She didn’t, but she followed just the same. At what she hoped was a safe distance. “You have no idea where you’re going.”

“Becky? Becky!” Cal. But far away. Somewhere in North Dakota. Maybe Manitoba. She supposed she should answer him, but her throat was too raw.

“I was just as lost in the grass as you two,” he said. “Not anymore. Kissed the stone.” He turned briefly and regarded her with roguish, mad eyes. “Hugged it, too. Whsssh. See it then. All those little dancing fellas. See everything. Clear as day. Back to the road? Straight shot! If I’m line, I’m dine. Wife’s right up here. You have to meet her. She’s my honey. Makes the best martini in America. There once was a guy named McSweeny, who spilled some gin on his . . . ahem! Just to be couth, he added vermouth. I guess you know the rest.” He winked at her.

In high school Becky had taken a gym elective called Self-Defense for Young Women. Now she tried to remember the moves and couldn’t. The only thing she could remember . . .

Deep in the right pocket of her shorts was a key ring. The longest and thickest key fit the front door of the house where she and her brother had grown up. She separated it from the others and pressed it between the first two fingers of her hand.

“Here she is!” Ross Humbolt proclaimed jovially, parting high grass with both hands, like an explorer in some old movie. “Say hello, Natalie! This young woman is going to have a critter!”

There was blood splashed on the grass beyond the swatches he was holding open, and Becky wanted to stop, but her feet carried her forward, and he even stepped aside a little, like in one of those other old movies where the suave guy says, “After you doll,” and they enter the swanky nightclub where the jazz combo’s playing only this was no swanky nightclub this was a beaten-down swatch of grass where the woman Natalie Humbolt if that was her name was lying all twisted with her eyes bulging and her dress pushed up to show great big red divots in her thighs and Becky guessed she knew now why Ross Hum-bolt of Poughkeepsie had such red lips and one of Natalie’s arms was torn off at the shoulder and lying ten feet beyond her in crushed grass already springing back up and there were more great big red divots in the arm and the red was still wet because . . . because . . .

Because she hasn’t been dead that long, Becky thought. We heard her scream. We heard her die.