HE WAITED IN THE CAR. He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one else wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.

Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.

He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.

“I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”

He asked if she wanted him to come get her.

“Okay,” she said.

On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kinds of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.

“I hadn’t been dancing in so long, and if I shut my eyes no one could see,” she was saying, looking out the window, her head tilted against the window. “No one there knew me until someone did. A woman I didn’t know. She kept shouting at me. Then she followed me into the bathroom and said she was glad my little girl couldn’t see me now.”

He knew what people would say. That she was out dancing at a grimy pickup bar. They wouldn’t say she cried all the way home, that she didn’t know what to do with herself, that no one knows how they’ll act when something like this happens to them. Which it probably won’t.

But he also wanted to hide, wanted to find a bathroom stall himself, in another city, another state, and never see anyone he knew again, especially his mother or his sister, who spent all day on the Internet trying to spread the word about Shelby, collecting tips for the police.

Shelby’s hands-well, people always talk about babies’ hands, don’t they?-but they were like tight little flowers and he loved to put his palm over them. He never knew he’d feel like that. Never knew he’d be the kind of guy-that there even were kinds of guys-who would catch the milky scent of his daughter’s baby blanket and feel warm inside. Even, sometimes, press his face against it.

ROGELIO WAS THE YOUNGEST of three, the skinniest, the least talkative. As a boy, he slept in the same room as his brother, Jaime, and his earliest, most profoundly comforting memories were of those late nights, before sleep: the chatter between them, the camaraderie. Then Jaime left for San Jacinto, and shortly afterward, when Rogelio was eight, his father died. In the months after that, Rogelio began skipping school to spend hours walking in the hills above town. He liked to be alone. He gathered bits of wood, and used his father’s tools to carve tiny animals-birds, lizards, that sort of thing-which he kept in a box under his bed. They weren’t particularly lifelike, but they were surprisingly evocative, and, at age twelve, he presented one to a girl he liked, as a gift. With trembling hands and a look of horror on her face, the girl accepted it, and for the next week she avoided his gaze. The other children whispered about him whenever he came near. There was no need to hear the exact words; their meaning was clear enough. The following year, Rogelio quit school officially, and his mother and his sister agreed that there was no practical reason for him to stay in town any longer, so he left to join Jaime in San Jacinto.

Rogelio was small for his age, but tough, good with his hands and his fists. He didn’t have a temper, the way his brother did. Instead he possessed an equanimity that his family found almost disconcerting. He’d been shunned all his life, or that’s how he felt, and he’d grown accustomed to it. He loved his brother, looked up to him, and never worried about whether Jaime loved him in return. He could follow instructions, had decent mechanical intuition, but, unlike most of his classmates, he had not learned to read. Jaime tried to teach him, but soon gave up: the boy kept confusing his letters. More than a decade later, Henry Nuñez, Rogelio’s cellmate in Collectors prison, explained to him that there was a condition called dyslexia. “How about that?” Rogelio said, but his face registered nothing-not regret or shame or even curiosity-as if he were unwilling to contemplate the ways in which his life might have been different if he’d had this information sooner.

For the first couple of years in San Jacinto, he worked on the broken-down trucks that his brother bought on the cheap. Together they would cajole these heaps of rusting metal back to life. Each machine was different, requiring a complex and patient kind of surgery. Parts were swapped out, rescued, jerry-rigged. It was as much invention as repair. When a truck was reborn, they sold it and reinvested the profits, which weren’t much at first, but the brothers were very careful with their money. In a photograph from this time, Rogelio sits on a gigantic truck tire with his shirt off; he is lithe and wiry, and he wears the blank expression of a child who asks no questions and makes no demands of the world. Not a happy boy, but, given his situation, perhaps a wise one.

Eventually Jaime bought his kid brother a motorbike, the kind outfitted with a flatbed of wooden planks in front. This machine became Rogelio’s source of income for the next few years; he rode it around the city, from one market to another, carrying cans of paint, lashed-together bundles of metal pipes, chickens headed for slaughter, crammed into crates stacked so high that he had to lean to one side in order to steer. San Jacinto was growing steadily, but not yet at the torrid pace that would later come to define it; Rogelio knew every corner of the city then, and years later, at Collectors, he would draw a map of it on a wall of the cell that he shared with Henry, using white chalk to trace the streets and the railroad tracks and to label the apartment he’d shared with his brother.

Henry asked him why he’d gone to the trouble.

“Because one day I’ll go back there,” Rogelio said.

In 1980, the year Rogelio turned seventeen, Jaime took him to a brothel near the center of town. It was the first of its kind, and had been built for the hoped-for wave of young, fearless men with money. There were rumors of gold in the hills, and the brothel’s fantastical anteroom paid tribute to those stories: the walls were painted gold, as were the bar and the wooden tables and chairs. In fact, that night even the three prostitutes on display for Rogelio’s choosing had followed the color scheme: one in a gold miniskirt, another in gold lace panties and bra, and the third in a gold negligee. Three little trophies, all smiling coquettishly, hands on their hips. Jaime encouraged Rogelio to pick one, but he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. The moment stretched on and on, far past what was comfortable, until the girls’ put-on smiles began to fade. And still the boy stood there, immobilized, amazed.

“Oh, fuck it,” Jaime said finally. He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and paid for all three.

It seems that Jaime had begun to sell more than refurbished vehicles.

When Rogelio was eighteen, he traded in his motorized cart for a small loading van and, shortly after, traded the van for a truck that he brought back to life with his own hands. The first time the reconstructed engine turned over was one of the proudest moments of Rogelio’s life. Each new vehicle expanded his world. Now he was a driver; he ferried a dozen laborers down to the lowlands, men who stood for hours without complaint as the truck bounced along rutted and bumpy roads. Once there, Rogelio discovered a prickly kind of heat he’d never felt before. He liked it, and began volunteering to drive that route whenever it was available.

The following year his brother sent him in the other direction, over the range to the west, and on that trip Rogelio saw the ocean for the first time. It was 1982; he was almost twenty years old. He sat at the edge of the boardwalk in La Julieta as the fancy people of the city strolled by, confident-looking men in blazers and women in bright dresses, boys he took to be his age but who appeared to possess a variety of secrets that Rogelio could only guess at. None so much as glanced in his direction. He wondered if he looked out of place, if they could tell that he was a stranger here, or if they could even see him at all. But when he considered the ocean Rogelio realized how insignificant these concerns were. He was happy, he told Henry later, and in prison he liked to remember the hours he’d spent there, gazing at the sea.

For the next few years Rogelio drove the route to the coast, to the lowlands, and back again, carrying vegetables to the city, raw materials to the mountains, laborers to the jungle. He was a quiet young man, still a boy in some ways, but he was dependable. He began to ferry other packages as well, small, tightly bundled bricks, which he kept under the seat or in a compartment hidden above the wheel well. One or two at first, then dozens. These were delivered separately, to other contacts. Rogelio never opened them to see what was inside (though he knew); he never touched the money (though he assumed that the quantities in play were not insubstantial). He had no qualms about this work. He trusted his brother. He never considered the consequences, not because he was reckless but because what he was doing was normal. Everyone was doing it.

On the last of these trips, Rogelio’s truck was searched at a checkpoint along the Central Highway, 65 kilometers east of the capital. The war was on, and the soldiers were randomly stopping trucks from the mountains to look for weapons and explosives. Rogelio was unlucky. Perhaps if he’d been more astute he could have arranged to pay the soldiers off, but he didn’t. Instead he waited by the side of the road while the men in uniform went through his vehicle with great care. Rogelio had time to consider what was happening, how his life was changing course before his very eyes. Not everyone has this privilege; most of us miss the moment when our destiny shifts. Later he told Henry that he’d felt a strange sort of calm. He considered running into the hills, but the soldiers would have shot him without thinking twice. So instead he admired his truck, which he’d had painted by hand, emerald and blue, with the phrase “My Beautiful San Jacinto” splashed across the top of the windshield in cursive lettering. At least, that’s what he’d been told it said. He recalled thinking, What will happen to the truck? Will it be waiting for me when I get out?

The soldiers found the package, and to protect his brother Rogelio said nothing about its origins. He played dumb, which wasn’t difficult. Everyone-from the soldiers who conducted the search, to the policemen who came to arrest him, to his ferocious interrogators, to the lawyer charged with defending him-saw Rogelio as he assumed they would: as a clueless, ignorant young man from the provinces. All these years, and nothing had changed: he was still invisible.

HOWARD PICKED UP his blinking line. “Investigations Division, Jim Howard.”

Silence. “Hello?”

Rough breathing. He could make out a quiet beeping in the background. “Charlie?”

“Jus’ a sec,” a weak voice said. Charlie Post had been in intensive care for ten days now. Howard waited as he gathered enough strength to speak.

“Lyle Collins is coming out,” Post finally rasped. “My guy at Eddystone told me.”

Eddystone was the warehouse of choice for Northern Indiana criminal psych patients. Howard felt a cold knot forming in the pit of his stomach.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t they ever die inside?”

“Coming out late this month. The report will say he’s stable.”

“Stable?! And what do the geniuses think did that? Sloppy Joes every Thursday?”

“Stay on’m, Jim. He’s ancient history. Off the books. He’ll be flying under the radar.” Charlie Post coughed hard.

Howard was jammed up, in the middle of a limbo that involved moving his life and his work from the Northern Indiana Investigations Division of the state police to northern Michigan, where he was trying to land a position with the Major Case Unit of the Michigan State Police. He and Charlie Post went way back. Way back was where Lyle Collins was coming from.

“Stay on’m. I know you’re spread thin. Just remember that bastard won’t be able to keep it together for long. He’ll be hungry.”

“I’ll make time, Charlie.”

Howard could hear fluid bubbling in Post’s throat. “Billy Ferguson used to come over Sunday nights to play hearts with the family. Sweet kid. He and Angie were a match, you know. Rare thing. Then one fine spring day he’s just gone.” Howard could not see the hand he lifted from the bed and waved slightly. “Just gone. Angie never got over it.”

“I remember,” Howard said. “You hang in there, Charlie.”

“Been doin’ that,” he whispered. “I’m ready for somethin’ else.”

“I’ll stop by next week.”

“Better make it sooner than that.”

Howard’s face was grim. He was going to miss old Charlie Post.

THERE WAS A GROUP of guys I knew from school gathered in a garage out back of Billy’s house, and Billy had hung a bed sheet up on the wall and propped the projector on a milk crate stacked on a folding chair. He told us he’d gotten the movie from somebody’s brother’s best friend’s cousin, and we all stood there and watched the film from start to finish, no credits, no title, no names, no sound. When the last jumpy frames of 8mm finally spun through the reels, everybody started talking at once, and Mike Toth said, No fucking way, and Lenny Richter leaned into me and whispered, Nothing but corn syrup and food coloring.

I was sweating even though the sun was long set, and I couldn’t seem to get my mouth around anything to say, so I checked my watch and saw that I was close enough to curfew and decided it was best to leave. Without a word, I slipped out to the main road to chance hitching home. I lasted fifteen minutes walking with my thumb out on the empty asphalt before I bent and broke and went to the pay phone at a two-pump gas station, the only lit building as far as I could see in either direction, and I called home, hoping my sister Charlotte would pick up fast. She answered on the first ring.

Charlotte was seventeen and had always been pretty, but not beautiful. That summer she had discovered Fleetwood Mac and changed. My dad started making rules, more rules than ever before, asking things like Where have you been? Everything was a privilege, and bedroom doors had to be left open, phone calls were monitored, and, as Charlotte liked to say, Privacy was part of the old regime. I sensed there was a battle brewing and it was going to get ugly fast. My dad may have had more power than Charlotte, but she was smart and quiet as a sniper, and sneaking out had become her specialty.

“Why the hell are you way out there in the country?” she said on the phone. “Can’t you get into trouble closer to home?”

I cradled the receiver between my shoulder and ear and dug my hands deeper into my pockets. “It’s not that far,” I said. When I left Billy’s, talk had been loud, and there had been a lot of clapping and shouts, and by the time I started walking down the driveway the decision had been made by everyone else to watch the film again. I had seen all kinds of trouble that night, and for once I hadn’t been the one in it, but I didn’t say that to Charlotte.

I was six months away from a driver’s license, and had a whole lot of nothing going on ever since I’d quit football. My dad said I had to have a job if I thought I was going to get a car, but jobs were hard to get, so I was mostly bored and looking for something to do. When we’d hitched out to Billy’s together earlier that night, Lenny had said this was going to be the best kind of something.

“I can’t get a ride, Charlotte. Please.”

“Dad’s home,” she said. “But he’s been talking with Johnnie,” and I knew she meant Walker, but she didn’t need to say it; it was our code for drunk.

I relaxed the phone into my ear and felt its warmth and could see my dad in his armchair, the footrest kicked up, the TV on, the glass empty. Around me the wind took less than a minute to become more than a gust, and I felt the edge under it and knew the August night was false, and even though the summer had mauled us, it was now packing to go. “I’ll pay you,” I said. “Twenty bucks.”

“Stay where you are,” she said. “I’m coming.”

The girl in the movie had dirty blond hair, and she was thin and was standing and bent forward onto the bed. I could see her spine rising up, bony and knobbed, and her skin was pulled tight, her head away from the camera, with just her shoulder blades looking out like hollow eyes. I had stared at her back, at the blankness of her skin, and it was so smooth that it looked fake, except for the raised red marks that could have been a handprint, and I flexed my own fingers and wondered if they were big enough to fill that space.

In the parking lot the only other sound besides the wind was the bugs beating themselves blind against the single overhead fluorescent. It was a sickly sodium light, too bright and artificial, and the cloud of insects swarming made strange shadows on the cracked cement below. I could smell wet grass, irrigation, farmland, and creosote seeping from the railroad ties that served as the borders between asphalt, fields, and road. In the distance a dog barked and barked, over and over again, a tired and monotonous sound, and there was no shout to quiet down, no hassled owner opening up a door and forcing the animal to come in, and I wondered what purpose a dog like that served if there was nobody to pay attention. There could have been a thousand things to bark at and nobody to teach it about real threats. Above me a bat circled, clumsy and big, and I watched until its path took it out of the arc of light. I tied my shoelaces, retied them, sat on the curb and chucked rocks, counted moths, listened for a car to come from the distance, and finally it did. The first and only car to come down the road, my father’s Dodge Royal Monaco two-door hardtop that I recognized from the engine whine when my sister drove, the 400 Lean Burn V8 held in full restraint under the hood, and the left hideaway headlight door stuttering like the engine to open up.

Charlotte had the heater on and the music loud, and I wondered how she had crept the car out of the driveway, but the very fact that she was there confirmed she had gotten away with it, and I was happy to slide in and pull the door shut and fold myself toward the warm vents in the dash.

“Stab and steer,” I said.

Charlotte looked at me without blinking. “What?” she said.

“You never get anything. Just punch it and drive. I’m cold.”

There were no cars on the road, no headlights in either direction, just house lights, and they were scattered few and far between, set back in the distance, as sparse and dim as city stars absorbed by the night. Charlotte signaled as she left the parking lot, though there wasn’t reason to, and then we were swallowed by the fields on both sides of the road, the staggered fence posts. Even though I had been walking in the dark, I did not realize the immensity of it until it had become a throat hold around us, and the broken yellow line was lost beyond the one good headlight.

After the accident I would wonder if I had seen it coming, the shift in shadows, the sudden definition of a shape, a thickening in the air like a premonition, because when something goes terribly wrong there is always a before and always an after, but the moment itself is vague and hard to gather, and time jumps like a skip in a record, and so I tried to remember the before, tried to trace what happened during, but in the end it all came down to after and we were spun hood up into a dry drainage ditch, the broken headlight suddenly finding its too little too late and pointing straight and strong at nothing more than wide-open sky, the windshield shattered and fracturing the night into a thousand webbed pieces, and Charlotte bleeding from her nose and me with my mouth open to say something, but instead everything just hung quiet and still.

“What did we hit?” Charlotte asked, and she rubbed the back of her hand under her nose and the blood smeared across it, and in the weak light the blood was more black than red. I thought about what Lenny Richter had said, nothing but corn syrup and food coloring.

“We didn’t hit anything,” I said. “Did we?”

“I saw it,” she said. “I just couldn’t stop.”

The engine was still on, the radio picking up the end of Kiss doing “Christine Sixteen,” and I turned around in my seat and looked out the back window at the rise of ditch behind us, tall grass and weeds pressed against the bumper. I realized the car was still in drive, and Charlotte’s foot was on the brake, because the slope of ground was lit bright and red.

“Turn off the car,” I said.

It took her a moment to cut the engine, and then there was a different quiet, with only the headlights telling us nothing except that we were off the road and looking at the stars. I opened my door and I could smell the grass torn up where the back end had swung around when we spun, and there was the sharp burn of fresh rubber on asphalt hanging in the air, but I could not remember Charlotte hitting the brakes at all. The wind had died down, or we were far enough in the ditch to be out of the gust, and I could hear crickets, a million of them in all directions around us, and the sound of something on the road just over the soft shoulder above where I stood, something ticking out of sync with the noise of the engine cooling, something struggling to get its legs under it, something trying hard to get up and walk.

I heard Charlotte’s door open, and the angle of the ditch forced her to put her weight into it so she could swing it wide enough to get free, and then she was walking up the short incline toward the road, and I stood there watching her, listening to the crickets, and trying to make sense out of the sound.

“Son of a bitch,” she said. And there was a sadness in her voice that made me want to get back into the car and shut my door and slide onto the floor, let Charlotte deal with it and wait it out, because Charlotte was older and had always been the one to take the brunt, but I wouldn’t do that this time. I was the one who had called her out here. She came for me.

My eyes adjusted to the dark, which had settled and thinned on the road. Even the smallest detail was defined and clear-the broken asphalt where shoulder met road, the yellow center line, the metal fence posts set back on both sides, leaning and loose with rusted wires marking acres. Behind me the wide, shallow ditch ran along the roadside, full of nothing more than dense grass gone to seed, trash, and my father’s Dodge Royal Monaco, nose up and cooling quietly with both lights shining into the air. The bugs had already come, gnats and moths in greedy clusters, so that the beams held their movement like dust.

There was a body in the road-Charlotte had been right about hitting something-and it was bigger than something as simple as a raccoon or a cat. As I got closer, the shape took definition, and I could see that it was just a deer lying in the center of the road, one back leg still kicking out for grip, and Charlotte was standing over it, hands squeezed tightly in front of her, watching the struggle. I stopped walking, and from where I stood I saw its head rise up from the pavement, watched the panicked white of its eye roll around and see nothing, and then the deer dropped its head and the back leg tucked in. All of it went still.

Charlotte crouched down and reached out and touched the deer, and part of me wanted to stop her, tell her not to, yank her back to her feet and down to the car, but I knew if I had been closer, I would have done the same thing, reached out and touched it too. I watched her run her hand over it, ribs to thigh, and I watched the way her hand lifted over the slope of its side, the stomach distended and pulled tightly back from the ribs.

“I can feel it,” Charlotte said.

“Feel what?” I asked. Everything around us had gone quiet; even the crickets had slunk back into the thicker grass and the night was still and the air felt warmer than it had before, the breeze now barely strong enough to bend and ripple the fields. I looked at the sky above us and there were a million stars. All of them seemed as if they were arranged in patterns I was supposed to understand, but I couldn’t recognize anything except that they were brighter and closer than I had ever remembered them to be.

