She forced a grin and for a moment, the wind froze her face that way. They sped on through the graveyard of a town where he pointed out an old, dilapidated bait shop, a hardware store, and a library. Then, something appeared that felt like an unsettling brand of déjà vu to Morgan. She knew this place. A frozen pond with a dock and a little lean-to shed. It looked smaller in real life than it had in the photographs. A pile of logs was stacked along one wall, a long-handled ax splitting the top-most one, as though whoever had last swung it, called it a day and simply never came back.

“This is your pond,” she said, remembering scanning old photos of Clive and Bennett, holding up fishing lines of bluegill and perch.

Bennett laughed. “Sure is. Man, we used to spend a lot of time out here.”

“You and your dad?”

“Yeah.”

A canoe that might once have been fire-engine red was beached on the shore. It looked cut in half, its tail end stuck under the ice. Who knew how long ago the little boat had been abandoned, left to the weather and the elements and the solitude. Morgan felt sorry for the thing, and then, as they continued to careen through the woods, she was struck by a memory so vivid, so real, that she almost fell off the machine, for all by its lonesome, amidst the birch trees, stood a blue box.

It looked like a vintage parking meter, and yet, she remembered being lifted up as a child, someone’s hand guiding hers as she dialed a number on the keypad. The memory was immortalized in a negative, even. Clive had taken her there.

“What is that?” she asked Bennett, pointing to the thing that was now behind them.

“What?” He turned to look over his shoulder.

“That blue box back there.”

“Oh. I think it’s a call box or something. For police, back in the day.”

“There’s a phone in there?”

“Probably not anymore.” He laughed as they blasted through a mound of powder. “Why, you wanna call in to report a crime? Perhaps someone’s stolen your heart, Miss Mori?”

Something like that.

Morgan brushed the joke aside with another forced smile and took note of her surroundings. Her wrist itched where the key was kept. She would come back later. Alone.

40 HUDSON

Hudson was disoriented. It felt as though he’d never left Muntz’s apartment, and now he was back in the dingy unit, the reek of blood and feces potent enough to choke. His eyes watered, blurring the scene before him. Ronald Muntz had devolved into a gelatinous pool on his mattress, his left eye socket blown out by a .45-caliber bullet. A matte black Glock lay on the floor, just beneath Muntz’s meaty hand that hung off the mattress, his fingers bloated to resemble blood sausages.