I came home unexpectedly for christmas. I found my daughter sleeping on the floor by the door, wearing torn, worn-out clothes. My sister had used her to clean shoes and told the guests, "that's our crazy servant." I didn't scream. I just stepped forward and said six words... the room suddenly fell silent.

Richard had not put on a coat.

He sat on the high steel seat of the John Deere 4020, wearing only a yellow flannel work shirt that was ripped across the shoulder and a pair of gray corduroy trousers tucked into unbuckled rubber overshoes. His face was gray as wet cardboard, his jaw working with a strange, chewing motion as if he were trying to grind his own molars into powder.

The tractor’s diesel was screaming in fifth gear, the straight pipe throwing blue sparks against the white snow. The heavy steel nose of the machine was jammed three feet into the right-hand fieldstone pillar—the one Brooke had paid four thousand dollars to have faced with imported granite to match the garden urns. The stone had cracked down the center, a jagged black line opening from the cap down to the frost line, while the big rear tires dug into the frozen gravel, throwing frozen mud and stone chips fifty feet back into the hemlocks.

Vance didn't draw his gun. He walked down the center of the lane with his flashlight held at his hip, his boots hitting the snow with that heavy, unhurried rhythm of a man who had seen twelve winters of farm disputes in the high hollows.

"Cut it, Richard," Vance said. He didn't shout; he just spoke into the space between the engine’s pulses.

Richard didn't look at him. His hands were locked around the black plastic wheel, his knuckles white and shiny as lard. "The... the water," he croaked. He didn't have his spectacles; he was squinting at the radiator cap where the coolant was beginning to boil, throwing a thin, sweet-smelling steam through the side-screens. "Brooke said the water was rising in the cellar. She said the girl left the tap on. She said the cellar was going to freeze and burst the boiler."

"The boiler is dead, Richard," Vance said, stepping up onto the tractor’s iron boarding step.

He reached out with his left hand, caught the red shut-off cable above the injection pump, and jerked it back.

The diesel died with a heavy, shuddering clack-clack-clank. The sudden silence was vast, filled only by the wind through the hemlocks and the dry hiss of the coolant dripping onto the hot manifold.

Richard didn't move. His hands stayed on the wheel. His eyes were wide, the pupils tiny as birdshot, staring through the shattered sidelight of his own windshield at the black woods beyond the gate.

"She told me to take the ladder down," Richard whispered. His voice was very thin, like an old woman’s voice through a screen door. "At noon. She said the wind was going to blow the shingles off. I took the ten-foot aluminum one from the barn. She had the three bags of lime in the wheelbarrow. She said... she said it was for the privy down by the brook. But she didn't take them to the brook."

"I know she didn't, Dick," Vance said softly. He reached out and touched Richard’s shoulder with his gloved fingers.

The man was shaking so violently that the steering column rattled in its brass bushings.

"She said... she said Clare was coming with a lawyer from Newark," Richard wept, his forehead dropping down until it rested against the cold iron of the instrument panel. "She said Clare had a paper that was going to put us on the road. She said... she said people don't go to jail for a smoky chimney. She said the doctor would write it down as the bad air from the swamp. She said the doctor was seventy years old and couldn't smell nothing but his own tobacco anyway."

Vance looked back over his shoulder at me.

I was standing twenty feet away, the red breadbox held under my arm against the wool of my trench coat. The wind was rising again, blowing the dry snow off the fieldstone wall, dusting my boots with white powder.

"Dick," Vance said. "Where’s the girl’s dog?"

Richard’s head jerked up. His eyes darted toward the barn, then back to the frozen driveway. "In... in the grain bin. Under the oats. She told me to put the latch on the bin so it wouldn't bark when the people came. She said... she said the little dog was too noisy for the ladies from the garden club."

I dropped the breadbox into the snow and ran.

The snow in the barnyard was untouched, a smooth white floor that reached to the sills of the three red doors. I hit the middle door with my shoulder, the old iron track groaning as the rollers jumped the rust, throwing the door wide enough for me to squeeze through the gap.

The barn smelled of forty-year-old alfalfa, dry swallow droppings, and the cold, sweet dust of rolled oats.

The grain bin was five feet high, built of two-inch hemlock tongue-and-groove, held together with iron straps that my father had forged in the blacksmith shop behind the cider mill. The iron hasp was down, held in place by a six-inch railroad spike that Richard had driven through the staple with the back of an axe.

My hands were bare. The skin of my knuckles tore against the rusted iron, leaving two red smears on the gray hemlock as I hauled upward on the spike.

It wouldn't budge. The frost had welded the iron to the oak.

"Gidley!" I screamed into the darkness of the rafters. "The bar! Bring the bar!"

The young trooper came through the door three seconds later, his boots slipping on the frozen chaff. He didn't ask questions; he saw the blood on the wood, saw the iron spike, and slammed the chisel-end of his pry-bar beneath the head.

The oak splintered with a sound like a rifle shot. The hasp flew back, striking the stone wall with a spark that smelled of flint.

I hauled the heavy lid back until it slammed against the barn siding.

Inside, half-buried in three feet of gray oats, was an old wool army blanket, rolled tight and tied at both ends with orange baling twine.

The bundle was small—hardly bigger than a sack of seed corn.

I reached down, my hands digging through the cold, slippery oats, and hauled it out onto the floorboards. My fingers tore at the twine, the coarse hemp cutting into my raw palms until the knots gave way.

A yellow terrier mix, scarcely fifteen pounds, lay curled in the center of the wool. His eyes were closed, his black lips pulled back from his teeth, his yellow ribs still as a stone.

"He's gone, Clare," Gidley muttered from the door, his flashlight beam shaking across the dead dog’s gray muzzle. "It’s ten degrees in here. He’s been in that box since noon."