Praying for Sleep

13

Trenton Heck pointed the Walther up at the turbulent clouds and eased the ribbed hammer down. He put the safety on and slipped the gun back into his holster.

He handed the wallet back to the skinny man, whose hospital identification card and driver’s license seemed on the up-and-up. The poor fellow wasn’t quite as pale as when Heck had tapped the muzzle to his head a few minutes before.

But he wasn’t any less angry.

Richard Kohler dropped to his knees and unzipped the backpack Heck had tossed onto the grass before frisking him.

“Sorry, sir,” Heck said. “Couldn’t tell whether you were him or not. Too dark to get a good look, with you crouched down and all.”

“You come up on Michael Hrubek that way and he’ll panic,” Kohler snapped. “I guarantee it.” He rummaged inside the pack. Whatever was so precious inside-just a couple of bottles, it looked like-didn’t seem to be damaged. Heck wondered if he’d caught himself a tippler.

“And I’ll tell you something else.” The doctor turned, examining Heck. “Even if you’d shot him, he’d’ve turned around and broken your neck before he died.” Kohler snapped his fingers.

Heck gave a brief laugh. “With a head wound? I don’t know about that.”

“There’s apparently a lot you don’t know about him.” The doctor rezipped the pack.

Heck supposed he couldn’t blame the man for being pissed off but he didn’t feel too bad about the ambush. Kohler, it turned out, had been padding down the same path Hrubek must’ve taken earlier in the evening. In the dark, how was Heck to know the difference? True, the doctor was undoubtedly a lot punier. But then so are all suspects after they turn out not to be suspects.

“What’s your interest here exactly, sir?” Heck asked.

Kohler eyed his civvy clothes. “You a cop, or what?”

“Sort of a special deputy.” Though this was untrue and he had no more police powers than an average citizen. Still he sensed he needed some authority with this wiry fellow, who looked like he was in the mood to make trouble. Heck repeated his question.

“I’m Michael’s doctor.”

“Quite a house call you’re making tonight.” Heck looked over the doctor’s suit and penny loafers. “You did some fine tracking to get yourself all the way here, considering you haven’t got dogs.”

“I spotted him up the road, headed in this direction. But he got away.”

“So he’s nearby?”

“I saw him a half hour ago. He can’t’ve gotten that far.”

Heck nodded at Emil, whose head was up. “Well, for some reason the scent’s vanished. That’s got me worried and Emil antsy. We’re going to quarter around here, see if we can pick it up.”

The tone was meant to discourage company, as was the pace that Heck set. But Kohler kept up with man and dog as they zigzagged across the road and along the fields surrounding it, their feet crunching loudly on leaves and gravel. Heck felt the stiffening of his leg muscles, a warning to go slow. The temperature was still unseasonable but it had dropped in the last half hour and the air was wet with the approaching storm; when he was tired and hadn’t slept his leg was prone to seize into agonizing cramps.

“Now that I think about it,” Heck said, “you were probably better off tracking him without dogs. He fooled our search party damn good. Led us all in the opposite direction he ended up taking.”

Kohler once again-for the fourth time, by Heck’s count-glanced at the Walther automatic. The doctor asked, “Led you off? What do you mean?”

Heck explained about the false clue-dropping the clipping that contained the map of Boston.

The doctor was frowning. “I saw Michael in the hospital library yesterday. Tearing clippings out of old newspapers. He’d been reading all morning. He was very absorbed in something.”

“That a fact?” Heck muttered, discouraged once again at Hrubek’s brainy talents. He continued, “Then he pulled a trick I’ve only heard about. He pissed on a truck.”

“He what?”

“Yep. Took a leak on a tire. Left his scent on it. The truck took off for Maine and the dogs followed it ’stead of going after his footsteps. Not many people’d know about that, let alone psychos.”

“That’s not exactly,” Kohler said coolly, “a word we use.”

“My apologies to him,” Heck responded with a sour laugh. “Funny thing: I was just falling asleep-you know how this happens sometimes?-and I heard a truck horn. It just come to me-what he’d done. Emil’s good but following airborne scent of a man hanging on to a tractor-trailer? Naw, that didn’t seem right. For that many miles? I drove back to the truck stop and sure enough picked up his backtrack. That’s a trick of the pros. Just like he hid that clipping in the grass. See, I wouldn’t’ve believed it, it’d been lying out in the open. He’s clever. He’s fooled dogs before, I’ll bet.”

“No. Impossible. He’s never escaped from anything in his life. Not a calculated escape.”

Heck looked at Kohler to see if he could spot the lie. But the doctor seemed sincere, and Heck added, “That’s not what I heard.”

“From who?”

“From my old boss at the state police. Don Haversham. He’s the one called me about the search. He said something ’bout seven hospitals your boy’d hightailed it outta.”

Kohler was laughing. “Sure. But ask Michael which ones. He’ll tell you they were prison hospitals. And when he escaped he was on horseback, dodging musket balls. See what I mean?”

Heck wasn’t quite sure that he did. “Musket balls. Heh. We’ve gotta head through this brush here.”

They plunged down a steep dirt path into a valley below. Kohler was soon winded by the arduous trek. When they reached flat ground, he caught his breath and said, “Of course you don’t know for certain that he isn’t headed for Boston.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, if he was smart enough,” the doctor pointed out, “to fool you into thinking he was going east, maybe now he’s fooling you into thinking he’s going west. Double bluff.”

Well. This was something Heck hadn’t thought about. Sure, why couldn’t Hrubek just do the same thing all over again and turn east? Maybe he did have Boston in mind. But he thought for a minute and then told Kohler the truth: “That might be but I can’t search the whole of the Northeast. All I can do is follow my dog’s nose.”

Though he was painfully aware that this particular nose presently had no notion of where his prey was.

“Just something to think about,” the doctor said.

They followed the path through a valley beside an old quarry. Heck remembered in his youth, a solitary boy, he’d taken an interest in geology. He’d spent many hours pounding with a hammer in a quarry similar to this one, snitching honest quartz, mica and granite rocks for his collection. Tonight, he found himself staring at the tall cliffs, scarred and chopped-the way bone was gouged by a doctor’s metal tools. He thought of the X-rays of his shattered leg, showing where the bullet cracked his femur. Why, he’d wondered at the time, as he wondered now, had the goddamn doctor shown him that artwork?

The hound turned abruptly several times, paused then turned again.

“Has he got the track?” Kohler asked, whispering.

“Nope,” Heck replied in a conversational voice. “We’ll know when he does.”

They walked behind Emil as he snaked along the base of the tall yellow-white cliffs around pools of brackish water.

They emerged from the rocky valley and climbed slowly. They found themselves once again back at the disabled MG. Heck was grimacing. “Hell, back to square one.”

“Why’re you out here by yourself?” Kohler asked, breathing heavily.

