Now, as she watched the big policeman gingerly sit down at the kitchen table, the chair too low for him so that his own legs remained at an acute angle, she was conscious of the muscularity of his shoulders, the shape of his chest beneath his shirt, the width of his arms. His hands, twice as large as hers, hovered in the air before him. He cupped them and placed them on the table, then unclasped them and moved them to his thighs. Finally, he folded his arms, jolting the table as he did so and causing a china bowl to tremble gently. He seemed even larger in the confines of the little kitchen, making it appear cluttered even though it was not. She had not seen the inside of his house but was certain that it contained the minimum of furniture, with the barest sprinkling of personal possessions. Anything fragile or valuable would be stored safely away. She felt a great tenderness for the big man, and almost reached out to touch him before she stopped herself and turned instead to the business of the wine. There was a bottle of Two Roads Chardonnay in the fridge, a treat for herself bought in Boston. She had been saving it for a special occasion, until she realized that she had no special occasions worth celebrating.
Marianne was about to open the bottle, by now instinctively used to doing everything for herself, when he asked her if she would like him to take care of it. She handed over the bottle and the corkscrew. The wine looked like a beer bottle in his hand.
He read the label. “Flagstone. I don’t know it.”
“It’s South African.”
“Robert Frost,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“The wine. It’s named after a Robert Frost poem. You know, the one about the two roads diverging in a forest.”
She hadn’t noticed, and felt vaguely embarrassed by her failure to make the connection.
“It’s hard to forget a poem like that on an island covered by trees,” he said, inserting the corkscrew.
“At least you can’t get too lost if you take the wrong road,” she replied. “You just keep going until your feet get wet.”
The plastic cork popped from the bottle. She hadn’t even seen him tense as he drew it out. She placed two glasses on the table and watched him pour.
“People still get lost here,” he said. “Have you been out to the Site?”
“Jack took Danny and me out there, shortly after we arrived. I didn’t like it. It felt…sad.”
“The memory of what happened still lingers there, I think. A couple of times each summer, we get tourists in to the station house complaining that the trails out to it should be more clearly marked because they went astray and had trouble finding the road again. They’re usually the worst ones, the loudmouths in expensive shirts.”
“Maybe they deserve to get lost, then. So why don’t you signpost it better?”
“It was decided, a long time ago, that the people who needed to find it knew how to get to it. It’s not a place for those who don’t respect the dead. It’s not a place for anyone who doesn’t find it sad.”
He handed her a glass and touched it gently with his own.
“Happiness,” he said.
“Happiness,” she said, and he saw hope and sadness in her eyes.
If Marianne was curious about the giant, then he was no less interested in her. He knew little about the woman, except for her name and the fact that she had brought with her enough money to rent her small but comfortable house, yet he had recognized an attraction toward her and thought, however unlikely it might at first appear, that she might feel something for him too. It had taken all of his courage to propose a dinner date, after months of gentle probing, and it had taken a moment or two after she replied for him to realize that she had accepted.
Yet something about her troubled him. No, that wasn’t true. It was not about her, precisely, but to do with some undisclosed element of her life. Joe Dupree had learned to read people well. His father had taught him the importance of doing so, and life on the island, with its exposure to the same faces, the same problems day after day, had enabled him to hone his skills, weighing his first perceptions against the reality of individuals as their characters were inevitably revealed to him. He glanced at the woman’s fingers as she put the cork back in the bottle and replaced it in the fridge. She sat down opposite him, and smiled a little nervously. Her right hand toyed with her ring finger, yet there was no ring upon it.
It was something that he had seen her do a lot, usually when a stranger came into the store or a loud noise startled her. Instinctively, she would touch her ring finger.
It’s the husband, thought Joe.
The husband is the element.
Bill Gaddis was not a happy man. There were a lot of reasons why Bill was unhappy even at the best of times, but now he had a specific reason. He was leaving a fine woman in the sack to answer an insistent knocking at his door, and that made him very unhappy indeed. He might even have been tempted to ignore the knocking, under other circumstances, but around here people had a habit of being good neighbors and the good neighbor at the door might take it into his or her head that, what with the lights being on and no reply coming from the Gaddis house, maybe somebody had had an accident, taken a tumble down some steps or slipped on some water in the kitchen, and nobody wanted to be the one who had to say, “Hell, I was out there just last night, knocking and knocking. If only I’d checked through the windows, or tried the back door, they’d still be alive today.” And Bill didn’t want old Art Bassett or Rene Watterson coming in the back way, hollering and nosing about, expecting to see someone lying on the floor with blood pooling, only to find Bill with his ass in the air and his mind on other things.
He wondered now why they had even decided to settle here. It was Pennsylvania, goddamnit. Pennsylvania. As far as Bill was concerned, the only people who settled here willingly were religious zealots who regarded buttons as sinful, and folks who regarded buttons as sinful were likely to cast a harsh eye on Bill Gaddis’s activities. Compared to those people, Billy Gaddis was virtually the Antichrist. Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, didn’t even figure on most maps, but Bill knew that was why they were here, precisely because you had to look hard to find it.
It had its good points, though. His wife had picked up a job at the Holiday Inn in New Cumberland, just off the turnpike, working the desk a couple of evenings each week. On weekends, she worked a few hours at the Zany Brainy over at the Camp Hill Mall, Saturdays, as though spending time in a children’s store could make up for the fact that she was never going to have any of her own. Two Sundays a month, she worked in the Waldenbooks at the Capital City Mall. The manager there, a guy named Jim Munchel, gave her books to take home and read, and she seemed to get along with the other folks who worked in the store. She told Bill that they were good people. Bill got the feeling that they knew just enough about him to not like him, so he stayed out of their way. A little independence of spirit on his wife’s part was a small price to pay for keeping her out of his hair.