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the paint-splattered floorboards. Apollo, the younger and more vigorous, licked Adam's hands, and managed to lie on the floor in such a way that his head was at Adam's feet and his twitchy tail fell across Augusta's cork shoes. It was a quiet, domestic moment, as close to an intimate moment as Adam would allow.

It was time for Augusta to leave. Yet Augusta was reluctant to leave.

Adam walked with her outside, to her car. It was a handsome expensive sleeky black new-model European car, rather out of place in Adam's weed-edged cinder drive, and Augusta never slipped into its leathery interior without thinking All that I've given up, to drive this car, is it worth it?

Maybe! Adam was in a subdued mood, for which Augusta blamed herself.

She said, "What do you believe in, then, Adam?" and he said, "I believe in grace." "Grace!" Augusta smiled uncertainly. "I believe in grace, too.

Though I've never been certain what it is." Adam said: "Grace is a moment of insight. A moment of beauty, and purity.

Though it could be a moment of supreme ugliness, I suppose. A sudden swift aerial view. We're lifted up out of ourselves, like out of clay pots, and we see. In an instant, we know."

"But, Adam-what do we know?"

Augusta spoke sincerely, anxiously. Wanting to take Adam's big-knuckled hands in hers and grip them against her heart.

Adam shrugged, and laughed. "We don't. We never know. We make our way by faith, and we never know where in hell we're going."

I * *, Augusta had flown to Atlanta. But she hadn't taken another plane out of Atlanta. She'd checked into an airport hotel and slept. She was exhausted, she was deeply shaken, confused. She slept late and swam in the hotel pool, in slow measured luxuriant laps. No makeup, her skin glaring pale, and her hair brushed back flat. She exuded no sexual allure, she attracted the attention of no men. It was easy not to be seen: you simply stopped looking at others. It was easy to feel no guilt about leaving your husband and family: you simply stopped thinking of them.

Never had Augusta been so close to a murderous rage as she'd been at the Thwaites' door, and she never wanted to feel such ugly emotion again.

"The girl Samantha will grow up without knowing anything of Adam, who saved her life. Of course. The parents won't want to tell her, out of shame. It's only natural. In their place I'd probably behave the same way.

Fuck them." She hoped never to think of the Thwaites again.

Middle Age: A Romance **

From Atlanta she moved in a southerly direction; it was November and beginning to be cold in the north. She rented a car and drove through Georgia, avoiding the interstate, staying in roadside motels. She knew that a "missing" person, an adult, would not be the object of a search by police, no matter how badly Owen Cutler wanted his wife back. Yet she half-surmised she might be discovered, if she drove on I-, and stayed in high-quality hotels of the kind she and Owen normally patronized. But several times she weakened, she came close to revealing herself: she telephoned her sons, her daughter. She did miss them. (Did she?) She did feel a tinge of guilt, for surely she'd upset them. (And why not? They'd upset her, plenty. Now it was Mother's turn.) With slow fingers she dialed their memorized numbers preparing to say, "Hey, it's me. Your ridiculous mother," but somehow she could not utter these words. For these were false words. She didn't feel ridiculous, she felt genuine. She could not say, with an apologetic little laugh, "Hello, darling! It's me. I'm sorry to have worried you," because in fact she wasn't sorry. She would never apologize to her children again.

Augusta continued in her southerly direction. There were relatives in Jacksonville, Florida, and in Palm Beach, girl cousins of hers, and her old, beloved college roommate, now divorced, lived in a luxurious residence in St. Petersburg. Vaguely Augusta had been assuming she would stay with one of these, she'd be welcome and her whereabouts kept secret, but she continued south past Jacksonville and the prospect of spending time in Palm Beach among people of the kind one meets in Palm Beach filled her with repugnance, and she showed no inclination to drive across the state to St. Petersburg, where, amid affection and gaiety and a good deal of drinking, she'd have been very welcome, and invited to stay through the winter. I can't. I can't be Augusta any longer. In resort towns along the eastern Florida coast she slept, walked on the windblown beach, fasted and "did" yoga, and slept; she was neglecting to shave her underarms, and indifferent to her hair becoming shapeless and streaked with silver at the hairline. At malls she bought cheap, comfortable clothes: stretch-waist polyester slacks, pullovers in bright pastels, cotton knit sweaters. She was surprised to see how attracttive she was-not glamorous, not beautiful: attractive-without makeup. Freckles emerged on her fair skin, her eyes without mascara were the eyes of a sane, intelligent woman of youthful middle age. Still, she had relapses: a ravenous sexual appetite swept upon her, in a Fort Pierce cocktail lounge she picked up a forty-year-old ponytailed guitarist and brought him back to her beachside motel room with a *

