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before I pressed on.
    The tavern is still technically an inn. The upstairs rooms are occupied by one dead poltergeist and a collection of living ones, poor semi-itinerant folks. I assume some crank gets smoked up there, even crack, for all I know. Downstairs in the public area there are three large connected rooms—a dining room on one end, a big U-shaped bar in the middle, and a dance floor with a stage in the back on the other side. It was a good happy-hour crowd and each room was occupied. Around the corner I ran into the township mechanic, John Kozlowski, who also hadn’t seen my deputy and had heard nothing from him.
    The next place to look for George was his trailer park on 37. It was a ten-minute drive from the bar. As trailer parks go, his was pretty nice. That may have been due to the Seventh-Day Adventist church next door, a corrugated steel warehouse painted white, with a steeple cobbled on. It was full every Sabbath. I didn’t know whether George was a member of the congregation there, and if so, whether he believed as they do. We never talked about it. The church and trailer park are both tucked in an open valley with a tree line marking where January Creek wends through. As night deepened I bumped to a halt in front of my deputy’s trailer. His yellow truck was there. On either side of his front door, two wooden half barrels contained devastated geraniums, a collection of cigarette butts, and a crushed tallboy. I knocked, but no answer came. I got back in the truck.
    Driving down 37 toward the part of the county where the Stiobhards lived, I was kept on the path by the skeletal trees to my left and the steep black hills to my right. A handful of stars spread out above me in the gap, looking like a watercolor painting because of the mist—white mist that I caught in my headlights when I passed through gullies, and collected as droplets on my windshield every mile or so. The snow was still melting. It would be gone by morning. The radio offered no opinions.
    I had the feeling of things getting carried away from me. The worry took many forms and faces, moving in and out of recognition and time. Polly made a cameo, Polly, my wife, who died in Wyoming, when there was nothing we could do. And that let the black dog in.
    If you’re in a mood, turning onto Old Account Road won’t cheer you up. It’s little more than a dirt track that the township doesn’t maintain in the winter or any of the other seasons. Why, I don’t know. I guess there are probably a lot of people below the poverty line living on it, and people who don’t pay taxes. The road was like a creek bed; that night, you could see great ribbons of muddy water cut through it, right down the middle, exposing fins of blue shale. My shocks whined, even at ten miles an hour. While Fieldsparrow Road meandered through wide-open spaces and rounded ridges, Old Account Road gave access to territory that felt compressed and crowded and too steep to live on. There wasn’t a place in the township that wasn’t hilly, but everyone referred to this particular area as “the Heights.” I knew from hunting there that every second step you took, you might also be ankle-deep in a stream. Even with the knife-edge ridges and the hollows in between, some of the blue and white natural gas ribbons fluttered optimistically on trailheads either side of the road. The whole Heights were interconnected with trails used with as much regularity as the county routes. Trails leading from home to home, spot to spot, hidden places you’d never see from any road. A decent outdoorsman with sympathetic neighbors could run me around for weeks.
    Around the third bend was a gritty driveway marked by a mailbox in the shape of a tractor, with one of those blue plastic cubbies beneath it to get the Pennysaver ; behind a thick wall of woods was Michael and Bobbie Stiobhard’s place, the most fixed abode that the Stiobhard family had. Their two sons and a daughter revolved around this