“What I need to figure out is where Mark fits into it, regardless of what the prosecutor does, or of what I think of Mark personally, or even whether he gets to be governor. Because until I can get that settled in my head, I’m going to have to keep digging. It’s the way I am.”
She smiled slightly. “Just for yourself? I doubt that. One thing leads to another, Lieutenant. I won’t help you be Mark’s jailer.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to. Maybe you could just help be his conscience.”
I was about to continue, but the look on her face made me stop. She seemed suddenly drawn into herself, as if the inner debate I’d suspected she’d been having all along had finally taken her over.
The silence dragged on, the cat continued sleeping peacefully, and I slowly became aware of every small sound in the house. Finally, she raised her eyes to mine, smiled ever so slightly, and said quietly, “I think I would like you to leave now.”
I placed Stan on the pillow next to me, brushed myself free of cat hair, removed my coat from the peg by the door, and let myself out.
On the face of it, I was leaving as empty-handed as when I’d arrived. On a deeper level, however, I felt oddly as if I’d accomplished something substantial, the meaning of which for now eluded me.
I returned to Brattleboro from Bristol along the scenic route, enjoying the fading day and the emergence of the stars. I’d seen my conversation with Marcia Wilkin as the last turn of a wheel before it comes to a final stop. If anything had been accomplished there, it was now going to be played out elsewhere by someone else. After ten months of digging, I felt-perhaps disingenuously-that I’d reached daylight, or at least enough of it to deserve a sense of peace. As I drove for hours along smooth blacktop, the trees, farms, and villages becoming an endless blur to either side, I reviewed the year’s events meditatively and tried to convince myself that while little had worked out the way I’d imagined, the final results were mostly acceptable.
I stopped to have dinner in a small café in Poultney. Eating at a table by the window, I watched the traffic go by as if from a fish tank, trying not to feel remote and ineffectual. Occasionally pedestrians turned toward me in passing, drawn by the neon sign flashing above my head, their faces alternating from pale gray to tepid pink, emphasizing my lack of success.
Gail had left for her job in Montpelier, driven to the next stage in her life as by a migratory urge, dissolving a pattern I’d been adjusting to since we’d moved in together. And despite my encouraging her, and having occasionally longed for a return to the “old days,” I was now having to deal with only a subtle imitation of the past-and at an age when such evolutions were made slowly and with doubt.
With Gail’s practiced help, I’d found a place to live on Green Street, just a block away from my old apartment. It was a radically different setup-a two-story carriage house out back of a large building that was home to a family of four. The carriage house had a garden, huge windows, a brick wall with a chimney, lots of exposed wooden beams. It was a place that felt like home.
Gail had joined me the first night I moved in. We’d made love in the bedroom upstairs, and on the rug in front of the open wood stove. I’d made her spaghetti out of a box, with sauce from a jar-my kind of vegetarianism. We’d watched an old movie on TV, huddled under a shared blanket on the couch. And after she’d left, and I’d cleaned the place up to some music on the radio, I’d felt better than I thought I would. Just as she’d reached a point where she could recollect her strength and set out to achieve new goals, so I began to think I might find comfort in surroundings all my own again.
In the end, I’d come to believe our undocumented marriage had been a pleasant, worthwhile, and honorable failure, doomed less by incompatibilities and more by the simple fact that we each needed privacy as much as we needed one another. In a suitable paradox, our separation had finally brought us closer together. Once again situated as we’d been years earlier, we’d been relieved of the question of what life might be like if we moved in together-and burdened by knowing what that knowledge had cost.
Arriving in a dark and quiet Brattleboro much later, I parked at the back of the shared driveway off Green Street and entered my new home, still enjoying the novelty of its unfamiliar odors. Seeing by the light filtering in through the windows, I crossed the downstairs to a door leading to a small attached barn and entered what I was hoping would become a source of rejuvenating comfort. One of the things that had attracted me most to this place had been the opportunity-for the first time since I’d left the family farm-to have a fully functional woodworking shop.
Aside from reading, which I did as much as possible, I had no real hobbies. Work had consumed most of my waking hours, later yielding occasionally to spending time with Gail, especially lately. But that was now over, and I had hopes of reaching back to my past to revive a pleasure I hadn’t visited in too long. As a boy and a teenager, I’d worked, first under my father’s guidance and then, after he’d died, by myself in a cow shed on the Thetford farm where Leo and our mother still lived, running ancient cast-iron saws, lathes, and drills, turning out everything from uninhabitable birdhouses early on to some pretty sophisticated furniture later. But since leaving home, I’d never tried it again.
With typically nurturing invasiveness, Leo had encouraged my yearnings. He’d taken time off from his butcher shop, and from caring for Mom, to help me move in, arriving with a truck full of the same equipment I’d used all those years ago-refurbished and overhauled and gleaming like new. It had taken a whole day just to set up the shop, but the results had been akin to receiving a transfusion.
Now the machinery sat strategically placed around the open floor of this small, warm, renovated barn, waiting to carve out a whole new line of creations. I was pretty sure I’d make a mess of things early on, but the comfort I felt merely watching these tools under a row of bright lights-silent, shiny black, and resolute-more than compensated for any lingering apprehension.
There was a gentle knock on one of the windows. I crossed over to the sliding door that led to the driveway and opened it enough to see Sammie Martens standing in the cold.
“Come on in.”
She slipped inside and leaned her back against the wall, taking in the scene before her. “Wow. You weren’t kidding about this.”
I slid the door closed again. “Nope. And it’s all my old stuff. My brother brought it down so I could take another stab at it.”
She took a few steps forward and laid a hand tentatively against the cold, hard flank of a band saw. “It’s beautiful-like out of a museum.”
“It’s old enough to be. All cast-iron, solid as rock. It’s the kind of equipment they used to have in lumber mills. My father picked it up over the years, sometimes bartering, sometimes buying it secondhand.”
I realized she was now looking at me, a small smile on her face. “You sound like a proud father yourself.”
I laughed and motioned her over to the door leading back to the living room. “Yeah-well-old dog, old tricks. You want something hot to drink? I just got back from upstate. I was thinking of fixing some hot chocolate.”
“Hot chocolate?” She hesitated as she passed before me. “Sure. Why not? I haven’t had any of that since I was a kid.”
I turned on a few lights as I walked toward the kitchen, which was separated from the rest of the room by a long, low counter.