“I will,” I said, floored by this odd encounter.
“Meanwhile,” he went on, regaining his composure as impudent self-assuredness spread across his narrow, bleached face, “you need to understand it’s in everybody’s best interest that you don’t interfere with the work he is doing right now.”
Across the yard, parked at the side of the road, was the same pale-blue Chevy that I’d seen when my girls and I had returned from the Rhinecliff train station. This time, no one was waiting for him by the car.
“Has he said how it’s coming along?” he asked.
“No, and I don’t want to know.”
“Suits me,” Slader said. “Just, as I say, don’t get in his way. I’m tying up loose ends, and don’t need you or anybody else impeding my progress.”
Was that a threat? Sarcastic, while again realizing just how much this man confused and frightened me, I told him, “Thanks for returning what you stole. If you ever come here again, I’ll call the police,” and shut the door in his face. After bolting it, I leaned my back against its cool oak, as if that would somehow keep him at bay. Unable to quell my curiosity, I hurried into the living room and peeked from behind the curtain in time to witness Slader climb into the car and, unlike before, get behind the wheel and drive off by himself.
Maisie, I thought. I needed to go to her friends’ house at once and, making excuses, pick her up. Placing the photograph back where it belonged with the others, I went to the kitchen and grabbed my wallet and car keys. I scribbled a note, Back shortly, left it on the table, turned off the burner, and rushed out.
Her closest friends were Celia and Janine Bancroft, twin sisters her own age. So it was toward the Bancrofts’ house I drove. As I passed the stretch of road where I believed Maisie had been ambushed by Slader, I slowed, wondering which thicket of bushes he’d been hiding in. Also, despite myself, I couldn’t help but ponder what on earth his connection was to Adam. How bizarre for Slader—who else could it have been?—to have impersonated my brother with that photo mask I found in the woods. Weird too that he filched the picture of Adam and me, and weirder yet that he returned it in person. It would have been much easier for him just to throw it out, knowing no one would be the wiser. Had he apologized? It happened so unexpectedly, I wasn’t sure one way or the other.
One thing I did know, as the woods gave way to a few houses on either side of the lane and I made several turns that would take me to town, was that I intended to ask Will what he knew about Slader’s relationship with my brother. My deep well of grief over Adam’s unsolved murder had been tapped again. When Will was finished with this vexing, this galling project of his, I would ask if he knew more than he’d let on about that bloody night in Montauk. Well-trod terrain, but maybe there was some small detail he’d remember that might open the cold case again. All these years I’d believed that Henry Slader had gotten away with murder, persuading myself that the prison time he served for assaulting Will doubled as bad-karma punishment for what I believed he’d done to Adam. Now I began to wonder.
Bikes littered many of the yards in the sparsely populated hamlet. A field-hockey goal with torn netting and no players in sight stood, a bit forlornly, in one yard across from a small church whose steeple was sorely in need of reshingling. An overturned russet wheelbarrow and Adirondack chairs with peeling yellow and orange paint occupied another. Here was a skinny teenager in jeans and sleeveless T-shirt bent under his open car hood; there, an elderly woman on a shaded porch, dozing in her wheelchair. And everywhere, the kaleidoscopic greens and flower-laden beds of deep August. Somehow, this interplay between games and work, youth and senescence, left me feeling more restless than when I’d left the farmhouse. I shook my head, concentrated on my driving.
To my relief, Maisie’s old-fashioned Black Bomber stood upright on its kickstand in the Bancrofts’ driveway. Finding myself reluctant to put my worries on exhibit in front of her friends, I drove down the mile-plus curve of road to its dead end, then parked next to what appeared to be the foundation of an unbuilt house. Nettles, blooming loosestrife, and an extended family of weeds were its only inhabitants now, together with a clan of fieldmice, or voles, rustling in the concrete fissures. Cutting off the engine, I got out of my car, walked over to an old guardrail that had been placed at the terminus of the road, and sat down on it to think. Behind me somewhere in the woods I could hear a stream trickling. Overhead, a family of finches peeped without a seeming care. No houses were in sight, though it was clear that when the developer paved this road some years ago, there had been every intention of lots being surveyed on either side, and homes built. While bucolic all the same and calming in its solitude, this shaded spot struck me as a place whose promise was unfulfilled, a place the past had somehow let down.
I shook my head and studied my hands clenched in my lap. Ease it up, Meg, I chided myself. Life’s a sine wave, and you’re nowhere near the bottom of the trench. Nicole’s a healthy, luminous, smart young woman. Maisie’s a brave and tenacious survivor, safe with her friends. And whatever Will is doing, it’s something he has to see through for reasons of his own. He’s been a paragon as a husband and father these many years. Nothing really is all that dire, surely, and the chances were good that I was projecting my own disquietude on these abandoned acres of cul-de-sac woodland. Noticing an empty gin bottle and discarded beer cans in the underbrush, I realized this must be a high schoolers’ partying site, a moonlight parking spot for lovers. So at least it was a locus of some sort of happiness, however secretive or fleeting.
A soft crunching roused me from my reverie. Not footsteps but the unbroken, smooth, rolling sound of tires over pebbles on pavement. When I snapped my head up, my eyes refocused from the folded hands in my lap to a car a couple hundred feet up the road from where I was parked. Its engine cut, it glided quietly to a halt. Sun and shadows on the windshield made it impossible for me to see who was in the car, and though I had only seen Slader’s—or whoever’s—Chevy from the rear, its pale-blue color was identical.
Unthinking, I gulped in air, got up from my corroded perch, and weighed whether to climb over the guardrail and run into the woods toward the stream or wait where I was, stand my ground. I patted my jeans pocket and, reassured that the key was there, considered striding the dozen paces over to my car, turning it around, and driving toward, then hopefully past, him, or them. If I bolted, I could be chased. If I tried escaping in the car, I could be blocked. Just when I needed to be clearheaded, my thoughts became a thicket of panicky, worthless non sequiturs. Caught in a paralysis of fear, I stood and stared down the road.
Movement, then. The door on the passenger side of the car opened. But rather than Slader or anybody else stepping out to return my gaze or confront me in some way, I saw a bulky shape, brown like burlap, fall from the opened door onto the macadam road, where it lay motionless. Now I took several steps forward, trying better to make out what was going on. For about the time it takes an orchestra to tune, nothing further happened as I gaped at this uninterpretable tableau. Overhead, the family of finches, which had fallen silent, began to chitter away again. Up much higher, circling like weightless black rags in the rich blue of the sky, several crows squawked.