The Killing Moon: A Novel

1 Hell road

A crack, a spray of flame, and he dropped onto his back on the side of the dirt road.

Nothing made sense at first. Not the trees overhead, nor the dark sky. The gasping that would not fill his lungs.

He heard hissing and felt a great pressure easing in the center of his chest, a sensation like deflating, like shrinking back into boyhood.

His fight-or-flight response failed him, blunted by years of false alarms. In the end, his brain was unable to differentiate between legitimate trauma and the fire drill of another cheap high.

The forest was fleeing him on all sides. Light came up in his face that he did not realize was a flashlight; a bright, beaming presence he thought might be divine.

Ten minutes earlier, he had been so fully alive. Pushing his way through the snagging branches of the Borderlands State Forest, jogging at times, giddy as he followed the full and smiling moon through the treetops. Intensely alive, every part of him, as he had not felt in weeks or even months.

He was two full days beyond sleep, yet his thoughts remained hyperfocused and particular, his mind blazing pure blue flame (no flickers of orange tonight, no air in the line). The thrill of risk, of danger, was his spark and his fuel.

He knew these haunted woods so well because it was he who had once haunted them.

Running the Borderlands had been, back in high school, a weekend dare for popular seniors with new driver’s licenses: speeding their parents’ cars along the ungated fire road that sliced through the state forest like a nasty scar. A midnight rite of passage, marquee entertainment in a town full of nothing-to-do, this tiny rural map-smudge in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, a fading and forsaken hamlet named Black Falls.

He had longed to participate, to be included as a passenger among a carload of screaming teenagers tearing through the forest. Stopping short on the access road, cutting the headlights, soaking in total blackness for an extra thrill. The stuff of roller coasters and horror movies.

But he was a strange young boy who had grown still stranger in adolescence. An outcast. One whom the others would never, repeat, never invite.

And indeed, he was different. More than any of them knew.

That was how he got the idea.

He still had loads of makeup left over from Halloween. He knew a thing or two about theatricality, about costumes, about the importance of performance. The mask and the reveal.

Word of the black-haired ghoul on the fire road blazed through school that week. Darting out of the trees with screaming eyes and a gaping black smile. The thrill seekers who returned the following weekend were disappointed by a no-show, until the creature’s notoriety exploded full force the weekend after that, with a dramatic reappearance said to have fouled the undergarments of a varsity running back.

The next week, no apparition, only the discovery of a blood-soaked shirt dripping from a low tree branch. Two more weeks passed, kids racing their fears with no payoff, until the demonic ghoul appeared yet again, this time hurling a severed human head (a hollowed-out cantaloupe larded with a mixture of Karo syrup and red food coloring) into a passing windshield, where it exploded with gore.

The legend of Hell Road had been born.

He camped there on weekend nights when the Thing in the Woods materialized, and even some nights when It didn’t: watching the headlights shoot through the Borderlands, his classmates alive to the danger, begging for some appalling shock to jolt them out of their tedious small-town existence. But they were merely flirting with death, whereas he was downright smitten.

Never once had he been afraid in these woods. He found only calm here. A haunted teenager sleeping in a haunted forest, he felt consoled.

That was how he navigated this night without flashlight or fear, following one of his old tree paths to the impending rendezvous on Hell Road. He had suffered all day in anticipation of this moment, opening himself to the forest now, to whatever this night would bring. The secret of the mystery man about to be exposed.

He had even worn his costume, updated through the years, including his hair. The night heat was oppressive, but he had no choice in the matter. It was not a disguise he wore, but a manifestation.

Not a mask, but a reveal.

Secrets were a thing he fed upon. A blood meal to him, a thing he craved. That sustained him.

But to Maddox he had made certain promises, some of which he might even keep. He was trying to be good. He actually was.

Illicit, not illegal, the midnight encounter of two like-minded souls of consensual age in the deep, dark forest. Adventurous, yes, and mysterious, and spectacularly dangerous — but perfectly legal.

He was hopeful, always. Of meeting a true soul mate. Of finding one person out there who understood him. His whims and eccentricities. He did believe, from their chats, that this mystery man in fact knew who he was, and evidently was okay with that. Which was a start. It would save him from getting beat up at least. Mystery Man even referred to their rendezvous point as “Hell Road,” so he had to be a local.

Regardless, it had given him something to dream about. Something to look forward to. A reason to go tripping through the forest yet again.

Night, bring me what you will.

That was what he had been thinking as he emerged onto the hard dirt pack of the moonlit fire road. And what he thought now as the light flooded his eyes, and he expelled a final, gusty sigh, settling deeply and comfortably into the ground as though it were a child’s soft mattress. He reverted to his best self, that innocent and unbroken young boy, exhausted at the end of another endless day of summer, surrendering to the moonlight and his secret dreams.

2 Ripsbaugh

It was the blue lights that drew him.

Kane Ripsbaugh didn’t go around seeking out beauty in life.

He had no poetry in his heart, no language for pretty things. He owned a septic service company and ran the town highway department and was loyal to his difficult wife. But police blues pulsing against the dark night: he doubted there was ever a more beautiful sight than that.

Ripsbaugh stopped his truck and killed the engine. He left the headlights on and looked out at the road in a squinting way that had nothing to do with the strange scene his lamps revealed. This was the way he looked at the world.

The cop out there, the new hire, Maddox, had his revolver drawn. He glanced into the headlights, then backed off from the big deer dying in the road.

Ripsbaugh climbed out and down, his boots hitting the pavement. As the head of Black Falls’ highway department, a hurt deer blocking the road was as much his business as anyone else’s.

“You all right?” he asked Maddox, walking up on him slow.

“Yeah,” said Maddox, looking anything but. “Fine.”

Ripsbaugh watched the deer try to lift its head. Its hooves scraped at the pavement, blood glistening on its muzzle and ears. The stick casting a jagged shadow near its head was not a stick at all but a broken antler.

Some fifty yards down the road, Maddox’s patrol car was pulled over onto the shoulder. The driver’s side door was open.

Maddox started to talk. “I was driving past the falls. The spray washed over my car, so I hit the wipers. The road ahead was clear. All of a sudden, bam! Car jerks left — not a swerve like I was losing control, but like the car had been shoved. I realized I hadn’t hit anything. Something hit me.”

He talked it through, still trying to piece together what had happened, the memory of the incident and its impact as fresh to him as an echo.

“I slam on the brakes finally, stopping down there. Red smoke everywhere, but it was just road grit swirling up in my brake lights. I get out. I hear this sound like scraping, a sound I can’t understand. The dust settled... and here it is.”

Ripsbaugh looked into the trees. Edge Road was so named because it traced the treeline of the Borderlands State Forest. “How’s your unit look?”

“Rear right passenger door’s pushed in.” He was starting to shake off the shock. “I never heard of that. A deer broadsiding a moving car?”

“Better that than getting up into your windshield.”

Maddox nodded, realizing how close he had come to death. His turn to look into the trees. “Something must have spooked it.”

Ripsbaugh looked him over, his blue jeans and hiking boots. The town couldn’t afford regular uniforms anymore, so the six-man force wore white knit jerseys with POLICE embroidered in blue over their hearts, and black “BFPD” ball caps, making them look more like security guards than sworn lawmen. Snapped to Maddox’s belt were a chapped leather holster and a recycled badge. He held an old .38 in his hand.

The deer resumed its scratching, bucking its head against the asphalt. “Aw, Christ,” Maddox said, knowing what he had to do.

Maddox had grown up in Black Falls but he was no farm boy. He’d left to go to college some fifteen years ago and never returned until his mother passed away. That was six months ago now. No one had expected him to stay more than a day or two beyond the funeral, but here he was, a part-time auxiliary patrolman, a rookie at age thirty-three. That was about as much as anybody knew about him.

“All right,” Maddox said to the gun in his hand, and to the deer in the street.

Sometimes the mercy part of the kill shot is less for the suffering animal than for the man who can’t stand to watch it suffer.

“In the ear,” Ripsbaugh advised.

The animal flailed, sensing its impending execution, trying to get away. Maddox had to brace its strong neck with the tread of his hiking boot. He extended his gun arm with his palm open behind it.

The shot echoed.

The deer shuddered and lay still.

Maddox lurched back like a man losing his balance coming off the bottom rung of a ladder. He holstered his gun as though it were burning him, the piece still smoking at his hip. His hand wasn’t shaking, but he rubbed it as though it were.

Ripsbaugh walked to the deer. Maddox’s patrol car blues flashed deep within its dead round eye. “That was a good stance you had.”

Maddox breathed hard and deep. “What’s that?”

“Your stance. A good cop stance.”

“Yeah?” he said. He wasn’t quite present in the moment yet. “I guess.”

“They teach you that here?”

Maddox shook his head like he didn’t understand. “You a shooter?”

“Just going by what I see on TV.”

“Must be we watch the same shows, then.”

Ripsbaugh eyed him a little more closely now. “Must be.”

He gave Maddox a minute to get used to the idea of grabbing the deer’s hooves with his bare hands, then together they dragged the carcass off into the first row of trees, leaving a blood trail across the road.

“I’ll come back in the morning with my town truck,” said Ripsbaugh, “take him to the dump.”

Maddox eyed Ripsbaugh’s company rig. “You working late?”

“Fight with the wife. Came out to drive around, cool off.”

Maddox nodded, about the only way to respond to that. He was wiping his hands on his jeans, coming back more fully into himself now. “Well,” he said, “just another night in Black Falls.”

Ripsbaugh watched the amateur cop head back to his patrol car, silhouetted in flashing blue. He returned to his own truck, checked the bundle rolled tightly in the tarp in the rear bed, and started for home.

3 Bucky

Bucky Pail — at sergeant, the highest-ranking member of the Black Falls Police Department — leaned forward against the counter, stretching his back as he looked out through the front windows of the station, past the people gathering on Main Street to the coursing blue stripe of the wide-running Cold River. The sun sparkled off its surface as though the waterway were a vein of blue blood conveying shards of broken crystal through the county. As though anyone going wading in it would shred their legs of flesh. Would find themselves standing on shins of pure bone.

This was what Bucky was grinning about when Walter Heavey walked in.

Heavey looked surprised to see Bucky up at the front desk. He hesitated a stutter-step before continuing forward, the man’s skin fishy white, his hair clown orange. He wore the same red jersey he always wore, bearing the three-oval State Farm Insurance symbol of his employer.

“What’s up, Walt?” said Bucky, not bothering to straighten.

“I’m here to report something.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

Heavey had wanted someone else to be there, anyone else. Knowing this, seeing the dread on Heavey’s face, gave Bucky a little lift.

Heavey said, “I heard a gunshot overnight.”

“Okay.” This was going to be good. “When-abouts and where?”

“It was last night. Late. Out in the Borderlands, behind my place.”

“Borderlands, huh? Woke you up?”

“It did wake me up, yes. But I wasn’t dreaming.”

“Mrs. Heavey had a bout of the gas, maybe?”

Bucky took Heavey’s shocked stare and savored it, anger blushing the man’s ridiculously fair face, further whitening his white eyebrows. Appearances alone, Bucky had zero respect for this guy.

“Okay,” said Bucky, Heavey too flustered to respond. “So. A gunshot.”

“I got kids in my house, Sergeant Pail. Three boys. I’m not... this isn’t fooling around. What’s it got to take for you to look into these things?”

Bucky nodded and kept up his grin. Kids. Kids weaken people. Not that Heavey had all that far to fall in the first place, but now the entire world was a white-hot threat to his precious offspring, all broken glass and sharp edges. Three tubby eight-year-old boys, identical triplets, all clown-heads like him. Piling out of the circus ambulance minivan with their Fat Lady mother huffing after them.

A comedy. A sideshow. And when something strikes you as funny, you smile.

Bucky said, “Is it that witch back sniffing around your boys again?”

Heavey was stewing and stammering now. “I never said it was a witch. I said she looked like a witch.”

Kids are a sex-change operation. Turn a man right into a woman.

“Maybe,” Heavey went on, “what I need to do is call the state police.”

Bucky grinned again, harder this time, curling it a bit. Relishing Heavey’s attempt at moxie. “See, it don’t work like that, Walt. We don’t answer to the staties, they’re not our bosses. Completely different thing. I bet they couldn’t even find Black Falls on a map.” Bucky straightened, using the step-up height advantage of the front counter. “But you go ahead and call them if you want, with your complaints about gunshots and witches trying to steal your kids—”

“Complaints?” Heavey looked around like he was on a hidden camera. “Shoe prints in my yard? Gunfire in the woods? These aren’t complaints. These are reports.”

Eddie wandered out of the back hallway behind Bucky, chewing on an apple. “What’s up?”

Eddie was two inches taller and two years older than his brother, but it was Bucky who was in charge, and had been ever since they were kids. Eddie’s hair was straw blond to Bucky’s dirty brown, but facially, especially in the tight eyes, there was no mistaking the Pail brand. Eddie ate green apples one after another like a horse, in big, choking bites — core, seeds, stem, and all.

Eddie would never have bothered showing his face out here just to help. He knew something about this. Bucky said, “Walt here thinks he heard something in the Borderlands last night.”

“Not ‘thinks,’” said Heavey. “It was a gunshot. The crack of a handgun. I heard it carry.”

Chock-hunk. Eddie said to Bucky, his mouth full, “That was Maddox.”

Just hearing the name changed the weather in Bucky’s head from overcast to threatening. “What are you talking about?”

“Hit a deer last night.” Eddie examined the apple like it was a kill. Chock-hunk. Bucky hated watching his brother eat. “Had to put it down in the middle of the road.”

Bucky also hated these rare occasions when Eddie knew something Bucky did not. “What road?”

“Edge Road. Out by the falls.”

Heavey was shaking his head. “I heard it in the woods behind my house.”

“Sound carries,” said Bucky. “You said so yourself. You live on Edge.”

“At the other end from the falls. The shot I heard came from the woods.”

Clown Man wasn’t going to budge. Why was Bucky wasting his time with this anyway? “Okay then, Walt. We’ll be sure and follow up on it.”

“How so?”

Bucky stopped. He cocked his head at him. “What’s that, Walt?”

Heavey backed down, just a little. Just enough. “I asked how so?”

