WHEN THE POLICE found the body on the Woodsmans property, everyone in Kipsen knew who it was. Mr. Loomis, whose breath always smelled like rotten fruit. He was a crotchety man who wore moth-eaten sweaters even in the summer. Dirty, box-framed glasses hung on the tip of his nose. His skin was patchy, dry, with petechiae on his cheeks and neck from the broken capillary blood vessels from drinking too much. He was always hunched over, his body fixed in a way as if it were about to collapse upon itself.

Loomis had lived on the edge of the Woodsman land. The story people in Kipsen told was that one of his ancestors had once been the overseer, who, toward the end of his life, had saved up enough to buy a piece of the land. Land that Loomis inherited.

Other rumors circulated about Mr. Loomis—that he’d been a sergeant during the Vietnam War and had never recovered from the men he’d lost. Or, others said, the men he’d killed. They said that even when he was younger he’d been angry and violent, that he used to beat his wife, a woman who left him long ago. They said he ate wild dogs gone loose. They said he captured children and locked them in his closet. They said he was one of the white knights. They said, they said, they said, with no one knowing how much, if any of it, was true.

He’d lived most of his life out in the woods in his shack of a house, rarely talking to anyone. He had a Rottweiler chained to a post to scare away intruders. Sometimes, late at night, one could hear the sound of his shotgun as he fired off rounds in the dark.

Mira saw him once in Harold’s Grocery. She’d reached for a box of Sugar Smacks and the box toppled to the floor. Mr. Loomis picked up the box and placed it back on the shelf. “Girl like you needs something that won’t rot out her teeth,” he’d said as he leaned down to meet her face to face. He smiled at her, the silver fillings on his teeth glinting in the light.

“You’re the Groves girl,” he said.

Mira nodded. He leaned closer, close enough their faces almost touched. She held her breath so as not to breathe in the sourness of his. “You look familiar. I can’t place it. Something about your face. I know you. Don’t I know you? I could swear I do.”