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“Except for sharing wives and rubbing noses, couldn't be better. How's things in the city?”

“Caught some jazz last week and got home alive to tell about it,” Wheeler said. “Also, the cockroaches in my apartment are getting smaller. I think it's a genetic selection thing. The bigger ones are easier to see so they get caught easier. The little ones get away, so over the years, the gene pool favors little cockroaches.”

“Your thesis stinks, and your research methods do, too,” I said.

“Hey, that's why I'm a journalist. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

“You're at the wrong paper for that.”

“So that's why I never get ahead,” Wheeler said.

Actually, he did.

Wheeler was the kind of reporter who made it look easy. He was breezy, charming, very good-looking, and relentless when it came to getting information. He was a journalist James Bond, with contacts in the United States, Mexico, and Europe, and a keen mind, cockroaches notwithstanding. Add to all of that the ability to write very well, and you had a guy who could go to any paper, anywhere.

If he could take pictures, I'd consider him.

Wheeler said he had asked around about my questions regarding St. Amand Paper and their parent firm, Quinn-Hillson, Ltd. For me,
it would have been a three-day project. For him, it was like looking up a number in the Manhattan White Pages.

He said he had checked in six states, with five different mills owned by Quinn-Hillson. The word was that the company was in a flat period in sales. It was six months into a strike at a mill in Georgia, which was costing it a fortune, millions of dollars each week. The company had also bought a tissue mill in Oregon that was proving to be a bit of a dog.

“So they're feeling the pinch, and they want to pass it on to the towns where they do business,” Wheeler said. “If they can whack twenty million a year off a property valuation, that's money in their pocket every year.”

“So in Maine, they threaten to move to Georgia.”

“And in Georgia,” Wheeler said, “they threaten to move to Maine.”

“How well can I document that?”

“I got a couple more newspaper articles. Some more union people you can call. Some other stuff. Fax it up to you?”

“Stick it in the mail,” I said.

“How primitive. What do they do? Fly in with one of those floatplanes?”

“No, they fly over. Don't bother to land.”

“Is it like an Eddie Bauer catalog, or what?” Wheeler said.

“Just like that. I owe you one.”

“Don't worry about it. When you get sick of moose meat and come back to civilization, we'll hit Sweet Basil's, take in some jazz. You remember jazz?”

“Saw 'em last week. Lost by two to the Lakers,” I said.

So he had some good stuff. Enough for another story—if not for this week, then for next. Show the town that the company was playing it for a sucker. Show these people that the company wasn't the Great White Father.

A good story. More trouble.

I couldn't leave. It was that simple. I couldn't back off on this story, or any other. The editorial on Arthur wasn't going to win me many friends, either, but it was true. I couldn't start telling lies, even if they were lies of omission.

And where did that leave Roxanne?

The solution was to solve the problem myself. Go after it, push until he or she or they showed themselves. Hope that Roxanne wouldn't be hurt in the meantime. And somehow put out a paper at the same time.

That meant doing things like taking pictures of old people, which I had to do in nine minutes, at eleven o'clock at the Androscoggin Manor Nursing Home. A woman was being presented the Boston Post Cane, an honor bestowed on the oldest resident of the town. The canes were a
Boston Post
promotion that had long outlived the
Boston Post
. For as long as anyone could remember, the canes had been given for the oldest person in town to hold. When a cane changed hands, it was a bittersweet occasion, because in order for one person to get the cane, someone else had to give it up. And the cane-holders rarely handed their canes over voluntarily.

In this case, the cane was being transferred from a man who had been ninety-seven to a woman who was ninety-six. I stuck my photos in the folder, put them back in the file cabinet, and locked it. Without looking at or talking to anyone, I left the office, went to the car, and drove the mile to the nursing home. The manager of the place was
loud and patronizing, probably from habit. The old woman sat in a chair in her room and smiled for me as I took her picture. When I left, I squeezed her hand. She was a nice person. She had just lived too long.

It troubled me, this mockery of what had probably been a fulfilling life. Driving back downtown, I had half-decided not to use the picture at all when the flash of blue strobe lights in the rearview mirror jerked me back to reality.

I pulled over on Penobscot Street and unrolled the window to the cold. Vigue walked up and leaned toward the window.

“Something I thought you should know, chief,” he said, peeking over the top of his aviator sunglasses.

“What's that, Lieutenant?”

“Mrs. Wiggins walked out of the hospital in Lewiston this afternoon.”

“Just walked out?”

“Hey, it's not a jail. Happens.”

“She mention my name on the way out?”

“I don't believe so. Didn't even stop to pay the bill.”

A car drove by and the driver tooted at Vigue. He waved absently.

“No,” Vigue said, “I figure somebody will pick her up walking on the side of some road someplace. Old lady hitchhikers are hard to come by.”

“You think she's dangerous?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “I wasn't looking down the business end of that Parker. What do you think?”

I thought for a second while a pickup went by.

“No,” I said. “I don't know. I think it was just one of those things. Something that happened once.”

“Once is all it takes,” Vigue said, sliding his sunglasses back up. “That's why I carry this.”

He put his hand on his holster and turned and walked back to his car and pulled away fast. I sat and watched his car until it turned the corner a block up. When he had disappeared, I sat some more.

That's why I carry this? What the hell was
that
supposed to mean? Was I supposed to go out and buy a gun so I could shoot an old lady? Was Pauline going to pick me off as I walked down Main Street? Put a bomb under my car, crawling under there on her skinny fragile elbows, one of which was now broken? Or was she going to go down to one of the local dives and offer somebody five hundred bucks to off me?

