"Didn't you?"

"I guess," Vern said. "You back off, sort of."

"Unless you're some kind of social worker."

"And I'm not," Vern said. "And you're not either."

Stacy or Tracy came by with the coffeepot and I shook my head, no.

"Where were you right before you came here? To this paper?" I asked Vern.

"In the dairy country of Wisconsin," he said. "Working for a weekly. With my nose buried in the want ads in the back of Editor and Publisher."

"Did they have somebody like Arthur at your paper out there?"

"Typesetter named Alice Neilson. Lived with her cat. Had pictures of the old thing all over her desk. She could set type like a son of a bitch, though. What about New York?"

"Are you kidding?" I said. "New York is full of them. The Times, too."

"All the lonely people," Vern half-sang.

"You got it," I said.

Vern left, walking up the block to LaVerdiere's drugstore to get the Boston Globe, his daily ritual. I let Stacy or Tracy give me a fresh cup of coffee and sat and felt a little guilty about Arthur-that I didn't feel anything that resembled grief.

I felt bad, but it wasn't grief. It was just feeling bad, sort of lousy, as if something had gone wrong. A big mistake in a story. The car breaking down. A guy you know drowns.

Hey, what can you do?

I'd known Arthur since I'd come to town, what, seven months ago. I'd seen him every day-every day I'd been at the paper anyway. He'd come into the office in his thrift-store plaid pants with his hair all greasy and his lenses and camera bodies all clacking together in the Army surplus ammo pouch he used for a camera bag. If I was on the phone, he'd wait, lurking out front in the big room, checking the basket for the prints we'd already published. He'd wipe the grease-pencil marks off them and, if I said it was okay, he'd sell the pictures to the mothers of the basketball players, the fire department, the Ladies' Aid, the officers of the Grange. When I'd come to the paper, the new guy from New York, he'd asked me if it was okay if he kept doing it and I'd said, Sure, as long as it wasn't something we needed for the files.

Arthur had always asked if things were all right. He'd walk in quietly, the way he did, almost infiltrating the office like a terrorist or something, and suddenly there'd be a print on my desk and Arthur standing there, waiting for me to say the picture was fine or good or even great, which his pictures never were. They were adequate for a small weekly. Grainy sometimes. Almost always formula. But sometimes he got lucky, and when I told him I really liked a photo he'd wag like a puppy and ask me if I really thought so, and I'd say I did, turned. Saw teeth. Smelled gum and cigarette. and he'd wag some more, licking up every last morsel of approval and then lapping the empty plate until it shone.

It made my skin crawl.

It was sad, this life of groveling, and now Arthur's death had been sad, too. Floating in the ice water in the canal, yanked out with a hook in front of all his acquaintances but not a single friend.

No, this wasn't grief, but in Androscoggin there wouldn't be much grieving from anybody. Maybe a few somber faces, but they'd be outnumbered by the people who were glad to have something happen, something to break up the monotony of the long winter and shift work.

I looked around the restaurant. Four old ladies from the River View up the street. More Canadian truckers. A high school kid eating toast and reading the Lewiston Sun sports page. Nobody looked too shook-up.

"Hey," somebody said to my left.

I turned. Saw teeth. Smelled gum and cigarette.

"What happened to your man there? Arthur?" the guy said. "What, was he screwing around, somebody offed him or what?"

He was a union guy from the mill. Bobby something. The last name didn't come to me.

"Where'd you hear that?" I said.

He grinned. Pushed back his baseball cap that said BUILT FORD TOUGH in white letters.

"I'm like you," he said. "I got my sources. Got to. Never find out anything in the paper, right?"

He tapped me on the shoulder. I told him I didn't know much yet, the cops still investigating, blah, blah, blah. He acted like I wasn't telling him the whole story and left when somebody he knew better walked in.

But I was telling him the whole story. A guy had died, somebody who worked for the paper, and what I knew about it would make a two-inch brief. An AP person from Portland who got stuck with the late police check would know as much just from calling the state police dispatcher in Augusta or the Androscoggin Sheriff's Department.

