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Someone identifying himself as Officer Truax answered the phone, resisting the Detective's questions with officious inflexibility until there was an interruption from an extension.

“Hey, Sherlock, that you?”

It was Charlie Wriggins's voice, and the Detective visualized him in his mind's eye: a seventy-five-year-old, ornery and energetic ex-newspaper man who loved his profession's image and cultivated all its clichés, full of piss
and vinegar and newsroom profanity. He was one of the few transplanted residents who got along with the locals (Charlie's term) because, although he was as irascible as they were, he was a reporter and not a reformer by nature; he didn't try to change their lives. The Detective waited until Officer Truax hung up.

“Where are you, Charlie?”

“The Klein place on the shore highway.”

“Which one's that?”

“You've been up here two years and you don't know the Klein place? Frankly, Sherlock, you amaze me. You know, the orange erector set overlooking the cove. The one they tried to revoke the building permit on; lost in court.

“Oh yeah, the Klein place,” the Detective said, but he didn't know it. A city man all his life, he had barely stepped outside since moving in with Sally, as lost in the New England countryside as a Kansas runaway in New York City. For him, Maine was a jumbled montage of sea gulls and rock and agitated ocean, a place you sent postcards from, returning home before they arrived. But now the Detective wouldn't return. Maine was his home; he would remain there until he died.

“Well, what's this all about? What happened?”

“It seems that someone—maybe Mr. Klein himself—took a walk last night.” Charlie paused and the Detective sensed him savoring the drama, the headline potential of the story. “A very strange kind of walk: three feet toward Nova Scotia, and five hundred feet down into the Atlantic Ocean.”

“What do you mean, ‘someone'?”

“Well, the Coast Guard hasn't found the body yet. We do have a witness, but he was too far away to see who it was. And too far away to see who pushed him.”

“He saw someone being pushed?”

“Not exactly. Couldn't print that, though I'd bet my next three social security checks on it.”

The Detective sees desks, rows of desks, gleaming under the fluorescence of institutional lighting; he sees faces, young and attentive, propped by pencils, above open notebooks; and then, before him, a hand, his hand, chalk-smeared and gesturing, clipped with authority; his voice emerging as
if from a distance, words in amber, preserved in time, to be summoned and repeated for the appropriate crimes…

“What's that you said?” Charlie asked him.

“I said: ‘No corpse, no crime.'”

“Don't be so sure about that. Listen, Klein's missing. The only one up here is his wife and the police chief is having a hell of a time making any sense out of her. He's been here all morning and doesn't know much more than when he started. Klein was some sort of VIP scientist, and I mean the real thing—physics, the atomic bomb, a Nobel prize about ten years ago; he's practically a national asset, so we're talking about federal authorities and national press if this thing doesn't get cleared up real soon. The Chief doesn't want that, and frankly neither do I—I want this story all to myself. Now Mrs. Klein is some kind of egghead, too, so I talked the Chief into letting me call you in. He's a reasonable sort for a local; knows that these intellectuals speak a language of their own. I told him you might be able to break her down, get through to her.”

The Detective cleared his throat, suddenly aware of his daughter's eavesdropping presence behind him. “Can you pick me up?”

“I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

The Detective hung up, avoiding Sally as he walked back to the study. She followed him there, though, as he knew she would, and that enraged him—the predictability, the knee-jerk reflexiveness of her smothering, mothering instinct. What's the matter, he wanted to say to her sarcastically, you didn't knock this time. But he remained silent.

“You're getting involved?”

The Detective searched his desk for his pocket notebook. “I'm going to take a look around, that's all.”

“You're getting involved.”

The Detective turned to his daughter; searched her face for an excuse to strike out at her, for a hint of the resentment he was sure she still felt toward him. But instead, he found only a sad resignation, her eyes reflecting truths that he didn't want to see:

Fact, they said: you are seventy-two, with a heart that's older.

Fact, they said: your wife is dead and you're lost without her.

