on what would now be a side issue.
“Still in the city?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a relief,” Ned said. “Because I’m not going to be able to make it. Something’s come up, and I just can’t.”
“Something about Anne?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. Work related. I’ll explain later.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Francie began, and prepared to blurt out the whole thing, get it over with. Why had she cared about the setting in the first place? Why had she wanted to pretty it up? Doing it, getting it done, was all that counted. “It doesn’t matter, Ned,” she repeated, “because-”
“You’re too good to me,” Ned interrupted, then lowered his voice, as though there was a risk of being overheard. “But it does matter. It matters to me. I’m really sorry, Francie. And I wish I could say it won’t happen again, but you know I can’t even promise that. Oh, how I wish-” His voice caught, the way it did sometimes, a hint of the emotions underneath that always stopped her in her tracks but that she couldn’t allow to stop her now. “I can promise I’ll make it up to you somehow,” he went on.
“No, Ned, it doesn’t-”
“But right now I’ve really got to go-I’m already running late. Call you tomorrow. I’m sorry, Francie.”
“Just-”
Click.
Why go on? That was the first thought to rise out of Francie’s confusion. She had no desire to be in the cottage alone and stepped on the brake, too abruptly. Her car fishtailed in momentum-gathering swings, then whipped around and glided backward, weightless and out of control, but slower and slower, straight up the lane toward Brenda’s gate. Francie did nothing to stop it, felt no fear, just waited for the out-of-control period to end. It was easy to see this spinout, this loss of control, as a metaphor, and Francie did, even as it happened: a metaphor of her and Ned in toto, and even of their coming denouement as well, now slipping away from her. She had to tell him, had to tell him now, would have no peace until she did.
Gravity reasserted itself; the car came to a soft padded halt halfway up the hill. Francie still had the phone in her hand. But where was he? Not at work, because Intimately Yours had been bumped by the Pops Christmas concert. And calling him at home was out, because Anne might answer, and saving her from all this was the whole point. Anne, that two-stories-tall Anne of the fairy tale, was the only one who mattered now, had become the master, in some funny way. Francie’s car was pointed back toward home, the engine still running. She gave it gas, rolled down Brenda’s lane, and realized at that moment that she would never see the cottage again.
A self-pitying thought she attacked immediately: too fucking bad. Was there a right to be happy, if that insipid word was the word? She’d been happy with Ned, happier than ever in her adult life, but she’d been sucking the happiness out of someone else’s universe. There was no right to that. A clear decision, and once made the hard part was done: in her mind if not yet in life, she and Ned were over, finished. Telling him was all that remained. Anne would never know. Period. No harm done, and nothing to cry about.
Francie reminded herself of that last part several times as she turned left on the highway, headed home, was so deep in her own thoughts that she didn’t notice she’d drifted across the center line until the headlights of an oncoming car were almost upon her. Francie swerved, once more losing her grip on the road; the other driver, also across the center line, swerved, too. They missed each other by inches, Francie continuing south, the other car-a minivan-going north, much too fast. As her wheels gained traction, Francie had a crazy thought: what if they’d collided, what if she’d been killed at that moment, with Ned still untold? A tidy ending for everyone, all loose ends forever unknown. She slowed to thirty miles an hour and kept the speedometer there until she reached the interstate. Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary-exemplars from a superseded age, a darker one for women, and not for her.
“Chief Savard?”
“Speaking.”
“John More, returning your call.”
Savard, just back in the office after clearing a pileup out at the Route 139 three-way stop-invariable pileup site whenever it snowed-thought he recognized the voice but couldn’t recall the name. His caller sensed that before he had to admit it out loud.
“Reverend More, of the Little White Church of the Redeemer.”
The pickup. A minor matter, especially on a night like this, but he had the reverend on the phone. “It’s about your pickup.”
“My pickup?”
“The church’s, I guess it is. I happened to see it over near my place on Little Joe Lake and…” And he’d been curious, as he would have been about any vehicle parked there. Curiosity gave him no legal right to ask any questions, so he didn’t.
“Is this about the taillight on the minibus? It’s going into the shop on Friday. I really hope you’re not planning to issue a ticket. They were booked solid.”
“This isn’t about the minibus, Reverend. It’s about the pickup.”
“We don’t own a pickup.”
“A white one, with the name of the church on the side panel.”
“Oh,” said the reverend. “That doesn’t belong to us in an official sense. It’s registered to a parishioner. We do use it from time to time, for dump runs and such.”
“The dump’s closed on Sunday.”
“As well it should be.” There was a silence. “Was there some question you had, sir?”
“That’s when I saw your pickup,” Savard said. “Yesterday. Sunday.”
“Impossible. We only use it in the summer, and never on Sundays, of course. It isn’t even insured right now-we renew the policy in May.”
“I thought you said it belonged to a parishioner.”
“And so it does. But since she can’t drive it herself and has been generous enough to provide it, we handle the insurance and registration.”
“Why can’t she drive it herself?”
“The poor woman’s legally blind.”
“Well, someone was driving it.”
“I don’t see how that could be. It’s shut up in the barn behind her house.” The reverend paused. “Oh my goodness-you’re not suggesting that someone stole it?”
“I’m not suggesting anything.”
“Would it be asking too much for you to drive out and have a look?”
“Can’t do it tonight, Reverend, not with the storm. But give me the address.”
“Ninety-seven Carp Road, Lawton Ferry.”
“And the name of this woman?”
“Perhaps you should mention me first when you call on her. Not that she’s in any way lacking as a citizen. She’s quite an independent sort, that’s all-lives alone with her cat, remarkably self-reliant.”
“I’ll do that,” Savard said, opening his notebook, taking out his pen. “What’s her name?”
“Truax,” said the reverend. He spelled it.
Savard didn’t write; his pen was still, poised above the unblemished page.
“Mrs. Dorothy Truax,” the reverend continued, “but everyone calls her Dot. God bless.”
The snow had stopped by the time Savard parked in front of 97 Carp Road, and the air had stilled, but the temperature was falling fast, as it often did after a storm. The moisture in his nostrils froze before he reached the front door.
Savard knocked. No answer. The house was dark, but why would a blind woman and a cat need lights? He kept knocking, kept getting no answer. “Mrs. Truax,” he called, loudly in case her hearing was going, too. “Mrs. Truax.” Speaking the name did something to him, something unpleasant. That made him knock harder, but it didn’t bring a response.
Savard went back to the cruiser for his lantern, shone it on the barn. The doors were unlocked but closed, and would be kept that way for a while by a snowdrift two or three feet high. Savard walked around the barn, found
