A Simple Plan

I couldn't tell if the story was finished, so I waited a few moments before I spoke. I had the photocopies in my lap. They gave off a faint chemical smell in the moist air.

Sarah lifted her thighs, then dropped them, drawing a gasp from the baby. They were both pink from the water. The ends of Sarah's hair were limp and damp.

"You found them at the library?" I asked.

She nodded.

"I guess it has to be our money, doesn't it?"

She nodded again, bending forward to kiss the baby on her forehead. "Do you recognize one of them from the plane?" she asked.

I turned to the back page and stared at the photographs. "I can't really tell. His face was all chewed up."

"It's definitely our money."

"He'd have to be the younger one. He was small." I held the picture out toward her. "The other guy's big."

She didn't look at the photo. She was watching Amanda. "It's weird, their being brothers, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you and Jacob."

I allowed myself to pursue that for a moment, but then I stopped. It wasn't something I really wanted to think about. I set the photocopies down on the edge of the sink.

"How'd you find them?" I asked.

She reached forward and pulled the plug on the drain. There was a rushing sound beneath the bathroom floor as the water began to make its way out. Amanda lay very still, listening.

"I just started going back through the old papers from the time you discovered the plane. I didn't have to go far. It was right there on the front page. When I saw it, I even remembered reading it."

"Me too."

"But it was just an article then. It didn't seem important."

"It changes things. Doesn't it?"

She glanced over at me. "How's that?"

"The way we talked ourselves into keeping it was that it was lost money -- it didn't belong to anyone, no one was looking for it."

"And?"

"And now we know someone's looking for it. We can't say it isn't stealing anymore."

She stared up at me from the tub, her face confused. "It's always been stealing, Hank," she said. "It's just that before we didn't know who we were stealing from. Knowing where it's from doesn't make it any different."

She was right, of course. I saw it as soon as she said it.

"I think it's good we know where it came from," she said. "I was beginning to worry that it might be counterfeit, or marked. That we'd done all this and it was useless, we'd never be able to spend it."

"It might still be marked," I said. I felt my heart throb painfully at the idea -- the bills were worthless; we'd killed them all for a bag full of paper. My mind reeled at the thought of it -- all our struggle, all our terrible choices, coming now, like this, to nothing.

But Sarah waved it aside. "They demanded unmarked money. It says so in the article."

"Maybe that's why they shot her. Maybe they got the ransom and discovered--"

"No." She cut me off. "It says they killed her right away. They shot her before they even saw the money."

"Couldn't we tell by looking at it? Can't you hold it up to an ultraviolet light or something?"

"They wouldn't have given them marked bills. It'd be too much of a risk."

"It just seems like--"

"Trust me, Hank, all right? The bills aren't marked."

I didn't say anything.

"You're being paranoid. You're just looking for something to worry about."

A little whirlpool formed at the far end of the tub. We both watched it spiral. The drain made a loud sucking sound beneath it.

"It makes me want to go back to the plane," I said. "See whether or not it's him."

"Was he carrying a wallet?"

"I didn't even think to check."

"It'd be stupid to go back, Hank. It'd be just asking to get caught."

I shook my head. "I'm not going back."

Sarah lifted Amanda off her legs. The water was nearly gone from the tub. "Get a towel," she said.

I stood up, pulled a towel from the rack. I lifted the baby from Sarah's hands, swaddling her, and then brought her back to the toilet. When I sat down, I rested her on my knees, bouncing her a little. She started to cry.

"What scares me," I said, watching Sarah dry herself, "is that someone out there knows about the money."

"He's terrified, Hank. They have his name."

"The FBI said they're sure they'll catch him. He'll tell them about his brother disappearing with the money in a plane."

"And?"

"The connections are just under the surface, Sarah. It wouldn't be that hard for things to come together. Carl knows I heard a plane with engine trouble out by the nature preserve. He knows about Jacob and Lou and Sonny and Nancy getting shot. If they find the plane, and they know it's supposed to have four million dollars on it..." I trailed off. Hearing myself say these things, I felt an instant's flicker of panic, a tremor in the muscles at the back of my neck. I waved toward the photocopies on the sink. "It's like them forgetting about the security camera. We're bound to be overlooking something."

She dropped her towel into the clothes hamper. Her bathrobe was hanging from the back of the door; she took it down and put it on. Then she picked up Amanda from my lap.

"The connections only seem obvious to us," she said calmly. "No one else would see them." The baby slowly stopped crying.

I stood up. I was beginning to sweat beneath my suit, so I took off my jacket and draped it over my arm. My shirt was stuck to my back. "What if Jacob or Lou or Nancy left something behind, a diary or something. Or if one of them told somebody we don't know about..."

"We're okay, Hank," she soothed me. "You're letting yourself think too much." She stepped forward and hugged me with one arm, the baby -- still whimpering a little -- pressed tightly between our bodies. I let her rest her cheek against my own. Her skin smelled clean and damp and fresh.

"Think about how people see you," she said. "You're just a normal guy. A nice, sweet, normal guy. No one would ever believe that you'd be capable of doing what you've done."

SARAH'S birthday was Saturday, the twelfth of March. I wanted it to be a memorable one, not only because it was her thirtieth but also because of the money and the baby, so I got her two big gifts -- both of which were well beyond my pre-duffel bag means.

The first was a condominium in Florida. Toward the end of February, I'd seen an advertisement in the paper announcing a government auction of property seized in drug raids. They listed all sorts of things that had to be sold -- boats, cars, airplanes, motorcycles, satellite dishes, houses, condominiums, jewelry, even a horse farm -- merchandise that could be purchased for less than 10 percent of its appraised value. It was on the following Saturday, March 5, in Toledo. I told Sarah that I had to work that day and drove into the city around nine, the hour it was scheduled to begin.

The address listed in the advertisement was a small warehouse, down by the port. Inside there were folding chairs lined up across the floor, facing a wooden podium. None of the actual merchandise was there -- they simply had photographs of it, and long written descriptions, all pasted together in a catalog that they handed to you as you entered from the parking lot. There were about forty people already there when I arrived, all men, and a handful more came in after me.

The auction was late starting, so I had a half hour to sit and explore the catalog. I'd come to see if there was any nice jewelry, but, as I flipped through the glossy pages, I began to change my mind. The fourth item scheduled for bidding was a three-bedroom beachfront condominium in Fort Myers, Florida. It had a deck, a hot tub, a solarium. There were color pictures of it, interior and exterior. It was white stucco, with a red-tiled roof, like a Spanish house. It was beautiful, luxurious, and I decided immediately that I was going to buy it for Sarah.

Its appraised value was listed as $335,000, but the bidding was set to start at $15,000. Sarah and I had a little over $35,000 saved up in the Ashenville bank, our nest egg for the move we'd been planning out of Fort Ottowa, and I decided, quite spontaneously, that I could spend $30,000 of it if I had to. I reasoned that if it came to the worst, and we still had to burn the hundred-dollar bills, I could sell the condo and probably even make a profit on it. I saw it as an investment -- shrewd and calculating.

I'd never been to an auction before, so when it began, I watched to see how people bid. They simply raised their hands as a price was called out, and when someone finally won, a woman with a clipboard took him aside and wrote down some information.

There were only three other men besides myself who took part in the bidding for the condo. The price gradually climbed through the twenties. As it approached $30,000, I began to get nervous, thinking I wasn't going to get it, but then, suddenly, everyone else dropped out, and I ended up winning it for $31,000.

The woman with the clipboard took me off to the side. She was young, thin faced, with short, black hair. She had a name tag on, and it said Ms. Hastings. She spoke very quickly, in a hushed tone, explaining to me what I had to do.

She gave me a business card. I had to get a check for the full amount bid to the address listed on the card within the next week. I should allow ten working days after the receipt of my payment for them to process my papers. After that time, but not before then, I'd be able to come to the same address in person and receive my property -- in this case the deed to the condominium. When she finished telling me this, and I'd filled out my name, address, and telephone number, she left me, moving on to the next person.

I sat back down in my chair, trying to sort through my feelings. I'd just committed myself to spending $31,000, nearly all of our savings. It seemed like a tremendously foolish thing to do. But then, in comparison to the money we had sitting on the floor beneath our bed, it was nothing. And I'd gotten a deal, too, had bought the place for less than a tenth of its appraised value. The longer I sat there, the more strongly this latter interpretation began to dominate my thoughts. I was a millionaire, after all, four times over; it seemed like I ought to start acting like one. By the time I got up to leave, I was feeling pleased enough with my purchase that there was a just perceptible jauntiness to my stride, and as I made my way to the exit, I even found myself wishing that I had a cane, so that I might twirl it as I walked.

My second gift to Sarah was a grand piano. This was something she'd always wanted, ever since she was little. She didn't know how to play, it had nothing to do with that; a piano simply represented to her, I think, the concrete embodiment of wealth and status, and as such it seemed fitting that I should give it to her now.

I shopped around, calling music stores from work, astonished at how much pianos cost. I'd had no idea; it was something I'd never even considered. I ended up finding one that had been marked down because there was an imperfection in its varnish, a large, hand-shaped stain on its lid. It cost me $2,400, virtually the balance of our account.

I had them deliver it to the house the morning of the twelfth. Sarah was working at the library, so she wasn't there when it arrived. It came in with its legs off, three men straining to carry it. I had them reassemble it in the living room. It looked absurd there, monstrous, dwarfing the rest of the furniture, but I was pleased with it. It was something special, something she'd like, and I knew it would look better in our next house.

I taped a little red bow to a sheet and draped it across the piano. I'd saved the page from the catalog with the condominium on it, and I put this next to the bow. Then I sat down and waited for her to return.

SARAH seemed much more impressed with the piano than the condo, perhaps because it was a physical presence in the room, concrete, undeniable, something whose keys she could touch and make a sound, rather than a mere picture of an object thousands of miles away. It was an actuality, whereas the condo remained nothing more than a promise.

"Oh, Hank," she said as soon as she saw it, "you've made me so happy."

She tapped out "When the Saints Go Marching In," the only song she knew. She opened the lid and looked at the strings. She pressed the pedals with her feet, ran her hands across the keys. She tried to sound out "Frere Jacques" for Amanda but couldn't seem to get it right, and each time she made a mistake the baby would begin to cry.

Later that night -- after the unveiling of the gifts; after a special dinner of cornish hens and stuffing and green beans and mashed potatoes, all of which I cooked myself; and after two bottles of wine -- we made love on top of the piano.

It was Sarah's idea. I was nervous that it might collapse beneath our weight, but she took off her clothes and jumped right up onto its lid, reclining there on her elbows with her legs spread wide.

"Come on." She smiled at me.

We were both a little drunk.

I stripped out of my own clothes and slowly, listening all the time for the warning creak of a collapsing leg, climbed up on top of her.

It was a remarkable experience. The piano's hollow chamber echoed our own sighs and moans back up at us, returning them subtly altered -- adding a peculiar resonance and fullness, embedding within them the soft choral vibrations of its tautly stretched wires.

"This is the beginning of our new life," Sarah whispered in the middle of it, her mouth pressed up tight against my ear, making her breath sound like a scuba diver's, deep and passionate and strangely distant.

As I nodded in response, I banged my knee down on the piano's lid, and the whole thing seemed to moan for a moment, a long, mournful echo seeping up through the wood, making it vibrate, so that it trembled against our naked bodies.

When we finished, Sarah got a bottle of furniture polish from the hall closet and wiped away our sweat.

MONDAY, on my lunch break, I made a quick visit to the cemetery. I walked from spot to spot, reading headstones -- Jacob's, my parents', Pederson's, Lou's, Nancy's, Sonny's.

It was a cloudy afternoon, gray and overcast, the sky hanging low above the ground, pressing down like a tarp. The view was desolate, empty. Beyond the church and the low scattering of tombstones, there was nothing but the horizon, and it was miles away. A bouquet of flowers was resting beside the Pederson plot, chrysanthemums -- yellows and reds -- their vivid colors looking garish in the dim light, more like splashes of paint from a passing vandal than the sincere symbols of grief they were meant to be. Inside St. Jude's, someone was practicing the organ. I could hear the sound coming faintly through the brick wall, the same low, throbbing sequence of notes repeated over and over again.

It hadn't snowed since the last rush of funerals, nothing more than the brief flurry the day Jacob was buried, and the fresher of the graves stood out along the cemetery's floor, a handful of large, black rectangles, each one slightly sunken.

When I was little I'd pictured death as an animated pool of water. It looked just like a puddle, a little darker maybe, a little deeper than usual, but when you walked by, it would reach up with two liquid arms and pull you into itself, swallowing you down. I have no idea where I got this image, but I held on to it for a long time, probably until I was ten or eleven years old. It may've been something my mother had told me once, the way she had of explaining it to children. If this were true, then Jacob must've held the same idea.

The fresh graves looked like puddles.

Before leaving, I stood for a few minutes beside our family plot. Jacob's name had been chiseled onto the marker, right beneath our father's. The blank spot in the stone's bottom-right-hand corner was waiting for me, I knew, and it was a nice feeling to realize that -- unless I were to die within the next few months -- it would never be filled in. I was going to be buried a long way from here, under a different name, and thinking this gave me an instant's rush of happiness. It was the best I'd felt since the shootings, the most confident in our course: for perhaps the first and only time, what we'd gotten seemed worth the price we'd paid. We were escaping our lives. That cube of granite had been my fate, my destination, and I'd broken away from it. In a few months, I'd set out into the world, free from everything that had formerly bound me. I would re-create myself, would chart my own path. I would dictate my destiny.

THURSDAY evening I returned from work and found Sarah in the kitchen, crying.

At first I wasn't sure. All I noticed was a stiffness, a strained formality, as if she were angry with me. She was standing at the sink washing dishes. I came in, still in my suit and tie, and sat down at the table to keep her company. I asked her some questions about her day, and she answered them in monosyllables, short little grunts from deep in her throat. She wasn't looking at me; her head was tucked down against her chest, watching her hands working at the dishes in the soapy water.

"You okay?" I asked finally.

She nodded, not turning around, her shoulders hunched forward, making her back look round. The plates clinked together in the sink.

"Sarah?"

She didn't answer, so I got up and came to the counter. When I touched her on the shoulder, she seemed to freeze, as if in fright.

"What's the matter?" I asked, and then, leaning forward to catch her eye, I saw the tears rolling slowly down her face.

Sarah wasn't a crier; I could count the number of times I'd seen her in tears on the fingers of one hand. They appeared only in the wake of major tragedies, so my first reaction to her weeping was one of panic and fear. I thought immediately of the baby.

"Where's Amanda?" I asked quickly.

She continued to work at the dishes. She turned her face off to the side, made a sniffling sound. "Upstairs."

"She's all right?"

Sarah nodded. "She's sleeping."

I reached forward and turned off the water. In the absence of its rushing, the kitchen took on a sudden silence, and it seemed to add a peculiar weight to the moment, which frightened me.

"What's going on?" I asked. I slid my arm along her back until I had her in a half embrace. She stood there rigid for a second, her hands draped over the edge of the sink, as if they'd been broken at the wrists, then she let herself fall toward me, let a sob work its way raggedly up through her chest. I hugged her with both arms.

She cried for a while, returning my embrace, her wet hands dripping soapy water down my neck and onto the back of my suit.

"It's all right," I whispered. "It's all right."

When she quieted down, I brought her over to the table.

"I can't work at the library anymore," she said, sitting down.

"They fired you?" I couldn't imagine how she could possibly be fired from the library.

She shook her head. "They asked me not to bring Amanda anymore. People were complaining about the noise." She wiped at her cheek with her hand. "They said I can come back after she's outgrown her crying."

I leaned forward and took her by the hand. "It's not like you really need the job right now."

"I know. It's just..."

"We've got enough money without it." I smiled.

"I know," she said again.

"It doesn't really seem like it's worth crying over."

"Oh, Hank. I'm not crying over that."

I looked at her in surprise. "What're you crying for?"

She wiped at her face again. Then she shut her eyes. "It's complicated. It's all sorts of things put together."

"Is it about what we've done?"

My voice must've come out strange -- nervous maybe, or scared -- because she opened her eyes at the sound of it. She looked directly at me, as if she were appraising me. Then she shook her head.

"It's nothing," she said. "It's just me being tired."

THAT weekend a thaw arrived.

Saturday the temperature rose to fifty degrees, and everything, the whole world, began to melt in a sudden dripping, sliding, oozing rush. Large, perfectly white clouds floated across the sky throughout the afternoon, pushed gently northward by the moist touch of a southerly wind. The air smelled deceptively of spring.

Sunday was even warmer; the thermometer eased its way up into the lower sixties, accelerating the melting. By late morning, the ground had begun to reappear in small squares and slashes the size of footprints, dark against the dirty whiteness of the retreating snow, and in the evening, when I went out to untie the dog and put him in the garage, I found him sitting in an inch-deep puddle of mud. The earth was unveiling itself.

I had trouble falling asleep that night. Water dripped loudly from the eaves beyond the window with an incessant ticktock sound. The house creaked and moaned. There was a sense of movement in the air, of things breaking free, coming undone.

I lay in bed and tried to trick my body into fatigue, consciously relaxing muscles, forcing my breathing to slow and deepen, but every time I shut my eyes, a vivid image of the plane floated up before me. It was lying on its belly in the orchard, its wings and fuselage free of snow, its metal skin glinting brightly in the sunshine, like a beacon, attracting the eye. Looking down at it in my head, I could sense it waiting, could feel its impatience. It was yearning to be found.

ON WEDNESDAY of that week, a strange thing happened to me. I was sitting at my desk, working on an account discrepancy, when I heard Jacob's voice out in the lobby.

It wasn't his voice, of course, I knew that, but its tone and pitch were so eerily familiar that I couldn't resist rising from my chair, walking quietly over to my door, opening it, and peeking out.

There was a fat man there, a man I'd never seen before. He wasn't a customer; he'd merely come inside to ask for directions.

He didn't look at all like Jacob. He was old, balding, with a thick, drooping mustache, and as I watched him speak, watched the unfamiliar gestures of his hands, the way his face moved above his mouth, the illusion that he was using Jacob's voice gradually disappeared. It started to sound a little too throaty, a little too rough. It was an old man's voice.

But then I shut my eyes, and it instantly became my brother's once again. I stood there very still, focusing my whole mind on the sound of it, and, listening, I felt an irresistible surge of sadness and loss rise up within myself. It was overwhelming, stronger than anything I'd ever felt before, so powerful that it had an actual physical effect on me, like a wave of nausea. I bent forward slightly at the waist, as if I'd been hit in the stomach.

"Mr. Mitchell?" I heard.

I opened my eyes, straightened my body. Cheryl was standing behind the checkout counter, staring at me with an expression of grave concern. The fat man stood in the center of the lobby, his right hand touching the corner of his mustache.

"Are you all right?" Cheryl asked. She seemed as if she were about to come running toward me.

I tried quickly to recall the past few moments in my mind, to see if I'd made some sort of sound standing there, a groan, or a gasp, but everything was blank. "I'm fine," I said. I cleared my throat, smiled toward the fat man. He gave me a friendly nod, and I returned it.

Then I stepped back into my office and shut the door.

THAT evening I read an article in the paper about a giant confidence game that had been operating lately in the Midwest, bilking millions of dollars from unsuspecting investors.

