Weariness settled over me like a weighted blanket and part of me longed to curl up beneath it and let sleep take me. Maybe sleep would lure death near enough to draw the curtain over the show of my life.

"I can drive," Mindy said.

"No." I rubbed my eyes hard enough to bring flashes of color and stars into my vision. "I'm okay."

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Had I ever been less okay?

I felt the warmth of my mother's blood running over my hands, thin and insubstantial.

"I'm okay." Maybe the repetition was for Mindy's sake, but more probably it was for my own. It took a bit of forward and back maneuvering to turn the car around without tipping the rear end of it into the ditch on one side or the river on the other. We re-traced our steps back into town.

"Are you going to try to leave by another road?" Mindy asked.

"Not yet. I'm going to see if I can get a good look at things." I saw no sign of life as we moved back through the town. By all appearances, the fire raged on at the church. The salt truck did not cross our path again. "Do you know Dan Tanner?"

Mindy scoffed. "Everybody knows crazy Dan."

"I'm starting to think Crazy Dan's the only sane person in this town. I've got a few questions I want to ask him."

"You're going to Dan Tanner's house?" Mindy fiddled with the lock switch on the door, causing the locks to click. The sound scraped against my raw nerves. "I don't think we should go there," she added when I failed to respond.

"Why not?"

She threw her hands in the air and let them fall, limp in her lap. "He's crazy."

"You just told me Alma James burned down the church because she's a devil worshipper and you're accusing Dan Tanner of being crazy?"

"It's different."

"How is it different? Did he touch you or something?"

"No." She turned her gaze to the window and I let the matter drop. If ever I lacked the strength to pursue an argument it was at that moment.

Every light in Dan Tanner's house crappy mobile home blazed in the darkness. Like a cop, ready to make a quick exit at all times, I backed into the drive and switched off the engine.

"You can stay here if you like," I said.

"No. I'll come with you." I didn't really care one way or the other. When I stood, my joints clicked and ached as if I'd aged forty years in the past few hours. Maybe I had. Or maybe I'd been here for forty years. Time didn't seem to mean much anymore.

Mindy and I walked side-by-side to the front door and I knocked. That unearthly silence ruled here, too. Night sounds in winter tended to be fewer and more ominous. No frogs or insects, but a larger predator, or one of the two-legged variety, might snap a stick while stalking you.

With my heart in my throat, I tried the doorknob and found it unlocked. For a guy as paranoid as Dan, that frightened me as much as any of the other oddities of the night.

"Hello?" I called out as I stepped over the threshold.

"We shouldn't go in there. We're supposed to be getting out of town," Mindy said.

"In case you haven't noticed, we're having a hard time managing that." I thought of the gun the supposed police officer found with my belongings and wished I had it with me. This sparsely furnished place had no place for anyone to hide. I turned toward the hall and gave silent thanks to whomever had turned on every light in the place. No part of me wanted to traverse that short distance in the dark.

Though rectangular hinges had made their marks on the door frame of the first room, the door had been removed entirely at some point and the room now stood open to scrutiny. As I stood looking, something needled my brain. Something was off, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I remembered the snake tank from before. It took up the entire length of the outside wall, save maybe six inches on each end. The snake lay coiled in one corner, its head lifted as if it had looked up to see who disturbed its slumber.

There was a closet with accordion doors, and inside several Rubbermaid tubs were neatly stacked and labeled with mundane things like, "extra blankets," "old photos," and "Mom's vinyl LPs."

A single stool stood in front of the glass tank.

"Gross," Mindy whispered from behind me. "I hate snakes."

I suspected snakes weren't especially fond of her, either, but I kept that to myself and moved to the second room, which proved to be just as uninformative. The bed was made in a way that was neat but not compulsive. Clothes were stacked in the dresser. The closet held nothing a person wouldn't expect.

The last door was a bathroom, and across from there, the back door.

I was missing something. I'd seen it and recognized it, but it was like a minnow flitting among river rocks—some shiny, elusive thing, too quick and slippery to be caught. Perhaps, if I didn't try too hard, it would come to me.

"Now where do we go?" Mindy asked.

"The shed in the back yard."

"Why? What's out there?"

Nothing, as it turned out.

As soon as I stepped onto the back stoop, I saw that the shed and the trap door within it were gone. No trace of it remained. Though there was a flurry of tire tracks and the snow and turf had been churned up into a muddy mess. I muttered a curse and descended the few stairs, being careful not to trip over the toes of the too-big boots. Stomping around as hard as I could revealed no place where the earth felt different, firmer, more like a door.

"What the heck are you doing? This is so creepy. Let's get out of here. Please?"

"Go wait in the car if you want," I said. Her whining was beginning to bother me so much I wondered that I'd been happy for her company such a short time earlier.

Mindy didn't leave, but stood on the stoop with her arms wrapped around herself, watching me.

I gave up trying to find the door, closed my eyes, and took a long, slow breath. Dan had wanted me to understand that my brother had turned this town into his playscape and that he was using me... for what? To star in his weird, voyeuristic show? Who would watch such a thing?

That was a stupid question. Everyone was a voyeur. Having an entire town living out a reality show would be the hit of the century.

Why had Dan wanted me to know? What was in it for him? And where in the world had he gone?

"Can we go?" Mindy asked from the door. "Maybe we can try another way out of town. There are still other ways."

"Yeah. Let's go," I said wandering back toward the house. We'd almost made it to the front door when my gaze landed on a light switch. Maybe we should turn some of these lights off, I thought, and, at that, the puzzle piece I'd been searching for snapped into place.

Leaving Mindy standing at the front door, confused and frustrated, I practically ran back to the first bedroom. Overhead lighting illuminated the snake which continued to stare at me, but the red heat lamp in the cage had been switched off. Dan had turned on every light in the house—every light that had been off when I'd been here earlier, but he'd turned the one bulb that had been on, off. It was his way of drawing my attention to that location without doing anything that would catch anyone else's eye.

I approached the tank and stared down into it, searching for anything that looked out of place, and it only took a moment to find it. On the bottom of the water bowl, scrawled in permanent marker, there was a hand-written message. 

Row P, Aisle 14, Vandenbusche.

After living in this town all my life and attending at least a dozen funerals for old people from church who'd passed away, I knew exactly what this was. Crazy Dan Tanner left me directions to a cemetery plot.