“Chasing my husband?” I said, rather acidly. “Which way did they go?”

He said he wasn’t sure, but set off downhill with a sudden burst of determination, me following more cautiously in order not to turn an ankle on the rocks and gravel the sudden freshets had left exposed on the trails.

I was beginning to think that there was something odd about Lieutenant Esterhazy’s behavior. He was sweating heavily, though the woods were still very cold, and though he cast aside from time to time, he did so in brief, erratic bursts before returning to a path of his own choosing. I rather thought he knew where he was going, and wasn’t really surprised when we suddenly came to a spot where the woods … weren’t.

We were standing at the edge of a copse of scraggy oak saplings, and below our feet, the ground fell away in a tumble of raw black earth, full of broken trees and shattered bushes, with great gray rocks that had been dislodged by the fall and now lay half buried in the dirt, their undersides exposed, stained and wet with mud and dislodged worms.

“Well,” I said, after a moment’s silence. “So this is the famous landslide. Were you here when it happened?”

He shook his head. His hair was coming out of its neat naval plait and straggled over his sweating face. He wiped it back, absently.

“No,” he said, then repeated, “No,” more definitely.

It wasn’t a huge landslide, though if one was standing at the bottom of it in the dark, it had probably been startling enough. About fifty feet of the mountainside had slipped, rumbling down a steep slope of granite and half blocking a small brook.

“Do you think—” the young man began, then stopped and swallowed, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Gilbert could be … in there?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said, eyeing the rubble dubiously. “If he is, though …” We were plainly not equipped to dig through a landslide with our bare hands, and I was on the point of saying so when the lieutenant grabbed my arm with a startled cry, pointing down.

“There! There!”

A smudge of navy blue, mud-smeared and nearly the color of the wet earth, was sticking out of the soil, about twenty feet from where we stood, and before I could say anything, Oliver was sliding and staggering through the wet clods, falling to one knee, then rising again and pushing onward.

I stumbled after him, gripping my emergency pack, though after the first convulsive leap, my heart had sunk like a stone. He couldn’t be alive.

Oliver had unearthed an arm and, leaping to his feet, heaved on it with all his might. I heard something crack and Gilbert’s head, with its dead-white face, burst from the ground in a shower of clods and gravel.