The Lovers

CHAPTER ONE

THE FARADAY BOY HAD been missing for three days.

On the first day, nothing was done. After all, he was twenty-one, and young men of that age no longer had to abide by curfews and parental rules. Still, his behavior was out of character for him. Bobby Faraday was trustworthy. He was a graduate student, although he had taken a year off before deciding on the direction of his graduate studies in engineering, with talk of going abroad for a couple of months, or working for his uncle in San Diego. Instead, he had stayed in his hometown, saving money by living with his parents and banking as much of what he earned as he could, which was a little less than the previous year as he could now drink with impunity, and was maybe indulging that newfound liberty with more enthusiasm than might have been considered entirely wise. He’d had a couple of killer hangovers over New Year’s, that was for sure, and his old man had advised him to ease up before his liver started crying out for mercy, but Bobby was young, he was immortal, and he was in love, or had been until recently. Perhaps it would be truer to say that Bobby Faraday was still in love, but the object of his affection had moved on, leaving Bobby mired in his own emotions. The girl was why he had opted to remain in town instead of seeing a little more of the world, a decision that had been met with mixed feelings by his parents: gratitude on the part of his mother, disappointment on that of his father. There had been some arguments about it at the start, but now, as with two reluctant armies on the verge of an unwanted battle, a truce of kinds had been declared between father and son, although each side continued to watch the other warily to see which one might blink first. Meanwhile, Bobby drank, and his father fumed, but remained silent in the hope that the ending of the relationship might lead his son to broaden his horizons until grad school in the fall.

Despite his occasional overindulgences, Bobby was never late for work at the auto shop and gas station, and usually left a little later than he had to, because there was always something to be done, some task that he did not wish to abandon uncompleted, even if it could be finished quickly and easily in the morning. It was one of the reasons his father, whatever their disagreements, didn’t worry too much about his son &rsqd nð…uo;s future prospects: Bobby was too conscientious to leave the beaten track for long. He liked order, and always had. He’d never been one of those messy teenagers, either in appearance or in approach. It just wasn’t in his nature.

But he hadn’t come home the night before, and he hadn’t called to tell his parents where he might be, and that in itself was unusual. Then he didn’t make it to work the following morning, which was so out of character that Ron Nevill, who owned the gas station, called the Faraday house to check on the boy and make sure that he wasn’t ailing. His mother expressed surprise that her son wasn’t already at work. She’d simply assumed that he’d come home late and left early. She checked his bedroom, which lay just off the basement den. His bed had not been slept in, and there was no indication that he’d spent the night on the couch instead.

When there was no word by 3 P.M., she called her husband at work. Together they checked with Bobby’s friends, casual acquaintances, and his ex-girlfriend, Emily Kindler. That last call had been delicate, as she and Bobby had broken up only a couple of weeks before. His father suspected that this was the reason his son was drinking more than he should have, but he wouldn’t have been the first man who tried to drown love’s sorrows in a batch of alcohol. The trouble was that frustrated love was buoyant in booze: the more you tried to force it to the bottom, the more it insisted on bobbing right back up to the top.

Nobody had heard from Bobby, or had seen him, since the previous day. When 7 P.M. came and went, they called the police. The chief was skeptical. He was new in town, but familiar with the ways of young people. Nevertheless, he accepted that this was not typical behavior for Bobby Faraday, and that twenty-four hours had now gone by since he left the gas station, for Bobby had not hit any of the local bars after work, and Ron Nevill seemed to be the last person to have seen him. The chief put together a description of the boy at the Faraday house, borrowed a photograph that had been taken the previous summer, and informed local law enforcement and the state police of a possible missing person. None of the other agencies responded with any great urgency, for they were almost as cynical about the behavior of young males as the chief was, and in the case of one going missing, they tended to wait for seventy-two hours before assuming that there might be more to the disappearance than a simple case of booze, hormones, or domestic difficulties.

On the second day, his parents, and their friends, began an informal canvass of the town and its environs, with no result. When it began to grow dark, his mother and father returned home, but they did not sleep that night, just as they had not slept the night before. His mother lay in bed, her face turned toward the window, straining to hear the sound of approaching footsteps, the familiar tread of her only son returning to her at last. She stirred only slightly when she heard her husband rise and put on his robe.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m going to make some tea, sit up for a while.” He paused. “You want some?”

But she knew that he was asking only out of politeness, that he would prefer it if she stayed where she was. He did not want them to sit at the kitchen table in silence, together but apart, the fears of one feeding those of the other. He wanted to be alone. So she let him go, and when the bedroom door closed behind him, she began toRon qhe began cry.

On the third day, the formal search began.

The golden host moved as one, countless shapes bending obediently in unison at the gentle touch of the late-winter breeze, like a congregation at church bowing in accordance with the progress of the service, awaiting the moment of consecration that is to come.

They whispered to themselves, a soft, low susurrus that might have been the crashing of distant waves were such an alien noise not unknown in this landlocked place. The paleness of them was dappled in spots by small flowers of red and orange and blue, a scattering of petals upon an ocean of seed and stem.

The host had been spared the reaping, and had grown tall, too tall, even as the crop decayed. A season’s grain had gone to waste, for the old man upon whose land the host was gathered had died the previous summer, and his relatives were fighting over the sale of the property and how the proceeds would be divided. While they fought, the host had stretched skyward, a sea of dull gold in the depths of winter, speaking in hushed tones of what lay, rush hemmed and undiscovered, nearby.

And yet the host, it seemed, was at peace.

Suddenly, the breeze dropped for an instant and the host stood erect, as though troubled by the change, sensing that all was not as it had been, and then the wind rose again, more tempestuous now, transforming into smaller, dispersed gusts that divided the host with ripples and eddies, their caresses less delicate than what had gone before. Unity was replaced by confusion. Scattered fragments were caught in the sunlight before they fell to the ground. The whispering grew louder, drowning the calling of a solitary bird with rumors of approach.

A black shape appeared upon the horizon, like a great insect hovering over the stalks. It grew in stature, becoming the head, shoulders, and body of a man, passing between the rows of wheat while, ahead of him, a smaller form cleaved invisibly through the stalks, sniffing and yelping as it went, the first intruders upon the host’s territory since the old man had died.

A second figure came into view, heavier than the first. This one seemed to be struggling with the terrain and with the unaccustomed exercise that his participation in the search had forced upon him. In the distance, but farther to the east, the two men could see other searchers. Somehow, they had drifted away from the main pack, although that itself had diminished as the day wore on. Already the light was fading. Soon it would be time to call a halt, and there would be fewer of them to search in the days that followed.

They had begun that morning, immediately after Sunday services. The searchers had congregated at the Catholic church, St. Jude’s, since that had the largest yard and, curiously, the smallest congregation, a contradiction that Peyton Carmichael, the man with the dog, had never quite understood. Perhaps, he figured, they were expecting a mass conversion at some point in the future, which made him wonder if Catholics were just more optimistic than other folks.

The chief of police and his men had divided the township into grids, and the townspeople themselves into groups, and had assigned each group an area to search. Sandwiches, potato chips, and sodas in brown bags had been provided by the various churches, although most people had brought food and water of their own, just in case. In a break with Sunday tradition, none had dressed up in the usual finery. Instead, they woe s qad, theyre loose shirts and old pants, and battered boots or comfortable sneakers. Some carried sticks, others garden rakes to search in the undergrowth. There was an air of subdued expectation, a kind of excitement despite the task before them. They shared rides, and drove out to their assigned areas. As each area was searched, and nothing found, another was suggested either by the cops who were coordinating the efforts on the ground, or by contacting the base of operations that had been set up in the hall behind the church.

It had been unseasonably warm when they began, a curious false thaw that would soon end, and the difficulty of coping with soft ground and melting snow had sapped the strength of many before they took a break for lunch at about one or one thirty. Some of the older people had returned home at that stage, content to have made some effort for the Faradays, but the rest continued with the search. After all, the next day was Monday. There would be work to do, obligations to be met. This day was the only one that they could spare to look for the boy, and the best would have to be made of it. But as the light had grown dim, so too the day had grown colder, and Peyton was grateful that he had not left his Timberland jacket in the car but had chosen to tie it around his waist until it was needed.

He whistled at his dog, a three-year-old spaniel named Molly, and waited, once again, for his companion to catch up. Artie Hoyt: of all the people with whom he had to end up. Relations between the two men had been cool for the last year or more, ever since Artie had caught Peyton eyeing his daughter’s ass at church. It didn’t matter to Artie that he hadn’t seen exactly what he thought he’d seen. Yes, Peyton had been looking at his daughter’s ass, but not out of any feelings of lust or attraction. Not that he was above such base impulses: at times, the pastor’s sermons were so dull that the only thing keeping Peyton awake was the sight of young, lithe female forms draped in their Sunday best. Peyton was long past the age when he might have been troubled by the potential implications for his immortal soul of such carnal thoughts in church. He figured that God had better things to worry about than whether Peyton Carmichael, sixty-four, widower, was paying more attention to objects of female beauty than he was to the old blowhard at the pulpit, a man who, in Peyton’s opinion, possessed less Christian charity than the average alligator. As Peyton’s doctor liked to tell him, live a life of wine, women, and song, all in moderation but always of the proper vintage. Peyton’s wife had died three years earlier, taken by breast cancer, and although there were plenty of women in town of the correct vintage who might have been prepared to offer Peyton some comfort on a winter’s evening, he just wasn’t interested. He had loved his wife. Occasionally he was still lonely, although less often than before, but those feelings of loneliness were specific, not general: he missed his wife, not female company, and he viewed the occasional pleasure that he took in the sight of a young, good-looking woman merely as a sign that he was not entirely dead below the waist. God, having taken his wife from him, could allow him that small indulgence. If God was going to make a big deal of it, then, well, Peyton would have a few words for Him too, when eventually they met.

The problem with Artie Hoyt’s daughter was that, although she was young, she was by no means good looking. Neither was she lithe. In fact, she was the opposite of lithe and, come to think of it, the opposite of light too. She’d never been what you might call svelte, but then she had left town and gone to live in Baltimore, and by the time she came back she’d piled on the pounds. Now, when she walked into church, Peyton was sure that he felt the floor led q the flotremble slightly beneath her feet. If she were any bigger, she’d have to enter sideways; that, or they’d be forced to widen the aisles.

And so, the first Sunday after she’d returned to the parental home, she had entered the chapel with her mom and dad and Peyton had found himself staring in appalled fascination at her ass, jiggling under a red-and-white floral dress like an earthquake in a rose garden. His jaw might even have been hanging open when he turned to find Artie Hoyt glaring at him, and after that, well, things had never been quite the same between them. They hadn’t been close before the incident, but at least they’d been civil when their paths had crossed. Now they rarely exchanged even a nod of greeting, and they hadn’t spoken to each other until fate, and the missing Faraday boy, had forced them together. They’d been part of a group of eight that had started out in the morning, quickly falling to six after old Blackwell and his wife seemed set to pass out and had, reluctantly, turned back for home, then five, four, three, until now it was just Artie and him.

Peyton didn’t understand at first why Artie didn’t just give up and go home himself. Even the modest pace that Peyton and Molly were setting seemed too much for him, and they had been forced to stop repeatedly to allow Artie to catch his breath and gulp water from the bottle that he was carrying in his rucksack. It had taken Peyton a while to figure out that Artie wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he’d kept searching while Artie had faded, even if the other man were to die in the attempt. With that in mind, Peyton had taken a malicious pleasure in forcing the pace for a time, until he acknowledged that his needless cruelty was rendering null and void his earlier efforts at worship and penitence, the occasional glance at young women notwithstanding.

They were nearing the boundary fence between this property and the next, a field of fallow, overgrown land with a small pond at its center sheltered by trees and rushes. Peyton had only a little water left, and Molly was thirsty. He figured he could water her at the pond, then call it a day. He couldn’t see Artie objecting, just as long as it was Peyton who suggested quitting, and not him.

“Let’s head into the field there and check it out,” said Peyton. “I need to get water for the dog anyway. After that, we can cut back onto the road and take an easy walk back to the cars. Okay with you?”

Artie nodded. He walked to the fence, rested his hands upon it, and tried to hoist himself up and over. He got one foot off the ground, but the other wouldn’t join it. He simply didn’t have the strength to continue. Peyton thought he looked like he wanted to lie down and die, but he didn’t. There was something admirable about his refusal to give up, even if it had less to do with any concerns about Bobby Faraday than his anger at Peyton Carmichael. Eventually, though, he was forced to admit defeat, and landed back down on the same side on which he’d started.

“Goddammit,” he said.

“Hold up,” said Peyton. “I’ll boost you over.”

“I can do it,” said Artie. “Just give me a minute to catch my breath.”

“Come on. Neither of us is as young as he was. I’ll help you over, and then you can give me a hand up from the other side. No sense in both of us killing ourselves just to prove a point.”

Artie considered the proposal and nodded his agreement. Peyton tied Molly’s leash to the fence, in case she caught a scent and decided to make a break for freedom, then leaned down and cupped his hands so that Artie could put one booted foot into his grip. When the boot was in place, and Artie’s hold on the fence seemed secure, Peyton pushed up. Either he was stronger than he thought, which was possible, or Artie was lighter than he looked, which seemed unlikely, but, either way, Peyton ended up almost catapulting Artie over the fence. Only the judicious hooking of his left leg and right arm on the slats saved Artie from an awkward landing on the other side.

