Dale was writing easily, but not well. Both his academic background and commercial writing experience had trained him to start from the outside in: that is, to structure the tale, research the characters and settings, and then write inward, the way a whittler carves a shape from a stick. I was just a kid when I died, but I had already discovered one important truth about writing—to do it well, one has to work from the inside out. That is, there has to be a quiet but unshakable center to the tale, whether in the core of the characters or the story or, preferably, in both, and everything must spiral outward from that point. Dale was still whittling away, trying not to cut across the grain and hoping to find honest shapes in the wood.

His sense of place in the unformed novel was very strong. What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods? Occasionally he would get in the Land Cruiser and drive slowly through the streets of Elm Haven to refresh himself on some item of geography, but in truth he wasn’t writing about the sad and battered Elm Haven of this shoddy new century. Dale was living in the summer of 1960 now, and when he drove the streets of the little town he was looking at structures and people who were no longer there, who would never be there again.

Dale had no guilt at borrowing my own journals of jottings and vignettes and character scribbles to capture the kids of the summer of 1960—including himself. After my death, Dale had promised himself that he would become the writer that his friend Duane had wanted to be, so it seemed natural that he would build on my old notes and observations to write this particular book.

But they were my notes and observations, not Dale’s. He still had not discovered his own key to the door opening on that largely forgotten summer. So when he began the early-chapter descriptions of our eleven-year-old friends—Mike O’Rourke, Kevin Grumbacher, Jim Harlen, Donna Lou Perry, Cordie Cooke, and the others—they were my perceptions and misperceptions, not Dale’s. Not even the images of young Dale himself and of his little brother, Lawrence, came completely from Dale. Perhaps he was afraid to go back to those memories all by himself.

The black dog returned nineteen days after he arrived.

It was late afternoon and Dale was taking his favorite walk, heading west to the flat rise, following the creek south to the woods on Mr. Johnson’s farm, then cutting northeast along a gully, coming out at Calvary Cemetery on County Road 6. Then it was less than a mile along the gravel road to the driveway back to the farmhouse.

This afternoon, he had just reached the woods and was preparing to cross the creek before hiking east when he saw the dog twenty yards or so behind him, on the same side of the creek cut. When Dale stopped, the dog stopped.

For a moment he was sure that he had solved the tiny mystery; if the dog was here in the Johnsons’ woods, then the dog must belong to Mr. Johnson. But then Dale realized that the hound had followed him from Duane’s farm.

Dale took a few steps toward the dog. The small black dog retreated a few steps, then turned and waited. Dale stood looking at it, wishing that he’d brought his binoculars.

The black dog appeared a bit larger than he remembered it, but the rest of his description to Sandy Whittaker still applied: a relatively small dog, all black except for a patch of pink on its flattened muzzle, floppy ears, no tail visible, and barrel-chested. He tried to remember the breed that Sandy had mentioned—a French bulldog?

The dog waited for Dale to begin walking again before it followed. Dale slid down the steep creek bank and jumped the narrow, half-frozen stream. The dog picked its way across twenty yards to the north and scrambled up the steep slope.

Dale followed his usual route back to County 6, following old cow paths along the rim of a narrow ridge that ran between two gullies. The stream in the south gully had been named Corpse Creek by Dale and his buddies forty-five years earlier. There had been a three-foot-deep pool on the east side of the gravel road where the creek ran through a tall culvert—a favorite hiding place for the boys—and frequently, dead animals hit by speeding cars on County 6 had ended up in the pool. Thus, Corpse Creek.

The black dog stayed twenty yards back, picking its way across frozen grass in that tenderfooted way that some dogs have outdoors. At one point, Dale stopped and threw a rock in the dog’s general direction—not trying to hit it, merely trying to get it to go away. The black dog sat on its haunches and stared at him.

Then the dog licked its muzzle and showed its teeth—not, Dale thought, in any sort of snarl, merely in a doggy grin.

Dale felt a chill of unease flow through him. He knew it must be a trick of the overcast day and distance, but for an instance it looked as if the black dog’s teeth were wrong.

It looked as if the dog had human teeth.

Dale shook his head, angry at himself for generating the image, and when he looked back, the dog was no longer showing any teeth. He climbed over Johnson’s wire fence at a sturdy fence post and walked out onto the asphalt of County 6 in front of the hilltop cemetery. It was a cold day, and windy. Usually the cemetery was empty of visitors during Dale’s weekday afternoon walks, but he realized with a start that this day someone was standing thirty or forty yards into the graveyard. The lone figure was male and oddly dressed—wearing what appeared to be high leather boots, khaki wool as in old military uniforms, and a Boy Scout–type broad-brimmed hat. An old veteran ? thought Dale. It was impossible to tell the age of the man at this distance, but the slimness and suppleness of his silhouette suggested someone younger.

There was no car in the grass parking berm along the black iron fence.

The man in the cemetery looked up from the headstone he was contemplating and stared in Dale’s direction. Dale waved. He wondered if it was someone local—perhaps the male half of the young couple who had bought Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s farm—or someone else who lived within walking distance of the cemetery. It would be nice to meet someone normal around Elm Haven.

The man stared but did not wave back.

Dale mentally shrugged and began his walk north down the steep incline, making sure, as always, that no car or pickup was roaring down behind him on the narrow asphalt road. When he thought to check, there was no sign of the black dog.

It was an hour later, after he’d finished some tomato soup and returned to his computer in the study, that he realized that someone had been in the house.

The IBM ThinkPad had been left on. The last sentence Dale had typed was still on the screen—

The summer lies ahead like a great banquet and the days are filled with rich, slow time in which to enjoy each course.

Dale had thought about that sentence during his walk and decided that the simile might be too flowery, but it was not the possible excess in the writing that concerned him now. Below his sentence had been typed—

gabbleretchetsyethwishthounds

hehaefdehundeshaefod&hisloccaswaeronofer

gemetside&hiseaganscinonswaleohteswamorgensteorra

&histethwaeronswascearpeswaeoforestexas

He didn’t pay any attention to the gibberish yet. He was more interested in who had written it. Dale reached under the sleigh bed in the study and pulled out the new baseball bat he’d put there. The crowbar was heavier, but it was in the kitchen cupboard.

Hefting the bat, walking as lightly as he could, Dale went down the hall to the kitchen, through the kitchen and out onto the side stoop. It had begun to rain again, but it was light enough for him to see the muddy turnaround area. It had been wet and muddy before he left. The only car tracks led to his parked Land Cruiser. The only footprints were the ones he had left coming and going.