quarter tilt of her head as she looked at him, that said Lauren.

Then she stepped forward, off the porch and down into the yard, and the motion broke loose the bizarre sensation in his mind and he understood that this was a living woman and not a specter. She was holding something in her hands that looked like a bucket. “Who’s there?” she said, and her voice was not even close to Lauren’s. Mark shouldn’t have needed that confirmation, but for some reason, in this place, he did.

“Markus Novak. I’m here to see Dixie.”

“I’m Dixie. And you’re early, Markus.”

He didn’t respond, couldn’t. She walked toward him with confidence, and suddenly, foolishly, he wanted to have his gun in hand. When she got close enough that he could see her face clearly, it was obvious that she didn’t look that much like Lauren. Her features were more delicate, almost fragile, and her lips were fuller, at odds with the bone structure, mismatched. There was a dimple in her chin, and her ears were lined with piercings, small silver hoops that ran from bottom to top. Up close, nobody would confuse them. But from a distance…he was still rattled from that moment in the moonlight.

“I didn’t expect you so soon,” she said. She was holding a metal bucket filled with ice and four glistening bottles of Dixie beer.

Mark nodded at them and said, “Brand loyalty, I see.”

“What? Oh. Dixie. Right. No, that’s just my preference. I was going to go for a walk. Shall we walk and talk? I prefer to conduct readings in the house, but you’re not here for a reading. You’re here for her.”

“Her?”

“Your wife,” Dixie Witte said simply. “Did you think I wouldn’t recognize your name? Honestly, I’ve wondered what took you so long. I’m afraid that she has too.”

Mark couldn’t think of anything to say to that, because there was an element of it that seemed like the truth.

“Let’s walk,” Dixie said after a pause. “We aren’t going far, but the energy is better. I’ll need good energy for this talk. You understand,” she said, handing him the bucket. “Here. Carry this, please.”

She headed down the street with a confident sway of her slim hips. She kept her stride fast enough to stay a full step ahead of Mark as he followed, holding the metal bucket, which sloshed water from the melted ice over his hands and numbed his fingers. Everything was still and silent and the lush smells of the oranges and rhododendrons were everywhere. In front of the moon, the scudding remnants of the storm clouds broke, re-formed, and then separated again like wet cotton.

They passed beside a still lake, not unlike the one into which Mark had thrown Myron Pate’s keys earlier, but Dixie didn’t stop or slow. They looped away from the park, went up the road toward the Cassadaga Hotel, and then they left the pavement and walked into a small garden.

“Medicine Wheel,” she said.

Mark froze. Every muscle tensed; every nerve hummed. He could hardly breathe.

“What did you say?”

“That’s what this park is called.” She sat on the low back of a small stone bench, her feet resting on the seat.

Mark looked around the dark park and tried to find his natural voice, one that didn’t betray the eerie spark he’d felt. “Officially?”

“What do you mean, officially? That’s its name; I didn’t make it up. There’s a plaque that says it.” She shrugged. “What’s it matter to you?”

What did it matter to him? He looked at her and thought about a flat mountain summit in the Bighorn range in Wyoming where rocks were laid out in twenty-eight piles that matched the lunar cycle, rocks that had been there for hundreds of years, their origin unknown but still lined up perfectly with the sunrise of the summer solstice. Rocks that were sacred to tribal nations from all over the West and where people still came daily to honor their own mix of gods, leaving behind feathers and brightly colored cloths and bits of bone and even the hair of the dead. His mother had been arrested there when she’d shown up and tried her Nez Perce spirit-guide act.

That had been one of the more lasting shames in a childhood full of them, but it was also one of the most vivid, because he’d experienced something in that spot. Something not understood, only felt. He had felt, standing on that windy peak and watching people speak in unknown tongues and worship in ways he didn’t comprehend, that he was a part of something beyond himself.

And then the rangers came for his mother, and they brought handcuffs. He would never forget the eyes of the grieving couple she’d been working with.

Now, twenty-five years later and three thousand miles away, he shook his head and said, “It’s a strange name, that’s all,” and advanced to the bench where Dixie Witte was sitting. Something metal glittered in her hand and for an instant Mark thought, Knife, before he realized it was a bottle opener. She beckoned with her free hand, and he set the bucket down in the grass and passed her a sweating bottle of beer. She popped the cap and handed it to him and then he gave her another, which she opened and kept. She looked at him with a sad smile.

“I knew you’d come,” she said. “It was a matter of time, that’s all. You weren’t ready before, were you? You had to get ready. In another place, maybe.”

“Something like that. I didn’t see the point, early on. The police were interviewing you plenty, and I read all of their transcripts.”

“The police asked the wrong questions.”

“Oh? What should they have asked?”

She didn’t answer right away. She drank some of the beer and then said, “Sit.”

“I’m good.”

“No. You’re putting a shadow on the road. Sit down.”

Why the shadow mattered, he had no idea, but he sat. He took the actual bench, so that Dixie was sitting above him, perched up by his right shoulder. He didn’t like that; he liked to be able to see her, to have the best vantage point and the freest movement possible. That was a consistent desire for Mark. Some would call it obsessive-compulsive, but he called it practical. Wild Bill Hickok didn’t get shot until he broke his own rule and sat with his back to the door.

Dixie Witte said, “Your wife had death all around her that afternoon.”

Mark didn’t speak, didn’t move.

“You, um…you were able to see this,” he finally said, thinking of a hypnotist he’d known in Indiana and trying to be accepting of things he knew better than to believe. To be tolerant of them, at least. That wasn’t so much to ask, but still, his own wife hadn’t thought he was capable of it on the day she’d made her drive to this place.

“Yes,” Dixie said. “Death arrived with her. It was very close. Unnerving, because I’d felt that before, but always in situations when it was anticipated. Home visits, usually, dealing with the terminally ill. Those things. But your wife, she was so vibrant. Her body was strong, her spirit was clean. Illness was not present.”

