She was his younger child. She was the difficult child. She was the one to break his heart.

THIS WAS HIS SICKNESS, he must keep hidden close to his heart like a poker hand so wonderful, its cards are ablaze and blinding.

SIX YEARS, EIGHT MONTHS. And this day, March 27.

A call from Juliet on his cell-Daddy? Call me back when you can.

Didn't say Daddy it's urgent. For that wasn't Juliet's way, to stir apprehension. Yet he sensed it, urgent.

Fumbling to call his daughter back.

SHE, THE ELDER DAUGHTER, poor Juliet had been driven away from Carthage. Could not bear to revisit Carthage. Even to recall Carthage, too painful for her.

Moved away, married. A man older than she was by nearly twenty years.

See, Daddy! I have grown up, I am an adult. I am not your little girl any longer and would not fall in love with a silly soldier-boy to break our hearts.

SO HE'D LOST his other daughter, too. As if the corporal had murdered both daughters.

Juliet was the "surviving" sister: a tabloid heroine, or hapless fool, whose younger sister had been "brutally murdered" by her "war hero" fiance.

Weeks, months. The coverage had been relentless.

Juliet had to quit her teaching job which she'd loved. Her volunteer work at Home Front she'd loved. Graduate school for an advanced degree in public education she'd postponed, indefinitely.

At first, she'd stayed at friends' houses avoiding the family house since reporters and TV crews awaited her on Cumberland Avenue like predator birds. Forbidden by law to trespass on private property the news-media people were spread across the front of the Mayfields' front lawn on the public sidewalk and in the public street; if you wanted to turn into the Mayfields' driveway, you had to plead with them to let you through amid a barrage of camera-flashes.

Finally, Juliet had moved away from Carthage to live somewhere "anonymously"-even her parents weren't always sure where she was living.

None of the Mayfields had guessed at the toxic after-life of a violent crime. The shimmering-sick phosphorescence of scandal accrued to a name: Mayfield.

The mild notoriety Zeno Mayfield had known as a controversial mayor of Carthage faded to nothing, beside this virulent and protracted attention.

It was illogical, since Mayfields were the victims. The murderer was Kincaid.

Somehow it was the sister-sister rivalry, so-perceived, or mis-perceived, that had excited the media interest. A lurid rivalry for the love of Corporal Kincaid, the two Mayfield sisters bitter enemies.

In blogs, it was suggested that Juliet, the fiancee, was pregnant: that she'd had a miscarriage, or an abortion; or, depending upon the blog, she'd had Corporal Kincaid's (premature, doomed) baby.

His younger daughter he'd been powerless to save. And now the older.

Beautiful Juliet Mayfield hounded and harried like the Unicorn of medieval Christian legend. Obsessively Zeno was moved to think of this peculiar and incongruous image: the elegant white Unicorn memorialized in the fifteenth-century French tapestries, the cruel and barbarous hunters, the imprisonment, the bright blood of innocence.

In the Cloisters Museum in New York City he and Arlette had been fascinated by the tapestries even as they'd been repelled by them. A fastidious sadism in such beauty, the apotheosis of Christian martyrdom.

And yet, in the final tapestry-the Unicorn is miraculously restored to life, though imprisoned like any barnyard creature in a small pen.

A WOMAN HAD COME into his life to drink with him.

A woman not one of his women. Not one who'd known him.

His old, lost Zeno-self. She hadn't known.

Though probably she'd known of. Everyone in Carthage seemed to know of Zeno Mayfield.

Like an old Roman general, he was. A Roman of antiquity. He'd fought many wars against the Goths and lost his numerous sons in the effort of decades and now he'd survived into another era in which only his name was "known"-except not why, and whether with merit.

Her name was Genevieve. A classy name and she was a classy woman or had been, not long ago: with wide-set hazel eyes, a soft mouth that looked as if it had been bruised, thick brunette hair to her shoulders. She'd lost a husband, an eighteen-year-old son: the one to divorce, the other to drugs. She'd had to sell at a loss her house in the Cumberland section of Carthage and lived now, coincidentally, though in such accounts there are really no coincidences, in the Cedar Hill condominium complex in which, since the dissolution of his marriage, Zeno Mayfield also lived, in squalid bachelor quarters in a two-bedroom apartment on the seventh, penthouse floor.

Genevieve had come into Zeno Mayfield's life after Arlette had departed. Just to make that clear.

"Please tell people, Zeno. Tell them the chronology."

"Why? Why does it matter?"

"Because of course it matters."