“Just am.”

“There’s a reward for him.”

Heck looped the track line for a moment. Finally he said, “How’d you know that?”

“I didn’t. But it explains why you’re out here by yourself.”

“And how ’bout you, Doc? If you spotted him, how come you didn’t call out the Marines?”

“He panics easily. I can get him back without anybody getting hurt. He knows me. He trusts me.”

Emil suddenly stiffened and turned to the forest, tensing. In an instant Heck drew and cocked his pistol. The underbrush shook.

“No!” Kohler shouted, glancing at the gun. He started forward into the bush.

But Heck gripped him by the arm and whispered, “I’d be quiet there, sir. Let’s don’t give our position away.”

There was silence for a moment. Then the muscular doe bounded in a gray-brown arc over a low hedge and vanished.

Heck put the gun away. “You oughta be a little more careful. You’re kinda trusting, you know what I mean?” He looked south along the road, where the gray asphalt disappeared into the hills. Emil’d shown no interest in that direction but Heck thought they ought to try it nonetheless. He started to hold the plastic bag containing Hrubek’s shorts down to the dog once more. But Kohler stopped his arm.

“How much?” the doctor asked.

“How’s that, sir?” Heck stood.

“How much is the reward?”

Emil was aware that a scent article was dangling over his head and he shivered. Heck closed the bag up again to keep the dog from growing too skittish. He said to the doctor, “That’s sort of between me and the people paying it, sir.”

“Is that Adler?”

Heck nodded slowly.

“Well,” Kohler continued, “he’s a colleague. We work together.”

“If he’s a buddy then how come you don’t know ’bout it? The reward?”

Kohler asked, “How much, Mr. Heck?”

“Ten thousand.”

“I’ll give you twelve.”

For a moment Heck watched Emil rock back and forth, eager to run. He said to Kohler, “You’re joshing.”

“Oh, no. I’m quite serious.”

Heck snorted a laugh but his face grew hot as he realized that he was looking at a man who could actually write a check for twelve thousand dollars. And probably have some left over afterward. “Why?”

“Thirteen.”

“I’m not bargaining with you. What do you want me to do for that kind of money?”

“Go home. Forget about Michael Hrubek.”

Heck looked slowly around him. He noticed in the west, far away, a diffuse flash of lightning. It seemed to stretch for a hundred miles. He gazed at the huge expanse of countryside, the muddy horizon against the black sky. He found the view disturbing, for the very reason that this unexpected money was so appealing. How could he possibly find one man in that vast emptiness? Heck laughed to himself. Why did God always drop temptations in front of you when you wanted them the most?

“What’s in this for you?” Heck asked again, to stall.

“I just don’t want him hurt.”

“I’m not going to hurt him. Not necessarily.”

“You were about to use that gun.”

“Well, if I had to I would. But I’m not going to shoot anybody in the back. That’s not my way. Wasn’t when I was a trooper. Isn’t now.”

“Michael isn’t dangerous. He’s not like a bank robber.”

“Doesn’t matter if he’s dangerous like a crazed moose protecting her calves or dangerous like a Mafia hit man. I’m looking out for me and my dog and if that means shooting the man’s coming at me with a rock or tire iron so be it.”

Kohler gave a little smile that made Heck feel he’d somehow lost a point.

“Look, he’s set out traps for dogs. I don’t give much quarter to a man like that.”

“He did what?” The smile vanished from Kohler’s face.

“Traps. Spring animal traps.”

“No. Michael wouldn’t do that.”

“Well, you may say that but-”

“Have you seen any?”

“I know he took some. Haven’t found any yet.”

The doctor didn’t speak for a moment. Finally he said, “I think you’re being used, Mr. Heck.”

“What do you mean by that?” He was ready to take offense but the psychiatrist’s voice was suddenly soothing, the voice of someone on his side, trying to help.

“Adler knows that a dog’ll make a schizophrenic snap. Chasing someone like Michael is the worst thing in the world for him. A patient like that, cornered? He’ll panic. He’ll panic bad. You’ll have to shoot him. Adler wants this whole thing wrapped up as smooth as possible. Fourteen thousand.”

Lord. Heck squeezed his eyes shut and opened them just in time to see another flash of lightning. At his feet Emil rocked on his paws and had just about had it with this human-conversation stuff.

Take the money and go back home. Call up the bank, feed them a big check. Fourteen’d buy him another nine, ten months. Maybe in that time HQ’d find money to reinstate all the troopers let go in the last three years. Maybe one of the thirty-six security companies that had Heck’s résumé would find an opening.

Maybe Jill’d come home with her knuckleball and tip money and her lacy nightgowns.

Fourteen thousand dollars.

Heck sighed. “Well, sir, I understand you’re concerned about your patient and all, and I respect that. But there’re other people to think about too. I wasn’t a trooper for nothing. Emil and me have a chance to capture this fellow. And I’d say it’s probably a better shot than you have-even with your talk about double bluffs and all. No offense.”

“But he isn’t dangerous. That’s what nobody understands. You chasing him, that’s what makes him dangerous.”

Heck laughed. “Well, you psychiatrists have your own way of talking, I don’t doubt. But those two fellows he almost killed tonight might disagree with you some.”

“Killed?” Kohler’s eyes flickered, and the doctor seemed as badly shaken as when Heck had pressed the black barrel of the gun against his skin. “What’re you talking about?”

“Those orderlies.”

“What orderlies?”

“He had the run-in with those two fellows near Stinson. I thought you knew about it. Just after he escaped.”

“You know their names?”

“No, sure don’t. They were from the hospital. Marsden. That’s all I know.”

Stepping away from Heck, Kohler wandered to the car. He picked up the small skull. He rubbed it compulsively in his hands.

“So,” Heck continued, “I think I gotta turn down your offer.”

Kohler stared at the night sky for a moment then turned to Heck. “Just do me a favor. If you find him, don’t threaten him. Don’t chase him. And whatever you do, for God’s sake, don’t sic that dog on him.”

“I’m not looking at this,” Heck said coolly, “like a fox hunt.”

Kohler handed him a card. “That’s my service. You get close to him, call that number. They’ll page me. I’d really appreciate it.”

“If I can, I will,” Heck said. “That’s the best I can say.”

Kohler nodded and looked around, orienting himself. “That’s 236 down there?”

“Yessir,” Trenton Heck said, then leaned against the fender of the car and-with a slight laugh-watched the peculiar sight of this narrow man in a suit and tie, muddy as a ditchdigger, sporting a fine-looking overcoat and a backpack as he strolled down this deserted country road late on a stormy night.

Dr. Ronald Adler’s eyes coursed up and down the Marsden County map. “Made it all the way to the state border. Who’d’ve thought?” He added with neither elation nor interest, “The Massachusetts Highway Patrol should have him within an hour or so. I want a worst-case plan.”

