Stay

CHAPTER ONE

From the roof of my cabin I can see only forest, an endless canopy of pecan and hickory, ash and beech and sugar maple. Wind flows through the trees and down the mountain, and the clearing seems like nothing but a step in a great green waterfall. Even the freshly split shingles make me think of water. Cedar is an aromatic wood; warmed by the autumn sunlight of a late North Carolina afternoon, it smells ancient and exotic, like the spice-laden hold of a quinquereme of Nineveh. It would be easy to close my eyes and imagine a long ago ocean cut by oars—water whispering along the hull, the taste of spray—but there’s no point. There’s no one to tell, no longer a Julia to listen.

Grief changes everything. It’s a brutal metamorphosis. A caterpillar at least gets the time to spin a cocoon before its internal organs dissolve and its skin sloughs off. I had no warning: one minute Julia was walking down the street, sun shining on black hair and blue dress, the next she lay mewling in her own blood. The bullet wound was bigger than my fist. Then she was on a white bed in a white room, surrounded by rhythmically pumping machines. She lasted six days. Then she had a massive stroke. They turned the machines off. The technician stripped off his gloves, and grief stripped me raw.

I set the point of a roofing nail against a shingle, lifted my hammer, and swang. The steel bit through the cedar right on a hidden imperfection, and the shingle split. The hammer shook in my fist. I put it down and laid my hands on my thighs. The shaking got worse.

A plane droned over the forest, out of sight even though the sky was clear, a hard October blue. Birds sang; a squirrel shrieked. The droning note deepened abruptly, grew louder, and resolved into a laboring car engine. There was only one road. I didn’t want anything to do with visitors.

The ladder creaked under my boots, but once on the turf I moved silently. Truck and trailer were locked, and the cabin did not yet have windows to break. I collected the most valuable of the hand tools—the froe and drawing knife by the sawhorse, the foot adze and broadaxe by the sections of split cedar—stowed them in the old hogpen, and walked into the forest.

Parts of the southern Appalachian forests have been growing uninterrupted for two hundred million years. Unlike the north, this area has never been scoured to its rock bones by glaciers. It has been a haven for every species, plant and animal, that has fled the tides of ice which creep across the continent every few thousand years: the ark from which the rest of the East is reseeded after the ice melts. A refuge, my refuge.

On my right, brilliant white-spotted orange puffballs bloomed from the horizontal trunk of some huge tree that had fallen so long ago it was impossible to identify. It was being absorbed back into the forest: carpenter ants and fungi broke down the cellulose; raccoons and possums lived in the cavities and salamanders in the shade; deer and wild pigs ate the mushrooms. When the whole thing collapsed into rotted punk, more microbes would turn it into rich soil from which a new tree would grow. I touched its mossy bark as I passed. This was the world I belonged to now, this one, where when a living thing died it fed others, where the scents were of mouse droppings and sap, not exhaust fumes and cordite, and the air hummed with insects rather than screams and the roar of flame.

Ninety feet over my head the canopy of ash and white basswood shivered in the constant mountain breeze; it was never quiet, not even at night. I stood for a while and just listened.

The sudden, rapid drumming of a pileated woodpecker echoed from the dense growth ahead. I pushed through fetterbush and fern and skirted a tangle of dogwoods, trying to pin down the source. It drummed again. North.

I found it forty feet up a huge yellow buckeye on a stream bank orange with jewelweed: big as a crow, clamped onto the bark by its strange backward-and-forward claws, and braced against the tree with its tail. Its scarlet head crest flashed forward and back in an eight-inch arc, over and over, a black-and-red jackhammer, and almost as noisy. Wood chips and plates of bark as big as my hand showered the weeds. When it reached softer wood, its tongue went to work, probing for carpenter ants, licking them up like a child dipping her tongue in sugar. Perhaps woodpeckers developed an instinct for which trees were rotten with ants, the way a police officer can spot the criminal in a crowd. It was efficient and brutal. When it was done, it launched itself from the tree and disappeared downstream, leaving the remaining ants wandering about in the wreckage of their shattered community. I wondered if the bird ever gave any thought to those left behind. I never had.

I emerged from the jewelweed and sat on a boulder by the rushing stream. Damselflies hummed; a chipmunk chup-chup-chupped next to a fallen pecan; birds began their evening song. Tree shadow crept to the edge of the far bank, then across the water. I let it all pour through my head, emptying it.

When I stirred, it was twilight under the trees; in the valleys it would be full dark. If my visitors had been smart, they would have turned their lights on to drive back down the mountain. I stretched, then walked along the stream bank, savoring the cool scent of moss and mud, following its curve north until it met the trail that led south and west to my cabin.

Three hundred yards from the clearing there were no birds singing, no squirrels scuttling through the undergrowth. The long muscles in my arms and legs and down my back plumped and warmed as adrenaline dilated blood vessels. I flexed my hands, moved silently to the tree line.

Woods surround three quarters of the clearing, but the southern quarter falls down the mountain as a heath bald and, unhindered by trees, the last of the evening sun slanted over the grass and splashed gold on the windscreen of a dark blue Isuzu Trooper parked by the trailer. A man sat on the log by the fire pit, one leg crossed over the other, an unlabeled bottle by his foot. He was slight, with black hair long enough to hint at ringlets where it touched his collar, and although I couldn’t see his eyes I knew what color they would be: Irish blue. He was whistling “Kevin Barry” through his teeth as though he might sit there forever.

I know how to look after myself; I have the money to buy whatever I need. Neither of these things is any protection for the raw wound that is grief, and this man sat like a sack of sharp salt in the middle of the only safe place I knew.

He didn’t hear me step from the trees, didn’t hear me cross the turf. It would be easy to break his neck, or pull the hatchet from its stump and chop through his spine at the sixth vertebra. But he had met Julia, once.

I stood behind him for nearly a minute—close enough to smell the familiar bitter hint of coffee grounds—before he jerked around and whipped off his shades.

“Aud!”

Aud rhymes with shroud. After a moment I said, “Dornan.”

“I was beginning to think… But here you are.”

There were dark circles around his usually bright eyes but I didn’t want to see them. “What do you want?”

“Would you sit down at least? I brought a drink.” He held up the bottle.

“Say what you have to say.”

“For the love of god, Aud, just sit for one minute and have a drink. Please.”

I didn’t move. “It’s almost dark.”

“We’d best make a fire then.” He stood, tried to look cheerful. “Well, now, hmm, I’m no expert but that looks like a fire pit, and this, over here, is no doubt firewood. If I put this in here, then—”

I took the hickory log from him. “Kindling first.”

“And where would I find that?”

“You make it.”

“I see. And how do I go about doing that?”

His forehead glistened. He knew me, what I might do if he pushed too hard. Something was so important to him that he thought it worth the risk; I would have to hurt him or listen. Briefly, I hated him. “Bring the bottle.”

Inside the trailer, I turned on lights and opened cupboards.

“Well, would you look at this! You do yourself proud.” He ventured in, patted the oak cabinets and admired the Italian leather upholstery, then stepped through the galley to the dining area. “A satellite television!” He pushed buttons. “It doesn’t work.” I had never bothered to connect it. “And a real bathroom.” The trailer, a fifth-wheel rig, was a treasure trove of hidden, high-tech delights. I let him wander about while I assembled plates, bowls, cutlery. “I had no idea these things could be such little palaces,” he said when he came back. “There’s even a queen bed.”

After five months of solitude, his prattle was almost unbearable. I handed him a chopping board and knife, and he frowned.

“So where’s the food?”

I picked up a cast-iron pot. “Bring that flashlight.”

“There’s no electricity?”

Only when I ran the generator, and I preferred the peace and quiet. He followed me to the water pump, where I handed him the pot. “Fill this. Less than a third.”

While he pumped inexpertly I jerked the hatchet from the chopping stump, split the hickory into kindling, and carried it to the fire pit. Beneath the ash, the embers were sluggish. I blew them to a glow. When the kindling caught I added a couple of logs and went to the bearproof hogpen to get the food. The sky was now bloody, the trees behind us to the north and east a soft black wall.

Dornan handed me the pot and I hung it over the fire.

“Pumping’s thirsty work,” he said, and uncorked the bottle. He drank and gave it to me. The poteen smoked in my mouth and burned my gullet. I shuddered. We passed the bottle back and forth until the water came to a boil. My forebrain felt strange, as though someone were squeezing it. I added rice, and opened plastic tubs of sun-dried tomatoes, green olives, olive oil, and cashew nuts.

“No meat I see.”

“You’re the café owner. Next time call ahead.”

“I tried. Do you even know where your phone is?”

It was around somewhere, battery long dead. The fire burned hotter. I drank more whiskey. When the rice was done I handed him the slotted spoon. “Scoop the rice into the big bowl. Don’t throw away the water. It’s good to drink cold.”

He gave me a sideways look but spooned in silence. Sudden squealing from under the trees made him jump. “Mother of god!”

“Wild pigs,” I said. The rice he had spilt in the fire hissed and popped.

“Would they be dangerous?”

“Not to us.”

He handed me a bowl of rice. I added the dried ingredients and olives, a little oil, and salt and pepper.

We sat on the log side by side and ate quietly while the sky darkened from dull red to indigo. Firelight gleamed on my fork and, later, when we set the plates aside, on the bottle as we passed it back and forth. I rubbed the scar that ran from my left shoulder blade and along the underside of my arm to the elbow.

“Still hurt?”

Only inside. “Tell me why you came, Dornan.”

He turned the bottle in his hands, around and around. “It’s Tammy. She’s missing. I want you to find her.”

He had disturbed me for this. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”

“I think she’s in trouble.”

Overhead, the first star popped out, as though someone had poked a hole in a screen.

“Now, look, I’m not a fool. I know you’re hiding up here, eating this, this rabbit food, because you want to be left alone. But I’ve tried everything, phoned everyone: police, family, her friends”—Tammy didn’t have friends, only male lovers and female competition—“and I’ve nowhere else to turn.”

His face was drawn, with deep lines etched on either side of his mouth, but I turned away. I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to care. Stay in the world, Aud, Julia had said from that metal bed in that white room.

“It started in July. Tammy changed jobs, left those engineers she was doing business development for and joined some new outfit. Something to do with shopping complexes.”

Stay alive inside. Promise me. And I had promised, but I didn’t know how.

“So off she goes down to Naples, Florida, to talk to some people who are putting in a new mall. Said she’d be gone a week or ten days. Then I get a phone call saying no, it’ll be another three weeks, or four. But just when she should have been coming home, she calls again. From New York. She’s learning a lot, she says, and she’s decided to spend a bit of time in New York learning firsthand from the consultant who was advising the Naples group. His name is Geordie Karp. He’s one of those psychologists that study shoppers and shopping. You know: how to design the front display to get shoppers inside, where to put what so they’ll buy it.”

He waited. When I said nothing, he sighed.

“She called at the beginning of August, and she sounded happy. So now you’re probably thinking: Tammy met someone and decided to leave me. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time she’s seen other men, would it? No, you don’t have to answer that.”

The bottle in his hands turned round and round.

“The thing is, you see, I know Tammy; I know who she is, what she’s like. I know you don’t like her, and you’re not the only one. But I love her anyway. Maybe I’m a foolish man, but there it is. So I gave her the ring. I can’t help hoping that one day she’ll look at that ring, she’ll recall I have money in the bank and I’ve promised to take care of her, and love her, and she’ll think, You know, maybe Dornan isn’t so bad, and she’ll come home and marry me.”

He drank, wiped his mouth, remembered me and passed the bottle.

“She was so happy when she called. Do you know what that’s like? That she was happy with someone else? But I’ve been through it before—she drops them as quickly as she picks them up, and she always comes home. But it’s different this time—never lasted as long before, for one thing. For another, she didn’t give me an address, or a phone number. And she hasn’t called again. It’s been two months. That’s not like her.”

Dornan’s voice was an irritant. The need to push him away was becoming harder to ignore.

“I tried directory assistance. Unlisted, they said. So I went to the police. They wouldn’t help me: they don’t have the time to go chasing down every woman who leaves her boyfriend.”

I drank some more. Irish whiskey, even the illegal kind, has a rough beginning but a smooth end, quite unlike most Scotch whiskeys. Which would Julia have preferred?

“Those first few weeks in Florida she couldn’t stop talking about this Geordie Karp and his bloody mall. ‘Geordie this, Geordie that.’ You’d have thought he was god himself. On and on, then nothing.”

I should really put some more wood on the fire.

“This silence isn’t like her. Something’s happened. I just don’t know what.” He ran a hand through his hair. Waited. “Well, say something.”

I added a log, pinewood that spat as the resin ignited. The flames burned more yellow.

“Aud, listen. Please. Julia is dead, yes, and I’m sorry for it. Sorry you had to see her shot, and sorry you had to watch her linger. Probably you think you should have been able to protect her, but—don’t you see? That’s how I feel about Tammy.”

If I closed my eyes, I could pretend he wasn’t there.

“Will you help?”

All my filters were gone. Everything was too big, too loud, too sharp. The squeal of brakes, a bright shirt, the stink of plastic: everything got in and I could sort none of it out.

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m not—I can’t.”

“Ah, Aud…” He scrambled unsteadily to his feet, arms open.

“Don’t. Don’t come near me.”

I didn’t want his friendship. I didn’t want to be connected. Never again. Stay in the world, Aud. Before I met her, everything had been so clear, so simple, but she had made me aware how alive and complex the world and the people in it were. And then she died, and now I couldn’t shut that awareness out again, couldn’t make it go away, and nothing made sense apart from this cabin. I could look at the wood I had hewn, the shingles I’d split and the pegs I’d hammered, and know what they meant and that they were real.

Stay alive inside. Promise me.

“If you could just—”

“No.”

A log broke open in a spume of orange sparks, and flames began to gnaw at the tilted remnants.

I upended the bottle, swallowed the last of the whiskey, and dropped the empty on the grass. The silence lasted a long time. The flames ate their way inch by inch to both ends of the broken log, and began to die.

“It’ll be winter soon,” he said, finally. “You won’t be able to work on the house in the snow.”

“Once the roof’s finished and the windows are in, it’s all indoor work.”

“Look, I know you hurt, but you’ll hurt for years. You can’t stay up here that long.”

“I could stay here forever.”

He studied me; his eyes reflected black, with tiny orange flames. “But you won’t?”

I didn’t say anything.

“We all worry.”

I looked at him.

He nodded. “Helen and Mick, Beatriz, Eddie, Annie.”

Annie, weeping by her daughter’s bed as the words echoed around that white room: cerebral hemorrhage, massive brain trauma, we’ll give you a moment with her. All because of one bullet, a piece of metal an inch long. And now I was here, and she was dead, and Dornan was alive, and Tammy: alive and walking around, laughing, breathing while Julia was dead.

All I had left of her were the promises she had asked of me. The promises I had given.

“I’ll find her for you.”

He turned away and poked vigorously at the fire with a stick. “Good,” he said after a while. “We’ll go back to the city in the morning.”

“You go. Bring back everything that might help us find out where Tammy is. Bring the mail from her apartment. Bring anything she sent you in the last few months: phone messages, cards, letters, photos. All of it.” The lovesick fool would have kept everything, just as I would have kept Julia’s letters, if I’d had any. “I’ll need other things, too. I’ll give you a list.”

I didn’t want to go back to Atlanta, to the house with the unfinished chair I had worked on while thinking of Julia, to the rug where she had curled up one evening, and the laundry on the floor that smelled of her: of sunshine and musk and dusty violets, of her rich skin, and her hair, oh dear god her hair…

“What?” Dornan said.

“There’s a sofa bed in the trailer,” I said harshly. “Go inside and leave me alone.”

I watched the rest of the stars come out, one by one, and tried to catch back that fleeting sense memory, her scent before she ended up wired to those machines, smelling of pain and medication and death.

An owl screamed in the wood and I wanted to ride behind its eyes when it plunged its talons into living flesh, wanted to tear something warm and soft to pieces while it squealed; wanted something else to hurt.

I dreamt of the phone ringing, the answering machine in Atlanta blinking red as messages piled up.

Beep.

A tremulous southern voice: “Aud, this is Annie. Why did you leave? You killed my daughter. She would be alive if she hadn’t gone to Norway. If she hadn’t loved you. You killed her and I want her back.”

Beep.

A cold, Norway-accented voice: “Hold for Her Excellency.” A pause. “On reflection, Her Excellency does not wish to speak to you. She no longer considers herself your mother. Not that she ever did, deep down.”

Beep.

Another voice, a woman’s, as warm and familiar as my own knuckles. “Love? You promised me. You promised.”

Dornan got up two hours after dawn. A raft of cloud had just floated over the sun and there was a breeze. He shivered as he climbed down from the trailer. I had water boiling over a fire.

“Morning,” he said. “Been up long?”

If he used his eyes he would see the pile of fresh shavings and newly stacked shingles by the shaving horse at the south end of the clearing. “There’s coffee in the pot but I’m boiling more water if you want fresh. I have some apples, and what’s left of yesterday’s rice, but if you want eggs or bread, then you’d be better off eating on the road.”

“Not too subtle, as hints go.”

“I put a list of the clothes and other things I’ll need in the glove compartment of your car.”

He nodded, but frowned. I waited. “I won’t, ah, I won’t bring any guns. Not across state lines.”

“I don’t need a gun. Here.” I handed him a cup of scalding black coffee.

“Ah, bless you.” He sipped, seemed to enjoy it as much as a fresh latte from one of his Borealis cafés.

“The day after tomorrow, then.”

“Aud…”

“Drive carefully.”

He smiled at me oddly, and carried his coffee to the Isuzu. The engine caught with a metallic shudder. He waved. I nodded. He turned in a circle and went back the way he’d come, leaving me to the wind and the birds and the smell of sawdust.

CHAPTER TWO

It was nearly midday and the clouds long gone by the time I hammered the last shingle into place and sat back. The birds were quiet, the sun streamed down, and for a moment the valley felt like a place out of time, secret and silent and still, where no one intruded and nothing ever happened. Then I saw that the gilding on the trees up the mountain wasn’t just sun but the first tints of autumn which would seep downhill until all was copper and russet and gold and, not long after that, bare.

I climbed down the ladder and rattled the extension down after me; this afternoon I wanted to work on the ground-floor window framing. Once they were glazed, the cabin would be weatherproof.

It would have been easy to buy precut framing, just as it would to get already-made roof shingles, but the fine details kept me anchored. I’d already split out the boards from good pine, and dressed them with what was probably the same drawing knife that had been used on the original. I’d found it with a stack of other tools in the falling-down hogpen years ago, when my father’s will had cleared probate and I first saw the place. Many of them had been too rusted to be saved but some I’d taken back to Atlanta, where I had sanded off the rust, sharpened the blades, and fitted new handles of smooth hickory. Then I’d oiled and wrapped them, and forgotten them, until grief drove me from the city and I made my way here, somehow, with everything I needed, without even knowing how or why, except that I had to rescue something from ruin.

That meant no shortcuts. The original framing had been fastened to the logs with locust wood pegs. I’d destroyed those pegs pulling the rotting frames out, so I would have to make more. Metal pegs rot wood; it takes several decades, but every day I would imagine the deterioration eating at the logs and pine uprights.

The pile of seasoning lumber smelled of sunshine and brittle beetle wings. I had to unstack several pieces before I found the plank of yellow locust I’d split out when I’d first arrived. I hefted it onto my shoulder, careful of its rough edges, then realized I should have worn gloves. Both hands were a mess of splinter scars, new, healing, and half faded. I should have been wearing gloves for months.

The sawhorse stood in the sun. There was still no breeze, and cutting can be heavy work, so I picked it up with my left hand and carried it and the plank into the shade. There was no pain now in the injured arm and shoulder, not even a twinge.

I marked the plank at inch intervals with a blue pencil, picked up the saw, and braced the plank on the horse with my left knee. Yellow locust is dense and hard, but the bright steel teeth ripped through the plank in three easy pushes, and a finger of wood, an inch square and five inches long, dropped onto the grass. I shifted the plank an inch, set the saw, pushed forward and down, and ripped off another, then another, until it was a mindless, mechanical rhythm, and after a while there was nothing left of the plank but a nine-inch board I could use for something else, and dozens of wooden bars in a pile. When I scooped them onto a square of canvas, they sounded like a disordered xylophone. I sat on the turf and poured them through my hands and listened, imagining a mobile strung with different woods that made soft, wooden sounds in the breeze among the trees.

After a while I simply sat. Sometime later, I realized I hadn’t eaten.

The hogpen smelled of wood, and dirt on cool stone. The sealed painter’s bucket sat on the right-hand shelf. I swang it down, opened it, and took out the airtight tub of rice salad. I carried it to the log by the cold fire pit, and ate mechanically with my fingers. The woods were still quiet. The tomatoes seemed unnaturally red, the olives too pungent.

Somewhere in Atlanta Dornan would be sorting through piles of precious keepsakes, wondering whether to trust me with embarrassing love notes or the fact that he had kept phone messages from Tammy from the last eighteen months. In the end, he would; he wanted her back. To want someone back and know it might be possible…

A familiar shuddering started deep deep down in a place I couldn’t even name. “No,” I said aloud to any bears who might be listening. “Not now. I have things to do.”

Then do them. Concentrate on the details and everything will be all right.

No birds nested in the engine block, no rat snakes curled around the battery. It took a moment to loosen the dipstick, but when it came free it glistened with clear, pungent oil. I wiped it on the cloth, redipped it, and pulled it out again. The smell was stronger now, thick and sullen and artificial, and, as though some spell had been broken, a cool breeze set the foliage whispering. The oil looked fine.

The cab was hot—I’d kept the windows closed to prevent spiders and squirrels from nesting in the upholstery during the summer—but the fuel gauge looked healthy. When I turned the key the truck started with a deep, authoritative rumble. It was strange to feel artificial fabric on my bare legs and the vibration of manufactured power under my feet. The Chevy was a big truck, an extended bed rear-drive V10, fitted with a second gas tank and compression brakes. The dashboard was a complicated affair, with extra displays to support the cooling system, the trailer’s lights, the brake controller, and all the other extras a driver needs to haul thirteen thousand pounds up a steep incline and control it on the way back down. The side and rearview mirrors were big, and minutely adjustable. I looked in the rearview. An oil smudge split my forehead between my brows, like war paint. It should have made me look fierce, but it didn’t. I hadn’t realized how much my hair had grown, how startling my eyes were against a tan, but the real difference was my expression: the shock of seeing myself had been written across it clearly, just as now it registered intent interest. I had forgotten how to wear a mask.

I turned the engine off and climbed back down to the turf, checked the tires on the dual back wheels, and the muffler and lights. The gas can, jack, tools, fire extinguisher, jump cables, and flashlight were in the trunk; the spare tire felt firm. No mask. How odd. Under its protective tarp in the truck bed, the fifth-wheel coupling looked fine.

When I couldn’t think of anything else to check, I went into the trailer, to the sink in the tiny bathroom. I turned on the tap and let the water run over my hand, endlessly. My hand got cold. I stared at it, then turned the water off. I’d been waiting for it to run hot. It wouldn’t; the point heater was set on OFF to conserve the battery. I stood gazing at the wet sink for five minutes before I lifted my head.

My face lay on the glass like a picture of someone else. I turned this way and that. No, more like a picture of a rock after some vandal has ripped off its decades-old layer of moss and soil, and the bare stone is revealed. I touched my reflected eyes. Wolf eyes, Julia had said, not long after we met, so pale and hungry. For a moment I saw her behind me, leaning in the doorway, arms folded, smiling at my reflection but serious as she said, “More like a blasted heath, now, Aud,” and she was so clear, the words so exactly what she might have said, that I almost turned around.

Run, I thought, run and run and run, and when Dornan comes back, don’t be here. Hide.

Sunshine warmed the middle of the clearing. I stripped, knelt, hands palm up on my naked thighs, and began the measured breathing of zazen. At first I was aware of the dry grass poking at my shins and instep, the ruffle of breeze stirring the tiny hairs in the small of my back, the scent of my body, and I still wanted to run, but as I breathed steadily, in and out, and in and out, everything faded but the rhythm of air. My eyelids half closed. My heart beat steadily, relentlessly, like a machine. “You are not a machine.” Julia’s voice in my head. I smiled. A tear ran down my cheek. I didn’t move to brush it away. Not a machine, then. A living, breathing being. Alive. Julia was dead, but I was alive. Skinless, and half mutated, but alive. In and out. Stay alive, Aud. Promise me. Had she known how hard it would be?

In and out. In and out. Nothing else.

A bluejay shrieked. I blinked. The sun was well past its meridian. Midafternoon. The need to run was buried, for a while. I stood, stretched, walked naked to the hogpen, and pulled the tarp off the generator.

The Onan Microlite 4000 is essentially a lawn mower motor that drives a tiny electrical generating plant to produce 115 volts. Like a lawn mower, it can be cranky. I changed the oil, put in new spark plugs, and topped up the fuel reservoir from the red plastic can, then pressed the starter button. The clearing filled with its shattering roar and a plume of blue hydrocarbon smoke. I watched it for a few minutes until it burned clean, then climbed up into the trailer to take a look at the converter and smart charger. The flickering LEDs all said what I wanted to see: the deep-cycle marine battery was charging swiftly. I tested the electrical appliances one by one, turning them on and then off in careful sequence. Everything seemed to work.

I hadn’t run any of the propane kitchen appliances for a long time so I checked and rechecked the fridge and stove and air conditioner to make sure the gas lines were closed and the pilot lights off before I went back outside and detached the regulator. The two tanks on the tongue of the trailer were more than half empty. I hefted them into the truck bed.