Sally shook her head and then left the room, closing the door behind
her. The Detective stared after her, ashamed of himself, ashamed that her pity was so well founded. He never should have moved to Maine in the first place. After Sadie's funeral, his first few weeks of absolute solitude had frightened him into accepting Sally's invitation, but now he understood that it had been a mistake. Better to have risked the loneliness, better to have risked a sudden breakdown or better yet, the blocked or burst vessel that would eventually be his end, better anything real or dramatic or painful than this slow rotting in place, this forced self-inspection, this philosophizing.

As his eyes scanned the desk, the Detective suddenly remembered the letters and he felt as if he were going to faint, heart fluttering, mouth gasping, sweat dampening his freckled forehead. He dropped into his easy chair and loosened his collar, closing his eyes.
The letters
. They were always there in the background of his mind like some vulgar jingle, popping into consciousness at the first vacant moment. And he couldn't brush them out, not the idea of them, not even their image—the white, feminine-fancy stationery, the elastic band surrounding them, the slanted curls of Sadie's script. And not the shock he had felt when, the week after the funeral, he had cleaned out her desk and found them; the suspicion. It hadn't been the sort of suspicion the Detective was accustomed to, not the professional curiosity, the teasing shadows of solutions, the pleasant, piquing mental play that directed his detection in case after case; but something more dominating and physical—nausea, paralysis, fear. And a fear that knew its object, for he had read the first two lines of the top-most letter and they had stopped him, sent him reeling. No, it hadn't been the sort of suspicion that the Detective was used to, but rather a suspicion that begged not to be confirmed: he had packed away the letters without reading another word.

————

A bedroom: middle class, modest in all respects, but carefully decorated, color-coordinated, its curtains and bedspread a matching dark blue, its wallpaper print a floral cerulean. It is late, night, and only a small desk lamp lights the room, its corners, the edges of vision, blurred in shadows. At a writing table across from the bed, under the funneled glow of the lamp, spotlit, stage center, the woman sits, with paper and pen, a hand covering what she has written. In profile hers is a striking face, hard-planed and
weathered, a middle-aged beauty, the grace of endurance, of suffering done well; but blushing now, too, as she looks to the door where the man stands, hat in his hand, shoes tracking water on the rug. Fact: it is raining outside. The room, the scene, their sudden meeting, is framed in words, her words; her eyes saying, “You should have knocked”; her refusal to avert his eyes, “I've earned my privacy.” “I'm keeping a diary,” she says aloud.

The man nods, accepts; he's entitling the frame, tagging it for his memory, something like—“We All Need Our Private Times.” But now the Detective wanders, peering into, peering from the blurred and darkened corners, of the room, his mind; superimposing new transparencies, the tinted glass of changing realities, trying to assimilate the late-found evidence; but all grows tentative, vaporous, murky—a scene out of focus. A new subtitle floats, flirts like suspicion through the translucency of time's cataract eye: “The Lie?” But who can tell now, trapped in the present tense?

————

There were three sharp knocks on the study door, and they drew the Detective's attention away from the desk drawer where the letters were hidden. His heart had nearly recovered from its arrhythmic attack, but he was pale and exhausted, and the room seemed to have grown suddenly cold. He fumbled with his handkerchief, dabbing his forehead and rubbing his cheeks, futile gestures to hide the attack, and when Sally entered the room with his sweater, coat, and scarf, she froze, momentarily shocked by his gray-tinged complexion. Then, recovering, she waited for the lie she knew would come.

“I'm all right,” the Detective said.

Sally said nothing, slumping her shoulders, watching with a pose of passive resistance she had learned from her mother: kill yourself if you must, but I'm not going to pretend that it isn't happening.

“
I am
,” the Detective said again, but uncomfortable with the lie, he tried to escape it by hurrying on, speeding up time. He stood up quickly, reaching for his sweater; but old age demanded slow transitions, from sleep into consciousness, from sitting into standing, was a slow transition itself from life into death. His left leg, gravity-pumped, swelled with blood, ached until he thought he would cry out from it, then buckled at the knee and he began to fall. He threw out his hand to catch the desk and brace himself,
but Sally's arms, younger, quicker, were there first, gathering him around the chest and pulling him toward her. He hung there, dead weight, a drowned body, his heart racing helplessly again, waiting for the slow transition out of pain.

