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.

Edmund woke in the log house at first light and clapped his hands in the small back room. The sound bounced off bare pine walls and carried straight through the door, down the hall, and out the kitchen window. He stood on the porch and clapped again from inside. He heard it clearly from the yard. A scream would travel farther. The county road ran a quarter mile through the trees, and a farmer in a slow truck would hear enough to remember. He had a house and a name left to find, but he did not yet have a room that would hold the work. He drove into the next town before the shops opened and parked behind a lumberyard. He bought thick felt blankets, a roll of tar paper, two boxes of nails, and six sheets of cork board meant for schoolrooms. At the feed store he bought a bale of straw and said it was for the puppy's box. The clerk smiled at the mention of the dog and asked its name. Edmund said the first word that came to him and paid in small bills. He loaded the truck and drove back through pines that hid the house from the road. He worked all day in the back room. He nailed cork to the walls in overlapping squares. He stapled felt over the cork and hung a second layer across the door. He packed straw between the floor joists through a hatch in the pantry. He unscrewed the window sash, filled the frame with tar paper and rags, and screwed a plank over the glass from inside. The puppy followed him room to room and chewed a curl of felt until Edmund shut it in the kitchen with a bowl of water. By afternoon the back room smelled of glue and hay. He shut himself inside, closed the door, and shouted at the wall as loud as he could. He opened the door and walked to the porch. He heard nothing. He walked to the tree line at the road. He heard nothing. He walked back smiling. At dusk a young man came up the drive on foot with a canvas pack on one shoulder. He wore a green jacket and carried a folded map. He said he was hiking to the next county and had seen the roof through the pines and hoped for water. The puppy ran out and pressed against his boots, and the young man crouched and scratched its ears and laughed. Edmund stood in the doorway of the log house and looked past the stranger at the empty road. No truck. No dust. No one waiting at the turn. He smiled and said the well was around back and the pump could be stiff, and would his guest like to come inside first and rest his feet.

The hiker stepped past Edmund into the front room and set his pack by the door. He rubbed the puppy's head and said the walk had been longer than the map showed. Edmund closed the door behind him and turned the bolt with two fingers, quiet as a latch on a jar. The hiker did not look up. Edmund crossed to the sink and ran the tap and filled a tin cup. He kept his voice easy. He asked where the young man had started that morning and nodded at the answer without hearing it. The hammer sat on top of the icebox behind a folded rag. Edmund had put it there that afternoon without a plan, only a habit. The young man drank half the cup and looked around the room. He saw the second felt blanket folded on a chair. He saw the fresh nails in the pantry door. His hand slowed on the puppy's back. He said he should get moving before the light went. He stood and reached for the pack strap. Edmund said the pump was quicker than the tap and picked up the cup as if to refill it. He stepped between the hiker and the door. The hiker's eyes moved to the bolt. He said, softly, that he had told his brother he would call from the next town by dark. Edmund heard the lie in the pause before brother. He set the cup on the table and took the rag off the icebox. The hiker ran. He got the bolt open with one hand and the door with the other and was on the porch before Edmund cleared the table. The puppy shot out between his boots and stopped in the yard, barking at nothing and everything. Edmund followed with the hammer low against his leg. At the tree line, a wolf stood in the last gray light, broad at the shoulders, watching the porch without moving. The hiker saw the wolf and cut left toward the drive instead of the woods. Edmund caught him at the truck. He swung once. The young man went down against the tire and did not get up. Edmund stood over him with his breath loud in his ears and looked back at the trees. The wolf was gone. The road was empty. He dragged the body by the jacket collar across the gravel and into the house and kicked the door shut. He had twelve. Now he had a thirteenth in the front room, blood on his floorboards, a pack on the porch, and a puppy in the yard barking at the dusk.

