"On a little kid."

Roxanne sipped her wine.

"You know what else? She was pregnant. The mother. Seven months anyway. When she came to the door she was smoking a cigarette."

"God," I said. "Some of these people should be sterilized. The kids don't have a chance, and their kids won't either."

Roxanne held her wineglass on her lap.

"You sick of talking about it?" I said.

She shook her head.

"It isn't that. I don't know. It's just that I don't like it when people say things like that. 'They should be sterilized.' 'Take 'em out and shoot 'em.' It means you've stopped thinking about the problem. A lot of people do that and it's-"

"I know. It's an easy out. Doesn't accomplish anything."

She leaned over and kissed me softly on the neck.

"You're still sexy, even if you're a reactionary," she said. "So how's the paper. Raking any good muck?"

I managed a bit of a smile.

"Nothing too juicy. We had, I guess you could call it, an unfortunate thing happen. Sort of awful, really."

She paled.

"Not to me," I said. "To Arthur. Arthur Bertin."

"The little photographer guy who came up to us in that restaurant?"

"Yeah. Well, he's gone. Dead. They found him in a canal down at the mill. Near the mill. Yesterday. He was drowned."

"My God," Roxanne gasped.

I told her about the kids, the fire truck, the boat.

"I can't believe it. He seemed nice that day. Remember how sort of shy he was? He had been at a football game and he was having hot chocolate to warm up, and it was like he didn't want to look me right in the eye but he kept almost peeking at me."

"He was afraid of women. Especially young, attractive ones."

"Well, what happened?"

"I don't know. They say-the medical examiner, I mean-says it was an accidental drowning. But I don't buy it. Where he was is in the middle of nowhere, and he didn't even have a car. So what did he do? Walk down there in the middle of the night to look at the view and get too close to the edge?"

"What do the police think?" she said.

"Accidental death until they find something that says otherwise."

"They must have their reasons, don't you think?"

"Yeah, like they don't feel like worrying about it, like it might involve some work. It's a big rubber stamp. Bang, bang. Case closed."

"Did he kill himself?" Roxanne asked.

"I don't know. Maybe. He seemed fine to me, though. Strange, the way he was, but happy enough. Basketball is about to start up and he really liked shooting basketball photos. It was warm, which is why he hated football. He said he had bad circulation, and he'd freeze standing around outside like that.

"But it's not just that. He wasn't the type to do something dramatic like that. I don't know. Something so final. He hemmed and hawed over everything. Which shot was better, which one to print, did I like this one, did I like that one better. Drive you crazy."

I finished my beer and ate a spoonful of chili.

"This is really good. You don't cook bad for a sexpot."

Roxanne sat with her legs crossed. I was glad she didn't paint her toenails.

"So what are you going to write?" she asked, fiddling in the chili with her spoon.

"I don't know. A news story. Write it straight. That's all I can do right now. I'll do some kind of profile, too. 'Stobit,' they call it. Part story, part obituary. But I'll keep pushing. Do an editorial. Maybe if I write enough nasty things about the cops and the medical examiner, they'll reopen the case. Bow to media pressure. Appoint a special commission to investigate allegations of neglect of duty and corruption."

"Have you ever had that happen?"

"Written stories that resulted in commissions being formed?"

"Yeah."

"Actually, I was involved in one. The Journal, in Providence. They had this hotshot investigative reporter who did some stories on a Mafia judge. Guy ended up being booted off the bench. I was just a gofer. But that was the Journal. This is the Androscoggin Review. There's something called the clout factor, and I don't know how much we have."

I finished my beer and put it down on the floor by Roxanne's shoes.

"I guess I'll find out," I said.

"You've got clout with me," Roxanne said.

"Just so you don't want me to tie you up."

"Do people really do that?" she giggled.

"Don't ask me. I just know what I see in Times Square."

"And what's that?"

"Nothing as nice as what I see right now."

"You didn't really go there, did you? To those movies, I mean."

"Hell no. I just went there to buy heroin."

"What am I getting myself into here?" she said, putting her arms around me.

"I've been asking myself that question," I said, kissing her deeply, and then deeper than that.

6.

I really had worked on a story like that. It was back when I was a young would-be hotshot working eighty hours a week at the Journal. The story had to do with bid-rigging and the construction industry and this judge who was on the take, but I didn't actually write it. I was what they called a contributing reporter, doing groundwork as part of the investigative team and getting my name at the end of the story in agate. The reporter who did the writing later won a Pulitzer for his work on the Mafia. He accepted it and packed his family off to Miami to work for the Herald. Rhode Island was a small state, and a lot of people didn't like him.

But I had never felt that I was in any danger back then, meeting construction-company sources in shopping malls and rousting Mafia types in their offices. Nobody went after reporters, and besides, I was twenty-four and I wasn't afraid of anything.

In eleven years, I'd changed.

Over the years, I'd gotten the late-night phone calls, the notes nailed to the door of the apartment. Bad grammar. Atrocious spelling. Threats of violence and a sad commentary on the state of public education. But even then, I'd had the protection of being one of millions. I could disappear into the crowd, hide behind the big security guards who stood in the Times lobby. In Androscoggin, there was no place to hide.