“The hell was that?” asked Artie once he had climbed down and had both feet on firm ground once again.

“Sorry,” said Peyton. He was trying not to laugh, and only partially succeeding.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know what you’re eating, but I could sure do with some of it.”

Peyton began climbing the fence. He was in good condition for a man of his age, a fact that gave him no little pleasure. Artie reached a hand up to steady him and, although Peyton didn’t need it, he took it anyway.

“Funny,” said Peyton, as he stepped down from the fence, “but I don’t eat so much anymore. I used to have a hell of an appetite, but now some breakfast and a snack in the evening does me just fine. I even had to make an extra hole in my belt to stop my damn pants from falling down.”

There was an unreadable expression on Artie Hoyt’s face as he glanced down at his own belly and reddened slightly. Peyton winced.

“I didn’t mean anything by that, Artie,” he said quietly. “When Rina was alive, I weighed thirty pounds more than I do now. She fed me up like she was going to slaughter me for Christmas. Without her…”

He trailed off and looked away.

“Don’t talk to me about it,” said Artie after a moment had passed. He appeared anxious to keep the conversation going, now that the long silence between them had at last been broken. “My wife doesn’t believe it’s food unless it’s deep fried, or comes in a bun. I think she’d deep-fry candy if she could.”

“They do that in some places,” Peyton said.

“You don’t say?” Artie looked mildly disgusted. “Jesus, don’t tell her that. Chocolate’s the closest that she gets to health food as it is.”

They began walking toward the pond. Peyton let Molly off the leash. He knew that she had sensed the presence of water, and he didn’t want to torment her by forcing her to walk at their pace. The dog raced ahead, a streak of brown and white, and soon was lost from sight in the tall grass.

“Nice dog,” said Artie.

“Thank you,” said Peyton. “She’s a good girl. She’s like a child to me, I guess.”

“Yeah,” said Artie. He knew that Peyton and his wife had not been blessed with children.

“Look, Artie,” said Peyton, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to say for a while.”

He paused as he tried to find the right words, then took a deep breath and plowed right in.

“In church, that time, after Lydia had come home, I-Well, I wanted to apologize for staring at her, you know, her…”

“Ass,” finished Artie.

“Yeah, that. I’m sorry, is all I wanted to say. It wasn’t right. Especially in church. Wasn’t Christian. It wasn’t what you might think, though.”

Suddenly, Peyton realized that he had wandered onto marshy ground, conversationally speaking. He now faced the possibility of being forced to explain both what he believed Artie might have thought Peyton was thinking, and what, in fact, he, Peyton, had been thinking, which was that Artie Hoyt’s daughter looked like the Hindenburg just before it crashed.

“She’s a big girl,” said Artie sadly, saving Peyton from further embarrassment. “It’s not her fault. Her marriage broke up, and the doctors gave her pills for depression, and she suddenly started to put on all this weight. Doesn’t help that she eats enough for two, but that’s part of it, you know, the eating. She gets sad, she eats more, she gets sadder, she eats even more. It’s a vicious cycle. I don’t blame you for staring at her. Hell, she wasn’t my daughter, I’d stare at her that way too. In fact, sometimes, it shames me to say, I do stare at her that way.”

“Anyway, I’m sorry,” said Peyton. “It wasn’t…kind.”

“Apology accepted,” said Artie. “Buy me a drink next time we’re in Dean’s.”

He put his hand out, and the two men shook. Peyton patted Artie on the back. He felt his eyes water slightly, and blamed it on his exertions.

“How about I buy you a beer when we’re done here? I could do with something to toast the end of a long day.”

“Agreed. Let’s water your dog and get the-”

He stopped. They were within sight of the sheltered pond. It had been a popular trysting spot, once upon a time, when both Artie and Peyton were much younger men, until the land changed hands and the new owner, the God-fearing man whose estate was now being fought over by his godless relatives, had let it be known that he didn’t want any adolescent voyages of sexual discovery being embarked upon in the vicinity of his pond. A large beech tree over-hung the water, its branches almost touching the surface. Molly was standing a small distance from it. She had not drunk the water. She had, in fact, stopped several feet from the bank. Now she was waiting, one paw raised, her tail wagging uncertainly. Through the rushes, something blue was visible to the approaching men.

Bobby Faraday was kneeling by the water’s edge, his upper body at a slight angle, as though he were trying to glimpse his reflection in the pool. There was a rope around his neck, attached to the trunk of the tree. He was swollen with gas, his face a reddish-purple, his features almost unrecognizable.

“Ah, hell,” said Peyton.

He wavered slightly, and Artie reached up and put his arm around his companion’s shoulder as the sun set behind them, and the wind blew, and the host bowed low in mour hi qlow in mning.

CHAPTER TWO

I TOOK THE TRAIN to Pearl River from Penn Station. I hadn’t driven down to New York from Maine, and I hadn’t bothered to rent a car while I was in the city. There was no need. Whatever I needed to do here, I could do more easily without an automobile. As the little single-car train pulled into the station, still barely altered from its origins as a branch of the Erie Railroad, I saw that any other changes to the heart of the town were also purely cosmetic. I climbed down and walked slowly across Memorial Park where a sign close to the unmanned Town of Orangetown police booth announced that Pearl River was still the town of friendly people. The park had been created by Julius E. Braunsdorf, the father of Pearl River, who had also laid out the town itself after purchasing the land, as well as building the railroad station, manufacturing the Aetna sewing machine and the America & Liberty printing press, developing an incandescent lightbulb, and inventing the electric arc light that illuminated, not just this park, but the Capitol area in Washington, D.C. Braunsdorf was one of those guys who made most people look kind of sluggish by comparison. Along with Dan Fortmann of the Chicago Bears, he was Pearl River ’s proudest boast.

The Stars and Stripes still flew over the memorial at the center of the park, commemorating the young men of the town who had died in combat. Curiously, these included James B. Moore and Siegfried W. Butz, who had died, not in combat, but in the course of a bank raid in 1929, when Henry J. Fernekes, a notorious bandit of the time, tried to hold up the First National Bank of Pearl River while masquerading as an electrician. Still, at least they were remembered. Murdered bank clerks don’t often qualify for a mention on public memorials anymore.

Pearl River hadn’t shaken off any of its Irish roots since I’d left. The Muddy Brook Café at North Main, on the far side of the park, still offered a Celtic breakfast, and nearby were Gallagher’s Irish butcher, the Irish Cottage gift store, and Healy-O’Sullivan Travel. Across East Central Avenue, next door to Handeler’s hardware store, was the Ha’penny Irish Shop, which sold Irish tea, candy, potato chips, and replica Gaelic football jerseys, and around the corner from the old Pearl Street Hotel was G. F. Noonan’s Irish bar. As my father often remarked, they should just have painted the whole town green and been done with it. The Pearl River movie theater was now closed, though, and there were chichi stores selling crafts and expensive gifts alongside the more functional auto shops and furniture stores.

It seems to me now that I spent all of my childhood in Pearl River, but that was not the case. We moved there when I was nearly eight, once my father had begun to tire of the long commute into the city from farther upstate, where he and my mother lived cheaply thanks to a house left to my father when his own mother died. It was particularly hard for him when he worked his week of 8:00 to 4:00 tours, which were, in reality, 7:00 to 3:30 tours. He would rise at five in the morning, sometimes even earlier, to make his trek in to the Ninth, a violent precinct that occupied less than one square mile on the Lower East Side but accounted for up to seventy-five homicides every year. On those weeks, my mother and I barely saw him. Not that the other tours on each six-week cycle were much better. He was required to do one week of 8:00 to 4:00, one week of 4:00 to 12:00, anotheren k of 4:† week of 8:00 to 4:00, two weeks of 4:00 to 12:00 (on those weeks, I saw him only at weekends, for he was sleeping when I left for school in the morning, and gone to work by the time I returned), and one mandatory 12:00 midnight to 8:00 tour, which screwed up his body clock so badly he would sometimes be almost delirious with tiredness by the end of it.

The Ninth worked what was called a “nine-squad chart,” nine squads of nine men, each with a sergeant, a system that dated back to the fifties and was eventually eliminated in the eighties, taking with it much of the camaraderie that it engendered. My father’s sergeant in the First Squad was a man named Larry Costello, and it was he who suggested that my father should consider moving down to Pearl River. It was where all the Irish cops lived, a town that claimed the second largest St. Patrick’s Day parade in the state after Manhattan. It was comparatively wealthy too, with an average income that was almost twice the national average, and an air of comfortable prosperity. So it had enough off-duty cops to form a police state; it had money; and it had its own identity defined by common bonds of nationality. Even though my father was not himself Irish, he was Catholic, knew many of the men who lived in Pearl River, and was comfortable with them. My mother raised no objections to the move. If it gave her more time with her husband, and relieved him of some of the stress and strain that was, by then, so clearly etched on his face, she would have moved to a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarp and made the best of it.

So we went south, and because all that subsequently went wrong in our lives was, for me, tied in with Pearl River, the town came to dominate the memories of my childhood. We bought a house on Franklin Avenue, close to the corner of John Street where the United Methodist Church still stands. It was a “fixer-upper,” in the peculiar language of Realtors: the old lady who had lived in it for most of her life had recently died, and there was nothing to suggest that she had done much with the house, other than occasionally move a broom across the floors, since 1950. But it was a bigger house than we could otherwise have afforded, and something about the lack of fences, the open yards between properties on the street, appealed to my father. It gave him a sense of space, of community. The notion of good fences making good neighbors was not one that held much currency in Pearl River. Instead, there were those in the town who found the concept of a fence mildly troubling: a sign of disengagement, perhaps, of otherness.

My mother immersed herself in the life of the town. If there was a committee, she joined it. For a woman who, in most of my early memories of her, seemed so self-contained, so distant from her peers, it was an astonishing transformation. My father probably wondered if she was having an affair, but it was nothing more than the reaction of someone who found herself in a better place than she had previously been, with a husband who was more contented than he’d been before, although she still fretted when he left the house each day, and responded with barely concealed relief when he returned home unharmed after each tour.

My mother: now, as I trawled through the details of our life in that place, my relationship with her began to seem less and less normal, if that word can ever truly be used about the interactions of families. If she had sometimes appeared disconnected from her peers, so too was she often at one remove from my father, and from me. It wasn’t that she withheld affection, or did not cherish me. She delighted in my triumphs, and consoled me in my defeats. She listened, and counseled, and loved. But it seemed to me that, for much of my childhood, she acted in response to my promptings. Ifh t�omptings. I came to her, she would do all of those things, yet she did not initiate them. It was as though I were an experiment of sorts, a creature in a cage, something to be monitored and watched, to be fed and watered and given the affection and stimulation to ensure my survival, yet no more than that.

Or perhaps that was just a game memory was playing on me as I churned up the mud in the reservoir of the past and, when the dirt had settled, picked my way across the bottom to see what had been exposed.

After the killings, and what followed, she fled north to Maine, taking me with her, back to the place in which she had grown up. Until she died, when I was still in college, she refused to discuss in any detail the events that had led up to my father’s death. She retreated into herself, and there found only the cancer that would take her life, slowly colonizing the cells of her body like bad memories canceling out the good. I now wonder how long it had been waiting for her, if grave emotional injury might somehow have triggered a physical response, so that she was betrayed on two fronts: by her husband, and by her own body. If that was so, then the cancer began its work in the months before I was born. In my way, I was the stimulus as much as my father’s actions, for one was a consequence of the other.

The house had not changed much, although crumbling paintwork, upper windows streaked with grime, and broken shingles like dark, chipped teeth spoke of a degree of neglect. The color was slightly different, a paler gray than it had been when I lived there, but the yard was still unfenced, like those of the rest of its neighbors. The porch had been screened since last I had seen it, and a rocking chair and a rattan couch, both bare of cushions, faced the street. The window and door frames were now painted black instead of white, and there was only lawn where once there had been carefully tended flower beds, the grass thin and straggling where it was visible through banked and frozen snow, yet this was still recognizably the place in which I had grown up. A drape moved in what used to be the living room, and I saw an old man staring curiously at me. I dipped my chin in acknowledgment of his presence, and he receded into the shadows.

Above the front door was a double window, one pane broken and patched with cardboard, where a boy would sit and gaze out at the small town that was his world. Something of myself had been left in that room after my father died: a degree of innocence, perhaps, or the last remnant of childhood. It had been taken from me in the sound of a gunshot, forcing me to shed it like a reptile skin, or the pupal shell of an insect. I could almost see him, this little ghost: a figure with dark hair and narrow eyes, too introspective for his age, too solitary. He had friends, but he had never overcome the feeling that he was imposing upon them when he called to their houses, and that they did him a favor by playing games with him, or inviting him inside to watch TV. It was easier when they went out as a gang, playing softball in the park in summer, or soccer if Danny Yates, who was the only person he knew who was enthusiastic about the Cosmos and had Shoot! magazine sent over to him by an uncle stationed with the air force in England, was back from summer camp, or had yet to leave. Danny was older than the rest of them by a couple of years, and they deferred to him in most things.

