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bumped against his thigh. Rigor mortis had started, stiffening the corpse's face and neck. According to Dr. Ratkay's autopsy book, rigor would proceed down the length of the body from head to toe, passing off in the same order twenty-four to forty-eight hours later.
    A chilly fog hung over the river. Billows moved heavily through it, following and overspreading one another. The damp cold ate into Dante like rigor mortis, bringing slow paralysis into his face and fingers, and his breath steamed up into the blinding fog that hemmed them in, making of their boat a little rocking world with only three inhabitants, two living and one dead. The only sounds were the chugging of the old Evinrude and the slap of the river against the bow. Once Dante peered back through the gloom, his eyes drawn to his corpse, only to see its chest and head thickly wreathed in mist, as if it were a candle guttering into clouds of cold gray smoke. With one hand on the tiller, Jet sat beside it, implacable as Charon.
    Dante hunched down against the cold and blew into his hands to warm them. He did not look back again.
    Some time later Jet said, "I see the willow." He flipped the engine into reverse to slow them down.
    A cloud of fog passed, and Dante, caught off guard, saw the great willow on Three Hawk Island with angel's eyes. Suddenly it loomed over him, showing itself with the force of a secret revealed: its trunk a great heart, splitting into ventricles, each bough an artery, each branch a vein, twigs tangled and dwindling into hair-thin capillaries; vessels and veins plucked whole from a giant's body and revealed to him, like the maps of the human circulatory system his father had tried to make him look at in the fearful pages of Gray's
Anatomy
.
    If one were a fish—a pike, say—what might one find in the hollow pool at the willow's base?

    What grief or guilt had lain there all these years, trapped, decaying, bleeding into the water the willow drank, the soil it consumed?
    Jet nosed the boat around the point of Three Hawk Island and into a shallow bay on the southern side. It was a good spot to bury a body. Here they had moorage for the boat and would be shielded from the eyes of anyone on the north shore, inciuding their parents. The river's south bank, steep and shadowy and cold, was almost uninhabited.
    Dante jumped onto the island and pulled the boat up on shore. Slowly he walked to the base of the big willow, squinting up into the branches. "Is the fort still there?"
    "Yes."
    A little puff of wind roiled through a cloud of fog; from the shadows overhead came a low, ghostly groan, and a hollow clacking, like the bones of a hanged man stirring in the breeze. Wind chimes, Dante realized with a start. Jet must have replaced the original glass chimes with bamboo ones that held a deeper, more haunting and melancholy music.
    "I fixed it up myself a few weeks ago," Jet continued. "A new coat of lacquer on the roof, another can of Thompson's on the rest." Jet grinned at Dante's look of surprise. "I still come here, you know. I sweep it out every autumn, after the willow drops its leaves. If you'd been paying attention, you would have seen the blinds rolled up and stashed in the boathouse."
    "I guess I had other things on my mind."
    "Not to mention your liver." Jet joined him at the willow's foot, leaning his back against the hoary bole. "We used to have a hell of a time keeping Sarah out of here."
    Dante grinned, remembering. "We beat back the Powells and Hewletts and the Baggy boys, but Sarah was a whole other situation."
    "We were handicapped," Jet pointed out. "We couldn't use slingshots."
    "Ah. Right you are."
    Overhead the sky was paling. A soft plop carried from the south bank, as of something slipping into the river. A mink, Dante thought. Or possibly a marten.
    They stood together in the gray morning, looking south. From time to time an eddy in the fog would reveal the far bank. Jet's eyes, for once empty of calculation or cold amusement,