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supply of lavender condoms and a picnic basket of smoked salmon, crusty French bread, brie, grapes, and several bottles of good Italian wine. There were similar relapses in Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, and Surfside. And then Augusta was in Miami Beach.

Here, her relapse took the form of checking into the luxury Loews on the beach. Openly she dined in the hotel's opulent dining room instead of ordering room service. She had cocktails on the terrace overlooking the ocean. She had her hair "done," a much-needed manicure and pedicure; she bought parrot-green silk trousers and a matching blouse low-cut to show the tops of her creamy breasts. She strolled along the beach, she shopped in boutiques, guilty in her old, absurd pleasures. ("But it won't last, Adam. I swear!") After a week in Miami Beach she began to notice a man covertly watching her, following her. Out of nowhere he'd appeared: in the hotel lobby, at the edge of the pool as she swam laps, in the cocktail lounge, on the beach. The man had a ravaged, but still handsome dark-tanned face and grizzled Indian-fighter hair that spilled from his bald pate onto his shoulders. Like few other men in Miami Beach he wore dark clothes, string ties, belts with oversized silver buckles. My stalker Augusta thought him. He was sexy and swaggering even as (Augusta, a woman of contradictions, could appreciate this) he was trying hard not to be noticed.

My stalker was a few years older than Augusta, with an eye for a woman of her ample figure. More than once, their eyes caught and a frisson of excitement passed between them. Augusta felt a quicksilver pang in her groin, desire like an electric shock. She turned away and would have left the terrace (it was twilight, cocktail hour) but turned back unexpectedly, to catch my stalker staring at her. She went to him, in a swath of perfume, furious and trembling and bold demanding, "Are you following me? Why? "

In this way Augusta Cutler met Elias West, the private investigator in her husband's hire.

T West's face! Here was a cunning crafty man who carried a (registered, legal) handgun beneath his left armpit, like a "private eye' in a Hollywood movie of the forties. Here was a man so skilled in subterfuge he could not clearly recall when he'd last uttered a word of unqualified un-varnished truth. And here was a man who'd been "involved" with so many women, for periods of time ranging from eleven years (an early wife) to eleven minutes (name unknown), it was his boast he was "totally immune"

Middle Age: A Romance *

to sexual attraction. Yet, staring up astonished at Augusta Cutler, his rich employer's wife, a tremulous rosy-skinned Renoir beauty in luminescent green, with a bosom remarkable in any woman, but extraordinary for a woman of her reputed age, West hadn't been able to disguise his emotion.

He, Elias West, actually blushing, stammering-"Mrs. Cutler, I guess I am. You got me there." A gentleman, West held out his hand to shake hers.

T very well, Augusta and Elias. They were of the same indefinable rogue species. And there was the pleasure of the illicit, the betrayal of faith: making love, they were deceiving poor Owen Cutler back in Salthill-on-Hudson, who anxiously awaited news of any "leads"

the private investigator could supply him. "He must love you very much, Mrs. Cutler," Elias West said, cupping Augusta's large soft big-nippled breast in his hand with unusual gentleness, "he's been distraught since you left him, and keeps assuring me 'Money is no object.' " Augusta laughed at this, and poked her tongue into West's hot, waxy ear, and West laughed, too, though he was slightly embarrassed: to so openly betray a client, in a situation that could backfire on him (if, for instance, Augusta returned to Owen, and confessed) was worrisome, indeed. But Augusta assured Elias West no, not very likely she'd confess-"This is too much fun." With brusque practiced fingers gripping West's semi-erect, slowly hardening penis. Like a woman shaking hands with a buddy.

