Twyla inhaled deeply, as if about to play her last card. She put the car in drive and we pulled out, heading even farther out of the small town of Doraville. We drove northwest, the readout on Twyla’s car told me, and the ground began to climb. I looked up at the mountains and I thought that if Jeff’s body were up there, I would never find it. I did not want to go hiking in those mountains, especially in this weather. I had a brief selfish thought: Why couldn’t Twyla have called me in two months ago? A month, even? I shivered, and thought of the biting cold, the snow that lay in patches on the ground, the predictions of bad weather in a few days. We began to go up, though the pitch of the ground was not so steep here.

And then Twyla stopped again. I noticed how stiffly she sat in the driver’s seat, how white she’d gotten.

“This is where the phone was,” Twyla said. She jerked her thumb to the right. “I put that rock there, to mark where it was exactly, after the sheriff showed me.”

There was a big rock with a blue cross on it, dug into the earth at the side of the road.

“You put it in pretty deep,” Tolliver said.

“The mowers had to pass over it,” she said. “That was three months ago.”

Practical.

I got out of the Cadillac and looked around, pulling on my gloves as I did so. It was freaking cold up here, no doubt about it. The Madison road rose steeply ahead of us, cut out of the rising mountain to the left. On our side, there was a fairly level narrow strip, perhaps a half acre to an acre of land, before the rolling slope began its rise. In that half acre lay the site of an old home. The house had been abandoned years before. The plot wasn’t in a neat rectangle because it followed the contours of the hill. It was long and thin in spots.

We were parked on the shoulder, and if I took a step I’d roll down the slope of a deep ditch. The driveway into the plot ran over a culvert so the flow of rainwater wouldn’t be impeded. The remains of this driveway passed through the remains of a fence. Now, with all the leaves fallen, the stands of weeds were golden or brown with winter’s death, and the occasional young pine looked startlingly green. The weeds and small trees appeared to be holding up the fence.