“Are you talking about the reward?” Peter Grimes asked.

“Reward?” the director snapped.

“Uhm. What do you mean by worst-case?”

Adler seemed to know exactly but didn’t speak for a moment, perhaps out of some vestigial superstition that medical training had not wholly obliterated. “If he kills a trooper when they find him. Or kills anybody else for that matter. That’s what I mean.”

“Okay, that’s possible, I suppose,” Grimes offered. “Unlikely.”

Adler turned his attention back to the E Ward supervisor’s reports. “Is all this accurate?”

“Absolutely. I’m sure.”

“Hrubek was in the Milieu Suite? Kohler was doing individual psychoanalysis with him? This delusion therapy he’s always boring people with?”

And publishing about in the best professional journals, Grimes reflected. He said, “So it appears.”

“NIMH guidelines. We all know them. The criteria for individual psychotherapy in schizophrenic patients are that they be young, intelligent, have a past history of achievement. And are more acute than chronic… Oh, and that they have some success in a sexual relationship. That’s hardly Michael Hrubek.”

The assistant came a half breath away from saying, Not unless you call rape a successful relationship. He wondered if Adler would have fired him or laughed.

“A history like his”-Adler riffled pages-“and still Kohler puts him in therapy. One way you could view it is that Kohler was more than negligent in this whole matter. Let’s just take that tack for a minute, shall we? Is that door open? My door there. Close it, why don’t you?”

Grimes did, while Adler flipped through one doctor’s assessment of Hrubek, in which was recorded the patient’s plans to remove this therapist’s internal organs with a single bare hand-a process that Hrubek described articulately and, all things considered, with an impressive knowledge of human anatomy.

When Grimes dropped again into his chair, Adler had snapped closed the file and was gazing at the ceiling. His hand dipped into his crotch, where he adjusted something. He said, “You realize what Herr Dr. Kohler has done?”

“He-”

“Do you know the case of Burton Scott Webley? Burton Scott Webley the Third. Or Fourth. I don’t recall. Do you know about him? Do they teach you such arcane things in… Where did you go to school?”

“ Columbia, sir. I’m not familiar with the case, no.”

“Co-lum-bi-a,” Adler stretched the four syllables out with elastic disdain. “Webley the Third or Fourth. He was a patient in New York. I don’t know. Creedmoor perhaps. Or Pilgrim State. Don’t let’s quibble. No, wait. It was private. Top doctors, like our friend, Sigmund Kohler. Cum laude sort of doctors. Co-lum-bi-a sort of doctors.”

“Got it.”

“You see, Kohler has this idea that our mental hospitals are chockablock with van Goghs. Poets and artists. Misunderstood geniuses, vision and madness locked together-the beast with two backs.” When he noticed Grimes staring at him blankly, Adler continued, “Webley was a paranoid schizophrenic. Delusional. Monosymptomatic. Twenty-eight years of age. Sound familiar, Grimes? Delusions centered around his family. They were trying to get him, blah, blah, blah. Felt his father and aunt were having an incestuous relationship. Including bouts of televised sodomy. On network TV, if I’m not mistaken. He had a bad episode and threatened the aunt with a pitchfork. Well, he’s involuntarily committed. Insulin-shock therapy is all in vogue and his doctors put him into a hundred seventy comas.”

“Jesus.”

“Then the ECS department third-rails him for six months after his blood sugar becomes an embarrassment. With that much amperage, well, he came out of it rather tattered, as you’d suspect.”

“This was when?”

“Hardly matters. A little while after they unplugged him, he sees the senior psychiatrist, who does a new diagnostic. Webley is neat and clean and coherent. And very sharp. Astonishing indeed, considering the Smith-Kline cocktails he’s on. He’s polite, he’s responsive, he’s eager to undergo therapy. The doctor schedules the full battery of tests. Webley takes, and passes, all twenty-five of them. A miracle cure. He’ll be written up in the APA Journal.”

“I can guess what’s coming.”

“Oh, can you, Grimes?” Adler fixed him with an amused gaze. “Can you guess that after he was released, he took a taxi to his aunt’s house then raped and dismembered her, looking for the hidden microphone that’d recorded the evidence used to commit him? Can you guess that her fifteen-year-old daughter walked into the house as his little search was in progress and that he did the same to her? Any inkling that the only thing that saved the eight-year-old son was that Webley fell asleep amid the girl’s viscera? You look sufficiently pale, Grimes.

“But I have to tell you the end of the story. The shocking part: it was all calculated. Webley had an IQ of 146. After he took himself off his brain candy, he snuck into the library and memorized the correct answers to each of those twenty-five tests and, I submit, honed his delivery pretty fucking well.”

“You think Hrubek did the same thing to Kohler? What this Webley did?”

“Yes! Of course that’s what I mean! Kohler bought a bill of goods. Lock, stock and barrel. Callaghan’s death, any other deaths tonight-they’re ultimately Kohler’s fault. His fault, Peter.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Tell me, what do you think of him? Of Kohler?”

“Pompous little shit.”

Adler was pleased to have someone second this sentiment though it reminded him how much he detested Grimes for being such a toady. “I think there’s more to it. Why is he being so blind? Kohler’s not stupid. Whatever else, he’s not stupid. Why?”

“I don’t really-”

“Peter, I’d like you to do something for me.”

“Look, sir-”

“Some detective work.” When the otherwise thin Adler dropped his head to look over the top of his glasses he developed an alarming double chin.

Because it was very late in the evening and he was tired of treading lightly through hospital politics, Peter Grimes chose not to be coy. “I don’t think I’d like to do that.”

“ ‘Like to do that’?” Adler snapped. “Don’t give me any of your bluster. I want to see fear in your face, young man. You’re not union. If I wanted your fucking balls, I’d have them in an instant and a hell of a lot easier than I could castrate those orderlies. Don’t you forget that. Now are you listening? Some detective work. Write it down if you can’t remember it. Are you ready?” he inquired sarcastically, forgetting for the moment that he was speaking not to an incompetent secretary but to a doctor of medicine.

As man and dog returned to the sports car, Heck grew convinced that Hrubek had hitched a ride or snuck into the back of a repair vehicle that had answered the distress call.

Hiding in trucks for real this time, is he? Heck wondered. He leaned against the car and shivered slightly as a breeze came up.

Oh, man, here I give up almost a year’s salary, sounding all grandiose and righteous, and look what happens? I lose the trail completely. What would you’ve done, Jill? Tell me you’d’ve told him to stuff it too.

But no, Heck knew. Jill would’ve skedaddled home and tucked Kohler’s check in her jewelry box. By now she’d be fast asleep.

In her pink nightgown.

Oh, baby…

Then, suddenly, Emil’s nose shot into the air and the dog stiffened. He turned north, toward Route 236, and began to trot forward. Heck followed, feeling the line go taut and Emil pick up the pace.