Mark had nothing to offer to that.

“I was relieved that she didn’t ask for a reading,” Dixie said. “Because I knew what I’d have to tell her. Then she told me the purpose of her visit, and I made a mistake. I’ve regretted it every day since. I mean that. Not one day has passed that I have not thought of her with regret.”

“You and me both,” Mark said. “I understand my regrets, Dixie. What are yours?”

“I let her leave without a warning.”

“What would you have said? What would the warning have been?”

“That death was close. Perhaps she would have laughed and gone on her way. I don’t know. But if I’d said it? Perhaps even if she didn’t take me seriously, it would have lingered in her mind just enough. The words linger, and sometimes, the words affect choices. And so I think of her, and I wonder, would she have had her guard up? Would it have mattered?”

“Yes,” he said. His voice was scarcely audible.

Dixie looked pained. “She had that quality. Skeptical but not aggressively so. That was something you shared, of course. You both wanted to believe in challenging things, but you kept that desire secret.”

“I just need facts, Dixie. Not mysticism.”

“You’re not going to succeed with that attitude, and you already know that. If what you’ve experienced recently hasn’t taught you that, what will?”

There was a tight tingle at the back of Mark’s skull, and he had a sudden vision of an accused murderer, Ridley Barnes, vanishing into dark cave waters, and he heard an echo of a hypnotist’s voice, revenants of the last case he’d worked, an experience that had taught him more than he’d wished to learn. He gave a small shake of his head, and Dixie watched him knowingly.

“You don’t care for coincidence, do you?” she said.

“No.”

“But you don’t believe in fate either.”

“No.”

“Do you realize there are no other options?”

“Sure there are.”

She shook her head. “It’s either coincidence or fate, Markus. You’re going to have to decide.”

“I don’t think my wife was fated to die here. I think someone made a choice to kill her.”

“Of course. But there’s one element in the mix that you do believe in already. At your core.”

“And what might that be?”

“Purpose,” she said. “You believe in purpose. You believe that it all fits, that opposing forces will find balance, and that your role in all of it matters.”

She put her left hand over the top of his right. Her eyes had the tender but firm expression of a good mother assuring her child that there were no monsters, and it was time to trust the dark and get some rest.

She said, “You are correct, Markus. Your role in all of it matters. It will matter-and it already did.”

Her touch put an electric heat through him that he wanted to deny, but he didn’t move his hand away. She was leaning forward, a posture that pressed her breasts high against her tank top.

“The answers you need won’t come from me,” she said. “You’ve got to believe that. But I can still provide them.”

“How does that work?” Mark said. His voice sounded the way steel wool felt.

“They’ll come from your wife,” she said. Then she squeezed his hand tighter. “I’ll need to let her enter me, do you see? Once she makes contact…I become the conduit. And you’ll have all that you want then.”

She leaned closer, her chest nearly touching his face. “You don’t want to believe in that, I know. It’s not your way. But you’ll have to. I can’t tell you anything about Garland Webb. I can’t tell you anything about what happened. But Lauren can. Of course she can.”

Mark was silent. She rubbed her thumb lightly over the back of his hand, and when she spoke again, her voice had the same caressing feel.

“I’m a channel, Markus. A conduit for energy. When we return to the house, the rest will be your choice, not mine. If you want the truth, you’ll need to let me open myself for Lauren. And once I have…you’ll need to believe that she’s within me. Will you be able to do that?”

“I’ll try.”

She nodded and squeezed his hand again. “That’s all that you can do. So let’s try together, shall we? We’ll go back to the house, and we’ll find your wife.”

She released his hand and climbed down from the bench, and he rose and followed her back through the moonlit streets.

11

The big house was dark and there was light in the windows of the guesthouse behind it, where Mark expected to go, but Dixie led him up the porch of the old home.

“I thought this was Myron’s,” he said. “Your tenant. The man in the big truck.”

She frowned. “My tenant lives there.” She pointed to the guesthouse. She used a key to turn the ancient lock, then pushed the door open and smiled reassuringly at Mark.

“You’ll need to accept the darkness.”

“What?”

“It helps. Trust me on this. We can have candlelight, but nothing more. Not if you want to hear from your wife. From Lauren.”

The way she said the name was musical, and it hurt him. I take thee, Lauren…

She hooked one index finger through his belt loop and tugged him forward. “Don’t be scared, now.”

In truth, he was a little scared. Everything, from the sound of the lock ratcheting back to the smell of the place, age-old dust and mildew, was unappealing, but there was more to it too. Sparks of concern, flickers at the edge of his consciousness like orbs.

Bad energy.

Mark told himself that the sources of that energy were pretty damn clear-when you blended Myron Pate and Garland Webb and this strange town, how could the house feel anything but bad?

That was to intellectualize it, though, and as Mark stepped inside that house with Dixie Witte, there was nothing intellectual or rational about the negative charge he felt; it was pure emotion, something primal, something that would have told his ancient ancestors, You need to run now.

Just in front of them a staircase led to the second floor, a window at the landing illuminating them. To the left a living room stretched out and blended into a dining room. Dixie hadn’t turned on any lights and the furniture stood around them in shadows. Then she slipped away from him and in seconds was on the landing halfway up the stairs.

“Markus?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Coming.”

The stairs creaked. The wood felt soft, yielding. Dixie Witte waited on the landing, and Mark was glad, because there she looked nothing like Lauren. Then she took another step away, into the darkness, and in silhouette she could have passed for his wife once more.

Were you here, Lauren? Were you ever inside this house?

He dearly hoped not. He knew that she hadn’t been killed here, but all the same, he prayed she had never been inside. It was that kind of place.

