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grief. There were private places in a man’s life where what he did with himself was his own concern. That’s how it was, even if Sarah was trying to help him. He didn’t want her pity, or anyone’s. If it came to a choice, he’d prefer her dislike.
    When Wintone turned back to his desk, he saw protruding from beneath a stack of file folders Doc Amis’s report on the Larsen boy. Wintone picked up the report and crossed the office to file it with his own scanty report on the Larsen incident.
    As the long file drawer slid smoothly shut on its metal rollers, Wintone wondered for an uneasy moment just how the boy had died. Probably he’d never know. The incident would be one of those bizarre cases that would eventually fade into half-believed, half-remembered Ozark folklore. Like some of the stories his grandfather used to tell. And his greatgrandfather …
    During the next week, calm settled again over Colver, a slipping back into the time-worn way things were. Wintone had only minor problems to deal with, and at Mully’s the talk turned to how good business was, to fishing.
    Whatever roamed the darkness beyond Colver, where the night was blacker and things nocturnal stirred to the cacophony of frog and cricket, was fading from the town’s consciousness as Wintone had hoped.

SEVEN
    T WO MILES OUT OF Colver a portable gas stove cast a faint, shadowy glow about a makeshift campsite. A blackened aluminum coffee pot sat off-center on the stove’s burner, and while the three men about the stove waited for the coffee to brew, they passed a quart bottle of Jim Beam bourbon among themselves. Beyond the campsite, through a slope of thick woods, an occasional glimmer of moonlight on black water, like an eye winking through the trees, was the only sign of their proximity to the lake.
    Brian Colby sat hunched on one of the folding cots. His two companions, Les Matson and Dave Larker, were crouched animal-like on their haunches.
    Colby was a tall, lean-faced man with long brown hair brush-combed sideways in a careful arc across his forehead. He sat checking the small .22 revolver that he’d used that day to plink at squirrels from the boat.
    “It’s darker than I thought it could get,” Larker said, gazing into the blackness of the surrounding woods and passing the bottle to Matson.
    Matson was short and thick-bodied, with a round face that expressed his uneasiness while reflecting the stove’s glow like a small, dissatisfied moon. He took a pull on the bottle and wiped his lips with the wrist of his plaid shirt. Colby had talked him into coming on this trip, and while Matson had enjoyed the day’s fishing and the recent dinner of fried bluegill that represented the day’s catch, the complete isolation and darkness of the woods seemed to dredge up all his boyhood fears.
    “There are things moving out there,” he said. “Hear them?”
    “Of course there are things moving,” Colby said reasonably. He was the head of accounting where the three worked at Vector Enterprises, and in a subtle carry-over from work, he considered himself the leader of the group. “There are day animals and night animals.”
    Larker grinned his broken-toothed grin. “You must have learned that from one of those television nature programs.” He belched lightly, with almost a polite delicacy.
    Matson took another pull on the bottle, passed it up to Colby.
    “Think of it this way,” Colby said. “The darkness wouldn’t bother you if you were out here with some chesty blond.”
    Matson shrugged. “I look around, I don’t see one.”
    “What I mean,” Colby said, “is then you’d be thankful for the darkness.” He raised the bottle to his lips and tilted back his head. “It’s relative, like everything else.”
    “I’m a lights-on man, myself,” Larker said. “What did you do with the remains of our supper, Les?”
    Matson motioned with his thumb. “Threw it back there in the woods. Those night animals Colby talks about are