What’s going on here?

The breeze blew over them again and Emil began to run.

Glancing down at the asphalt, Heck closed his eyes in disgust. “Goddamn! What was I thinking of? Bicycle!”

Heck commanded Emil to stop, then examined the asphalt and found a tread mark leading unsteadily from the car toward the highway. The tread was very wide; the rider could easily weigh three hundred pounds.

The surest clue though was Emil, whose nose was in the air. When a dog raises his nose and switches from trailing ground scent to trailing airborne, it’s a good sign that the quarry’s on a bike or motorcycle. They’d probably been upwind of the scent until the breeze a moment ago blew a bit of it back in their direction. Emil’s ears twitched and he doled his weight from the left paw to the right and back again, ready to run.

Heck was too. Airborne scent is the hardest to track and even a moderate wind will disrupt it. A storm of the sort that was expected would surely obliterate it altogether.

Strapping the thong over his pistol, he wrapped Emil’s red lead around his left hand.

“Find, Emil. Find!”

The hound broke from the starting gate and surged down the road. They were on the trail once again.

What’s different?

Standing on the edge of the lake not far from the patio, Lis was momentarily disoriented. This place seemed both familiar and foreign. Then she understood why. The lake had risen so high that the shape of the shoreline had changed. What had been a voluptuous outcropping of lawn and reeds was now concave, and a cluster of small rock islands roughly in the shape of the constellation Orion had vanished-completely covered with water.

She turned back to her labors.

The two women hadn’t returned to the dam but chose to build the new levee closer to the house, filling and piling sandbags where the culvert met the lawn. Even if the lake were to overflow the dam a line of bags here would, if it held, stop the water from reaching the house. Besides, she decided, they hardly had the time or strength to cart several tons of sand a hundred yards through a rocky culvert slowly filling with water.

Portia filled the bags and Lis dragged or carried them to their impromptu line of defense. As they worked, Lis glanced occasionally at her sister. The rings and crystal necklace were gone and her delicate hands and short, perfect nails-fiery red-were covered by canvas gloves. In place of the black lace headband was a Boston Red Sox cap.

Portia lunged energetically with the shovel, absorbed in the task, scooping huge wads of sand and pitching them into bags. Lis, with years of gardening and landscaping behind her, had always assumed herself the stronger of the two. But she saw now that they were, in strength at least, on par. Thanks, she supposed, to the hours Portia spent on health-club treadmills and racquetball courts. Occasionally the young woman would stop, pull off a glove to see what sort of honorable callus she might be developing, then return to the job. Once, as she gazed out into the forest, Portia twined a strand of hair around her finger and slipped an end into her mouth. Lis had seen her do this earlier in the evening-a nervous habit that she’d perhaps developed recently.

But then, Lis thought, how would I know if she’d picked it up recently or not? She reflected how little she knew of her sister’s life. The girl had for all practical purposes left home at eighteen and rarely returned for any length of time. When she had, it was usually for a single night-a Saturday or Sunday dinner-with her current flame in tow. She even spent the majority of holidays elsewhere-usually with boyfriends, sometimes workmates. A Christmas for two in a far-off inn, however romantic, didn’t appeal much to Lis. During summer breaks from college Portia would travel with girlfriends, or work at internships in the city. When she’d dropped out of school her junior year, the girl had abandoned her Bronxville apartment and moved to Manhattan. Lis was then working at Ridgeton High School and living in a small rental house in Redding. She’d been hoping that after her sister left Sarah Lawrence, the young woman might come back to the area. But no, Portia smilingly deflected the suggestion, as if it were pure craziness. She added that she had to move to New York. It was time for her to “do the city.”

Lis remembered wondering what exactly this meant, and why her sister seemed to treat it as an inevitable rite of passage.

What, Lis wondered, was life like when you “did” the city? Did Portia’s daytime hours pass quickly or slow? Did she flirt with her boss? Did she gossip? What did she eat for dinner? Where did she buy her laundry soap? Did she snort cocaine at ad-agency parties? Did she have a favorite movie theater? What did she laugh at, Monty Python or Roseanne? Which newspaper did she read in the morning? Did she sleep only with men?

Lis tried to recall any time in recent years when she and Portia had spoken frequently. During the prelude to their mother’s death, she supposed.

Yet even then “frequently” was hardly the word to use.

Seventy-four-year-old Ruth L’Auberget had learned the hopeless diagnosis a year ago August and had immediately taken up the role of Patient-one that, it was no surprise to Lis, her mother seemed born to play. Her monied, Boston sous-Society upbringing had taught her to be stoic, her generation to be fatalistic, her husband to expect the worst. The role was, in fact, simply a variation on one that the statuesque, still-eyed woman had been acting for years. A formidable disease had simply replaced a formidable husband (Andrew having by then made his unglamorous exit in the British Air loo).

Until she got sick, the widow L’Auberget had been foundering. A woman in search of a burden. Now, once again, she was in her element.

Buying clothes for a shrinking figure, she chose not the shades she’d always worn-colors that made good backgrounds, beige and taupe and sand-but picked instead the hues of the flowers she grew, reds and yellows and emerald. She wore loud-patterned turbans, not scarves or wigs, and once-to Lis’s astonishment-burst into the Chemo Ward announcing to the young nurses, “Hello, dahlings, it’s Auntie Mame!”

Only near the very end did she grow sullen and timid-mostly at the thought, it seemed, of an ungainly and therefore embarrassing death. It was during this time that, on morphine, she’d described recent conversations with her husband in such detail that Lis’s skin would sting from the goose bumps. Mother only imagined it, Lis recalled thinking-as she’d protested to Owen tonight on the patio.

She’d just imagined it. Of course.

The chills, however, never failed to appear.

Lis had thought that perhaps their mother’s illness might bring the sisters closer together. It didn’t. Portia spent only slightly more time in Ridgeton during the months of Mrs. L’Auberget’s decline than she had before.

Lis was furious at this neglect, and once-when she and her mother had driven into the city for an appointment at Sloan-Kettering-she resolved to confront her sister. Yet Portia preempted her. She’d fixed up one of the bedrooms in the co-op as a homey sickroom and insisted that Lis and Ruth stay with her for several days. She broke dates, took a leave of absence from work and even bought a cookbook of cancer-fighting recipes. Lis still had a vivid, comic memory of the young woman, feet apart, hair in anxious streamers, standing dead center in the tiny kitchen as she slung flour into bowls and vegetables into pans, searching desperately for lost utensils.

So the confrontation was avoided. Yet when Ruth returned home, Portia resumed her distance and in the end the burden of the dying fell on Lis. By now, much had intervened between the sisters, and she’d forgiven Portia for this lapse. Lis was even grateful that only she had been present in the last minutes; it was a time she would rather not have shared. Lis would always remember the curiously muscular touch of her mother’s hand on Lis’s palm as she finally slipped away. A triplet of squeezes, like a letter in Morse code.