From the landing, he noticed what he thought at first were odd shadows on the walls. Then he realized they were actually paintings, and when he leaned close enough, he saw that the pictures had been painted directly onto the wall. The ancient plaster was the only canvas.

The paintings were strange symbols. Mark couldn’t make them out very well in the dark, but they seemed heavy on circles and triangles. Masonic symbols? He leaned closer to the wall, trying to identify the shapes. Not Masonic symbols, or at least not any he’d seen before. The triangles blended into a circle with what appeared to be a spiral at the center. In the uneven moonlight, the spiral drew the eye and made Mark feel suddenly dizzy. He put a hand against the plaster to steady himself.

Dixie Witte came back down the steps, took his belt loop again, and let her body press against his. When she spoke, she reached up so that her lips were next to his ear.

“She’s close to us now, Markus. I can feel her. It’s so special. I can’t explain just how special it is. But if you can trust, if you can open yourself to the energy…you’ll feel her too. Are you able to trust?”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t try, just believe. Soon my energy will cease, and hers will replace it. You’ll know when it happens. You’ll feel her within me.”

The house felt too hot, with none of the fresh breezes scented with oranges to cool him here. He wondered if she’d paid the boy, the strange boy who spoke of the dead. Fifty cents if I do the whole tree, he’d said. Someone cut off his hands. Put them in a cigar box, he’d said. You ever seen something like that?

There was sweat on Mark’s forehead and he was breathing hard, as if the stairs had been a laborious climb. Dixie moved her hand to his forehead and wiped off the beads of perspiration gently. Her hand felt cool and wonderful. He didn’t want her to step away. If anything, he wanted her to come closer, press tighter.

You’ll feel her within me.

What he felt was sick. Disoriented and dizzy. Were there no fans in this damn house, no open windows? It was like a tomb.

“Trust,” Dixie Witte breathed in his ear. “You’ve got to trust.” Then she stepped away again, heading up the next flight of stairs. “She’ll have the answers for you. She knows if it was Garland Webb. She knows, Markus. She’s the only one who does.”

He climbed after her, sweating freely now. At the top of the stairs Dixie turned toward a room that was on the side of the house facing away from the moonlight, which left it in total darkness. Mark followed her in and his sense of claustrophobia rose to new heights. The room was small but it was also blacked out, with thick curtains over the windows, and smells of sage and other incense hung heavy in the air. Cloying and unpleasant, nothing like those cool orange-scented breezes in the yard. He thought of the strange boy again and wondered if he should ask about him. She would know who he was, who had told him that story about the man named Walter with the severed hands. Maybe it had been Dixie. She certainly seemed right for the part. Or maybe one of the people who’d passed through, the angry people. They come and they go, the boy had said.

“We’ll try to make contact with her now,” Dixie said. “With Lauren.” She stepped close to him and then, in a strange and sudden motion, she slid down to her knees and took his hands, gripping them tightly, bowing before him. “Close your eyes and trust. You’re resisting. You’re not open yet. Just trust.”

He could barely make out her shape. The room was that dark. Cave dark, he would have said once, before he got a lesson in what cave dark really was. She held his hands and swayed in silence, and he tried to find the part of himself that felt scorn for this, the part of himself that should be laughing at the whole act, but he couldn’t. That part was gone now, in this place. She was compelling. And disturbing. The most disturbing thing since that boy…

They come and they go.

The boy had pointed at the big house when he said it. Not the guesthouse. He had pointed indisputably at the old house, the one where angry people came and went.

Dixie Witte had begun to hum, a low and eerie sound, and her fingers were sliding over his hands, tracing the lines on his palms.

“Lauren,” she whispered. “Lauren, join us.”

Mark didn’t like hearing the sound of his wife’s name from her. He wanted to tell her to stop saying it. But Lauren had given this woman respect; that was what had brought her here in the first place. Unlike Mark, who for two years had settled for the transcripts of police interviews, and now he had to-

Too young.

The thought came to his mind unbidden, a blitzing image, the opening page of one of the police transcripts. They’d asked Dixie to state her name and age. She’d said she was fifty-two.

Mark stepped back fast, releasing the woman’s hands and fumbling in his jacket. She got as far as “Markus, you’ve got to relax-” before he withdrew the tactical light from his pocket and hit the thumb switch.

These days they gave the label tactical to everything from socks to polo shirts, but with the Surefire light, it was more than an adjective-the light was a weapon in its own right. The thumb trigger flooded five hundred lumens directly into Dixie Witte’s eyes, approximately ten times more light than human night vision is prepared to handle, and the overload both blinds and freezes. She lifted her hands and swore at Mark in a harsh voice that bore no similarity to her Tennessee Williams-heroine tone.

“Who are you?” Mark said. “Who in the hell are you? You’re not Dixie, and you’re not in the right house, so-”

He stopped talking abruptly, the woman’s identity suddenly unimportant. The flashlight had caught a glint of metal and drawn his eye to an old table just behind her shoulder. Knives glittered from every inch of it. A dozen, at least, and no standard blades in the mix. There were fat, curved bolo machete blades, hard-angled tanto tips like small samurai swords, an ancient knife with a stone cutting edge and a bone handle. Ancient, but honed. Any of them would kill you, and cruelly. They were not knives designed for simplicity. They were designed for pain.

“What was the plan?” Mark said. His voice was hoarse. It took an effort to look away from the knives and back to the blond woman who’d promised to find his wife’s energy. A moment ago she’d looked weak and under attack, on her knees and temporarily blinded. Now she lowered her hands and smiled with empty contempt.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” she said. “But it wasn’t up to you, was it? I bet that’s even what you tell people. I bet you’ve said that already. If you haven’t, you will soon. You’ll explain how you ended up in this room. Do you know what word you’re going to use? Called. That’s what you’ll say. You felt called here. You might blame the dead bitch, but when you’re alone with your thoughts, you’ll know that’s not true. She’s the smallest part of it. And you’ll be sure of that by the end.”

