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therapist.”
    “Are you?” I asked.
    “At my age, son, your circulatory system needs all the aid and assistance it can get.”
    Sarah had taken it upon herself to arrange a dinner with the Stevenses at our house. After my talking about Charley and Ora so much over the winter, she wanted to meet them in person. I felt certain they’d enjoy one another’s company. So why was I anxious?
    I crouched down on the salt-frosted asphalt and plucked a tuft of deer hair from the frozen blood. I rubbed the coarse, hollow fibers between my fingers and let them blow free in the wind. Knowing my district the way I did, I probably had a better chance of locating my missing deer than I did Ashley Kim.
    The first place I’d start looking was at the home of Calvin Barter, a man I knew only by his nasty reputation. My predecessor in the district had told me that Barter was a petty drug dealer and notorious game thief who never passed up fresh roadkill. I’d heard that he had an uncanny way of appearing mere minutes after a police officer radioed in a deer/car collision—ready, willing, and able to carry away the meat. Coincidentally, he was also one of the men Hank Varnum had identified as a suspected ATV vandal. So I’d be killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.
    Despite all the fancy summer houses along its coast, Maine is a desperately poor state. My sergeant, Kathy Frost—who’s not known for being politically correct—calls it “the fist of Appalachia shoved up the ass of Maritime Canada.” I could travel just a few miles inland and see poverty everywhere: run-down mobile homes swarming with toddlers or Typar-sided shacks with junked autos rusting in their dooryards. Down every dirt road loomed a falling-down farmhouse plastered with K EEP O UT signs, as if there was anything inside worth stealing. Some of those same buildings, however, contained well-guarded meth labs and vast indoor nurseries of marijuana plants, in which case those warnings were well heeded.
    The Barters’ farmhouse was a rambling red brick affair with flaking white trim and rusted metal gutters. The dirt driveway up to the house led through an orchard of skeletal apple trees, and off to one side was a rolling hayfield in which various targets had been set up for rifle and archery practice. A ragged line of spruces ran along the back of the field, then crept in close behind the outbuildings.
    A child was waiting for me in the drive. Her hair was a wild red tangle.
    She couldn’t have been older than five. The temperature was twenty-eight degrees, but she was wearing dirty pink shorts and a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon mouse. Her lips were stained purple, as if she had just finished eating a Popsicle.
    The girl watched me with enormous pale eyes as I got out of my truck.
    “Sweetheart,” I said in my softest voice. “Is your daddy home?”
    The words that came out of her mouth sounded old beyond her years: “Yeah, but he’s passed out. Ma’s around back, though.”
    I followed the girl around the house and through a maze of scratchy bushes. Along the way, we encountered a mute toddler dressed in a denim jumpsuit and seated in a circle of petrified mud. Two more kids, a boy and a girl, both a little older, met us around the corner of the barn. Every one of them had kinky red hair. They all fell in behind us, forming a procession of sorts.
    At a henhouse, three more people stood waiting. One I took to be Mrs. Barter. She was about the size and shape of a rain barrel, and she was dressed in a flowered cotton sundress with a frayed hem. Her hair was mostly gathered up in a faded kerchief, but a single gray-and-red strand had escaped confinement and now hung across her forehead. She had a cigarette clenched between her thin lips and an expression that looked as if she was barely holding in a belly laugh. A freckle-faced girl stood beside her, clutching a baby swaddled up so tightly, I couldn’t be sure if it was a child or a doll. She