“Salem is odd all the way around. And like I said, it has to be affecting us—is affecting us—likely in ways we aren’t even aware of. We should keep taking that into account.”

“Is that supposed to reassure me?”

Quentin smiled faintly. “Not really. It doesn’t reassure me. It’s . . . an anomaly. And we’ve all learned to be wary of those. Signposts to pay attention to. It may turn out not to matter. To us, to what we came here to do. Or it may be important. Either way, we keep it in mind.”

She walked beside him in silence for a bit, then said, “If Daniel is from Salem and wanted our help, why ask for it in the gray time? I mean, actually there. It seems like a much harder way to do it. Why not just appear to Hollis?”

It was Quentin’s turn to walk in silence for a few moments, his eyes roaming their surroundings just as hers were, trained to be aware of everything around them no matter what else was going on. Then he said, “Are you afraid he’s trapped in the gray time?”

“Well—” Diana stopped abruptly as they reached the edge of a smallish clearing. Staring across it at an odd tumble of granite boulders placed as if some giant had piled them there, watching as a little boy walked calmly around them and disappeared behind them, she said, “No. I’m not afraid of that. Not anymore.”

TWELVE

Hollis was aware of Reese coming to stand behind her, but she didn’t take her eyes off the ragged opening in the thicket of brambles and briars they had discovered only a few yards away from Megan Hales’s grave. The thicket had hidden its contents from the eye very effectively, though a normal police search of the area would certainly have uncovered them. It was a shame, Hollis thought, that the extensive law enforcement search weeks before had been concentrated in the mountains on the other side of the valley.

Absently rubbing her hands together, where lacerations that had been some fairly deep gashes were healing, fading away by the moment, she said, “I just knew. That her bags would be somewhere near.” She had reached the thicket several steps ahead of her partner and had already been tearing branches and brambles away when he’d joined her to help.

Reese put his hands on her shoulders. “I know.”

There were two of them, the bags, a girlish pink, faded by the passing of months out in the weather. A duffel with a shoulder strap as well as wheels at one end, and a much larger suitcase, also wheeled. Obviously part of a set. Each had an ID tag.

Hollis didn’t bother to look at those.

“I don’t really want to know what’s inside them. What she wanted to take with her. Thinking she’d never come back.”

“No reason why you should. I doubt it would tell us anything about who her killer is or why he chose her.”