Bucky said, referring to brother Eddie, “Patrolman Pail here will swing by Edge Road after the parade.”

Eddie took another apple bite, chock-hunk. “No, I won’t.”

Bucky said, “Enjoy the parade, Walt.”

Heavey turned, livid, and pushed out through the screen door to the front porch, starting away. Bucky imagined him doing so in big, floppy clown shoes.

“Heavey on the rag again?” said Eddie.

Bucky looked at him chewing. “Most people don’t eat the stem, you know. They leave that last little bit.”

“Gives me something to chew on,” he said, as Bucky started past him down the back hall. “Hey. I don’t actually have to go out there to Heavey’s, do I?”

Bucky’s focus was on Maddox now. “I don’t give a fuck what you do.”

He banged out the rear door, slowing at the top of the back steps, finding the others gathered around Maddox’s patrol car in the center of the dirt lot.

Without looking, Bucky was aware of Maddox standing apart from them, and also aware that Maddox was aware of him. A reverse magnetism had developed between them.

“What’s this, now?” said Bucky, coming down off the steps.

Mort Lees, who was third in seniority after Bucky and Eddie, straightened near the rear left passenger door. He and Eddie had run around together all through high school, Mort being the tougher of the two. “Buck, check this out. Deer rammed Maddox’s unit.”

Bucky went around the patrol car. The door was pushed in good, but he didn’t reach out and feel it like the rest. He wouldn’t give Maddox the satisfaction.

He looked over at the part-time rookie, and just by the way Maddox was standing thought he seemed more confident. Like Maddox was becoming one of the boys. Bucky felt camaraderie blooming here.

He would not ask to hear Maddox’s thrilling deer story. He didn’t fall in love so easy. Instead he focused on the trunk of the spare patrol car behind Maddox, which was open. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Maddox had a box of road flares in his hands. “Moving my stuff into the extra car.”

Bucky shook his head nice and slow. “For emergencies only.”

Maddox stared like he didn’t understand. “Mort took it when his windshield glass got that thread crack in the corner.”

“See, that’s a safety issue there. Windshield. Yours is just bodywork, cosmetic. Bang out that dent if you want, but do it on your own time.”

The police department budget was a joke. Black Falls was a piss-poor town struggling to afford Bucky and Eddie full-time. No money existed for their uniforms beyond T-shirts and ball caps; no paid vacations for anyone; no overtime and no paid details. Bucky and Eddie were the only ones who rated health insurance coverage, which both of them had declined, opting to leave their contributions in their paychecks, their salaries measuring out to a measly $7.85 hourly wage.

But there were other advantages to running a town. A smart cop could more than make up for the pay discrepancy on the side. That was where the real benefits of the job were: out on the fringe.

The patrol cars were puttering ’92 and ’93 Fords. Bucky’s had more than 140,000 miles. And since February they had been paying to gas up their own vehicles. They already bought their own weapons and ammo. And anything that broke inside the outmoded station was theirs to repair.

But then Maddox swept back to town, and old man Pinty strong-armed his fellow selectmen, somehow finding enough money in the budget to hire on another thirty-six-hour-a-week cop with no qualifications whatsoever. Because Maddox was a legacy, because the man’s father had been Pinty’s partner once upon a time and, oh yeah, had been stupid enough to get himself killed in the line of duty in such a sleepy town as this.

That Maddox was Pinty’s special hire here was a little too obvious. Transparent, the old man trying to hold on to the police force, forgetting that he had retired ten years ago and that his time had long, long since passed.

“Heavey heard Maddox’s deer shot,” Eddie announced to the others. “Dumb cluck thought the gun went off in his own backyard. Wants round-the-clock surveillance.”

Bart Stokes, the fourth cop, thinner and dumber than the rest, said, “Guy needs to buy himself a pair of long pants and some balls.”

Bucky asked, “Where’s this deer now?”

Maddox’s eyes and mouth were tighter as he responded. “Off the side of the road. Ripsbaugh said he’d pick it up today.”

“Mmm,” said Ullard, the fifth cop, the joker of the bunch, rubbing his chubby hands together. “Venison stew all week at the Ripsbaughs’.”

Stokes said, “Five bucks he mounts the head. Trophy of a retarded deer.”

Ullard said, “You’d mount a retarded deer for five bucks.”

Stokes reached out to push Ullard as the others laughed. All except Bucky. And Maddox.

Bucky said, “Show and Tell’s over. Maddox, you got some forms to fill out.”

“Forms?” he said.

“Vehicle damage report. And discharge of a firearm. Tell you what, why don’t you write me up a full report on the whole thing.”

Maddox checked this with the others. “Write you the report, Bucky?”

“As your senior-ranking sergeant.” Bucky didn’t like the look he was getting, the attitude. “And for future reference, deer hunter? ‘Bucky’ is what friends call me. You can stick with ‘sarge.’”

That woke up the others. Bucky was pretty much done waiting for Maddox to get bored of working his three-a-week, twelve-hour graveyard shifts all by his lonesome. Done waiting for him to sell his dead mother’s house and move the hell out of Black Falls. If Maddox was entertaining any real-cop dreams and thinking he might catch on here full-time, then maybe he was stupider than Bucky knew.

But no. Maddox was anything but stupid. That was the thing. Maddox was too smart, he was too sure, and he kept things inside. Most of all, he had a knack for being around when things happened. The sort of knack that could get a man into trouble.

Bucky looked at the others. “The parade extravaganza ready?”

Maddox was in the dark about that. No one had told him about the parade plans.

“Ready, Bucky,” said Stokes.

The way Stokes accentuated the “Bucky” was exactly what Bucky wanted to hear. Rally these idiots, keep the station house lines drawn. Chase Maddox off the force, and then run this town exactly as he pleased, with no one trying to peek over his shoulder. Better careful than sorry.

Bucky said, “Maddox, you’re on parade duty. The rest of us? We got some marching to do.”

4 Heavey

Gayle unfolded her oversized sunglasses and said to him, “Walter, please. We came for a parade.”

And she was right. Here he was snapping at his boys, taking it out on them. The parade was about to start, and why should he let the Pail brothers ruin the town holiday, such as it was?

Because that pair of no-brains had laughed at him.

Neanderthals. With their trademark Pail eyes peering out from deep inside their skulls, tramp eyes, Bucky with his oh-so-clever grin and Eddie with his toothy smile. Menaces. In any other town, those two would be pumping Walter Heavey’s gas or mowing his lawn.

Imagine if a protected species like a bald eagle or a spotted owl knew it was protected. Knew it could peck at your eyes and ears and turd on your face and there was not a damn thing you could do — because if you so much as raised a hand against it, into jail you would go. Now give that protected species loaded guns and powers of arrest.

He reached for his sons’ whiffled heads, Wallace, Walker, and Waldo, their orange fuzz bristling. If those Pails ever tried to humiliate Walter Heavey in front of his boys

“The gall of that punk, Gayle. By God. Something’s got to give.”

Her hand fell to her side, her charm bracelet and its three identical silver heads jangling as she communicated her aggravation with a sigh. “So let’s move then, Walter.”

She lobbed this bomb at him every once in a while, but she was the one who could never part with the house, having sunk so much time and energy into decorating it to her liking. But he played his part. “Move where? Where else are we going to find a house as big as ours with as much acreage as we have for what we’d get in this market? At this tax rate? Take it from a man who knows,” he said, thumbing his State Farm Insurance shirt.

Gayle put her hand on his arm, the immediacy of her grip meant to silence him.

A black ball cap and white jersey moving up the sidewalk. Dark sunglasses. A Black Falls cop coming their way.

Walter Heavey felt his wife pulling the boys back from the sidewalk’s edge. It just wasn’t right. A family shouldn’t be wary of their own police force.

It was the new cop, Don Maddox. Maddox’s hiring had been little more than a bad joke, indicative of the whole sorry state of affairs here in Black Falls. Maddox was about as qualified to be a law officer as Walter Heavey was. The POLICE jersey he wore, a pair of sunglasses: Was that all it took? If Heavey traded shirts with Maddox, would Maddox be able to draw up a whole-life policy? Would he be able to decode an actuarial table at a glance? Walter Heavey was his company’s top performer in the region, remarkable when you factored in that State Farm didn’t even offer insurance products in his home state. His region encompassed southwestern New Hampshire, southern Vermont, and eastern New York State, a customer base he had built up over the past fifteen years — fifteen years while Maddox was doing — well, what, exactly?

Maybe Maddox could put on surgical scrubs and take out Walter Heavey’s appendix while he was at it.

Pinty was the one who had helped him catch on part-time with the police — another head-scratcher. If Pinty and Maddox went back such a long way, why would Pinty drop a friend into that pit of vipers?

“What now?” said Heavey, as Maddox came up. “You come for a chuckle too?”

Behind his dark glasses, Maddox acted confused. “I heard you heard a shot last night.”

“I know, I know. You put down a deer in the road, that was the shot I heard. Only, it wasn’t. The one I heard came from the Borderlands behind my house. The other direction.”

“You remember the time, by any chance?”

“I do. It woke me up and I checked the alarm clock. Nine minutes after midnight.”

Maddox looked around as though concerned someone might overhear their conversation. The turnout for the parade wasn’t amounting to much — a combination of hot July sun and general apathy. “The shot was all you heard?”

“All I heard, that’s right.”

“No voices, no yelling?”

“Nothing. And I listened.”

“Well, the timing seems about right,” said Maddox. “This deer, it came streaking out of the Borderlands, broadsided my patrol car headfirst. Going that fast, I figure something must have spooked it.”

This took a moment to settle in: Maddox believed him.

Maddox noticed the three boys looking up from behind their mother’s shielding hips. He bent down closer to their level. “Hey, there, guys. You ready for the parade?”

The boys crowded closer as though trying to climb back inside their mother.

Maddox straightened, his smile bearing a trace of regret. “Anyway, enjoy the day, folks,” he said.

Heavey said, “You’re going to check into it?”

“I’ll take a ride out on the fire road, I guess. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

“What about the shoe prints?”

That stopped Maddox from leaving, brought him back. “What shoe prints?”

“They didn’t tell you?”

“I work just three overnights a week, Mr. Heavey. They don’t give me a whole lotta help on the shift change.”

Heavey told him briefly about the woman in black. He liked the concern he saw on Maddox’s face. Liked it very much.

“Those shoe impressions still there?” said Maddox.

“Some, sure.”

“Think you can keep your boys from trampling them? I could stop by at the beginning of my shift tonight, before it gets dark.”

Heavey was speechless. A Black Falls cop actually listening to him. Willing to act.

Parade music started up, a prerecorded band march. Maddox glanced around again, leaving Heavey with the distinct impression that Maddox did not want to be seen talking to him. All to the better.

“Just you, then,” Heavey said. “I don’t want any of those others on my property.”

5 Pinty

They say rivers usually divide towns, but not Black Falls. The town had grown up around an east-west crook in the south-flowing Cold River, forming a natural crease between the low farmlands to the south and the foothills rising in the north. The town got its name from a pair of waterfalls just up the river, the site of a massacre — so bloody the water was said to run black — of Pequoigs in 1676, at the height of the Indian Wars. The town was not officially incorporated until 1755, the criteria being a population financially capable of building its own Congregational church and supporting its own Congregational minister. A state law in 1831 separating church from state prompted the construction of a new town meeting site, a white clapboard building renovated in the mid-1960s, now resembling a side-by-side two-family house, the town offices on one side and the police station on the other.

That building, symmetrical beneath a round attic window like an always open, always staring eye, stood at the head of the T-shaped intersection of Main and Mill. Main Street represented the top bar of the T, accompanying Cold River in either direction. Number 8 Road, the fragment of an old Hartford-to-Montpelier mail route, shot northward from the western bar, narrowing as it snaked into the hills above town.

Mill Road ran south, being the trunk of the T, first as a low iron bridge spanning the summer-swift Cold River, then as a paved road hooking around the old Falls Paper Incorporated pulp mill, rotting on its river stilts.

About half of Black Falls’ 1,758 residents were clustered in the town center, in the old mill houses crowded along Main and Mill, crumbling brick tenements and company-built three-deckers with sagging roofs and slumping porches. The shuttering of the paper mill almost twenty years ago was largely to blame for the town’s current state of affairs. Black Falls had evolved from a trading post town in the eighteenth century to a farming town in the nineteenth century to a mill town in the twentieth. But even its proudest citizen had to admit that the twenty-first held little promise. The town wasn’t dying so much as it was disappearing. No supermarket. No traffic lights. No ATM. Mobile telephone reception was one bar at best, broadcast television reception almost nil, and the wait for cable television was currently twenty-five years and counting. As “globalization” evidently required paying customers, the modern world appeared willing to leave the town behind.

The town was hurting, financially, geographically, every which way. The community as a whole was depressed beyond simple economics. It was in the grip of a spiritual malaise from which there seemed no relief. The Mitchum County Chamber of Commerce guide referred to Black Falls as “once historic,” and Pinty didn’t even know what that meant, though the wording somehow seemed right.

Stavros Pintopolumanos leaned forward on his cane, the silver English grip familiar and smooth to his hand. With the bridge and the Cold River at his back, he looked across at what he considered to be the current source of the town’s ills. To Pinty, everything started and finished with the police department, the institution which had employed him most of his life and which he had helmed at the time of his retirement almost ten years before. He looked at the big flag atop the pole in front, its colors vibrant even when furrowed on a windless day. As a source of inspiration and a symbol of hope, it buoyed him. He had lived in the same small town all his life, with the notable exception of three years of service in the Korean War, and whenever he laid eyes on the flag hung properly and high, he felt a breeze lift his heart.

This was parade day, after all. Two hundred and fifty years of incorporation, and that wasn’t a birthday to let slip by unacknowledged. His hope that such an event might invigorate the town had already been dashed: the parade had started, and the center of town still didn’t seem ready for it. So many bare patches along the sidewalks that families should have been filling. But then the Cub Scouts came marching, with their troop flag and their den mothers, and all Pinty could do was smile.