Mark had once gotten a murder confession from a man who’d calmly and precisely explained how he’d gone about killing a husband and wife in their own living room following five days of careful hunting and planning. He said he’d done it because he’d understood that the gods-plural; he was clear on that too-wanted him to carry lessons of respect into the world. For many years, Mark had thought he was the most chilling specimen of what could appear on this earth disguised as a member of humanity.

That was before he’d met this woman.

The flashlight trembled just the faintest bit in his hand, but because of the play of light in the dark room, the shaking was obvious, and her smile widened, a leering, rictus grin.

“What do you know about my wife?” Mark said.

“More than you, which is to say that I understand she’s inconsequential. When you accept that, you’ll be better off, but it won’t really matter.” She shrugged. “Your mind isn’t strong enough to matter to us.”

“Who is us? You and Myron? You and Garland Webb?”

“I have many brothers,” she said.

“Is Garland Webb a brother to you?”

“I don’t know that name.”

“He shared your house.”

“He never shared my house.” She rose from the floor and reached for one of the knives, grabbed the one with the bone handle. By the time she lifted it, Mark had cleared the.38 from its holster and had the muzzle pointed at her.

“Wrong weapon,” he said.

She didn’t answer, just backed out of the bedroom with the knife held at shoulder level. Then she headed for the stairs, and Mark was left with only a few options, none of them good: try to stop her and invite the opening of his arteries in the process, shoot her in her own home, or let her go.

He let her go.

When the front door banged shut behind her and he was alone in the house, Mark moved to the wall, sagged against it, and looked at the table of knives. He wondered how close he’d come, how many minutes-or seconds-he’d had left when he’d drawn the light.

And whether he’d been the first Novak to cross this threshold.

As silence descended around him and sweat dripped from his forehead, he pushed off the wall and gathered himself. He didn’t know how long she’d be gone or how many people she’d bring with her when she returned, but right now he was alone in a house that might have evidence relating to Lauren’s death, and he wasn’t about to waste that chance.

12

At first Sabrina thought the voices were a trick of her mind, because they were usually faint, whispered echoes, and in the brief period she’d had light, she’d become convinced that she had seen the entirety of the cabin.

Eventually, she realized that there was a second level above her, and that was where he was. The sound had confused her because there were no interior stairs, no evidence of a second story. Access had to come from outside.

Her first reaction to this realization was added fear, because now she knew that even when she thought she was alone, she wasn’t.

In time, though, she decided that it was a good thing. The more she understood about her situation, the better her chances of escape. All the things she could not see were potential threats. Having a greater sense of the layout was a help. When she ran, she would need to know as much as possible.

So far her escape plan had only its first step: obtain the woman’s assistance. Sabrina thought that she could get that. In the time the woman had remained in the cabin, preparing food for Sabrina in the small kitchen, she had been both tender and obviously uncomfortable. She’d kept her eyes away from the handcuff and the chain, and Sabrina was certain that they bothered her. When she’d brought food to Sabrina-oatmeal with brown sugar-she’d actually tried to feed her with the spoon, like a loving mother, before Sabrina simply used her free hand to do it herself. The woman had made a soft cooing sound and stroked Sabrina’s hair sympathetically. At first Sabrina had recoiled from the touch, feeling only madness in it, but then she realized the concern was real. However powerful the madness was, it had not evaporated the human concern, the empathy. It was there, and real, and it could be used. How easily it could be used, Sabrina wasn’t sure.

In this, as well, Sabrina found comfort. This woman wasn’t chained and shackled, but she was still dominated. Controlled. And somewhere in her, Sabrina believed-had to believe-there would be resistance to this. Resentment.

Please God, let that be true.

She understood that trying to make one of her captors into an ally was hardly a first-class plan, but she was chained to the wall with only three feet of movement; it was the best she had.

She needed her captor’s concern, and the bathroom. She was considering the latter, and not just because of the rising pressure in her bladder. The cabin was too neat and they went to too much effort to provide a bizarre illusion of comfort for her to believe that they intended her to sit in her own mess. At some point, the handcuff was coming off that bolt in the wall. She was almost sure of it.

She had to be sure of it. Because if it wasn’t true…

She cried again then, softly but desperately, her body aching. Leaned against the log wall and sobbed herself dry, and when it was done, she told herself that it was the last time.

Until the woman returned, at least. The woman who was weaker than the man, and certainly weaker than Sabrina. Anyone who could be controlled by this man without chains and handcuffs was far weaker than Sabrina. She would use emotion as a weapon, because she believed the woman would respond to it. The tools she had now were limited, and so it was critical to identify them and sharpen them.

Her mind was clearer now, whatever narcotic she’d been drugged with cleansed from her veins, and she had begun to make mental lists-the things that she knew about her situation, a short list, and the things that her captors did not know.

It was in this second list that she was starting to find more strength. Things they did not know about Sabrina Baldwin:

She had been orphaned at twelve, her parents killed by a jackknifing semi on an iced-over Michigan interstate; she and Tim, closer than most siblings because of the tragedy, had gone through three different foster homes. Before she turned eighteen she’d earned a partial athletic scholarship to the University of Montana for track, where she won conference titles. Before she’d turned twenty-five, she had started her own business, and had paid off every loan within two years. When she buried her brother, the only family she had left, she’d moved to a new town and faced new challenges and none of that had broken her yet. What her captors saw-a helpless woman in a nightgown, frightened and cowering-was not what they actually had.

Sabrina Baldwin was a lot of things, and frightened was sure as shit one of them right now, but helpless and cowering never had been and never would be.

These were the things she had to remember.

