The closet had been cleaned out, and there were clothes all over the floor. A note on the table asked Devlin's sister to please turn off the water so the pipes wouldn't freeze that winter and put antifreeze in the toilet bowl.

Mathew went back outside and across the lawn. He turned and fired a brace of birdshot at the house, and kept on walking.

Back in the dark old house of his mother, he meticulously, with his black comb, combed his blond hair in a ducktail in front of the small kitchen mirror just like in a movie, even though he never had anywhere to go.

THREE.

Cynthia knew that everything had changed for them, that the lawsuit showed their hidden contours of greed and self-interested pity.

She could see that something grander must propel her future now. Any idea that she cared for others was decimated once you studied her face and heard her laughter. Yet those who knew she did not care for them cared deeply for her. Her wild beauty had seduced many, some boys as young as eighteen.

Cynthia had been Mathew's most loyal adviser and friend, but it was time to loosen her tethers. Mathew was neither trusted nor liked. She saw this as a liability to herself. If he was to go to jail she must distance herself now. She must give Mathew up. It would be for the best. To escape prosecution herself, she would hand them Rudy Bellanger too. She was preparing to phone the police to test the ground.

But the next morning the telephone rang. It was Rudy Bellanger. He said he had to see her.

"I can't possibly," she said.

"It is urgent," he said and hung up.

Rudy came to her at ten on a quiet, bright day. She was sitting on a green chair in her bedroom. Her bedroom suite looked foreign to the house, as if it kept as its guest some countrified prima donna. Many houses in the country have a room like this, done over by a sister or a daughter who could never leave home.

Before he could speak she told him she didn't want anything; that it was not in her nature to want, but that he was behind in payments for the child; and that she had never planned to become dependent on him.

"I have no more money," Rudy said. "Honest to God I don't have any - I've paid you, I've paid Mathew - both of you have come to me over the last five years -"

She looked closely at him. From the time of Teresa's birth until now she had received some nineteen thousand dollars from him. Could it be that even this pittance would run out?

"What do you mean, you have no more money?"

"My wife has a trust fund and a residual from the pulp mill from the years when Leo sublet his land to them - but it's not all that much, perhaps no more than forty thousand left. She needs care; she is in a wheelchair now more and more. And someone is telling lies about - us - to her - about - the child. She has not spoken to me in months - and neither has Leo."

"Well what about Teresa - should she suffer because of that!"

Rudy nodded glumly and waited patiently to tell her why he had come.

"I've suffered because of you," she said. "My God, it's my own fault for falling in love with a married man." Then she shed a tear, as easily as she did everything else.

He stared at her face, her dark hair and tight slacks, and wondered if this was true. He was vain enough to hope that it was. He smiled slightly, like a child.

Cynthia's eyes brightened. "You know I never meant to harm you, Rudy - I was the one that kept them away from you as best I could - it was Mathew - wasn't it. Connie and Mathew and you - all in this together. I have to go to the police. I mean, if you go to Dorchester - I don't want to go - really, I've been harbouring fugitives - Mathew, and you. Even though I love you this is very serious stuff. My love has made my head all wobbly."

"Your head wobbly -"

"Yes - and I've prayed to the Virgin - look." She pointed in regal fashion to an old picture of the Virgin Mary. "I prayed to her to get her act together and help me. The Virgin told me, in kind of a little voice, that I was blinded by love for you - and I think the Virgin Mary is telling me to turn you in - it would be for the best, wouldn't it?"

"God - no," Rudy said. "I kept quiet, now you have to."

"Why?" Cynthia asked innocently. "Hmm?"

"I - I could be harmed. If I go to jail, I mean - if you love me as you say - and I know - I mean, I've prayed to the Virgin as well - but, well - you can't take everything she says so seriously!"

Cynthia stared at him blankly.

"I would be culpable in everything - I'd get ten years in jail. I couldn't face that," Rudy whispered.

"What am I to do? I'm a nobody, just a little country girl who likes to listen to Dwight Yoakum and Steve Earle, but I refuse to go to jail as a nobody. It's high time I was a somebody, came forward and had a little article written about me. How's Gladys?" she said, lighting a cigarette.

