Dancing
in Time

From the Opening Pages

The mist never truly leaves the mountaintop; it only retreats into the hemlocks to wait for the sun to fail. In the center of the village, the four-faced clock stood as a sentinel of order in a wilderness that resisted it. To the summer guests, it was a convenience. To those who knew the secrets buried beneath the shale of Sullivan County, it was a countdown.

The bedside phone rang, waking Sarah St. Clair on the third ring to a muggy DC morning. She sat up and stretched her thin muscular arms before answering the eighth high-pitched ring. She lifted the receiver with tired irritation — and a voice she would spend the next six months trying to outrun told her that her grandmother had been found. That she was dying. And that she had left an envelope with the Pennsylvania State Police — to be picked up by noon on Thursday, but no earlier than eleven.

Sarah sat in a trance on the edge of the bed cradling the receiver in the crook of her neck. The only thing that came to her mind was Shakespeare's paraphrase — there are a great many things in heaven and earth that we do not and cannot understand. This would pass through her cranium several more times in the hours to come.