She continued to build onto the list as the minutes-hours? It was impossible to know-passed by, and though she did not move from the wall and could not, she began to feel less anchored to it. Some kidnapping victims escaped. She had seen the stories; everyone had. It was possible. She just had to remember that it was possible.

When the woman returned, she was alone, entering through the front door that seemed to provide the only access to the lower portion of the cabin. Sabrina had slept in fits and starts until the pressure in her bladder built to such a constant ache that she could sleep no longer. She’d been about to give up and succumb to her body’s demands when the locks turned.

“Dear? Are you awake? Are you all right?”

“I’m awake. I need the bathroom.” Sabrina’s voice cracked and rasped. It had been hours since she’d spoken, and the crying bouts had left her dried out. The request I need the bathroom felt childlike and weak, and she hated herself for it.

“Of course! Of course, dear.”

Remember that she can be manipulated, Sabrina told herself. She shouldn’t fear showing weakness around this woman; she should strive for that. It was clear that the woman could be manipulated-her very existence in this place, her acceptance of it, announced her coercion. You could sell this woman a lie.

A flashlight came on, and Sabrina squinted against the harshness of it. The woman was carrying a bag, and inside the bag were Sabrina’s own clothes, apparently stolen from the house along with her.

“For your comfort,” the woman said. “I’m sorry it took so long. I didn’t know where they put them.”

There was a metallic jingling and then a key ring appeared in the light and the woman set to work unfastening Sabrina’s handcuff from her wrist. She carried herself like a concierge rather than a kidnapper. She gave Sabrina her clothes, then went into the little kitchen and turned her back politely to allow Sabrina to change in privacy. The feeling of slipping into jeans and a sweatshirt was remarkable; they felt more like armor than clothes, made her feel so much less vulnerable than she had in the thin nightgown.

And the only thing between her and freedom was the door, and the woman had the keys for it.

You could run, Sabrina thought. She could knock this woman aside and run. She was stronger than her, and far, far faster.

“Ready for the bathroom?” The woman walked for the door, keys in hand. Sabrina stared at her, astonished at how easy she was making it.

Just run. You posted a sub-six-minute mile for five years straight. Just run!

Then the door was open and the woman shone her light outdoors, and Sabrina understood much more.

The cabin stood in the center of a fenced enclosure, like a shelter in a zoo’s pen. The wooden fences had to be fifteen feet tall, maybe twenty. The corner posts were constructed from telephone poles.

“This way, dear. This way.”

Using the flashlight, the woman guided her away from the cabin and down a short path to an outhouse. Traces of snow lined the path, and Sabrina was shivering, her breath fogging the air. They were up high, but they weren’t in the Beartooths, because there would be much more snow there. How many miles had they covered before she’d regained consciousness? Were they even in Montana?

The woman opened the door and smiled awkwardly.

“I have to wait, of course, but you’ll have privacy.”

Sabrina stepped into the outhouse, pulled the door shut, and fumbled her way onto the seat. When she’d relieved herself, she rose again and tried to stretch in the dark, cramped quarters to get as loose as possible.

It’s just a fence. Fences can be climbed.

The truth was, it had looked easy to climb. It was constructed with plywood panels nailed against a frame of two-by-fours, cheap and easy work, and the frame was on the inside, providing handholds and foot braces all the way to the top. She couldn’t afford to wait in hopes of a better opportunity. This might be the only opportunity.

“Are you okay?” The voice came from just outside the door.

“Yes,” Sabrina said, massaging her hamstrings, bouncing up and down on her toes, telling herself she was just getting ready for a run, that was all it would be, just a short run and a climb and then go, go, go! “I’m fine.”

When the woman opened the outhouse door, she was smiling-right up until Sabrina punched her.

It was a wild blow, catching the woman on the side of her face, just below her left eye. She stumbled backward and cried out and then Sabrina charged her like a linebacker, lowering her head and leading with her right shoulder. The woman fell easily, just as Sabrina had hoped; she went down hard and landed with a grunt of pain and then Sabrina was past her and alone, nothing between her and freedom but that fence.

They didn’t think I would try! How could they think I wouldn’t try?

She was running now, giddy to the point of dizziness with fear and adrenaline, expecting some disaster, expecting the man from her house to rise up again, that strange dart gun in hand or, worse, a real one, but nobody came. It was just her and the open ground and she covered it easily, her stride fast and smooth, and she was half laughing and half crying as she neared the fence, the adrenaline so intense that there was a high hum in her ears, so strong it was something she could almost feel as she reached for one of those two-by-four braces that supported the fence and was about to provide her easy escape over the top.

She didn’t register the impact, didn’t register even any pain, just surprise. There was a reason they called it an electric shock. One minute she was running free and strong and the next she was down on her ass and her right arm felt like it was missing and the rest of her tingled as if spiders were swarming over her flesh. She looked from the ground to the fence in bewilderment, dazed, and finally she understood that the hum in her ears hadn’t been imagined and realized why the woman had freed her from the handcuff with such casual confidence.

The fence was electrified.

Powerfully electrified.

From pole to pole, strands of exposed copper wire ran along the wooden braces, and the voltage passing through was so strong that the hum was audible. Each brace carried a wire. It would take a pole vaulter to clear this fence without contacting the electrical current.

Get up, she thought stupidly, get up and try another place. You can’t just sit here.

She heard a sound behind her then and turned to see the woman approaching. Not running, just walking with a steady stride, all the kindness gone from her face. When she reached Sabrina, she knelt beside her.

“You got buzzed pretty good, didn’t you?”

Sabrina didn’t answer. The woman turned the flashlight away from the fence and panned it to the right, and Sabrina saw the cabin clearly for the first time-two stories, with only one door to the lower level and a set of exterior stairs on each side of the house leading to the second floor. All around the fence were tall pines, and just behind it a cluster of dead trees that hadn’t been cut. Then the flashlight beam stopped moving, and Sabrina gasped.