I wondered where most of those former friends were now (none of them black, for Pearl River was a lily-white town, and we only encountered black kids at varsity games). I had lost touch with them after we left for Maine, but some were probably still living here. After all, Pearl River -clannish, fiercely protective of its own-was the kind of in� the kind place that became home to generations. Bobby Gretton had lived two doors down on the other side of the street. His parents drove only Chevys, and kept each car for a maximum of two years before trading it in for a newer model. I looked to my left and saw a brown Chevy Uplander in the drive of what had always been the Gretton house. There was a fading bumper sticker on the rear of the car supporting Obama for president in ’08, and beside it a yellow ribbon. The car had veterans’ plates. That was Mr. Gretton for sure.

The light changed at my old bedroom window, a cloud scudding overhead giving the impression of movement within, and I felt again the presence of the boy I once was. There he sat, waiting for the first sight of his returning father, or perhaps a glimpse of Carrie Gottlieb, who lived across the street. Carrie was three years older than he, and generally considered to be the most beautiful girl in Pearl River, although there were those who whispered that she knew it too, and that that knowledge made her less attractive and personable than other, more modestly endowed and self-effacing young women. Such mutterings did not concern the boy. It did not concern many of the boys in town. It was Carrie Gottlieb’s very separateness, the sense that she walked through life on pedestals erected solely for her own purposes, that made her so desirable. Had she been more down-to-earth and less self-assured, their interest in her would have been considerably diminished.

Carrie went off to the city to become a model. Her mother would tell anyone who stood still for long enough about how Carrie was destined to adorn fashion spreads and television screens, but in the months and years that followed, no such images of Carrie appeared, and in time her mother stopped speaking of her daughter in that way. When asked by others (usually with a glint in their eye, sensing blood in the water) how Carrie was getting along, she would reply, “Fine, just fine,” her smile slightly strained as she moved the conversation on to safer ground or, if the questioner persisted, simply moved herself along instead. In time, I heard that Carrie came back to Pearl River and got a job as the hostess in a restaurant, eventually becoming the manager after she and the owner got married. She was still beautiful, but the city had taken its toll on her, and her smile was less certain than it once had been. Nevertheless, she had returned to Pearl River, and she bore the loss of her dreams with a certain grace, and people admired her for it, and maybe liked her a little more than before because of it. She was one of them, and she was home, and when she visited her parents on Franklin Avenue the ghost of a boy saw her, and smiled.

My father was not a big man compared to some of his fellow officers, barely making the NYPD’s height requirement and slighter in build than they were. To my boyhood self, though, he seemed like an imposing figure, especially when he wore his uniform, with the four-inch Smith & Wesson hanging on his belt, and his buttons gleaming against the deep, dark blue of his clothing.

“What are you gonna be when you grow up?” he would ask me, and I would always reply: “A cop.”

“And what kind of cop will you be?”

“A New York cop. N! Y! P! D!”

“And what kind of New York cop will you be?”

“A good one. The best.”

And my father would ruffle my hair, the flip side of the light cuff he would dispense whenever I did something that displeased him. Never a slap, never a punch: it wply� punch: ias enough to cuff the back of my head with his hard, callused palm, a signal that a line had been over-stepped. Further punishments would sometimes follow: grounding, the withholding of my allowance for a week or two, but the cuff was the danger sign. It was the final warning, and it was the only kind of physical violence, however mild, that I associated with my father until the day the two teenagers died.

Some of my friends, tired of living in a town defined by cops, were wary of my father. Frankie Murrow, in particular, used to curl in upon himself like a startled snail whenever my father was around. Frankie’s father was a security guard at a mall, so maybe it was something about uniforms and the men who wore them. Frankie’s father was a jerk, and perhaps Frankie just assumed that other men who wore uniforms and protected things were likely to be jerks too. Frankie’s father had asked him if he was a fag when, at the age of seven, Frankie had gone to take his father’s hand as they prepared to cross the road. Mr. Murrow was a “royal sonofabitch,” as my father had once put it. Mr. Murrow hated blacks and Jews and Hispanics, and he had a string of derogatory terms on the tip of his tongue for every one of them. He hated most white people too, though, so it wasn’t as if he was a racist. He was just good at hating.

At the age of fourteen, Frankie Murrow was put in reform school for arson. He’d burned his own house down while his old man was at work. He’d timed it pretty well, so that Mr. Murrow was turning onto his street just as the fire engines were arriving behind him. Frankie was sitting on the wall of the house opposite, watching the flames rise and laughing and crying at the same time.

My father was not a heavy drinker. He didn’t need alcohol to help him relax. He was the calmest man I had ever known, which made the relationship between him and his partner, and closest friend, Jimmy Gallagher, so difficult for the boy to understand. Jimmy, who always walked near the head of the town’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, who bled Irish green and cop blue, was all smiles, and almost-playful punches. He was taller than my father by three or four inches, and broader too. If they stood side by side on those occasions when Jimmy came to the house, my father would look a little embarrassed, as though he felt himself to be somehow wanting when compared to his friend. Jimmy would kiss and hug my mother as soon as he arrived, the only man, apart from her husband, who was permitted such intimacies, and then he would turn to me.

“There he is,” he would say. “There’s the man.”

Jimmy wasn’t married. He said that he had never met the right woman, but he’d enjoyed meeting a lot of the wrong ones. It was an old joke, and he used it often, but my mother and father would always laugh, even though they knew it was a lie. Women didn’t interest Jimmy Gallagher, although it would be many years before I understood that. I often wondered how difficult it must have been for Jimmy, keeping up a front for all those years, flirting with women in order to fit in. Jimmy Gallagher, who could make the most incredible pizzas from scratch, who could cook a banquet to please a king (or so I had once heard my father tell my mother) but who, when he hosted a poker game at his house, or had his buddies around to watch a ball game (because Jimmy, being single, could always afford the best and most modern TVs), would feed them nachos and beer, potato chips and store-bought TV dinners or, if the weather was good, cook steaks and burgers on the barbecue. And I sensed, even then, that while my father might have spoken too d�ve spoken my mother of Jimmy’s secret culinary skills, he did not make such references carelessly among his brother cops.

Jimmy would take my hand and shake it just a little too hard, testing his strength. I had learned not to wince when this occurred, for then Jimmy would say, “Ah, he has a way to go yet,” and shake his head in mock disappointment. But if my face remained still, and I returned the grip as best I could, Jimmy would smile and slip me a dollar, with the admonition: “Don’t spend it all on booze, now.”

I didn’t spend it all on booze. In fact, until I turned fifteen, I didn’t spend any of it on booze. I spent it on candy and comic books, or saved it for our summer vacation in Maine, when we would stay with my grandfather in Scarborough and I would be taken to Old Orchard Beach and allowed to run riot on the rides. As I grew older, though, booze became a more attractive option. Carrie Gottlieb’s brother, Phil, who worked for the railroad and was believed to be of slightly subnormal intelligence, was known to be willing to buy beer for underage kids in return for one bottle out of every six. One evening, two of my friends and I pooled our cash for a couple of six-packs of PBR that Phil picked up for us, and we drank most of them in the woods one night. I had liked the taste less than the frisson of pleasure I experienced from breaking both the law and a rule of the house, for my father had made it clear to me that there was to be no drinking until he said it was okay. Like young men the world over, I took this and other rules to refer only to things about which my father knew, since, if he didn’t know about them, then they couldn’t possibly be of any consequence to him.

Unfortunately, I had brought home one of the bottles and stashed it in the back of my closet for future use, which was where it was found by my mother. I’d taken a cuff on the head for that, and was grounded, and required to take an involuntary vow of poverty for at least a month. That afternoon, which was a Sunday, Jimmy Gallagher had come by the house. It was Jimmy’s birthday, and he and my father were going to hit the town, as they always did when one of them celebrated another year of not being shot, stabbed, beaten to a pulp, or run over. He had smiled mockingly at me, a dollar bill held between the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

“All those years,” he said, “and you never listened.”

And I had answered sullenly: “I did listen. I didn’t spend it all on booze.”

Even my father had been forced to laugh.

But Jimmy still didn’t give me the dollar, and after that he never gave me money again. He never got the chance. Six months later, my father was dead, and Jimmy Gallagher stopped coming around with dollar bills in his hand.

They had questioned my father after the killing, for he admitted his involvement as soon as they confronted him. They treated him sympathetically, trying to understand what had taken place so that they could begin to limit the damage. He had ended up at the Orangetown PD, since the local cops were the primaries. IAD had been involved, as had an investigator from the Rockland County DA’s office, a retired NYPD cop himself who knew how these things were done, and who would smooth the feathers of the local boys prior to taking over the investigation.

My father had called my mother shortly after they came for him, ana m� for him,d told her of what he had done. Later, a courtesy call was paid to the house by a pair of local cops. One of them was Jimmy Gallagher’s nephew, who worked out of Orangetown. Earlier that evening, when he was not yet on duty, he had come to our house in his casual clothes and had sat in our kitchen. He had a gun on his belt. He and my mother had pretended that it was merely a casual visit, but he had stayed too long for that, and I had seen the tension on my mother’s face as she served him coffee and cake that he barely touched. Now, as he stood again in our house, this time in uniform, I understood that his earlier presence had been connected to the shootings, but I did not yet know how.

Jimmy’s nephew confirmed for her all that had occurred, or appeared to have occurred, on the patch of waste ground just a short distance from the house, without ever referring to the fact that it was his second visit to the house that evening. She had wanted to join her husband, to offer him support, but he told her that there would be no point. The questioning would go on for some time, and then he would probably be suspended on full pay pending an investigation. He would be home soon, he promised her. Sit tight. Keep an eye on the boy. Tell him nothing for now. It’s up to you, but, you understand, it might be better to wait until we all know more…

I heard her crying after my father’s call, and I went to her. I stood before my mother, dressed in my pajamas, and said:

“What’s wrong? Mom, what’s the matter?”

She had looked at me, and for a moment I felt sure that she had failed to recognize me. She was upset and in shock. What my father had done had frozen her responses, so that I seemed to her a stranger. Only that could explain the coldness of her stare, the distance it placed between us, as though the air had frozen solid, cutting us off from each other. I had seen that expression on her face before, but only at the worst of times, when I had done something so terrible that she was unable to bring herself to speak: the theft of money from her kitchen fund, or, in an abortive attempt to create a bobsled for my G.I. Joe, the destruction of a plate bequeathed to her by her grandmother.

There was, I thought, blame in her eyes.

“Mom?” I said again, uncertain now, frightened. “Is it Dad? Is he okay?”

And she found it in herself to nod, her upper teeth clamped down hard on her lower lip, so hard that, when she spoke, I saw blood against the white.

“He’s okay. There was a shooting.”

“Was he hurt?”

“No, but some people…Some people died. They’re talking to your father about it.”

“Did Dad shoot them?”

But she would not say anything more.

“Go back to bed,” she said. “Please.”

I did as I was told, but I could not sleep. My father, the man who could barely bring himself to cuff the back of my head, had drawn his gun and killed someone. I was sure of it.

I wondered if my father would get into trouble because of it.

Eventually, they released him. Two IAD goons escorted him home, then sat outside reading the newspapers. I watched them all from my wwhe�ll from mindow. My father looked old and crumpled as he walked up the garden path. His face was unshaven. He glanced up at the window and saw me there. He raised his hand in greeting and tried to smile. I waved back, but I did not smile, before leaving my room.

My father was holding my mother tightly as she wept against him, and I heard him say: “He told us they might come.”

I waited halfway down the stairs, holding my breath.

“But how could that be?” my mother asked. “How could it be the same people?”

“I don’t know, but it was. I saw them. I heard what they said.”

My mother began to cry again, but the tone had changed: it was now a high keening, the sound of someone breaking apart. It was as though a dam had burst inside her, and all that she had kept hidden away was now pouring through the breach, sweeping away the life she once had in a great torrent of grief and violence. Later, I would wonder if, had she managed to hold herself together, she might have been able to prevent what happened next, but she was so caught up in her own sorrow that she failed to see that, in killing those two young people, her husband had destroyed something crucial to his own existence in the process. He had murdered a pair of unarmed teenagers, and, despite what he had said to her, he was not sure why; that, or he was unable to live with the possibility that what he had told her was true. He was tired, wearier than he had ever been. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to sleep and never wake up.

They became aware of my presence, and my father removed his right arm from around my mother, and welcomed me into their embrace. We remained that way for a minute until my father patted us both on the back.

“Come on,” he said. “We can’t stay like this all day.”

“Are you hungry?” my mother asked, wiping her eyes on her apron. There was no emotion to her voice now, as though, having given vent to her pain, she had nothing else left to give.

“Sure. Eggs would be good. Bacon and eggs. You want some bacon and eggs, Charlie?”

I nodded, although I was not hungry. I wanted to be near my father.

“You should take a shower, change your clothes,” my mother said.

“I’ll do that. I just need to do something else first. You worry about those eggs.”

“Toast?”

“Toast would be good. Wheat, if you have it.”

My mother began bustling around the kitchen. When her back was to us, my father held my shoulder tightly and said:

“It’ll all be fine, understand? You help your mother, now. Make sure she’s okay.”

He left us. The back door opened, then closed again. My mother paused and listened, like a dog sensing some disturbance, then returned to heating the oil in the pan.

She had just broken the first egg when we heard the shot.

CHAPTER THREE

THE MOVEMENT OF THE clouds against the sun caused the light to change rapidly, disconcertingly, brightness briefly fading to a wintry dusk in the blink of an eye, a taste of the greater darkness that would soon encroach. The front door opened and the old man appeared on his doorstep. He was wearing a hooded jacket, but he still had his slippers on his feet. He trotted to the end of the path and stopped at the edge of his property, his toes lined up with the lawn, as though the sidewalk were a body of water and he was fearful of falling from the bank.

