"Oh, five years. Maybe more. These days, when I say something was five years ago, it's more like ten."

I took a drink of coffee and swallowed.

"That's like your picture, isn't it, Martin," I said. "Taken without your permission, I mean."

I said it directly and let it hang. Martin looked away and opened his mouth, then closed it. I waited. I wasn't going to help him and he knew it. He could either turn around and walk out the door or tell me. I looked right into his face, counted the pores on his red nose. He stayed.

It took a half-hour and another cup of coffee, but I got an answer-at least as much as I could expect.

He had heard she had died ten years before or more, and he hadn't seen her in forty years. He said he never knew her very well. When the picture was taken, he was thirty-five, and she was about five years younger. They were both married.

Martin called it his "episode." Pauline never knew about it, he said, but Arthur did. Arthur knew because the woman in the picture, with the dreamy Hollywood gaze and pretty legs, was his mother. Arthur's mother. Her name was Meredith, and her husband drank and didn't come home. She was pretty and it happened. Martin pronounced her name as if it hurt.

"So we used to sit," he said, his voice raspy. "That's what we did. Young people today don't just sit anymore. They roll around in the back of some car, and that's why you see these babies being born all over the place. But back then, you could just see somebody without getting into bed right off the bat, and that's what we did. In the afternoon, by the eddy of the river up in Byron. I told Pauline I had to go out on an assignment. I always took my notebook. It wasn't that much. We'd just sit and talk, mostly. I'd talk and she'd listen and she'd talk and I'd listen and we'd sit there and she'd ... she'd hold my hand. We'd kiss and sit close together. Just sit. That's it. It wasn't this terrible thing."

His eyes had a deadened look, as if he'd had this conversation with himself a thousand times over the years.

"Never did it before and never since," Martin said. "Not like today, everybody and his brother having affairs and dumping the wife for a new model."

"What about the picture?"

He flinched.

"That goddamn picture. Goddamn thing. I didn't even know there was one until a couple months ago. Oh, God. I get this letter in the mail; Pauline is downtown. It's from Arthur. I saw him every day on the street for forty years and he sends me this letter saying-oh, I couldn't believe it, still can't-saying I'm his father. His real father."

"Where did the picture come in?"

"He said he had a picture of us in the backyard on Center Street. We sat over there one time, fools. He says in the letter he took it from the roof. What was he? Twelve? Younger? I didn't know him much then. He was in school when this went on. After all these years ..."

"So what did he want?"

"I don't know, Jack. That's what was so terrible. Like torture. He never said what he wanted. Money. Or whatever it was, who knows. I just didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything."

"And you want the picture back so Pauline won't see it?"

"It wasn't anything. Jack, today they swap wives like fishing stories. Don't like the one you have, trade her in. This was nothing."

"But Pauline wouldn't think that?"

He shook his head.

"Did you ask Arthur for it?" I said.

"I tried to, but he'd just walk away. Wouldn't talk about it, or at least he didn't try. I didn't either, I guess. I don't think he was all right in the head. I think he was having some sort of breakdown. Imagine coming up with something like that after all these years. Who knows what went on in his mind?"

"I'd like to, but I can't give the picture back," I said.

Martin looked stunned.

"That's the way it is, Martin. It's a police case. Arthur's dead. His stuff is all evidence, and that picture was part of his stuff, his belongings. I'm sorry, but ..."

"Well, Jack," Martin said, his voice slow and hard like I'd never before heard it. "Do you know what this will do to an old lady? Do you? This whole goddamn town will know. You know what this place is like. It will be out, and that woman, after all these years, will be a laughingstock. Don't you know what this town is like? Don't you?"

I just looked at him, my mug still in my hand in front of me. I looked and he suddenly put his mug on the counter and turned and went out the door. From my place in the kitchen, I stood and listened to his footsteps on the stairs.

For a little guy who didn't say much, Arthur sure knew how to make trouble.

Maybe I should have told Martin that his secret was safe. It was locked in the drawer with the Wonder Waitress. The waitress was safe, too.

It was Saturday morning, and I was sitting at my desk looking at the two pictures, the works of a lifelong voyeur, the bookends of a long and secret career. Arthur Bertin, a retrospective.

The logical thing would have been to turn both of them over to the cops and go about my business. But it would not be that easy. Would I tell the cops about my conversation with Martin? Who would I tell? Vigue? Go over his head to some state cop who would go right to Vigue with the information? What would Vigue do? Go right to Martin and ask him? Say Jack McMorrow says you had reason to want Arthur Bertin dead? How the hell did I get stuck in the middle of this mess?