Now Lis suddenly found herself gasping for breath and realized that, in the grip of memory, she’d been working with growing fervor, the pace increasingly desperate. She paused and leaned against the pile of bags, already three-high.

She closed her eyes for a moment and was startled by her sister’s voice.

“So.” Portia plunged the shovel into the pile of sand with a loud chunk. “I guess it’s time to ask. Why did you really ask me out?”

14At her sister’s feet Lis counted seven bags, filled, waiting to be piled up on the levee. Portia filled two more and continued, “I didn’t have to be here for the estate, right? I could’ve handled it all in the city. That’s what Owen said.”

“You haven’t been out for a long time. I don’t get into the city very much.”

“If you mean we don’t see each other very much, well, that’s sure true. But there’s something else on your mind, isn’t there? Other than sisters socializing.”

Lis didn’t speak and watched another bag vigorously fill with wet sand.

“What is this,” Portia continued, “kiss and make up?”

Lis refused to let herself be stung by the mocking tone. Gripping a bag by the corners she carried it to the culvert and slung it fiercely on top. “Why don’t we take five?”

Portia finished filling another bag then planted the shovel and pulled off the gloves, examining a red spot on her index finger. She sat down, beside her sister, on the low wall of bags.

After a moment Lis continued, “I’m thinking of leaving teaching.”

Her sister didn’t seem surprised. “I never could quite see you as a teacher.”

And what exactly did she see me as? Lis wondered. She assumed Portia had opinions about her career-and about the rest of her life, for that matter-but couldn’t imagine what they might be.

“Teaching’s been good to me. I’ve enjoyed it enough. But I think it’s time for a change.”

“Well, you’re a rich woman now. Live off the fat of the land.”

“Well, I’m not going to just quit.”

“Why not? Stay home and garden. Watch Oprah and Regis. There’re worse lives.”

“You know Langdell Nursery?”

“Nope.” The young woman squinted, shaking her head. “Oh, wait, that place off 236?”

“We used to go there all the time. With Mother. They’d let us water flowers in the hothouse.”

“Vaguely. That’s where they had those big bins of onions?”

Lis laughed softly. “Flower bulbs.”

“Right. It’s still there?”

“It’s for sale. The nursery and a landscaping company the family owns.”

“Jesus, look.” Portia was gazing across the lake into the state park. The water had pushed an old boathouse off its pilings. The ghostly white structure of rotting clapboard dipped slowly into the water.

“The state was going to tear it down.” Lis nodded toward the boathouse. “The taxpayers just saved a few dollars, looks like. The nursery, I was saying?…” She rubbed her hands together a few times and felt her palms go cold as the nervous sweat evaporated. “I think I’m going to buy the place.”

Portia nodded. Again a bit of yellow hair wound between her fingers and the tips of the strands slipped into her mouth. In the muted light, her face seemed particularly pale and her lips black. Had she refreshed her lipstick before coming out here to stack sandbags?

“I need a partner,” Lis said slowly. “And I was thinking I’d like it to be you.”

Portia laughed. She was a pretty woman and could instantly, as if by turning on a switch, become entirely sensual or charming or cute. Yet she often laughed with a deep breathiness that, Lis felt, instantly killed her appeal. This usually occurred when, as now, she was critical in an obscure way, leaving it to others to deduce their slipups.

Heat bristled at Lis’s temples as the blush washed over her face. “I don’t know business. Finances, marketing, things like that. You do.”

“I’m a media buyer, Lis. I’m not Donald Trump.”

“You know more than I do. You’re always talking about getting out of advertising. You were thinking about opening a boutique last year.”

“Everybody in advertising talks about quitting and opening a boutique. Or a catering company. You and me in business?”

“It’s a good deal. Langdell died last year and his wife doesn’t want to keep running the place. They’re asking three million for everything. The land alone’s worth two. Mortgage rates are great now. And Angie said she’d be willing to finance some of it herself, as long as she gets a million and a half at the closing.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I need a change, Portia. I love gardens and-”

“No, I think it makes sense for you. I meant, you’re serious about us. Working together.”

“Of course I am. You handle the business and finance, and I handle the product-there, doesn’t that sound professional? The ‘product’?”

Portia had been staring at the pile of bags she’d filled. She picked one up, carried it to the wall, dropped it into place. “Heavy bastards, aren’t they?” she gasped. “Maybe I oughta shovel less.”

“I’ve got a lot of ideas. We’d expand the formal gardens and open a specialty hothouse for roses. We could even have lectures. Maybe do videos. How to crossbreed. How to start your first garden. You know people in film production. If we work hard, it could really fly.”

Portia didn’t speak for a minute. “Fact is, I was going to quit anyway after the first of the year. Just stay long enough to get my bonus.”

“Really? That’s when I was thinking of buying the place. February. Or March.”

The young woman added quickly, “No, I mean I was going to take the year off. A couple years maybe. I wasn’t going to work at all.”

“Oh.” Lis straightened one of the sandbags, which teetered between the two women. “And do what?”

“Travel. Club Med it for a while. I wanted to learn how to windsurf. Demon of the sea.”

“Just… not do anything?”

“I hear that tone, Mother.”

Lis fought down the wave of anger. “No, I’m just surprised.”

“Maybe I’ll do Europe again. I was poor when I did the backpacking routine. And, God, those trips with Mother and Father? The pits. Señor L’Auberget, fascist tour guide. ‘Come on, girls, what the hell’re you up to? The Louvre closes in two hours. Portia, don’t you dare look back at those boys…’ Ha, and you-you were probably the only kid in the history of the world who went to bed without dinner because she bitched about leaving… what was that?”

“The sculpture gardens at the Rodin museum,” Lis said in a soft voice, laughing wanly at the memory. “A culture victim at seventeen.”

After a moment Portia said, “I don’t think so, Lis. It wouldn’t work.”

“For a year. Try it. You could sell out your share if it isn’t for you.”

“I could also lose the money, couldn’t I?”

“Yes, I suppose you could. But I won’t let it go under.”

“What does Owen think?”

Ah, well, there was that.

“He had some reservations, you could say.”

You could also say that it nearly broke up their marriage. Lis began thinking about opening a nursery just before their mother died and it was clear that the sisters would be inheriting a large sum of cash. Owen had wanted to put money into conservative stocks and invest in his law firm, hiring several attorneys and expanding into new offices. That would be the best return on the investment, he’d told her.

But she was adamant. It was her money, and a nursery would be perfect for her. If not the Langdells’, then another one somewhere nearby. Always the practical counselor, he rattled off a list of concerns.

