They waited until the diner was dark.
Kurt didn't come upstairs. Dana could hear him from her room, out on the porch below with the man who'd painted the store and two others, a bottle going round, Kurt's big laugh coming up through the boards every few minutes. She had tried to tell him at ten. He had listened for nearly a minute before he put his hand on her shoulder and said, "Get some sleep, okay? You've had a hell of a week."
Theo had gone home with Earl. He had stood up when the old man stood up and gone out into the dark without looking back at her. Concussion did that, she told herself. It flattened people. She had made her mind up about Theo, and she put him away, and went back to what she had come into the valley for.
Erik and Marit Lindqvist had walked away from the Harrow Creek Trailhead three weeks ago and nobody had found a bootlace.
Wes listened longer. He sat on the end of her bed while Hassan told it, the boots, the trough, the poster, and when Hassan was done Wes looked at the floor for a while and said, "Duke didn't like that hiker." Then: "What do you need?"
"Stay with my son," Hassan said. "Lock the door. Don't open it to anyone. Not to me, unless I knock twice and say his name."
"And if somebody says your name?"
"Then don't answer."
Wes nodded. He didn't ask why.
The street was empty and the porch lights were off. A moon three-quarters full stood over the playa, and the white ground under it gave the whole town a cold, even light, so that Dana and Hassan moved along the backs of the buildings without a lamp. Dana had the recorder clipped to her jacket, running.
The smokehouse was first. Long and low, stone at the bottom and planks above, a thin thread of hickory smoke still rising from the stovepipe. The door had a hasp and no lock.
Inside it was close and dark and it stank of smoke and fat. Dana cupped her phone light in her hand.
Meat hung from hooks along the rafters in dark, glossy sides. She couldn't tell what it had been. She made herself stop looking.
Along the back wall, on shelves, there were bones.
They had been cleaned and sorted. Long bones on one shelf, laid side by side like firewood. Ribs on another, bundled with twine. On the bottom shelf, in a row, the skulls, eleven of them. Some were small. Two were brown as tea. One was white and new.
Hassan crouched and lifted the white one in both hands, carefully, the way he might lift something in a pharmacy that could spill. He turned it toward her light. It was whole. No crack anywhere, no hole in the crown. He tilted it and looked up into the dark of the nose, and Dana looked with him, and saw only that something deep in there, a thin shelf of bone behind the nose, was broken through, as if a finger had been pushed up into it.
He set the skull back in its place and said nothing.
She photographed them.
Hassan was standing by the door looking at a nail beside the frame, where something small and gold hung on a loop of string. A man's wedding ring, wide and plain. Dana turned it to the light. Inside the band: "E + M. 14. 06. 2019."
"Erik," she said.
"They eat them," Hassan said. "The town. They eat people."
Saying it aloud made it smaller and worse at once.
They went the long way to the barn, behind the church, along the cemetery fence.
Hassan stopped at the pickets.
The graves were open. Each one was a neat square hole with the soil heaped in a mound beside it, and every hole was empty. No coffins. No bones. In the nearest he could see, in the moonlight, steps cut into the dirt wall at one end, worn smooth, like the steps down into a root cellar. The bottom of the hole was packed flat and lined with straw, and there was a hollow in the straw the length of a person.
"Grave robbers," Dana whispered. "They rob the graves too."
Hassan didn't answer. He was looking at the straw, and at the shape pressed into it, and thinking that nobody lines a hole with straw to rob it.
They went on to the barn.
The barn doors were chained. The side door wasn't. It opened on leather hinges, without a sound, into a dark that was warm and smelled of straw and something sour underneath, unwashed bodies, old urine.
Stalls along both sides. Clean straw in each, a water bucket, a metal food bowl like you'd put down for a large dog. And in three of them there were people, chained by the ankle to a ring in the back post, each chain long enough to reach the water and the bowl and a bucket in the corner, and no farther.
Dana went down the row with the light, looking for a blond man and a blond woman, the faces from the poster she had been carrying around for three weeks.
A woman was sitting against a post with her knees drawn up. Thin, blond, sunburned under the dirt, her hair cut short and ragged as if with a knife. When the light found her she didn't shield her eyes. She came up onto her knees and held the chain out toward them in both hands, the way you would hold out something you needed someone to take.
"Please," she said. "Please. Get it off."
"Marit?" Dana said. "Marit Lindqvist?"
"Get it off me. Please. Before they come."
Hassan was already down in the straw beside her. He followed the chain with his hands. A steel cuff around her ankle, rubbed bright on the inside, the skin under it raw. A padlock through the cuff, new and heavy, a hardened shackle, the kind you'd put on a gate. The chain ran from the lock to a ring bolt in the back post, and the post was oak, old and gray and hard as iron. He pulled on the ring. It didn't give.
"How did you get here?" Dana said. Her voice had gone flat and careful, her interview voice.
"We were walking." Marit was watching Hassan's hands, not Dana. "Third day. We were lost. A man called to us from the trees. He knew our names." "Can you break it? Can you?"
Hassan set the hatchet's edge against the staple where the ring went into the wood, and hit the back of it with a stone from the floor. Once. Twice. The sound was enormous in the dark barn. The staple didn't move.
"Where's Erik?"
Marit's hands closed on the chain.
"They took him the first week," she said. "At night. They said, 'the oldest first.'" She was quiet. Then: "Eight days after, he walked past that door. In the afternoon. Hands in his pockets." "He was smiling. Erik never smiled like that in his life."
Dana's light dropped an inch and came back up.
"How long have you been here?"
"I count the bowls. Two a day." "Forty-one. Forty-two. I lose it at night."
Hassan tried the lock instead. He worked the hatchet's corner into the shackle and leaned his weight on it until the handle creaked. The shackle held. He went at the post next, and the blade went in an eighth of an inch and stopped.
"Has anybody come?" Dana said. "Police? Search and rescue?"
"A deputy. In a car. She gave him supper." "I heard them laughing through the wall. I didn't hear him leave." She swallowed. "Before that, at the door, I heard her say lions. Laughing. Lions."
The other two stalls held men Dana didn't recognize. One was asleep or unconscious, gray-skinned, breathing in long rattles. The other sat staring at the light and didn't speak. He had a deputy's brown trousers on under the dirt, and no shoes.
"A young man," Dana said. "Korean. Gray beanie. Have you seen him?"
Marit looked at her for the first time.
"Two nights ago they carried someone in. He was crying." "They took him out again before morning. To the smokehouse." "He didn't come back."
"No," said Dana. "That's not him. He's at Earl's. I held him at supper."
Marit didn't argue. She looked back at Hassan's hands.
"Why?" Dana said. Her voice had gone high. "Why keep you?"
"She says winter." "That's all. Winter." "At night one of them sits by the door and talks to me in my mother's voice. So I won't be lonely, it says." "Please. Please get it off."
Hassan sat back on his heels. His palms were burning and the oak had barely a scratch.
"I can't," he said. "Not with this. I need a cutter. A bar. Something."
"No." She caught his sleeve. "No, no. Don't go. Please don't leave me here."
"We'll come back."
"The deputy said that." She held on a second longer. Then she let go of his sleeve, one finger at a time, and sat back against the post with the chain in her lap. "Go, then. Go and come back."
The light from Dana's phone swung across the barn doors as she stood up, and stopped.
Somebody was standing inside the side door, in the shadow by the frame. Gray hoodie. Black hair. Brown boots laced to the knee. He was smiling at her with his hands in his pockets.
"Hi," he said. "Mae says you should come back to bed now, ma'am. She says it's late, and you'll catch cold."