Free The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly

recall if her eyes were open or closed?”
    “What does it matter? She’s dead. Whether we cover her up with her eyes wide open or squeezed shut is going to make no difference to her or to us.”
    He was right, thought Harry. He shouldn’t even have been able to see her eyes so clearly through the plastic, but it was as though there was a light shining inside her head, illuminating the blue of her irises. She looked more alive now than she had in the basement.
    He shook the thought from his head and pulled sharply on the plastic, dragging the girl’s body flat. He didn’t want to see her face again, so he turned away from it. He’d tried. She’d been given a better chance than any of the others, of that he was certain. It wasn’t his fault that Ben Pearson had put an end to her hopes.
    Suddenly, all the strength was gone from his body. He couldn’t haul himself from the grave. He could barely raise his arms. He looked up at Morland. The chief had the pickax in his hands.
    “Help me up,” said Harry. But the chief didn’t move.
    “Please,” said Harry. His voice cracked a little, and he despised himself for his weakness. His mother was right: he was half a man. If he’d been gifted with real courage, he’d have put the girl in his car, driven her to the state police in Bangor, and confessed everything to them, or at least dropped her off in the center of the city, where she’d be safe. Standing in the grave, he imagined a scenario in which the girl agreed to keep quiet about what had occurred, but it fell apart as soon as he saw himself returning to Prosperous to explain her absence. No, he’d done the best that he could for her. Anything more would have damned the town. Then again, it was already as close to damnation as made no difference.
    He closed his eyes and waited for the impact of the pickax on his head, but it never came. Instead, Morland grabbed Harry’s right hand, leaned back, and their combined strength got him out of the grave.
    Harry sat on the ground and put his head in his hands.
    “For a second, I thought you were going to leave me down there,” he said.
    “That would be too easy,” said Morland. “Besides, we’re not done yet.”
    And Harry knew that he wasn’t referring to the filling in of the grave alone.
    THE GIRL WAS GONE, covered by the earth. The ground had clearly been dug up, but Morland knew that whatever remained of the winter snows to come would take care of that. When the thaw came in earnest, the ground would turn to mire. As it dried, all traces of their activity would be erased. He just hoped that they’d buried the girl deep enough.
    “Shit!” he said.
    “What is it?” said Harry.
    “We probably should have taken her out of the plastic. Might have helped her to rot quicker.”
    “You want to dig her up again?”
    “No, I do not. Come on, time to go.”
    He wrapped the blade of the shovel and the head of the pickax in plastic bags, to keep the dirt off the trunk of his car. Tomorrow he’d clean it inside and out, just to be sure.
    Harry had not moved from his place beside the grave.
    “I have a question,” he said.
    Morland waited for him to continue.
    “Isn’t there a chance that she might be enough?” said Harry.
    Morland might have called the look on Harry’s face hopeful, if the use of the word “hope” weren’t an obscenity under such circumstances.
    “No,” said Morland.
    “She’s dead. We killed her. We’ve given her to the earth. Why not? Why can’t she be enough?”
    Chief Morland closed the trunk before he replied.
    “Because,” he said, “she was dead when she went into the ground.”

CHAPTER
    IX
    It was just after five on the evening after my return to Portland when I arrived at the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue. The bar was buzzing, as it always was on Thursdays. Thursday was showcase night, when the Bear invited a craft brewery to let folks taste its wares, always at a discount and always with a raffle at the end. It