“Father Latimer wants to see you,” he told Mary Beth. She was sitting on the flagstones, curling a long blade of grass between her fingers, and looked up when he spoke. “I told him about the man,” Eugene confessed, dropping his gaze to the ground. “I didn’t mean to. I keep having dreams about him, and I—”

“Did he believe you?”

“Not really. He said he might be the devil.”

“I don’t think so.” But she stood all the same. Father Latimer appeared in the doorway, beckoning for her to come. Over his shoulder, in the dark of the church, the man waited, the shadows making it seem as if he were frowning. “I pray often enough, and he never pays it any mind.”

She went to the church and Father Latimer put his hand on her shoulder, ushering her inside. Before the darkness swallowed them, he ran his hand over her back where her hair cascaded like a waterfall from under her bow, and she turned to glance back at Eugene, just enough for him to see that secretive expression that always seemed too mature for a child of her age. Eugene wanted to warn her, suddenly, of that catch he had heard in Father Latimer’s voice when he said her name, but then she was gone and it was too late.

V.

Eugene paused outside his landlady’s door early the next morning. He wanted to voice his strange, unprovable suspicion that Benoit would not return, but he was gripped with a twin misgiving that wrapped around his brain and made him hesitate before he knocked. Pressing his palm to the door, it swung open without resistance.

“Hello?” he called, feeling foolish. “Miss Mol?”

His voice echoed back to him. In the kitchen, a pot of coffee burned with no one to drink it. He backed out again, returning the door to its earlier position, and headed to work.

Murdock and his family hadn’t returned. The Gazette settled into an uneasy routine where no one spoke his name above a whisper, and the whispers were clipped. No one wanted to speculate. The idea that he had simply packed his family into the car and driven off withered in the heat.

“It’s that damned humming,” said the senior reporter who had stepped in to fill Murdock’s place. “Gets under my skin, shivering around till I can’t concentrate on a goddamn thing. Can’t you hear it?”

Eugene couldn’t hear anything besides the roll of the machines and the click-clack-whirr of the typewriters, but the idea hung in the air like the smell of rotting meat, and wormed its way into people and set them sweating with some nameless dread.

They ran a piece in the paper noting Murdock’s absence—not a disappearance, they wouldn’t call it that—and asking for anyone with any information to please get in touch. It was printed on the same page that they ran the obituaries, leaving a bad taste in Eugene’s mouth.

He took his lunch break as a chance to escape, going to run an errand at the bank a block down, eager for any excuse to get away. The air outside was as stagnant as that in the office, though more heavily perfumed. He walked briskly, hoping the exercise would shake his unease. It was likely Murdock had some family emergency that demanded his immediate attention out of town.