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  But no one shouted. No attack hounds bellowed up the slope. No one started shooting. I peeked around the tree and saw that the light source was not security floods, but a wall of glass, lit from within. The square dormer that spoiled the roofline housed an artist’s studio, a huge, lofty bare white room. Clearly someone had finally taken the architect in hand and said, Okay, you’ve got your turret, your crenelations, your moat and goddamned drawbridge, now what I need in the back of this fantasy is an old-fashioned Greenwich Village studio with high windows facing north; no one will even see it unless they’re sneaking around in the woods.

  I found myself liking the house more; the studio lent it purpose. There was something no-nonsense about it. A huge canvas was propped on an enormous easel, draped with a bedsheet. Next to it, a small easel that held a blank sketchpad faced a low platform.

  A pair of shadows leaped on the walls. For a moment, I was back in Manhattan, beside a perfumed woman in a darkened theater, waiting for a play to begin.

  Chapter 3

  Naked, the boyfriend, the one Rose said tended to violence, looked like a guy who enjoyed working out. His shoulders, broad chest, and upper arms were heavily muscled, his waist and hips model-trim. He was not, however, a professional model. He mounted the platform a little clumsily, threw his arms apart in a self-conscious way, and grinned at someone who I assumed cared for him, because otherwise a ready and willing erection was going to go to waste.

  He looked very happy—a young, happy, naked clean-shaven guy with white-blond hair. I was reaching belatedly for the camcorder when Mrs. Long strode into view, her back to me, and fully clothed in a long, flowing silvery blouse over jeans. Only her feet were bare. Rose had called her a brunette, which hardly conveyed the Oriental splendor of the inky black hair that fell shining down her back.

  By the time I unlimbered the camera, Mrs. Long was hard at work with a pencil. Zooming the lens over her shoulder, I could see the drawing as clearly as she could. She quickly established the bulge and swell of the muscles on his chest and worked her way down his flat belly. I panned the sketch, the easel, unzoomed to take in her standing before it, swept the studio, then zoomed in on his body and face. I got back to the sketch in time to see her hesitate.

  She had done his waist and brought life to his legs with uncommon skill, catching their main lines before she concentrated on his muscles. He was still standing as before, a little awkward, and undoubtedly uncomfortable. Holding the pose with his arms apart, he must have been getting tired, if his wilting erection were any clue. It was there at the groin that she had hesitated.

  Suddenly she went for the face. I let go the trigger. He had a broad, almost round face, but on drawing paper only his pathologist would ever know him. Instead of his face, she sketched his skull. She drew cheekbones, but no cheeks, brow ridges, but no brow, no hair, no eyes, only their sockets. She did his teeth in jagged strokes, a bony jaw, and the short, split bone of a fleshless nose. I shivered. She was so skilled she seemed to peer through his skin, into his future.

  She put down her pencil and started toward him. By now my camera was dangling from one hand. He too was down to half mast. He watched her come toward him and smiled with an anticipation he might not have felt had he seen how she had rendered his face. I was beginning to wonder about Mrs. Long, but her boyfriend had no doubts. He jumped down from the platform, scooped her into his arms, and kissed her. They kissed awhile, which I dutifully recorded, though from the back he could have been kissing any woman with beautiful black hair. They broke at last, and now when he hugged her, I could see by his expression that he probably wouldn’t give a damn what she sketched on paper.

  She pushed him back onto the stage, gestured that he should spread his arms again. I fired up the camera, anticipating her next move by the one remaining blank on her drawing paper. Sure enough, slowly unbuttoning her blouse, she let it slither off her shoulders. There are fashion-model square clotheshorse shoulders, and there are courtesan shoulders like Rubens painted. Mrs. Long had round, white courtesan shoulders. How she looked in front could be assumed by her boyfriend’s eager “Yes, yes, yes,” clearly audible through the open casement window.

  She laughed and did a little shimmy that could have gotten her a job dancing hiphop for Madonna. Her shirt slid off her back, a smooth, white, very beautiful back with twin rounds of muscle softly rimming her spine.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “Don’t move!”

