The Northeast Kingdom

Chapter 3

The story of Rebecca Loden’s divorce reached a wider audience than her recently published novel, the bestselling thriller Last Words, ever would. The upheaval had begun, in true literati fashion, with a cheeky blind item on “Page Six:”

Rebecca phoned Jeb that day to see if he had the inside scoop on the offenders’ identities. That was how unprepared she was for her husband’s infidelity. If she had been holding the telephone more closely, she might have heard the office blinds being drawn.

The Other Woman was a celebrity romance writer, a miniseries-spawning, household name, so the imbroglio quickly went national, splashed onto magazine covers and decried in chat rooms and alluded to in the presidential campaign in a stump speech on modern morality. In two weeks Rebecca Loden went from being a mid-list thriller author to the poster wife for spurned spouses everywhere. The just-released Last Words, bursting with pre-pub acclamation and already touted as Rebecca’s breakout book, went back to press eight times, riding the sudden surge of public awareness all the way to number four on the New York Times Bestseller List, her very first charting. The scandal pushed the book into early buyers’ hands; but it was the story itself, that of a rookie female FBI agent tracking a sociopathic militia leader across the American west, that clicked with readers. Now one year later and three weeks into its softcover release, the paperback was number one on the USA Today top fifty, while the romance author, whose affair with Jeb did not outlive the scandal, had failed to chart with her subsequent offering. It seemed that romance readers would tolerate adultery neither from their cherished characters, nor from their favorite authors.

But victories of morality and commerce had meant little to Rebecca. The breakup of her marriage was a car wreck, an absolute broadside, she hadn’t seen it coming. She endured the usual crises of mind, body, and soul. The blame was all Jeb’s, and yet still she searched for reasons. That someone once so compassionate and smart could fail her so badly. He had pledged to change, to restore love, trust, intimacy. In fact he begged her to stay, to go with him to counseling and give him another chance. She agonized and he apologized and she prolonged the suffering by going back and trying to make it work. But Jeb wasn’t interested in repair, he was interested in syndromes, compulsions, addictions, he wanted to convince himself that he was blameless, that having a poor character was not a flaw but a disease. They had been more than a couple, they had been a team, a single ambition, she the author and he her literary agent, but somewhere along the way she had lost him to himself. Somehow he had changed without regard to Rebecca. The sweet, tender, dedicated man she had loved perished in that car wreck — that was how she mourned her marriage. The Jeb she had admired was dead.

And yet the new Jeb was still in her life. He had been profoundly responsible for the business side of her success, argued her lawyers and accountants, giving him a potential legal claim on future earnings. Why forfeit an extra fifteen percent to another literary agent on top of whatever earnings settlement he might attach? The emotional toll of retaining his services — Jeb was a top agent — seemed too great, until anger caught up with her and Rebecca decided that Jeb should have to sing for his supper and not cost her a penny more than he was worth. So the alter-Jeb remained her agent, a doppelganger negotiating the deals for her current work-in-progress, the much-anticipated follow-up to Last Words.

After the divorce was settled and they embarked on separate lives, every block in Manhattan, a city they had discovered together and made their own, became a monument to betrayal and defeat for Rebecca. Central Park was now a wasteland of softball games and summer picnics. The. entire Upper East Side, where they had lived for the last year of their marriage, was off-limits to her now, as though cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape. The street noise distracted her, and she was unable to write more than a sentence or two without losing her way. The rest of their property had been divided equally, but she found she could not share custody of the city with him. Friends expressed concern about the radical nature of her move, from the Upper West Side to rural Vermont. “Depression” is a word even close friends don’t use lightly. But she wasn’t fleeing New York City so much as she was returning to the only safe place she knew, the only world she could trust now, the world of her writing.

It was writing that had first brought her to Vermont. She had stalled near the end of the first draft of Last Words, whose nemesis she had modeled on Jasper Grue, the leader of the vicious band of backwoods survivalists known as The Truth, who had bankrolled their segregationist militia with a spree of kidnap-murders in the mid-1990s. A scrap of research about his current residence, the Administrative Maximum Unit Prison at Gilchrist, prompted a long drive north into Vermont in an attempt to break the mental logjam. She never got any closer to him than the penitentiary parking lot, but that was all she had needed. She retreated to a nearby country inn and completed the novel that night in a torrent of creative energy.

She now lived a half hour north of St. Johnsbury in a two-story post-and-beam house of exposed wood and high ceilings and magnificent views of the unnamed mountain that was her only neighbor. She wrote at a converted carpenter’s desk in a sunroom off the kitchen, late into each day until the sun cycled behind the cap of the mountain. At night, her world revolved around the broad-mouthed fireplace. This was a period of hibernation, of recovery. Her novel had occupied her full-time, its completion her sole focus.

She felt confident returning north to ADX Gilchrist. Driving her big red Mountaineer, feeling the rhythm of the road under the tires, gave her a sense of independence, something else she had reclaimed from Manhattan. There the city set the pace, traffic lights, train times, escalators. In Vermont, she traveled at her own speed. She slowed now, taking in the regenerative beauty of the Northeast Kingdom. As she crossed the town limits of Gilchrist, the noon sun glinted off crystalline lakes in an ice-laden valley, the snow shining like sugar on the roofs of the cozy lakefront homes. She passed a Christmas tree farm, an acre of neatly spaced rows of blue spruces of graduating heights, and started to feel good again. Nothing very bad could ever happen here.

ADX Gilchrist looked less like the most secure prison in the country than it did a vocational high school fortified against a terrorist attack. The penitentiary was set behind high fences inside a wide clearing of high birch trees cut back from the perimeter in a perfect, sacred square. Rebecca pulled into the main lot and stepped out into a thin, crunchy layer of packed white dust, pulling on her parka and zipping it against the cold. She left her handbag in the car, carrying neither a notebook nor a tape recorder. Both were contraband on the inside.

She stepped past muddy snow plowed into tight piles and across a damp gravel road to the entrance, putting herself in the place of an arriving inmate. She passed under a squat guard tower and there was no one about. The entire prison compound looked like a border checkpoint at the crossroads of nowhere.

The outer fence was twenty feet tall, topped by taut strands of barbed wire angled inward. Inside the fence were bales of gleaming, spiraled concertina wire, stacked three wide and five high. They looked springy if you ignored the two-inch razor blades. Still, the visceral effect of the fence and the wire surprised her. She proceeded to a grille of thicker steel than the fence, with no visible lock or handle, barring her from a steel mesh tunnel inside. There were no buttons to push, no telephone receiver to pick up.

“Your name, ma’am?”

She found the source of the voice in the observation deck over her right shoulder. The guard stood impassive in a white shirt, black tie, and wide amber-lensed sunglasses of the type usually available through a special TV offer. A rifle leaned against the sliding glass window.

