Excerpt from In the Country of the Blind by Edward Hoagland, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Hey, there's hippies here," Karl mentioned. "I guess they come to buy goats to milk, bedsteads and tomato plants. Maybe your girlfriend'll come over."

But she didn't.

"Sorry," she said, showing up unexpectedly early the next morning when Press was carefully heating water for coffee. "I haven't been away but I've been dealing with the guy that built my house. He seems to think I owe him forever." She actually hugged Press, didn't merely tease him with a grope. They sat. She asked for news of his own two kids, Jeremy and Molly. Hers were at a friend's house.

Suddenly, as the silence grew vaguely embarrassing, she said, "I'll take you home." He didn't understand what that meant till he found himself winding up a short braiding of dirt roads to the small cabin he'd been near when he climbed along the stream, then settled in a threadbare upholstered chair of the sort you might salvage from the front lawn of a foreclosed house.

"This is what I do all day," she said—meaning cut and manipulate stained glass. And he began to hear the click of tools, smelled the soldering iron.

"Not so bad?" she asked after a spell.

"No, no, I could spend an eternity in this chair, I guess, unless your patience wore out."

She repaid the compliment by regretting he couldn't see her work. "But this is what I do. And I'm sick of being hit on. I suppose that's partly why I like you, because you can't." She laughed, moving over to poke her finger in his mouth to suck on like a cigarette. "And yet I hit on you myself."

She rolled a joint, from the crinkle that he heard, and then the scent. "I need to wean this other guy off me."

He smiled. "I hope so." Carol continued working, after offering Press a cookie and tea. Eventually her concentration waned and she sat down with a sigh and said, "I have something for you." He listened, hesitating stupidly for more of a hint while she waited.

"Are you not interested?"

He walked toward her voice, then, her shape apparitional in the other chair.

"I need a body rub," she instructed. "I want to be spoiled." He obliged, luxuriating. Afterward, she fed him peanut butter and jelly on hamburger rolls, which they ate by the stream, and drove him home before the kids returned.

For the whole next day he remained jubilant, alone, apologizing to the Swinnertons by phone for missing two lunches with them, but Dorothy said Karl was butchering a deer he'd shot and they were busy anyway with preserving the cuts of that, from lard and heart to chitterlings. He listened to Mozart and Bach broadcast from Montreal, combined with the creak of his swing on the porch, barn swallows harvesting bugs overhead, a teacher bird, and a wood thrush's liquid fluting.

Jack Brook rushed tumbling down the mildish mountainside that led to Carol's cabin. He wondered if he simply climbed it again and yelled for her, she'd hear him. If he turned an ankle, of course, no one might find him for several days, because she wouldn't be notified that he was missing by Karl or whoever was faced by the quandary. Karl had often searched for missing persons in his heyday, with Fish and Game, the sheriff, or the state cops, using a hound he'd trained. Another hound would trail whichever furbearer he was after at that moment in the snow—leaving a raccoon's track, for instance, if he pointed at a fox's prints they crossed, which was more valuable, but then leaving the fox's, perhaps, if Karl saw a bobcat's, whose skin would fetch still more cash: as much as sixty dollars. A miracle dog, she could also smell and tell him which mink or beaver traps had a creature in them. Tree frogs and leopard frogs were singing, along with the birds, and Press was grateful to Karl for teaching him the distinctions—also peepers, toads, green frogs. Dorothy had written a column on the subject from Karl's explanation; then later one on missing-person searches, when Press had drawn him conversationally out on that. What lost people did in circling, or where a murder victim had been dumped. In the war, Karl been a BAR man, toting that extra-heavy Browning automatic, bi-pod rifle; another story altogether. He didn't discuss combat or recount how he had won his Bronze Star, nor want her to write about it. Just fire prevention, drawing on his recent expertise.

Excerpted from In the Country of the Blind by Edward Hoagland. Copyright © 2016 by Edward Hoagland. Excerpted by permission of Arcade Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.