The other two selectmen followed: Parker Harris, the elementary school principal, pulling a boom box in a red Radio Flyer wagon, playing a Sousa march; and Bobby Loom, known as Big Bobby, proprietor of the Gas-Gulp-’N-Go, the minimart filling station a half mile west on Main. Big Bobby was scattering wrapped bubble gum and Dum Dums to the children. Pinty would have been out there with them as the third town selectman, were it not for his hips. He tap-tapped his cane nub on the sidewalk as they marched past.

Pinty saw Donny Maddox coming toward him along the sidewalk and felt a lift similar to the one he’d experienced looking up at the flag. Hope, mainly. But Pinty had learned in life not to hope too hard.

Donny stopped next to him, facing the parade. “Not up to it today?”

“Today’s a good day,” said Pinty, patting his hip. “Not a bad day.”

“How about a chair?”

“Never would get up out of it.”

“I’d have built a float for you, if I’d known. Sit you up there on a throne.”

“I would like that. That’s about my style.”

“This town should throw you a parade. They will, someday.” Donny crossed his arms, implacable behind his sunglasses. “They better.”

Pinty smiled, not at Donny’s words, but at his respect. “Two hundred fifty years,” he said, gesturing at the parade like a symphony conductor demanding more out of an orchestra. “Older than the country itself. A hell of a long time.”

“Maybe too long,” said Maddox.

“Think of what all this land looked like to the colonists and trappers who first walked down from the hills.”

Maddox said, “Think of what the colonists and trappers must have looked like to the Pequoigs already settled here.”

That was Donny’s habit, his role, the town contrarian. Pinty never took it seriously, this rebelliousness Donny had held on to since his teens. Donny always thought he was too big for Black Falls. And when he was younger, he was right. He’d won the college scholarship, and everybody expected big things. Now, fifteen years later, he was back, and nobody knew what to make of him.

The town plow sander came rumbling along, sputtering its diesel exhaust. Black Falls’ two major municipal purchases in the past decade were: the new flag and pole, after 9/11; and the fork-bladed plow. No town in the Cold River Valley could survive winter without one of these immense road clearers.

Above the BLACK FALLS HIGHWAY DEPT. stenciled into the driver’s side door sat Kane Ripsbaugh, his bare, sun-chapped elbow jutting through the open window as he kept the angry-looking plow at an even five miles an hour. The word “highway” used to be defined as any public way, and showed that the department and its facilities — the garage farther east on Main, the salt and sand sheds, the town dump — dated back to the early days of the automobile.

Ripsbaugh was the one-man highway department, a position he had held for the last three decades. Some, such as Donny, would say that Ripsbaugh’s longevity was due to the job offering hard, physical work for little pay and zero prestige. But Pinty viewed Ripsbaugh’s role as an honorable one, and knew that Ripsbaugh did too. A town like Black Falls could not get by without a Kane Ripsbaugh. He was as day-to-day instrumental in its upkeep as was Pinty, though the two men could not have been more different. It was funny, to Pinty, how withdrawn Ripsbaugh was, that a man so devoted to his community could be so indifferent to his neighbors at the same time.

So it was indeed possible to love a place and not necessarily adore its people. This was something Pinty needed to communicate more successfully to Donny.

Donny said, “You notice who’s missing this morning?”

Pinty turned right away, looking down to the end of the parade route, the junction of Main and Number 8 Road. The house on the corner there was divided into twin apartments upstairs and down, with the upstairs tenant, who was also the owner, having the advantage of a large balcony built above the front door.

That was where Dillon Sinclair usually stood, leaning against the iron rail, dressed all in black like an undertaker, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and watching the town pass below him.

Pinty noted the look of concern on Donny’s face. Pinty said, “It’s not like him to miss a parade.”

Black Falls was currently home to nine registered sex offenders, four Level 2s and five of the more dangerous Level 3s. This was a regional concern. Publicity generated by the sex offender registry was effectively chasing offenders from more populated, organized, and affluent towns into smaller, remote communities. Nine out of the top ten Massachusetts communities in sex offenders per resident were rural towns far west of Boston. Out of 351 total cities and towns statewide, tiny Black Falls ranked eighth.

Dell Stoddard went rolling past in his prized 1969 yellow Mustang convertible sponsored by Stoddard’s Auto Body, playing loud surfing music that in no way jibed with the mood of the moment or of the town. Two women in sun hats made their way along the sidewalk toward Pinty, Paula Mithers under a wide, curled brim of straw, followed by her grown daughter, Tracy, sporting a beat-to-hell cowgirl-style number. The mother wore a gardening shirt, Bermuda shorts, and muck boots fresh from the barn. The daughter wore an oversized T-shirt knotted at the waist and cutoff jean shorts, her knees and elbows grayed with dry mud.

The Mithers women raised llamas on a little farm over on Sam Lake. Middle-aged Paula had a face most would describe as handsome, etched with deep lines by sun and divorce, while twenty-two-year-old Tracy was sun-freckled and slim, petite yet somehow leggy, blond hair washing out of the back brim of her cowgirl hat.

“Hi, Chief Pinty,” said Tracy.

“Not ‘Chief,’ Tracy,” said Pinty, correcting her gently. “Just Pinty.”

She nodded and turned to smile at Donny. “Hi.”

Pinty said, “You know Donny, right?”

“I know Donny,” she said, and they shook hands, a loose-gripped, formal up-and-down. Donny was the first to let go, but Tracy was the first to look away.

Paula waved for Pinty’s attention. A deaf woman, she signed angrily, hands picking apart the air as though arranging her words letter by letter on an invisible board.

Pinty turned to Tracy, who looked sheepish and almost teenager-disappointed in her mother. She translated flatly: “‘Aren’t you going to do something about this?’”

Pinty looked back at Paula. “About what?”

Then he heard the Indian cry. It was the Black Falls Police Department come marching. Bucky Pail led the way, showing off an antique musket to the crowd and exhorting their cheers, while brother Eddie and the three others followed in tow, each gripping one handle on a rescue stretcher bearing a cigar store Indian. It was the wooden statue that greeted customers at Big Bobby’s Gas-Gulp-’N-Go, adorned now with a headdress of turkey feathers and bandaged in ketchup-stained gauze.

Some spectators joined in the jeering salute, though most, like Pinty, watched in stunned silence. He felt Donny stiffen next to him and reached out to hook his arm just as Donny started to move, holding him back.

“Don’t,” Pinty said.

Maddox held still, watched them pass. Pinty released his arm and returned both hands to the grip of his walking stick. He absorbed the ridiculous display because he had to, using it to feed his inner resolve, as he knew it was feeding Donny’s.

How had things gone so wrong since his retirement? The police department’s troubles began in earnest with the passing of Pinty’s successor, Cecil Pail, who looked like Johnny Cash but died like Elvis Presley, of a massive coronary inside the station john three years ago. Pail was by and large a good man, but foolish and half blind when it came to his sons, Bucky and Eddie, whom he indulged. He had elevated his boys to the only remaining full-time positions on the shrinking force, in part to keep a closer eye on them. Pinty and the other selectmen refused to promote from within, yet were unable to attract a suitable replacement at the salary offered, to a town with no budget for police uniforms. So the chief’s position remained vacant, and into this vacuum of power had risen Bucky Pail, with his brother at his right hand.

They stopped to rest in the middle of the intersection of Main and Mill, standing the bloodied Indian right out in front of the station, below the flag. Stokes swapped his ball cap and sunglasses for the headdress of turkey feathers, and the rest of them amused themselves posing for pictures like jackasses.

Pinty saw parents turning their kids away from the vulgar effigy.

“Pinty,” said Donny.

Pinty squeezed the handle of his walking stick and shook his head. “If I can take it,” he said, “you can too.”

Tracy Mithers looked at them, confused. Her mother signed something, her daughter refusing to translate it until Paula Mithers clapped and pointed angrily at Pinty and Donny.

Tracy could not look at either of them. “My mother says to say that — you are both a disgrace.”

Pinty watched Donny’s eyes go dead. Pinty tried to grab his arm again, but it was too much for Donny, seeing Pinty’s honor suffer like that. He pulled away and started off the curb toward the jackasses, Pinty calling after him, “Donny,” and then once again, as loud as he dared, “Donald.”

If Donny had one weakness, it was him: it was Pinty. What he felt he owed the old man. But Pinty didn’t mind playing possum, now that the plan was in action and there was finally some hope. The town had abided these overgrown punks for too long now. Pinty only hoped that Donny didn’t let them push him too far too soon.

6 Maddox

Maddox was tunneled in. Bucky stood a few steps away from the spectacle, eyeballing the parade crowd through his dark shades, the old musket in his hands. Maddox remembered something from a college survey course on twentieth-century history about all despots having in common an innate knack for symbolism.

Maddox still carried pressure on his elbow from Pinty’s surprisingly strong grip as he went up to Bucky and said, “That’s enough.”

Bucky looked at him. Maddox was close enough to see his buzzard eyes through the tinted shades. Pure amusement. “You say something, rookie?”

Bucky’s intimidation came less from his size — he was big enough, but no bigger than Maddox — than from his eyes. Carny eyes, Maddox thought, assessing you while his dirty hands ripped your ticket, a guy with nothing in his life except dark thoughts. As a sergeant, Bucky outranked him, Maddox being just an auxiliary patrolman with the minimum 120 hours of in-house training. But Maddox could not stop himself. He could not stand by and let Pinty suffer this indignity. “I said it’s time to break it up. Move on.”

Bucky’s grin widened. He looked over at the others, including them in this, then checked back once more as though Maddox might be putting him on. “Hey, boys?” said Bucky, speaking through his grin. “Maddox here is shutting us down.”

“You put me on parade security,” Maddox said. “This is disturbing the peace. It’s time to move along.”

“Disturbing the peace?”

“You’re scaring kids.”

“Scaring kids?” said Bucky, gesturing at the bandaged statue with his musket. “This here’s a history lesson.” Bucky turned back in such a way that the long, thin barrel of the musket was directed right at Maddox’s gut. “This pop gun right here is a genuine Indian killer.”

Maddox grabbed the muzzle and shoved it backward so that the butt of the weapon jabbed Bucky in the ribs, then pointed the muzzle skyward.

Bucky’s eyes flared a moment behind his glasses — as shocked by Maddox’s impudence as he was by the speed of his reflexes — lips curling to reveal the savage lurking inside the grin.

Maddox saw how far he had overstepped then. Bucky shook his grinning head, barely able to contain himself, overwhelmed by this great gift. The chance to belittle and demean Maddox in public. To humble him in the crossroads of Black Falls.

The others spread out around him, Maddox having nowhere to go. His neck burned, not because he would lose this confrontation, but because he had allowed himself to be drawn into it in the first place. All the station house tensions came bubbling to the surface. He had crossed a line, and things would only get more difficult from here on in.

“If I got this straight,” said Bucky, “you’re saying if we don’t move our Injun friend here in a timely and forthright manner, you gonna cuff us all and take us in?” His half-clever smile fell away. “All by yourself?”

Maddox could not back down, and anyway, he wanted this too, more than anyone. He went cap brim to cap brim with Bucky, ready to jeopardize everything just to throw down with these goons.

A shadow fell across him. Maddox heard the prodding of the walking stick on pavement, and his heart simultaneously rose and fell.

“Hot one today, isn’t it, boys?” said Pinty, appearing at Maddox’s right shoulder.

Behind Bucky, Eddie Pail eased back. Even Bucky’s eyes flickered a little, the way a candle does when a door is opened.

Maddox said, still staring hard at Bucky, “This is nothing, Pinty.”

“Good,” said Pinty. “Because it just wouldn’t do to have Black Falls’ own sworn peacekeepers brawling in the center of town on its two-hundred-fiftieth birthday.”

Bucky pulled off his sunglasses, trying to turn his deep-eyed stare on Pinty, but it got him nowhere. As an elder statesman, Pinty still wielded a bit of moral authority.

“Now how about showing a little respect for the town and for yourselves,” said Pinty, crowbarring Maddox and Bucky apart with his walking stick, “and let’s everyone go on his merry way.”

Bucky backed off but his eyes would not let go of Maddox. His look said that someday Pinty wouldn’t be around to bail Maddox out.

Maddox banked that look, and the feeling it left him with, then turned away, part of him charging up like a battery, filling with new resolve. The other part of him remained pissed off, at himself, at the town, and even, he realized, at Pinty. Not for intervening. He was pissed off at Pinty for sticking with this backward town, for being the devoted captain who had to go down with this flooding ship.

The parade was breaking up now, a sad affair, more funereal than celebratory. Maddox cared little for the future of the town, but he cared about Pinty, who, to his mind, was the town. The aging Greek, seventy-one now, was a physical contradiction: barrel-chested on top and slender on the bottom, his waist and legs too small for the rest of him, carrying his weight like a vest of old muscle. As chief of police and town selectman, he had all but ruled Black Falls for the past quarter century. A benevolent dictator, the kind of man who mattered as much to a place as the place mattered to him. The decay of the police department haunted Pinty, his life’s second-greatest disappointment after the early death of his only son. A proud man, and tired, leaning heavily on his oak walking stick, Pinty’s last great gambit was to right the course of the police department before it was too late, to take the poison out of the well before it wiped out the entire town.

With that in mind, the vacancy of the balcony at the corner of Main and Number 8 bothered Maddox like a premonition. “Scarecrow” was the nickname the cops had given to Sinclair, for his thin, unstuffed frame and his ever-present watchfulness over the center of town, looking down from his balcony like a mannequin of rags and straw. Maddox was turning away from the sight of it when he walked right into Ripsbaugh.

“Kane,” said Maddox, startled backward.

“Went back for your deer this morning,” Ripsbaugh said.

“Oh, right,” said Maddox. He saw again the deer’s head crack open beneath his boot. “Thanks.”

“Wasn’t much left. A hoof, patches of fur and hide. A chunk of leg. The rest was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Coyotes. Must have gotten to it overnight. They’re all over town this year. Got no fear. Keep chewing holes through the dump fence.”

Maddox guessed that there was a Kane Ripsbaugh in every small town in the country. A man indivisible from the landscape, someone you see all the time but never really look at, who would fade away altogether were it not for the rake or shovel in his dirt-browned hands. A constant. A man everybody waves to and nobody knows.

