“Walter doesn’t think he’s the alpha male,” I protested at the time, sort of lamely now that I come to think of it. I looked to Walter for confirmation, which probably wasn’t the smartest move on my part if I was trying to claim superiority. Walter, hearing his name, was looking back and forth between us, as if trying to figure out which one of us was going to relent first and just hand over a set of keys and the deed to the house.
“Hah!” was Rachel’s response. She has a way of saying “Hah!” that pretty much skewers any possible dissent, like a skeptical python that’s just been told to cough up the rabbit and send it merrily on its way.
Rachel had patted her bump and said, “I hope you’re listening to this. That’s your daddy talking. He thinks he’s the alpha male, but just shoot goo-goo eyes at him and he’ll buy you a car.”
“I didn’t buy you a car,” I pointed out, “and you shot goo-goo eyes at me all the time.”
“I didn’t want a car,” she said. “I have a car.”
“So why did you shoot goo-goo eyes at me?”
“Because I wanted something else.”
“And what was that?”
“I wanted you.”
I thought for a moment.
“You know,” I said, “that would be really cute if it wasn’t kind of sinister.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “It would, wouldn’t it?”
I glanced at my watch. Rachel would be back soon. The house always felt very empty when she wasn’t around. In the background, a track from the album faded out, the singer repeating over and over something about the people we choose to leave being the ones whom we see all the time, all the time. I fed Walter my last piece of sandwich.
“Just don’t let Rachel know I did that,” I told him. “Please.”
The Grady house was quiet. A breeze stirred the trees, and disturbed the pile of dry leaves beneath which the dead wren rested. Matheson stood at the bottom of the steps leading up to the porch, and shined his flashlight upon the house. He checked the locks on the doors, and the wood that covered the windows. There was a SIG Compact in a holster on his belt. He had begun carrying it shortly after the man he now thought of as The Collector came to his office and demanded payment of an old debt.
The sound of approaching footsteps came to him, but he did not turn around. The beam of a second flashlight joined his own.
“Everything okay?” asked the patrol cop. He had seen Matheson pull up at the Grady house, and had offered to accompany him up the dark road. Matheson had been grateful for the offer.
“I think so,” said Matheson.
“It’s getting colder.”
“Yes. Snow is coming.”
“It’ll make it easier to tell if anyone’s been snooping around here.”
Matheson nodded, then turned to go. The cop followed him, then stopped short. He turned his flashlight upon the woods.
“What is it?” asked Matheson.
“I don’t know.”
He inched forward, his hand already drawing his gun. Matheson added his own light to the cop’s, and together they scanned the trees. Suddenly there was the sound of movement in the undergrowth, and a gray shape with red underparts darted through the low greenery before disappearing into the shadows.
Both men let out a long, relieved breath.
“Fox,” said the cop. “That wasn’t good for my nerves.”
He replaced his pistol and headed back to his car. Matheson remained staring into the woods for a moment more, then followed him. They made their farewells, and both cars drove away.
There was silence for a time before the figure of a man detached itself from a bank of pines in the darkest reaches of the woods and approached the Grady house. He stood at the very edge of the tree line, then began circling the building, never once straying from the safety of the woods, as though the ground beyond them was somehow unsafe to tread upon. He made one full circuit of the property, then a second, slower this time, seemingly searching for something that had been lost. Eventually, he stopped as he faced the eastern side of the house. He knelt, and, using a pocketknife, commenced digging beneath a small cairn of pebbles that lay almost hidden by grass at the verge of the yard. After he had dug about six inches into the earth, a pale totem was revealed: the skull of a dog. Symbols and lettering had been carved into the bone.
The man sat back on his haunches, but he did not touch the skull. Instead, he let out a suppressed hiss of anger and disgust. Carefully, making sure that his hands did not come into contact with the dog’s remains, he replaced the earth upon it, then folded the knife and put it back in his pocket. In total, The Collector had counted eight such cairns, each representing a compass point.
It was as he had suspected: the house was impregnable.
He retreated into the forest, and then was gone.
Later that night, I watched from our bed as Rachel undressed in the moonlight. She eased the straps of her slip over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, then stared at her reflection in the mirror, turning first to one side, then the other. The moonlight touched the swelling of her belly and cast the shadow of her breasts upon the wall.
“I’m big,” she said.
“Bigger.”
I ducked my head just in time to avoid being hit by a shoe.
“I look like a whale.”
“Whales are lovable. Everybody loves whales, except the Japanese and the Norwegians, and I’m neither. Come to bed.”
She finished undressing and slipped under the covers, then lay awkwardly on her side, looking at me.
“Did you meet your client?”
“Yep.”
“Did you take the job?”
“Yep.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not tonight. It’s nothing bad, so don’t start worrying. It’ll keep until the morning.”
Rachel grinned.
“So whatcha wanna do now?” she said.
She leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips. Softly, I kissed her back.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I can’t get pregnant.”
“Very funny.”
“I’ll even let you be the alpha male.”
“I am the alpha male.”
Her hand moved slowly down my chest and on to my stomach.
“Of course you are, darling,” she whispered. “Of course you are…”
IV
The town of Two Mile Lake lay in the middle of hard-scrabble land, three miles northeast of the towns of Bingham and Moscow. Here the Kennebec River fed into Wyman Lake before proceeding on its way toward the coast, enlarged further by countless small streams and tributaries. This area was part of the “Bingham Purchase,” named after a Philadelphia landowner named William Bingham who owned so much of the state at the end of the eighteenth century as to be able to bequeath his heirs sufficient to cover half of Massachusetts. There was even a territory dam named after him on the Kennebec, which put him right up there with Hoover.
North of Two Mile Lake, up by the confluence of the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, lay The Forks, one of those strange Maine places where the past and the present appeared to have reached an uneasy accommodation. The Forks was still technically a plantation-in Maine terms, an unorganized township-and had once been the center of a resort area in the nineteenth century. Now rafters came here, attracted by the effect of the Harris Hydroelectric Station on the water flow. New inns and stores stood alongside the old Marshall Hotel, with its neon COCKTAILS sign, and the stuffed animals in Berry’s General Store. From The Forks, 201 headed north to Canada along the Arnold Trail, striking out into the wilderness just like old Benedict himself did on his way to Quebec at the end of the eighteenth century, with Jackman as the only decent-sized stop along the way.
Two Mile Lake must have envied some of the comparative prosperity enjoyed by its northern neighbor. It wasn’t entirely clear how the town had come by its name, as there was no body of water worthy of the name closer than Wyman Lake. Two Mile had a kind of standing pond on the northern edge of town, and if you were particularly foolhardy you might take a chance on swimming in it, or eating something that came out of it, but it was no more than a couple of hundred feet at its widest point. Instead, the only conclusion that anyone could reach about the town’s name was that if you headed north from it, then you’d head right back south again after two miles, because there was nothing there to see. In essence, Two Mile Lake was two miles away from nowhere.