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filled with old license plates, and that they’d be stopping soon to switch plates.
    She brushed the dust from her slacks. By now the Impala had disappeared. Only its tire tracks in the dirt proved that the Emerys had ever been here at all.
    She looked down the long gray ribbon of highway. Once again she pictured the little boy’s face framed by the car’s rear windshield, the somber immobility. And she remembered Matt’s face, too, the way she’d seen it in death, the light gone from his eyes, as he finally seemed to recognize all that he’d missed by following his father’s path, all the years of love from which he’d been exiled. Everybody had wounds. The only children who made it through the world without them—and the thought gave Bell an odd kind of solace, because it justified her decision to keep caring, keep fighting, even in the face of harrowing realities—were the children who never existed in the first place. The ones on the ghost roll.

 
    Read on for an excerpt from
    the next book featuring Bell Elkins
    Available in hardcover from Minotaur Books in August
    2015

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    Copyright © 2015 by Julia Keller

Chapter One
    Goldie was a six-year-old shepherd-retriever mix with a thick yellow coat that had inspired her name, a riotous tail, and chocolate-brown eyes that suggested profound depths of mysterious wisdom. At present that wisdom had coalesced into a conviction that something smelled mighty good—that is, powerful and unusual—somewhere along the slanting bank of Old Man’s Creek. Wet black nose plowing a shallow trench across the rugged terrain, body balanced expertly to accommodate the steep grade, Goldie rammed forward along the upper brow of the creek bank, sniffing and quivering. The smell, as it intensified, became even more intoxicating. It was like a string pulling her along, winding itself tight on a bobbin at the other end. Everything else dropped out of Goldie’s thoughts.
    From behind her came the distant syllables of someone calling her name: “Goldie! Here, girl! Go-o-oldeee! Come on!”
    She didn’t hear it. Rather, she heard it, but the hearing part and the subsequent ignoring part constituted a single supple action that had nothing to do with volition, nothing to do with stubbornness or calculation. Goldie wasn’t being disobedient. Goldie was being a dog.
    â€œ Go-o-o-ldee! Come on!”
    She didn’t even lift her head. She knew her name, and she had a definite affection for the man yelling it, but those two facts counted for nothing now. She was All Nose. Her nose was her destiny.
    â€œGoldie, you ornery girl, you. Taking off like that. Leadin’ me a merry chase. Never seen the like.” The yell had subsided into a running grumble. Andy Stegner was getting closer, following the trail of mashed-down dirt and still-trembling branches that testified to Goldie’s hasty journey past them.
    He was, at the moment, sorely regretting the fact that he’d stopped to pick her up that morning. Goldie was turning out to be Trouble-with-a-capital-T. His neighbor, Royce Dillard, had seven dogs, including Goldie. That was down from the fifteen he’d had a year ago, which sounded like the aftermath of a massacre but was actually due to the fact that eight of the dogs were dreadfully sick when Royce first took them in, and it was only through Royce’s kindly labors that they’d lasted as long as they did, and were granted, one by one, a serene, dignified death. Stegner couldn’t keep a dog—his wife was allergic to the fur, her only fault as far as he was concerned—but he liked to have company when he checked his raccoon traps. Royce never minded lending one out for a morning’s patrol.
    Today, though, Goldie was climbing Andy’s last nerve. The instant they ventured near