I wondered what had been in the Sun. Probably a couple of grafs, inserted on the local page or maybe the jump. There was a paper in pieces at the end of the counter. I walked down and got it and looked through it until I found the brief on the local section front.

It was boilerplate. What the Times did when somebody without notoriety or celebrity was killed. The drug runner from the Dominican Republic. The kid from the projects in Brooklyn. The Russian lady from Brighton Beach. In New York, you couldn't keep up. You couldn't keep track. After a while, you barely could care, but in Androscoggin, we didn't have that excuse.

I left the restaurant and, in no hurry, walked down Main Street toward the office.

A couple of old ladies from the senior center smiled and nodded as they passed. Outside Perry's Variety, David Mattson from the school board waved his folded Sun and jumped into his double-parked Toyota pickup. One of the secretaries from the municipal building, a very nice grandmother named Toni, swished out of Alfond's Bakery with a bag of something and coffees in a tray and said "Hi" over her shoulder.

I said "Good morning" back and kept walking. I walked the length of the street, all two blocks of it, and turned around at the empty Mobil station on the corner. From there, I crossed the street and headed back toward the Review office, looking up at the false fronts of the downtown buildings, thinking, for the thousandth time, that they were like the facades on buildings in the Old West. The names of the original owners were inscribed in granite and cement at the top of each building: Carpenter, Hyde, Bushnell, Burr. The names of the actual builders, the Italian, Scottish, Irish, and, as a result of one of those quirks of immigration, Lithuanian laborers who shoveled and laid brick and nailed down floors, were not inscribed anywhere. I often had thought that this was an injustice, and I thought so again as I walked along, knowing that what I really didn't want to do was run the gauntlet at the office.

But here it was.

"Jack," Cindy said.

"I know," I said.

She came around the counter and walked toward me, her eyes dark with mascara but pink from crying. A couple of feet in front of me she stopped and fingered the gold chain that disappeared inside her blouse somewhere around the unbuttoned third button. There were times when I wouldn't have minded Cindy throwing her arms around me, but this wasn't one of them. I sidestepped and headed for my desk, leaving her in mid-scene.

I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to come out and say a few words, maybe make them feel better, but more likely to give everybody a chance to savor the excitement of this event, to speculate and hear everyone else's speculations about what had happened to Arthur.

They waited out front. Cindy and Marion and Paul and Vern and Martin, whom I could hear talking to nobody but everybody as I took off my parka.

"Awful thing. Awful."

Martin came around the partition and stood five feet away. When I looked over at him, he continued.

"Awful thing. Awful."

I nodded.

"I can't believe it," Martin said, hands in the pockets of his wool car coat, his galoshes doing a little shuffle on the carpet. He took his right hand out of his pocket and pushed his glasses back on his nose. They slid back down.

"I can't believe it," he said.

"You knew him a long time, didn't you?"

"Oh, Godfrey, yes. For ... I don't know how many years. Way back. I can't believe it."

"Nope," I said.

"You get over there?"

"Yeah. For a while."

"Much to see?"

"Not much. A body and a bunch of firemen. You know what those scenes are like. A little different when it's somebody you know."

"Well, I would imagine, yes," Martin said. He fiddled with the zipper on his coat. "You get an obit yet?" he asked.

"Not that I've seen. Beauceville's doing it, I guess. But Arthur's still down in Augusta. Autopsy."

"Oh, yes. They'd have to do that. Find out what happened, I mean. What will they try to see? If he was ... if he died before he was in the water, that kind of thing?"

"That kind of thing," I said.

I could hear the others still talking out front and I didn't want to say all this twice. But Martin was still standing there. Martin Wiggins, the retired editor, probably wishing he was back at the big desk, feeling the adrenaline run, that pumped-up, surging feeling you get when you have a big breaking story.

And then he came to.

"Well, I'm sorry," Martin said. "If you need any help fleshing out the obit, let me know. I'll be home. You know, just little things the funeral home might not know. He didn't have any family, you know."

"Why don't you call them, then," I said.

