This time, I decided to stay in a motel about a half hour outside the city. I wanted to avoid crossing paths with anyone from Rubicon. I wasn’t sure where in the country Dr. Kriss currently was, but now I’d put it together that every time I saw or spoke with her, the ghost had a way of finding me.

As I drove through the south side, I noticed how Mayor Klausmeyer’s Retreat 2010 plan had accelerated. For one thing, I didn’t see many stray dogs. My notes from just months before contained packs sprinting along the roadside, but now they appeared, when at all, as eyes glinting in the deep shade, like a species on the edge of extinction.

The Glades was finished, about fifteen identical properties on the site. Each house boasted a hideous mélange of cascading gables, multistory windows, enormous columned porticoes. It seemed impossible that anyone would want to live here, but in fact the houses were already occupied. Men hosed down SUVs, toys were scattered on lawns, a Tampa Bay Buccaneers flag flew above the door of a garage. The place where we’d found Zeke bleeding was paved over. You’d never know things like that had happened here, that a whole community had been spread across this land.

A few blocks from the Glades, I came upon another, even larger expanse being upturned by backhoes, the red clay exposed. A massive sign said COMING SOON: BOUGAINVILLEA RAVINE. A similar sign for the Glades had been just a board on stilts, but this one came with bougainvillea shrubs planted around an ornamental pond, the whole apparatus plugged into a generator.

I parked the car and went into the showroom in an air-conditioned trailer. A woman got up from behind the desk and we shook hands. I told her I was visiting from out of state, only looking.

I examined the model for the development. They were actually digging a ravine, alongside which the houses would be built. It wasn’t entirely clear, but I was pretty sure that Tori’s grandma’s place used to stand where the ravine would empty into a reservoir. On the wall above the model, you could track the progress of the construction. There was a photo of Mayor Klausmeyer in a yellow hard hat at the ground-breaking.

“The Glades went up in a hurry,” I observed.

The saleswoman responded with that strange corporate pride adopted by employees on the bottom. “The Ravine is going to make the Glades look quaint,” she said. “Not to be disrespectful. They were first, after all, pioneers. But from a landscape-architectural perspective, the Glades was a missed opportunity. They just leveled the ground and hammered things together. There’s no sense of wilderness, no dynamism.”

“No ravine.”

“No ravine, you got it.”

I asked if she remembered the people who used to live around here.

“Around here? I don’t think anyone lived around here.”

“There were houses,” I said, “and encampments.”