Tolliver stumbled around the grave to kneel beside me, put both his arms around me, and we held each other fiercely. We were shivering, shivering intensely—not from the cold, but from the nearness of the unknown. I made a little noise that was horribly like a whimper. Tolliver said, "Don't be scared," and I turned my head a little to tell him I wasn't any more scared than he was; which was to say, quite a lot. He kissed me, and I was glad for his warmth.

I said, "This is a thin place."

"What's that?"

"A place where the other world is very close to this world, separated only by a thin membrane."

"You've been reading Stephen King again."

"It felt strange from the moment we got here tonight."

"Did you feel anything different when we were here the first time? Yesterday?"

"The old ones always feel a little different from the new ones. Maybe I saw the dead more clearly, with more detail." I held him tighter. Now that I'd gotten over my startled reaction to the ghost, I had plenty of other fears to cope with. We had a situation on our hands. "What will we do about the body, Tolliver? We shouldn't call the police, right? We're already under enough suspicion."

My feelings about the law were, at best, ambiguous. I couldn't blame the Texarkana PD for not knowing what was going on in our household when I was a teenager. After all, we'd struggled so hard to conceal it. I hardly blamed them for not finding Cameron; I, of all people, knew how hard it could be to find a dead person. But now that I was grown, the thing I valued most was the ability to shape my life as I wanted. The law could take that away from me in a New York minute.

"No one knows we came here," Tolliver said, as if thinking out loud. "No one's come out here since we got here. I bet we could leave and not get caught. But someone's got to get this body out of the grave. We can't just leave him."

I was beginning to feel calmer. "Who is it?" I asked, and my voice was steadier. After all, bodies were my area of expertise. I was not at all worried about being this close to a corpse. I was worried about the police suspecting I'd made him a corpse.

"I'm not sure." Tolliver sounded a little surprised, as if he should have known who was in the hole from the brief glimpse we'd had.

"Let's look again," I said practically. I was feeling a little more like myself.

We pulled apart then, and deployed our flashlights.

If my heart could sink any lower, it did. Since the body was on its stomach, I couldn't identify its face, but the clothes were familiar.