They needn’t have bothered. Still, it was almost reassuring to know things in Amberlough still worked like he remembered them: there was the letter of the law and there was the truth, which stood a little to the left of it. Someone was worried he might run while he was still a free agent, so they’d pulled some strings to tie him up ahead of his time. Leverage didn’t stand on ceremony.

Two Carmody police officers had come along for the show. Staring at them Cyril felt as though thirty years of his life had suddenly turned transparent, and through them he could see the officers who’d come up to the house when he and a couple of the village kids set a bucket of paint over the schoolmaster’s door, which not only stained his clothes but got him six stitches.

This encounter would lead to something more serious than scrubbing a doorstep and fetching and carrying for a concussed teacher.

“Those are Jem and Paley,” said Stephen, chin resting on his hands. They were up on the roof, where Cyril had spent several days teaching Stephen surveillance techniques.

“The hounds?” asked Cyril.

“Mm-hm.”

“How do you know them?”

“Slingshotting over the neighbor’s wall. Broke her window. They marched me back home like I was for the—” he stopped, sending a sidelong glance at Cyril. “They’re full of themselves, is all.”

“Small-town terriers,” said Cyril. They were probably hard as kitchen pokers right now, standing at attention to either side of the dour woman below. Proximity to power they had never dreamt of.

He couldn’t see her well from this angle, but she was older, with brown skin and her skull shaved bald so he couldn’t tell if her hair was silver or dark. If it hadn’t been for the pumps and stockings, he’d have sworn Ada Culpepper had come back for him, to see her own justice done.

“They’re here for you,” said Stephen. Cyril ignored the slight wobble on the last word—it might have been a question, to which the answer should have been obvious. If it wasn’t a question, it was something like fear or sorrow, and Cyril did not have the strength for that.

“I suppose I’d better go down then.” Cyril sat straight and brushed snow from his jacket.

Stephen sat as well, and regarded Cyril solemnly, working up to something. Cyril lit a cigarette while he waited, in no hurry to go to his fate.

“It’s stupid,” he said, finally, and in those two words was a world of grief, confusion, anger.

Cyril laughed. “Most things are.”

Stephen stayed on the roof, when he went down.