Still naked, I walked into the trailer, turned the water heater on, found my cell phone and started it charging, then took paper and pen to the captain’s table and wrote a list. The pen felt strange in my hand. When the list was done, I found my wallet and put it on the bed. Next to it went clean clothes, suitable for going into Asheville. Then I dug out a towel and fresh soap, and had a shower.

I drove through the toylike downtown to carefully streetscaped Wall Street, with its new old-fashioned lights and neatly ordered trees. Everything was very clean, very open. Healthy-looking people smiled. It was like moving through the set of a 1960s TV show of the utopian future. There was a parking space in front of the Heads Up Salon. Someone had even left time on the meter.

A young woman was cutting a man’s hair in the brightly lit interior. “Be right with you,” she called, looking up from her work, beginning to smile. The smile went out and she stepped forward a pace. “Ma’am? Are you all right?”

“Yes. Fine, thank you.”

“You just sit right down and let me bring you some water.”

She was the first stranger I had seen without metal and glass between us in months. I experimented with a smile. “No, really. I just… It was a little warm out there.”

“Well then, if you’re sure? I’ll just finish up here. Won’t take but five minutes.”

I feigned an overwhelming interest in the rows of hair care products lining the shelves above the large plants near the cash register, and she went back to work. After a minute or two, I could breathe normally. I didn’t want to flinch every time the hairdresser or her customer laughed at something the other said. I tried to remember how small talk worked. The weather. The news. I didn’t know any news. What a lovely town this is …? Yes, and What a nice little salon… I could do this.

The customer admired his cut in two mirrors, stood, paid, left.

“Your turn,” the woman announced. I sat in the swiveling chair. We looked at ourselves in the mirror. She ran her fingers casually through my hair. I made myself sit still. “It looks as though it’s been a while.”

“Yes.”

She fingered a few inches thoughtfully. “You’d look great in one of those new, sleek cuts that you just wash and go. But they’re very short.” She cupped both hands around my face, looked at me in the mirror, got suddenly enthusiastic. “I think we should do it! With your eyes and height you could carry it off!”

“I’m game,” I said, and tried a grin, and just like that I went from stranger to conspirator. It was easier than I remembered. A chameleon, Julia had called me. Don’t you ever get lost, pretending to be so many people? I hadn’t understood, then.

“I’m Aud,” I said abruptly. “This is my first trip into Asheville.”

“Oh.” She blinked. “Well, I’m Dree. I’ve lived here since I was two.”

“Dree isn’t a name I’ve heard before,” I said as she led me over to the sinks.

“It’s from India or Pakistan or something. My mom wasn’t sure. Maybe it’s short for something. I tried looking it up once, but couldn’t find it. Lean forward.” She wrapped a thick, soft towel around my shoulders. “My mom was one of those old feminists, you know, who came out here to live on the land in a women’s community.” Slush of water from the tap. Squirt of liquid. “This is chamomile mint.” She held her hand under my nose. It smelled light and young, like Dree. “Lean back.”

The water was warm, the shampoo cold. For some reason it wasn’t as hard to have her touch me, now that she knew my name. Her fingers were very strong and brisk. I wondered who she went home to, whether she washed their hair for them in the shower or bath, if she knew how easy it would be to hit me across the larynx with a shampoo bottle and watch me choke to death. I almost sat up.

“I’m going to use an intensifying conditioner. Like all our products, it’s made from all-natural extracts and not chemicals.”

“Everything is made with chemicals,” I said at random. “Water is a chemical molecule: made of hydrogen and oxygen. The air we breathe, even the food we eat: carbon, nitrogen—”

Her hands had stilled, so I made myself stop, but then I felt her shrug and she laughed. “Okay. So it’s made with naturally occurring stuff, from plants, not things made with a giant chemistry set. Better?”

“Better.”

She finished rinsing my hair, wrapped it efficiently in the towel. “Come over to my station.”

I sat in the chair before the mirror and she combed my hair through and picked up her scissors. “Last chance to say no.”

“Go ahead.”

She pulled wet hair up between her index and middle fingers, like a ribbon, and cut. “Will you be in town for a while?”

“I’ve inherited some property a few miles from here. I’m renovating it.”

Pull, snip. Pull, snip. “To live, or just a vacation home?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“It used to be that you couldn’t get a job around here unless it was as a forest ranger in the park service, or working at Biltmore. At least not year-round. Summer jobs, waiting tables, selling crafts, during tourist season. But then people started to live here.”

“Seems like a nice town.”

She shrugged without missing a beat in her cutting rhythm. “I suppose. People are moving here all the time from Atlanta and other big cities.” Snip, pull, snip. “Tilt your head sideways for me, please. Ken—that’s my brother—works for McCann construction, and he’s never been so busy. They’re building houses as fast as they can nail together two planks. Not just itty-bitty things, either, but monsters with pools and party decks, the whole nine yards.” Snip, pull, snip. “Oh, this is going to look good. Such lovely hair. Bet you’ve never wanted to color it.”

“Can’t say I have.”

“And there’s a bunch of—Hold on while I just lower you a bit. How tall are you, anyway?—bunch of businesses that moved close to town a while ago that just keep getting bigger and bigger. There’s Sonopress, ITT, BASF, all those high-tech places. They’re even going to expand the airport.”

“I didn’t know Asheville had an airport.”

“It’s about as big as my left toe. But like I said, that’s going to change. My mom’s always moaning about how fast everything’s growing.”

Her mother’s opinions carried us until she exchanged the scissors for a hair dryer, which roared to life like an old Norton Commando and effectively put a stop to all conversation.

“There.” She turned it off, spun my chair this way and that, nodding to herself. “Take a look.” She turned me back to face the mirror.

“It looks great.”

“I think it works,” she said complacently, and hummed to herself as she pulled off my towel and brushed a few stray hairs from my collar.

She went behind the cash register. “Would you like some product—some of that conditioner? Then that’ll be just thirty-five dollars.”

She zipped my card through the magnetic reader and the receipt churned silently from its machine. I added in a good tip and signed.

“That cut should be trimmed every six to eight weeks, so I’ll expect you back before too long.”

“I’ll be here.” And then I was outside, with the sun warm on my newly exposed neck, and feeling hungry. I started walking.

The heart of downtown Asheville looks as though some mad city planner scooped up half the art deco buildings in Miami, dumped them at random points around a small town square, then stuck in a fountain for pretty, along with a few postmodern structures whose only apparent aesthetic purpose was to reflect in their green glass the older, more substantial buildings. Everything was achingly clean.

As I moved more or less east through the streets, the character of the passersby gradually changed from individual people striding purposefully on everyday errands to that amble, stop, gawk-while-we-hold-hands-and-block-the-street pattern of the tourist.

I turned around and marched down a street called Biltmore Avenue, looking for a place real people might belong.

I found two pubs, practically side by side. I avoided the one with the aggressively shiny brew kegs, wine list, and perky logo, and chose the one that boasted Forty Beers on Tap!

It was like stepping back in time to being a teenager in England; the place smelled of smoke and beer and felt utterly peaceful. Patrons talked in low murmurs, minding their own business over tall glasses half filled with dark, murky brew and streaked with white foam. Smoke curled bluely through the occasional slant of sunlight; dark wood gleamed. I found a table in a corner, facing the door, and ordered pizza and a pint of Greenman ale, which turned out to be more like a bitter than anything else and slipped down beautifully. The pizza, when it came, had everything on it. The sausage was chewy and tough and I savored every bite. I ordered another beer, and half drowsed in the snug warmth, until I felt the light touch of Julia’s hand on my hair, and her whisper, My anti-Samson. The room fractured and shimmered.

She sat next to me in the truck all the way back, her hand resting on my thigh.

“Something’s changed,” she said. We drove west. The sun, low on the horizon, shone straight into the cab. She wore the same coat as on the night we’d met. A raincoat. Today it was dry.

“I still love you.”

“Bed linens, bread, orange juice…”

In the rearview mirror, my face was gold in the sunlight. Hers wasn’t, and when she turned to look at me, she didn’t squint against the glare.

“…beer, milk, fruit and vegetables and fish. And a newspaper.”

“Dornan will need a decent place to sleep tomorrow night, and breakfast. And I want something for dinner that’s not rice.” I couldn’t explain the newspaper.

The raincoat had disappeared. Now she wore jeans and a white, low-cut button T that exposed her tight belly. When had she worn those?

“You didn’t mention the other things,” I said. The tarps, the cash, the liquid propane gas, the double tanks full of diesel fuel. She didn’t seem to hear. After a while, I realized why: they were going-away things.

CHAPTER THREE

The Isuzu bumped into the clearing just after midday, and Dornan poked his head through the open window. His face had more lines, or maybe it was the light. He climbed out and stretched. “Mountain roads…” He looked around, looked at me. “Something’s different.”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Well, I brought everything you asked for, plus a few extras.” He went round to the back of the Isuzu, opened the rear door, and pulled out a cooler. “There’s steak, and beer, and potatoes. Some decent coffee. And just in case you get the power on…”—he balanced the cooler against the rim of the trunk, reached in, and pulled out an espresso machine—“this.”

“Good,” I said, then ran out of polite conversation. “Bring the records, and my clothes.” I lifted the cooler from him and carried it into the trailer. He followed with my hanging bag.

“Where should I put it?”

I jerked my chin forward, towards the bedroom, “On the bed,” and started transferring the cooler contents to the fridge.

By the time he came back with the two cardboard file boxes, the food was in the fridge and I was wiping down the inside of the cooler. “On the table. I’ve almost finished.”

He leaned against the table for a moment, considering. “The power is on,” he said, “and you’ve had your hair cut.” It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t respond. “I’ll make coffee.”

He hummed to himself while he ground and measured, but he moved more slowly than usual, and there was more shadow than there had been around the bones of his wrists and nose.

“You’ve lost weight.”

He didn’t turn around, but said after a moment, “So have you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and now he did turn around, but I wasn’t sure how to explain what I meant: that I knew I’d been selfish; that I hadn’t cared about his worry, about Tammy; that there just wasn’t much room inside me for anything but my grief.

“I just want you to find her for me, and bring her back,” he said.

“I’ll find her.”

“And bring… Oh, god. You think she’s dead.”

“No.” The espresso machine hissed and spat. “Make the coffee and come and sit.”

He made the coffee mechanically and brought it to the table.

“I’m going to find Tammy,” I said. “I’ll talk to her. If she wants to come back, I’ll bring her. If.”

“You’ll tell me where she is?”

“If she wants me to.”

He could have said a lot of things then, but he didn’t. He forced himself to smile. “You’ll let me know she’s safe at least?”

“Yes.” If she was.

He sipped at his coffee for a while, as though I weren’t there. “It’s a nice afternoon,” he said at last. “I think I’ll take a walk.”

“There’s a trailhead on the west side of the clearing. If you follow that, it’ll bring you to the creek. If you’re not back by four, I’ll come find you.”

I sat for five minutes after he’d gone, then took the lid off both boxes. One held a collection of opened and unopened mail—junk and bills mainly—going back at least three months, plus the other information I’d asked for: insurance documents, 401(k) and bank statements, birth certificate, apartment lease. The other was Dornan’s private shrine to Tammy. He had saved everything, in no particular order: printouts of e-mails were bundled with birthday cards and Post-it notes; snapshots poked out from cassette cases; there were plane tickets and hotel bills and dinner receipts. On top lay a shopping list. Slim-Fast, it said forlornly, toothpaste, water, dishwasher soap. I imagined Tammy loading a dishwasher, and the only picture I could get was her playing to an audience: stretching so that her pants pulled tight across thigh and buttock. But her handwriting was not what I’d expected: no circles over the i, no fat loops; it was strong and clear and angular, and she had preferred black ink.

I didn’t want to know what Tammy had said to Dornan via e-mail, what she had whispered late at night to his phone machine; I doubted I’d need to.

I started with the mail, sorting it quickly into bills, junk, and personal. The junk I put back in the box, the personal—all unopened—I set aside, and the bills I sorted further by date and type, discarding anything before the first of the year. Tammy had not canceled the lease on her apartment, so there was ten months’ worth. All had been paid by Dornan; his notation of check number and date and amount was scrawled in the upper right corner of each. The Visa card pile was significantly smaller than the others; it contained nothing since August. Her other credit card, an American Express, was there in full, though the last three months showed no spending activity. I pulled an example from each pile. The AmEx listed plane tickets, hotel bills, out-of-town restaurant meals. Business expenses. Probably referred immediately to the company she worked—used to work—for. The Visa was billed from a variety of Atlanta restaurants, two different hair salons, Macy’s, Saks, auto repair, pharmacy: purely personal. The conclusions were obvious.

I found the 800 number on the bill and, while it rang, assembled a few things from the box. A bored, beaten voice answered. “ParkBanc this is Cindy how may I be of service.”

“Yes, hello. I’m calling about my Visa bill.”

“Name please.”

“Tammy Foster.”

“Account number please.”

I read off the number. I heard her fingernails ticking on the keyboard even on the cellular phone. “Tammy J. Foster,” she read back to me like a robot. “Last four numbers of your social security number for security purposes.”

I read them from the bank statement. More plastic ticking. As my partner, Frank King, had said when I was a uniformed rookie in Atlanta, Finding people’s not rocket science, Torvingen. They got a social security number, it’s easy—

“Address please ma’am.”

“Yes, well that’s why I’m calling. I haven’t had a bill since July, so you probably still have my old Atlanta address.”

“No ma’am we have a New York City address.”

“Well, it’s probably the wrong one because, like I said, I haven’t seen a bill since July.”

“Your account is current ma’am.”

“Well, that can’t be right. Like I said, you haven’t sent me a bill for months. What address do you have there?”

“One moment.”

—It’s your illegals that are hard to track. Otherwise, hell, just follow the money. Frank had been right, mostly. The exceptions were dead people, and smart people with no scruples and enough money to pay for both active and passive concealment. Unless Tammy was dead, I could probably do it just from the bits of paper I had here. Dornan could easily have hired a private investigator to do the job for a hundred dollars: all they had to do was run her name through their subscription databases. No doubt he hadn’t gone that route because—

“Your mother’s maiden name please ma’am.”

I read it from the birth certificate. “Acklin.”

“Yes ma’am. We have you listed at Apartment C 95 Seventh Avenue South New York New York 10012.”

Greenwich Village. What was she doing in Greenwich Village? “Well, that’s the right place, all right. But I don’t get it. Why aren’t I getting my bills? It doesn’t make any—Oh, shoot,” I said, doing my best to sound embarrassed. “I think I’m calling about the wrong account here. I was looking at my American Express and my Visa at the same time and I guess I just mixed them up and called the wrong one. It says here I paid the last few bills, so I guess I got them.”

“Yes ma’am. Your account shows your last payment of $354.89 paid September 29th. That was billed to the New York address.”

“God, I’m sorry.”

“Yes ma’am,” she said, still bored. “Have a good day.” She disconnected with a click.

New York. Blaring horns, shrieking sirens, the sour stink of ten million people, all streaming by at a thousand frames per second. New York. And I would have to go there. That’s why Dornan had asked me to find her, not some faceless agency, so that I would go to her on his behalf and ask her to come home.

I put each item back in the box one at a time, carefully squaring envelopes and aligning stamps, concentrating on arranging the bills in chronological order, deliberately not thinking, because if I thought about all the basic groundwork I should do, the phone calls I ought to make, I would walk away, walk into the woods and not come back, and I had promised.

I heard Dornan emerge from the trees just before four, but he didn’t come in. I got two Coronas from the fridge, opened them, and took them outside. He stood at the southern edge, looking down and out over the heath bald. I let the bottles clink as I walked, and held his out when he turned.

He nodded and drank. “Nice woods you’ve got here.”

“About two hundred acres.”

He nodded some more. “So why do you have that strip of AstroTurf in front of the trailer when there’s all this natural stuff?”

“It doesn’t get muddy. Works as a doormat.”

“Ah.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“I didn’t look at the private papers. I didn’t need to.”

Now he looked at me. “You know where she is?”

“Yes.” Her, or someone pretending to be her. “I’ll be ready to leave tomorrow. It might take a few days.” He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. It shook slightly. “I haven’t shown you what I’m doing with the cabin. Bring your beer. Then we’ll cook that steak.”

His smile told me he knew I was doing it to help him, but he followed me to the cabin anyway.

“It faces south and west, and the long side measures thirty-six feet. The logs are oak, hand hewn. They’re a hundred years old and there’s no reason for them not to last another century.” I laid my palm against the solid wood. It was still warm from the sun. New York. “This is a craftsman cabin, built for my great-grandfather by masters, not one of the more usual settler’s shacks made from whatever came to hand and which have long since rotted away, and good riddance.”

His smile was real this time. “You always have been a snob, Torvingen.”

“I like well-made things.” I squatted and patted the corner of the building. Ten million people. “See how the sill and first end log are quarter-notched? If you could rip up the floor you’d see that the sleepers it rests on are all lap-jointed and middle-notched, and then pegged.”

He nodded seriously. He hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. It was suddenly necessary that he understand.

“Everything here was done by hand. You couldn’t just drive to Home Depot and load up your truck a hundred years ago. They had to cut the tree—and remember they didn’t have chain saws. Then they had to hew the logs: make the round sides flat. Even the chalk they used in their chalk boxes was made from local stuff, like pokeberry juice and lime.”

“What’s a chalk box?”

“What you use to snap out a line, so you know you’re cutting straight. You make the line, then score the log every two or three inches with a poleaxe. Then you use a broadaxe to slice off the chips.”

“Which you could probably use as kindling, to start a fire.”

“What?” My throat felt very tight.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m doing my best. I only know two things about wood: it grows on trees and you can burn it, and I only learned the second thing two days ago. But go on, I’m listening.”

“This door—”

“There isn’t a door.”

“—doorframe. It’s pine that I split out myself, and it’s pegged with yellow locust.”

“Locust? Strange name for—”

I talked right over him. “Do you know how rare yellow locust is now? Do you know how long it takes to cut it, season it, then slice it into bars, then whittle it? Then you have to auger out the frame holes and get the wood braced properly against the logs. It’s hard to do that on your own, to get it vertical, to get a ninety-degree plane this way, too, and then to hold it there while you hammer in the pegs when you only have two hands and I don’t know how I’m going to hang the door itself, to make it all fit seamlessly so no one can tell I was—You have to never give up, never stop, because then you have to see—”

“Aud…”

“You have to see she’s not there, that there’s this great hole inside instead, nothing there—”

“Aud.”

My fists were balled and the veins on my wrists and the back of my hands thick blue worms.

“Aud!”

I panted. My face felt cold.

“I’ll help you hang the door.”

“The door?”

“I’ll help you hang it.” He put down his beer. “Right now. Where is it?”

“Inside.”

“Then let’s get it.”

My body belonged to someone else. I led him inside, over the wide, heart-of-pine floors that would be refinished once the door and windows were in, past the hearth I had already rebuilt, right through the wall that would be—between the studs I would cover with pine board one day soon—to the oak door. I had to put my own beer down before I could pick up the far end. He picked up the near. We walked it outside and leaned it on its end to the right of the doorway. He followed me to the hogpen, silently accepted hammer and nails and spirit level while I lifted down the massive wrought-iron hinge pieces and candy-cane-shaped drop pintles, then followed me back.

I watched myself lift half the hinge and put it against the logs at shoulder height and measure with the eyes, move it up slightly, hold it with the left hand, and with the right lay the spirit level along its top. Hinge a little low on the left. Move it slightly. Nod at Dornan, at the hammer in his hand, swap left hand for right and step to one side to watch while he puts in the big nail, don’t flinch even slightly as he swings, don’t move as what should be three swift blows for each of the three nails becomes a dozen swings, fourteen, then a pause, and on to the other hinge, at knee level this time. Bang bang bang, bang bang bang, bang bang bang. See Dornan’s pleasure: he can do this. Nod. Lift other hinge pieces, position, drop in steel spindle, move assembled hinge back and forth, remove. Measure door. Nail on upper hinge. Pause. Let Dornan nail on second. Pointing. Lifting the door. Holding, maneuvering, dropping in spindles. Done.

And with a snap I smell my own sweat, feel utterly weary, realize Dornan is watching me carefully.

“We hung a door,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, for the second time that day. He waited. “Going off like that. You must have—It’s…” I had never bled on someone before. I didn’t know how to apologize for it.

He didn’t seem to know what to say, either. He pushed the door gently, watched me and the door both as it swung smoothly backwards. “It works.”

“It’s not quite finished.” All I wanted to do was walk into the woods and stop thinking, but if I left the job half done it would drive me mad. “The top of the pintle needs securing, nailing down.”

He bent and picked up his beer, deliberately casual. “You’d have to show me how.”

“No.”

“Many hands make light work.”

“No.”

“Why not?” he asked softly.

I didn’t know.

“You’re helping me with Tammy. I’d like to help you.”

The sun shone warmly, the birds sang, and my cabin was more whole than it had been. I began to pant again, felt my heart accelerating, and this time it wasn’t a smooth machine, a turbine beginning to whine as it reached redline, it was a panicking, soft muscle. Accepting help would be like levering open my rib cage with a crowbar and giving him a knife.

Dornan’s face was tired, but the harsh lines bracketing his mouth had gentled. I don’t know what my face must have looked like, but he nodded as though I’d said something. “I’m your friend. I have been for a long time, even if sometimes I wonder if you know what that means.”

I was the one who helped, the competent one, armored and invulnerable. Aud rhymes with proud.

“You saved my life once, and I know you’ll find Tammy for me, but I know that none of that really means anything to you. You’re helping me the way you’d help a hurt dog. Which doesn’t exactly make me feel good. I’m a person, not a dog. But you don’t know that because you won’t let anyone in. I’ve been banging on that particular door for eight years. Mostly it’s been a waste of time. Even just six months ago, if I’d said all this you would have smiled and ignored me because you’d have had no idea what I meant.”

But now I knew, because Julia had turned me inside out like a sock, and there was no going back.

“So, will you show me? About the hinges?”

Children in the schoolyard ask, Will you be my friend? and they mean it, but this was the adult version, loaded with traps and consequences.

“And then you can show me the other stuff. The cabin. All the things you’ve done on the inside.”

“You’re not really interested.”

“I admit I don’t know a piece of pine from a piña colada, but I want to hear all about what you’ve done with the place, because it was you who did it.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re friends. That’s how it works.”

That’s how it works. He seemed so sure.

So I showed him how to take a picture nail, hammer it part of the way into the doorframe just below the handle of the pintle’s candy cane, then use the hammer to tap it into a U-shape arching up over the pintle and back into the frame so the pintle couldn’t fall out. He did the second. Two small picture nails. Two friends. We stood and looked at our handiwork for a while.

“Now we can look inside, and you can tell me every single thing there is to know about how to make a log cabin from scratch.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Though if there’s a lot to say—and I can’t imagine it being otherwise—then perhaps we should wait until we’ve eaten. There’s steak. What would you like with it?”

“You’re the cook. I’ll sit out here and think.” Not think. “About finding Tammy.” About being in the world.

“And you’ll be wanting another beer brought out to you, I suppose?”

“I’ll be down there.” I pointed to a boulder fifteen yards down the heath bald.

He headed back to the trailer and I walked sideways down the slope. From the boulder, blackberries, azalea, and rhododendron stretched all the way down to maple and cherry and other successional trees. Julia appeared about ten feet away, her back towards me. She said nothing for a moment, and when she turned round she was frowning. “You’re blaming me for this?”

“You made me make that promise.”

“You could have said no.”

“Not to you.”

She laughed then, that rich, fuming laugh, like Armagnac, and knelt next to me. “It was your choice, Aud. You were ready. I just came along at the right time.”

“Beer,” Dornan said from behind me, and handed me a frosted bottle. “Does that miniature stove work the same way as a real one?”

I turned back to look at Julia, but she was gone.

“Aud? The stove?”

“Yes. It takes a bit longer, that’s all.”

“Dinner in half an hour, then.” He turned to head back up the slope.

“Dornan?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.”

He shrugged and climbed back up, those long wiry muscles working under his jeans. He rarely wore anything but jeans, even though he made a lot of money from Borealis, his string of cafés. The closet in his midtown home was full of good clothes; he had shown me them years ago, complaining that his girlfriends always bought him suits, as if he couldn’t afford them for himself, if he’d wanted. I knew what clothes he had, what films he enjoyed, what books he read; his favorite color, his hopes and fears and dreams. I knew that his front tooth was blue not as the result of a barroom brawl, as he liked to pretend, but because he had hit the metal bar with his mouth when trying to beat the Trinity College, Dublin, pole vault record. I knew that his first wife had died of leukemia six months after they had both graduated, before he and I had met.

In the time I’d known him I had driven him home when he was drunk, held his head while he puked, put him to bed. I listened on the nights his pre-Tammy girlfriends had left him. He had been to my house once, the night he drove me home from Borealis, the day he thought I’d been in a car accident, the day Julia died. I had not even let him through the door. And now he was here, and I had let him help.

The steak smelled good, rich and red and strong. Muscle. Cooked muscle. I flexed my left hand, the one holding the beer, and watched the muscles in my forearm swell, then relax. What had Dornan’s muscle felt like when he swang that hammer? Everyone’s muscle attaches differently, to a bone that’s thicker or thinner, under skin that is sensitive or not.

Everyone is different, I thought. Everyone is different. I stood. “Dornan, I’m hungry.”

“Then get up here and eat. It’s more or less done.”

We ate outside. The steak was so big there was barely room on the plate for the red potatoes tossed in butter and marjoram. We had to eat the corn first. It was succulent and buttery and very hot. Dornan admired the wood-and-steel prongs jammed into each end of his corn.

“Halfway up a bloody mountain, half mad, no food, but you remembered to bring these—What are they called, anyway?”

“No idea.” The corn was the best thing I’d tasted in months.

