A new excerpt.

This is from a chapter late in the book, narrated by Stephen Bishop, the longtime friend of Julie Sullivan, the girl who is abducted and returns nine years later. Enjoy.


1. THE FIRST TIME I SAW HER, SHE DREW BLOOD.

She was nine, or nearly nine. Which would have made me eleven, or nearly twelve. And on a summer afternoon my little brother and I watched as she bloodied the nose of a South Bailey boy, a feat still spoken of to this day. Back then there were no real neighborhoods in Bailey, merely directions. Coordinates. These days there are small yet exclusive housing developments with names like Copperwood, Southbridge, Bullhead. Specific, unimaginative names affixed to points on a map. But we had no such clear, precise logic on our maps when I was a boy. All was painted in vague, broad strokes. Generalities. Aside from the few homes situated around Mill Creek (literally named for a freshwater spring, or creek, that ran by an old, dilapidated mill), you either lived in North Bailey or South Bailey. And that was it. Naturally, the kids from North Bailey seemed forever at odds with those from South Bailey. Our own little Civil War. All we lacked was the convenient color-coding of blue and gray. For long stretches of time, there would be peace between the two tribes. Yet every so often, a group of South Bailey boys would break free of whatever confinements held them at bay and make the one or two-mile trek up north, a band of stir-crazy marauders looking for something to pillage. We could always hear them before we could see them. They dragged sticks and baseball bats along the sidewalks, where there were sidewalks, banged them on mailboxes and fences and road signs, knocked over trash cans with them and swung them at cats. They sang ridiculous songs, off-key and loud as a fire alarm. They made catcalls to the girls's windows and threats to the boys'. And they would, inevitably, find what they sought most. A group of kids at play. There were no playgrounds in North Bailey. The closest thing could be found at Bailey Elementary, a rusty metal slide and a pair of creaky swings, both considered more potential deathtraps than anything else. So us North Bailey children would either remain in our backyards - mostly just wild, unkempt fields with ribboned, oft-ignored wooden stakes, planted there to let you know when you had left your backyard and wandered into someone else's - or, if we felt courageous, venture over to the old Miller place. Long abandoned, the Miller place was a miniature, burned-out farm shack, no more than three hundred square feet. Its door sat askew in its frame, its chimney had fallen through to the foundation, and the shards of glass which remained in the windows were jagged survivors of volley after volley of stones thrown by children, lending the place the appearance of a hungry monster in possession of razor-sharp fangs. Outside the shack was a clearing, where we were known to while away many an afternoon playing catch, or freeze tag, or nothing at all. The girls of North Bailey, if they happened to find the clearing free of boys, would throw elaborate tea parties or parades of Barbie dolls, and if boys happened to be there first, they would stage a coup, out-sassing and out-backtalking the hapless males into retreat. But this would never work on the South Bailey boys. The few times they did manage to sniff out, like a pack of hyenas, the redolent, sweet fragrance of local girls in the clearing, there had been trouble. Insults had been hurled, resulting in vicious name-calling from the girls, to which the South Bailey boys would respond as boys will most always do. With the forceful application of blunt objects. Rocks were thrown, sticks were swung, though not even a South Bailey boy would dare make contact with a stick. The girls would run around the clearing, teasing and heckling their pursuers in sing-song fashion, playing along until the fear of pain became insufferable, or until a rock actually found one of them, bruising a shin or a shoulder. Then they would cry and wail and run away, leaving the victorious South Bailey boys howling with laughter, pumping their fists in the air.

And it was just such a skirmish my little brother and I wandered into one July afternoon, having come to the clearing in a fit of boredom. The summer prior we had hung a rope swing from old man Miller's largest tree, what we called Miller's Oak, the ancient hulk of a tree that dominated the clearing, littering the ground with leaves in autumn, and casting long, ominous shadows in summer. But even this did not entitle us to free play whenever the South Bailey boys arrived. Rather than flee upon seeing them, we crouched low, slinking along the ground until we found adequate cover behind a pine tree, from which to spy on the proceedings. What we saw was not surprising, but always entertaining. A half dozen girls, most of them my brother's age or younger, being chased around the clearing by three or four South Bailey boys. These boys were larger than usual, it seemed. Or perhaps they were the same I'd seen before, only grown up a bit. One of them I knew, or knew of. Travis Beacham. The others were as foreign as Saracens to me. They loomed over the girls the way Miller's Oak loomed over us all, bearing down on them with an unprecedented ferocity, which made me nervous. I found my body had become tight and rigid with tension as I watched, crouched low as if ready to pounce. All of the girls being pursued I recognized, except one. She had dirty blonde hair, pulled back in a ponytail. You never saw a ponytail on a girl that young in North Bailey. Everything was braided, curled, colored, permed, or straightened. Ponytails were for exercising mothers, or the girls on the high school field hockey team. She dressed oddly. She wore a t-shirt and jeans like us boys, in sharp contrast to all the North Bailey girls who ever came to the clearing, always decked out in their finest dresses and frills, as though groomed for church. And she didn't move like one of them. The other girls, even the most graceful among them, moved and ran with a clunky ineptitude compared to this girl's fluid, balletic movements, as if their legs had been weighed down with lead. She moved as though she had simply sprung out of the ground, darting and dashing with the kind of speed, strength and confidence I had never seen in a girl before, little or no.

The blonde girl, I said to my brother, the one with the pink t-shirt and ponytail. Who is that?

You mean you don't know? said my brother. I thought everybody knew her. That's Julie Sullivan.

I had heard the name before, of course. The Sullivans, who lived in relative seclusion at the northernmost point of Bailey's limits, were practically celebrities in our town. Mr. Sullivan, whose first name, like the first name of most girls' fathers, I did not yet know, was terribly rich, according to our mother. Rich and sad, she used to say. Years later I would come to love Arthur Sullivan, almost like my own father, but back then, in the minds of us North Bailey kids, he was a craggy old bastard, as miserly and foul as Ebenezer Scrooge. No one ever saw the Sullivans in town, it seemed. For many years, until Julie was in high school, she was educated at home, by tutors. And they had help. A cook, a maid, and a gardener. It was these three, nameless and silent, whom we would encounter in town, running various errands for old Mr. Sullivan. But now here she was, Julie Sullivan, among us. How or why, I had no clue. From the safety of our pine tree, I watched her run. Unlike the other girls, she laughed as she ran, and she ran without fear. As though she knew exactly what she was doing. She seemed to know just how far and how fast to run in order to stay out of danger, while still managing to tease the boys in return by slowing down a little, offering herself as a potential target. She would turn around and run backwards, then make antlers with her hands and stick out her tongue, giving the boys a nice, loud, raspberry. If they came close to catching her or pelting her with a stone, she would pick up the pace. And she could outrun them all. If they were going to be foolhardy enough to chuck rocks at her, well then she was going to make them work for it. I couldn't help but be impressed.

Finally, it happened. One of the girls - who it was escapes me now - was clocked in the face by a hefty throw from the biggest of the South Bailey boys. The stone made a repulsive, nauseating sound as it collided with her face, and her hands flew up to cover her nose. Everything stopped. No one, not my brother or myself, or anyone in the clearing, moved or made a sound. Then the blood came. In the months and years that followed, the amount of blood pouring from this girl's nose would grow more and more copious with each telling, all depending on who the storyteller happened to be. In truth, it was not a trickle, and not an ocean, but somewhere in between. Twin streams of red descended from her nostrils to her mouth, then came dripping from her chin to the grass and splattering on her shoe. I didn't know whether to laugh or gasp in horror. The girl screamed and bawled, flapping her arms and shaking her hands as if in the throes of an epileptic fit. The boys, who for several long moments had remained silent, now erupted with laughter. Travis Beacham slapped his belly and doubled over, while the giant who threw the stone pointed, hooted and cackled. He was so distracted with his own fit of laughter that he did not see Julie Sullivan, marching across the clearing. Hey! she shouted, startling him. He opened his mouth and began to say what I believe he meant to be Hey yourself. But he was unable to complete his sentence. Instead, he received a beautiful right cross delivered with uncanny speed and accuracy to the meat of his nose; delivered by a girl who had clearly punched a boy in the face before. The giant swore and staggered, wobbling like a newly born calf. He attempted to regain his bearings and play it off, but he wasn't fooling any of us. He was genuinely stunned. And hurt. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and it came away streaked with blood. There was a conflict at work in the muscles of his face, and clearly he was waging a violent internal debate about what to do next. Any other girl, and I imagine he would have chased her down, exacted some sort of punishment. I don't believe he would have hit her - that was beneath even the nastiest of South Bailey boys - but there would have been some sort of penalty. Perhaps he would have pinned her arm to her back until she cried Mercy, or perhaps an Indian Sunburn. But this kid hadn't figured Julie Sullivan out yet. None of us had. He simply wobbled in place for a moment or two and glared at her, while everyone looking on remained silent. I suspect he was weighing the cost of pursuing vengeance versus the risk of catching another beating. In the end he simply gave her the finger, turned around and skulked off alone, ignoring the gales of laughter that erupted the moment he turned his back.

Years later I would return with Julie to this very spot, where we would recall the event with progressive levels of clarity, and laugh about it until our stomachs hurt. Then we would take the door of the old Miller place off its hinges, quite by accident, and walk the shack's crumbling floors, shining flashlights into every corner, searching for brown recluses and rats and ancient secrets. She would jump and shriek and cling to me for a moment when a hairy spider the size of an apple darted from beneath the window, down the wall, scurrying across the floor and between her legs before being crushed beneath my bootheel. And I would hold her for a few seconds longer than necessary, feeling the warmth of her body travel into mine. I would smell her hair, rich with the scent of strawberries and brown sugar. We would spread a blanket down on the floor and read Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and t.s. eliot to each other. We would open a verboten bottle of cheap red wine, stolen from my parents' pantry, and take turns sipping from it. And it would never occur to her, I'm sure, to view this scene as romantic. She was in love with Travis Beacham, or at least this was my assumption. She had never said as much. But she was with him. They had kissed, with great passion and frequency, right in front of me, as though I had ceased to exist. For all I knew, she had lost her virginity to him. But I had never asked her about this, as my acquisition of the truth, whatever the truth may have been, was far too dangerous to be worth the risk. For that one night I would pretend, for as long as I was able, that there were only the two of us alive in the world. That there was no other truth but ours. And she would float along with me, adrift in my happy illusion; reading poetry, sipping wine, taking comfort, I think, in the knowledge that she was safe with me, safe in the warm cocoon of our friendship.

The End Is Nigh!

So I have exactly thirteen days to finish my book before my deadline, in order to submit my finished manuscript for consideration in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. This is a Herculean task, as I still have quite a lot of work to do. But it will be done.

In the meantime, here's an excerpt from a later chapter. The narrator is Ezra Cartwright, a minister, who also had a brief tenure as a chaplain for the FBI. Here he describes his first assignment as chaplain. To read the excerpt, click here.

Cheers!

Carts and baskets.

