At five-thirty, I turned the radio on again. A woman from Georgia was telling the announcer about the time she saw the inside of Tammy Wynette's tour bus. The woman said it was "beeyootiful," and said she understood that Tammy was a regular person, too. I turned the radio off and scraped some more.

Ten more minutes, I told myself. Ten more minutes and home. I checked my watch, looking down for just a second.

And I almost missed it.

The figure came out of the darkness at the far side of the building, walked quickly to Arthur's door, and disappeared inside.

I had been right.

Without taking my eyes off the door, I bent and tied my boots, first the left, then the right. I took the flashlight from the passenger seat and stuck it in my right pocket, then popped the door latch. I slid out from behind the steering wheel and closed the door but didn't latch it. Then I squatted by the front left wheel and watched.

The figure had moved quickly, as if he had done this many times and had every move down. If he was as efficient inside the building, I might not have a lot of time.

There was a lug wrench in the trunk, the kind with a single-size head. I rose from my crouch and then eased back down.

After another minute, I crept to the back of the car and opened the trunk slowly and carefully. I felt for the wrench and found it half under the spare tire. I took a glove off and slid it out, then went back to the front of the car and waited. For what? When should I move? I didn't want to lose him. Maybe I should go and stand by the door. When he came out, get a look at the face. If he tried anything, use the wrench. Could I actually hit somebody with it? I didn't know. If he swung first, maybe I could.

I got up and crouched back down. Twice. Three times. I had to move. Couldn't move. The sky was turning from black to navy blue. Now, I thought. Go. I stood up and he slipped from the door. He was going around the far corner. He was gone.

Still crouching, I ran across the street, the wrench down close to my leg. At the corner of the building, I stopped. Listened. Stepped out.

Nothing.

I ran around to the back, past trash cans. He was halfway down the side street, walking on the edge of the pavement. I followed. He was walking quickly. At the end of the street, he went left, out of sight. I broke into a trot, picking my way around pieces of ice and snow that crunched underfoot.

There were streetlights on and I tried to see a face. I made out a dark jacket, dark pants. A black hat, maybe knit. No face. Not big, not small.

We passed one street, then another. I needed a car. At least a car and a license number. I closed to forty yards. Trotted. Backed off. He took the next left and headed back to the main road. I turned the corner. He went between two houses and disappeared.

I sprinted. My boots clumped on the pavement. The houses were dark, with cars in the driveways. I slowed as I got to the backyards. There was a garage, a shed. I banged into a lawn mower, or something like a lawn mower. There was a space in a hedge and I moved through it and ran down another driveway to the next street.

Nothing.

He wasn't in sight. I stood in the middle of the street with the lug wrench in my hand and listened. A truck whined in the distance. Then downshifted. And then I heard it.

A starter grinding. A motor starting. Tires crunching on pavement.

It was another street over. I ran up a driveway but there was a six-foot fence. A dog started barking.

He was gone.

"Damn it all to hell," I said.

I stood there for a minute, forced myself to wait instead of succumbing to the adrenaline-fed urge to get the hell out of there. The dog was still barking, woofing in that rhythmic way dogs bark when they realize that they've got nothing else to do. I walked down the driveway away from the barking and went back to the studio the way I had come, still holding the wrench.

When I got there, everything was still and quiet, as if I had dreamt the whole thing. I looked around once, then went to the door where the person had come in and out. The door was padlocked but the person hadn't unlocked anything. I gave the knob a pull and the hasp came away from the frame. The screws had been stripped or the holes drilled out. The door opened.

Inside, I flipped on my flashlight and walked slowly to the darkroom. It was empty. I checked the sinks. They were wet. I bent and smelled the drain. It smelled of fixer. Whoever it was that made the prints had dumped the chemicals down the drain. I looked at the enlarger. It was clean. The negative holder was still in place.

I walked to the bedroom and flashed the light over the junk. It looked different. The cartons that had been piled everywhere were stacked along the wall. I peered into them. The contents were just stuffed in. Papers and magazines, plastic knives and forks, junk. Someone had emptied the boxes and gone through the stuff and then dumped everything back in. The shelves were the same. Books were in stacks. The toy animals were piled on the floor, like bodies in a mass grave.

What I needed was records. Arthur's records of assignments. The little notebooks he pulled out whenever he thought his pay was wrong. They wouldn't be in the cartons; everything I saw there was old. Arthur the packrat. The notebook he kept with him, like a pen. His wallet. Get out of bed and stuff them in his pockets. First thing. First thing out of bed. The carton that had been beside the bed was gone, probably shoved in with all the others. I flashed the light over them again. They all looked the same.