They weren’t trees. They were telephone poles, ten of them, at least, and what looked like old transformers had been mounted high on them, though no wires were strung.

“What are…you…doing here?” Sabrina croaked as the pain from the shock began to pulse through her arm, the surprise gone and only the agony left. “What do you want?”

“It’s not what we want, dear, it’s what we need. All of us. It has to be done.”

“What does?”

“Awakening. Every society needs one. It’s undeniable, one of the firm truths we have. Eli will explain this to you. He’ll tell you what the mountains have told him. I know that it will be hard at first, but please, please listen. Open your mind, open your heart. Here’s what you need to remember, Sabrina-the mountains have been here since before any of us were even imagined. Now, you tell me: Would they lie?”

Sabrina couldn’t formulate a response, and the woman smiled again, her eyes glittering in the flashlight glow.

“Exactly, dear. Exactly. The mountains wouldn’t lie. They couldn’t! And we should be very grateful that Eli can hear them. Are you ready to go back to the cabin? Have you satisfied yourself with your little experiment?”

There was no point in resisting. She couldn’t climb the fence, so she’d have to figure out how to disable it. She was thinking about this when the woman said, “And, oh yes, dear, there’s one other thing-you’re not allowed to hit me. That’s against the rules.”

She swung the flashlight and hit Sabrina full in the face.

As Sabrina howled in pain and blood poured from her nose, the woman regarded her with the sympathetic eyes, the caretaker eyes.

“Let’s not have a problem like this again,” she said. “It’s bad for everyone, isn’t it? But as Eli always says, rules need to be enforced or they aren’t rules at all. It’s a matter of energy, dear. Whatever you put out will be returned to you. It will pay to remember that while you’re here.”

13

By the time Mark had worked his way through the house, he was talking softly to himself. It was more a prayer than anything else. Please tell me she was never here. Please tell me she was never in this place.

The idea of Lauren gunned down in that dark thicket of bamboo beside the ditch had always felt more than horrific enough.

That was before he’d seen the house.

Between the ground floor, the stairwell, and the upstairs bedrooms, he counted sixty-seven paintings on the walls and chalk drawings on the floors, all some variation of a spiral theme. Each one pulled him in like a hypnotic eye. Beyond the spiral imagery, there was only one constant to the artwork: the center of each spiral was black. Even in the chalk drawings, black paint had been used in the center.

What mattered the most to him, though, was in the bedroom at the far end of the upstairs hall. There, words had been painted among the drawings. Each drawing was carefully, artistically done, clean and precise. The words were not. They were lettered unevenly, growing larger and bolder, conveying a sort of mania, and while Mark didn’t understand their meaning, the words were familiar.

Rise the Dark the DARK will RISE RiSE the DaRK RiSE rise will RISE the DARK

The only unexplained words in the notebook that Lauren had left on the passenger seat of her car before she’d stepped out of it on her way to death. As Mark had told the detectives, that was the first time he’d seen the phrase.

And the last, until now.

The house was so stifling that he felt dizzy when he moved too fast, but as he read those words he felt a chill. Every time. And he returned to them often. As he searched the rest of the house, he kept interrupting his progress to go back to that room and stare at the wall in the glow of the flashlight.

Did you see this, baby? Were you here?

He had to order himself away from that wall, force his attention elsewhere, and elsewhere the hypnotic-eye drawings loomed in every corner, like funhouse mirrors.

Sweat was dripping down his face and along his spine, but now it felt like the clammy sweat of sickness. He went to wipe his face with his jacket and realized he’d taken it off and wasn’t carrying it any longer. At one point he’d been holding it. Where had he put it? He couldn’t remember. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand instead, and the flashlight beam bobbed crazily around the walls, catching first one spiral drawing and then the next.

No. Not spirals. You’re using the wrong word.

That was true. There was a term for the shape in those drawings, and it wasn’t spiral. It was-

Vortex.

He heard the word in his own head but it seemed to be spoken in someone else’s voice. It was a sensation he’d had before in a place he didn’t want to remember-endless caverns of damp, dark stone-on a day when he’d been certain he’d never see daylight again. See any kind of light. The voices down there had saved him, though. Maybe. He tried not to think of them often.

They’re gathering here for something. But what?

The house provided no answers. Nor did it provide much in the way of tangible evidence of who its occupants were. There were no computers or phones, though there were power cords and chargers; no mail, none of the standard artifacts of modern human existence. The closest thing Mark found was a bookshelf filled with texts that had clearly been read often, and recently. Most of them were books about energy and psychic phenomena, but there was also an investment in the works of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Mark combed through every closet and every drawer and found not a single piece of paper with a name or even a clue as to the identity of the blond woman. Perhaps Dixie Witte-the real Dixie Witte, the one in the guesthouse awaiting him now-would be able to answer that simply enough, but Mark didn’t want to leave the property until he was convinced he’d seen all there was. Once he walked out, he didn’t think he’d be coming back without a subpoena…and, truthfully, he hoped he’d never be back at all. There was something sick about the place.

Rise the Dark the DARK will RISE RiSE the DaRK RiSE rise will RISE the DARK

They were words of madness, and yet he stood looking at them again as if he were intending to solve a riddle. He played the light over each wildly painted letter, trying to think of what the phrase might be from. A poem, a song? The look of the word rise reminded him of something, and eventually he got it-the Manson Family. They’d painted the word in blood at the home of their victims. The Tate house. No, not Tate. The second house. The LaBiancas. Husband and wife, butchered in their own home. Rise. The Manson girls had been in that house before. They’d broken in and moved things around, let the dog out, just generally left a sense of intrusion, invasion. Creepy-crawling, they’d called in. That house was where the police had found the words helter skelter too. Had inspiration from that bloody summer of 1969 found its way to Cassadaga? The Manson Family, with their pretty young girls with changed names, new identities.