  She stepped closer, bent her head.

  Her hair blocked the camera, but there wasn’t a divorce court in the nation that wouldn’t get the picture. Her boyfriend cried out. He reached for her. She pushed his hands back in position. He laughed. Mrs. Long stepped back, leaving him rigid and glistening, and whirled to the easel.

  It was my turn to cry out—an up-from-the-gut gasp of astonishment at my first glimpse of her face. I had never seen a woman so beautiful or so happy. She had a heart-shaped feminine face with a high brow, wide-set cheekbones, a strong nose, and enormous blue eyes. There was a fine quality to her bone structure that made me think of Norwegian blood, despite her jet-black hair. Blue eyes, black hair, maybe Irish, maybe Scots, who knew? Who cared? Her lips were full and wet, and when she laughed she radiated joy.

  I ripped the video cartridge from the camera and threw it into the woods.

  I felt redeemed, for a fraction of a second: I had come too close to doing a terrible thing to a couple of happy people—a far worse sin than sacrificing little Alison’s braces—and I saw Rose’s spy job for the dirty job it had been all along.

  Then the damned tape hit a tree—with a surprisingly loud bonk—and bounced onto the lawn. The cartridge was made of black plastic, except for the white label on the face, and sure enough it landed face up, gleaming in the light from the window. If they didn’t find it, the lawn-mowing guys would hand it to the husband.

  Mrs. Long had apparently caught the bonk through the open window. I heard her say, “What was that?”

  I scrambled after the cartridge, hugging the woods. I was nearly to it, crouching across the cut grass, when she cried, “Raccoons! Raccoons. Turn on the light.”

  Fortunately, he didn’t know his way around the house that well, and it took him an extra moment to find the switch, during which time I slid down the slope, grabbed the videotape, and started scrambling for cover. I almost made it. In fact my head and shoulders were in the dark space between two bushes. Then he found the outside floodlights switch, and suddenly the back yard was bright enough to land helicopters.

  “Look! It’s a bear.”

  “That’s no bear. It’s some son of a bitch hiding in your woods. Hey!”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  Deep in shadow, at last, I glanced back. He was leaning out the window. She was pulling him back. “What if he has a gun?” Then she acted like a smart city girl. Instead of hauling out her own gun, or setting a dog on me, she ran to a security keypad embedded in the wall and pushed the panic button on her burglar alarm.

  More lights. They blazed down from the roof and lit three acres, some flashing, while a siren began whooping loud enough to alert the next county. It was one of those ah-whooo, ah-whooo klaxons straight out of The Hunt for Red October, and I would not have been surprised to see Sean Connery submerge the Castle to a hundred fathoms. Nor would I doubt that the burglar alarm also sounded in the alarm company’s New Milford office, where they would immediately dispatch a car, and alert Oliver Moody that someone was housebreaking on his turf. Oliver would respond first, armed and dangerous. I ran, tripped on a fallen limb, and fell face down, crunching my knee on a piece of granite ledge.

  I have felt real pain twice in my life, but nothing like what I felt then. It was as if someone had driven a three-eighths drill through my kneecap, backed it out, and hammered in a rusty spike. I went blank for several seconds, dead to the world except for the siren, which grew faint. Then I started to vomit.

&
nbsp; I held it down, ground my teeth, and dragged myself deeper into the shadows. The siren kept shrieking, throwing up walls of sound, and I thought I heard them arguing behind it. He wanted to come looking for me. She was saying no, hide. I worked at getting my breath back. And when I had, and my heart was slowing a little, I tried to bend my knee.

  It moved. Not a lot, and not without considerable pain. But I’d be able to walk to my car—in a half hour or so—if I took it real easy and walked on the level road.

  Inside the studio, Mrs. Long took charge again.

  She strode first to the security keypad and punched in a code that stopped the siren abruptly, leaving an ah-whoo, ah-whoo echoing in my ears. Then she put on her blouse and went to the open window where her boyfriend was peering intently into the dark, and took his arm.