"But-why? At our age?"

"All the more at our age."

Genevieve knew that all of Zeno's friends who'd been Arlette's friends would resent her. For Arlette Mayfield was a woman whom other women liked very much and would have liked to protect from harm.

Especially, since the loss of her daughter.

Since the so very public loss of her daughter.

Zeno was amused by Genevieve's sense of propriety. Though he was touched by the woman, too-so badly she wanted things to be correct, proper between them.

Though she was forty-seven years old and a divorced woman and by her own account she'd had "relationships" with men since her divorce.

They were eager and clumsy in intimacy like actors-middle-aged, yet inexperienced actors-playing roles for which they were unprepared. Scripts they hadn't memorized nor come close to understanding. So long married and accustomed to a woman living with him without particularly seeing him, Zeno was chagrined to realize that this new woman would see his dissolute physical self in a way that had to be unsparing; on his part, he was inclined to view her, in the affable confusion of bedclothes and nightwear, with gallant part-shut eyes.

In fact Genevieve had known Arlette first, before she'd met Zeno. She'd been a volunteer at the Carthage H.E.L.P. Center Wig Boutique which was patronized predominately by women needing hair replacement in the aftermath of chemotherapy; she'd consulted with Arlette on the matter of customizing some sort of wig, synthetic or human hair, or a blend of the two, following the loss of Arlette's hair during six months of post-surgery breast cancer treatment.

(Arlette's breast cancer had been diagnosed relatively early, at Stage II. Zeno had been more terrified than Arlette, it had seemed. As, with months of grueling chemotherapy, and radiation to follow, Arlette had grown ever more thin, ethereal-thin, "radiant" and "spiritual" as Zeno had grown more distracted and slovenly and his drinking had veered as it's said in AA circles out of control.) Unlike Arlette whose idea of reckless shopping was to spend beyond twenty-five dollars at Second Time 'Round Consignments, Genevieve dressed with care, and style; where Arlette wore much-laundered jeans, patchy pullovers and nylon parkas, Genevieve wore designer jeans, cashmere pullovers and chic faux-fur coats; Genevieve spent more money on shoes and boots in a season than Arlette had spent through the entirety of her marriage with Zeno.

In his more casual way Zeno too had been a careful dresser, when active in public life. He'd known the value of a boldly colored necktie. He'd known the value of stylish but not extravagant clothes, which Arlette had helped him choose-the politician should inspire confidence, not envy or resentment. It had been a stubborn fetish of Zeno's, ridiculed by his family of pragmatic-minded females, that he refused to wear a hat and often an overcoat in even the arctic winter of upstate New York.

Now semi-retired, demi-semi-alive, whatever this condition of anxious ennui was, Zeno wore his familiar old clothes, tweed jackets, sweaters out at the elbow, torn jeans, remnants of J. Press suits that had come to fit his sagging body like a glove, without much attentiveness or interest; he'd stopped wearing neckties entirely, and rarely the crisply-laundered white cotton dress shirt that had been the mayor's signature. His old habit of showering every morning, shampooing his thick-graying-frazzled hair, he retained out of a sense that, if he missed even one morning, it would be the beginning of the fabled end.

Initially he'd been flattered by Genevieve's gifts. Touched and grateful, this attractive woman should think of him. Then by quick degrees it had come to seem that the gifts she gave him which were nearly always clothes-Italian designer shirts, cashmere sweaters, leather belts, gloves-were a rebuke to his taste, or his absence of taste. And Genevieve made presents to him of her small Fauve-floral oil paintings and ceramics, which she positioned in strategic places in his apartment, to "enliven" the atmosphere.

Also she brought him fancy wine-wines. Genevieve was an adventuress in wine-New Zealand, Moroccan, Brazilian, among the more dependable Italian, French, and Californian. Their pleasure in each other's company had much to do with wine as well as whiskey, gin, vodka, brandy, and distinctive sorts of beer and ale, of which Zeno was the adventurer.

Gallantry wasn't required when you were affably/happily drunk but came quite naturally.

As high-pitched girlish laughter, spontaneous-sounding and utterly delighted laughter came quite naturally to Genevieve in this state.

"It's good to laugh again, Zeno. Thank you for that."

And he hadn't known what to say. He'd been struck dumb.

For it was a script they hadn't memorized, yet. A clumsy hopeful script, in the making.

Examining Genevieve's little square-cut paintings, not one of which was larger than eight by eight inches and all of which exuded a lush, sensuous, giddily exuberant life, Zeno thought How different from Cressida.