I got down on the floor and lifted the blankets. The light showed dust and dirt and a newspaper. I pulled it out. The Review, before my time. Front page had a picture of kids holding posters they had drawn. A keeper.

Standing up, I picked up a pillow and shook it. Nothing fell out. I ripped the blankets and sheets off the bed and shook them, too.

Nothing.

The mattress was stained at the center. I patted it reluctantly, then lifted it up and looked underneath. The bottom was stained, too. I pulled it off the bed. Something fell to the floor, next to the wall. I bent down and reached under the bed, through the dust and grime, and pulled it out.

A white reporter's notebook.

22.

The note was still on the table when I got home. I went in and touched Roxanne on the shoulder and she opened her eyes and grabbed the alarm clock.

"I'm late," she said, and bounded out of the bedroom, still in her slip. I heard the shower curtain rustle and the water hiss on. I went into the kitchen and put on water for coffee and got two mugs out of the cupboard. Black for me. Milk and sugar for her. Roxanne trotted from the bathroom to the bedroom, a blue towel held loosely in front of her. It occurred to me that we hadn't made love lately. For good reason, I supposed, but damn, she was sexy.

I made the coffee and put the toast in the toaster as Roxanne came out of the bedroom, zipping a tweed skirt and trying to slide on a pair of black pumps at the same time. She scuffed across the floor and I put a spoonful of sugar in her mug.

"Take it easy," I said.

"You'll get there."

"I know, but this is a first meeting with this family, and they're not going to be too glad to see me in the first place. Never mind being an hour late."

"Where is it?"

"Cumberland."

A good hour and a half away.

"What time?" I asked.

"Family at eight. Support team at seven-fifteen."

"So you'll be a few minutes late."

"So I will," Roxanne said, putting more sugar in her coffee. "Where were you? Did you go out?"

"For a while. I was awake so I went for a ride. I saw somebody come out of Arthur's place. Come out of the studio."

Roxanne stopped in mid-sip.

"At six in the morning?" she said.

"Five-thirty-three."

"Who?"

"Couldn't see."

"Did you call the police?" Roxanne asked.

I looked at her. She put her mug down.

"Jack. What the hell is this? Some kind of game? You act like it is. You act like it's some kind of a game, you against somebody or something or whatever the hell it is. Well, I hope you're having fun playing detective, but I'm not. I feel like I'm in danger. I do, Jack. I feel like I'm in danger and you don't care. You're thinking of yourself or your paper or something, but you're not thinking of me."

"But I am," I said.

"No, you're not. If you were, you'd go to the cops; you'd do something to put an end to this foolishness. Like leave. Oh, God, I don't have time to talk about it now."

Roxanne put her mug in the sink and went into the living room for her coat, which was long and gray. She came back with it on and I stood and went to the door. Her face was hard and grim.

"I'll tell you right out, Jack," she said.

"I don't understand this. I don't feel like you're telling me everything-not at all. Maybe you're protecting me or something, but I just can't live like this. I want to be with you. I think maybe I'm falling in love with you. Maybe it's not even maybe. But I don't want to be here with you. Not here. Not with all this ... this shit going on, Jack; I just can't."

I waited.

"My offer still stands from last night. Effective immediately. Today. Tomorrow. Follow me home. Come to Portland. We could, I don't know-you know what I mean."

"It would be great," I said, "but I can't do it now."

"When? Two weeks? Two months? Two years?"

"I don't know. I can't just run away whenever a problem comes up."

"A problem comes up?" Roxanne said. "Do you have these problems all the time? Getting kidnapped? Getting beat up. Having your girlfriends threatened? What is this? James Bond or something? No, I don't think this is your problem. This stuff with the mill, that's the town's problem. Arthur's dead. I'm sorry it happened, but you didn't do it. Can't you see? You don't have to do all this yourself. Let somebody else worry about something."

I opened my mouth to say something but changed my mind. Roxanne leaned over and kissed me coldly on the cheek, her lips like dry fingers on my skin.

"I've got to go," she said, and opened the door.

"I'll call you," I said, and she walked down the stairs, her pumps snapping on the steps. As her car swung out of the driveway, I pulled out the notebook.

It was white. Spiral-bound. Arthur had doodled long cylindrical shapes on the back cover. Inside the front cover he had written SEPTEM and an arrow pointing to the right. I riffled the pages; the notebook was three-quarters full.

