But even in daylight, even looking as hard as I could, thinking and thinking, I couldn't see any of it. So, unseeing, I finished the beer and then found myself dozing in the chair. I forced myself up and grabbed the phone and took it with me to bed, which was still a sleeping bag. The phone went on the floor beside the bed, in case Roxanne called, in case I wanted to call her. For a second, I wondered if this meant I was falling in love, but then I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

The room was still blue-black when I woke up. I looked at the ceiling and waited for my eyes to focus. As I waited, I heard something.

A sound in the living room. Someone sitting down in the chair.

She shouldn't have driven all the way back, I thought, groggily. She must be exhausted. She could have had an accident. I dragged the sleeping bag aside and lurched out of bed.

"Hey, hon," I said, shuffling into the living room in my boxer shorts. "You should have just called. You must be-"

I tensed.

There was a figure in the dark. And a smell. Soap. Perfume. The wrong smell. I took a half-step back and patted the wall for the switch. The light was blinding.

It wasn't Roxanne.

"Mrs. Wiggins?" I said.

She was wearing a green parka and a red beret sort of hat. The beret was pulled over her white hair at an angle, like Che Guevara. She was holding a shotgun. Martin's Parker, off the rack on the wall. The butt was under her arm and both barrels were pointing at me.

"What the fu-"

"Sorry to disappoint you," Pauline said. She sounded like it was funny. Something was funny.

"I gather you were expecting your floozy. I don't know why you bother to smuggle her in here at this hour. The whole town knows about her. And you."

"What's going on?" I sputtered. "Put that-"

"We're going to have a talk, Mr. McMorrow. That's the first thing. Sit over there on the couch, please. Sit down. Now."

Her voice was calm but also tense, as if she were in control of the situation, but the situation was serious. Like somebody trying to tell other people not to panic. Her face was dry and white and her lipstick was red and fresh, like a drag queen's. She sat in the big chair with the shotgun pointed at my midsection. The barrel was shiny and long, and the round ends were very black.

I sat slowly on the kitchen chair that I'd brought out when Vern had been in her chair. Martin's killed himself, I thought. He blew his brains out, and she wants to take me with her when she goes after him.

Her long fingers were around the trigger and I could see her wedding band and diamond under the barrel.

"I'm going to tell you something about decency," Pauline said, in the same assured, controlled tone. "It is a subject with which you may not be familiar."

She looked right at me, right at my eyes. I watched the end of the shotgun make small circles in the air.

"My husband is a decent man. A good man, I think. I'm not boring you, am I? Good. Well, Mr. McMorrow, we have had fifty-one years together, pretty good years, and he has been a devoted husband, a good man. A respected man in the community. Oh, yes, people thought a lot of Martin, in ways you would never understand. Not ever."

She shifted her left hand. The barrel dropped. I watched her finger on the trigger. One squeeze. It would take one squeeze.

"A long time ago, my husband slipped. Not badly. Just a momentary fall. There was a woman in town who had designs on him, and in a moment of weakness or vanity or insecurity, or whatever it is that makes men do such things, he accepted. Briefly. I knew; I knew all about it, but I had faith in him. You wouldn't know about that either. It didn't last long and we went on with our lives. You do those things. My husband never knew I knew, and he devoted himself to me after that. He did. He really did. A fine man. He was ready to carry his secret to his grave, and it must have been a burden, just to keep from hurting me."

I shifted my legs, which were cold and bare. The gun went to my face.

"Please listen," Pauline said.

She waited a moment and continued.

"That grave is approaching for both of us, Mr. McMorrow. And let me tell you something else, sir. Life is remembered as it ends. We like to go out on a happy note, as it were. A word to the wise, let's say."

She smiled crazily. A strange serene smile.

"Yesterday, Mr. Wiggins came to me a broken man. He came to me and said he wanted me to hear it from him and not from the gossips on the street. And like a man, he stood there and told me about his indiscretion. He told me about Arthur Bertin and his filthy photographs. There's at least one person in this town who did not mourn his passing, I'll tell you. And that is me."

I was eight feet away from her. The kitchen was to her right. To my right were the living room windows. Fifteen to twenty feet down but storms and window. Too much glass to go through. I'd hang up and get shot.

The butt of the heavy gun had dropped from her armpit to the crook of her arm.

"Another thing you probably don't know much about is pride. You are not half the man he is, for all your big-city background. This picture you gave to the police-it will make him the butt of jokes all over town. Everywhere he goes. He will not be able to get a cup of coffee, to talk to his friends, to walk down the street. A mockery. That's what you've made of his life. After all he's done, after all we've done for this town. We didn't have children, you know. This town was our child."

She hesitated.

"Mrs. Wiggins, I never wanted to hurt Martin. I didn't-"

She stopped me with a wave of the gun.

"That man walked out of our house last night and he was ruined. Ruined. Because of some big-city big shot up here on a lark to laugh at the locals. A vacation for you and your floozy. It makes me so angry. So sick. Oh, God."

Tears welled up in her eyes. She sobbed and her body and the shotgun jerked up and down. From my belly to my face. Up and down.

The phone rang and I flinched. She turned and there was a white flash and a rocking explosion and I was off the chair and had the shotgun and heaved it behind me. It clattered and I stood over Pauline. The phone had only rung once.

