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She dragged a brush through her hair, spread balm over her lips.

Miranda’s dead. She was the only thing keeping me here. I don’t give a flying fuck about the rest of them. Let them rot out here. Kick them out. Get them evicted. How hard can that be? Fuck, I’ll just give him the damn place. I’ll sign it over to him and curse him as I do,
she thought as she crossed the muddy yard to her truck.
Curse this whole godforsaken place.

Her nervous fingers fumbled with her keys, they fell from her hand, and, as she bent to pick them up, the noisy rumblings in her own head were suddenly supplanted with a new sound. A cry. A muffled wail of raw, unadulterated confusion and discomfort. Sally tilted her head and listened. Maybe it was just a cat. Some feral things fighting or fucking each other. It was that time of year. She’d heard them howling a few times recently, their screams waking her suddenly but briefly in the dark of night. But then, through the damp air, it came again. Crying. She moved toward the sound. Without realizing it, she took several steps on the path to the trailer. Not a cat. A human sound. A baby sound. A baby was crying. In the trailer. The sound was now hushed. Someone was comforting—or maybe just silencing—a baby.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,
Sally thought as she squatted in the mud. The trailer. The busy, secretive hustling and bustling out there. The snatches of conversation with Miranda about Darius’s desires to raise her child.

It all came together.

The baby didn’t die with her mother. The baby was here. Miranda’s baby. They were hiding the baby right here.

Dix eased his way back into life. He started answering his calls, returning messages, getting back to work. Lucky limped along behind him in the house, a few steps from his heel, a constant trip hazard every time he turned around. She followed him into the bathroom, watched as he brushed his teeth, and sat outside the shower as he bathed. She moved from sleeping on the floor alongside his bed, where his bare feet had always found her first thing in the mornings, to sleeping in the bed with him and the cat, her cheeks huffing and her paws twitching against his back as she ran and ran inside her doggie dreams. If he pulled on his coat, she went to the front of the truck, her tail slowly wagging, so he was obliged to pick her up—her back legs were too stiff to jump in—and take her with him wherever he had to go. He found the feel of her chin on his thigh and her fur against the palm of his right hand as he drove soothing.

Dix also had a pile of paperwork and accumulated mail to sort through. Some of it was Miranda’s. She felt so distant to him, he began to wonder if the closeness he had once felt with her had been some kind of mirage. He felt the loss of her less personally, as if it was something she had done to herself, not to him. Which he supposed was true. But she lingered in his life, detritus that had blown in on a bad storm and now needed to be cleaned up. He had to open envelopes, think about the storage unit, organize her finances, figure out what to do with her things, her stuff, the parts of her that were left in the world. He began with the most recent bank statements that had arrived over the last months and that he had left untouched. He was afraid to discover how much she’d given to Darius. He didn’t want or need the money himself; he just didn’t want Darius to have it. Whatever was left, he figured he’d give to a charity that served local, underprivileged youth. That’s what she’d always wanted—to help that population. Her work with Darius had been useless in that regard. At least in her death, she could provide the service that had escaped her in life.

Dix sliced open an envelope. He was gratified to see at the top of the page that there was still a fairly substantial balance. He unfolded the statement. There had been three withdrawals: $500, $250, $750. He wondered what she might have needed those funds for. Then he looked at the dates. It was impossible. It didn’t make sense. Until suddenly it did.

Dix did not require an appointment. When Warren Bessette’s secretary knocked gently at his door and told him who was in the outer office, Warren stopped what he was doing and waved at her to show him in.

“Hello, Marshall,” Warren said, unfurling himself from behind his cluttered desk as he stood to greet Dix.

Warren knew everyone called the man in front of him Dix, but after so many years of creating documents in the man’s full, legal name—Marshall Dixon Macomb—he found it difficult to use the nickname. Warren had handled many transactions of both a business and personal nature for Dix—mostly sales, deeds, and lease arrangements. As well as the deaths and estates of his parents. Warren knew that Dix owned more land in various parts of the Adirondack Park than anyone suspected. It had come to him through the deaths of family members as well as through smart purchases, funded partially by shrewd lease arrangements, timely sales, and desirable rentals. Dix was a wealthy man who cared nothing for wealth but plenty for land. Which he wanted simply to protect. Warren understood that Dix did caretaking work not for the income but because he liked to take care of things—it was that simple. He was just a man bent on improving things.

Warren had heard people in town speculate that Dix had gravitated to Miranda for her money, and that she chose him in rebellion against her father. Warren knew, as no one else did, including Miranda, the multitude of ways this assumption was wrong. Warren was the only person in the world who understood the depth of Dix’s resources. He also understood why a man like Dix, in a place like this, where most people’s daily lives were defined by scarcity, would want to keep the details of his own abundance quiet.