So I decided to just go ahead and post the entire first chapter of the book, rather than continue to post random little chunks (although I may do that with other chapters). This may be the literary equivalent of putting all my eggs in one basket, or putting the cart before the horse, or whatever cliché works in this context, but I don't care. It still needs some tweaking, I'm sure, but here it is nonetheless:




The Painted Lady.
Part One. The Ghost Girl.




Chapter One. Alice Anderson.





It was the Thompson boys who saw her first. This I know for certain. Other people remember it differently, so they tell it differently. Maybe they choose to, maybe they don't. I can't say. Stories, like secrets, have a way of flitting like birds from soul to soul, becoming entirely different creatures along the way. Fact is spun into legend and legend into fact and back again. You may start out with a robin, yet by the time it alights on your windowsill you'll find you've got yourself a blue jay. But I'm not in the business of selling legends here, to be quite honest. Just stick to the facts, that's me. That's how my father raised me, and it's in keeping with my training as an officer of the law. So I will attempt to tell the story, or my little corner of it, fact for fact, though some will no doubt call it lie or legend when I'm done.

I suppose I could, as is the way of many, start at the beginning, some twenty-seven years ago, when I first beheld that little golden girl, merely a toddler then, waddling around in nothing more than a diaper, sucking on all of her fingers at once, as though they might come unglued otherwise, and fluttering her eyelashes at passing strangers like a miniature Hollywood starlet. I could then go on to tell of her childhood, brilliant and sad and wonderful and crazy, describing at length the way she grew like a rose among weeds, how she carved her initials into this town. How, in many ways, she wound up becoming a fulcrum on which our little world would rest and pivot.

But that would not be right. For me, the story begins elsewhere. It begins many years later, with me and Jasper Whitley in our respective vehicles, sitting and talking the way we always did, in that cold, dead space between evening and morning, when the sky goes blacker than you ever thought it was capable of, and the earth has nothing to say for itself. When even the woods surrounding you are silent. We had been meeting that way nearly every night for going on fifteen years, I suppose, parking our government-issued jalopies side-by-side, just within sight of Lazy Susan's, the one-and-only local bar, and the only place in Bailey where the kinds of things happened that might have required our attention. Besides, it was the perfect spot, situated just so near the northernmost tip of my route, and the southernmost tip of Jasper's. The two of us had arranged our cruisers in the classic patrolman fashion: the grille of Jasper's pointing due south, mine aiming north, straight for the top of creation. It was cold, I remember, damn cold. The kind of cold that behaves more like white heat than cold, burning you up from within, from nostrils to knuckles to knees. The kind of cold which makes you rend your garments and cry out for springtime. We sat there in the freezing dark, heaters blasting, coffee in hand, windows cracked ever so slightly so we could hear each other speak without resorting to screaming and wouldn't catch a chill in the process, talking about whatever it was that popped into our heads we thought was worth mentioning out loud. And it was then the call came in. Not a radio call from the station, like usual. We rarely got one of those at that time of night. And when we did, it was more often than not an assist call, summoning us out to the home of some poor old soul who went to bed complaining of heartburn, woke up clutching his chest a few hours later in the throes of a full-blown cardiac arrest. Most of those calls, by the time you get there, it's already too late. No, this call came in on my cell, my direct line. That was how I first learned about her. About how the Thompson boys found her.

The Thompson boys, Billy and Seth, lived with their father Danny on his thirty-acre spread down south, the very butt end of my route. At that time I'd been driving the same route every day, six days a week, for going on twenty-two years. So you can bet your ass I know this town. I know its roads, its hills, its trees, its sky, its people. You give me a name, any name, of a resident of Bailey, and I can tell you their street address, what they call a living, whether they go to church over at First Baptist or across the way at First Lutheran, the names of their children, the names of their pets. I can even tell you when they'll be at work and when they'll be at home, what kind of vehicle they drive, what their favorite color is. There's always one old geezer in town who can take you to a strip mall or a row of new, Colonial-style homes surrounded by fast food joints, point and say I can remember when there wasn't none of this here, just trees and grass as far as the eye can see. Well, in Bailey, that's me. Like I said, twenty-two years. The graveyard shift. I set out every night at eleven o'clock sharp, starting up near the Swann place in Cherry Hill, home to Evelyn and Richard Swann and their three children: Maxwell, Emma, and little Ruby. Terribly wealthy, but just about the finest people you could hope to run in to in Bailey. Then I'd wind my way through Forrest Mills and Bullhead to the Olde Town historic district - where the high school kids liked to sneak off to and hang out after hours, doing God knows what - then to Newtown, where the county municipalities are now headquartered and more new prefab condos spring up by the dozen every few months. Then I'd drive back up north, where Jasper and I would have our little chit-chat outside Lazy Susan's at the start of his shift, since he began his patrol a few hours behind mine. After that I'd head down to Mill Creek, once a thriving community of its own - about thirty families living in modest yet lovely brick homes - now just a broken down, degenerate trailer park. Not much to patrol in Bailey, you understand. A town of only about a thousand souls. Time slows to a crawl when you're out there, driving around, looking for something. Looking for what? Trouble, I suppose. But rarely is there any to be found out there. Why they even needed two of us to patrol the place in the dead of night baffles me. It's like hiring two pairs of hands to milk one scrawny old heifer. But I was grateful every day for Jasper. Not that we had some deep, meaningful connection or some such nonsense. No, I can't say that. We liked each other fine, and still do. Jasper is as good a man as they come, salt of the earth and all that, and I can safely say I love him like family. We even keep in touch to this day, and pretty regularly at that, despite his getting out of town and putting on a fireman's uniform. But it wasn't how much I liked Jasper. No, the cause of my profound gratitude, when you put it in a pot and boiled it down to its nuts and seeds, was simply this: when you're out there, putting around, looking for signs of distress in the cold, dark nothing that is winter in Bailey, you start to get lonely. A little sad. Scared, even. You start talking to yourself, or praying, or whatever it is you do to keep yourself from losing it. And you can only listen to so much gospel or country-and-western on the radio, since that's all they play up here. In fact, they tell us in Academy not to listen to music while on patrol, that it dulls the senses and distracts you from the present moment. Which is true enough, I've found, but if I don't have a little something to sing along with out there in the void, I'd be in a straight jacket for sure. So in a sense, Jasper was my ballast, I guess you could say. My little nothing conversations with him would keep me grounded, keep me from yanking my hair out one strand at a time. We'd sit there, shooting whatever breeze we could find for ourselves, keeping an eye out for any suspicious activity over at The Suze, as many of the locals call it. And I say suspicious very loosely. Every once in a great while there'd be something for us to deal with, more often than not some crazy drunk - usually Everett Smith or Jimmy Jackson - running off at the mouth too much, or maybe a sloppy bout of fisticuffs over some girl. But nothing serious. Since most of the regulars at Lazy Susan's were friends and neighbors, any mayhem or ruckus would inevitably peter out soon enough, often without our intervention. Eventually, Everett Smith, or Jimmy Jackson, or whoever he was, would get lovingly escorted out the door by his fellow patrons, sometimes accompanied by one or both of us, and the two (or three, or four, as it sometimes happened) parties involved in the exchanging of blows would inevitably unite in a long, beer-soaked embrace, all the while uttering loud and slobbery declarations of brotherly love. And that would be that. Before the thing with the Sullivan girl, that was about as complicated as things got around here.

That night in particular was a quiet one at The Suze, I remember, the only exception being early on, round about midnight. Jasper and I had been put a bit on edge when we'd seen Buck Janes and Travis Beacham roll up in Travis's pick-up. A few years back, Travis had gotten himself a big, banged-up old used Ford F-350 around his twenty-first birthday, and right away had jacked it up high and tweaked the engine so it roared like a pride of lions, and painted it jet-black with big orange flames ripping down the sides of it. Even gave it a name and emblazoned it on the hood like some sort of superhero emblem; called it The Thing. After that, anytime we saw Travis sitting high and pretty in The Thing, it was almost certainly cause for alarm, as the kid was usually up to no good in that truck. The one truly bad apple in Bailey, you ask me. Even the boys who ran with him, like Buck Janes and Tim Preston and Marshall Lewis, they were all right in my book. More or less. A bit misdirected, a bit lewd, but harmless in the end. The way I figured it, Travis had them under some kind of macho spell, since they were likely to do whatever Travis did, or told them to do, even if it meant the occasional infraction of the law. We hadn't heard much from them in quite some time, and that was just fine by me. But here they were, Travis Beacham and Buck Janes, a couple of hot-footed demons on shore leave. We paused in our conversation to watch them hop out of the truck, and something in the way they were walking - Travis strutting, real cocksure and edgy and dangerous, Bucky Janes kind of jittery, hopping and shuffling like a welterweight about to enter the ring, like he had fire in his pockets - gave me pause, made me unbuckle my seat belt and reach for my keys to shut the engine off. When I looked over at Jasper, he had done the same, his body cocked forward as though it was ready to spring into action, his hand poised over the ignition switch. But we waited. I can't say why we waited, but we waited. And just a couple minutes later, out they emerged, with three others, two of whom, Tim Preston and Marsh Lewis, I knew. But this third kid, him I didn't know. Tall, muscular, dark fellow wearing a white tank top - what they call a wife-beater - and covered in tattoos. How he wasn't freezing to death while dressed like that is beyond me. The five of them were laughing and hollering and cursing up a storm, all of them passing around a few fat, lumpy, hand-rolled cigarettes which may or may not have been doobies. We'd observed this and questioned them about it many times before, believe me, and finally one night, Travis had reluctantly turned one of his own cumbrous creations over to Jasper, who gently tore the thing open like a birthday present and sniffed the contents. It's okay, Jasper had said, handing a useless brown-and-white heap of dried leaves and parchment back to Travis. I snatched a handful of the stuff out of the boy's hand and took a deep whiff. Tobacco. I opened my hand and a tiny funnel cloud of wind snatched the bits of tobacco from my palm and toyed with them a moment before carrying them away. Travis flashed us that movie-star smirk of his and took a little bow before climbing back into The Thing and disappearing with his posse. We both had a hunch that they'd just gotten lucky that night, or, worse yet, they'd pulled a fast one on us. We may not have been the brightest bulbs in Bailey, but we weren't thick enough to be ignorant of the fact that there was a steadily growing drug culture in our little town, and that Travis Beacham was right out in front of it, like the damn Pied Piper.
We watched for a while as they blew smoke rings into the dry mountain air and patted each other on the back and hi-fived and bounced around on their boot heels, the whole scene reminiscent of some bizarre tribal dance. Then they piled into The Thing, Travis and Buck up front, the other three hanging like monkeys off the sides in back. Travis revved the engine good and loud, shaking the whole earth to its foundations, then spun out and did a donut in the dirt parking lot, kicking up a great cloud of dust and slinging rocks and filth all over the vehicles unfortunate enough to have been parked nearby. Then he whirled The Thing around and headed out, suddenly stopping short. He leaned over and turned his head to look past Buck Janes in the passenger seat and, plain as day, looked right at me and smiled. I heard him call out Yoo hoo! Alice! followed by a chorus of falsetto voices. Alice! Hey sweet thing! You be careful now, you hear? Don't let Jasper there get too rough with you! Travis stuck his fist in Bucky's face and flashed me the finger. Bucky roared with laughter and I could hear him stomping his feet on the floorboard. Naturally, three more middle fingers went up in the air, followed by more catcalls, and more laughter. Seconds later they had vanished into the blackness, a whirling dust cloud like a miniature tornado lingering behind for more than a minute, the only evidence of their existence.

