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“She pretty tough in the classroom?”

“I guess she was,” Vern said. “You know. The ramrod-tough teacher who the kids respect and all that. I guess she was a good teacher. I've been told she got a lot of kids to go to college who otherwise wouldn't.”

“Robbing the mill of the best and the brightest?”

“Snatching them out of its gaping maw.”

Vern opened his mouth wide, threw the pick in, and chomped it. I grinned.

“Martin ever get upset with her? He seems sort of henpecked or something.”

“Oh, she kept him in line,” Vern said, looking through the stuff on Paul's desk. “I think she probably wrote three-quarters of the editorials, but who knows now. Martin wasn't a great writer. Really had to work at it. He's written a couple of things for me that took mega-editing.”

He waited as a pulp truck downshifted out front, sending out a cloud of blue diesel smoke.

“Martin used to put the phone down sometimes. This is way back, I don't know, five years, when I first got here. I'd hear him say, ‘Who the hell does she think she's talking to? A child?' But he kept it to himself. Funny thing was, she was nice as pie to him whenever I saw them together. Motherly, almost.”

The phone rang and Vern jumped down off the table. His gut shook when he hit the floor.

“You never know what people are like in the privacy of their own homes,” he said, walking to his desk. “Good morning!
Androscoggin Review
. What can we do you for?”

Vern talked, something about a club notice that hadn't been in, and I thought about Martin and Pauline. My time in their kitchen told me that she was the dominant one of the pair, but there was
something motherly about the way she treated him. And he seemed to care about her. Maybe that was true love. True love with one brief lapse, long ago but not forgotten.

Vern spotted somebody walking across the street and took off out the door, his jacket in one hand and a notebook in the other. I tried to work but ended up answering the phones, taking three briefs and scheduling a photo of the fifth-grade science fair at Androscoggin Elementary. The teacher said we did it every year, and she was probably right.

We aimed to please, after all.

Arthur had liked those assignments. He'd line up all the kids and get them to smile Norman Rockwell smiles and then bark at them to stay in line until he got their names down in order in his grimy little notebook. He printed in tiny letters and used the same notebook for months, putting everything down: assignments, hours, expenses. I wondered if he'd had a notebook on him when they found him.

Arthur.

The bushes rustle. He strains to focus the Nikkormat in the dark. The shutter clicks, the winder turns. Click. Turn. Click. Like a twig snapping over and over, the same sound, and clothing falls away as the figure passes in front of the window.

Leave those cheerleaders alone, Martin says. Arthur says nothing. Sees the swish of pleated skirts, hears the squeak of sneakers on the polished gym floor.

Arthur in the ice water, turns blue and white. Hauled out by the ankles, some chump who goes for a swim. So I go to the waitress, Vigue says.

I'd like to give you your picture, but I can't.

The phone rang again. I sat with my pictures and stared.

13

T
en miles north of Androscoggin, the road turns into a dipping, twisting, two-lane strip with treacherous iced patches where the pavement is shaded by thick banks of dark green spruce trees.

I drove slowly, between thirty-five and forty-five, occasionally taking the beer can from between my thighs and taking a sip. I had no destination other than a vague plan to head north to Andover and swing west until I hit a road that would take me back to Route 2, either in Maine, near Bethel, or over the border in New Hampshire. There was a road that went that way, coming into Route 26 somewhere north of Grafton Notch, but I'd never driven it. I hoped it was passable for the Volvo, but up this far north it was hard to predict. Maps told you there was some sort of road there, but not whether it was filled with potholes or washed out, or, in spring, turned to muck. It was uncharted territory and I liked it.

It was midafternoon and I'd worked at the office for three hours, rewriting press releases and putting them in the system. Marion couldn't handle the load herself, and that left me, the Renaissance man of Maine newspapers. I had dutifully typed in notes from the Daughters of the American Revolution and announcements from the

Androscoggin Center Calvary Church and then had gone and bought three beers, a bag of pretzels, and a tank full of gas. I had left town like a captain leaving the harbor.

A woman I'd been involved with when I was a little—but not a lot—younger had said these jaunts were an indication that I wasn't able to cope with the pressures of my life. She suggested counseling. I disagreed. The rides were my way of putting things in perspective, I had told her. She never approved, and one day, not long after one especially probing discussion of my problems, we decided to go our separate ways. One less thing with which to cope.

She never complained about my grammar.

In the first hour, I passed through the town of Andover, a wood-mill town with a store where pickup trucks were drawn up like horses outside a western saloon. I drove to the center of the village, turned left at the flashing yellow light, and drove west toward the White Mountains. For the next thirty miles, the Volvo was the only car in sight. Roadside ledges gave way to splintered cliffs, and the sun flickered in and out in an early mountain-style sunset.

Without the sun, it got colder. There was more snow here, and the woods looked black and deep. It was starkly beautiful but deadly in winter, especially to someone who had no survival gear. Twelve hours in these woods in winter without matches and you could be dead or maimed. Frozen, like Arthur.

I sipped my beer and turned up the heat.

Arthur was pushing his luck before it ran out in the canal. The voyeurism that began with the cheerleaders was getting out of hand. How long could he have expected to skulk around people's houses in a small town without being caught? It must have been an obsession, a compulsion. But the letter to Martin. Why force the situation after
all those years? Did he worry that Martin would die before he could tell him that he thought he was his father? Meek, mild Arthur had been on a collision course with something. Or someone.