“There’s a baby,” she said. “I can feel the baby inside.” I walked up next to her, careful to keep my footsteps quiet, and then I realized that the deer was maybe dead and there was nothing left to startle. I squatted down next to Charlotte and reached out my hand. I wanted to touch it, let myself feel the hair, stiff and coarse, and I knew I would be surprised by how warm the deer would feel, her skin radiating heat, and I would rest my hand against her rough side and hold it there, waiting for something to happen. But I could not touch the deer. I just stood there with my hand holding air.

“Is she dead?” I asked. I stood up and pushed at the deer with my foot, hooked the toe of my tennis shoe under her ribs and tipped her side up and off the asphalt. Charlotte grabbed my leg and pushed me backward, hard, so that I lost my balance and fell onto the warm road.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

“I was seeing if she was dead.”

“She’s dead,” Charlotte whispered. From where I sat, I could see around Charlotte to the deer’s head resting on the ground, one eye open and fixed and staring up at nothing and her jaw slack, widened just enough so that her tongue lolled out and over the darkness of her lips. There was blood on the road underneath her, spreading around her shoulders and neck.

“The baby’s still alive,” Charlotte said, and she started rubbing the deer’s side in small, tight circles. “I think we can save it.”

The asphalt was comforting and warm, and I was surprised at the way it held the heat from the day despite the wind and the dark. I could feel small rocks biting into the palms of my hands and I reached forward and rubbed them clean on my jeans. I looked over the deer and down the road, looked in the direction that we had been going before we found ourselves spun into the ditch, and I looked for a pair of lights that would signal the approach of a car, the intervention of someone else to help us pull the Dodge out, move the deer, and get us back on track toward town, someone to interrupt the things that my sister was saying and gently tell her that what she wanted was an impossibility that should not even be thought about, let alone said out loud. But there was nothing around us in any direction, not even the promise of lights, no cars, no more barking dog in the distance, no houses with porches cast in a soft yellow glow, no gravel driveways, no mailboxes marking homes.

“We have to go,” I said. “I want to be in my room before Dad wakes up.” I didn’t really want to be there, but I didn’t know of anywhere else we could go, and Charlotte had Dad’s car and we’d have to go back eventually.

At the mention of our father, Charlotte stood up and walked to the edge of the road and down the incline to the driver’s side of the car, and I thought for a minute she might just get in, start it up, and leave me stretched out on the ground, but she pulled the keys from the ignition and kept walking and I could hear them rattling, knocking back and forth on the ring, and then the trunk lid popped up and there was light from the small bulb inside and I could hear her moving things around.

“Dad’s tools are in here,” she called to me, and I stood up and went down to watch her.

In the light from the trunk I could see the blood drying on Charlotte’s face, a cracked thin smear across her upper lip and over one cheek, but there was no fresh blood and she looked all right to me. Our dad was pretty organized and not one to carry anything he didn’t need, but the contents of the trunk had been tossed around and nothing appeared useful. There seemed to be too much and too many of everything, screwdrivers and wrenches, spilled nails, bolts, and washers, drill bits and sockets, some flannel shirts, a water jug, and a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam.

“Perfect,” I said, and I pulled the bottle out, unscrewed the lid, and took a long drink, and it felt good. I realized I was thirsty and my mouth was dry and I swallowed all I could before my throat closed up against it.

Charlotte was picking up tools, holding them up for inspection under the trunk-lid light, and setting them back down again. “What about this?” she asked. It was a 12-inch flat-head screwdriver, and I thought about her bent over the deer, cutting it open with a screwdriver, and how much effort it would take to punch through and saw into the skin, and then I remembered the movie at Billy’s, and how they had started with box cutters, the two men who tied the girl to the bed, and how she had been facedown and struggling, but not really, and maybe it wasn’t real, or maybe she didn’t actually know what was going to happen to her, didn’t possibly think it was going to get as bad as it eventually did when they started with the box cutters and they were not kidding around.

“I have a knife,” I said. It was a little 3-inch Smith & Wesson single combo-edge blade, smooth and serrated, a gift from our dad on my thirteenth birthday. He made me promise not to hurt myself or use it on anything that I wasn’t supposed to, and since then I had used it to carve my name into picnic tables at the park and once to gut a bluegill that Lenny Richter and I accidentally caught on an empty hook out at his grandpa’s pond.

“Give it to me,” she said. She reached out her hand and I dug it out and handed it over to her, the black handle scratched and worn down over the past couple of years, and she took the knife and shoved it into the back pocket of her jeans and held her hand out toward me again, waiting, and then I gave her the bottle and she smiled for the first time since she had pulled into the parking lot to pick me up. In the dim light the shadows made her cheekbones dark and defined, and her lips were full and red, and with her straight blond hair tucked behind her ears and her face holding colors in a way that I had not seen before, I knew why our father worried.

“Are you going to help me?” she asked. She took a drink from the bottle, and I noticed its level was dropping fast and I wished there was more.

“This is crazy,” I said. “You do know that?”

Charlotte picked up a flannel shirt from the trunk and used it to wipe her nose off. “I’m going to be in advanced biology next year,” she said. “People do this all the time. Emergency C-sections. It’s not that hard.”

Above us, on the road, I thought I could hear a car coming in the distance, the drone and shift of an engine rounding a bend. I walked back up to the top of the ditch and looked in both directions, but the road was open and clear and dark as far as I could see.

“There’s no cars out here,” Charlotte said. “I learned to drive on this road at night. I was out here for hours and never saw anybody else. It’s weird,” she said.

“I didn’t know Dad took you out here.” I tried to think of our dad doing anything after the sun went down, anything that didn’t involve the TV and his chair, or the tool bench in the garage, and a drink half full named after somebody else.

“I wasn’t with Dad,” she said.

I walked back toward the deer and looked down at it. From that angle it was harder to see how pregnant she was, if her sides were actually wide enough for her to be carrying something more than herself.

“Come here and help me,” Charlotte said, and I went back to the trunk of the car, where she loaded me down with the flannel shirts and a dirty blue tarp, and she carried the bottle and a flashlight, and we went back to the deer and she lined everything up like a doctor would.

“What are you going to do?”

She spread the tarp out onto the road and tucked it under the side of the deer. I didn’t like the sound it made when she moved it on the asphalt, a stiff and artificial scraping noise that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“We’re going to deliver the baby,” she said. “We have a chance to save it. We killed its mother, but maybe we can still give it a chance to live.” She took my knife out of her back pocket, opened the blade, held it up toward what little light hung in the air from the headlights that neither of us had thought to turn off, poured some Jim Beam on the blade, and wiped it clean on one of our dad’s flannel shirts.

“I don’t think you have to sterilize it,” I said.

Charlotte looked up at me. “It’s not for the mother,” she said. “It’s for the baby. Just in case I go too deep.”

“Charlotte, what are we going to do with it?” I felt warm inside, maybe a little bit drunk, and the air felt good against my skin, and I could hear plants rustling, settling back and forth together in their even rows in the fields. When the wind died, nothing moved around us, nothing shifted, nothing bent or made noise, and I could feel the stillness like something I could touch.

She laid the knife down near her on the tarp and started ripping the shirts, first one and then another, into long neat strips like rags, and the last one she spread open and wide beside her. The crickets had scattered and were suddenly loud and distant, and the only sound that was clear and close was the noise of Charlotte moving around on the tarp.

“Dad can build a pen in the garage,” she said. “I can raise it and feed it from a bottle. I can take care of it just like its mother.”

A bird suddenly called from somewhere across the road, somewhere deep in a field, and it sounded big and close but I could not see it.

“Nothing works out like that,” I said. “You can’t just cut a baby deer out of its mother and take it home and call it your own.” Our dad had never even allowed us to have a dog, because he hated pets. He said he hated the noise and the smell and the responsibility of looking after something else in the house, and even when we begged and promised we would do all the work, he said it was impossible, that he had been young once too, and he knew that kids failed, and it would become his dog and he didn’t want one.

Charlotte tucked her hair behind her ears, sat back on her heels, and looked up at me standing over her. “You know Dad hates me,” she said.

I thought about the way he yelled, the way he put his hand on her arm when she walked in the door sometimes, the way he yanked her around in the kitchen. Where have you been?

“That’s just Dad,” I said. “You know how he gets. He worries.” I felt like a liar, making excuses. People were always doing that.

When I saw the girl in the film for the first time, I thought the men would be younger, that they would be in high school, that for some reason they would be boys, and I hadn’t thought about them being anything else, but they had been men our father’s age, or maybe even older, and they had tied the girl to the bed and her spine had stood out in a rail of bones, and I had seen the shadows of the men first, saw their shapes moving across her white skin like clouds, and she hadn’t seemed scared at all, and I had flinched for her, felt something familiar in my stomach curl up and pull tight.

“He loves you,” I said. “He’s just weird about showing it.”

“He hates me. He wishes I would just move away and never come back so he could say that he just has a son.”

The headlights behind us had become so much of a presence I had almost forgotten about them and then the left one sputtered and the hideaway window folded it in with a soft pneumatic sound, a hush like an automatic door closing, and we were cut down to one weak beam staring up at nothing and the darkness filled in. I could hear Charlotte breathing through her nose, and the sound was heavy and thick.

“You know he caught me in June,” she said. “Right after school got out. He caught me making out in front of the house. It was late and we were parked on the street and I thought everybody was asleep-the house was dark-and I didn’t want to come in. You probably don’t understand what I’m talking about, I don’t know, but maybe you do. I can’t really explain it and it doesn’t make any sense, but I just couldn’t stop, even though I knew I needed to go in. I just didn’t.”

I wanted to tell Charlotte that I knew all about what it felt like to feel something and not be able to stop, but instead I tried to imagine who Charlotte had been with and I couldn’t. I had never seen her sit with anybody other than girls at school, had never heard her talk to a boy on the phone, had never heard her mention a name, or act strange, or get nervous. I had never known Charlotte to pay attention to anybody except for her best friend, Macy.

“It wasn’t Pete Holbrook, was it?” I asked. He was the only one I could think of Charlotte liking and that was only based on the fact that I knew he had liked her the year before, had followed her around at lunch all the time-I had seen him in the cafeteria, trying to get next to her in line, sit by her and Macy at a table-and I knew he had asked her to a dance once but she said no.

Charlotte laughed. “Pete? God no,” she said. “Not even close.” She moved onto her knees, and I could hear the tarp shift underneath her, and I could hear her take a deep breath and hold it and then exhale. “Hold the flashlight, okay?” She clicked it on and handed it up, and the unexpected heaviness spun the light backward, blinding me for a second.

I pointed the beam down at the side of the deer, and I thought I was still seeing spots from the light, but then I realized they were ticks, standing out like blood-filled moles, and I wanted to look away, but Charlotte was pushing on the deer’s stomach with her hand, running her fingertips over the brown skin, pulling the back leg so that she could see the entirety of the white belly underneath. I was shaking badly and I tried to hold the light steady, but it kept jumping around and landing everywhere except where Charlotte was pointing the knife.

“On the count of three?” she asked, and I nodded but said nothing, and she looked up at me, waiting for an answer.

“Okay,” I said.

We both took a breath and started counting in unison, “One, two, three,” and then Charlotte stuck the knife in, center of the stomach, buried to the handle, and there was blood, a darkening around where the blade went in, and I could hear Charlotte inhale hard through her nose, and she pulled the knife out and there was more blood and it flowed freely, thick and red.

I shifted the flashlight and caught the knife in the beam, and the blade was red and there were white and brown hairs stuck to it, and I realized that Charlotte’s hand was shaking worse than mine and together we couldn’t hold anything in focus for more than a second. She wiped the knife clean on a piece of flannel shirt and sat back from the deer, pulled her knees to her chest and hugged her arms around them.

“What time do you think it is?” she asked.

I looked down at my watch and could see the two tiny glowing hands beneath the glass. “It’s after two,” I said.

“Dad was asleep when I left,” she said.

I imagined how it would be when we pulled into the driveway, our dad not knowing Charlotte had gone, his windshield smashed, the tires caked with dirt, bumpers full of weeds, and us carrying a newborn deer wrapped in one of his old shirts from the trunk. Part of me hoped everything would happen like something on TV and we would make breakfast even though the sun had not begun to rise, and we would be inspected for injury, turned this way and that under the kitchen light, and our dad would take the fawn and come up with a way to feed it, make it a bed in a box, and he would look at the car and shake his head and be happy both of us were fine, and we would tell the story of how Charlotte had delivered the baby on the road from the deer we had hit and our dad would be so impressed that he would put his arm around her shoulders and say, That’s my girl! and he would repeat the story to his friends, too proud to keep from telling it over and over again for the rest of the week. But really I knew it would be nothing like that; it would be something that my mind did not want to imagine, and there were no pictures stored inside my head to give any kind of meaning to how it really would be, and I think that Charlotte knew it too, but maybe she believed in her own TV version a lot more than I did, or she had more hope, or more need, and maybe those were the things that made her put the knife into the deer again while I stood there, and make another narrow gash next to the first.

“You can’t just keep stabbing at it,” I said. “You have to keep the knife in and cut.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

When the men in the film had the box cutters in their hands, I didn’t think they would really do it, that they would put them against the girl and carve into her back, so that narrow lines of darkness rose to the surface of her skin in shapes almost like words, and Lenny Richter had been standing beside me, and he had put his hand over his mouth, and I thought for a second he was trying to stop himself from getting sick, and then I realized that he was laughing. He had his hand over his mouth and he was bent forward and he was laughing. I had felt all the spit dry in my mouth, and my tongue had gone thick so that even if I had wanted to laugh and pretend I was not sweating through my T-shirt, I could not. All I could do was watch and not move.

Charlotte had the knife in a tight grip, and I could tell she wanted to drag it sideways, tear through the thin wall of skin that divided the second cut from the first, turn the 1-inch slit to 2 inches, but just when I thought she might do it, go ahead and run the knife the distance of the belly and make a line big enough for her to open the stomach and reach in, find the baby inside, and pull it out onto the tarp, she took her hand off the handle and sat back on her heels and left the knife stuck in the skin. She wiped her hands on the thighs of her jeans and stood up. She turned away from me and started walking back toward the car.

“I need to think for a minute,” she said.

I stood there with the flashlight still pointed down at the deer, the beam suddenly steady, the knife just a small interruption in the slight curve of belly that was divided now by a thick line of color. The deer didn’t look as swollen as I had thought she was in the dark. She was just a deer, caught in the open between one field and the next, dead on the road. I clicked the switch and cut the light and turned around and followed Charlotte over the embankment.

Charlotte was sitting in the Dodge, drinking, and I wished she had the keys back in the ignition so we could listen to the radio, but they were still hanging from the lock in the trunk. She passed me the bottle and I noticed with the door shut the car was too quiet and too still.

“Would you miss me if I left town?” Charlotte asked. She pushed the knob on the headlights and the single swath that had cut into the darkness went out and the gathered bugs scattered in confusion, and there were only prismed stars above us through the shattered windshield and the slope of the ditch rising around us outside the windows.

“I would miss you,” I said. “But I don’t think you’ll go.”

“I might,” she said. “I might surprise you.” She had a piece of flannel shirt in her hands and she was rubbing at her palm, trying to get it clean.

“Who did Dad catch you making out with in the car?”

I took another small drink and turned my head toward her so I could see her face. She was staring straight ahead, staring out the broken windshield and into the darkness.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. She stopped rubbing her hand and wadded the shirt into a ball on the seat beside her. “Do you think we can get out of this ditch on our own? I don’t want to wait until the sun comes up for someone to drive by.”

I looked over my shoulder at the angle of the car in the ditch, the way the back end hadn’t slid so far that it was wedged into the slope, and if Charlotte cranked the wheel hard enough and put it in reverse, she could ease us down into the bottom of the gully and we would have a chance at punching our way up and over the incline if she was willing to wind the engine tight and hit the gas hard.

“You could do it,” I said.

She took the bottle from me and emptied it in one long swallow. “Help me gather everything, okay?”

We collected the things from around the deer, rolled up the tarp, folded it all together with the torn shirts, put them back in the trunk, and went back to the road. We both stood looking at the deer, and Charlotte crouched down and put her hand on the doe’s side and petted her.

“She’s cold,” Charlotte said.

The air around us was getting thinner, and I didn’t have to look at my watch to know that somewhere over the horizon line the sun was on its approach and the darkness would begin to soften and give way to light before too long. There were more birds making noise, but they were still too far out to see, and the crickets had almost given up, and I realized I was tired and ready to be home.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said. For a second I thought she was talking to me, but she had said it to the deer, and her voice was quiet and I knew that she was crying even though I could not see her face. “I tried,” she said. She kept running her hand over and over the side of the deer, and then she reached forward and slowly pulled out my knife and handed it to me, bloody, and thick with matted hair, the handle sticky, the blade too stiff to fold.

I rubbed the knife against the hem of my shirt and was finally able to get it to close, and after I shoved it back into my pocket, Charlotte pointed me toward the front of the deer and she stayed at the back and we each grabbed a pair of legs and pulled. The deer had settled into the asphalt so that it was hard to free her, and it took us ten minutes to get her across the opposite lane. We dragged her to the side of the road and pushed her down toward the bottom of the other drainage ditch, away from the car. Her legs did not bend and she didn’t make it very far down the ditch, but she was out of the way and off the road and nobody else was in danger of hitting her. We both stood on the blacktop shoulder, sweating and breathing heavily, looking at her dark body lying in the grass like nothing more than shadow.

“Why did you stop?” I asked.

Charlotte bowed her head and said nothing for a second, and then she wiped both her eyes and turned back toward the car. “It wouldn’t have lived,” she said. “It wouldn’t have been natural to force it like that. It wasn’t meant to be born yet.” Behind her, in the thin light, I could see the narrow stain in the road.

She did just what I told her to do-eased the Dodge into reverse and turned the wheel so the entire car slipped back into the very bottom of the ditch, and we were only at a slight angle with the driver’s side high-centered on the incline. I told her to put the car into drive and floor it, get enough forward momentum to push the car up the side and out of the ditch, and to keep a tight grip on the wheel and not let the car slide out from under her in the grass and the dirt, and she did those things too, and we hit the top of the ditch so hard we caught air and crossed to the other side of the road, and Charlotte had to guide us into our lane without overcorrecting, and she did that, and there was a little bit of fishtailing and the sound of tires breaking loose, and then we were on our side of the road, with one good headlight pointing out the direction.

In the movie the girl had been almost naked; Lenny had said she would be, but it had taken a while. They had tied her across the bed and she had been shirtless without a bra, her back nothing but blank skin and bone, and she had been wearing panties, white and thin, and when she twisted around on the bed, rolling up off her hips, trying to loosen her hands from where they were knotted above her head, I saw the panties were the kind like my sister had for a while, the ones she used to hang out back on the line to dry, the kind with the days of the week on them, and the girl had been wearing a pair that said Tuesday. I was suddenly embarrassed for her, in the same way I was embarrassed when my sister did our laundry and hung everything out in the yard for the neighbors to see-all of our private things exposed.

I rolled down my window so the air would keep me awake and I could lean out to help guide Charlotte down the road. Everything smelled wet and sharp and alive and I watched it all fall behind us as we passed. We were finally leaving the country, the fields, and the fence lines, and I wasn’t sorry to watch them go. Outside my window was the sound of metal on metal and tire rub as the car tried to shake broken pieces loose.

The knife was shoved deep in my pocket, like a warm spot against my thigh, and when I looked at it again in the daylight, unfolded the blade, there would still be blood on it, and strands of light-colored hair. Charlotte had her hands gripped tightly around the steering wheel, and I wanted to ask her what it had felt like to cut into the deer. If it had been me who had held the knife, I wanted to think that things would be different now. Maybe I couldn’t have gone as far as Charlotte did. Or maybe I wouldn’t have stopped.