“You’re crazy, Lis. A nursery? It’s seasonal. It’s weather-dependent. With landscaping, there’re major liability issues. You’ll have INS problems with the workers… You want to garden, we’ll build another one here. We’ll get an architect, we can-”

“I want to work, Owen. For heaven’s sake, I don’t tell you to stay home and read law books for fun.”

“You can make a living at law,” he’d snapped.

The more he argued, the more insistent she grew.

“Jesus, Lis. At best, you’ll probably clear a few thousand a year. You’d make more if you put it in the bank and earned passbook interest.”

She flung a Money magazine down on the table. “There’s an article on profitable businesses. Funeral homes are number one. I don’t want a funeral home.”

“Quit being so damn pigheaded! At least in the bank the money’s insured. You’re willing to risk it all?”

“Mrs. Langdell showed me the books. They’ve been profitable for fifteen years.”

He grew ominously quiet. “So you’ve talked to her about it already. Before you came to me?”

After a moment she confessed that she had.

“Don’t you think you might’ve asked first?”

“I didn’t commit myself.”

“You haven’t even got your hands on the money yet and you’re pretty fucking eager to throw it away.”

“It’s my family’s money, Owen.”

Most scripts of domestic confrontation would call for a little parrying at this point. Your money? Your money? I supported you when the teachers went on strike… When you lost your big bank client two years ago, it was my salary-a teacher’s salary!-that got us through… I’m doing all the estate legal work for free… All those months when we couldn’t pay the light bill because you joined the country club…

But Owen had done then what Owen did best. He closed his mouth and walked away. He grabbed his old.22 pump rifle and walked out into the woods to plink cans and hunt squirrels and rabbits.

For several hours Lis was left alone with the distant pops of gunshots and the memory of the coldness in his eyes when he’d walked out the door.

And for several hours she wondered if she’d lost her husband.

Yet when he returned he was calm. The last he said about the nursery was, “I’d counsel against it but if you want to go ahead anyway, I’ll represent you.”

She’d thanked him but it was several days before his moodiness vanished.

Tonight, Lis started to tell her sister some of Owen’s concerns but Portia wasn’t interested. She simply shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

After a moment Lis asked, “Why?”

“I’m not ready to leave the city yet.”

“You wouldn’t have to. I’d do the day-to-day things. We’d get together a couple times a month. You could come out here. Or I could go into the city.”

“I really need some time off.”

“Think about it, at least. Please?” Lis exclaimed breathlessly to her sister’s face, pale and obscure in the darkness.

“No, Lis. I’m sorry.”

Angry and hurt, Lis picked up a large sandbag and tossed it onto the edge of the levee. She misjudged the distance though and it tumbled into the lake. “Shit!” she cried, trying to retrieve the bag. But it had slipped deep beneath the surface.

Portia spun some strands of hair once more. Lis stood. Several waves splashed loudly at their feet before Lis asked, “What’s the real reason?”

“Lis.”

“What if I said I didn’t want to buy a nursery. What if I was all hot for a boutique on Madison Avenue?”

Portia’s mouth tightened but Lis persisted, “What if I said, Let’s start a business where you and I travel around Europe and try out restaurants or rate châteaux? What if I said, Let’s start a windsurfing school?”

“Lis. Please.”

“Goddamn it! Is it because of Indian Leap? Tell me?”

Portia spun to face her. “Oh, Jesus, Lis.” She said nothing more.

The surface of the lake grew light suddenly, as a huge flash, bile green, filled the western horizon. It vanished behind a slab of thick clouds.

Lis finally said, “We’ve never talked about it. For six months, we haven’t said a word. It just sits there between us.”

“We better finish up here.” Portia seized her shovel. “That was some mean son-of-a-bitch lightning. And it wasn’t that far away.”

“Please,” Lis whispered.

A groan filled the night, and they turned to see the boathouse slide completely off the pilings and into the water. Portia said nothing more and started shoveling once again.

Listening to the chunk of the sandbags filling, Lis remained near the shore, gazing out over the lake.

As the boathouse sank, a vague white form appeared in the trees behind it. For a moment, Lis was sure that it was an elderly woman limping slowly toward the lake. Lis blinked and stepped closer to shore. The woman’s gait suggested she was ill and in pain.

Then, like the boathouse, the apparition eased off the shore and into the water, where it sank beneath the still, onyx surface. A piece of canvas tied to a cleat on the frame, or a six-mil plastic tarp, Lis supposed. Not a woman at all. Not a ghost.

She’d just imagined it. Of course.

The night Abraham Lincoln died, after spending many hours with a horrid wound in the thick mass of sweat-damp hair, the moon that blossomed out of the clouds in the eastern part of the United States was blood red.

This freak occurrence, Michael Hrubek had read, was verified by several different sources, one of whom was a farmer in Illinois. Standing in a freshly planted cornfield, 1865, April 15, this man looked up into the radiant evening sky, saw the crimson moon and took off his straw hat out of respect because he knew that a thousand miles away a great life was gone.

There was no moon visible tonight. The sky was overcast and turbulent as Hrubek bicycled unsteadily west along Route 236. It was a painstaking journey. He was now accustomed to the mountain bike and was riding as confidently as a Tour de France racer. Still, whenever a crown of light shone over the road before him or behind, he stopped and vaulted to the ground. He’d lie under cover of brush or tree until the vehicle passed then would leap onto his bike once again, his hammish legs pedaling fast in low gear; he didn’t know how to upshift.

A flash of light startled him. He looked across a field and saw a police car patrolling slowly, shining a spotlight on a darkened farmhouse. The light clicked out and the car continued east, away from Hrubek. His anxiety notched up a few degrees as he pedaled on, and he found himself thinking of his first run-in with the police.

Michael Hrubek had been twenty years old and the arrest was for rape.

The young man had been attending a private college in upstate New York, an area pretty enough at the height of a vibrant summer but for most of the year as bleak as the depressed economy in the small city and fields surrounding the campus.

During his first semester Michael had been reclusive and fidgety but he’d done well in his studies, especially in his two courses in American history. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, however, he grew increasingly anxious. His concentration was poor and he seemed unable to make even the simplest decisions-which class assignment to do first, when to go to lunch, whether it was better to brush his teeth before he urinated or after. He spent hour after hour staring out the window of his room.

He was then nearly as large as he was now, with long curly hair, Neanderthal eyebrows grown together and a round face that paradoxically seemed kind as long as he didn’t smile or laugh. When he did, his expression-in fact usually one of bewilderment-appeared to be pure malice. He had no friends.

Michael was therefore surprised, one gray March Sunday, to hear a knock on his door. He hadn’t showered for several weeks and had been wearing the same jeans and shirt for nearly a month. No one could remember, he least of all, when he had last cleaned the room. His roommate had long ago escaped to a girlfriend’s apartment, a desertion that delighted Michael, who was certain that the student had been taking pictures of him while he slept. On this Sunday he’d spent two hours hunched over his desk, repeatedly reading T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He found this task was like trying to read a block of wood.

