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arrive exactly on time. How long had it
been since I'd watched Drew disappear into the culvert? Fifteen
minutes? They couldn't have left without me so quickly!
    Because it was the easiest thing to do, and
because I didn't want to contemplate walking the trail to Garrett's
cabin alone, I skip-stepped into a run and continued up the towpath
toward the closed footbridge. That took a few minutes, and by the
time I got there I knew the detour was a mistake. I turned and
started walking back to the culvert with my hands on my hips,
trying to catch my breath.
    And just as I was about to resume running, I
heard the faint sound of a dog barking in the distance. I stopped
to listen and heard it distinctly – deep-pitched, steady-paced,
incessant. The dread welled up and I ran. The barking came, I was
sure, from Garrett's cabin.
    The lightly-worn trail met the towpath about
a hundred feet short of the culvert. After dipping down a slope and
under branches, it wandered around depressions and fallen trees
toward the creek delta, where Garrett had built his cabin on a spit
of high ground adjacent to a lesser channel, not far from its
juncture with the Potomac. Different branches of the trail led to
different places – a deep pool on the main creek channel, a small
beach on the river itself, and both the front and back sides of
Garrett's cabin – and I knew we needed to turn right, right, and
then left at the sequence of forks to reach Garrett's front door
without first alerting the dog he tied up in back.
    When I reached the trail, ducked under its
guardian branches, and stood to regain my bearings, I saw an orange
glow in the distance through the scattered brush and trees. I
walked fast, keeping one eye on the firm mud and crushed leaves
that signified the trail and the other on the spectral orange light
ahead. It grew as I approached, then gained motion when I was close
enough to smell smoke. I zigzagged around a fallen trunk and ran
the last ascending stretch, eyes fixed entirely on the fire.
    The side wall of the cabin nearest to me was
engulfed, and flames were licking across the shingled roof toward
its center. Smoke poured out the top of the open doorway but the
fire hadn't reached it yet, and the right side of the cabin was
unlit. The door was opened fully into the single room beyond, where
I saw flames dancing along the ceiling and curtains on fire above a
back-wall table. I crouched, covered my nose and mouth with my
sleeve, and edged into the heat of the cabin.
    Drew's body was the first thing I saw,
slumped on its side in the center of the floor six feet from the
door. Even in the unsteady light I immediately knew he was dead –
his eyes were wide and unseeing, his mouth slack, his face and neck
dotted with specks of blood. The smoke turned my stunned cry into a
coughing fit as I clasped his shoulder and rolled him supine.
Inside his unbuttoned coat, his warm, wet, mulberry-colored chest
was shredded. Without thinking, I placed my hand on his forehead
and ran it back through his hair, then pulled his eyelids
closed.
    I must have known when I entered the cabin
that no one was lying in wait for me. It was on fire, after all,
and the dog out back had continued its staccato barking. Anyone
inside had to be badly wounded or dead. So it was only after
kneeling by Drew's corpse for a minute with tearing eyes that I
thought to survey the rest of the cabin. There was really only one
direction to look.
    Between Drew's body and the flaming wall was
a tipped-over kerosene can next to a square opening in the floor
that led down to a wood cellar, and dark smoke was gushing up
through the hole. The split logs in the low-ceilinged cellar were
on fire. The trapdoor cover had been slid across the floor, but my
eyes were riveted by what was lying near the edge of the opening
closest to Drew. Four severed fingers resting side by side in a
pool of blood. And a few inches away, a bloodstained hatchet lying
on the floor.
    My eyes shot back to