In late November--almost at the end of deer season--two Hmong men from Canada went hunting. They later claimed they found the woods along the southern border of Ontario to be dense, confusing. They said it was a simple mistake that took them across the border into Minnesota.

For two days they bagged no game, not so much as a squirrel, so they kept moving deeper into the woods, where they had never been before. The skies were overcast. They had trouble with their GPS. By the time they were able to use it they were already in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near the Wisconsin border--or so they would claim if anyone asked them.

The very next day--coincidentally--Jim Davis failed to show up for the night shift at the credit union where he ran an old mini computer. His employer wasn't particularly surprised. He later told the cops, "I always thought Jim was a little 'loopy.'"

The DEA assumed he'd skipped town to avoid drug manufacturing and sale charges. They issued a warrant for his arrest. No one ever saw Jim Davis again.

The county condemned his Victorian two-flat, and six months later it burned to the ground. Neighbors suspected Jim's sister had something to do with that.

In seven years Chris would have her brother declared dead. As the sole heir to the property, she had found out he had insurance on the house, and even though it was condemned it would pay $10,000.00 into an escrow account to pay property taxes. Then when she could legally take possession of the lot, she would sell it for a tidy sum.

On the night the house burned down, in a faraway Canadian cemetery--outside time, unaware of past or future--one of the Chalk Ghost's souls smiled contentedly at the beautiful, embroidered shroud in which her mother had wrapped her. She thought about using the cell phone her mother had buried with her to call Flowers again. An empty pauper's grave in Wisconsin waited patiently for another indigent's body.

Fifteen years later a teenage Chippewa hunter named Zane Whitehorse would stumbled across a shallow grave in the North Woods of Wisconsin near the border with Michigan. He would look down at his feet and shudder when he saw that he had stubbed his toe on a human skull with a bullet hole in it.