Ripsbaugh stood at about Maddox’s height, in a no-brand brown T-shirt, knee-length bleach-spotted beige shorts, and crusted gray work boots with wiry laces untied. His eyes looked less silvery in sunlight, more gray against his dark eyebrows, his mossy hair shaved short like a prisoner’s, his hands mittlike and dark with work-toughened nails.

Maddox was also getting the familiar smell of shit, low-grade but pungent enough, that was part of Ripsbaugh’s peculiar charm. In addition to running the town’s highway department, Ripsbaugh also owned and operated Cold River Septic out of a garage next to his home.

Ripsbaugh nodded, lingering, as though he wanted to say something more. “Heard what you said to those others.”

Maddox shrugged. “Just running off my mouth.”

“Somebody had to.”

“What good it will do.”

“You need any help, anything, you know where I am. Town needs reviving.”

“That it does, Kane. That it does.” Maddox started away, then remembered something. “Hey. Last night when you were driving around, you didn’t hear a gunshot, did you?”

“Before yours, you mean?”

Maddox nodded.

“No,” said Ripsbaugh, thinking back. “Why?”

Maddox shook his head like it was no big deal. Inside he was frowning at the mystery. “No reason.”

7 Wanda

Wanda was wearing a tank shirt, blue pastel. Used to fit her better, drooping too much under her arms now, giving the boys a piece of profile whenever she leaned the right way. The teasing wink of her cup crease. She looked down to see what else, and on her skinny hips were beige terry-cloth shorts with white racing stripes.

She thought she saw movement in one of his upstairs windows as she came to his driveway. She had wanted to surprise him. That was the whole point of walking all this way. Playing out different seduction scenarios on the walk over. She didn’t know why she was fixated. It wasn’t even him, probably, if she had to be honest. It was her idea of him.

The good cop. The incorruptible.

She turned in past the FOR SALE sign. The surface of his driveway was hot as a cookie sheet, so she tread the grass lane next to it, feeling slinky in her bare feet. She followed the flagstones past a big planter in front, where the face of his house angled toward the quiet street. It was pretty isolated, bordering a quarter acre of buggy, high-weed wetlands.

There he was, sitting on the front step. He had seen her coming from the window. She couldn’t even sneak up on this guy.

She spread out ta-da hands. “Trick-or-treat.”

Maddox said, “I think you’re a couple of months early.”

“This is how I do it. Start early, avoid the Halloween crowds.” She liked what her mouth was saying. “Surprised?”

“You could say.”

“Pleasantly surprised?”

“Surprised.”

“What if I told you I’m here to open my heart to you? To bare my everlasting soul.”

He had on a great-looking, soft green cotton tank shirt, hanging off his thick shoulders and chest. His shorts were knee-length, his calves hairy but not furry. He sat half in and half out of shadow, leaning back against one of the narrow pillars. Almost guarding his house from her. She felt powerful and feared, and it made her smile.

“You’re drenched,” he said.

“I looked a lot better when I started out.”

“What’s with the wristbands?”

She wore two big ones together on her left arm. No pain today, at least not right now. “It’s a look,” she said. She was proud of her skinny limbs. “I think I burned some new freckles into my shoulders.” She moved the straps to check, giving him a little peek inside.

“Your feet okay?” he said.

She wiggled her toes. They were filthy, and worse inside the cracks. She saw a little blood around her left heel, nothing to get excited about. “I walked a long way,” she said, working a smirk. “You should be flattered. I started out in these flip-flops, but the thong thing was cutting into my toe cleavage, killing me.”

“Toe cleavage?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what that is. I passed this yard, and there was this little bike, pink with tassels? The kind I always wanted as a girl. Though maybe I shouldn’t be telling this to a cop.”

“You shouldn’t be telling it to anyone. You stole a little girl’s bicycle?”

“I borrowed it, who do you think I am? Not my fault if the chain snapped.” She chewed on a cuticle, what was left of her fingernail. “I was going to bring it back.”

“You walked barefoot all the way here from Bucky’s house?”

She put her hand on her hip. “Didn’t take long for him to come up. Jesus. Like talking to a guy who only wants to talk about your best friend or your sister or something. Except in this case, it’s my guy he’s obsessed with.”

“You don’t stay over at Bucky’s?”

“You know I don’t.”

“I must have forgot.”

“No, you didn’t. You wanted to make your point that he doesn’t treat me right.”

“He’s a private guy that way.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“I don’t know. You think he has someone else?”

“He’s a Black Falls cop. What do you think?”

“And that’s fine with you.”

“Maybe I got somebody else too.” She tried to wink at him but she had never been very good at winking. “Hey, if I wanted to be married to someone, I’d be married, right? We have something different from that. Something deeper.”

“I’ll bet those are his words exactly.”

“Like partners. Maybe he chases it on the side, but he can only catch so much. I know he doesn’t bring it home with him. No one gets inside his place ’cept me. Why I captivate you so.”

“What’s he do up there on his mountain, he needs so much privacy?”

She moved to the short stone patio before the brick step. “Kiss me and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

Maddox smiled in that way he had, of appraising her, which made her frown and sent her back to working on her nail.

“You seem a little hyped up,” he said. “You eat anything today?”

“I had a Popsicle.”

“That’s not food.”

“Oh, sorry. See, the food stamp people got me and Daddy on this strict twenty-four-dollars-a-month diet.” She tried out a wide, dirty grin. “You want to take me inside, feed me something?”

“I don’t think so.”

She scratched the itch on the back of her neck. “You are such a drag, you know that? It’s just rude, not inviting me inside. Why you so hot for Bucky?”

“I’m not.”

“So hot for him instead of me.”

“Give me a break.”

“So secretive all the time. Talk about privacy.” She shifted posture, her bare knees rubbing. “You’re playing me. You think I don’t know it.”

“Then that means that you’re playing me.”

“No. Because I don’t play.”

“You said you and Bucky are partners. Partners in what?”

“Partners in life.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know, he was a new cop when I met him. Just like you. Used to cruise by me in his patrol car when I was walking home from school. Kept offering me rides, until I took him up on it.” She smiled. “He liked it on the hood of his patrol car. He was into being a cop when it was new. What about you? You into it still?”

“I’m not that into it.”

She looked him over. “You’re into it, all right. What is it you do there all night at the station by yourself, anyway?”

“Fight crime.”

She snickered. “You’re a bad boy. You are. Act all good, but you’re bad inside, I can see it. You do bad things.”

That hit something in him. Something real. She watched his eyes narrow, and was surprised.

“Maybe your bedroom’s air-conditioned,” she said. “We could go talk in there.”

“No.”

“What are you so afraid of?” She took another step closer to him, her bare feet touching the smooth stone landing, just now starting to feel the day’s journey in her soles. “You know you don’t come around me just for the questions.”

“No?”

“No. The way you look at me sometimes. Not now. Today you’re being kind of a dick. But other times.”

Maddox looked out at the overgrown marsh his house faced, the weeds humming with bugs. “I guess maybe you remind me of someone.”

She was shocked to get any water out of this stone. “All right. Now it comes out. Now we’re getting somewhere. Not your mother, I hope.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“First love? College sweetheart? Old girlfriend?”

“Just someone I knew.”

“And she’s dead now?”

He showed surprise at her insight. Even Wanda was a little impressed with herself.

“So come on, then,” she said, moving closer still. His sneakers were flat on the landing, his bent legs bunching up his package in between. She reached out and touched his bare knee. “Let’s start up the old air conditioner. Go for a spin on my pink bike. What do you say?”

Maddox stood, a head taller than she, so that her hand fell from his knee. “I have to get ready for work now.”

“It’s personal, this thing between you and Bucky. I can tell. So what better way to fuck him over?” She reached for his shorts over his thighs, wanting to run her hand up inside.

Maddox shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

“Of course it is. The ultimate get-back. You can’t fuck him so you fuck the one he fucks. Believe me — he would jump all over your girl. If you had one.”

Maddox’s hand guided hers away from his shorts with a firm grip. “Maybe you don’t realize what an ugly thing that is to say.”

Wanda could only smile at the chill she felt, brought on by her discovery. “You do have a girl?”

Maddox reached out and pulled the sunglasses off her face. It was confusing because she had forgotten she was even wearing sunglasses, and so the change in light disoriented her. A pair she had borrowed from Bucky, too big for her face.

“Good Christ,” said Maddox.

“Give those back.”

“When was the last time you slept?”

She squinted, nearly blind, the day so bright. “Sleeping alone is so boring.”

“Look at me.”

She couldn’t. Her eyes were stinging and watering over.

He handed back her glasses. She put them on and waited until she could see him good again. He was looking at her forearm. The sweatbands. He reached for her wrist, and she pulled back before he could touch it.

He didn’t like that.

“You listen now,” he said. “Don’t ever come to my house again. But especially don’t think you can hit up and then come by. That’s not how I live here. You want me to bust you right now?”

“Oh, that would be good. Yeah, go ahead. Rookie cop busting his sergeant’s girl.”

“You want to talk, and I mean talk, you page me. You have the number. Otherwise you wait for me to get in touch with you. Understood?”

“Understood,” she said back at him, with sixth-grade petulance. She took out some aggression swatting at a fly buzzing around her head. “So, what, am I even going to get a ride back home?”

He looked at her like she knew better.

“Hard-ass,” she said. “Can I at least use your bathroom first? I’m serious, the toilet’s stopped up at my dad’s. The plumbing quit — I’m serious. He dug a latrine outside last night. Don’t make me pee in the woods. Pretty please? You can wait out here, where it’s safe.”

Maddox stepped aside. “Make it fast,” he said.

She curtsied and flipped him off and walked up the steps past him.

8 Tracy

Tracy Mithers saw Donny Maddox out in front of his house, so she left her pickup in the driveway rather than use the remote garage door opener he had given her. She followed the flagstones to where he waited with his hands in his pockets, a tank shirt baring his arms, shorts baring his legs.

My man.

Seeing him at the parade that morning and not being able to talk to him was murder, and how the day had dragged on since. The hours she stole each week to be with him were her life now. The rest of the time was just waiting. She wanted to bound up to him and leap into his arms, but something about the way he was standing outside alone in the sun slowed her.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

He shook his head, a strange look on his face, a tension. He glanced at his screen door. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “But I don’t know if you’ll agree.”

“Okay,” she said, still smiling but confused. “What does that mean?”

“Remember what I said to you when we first started this? That I would be straight with you? That I would never lie to you, no matter what?”

She remembered, all right. They had been in his bed. He had been studying her hand, fingers entwined with his. He had kissed the underside of her wrist, her beating pulse.

He said, “I promised you that, right?”

Now she was getting scared. “Yes.”

His screen door opened and a woman stepped out, wiping wetness from her chin as though she had just slurped water from a sink tap.

A bomb went off. The planet cracked open with a tremendous, shuddering roar, and Tracy stood in a deep crater of earth now, the heated air buzzing around her with smoke and steam.

The woman saw Tracy and stopped. They recognized each other.

Oh my God.

Wanda Tedmond.

“Ha,” said Wanda, stopping. “What do you know?” She looked at Donny with surprise that, by the time she looked back at Tracy, turned mocking. “Tracy Mithers, right? The llama girl.”

Tracy stared at the skinny girl’s filthy bare feet.

Wanda walked down the steps and across the stone landing to the grass. “I helped myself to some water, hope that was okay.”

She was talking to Donny. Familiar with him.

Her toes were wide-spaced and short and ugly. The nails were unpainted and ground down. The dirt around the bottoms of her heels looked congealed with blood.

Wanda said to him, “You should have told me you were expecting someone.”

Her collarbone stood out like a hanger on which her overwashed blue tank top hung, her bony legs rising into beige, Juniors-department Adidas shorts with white piping held up by no hips at all. She wore sweatbands on her forearms like she was a rapper, and a pair of men’s sunglasses sat perched on the bridge of her nose, chrome-rimmed, wide and obnoxious on her underfed face.

Tracy looked at Maddox. He looked right back at her.

“Tomboy cutoffs,” Wanda said, eyeing Tracy. She wasn’t at all flummoxed by the awkwardness of their encounter. “The farm girl look. That works, huh? Once you scrub all that llama shit off your knees, I guess.”

The artlessness of the insult stunned Tracy. They had no history Tracy was aware of, good or bad, none at all. If she was exacting revenge, it was not at Tracy’s expense: it was at Donny’s. And that shocked Tracy even more.

“Anyways,” said Wanda, “I wouldn’t want to intrude. Just stopped by to say hi.” She smiled at Donny and started away, passing a few steps wide of Tracy. “Bye.”

Closer, the more hideous Wanda appeared to Tracy. Skinny verging on frail, her hair a sweaty, mustardy mess, making her look drowned. Her limp boobs were barely covered by the stringy tank; Tracy saw ribs pressing through its sides. And she had sores. Like pimples but without whiteheads on them. Scratch marks on her neck.

Say something.

“See you around,” said Tracy. Not brilliant, but sort of cutting.

“Oh, definitely,” said Wanda, with a quick little smile back at Tracy that said, Game on, slut.

Wanda walked away with her head angled down, knowing her skinny backside had an audience. She reached the FOR SALE sign and turned the corner.

No car. Barefoot, no shoes in her hands. No handbag, no pockets, even. Wanda Tedmond had walked all this way without any money or keys. For what?

Tracy waited many moments before turning back to Donny. She wanted to say something poised. Her heart was pounding in her ears.

“Well,” she said. “That was a surprise.”

Donny was nodding. “For me too.”

“Really.”

“Entirely.”

“Hm,” she said through tight lips, trying to keep from shaking. She kept swallowing, to calm herself, looking out toward the wetlands but not seeing anything.

Donny said, “She asked to use the bathroom.”

“For what, to shoot up drugs in there?”

“What do you know about shooting drugs?”

“What do you know about having a girl like that inside your house?”

“You notice, I stayed outside.”

“Because you knew I was coming.”

She might have been yelling. It was a possibility. She stopped speaking for a little while because she did not want to seem hysterical. Her mother was the one who got hysterical.

Tracy felt the sun boring a hole into her. “I only wish you had told me you liked girls that skinny. Girls on a sperm-only diet.”

Wow. The smile stretching her cheeks felt tight as a strap. The burning in her throat was acid left over from the taste of those words.

