“The old man did?”
His breath hitched strangely. He was hard to look at but I made myself do it, following his eye as it shifted and focused on something behind me.
“No,” he said. “He did.”
And then a light swept over us and a loud voice barked, “Who’s there!”
Emma closed her hand and the flame hissed out, and we all spun to see a man standing in the doorway, holding a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Enoch yanked his arm out of the ice while Emma and Bronwyn closed ranks around the trough to block Martin from view. “We didn’t mean to break in,” Bronwyn said. “We was just leaving, honest!”
“Stay where you are!” the man shouted. His voice was flat, accentless. I couldn’t see his face through the beam of light, but the layered jackets he wore were an instant giveaway. It was the ornithologist.
“Mister, we ain’t had nothing to eat all day,” Enoch whined, for once sounding like a twelve-year-old. “All we come for was a fish or two, swear!”
“Is that so?” said the man. “Looks like you’ve picked one out. Let’s see what kind.” He waved his flashlight back and forth as if to part us with the beam. “Step aside!”
We did, and he swept the light over Martin’s body, a landscape of garish ruin. “Goodness, that’s an odd-looking fish, isn’t it?” he said, entirely unfazed. “Must be a fresh one. He’s still moving!” The beam came to rest on Martin’s face. His eye rolled back and his lips moved soundlessly, just a reflex as the life Enoch had given him drained away.
“Who are you?” Bronwyn demanded.
“That depends on whom you ask,” the man replied, “and it isn’t nearly as important as the fact that I know who you are.” He pointed the flashlight at each of us and spoke as if quoting some secret dossier. “Emma Bloom, a spark, abandoned at a circus when her parents couldn’t sell her to one. Bronwyn Bruntley, berserker, taster of blood, didn’t know her own strength until the night she snapped her rotten stepfather’s neck. Enoch O’Connor, dead-riser, born to a family of undertakers who couldn’t understand why their clients kept walking away.” I saw each of them shrink away from him. Then he shone the light at me. “And Jacob. Such peculiar company you’re keeping these days.”
“How do you know my name?”
He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his voice had changed radically. “Did you forget me so quick?” he said in a New England accent. “But then I’m just a poor old bus driver, guess you wouldn’t remember.”
It seemed impossible, but somehow this man was doing a dead-on impression of my middle school bus driver, Mr. Barron. A man so despised, so foul tempered, so robotically inflexible that on the last day of eighth grade we defaced his yearbook picture with staples and left it like an effigy behind his seat. I was just remembering what he used to say as I got off the bus every afternoon when the man before me sang it out:
“End of the line, Portman!”
“Mr. Barron?” I asked doubtfully, struggling see his face through the flashlight beam.
The man laughed and cleared his throat, his accent changing again. “Either him or the yard man,” he said in a deep Florida drawl. “Yon trees need a haircut. Give yah good price!” It was the pitch-perfect voice of the man who for years had maintained my family’s lawn and cleaned our pool.
“How are you doing that?” I said. “How do you know those people?”
“Because I am those people,” he said, his accent flat again. He laughed, relishing my baffled horror.
Something occurred to me. Had I ever seen Mr. Barron’s eyes? Not really. He was always wearing these giant, old-man sunglasses that wrapped around his face. The yard man wore sunglasses, too, and a wide-brimmed hat. Had I ever given either of them a hard look? How many other roles in my life had this chameleon played?
“What’s happening?” Emma said. “Who is this man?”
“Shut up!” he snapped. “You’ll get your turn.”
“You’ve been watching me,” I said. “You killed those sheep. You killed Martin.”
“Who, me?” he said innocently. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“But you’re a wight, aren’t you?”
“That’s their word,” he said.
I couldn’t understand it. I hadn’t seen the yard man since my mother replaced him three years ago, and Mr. Barron had vanished from my life after eighth grade. Had they—he—really been following me?
“How’d you know where to find me?”
“Why, Jacob,” he said, his voice changing yet again, “you told me yourself. In confidence, of course.” It was a middle-American accent now, soft and educated. He tipped the flashlight up so that its glow spilled onto his face.
The beard I’d seen him wearing the other day was gone. Now there was no mistaking him.