On Christmas morning, my 9-year-old daughter opened a present from her grandfather, my father-in-law. Just seconds later, she let out a terrifying scream, clutching her face and crying that it was burning.

The road didn't appear on the highway signs, nor on the modern paper map I had bought at the Mobil station outside Concord. It was nothing more than an unpaved cut through a dense canopy of hemlock and second-growth birch, flanked by two rusted iron posts from which a rusted chain hung down, broken and half-swallowed by the encroaching ferns.

I hadn't turned toward Boston.

I couldn't. Not after I pulled into the gas station and found a white envelope tucked beneath my windshield wiper while Tessa was in the restroom—an envelope containing a single Polaroid taken less than ten minutes earlier: Tessa, standing at the sink of that very gas station, viewed through the dirty screen of the high ventilation window.

Someone was herding us.

Every turn I made away from the north had been met with a subtle, terrifying reminder that our perimeter was compromised. A gray sedan lingering three car lengths back on the turnpike. A black SUV idling at the edge of a rest stop. They didn't want to capture us on the open highway; they were funneling us here, into the dense, cellular-dead zone of the Coos County timber reserves.

The station wagon groaned as its undercarriage scraped against a granite ledge buried in the dirt track. Low-hanging spruce boughs whipped against the windshield, screeching like fingernails across glass.

"Mom," Tessa said from the passenger seat. She had the butcher-paper parcel on her lap now. She had picked it up while I was checking the oil. Her small, scarred fingers were resting on the rough jute twine, slowly picking at the knot.

"Don't open that, Tessa," I said, my voice tight, my knuckles white against the steering wheel.

"It smells like Grandfather's coat," she said softly.

"Put it down."

"He told me once that if you put something bad in a box and bury it deep enough, the dirt cleans it. He said that’s how you make things new again."

I glanced at her, my stomach dropping. "When did he tell you that?"

"At Christmas," she whispered, her gaze unfocused, staring straight ahead through the sweep of the wipers. "Before we opened the tree. He took me down to the fruit cellar while you were making the cider. He showed me the box. He said it was a test for Daddy."

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. "A test?"

"He said Daddy had to choose between being his son or being my father. He said a real man knows when to burn the field so the next crop can grow."

The track ended abruptly in a wide, circular clearing choked with dandelion and wild blackberry brambles.

At the far edge of the clearing, perched on a rise overlooking the motionless, oil-black surface of Blackwood Pond, sat the cabin.

It looked worse than it had in the 1974 photographs. The timber logs were weathered to the color of wet ash, the roof sagged along its central ridgepole like the spine of an old horse, and three of the front windows were covered with sheets of black plastic that billowed slightly in the evening breeze.

Parked in the tall grass beside the rotting porch was Brian’s silver Volvo.

The driver’s door stood wide open. The interior dome light was on, casting a faint, sickly yellow glow over the front seats.

There was no one inside.

"Stay in the car," I commanded, reaching down and pulling the revolver from my tote bag. I checked the cylinder—six hollow-point rounds, seated brass-clean in the chambers.

"Mom—"

"Tessa, listen to me," I said, turning to grip her shoulders, looking straight into her wide, frightened eyes. "If I don't come back to this porch in ten minutes, you climb into the front seat, put this car in reverse, and you do not stop until you hit the state police barracks in Lancaster. You don't look at who’s waving. You run them down if they get in your way. Do you hear me?"

Tears spilled over the pink, puckered skin of her cheek, but she nodded. "I hear you."

I slipped out of the wagon, closing the door until the latch caught with a muted click.

The silence of the woods was absolute. No birds sang. No insects buzzed in the high grass. There was only the faint, rhythmic *lap-lap* of the black water against the dock pilings fifty yards behind the cabin, and the heavy, metallic stench of damp earth mixed with something chemical—something sharp, alkaline, and dreadfully familiar.

I stepped onto the bottom rung of the porch stairs. The wood shrieked beneath my boots.

The front door of the cabin was ajar, hanging crookedly on a single iron hinge.

"Brian?" I called out, raising the revolver with both hands, my thumbs resting on the hammer. "Brian, I'm here. Step out onto the porch."

No answer.