Edmund stood over the body in the front room and made himself think. The hammer was tacky in his hand. His shirt was wet down the front. The pack was still on the porch. The puppy was still in the yard, barking. Any car on the road would hear it. Any neighbor bringing eggs or a borrowed saw would find him red to the elbows before he could set the door. He had minutes. Maybe less. He worked in order. He set the hammer on a sheet of newspaper and went out and grabbed the pack off the boards and pulled the puppy in by the scruff. He shut the door and threw the bolt. He stripped his shirt and pants in the kitchen and stuffed them in a feed sack with the rag and the newspaper and the hammer. He scrubbed his arms and neck at the sink until the water ran clear. He pulled a clean shirt from the line by the stove. Then he dragged the body by the boots into the back room and shut that door too. He mopped the front room twice. He carried the sack out to the burn barrel behind the little log house and doused it with kerosene and dropped a match. The flames caught fast. He watched the shirt curl black. He watched the hammer's handle burn down to the head. He listened for engines on the road and heard none. When he turned back toward the porch, the wolf was there. It stood at the edge of the yard where the gravel met the grass, broad through the chest, yellow eyes steady on him. It had not made a sound. The puppy whined once inside the house and went quiet. Edmund did not move. The wolf looked at him, then at the barrel, then at him again. It knew what the fire was for. Edmund understood that the way a man understands weather. After a long moment the wolf turned and walked back toward the trees without hurry. Edmund stood in the yard with the kerosene can in his hand and his breath even. No neighbor had come. No car had passed. The clothes were ash. The body was behind a bolted door. He had gotten away with it. He had thirteen. And something in the woods had counted them with him.

By morning the house smelled wrong. Edmund stood in the kitchen with coffee going cold and knew the back room had turned on him overnight. The air near the bolted door had a sweet edge under the tar paper smell. He had planned to wait a day, maybe two, before moving the hiker. He no longer had that time. The road out front carried a truck past twice a week. A neighbor from the next place down sometimes walked over with jarred beans. If any of them stepped onto the porch and drew a breath, he was finished. He went out to the shed and looked at what he had. A tarp. A short spade. A wheelbarrow with a soft tire. The ground behind the little log house rose into pine and rock, no good for digging deep. He thought of the empty cottage a quarter mile through the trees, the one with the steep roof and boarded windows, sitting on its own overgrown lot. He had walked past it twice buying the puppy's feed. No smoke from its chimney in months. The crawlspace under it would be dry and dark and no one's problem. He pumped the wheelbarrow tire and rolled it to the back door. The body had gone heavy in the way bodies do. Edmund wrapped it in the tarp and lashed it with baling twine. Lifting it into the wheelbarrow, he felt the dead weight lurch against him like some big rotted thing out of a bad dream, all slack limbs and stink. He gagged once and kept working. He pushed the load along the deer path through the pines, stopping when the tire caught on roots. Sweat ran into his eyes. The puppy did not follow. At the boarded cottage he pried a lattice panel off the foundation and dragged the tarp under. He dug a shallow trench in the crawlspace dirt, rolled the body in, and covered it with the loose earth and a layer of old brick he found stacked by the chimney base. He nailed the lattice back. He walked home a different way and dragged a pine bough behind him over the wheelbarrow ruts. Back at his own place he opened every window and burned coffee grounds on the stove. By dusk the sweet smell was gone. The back room was only cork and felt and straw again. He washed the wheelbarrow with well water and left it turned over in the yard. At the tree line the wolf stood watching. It looked at him, then in the direction of the boarded cottage through the pines, then back. Edmund met its yellow eyes and understood that it knew where he had put the body. The count still stood at thirteen. But now thirteen was buried under someone else's floor, and the wolf knew the address.

Edmund did not sleep. By first light he was at the tree line with the short spade and a coil of wire, watching the pines toward the boarded cottage. The wolf had stood there yesterday and looked from him to the burial and back. Any tracker who followed that animal would end at the crawlspace lattice. He could not move the body again so soon. He had to move the wolf. He baited a spot near the deer path with a strip of raw pork from the icebox. He set the wire in a loop between two young pines, low, at chest height for a running dog. He staked the free end to a root. Then he sat behind a rock with the spade across his knees and waited. The plan was simple. Catch it. Kill it. Bury it deeper than the hiker. He heard the girl before he saw her. A small voice calling a name he did not know, then boots in dry needles. She came around the bend in a green vest with a satchel bumping her hip, braid over one shoulder. Ten years old, maybe eleven. A neighbor's child he had never spoken to. She stopped at the pork and looked at the wire and then at him behind the rock. "Mister, that's a snare," Maddie said. Her voice was flat, not scared. "You can't put those here. My dad walks through." Edmund stood up slow. He made his face into the face he used at the feed store. "Just for coyotes. Been at the trash." She did not move. She was looking past him now. He turned his head. The wolf stood on the path, brown and gray, yellow eyes steady. It had come in without a sound. It looked at the wire. It looked at the girl. Then it stepped over the loop, walked past the pork, and sat down beside her boots like it belonged there. Maddie put her hand on its shoulder without thinking. "He follows me sometimes," she said. "Since summer." Edmund's mouth went dry. The animal that knew where the hiker lay was now a child's companion. A pet the whole road would see. If he killed it here, she would tell. If he touched her, someone would come looking within the hour, and the pines behind him held a shallow grave a quarter mile off. He made himself smile. He bent and picked up the pork. "Bad idea, you're right. Sorry, girl." He cut the wire free with his knife and pocketed the loop. She watched him walk back toward his house. The wolf watched too, sitting at her leg like a dog on a porch. Edmund reached his door and shut it and put his forehead against the wood. The count still stood at thirteen. The witness now had a witness of her own.