I looked over at Jasper, his face red as a beet, knuckles blanched, clutching his steering wheel. You wanna follow them? he said. See what they're up to? He spoke in a flat, angry monotone, without even turning to look at me.

Nah, I said. They're just bats looking for a belfry is all. Following them would only make matters worse.

Yeah, he said. I suppose you're right. But I could tell he didn't want to believe that.

Things went back to quiet and stayed that way for a good while. Folks began trickling out of Lazy Susan's - a couple here, a few more there - until quitting time came around 4 am and Pete and Edith Waverley, the couple who own the place, locked up and headed home. That was our cue. We started up our engines and were giving them a little bit of idle time to warm up when my cell rang, Danny Thompson on the other end; I swear, the only time I can ever recall hearing the man sound frightened. His voice shook while he spoke like he'd swallowed a jackhammer, his words stammered into oblivion. Now Danny Thompson never stammered. On top of which, the high mountain air was getting to my cellphone reception and the words that did come out of Danny's mouth fell to pieces, crumbling and dropping away like bits of stone under a chisel. Our conversation, if you can call it that, was something of a boxing match. Danny throwing a few shaky words in here and there like quick jabs, me desperately - and loudly - trying to bob and weave and toss a few blows of my own in at any cost, even shouting at one point. Dammit, Danny! Just shut up and let me talk! But it didn't do a lick of good. I might as well have been shouting into a storm. All told, I picked up something about Billy and Seth and something else, something about the woods. And amidst all the tumult I clearly made out the word girl. Then the atmosphere, our merciless referee, killed the call. So after a few pointless utterances of Hello? Hello? I sat for a moment in silence, clutching the phone like it was attempting an escape, my heart beating so loud you could have heard it from several towns away. So what was that all about? asked Jasper.

That was Danny. Danny Thompson. I realized I was speaking a bit like a dead person just back from the grave. Hearing stalwart Daniel Thompson all shaken up like that had me thrown, and I knew it was evident, right there, plain as the sky is blue, in the deadness of my voice.

Jasper waited as long as he could before saying anything else. He's a patient one, that Jasper, but I could practically hear his patience bending and snapping like a brittle twig in a frost. So, what did he say? Al? Are the boys all right? What the hell's going on?

Couldn't really say, Jasper. But I think I need to get myself down there. Right now.



Anyone in Bailey could tell you that Danny Thompson was a good man, as good as they come. He's gone now, cancer of course, and those of us left behind are so much the poorer for it. I'd known the man nearly the entire length of his life, and as far back as my memory of him could reach, he had always been the best of souls; the kind to call you "ma'am" or "sir," no matter how many times you begged him not to. The kind of man who stood when a lady entered the room and picked up garbage off the street, regardless of who put it there. He sat with me for nearly ten years on the town council, and I think I heard him utter only a tiny handful of words in all that time. But we all knew that when Danny Thompson opened his mouth, he'd been pondering what came out of it for a good while, and he was prepared to back it up with the fire of his resolve. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't have done anything for that man and his family. Now Danny wasn't expressly asking for my help, not that I could have heard him if he had been, but we had an understanding, that if trouble came his way, he would call me directly, never the station. There were too many people in my department I knew Danny didn't trust, and frankly, neither did I. Besides, no need to rustle up trouble where there may not be any. So here he was, calling me in the dead of night, and from what I could gather, he had stumbled into some kind of trouble, or if not trouble, something serious enough that it set off an earthquake somewhere inside of him. Now I'm not one to sit and ponder. Something needs doing, I'm doing it. So I said my goodbyes to Jasper and made nothing of the thirty miles between Lazy Susan's and the Thompson farm, driving like hell itself was nipping at my back tires. Now you'll never catch me exceeding the speed limit. Not ever. I've never seen the use of it. Never even been in a high-speed pursuit. No need for that sort of thing around here since, like I've said, folks generally keep to themselves in Bailey, more often than not treating one another as the Bible tells them they ought to. Sure, we had some drugs being passed around here and there, but what town didn't? And we did have a husband shoot his wife once, up on North Plains Road about ten years back, but it was purely by accident. And the woman lived. Had to eat her meals out of a straw, but she lived.

The Thompson farm was situated smack in the middle between our little town of Bailey and nowhere. Acres upon acres of choice real estate they had there, but the western portion of the property was outlined by the thickest, creepiest stretch of woods you'd ever hope to see. Not big, majestic oak or pine trees either, but tall, scrawny Aspens and Maples and such, the kinds of trees that go all skeletal and spooky with the onset of winter, limbs like bony fingers reaching out to snatch the life right out of you. In Bailey you'll always hear them say those woods are haunted, as people in small towns with nothing better to occupy their time are wont to say. I'd like to believe I know better in my advanced age than to buy into all that hokum, yet those old woods still manage to get my heart out of rhythm, if only for a moment or two.

Turning on to the long, snakelike dirt road that led onto the Thompson property, I could catch a glimpse of a few of Danny's acres just as the sun was starting to inch its way up the tree line, shooting through the branches and illuminating the frosty earth, lending the land the appearance of being alive, a living sea of tiny, fiery diamonds. And there sat the house, as ever a friendly giant resting for a spell atop a hill. It had been a couple years since I'd been down there; just hadn't felt right to me to be there since Danny's wife, Cecelia, had passed. Self-preservation, I suppose. Now here I was, and as I drove up I couldn't help but notice that, even from outside, the house looked, well, sad. Broken. Cecelia's window boxes were still there, but now they were covered in mildew, the flowers planted in them long since dead and gone. The house seemed to have changed color, darkening somehow, as though it had been in mourning. I thought of Cecelia and the way the house sparkled and shone, even on the grayest and dreariest of winter days while she graced the earth. And for a moment, I thought I might go all misty-eyed.

I pulled up to the front of the house and there was Danny, with his youngest, Seth, clinging on to his father's pants leg for anchorage, as though he was frightened Daddy might float away. Even from the car I could see that Danny's face had gone pale and thin as a cadaver's. He stood stoop-shouldered, and Danny never stood stoop-shouldered. He appeared weak. Now Danny's a big man. Big, giant oak tree of a man. The kind you don't want to wind up on the wrong side of. But at that moment he seemed ready to topple over like a rotted-out sapling in a stiff breeze. There was a darkness under both of his eyes, and not on account of broken sleep, either. I could tell. Something was hiding there, and I didn't like the looks of it. The older boy, Billy, stood next to his father, both of them now, inconceivably, nearly as tall as one another. Next to Billy sat Bo, their chocolate Lab, whom had been picked out of a litter of eight by Cecelia and now, I figured, had to be nearly the same age as Billy. I stepped out of the car, aware that whenever I stepped out of that vehicle on Danny Thompson's property, in uniform, it was impossible for me to do so as Officer Anderson, but as, simply, Alice. So I made no attempt to put on any airs of authority or courage or other such nonsense. Couldn't if I had wanted to.

Bo stood up as fast as an old dog can and began barking loudly, even ferociously. Easy, boy, Danny said, it's just Auntie Alice, and Billy hooked a finger in Bo's collar and yanked him back down into submission.

Guess old Bo's forgotten me, eh? I said.

Oh, pay him no mind, Danny said. He's practically senile these days. The dog sat down at Billy's side, but I could see he didn't like the idea. He eyed me suspiciously and sat tensely, ready to pounce should I prove his suspicions correct. I've never been easy around dogs, it's true, but I did my best to ignore Bo, approached Danny and smiled like nothing in the world was wrong, like he hadn't just phoned me in a near-panic half an hour ago. Hey, Al, he said, his mouth curling up a bit at the corners in some vague imitation of a smile, like he'd seen other people doing it and was only copying. I wanted to hug him around the neck, but I settled for patting him vigorously on the shoulder. Next I walked up to Billy, shook his hand. Even at fourteen, the boy gave a man's handshake. Then I crouched down to look Seth in the eye, ruffled that beautiful, shaggy blond hair of his. He was ten now, yet much older than many children that age, I knew, simply by virtue of being born into the Thompson family and working on the Thompson farm. Right now, however, he appeared small and fragile, like a baby bird shaken from the nest.

How are you, sport? I asked. You doing okay?

He nodded; a meek little nod, like it took all the strength in the world. The wind kicked up and Seth shivered and pulled his Daddy's leg in closer. I looked in his eyes. The early morning light was dim, but I could still see into those eyes well enough to see that something had troubled this little boy. Was troubling him still. But it wasn't my place to ask Seth any questions just yet. No need to put a young mind through all that trouble all over again, no matter what had put it there. I just smiled and touched his cheek, and the faintest suggestion of a smile came back to me.

It's cold out, said Danny. Why don't you come inside, Al. Come see what I was telling you about. I didn't bother telling him I hadn't the faintest idea what that might be.
Danny and the boys turned and led the way into the house. Bo straggled behind Billy, still keeping an eye on me, then decided to give the barking another go. Billy bent over and pointed a stern finger in Bo's face. No, Bo! That's enough, he said in a stern, raised tone, and I was struck by how much of the man to come was now present in that boy's voice, which had been high and squeaky the last I'd heard it. Instantly, the dog sat back down, humbled, his expression immediately softening into one of genuine remorse. Now come on, Billy said, and with a jerk - not mean, but firm, masterly - brought Bo back up onto his feet. Danny opened the door, and the thing creaked and groaned like a mad old geezer, seemingly rusting right off its hinges. Warm, stale air from the potbelly stove came flooding out and with it came a smell that tore its way into my nostrils. Not a rotten smell exactly, but a stiff, angry smell. A male scent, the scent of dust and a dog and boys with no mother and a farmhouse that appeared to be falling down around them.

I couldn't say how long since I'd been inside the Thompson house; since before Cecelia passed, I'd have to guess, when she was just beginning to fade away, but still on her feet, ready and still somewhat able to entertain. Now, sad to say, it was devastatingly obvious that she was gone. As we walked through the laundry room and into the kitchen, I couldn't help but notice the debris. Clothes scattered this way and that, garbage everywhere, beer bottles, half-empty cans of soda pop with flies buzzing about them, junk mail and bills left unopened and strewn about the tables and chairs, everything spilling out onto the floor so you had to step with care, as though walking through a minefield. But I couldn't judge the man. These were the broken pieces of a life half-lived, the life of a full-time farmer, and a widower at that, raising two boys and a herd of cattle with no one to help him or offer support, the rock and comfort of his life dead and gone and never coming back. It pained me to think of Danny that way, and to see the place like this, so fallen from its former glory. Danny must have sensed my alarm, the way a dog knows you're about to piss yourself with fear. He turned and muttered an apology for the state of the place, made some half-hearted excuses, then trudged on.