A fake advertisement would be placed in the local paper, announcing a government sale of goods seized in drug raids. People would bid on this merchandise sight unseen, apparently believing that since the government was running the auction nothing fraudulent could be occurring. The con men would have several confederates mixed in with the crowd, to help artificially raise the bidding. Their victims would make payments by check, assuming that they'd bought things at less than 10 percent of their appraised value, then show up two weeks later to find that their purchases were nonexistent, simply photographs in a catalog.

I took this news with remarkable calm. My check had cleared the day before; I'd gone by the bank to see. My account balance was listed as $1,878.21. I'd given away $31,000, virtually our entire savings, but I couldn't force myself to believe it. It seemed like too horrible a thing to have happened so quietly. A calamity had struck, undoubtedly one of the worst I'd ever encountered, but it had arrived with such little fanfare, a tiny article in the middle of the paper, that I had trouble accepting it. I needed something more, needed to be woken from my sleep late at night by the ringing of the phone, needed the sound of sirens in the distance, needed a sudden flash of pain in the center of my chest.

I surprised myself, in fact, by feeling more reassurance than grief. As long as I maintained the image of the duffel bag in my mind, I could make the $31,000 seem inconsequential, a minor mistake, an unfortunate lapse in judgment. And I found the idea of someone stealing it, rather than my merely losing it, strangely comforting. There were men out there who were just as bad as me, even worse, a whole gang of them traveling the country and robbing innocent people of their savings. It made what I'd done seem a little more explicable, a little more natural. It made it seem easier to understand.

There was a tremor of fear, too, of course -- I can't deny that -- a cold, little kernel of terror mixed in with my reassurance. The safety net that I'd strung up to aid our descent into crime, the idea of burning the packets at the first sign of trouble, had been swept away. We could never relinquish the money now, no matter what might happen in the future, because without it we had nothing. My last illusion of freedom had been stripped from me -- I realized this with perfect lucidity -- and it was this thought that lay at the core of my fear. I was trapped: from here on out, all my decisions about the money would be dictated by its indispensability; they would become choices of necessity rather than desire.

When I'd finished studying the article, I tore it out of the paper and flushed it down the toilet. I didn't want Sarah to know until we were safe and far away.

LATE that night, while I was untying Mary Beth from his tree to take him into the garage, I noticed that the raw spots beneath his collar had grown dramatically worse. They were open sores now, bleeding, oozing runny streams of pus. Mud was plastered into the surrounding fur.

Seeing this, I felt a burst of compassion for him. I knelt beside him on the wet ground and tried to loosen his collar a notch, but as soon as I touched him, he tucked his head, and, very quickly, very neatly, like someone pruning a branch off a bush, bit me on my wrist.

I jumped up, shocked, and he cowered before me in the mud. I'd never been bitten by a dog before, and I wasn't sure how I ought to react. I considered kicking him, stomping into the house and leaving him to spend the night out in the yard but then decided against it. I wasn't really angry, I realized; I merely felt like I ought to be.

I carefully inspected my wrist. The sun was set, and the yard was dark, but just by the way it felt, I could tell that the dog hadn't broken the skin. It was only a nip, a sort of slap rather than a closed-fisted blow.

I watched Mary Beth lie down in the mud and begin to lick at his paws. Something, I knew, had to be done about him. He was sick, unhappy, like an animal in the zoo, tied up all day, imprisoned during the night.

The front light flicked on, and Sarah leaned out the door. "Hank?" she called.

I turned toward her, still holding my wrist in my hand.

"What're you doing?" she asked.

"The dog bit me."

"What?" She hadn't heard.

"Nothing," I said. I bent down and carefully took Mary Beth by his collar. He let me do it. "I'm putting him in the garage," I said to Sarah.

THURSDAY night, late, I opened my eyes and sat up in bed, my body literally shaking with an irrational, panic-filled sense of urgency. Deep in the depths of sleep, I'd devised a plan, and now I turned to wake Sarah and tell her.

"Sarah," I hissed, shaking her shoulder.

She rolled away from my hand. "Stop it." She groaned.

I turned on the light and pulled her toward me. "Sarah," I whispered, staring down at her, waiting for her eyes to open. When they did, I said, "I know how to get rid of the plane."

"What?" She glanced toward Amanda's crib, then blinked up at me, her face still half asleep.

"I'm going to rent a blowtorch. We'll take it out into the woods and cut the plane into little pieces."

"A blowtorch?"

"We'll bury the pieces in the woods."

She stared at me, trying to grasp what I was talking about.

"It's the last piece of evidence," I said. "Once it's gone, we'll have nothing left to worry about."

Sarah sat up in bed. She brushed her hair from her face. "You want to cut up the plane?"

"We have to do it before someone discovers it." I paused, thinking. "We can do it tomorrow. I'll take the day off. We'll call around to find a place that rents--"

"Hank," she said.

There was something about her voice that made me stop and look at her. Her face was frightened. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Listen to yourself. Listen to how you sound."

I stared blankly at her.

"You sound crazy. We can't take a blowtorch out into the woods to cut up the plane. That's insane."

As soon as I heard her say this, I realized that she was right. It suddenly seemed absurd, as if I'd been talking in my sleep, babbling like a child.

"We've got to calm down," she said. "We can't let things get to us."

"I was only--"

"We've got to stop this. What we've done, we've done. Now we just have to live our lives."

I tried to touch her hand, to show her that everything was all right, that I was in control, but she pulled away.

"If we keep on like this," she said, "we'll end up losing everything."

Amanda made a short crying sound, then stopped. We both glanced toward the crib.

"We'll end up confessing," Sarah whispered.

I shook my head. "I'm not going to confess."

"We're so close, Hank. Somebody'll find the plane soon, there'll be a big commotion, and then people'll start to forget. As soon as that happens, we'll be able to leave. We'll just take the money and leave."

She shut her eyes, as if to picture us leaving. Then she opened them again.

"The money's right here." She patted the bed with her hand. "Right beneath us. It's ours if we can keep it."

I stared at her. The light on the night table made a little golden cloud out of her hair, so that it looked like she had a halo.

"But don't you feel bad sometimes?" I asked.

"Bad?"

"About what we've done?"

"Of course," she said. "I feel bad all the time."

I nodded, relieved to hear her admit this.

"We have to live with it, though. We have to treat it just like any other grief."

"But it's not just like any other grief. I killed my brother."

"It wasn't your fault, Hank. You didn't choose to do it. You have to believe that." She reached forward to touch my arm. "It's the truth."

I didn't say anything, and she pressed down on my arm, pinching my skin.

"Do you understand?" she said.

She stared at me, squeezing my arm until I nodded. Then she glanced at the clock. Her head slipped away from the light, and her halo disappeared. It was 3:17 in the morning. I was fully awake now; my thoughts were clear. In my mind, I repeated her words: It wasn't your fault.

"Come here," she said. She held out her arms for a hug. I leaned forward into her body, and when she got a grip on me, she dragged me slowly toward the mattress.

"Everything's going to be all right," she whispered. "I promise." She waited a moment, as if to make sure that I wasn't going to try to sit up again; then she rolled away and turned out the light.

As we lay there in the darkness, Mary Beth began to howl.

"I'm going to shoot him," I said. "I'm going to put him out of his misery."

"Oh, Hank." Sarah sighed, already halfway into sleep. She was lying a few inches to my right, the sheets growing cool in the gap between us. "We're all through with shooting now."

Sometime before daybreak, winter returned. A wind came up from the north, and the air turned cold.

Friday morning, as I made my way out across the farm country in to work, it started to snow.

9

THE SNOW continued to fall throughout the morning and into the afternoon -- heavy, incessant, as if it were being thrown from the sky. The customers brought it into Raikley's, brushing it from their shoulders and stamping it from their boots, so that it collected on the tiles before the door, melting into little puddles. Everyone seemed excited by it, even giddy: the suddenness of its arrival, the rapidity with which it fell, the ghostly silence that it draped across the town. There was a manic quality to the voices I heard drifting into my office from the lobby, a holidaylike tone, an extravagant friendliness and good cheer.

For me, though, the storm acted not as a stimulant but as a sedative. It calmed and reassured me. Ignoring my work, I spent much of the morning sitting at my desk, staring out the window. I watched the snow fall on the town, softening the contours of the cars and buildings, blocking out the colors, making everything white, uniform, featureless. I watched it fall on the cemetery across the road, erasing the black rectangles of Jacob's and Lou's and Nancy's and Sonny's graves. And when I closed my eyes, I pictured it falling in the nature preserve, drifting quietly down through the stunted trees of the orchard, and slowly, flake by flake, burying the plane.

I accepted Sarah's logic -- eventually the wreck had to be discovered. It had to be found and then forgotten, so that we could leave and begin our new lives. But I knew, too, that the longer it took to surface, the safer we would be. I prayed silently: Let no one connect the shootings with the money on the plane. Let no one remember the one when they think of the other.

While I watched the storm, I daydreamed about where we'd go and how we'd live. I doodled on a pad -- miniature sailboats, Concorde jets, the names of foreign countries. I imagined myself making love with Sarah on an island beach, pictured myself surprising her with expensive presents from native bazaars: exotic perfumes, tiny statues of ivory and wood, jewels of every size and color.

All day the snow continued unabated, filling in the morning's footprints, drifting back across the freshly plowed road.

ABOUT a half hour before closing, I got a call from Sheriff Jenkins.

"Howdy, Hank. You busy?"

"Not really," I said. "Just tidying things up for the weekend."

"Think you could pop over to my office real quick? I got somebody here you might be able to help."

"And who's that?"

"A man by the name of Neal Baxter. He's from the FBI."

WALKING across the street through the snow, I thought, This has nothing to do with what I've done. They wouldn't call me over to arrest me; they'd come to Raikley's and get me themselves.

Carl's office was in the town hall, a squat, two-story, brick building with a short flight of concrete steps leading up to its double doors. I paused at the foot of these steps, beside the aluminum flagpole, and tried quickly to gather myself together. I brushed the snow from my hair. I unbuttoned my overcoat and straightened my tie.

Carl met me in the entranceway. It seemed as though he'd been waiting for me there. He was smiling; he greeted me like an old friend. He took me by the arm and led me off to the left, toward his office.

He had two offices really, a large outer one and a smaller inner one. His wife, Linda, a short woman with a pretty face, was working in the outer one, typing at a desk. She smiled at me as we came in, and whispered hello. I smiled back. Through the open doorway beyond her, I could see a man sitting with his back to me. He was tall and crew cut and dressed in a dark gray suit.

I followed Carl into the inner office, and he shut the door behind us, blocking out the sound of Linda's typing. There was very little in the tiny room -- a wooden desk, three plastic chairs, a row of filing cabinets along the wall opposite the window. Two pictures were propped up on top of the cabinets: one of Linda holding a cat in her lap; another of the entire Jenkins clan -- children, grandchildren, cousins, nephews, nieces, in-laws -- all crowded together on a lawn in front of a yellow house with blue shutters. The desk was clean, orderly. A little American flag in a plastic stand sat beside a tin can full of yellow pencils and a stone paperweight without any papers to weigh down. Behind the desk, hanging from a wall, was a glass-doored gun cabinet.

"This is Agent Baxter," Carl said.

The man rose from his chair, turning to face me. He leaned forward to shake my hand, wiping his own along the side of his pant leg before he did so. He was lean, broad shouldered, with a square face and a flat nose, like a boxer's. His handshake was short, firm, decisive, and he held my eye while Carl introduced us. I found him strangely familiar for some reason, as if he resembled a movie star, or an athlete, but I couldn't exactly place it; the resemblance was too vague, just the bare trace of a memory. He was polished; there was a glow about him, a sheen of calm competence.

We sat down, and Carl said, "You remember earlier this winter, when I saw you out by the nature preserve?"

"Yes," I said, a fistlike ball of panic forming at the center of my chest.

"Didn't Jacob say you guys had heard a plane with engine trouble a few days before?"

I nodded.

"Why don't you tell Agent Baxter what you heard?"

I could see no way to avoid it, no way to lie or evade the question, so I did exactly as Carl asked. I dragged up Jacob's story and laid it out for the FBI man. "It was snowing," I said. "Hard, like today, so we weren't really sure, but it sounded like an engine coughing on and off. We pulled over to the edge of the road to listen, but we didn't hear anything more -- no crash, no engine, nothing."

Neither Carl nor Agent Baxter spoke.

"It was probably just a snowmobile," I said.

Agent Baxter had a little black book open in his lap. He was taking notes. "Do you remember the date?" he asked.

"We saw the sheriff on New Year's Eve. It happened a few days before that."

"You said it was near where I saw you?" Carl asked. "Out by Anders Park?"

"That's right."

"Which side were you driving on?"

"The south side. Near the center."

"By the Pederson place?"

I nodded, my heartbeat rising, forcing its way up into my temples.

"Would you be willing to take us out there?" Agent Baxter asked.

I gave him a confused look. "To the nature preserve?"

"We'd have to go in the morning," Carl said. "After the storm passes."

My overcoat was dripping melted snow onto the floor. I started to take it off but stopped myself when I saw how my hands trembled once they were free from my lap.

"What's going on?" I asked.

There was a short silence while the two lawmen seemed to debate who should speak, and what exactly ought to be revealed. Finally Agent Baxter, with just the slightest, the most subtle of movements, gave Carl a little shrug.

"The FBI's looking for a plane," Carl said.

"This is all confidential, of course," the agent said.

"I'm sure Hank understands that."

The FBI man sat back in his chair, crossing his legs. His shoes were shiny and black, their leather spattered with little water spots from walking through the snow. He gave me a long, penetrating look.

"Last July," he said, "an armored car was robbed as it was leaving the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank. From the start we suspected that it was an inside job, but nothing came of it until this past December, when the car's driver was arrested for raping an old girlfriend. After his lawyer told him that he might get twenty-five years, he jumped on the phone to us, saying he wanted to turn state's evidence."

"He handed over his friends," I said.

"That's right. He was mad anyway because they took off after the heist without giving him his share, so he fingered them, and we got his charges reduced to a misdemeanor."

"And you caught the robbers?"

"We traced them to Detroit, their hometown, and set up a surveillance team outside their apartment."

"A surveillance team? Why didn't you just arrest them?"

"We wanted to make sure we got the money, too. There was no evidence to indicate that they'd even tapped into it yet. They both had jobs and were living together in a rathole apartment down by the stadium, so we assumed the money was hidden somewhere, that they were waiting to make sure no one was looking for them. Unfortunately, our surveillance was sloppy, and the suspects bolted. We caught one of them the next day trying to cross into Canada, but the other one disappeared. We'd almost given up on him when an informant called my partner and told him that the suspect was about to take off in a small plane from an airfield outside of Detroit. We rushed over there and arrived just in time to see the plane lift off from the ground."

"You couldn't follow it?" I asked.

"There was no reason to."

"They knew where he was going," Carl said. He seemed very pleased by this idea. He sat back in his chair and grinned at the FBI man. Agent Baxter ignored him.

"My partner's informant gave us the suspect's destination. It was another small airfield, this one just north of Cincinnati." The agent paused, staring at me, his face collapsing into a frown. "Unfortunately, the plane never arrived."

"Maybe he went somewhere else."

"It's possible, but doubtful. For various reasons, we consider our informant's word to be virtually incontestable."

"They think he crashed on the way," Carl said. "They're covering his route, going over it town by town."

"Was the money on the plane?" I asked.

"We assume so," the agent said.

"How much?"

Agent Baxter glanced toward Carl. Then he looked at me.

"Several million dollars."

I let out a low whistle and raised my eyebrows, feigning disbelief.

"We wanted to head out around nine tomorrow morning," Carl said, "after the weather clears. Can you make it then?"

"I didn't see a plane go down, Carl. I just heard an engine."

They stared at me, waiting.

"I mean, I really don't think we'd find anything out there."

"We realize it's a long shot, Mr. Mitchell," Agent Baxter said. "But we've reached the point in our investigation where all we have are long shots."

"It's just that I can't show you anything. I didn't even get out of the car. You could simply drive along Anders Park Road and see everything I did."

"We'd still appreciate it if you came. You'd be surprised at what you might remember once you got there."

"Is nine o'clock bad for you?" Carl asked. "We can make it earlier if you want."

I felt my head shake, as if of its own volition.

Carl grinned at me. "I'll treat you to a cup of coffee when we get back."

As I got up to leave, Agent Baxter said, "I don't think I can put too much emphasis on the confidentiality of all this, Mr. Mitchell. The whole thing's something of an embarrassment to the Bureau. We'd be very disappointed if the press were to get ahold of it somehow."

Carl interrupted before I could respond. "Press, hell," he said. "There's four million dollars sitting in those woods. Word gets out, and we'll have a goddamn treasure hunt on our hands."

He laughed and threw me a parting Lou-like wink. Agent Baxter smiled icily.

SARAH already had dinner prepared when I got home.

"A robbery?" she said, when I told her what had happened. She shook her head. "No way."

I was sitting across from her at the kitchen table, watching her serve herself a leg of barbecued chicken. I already had one on my plate. "What do you mean, no way?"

"It doesn't make sense, Hank. The kidnapping made sense."

"This isn't a guess, Sarah. It's not a theory. I talked to a man from the FBI, and he told me where it's from."

She frowned down at her plate, pushing at her rice with her fork, mixing it into her peas. The baby was on the floor beside us, lying in her Portacrib. She looked like she always did lately, like she was about to cry.

"He's searching for a plane full of money," I said. "You can't tell me there's more than one of those around here."

"It's hundred-dollar bills, Hank. If it were an armored car, there'd be other denominations. There'd be fifties and twenties and tens."

"You aren't listening. I just told you, I talked to him myself."

"It's old money. If it were coming out of a Federal Reserve bank, it'd be new. They burn old bills there and replace them with fresh ones."

"So you're telling me he's lying?"

She didn't seem to hear me. She was biting at her lip, her head turned toward the baby. Suddenly she gave me an excited look. "Did he show you his badge?"

"Why would he show me his badge?"

She dropped her fork onto her plate, pushed back her chair, and ran from the room.

"Sarah?" I called after her, bewildered.

"Wait," she yelled over her shoulder.

As soon as she left the room, the baby began to cry. I hardly even looked at her. I was trying to devise a way to get the money back into the plane without leaving any tracks. I scraped at my chicken with my knife, tearing strips of meat from the bone.

Amanda increased her volume, her body tightening like a fist, her face flooding a dark crimson.

"Shhh," I whispered. I stared down at my slowly cooling food. I'd have to go during the night, I realized, right after dinner, before it stopped snowing. I'd have to do it in the dark. I'd keep three packets, just enough to cover what I'd lost on the condominium, and give everything else back.

Sarah returned a moment later, carrying a sheet of paper. She sat down with an exultant look on her face, her cheeks flushed with it, the paper held out toward me like a gift.

I took it from her, recognizing it immediately. It was the photocopy of the article about the kidnapping.

"What?" I said.

She grinned at me. "It's him, isn't it?" She leaned down and touched Amanda's face with the back of her hand. The baby stopped crying.

I examined the piece of paper. It was the third article, the one with the photographs. I studied them left to right -- first the younger brother, then the older, then the freeze-frame of the younger one executing the security guard.

"He's looking for his brother," Sarah said.

My eyes strayed back to the center picture and for one brief, intense instant, I was flooded with a sense of recognition. There was something familiar about the man's eyes, about the way his cheeks sloped down toward his mouth, the way he held his head on his shoulders. But then, just as quickly, it was gone, overwhelmed by his other features -- his beard and thick hair, the stockiness of his frame, the mug-shot frown on his face.

"You're saying it's Vernon," I said. "The older one." I laid the piece of paper on the table between us.