AFTER LYING IN BED awake for an hour, Connie finally pushes back the blankets and gets up. It’s still dark. He’s barefoot and shivering in his boxers and T-shirt and a little hungover from one beer too many at 20 Main last night. He snaps the bedside lamp on and resets the thermostat from 55 to 65. The burner makes a huffing sound and the fan kicks in, and the smell of kerosene drifts through the trailer. He pats his new hearing aids into place and peers out the bedroom window. Snow is falling across a pale splash of lamplight on the lawn. It’s a week into April and it ought to be rain, but Connie is glad it’s snow. He removes his.45-caliber Colt service pistol from the drawer of the bedside table, checks to be sure it’s loaded, and lays it on the dresser.

By the time he has shaved and dressed and driven to town in his pickup, three and a half inches of heavy wet snow have accumulated. The town plows and salt trucks are already out. The plate-glass windows of the M & M Diner are fogged over, and from the street you can’t see the half-dozen men and two women inside eating breakfast and making low-voiced, sporadic conversation with one another.

By choice, Connie sits alone at the back of the room, reading the sports section of the Plattsburgh Press-Republican. He has known everyone in the place personally for most of their lives. They are all on their way to work. He, however, is not. He calls himself the Retiree, even though he never officially retired from anything and nobody else calls him the Retiree. Eight months ago he was let go by Ray Piaggi at Ray’s Auction House. Let go. Like he was a helium-filled balloon on a string, he tells people. He sometimes adds that you know the economy is in trouble when even auctioneers start cutting back, indicating that it’s not his fault he’s unemployed, using food stamps, on Medicaid, scraping by on social security and unemployment benefits that are about to run out. It’s the economy’s fault. And the fault of whoever the hell’s in charge of it.

Connie has already ordered his usual breakfast-scrambled eggs, sausage patty, toasted English muffin, and coffee-when his eldest son, Jack, comes through the door. Jack nods and smiles hello to the other diners like a man running for office and pats the waitress, Vivian, on the shoulder. He shucks his heavy gray bomber jacket and pulls off his winter trooper hat, hangs them on a wall hook next to his dad’s Carhartt and forest-green fleece balaclava, and takes the seat facing the door, opposite his dad.

“I was starting to think it was time to pack that stuff away,” Jack says.

Connie says, “One of my goddamn hearing aids just told me, ‘Battery low.’ Like I can’t tell when it’s dead and that’s why I’m getting no reception. Man my age, his batteries are always low, for chrissake. I don’t need no hearing aid to tell me.”

“Your hearing aids talk to you?”

“It’s a way to get me to buy new batteries before I really need them. I’ll probably buy fifty extra batteries a year, one a week, just to get my goddamn hearing aids to stop telling me my battery’s low.”

“Seriously, Dad, your hearing aids talk to you? You hearing voices?”

“Yeah, I’m a regular schizo. No, it’s these new computerized units Medicaid won’t subsidize. Over six grand! I shouldn’t have listened to that goddamn audiologist and bought the subsidized cheapos instead. With these, there’s a little lady inside whispers that your battery’s low. Also tells you what channel you’re on. I got five channels with these units-for listening to music, for quiet time, reverse focus, and what they call master. Master’s the human conversational channel. And there’s also one for phone. I can’t tell the difference between any of ’em, except phone, which when you’re not actually talking on the phone is like a goddamn echo chamber. It does help me hear with a cell phone, though.”

Vivian sets Connie’s platter of food and coffee in front of him. “That gonna be it, Conrad?”

“Please, Viv, for chrissake, don’t call me Conrad. Only my ex-wife called me Conrad, and thankfully I haven’t heard it from her in nearly thirty years.”

“I’m kidding,” she says without looking at him. “Connie,” she adds. She takes Jack’s order, oatmeal with milk and a cup of coffee, and heads back to the kitchen.

For a few seconds, while his father digs into his breakfast, Jack studies the man. Jack’s been a state trooper for twelve years and studies people’s behavior, even his seventy-year-old father’s, with a learned, calm detachment. “You seem sort of agitated this morning, Dad. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sure. I was just teasing Viv about that Conrad business. But it is true, y’know, only your mother called me that. She used it to give me orders or criticize me. Like she was afraid I’d take advantage of her somehow if she got friendly enough to call me Connie.”

“You probably would’ve.”

“Yeah, well, your mother took off before I really had a chance to take advantage of her. Smart gal. She quit before I could fire her.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“You have to let it go, Jack. She didn’t want the job, and I did. In the end, everybody, including you boys, got what they needed.”

“You’re right, Dad. You’re right.” They’ve had this exchange a hundred times.

Vivian sets Jack’s coffee and oatmeal in front of him and scoots away as if a little scared of Connie, mocking him. Jack smiles agreeably after her and shakes out the front section of the newspaper and scans the headlines while he eats. Connie goes back to the sports page.

Jack says, “Looks like we got through March without another bank robbery. Maybe our boy has headed south, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He flips the front page over and goes on to national news.

After a few minutes, without looking up, Connie says, “You talk to Buzz and Chip recently?”

Jack looks over at his father as if expecting more, then says, “No, not in the last few days.”

“Everything the same with them these days?”

“More or less. Far as I know.”

“Wives and kids?”

“Yep, the same, far as I know. All is well. No news is good news, Dad.”

“I wouldn’t mind any kind of news, actually.”

“They’re busy, Dad. It’s easier for me, I don’t have a wife and kids. Plus Buzz has that long drive every day up to Dannemora and back, and Chip’s taking criminal justice courses nights at North Country Community College down in Ticonderoga. And they both live way the hell over in Keeseville. Don’t take it personally, Dad.”

“I don’t,” Connie says, and goes back to reading the sports page.

Jack finishes his oatmeal, shoves his bowl to one side, and cups his mug of coffee in his large red hands, warming them. He’s thinking. He suddenly asks, “You ever consider it a little weird that all three of us went into law enforcement? I sometimes wonder about it. I mean, it isn’t like you were a police officer. Like me and Chip. Or a prison guard like Buzz. I mean, you ran auctions.”

“Yeah, but don’t forget, I’m a former Marine. And you’re never an ex-Marine, Jack. So that was the standard you boys were raised by, the United States Marine Corps standard, especially after your mother took off. If my father had been a former Marine, I probably would have gone into law enforcement too. I always kind of regretted none of you boys were Marines.”

“Dad, you can’t regret something someone else did or didn’t do. Only what you yourself did or didn’t do.”

Connie smiles and says, “See, that’s exactly the sort of thing a former Marine would say!”

Jack smiles back. The old man amuses him. But he worries him too. The old man’s in denial about his finances, Jack thinks. He’s got to be worse than broke. Jack gets up from the table, walks to the counter, and tries to pay Vivian for both their breakfasts, but Connie sees what he’s up to. He jumps from his seat and slides between his son and the waitress, waving a twenty-dollar bill in her face, insisting on paying for both his and Jack’s meals.

Vivian shrugs and takes Connie’s twenty, just to get it out of her face.

She hands him his change, and father and son walk back to the table, where both men pull their coats and hats on. “You take care of the tip,” Connie says. “Make it big enough so you and I come out even and Vivian ends up forgiving me for being an asshole.”

“Dad, you sure you’re okay? I mean, financially? It’s got to be a little rough these days.”

Connie doesn’t answer, except to make a pulled-down face designed to tell his son he sounds ridiculous. Absurd. Of course he’s okay financially. He’s the father. Still the man of the house. A former Marine.

WHO WOULD BELIEVE somebody could drive a car across the bottom of an ancient glacial lake at night, the high beams tunneling in electrified shafts of yellow smoke under the surface, but I stood on the bank and saw it, my head still throbbing from a couple of licks I took when I was on the ground and couldn’t protect myself. The sky was bursting with stars, the fir trees shaggy and full of shadows on the hillsides, the cherry trees down by the lake thrashing in the wind. Most of the people we picked cherries for lived in stone houses on the lakeshore, and after sunset you could see their lights come on and reflect on the water, but tonight the houses were dark and the only light on the lake was the glow of the high beams spearing across the lake bottom, the ginks that had chased us through the timber with chains afraid of what their eyes told them.

Flathead Lake was a magical place back in those days, all 28 miles of it, the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, so beautiful that when you stood on the shore at sunrise it was like day one of creation and you thought you might see a mastodon with big tusks coming down out of the high country, snow caked and steaming on its hide.

We called ourselves people on the drift, not migrants. Migrants have a destination. Buddy Elgin wasn’t going anywhere except to a location in his head, call it a dream if you like. He was the noun and I was the adverb. We never filed an income tax form, and our only ID was a city library card. Like Cisco Houston used to say, we rode free on that old SP. Tell me there’s anything better than the sound of the wheels clicking on the tracks and a boxcar rocking back and forth under you while you sleep. Buddy was like a big brother to me. Even though he was a water-walker and took big risks, he always looked out for his pals.

We worked beets in northern Colorado and bucked bales in the Big Horns during the haying season. I can still see Buddy picking up the bale by the twine and flinging it up on the flatbed, the bale as light as air in his hands, the muscles of his upper arms swollen like cantaloupes, a big Swedish girl in the baler not able to take her eyes off him. Buddy was on the square with women and never spoke crudely in front of them or about them, so any trouble we got into was political and never had female origins. Not until we got mixed up with a hoochie-coochie girl who could rag-pop your boots and leave you with a shine and a male condition that made it hard for you to climb down from the chair, pardon me if I’m too frank.

I loved the life we led and would not have changed it if you hit me upside the head with an iron skillet. I told this to Buddy while we were gazing out the open door of a flat-wheeler, the Big Horns slipping behind us under a turquoise sky and a slice of moon that was as hard and cold as a scythe blade.

He wore a gray flop hat that had darkened with sweat high above the band, one knee pulled up in front of him, the neck of his Stella twelve-string guitar propped against it. The locomotive was slowing on a long curve that wound through hills that were round and smooth and reddish brown against the sun and made me think of women’s breasts.

“What are you studying on?” he asked.

“I was wondering why most men get in trouble over a reasonable issue like money or women or cards or alcohol, not because they cain’t keep their mouths shut.”

Buddy tried to roll a cigarette out of a ten-cent bag of Bull Durham, but a flat-wheeler doesn’t have springs and makes for a rough ride and the tobacco kept spilling out of the cigarette paper cupped in a tube between his fingers. “It was a free country when I woke up this morning,” he said.

“You don’t hold political meetings in a bunkhouse. The people listening to you think Karl Marx has a brother named Harpo.”

He worked on his cigarette until he finally got it rolled and licked down and twisted on both ends. He lit it with a paper match and flicked the blackened match out the door and watched the country go by. I wanted to push him out the door.

“What do those hills put you in mind of?” he asked.

“Big piles of dirt and rock and dry grass that I wish would catch on fire.”

“It’s beautiful. Except there’s something out here that wants to kill you.”

“Like what?”

“It.”

“What’s it?”

“Everything,” he said. He picked up his guitar and formed an E chord and drew his thumb across the strings. “Sheridan coming up. Listen to that whistle blow.”

THE DETECTIVE WANTED to know if Aida was the sort of girl who would run away from home. He’d asked to talk to me alone in the living room. My parents stood around the kitchen with the lady cop and the other detective, an old man who looked to be on his last days of the job. They were telling my parents Aida would walk through that front door any minute now. She probably just got distracted, wandered off with some friends. Our mother wasn’t crying yet but she was close. I sat in the middle of the sofa, my thighs parting the cushions. The detective sat on the armchair our mother recently had reupholstered with a fleur-de-lis print because the cat had clawed through the previous paisley.

He looked young to be a detective. He wore jeans with a flannel shirt under a tweed blazer even though it was August. He wanted to know if Aida ever talked about leaving, as if she had plans beyond this place, something else waiting for her somewhere.

I shook my head. I didn’t tell him that since we were eleven, Aida and I had kept a shoebox in the back of our closet that we called our Runaway Fund. The first year or two we added every extra dollar we came across, and when our piles of bills became thick and messy we took them to the bank and traded them for twenties. We planned to run away and join a group of travelers, sleep under bridges beside other refugee kids and form orphan families like you see in movies and Friday night TV specials. Those were the days before we understood how much our parents needed us. Aida insisted on taking the cat with us. Andromeda was fat but could fit in her backpack. Aida had lied to our parents and said she found the cat alone one day by the river behind the soccer field, but she’d really bought her at the pet shop with some of our runaway savings. I didn’t mind. The cat always loved her more than me, though.

“Does she have a boyfriend? Somebody special?”

She didn’t. Neither did I. Our parents told us boys were a big waste of time and we kept busy with other things. School. Sports. Jobs. Painting classes for Aida and piano lessons for me. Our parents said just because we were girls who lived in a small town didn’t mean we had to be small-town girls.

“Did she have any secrets?”

“Not from me.”

“Even twins have secrets from each other.”

He made me tell him all over again what happened, even though I’d gone through it several times in the kitchen while the old man detective took notes and the lady cop leaned against the refrigerator, arms folded across her blockish breasts. The young detective said he’d keep whatever I told him in the strictest confidence. “If there’s something you left out because your parents were around, now is the time to tell me, Salma.”

“There’s nothing,” I said, and repeated all I’d already told them. How Aida was coming off her summer job as a gift-wrapper at the children’s department store at the bottom end of Elm Avenue, while I was sweeping and cleaning the counters before closing at the coffee shop on the top end, where I worked the pastry case. We had this routine: whoever finished their shift first would call to say they were on their way to the other. Or we’d meet halfway at our designated third bench on the sidewalk in front of Memorial Park and we’d walk home together. That night, a little after seven, Aida had called and said, “Sal, I’ll come to you.” When she didn’t show up, I took my purse and walked across the intersection to the park. I sat on our bench for a few minutes before walking the periphery of the park to see if maybe she’d run into some kids from school. Aida was friendly with everyone. Even the dropouts most everyone in town avoided, though they hung around the bus station and liquor store and you couldn’t walk through the park without getting a whiff of their weed. Aida had a smile for everyone. People liked her. Sometimes I got the impression they just tolerated me because we were a package deal.

I called her phone but she didn’t answer, then I tried our parents to see if they’d heard from her. It started from there. The calling around. Probably for the first time ever, the town employed that emergency phone chain where each person is assigned five others to call, to see if anyone had seen Aida. Around here, you can’t get a haircut without it being blasted over the gossip wires, but nobody knew where she was. This is a town where nothing terrible ever happens. There are perverts and creeps like anywhere else but never an abduction or a murder. The worst violent crime this town ever saw beyond an occasional housewife wandering the supermarket with a broken nose or split lip was back in 1979, when one sophomore girl stabbed another with a pencil in the high school cafeteria.

The old man detective reminded us we had the good fortune of living in one of the safest towns on the East Coast. “This isn’t some third-world country,” he told our mother. “The likelihood that your daughter was kidnapped is extremely remote.” He told our parents it was common for teenagers to test boundaries. If he only had a dollar for every time a parent called looking for a kid who it turned out had just taken off to a rock concert at the Meadowlands or hopped in a car with some friends and headed down the shore. And it’d only been four hours, he emphasized. Aida couldn’t have gotten very far. Our mother argued that four hours could take her to Boston, to Washington, D.C., so far into Pennsylvania that she might as well be in another country. Four hours was enough to disappear into nearby New York City, her dark pretty face bleeding into millions of others. But the old detective insisted, “Four hours is nothing, ma’am. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

I’M SITTING AT THE BAR in the semigloom of the Silver Dollar, as far away as I can get from the loud music. A babe comes through the door. It’s still before nine; too early for anyone else to be eyeing the sign taped to the bar mirror: NOBODY’S UGLY AT 2 A.M. I watch her in the mirror. She looks around-a dozen or so patrons, the usual crowd. The Dollar is still a workingman’s bar, no video games, no retro pinball machines, no happy hours, no grill. The clientele comes from the big Basque bakery next door and what’s left of the failed industrial park down the road where I live. About a fourth of the customers are women: after eight hours of unloading ovens in 110-degree heat, they’re here to replace body fluids, and they’re not romantically inclined, but that’s weekdays. Fridays-paydays-like tonight, and Saturday nights are different.

This woman is dressed mostly in white. Blond, probably in her late twenties, shapely. Stunning. If we’re looking her over, she’s looking us over too, unhurried, calm, unaware of the effect she’s having, or maybe just used to it. Her eyes are adjusting to the low fluorescent lights and the kind of alcohol-induced boredom that takes the place these days of outlawed cigarette smoke. The woman walks over and sits down beside me.

I look what I am: a forty-three-year-old tow-truck owner and operator. Tall, like my mother’s brother. I went through the windshield of a Camaro when I was a kid and the scars crisscross both sides of my face. I briefly thought I was tough, and got my nose broken twice while I was in the army. I stay in shape because I’m crawling around wrecked cars night and day. My hair is thinning on top, which I don’t notice too often. Even in my driver’s license photo, I look normal.

I’m still in uniform, my dark blue coveralls with Dwight over the pocket and the name AAACE TOWING stitched across my shoulders. I don’t stutter; I can spell; it’s AAACE so my ad in the yellow pages will be first, stand out. Trust me, it makes a difference. I’m in a competitive business.

I’m thinking this woman might be part of the fallout from the book about the Silver Dollar written eight years ago by a sociology professor at one of the local colleges. We called him Doc; he liked that. He’d bring his seminar class in on Saturday nights. Cellophane-wrapped young women and men, untouched, who turned everyone’s head, as if we’d all got a magic wish: twenty years off our ages, young enough to act foolish again. We learned words like ambience and acculturation. When the book came out, Closing Time at the Silver Dollar, you couldn’t get in the place; it was jammed with gawkers. Local TV kept doing segments, and the newspapers never passed up a chance to mention the place. City officials, politicians, famous athletes-you name it, they were there. Everyone knows the rest of the world wants to come to California, but not necessarily to the capital. A tour bus full of people from Warsaw, Poland, stopped here once. Our part of Sacramento had never seen anything like it. Larry had to hire two more bartenders. We locals from the neighborhood were left outside. It didn’t last; a year, eighteen months. It was like a blackout: the electricity goes, you’re left in the dark, the lights come on, it’s over; and you go back to where you were. A brief interruption. Doc still comes around-misses the camaraderie of the Dollar, he says-and shares his opinions and keeps track of things. He’s the one who taped the other sign on the bar mirror: NEVER GO TO BED WITH ANYONE WHO’S GOT MORE PROBLEMS THAN YOU. SIGMUND FREUD. Sex and money are his usual topics.

I’m perplexed. Good-looking babes don’t usually sit next to me or hit on me. If I’m surprised, Larry, the owner and bartender, is in shock. He moves toward us like he’s afraid to come too close. “Give me what he’s having, and hit Dwight again,” she says. She puts down a fifty-dollar bill. The jukebox is still playing, but it’s quiet now, like we’re waiting for someone. I have to look in the bar mirror at our reflection. She speaks to my image in the mirror. “Do you remember me?”

Nowhere in my memory bank do I have this woman. It’s like there are four of us in the conversation, the two in the mirror and the two of us sitting on the stools. I’m confused, and I shake my head.

“You came out when I was rear-ended by those drunks in April. On 99 by the Fruitridge exit.”