It was morning and I stayed in bed and thought about things. The Journal. Roxanne in bed. God, she was voracious in a single-minded, almost athletic sort of way. After the self-doubting neurotics I'd been with, it was almost baffling. Could she really be that well-adjusted?

She had left while it was still dark, a figure in a skirt and white blouse, bending over me with shoes in her hand. She'd said she'd call me, and then there was the faint whir of the Subaru motor and the sound of gravel and leaves crunching in the driveway.

Exit, stage left.

Her assessment of Arthur was interesting. That he was polite and nice. With Roxanne, there were no snide remarks about his clothes, his hair. Ridiculing wouldn't have accomplished much, she'd probably say. And if you didn't make fun of his clothes, there wasn't much more to say.

Arthur was very private. He never talked about himself, his family. He'd never given me a clue of what he did when he wasn't shooting pictures for the paper. I hadn't seen a television or even a radio in his studio. Maybe photography was his life. His photography. The Knights of Columbus bowling champs. The Garden Club and the Androscoggin High School basketball team.

The phone rang once and stopped, jarring me loose from the bed. I stood in front of the window for a second, naked from the night before. Outside, it was cloudy and raw and looked cold enough to snow. I grabbed my robe, picked up two empty Molson bottles from the floor, and went to the kitchen to make breakfast.

I was out of the house at 8:30. The Volvo started hard, and I sat for a minute to let it warm up. It was a car that taught you Nordic discipline. A good student, I waited for the temperature gauge to inch past the line next to "C" and started downtown through the back streets.

Lawns were covered with a film of frosted oak leaves and a light tentative snow was beginning to fall. I drove down streets lined with old Victorian houses, the town's showplaces of the last century. Some were faded but intact. Others had been chopped into apartments, the intricate detail yanked off as it rotted. The doctors and lawyers and lumber and paper barons were gone, and another era had come to a not-so-graceful end.

The new money did not build mansions. The new money was mill money, and it was earned at sixteen dollars an hour, time and a half on weekends and holidays. It built ranch houses on slabs with oversize garages for ski boats and snowmobiles and new four-wheel-drive pickups. It bought security and luxury that hadn't even been dreamed of by earlier generations. It was hard-earned union money, and sometimes I wondered how long it would last.

At the west end of town, I cut in on a convoy of pulp trucks lumbering toward the mill. On the upgrades, the drivers downshifted and the trucks shuddered under the strain, coughing big clouds of diesel smoke. I followed the dirty orange warning flag that dangled from the waving tip of the longest spruce log in the load of the truck in front of me. The tree was spindly, maybe eight inches at the stump and thirty years old. That was what they were cutting now because most of the bigger stumpage had been cut. The country wiped its noses and kitchen counters faster than trees could grow in the Maine woods.

Where the pulpwood procession went straight on Route 108, I took a left and drove past the boxcars and storage sheds down to the canal road. When I pulled up to where Arthur had been pulled out, two kids, thirteen or fourteen, were standing on the wall. They looked over their shoulders at me when I got out of the car. One of them flicked a cigarette out into the water.

I walked up and said hello. They looked at me suspiciously, then grunted a guttural greeting. We stood there, the three of us.

They were wearing high-top sneakers with the laces undone. Their blue denim jackets had designs scrawled on the back with ballpoint pen. Red bandannas hung limply from their back pockets.

We looked down at the black water. The jagged chunks of ice broken by the rescue boat had refrozen in a zigzag pattern like the fruit in Jell-O salad.

"You a cop or something?" one of the kids suddenly asked.

He looked at me defiantly, one eye covered with a swatch of blond hair.

"No," I said. "I work for the paper."

"The paper here? I worked for the paper. Had a route but quit it."

"Too much work?"

"Naah. I didn't feel like doing it."

We looked at the water some more. It looked bitterly cold but deadly as hot tar. The walls were sheer granite slabs, stacked on top of each other. There was no easy way out, and the water wouldn't give you much time to think about it.

"A guy bought it here," the short kid said.

"Yeah, I heard," I said.

"Friend of mine saw him. In the water there, with his arms out like this."

He held his arms out in front of him and stuck out his tongue and tilted his head. His friend snorted. The short kid grinned at me.

"My friend knew he was dead. He freaked right out, man."

"Scared him, huh?"

"No, it didn't scare him or nothin' like that. It was just, like, gross. Like the guy was in there floating and everything, and he was dead. It was some old guy. He bit it, man. Big-time."

We stood and looked down at our feet. Four dirty sneakers. Two tan leather boots.

The kid turned toward the Volvo.

"What kind of a car is that?"

"Volvo."

"That from Japan or someplace?"

"Sweden."

"What?"

"It's Swedish. Made in Sweden. It's a country in Europe."

"What is it? An antique or something?"

"It's not that old. It's a sixty-four."

"That's old. Me and him weren't even born yet."

"Nope."

"I've got a dirt bike. Suzuki two-fifty. I bet it's faster than that."