“You said she was buried there, in your dream,” said one of the sausagemakers. “Where?”

“Behind the wall under a window,” said Rigg. “The west-facing window.”

“Behind the stone? Not in the floor?”

“That’s right,” said Rigg. “But is that even possible?”

“We’ll see,” said a man. And they went on ahead.

Ram Odin was among the men who had come out of the Cave. He didn’t go into the house, either. “So you decided to tell them your . . . dream.”

“Naming no names,” said Rigg. “They’ll know whose house or they won’t. They’ll accuse him or they won’t. He’ll break down and confess what he did, or not. But her parents will have her body and know she didn’t leave them and run off somewhere. No one carried her off. They’ll know.”

“Small comfort, if they knew how she died.”

“After all these years, I think the comfort will be more than small. But I’m not telling them how she died, or what was done to her first. I’m making the minimal change, and leaving them free to make of it what they will.”

They were a deliberate people—after all, despite years of suspicion, they had never taken any action against the villages they suspected of taking Onishtu. The girl’s parents were given a chance to wail over the body, and they buried the body in a real grave, among her ancestors, with a marker, before anyone started open inquiries about who had built the house.

It took only a few minutes to get past the “nobody knows who builds them” objection, and then it was only a few moments before they had named aloud the man who built it. The murderer kept his silence, except to say, “I’m angry that the killer hid her in the house I was building.”

And they took that at face value for a while.

But finally the question came. “Who did you build it for?”

He would not tell them. “A man doesn’t have to tell. Shouldn’t tell. She chose another.”

They started ticking off the women who had accepted houses during that year. They all agreed—for by now the whole town had assembled—that the man had not shown special attention to any of those women.

“Did you never offer it?” asked a man.

“She already took another,” said the murderer.

“Who, then? Because if it’s one of these, she never knew.”

“I’m a shy man,” he said. “I was afraid to speak, and then it was too late.”

“You never even looked at any of the women of Woox-taka-exu,” someone pointed out. “Was she an outsider?”

“When would I see an outsider girl?”

“Who was it?” they demanded.

He named one of the women who had accepted a house at the time.

“You never looked at me, you never talked to me,” the woman said.