Next morning, I was up at seven-thirty. Silence in the den suggested Geneva and Tamela were still dead to the world. After spinning Boyd around the block, I filled pet bowls, set cornflakes and raisin bran on the kitchen table, jotted a note, and hopped into the car.

Clover lies just beyond the North Carolina-South Carolina border, halfway between a dammed-up stretch of the Catawba River, called Lake Wylie, and the Kings Mountain National Park, site of Ryan and Boyd's Revolutionary War excursion. My friend Anne calls the town Clo-vay, giving the name a je ne sais quoi panache. During off-peak traffic hours the trip to Clo-vay takes less than thirty minutes. Unfortunately, every driver registered in either the Palmetto or the Old North State was on the road that morning. Others had joined them from Tennessee and Georgia. And Oklahoma. And Guam. I crept down I-77, alternately sipping my Starbucks and drumming the wheel.

Clover was incorporated in 1887 as a railway stopover, then boomed as a textile center in the early nineteen hundreds. Water seepage from the railroad tanks kept the place damp and carpeted with clover, earning it the name Cloverpatch. Aspiring to a more imposing image, or perhaps wanting to dissociate from the Yokums and the Scraggs, some citizens' committee later shortened the name to Clover.

The image polishing didn't help. Though Clover is still home to a few mills, and things like brake parts and surgical supplies are cranked out nearby, nothing much happens there. A perusal of chamber of commerce literature suggests that good times are had elsewhere: Lake Wylie, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Carolina beaches, Charlotte Knights baseball games, Carolina Panthers football games.

There are a few antebellum homes hiding in the hills around Clover, but it's not a place for French country hand towels and stripy umbrellas. Though very Norman Rockwell, the town is strictly blue-collar, or, more correctly, no-collar.

By nine-forty I was at the point where US 321 crosses SC 55, the beating heart of downtown Clover. Two- and three-story redbrick buildings lined both blacktops forming the intersection. Predictably, Route 321 was called Main Street along this stretch.

Remembering the Yahoo! map, I went south on 321, then made a left onto Flat Rock Road. Three more rights and I found myself on a dead-end street lined with longleaf pines and scrub oaks. The address Zamzow had given me led to a double-wide on a cement slab eighty yards down at the far end.

A front stoop held two metal lawn chairs, one bare, the other with green floral cushions in place. To the right of the trailer I could see a vegetable garden. The front yard was filled with whirligigs.

A carport hung by suction cups to the trailer's left end, its interior filled with oddly shaped stacks covered with blue plastic sheeting. A stand of shagbark hickories threw shadows across a rusted swing set to the left of the carport.

I pulled onto the gravel drive, killed the engine, and crossed the yard to the front door. Among the whirligigs I recognized Little Bo Peep. Sleepy and Dopey. A mother duck leading four miniature versions of herself.

A skeletal woman with eyes that seemed too large for her face answered the bell. She wore a saggy, pill-covered cardigan over a faded polyester housedress. The garments draped her fleshless form like clothes hanging on a hanger.

The woman spoke to me through an aluminum and glass outer door.

'Got nothing this week.' She stepped back to close the inner door.

'Mrs. Cobb?'

'You with the kidney people?'

'No, ma'am. I'm not. I'd like to talk to you about your daughter.'

'Got no daughter.'

Again the woman moved to close the door, then hesitated, vertical lines creasing the bone-tight flesh on her forehead.

'Who are you?'

I dug a card from my purse and held it to the glass. She read the card then looked up, eyes filled with thoughts that had nothing to do with me.

'Medical examiner?' she said.

'Yes, ma'am.' Keep it simple.

The aluminum grillwork rattled when she pushed open the door. Cold seeped outward, like air from a recently unlocked tomb.

Wordlessly the woman led me to the kitchen and gestured toward a small table with antique green legs and a simulated wood top. The trailer's interior smelled of mothballs, pine disinfectant, and old cigarette smoke.

'Coffee?' she asked as I seated myself.

'Yes, please.' The thermostat must have been set at fifty-eight. Goose bumps were forming on my neck and arms.

