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slide across her face, and resisted an inkling that she was glad she’d come. She headed for the cabin, keeping to the edges of the meadow, avoiding exposure out of habit, stepping carefully through the darkness beneath the trees. She didn’t see the red pickup until she was nearly upon it. Lola flattened her hand against it. The metal was cold, its surface jeweled with dew. Mary Alice hadn’t parked it moments earlier and rushed inside to get her things before racing back out to fetch Lola from the airport, full of apologies for being late. No, she had not.
    Lola looked at the truck awhile. Maybe something was wrong with it. Maybe Mary Alice had caught a ride with someone else or borrowed a friend’s car. Maybe she’d gotten halfway to the airport and then checked her cell phone and listened to Lola’s messages and was speeding back, readying a lecture for Lola on the value of patience.
    Maybe.
    Probably.
    A dog barked.
    Lola ducked behind the truck. She raised her head above the hood by degrees, scanning the forested hillside beyond the cabin. A shaggy black and white dog raised itself stifflegged from the grass and whined. Lola dropped to her knees, knocked off balance by a flood of recall and its accompanying relief. Mary Alice had gotten a dog. She liked to hike with it, she’d written. So that’s where she’d been.
    “Hey, Mary Alice,” Lola called into the woods. “Your dog beat you back.”
    The words rose on the wind and lost themselves amid the trees. Lola listened for an answering shout, for the sound of footsteps hurrying home. The wind settled. The silence that followed had weight and texture. Lola stood uncertain within it. The dog lay down across something heaped and shiny. It flattened its ears and sent a long, audible growl Lola’s way when she took a step, and then another toward it. Lola watched the ground, wary of losing her footing in the darkness. Halfway up the hill, she lifted her gaze. The shiny stuff was a jacket and someone was in it. She forgot about her feet and sprinted, almost falling beside a rolled-up sleeping bag.
    Mary Alice’s eyes stared upward, a fat fly quivering atop a pupil, despite the evening chill. Lola avoided their unwavering scrutiny and concentrated on the neat hole in Mary Alice’s cheek and remembered a time years earlier when, still new on the job, she had held a ballpoint pen to a similar hole in a man’s chest, thinking that its very insignificance—so small, so defined—made a good detail for the story she was writing. She hadn’t known then, but she knew now, what the hole’s counterpart looked like; and so when she put her hands to Mary Alice’s head, she was careful just to touch fingertips to temples, and sure enough, when she lifted gently, not even an inch, there was nothing left back there, just a mess of congealed blood and brain and shattered bone, brocaded by long, long strands of bright golden hair.

CHAPTER THREE
    T he car sidewindered back down the grassy track, the steering wheel spinning in Lola’s hands.
    Twigs snatched at her through the open window. Lola risked a hand off the wheel to punch 9-1-1 into her phone. “No service,” it blinked in response. She flung it to the floor. The car fishtailed onto the main road, slewing around the curve where she’d nearly hit the man on the horse. “Please,” she whispered. “Be there.” She saw the horse first, riderless, and then the man, crouched beside a ditch, fooling with a wheeled metal contraption. Lola mounted a two-pronged attack on horn and brake. The horse reared, dancing backward, hooves slashing the air. The car spun to a stop. Adrenaline abandoned Lola as quickly as it had rolled in, a tidal wave and its sucking retreat, leaving her fighting for air. She slumped across the steering wheel.
    “Miss,” a measured voice said, “you have got to learn to drive more carefully.”
    Lola lifted her head and took in a green-shirted midsection and a tooled belt with a silver buckle