She nodded, still smiling. Neither of us had eaten any of our food yet. It was cold now, the sauce on the chicken growing viscid. I scrutinized the photo, willing myself to recognize Agent Baxter in Vernon Bokovsky's features. I concentrated, squinting, and briefly managed to make him appear, but again it was only for a second. The photo was several years old. It was blurry, grainy, heavily shadowed.

"It's not him," I said. "The guy I met today was skinnier." I pushed the article back across the table toward Sarah. "He had a crew cut, and no beard."

"Maybe he's lost weight, Hank. Maybe he cut his hair and shaved his beard." She looked from me to the article, then back again. "You can't tell me it's impossible."

"I'm just saying that it doesn't seem like it's him."

"It's got to be him. I know it."

"He seemed like an FBI guy, Sarah. He had that professional look, like a movie star. Poised, perfectly groomed, a nice dark suit..."

"Anybody can do that," she said impatiently. She slapped her hand at the article. "He impersonated a cop to kidnap the girl. Why wouldn't he fake being an FBI agent to get back the ransom?"

"But it'd be such a risk. He'd have to go through every town from here to Cincinnati, show up in all these different police stations, each of which would probably have his face tacked up somewhere on a poster. It'd be like he was asking to get caught."

"Put yourself in his shoes," Sarah said. "Your brother takes off in a plane with all that money and disappears. You think he's crashed, but you wait and wait, and nothing's reported. Wouldn't you go out and try to find him?"

I thought about it, staring across the table at the photos.

"You couldn't just give it up. You'd have to at least try and get it back."

"He's thinner," I said quietly.

"Think about what we've already done to keep the money. What he's doing is nothing compared to that."

"You're wrong, Sarah. You're just making this up."

"Would the real FBI try to find a plane like this? Send an agent in a car all the way across the state? Wouldn't they just issue some sort of announcement?"

"They don't want it leaked to the press."

"Then they'd call on the phone. They wouldn't send an agent."

"Why wouldn't the kidnapper call, then? It'd be safer. There'd be less chance of getting caught."

She shook her head. "He wants to be there. He wants to be able to control things, convince people with the way he's dressed, the way he acts. Like he convinced you. He can't do that on the phone."

I thought back over my interview with Agent Baxter, searching for clues. I pictured him wiping his palm on his pant leg before he shook my hand, like it was clammy with sweat. I remembered how insistent he'd been about confidentiality, keeping the story away from the press.

"I don't know..."

"You have to use your imagination, Hank. You have to picture him with more hair, with a beard."

"Sarah." I sighed. "Does it even matter?"

She picked up her fork and poked at her chicken. "What do you mean?" Her voice was hesitant with suspicion.

"If we were to decide that he was really the kidnapper, would it change what I did tomorrow?"

She cut off a square of chicken and put it into her mouth. She chewed slowly, pausing between bites, as if she were afraid it might be poisoned. "Of course," she said.

"Let's say we agree that he's really an FBI agent."

"But we don't."

"Just hypothetically. For the sake of argument."

"All right," she said. Her fork was poised over her plate. I could tell that she was waiting to contradict me.

"What would I do?"

"You'd take him to the plane."

"If I were going to take him to the plane, I'd have to go back tonight and return the money."

She set her fork down on her plate. It made a clinking sound when it hit. "Return the money?"

"They know it's on the plane. There's no excuse for any of it to be missing."

She stared across the table at me, as if waiting for something more. "You can't give it back," she said.

"We'd have to, Sarah. I'd be the only one they'd suspect. As soon as we left town, they'd know."

"But after all you've done? You'd just let it go?"

"After all we've done," I corrected her.

She ignored me. "You wouldn't have to put the money back, Hank. If you guided him to the plane, you'd be beyond suspicion. There'd be no tracks in the surrounding snow, so it'd look like no one had been there. He'd find the five hundred thousand and just assume that his informant was wrong, that the pilot had left the rest behind somewhere."

I pondered that. It seemed to make sense. It was a risk, but no more of a risk than sneaking back to return the money would be.

"Okay," I said. "Let's say that if we decide he's really from the FBI, I'll brave it out and take him to the plane."

She nodded.

"Now what'll I do if we decide he's actually the kidnapper?"

"You won't go."

"Because?"

"Because he's a murderer. He killed all those people -- the guards and the chauffeur and the maid and the girl. You'll call Carl and make up an excuse. You'll say that the baby's sick and you have to take her to a doctor."

"I'm a murderer, too, Sarah. Being a murderer doesn't necessarily mean anything."

"As soon as he sees the plane, he'll shoot you both. That's why he wants you to go, so he can get rid of all the witnesses."

"If I don't go, Carl'll take him by himself."

"And?"

"And, by your logic, if they find the plane, this guy'll shoot him."

She thought about that. When she spoke, her voice was low and ashamed sounding. "That wouldn't be such a bad thing for us," she said. "Any violence he does will only help cover up our involvement with the plane. It'll push us off to the edge."

"But if we were sure it was Vernon, it'd be like we were setting Carl up. It'd be just as bad as shooting him ourselves."

"They're the only two people who can threaten us. They're the only ones who can tie you to the plane."

"Wouldn't you feel bad, though? If Carl were killed like that?"

"It's not like I'm asking you to shoot him, Hank. I just want you to stay away."

"But if we know..."

"What do you want to do? You want to warn Carl?"

"Doesn't it seem like we ought to?"

"And what would you say to him? How would you explain your suspicions?"

I frowned down at my plate. She was right: there was no way I could warn him without revealing my knowledge of the plane's cargo.

"He might not even shoot him," Sarah said. "We're just guessing about that. He might just take the money and disappear."

I didn't really believe this, and I don't think she did either. We both picked at our food.

"You don't have a choice, Hank."

I sighed. It had come down to that again -- our telling ourselves that we didn't have a choice. "It's a moot point anyway," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we won't know if it's him until after it's over."

Sarah stared down at Amanda, thinking this through. The baby's arms were extended stiffly into the air, one pointing toward me, the other toward her mother. It looked as if she were trying to hold our hands, and, for a moment, I was tempted to reach out and touch her. I resisted, though; I knew it would only make her cry.

"We can call the FBI office in Detroit," Sarah said. "We can ask for an Agent Baxter."

"It's too late; they'll be closed by now."

"We can call in the morning."

"I'm meeting them at nine. They won't be open before that."

"You can stall them for a bit. I'll call from here, and then you can run over to your office and call me to find out."

"And if there's no Agent Baxter?"

"Then you won't go. You'll tell Carl that I just called, that the baby's sick and you have to go home."

"And if there is one?"

"Then you'll go. You'll take them to the plane."

I frowned. "It's a risk either way, isn't it?"

"But at least something's going to happen. The waiting's over; it's all going to come out now."

The baby let out a short yelp, an exploratory sound. Sarah reached down and touched her hand. My dinner sat before me, cold and uneaten.

"We'll leave soon," Sarah said, as if she were comforting Amanda rather than me. "We'll leave and everything'll be all right. We'll take our money and change our names and disappear, and everything'll be all right."

SOMETIME after midnight, I opened my eyes to the sound of Amanda waking up. She always signaled the onset of a nocturnal crying spell with several minutes of quiet gurgling -- a choking babbling mixed with little hiccoughs. She was doing it now, building up from a soft undertone, something close to the idling of a car's engine, toward what I knew would momentarily be a sudden, window-rattling shriek of distress.

I slipped from beneath the covers, padded barefoot across the room, and scooped her out of her crib. Sarah was lying on her stomach in the bed, and as I snuck away, she reached out her hand, pulling my empty pillow toward her chest.

I rocked the baby in my arms.

"Shhh," I whispered.

She was too far along to be comforted so easily, though; she let me know this with a single avian squawk, like an extended burp, and I took her quickly across the hall into the guest room, to keep her from waking her mother. I climbed onto the bed there, pulling the comforter around us.

I'd come to enjoy these late-night sessions with Amanda. They were our sole form of bodily contact; during the day she'd begin to shriek as soon as I touched her. Only at night could I hold her in my arms, or stroke her face, or kiss her softly on the forehead. Only at night could I soothe her, quiet her, make her fall asleep.

I was pained by her constant crying; it weighed on me like a feeling of guilt. Whenever she was left alone with me, she immediately started to weep. Our pediatrician, though he seemed hesitant to say when it might end, claimed that it was just a phase, a brief period of increased sensitivity to her environment. I understood this and trusted his opinion, but still -- despite my efforts not to -- I couldn't help letting it affect my feelings for her. I was developing a cruel ambivalence around her, so that while I was filled with both warmth and pity in her presence, I was also faintly repulsed, as if her crying were symbolic of some budding character flaw, an innate pettiness and irritability, a judgment of me, a refusal to accept my love.

At night, for some reason, all this disappeared. She accepted me, and I was flooded with love for her. I'd tuck my head down close to her face and inhale the soft, soapy fragrance of her body. I'd cuddle her against my chest, let her hands grip at my skin, explore my nose, my eyes, my ears.

"Shhh," I said now, and whispered her name.

The room was cold, its corners sunk in shadow. I'd left the door open, and through it I could see the hallway. Its bare white wall seemed to glow in the darkness.

Very slowly, Amanda began to quiet. She twisted her head back and forth on her neck, her hands opening and closing in rhythm with her breathing. She pressed her feet up against my ribs.

Twice now, I'd dreamed that she could talk. Both times she was in her Portacrib by the kitchen table, eating with a fork and knife. She babbled nonsense, her voice surprisingly deep and throaty, her eyes staring straight in front of her, as if she were talking into a TV camera. She made lists: lists of colors -- blue, yellow, orange, purple, green, black; lists of cars -- Pontiac, Mercedes, Chevrolet, Jaguar, Toyota, Volkswagen; lists of trees -- sycamore, plum, willow, oak, buckeye, myrtle. Sarah and I listened in stunned silence while she lay there before us, smiling, the words literally tumbling from her lips. Then she listed names -- Pederson, Sonny, Nancy, Lou, Jacob...When she got to Jacob, I stood up and slapped her in the face. Both times that's how the dream ended -- I woke up with the slap -- and each time I was left with the inescapable feeling that if I hadn't struck her, she would've kept reciting names, spitting them out, one after the other. The list would never have ended.

As she quieted down, I began to hear the house. The snow had passed, and a wind had come up. The walls creaked with it, a boatlike sound. When it gusted, it made the windows shake. Shivering, I pulled the comforter more tightly around us, supporting Amanda's weight within its folds.

I knew that I could take her back into the bedroom now, that she was about to fall asleep, but for some reason I didn't want to. I wanted to stay there for a while yet, with her quiet in my arms.

This was Jacob's bed. The thought came unbidden, a surprise, and following right behind it was an image of him lying there, drunk, and of me bending over him to kiss him good night. Without thinking, I held the quilt to my nose and inhaled, trying to believe that I could smell him in it, though of course I couldn't.

Judas kiss, he'd whispered.

Outside, on the street, a snowplow passed, thudding and scraping. I glanced down at Amanda. She was limp in my arms, as if she were sleeping deeply, but her eyes were still open. I could see them shining in the darkness, like glass marbles.

When I looked forward to the approaching morning, I got a hard knot in my stomach. I couldn't escape the feeling that no matter what I decided to do, it would probably be a mistake.

The best solution, I realized suddenly, the utterly ruthless one, would be simply to take the money and run. I could abandon Sarah and Amanda, just head off into the night, alone. I could start up a different life from scratch, change my name, create a new identity. I closed my eyes and pictured myself purchasing a new car, something foreign and sporty and brightly colored, not worrying about financing or loans or payment schedules, simply counting out the money from my wad of hundred-dollar bills into the startled salesman's hand. I imagined myself driving off in this new car, living out of a suitcase, buying new clothes when the old ones got dirty, moving from hotel to hotel -- expensive ones with pools and saunas and weight rooms and king-size beds -- all the way across the country in a giant zigzag, moving on as soon as I grew tired of a place, westward or southward or eastward or northward, any direction I felt like as long as it was somewhere new, as long as it was away from here where I was now, home, Ohio, where I'd always been.

And why not? If I could kill my own brother, then I must be capable of anything. I must be evil.

Above me, in the attic, the wind made a moaning sound. I glanced down at Amanda, at the soft glimmer of her eyes.

I could kill her. I could wrap her in the quilt and smother her. I could take her by her ankles and beat her against the wall. I could squeeze her head between my hands until it popped. And I could kill Sarah, too, could sneak across the hallway and strangle her in her sleep, could suffocate her with her pillow, could smash in her face with my fists.

I pictured all of this in my mind, one image following quickly after the other. I could do it, I realized. If I could imagine it, if I could plan it out, then I could do it. It'd simply be a matter of my mind telling my hands what to do. Nothing was beyond me.

There was a rustling sound in the hall, and when I looked up, Sarah was in the doorway. She was wearing her robe, tying its belt in a loose knot as she stood there. Her hair was pinned back with a barrette.

"Hank?"

I gazed up at her, mute. The bloody images slowly slipped from my head, dreamlike, leaving little, shallow pools of guilt behind, like puddles after a rainstorm.

Of course not. The thought rippled through my mind, drifting down to its very depths and returning changed, an echo of the original. I love them both so terribly.

I bent my head and brushed Amanda's eyelashes with my lips. "She's having trouble falling asleep," I whispered.

Sarah stepped into the room, the floorboards creaking beneath her. She climbed up onto the bed with me, and I opened the quilt, enclosing her within it, my arm circling down around her waist. She wrapped her legs around my own, resting her head against my shoulder, so that it was just above Amanda's.

"You have to tell her a story," she said.

"I don't know any stories."

"Then you have to make one up."

I thought for a moment, but my mind was blank. "Help me," I whispered.

"Once upon a time there was a king and a queen." She paused, waiting for me to pick up.

"Once upon a time," I began, "there was a king and a queen."

"A beautiful queen."

"A beautiful queen" -- I nodded -- "and a very wise king. They lived in a castle by a river, and it was surrounded by fields."

I trailed off, at a loss.

"Were they rich?"

"No. They were just normal. They were like all the other kings and queens."

"Did the king fight in battles?"

"Only when he had to."

"Tell a story about one of his battles."

I thought for nearly a minute. Then I got an idea that seemed, as I lay there in the darkness, like it might be clever.

"One day," I said, "the king was out walking in the forest and he stumbled upon an old wooden box. At first he thought it was a coffin. It was shaped like one, and its lid was nailed shut, but it wasn't buried, it was just lying in the grass. And it was heavier than a coffin would be. When the king tried to pick it up, he strained his back."

"What was in it?" Sarah asked, but I ignored her.

"The king went home, and he told the beautiful queen about the box. 'Queen,' he said..."

"Beloved," Sarah whispered.

"Beloved?"

"That's what they call each other. Beloved."

"'Beloved,' the king said, 'I found a heavy box in the forest. Come help me carry it home.' So she did, and they brought it back to the castle, and the king called two of his dukes into the throne room to help him pry off the lid."

"And there was a witch inside," Sarah said.

"No. It was full of gold. Gleaming bars of gold."

"Gold?" she prompted me, but I hesitated. I was realizing that it might not be so clever after all.

"How much gold?"

"A lot," I said. "More than they ever would've dreamed of owning."

"And were they excited?"

"They were more frightened than excited. They realized that the neighboring kings and queens would be jealous of them now, and would attack with their armies to steal the treasure. They'd have to recruit an army of their own and dig a new moat before letting anyone know about the gold. Otherwise they'd lose not only it but their whole kingdom, too. So the king warned the two dukes not to speak of what they'd seen, and as a reward for their silence, he promised them each a portion of the treasure."

I paused, to see if she'd caught on yet. She hadn't, though: she was lying very still, waiting for me to continue.

"Days passed, and the king began to dig his new moat. But then, quite suddenly, he started to hear distressing rumors in his court, rumors about the gold. The queen heard the rumors too, and she came to see him. 'Something must be done about the dukes, Beloved,' she said."

"Oh, Hank." Sarah sighed, her voice sounding pained.

"The king agreed, and they decided to kill the dukes. But since they couldn't simply execute them without confirming the court rumors, they organized a jousting tournament and arranged for the dukes to die during the contest, apparently accidentally, one run through with a lance, the other trampled by his horse."

"Was one of them the king's brother?"

I started to shake my head, but then I stopped. "Yes."

"And was the money safe then?"

"The gold."

"Was the gold safe? Did they build the moat and recruit their army?"

"No. Right after they murdered the dukes, their neighbors appeared with their armies and arrayed them on the fields around the castle."

I fell silent. When I glanced down, I saw that Amanda was staring directly at me. She'd been listening to my voice. The room was dark and cold, but we were warm together beneath the quilt.

I felt Sarah's hand slide across my stomach toward the baby, and watched her as she stroked the infant's forehead with her fingertips. "How does it end?" she asked. Her head was heavy against my shoulder, like a stone.

"The king went off alone to think. When he returned, he found the queen on the battlement of their castle. He was worn out with keeping his secret. His face was pale; his lips trembled when he bent to kiss her hand. 'Perhaps, Beloved,' he said, 'we shouldn't have opened the box. Perhaps we should've left well enough alone.'"

"The queen kisses the king on his forehead," Sarah said, lifting herself so she could kiss me on my forehead. "She says, 'Beloved, it's too late to question things like that. The armies are arrayed for battle.' She waves her arm out over the edge of the battlement, toward the campfires which dot the fields for as far as the eye can see."

"When was the time to question things?"

"In the beginning, Beloved. Before the box was opened."

"But we didn't do it then. We didn't know what we know now."

She craned back her head, trying to see my face in the darkness. "Would you really give it up? If there was a way you could?"

I was silent for a moment. When I spoke, I didn't answer her question. I simply whispered, "I should've turned it in right from the start."

Sarah didn't respond to that, she just snuggled closer. The baby had fallen asleep, a soft warmth against my chest.

"It's too late now, Hank," Sarah whispered. "It's too late."

10

EARLY the next morning, even before the sun appeared, the snow began to melt. It took its leave in the same manner it had arrived -- with a wild, headlong rush, as if the whole storm had been an embarrassing error on nature's part, a regrettable mistake that it wished to erase and forget as rapidly as possible. The temperature jumped into the upper forties, and a heavy mist rose from the ground, hiding the dawn. Groaning and hissing and dripping, the snow dissolved quickly into slush, and the slush even more quickly into water, so that by eight o'clock, when I drove into town, I was hindered not by ice on the roads but by mud.

Carl was in his office, alone, reading the paper.

"You're awful early, Hank," he said, when he looked up and found me standing in his doorway. "We aren't going to head off till nine."

His voice was loud in the empty office, cheery. As usual, he seemed absurdly pleased to see me, as if he were lonely and glad for the company. He poured me a cup of coffee, offered me a donut, and then we both sat down, his big wooden desk filling the space between us.

"I was planning on swinging by the feedstore real quick," I said, "but I forgot my key."

"They let you have a key?" Carl grinned. He had a mustache of powdered sugar on his upper lip.

I nodded. "My face inspires trust in people."

He studied my face, taking me more seriously than I'd intended. "Yes," he said. "That's probably true." He wiped the sugar off his lip, glanced out the window across the street toward Raikley's.

"I'm going to have to wait till Tom gets in," I said. "That'll be around nine, so I might hold you guys up for a few minutes."

He was still looking out at the feedstore, a slight frown on his lips. "That's all right," he said. "We can wait."

Beyond the window, the street was wet, slushy. A light rain had begun to fall.

"You really think there's a plane out there?" he asked.

