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“Okay . . . ,” I say, still not following.

“What did that fox sound like to you, out on Far Cry? What words did you think you heard?”

“Oh my God,” I say, my mouth almost too dry to speak. “But panicked and drawn out. Like someone—”

“Screaming for help,” Bristal finishes for me. “Screaming for help and sounding so much like the sound people out there were used to hearing that nobody noticed.”

“Except the dogs,” I say, following the path of Bristal’s finger along the map. “Like you said that night we were out on Far Cry, nothing reacted to that scream because the animals were so used to hearing it. No dogs barked that night we were out there, and the dogs back in 1994 weren’t barking because of the barometer pressure, either.”

“Nope,” Bristal says. “Somebody was out there screaming. Somebody who was making their way west and stopped making noise right here.” She taps the screen, the image pixelating where her finger presses down. “Right here in this copse of trees where Far Cry intersects with 96.”

“Where Linda Chance found Dodger,” I say.

“Covered in mud,” Bristal adds. “Because he was digging something up.”

We’re both silent, the lessening patter of the rain on my windows fading with the last of the sun, the evening clouds eating what’s left of twilight.

“We gotta go out there,” I say, staring at the map.

“And we should probably take a shovel,” Bristal says.

Forty

I pull into the abandoned Hemming place and yank my jacket hood over my head before getting out of the car. Bristal does the same, hitting the hatch and retrieving the shovel I’d grabbed out of Mom’s gardening shed. She still wasn’t back from Erin Hendrix’s when we left the house, and Dad hadn’t returned from work, either. I’d shot them a text on our family chat that I was going over to Bristal’s, while Bristal texted her mom to let her know that she was going to go dig up a dead body, to which Madison had responded, Cool.

I whip out a flashlight, and we push our way through the overgrown yard, out past an empty granary, hugging the side of a half-collapsed shed at the back corner of the property before we break out into the open field. I can see the thin, white bodies of the birch trees at the edge of the culvert, a few hundred feet from the intersection of Far Cry Road and County Road 96.

“If we see any cars, you need to turn your light off,” Bristal says as we step out into the field. “Technically we’re trespassing, and I don’t feel like explaining why.”

But she doesn’t need to worry; nobody is out on a chilly, rainy night, and we reach the copse of trees without hearing the sound of an engine or seeing the flash of headlights.

“Okay,” I say, pulling my hood closer around my face as the rain picks up again. “How do we know where to dig?”

Bristal rests the shovel against a tree, and blows on her hands, rubbing them together for warmth. “It’s not a huge area,” she says. “When he buried her, he would’ve wanted to stay under cover, and you’ve got to imagine these trees have grown quite a bit in thirty years, and the canopy has spread. So we don’t look around the edges, first of all.

“Second, not to be awful, but I doubt he bothered digging the required six feet. He was burying a body, and probably fast. A shallow grave would settle, so we need to look for—”

“A depression, about the size of a human body,” I say, sweeping my flashlight around the copse of trees. “And not too close to the culvert because he’d know that running water would uncover her, sooner or later.”

“Look for a puddle,” Bristal advises, curling her arms around herself. “This rain is cold, but it might do us some favors.”

We search the south side of the culvert without finding anything that looks promising, ducking down low once when we hear a car. I flip the light off, hovering next to Bristal as our breath makes clouds in the air, the warmth of our bodies evaporating in front of our eyes. The car passes by, and I turn the light back on as she hops the culvert and the thin steam of water running there, then turns to me.

“Toss me the flashlight,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because you’re going to fall when you jump,” Bristal explains. “And I don’t want to lose the light.”

“I’m not going to fall!” I insist.

“Just toss me the light,” she says. “Save me the trouble of saying—”

I flex my knees and jump, expelling what feels like Herculean effort as I fly through the air—and collapse into a heap, the light rolling away from me.

“I told you so,” Bristal finishes, with a sigh. “Just once, you’re going to listen to me. And when it happens, that will be a beautiful moment.”

“Sorry,” I say, pulling myself to my knees and brushing mud off my ruined jeans. I head for the light, which had flown from my fingers to land just outside the copse of trees, its beam spreading across the open, empty field. I trip on something and fall again, catching myself just in time. Cold water spreads up past my wrists and I gasp as it hits my face.