I push on through the disorientation, the growing unease. There are bread crumbs here and there, signs of kids having passed this way—a hair elastic, a cigarette butt. I walk by the first blaze-orange tree marker, then a familiar pile of rusty bedsprings in the weeds, where somebody must’ve ditched an old mattress once upon a time. I’m on the path to the marsh.

Eventually, I step out into the open. The tide is in. Shallow, murky water, islands of reeds and gone-to-seed cattails creating a piecework pattern over to the opposite wooded shore. As I look out, I notice a large, impossibly long-legged white bird on the shore below, still as a spear of birch. I watch it, willing it to move, prove to me it’s alive, but I get the feeling it could outlast an ice age.

The murals are even more impressive in daylight, painted in broad strokes by a sure hand. Other, less talented artists have contributed standard graffiti, coating the granite in bright colors so alien to this muted place. I stop, get eye-to-eye with the jack-o’-lantern, running my fingertips over the razor-toothed smile.

Instinct draws my gaze up to the top of the ledge. I spot him there, among the trees and brambles, hunkered down, his face like some brownie’s or woods elf’s, peering out from a mosaic of branches and leaves. Kincaid.

I jerk back from the mural. He stands, holding a low branch for balance because he’s so close to the edge that bits of moss and earth crumble down to me.

He takes the descent ledge by ledge, and I think of last night, slamming through the woods with Bree, how Kincaid always seemed to slip away from us, evaporate into laughter somewhere down the trail. How we could never seem to get a piece of him like we could the other boys.

He hops the last four feet and walks over to me, hands stuffed in his coat pockets, looking taller than I remember, maybe emphasized by his lankiness and the mid-thigh length of his coat. “Found your way back alone, huh? Not easy to do.” He leans into the jack-o’-lantern’s face. “Makes you wonder about him, doesn’t it? The one who started this. Carrying paint and brushes all the way out here to paint for the trees.”

“What makes you think it was a him?” A little surprised at how confrontational I sound.

He laughs, glancing over, taking a quick study of me with those murky green eyes. “Sounds like you’ve got a theory.”

“Maybe it was you.”

A pause, then he gestures to something at the base of the rock, his arm winglike in the coat, flashing a worn satin lining. Below The Scream is a small date, written in the same green paint as the pot leaves: ’11. Which would’ve made Kincaid about nine years old. Clara Morrison, master of deductive reasoning.