He found her on his list — it could only have been one name long — and with a slow rolling rumble the steel grille opened to admit her. She walked the twenty paces to the second grille, feigning poise as the first grille rolled shut, effectively trapping her inside the enormous sally-port cage. She heard a low ambient humming she realized was the electrified fence. When the second grille did not immediately open, something interesting happened. Rebecca began to panic. The electric fence, the tower, the glimmering wire, all roused a basic fear, one of humanity denied, of freedom revoked. She trembled, and yet even in the grip of this unreasonable distress, the writer in Rebecca thought, Remember this. Use this. When the grille clicked and rolled open finally, she squeezed through to the other side and did not look back.

The boxy, austere building ahead did not intimidate her as she imagined a super maximum security prison would. The facade was white limestone and square windows, cold and uninviting but not fearsome, with no outward symbols of deterrence. Certain embassies in New York City inspired more dread.

Warden Barton James met her at the administration building’s door. He was tall, no older than sixty, stooped at the shoulders like a career butler, although his hand, when she took it, was warm. Baldness articulated the shape of his skull, tipped forward deferentially on his long neck, and at times his sentences began with a mild stutter. Capillaries of red and blue showed maplike beneath the thin flesh of his face, giving him a sense of frailty that interested Rebecca. Oddly, she noticed his fingernails were trimmed to various lengths, as though he observed some obsessive grooming routine that allowed time for only two fingers each morning.

She had him pegged as a bachelor, a man with nothing but order waiting for him at home, so when he mentioned that Mrs. James was a loyal fan of hers, Rebecca was, in a writerly way, intrigued by her error. Keep surprising me, she thought. Another man and a woman met them inside, Special Agents Gimms and Coté, two FBI agents assigned full-time to the federal penitentiary, and both admirers of Last Words. They shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, then Rebecca continued with Warden James to another imposing grille, this one a grid of two-inch-square steel bars rising from the floor.

“We don’t get many visitors,” he said, excusing the agents’ attention.

“But the inmates must,” said Rebecca, uncertain she had used the right term. Convicts? Prisoners? Criminals?

“They’re allowed one per month, but we find ourselves in a rather remote location here, and these men aren’t that well-loved. We’ve actually cleared very few outsiders since Gilchrist went online five and a half years ago. Which, frankly, is just how we like it.”

“I appreciate you bending the rules for me.”

“No, not me,” he said, pleasantly. “I just do what I’m told.” He led her under the raised grille to another guard wearing a white shirt, black pants, and black tie, standing at an inner checkpoint. Rebecca clipped a laminated ID card to the smooth wool of her sweater. “You’ll have to bear with us now, there are certain things, regulations, we must insist upon. A pat search, to begin with. You received the appropriate clothing list?”

“I did.”

The only restriction that had affected her, aside from the prohibited colors black, blue, and orange, was the one banning brassieres containing wire supports. She wore a sports bra beneath her boyish sweater, a prudent, if somewhat defensive, choice of apparel.

She followed a secretary named Donna into a secure room and surrendered her car keys, coat, and belt, and stood for her very first frisking. Donna’s technique was efficient and businesslike — she had the busy, no-nonsense demeanor of a well-caffeinated young mother — and Rebecca smiled and never squirmed. After more scrutiny from a metal detector wand, Donna asked her to raise her sweater up to her shoulders. “Body alarm,” Donna said, attaching an adhesive patch to Rebecca’s chest, just above her heart, connected by wire to a red, pager-sized device, which clipped to the waistband of Rebecca’s khaki trousers.

“We call them ‘triple deuces,’ ” said the warden, back outside at the lobby checkpoint. “That was the prison system’s old method of sounding an emergency alert, dialing two-two-two on any facility phone. Pressing that black button on the transmitter sends an electronic signal directly to the Command Center, which controls everything inside the prison. The device also tracks your location anywhere within the perimeter at all times. Every officer here at Gilchrist wears a body alarm, and every one of them will answer a triple deuce running. The pulse rate monitor is a backup device: A read over one hundred and sixty will trigger the alarm if, for instance, a gun to your head is preventing you from signaling. If the electrode wire disconnects, same thing. But don’t let that scare you. We haven’t had a triple deuce here in...”

“Twenty-seven weeks,” answered the lobby watchman, one eye on his closed-circuit monitor.

“Twenty-seven weeks. Thank you, William.” The warden passed her a clipboard. “And of course, that was a false alarm.”

She signed the liability waiver, as well as an autograph for Donna, who was markedly more personable now that her official duties were complete. “I can’t wait for your next book.”

Rebecca asked her full name and, inscribing the autograph, asked her what it was like to work at ADX Gilchrist, leaving the part about “being a woman” unsaid.

“Super,” Donna said, brightly. “Pay’s good. Job security, real safe.”

“I notice you don’t wear a weapon.”

“No one does inside, except the extraction teams. There’s really no need. We have rifles at our desks in the event of an emergency. We’re retrained each year.”

“Really,” said Rebecca.

“I like the M-14,” said Donna, eager to impress.

Other than shooting skeet over the rail of a cruise ship on her honeymoon, Rebecca had never held a firearm in her life. A retired police captain from the Bronx edited her fictional gunplay for accuracy. Here was a young mother six inches shorter than she who could handle an M-14.

“My kind of reader,” Rebecca said.

She continued with Warden James down a long corridor of granite terrazzo polished to a high sheen. “Up Front,” as the warden referred to the administrative area, had the antiseptic charm of a hospital morgue at night. Their footfalls echoed. Warden James offered her a tour and was surprised and a little disappointed when she declined.

“I hope you didn’t go to any trouble on my behalf,” she apologized. “But I’m really just here to see Trait.”

He gestured graciously with his hand. “My office, then.”

The interior was routine upper-management, which disappointed her. The office of the warden of ADX Gilchrist could have been that of the president of a smalltown savings and loan. Her eye was drawn to the commendations on the wall and a crystal vase full of butterscotch candies on his desk. He picked up his telephone and said without dialing, “Please make Mr. Trait available.”

Rebecca sat in a firmly padded vinyl chair, mindful of the body alarm wire squirming against her belly. The warden hung up and faced her, standing against the sill of a barred window, fences and cushions of razor wire visible behind him.

“Is it fair to ask what you’re working on?” he said. “Or is that off-limits?”

“Perfectly fair,” she answered, “although I don’t have a one-line synopsis worked out. I can tell you what it is not. It’s not a prison book. Very little of it will actually take place inside a prison. There might be a scene like what we’re doing here, with a character entering a high-max penitentiary for the first time. I must say, these triple...”

“Deuces. Triple deuces.”

“The body alarms are a great detail.”

“I could get you some technical specifications.” He was moving toward his phone.

“Oh, no, thank you. The fence outside, it’s electrified?”