The first time they were alone together, in Augusta's room on the top floor of the hotel, still flushed from lovemaking, Augusta slapped down a wad of bills on a table beside Elias West and said, "I'd like to hire you to keep Owen uninformed of where I am. Is it a deal?" West said, "Augusta, I couldn't take money from you under these circumstances. But I give my word, I'll keep your husband uninformed." He paused, frowning. "Though I may have to mislead him at some point, if I don't want to be fired. He'll be expecting to hear something." "Maybe," Augusta said wistfully, "I could be found dead? I mean-a body resembling me. Somewhere." West said, "That might happen, eventually. But probably not for a long time. And even if the body were badly decomposed, dental records can be checked, and identification made." Augusta hid her face, for a moment overcome by emotion. "That's horrible to think! I wish I hadn't said it." West said, taking her hands, "Darling, whoever it is who may be murdered, whenever it *

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happens, and wherever-it will have nothing to do with you." Augusta shuddered. "It was a strange thing to have said, and I wish I hadn't said it."

West said, "If we want to throw your husband off the scent, there are eas-ier ways."

They went on to discuss Owen Cutler. Augusta was touched to hear that Owen was offering a $, reward for information leading to her return. "Poor Owen! I do love him, I suppose. But . . ." In an uncharacteristic gesture of remorse, or sentiment, Augusta wiped at her eyes. Elias West frowned. "If you love your husband, Augusta, why have you left him, and made him so miserable? He does seem to love you."

Augusta shook her head emphatically. She was naked, and now slipped into a white terrycloth robe, tightly knotting the sash. "Owen loves his idea of 'wife'-he doesn't love me. Only one man loved me in my lifetime, in the sense of knowing me, respecting me, and that man has died." Elias West felt a stirring of jealousy, of which he gave no sign.

"And who was this man, this paragon of perfection?" he asked ironically, and Augusta said, smiling, ignoring the irony, "Oh, Adam wasn't perfect.

Far from it. He wasn't even very attractive. He had an ugly battered face and one blind eye. And you know," Augusta lowered her voice, playfully stroking West's face, "I love handsome men." "He was a fantastic lover, eh?" West asked, annoyed, and Augusta said, "Lover? Yes. I suppose so. I mean, he would have been. Possibly. We weren't lovers . . . exactly." "Yet you loved him?" West asked, surprised. Augusta said, "Of course I did!

Adam was the most powerful, the most romantic masculine presence in my life, including even my father. If you asked me to explain, I couldn't.

I can't. Adam was just . . . the man he was. I left Salthill because I couldn't seem to bear living in that place, without him. But now I think I'll try to trace him. His origins, I mean." An idea had come to Augusta, inspired by the presence of Elias West in her life. Her eyes brightened as she looked up at him. "Maybe you could help me, Elias? For your regular fee, of course."

To this proposal Elias West allowed himself to say yes.

Within days, to Augusta's surprise, West reported to her what he'd been able to discover by way of telephone calls, faxes, and the Internet, about the late Adam Berendt in those years prior to * when he came to New York. "Before he came east your 'Adam Berendt' was living in Detroit, Michigan, where he worked for a multi-millionaire real estate developer; before that he was living in Muskegon, Michigan, on Lake Middle Age: A Romance *

Michigan, where all I could find out was he became acquainted with this real estate developer who was building lakefront properties, and the guy must've liked your 'Adam Berendt' and brought him to Detroit. At some point he seems to have gotten a license to sell real estate. Before that-if we work our way backward in time, contra-chronologically-Berendt was living a much different life in Minneapolis, where he drove a truck and took night courses in the business school at the University of Minnesota. (Yes, I tried to get his transcript faxed to me but the registrar wouldn't release it.) Before that, in *6, he was living in a place called Red Lake, in northern Minnesota, where he worked odd jobs including seasonal labor across the border in western Ontario. But prior to that,"

West said, frowning, "the trail is cold."

