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nose stings at the sharp temperature drop. Standing beside the car with the dome light on and the reassuring little chime of civilization reminding her that, whatever else is going on, the door is still ajar, she waits for the sensation to come back, the feeling of being watched.

    She doesn’t have to wait long. She feels his stare pressing down on her from somewhere close. It is horrible, this feeling. The fear sinks to the pit of her stomach.

    “Get the shovel and the canvas out of the back,” the voice on the phone says. “You’d better take the flashlight too. It’s going to be very dark where you’re going.”

    “What do you want me to do?”

    “I want you to go down underneath the bridge.”

    “Is that where you are?” she blurts, although it’s not actually what she means. What she means is, Is that where my daughter is? But these questions—and any others she might care to raise—are met with such total preemptive silence on the other end that Sue realizes that he’s hung up again. And now she senses that there will be nothing more forthcoming until she does as she’s told.

    And of course there is another problem. The items he asked her to get out, the shovel and the canvas, are not in the Expedition. They are not in the Expedition because she didn’t bring them. In the case of the canvas tarp, at least, the voice on the phone must know this, since he was the one who came and took the tarp from the garden shed himself.

    She does however have the flashlight and for the moment the flashlight will have to do.

    Now ankle-deep in snow, she begins edging her way toward the embankment, where the bridge takes over, with the phone in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Shining it under the sagging timbers she realizes immediately the light itself will do very little good since she has no idea how deep the snowdrifts are down there. On the third step her right foot plunges through the snow to her crotch, throwing her off-balance, and for an ugly, dizzy moment she is sure she’s going to go tumbling headfirst down the slope to land in a heap in the frozen swamp below.

    Instead she grabs one of the timbers, hooks her left arm around it, and clings there for a span of seconds until her center of gravity is at least partially restored. Then, turning the edges of her feet against the angle of the hill, she inches downward once again, eyes riveted to the circle of the flashlight’s beam ten feet in front of her. As she descends fully beneath the bridge the drifts taper away to wet, bare ground. No amount of wind could blow snow down at this angle.

    Then the smell hits her, not incrementally but all at once.

    The ripe and boggy rot panting upward from the very pores of the earth. It speaks directly to her limbic system and suddenly it is a long time ago and she and Phillip are standing down here, with pieces of hay and grass and sticks stuck to their skin, sweating and filthy among the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. Staring at each other dead-eyed with the knowledge of what they’ve done and the work that is still ahead of them on that endlessly long afternoon.

    You can’t tell anybody, he tells her.

    Sue nods at Phillip’s ghost, his earnest, eleven-year-old face split down the middle by a single ray of sunlight falling from a crack in the bridge above their heads. A bird cries out with a cackling trill.

    Now she is standing at the bottom of the hill. It is so dark down here that the very absence of light itself seems to swallow her up, consuming the flashlight’s illumination in a single gulp. Still, if she looks out of the corner of her eye she can make out the rough outline of wooden piling twenty feet to her right, its base implanted crookedly in the dirt. There is no wind down here, but it is cold and damp.

    Her cell phone rings in her hand. She touches the button to answer but doesn’t say anything. For a moment neither does he.

    “Are you in the place?”

    Sue realizes she’s