body as long as his arm rotted on the bare sand. All that remained were the barbed whiskers, hinged sucker jaws, a cage of bones. A prehistoric creature of mud and deep currents, it had probably been marooned here as the river dwindled to a shallow pond and then to nothing. The sun had bleached the scales gray, and a few crows worked at the head, picking at the flesh, before they saw Grizz and flapped their wings lazily in the heat, moving to the other side of the river.
Sweat crept down his spine. In the middle of the river a long golden sandbar gleamed under the sun. He thought of his son out here with that girl just a few months before. There would have been enough water then that Seth and Leah would have had to swim to reach the sandbar.
He let himself imagine it as it must have happened. A fire crackling from the shore in a sandy pit, a beer can sweating in his boy’s hand, the river a band of caramel under the moon, Leah dipping a red-painted nail into the water and asking, You want to go swimming?
Can’t. Didn’t bring any suit.
It was innocent, the girl had told Grizz. But had it been? He imagined her undoing the buttons of her cutoffs and letting them slide to the sand, showing long legs like a gazelle’s. And then quickly, while Seth gaped openmouthed, the shirt peeled off and fluttered behind her, before she dived in her bra and panties, popping to the surface a ways from shore, her blonde hair dark and wet against her pale shoulders. You coming in or not? And when he had followed, stripping shyly with his back turned to her, and dived in after and found in her in the river, had she tasted of the beer and the river itself, the salty mineral heat of her true self, sweet breath and the carbon of stars?
A kiss, a long kiss, Seth fighting for footing as the lazy current pulled at them, Seth trying not to think of the channel cats the size of barracuda swimming near him, all the things sliding past him in that secret river. A long kiss before the girl pulled away and went for the sandbar, laughing.
They had not been alone, Leah had implied. Someone had stood on this shore as he did now, back in the trees, watching the two teenagers in the shining river. And if it had been Will, why hadn’t he arrested them for trespassing, two half-naked minors under the influence? Will Gunderson had not been the kind to look away while others broke the law. Unless Will himself had secrets out here. Unless this was not the first group of teenagers he had spied on.
Grizz breathed through his mouth, steadying himself. He had a hard time letting go of that vision of his son in the river with the girl. For a short time in the early part of summer he had stopped fearing for his son’s future, and let his guard down.
A beaten path led to a small cabin in the clearing. This was the place Grizz had been heading for all along. The cabin leaned on its river-rock foundation, something mudded together in a bygone century. This was the place Leah had told him about, where Will brought vagrants and strangers to scare them. A sign warning that this was county property was nailed near the door, but some kid had spray-painted FUCK YOU, PIG in red letters over it.
A rusty lock sealed the door shut, but one kick of Grizz’s boots splintered the spongy wood around it and sprung it open. When he stepped inside, the first thing that hit him was the abrasive smell filling up the room. A table was pushed up against one wall and on it sat a Coleman camping stove, a kettle, and a tin of instant coffee next to some chipped mugs. Above this table tools hung by nails in the planking, pliers and brands and sheers. Big iron-jawed traps for beavers and muskrat also spread around the room. Grizz saw a bottle of Stop-Rot, a woman’s hairbrush, toothbrushes, a hot-glue gun, and a rusting hacksaw all arranged on an old potbellied stove. Along the wall rested the source of the stink, gallon buckets where dead things bobbed in what he guessed was formaldehyde.
“Oh, Christ,” he said when he realized what else was here. Deformed stuffed animals were posed around the room