They entered through a big rotted opening in the back corner of the place, into what must have been Danica’s bedroom. A twin mattress lay in tatters atop the collapsed wreck of a bedframe. On the opposite wall stood a dresser and a small desk. The elements had played hell with all of it: every wooden surface was cracked and warped. A dense covering of moss had scaled the front of the dresser, fusing the drawer fronts together. Dryden pulled them open one by one; there was nothing in any of them but misshapen lumps of old clothing, colonized by decades’ worth of fungus and mold.

Danica crouched beside the dresser and put her eye to the gap behind it.

“There’s something back here,” she said.

They slid the dresser out and found three picture frames that had fallen off the top of it, down to the baseboard. Each of the frames still had its glass intact, but all three pictures inside were ruined anyway: twenty-nine years of winter frost and summer humidity had caused a reaction in the photo paper. All three images had darkened until they showed only phantom-like outlines of the people in them—presumably Danica and some of her friends, but they could have been anyone.

“Ashland’s no place for memories to survive,” Danica said.

She turned and studied the room itself. The interior walls were like those they had seen everywhere else: discolored, mostly fallen away from the studs. Rot-blackened insulation clung to the uprights here and there. None of it could possibly be recognizable.

Danica went to the doorway that led deeper into the house.

“Hold up,” Dryden said.

He crossed back to the rotted opening in the exterior wall. He stared out into the woods, north toward the distant sounds of screaming. The occasional burst or crack of gunfire still filtered through the trees.

It all sounded far away yet, way up at the north end of the forest.

Dryden scanned the nearer trees anyway. He watched and listened.

Nothing coming toward them. Nothing moving at all.

So far.

“We’re good,” he said. “But let’s not push it.”

They made a quick survey of the next bedroom—the master. The walls and furniture were in the same condition as in the previous room. Nothing left to jog a memory.

They looked into a small bathroom off the hall, then continued past it. In front of them the hallway ended at a corner, beyond which could only be the living room and kitchen. They rounded it—and stopped.

There was a blue camping tent pitched in the middle of the living room, crisp and clean against the backdrop of decayed carpet and furniture. It looked as if someone had bought it brand new yesterday.

“What the hell?” Danica whispered.

“The FBI sweep didn’t find this,” Dryden said. “I don’t think they made it this far south.”