And now Vigue wanted me to go to court, or at least that was the way it seemed. I went over the conversation again in my mind. I don't care, he said. I used to, but I don't ... Go in the mill and start at what I make here after eighteen years ... Scraping the snow off his car ... I'll make some inquiries but don't push me ... What do I do, go up to the waitress at the Pine Tree and say, Hey, some guy was taking your picture, and now he's dead, and she says- The waitress. I looked at the picture, the shape of her thighs, the wide shoulders. The waitress.

I felt sick.

He had said waitress. He had said the waitress at the Pine Tree ... He had said it, and I had never given him the picture. I had kept it and he had said waitress. I had shown him the others, the girl at the bank, but not this one. The waitress was right here in front of me, and waitress was what he had said.

What was going on; what was happening? I knew it. I didn't have notes, but I could remember his voice as he said it, the sound the scraper made on the windshield of the police cruiser, the sneer in his voice as he pictured walking in and saying this to the waitress.

She says, Yeah, what's the bad news?

The door slammed open.

"Hey, Jackson, baby. Dig those scoops. Unearth that news. Jackson, I see a Pulitzer in your future."

"Hey, Vern baby," I said. "You hung over or just glad to be alive?"

"Jackson, I love my job," he said, hopping up on Paul's desk and sitting on top of a couple of camera-ready ads worth eighty or ninety bucks. "You know, you and me are lucky to have found stimulating careers in journalism here in this news hot spot we call western Maine. Some people only dream of such a fate."

"They're called nightmares."

"Oh, Jack. Don't tell me you're feeling pangs about leaving the big city. The glitter and glamour. Dinner with the Saltzbergers."

"That's Sulzbergers," I said. "Them, too."

I paused to break his stride.

"You're in rare form. What's up?" I said.

Vern swung his legs.

"Nothing much, but then again, it doesn't take much to make me embrace life on this planet. I thought I'd start my column, my basketball crystal ball. This afternoon, off to Lewiston for a round robin."

Vern took a toothpick out of his shirt pocket.

"Mint," he said.

"Nothing but the best," I said.

"Nothing but."

He sat on the desk and worked the toothpick around in his mouth.

"Martin as straight as he seems? Pillar of the community and all that?" I asked.

"Polly pure," Vern said. "Church on Sunday, passes the plate."

He didn't ask why I wanted to know. It was a curious thing about Vern. I could stop in the middle of a conversation about the Red Sox and ask him if he had ever been spelunking. He would say no, or yes, and we would start up with baseball where we'd left off.

"They never had kids?"

"Nope. Pauline scared the sperm cells away," Vern said. "No, that's not nice. No, they don't have children. No, I don't know why."

"She pretty tough in the classroom?"

"I guess she was," Vern said. "You know. The ramrod-tough teacher who the kids respect and all that. I guess she was a good teacher. I've been told she got a lot of kids to go to college who otherwise wouldn't."

"Robbing the mill of the best and the brightest?"

"Snatching them out of its gaping maw."

Vern opened his mouth wide, threw the pick in, and chomped it. I grinned.

"Martin ever get upset with her? He seems sort of henpecked or something."

"Oh, she kept him in line," Vern said, looking through the stuff on Paul's desk. "I think she probably wrote three-quarters of the editorials, but who knows now. Martin wasn't a great writer. Really had to work at it. He's written a couple of things for me that took mega-editing."

He waited as a pulp truck downshifted out front, sending out a cloud of blue diesel smoke.

"Martin used to put the phone down sometimes. This is way back, I don't know, five years, when I first got here. I'd hear him say, 'Who the hell does she think she's talking to? A child?' But he kept it to himself. Funny thing was, she was nice as pie to him whenever I saw them together. Motherly, almost."

The phone rang and Vern jumped down off the table. His gut shook when he hit the floor.

"You never know what people are like in the privacy of their own homes," he said, walking to his desk. "Good morning! Androscoggin Review. What can we do you for?"

Vern talked, something about a club notice that hadn't been in, and I thought about Martin and Pauline. My time in their kitchen told me that she was the dominant one of the pair, but there was something motherly about the way she treated him. And he seemed to care about her. Maybe that was true love. True love with one brief lapse, long ago but not forgotten.

Vern spotted somebody walking across the street and took off out the door, his jacket in one hand and a notebook in the other. I tried to work but ended up answering the phones, taking three briefs and scheduling a photo of the fifth-grade science fair at Androscoggin Elementary. The teacher said we did it every year, and she was probably right.

We aimed to please, after all.

Arthur had liked those assignments. He'd line up all the kids and get them to smile Norman Rockwell smiles and then bark at them to stay in line until he got their names down in order in his grimy little notebook. He printed in tiny letters and used the same notebook for months, putting everything down: assignments, hours, expenses. I wondered if he'd had a notebook on him when they found him.

Arthur.

The bushes rustle. He strains to focus the Nikkormat in the dark. The shutter clicks, the winder turns. Click. Turn. Click. Like a twig snapping over and over, the same sound, and clothing falls away as the figure passes in front of the window.