I have many brothers, the blond woman had said.

They come and they go, the boy had told him about the people in the house.

He moved away from the wall, panning the light from left to right across the room to illuminate those odd drawings, and felt dizzy again.

Rise the dark. The dark rise.

Again he heard a voice in his head that was not his own. A male voice, but not one he knew, saying: Too long in here, Markus. Too long. Time to go.

He pulled away from the wall with an effort, went down the stairs, and noted numbly that his jacket was on the floor in the living room. He gathered that up and was about to head for the front door and escape when he realized that he hadn’t checked the kitchen. He’d been about to when he’d had one of those strange urges to go back upstairs and revisit the bizarre painted words. As bad as he wanted out, he couldn’t go yet. He had to finish the job. See everything there was to see.

There wasn’t much in the kitchen, but a door there led to a cellar. He hadn’t expected to find a cellar, because houses of that age in Florida usually didn’t have basements. They were built over crawl spaces most often, prepared for tropical rains and flooding. The house at 49B, though, didn’t have a Florida look. It had been built by a Northerner for a Northerner. As soon as Mark opened the door that led downstairs, the air told him why the basement had been a bad idea. The trapped smell of a thousand floods leaked out, a sickeningly sweet mustiness.

The cellar ceiling was so low that there was no way he could stand up, and he had to go down the bottom steps in an awkward crouch. The confinement, paired with the smell of damp stone, brought back memories of Indiana caves, and he wanted none of those.

The space was cluttered, stacked with what seemed to be random pieces of machinery, like a salvage yard. It took him a moment to realize what they were-generators. They were all in pieces, disassembled and scattered. Some were so ancient that it was little surprise he hadn’t recognized them at first. The presence of the generators wasn’t so strange-in a place where hurricane season was serious business, you saw a lot of them-but so many in scattered pieces just added another layer of frenzy to the house. It looked as if someone had been frantically trying to assemble one as time was running short.

There was a special delusion going on in the home, that was clear, but Mark had no sense of exactly what the people who lived here believed.

Beyond the generator was a workbench, and when Mark moved his light to its surface he saw more metal, but this was different from the generators, clean and gleaming. New.

He approached it with caution. There were angled pieces of steel on each end of a central piece that looked like a grate or maybe a drain cover, with ribbed bars and gaps between. The angled sections were hinged. He reached out with his flashlight and tapped the center of the object, and the bench seemed to explode.

The flashlight was torn from his hand and he felt something snap at his finger like a wolf’s teeth and then the flashlight was on the floor, rolling, its beam painting crazy patterns of the generator shadows, and Mark couldn’t see the workbench anymore and didn’t have a damn clue what had happened. It had felt like an explosion, but there was no fuel, and no debris. His heart was thundering and he’d reached for his gun as if he needed to return fire.

He knelt and found the light and turned it back to the bench, and finally he understood-it was a trap. A literal trap, with a spring-loaded central piece that banged those angled jaws home. If he’d tapped on it with his fist instead of the flashlight, he’d have a broken hand.

He turned from the device and back toward the stairs and that was when he saw the dead woman.

She was jammed beneath the short flight of steps, her body pressed into a crevice barely large enough to contain it. He’d walked right over her when he’d entered. Her eyes were open, glittering in the light, bright, but not as bright as the blood that saturated the front of her white dress. Her throat had been slashed, and not long ago-the blood wasn’t entirely dry.

Mark said, “God, no,” as if he could deny the reality.

Slow drips of blood plinked down from the gash in her throat and joined the horrific pool below.

This, Mark thought dully, would be the real Dixie Witte.

When he’d arrived, the blond woman had seemed startled, legitimately bothered by the fact that he was early for his appointment. Had she emerged from the cellar just a few minutes earlier? Had she smashed the remains of a human life under the steps like so much discarded junk and then gone up and put beer on ice?

What if you’d been on time? What was supposed to be in the beer? Was that walk to Medicine Wheel Park actually part of the plan, or was she filling time?

The dead woman’s eyes were fixed on his, and they were the only part of her that seemed to hold a trace of life. He had the disquieting sense that she wished to tell him something, or wished for him to tell her something.

Did you hold hope, even as you died? Did you watch your own blood fill your hands and, even as you understood that it was too much, too fast, still think that there was a chance?

I’m glad they shot Lauren, he thought, because he’d read the autopsy reports, read the expert opinions stating that she wouldn’t have known pain. But who in the hell could say that, really? The living could only guess at how it had gone for the dead. There was no such thing as an expert opinion when it came to death.

He was standing there staring at the corpse when he heard a low, distant rumble like far-off thunder. For a moment he thought that was exactly what it was, the coming of another storm, but the sound remained.

Not thunder.

Myron’s truck.

Shaken back into motion, he straightened and promptly slammed his head into the low ceiling, a teeth-snapping crack; he swore and dipped low again, back into a crouch, and drew his gun. There was a small window in the cellar, right at ground level, that let a small amount of light in. When he went to it, though, the pane was so filthy that it didn’t allow a clear look anywhere, and even if it had, the window faced the backyard. The sound of the truck was coming from the front.

He turned from the window. The only path of exit was up those steps, right over the dead woman.

He crossed the basement in an awkward crouch, trying to keep his eyes on the door but not look at the woman, which was impossible. He’d just reached the base of the steps when he heard the front door open.

He had no idea where his Dixie Witte impostor had gone after she left the house or whether she knew that he’d remained so long. What he did know was that the man who had called himself Myron Pate had probably not been kidding when he promised that the next time he saw Mark, he’d be armed. If Mark stepped out of the cellar now, he’d need to be ready to step out shooting.

