“We need everything preserved for the lab. That means every bit of carpet. Scrap of paper. Gum if there’s any in the cab. Coffee cups. The condition is unimportant right now. If you think anything is trash, then you should get another job. We need to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks here. That means the truck too.”

I’m pretty sure someone mutters the word bitch. That’s fine. That means I made an impression. I’m not here for a date anyway. I’m here for justice for the dead woman.

“Did anyone find anything on the perimeter?”

The trooper who met me when I first arrived pipes up.

“I did,” he says. “I found a plastic shoe.”

He holds up a clear plastic bag.

“Trooper, that’s a Croc.”

“Sorry,” he says. “I thought it could be helpful.”

Everyone laughs. His face goes scarlet.

“It might be,” I say with a reassuring nod. “That’s the brand of the shoe.”

Ten

The forest is full of eyes. Tiny eyes. Bigger ones. When an intruder or a pack of them find their way into the dark world of green with its sweet, musky smells, watchers track every movement. Every interloper is a threat. To the single eye that tracked the police, nothing was more dangerous than what was transpiring over by the truck she’d carefully hidden. She watched, unblinking, as the coroner and another deputy carried something away on a stretcher.

Another body?

Regina couldn’t believe what she saw. How did she miss that? How was it that there were two? Her attempt at concealment was a devastating failure, one that could ruin her life with Amy.

Damn!

Fuck!

What can I do? What will I say if they come calling?

That night, she carried Amy to the barn. She was asleep, and the weight of her body was heavy in Regina’s arms. She made some soft wheezing sounds and to Regina the noise was as lovely as an aria.

Amy opened her eyes.

“I love you, baby.”

“I love you more.”

Regina could feel Amy’s gentle, almost timid, embrace. She longed for the day when she’d be better, and they could live with carefree abandon. They could live as they did before that terrible day two years before.

“I’m going to put a note on the door that we’re away for the rest of the summer.”

“Good idea, Regina.”

“I try. Besides, we used to love sleeping up here anyway.”

Amy smiled as Regina lifted her onto a mound of straw she’d fashioned into a bed in the loft of the small barn they’d built so many years ago. It was like a homecoming of sorts. Memories of those early days were magical. The best years of their lives.

She put Amy to bed and went down to the kitchen in the house and wrote out a note.