ON THE WAY HOME, they stopped for a fried fish dinner at Captain Charlie’s. The counterman had a tattoo of a lizard on the side of his neck. He sat behind the register reading his newspaper, and Scott and Henry carried their cardboard baskets of fried perch and hush puppies over to a booth on the far side of the restaurant. It was decorated in fishing nets and plastic crabs, and they sat underneath a framed picture of one of the owners standing next to John Travolta for a movie that Travolta had filmed here some years ago. The movie showed up occasionally on cable, and Scott realized now how strenuously he had endeavored to avoid it, streets and storefronts of his hometown shown from strange Hollywood angles.

Afterward, Scott drove to his father’s house and walked Henry to the door. The boy seemed reluctant to go inside.

“I’ll see you later,” Scott said.

The boy looked hopeful. “Later tonight?”

“Probably not. It’s getting late.”

“What’s your hurry?” Owen’s voice demanded, from somewhere inside. A football game was playing on TV.

“I’ve got work to do back at the house.”

Owen gave a mocking laugh. “Work, huh?”

Scott walked into the living room. His brother was stationed in front of the television rummaging through a bag of potato chips the size of a pillowcase. Bottles and trash surrounded him like the swath of a tropical storm. A battered old guitar leaned against the fireplace, a reminder of the years Owen had spent locked in his room, brooding over the same three chords.

“What were you looking for in the shed last night?” Scott asked.

Owen’s shoulders went rigid and he withdrew his hand from the bag. A bloody piece of paper towel hung from his palm like a tattered flag, held in place by strips of Scotch tape with salted yellow crumbs stuck to them. Without looking at Henry, he said, “Go up to your bedroom.”

When the boy went upstairs, Owen turned and faced Scott squarely.

“How much longer are you planning on sticking around?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” Scott said.

“Yeah, well.” Owen peeled back the paper towel, sucked some of the salt from his wounded hand, never looking away from Scott. “Maybe it’s time you start.”

“You still haven’t told me why you were out in the shed.”

Owen looked down, found his beer on the floor, and drained it. “If Dad left anything else around here, I’m entitled to my share.”

“So you were looking for money?”

“I’m not going to spend my life dragging wheelbarrows and hauling scrap.” Owen’s face was reddening as he spoke, spitting the words as much as speaking them, and Scott glanced at the empty bottle in his fist, wondered if it might shatter. As genuine as his brother’s anger appeared, he somehow felt as if he wasn’t getting the whole story from Owen—as if perhaps Owen himself didn’t know what he’d been doing out there. He’s scared, Scott realized. I’ve asked him to explain something about himself that even he doesn’t understand, and it’s making him feel like a cornered animal.

Owen took a deep breath and put the bottle down on the end table to his right. “You remember that time in fifth grade, that kid Brad Schomer who kept messing with you? One time he pushed you from one side of the cafeteria to the other, waiting for you to fight back.”

Scott felt the tips of his ears growing hot. “Yeah.”

“You finally broke down and started bawling.”

“Until you stepped up and hit him for me,” Scott said. “I’ve never forgotten that.”

“I always wondered why you never stood up for yourself. But now I get it. In this life, you either fight or run away. You’ve always been a runner.”

Scott glanced at the scrap of paper towel flapping from Owen’s hand. “Take care of that cut,” he said. “And let Henry know I said good night.”

He could feel Owen’s eyes on him until he got back into his car.

SCOTT DROVE OUT OF TOWN with a sense of renewed urgency, a stopwatch twitching in the pit of his stomach, a sense of time running out. Seeing Colette and her ancient aunt had reminded him that everything had a deadline, the present bulldozing forward into the future, carrying all the weight of the world with it. Colette had once been so fetching, the sort of girl whose face and body were enough to make you believe in God’s almighty grace, impervious to the ravages of time. All that was gone now, spoiled and sodden.

And Owen—had Owen ever really had a chance? A permanent storm cloud of doom hung over his brother, portending endless disappointment, from as far back as Scott could remember.

What about you? What have you got?

As if in answer, he reached for the front door and turned the knob, stepping inside. The cold within the house slipped around him, insinuating its way through the protective layer of his clothes, finding his core. Scott turned on the lights and stared slowly down the hall, half expecting to see someone—or something—waiting for him here. Time was moving here too, but the stopwatch feeling was gone, replaced by the steady and somehow more apt image of sand through an hourglass. Scott could almost feel it trickling away. He thought of something a writing professor had once said: We write as a means of stopping time; paradoxically this allows us to see how things change. Arrows on a chalkboard, diagrams, equations—action and reaction, cause and effect.

He mounted the stairs, unconsciously counting them, and stopped at the landing, then turned and went back down again, up the hallway and around the corner.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, he was sitting back in the dining room with the laptop on his knees. It was 8:02. He had returned expecting nothing more than another marathon of head-pounding frustration and even now stared at the blank screen and the blinking cursor.

8:07.

8:13.

8:22.

Creative visualization: He’d used it to write greeting cards—why not fiction? Shutting his eyes, he imagined the room around him, the way Faircloth had it arranged on page 138 of the manuscript. The Luger sat on the table next to the open bottle of I. W. Harper bourbon, half full, although a man like Faircloth would see it as half empty. A pack of Lucky Strikes and a red and white box of kitchen matches. And Round House itself, the huge old manse and all its endless subconscious curves and eased edges warping around him in the night.