I remember. I’d heard the CHP call on the scanner and raced out there to beat out the other tow trucks. Five belligerent drunks, too many for the CHP patrolman. Backup was on the way. The drunks were blaming the woman for being in their way. The cop had cuffed one, but another had jumped on his back, and a third had him around the legs. The two other drunks were chasing the woman. Normally I don’t participate in crashes. I don’t stop the bleeding or console the bereaved. And I never ever subdue the unruly. What I do is tow your car and sweep up the broken glass, an added service for the state. Cops like that. But this time I say to the drunks chasing the woman, “Hey, slow down; you’re just making it worse for yourselves.” The big one pauses to spit a stream of tobacco juice in my face. I lose control and head-butt him. My forehead smashes his nose, and he goes down. The other one lets go of the woman and tries to punch me, and I kick him in the nuts. I’m too pissed off to stop there. I pull the guy off the CHP’s back and punch and kick him into silence. The CHP clubs the other drunk. Quiet. It’s three o’clock in the morning-no traffic, no gawkers slowing down to stare. Between the red glare from the road flares and the smoke, it’s like the blacktop is burning. I back up my wrecker and tow the drunks’ car away. End of story. How could I forget this woman?

“I want to thank you, Dwight. I didn’t get a chance that night.”

“That’s okay.” Smooth as always. She’s sipping the beer but knocks back the shot of bar whiskey and pushes the shot glass toward Larry, who nearly kills himself rushing over to refill her glass. “Give us a bag of chips,” she says, and when she opens the bag she slides it toward me so we can both partake. We take turns, chip for chip. I wish I could think of something to say, but I can’t. But the silence isn’t awkward; its like we’ve known each other a long time and talk isn’t necessary anymore. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but I turn my pager off.

“From now on, Dwight, I want you to call me Jamie.”

She’s waiting for a reply. I speak to her image in the mirror. “All right, Jamie.”

Licking her fingers, she whispers, “I know who you really are.”

I’m not taken aback by the statement. I catch on now. She thinks I’m part of the Petrov family. We exchange looks in the mirror. I nod. A couple of years back the Petrovs ran supreme in the tow-truck business on 99 from Stockton to Redding. They were from somewhere in the former Soviet Union, and there must have been at least 120 in the extended family; there was even a seventy-eight-year-old grandmother who got indicted. You get the picture. I got hired just before the ring got busted, started working for Nick Petrov in the storage yard about half a mile from here. This was after the army had given me a medical discharge but denied me any benefits-I had problems from the Gulf War, which should have been a 65 percent disability. Anyway, I was a trained diesel mechanic, and I did maintenance on the Petrov trucks for eleven months, until the place was raided.

It turned out the Petrov family wasn’t just towing wrecks or disabled cars. They had extended their business by towing expensive cars out of driveways and parking lots and taking them to their storage yards. The owners, assuming their cars were stolen, reported their loss to the cops and insurance companies. After an appropriate wait, the Petrovs sent the owners a bill for storage fees at a hundred dollars a day, and took the owners to small claims court if they protested the fees. If it got messy and an owner tried to fight back, his car disappeared into one of the chop shops to be sold for parts. It had been going on for twenty years.

About thirty-five of the Petrovs got indicted and sentenced. Mr. Petrov got twenty-three years; the grandmother, who I’d met once, fourteen years. When the state was ready to sell some of the Petrovs’ properties, I was ready to buy the yard I’d worked at. It was going cheap: the light-industry park by then was mostly vacant buildings with fading FOR LEASE signs. I’d received three years back medical payments from the VA, enough for a down payment on the half-acre storage yard with shop, office, and apartment. All I had to do was change the name to AAACE TOWING.

When Jamie stands up, and says, “Let’s get out of here,” I’m not the only one who’s surprised when we walk out of the place together. She clicks the doors open on a black Mercedes convertible parked in front. I still can’t think of anything to say, but it doesn’t matter as we glide under the streetlights. I don’t come much to this part of Sacramento where we’re driving, but I remember that Ronald Reagan lived around here when he was governor.

I’m too unsettled to see much of the living room because I’m sitting on a white sofa with my greasy boots on her white rug. The place is just too big to take in. She’s standing in front of me, hands on hips, looking down at me. She is so perfect. It’s the only word I can come up with. She is beyond anything I can imagine. “I want you to do something for me, Dwight.” I wait for more. “I have two brothers who are cheating me. I want you to beat the shit out of them for me.” The words don’t convey any real message to me. “When the time comes I’ll give you more particulars.” I’m still waiting for a sentence I can grasp. It isn’t the drink. I’m not hammered. “I know I can find you at the Silver Dollar.”

She pauses. “Go home now, Dwight. I’ll call a cab.” And that’s what she does, walks me to the street, gives the driver some money, and says goodnight. I have the cab let me out at the Dollar. When I step through the front door there is a spontaneous burst of clapping and someone says, “That a boy.” I give them a low bow in return.

MY SISTER DECIDED we had to go see her estranged husband in Reno. When she told me, I was in a mood. I said, “What does that have to do with me?”

Carolina married when she was nineteen. Darryl, her husband, was a decade older, but he had a full head of hair and she thought that meant something. They lived with us for the first year. My mom called it getting on their feet, but they spent most of their time in bed so I assumed getting on their feet was a euphemism for sex. When they finally moved out, Carolina and Darryl lived in a crappy apartment with pea-green wallpaper and a balcony where the railing was loose like a rotting tooth. I’d visit them after my classes at the local university. Carolina usually wasn’t home from her volunteer job yet, so I’d wait for her and watch television and drink warm beer while Darryl, who couldn’t seem to find work, stared at me, telling me I was a pretty girl. When I told my sister, she laughed and shook her head. She said, “There’s not much you can do with men, but he won’t mess with you, I promise.” She was right.

Darryl decided to move to Nevada-better prospects, he said-and told Carolina she was his wife and had to go with him. He didn’t need to work being married to my sister, but he was inconsistently old-fashioned about the strangest things. Carolina doesn’t like to be told what to do and she wasn’t going to leave me. I didn’t want to go to Nevada, so she stayed and they remained married but lived completely apart.

I was asleep, my boyfriend Spencer’s arm heavy and hot across my chest, when Carolina knocked. My relationship with Spencer left a lot to be desired for many reasons, not the least of which is that he only spoke in movie lines. He shook me but I groaned and rolled away. When we didn’t answer, Carolina let herself in, barged into our bedroom, and crawled in next to me. Her skin was damp and cool, like she had been running. She smelled like hairspray and perfume.

Carolina kissed the back of my neck. “It’s time to go, Savvie,” she whispered.

“I really do not want to go.”

Spencer covered his face with a pillow and mumbled something we couldn’t understand.

“Don’t make me go alone,” Carolina said, her voice breaking. “Don’t make me stay here, not again.”

An hour later we were on the interstate, heading east. I curled into the door, pressing my cheek against the glass. As we crossed the California border, I sat up and said, “I really hate you,” but I held on to her arm too.

St. John’s, July 2013

ON THIS PARTICULAR spring Tuesday, Anne DeWitt was thrown off her regular schedule. Between brushing her teeth and putting on her foundation, she had to kill a man.

Most mornings Anne was as accurate as a precision watch. Between the moment she rolled out of bed and the moment she got into her car, attractively groomed and dressed, Anne used a total of forty-five minutes. Following a fifteen-minute drive, during which she reviewed the day to come, Anne walked in the front doors of Travis High School at ten minutes before eight o’clock. Her secretary had better, by God, be sitting behind her own desk when Anne’s heels clicked on the office floor.

But this Tuesday morning was not like most mornings, due to the short struggle and the longer effort of body disposal.

On the drive to work, she figured he’d scaled the roof while she was asleep, broken in a dormer window in the attic, and let down the attic steps while she was in the shower. (She’d noticed some specks on the carpet under the attic opening. Insulation?) Anne wasn’t pleased that she hadn’t foreseen this possibility, but she tried not to be too hard on herself either. A woman had to sleep. A shower made noise.

It was her fault, however, that she hadn’t included the attic windows in her security system. She’d rectify that immediately.

It was Anne’s good luck that she was looking in the mirror. If she hadn’t been, she might have missed the flicker of movement as he came through the bathroom door, might not have realized the man was there until the wire cinched around her neck.

It was the would-be killer’s bad luck that Anne was standing before the mirror naked, trimming a few errant hairs in her bangs, scissors in her hands. She pivoted instantly, her knees bent, and drove the sharp points upward into his throat, the two blades sinking in with a minimum of effort. Anne never bought inferior steel. Anne’s hand came away, leaving the scissor blades in the double wound to minimize the inevitable leakage.

As a bonus, the dying man landed on the cotton bathmat with its no-slip rubber backing, which soaked up the trickles of blood.

Anne squatted by the body as the man died and looked at him intently. She was mildly surprised to discover she knew him: Bert Sawyer, her neighbor of two months, who’d moved in two doors west. He’d come over to borrow her jumper cables a week before. Anne spared a moment to think about that as she got the extra shower-curtain liner, still in its packaging, from the bathroom linen closet.

She assumed “Bert” had had backers. They’d taken time to set this up, time and money. If Bert had been acting on his own, his preparation was even more impressive. This had been a carefully thought-out plan. None of the kids at Travis High School would have recognized their principal as she smiled at the failure of this plan, at her victory.

But it had been a victory by too narrow a margin. Anne’s smile faded as she called herself to task. She was alive only because Bert had made stupid choices.

Why hadn’t he attacked while she was asleep? Why had he waited until daylight, until she was clearly up and about? She stared down at the body, tempted to give it a kick. She was pretty damn irritated about losing the scissors.

A glance at her wall clock told her she was already running five minutes late, and there was a small spot of blood on her left shoulder. Dammit! She stepped back in the shower and washed herself off in case there were specks she hadn’t noticed, careful not to get her hair wet since she’d already styled it for the day. She didn’t want to spend the extra time to repeat the process.

As the water beat down, she thought hard about her next step. She was tempted to leave the body where it was until she came home from work, but there was always the chance that they (if there was a “they”) would call the police, concoct some story that might compel the police to check out the inside of her house. Heard screams… saw smoke… think someone’s broken in.. . any of those might make a conscientious cop insist on checking out the interior.

Anne puffed out her cheeks in exasperation as she completed her makeup. No, she had to do a certain amount of cleanup. Now she would be late, no doubt about it, and her record at this job had been as perfect as her record at her previous employment. Son of a bitch.

Her jaw set in a grim line, Anne pulled on rubber gloves and removed the plastic liner from its packaging. Anyone might use rubber gloves to clean, just as anyone might keep an extra shower-curtain liner. Right? Hindered by the small floor space, Anne (who was very lean and athletic) managed to roll the body and the bathmat onto the clear plastic sheet and began securing it from the feet up, using duct tape from a fresh roll.

She left the scissors in the man’s throat with a pang of true regret. She’d looked at many pairs of scissors before she’d selected those, and she’d used them exclusively to trim hair. That was why they’d maintained their great edge.

Well, she thought, it was worth it. She’d wiped off the handles, of course. She was sure any tiny snips of her hair that might have adhered to the blades would be too degraded by the time the body was found to be of any use to criminalists. In time she’d acquire some more scissors for the rare self-trim job. Before she covered the dead man’s face, she took another look.

Like Anne’s, Bert Sawyer’s hair was thick, though his was sable brown, several shades darker than hers. She wondered if Bert’s hair was dyed, like hers; probably. She had another sudden thought, and pushed aside the would-be killer’s hair in a couple of spots close to his ears. Huh. He’d had plastic surgery. She turned his face to the overhead light again, really concentrating on its contours, but there’d been so many faces in those ten years she’d run the school at her previous job.

And that had to be why he’d come here.

Anne deployed the duct tape until Bert Sawyer was encased and leak-proof. She cast a critical eye around the bathroom. There was no blood visible to the naked eye on the vanity or the mirror, but she ran a washrag over them nonetheless. All the while she puzzled over Bert Sawyer’s true identity. But she dismissed her concerns after a glance at her watch; twenty minutes late, and the body to dispose of!

She called her secretary. “Christy, I’m running late today,” she said. Anne’s policy was never to apologize for things she couldn’t have prevented.

“You are?” Christy, the doughy, fiftyish school secretary, couldn’t hide her astonishment. “You’re sick? Oh, I hope you haven’t had an accident?”

Anne said, “My car wouldn’t start. It’s running now, but I’m behind.”

“No problem,” said Christy reassuringly.

Anne tried not to snarl at the phone. Of course the disruption of her routine was no problem for Christy; but it certainly was to Anne. “I’ll be in as soon as I can. The Meachams aren’t due for another forty-five minutes.”

“Right,” Christy said. “Oh, and Coach Halsey is in here. I’ll tell him to come back.”

The baseball coach had never come to her office for a one-on-one before. Anne almost asked what Holt Halsey wanted, but it was hardly Christy’s job to find out, if the information hadn’t been volunteered. “Do that,” Anne said pleasantly and evenly.

She went into the bedroom to put on her underwear and went back to the bathroom to check her shoulder-length hair, stepping over the corpse on her way. Then Anne put on the outfit she’d laid out the night before: gray trouser suit, well cut, with a darker gray silk blouse. Garnet earrings and a necklace with a garnet pendant, small and tasteful. But then she put on sneakers, grabbing the black pumps she’d selected to go with the outfit.

Anne bounded down the stairs, passed through the gleaming kitchen with its block of sharp knives, and opened the door to the garage. After placing her high heels on the floorboard of the passenger-side front, Anne opened her trunk, spreading out another plastic sheet (just in case). There was a cheap yellow rain slicker, the kind you could buy in a hanging pouch from the rack of any dollar store, hanging on a hook by the back door. Anne pulled it on, carefully drawing the hood over her chestnut hair. She went back up the stairs to her bathroom to grab the ankles of the plastic-shrouded corpse. Tugging carefully, steadily, digging in her feet, Anne dragged the body down the stairs.

Bert Sawyer’s head bumped against each wooden step. Anne, who’d heard much worse noises, ignored the sound.

Getting Bert into the trunk was tricky, but nothing Anne hadn’t done before. When the body was completely inside, she pulled off the cheap slicker and stuffed it in with the body. She went into the house one final time to grab her purse and give her hair a once-over look in the mirror. Finally-finally!-she was on her way to work. She’d been thinking while she stuffed Bert in the trunk, and she’d thought of a good spot to dispose of him.

The winding roads and pleasantly rolling hills relaxed Anne, as always. The four-lane was moderately busy, but due to Anne’s unwilling delay, there were fewer cars than usual. When she got close to the spot she’d chosen, she drove in the slow lane until the road was clear. Then she whipped right and went down a gravel road just wide enough for her car. Luckily it hadn’t rained recently, or she would have had to make a different choice. But Bert would molder nicely out here. It would only get warmer and damper every week now that spring had arrived in North Carolina.

At the end of this service road was some sort of electrical relay tower, surrounded by a high gated fence liberally posted with warnings. The gate was heavily padlocked, which was fine with Anne, since she had no interest in gaining entrance. Her car was far enough into the woods to be invisible from the four-lane, and she maneuvered Bert’s body out of the trunk with the facility of experience. As a bonus, the gravel road was slightly raised for drainage, so she was able to roll the plastic bundle into the forest and then drag it through the pines until it could not be seen from the gravel track. After leaving the body behind a copse, Anne grabbed a fallen branch. On her way back to the car, she swept away the swath the passage of the corpse had cut through the winter leaves and pine needles. She was glad the temperature this morning was in the high fifties; she didn’t want to work up a sweat.

Good enough, Anne thought as she stood by her car brushing her jacket and her pants. She swung the car around on the apron before the fence, and when she returned to the four-lane she stayed back in the tree line until the road was clear.

It was less than 2 miles to Travis High School, where Anne had worked for four years-two as assistant principal, two as principal. After she’d parked in her designated parking space, she exchanged her sneakers for the high heels.

She looked up at the big wall clock as she entered the school lobby. She was now fifty minutes late. Damn Bert Sawyer, and whoever had recruited him. Anne shoved the anger aside. She would have to think seriously about Bert and his garrote later. No one had tried to kill her for three years.

For now her head should be in its proper place. This school was her kingdom; she was its ultimate ruler. She relaxed because she was within the walls of her domain.

She got her second surprise for the day when she opened the door to the outer office, Christy Strunk’s domain. Coach Holt Halsey was still waiting for her. This surprise wasn’t exactly either good or bad, but it was unprecedented. Her respect for the baseball coach, who’d come on board two years ago, was not only based on Halsey’s winning record but also on the fact that Halsey seemed to solve his own problems in a rational way.

Christy looked at her with some apology, and Anne understood that she’d tried to get the coach to return later, with no success. Anne said, “Good morning, Christy.”

A few brisk steps took her abreast of Halsey, who’d risen from his chair. It didn’t bother Anne at all to look up at him. She was not intimidated by large men. But she hesitated before using his first name, since she’d never done so. “Holt, how long do you need? I have less than ten minutes, if that’ll do the job.”

The coach nodded. “I only need a few minutes,” he said. She walked over to the inner door, the door to her office, with her name on it. She loved the sight of it, no matter how many times she passed it. That she’d been born neither Anne nor DeWitt made no difference to her pleasure.

“I’ll hold your calls, Mrs. DeWitt,” Christy said unnecessarily. That was SOP in this office.

“Come in,” Anne said. Christy had been in to turn on the light and deposit her messages, but everything was as Anne had left it the evening before. She checked automatically as she moved behind the desk to put her purse in its drawer. She’d carefully arranged the office to make it seem as though she’d led a complete life. There were two pictures of her parents, one of her sister, and one of her deceased husband.

None of these people existed. Of course she had had parents, but she’d never met them. She’d never been married. To the best of her knowledge, she didn’t have a sister. “Have a seat, Holt,” Anne said, pulling out her own chair and sitting. There was a handful of call slips lined up beside her mouse pad. It had taken her two weeks to break Christy of the habit of telling her about each call as she entered the office. She allowed the fearful idea that she might have to leave, that there might be another attempt-who had the would-be assassin alerted when he’d tracked her down? With grim determination, she shoved this conjecture back to the corner of her mind.

Coach Halsey was sitting, elbows on knees, in one of the lightly padded chairs positioned in front of Anne’s neat desk. Holt Halsey was a broad-shouldered man, a couple of inches over 6 feet, and he had a face that might have been chiseled out of granite. He wasn’t unattractive in a rough-hewn way, but he didn’t work that attraction, and he didn’t show a lot of emotion. Anne liked both qualities.

“Clay Meacham is a problem,” Holt Halsey said, without further ado.

“Odd you should bring him up. His parents are coming in right after I finish talking to you.”

The coach’s flinty face managed to convey his opinion of the Meachams in a precise, economical tightening of the lips.

Brandon and Elaine Meacham, the parents of Travis High’s star pitcher, were active in the Baseball Boosters Club, and they spent a lot of time volunteering at other school activities. Clay was their only child. They didn’t miss a single opportunity to support and promote the handsome junior.

If Clay had been as good a young man as he was talented, Anne would have thoroughly approved. Clay’s academic and athletic glory was the school’s (and therefore her) glory. But Clay was not a good young man, and his judgment was deeply flawed.

“What’s he done?” she asked.

“He was messing with Hazel Reid.”

Their eyes met while Anne absorbed the implications. She considered wasting time with things a normal woman would have said, like “How is she?” or “Should we call the police?” None of that was on the table: if it had been, Holt would have led with the worst news. Hazel Reid was mentally and emotionally handicapped. But she was also a physically mature sixteen. Anne said, “How far did it go?”

“He’d taken her shirt off,” the coach said.

“Where?”

“In the woods in back of the school. If she hadn’t been wearing bright pink, I wouldn’t have spotted them.”

