I heard the baying of Gillebride’s dogs in the near distance, and the thunder of Bluebell’s feet as she raced down the hall to meet them. They should be all right together; the MacMillan dogs were both male. Bluey was a female and not in heat, and as Jamie had told me in a wry moment, dogs don’t bite bitches.

“Doesna always work the other way round, mind,” he’d said, and I didn’t quite smile at the memory, but felt the air press less heavily on me for a moment.

Then I heard a step in the hallway and looked up, thinking it was Gillebride. It wasn’t, and the air suddenly thickened in my chest.

“Mrs. Fraser.” It was the tall black figure of Mrs. Cunningham, bony and stern as the Grim Reaper, with a folded cloth over one arm. She hovered awkwardly on the threshold, and I just as awkwardly motioned her in.

“Mrs. Cunningham,” I said, and stopped, not knowing what the hell else to say to her. She cleared her throat, glanced at Amy’s half-clad corpse, then quickly away. Even though the head was covered, the mangled arm and shoulder were in plain sight, cracked and shattered bones showing sharp through the still flesh.

“I was by the creek. Your grandson passed me on his way to MacMillan’s and told me what was a-do. So I went along to Mr. Higgins and asked for his wife’s shroud.” She lifted the cloth slightly in illustration, and I saw the embroidered edges, done in greens, blues, and pinks.

“Oh.” That Amy would have her shroud already prepared hadn’t occurred to me at all—though it should have. “Er … thank you, Mrs. Cunningham. That was very thoughtful of you.”

She lifted one shoulder in a faint shrug and, taking a visibly deep breath, walked up to the table. She looked the situation over deliberately for a moment, exhaled through her nose, then reached to untie the ribbon of Amy’s shift.

“If ye’ll hold her steady, I’ll roll it down.”

I opened my mouth to protest that I didn’t need help, but then shut it again. I did, and plainly she’d had some experience of laying out the dead; any woman of her age would. We rolled the shift off Amy’s shoulders and I got one hand solidly into the bare right oxter, the damp hair there feeling disconcertingly warm and alive, and then, with an uncontrollable sense of squirm, threaded my fingers under the wet mess of the left shoulder, finding enough to grip.

So close, the odor of the bear on her was strong enough that I felt an atavistic shiver down my spine. Mrs. Cunningham did, too; she was breathing audibly through her mouth. She got the petticoat untied, though, and pulled shift and stockings off with steady hands.