Chapter 18: Prout's Confession That Wasn't

The afternoon light was going yellow-grey over the corn when Mara picked up Prout's trail.

She had not planned it. That was the thing she would turn over later, lying in her bed with the ceiling fan clicking overhead and the television murmuring through the wall — she had not planned any of it. She had been walking home from the sheriff's station, still carrying the folder with its photocopies and its careful annotations, still feeling in her sternum the particular cold of watching a door close from the wrong side, when she had seen Prout's Lincoln Continental pull out of the Municipal Building's side lot and head south on Route 9.

South.