The woman took two mugs from an overhead cabinet and filled them from a coffeemaker on the counter.

'It is Mrs. Cobb, isn't it?'

'It is.' Mrs. Cobb set the mugs on the simulated wood. 'Milk?'

'No, thank you.'

Sliding a pack of Kools from the top of the refrigerator, Mrs. Cobb took the chair opposite mine. Her skin looked waxy and gray. A growth protruded from a comma below her left eyelid, looking like a barnacle on the side of a pier.

'Got a light?'

I dug matches from my purse, struck one, and held it to her cigarette.

'Can't ever find the darned things when I need them.'

She inhaled deeply, exhaled, flicked a finger at the matches.

'Put those away. I don't want to be smoking too many.' She snorted a laugh. 'Bad for my health.'

I shoved the matches into my jeans pocket.

'You want to talk about my child.'

'Yes, ma'am.'

Mrs. Cobb fished a Kleenex from a sweater pocket, blew her nose, then took another drag.

'My husband's dead two years come November.'

'I'm sorry for your loss.'

'He was a good, Christian man. Headstrong, but a good man.'

'I'm sure you miss him.'

'Lord knows I do.'

A cuckoo popped from its clock above the sink and sounded the hour. We both listened. Ten chirps.

'He gave me that clock for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.'

'It must be very dear to you.'

'Fool thing's kept working all these years.'

Mrs. Cobb drew on her Kool, eyes fixed on a point midway between us. On a point years past. Then her chin cocked up as a sudden thought struck her.

Her gaze shifted to me.

'You find my child?'

'We might have.'

Smoke curled from her cigarette and floated across her face.

'Dead?'

'It's a possibility, Mrs. Cobb. The ID is complicated.'

She brought the cigarette to her lips, inhaled, exhaled through her nose. Then she flicked the ash and rotated the burning tip on a small metal saucer until the fire went out.

'I'll be joining Charlie Senior shortly. I believe it's time to set a few things right.'

She rose from her chair and shuffled toward the back of the trailer, slippers swishing on the indoor-outdoor carpet. I heard rustling, what sounded like a door.

Minutes cuckooed by. Hours. A decade.

Finally, Mrs. Cobb returned with a bulky green album bound with black cording.

'I think the old goat will forgive me.'

She laid the album in front of me and opened it to the first page. Her breathing sounded wheezy as she leaned over my shoulder to jab at a snapshot of a baby on a plaid blanket.

The finger moved to a baby in an old-fashioned bassinet. A baby in a stroller.

She flipped ahead several pages.

A toddler holding a plastic hammer. A toddler in blue denim coveralls and bicycle cap.

Two more pages.

A towheaded boy of about seven in cowboy hat and twin holsters. The same boy suited up for baseball, bat on one shoulder.

Three pages.

A teen with palm extended in protest, face twisted away from the lens. The teen was about sixteen, and wore an enormous golf shirt over baggy cutoffs.

It was the hammer-baseball-buckaroo boy, though his hair was darker now. The visible cheek was smooth and pink and dotted with acne. The boy's hips were wide, his body softly feminine, with a marked lack of muscle definition.

I looked up at Mrs. Cobb.

'My child. Charles Grant Cobb.'

Circling the table, she sat and wrapped her fingers around her mug.

For sixty ticks we both listened to the cuckoo. I broke the silence.

'Your son must have had a difficult time during his teenage years.'

'Charlie Junior just never went through the right changes. He never grew a beard. His voice never changed, and his—' Five ticks. 'You know.'

XXY. A Klinefelter's syndrome boy.

'I do know, Mrs. Cobb.'

'Kids can be so cruel.'

'Was your son ever examined or treated?'

'My husband refused to admit there was anything wrong with Charlie Junior. When puberty came, and nothing seemed to happen except for Charlie Junior getting heavier and heavier, I suspected something wasn't right. I suggested we have him looked at.'

'What did the doctors say?'

'We never went.' She shook her head. 'There were two things Mr. Cobb hated with all his might. Doctors and fags. That's what he called, well, you know.'

