The clock tower rang ten as I passed the Amtrak station where I had first landed, the store where I had bought an instant camera and a bar of soap, the library where Harnett and I had researched pawnbrokers. Bloughton now seemed preposterously puny, the corners too sharp and the streets too clean for it to be anything but an unoccupied replica. Life was proven only by living room windows flickering with evening programming. Unconsciously I began to slink. I was a criminal here, in all probability a wanted man.
The town square was lit with too many lights and I hugged a line of storefronts. Hurrying by was the only sensible course, and yet I paused. For so late at night, there was an unusual amount of people milling about. Upon closer inspection I made out several loose groups of children playing in the grass and a few teenagers threading among them. A few steps closer—I had strayed into the middle of the road now—and I discerned several large objects resting in the central pavilion. Aside from the yearly Christmas display, the structure usually sat empty. I could not resist; I went closer.
The objects were coffins. The receptacles had become so prevalent in my life that it took me several minutes to appreciate the abnormality of their presence in the center of the square. People of great significance must have died. I reached the edge of the grass and stopped cold. Gottschalk, Woody, Celeste—what if what I had done had driven them to suicide and this was their ongoing elegy? No matter how bad they had been, I was worse. Self-disgust choked me. Three boys looked up and backed away. I wiped my mouth and edged closer to the pavilion until I realized that these could not be the caskets of my former tormenters. Not only was the workmanship and style of a different era, but I recognized the evidence of tampering. The markings were more than familiar. They were my own.
A girl of six or seven stood next to me. Her curly black hair was split into pigtails. She wore pink shorts and a rainbow shirt further colored by the dribblings of long-gone ice cream. A Bratz doll dangled from her hand. Her teenage guardian, bestowed with the same curly black hair, was occupied with what looked like very meaningful texting. I forced a smile at the little girl and pointed at the coffins.
“Why—” My voice was wild and I coughed it down, fighting for stability. “Why are these here?”
“So they can catch the bad man.” She seemed grateful for the opportunity to flaunt her memorization. “And so to remember the bad things he did. And also to punish the bad man for the bad things he did.”
I spoke so carefully the words hurt. “What did the bad man do?”
“He took them out of the ground, silly.”
My intestines knotted.
“That was silly,” I managed. “Did they catch the bad man?”
“No, but they’re going to. My daddy says they’re going to.”
“When are they going to catch him?”
“Right now, silly,” she said. “They went down the road. That’s why my sister is playing babysitter.”
I strained to control my pulse.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Blood,” she said, pointing at my hip. Next she pointed at my shoulder. “Blood.”
“That’s right, I have an owie,” I said. “What’s your name, sweetie?”
“Hazel,” she said. “Hazel Geraldine Gatlin.”
She held out her hand but I was already running down the same roads that had guided me to and from my reckless revenge. Now the revenge was theirs. This was what Boggs had been laughing about each time he had read Bloughton’s online news. What I’d done at the school had led to a manhunt, which had likely stagnated until yesterday, when a family by the name of Gatlin had shown up in town muttering an accusation that local citizens were all too ready to believe. It was not difficult to guess who had finally tipped off the Gatlins.
The blaze was evident before I hit Hewn Oak. I hurtled through woods made rapturous by the red glow and burst into a clearing where everything was rippling with fire—the woodpile was on fire, Harnett’s truck was on fire, and flames shot from the cabin with waterfall velocity.
The yard lamps, the nailed windows, the extra locks—every feeble attempt to keep out the world’s dangers now melted and stewed. I shot through a wall of men made mute by their own savagery and slung aside a stranger who held in