I’m Faircloth. I’m Faircloth. And I’m waiting …

But the last page kept intruding on the rest of the story. Next to the pistol and the whiskey and the cigarettes, Scott began to imagine a stack of old papers, research material, notes, all of it pertaining to a young girl named Rosemary Carver. Old articles. Transcribed court documents. Eyewitness reports of the girl who had disappeared, Milburn’s little lost lamb. What had Aunt Pauline called her?

An angel, a little one called up to heaven before her time.

Scott’s eyes opened. He glanced down at the computer screen and knew what he needed to write next. There was no sense of realization—the words were just there, almost as if his father were standing beside him, whispering in his ear. Without hesitation, he started typing.

Faircloth looked across the table at the articles he had assembled there. Maureen would be home soon, drunk and stinking of another man’s cologne, and she would start yelling at him for making a mess in the dining room, but suddenly he didn’t care about any of it. He didn’t care about his pig of a wife and the way she cheated on him right under his nose, and the pathetic, impotent weakness that he felt when he pretended it wasn’t happening. The only thing that mattered was Round House and the girl, an angel called up to heaven before her time, sad and lost and alone, who had died somewhere under circumstances so horrible that he could only guess what might have happened to her.

Faircloth looked back at the old pages and felt something stirring somewhere in the room.

Then, unexpectedly, in the front of the house, he heard a sound. It was the unmistakable scrape and click and rattle of a key turning in a lock. Maureen was

Click!

The noise was faint but perfectly clear. It had come from the direction of the front door. Scott stopped typing, fingers still hovering over the laptop’s keys, and cocked his head, listening for the sound to come again, metal on metal, a key in a lock.

When he didn’t hear anything more, he took the computer off his lap and stood up from the settee, heart thudding sickly in his chest as he walked out of the dining room and into the long, empty corridor that led to the front door.

He could hear his own footsteps creaking along the boards, faster now, as he approached the entryway. There was the ridiculous urge to shout “Hello, who’s there?” and he managed to quell it, barely, but only by running the last few steps, determined to bring the ridiculous moment to a close, gripping the handle with both hands and flinging the door open.

The porch was empty.

Of course it was empty. His mind was playing tricks on him due to his not having taken the medication prescribed for him—

He stared at the outside of the door.

There was a key stuck in the lock, attached to a ring with a dozen other keys dangling from it. Scott touched the key ring, weighing it in his palm, the metal keys tinkling against his fingers, their ridges making them feel more real. They were startlingly cold, as if they’d just been removed from a deep freeze. He pulled them free, expecting resistance, but the key in the doorknob slid loose from the lock with oily ease. They must have been here for a while, he thought; maybe the Realtor had dropped them off after he had arrived home earlier.

But where had the recent noise come from?

It had come from the house.

He carried the keys back inside and shut the door.

And locked it.

BACK AT THE LAPTOP, he wrote:

Maureen was coming around the corner, trying to move quietly but far too drunk to succeed. Her cheap high heels clattered like stones along the hardwood floor; she would have woken him from even the deepest sleep.

When she saw Faircloth at the dining room table, her doughy face flushed bright red and spread into an idiotic smile.

“Karl? What are you still doing up?”

“Just working on my scrapbook.”

“Scrapbook?” Her watery eyes took in the piles of paper, the old articles and historical documents. “You don’t have a scrapbook.”

“I’m just starting one,” he said with a smile.

“It’s after midnight, honey. Aren’t you tired?”

He shook his head and stood up slowly, seeing the nervousness drifting over her face like a cloud scudding across the moon. It didn’t bring the rush of pleasure he’d hoped—he felt it only faintly, as if his own nerve endings had been worn down. Through a glass darkly was the Scripture that ran through his mind.

“Well,” she said, “I’m going to bed. I’m bushed.”

“Maureen …?”

She turned and saw the Luger in his hand, pointed at her. Her eyes widened, and she emitted a single shrill giggle that died almost before it left her lips.

“Karl.” It wasn’t quite a whisper. Her hands opened, showing pudgy, glistening palms. “Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why–”

The sound of the gunshot was much louder than he’d been prepared for. It boomed through the house, deafening him. Maureen’s entire body flew backward, jerked by invisible cables, and she hit the wall in silence, dropping to the floor. A pool of dark blood was spreading steadily from beneath her, seeping into the rug, darkening it.

Faircloth put the gun aside and went over to her. There was no feeling of panic or disbelief, no rise in heart rate or shortness of breath, none of the physiological symptoms that he’d wondered if he would experience. He felt absolutely calm and sane.

Kneeling down, he rolled her body in the rug where she had fallen. When she was bundled the way he wanted her, he hauled the whole package across the dining room floor to the oak door in the corner. He laid it aside, opened the door, and gazed into the deep and windowless black space, which seemed to go on and on forever.

Turning around, he began dragging her body inside.

Scott stopped typing and sat back to reread what he’d written, allowing himself a little thrill of satisfaction. Finally, it was going well. Not great, not yet, but at least it was on track with what his father had been writing. For the first time, the sight of words on the page didn’t bring a dull drumbeat of incipient dissatisfaction.

He stood up and stretched his back, then glanced at the clock and saw that it was almost midnight. His spine ached but it was a good ache, a manifestation of hard work.

Quit while you’re ahead. Go back in the morning when you’re fresh.

Don’t quit when you’re on a roll.

Tonight he was on a roll and he knew it. He put his hands back on the keyboard and kept going.