She dug for another Kleenex, blew her nose again.

'It was like arguing with a cinder block. To his dying day Charlie Senior believed Charlie Junior just needed to toughen up. That's what he was always telling him. Tough up, kid. Be a man. No one likes a girly boy. No one likes a pansy.'

I looked at the boy in the photo, and thought of cool guys shoving geeks in the halls at school. Of kids taking lunch money from smaller kids. Of loudmouthed bullies picking at flaws and frailties, making others bleed like unhealed scabs. Of kids taunting, tormenting, persecuting until their victims finally give up on themselves.

I felt anger, frustration, and sadness.

'After Charlie Junior left home he decided to live as a female,' I guessed.

She nodded.

'I'm not sure exactly when he switched, but that's just what he did. He' — she struggled for the proper pronoun — 'she visited once, but Charlie Senior pitched a fit, told him not to come back until he'd straightened himself out. I hadn't seen Charlie in over ten years when he' — more pronoun confusion — 'when he went missing.'

Conspiratorial smile.

'I talked to him, though. Charlie Senior didn't know that.'

'Often?'

'He'd call about once a month. He was a park ranger, you know.'

'A Fish and Wildlife Service agent. That's a very demanding profession.'

'Yes.'

'When was the last time you spoke with Charlie Junior?'

'It was early December, five years ago. I got a call from a cop not long after, asking if I knew where Charlotte was. That's what Charlie Junior took to calling himself. Herself.'

'Was your son working on anything in particular at the time of his disappearance?'

'Something to do with people killing bears. He was pretty fired up about it. Said people were slaughtering bears by the bushel just to make a few bucks. But, as I recall, he talked about it like it was something on the side, not an official assignment. Like it was something he just stumbled on. I think he was really supposed to be looking out for turtles.'

'Did he mention any names?'

'I think he said something about a Chinese. But wait.' She tapped a bony finger to her lips, raised it in the air. 'He said there was a guy in Lancaster and a guy in Columbia. Don't know if that had to do with bears or turtles, but I remember wondering about it later, because Charlie Junior was working up in North Carolina, not down here.'

The clock cuckooed once, marking the half hour.

'More coffee?'

'No, thanks.'

She rose to refill her cup. I spoke to her back.

'Skeletal remains have been found, Mrs. Cobb. I believe they could be those of your son.'

Her shoulders slumped visibly.

'Someone will be phoning?'

'I'll call you myself when we're sure.'

She balled her fists, slipped them into the pockets of her sweater.

'Mrs. Cobb, may I ask one last question?'

She nodded.

'Why didn't you share this information with those investigating your son's disappearance?'

She turned and regarded me with melancholy eyes.

'Charlie Senior said Charlie Junior'd probably gone off to San Francisco or somewhere so's he could pursue his lifestyle. I believed him.'

'Did your son ever say anything to suggest he was considering a move?'

'No.'

She raised her mug to her lips, set it back down on the counter.

'Guess I believed what I wanted to believe.'

I rose. 'I should be going.'

At the door, she asked one last question.

'You read much Scripture?'

'No, ma'am, I don't.'

Her fingers bunched and rebunched the Kleenex.

'I can't figure the world out.' Barely audible.

'Mrs. Cobb,' I said, 'on my best days, I can't figure myself out.'

Weaving through the whirligigs, I felt eyes on my back. Eyes filled with loss and sadness and confusion.

As I walked toward my car, something on the windshield caught my attention.

What the hell?

Two paces more and the object grew focused.

I stopped in my tracks.

One hand flew to my mouth. My stomach rolled over.

Swallowing hard, I took two steps closer. Three. Four.

Dear God.

Revolted, I closed my eyes.

An image crawled through my mind. Crosshairs on my chest.

My heartbeat shot into the stratosphere. My eyes flew open.

Did the Grim Reaper have me in his sights? Had I been followed?

I had to force myself to look at the macabre little form scarecrowed against my windshield.

Propped between the wiper blade and the glass was a squirrel. Eyes glazed, belly slit, innards sprouting like mushrooms on a rotting log.