Autumn had started out cold that year. The sugar maples and sumac had turned early, a deep crimson. At sunrise, the eastern sky was often the color of an open wound and sometimes on crisp mornings the frost that lay over everything reflected the sky, and the whole land appeared to bleed. Warm weather returned in the first week of October, and for the past few days it had felt almost like June again.

“I love Indian summer.” Marsha Dross smiled, as if hoping for a pleasant change of subject.

She was a tall woman, nearly six feet, and slender. Her hair was coarse and brown and she kept it short. She had a broad face, large nose. In her uniform and without makeup-something she never wore on the job-she was sometimes mistaken for a man. Off duty, she knew what to do with mascara and eyeliner and lip gloss. She preferred tight dresses with high hemlines, gold jewelry, and line dancing.

“Don’t you love Indian summer, Cork?”

“Know where the term Indian summer comes from?” he asked.

“No.”

“A white man’s phrase. They didn’t trust Indians, so when the warm days returned in late fall and it felt like summer but everyone knew it was a lie, they gave it a name they deemed appropriate.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“I do love Indian summer.” He pointed to the right. “Turn here.”

“I know.”

Dross pulled onto a side road even smaller and rougher than the one they’d just followed, and they slipped into the blue shadow of a high ridge where a cool darkness had settled among the pine trees. The red-orange rays of the setting sun fell across the birches that crowned the hilltops, and the white trunks seemed consumed by a raging fire.

“I wish you had let me take the call alone,” Dross said.

“As soon as you hit that skunk, so did I.” He smiled briefly. “You know my policy.”