For a moment, the Detective gave in to it; more than physically he surrendered his resistance and clung to his daughter. It occurred to him then to ask her. It occurred to him then that she might know, and that even if she didn't, just to share the burden, to transfer it, letting her ask the questions he couldn't ask, letting her read the lines he couldn't read—letting her be the detective—would be a relief. But what was he to ask her, how was he to phrase it? “Did your mother, did your mother always love me? Was she always, did she ever…?” Words faded; pain faded, pumped away by a steadier heart, replaced by anger, self-disgust. That he should have to ask Sally in order to know; that she should know and not he; that she should have been closer to Sadie than he…The Detective placed his hand on the desk and pushed himself away from her.

“Let go of me,” he said.

Sally dropped her arms, slowly at first, ready to support him again if he weren't strong enough to stand on his own. She refused to look at his face—for his sake, his pride, the shame she knew he felt at his dependence on her; and, too, for her own sake, to avoid the hate she knew she'd find in his eyes. And the Detective hated her even more for that further kindness—her refusal to rub it in. Fact: their roles
had
reversed. That she believed that and still tried at times like these to pretend she didn't only emphasized its truth all the more to him. He was close to Sally now, closer than he had ever been before, but he had never loved her less. Inequality bred dependence, bred closeness, bred hate and resentment. That she should know and not he…no, he wouldn't, he couldn't ask. The Detective reached for his sweater and, turning his back to his daughter, buttoned it slowly, taking refuge in the independence of a simple task.

A car horn honked from the driveway. The Detective hurriedly threw on his coat and scarf, and then, avoiding Sally's eyes by looking toward the floor, he left the room, hoping to avert another confrontation. But by the time he reached the front door, he was acutely conscious of an obligation to reassure her, aware that she would worry as soon as he left her sight. He
paused there in the doorway and turned to face her; there were tears in her eyes, tears he had caused.

“Don't go, Dad,” she said. “You know you're not up to it.”

Sally reached out tentatively, touching his plaid scarf, a gesture so pathetic that the Detective wanted to slap her hand away and to slap away with it all the closeness and dependence and guilt he felt. But his revulsion passed quickly, and instead, he felt sorry for her, bound to her all the more. Sea Gull Sally, the habitual worrier—what had he done to her that she had so little faith? and what had happened to him that he was becoming so like her? The Detective kissed his daughter on the cheek, squeezed her hand reassuringly.

“I'll be all right,” he said.

But as he walked down the steps toward Charlie Wriggins's car, he knew that he wasn't all right. All the hope that Charlie's phone call had aroused in him was suddenly gone, Sally's oppressive despair in its place:…those strange thoughts which afflicted him now, those concepts that stretched beyond comprehension, so unlike the measured facts of detection—what was he to do with them? what did they mean? Despair was the province of a philosopher, not a detective. To a man without hope, the world appeared hopeless; a man with hope, foolish—but was it actually so? The first rule: always doubt the witness. The Detective no longer trusted his own judgments; everything had become tentative, vaporous, murky. Come to grips with reality, his daughter had told him, but which reality, whose reality? Sally's? Charlie's? His own?

And even as he drove to the Klein house, captive audience to Charlie Wriggins's manic enthusiasm, despair wouldn't leave the Detective. He turned in the seat, pretending to listen, his attention though directed inward; and staring through the windshield into the formless slate of the sky, he thought: “Even murder can't excite me anymore.” It was as if he were dead or anesthetized. But then another realization—unsolicited, unwanted—followed: it was as if he were on another case, preoccupied and withdrawn, seeking the solution, and nothing, not even murder, could divert his attention from it. Yes, he was on another case, although he fought it, forcing it from consciousness whenever he could, although he wished more than anything else that the case would disappear. And as they drove
toward the ocean, toward the Klein house, toward the scene of the crime, the Detective projected onto that blank and depthless sky, as though it were the blackboard of his old classroom or a clean page in his pocket notebook, the skeletal clues of the other crime, the one that would not leave him. And he saw written there the words of his own mind; recorded, preserved in time, as objective and relentless as the aching in his thighs. Fact, he saw there, fact: I've never found her diary.