“Eight of them,” Tolliver said. He was sitting in one of the chairs, his feet propped on his bed.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was really, really awful.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It’s almost too bad to talk about, Tolliver. They were tortured with knives and beatings and all sorts of stuff. They were raped. They were killed slowly. It took a while. I got the impression that there was more than one person there.”

Tolliver looked sick.

“I’m sorry for Twyla, then,” he said. “This will be worse than just finding him as a skeleton with a broken leg at the bottom of a steep slope.”

“It’s going to get even worse before it gets better.” We’d found plenty of accidental deaths—particularly in the mountains. Most people didn’t understand that the terrain could kill you, or perhaps they became complacent in a familiar environment. Hunters, especially, grew so used to carrying guns outdoors that they grew lax about the basic safety rules. They carried their rifles carelessly. They let their cell phone batteries die out. They didn’t tell anyone where they were going to hunt. They didn’t carry any first aid equipment. They didn’t have a hunting buddy. They forgot to wear orange.

But these deaths were far from accidental.

“Yes, it’ll be a lot worse,” I said again. “And there’ll be someone to blame. Someone around here did this.”

Tolliver stared at me for a minute. “Right,” he said finally. “No one but someone local would bury the bodies there. All together.”

“Yeah, no one from out of town would make a trip back to that site to bury a body eight times.” That seemed like a reasonable assumption to me.

“Were they killed there? Do you know?”

“I didn’t read all of them,” I said. “The first one, the first grave—yeah, he died in the old house, or in the shed. Without looking inside, I can’t be sure which.”

“He took them in there, did everything?”

I puzzled through the rush of impressions I’d gotten. “Yeah, I think so,” I said doubtfully. There was something about the feeling of the deaths, something a little off.

“Definitely someone local,” my brother said.

“In a small community like this, how is that possible?” I asked.

“You mean, how could a man conceal from other people the fact that he wanted to torture and kill boys?”

I nodded. “And how come the people around here haven’t been up in arms about the fact that so many boys are missing?”

“I guess, if no bodies are found, it’s a little easier to explain away,” Tolliver said.