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‘Hard to say. We found her face-down on a rock with her head split open.’
    Sheriff Townsend’s eyes shot him a warning and Bud quickly corrected himself. ‘Severe head trauma, looks like.’
    Katherine was incredulous. ‘Someone killed her?’
    â€˜Now, Mrs Wilton,’ the sheriff said. ‘We don’t know anything yet. We just found the girl this morning. So far, it looks like an accident.’
    â€˜Oh my God.’ She shook her head.
    â€˜Is that what you were looking for last week?’ Vivian asked.
    The sheriff nodded.
    â€˜Mrs Brodie reported Chanelle missing,’ Bud said, ‘so we conducted a preliminary search of the area.’ He glanced at Nowell. ‘The Brodies live on the other side of your land.’ He pointed towards town. ‘After a few days went by, we decided to give it another look-through.’
    â€˜Probably didn’t look too hard the first time,’ Katherine said, ‘since that girl was running off every few weeks. Not the easiest child to keep track of, I would think. That poor woman!’
    â€˜We’re just about finished here,’ Sheriff Townsend said. ‘I was asking your husband whether he’d seen or heard anything, Mrs Gardiner. He told me that you just arrived last Thursday.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜And you both saw lights back there that evening?’
    She nodded. ‘Nowell said it was probably the sheriff, well, you, looking around.’
    â€˜Have you seen or heard anything since then?’
    â€˜No.’
    He nodded slowly then turned abruptly to Bud. ‘Let’s get going, Deputy.’
    â€˜Wait.’ Vivian touched Nowell’s arm and he flinched. ‘Is she…?’
    â€˜The coroner’s been and gone,’ Bud said.
    The men turned again to leave. Vivian turned to look at the trees, to imagine what was beyond them, when all at once, a lone figure emerged from the woods and advanced slowly but steadily, up the incline and through the high grass, the tall trees at his back like a house he’d just left through the front door. ‘Look,’ she said.
    The sheriff’s hand went to his holster; Nowell and Katherine took a collective step backwards.
    The grass crunched under the feet of the stranger, closer and closer until Vivian could make out a plaid shirt, blue jeans, black and silver hair. Something about his stride was familiar, the loose-jointed smoothness of his gait, like her father’s. This man was much younger, his face more angular, she thought.
    Sheriff Townsend called, ‘Evening, Mr Stokes.’
    They sighed, leaned back on their heels, and began to stir again.
    Flushed slightly from his walk and his eyes shiny with moisture, the man looked around at each one of them. ‘Evening, all,’ he said.

5
    The summer Vivian was nine, she and her parents spent a month in the east, in a cabin surrounded by trees. Her mother was participating in a seminar for writers, having been invited to give two workshops on non-fiction. Backed by a well-known writing school, the seminar ran for six weeks and drew fledging writers from all over the country. Her mother directed a general course titled Writing about History and another on Finding the Story within the Stor y. Vivian remembered these details from the brochure that arrived several weeks before the trip. She had been intrigued by the picture of her mother inside, a grainy, indistinct photograph, black print on brownish paper. Held at a distance, it looked like her mother, but held closer, it was only a pattern of tiny dots, uneven splotches of ink.
    A genuine log cabin was their home for the month-and-a-half, gratis for her mother’s efforts with the struggling writers-in-residence. Her mother, Dr Shatlee to her students at the university and simply Margery to the workshop participants, dreaded the time with the amateur writers. But she was excited by the prospects of a real vacation for