By afternoon Edmund saw the girl again from his kitchen window. She was at the fence line with the wolf at her heel, closer to his property than yesterday. She had a stick and was poking at something in the leaves. The wolf watched the woods, not her. Edmund set down his coffee. The boarded cottage lay a quarter mile through the pines behind her, and she was drifting that way. He could not shoot her. He could not shout at her and make her remember him as the strange man with the wire. He needed her afraid of these woods without being afraid of him. He went to the shed and found the old ax handle and a burlap sack. Then he thought better of it and took only a small game call from a nail on the wall, a wooden tube that made a wounded rabbit's cry. He circled wide through the trees, downwind, past the cottage with its plywood windows. He kept the crawlspace lattice at his back and moved toward the deer path she was following. When he judged the distance right, he crouched behind a deadfall and blew the call twice, short and thin. Brush cracked to his left. Not the girl. Something smaller and lower crashed through the ferns and stumbled into the clearing between them. A bear cub. Brown, knee-high, eyes wide, mouth open in a small startled sound. It froze in the leaves and stared at nothing. Edmund went very still. A cub meant a sow. He could hear the girl now, close, calling the wolf. Then the wolf came through the trees at a trot, hackles up, and put itself between the cub and the sound of the girl's boots. Its yellow eyes found Edmund behind the deadfall. It held there one beat. Then it turned its head sharply back the way she was coming and gave a low, hard bark. Maddie stopped. Edmund heard her boots slide in the needles. "Come back," she said to the wolf. "Come on. Come." The wolf barked again, driving her. She retreated. Edmund heard the crashing in the brush grow louder somewhere north, a heavier animal moving fast, and the cub bolted toward it. The wolf stayed a moment longer, eyes on Edmund's hiding place, then turned and followed the girl back toward the road. Edmund waited until the woods went quiet. He crawled out and walked the deer path to where she had turned around. Her boot prints stopped forty yards short of the cottage. Tomorrow her mother would hear about the bear and the girl would be kept to the yard for a week, maybe longer. He walked home the long way. The wolf had moved her off his ground for him. It had also looked him in the face and chosen not to bring her closer. He understood then that the animal was not protecting the burial. It was protecting the girl. From him.

Edmund walked home from the woods with the game call still in his pocket. The wolf's yellow stare stayed with him. He had one problem left that mattered more than a girl or an animal. Somewhere between the city and the sheriff's desk, a sketch of the woman who got away was moving closer. He did not know how close. Without knowing, he could not plan his last kill or his exit. He made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with a road map. The county seat was forty miles east. Mail from the city came through a sorting office there, then out to the sheriff by county van three days a week. He had watched that van at the crossroads all summer. If the sketch was in a padded envelope on that route, he needed eyes on the depot. He could not stand at the depot himself. His face was the face on the paper. He needed a reason to be in town without being seen looking. He thought of the young mother two doors down the road, the one with three small children hanging off her at the grocery. Sarah Morrison. She drove into the county seat every Thursday for diapers and cheap milk. She talked to anyone who would hold a door. He crossed the yard that afternoon with a paper sack of apples from his tree. She was on the porch with a toddler on her hip and a pacifier in her free hand. Two more children fought over a plastic truck at her feet. She smiled at him like he was a kind neighbor. "I hate to ask," Edmund said. "I'm expecting a legal envelope from my sister's lawyer. Post office keeps losing it. You go through the county seat Thursdays, don't you? Could you stop at the sheriff's front counter, ask if any mail from the city came in for Graves this week? Save me the drive." She shifted the toddler. "Sheriff's office? Sure. I'm in that block anyway." "I'd owe you." He handed her the apples. "Just the front desk. They'll say yes or no." She agreed. He walked back across the road with his hands steady for the first time in a week. She would ask an innocent question at the counter. She would come home and tell him what mail the sheriff was waiting on. He would know the day. Thursday evening she knocked on his door. The toddler was asleep against her shoulder. Her face was wrong. Pinched. Careful. "They said no envelope for you," she said. "But the deputy at the counter, he looked at me a long time. He asked how I knew you. He wrote my name down." Edmund kept his face still. He thanked her. He closed the door. He had his answer. The sketch was already there. The deputy had it in a drawer and was watching for anyone who spoke his name.

