Edmund Graves's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Edmund Graves counted twelve names in a small notebook and needed one more. He kept the list under a loose board in his rented room, above a hardware store on the town's main street. The walls were thin. Last week a woman had screamed into his hand and the grocer downstairs had knocked on his ceiling with a broom. Edmund had let her go with a lie about a stubbed toe, and she had walked out alive, which meant the sheriff would soon have a face to draw. Thirteen was the number Edmund wanted before that drawing found its way to a lawman's desk. Twelve was not enough. He left town before dawn and walked the county road until the houses thinned. Two miles past the last fence he found what a newspaper ad had promised: a small log house set back in the pines, empty since the owner's death, priced for a quick sale. The porch beams were sound. The windows were tight. The nearest roof was a quarter mile through trees. Edmund walked each room and listened. He clapped once in the kitchen. No dog barked. No neighbor called out. He paid the widow's son in cash that afternoon and signed the deed under a name he had used twice before. By evening the key was in his pocket and the hardware store room was stripped of anything that named him. He drove out at dusk with his tools in a canvas bag and a shivering thing in a box on the passenger seat. The boy at the feed store had sold him the puppy for three dollars, a soft golden animal with floppy ears and a blue collar, meant as a gift for a niece who did not exist. A man walking a puppy on a country road was a man no one questioned. A man buying rope and lye and a second padlock was only a new owner fixing up an old place. Edmund set the puppy on the plank floor of his new house and watched it sniff the corners where the screaming would happen. He had a private room now. He had one name left to find. The sheriff, whoever the sheriff was, did not yet know to look this far out.