Sam groped in his pocket for the keys and ran quickly and quietly over to the truck. The door wasn’t even locked. No one in Silver locked their car doors much. Maybe they’d start doing it now. And locking their porch doors real tight too. He kept his eyes on Marty’s windows as he started the engine, the noise exploding like a cough into the still, snow-laden air. No lights came on. Thank God. He chucked it into drive and moved away slowly down the block. If he took a left on Argyll the cops wouldn’t even see the truck. They might wonder where a Silver Ski Company truck was going at one in the morning.

As Sam drove it down onto Main Street, he wondered that too. This was a crazy scheme. The snow was so thick that the wipers were just moving it around instead of clearing it and he knew what kind of a road there was up to the Hawk place. But if Daniel could just tell him anything, anything at all that would help him understand what was happening, then he’d walk to the fucking North Pole in his flip-flops if he had to.

So Joe Reader hadn’t died in an accident? That was what they were getting at wasn’t it? Asking him about where he was that night. Jesus. His hands gripped the wheel like a lifebuoy. His thoughts were hot coals now, searing him as they insisted he heed them. Who was he? Was he Sam Hunt, loving and loved husband and father? Or was he really, and in fact always had been, Sam Hunting Wolf? An altogether darker proposition.

What was it the Reverend Jenkins had said to him that time on the double black diamond? The time he wanted to go home after a bad fall. The thin white man had skied to his side, picked him up and dusted the snow off his cheap and frayed parka, despite Sam’s humiliated tearful protests.

‘Sure you can go back and give up now, Sam. But it’ll go back on the bus with you. You’ll wake up tomorrow and the fact you gave up will be right there with you. No escape. But if you get up and do that run again till you get those turns right, then that’s what you’ll wake up with. You can carry success around with you as much as failure. Which is it to be?’

Stupid to think that he might not wake up some day from the dream of perfect happiness with Katie and still face what he’d tried to forget. The Reverend was right. Success or failure. Good or evil. You carried it right along there with you on the bus.