I drove southwest on the third leg and third beer of my loop. The road cut through Grafton Notch State Park, a jagged craggy ridge where a mountain climber or hiker died every few years. The rock peaks were high above the road, and I pictured the cold, the wind, the scoured bareness high above me. Today, it would be silent up there. Hawks had gone south. Hikers had packed it in and ice climbers were yet to come. These rocks hadn't been tamed for people to slide down them. They didn't bristle with gondola towers and microwave transmitters. There were no condos, no restaurants, no bars for the skiers who knew the mountains as a diversion from their lives in offices and classrooms to the south. There was just rock and wind and scrub.

I drove along through the gathering darkness and felt reassured.

Back on Route 2, I headed east with my lights on, meeting other cars now, many with skis on roof racks. They were headed west for Sunday River, and the ski areas of the Mount Washington Valley. Roxanne had said she loved to ski. She had this idea that we could go off for a weekend in New Hampshire or Vermont, ski all day, and hit the hot tub at night. Good skiing, good food, good … times. When she had said this, I didn't tell her that I didn't own a neon racing suit or the hottest skis. That I was too old to try to be hip. She was younger and hipper, without trying. And when I pulled into my driveway, her car was there.

“All right,” I said, whooping softly to myself. The mountain had come to Mohammed.

The door opened when I got to the top of the stairs. Roxanne was wearing jeans and an Irish knit sweater. The sweater gave me a
hug and she gave me a long kiss and then an even longer kiss after that. Her mouth was warm and soft and strong. She broke for breath and beamed.

“Déjà vu all over again,” I said.

“It ain't over 'til this lady sings,” Roxanne said, pulling me toward the living room.

“I think you're the wrong lady.”

“I'll ask you about that later,” she said. “Sit down and I'll be right back.”

Was she going to slip into something more comfortable, just like the movies? What had I done to deserve all this? I hoped I wouldn't pay for it later. Somehow, somewhere.

Roxanne came back from the kitchen carrying a pizza box and an open bottle of Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale, imported very carefully from England.

Oh, I would pay for it in another life.

“Pizza,” she said, putting the box on the now-wobbly table. “And I brought you this beer even though you lied to me about the state of this apartment.”

“I didn't lie. I misspoke myself,” I said.

“Ronald Reagan misspeaks. You tell whoppers.”

“Tiny white ones.”

She looked at me and went back to the kitchen for the wine and a corkscrew. It was red Italian table wine. I popped the cork and poured her a glass. We toasted.

“To England,” I said.

“And pizza and you,” she said. “In that order. I'm starved.”

Roxanne was bubbly, chatty, and she seemed young as she talked about a case she'd won in court that week.
Won
was not the right
word in her business, though. Sometimes she lost, and sometimes she lost big.

The decision kept an eleven-year-old girl in state custody rather than handing her over to a supposedly reformed stepfather who had served six months for molesting the girl's older sister. I remembered my last discussion with Roxanne, the one that nearly kept us out of bed, and bit my tongue.

“So with Tiberson, you never know,” she said. “Some judges you do know. They lean one way or the other. Tiberson depends on what he had for lunch or the color of the kid's hair or something. I've seen the same evidence presented, the identical situation, and he goes with the guy or the child.”

“Nice,” I said. “A crapshoot with a kid's life as the payoff. The defendants don't go with jury trials?”

Roxanne pulled a long string of cheese off her pizza and dropped it in her mouth.

“Uh-uh,” she said. “They're learning. The ones with any brains or money to get a decent lawyer know that the judge is a better bet. Hey, you figure he's seen a thousand of these things. You get a jury that's never heard all this stuff about semen and penetration. Little old lady sitting up there wishing she could plug her ears. Sometimes she lowers the boom just because she had to sit through all this crap.”

I sipped the beer. It was not Ballantine Ale.

“You okay?” Roxanne asked. “I came up here to cheer you up. Keep you off the streets and out of the slammer. Something else happen?”

I shook my head, no.

“Just a lot of little stuff,” I said.

“What do you call little,” Roxanne said. She pulled her sweater off over her head, stretching so that her breasts were taut under her T-shirt. I lost my train of thought.

“I've just been talking to people a little,” I said.

“You're not a cop, Jack,” she said.

“I know that. Let's not get into that. It's just that … This sounds funny, but there are a lot of people here who really are better off with Arthur gone.”

I told her about Martin, between bites, then got up and got another beer from the refrigerator. I told myself this would be the last one.

“Why don't you just give it to him?” Roxanne asked, as I sat back down.

“Because it's evidence.”

“If it's evidence, why is it in your drawer? Why don't you give it to the police? Like you told him. You'd be out of it, and they could take over. Why get into all this stuff deeper?”

“Who am I gonna give it to? Vigue? He knew about those pictures. He had to. He talked about the waitress and I never—”

“Never what?” Roxanne said.

“I never gave him that one. I, well, I put that one aside.”

“Why'd you do that?”

Her voice had chilled, just slightly.

“I don't know. Just to keep some control of the thing, I guess.”

I didn't mention that the waitress was very attractive. Even without that, Roxanne was finishing the wine in her glass. She wasn't smiling.

“You know, Jack, I was going to say that this town was nuts. It is. But I think some of it is rubbing off on you.”

She got up and went into the kitchen and I heard the water running in the sink. I took a gulp of the Sam Smith's but it didn't taste good anymore. I put it down and picked up an old
Newsweek
from the floor and flipped through it, stopping at the gossip page, which was about all I could handle. The water stopped running and Roxanne came back into the room and picked up her sweater and put it back on. She pulled a copy of
Farewell to Arms
from the shelf that had been flipped on the floor and started reading.