For years before he tried his hand at farming, Danny Thompson had been a carpenter, and a damn fine one at that. He took up the trade in the late 80's, shortly after his one and only run at college, and found that not only was he good, but he enjoyed himself doing it. The man was far better with wood than he ever was with cows, I have to say. Made a pretty good living by it, too, building fine, handsome cabinetry and the sort of rough-hewn, rustic furniture that was so popular then, fashioned from hearty birch and aspen and cedar trees cut down by his own two hands. Folk from as far as Evanston and Greentree were coming to his shop, having him custom-design and build everything from the mundane - nightstands and bookshelves and counter tops and the like - to insane, artsy-fartsy things that were more aesthetic than they were practical, more like sculpture than anything else. But Danny did it all, no matter how bizarre, and he loved it. Even built his own house. He and Cecelia designed it themselves and Danny took it upon himself to build it by hand, from scratch, with the help of only his brother Earl in from Gosford and two of the local boys, Dean and Dale Bradford, who were paid in Cecelia's unmatched home-cooking. Took them over five years to build. But oh was it worth it. I suppose we were all a bit surprised by the end result. We all knew Danny was a perfectly capable carpenter, even quite talented, but to build a house? Well. I'd be lying if I said it didn't turn out to be a most beautiful sight. Spectacular, even. People from five towns over would drive by on Sunday afternoons just to gawk at it. Strangers would knock on the door and ask for a tour, and they'd never be turned down. Many is the time I heard Cecelia say it was truly her dream home, that she could not imagine a more wondrous place to live and raise her boys. But it was never simply her house, nor was it simply Danny's, even if he was the one who built the thing. No, sir. Walking through that house, you could see the two of them in every square inch; Danny in the strong, muscular timber of the crossbeams that bore the weight of the high, vaulted ceiling, or the dark oak and cherry that he incorporated everywhere: the cabinetry, the shelving, the baseboards, the floors, lining the walls. Cecilia, well, she was present most in the adornments, the gentle feminine touches here and there. A tiny clay pot of wildflowers in the corner of a room. A book of poetry here, an array of candles there. A painting of a young girl sprawled in a field, staring at a barn. You could sense Cecelia's presence, too, in the general layout of the place, in the way it simultaneously felt open and inviting as a meadow and warm and close as a cocoon. Men build either caves or coliseums, I find, whereas women build homes, nests. Danny may have erected the house, but it was clear to all who entered that it was a woman who dressed it up for church. I would visit them a lot back in those early days, every opportunity I could manage. I started by inventing excuses, pulling up in my cruiser about mid-morning, saying hello to Danny in his shop (he was always in that shop), telling him some cock-and-bull story about how someone had reported a disturbance, or a missing dog, or something. And Danny never questioned me. Either he was dim enough to buy it or wise enough not to let on. He would just listen and keep at his work while I droned on about some imaginary trouble I'd concocted, then smile and invite me inside for a cup of Cecelia's famous coffee. She would sit me down at the table and we'd talk about anything at all, Bailey and its people mostly, and after just a few visits at her table, she'd found me out. There's never any disturbance in this part of Bailey, she had said, and certainly not this time of day. From then on, I was practically family. I can't say why I felt compelled to spend so much of my time there, exactly. Nor why they felt compelled to take me in. They were young, younger than myself by over two decades, yet they seemed older and wiser than anyone in Bailey. They were isolated out there, fifteen miles from the edge of town, surrounded by cows and woods and the vast, quiet foothills, yet they were never reclusive, and still maintained a constant, vibrant presence in town; Cecelia at PTA meetings and church functions, Danny on the town council, and just about anywhere someone might need a hand, be it hauling furniture or painting a house or mending a roof. And they never once seemed to be working at it. They were, simply, happy, which was a hell of a lot more than I could say for just about all the other families in Bailey. But all of that was before the accident.

You see, Danny got himself shot during a hunting trip up in north country. Some doctor friend of a friend's who tagged along, never fired a gun in his life; thought he had the safety on, didn't know better and had the barrel of his 12-gauge pointed right at Danny, rather than slung over his shoulder like the old pros. So when an eight-point buck leaped out of the woods and scared the poor bastard half to death, the gun went off in his hands. Missed Danny's spinal column by a hair, but put him out of commission for quite some time. He practically had to learn to walk again. And when he did, he tried picking up the carpentry business where he left off. But several months later, it was all over. Danny never said as much, never once complained, but it was clear to the rest of us that he just wasn't up to it. All that standing and bending and measuring and cutting proved too much for that poor back of his, I suppose. So he quietly laid down his tools and resolved to be a dairy farmer instead, though we all thought he was off his rocker. Said he had been fantasizing about it for most of his adult life. Now how that profession is gentler than carpentry on a back with that kind of history is beyond me, but by the time Danny finally managed to dump all his savings and then some into purchasing his land and his cows and equipment and such, his sons were old enough to start earning their keep, doing most of the bending and squatting and heavy lifting their daddy just wasn't capable of. And of course, he had Cecelia. Mighty Cecelia, with a body like a tough, slender maple tree and a heart to match. Not a day goes by I don't miss her. The cancer came back and took her swiftly, like a thief in the night, as they say. Right on the heels of Danny's recovery, no less. Cancer of the colon. She had fought it off once before, and bravely, too, but it found a vulnerable place in her defenses, I guess, and came back to claim her with a fury and a vengeance, as though she were a runaway slave and it had finally turned up at her doorstep to reclaim its property. I knew that her loss was there, in the dark circles under Danny's eyes, in the way his face had gone all gaunt and pale like a ghost's, and in the way the house seemed to have lost its very soul.

As I walked through the Thompson house that morning, with the misty early morning light nervously inching its way in through the windows as though it was fearful of coming in, I could feel Cecelia. I could see her and smell her and almost touch her, and not in some ooky-spooky, spiritual sort of way. I mean it very much literally. She was still completely present in that home, despite the stink and filth and detritus that men and young boys will leave in their wake when a good woman isn't around to temper them.

In here, Danny said, leading the way through the living room, which always seemed to me a miniature cathedral, with its enormous ceiling and the rows of rafters that gave you the impression of walking through the belly of a giant animal. The story was much the same in here; discarded fast-food bags, old newspapers, scattered socks and various bits of laundry, cans and bottles and whatnot scattered every which way. We paused outside the door to the master bedroom.

What's going on, Daniel? I asked. I never called him Daniel. I suddenly felt the way I guessed his late mother must have, employing his full name that way, as though that one extra syllable was the only thing necessary to fully distinguish child from parent.

He held a finger up to his lips. See for yourself, whispered Danny. He slowly opened the door and it made a high, mousy squeak. Danny winced, like the sound had inflicted physical pain.

The door opened onto the room Danny had shared with Cecelia for nearly fifteen years, and it appeared as though she'd never left, everything in the room practically untouched, as though it were a museum exhibit. No filth or excess junk had been allowed to darken the door of this room, no sir. The furniture had remained unmoved, the bedding unaltered, the curtains, the pictures on the walls, the books on the bookshelves, everything the same, the whole room frozen in one singular moment, when Cecelia was still breathing and Danny was still the happiest son of a bitch I knew. I imagined Danny keeping the room cordoned off, prohibiting the boys' entry under the strictest of penalties. It was astonishing; everything was precisely the way I remembered it looking the last time I stood here. There in the corner was Cecelia's wardrobe, a tall, slender gorgeous thing, like Cecelia herself, built for her by Danny as an anniversary gift. And perched atop the wardrobe, as always, was her precious array of odds-and-ends: the little white music box she'd had since kindergarten with a dancing ballerina on top, ready to twirl away if the key was turned; a make-up case; a perfectly arranged stack of little books of poetry; a tiny porcelain vase with two synthetic white roses peeking out. But most important to her, I knew, had been the photographs - shots of her two beautiful boys at the height of their rambunctiousness; Danny in his shop, of course, captured in all of his handsome, powerful glory, shortly before the accident; a faded black-and-white of herself as a pretty, little gap-toothed girl, even one of Bo as a puppy. And on the farthest end of the wardrobe was a picture of Emily Thompson, Cecelia's little angel, lost to a mysterious infection just six days after her first birthday. I couldn't help but be aware that this - this room I now stood in - was Danny's one and only tribute to his darling wife. It was to him, I believe, some kind of legacy.

But that was not what I was here to see.

Danny approached the bed and stood by it, as if waiting for something. I snapped out of my revelry and looked down at the lump nestled there, wrapped in one of Cecelia's enormous handmade quilts, the one she had covered with every type of fruit imaginable. And that's when I saw her.

Oh sweet Jesus, I said, louder than I should have, and clasped a hand over my mouth.

The girl was asleep, curled up in a fetal position. She was hardly a girl, really, but a grown woman, probably in her mid-20's. She was tall and thin, bone-thin. I couldn't see her face from all the matted, tangled-up hair draped over it, so I circled the bed and squatted down next to her and watched her sleep. Her breathing was deep, but ragged, as though her lungs were fighting it. Her face was lovely. Anyone could see that, even with the twisted tendrils of filthy hair nearly covering it up. I reached out my hand and my fingers trembled. I brushed a few strands of hair away, gently, careful not to wake her. And what I saw there made me gasp and jump several feet back like I'd run smack into an electric fence. Holy God in heaven, I said.

What. You know her? Danny whispered.

Of course I know her, I answered. Danny stood there gawking at me like a great, mute beast. I approached the bed again, slowly, nervous she'd wake up screaming or disappear in a puff of vapor. I crouched down beside her again. It was her, no mistaking that. I leaned in close and studied her face. A lovely face, as ever it was. Gaunt, pale, troubled, yet lovely still. Thin little scratches covered her cheeks, as though they were put there by cat claws, or tree branches. There were twin scars just above her brow - deep, jagged lacerations that would be with her the rest of her days. And these weren't fresh scars, either; they had become part of her years ago. Danny, I said. You mean to tell me you don't recognize this girl?

How could I? Danny said.

Because she's one of us, Danny. This girl lived here, among us. Then I saw it, the slow dawning of revelation spreading across Danny's face, beginning with his eyes and spreading down to his cheeks, which were now filling up with color, and finishing up at his lips, which parted slightly, as if they had no choice in the matter.

But, said Danny. She's dead.

No, she most certainly is not, I said. She's here. She's lying right here on your bed.




Out in the hallway, I had him tell me the whole story. It was his boys who had first seen her. They had been outside, performing their morning chores in the empty dark of early morning, before school, the same as any other day. The boys, I knew, began each day around three-thirty in the morning, hauling hay, milking cows, cleaning stalls - whatever needed doing - finishing up their chores in time for breakfast at five-thirty, then heading out the door for their two-mile hike to school by six. The only day their daddy gave them a break from chores was Saturday, since he held fast, he said, to the Bible's notion about that day being the original day of rest, and not what some crazy Roman emperor said it was. But Danny was never the kind to assault you with what he believed, unless you asked for it.