I tilted my head, as if debating. "I doubt it. I think we would've heard a crash if it'd been a plane."

Carl gave a slow nod. "I imagine."

"I'm sort of sorry I even reported it in the first place. I'd hate to waste this guy's time on a false alarm."

"I don't think he minds. He seems fairly desperate, driving all over the state like this."

We fell silent for a moment. Then I asked, "Did he show you a badge or anything?"

"A badge?"

"I always wondered if they look like they do in the movies."

"And how's that?"

"You know, bright and silver with the big F-B-I stamped across the center."

"Sure they do."

"You saw his?"

He had to consider for a second. Then he shook his head. "No, but I've seen them before." He winked at me. "I'm sure he'd show it to you, if you asked him."

"No," I said. "I was just curious. I'd feel silly asking."

We both returned to our coffee. Carl took another bite from his donut, glancing down at the newspaper, and I stared out the window, watching as a pickup truck moved slowly past, a wet dog huddled up against the back of the cab. Inevitably it made me think of Mary Beth, caused a picture of him -- cold and uncomfortable, tied by a short length of rope to the hawthorn tree in my front yard -- to appear for a moment in my mind.

A strange thing happened then, as soon as this image took shape. Right there, not even trying, just sitting in Carl's office with the cup of coffee in my hands, a half-eaten donut perched on the desk before me, the room stuffy and over-warm, I thought of a plan. I thought of a way to make things right.

I turned from the window, my eyes straying up above Carl's head, toward the gun cabinet on the wall behind him.

"You think you could loan me a gun?" I asked.

He looked up from his paper, blinking. He had powder on his lip again. It made him look childish, unreliable. "A gun?"

"A pistol."

"What would you want with a pistol, Hank?" He seemed genuinely surprised.

"I've decided to put Jacob's dog down."

"You want to shoot him?"

"He hasn't really been able to adapt to Jacob's absence. He's just gotten meaner and meaner, so that now I don't think I can trust him around the baby." I paused, slipping in a lie. "He bit Sarah the other day."

"Bad?"

"Bad enough to give us a good scare. She's making me keep him out in the garage now."

"Why not just take him to a vet? Pete Miller'll put him down for you."

I pretended to consider this, but then, sighing, shook my head. "I have to do it on my own, Carl. The dog was Jacob's best friend. If it has to be done, he would've wanted me to do it myself."

"You ever shoot a dog before?"

"I've never shot anything before."

"It's a horrible feeling, Hank. It's one of the worst things in the world. If I were you, I'd take him to Pete."

"No," I said. "I wouldn't feel right doing that."

Carl frowned.

"It'd only be for a day, Carl. I'll do it this afternoon, and have it back to you by the time you leave tonight."

"You even know how to use a gun?"

"I'm sure you could show me whatever I need to know."

"You'll just take him out in a field somewhere and shoot him?"

"I thought I'd do it near our old place. Bury him there, too. I figure that's what Jacob would've wanted."

He considered for a moment, his face serious, frowning. "I guess I could loan you one for a day," he said.

"It'd be a big help, Carl."

He spun his chair around so that he was facing the gun cabinet. "You wanted a pistol?"

I nodded, standing up so I could get a better view. "How about that one?" I pointed at a black revolver hanging from a peg in the cabinet's bottom-right-hand corner. It looked like the one he wore on his belt.

Carl took a key ring from his pocket, unlocked the glass-paneled door, and removed the gun. Then he sat down, opened his bottom desk drawer, and took out a small cardboard box full of bullets. He flipped open the pistol's cylinder and showed me how to load it.

"You just aim along the barrel and squeeze the trigger," he said. "Don't jerk it, pull it easy." He handed the gun across the desk to me, along with two bullets. "The cylinder'll advance automatically. There's no safety or anything like that."

I set the bullets down on the desk, side by side.

"It's my old pistol," Carl said.

I hefted it in my hand. It had a dense, compact feel, like a fist of iron. It was cool and oily to the touch.

"It's like the one you carry now?" I asked.

"That's right, just older. Probably older than you even. I got it when I first took office."

We both sat back down. I placed the gun on the edge of the desk, beside the bullets. The bullets were smaller than I'd expected, with shiny silver jackets and gray conical heads. They didn't look like they belonged with the gun. They weren't sinister enough; they lacked the pistol's threatening quality, its overt potential for violence. They looked harmless, like toys. I leaned forward and picked one of them up. Its skin had the same oily surface as the gun.

"I'll probably want to take a couple of practice shots before I actually do it," I said.

Carl stared at me.

"You think I could have a few more?"

He opened the drawer again to take out the box. "How many?"

"How many does it hold?"

"Six."

"How about four more, then?"

He removed four bullets from the box and rolled them one at a time across the desk. I collected them in my hand.

Beyond the window, I saw Tom Butler appear, stoop shouldered against the misting rain, a bright orange poncho clinging to his body. He was unloading something from the trunk of his car.

"There's Tom," I said. I stood up, checked my watch. It was ten minutes till nine. "I should be able to finish by five after. Can you wait till then?"

Carl waved his arm at me. "Take your time, Hank. We're in no rush."

I started toward the door, but he stopped me.

"Wait," he said, and I turned, startled. He held out his hand. "Let me have the gun."

He picked up the bag of donuts and emptied it out onto the desk. There were three donuts inside, two powdered and one chocolate. The chocolate one rolled slowly across the desk's wooden surface, balanced for an instant on its edge, and then fell with a soft slap to the floor at my feet. I bent over to retrieve it. When I stood up, Carl was wrapping the pistol in the paper bag.

"You don't want to get it wet," he said.

I took it from him, nodding. The bag was pink and white, with blue lettering. LIZZIE'S DONUTS, it said, the words folding themselves slantwise across the pistol's butt.

"You'll be careful, won't you?" he asked. "Hate to loan you a gun and have you accidentally shoot yourself with it."

"I'll be careful," I said. "I promise."

AS I WAS making my way down the town hall steps, I caught sight of Agent Baxter up the street, just climbing from his car. I paused on the sidewalk, waiting for him to approach.

He strode toward me, his body erect, his head held up against the rain. His feet, bootless, cut straight through the piles of slushy snow scattered across the sidewalk. I watched him come, searching his face for similarities to the picture of Vernon Bokovsky. I scanned the close-set eyes, the small, flat nose, the low, squarish forehead, tried to draw in a beard along his jawline, to lengthen his hair and add weight to his cheeks, but I only had a second to do it. Then he was right in front of me, returning my gaze with a directness that unnerved me, made me feel awkward and suspicious. I looked away.

"Good morning, Mr. Mitchell," he said.

Confronted with his presence, I had an instant's tremor of panic. He was dressed exactly like the day before -- a dark suit; an overcoat; black, shiny shoes. His head was bare, his hands gloveless. He had that same confident air about him that I'd found so intimidating on our first meeting, and beside him -- dressed in my old jeans, a flannel shirt, my oversized parka -- I felt like a hick, a country bumpkin fresh from the fields.

The panic passed, however, almost as quickly as it had come. I looked at the man before me, his crew cut slick with rain, his skin raw looking from the cold, and I realized that the walk, the handshake, the practiced formality, were nothing but a show. He was cold and uncomfortable, and he was going to be miserable when he got out into the woods.

"The sheriff's inside," I said. "I've just got to run a quick errand across the street before we go." I waved my arm toward the feedstore. Tom Butler was standing outside its front door, a damp cardboard box clenched beneath one of his arms. He was searching his pockets for his keys. The poncho, all folds and billows, hindered him like a shroud.

As I started out into the street, the agent called me back.

"Hey," he said. "What's in the bag?"

I turned halfway toward him. He was standing before me on the sidewalk, the barest hint of a smile on his face. I glanced down at the bag. I was holding it clasped against my chest, the paper molded into the damp, unmistakable shape of a pistol.

"The bag?"

"I'd kill for a donut right now."

I smiled at him, relief rushing through my body like a drug. "They're inside," I said. "I just borrowed the bag so my camera wouldn't get wet."

He eyed the bag. "Camera?"

I nodded, the lie seeming to maintain itself of its own accord, without any conscious thought on my part. "I'd loaned it to the sheriff."

I started to turn back toward the road but then stopped myself. "Want me to take your picture?" I asked.

Agent Baxter retreated a step toward the doors above him. "No. That's okay."

"You sure? It's no problem." I started to unwrap the bag.

He backed another step away from me, shaking his head. "It'd just be a waste of your film."

I shrugged, retightening the paper. I put the bag back against my chest. "Your choice," I said.

Turning to cross the street, I caught sight of my reflection in the rain-smeared window of a parked car. Above my shoulder I could see Agent Baxter continuing on up toward the town hall's big wooden doors.

Before I'd even fully thought it out, I'd called his name.

"Vernon," I said.

His reflection, murky and dim on the wet glass, paused as it pushed at the doors. He turned his head halfway toward me. It was an ambiguous gesture; it allowed me to see in it whatever I wanted.

"Hey, Vernon," I yelled, waving across the street at Tom, who was just disappearing into Raikley's. I jogged out into the road. Tom turned to stare at me, the cardboard box still clamped beneath his arm. He waited for me, holding open the door.

"You call me Vernon?" he asked.

I brushed the rain from my parka, stomped my boots on the rubber mat, and gave him a confused look. "Vernon?" I shook my head. "I said, 'Wait, Tom.'"

When I glanced back across the street, the town hall steps were empty.

MY OFFICE was dim, the blinds drawn, but I didn't turn on a light. I went straight to my desk and took the pistol from the bag. It was covered with donut crumbs.

The clock on my wall said 9:01.

I shined the gun against my pant leg, removing the crumbs. Then I loaded the bullets.

When the clock flipped to 9:02, I picked up the phone to call Sarah.

The line was busy.

I put down the phone. I tried jamming the pistol into my jacket's right-hand pocket, but it was too big to fit: its butt protruded and its weight made the parka hang at an odd angle on my body.

I took off my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, and slid the pistol into my waistband, barrel first, fiddling with it until it felt secure. It was in the center of my belly, sharp and cold against my skin, its grip pointing to the right. Its weight there gave me a peculiar charge, a little burst of excitement, making me feel like a gunslinger in a movie. I buttoned up my shirt but left it untucked, so that it covered the gun. Then I put my parka back on.

The clock changed to 9:03.

I dialed home again. Sarah answered on the first ring.

"It's him," I said.

"What do you mean?"

I told her quickly about the badge, about how he hadn't wanted his picture taken, and how I'd called his name on the street. She listened quietly, not once questioning any of my deductions, but even so, as soon as I started to speak, I felt my sense of certainty begin to seep away. There were alternative explanations for everything that had occurred, I realized, all of which were just as plausible, if not more so, than the idea that Agent Baxter was an impostor.

"I called the FBI," Sarah said.

"And?"

"And they said he was on field duty."

It took me a second to absorb this. "They have an Agent Baxter?"

"That's what they said."

"You asked for Neal Baxter?"

"Yes. Agent Neal Baxter."

I stood there for a moment, frozen, the phone clamped against my face. I was shocked; I hadn't expected this at all.

"What do you think that means?" I asked.

Even over the phone I could sense her shrugging. "Maybe it's just a coincidence."

I tried to force myself to believe this, but it didn't work.

"Baxter's not that uncommon a name," she said.

I could feel the pistol digging into my gut. It felt alive, like it was kneading my stomach. I repositioned it with my hand.

"He might've even known there was a Neal Baxter," she said. "He might've picked the name on purpose."

"So you're saying it's him?"

"Think about what you just told me, Hank. About him not having a badge and all."

"I didn't say he didn't have a badge. All I said was that he didn't show one to Carl."

Sarah didn't respond to this. Behind her, in the background, I could hear Jacob's teddy bear singing.

"Just tell me," I prodded her.

"Tell you what?"

"If you think it's him."

She hesitated, and then, "I do, Hank. I really do."

I nodded but didn't say anything.

"Do you?" she asked.

"I did," I said. I walked from my desk to the window. I lifted the blind and peeked out at the day. Everything was cloaked in mist. The cemetery's gate looked black in it, like a net, the tombstones beyond it gray and cold and indistinct.

"I guess I still do," I said.

"So you're coming home?"

"No. I'm going."

"But you just said--"

"I got a pistol, Sarah. I borrowed it from Carl."

There was silence on the other end, and I could feel her thinking. It was as if she were holding her breath.

"I'm going to protect him," I said. "I'm going to make sure he doesn't get hurt."

"Who?"

"Carl. If it's Vernon, and he pulls a gun, I'm going to shoot him."

"You can't do that, Hank. That's insane."

"No," I said. "It isn't. I've thought it out, and it's the right thing to do."

"If it's Vernon, it's important for us that he escapes. That way no one else will know how much money was on the plane."

"If it's Vernon, he's going to kill him."

"That's not our problem. We don't have anything to do with that."

"What're you talking about? We have everything to do with it. We know what Vernon's going to try and do."

"It's just a guess, Hank. We don't know for sure."

"I can stop him if I go."

"Maybe, maybe not. A pistol's not like a shotgun. It's a lot easier to miss with. And if you miss, he'll kill you both."

"I'm not going to miss. I'm going to stay right up next to him the whole time. I'll be too close to miss."

"He's a murderer, Hank. He knows what he's doing. You wouldn't have a chance against him."

The bear continued to sing behind her, its voice slow now, shaky. I pushed the gun farther down into my belt. I didn't want to listen to her, wanted just to go, but her words settled into my mind like tiny seeds, sprouting pale shoots of doubt. I began to waver. I tried to revive my determination by imagining how it would feel to draw the pistol from beneath my coat, to crouch down like a cop on TV, aim at Vernon's chest, and pull the trigger, but what I saw instead was everything that could go wrong -- the gun snagging on my shirt; my boots slipping in the snow; the gun not firing, or firing wide, or high, or down into the ground at my feet, and then Vernon turning on me with his wooden smile.

I realized with a shock that I was scared of him.

"You have to think of the baby, Hank," Sarah said. "You have to think of me."

My dilemma seemed simple: I could either go with them or stay away. To go would be the braver choice, I knew, the nobler one, but also the riskier. If it was really Vernon who was waiting across the street, then he was probably planning on shooting both Carl and me. By going home, I'd escape that. I'd leave Carl to his fate, whatever that might be, and save myself.

I stood there pondering these two alternatives. Sarah was silent, waiting for me to speak. My left hand was in my pocket; I could feel some coins in there, my car keys, a little penknife that had belonged to my father. I pulled out one of the coins. It was a quarter, a bicentennial one.

If it comes up heads, I thought to myself, I'll go.

I tossed the coin into the air, caught it in my palm.

It was heads.

"Hank?" Sarah said. "Are you there?"

I stared down at the quarter with a pit of fear in my stomach. I'd wanted it to be tails, I realized, had been praying for it with all my heart. I debated flipping it again, going for two out of three, but I knew it didn't really matter. I'd just keep doing it until I got what I wanted. It was only a trick to soothe my conscience, a way to escape responsibility for my cowardice. I was too scared to go.

"Yes," I said. "I'm here."

"You're not a policeman. You don't know anything about guns."

I didn't say anything. I flipped the coin over in my palm so that the tails side was facing up.

"Hank?"

"It's all right," I said quietly. "I'm coming home."

I CALLED Carl and told him that the baby was vomiting, that Sarah was in a panic.

He was full of concern. "Linda's here now," he said. "She's done some nursing in her time. I'm sure she'd be willing to drive out with you if you need some help."

"That's awful nice of you, Carl, but I don't think it's that serious."

"You sure?"

"Positive. I just want to get her to a doctor to be safe."

"You head straight home then. I'm sure we can manage on our own. You didn't really see anything anyway, did you?"

"No. Nothing at all."

"You said you heard it on the south side? By the Pederson place?"

"Just a little ways past it."

"All right, Hank. Maybe I'll give you a call when we get back, let you know how it went."

"I'd like that."

"And I hope everything's okay with the baby."

He was about to hang up. "Carl?" I said, stopping him.

"What?"

"Be careful, okay?"

He laughed. "Careful of what?"

I was silent for several seconds. I wanted to warn him, but I couldn't think of a way to do it. "Just the rain," I said finally. "It's supposed to get colder later. The roads'll ice up."

He laughed again, but he seemed touched by my concern.

"You be careful, too," he said.

I COULD see Carl's truck from my window -- it was parked in front of the church -- so I waited there, hidden behind the blinds, to watch them leave. They appeared almost immediately, walking side by side. Carl had on his dark green police jacket and his forest ranger's hat. The rain was falling in a thick mist now, forming puddles in the gutter and adding a rawness to the day, a cold, aching feeling, which I could sense even through the window.

Carl's truck was like a normal pickup, except it had a red-and-white bubble light on its roof, a police radio hooked to the underside of its dashboard, and a twelve-gauge shotgun hanging from a rack on the rear window. It was dark blue, with the words ASHENVILLE POLICE written in bold white letters on its side. I watched as he climbed in behind the wheel, then leaned across the seat to unlock the agent's door. I heard the engine start, saw them put on their seat belts, then watched the windshield wipers begin to slide back and forth, clearing the glass of rain. Carl removed his hat, smoothed his hair once with his hand, and put the hat back on.

I stood there, crouching beside the window in my darkened office, until they pulled out onto the road and headed off toward the west, toward the Pederson place and the nature preserve, toward Bernard Anders's overgrown orchard and the plane that lay within it as if in the hollow of a hand, awaiting, while the rain freed it from its veil of snow, their imminent arrival.

Before the truck disappeared down Main Street, its brake lights flashed once, as if in farewell; then the mist fell in behind them, leaving just the town beyond my window, its cold and empty sidewalks, its drab storefronts, with the rain running over everything, beading and pooling, and hissing as it fell.

I DROVE home.

Fort Ottowa was quiet. It was like entering a cemetery -- the winding roads, the empty lawns with their mounds of dirt, the tiny, cryptlike houses. The children were all inside, hiding from the rain. Occasional lights dotted the windows; televisions flickered bluely behind drawn curtains. As I made my way through the neighborhood, I could picture Saturday-morning cartoons; card tables littered with jigsaw puzzles and board games; parents in bathrobes sipping mugs of coffee; teenagers upstairs sleeping late. Everything seemed so safe, so normal, and when I reached my own house, I was relieved to see that -- at least from the outside -- it looked exactly like all the others.

I parked in the driveway. There was a light on in the living room. Mary Beth was sitting beneath his tree in the rain, Buddha-like, his fur plastered wetly to his body.

I got out of the car and went into the garage. There was a small shovel hanging from a hook on the wall there, and I was just reaching up to pull it down when Sarah opened the door behind me.

"What're you doing, Hank?" she asked.

I turned toward her with the shovel. She was standing in the doorway, a step up from the garage. Amanda was in her arms, sucking on a pacifier. "I'm going to shoot the dog," I said.

"Here?"

I shook my head. "I'm going to drive him out to Ashenville. To my dad's old farm."

She frowned. "Maybe this isn't the best time to do that."

"I told Carl I'd return his pistol to him by this afternoon."

"Why not wait till Monday? You can have a vet do it then, and you won't need the gun."

"I don't want a vet to do it. I want to do it myself."

Sarah shifted Amanda from her right arm to her left. She was wearing jeans and a dark brown sweater. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, like a girl's. "Why?" she asked.

"It's what Jacob would've wanted," I said, not sure if this was actually the truth or merely a continuation of the lie I'd told Carl earlier.

Sarah didn't seem to know how to respond to this. I don't think she believed me. She frowned down at my chest.