  “Lock yourself in our room. I’ll deal with the cops.”

  He protested.

  She said, “I’ll be fine. Here they come now. Go!”

  I heard it too, across the hills the urgent scream of a state police siren. And on the low ends of the siren, the spectacular roar of a fullblown Plymouth Fury flat out.

  Even if I ditched the camera and hid the tape, what possible explanation could I offer for trespassing in Mrs. Long’s woods in the middle of the night? And even if Oliver didn’t arrest me—fantasy, because he would find some charge, having waited twenty years for the opportunity—my name would be wrecked once again, and once and for all, in the town, which would put me out of business. You can’t make money selling houses without listings. A number of straitlaced people had been very kind when I came home—kind perhaps to the memory of my father, kind nonetheless to give me their business. But two strikes and I was out. This stupid lark was about to finish me.

  I stood up, took a step and fell down. It hurt like hell, but I knew nothing was broken. I just needed time. Oliver’s siren got loud and his lights came bumping across the Longs’ meadow as he careened into their driveway. I backed up the wooded slope, pulling myself along from tree trunk to tree trunk, getting nowhere fast. A wolf tree loomed, a huge, fat red oak, a sentinel standing alone, older than the second-growth stuff around it. Its lower limbs were dead, but enormous, barely clearing the ground that sloped up behind the tree. I got my hands around one, swung, and tugged myself up onto it. Then, clutching the main trunk, I climbed another and perched precariously on the backside of the tree, fifteen feet above the forest floor, some twenty or thirty feet in from the floodlit lawn. I peered around the trunk.

  Oliver had gone in the front door and now he came out the back, wielding a five-cell Mag light, the brilliant halogen type about two feet long with instructions from the maker that it is not to be used as an “impact” instrument. “Stay inside!” he commanded Mrs. Long.

  He started up the slope. He held the light in his left hand. His right hovered near his holstered gun.

  Chapter 4

  Resident state troopers are a special breed, part Lone Ranger, part schoolyard bully. They rule the law-abiding in their vast territory by moral presence, and the lawbreakers by fear. Oliver Moody, who stood six-five and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds, came up the slope like an armored personnel carrier. He was ten years older than me, but I suspected that in a footrace up the hill, he’d be waiting for me on top with his impact instrument.

  I sat tight and watched, shooting glances around my tree. He moved cautiously through the undergrowth, playing the flashlight on the shadows. To my relief, he was looking at man height, not tree height. Slowly, I forced the wounded knee to bend, wondering if I would ever straighten it out again.

  Oliver stopped. He aimed his light at something on the ground. He studied it, picked it up, and pocketed it. I couldn’t see what he had found. Then, with one last pass through the brush, he started back to the house.

  Something yowled in the treetops, crashed through the leaf canopy, and landed, thrashing and crying on the end of the limb I was sitting on. When it caught its balance and turned toward me, I saw in the moonlight the masked face of a raccoon. Oliver came pounding up the slope.

  I am not unaware of the comic nature of the preceding events, but I wasn’t laughing. Raccoons don’t fall out of trees unless something is wrong with them, and we were in the thick of a rabies epidemic. Rabies turns them lethally unpredictable—frightened in one instance, aggressive in another. When he saw Oliver’s halogen beam darting between the tree trunks, he backed away, closer to me. Finally, he sensed me and growled. I pointed the camera at him. He retreated back from where he came only to get hit square in the face by the light.

  He was a horrible sight; he had clawed his own stomach open in his agony. He bared his teeth and growled down at the state trooper, who had come to a halt a few feet below.

  “Oh, you poor son of a bitch,” said Oliver. “Now you just sit still. In a minute everything’s going to be fine.”

  From the house, Mrs. Long called, “Are you all right, Officer?”

  “Found your prowler,” Oliver called over his shoulder. “Rabid raccoon. Go get a plastic garbage bag and stay inside until I call you.”