“Can I help you with something, son?” he called.

Son.

I crossed the street. He tensed slightly, wondering now if it had been such a good idea to confront a stranger after all. He glanced down at his slippers, probably thinking that he should have taken the time to put on his boots. He would have felt less vulnerable in boots.

Up close, I could see that he was seventy or more. He was a small, fragile-looking man and, I imagined, he had always been that way; he did not carry himself like one who had once been significantly bigger and fitter, yet he had enough inner strength and confidence to face down an unknown man who was staking out his home. There were men younger than he was who would simply have called the police. His eyes were brown and rheumy, but the skin on his face was relatively unwrinkled for someone of his age. It was especially taut around his eye sockets and cheekbones, giving the impression that his skin had begun to shrink, not loosen, against his skull.

“I once lived here, in this house,” I said.

Some of the wariness left him.

“You one of the Harrington boys?” he asked, squinting as he tried to identify me. There were marks on either side of his nose from the spectacles he usually wore. Perhaps he had decided to leave them inside in order to make himself appear less frail than he was.

“No, I’m not.”

I didn’t even know who the Harringtons were. The people who bought the house after we left were named Bildner. They were a young couple, with a baby daughter. But then, over a quarter of a century had passed since I had last seen the house. I had no idea how many times it might have changed hands over the years.

“Huh. What’s your name, son?”

And each time he said that word, I heard the echo of my father’s voice.

“Parker,” I said. “Charlie Parker.”

“Parker,” he repeated, chewing on the word as though it were a piece of meat of whose taste he remained uncertain. He blinked rapidly three times, and his mouth tightened in a kind of wince. “Yes, I know who you are now. My name’s Asa, Asa Durand.”

He held out his hand, and I shook it.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

“Twelve years, give or take. The Harringtons were here before us, but they sold it and moved to Dakota. Don’t know if it was North or South. Don’t suppose it matters much, seeing as how it was Dakota.”

“You been to Dakota?”

“Which one?”

“Either.”

He smiled mischievously, and I saw clearly the young man now trapped in an old man’s body. “Why would I want to go to Dakota?” he asked. “You want to come inside?”

I heard myself say the words before I even realized I had made the decision.

“Yes,” I said, “if it’s not an imposition.”

“Not at all. My wife will be home soon. She plays bridge on Sunday afternoons, and I cook dinner. You’re welcome to stay, if you’re hungry. It’s pot roast. Always pot roast on Sundays. It’s the only thing I can cook.”

“No, thank you. It’s good of you to offer, though.”

I walked alongside him up the garden path. His left leg dragged slightly.

“What do you get in return for cooking dinner, or am I allowed to ask?”

“An easier life,” said Durand. “To sleep in my bed without fear of suffocation.” The smile came again, soft and warm. “And she likes my pot roast, and I like it that she does.”

We reached the front door. Durand went ahead and held it open. I paused on the step for a moment, then followed him inside, and he closed the door behind me. The hallway was brighter than I remembered. It had been painted yellow with white trim. When I was a boy, the hallway had been red. To the right was a formal dining room, with a mahogany table and chairs not dissimilar to the set we had once owned. To the left was the living room. There was a flat-screen high-definition TV where our old Zenith used to stand, in the days when VCRs were still a novelty and the networks had instituted a family hour to protect the young from sex and violence. When was that-’74, ’75? I couldn’t recall.

There was no longer a wall between the kitchen and the living room. It had been removed to create a single, open-plan space, so that the little kitchen of my youth, with its four-seat table, was now entirely gone.

I could not picture my mother in the new space.

“Different?” asked Durand.

“Yes. This is all different.”

“The other people did that. Not the Harringtons, the Bildners. They the ones you sold to?”

“That’s right.”

“It was vacant for a time too. Couple of years.” He looked away, troubled by the direction the conversation was taking. “Would you like a drink? There’s beer, if you want. I don’t drink it so much now. Goes through me like water down a pipe. Hardly in one end before it’s out the other. Then I have to nap.”

“It’s a little early for me. I’ll take a cup of coffee, though, if I don’t have to drink it alone.”

“Coffee we can do. At least I don’t have to nap after it.”

He switched on an ancient, stained coffeemaker, then rounded up some cups and spoons.

“Would you mind if I looked in my old bedroom?” I asked. “It’s the small one in the front, with the broken pane.”

Durand winced again, and looked a little embarrassed. “Damned pane. Kids broke it playing baseball. I just didn’t get around to fixing it. And then, well, we don’t use that room for much other than storage. It’s full of boxes.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’d still like to see it.”

He nodded, and we went upstairs. I stood at the threshold of my old bedroom, but I did not enter. As Durand had said, it was a mass of boxes, files, books, and old electrical equipment that was now gathering dust.

“I’m a packrat,” said Durand apologetically. “All that stuff still works. I keep hoping someone will come along who might need it and take it off my hands.”

As I stood there, the boxes disappeared, vanishing along with the junk and the books and the files. There was only a room carpeted in gray; white walls covered with pictures and posters; a closet with a mirror on the front in which I could see myself reflected, a man in his forties with graying hair and dark eyes; shelves lined with books, carefully ordered according to author; a nightstand with a digital alarm clock, the height of technology, showing a time of 12:54 P.M.

And the sound of the gunshot carrying from the garage at the back of the house. Through the window, I saw men running-

“Are you okay, Mr. Parker?”

Durand touched my arm gently. I tried to speak, but I could not.

“Why don’t we go downstairs? I’ll make you that cup of coffee.”

And the figure in the mirror became the ghost of the boy I once was, and I held his gaze until he slowly faded away and was gone.

We sat in the kitchen, Asa Durand and I. Through the window, I could see a copse of silver birch where the garage used to be. Durand followed my gaze.

“I heard about what happened,” he said. “A terrible thing.”

The room was filled with the aroma of Durand’s pot roast. It smelled good.

“Yes, it was.”

“They knocked it down, the garage.”

“Who did?”

“The Harringtons. The neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Rosetti-they were probably after your time by a couple of years-told me about it.”

“Why did they knock it down?” But even as I asked the question, I already knew the answer. The only surprise was that it had stayed intact for as long as it had.

“I guess there are those who feel that, when something bad happens in a place, the echo of it remains,” said Durand. “I don’t know if that’s true. I’m not sensitive to such things myself. My wife believes in angels”-he pointed at a wispily clothed winged figure hanging from a hook on the kitchen door-“except all her angels look like Tinkerbell to m="0‘kerbell te. I don’t think she can tell the difference between angels and fairies.

“Anyway, the Harrington kids didn’t like going into the garage. The youngest one, the little girl, she said it smelled bad. The mother, she told Mrs. Rosetti that sometimes it smelled-”

He paused, and winced for a third time. It seemed to be an involuntary response when anything discomfited him.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Go on, please.”

“She told her that it smelled like a gun had gone off in there.”

We were both silent for a time.

“Why are you here, Mr. Parker?”

“I’m not sure. I think I have some questions I need answered.”

“You know, you get the urge, at a certain point in your life, to go digging around in the past,” said Durand. “I sat my mother down before she died and made her go through our whole family history, everything that she could remember. I wanted to have that knowledge, I guess, to understand what I was part of before anyone who could clear that stuff up for me was gone forever. And that’s a good thing, to know where you came from. You pass it on to your children, and it makes everyone feel less adrift in life, less alone.

“But some things, they’re better left in the past. Oh, I know that psychiatrists and therapists and Lord knows who else will tell you different, but they’re wrong. Not every wound needs to be poked and opened, and not every wrong needs to be reexamined, or dragged kicking and screaming into the light. Better just to let the wound heal, even if it doesn’t heal quite right, or to leave the wrongs in the dark, and remind yourself not to go stepping into the shadows if you can avoid it.”

“Well, that’s the thing of it,” I said. “Sometimes, you can’t avoid those shadows.”

Durand pulled at his lip. “No, I guess not. So, is this the beginning, or the end?”

“The beginning.”

“You got a long road ahead of you, then.”

“I think so.”

I heard the front door open. A small, slightly overweight woman with permed silver hair stepped into the hallway.

“It’s me,” she said. She didn’t look toward the kitchen. Instead, she first removed her coat, gloves, and scarf, and checked her hair and face in the mirror on the coatrack. “Smells fine,” she said. She turned to the kitchen and saw me.

“Goodness!”

“We got company, Elizabeth,” said Durand, and I stood as his wife entered the room.

“This is Mr. Parker,” said Durand. “He used to live here, when he was a boy.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Durand,” I said.

“Well, you’re-”

She paused as she made the connection, and I watched the emotions play upon her face. Eventually, her features settled into what Iu c‘ into wha suspected was their default mode: kindness, tinged with just the hint of sadness that comes with a lifetime of experience, and the knowledge that it was all coming to an end.

“You’re welcome,” she settled upon. “Sit, sit. You’ll stay for dinner?”

“No, I can’t. I have to get going. I’ve taken up too much of your husband’s time as it is.”

Despite her inherent decency and good nature, I could see that she was relieved.

“If you’re sure.”

“I am. Thank you.”

I stayed on my feet to put on my coat, and Durand showed me to the door.

“I ought to tell you,” he said, “that when I first saw you, I thought you were someone else, and I don’t mean one of the Harrington boys. Just for a second, mind.”

“Who did you think I was?”

“There was a man came here, couple of months back. It was evening, darker than it is now. He did what you did: stared at the house for a time, even went as far as to come onto the lawn so he could take a look at the back of the house, out where the garage used to be. I didn’t like it. I ventured out to ask him what he thought he was doing. Haven’t seen him since.”

“You think he was casing the house for a robbery?”

“At first, except that when I challenged him, that’s not what he said. Not that a burglar would tell you he was casing a place, not unless he was dumb as dirt.”

“What did he say?”

“‘Hunting.’ That’s what he said. Just that one word: ‘Hunting.’ Now, what do you think that means?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Durand,” I said, and his eyes narrowed as he wondered if he was being lied to.

“Then he asked me if I knew what had happened here, and I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, and he said that he thought I did. I didn’t care for his tone, and told him to be on his way.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

“Not so well. He was wearing a wool hat, pulled down over his hair, and he had a scarf around his neck and chin. It was a cold night, but not that cold. Younger than you. Late twenties, maybe older. A little taller too. I’m nearsighted, and I didn’t have my spectacles. Keep leaving them places. I should buy a chain.” He realized that he was drifting from the subject at hand, and returned to it. “Apart from that, I don’t recall much about him, except-”

“What?”

“I was glad to see him leave, that’s all. He made me uneasy, and not just because he was on my lawn, snooping around on my property. There was a thing about him.” Durand shook his head. “I can’t explain it right. I could say to you that he wasn’t from around here, and that would be as close as I could get. He wasn’t from anywhere like here, anywhere at all.”

He looked out over the town, taking in the carsuo;‘ in the c moving on the streets, the lights of the bars and stores near the train station, the dim shapes of people heading home to their families. It was normality, and the man who had stood on his lawn did not belong in it.

Night had now come. The streetlights caught the patches of frozen snow, making them shine in the gloom. Durand shivered.

“You be careful, Mr. Parker,” he said. We shook hands. He stayed on the step until I reached the sidewalk, then he waved once and closed the door. I looked up at the window with the broken pane, but there was nobody there. That room was empty. Whatever remained there had no form; the ghost of the boy was inside me, where he had always been.

CHAPTER FOUR

I MET ANGEL AND Louis for dinner that night at the Wildwood BBQ on Park Avenue South, not far from Union Square. It was tough to make the call between Wildwood and Blue Smoke up on Twenty-seventh, but novelty won out; novelty, and, for Louis, the prospect of beans that had pieces of steak added to them. When it came to rib joints, Louis liked extra meat with everything, probably including the Jell-O. If he was going to die of a coronary, he was going to do it in style.

These two men, both of whom had killed, yet only one of whom, Louis, could truly be called a natural killer, were now my closest friends. I hadn’t seen them since late the previous year, when they had managed to get themselves into some trouble in upstate New York and I’d followed their tracks to see if I could help. It hadn’t ended well, and we’d kept some distance from one another since then; not due to any ill will, but because Louis was concerned about the possible fallout from what had occurred, and didn’t want to see me contaminated by association. Now, though, he appeared content, or as content as Louis ever seemed to be, figuring that the worst was over. In truth, it was hard to tell. After all, it wasn’t that when Louis laughed, the world laughed with him. Instead, when Louis laughed, the world tended to look around to see who had fallen over and impaled himself on a spike.

It was always an entertaining spectacle, seeing Angel and Louis eat ribs, in part because some kind of role reversal seemed to occur. Louis-tall, black, and dressed like a showroom dummy that has suddenly decided to take flight and seek better accommodations elsewhere-ate ribs in the manner of a man who fears that his plate could be whisked away at any second, and he should therefore consume as much as possible as quickly as possible. Angel, on the other hand, who was small and white (or, as he liked to put it, “whiteish”), and who not only always looked like he’d slept in his clothes but looked like other people might have slept in them too, nibbled his food in an almost delicate manner, the way a small bird might if it could hold a short rib in its claws. They were drinking ale. I was sipping a glass of red wine.

“Red wine,” said Angel. “In a rib joint. You know, we’re gay, and even we don’t drink wine in a rib joint.”