“Come to think of it, there are a hundred things I don’t know the name of, usually fiddly little things. These, for one. And those things they use to nail cable and wire to the baseboard in your house—you know, those double-spiked U-shaped thumbtack things—for another. And where do they all come from, who thinks them up?”

“Um,” I said, around my corn.

“Rubber bands. Toothpaste caps.” He touched the ruby stud in his left ear. “Those little metal things that go on the back of earrings. I’ve had this since I was twenty, never lost the stone, but I’ve probably sent the sons and daughters of the devil who makes earring backs to college.”

That was something Julia might have said. I felt my mouth twist. Dornan tilted his head and waited.

“Julia…” I tried to swallow past a closed throat.

He understood. He went back to eating his corn. After a moment he said, “I liked what I saw of her, that once, in the café.”

I set my corn aside. “Tell me what she looked like to you.” I was hungry for another viewpoint, to see Julia again for the first time.

“Tall, taller than she really was, anyway, because of the way she held herself, like a ballet dancer. When I saw her come in that night with you, I said to myself, Now there’s a handful, because I thought she’d be snooty, you see. It was the way she carried her head. But she wasn’t.” He picked up his steak plate and knife and fork. “Until Tammy came in. Though I don’t blame her for it—I expect she took her cue from you.” He looked up. “Your face is a study.”

I just stared.

“You think Tammy’s body blinds me to her faults?” He shrugged comfortably, then started cutting his steak. “Bit more well done than I like. No, I think I see her very clearly. You, now, you were the one who was blinded. You couldn’t see her good points for her bad. Ah, now your face is closing up. I haven’t seen that face for a while. No doubt you’re thinking, He doesn’t know the half of it and I’m not going to ruin his image of his fiancée by telling him. Tell me, did she try to seduce you? Yes, I thought so. She tried it with all my other friends who didn’t like her.”

“I—”

“Oh, I know, you turned her down.” He speared a piece of steak, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “So, you turned her down, not your type, but the point is, Torvingen, the point is, she is my type. She might use sex like subway tokens but I trust her in my own way.” He forked up more steak. “Eat, eat, while it’s still hot.”

I did. My teeth sank into the juicy muscle. Everyone is different. “Different people want different things.”

“Yes. And Tammy was the one for me.”

“I’ll find her.”

“No doubt.” He looked at his steak sadly. I reached out and touched his arm.

“I’ll find her,” I said again. We ate for a while without saying anything. I drank my beer.

“She pretends she’s tough,” he said, “but she’s not. She’s smart, and pretty as a picture, and she knows her way around the world, but sometimes I’d look at her and just want to hold her, protect her from everything. She wouldn’t let me.”

“No,” I said. I hadn’t been able to protect Julia. I hadn’t been able to protect myself from her. Dornan got up, disappeared into the trailer, came back with a box of tissues.

“Every luxury,” he said with a crooked grin that showed the blue tooth. “Even halfway up a mountain.”

I wiped my face. The tears kept welling, I kept wiping. “I can’t bear it.”

“You will, eventually.”

“Tell me about it, Dornan, about grief.”

“It never goes away. After a while, though, after a long, long while, life starts to sand it down and take the sharp edges off. Over the years it gets smaller, until you don’t notice it so much. Sometimes some jagged bit will catch you off guard, but that happens less and less.”

I thought of Julia weeping on the boat in Norway, so many years after her brother died. “I don’t think I can live for years feeling like this.”

“You don’t have much of a choice.”

“There are always choices.”

“Oh, you won’t kill yourself, you’re too self-centered, and you’re too stubborn to go mad. So that means you’ll have to cope.”

Cope. A small word for a terrible task.

“Building this house is one way of doing it, of course.” He put his plate down and twisted to look past me at the cabin. “It looks almost finished.”

“The outside, maybe. The inside needs a lot of work. That interior wall needs finishing, some of the floor pulling and relaying. The handrails up to the loft have to come out. I have some lovely walnut I want to put up there, really fine grain. I also want to turn the board gable into one of half logs, so it matches everything else.”

He stood, dusted off his jeans. “Show me.”

I did. I showed him each joint, discussed every decision on materials and design, and explained how I’d cut the walnut for the railings myself, from the sixty acres of mature black walnut plantation that was part of the reason my great-grandfather had bought this land in the first place. As the evening wound on, I took the flashlight down from the nail near the door and kept talking. He listened patiently for hours, as friends do.

Outside, it was almost dark.

“Espresso, I think,” Dornan said, and went into the trailer. I sat on the log, stoked the fire back to life.

He brought two cups and a carafe outside, sat next to me on the log, and poured for us both. We stared at the fire. Far away, wild turkeys gobbled.

“I’ve told you what happened my first night in this country,” I said.

He nodded. “The man who broke into your apartment. That you killed.”

“Yes.” Fourteen years ago. “I never told you how it felt.” A hot night in a new country. I’d fallen asleep naked and woken with a gun in my face. “It was like a dream—how could it be real to wake up with someone pointing a gun at you?—but I knew it wasn’t. Under my pillow I had my father’s flashlight.” Old. Heavy. Polished steel. “I hit him with it. It was easy. I just stood up and hit him with it, and his neck broke. I didn’t have to think, because the adrenaline took me to a place where—” I couldn’t tell him, after all. “It took me to a place where you don’t think. And that’s what happened in Oslo. I didn’t think.”

Julia walking down the street to my Aunt Hjordis’s house, oblivious to the two men right behind her, lifting their guns. Me leaping from the car, smiling, almost floating, getting one before he could shoot—crushing his spine where it met the skull—but reaching the other a split second too late. If I had been five seconds earlier, if I had not forgotten I had a gun…

“I could have saved her.”

“Drink your coffee,” he said eventually. We sipped for a while. “That night you brought her to the café, you and she hadn’t, you weren’t yet—”

“No.”

“But I knew you would. It was as plain as day.”

I remembered. Julia had excused herself at one point, and when she walked to the bathroom we both watched, and Dornan said Very nice, Torvingen, and I said—I believed—It’s all business, Dornan, because I hadn’t understood. Not then.

“Just six months ago,” he said. “All four of us under one roof.” He shook his head.

“How tired are you?” I asked.

“It depends what you have in mind.”

“Before I leave, this cabin has to be weatherproof. That means getting tarps up at the windows. I could do it tomorrow, but if we both worked tonight for an hour or two, I could leave early in the morning.”

“Just a bit of hammering?”

“We’d have to fire up the generator and hang a few lights, but, yes, just a bit of hammering.”

We split the night open with noise and light and the stink of diesel and it felt good, it felt human, and although the tarps were heavy and the nails awkward, although Dornan hit the knuckle of my left index finger once and his own thumb twice, I think we both had the most fun either of us had enjoyed for months. It was a single, simple, discrete task, and we did it well.

When the generator had been turned off and the tools stowed in the hogpen, we went into the trailer. In the steady, yellow-white fluorescent light, Dornan’s shoulders were no longer hunched; the lines at the corner of his eyes were not as deep. I felt tired, and peaceful.

“Time for bed,” I said. “Tomorrow I want an early start.”

I did not sleep for a while. From the woods to the west, a screech owl hooted. Another answered from the north. Calling to each other in the dark.

CHAPTER FOUR

I shook Dornan awake just before six. “I have a long drive today. I want to be out of here in an hour. Clean the shower after you’ve finished.”

While he blundered about getting showered and dressed, I poured coffee, then unplugged and cleaned his espresso machine. I unloaded the fridge and put the perishables in a cardboard box.

Dornan peered into the box over his coffee. “Eggs. Green peppers. Seems like an odd choice to eat on the road.”

“This is for you to take with you. No point it all going to waste.”

“You expect to be gone a while, then?”

“A few days. I’ll call, when I find her. That’s all you need to know. Now drink your coffee and load your car. I want to leave before seven.”

I wiped down the inside of the fridge and propped the door open, shut down the appliances one by one, turned off the propane and water lines, checked locks, latches, and bolts on the cabin, hogpen, and trailer, put my bag and phone in the truck. The light in the clearing was like cool green tea, and dozens of birds sang. Dornan leaned against his Isuzu, sipping coffee and looking forlorn.

“Got everything?”

He nodded.

“Then I’ll call you in a few days.”

He nodded again, turned and slid into his seat, put his coffee in the cup holder and the key in the ignition, but didn’t shut the door. “Which way are you heading?”

“Go home, Dornan. Go home and take care of your business. Don’t come back here. I’ll call you.”

I stood there for a long time after he bumped his way over the turf and down the track, until the smell of his exhaust had faded into the trees and soil, and I could hear nothing but the birds. The air smelled like rain.

By seven-thirty I was on I-26 heading north and west for Tennessee. If I ignored the weather, ignored the scenery, and just drove, I could hold the clearing in my mind; I could imagine the soft patter of rain on the leaves—a flatter sound, now that the leaves were drier and getting ready to fall—building to a harsh rattling, the gush of rain runneling over the rich forest loam. In my truck, I could pretend I was not heading for a place hard with machine hum and concrete and seething with people who stank of fear and need. Once on I-81 I crossed Tennessee and Virginia at a steady seventy-five miles an hour, tires thrumming rhythmically over the concrete and whining on the asphalt, stopping only to refill the truck’s huge twin tanks. At about one in the afternoon, just before Roanoke, I took a twenty-minute break to eat, drink, and use the bathroom. I didn’t stop again until seven in the evening, not far outside Harrisburg. Both times I chose seedy, ill-lit fast food shacks where the colors would be dim and the noise low—no children screaming and running up and down, no canned music—and I wouldn’t have to smile or talk. In the rest room I didn’t look in the mirror. When I got back into the truck near Harrisburg, the wind was blowing pewter clouds into an already darkening sky.

“It won’t work,” Julia said.

“What won’t?”

“Pretending. The world’s out there. You have to move through it at some point.”

I changed gears unnecessarily and didn’t reply.

“And why do you need a truck in New York?”

She gave me that smug smile she always used when she was being Socratic, and disappeared.

Rain hissed against my windscreen, washing it to silver and mercury. I hadn’t thought further than the fact that I didn’t want to fly. The truck was familiar, a piece of my refuge. I should have rented a car in Asheville.

I drove grimly through the rain. Pennsylvania became New Jersey. I took the Newark Airport exit, and the streaming windscreen yellowed to cadmium and sodium as I approached the long-term parking lot, which turned out to be full of cars but empty of people. The rain was steady, and when I looked up as I got out of the truck, falling drops seemed to stretch and streak until they were golden needles. It seemed I had not thought to bring a coat.

The shuttle bus was driven by a woman with drooping eyelids and swollen knuckles. One of the pair of doors wouldn’t open fully; I had to hold my bag in front of me to squeeze through. The driver watched noncommittally. “Which airline?” Jamaican accent.

“American.” It made no difference. The bus jerked into motion.

Inside it was too hot and too bright, the air swollen with rain evaporating from wet passengers, bulky with coats and hats and umbrellas. I couldn’t breathe. I shut my eyes. Grass, trees, pigs rooting by the remains of a fallen tulip tree. Fish finning idly in the dark, deep water near the bank. The bus jerked again, and I heard “Which airline?” delivered in exactly the same tone, as though the driver were a machine, except the designers of such a thing would have made it pretty and white and young, with an insanely cheerful smile and large breasts.

The bus stopped again. “United,” the voice announced, and I stood up with a couple who studiously ignored each other, even though their matching rings said they were married. The driver didn’t seem to care that I was getting out at the wrong stop.

The terminal was a madhouse of flashing blue-and-white screens, security personnel in red-piped uniforms waving people through lines, green exit signs, arrows pointing this way and that at eye height and overhead, labels on bathroom doors, logos on storefronts, and flashing Bureau de Change icons, and it roared with voices and trundling luggage wheels, childish screams and the beeps of video games and cellular phones. I walked into the nearest rest room, into a stall, and shut the door. Grass, trees, pigs rooting by the remains of a fallen tulip tree. Grass, trees, pigs. Breathe. The place stank of disinfectant and dirty water. My heart rate slowed.

I changed from my wet traveling clothes into an Eileen Fisher tunic and trousers, swapped my boots for shoes, added earrings, and left the stall. The sinks were slimed with violently green liquid soap, scummy with old lather, and dripping with dirty water. I reached for the paper towel dispenser and stopped. The mirror showed a face with wild eyes and skinned-back lips, the face of a fox gone mad. I closed my eyes and rubbed my cheeks and forehead with the heels of my hands, stretched the muscles wide then pulled them tight, pulled and relaxed, until they let go. I practiced until my expression was bland, then went to find a cab.

I said, “Midtown, the Hilton. Fifty-third and Sixth.”

The cab was hot and reeked of air freshener. My window wouldn’t work. Halfway through the Holland Tunnel my knuckles began to ache; I wanted to punch the glass from the doors and escape.

The city sucked the cab north with terrifying ease, as though we were falling downhill, as if the whole island had tilted north. I closed my eyes against the momentary vertigo. When I opened them again, I kept my gaze focused forwards. Even at ten-thirty, traffic blared, lights flashed, and pedestrians gesticulated as they walked swiftly. Radio City Music Hall was already advertising the annual Christmas Rockettes show; there must have been some special event at MoMA because women in elegant dresses and men in casually expensive clothes streamed onto the wet sidewalk, whose slick black surface sizzled with reflected electric blue and neon pink. A sea of people, all distinct, all with dreams and fears, bank accounts and health problems, family and enemies. Too many, far too many.

The cab pulled into the semicircular driveway in front of the hotel. Big and busy and anonymous. A uniformed doorman opened my door and took my bag, another waved the cab forward to join the line waiting to take some of the perfume- and cologne-drenched passengers queuing behind a red velvet rope. I followed my bag through the lobby to the registration desk. The woman spoke, and my answers must have made sense because I handed her my credit card and she handed me a pen, and then a key card, but it was like watching a silent film. Then I was following the bellman and his gilded bag trolley to the elevators.

The elevators stood near the bar, which was full of burly-voiced conventioneers, several of whom decided at that moment to return to their rooms. When a door tinged and opened, they bulled forward, and although the bellman gestured that he would follow me onto the elevator, I shook my head. The bellman, unlike the usual cheerful kind, merely ducked in assent.

When the next elevator came, he again waited for me to get in first, and pushed the button for the twenty-second floor with a powerful finger. His nails were ragged and chewed, but there were no tattoos on his hands. Curious. His body language—his excessive, almost cringing politeness, his careful button pressing, lack of swagger—was something I associated with time spent in prison, where assertiveness is beaten out of you in a matter of weeks and replaced by a nervous need to please. But there were no jailhouse tattoos.

He knew I was watching him. He didn’t know what it meant. It made him anxious. “Good flight I hope. Well, my name’s Bob, and I’ll be happy to help you with anything you might need during your stay. I’ll just get these bags, this bag, to your room and get you settled. The ice machine is just a few doors down from your room—which faces north, so you should have a view of Central—”

He shut up abruptly. I wondered if my lips were skinning back again. I smiled and forced the bland expression back into place, but he still tried unobtrusively to put the trolley between us. Bad haircut, cheap watch, new shoes, nervous eyes. He hadn’t been doing this long, and it was probably his first steady paying job for a while. What kind of family waited for him when he got home after his shift? Probably divorced, maybe with two kids he was allowed to see every other weekend. The hotel might not even know he had been in trouble with the law. The lack of tattoos meant he’d done his time somewhere soft, and not for too long, so whatever he’d done was probably crime against property rather than person; forged checks, boosting truckloads of cigarettes, something like that. I could do or say almost anything in this elevator and he wouldn’t retaliate: he needed this job, and it would be his word against a guest’s. I tracked the way the muscles in his shoulders moved as he kept his balance in the elevator: not easy, not supple.

The door opened, I stepped off first, he followed cautiously. My room was halfway down a long corridor. I opened it myself, lifted the bag from the trolley, and gave him a ten because it occurred to me that even timid guests probably sensed they could undertip him, and because I felt soiled, having imagined the things I could do to him if I wanted. I knew he had sensed my understanding of his vulnerability, might have bad dreams tonight in his fifth-floor walkup with the bath in the middle of the kitchen. “Thank you,” I said, and shut the door. I opened it again when he was gone, put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, then locked and chained it.

It took less than a minute to unpack: I had forgotten almost everything. No toiletries, no underwear, not even a comb. Just the clothes I had worn for most of the drive, the clothes I stood up in, three pairs of socks, two books, my phone, and a can of half-frozen concentrated orange juice. How strange.

It was an anonymous room, done in the artificial pinks and grays popular for public spaces five years ago, with two beds. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a hotel room with two beds. The furniture was all fake-mahogany-veneered particleboard, and the window would only open three inches, barely enough to let in the greasy, hydrocarbon air. Room service was open until midnight: another ten minutes. The desk phone felt large and unnatural in my hand. I told the woman who answered that I wanted tomato soup, chicken teriyaki, a bottle of Samuel Adams, and three bottles of Evian. I had to repeat myself because even up on the twenty-second floor and even at night the ululation of sirens and honking of angry drivers on Sixth drowned me out. That done, I stripped off the Eileen Fisher and hung it up.

The only space big enough to lie on the carpet was in front of the dresser. I sat and stretched my tendons one by one. I wondered when Bob got off shift, whether or not he had friends to go for a drink with, or whether he crept home to a microwaved dinner and reruns and infomercials on TV. I stood, began the slow swelling inhalation of an aikido warm-up. Maybe he had a cat who would curl up on his stomach and knead his chest, digging its claws through the cheap cotton and into his skin, reminding him that love hurts. I moved in the blending exercise, soften, step, exhale, turn, slide. There wasn’t room for a kata, or a tai chi form.

There was a mirror above the dresser. I touched my reflection with a fingertip. My reflection felt nothing. That’s what I wanted from the world, to feel nothing. To feel nothing and not be involved, for everything to stay comfortably outside myself and not get in. How did people survive all this knowledge of suffering in the world? How did they carry it around, day after day, and not go mad? And what would I wear tomorrow?

The food came. I didn’t let the man push the table into the room, refused to look at him; I didn’t want to know what he looked like or how he felt or anything about him. I didn’t care, I didn’t want to care. It wasn’t until I shut the door again that I realized I’d answered it in my underwear.

I dreamt of the woman I had found on patrol nine years ago drowned in her tub, eyes turning to glue, the water so still I knew her heart hadn’t beaten in days. Once again I felt the slow, inevitable realization that the air in my lungs was still and stale, that I was dead, too. I woke at three in the morning and thought of how Julia had shaken me fiercely from the same dream six months ago and put her hand on my beating heart and my hand on hers, and told me I was alive, alive.

I had breakfast in my room, then called information. They had no Tammy Foster listed, no Geordie Karp. No Tammy Karp or Geordie Foster. Not in Greenwich Village or anywhere else in Manhattan. It would have been convenient to call ahead and make sure she was there.

At nine in the morning, the concession shops were deserted but none of them sold underwear. Guests might forget toothbrushes, they might forget a pen, their vitamins, a comb, but they didn’t usually forget underwear. I had remembered the perfect change of clothes, down to jewelry, brought credit card and money and socks and shoes, but had not thought of a coat or underpants. We only recognize we have an autopilot when it goes horribly wrong.

Even in dirty clothes it was a pleasant walk to Saks in the kind of sunlight New York specializes in at the beginning of autumn: too warm in the sun, too cold in the shade without a coat. There was never quite enough space on the sidewalk to stride, and after I bought underwear and toiletries I walked back along Fifth all the way to East Fifty-seventh, just so that I could swing my arms. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Thomas’s Church, the Fifth Avenue Church: a similar concentration of churches per square mile as the poor Baptist South, though probably not as well attended. Central Park beckoned briefly, but I resolutely turned left and kept walking. Move, don’t think.

After I’d changed I didn’t pause to talk to the concierge or to get a map but walked back out again, to the subway at Fifth and Fifty-third, and down into the stink of diesel fume and stale urine to catch the F train. If I could get to Washington Square Park, all I had to do was walk west to find Seventh Avenue. On the platform I tried to shut down my senses, close out the noise, the carbon-slippery air, the three middle-aged businessmen in expensive coats talking in tight voices about some deal that had gone south. A redheaded boy on crutches who couldn’t have been more than fifteen stood next to the men, whose discussion had now escalated to the kind of argument people have when they’re looking for someone else to blame. The boy stood too close. Any of those men could lash out in frustration and the boy would tumble off the platform onto enough electricity to hard-boil his eyes in four seconds. Anyone could push any of us off. I looked behind me. No one. I stepped back several feet and tried to breathe normally. There could have been someone there. I should not have had to look. I should have known. Be present, stay alert: the first rule of self-defense. But then I wouldn’t be able to shut out the noise and stink and tension around me.

The train was not full. No one paid attention to anyone else as we racketed past signs for Rockefeller Center, Forty-second Street, Herald Square. The same tunnels, different signs. It could have been an episode of The Twilight Zone: dead people traveling in Charon’s twenty-first-century barge. When I got off at Fourth Street, the steps were too steep, and the higher I climbed the less oxygen I seemed able to pull into my lungs, but at the top, outside, the sun still shone. Again, I had that brief sense of vertigo. I walked without thinking, without direction, just to be walking, to be not trapped among the women with cross-slung purses and men with messenger bags who radiated aggression and fear, and eventually the press thinned and I could breathe, I could begin to separate out different packets of information—a smell from a shout from a flash of color—and I found I was heading south on La Guardia Place. At the next cross street, Bleecker, I turned right and headed west.

I passed the Bitter End, “New York’s Oldest Rock Club,” and two or three blocks later the Greenwich Village Funeral Home. Old rock stars never die. Right again, north on Sixth, because it was wider, and there was less information per square foot, but before I could head north and west on West Fourth I was caught by the flash and thud of a ball and the slip and play of tree shadow on the sweat-sheened arms of two men rising to the basket, and I had to stop because the information made no sense: taxi honk, thump of ball, back-and-forth flash of green, then white, as money and drugs change hands, fence around a paved court, crunch of fallen leaves, screech of tire on asphalt. And then it was clear: pickup basketball on an urban court around which rip-off-the-tourist drug deals met gentrified neighborhood in early autumn sunshine. I leaned on the wire fence around the court, let it dig into my back, breathed until my heart slowed. I knew where I was. I started to walk. I knew why I was there. I swang my arms. I knew where I was going.

My arms would not swing properly. The tension in my shoulders would not let go.

The last time I had had to consciously relax as I walked a city street was nearly eleven years ago, during my first weeks on patrol with the Atlanta PD. Then, I had reared at every shadow, flooded with adrenaline at every human voice, wondering if this was the situation that would get away from me, if that might be the man who would be bigger or faster or stronger. I had learned after a while to recalibrate my sense settings, to distinguish the shout from a bar doorway that meant I am about to shove this shank in your kidney from the one that said Damn, I feel good today!, to differentiate the flash of movement on a sunlit downtown street that signaled the sudden attack from the one that meant someone had just realized he was late for his meeting and had to run. You had to trust your unconscious mind to understand the whole picture; it can process faster than thought. It will let you know if the charging man has bared teeth and mismatched socks, or whether he is wearing a silk and cashmere suit. It will add that information to whether he is growling or merely cursing his own idiocy under his breath, and whether his smell is Mogen David or something by Calvin Klein, and then flash a red or green light to your adrenal glands, all between one heartbeat and the next. If you adjust your conscious filters to the appropriate setting, you can relax and let your subconscious take care of things. It’s something I used to be good at.

I kept walking north and west on West Fourth, swinging my arms, telling myself I was relaxed. If you walk as though your mind is easy, your mind believes your body and becomes easy. If your mind is easy, your body believes it and becomes easy: a basic feedback loop. I half closed my eyes, ignored the noise around me, imagined my wrists loose and my fingers relaxed. Breathe, stride, swing. By the time I turned north on Seventh I didn’t have to think about it anymore.

The ground floor of 95 Seventh Avenue South turned out to be a pizzeria, but there was a doorway to the left, and three neat black bell pushes and an intercom grille. No mailboxes. I took thin leather gloves from my jacket pocket and put them on. I tried the door: locked. None of the buttons were identified by apartment number, but two of them had names, Jhaing and Donato. I pushed each button in turn. The grille crackled.

“Yeah?” A man’s voice, young.

“Package,” I said.

“Uh, so you could put it in the mailbox.”

“Won’t fit the mailbox.”

“Then leave it in the lobby. Jeez…”

New York, I reminded myself. “I can’t get in to get to the lobby, asshole, because I’m not from the goddamn post office, okay? If you don’t want the package, then fuck you and have a nice day.”

“Whoa! Okay, okay. Jeez. You’d think—” Whatever I was supposed to think was drowned out by the buzzer and I pushed the door open. The mailboxes were on the right, three of them, and all were labeled: Apt. A: Jhiang, Apt. B: Dutourd, Apt. C: Donato, Karp, Foster. They were locked.

The stairs were made of a glittery stone composite and didn’t creak. I stopped halfway up the first flight and sniffed: something summery and old-fashioned. Lavender. My face tightened as adrenaline nudged up my blood pressure: this was not the kind of place I would expect to find Tammy, or the darling of retail sales, Mr. Karp.

The first floor was carpeted in neutral beige. The green-painted door said it was Apt. A. The second floor was a well-finished hardwood, with a cheerful rag rug and a vase of dried flowers on a Chippendale hall table. Probably the source of the lavender scent. I kept going, and hadn’t quite reached the third floor when a door banged open above me and a slightly built man hurried along the hallway to the stairs. I went perfectly still. He literally jumped when he saw me.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Early twenties, black hair, black eyes, left ear pierced twice, and the kind of clothes that didn’t fit with the probable rent of his apartment.

“I said, who the—”

My heart was pumping smoothly. “I’m looking for Tammy Foster.”

“She doesn’t live here.”

“I’m still looking for her.”

He tensed and backed up. “You the police?”

“No.”

“My mom send you?”

