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sort things out.”
    â€œAgreed,” Pepper said, starting past me to the path that would lead us back to the playground.
    I snatched his shirt and said, “No. We can’t walk back down that way. If anyone sees us coming down the path they might put two and two together after someone finds him. Let’s cut over Hogback Hill and take the path down Riddles Run to the glass works. It will look like we were scouting those fields. We’ll come into town from the south, and no one will ever know we were up here.”
    We looked at Adrian and he nodded his approval. In spite of the situation, I welcomed the nod. It was the first time in my life that I could recall making a decision of significance around Adrian. Usually, we simply deferred to him.
    Deak looked back at Petey. “Deak, there’s nothing we can do for him,” I said. He nodded. As we headed across the clearing, I stopped and used the stick to point back to the brush. “Better pick up that maul, Adrian.” He went back, kicked around the weeds, and found it a couple feet from the body. As he emerged into the clearing, he rolled it in his hand and appeared to be examining it for bloodstains.
    Pepper led us south along the backside of Hogback Hill, the largest of the foothills that rimmed the southwest corner of Crystalton. It would bring us out of the woods near the old Longstreet Mine No. 8 and along the Little Seneca Creek, a quarter of a mile from where it emptied into the Ohio River near the foundation of the old Brilliant Glass Works. The glass works was more than four decadesgone, but its stone foundation remained and we would occasionally dig around the grounds for slag, the large pieces of glass that were formed when leftover molten glass was dumped at the end of a run. The slag was considered trash when glass factories lined the Ohio River in Crystalton, but in 1971 they were treasures of our lost past and people would pay five dollars for clear, brick-sized pieces, which were commonly used as doorstops. Along the east side of the old foundation, sloping several hundred yards toward the river, was another farm field that we sometimes searched for arrowheads. After a big storm the relics could be found in abundance along the lower ridge of the field and in the mouth of the Little Seneca, where we scooped out silt and rock in kitchen colanders, searching for arrowheads like prospectors panning for gold.
    We did not run across Hogback Hill, but walked in silence and at a brisk pace. I recalled that I had been thinking about lunch when we walked out of the Postalakis’s feed-corn field. I was no longer hungry, the pangs canceled by the clenching of my throat and intestines. As we walked I remembered that I had promised my mother I would cut the grass that afternoon. I thought it odd that in the midst of such chaos I would remember something as seemingly insignificant as mowing the lawn.
    As we followed the path around Hogback Hill, I felt oddly euphoric, light in the chest, as though I had just walked away from a plane crash. I had witnessed a horrific event, a young man had died, but there was a modicum of relief in knowing that I had not thrown the stone that ended Petey’s life. As bad as things were, I knew that I would never have to shoulder that blame. Was I helping to hide the killer? Absolutely. But I could never be held accountable for the murder. The ground was ablaze and strewn with crushed wings and engines and body parts, but I was walking out of the fuselage virtually unscathed.

Chapter Three
    O n the hillside farmed by Del Cafferty south of town, an outcropping of sandstone protruded from the soil a hundred feet from the edge of the field, which tumbled toward the river and within a few feet of the New York Central Railroad tracks. During our arrowhead sojourns to the field, we would often pack a lunch and sit on the pitted outcropping as we ate, our feet dangling two feet from the loam below, watching