"The dog's miserable," I said. "It's not fair to him, keeping him out there in the cold."

Amanda turned to look at me when I spoke, her round head swiveling on her neck like an owl's. She blinked her eyes, and her pacifier fell out of her mouth, bouncing down the step into the garage. I came forward and picked it up. It was damp with her saliva.

"I'll be back in an hour or so. It won't take that long."

I held out the pacifier to Sarah, and she took it from me, grasping it between two of her fingers. Our hands didn't touch.

"You aren't going by the nature preserve, are you?" she asked.

I shook my head.

"You promise?"

"Yes," I said. "I promise."

She watched from the front window as I untied Mary Beth and led him toward the car. Jacob's things were still loaded in the back, and when the dog got inside, he began to sniff at the boxes, his tail wagging. I climbed in behind the wheel. Sarah was holding Amanda up to the window, waving the infant's tiny hand back and forth.

I could see her mouth moving in an exaggerated fashion. "Bye-bye," she was saying. "Bye-bye, doggy."

MARY BETH slept the whole way out to the farm, curled up in a ball on the backseat.

The weather didn't change. A fine drizzle fell from the sky, dissolving into the mist. Houses materialized around me as I drove, ghostlike beside the road, surrounded by barns and silos and outbuildings, their colors bleached, their eaves dripping, old cars parked haphazardly about their yards. The ground had already begun to appear in places, dark, muddy clumps rising like gloved fists through the snow; in some fields there were whole lines of them, marching parallel into the distance, the remnants of last year's furrows, their termini hidden by the fog.

When I reached the farm, the dog refused to climb out of the car. I opened the door for him, and he backed away from me, growling and baring his teeth, his hair rising along his neck. I had to drag him out by the clothesline.

He shook himself when he hit the ground, stretched, then jogged off ahead of me into the field.

I followed him, holding the rope in my left hand and the shovel in my right. The pistol was holstered beneath my belt.

The snow was melting rapidly, but it was still deep enough in places to rise up over my boots. It was heavy and wet, like white clay, and difficult to move through. My pant legs grew dark with its moisture, clinging to my calves so that I looked like I was wearing knickers and knee socks. The drizzle drifted down from the sky, falling lightly on my head and shoulders and sending a chill across my back.

I flipped up the collar on my parka. Mary Beth moved in a zigzag course before me, sniffing at the snow. His tail was wagging.

We headed out into the center of the field, toward the spot where my father's house had once stood. His windmill was off to the left, barely visible in the mist, its blades dripping water into the snow.

I stopped near where I thought our front stoop should've been and dropped the clothesline and the shovel to the ground. I stepped on the rope with my boot, to keep the dog from running away. Then I removed the pistol from my waistband.

Mary Beth started to jog back toward the road but only got about ten feet away before the clothesline went taut and he had to stop. Beyond him, our tracks were dark and round in the snow, two wobbly lines connecting us with the station wagon at the edge of the road. There was an ominous quality to the view; the fog seemed to deny us retreat, to form a thick gray-white wall just beyond the car, imprisoning us in the muddy field. It was like a drawing from a book of fairy tales, full of hidden threat and terror, and I got a peculiar feeling looking at it, something close to fear.

Carl could be dead right now, I knew. I wanted to believe that he wasn't, that, having spent the morning walking aimlessly around the woods, they were already heading back toward town, but my mind wouldn't let me. Against my will, I kept picturing the wreck. The snow would've melted from it: it would be impossible to miss. I could see it in my head, could see the crows, the wizened trees. I could see Vernon very calmly -- so that the gesture seemed perfectly innocuous -- pulling a pistol from beneath his jacket and shooting Carl in the head. I could see Carl falling, could see his blood in the snow. The birds would fly up at the sound of the shot. Their cries would echo off the side of the orchard.

I bungled the shooting of the dog, transformed what I'd planned to be an act of mercy into one of torture.

I got behind him and aimed at the back of his neck, but he spun toward me just as I pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him in the lower jaw, breaking it so that it hung down from his head at a grotesque angle. He fell onto his side, whimpering. His tongue was severed; blood poured from his mouth.

When he tried to rise to his feet, I fired again, in panic. This time I hit him in the rib cage, just below the shoulder. He rolled over onto his side in the snow, his legs jerking out straight and freezing like that, rigid against the ground. His chest heaved in and out with a deep bubbling sound. For a moment I thought that it would be enough, that he was going to die, but then he started to struggle upward again, and a frightening sound emerged from his throat, something closer to a scream than a bark. It went on and on and on, rising and dipping in volume.

I stepped forward and straddled his body. I was sweating now, my hands slick with it, trembling. I placed the gun's barrel against the top of his head. I shut my eyes, my stomach rising into my throat, and pulled the trigger.

There was a sharp crack, a muffled echo, and then silence.

The rain increased slightly, growing into full-size drops, riddling the snow.

Mary Beth's body was outlined in blood, a large, pink circle around his head and shoulders. It gave me a guilty feeling to look at it. I thought of my father, how he'd refused to slaughter animals on his farm, persisting in this compunction year after year despite the disdain and derision it had earned him among his neighbors. And now I'd violated his taboo.

I stepped away from the dog, wiped my face with the back of my sleeve. The mist hung all about me, blocking out the world.

I picked up the shovel and started to dig. The ground was soft on top, wet and muddy, but this only lasted for about ten inches; then it was as if I were attempting to dig through a slab of concrete. The shovel's blade made a ringing sound each time I brought it down; the earth was frozen solid. I used my boots, kicking at the dirt, but nothing happened: I could go no deeper. If I was going to bury the dog here -- which I had to, there was no way I could carry his bloody corpse back to the car -- it would have to be in a ten-inch grave.

I grabbed Mary Beth by his legs and dragged him into the hole. Then I scraped the dirt back over him. There was barely enough to cover his body; I had to finish the job with snow, piling it up until I'd built a little mound. It was something that wouldn't last, I knew. If an animal didn't dig it up by the spring, then George Muller, the man who owned the farm now, would uncover it when he plowed the field. I felt a pang of remorse over this, imagining what Jacob would've thought if he could've seen how inadequate it was. I'd failed my brother even here.

I CRIED on the way home, for the first time since Jacob's apartment. I'm not sure even now what prompted it. It was a little bit of everything, I suppose -- it was Carl and Jacob and Mary Beth and Sonny and Lou and Nancy and Pederson and my parents and Sarah and myself. I tried to stop, tried to think of Amanda, and how she'd never know about any of it, how she'd grow up, surrounded by all the benefits of our crimes without any of the pain, but it seemed impossible to believe, a fantasy, the happy-ever-after ending of a fairy tale. We'd romanticized the future, I realized, and this added a further weight to my grief, a sense of futility and waste. Our new lives were going to be nothing like we'd imagined: we were going to lead a hard, fugitive existence, full of lies and subterfuge and the constant threat of getting caught. And we'd never escape what we'd done; our sins would follow us to our graves.

I had to pull over onto the edge of the road before I entered Fort Ottowa and wait for my tears to run their course. I didn't want Sarah to know that I'd been crying.

BY THE time I returned to the house, it was almost noon. I hung the shovel on its hook in the garage, then went inside. I was muddy, cold. My face felt bloated from weeping, my hands weak and shaky.

Sarah called out to me from the living room.

"It's me," I yelled. "I'm home."

I heard her stand up to come greet me, but then the phone began to ring, and she went into the kitchen instead.

I'd just finished taking off my boots when she leaned her head out into the hallway. "It's for you, Hank," she said.

"Who is it?" I whispered, moving toward her.

"He didn't say."

I remembered how Carl had promised to telephone me when he returned from the nature preserve, and I felt a surge of relief. "Is it Carl?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so. He would've asked about the baby."

She was right, and I knew it, but I still allowed myself to hope. I went into the kitchen and picked up the phone, expecting to hear his voice.

"Hello?" I said.

"Mr. Mitchell?"

"Yes?"

"This is Sheriff McKellroy, of the Fulton County Sheriff's Department. I was wondering if you'd be able to come on into Ashenville for a bit, so that we could ask you a few questions."

"Questions?"

"We could send a cruiser if you wanted, but it'd be easier if you could just drive in yourself. We're kind of strapped for manpower right now."

"Can I ask what this is all about?"

Sheriff McKellroy hesitated, as if unsure what he should say. "It's about Officer Jenkins. Carl Jenkins. He's been shot."

"Shot?" I said, and the horror and regret in my voice were genuine. Only the surprise was counterfeit.

"Yes. Murdered."

"Oh, my God. I can't believe it -- I saw him just this morning."

"Actually, that's what we'd like to talk--"

Someone on the other end interrupted the sheriff, and I heard him put his hand over the phone. Sarah stood across the kitchen, watching me. The baby was beginning to cry a little in the other room, but she ignored her.

"Mr. Mitchell?" McKellroy's voice returned.

"Yes?"

"Did you meet a man named Neal Baxter yesterday afternoon?"

"Yes," I said. "From the FBI."

"Did he show you any identification?"

"Identification?"

"A badge? A picture ID?"

"No. Nothing like that."

"Could you describe him for me?"

"He was tall. Maybe six-four or so. Broad shouldered. Black hair, cut short. I can't remember what color his eyes were."

"Do you remember what he was wearing?"

"Today?"

"Yes."

"An overcoat. A dark suit. Black leather shoes."

"And did you see his car?"

"I saw it this morning. I saw him climb out of it."

"Do you remember what it looked like?"

"It was blue, four doors, like a rental car. I didn't see the plates."

"Do you know the make?"

"No," I said. "It was a sedan, kind of boxy, like a Buick or something, but I didn't notice the specific make."

"That's all right. We'll probably show you some pictures when you get in, and maybe we'll be able to identify it from that. Can you come right away? We're at the town hall."

"I still don't understand what happened."

"It's probably best if you just wait till you get here. Do you need us to send a cruiser?"

"No. I can drive myself."

"And you'll come quick?"

"Yes," I said. "I'll leave right now."

11

I TOOK the pistol out of the car before I left and put it in the garage. It didn't seem like something I'd want to have with me when I spoke with the police.

The rain was still falling, an icy drizzle, but I could tell that it was going to stop soon. The sky was lighter; the air was growing colder. The fields alongside the road were quilted brown and white.

Ashenville was abuzz with activity. Two television crews -- one from Channel 11 and one from Channel 24 -- were busy assembling their cameras on the sidewalk. Several police cars were pulled up in front of the town hall. The street was crowded with gawkers.

I parked a little ways down the block.

There was a policeman standing at the foot of the town hall steps, and at first he wouldn't let me by. Then one of the wooden doors opened above us, and a short, pudgy man leaned out.

"You Hank Mitchell?" he asked.

"Yes."

He held out his hand, and I climbed up the steps to shake it. "I'm Sheriff McKellroy," he said. "We spoke on the phone."

He led me inside. He was very small, and he waddled when he walked. He had a wan, pasty face, and short, colorless hair that smelled strongly of hair tonic, as if he'd come here directly from a barbershop.

Carl's office was packed with policemen. They all seemed very busy, as if they were under some sort of deadline. No one looked up when we came in. I recognized one of the deputies from when Jacob had been shot. He was the one with the farm boy's face, the one who'd dropped off Mary Beth at my house. He was at Linda's desk, talking to someone on the phone.

"Collins!" Sheriff McKellroy yelled. "Take Mr. Mitchell's statement."

One of the policemen stepped forward, a tall man, older looking than McKellroy, with a lean, grizzled face and a cigarette in his mouth. He escorted me back out into the hallway, where it was quieter.

The idea of giving a statement to the police made me nervous, but it turned out to be a remarkably simple affair. I just told him my story, and he wrote it down. There was no interrogation, no third degree. He didn't even seem particularly interested in what I had to say.

I started almost three months earlier, at the end of December. I told him how I'd heard a plane with engine trouble out by the nature preserve, how I'd mentioned it to Carl, and how -- since there'd been nothing in the news about a missing airplane -- he'd said it was probably a false alarm.

"I didn't think anything about it," I said, "until yesterday afternoon, when Carl called me over as I was leaving work. There was a man from the FBI in his office, and he was looking for a missing plane."

"That was Agent Baxter?" Collins asked.

"That's right. Neal Baxter."

He wrote this down. "Did he say why he was searching for the plane?"

"He said it had a fugitive in it."

"A fugitive?"

"Someone the FBI was looking for."

"He didn't say who?"

I shook my head. "I asked, but they wouldn't tell me."

"They?"

"He and Carl."

"So Officer Jenkins knew?"

"I think so. That's what it seemed like."

He scribbled this down. Then he flipped to a clean page in the notebook. "You met them again this morning?"

"That's right. We'd planned to go out around nine o'clock to look for the plane, but my wife called just as we were leaving and said that our daughter was throwing up. So I went home instead."

"And that was the last you saw of either Officer Jenkins or Agent Baxter?"

I nodded. "They drove off, and I went home."

Collins scanned his pad, rereading what I'd told him. He underlined something, then closed the notebook.

"Can you tell me what's going on?" I asked.

"You haven't heard?"

"Just that Carl's been murdered."

"He was shot by this man who was looking for the plane."

"Agent Baxter?"

"That's right."

"But why?"

Collins shrugged. "All we know is what you and Mrs. Jenkins have told us: Officer Jenkins left town with Baxter around nine-fifteen. Just after eleven o'clock, Mrs. Jenkins looked out her window here and saw Baxter pull up, alone, in her husband's truck. He parked it across the street, walked back to his own car, and drove away. She called her house, thinking that her husband might've been dropped off there, but got no answer, so she decided to drive out to the nature preserve herself and see what was going on. When she arrived at the park, she found their tracks in the snow and just followed them in. They went on for about a half mile through the trees and stopped beside the wreckage of a small plane. That's where she found her husband's body."

"Linda found him herself?" I asked, horrified by the thought of this.

He nodded. "Then she ran back to the road and called us on the radio."

"But why would he have shot Carl?"

Collins seemed to debate for a second. He slid his pen into his shirt pocket. "Baxter didn't mention anything to you about some missing money?"

"No." I shook my head. "Nothing."

"Mrs. Jenkins said he told her husband there was four million dollars on the plane."

"Four million dollars?" I stared incredulously at him.

"That's what she claims."

"So he shot Carl for the money?"

"We aren't sure -- Baxter may have been lying. He said it came from an armored-car robbery in Chicago last July, but we can't find any record of that. All we know is that it had something to do with the plane. Beyond this, it's anyone's guess."

COLLINS left me, to show my statement to Sheriff McKellroy. I wasn't sure if I could go yet -- the sheriff had said that I might have to look at some pictures to identify Vernon's car -- so I just stuck around. They'd brought some folding chairs into Carl's outer office, and I took one and sat down by the window. The farm boy nodded hello when I came in with Collins, but after that no one paid me any attention. Someone had brought in a police radio, which hissed and sputtered in the corner. There was a large map tacked up on the wall, and sometimes Sheriff McKellroy would go over and draw a line on it.

They were hunting for Vernon, I knew, tracking him down.

Outside, the crowd had grown. People were pulling up in cars. Both of the TV crews were filming interviews -- Channel 11 with a state policeman, Channel 24 with Cyrus Stahl, Ashenville's octogenarian mayor. The weather was clearing, and the town had taken on a festive air. People were talking in large groups. Some children had gotten out their bikes and were racing up and down the street. Little boys peered inside the parked police cars, their hands cupped to the windows.

The rain had stopped, and a wind had sprung up from the north, gusting now and then in cold little shocks of air that made the flag above the town hall snap and flutter, its lanyard clanking hollowly against the aluminum pole, like the distant tolling of a bell. The flag had been dropped to half-mast, in mourning for Carl.

I'd been sitting there for almost an hour and was staring out the window in a daze when the room behind me seemed to explode in a rush of movement.

"Where's Mitchell?" I heard the sheriff yell. "He go home?"

I turned around and found one of the deputies pointing at me. "He's right here."

Collins and the farm boy were picking up their hats and jackets and striding toward the door. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, but I couldn't focus on what they were saying.

"Collins," Sheriff McKellroy yelled. "Sweeney. Take Mr. Mitchell with you. Have him ID the body."

"The body?" I said.

"You mind?" the sheriff asked from across the room. "It'd be a big help."

"Mind what?"

"We got a guy that fits the description you gave of Baxter, but we need a positive ID." He pointed toward Collins and the farm boy, who were waiting in the doorway. "They'll take you," he said.

I picked up my jacket and started toward the door but then stopped in midstride. "Would it be all right if I called my wife?" I asked McKellroy. "Just to let her know where I am?"

"Of course," he said, giving me an understanding look. He evicted a deputy from Linda's desk and sat me down there.

I picked up the phone and dialed home.

Linda had a picture of herself and Carl on her desk, and I turned away from it, toward the window, though not quickly enough to avoid having to wonder where she was right now. Probably at home, I thought. She'd never forget what she'd seen this morning -- her husband lying in the snow, dead -- and it gave me a tired feeling to think this, a numbness in my heart.

Like this morning, Sarah answered on the first ring.

"It's me," I said. "I'm at the police station."

"Is everything okay?"

"Carl's dead. The guy from the FBI shot him."

"I know," she said. "I heard about it on the radio."

"But it sounds like they caught him. They're taking me out now to make sure it's the same guy."

"Taking you where?"

"I don't know. I think he might be dead."

"Dead?"

"They said 'body.' They want me to ID the body."

"They killed him?"

"I'm not sure. That's what it sounds like."

"Oh, Hank," she whispered. "That's perfect."

"Sarah," I said quickly, "I'm at the police station." I glanced around the room to see if anyone was listening. Collins and the farm boy stood by the door, their hats in their hands. They were both watching me, waiting for me to finish.

Sarah fell silent. I could hear the radio playing in the background, a man's high-pitched voice, selling something. "Do you know when you'll be home?" she asked.

"Probably not for a little while."

"I'm so relieved, Hank. I'm so happy."

"Shhh."

"We're going to celebrate tonight. We're going to ring in our new life together."

"I have to say good-bye now, Sarah. We can talk when I get home."

I set down the phone.

THE FARM boy drove, and I rode beside him in the front seat. Collins sat in back. We headed south out of town, speeding, our lights flashing. The temperature was dropping now, and the roads had spots of ice on them. The air seemed to grow clearer by the moment, the views wider and crisper. Every now and then a tatter of bluish sky appeared between the swiftly moving clouds above us.

"Did Sheriff McKellroy say 'body'?" I asked the farm boy.

He nodded. "That's right."

"So Baxter's dead?"

"Dead as a doornail," Collins said from the backseat, his voice sounding almost gleeful. "Shot full of holes."

"Perforated," the farm boy said.

"Like a sieve."

They both grinned at me. They seemed excited, like two boys on a field trip.

"He was killed down near Appleton," Collins said, "at the entrance to the Turnpike there. He ran into a pair of state troopers, shot one of them in the leg, and then the other one blew him away."

"Four shots," the farm boy said.

"Three to the chest. One to the head."

The farm boy glanced across the seat at me. "Does that bother you?" he asked with sudden seriousness.

"Bother me?"

"Having to go ID him if he's been shot. The blood and everything."

"Head shots can be pretty ugly," Collins said. "It'll be best if you just give him a quick glance. Try to think of it as meat, like you're looking at a pile of ground--"

The farm boy interrupted him. "His brother was shot," he said quickly.

Collins fell silent.

"Remember a couple months ago? That guy out here that came home and found his wife in bed with his landlord? The one that went crazy?"

"That was your brother?" Collins asked me. "The gambler?"