“Then I guess if I were gay, I’d just be a more sophisticated homosexual than you. In fact, regardless of my sexuality, I’m still more sophisticated than you.”

“You not eating?” asked Lis bird e souis, pointing with the end of a mostly demolished rib at the small pile of bare bones on my plate.

“I’m not so hungry,” I said. “Anyway, after watching you two, I’m considering vegetarianism, or just never eating again. At least, not in public, and certainly not with you.”

“What the hell is wrong with us?” Angel sounded spectacularly aggrieved.

“You eat like an old lady. He eats like they just thawed him out next to a mammoth.”

“You want us to use a knife and fork?”

“Do you know how to use a knife and fork?”

“Don’t tempt me, Miss Manners. The knives are sharp here.”

Louis finished his final rib, wiped his face with his napkin, and sat back with a sigh. If his heart could have sighed with relief, it would have echoed him.

“Glad I wore my buffet pants tonight,” he said.

“Me too,” I said. “You’d worn your regular pants, one of your buttons would have taken someone’s eye out by now.”

He arched an eyebrow at me, and waited.

“Sorry,” I said. “You continue to be boyishly slim.”

Angel signaled the server for another beer before speaking.

“You want to tell us about it?” he said.

But they knew most of it already. I had lost my Maine private investigator’s license, and my lawyer, Aimee Price, was still fighting to have it restored to me, hampered at every turn by the objections of the state police and, it appeared, a detective named Hansen in particular. From what Aimee could establish, the order to revoke my license had come from high up, and Hansen was just the messenger. A court challenge was still an option, but Aimee wasn’t sure that it would be useful. The state police were the final arbiters when it came to licensing, and any court in Maine would probably be guided by their decision.

My firearms permit had also been revoked, although the precise nature of the revocation was still unclear to me and to my lawyer. I had initially been ordered to hand over every gun in my possession pending what was vaguely termed “an inquiry,” and was told that it would be only a temporary matter.

I had surrendered my licensed firearms (and hidden the unlicensed ones, after an anonymous tip that the cops were coming with a warrant), which had subsequently been returned to me when it became apparent that the surrender notice was of dubious legality, and possibly in breach of the Second Amendment. Less open to argument was the decision to rescind my permit to carry a concealed weapon in the state of Maine, on the grounds that my previous actions had revealed me as an “unsafe” person. Aimee was working on that one too, but so far a brick wall would have been more yielding than the state police. I was being punished, but just how long that punishment would continue remained to be seen.

Now I was working as bar manager at the Great Lost Bear in Portland, which wasn’t bad work and usually only took up four days each week, but it wasn’t what I was good at. It didn’t seem as though there was a great deal of sympa by¡eal of sythy for my plight in the local law enforcement community. I couldn’t recall how I’d made so many enemies until Aimee took the trouble to explain exactly how I’d managed it, and then it had all become a little clearer to me.

Strangely, I didn’t care about what had occurred as much as Hansen and his superiors might have thought. It had dented my pride, and my lawyer was fighting in my name partly on principle and mostly because I didn’t want Hansen and those above him to think that I would just roll over and die on their say-so, but in a sense I was almost satisfied that I couldn’t practice as a PI. It left me free, relieving me of the obligation to help others. If I were to take on a case, however informally, it would probably land me in jail. The state police’s actions had given me permission to be selfish, and to pursue my own aims. It had taken me some months to decide that that was what I was going to do.

Despite what the old man, Durand, might have thought earlier that day, I hadn’t chosen lightly to delve into my past and to question the circumstances of my father’s death. A man, a foul man who used the name Kushiel but was better known as the Collector, had whispered to me that my family had secrets, that my blood group could not have been the result of my assumed parentage. For a time, I tried to hide from myself what he had said. I did not want to believe it. I think that I took the job in the bar in part as a form of escape. I replaced my obligations to clients with my obligations to Dave Evans, one of the owners of the Bear, and the man who had offered me the job. But as time passed, and winter came again, I made a decision.

Because the Collector had not been lying, not entirely. The blood groups did not match.

When the new year dawned, I started asking questions. I began trying to contact those who had known my father, and especially the cops who had worked alongside him. Some were dead. Others had fallen off the radar after retirement, as sometimes happens with those who have served their time and desire only to collect their pensions and walk away from it all. But I knew the names of the two men to whom my father had been particularly close, beat cops who had graduated from the academy alongside him: Eddie Grace, who was a couple of years older than my father; and Jimmy Gallagher, my father’s old partner and closest friend. My mother had sometimes referred semifondly to my father and Jimmy as the “Birthday Boys,” a reference to their twice yearly nights on the town. Those were the only times when my father would stay out all night, eventually reappearing shortly before noon the following day, when he would return quietly, almost apologetically, slightly the worse for wear but never sick or stumbling, and sleep until the evening. My mother never commented on it. It was an indulgence that she permitted him, and he was a man of few indulgences, or so it seemed to me.

And then there was Jimmy Gallagher himself. I hadn’t seen him since shortly after the funeral, when he had come to the house to ask how my mother and I were doing, and she had told him that she intended to leave Pearl River and return to Maine. My mother had sent me to bed, but what teenager would not have listened at the top of the stairs, seeking some of the information that he was certain was being withheld from him. And I heard my mother say:

“How much did you know, Jimmy?”

“About what?”

“About all of it: the girl, the people who came. How much did you know?”

“I knew about the girl. The others…”

I could almost see him shrugging.

“Will said they were the same people.”

Jimmy did not answer for a time. Then: “That’s not possible. You know that it’s not. I killed one of them, and the other died months before. The dead don’t return, not like that.”

“He whispered it to me, Jimmy.” The tears were being held back, but only barely. “It was one of the last things he said to me. He said it was them.”

“He was frightened, Elaine, frightened for you and the boy.”

“But he killed them, Jimmy. He killed them, and they weren’t even armed.”

“I don’t know why-”

“I know why: he wanted to stop them. He knew that they would come back in the end. They wouldn’t need guns. They’d use their bare hands if they had to. Maybe-”

“What?”

“Maybe they’d even have preferred it that way,” she concluded.

Now she began to cry. I heard Jimmy stand, and I knew that he was putting his arms around her, consoling her.

“We’ll never know for sure. This I do know: he loved you. He loved you both, and he was sorry for all that he did to hurt you. I think he spent those years trying to make it up to you, but he never could. It wasn’t your fault. He couldn’t forgive himself, that’s all. He just couldn’t do it…”

My mother’s sobbing increased in intensity, and I turned away and went as quietly as I could to my room, where I watched the moon from my window and stared out at Franklin Avenue, and the paths that my father would never walk again.

The server came to take away our plates. He seemed impressed with Angel and Louis’s demolition of their food, and commensurately disappointed in me. We ordered coffee, and watched the place begin to empty.

“Is there anything we can do?” asked Angel.

“No. I think this one is mine.”

He must have spotted something playing on my mind, its movements replicated on my face.

“What aren’t you telling us?”

“The old man, Durand, he said that a young man-late twenties, according to him, maybe a little older-had come to his place a couple of months ago. He was snooping around. Durand called him on it, and the guy said he was ‘hunting.’”

“In Pearl River?” said Angel. “What was he hunting: leprechauns?”

Louis spoke. “Might be nothing to do with you.”

“Might not,” I agreed. “But he asked if Durand knew what had happened there.”

“Thrill seeker. Murder tourist. You’ve had them before.”

“Durand said that the guy made him uneasy, that’s all. He couldn’t put his finger on why.”

“Not much you can do, then, unless he shows up again.”

“Yeah, a late twenty-something guy in New York who makes people uneasy. Shouldn’t be hard to spot. Hell, that description even covers half of the Mets’ starting lineup.”

We paid the tab, then headed out into the night.

“You call us, anytime,” said Angel. “We’re around.”

They hailed a cab, and I watched them head uptown. When they were gone from sight, I went back into the restaurant and sat at the bar, sipping another glass of wine. I thought about the hunter and wondered if it was me he was hunting.

And part of me willed him to come.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE GREAT LOST BEAR was a Portland institution. It occupied a space on Forrest Avenue, away from the main tourist drag of the Old Port, that had once housed a bar called Bottom’s Up. Semibig bands used to play there, groups that were either on their way up, or on their way down, or had just reached a plateau where all that mattered was a paying gig in front of a decent-size crowd, preferably one that wasn’t about to start hurling bottles when they departed from the hits to play a new song.

The stage lighting was still in place in the restaurant area, which always gave the impression that either the diners were only a prelude to the main act, or they were the main act. Half of the building also used to be a bakery, and at 11:30 P.M., as the bar was serving last rounds, the place would fill with the smell of baking bread, driving the customers into paroxysms of the munchies just after the kitchens had closed.

When the bar changed hands in 1979, it became known as the Grizzly Bear, until a pizza chain on the West Coast objected and the name was changed to the Great Lost Bear, which was more evocative anyway. The Bear’s main claim to fame, apart from its general conviviality and the fact that it served food until late, was its beer selection: fifty-six draft beers at any one time, sometimes even sixty. Despite its location in a quiet part of the city not far from the University of Southern Maine ’s campus, it had built up a considerable reputation over the years, and now the summer, which used to be slow, was its busiest time.

As well as locals, the Bear attracted the beer aficionados, most of whom were men, and men of a certain age. They didn’t cause trouble, they didn’t overindulge, and mostly they were content to talk about hops and casks and obscure microbreweries of which even some of the bartenders had never heard. In fact, the more obscure they were, the better, for there was a kind of competitiveness among a certain group of drinkers at the Bear. Occasionally, the sight of a woman might distract them from the task at hand for a time, but there would be other women. There wouldn’t always be a guy sitting next to them who had tried every microbrew in Portland, Oregon, but knew squat about Portland, Maine.

I had been working as the bar manager in the Bear for a little over four months. I wasn’t hurting for money, not yet, but it made sense to find some kind of work while Aimee Price fought my case. I had a daughter to support, even if her mother wasn’t pressing me for payments. I sometimes wondered if Rachel might have preferred it if I wasn’t part of Sam’s life at all, although she had never uttered anything that might have led me to that conclusion. I was allowed to visit Sam over in Vermont any time that I chose, as long as I gave Rachel some notice. Even then, I had sometimes felt the urge to see Sam (and, truth be told, Rachel, for there was unfinished business between us) and had traveled to Burlington on a whim. Apart from the occasional disapproving look from Rachel’s father, for she and Sam lived in the adjoining cottage on her parents’ property, such unscheduled visits had so far caused no friction between us.

Rachel and I had slept together a couple of times since the separation, but neither of us had raised the possibility of a reconciliation. I didn’t think that one was possible, not now, but it didn’t prevent me from loving her. Still, it was a situation that couldn’t last. We were drifting further and further apart. It was over, but neither of us had spoken the words yet.

It was a little after four on Thursday afternoon, and the Bear was quiet for now. Well, relatively quiet. Three men were seated at the bar. Two were regulars, classic Maine winter types in worn boots, Sox caps, and enough layers of clothing to ward off the effects of a second Ice Age until someone got around to opening a bar in a cave and began brewing beer again. Their names were Scotty and Phil. Usually, there was a third guy with them called Dan, or variously “Dan the Man,” “Danny Boy,” or, when he wasn’t within ear-shot, “Dan the Dummy,” but on this particular occasion, Dan was absent, and taking his place was a man who was not considered a regular, but looked like he was about to become one now that I was working there.

This was not necessarily a good thing. I liked Jackie Garner. He was loyal and brave, and he kept his mouth shut about the things that he had done in my name, but something rattled in his head when he walked, and I wasn’t certain that he was entirely sane. He was the only person I knew who had volunteered to attend military school instead of a regular high school, since he liked the idea of being taught how to shoot, stab, and blow things up. He was also, curiously, the only person I knew who had been quietly expelled from military school for his excessively enthusiastic attitude toward shooting, stabbing, and, most particularly, blowing things up, an enthusiasm that made him as potentially lethal to his comrades as to his enemies. Eventually, the army found a place for him in its ranks, but it had never quite managed to control him, and it was hard not to feel that the U.S. military had raised a discreet cheer when Jackie was eventually invalided out.

Worse, where Jackie went, the Fulci brothers, Tony and Paulie, frequently went too, and the Fulcis, blockhouses in human form, made Jackie look like Mother Teresa. So far, they hadn’t graced the Bear with their presence, but it was only a matter of time. I still hadn’t worked out how to tell Dave that he’d have to get a couple of chairs reinforced for them. I figured that when he heard the Fulcis might be about to become regulars, he’d just fire me; that, or load up with guns and prepare for a siege.

“Dan not around?” I asked Scotty.

“Nah, he’s back in the hospit l±in the hotal. He thinks he might be schizophrenic.”

It figured. He was certainly something ending in ic. Schizophrenic would do to be getting along with until they found out for sure what it was.

“He still dating that girl?” asked Phil.

“Well, one of him is,” said Scotty, and laughed.

Phil frowned. He wasn’t as smart as Scotty. He had never voted because he claimed the machines were too complicated. One of his brothers, who was even less intellectually endowed than Phil, had ended up in jail after writing to Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” asking them to fix him up with a date.

“You know the one: not so smart,” continued Phil, as though Scotty hadn’t spoken. He thought for a moment. “Lia, that’s it. Dumb as a box of doughnuts.”

