Blurred faces surround me, their heads glow as if with halos from the lights of the vehicles. I hear another trigger being cocked. In the background an idling diesel engine rumbles.

Then a thin voice speaks to me from a half-remembered past. “Never thought I’d see you again.”

It’s an old woman, her face red from the tail-lights of the idling Suburban. Even bent over me, Tempest Dow seems as small as a child. Maybe she has shrunk as she’s aged, as people tend to do. More likely, the matriarch of that criminal clan had grown in my imagination over time. Seeing her again in the flesh has reduced the woman to her proper size.

She’s wearing the same man’s leather jacket I remember from our last encounter, but she’s added a scarf against the night chill. Underneath, she has on a pair of denim overalls she must have found in the kid’s section of Walmart. The hems are tucked into a pair of snow boots likely purchased in the shoe department of the same store.

“Mrs. Dow,” I manage.

“Missus! I ain’t never been married. Besides, I’m Dillon now. All of us are, legally.”

“I preferred Dow.”

Her curls are the bone-yellow of someone who was once a red-head. Her skin is extraordinarily wrinkled.

“You and your warden friends put a stain on our good name,” she says. “We couldn’t use it no more without someone Googling us. My lawyer in Dover-Foxcroft did the paperwork for us. Cost me three thousand dollars. But what else am I going to spend money on at my age? There ain’t nothing more important in life than family. And there ain’t nothing worse than being alone.” Then she adds, “Like you are right now.”

There has always been something at once terrifying and ridiculous about Tempest Dow. The people around Monson called her a witch, and it wasn’t entirely a joke. She’d actively conjured an aura of supernatural menace by placing the head of a steer on a pike at the edge of her property. Those tarot cards Lynda Lynch had used for a parlor trick were hers, no doubt.

I make an effort to speak clearly, despite my swollen tongue. “It doesn’t matter what your legal name is. I told the dispatcher who you are. Where to find you.”

“Except we ain’t there. We’re here.”

Through the legs of the people around me I expect to see a gravel pit. Isn’t that where Tina said they were taking me?

Instead I see a long weathered building with a saddle-backed roof, and walls scaled with wooden shingles. Decades ago, this low-slung barn must have housed thousands upon thousands of chickens.

Tina’s mention of a gravel pit over an open radio channel had been another act of misdirection.