"Maybe I will. Might save everybody some time. Hey, don't mean to talk business at a time like this, but you got any problems with my column? Want to look it over while I'm still here? They really were quite a team. Lost by two points in overtime. Quite a game. Would have been New England champs of nineteen fifty-one. That Waterville team was tough, though. Fast? My goodness, they had some speed. But you got to go. I'll be home, Jack."

Even Martin. Business as usual.

"Okay, Martin. Thanks," I said, and he walked out, saying, "Carry on, troops" to the group that was still waiting for me to come and deliver a eulogy for Arthur Bertin.

"I'm not sure what to say," I said. They still waited.

"What can you say? Arthur's gone. We don't know what happened, but we know we'll miss him and his contribution to this paper. You guys know even better than me. You worked with him for what-ten years?"

"More like twenty," Marion said, hands wrapped around her I (HEART) MOM coffee mug. "He did pictures for Martin forever."

"We've got sports stuff in the files that goes back twenty-five years," Vern said. "Photograph for the Review by Arthur T. Bertin. Must've been when he was in high school."

"Maybe we could run three or four pages of his best stuff," I said. "A kind of tribute to the guy."

"The collected works?" Vern asked.

"That'd be fun to sell," Paul said. "Jesus. Right before Christmas."

"Who could say no?" I said. "Without seeming like a real dink?"

"You got time? I'll make a list," Paul said.

"We wouldn't make money on it," I said. "We could take the proceeds, which would be what? A couple hundred bucks? So you could take the money and use it for something in Arthur's memory. Something for the high school. A trophy case or something. They have a darkroom up there?"

"Yeah, they do," Vern said.

He was leaning against the counter next to Cindy, who still looked upset. Once in character, she found it hard to come back out.

"Well, I don't know, but I don't think it's right," she said.

"What?" Vern said. "Selling Arthur's pictures? Using his untimely end as a vehicle for commerce? Hey, look what they do with George Washington."

"No. Being open like this. We should be closed in honor of his memory."

Paul rolled his eyes and blew smoke toward the window.

"But you didn't even like the guy," he said.

"That's not true, and it's got nothing to do with it, whether I or you or anybody else liked him. It's respect, for God's sake. What do you think? We should just say, 'Good morning, Mr. Smith, or whatever. Yes, it's too bad that Arthur is dead, drowned or whatever, but that will be seven-fifty plus tax, running for three weeks, Autos for Sale.' "

"This is a newspaper," Paul said, exasperated. "It isn't a friggin' jewelry store, Cynthia. It's a public institution, you know? They don't close the hospital 'cause some doctor's mother-in-law kicks off."

"A business is still-"

"All right, all right," I shouted over them. "Here's the way it's gonna work. Business department. Cindy. Marion. Paul if you want. Put a sign on the door. 'Due to the death of Arthur Bertin, the Review business office will be closed until tomorrow, Wednesday, November 13. It will reopen at eighty-thirty a.m. Thank you for your consideration.' Or something like that."

"Well, I'm working," Paul said, mashing his cigarette in an ashtray. "I've got about forty accounts to hit-"

"Well, don't make it sound like I just want the day off because-"

"Cindy!" I said. "It's okay. You're right. We should do something. Show our respect. But you better do it quick before you get people in here wanting to know what happened."

"What did happen?" Cindy said.

I started to answer. Stopped.

Even in the throes of grief, they were all ears.

I told the story, trying to ease past the details about Arthur's postmortem appearance, but Marion, of all people, wanted to know how he looked. The maternal side of her coming through.

But Cindy and Marion closed up in no time, flying out the door to go and spend the day shopping or hanging around at home or any other way they could show their respect for Arthur. I set to the job of throwing the mail away, filling my wastebasket with important press releases. On the other side of the room, Vern was on the phone, his big sack of a body slouched in his chair. When I put on my jacket to go to the police station he put his hand over the receiver.

"Cops?" he said.

"Yeah," I said. "See what they know."

"How long does it take to do an autopsy?"

"I don't know. Couple of hours. I suppose it depends on what they find."

He started talking, calling somebody "Coach."

I went back and got the medical examiner's number off the Rolodex, where it had been since an old man had shot his wife over on Oxford Street, last Christmas.