“Yo, Mike.”

“Who is it?”

The visitors were two students-juniors who lived in the dorm. Michael stood in the open door, gazing at them suspiciously. They smiled their clean-cut smiles and asked how he was doing. Michael stared at them and said nothing.

“Mikey, you’re working too hard. Come on. We got a party in the rec room.”

“Have something to eat, come on.”

“I have to study!” he whined.

“Naw, naw, come on… Let’s party. You’re working too totally hard, man. Have something to eat.”

Well, Michael did like to eat. He ate three big meals a day and snacked constantly. He also tended to acquiesce to people’s requests; if he didn’t-if he refused to do what they wanted-his gut erupted with fiery bursts of worry. What would they think about him? What would they say?

“Maybe.”

“Hey, excellent. Party down!”

So Michael reluctantly followed the two young men down the hall toward the dorm’s common room, where a loud party was in progress. As they passed a darkened bedroom the juniors paused to let Michael precede them. They suddenly swiveled and pushed him into the room, slamming the door shut and tying it closed.

Michael howled in panic, tugging furiously at the knob. He stumbled, looking unsuccessfully for a light. He stormed to the window, ripped down the shade and was about to break the glass and jump forty feet to the grass lawn when he noticed the room’s other occupant. He’d seen her at one or two parties. She was an overweight freshman with a round face and curly hair cut very short. She had thick ankles and wore a dozen bracelets around her pudgy wrists. The girl was passed-out drunk, lying on the bed, skirt up to her waist. She wore no panties. Her hand held a glass that contained the dregs of orange juice and vodka. She had apparently regained consciousness long enough to vomit then passed out again.

Michael leaned close and studied her. Instantly, the sight of her genitals (his first glimpse of female private anatomy) and the smell of liquor and puke sent him into paroxysms of fear. He screamed at the insensible girl, “What are you doing to me?” Then he flung himself into the door again and again, the huge noise resounding throughout the dormitory. In the hallway outside, laughter pealed. Michael fell back onto the bed, hyperventilating. Claustrophobia clutched him and sweat flowed from every pore. A moment later his mind mercifully shut down and his vision went black. The next thing he remembered was the cruel grip of two security guards, brutally pulling him to his feet. The now-conscious girl, tugging down her skirt, was screaming. Michael’s pants were undone and his limp penis hung out, cut and bloodied by the zipper of his trousers.

Michael recalled nothing of what had happened. The girl claimed she had just gone to bed, having caught the flu. She’d opened her eyes and found Michael spreading her legs and penetrating her violently, despite her desperate protests. Police were called, parents notified. Michael spent the night in jail, under the cautious eye of two very uncomfortable deputies, unprepared for a prisoner who glared at them and threatened to make them “dead fuckers” if they didn’t bring him a history book from his room.

The evidence was in conflict. Although there were traces of three different condom lubricants found in and around the girl’s vagina, Michael wasn’t wearing a condom when the guards captured him nor were any located in the room. The defense lawyer’s tack was that the girl herself had lifted Michael’s penis from his jeans and alleged rape, rather than admit that she’d taken on a succession of students after drinking herself semiconscious-a theory that, while politically incorrect, might very well have appealed to the jury.

On the other hand there were several purported witnesses to the crime, including the girl herself. Then too Michael had threatened or glared at half the campus at one time or another-particularly women.

But the most damning evidence of all: Michael Hrubek himself-a big, scary boy, more than twice the girl’s size, who’d been caught, the prosecutor was only too pleased to point out, with his pants down. Nailing shut his own coffin, Michael grew incoherent after the incident and began to mutter violent epithets. Taking the stand in court would have been a disaster. The lawyer pled him down to one count of sexual assault and he was given probation on condition that he withdraw from school and voluntarily commit himself to a state hospital near his home, where he’d undergo a treatment program for violent sex offenders.

After six months he was discharged from the hospital and returned to his parents’ home.

Once he was back in Westbury, reason and madness rapidly began to merge. One day, the autumn after the rape, Michael announced to his mother that he wanted to return to college. He added, “I’m only going to take history. They better let me do that. Oh, and I want to become a priest. I’m not going to study anything else. No math, no English, no al-ge-bra! Just fucking forget about it! I’m only going to study history.”

His bleary-eyed mother, lolling in her unmade bed, her blond hair stiff as straw, laughed in astonishment at his demands. “Go back to college? Are you serious? Look what you did! Do you know what you did to that girl?”

No, Michael didn’t know what he’d done. He had no idea. All he remembered was some girl lying about him and because of that he’d been forced to abandon his precious history classes. “She’s a fucker! She lied! Why can’t I go back? Aren’t I fashionable enough to go to school? Well, aren’t I? Priests are very fashionable. Someday I’ll write a his-tory about them. They often fuck little boys, you know.”

“Go to your room!” his mother tearfully shouted, and he-a man in his twenties, a man twice her size-scurried off like a whipped dog.

Often he’d whine, “Please? I want to go back to school!” He promised to study hard and become one fucker of a priest to make her happy. He said he’d wear a crown of thorns on his bloody head and make people rise from their graves.

“Jesus wore thorns because He rose from the dead,” he explained one day to her. “That’s why roses have thorns.”

“I’m going out, Michael,” she would cry.

“Are you go-ing to run away from me? Where are you go-ing? To al-ge-bra class? Are you going to wear a bra while a priest fucks you?”

His mother left the house. She no longer called him her little soldier boy. She no longer had nails as red as burning cigarette embers, and the masks of her eyes often ran in streaks down the matte skin of her cheeks.

Oh, Mama, what are you wearing? Take that hat off your head. Take off that crown. All those bloody thorns! I don’t like that, not one bit. Please! I’m sorry for what I said about you and the soldiers. Please, please, please, take that off!

It was an extremely agitated Michael Hrubek who, upon this damp night in November, bicycled doggedly down Route 236 at twenty miles an hour, lost in these hard memories-which was why he didn’t hear the police car, dark and silent, until it was within ten feet of the bike’s rear wheel. The lights and siren burst to life.

“Oh God oh God oh God!” Hrubek screamed. Panic exploded throughout his body.

A voice came over the loudspeaker, jarring as a firecracker. “You there! Stop that bicycle and get off.” A spotlight was trained on the back of Hrubek’s head.

John Cops! he thought. Agents! FBI! Hrubek coasted to a stop and the deputies stepped from their squad car.

“Just climb off that, young man.”

Hrubek swung awkwardly off the bike. The men cautiously approached. One whispered, “He’s a mountain. He’s huge.”

“All right there. Could we see some identification?”

Fucking fucker conspirators, Hrubek thought. Politely he asked, “Are you federal agents?”

“Agents?” One of them chuckled. “No, we’re just police officers. From Gunderson.”

