Excerpt from The Distant Dead by Heather Young, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Holy shit." Jake stopped and got himself in hand. He was wearing the uniform of the Marzen Volunteer Fire Department, and despite the game shows he took that responsibility seriously. He turned off the television. "Is it a skeleton?" No one in Marzen was missing that he knew of, and every once in a while somebody turned up the bones of a miner or a settler who'd taken a wrong turn on the way to California.

Sal hesitated. "No."

"Do you know who it is?"

The boy's dark eyes slid sideways, to the station's refrigerator. There was a sign taped to the door that warned of terrible consequences if food was left in there too long, or if anybody took food that wasn't theirs. "I think it might be my math teacher."

"Your math teacher?"

"There's a car. I think it's his."

Jake didn't know what to do. He looked around the small station for help, but of course there was none. Leon Petrelli wouldn't relieve him until two. Maybe he should treat this as a medical call, he thought. Marzen was small enough that its fire department volunteers doubled as paramedics, and Jake was even more proud of his EMT license than he was of his fire department uniform. He could take the ambulance up there, see what Sal had found. He wiped his palms on his pants. "Okay, why don't you show me."

They drove up the dirt road that led from the town to the Prentiss place. Jake figured Sal had found the body on his way to the school bus, and sure enough, about a mile along they came upon an old brown Corolla parked just off the road, and Sal told him to stop. Jake walked over to the car. He knew better than to touch it, but he looked inside. It was empty.

He walked back to where Sal waited beside the ambulance. All around them the foothills of the Humboldt Range rose in bristly mounds, treeless and dry. To the right the land sloped up toward a rocky cliff that threw man and boy into shadow. The wind pushed Sal's Denver Broncos sweatshirt against his thin chest. It was cold in this high desert country in March; the tops of the mountains were still white with snow.

Sal turned and led Jake up the slope. They climbed in silence, through sagebrush that snatched at their pants legs. When they reached the top the ground dropped into a seasonal wash that ran along the base of the bluff. A cluster of acacia trees stood there, their canopies lifted to the sky like open palms. They were the only trees Jake had seen since they left Marzen, and the dense little grove spoke of shelter, of safety. Of a place to hide.

Sal stopped. The wind whipped in the sagebrush and the gray-green leaves of the acacias, and moaned as it curled among the hills. There was a smell, too, faint but insistent. Tangy, ripe, burnt. Far above, two chicken hawks floated in lazy circles, their wings tipping in, then out, then in again.

Jake looked at the boy. His eyes were closed, his shoulders drawn in tight.

"Is it down there?"

Sal nodded without opening his eyes.

"Wait here." Jake pressed one hand against his belly, tucked in his shirt, and walked into the wash.

When he reached the grove of trees, he didn't see the math teacher right away. He saw the careful ring of stones that made the fire pit, and the ashes piled in the center. Around it lay trees that had grown and died and fallen, their corpses blackened in the long, quiet decay of desert things. At first, Jake took the math teacher's body for one of these. Only when he saw the empty vodka bottle and the children's jump rope did he see what was left of the man. Then Jake, too, closed his eyes.

Excerpted from the novel The Distant Dead by Heather Young. Copyright © 2020 by Heather Young. On sale June 9 from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.