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prove anything of your worth out here, Mr. Dillard. Neither you nor the boy both.”
    “Quillie,” Mrs. Cuthbert said, her arms crossed, and I could see her shake her head, that hair of hers at odd angles. “That’s enough.”
    “I’ve already called your momma, Huger,” Mrs. Q said. “She’s on her way as we speak.”
    “Perfect,” Unc whispered. He let out a hard breath, called out, “Jessup, just get the DNR boys on down here too.”
    “Yessir,” Jessup said.
    “You bag that son of a bitch,” Mr. Cuthbert called, “and we’ll cook us up some steaks tonight, you want to, Leland. We’ll barbecue us some fauna, I tell you what.”
    He let out a laugh, a loud one that seemed more forced than anything else. And even though it was a kind of innocent laugh, meant only to poke both at that old bag Mrs. Q and at the fact he knew Unc was out here golfing in the middle of the night again, still that laugh echoed cold and easy across the marsh, and very very wrong.
    There was a dead body right here with us. A dead woman right here at the end of this pole I was pushing down on to hold it up. A laugh out of Mr. Cuthbert was the wrong thing to happen out here, just as an idiot joke about the trailer trash element we’d brought here was wrong too.
    There was no joke to any of this.
    But there was still in me this pressure in my chest I knew wasn’t going to leave any time soon. Still in me, too, that rifle-scope view of the body, my line of sight filled with those teeth, that flesh, and whatever had happened—whatever had been done to—her face, and the glow and glisten of water runneling off a body, and I had no choice in that second of Mr. Cuthbert’s laugh echoing back across the marsh but to bark out sharp, “It’s a body.”
    I said it loud, and heard my own echo come back to me, same as that laugh.
    Nothing happened for a moment, everyone in the Dupont backyard just standing there, frozen. The only thing alive seemed that echo back at us, hanging right here in the air around us.
    Mr. Cuthbert, hands still on his hips, took another step forward, said, “What you mean, ‘a body’?”
    “He means a body, Grange,” Unc said, the words quiet. “A woman’s body. Now we need to just wait until the authorities get here before we can—”
    Right then Mrs. Quillie Izerd Grimball took in a breath that tangled up and warbled in her throat, a hard intake of air that made her shoulders seize up to her ears, and she fainted, dropped backward into the shadows like a deer shot through the neck.
    Right then the Guatemalan nurse let out a screech pure and true, a long, high scrape of animal sound.
    Right then Unc flinched there in the seat in front of me, put both hands to the gunwales, and jerked toward the sound; Jessup flinched too, dropped his radio and turned back to the nurse, his arm up to the sound as though it were a fist coming down and him ready to block it.
    The nurse put her hands to her ears, backed away and into the house, then turned and disappeared, still screaming.
    Everything broken, just like that.
    The Cuthberts knelt in the shadows where Mrs. Q had fallen. Jessup bent over and picked up his radio, spoke into it again. The nurse’s scream broke into ragged shards somewhere inside the house, and Jessup went on in after her to try, I figured, to calm her down.
    I let go the pole then, felt the lever of it lift in my hands like a slow seesaw until it stopped in the mud. I didn’t care that Unc wanted me to hold the body up. Let it settle into pluff mud again, where somebody’d stashed it thinking it was gone forever, and where soonenough cops and the sheriff and even the game warden’d be out here to fish it right back up.
    “Knew what it was when I touched it,” Unc whispered. “Damn.”
    I ’d seen bodies before. In fact, if you wanted to trace the picture that way, you could say it was the bodies I’d seen that got us here to this one.
    I don’t know how to get into it without getting