I started at the back. The last entry said SNO MO BANQ. DIX. THURS. 11 O'CLOCK. I remembered that one. It was a promo for a snowmobile club kick-off dinner. I'd asked Arthur to do it the last Thursday we went to the printers. Three days before he died. I flipped the pages toward the front.

A Christmas fair at the Catholic Church in Mexico. A quilt raffle at the Baptist Church in Androscoggin Center. Boy, we used a lot of this stuff. But the people wanted it. What the hell.

That same day, Arthur had noted going to a car accident on Route 17. Next to it, he had written NU. Not used. I remembered that one, too. Nobody had been hurt and the photo was flat. Blah. Under our agreement, Arthur got paid ten bucks for going to something like that, fifteen if we used it. If I didn't pay him for enterprise stuff, the paper would be wall-to-wall fair pictures.

The rest of the stuff looked routine. BBALL AHS. 3 P.M. 11/14. Something Vern had assigned. It had been taken two weeks before Arthur had died. There was an entry for supplies purchased: $48.80 for a case of Tri-X film. More promos. Then back to football, another accident, a fire in a chimney, not used. Another ten bucks.

And there it ended. Thursday to Sunday, the day Arthur's body was found, was a blank. I turned the notebook over and flipped through the reverse side of pages. Nothing.

So what next? Wait for something to happen? Get grabbed again and hope for everybody to break and confess.

I stood leaning against the counter and let the pages of Arthur's notebook flutter. Promo ... basketball ... 90th birthday ... Arthur's existence. The chapter headings of his life, a series of- The entry was toward the back, on a single page, on the reverse side. It was scrawled in big letters, at an angle-written in a hurry.

S/O w/v.

I looked at it. Nothing came to me.

S/O w/v.

Sheriff s office. Wide-vision. Studio office. Sports offering. Sandy Ogden. It wasn't one of the abbreviations Arthur used. I couldn't remember him using it at all. And how would I check? I didn't have any other notebooks, though I was sure Arthur kept them someplace. Looking for them would mean another visit to the studio. They had to be there because Arthur was always digging them out, looking for some piece of trivia, an answer to an offhand question nobody really cared about, or if his pay was short, which it was sometimes, usually because of something I did- His pay.

That's what I did have. Payroll records. We had to keep them for taxes and the feds, and Arthur used the same kind of abbreviations on his pay vouchers. BBALL. PROMO. NU. I had them for the six months I'd been at the paper, anyway. There were more records in the basement someplace. If he had used that one, that S/O w/v, maybe I could find it. Then I could check with the back issues to see what assignment he was talking about. It might work. If it didn't, I wasn't any worse off.

It was snowing lightly again and the streets were greasy and slick. I eased the Volvo down the hill, trying not to ram the Jeep in front of me at the stop sign. It had fat tires and was raised up high, a macho vehicle for a guy with feelings of inadequacy, I figured. The roar from his exhaust when he pulled away confirmed it.

I headed into town, stopping at the light on the downtown side of the bridge and staring idly at the people going into LaVerdiere's.

"Hey," somebody shouted, and I turned, startled. The light changed to green and an old blue pickup, a sixties GMC with a green passenger door, pulled alongside.

It was Cormier. He waved for me to follow and I did, as he made a U-turn in the LaVerdiere's lot and headed back over the bridge and up Penobscot Street, out of town. He drove over the hill to the White Mountain Road and took a right. I followed him a couple of miles before he pulled off onto a dirt side road. He wouldn't try the same thing again, would he? I was about to turn around and blast out of there when he pulled over, with nothing in sight but birch and poplar woods. Cormier got out and started to walk back. I got out and walked toward him.

"Hey," he said.

"How's it going?" I said back.

"Hey, okay," Cormier said.

We were standing beside the truck, which was rusted, with big gaping holes in the bed. Where there weren't holes, there was a gas can and a Jonsered chain saw and a few dozen beer cans, Bud talls. Maybe he just drove around until they all fell out.

Cormier was wearing a faded denim jacket, jeans, and boots. His hat was green camouflage and advertised Winchester ammunition.

"Hey, listen," he said. "How much will that window run you? I can give you the money, but I' m not gonna be around to, like, get it fixed."

"You got off?"

"Filed. Fifty bucks. Lawyer got it done this morning."

"Not a bad deal."

"What the hell," Cormier said. "About what it was worth."

I shrugged. He looked away again. Nobody had told him about Dale Carnegie.