Rudy didn't answer.

"Rudy, what do you do during the day? I never see you, so you must do something."

"I'm at the unemployment office looking for work. I was washing windows in town."

Cynthia burst out laughing, a coarse, self-indulgent, and provocative laugh. Rudy had started out washing windows at McVicer's store twenty-five years before.

"It doesn't do any good to laugh," Rudy whispered. He felt as if needles had been shoved through his body, and he remembered his own laughter at Elly when he showed her the gold money clip. "With Leo's store burned I can't do much - washing windows is a job - I don't know what else I'm going to do with myself."

"Where will all of Leo's money go?" Cynthia asked.

Rudy said nothing. He looked out the back window at the string of cottages below.

"If Connie changes his story - poor Mathew is in a mess -" Cynthia continued, "and you too. And you know they'd just as soon charge an innocent man as a guilty one. My worries are for my mother -" She took a drag of her cigarette and scrutinized him. "And your wife - if you have to go to jail as well."

Rudy felt the air on his skin, and realized that this was the moment he had been dreading for years. The moment when people he trusted would consider him expendable.

"But you were the one," Cynthia said. "In some ways you hired Mathew to do everything. How will Leo take that!"

There was a long pause. Then Rudy looked at her.

"Please - I've just come to do you another favour."

"What?" Cynthia said suspiciously.

"You asked me to introduce you to Leo McVicer."

"I never asked you that," Cynthia said, flushing. "I hope you didn't tell him I asked you that."

"I was told to tell you that he wants to see you - he told me to tell you to go to his house - I'm just bringing you a message. But please don't tell him anything - it's the only thing I ask. Please."

"He wants to see me - why, in God's name?" Cynthia said at the same moment he was begging.

Then they were both abruptly silent, and she looked at him with a certain gravity, and just as one might with an errand boy, she had nothing more to say to him at all.

FOUR.

My mother was ill that day, and I was with her as I saw Cynthia leave, smelled smoke and early fall, heard far off the short huff of a young moose that I knew I would call and butcher. I did not know where Cynthia was going in her swaying way that seemed to squander so much, like the scent of late-summer flowers, the overripe apple bins of fall.

I saw her leave in a plain summer dress, the length of which was somewhere above her knee. After she left I saw Mathew Pit, looking sick, come into the yard and walk toward the brook. There he sat on an old chaise longe staring at the water, as he sometimes did when fighting off a binge. Cynthia left in the other direction.

I know what happened that day, just as I know what has happened all the days before. I wish I could have changed just one action; the reflection of that change might vastly have altered me.

Their back path led through the gravel pit and to the dark, worn path through the spruce grove that smelled so green to a hidden trampled field behind Leo McVicer's. I know how she must have moved, for I envisioned her. Hers was a remarkable journey - for it was a journey that would radically shift the balance of power and loyalty for myself and others.

She came to a tree, and paused in a moment of splendid isolation, a woman as proud as the world, living in solitude. She came to McVicer's back fence and tried to climb it, catching her leg on the wire and tearing the skin.

McVicer was sitting in the porch staring out at the bay and winging a red alder switch when she came to the front of the house. The water had taken on the look of desolation that water takes on in September, after the vacationers have again sought the comfort of the town or the cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Boston.

So our shore was now abandoned, and the water suspended for one second or two before the maelstrom. Leo, too, looked as if he had postponed his slide into old age. And flush with his recent victories - for he knew Mathew and Connie and Rudy would go under now - he was offering a laurel wreath to the one he wished to save. It was the same bestowal he had once given Gerald Dove, or a dozen others over the years. His power allowed him to pick and choose. He saw her walk through his back gate, knock on the door, and enter with a smile.

"Why, you are hurt," Leo said. He jumped up in a spry way and took her hand, which was large for a woman's. "Look - let me get something for you, girl -"

He pressed his hand against the small of her back and led her into the living room.

"Really, I'm fine," she said.

