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– in a manner of speaking, his entire life. Now, he realized she had been here all along.
    He didn’t want to believe it – the body couldn’t be Miranda, it couldn’t; but deep inside he knew the awful truth, no matter how much his mind tried to persuade him that it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, how could it be? - Tom knew with horrible certainty that it was her.
    As he stared through tears into her lifeless eyes, he realized she didn’t quite look like his Miranda anymore. The sparkle in her eye that made her different from every other woman he had ever met was gone, replaced by a glassy coldness that was nothing like her, the real her - not this wax-museum quality replica of her laying in the mud underneath his house.
    As he began to weep - something he hadn’t done since he was a small boy, the flashlight shook violently in his hand.
    Maybe she was still alive, and he could save her; he hoped it wasn’t too late. He slid his arm under her head and pulled her close into his chest, cradling her like a child.
    “Miranda,” he pleaded. “Talk to me. Say something. Come back, baby, come back – I love you so much.”
    His warm tears rolled down her cold cheek as he laid his sobbing face against hers. He pressed his fingertips against her slender neck, checking for a pulse. Her skin felt like fossilized wood: cold, smooth and rigid.
    Her eyes were wide open, bulging half out of their sockets, mapped with dark red bloodshot veins, her eyelids dried and curled back much farther than they should have been. She stared past him, at some point off in the distance, over his right shoulder.
    Her mouth was frozen in a snarl, teeth slightly bared. It reminded him of a dog growling a warning: “Stay away, or else.”
    He wanted so badly to close her staring eyes, to bring together those soft lips that had kissed him with such tenderness only a couple of days before. He wanted to give her back the dignity that had been stolen from her in death. She had been murdered and discarded like garbage, a total calamity in which he had played an unwitting role.
    She was wearing a blue dress, a gift from him. It had perfectly matched her stunning periwinkle eyes, those eyes that had sparkled with delight when he had surprised her with it.
    She loved it, she had said, and had wanted to try it on immediately. He had said no, to wait. He had asked her to wear it when she came to see him at the farmhouse this week. He couldn’t wait to see how beautiful she would look wearing it while lying across his bed.
    Well, here she was, and he was finally seeing how beautiful she looked in the dress. Except she wasn’t reclining gracefully on his bed, she was laying in the mud underneath his house, about six feet below where his bed would be. The blue of the dress now more closely matched the color of her pallid skin than her eyes. Those eyes that once contained a bottomless sea of blue were now wide and black in the center, pupils dilated like big black pennies.
    This is not real , he thought, but it was. The cold heaviness of her body in his arms was proof enough of that.
    An odd thought occurred to him, the thought that at any moment she might spring back to life, full of hatred for bringing her to this tragic end. He pictured her setting upon his flesh, intent to devour him with canine fangs gleaming, glistening in the dim glow of the solitary light bulb here in the squalid mud beneath his house.
    He resisted an urge to drop her into the mud; instead he laid his hand upon her clammy leg, stroking the smoothness of her right calf, so cleanly shaven and porcelain white, as if to say “I’m sorry. Oh, my dear sweet Miranda, I am so sorry.”
    But she didn’t jump to life with eyes blazing and teeth bared to devour his flesh and his forever damned soul as he had feared. Instead, she did what the dead do: nothing. She ignored his touch as though he was the phantom, and something much more important than him occupied her entire attention, somewhere