SCOTT DROVE BACK THROUGH TOWN and north. The old highway was plowed and clear, but twenty yards after turning off onto the dirt road where his father had met his death, passing those old metal gates, the car hit a drift it couldn’t handle and sank into a foot of snow.

“Shit.” He climbed out and felt his leg disappear to the knee in a mantle of smooth, unbroken white. The wind seethed and fretted over the plain, sifting restlessly through dry powder as if searching for something irretrievably lost. Midafternoon had begun to turn the shadows blue all around him.

Make your move.

Without actually making a formal decision to continue, he started following the road deeper into the woods. It felt much farther on foot. Twenty minutes from here, people were watching cable TV, reading Harry Potter, and surfing the Web, but out here it was still 1956.

Or 1882.

Why had he thought of that particular year? Of course he knew exactly why—it had been the decade of Rosemary Carver’s disappearance. He remembered that now. What if time had somehow stopped then, and the same woodland animals that were alive then were alive now, watching him from the edge of the forest?

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep—

The cliché of thinking about Robert Frost in a New England forest brought him a fleeting moment of comfort, but the wind was there immediately to wipe it away. Up ahead, the road curved into its final turn, trees retreating into snowy openness, everything so different when he experienced it like this, larger and more immediate. He could’ve sworn the road hadn’t gone this far, that the forest wasn’t quite as thick here. But that wasn’t possible, of course—there was only one dirt road off the old country highway. This had to be it.

He came out of the trees and saw the house. Eyeless. A peculiar adjective, since there were plenty of windows, and since—

Even from this distance, it seemed to be staring back at him. It made him think of the painting he’d found, and it occurred to him that this was the exact angle that it had been painted from. He wondered what it would be like to see a shadow moving inside the house, past the windows and behind the curtains.

There are other ways of watching.

“Stop that shit,” he said, hating the way his voice shook.

Fresh tire tracks marked the snow around him. Someone had been here recently. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Fusco’s.

“Scott,” Sonia’s voice answered. She must have recognized the number on caller ID because her greeting was a statement, not a question. In the background, he could hear glasses clinking, men’s voices, the brisk snap of a cue ball.

“Is Owen there?”

Dark and deep.

“Not yet,” she said, “but he’ll probably be.”

“What about Red?”

Long pause. “What’s this about?” Sonia asked, and when he didn’t reply: “Listen, I’m working till midnight. Why don’t you drop by and we’ll talk?”

Promises to keep.

“Sounds good.” As he spoke, he was still making his way toward the house, careful steps, never taking his eyes off the door. Less than twenty feet from it now and the only sound in the world was the powdery scrunch of his boots through still-fresh snow. “But I’ve got some things I need to take care of out here first.”

“Where are you?” Sonia asked, seeming to realize something as she spoke. “You’re not—Scott, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go back into that house right now.”

He stepped up onto the porch. “I’ll be fine.”

“What happened last night? We never talked about it.”

“What happened sixteen years ago?”

She fell silent again but not for as long as he’d expected.

“We can talk about that too,” Sonia said quietly.

“I’ll see you later,” he said, reaching for the doorknob.

Before he could touch it, it turned by itself, the door swinging open to reveal the face of the woman standing just behind it, grinning at him.