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especially if we miss deadline again. I can’t tell him I’m late because of what’s happening with the…the tree people.” He turned away and headed toward his workroom. “What if he hires another artist? Ghoulie doesn’t make much, but I can’t—“
    “Sean…” she said, reaching for him. “Forget Ghoulie. Forget the money. Are you sure you didn’t hit your head or something?”
    “Wish I had. The news crews’ cards and a sheet from the sheriff are on the counter.” He shrugged again, knowing he sounded like a nutter. “I’d better get back to work.”
    He’d just righted his stool and gathered his pens and sketches when Mare walked into the little bedroom they used as a studio and office. She stared at her handful of papers and cards. “How? Why?” She blinked, shaking the documents at him. “I went to high school with Mindy Howard! Her funeral! This can’t be real.”
    “I know, hon. It should be all over the TV news sites, maybe their teasers. Might even show one of my interviews.”
    She nodded, dazed. “Were they rotting? Like zombies?”
    “No. Just scared, confused people. They looked perfectly normal, not scary at all.”
    She let out a nervous laugh as she read the sheriff’s sheet again. “Ten confused zombie scam artists. In my house. Yaaay.” She folded the paper and stuffed the business cards inside.
    “You okay?” he asked.
    “Think so.” She forced a smile and took a breath, her color improving. “How’re the layouts coming?”
    “Okay, I guess. Finally started working on them ‘round noon thirty so I’m way behind.”
    “Better you for a change than everyone else,” Mare muttered. “At least you’ll catch up. Murph is the procrastinator. Surely Black Pawn knows that.” She looked past him to the drawing table. “Who’s the kid? Thought you were doing Ghoulie.”
    Kid? What kid? Sean turned and took an immediate step back, crunching Mare’s feet as he stared at a ghostly image in the blackened full-page illustration. A naked child screamed from within the darkness and clawed bloody streaks on a cinderblock wall. His feet were sawed off at the ankles, the exposed ends of his fibula and tibia coated with bright blood and dark filth.

Chapter Five
    Her poor bare feet scorched and bleeding, and her legs aching and quivery from the long cross-country trudge, Mindy wiped sweat from her sunburned brow as she limped toward her mother’s acreage in the northern county.
    I hope Mom’s there, that she hasn’t moved, too.
    Since it was only a few blocks from the hospital, she’d walked to her house first, expecting to find Jeff busy fiddling with his stocks online like he did most Sunday afternoons, but two middle-aged women lived there. They had been rather suspicious of a barefoot woman in scrubs asking for the previous owner.
    She’d left before they could call the cops.
    In town, few paid any notice to her but out in the county it seemed like every car slowed down to assess her intent. A farmer who had to be seventy suggested a bodily-fluid exchange for a ride, and a teenage kid in a rusted out Honda offered to give her a lift, no strings attached. She declined both.
    Tattered feet or not, the long walk gave her plenty of time to think.
    She’d seen desk calendars and newspapers before leaving the hospital. All agreed it was Sunday July 19, 2015, not Friday November 23rd, 2012. Even if she could explain away the heat, humidity, and green fields—which she couldn’t—all of those calendars left little room for doubt.
    She’d lost almost three years. She had no idea where she or the time had gone, only a normal sequence of memories, then blinking awake in Sean’s backyard.
    In her previous memory, it had been nearly dusk and spitting sleet after a long day of Black Friday sales at the mall. She had stopped at the Git-N-Go in Madrid for gas, then turned north again on Highway 17. All that was clear.
    Did I make it to Luther? To Highway 30? she wondered as the