Page 1

CHAPTER

1

THE DESERT SWALLOWS things. Bones. Bodies. Memories.

They can disappear forever. Or they can resurface when you least expect.

I knew how to sift through the desert’s ingredients, how to find things that most people couldn’t. I’d been born there, made of it, according to my father, Wilmot Dylan. He’d said as much when I was a child sitting atop a table next to his workbench as he went out about his trade.

I remembered a knock on the front door early one long ago morning, as one had come many mornings. That day, I’d pulled myself from my small bedroom and crept out to the museum, its walls and corners filled with the feathers, fur, and fangs of animals that were once alive but no longer. No one was as good as Wilmot Dylan had been in emulating that life in taxidermized form.

It hadn’t been strange to me. It had been home.

That day, someone had brought in a mountain lion. Later, after he’d chilled the carcass, Wilmot got to work creating the mount for the customer. I’d watched him, fascinated, too young at the age of six to have been introduced to the hatred and disgust that some people felt about my father’s livelihood. Too old to remember any sort of existence before the one we, just the two of us, occupied.

“You know,” Wilmot had said, “there was a time, oh, I think fifty years ago or so, hunting mountain lions was illegal. It would have been wrong to work on this beautiful creature’s body if it had been poached.” His dark, serious eyes were framed with crow’s feet, scorched deep by the sun. At thirty-three years old, I had those same eyes now. The sun always carves its way in.

“I know, Papa,” I’d said.

“What do you think, little one, would I have taken an animal killed illegally?”

“No.”

“Hmm.”

He’d always claimed that he and I had been formed by swirls of dust devils—tornados of dirt that could spin all the way up to the sky. He used that story mostly when I asked about my dead mother, Catalina Shaw Dylan. He’d never said the exact words, but it always seemed he was trying to tell me that she had been made of softer stuff than he and I, something not devilish.

“Papa, can I have that one?” I’d pointed.

“The femur bone?”

“Yes.” And then I’d whispered words that had seemed magical to me: “A mountain lion’s femur.”

Who wouldn’t want something like that?

“Are you building a skeleton, Hazel?”

“I … like the bones, Papa.”

He’d laughed then, a noise filled with real glee. “You are a chip off the old block, little bit. Okay then. You clean it, and it’s yours.”

I had nodded and then turned my attention back to my father’s hands as he worked quickly, expertly.

Almost thirty years had passed since that day—it was so long ago that I was always surprised when the memory resurfaced. But it was one of the clear ones I still had of my father, who disappeared seven years later, when I was thirteen, probably swallowed by the thing that had made us, and the place the sheriff had brought me out to this morning—the desert. That was the day I’d earned not only Wilmot’s approving laugh but also that femur.

Now, I tipped my cowboy hat to shade my eyes better as I looked out into a tangle of cactus and dirt patterned by the wind, though no devils were currently present, at least of the dust variety. I pushed away the memory and worked to keep cool, somewhat literally but mostly figuratively—the morning summer air was too warm, hinting at what was sure to be another typical southern Arizona scorcher, but it was still bearable enough.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sheriff Benji Calloway muttered behind me. His voice was as dry as the air.

“Yeah,” I said distractedly. I was still trying to digest the scene.

Like the man with the mountain lion all those years ago, the sheriff had pounded on my door right before sunrise. “You in there, Hazel?”

Used to the occasional middle of the night interruption, either someone with a fresh kill who didn’t know I hadn’t continued my father’s trade or someone wanting to haze me for the same misconception, I’d opened my eyes quickly.

I’d roused myself from the bigger of the two small bedrooms I’d moved into on the second floor after Wilmot wasn’t there to occupy it anymore, threw on some clothes, and opened the nightstand drawer. My gun was there but not the folding knife that I carried in my back pocket most of the time. Where was it? It came to me a moment later—I thought I’d left it on the patio the night before. I didn’t want to take the time to look for it now, so I grabbed the gun and made my way down to the gallery, the place that was still visited sometimes, coins and dollar bills left behind for the chance to take a look at the most lifelike dead animals in the state of Arizona, maybe the whole western United States. Once I recognized the voice, I set the gun on the donation table and answered the door.

“I need you to see something.” Sheriff Calloway stood there in civilian clothes but with his gun holstered at his waist.