“Five thousand volts.” He settled back against the sill with an incongruous smile. “We lose a few birds every spring and summer.” A moppy spider plant browned at the fringes spoke to the aridity of his office. “I gather you’re doing something on Luther Trait.”

“Something, yes. There are similarities.”

The odd smile again. “I’m wondering what you think you’ll get from him. From meeting him face-to-face, I mean. None of my business really, but we do take our jobs seriously here. I’d like to think there’s real interest here on your part, in prisoners, in crime — not just in exploitation. I’d like to think you are something of a student of the criminal mind and not just another writer stirring the pot. I’m hoping that your coming here isn’t just a publicity stunt.”

She nodded, feeling tested. The truth probably fell somewhere in the middle. She was certainly conscious of the publicity value of this rare meeting with Luther Trait. And she was aware of the market pressure to follow Last Words with an even bigger book, thereby reinforcing her bestseller status and putting her on track to getting her scratchboard portrait on a Barnes & Noble tote bag. She knew from experience that quality was rarely enough to get a novel into buyers’ hands, that there had to be a hook, something to reach beyond everyday readers and tap at the shoulder of the public at large. Something topical, something urgent, what they call in the trade “that Big Book feeling.” Something to push it to the front of the bookstalls. The Holy Grail of publishing was the Controversial Bestseller.

At the same time, she was writing about crime, and not a multigeneration romance or a mother-daughter weeper or a memoir. Criminals and their methods and mind-sets. Where was the appeal? This was something she thought about more and more often. What was it about violent crime that attracted her interest at all?

“I just want to get things right,” she said.

The warden smiled a moment, distant with thought. “Well, I’m not sure what you’ll be able to do with Trait,” he decided. “Not much entertainment value there. But — I suppose I might’ve said the same about Jasper Grue.”

She smiled wanly, sensitive to people confusing her fictional antagonist with his real-life model, or assessing the relative entertainment value of her work. But more than that, the warden’s remarks reminded her that she was now indeed inside the same building as Grue. Sharing space with such a creature, breathing the same square acre of air. She wondered suddenly if she had given this visit sufficient thought. She asked the warden who else was incarcerated there.

“We have them all. Anyone you can think of, and some you probably can’t. Not merely the most violent, although we do house them. But some of these men have a certain drive, something innate, an indomitable criminal will. It takes work to keep your sanity while confined twenty-three-and-a-half hours each day in a windowless, double-doored, six-by-eight pod, denied all human interaction. We’ve seen some breakdowns. You remember Feretti, the New York mafia don?”

“Sure.”

“Hallucinations. Self-mutilation. We finally had to ship him out. His family’s lawyers were going to sue, but that would have meant their don’s condition leaking to the New York papers. He’s no tough guy anymore. Off the record?”

She was not a journalist, never had been. “Sure.”

“For the worst of the worst, a life sentence means freedom. Take away their fear of death, all hope of eventual release, and what do you have? You have empowered a criminal, over whom you no longer wield any influence. We are not a vengeful society, but order must be kept, a certain decorum. Our goal is to restrict a prisoner’s freedom, not establish it. The system requires something more, some penultimate level of punishment short of death in order to keep these career criminals in check. That is the primary function ADX Gilchrist serves in the federal prison system. This is hell on Earth. A necessary dungeon. No fraternizing allowed. No contact visits. No central mess hall or congregate recreation yard. No weight training. A regime of absolute silence. No sleeping between six a.m. and ten p.m. No work opportunities, and no pacifying movies or television. And for many, twenty-four-hour video surveillance. We move inmates through the facility electronically, opening and closing all gates and doors by remote control, thereby eliminating most contact with guards. We have not had a single violent incident since we went online. What you see here is the future of high-tech penology. In a sense, we are no longer jailing these irredeemables. We are merely watching them until the day God Himself commutes their sentence here on Earth. This place is more like a nursing home than a prison.”

“A nursing home.”

“You can use that.” He straightened, as though to indicate he was back on the record. “We care for the most dangerous, the most escape-prone, the most famous and infamous, the most threatening and most threatened criminals in the federal prison system. Terrorists. Serial killers. Members of the Medellin and Cali drug cartels. Mariel Cubans. The Libyans who tried to blow up the New York Stock Exchange. The heads of every major national prison gang, which we call ‘disruptive groups.’ The Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrillas, the Mexican Mafia — these men didn’t get to the top by a vote. Witness Security cases, and prisoners who have to be separated from one another. All the big CIA spies. And your man, Grue. Take the worst of the rotten apples from every Level-Six institution system-wide, seal them inside Gilchrist to rot together, and thereby improve the quality of the harvest overall.”

He was pushing it a little with that harvest metaphor, which sometimes happened, people getting grandiloquent in a writer’s presence.

“A real rogue’s gallery,” he finished. “A treasure trove of bad guys. Enough to keep you going for an entire shelf of books, I’d imagine.”

His telephone buzzed. Trait was ready. Warden James opened his office door and led her out, ever considerate, intent on playing Virgil to her Dante.

“Now, Luther Trait,” he said. “He’s got the thickest jacket in central file. Everything about him is recorded — movement, meal consumption, books read, everything. Trait is a ‘blue-book’ inmate, a resident of Echo Unit, ‘The Director’s Unit’ as it’s known, thirteen underground pods that are the most isolated in the facility. Yes — even in this place, there has to be some higher level of punishment for these men to fear, because that is all they respect. Echo Unit is the hardest time in the federal prison system. That’s where Feretti was when he cracked. The most notorious cases, spies, terrorists, dissidents. It’s both political and symbolic. Trait has ‘walkalone’ status outside Echo, meaning that if he travels anywhere inside the prison or out — the rare occasions when he is subpoenaed to testify in an accomplice’s criminal trial — he travels in four-point restraints in the company of our number-one extraction team. We can put on a pretty good show if we want to. The cameras in his pod go dark one hour each week, per court order; other than that, he’s always under the glass. But let me say this.”

They stopped before another rising grille. Rebecca watched the steel curling into the ceiling.

“I’m not impressed much by criminals. The images the media creates — supercriminals, evil geniuses... I’m a career corrections officer who rose up through the ranks. I’ve worked with all kinds of felons, all my life, and I’m here to tell you that every single one of them, almost to a person, is in essence a pathetic excuse for a human being, a narcissistic, low-intelligence opportunist, and a failure. Weak-minded predators, all. So when I say that Trait is an exception, understand that I am not given to hyperbole or mislaid awe. This institution, built to break such men as Luther Trait, hasn’t even touched him yet. On the contrary, he seems to be thriving. The regimen, the military routine, the ascetic existence: I believe this place has been good for him. He is a better man here than he ever was in any other lockup, and certainly better than he was on the outside.”

A dying fly flopped on the floor and the warden stooped to pick it up before continuing ahead.