Leave those cheerleaders alone, Martin says. Arthur says nothing. Sees the swish of pleated skirts, hears the squeak of sneakers on the polished gym floor.

Arthur in the ice water, turns blue and white. Hauled out by the ankles, some chump who goes for a swim. So I go to the waitress, Vigue says.

I'd like to give you your picture, but I can't.

The phone rang again. I sat with my pictures and stared.

13.

Ten miles north of Androscoggin, the road turns into a dipping, twisting, two-lane strip with treacherous iced patches where the pavement is shaded by thick banks of dark green spruce trees.

I drove slowly, between thirty-five and forty-five, occasionally taking the beer can from between my thighs and taking a sip. I had no destination other than a vague plan to head north to Andover and swing west until I hit a road that would take me back to Route 2, either in Maine, near Bethel, or over the border in New Hampshire. There was a road that went that way, coming into Route 26 somewhere north of Grafton Notch, but I'd never driven it. I hoped it was passable for the Volvo, but up this far north it was hard to predict. Maps told you there was some sort of road there, but not whether it was filled with potholes or washed out, or, in spring, turned to muck. It was uncharted territory and I liked it.

It was midafternoon and I'd worked at the office for three hours, rewriting press releases and putting them in the system. Marion couldn't handle the load herself, and that left me, the Renaissance man of Maine newspapers. I had dutifully typed in notes from the Daughters of the American Revolution and announcements from the Androscoggin Center Calvary Church and then had gone and bought three beers, a bag of pretzels, and a tank full of gas. I had left town like a captain leaving the harbor.

A woman I'd been involved with when I was a little-but not a lot-younger had said these jaunts were an indication that I wasn't able to cope with the pressures of my life. She suggested counseling. I disagreed. The rides were my way of putting things in perspective, I had told her. She never approved, and one day, not long after one especially probing discussion of my problems, we decided to go our separate ways. One less thing with which to cope.

She never complained about my grammar.

In the first hour, I passed through the town of Andover, a wood-mill town with a store where pickup trucks were drawn up like horses outside a western saloon. I drove to the center of the village, turned left at the flashing yellow light, and drove west toward the White Mountains. For the next thirty miles, the Volvo was the only car in sight. Roadside ledges gave way to splintered cliffs, and the sun flickered in and out in an early mountain-style sunset.

Without the sun, it got colder. There was more snow here, and the woods looked black and deep. It was starkly beautiful but deadly in winter, especially to someone who had no survival gear. Twelve hours in these woods in winter without matches and you could be dead or maimed. Frozen, like Arthur.

I sipped my beer and turned up the heat.

Arthur was pushing his luck before it ran out in the canal. The voyeurism that began with the cheerleaders was getting out of hand. How long could he have expected to skulk around people's houses in a small town without being caught? It must have been an obsession, a compulsion. But the letter to Martin. Why force the situation after all those years? Did he worry that Martin would die before he could tell him that he thought he was his father? Meek, mild Arthur had been on a collision course with something. Or someone.

I drove southwest on the third leg and third beer of my loop. The road cut through Grafton Notch State Park, a jagged craggy ridge where a mountain climber or hiker died every few years. The rock peaks were high above the road, and I pictured the cold, the wind, the scoured bareness high above me. Today, it would be silent up there. Hawks had gone south. Hikers had packed it in and ice climbers were yet to come. These rocks hadn't been tamed for people to slide down them. They didn't bristle with gondola towers and microwave transmitters. There were no condos, no restaurants, no bars for the skiers who knew the mountains as a diversion from their lives in offices and classrooms to the south. There was just rock and wind and scrub.

I drove along through the gathering darkness and felt reassured.

Back on Route 2, I headed east with my lights on, meeting other cars now, many with skis on roof racks. They were headed west for Sunday River, and the ski areas of the Mount Washington Valley. Roxanne had said she loved to ski. She had this idea that we could go off for a weekend in New Hampshire or Vermont, ski all day, and hit the hot tub at night. Good skiing, good food, good ... times. When she had said this, I didn't tell her that I didn't own a neon racing suit or the hottest skis. That I was too old to try to be hip. She was younger and hipper, without trying. And when I pulled into my driveway, her car was there.

"All right," I said, whooping softly to myself. The mountain had come to Mohammed.

The door opened when I got to the top of the stairs. Roxanne was wearing jeans and an Irish knit sweater. The sweater gave me a hug and she gave me a long kiss and then an even longer kiss after that. Her mouth was warm and soft and strong. She broke for breath and beamed.

"Dej vu all over again," I said.

"It ain't over 'til this lady sings," Roxanne said, pulling me toward the living room.

"I think you're the wrong lady."