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sitting year after year at the same end of the same pew, a pew two rows down from Osborne’s. So it was that every Sunday morning he followed her slow walk up to the Communion rail and back. She never drank from the chalice, nor did he.
    Widowed thirty years now, Edna was unusually tall for a woman of her generation. Bone-thin with facial features that Osborne found slightly askew due to the angle and crook of her nose—the result of its having been broken several times during her marriage to a short, thick man who had been known to beat her and their four children nightly before he had the good grace to fall out of his fishing boat one night dead drunk.
    The beatings were known town-wide because they could be heard by the neighbors. But what Osborne didn’t know until after he had lost his wife was that one of Edna’s sons had once attempted to molest his eldest daughter, Mallory. While he may not have known of that incident until years after it had occurred, he knew plenty about the man who did it: Bobby Shradtke. And he sure as hell knew Bobby’s car.
    The unexpected sight of that car for the first time in years triggered a memory of such impact that Osborne had to pull over. He held his breath as his mind churned through the details of a conversation he would never forget—and made a connection so disturbing he felt sick to his stomach.

    Twenty-three years ago, the driver of that car had followed nine-year-old Mallory home from the Loon Lake skating rink one January night. Osborne and his wife had not yet built their lake home, so the family lived in town just three blocks from the rink. A polite child, Mallory was careful to follow parental instructions and address adults as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” no matter who they were. Grown-ups were grown-ups—to be treated with respect.
    So when the man in the red car asked directions to the Loon Lake Pub she did her best to answer until he opened his door, exposed himself and tried to drag her inside—all the while hee-hawing in a strange, high whinny, a noise which Mallory told Osborne still gives her nightmares.

    His car stopped at the curb across the street from Edna’s home, Osborne stared at the vehicle in the driveway. He was sure it was the same one: a red 1960 Ford Sunliner convertible with a white top. While the tailfins, chrome and hulking size might spark fond memories among some car buffs, he felt only a mounting nausea.
    The longer he looked, the more he was sure: that expression on Mason’s face, her refusal to tell her mother what had frightened her this morning. Mallory had behaved just like that after the episode with the stranger in the car.
    He remembered how he and Mary Lee had known something was up that night when Mallory dashed into the house crying, her shoulders shaking. But she had insisted it was nothing, refusing to answer their questions until they decided she must have had a falling out with one of her little friends and hurried her off to bed. Mary Lee would never know what really happened because Mallory kept her secret for years—until the day after her mother’s funeral.

    Mary Lee’s death had caught Osborne and their daughters by surprise when a lingering bronchitis turned deadly in the midst of a blinding snowstorm. Even with the Herculean efforts of Ray Pradt—who braved swirling snow and sub-zero temperatures to bolt his plow onto his pickup at two in the morning and rush them to the emergency room (this for a woman who had done her best to get him kicked off his property because his house trailer blocked the view from her dining room window!)—it was too late.
    The day following the funeral and the wake, Osborne and his daughters, the three of them reeling from the fatigue that hits after hours and hours of assuaging the grief of friends, opted for a retreat to the woods—far from phones and flowers and casseroles. They stepped into their crosscountry skis, slipped on well-stocked backpacks and skied in silence and brilliant