“The Brotherhood of Rebellion gang he headed up at Marion was unique among disruptive groups. It was more than just a criminal racket hiding behind tribal colors: It was a culture, a religion. He had members of different races and backgrounds all willing to fight and die for him. And they ran Marion from the inside, which was no playschool itself. The BR was the biggest threat to the security of the American prison system we’d ever seen, and Trait was both its czar and messiah.”

They arrived at the Command Center, an imposing, circular guard station like a phantom tollbooth. Double doors opened inward to find eight guards working the room like air traffic controllers, monitoring dozens of viewing screens and issuing instructions into headset microphones. Assault rifles, handguns, and boxes of ammunition were stored inside glass cabinets at the compass points of the room. One man walked away from his post to tell the warden that Trait was on his way, pointing to a computer screen showing a black man in drab gray clothing and chains walking down a hallway surrounded by a phalanx of helmeted men. On another monitor nearby, Rebecca noticed the words Visitor: LODEN, R. superimposed above the time, date, and her current location, C. Center. Between the lines of text, a small red graphic animated her rising pulse rate.

The warden explained that the penitentiary was designed so that the entire facility, the gates, doors, cameras, lights, thermostats, and alarms, could be operated from within the Command Center, the fortified brain of ADX Gilchrist. It was to be the last post evacuated in the event of an emergency.

They stepped through a small sallyport trap into a new hallway, short and bright and sealed off on either end with steel grilles, blocking stairs she would not want to descend. The walls were different there, a sad, gray concrete that left the corridor still and cool. She was suffering through the dreamlike dread of knowing she was in a place she should not be.

The first door on the right opened into a small room where a corrections officer stood waiting against a side wall. There was a closed door near him that perhaps led to a bathroom, and a Formica-topped table with two blue chairs. Nothing else but the walls.

Warden James said, “Trait’s pod in Echo Unit is underground, closed off from the outside hallway by grilles and an electronic door that seals off noise. For security reasons, no one from the outside is allowed into Echo.”

“No complaint from me.”

“This is the disciplinary hearing room. Our kangaroo court — right, Carlos?”

Carlos grinned behind square-rimmed, top-tinted eyeglasses. “Yes, sir.”

“Carlos came over with me from Florence. He’ll wait with you here. Normally we would do this in our visiting area with each of you on opposite sides of a Plexiglas wall, but Trait has never been allowed that far up front, and I’m of the opinion that certain inmates should remain generally ignorant of prison geography. So special arrangements have been made. You’ll be face-to-face here. No extraordinary restraints. Trait will be wearing a stun belt, activated remotely at the extraction team’s discretion, delivering an immobilizing electrical charge. If by chance Trait does misbehave, your interview will be terminated and he will be removed. The encounter will be recorded, of course.” He indicated two cameras in the corners of the ceiling. “I don’t suppose I have to instruct you not to initiate any physical contact with him. Oh, by the way — we could not, by law, compel him to attend this interview. The choice was his. Were you aware that he has turned down every other media request for an interview, until today?”

“No,” she said. “No, I was not.”

“This is going all the way back to his tour in Marion. Can you think of any reason why he would desire to meet with you in particular?”

She was spooked now. “No — certainly not.”

The warden shrugged, smiling obliquely, and walked to the door. “I hope you get whatever it is you’re looking for.”

“You’re leaving?” she said.

“It’s best that I wait back at the Command Center. My presence here would only be a distraction.”

Carlos showed her to a chair at the table and then returned to the wall without a word. Rebecca tried to get comfortable, overthinking her posture and conscious of the body alarm electrode pasted over her heart. Her nerves were on display inside the Command Center. It was not the rate of her heartbeat that troubled her, but rather its force, its bass depth, the heaviness of which seemed to dislodge something in her chest that rose to obstruct her throat, a lump of intimidation she tried to swallow back. Why had Luther Trait agreed to this visit?

She heard chains approaching and clasped her hands underneath the table.

The door opened and the room was scanned by two men in riot gear: helmets, flak vests, jackboots, lineman’s gloves, black truncheons. They entered and Trait followed in his chains, backed up by two more men in riot gear and a fifth, the team leader, wearing yellow latex gloves.

Trait wore prison scrubs, thick blue cotton washed to gray. Both his leg irons and handcuffs were shackled to a belly chain that draped around his stun belt like the tassels of a ceremonial dress. He did not shuffle but instead used the entire length of ankle chain to stride from the door to the table. His eyes were fixed on her, and images from his criminal trial came flooding back to her mind: slow-motion video of him walking in and out of court, staring defiantly at the cameras, smiling when his verdict was read. Rebecca tried to meet his stare across the table, certain her body alarm was going to go off screaming. ADX Gilchrist was an athenaeum of killers, and these librarians had just brought to her table their rarest book.

The team leader held the plastic back of the chair as Trait sat. A pair of guards remained at the door while the other two moved peripherally away from him, almost to the walls. The lead man remained between Trait and the door, muttering softly into his headset. His hand was poised over an instrument on his holster belt that must have been the stun-belt trigger.

Luther Trait looked no older since his trial, only slimmer and more compact. His forearms, neck, and face had all lost muscle, his brown skin appearing to have faded in tone. Still, he bore none of the criminal ugliness one usually sees in a murderer, but rather a sense of nobility and pride. Only his eyes hinted at his malevolence. Light brown, nearly yellow, the irises blemished and cracked like gems miscut by a jeweler, they were eyes that had split public opinion: To some, they were evidence of a mystic intelligence attributed to Trait; to others, they were an outward manifestation of his evil soul. Still others found symbolism in their shattered appearance, with regard to the abuse he had suffered as a child. To Rebecca, they stood out like negative images in an otherwise developed photograph. It seemed to her that eyes so singular in appearance must also view the world singularly.

He was studying her too. “I don’t know you,” he said. “The phone is off the hook. They record every conversation.”

It seemed an odd prelude to their discussion, a warning. “Okay,” she said.

“They said you are a writer, a novelist. Are you going to write about me?”

“I am writing about someone like you.”

“There is no one like me.”

“I am writing about someone who is in a position similar to yours.”

“A black man in prison.”

“A leader. A prince among criminals.”

“A man of revolution. A criminal to your society but an innocent in the eyes of the true man, the eternal man: the warrior.”

Trait’s unusual eyes bore none of the recalcitrance of a sociopath, but instead his gaze drew her more intimately into the encounter. He was like a thick wire humming with electricity. He emanated power. She felt his radiation working on her. His voice was deep and commanding, and she gave in to it because she was safe. There were guards and cameras.

“At Marion,” he said, “the warden would parade visitors by my cell. Nobody wanted to leave the zoo without seeing the lion. The king of the jungle is safe in his cage and all is well.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” she said.

