I gave Manfred a hug, and Tolliver shook his hand. “We’ll come if you need us, man,” he said, and Manfred nodded.

“I don’t think she’ll last the night,” he said. “She’s tired out. But at least she had a last moment in the sun yesterday. She told me she thought the boy definitely killed the animals, but that something else was going on there, too.”

“Like what?” I’d been moving away, but now I turned back to face Manfred. This was bad news.

He shrugged. “She never told me. She said the whole property was surrounded by a swamp of evil.”

“Hmmm.” Well, “swamp of evil” sounded pretty bad. What could Xylda have meant? See, this is what makes me nuts about psychics.

“She used a different word.”

“Than what?”

“Than swamp. She called it a…miasma? Is that a word?”

Manfred wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t much of a reader, either. “Yeah, it is. It means, like, a thick unpleasant atmosphere, right, Tolliver?”

Tolliver nodded.

Had I missed something, like a body? Had I made a mistake? The idea was so strong, so shocking, that I hardly noticed the bitter cold as we made our way to our car. “Tolliver, we’ve got to go back to that property.”

He looked at me as if I were nuts. “In this weather, you want to go poke around private property?” he asked, getting all his objections in one sentence.

“I know the weather is wrong for this. But Xylda…”

“Half the time Xylda was an old fraud, and you know it.”

“She wouldn’t be about this.” A thought occurred to me. “Do you remember when we were in Memphis, she said, ‘In the time of ice you’ll be so happy?’”

“Yeah,” he said. “I do remember that. And it is the time of ice and up until you wanted to go trespassing, I was happy.” He didn’t look happy. He looked worried. “As a matter of fact, I wanted to go back to the cabin and stoke up the fire and get happy again.”

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. “Why don’t we just ask?” I said.

“Just ask this guy if we can look over his property again? Just ask him if he snuck some bodies in there while we weren’t looking? Because there’s a miasma of evil around it?”

“Okay, I get your point. I just think we have to do something.”

Tolliver had started the car the minute we got in and the heater was finally working. I bent over a little to let the hot air blow directly on my face.

“We’ll go by, have a look,” he said, very reluctantly.

“Then we’ll follow your plan about the cabin.”

“Okay, that part sounds good.”