That old proverb about people in glass houses had clearly never made an impact on Phil. He was the kind of guy who would throw a stone in a glass house, and then be surprised when it didn’t bounce.

“Understatement,” said Scotty. “Girl gave herself a jailhouse tattoo, couldn’t even spell her own name right. Three fucking letters. How hard could it be? Now she has ‘Lai’ tattooed on her arm, goes around telling people she’s half Hawaiian.”

“Wasn’t she in a cult?”

“Yeah. Couldn’t spell that right either, or else her hand slipped. Now she has to keep her left arm covered up, especially in church.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not like Dan the Man is anybody’s idea of a catch,” said Jackie. “He lives with his mother and sleeps in a NASCAR bed.”

“Jackie,” I pointed out, “you live with your mother.”

“Yeah, but I don’t sleep in no NASCAR bed.”

I left them to it, wondering if those three should be the first guys I banned from the bar, and went to help Gary Maser stock the domestic bottles. I’d hired Gary shortly after I became bar manager, and he was working out well. When we’d finished, and I’d poured us both a cup of coffee, Jackie, Phil, and Scotty were still around, unfortunately. Jackie was reading aloud from the newspaper.

“It’s that guy again, the one from Ogunquit who got abducted by aliens,” he explained. “Says he can’t turn on his TV no more. Says the channels keep changing without him touching the clicker, and it makes his head buzz.” Jackie considered this for a time. “How come it’s always guys from Ogunquit that these things happen to?” he asked.

“Or Fort Kent,” said Scotty.

“Ayuh, Fort Kent,” said Phil. All three nodded in solemn understanding. It was a widely held belief down east that once you got a certain distance north in Maine, people became very strange indeed. Given that Fort Kent was about as far north as a person could go without taking out Canadian citizenship, it followed that its denizens had strangeness all wrapped up.

“I mean,” Jackie continued, “what do the aliens think they’re going to learn from snd ±learn froticking a probe up the ass of some fella from Ogunquit?”

“Apart from the obvious,” said Phil.

“Like not to do it again,” said Scotty.

“You’d think they’d abduct nuclear scientists, or generals,” said Jackie. “Instead, all they seem to do is take crackers and rubes.”

“Foot soldiers,” said Phil.

“First wave,” said Scotty. “They’re the ones the aliens will have to, y’know, subdue.”

“But why the probing?” asked Jackie. “What’s with that?”

“Could be someone was yanking their chain,” said Phil. “Some Venusian: ‘Yah, you stick a probe up their asses, and they light up.’”

“‘They play a tune,’” said Scotty.

“I just don’t understand it,” Jackie concluded.

At the end of the bar, there was a man scribbling in a notebook. His face looked familiar, and I thought he might have been in the previous week, although he wasn’t a regular. He was in his early fifties and wore a brown tweed jacket and an open-collared white shirt. His hair was short, and either he was aging well or he was spending a lot on Grecian. When I’d served him earlier, I’d caught a hint of expensive aftershave. Now he had a finger width of beer at the bottom of his glass. I wandered over to him.

“Get you another?”

As he saw me approach, he closed the notebook and glanced at his watch.

“Just the check, thanks,” he said.

I nodded and slipped him the tab.

“Nice place,” he said.

“Yeah, it is.”

“You been working here long?”

“Nope. Wouldn’t even be working today if one of the regular bartenders wasn’t sick.”

“So, what? You the manager?”

“Just the bar manager.”

“Huh.” He chewed his bottom lip, and seemed to consider me for a moment or two. “Well, I’ll be on my way. Next time.”

“Sure,” I said. I watched him leave. Jackie caught the look on my face.

“Something?” he asked.

“Probably nothing.”

But I didn’t have time to think about the stranger for the rest of the evening. Thursday was always microbrew night at the Bear, with beer specials, and that night we were hosting a small brewery named Andrew’s Brewing Company, a father-and-son operation out of Lincolnville. Minutes later, we were swamped, and it was all that I could do to keep us out of the weeds for the evening. Two large birthday groups, one almost entirely male, the other exclusively female, hit the restaurant simultaneously and, over the course of the night, began to meld into one indistinguishable whonks±uishable le of booze-fueled carnality. Meanwhile, there was rarely more than one seat free at the bar, and everyone seemed to want to eat as well as drink. Shorthanded as we were, it meant that Gary and I were working flat out for six hours solid. I didn’t even remember seeing Jackie leave; I must have been changing a keg when he wandered into the night.

“This is still February, right?” asked Gary as he made a batch of margaritas for Sarah, one of the regular waitresses who always kept her head covered with a scarf, which made her easy to spot on nights like this one.

“I think so.”

“Then where the hell did all these people come from? It’s February.”

At about ten thirty, things quieted down some, and there was time to restock and deal with our casualties. One of the line chefs had sliced himself badly across the palm of the hand with a paring knife, and the wound needed stitches. Now that the Bear was a little calmer, he was free to drive himself to the emergency room. Apart from that, there were the usual minor burns and heated tempers in the kitchen. I’d give the line chefs this much: they were always entertaining. The ones who worked at the Bear were better than most. I knew people in the business who spent a significant portion of their time bailing their chefs out from jail, finding places for them to sleep when their old ladies threw their asses out on the street, and, occasionally, beating them into submission just to keep them under control.

A group of Portland cops had taken up position near the door. Gary had been looking after them for most of the evening. The Bear was a popular hangout for local law enforcement: there was parking, the beer was good, it served food until closing, and it was far enough away from the Old Port and Portland PD headquarters to make them feel that they were off the radar. Perhaps its bunker-like aspect appealed to them as well. The Bear didn’t have many windows-and most of those were bricked up-and if all of the lights were switched off, it was pitch-black inside.

Now, as I watched, the crowd of cops parted slightly, and a familiar figure made his way to the bar. I had assumed that they were all Portland cops, but I was wrong. One of them, at least, was a statie: Hansen, the detective out of the barracks in Gray who, more than anyone else, I believed was relishing my current situation. He was fit looking, his eyes more green than blue, with very black hair and a permanent dark shadow on his face from years of shaving with an electric razor. As usual, he was better dressed than the average cop. He wore a well-cut dark blue suit and a blue paisley tie. A gold tiepin twinkled as it caught the lights above the bar.

He took a seat away from the main group and placed his near-empty glass on the bar, then put his hands together and waited for me to come to him. I let a couple of seconds go by, then resigned myself to having to deal with him.

“What can I get you, Detective?” I said.

He didn’t reply. His jaw moved as his bottom teeth worried against his incisors. I wondered how much he’d had to drink, and decided that it probably wasn’t much. He didn’t seem like a man who liked to cut loose.

“I heard you were working here,” he said.

“Took you awhile to drop by.”

“This isn’t a social call.”

“I guessed that. I don’t think sociability is in your makeup.”

He looked away, shaking his head slightly, a reasonable man faced with an unreasonable one.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, gesturing with disdain at the bar, the clientele, maybe even the world itself.

“Making a living. You and your buddies dug up my chosen career path. I picked another temporarily.”

“‘Temporarily’? You think so? I hear your lawyer is making a lot of calls on your behalf. Good luck to her. Better rack up the tips. She doesn’t work cheap.”

“Well, here’s your chance to contribute to the cause. You want a refill on that, or should I just leave you to fill it yourself with piss and vinegar?”

Hansen leaned forward. His eyes, I now saw, were slightly glazed. Either he’d had more than I thought, or he just couldn’t hold his booze.

“This is a cop place. Don’t you have any dignity? You let good police see you like this, working behind a bar. What are you trying to do, rub it in their faces?”

It was a question that I’d asked myself. Even Dave had said, when he offered me the job, that he would understand if I didn’t want to take it because of the cops who drank there. I told him I didn’t much care what anyone thought, but maybe Hansen was hitting closer to the mark than I wanted to give him credit for. There was an element of cussedness about my decision to work at the Bear. I wasn’t going to slink away after what had happened. True, some of the cops who came to the bar seemed embarrassed at first by my presence there, and a couple were openly contemptuous of me, but they were guys who’d never much cared for me anyway. Most of the rest were just fine, and some had let me know how sorry they were for what had been done. It didn’t matter much either way. I was content to let things rest, for now. It gave me time to do what I wanted to do.

“You know, Detective, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that you had a hard-on for me. Maybe I could introduce you to some people? Might help relieve some of that tension. Or you could take out an ad in the Phoenix. Lot of guys out there aching for a man with a uniform in his closet.”

Hansen expelled a single humorless laugh, like a poison dart being blown from a pipe.

“You’d better hold on to that dry wit,” he said. “A man who goes home smelling of stale beer to an empty house needs something to laugh about.”

“It’s not empty,” I said. “I have a dog.”

I picked up his glass. I figured he was drinking Andrew’s Brown, so I poured him a refill and placed it before him.

“On the house,” I said. “We like to keep good customers happy.”

“You drink it,” he replied. “We’re done here.”

He took his wallet from his pocket and put down a twenty.

“Keep the change. Won’t buy you much, but it’ll buy you even less in New York. You want to tell me what you were doing down there?”

He had taken me by surprise, but I shouldn’t have been shocked. I’d been stopped five times by state troopers on the highway in recent months. It was someone’s way of letting me know that I hadn’t been forgotten. Now a cop at the Portland Jetport had probably recognized me when I was either traveling to, or from, New York, and had made a call. I’d need to be more careful in the future.

“I was visiting friends.”

“That’s good. A man needs friends. But I find that you’re working a case, and I’ll break you.”

He turned away, said his good-byes to his buddies, and left the bar. Gary sidled over to me as the door closed behind Hansen.

“Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” I handed him the twenty. “I think he was one of yours.”

Gary looked at the untouched beer.

“He didn’t finish his beer.”

“He didn’t come here to drink.”

“Then why did he come here?”

It was a good question.

“For the company, I guess.”

CHAPTER SIX

I TOOK WALTER, MY Labrador retriever, for a walk when I eventually got home shortly after eleven. The novelty of snow had eventually worn off for him, as it did for most creatures, man or beast, who spent longer than a week in Maine in winter, so that now he contented himself with a few desultory sniffs before doing what he had to do and indicating his preference for returning to his warm basket by turning around and heading straight back to the house. He had matured a lot in the last year. Perhaps it was because the house was quieter than it was before, and he had accommodated himself somewhat to the fact that Rachel and Sam were no longer part of its, and his, routines. I liked having him in the house, for a whole lot of reasons: security, company, and maybe because he was a link to the family life that was no longer mine. Two families lost now: Rachel and Sam to Vermont, and Susan and Jennifer to a man who had torn them apart, and who had died in turn by my hand. But I also felt guilty about the amount of time I was leaving Walter alone, or with my neighbors, the Johnsons. They were happy to look after him when I wasn’t around, but Bob wasn’t so good on his feet anymore, and it was asking a lot of him to exercise a frisky dog regularly.

I locked the doors, patted Walter a final time, then went to bed and tried to sleep, but when it came it brought with it strange dreams, dreams of Susan and Jennifer so vivid that I woke in the darkness, convinced that I had heard someone speak. It had been many months since I had dreamed of them in such a way.

What do I call them? Even now, after all these years, how do I say it? My murdered wife? My late daughter? They died, but I held something of them inside me for too long, and that in turn manifested itself as phantasms, echoes of the next life in this one, and I could not bring myse hooing it?lf to call these remnants by the names of those whom I had loved. We haunt ourselves, I sometimes think; or, rather, we choose to be haunted. If there is a hole in our lives, then something will fill it. We invite it inside, and it accepts willingly.

But I had made my peace with them, I thought. Susan, my wife. Jennifer, my daughter. Beloved of me, and I, beloved of them.

Susan once said to me that, if anything happened to Jennifer, if she were to die before her time, before her mother, then I should not tell Susan what had occurred. I should not try to explain to her that her child was gone. I must not do that to her. If Jennifer were to die, I was to kill Susan. There should be no words, no warning. She should not have time to look at me and understand why. I was to take her life, for she did not believe that she could live with the loss of her child. It would be too much to bear, and she would not be able to withstand such pain. It would not kill her, not at first, but it would draw the life from her just the same, and all that would be left would be a hollow shell, a woman resonant with grief.

And she would hate me. She would hate me for putting her through such sorrow, for not loving her enough to spare her. I would be a coward in her eyes.

“Promise me,” she said as I held her in my arms. “Promise me that you won’t let that happen. I don’t ever want to hear those words. I don’t want to have to hurt that much. I couldn’t bear it. Do you hear me? This isn’t a joke, a ‘what-if.’ I want you to promise me. Promise me that I will never have to endure that pain.”

And I promised. I knew that I could not have done what she asked, and perhaps she knew that too, but I made the promise just the same. That is what we do for the ones we love: we lie to protect them. Not all truths are welcome.

But what she did not explain, what she did not consider, was what would happen if they were both wrenched from me. Should I take my own life? Should I follow them into that dark place, tracing their steps through the underworld until I found them at last, a sacrifice to no purpose other than the denial of loss? Or should I continue, and if I should, then how? What form should my life take? Should I die alone, worshipping at the shrine of their memory, waiting for life to do what I could not do for myself; or would I try to find a way to live with their loss, to survive without betraying their memory? What acts do those who are left behind have to perform to honor the memory of the departed, and how far can they go before they betray that memory?