“This so-called dungeon: It is my temple. It was built to worship the warrior Luther Trait. For six thousand years the civilized man, the weak man, the modern intellectual, has constructed laws in order to protect himself. He has branded the warrior a criminal in order to confine the dominant male who would otherwise be his master. You see before you a strong man in an age where strength is feared. How do you punish the unpunishable? I am a riddle they cannot solve. That is why they watch me constantly: to study me, to learn from me. All of mankind’s worthiest impulses, shut up in this museum buried in the frozen earth. Everything you see here — this table, these guards, these bars, and walls — it’s all about one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You. It’s all about you. Imprisonment is population control. The dominant male is the mate attractor. You, the female, are the great prize.”

“A prize?” she said. He was just pushing her buttons, seeking her out. “Is that what I am?”

“Take away these chains, these jails, and laws. Turn every man loose in the world to fend for himself. Where would you be then? Who would you run with for shelter, for protection, for survival? A smart man? A cultured man? You would align yourself with a criminal.” He leaned closer, dragging a few links of steel over the edge of the table. “You would run with a warrior. You would run with me.”

“Oh,” she said, sputtering now, offended. “Please.”

“You have something for me,” he said.

He was leaning close to her. He wore a musk of confidence.

He was waiting.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

He said again, “You have something for me.”

She wanted to dismiss this as horny bravado, but could not ignore the pale sulfur of his eyes. In them were scrutiny and insistence, and she was struck cold. She sat still, forgetting her quickened pulse rate transmitting through the body alarm. For the moment there was no one else in the room and no warden watching them on camera. There was no one else in the penitentiary.

It was as though he knew something she did not. All she could think was that there had been some gross mis-communication regarding the circumstances of her visit.

“Maybe there was some mistake, I—”

“There was no mistake.”

His stare was different now, more probing than provocative, more evaluative than involving. He finally sat back, and there was perhaps a hint of relief in his eyes. None of this meant anything to Rebecca. But like a plug pulled from a wall, the connection between them — at once so forceful and immediate — was broken.

Rebecca was mystified. “What is it that I could possibly have for you?”

Trait stood abruptly. His chair scraped violently against the floor and his surprising agility froze Rebecca.

“I’m done here,” he said.

He doubled over before he could finish speaking. He dropped to the floor as though struck on the back of the head. He lay on his side, grunting and twitching, chains rattling as he contorted.

The two nearest guards moved in immediately. A Clear order was issued, and they reached for his armpits, jerking him to his feet. The group leader opened the door, muttering into his headset.

Trait had not made a move for her, as far as Rebecca could tell. Still, she wasn’t sorry they had dropped him, only that the interview was over.

Trait’s livid brown eyes found her. His face was proud. He bore the abuse nobly, shaking off the electric charge that had humbled him and assuming his former poise. The guards released him and his hands trembled as he stood to full height.

“Next time we meet,” he said, through gritted teeth, “it will be on my terms.”

The guards fell in around Trait as he turned and strode unassisted to the door, the chains slithering like serpents at his feet.

Chapter 4

Trait came off the stairs into the bleak silence of the underground corridor and walked the range of granite and steel, his handlers keeping stride with him like the five points of his star. His thoughts were divided. As usual, he was measuring the distance of the hallway in paces, counting off the steel doors, watching the hacks and how they signaled to the cameras to rack up the steel grilles. He didn’t get out of E-Unit more than three or four times a year and made the most of every opportunity. He listened attentively to the click of the automatic door locks. He studied the camera positions and observed the sight lines down each range. He noted the way the hacks communicated by hand gestures in observance of E-Unit’s regimen of silence, and thought of the various ways that this could benefit him.

They walked him to the examining room inside the E-Unit entrance trap. The doctor was waiting but nothing happened right away — no strip search, no examination — and Trait realized who they were waiting for.

In the other half of his mind, Luther Trait was not in the penitentiary at all. He was a Nubian king strolling along the banks of the River Nile with his wartime advisors under the beating African sun. He was the leader of a complicated system of tribes that reigned over a powerful seventh-century empire stretching from modern-day Egypt into modern-day Ethiopia, descendants of the early Nubian kingdoms who battled with Egyptians for power in the vast Lower Nile region, long before the campaigns of Alexander and the age of Christ.

This was not a dream. His thoughts represented a spiritual journey to the source of his strength and will, a pilgrimage to his inner homeland. The bars and walls around him had reality in space but no reality in time, and freedom from the senses of his immediate environment unlocked the universal. Anywhere he wished to go, he freely went. In an instant he reassembled the kitchen of his early youth. He was kneeling on a chair at the gouged wooden table by the window. He picked up a Dixie cup, felt the texture of the ribbed place mat underneath his forearm, smelled the food stains hardened in the grooves. He shredded a paper napkin into thin strips. He reached across the table and tasted a pinch of sugar from the chipped bowl as he looked out the steamed window, its grime etched into his brain like a Rorschach blot. He walked to the closet in his mother’s bedroom, the one he had spent so many hours of so many days locked inside. The padlock was nothing to him now. He opened the door for the little boy sitting on the musty shoeboxes beneath the hanging old coats, squinting into the sudden light.

His journeys were not fantasies or delusions, nor empty masturbatory voyages.

The foster homes of his youth: They were as real to him as the examining room he was in now. He returned often, prowling the shadows of his past, assembling the houses before him room-by-room like a god — every stick of furniture and the people who owned them. The little boy eating cereal at the breakfast table knew what he had to do to get back to his mother. It was all prearranged. Leave the back door unlocked or free the latch on the bulkhead before the happy family leaves the house for the day. She was careful only to take little things that wouldn’t be missed, and he smelled her in the rooms, Winstons and spearmint. Then she would reclaim him and he would be back home for a few weeks of her and the closet until the time came for her to give him up again. He did whatever he had to do in order to return home again. Then there was the last house, the big one on the hill in New Jersey. The polished marble foyer and game room, pinball and soda, and his own bedroom and his own TV. Their daughter was three years older than he and she let him play with anything he wanted. He liked it there. He let himself stay too long. When the homesickness came, before a day-trip to the Central Park Zoo, he cranked open the downstairs bathroom window just a few inches, so that it might not even be noticed. He left it up to fate. That evening he smelled his mother in his bedroom, the smoke and the gum, and at once was ashamed. The next morning, the father noticed his paintings missing. The silver was gone from the dining room and the coins from the cabinets of glass. Desk drawers had been pried open and important papers taken, bank accounts drawn on. The police came and talked to Luther but he fooled them with his answers. And he had been with the family all weekend. He couldn’t wait to return home, and the ensuing days were agony. Finally he called the number from a pay phone after school. His mother’s telephone was disconnected. After that, he was rarely sad anymore, only angry.

