“It was too long.”

“Look at your legs, running around in those damn woods all day. If you go out into the sun, those scratches are going to turn to scars. Who’s going to marry a girl with scars all over her legs?”

Annie didn’t say anything. Four days ago she had been in Frank’s truck making a delivery with him when it had begun. It had frightened her. She had no idea what it was and Frank almost pulled the truck into a ditch when he saw the blood on her fingers and smeared on the inside of her thigh. Frank was both fierce and fearful—fearful for her especially. Because this had happened in front of him, she sensed it was as if he now, reluctantly, had a part in it, of her not being a child anymore.

Annie followed him back into the store.

“Can’t shake hands,” Frank said to the Englishman, showing his oily fingers. “Annie tells me you need a ride to Ruth’s place.” He barely glanced at the boy, as if it were somehow rude to look at him for too long.

“I don’t mean to put you to any trouble,” the man said.

“It’s no trouble,” Annie insisted, nuzzling her head against her brother’s arm. The man was smiling at her, which pleased Annie, but the kidnapped Indian boy was still staring at her one bare foot.

“I am most dreadfully sorry, Rajiv,” she said, imitating the man’s accent again, “but I must remain.” She saw the Indian boy smile just slightly before he followed the man and her brother out of the store.

Frank dropped them in front of a small white farmhouse a few miles out of town.

“Raj, listen,” Haig said, as they climbed the five steps to the porch. “You have to speak. You can’t carry on like this. I wanted to say that I’m really—”

Haig’s knocking had set off the baying of a young hound, white with brown patches, which came cantering from the back. In red, on its flank, someone had painted the number 53. It barked self-consciously, glancing around and wagging its tail. At last it climbed onto the porch, sniffed at them, and trotted away.

Haig tried the door and it opened. They entered a dark wood-paneled interior, Haig calling softly as they moved through the house into the kitchen. A half-made cherry pie, now covered in flies, had been left out on the counter. The back door was wide open.

Haig made them sandwiches, using luncheon meat he found in the icebox, and they sat on the back porch for a couple of hours, watching the hens scratching about in their pen. The hound lay beside them, making all kinds of revolting licking and snorting sounds. Near the pale red barn, behind a fence, stood a cow, lowing mournfully.

As the sun set, they heard a car grinding up the front driveway and hurried back through the house.

It was a police cruiser, out of which stepped an officer in his fifties, with a boyish and sternly embarrassed face. He was ordinarily proportioned—even quite slim—except for his beach ball of a belly.