“So, after school. But on school property.”

“Yeah.”

“Why wasn’t she on her bus?” Hazel was supposed to catch the vehicle derisively called “the short bus” to her home.

“Her mom was here for teacher conferences. She’d parked Hazel on the bench outside to wait. Clay saw her when he was walking to his car after practice. I guess he was in a bad mood. Or maybe a good one.”

“Does he know you know?” she asked.

“Not for sure. I called him on his cell phone, asked him if he’d seen Hazel in the parking lot, her mom was looking for her.”

Anne checked the list of phone calls she’d gotten that morning, and Mrs. Reid wasn’t on it. “Hazel didn’t tell,” Anne said.

“I don’t think she minded,” the coach said. “But she’s not mentally capable to consent or refuse.”

“Noted,” Anne said. She thought for a moment, and Coach Halsey let her.

Her previous job had been far tougher than this one, and when she’d left it so abruptly, she’d sworn to herself she wouldn’t ever get so invested again. But here she was, thinking of Travis High and its reputation.

Did Anne care about each individual student? No. But this was her turf, and she would protect it. She would make it as perfect as she could. When she looked up at the rugged, impenetrable face of her baseball coach, she surprised a look almost of… sympathy. And for a second…

“Do I know you?” she asked, with no premeditation.

He smiled. It was like watching rock move. “It’s time for the Meachams to get here. I’ll hear from you later.” It wasn’t quite a question.

“You will,” she said, and stood up. They eyed each other for a moment. It was as though Holt Halsey was willing her to realize something. But then he turned to go, and she had to change gears to deal with Clay’s parents.

The Meachams weren’t anything special, in Anne’s expert estimation. Brandon, handsome like his son but not as mean, might look at other women but he never touched. His wife, Elaine, a former pageant queen, made a creditable effort to conceal the fact that she didn’t give a shit about anyone else’s child but her own. She would clap for another child’s achievement, she would tell the other moms how much she admired their progeny, but in truth she believed the sun shone out of Clay’s ass.

All in all, Anne couldn’t feel surprised that Clay had no sense of guilt in taking advantage of a handicapped girl. He was sure that everything he did was fine, simply because he, Clay, wanted to do it.

“Mrs. DeWitt,” Elaine Meacham said, flashing her broad white smile. “Thanks for making the time to see us today.”

“Of course. What do we need to talk about this morning?” Anne asked, trying to cut through the pleasantries. She gestured them to the chairs in front of her desk, took her own seat again.

“I saw you at the last game,” Brandon said, to make sure she knew he appreciated her. “I know the kids think it’s really cool that you go to all the sporting events.”

“Of course I do,” Anne said. This is my school, she thought. I’m going to go to everything I physically can. She adopted her fallback face: pleasant but not encouraging. Not only did she have to think about Coach Halsey’s tale; the pile of paperwork in the in-basket wasn’t going to take care of itself. She had two other meetings scheduled during the day too, one with a prospective temporary replacement for the enormously pregnant Spanish teacher and one with a vendor who wanted the school to switch to his software system in the chemistry lab. The vendor would ask her out for a drink after work: she would refuse him. She was going to have to be more forceful in her refusal this time.

Barely able to restrain some manifestation of her boredom and her itching desire to get to the work on her desk, Anne had to sit through a few more platitudes before Brandon got down to brass tacks.

“Principal DeWitt-Anne-we hope the school will help Clay achieve his goal,” Brandon said very seriously.

“Which goal is that?” Anne worked to keep her voice neutral. She was thinking of how much she’d like to kick Clay Meacham’s ass. The enormity of the boy’s offense was sinking into her psyche. She didn’t even want to imagine the headlines, the disgrace of the school, the navel-gazing that would inevitably follow the exposure of Clay’s little after-hours adventure with the hapless Hazel Reid. Anne found herself thinking wistfully of some of the more inventive punishments she’d employed at her previous job.

Instead of getting to the point, the Meachams began the litany of what Clay had meant to the school: class president, star athlete, honor roll, captain of the debate team. “And what goal would that be?” Anne prompted again, when she felt her impatience building to a dangerous level.

Cut off in midflow, Elaine looked comically surprised. “I’m sorry?” she said.

“I’m very well aware of Clay’s position at Travis,” Anne said evenly. “Can you tell me what you think Clay needs from this school?”

“Sure,” Brandon said. “Sure. I’m sorry, we got kind of carried away, like parents tend to do.” He smiled at Anne in what he surely felt was an ingratiating manner, though he couldn’t suppress the snap of irritation in his voice.

She tried not to let her shoulders heave in a sigh of exasperation, but maybe the lines of her face conveyed her strong desire to extract some specifics.

“It’s his senior film.” Elaine again bathed Anne in the radiance of her brilliant smile.

“Clay isn’t in the drama department’s film class,” Anne said. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“He needs a film to send to recruiters. Clay’s such an outstanding pitcher, we want to be sure he’s placed at the right college, with a good scholarship. So he needs a film to send out to athletic departments early next school year. We’ve got some examples.” Elaine extracted some DVD cases from her purse and set them on the edge of Anne’s desk.

“So you’ll hire someone to film Clay’s games?” Anne said, not reaching for the DVD cases.

“We were kind of hoping that we could use clips from the school’s game films,” Elaine explained. She kept the smile in place. “It seems like a shame to duplicate effort.”

She meant it was a shame for the Meachams to spend their own money. Anne had wondered how Meacham Motors was doing in this recession. She thought she’d just learned the answer.

It was true that the school lined up an employee or some astute volunteer parent to film every baseball game-and all the other sports events too, of course. This was invaluable as a teaching tool, the coaches assured her.

The politically correct response would be that of course Clay’s recruiting film could be composed of clips from the game recordings, and Coach Halsey would be happy to help with such an effort. But what if Clay’s recent misdeed came to light? Wouldn’t the school suffer, especially if it had offered this extra support to an athlete who’d proved to be a rotten, degraded egg? While Anne allowed herself a lot of moral leeway-she had no problem killing people who attacked her-she did deplore Clay’s self-indulgence and poor judgment in attempting to seduce a girl who would never be an adult mentally or emotionally.

“I’ll discuss it with Coach Halsey,” Anne said briskly. “Who would you expect to do the work involved in editing the film, excerpting Clay’s pitches? I’m assuming you’d also want the times he comes up to bat included in the recruiting film. I don’t know what would be involved, but I’m assuming you two do?”

“Well,” Brandon said, doing his best to look as if he weren’t being pushy, “I think we were hoping that since Clay is the best pitcher Travis High’s ever had, and him going to a good school to pitch would be a great feather for Coach Halsey’s cap…”

“So you think Coach Halsey should do this work.”

Elaine spread her hands. “Well, we were just hoping! Since he’s fairly new here, still making his name…”

Anne knew how many hours Halsey put in on his job, for slim money. “It’s baseball season now,” she said, as if they needed to be reminded. “I don’t know how much time the coach could devote to doing this for one player, no matter how gifted. Of course we all want to see Clay succeed, and we want him to play for the college of his choice. Has he told you where he’d like to go?” She put on a somewhat brighter smile and got up, signaling the end of the interview.

Somewhat bewildered, the Meachams rose too. “He was thinking of the University of Arkansas-they’re in the top five. Or Louisiana. Maybe UCLA, though we don’t want him that far from home.”

Three top baseball programs. The Meachams were aiming very high. Was Clay really that good? She would ask Coach Halsey.

Anne finally got the Meachams out of the office with promises to “get back with them” after talking to Coach Halsey. Then she returned the calls on Christy’s list. Then she dove into the paperwork. Before she knew it, the bell rang for first lunch, the sophomore seating.

Normally Anne would have brought a salad to eat at her desk, or even shared the students’ meal choices in the cafeteria, though that was strictly an exercise in morale boosting. But today she went home for lunch, as she was careful to do at least once a week, though never on the same day. Her house, tidy and spruce with its fresh paint and neat yard, had an interior air of slight dishevelment, like a bed made crookedly. Her breakfast cereal bowl still sat by the sink, unrinsed. Upstairs, the bathroom looked curiously incomplete since the bathmat was missing. Her makeup was not aligned on its tray. Her pajamas were still lying across the bench at the foot of her bed. But Anne left these little signals of disruption. She’d take care of them after more pressing matters.

She took her gun with her when she let down the attic stairs and ascended them.

She didn’t seriously believe there was another assailant in her attic. But then, she hadn’t expected the first one either. That failure was bitter to Anne, whose job in the past had been to teach others to be masters of close fighting. Quicker, smarter, faster, tougher, able to take more stress and dodge more punishment than other human beings. And many people who’d passed through Anne’s hands had become wonderful killers.

Standing in her own attic, seeing the evidence of last night’s intrusion, Anne was bitterly aware she had failed. She’d been lulled by her artificial life into an equally artificial sense of security. In her own home, her lack of readiness had come very close to getting her killed.

There were three dormer windows in the attic, which was painted and floored. Its walls were lined with everything that belonged in a storage space. There was a modest box of Christmas decorations underneath a wreath hung on a wall hook. There was a box of old pictures in aged frames, which any casual visitor would assume were ancestors of Anne’s.

Well, the long-dead faces belonged to someone’s ancestors, but not hers, as far as she knew. She was proud of a trunk of fake memorabilia that had belonged to her fake dead husband. There was an antique quilt inside, among the report cards and trophies, a quilt that must have been stitched by someone’s grandmother; it might as well have been “Brad’s.” There was an old rickety rocking chair by the trunk, just the kind of chair such a grandmother might have rocked in as she quilted. There was a crate packed with a very old set of china, and one full of the sort of scholarly books Anne DeWitt might have collected over the course of her academic progress: Jacobean poets, theories of education, the psychology of leadership. The attic was as carefully staged as the rest of the house.

Bert Sawyer had come in through the west dormer. The dormers faced the road, but in the wee hours of the morning there was not likely to be anyone up or about on this quiet residential cul-de-sac, one carved out of the woods. The house between Anne’s and Sawyer’s belonged to the Westhovens, and they had left for Florida the previous week. Maybe that was why Sawyer had chosen the previous night for his move on Anne.

The pane on the window had been cut out and removed, and cool spring air flooded the attic, carrying the pleasant scent of budding plants.

Obviously Bert had ascertained that the dormers weren’t hooked up to the alarm system. He must have made a preliminary trip to her roof on some previous night. She’d have to figure out how he’d scaled it, because she didn’t see a rope and there was no ladder leaning against the eaves, for God’s sake. She thought about all these things as she noted the tiny signs of his presence in her attic; the dust on the trunk had been smudged, probably by his butt as he sat on it to wait for the sound of her shower running. There was a small ring in the dust too. Anne decided he’d had a tiny flashlight, and he’d used it to check out the story her attic was supposed to tell. It must have been in his pocket when she dumped him.

The woman she’d formerly been would have learned how to replace her own glass, but Anne DeWitt would not do such a thing. She decided to tell the repairman that a bird must have flown into the window, and she’d found it broken. Of course, Anne DeWitt would have cleaned the mess up immediately. Anne found the pane of glass, leaning carefully against a wall. She put it on the floor and stomped on it. Then she fetched a broom and dustpan from the kitchen and swept up the fragments. She called the handyman who helped her out with things Anne DeWitt couldn’t do. He agreed to come the next afternoon at five.

Anne would wait a couple of days to call the alarm-system people.

After another, more thorough cleaning of the bathroom, Anne had only time to grab a granola bar to eat on the way back to school. Her stomach growled in protest, and she promised herself she’d have a good dinner.

On her way back to Travis High, she saw a pickup truck emerging from the gravel road to the electric tower, the spot where she’d dumped Bert Sawyer’s body. Every nerve in her body went on the alert as she passed the road and the truck pulled out behind her.

She recognized it. It was Holt Halsey’s.

He drove behind her all the way back to the school. She went to the administrative parking lot, and he went left to park by the gym complex.

There was nothing Anne could do about the coach that afternoon. He was a riddle, for sure, and one she’d better solve sooner rather than later. It was no coincidence that he’d gone down that obscure track; and she didn’t believe it was a coincidence that he’d emerged from it just when she was approaching.

He’d found the body.

He hadn’t told anyone.

After an hour had passed, she knew he wasn’t going to.

The meeting with the salesman, her last of the day, was over by five o’clock. Christy was itching to leave, opening and closing drawers on her desk with annoying frequency, as Anne could see (and hear) through her open office door. When this salesman (she mentally called him the Jerk) visited, she always left her door open. She didn’t want to have to break his arm, which she had been sorely tempted to do more than once.

The second she stood up to conduct the Jerk out, Christy was out of the door like a shot. The Jerk took the opportunity to put his hand on her arm. “Please reconsider. I’d love to take you to dinner at the lake,” he said, smiling his most sincere smile.

Anne looked at him, thinking about pulling out his teeth one by one.

“Sorry,” said Holt’s deep voice from the doorway. “The principal and I have things to discuss this evening.”

The Jerk covered his chagrin well-after all, he was a salesman-and Holt and Anne regarded each other. There was so much texture and complexity to that look she could have worn it like a sweater. When the Jerk was gone and the school was quiet and empty around them, Holt said, “Well, you had a busy morning. No wonder you were late.”

And Anne heard herself saying, “Who are you?”

This was a talk that had to be private, but Anne was not about to go to Holt’s house, and she didn’t want him in hers, not yet. They drove separately to a restaurant that was nearly empty at this time of day. They asked to be seated on the patio, which had just opened for the season. It was almost too cool to sit in the open air in the late afternoon, but Anne was willing to be a little chilly if it meant no one would be close to them.

After they’d ordered drinks and a plate of nachos, he said, “Holt isn’t the name I was born with, but I expect to use it for some time. I know you’re Twyla Burnside. My little brother was in your tenth class.”

Anne considered all this while their drinks came. “So you know all about the event.”

“The one that got you fired? Yes.”

“Why are you here, at Travis?”

“I did the same training, but in a different location,” he said. “The guy in charge was as tough as you can imagine. He was coming up a couple of years before you got your job. David Angola.”

She nodded. David Angola had saved her ass at the secret hearing. “I lost one person in almost every class,” she said. “Until the tenth class, they always considered it the price of doing business. It was my job to make sure the grads were the best my school could produce. They had to pass the tests I set. Of course the tests were rigorous. I would fail in my mandate if they weren’t as challenging as I could possibly devise… to ensure the grads were completely prepared for extreme duress and with extraordinary survival skills. Until my tenth year as an instructor, one loss a year was acceptable.” She shook her head. “And that year, the lost student was the one with connections.”

Holt smiled, very slightly. “You have a huge reputation, even now. David himself said he was a pussy compared to you.”

She smiled, a wry twist of the lips. “That’s a huge compliment, coming from David. That woman’s brain aneurysm could have gone at any time. You can’t tell me it gave because of ‘undue rigor’ or ‘borderline cruelty.’ Her bad luck, and mine. Her dad had a lot of pull.”

Holt’s face held no judgment. “They give you the new identity when they fired you?”

“Complete with references.”

“Me too.”

She raised an interrogative eyebrow.

“Shot the wrong person,” he said. “But it was a righteous mistake.”

She absorbed that. “Okay,” she said. “And you’re here because?”

“David heard some people were coming after you. You got some enemies.”

“No one’s tried for three years.”

“Right before I got to Travis, huh?”

“Yeah. This guy was waiting in my car after I chaperoned the senior prom.”

“Garrote?”

“No, knife. The man this morning, he had a garrote.”

Their nachos came then, and they ate with some appetite.

“David actually sent you here?” she asked, when she’d eaten all she could.

“When they cut me loose with a coach persona, David gave me a call. He thought this might be a good place for me to land.”

“I’ve never felt like you were watching me. Are you that good?”

“I didn’t need to watch you too closely. You’re great with your cover. This morning, when you came in, I could tell you’d broken your routine because something had happened, and I got a little whiff of blood from your hair.”

Anne was intensely angry at herself. She should have taken fifteen more minutes to rewash and restyle her hair.

“So you figured out…”

“If I assumed someone had gone for you, I knew where I would have dumped him. I figured I might as well check.”

“You’re cool with this.”

“Sure,” he said, surprised. “I had a look at him. Chuck Wallis. He was the brother of…”

The name triggered a switch. “Jeremy Wallis. He died in the fifth class. So. Now what?”

“Now we figure out what to do about that little shit Clay.”

She smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. It was Twyla Burnside’s smile, not Anne DeWitt’s. She would have to rebury herself in her new character all over again, but it felt so good to let Twyla out. “I think we need to put the fear into him.”

“The fear of God?”

“The fear of us. Oh, by the way, let me tell you why the Meachams came to my office this morning. It’ll get you in the mood.”

THE COFFEE WAS GONE AGAIN. Mercer swore softly, tiredly, and carried the coffeepot to the basin. He moved slowly. His eyes were red and he ground them mercilessly with the heels of both hands while the percolator was filling. He needed a shave now, and the total relaxation of his heavy face gave him the hopeless, stupid, waxen look of a drunkard. Carter sat limply at the large pine table and watched him, scarcely seeing him in his own fatigue. It had been a long night, he was thinking, a fantastically wicked, confused, and diabolical night, and it was only just beginning.

He watched Mercer start back across the room and stop at the window to stare out glumly at the entrance to the hospital across the street. The chill fog outside had streaked the glass with drippings of mist that gleamed like cheap jewelry in the light from the naked yellow bulb in the room. The window was dirty, and each time that Carter’s eyes fell on the coarse patterns of grime he was reminded of photographs of diseased tissue that he had seen a long time before in Life magazine. They had been drinking coffee for hours, and the warm odor was thick and stale in the air and made him nauseous.

“Is anybody out there?”

“A few men,” Mercer replied, after a full minute had gone by. “Men from the railroad, probably.”

He turned from the window and set the coffeepot on the electric burner. For several seconds there was a quiet fury of hissing and sputtering as the water on the outside of the can boiled off.

Only Henney was in the room with them now. Beeman and Whitcombe had gone to the hospital to wait for news of the Wilson boy. There were no prisoners in the jail downstairs, and there was little for Henney to do. There never was any real need for a night porter, but Henney was Mercer’s cousin, a consumptive, simpleminded man with very weak eyes who could not hold down a job anyplace else, and Mercer maintained the sinecure for him. Henney was reading the newspaper. He had been reading the same eight pages all night. Suddenly he began humming aloud, unconscious of the annoyance he was creating.

Mercer stood it as long as he could, and then said, “Henney, go down to the diner and get some chicken sandwiches. Don’t let him put any butter on.”

Henney came to his feet with a start and hurriedly folded the newspaper. “Sure, Jay, sure.”

“Cigarettes,” Carter said moodily.

Mercer gave his approval, and Henney walked out. The coffee was bubbling already, sending rapid puffs into the air. Mercer brought the pot to the table. Carter shook his head, but he filled both cups anyway and poured condensed milk into them from a can. There was no sugar. Carter stirred the brew and took a quick gulp. The coffee scalded his throat but left his body cold. Mercer sat down facing him.

“Why don’t you go home, Carter?” he said slowly. “Get some sleep. Get up early and go away for a few days. Stay out of town awhile. They may get after you also.”

Carter shook his head, although he knew Mercer was right. His eyes were stinging with rawness, and there was a stabbing ache in his temples, his jaws, and in the back of his neck. He had caught cold during the chilly vigil. His eyes were tearing, and he wiped them with his hand every few minutes. He needed sleep badly. He rested his head in his upright hands, massaging his face torpidly against his fingers. The contact brought a fleeting relief, but soon the points of his elbows were sore against the rough, unvarnished wood.

