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it’s Peter—and tell her it’s important.”

Thirty-year-old Kathryn Guilford slowed her car as she approached the small gravel road that cut a hole deep into the woods just outside of Sandridge. Sandridge was the extreme western boundary of Holcum County, a remote area of old abandoned home fields that had been slowly but thoroughly reclaimed first by brush, then by pines, then by the overpowering hardwoods. She turned the nose of her ’97 Acura onto the crunching gravel and peered as far as she could down the path. Thirty yards ahead of her, it curved slowly to the right and disappeared behind a gnarled red oak. To her left was a rectangular white sign, too small and with too many letters to be read from the main road. It didn’t seem to advertise or welcome, Kathryn thought; it seemed to exist simply to mark a location, like a survey marker or a gravestone. In red gothic letters it stated plainly, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY—DEPARTMENT OF ENTOMOLOGY—HOLCUM COUNTY RESEARCH STATION. In the center of the sign was the seal of the university, but freshly pasted across the seal was a blue and gold bumper sticker emblazoned, GO NITTANY LIONS.
    Kathryn rolled down her window and listened. From the woods came the slow, heavy, rolling chant of the cicadas, already laboring in the rising morning steam. A thousand invisible wood crickets joined the lament, and blunt-bodied beetles, weighed down by the morning haze, buzzed slowly back and forth across the path.The woods were thick and crowded with life, all groaning and complaining in the early summer heat.
    Kathryn felt a shudder flutter down her spine. She fastened the top button of her white satin blouse and rolled the window up tight, instinctively glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure that each window had sealed completely. Then, flipping the air conditioning to high, she proceeded slowly down the gravel path.
    Thirty yards past the red oak she came to a tall chain-link fence topped by a spiraling roll of razor wire. An unchained gate swung open away from her, and beside the gate was a bright yellow sign bearing a single word: BIOHAZARD. Below the sign was a piece of weathered poster board with a frowning face markered at the top. Below it in rough hand-lettering were the words Mr. Yucky says GO HOME.
    “Strange sense of humor,” Kathryn whispered, and proceeded through the gate.
    The road straightened and widened now, and she relaxed a little and accelerated down the path. Her eyes began to pool with tears when she remembered Peter’s phone call, less than three hours ago, with the gut-wrenching news that Jimmy McAllister was dead—and by his own hand. The coroner checked everything out. He was depressed, they had said. It was only a matter of time before something like this would happen. Everything fits; everything is in order; everyone is so sure.
    Everyone but me.
    Kathryn snapped back to attention at a buzzing sound from under the dashboard. To her utter horror, a single wriggling yellow jacket squeezed from the left floor vent and fanned its cellophane wings. Before she could even scream, the yellow jacket shot forward and landed on her left thigh just below the hemline, then crawled a few quick steps upward. Kathryn found her voice and let loose a scream, snapped both legs straight, and slapped violently at her leg. The car lurched abruptly left, and she jerked the wheel back toward the center of the road. The yellow jacket, now decidedly annoyed, shot upward and buzzed close across her face, then disappeared into the backseat behind her. She threw herself forward and flailed her right arm wildly over, around, behind her head. A venomous hiss sizzled past one ear, retreated, then streaked across the other.With a shriek of terror and rage, Kathryn released the wheel with both hands and swung madly at the air.
    In that instant Kathryn Guilford was no longer a thirty-year-old bank executive driving a shining silver Acura. Somehow, one tiny