They rode to Martha Chase’s house, where the chimney was falling down and the windows were shuttered. There was no sign of life. Maria felt a wave of darkness as they approached, which hit her like the heat from an oven. Her child was her heart and now she was hollow. When she pushed open the door, she saw that jars of raspberry jam had been left to cool on the table, and the place smelled sticky sweet. There was the small pallet where Faith had slept. Everything else was gone. They had left in a hurry.

Maria went into the garden. Samuel tried to comfort her, but she could find no comfort here. Then she heard a moaning from a storm cellar where Martha Chase stored her provisions and jars of jam. Samuel came to help unbolt the lock and then open the heavy wooden doors. When they peered into the dark, there was the wolf, Keeper, chained to the wall, his ribs showing, starved and abandoned. Made vicious by his ill treatment, he growled when he spied a human form.

Samuel put a hand on Maria’s arm as she went forward. “That’s a dangerous animal,” he said, concerned.

“Every mistreated creature is dangerous,” she replied.

She ran down the rotted wooden steps into the dark and let the wolf off his chain. He only glanced at her with his silver eyes, before he lurched past her and ran up the steps and into the house, in a mad search for Faith. When he found she wasn’t there, he lay down beside the pallet where she had slept, exhausted and hoarse from weeks of howling. Martha had duped him, tricking him into the cellar by tossing Faith’s clothes down the stairs. She’d then thrown a chain around his neck, attached to the mud-caked wall. Whenever Faith had heard howling, Martha had said it was the wind, and she’d vowed that the wind here always sounded like crying, and it was best to ignore it.

They went through the woods, the wolf following at a distance. At the lake Maria stripped off the white shift she had worn for weeks. Dias could not take his eyes off her, so he didn’t try. He gave her his coat to wear once she had bathed, then spoke to her in Portuguese. “We’ll look through every house in this damn county.”

But the sight had returned to Maria and she could see and feel what an ordinary woman could not. She knew her daughter would not be found in Massachusetts. The green rain she had called down upon the people of Salem had also washed away any trail that might have been left, making it impossible for the wolf to track Faith. Keeper knew it as well. The girl was gone.