Chapter 31: Orchard Hill Road

Ronan's POV

I felt her go out of reach before we passed the county line.

It started at the first mile.

The strength drained out of my legs a little at a time.

By the tenth mile it was gone.

I did not tell Abel.

He drove the farm truck with both hands on the wheel and talked about lasagna, because he talked when he was afraid.

"Altitude," I told myself once, out loud.

"What?" Abel said.

"Nothing."

I had been lying to myself about that word for a week.

We left the truck on a farm track a half mile below Orchard Hill Road.

We went the rest of the way on foot, through a field of dead corn, and we lay down behind a stone wall above the house.

It was a white clapboard house with a wide porch and a cellar bulkhead on the side.

An old apple orchard ran behind it, black in the dusk.

At nine o'clock a white box van came up the road with its compressor humming.

Collared wolves climbed out of it.

There were six of them, and I saw the heavy gray-haired one who had stood in Mara's assessment room.

They hauled gray boxes out of the back and carried them down the bulkhead steps into the cellar.

One box, two, three.

Light spilled up out of the cellar door each time it opened.

I saw rows of iron beds down there, forty of them, bare.

The sixth box was marked in black pen.

H-4 / MRS. DRAYCOTT.

They carried that one down slowly, with two men on the handles.

I heard a sound come out of me.

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