Sensory deprivation was for Luther Trait the ultimate freedom. Like the boy in the closet, he transcended consciousness, able to project himself to any place and time in every manner of being except the realm of the physical — the very realm he was working on right now.

The door opened and Warden James stepped inside. He had paled during his tour at Gilchrist, same as his prisoners. Trait had not seen him in perhaps two years.

“Initiate a search log,” the warden said.

The doctor had a clipboard prepared, snapping on examination gloves as he faced Trait. The egg salad on his breath was stomach turning. “Does the prisoner request an X ray in lieu of a digital search?”

Trait nodded.

The warden shook his head. “No more than two non-medical abdominal X rays per year.”

The doctor was bored with this routine. “Sign the waiver,” he said, holding the clipboard up to Trait.

Trait was looking at the warden. Not with malice, just studying him, tracing the veins beneath the thin veneer of the man’s pallid face and wondering if the face of a prison was the face of its jailer.

“Prisoner refuses to sign,” declared the warden, taking the clipboard and pen from the doctor and authorizing the search.

The doctor started with Trait’s ears, curling them inward and running his fingers behind and inside, his sickly egg breath pushing into Trait’s face. He tipped Trait’s head back to fully expose his nostrils, then probed them with a short nasal speculum. He held Trait’s jaw and slid a plastic bit between his teeth to prevent him from biting, then used a wooden blade to lift Trait’s tongue for inspection. The doctor’s latex thumbs entered his mouth and fished out the insides of his cheeks. This was the intrusion Trait enjoyed most, a white man checking the quality of his teeth. He felt aligned with his slave brothers, slaves who built the South, who built the pyramids, who built everything. All this time the warden watched him patiently.

The riot sticks in the hacks’ hands were truncheons, yard-long black sticks tipped with steel ball bearings. “Rib spreaders,” they were called, separating the ribs without breaking them or leaving any bruises or marks. There was a symbolism in those sticks, only partly phallic, of the agents of the state reaching through the bars of the rib cage of a free man to get at his soul. Trait slept with wet toilet paper stuffed in his ears, to keep out their hammering on the bars every hour on the hour, ostensibly checking for sawed pieces but really just banging on a man’s mind, whacking away at his sanity: Bang! Bang! Bang! He had to fight to survive, every step of the way.

The hacks tore apart the back of Trait’s prison shirts, seamed in Velcro for just that purpose, sliding it down over his manacled hands to expose his back and chest. His shoes were removed and his feet inspected, the soles and the spaces between each brown toe. The stun belt was removed and one hack grasped his cotton pants at the elasticized waist and pulled them to his ankles, and the doctor lifted his dick for inspection, then his sack. Trait remembered the first time he had stood for this, in a county lockup outside Milwaukee. He had proudly urinated in the examining guard’s face. But he was young then and his anger had lacked focus.

“Bend over the table.”

The Nubian kingdom fell in the fourteenth century as claims on the Nile by outside countries were defended and won. Aside from a few artifacts and ruins, none of the Nubian culture survives today except the language. Even the name was taken away. The lesson of history, as Trait understood it, was that every great empire believes itself the anointed, the eternal, the last. And every great empire eventually falls.

“What could she have had?” said Warden James.

The warden’s face was near his own, his voice was soft and intimate in his ear. In five years, he had never once addressed Trait directly.

“What did you think she could possibly have had for you?”

Like flashes of true insight to a cloistered monk, communication was a rare and beautiful thing to a man in total isolation. In a life as rigidly controlled as Luther Trait’s, there was no room for coincidence — and so the woman’s visit, scheduled one day before the beginning of the beginning, had demanded his courtesy. The message he had expected from her, in fact the only message she could have carried for him at that late hour, was one of abortion, of the failure of their great plan. His relief at her ignorance eclipsed his displeasure at the distraction her visit had posed, at that very late hour when demands upon his concentration were at their highest. No — she had been sent to him for some other reason, one that he had not as yet divined.

Trait looked at the warden’s venous face, his dewy eyes, so impassive and near. He pitied the man left holding the keys in a kingdom of open doors. The doctor continued his manual prodding, an exercise in humiliation, a thorough search for something when they knew that nothing was there. As the cold steel table chilled his chest, against his bare back Luther Trait felt the burning desert sun, and in his ears he heard drums of war, and water lapping patiently at the sandy banks of the ancient and holiest Nile.

Chapter 5

How warm and reassuring was the rambling Gilchrist Country Inn: the warm blond oak of its floors, the ornamental wreaths and pewter sconces hanging on the walls, the framed homilies (“God made us Sisters, Life made us Friends”), the brass registers breathing warm air through the floors. The formal prose of the inn brochure, printed in violet ink on heavy ivory stock, delighted Rebecca.

The bell on the reception desk — an actual handbell, set next to a spice-scented candle of caramel-colored wax in a squat canning jar — brought the proprietor and innkeeper, Fern Iredale, out of the kitchen. Fern was about sixty, solidly built, strong and broad but not tall, with short salt-and-pepper hair and a relentlessly upbeat manner. She appeared wearing a yellow apron tied over a work shirt, khakis, and moccasins. Rebecca remembered her first visit, and how five minutes chatting with Fern at check-in had completely deionized her urban cynicism. It turned out Fern was a fan of “strong women” thrillers. She had made Rebecca promise that if she ever came near Gilchrist again, she would spend another night or two at the inn and Fern would organize a reading in town. And Fern was so warm and dear that Rebecca could not let her down. There were worse things she could do for herself than enjoy a weekend of Fern’s mothering.

A carton of paperbacks sat behind the desk, ready for the next evening’s event. Fern checked her in, then proudly led Rebecca around to the back of the house via the enclosed farmer’s porch. A painted sign above the communal bookshelves read, “Take a book. Leave a book.” On a small stand on the highest shelf was an autographed, plastic-sleeved hardcover copy of Last Words, with a handwritten sign below it reading, “... Except This One.”

Dinner was an adventure. Vermont cheddar-cheese soup, homemade oatmeal-maple bread, cob-smoked maple ham, potato pie, and maple-butternut squash, with not a green vegetable in sight. Apple cider was the beverage, apple berry the dessert. Guests sat family style at one long table in a room of latticed windows looking out on the night and the trickling snow. Rebecca noted that the sage-green floral wallpaper matched the fabric of the seat cushions, the tablecloths, and the linen.

Fern hovered over dinner, a body in perpetual motion, returning again and again from the kitchen with platters of food. Later, dishes of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food would follow them into the parlor, as well as Granny Smith apple wedges dusted with nutmeg and cinnamon. Also “sugar-on-snow” was a local treat — maple syrup boiled and poured over a bowl of freshly fallen snow. And coffee, tea, and homemade oatmeal-maple cookies.

