“Keep going,” George said.

“I let the kid play a bit one day when Andy was out getting food. All of a sudden the woman said, ‘Alice, go play!’ And that kid took off running. I think she had been coaching the kid to do that, like it was a game or something. Before I could run after the kid, the woman jumped at me. She had gotten her hands loose. She was strong. You never met a broad so strong. She jumped on top of me, dug her thumbs into my eyes. I dropped my gun. I didn’t want to hurt her. I thought, Just let her go; let her run. But something in me . . . I don’t know, if you fight all the time you can’t not fight if you get jumped. She was going for the gun, and I grabbed a shovel or something from the wall and hit her with it, hard. There was blood, but . . . she was still standing. She started running. I can still see her running across that field, screaming for the kid to run. The kid was nowhere. In my head, I’m thinking, It’s over. Good. It’s over. We can just go now. But she was screaming so loud I got scared. I caught up to her when she fell. She had blood on her face, in her eyes. I told her to shut up, shut up and everything would be fine. I hit her once or twice, just to try to get her to stop. And she started . . . laughing.”

At this, Jerry stopped and seemed genuinely puzzled by the story. George tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

“Andy came back when this was going on. When I saw him, I let her go. Because I knew. I thought, Give her a chance. She got up and started screaming again. And Andy, he just . . .”

The picture was complete and all too clear to George. Iris was one of the most alive people he had ever met. She loved a dance, a party . . . she could swim for miles. That moment in the field—she had trained for that her whole life. She was a Valkyrie. She went down fighting.

“. . . shot her,” Jerry said simply. “It all happened so fast.”

Jerry fell silent, lost in the moment of Iris’s death there in the field.

“Alice,” George prompted him.

“It took us an hour to find the kid,” Jerry went on quietly. “I told her her mother had gone home. She started crying. We moved to another place. We wrapped the woman’s body up and Andy drove back to Lake Champlain and put it there to make it seem like we were closer to Burlington than we were. After that, Andy started getting nuts, talking about the FBI all the time. He never left me alone with the kid again. We’d drive from place to place. We slept in parks, sometimes hotels, but usually out in the open, in the car. Then one day he decided he could leave me with the kid again for a little while. He went out for an hour and came back and said he’d found this place. We were going to leave the kid for a bit and come back when it was less hot for us. This couple would watch her. We told them she was his sister’s kid, and that the husband was no good and we wanted to keep the kid safe for a bit while we dealt with it. They seemed to buy it, and they liked the money. We slept in a barn that night. Andy talked about Cuba, that he knew a guy with a boat who would take us there for five hundred. He said we should go there. We’d drive to Boston and get in the boat. When I woke up, Andy was gone. He left a grand in my pocket. I didn’t know what to do. I got cousins in New Jersey, so I went there. But I don’t know what to do in New Jersey. So I came back to New York. I knew at some point you’d show up.”

“So why leave me the card?” George asked.

“I guess I was tired of fighting it. You get tired.”

George felt something roiling in his abdomen—coffee and bile. You get tired. He was so tired. Once he got Alice, it would be over. Whatever happened to him then, maybe it didn’t matter. Get Alice and get Andy. Albert Ellingham knew half the government of Cuba. That would be easily settled. A sweet relief broke with the dawn. So much pain and tension and fear this last year, and for what? Now, there would be some redemption.

“Here,” Jerry said. “Turn here.”

They turned down something that was barely a road—it was a dirt path cut into the woods, pocked and pitted, full of ice and snow. The car sputtered and at one point almost slid off the road and into a tree. At the end of the road was a house, rough, made of logs and clapboard, with a collapsed-in porch with several deer antlers scattered around. An anemic finger of smoke came from the chimney.

“This is it?” George said.

“This is it. This is the house. These are the people. Nice people.”

“So here’s what we’re going to do,” George said. “I untie you. You walk up to the door in front of me, in case these are the kind of people who say hello with a shotgun. I’m behind you with my gun. Remember, I want to shoot you. You do anything funny, I give in to my impulse.”

“Nothing funny, nothing funny.”

George tugged the ropes loose so that Jerry could get out. The cuffs he left on, covered once again with George’s coat. Jerry stumbled ahead as the front door of the house opened and a man walked out. He may have been George’s age, or even younger, but time ravaged here. His hair was thinning and greasily patched to his head. He had a gray complexion, the look of someone who hadn’t seen the sun or a decent meal in some time. He wore loose overalls and a flannel shirt, but no coat. He did not seem happy to have visitors.

“Morning!” Jerry said with a queasy fake cheerfulness. His New York accent sounded like snapping twigs in the cold morning. “You remember me? With the kid?”

The man regarded them both for a long moment, and George rested his hand on the butt of his handgun tucked into the back of his trousers, just in case. This man had keen eyes and seemed to read the situation well—he took in Jerry, supplicant and bundled, and George, who always looked like a cop, no matter what he did.

“Took you long enough to come back for her,” the man said, sounding annoyed. “You said a week. Lot more than a week.”

“I know,” Jerry said. “I’m sorry. But we’re here now.”

“Only paid us for the week.”

“You’ll be paid,” George cut in before Jerry could say anything else. “Take this for a starter.”

He reached into his pocket and grabbed a handful of bills. He had no idea how many. Could have been two hundred bucks or two thousand. He held them out, and the man stepped down from the porch and took them. His hands were rough and worn from work, but clean. This lightened George’s heart somehow. This was a poor house in a rough terrain, but there was nothing wrong with being poor, and people knew how to live here, how to keep warm and fed, even during the depths of an endless winter.

“Thought so,” the man said, looking at the fistful of cash. “It’s that kid from the papers, isn’t it? Has to be. The Ellingham girl.”

George tilted his head noncommittally.

“Bet there’s more where this came from,” the man said, holding up the crumpled notes.

“You’ll be paid well.”

The man grunted. “You should have come sooner. Been a long time. You said a week or two.”

“We’re here now,” George said.

“She’s in the back.”

George went to walk up the stone steps, but the man shook his head.

“No, not in the house. She’s outside, out back. Come on.”

George looked out at the snowy field that stretched behind the house. A good place for a kid. A kid could build a good snowman out there. He could almost see her already, thumping through the snow, laughing. Maybe this had all been for the best. Maybe Alice had had a normal life here, a simple life. Maybe she had swum in a lake in the summer, picked apples in the fall.

“Bess liked having a kid around,” the man said, trapping through a half foot of snow.

George looked around at the smooth, pure snow. There were, he noted, no footprints.

“Where?” he said, scanning the area.

“Over there,” the man said somewhat impatiently. “By them trees.”

George began to walk faster, forgetting Jerry, who stumbled along with his hands bound behind his back, the coat slipping from his shoulders. Alice. Alive. Alice. Alive. Those words were so alike. She was here, playing. She was here, in the snow. She was . . .

There was no one by the tree.

George felt the rise of the panic and his reflexes kicked in. He pulled the gun from his waistband and spun in one move, hampered a bit by the snow packed around his ankles. How had he been so stupid? He had walked into a trap. This was a conspiracy, and George was about to be taken down.

And yet, when he faced the stranger and Jerry, there was no gun pointed at him.

“What’s going on?” he yelled. “Where is she?”

“I just told you,” the man said. “She’s here.”

“There is no one here.”

“Look down,” the man said.

George looked down at snow.

“It happened not two weeks ago,” the man said. “She got the measles. Marked her there, where the stone is.”