“Step over here, sir. You have a driver’s license?”

Hrubek sat down, his back to the officers, and bowed his head.

The policemen looked at each other, wondering how they might deal with this. Hrubek upped the ante by crying out, “I’m soooo upset! He took everything. He hit me on the head with a rock. Look at my hand.” He held up his scraped palm. “I’ve been look-ing for help.”

They continued forward but stopped a safe distance away. “Somebody attacked you, you say? Are you hurt? If you could just let us see some ID.”

“Is it him?” one asked.

“We just want to see some identification, sir. A driver’s license. Anything.”

“He took my wallet. He took everything.”

“You’ve been robbed?”

“There were several of them. Took my wallet and my watch. That watch,” Hrubek reported solemnly, “was a present from my mother. If you’d watched the roads better, you might’ve prevented a serious crime.”

“I’m sorry if you’ve had some misfortune, sir. Could you give us your name and address…”

“John W. Booth is my name.”

“Didn’t think it was that,” one cop said to the other, as if speaking in front of an infant.

“Don’t recall. The notice said he’s harmless.”

“May be, but he’s big.”

One cop walked closer to Hrubek, who rocked and moaned in mournful tears. “We’d appreciate you standing up, Johnnie, just coming over to the car. People at the hospital’re worried about you. We want to take you back there.” In a singsong voice he added, “Wouldn’t you like to go home? Get some pie and milk maybe? Some nice apple pie?” He stood behind Hrubek, training his flashlight on the man’s empty hands then shining it again on the back of the glossy and somewhat blue head.

“Thank you, sir. You know, I would like to be getting back, now that you mention it. I miss the place.” Hrubek turned and grinned amiably as he reached up very slowly to shake the officer’s hand. The policeman too smiled-in curiosity at the young man’s sincere gesture-and gripped Hrubek’s meaty fist, realizing too late that the madman was intending to break his wrist. The bone snapped and, shrieking, the officer dropped to his knees, the flashlight falling onto the ground beside him. His partner reached for his gun but Hrubek had already trained the stolen Colt on him.

“Nice try,” he announced with damp lips that pulled into a wry smile. “Drop that, drop that!”

The cop did. “Oh, Jesus.”

Hrubek took the injured cop’s gun from his holster and tossed it away. The man huddled on the ground, cradling his wrist.

“Look, fellow,” his partner pled, “you’re going to get in nothing but trouble over this.”

Hrubek chewed on a fingernail then he looked down at the cops. “You can’t stop me. I can do it. I’m going to do it, and I’m going to do it quickly!” These words rose like a mad battle cry. He shook a fist above his head.

“Please, young man, put that gun down.” The injured policeman’s voice broke and his eyes and nose dripped pitifully. “Nothing serious’s happened. Nobody’s been really hurt yet.”

Hrubek turned a triumphant eye on him. He spat out, “Oh, nice try, John Cop. But that’s where you’re wrong. Everybody’s been hurt. Everybody, everybody, everybody! And it’s not over yet.”

Owen Atcheson parked his truck along Route 236 next to a large, freshly turned field about seven miles west of the high rock overlook where he’d located Hrubek’s nest. As anticipated, he’d found deep indentations of footsteps, indicating Hrubek was moving parallel to the road. From the depth and spacing of the toe prints it was clear he was moving fast, running.

Owen stopped at a closed gas station and used the pay phone to call the Marsden Inn. The clerk told him that Mrs. Atcheson and her sister had called and said they’d be delayed some. They hadn’t checked in yet.

“Delayed? Did they say why?”

“No, sir, they didn’t. Is there any message?”

Owen debated. He thought of trying to encode a message for her: Tell her the visitor’s heading west but she’s not to call anyone about it… But there was too much risk that the clerk would be suspicious or get the message wrong.

Owen said, “No, I’ll try them at home.”

But there was no answer at the house. Just missed them, he thought. He’d call them at the Inn later.

The night was very dark now, the cloud cover complete, the air growing colder, compressing around him. He used his flashlight sparingly, only when he thought he saw a clue and even then lowering the light almost to the ground before clicking it on, to limit the radiation of the light. He then moved on-but slowly, very slowly. Every soldier knows-as between the hunter and the hunted, the prey has the vastly greater advantage.

Owen fell several times, catching his boot on a fence wire or forsythia tendril. He went down hard, always rolling and absorbing the impact with his shoulder and sides, never risking breaking a finger or wrist. He saw no more traps. Only at one point did Owen despair. The trail vanished completely. This happened in a vast grassy field, twenty acres square and bordered on all sides with dense woods. Owen was two hundred yards from Route 236. He stood in the center of this field and looked around him. The field extended through a break in the long line of rocky hills and offered an easy route south toward train tracks and more populated parts of the county. Freight trains came through here regularly and it was conceivable that Hrubek had leapt onto one. Or maybe he’d simply continued through the notch in the hills south toward Boyleston, a town that had both Amtrak and Greyhound stations.

Losing hope, Owen moved aimlessly through the grass, pausing to listen for footsteps, and hearing only owls or distant truck horns or the eerie white noise of an expansive autumn night. After ten minutes of meandering he noticed a glint coming from a line of trees west of him. He headed instinctively toward it. At the grove of maples he went into a crouch and moved slowly through a cluster of saplings until he came to a break in the foliage. With his gun he pushed aside a bough of dew-soaked hemlock, inhaling in surprise as drops of water fell with chill pinpricks on his neck and face.

Walking in slow circles around the old MG, Owen studied the ground. He kicked aside a white animal skull. He recognized it instantly as a ferret’s. There were dozens of footprints and tire prints covering the asphalt and the shoulder. Some seemed to be Hrubek’s but they were largely obliterated by people who had been here after him. He saw dog prints too and wondered momentarily if the trackers had learned that Hrubek was going west. But there was evidence of only one animal, not the three that he’d seen pursuing Hrubek from the site of his escape.

He circled the car again, weaving over the shoulder and through the bushes nearby. No sign of Hrubek’s prints in any direction. Hands on hips, he glanced at the car once more. This time he noticed the bike rack but then he immediately dismissed the idea that Hrubek had stolen a cycle. What kind of escapee, he reasoned, would make a getaway on a bike, riding down open highways?

But wait… Michael Hrubek was a man whose madness had its own logic. A bicycle? Why not? Owen examined the road around the car and found faint tread marks, rather wide ones-either balloon tires or those of a bike ridden by a heavy cyclist. He glanced back at the car. The carrier rack seemed broken as if the bike had been removed by sheer force.

Owen continued to follow the tread marks. At the intersection of this country lane and Route 236 he found where the rider had paused, perhaps debating which way to go.

He was not surprised to find, beside the tread, the clear imprint of Hrubek’s boot.

Nor was he surprised to find that the rider had decided to turn west.