He had a busy schedule the next day. He had classes all through the morning and into the afternoon, the first one at eight, and after that the football team to coach until dusk. His puzzlement increased at the thought of the football team. If anyplace, it was there, with all the physical contact that the game required, that he would have expected an outbreak, but that had gone smoothly, better than even he had dared to hope, and then, just as he was beginning to relax, to triumph, abruptly, fiercely, irrevocably, everything that had been accomplished, everything for which he had toiled so long, with a suddenness that left him dazed, was rudely, cruelly, decisively, and insensately obliterated by the primordial brutality of an alley fracas.

His consciousness was throbbing now with the dim recognition of atavistic pressures that were emerging uncontrollably all about him. He could see but not understand them, and they were horrifying in their mute and immutable finality. All afternoon he had been watching the terrible recrudescence of savage animal passions, and he was tormented by the helpless despair of being unable to arrest it, of being unable, even, to try. His confusion rose suddenly, filling him with panic, and he dug his nails painfully into his forehead and shivered.

The sound of footsteps roused him to attention. His eyes went hopefully to the door, but it was only Henney returning with the sandwiches. He stepped into the room spryly, swinging the door closed behind him, and delivered a brown paper bag to Mercer. There was no stop on the door, and it slammed shut with a sharp, reverberating boom that rattled hollowly through the walls of the building and seemed to shake the foundations. Carter winced and Mercer frowned, and Henney, himself surprised by the report, shifted uneasily and smiled at Mercer with apology.

Mercer pushed a package of cigarettes to Carter and began tearing the bag along the seam, doing it slowly, with very deliberate caution. His thoughts were obviously elsewhere, but the intense preoccupation they gave his manner solemnized the act, and for a moment he seemed like a surgeon making a careful incision. There were four sandwiches inside, each wrapped sturdily in thick wax paper. Gazing at them, Mercer spoke to Henney. He said, “Did you see Beeman?”

Henney shook his head. “No, Jay. They said he was still in the hospital.”

“Who said?”

“The men outside.”

Mercer sighed with exhaustion and looked up at him.

“Henney, what’s going on outside?”

“Nothin’, Jay,” Henney said quickly. “Just a few men waitin’ around to see what happens.”

Mercer regarded him steadily for a moment and then stared down at the table. He had large hands, Carter noticed, with strong, callused, fleshy fingers. There were spots of dirt on each of the big knuckles and in the folds of skin between them.

“I spoke to Whitcombe,” Henney said suddenly. He glanced significantly at Carter, and then went on in an excited voice that kept rising gleefully with a shrill, whinnying, malicious hysteria. “He says we’re goin’ up tomorrow an’ burn ’em all out. He says we’re gonna get rid of ’em for good. He says it doesn’ matter what happens to the Wilson boy. He says we’re goin’ up anyway an-”

He might have continued indefinitely had not Mercer interrupted.

“Did you let him put butter on these sandwiches?” he demanded.

The sudden inquiry caught Henney by surprise, and he blinked his eyes in confusion.

“What’s ’at, Jay?” he stammered.

“Nothing, Henney,” Mercer said, in a softer voice. “It’s not important.”

He pushed a sandwich to Carter. Carter pushed it back.

“You’d better eat something,” said Mercer, with rough solicitude. “You look like hell.”

“So do you,” Carter replied sullenly.

He took the sandwich and bit into it. The gums on one side of his mouth were inflamed, and he moved the food over with his tongue and chewed it slowly. He drank some coffee and then took another bite and washed that down with more coffee and then, even while he was reminding himself that he had eaten nothing since lunch and was telling himself that the chicken tasted good, he laid the rest of the sandwich aside and forgot it.

“I tol’ ’im no butter,” Henney said defensively, finally understanding. “I didn’ watch ’im, but I tol’ ’im not to put any butter on.”

Mercer was silent, and Henney picked up his newspaper and resumed reading.

Soon Beeman and Whitcombe returned. Whitcombe was a brash young man of twenty-six who wore his uniform with a careless insolence. Beeman was older, almost forty, and hard as nails. He had a pale, gaunt, angular face, with very thin lips, strong bones, and a small, round, wrinkled scar high up on one cheek, and he was the coldest and most efficient-looking man that Carter had ever seen. He wore black leather gloves, thin, black, tight leather gloves that gave him a menacing air of competence.

“He’s going to die,” Beeman said, when he had crossed the room and was standing by the window.

“Did he say anything?” asked Carter.

“He’s in a coma.”

“Did he say anything before that?”

“He don’t have to,” Whitcombe drawled placidly from the side. “There are witnesses.”

“But did he say anything?” Carter implored vehemently.

“He said that Jess Calgary did it,” Mercer said, without looking up.

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

Carter cursed silently. Beeman had poured out a cup of coffee, and he came to the table for the can of condensed milk and the wet spoon that lay at Carter’s elbow.

“They know you up there, Carter,” he said, in his dry, precise voice. “You could bring him in for us.”

“I’m a schoolteacher,” Carter said. “Not a policeman.”

“Not for long,” said Whitcombe. “I guess this puts you out of business.”

Carter saw the wink he sent in Henney’s direction and the unsuccessful effort Henney made to repress a chuckle. He was too weary to resent it.

“We’ll pick him up in the morning,” Mercer decided. “It’s too late to do anything now.”

“He may be hard to find,” Carter argued.

“There’ll be enough people helping us,” Beeman replied.

“There sure will,” echoed Whitcombe.

Henney, encouraged perhaps by Whitcombe’s manner, took a bold step toward Carter.

“Yes,” he exclaimed broadly, his pale eyes glinting with a vindictive light. “You’re goddamn right there will. You an’ your smart college ideas. Puttin’ ’em all in the same school like that. We all knew this would happen, but you wouldn’ listen. No, you were too smart. Well, it’s all your fault, goddammit, an’ it serves you right!”

Carter sat without looking at him, listening to his voice as if to some incomprehensible noise in the distance. When he finished, Mercer let out a long breath and spoke to Whitcombe.

“Find something for him to do downstairs.”

Henney followed Whitcombe out docilely, glancing back at Carter with dogged emphasis. He was very careful with the door this time, too careful, and after he had gone it swung open with a creaking moan and wavered there slightly in the draft from the hall. Carter stared at it morosely. It distracted him terribly, like a crooked picture hanging on the wall, and he rose finally, swearing, and slammed it shut. Every bone in his back gripped him with pain, and when he sat down he could do nothing but curl forward over the table like some monstrous fetus.

“Go get him, Carter,” Mercer said. “It’ll be better that way.”

“Will you take care of him if I do?”

“We’ll do what we can.”

“How much will that be?”

Mercer was honest. “You know how it is, Carter,” he said regretfully. “We’re all relatives here.”

Carter laughed scornfully and shook his head.

“Be smart, Carter,” said Beeman. “They’re your friends, not ours. If we go, every car in town will go with us.”

Carter gave no reply. The coffee was making him sick. He carried the cup to the basin and turned the faucet on to rinse it. The force of the water almost tore it from his hand. When he drank finally, the water was tepid and colored slightly with the faint shadow of rust and still tasted strongly of coffee.

“I’ll think about it,” he snapped irritably.

“Think fast, Carter,” Beeman pursued remorselessly. “He has to be here by morning.”

The inflexible logic of his reply and the cold and hostile persistency with which it had been delivered were more than Carter could stand.

“Let me alone!” he cried furiously.

He slammed the cup down with a bang, shattering it into a noisy spray of fragments, and stared angrily from the slumping reluctance of Mercer to Beeman’s trim and rugged and clean-shaven rigidity, his eyes darting defiantly from one to the other and back again, and then to the faded, yellow squalor of the old walls with their loathsome clots of squashed mosquitoes and to the mute black wound of the window where the sparkling moisture and crusted patterns of soot distorted the amputated reflections on the glass, and finally he turned abruptly and strode from the room and down the stairs to the landing where Whitcombe and Henney stood in quiet conversation and past them swiftly without a glance and down the last flight of steps, stumbling over the bottom few, and through the door and out, finally, into the street.

The cold, fresh air brought him to a stop. He stood there, panting, and allowed himself to grow calm. It was still dark out, although the first sinister rays of green were already creeping into the sky. A number of men shifted slowly in a group across the street. In their shaded movements, they seemed like the amorphous images of a dream. The streetlamps had long since been extinguished, but the paved road was dimly visible in both directions, looking like shrouded marble in the paling darkness. It was a few minutes before Carter realized he was cold. He pulled his coat closer about him and walked down the street to the diner.

Three men were at the counter, a young mechanic from the filling station and two older men from the railroad.

“They’ve been sitting around all night,” the mechanic was complaining insistently when Carter entered, “just like they expected him to walk in alone and lock himself in a cell.”

They fell silent at Carter’s appearance. Carter paused in the doorway, caught in the harsh spotlight of their belligerent curiosity. He swayed uncertainly a moment and then walked to the other end of the counter.

“Hear anything about the Wilson boy, Mr. Carter?” the mechanic called after him.

Carter shook his head and sat down directly in front of the cake stand. A solitary cut of coconut pie was before him. It was soggy and yellow, and grew after a minute to resemble some festering organ of the body. He shifted to another seat.

Freddie Hawkins approached slowly, flicking idly at crumbs with a clean white towel.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Carter,” he said quietly.

“Thanks, Freddie. I’m glad someone is.” Carter kept his own voice low. “Bring me some coffee, please.”

“Strange thing, Mr. Carter,” Freddie said, with an abstracted air of puzzlement, as he set the cup down, “that Calgary boy getting into trouble. He did some work for me when I enlarged the place. Funny fellow. Anyway, Mr. Carter, here’s what stumps me. He’s a big fellow, and that Wilson boy ain’t no wider than a splinter. Why’d he have to stab him?”

“I don’t know, Freddie. I don’t know anything anymore. Freddie, you’ve been listening to them. What’s going to happen tomorrow?”

Freddie shook his head. “There’s going to be trouble, Mr. Carter. It’s like a holiday, a real holiday, and they’re going to have it, no matter who pays for it. It’s almost like Christmas the way everybody’s walking around in a fever of excitement. Don’t let their anger fool you. It’s a chance to feel important, and they’re going to use it.”

“Why, Freddie? Why?”

“That’s hard to say, Mr. Carter. Maybe they just want to be respectable. Everybody wants to be respectable, and joining a mob is the easiest way.”

Carter nodded, and after a few seconds said, “Freddie, what are you going to do tomorrow?”

“Me, Mr. Carter?” Freddie said. “I get pretty tired by the time I finish up here. I guess I’ll just go home and sleep. There’s not much else I can do, is there?”

The door opened before Carter could reply, and Mercer entered, moving sluggishly with a ponderous fatigue. He stood motionless a moment, his eyes going through the oblong interior until they found Carter. The tough stubble on his face was black now and very dense.

“Hey, Mercer!” one of the men from the railroad demanded. “When the hell are you getting busy?”

Mercer ignored him. He walked slowly to Carter and sat down beside him.

“You need a shave,” Carter said.

“Go get him, Carter. It’s the only thing that will keep the people in town.”

“Do you think it will?”

“It might,” Mercer said. “We’ll hold him as long as we can. Maybe they’ll be too tired for anything else.”

“Turn him right over,” Freddie suggested. “Don’t give them a chance to win anything. Maybe you can put some shame into them that way.”

“Who let you in?” Mercer said to him.

“I did,” answered Carter.

“Bring me some coffee, Freddie.”

“Some cold water,” Carter added. “A glass of cold water.”

Freddie moved off with a nod. Mercer watched Carter steadily, waiting for his reply. Carter shifted uncomfortably.

“Get me some gum,” he said. “My throat is sore.”

Mercer called to Freddie for chewing gum. Carter had forgotten the cigarettes. When Freddie returned, Mercer sent him for a pack. Carter began quickly on a slice of gum, but his back teeth started aching almost immediately, and when he turned irately to spit the gum out it stuck to his lip, and after he had plucked it off with his hand it adhered to his fingers and wouldn’t shake off, and he was forced finally, cursing aloud by this time, to twist it off with a paper napkin.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Carter said. “I’ll go hear what he has to say.”

Mercer nodded and said nothing.

“That’s all,” Carter insisted. “That’s all I’m going to do.”

Mercer nodded again. Carter rose and walked outside. Dawn was coming with a rush, bold, brazen, and bright, and the blackness that had consolingly made the hours seem unreal was mixing already with a dull gray morning light that stirred like heavy dust in the air and gave the forbidding pallor of tombstones to the concrete sidewalks and the two imitation marble Corinthian columns in front of the bank and to the flat white facades of all the buildings that stood small and square on both sides of the quiet street. Mercer was beside him.

“It’s too early,” Carter said.

“They’ll be getting up early.”

“All right. I’ll go now.”

“Thanks, Carter.”

“Don’t thank me!” Carter said, with vicious feeling. “For Christ’s sake, don’t thank me!”

He turned from him and strode back past the police station to where he had parked his car in the afternoon. He had forgotten to put the top down, and the steering wheel and the two brown leather seats in front were coated with moisture. He had left the cigarettes behind again. The windshield was a solid blank of mist. He entered the car and drove slowly toward the river, gravely intrigued by the ground fog bunched up into thick white veils. It was going to be a nice day. The sun was full already, and the few clouds in the sky were puffed up like clean bedding and scattered remotely through the heavens. An empty shell of a moon hung in profile overhead. A raw chill was in the air.

He crossed the bridge and went faster as he moved into the hills where the small community of Negro farmers, whose begetters of a generation before had emigrated from the Deep South to purchase the land from the town on a plan dictated by the authorities, contended with the tough earthen slopes for substance.

Soon he passed Will Perkins alone in his field, a mule in traces and a bulky hand plow before him in silhouette, standing motionless as a monument as he watched Carter speed by. There was something odd about the scene, and when he had passed some more of their farms, each with a solitary sentinel staring somberly toward the road, he realized what it was. There was no smoke in the chimneys, no sign of a woman or child; the only motion came from the restless thrusts of a hound or the scratching flurry of chickens or from a fat sow swaying through the yard with a squealing litter at her heels. The families had been moved out overnight; the men had remained behind and were waiting. There was pathos in the landscape, in the utter lack of activity, in the grim, gray, ominous quiet, and Carter was reminded for a moment of Sudbury and Hales taking the sacrament in the tower with the knowledge that at that same moment their lives were being traded to the mob. The need for haste swept over him, and he drove faster still.

He had been to the Calgary place before, but he was not sure now that he remembered the way, and when he arrived at the dusty thoroughfare that marked the settlement, he left his car and hurried into the general store. About a dozen men stood inside. Carter scanned each of the men quickly.

“Where’s Ira Calgary?”

There was no sound. He scowled impatiently and picked out a man whose name he remembered.

“Raymond, where’s Ira Calgary?”

“Ah don’ know, Mista’ Cahta’,” Raymond answered. “Ah ’spect he’s at his place.”

“Take me there.”

Raymond moved forward soberly, a square, good-looking man with a face made for sport and virile merriment. A voice from the back intoned, “How’s the Wilson boy, Mr. Carter?”

Carter came to an abrupt stop. There was a long moment of silence before he could reply.

“He’s all right,” he answered slowly, turning a bit to face them. “Yes, he’s all right.” He paused uncertainly in the doorway and then turned sharply and walked out.

They passed two homes to get to the Calgary place, each with a man in dark clothes gazing at them with lugubrious interest. Ira Calgary was waiting at the gate to his yard, a corroded feeding pail in his hands and a few brown hens clucking at his feet.

“You’d better give them something to eat,” Carter said, trying to smile.

Calgary turned with obedient melancholy and chucked a handful of corn to the ground. He looked back at Carter and waited. He was a tall, thin man with a long face, heavy lips, and big teeth. His eyes were mottled with moist flecks of yellow and protruded slightly. There was a goitrous swelling on his neck.

“Too bad about that scrape yesterday.” Carter paused, but Calgary remained silent, and he swallowed nervously and went on. “Good thing no one was hurt. The Wilson boy is all right. They want Jess in town to sign a paper. I’ll drive him in and then take him on to school when he’s finished.”

Calgary regarded him suspiciously. “You say no one was hurt?”

“No. It was only a scratch. Where’s Jess?”

Calgary looked dubiously at Raymond.

“Go get him, Ira,” Raymond said.

“He says no one was hurt,” Calgary argued.

“Go get him, Ira,” Raymond repeated firmly.

Calgary turned and walked despondently into the house. Carter and Raymond waited without talking. Far below them the town rested like a somnolent white island, its anchored insularity intensified by the brief contact it made with the state highway that tapped it obliquely and then darted swiftly into infinity like a jagged cable. The dirt road he had traveled was clear and sharp. A heavy haze enriched the color, and it unrolled slantingly into town with the softness of a ceremonial carpet, the dark hues alternating in radiant planes of purple and deep red in the shifting daylight. A rooster sent an echoing question into space.

The door to the house opened and Ira Calgary reappeared. Jess was with him, walking in passive silence, tall and thin like his father, but not nearly as tall and a good deal wider. A bandage bound his head from front to back. One side of his face was badly smashed; the broken flesh was swollen and discolored. Carter turned cold when he saw him.

“You’re hurt, Jess,” he said softly.

“Yes, suh, Mr. Carter.”

Carter gazed at him with morbid awe. He forced down a rising taste of nausea, burdened to his soul suddenly by that viscous paralysis that came to him always with the spectacle of illness, violence, or injury, and he balanced himself against a feeling of dizziness that awoke every nerve in his body to the pains and cruel pressures of all his tired and infected parts. He swallowed again and said, “They want to ask you some questions, Jess. I thought I’d drive you in and then take you to school when you’re finished.”

“He says no one was hurt.”

“Yes,” Carter said. “Will you come?”

Jess nodded. His gaunt air of submission was both meek and sullen. He lingered an instant and then moved forward regretfully and came listlessly through the gate and began walking steadily down the path, his eyes staring blankly at the ground, his arms dangling at his sides loosely.

“You bring him back, Mista’ Cahta’,” Calgary said. “Do you hear? You bring him back, now.”

“Mista’ Cahta’,” said Raymond guardedly, “if the Wilson boy ain’ hurt, then it’s safe to send for the women, ain’ it?”

“I don’t know.” Carter glanced about helplessly and wondered dismally what to say. “You’d better wait, Raymond. The Wilson boy is all right, but there’s no telling what a few hotheads might try. Yes, Raymond, you’d better wait.”

Raymond nodded and stepped back, and Carter turned and walked to where Jess had stopped to wait. They returned to the car in silence. A steady wind was blowing up from the river, pungent with the smell of burning leaves. A spotted mongrel joined them from the side. He sniffed at their heels for a few paces, was disappointed, and loped off ahead. The men were assembled outside the store to watch them go. Each of them seemed round-shouldered.

Carter held the door open for Jess and then came around the front and sat down behind the wheel. He did not look at him until they were on the road, and then his eyes were drawn up his face slowly to the edge of the bandage. An appalling sorrow went through him.

“That looks bad, Jess. You’d better have a doctor see it.”

“I guess not, Mr. Carter,” Jess decided. “I guess a doctor won’t be much help.”

No, Carter remembered, I guess not. He forced his eyes back to the road, but soon the full realization of what he was doing swept over him, and he gripped the wheel with all his strength, feeling that his limbs would go wild with panic were he to relax his arms even slightly.

“Why’d you have to stab him, Jess? Couldn’t you whip him with your hands if you had to?”