Donny retreated to his front step and sat down. His strategy was to try and wait her out.

Tracy said, “Isn’t she with Bucky Pail already?”

“I believe so.”

“So one Black Falls cop isn’t enough for her? Does she want to take on all six at once?”

“This is how women talk about each other when the gloves come off?”

“When one is sniffing around my man? You bet.”

She then had a wild thought that he was holding back a smile.

“Am I being ridiculous?” she said, her voice getting away from her again. “Do I look ridiculous? Do I look hysterical?”

“No. You look pissed, and you have every right.”

“You’re goddamn right about that, mister.” Mister? She nodded like she had won the argument. “Goddamn right about that.” She folded her arms and walked in a neat little circle. “So what are you going to tell me? This has something to do with work?”

“That’s right.”

“Her walking halfway across town barefoot to your house. On a Saturday afternoon. Uninvited?”

“Completely uninvited.”

She was the cop now, checking his eyes for lies. Breaking down his alibi. “But you won’t tell me why.”

“I don’t know why.”

She stopped. “Come on.”

“I did not invite her here. I don’t know why she showed up.”

Tracy threw her hands out at him. “How do you know her at all? You’re a Black Falls cop. An auxiliary patrolman, part-time!” The pounding surged inside her again. “Fine. Then why do you think she came here, to you, today, this hour?”

“Honestly? For sex. And possibly air-conditioning.”

Tracy kept staring. The thought was so repulsive to her, she needed to show him how much it hurt by baring her wound. “And what about me?” she said. “Is that what I come here for?”

He very wisely declined to answer that.

“She was inside your house,” said Tracy. “That no-ass trash.”

Tracy remembered when Wanda repeated eleventh grade and wound up in some of Tracy’s study periods and gym class. How she was always being sent to the office. A hard girl with hashed-up hair and an underage, oversexed snarl, who made out with boys between classes, right there in the hallway. When Wanda dropped out for good halfway through the year, every single girl in Tracy’s class sighed with relief.

“So she’s poor,” Tracy said. “And we’re all supposed to feel sorry for her. But, God — I could loan her a bra if she needs one. I work. I might get my knees rough working around a barn, but I don’t need to live off a man.”

He nodded, infuriating her.

“And me, stupid me — I was coming here to apologize to you. For my mother this morning. For the way she lumped you in with the rest of the cops in town.” She shook her head. “It’s proof anyway that my mother doesn’t know anything about us. No one did — until today. Until Wanda fucking Tedmond. But, whatever.”

It was stupid. The afternoon was ruined, the day was ruined, everything was ruined. When Tracy got disappointed like this, she always thought of her mother, who was the queen of disappointment. She remembered her scowling at Donny that morning.

“What did Pinty mean? ‘If I can take it, you can too’?”

“What?” Donny said.

“This morning. See, sometimes when I sign for my mother, people talk around me like I’m deaf too. To keep you from going after the Pails, he said, ‘If I can take it, you can too.’ Take what?”

“I can’t really get into it.”

“No, of course not. Because of how critical your part-time police work in Black Falls is. I’m sorry, Donny, but this is bullshit. It’s crap, this whole thing. Skinny cop-sluts coming out of your house in the middle of the day? Your truth-only pledge, which lets you dodge all the questions you don’t want to answer? That’s so convenient for you.”

“You have every right to be angry—”

“Stop agreeing with me!”

“I’ve been up front with you all along. I’ve said the whole time, once I sell this house—”

“You’re leaving, good-bye. I know it. I’m shrill.”

She had lost herself in this relationship, happily, purposefully, using it to escape from everything else in her life. Over these past few months she had felt herself growing in ways and at speeds beyond anything she had ever experienced.

Best of all, it was an affair. A beautiful secret. She had a man.

Now the fact that he had become so much in her life so fast scared her. He was the only good thing she had, and what would that mean once he went away?

She was pissed off, she was scared, and yet — she still wanted to believe him. “I don’t understand,” she said, “why everything has to be so undercover with you.”

His patient look vanished then. Almost like she had offended him somehow.

But bitching at him wasn’t going to get her anywhere. This much she had learned from her mother, from her parents’ divorce.

“I can’t do this right now,” she said. It was only dinner they had planned, because he was working an overnight. But still: saying this took great courage. “I can’t stay. Don’t you see?”

“Stay,” he said. “Stay and talk.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I need to think, or something.”

Huge and scary, walking away from him like that. She was punishing him, yes, but she was also, if he could see it, demanding respect. A drastic move, but not a deal breaker. Not a relationship ender.

She hoped.

As she drove off in her old Ford, gripping the steering wheel, this seemed like just a preview of coming attractions. How it was going to end between them for good. Which made Tracy realize, for the umpteenth time, just how far she had fallen for him.

9 Heavey

“I kept the boys out of the pool today,” said Heavey, standing over Maddox’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you, it wasn’t easy.”

“I appreciate it,” said Maddox.

Maddox, in his cop shirt and cap, squatted over the impression in the dirt near the aboveground swimming pool. The rest of the backyard was grass, but the boys had worn out a track between the small skateboard ramps and the pool ladder.

Heavey said, “It’s a sneaker, right? Adult size.”

Heavey could tell by the outline of the tread, the way it was broken with notches. The center of the tread had not made an imprint. Heavey brought out his two pairs of sneakers, as well as Gayle’s walking shoes, to prove he wasn’t crazy.

With the sun going down, Maddox brightened the impression with his flashlight beam. Marks before and after it indicated tracks from the treeline along the right side of the yard to the rear of the house. Heavey said, “Ground dried up a bit today with the heat.”

“Muggy last night,” said Maddox, eyeing the edge of the forest. “No AC in my patrol car. Your house air-conditioned?”

“Not centrally. We’ve got a unit in the bedroom window. I keep it on Economy and it cycles on and off. Does the job.”

“It cycled on soon after you heard the shot?”

Heavey remembered now, how after going around checking on the boys and double-checking doors and windows, he had jumped when the box started up again in his bedroom. “In fact it did.”

Maddox straightened and took in the yard in the dying light. Heavey tried to see what he saw, with a visitor’s eyes. The alligator float drifting in the pool, the safety-netted trampoline, the T-ball stand, the swing set, the three matching electric cars.

“Guilty as charged,” Heavey said.

“What’s that?”

“Spoiling three boys. We tried not to, but I guess it’s having all our kids in one shot. Treating them equally.”

“I was just thinking how private it is here. The land between the homes.”

“Summer leaves make it more so. Why?”

“Nothing’s missing, right?”

“No, not a thing. The boys would know, believe me. If one doesn’t have something that the other two have, it’s Armageddon.”

Heavey followed Maddox’s eye back to the house. Three orange heads ducked below the sill of the upstairs den window. His boys loved to play spies.

Maddox moved toward the house alongside the approximate foot trail. Grass grew sparsely around the foundation, despite Heavey’s repeated attempts at seeding — something about drainage, too much sand in the soil.

Maddox used his beam on the ground. Right outside the boys’ bedroom, he illuminated what could have been the toe half of another imprint. As from someone standing on the balls of his feet.

Maddox sized up the window while Heavey, alarmed, watched his reflection in the glass. “All right if I?”

“Go ahead,” said Heavey, and Maddox cupped his hand over his eyes, careful not to touch the window as he peered inside. Heavey explained, “We knocked down a wall to make one big room so all three boys could be together.”

“Your boys sleep with a night-light?”

“A desk lamp, dimmed low.”

Maddox kept looking. “And you’re sure it was a woman you saw?”

“Yes. Back a couple of weeks ago now.”

“If it was night, how did you know it was a woman? Could you see her face?”

“Here’s what it was. I heard something outside, or maybe just felt something was wrong, one of those parental things. I came down to check on the boys, and as I open up the door, I can see something moving outside the window. Running away. I tripped over toys, getting to the window just in time to see her disappearing into the trees. Dressed all in black, thin, with long dark hair.”

“A black dress?”

“No. More like a sweat suit or something.”

“And sneakers.”

“Apparently.”

“But it could have been a man in a wig.”

“Well — Jesus Christ.”

“It couldn’t have been?”

Heavey became flustered, unable even to consider it. “What I saw was a woman.”

Maddox turned his flashlight beam at an angle to the window. He breathed onto the cooling glass, his warm breath revealing a few smudges and handprints. But all boy-sized.

“Neat trick,” said Heavey.

Maddox turned and ran his beam over the yard to the forest, inside which it was already night. “This person ran into the trees. Where?”

Heavey showed him. Maddox skimmed his flashlight beam over the ground, but browned pine needles and last autumn’s leaves obscured any footprints. “Boys play army in here,” said Heavey. “I don’t know if I’d build a house on the edge of a forest again. You have kids?”

Maddox shook his head, looking back at the house, then circling to the right, just inside the perimeter. He kept checking the house, maybe looking for a good view of it from the trees.

Heavey said, “Real sorry to hear about your mother. She had a fall?”

“She had been sick for a while. Her lungs. Medication made her unsteady.”

“Stairs?”

“Bathroom floor.”

“Most dangerous room in the house. I lost my mother two years ago this September, to viral pneumonia. I was the baby of the family. Your mother was insured?”

“Enough to cover the burial.”

“Good for her. I tell you, most people around here, they’ve either forgotten or never learned how to plan for the future. They got no cushion in their lives. Living day to day.”

Maddox found a good vantage point on the house, almost in line with the sneaker treads heading past the skateboard ramps. He scoured the ground with his flashlight beam, toeing at the soft forest floor. Heavey thought he saw something illuminated, white and small.

Maddox became very still, focusing his beam on this tiny object. Not as thick as a smoked-down cigarette butt, unless maybe it was the hand-rolled kind. It seemed important until, suddenly, with his hiking boot, Maddox scattered whatever it was back among the dead leaves, clicking off his light.

10 Zoo lady

The upstairs doorbell rang a fifth time, and Horton and Glynda scrambled back onto the front windowsill to scratch at the glass. Norman howled in despair from his pillow bed, unable to get up due to his leg splints. Felicia, the lamp-shade-collared beagle, fretted back and forth along the kitchen floor, trot-trot-trot, while Carlton, one of two skinny ex-racetrack greyhounds, sat up on the tea-rose-colored sofa and rhythmically sniffed the air. Belouis, a three-legged Canadian hairless, rolled onto his back on top of the refrigerator and caterwauled.

Penelope and Vernon would tear down her already shredded curtains unless somebody answered the front door. Miss Beverly shushed them to no avail, finally turning down Bill O’reilly and shuffling through the living room to her door. She didn’t realize she was barefoot until she was already out on the old black-and-white diamond tile of the entranceway, squeezing through with only two cats — Lucinda and Raoul — escaping.

She hated her damaged feet, her blunted toes and the perpetual bruising over the arch. The town knew her only as the Zoo Lady, foster mother to a menagerie of abandoned and rescued animals, but in her former life, she had been a dancer, and a great one. She had owned apartments in both Manhattan and Paris. She had hoofed on Broadway, and never in a chorus line. She had toured all of Europe, declined marriage proposals from four separate men, and once dined with a prince. She had danced for George Balanchine and with Gene Kelly. She had affairs with two movie stars, only one of which she regretted.

It was a policeman, and he had seen her there, and it was too late to go back inside for her shoes now, not with all the yipping and scratching at the door behind her. Impossible to keep a pair of slippers with all the gnawers in the house, which was why she stored her $750 orthopedic shoes in the refrigerator. A crazy-lady thing to do, she realized, but better that than allow them to become two very expensive chew toys.

If this young gentleman was the one who would someday break in and find her gone on to her final reward, he would also discover, along with the shoes, her last will sealed in plastic in the freezer. And her two-volume autobiography, neatly typed on four reams of rose-scented paper, light on scandal but heavy on a life of accrued knowledge, Part One in the meat drawer and Part Two in the crisper.

She had once read a newspaper story about an elderly shut-in found a week after her death, her hungry cats feasting upon her body. In fact, Miss Beverly thought that would be quite all right with her. She never had a little baby of her own to feed. She only hoped she tasted good enough.

She was not surprised to see a policeman at the door, nor foolish enough to ask why. She had considered herself fortunate, after a decade of declining health and ruinous investments, to find a landlord sympathetic to her animal ministry. Of course, Mr. Sinclair could little afford to complain, given that he had been compelled by law to disclose his probationary status as a convicted child molester to all prospective tenants. So the rent was low and her infirm pets tolerated.

She pulled open the front door just a few inches, so that no one would escape into the night.

No, she answered the policeman, she hadn’t seen Mr. Sinclair at all today. Though she had heard his footsteps earlier, upstairs. But nothing for a few hours now.

He seemed angry, yet paid her the courtesy of politeness, which was not often the case anymore. People today felt justified in their anger and their right to broadcast it around.

He was handsome enough, in an American way. She could still notice these things. She hoped he would be the one who would eventually find her.

“No, no message,” he said, stepping back for another look up at Mr. Sinclair’s black-curtained windows. “I’ll stop back some other time.”

11 Frond

From the outside, the Gas-Gulp-’N-Go looked like a bait shack with two old-fashioned fuel pumps in front. Inside, it didn’t look much better. Nightcrawlers in Styrofoam cups of soil were stocked next to the butter and cream in the back coolers. The newly repealed Massachusetts blue laws meant that the liquor cabinet was no longer chained on church day. The Gulp was the only place in Black Falls where you could buy your milk, bread, newspaper, cigarettes, lottery, booze, and porn. A startling amount of porn, shrink-wrapped magazines and boxed VHS movies pasted with happy-face stickers to cover offending penetrations while leaving the rest of the image intact.

Randall Frond bumped the wire carousel as he passed it, the porn rack creaking guiltily. He was the only one in there, having just made it before the store’s nine o’clock closing. Frond had a cold. He had tried his usual homeopathic herbal remedies — eucalyptus oil, ginger root, yarrow leaf, and elm bark — but found he couldn’t sweat it away. So here he was, reduced to searching for off-the-shelf cold medicine, the taking of which went expressly against his New Age philosophy. But that’s how bad he was plugged up. The last time he’d swallowed a Sudafed, in college during finals week, he had the craziest dreams in his life. Something that messes with your brain chemistry like that can’t be any good for you. His girlfriend at the time saved his GPA by brewing him some cinnamon honey tea and feeding him echinacea and raw garlic.