“No.” Oxygen-rich blood coursed through dilated blood vessels. “Where is Tammy?”

He frowned but his shoulders came down a fraction. “Why do you care?”

My muscles were relaxed and my voice, when I spoke, sounded almost gentle. “I don’t care, particularly, but you will tell me—”

“I don’t—”

“—where she is and why her name is on your mailbox.”

“There’s no law against that. Is there?”

“We’ll talk about it inside, Mr. Donato.” I mounted another step, lightly, easily, walking right at him, and he blinked, then gave in.

The hall smelled of old dishwater and uncleaned toilet and there were boot marks on the paintwork. He led me into the living room, where he hurriedly cleared takeout cartons, and a stack of what appeared to be bad charcoal sketches, from a love seat, looking embarrassed and about seventeen years old. I ignored the couch and stepped back into the hallway, stuck my head in the kitchen, then the filthy bathroom and the mess and disorder of the bedroom. A nice apartment, clearly beyond this boy’s apparent means, both economic and psychological. It was also clear that only one person lived here.

“Give me her forwarding address.”

“What?”

“Tammy Foster’s forwarding address.”

“I don’t have that!” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“Tell me where you send her mail.”

“But I don’t.”

He began to shift from foot to foot. He wasn’t lying. “Explain.”

“It’s like, you know, an arrangement.” I waited. “They pay me. This is Mom’s apartment. I mean she pays the rent but I live here. She doesn’t pay for, you know, food or clothes because she says if I want to waste my time on—Right, okay. So this dude pays me a few bucks a week to collect their mail, and that’s about, you know, it.” He shrugged with his thin arms, inarticulately.

“Does Karp or Foster come and get it?”

“No. I just toss it in the garbage.”

“You throw their mail in the garbage.”

“Well, yeah.”

It would be so easy—my right hand on his right wrist, pull and step, left arm across his throat, whirl and spread my arms, like a dance, and he would drop spine-down over my thigh, snap: less than three seconds, start to finish—but a broken boy would help nothing. The adrenaline ebbed.

“Do you have any mail addressed to them that you haven’t thrown away yet?”

“Yeah.”

“Give it to me.” In the absence of adrenaline I felt mounting irritation.

“Uh, isn’t opening other people’s mail like a federal offense?”

“It’s exactly like a federal offense. So is aggravated assault.” I reached slowly into my inside pocket, giving him time to register the fact that I wore gloves.

“Whoa! I was just—”

“Bring me the mail.” He scuttled off into the kitchen and came back with five envelopes and two catalogues, all obviously junk apart from one white envelope with a familiar blue logo. “Give me the one from American Express.” It was addressed to George G. Karp. I opened it. A bill. Not a solicitation, but a regular bill. I scanned the list of charges. It seemed genuine. I put it in my pocket. “What else do they get?”

“Stuff. I don’t keep track, you know?”

“Visa? Utility bills?”

“Yeah, like that.”

Why would someone go to the trouble of setting up a mail drop and getting bills and other correspondence mailed to it, only to have those bills thrown away? “How much does he pay?”

“It used to be twenty-five a week, but when he added the Foster chick’s name, I told him, man, I can’t do it for less than forty.”

“Cash?”

“Well, duh. Every other Thursday, in the mail. Paid last week.”

I reached into my jacket again. Before he had backed up more than two steps I pulled out my wallet. He bobbed his head: a combination of relief and greed. I extracted five crisp twenties. “I want to know everything you know about Karp and Foster.”

I put my gloves in my pocket and walked around the Village for a while. Donato had not been able to remember what bills had come or what the cycle was, and he couldn’t describe Karp except that he had, you know, maybe sort of blondish hair? He’d only met him, like, once. Tammy he had never seen. I had taken back four of the twenties.

Tammy had to be here. She’d told Dornan this was where she was going after Naples. Her credit card confirmed it. I had followed the money and it led nowhere except back to Tammy’s Atlanta apartment and to a mail drop. But if she hadn’t lied to Dornan, then she was here with Karp. Find Karp, find Tammy. I knew Karp was somewhere close: his American Express showed dozens of charges to Manhattan restaurants, mainly in midtown, SoHo, and the Village, with a few in Brooklyn.

I wandered past endless coffeehouses on MacDougal Street. It was only eleven o’clock, not yet lunchtime, but the crowds were growing, the air starting to feel used. A double-decker bus stuffed with tourists rumbled past.

Inside the café, there was one spare table and a line at the counter. Most of the people sitting and sipping were talking—half to friends, the other half to their phones. One woman tapped diligently on her tiny keypad and frowned at the display. The web. Of course. You had to have an official billing address for a credit card or utility, but you could pay by phone or online.

Somewhere, Karp would have an e-mail address, maybe even a business website. I didn’t have my laptop and my phone screen was tiny, its processing power more suited to instant text than a web search.

A hard-eyed young thing behind the counter asked me what she could get me. I ordered latte, and dropped two ones in the tip jar. “Where’s the nearest library?” I asked.

“Library? Public library?”

“Yes. Where is it?”

“Hold on.” She called back over her shoulder to the man behind the espresso machine. “Hal, the library’s at Sixth and Tenth, right?”

“Around there, yeah.”

She turned back to the counter and spoke to the customer behind me. “Get you something?”

The library was an imposing brown-and-white building that looked like a cross between a Gothic cathedral and the Doge’s Palace. There were two Macs on the second floor, one, on the right, already taken by a woman in her fifties, who froze when I came into her peripheral vision, and stared rigidly at her screen until I sat.

A Google search brought me eight hundred hits, none of which seemed to be a home page. There was a profile from Talk a year ago, a Business Week cover spread, and literally dozens of features in obscure trade journals, both print and web-based. Interestingly, there was no photo: both the Talk and Business Week articles were accompanied by the cover illustration for his book, Hostage Exchange: Their Money for Your Goods, which had been reprinted in a paperback edition last month.

The woman next to me had relaxed enough to resume her tapping. Every now and again she sighed loudly.

There were several links relating to recent and forthcoming appearances; he was doing a reading and signing at the Citicorp Center Barnes and Noble in four days. I skimmed half a dozen interviews: repeated citations of design awards, recycled plaudits from a variety of retail executives, including a glowing but utterly impersonal quote from the Nordstrom VP of Full Service Stores, some number-dense analyses of retail sales from various stores pre- and post-consultation with Karp, and one snippet in an article written almost five years ago about how Karp worked from his SoHo loft “with a cell phone and a laptop.”

The articles shared a sameness that hinted at very, very careful information management by Karp. It wasn’t easy to control the editorial content of magazines. I wondered how he had done it. Then I laughed, aloud, which made the sighing woman look at me sharply—funny how tiny infractions made people bold. I gave her a smile with a lot of teeth.

Most magazines rely on advertising revenue; many advertisers are retailers; Karp had great contacts in the retail world. A discreet word here, a favor called in there would bend a few rules. But favors were usually costly in any profession. What did he have to hide?

I went to Switchboard.com and tried Karp, and G. Karp, and George Karp, and Geordie Karp, in the state, then the city. Hundreds of Karps in New York State, too many to trace one by one. No George Karps in the city. One G. Karp in Brooklyn. I wrote down the number and address but knew it wouldn’t be him. An initial was a flimsy hiding place. I repeated the exercise for Tammy, and found nothing promising. I tried again on Bigfoot with the same results.

I followed a few more links. Nothing. Why was he so careful? What was he afraid of?

On my way past the woman at the other computer I stopped. Her shoulders hunched but she didn’t turn around. “You should always look,” I told the back of her head. “Not looking never kept anyone safe.”

Outside, I called the Brooklyn number. A machine picked up after four rings. “Hi, this is Gina Karp. Leave a number. You know the drill.”

I closed the phone. A loft in SoHo, but five years ago. Not much else. Just the book, and the bookstore signing in four days. If all else failed, I could go to that and follow him home, or go to the restaurants and bars listed most frequently on his statement and hope he showed up. Either alternative meant staying in New York, talking to people, interacting. I didn’t think I could stand one more day of concrete and braying voices.

Washington Square Park was crowded with dog walkers, mime artists, skateboarders, street musicians, jugglers, and chess players; tourists seethed so thickly around the fountains that I could only see the top of the water spout and couldn’t hear it at all; people sat in ones and twos at the foot of every tree, reading.

Maybe Karp’s book would tell me something about him.

The Village is full of bookstores. I bought a copy, carried it back to the park, and folded myself onto the grass to read.

Several case studies, complete with photos. A hint of smugness, perhaps, gleaming cold and hard through the personable prose. Again that boast: he needed no office but his cell phone and his laptop. No other scrap of information about where he was born, where he lived, who he was.

A pair of police officers strolled down the bike path, a white man and Hispanic woman, nodding occasionally to passersby, smiling at a toddler being dragged along by his parents. Obviously officers specially trained to be nice to tourists. Their eyes remained watchful.

I turned the book over and over in my hand, front and back, back and forth, feeling its weight, taking its measure, the way an antique dealer might handle a jade carving, or a sculptor her wood. I put it on the grass in front of me, turned my face up to the hazy sun. In North Carolina, the sun would be yellow as an egg yolk on a blue plate, and leaves would be drifting down onto the cabin roof.

I picked the book up again, riffled through the pages from back to front, and there it was, the copyright notice: © Koi Productions. Hiding behind his own cleverness.

I had to walk a few yards before my phone got a decent signal. Information gave me the address: Koi Productions, 393 West Broadway. The SoHo loft.

I took three cabs, getting in and out after random intervals, before I found a driver who spoke English and who spent just a second too long looking in the rearview mirror at the roll of money I took from my pocket. His ID said his name was Joe Czerna; he had a red nose and gray hair. Late fifties, maybe. I made my body language younger, more excited. I smiled a lot, as though nervous.

“So, Joe, what’s it like driving a cab in New York?”

He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“Bet you get some real wackos to deal with sometimes.”

“Sometimes.”

“You ever see anyone get shot?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you call the cops?”

“Nobody shot me. I just drive. I got money to earn.”

“You want to earn some money for helping me?”

Pause. “How much?”

“A hundred, plus fare and tip.”

“You gonna shoot anybody?”

I laughed. “No, no. No shooting, but some people might be upset. It’s my sister, y’know? She’s, like, a bit crazy. I’m gonna go get her, from where she’s staying with her boyfriend. But she might not want to come, y’know?”

“No drugs, nothing like that? I don’t want no throwing up in my car.”

“Nothing like that. Just some yelling, maybe. Okay?”

“Your sister?”

“My sister.”

“My family shout alla time. Where you want to go?”

“West Broadway.”

It didn’t take long. I got out, tore a hundred-dollar bill in half, gave one piece to him, and put the other in my pocket. “Wait for me. I shouldn’t be longer than half an hour maybe.”

He tapped the meter. “Gonna keep this running, too.”

“Okay, whatever. But wait.”

I was beginning to wake up. I had been too long in the woods. I had forgotten, for a while, to be cautious. Bears and bobcats could be dangerous, but they didn’t feel the need to hide, and they weren’t smart enough to hide their addresses. If I needed to get Tammy away against her will or anyone else’s, I wanted a cabbie with a vested interest in taking what would look like a risky fare. Of course, she might not even be there, in which case I’d just wasted a hundred dollars.

Number 393 was a brick-faced building, a shop front, Anderly Flowers, and six steps with no railing leading up to a metal door, with a keyhole beside it. It took me a moment to recognize it as an elevator door, the kind that goes straight up to a loft. My scalp felt tight. I put my gloves on and pushed the buzzer. No response. I waited a minute, then pushed it again. Nothing. Again. Just like fishing. I had all day.

“Who is it?” A woman’s voice. Tammy’s, though it was hard to be sure over the hiss of the intercom.

“Mr. Karp?”

“He’s not here.” Definitely Tammy’s.

I made my accent warm and Hispanic. “No, no. I’m from Mr. Karp. I have a delivery.”

Silence, then: “I’m not expecting anything.” Her voice sounded thick, as though she’d been crying, and with a questioning lilt, oddly hopeful, like a child’s.

“Well, I have a special delivery here for someone called Tammy. From Prada. They’re paid for. I’m just dropping them off.” Silence. “A present maybe, I don’t know.”

“A present?” Her voice was uncharacteristically tentative. “You could just put everything in the elevator.”

“No, no, I have to come up. You have to sign.”

“Wait, two minutes.”

I waited. After a while the doors opened. There were two old-fashioned Perspex buttons, UP and DOWN. No key slot to override instructions from upstairs. A perfect trap. But I knew Tammy. She would never cry or sound childish in front of a man. I stepped in and pushed UP. The doors closed and the cage rose.

The doors opened to brick and blond wood, soaring spaces lit by bright halogen light, and there was Tammy, elevator key dangling from the thin chain she’d wrapped around her wrist, standing straight, and well dressed, but looking destroyed, torn up by the roots. She had just washed her face, but the lids were still puffy and she breathed through her mouth because her sinuses were still blocked from weeping.

I stepped from the cage. “Hello, Tammy.”

“Aud?”

She looked behind me, as though expecting to see a young Hispanic woman dead on a pile of Prada couture on the elevator floor. The elevator doors closed. “Aud?” Then her hand went to her heart, as though someone had punched her, and her face turned a dirty gray. “Is Dornan here too?”

“No.”

I’m not sure she heard me. She seemed about to topple with fear.

I took her by the elbow and considered. To the right, the stainless steel of a chef’s kitchen; ahead, a short corridor with three closed doors; to the left, a vast living room with ivory leather furniture, a brilliant kilim worth more than a luxury car, and a minimalist audiovisual system flanked by two large plinths that supported what looked like nineteenth-century French bronzes. I steered her towards the living room. “Dornan doesn’t know where you are. I didn’t tell him. No one knows except me. Come and sit down.”

She moved like an ill person, not drugged but docile, and unconfidently, as though the world were a dangerous place. Perhaps it was, or at least this part of it. I led her around a brick support pillar to a couch.

“Sit.” She sat. The features were the same as Tammy’s but this wasn’t the Tammy I’d known. “Dornan is worried—” She began to blink rapidly. She couldn’t be afraid of Dornan. Afraid of him seeing her like this? “He doesn’t know where you are, and I won’t tell him unless you want me to. He doesn’t have to know about—” Distinct pallor. What had she done? “—any of this. But he’s worried, so he asked me to find you and make sure you’re all right. Are you? All right?”

Her eyes filled with tears but she made no move to reply. It was clear that she was very far from all right.

“I have a cab waiting downstairs. We can go to my hotel. We can talk. We’ll drink tea. You can tell me what’s going on. After that, you can come back here if you—”

“No!”

That seemed clear enough, so I stood, took her hand, helped her to her feet, and headed for the elevator.

“No!” she said again.

“You don’t want to leave?”

“I mean…” She made a vague gesture towards a closed door. “My things…”

Her things. “Where is Karp—Geordie—when is he coming back?” But she had closed her eyes; she wasn’t listening. “Give me the key. The elevator key.”

Without the key, she couldn’t leave, or let anyone else up. I had no idea what was going on, but I knew she was afraid. I didn’t want to be surprised. She handed it over without protest, and I put it in my pocket. Behind the first closed door was a windowless office, almost bare but for a utilitarian desk on which stood a printer and small photocopier, and, against the wall, a self-contained video playback unit and a stack of tapes. A lateral filing cabinet, freestanding supply drawers. No fax, no phone, no computer. The second door hid a half bath. The third led to the bedroom, which appeared ordinary enough—king-size bed with crimson-covered duvet, two dressers, a lovely eighteenth-century beechwood armoire, thick cream rug, reading lamps, long, heavy crimson curtains—but felt strange. I stood there for a moment, trying to work out where the oddness lay, then dismissed it. Tammy’s purse sat on the bed. I tipped out the contents to make sure that keys, wallet with credit cards, Georgia driver’s license, health insurance—all the personal essentials—were there, then shoveled everything back in. The master bath yielded two bottles of prescription pills and one cream, and contact lens paraphernalia. No watch. I took a toothbrush for good measure, and a comb, and added them to her bag. On the way back through the bedroom, I opened the dresser drawer and scooped out a handful of hose and underwear. Glasses from the bedside table. Was that everything she’d need for twenty-four hours? I didn’t want to have to take my eyes off her for a while. Something else, something else… Ring. She hadn’t been wearing Dornan’s ring. An antique jewelry chest, also eighteenth-century, but made of some dense tropical wood I wasn’t familiar with, sat on the second dresser, but I couldn’t find the ring. I tipped everything out, stirred it with my finger. No ring. Back to the bedside table. Nothing. Bathroom: no jewelry case. I went through the medicine cabinet more carefully. Nothing. I paused. This was Karp’s apartment; his ownership was apparent everywhere, from the precisely placed bronzes to the orderly kitchen to the matching leather furniture. Tammy had not made a single impression: she didn’t feel safe here. An engagement ring was personal, perhaps even precious, something to keep private, hidden. I went back to the underwear drawer, pulled it out, tipped it onto the bed. Nothing. Dornan still meant something to her or she wouldn’t be so afraid of him seeing her like this; she would have kept the ring. I shook out each pair of underpants, one at a time, put them back in the drawer. Opened the packets of hose. Began unfolding the sock pairs. I found it in the third pair, tucked down near the toe.

Back in the hallway, Tammy still stood by the elevator. I held out the bag but she took no notice of it. I used the key, and when the elevator opened she stepped in without a word.

She didn’t say anything when I gave her the bag and opened the cab door, nor when Joe turned to look at her black hair, chocolate brown eyes and full figure, then at my height and light blue eyes, and said, “Sister, huh?”

I gave him the other half of the hundred-dollar bill. “Different fathers.”

“Uh-huh.”

I gave him another fifty. He drove.

“We’re going to the Hilton,” I told Tammy. She stared through me as though I were talking in algebra. Her pupils looked normal, she wasn’t flushed or overly pale, and her breath came smoothly; she was not drugged; she had removed herself somehow, as though she had given up all responsibility for herself, or hope. Dornan had said she was smarter than I gave her credit for. What would he make of this?

We pulled up outside the hotel. “We’re getting out here,” I told her. She climbed out obediently. I sighed and reached back into the cab for her bag. Joe drove off without a backward glance. I held the bag out; she took it. “This way.” She followed me through the lobby, crowded now with guests checking their watches and exuding stress and impatience. “We’ll be in my room soon,” but she didn’t seem bothered by so many bodies all trying to breathe the same air, the same molecules that had just slithered down one red throat, then back up, to be snatched by the phlegmy lungs of a passing bellboy, who exhaled near the mouth of an old woman whose heart was probably as weak as her watery eyes. My clothes felt too tight. I wanted to punch my way to the street and not stop running until I reached Central Park and could lean against a maple trunk and look up into the leaves and believe I was not in the middle of ten million people; but here was Tammy, standing by the elevators, empty as a gourd, and Dornan, my friend, needed me to make sure she was safe.

The elevator opened and Tammy just stood there. I began to shake. I lifted my hand, but turned it instead into a light touch on her elbow and a gesture. “In. We have to go up.”

Halfway up she began to weep silently, but her expression didn’t change.

“You’re safe,” I said, wondering if I was lying. “We’re almost there.”

A couple was waiting at the twenty-second floor to go down. The younger of the two noticed Tammy’s tears and gave me a sharp look, but neither of them said anything.

Housekeeping had already tidied and cleaned the room; with my personal things hidden behind doors, it felt as comforting as an autoclave. I sat Tammy down on the edge of the nearest bed and went round turning on all the lights. The dim yellow glow added some warmth to the room. I closed the curtains to make her feel safer. “I’m going to run you a bath, and I’ll order some food while you’re relaxing.” Tammy just sat there. I took her hand and tugged her gently towards the bathroom. Her hand was cold. “The bath will get you warm.” The water gushed into the tub. I made sure there was soap, that the bath mat was on the floor. The chlorinated water frothed on itself, water so clean it was dead. I tried to ignore the automaton breathing behind me. The tub filled. As though she were a child, I tested the temperature of the water with the back of my hand. I turned off the taps. “I’ll shut the door, but I’m just out here if you need me.”

I listened outside the door. There was no snick of the lock, but after a moment I heard the soft plash of flesh meeting water, and moved away.

I called room service, ordered tea and coffee, sandwiches, water, juice.

No matter how many lights you turn on, hotel rooms are always too dark and always too small, and when you press your face up against the glass, all the people so many stories below always seem to have more freedom than you do. Even the people in the building opposite, harshly lit by fluorescents in their office cubicles, seemed to have fuller lives. One man wearing a shirt and suspenders kept scratching at his sandy-haired head with a pencil. He held a phone in his right hand and the pencil in his left, talk talk scratch scratch, then he swapped hands, scratch scratch talk talk. If the pencil was sharp, he would have tiny rips all over his scalp.

Stationary cabs lined up like golden beetles down the center of Fifth, glittering in the strange New York sunshine. In any other city on earth the drivers would have been standing by their cars, arms folded, leaning against hoods and gossiping.

No noise from the bathroom. To the left of the office building, a huge sign spelled out ESSEX HOUSE backwards. Sandy Hair put down his pencil and scratched fiercely at his temple with his fingernails, exactly the way a squirrel would, only much more slowly. Cabs opened their doors, closed them, and drove off with fares. Other cabs took their place.

Someone rapped on the door and announced that they were room service. When I opened the door, a rotund woman, crisp as a freshly baked dinner roll in her white jacket, pushed the cart briskly into the room. I stepped in front of her before she could go any further. “I’ll take it.” I signed the tab and herded her out.

Sandy Hair was still scratching his scalp. I set the table up so one chair faced the corner and the other the door. “Room service is here,” I called to Tammy. I lifted plate rings, poured tea, divided sandwiches. I ate one. Tuna salad. No sound from the bathroom. I sipped tea. Not made with boiling water. Tammy was probably sitting in the bath with her mouth hanging open. She hardly knew me, yet here she was, depending on my goodwill, like a child. Selfish, like a child. What gave her the right to assume I’d just take care of everything? There was no way to know what to do with her. It was obvious she didn’t want to see or be seen by Dornan, but I couldn’t leave her on her own in this state; I didn’t trust her to look after herself. I didn’t trust her, full stop. If I got her in my truck and drove to Atlanta, or anywhere else for that matter, I wouldn’t put it past her to cry kidnap when she recovered her wits.

“Tammy. Food,” I called again. Nothing. The bathwater was probably getting cold. Maybe that would prompt some movement.

I will find her, I had told Dornan, but all I’d found was a shell. I had no idea how to go about finding the rest.

I poured myself more tea and took it over to the bed nearest the door where Tammy’s bag lay on its side next to the pillows. Cup in one hand, I opened the bag with the other and tipped it upside down, stirred the spilled contents with one finger. The two plastic bottles both held the same thing, Ambien, a prescription sleeping pill. I put them on the bedside table, along with the ring, the contact lens case and its solutions, and the glasses. I stuffed everything else back in except for the underwear, which I put in the drawer next to the one that held mine. No clues.

I put my empty cup back on the room service trolley. That bathwater would be really uncomfortable by now.

“Tammy?” I knocked on the door, listened. Nothing. “Tammy?”

Memory of my dream about the woman dead in the bath made my knees sag as though I were in a high-speed elevator braking to a halt. I hammered on the door. “Tammy!” I turned the handle and slammed into the door, forgetting it wasn’t locked.

Tammy wasn’t sitting in her own blood, her eyes weren’t rolled up, she wasn’t floating facedown. She was hunched, knees under her chin, at one end of the bath, weeping silently, great fat tears falling like fruit onto her thighs. The ends of her hair were wet. Eight hundred miles for this.

“Get up,” I said. She was alive, and she didn’t care, didn’t understand how precious that was. “Get up!” Her face was quite still and calm. If it were not for the body language and the tears, I might have thought she was meditating. She was removed, no longer caring; life wasn’t worth living but there wasn’t enough of her left for her to bother killing herself. Maybe she wanted me to do it for her.

“Let’s get you out of there. Come on now, Tammy, come on.” I took one of the towels from the rack and held it out encouragingly. “It’s lovely and soft and warm. Come along now.” She blinked slowly. I slung the towel around my neck and leaned down. “I’m going to put my hands under your arms, that’s it, just like that, and lift you out, that’s it, move your legs, that’s right. And now you have to step over the rim, onto the mat.” Her skin felt firm and cold, meat waiting to be cut. “Put this towel around you. Yes, yes, come on now.” She made no move to pull the towel closed about her. I left it draped over her shoulders and got another one. “A good, brisk rub and you’ll be fine. And when you’re dry, I’ll put you to bed. There’s tea, and food if you want it. And perhaps a bit of television. The door’s locked, no one can come in or out. You can sleep. You’re safe.” I opened the bathroom door, put my right arm around her waist, and took her left hand in mine to lead her forward. “Here we go. Here. This bed. You sit right there. I’ll turn on the television.” She sat obediently, unconscious of her seminakedness, while I flipped through channels until I found a soothing natural history program about domestic cats. “Stand up just a minute while I pull back the covers. There we go. Sit down. Now swing your legs up.” Flash of skin, smooth now, warmer. She smelled of towel. “Lie down, that’s right. Here, let me take the towel. What you need right now is some sleep.” The food could wait. I tucked the bedclothes around her shoulders and under her chin. She closed her eyes obediently. I sat next to her on the bed. “You’re safe. I’ll be sitting near the window, right here. You sleep.” Maybe I should give her a sleeping pill. Her breathing deepened. Just as I eased off the bed her eyes flicked open, and they were frightened.

“What time is it?”

I glanced at the bedside clock. “Two fifty-three. In the afternoon.”

She followed my glance to the clock, wouldn’t take her eyes off it.

“Here.” I moved it so it was closer, and facing her. She looked at me, back at the clock, at the curtains.

“Open the curtains.”