“I guess not, Mr. Carter,” Jess said, and went on resentfully. “There were three of them, Mr. Carter, three of them hitting me with a lead pipe.” His fingers twitched nervously on his thighs. He had large, sinuous veins that spilled erratically over the backs of his hands. “I guess you didn’t know that, did you?”

“No, I didn’t. Simpson and Suggs said they found you fighting in the alley.”

“They didn’t find me,” Jess said, with a low, mirthless laugh. “They were there.”

Carter said nothing. Jess gazed ahead for several moments and then turned abruptly.

“I don’t carry a knife. Here, Mr. Carter. Here, look at this!”

And before Carter realized what he was doing he had torn his shirt free from his trousers and had clawed open the buttons to reveal a thick, wide calico strip girdling his bare waist just above the hips. A thick wadding of gauze had been stuffed underneath on one side, but the blood had soaked through anyway in three places, one dark blot and two very faint stains, and it was impossible to tell whether it had flowed from one wound or many. Carter was horrified.

“It wasn’t my knife that cut him,” he heard Jess say.

Carter stared down at him with amazement, letting his eyes dwell sickly on the awesome sight, growing sicker and sicker with what they saw until he thought he would vomit. It was right over the kidney.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” was all he could say.

“Yes, suh, Mr. Carter. It hurts.”

Carter let another minute pass and then made up his mind, and he slammed the brakes on as hard as he could, hurling himself forward and banging Jess up hard against the front. He whirled immediately to speak, but the car had skidded through a dry patch and the wind caught the harsh dust and rammed it fiercely into his face, blinding and choking him, so that he was reduced to coughing and clutching helplessly at his eyes.

“I’ve been lying to you, Jess,” he gasped, when he could finally speak. “You’re in trouble and there isn’t much time. Get out and run, and for God’s sake, hurry!”

Jess remained perfectly still. Carter shook him roughly.

“Do you understand, Jess? The Wilson boy is dying. They want you for murder!”

Jess spoke very softly. “Yes, suh, Mr. Carter,” he said, staring intently down into his lap. “I knew I hurt him pretty bad.”

Carter gaped with astonishment. “Then what are you doing here?” he cried frantically. “Why did you come?”

“I guess it’s best this way,” Jess continued, in a sad and steady voice. “Maybe they’ll leave the rest of us alone.”

“Jess,” Carter asked, with hoarse wonderment, “do you know what will happen to you?”

“Yes, suh, Mr. Carter.”

“And you still want to go?”

“Yes, suh, Mr. Carter.”

“I can’t take you,” Carter decided, his confusion rising into a muddled despair. “I told your father I’d bring you back. No, I can’t take you.”

“He knew you didn’t mean it,” Jess said.

“He knew also?”

“Yes, suh, Mr. Carter. We all knew it was pretty bad. We had a meeting last night and decided I was to give myself up if the police came for me alone. I’m glad it was you, Mr. Carter. I don’t like the police.”

“Oh, God,” Carter realized, with an overpowering shame. “They all knew I was lying.”

“You did it for the best,” Jess said.

“Shut up, Jess,” Carter pleaded. “For Christ’s sake, shut up!”

Jess looked down humbly.

“It’s none of my business!” Carter exclaimed. He banged his hand down on the steering wheel, hurting himself but not feeling the pain until later. “I’m washing my hands of the whole thing. You get out here and do what you want. I’m not having anything to do with it.”

He waited, breathless and furiously distraught, until Jess reached for the door.

“Jess,” he asked, almost whispering, “what are you going to do?”

“Walk into town, I guess.”

Carter gazed at him and went limp with a sense of futility. The resistance drained out of him, leaving him hollow, cold, and numb.

“All right, Jess. I’ll take you.”

Jess sat back, and in silence they spiraled down through the hills toward the level ground. They passed Perkins, the solitary plowman watching them ride by, and soon came to the bridge. After the bridge the town was before them. Carter stared ahead tensely for a sign of motion on the road. It was empty. A few minutes out, he brought the car to a stop and put the top down. He rolled each of the windows up tight. A flock of crows went winging overhead.

“I’m sorry about the school, Mr. Carter,” Jess said when they were driving again. “Pap and the other men, they didn’t like it, but we liked it fine.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Carter said.

“I tried not to fight, Mr. Carter. I thought if I kept my hands down they’d stop hitting me, but they kept after me like they’d beat me to death. I had to do what I could. I had to try to save myself.”

“Sure, Jess. Of course.”

Carter turned off before he reached the first buildings and circled the outskirts so as to come up behind the police station. He entered town finally, driving slowly now, and as they rode past the comfortable white houses, all with their fine shade trees and spotless picket fences or stunted hedgerows, the bell in the church steeple began to sound. It tolled eight times. Jess smiled grimly.

“I guess we’re both going to be late for school.”

“There won’t be any school today,” Carter said.

In another minute they were there. An atmosphere of excitement filled the area. People had collected in small groups on both sides of the street. Others were streaming up. Mercer and Beeman stood together at the top of the steps. They came hurrying down as soon as Carter appeared. Mercer got into the car. He had shaved and washed, and he looked hard now and wide awake.

“Any trouble?”

Carter shook his head.

“You can decide,” Mercer went on rapidly. “There’s still time to take him out, but they’ll sure as hell get after the whole bunch if we do.”

“He wants to stay.”

“Do you?”

Jess nodded. He was beginning to look frightened. Mercer gave him no time.

“Walk fast when we get out.”

He took hold of his arm and pushed the door open. Beeman fell in on the other side, and they moved quickly across the sidewalk and into the building. The people near the door began crowding forward, and then Beeman stepped out to face them.

That was all Carter saw. He had put the car in gear and was rolling forward, and it all vanished behind him like the macrocosm of a turbulent dream. He crawled forward aimlessly for a few blocks, wondering dully where to go, and then turned at the crossroad and drove slowly toward his house. He was tired and sick, and there was nothing for him to do now but sleep.

AS THE TRAIN chugged across the Galveston Bay Bridge toward the Virginia Point station, Wendell Asquith made a show of touching the watch pocket of his vest, then patting his frock coat’s other pockets. “Of all the deuced luck!”

His wife, Amelia, remained focused on her embroidery. “What is it, my dear?”

“In the rush to leave for the station, I forgot my pocket watch.”

Amelia looked at him, surprised. “It’s hard to imagine you ever being without that watch.”

“Imaginable or not, it’s happened.”

“I’m sure you can secure a temporary replacement once we reach Fort Worth.”

“That won’t do. It’s my lucky watch. My father sent it to me when I started my first business, engraved with his best wishes. I can’t just leave it behind.”

Amelia stuck her needle into the stretched linen and set down the embroidery hoop beside her on the bench seat. “What do you propose, Wendell?”

“I’ll jump off at Virginia Point and take the next train back to Galveston. You continue on with the servants. I’ll catch the afternoon train and meet you in Fort Worth tomorrow.”

Amelia sat forward, her face troubled. “Must you? I fear there’s a bad storm on its way.” She glanced out the window and shuddered. “Those clouds.”

Wendell remembered the bizarre clouds that had greeted the dawn on that second Saturday of September. Luminescent pink they were, though shards within the clouds caught all the colors of the rainbow. Soon enough they changed into the black-and-gray thunderheads that often traversed the sky above Galveston. While threatening, those clouds were reassuringly familiar.

“I have my umbrella, and should it worsen I’ll put on a rain slicker at home. I’ll be fine, Amelia.”

“Rain’s not the worst of it. The streets will flood again.”

“I’ll take a cab from the station. But really, anyone who can’t take getting their feet wet shouldn’t live in Galveston.” The streets of the town were notorious for flooding, since the island Galveston occupied rose less than 9 feet above the sea. The city fathers had raised the sidewalks to 3 feet above the plank-paved roads to help keep people dry, but apparently they’d forgotten people had to cross the streets. Soggy shoes and socks were the rule whenever it rained.

“Why don’t you have Arthur accompany you? I’d feel better, knowing you’re not alone.”

Wendell strangled a sharp retort. There’s no place in my plans for bringing along witnesses, especially my own butler. Instead he smiled at his wife.

“I can certainly handle such a minor task by myself.” He slid forward on his seat and took hold of Amelia’s hand. “Besides, darling, I’ll feel much better knowing Arthur’s watching over you.”

A blush blossomed on Amelia’s cheeks, and once again he thanked the stars that this gorgeous woman had accepted his proposal. Even after ten years and giving birth to twin daughters, Amelia’s beauty had not faded. If anything, the journey from twenty-year-old bride to thirty-year-old pillar of society had sanded away youthful immaturities and left a polished, poised woman.

She was his wife, and no blackguard would take her from him. He would see to that.

When the train halted at the station, Wendell stood and grabbed his hat, a slate-gray bowler that matched his frock coat. A quick glance in a mirror confirmed that his diamond stickpin was still centered in his ascot. After a tug on his maroon brocade vest, Wendell turned back to Amelia and again reached for her hand, this time bringing it to his lips.

“Don’t fear, my dear. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Do say goodbye to the twins, dear. They’d be horribly distressed if they found you’d disappeared.”

Wendell grabbed his leather toiletries case from the rack above him and secured his umbrella between the handles. As he slid open the compartment’s door, he glanced back at Amelia, already engrossed in her embroidery again. This is for you, my love, though you’ll never know what I do this day. With that benediction, Wendell left the compartment.

LABOR DAY. WE could hear the bellow and grind from the Route 19 overpass. Below, the river gleamed like a flaw in metal. Leaving the parking lot behind, we billy-goated down the fisherman’s trail, one by one, the way all mountain people do. Loud clumps of bees clustered in the fireweed and boneset, and the trail crunched underfoot with cans, condom wrappers, worm containers. A half-buried coal bucket rose from the dirt with a galvanized grin. The laurel hell wove itself into a tunnel, hazy with gnats. There, a busted railroad spike. The smell of river water filled our noses.

Finally sun spilled through the trees, and we saw Pillow Rock rise as big as a church from the waters. A gaudy lichen of beach towels and bikini tops coated it over. Local women shouted our names. “Happy Labor Day!” When we set foot upon it, the granite seemed to curve to our bare soles, radiating an animal heat. Wolf spiders raced off. We made the top, where Pillow Rock flattened. The river nipped at its base. So much water. The Army Corps of Engineers had uncorked the dam below Summersville Lake. The water churned and gouged at the canyon walls. The Gauley had the reputation of a drowning river, even before the Army Corps wrestled it out of God’s control and gave it power.

Upriver, scraps of neon: rafters. Dyes like that don’t appear in nature. Their paddles flashed like pikes in the sun.

Rafting brings in millions of taxable dollars a year. The commissioner says it’s the best thing to happen to Nicholas County since the coal severance tax. “Coal was king,” he says. “Coal was king.” Men in their twenties and thirties and forties shouldn’t stand idle. We who’d lost our mining jobs would work in whitewater, plow that wet furrow. Nice thoughts. Invigorating lies. For our bread, we worked filling stations, timber outfits, hospice care, county schools. The two big successes among us, Chet Mason and Reed Judy, started a welding outfit out of Reed’s old echoing barn. The rafting operators-from Pennsylvania, Oregon, Croatia-brought their own people and did little hiring, until Kelly Bischoff started Class Five. He hired locals. The papers gushed over Kelly. He’d graduated from Panther Creek High School. One of us. Ex-miner. He looked rugged-good and dusky on a brochure, glossy and smiling, holding a paddle. His mother’s from Gad.

On Pillow Rock, men and women spoke to one another, casual and cunning. Someone fiddled with a portable radio: white jags of static, the silver keen of a steel guitar. We pried open prescription bottles that carried names other than our own.

Too late for trout fishing, too early for squirrel season-time to sun ourselves like happy rattlesnakes and watch the frolic. Five weeks running in the fall, we did, every Saturday, every Sunday. Opening day was always best. Every few minutes another raft tumbled over Sweet’s Falls and crashed in the shredding whirlpool. After a tense moment, the raft popped up like a cork in a sudsy bucket of beer. We cheered. Agonized faces glanced back, blooming with smiles. They loved us, or the sight of us. They held paddles aloft in pale white arms and their orange helmets shined. Some claim we don’t care about those people, we just take their commerce. Not true. We wonder about their jobs, their towns, their faces, their names.

Kelly Bischoff swore he heard a cash register chime every time they tipped over the falls. I love clientele, he said. Kelly moved between the two worlds, sleek as an otter. He knew us. He knew the rafters. Their names, their faces. He had everything you could want.

“Look, that one’s so scared he keeps paddling, not even hitting the water.”

Laugher tumbled down the rock. “What a jackass.”

“A happy jackass.”

“Would you do that?” Chet Mason asked a woman. “Go over the falls?”

“I’d love to scream like that. I never scream like that.”

“You hear that, Jason? Sounds like you’re not taking care of your husbandly duties.”

Reed Judy said, “You pay big money to holler like that. Old Kelly gets two hundred dollars a head. You got to come with a full raft too. He got plenty of rafts.”

“How many heads is that?”

“One, two… six in that one, not counting the guide,” Chet Mason said. “Slick as a hound’s tooth, Kelly is. Course, fall’s got to pay for winter, spring, and summer-that’s awful heavy math. There he is. That’s Class Five, that’s Kelly’s.”

The forty-seventh raft that day. Class Five River-Runners had blue-and-yellow rafts, same colors as the Mountaineers’ football team. We were proud of Kelly. After they sealed the Haymaker Mine, he took out a mortgage to start his outfit. Kelly punched out Mayor Cline last year at the festival. Wasn’t even drunk.

“Hey, Kelly boy!” We cupped hands around our mouths. “Hey, Kelly!”

But he didn’t wave back, riding closer on the careening swell. The raft hit at a bad angle. Rocks scraped the wet, blubbery rubber. As it made the lip of the falls-in our bellies, we felt a feathery sympathetic tickle-the raft toppled and shook out bodies.

Quiet. Then the screaming.

We bounded down to the water’s jagged edge, we tried to tally them, keep the numbers right. Neon tumbling in that gullet of foam, and one frail arm. We reached and missed and cussed ourselves. Reed managed to hook a belt and flopped a man onto the rock.

One disappeared under a boulder for a few sickening moments and shot out the other side. His mouth a hard circle.

With a strong crawl, Kelly led some into a backwater that bristled with logjams and lost paddles. Their heads broke the surface. The current sucked them back.

Kelly and the girl reached up at the same time. Chet Mason was closest. He had one set of hands. He hesitated for a millisecond. He reached for Kelly. “Got you.”

A sharp little yelp cut the noise. The girl’s helmet disappeared downriver. She was gone.

IN NEW FRANCE, which people more and more called Canada, from the old Iroquois word kanata, Duquet was everywhere-examining, prying, measuring, observing, and calculating. Limbs and low-quality hardwood waste became high-quality firewood, and every autumn he packed twenty wagons full for the Kébec market and for Paris, when he could charter available ships with the promise of a good return cargo of tea or coffee or textiles, spices or china. Without the sure promise of a rich return cargo, he thought, let the Parisians freeze, for all he cared.

Leasing a Dutchman’s ships was well enough, but he needed ships of his own. In 1712, a business acquaintance in Boston, an Englishman named Dred-Peacock, connected him to an English shipbuilder and a new but promising yard on the River Clyde, in Scotland, joined to England by the Act of Union, in ’07. Duquet wanted a ship; the yard wanted wood.

“Regard the map, sir,” Dred-Peacock said. “It’s the closest point to the colonies-the briefest sailing time. There are signs of success on the Clyde, but they need good timbers. They will pay for them. It is an opportunity that cannot be neglected.”

There were good precedents in New France for trading with the enemy, but arrangements with the English and the Scots were still secret, complex, expensive, even dangerous. Yet Duquet knew that there was profit in selling to the English, despite their colonial aims. Duquet took the plunge and Dred-Peacock took a goodly share of the profits, which increased year by year. Fifty acres of oak were needed to build one seventy-four-gun warship, and the hardwood stands along the rivers of New France began to fall to Duquet’s ambitions. But he felt hampered by Kébec’s distance from the money pots of the world and by the ice blockage of the Saint-Laurent River in winter.

“Duquet, it is past time for you to consider shifting your business operation to the colonies,” Dred-Peacock told him as they sat over their papers and receipts in the Sign of the Red Bottle, near the wharves, the inn they favored in Boston. Never did Dred-Peacock present his ill-formed face to Duquet in Kébec; always Duquet made the trip south by schooner or by packet.

“Oh, I think on it,” Duquet said, swirling the ale in his tankard until it slopped over the rim, as if that settled the question. “I think of it often. I am of half a mind to do so, sir.”

“Damn, sir! It is quite time you acted. Finish with thinking and act. Every day those poxy whoresons of mill men push into the forests and gain control over the land. In Maine there are countless white-pine mast trees and lesser pines to be used for tar and pitch. You know there is a great market for these if you can get them on a ship bound for Scotland, England, or even Spain or Portugal.”

Duquet nodded, but his face was sour. He knew that Dred-Peacock saw him as an ill-bred boor, a creature from the depths. True enough, he had escaped a cramped childhood spent pulling rabbit fur from half-rotten skins, pinching out guard hairs, plucking the soft fur for quilt stuffing. As a boy he had coughed incessantly, bringing up phlegm clotted with rabbit hair. The fine hairs had settled on every surface, matted on his family’s heads and shoulders. Finally, in this clinging miasma of stinking hair and dust, his mother, choking blood, had lain on the floor as his father’s black legs scissored away into the night, and Duquet began his struggle to get away from France, to become another person.

Dred-Peacock may have sensed Duquet’s squalid beginnings, but his fantastic drive to make money was what interested the Englishman. Dred-Peacock went on, his voice vibrating, “Where there is a market, the businessman must act. And all this would be immeasurably easier if you operated from Boston rather than bloody Kweebeck. And with my help these affairs can be managed.”

It was obvious and timely advice, and yet Duquet hesitated to commit to leaving New France. He had valuable connections there, and a lifetime dislike of the English language, with its vile obscenities, and those who spoke it.

Soon several ships belonging to Duquet but flying British flags ran the seas between Portsmouth and Boston harbors and the ever more numerous Clyde shipyards. It was like walking on a web of tightropes, but the money flew around Duquet like dandelion fluff in the wind. He had only to catch it in his net. And share it with Dred-Peacock.

THE SNOW HAD JUST BEGUN to really fall when Johnny’s mother reminded him for the third time that she had to have milk and eggs. He’d been through fourteen winters in his lifetime, all of them in that same Virginia farmhouse back in the woods near McPeak Mountain, so he felt he had a pretty good feel for how bad this storm might be. The way the sky hung heavy, the way everything turned gray, the way smoke chugged from the chimney, not in a straight column but instead barely making it out before spilling and hovering over the roof like a witch’s brew. And by Johnny’s calculations, this was going to be a whopper. He’d seen deer feeding in the neighboring field in the middle of the day while he’d been splitting stove wood. Another sign.

“Johnny, I’m telling you, we have to have milk,” said his mother. “Henry’s probably going to close early. If the babies don’t have their food, there’ll be hell to pay. The truck isn’t going to be able to deliver in this snow. Not for a few days, most likely.”

“I know,” said Johnny, buttoning his mackintosh and securing a wool toboggan on his head. “I’m going.”

His mother reached into her coin purse and handed him four quarters. “Get as much as you can carry, and at least a dozen eggs. The hens aren’t laying good in this cold.”

“All right, Ma,” said Johnny as he threw a canvas rucksack over his shoulder and headed out the door.

