‘Did you want to talk to us?’ Elise asked.

‘Well, I kinda have to,’ Eden said. He sealed his cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. John waited to see if it would fall apart, as the other one had. He felt mildly disoriented by all this, as if he had walked unknowingly into some bucolic version of the CIA.

The cigarette somehow held together. There was a charred scrap of sandpaper tacked to one of the arms of the rocker. Eden struck the match on it and applied the flame to his cigarette, half of which incinerated on contact.

‘I think you and Missus might want to spend tonight out of town,’ he finally said.

John blinked at him. ‘Out of town? Why would we want to do that? We just got here.’

‘Good idea, though, mister,’ a voice said from behind Eden.

The Grahams looked around and saw a tall woman with slumped shoulders standing inside the Mercantile’s rusty screen door. Her face looked out at them from just above an old tin sign advertising Chesterfield cigarettes – TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL SMOKES. She opened the door and came out on the porch. Her face looked sallow and tired but not stupid. She had a loaf of bread in one hand and a six-pack of Dawson’s Ale in the other. ’I’m Laura Stanton,’ she said. ‘It’s very nice to meet you. We don’t like to seem unsociable in Willow, but it’s the rainy season here tonight.’

John and Elise exchanged bewildered glances. Elise looked at the sky. Except for a few small fair-weather clouds, it was a lucid, unblemished blue.

‘I know how it looks,’ the Stanton woman said, ‘but that doesn’t mean anything, does it, Henry?’

‘No’m,’ Eden said. He took one giant drag on his eroded cigarette and then pitched it over the porch rail.

‘You can feel the humidity in the air,’ the Stanton woman said. ‘That’s the key, isn’t it, Henry?’

‘Well,’ Eden allowed, ‘ayuh. But it is seven years. To the day.’