The farm boy shook his head. "His brother was the other guy. The one that got shot coming to the rescue."

I could actually feel the mood in the car shift downward. It was as if we'd driven into a shadow. The farm boy leaned forward and turned the cruiser's heat up a notch. There was a warm push of air against my face.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Mitchell," Collins said. "I didn't know."

I nodded. "It's all right."

"How's that dog?" the farm boy asked. He glanced in the mirror at his partner. "His brother had a real nice dog. Mr. Mitchell adopted it."

"What kind of dog?" Collins asked. They were both working together, trying to revive their good spirits.

"It was a mutt," I said. "Part German shepherd, part Lab. But I had to put him down."

Neither of them said anything. The farm boy fiddled with the radio.

"He didn't adapt very well to my brother's absence. He got mean. He bit my wife."

"Dogs are like that," Collins said. "They get attached. They feel grief just like us."

After that no one said anything for the rest of the trip. The farm boy concentrated on the driving. Collins sat smoking in the back. I stared out the window at the road.

VERNON had been shot at a tollbooth, trying to get onto the Ohio Turnpike just north of Appleton. As he'd pulled up to take his ticket, his car had slid on a little patch of ice and banged into the one in front of him. There were a pair of state troopers on the other side of the median, and when they saw the accident, they came over to help. Even then, if Vernon had stayed calm, he might've gotten away. He'd changed his blue car for a red one sometime after leaving Ashenville and had put on a parka and a wool hat to cover his crew cut, so he didn't look like the man the troopers were searching for. But he panicked when he saw them coming, climbed out of his car, and pulled a gun.

It took us a while to get through to the tollbooth. The entrance ramp had been blocked off, and there was a state trooper rerouting traffic, waving it on down the road to the west. There were five or six police cars parked at odd angles across the little plaza. An ambulance was just leaving as we arrived, its lights flashing.

There wasn't much around the exit -- a pair of gas stations, a boarded-up Dairy Queen, a convenience store. It was farm country, flat and featureless.

We pulled off onto the edge of the road, then got out and walked toward the tollbooth. Vernon's car, a cherry red Toyota hatchback, was sitting there with its door hanging open. The area around it had been roped off with bright yellow tape. There were state troopers everywhere, but no one seemed to be doing anything. The car Vernon had rear-ended had been driven away.

I could see a body lying beside the Toyota. It was covered with a silver blanket.

We ducked under the tape and made our way through the milling policemen to the corpse. The farm boy and I crouched down beside it, and he flipped back the blanket. Collins stood behind me.

"That him?" he asked.

It was Vernon. He'd been shot in the side of the head, just above the ear. I could see the entry hole, a black puncture, no larger than a dime. There was blood everywhere -- on Vernon's face, the blanket, the pavement, even his teeth. His shirt collar was pink with it. His eyes were open, round with surprise, staring straight up at the sky. I had to resist the temptation to reach down and shut them.

"Yeah," I said. "That's the guy."

The farm boy flipped back the blanket, and we stood up.

"You okay?" he asked. He touched me on my elbow, turned me away from the corpse.

"I'm fine," I said, and then, surprising myself, felt my face begin to grin. I had to concentrate to stop, had to clench my teeth together and tighten my jaw. It was the relief that did it -- I was startled by its strength -- it eclipsed my sadness over Carl's murder, made his death seem almost worthwhile, expedient, the sort of price one might expect to pay for a bag full of treasure. For the first time since the night we decided to take the packets, I felt absolutely secure. Sarah had been right, it was perfect: now there was no one left to connect us to the money. Everyone was dead -- Vernon and his brother and Carl and Lou and Nancy and Jacob and Sonny and Pederson. Everyone.

And the money was ours.

Collins went off to radio Sheriff McKellroy and tell him that I'd identified the body while the farm boy fell into conversation with some of the state troopers. I started to return to the car -- it had gotten cold out, and I wanted to sit down -- but then changed my mind and remained where I was. I was curious to see if they'd found the bag of money yet and thought that if I hung around I might hear about it. I moved off toward the tollbooth and stood there, just beyond the yellow tape, with my hands in my pockets, trying to look inconspicuous.

A red-haired policeman began to take pictures. He pulled back the blanket and photographed Vernon's body. He photographed the Toyota, the tollbooth, the blood on the pavement -- everything from several different angles. Although the weather was continuing to clear, the day was still dark, and he used a flashbulb on his camera. It went off again and again in rapid cadence, little explosions of light, like sun bouncing off a mirror.

After a few minutes, a news crew pulled up in a yellow van. CHANNEL THIRTEEN was written diagonally across its side in large red letters, and below it, in black, ACTIONEWS. They had a Minicam with them, and they started filming the crime scene with it. They tried to get a shot of Vernon's body, but one of the troopers ordered them away.

A dark brown car arrived right after the van, and two men climbed out of it. I could tell they were from the FBI as soon as I saw them. They looked like Vernon had -- tall and lean, short haired and hatless. They were both wearing overcoats, unbuttoned over dark suits and sedate ties. They had black shoes on their feet, black leather gloves on their hands. Hovering all around them -- both in the way they moved and in the gestures they used when they spoke to the troopers -- was that same coolly professional air, that same sense of icy precision and control, which Vernon had so successfully imitated when we'd been introduced. And it intimidated me now exactly as it had then; my chest went tight, my heart sped up, my back began to sweat.

The horrible fear that I'd overlooked something, that I'd left some clue, some incriminating trace of myself within the crime, drifted, draftlike, into my thoughts. If I were to be caught, I realized with a chill, these would be the men who'd do it.

I watched them walk over to Vernon's body and crouch down beside it. They uncovered him and began checking his pockets, pulling them inside out. One of them took Vernon by the chin and turned his head back and forth, as if he were examining his face. When he let go of it, he wiped his hand on the silver blanket, murmuring something to his partner. His partner shook his head.

From Vernon's body they proceeded to an inspection of the Toyota, and from there to a brief conference with one of the state troopers. After about a minute or so, the trooper called over the farm boy and introduced him to the two agents. They talked for a few seconds; then the farm boy turned to point in my direction.

"Mr. Mitchell?" one of the agents called. He started walking toward me. "Hank Mitchell?"

"Yes?" I said, stepping forward to meet him. "I'm Hank Mitchell."

He reached into his jacket and pulled out his wallet. He flipped it open to show me his shield. It gave me an anxious feeling, watching him do this, like I was being arrested. "My name's Agent Renkins," he said. "I'm from the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

I nodded, staring at the badge.

"My partner and I were wondering if you'd mind driving back into town with us, so you could tell us what you know about all this."

"I've already gone over it once with the police," I said. "Couldn't you get my statement from them?"

"We'd prefer to hear it for ourselves. You can appreciate that, can't you?" He gave me one of Vernon's fake smiles.

I didn't answer; it was clear that I didn't have a choice. The other agent came up to join us. He had a black plastic garbage bag clamped beneath his arm.

"We're parked over here," Renkins said, pointing toward their car. Then he turned and led me away.

I RODE in the backseat. Renkins drove, and his partner, Agent Fremont, sat beside him. The two men looked virtually identical from the rear -- their shoulders were the same width, their heads rose to the same height above the car's seat, and their hair grew out in exactly the same tint of dark brown, covering their identically round scalps to the same depth and thickness.

There was only one variation between them, though it was a dramatic one. Fremont's ears were much too large for his head. I couldn't help staring at them as we pulled away from the toll plaza; they were huge, convoluted ovals, stiff looking and astonishingly white, and they had an extremely personable effect on me. They made him instantly likable. He must've been teased about them when he was little, I thought, remembering Jacob's childhood and how he'd been tormented for his weight, and I felt a wave of pity for the man.

It was a remarkably different sensation, sitting in the rear of the agents' car, than it had been sitting in the front of the cruiser. It was just a normal car, like a traveling salesman might own -- black vinyl interior, little ashtrays on the doors, a cheap-looking tape deck in the dashboard -- but, alone in the backseat, I had the definite sensation that I was in their custody, that I was under their control. It was a feeling I hadn't had in the cruiser.

We headed toward Ashenville, moving at right angles along the perpendicular farm roads, first north, then east, then north again, and I told them my story. They kept a tape recorder running as I spoke, but they seemed relatively uninterested in what I had to say. They asked no questions; they didn't glance back at me when I paused or nod encouragement to move me along. They sat impassively before me, staring out the windshield at the road. We retraced the route I'd driven with Collins and the farm boy earlier that afternoon, passed the same landmarks, the same houses, the same farms. The only difference was that it was clear now, the air pale and dry. The sun, approaching the end of its slow arc to the west, glinted brightly off of distant rooftops.

As I talked, I decided that the agents' silence could mean only one of two things. Either they'd already accepted my story and were merely listening now as a formality or they'd discovered something damning in their investigation of the crime site, some contrary evidence that wiped everything I was saying aside, and they were simply waiting for me to finish, allowing me to dig myself further and further into my falsehood before unmasking me for what I was: a liar, a thief, a murderer. I lingered as I neared the close of my tale, pausing and repeating myself, fearful to discover which of these possible alternatives would confront me.

But then, unavoidably, I reached the end.

Fremont punched a button on the tape recorder, stopping it. Then he turned to look at me.

"There's only one problem with your story, Mr. Mitchell."

A tightness settled into my stomach when he said this. I looked out at the passing fields, forcing myself to wait before I spoke. Off in the distance I could see a scarecrow, dressed in black, hanging from a pole. He had a straw hat on, and from this far away, at first sight, he looked like a real man.

"A problem?" I asked.

Fremont nodded, his elephantine ears moving up and down like paddles beside his head.

"The man whose corpse you identified back there -- he wasn't from the FBI."

The relief I felt at these words was so intense that it had an actual physical effect on me. Over the entire surface of my body, my pores opened, and I began to sweat. It was a strange, even horrible sensation, like losing control of one's bladder, a sudden slipping, a dizzying loss of control. It made me want to giggle, but I suppressed it. I wiped my forehead with my hand.

"I don't understand," I said. My voice came out hoarser than I would've liked. Fremont didn't seem to notice.

"His name was Vernon Bokovsky. That plane you heard with engine trouble back in December was carrying his brother. It crashed in the nature preserve."

"He was looking for his brother?"

Fremont shook his head. "He was looking for this." He lifted the plastic bag from between his feet. I leaned forward to get a better look. It gave me a thrill to see it; it was knowing something secret.

"A garbage bag?" I said.

"That's right." Fremont grinned. "Full of some very expensive trash." He opened the bag, shaking it so I could see the money.

I stared at it, counting to ten in my head, trying to look speechless with surprise. "Is it real?" I asked.

"It's real." Fremont stuck a black-gloved hand into the bag and pulled out one of the packets. He held it up before my face. "It's ransom," he said. "Bokovsky and his brother were the guys who kidnapped that McMartin girl last November."

"The McMartin girl?"

"The heiress. The one they shot and dumped in the lake."

I kept my eyes on the money. "Can I touch it? I'm wearing gloves."

The two agents laughed. "Sure," Fremont said. "Go ahead."

I stretched out my hand, and he set the packet in it. I stared down at it, weighing it in my palm. Renkins watched me in the rearview mirror, a friendly smile on his face.

"It's heavy, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "It's like a little book."

We were approaching Ashenville now. I could see it rising from the horizon, a low mound of buildings clustered tightly around the crossroads. It looked fake, illusory, like the city of Oz.

I handed the packet to Fremont, and he dropped it back into the bag.

Ashenville had returned to normal in my absence. The TV crews had left, the crowds had disappeared, and now the town looked exactly like it would've on any other Saturday afternoon, empty, sleepy, a little run-down around the edges. The only thing that remained as a reminder of its recent tragedy was the flag, fluttering limply at half-mast.

Renkins parked in front of the town hall, and we climbed out onto the sidewalk to say good-bye.

"I'm sorry you had to get dragged into all this," Fremont said. "You've been very cooperative." We were standing at the base of the town hall's steps. There was only one police car left.

"I still don't really understand what happened," I said.

Renkins grinned at me. "I'll tell you what happened," he said. "Two brothers kidnapped a girl outside of Detroit. They shot seven people, including the girl, and escaped with a ransom of four point eight million dollars. One of the brothers crashed a plane into that park. The other came out to find him, pretending to be a federal agent. When he saw the plane, he shot Officer Jenkins."

His smile deepened.

"And then a state trooper shot him."

"There's four point eight million dollars in that bag?" I asked, as if I were ready to believe it.

"No," Renkins said. "That's five hundred thousand."

"Where's the rest?"

He shrugged, glanced at Fremont. "We're not sure."

I gazed off at the town. There were two birds fighting over something in the gutter up the block. They screeched loudly at each other and took turns trying to fly away with it, but it was too big, neither of them could lift it. I couldn't tell what it was.

"So there are four point three million dollars out there, just floating around?"

"It'll turn up," Fremont said.

I looked at him, closely, but his face was absolutely expressionless. Renkins was staring up the street at the birds.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"We had the money for two hours before Mr. McMartin had to take it to the drop site. We couldn't mark it -- we were afraid the kidnappers would detect the markings and kill the girl, so we put together a task force of twenty agents, and they wrote down as many of the serial numbers as they could." He smiled at me, like he was letting me in on a joke. "We ended up recording just under five thousand of them, one out of ten of the bills."

I didn't say anything. I simply stared at him, struck dumb. I couldn't really bring myself to grasp what he was saying.

"We'll track it down," he said. "It's just a matter of waiting for the numbers to turn up. You can't go around passing hundred-dollar bills without eventually sticking in someone's memory."

"The money's marked," I said slowly. I looked down at my feet, frowning, trying not to react to this news, trying to appear calm, distant, uninvolved. I concentrated my whole mind on my boots, forced myself to think up names for their color, occupying all my energies on this task, knowing implicitly that I'd collapse if I allowed myself to try to lift the full weight of Fremont's revelation.

"That's what it amounts to," he said. "Marked money."

"Crime doesn't pay," Renkins said.

Tan, I thought, oatmeal. With a strain I managed amber. But the knowledge slipped in around the words, waterlike, seeping through the cracks. The money was marked.

Fremont offered me his hand. I forced myself to take it, struggled to match its firmness. Then I repeated the ritual with Renkins.

"Our knowing about the serial numbers," he said, "that's confidential, of course. It's the only way we'll be able to catch whoever else is involved in this."

Fremont nodded. "So if you talk to the press..."

"Yes," I said, "I understand."

"If we need you, you'll be around?" Renkins asked.

"Of course," I said. I gestured across the street toward Raikley's. "I work over there."

They both glanced at the feedstore. "We probably won't have to bother you," Renkins said. "It seems pretty cut-and-dried."

"Yes," I said weakly.

Sepia, I thought. Terra-cotta. Adobe.

"I'm just sorry you had to get mixed up in all this. It's a tragedy, the whole fucking thing."

He gave my shoulder a parting pat, and then they turned, one after the other, walked up the town hall steps, and disappeared through the double doors.

I watched my feet make their way toward the curb. They shuffled out into the street, then moved across it to the other side. My car was there, a little ways down the block, and my boots guided me around its rear end, stopping when they reached the door. Magically, my hand emerged from my jacket pocket, holding the keys. It unlocked the door, pulled it open, and my body bent at the waist, my head ducking forward, as I dropped into the seat.

And it was only then, safe in my car with the door shut firmly behind me, that I let my mind slip free, allowed it to settle on Fremont's words, absorb them like a sponge, swelling with their import.

The money was worthless.

My first reaction, one that had even begun to trickle out while I was standing there with Fremont and Renkins on the sidewalk, was an overwhelming wave of despair. The bloodied corpses of Pederson and Nancy and Sonny and Jacob all rushed forward to confront me -- four lives I'd ended with my own hands to protect my hold on the bag of money, money that was nothing now, simply stacks of colored paper.

Fatigue followed directly behind despair, like rain from a cloud. It was my body's reaction to the horror of what I'd done -- a bonenumbing tiredness, a feeling of surrender and acceptance. I sank in the seat, my head falling forward on my chest. I'd been living for almost three months beneath a tangled knot of strain, a knot that had just been loosened, severed even, in one sharp stroke. There was some relief in that at least -- for now it was truly over. I could go home and burn the money, the final fragment of damning evidence, the last loose end.

Move.

The thought flickered through my despair and fatigue, a warning from some deep corner of my mind, some frontier outpost that was still planning, still cautious, still carrying on the fight, unaware that the war was over.

If Fremont or Renkins were to glance out Carl's window, it whispered, they'd see you sitting here in a daze. It might set them thinking. Start the car. Drive away.

The voice had strength to it, the strength of caution. It was a voice I'd been listening to with care for nearly three months, and, automatically, as if conditioned, I listened to it now, too. My hand rose, inserting the key in the ignition.

But then I stopped.

On the street corner behind me, perhaps fifty feet away, was a phone booth, the sinking sun glinting off its Plexiglas sides.

Drive away, the voice said. Now.

I scanned the street. Across the intersection, in front of the church, a woman moved down the sidewalk with a little girl in a stroller. She was talking, and the child was twisting around in her seat to watch her. They were dressed brightly, in matching yellow parkas. I recognized them -- they were Carla and Lucy Drake, the daughter and granddaughter of Alex Freedman, the owner of Freedman's Dry Cleaning. I'd gone to high school with Carla; she'd been in Jacob's class, three years ahead of me. I watched her now as she and her daughter made their way up the walk to St. Jude's and disappeared inside.

The voice persisted, a tone of urgency creeping in: Drive away.

I ignored it. I had a view of Carl's office window, but the sun was glinting off it like a mirror. Fremont and Renkins were invisible behind it.

I glanced back at the phone booth, then scanned the street one last time. It was empty.

I climbed quickly from the car.

SARAH answered on the third ring.

"Hello?" she said.

I paused, a long, weighty moment. Sitting in the car, I'd thought that telling her immediately would help somehow, would diffuse the grief I felt pressing down on my heart, allow me to shift some of it onto hers. I'd wanted her to know, so that I could soothe her, could tell her that it would be all right, because by doing so, I knew that I would soothe myself, too. But as soon as I heard her voice, I realized that I couldn't do this over the phone; I had to be there; I had to be able to touch her while I talked.

"Hi," I said.

"Are you still at the police station?" she asked.

"No. I'm out on the street. On a pay phone."

"We can talk then?"

"We can talk."

"I saw all about it on the news."

I could hear the excitement in her voice, the relief. She thought it was over, she thought we were free. It was how I wanted to feel.

"Yes," I said.

"It's done now, isn't it? We're the only ones that know." She sounded elated. I was half-expecting her to laugh.

"Yes," I said again.

"Come home, Hank. I want to start our celebration. I've planned it out."

Her voice was rich with joy. It stabbed at me like a knife.

"We're millionaires now," she said. "Starting from this very moment."

"Sarah--"

She cut me off. "I don't think you'll care, Hank, but I did something stupid."

"Stupid?"

"I went out and bought a bottle of champagne."

I shut my eyes, pressed the receiver against the side of my face. I knew what she was going to tell me; I could see it coming.

"I used some of the money," she said. "One of the hundred-dollar bills."

I felt no surprise, no rush of panic. It was as if I'd known from the very beginning, from the very moment I'd pushed the duffel bag out of the plane, that this would happen. It seemed just; it seemed deserved. I rested my forehead against the side of the phone booth, the Plexiglas cold and smooth along my skin.

"Hank?" she said. "Hon? Are you mad?"

I tried to speak, but my throat was clogged, and I had to clear it first. I felt drugged, half asleep, dead.