“You’ll sleep better if they’re—” Her eyes started to go dead again. “Okay. Hold on.”

I opened them. She looked at the concrete building, the blue sky, back at the clock. “Afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Two fifty-three?”

“Two fifty-four, now.”

She nodded slightly to herself and fell asleep as though someone had pulled the plug.

I settled myself in the armchair near the window. Taxis honked; sirens grew, dopplered, faded. On the TV, an orange kitten chased floating dandelion seeds through the sunlight of a summer garden. I did not know what to make of Tammy’s behavior. Fear might explain some of it, but fear of what? She had had a key, she could have left anytime, or if she was scared of something outside the apartment, she could just have picked up the phone. Except, of course, there hadn’t been a phone.

The kittens were replaced by some woman with a Canadian accent demonstrating the art of stenciling in home decor.

Tammy woke after an hour. She didn’t sit up or say anything, just gasped, and her respiration rate went up. Then she started turning her head very, very slowly towards the clock, as though her life depended on me not knowing she was awake.

“I’m here,” I said. She froze. After a moment she turned her head to look at me. “Are you hungry yet? The sandwiches are still here. The drinks have gone cold, though, so if you want tea or coffee, we’d have to order more.”

“Where are we?”

“The Hilton.”

She looked at the clock. It seemed to reassure her.

“The tuna salad sandwiches aren’t bad.” I put one on a small plate, added a napkin and the saltshaker, and brought it over to the bed. She looked at it as though it were a snake. I put it down near the clock. “Food is almost always a good idea.” She reached for it without sitting up, careful not to let the covers slide off her shoulders. Well, well. “I’ll bring you a robe.” I put it on the bed and withdrew to the bathroom for a couple of minutes, where I folded her corduroys and cashmere, and when I came back she had taken a bite and was chewing. I poured her some water and brought that over, too. She was still chewing the same bite. “Swallowing comes next.”

She swallowed obediently. I sighed, and she flinched and dropped the sandwich, which made me sigh harder with irritation, and she shrank back against the headboard.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know what you want,” she said in a small voice.

I stared at her. The Tammy I had first met nearly two years ago would have walked naked down Peachtree Street before it occurred to her to wonder what anyone but herself wanted. She studied her sandwich fixedly. “I want you to eat that sandwich, if you can, and drink some water. Then I want you to sleep again. I want you to know you’re safe. And then tonight we’ll decide what to do.”

She looked at the clock again, and picked up the sandwich.

As I’d thought, the carbohydrates combined with whatever shock she’d had sent her off to sleep again within a few minutes. I got up and turned the heat down, then went back to alternately looking out of the window and watching the television. The Canadian woman was now demonstrating color glazing. Every time the camera pulled back, the word “cheap” hovered brassily in the corners of the small, flimsy set; the wall wobbled as she leaned on it. To the English, cheap is not a pejorative word, simply descriptive, and usually delivered with an air of triumph: “I got these jeans cheap at the market!” In the United States, of course, cheap means shoddy, tacky, gimcrack; I didn’t know a single American who would boast of buying something cheaply. Where were the Canadians on the cheap scale? Perhaps they followed the same cultural and geographic axis as the country in general: more European in Quebec, more American in Vancouver.

The chattering Canadian came to an abrupt end, and was replaced by an earnest magazine program dealing with health care for the mentally disabled. A while later I began learning more than anyone needed to know of the reproductive cycle of emperor penguins.

Sandy Hair and his coworkers had just begun to pack up to leave when I realized Tammy was awake and watching me. When I looked at her, she lowered her gaze in the universal primate gesture of submission. I should have noticed her wake, but, like a prey animal, she had learned to move quietly. Interesting. She seemed to have her wits about her, now.

“Good evening. It’s pretty dark outside. You’re not wearing much and this room is lit up like a stage. I’m going to close the curtains.”

No protest this time. She sat up, touched her bare shoulder with her left hand. “You undressed me.”

“Yes.”

Silence, then: “Have you told Dornan anything?”

“No.”

Another silence. “I want to leave.”

“The door’s right there. You have money in your purse.”

“No. I mean, I want us to leave New York.”

“Us?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Is someone looking for you?”

“I have to leave now,” she said.

“I’ll be driving back south, but—”

“I don’t want to go to Atlanta!”

“I’m not going to Atlanta, and I’m not leaving until tomorrow—unless you want to talk to me, tell me why you need to leave right now.”

“Where are my glasses?”

“Right there next to the water.”

She found the case, put on the steel-rims. I expected the gaze she turned on me to be sharper, but it was as blank as before. “Why can’t we leave now?”

We. The I-can’t-cope-by-myself ploy was something I had seen her use before, but not like this. This time there was no glint in her eye, no upthrust breast or canted hip, just a frightening brokenness.

I didn’t want to stay in this hotel, in this city, another night anyway. “I’ll pack while you dress.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Midnight, and a black autumn wind was trying to push the truck this way and that as we crossed the southern edge of Maryland. Tammy slept in the passenger seat, right hand curled around her left wrist and the cheap watch we’d bought her at the airport. All she’d done since I’d taken her from that apartment this morning was sleep.

“It’s a shock reaction,” Julia said. She sat sideways on Tammy’s lap, facing me. “A way to hide. You hide in the woods, Tammy hides in her dreams.” She stroked Tammy’s face gently, moving the back of one finger up her cheek, as if catching a tear. The muscles in my legs tensed and the truck jumped forward. “Where’s the fire?” she said.

“I want to be in West Virginia before we stop.”

She studied Tammy, whose eyes were darting from side to side beneath closed lids. “Did you take away those sleeping pills?”

“No.”

“Might be an idea. At some point she’s going to crawl far enough out of her pit to get her self-will back. That’s when she’s liable to do something stupid.”

Tammy umphed and turned in her seat, moving Julia, who said, “Bony hips. I think she’s lost weight,” and I suddenly couldn’t stand the idea of Julia touching another woman, not touching me, never touching me again.

“Please,” I said.

Julia raised her eyebrows.

“This—I can’t—” I braked and started to pull over.

“What?” Tammy sat up.

Julia vanished. I yanked on the parking brake before we quite stopped moving and Tammy jerked forward against her seat belt. The engine rumbled. The wind howled. Her gaze slid this way and that but she kept her head down.

“Get out.”

She put her hand on the door lock and prepared to get out, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, without even looking at me. It was as though she had expected all along to be abandoned, as though she accepted it, even deserved it.

Shame raised prickles on my skin from knees to neck. “I mean get in the backseat. There’s more room, you can stretch out.”

She climbed out and into the back without another word.

“Are you warm enough?” She nodded, eyes huge. “Good, that’s good.” The truck started up again smoothly and I pressed the accelerator down and down until it wouldn’t go any further. Lane marker studs streamed under my wheels. The engine began to whine. Annoying.

“It’s all right,” I said, to myself, to Tammy, to Julia, wherever she was, and eased my foot off the gas. The stream flowed more sedately. “We’ll take the next exit and stop for the night.”

The Days Inn was plain and comfortable; spending the night with Tammy was neither. She didn’t take off her underwear or her watch and lay rigid on her tautly made bed like a knife from the wrong set of silverware set out on its napkin by mistake. She didn’t talk, she barely breathed, and her eyes glimmered slightly: wide open and empty even of fright.

I woke at six the next morning, and opened my eyes just in time to see Tammy’s flick open and watch me. Back to square one. I got up, ignored her, and went and had my shower. There was no packing or unpacking to do.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” I said. “Be ready to leave. Assuming you still want to come with me.” It took most of that hour to get a copy of the elevator key made, to find and buy an envelope, to persuade the desk clerk to run it through their stamp machine, for a fee. I put the original key in the envelope, addressed it to Geordie Karp at his loft address, and dropped it in the mailbox. The duplicate went back in my pocket; you never knew.

When I got back I walked around the parking lot for the remaining minutes, saw license plates from sixteen different states, almost all on American cars, and wondered what the percentage of foreign to American vehicles would be at a hotel as opposed to a motel. Probably some ethnologist has done a study.

Tammy was washed, brushed, and standing by the bed like a cadet in a military academy when I got back. So she could at least make sense of what I was saying.

“Hungry?” I asked. She waited a fraction to see if I’d give her a hint about what I’d prefer her answer to be, and when I gave her no clue, she shrugged very slightly. Apart from that single “What?” when she woke in the truck, she hadn’t said a word since we’d left New York. “I need to eat before I drive.” She picked up her purse. She was connecting at least some of the dots. I drove us through a quiet, gray morning and, when I could find nothing else, to the violence of light and plastic and noise that is Denny’s.

Our server’s eyes were overbright, as though he were in the middle of a speed jag, but it could just have been the light. “What’ll you have?”

I ordered pancakes and eggs and bacon, with coffee. Tammy refused to look up from the menu. I smiled blandly at the server, offering no help at all. He shifted from foot to foot.

“Regular breakfast is pretty good,” he said finally. Tammy nodded. “With coffee?” She nodded again.

We ate in silence. When the bill came, I stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll see you outside.” She made a panicked, abortive movement, but no sound. “Your wallet should be in your purse.”

“She’s not ready to do things for herself,” Julia said from behind me as I washed my hands.

“I think she is.” I pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, lifted my gaze to her reflection in the mirror, and the floor seemed to drop six inches: Julia’s indigo eyes had darkened to chocolate brown, like Tammy’s.

“Imagine if it were me out there,” she said.

The bathroom door swang back and forth behind me as I walked rapidly back to the restaurant.

Tammy, pale-cheeked, was still at the table, but she had her credit card out, sitting on top of the bill.

“You—we should probably take that up front.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she picked up the bill and card and followed me to the cash register. She handed it over to the server without a word. He handed her a slip and a pen. She looked at me with those empty brown eyes.

“Sign,” I said. She wrote slowly. “And add five dollars, for a tip.” The faster she came back to the real world, the faster I’d be rid of her.

In the parking lot, I went to the driver’s side, unlocked it, then climbed in the passenger seat. Tammy looked at me, looked back over her shoulder at Denny’s, then up at the sky when a solitary raindrop hit her shoulder.

“Better get in before you get wet.”

She got in. I handed her the keys.

“I’ve done too much driving lately, I’m tired. Wake me in a couple of hours.” I curled up and closed my eyes. We sat there for nearly thirty minutes before she put the keys in and turned the ignition. I kept my eyes shut while the engine idled.

“I can’t,” she said at last. I waited some more. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

“No,” I agreed.

Another long, long wait.

“Where are we going?”

“North Carolina, near Asheville.” I sat up and turned to face her. “Unless you’d rather go somewhere else. I’ll travel with you wherever you want, get you settled somewhere.”

“Not Atlanta,” she said.

“All right.”

“North Carolina?” I nodded. She nodded back and steered us carefully out of the parking lot, onto I-81 South. Her driving was bad at first, but improved rapidly. She stayed slightly under the speed limit. I was starting to go to sleep for real when she spoke again. “What’s in North Carolina?”

“Woods, birds, a house. There’s room enough for two, for a little while.” Until Dornan can come and get you. She didn’t say anything but the engine hit a higher note.

I didn’t sleep but drifted in a theta-wave state for a while until she began to brake too hard and make abrupt lane changes.

“Take the next exit,” I said. “I’ll take over.”

When she sat in the passenger seat it was obvious that returning to the world had taken its toll; her shoulders were hunched around her ears, and she picked endlessly at her thigh where the corduroy had worn thin. A person who is new in the world—a child, or an adult in a foreign country or just out of hospital—needs safety, first of all, but then they need to know that they matter, that their opinions are considered, that there are choices. The trick is not to offer too many options at once.

I turned on the radio and skimmed through channels: the blandly perfect smile of fusion jazz, a huge-voiced country music diva belting out about how her dawg done left her, an apoplectic talk show host ranting about tax reform, a commercial for wireless phone service that degenerated into the low-toned gabble of federally regulated footnotes. I kept trying, and eventually plumped for some college station that sounded as though it was broadcasting from the bottom of a disused well. “Not exactly to my taste. Feel free to change the station.” The thigh-picking slowed, but we listened to well-bottom music until the weak signal started to fade. “Find something else, will you?”

She found something that called itself adult contemporary and sounded as though its artists, mostly women with little-girl voices, lived on Prozac. Still, it was a decision.

“Maybe we should stop at the next town and buy some CDs.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shopped for something unnecessary.

I drove for another hour. Tammy napped. When the adult contemporary signal faded, she sat up and changed the station without prompting. Mommy’s little helper.

At Wytheville, just north of the North Carolina border, I left the interstate and took us onto the Blue Ridge Parkway: more than two hundred miles without a single traffic light or fast food franchise. With a speed limit of forty-five miles per hour—less on some of the hairpin bends—leaving the interstate meant adding at least two hours to our journey, but it was an essential buffer zone between where Tammy had been and where she was going. I turned off the radio and opened both windows.

“Breathe,” I said. Valleys ran long and deep to either side, and cows grazed in pastures framed by split-log fences. The air was rich and cool and edged with life.

“It’s cold.”

“Put your sweatshirt on. We’re two thousand feet up a mountain.”

“You live up a mountain?”

“A valley halfway up a mountain, but we’ve a couple of hundred miles to go.” Somehow, in four or five hours, I had to show her how much there was here to appreciate. She had to know before she got there how special this place was. It had to become special to her, too, otherwise she would trample all over the fragile peace of my refuge. She squirmed into her sweatshirt and we drove for a while in silence.

“These are the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“Part of the Appalachians, one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth. They’re so old that they appeared before most animal and plant life existed.”

“No fossils,” she said after a moment.

“Right. Lots of gemstones, though.” Smarter than she looks, Dornan had said. “Some of the rivers are even older than the mountains.”

She didn’t seem interested in the apparent paradox. Mountains form in geological time, in slow motion. A river that exists before the mountain forms will cut through the new, soft rock to get to the sea. Most of those seas were long gone, but the rivers remain. We passed a sign for Blowing Rock, the head of the New River. Stupid name for the oldest river on the continent.

“It’s about time for lunch. We could stop and eat and take a look at the river.”

She nodded, though I’m not sure whether it was the food or the river that appealed.

Blowing Rock is a small town with a lot of money whose inhabitants had managed to keep the ugly face of tourism from their doors. We ate fettucini in a café under a bright awning, surrounded by window boxes spilling flowers; sun warmed those wood and fieldstone houses not sheltered by maple and poplar. Tammy spent more time watching relaxed, clean, happy people walk past the window than eating.

“Is this real?” she asked eventually.

I nodded, and for a moment I thought she would burst into tears, but she just shook her head.

When we got back in the car, she watched the scenery more intently, and once pointed to a speck hanging high over the canopy. “What’s that?”

“Hawk,” I said. “I can’t tell what kind.”

She was silent the rest of the drive, and I left her to her thoughts, because now we were driving through the beginnings of Pisgah, and the air began to smell like home.

An hour later we drove into Asheville and I parked in more or less the same place I’d parked when I got my hair cut, and when I climbed out of the truck into the slanting afternoon sun, I had the absurd urge to drop into the Heads Up Salon and see if Dree was there.

Tammy was trying to get out of the truck and pull off her sweatshirt at the same time. She managed both, then just stood there holding the sweatshirt in a bundle in front of her, as though it were something dirty.

“Is your house near here?”

“No. It’s… some distance outside Asheville. We’re here to pick up food, and clothes for you.” She might be staying with me, but she wasn’t going to wear my clothes. “Bring your money.” She rooted around in her purse, then hesitated, still clutching the sweatshirt. “You won’t need that. It’ll stay warm for another hour or so.”

Somewhere between the sidewalk and the first hanging garments, Tammy’s body language changed; her brows arched disdainfully; she sighed and shook her head dramatically at the offerings, then fingered a slippery rayon dress.

“T-shirts and shorts and boots would be more appropriate for where we’ll be; some jeans; a sweater for the cool nights.”

She swung the hair back from her face and eyed me sullenly, now the perfect teenager. Infant to child to teen in one day. With any luck she’d be dead of old age before we reached the clearing.

“Your money, your choice.” It would only be for a day or two, anyway. And if she bought all the wrong things she could either suffer or drive herself back here. Nursemaid was not part of the job description.

Tammy remained in teenage mode as we drove north and west along secondary roads which narrowed to gravel, and then took an abrupt turn left and hit the unpaved track up the mountain.

“Where are we going?”

“My cabin.”

She sighed heavily and pulled her sweatshirt back on. After another ten minutes she rolled up the window.

I took the last half a mile in second gear. Judging by the mess alongside the road, hogs had been through recently, and tree debris indicated high winds sometime in the last couple of days. For some reason my heart was beating high as we pulled into the clearing.

It was all there, as I’d left it, cabin roof still on, tarps snug and tight across windows, trailer fast shut, but different. Forest litter from the wind or storm lay everywhere, and foliage that had been green had faded to yellow, what had already been yellowing was now gold, and the elder and dogwood and maple leaves had deepened to rich, winelike hues. I parked and just sat there for a moment, drinking in the smell, which was loamier, wilder.

“This is it?”

“Yes.” Even I heard the smile in my voice.

“What happened?”

“A storm. The wind must have really ripped through here while I was gone. We can use the deadfall for firewood.”

“No. I mean the house. It looks… scabby.”

“I’m rebuilding it,” I said shortly, and climbed out of the truck, but I looked at the cabin again, at the different colors of the old and new wood—that could, I supposed, look leprous to the uneducated eye—and the messy tarps, the gables. “It will look better when the windows are in and the new wood’s had a chance to weather.” But I wondered, which made me angry. “Did you pull the wings off flies, too, when you were little?”

Her face changed abruptly, the same look a child gets when she breaks a parent’s favorite ornament and looks up, too frightened to even cry out that it was an accident.

“This place means a lot to me. If you don’t have anything good to say about it, keep quiet.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I—”

“You weren’t to know. Let’s get unpacked. We’ll be sleeping in the trailer.”

We unloaded the food, then her things. I showed her where to stow her clothes, handed her sheets, which she accepted wordlessly, and pointed out the sofa bed. I left her to it, and went to start up the systems. There was enough propane for a while, but after Dornan’s visits and with Tammy here, I’d have to take the trailer out in a few days and pump out the gray and black water tanks. Refilling with fresh from the pump was no problem, but there was no point if the sewage tanks were full. That would be another new thing; I hadn’t had to pump the tanks since I’d arrived here, shell-shocked and more than half mad, not wanting to shower or wash dishes or use the toilet, not wanting to have anything to do with civilization at all.

I went back into the trailer. “Tammy.” She was sitting hunched on the couch that was the sofa bed, as though she had been given permission to use only that piece of furniture. “Come sit at the table.” She did, cautiously. “I’m going to show you how everything works. Most of it’s simple, but if you have questions, ask. Tonight I’ll cook dinner, but from tomorrow you’ll take your turn.”

She watched me as a crippled deer does a hunter.

“Do you understand?” She nodded. “Good. But first I’m going to take the phone outside and call Dornan.” No reaction. “I won’t tell him where you are now, but I will say I found you, that you’re all right, but that you don’t want to talk to him at the moment. Would that be a fair statement?”

She started to nod again, then said, “Yes.”

“I will also tell him that either you or I will get in touch with him again within a week.” With luck, she wouldn’t be here that long.

Outside, late evening sun pooled on the canopy like syrup and the air felt slow and thick. Somewhere a wildcat would be crouching on a maple limb, waiting for a turkey to strut by; newly fallen leaves would rustle with the beetling of shrews and chipmunks; flycatchers would start swooping through the invisible insect towers hovering above the leaves, snipping up their dinner. It was just after six o’clock, a busy time at the coffeehouses. I called his home phone; this would be easier for everyone if I talked to his machine.

“It’s Aud. I found her and have her somewhere I can keep an eye on her. She won’t be running off anywhere anytime soon. She’s fine but doesn’t want to talk to anyone at the moment. We’ve agreed she’ll call you in a week, if not before.” I lowered the phone, not ringing off but not knowing what else to say. For months, Dornan had been having god knows what nightmares about Tammy maybe sitting in seven separate garbage bags in a ditch alongside some dirt road in Alabama, or getting married to a red-haired, pompous psychologist, or wandering New York in an amnesiac daze. And he had helped me. I lifted the phone again. “Dornan, she was glad to leave. I think she’s been through a bad time, emotionally, but I think she’s going to be just fine. I’ll make sure she talks to you soon. And Dornan—she hasn’t thrown away your ring.”

I closed the phone up and resisted the urge to walk into the trees.

Inside, I set about showing Tammy the dos and don’ts of trailer living. I began with the stove and refrigerator, then took her outside to show her the propane hookups. I didn’t want to get blown up in the middle of the night just because she wanted a cup of coffee and the pilot light was out. “The fridge operates on propane, too. Here’s the shower. Gray water capacity is only sixty gallons, so you won’t be using it often. You turn the hot water on here, like so, but again, you won’t be using that much. The toilet is pretty self-explanatory and I’m expecting you to use it as little as possible.” Black water capacity was only forty gallons, and there were plenty of trees to use as screens. “We’ll get most of our freshwater from the pump, and there’s a stream we can use while the weather is good.” Ah, but how much longer would that be? “When you use the stream, use only the shampoo, soap, and toothpaste on this shelf. I don’t want you killing the trout. Over here is the TV. Music. Again, use sparingly. We can prime the batteries anytime, but it’s noisy, and I like my peace and quiet. Tomorrow I’ll show you how to use the generator. Crockery down here, bigger utensils up here, tins in the pantry. Dry food and other staples in the hogpen. No open food to be stored in this trailer except in the fridge.” Which was airtight. Telling her about the bears could wait for tomorrow. “Beer in here.” I took two bottles from the fridge and opened them, but didn’t hand her one. “Which reminds me. You have a decision to make: you can drink, or you can take sleeping pills. It’s reasonably safe out here, but not if you mix and match your poisons.”

She nodded. I sipped my beer with obvious appreciation but didn’t hand hers over.

“You’re saying I have to decide right now?”

“Right now.”

“Jesus. You’re not my mother.”

My mother wouldn’t have cared. “My land, my rules.”

“I’ll take the beer.”

I took another sip from my bottle.

“Jesus!” She rooted around in her bag, handed me both bottles of pills.

I handed her the beer. “What do you want for dinner?”

I lay in bed and watched moonlight inch its way down the wall by my side. Tammy had been asleep for over an hour; the whole trailer hummed with her presence.

After giving me the pills, she had eaten her dinner quietly and cleaned up without being asked. Even after she was in bed I felt her cowering, quivering, afraid to make a noise in case I disapproved and did to her whatever had been done to her in New York.

When someone cowers, their body language says, essentially, Hit me. The permission is there, they are telling you they will not retaliate, and I could feel this terrible urge to throw aside my duvet, stride down past the galley, and drag her outside by her hair into the moonlight. Her shirt would ruck up around her waist, her eyes would be black in the silver light, she would look up into my face and see hard bone and shadow, wet strong teeth, and she would tell me everything. Then I could take her somewhere else, get rid of her, tell Dornan, I found her, here’s what happened to her in New York, and I would finally be alone again, and safe and quiet. It was tempting, and I resented the temptation.

CHAPTER SIX

I surged upright, then realized it was morning, and that the noise that had woken me was Tammy leaving the trailer. I knelt on the bed and watched through the window as she took a pan to the pump and filled it, then studied the pile of firewood by the pit. She stood there for a while, then looked around. I’d put the hatchet away before leaving for New York. She went to the hogpen, hauled open the door, and disappeared inside. I imagined her studying the different axes. She reemerged with the hatchet.

“Promising beginning,” Julia said, joining me at the window.

Tammy glanced around again, as though she thought someone was watching from the trees, then lifted a log onto the chopping stump. The swing needed improvement, but she got the hang of it after a while and soon had a small pile of kindling at her feet. She took off her sweatshirt.

“Interesting. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I meant the fact that she has a clue how to build a fire.”

“She hasn’t built the fire yet,” I pointed out.

“She has lost weight, though.”

Tammy was about five foot six. When I first met her, I would have guessed her weight at a lush hundred and forty-five pounds. With her dark hair and eyes and golden skin she had been as sleek as a seal. Now some of the luster was gone, and about fifteen pounds of fat. On another woman it would have looked fine, but on Tammy it was all wrong. Her breasts no longer plumped out her T-shirt with soft weight; the seams of her jeans did not strain over hip and buttock as she knelt on the turf by the fire pit; the bones of her face, once softened with subcutaneous fat, stood out sharply.

She had her back to the trailer, face to the woods, but I could see enough of what she was doing to know that her first attempt to light the fire would be a failure. The kindling sputtered and went out. She looked around again. Perhaps it was some kind of tic. She pulled the pile apart, rebuilt it along much the same lines as the first, and tried again with the same result. This time she took everything apart and thought about it for a while, then carefully made a pyramid of twigs and dry grass surrounded by the seasoned kindling. It caught at the first try and she watched it with quiet pleasure. Too late she realized she should have brought more fuel, and the brave little blaze died to nothing.

Julia lay down and stretched luxuriantly in the pool of sunshine on the bed. “Are you going to let that poor girl struggle out there for hours to get a fire going?”

“Let her do her learning in private.” Even as I watched, Tammy assembled what she would need: grass, twigs, seasoned kindling, green wood as fuel.

This time it worked. I watched long enough to see the fire blaze up merrily and Tammy carefully hang the water over the flames, then turned back to Julia. She was gone.

I dressed in boots, shorts, and tank. The soap and toothpaste and towels in the bathroom were undisturbed. I thought about that for a while, then brushed my teeth at the sink, used the toilet and flushed it, and went outside. The air was cool and still, and my boots left tracks in the dew.

“That looks like a good fire.”

She scrambled to her feet. “I thought you might want some coffee when you woke. Or some cooked breakfast.”