The other guests were generally pleasant. Normally Rebecca resisted groups. Anytime strangers are brought together in a closed social system — a doctor’s waiting room, an airplane, a checkout line — a sort of existential jury is formed. Judgments are passed from stranger to stranger, if only silently, and any action taken by one within the group becomes collusive. If at a large dinner one person is inexcusably rude to the waiter, then by association the entire table is held responsible for his bad manners. Naturally, Rebecca’s mind carried this to extreme “lifeboat” scenarios. Who in the group would be the first to crack? Who would betray the others for his or her own gain? Who would hoard the drinking water? Who would emerge as the leader? Especially since her divorce, Rebecca had a hard time surrendering to anything that was beyond her complete control.

Fern, a platter of ham on her arm, posed an icebreaker — “What was the best meal you’ve ever eaten?” — and Rebecca enjoyed what the responses told her about the others.

First there was Terry, a bonds analyst from Fort Hill, New Jersey, who was in Gilchrist to research the prison-bond offering as a model for other towns pursuing similar projects. He wore a blazer to dinner, his buttery hair still damp from a shower. He was boorish about his job, eager to impress, but at least he kept the conversation going. His favorite meal was a luncheon he had attended in London, where he had been seated two tables away from the CEO of Sun Microsoft Systems.

Mr. Hodgkins was a gentleman in his late-fifties, polite and well-groomed without being particularly handsome. He had the air of a man of travel, a seen-it-all self-possession that made him difficult for Rebecca to read. His hair was graying and fading off the top and sides of his head, his eyebrows were wiry, his eyes cool blue. There was a whiff of money and manner, which Terry in particular deferred to, sensing a soul mate, but Hodgkins would give nothing away. Evidently, he had been at the inn for a few days already; perhaps he was looking for retirement property in the region. He declined both wine and dessert and retired to his room immediately after dinner. His favorite meal, he said with a fond smile, was a lamb dish at Maxim’s in Paris, “With a lady friend — but that was twenty years ago.”

Mia, a social worker, was from the Montreal area, traveling on vacation with her young husband, Robert. They both seemed younger than their twenty-four years. This was their first night in the United States and, in contrast to Hodgkins, the couple possessed an abundance of youth but clearly little cash, reminding Rebecca of her hungry years with Jeb. Robert was slender and goofy with a honking laugh, while Mia, when not enthusiastically defending the poor, was shy and quiet, the fabric of her black turtleneck stretched from her pulling the front fold up over her pale lips. They were a couple one looks at and wonders how they ever got together, and yet is greatly relieved they did. Mia’s favorite meal was a picnic the two of them had once shared in the middle of a soccer field on one of their first dates, cold chicken and pasta under the stars. After some deliberation Robert agreed, although he also liked Mia’s beef stew. The couple withdrew to a cushioned deacon’s bench after dinner to play Yahtzee, a game Rebecca hadn’t even known still existed.

Dr. Rosen was a tall, thin, sandy-haired podiatrist from Boston. He looked natty in a blue cardigan sweater, corduroy trousers, and tan loafers, sitting in an easy chair after dinner with a copy of Yankee magazine open on his knee; his attention was split between the game of Yahtzee to his left and a Jeopardy! match to his right. Dr. Rosen smiled with self-satisfaction when he knew the Jeopardy! answer, and switched his attention to the dicing game when he did not. He was content to monitor the matches rather than play, and to his credit meddled in neither. He could not think of a favorite meal but pledged to come up with one before the end of the evening. He wore a wedding band, although it was clear — to Rebecca at least — that the woman he was traveling with — a short, young, thick-waisted salon blond named Darla — was not his wife. Her favorite meal was “a cruise to the Bahamas — the entire cruise was just one big meal!” A small gem linked to a delicate gold strand around her wrist was a constant source of distraction. It took very little deducing to figure out that Darla and Dr. Rosen were in the early stages of a May-December extramarital affair.

Bert and Rita Noonan, a married couple near Dr. Rosen’s age, were visiting northern Vermont for a weekend of antiquing and cross-country skiing. They were florists from Connecticut, having left control of their small chain of stores in the capable hands of their eldest daughter. Bert and Rita were very much a team — so much so that they were nearly one person, Bert-and-Rita, two heads thinking as one. In the parlor; each opened a different newspaper and read articles to the other over decaf tea. Their favorite meal was a salmon dish served at Canyon Ranch, a spa in the Berkshires they visited twice a year. They were eerily fit and friendly, these semiretirees in casual slacks and half-glasses, like forty-year-olds suffering from a mysterious aging disease.

Coe, a teenager who worked for Fern, was tending to the wood fire in the parlor, running the carpet sweeper over Terry’s cookie crumbs, and collecting empty bowls, dishes, and plates. “Done with that, Miss Loden?” He wore a woolen court-jester hat of the snowboard generation, even indoors, and was very much the postmodern dude. No one asked him what his favorite meal was. From the look of him, Rebecca would have guessed frozen pizza.

Later that evening, sitting in a quilt-backed rocking chair with a china cup of blackberry tea on the chessboard table at her elbow, blissfully content, Rebecca noticed Coe returning from an outdoor task with a markedly jauntier pace. Smiling to himself and meeting no one’s eye, he carried a few scraps of kindling to the fireplace, breezing past her, the flaps of his untucked flannel shirt emanating the unmistakable fragrance of marijuana. The boy kneeled at the wide stone hearth, his tattered jeans frayed at the hems, the dirty white strings dripping with snow, and attended to the crackling pine wood with rapt concentration. Rebecca watched him wistfully, envying his carefree youth.

She was not the only one. On the other side of the fireplace, in a wide club chair near the player piano and the French doors leading out to the porch, a guest named Mr. Kells sat with the New York Times dipped just a few inches below his eyes. In them, fleeting yet unmistakable, was the same wistful expression that had clouded her own eyes, the same glimmer of the fuddled memories and exquisite indolence the tender aroma of pot aroused. At precisely the moment she became aware of him, Mr. Kells looked up and became aware of her — prompting her to glance away, embarrassed and protesting her innocence with a return to her copy of Vermont Life and a feature story about chain-saw art.

Mr. Kells was a football coach at a small northeastern college, in Gilchrist overnight to scout a quarterback recruit. At least, that was the occupation her writer’s mind assigned him. Big hands held the newspaper, football hands — brown-skinned, ringless, and hairless. He was in his mid-forties, thick-chested, his weight well-distributed over his tall frame but just beginning to round out in the middle, the stone build of his youth starting to soften. The plate of oatmeal-maple cookies that found its way to the piano bench near him was empty now, but for the crumbs. A few tiny woolen pills remained stuck to his white polo shirt, from a sweater he had pulled off after dinner. But his belt matched his shoes, and in general, Mr. Kells bore an agreeable, everyman look, a rugged, one-of-the-guys familiarity that belied his actual behavior.