Seth was the first to see her. He had been alone outside, running wheelbarrows full of hay back and forth while Billy was working in the barn. Upon seeing her, he tore up to the stalls to find Billy, running like his feet were aflame, gibberish streaming out of his mouth and his hands flapping as though he was trying to lift himself off the ground. Billy had attempted to calm him, but the boy kept carrying on like that. Finally Seth managed to spurt something out about the woods, a ghost, and a girl. Now Billy wasn't given to telling lies. He was a tough, quiet, reliable boy, and I could always tell that Danny was painfully proud of him. It was easy to see why. He was much like his father. Little Seth, on the other hand, was his mother's son through and through, which I imagined both tickled and tormented poor Danny. It must be the sharpest kind of double-edged sword, having a child who so uncannily embodies someone you've loved so fiercely and lost forever to oblivion; a distinct pleasure while she is alive - Oh, you are exactly like your mother - but, with a flip of the same coin, a cruel trick once she's gone. Like his mother, Seth was known to possess a feverish imagination (Cecelia could certainly entertain wild flights of fancy now and again) and, on top of that, a knack for spinning crazy stories. So, naturally, Billy would have had some difficulty buying what his little brother was trying to sell him that morning. After all, this was the little boy who had invented a best friend named Dave, a most dubious character indeed. If Seth stole a pack of gum from Hanson's general store, or pushed a little girl off the swings, or fed Bo a collection of Billy's most treasured baseball cards, it was Dave. Always Dave. Billy remained calm, eventually coaxing a complete sentence out of Seth. There's a ghost girl coming out of the woods. Seth then jerked and pulled on his big brother's hand, on his clothes, on whatever he could, dragging Billy outside with him. Good-hearted Billy played along, allowing Seth to yank him out into the dark. And sure enough, his little brother wasn't full of bullshit. Billy saw the girl walking slowly, mindlessly towards them, as if in a dream. She was clothed only in a white nightgown, and she was barefoot, traces of blood visible as her raw, naked feet left soft, shallow prints in the patches of leftover snow. She reached out to them, Billy had said, clawing the air as though she was trying to grasp a mirage, then collapsed to the ground a mere ten feet away. Billy had walked up to her motionless body, stood over her and spent a few long moments staring down at her. Then the boy came to his senses and hurried back to Seth - who was sobbing and covering his eyes now - grabbing and carrying his little brother back to the house, returning him to the warmth and shelter offered inside. Soon thereafter Billy had burst into his father's bedroom, shaking the big man until he left dreamland and came back to the here-and-now, practically shouting something into his father's ear about a girl, a ghost girl. Danny confessed to me, as if I were a priest, a desire to throttle his son and carry on sleeping. But then, he said, something occurred to him in that moment, like a pin stuck into his flesh, that Billy would never do such a thing without damn good cause. So Danny threw on some clothes and boots and followed his son outside.

And there she was, Danny said. Just lying there on the frozen ground. I swear, Al. I thought she was dead.

He had felt her neck, then her wrist, where he was finally able, after several terrifying moments, feel a pulse, faint and tentative. Then he'd carried her into the house. And it was at this point in Danny's narrative that we heard them, coming from outside, violating the precious quiet of the farmhouse.

Sirens.

Danny, I said, tell me you didn't. Blinding reds and whites and yellows came flashing in through the windows like frantic Christmas lights.

I had to, Al.

You panicked.

I didn't know what else to do.

Of course, I said. I went to the window, pulled back the curtain. Two vehicles, an ambulance and a rescue truck, were parked out front, about a half-dozen uniformed men and women streaming out of them, looking busy and very, very serious. Bailey had no hospital of its own, so the call had been dispatched up to North Bridge General, about forty-five miles northeast, which explained the delay. Dammit, I said, instantly wishing I hadn't.

Sorry, Al, said Danny.

I couldn't be angry with the man. After all, he was no doctor, and neither was I. How could we possibly care for this girl in the manner she required? But had it been me, this would all have been going quite another way. Maybe it's the woman in me, maybe it's not, but I would have cleaned her up myself, fed her, clothed her, and taken her to see old Doc Thorne, just ten minutes east of Danny's farm. Doc Thorne was about as good as they got, if you ask me, and he would have been discreet. Then Doc Thorne's daughter, Margaret, a capable doctor in her own right, could have given her the once-over as well. No sense hooking the poor girl up to tubes and wires and poking and prodding and throwing her in the back of some truck so she could be bounced up and down the mountain pass all the way to North Bridge. But the deed was done.

One of the uniforms hammered on the front door. Danny answered and I stood near him, hovering in the shadows just out of sight. There were three of them standing there, one out in front, the one who knocked, a man with a face of chiseled and polished granite, who appeared to be the man in charge, the Boss Man, as he had on a blue jacket covered in badges and insignia. He was flanked on either side by two more; a man on his right and a woman on his left, both of them stoic-faced, standing at attention, their arms tucked behind their backs, military-style. Boss Man had a metallic clipboard in his hand, various forms attached to it. Morning, he said. You Mister, uh, Mister Thompson, sir?

I am indeed, said Danny.

You said something about a girl, sir? Found on your property?

That's right.


She collapsed on your property, is that correct, sir?

Yes, that is correct.

And whereabouts on your property was she found, sir?

Danny pointed over their heads, back towards the woods, about thirty yards away, saying nothing. I knew the man well enough to know he was starting to get testy.

And approximately what time did this occur, sir?

Danny sighed and rubbed his eyes. Look, Sherlock, are you a cop?


Excuse me, sir?

I said, Are you a cop?

No, sir.

Didn't think so. You see, just so happens I have a cop right here. He beckoned me forward and I stepped out into the light, held up my hand and offered a pathetic wave, feeling more like a sideshow freak than a figure of authority. The two on either side of the Boss Man gave me curt little nods in return. This is Officer Anderson of the Bailey Police, said Danny. And she knows everything that's going on. Also, I answered about a hundred questions when I first made the call. So why don't you just do what you came to do, okay? Time's a-wasting.

Is the girl inside, sir? Boss Man asked, not even a little flustered.

Right this way, said Danny.

He led them through the house, making no apologies for the state of it, as he had with me. She's in here, he said, and opened the bedroom door.

The three of them went to work, taking no care to be quiet or gentle. Boss Man muttered some coded nonsense into a radio attached to his shoulder. Whatever he said, it must have been translated as Get the hell in here immediately, as the three other uniforms came flooding into the bedroom, two of them carrying a fold-out gurney, a third carrying two enormous, white tackle boxes full of equipment.

One of them tore the bedclothes from off of her, exposing her near-nakedness and startling a gasp out of me. She wore nothing but an old, tattered nightgown, just as the boys had said. At one point the thing must have been lily white, but right now it more closely resembled the contents of an ashtray. Her flesh, pale and translucent, was nearly the same color. Her body was covered in marks of every kind; abrasions, bruises, lacerations. In a couple of places I could see that someone had used her to snuff out a cigar. The technician knelt on the bed, nearly straddling her, and shone a flashlight into her eyes, slapping her cheeks. Hello, he said. Hello? He then forced her mouth open and poked around inside.

Take it easy, I said.

He ignored me, held a stethoscope up to her chest, listened in, while another uniform, the only woman among them, wrapped a black blood pressure meter around her arm, compressing it tighter and tighter until her arm seemed fit to burst. Blood pressure's fifty-six over thirty-five, she said.

And what do we call that, Crawford?

Hypotension, sir.

Correct. Okay, folks, said Boss Man, scribbling on his clipboard. Get her some oxygen and let's hustle her out of here.

Another of the men whipped something out from one of the white kits, an oxygen mask hooked up to a small metallic bottle. He affixed the mask to her face and a second or two later the thing hissed and popped as the false air made its way from the bottle into her lungs.

Are they gonna shock her with those paddle things? asked Seth. I hadn't even seen the boy enter the room. I wondered how much his ten year-old eyes had taken in. He was standing by Billy, his body half in the open and half tucked away behind his big brother, both boys hovering tentatively in the doorway.

Boys, said Danny. Back to your rooms.

But Dad, said Seth.

Now, said Danny, not a trace of sympathy in his voice. The boys nodded, retreating without another word.

Next thing I knew, Boss Man was counting, loudly. One, two, three - Hup! Then two of them lifted her up as though she were merely a feather. Meanwhile, with impressive ease and precision, another one popped a latch or two on the gurney and flipped it open, the legs and wheels snapping into place with a succession of loud pops and clicks. Within seconds she was laid out on the gurney, strapped down and ready to roll. The woman, whom I assumed was Crawford, slid in between the others and deftly inserted a needle into the girl's wrist. I winced like the wrist was mine. How that poor girl didn't awaken from all the commotion and manhandling, I'll never know. The woman, Crawford, stuck an IV tube into her wrist, connected the tube to an IV bag. She then flipped a hidden bar up on the gurney and hooked the IV bag onto the bar.

All right, said Boss Man. Is she good?

Yes, sir, the men said.

He turned to the woman. Crawford, we good?

Yes, sir. We're good. Crawford was vibrating, as though she was tensing every muscle against an inner onslaught of nervousness, or perhaps the adrenaline induced by the action of the moment. I still remembered it from my rookie days. My captain at the time always called it the juice. Crawford swallowed hard, pushing it all back down, whatever it was. She looked at me, I like to think for reassurance, but more likely because I happened to be standing there. I gave her what I believed to be my most comforting smile. She seemed to entertain the thought of responding in kind before simply looking away and returning her attention to the task at hand.

That's what I want to hear. Okay, let's move. We gotta have this girl where she needs to be two hours ago.

They grabbed their equipment, loaded up the white cases with military precision, wheeled out the gurney, all without so much as a goodbye. Danny and I followed them out into the cold, watching from the front steps as they opened the vehicle doors. Now you won't typically catch me moving too fast. It's just not in my blood. I'm short and squat and I like it that way. But just then something grabbed hold of me and made me hustle my ample self up to the gurney. I can't say for certain what it was. I've never had any offspring of my own, so perhaps it was some deeply buried, unrealized maternal instinct. Or perhaps I was simply afraid of what might happen to her once she left my sight. All I know was, now that she had returned home, I couldn't let myself stand at a distance and watch as they loaded her up and hauled her away from me. I stood beside her for a moment and looked down at that pretty face and took her hand.

All right, Ma'am, Boss Man said, approaching me from behind. I just need a few more pieces of information here and then we'll be out of your hair. Can either you or the gentleman tell me the approximate age of the young lady?

Oh, I don't know. Twenty-five? Twenty-six? She was about sixteen when -

Okay, that's fine. Just need something to put down here for the time being. Name?

Name? Oh, how I did not want to tell him. How strongly I resisted the notion, as if it had less to do with any desire, or lack thereof, on my part, and more to do with a sense of obligation, as if the very act of speaking her name had been forbidden of me. It sounds strange, I know, and terrible, but the very idea of her name had all but disappeared from our town years ago. It had been stuffed down deep like an item of clothing in a drawer, so full of holes and stains it is far too embarrassing ever to wear out in the open, yet far too sentimentally valuable to completely discard. True, her name was still whispered here and there, among the faithful, in bedtime prayers and lunchtime gossip, but never uttered out loud, for that would be some kind of blasphemy. I can't say when it happened, but somewhere along the way there had been passed a kind of unwritten legislation; one just didn't say that name in Bailey. Some refused on grounds of personal grief, as if they believed that the utterance would resurrect everything they had no doubt fought to leave behind. Others refrained for more cynical reasons, fearing that merely the mention of her name would summon some dark, unseen force to town like a host of demons, snatching up our little girls one by one, leaving us all forever bereft.