“Thank you.” The fire wouldn’t be much good for cooking until it had been burning long enough to produce coals, but there was no point in spoiling her triumph. “Don’t make my coffee too strong.”

We sat in the sun and sipped while the dew burned off and the fire snapped. She held her mug in her left hand and the right hung empty and relaxed from the wrist resting on her knee. It was the first time I had seen her neither tense nor posed.

“I’ve decided to take the trailer into town today and get the wastewater tanks drained and the freshwater filled. That way you’ll have showers and other indoor plumbing conveniences for the few days that you’re here.” And I wouldn’t have to live in a small space with the smell of an unwashed, unbrushed guest. I finished my coffee, which wasn’t bad. “I shouldn’t be longer than four or five hours. Don’t play with any of the edged tools while I’m gone.”

“You’re going to leave me here?” Both hands were now wrapped around her mug so tightly that her fingertips were white.

“I had planned on that, yes.”

“What will I do?”

“Whatever you want. Go for a walk. Take a nap.”

“Where?”

I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “Well, right here. The grass is comfortable, and it’ll be warm all day.”

“But—out in the open, all exposed?”

She was genuinely frightened. I opened my mouth to tell her she could always lock herself in the hogpen if she was afraid of bears, but I doubted she had even considered that possibility. I shrugged. “Well, come with me if you’d rather, but don’t expect to be an idle passenger. There’ll be time for you to take a shower.”

I banked the fire and cut more firewood but was still done before Tammy emerged, hair wet, smelling clean and young.

“Come help me get the rig ready for traveling. I don’t want a single loose item by the time we leave. Start with your bed.”

It always took longer than I thought. Everything that was on an open shelf or countertop had to be stowed and secured, a rubber band snapped around the roll of toilet paper, the water heater turned off, food in the fridge and cupboards cushioned against breakage, rugs rolled and furniture moved to pull in the living area and wardrobe slide-outs, awning stowed, and all the carefully reconnected propane appliances disconnected again.

I used a hitch with an adjustable quick-slide base, so it didn’t take too long to hook up the truck, but then there was the rig’s tire pressure check, a last check to make sure all doors, interior and exterior, were dogged and/or locked, and, finally, unchocking the rig’s wheels. I threw the chocks onto the rear seat of the truck and Tammy got into the passenger seat. I looked around the clearing.

I had no memory of getting here, all those months ago, and it was a minor miracle I hadn’t ended up in the natural ditch that ran along the northern edge of the track. I’d have to fill that ditch sometime soon. Meanwhile, I wasn’t alone.

I leaned in to the open window. “How are you at guiding drivers?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

“I need the truck and trailer to be lined up dead straight before I hit the top of the track, otherwise the trailer wheels might cut across and end up in the ditch. And I’d rather not flatten the well pump while I’m backing and filling.”

“I could try, I guess.”

She did an excellent job, and after ten minutes we were creeping down the mountain. I kept an eye on the dash readouts; engine compression holdback was excellent, even on the steeper grade halfway down, and I began to relax. It’s a forty-minute drive down Highway 25 to Naples. We kept our thoughts to ourselves.

The service station was empty except for two coverall-clad workers: a tall, soft-faced boy who could not have been more than eighteen, and a wizened, bowlegged man who came up to his shoulder and had probably been born before cars were invented.

I pulled in and leaned out of the window. “Hey there.”

A nod and “Ma’am” from Bowlegs, just a blush and a bob of the head from the boy. In my peripheral vision Tammy began to rearrange herself subtly in her seat, sitting up straight, tilting her face so her dimples showed, pulling back her shoulders to push her breasts up tight against her shirt—and then her pupils irised down to points and her focus turned inward and something in her sagged. She slumped and pulled herself in and down.

“I need to empty her out, hose her down. If you’d point me in the right direction I’d be grateful.”

“Empty her out, is it?” Eee-yut. He cocked his head at the RV bay. “Just had everything topped up Thursday.” Thur-us-day. “Should suit. Need some help?”

Tammy slid a bit further down in her seat.

“Just about got it covered.”

“You sing out now if you change your mind.”

I parked, got out, and chocked the wheels, just in case. Then I showed Tammy how to hook the power cable up to the converter so the batteries could start charging. “There should be two pairs of rubber gloves in the undercarriage storage bay. Get them.”

We drained with the red hose and rinsed with the green, opened and closed, connected and disconnected for a while, then washed the whole place down—including the truck and trailer—before rinsing and filling the freshwater tanks a final time. It was tedious, messy, and foul-smelling, but once all the hoses were stowed and all the valves, cocks, and caps firmly closed, I felt the usual satisfaction of an unpleasant job well done. I told her to check the tires while I squeegeed the windows. She finished first. When I’d dried the windscreen wipers and snapped them back in place, I walked slowly past the glistening tires. They looked fine and fat and all the dust caps were in place.

“You’re dying to check, aren’t you?” Julia said, sitting cross-legged on the roof of the truck.

I was.

“Don’t do it.”

“Aud?”

I hadn’t heard Tammy approach.

“Aud?” A curious glance at the truck, then at me. “Are we done?”

“Yes. We’ll fill up on gas and pay on the way out.” I remembered her reaction to the men. “Or I can walk over and pay while you stay here.”

She steeled herself. “On the way out works.”

She sat stiff as a ramrod as I chatted to Bowlegs and he scratched his chin and wrote a few smudged figures on an invoice while his young assistant filled the gas tanks and money changed hands. She didn’t say anything as I pulled out, or as we drove back up Highway 25.

“New York,” I said, and her head made a slow, unwilling turn. “You don’t have to talk to me about it if you don’t want to, but if you do, I don’t have to tell Dornan.”

She said nothing for a while and I thought she was going to go back to that unnatural, unreachable place, but then she breathed in and out, fast, twice, the way you do before you dive through a doorway not knowing who or what is on the other side, and said, “It’s not a pretty story.”

“No.”

“I mean, it doesn’t make me look good.”

We didn’t say any more for five miles, but she began to fiddle with her window button, then her air vent, then the seam of her pants. She tucked her hair behind one ear, then the other, then pulled it forward again.

“I want to tell someone.”

“Yes.”

“It—I just can’t.”

“Okay.”

“Stop being so fucking agreeable!” Her face worked as she tried not to cry, paling at the creases like a stretched and twisted pencil eraser.

“Tissues in the glove box,” I said.

After she had finished, and had wiped her swollen face clean of mucus, she stared out of the window. “This is the road back to the cabin,” she said suddenly.

“Just about there,” I agreed.

“Maybe we should get everything set up and back in place, first.”

“If you like.”

We worked for two hours putting everything back together, and when that was done it was time for a late lunch. In the clearing, Tammy talked brightly of the food, of the road, of the rig, and her eyes shone like spinning coins. When she stopped talking, the clearing was silent but for the wind hissing in the treetops. A blood red maple leaf spiraled down from a branch and landed tip first in the grass.

“Aud?”

“Mmm?”

“What was it like, being here on your own, with everything so quiet?”

“Peaceful.”

“You didn’t get… nervous?”

“No.”

“This morning, when I was making the fire, I felt jumpy, exposed.”

Exposed. Second time she’d used that word. “But you don’t feel that way now.”

“No. Because you’re here. And there’s the trailer, somewhere I can go.”

I looked at the massive tulip tree, the trillium growing at its base, at the maple leaf. This made no sense whatsoever to me. “But it doesn’t worry you if I’m here?”

“No.”

“If you were downtown on your own in”—I nearly said New York—“some big city, at this time in the afternoon, would that worry you?”

“Jesus, look, I know cities. I know how they work, what the rules are. This outdoors stuff, it’s… It just doesn’t feel safe.”

Nothing was ever safe, not the way she meant it. But she had said exposed, and I knew that word. Exposed meant going back to live in Norway when you were ten years old, speaking English with more facility than Norwegian, and already being two inches taller than your classmates. Exposed meant conspicuous, different, not fitting in, not feeling at home, at least not until you learn that your self is your home and no one can take it away—until you fall in love and are led partway down a path that disappears as abruptly as your lover and leaves you stranded, lost in the mist.

Tammy’s eyes were bright again, and her mouth twisted at one corner. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Why don’t you tell me.”

After a pause she said, “I grew up in Connecticut.”

Either she’d get to the point or she wouldn’t.

“I grew up knowing the woods weren’t a place I should go. No one ever said anything straight out, but the woods were where little girls got raped and trees got hacked down and Bambi got shot. You read about it in the papers.” She shredded a blade of grass with great concentration. “It was like someone stuck big labels on everything: the woods, all the outdoors, was theirs, and if we went there, we’d end up like the deer or the trees. So, before, when you were still in bed and I was building the fire, it was like there were people in the woods watching, or animals, or whatever. They knew I was out here on my own. But it wasn’t so bad because I knew I could run into the trailer. And you being out here, now, makes it safe. Or something. And the trailer’s safe because I slept there.”

Forest can be dangerous if you don’t treat it with respect, but it’s just trees and birds and bears and beetles. I tried to think of a way to explain that. “A forest is just like a city. It can be dangerous, but if you learn what to expect and how to deal with it, you’re fine. Once you know how to read traffic signals and use a crosswalk, you’re pretty safe crossing a road. It’s the same with the woods.”

“Right.”

“You just have to get to know it, neighborhood by neighborhood, except you have streams instead of avenues. The places a stream runs through can feel like different worlds, the way, say, Park Avenue runs through both the Upper East Side and Harlem. I can show you one little neighborhood, if you like.”

A week ago, this part of the river, where trees on each side of the bank touch and merge overhead to form a living tunnel, had been a green-and-black oil painting of dark water and moss-backed boulders. Now it was as though some vandal had hurled cheap emulsion at the canvas: the arterial red leaves of a low-lying maple branch streaked violently from one bank to another, and on the far side, little poplar leaves the exact color of twenty-four carat gold lay strewn over the boulders like pirate treasure. Autumn, like grief, changes everything.

The air smelled the same, though, rich and slow and secret.

“The best times of day to see wildlife are dusk and dawn.” The sun would go down in half an hour or so. “Sit quietly, and keep still. Even blinking can be enough to scare a bird off. Watch the falling leaves—they all fall at the same speed. When something moves at a different speed, you’ll notice. Use your peripheral vision.” It was like adjusting to the rhythms of an urban beat: learn the patterns, tune them out, and the unusual is instantly apparent.

We sat still and quiet, and gradually the ever-present rush of water faded into the background and I could hear Tammy’s breath. Ten yards south, a jumble of boulders and two fallen trees helped form a quiet backwater where the black, gleaming surface barely moved.

A bright chur-wee cut through the wood, and a little bird with powder blue wings flashed out then back into the trees. Tammy jumped.

“There’ll be more. Wait.”

Then it seemed the woods were full of bluebirds with their chur-wee and tur-a-wee and rusty-colored breasts. Two females flew at each other like kamikaze pilots playing chicken and Tammy smiled, but the battle was in earnest. Everywhere at this time of year, female bluebirds fought female, and males fought male, defending territory with the snuggest nesting hollows. When winter came, the winners would survive; the losers might not. The battle gradually retreated back into the trees and the calls faded.

Something plopped in the backwater. “Turtle,” I murmured, though I hadn’t seen it. Nothing else made quite the same sound, like a dinner plate falling flat into a full sink. The light began to change, thinning from rich afternoon mead to a more sophisticated predusk Chablis which slanted in through the trees and picked up the wings of insects dancing over the surface. Far fewer than there had been two weeks ago. Seasons are like economic change: cycles of plenty and dearth.

A flash of blue and white feathers and yellow feet caught my eye for a split second, then a kingfisher was rising up out of the water with a silvery fish in its beak. It alighted upstream on the blood red maple branch over the water and looked this way and that before maneuvering the fish so that it could swallow it headfirst. Then it was off again, sturdy body and mohawk haircut disappearing as it followed its river road to wherever.

We sat for a while, until the light began to drain away in earnest. “Time to go.” When you are visiting any strange place for the first time, short visits are best.

It was darker under the trees, and I walked behind Tammy so that she could see ahead instead of looking at my back, and so that she wouldn’t have to worry about an unnameable something creeping up behind her in the glimmering dusk.

It rained on and off for two days. Tammy didn’t seem inclined to talk and it was impossible to sit for hour after hour in the trailer with rain drumming on the roof, so I took her into the cabin and showed her how to use a drawknife and a saw. We started on the interior wall. Most of the studs were up; it just needed pine board hung, and pine is an easy wood to work with. That first morning Tammy, although she tried hard, was a real hindrance; she had no idea how to hold anything, how to steady a board on a sawhorse, how to plane smoothly with a drawing knife. I demonstrated, over and over. We were both glad to break for lunch. After lunch, I gave her the task of cutting the boards to size and nailing them to the studs.

“Don’t worry about making mistakes,” I said. “That’s how you learn. If you saw something short, we put it aside and cut another. If you nail a board in the wrong place, we pull the nails and do it again. The worst thing you could do is mash your fingers flat with that hammer.” Or slice open your femoral artery if the saw skids. A sudden image of me kneeling before her, arterial blood gouting over the unfinished floor while I ran my hands up her smooth thigh and into her crotch, seeking the pressure point, made me turn away abruptly.

I worked in my corner on a piece of walnut that would become part of the stair rail, and pretended not to watch as she tucked her hair behind her ears, took a deep breath, measured once, measured twice, then cut.

She went to bed at eight o’clock that night and slept like the dead for twelve hours. I didn’t. The noises she made while she dreamt kept me awake. Her face was drawn when she woke.

“Okay?” I asked over coffee.

“My muscles ache.”

I let it pass. “Ibuprofen’s in the bathroom. And a hot shower will help.”

The drip and runnel of rain ran counterpoint all day to the rasp of steel on wood. I worked steadily, but she kept stopping and staring off into the distance, then looking at her saw as though it had appeared in her hand as unexpectedly as a dinosaur bone.

The next day was beautiful, hotter than it had been for a while, and Tammy, whose sawhorse stood in the sunlight streaming through the door, sweated while she worked. Her scent—earthy and light, like the smell of crisp baby carrots when you first pull them from the ground—mixed with that of sawdust and leaf mold. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, wiped her face, and bent once again to the board she was recutting. Muscle flexed in her thigh as she steadied the wood against the sharp rip of the saw. The shorts were mine and fit snugly. I turned away and drank some water, then contemplated the walnut I’d been working.

Walnut is a hardwood that cuts and splits almost as easily as pine, but its real value is its beauty. The grain of the three pieces I had cut and polished for the handrail up to the loft could have been painted by a long-ago Chinese artist. Imagine porous paper stretched tight under a silkscreen, healthy dollops of gold and saffron ink, smaller ones of chestnut, tiny, tiny pinpricks of some color paler than the winter sun, the sudden back-and-forth of the wedge, and while the wavy lines bleed into each other, the artist dips his fine brush in umber ink and paints on careful rosettes which spread like the ripples in a pond. Then, while the ink still glistens, he sprays everything with lacquer and the surface is liquid-looking but hard, and complex as a natural fractal.

“You look like you’ve seen god,” Tammy said from right beside me.

I smoothed the wood with my palm, then looked at her. She was grinning.

“I’m done,” she said, and stepped aside so I could see the interior wall. It was finished, or one side of it was, at least. I stepped up to take a look, trying not to think about the hammer handle shoved down the front of her shorts. It was suddenly obvious that she wasn’t wearing underwear.

“Looks good,” I said. “Now help me with this stair rail.”

Two hours later, still sweating, muscles aching pleasantly, we stood admiring the finished railing and one-sided wall.

“It’s starting to look like a house,” Tammy said.

“Long way to go.”

“Jesus. Would it do any harm to pat yourself on the back, just kick back and drink a few beers?”

Julia had said the same sort of thing, more than once. “A few beers it is, then.”

We built a fire in the pit while we drank our first, and opened a second while we waited for the coals to get hot. It was about six o’clock, and the sky glowed like stained glass.

“It’ll cool fast tonight,” I said. “I’m going to put on some warmer clothes.”

In the trailer I changed into old corduroys and sweater, and tried to remember what clothes she had bought in Asheville. I took fresh beers outside.

“I laid some spare sweats on the bed, in case you needed them.” She took the empties back in with her.

Icy beer, hot fire, fading sun and total quiet. Lovely. I lay on the turf and stretched. When Tammy reemerged I propped myself on one elbow and pointed to where I’d put her beer on the log, away from the heat. She took a swallow, then squatted down opposite me to examine the fire.

I shouldn’t have lent her the sweats. She still wasn’t wearing any underwear, and the cloth was old and thin and contour-hugging. I could see, clearly, the swell of her vulva, the bone of her hip, the curve where inner thigh becomes groin. When I looked up at her face, she was watching me watch her. She bent to poke the logs, then sat, and the moment passed.

“You did a good job today. You learn fast.”

“Oh, I learn fast all right.” It sounded bitter.

I didn’t understand that. “Dornan helped me, too, when he was here. Though I think he hit more fingers than nails.” She didn’t smile. “You should call him.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I just can’t.” Without looking at me she said, “Anyhow, I’d have thought you’d be happy to keep me away from him. You never liked me when we were together.”

There was no point denying it.

“So why’d you come find me? How’d he get you to do that?”

Because we’re friends. That’s how it works. “He knew you were in trouble—he just didn’t know what kind.”

“Neither did I,” she said. “Not at first.” Now she looked at me. “You know what my job is, right?”

“Business development.”

“And you probably think it’s a nothing job that any zero brain can do as long as she’s pretty and smiles and flirts.” I don’t like being told what I think, but this was her therapy session, not mine. “It was kind of true, at least it used to be. But then I went down to Florida, to that mall development in Naples, and met Geordie Karp.

“Geordie was… he was like a dream, you know? Famous, kind of, and good-looking and rich and great at his job. He’s probably, I don’t know, in his late forties, but he looked a lot younger. And he singled me out, and told me I had lots of talent, people talent. Then he offered to mentor me.”

I nodded.

“It was like he’d looked inside me and seen exactly what I wanted; he understood. He saw me, the real me, not the southern party girl who was fun to have around at the business meetings so you sometimes threw her a bone.”

A time-honored southern strategy.

“He was going to help me, give me the tools to be professional, he said. Then I could get what I wanted without having to flirt and smile. He’d been looking for someone like me, he said, someone worth his time. And I believed him. But it was more than that. Geordie was… Look, just don’t judge me, okay? Geordie was gorgeous. Tall, maybe two inches taller than you, and fit, sort of whippy, with curly golden hair and a red-brown beard. Soft, not like most men’s facial hair. And he knew all the best restaurants, and the people there always knew him, and he was generous, and funny, and well dressed.”

“He dazzled you.”

“Yes. And I thought I dazzled him, too, especially when the Naples project was done and he said did I want to go back to New York with him and help him in his new project. Did I tell you he’s a psychologist?”

“No.” Present tense at last. I was beginning to think she’d killed him.

“He’s a clever son of a bitch. He knows how people work inside, really knows. That’s how he got me.” That bitterness again. “Geordie earns seven figures a year telling Nordstrom and Tiffany’s and the Gap how wide to make the aisles, where to site their stores, what product should be where in relation to the door, so that consumers spend more. It’s a science. He’s got all these charts and graphs and programs—can quote numbers like a TV guy doing sports stats. The time per visit that the average American spends in a shopping mall is fifty-nine minutes, he says to his customers, down from sixty-six in 1996 and seventy-two in 1992. Then he tells them how he can make each minute worth more to them, how to maximize each square foot of retail space.”

“And can he?”

“Oh yeah. Like I said, he’s good. The best. I learned a lot from him: the downshift period, the decompression zone, the invariant right. Think about a street in New York, people walking fast to get someplace. When you walk fast, your peripheral vision narrows, so you don’t pick up visual cues well, and it takes you a while to slow down if something catches your interest—depending on how fast you’re going, you need up to twenty-five feet. So the best place to be is next to a store with a cool window display, because by the time the shopper begins to slow to shopping speed, he’s outside your place, and the things in your window will really catch his eye, and he’s more likely to come inside. So then he goes inside, but he’s still in street mode for the first ten or fifteen steps, so it’s useless putting anything near the door because he just won’t see it. That space is where the potential shopper decompresses. Once he’s begun to do that, he always—invariably, Geordie says—turns to the right. Why? Who cares, he just does. So that’s where you put the stuff you want him to notice: twelve paces in and to the right. You do that and sales go up more than thirty percent. It’s like a guarantee. And that’s just getting them inside. Geordie told me that after one retailer talked to him and redesigned their stores, gross sales climbed sixty-one percent. Since then, his contracts always include a bonus clause.”

“So you learned a lot. Was this in Naples?” Beneath the burning logs the coals were beginning to glow, and I was hungry.

“Some. We were there—I was there—six weeks; he’d been there a few weeks before me. Then we went to New York.”

“And you stayed in his loft in SoHo.”

She wrapped her arms around her and nodded. I waited. Her gaze stayed internal.

“How about another beer?”

She nodded again. I brought two back, put one on the grass beside her, and settled down again. “So, you moved to SoHo.”

In what seemed like an irrelevant aside, she asked, “Did you know that half the grocery stores in the country have these tiny cameras inside their frozen food cases, or even inside cans of peas sitting on a high shelf? It’s illegal to have video surveillance of changing rooms, but they’re wired for audio. Half the mirrors in a department store have cameras behind them—and hundreds on the ceilings. Geordie’s apartment was like that, except I didn’t find out until later.”

Cameras. I hadn’t thought of that.

“Man, I loved that loft: so urban and cool. Those halogen lights, high ceiling, bare beams, antiques in the bedroom. An elevator right from the street! And Geordie took me with him to his first job on Fifth Avenue, told everyone I was his associate, even consulted me on where to set up our cameras—though even then I knew it was more his way of teaching me than real consultation. Jesus, the things I learned. Unbelievable. And it was all real.”

“But other things weren’t.” I didn’t like the idea that I might be on tape.

“No. Only Geordie kept my mind on other things so it was hard to tell. He flattered me, he treated me like a peer. He was kind. He… the sex was great, exciting—he was generous there, too. It was great, everything was perfect.” She had begun to circle; we were coming to it. “He talked a lot. Sometimes it was hard to tell when he was joking. He talked about all his cameras and his charts and statistics and how he could train anyone to be his slave if he wanted. As long as they were young enough when he started. A woman my age was too old to train, he said, it would be easier to break me than train me. But he talked as well about training shoppers so they were like lemmings, and he’d laugh—I would, too—and it would be a joke, so I thought it was all a joke. Life was one huge joke, a big party, and I was the guest of honor, and I deserved it.”

“But then something happened.”

“Yes. He… the first time, it…” She took a swallow of beer, then a deep breath. “We were having sex. I was on top. He suddenly said, Stop, and his voice was all cold, so I stopped, and he pushed me off and got off the bed, and I thought maybe he was ill—was going to the bathroom or something—but then he suddenly grabbed me from behind, shoved me on my face, and got on top of me, and I could feel that he wanted me up my ass, so I said, No, stop, wait, let’s get some lube, but he just… he didn’t, he wouldn’t, he just fucked me anyway, and it hurt, and I yelled, but he kept on and on until he came, and then he laughed and climbed off.”

“Why didn’t you hit him?”

“Hit him?” She looked as though she had no idea what I was talking about.

We stared at each other: the alien across the fire.

“Anyhow, I cried. And when he saw I was crying, he smiled, but then his face fell and he said, Sorry, sorry, oh god, sorry, I forgot, and the change was so quick I thought maybe I’d imagined it, especially when he started crying, too. He stroked my hair, he just kept saying sorry. Then he brought me some tissues, and he held me, and he said that his last girlfriend—he’d talked about her before, they’d been together about a year—had liked that, liked being fucked up the ass and taken by force, pretending to say no, and he’d just been confused. And then he ran me a bath, and washed me—he was sweet—and said sorry again, and made me cocoa. And the next day he took me out for a great dinner at Le Cirque, and gave me a diamond bracelet.”

The clearing was silent but for the hiss and pop of the fire. “And the second time, what did he give you for that?”

“Stock. But that makes it sound so easy, so simple. It wasn’t.”

I waited, but she didn’t seem to want to say any more. I drank some beer, savored its bite. “Did you know,” I said, “that fizz isn’t just the feeling of bubbles of carbon dioxide bursting on your tongue, it’s mostly a chemical reaction detected by your taste buds?”

She took a sip. “It feels like bubbles.”

We both silently contemplated the enzymatic breakdown of carbon dioxide to carbonic acid. After a while, I sighed. “Finish the story, Tammy. You may as well just get it all out.”

After a long moment she bowed her head, and began again.

The second time, she said, was not until after she had finally come to believe that she had been wrong about that cruel smile, that it had just been a mistake, a slip akin to crying out an ex-lover’s name just as your muscles begin to squeeze and shudder. Geordie was letting her analyze his data on the shopping traffic at the boutique he was consulting for, and was paying her well for it. Their sex was good, and everything else, especially for a southern girl who had spent most of her adult life in Atlanta. They went to MoMA, and off-Broadway plays, to a New York premiere of some film directed by a colleague’s brother. She’d been out to lunch at one of the galleries, then bought a few things at Saks, then come back to the loft to find Geordie on the phone. She’d put her shopping down near the elevator door, tiptoed up behind him, and kissed him on the back of the neck. He turned and punched her in the stomach.

“He didn’t hesitate, he didn’t change expression, he didn’t even check to see where I’d landed, just kept talking. Didn’t miss a beat. I lay half on and half off the rug, thinking, Oh, I have a run in my hose, and trying to figure out why I couldn’t get my breath, and he just kept talking. And when he put the phone down, he smiled and said, Hi honey, what are you doing down there? It was so… so confusing, and he seemed so concerned, that I couldn’t put it together. His reality and mine.”