And now, as he prepared to violate his closely held principles for the sake of his sinuses, what did he find before him but empty shelves. Plenty of liquid remedies, Robitussin and NyQuil, but no Sudafed, no Contac, nothing with enough punch to clean out the wad of wet cotton inside his head. Summer colds were the worst.

He brought a bag of Halls drops — their paltry 5.6 milligrams of menthol would have to do — to the front counter, where the owner of the Gulp, the man known as Big Bobby Loom, waited. Frond asked about the Sudafed and received a surly shrug.

Loom said, looking at him over the bag of cough suppressants, “You’re the witch, right?”

It wasn’t a term Frond cared to deny. Only in its modern connotations was it inaccurate. “That’s right,” said Frond.

Loom took his money and made change and said not another word.

Feeling worse now than when he had walked in, Frond exited through the swinging door. That’s what he got for staying in a town this size; everybody knew everybody else’s business.

He was almost at his Jeep when headlights pulled in off Main. Frond made out the light rack on the roof of the patrol car, and slowed near the ice chest, cornered. He wanted to avoid another costly go-round with the Pail brothers. Bogus speeding tickets had already wiped out his “Safe Driver” steps and raised his insurance rate three hundred dollars.

The cop parked right next to his car. Frond saw that it was the new hire, the one they called Maddox. He felt a dash of relief, but kept moving just the same, pulling open his unlocked door. He trusted none of them.

Frond had moved up here seven years ago. Sick of the pace and cost of living in the real world, and in an effort to renounce consumerism, he gave away his television and most of his possessions and retreated to a stone-and-timber house. He subsisted now on Internet sales of New Age paraphernalia and as an online broker — his 56K dial-up modem demanded Zen-like patience — for a consortium of potters and weavers in the hills of Mitchum County.

But the modern world didn’t like losing even one consumer. That was the only way he could explain his recent turn of bad karma. One good deed had begat a chain of punishments and tiny agonies.

He was fishing his keys out of his shorts pocket when Maddox came around, asking, “Everything all right?”

He started up the engine. Something uneasy about this one. Not an evil vibe, as from the others, but a strange one. He struck Frond as a watcher, as a seeker, and Frond was usually right about people.

Maddox said, “You looked a little spooked when I pulled up.”

“Did I?” said Frond, swiping at his nose. Fear worked as well as cayenne in loosening up the nasal passages. “No, just the bright headlights.”

“I thought it might be the sight of the patrol car. I heard you had some run-ins with other members of the department.”

Harassment was the legal term for it. Intimidation was the purpose. Ever since he had passed Bucky Pail beating up a man in handcuffs by the side of the road. What did it matter that Dillon Sinclair, the sex offender, was the one getting smacked around? Frond did what any good citizen of the world would do: he filed a complaint with the county through the state police. Now he worried every time he left his house.

Maddox said, “If you feel that some members of the police force are overstepping their authority, you should come forward.”

“I think I tried that, didn’t I?” What was this? Using the new guy to get to him? “They want to punish me until I move, and they might just get their way. You’re not so new that you can’t know. I’m not the only one who’s scared.”

The swinging door slapped shut behind Maddox, Big Bobby Loom locking up for the night. He looked them over talking together, then turned and swayed toward his white Fairlane parked around the side.

Why was Frond bothering? When would he learn to keep his mouth closed around Black Falls cops? He shifted his Jeep into gear. “I’m no crusader. Not anymore. State police promised me they’d do something.” He was pulling away. “I’m still waiting.”

12 Tracy

Tracy couldn’t sleep.

She didn’t want to call, but lying there in the dark wasn’t getting her anywhere, thinking hard and not sleeping, so she picked up the phone. The green-backlit number pad was the only light in her room as she dialed three numbers.

“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

“Yes, well there’s this guy I’ve been seeing for about four months, okay?”

“Ma’am?”

“Actually, four months, six days, twenty-two hours. Give or take a few minutes.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, today I stopped by his house and I caught him with this total low-rent hoochie.”

“You say a hoochie?”

“Big-time hoochie.”

“Ma’am, this line is intended for emergencies only.”

“This is an emergency, or it was — for me, anyway. There was an altercation, but it was mostly verbal. Actually, it was mostly me.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“Not really, no. I tried to inflict some emotional damage, but as usual it totally backfired. So now I’m home all alone, stressing out that I embarrassed myself beyond repair.”

“I’m sure that’s not the case. I bet you behaved admirably well under the circumstances.”

“I just wanted you to know. I’m not mad.”

“Good.”

“But I’m no pushover either. I’m no doormat.”

“Okay.”

“But leaving you that way, us parting the way we did — that hurt the most. That felt really shitty. I don’t ever want to do that again, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. What are you doing now? I picture you sulking the night away.”

“I’m reading. While I sulk.”

She pushed herself up on her pillow. “That same war book?”

“Volume three. Marching toward Appomattox.”

“Do you think it’s weird that people have favorite wars?”

“I guess I do, yeah.”

“I’d say Revolutionary War people are optimists. Birth of a nation and all that. Brightly colored uniforms, fireworks in the sky — right? World War Two people, they seem sort of downbeat. Drab and tough and dirty. We won, but at what cost? Realists. But Civil War people — I would say we are humanists. You know, brother against brother, a nation divided. People interested in people, in their fellow countrymen.”

“And slow readers.”

“That too. Did you bring lunch? Since we never actually ate, I thought maybe I could—”

“I did bring something, yeah.”

She shook her head in the darkness of the room, pushing past his reluctance. “Well, do you want some company when you take your forty? A midnight lunch, like the first time—”

“I can’t. Not tonight.”

She lay very still in order that he wouldn’t hear the pillow crunching or the mattress creaking or any other sounds of distress. “You have to be somewhere later?”

“I do.”

“Okay,” she said. She moved her head a little, just to clue him in. “And I’m not going to take that the wrong way. I’m not going to overreact.”

“Good.”

“I’m definitely not going to think you’re meeting Wanda.”

“You know I’m not.”

“Of course I do.” She let some silence play. “Of course.”

“The badge and the gun, they mean something in a town full of nothing. To some people. That’s all that is.”

Not me, she thought. She wished he would take them both off, and for good. She pictured him there at the station with his book open on his lap, wondering why he bothered with her at all. “Is this humiliating call going to be saved forever on tape?”

“I switched off the recorder when the Sam Lake address came up.”

“You’re lucky she’s so gross, you know. I mean — lucky.”

“I do know it.”

“I can tell by your voice, you’re smiling.”

“I can tell by yours, you’re lying down. In bed?”

“I was worried you were going to try and hand me some bullshit. Like that she was in trouble or something. Like you were ‘helping’ her.”

“What are you wearing?”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “No way.”

“I can tell by your voice,” he said, “you’re smiling.”

“Just tell me that all this sneaking around is really necessary.”

“All this sneaking around is really necessary.”

“I don’t know how cops’ wives do it. I really can’t imagine.”

“You can’t?”

She couldn’t believe he had just said that. “Don’t play with me. Mr. ‘I’ll-never-lie-to-you.’ Mr. ‘I’ll-be-brutally-honest-when-it’s-time-to-break-your-heart.’”

Across the silence of the phone line, she broadcast her thoughts: Ask me to go away with you. See how fast I can pack.

Yet the shame of this secret desire, her guilty ambition, reddened her cheeks. She thought of the barn, the llamas sleeping under the summer moon, and everything she had to do after dawn. But especially her mother, in her bed in the room across the hall. How profoundly the deaf sleep.

13 Cullen

“Summer mornings,” said Cullen. “The air, before it heats up? Nothing like it. A gift. This is the only time of year when I don’t question what the hell are we doing still living here.”

Maddox, taciturn Maddox, sat over his food across from Cullen in the red vinyl booth.

“Must be nice for you these days,” said Cullen, pursuing him, “seeing the sun come up. I don’t imagine that happened much in your previous incarnations.”

Maddox picked apart his omelet with the precision of a laboratory scientist, exposing and extracting cubes of Canadian bacon, chunks of green pepper and mushroom, inspecting each before allowing them into his mouth. “Not really.”

Cullen surveyed his own lumberjack special, which had seemed like such a good idea when he ordered it. Now he’d be knocked out all morning, bloated and yawning.

Cullen sponged up some blueberry syrup, washed it down with a gulp of coffee. He looked out the window of the pancake house, cars curling around the rotary and up the highway ramps. Rainfield was a mid-sized town of strip malls, fast food, and on-the-go convenience massed like plaque at the arterial interchange of a north-south interstate and an east-west route. Not much to look at, and even less to visit, but with its Best Buy, Kohl’s, chain restaurants, and a six-screen movie theater, to the scratch towns of northern Mitchum County it was a metropolis. The region’s Las Vegas.

Most people, when they hear the words “western Massachusetts,” think of the rustic Berkshires, wine and cheese on the lawn at Tangle-wood, or antiqueing in Stockbridge. But getting out to Norman Rockwell country from Boston means passing through Mitchum County first. It is the only county in Massachusetts without a city. The Cold River Valley is 725 square miles of natural isolation, rivers, hills, farmlands, and old New England. Less visible to the naked eye is the fact that, while per capita crime rates are generally low, domestic ills such as spousal and child abuse, child neglect, single-parent families, and unemployment run high. Towns that rank at the bottom in median income, yet near the top in lottery revenue. A well of desperation hidden deep in the valley, pain-filled voices that go unheard.

Cullen saw Rainfield as an open-air convenience store spread out over miles. A good deal of drug crime happened here, with the associated sordid living and dead-end behavior. This place made the town of Mitchum, the county seat where Cullen lived and worked as a prosecutor of narcotics crimes for the district attorney’s office, look quaint and almost clean. The amounts seized in busts here were not large by national standards, nor was the level of drug violence statistically very high. But the devastation to families was the same if not worse.

Heroin came across from upstate New York, pot down from Canada. Cocaine was cheap these days, but currently on the ebb. What surprised Cullen most about what he saw was the effect that market forces had on drug trends. People don’t become addicted to a particular drug, he had learned. They become addicted to doing drugs, period, and when conditions such as purity or availability or price change drastically, people will trade one poison for another. Simple as that. No brand loyalty exists when you’re dopesick and looking to score.

It would be nice to get on top of things for a change. To be ahead of the curve. They had a real chance here to head off the Next Big Thing before it metastasized and reshaped the landscape.

Maddox wiped his mouth, again sweeping the restaurant with his eyes. Force of habit, Cullen guessed. Meeting with Maddox always put him on edge.

“My boy, Kyle,” said Cullen, checking his watch and signaling the server for the check. “A soccer prodigy. Or so I’m told. Great moves, fast feet, everybody telling me, ‘Hire a coach, you’ll make it all back in scholarships. Groom him.’ I’m like, groom him for what? It’s soccer. Maybe the eighth or ninth most popular sport in the United States, behind Frisbee and probably bowling. Kids have been playing in leagues for two generations now, and it’s catching on about as fast as the metric system. Watching him the other day, I figured out why. You know why?”

Maddox shrugged, barely putting forth the effort of humoring him.

“Because Americans don’t trust a game where you can’t use your hands. A sport that actually forbids use of the hands, people can’t understand that. ‘Pick up the damn ball and throw it in the frigging net!’ But he’s eight, what does he know? He loves it. So I put him in a camp for the summer. We’ll see what happens.”

Maddox pulled six jelly packets from the sugar caddy, stacking them and unstacking them like a casino dealer. In terms of exchanging information, these monthly get-togethers were strictly a formality and could have been transacted over the telephone. They met so that Cullen could evaluate Maddox in person. And, as usual, he found himself doing most of the talking.

“Six months now,” said Cullen. “Here’s the word, and it comes from on high. She believes we will be able to move on this. She wants to move on this, sooner rather than later.”

“This an election year?”

“Hey — every year is an election year. But don’t get on her for that. There’s always that part of it, of everything, that’s the job. But she is good, and by that I mean, she is a prosecutor. This is a big juicy piece of meat here. She wants to carve it up nice and thick.”

“Okay.” Maddox nodded, still scanning the joint. “Good.”

“But it’s not enough yet. The press’ll gobble up any bloody thing she throws down for them, but for herself, and for the community at large, she’s got expensive tastes. She wants to serve this up right.”

“Fine by me.”

“I know it’s fine by you. It’s been six months.”

Maddox said, “You’re thinking, Hey, it’s a small town, make fast work of it. But it’s just the opposite. Everybody knows everybody else. That said, things are starting to break open now. I thought I was going to have something for you this morning. Something of consequence.”

Cullen waited. “But?”

“But he stood me up last night.”

“Okay. What does that mean to you?”

“I don’t know. Either of two things. Either something is up with him — or else he’s ducking me. Which means that something else is up.”

“Where can he go, right? Small town. He has to turn up.”

Maddox shrugged, leaving it at that.

Cullen said, “They want me to revisit with you the hardware.”

“Look,” said Maddox, firm but not agitated. “It’s not that I have anything against it. No one’s frisking me or anything like that. It’s just unnecessary. They don’t discuss anything in front of me. This isn’t like before, when I’m a party to illegal activity. I’m just a snoop here. But what I get, when I get it, will be better than words on a wire. It will be evidence, hard and fast.”

“You’re that sure.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. You think another thirty days?”

“I hope.” He sat back, extending his arm over the top of the booth. “Don’t think I’m enjoying myself here.”

Cullen looked him over again. Maddox smelled confident, a big change from when they started. “What about you? They’ll want to know I asked.”

Maddox soured the way Kyle did when Cullen made a show of touring the mowed lawn before paying out his allowance. His arm came back off the booth, his shoulders tight again. Tired of being checked up on all the time. “How am I, you mean?”

“How are you, I mean.”

“How do I seem?”

“Tired. Frustrated. Impatient.”

“That’s about right,” Maddox said, and then he was out of the booth, moving with surprising speed to the door.

14 Val

Her doorbell never rang, but when it did, on this particular afternoon, the door opened back fifteen years.

