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    “A good man, Mr. Eagles,” Ian Rose said, putting another log on the fire.
    “Who could have hated him like that? Poor guy, always with his Eukanuba. Euk-an-uba, weird name for dog food, sounds more like a Cirque du Soleil show.”
    They were silent for a long while as they ate spoonfuls of leek and potato soup and watched out for any reactions from the dogs, who slept peacefully, not sensing any cause for agitation.
    “Good boy, good boy,” Cleve said, tapping one of them on the head, making his voice higher to imitate Mr. Eagles. “That’s what he always said to the dogs, remember, Pa? Good boy, good boy, with that squeaky voice of his. So strange, that voice in such a huge guy. He tapped them on the head like that, not petting them, just little taps on the head, as if fulfilling his duty with the client, or because he didn’t want his hands smelling like dogs. Do you think deep down he didn’t really like them?”
    “Dogs? Maybe. He made a living off neighbors like us who overfed their pets treats and canned food and such. He was a mountain boy, I’m sure he didn’t approve of pampered animals like ours, us city people.”
    “To kill him, to rip off his face. Fuck, only a miserable rat would do something like that. A calculating psychopath.”
    “Whoever did it is still out there. Although who knows, with so many cops around  . . . ”
    “We could use some bars on the windows. Or at least some curtains for now, Pa. I’m holed up in the attic, but down here you’re on display  . . . ”
    “We’ve never needed curtains. There’s no one around here. Maybe we should put lights out in the garden. I’ll do it tomorrow. He has to be a big guy. I mean to overcome Eagles, who was pretty strong, and to drag his body  . . . Maybe there were a few of them, at least two, one in the front seat and one in the back. The one who killed him was in the back; he strangled him from behind. But why did they rip off his face?” Ian Rose said, looking for his flashlight before taking out the dogs for a walk on the grounds.
    “I’ll come with you,” Cleve said, putting on his shoes and running after his father.
    Days later, Cleve would recount the details of Eagles’s murder in a note written in longhand with a fountain pen.
Something brutal and inexplicable happened ten minutes from my father’s house in this peaceful corner of the world where nothing ever happens. But it was precisely here that it did happen, on the side of the road, a few steps from the dark waters of Silver Coin Pond. Somebody carried Mr. Eagles’s body from his pickup, and not in the darkness of a cloudy night, no, because it must have been no later than four in the afternoon, in the plain light of a fall day. And it didn’t happen on a Sunday either, when this place is abandoned, but during the week, with some traffic on the road because at that hour some people go down into town to pick up their kids from school. Nothing was stolen, not the pickup, the wallet, nothing. And yet, to see the shape they left him in. A sadistic act hard to fathom. One of the four great skinnings in Western history along with the flaying of the fawn Marsyas by Apollo, the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, whose skin was depicted by Michelangelo in The Last Judgment , and Burt Reynolds’s portrayal of Navajo Joe, the Indian who twirled scalps at the end of his spear. I’m saying this because Mr. Eagles’s face was torn off. That’s right. They took the face off that decent man as if it were a mask. And in fact the face is a mask over the skull; I just had never thought of it like that until I saw such a thing. It was impossible not to see it because the murderer had glued it to a rag, a red rag—the kind people have in a car to clean the windows and such. They found the Rhino Glue bottle on the bottom of Silver Coin Pond the following day, although there were no fingerprints on it. The red rag with the face glued on was in turn attached to a tree trunk