He was the only guest aside from Mr. Hodgkins not to succumb to the geniality of that pleasant, fire-lit evening. He had kept to himself at dinner, seated next to Mr. Hodgkins, eating methodically. They were the only two not to ask any questions about Rebecca’s interview with Luther Trait. Since dinner, he had spent the evening ensconced behind the New York Times — not hiding, necessarily, but separated from the rest, an outsider. Perhaps it had something to do with his traveling through all-white Vermont. But would a college football coach lavish the better part of an evening on the Times’? Rebecca could not get a good read on him. When pushed for his favorite meal, he pointed to his plate as he chewed. “This is it,” he said, “right here.”

Rebecca found herself missing the Times for the first time since leaving New York. She kept up with it online, but news was so ephemeral in cyberspace. Printed on paper, it seemed intractable, authoritative, final.

She roused herself out of the rocking chair. In the sitting room near the kitchen there was an overstuffed sofa with navy blue throw pillows sunk like napping children in the curves of its plush, welcoming arms. The sofa was Fern, the pillows her guests.

“In here, dear.”

Fern was inside the saloon doors, past a sign that read Employees Only.

“Oh, never mind the sign,” she said. “That’s just to keep out the riffraff.”

Rebecca pushed through into the warm kitchen. “You get a lot of riffraff here?”

The room was square, arranged around a large, central butcher-block island. The sink and countertops had been wiped down, the trash paper bagged, recyclables separated and ready to go. Fern fed muffin pans to a large stove built into an exposed brick wall, then pulled the string on her apron, lifting the neck loop over her neat, peppery hair, and padded in moccasin shoes over to the faucet to refill the kettle. Fern struck Rebecca as an old-guard lesbian, a distinguished veteran of the gender-identity wars, her commission honorably resigned. If she was alone, it was certainly by choice, and yet she wasn’t alone. She had her guests and, as Rebecca set her cup on the counter, Ruby the cat came rubbing against her leg.

“Hi, there,” said Rebecca, kneeling to pat Ruby’s slinky black coat. “I remember you.”

“Ruby, come here,” Fern tsk-tsked, pouring a dish of milk and setting it on the floor. Ruby’s belly pouch swayed as she sauntered over to the dish on silent, white-mittened paws. Fern stroked her tail as the cat lapped.

Rebecca asked, “Is she an indoor or outdoor cat?”

“She’s no mouser. She’s too lazy. You’re lazy.” Fern worked the cat’s soft head, scruffing the blaze of white between her forehead and her nose. “She’s too skittish, the old girl. I don’t know what she’d do with herself if she ever got outside. She’s too sheltered. You’re too sheltered.” Ruby had stopped drinking altogether, back arched, eyes narrowed to a squint as she luxuriated under Fern’s small hand.

“Thanks again for arranging things.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Fern. She was up and washing her hands in the sink. “I’m thanking you. When’s the next one coming?”

“Soon, I hope,” said Rebecca, as Fern pulled a bag of oranges from the pantry and spilled them onto the butcher’s island. She halved them with a long knife pulled from a magnetic strip on the wall. “I don’t suppose there’s anywhere I could get a New York newspaper at this hour?”

“No. I know that Mr. Hodgkins has been driving up to Newport for his. He usually leaves it around here somewhere.”

“Mr. Kells has it,” she said. The dishwasher began to breathe steam and Rebecca slid down the counter away from it. “Has Mr. Hodgkins been here awhile?”

“Four days. A nice, quiet guest. Private bath, uses a lot of towels. He must have some friends near town. He’s always driving off.”

The kettle whistled and Rebecca filled her cup. “What about Mr. Kells?”

Fern paused to think, her knife blade poised over a Sunkist as though determining its fate. “His second night. He skipped dinner yesterday. I don’t know him that well. Funny thing, though.”

“What?”

“No skis. Neither of them. No winter sports gear whatsoever. This time of year, that’s usually what I see. Not people traveling alone and without skis.”

“I’m traveling alone,” Rebecca said. “And I don’t have skis.”

“Ah,” said Fern, winking and pulling a juicer out of the island cabinet. “Everyone is a suspect.”

Rebecca returned to the parlor with her tea. Dr. Rosen and Darla had slipped away, and Robert and Mia were chatting in French over a game of Mastermind. Bert-and-Rita had moved on to back issues of Consumer Reports they had brought along with them. Terry was watching SportsCenter with the volume turned down. Coe was still tending to the fire.

The Times was folded on the piano stool next to the plate of crumbs and Kells was gone. Rebecca picked up the wrinkled newspaper and glanced at the headlines, then dropped it back onto the stool. She was less interested in its content than she had thought.

She opened the French doors onto the glassed-in porch. The chill was refreshing after the heat of the parlor fireplace and the warmth of the kitchen stove. She couldn’t find a light switch, so she followed the dim passageway toward the darker rear of the house, letting her eyes adjust. She set her teacup down on a wicker plant stand and crossed her arms to the cold, looking out at the snow shaking out of the unseen sky and tumbling onto the grounds. A glowing white carpet stretched to the bare trees at the foot of the mountains and the silence was absolute. She wondered at the strangeness of the day, a study in contrast: ADX Gilchrist and Luther Trait standing in sharp relief against the agreeableness of the inn. She thought of killers and innkeepers and bestselling sequels and wondered what direction her life and her career were taking.

“Excuse me.”

The voice was low and perfunctory — but still Rebecca jumped as Kells walked out of the shadows at the dark end of the porch, stepping past her.

“Didn’t want to startle you,” he said.

“Right,” she said, nervously touching her throat with her hand. “Thanks.”

He was already on his way back to the parlor door. She stood there a moment, angry with herself for being spooked, then she turned her attention back to Kells. There was an air of tensile strength in the way he carried himself. What had he been doing on the porch?

She returned to the parlor door, but he was gone again, as was the plate of crumbs. Rebecca ignored the growing cold and continued stealthily along the outer porch almost to the front entrance of the inn, stopping at the twin French doors. She saw Kells there, just inside the saloon doors, handing Fern the small plate and saying goodnight. Rebecca edged back from the wall to avoid being seen, and peeked out again as he moved past the reception desk to start up the carpeted stairs to the guest rooms, a hardcover book in his hand.

She made her way back to the porch door. She found her cup of tea on the plant stand and then, curious, she rounded that last corner, following the porch to the end. Another pair of doors led to an outside stairway going up, and they were locked. Before the doors was Fern’s communal library, the built-in bookshelves packed with chipped paperback spines of varying widths and lengths: chubby romances, thin humor books, self-published Vermontalia, and the familiar stripes of last year’s thrillers. But what surprised her was the top shelf where earlier that day she had viewed Fern’s autographed copy of Last Words above the sign admonishing borrowers, “... Except This One.”

The wire display stand was empty.