Meaning How different from Cressida's art.

Zeno had shown Genevieve some of his daughter's ink drawings. He'd been surprised to see how large they were, and how complex in execution; how particular the vision of the artist, and difficult of access.

The paintings of Genevieve and her women-artist friends, whose work Zeno saw frequently at gallery exhibits in Carthage, to which Genevieve took him, lay almost exclusively on the surface like gaily colored lilies in a pond; Cressida's finicky, fussy art was a matter of depths.

You were instinctively drawn to the boldly colored art, that celebrated life. Yet it was the other more complex art, that provoked and disturbed, that captivated your attention.

"How strange, for a girl! How-unusual . . ."

Zeno winced inwardly hearing this inane remark. He could imagine Cressida's reaction.

"And you say she was-how old? Still in high school?"

Zeno said he thought so, yes.

In fact, the drawing of vertiginously interconnected bridges, a fantasy of M. C. Escher superimposed upon the distinctive six bridges of Carthage, New York, had probably been done when Cressida was younger, since there were traces of color in the bridges' "shadows."

Genevieve had no idea of the Escher influence, and Zeno had no interest in telling her.

As it turned out, Genevieve remembered seeing the exhibit of a selection of Cressida Mayfield's drawings in the Carthage Public Library in January 2006. This exhibit had been arranged by Arlette and the head of the library and had been greeted with much local acclaim focusing upon the "tragic loss" of the young artist at the age of nineteen.

Genevieve hadn't known the Mayfield family and had not spoken to them about it but years later, after she'd met Zeno, and he'd showed her some of Cressida's work, she remembered vividly-"Those drawings made a strong impression on me. I thought, what an unusual girl. And I thought, it must have been a challenge to be her parent."

"That's so." Zeno paused. "I mean-it was so."

Zeno had been flattered by the local response to Cressida's work but subtly repelled by it as well. He could imagine his daughter's sardonic reaction-Where were all these "fans" when I was alive?

In the Carthage newspaper, two full pages were devoted to the exhibit. Headlines were exuberant.

STUNNING EXHIBIT TRACES GROWTH.

OF UNUSUAL ARTISTIC TALENT.

"A Posthumous Gift"

Rare family photos of the young artiste Cressida Mayfield in a smiling mood, or at least not actively scowling, accompanied the library exhibit which, in an expanded version, reopened some months later in the Carnegie House, a former mansion donated to the municipality for community-service and non-profit activities.

Zeno thought it ironic that the stark, minimalist, Escher-inspired drawings, created out of what ferocious despondency of lonely and embittered adolescence, had become the means, posthumous, for his daughter's local fame. Virtually everyone in Carthage-all ages, including her adolescent contemporaries-now knew the name Cressida Mayfield who'd been both the (alleged) victim of (alleged) rape-murder as well as the heralded artiste.

"Jesus! Cressida would be mortified." Zeno shook his head like a beast that has been prodded with a dull instrument that might soon turn sharp.

Arlette took offense. Arlette had become sensitive, since July 2005, of what she defined as cynical, scurrilous, irreverent, negative-reinforcing language.

"You don't know how Cressida would feel. You have no idea how Cressida would feel. There was a side of our daughter, we saw it when she volunteered for the math program, that wanted to connect with others-with the community. Cressida wasn't a negative person, she was-complex."

Zeno had come to note how the very word negative seemed often to be a concern of Arlette's. How any suggestion that Cressida might have reacted to the maelstrom of attention focused upon her, since July 2005, scarcely abating since the confession of Corporal Kincaid in October of that year, with anything like Cressida's usual skepticism, drew a sharp, unflattering crease between Arlette's eyebrows. As if the mother Arlette, not the father Zeno, had become the missing daughter's interpreter: the missing daughter's surrogate.

He'd heard, after a death in the family there will be a seismic realignment among survivors. The old connections have been ruptured, new connections must be established, but how?-the absent party remains both absent and tantalizingly, teasingly present.

In their focus upon the missing daughter, Zeno knew that he and Arlette were now neglecting their surviving daughter. So long, Juliet had been the center of their parental attention, to Cressida's disadvantage; now, all that had changed. And Juliet too had been wounded, irrevocably.

