push his guts back inside. A matting of red, the cattails splattered. A smell like brimstone, something sweet and charred, drifted in the air. He moaned and pounded the ground with his fists. Then Wylie rushed past Grizz and knelt beside their father. The boys’ father tried to sit up, but the pain brought him low. He looked up at Grizz, he looked up at him in his blood, and said, “I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Run get help!” Grizz told his little brother.
Wylie climbed to his feet. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Oh, Jesus.” He stopped to retch again in the cattails.
“Hurry,” Grizz said to him.
When his brother was gone, Grizz made sure to kick away his father’s gun, where he couldn’t reach it. It didn’t matter by then. The man’s breathing had grown labored, his eyes rolling back in his head.
“It hurts,” he said. “Hurts worse than I thought it would.” His voice softening. He waited for his father to curse him, waited a long time before there were sirens in the distance. Volunteer paramedics. Sundown. The sky violet, then deepening into indigo. Geese going overhead, racing the falling night. A long time more before the paramedics walked out here from the road. The grass turning brittle with cold. There was an aurora that night, the sky ablaze with energy, green and red lights reaching down like burning fingers, as if the universe were tilting to show some molten secret.
At the house that night, the sheriff interviewed both boys in the kitchen. Grizz told the same story over and over. A deer rising up between them. The slug. It must have ricocheted. An accident. It had been an accident, right? He hadn’t meant to do it. A deer, a beautiful buck. Both his brother and mother weeping. He hadn’t known until then. Hadn’t realized they loved his father. They loved him even though he was a monster. And Grizz? What did it make you, if you were the one who killed the monster? What he felt in that moment was a profound sense of calm, of relief. He was glad his father was dead and could not hurt any of them again. Yet it had not mattered. Within ten years both Wylie and Gail were dead. The sheriff taking notes, glancing from older son to mother. That terrible scar along her jaw.
“You don’t seem too upset,” he said to Grizz.
“It won’t help him to cry now.”
The sheriff nodded, closing up his notes. He was so young then, with daughters Grizz’s own age. His wife had left him a few years back, run off to California with another man. He knew the boys’ father, knew this whole family. “What’s done is done,” he said. Sheriff Steve had suspected Grizz all along and despised him for it.
GRIZZ THOUGHT FOR A long time what to do with the gun Lee had left on his property. When he came down from the mountain, he carried it with him.
BOOK TWO
LOUP GAROU
One day when Clara was walking down the cereal aisle of the grocery store with her father, a woman had paused to appraise Clara. “What a beautiful little girl,” she said to her father. “She must favor her mother.”
He had smiled, thin lipped, and put his hand on the top of Clara’s head. “No. She doesn’t look a thing like that woman.” Something in his tone made the stranger draw back.
Clara wasn’t any more than seven when this happened, but she knew an opportunity when it came her way. While the woman was still in earshot, she asked her father, “What did my mother look like?” But his hand only tightened atop her head, tugging at the roots of her hair, and he hurried her down the aisle without speaking.
In the next aisle her father leaned down at eye level and said in a low voice, “Don’t ever shame me like that again.” When he took his hand away from her head, strands of her brown hair were stuck to his palm. To this day, remembering made Clara’s scalp ache.
She ran away the first time that afternoon. While her father napped on the couch in front of an episode of Bonanza, she loaded up a canvas tote bag with a loaf of Wonder bread, a jar of strawberry jam, and a copy of her favorite book, Madeline and the Gypsies. She didn’t make it far from the apartment where they lived in Savage, because it started raining as soon as she stepped out