Vigue couldn't possibly think so. She had been irrational, upset, maybe a little senile. But a hysterical old woman was not a killer. If she was not a killer, then what did he mean? Why did I feel more threatened after his warning than before?

And why couldn't I bring myself to tell him about the pictures and Roxanne?

It was the logical thing to do. Roxanne undoubtedly assumed I'd done it as soon as I saw the picture. But I couldn't bring myself to go to the cops. Not these cops. Not now.

If they happened to catch somebody, which was highly unlikely, the charge would be criminal threatening. Maybe terrorizing. I wasn't sure exactly where one began and the other left off. I was sure that Roxanne felt terrorized. Terrorized and terrified. And I was beginning to feel a little terrorized, too.

But the issue wasn't the crime. The issue now was what I was going to do about it, why I wouldn't go to the cops. And that issue was trust. I did not trust Vigue. I trusted LeMaire, J. a little more,
but not much more. I didn't trust anybody, and in this town, way up here in the woods, it really was a terrifying feeling. It wasn't a feeling that I was going to be harmed. It was worse than that. It was a feeling that, up here in the woods, on the edge of the cold, black mountains, I was very much alone.

When I went home to eat that afternoon, I got out of the car slowly and stopped and looked up at my bedroom window. It was still closed. I couldn't see anyone. I turned and looked back at the woods, listened to the red squirrels chirring at each other in the oaks. That was the only sound. I waited to make sure.

I stopped on the landing outside the door and listened, hearing only the hum of the refrigerator. I pushed the door open slowly and listened again. Then I walked very slowly through the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom. After I looked in the bedroom, I went back through the kitchen to the bathroom and flipped the shower curtain aside.

There was nothing there but a bottle of shampoo and a bar of white soap with a hair embedded in it.

I felt a little silly, but not a lot.

Standing in the kitchen, I ate a sandwich. Cheddar cheese on wheat with good mustard. I tossed the knife in the sink, brushed the crumbs off the counter into my hand, and went back downstairs and outside. I walked around the front of the house, crunching through the inch of crusty snow, and looked up at my living room windows. Then I walked across the yard, across the driveway and into the trees, and began walking up the hill between the spruces and hemlocks. The snow was sprinkled with hemlock cones dropped by the red
squirrels, but there was no sign that anyone had been there. No tracks, no nothing, until I got halfway up the hill.

And then there were tracks. Lots of tracks, in front of a big hemlock.

The footprints were bigger than mine, and rounder, like they were made with rubber boots. Flurries had settled in them, but they had been made after the last light snow, on Thursday. They came down the hill, shuffled around for a while in front of the tree, and then turned back up the hill again. I followed them and about thirty feet up, only fifteen feet from the edge of the street on the next block, found what I was looking for.

Three small round holes in the crust of the snow.

This was the spot. Roxanne had come out of the bedroom, leaned over the table, and the shutter had opened. It had stayed open for a tenth of a second, maybe less. It had been enough to capture the image on film, and the image had been delivered to both of us, with message attached.

The three holes had to be from a tripod. I took a plastic calendar card from my wallet. The card had a three-inch rule on the side and I crouched down and measured the tripod hole. Three-quarters of an inch. I turned the card end over end and measured one of the footprints. Thirteen inches. Big feet—or at least big boots.

18

T
here were sixteen Cormiers in the phone book and nine in the town of Androscoggin. I called seven before I found a woman who said she knew my Cormier because he was her cousin. She said she didn't know where he lived and hadn't seen him in months. I asked very sweetly if she knew somebody who might know a little more, and she sighed and finally gave me the name of somebody called Chereel.

“What's the first name?” I asked.

“That is her first name,” she said.

I called the number she gave me and a kid answered. He sounded nine or ten and he shouted something over the blare of a television that was tuned to a show with a laugh track. Somebody shouted back and I heard the receiver clatter as the kid put it down. Then he was back.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I want to know where Roger Cormier lives,” I said.

“He ain't living here.”

“I know that. I wondered if you would know where he is living.”

The kid didn't answer and then I heard the phone clatter again. It sounded like he was throwing it against a concrete wall.

I waited. He came back.

“My ma says she ain't seen him, but he used to be living with Tammy, but he left there and now he's got a place on Waldo. Waldo Street. You a friend of his?”

“I haven't seen him in a while. Where on Waldo Street?”

“Where on Waldo Street, the guy wants to know,” the kid yelled. “He says he's a friend of Roger's. How the hell should I know? … Behind Lockhart's store. Ma says behind Lockhart's store.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“You're a cop, ain'tcha,” the kid said.

It turned out that there were a lot of places behind Lockhart's store, which was officially known as West End Variety. The lady behind the counter said she knew Cormier lived back there someplace, but didn't know where, so I bought my Pepsi and left.

Around the corner, I handed it unopened to a little kid, a boy with long hair tied with a bandanna. He looked at me like I had handed him a can of cyanide.

Behind Lockhart's store were four cars, old with mag wheels and Bondo spots here and there like camouflage. One was crammed with parts and junk. Pieces of broken plastic toys were strewn over the hard-packed gravel—the yard for a four-story block of apartments, on which rickety wooden porches hung like scaffolding. Garbage bags, some ripped, some open, were lined up in front of the stairs. When I stepped on the first step a gray cat shot out from the bags and across the yard.