The Taken

likes him. He tries to be good.”

“Is that why you tolerate his behaviour?”

“I don’t tolerate it. I live with it.”

“You’ve got plenty of choices, Mrs. Eldwin. You could leave him. You could kick him out. Hell, you could kill him.”

She gave him a weird look. “You know, he tells me I should. Sometimes I think he’s just trying to preempt my anger, but I know he thinks he doesn’t deserve me.”

“Do you think that?”

“Everyone deserves their fate. You know that story about the rattlesnake that asks the horse to carry him across a flooded river?”

“I haven’t heard that one.”

“Snake says, Take me to safety, and the horse tells him to forget it, he’ll bite her if she lets him near. The snake says, If I bite you, we both die, and the horse sees his point and lets him get on her back. Halfway across, he bites her. You’ve killed us both, she says, why did you do that?”

“Because it’s my nature,” said Wingate.

“Right. How can I hate him for his nature?”

“You don’t have to love his nature, but you don’t have to live with it, either.”

She finally poured herself a drink. “You talk like a man who’s never been in love.” He watched her drain the Grand Marnier in one long draught. “You get used to being bitten when you’re in love. You find yourself getting used to the poison. You even start to crave it.”

She was pitiful. He couldn’t rule out that she was crazy enough to tie her own husband to a chair in their basement and chop off his hand. Maybe Claire Eldwin was the “her” that needed saving. “Do you mind if I take a look around?”

“Hey, mi casa, etcetera.”

He thanked her and got up from the table, went down the hallway behind the living room. It was a nicely appointed house with some decent paintings on the walls and shelves of books and CDs. The house spoke of people who spent money easily. So where did it come from? There were bookshelves in the hallway full of paperbacks and piles of magazines with their spines hanging over the edge of the shelves. He picked one off the top: a copy of People from a couple of years ago. He pushed the door open that led into the master bedroom, with its neatly made bed. He was out of Mrs. Eldwin’s view now, and he pulled on a pair of black gloves and opened the closet doors. Four seasons’ worth of slacks and pants and dresses and dress shirts hung from a bar. He ran his hand along the shelf above and then quietly clapped the dust off his gloved fingertips.

There was nothing of interest in the drawers, nor in the bathroom. On one of the bedside tables, he found a pile of paper with one of the drafts of Eldwin’s story on it. It was written over with small cuts and corrections. Eldwin had crossed out the word gaspingly and replaced it with mind- manglingly. Wingate looked more closely at the sentence. He thought the word Eldwin had probably wanted was horrorstruck. He made sure the papers looked the way he’d found them.

He retreated to the hallway. A guestroom with a convertible couch was across from the bedroom. Some books lay piled on the couch, leaning against one of the arms. The room next to it appeared to be Eldwin’s office, and Wingate spent a little more time in it, shuffling through papers on the desk. These appeared to be pages from the Great Canadian Novel. From what he could tell at a quick glance, Eldwin had been working on a section that took place in a mining town in northern Ontario. It looked as if Eldwin did most of his composing on his desktop computer, a bulky PC model at least six years old. Listening for Mrs. Eldwin, he leaned down under the desk and turned the computer on from the hard drive. It bonged softly and took two minutes to boot up, and then Wingate quickly searched the root directory for text files. He found the first four chapters of “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” but there was no evidence of the replacement chapters he’d told Portman he was going to send. He stared at the screen and then tried to open Outlook to go through Eldwin’s email, but the program was password-protected. Wingate blinked at the empty box and then typed in Verity and Verityforms, knowing he was just shooting in the dark, and neither worked. He couldn’t remember the DNS number from the back of the mannequin, but he was pretty sure that wouldn’t have worked either. He shut the computer down and then stood in the office a moment or two longer, looking at the shelves. The books here were mostly hardcovers, recent fiction in English, as well as some of the classics in old paperbacks. Tolstoy and Joyce. Chesterton, Gogol, and Graham Greene. On a higher shelf, Trollope and Flaubert and the essays of Michel de Montaigne. He realized these books were in the original French. He breathed in deeply and sighed an arrow of air out of his mouth. He wasn’t sure what any of this meant, apart from the fact that this guy was obviously hoping to punch above his weight.

Back in the hallway, he saw a closed door and, checking behind himself to be sure Mrs. Eldwin was keeping busy with her bottle, he went to open it. Behind it were stairs leading to the basement. He unsnapped the strap on his holster and switched on the light.

As he descended, he could see the basement wasn’t anything like the one in the video. It was upholstered and furnished: almost a separate apartment. There was an expensive-looking bar with four stools behind it and it was fully stocked with good whiskies and other liquors. A couch faced a fireplace and there was an end table stocked with interior design magazines. At the far end of the room stood a stationary bike and a rowing machine. He walked over to the bar and stood beside it. It was difficult to imagine the Eldwins as big entertainers, and he concluded that all of this, all this good living, was for them alone. There was a pair of birthday cards standing on the bar. He picked one of them up. It was one of those cards with an earnest, rhyming message on the inside on the subject of the inverse relationship between the recipient’s age and her beauty. The handwritten note said, You’re a flower that blooms more beautifully every year. I’m grateful for everything you’ve given me, my love, even if I’m the toadstool in your garden. Lots of love, Colin. Wingate stared at the card. Every relationship was a mystery.

He returned upstairs and put his cap back on. “Find what you were looking for?” she asked him.

“I wasn’t looking for anything,” he said. “Just seeing if anything jumped out at me.”

She swayed a little. He imagined she’d been able to get a couple more stiff drinks into her while he’d been snooping. “Did anything jump out at you?”

“No.”

“Well, then you can have that drink.”

He sat down at the table and let her pour him one. She put it down in front of him, but he didn’t touch it. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Before wasn’t personal?”

“I was just wondering how the two of you afford all of this. I mean, Colin isn’t a successful writer -”

“Yet,” she said.

“Right, yet. And you take in dogs. Does that pay well?”

“It pays okay. But not enough for all this,” she said, sweeping her arm out. “That’s what you’re asking?”

“Yes.”

“My parents died in a car accident six years ago and I got everything, including a large settlement. It was our chance to start over. I put everything into this house I thought he’d like to have. But I guess it’s not enough.”

“I’m sorry. About your parents.”

“You lose everyone eventually, or they lose you. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

He stood out on the sidewalk, looking back at the house. From the front, a nondescript, one-storey bungalow on a country sidestreet. There was no hint that a crazy, heartbroken woman lived behind that door, nor a man who could inspire the kinds of passionate feelings he’d seemed to inspire in his wife and, by her report, others. The world of the case had fully opened up now; so many parts of it were in motion. In his mind, he saw the elements moving over each other, emerging out of the fog of hints, beginning to jockey for position in the play of cause and effect, relationships and connections…

Suddenly, he realized why the view of the back garden had rattled him. In the most recent chapter of the Bass Lake story, the father had brought the body to a house with a flagstone path and a fountain. And – he turned and looked behind himself – a willow tree. There was one across the street, a huge, healthy willow with a wide trunk, its long green leaves cascading over the lawn it stood on. It was as if Eldwin had rearranged the elements of his