Sarah had died of a fever that struck suddenly on her thirty-third birthday, Taylor added.

“Woke up feeling a little weak and the fever started and she was dead before sundown,” he said. “Nobody knows what it was. It just happened.” He paused. A look of memory covered his face. “I never saw a funeral like it. More people outside the church than was in it. Had to be more flowers there than there was in the Garden of Eden. Not a dry eye in the valley, that’s how much people thought about her. Anyhow, Milton moved back in with his folks after that and took a job working with a road-building company. He’s gone most of the time, but when he’s here, you couldn’t pry him away from that boy of his with a crowbar. He’s a good daddy. If anything’s happened to the boy, it’ll tear him apart.”

Taylor drove slowly, sitting upright behind the steering wheel of the car, keeping his head moving on lookout for Matthew, motioning at shadows to Noah

They saw two deer and a wandering, half-starved dog. Nothing else.

“If we don’t find him tonight, Whitlow will in the morning,” Taylor said. “A lot of people have fun with Whitlow over his running for sheriff every time there’s an election, but he does it mostly for sport. Truth is, he knows the woods better than anybody around here. I’ll give him that, and those dogs of his are better than they acted tonight. He’s always getting calls from one of the sheriff ’s offices around here about using his dogs for some escaped convict, or some fool from Atlanta that gets himself lost up in the mountains. That’s probably another reason he keeps running for sheriff. He’s got those bloodhounds. Always has had some. He swears they’re the best dogs on earth.”

At the store, Taylor stopped the car and got out and stood beside the opened door. He called in a loud voice, “Matthew, Matthew.” Waited for a reply that he knew would not come. Then he slipped back into the car, said, “Let’s drive up to Eleanor’s place.”

The rope-and-plank swing that Boyd Cunningham had erected for Matthew Reynolds on the limb of an oak tree in the side yard of his home moved gently in a slight breeze that blew up from the open pasture behind it. It had the look of a swing coming to rest after a child had rocketed from it at the end of its long pendulum, leaving squeals over his, or her, tumbling fall to earth.

“Looks strange, don’t it?” Taylor said quietly.

Nearby, a whippoorwill sang merrily. Across from the singing, but far away, another whippoorwill answered. Song and chorus.

“You remember me telling you about that old woman that makes soap up in the hills?” asked Taylor.

“I do,” Noah answered.

“Around here, people think of her as the ghost lady.”

“Why’s that?” Noah said.

“She’s always seeing ghosts, or says she does. Claims she can talk to them. There’s always somebody going up there to see her, wanting her to talk to somebody that’s dead,” Taylor told him. “She says all you got to learn to do is look for signs, and that’s where you’ll find the dead.” He reached to catch the rope of the swing, stopping its sway. “Wonder if she’d see anything in this swing swinging by itself.”