(Juliet's way of coping with the loss of her sister was to say very little about it. Her way of coping with the loss of her fiance was to say nothing about it.) (Juliet's way of coping with the wreckage of her Carthage-life was to depart from it-moving finally to Albany where she would enter the graduate school of public education at the State University at Albany and earn a master's degree in English education; she would acquire a teaching position at the prestigious private Hedley Academy in suburban Albany and almost simultaneously a new fiance whom her left-behind Carthage parents would scarcely know before the wedding.) In the wake of Cressida's disappearance from their lives Arlette undertook to commemorate their daughter in ways that were touching to Zeno initially, then discomforting; finally, disturbing. He sensed that Arlette was able to accept that their daughter was deceased in a way that somehow he could not; despite every effort of his rational being, every application of what might be called common sense, in some part of his brain Zeno still held out a measure of-skepticism? Hope?

From undergraduate days he recalled the brainteaser-conundrum Schrodinger's cat.

A thought experiment of the 1930s. A paradox in which the (enboxed) cat is simultaneously alive/dead until one opens the box to see for oneself if the cat is alive/dead.

Zeno couldn't recall if the observer, the one who opens the box, also controls the cat's fate. Maybe opening the box precipitates the cat's death? Zeno remembered something vague about radiation, poison pellets . . . No one considered that the thought experiment was "cruel to animals" for no one at the time, apart from a few eccentric antivivisectionists, gave a damn for the suffering and deaths of experimental animals; certainly, no one seemed to give a damn about Schrodinger's famous cat.

Sleepless for years he lived, relived those early hours of the Search.

Those early hours of almost unbearable intensity, excitement-hope . . .

The search party in the Preserve. The professionalism of many of the searchers who knew how to look for hikers lost in the Adirondacks.

We'll find her, Mr. Mayfield. If Cressida is here-we'll find her.

And he'd believed. Wanted to believe.

The final exertion of his life as a physical being, a man.

For despite his zealousness he'd failed. Despite his Eagle Scout skills he'd failed to find his daughter.

Failed more fundamentally-(though no one would have condemned him except himself)-as a fellow searcher in the wilderness Preserve for pain had felled him early on, after only a few hours. (Well, maybe it had been eight hours?) Zeno Mayfield who'd prided himself on his hiking skills, insisted upon Adirondack weekend retreats for his mayoral staff and associates, now forced to acknowledge how out of condition he was, how inadequate. Now years later unless he drank himself into oblivion he was prone to the cheerless habit of wounding himself anew recalling the particular humiliation of collapsing in a paroxysm of pain, sinking to his knees as a younger man came bounding to his rescue.

Mr. Mayfield! Zeno! I got you.

WON'T TELL GENEVIEVE this background. Pathetic etiology.

Let her discover for herself that Zeno Mayfield isn't any longer what he'd been rumored to be in certain quarters of Carthage (in fact erroneously-he'd loved it): sexy, sexual, irresistible to women and a lover of women.

PARENTS OF MISSING Girl, 19.

Grieving Parents of Murdered Girl, 19.

Arlette had dealt with their daughter's disappearance in a way no one could have anticipated. She'd made of mourning a kind of celebration, relentlessly public. Soon after Corporal Kincaid had confessed, was convicted and incarcerated at Dannemora and it had seemed that the search for the missing girl had come to an end she'd helped organize the exhibit in the Carthage Public Library and she'd been active in local fund-raisers for battered women's shelters; she'd been a guest on an afternoon talk show, on a CBS-TV affiliate in Watertown; she'd arranged for other art exhibits in local galleries and at Home Front Alliance; she'd donated one of Cressida's larger drawings for the annual Home Front auction, where it had brought in a considerable price-two thousand dollars. (Zeno had been furious, Arlette had given away their daughter's Descending and Ascending without consulting him. And she'd been shocked at his anger.) She'd made donations to the Math Literacy Squad with such enthusiastic public commentary, you'd have thought that Cressida had had a brilliantly successful experience with the volunteer program and not, as her family knew, a disappointing one.

More ambitiously, with the help of sympathetic women-friends Arlette established a hiking trail and "memorial garden" in Friendship Park, that ran along a bluff above the Black River for several miles, in commemoration of their lost daughter; a beautifully crafted cedar bench overlooked the river, with a little brass plaque-CRESSIDA MAYFIELD 19862005-which Zeno so resented, he'd shouted at Arlette that it was perverse, it was wrong, it was obscene: "Can't we just have her name? Why do we need those dates? Why does everything have to be dated, finalized?"

Another time Arlette was stung by her husband's anger. She had expected Zeno to be deeply moved, as she was, and others had been; she said, in a hurt, puzzled voice, "I don't know, Zeno. Why? You're the intellectual in the family. Why do things come to an end?"