"Why?" I said. My voice came out very small.

"Why what?"

"Why did you use the money?"

She was immediately defensive. "It just seemed like the right way to start things off."

"You promised not to touch it."

"But I wanted to be the first one to spend it."

I was silent, struggling to find a way through this. "Where?" I asked finally.

"Where?"

"Where did you buy the champagne?"

"That's how I was smart. I didn't buy it around here. I went all the way out by the airport and bought it there."

"Where by the airport?"

"Oh, Hank. Don't be mad."

"I'm not mad. I just want to know where."

"A place called Alexander's. It's a little package store on the highway, right before you get to the airport's access road."

I didn't say anything. I was thinking, my mind moving slowly, painfully around the situation, searching for an escape.

"I was good, Hank. You would've been proud of me. I said the bill was a birthday present, that I hadn't wanted to break it, but the banks were closed and my sister had just been proposed to, so it was worth it."

"You brought Amanda with you?"

Sarah hesitated. "Yes. Why?"

I didn't answer her.

"It's no big deal," she said. "The cashier hardly even seemed to notice. He just took the bill and gave me my change."

"Was there anyone else besides the cashier in the store?"

"What do you mean?"

"Customers? Employees?"

She thought for a second. "No, just the cashier."

"What did he look like?"

There was a pause on the other end.

"Hank," she said. "He didn't even notice."

"What did he look like?" I asked again, raising my voice.

"Come on. He doesn't know me. It's no big deal."

"I'm not saying it's a big deal. I just want to know what he looked like."

She sighed, as if exasperated. "He was big," she said. "Black hair, a beard. He had wide shoulders and a thick neck, like a football player."

"How old?"

"I don't know. Young. Probably midtwenties. Why?"

"Don't spend any more of it before I get back," I said, forcing a little laugh, trying to make it sound like a joke.

She didn't laugh. "Are you coming home now?"

"In a bit."

"What?"

"In a bit," I said more clearly. "I've got a few things to take care of here. Then I'll be home."

"Are you mad, Hank?"

"No."

"Promise me you aren't."

I lifted my head and stared off across the intersection. Carla and Lucy Drake had reemerged from the church. They were moving down the opposite side of the street now, their faces hidden beneath their yellow hoods. The little girl seemed asleep. Neither of them sensed me watching them.

"Hank?" Sarah asked.

I sighed, a tired sound. "I promise you I'm not mad," I said.

Then we said good-bye.

THERE was a directory hanging from a wire beneath the phone. I looked up Alexander's in it and called the number. A young man's voice answered.

"Alexander's."

"Yes," I said. "What time do you close tonight?"

"Six o'clock."

I checked my watch. It was 4:52.

"Thank you," I said.

I WAS halfway back to my car when I thought of something else, the first vestige of a plan. I stopped in midstride and returned to the phone booth.

I looked up the state police in the directory.

A woman answered. "State Police."

"Hello," I said, deepening my voice to disguise it, in case they taped their calls. "I'd like to report a suspicious person."

"A suspicious person?"

"A hitchhiker. I picked him up outside of Ann Arbor, and while we were driving south he pulled out a machete, started sharpening it right there in my front seat."

"Pulled out what?"

"A machete, a big knife. I told him to get out after that, and he did, no problem, but then I started thinking, maybe the kid's dangerous, so I decided I ought to call you, just to be safe."

"Did he threaten you with the machete?"

"No, nothing like that. I asked him to leave, and he left. I just thought maybe you might want to check him out."

"Where did you drop him off?"

"Outside of Toledo, right near the airport. He made a joke about hijacking a plane with the machete."

"On Airport Highway?"

"Yes. Outside a convenience store."

"Can you describe him, please?"

"He was young, maybe eighteen or so. Thin. Kind of weird looking, like he was sleepy or drugged out..."

"Caucasian?"

"Yes. Red hair, pale skin, freckles. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt, the kind with a hood on it."

"Height?"

"Average. Maybe six feet, a little less."

"And may I have your name?"

"I'd rather not," I said. "I live in Florida. I'm on my way back there now. I'd prefer not to get involved in anything up here."

"I understand," the woman said, her voice clipped, officially precise. "Thank you for calling. I'll have the dispatcher alert our patrolmen."

I SPENT the next twenty minutes sitting in my car, right there on Main Street. St. Jude's rang the hour, a little melody of bells, then five heavy strokes. The sun closed in on the western horizon, the sky around it taking on a pinkish tint. It had turned into a stunning afternoon, the air so crystalline it seemed like it wasn't there. Objects -- the cars lining the street, the storefronts, the parking meters, the church steeple -- seemed more clearly defined than usual, as if they had thin, black lines drawn around their edges.

The town was quiet, abandoned looking.

I knew there was a 90 percent chance that the bill Sarah had used was untraceable. Perhaps this should've been enough for me, but it wasn't. I thought about it, debated it in my head. If only one of the bills had been marked, or ten of them, or even a hundred, I think I might've acted differently, I might've just let it go. There were five thousand of them, though, one out of ten, and that was too much. I couldn't take the risk.

Fremont and Renkins came down the town hall steps shortly after five. They didn't notice me; they walked off to the right, up the sidewalk, Fremont talking in an animated manner, Renkins nodding emphatically to everything he said. They climbed into their car and pulled out, heading east, toward Toledo. Renkins drove.

I waited until my watch said five-ten. Then I started my own car, eased it away from the curb, and, also heading east, the setting sun large and red in my rearview mirror, made my way carefully out of town.

It was a thirty-minute drive to the airport.

12

IT STAYED farm country until right before I hit the airport. Then the highway broadened to four lanes, and buildings started to pop up -- convenience stores, video arcades, taverns, cheap hotels, pool halls, fast-food restaurants -- growing denser and taller and brighter the farther east I went. Traffic thickened, cars exiting and entering, blinkers flashing. This was the edge of Toledo, a long boulevard of neon and fluorescent light reaching out like a tentacle from the city's core.

Alexander's was a dingy-looking store, bunkerlike, with low, concrete walls and a flat roof. Iron bars crisscrossed its windows, and a sign flashed BEER on and off in pink and blue letters above its door. There was only one car in its tiny lot, a black, mud-spattered Jeep, sitting out near the road.

I drove past, then circled back.

There was a greenhouse a hundred feet beyond Alexander's. It was closed for the weekend, dark. I pulled into its gravel lot and parked facing the street, to facilitate my getaway.

Across the highway, running parallel to the road, was a chain-link fence topped with a double coil of razor wire. Beyond it lay the airport. I could just make out the control tower in the distance, could see the slow spiral of its spotlight through the night sky, and, below it, the vague red-and-green glow of the runways.

I climbed out, walked around to the rear of my station wagon, and swung open the tailgate. Jacob's trunk was there; it'd been the last thing I loaded when I cleaned out his apartment. Quickly, I lifted its lid and reached inside, my hand moving over the stack of bath towels, the tackle box, and the fielder's mitt, groping for the cool, metallic edge of the machete's blade.

It was off to the right, exactly where I'd left it. I took it out and set it on the bumper. Then I began searching through the other boxes. I found Jacob's ski mask in the first one I opened, his hooded sweatshirt in the second.

I exchanged my jacket for the sweatshirt. It was much too big for me -- the sleeves hung down to my fingertips and the hood draped itself across my face like a monk's cowl -- but that was exactly what I wanted: it would cover my hair and forehead, disguising my features long enough for me to enter the store and make sure that it was empty. Then I could put on the ski mask.

I slid the machete up my right-hand sleeve, handle first. Its point rested in the center of my palm, a sharp pinprick of pain. I jammed the ski mask into my pants pocket, swung the tailgate shut with my hip. Then I headed off toward the store.

It was quarter till six, and the sun had just disappeared. Drivers were switching on their headlights.

As I entered the parking lot in front of Alexander's, a plane thundered overhead, shaking the air, a huge mass of steel less than a hundred feet above me. Its landing lights threw a moment's glare onto the asphalt, like a flashbulb popping, then it was gone, shooting across the highway, its engines whining as they decelerated, its flaps coming down, its wheels stretching toward the ground. I watched it until it landed.

When I pushed open the store's front door, a bell rang above my head, alerting the cashier to my presence. He was sitting behind a counter off to the left, reading a newspaper. There was a radio playing beside him, tuned to an evangelical station, its volume turned up high.

"You got to be careful what you listen to," a man's voice said from the radio. "Just like there's the word of God, there's also the word of Satan. And it sounds the same. It sounds exactly the same."

The cashier glanced up at me, nodded, then returned to his paper. He was exactly as Sarah had described him: large, muscular, bearded. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and he had a tattoo on his arm, black and green, of a bird in flight.

I moved past him and into the store's center aisle. I kept my right arm clamped against my side as I walked, holding the machete in place. The store was longer than it was wide, and by the time I reached its rear, I was safely out of sight.

I pulled off the hood and looked around.

The back wall was lined with sliding glass doors, behind which sat cans of soda and beer, tubs of ice cream, boxes of frozen food.

I walked quickly to the left, then back to the right, scanning the other two aisles. They were empty; there was no one else in the store.

The radio continued to preach, reading now from the Bible: "'There is great gain in godliness with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world; but if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content.'"

Beyond the refrigerated display case, in the far-right-hand corner of the building, was a door. It was cracked partway open, its interior lost in darkness. I assumed that it led to a storeroom.

"'But as for you, man of God, shun all this; aim at righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness....'"

At the end of the center aisle, there was a gigantic display of red wine. There were six green-glass gallon jugs lined up along the floor, in two rows of three. On top of these bottles was a sheet of cardboard, and on top of the cardboard another six jugs of wine. There were five levels in all, a total of thirty jugs. They rose up to just below my chin.

"'I charge you to keep the commandment unstained...'"

I took out the ski mask and pulled it over my head. It smelled of my brother, of his sweat, and at first it made me gag, so that I had to breathe through my mouth.

"That's the Bible. The Word of God. Once I had a listener call in..."

I slid the machete out of my sleeve.

"'Who wrote the Bible?' she asked me..."

When I turned to head back down the aisle to the front of the store, I was remarkably calm, and this calmness seemed to feed on itself, growing stronger and stronger with each passing moment, like panic might in a similar situation.

The cashier was reading his paper. He was sitting on a stool, with his arms resting on the counter. He was a good six inches taller than I and probably outweighed me by ninety pounds. It made me wish that I'd brought Carl's pistol. I had to stand in front of him for several seconds before he looked up. Then he just stared. He seemed neither frightened nor surprised. Very slowly, he closed his newspaper.

I gestured threateningly at him with the machete, nodded toward the cash register.

He reached across the counter and turned down the radio. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" he asked.

"Open the register," I said. The words came out sounding hoarse, nervous. It was how his voice should've sounded.

He smiled. He wasn't as young as I'd thought at first; close up, he looked like he might even be older than I was.

"Get out of my store," he said calmly.

I stared at him, bewildered. The stench of Jacob's sweat in the ski mask was making me dizzy. I realized that things weren't going to happen like I'd planned, and it gave me a sinking feeling, a hard little pip of nausea in my stomach.

"You gonna chop me up?" he asked. "You gonna kill me with that thing?" His voice began to rise in anger.

"All I want is the money."

He scratched at the tattoo on his arm, then took his beard in his hand and lifted it toward his nose, thinking. "I'll give you this one chance," he said. He waved toward the door. "You run now, and I'll let you go."

I didn't move. I just stood there, speechless.

"Either run or stay," he said. "That's your choice."

I lifted the machete, held it up over my head like I was going to hit him. I felt foolish doing it: I could tell that it didn't look real. I waved it in the air. "I don't want to hurt you," I said, meaning it as a threat, but it came out sounding like I was begging. "I've killed people. I'm a murderer."

He smiled at me. "You're staying?"

"Just give me the money."

He climbed off his stool and, almost casually, made his way around the counter. I retreated into the center of the store, the machete held out in front of my chest. He walked toward the door, so that for a moment I thought he was going to leave, but then he pulled a set of keys from his pocket and twisted shut the lock. He turned his back on me to do it, as if to emphasize how little he feared me.

"Come on," I said. "Quit screwing around."

He slid the keys back into his pocket and took a step toward me. I retreated into the center aisle. I held the machete in both hands, straight out in front of me. I was trying to look threatening, trying to regain control of the situation, but I knew that it wasn't working.

"Anything I do to you now," he said, his voice laced with a sudden malice, "will be in self-defense. That's how the police'll see it. You came in here with that knife, threatened me, tried to steal what's mine. You've put yourself outside the protection of the law."

He came toward me slowly, grinning. He seemed to be enjoying himself. I continued to back away.

"I gave you a chance to run because I knew it was the Christian thing to do. But you wouldn't leave. So now I'm going to make sure, no matter what happens to you once the police arrive, that you'll never do this again. I'm going to teach you some respect for other people's property."

He was in the aisle now, stalking me. I was about ten feet away from him. I held the machete in my right hand and waved it again, but he didn't seem to notice. He was staring at the shelf to his right, as if searching for something. I watched as he reached up and pulled down a can of peas. He hefted it in his hand, and then, very calmly, without any hurry to the motion whatsoever, reared back and threw it at me. It hit me in the chest, hard, with a loud cracking sound, just below my left nipple. I stumbled backward, gasping. It felt like he'd broken one of my ribs.

"This is a rare opportunity," he said. "There aren't many situations where you can hurt someone as bad as I'm going to hurt you and get away with it."

I had no idea how to handle this. He was supposed to have just given me the money. Then I was going to make him lie down on the floor and count to a hundred while I ran off to my car.

"I'll even be congratulated for this," he said. "Taking a bite out of crime. They'll call me a hero."

I continued backing down the aisle. I assumed that the building had an exit in the rear, probably through the storeroom I'd noticed earlier. I thought that if I could just hold him off till I got there, I could make a break for it, could get outside and sprint for my car.

He reached up again, pulled down a jar of olives from one of the shelves, and threw it at me. It hit me in the shoulder this time, then fell to the floor, shattering at my feet. A dull, tingling ache spread down my arm, and my fingers, as if of their own accord, opened, dropping the machete. It landed in the olives. I had to pick it up with my left hand.

"That's enough," I said. "I'll go now. You can keep the money."

He laughed, shaking his head. "You missed your chance. The door was open, and now it's shut."

At the end of the aisle, something caught my arm. Without taking my eyes off the cashier, I tried to jerk it free. I looked back, quickly, and saw the display of red wine, the huge column of jugs. There was a large staple in the sheet of cardboard that divided the third tier of bottles from the fourth, and it was on this that my sweatshirt had become hooked.

I glanced toward the cashier. He was six feet away. Another step and he would've been able to reach out and grab me. In a panic, I yanked my arm away from the staple, but instead of freeing myself, I simply pulled the sheet of cardboard out of the display. The bottles it had supported balanced there for an instant, like in a magic trick, trembling, and then began to fall. The whole display came apart before my eyes, the jugs hitting the floor one after the other in a loud, prolonged crash.

There was a brief silence in the store, a pause through which the preacher's voice found its way toward us down the aisle. "And is there a difference," he asked, "between a sin of omission and a sin of commission? Is one punished with more vengeance in the fires of Hell than the other?"

The tiles at my feet were red-black with wine. Shards of glass lay scattered about, like jagged islands. I stepped back from the mess, retreating all the way to the rear wall, watching as the puddle spread out across the floor.

The cashier made a whistling sound, shaking his head. "Now who do you think's going to pay for that?" he asked.

We both stared down at the shattered bottles. The sheet of cardboard hung from my arm, swaying. I tore it free and dropped it to the floor. My fingers were still tingling, and my chest ached each time I took a breath. I wanted to begin working my way toward the storeroom, but my legs wouldn't move. They held me there, pressed up against the icy door of the cooler, paralyzed.

The cashier stepped forward, moving around the edge of the puddle. He paused at the far side, no more than three feet away, turned his back to me, and stooped down to retrieve a funnel-shaped hunk of glass from the wreckage. It was in the center of the puddle, and he had to lean forward on his toes to reach it.

He was getting it to use as a weapon, I knew. When he stood up, he was going to cut me.

I glanced toward the storeroom. I was fairly confident that I could make it there if I sprinted. The cashier was off balance, in a crouch; I'd catch him by surprise. And when I pushed away from the cooler, that's what I thought I was going to do -- I thought I was going to run. But I didn't. Instead, without planning to, I found myself stepping toward him. My hands grasped the machete like a baseball bat. I lifted it over my head, my eyes locked on the back of his neck. Then I brought it down with all my strength.

It was only as I did it, only as I heard the blade hiss through the air above me, that I realized it was what I'd yearned to do all along.

He seemed to sense the blow coming. He started to rise, twisting his body to the right. This was the side I hit him on, the machete coming down at an angle, striking him just below the chin, its blade burying itself into his throat. It cut deep, but not nearly as deep as I'd hoped. Brutal as it sounds, I'd wanted to chop off his head in a single stroke, ending it in an instant. I didn't have the strength, though, or the blade wasn't sharp enough, because it sank about two inches in, then stopped. I had to jerk it free as he collapsed to the floor.

There was another silence, another pause.

The radio echoed through the store: "And Christ said, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?' That is to say, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'"

The cashier was lying on his stomach, with his hands tucked in at the sides of his chest, as if he were about to do a push-up. There was a tremendous amount of blood, much more than I would've expected, more even than I would've thought his body could contain. It came out of his neck in thick cords, rhythmically, mixing with the pool of wine.

I'd severed his carotid artery.

"And so if our Savior in the moment of his passing was brought to the point of questioning God, what is to keep us, mere mortals, flawed individuals that we are, from questioning Him likewise?"

I stood there, watching him bleed. I held the machete away from my body, to keep it from dripping on my pants. I could see that it was simply a matter of waiting now, and I was relieved by this. I felt too drained, too sluggish, to hit him again.

"Something goes wrong in your life. You get sick, you lose your job, and you say, 'Where is the Lord's hand in this?'"

I stepped forward, into the puddle, switching the machete from my right to my left hand. Blood continued to surge from the man's wound, but his body was very still. Although I didn't think he was dead yet, I was sure that he was close to it, approaching the boundary, slipping beyond its edge. I thought to myself, quite clearly, You're watching him die.

But then a surprising thing happened. Very slowly, as if he were being pulled from above by a set of strings, he climbed to his hands and knees.

I was too shocked to step back. I stayed right beside him, watching in astonishment, my body bent forward at the waist, my head tilted to the side.

Somehow, in an awkward, disjointed series of movements, he struggled onto his feet. He stood there, stooped over, his hands on his thighs, a thick stream of blood still pulsing from the gash in his neck. His T-shirt was soaked a deep red with it, and it clung to his body. I could see the shape of his nipples through the fabric. His face was perfectly white.

"You say, 'Either the Lord has forsaken me or He is purposefully sending hardship my way.' And you see no reason why you might deserve this. You're righteous, you're faithful, you're loving, you're steadfast, you're gentle, and yet the Lord chooses..."

I took a step back from him, toward the cooler, and he raised his head. He stared at me, his eyes blinking very rapidly. His breathing made a watery sound in his chest; his lungs were filling with blood. He put his hands on his throat.

I took another step backward. I knew that I should hit him again, kill him, knew that this would be the humane thing to do, but I didn't feel like I had the strength to raise the machete. I felt spent, finished.

He tried to speak: his mouth opened and closed. There was no sound, though, simply the gurgling in his chest. And then, very slowly, as if he were moving underwater, he pulled his left hand away from his throat and extended it to the shelf at his side. He wrapped his fingers around the neck of a ketchup bottle sitting there, and, more shoving it than throwing it, propelled it toward me through the air.

