Chapter One

"Gotcba one, Doc," came Cecil Clegg's familiar twang on the other end of the phone. His voice syrupy-thick, urgent, slightly bovine, what I imagine an unmilked cow sounding like if a cow could talk. That chewing-on-cud hillbilly accent, the vowels all drawn out and masticated to hell.

Fuzzy-headed, I glanced at the bedside digital clock, which proclaimed, in letters so red they seared the darkness like a branding iron, 2:13. The familiar dream I was having when Cecil called still hovered uneasily nearby. Will. I'd been dreaming about him a lot lately. In it he'd had his own dream. A dream within a dream, like one of those Chinese boxes Annabel used to collect. As if in a Grimm fairy-tale, he'd awakened from a nightmare with wolves chasing him through some dark wood, and had run into our room and clambered into bed with us.

He'd gone through a period when he used to have bad dreams involving wolves. I'm not sure why. We don't have any in these mountains. Though there's a Wolf Knob and a Wolf Lake three miles east of here, wolves have been extinct in the southern Blue Ridge for more than half a century. Maybe it was some book we read to him or just his child's fertile imagination. In any case, wolves terrified him. Each night he'd insist I look under the bed to make sure none were lurking there, that his window was locked. Despite these precautions, he'd sometimes wake from a nightmare and make a dash for our room. He'd crawl between Annabel and me, smelling vaguely of urine and fear, his small heart beating like a drum. A wolf was after me, Dad, he'd say. He had these big teeth. I'd tell him everything was fine, that it was just a dream, as if that made his fear any less real. My own dream seemed so real I found myself patting the far side of the bed, as if searching for him. But it was empty, of course, the sheets cool as rubbing alcohol on the skin.

"Y'all there, Doc?" Cecil asked, interrupting my thoughts.

I felt an odd sensation in the back of my head, an unpleasant kind of tickle, as if someone were teasing my brain with a feather. I was still half asleep. I'd been at the hospital until eleven with a protracted labor, and, pooped but wired as I always am after such a birth, it was nearly one before two glasses of Scotch had induced sleep in me. What I wanted more than anything was for Cecil to be just a dream so I could crawl back into my other dream and lie there holding my son. But duty called.

"I'm here," I said at last.

"You are covering tonight, right?"

"I'm covering," I replied. "What's up?"

"For a minute I thought maybe I should've been bothering Dr. Neinhuis."

"No, you're bothering the right fellow. Rob went over to Charlotte to be with his in-laws for Christmas."

"I don't mind saying I prefer working with you anyway, Doc."

"'Preciate that, Cecil," I said, dropping syllables, which you tend to do after being here as long as I have. It's not so much an effort to fit in, plane the edges off my sharp New England accent, as it is pure contagion. Or sheer laziness. I'm not sure which. "What do you have?"

"Not that I got anything against Neinhuis, mind you," he said, ignoring me. "It's just his manner I don't take to."

"Rob's a little high-strung."

"I'll say. He lets you know right quick he's the doctor. And you're just some redneck peckerwood with a badge."

"So what's up?" I asked, growing impatient.

"Not like you, Doc. You're regular folk. Or almost," he added with a snicker.

"You didn't call at two in the morning to tell me I'm regular folk."

He laughed nervously. "Sorry. Got us a homicide."

He never liked to tell me straight out why he was calling. He had this exasperating habit of making small talk, giving it to me a little bit at a time, almost as if he feared that if he dumped it on me all at once, I just might hang up on him and go back to bed. Which I sometimes had a good mind to do. Yet I knew when Cecil Clegg, the Hubbard County sheriff, called in the middle of the night like this it could only mean one thing: He wanted me to pronounce somebody. Pronounce, the way you would a word, or two people man and wife. Only in this case it was saying they were legally, certifiably dead. Cecil wanted me to drag my butt out of a nice warm bed and accompany him to some sordid spot where death had left its signature. To drive out with him to a cold, dark stretch of mountain road or hoof it into the woods or climb down into someone's dank-smelling cellar. All those places people choose (if they're lucky) or have chosen for them (if they're not) as the spot where they'll breathe their last.

It might be some trucker, say, who'd fallen asleep at the wheel while hauling logs over to Knoxville. Or a girl who'd made the mistake of hitchhiking home after the high school dance and was just another face on a poster until some fisherman snagged her moon-pale thigh with his Rapala out at Glenwood Lake. Or a kid from the college who'd gone backpacking alone in the mountains, got himself good and lost, and what was left of him in the spring after crows and wild dogs got through with him would fit in a violin case.