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lifted a few lengths of twine. “We’ll use this to belt it. And there are boots.”
    She nodded.
    Matt went to the heap of their frozen clothes, pried his jacket loose, peeled open the pocket, grimacing at its brittle cracking. There were items there he’d need. It took him a moment, but he got them out and tucked them into his overalls pocket. Hopefully the warmth of his body would thaw them. He walked back to the door, bent and tugged two of the boots on (also too big), and took up his ax. The heft of it, the solid, cold haft in his hand—it was a reassuring thing. A tool for cutting the rot out of wood or out of a human body or out of a town, cutting away whatever festered. Something he could trust to do its job. A piece of home and family and good memory that would neither turn to bury its edge in his heart nor disappear. He took a breath and pulled open the door.

    Outside, snow had taken the forest and eaten it, devouring all its traces of where men or animals had been. The snow had stopped falling, and Matt glanced about, looking carefully for any prints, but nothing had been near the barn recently. Nothing that left tracks, anyway.
    He couldn’t start thinking like that. But this forest, this lake, gave him the willies. That bit of rot in Adette’s shoulder, that gave him the willies. Nothing was right here. Probably nothing had been right here for a long time, even before Richard’s arrival. This looked like one of those places where people went when they wanted to leave their memories behind. A secret locked in the basement of every house, a regret shut into every attic. Matt had known places like this. They were not Mr. Dark’s killing ground—these people didn’t want to go on a rampage, they wanted to bury themselves and only themselves, quietly and out of sight—but it was the perfect hunting ground for a serial killer who liked to visit his victims in their own homes and then take his time.
    Adette gestured to her right, out along the bank. “Over there,” she said.
    Matt looked at her.
    “I knew where he was when I woke. When he…”
    “When he killed,” Matt said.
    Her eyes were guarded.
    “You’re going to have to tell me later how you do that,” he said. “Come on.”
    He struck out across the snow, ax in his right hand. Adette walked beside him, still pale except for her nose and ears, already red with cold. Occasionally she nodded to the left or the right, and they veered. Matt tried to walk as silently as he could in the snow, but that was a lost cause. He blew out his breath in a long streamer of fog, as though he were a steamboat turnedinto a man, and reflected that the killer probably wasn’t out in this deep, bone-biting cold to hear him. He was in a wooden house, and if he was smart, if he was very smart, he was under a heavy wool blanket.
    “Is it always this cold up here?” Adette hugged herself.
    “Don’t know. I’m not from here.”
    “Where you from?”
    “Not here.” A few more steps in the snow, and he took a breath. “Adette, this night. I enjoyed—”
    “Didn’t happen,” she cut in quickly.
    “What?”
    “Didn’t happen.”
    He turned to look at her, saw her face flushed. Though that might have just been the cold biting at her cheeks. Not for the first time, he thought what a strange thing it was that a man and a woman could be so intimate, one nestled inside the other, yet so alien to each other also.
    After a moment, he nodded. “All right.”
    It had been a long time since he’d wanted entanglements, either. Perhaps she was like him, burdened with some terrible secret that kept her alone, some riddle that was uniquely hers. But Matt didn’t like riddles he didn’t have answers to.
    “Your vomiting. And your vision. Dream. Whatever it was, back there in the stable. Tell me about that.”
    “Nothing to tell.”
    “Well, you don’t want to talk about sex. Let’s talk about the other thing on my mind.”
    Silence.
    He held on to his patience.