'Alice,' I said, 'I've got to find him. I'm not the only person looking for him. A man's been killed. The police are calling it a homicide and they think Jimmy's involved.'
'I know.' Her fair, clear skin flushed a deep red. 'I mean, I know about the killing, and I know it happened at Tony's bar. It was on the news. The man who was killed—Jimmy had talked about him. He talked about all those people. I told him he didn't have to explain things to me, but he said he wanted me to know.' She looked at me seriously. 'He said that was over. He said he wants something different now.' She added quietly, 'I hope he finds it.'
She peered through the window to the pale horizon, but I didn't think she was watching the clouds. Her dark eyes turned back to me. 'I don't think Jimmy killed that man.'
'Why do you say that, if you haven't seen him?'
She didn't answer right away. Finally she said, 'You don't think he did either.' It wasn't a question.
I said, 'I want to talk to him.'
She gave a small shrug, spread her hands helplessly.
'If he does get in touch with you, will you tell him I'm here and I want to help?'
She nodded.
'My cell phone number is on the card. Or you can always reach me at Antonelli's. Jimmy knows that.' I stood. She stood too, and hesitated; then she offered me her hand. We shook; her skin was soft and smooth. She smiled a quiet smile which didn't so much light up her face as allow it to glow softly, from within.
I went back down the porch steps and out to my car. The wind had come up and the clouds had thickened. I drove out of the lot and down the driveway, turning left onto Winterhill Road, the way I had come. The land up here on the ridge was gently rolling. I looked for a spot to pull off and I found a good one, behind a little slope about two hundred yards from the house. The road curved here; someone concentrating on driving, especially at dusk, might pass a parked car and never even notice.
I pushed the seat back, stretched my legs. I turned the CD player on, slipped in the disc of Uchida playing my Mozart Adagio. I could never hope to play with the control she had, the enormous technical mastery that made the piano respond to her precise intention every time, but I could learn from it. My fingers started to feel the music, to move the way your foot will move to where the brake pedal should be when someone else is driving the car. The Baldwin in the cabin, recently tuned, had sounded good these last two nights in the cedar-scented darkness. Now, in the still car, the tips of my fingers, looking for the smoothness and hard edges of ivory and ebony, found only denim and leather and the coldness of the air.
Color drained from the fields and the sky as the day grew old around me. I turned the car on twice, to get a little heat, trying to thaw that deep bone chill that can come from sitting in the cold, not moving. I kept reaching for a cigarette, remembering I had none, cursing first silently, then out loud.
Three cars passed me during the time I sat there, two from the east, one from the west. With each I turned off the tape, listened with the window open for the sound of brakes or slamming doors. In the wide, treeless emptiness the wind, blowing east, would have brought me those sounds, but there was nothing, so I stayed where I was and I waited.
It was longer than I thought, almost two hours, the day close to darkness, when the yellow Horizon I'd been waiting for whisked by. It had been the only Plymouth in the Winterhill lot. I started the car, pulled out without haste. I wanted plenty of room between us on roads as deserted as these.
She drove down into Jefferson and beyond it, picking up 2 heading east. There was a Stewart's a few miles along and she stopped there. I pulled into the lot, engine idling while I watched her shop under the harsh convenience- store light.
She was wearing a blue parka, her glossy chestnut hair half hidden under a blue knit hat. She filled a basket and it didn't take long. Cold cuts, milk, coffee, a six-pack of Bud. After a moment's hesitation, a second six-pack. Something from the sandwich counter in the back, microwaved before it was wrapped and handed to her. At the checkout she bought the
Maybe she'd pick me up a pack of Kents, if I asked.
She loaded the paper bag into her trunk, rolled out of the parking lot. She turned north on 30 as far as Middleburgh, then suddenly left it and started threading her way over back roads. I kept my distance. She wasn't acting as though it had occurred to her she might be tailed; she hadn't even scanned the Stewart's lot. But she wasn't stupid and I didn't want to scare her off.
She knew the roads well, choosing the better-paved shortcuts, working her way north. I kept her in sight close enough so I wouldn't lose her when she made a turn, but no closer. A couple of times I killed my lights, not for long, just long enough so that she'd think the headlights in her mirror belonged to three or four different cars, if she thought about it at all.
About half an hour after we'd left 30, twisting and turning along dark roads where the trees crowded close, she turned onto a well-kept county road and I suddenly caught on. She drove west about two hundred yards.
I didn't follow her, just watched as she turned left into a space in the trees that was a road only if you thought it was. I didn't need to follow her now; I knew where she was going.
After the Plymouth's tail lights disappeared I parked on the shoulder across from the mouth of the hardscrabble road she'd turned up. I locked up the car, started to pick my way. I had the flashlight from the car and I needed it. The sky was a thick steel gray, no moon, no stars. Branches pressed against its underside. The darkness around me started at the edge of the flashlight beam and was complete.
There were no night sounds, no birds; just my footsteps scraping softy, as softly as I could manage, up the stony road.
The road wasn't long; I knew it wasn't. I switched off the flashlight as I came near the top. The path leveled out and the trees stopped abruptly, staying behind. In the darkness there were darker shadows, but mostly there was a sudden feeling of openness, an empty plain where, if I stood long enough, I would begin to be able to see what I knew was there.
Close in, there would be piles of boulders and slag standing on the dead earth; farther off, a pit, an enormous hole maybe five hundred yards across and half that deep, sudden and sharp-sided and filled with inky water. Beyond