“Donny,” said Valerie Ripsbaugh, seeing him in the doorway with the haze of late-day heat behind him. She recognized him instantly, but not because he hadn’t changed. There was more of him now, and in all the right places. As though the skinny boy she knew in high school had been ingested by this man.

With fifteen years rushing up on her, she looked down at herself. Red plaid pajama pants with a hole in the knee, flat-soled flip-flops, and a loose cranberry jersey. What he must have been thinking as he compared the Valerie Sinclair of yesteryear to the Val Ripsbaugh of today. She looked away, wishing he would too.

“Val,” he said. “How have you been?”

Most people, she didn’t care. She had let herself go a long time ago. But Donny Maddox, he was the one mirror she could not pass. In him she felt a sort of death. Though they had only been academic rivals, never boyfriend and girlfriend, Donny more than any other person had defined Val’s high school years.

“If you’re looking for Kane,” she said, “he’s gone.” She glanced over at the fenced-in septic service garage adjacent to their yard, the reason why all the window fans in her house faced out.

“No,” he said, “I came to talk to you.”

Only then did it occur to her that something might have happened to Kane. She always thought of her husband as vulnerable to nothing and no one except her. “Is it Kane? Is everything okay?”

“Oh — yes.” He reached up for his cap as though he had forgotten he was wearing the team uniform. Seeing him dressed as a local cop was so wrong. “Everything’s fine.”

Her reaction did not go quite as far as disappointment — she wasn’t that callous — but it was something like readiness, a borderline eagerness, which was close enough. I could sell the house. I could start over. I could be free.

Donny had kept himself in shape. He had found balance in his life. A few years earlier he would have seen a slimmer Val Ripsbaugh. Always up and down with her. If she wasn’t dieting, she was bingeing; if she wasn’t exercising, she was sleeping twelve hours a day. She could never get any traction in the middle ground. Yet she never recognized this compulsive behavior for what it was until she was out of one rut and into another.

Donny said, “It’s about your brother.”

Val nodded, fighting that sinking feeling she got whenever Dill’s name came up. “What’s he done now?”

“Nothing. That I know of. He’s just missing. We usually see him around the center of town, at least up on his porch. But no one has recently.”

If Donny was coming inside, she’d have to stash the wineglass in the sink, cap the open jug on the kitchen counter. “He wouldn’t come here. If that’s what you’re asking.”

“No, no. Just if you’ve seen him, or heard anything from him.”

“The police need to know where their sex offenders are.”

Donny shrugged, allowing that that was the extent of it.

She stepped back, her hand still on the doorknob. “I can’t believe it, Donny. I can’t believe you’re a — a cop.”

“I know.”

“I can’t believe you came back. You got out. You had a free ride to college. You were gone. On my scholarship.”

She forced a smile to leaven her bitterness, but it didn’t work.

In the year of their graduation from Cold River Regional High School, one full scholarship had been offered to the Black Falls senior with the highest cumulative grade point average. Because her tax-cheat father wouldn’t open himself up to the scrutiny of a financial aid application, this blind scholarship had been her one and only hope. Val led the class academically until their final semester, when she was edged out by Donny, by exactly one-tenth of one percentage point. Just like that, her art career dreams went up in smoke.

“I heard about your mother,” she said. “Sounded like it was awful at the end. I was very sorry. I always liked her.” The Sinclairs and the Maddoxes had lived on the same street, Val having moved to Black Falls when she was seven. Single-parent kids, both of them — Val with her crooked father, Donny with his troubled mother — and Val used to fantasize about their parents marrying and Mrs. Maddox becoming her mother and protector. Even into high school, she was always on her best behavior around Donny’s mom, on the off chance that, even if she couldn’t find a way to fall in love with Val’s father, maybe she would fall in love with Val. Maybe enough to want her as her own daughter. “But why have you stayed?”

“Just to sell her house and get her things settled.” He smiled a smile that had no meaning behind it. “I’m kind of stuck here until then.”

“You’ve got nothing else out there waiting for you? Where have you been all this time? What’ve you been doing? We heard rumors.”

“Rumors?”

“Town talk, you know. After the way you left. All the promises you made, then broke. Me, I was laughing. I hope I would have had the guts to screw off like you did.”

“What rumors?”

“Someone said you’d joined a band. Or that you were in banking or finance or something. Someone said they’d read somewhere that you’d founded one of those Internet companies and made a billion dollars.”

He smiled and shook his head, relieved to change the subject. “No, nothing like that. Just bouncing around. What about you? You still draw?”

She huffed out a laugh at her long-ago artistic pretensions.

“What?” he said. “You were good.”

“You know how they say that if you really want to make God laugh, tell him your plans? God had milk coming out of his nose every time I opened my mouth about art school.”

Donny shook his head. “None of us are the people we hoped we would be. Probably nobody ever is. But you’re happy, right?” He leaned back for a look at the house. “You have a home. A husband.”

She flashed a quick, hard smile, preferable to flowing tears. She looked down at the thin wedding band cutting into her swollen finger. “So, I don’t know where Dill is,” she told him. “No idea.”

“Okay,” said Donny. “Hey, I’m sorry if I...”

She shook her head, wanting very much not to say anything she would regret. “I was happy for you, Donny. Really, I was. Crushed for myself. I mean, a B-plus instead of an A-minus, and poof, your future plans are no more. But at least, with you getting away — one dove got free, you know? If it couldn’t be me. I just — I didn’t ever think you’d waste it. But now, fifteen years later, you’re here again. It’s a little hard for me to see. So don’t take this the wrong way, Donny. Please don’t take this the wrong way. But I really wish you had never come back.”

After closing the door, she stood with her hands trembling in a prayer pose against her nose and lips, then went to refill her glass of wine.

15 Bucky

They came up Old Red Road in the rescue truck, Bucky and Eddie, the box siren whirring out of the roof over their heads. Eddie slowed when he saw Maddox’s blues skimming the dark trees, and eased in around the corner.

Twenty bucks extra they were paid each month, the Black Falls Volunteer Fire and Rescue, to keep their town pagers handy night and day. Seven more bucks per call, per hour, on top of that. Because of the overlap in certification training, the police force and fire and rescue were one and the same, the off-duty cops available as on-call firefighters.

Except rookie Maddox. He had not, and as far as Bucky was concerned, would never be invited to join.

Beyond the patrol car, a mustard gold Subaru wagon sat steaming. It had punched straight into a broad tree trunk, its hood mashed like a broken fist. The impact had brought a heavy limb down on the roof, and gasoline from the fuel line was puddling into the road, streaked green with antifreeze.

The pumper truck came up behind them and Eddie hopped out, him and Mort taking the ice ladder down off its hooks in order to flip open the side compartments and pull out the medical cases. Bucky dropped out of the passenger-side door wearing old painter’s pants and a ribbed tank shirt, grinding his cigarette butt into the dirt shoulder and spitting into the trees. He reached for a fire extinguisher and a red ax and walked to the car as the other two jogged past him.

Maddox was at the Subaru, trying to talk to the driver and passenger inside. He stepped back as they arrived. “I called the ambulance,” he said.

Best-case scenario — nighttime, no traffic tie-ups, drivers who didn’t get lost more than once — it was a thirty-minute ambulance run from Rainfield into Black Falls. Leaving Bucky plenty of time.

He checked the hissing engine first, verifying that it was steam rising and not smoke. The windshield had shattered over the crumpled hood and the dash, so that when Bucky unclipped the small flashlight from his belt, its beam shone through an empty frame.

Both front air bags had deployed, hanging empty now, the driver and the passenger dusted in cornstarch from the bags, like mimes that had been in a car accident on their way to the circus. Oak leaves lay among the starch and chunks of glass.

The driver had flipped open the vanity mirror in his visor. His nose was busted, swollen and pulpy, but what bothered him was the glass. He was picking it out of his dusted skin with his fingertips, tenderly removing the shards and arranging them like a row of bloody diamonds on the dash over the radio.

Bucky knew his face but not his name. The passenger too. Wanda had pointed them out to him once. Foster kids, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. Bucky kept his beam on them so they couldn’t make him out, just in case. Glass sparkled in their scalps. He beamed the driver’s eyes and the kid’s pupils were eight-balled.

“Damn,” said the kid, wincing, but never stopping his digging. “Gotta clean it out. They still coming?”

“Who?” said Bucky.

“Them that’s chasing us.”

Pure paranoia. Bucky watched the kid pluck a large fragment out of his cheek, a layer or two deep inside the dermis, yet show no sign of pain. All this while the one in the passenger seat whimpered softly, mime tears streaking the powder on his cheeks from the corner of each eye.

Christ, thought Bucky. It was something to see firsthand. Everything they said about this stuff. Exactly as advertised. No shit.

He felt a surge of omnipotence that was difficult to contain. He pulled himself away, letting the others work as he backed off upwind from the fuel spill and sparked another Winston Gold.

Eddie and Stokes readied a c-collar and tried to get the driver to give up on the glass in his face. Ullard remained at the pumper, hanging on to the side mirror, still wearing sleep boxers and a zipped windbreaker, looking very happily shitfaced.

Maddox came up the road, Bucky speaking first to neutralize him. “Two drunk kids joyriding in a stolen car.”

“Drunk?” said Maddox. “You see that kid pulling glass out of his face?”

“Saw a guy once in a car pinned under a fence, insisted he was still inside his own garage. Wondered how I got in.”

“You see their eyes?”

Bucky talked smoke at him. “Yeah, I saw their eyes. What are you, a doctor? Snap some accident scene pictures and call in Ripsbaugh to mop up. Then take off.”

But Maddox didn’t leave right away. He lingered, looking kind of funny at Bucky, almost puzzled, like he was thinking something. Smelling something.

“The fuck are you doing?” said Bucky, his voice raised loud enough for the others to hear. He blew more smoke his way. “Are you fucking sniffing on me, you queer motherfuck? The fuck is your problem?”

Maddox stood steadfast in the dissipating haze, resetting himself. “I have a problem?”

“You do. I am your problem. Remember that.”

A school-yard stare, but nothing more. Never anything more, thought Bucky, Maddox always holding himself back. The brain inside was always working — but on what?

“Look at you here, pussyfooting around,” said Bucky. “Fucking college boy playing cop. You know what I think? I think you ought to be real careful on these shit-shift overnights. Accidents do happen.”

“That right?”

“That’s fucking right. Like that deer that hit you — you just never know. You’re out here all on your own. Long way from civilization. Think about who your lifeline is. Ain’t no ambulance.” Bucky peeled off a grin. “It’s us. It’s me. You think about that sometime.”

Bucky flicked his cigarette butt at Maddox’s boots and walked back to the wreck, where both boys were now out and being strapped to backboards. “Fucking homo,” Bucky said to the others. He tossed a look back at Maddox and yelled, “Pictures, camera, snap-snap, let’s go!” and stared him back to his patrol car.

“Fucking spook,” said Bucky, turning back to the strapped-down boys at his feet. He kneeled and went through their pockets quickly, finding nothing, no IDs. He looked into their faces and would have said something, would have warned them against talking, but their eyes were so far gone with shock and dope that any threat would have been wasted.

He leaned into the car and studied the seat with his flashlight beam, then cracked open the glove and emptied the contents onto the floor. Two small plastic zippered envelopes slid out. Bucky reached in and pocketed them quick, making sure there weren’t any more.

Maddox came up with the Polaroid as Bucky stepped back. Bucky watched him snap his pictures, making him feel his presence. Goading him into saying something, making a move. But Maddox worked silently until the ambulance arrived. Bucky caught up with one of the EMTs after they had loaded in the boys. He showed the guy his cop badge.

The EMT said, “It’ll be Rainfield Good Samaritan.”

“We found a bottle of vanilla schnapps in the backseat there,” lied Bucky. “Pretty cut-and-dried.”

“Vanilla?” snorted the EMT, not so long out of his teens himself. “Any flavor they don’t make that mouthwash in?”

“Kids like their poison sweet. No IDs yet, but we’ll track down the parents and phone in the particulars.”

“You got it. Have a good one.”

Bucky tucked his badge away. “I’ll sure try.”

16 Ripsbaugh

Ripsbaugh pulled up on the scene just as Stoddard’s mechanic was driving off with the wreck. It looked bad but not fatal. The wound in the tree trunk oozed sap, but it too would survive, though with a good scar.

Maddox stood at his patrol car, arms folded, apart from the layabouts near the pumper and the rescue truck farther up the road. Ripsbaugh pulled around the road flares and angled in next to Maddox’s car, silencing the engine and stepping out of the cab. He walked to the back of his truck, his untied bootlaces flicking at his heels.

“Late call,” said Maddox, coming over.

Ripsbaugh dropped the rear door. “Usually is.”

“Couple of kids, nothing too serious.” Maddox glanced at the other cops. “Some glass in the road, along with the fuel.”

Ripsbaugh dragged out an open sack of sawdust. He lugged it over and emptied it onto the gasoline spill, then hauled out two buckets of cat litter and shook them on top of that. The blade of his long-handled shovel scraped the pickup bed as he slid it out.

The gas-soaked gravel scooped up like cornmeal and he shoveled it back into the plastic buckets. He kept his head down, working steadily but without haste, as was his manner. He remembered the last car accident he had to clean up — Ibbits, the escaped prisoner — and how Bucky had watched over him as though afraid Ripsbaugh would steal something from the burned wreck. This time Bucky was relaxed, all of them loitering by the pumper, prolonging the accident call into an extra hour’s pay.

Ripsbaugh pretended not to notice them, in the same way he generally pretended not to notice anyone, work being a cloak of invisibility he pulled over himself. Ullard was drunk as usual, nodding off against the front tire, and Stokes drew a laugh by kicking him over. Bucky took a drag off a stubby cigarette and, with his patented Pail grin, pretended to launch the lit butt at Ripsbaugh and the fuel-sodden sand.

The others snickered hard. Ripsbaugh continued scraping his shovel like he hadn’t noticed.

“Hey, Buck,” said Eddie, sitting on the rear bumper of the rescue truck, looking to impress his younger brother. “Remember that high school janitor? The one with the crazy walleye?”

Bucky said, “The one I pulled the firecracker stunt on.”

