It was, in keeping with the rest of the place, enormous—at least the size of a baseball diamond, fringed on three sides by frosted hedges four feet high. We stepped over a plastic tarp rolled up in front of the entrance, and Julian’s flashlight bounced over furrows of iced dirt and the pikes of grass hardy enough to survive the winter. A sudden movement, low and to our right, caught our eyes, and Desiree stopped me with a yank to my head. The halo light jerked right then back to the left and an emaciated hare, its fur spiked by the cold, jumped through the circle of light and then vaulted off into the hedges.

“Shoot it,” I said to Desiree. “It might have some money.”

“Shut up.” She said, “Julian, hurry up.”

“Dear.”

“Don’t call me ‘dear.’”

“We have a problem, dear.”

He stepped back and we looked past him at the circle of light shining into an empty hole about five and a half feet deep and a foot and a half square.

The hole might have been tight and neat once, but someone had made an awful mess coming back out of it. Trails of dirt deeper than rake marks were ripped through the earth, and soil had been spewed in a wide radius around the hole. Someone hadn’t just been desperate pulling herself out of that hole. She’d been angry.

Desiree looked left, then right. “Julian.”

“Yes?” He peered down at the hole.

“How long since you last checked on her?”

Julian consulted his watch. “At least an hour.”

“An hour.”

Julian said, “She could have reached a phone by now.”

Desiree grimaced. “Where? The nearest house is four hundred yards away, and the owners are in Nice for the winter. She’s covered in dirt. She’s—”

“In this house,” Julian hissed, looking back over his shoulder at the mansion. “She could be inside this house.”

Desiree shook her head. “She’s still out here. I know it. She’s waiting for her boyfriend. Aren’t you?” She called to the darkness, “Aren’t you?”

Something rustled to our left. The sound might have come from the hedges but it was hard to be sure with the surf raging just twenty yards away on the other side of the garden.

Julian bent by a row of tall hedges. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

Desiree pointed her gun to her left and let go of my hair. “The floodlights. We can turn on the floodlights, Julian.”

“I really don’t know about this,” Julian said.

A whisper of wind or surf noise curled against my ear.

“Goddammit,” Desiree said. “How could she have—?”

And something made the sort of squishing sound a shoe makes when it steps in a puddle of icy slush.

“Oh, my,” Julian said and shone the flashlight down on his own chest at the two shiny blades of garden shears that protruded from his sternum.