Edmund sat by his window all night. He watched Sarah's house across the road. The deputy had written her name down. She had come home pinched and careful. She knew something was wrong with him now. If she talked to the wrong neighbor, or drove back to that counter with more questions, the deputy would come. Edmund could not run yet. He had one kill left to reach thirteen and hold his record. He needed Sarah quiet until then. At dawn he crossed the road with an empty basket, as if returning her kindness. She opened the door before he knocked. She did not smile. She held the toddler tight against her chest. "I don't want the apples," she said. "I don't want anything from you." "Sarah." He kept his voice soft. "You looked upset last night. Let me explain about the lawyer—" "The deputy asked if I trusted you." Her eyes moved to the road behind him. "I told him I barely knew you. That was true." She stepped back. "I'm taking the kids to my sister's today. I already called her." Edmund's stomach dropped. Her sister lived in town. If she left, she would talk. He reached for the door. A growl stopped his hand. The wolf stood at the edge of Sarah's yard. Its yellow eyes fixed on Edmund. Beside it, small and stubborn, stood Maddie. She had followed the wolf up from the woods again. Her braid hung over her shoulder. She stared at Edmund the way children stare at something they do not trust. "Mister Graves," Maddie said. "He doesn't like you." She rested a hand on the wolf's fur. "He never did." Sarah looked at the wolf, then at Edmund's face. Something settled in her, some final decision. She stepped inside and shut the door. The deadbolt turned. Through the window Edmund heard her tell the children to get their shoes. He stood on the porch with the empty basket. The wolf did not move. Maddie did not move. He could not touch Sarah now. Not with the girl watching, not with the animal between them. If he acted, he would have two more witnesses and no time to hide anything. Sarah's car started ten minutes later. Edmund watched from his own window as she loaded three children and two bags into the back seat. She did not look at his house. She drove toward town, toward her sister, toward anyone who would listen. Edmund set the basket on his table. His hands were not steady now. Sarah was gone, and she was talking. The deputy would hear his name spoken by a frightened woman with a written statement. His time had shrunk from days to hours. He pulled his bag from the closet. If he wanted his thirteenth to stand as his record, he had to take it tonight, and he had to be gone before the county van rolled in at dawn.

Edmund packed his bag while the light failed. His plan for tonight was simple. Take his thirteenth kill, then drive out before the county van came. But one thing stood between him and a clean escape: the wolf. It followed Maddie everywhere. If it appeared at his kill tonight, it became a living witness. A tracker could follow the animal straight to the buried body and to him. He had to break the pair apart first. He drove the quarter mile through the woods to the abandoned cottage. The little wooden house sat boarded and quiet under the trees. He knew the wolf circled here because Maddie wandered here. So he would give the girl a reason to stay home. He nailed a warning to the door where she would see it. The sign was old, its edges rusted, its white face streaked with dark red stains. NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT. A child would read that and turn back. Then he waited in the brush with his game call. He meant to lure something small and loud, a fright that would send Maddie running for good. Maddie came at dusk, alone. Her braid swung as she walked. The wolf was not with her. Edmund's chest tightened. This was better than he had hoped. He blew the call once. A bear cub crashed out of the ferns, wide-eyed and squealing, its small body tense with alarm. Maddie froze. The cub bawled. And then Edmund understood his mistake. The cub's cries would bring its mother. Brush snapped behind the cub. Something large moved. Maddie screamed and ran, not toward the road, but deeper into the trees, away from her house. Edmund broke cover to grab her. If she died out here, the wolf would find her body, and searchers would find both. He needed her alive and home. The wolf came first. It burst from the dark and put itself between Maddie and the crashing sound. It snarled at Edmund, then herded the girl with its shoulder, driving her back toward the path, toward home. Maddie ran. The wolf ran at her heels, guarding her the whole way. Edmund stood alone at the cottage. He had not split them. He had proven again that nothing separated the girl from the animal. His noise had woken the woods. The bear cub still bawled, and its mother was near. He walked back to his car with empty hands. Full dark now. No time left to hunt a stranger, no time to be careful. His thirteenth kill would not come tonight, not cleanly, not with the wolf awake and the woods stirred. At his house he saw headlights on the road. They slowed. They stopped at Sarah's dark, empty house across from him. A door opened. Someone stepped out with a flashlight and turned the beam toward Edmund's windows.