"Fine - nonsense altogether." He left, and she was alone to gaze about the room. He came back with cotton balls and iodine and kneeled before her. She let him take her leg in his hands and wash her cut, and she stared at the top of his white head, cropped close, with reddish wrinkled skin on the back of his neck, and his hair unkempt; not like a man with so much money. And when he stood she was suddenly surprised at how poorly fitted and unnatural looking his false teeth were. His life was in the woods, and though he might have thousands tucked away, he still called mathematics figures and men with education eggheads.

He took a seat beside her. He smelled of spruce gum and earth, of moments cast against the ice and snow that should never be a cause of disrespect. But now children thought him an old man and of no importance at all. They did not even care about the Second World War, let alone think it important that he exercised extreme courage in it.

"So, Miss Pit, how is your mom?"

"Please - call me Cynthia - she is okay -" And then her voice changed. "But Trenton's death took a lot out of her."

He was smiling when she said this, and his smile faded, first on the side of his face nearest her.

"That was terrible," he said, "but they get theirs back, you see, those people who cause those things, they never get away. They might think they get away for three or four years, and then suddenly new information comes forward, and the little boy is avenged - and new charges will be laid by Christmas or soon after!"

This startled her, and frightened her as well. He raised his finger and pointed to the ceiling as if it was in God's hands and he alone understood this. Then he glared down at the carpet and looked up suddenly.

He told her that he needed her advice about who might help look after his daughter.

"Oh my, what's wrong?" Cynthia asked, with feigned concern that she could not disguise, and he could not help but detect though he pretended he did not.

"She is an invalid more than ever," he said. "She is depressed too, and has no friends. She used to have a monkey when she was a girl - but he died. Rudy wouldn't allow her none." He paused, his brow furrowed.

"A monkey - ?"

"No - friends - wouldn't allow her no friends."

"Oh yes," Cynthia said.

"She has a wheelchair - but it's very hard for her where the hallways are carpeted. And I've gotten her a hospital bed but it's still out in the garage. Rudy is completely useless - I don't know if you know him?"

"Rudy? Oh yes." Cynthia expressed a slight smile of disapproval that Leo welcomed. It seemed to make her feigned concern for Gladys more acceptable.

"And how is your little girl?" he said, eyeing her quickly.

"Teresa - she's okay - in fact, I was going to bring her today but thought against it - I'll bring her over some day maybe to see you."

"She was named after Mother Teresa, I bet," Leo said.

"Oh yes," Cynthia said, although this was the first she had heard of it.

He nodded. Then they were both silent. He felt attracted to her, and she let him be. She crossed her legs suddenly to look at her cut, which allowed him a slight view of her panties, and then she looked up at him with large brown eyes.

"I can do it any time," she said, without changing her position.

"Pardon me?"

"I could help your daughter -" she said, rubbing the scrape with her fingers. Her nails were painted purple. "I've taken a course in homecare because of Trenton. It was a while ago, and I don't have references - but I can help her in and out of the bath, take her for walks, cook a meal - you know, that kind of thing."

"That kind of thing," was said softly and coyly, as if it was a coded message or soft trap, and she looked again at the scrape.

Then she put her knee down and pressed her legs together shyly.

There was another long pause, and Leo McVicer scrutinized her. Then he smiled, once again showing the poor fit of his false teeth.

"Of course - that would be good -"

When she got up to leave he walked behind her. He suddenly felt the same man he was years ago, when he had walked into a dispute at his sawmill and taken a peavey out of the hand of the man who had promised to crush his skull.

But Cynthia had also gone through a metamorphosis. Suddenly she was not the Cynthia who had talked to Rudy that morning, but was concerned and tolerant of others, was not envious of Gladys's money but was her compatriot, who wished to help and protect her. When Cynthia turned at the door Leo was very close to her and her breasts pressed against him.

"Oh!" she said.

He laughed uncertainly and grabbed her shoulders to keep his balance.

"You come tomorrow afternoon and we will work out the money - and, well -"

"Of course," she said. "I'll be here at three o'clock."

She left the house along the walkway and disappeared, while he went outside and straightened gunnysacks over the newly planted pear trees. They never grew here, but nonetheless were planted every few years on a whim. He watched her walking away, saw her lilting sway, and his heart leapt in old fire and joy.