The day was lighter now but the sun didn’t do much to brighten up Blackwater Landing. The river was deep here and fringed with messy black willows and thick trunks of cedar and cypress—some living, some not, and all choked with moss and viny kudzu. To the northeast, not far, was the Great Dismal Swamp, and Lydia Johansson, like every Girl Scout past and present in Paquenoke County, knew all the legends about that place: the Lady of the Lake, the Headless Trainman…. But it wasn’t those apparitions that bothered her; Blackwater Landing had its own ghost—the boy who’d kidnapped Mary Beth McConnell.

Lydia opened her purse and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. Felt a bit calmer. She strolled along the shore. Stopped beside a stand of tall grass and cattails, which bent in the scorching breeze.

On top of the hill she heard a car engine start. Jesse wasn’t leaving, was he? Lydia looked toward it, alarmed. But she saw the car hadn’t moved. Just getting the air-conditioning going, she supposed. When she looked back toward the water she noticed the sedge and cattails and wild rice plants were still bending, waving, rustling.

As if someone was there, moving closer to the yellow tape, staying low to the ground.

But no, no, of course that wasn’t the case. It’s just the wind, she told herself. And she reverently set the flowers in the crook of a gnarly black willow not far from the eerie outline of the sprawled body, spattered with blood dark as the river water. She began praying once more.

Across the Paquenoke River from the crime scene, Deputy Ed Schaeffer leaned against an oak tree and ignored the early morning mosquitoes fluttering near his arms in his short-sleeved uniform shirt. He shrank down to a crouch and scanned the floor of the woods again for signs of the boy.

He had to steady himself against a branch; he was dizzy from exhaustion. Like most of the deputies in the county sheriff’s department he’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, searching for Mary Beth McConnell and the boy who’d kidnapped her. But while, one by one, the others had gone home to shower and eat and get a few hours’ sleep Ed had stayed with the search. He was the oldest deputy on the force and the biggest (fifty-one years old and two hundred sixty-four pounds of mostly unuseful weight) but fatigue, hunger and stiff joints weren’t going to stop him from continuing to look for the girl.

The deputy examined the ground again.

He pushed the transmit button of his radio. “Jesse, it’s me. You there?”

“Go ahead.”

He whispered, “I got footprints here. They’re fresh. An hour old, tops.”

“Him, you think?”

“Who else’d it be? This time of morning, this side of the Paquo?”