The flashlight beam swept Edmund's front windows and held there. He stood still in his dark kitchen. He did not know who held the light. If it was the deputy, Edmund had minutes before a knock and a badge. If it was only a neighbor, he could still run tonight. He needed the answer before he moved. A wrong guess meant walking straight into an arrest. He pulled his own curtain back one inch. Sarah's dark house sat across the road. A vehicle idled at her curb. The beam swung to her porch, then back to Edmund's place, patient and searching. A deputy would circle. A curious neighbor would give up. So Edmund waited and watched what the light did. It came toward him. Boots crossed the road. The beam bounced with each step. Edmund killed his last lamp and reached under the sink for the hammer he kept wrapped in a rag. His car sat behind the house, keys in his pocket. If he had to, he would take this man quiet and drive. Knuckles rapped his door. "Mr. Graves? You home?" Edmund cracked the door on the chain. A man stood on the step in a pressed gray suit, hands folded, polite as a churchgoer. Not a uniform. Not a gun on the hip. The flashlight hung loose at his side. "Evening," the man said. "I'm sorry to come so late. I'm looking for Sarah Morrison. Her sister sent me. Sarah didn't answer at the house." He nodded toward the dark place across the road. "You know if she left?" Relief moved through Edmund's chest like cold water. Not the deputy. A messenger, nothing more. He kept his voice easy and slow. "She took her kids to town this afternoon," Edmund said. "Her sister's place, I think. You just missed her." The man's shoulders dropped. "That's a relief. Family got worried when she didn't call." He raised the flashlight in thanks. "Appreciate it. Sorry to bother you." Edmund watched the suit walk back across the road. The vehicle's door shut. Taillights shrank down the road and were gone. He unwrapped his fingers from the hammer and set it on the counter. His hands shook once, then stopped. But the relief did not last. Edmund understood what the visit meant. Sarah's sister was already worried. Sarah had already talked to her. Now a stranger had driven all the way out here at night to find her. Word about Edmund Graves was moving in town, from Sarah to her sister to whoever else would listen. He had the night. He no longer had tomorrow. The deputy had not come, but the deputy would come, guided by everything Sarah said. Thirteen kills sat one victim short, and Edmund had hours to close the gap before the road filled with cars that did not stop at Sarah's empty house. He picked up his bag.

Edmund reached for the door with his bag in hand. Then a thought stopped him cold. The man in the gray suit had believed his lie. But belief was not proof. If the stranger called the sister and the sister called Sarah, one question would break the whole story. Sarah had not taken her children to town that afternoon. She had left the night before. The lie had a crack in it, and the crack could open tonight. He stepped outside. The taillights were long gone, but the road ran flat and straight. A car could not have reached town yet. Edmund got in his own car and drove after it, headlights off, hands tight on the wheel. He found the sedan pulled over a mile down the road. The dome light glowed inside. The man held a phone to his ear. Edmund parked behind him and walked up slow, palms open, face friendly. He tapped the window. The man rolled it down. "Sorry to chase you," Edmund said. "I got the days mixed up. Sarah left yesterday, not this afternoon. Didn't want your family fretting over the wrong story." The man lowered the phone. His eyes moved over Edmund's face, then past him to the dark car with no lights. Something shifted in him. He had heard the town talk too. "You're Graves," he said. It was not a question. His thumb went to the phone screen. Edmund's hand came up with the tire iron he had carried from his trunk. He swung once through the open window. The man slumped against the wheel. The phone dropped to the floor mat, the call still live. Edmund reached in, ended it, and pocketed the phone. That was when he heard the huff. A small brown shape stumbled from the roadside brush, ears back, eyes wide with fright. A bear cub, lost and alone, caught in his headlights' absence, close enough to touch. Edmund froze. Where the cub went, the mother followed. Behind the cub, low in the grass, two yellow eyes caught the moonlight. The wolf stood between the cub and the road, steady and calm, watching Edmund the way it always watched him. It had counted this one too. Then it turned its head toward the trees, and a girl's voice called out from the dark. "Maddie, wait!" A woman's voice. Sarah's sister, or someone near her. People were closer than he thought. Edmund shoved the dead man's phone deep in his pocket and ran for his car. The stranger would not report anything now. But the call had gone through. Someone on the other end had heard a voice, then silence. And the wolf had seen his fourteenth body slump against a steering wheel a mile from town, with witnesses closing in on foot.