Ma'am?

He asked me. So I told him. I opened my mouth and nervously uttered those two syllables, the word they formed like a long-forgotten name of God, the texture and sound of it sending a tiny, electric quiver traveling along my tongue and bouncing over my teeth and splashing into my bloodstream. And just like that, it was done; the name was spoken. I was now a blasphemer. Or a believer. I didn't know which.

Julie, I told him. Her name is Julie.


How strange it is that a million days can exist in your memory, profoundly ordinary days, perhaps even a few that were truly remarkable, yet if someone were to ask you to recall the date of just one of them, you would find yourself perfectly helpless. Unless, of course, something terrible had occurred on that day. Then, it seems, a kind of code is indelibly stamped there, forever etched in your brain, enabling even the most trivial and seemingly insignificant of details to be perfectly, immediately, accessible. I couldn't tell you a damn thing about November 21st, 1963. But I can tell you everything you'd ever want to know about the 22nd. I could tell you what the world looked like that day to my twenty year-old eyes: everything steel-grey and muted, the sky thick with the promise of rain, a promise that was never fulfilled. I could tell you what I was wearing, right down to the purple ribbon in my hair, the color of the sweater I wore, the shoes on my feet. I could even tell you what my college professors wore that day if you cared to know. It was the same for my father before me, who would eternally remember every detail of December 7, 1941, right down to the songs playing on the radio and the temperature outside and whether he had eggs or oatmeal for breakfast. So it is with the day Julie was taken from us. Saturday, October 16, 1999. The date is burned into my being, like the giant capital T branded into the hind parts of each of Danny Thompson's cattle. Contrarily, I cannot remember the date on which she returned to us. And this thought always sends a great wave of sadness washing over me.

Later I would learn there had been a massive earthquake the same day, not all that far away, rocking the earth beneath southern California, as well as parts of Arizona and Nevada. But we here in Bailey didn't know a thing about it. Here, there was occurring beneath us a fissure of a different sort. All was peace and quiet, then sudden violence and chaos. We knew right away that the foundations of the earth had been ripped to shreds beneath our feet, but the extent of the damage would never fully be realized, aftershocks rippling out for years on end, felt even to this day.

She was beautiful. This you have to understand. And at the mention of that word, beautiful, you may think you know precisely what I mean, but you'd be wrong. When I employ that term in reference to Julie Sullivan, I'm talking about something so ingrained in the fiber of that girl that no other word will do, and yet, the word itself is not enough. The concept of beauty, this word beautiful, is flung around so thoughtlessly, it seems to me, that ultimately it is rendered an empty shell of a word, never fully pregnant with the true idea of beauty, of what it means to possess beauty oneself, or to discover it in someone else.

I believe I can say, without violating the truth, that it was beholding Julie Sullivan in her youth, in the delicate arms of childhood, which finally delivered to me an understanding of beauty. I am not beautiful myself, nor can I ever hope to be. I'm in my sixties now, and I look every day of it and then some. My skin is mottled, large, hairy brown moles are protruding with greater size and frequency on what seems to be a daily basis, and I even have a liver spot or two. (I can remember when liver spots were relegated only to the elderly and infirm; now it looks as though I am joining their ranks.) As a girl I was tall and gangly, before my classmates caught up to me and I became, simply, average. Soon after the third grade they all passed me by and my growth suddenly halted, rendering me short and scrawny. My teeth, jagged and discolored, protruded from my mouth thanks to a hideous overbite, which my parents, despite my protests, were never willing to pay to have corrected. They never saw the point of it, accusing me of reckless vanity to even have considered such a thing. Vanity was an absolute evil in our home, on par with theft or blasphemy or masturbation. Consequently, I grew up indifferent to beauty, even my own lack of it. Well, perhaps that is not entirely true. I was certainly, keenly, aware of something missing from me. In childhood, I was never referred to as pretty, as every other girl I knew was. Adults simply looked at me and smiled and said, you sure are something. In adolescence, when girls are no longer called pretty and start hearing beautiful, I wasn't referred to as anything at all. I was a blank wall. One day, at about thirteen years of age, I decided to settle the matter once and for all. I approached my mother, in itself no easy feat, and asked Mama, am I pretty? She scooted her her glasses up to the bridge of her nose, leaned in, and regarded me with the look of one appraising a found diamond, as if she had never seen me before in her life. She sighed. No, sweetheart, she said. You are not. This did not, as one might expect, deflate me, nor even discourage me. Instead, it confirmed every suspicion I'd had about myself. A thousand lead sinkers dropped from my body, as though they'd been hooked into my skin since birth and were suddenly cut free. You are unique, my mother had gone on to say, with the concentration of a scientist, or a librarian. You are robust, lively, kind. Delightful. Your character is your beauty, and always will be. Then she turned around and resumed her sewing. I had heard things like this from grown-ups before, about being pretty on the inside, or special, or one-of-a-kind, and I always knew I was merely being sold a bucket full of bullshit. But my mother's voice betrayed nothing false. There was no lie in her tone, nothing to suggest that what she was telling me was anything less than some kind of prophecy. So I arrived at a level of peace, a feeling of a truce having been called between myself and beauty. I would never be beautiful, or pretty, or even cute, and it suited me just fine.

Indifferent as I had always been to beauty, Julie Sullivan, to my eyes, was the very idea of beauty itself. This is said about many girls, it's true, so much it's become cliché, but surely that does not negate its validity. Yes, there were girls I had seen who were prettier, but never as beautiful. And how can I begin to explain why? To attempt to describe her beauty by simply cataloging her physical attributes would be akin to painting a landscape with only two colors; it could be pleasant to behold, but never could it fully capture the intended subject. Besides, I have no interest in belaboring the obvious. Much has been said about Julie's eyes, for instance, and more will be said still. I will leave that be. Even her eyes, stunning as they were, were not the source of her loveliness. What struck me about them was not the intensity of the blue they held, nor the shape of them, nor their brightness, but the spark behind them, created by something other than her eyes, which spoke of greater wonders hiding elsewhere inside her. This thing, this spark, promised radiance and life and utter joy. It invited you to peer inside and partake of whatever you found there for as long as you wished.

Like many of Bailey's children, I watched Julie Sullivan grow in front of me. Hers, unlike that of most girls, was not a gradual ascent to beauty. She was never the ugly duckling who one day miraculously blossomed into the ravishing swan. Neither was she entirely swan. She was some new creature, some impressive new invention on God's part, that both perplexed and enraptured us all. I watched as she went from diapers and bibs to dresses that twirled around her as she spun in circles to purposely shredded blue jeans and skimpy tank tops. I can vividly recall one particular summer when I witnessed the woman emerge from inside her, as if overnight, her breasts budding forth into impressive twin blooms, her legs transformed from pale, girlish stalks into a woman's legs - voluptuous, tan and ladylike, suddenly no longer hidden, but exposed to the world by short shorts and mini-skirts. And oh, how the boys flocked after her. The girls too. She was effortlessly popular, had been since infancy. She never earned love; it was merely bestowed upon her, generously, wherever she went. She was the queen of everything in high school - homecoming, cheerleading, sports, academics - there was nothing missing. Twice, the town bestowed upon her the honor of being our own Miss Bailey, seated in glory atop the biggest float in the annual Tri-County parade, though she was hardly a pageant girl. It was as if she had been entered by default, against her will, for if she didn't do it, then who else in our little town was worthy of such a title?

She was, as far as I am aware, never the object of hatred or scorn. Oh, I'm certain that the odd girl at Bailey High was consumed with jealousy, the odd boy bitter and forlorn, spurned by her refusal to choose him as her own, not to mention even aware of his existence. But I doubt that even they could profess a genuine hatred of the girl. For someone to swoop down out of nowhere and snatch her away from us, to mar and adulterate her the way they did, was beyond the scope of our imagining. You just didn't do such a thing to Julie Sullivan. And if you did, then clearly, you did not know her.

Perhaps you will say that I have idealized her in my memory, the palace of Retrospect; that no one girl could be this way, so beautiful and so beloved. And perhaps you would be right. But this is the way I knew her, and these are my memories of her before she left us. And they are my business. You see, the girl who was taken from us on October 16, 1999, was not the girl who appeared in Danny Thompson's field nine years later. How could she have been? To this day I have no real way of reckoning just what the girl endured in the interim to split her so, to tear her asunder and forge a new girl, weary and bitter and tattered, from the fabric of the old. (I heard fragments of her story from her own lips, but a story will remain a flat, two-dimensional thing unless one has lived it; then, and only then, does it have teeth that bite and nails that claw and a voice that screams.) So there are now, irrevocably, two versions of her in my memory. And forgive me, but I often choose to linger on the former while I let God sort out the latter.

Bright thoughts of Julie - snapshots of the girl at every stage of life - were what I carried around with me in the days immediately following her disappearance, I and a dozen others tromping through the woods that skirt the edges of Bailey's town limits, the cold and wet of the marshy earth seeping into the heart of me, sneaking in through my boots and socks and skin until I was too numb to notice. By then the hope of finding her was growing fainter by the minute, it seemed, but we trudged on. Next to me, always, was Jasper. Also nearby was Stephen Bishop, who in those days of searching would become a dear and, rather surprising, friend; surprising simply as he was over thirty years my junior, and the first and only of Bailey's children to regard me not as an officer of the law - whom all the town's young people treated with both fearful respect and cheerful ridicule - nor as an old woman, taboo in nearly every way imaginable. Nearby too would be Danny Thompson and, when she could break away from the responsibilities of hearth and home and leave someone else in charge, Cecelia, along with their dog, Bo. Captain Harris, my boss, led the charge along with Julie's father, Arthur, and a host of other uniforms, several from our department, several more from the FBI, who had now taken over the investigation. Noticeably absent from the search party was Travis Beacham, who had been Julie's boyfriend for over a year, and was the son of the devil himself if you ask me. Some in town would later suggest that perhaps Travis was so overcome with worry and sorrow that he couldn't bring himself to join us, but I wasn't about to buy that bullshit for any amount of money.

A new figure had emerged several days into the search, a young minister named Ezra Cartwright, fresh out of seminary in Chicago and now chaplain for the FBI, reportedly one of the youngest they had ever placed in that position. His job sounded both simple and unbearably difficult - to accompany the living into the darkness, into horrific situations in which their loved ones had been suddenly, often brutally, ripped out of their lives, be it by car crash or homicide or suicide. He was there in the woods with us simply to be there, in the event that we did indeed find Julie Sullivan's mutilated body somewhere out there in the woods, among the trees and leaves and mud and marsh. I distrusted pious men in general, always have, perhaps since my late father was a man of the cloth, not to mention a sad, drunken, pathetic son of a bitch. But Ezra I liked right away. He'd been burdened with a heavy name, straight out of the good book, but he did not have a minister's face, or at least not the face I had forever associated with that vocation. All the preachers I had known possessed hard, weathered faces that looked as though God had dangled them by a spider's web three feet above the flames of hell most of their lives. But not this boy. His was an earnest, open, trustworthy face. I began to wonder if all ministers started out with faces like his, and traded them in down the road for rougher, more terrifying models, the better for getting their points across. But I hoped not. Somehow I sensed that he was too strong for that, that he would keep this face, this demeanor, this level of calm, until the end of his days. We all walked for hour upon wordless hour together, unsure of how to behave, afraid to speak, lest the words we utter be the wrong words. The only comfort we would find out there would be a gentle touch, a gesture, a nod, a knowing half-smile from a neighbor or friend.

