to do about it. She stands in the pine needles with her shoulders slouched and her slight body turned away. Her arms are crossed and Joseph’s heartbeat quickens as he sees her fingers curled around her bicep: Gracie is a creature of fine, delicate features, and for some reason the sight of her hands and neck makes something fragile and trembling in him unfurl its wrinkled butterfly wings and take flight.
“So you snuck out okay?” he asks, coming closer.
“Snuck out?”
“Yeah. They didn’t notice you?”
She looks at him, curious. “Joseph,” she says, “my parents know I’m out. Don’t you know what tonight is?”
And at that, his blood runs cold. Joseph looks around at the trees and the cliffs and the queerly colored moonlight, and he realizes he has made a terrible mistake. “It can’t be,” he said. “Not again. Not so soon.”
“It’s been a month,” she says.
“It hasn’t felt like it.”
“No,” she admits. “It hasn’t.”
She holds a hand out for him to take, and, to his shame, he hesitates. He covers it up by fumbling with the bottles, and when he does take her hand it is ice-cold.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll leave if you want.”
“Don’t leave,” she said. “You can’t come with me. Not past the woods, anyway. But I don’t want you to leave.”
They walk through the woods hand in hand, with the grapefruit moon shining down on them. Up ahead the trees thin out and the rocky side of the mesa begins. In the moonlight the cliffs are white and gray, miles and miles of beautiful desolation. Were the sun up they would be pink and blood-red, but tonight under the clear skies they are like bone.
“Is it bad that I’m here?” he asks.
“It… might be,” she says. “I don’t know. Things are difficult right now. Everyone is upset.”
“What is it? Is it why you left the diner early?” Gracie is currently in training at Chloe’s, and her early absence would normally not be tolerated. Something serious must have happened to excuse her.
“Yes. A little.” She falls silent, and bites her lip.
“Is it something to do with… what it wants?” he asks.
“It’s a he, Joseph. We’ve talked about that.”
“Or that’s what it says it is,” says Joseph sullenly. He wishes now that he had not come. On other nights Gracie is free and fresh and beautiful; he thinks of how he holds her in his arms, her black hair gleaming on the pine needles, her laughter and breath on his neck. But tonight she is a frightened, shy little thing, disappointed with everything that’s ever happened to her.
“It’s Mr. Weringer,” she says.
“Yeah. I figured. Everyone is worried about it,” says Joseph. “I didn’t even think something like that could happen. Did you go to the funeral?”
She nods. “But it’s not that. They don’t think he just died, Joseph… they think he was murdered.”
Joseph is shocked. He almost stops walking altogether. The idea of Mr. Weringer being murdered is even more unbelievable than him dying. “Who told you that?”
She nods ahead to the gray-and-white canyons. “Mr. First, of course.”
His face darkens. “I thought you only saw Mr. First once a month.”
“I visit him, yes, but sometimes he comes to me.”
“And he visited you last night?”
She reluctantly nods.
“In your bedroom?” he asks.
She does not answer.
“Did he visit you in your bedroom, Gracie?”
“Yes,” she says, and there is an edge to her voice. “Are you really interested in this?”
“No,” he says.
“You are. We always talk about this. I’m so sick and tired of talking about this. I wish we could talk about anything else.”
“It’s just… I don’t like you keeping things from me.”
“But you knew I would. Right from the start of this, I told you I would have to.”
Joseph can think of no answer. It is true that she warned him about this. At first he laughed it off, thinking it was a small price to pay in comparison to the rewards he’d get out of it. But with each visit the subject grows heavier and heavier, and it feels like every conversation they have circles it but never truly touches upon it.
But perhaps the problem is that he is getting older, and with each day he grows aware that the entire town is doing the same thing—treading carefully around many anxious, unspoken truths—and this perplexes and saddens him in a way he cannot articulate.
“I’ll tell you,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. I was lying on my bed. About to go to sleep. But then I heard his sounds. It