Pauline had her eyes closed and her left hand was holding her right upper arm. She rocked slowly back and forth, her knees and feet pressed together.

"You okay?" I said.

She rocked and didn't answer.

15.

The butt of the gun had recoiled into her upper arm. The bone, old and brittle, could have been broken or even shattered. I started to go to call an ambulance, but when I got to the door of the bedroom, I could see the phone receiver off the hook and the base upside down.

Thank you, Annie Oakley.

Fortunately, I could hear that irritating beeping sound the phone company uses to tell you your phone has been shot but still is working. I flipped the base over, picked up the pitted receiver, and dialed 911. A woman, probably a county dispatcher, answered. I told her my address and said I needed an ambulance.

"What is the nature of the emergency?" she asked.

"A woman shot a gun off in my living room and I think she broke her arm."

"Does she still have the firearm?" the dispatcher asked. "No. I threw it over the couch," I said.

"Is the firearm in her proximity?"

"I guess, but I don't think she feels like shooting it anymore."

"Where is she now?" the dispatcher said.

"She's in the living room, crying."

And she was. I went in and sat with her for a few minutes. Pauline sobbed silently and I patted her on the shoulder. Her shoulders were very thin and bony, and it was like consoling a skeleton. We waited what seemed like a very long time, sitting there in the quiet, and then there were heavy footsteps and voices in the hallway and the room filled with uniforms.

Vigue and a couple of other Androscoggin cops came in first. Then a bunch of volunteer firemen who came to the ambulance call as much for something to do as to help. A big state trooper who had heard the call on her radio and came in case there was a real shoot-out.

Pauline buried her face in her arms and the cops and firemen stood over her like they were visiting a sick aunt. They brought a stretcher up from the ambulance and lifted her onto it and she didn't look at anybody as they maneuvered her through the kitchen and out the door and down the stairs.

After she'd left, I went in and found the state trooper in the bedroom, looking at the basketball-size hole in the wall. The plaster was blown away, the wooden laths underneath were splintered, and there were dime-size holes going through to the darkness outside.

"Buckshot," the trooper said.

"It's always something," I said.

"Where's this friggin' picture?" Vigue said.

He was behind the wheel of his cruiser with a clipboard balanced in the steering wheel. The radio was coughing up static, the motor was running, and the heat was blasting onto my feet in the passenger seat.

"At the paper," I said.

"What's it of?"

"Martin and Arthur's mother. Meredith something."

"So what's the big deal about it?"

"I don't know. It's of Martin and this woman sitting together. Sort of hugging."

"So?"

"So, I don't know. I guess Martin had some kind of fling with this lady a hundred years ago."

"When he could get it up," Vigue said.

"Whatever. What happened is, I found this picture in Arthur's stuff after he died. Or drowned. He had all these pictures, and this was with them."

"Like the pictures of the girls."

"Yeah. They were in a folder. I was looking for stuff for the paper, and there was all this other stuff. I didn't think anything of it. Sort of funny, I thought. Some high-school date or something. No, it was too old for high school. But anyway, I didn't think much of it. But I said something to him about it. Kidding or whatever. He said he wanted it back, but I said I'd have to give it to the police because it wasn't mine to give away, and the police were handling the investigation of Arthur's death."

"So where is it?" Vigue said.

I shrugged.

"I wasn't sure what to do. I guess I didn't do anything."

He had stopped taking notes and was smoking a cigarette. He hit the power button and whirred the window down to flick out an ash.

"So that's it?" Vigue said.

I looked at him.

"Is that what all this is about? Some old picture? You gotta be shittin' me."

"I told you what she said."

Vigue whirred the window down and flicked the cigarette down again. The ambulance had left and LeMaire, J. and another Androscoggin cop were talking with the trooper next to the trooper's cruiser. All of the cars were running.

"A couple days ago, Martin came and asked me for the picture again. He told me Arthur told him about the picture, and told him-Arthur told Martin, I mean-that the picture was some kind of proof that Martin was Arthur's real father."

Vigue looked at me.

"Is this Guiding Light, or what?" he said.

"'Hey, don't look at me. That's what he said. Pauline gets there and she's just sitting in the room, and she says Martin told her I had the picture and I was going to give it to you. She said she knew, but he didn't know she knew because she never told him. About this fling."

"Jesus," Vigue said.

"I don't know. I know it sounds crazy, but if he thought the whole town was going to find out this deep, dark secret about his past-"

Martin. The pillar of the community, third row at the Baptist Church, writing nice stories about all his nice friends. Vigue had put the pen back in his pocket. It was a gold Cross that went with his uniform. He took it back out.

"I think he had wanted her to think he could be trusted, but then he figured everyone in town would know because of this picture. That's what it looks like, anyway."

Vigue exhaled the last drag on his cigarette and flicked it out the window onto the driveway.

"Okay," he said. "Forget the picture. You're all nuts. Did she have the firearm aimed at your person?"

"My general direction. Not when she shot it."

"She didn't fire it at you."

"Nope, she was shooting at the phone. It rang. Like I told you. Saved by the bell, I guess."

Vigue scribbled on the pad.

"You would have been splattered all over that wall, my friend," he said, without looking up. "The buckshot in that gun would have cut you in two. They'd be in there for weeks with scrub brushes, trying to get Mr. McMorrow off the walls."

"Funny thought."

"I'm chuckling," Vigue said.