The numbers of those searching thinned out quickly as time dragged on. The first day, it seemed as though all of Bailey had come out to comb the earth for her, and with gusto. They would spill out in swarms like bees released from the hive, marching vigorously, angrily even, shouting her name, flanked on every side by their fellow townsfolk and barking dogs. All that was missing were the pitchforks and torches. The next day, when it was clear that she had not yet been found, we were down by half. A week later, a dozen was about all we could seem to muster. Soon talk turned from sunny declarations of We'll-find-her-soon optimism to bleak, tightly guarded realism, never uttered except under one's breath, cautiously, and only to the most trusted companions. By then it was assumed by most, whether they admitted it or not, that she was dead. Her father had run through the story a hundred times with us, each time retracing his steps in tragic pantomime at the spot where she was last seen. They had come to Olde Town, as they often did, and split up, agreeing to meet back at the fountain in the center square in one hour's time. Her father had gone on to run a few errands - film for the camera, batteries and such - while Julie, well, who knew how Julie had spent those final moments in Bailey? Her father guessed that she had gone to First Chapter, the only real bookstore in Bailey, not counting Harrold's drugstore with its paltry selection of two dozen thrillers and bodice rippers; and he was right. A clerk at the bookstore, a young, bespectacled and nervous redheaded girl, had been questioned the day after Julie vanished, and had said that yes, Julie had, in fact, been there that day. Said it wasn't difficult to remember her, as pretty and well-known in Bailey as she was, aside from the fact that she was the only customer the girl could remember seeing in nearly two hours. She had bought something, too, but the girl could not remember what. This fact alone practically altered the course of the investigation, which had begun with Julie cast as a potential runaway, the disillusioned teenage beauty queen gone astray. Now the whole thing appeared far more ominous. After the cashier's testimony, the manager of the bookstore extracted a copy of the receipt for Julie's purchase from the computer, time-coded at 5:06 pm, around twenty minutes after Arthur Sullivan had last seen his daughter. No title, just a long alpha-numeric UPC code followed by a price. $5.99. She had paid in cash, with exact change. An hour later, the book had been found, a paperback edition of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, hidden in plain sight, obscured in the mud about a hundred yards from the bookstore. It was Bobby Farrell who found it, one of our newbies in the department. He brought it back to us in a plastic bag, his face glowing with pride. I watched as Arthur's countenance collapsed upon seeing the book, as if some hidden support beams had given way within his skull. I could see what he was thinking. Julie would never have left a book just lying in the mud; the girl was never without a book. Alternative scenarios were flashing through Arthur's mind now, I knew, just as they were flashing through mine. They had to be. His girl running away was one thing; terrible, but manageable. Fixable. She could be found, reasoned with, persuaded to return home. Anything else was unthinkable.

Moments later, the FBI had begun their impossible work, attempting to spin entirely theoretical notions into workable data, like gold from a cotton loom. They spoke in a football-style huddle, though not quietly. It made sense, seeing them like that. The few times I'd worked alongside the FBI in my quarter-century as a police officer, their agents had always struck me as the jocks of law enforcement - tough, fit, curt, monosyllabic, street-smart. We small town cops were the academics, the misfits. We were slower on the draw, not due to some inherent penchant for laziness, but for the simple fact that there was never much to do. Thus, by default, we were further behind in every conceivable way: financially, technologically, and not least of all, physically, as every one of us (with not a single exception) had gone a bit soft in the middle. Yet, I convinced myself, where the jocks had the muscle, we had the gift of gut intuition, as nearly all small-town, mountain people possess. And we had heart. We were the emotional ones, the kind ones, the ones to hold your hand, to allay your fears, at least for a little while. Not genuine law enforcement, I know, but it has to count for something. And in an inconceivable situation, such as the one in which Arthur Sullivan now found himself, in which even a crack team of agents with state-of-the-art this and up-to-the-minute that are practically useless, it is, I believe, completely indispensable. So I stood by Arthur Sullivan in those first moments of inconsolable and incomprehensible grief, and put my arm around him, feeling his previously well-managed emotions uncoil inside of him and spill out onto my shoulder in a flood. Captain Harris would later, gently, reprimand me for this, suggesting that such an act undermined my role as an enforcer of the law, but I didn't give a good goddamn. The man was a widower now, his wife taken by lymphoma when Julie was just a toddler, and now his girl had vanished into the void. That girl was his very life. And here she had suddenly gone from a potential fugitive operating under her own influence to a victim, perhaps of rape, murder, or both. Kidnapping was, naturally, a possibility, but somehow didn't seem likely. There had been one kidnapping to speak of within a one hundred mile radius, occurring over forty years prior, never solved. The concept of kidnapping just wasn't in our consciousness, I guess. Regardless of what had taken place, someone needed to stand by that man while he watched and listened, overhearing the police and FBI loudly, tactlessly, spell out the very real possibility that his little girl was no more.

We searched every day until dusk, when most everyone peeled away from us and returned to the warmth of their homes and loved ones. Then we searched some more. The four of us - Jasper, Stephen, Ezra, and myself - had made an unspoken vow, it seemed to me, to carry on together, each day, until we could go no further. We would stay with Arthur Sullivan until his girl was found, or until it was clear to us all that she never would be, a thought not one of us desired to entertain. At the end of each night, we three would collapse into hard, unforgiving wooden chairs at The Grindstone for coffee or at Lazy Susan's, or at Del's Bistro, emotionally and physically exhausted beyond reckoning, nursing our nonexistent appetites and consoling one another in our mutual exhaustion and grief. What we knew in those late hours was grief of the most ungodly sort, for it is nothing more than a vacuum, a black hole; it knows no closure. There is no period affixed to the end of the sentence when the object of one's grief exists only in the ether of Maybe, of Possibly. Yes, even Ezra, new to our town, had come to know a measure of grief, hard as it may be to believe. I wouldn't have believed it myself had I not been with the man daily, hadn't seen the stuff grow all over him like a plague, like a kind of leprosy, choking all the color out of his skin, sapping the life from his eyes. Initially it was his chosen profession that had joined him to us out there in the great, vast, Empty. We all, I imagine, thought the same thing of him, wondering what a soft, tall, lanky kid from the city could possibly know of what it was like to have our universe robbed of its brightest star. Yet he had quickly become a partner in our misery, perhaps by osmosis, by sheer physical proximity to our town's collective anguish. A hell of an initiation, if you ask me.

And as for Stephen, well. He was in love with her, I knew. Half the people in Bailey knew it, even if he didn't. He seemed bloated with it, as though he had stuffed it down into some deep inner chamber long ago, and now it festered there, moldering, spreading infection, surging up like bile and breaking his heart again and again. He was Julie's oldest and closest friend, the two of them inseparable since childhood, and somewhere along the way had pawned off friendship for something larger, heavier and far more expensive. Of course, he wasn't the only boy in Bailey in love with Julie Sullivan, and he knew it. As is the way of many a young lady, Julie had grown up to favor the darker sort, rejecting the scores of nice, handsome young boys throwing roses at her feet, and instead getting herself entangled with Travis Beacham. And what boy in Bailey could ever best Travis Beacham for a girl's affection? I imagine this was at the heart of why Stephen took such great pains to swallow and digest his love away, to turn his attention to other pursuits, even other girls, none of which, like poorly chosen professions, ever took.

Weeks became months, and the search had produced nothing. Not one shred of physical evidence. A short list of suspects had been rounded up and questioned by the FBI, every last one of them male, from Arthur Sullivan to David Fulton, who had been known to, frequently and publicly, profess an obsession with Julie Sullivan, to Travis Beacham. Even Stephen Bishop had been questioned, which, to me, was preposterous. Anyone with eyes could see that the boy could never be capable of such a thing, and certainly not where Julie Sullivan was concerned. Travis, on the other hand, well, I had my suspicions, as did most of Bailey. He had never, to anyone's knowledge, murdered anyone, but the potential for such evil seemed coiled up within him like a patient cobra. We could all envision a dozen possible scenes, all with the same constant, hideous, plot devices: jealousy, accusation, incredulity, an exchange of bitter words and shouts, the kind of thing we had seen occur between him and Julie many times - in the school parking lot after a game, at a party, in the middle of Harrold's drugstore. The idea of such an episode going too far, getting violent, ending up with Julie dead in a ditch somewhere, was not, as shameful as it may sound, that much of a stretch for our imaginations. Travis's absence from the search party did not serve him well, either. Shortly after Julie's vanishing, the FBI had obtained a warrant to search Travis's family's home, his bedroom, all of his personal belongings. They ransacked his room, much to his mother's horror, overturning bookshelves, ripping open pillows, scanning yearbooks, textbooks and notebooks for any sign of homicidal tendencies, turning up nothing. The only evidence of Julie's presence to be found there was a framed photo of the two of them at prom the year before, both of them coifed and groomed and perfect, Julie in a light blue chiffon dress, leaning back against Travis and smiling, Travis, impossibly handsome, standing tall and proud, though unsmiling, arms wrapped protectively around Julie from behind. They searched his car, found a few of Julie's hairs here and there, but concluded that it meant nothing, as every girl leaves plenty of evidence of herself behind in her boyfriend's car, particularly in the heat of the moment. Travis had an alibi as well, and a corroborating witness in his mother, who vouched for his being at home at the dinner table at the time of Julie's disappearance. As much as none of us cared to admit it, the boy appeared clean, as did everyone else in town. Soon the investigation sputtered and slowed to a crawl like a truck with an empty tank. One way or another, Julie was gone, and it was clear that we were all going to have to, somehow, learn to come to terms with it. Many in town returned to daily life as though nothing happened, finding new fodder for gossip, steering clear of talk about Julie and Travis and what may or may not have happened on October 16th, 1999. Even my department went back to business as usual, Jasper and I back on patrol in the quiet Nothing of early morning. Life in Bailey, such as it was, resumed, though now we lived each day beneath a shadow and a wintry chill, whether we acknowledged it or not.

Jasper and I still met regularly with Stephen and Ezra - who had quit the FBI to stay here in Bailey, preaching over at First Lutheran - perhaps out of habit, perhaps in hopes that doing so would somehow conjure her up, beckon her back to us. My guess is a bit of both. We were now known to some in town as The Boresome Foursome, a name that exasperated the men but, oddly enough, delighted me. We sat around the table now with little to say, little to occupy our thoughts. We exhausted every ounce of small talk we could, then sat in blissful silence for minutes at a time, maybe even half an hour, before settling the bill and going our separate ways. It was the worst part of my day, always, parting from them, saying our goodbyes and returning to whatever life we had left.