Those babies. Those damn babies. They were enough to drive him insane. What his mother meant, what his mother called her babies, were the eight or nine or maybe ten cats, Johnny wasn’t even sure anymore, that ruled his mother’s life. They ate better than he did most of the time, and he resented them for it. There’d been many a day, while his mother was at work and he’d already gotten home from school, when he’d considered taking the twenty-gauge and culling the kitty population by a few. But he’d never mustered the courage. Not yet, anyway.

He cursed those cats as he headed down the road to Henry’s General Store-the dirt and gravel already covered in a thin layer of snow-working his way through the Pleasant Grove section of McPeak Mountain. It was the only store on the mountain, and he knew his mother was right: Henry often closed shop early, for any reason he felt like, though usually it was because he’d run out of liquor and needed to get home before his throat got too dry. So a snowstorm was a perfect excuse for him to close, head home, sit around a fire, and get down to some proper drinking.

The temperature wasn’t cold, barely freezing, and there was no wind to speak of. The flakes fell straight down, fat and heavy, as Johnny trudged along, his boots giving that comforting crunching sound as they marched through the absolute quiet. Johnny loved the silence that a snowstorm brought. No birds chirping, no cars straining to make it up the hill, no clopping of horse hooves or the creaking of wagon wheels from old-timey farmers who’d still stubbornly resisted the purchase of an automobile.

The road was narrow and hilly, twisting and turning through stands of oak and pine. Henry’s was only a mile away, but in the snow everything took longer, and besides, Johnny wasn’t in any hurry. During the walk home it would be a different story, wanting to get the weight of the glass bottles off his back, but at the moment he was in no rush. At the moment he was going to enjoy it.

He stopped at the little stone bridge crossing Oldfield Creek and stared downstream, seeing rounded mounds of white on the exposed stones in the middle of the water. He often came down here and set leg-holds for mink, raccoon, and muskrat, selling the hides to Henry for a little spending money. But he preferred using snares, which he set in the fields by his house, occasionally catching the ultimate prize: a red fox.

As the creek gurgled along, as the snow continued to fall, now catching on the overhanging sycamore limbs that curled over the water, he wondered if his daddy had ever trapped. He wondered if his love for the hunt was inherited. He thought about that often when he was in the woods, imagining what his dad had been like, fantasizing about how different his life would be if his father hadn’t been killed during a training exercise in the army. His mother had told him she was still pregnant when his father died, at a barracks in South Carolina, never even getting the chance to go overseas and kill some Nazis. She only had one photo, a handsome man in uniform, his face turned to the side in profile. But he felt that he resembled his father, and hoped that when he was grown he’d have the same strong jawline, those same rugged features.

Johnny snapped out of his reverie when he heard the high whine of a pickup approaching. The engine raced and the truck moved fast, coming down the hill and heading toward the bridge, the back end fishtailing. It was an older model, probably a ’50 or ’51, and definitely a Ford, judging by the rounded roof and distinct eyeball headlights.

Johnny had to make a decision and make it fast. The truck now slid from side to side, out of control, the man frantically working his hands over the steering wheel, trying to right the ship. But it wasn’t going to happen. That ship was going to sink.

Johnny hopped onto the stone wall and then leapt, dropping 8 feet before hitting the creek. He landed on his feet, but his momentum carried him forward. He put out his hands, catching himself in the icy water, and avoided falling flat on his face. At the same instant his hands hit, a terrific crash sounded above him. Johnny looked back, arching his midsection over the water to stay dry, and saw metal colliding with stone, then a horrible scraping as sparks showered over the bridge. Finally there was a deadening thud as the truck careened across the road and slammed into the trunk of a fat oak.

Johnny’s boots sucked up the shallow creek water before he stepped out and climbed the gentle embankment toward the road. Steam hissed from the front of the truck, and the snow, which was hammering down now, disappeared as it hit the hot steel of the crumpled hood. The two tires on the driver’s side were flat and shredded.

The driver’s window was clouded over with fog, preventing Johnny from seeing inside. He looked around, hoping someone would magically appear who could help him. Could tell him what to do. But all he saw in either direction was a column of peaceful hemlocks, holding soft pillows of snow as they lined the road. Johnny grabbed the handle and pulled, but the door, dented and now showing streaks of silver in the red paint, was stuck. He tugged harder, throwing his weight into it, and the door opened awkwardly, sending off a horrendous squeak and pop through the otherwise silent afternoon.

Inside, the man sat slumped over the bent steering wheel, the top of it nearly touching the dashboard, almost as if it had melted. The windshield was fractured like pond ice, the epicenter containing pieces of hair and skin and blood. Johnny had never seen a dead person before, and though he was scared, he was also surprisingly calm. He grabbed at the wool collar of the man’s red-checked hunting jacket, pulling him back so he could sit properly. His head lolled, as if he had no neck muscles, finally resting against the cold rear window, his bloody chin pointing toward the roof.

Johnny hadn’t recognized the truck as one he’d seen around town before, nor did he recognize the man. But he didn’t figure anyone, not even a best friend or a wife, would have recognized him right then. His smashed nose had shifted to the left. A large piece of skin was absent from his forehead, presumably clinging to the windshield, and mashed wire from his glasses had wedged into his cheeks, though somehow the lenses had stayed intact. His entire face, from forehead to chin, was sopping with blood, and a pool of it stained the thighs of his dungarees.

But he was still breathing. At first Johnny thought for sure the man had to be dead, but then he heard a slow gurgling, similar to Oldfield Creek rolling over the rocks.

“Mister, can you hear me? Mister, you okay?”

There was no response, and Johnny hadn’t expected one. He wasn’t sure what to do but figured since he was about halfway between home and Henry’s, the smartest thing would be to go on to the store. His mother didn’t have a telephone, but Henry did, and he could call the police once he got there. Except just as Johnny was about to leave, he looked across the man’s lap and saw something lying on the passenger’s side floorboard. It was a beige gunnysack, and spilling from the top, where the drawstring had loosened, were gobs of twenty-dollar bills, fanned out like tail feathers.

He closed the door and ran around to the other side, where the passenger door opened easily. As quickly as he could, without forethought of repercussions, he snatched the gunnysack and stuffed it inside his rucksack. He also found a pistol, which he grabbed before thinking properly. As he was about to close the door the man said, “I see you, boy.” The voice was strained, weak, gravelly. But he heard it all the same.

Johnny slammed the door, ran to the bridge, and tossed the pistol as far as he could downstream. Then he took off for home, shuffling through the snow-now boot-high and rising fast-practicing the words he’d tell his mother once he arrived. “Henry’s was already closed, Ma. I’m sorry. I know I messed up.”

SHE DIDN’T FLINCH none. Gag neither. I’ll give her that. But after looking flinty-eyed at the body for a minute or more, both of ’em still as stumps, she did stare me straight in the face while we talked, so as not to get another eyeful by accident. That staring was, I figure, more discomfiting for me than seeing a corpse was for her. Our county nurse, Miss Haseltine Polk, is as fine-looking a woman as you’ll find anywheres. I’d never yet been close enough to see that her eyes are green and sparkly, like a bitters bottle. The wavy dark hair, mostly tucked under a poufy crocheted hat, I’d noticed more than I care to admit.

It had been a godsend she’d drove by within shouting distance while I was there. I was down in the creek bed under the trestle bridge, where some colored boys had come across the body an hour afore. The boys had been fishing and were so affrighted by what they found, they flagged down a passing farmer, showing themselves to be in no way responsible for whatever had took place or they’d have surely run away instead. The farmer found me at the railroad depot, buying a box lunch, and I ran right over to the livery to borrow a horse.

I was taking in first impressions of the nattily attired body when I saw her whipping by on the roadbed above me in that little two-wheeled pony trap she favored for unpaved roads. Her dog, a pink-nosed white bulldog she called Gumbo, for no good reason I could think of, rode in the trap beside her. He spotted me afore she did and barked to help me get her attention.

She hopped down that rocky red-clay bank light as a fairy, only stopping to gather up some excess skirt and tie together the ends of that long blue cape she wore when she was on official county-nurse business. Her dog whined and wriggled around in the pony cart where she’d ordered him to stay. The pony was indifferent.

I took off my hat and stationed myself between her and the body to give her time to steady herself on that slick, oozing creek bank before I revealed what I wanted her to see. Her job was mostly checking on the bedridden and the newborn, but I knew that upon occasion she assisted old Dr. McQuinney in some right gruesome undertakings. If what he was doing required four hands instead of two, and there weren’t no man around with a strong stomach.

I was pretty sure she knowed who I was. But I hooked my thumb under my gunbelt, pushing my coat front aside to reveal my badge. I have to pin my badge into the thick leather of my gunbelt ever since the cheap safety catch on the badge back broke off. I can’t pin it to my lapel no more without risking losing it or wounding myself. Might as well get used to it. I’ll have my first set of false teeth afore the county buys me a new one.

“Good afternoon, Miss Polk. I’m terrible sorry to inconvenience you, but I need some assistance and you are just the person to help me. You might need to brace yourself for a disturbing sight.”

She didn’t say nothing, but if she’d been a pup, I’d of said her ears pricked up. I stepped aside. The man’s body was half crumpled up and half flung out over a cluster of smooth flat boulders. A shallow but lively trickle of creek water had soaked the underside of the man’s good-quality tweed suit and near-new pinstriped shirt. Looking up, I could see what was probably his hat wobbling in the breeze overhead, snagged by a bolt projecting from a trestle beam about 20 feet overhead. His head was stove in at the temple and his neck twisted enough to permit us to see most of his face and to conclude he’d suffered a broke neck.

“It appears, Miss Polk, that this unfortunate man either jumped or fell from the bridge. Would you happen to know who he is?”

“I’m sad to say I do. His name is Reynard Farley. A drummer. Haskell Pitt Shoe Company. ‘Ten toes in heaven.’”

“Ma’am?”

“That’s the motto of the Haskell Pitt Shoe Company, not an observation.”

“I see. And you’re sure this is Mr. Farley?”

“Oh, yes, I’m entirely certain, sheriff. Lord, what a pitiful sight!”

“Deputy, Miss Polk. Deputy Jervis Stickley. Farley, huh? I thought that’s who it was. Lives at the hotel, don’t he?”

“Yes. He and his wife are boarders.” She got real quiet, thinking about them that was left behind and was going to have to make do without Mr. Reynard Farley.

“I was hoping you’d help me, Miss Polk, by breaking the sad news to Mrs. Farley about what has transpired and see, maybe, if there ain’t some friends or kin we should communicate with on her behalf. I’ve got to get the body back to town and have the doctor pronounce him officially dead. I’d hate for Mrs. Farley to get such news accidental like. Those colored boys that found him might have recognized him too, and have already set the county grapevine afire.”

She narrowed her eyes to fluttering quarter-moons and mulled things over. “I’ll help you get him into my pony cart. We’ll have to fold him up, but I’ve got some vulcanized rubber sheets we can wrap him in. Dr. McQuinney is in Moultrie visiting his nephew. In his absence, either the sheriff or I have the authority to pronounce a body dead. The sheriff is sleeping off the lancing of an axillary abscess.”

I knowed that already. Our sheriff was susceptible to frequent armpit boils.

She knelt down by the body, pressed his neck and wrist, and draped a filmy handkerchief she drew from somewhere within that cape over Farley’s nose. It lay motionless as them boulders.

“He’s dead, all right. Not a doubt in my mind. And I’ll sign the document to that effect. Wound still gelatinous. I’d estimate he’s been dead no more than a couple of hours.”

She stood up, brushed herself off, and glanced all around. “Where’s his automobile?” I must have looked dumb as a barrel bung.

“What I mean to say, deputy, is how’d he get out here?”

“Had an automobile, did he?” My first thought was that Farley had been in a horse-drawn vehicle of some kind, which the horse had probably already towed home to stall and feedbag. I hadn’t noticed any automobiles stopped alongside the road. More people had them every year, including yours truly, but they was still a whole lot less numerous than mules and still as likely to draw a crowd of excited little boys as the mules are to draw flies.

“Well, might be it’s up there.” She pointed to the trestle bridge. I should mention that the trestle bridge roadbed was wide enough on both sides of the track to serve as walkway or mule crossing, although it would be a mite foolish to attempt such a passage while an actual train was on the bridge. Flying cinders might scorch your clothes, and the side draft could knock a scrawny fella off his pegs.

A regular-sized dirt road extended beyond the bridge on both ends, running alongside the rail bed. On the east side that road made a sharp turn downhill, becoming a feeder to the county road. On the other side the road soon shrank to just tracks and enough rail bed for the train to follow into town.

Miss Haseltine Polk whistled for Gumbo to come on down and keep an eye on the deceased while we scouted the area. His hackles went up at the first close whiff, but he did as he was told. Miss Polk had a naturally commanding presence.

Sure enough, there, parked at the foot of that dirt road, occulted by hovering redbuds, was a Sears and Roebuck Model P, its trunk lid neatly tied down to secure all the shoe boxes stowed inside that kept the latch from catching like it was supposed to.

I pointed out to Miss Polk some deep scrambling-type footprints going up the road toward the trestle bridge. There was none coming back down.

“What in the world would lure him up onto that bridge in such a hurry?”

Me and her mused as one. Once onto the trestle bridge, we didn’t see nothing out of the ordinary, until Miss Haseltine Polk found some tweedy wool threads trapped in the rivets and welded seams of a particular steel railing, about two-thirds of the way across.

“Must be where he pitched over,” I concluded.

I was the one who spied what might be splatters of blood on a nearby upright.

“Don’t seem likely he jumped, you know, intentional, now does it?”

She shook her head. “It wouldn’t make sense even without the blood. He’s got a load of orders to deliver and make a profit on. A real sweet wife waiting for him at home. He was wearing a watch and chain that were in no respect trinkets. Wouldn’t you think he’d have left those behind for his wife if he intended to take his own life?”

She cleared her throat. “And to add to the conundrum, there’s that peculiar injury to his face.”

“Good God, I mean, good gracious, Miss Polk. The man fell off a bridge onto a pile of rocks. Can’t hardly expect him to look like the Arrow collar man.”

She gave me a look I would have described as fish-eyed, only nothing sporting gills ever had eyes made my mustache tingle like hers did.

“I know that perfectly well, Deputy Stickley. But those rocks he leapt or fell onto are mossy and humpbacked as a camel. That wound across Mr. Farley’s eye and cheek looks like it was made with a hoe handle. Something elongated and shaped the same from one end of where it struck to the other. It appears he suffered an orbital… eye socket… fracture.”

I hadn’t paid much mind to that particular wound, but now that I recollected it, she was right. “Then you think he was struck in the face, up there on the bridge, afore he fell?”

“I do.”

“But why? If somebody wanted to rob him, why’d they leave his watch? And all them spanking-new shoes in his automobile? Not to mention the automobile itself.”

She shrugged.

“Say, how well do you know the Farleys? Anybody holding a grudge? Old enemies? Ever been accused of cheating anybody? His shoes give anybody one too many bunions?”

It wasn’t fish eyes but daggers she was flashing my way now.

“Beg pardon, miss. My levity was uncalled for.”

The wind gusts on the trestle liked to knock off both our hats. She wrapped her cape more snugly around her, to keep from getting airborne like one of them Wright brothers’ flying machines. Meanwhile the wind continued to riffle her skirt above a pair of sturdy, lace-up shoes and dainty ankles. Her stockings were white as moonlight peeking through dark clouds. She let me cradle her elbow as we made our way off the bridge.

“I understand that Mr. Farley travels quite a bit,” she told me, “but whenever he’s in town, he seems to get along with everybody just fine. He moved here from Michigan, I believe. But he’s not the least bit brash or irritating. His wife’s from Clayton County. And his reputation as a businessman is spotless. That fusspot Lottie Kreuger just about wore out a pair of pumps before deciding they didn’t fit and she wanted her money back. He gave it to her too.”

I won’t detail the events surrounding our getting Farley’s body out of the creek bed and into the pony cart, all wrapped up in them vulcanized rubber sheets. Just let me say that Miss Haseltine Polk’s strength in no way is a reflection of them dainty ankles. I swear, I think she could have done the job all by herself. We left the body with John Milton Penrose, the most respected embalmer and undertaker in the county. Penrose could make a ninety-year-old scrofula victim look like a Florodora girl.

LAROCQUE GOT A CALL when his father died. This was when he was living in the desert, in a trailer on the edge of Banning. He couldn’t remember giving out the number, but one day in December the phone rang and it was his father’s girlfriend, telling him that Henry had died of cancer. She said he had to come decide what to do about the property, the dogs. She was moving to Florida, to Del Ray. After he hung up the phone Larocque put a hand on his chest, feeling a tightness there as if she had called to tell him about a bill he owed.

He stood for a long time in the open door of the trailer, feeling the heat, watching the trucks go by on 10. After a while he began to carry his few possessions to the truck: the fan, the microwave with the taped door. He left a pile of things in the middle of the floor with a note for Jed and Marie thanking them for the use of the place and saying they should sell what they could. They were gone, visiting Jed’s son in Kanab, and the two Mexican kids whose names he had never learned were working the station, so he just stood at the edge of the broken asphalt thinking about the difference between this place and Cheshire County. Here the bright yellow and red of the desert was everywhere, even when you closed your eyes, even in a dream. He remembered New Hampshire as a wilderness of dark blue and black so that even at noon it seemed like twilight and it was hard to feel that what was happening was real.

He had liked the trailer, the descending shelf of brown dust that led to the highway, the heat that he felt held him hard against the ground. Around the lot were scattered desert plants that gave off bright, medicinal smells. Marie said that each one could cure a specific disease and was always pushing some tea at Larocque that she said would clear up his cough or stop his nightmares. She made sweet, grainy cookies and bread from mesquite and sold them from a little display Jed built in front of the station to the families on their way to Palm Springs or Marines from Twentynine Palms. The young Marines were quick and lithe and seemed to Larocque tense with the coiled and watchful energy of people capable of great violence. He wondered what he looked like to these travelers and would take pains to smile at everyone, especially the cars full of young girls heading to weekends in the desert, to parties he’d imagine in night-lit casinos he’d never seen except on television.

Jed said he liked knowing Larocque was there by the station after hours in case something happened, though nothing ever did. Days he worked landscaping for Bermudez Triangle, and after dark he sat looking out at the highway through the trailer’s open door as if from a cave and sipping White Horse. On his last night he watched a truck burning out on the highway, the police and fire trucks going by in showers of red light, and he realized that all the years he’d been in the California desert, he had been hiding.

Daniel Alarcón’s books include War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Award, and Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. He is executive producer of Radio Ambulante.org, a Spanish-language narrative journalism podcast. In 2010 The New Yorker named him one of the twenty best writers under forty, and his most recent novel, At Night We Walk in Circles, was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award.

• This story came together after years visiting the prison known as Lurigancho, on the outskirts of Lima. I went inside for the first time in 2007 and have been returning ever since, never quite knowing what I am doing there or what keeps drawing me back to that place. In 2009 I taught a writing workshop there, and eventually, in 2011, I pitched a piece to Harper’s about life in the drug trafficking block. “Collectors” is based on the material gathered on that reporting trip. In this case, the spark was an offhand comment by an inmate, who began musing about the prison’s collection of terrible odors. He said it half jokingly, and then mentioned the worst smell of all: the smell of sex when you weren’t having any. I asked him to explain, and he did. The story was eye-opening. I knew I had to do something with that.

OTTO PENZLER, series editor, is a renowned mystery editor, publisher, and columnist, and the owner of New York’s The Mysterious Bookshop, the oldest and largest bookstore dedicated solely to mystery fiction. He has edited more than fifty crime-fiction anthologies.

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