I lived. That is what I did. They were taken, but I stayed. I found the one who had killed them, and I killed him in turn, but it gave me no satisfaction. It did not assuage the burning grief. It did not make their loss any easier to endure, and it almost cost me my soul, if, indeed, I have a soul. The Collector, that repository of old secrets, once told me that I did not, and sometimes I am inclined to believe him.

I still feel their loss every day. It never goes away. It defines me.

I am the shadow cast by all that once was.

CHAPTER SEVEN

DANIEL FARADAY SAT IN the basement room andth= D‡ felt his grief slowly give way to anger. His son had been dead for four days, and his body still lay in the morgue. They had been assured that he would be released for burial the next day. The chief had promised them as much during his visit earlier that afternoon.

In the days since the discovery of Bobby’s remains, Daniel and his wife had become ghosts in their own home, creatures defined only by loss, and absence, and grief. Their only son was gone, and Daniel knew that his passing signaled also the death of their marriage in all but name. Bobby had kept his parents together, but his father had not realized the extent of their debt to him until he had left for college, and then returned. So much of their conversation had revolved around the activities of their beloved son: their hopes for him, their fears, their occasional disappointments, although the latter now seemed so trivial that Daniel silently berated himself for ever having raised them with the boy. He regretted every harsh word, every argument, every hour of sullen silence that had passed in the aftermath of conflict. Even as he did so, he recalled the circumstances of each disagreement, and knew that every word spoken in anger had also been spoken out of love.

This had been his son’s space. There was a TV, and a stereo, and a dock for his iPod, although Bobby was one of the only kids in town who still preferred to listen to music on vinyl when he was at home. He had inherited his father’s old record collection, most of it classic stuff from the sixties and seventies, adding to it from the racks of used-record stores and the occasional yard sale. There was still an LP sitting on the turntable, an original copy of After the Gold Rush by Neil Young, its surface a network of tiny scratches yet clearly, as far as Bobby had been concerned, still listenable, the pops and hisses a part of the record’s history, its warmth and humanity enhanced by the flaws it had accumulated over the years.

Most of the basement floor was covered by a huge rug that always smelled faintly of spilled beer and old potato chips. There were bookshelves, and a gunmetal gray filing cabinet whose drawers had been used mainly for storing old photographs, college notes, and textbooks, and, unbeknownst to the boy’s mother, some mild pornography. There was a battered red couch with a stained blue pillow at one end facing the TV. The pillow still bore the imprint of his son’s head and the couch had retained the shape of his body so that, in the dim light cast by the basement’s sole lamp, it seemed that the ghost of his son had somehow returned to this place, occupying his old familiar position, a thing invisible yet with weight and substance. Daniel wanted so much to curl up there, to mold his body into the ridges and hollows of the couch, to become one with his lost son, yet he did not. To do so would be to disturb the impression that remained, and with it to banish something of the boy’s essence. He would not lie there. Nobody would lie there. It would remain as a memorial to all that had been taken from him, from them.

At first, there had been only shock. Bobby could not be gone. He could not be dead. Death was for the old and the sick. Death was for the children of other men. His son was mortal, but not yet shadowed by mortality. His passing should have been a distant thing, and his father and mother should have predeceased him. He should have mourned them. It was not right, not natural, that they should now be forced to cry over his remains, to watch as his coffin was lowered into the ground. He remembered again the sight of his son’s body on the gurney in the morgue, draped with a sheet, swollen with the gases of decay, a deep red line circling his throat where the rope had cut into him.

Suicide. That had been the initial verdict. Bobby had asphyxiated himself by tying a rope to a tree, dropping the noose at the other end around his neck, and leaning forward with the full weight of his body. At some point, he had realized the awfulness of what was about to happen and had struggled to release himself, scratching and tearing at his flesh, even ripping loose one of his fingernails, but by then the rope had cinched itself tight, the knot designed so that, if his courage failed him, the instrument of his self-destruction would not.

The chief had asked them, in those first hours, if they knew why Bobby might have wanted to kill himself. Was he unhappy? Were there unusual stresses and tensions in his life? Did he owe money to anyone? The autopsy showed that he had been drinking heavily before he died, and his motorcycle was found in a ditch at the edge of the field. It was a wonder, the coroner said, that the boy had managed to ride the bike so far considering the amount of alcohol he had consumed.

And all Daniel Faraday could think of was the girl, Emily, the one for whom his son had not been good enough.

But then the chief had returned to them that afternoon, and everything had changed. It was a question of angles and force, he had told them, although he, and the state police detectives, had already voiced their suspicions among themselves, given the nature of the wounds that the rope had left on his skin. There had been two injuries to his son’s neck, but the first had been obscured by the second, and it had taken the arrival of the state’s chief medical examiner to confirm the suspicions of her deputy. Two injuries: the first inflicted by asphyxiation from behind, possibly while the boy was lying flat on the ground, judging by some bruises to his back where his attacker had perhaps knelt upon him. The initial injury was not fatal, but had resulted only in a loss of consciousness. Death had occurred from the second injury. The noose had been kept around the boy’s neck as he was lifted to his knees, the other end of the rope secured around the trunk of the tree. His killer, or killers, had then put further pressure on his back, forcing him forward so that he slowly strangled.

The chief had said that it must have taken considerable strength and effort to kill big, strong Bobby Faraday in that way. The rope was being tested for traces of DNA, as was the lower part of the tree, but-

They had waited for him to continue.

The person or persons responsible for Bobby’s death had been careful, he told them. Bobby’s hair and clothing had been soaked with pond water and mud, along with his fingernails and the skin of his hands. The intention had clearly been to corrupt any trace evidence, and it had been successful. The authorities weren’t going to give up on finding Bobby’s killer, he reassured them, but their task had been made a great deal more difficult. He had asked them to keep this information to themselves for the time being, and they had agreed to do so.

After the chief left, Daniel held his wife as she wept in his arms. He was not sure why she was crying, and he was only surprised that she had any tears left to shed. Perhaps she was weeping at the horror of it, or because this was a new grief caused by the knowledge that her son had not taken his own life, but that his life had instead been taken from him by others. She did not say, and he did not ask her. But when he felt the first of his own tears slide down his cheek, he understood that his were not tears of loss, or of horror, or even of anger. He was relieved. In that moment, he realized that he had felt a kind ofas Ñlt a kind hatred for his son for killing himself. He had been raging at him for the selfishness of the act, for the stupidity of it, for not turning to those who loved him in his moment of direst need. He had hated his son for rendering his father powerless, and for leaving his parents to bear the weight of his awful grief in his stead. For the time that he had believed his son had died at his own hand, Daniel had contemplated the horror of the act during the long, still days and nights, the hours creeping by with relentless sloth. Grief, it seemed, was a kind of matter: it could not be created or destroyed, but merely altered in form. In dying, the sadness that might have driven Bobby to such an act had not dissipated, but had merely transferred itself to those left behind. There had been no note, no explanation, as though any explanation could have sufficed. Instead, there had only been unanswered questions, and the gnawing sense that they had failed their son in some way.

And Daniel’s first instinct had been to blame the girl. His son had not been the same since she had broken off their relationship. Despite his size, and his apparent ease with the world, there was a sensitivity to him, a softness. He had dated before, and there had been breakups and teenage traumas, but he had fallen heavily for the slim young woman with the dark hair and pale green eyes. She was a few years older than Bobby, and she had something special; that was undeniable. There had been rivals for her affections, but she had chosen him. His son knew that. The power had been hers, and he had always struggled slightly with the imbalance that it created in the relationship.

Daniel believed, as most fathers did, that his son was the finest young man in town, maybe even the finest young man he had ever known. He deserved the very best in life: the most rewarding of jobs, the most beautiful of women, the most loving of children. That Bobby did not share this view was both one of his best and worst qualities: admirable in its natural humility, yet frustrating in the way in which it stifled his ambition and caused him to doubt himself. Daniel believed that the girl was clever enough to play on that disparity, but then that was true of all her sex, for Daniel Faraday had always been suspicious of women. He admired them, and was deeply attracted to them (in truth, more than his wife knew, or pretended not to know, because he had acted on that attraction with others more than once during their marriage), but he had never come close to understanding them, and by engaging in casual conquests and then casting them aside he was able to balance this lack of comprehension with a degree of contempt, although he would never have been able to acknowledge his actions to himself in quite those terms. He had watched as the girl manipulated his son, twisting and turning him as though he were caught on a silken thread that could be used to draw him closer or keep him dangling at a distance, as she chose. Bobby knew what was being done, and yet he was so smitten that he could not bring himself to break the bond. His father and mother had discussed it more than once over a bottle of wine, but had differed in their interpretations of the relationship. While Daniel’s wife had acknowledged that the girl was clever, still she felt that there was nothing unusual in her behavior. She was merely doing what all young girls did, or what those who understood the nature of the balance of power between the sexes generally did. The boy wanted her, but as soon as she gave herself to Bobby unconditionally, she would cede control of the relationship to him. Better to force him to prove his loyalty to her before she surrendered herself fully.

Daniel had to concede that his wife had a point, but he disliked seeing his son being played for a fool. Bobby was comparatively naive and inexperienced, even though he was almost twenty-twom tÑt twenty-. He had not yet had his heart truly broken. Then the girl had ended the relationship after Bobby came back from college for the holidays, and that experience had been forced upon him. There had been no warning, and no explanation was given beyond the fact that she believed Bobby was not the man for her. His son had taken it badly, to the extent that it had caused him actual, physical pain, he said: an ache deep in his belly that would not subside.

The breakup had also plunged him into depression, a depression exacerbated by the fact that this was a small town: there were only so many places one could go to drink, to eat, to see a movie, to pass the time. The girl worked behind the bar at Dean’s Place, and Dean’s was where the young people of the town-and many of the older ones too-had for generations gone to congregate. If Bobby wanted to socialize, then Dean’s could be avoided for only so long. Daniel knew that following the breakup there had been encounters at Dean’s between the two young people. Even then, the girl had enjoyed the upper hand. His son had been drinking, while she had not. After one particularly loud exchange, old Dean himself, who ruled his bar like a benevolent dictator, had been forced to warn Bobby against bothering the staff. As a result, Bobby had stayed away from Dean’s for a week, returning home from work each evening and heading straight for his basement hideaway, barely pausing to greet his parents and only emerging to raid the refrigerator or to share an awkward meal at the kitchen table. Sometimes, he even slept on the couch instead of in the adjoining bedroom, not even bothering to undress. Only after some of his friends came by and cajoled him out did the clouds above his head seem to break for a time, and then only for as long as he avoided seeing the girl.

When his body was discovered, Daniel’s first thought was that he had killed himself out of some misplaced devotion to Emily. After all, there seemed to be nothing else troubling him in life. He was saving for college, and seemed to have every intention of returning to further study, hinting that perhaps Emily might come with him and get a job in the city; he was popular with his friends both there and at home; and his natural disposition had always tended toward the optimistic, or had until the dissolution of his relationship.

Emily should have stayed with his son, thought Daniel. He was a fine boy. She should not have hurt him. She should not have broken his heart. When she had arrived at the death site, just as the body was being carried across the fields to the waiting ambulance, Daniel had been unable to speak to her. She had approached him, her eyes glistening, her arms raised to hold him and to be held in turn, but he had turned away from her, one hand outstretched behind him, the palm raised in a gesture that was plain not only to her but to all who had witnessed it, and in that way he had made it clear where he felt the blame for his son’s death lay.

And so Bobby’s mother had wept tears of grief and pain at the news that her son’s life had been taken from him by others, of incomprehension at the manner of her son’s death, while his father had felt some of the weight lifted from his shoulders, and he marveled at his own selfishness. Now, in the basement, the anger came back, and his hands formed themselves into fists as he raged at the faceless thing that had killed his son. Somewhere above him the doorbell rang, but he barely heard it over the roaring in his head. Then his name was called, and he allowed the tension to ease from his body. He released a ragged breath.

“My boy,” he said softly. “My poor boy.”

Emily Kindler was sitting at the kitchen table. Behind her, his wife was making tea.

“Mr. Faraday,” said Emily.

He found that he was now able to smile at her. It was a small thing, but there was genuine warmth in it. There was no longer any hint of blame attaching to her for what had occurred, and now she seemed more like a link to his son, fuel for the fire of his memory.

“Emily,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“Okay, I guess.” She could not look at his face. He knew that his rejection of her at the place of his son’s death had wounded her deeply, and if he had absolved her of all blame then she had yet to do the same for him. They had never discussed what had happened that day, so it was true to say that he had not made any recompense for it.

His wife came over and touched the girl’s hair gently with the palm of her hand, smoothing down some loose strands. Daniel thought that they looked a little like each other: both were pale and without makeup, and there were dark circles of grief beneath their eyes.

“I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving after the funeral.”

He was surprised. He struggled to find something to say.

“Listen, honey,” he said, “I owe you an apology.” He reached for her hand, and she allowed him to take it. “That day, the day they found Bobby, I wasn’t myself. I was just so hurt, so shocked, that I couldn’t…I couldn’t…”

Words failed him. He did not want to lie to her, and he did not want to tell her the truth.

“I know why you couldn’t look at me,” she said. “You thought it was my fault. Maybe you still do.”

He felt his chin begin to tremble, and his eyes grew hot. He did not want to cry in front of her. He shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I apologize for ever thinking that of you.”

Now she gripped his hand tentatively as his wife placed three cups on the table and poured tea from an old china pot. “Thank you.”

