The body rested loosely in the soil, as if it had been hastily covered before the rocks were set in place. There was a wrinkled elbow, grimed and whorled like a thumbprint, and a couple of inches of exposed upper arm, the flesh so bloated and tight that it strained against the sleeve of a thin white T-shirt. The shoulders and back were also swollen, the weave of the T-shirt puckered, and Emily thought of the Halloween dummies she and her mother used to construct each year, before the time some bullies from Billy’s school had set one on fire as a prank. They would close the sleeves of one of her father’s old flannel shirts with rubber bands and stuff so many leaves into the torso that you could see the points spilling out between buttons. This body, too, was overstuffed, the back humped, the neck bulging against the razored edge of short hair. A man, Emily thought at first—the body seemed both fat and muscular, the hair too short to be feminine—but there was some detail throwing off the image of maleness, a clue that she was grasping with the edges of her mind but not yet consciously. She crouched down and put out a trembling hand, a pointed finger, and touched one of the fingers of the exposed hand. The nails, she’d noticed from above, seemed longish—had she once heard that they continued to grow in death? When she pushed, something gave and came free, and Emily didn’t even jump this time; she just squinted in the low light, the vein in her neck pulsing with her excitement, and came as close to the object as she could stand to. It was a press-on nail, painted peach with an even white tip. It lay bright against the dark ground, like an opal.