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like a hammer claw mounted in his chest, squeezing in deep and prying up his ribs.
    He constricted there, airless, at the sight of Laura Bailey.
    The rookie hauled her out, bowed across his arms, in a rainfall of water from an upturned hose. Mouth open, eyes closed, wearing nothing but a nightgown. The fabric of the gown clung tightly to her breast, and her head hung limp, and her hair unspooled. She was sooty from the bottoms of her feet to her throat but her face looked rinsed and immaculately pale.
    Henry tipped to his knees and Laura vanished, blocked by the medics and a pop-up stretcher. All around him it was dark—nightlike and evil—and the Finns pressed close and put their hands on his back. They were holding him. Their fingertips were skeletal and real.

 
    6
    Henry pulls around the corner onto Arcadia Street and has to roll the windows down because the car’s a thousand degrees and full of dog breath. Nan insisted that he eat before he left—“to buck you up,” she had said—but then instead of sitting down and offering advice, she’d made him a turkey sandwich and retreated to her room, leaving him to eat and brood about the trip. Now he wishes that he didn’t have a morsel in his gut. He hasn’t returned to the block since the fire and braced for something else—not the char-blackened ruins of his memory, of course, but not the plain drab neatness of the neighborhood, either. The homes are just gone. The Carmichaels’ house looks the way it always did except for a plastic tarp covering a section of the roof, and even that looks crisp and kindergarten blue. Billy and Sheri’s house is worse for wear, lacking siding on the wall that used to face the Finns’, but the underlying wood is new and nobody would guess how close it had come to burning down.
    The trailer’s at the trees, farther back than he expected. He turns around to park and brakes too hard. Wing jerks against the dash, nose smearing up the glass: he doesn’t know this place and wants to check it out. Peg’s Audi isn’t here. Billy’s car is parked in front of his house but that’s it. There’s not a single other vehicle that might belong to Sam.
    Henry rolls up the windows and takes a double breath, leaning on the wheel before he unclicks the belt.
    “Okay,” he says. “Okay.” And then to Wing: “I’ll be back.”
    Wingnut answers with a wag, but when Henry steps out and shuts him into the car, he cocks his head and stares in disbelief: surely not. His confusion only grows watching Henry walk away, his desperation rising to a high-strung whine.
    Henry doesn’t hear it. The fresh-laid dirt is dry and uncompressed, picking up prints like he’s walking on the moon. He’s sensitive to places, a walker by profession, able to read the safety of surroundings, sometimes even a resident’s personality, merely by intuiting the nature of the property. Here the lack of anything is difficult to gauge.
    The trailer fronts the woods instead of the street and Henry walks around it, onto the narrow span of grass hidden in the shade. No one answers when he knocks, so he knocks a second time. The thought of going home and coming back is too disheartening. His only other choice is waiting here awhile. He notices a very faint trail into the woods. Worth a shot, Henry thinks, peering into the trees, listening for any kind of movement in the depths.
    He can’t leave Wing stranded in the car and wouldn’t mind the company anyway, so he walks back and leashes him up, aware of how brazen it’ll look if someone sees him walking his dog around the property. He doesn’t feel safe until they’re entering the woods, where a different strain of fear comes with every step. Branches, twigs, and roots crackle all the way; he’s as subtle as a Sasquatch tromping in the wild. The trees buttress one another, meshing overhead and struck, now and then, by kaleidoscopes of sun. Wing’s so excited he’s choking himself with the collar. There must be