When she’d got her breath back, she told him he’d hit her—but she was hesitant about it—and he said, Oh, I must have caught you in the stomach with my elbow—you should never sneak up on me that way, honey—I’m really sorry I hurt you. And a portfolio of biotech stock appeared in her name the next day. She was bewildered: was it possible he really believed he hadn’t punched her? Had he? Was she mistaken?

He started to talk about her joining him in business partnership in a few months, about her bringing her things from Atlanta. Their sex became more adventurous; lots of fantasy role-play. Their schedule—all in the analysis stage, now, and done in the loft—was hectic, and sometimes they didn’t sleep for thirty hours at a time, and even when they did sleep it was at odd times of the day; their meals were ordered in, and erratic.

“I didn’t know, sometimes, what time of day or night it was, or even what day of the week. There’s no windows in that place, except the bedroom, and he’s got those covered in this slippery gray plastic stuff. The outside world started to feel weird. My watch had disappeared that first week, so I only ever knew what time it was when I asked Geordie, and sometimes what he told me didn’t make any sense. What?”

“Nothing.” I understood, now, what had been so odd about that loft: no clocks. Even the VCR and microwave displays read 88:88. And there had been no radio tuner on the music system, heavy drapes closed in the daytime bedroom, no phones. “Go on.”

“It was surreal. He’d sometimes stop in the middle of talking about foot traffic patterns and shopper penetration zones and say… weird stuff, like ‘Women are lesser beings,’ and he sounded so, I don’t know, so earnest and reasonable, that I just… I ended up agreeing with him.”

That, she said, was when their sex play went from make-believe bondage to using silk scarves, which became rope, and then chains. One time he chained her up and teased her sexually for hours until she was crying out, screaming, begging him to give her an orgasm, and he just goaded her into saying more and more humiliating things, explicit things, until he finally let her come and come again. “And I liked it,” she said, half defiant, half ashamed.

I kept my expression vaguely concerned.

“What I didn’t know was that he had the whole thing on tape. He played it for me one day—it could have been morning, it could have been the middle of the night—when we were eating breakfast. Have you ever watched yourself having sex? It’s…” She closed her eyes for a moment. Her head was almost wholly in shadow, black against the stained sky. Uncertain firelight, a softer orange, made the shadows dance and sway, so that her face looked hollowed and old. She opened her eyes. “You don’t look like a person, you look like a thing, a wiggling white thing, dripping with sweat, drooling, face all swollen. The audio makes it worse. I looked at that video and hated myself. And Geordie smiled, and said something like, Imagine if your family and friends got their hands on this! And then he went back to eating his scrambled eggs and asked me to pour him some more tomato juice. And I did.”

After that, things got worse. He acted as though they were still partners, equals. She didn’t know up from down. He even began to seem sort of fatherly. “That’s when he told me about the girl in Arkansas. He called her his wife-in-training.”

She played with the cheap watch we’d bought in New Jersey, the one she never took off. My bottle was empty, hers barely touched. It would only delay her, and my dinner, if I asked if I could have it, so I lay down again on the grass and breathed its scent, green and vital and unspoilt. The fire burned cleanly now, bright in the gathering dusk, and the wind in the trees whispered back and forth. The whispering grew, and was suddenly shot through with myriad tweets and twitters. I sat up.

“Oh,” Tammy said, as a thousand red-breasted grosbeaks settled like feathery locusts in the trees surrounding the clearing. The air shivered with their flutter and preen, and their calls sounded like the metallic squeaks of a thousand rusty water pump handles. After a while the noise died to an occasional squeak or flutter as they settled for the night.

“Where did they come from?”

“The north. They’re migrating. Tomorrow they’ll be on their way again, after they eat all the high-lipid berries and unwary insects in sight.” Asset strippers. But she wasn’t interested in the birds, just in avoiding talking. “So,” I said.

She pretended to be busy watching the trees.

“You were talking about his wife-in-training. That’s an odd phrase.”

She muttered something.

“What?”

“I said, he meant it literally. Her name is Luz. She’s nine years old.”

I knew I didn’t want to hear this.

“He bought her in Mexico City two years ago. She was seven. Her mother was a prostitute, and her brother and sister. Or maybe they were dead. Geordie said she’d still be on the street if he hadn’t… if he hadn’t rescued her. He said they flock like birds, the kids there. Gangs of them, running around wild on the streets. He adopted her but she’s being fostered by someone else. That was the hardest part, he said, finding just the right family. He seemed so proud of it, the way people talk about the dream house they’re having built. You know: they tell you when they first got the idea for something, what sparked it, even where they were; they go on and on about how they picked the architect and the builder, how they found the land and beat all the obstacles, the building permits, getting the utilities connected, what they did when they found out that what they’d figured was bedrock wasn’t. Jesus, I hate people like that. Anyhow, he found a couple in the Bible Belt, an hour’s drive from Little Rock, and he paid them a lot of money—a lot in their terms, he said—to school her at home in traditional values, to teach her to cook and sew and obey her future husband, to keep her away from the influence of TV and video and the web, even books. She had enough English now, he said, to read from the Bible. He pays the couple to keep their mouths shut. She’s nine now. Very pretty, very sweet, he said; he’s been to see her twice. Real healthy, and smart. When she gets to be fourteen—a well-trained, brainwashed fourteen—he’ll take her to Georgia or someplace and marry her. And she’ll belong to him totally. She’s already trained to think he can do what he wants with her, he said. If she even squeaks, all he has to do is divorce her and she’ll be kicked back to Mexico, still a teenager. No family, no money, no job, nothing. She’d probably be dead in a few years. And you know what? It’s true, pretty much. He can do all that. It’s legal. He liked telling me that part. He didn’t apply for citizenship, and because she’s a minor she wouldn’t even really be a legal resident. If he divorced her at fifteen, she’d be shipped off and no one would care.”

No one cared now.

I stared up and back at the trees behind me. Here was a smart, good-looking woman who had grown up in the last quarter of the twentieth century, yet she had been reduced to nothing more than a shell in just three months. She had allowed herself to be raped, and beaten, and humiliated. She had let him convince her she was crazy. Three months. And even after learning what this man was doing to a child, she had stayed. She had had a key, and money, and Dornan, who loved her, and she had stayed. I didn’t understand at all.

“Why did you leave with me? What made things different? Karp still has that tape.”

Tammy laughed, and it was one of the saddest sounds I had ever heard. “You have no idea what you’re like, do you? There I was, floating in this loft like… like a goddamn orange bobbing in space, tethered to nothing, no up, no down, no idea how I got there, no air to breathe, no way home, everything so unreal I wondered if I even existed, and you walked through the door. You’re like concrete. Completely real. Even just standing there, before you said anything, you made everything else real: the walls, the floors, what he’d done to me.”

Me, real. It was my turn to laugh, but it didn’t sound sad, and now that I’d started I couldn’t seem to stop.

You’re frightening her, Julia observed.

“I know,” I said. “Dornan was wrong. I think maybe I’ll go mad after all.”

Tammy sat back on her heels, and I suddenly saw her as she must have looked when she was thirteen, with new breasts, and the realization that she was never going to be allowed to do things boys did, never just be herself, and I was filled with a horrible, insidious tenderness. She was fighting hard. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have any of the tools.

“What do you mean about Dornan?” she said.

“What? Oh. He told me I wouldn’t go mad with grief, that I’m too stubborn.”

“Grief?”

I stared at her. How could she not know? “Julia,” I said carefully.

She took the kind of short breath people do when they remember something they know they shouldn’t have forgotten. But it had been back in May, and I had only been her fiancé’s friend who didn’t like her, and then I’d just disappeared, and so much had happened to her since then that it wasn’t surprising. Except, of course, it was.

“Don’t.” I held up my hand. “Don’t apologize.”

She didn’t. She just studied my face for a while, then rocked back on her heels and up onto her feet, and walked into the trailer. She came back with a fresh beer for me.

I felt tired and sick and didn’t really want it.

Let the woman apologize. Take the beer, Julia said, and for the first time, I wished she would go away. I tried to call the wish back, but it was too late. She disappeared.

“Aud?”

I shook my head, and accepted the beer. I took one swallow and set it aside. “Dornan,” I said. “What are you going to do about that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it.”

“Sure.” Her eyes cut sideways, the way a street dealer’s would if you rousted him on the street with a dime bag in his pocket.

“I mean think about it now. At some point you’re going to have to face him, face yourself. At some point you’ll have to leave here.”

“Oh, right. I’ll just leave, go back to Atlanta, and pick up where I left off. No problem. Only I can’t. Not while that prick is out there with that tape. He could send it to anyone, anytime. He could already have sent it to Dornan. All he has to do is threaten to do that, to make me do anything he wants.”

“Only if you let him. If you call Dornan, tell him everything, Karp has no power over you.”

“Could you do that?” Her voice was intense. “Could you have picked up the phone and told your girlfriend, ‘Sorry, honey, yes that’s me screwing some guy, but why don’t we pretend it didn’t happen? Why don’t you just never, ever let it cross your mind again?’ ”

I wanted to smash her lush, filthy mouth with my bottle.

She changed tack. “I have some money. I could give it to you, if you helped me, if you fixed him for me. Geordie.”

It was an effort to speak politely. “I’m not in the revenge business.” But I remembered what I had done after Julia’s death.

“Please, Aud.”

“No.” If I hit her I wouldn’t feel any better. I breathed as evenly as I could. “We could both do with some food.”

This time we ate inside, and neither of us spoke.

I woke when Tammy slid naked into my bed. It felt good, her mouth at my throat, her hand on my breast then my stomach then my thigh, and my breath went ragged, the muscles in my belly tight, and I got hot and swollen and wet, before I realized what was happening and held her away from me.

“Please, Aud. I need this. Please, please. I need someone to hold, someone.” And her waist was so warm and soft under my arm, her thigh so smooth, and it had been so long I wanted to let her.

She kissed my cheek. “I saw you looking at me tonight, the way your eyes followed me. Here.” She took my right hand, put it on her breast, where the nipple puckered and tightened under my palm, and despite myself I groaned. “Yes, you want me, don’t you?” and she rolled on top of me, belly against my vulva, face between my breasts, “Oh, yes, come on, come on,” and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to just give in, push myself wet and slick against the warm rounded skin, I wanted to, but I heaved her off and raised myself up on one elbow. It took a moment of groping to find the light switch.

She lay on her back, hair tousled, cheeks touched with sharp red. Her eyes glittered. “Turn it off.” Her voice quavered. “What’s the matter? What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it because you don’t like me? Not even enough to fuck? How hard would it be, Aud? A half hour of your life. Is it so much to ask?” Short, angry movements as she wiped her cheeks with her hands.

I wanted to turn to her, cradle her head against my shoulder, let her feel her tears dropping on another human being’s skin, not a sheet, but I knew if my body came close enough to touch hers I might not be able to stop a second time. “It’s not me you want.”

“Everyone is always telling me what I want! Like my own opinion doesn’t count!” She grabbed my hand, thrust it between her legs. “There, does that feel like I don’t want you? Does it? Does it matter, does it really matter what else is real except that we could have sex here, just two people, giving each other back something good? But it does to you.” She thrust my hand away. My fingers were wet and sticky. The small trailer was thick with the smell of sex. “Well, maybe you’re right, maybe I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last person on earth, except that I want something. That’s what you think, isn’t it? Well, I do want something. I want you to get that man for me. Fix him. That’s something you’re good at, isn’t it? Hurting people. It would be easy for you. Fix him. Oh god, Aud, please! Get the tape. Please.”

“He won’t use the tape now.” I didn’t know why my voice didn’t shake, didn’t know how I kept it so flat, why I didn’t just kiss her and tear her apart. “Think about it. There’s no point. It was to control you, but you’ve already left. He doesn’t sound like the type to waste time on a lost cause. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry about.” Her voice was thick with anger. “You have no fucking idea, do you? Look at you. You’ve always done what you want, got what you want—you just reach out and take it. You have no fucking idea. You’ve never been paralyzed with fear, never had to wonder if you did the right thing, or wish you were different. Always so self-confident, so fucking controlled. You have no idea even what it’s like to make a mistake.”

I had made bigger mistakes than this woman even knew existed. To her a mistake was something that made you feel bad, something embarrassing on tape. My mistakes had led to that white room, to those machines, that dead husk. Tammy’s mistakes were her own. Mine had dug a hole in two lives and annihilated a third. And here Tammy lay, so smug in her assumptions, still healthy, still breathing, still alive.

I put my hand on her throat. She went very still. It wasn’t a small throat, it was smoothly muscled, young and strong, but I could rip out her trachea or crush her larynx in a second, or I could just squeeze. Some harsh noise began to irritate me, and I realized it was my breath, tearing in and out, and Tammy was terrified, and I lifted my hand. “Go away,” I said. “Just go away.”

She scuttled away to her own bed at the other end of the trailer and I turned off the light.

Rage and sex and grief bubbled like magma below my breastbone. I wanted to fuck, to kill, to hurl myself from a cliff. Julia was dead, she’d gone away and left me, naked and raw and uncertain in a world where people who called themselves my friend kept pulling off the scab and making me do things for them. Dornan had assumed I could just go find Tammy. Tammy assumed I could get on a plane to New York and fix her problems for her. Just like that, as though they were asking me to pass the salt at dinner. Thank you, they’d say, and think no more about it. And Julia hadn’t even stayed behind to help me with this, she hadn’t even tried. She had just gone away, given up, because it hurt. But I was still here, and now I was cursed to see that what I did in the world mattered.

No. Tammy’s mistake, her mess to clean up.

But, Please, she had said, Get that man for me, and she couldn’t do it for herself. But she had tried to manipulate me. She had slid her warm, smooth body on top of mine, belly between my legs, and her eyes had been wide, watching as the flush hit my cheeks, smiling as her pulse and mine ratcheted up and synchronized, as we came within a hairsbreadth of moving together in a dance that meant nothing to her, nothing. So close. But it had meant something to her. Her smell, the slipperiness between her legs, the way her nipples puckered and grew. Unmistakable. Her smell was on my fingers, mine on her belly. She had wanted sex, maybe even needed it, and I’d said no. It would have cost me nothing to pretend, to give her, as she said, half an hour of my life.

I imagined how it might have been, to bend and kiss her, to feel the flutter of the pulse at her throat, to make her croon with her eyes closed, to lay myself slowly, ah, inch by inch along her length, mouth to mouth, lips like plums, breast to breast, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. Wet pubic hair would tangle together, and her breath would shudder, her eyes would flick open, stare into mine, blue, like still-wet-from-the-dye denim—

Tammy’s eyes were brown. Brown. It was Julia’s eyes that were blue, Julia whose lips were like plums. It was Julia’s scent I imagined, Julia huffing down her nose, Julia’s hands holding my cheeks, grinding me into her, pulling me down hard enough that her long fingers would leave bruises. But my palms tingled with the memory of Tammy’s breast, Tammy’s skin. Help me, she had said. They had both said.

I sat up. Julia? No response. Should I do this? There were always consequences. There always would be. Perhaps it was a bit late to think about that now. Julia? Nothing.

I put the light on again, made the seven strides to Tammy’s bed. She lay on her side, back to me, very tense. “Tammy.” She turned, slowly. “Tell me everything you know about Karp. What he looks like. His routines, his friends, his work. Everything.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“He’s not worth killing. But I’ll get the tape.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The red-breasted grosbeaks lifted from the clearing just after dawn. Three hours later, I lifted from Asheville regional airport, on my way to New York. I’d left Tammy with the truck, a brand-new cell phone, and a list of things she could attend to in the cabin and clearing, if she felt confident to do so. “I should be back tomorrow or the day after, but I’ll call.”

The flight was uneventful, and this time when I checked in at the Hilton I remembered to ask for a king-size bed. King beds are often put in corner rooms so that any noise the occupants might make is less likely to disturb other guests; the greater distance from the elevator means less foot traffic, and so more peace and less danger. They are also very handy to the emergency exits. This time, too, I remembered to bring underwear. Unpacking took longer.

At four in the afternoon, the hotel’s corner coffee lounge was largely deserted—just me, the baby grand in the corner that looked as though it hadn’t been played for months, and the solitary customer who sat with his back to huge windows onto Sixth and stared morosely at a legal pad covered in scribbled figures. I took a seat in the corner, facing out, where I could watch both the room and the three pigeons strutting in and out of the shadow on Fifty-third Street. In the sun their neck feathers shone green and purple, in the shade their tiny eyes glowed brilliant orange. Eventually a server in black trousers and white shirt came over to find out what I wanted. I ordered a latte. He ambled off.

Tammy had given me Karp’s cell phone number. “He always answers it, if he’s at home. If he’s working, or with a client, he keeps it switched to voice mail.”

“Always?”

“I was with him for nearly four months, I never saw an exception. He takes that phone with him to the bathroom, the bedroom, when he’s emptying the garbage. He has four batteries: it’s always on. It’s the only phone he uses.”

“What about when he’s out, but not at work?”

She had frowned as she thought back. “I’m not sure. I don’t remember it ringing when we were out eating dinner or at a movie or anything.”

I took my own cell phone from my pocket and dialed his number. It went straight to voice mail. “This is Geordie Karp. Leave a message.” He was working—but where, and for how long? A lot of the initial work on any project would be informal, she said. He would sit and watch for hours, not even taking notes, then he would talk to the client—again, usually informally; he liked cafés and food courts and bistros. It was only after that that he made detailed notes, and set up his cameras to record data. Then he analyzed the video data and drew up recommendations. He could be anywhere, at any stage in the process.

My latte arrived. It tasted like Starbucks; not a patch on Dornan’s. Two of the three pigeons took flight and landed on the verdigrised metal sculpture at the corner, on Sixth. I had no idea what it was meant to be, but from the back it looked like an enormous green dildo. Perhaps the artist had been making some kind of statement about prostituting her art. I tried to estimate its size, ran through scale comparisons in my head: it would have to be wielded by a person about the same height as the Hilton. Assuming that person was having sex with someone of the same proportions, and that they were enjoying themselves and thrashed about a bit, they’d do more damage to Manhattan than Godzilla. For a while I had fun with film titles: Attack of the Fifty-Foot Couple. Dyke! They Came from Bikini Atoll… The body doubles would have a hard time of it, take after take rolling naked on tiny model buildings. Perhaps they would be paid time and a half, to make up for all the bruising.

It took me a while to realize Julia had not appeared to join in the fun. I tried not to think about it.

Karp liked to eat out, he liked to party, and when he had the choice he rose late and worked late. I could either check out his favorite haunts, one by one, or I could relax until tomorrow; he would be in or out of the loft at some point and I could track him from there.

I walked south under an early evening sky: violet and strawberry and peaches-and-cream, like some fanciful layer cake. I ate at a restaurant in the MetLife Building, where the haricot soup was better than mediocre, the service impeccable, and the highly polished marble floor slippery. One old man with frail skull and wrist but strong chin, too proud to use a cane although it was clear he needed one, nearly fell three times just getting to the bathroom. Perhaps the food was so expensive because of all the lawsuits.

It was still early, so I walked the fifteen blocks to the hotel. It was about nine when I got back, and the downstairs bar was filling up. I found a seat near the stone sphinx and snagged a harassed-looking server. I’d been drinking Syrah with dinner, but here they didn’t have anything decent by the glass. I asked for brandy instead, and it arrived at the right temperature, and more swiftly than my afternoon latte.

When I brought the glass to my mouth, the fumes punched right into my hindbrain and the memories there: sitting in the restaurant in Oslo, stomach full of good food, sipping Armagnac while Julia leaned across the table and put her hand on my arm, her lovely hair swinging across her jaw, smoky sable in the low lighting. She wore the gorget I’d just given her, and her smile was lopsided, patient, because she knew I’d bought the gift because I loved her; it was just that I didn’t know that yet, and she would have to wait a little longer for me to work it out.

I sipped, and the hot liquor eased the pain in the center of my chest, warmed the unfallen tears, made me long to bury my face in a woman’s hair. In Julia’s hair. I sipped again, and breathed more easily, and knew I wouldn’t curl up and weep in the bar of the Hilton.

The bar was almost full, but the conventioneers—the Sixth Annual National Minority Business Conference—were easy to spot. They sat in tight groups of three or four, mostly men, mostly in black or charcoal suits with pin-striped shirts and silk ties. It was clear from the volume that most were meeting for the first time: as strangers, they didn’t know who was the most important, so they had to seem comfortable, to take up space physically and verbally; they were defining their places in the hierarchy. Laughter and booming voices rose and fell in unpredictable patterns, accompanied by lots of backslapping and gaze-meeting. The occasional woman in these groups showed the same affinity for solid primary colors—sky blue, bright red—as women in politics used to.

A young Japanese woman stood as three sober-suited Japanese men approached her table. She bowed quickly, a test bow, to which they bowed in fast response, but a fraction more deeply, and now they had each other’s mettle. She held a business card in both hands and bowed again deeply, committed, and they followed suit. Bow, bow deeper, straighten, bow more deeply still, back and forth. Inverse hierarchy: allow me the privilege of abasing myself more than your most illustrious self! The conventioneers laughed loudly in their corner. I wondered how each group would manage in the other’s culture.

The Japanese eventually sorted themselves out, and I judged by the body language that the woman was some lower-level employee pitching something to three superiors. She did not seem to be having much success. Somewhere in the back of the room, someone lit a joint. No one would call the police; the charge wouldn’t be worth the negative publicity. An extra loud burst of raucous laughter rolled over the room from the front, followed by a higher-pitched but longer-lasting version from the back, where the joint was being smoked. It would just get worse. Time for bed.

I woke, slick with sweat, at four in the morning. “Julia?” She had never been gone so long. I sat up. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean it.” But I had, I’d wanted her to shut up, just for a moment, and now it seemed she had shut up forever. “Julia?” I listened, but all I could hear were sirens in the street below, the hum of the fan, and the churning of blood through my veins.

Sitting at the table by the window with my tea and toast the next morning, I found it hard to believe that it was autumn. It seemed more like spring: puffy white clouds scudding by, sunshine, spits of rain. Even shackled by miles of road and pinned by monstrous glass and concrete towers, nature was exuberant. Karp, assuming he was tucked up in his windowless loft, would be missing it.

I finished my breakfast, wiped my mouth, and called him. He picked up after five rings. He sounded annoyed that the caller wouldn’t respond, or maybe by the lack of Caller ID. I folded the phone. Time to hunt.

SoHo’s huge, cast-iron-framed buildings were originally erected in the middle of the nineteenth century to house companies such as Tiffany’s and Lord & Taylor; the lower floors were designed as display windows, perfect for the art galleries and boutiques and upscale stores of today. Across the narrow cobbled street from the building that housed Karp’s loft were two cafés, a gallery, and a bar. Surveillance here would be easy and comfortable. Although Tammy had told me Karp never, ever left before eleven in the morning, I took a window seat in the first café at ten-thirty. The place was empty, and seemed likely to stay that way until lunchtime. I hung my jacket over the back of the chair, ordered mineral water, and opened the paperback I’d bought at the hotel—a best-seller, nothing too engrossing. If the elevator doors across the street opened, I wanted to be able to catch it with my peripheral vision. Good surveillance and good books don’t mix.

It was eleven forty-five and I’d reached page 182 by the time the café began to fill up and the server started asking me every two minutes if I wanted to order anything else. She was new at her job, reluctant to push me, but an older woman at the counter kept punting her back in my direction. There was nothing on the menu that appealed, so I left her a twenty-dollar bill—about a four hundred percent tip—and walked over to the next café. They didn’t have a table by the window, so I moved on to the gallery. Which was a mistake.

Like most galleries, most of the time, it was empty except for the owner in a tiny, glass-walled office that was really no more than a cubicle. He gave me about forty seconds on my own with the installation closest to the window—what looked like a rag doll impaled on a tripod with a nearby video projector beaming a moving face onto its cloth head—before he couldn’t stand it any longer and came beetling over the Swedish finished maple floor, smile glued on, opening his hands and mouth, about to launch into some gushing praise of the art, and I felt reality shudder and stretch, and a stream of alternate worlds purled forth from this one, like soap bubbles when you blow through the filmy circle on the plastic wand. In one bubble world, Julia was still alive, and might be entering this gallery to talk to this man about buying the art on display for some corporate investment team. In another, she had never discovered corporate art investment and was running the place herself, and it was she who stood before me, looking me up and down, trying to judge whether I was good for the outrageous prices she was asking, tilting her head to listen, then tossing it back to swing her hair out of the way, smiling at something I said—because I would say something to make her smile, to see those indigo eyes glow and flicker like night-lights—checking my hand for a wedding ring. In yet another, we walked in together, trading a knowing look, having made a bet on how long the owner of this gallery would give us before rushing over. Then the owner spoke, and the words clapped like quick, vicious hands on every bubble until it was just a second-rate gallery in SoHo, empty of Julia.

I have no idea what that man said to me, or I to him, but eventually he went back to his box and I closed my eyes. Years, Dornan had said. Dear god.

Sometime later, the owner cleared his throat behind me and I realized I’d been standing, eyes closed, for a while. I walked onto the street. Rain spat cold on my face. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes. I fumbled out my phone, hit the redial button, and only had to listen to it ring three times before Karp snapped “Yes!” He must be waking up.

The second café now had a window table vacant. I tripped in the doorway, caught my elbow on the chair sitting down, and when I tried to make sense of the menu, found I was holding it upside down. Once I had it the right way up, I ordered a lamb and leek sandwich with mesclun in balsamic vinaigrette. I tried to breathe evenly, tried to remember to watch Karp’s door, tried to remember why it was important.

But then my sandwich came, and the act of reaching out and picking up the sturdy bread and thick meat, and lifting it to my mouth, all in logical sequence, helped the world make sense again.