It hit me in the leg. It didn't hurt; it bounced off, cracking into three nearly equal pieces on the floor. I stared down at it, another tint of red.

"And you say, 'The Lord moves in mysterious ways? What does that mean to me?' You say, 'Isn't that some sort of cop-out? Some sort of escape clause for when things go bad and you preachers have no explanation?' You say, 'Where is Responsibility? Where is Justice?' You're angry and you feel you deserve an answer..."

He put his hand back up to his throat. The blood pumped out between his fingers, but more weakly now.

When he fell, he did so in stages, hesitating for an instant between each one, like an actor overplaying his part. He dropped to his knees first, landing on a shard of glass from one of the jugs, crushing it with a horrible grinding sound beneath his weight. He paused, settled back on his rear end, paused again, then sank sideways to the floor. His head banged into the base of the shelf, bouncing off it at an awkward angle, his hands falling away from his throat.

All of this happened in slow motion.

"Let's say that someone tells you, 'The Lord giveth. The Lord taketh away.' What does that mean to you?"

I stared down at him, counting in my head as I had with Pederson on the edge of the nature preserve. I counted to fifty, breathing once between each number. As I watched, the blood slowly stopped pulsing from his neck.

I stuck the machete through my belt, like a pirate. Then I pulled off the ski mask. The air felt cool against my face, soothing, but the smell of Jacob's body remained stuck in my nostrils. It seemed to cling to my cheeks, like grease. I took off the sweatshirt, dragging it over my head. My back was drenched with perspiration. I could feel it running down in little rivulets along my spine, soaking into the waistband of my underpants.

"Or they say, 'A man's mind plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps...'"

I wanted to check the cashier's pulse, but the thought of touching his wrist gave me a loose, sick feeling in my stomach, so I let it go. He was dead. I could tell that just from the amount of blood on the floor -- it was a huge puddle, spreading out along the rear of the store and seeping down the center aisle. Mixed with the wine and ketchup and shattered glass, it looked surreal, ghoulish, like something from a nightmare.

"Or they say, 'The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble...'"

I stood there, listening to the preacher's voice. He was in a studio somewhere, and it sounded like there were people with him, offering up an occasional "Amen!" or "Glory!" or "Hallelujah!" And then there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people all across the region -- Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania -- sitting in their homes, driving in their cars, listening. Each of them was connected to the others, and all of them were connected to me, simply by the sound of this man's voice.

And they don't know, I thought. They don't know about any of this.

Very slowly, I felt myself begin to calm down. My pulse slackened; my hands stopped shaking. I'd almost ruined everything by coming here, but now I'd saved it. We were going to be all right.

I lifted my shirt to look at my chest. It was already starting to bruise, a deep purple flower blossoming across my rib cage.

"Let me talk to you about fate, Brothers and Sisters. What does that word mean to you? If I say to you that you are fated to die someday, is there one among you who would question me? Of course not. And yet if I were to say to you that you are fated to die on one particular day, at one particular hour, and in one particular way, you would shake your head and say that I was a fool. And yet that is what I do say to you, I say..."

I shook myself, as if from a stupor, walked quickly down the center aisle to the front of the building, leaned over the counter, and clicked off the radio. There was a SORRY, WE'RE CLOSED sign hanging from the front door, and I flipped it so that it was facing out. I wanted to turn off the lights, too, and spent nearly a minute searching for the switch before finally giving up on the idea and returning to the back of the store.

Without the preacher's voice, the building had an ominous silence to it. Every noise I made echoed back at me from the shelves of food, sounding furtive, rodentlike.

I took the cashier by his feet and started to drag him toward the darkened storeroom. He was lighter than I would've thought, drained of blood, but it was still a difficult task. His body was cumbersome, awkward, and the floor was treacherous with blood.

My chest throbbed every time I moved.

The storeroom was tiny, a narrow rectangle. There was a mop in it, a bucket, some cleaning supplies on a shelf. In its very rear were a sink and a dirty-looking toilet. The smell of disinfectant was heavy in the air. There was no exit. If I'd run there, I would've been trapped.

I dragged the cashier in, feet first, but had to stop midway to untangle his arms from the narrow doorway. I laid them across his chest, like a corpse in a coffin, then pulled him the rest of the way in, propping his legs up against the toilet so that there'd be enough space to shut the door. I took his wallet, his watch, and his key ring and put them in my pocket.

Once the body was safely hidden, I walked back through the puddle to the front of the building. I went behind the counter and rang open the cash register. The hundred-dollar bill was in the bottom of the drawer, beneath the till. It was the only one there. I folded it in half and slipped it into the front pocket of my jeans.

There was a stack of paper bags on the counter. I grabbed one, shook it open, and emptied the rest of the register into it -- bills, change, everything.

As I was shutting the drawer, my eyes searching the surrounding shelves for other items a drifter might steal, a car pulled into the lot. The sight of it literally paralyzed me, froze me in place, my hand hanging in midair above the register. I watched as it rolled up to the edge of the building, its headlights shining through the front windows.

The sweatshirt and ski mask were sitting before me on the counter. I picked up the sweatshirt and started to put it on, but the arms were all tangled, and I couldn't get it over my head. Finally I just gave up and held it out in front of my chest, as if hoping to hide behind it.

The headlights went out, and the engine shut off. A woman climbed from the car.

I took the machete from my belt and set it on the counter, covering it with the cashier's newspaper.

You could see the puddle of blood and wine from the front door, could stare right down the center aisle to the rear of the store. I'd tracked it forward on my boots, too: my footprints trailed across the floor to the counter, looking painted on the tiles, like the kind they have at dance schools, a bright, shiny red, perfect and precise, their edges still glistening with wetness. I stared at them from the counter, a queasy flutter seizing hold of my chest. I realized that I wasn't thinking, that I was being careless. I was leaving clues behind.

As the woman approached the front door, another plane flew overhead, roaring in on its descent to the airport, its engines making the building tremble. She turned to stare at it, ducking a little, instinctively, at the sound. She was old, probably in her late sixties, and elegantly dressed -- a dark fur coat, pearl earrings, black high-heeled shoes, a tiny black purse. Her face, despite a thick layer of rouge, had a definite paleness to it, as if she'd been sick recently. Her expression was tight, firm, like she was late for something and rushing to make up time.

She tried the door, found it locked, held her black-gloved hand up to the glass to peer inside. Her eyes fell immediately on me, standing frozen behind the counter. She made an elaborate show of checking her watch. Then she held up two fingers. I watched her mouth form the words "Two...minutes...till...six!"

I shook my head at her. "Closed," I yelled.

A voice was whispering madly in my skull, high-pitched, frantic: Let her go, it said. She'll remember nothing. It looks as if you're closing up, as if you're ready to leave. Let her go.

I rested my hands on the counter and shook my head again, willing her to climb back into her car.

She rattled the door.

"I just need a bottle of wine," she yelled through the glass. I heard her, but from a distance. Her voice reminded me of someone I knew, though I couldn't decide exactly who.

"We're closed," I yelled.

She rapped at the glass with her fist. "Please."

I looked down at my hands, checking them very slowly, finger by finger, to make sure that they were free of blood. When I looked back up, she was still there. She was going to make me do it, I realized; she wasn't going to leave.

She rattled the door again. "Young man!"

I knew what I was going to do, saw how it would end. The past three months had conditioned me for it, trained me, and now the weight of all that had come before seemed to eliminate any other possibility, render it impotent, a mere half measure where nothing but the most extreme would suffice. I'd just spent three hours talking with the police. If she were able to describe what I was wearing, they'd know right away who it was. And then I'd be caught; I'd be sent to jail. I recognized the horror of it, realized that it would be the worst thing I'd ever done -- worse even than killing my brother -- that it would be something I'd regret for the rest of my life, and yet, of my own free will, I chose to do it. I was scared, nervous, trapped. I'd just killed a man with a machete. There was blood on my pants and boots, and every time I took a breath it smelled of Jacob.

I stepped out from behind the counter.

"A single bottle of wine," she yelled through the glass.

I unlocked the door with the cashier's keys. I pulled it open, glancing at her car to make sure she was alone. It was empty.

"I'll be extremely brief," she said, sounding slightly out of breath. "I simply need a dinner wine, to bring as a gift."

She stepped inside, and I closed the door behind her, twisting the lock shut with a click. I put the keys back into my pocket.

She turned to look at me. "You do sell wine?"

"Of course," I said. "Wine, beer, champagne..."

She waited for me to go on, but I didn't. I stood there, smiling, my body between her and the door. Now that I'd made my decision, I was remarkably calm. It was the same way I'd felt with Sonny, like I was slipping into a groove, acting out a role.

"Well? Where is it?" She hadn't noticed the bloody boot tracks yet.

"We have to make a deal, first."

"A deal?" she asked, confused. She looked at me then, really looked, assessing me for the first time, taking in my face, the expression of my eyes. "I don't have time for jokes, young man," she said, her head assuming an imperious tilt, like a hawk's.

"I knocked over a rack of red wine." I pointed toward the rear of the store.

She peered down the center aisle at the puddle. "Dear me," she said.

"My mop's up on a shelf in the storeroom, and I have to climb a ladder to get it. I need someone to hold the ladder for me."

She stared at me again. "You're asking me to hold the ladder?"

"I'm doing you a favor, letting you in like this."

"A favor?" She snorted. "You were closing up early, trying to sneak home before you were supposed to. I don't imagine your boss would look upon this as any great favor."

"All you have to do is hold--"

The woman tapped at her watch. "It was two minutes before six. A favor! I never heard of such a thing."

"Look," I said. "I can't clean that up without a mop. And I can't get to the mop without your help."

"Whoever heard of storing a mop on a shelf?"

"I'm asking for a very small amount of your time."

"I'm dressed for dinner. Look at me! I can't be holding ladders for people when I'm dressed like this."

"What if I give you the wine for free?" I asked. "Any bottle you choose, on the house. All you have to do is come back to the storeroom and hold the ladder for me."

She hesitated, her face wrinkling with thought. Beyond the window, cars zipped by, one after the other, a steady stream of lights.

"You said you had champagne?"

I nodded.

"Dom Perignon?"

"Yes," I said. "Of course."

"Then that's what I want."

"All right," I said. "That's what you'll get." I stepped back over to the counter and picked up the newspaper, folding it over the machete. Then I returned to the woman and took her by her elbow.

"If we go down the far aisle, we can avoid the puddle."

She allowed herself to be guided forward. Her heels clicked loudly against the tiled floor. "I won't be mussed, will I? I won't do this if it involves touching anything dirty."

"It's all very clean," I soothed her. "It's simply a matter of steadying the ladder."

We were heading down the far aisle. My eyes moved along the shelves we passed, noting items at random -- bread, croutons, salad dressing, toilet paper, Kleenex, sponges, canned fruit, rice, crackers, pretzels, potato chips.

"I don't have much time," she said. She brushed at her fur coat, glanced quickly at her wrist. "I'm already late."

I was still holding her by the elbow. The machete was in my left hand. I could feel its blade through the paper.

"I'll be up and down the ladder, find your champagne, and like that" -- I took my hand away from her arm and snapped my fingers -- "you'll be out of here."

"This is the most extraordinary situation," she said. "I can't recall anything like it."

I returned my hand to her elbow, and she looked up at me.

"You know I won't be coming back here again," she said. "This is the last time I'll ever grace this establishment. That's what forcing customers into awkward situations does, young man. It alienates them. It puts them off."

I nodded, barely listening. Without sensing its approach, I'd suddenly become extremely nervous. I could feel my blood pulsing through my head, thickly, as if my veins were too small for it. We were nearing the end of the aisle. The puddle had spread all the way to the wall, blocking off the doorway. There were boot prints around its edge and drag marks from the cashier's body. The woman stopped short when she saw it, stomping her foot.

"I'm not walking through that."

I tightened my grip on her arm, moving my body to her rear. I pushed her forward toward the storeroom.

"What on earth are you doing? Young man?"

I stuck the newspaper-wrapped machete beneath my arm and then, gripping her with both hands, half-carried, half-pushed her into the dark red puddle. She made light, high-kneed steps, trying to dance her way through, her feet going tap, tap, tap on the tiles.

"This is outrageous," she said, her voice rising to a low shriek.

There was a pause while I fumbled with the doorknob. Looking down, I saw her shoes, stained from the puddle. They were very tiny, like a child's.

"I...will...not...stand...being...," she sputtered, trying to free herself from my grip. I had a solid hold on her jacket, though, a fistful of fur, and I refused to let her go.

"...manhandled...by...a...common..."

I got the door open, slid my hand to her back, and pushed her inside. With my other hand, I shook the machete free from its disguise. The newspaper fluttered down into the puddle.

She was surprisingly stable on her feet. She seemed to sense the body in front of her before she actually realized what it was and regained her balance with two quick steps, one landing beside the cashier's head, the other beside his chest.

She started to turn toward me, her mouth opening in protestation, but then her eyes were pulled downward by the horribly familiar form of the obstruction at her feet.

"Dear God," she said.

I'd planned on doing it quickly, as quickly and cleanly as possible, just hitting her from the rear, hard, and leaving, but the sound of her voice stopped me. I realized with a shock who it reminded me of. It was Sarah -- the exact same tone and pitch, only raised a bit by age; the same firmness riding beneath the words, the same self-confidence and resolution. I thought to myself, This is how Sarah will sound when she's old.

The woman took advantage of my hesitation to turn on me, and the expression on her face -- a mixture of fear, disgust, confusion -- jarred me into an even longer pause.

"I don't...," she began, but then fell silent, shaking her head. The room was dark; the only light came from the open doorway, where I was standing. My shadow covered the woman to her waist. I held the machete out in front of me, as if to ward her off.

"What is this?" she asked, her voice shaking a little but still sounding remarkably calm. I watched her as she carefully repositioned her feet, turning so that she could face me directly. She straddled the cashier's corpse, putting one foot on either side of his stomach. The hem of her fur coat bunched up a little, resting against his body.

I knew that I ought to kill her, that the longer I spent there, the more danger I'd be in, but a lifetime's training in the proper social behavior of responding when one is addressed overrode that knowledge. Automatically, without thinking, I answered her question.

"I killed him," I said.

She glanced down at the cashier's face, then back up at me.

"With that?" she asked, gesturing toward the machete.

I nodded. "Yes. With this."

We stared at each other then, for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds, though it seemed like much longer. We were each waiting for the other to initiate something.

I tightened my grip on the machete. My mind sent out an order to my arm -- clear, precise, direct. Hit her, it said. But my arm remained in front of me, motionless.

"What kind of a man are you?" the woman asked finally.

The question took me by surprise. I stared at her, thinking. It seemed important that I answer her sincerely. "I'm just normal," I said. "I'm like anyone else."

"Normal? Only a monster would be capable of..."

"I've got a job. A wife, a baby girl."

She averted her eyes when I said this, as if it were something she didn't want to hear. She noticed that her coat was resting on the cashier's body, and she tried to reposition it, but it was too long. She glanced back up at me.

"But how could you do this?"

"I had to."

"Had to?" she asked, as if the idea were absurd. She eyed the machete with disgust. "You had to kill him with that thing?"

"I stole some money."

"Surely you could've taken it without killing him. You could've..."

I shook my head. "Not from him. I found it in a plane."

"A plane?"

I nodded. "Four million dollars."

She was confused now. I'd lost her. "Four million dollars?"

"It was ransom. From a kidnapping."

She frowned at that, as if she thought I was lying. "What does that have to do with him?" she asked angrily, pointing down at the cashier. "Or me?"

I tried to explain. "My brother and I killed someone to keep him from finding out about the money. And then my brother shot his friend to protect me, and I shot his friend's girlfriend and their landlord to protect my brother, but then he started to break down, so I had to shoot him to protect myself, and then the kidnapper..."

She stared at me, and the fear in her face made me stop, made me realize how I must sound, like I was insane, a psychopath.

"I'm not crazy," I said, trying to make my voice come out rational, calm. "It all makes sense. It all happened one thing after the other."

There was a long moment of silence. It was broken finally by the roar of another plane flying over. The whole building echoed with the sound of its engines.

"I tried to make you leave," I said, "but you kept knocking on the door. You wouldn't listen."

The woman clicked open her purse. She reached up, pulled off her earrings, and dropped them inside, one at a time.

"Here," she said, holding it toward me.

I stared down at it. I didn't understand what she wanted me to do.

"Take it," she said.

I reached out with my left hand and took the bag.

"I didn't do it for the money," I said. "I did it to keep from getting caught."

She didn't say anything. She didn't know what I was talking about.

"It's like those old stories about people selling their souls. I did one bad thing, and it led to a worse thing, and on and on and on, until finally I ended up here. This is the bottom." I waved the machete toward the cashier. "This is the worst thing. It can't go any farther."

"No," the woman said, seizing on this last statement as if she thought it might save her life. She straightened herself up. "It won't go any farther."

She started to reach her hand toward me, and I stepped backward, shifting my weight.

"We'll stop it here," she said. "Won't we?"

She tried to catch my eye, but I looked away, down at the cashier's corpse. It was staring up at the ceiling.

"Let's stop it here," she said. She stepped forward, hesitantly, sliding her foot along the tiles, as if she were on a frozen pond, testing the slickness of the ice.

I could still hear Sarah in her voice, riding just below the surface. I tried to block it out but couldn't. The purse was in my left hand and the machete in my right, held motionless before me.

"I'm going to help you do it," she said.

She was right beside me now, edging around my body toward the open doorway behind me, moving slowly, carefully, as if I were some small wild animal that she was afraid to startle into flight.

"It's going to be okay," she said.

She took another shuffling step and was in the doorway. I turned to watch her.

For a moment, I actually thought I was going to let her go. I was going to let her finish it for me, was going to place myself in her hands.

But then her back was to me. She was tiptoeing into the puddle, the store opening itself up before her, and whatever it was that had been holding me back was gone. I stepped out after her, raised the machete above my head, and swung for her neck. Like the cashier, she sensed it coming just before it hit. She started to turn and lift her hand, made a short squeaking sound in her throat, as if, absurdly, she were trying to suppress a laugh, and then the blade hit her, knocking her to the left. She bounced off the shelves there, dragging down some cans of soup behind her as she fell.

There were none of the cashier's melodramatic death throes. She simply collapsed into the puddle, bleeding, and was dead. The soup cans rolled across the tiles with a tiny metallic sound, which, when they finally stopped, deepened the silence of the store.

Everything was very still.

IT WAS close to seven o'clock before I reached home. I parked out in the driveway, and -- with a caution rising from the proximity of my neighbors' windows -- left the machete and the woman's fur coat in the car.

As I came up the front walk, I smelled the sharp, comforting odor of burning wood. Sarah had a fire going in the fireplace.

I took off my boots on the porch and carried them inside.

The entranceway was dark, the door to the living room shut tight. Down the hall I could hear Sarah moving about in the kitchen. There was the soft suction sound of the refrigerator being opened, then the clinking of glasses. She flashed by the open doorway, dressed in her robe, her hair down. She smiled toward me as she passed.

"Wait," she yelled. "Don't come in till I tell you."

The kitchen light flicked out, and I heard her move into the living room. I stood very still in the darkened entranceway, listening, my boots in one hand, the paper bag full of money in the other. I could tell from the sound of her voice that she was excited, happy. She thought that we were free now, free and rich, and she'd planned a celebration. I couldn't imagine how I was going to tell her otherwise.