Oren exhaled a blue cloud and sipped from his shot glass. In faraway places, this was something he had imagined time and again, sharing smoke and whiskey with his father and listening to the old man's oral history of family and town.

The judge slapped the ground with one hand. "Pursey's miracle happened right here on this very spot. It was the day of your mother's funeral. Well, the sky's clouding up. The rain's coming any minute, and everybody knows it-umbrellas at the ready everywhere you look. And the Reverend Pursey's building up to the high point in his eulogy. Then the first raindrops fell. Oh, how that pissed him off. He looks up at the sky, a real nasty look like a warning. Then it begins to pour-a solid wall of rain. Well, Pursey's drenched, and people are surprised he doesn't drown when he opens his mouth. His eyes roll up toward heaven. He shakes one fist and yells, 'Knock it off!'

"And the rain-just-stopped.

"Damndest thing, a rare thing, but not unheard-of. You see, the rain didn't taper off. It was more like a giant faucet in the sky got turned off." The judge snapped his fingers. "That quick. So the miracle of the rain figured into a lot of church sermons after that. And then it became the punch line to a joke on a crazy old fool. Every time it rained, you'd see people stop on the street to shake their fists and yell at the sky and laugh- how they laughed. Now, if that's a miracle in your book, I'd have to say your standards are really low."

Father and son smoked cigars by the light of the moon and shared the whiskey for as long as it lasted.

Addison Winston aimed his flashlight beam at a patch of ground behind the stable. He held out the shovel to Isabelle. "Shall we dig it up?"

"You put it there."

"Ask your mother who buried it. Oh, that's right. You can't, can you? It might send her poor fragile mind right over the screaming edge. Belle, you have a first-rate brain, and this is simple logic. If I had evidence to hide, why would I bury it on my own land? I would've thrown it into the sea. But your mother's clearly an amateur in all things criminal. Or maybe her mind wasn't working right the night she buried it."

Isabelle sank the shovel a few inches into hard ground. "All right- logically-it shouldn't still be here." She used one foot on the metal edge to sink it deeper. "Why didn't you dig it up and get rid of it?"

"Well, it helps if you think like a lawyer. It's evidence that goes to your mother's state of mind-insanity. I thought it might come in handy if, by some miracle, Cable Babitt ever got to thinking like a real cop. He might wonder why you'd fake an alibi for Oren Hobbs. I wondered about that myself when you were sixteen. There's two ways to look at it-from the law's point of view. Either you killed Josh and you needed an alibi for yourself-or you knew for a fact that Oren didn't do it… because you knew who did. Sorry I can't help with the digging or the disposal. That would make me a material witness. I wouldn't be able to represent your mother if it comes to a trial."

"Mom would never hurt Josh." Isabelle lifted a shovelful of dirt and then another. "They were friends."

"Her friendships end badly. Look at poor William. After you left town, he'd drop by for dinner at the usual time, and your mother would lock herself in her room. No apology, not one word of explanation. That was shabby."

The shovel clinked against a metal object. Isabelle knelt down to scoop the dirt away with her hands. She could hear her restless horse moving in his stall on the other side of the stable wall.

"And now," said Addison, "back to your phony alibi for Oren Hobbs. How could you know he was innocent? You must have seen your mother when she came home from the woods that day-the day Josh disappeared. She was all sweaty and exhausted. Burying a corpse is hard work. You might recall all the blisters on her hands."

Discarding the shovel, Isabelle lifted a camera from the hole. It was crusted with dirt, and the metal was pitted like a sponge. Every mechanism was jammed. She set it on the ground and wiped her hands. "I can't open the back."

"Looking for a roll of film? You think maybe the boy had time to snap a picture of your mother?" He handed her the flashlight and stooped to pick up the shovel. "Good thinking, Belle. No telling how long film might hold up." He made a swing with the shovel and brought it crashing down on the camera.

Now it was easy to lift the broken back, but there was no roll of film inside. Isabelle aimed the flashlight beam at the open compartment. A small piece of torn film was snagged in the spool. "My mother didn't kill

Josh. Mom knows how to operate a camera like this one. Somebody else ripped out the roll-and botched it."

"A prosecutor will argue that she panicked."

" Addison, did you ever try to rip something like this, a piece of plastic or a negative? It's not easy." She stared at the mangled snatch of film, all that remained of Josh's last roll. "This was a violent act. And the killer knew nothing about cameras."

"Like me?" He squatted down beside her. "Burying the body-that's what made the blisters on Sarah's hands. Remember how beautiful her hands were?" He pointed to the camera. "Your mother brought home that little souvenir the following day. She waited for the cover of night to put it in the ground. Sarah was drunk by then, and she couldn't find the key to the toolshed. No shovel. She dug the hole with a spoon and her bare hands. That was just hell on her manicure. You remember the broken fingernails? You even asked her how she broke them. Is it all coming back to you now?"

Isabelle dropped the camera back into the hole.

"What are you doing? Belle, this is the time to get rid of it. If we wait too long, your mother might dig it up herself. She's coming apart. Throw it into the sea."

Isabelle shook her head. "Bad idea."

"All right, here's a better one. The grave in the woods. There's no one guarding it anymore. And now that they've closed up the hole, it's the perfect hiding place."

"No, Addison, I don't think so. That would be tampering with evidence. So you'd better hope I never testify in court. I'd have to say that I saw you smash the camera with this." She took the shovel from his hands and steeped it into the pile of loose dirt. "It was all so long ago. I can't say I remember seeing blisters on Mom's hands," she lied, "or broken fingernails."

She filled in the hole and tamped it down with the flat side of the spade. "And the camera's buried on your land, isn't it? What a crazy thing to do. And you knew where to dig. You led me right to it."

Isabelle handed him the shovel. "If this ever comes back on you, Addison, you can always plead insanity." And that plea might ring true.

She picked up the flashlight and switched it off, not wanting to see his face. Was he grinning in the dark?