Two voices became audible, one deeper, one softer. Floorboards creaked overhead as heavy footsteps pounded through the ancient house. Mark looked at the dead woman just a few feet from him and a part of him felt as if giving himself up to an exchange of gunfire would be better than waiting down here with her any longer. He could smell the blood now; it seemed to be all he could smell, and he wondered how he’d missed it before. He stepped back, turning his face from her.

The sounds above grew louder-too loud, thumps of furniture and banging against the walls, and the front door opened and closed and opened and closed again. How many people were they bringing? It sounded like an invasion. Mark blinked sweat out of his eyes, his shoulder beginning to ache from holding the firing position, his gun aimed at the only door they could come through.

The corpse lay before it like a promise of his fate.

Upstairs, the front door banged open again and Mark heard a male voice say, “Take this,” and he realized what all the traffic up there was: there weren’t more people entering-they were packing up.

You’ve flushed them out, he thought. They’re emptying the house, and doing it in a hurry.

A female voice: “He said to shut it down, and he meant it.”

Then a new sound, splashing, and Mark was painfully slow in understanding it. He had been listening to it for several seconds, confused, when his nose told him what his ears hadn’t-gasoline.

Footsteps pounded into the kitchen for the first time, and he tensed his finger on the trigger, but the door didn’t open. The gasoline sloshed against the door and then the footsteps were gone and all that remained was a slow, steady drip at the top of the stairs. The fuel leaked down the steps and trickled onto the dead woman, joining her blood. Mark stared in horrified fascination as a single drop of gasoline landed directly on her open eye, splashing off the cornea but triggering no blink.

The thundering sound of the truck engine’s starting jerked his attention away. They were ready to leave, and that was both good and bad, because he knew what was coming once they were gone.

Almost immediately there was a whoosh of ignition, and the closed door at the top of the cellar stairs was outlined in a thin orange line.

The house was burning on top of him.

He went up the stairs, crossing over her body. Then he pulled the door open and almost fell back down the stairs in the face of the wave of flames that met him. The kitchen was aglow with fire; flames climbed the walls. Somewhere in the living room, what was left of the gas can exploded, and the blaze that followed it had a flash of blue trapped in the orange and red.

Mark slammed the door against the heat, and the cellar returned to blackness, but there was heavy smoke already, and he knew time was short.

He left the stairs and stumbled to the window. It had an iron lock, rusted shut. He hammered on it with the butt of the.38 but made no progress, and the smoke was thickening already, so he gave up on the lock and bashed the butt of the gun into the center of the glass. The old pane fractured but didn’t give, and he swore and smashed it again and this time it broke and he put his hand through the window and over the glass, razoring his thumb open. He balled his jacket in his fist and used that to clear the remains of the glass, then he put his right foot on the old generator nearby, the massive hunk of rusting steel, and stepped up high enough to reach through the small window and get a grip on the exterior wall.

It was tight, but he’d wormed through tighter spaces in caves in Indiana, and with the fire crackling just behind him, motivation was not an issue. He dragged himself through, leaving thin ribbons of flesh behind as he swept over remnant teeth of glass, and he was on his belly in the grass, gasping for air, when he saw a figure just ahead. He fumbled to get his gun upright and had nearly pulled the trigger when he recognized the boy from the orange tree, illuminated by the flames. He was offering a hand.

Mark accepted it and the boy helped him to his feet and they stumbled away together as a window blew out somewhere upstairs and the fire roared through the old house.

“It wasn’t me,” Mark said.

“I know.” The boy released him and stepped aside, regarding the burning home with curiosity but no evident fear. “I saw them. I didn’t know you were inside, though. I saw them with the gas cans.”

A siren rose over the sound of the flames and they both turned toward it. No emergency lights were visible yet, just the sound. The flames cast flickering orange glows over the palm leaves but out beyond the village was dark.

“I think they hurt Dixie,” the boy said.

“Yes,” Mark said. “They hurt her.” He rubbed his eyes as if to remove the image of the woman’s body jammed indifferently under the cellar stairs. “Do you know who they are?”

The boy shook his head. “No, but they said the name you asked about before. The strange one.”

“Garland?”

“That’s it. They’re going to him now.”

“Where?”

“They didn’t say a place. And they said another name too. Eli.”

Eli. It meant nothing to Mark. He said, “Do they work for Garland, is that it? Is he in charge?”

“No. The one named Eli is in charge.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I just am. I know things, sometimes. Everyone here does. One day I’ll be better at it than I am now. But I know some things already. Eli is the worst one.” The boy was backing up as the flames grew taller and hotter. “He’s very bad.”

Mark had trouble imagining anyone worse than Garland Webb, but he nodded and said, “Okay. Thank you for telling me. And wait, please. I need something from you. Please, it’s important.” He fumbled in his pocket with a bloody hand. “Son, I need you to take something for me and keep it until I’m back. Can you do that? It’s very important. It will help me find them and stop them from hurting anyone else.”

He extended his cell phone with its photographs of the red truck’s license plate from earlier in the afternoon. He didn’t want to have it on him when the police came, didn’t want to have to explain any of the photos. He needed a head start. The boy regarded it suspiciously.

“Why don’t you give it to the police?”

“Because I need to find those people before the police do.”

The boy looked into Mark’s eyes for a second and then turned his chin slightly, his gaze drifting up and over Mark’s shoulder.

“I shouldn’t do it, but Walter says it’s fine.”

A few short hours ago Mark would have told the boy to stop telling his tales about ghosts. Now he said, “Listen to Walter, son. It sounds like he knows something about what happens when bad people stay out of prison.”

By the time the police arrived, the boy had pocketed the phone and was standing in the shadows just outside the circle of firelight, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered.

“Is there anyone inside?” an officer asked.

“Yes. But you’re not going to be able to help her now,” Mark said, and then he glanced back for the boy, but he was gone.