She spent a total of ten days in North Bridge General - three in Intensive Care, the rest in a wing of the hospital undisclosed to the press - drugged up and unaware for much of that time of anything at all, even with wave after wave of visitors pouring in from forty-five miles south in Bailey. Word had spread quickly, it seemed, despite the attempts of some of us, myself included, to keep her under wraps. Before long there was practically a shrine built to her wherever blank space could be found - at the foot of her bed, on either side of her, plastered above her on the wall. Cards, flowers, candles (which the hospital staff forbade to be lit), enormous baskets filled with candy, balloons, angels, crucifixes, all gifts from the townspeople, adorned her room, alongside beautiful, vividly illustrated cards from the children of Bailey, inscribed with We Love You, Julie or Get Well Soon, each depicting Julie standing in a field, or by the sea, or in some fairy land inhabited by winged creatures and knights and dragons. Wherever she was, the children made certain she was always smiling. Visitors from town, even those who had never met her, came at all hours, regardless of hospital policy, to wait their turn to stand by her bedside while she slept, or to look down at her and smile and say nothing in case she happened to open her eyes and treat them to a dazed, heavy-lidded gaze. A few of the church women came to sit by her, hold her hand, read to her from People magazine, Reader's Digest, and, of course, The Bible, stating that they'd read somewhere in a magazine or something the importance of aural stimulation, that someone should read to Julie everyday. I wanted to tell them that no, that was for someone in a coma, which Julie certainly was not, but who was I to say the ladies shouldn't come and do their good deeds.

Naturally the place was teeming with reporters from magazines, newspapers, tabloids, from as far away as L.A., Manhattan, Virginia, even Montreal. TV crews camped out night and day for a look at her, which they were never granted, despite a few nasty tricks by some, including attempts to bribe janitors and townsfolk to smuggle them in for a peek. Captain Harris began stationing officers outside her door, and postponed any investigation into her reappearance until she was well enough to bear it. I was denied a detail guarding her room, and was kept on patrol, for reasons I was never fully apprised of. Instead I visited her as often as I was able. I found I needed to dress in civilian attire, otherwise I was treated merely as a member of the guard detail and never as a human being. That first visit, standing there in my uniform before I got the hint, I couldn't help thinking she looked like a telephone operator's switchboard, tubes and wires plugged into nearly every opening, an IV still pumping fluid into her, her only source of nourishment, an untouched tray of hospital food perched inexplicably on a stand beside her bed. The hospital staff later informed me that she had gained a few pounds, but I couldn't see it. Bones protruded everywhere - cheeks, shoulders, ribs, elbows, wrists - with skin resembling the thinnest of butcher paper stretched taut over them. The nurse, a heavyset black lady - something you just didn't see in Bailey - came whooshing, as a hurricane, into the room, opening blinds, adjusting bedclothes, checking the IV. Julie's eyes fluttered open once, twice, then closed again. The nurse roughly took hold of Julie's wrist and, gazing at a stopwatch, took her pulse. She seemed to make a mental note of this by nodding and uttering a loud hmph. And just like that, she was gone, without a word, as though I had not been in the room. The moment the door clicked shut, Julie's eyes opened again, much wider this time, as if she had simply been faking it, waiting for the nurse to exit the room. She looked around her, slowly, groggily, as though stepping fresh out of a dream and readjusting to the world she'd left behind. Then she looked at me.

Alice, she said, her voice as thin and rough as sandpaper. Alice.

The nurse burst in once again. Oh, good, baby, she said, you're up. Perfect timing. She bore in her arms a bundle of new bedclothes and a clear plastic bag containing various accouterments I was not educated enough to make heads or tails of. Julie attempted a croaky response, possibly Hello, but I couldn't be certain; could have been Hell no for all I could tell.

Once again, the nurse went about her business, oblivious to anything but herself and her duty. She reached beneath Julie and put a firm hand on the small of her back and raised her up into a sitting position. Julie winced and groaned. That's all right, baby, you can do it, said the nurse. Julie sat upright, staring at the bedclothes, her face the faintest shade of green. The nurse gave her the once-over, pressing the flat of her palm to Julie's forehead, then inserting a digital thermometer into her mouth. The thing beeped once, twice, then several more times in rapid succession. All right, she said, not bad. She took the stethoscope from around her neck and held it up to Julie's back, saying, Okay now, breathe for me, girl. Julie inhaled, producing a ragged, sorrowful sound, sputtering out in jerky coughs and spasms. Come on, baby, you call that breathing? Julie gave it another try, this time apparently managing to give the nurse what she wanted, as a satisfied look spread across the woman's face. Now that's more like it, said the nurse. She lifted the lid on the tray of food and grimaced as though she were smelling sulfur. Hmm, I don't know why they insist on bringing you this garbage when they know good and well you ain't gonna touch none of it. And I can't blame you, darlin'. You get yourself all better and I'm gonna take you over to the Sizzler myself, get you some real food, now how's that sound? Julie coughed in response. Now, we got a couple things to do here, gotta get you changed, check those bandages, et cetera. Gonna have you in your natural state, so maybe you want some privacy. Then she glanced in my direction. Or do you want your friend to stay? This was the first sign that she had even taken note of my existence.

Julie nodded, said something neither of us could make out.

What was that, baby? I'm afraid I'm hard of hearing in this ear. She then turned to me and give me a knowing little wink, the way my Aunt Sophie used to do when she was trying to be clever.

She can stay, said Julie.

All right, then. Let's get you all straightened out here. The nurse proceeded to open Julie's gown from the back, adroitly removing it and tossing it to one side. The sight of the girl in her nakedness made me want to weep. Her body was emaciated, her ribcage perfectly visible, breasts shrunken and shriveled like prunes, a thick, ragged scar traveling across one of them, just above the nipple. Her belly was tiny but swollen, perhaps from bloating. Bruises covered her, particularly her right side, where various shades of black, purple and green crawled up and down her skin like hungry parasites. As the nurse cleansed Julie's wounds and changed her dressings, Julie looked up at me, her eyes apologizing, it seemed, for what I was now witnessing.

There, said the nurse, tying Julie up in a new gown, that about does it. Now, on to the fun stuff. She reached into her bag and withdrew a strange instrument, the likes of which I'd never seen, at least not in Bailey. I didn't spend too much time in hospitals, you see. Never much need to. Had a couple check-ins with Doc Thorne every now and again, more now that I was getting up in years, but his office was not what I would call technologically sophisticated. Doc was of the opinion, as was I, that if God wanted us to use all that fancy equipment, he would have made it himself, instead of just letting us figure it out down here.

The nurse lifted Julie's new gown, exposing her belly and breasts once more, and applied a thick, blue gel. Julie winced again. I'm sorry, baby, said the nurse. I know it's cold as the dickens. She attached the instrument to a small monitor which sat near Julie's bed. She turned the monitor on and it squelched loudly, setting off an alarm bell in my eardrums. The monitor displayed nothing but blackness and static, a few wavy lines here and there, like punctuation. She moved the gadget up and down Julie's stomach and the monitor emitted loud, underwater sounds - whooshes and splashes and hums. Then, a steady, rapid-fire hammering sound. Aha, said the nurse. There she is.

There who is? I said.

The baby. That there is the baby's heartbeat.

Oh, I said. Of course. I looked at Julie's face - flat, colorless, moodless - nothing registering there at all. No shock, no joy, no remorse. Nothing.

She sounds good, the nurse said. Real good. She wiped away the excess gel and gave Julie's belly a gentle pat before covering it up again with the gown. So, she said, tell me the truth, baby. On a scale of one to ten, how's the pain today?

Julie motioned with her hand, so-so. Six, she whispered. Six and a half, maybe.

Oh, well, good. That's better than yesterday. Nine, yesterday, wasn't it, baby? Good. However, you know the drill. Until it's a four or less, I'm gonna have to keep on doing your favorite thing in the whole wide world.

Julie rolled her eyes like a six year-old.

Come on now, honey, it ain't that bad. The nurse produced a syringe and a clear vial, and within seconds had pumped Julie full of the stuff, whatever it was. With a moist cotton ball, she dabbed the microscopic wound she had made with the syringe, then applied a fresh bandage. Then she brushed Julie's cheek with the backside of her hand, perfectly, like a mother. I imagined her returning home to a house full of children, perhaps grandchildren. All right, she said. Nighty-night. She turned to me. Stay as long as you like, she said. She gathered her equipment and, just before leaving, turned to me again. She's a good girl, ain't she?

The best, I said.

Oh yes. I can tell. You can always tell. She turned out the overhead lights and walked down the hallway, her footsteps clipped and heavy, the sound of someone moving with purpose.

Within moments, Julie was asleep. I sat in a chair across from her bed, reading an old issue of Harper's Bazaar, then Cosmopolitan, both of which might as well have been written in French as far as I was concerned. Before I knew it, I found myself reading aloud to her. Ten fashion tips for Fall. Twenty ways to know if your man is cheating. Are you ready for commitment? Take this short quiz.

I kept reading until the echo of my own voice on the walls made me nervous, skittish. I shut the magazine and looked out the window. Nightfall. The sun inched its way down the edge of the sky, drawing a thick crimson blanket over the trees. Two deer, fawns by the look of them, darted in and out of the foliage, as though playing some secret little game. The sound of Julie's breathing, heavy and rattling, was itself the sound I would from then on forever associate with a sense of relief, of profound gratitude, for here she was, among her people once more. I watched her sleep, somebody's baby sleeping inside her, adrift in a sea of warm ignorance of the world it would soon enter; a world in which one could steal another away from her hometown, like a fox snatching an egg from a nest, and invade her, poison her, crush her, eternally alter her. And, it occurred to me, when the fox snatches the egg, it not only destroys the egg, but the nest as well, for now the nest has been robbed of its purpose, the thing for which it was thatched together from twigs and leaves and earth. I sat in that hospital room watching the sky pretend to be something else, aware now that I could never fully come to terms with such a thing, or such a world. And I did not want to.

The door creaked open behind me, but I did not turn around. A long shadow, the shadow of a man, spread out across the floor from beneath my chair, then crept over Julie's bed until it fell upon her face, covering it in darkness. A shallow knock came at the door. I turned to see Stephen Bishop, standing in the doorway, a bouquet of daisies at his side.

I'm too late aren't I, he whispered.

What?

She's asleep. I'm too late. He crossed the room and placed the flowers atop the abandoned tray of food. He stood over her, unsure, I could tell, of how to stand, what to do with his hands, how to breathe. His body seemed tense, rigid, his breathing shallow. He stood there so long he appeared to have fallen asleep standing up. I fought the urge to split open the silence, to say something, anything. Instinctively, I understood that he needed this silence, this nothingness here with her. Finally, he moved. He bent low, and stroked her hair, and kissed her on the forehead. She turned her head slightly to one side and moaned, but remained asleep.

He walked over to me. His eyes were red and damp, his face flushed, and I could tell he had been fighting back tears. He rested his hand on my shoulder. Then left without a sound.