“Look at what the cat dragged in,” she said.

Michael closed the door behind him, caught for a long second between two images: the girl he had left in a field outside Eccleston, her jumper soaked red and her mouth full of pansies, and the three women in the campervan, as they appeared to him then—Colleen the maiden, biting her pink lower lip, the unknown pregnant woman on the cusp of motherhood, and the Bickerstaff sister, her face young and unlined yet as knowing as any crone. The girl’s heart was in the wood now at least. He reminded himself of that, and it calmed him.

“Mike, I didn’t think you were coming back tonight.” Colleen stood and came over to him awkwardly, slipping her arms around his waist and squeezing him. “We were just having a girl’s night in.”

“How nice.” It was difficult to speak, the words lodged and dry in his throat. It always was after he had returned someone to the woods, as though part of him had gone back to the cupboard, to the time when he did not utter any words.

“Have you seen the news?” The Bickerstaff woman—her name was Lizbet or Beryl—slid a folded newspaper toward him. It was one of the red tops, the headline screaming “FIFTH SUSPECTED VICTIM OF THE RED WOLF” and underneath it was a fuzzy photograph of a stocky woman with thick, curly hair. The photo had been taken at a wedding, and she was dressed in a particularly unflattering peach-colored bridesmaid dress. She hadn’t been wearing that when Michael saw her last. Lizbet or Beryl turned her lips down at the corners. “Nasty stuff, isn’t it? What a monster he must be. What do you think, Janie?”

She elbowed the pregnant woman next to her, who took a good three seconds to react. Her head wobbled up, and she struggled to focus on the newsprint. Michael watched her trying to figure it out, and eventually she shrugged and turned away, stubbing out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. Drugs.

“It’s scary,” said Colleen, with feeling. “I wish they wouldn’t use these names for them, it just makes it all seem, I don’t know, glamorous or something.”

“The Red Wolf,” repeated the Bickerstaff woman. Then she grinned, and leaning over suddenly, rubbed at the pregnant woman’s distended belly. “No big bad wolves in your bedtime stories, little one?”

This seemed to wake the girl in the yellow t-shirt up a little. “Do you have anything for me, Beryl?”

“Beryl and Lizbet are nurses,” said Colleen. She looked up at Michael, as though trying to convince him of something. “They’re keeping a special eye on Janie.”

“A natural birth,” said Beryl, gazing fondly at Janie. “A child born under the stars. Won’t that be something?”

Michael shrugged. He knew already that the Bickerstaffs were providing the contraceptive pill to many women in the commune, knew that Colleen was diligently taking it. He didn’t ask what other drugs the Bickerstaff sisters were doling out, or why the pregnant Janie was clearly chain-smoking her way through packets of Lambert and Butler. Instead he gently unhooked Colleen’s arms from his waist and stepped back toward the flimsy door.