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a tattoo, by the way. I can’t find anybody who’s seen a fella with a tattoo like the one you described.” Sheriff Amory looked at me, then my mother, and then back to my dad with his coal-black eyes. “You know that riddle, Tom? The one about a tree fallin’ in the woods, and if there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a noise? Well, if there’s no body and no one’s missin’ anywhere that I can tell, was there a murder or not?”
    “I know what I saw,” Dad said. “Are you doubtin’ my word, J.T.?”
    “No, I didn’t say that. I’m only sayin’ I can’t do anything more until we get a murder victim. I need a name, Tom. I need a face. Without an identification, I don’t even know where to start.”
    “So in the meantime somebody who killed another man is walkin’ around as free as you please and doesn’t have to be scared of gettin’ caught anytime soon. Is that it?”
    “Yep,” the sheriff admitted. “That about sums it up.”
    Of course Sheriff Amory promised he’d keep working on it, and that he’d call around the state for information on missing persons. Sooner or later, he said, somebody would have to ask after the man who had gone down in the lake. When the sheriff had gone, my father went out to sit on the front porch by himself with the light off, and he sat there alone past the time Mom told me to get ready for bed.
    That was the night my father’s cry awakened me in the dark.
    I sat up in bed, my nerves jangled. I could hear Mom talking to Dad through the wall. “It’s all right,” she was saying. “It was a bad dream, just a bad dream, everything’s all right.”
    Dad was quiet for a long time. I heard water running in the bathroom. Then the squeak of their bedsprings. “You want to tell me about it?” Mom asked him.
    “No. God, no.”
    “It was just a bad dream.”
    “I don’t care. It was real enough.”
    “Can you get back to sleep?”
    He sighed. I could imagine him there in the darkened bedroom, his hands pressed to his face. “I don’t know,” he said.
    “Let me rub your back.”
    The bedsprings squeaked again, as the weight of their bodies shifted. “You’re awful tight,” Mom said. “All up in your neck, too.”
    “That hurts like hell. Right there, where your thumb is.”
    “It’s a crick. You must’ve pulled a muscle.”
    Silence. My neck and shoulders, too, had been comforted by my mother’s supple hands. Every so often the springs spoke, announcing a movement. Then my father’s voice came back. “I had another nightmare about that man in the car.”
    “I figured so.”
    “I was lookin’ at him in that car, with his face beat all to pulp and his throat strangled with a wire. I saw the handcuff on his wrist, and the tattoo on his shoulder. The car was goin’ down, and then… then his eyes opened.”
    I shivered. I could see it myself, and my father’s voice was almost a gasp.
    “He looked at me. Right at me. Water poured out of his eyeholes. He opened his mouth, and his tongue was as black as a snake’s head. And then he said, ‘Come with me.’”
    “Don’t think about it,” Mom interrupted. “Just close your eyes and rest.”
    “I can’t rest. I can’t.” I pictured my father’s body, lying like a question mark on the bed as Mom kneaded the iron-tight muscles of his back. “My nightmare,” he went on. “The man in the car reached out and grabbed my wrist. His fingernails were blue. His fingers bit hard into my skin, and he said, ‘Come with me, down in the dark.’ The car… the car started sinkin’, faster and faster, and I tried to break loose but he wouldn’t let me go, and he said, ‘Come with me, come with me, down in the dark.’ And then the lake closed over my head and I couldn’t get away from it and I opened my mouth to scream but the water filled it up. Oh Jesus, Rebecca. Oh, Jesus.”
    “It wasn’t real. Listen to me! It was only a bad dream, and everythin’s all right now.”
    “No,” Dad