I ate the sandwich methodically, followed by every leaf on the plate, then returned to the paperback. It took forty minutes to get through the next hundred pages, forty minutes of ridiculous plot culminating in two wet-behind-the-ears lawyers scooting on skis through snow-paralyzed city streets being shot at while their boss digs with her hands like a dog in the sand at some beach house location. By two o’clock I’d finished it and was leafing through the beginning again, marveling that any editor would countenance such stuff or that so many readers would buy it. Then again, I had.

The elevator doors opened.

Without taking my eyes off the elevator, I put the book and a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and stood.

“Hey, you forgot your book,” my server said. I ignored her.

Tammy had described Karp as tall, about six-two, and the man walking north up West Broadway was six feet at most. But it was Karp. The hair was the same, reddish gold in boyish curls, as was his walk, eager and on his toes, almost bouncy, a walk much younger than his age, which Tammy had told me was late forties. The clothes were younger, too, sharply cut khakis, leather jacket, boots, shirt, saddle-stitched laptop case, the Details magazine look of a twenty-five-year-old making real money for the first time. I kept to the opposite side of the street, about thirty feet behind. We walked along at a brisk pace through streets full of that mix of tourist and resident which, along with the flowers and iron railings and small shops, reminded me of Knightsbridge.

Every now and again he stopped and looked in a shop window to check his reflection in the glass, but he never ran his hand through the curl that fell just so over his forehead, or tugged at the waistband of his trousers to look thinner. Odd. He walked for three blocks before turning right on Prince and buying coffee from an espresso stand. His manner with the stand owner was easy and confident. They both smiled. His smile switched off abruptly as soon as he was out of the owner’s sight. Two empty cabs cruised by as he passed the mural at Prince and Greene. He walked on, sipping every now and again, avoiding pedestrians with relaxed, easy steps, frowning at a woman carrying two bags who bumped his laptop as she passed. The frown, too, was gone an instant later. Another empty cab going in his direction. He was walking all the way, then. I walked behind him, on the same side now, still thirty feet away, loose-muscled and relaxed, watching, assessing.

When he turned onto Broadway proper, which seethed with pedestrians, I shortened the distance to fifteen feet. His boots, brown nubuck, either were brand new or lavished with extraordinary care; his jacket was still uncreased; his hair bounced gently and shone whenever the sun poured out from behind the clouds. No rings on his hands, which were strong and well manicured and quite hairless. Half a block from a large store with a checked flag hanging outside, he stopped dead on the sidewalk and just stood there. There didn’t seem to be anything to see except for the people and traffic. I stepped into the doorway of an antique shop until he nodded to himself, and walked on. I was still twenty-five feet behind him when he turned into the store with the flag. I followed him in.

Cheap striplights, huge floor space, a jumble of racks, plain-looking signs advertising jeans, army-navy clothes, and club gear: nothing like the upscale emporiums Tammy said he usually patronized or consulted for. At any other SoHo store I would have waited by the door, but there were several levels here, and probably more than one exit. I’d have to follow him. This was not easy; I couldn’t stay in his blind spot, because I couldn’t predict where his gaze might fall. One minute he’d be walking along slowly, looking at the floor, the next he’d stop and turn and watch the tourists goggling at vinyl fetish clubwear; then he’d go stand in a corner by the sports jackets and look up at the ceiling, at the pillars with their mirrors, at the mannequins in their cargo shorts and caps. After a while I decided he was calculating camera angles and placement, studying pedestrian traffic patterns, gauging penetration zones, and it became obvious that he didn’t see people as people at all, that I could smile and wave at him every time he looked my way, and he wouldn’t notice me. I would be just another data point, part of a flow pattern, a consumer unit. I stayed about twenty feet back and watched.

His face while he worked was empty, removed, like that of an Olympic springboard diver as he sets his toes on the edge, spreads his arms, and begins the bouncing jump. When he stood still, his body canted slightly to the left, with his head tilted to the right in compensation. He kept his hands clasped behind him, like male members of the British royal family, and I doubted—even if he had not had to carry his laptop—that he would ever put them in his pockets. Judging by his posture and musculature, he was not a physical person; there were no laugh or frown lines on his boyish face. A man who lived in his head, or in the heads of others.

Around me, shoppers moved in miniature flocks of four or five, doing a lot of looking and talking, in German and Japanese and Portuguese, but not much buying. No doubt Karp had been called in to remedy that.

He spent hours inside the store, watching, listening, absorbing. I followed him from floor to floor. At some point he decided he was done: his face tightened, then curved in a practiced smile which made his eyes twinkle, and he walked purposefully to the second floor, and across to the far wall, where he talked to a woman behind a counter. She obviously did not respond as quickly as he felt was his due, because he put his bag on the counter, leaned forward, and spoke forcefully, until she picked up the phone. Less than a minute later, a door marked PRIVATE opened, Karp shook hands with a young man wearing jeans and a hundred-dollar haircut, and they went through the door, shutting it behind them. The room was built against a sidewall; it was unlikely that it led to another exit. I settled myself behind a row of mesh T-shirts to wait.

When he emerged half an hour later, he was still smiling, still twinkling—at least until the door closed behind him, when his face smoothed. I followed him onto the street, with its rush-hour traffic of frowning pedestrians and honking cabs, where he stepped behind a lamppost, put his laptop between his feet, and pulled out a phone. I moved closer.

“—about, oh,” he looked at his watch, “an hour? Two? Okay, eight o’clock. Yeah, yeah, or we can order in at my place if that’s what—Sure. We can decide later.” Not a business call.

He went back to his loft, walking briskly. This time I watched from the bar, drinking mineral water. He came out after only ten minutes, minus the laptop, wearing corduroy trousers and a sweater under his leather jacket. I followed him two blocks to Greene Street, and a restaurant and cocktail lounge paneled in dark wood, where he sat at the bar and nodded to one of the bartenders but didn’t speak. I took a table against the wall right behind him where he wouldn’t see me. A margarita appeared on the bar in front of him. He came in here a lot, then. It hadn’t been on the American Express bill. He sipped, smiled appreciatively—the same curving, twinkling smile I’d seen him assume at the store—and said something to the bartender, who laughed. The other bartender, this one a man, came over and said something. They all laughed. Lots of exaggerated head tilting, smiling, hand movements: flirting body language.

I ordered a Heineken.

For the next hour and a half I watched him flirt indiscriminately with men and women, couples and groups and singles, flashing out that smile, hooking them in, dismissing them after a sentence or two when it became clear he could have them if he wanted. Geordie Karp did not add up.

The first eighteen months I worked for the Atlanta police force it was as an ordinary patrol officer. One of the most frequent calls my partner Frank and I’d get would be domestic violence. The abusers came in every size and shape and color, every background and political stripe, but the vast majority had this in common: somewhere inside, they were afraid. The bigger and louder and richer they were, the easier it was to overlook that fear, but in the habitual abuser—cases where a onetime psychosis or injury or other unusual circumstance was not to blame—it was always there. It might be fear of losing control, or of not being loved, of being ridiculed, or separated, or of being less somehow, but you could see it. Something in the way they held themselves, in the way they tried to fast-talk the officers who arrived, even, sometimes, in their misplaced pride.

Geordie Karp did not add up as an abuser. I could see no fear in him; I could see no genuine emotion at all. Everything, the smiles, the flirting, the frowns when he had been bumped into on the street, the peremptory attitude towards the woman behind the counter in the store, was fake: gone the second he no longer needed it. Learned behavior. I went through all the things Tammy had told me: the good sex, the confusing signals—treated as an equal one minute and raped the next—and his rapid, all-too-plausible explanations. There had been no putting Tammy on a pedestal, no overly fast discussion, when they first met, of them marrying or spending their lives together—none of the classic profile pointers of abuse. Tammy had been an experiment, an amusement, one of many, most probably.

The SoHo bar was overlaid with an image of a bar I had gone to many times with Frank. He would hitch his gun belt to a more comfortable position, order a draft and a bowl of pretzels, and expound upon the three kinds of crazy. “There’s your basic loser, some guy whose wife maybe tells him his dick’s too short so he goes on a toot and picks the wrong pansy to beat on. There’s your psychos and sickos—oh, excuse me for breathing, your sociopaths—who are screwed up from crap in their childhoods. That looniness goes way deep, they’re just fucked. And then there’s your As-Ifs, what they call borderline personality disorders, and these guys aren’t human. They look normal, but they don’t feel a goddamn thing, don’t know happy from sad from a hole in the ground. They walk around smiling and frowning and pretending to feel shit, and think everyone else out there is pretending too. No one’s real to these guys, you know what I mean? I don’t mind telling you, Torvingen, they scare the crap out of me.”

Geordie Karp hurt people and manipulated them because they weren’t real to him. He acted as if he were human, but he was a monster.

While I watched, he stood to greet a woman with long hair and long nails whose floor-length leather coat had what looked like solid silver buttons, to match her silver jewelry. It was plain, from the way their bodies asked before touching—a pause, a raised eyebrow, a you-first gesture—that they were almost strangers. What plans did he have for her? Would she let him? It didn’t really matter. She was young and strong and capable of walking away if she didn’t like it, as Tammy should have done. I was more interested in their plans for dinner. They ordered cocktails, then asked for menus. They examined the menus halfheartedly and I thought for a moment they might swallow their drinks and leave, go back to his loft, and get something delivered, but then the woman shrugged, and Karp nodded, and I heard them place their order: salad and entrée, and a bottle of merlot. They would be here at least another hour. I paid and left.

Elevator locks are a more difficult breed to replace than common dead bolts, and Karp had had no reason to bother once Tammy’s key was returned to him. I slid the copied key into the lock and turned. It worked.

On the way up, I unclipped the panel covering the light in the ceiling and looked for a camera. Nothing. When the doors opened I stepped out and sent the elevator back down.

The loft was as I remembered—rich carpet, polished floors, and stark brick support pillars all brilliantly lit, even with no one at home—only now wherever I looked I saw that unfeeling mind at work, controlling, manipulating, hiding.

I started in the most obvious place: the office. Karp’s laptop was out of its leather bag and connected to the printer. I turned it on, but got a password screen. Passwords take time. I could come back to it. The bag held nothing but pens, a notepad, and two cell phone batteries. No interesting papers left in the photocopier. I turned to the stacks of videotapes labeled Gateways Mall, Champaign, IL, cam. #22, 3/27/98 or Courvoisier St., Mobile, AL, cam. #07, 8/19/00. Ran a few at random. All what they purported to be. No surprise: the one I was after would be hidden somewhere more personal, like the bedroom. Nonetheless, I checked every drawer and cupboard before moving on.

Finding the camera was easy. It was behind the mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed, and hooked up to a sophisticated editing deck. Sophisticated for analog. I checked camera and deck: no tape. I moved on. Nothing in the drawers, or bedside cabinets, or closets. Nothing under the bed or between the mattresses. Nothing between the curtains and the blank, silvered windows. Eyes and souls and windows. Fifteen minutes gone. No tapes or camera in the linen cupboard or medicine cabinet or behind the toilet, nothing in the shower. I would have moved faster but it was not part of my plan for Karp to know anyone had been here. In the living room I peered behind books, lifted paintings from the wall, pulled aside rugs: no cutout boards, no hidden safes. The bronzes were too heavy to move; the mirrors were all one-way glass with nothing lurking beneath. On to the kitchen, where I found nothing in the freezer, or rice and flour bins, or even the garbage. Twenty-five minutes gone, and my heart was pumping easily and my breath coming smooth as cream. I stopped, and straightened, and stood by a support pillar in the center of the huge loft, thinking.

I slid the VCR from its shelf beneath the TV in the living room and traced the cables: no satellite, cable, antenna, or computer connections. I found the electrical box in the hallway by the elevator and flipped the breakers one by one. No circuits running power to any unexplained outlets. Unless he had a camera and recorder running on battery power, there were no more recording devices hooked up. Just the tape, then. Or tapes. It seemed unlikely that there would be only one.

According to Tammy, the loft was his private haven; no casual friends or business associates were ever invited over. So the tapes wouldn’t have to be secure, merely concealed. He probably used them in the same way he used his tapes of shoppers: to study, over and over, and learn from. They would be readily accessible. The hiding place would be obvious, if you knew what to look for.

I closed my eyes and pictured the floor plan, placing the furniture, the lights, the rugs and art, then examined the picture slowly and methodically from every angle. Nothing unusual. I imagined the loft as a whole, its proportions, the roof with its exposed iron girders, its brick-clothed support pillars—and smiled. I laid my hands on the pillar in front of me. Why would he have covered a cast-iron support in brick when he’d left the girders exposed?

I got a ladle from the kitchen and began banging the pillars one by one, and found the hollow one on my third try. I popped open the false front.

There were five shelves. Only the bottom three were filled: a small, matte-black box, a slim sheaf of papers in a file folder, and two rows of tapes. Like his work tapes, these were neatly labeled: Anthony, April, Cody, Fiona… Alphabetical order. No Strange Woman Who Took Tammy Away, no Unidentified Blond Intruder. I found Tammy and took it to the office, where I turned on the video unit, put the tape in, and hesitated.

Have you ever seen yourself having sex? You don’t look human. You are a thing… But I wouldn’t put it past Karp to have one last joke on anyone who found these tapes, and I had to be sure. I pressed PLAY.

If I hadn’t known what to expect, it would have taken me a moment to work out what I was seeing because the body, naked and bound and writhing, and observed close-up, does not move in familiar ways. He must have had remote control on the camera, because the focus zoomed in and out; one minute it was a close-up of a belly and right thigh, slippery with sweat and other things, looking white and enormous and inhuman, the next she was hanging there, about eight feet away. I fast-forwarded until the hanging, writhing figure moved its head and I saw its face. It was Tammy.

My hand shook slightly when I pulled the tape out and put it in my jacket pocket. No one but a lover should ever see such an expression, and then only fleetingly, yet here it was, captured forever.

I went back into the living room. Twenty-two tapes. I carried them eleven at a time into the kitchen. Only six would fit in the microwave at once. I tried the first batch on thirty seconds, picked one at random, Jean—who were you? what dreams of yours did he destroy?—and trotted it through to the office, where I played it. Nothing but a snowstorm. Perfect. Back in the kitchen I did the same for the other three batches, then carried them all to the living room and put them back on the shelves in the right order.

Forty-five minutes gone.

The box was made of steel, and locked. I tilted it gently and recognized the sliding thump. A handgun. I put it back. Then I took out the papers.

A seven-year-old girl with soft, toffee brown eyes and sharp baby teeth beamed at me from the head-and-shoulders photo. Her hair, cut just longer than her ears, was the color of rich, fertile mud, the kind you can’t help plunging your hands in. I turned it over. The next sheet was typed. It had a bar code label at top right, a miniature black-and-white version of the bigger color photo on the left, and a large, florid signature at the bottom. It was written in Spanish, a medical report of a seven-year-old girl, one Luz Bexar, healthy and reasonably nourished, good teeth, good eyes, virgo intacta, no intestinal parasites, small scar above right elbow, vaccinations given on the following dates. Behind that, with the same bar code at the top right, was an adoption certificate, again in Spanish, with two signatures: the rounded, laborious letters of someone who doesn’t write very often, and George G. Karp, of New York, New York. There was a catalogue of foster families in various parts of the country, followed by a receipt acknowledging Karp’s payment and confirming his choice of the Carpenter residence in the town of Plaume City, Arkansas. After that there were progress reports dated at six-monthly intervals. I learned that she now spoke English fluently, had an excellent memory for rote learning as evidenced by progress with the Bible, was nimble—enclosed one embroidery sample—modest, demure, and clean. A medical update was stapled to the latest report: she was now well nourished, and still virgo intacta. The picture on the Mexican passport was the same one on the medical report; the visitor’s visa to the United States had long since expired. There were two more pictures, one taken a year ago, one about three months ago. In the first, her hair had grown and lay about her shoulders in a wild swirl, her baby teeth were gone, and the light in her eyes did not fit with “demure” or “modest.” My hand was now shaking so much that I had to lay the second photo on the floor: her hair was neat and her eyes wary. I didn’t read the rest.

What I’d told Tammy was true. I was not in the revenge business; I was not the universal protector of the weak. I was only here to get the tape.

Fifty minutes gone. I put everything back in the folder, put the folder back on the shelf, closed the false front, turned away, then turned back and opened it again. What Geordie did to adults who knew the ways of the world was one thing, but this was another.

While I fed Luz’s documents into Karp’s photocopier one sheet at a time, a process made slow and clumsy by my gloves, I listened for the elevator. Six months ago I wouldn’t have worried: if Karp had returned before I was done, it would have been a simple matter to disable him—a palm strike to the forehead would knock him unconscious for thirty seconds and leave very little in the way of a bruise—and depart before the police arrived. There would be no fingerprints through which I could be traced, and my description would mean nothing to New York police. The upright and outraged citizen—who might be famous in his own field but almost certainly was unknown outside it—wouldn’t even have a bruise to point to, no sign of forced entry, and nothing disturbed; they would write him off as a kook. Until six months ago, everything had always gone the way I wanted it to; anything that hadn’t, I had fixed, or walked away from with a shrug, and if anyone had had a few bones broken as a result, what of it?

Violence is usually a tool, like any other, but occasionally it is much more. Occasionally it takes me to a place where time and light seem to stretch, and the air is tinged with blue. In that blue place the test of bone and muscle becomes a pavane where everyone but me is locked into preordained steps while I dance lightly, mind clean as a razor: faster, denser, more alive. There I exist wholly as myself, wholly outside the rules, and the world is stripped to its essence: clean and clear and simple.

But I don’t go to the blue place now. I avoid every temptation. Last time I had forgotten I had a gun: the mistake that got Julia killed.

I wanted to be out before Karp came back. I put the warm photocopies in my inside pocket with the tape, and the original papers back on the shelves. The false front clicked shut, and everything was as it had been. I took the ladle back to the kitchen and opened the drawer from which I’d taken it—and was almost overwhelmed by the urge to smash every glass and plate I could find. I shook with it. I wanted to tear the doors from the cupboards and break them over my knee, wanted to feel the heft of that cleaver and swing it hugely at the antique dresser in the bedroom, wanted to punch my fist through the screen of his monitor, to throw the copier against the fake brick support columns until the place was reduced to shards and splinters, and torn fabric glittering with scattered glass.

I used the elevator key, flattened myself against the wall to one side, and waited, the plaster cool and hard at the back of my head. The elevator rose slowly, stopped. I stepped away from the wall: empty.

I got in. Breathed. My hands uncurled. The cage lurched slightly as it descended, and the muscles wrapped around my femur and spine flexed. I breathed, in and out, and gradually my muscles relaxed. Everything had gone well, I told myself. There would be time to pack, get to the airport, and have a drink while I waited for the last plane to North Carolina. Everything had gone well. My blood pulsed evenly, and every joint felt oiled and smooth.

When the elevator opened, the only people on the street were two men entering the café where I’d eaten earlier: one of those strange city moments where, for an instant, it seems as though humanity has been swept from the earth. I stood for a moment, to adjust to the dark and the now-definite autumn chill, then turned to walk north up West Broadway, and had taken perhaps ten steps when behind me I heard the laughter of a woman and the answering “Yes, on this block” of a man as they came around the corner from Broome Street. I shouldn’t have turned, but, oh, I did, and the streetlight caught on the reddish gold of Karp’s hair as he leaned in towards the woman, and the light slid across her hair, too, as she tossed her head and the soft brown wing of it swang past her cheek, just as Julia’s had, and I saw the way he looked at her, and wondered if, in some alternate world, I would stand by and do nothing while another Julia talked and laughed and trusted this man—wondering if maybe she loved him and whether he would take care of her—while silently he calculated and jeered and rubbed his hands as she let down her guard, little by little. And then my muscles moved and I was upon them, and “Run!” I spat between bared teeth to the woman, and she did, and I turned to Karp.

This is not the blue place. It is a rough roar in my ears, the need to damage this man heaving like volcanic mud in my belly, swelling through my veins until I shake all over—the long, rolling shudders of the ground before it splits open. I hit him across the throat, and with a small cough he can no longer breathe. I pull him into the elevator and throw him against the metal wall, and he starts slipping to the floor only half conscious but I hold him up with one hand while the doors close. If I had a good knife I would hang him up by the ankles and gralloch him, slit him from throat to pubis and watch his guts fall out in a soft heap. I would wipe my left cheek then my right with the flat of the bloody knife, and begin. I don’t have a knife. I have my hands; they are very strong.

I growl as I hurt him; the noise spills from me as harsh and hot as gravel shoveled from a furnace. By contrast, the noise bone and flesh makes is mundane, dull and sullen as an uncooked roast thrown on the chopping board. Even when teeth break, their sharp snap is muted by the gush of blood—the same blood splashed on my face and coating my own teeth. A human arm coming free of its socket makes a deep creak, more like a wooden trestle under the weight of a train than a chicken wing being twisted off.

It is a few minutes after the doors open in the loft that I drag him out onto the polished floor. He slides easily in his own blood. I am covered in blood, and slick with spittle. He mews a little, then is quiet. I try to think but my brain is still thick and hot and swollen. I rub my forehead, then see my bloody footprints.

I take my shoes off and step onto a rug. That’s better, but I’m not sure why. I stare at the red tracks. Tracks. Hunters.

I strip naked, except for my gloves. I drop my clothes on the bare floor by the body and walk to the bathroom. The shower fitments are sleek and modern, the water pressure strong. I wash carefully, thoroughly; the leather gloves feel odd on my skin; even after I’m clean I keep the water running a long time. I pick a couple of stray hairs from the plughole, get out without turning the water off. In the kitchen I find scissors and plastic grocery bags; I cut the labels off my clothes and put the clothes in the bags and the labels in a little heap on the floor. I have to take my jacket out again to get the tape and photocopies. Photocopies. It takes a moment to open the false front and find the original file, which I put by the cutoff labels, next to the tape and the copies. I line them all up carefully, edge to edge, then find there is a red glove print on the folder. It puzzles me: I can’t make it line up with the tape or the photocopies. I put the photocopies inside the folder and the tape on top. Better. The scissors go back in the kitchen, and I bring back sponges and a towel. I wipe away my footprints, and dry the floor. I go back to the kitchen for a mop and bucket. The walls of the elevator glisten, and the air is thick with the sweet coppery stench of the abattoir: blood, marrow, intestines. I begin to clean it up, then vomit, then have to clean that up, too. I rinse the mop and sponges in the shower, leave it running while I take the mop and sponges back to the kitchen.

I don’t want to stand naked in Karp’s bedroom. I have seen the pictures of the women and men who have done so. There is no choice.

His clothes fit me surprisingly well, but his shoes are a little big. I add another pair of socks and tie the shoelaces tightly.

My gloves are shrinking and uncomfortable. I take a look around the loft—if only I hadn’t taken the time to do this before, I would already have—

No. I didn’t have time for that.

I put the bagged clothes in two more bags, stepped over the bloody thing in the hallway into the elevator, and turned the key. My heart thumped lumpily and I couldn’t breathe quite right. The woman. She had seen me. But she had run, and she hadn’t known where Karp lived: “Yes, on this block,” he’d said, as they turned the corner. If I could take a cab without being seen, I would be safe.

The elevator doors opened and every muscle in my body clamped down hard on the nearest bone: the street heaved with people. A man lay dead or dying twenty feet above my head, and here I was, displayed like a vase in a museum. I couldn’t move. A group of twenty-somethings walked past. One turned to look. His face stretched in shock.

Blood smeared on the elevator wall? Teeth on the floor? If I’d missed something on my cleanup, there was nothing I could do about it now. I jerked one leg forward, then the other, and walked right at him, and his little group burst apart like a school of minnows, and I was through. Three feet past, six.

“Hey!” Twelve feet. “You!” Thirty feet. More shouts. The cutoff whoop of a police siren stopping just as it was about to start; a car braking. Fifty feet. Never run from a scene, never. It’s the first thing they look for. Walk. Eat the ground with your stride, but walk.

“Here!” A woman’s voice. “Over here!” But I didn’t stop, didn’t look back. I moved past people as though they weren’t there, not thinking or planning, just moving. Between one stride and the next, everything changed: unrelated pedestrians suddenly focused, sharpened, tightened into a crowd. Heads turned and mouths opened, and a hundred hands lifted to point. My mind did a terrifying thing: it shut down. I bolted.

Lights. People. Air harsh, like sand in my lungs. Fingers curled around plastic bag handles. Pavement hard hard hard under my feet. More lights. Darker alley. Fewer people. Breath tearing in and out, in and out. Another street. More people. Yellow. Open, in, red upholstery.

“Where to?”

A cab. I was in a cab. “Drive.”

“That’s what I do. But where to, lady?”

I couldn’t think. “That way.” I pointed at random. He drove. The bags were heavy in my hand. Wet and heavy. “Let me out.” I gave him a ten and climbed out, walked. Kept walking, mindlessly. Passed a street sign. King Street. I stopped at a traffic light. A cab stopped at the same time. I looked inside. The driver raised his eyebrows. I nodded, or my head jerked, and I climbed in. “East,” I said, then, “That way.”

“Not good that way,” he said. “Trouble. Police trouble.”

I was remembering the voice, earlier, shouting “Here! Over here!” A woman’s voice. The woman who had been with Geordie? But she’d said “Here,” not “There.” Then the sound of a police car, the cutoff whoop—not a chasing-the-perp whoop, more a clear-the-crowd-from-the-scene whoop, one I’d heard a hundred times. She had called them, then. It would take a few minutes for them to understand what was going on, to put it all together with whatever that crowd had seen in the elevator. Had she described me? Had that group outside the elevator?

A street sign said West Houston. I knew where I was. “Go north. Tompkins Square Park.”

I could do this. Dump the clothes at the park, take another cab to the hotel. Change. Catch the plane. Yes. I could do this.