Warren gestured to a seat, his large, long-fingered hand sweeping through the air between them. But Dix remained standing, so Warren did, too. Two tall men, one in canvas, the other in pinstripes, loomed, vulturelike, in the small office. They were quiet together. While Warren waited for Dix to start, he assessed the man’s face. The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes looked raked in more deeply than he remembered, and the vague slump that had sometimes crept into his shoulders looked permanently sealed in place. Dix finally descended into a chair with a sigh. Warren lowered himself to his own seat and watched as Dix took six bank statements from the file folder in his hand and spread them out neatly on the desk, smoothing their folds. Dix’s long index finger bobbed over the pages as he pointed to several numbers. Warren saw that each month contained one, two, or three withdrawals in amounts ranging from $100 to $800. There were no deposits, other than interest on the capital. Miranda’s name was on every page.

Dix pointed to the date at the top of one of the statements. “Miranda moved out to that commune about a month before this,” he said.

Warren nodded. He’d heard gossip about the situation. He didn’t need any more information or speculation on the topic.

Dix pointed to the most recent statement and said, “Miranda died, Warren.”

This was something Warren had not known. Miranda. Dead. It was impossible. And yet, totally believable at the same time. The final tragedy in a tragic family saga.

“Out there. In that shithole,” Dix went on. “She was pregnant. She got sick, I guess. I don’t know how or why. A fever, I think. She’d rejected technology, meat, Western medicine. Maybe she and the baby died in childbirth. There was no way for me to find out. She’d stopped talking to me. She was completely caught up in that place. In that man.” Dix choked and then coughed down his emotions. “She . . . I guess she asked to be cremated out there. It’s all so wrong. I tried—”

“I’m sorry, Marshall,” Warren broke in. “You’re saying they cremated her? Themselves?”

“She asked them to,” Dix said. “It’s all so wrong. But she’d changed so much, Warren. I tried to get her back. To talk sense into her. She wouldn’t listen. Everything I said seemed to push her farther away. What could I do? What could anyone do? She was an adult. She had no family. No one had any claim on her. Not even me.” Dix’s words sputtered out.

Warren kept his eyes on the numbers on the statement in front of him. They began to swim. Miranda. Beautiful, sweet Miranda. Now dead. Like the rest of her forsaken family. He blinked back tears. The numbers came into focus again.

“She died at least six weeks ago, Warren,” Dix said. “Maybe longer. I don’t know. But that’s when I found out she was gone.”

Warren’s eyes flicked over numbers on the statements, dates and amounts. He began to nod. The withdrawals on all the statements were similar. But several had taken place after Miranda died.

“The bastard is stealing her money,” Dix said. “He’s probably been doing it all along. Probably doing it to all the women out there. You know I don’t care about the money. But now I have something on him. There was nothing I could do before. Now I have what I need to shut him down, don’t I? For everything he’s done to her. To who knows how many other people.”

Warren nodded more vigorously. He looked up at Dix. The men locked eyes.

“We need to take him down,” Dix said.

“Yes,” Warren said. “Yes, we do.”

Dix was in his backyard, trying to teach Lucky to fetch. She was so solemn, a creature both wise and world-weary. He was hoping she’d learn to play a little. A behavior he realized was as unfamiliar to him as it was to her. But Lucky remained uninterested in the ball. She’d watch it fly over her head and then turn her attention back to Dix, her tail slowly wagging. Dix fetched it himself.

He had his arm cocked back, about to throw the ball again, when he heard an unfamiliar sound. Tires on gravel. Strange. No one ever came up his driveway. Lucky’s ears pricked up, she huffed once or twice, then barked. This was a first. Dix had heard her voice only when it was muffled in her doggie dreams. She padded away from him. Another first, her voluntarily leaving his side.

Strange day,
he thought.
And now a visitor.
Probably just a lost person, hoping for directions, thinking he or she had turned down a small road instead of a private drive. He followed his dog, rounded the corner of the house, and there was Lucky, tail ticking back and forth in the summer sunshine, sniffing at a woman.

She was not old, not young, could be anywhere from her late twenties to midthirties, Dix thought. Not tall. Not short, either. Not unattractive, just not that interested in doing what it might take to be attractive. Bluntly cut, medium-length, medium-brown hair. White T-shirt of the kind that came in a three-pack. Well-worn Levis, lightweight lace-up boots of the kind that came from a store that sold guns and ammo along with clothes. She was squatting on her heels in front of a small truck with a lot of rust on it, petting his dog.

His dog. He had a dog. It seemed a long time since he’d had anything he cared about.

“’Lo,” he said, not quite ready to close the distance between him and this other person, not wanting to intrude on what was happening between her and Lucky. “Can I help you?”

The woman stood. Lucky returned to Dix and sat on his feet. The woman looked at them both, her gaze full of frank assessment.

“Nice dog,” she said, not answering his question.

“Thanks. Found her in the woods.” Dix rarely offered information unsolicited. Something in this woman’s matter-of-fact stare invited him to share more than he normally would.