“So, the thing is,” said the sheriff. “It doesn’t really matter whether they plan to use the Dead to harm us or not. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at all whether they mean to do anything. The question is, do you think it’s possible that they could, no matter how inadvertently, become dangerous back in society should that trance ever escalate to violence?”

Ice at the bottom of the glass burned the skin in Peter’s palm. He could sit here all night waiting for that question to go away, or the ice to melt, whichever came first. But like all questions with dark and troubling answers, the only thing that would ever make it go away was the hardest thing of all: accepting the truth. Peter looked up with his stomach all in twists at how it ever came to this.

“It’s possible,” he whispered. Then, “Yes. I think that’s possible.”

The sheriff blinked deeply to mark his respect for Peter’s bravery. “But we still don’t know what Timberdark is.”

Peter pulled the silver snowflake from his pocket and held it over the table where it spun in the candlelight, glinting.

The sheriff shifted forward in his seat. “What is that, son?”

“It’s the Returnees’. When the Dead first came, and Returnees began to realize that people would hunt them down just because they were scared they’d turn out to be just as bad, one woman, Selma, led a band of survivors to freedom. The snowflake was used to communicate not only their allegiance to one another but to every Returnee left out in the world who needed their help. Each founding member of the original community who took refuge at Lake Wranglestone wore a silver snowflake and this one belonged to my friend Rider before he died. But I found it in Cooper’s rucksack. At the time, when you first asked me about Timberdark, I couldn’t see how Cooper could even have heard of that word, let alone know what it was. But there was a way. Just one.”

The sheriff shook his head. “How?”

“While you were living peacefully alongside the Returnees at Yellowstone, the leader of my community, Henry, kept their existence from us by killing them out by the falls or trading them in for weapons and medicines. When Rider helped me rescue Cooper from a cowboy he’d been sold to, we planned to go back to the lake, not just to tell the rest of the community the truth about the Returned, but to flush out the one remaining member who’d helped Henry.”

“This is Darlene,” said the sheriff taking a swig from Teddy’s tumbler.