He thought about the events of the last twenty-four hours, his eyes scanning the horizon toward the ocean, his thoughts playing back what Dave had said between sips of whiskey. Was it the whiskey talking or did Dave have a valid point? “So you fight the fight, but never define the undefinable because it’s always just over the horizon…in any and every direction. And there lies evil.” He remembered what Nick had said while making his crab boil. “So grandma is having a conversation with the dead lady in the painting. I told you that thing might be cursed.”

O’Brien watched the glow of a pink light bloom from the dusky water far out into the Atlantic, beyond the horizon, the appearance of a new sunrise, the promise of a new day. He pulled the photograph of the painting from the file folder, stared at the woman’s face in the picture, and then watched the rosy bloom in the eastern sky. He rubbed Max’s shoulders and said, “Max, you’re a lady. We can’t find the lady in the painting, but we might find the painting. And if we’re lucky, it’ll answer some questions and speak volumes for someone.”

Kim Davis tried to make sleep come to her. But it was elusive, the dream-weaver playing a stealthy game of hide-and-seek. Kim lay in her bed, the chirping of crickets outside her small home, soft glow from the moon backlighting the thin, white curtains across her window. She glanced at the clock on her nightstand. The red numbers glowed: 4:07 a.m. She thought about the old man who seemed to come from nowhere, asking for Sean, asking for a favor — to search for a Civil War era painting.

Was it just coincidental that a Civil War re-enactor was killed on the movie set?

She thought about her few hours on the set waiting for a casting call.

She pictured the re-enactor, the man with the long sideburns who looked at her that morning on the set in a strange way—a way no man had ever looked at me before. Although her bedroom was warm, she felt a chill. She turned toward the single bedroom window, pulling the sheet over her bare shoulder.

Then she saw it. Out of the corner of her eye. A shadow against her drapes. Maybe it was a bat. Maybe it wasn’t really there.

But the noise was real.

Something in her front yard. The sound was as if somebody opened her mailbox that was attached to a wooden pillar near her front door.

She slipped quietly out of her bed. Heart hammering. Palms sweaty. Kim tiptoed across her bedroom to the window. She used both hands to just open the drapes, afraid of what might be staring back at her.

Nothing. Nothing but the glow of the moon over her yard. She looked toward her white Toyota in her driveway. She could see no one. Palm fronds swayed slowly in the night breeze, the tiny flicker of heat lightning far away in the distance. Then she looked at the porch, the front porch swing scarcely moving in the draft

Her eyes scanned the area. Something was different. But what was it?

The mailbox.

She’d checked the mail when she came home from work. And she remembered closing the lid. Now it was open, yawning in the night.

And something was protruding from the mailbox.

Joe Billie lived so far off the grid that O’Brien wondered if Billie even had a birth certificate. O’Brien thought about that as he set out at dawn to find a man who could only be found if he wanted to be found. O’Brien didn’t know if Billie was home. He never did. Billie didn’t have a phone. He didn’t own a computer. O’Brien wasn’t sure if Billie drove a car. He did own a canoe. His universe — the natural world, was larger than the World Wide Web, but far removed from social networking. The tweets he paid attention to come from birdsong in the cypress trees near the St. Johns River. Even among the Seminole Indians, Billie, full-blooded Seminole, was a mystery. He’d spend time with family on the reservation in South Florida, but he kept his distance from the casinos owned by the tribe and controlled by a select few within the tribe.

Their paths first crossed one summer morning when O’Brien was working at the end of his dock, repairing some boards. He looked up and spotted Billie in the distance, bronze face shadowed under a wide-brimmed hat, walking in chest-deep water, tapping the river bottom with a wooden pole. Between the pole and his bare feet, Billie would find and retrieve ancient arrowheads from the river mud. He was undaunted and seemed impervious to the possibility of being pulled beneath the water by alligators, some more the thirteen feet long and weighing over a thousand pounds.

O’Brien thought about that as he drove back in time down the winding gravel road leading to Highland Park Fish Camp. He thought about Billie’s constant awareness of the natural presence honed from biology of survival, from a DNA helix spiraled by endurance and inherited from the collective souls of the elders, the handed-down genes of a shaman.

The old fish camp was a throwback to Florida of the 1950’s, timeworn cabins with screened-in porches, Airstream trailers anchored beneath live oaks cloaked with pewter beards of Spanish moss. O’Brien could hear the muffled sound of a boat motor on the river in the distance. There was the scent of wood smoke, fresh pine needles, and damp moss in the still air.

It was in the most remote section of the fish camp where Joe Billie lived, away from fishermen and families renting cabins for long weekends on the water. His trailer sat on cinderblocks beneath pines and oaks, the decades-old Airstream’s traditional polished exterior now covered in age spots from time, tree sap, and roosting birds. To the left of the trailer, a canoe was turned upside down, perched on logs a foot off the ground.

O’Brien parked and got out, Max scampering from the Jeep’s open door, squatting to pee near a rotting tree limb covered in salmon pink mushrooms. “Max, let’s go see if Joe’s home.” She cocked her head, sniffed the mushrooms, and trotted behind O’Brien down a pine straw path to the trailer’s front door.

O’Brien knocked. Silence coming from the trailer. There was the chortle of two ravens flying over the pines in the indigo blue sky, the birds making a half circle high above O’Brien before heading toward the river. An acorn dropped from an oak and bounced off the trailer’s roof. In the distance, rifle shot echoed across the river somewhere in the Ocala National Forest.

“What brings you to my place in the woods?”

O’Brien turned around and smiled. Joe Billie, six-two, notched brown face with a hawk nose, could look O’Brien directly in the eye. And he did. He wore faded jeans, black T-shirt and a wide-brim, fawn-colored hat. In his left hand he carried a paperback novel. Billie grinned and squatted as Max ran up to him, her tail wagging, eyes bouncing. He lifted her up in one large brown hand. He held her against his wide chest and said, “I will never forget the time Max had her first encounter with that big rattlesnake. She showed no fear.”

O’Brien smiled. “I believe she thought the rattle was a toy.”

“She’ll know better next time.”

“How’ve you been, Joe?”

“Okay. You?”

“Good.”

“I rarely see you when things are good, Sean.” Billie smiled.

“You’re not an easy man to find, good or challenging times.”

“I’ve been building a few chickee huts for outdoor bars and restaurants. That work takes me into the ‘glades where I harvest palm fronds for the thatched roofs. The fronds are getting harder to find.”

“I have something that’s hard for me to find.” O’Brien stepped closer to Billie and opened the file folder. He lifted out the photo of the woman standing next to the river. “This picture was taken around the time of the Civil War. Do you recognize that place on the river?”

Billie shifted Max to his left hand and held the photo with the right hand. He stared at the image, his dark eyes alternating between the woman in the photo and the river in the background. “The lady is beautiful. Who is she?”