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fell again,
finally: Meade had just brought a knife to a gunfight, and me, a
barstool to a knife fight.
    All of a sudden Meade backed off of me and
began to stand. The Beretta stayed cocked and aimed at him. I sat
up trying my best to stand, but couldn’t. Whoever was holding the
gun had also put a hand on my shoulder and was insisting I stay
where I was.
    Meade took a few more steps back. That’s
about the time I coughed up some blood and then realized the person
restraining me, the person cradling that Beretta, was a woman, and
a young one at that. Then I heard her say, “That’s right, now put
the knife down and move the fuck on!”
    Suddenly, Meade, the voices, and the
stragglers were gone. It was just this stranger and I, Ogelthorpe
and the boys, and the rain. 
    “Thank you,” I managed to say, and
half-mumbling, I asked this stranger her name.
    “My name’s Amelia. Amelia
Hawkins…Mitchell.”
    I wasn’t sure I heard her right. I thought
she had just called me by my true name, just loud enough for me to
hear it, just quiet enough so that no one else did. My eyes grew
wide. Silently I was asking her to repeat herself, but I didn’t
dare ask. The relief I felt at having been spared was suddenly
replaced by the sheer panic of having been found.
    I dropped my chin and reached around to my
back. There was a lot of blood there, and a lot of blood on my
hands, a lot like there was in that toolshed that night when Mom
killed a man.
    I was spared again—just like I was by my
mother twenty-five years ago in that shed—this time by a stranger
bent on taking as compensation a listening ear to her story, a
story of mothers and fathers and missing children. It was a story
that sounded much, too much, like my own.
     
     
    ***

Chapter 5
    April 20, 1995: Sometime after midnight 
    Mitchell
    Since I was about the age of nine or
ten-years-old, I had been having a recurring dream about a little
girl. It happened again the night I met Amelia Hawkins.
    In this dream I’m standing in the middle of
a little girl’s bedroom. The room feels old. The girl is lying in
her bed. She’s maybe twelve years old. She doesn’t seem to be able
to see me, but I can see her. She’s very still as if listening for
something, or for someone. A frost has formed on her window pane. I
can see the girl’s breath vaporizing in the air around her. She’s
also shaking, but I can’t tell if it’s from the cold or from fear.
There is a thump, not a loud one—just a thump, as if someone has
knocked on a wall or a distant door. The little girl looks to her
closet. Its door begins to open. The girl has an expression of
frozen terror on her face.
    It’s that thump and that expression I can’t
seem to stop dreaming about. I wake up gasping, and I woke up
gasping again that night in Neah Bay.
    I sat up and looked around, and tried to
catch my breath. My head was still pounding. My ribs were killing
me. At first I thought I was in my cabin near the marsh butting the
ocean, but as my eyes adjusted to the dark, and my ears to the
steady beeping of an intravenous pump, I realized I wasn’t. I
turned toward a window to my left to see if there was frost on the
window, to see if I was still dreaming. There was no frost, but
there appeared to be someone sitting there in silhouette, legs
crossed, and facing me. She was also smoking a cigarette.
    I stared at this stranger for a moment. I
remembered her from the bar, but I couldn’t remember her name. Then
she said, “Nightmare?” It was a question that came out more like a
statement.
    “No, that’s how I always sleep!” I replied.
“What are you doing here?”
    “They think I’m your wife,” the woman said,
“so don’t say anything to the contrary.”
    I didn’t have a wife. I never had. “You had
the gun,” I said. “The Beretta.”
    “That would be me.”
    “It was Emily…or Amy, or something like
that.”
    “Amelia Hawkins.”
    I nodded. I remembered.
    “How are you feeling,