“What if she’s just asleep?” Dennis said. “What if she was buried alive and she’s in a coma?”

He tried to push up one of the woman’s eyelids, but it wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the woman’s face.

To Tommy it looked as if something had been digging at the grave. One of the woman’s hands was out of the dirt, as if she had been trying to reach out for help. The hand was mangled, like maybe some animal had chewed on her fingers, tearing flesh and exposing bones.

He had fallen right on top of a dead woman. His head swam. He felt like someone had just poured cold water over him.

As Dennis reached out to touch the woman again, a dog stepped out of some bushes on the other side of the body and growled deep in its throat.

None of them moved then. The dog was mean-looking, white with a big black spot around one beady eye and over the small ear. The dog moved forward. The kids moved backward.

“He’s protecting her,” Tommy said.

“Maybe he killed her,” Dennis said. “Maybe he killed her and buried her like a bone, and now he’s back to eat the body.”

He said it as if he hoped that was the case, and he couldn’t wait to watch the next gruesome scene.

Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the dog stepped back into the bushes and was gone.

In the next second, a man in a sheriff’s deputy’s uniform appeared at the top of the bank the kids had tumbled over. He looked like a giant looking down at them, his hair buzzed flat on top, his eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses. He was Dennis Farman’s father.

Tommy stood well back from the deputies who had come with yellow crime-scene tape to mark off the area around the shallow grave. He should have been home by now. His mother was going to be really mad. He had a piano lesson at five. But he couldn’t seem to make himself leave, and he thought maybe he wasn’t supposed to.