If this had been Thanksgiving Day, I would have expected a Norman Rockwell grandmother to be standing at the open front door, costumed in a long apron over a gingham dress, a smear of flour on one cheek, waving to the arriving grandkids.

Deep in cottonwood shadows, Stormy said, “Creepy.”

“Megacreepy,” I agreed.

“Blue rabbits? What’re they supposed to be—the product of nuclear waste?”

“Bunny Godzillas,” I said.

“Are the gnomes playing poker?”

“I think they’re having tea.”

Wary of snakes, we continued through the trees until we could see up the back porch steps to the open kitchen door.

Stormy said, “Something’s lying in the doorway.”

I squinted and said, “Maybe a dead guy.”

“What dead guy?”

“Probably the meat-cleaver-in-the-neck dead guy.”

She tried using her cell phone again, but as before there was no service in this area. “I’m having second thoughts. Blue rabbits and now a corpse. Let’s drive someplace the phone works and call Chief Porter from there.”

As a chill crawled up my spine and stiffened the hairs on the nape of my neck, I said, “Too late.”

“This isn’t a stupid horror movie, odd one. It’s never too late to do the intelligent thing.”

“Someone in there needs our help right now. There’s no time to waste.”

“How do you know?”

“Intuition.”

“Yeah? Well, my intuition says we should leave this very minute or get a meat cleaver in the neck.”

“When I say intuition,” I reminded her, “I mean sixth sense. My intuition isn’t like yours. No offense intended.”

“I fall for a fry cook,” she said, “and find myself with a clairvoyant.”

“Clairvoyant isn’t the right word.”

“Is there a right word for you?”

“Maybe not,” I admitted.

Draperies or curtains covered most of the windows, and the house stood in silence, as if abandoned.

“She’ll die if we don’t go in there right now,” I said.

“Who?”

“I don’t know who or how or why, but I know we don’t have much time to save her.”

Whether or not fortune favored the bold, we crossed the lawn without darting from one point of cover to another. The four gnomes around the ceramic toadstool were neither playing poker nor having tea. Each of them held a beer stein, and judging by the expressions on their faces, the sole reason for their gathering was to drink themselves into a stupor.

Lying across the threshold between the porch and the kitchen was in fact the fortyish guy with the shaved head and the wide blue eyes, the same man whose anguished spirit had led us to this place. The cleaver had cut through his carotid artery, and he had bled onto the porch floor so recently that the pooled blood had not yet developed a skin.

To avoid tracking blood into the house, Stormy and I had to step on the dead man’s back and then between his splayed legs. I’m not an admirer of bearskin rugs, but at least all the squishy-gooey parts of the bruin have been long removed before it is cast down to be trod upon. From the cadaver’s torn throat issued rude wet noises that, it seemed to me, we deserved.