“Every time some freshman girl coughed up her macaroni, he’d come in wheeling his bucket of slosh, sprinkle that odor-eating powder on the mess, and mop it up. Frigging thirty years he was there, mopping up kiddie spew once a week. What a life.”

Bucky said, “Seems to me that black folk, when they mop up, usually whistle a happy tune.”

The others laughed aggressively, Eddie harder than anyone. “Hey, Kane,” Eddie said, emboldened. “Know any tunes to pass the time?”

Ripsbaugh slowed the rhythm of his road scraping to a stop. With both hands resting comfortably on the handle of the shovel, he stood there, looking at them all. Nothing threatening in his manner. Nothing in his face. Just him leaning on his shovel, standing, staring.

Their chuckling petered out, the sneer draining from their smiles, faces going soft and empty. All except Bucky, who kept up his tomcat grin. He didn’t back down, but he didn’t say anything else either.

Ripsbaugh finished his shoveling and began hauling the heavy buckets back to his truck. Maddox was there and helped him load them in one at a time, the old truck’s springy suspension dipping a bit under the weight. Ripsbaugh pulled out a broom and a large paper bag and returned to the roadside by the gouged oak, sweeping up chunks of windshield.

Maddox followed. The cops were packing to leave, trying to rouse Ullard. Maddox said, “Val tell you I stopped by earlier?”

Ripsbaugh said, without looking up or breaking pace, “She did.”

“Seemed like I might have upset her. I hope not.”

“She upsets easily these days.”

“I was looking for Dill.”

“She said that. Building up probable cause, I suppose.”

Maddox paused. “Building up what?”

Ripsbaugh kept right on sweeping. “I figure you want to get inside his place. Legally, you can’t just walk in. Even a sex offender’s got rights. So you establish a threshold of suspicion. That’s how you build it.”

Maddox was interested. “Go on.”

“There was a case like this on Court TV a month or so back. You have to get a family member to say that he’s missed an appointment, or that someone’s worried about his health. Or a neighbor to say he hasn’t been cutting his lawn. Make it a public safety issue. That’s your in.”

“I see,” said Maddox. “Probable cause.”

“I figured maybe that was what you were going for.”

“You a crime buff?”

“I watch all those shows.”

The pumper and the rescue truck engines started, backing up beeping into the road, Maddox following the vehicles with his eyes until they pulled away. “Maybe you should have been made cop here, not me.”

Ripsbaugh regripped the handle of the broom and swept up the last of the shattered glass, now whistling a slow tune.

17 Maddox

On the morning of Donald Christopher Maddox’s second birthday, February 4, 1974, Sergeant Pintopolumanos was patrolling the town with Officer Reginald Maddox. Black Falls’ finest rode in pairs back then, as with the logging industry still largely unregulated and the paper mill in full operation, the department was twenty men strong and still growing. Maddox’s father had come late to police work, having struggled for seven years at a career selling prefabricated office dividers: cork and wood partitions for the precubicle age. The last sale he made was to the Black Falls PD. During a tour of the premises, Sergeant Pinty picked up on the salesman’s interest in police work and invited him to apply for a position. Maddox’s mother, newly pregnant at the time, was won over by the bucolic setting of northern Mitchum County, and three months later the Maddoxes moved from a tiny apartment in the Boston neighborhood of Readville to a three-bedroom house in Black Falls.

At a little after ten on that February morning, Pintopolumanos and Maddox came upon a white Cadillac parked under a thin sheet of snow just off the shoulder at the eastern end of Main Street, less than one hundred yards from where the road crossed into neighboring Brattle. Snoring in the driver’s seat was a man named Jack Metters, a lower-echelon hoodlum from East Boston transporting a trunkful of life sentences in the form of two dozen stolen army machine guns.

Metters awoke to Officer Maddox’s window knock, emerging from his Caddy with a yawn and a smile. He asked the name of the town he was in, and before Maddox’s father could even answer, Metters fired a .38 Special five times with his right hand deep in the pocket of his pea jacket, dropping both policemen into the day-old snow.

Metters shed his burning coat, climbed back into his car, and continued on toward Boston, meeting his end less than one hour later in a roadblock shootout with state police.

Officer Maddox alligator-crawled back to his patrol car with two holes in his chest and one in his thigh, and died talking into the dash radio.

Pinty dragged himself off the road, where responding officers found him sitting against a young oak on a blanket of red snow, reporting no pain, only a low-voltage tingling in his toes.

Two rounds had shattered Pinty’s hips. The doctors who performed his surgeries told him he would never walk again. Pinty sought a second opinion — his own — and in the summer of 1975 returned to the same tree he had been found under, stepping from the car under his own power and chopping down that young oak with an ax. He milled the wood himself, fashioning his walking stick and topping it with a smooth, silver English grip ordered from a catalog.

Looking at the walking stick now, the nub of it tapping against the toe of Pinty’s boot as he sat deep in a big-armed, mission-style chair, Maddox was reminded of Pinty’s determination, of the man’s strength and pride. The police department was his life’s work, as was, by extension, Black Falls itself, and the prospect of bequeathing his legacy to a band of brigands was eating him up inside.

“Cancers,” Pinty said, after Maddox’s recap. “Got to carve them out with a knife. Cut them right out of our own goddamn belly.”

Maddox sat facing him on a skirted, powder blue sofa. Mrs. Pinty’s China dolls smiled from their display shelves in the formal living room, the collection untouched since her death. Maddox had stopped by after his shift, early enough to find Pinty with his breakfast napkin still tucked inside his collar, but not so early that he didn’t have his hairpiece in place. Pinty’s modest fluff of vanity was a decade old now, a shade or two darker than his existing silver fringe.

Pinty was in the process of converting his house for first-floor living. Maddox saw the folded wheelchair hidden behind the sofa.

“Ever heard the term ‘formication’?”

Pinty scowled. He was not in a learning mood. “That’s when a man and a woman...”

Maddox smiled. “It’s the sensation of insects creeping beneath your skin.”

“That’s something they need a name for?”

“Causes you to pick at your own flesh. People get obsessed, they wind up tearing apart their face, their arms.”

“It was probably just the shock of the crash.”

“That’s what Bucky said.”

Pinty didn’t like that, jabbing at the rug with the rubber nub and twisting the handle, as though screwing the cane into the floor.

“Look,” Maddox said. “I know you don’t want to believe it.”

Pinty gripped the fat arm of his chair, Maddox knowing better than to help him get to his feet. Stiff from sitting too long, Pinty hobbled over to the China dolls, as though presenting himself before their glass-eyed innocence. “So, this guff about the schnapps?”

“Cover story. Kids drunk, and now dazed from the crash. He doesn’t want them drug tested.”

Pinty sagged a bit before the display. “If you’re right about all this, Donny...”

“It’s not about me being right. It’s about Bucky going down.” Maddox frowned, remembering Bucky’s attempt at intimidation at the accident scene, then summarizing the exchange for Pinty. “He basically outlined the Ibbits crash scenario to me.”

In October of the previous year, a man living out of a 1989 Ford Escort had died in a fiery, one-car crash way up in the hills above town. By the time the Rainfield Good Samaritan ambulance arrived to take over for Black Falls Fire and Rescue, the blaze had long since burned through the Escort, its driver, and all his belongings.

The wrecking company recovered enough of the VIN number to trace the car back to a California fugitive named Hugo Ibbits, which occasioned a visit to Black Falls from a U.S. Marshal. It turned out that Ibbits was a former chiropractor who, six months before his death, skipped out of Fresno while awaiting trial on malpractice and insurance fraud charges. He had been a prominent player in a complex automobile insurance scam set up to finance the mass production of crystal methamphetamine, of which the ex-Dr. Ibbits was an addict.

After some initial confusion over the exact time line, the marshal was informed that Ibbits had not been held in the Black Falls lockup on a vagrancy charge over the long Columbus Day weekend, as was initially thought, but was released following a traffic stop late Friday afternoon. Witnesses who had claimed to see Bucky Pail handcuff and arrest the driver of a beat-up Ford Escort outside the Falls Diner three days before the late-Monday-night crash later changed their stories. Once the fugitive’s remains were proven conclusively to be Ibbits’s, the matter was considered closed.

Maddox said, “And another thing. I don’t know where Bucky was when his beeper went off tonight. But when I got up close to him, there was this smell.”

“Yeah?” grumbled Pinty. “Like corruption?”

“Like ammonia. Or cat piss. Same smell I got when the Zoo Lady pulled open the front door of Sinclair’s building.”

Pinty turned to him. “You’re saying?”

“Well, I finally got a call back this morning from the probation office. Sinclair’s caseworker is away on vacation for two weeks. That’s why we haven’t heard anything about him missing his court-ordered group sessions.” Maddox briefly considered telling Pinty about the footprints in Heavey’s backyard, the hand-rolled cigarette he had found in the trees. He decided Pinty was red-faced enough as it was. “Zoo Lady hasn’t seen him. Says she heard him upstairs. But then again...”

“Then again she’s the goddamn Zoo Lady.”

“The woman sings to her dogs to help them urinate in the street. And she’s one of the least crazy people in town.”

Pinty discovered his breakfast napkin and pulled it from the neck of his loose-collared, Cuban-style shirt. “You think they got onto him somehow? Maybe decided to finish what they started before that kook Frond got in their way?”

Maddox scowled at the mental image of that fidgety freak Sinclair, reminded once again that the future of the town and Pinty’s legacy rode on that skinny pervert’s shoulders.

18 Frond

Noises brought him back. Like a knuckle tap-tap-tapping on his consciousness. Randall Frond’s eyes fluttered open, only to have his forehead, brow, and lids slam down immediately again like a crash gate.

A smashing headache. He was hurt. He didn’t know how, yet — maybe badly — but he was not paralyzed.

He was restrained.

He heard the protest of the old mattress as he moved. He was tied up, facedown, on the bed in his spare room.

Okay. He was being robbed.

He had maybe forty dollars in cash in the kitchen downstairs. No television. No consumer electronics, other than his computer. Nothing thieves want.

His arms were pulled behind him, wrists bound by something cutting like wire or twine, also his ankles. He tried to twiddle his fingers, to see if he could get loose, but without circulation they were dead.

In T-shirt and boxers, he had just come out of the bathroom. He was taking quick little showers three times a day to keep the humidity from driving him mad — he owned only one window fan, no air conditioner — but it was a losing battle. Sweat popped from his pores as soon as he toweled off, which was when he had heard the loose board on the stairs. The third step from the top: he knew exactly where it was. Artists would occasionally drop by for him to take pictures of their wares, which he fronted for them on eBay, but unlike most others in town, Frond locked his doors. A real-world habit he had been unable to shake. He’d said, “Hello?” and stepped into the hallway with a stick of deodorant in his hand.

Rummaging. He heard that now. Near, on the other side of the wall. The bathroom? What were they looking for in there?

Water ran through the pipes. You could hear it wash all the way down into the basement. Creak, creak — the sound of the wooden towel rack.

Burglars who washed their hands?

He shut his eyes. He tried to journey to another place. He worried about freeing himself after they were gone. It could be days until someone else came by.

And what then? What could he do about this robbery? Call his friends at the police station?

What happened when the thieves didn’t find anything worth taking? What if they were messed up on drugs or something? What if they came back in here pissed off and wild? All they needed was one of these pillows. Hold it over his head, and in a minute or two he would be on to the next life. He was utterly vulnerable.

Panic rising, he started rocking himself. He wasn’t even aware at first, but then he began to rock in earnest, desperate to get his face off this soft comforter. His arms were numb and aching at the same time, almost like phantom limbs, as he tried to get some back-and-forth momentum.

He got too much. He rolled onto his arms and his tied-back feet, arching his belly, then tumbled off the bed, landing hard on his side with an “Ooof!” that knocked the wind out of him.

He was sucking for breath when he realized the rummaging had stopped.

Footsteps now. Leaving the bathroom, coming around through the hallway.

Oh God.

He regained his breath with a great and awful groan, lying there facing the underside of the bed, where his fireproof safe was.

The footsteps were in the room now. He could feel their weight on the floor. They were going to be pissed off. They were going to break his arms.

“I’m sorry,” Frond said. “I fell. I just fell. I’m sorry. Take anything you want.”

Silence. Maybe it was better not to hear the intruder’s voice. Good that he was facing away from the door.

“I know it’s not much. I don’t have much. Some cash in the creamer in the downstairs cupboard. I gave away everything when I moved up here.”

Waiting.

Nothing.

But in the awful silence, huge in the room, like an enormous bell without a clapper — something about the intruder’s malevolent presence, his barely heard breathing, gave Frond a sudden, terrible insight.

“Bucky Pail?” he said.

The footsteps moved. Coming toward him. Whispering on the maple floor, sneakers.

“Wait. Listen, Bucky. You wanted me out of town — I’ll go. Now. I swear, I’ll leave tonight. Not a word to anyone, I’ll just go—”

Hands seized his bent leg, smooth-fingered, almost without texture, dragging him from the bed.

“I promise,” Frond pleaded. “I’ll never tell anyone.”

His sweaty flesh squeaked against the floor varnish, creating a friction burn, until he bumped up over the raised threshold of the doorway onto the rough carpeting of the upstairs hall. The strange hands were dragging him to the top of the stairs.

“Wait! Please — I don’t know anything, I tell you. Listen to me. The state police. They said they were going to do something. They promised me, they said they were going to send someone.”

The dragging stopped. Frond was on his belly, the hands moving to his arms now. He was staring down the curving wooden stairs.

“But they never did! Don’t you see? They did nothing. It all came to nothing, and I–I was wrong. It was a stupid, stupid thing to do. Just please let me go, and I promise I’ll never say — No!”

The stairs upended, rushing at him, tumbling, pummeling. Unable to protect his head or his neck or any part of him, he fell like a screaming human football, the blows coming faster and faster until they stopped.

Frond faced the bottom step. He tasted blood and rug and his neck was wrenched, his breath groaning through it.

Footsteps again. Coming down.

Frond had a fun-house angle on the curved staircase and the man descending them. Black sneakers. Black pants, black shirt. Black hair, wild and long.

But his face. Mashed and deformed, nearly inhuman — yet, somehow, horribly familiar.

Frond tried to scream as freakishly smooth hands reached for his head.