“Chief Dashut came by earlier,” he continued. “He said that Bobby didn’t take his own life. He was murdered. He asked us to keep it quiet for now. We’ve told nobody else, but you, you should know.”

The girl made a small mewling sound. The little blood she had left seemed to drain from her face.

“What?”

“The injuries, they’re not consistent with suicide.” He was crying now. “Bobby was killed. Someone choked him until he was unconscious, then tied him up and forced him forward until he died. Who would do that? Who would do such a thing to my boy?”

He tried to hold on to her, but her hand slipped from his. She stood up, teetering on her low heels.

“No,” she said. She turned suddenly, her right hand trailing. It caught the nearest cup and sent it falling to the floor, where it shattered on the tiles. “I have to go,” she said. &lrsqÑshe said.dquo;I can’t stay here.”

And there was something in her voice that caused Daniel’s tears to cease, and his eyes grew sharp.

“What do you mean?”

“I just can’t stay. I have to leave.”

There was knowledge in her eyes. Daniel saw it.

“What do you know?” he said. “What do you know about my boy’s death?”

He reached out to her, but she pulled away from him. He heard his wife say something, but it meant nothing to him. All of his attention was focused on the girl. Her eyes were huge. They were staring not at him but at the window behind him, where her face was reflected in the glass. She looked confused, as though the image that she saw there was not the one she had expected to see.

“Tell me,” he said. “Please.”

She did not speak for a time. Then, softly: “I caused this.”

“What? How?”

“I’m bad luck. I bring it with me. It follows me.”

Now she looked at him for the first time, and he shivered. He thought that he had never before seen such desolation in the eyes of another human being, not even in his wife’s eyes when he’d told her that their son was dead, not even in his own as he looked in the mirror and saw the father of a dead child.

“What follows you?”

The first of the tears began to fall from her eyes. She continued speaking, but he felt as though their presence in the room was immaterial to her. She was talking to another, or perhaps only to herself.

“There’s something haunting me,” she said, “someone haunting me, following in my footsteps. It won’t give me peace. It won’t leave me alone. It hurts the people I care about. I bring it down on them. I don’t want to, but I do.”

Slowly, he approached her. “Emmy,” he said, using his son’s pet name for her, “you’re not making any sense. Who is this person?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her head low. “I don’t know.”

He wanted to hold her. He wanted to shake her, to pummel the information from her. He did not know if she was talking about a real person or some imagined shadow, a ghost conjured up to explain her own torment. He wanted her to clarify it for him. An unknown entity had killed his son. Now here was his ex-girlfriend talking about someone following her. It needed to be explained.

She seemed to sense what he was thinking, for as he moved to take hold of her, she slipped away.

“Don’t touch me!” she said, and the ferocity with which she spoke caused him to yield to her.

“Emily, you need to explain yourself. You have to tell the police what you’ve told us.”

She almost laughed. “Tell them what? That I’m haunted?” She was in the hallway now, backing toward the door. “I’m sorry for what happened to BobbyrhaÑned to Bo, but I won’t stay here. It’s found me. It’s time to move on.”

Her hand found the door handle and twisted it. Outside, Daniel felt snow coming. This strange spell of warmth was coming to an end. Soon, they would be lost in drifts, and his son’s grave would gape darkly amid the whiteness like a wound as they lowered him into the ground.

He began running as Emily turned to leave, but she was too fast for him. His fingers touched the material of her shirt, and then he stumbled on the porch step and dropped heavily to his knees. By the time he got to his feet, she was already running down the street. He tried to follow, but his legs hurt and he had been shocked by the fall. He leaned against the front gate, his face contorted in pain and frustration, as his wife held his shoulders and asked him questions that he could not answer.

Daniel called the police as soon as he was inside the house. The dispatcher took his name and number and promised to pass his message on to the chief. He told her that it was urgent, and demanded that she give him Dashut’s cell phone number, but she informed him that the chief was out of town and had given orders that, for this night at least, he was not to be disturbed. Eventually, she promised to call the chief as soon as Daniel was off the line. With no other option, Daniel thanked her and hung up.

The chief did not call back that night, even though the dispatcher had informed him of Daniel Faraday’s call. He was having a good time with his family at his brother’s fortieth birthday, and he believed that he had earned it. He had not told Daniel Faraday and his wife of all that he had learned. That morning, one of his men had called Dashut’s attention to the base of the tree to which Bobby Faraday had been tied. Initials had been carved into its bark by the kids who had gone there to make out over the years, transforming it into a monument to love and lust, both passing and undying.

But something else had been hacked into the bark, and recently too, judging by the color of the exposed flesh beneath: a symbol of some kind, but unlike anything that Dashut had seen before.

He made sure that a photograph was taken of it, and he intended to seek advice about it the next day. The symbol might mean nothing, of course, or be entirely unconnected to the Faraday killing, but its presence at the murder scene troubled him. Even at the party, as he tried to put it from his mind, it came back to him, and with a damp finger he found himself tracing it upon a table, as if by doing so it might reveal its meaning.

By the time the party was over, it was after 2 A.M. Daniel Faraday, the chief decided, would have to wait until the morning.

Daniel Faraday and his wife died that night. The rings on their gas stove had been turned to high. The windows, and the front and back doors, all fit perfectly in their frames, for Daniel worked as a supervisor for one of the local utility companies and knew the cost of heat leakage in winter, so no gas escaped from the house. It seemed that his wife must have had second thoughts at some point (that, or there was the dreadful possibility that it was not a pact, but a murder-suicide on the part of her husband), for her body was found lying on the bedroom floor. On the kitchen table was a photograph of the Faradays with their son, along with a bunch of winter flowers. It was assumed that they had killed the>

Emily finished packing her bags after leaving the Faradays. She had been preparing to leave town ever since Bobby had gone missing, sensing somehow (although she did not speak the words aloud) that Bobby would not be returning, that something terrible had befallen him. The discovery of his body, and the nature of his death, only confirmed what she already knew. She had been discovered. It was time to move on again.

Emily had been running for years from the thing that was pursuing her. She was getting better and better at concealing herself from it, but not good enough to hide from it forever. Eventually, she feared, it would trap her.

It would trap her, and it would consume her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I HAD THE NEXT day off, and it was the first opportunity I had been given in some time to see how unsettled Walter had become. He would paw at the door to be let out, then minutes later would beg to be let in once again. He seemed not to want to leave my side for too long, but struggled to sleep. When Bob Johnson came over to say hi while out for his morning constitutional, Walter would not go to him, not even when Bob offered him half a cookie from his pocket.

“You know,” said Bob, “he was like that while you were away in New York. I thought he might just be ailing that weekend, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten any better.”

I took Walter to the vet that afternoon, but the vet could find nothing wrong with him.

“Is he alone for long periods?” she asked me.

“Well, I work, and sometimes I have to stay away from home for a night or two. The neighbors look after him when I’m gone.”

She patted Walter. “My guess is he doesn’t like that very much. He’s still a young dog. He needs company and stimulation. He needs a routine.”

Two days later, I made the decision.

It was Sunday, and I was on the road early, Walter on the front seat beside me, alternately dozing and watching the world go by. I reached Burlington before noon, and stopped at a little toy store I knew to buy a rag doll for Sam, and at a bakery to pick up some muffins. While I was there, I bought a coffee at a place on Church Street and tried to read The New York Times, Walter at my feet. Rachel and Sam lived only ten minutes outside town, but still I lingered. I couldn’t concentrate on the newspaper. Instead, I stroked Walter, and his eyelids drooped with pleasure.

A woman emerged from the gallery across the street, her red hair loose upon her shoulders. Rachel was smiling, but not at me. A man was behind her, saying something t &ld T‡hat was making her laugh. He looked older than she did, comfortable and paunchy. He placed the palm of his hand lightly against the small of her back as they walked together. Walter spotted Rachel and tried to rise, his tail wagging, but I held him back with his collar. I folded the newspaper and tossed it aside.

Today was going to be a bad day.

When I reached Rachel’s parents’ property, her mother, Joan, was outside the main house, playing ball with Sam. Sam was two now, and was already at that point where she knew the names of her favorite foods, and understood the concept of “mine,” which pretty much covered everything she had developed a liking for, from other people’s cookies to the occasional tree. I envied Rachel and her family the opportunity she had to watch Sam develop. I seemed to see it only in fits and starts, like a jerky film from which crucial frames had been excised.

Sam recognized me as I stepped from the car. Actually, I think she recognized Walter before me, because she called out a mangled version of his name that sounded like “Walnut” and spread her arms in welcome. She had never been afraid of Walter. Walter fell into the category of “mine” where Sam was concerned, and Walter, I suspected, regarded Sam in much the same way. He bounded up to her, but slowed down when he was a couple of feet away, so that he wouldn’t knock her over when he reached her. She threw her arms around him and, after licking her some, he lay down and let her fall upon him, his tail wagging happily.

If Joan had been gifted with a tail, I don’t think it would have been wagging. She struggled to put a smile on her face as I approached, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

“We weren’t expecting you,” she said. “Rachel went into town. I’m not sure when she’ll be back.”

“I can wait,” I said. “Anyway, I came to see Sam, and to ask a favor.”

“A favor?” The smile wavered again.

“It’ll hold until Rachel returns,” I said.

Sam relinquished her grip on Walter for long enough to toddle up to me and put her arms around my legs. I lifted her up and stared into her eyes, as I gave her the doll.

“Hey, beautiful,” I said. She laughed and touched my face.

“Daddy,” she said, and my eyes grew warm.

Joan invited me inside and offered coffee. I’d had my fill of coffee for the day, but it gave her something to do. Otherwise, we’d simply have ended up staring at each other, or using Sam and Walter as a distraction. Joan excused herself, and I heard a door close and then her voice speaking in a low tone. I guessed that she was calling Rachel. While she was gone, Sam and I played with Walter, and I listened to her speaking a mixture of recognizable words and her own private language.

Joan returned and poured the coffee, then put some milk in a plastic cup for Sam, and we picked at the muffins while talking about nothing at all. After about fifteen minutes, I heard a car pull up outside, then Rachel entered the kitchen, looking flustered and angry. Sam immediately went to her, then pointed at the dog and said “Walnut” again.

“This is a surpr baás is a suise,” said Rachel, making it clear that, as surprises went, it was right up there with finding a corpse in one’s bed.

“A spur-of-the-moment decision,” I said. “Sorry if I disrupted your plans.”

Despite my best efforts, or maybe they just weren’t very good to begin with, there was an edge to my voice. Rachel picked up on it, and frowned. Joan, ever the diplomat, took Sam and Walter outside to play as Rachel removed her coat and tossed it on a chair.

“You should have called,” she said. “We might have been out, or away somewhere.”

She made an attempt to clear some plates from the draining board, then gave up.

“So,” she said. “How have you been?”

“I’ve been okay.”

“You still working at the Bear?”

“Yeah. It’s not so bad.”

She did a good imitation of her mother’s pained smile. “I’m glad to hear that.”

There was silence for a time, then, “We need to formalize these visits, that’s all. It’s a long way to come on a whim.”

“I try to come as often as I can, Rach, and I do my best to call. Besides, this isn’t quite a whim.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know.”

More silence.

“Mom said you had a favor to ask.”

“I want you to keep Walter.”

For the first time she showed some emotion other than frustration and barely restrained anger.

“What? You love that dog.”

“Yes, but I’m not around enough for him, and he loves you and Sam at least as much as he loves me. He’s cooped up in the house when I’m working, and I keep having to ask Bob and Shirley to look after him when I leave town. It’s not fair to him, and I know your mom and dad like dogs.”

Rachel’s parents had kept dogs until very recently, when their two old collies had both died within months of each other. Since then, they’d talked about getting another dog, but they hadn’t quite been able to bring themselves to do it. They were still hurting from the earlier deaths.

Rachel’s face softened. “I’ll have to ask Mom,” she said, “but I think it’ll be fine. Are you sure, though?”

“No,” I said, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

She walked over to me and, after a moment’s hesitation, hugged me.

“Thank you,” she said.

I’d put Walter’s basket and toys in the trunk, and I handed them over to Joan once it was clear that she was content to take him. Her husband, Frank, was away on business, but she knew that he wouldn’t object, especially if it made Sam and Rachel happy. Walter keáappy. Wal seemed to know what was happening. He went where his basket went, and when he saw it being placed in the kitchen he understood that he was staying. He licked my hand as I was leaving, then sat himself down beside Sam in recognition of the fact that his role as her guardian had been restored to him.

Rachel walked me to the car.

“I’m just curious,” she said. “How come you’re away so much if your job is at the Bear?”

“I’m looking into something,” I replied.

“Where?”

“ New York.”

“You’re not supposed to be working. It could prevent you from getting your license back.”

“It’s not business,” I said. “It’s personal.”

“It’s always personal with you.”

“Hardly worth doing if it isn’t.”

“Well, just be careful, that’s all.”

“I will.” I opened the car door. “I have to tell you something. I was in town earlier. I saw you.”

Her face froze.

“Who is he?”

“His name is Martin,” she said after a moment.

“How long have you been seeing him?”

“Not long. A month, maybe.” She paused. “I don’t know how serious it is yet. I was going to tell you. I just hadn’t figured out how.”

I nodded. “I’ll call next time,” I said, then got into the car and drove away.

I learned something that day: there may be worse things than arriving somewhere with your dog and leaving without him, but there aren’t many.

It was a long, quiet ride home.