  I pressed like bark against the tree, praying he wouldn’t see me and hoping he wouldn’t splatter rabid raccoon all over me with the cannon he wore at his waist. Then Oliver, who was, for a mean, simple bully, one surprise after another, gave up another one. He glanced back, making sure Mrs. Long couldn’t see him, and reached down and pulled a little Beretta .22 from an ankle holster concealed under his pants. In all the years I had known him, I never knew, and no one ever said, that he carried a backup weapon. You learn something every day.

  It was the right gun for the raccoon. Holding his light in one hand and the gun in his other, Oliver caught the animal’s attention by talking to it, telling it everything would work out fine, and shot him neatly through the head. It fell at his feet.

  “Bring the bag,” Oliver called.

  Mrs. Long ran up her grassy slope; Oliver met her at the edge of the woods. Taking care not to touch the animal with his bare hands, he worked the bag around it and tied it shut. Then he sauntered down to the house, trailing the bag.

  “What are you going to do with it?” asked Mrs. Long.

  “Landfill.” He walked around the house, slammed the Fury’s door and drove off, as the burglar-alarm company’s van raced up with a funny little blinking light on the roof.

  ***

  There were lights in Town Hall, burning late as usual in the first selectman’s office. As I drove past on deserted Main Street, the clock bonged eleven—amazingly early, considering my night so far.

  My answering machine was blinking.

  I went straight to the bourbon. Then I put the tape in the VCR and ran it on RECORD to erase it. I remembered Nixon and his missing eighteen minutes and wondered whether erased video recordings could be restored by computer enhancement. I played the tape on the TV: blizzards of snow. But what if Rose suspected I’d shot some footage before I got religion, and spent a bunch of Mr. Long’s money on a rocket scientist hacker? What if the genius found Mrs. Long and her fella romping between the electrons?

  I couldn’t trash it. Recycling’s very big up here, and a discarded video cartridge would be just the thing to catch the sanitation officer’s eye. I was getting a little paranoid, but having decided not to participate in the Long divorce, I did not want to blow it by accident. If I had had a big fire burning in the hearth I could have burned it, I suppose, but it would have stunk to high heaven. So I hid it. Compared to a cell, a big old house has more stash holes than a maze.

  I poured another drink and listened to my messages. No buyers had called, no brokers trolling Multiple Listings, not even an impatient New York detective. The only message was from Town Hall. Newbury’s first selectman, a young woman named Vicky McLachlan, had phoned a reality reminder:

  “A real estate broker who loses his driver’s license for speeding is like a crow with one wing.”

  Vicky and I had
been what were called in my Aunt Connie’s day “dear friends.”

  We were two of the few single people in town in our age range and who liked each other’s looks. Our mutual interest extended to my respect and admiration for her achievements and ambition and her slight awe of my multifaceted past. I think deep in her heart she regarded me as an interesting pet, the sort you’d keep in the barn. But her bio-clock was ticking and cast on me an unnatural glow, like the dark red blush from a bedside alarm that made me look better than I was.

  I kept telling her that bright young politicians with a shot at the state legislature, and maybe governor by age forty, ought not to be seen hanging out with convicted felons, jailbirds, and other such riffraff. My noble sacrifice for the sake of good government had apparently had its effect. We hadn’t seen each other in weeks.

  But Mrs. Long and her happy fella had left me a little unsettled. In fact, I felt lonely, which was not usually my way. So I limped out of the house and up Main Street and stood outside Town Hall awhile, thinking, Well, maybe no harm in saying hello. Persuaded, I slipped in the unlocked side door, crossed the dark lobby, stuck my head in the first selectman’s office, and rapped on the door frame.

  “Got your message. Good to hear your voice.”

  Vicky looked up from her heaped desk. She was a small and angular fine-featured woman whose enormous, curliqued thicket of chestnut hair made her seem bigger than she was. It caught the light in many hues of gold and brown and stood her handsomely in photographs; nor did she ever go unnoticed on the campaign trail. Pinned to her bulletin board under a sign that read “About Time” was a newspaper photo of the president’s wife lobbying three femininely dressed U.S. Representatives.