Augusta thought Prior to that "Adam Berendt" hadn't existed.

She would tell West nothing about "Francis Xavier Brady." Only she, Augusta, would know of "Francis Xavier Brady."

Augusta asked West if there was any record of Adam Berendt having been married, and West said, "No. Not that I've discovered." No family?

No relatives? West said, "For more detailed information I'd have to go there, of course. Want to hire me? We could go together."

"No! No, thank you. This is all I need to know." Augusta spoke quickly, almost frightened. She didn't want to share Adam Berendt with anyone, certainly not with a stranger. "How much do I owe you?"

West kissed Augusta, and stroked her shoulders through the terrycloth robe. "My fees are always negotiable."

On the eve of Augusta's departure from Miami Beach, Elias West tossed her handbag over the fence of a hotel construction site a few miles from the hotel. Handling the bag, West wore gloves. All that remained in the bag were used tissues and cosmetics and a wallet emptied of everything except a Salthill-on-Hudson, New York public library card issued to Augusta Cutler, Pheasant Run. The bag, Italian-made, of beautiful hand-tooled leather, had been scratched and dirtied so that the individual who found it wouldn't be tempted to keep it; yet, beautiful as it had once been, and obviously expensive, it would strike the finder as worth reporting to police.

Elias West was in contact with Florida police, in particular Dade County police, in his search for the missing Augusta Cutler. When he checked with them the following day, the handbag had been reported, by which time Augusta had begun her long drive north, alone. The scheme *

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had worked! But Elias West felt little satisfaction, telephoning his employer to tell him news of the "lead"-the first solid lead they'd had yet.

He was missing Augusta, he had to admit. He'd never known anyone quite like her in all his years as a professional.

I of anticipation and apprehension "Elizabeth Eastman"

drove north and west through the states of Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin . . . The drive took her a long time. She wanted, and did not want, to arrive at her destination: Red Lake, Minnesota. She wanted, and did not want, to know: the truth of Adam Berendt's life. By the time she arrived in Minnesota, and began her drive through that long northerly state, her hairline glinted with silver like wires, and wiry hair sprouted in her underarms. She was again wearing polyster elastic-waist pants, T-shirts, and pullovers. She'd taken off her rings, and hidden them in the lining of her suitcase. The polish was chipped from her nails. Her rented car was a sparrow-gray Honda Civic.

The glamour of Miami Beach was behind her, the romance of Elias West rapidly fading. For the first week she'd missed him-how well matched they were, sexually and temperamentally!-then she began to forget. West had given her his cell-phone number urging her to call him at any time, he'd come to her, but Augusta threw away the number. Loving Elias West would be a betrayal not of Owen Cutler but of Adam Berendt.

Augusta had purchased a camera in Florida, and now took photographs of the approach to Red Lake, Minnesota, as if transcribing Adam's interior life. He'd left this small, not very prosperous place more than thirty years before, but except for a scattering of newer houses and a few fast-food restaurants and mini-malls on the highway, Red Lake didn't seem to have changed much in a long time. The lake itself was enormous, beautiful in the sun. Its wind-rippled surface drew Augusta's eye, and made her shudder. Adam had died, or had begun to die, in such wind-rippled water. Almost, at times, Augusta imagined she'd been a witness.

Not in Red Lake but thirty miles away in Hannecock, the county seat, in a ground-floor township clerk's office, Augusta would discover the document she sought: the legal notice, dated September , *6, stating that Francis Xavier Brady had officially changed his name to "Adam Berendt."

(No middle name! Why, Augusta wondered, hadn't Adam wanted a middle name?) Attached to the document was a badly faded copy of Brady's Middle Age: A Romance *

birth certificate, which Augusta could only just decipher. She held it to the light, her fingers shaking. Francis Xavier Brady born March , *, in Beauchamp, Montana. Son of Morton and Elsie Brady. Her breath caught. This was it! The clerk who'd located the document for her, a middle-aged woman whom Augusta charmingly inveigled into undertak-ing the search ("I'm checking the background of this 'Adam Berendt' who wants to marry my sister, my sister is newly widowed and very lonely"), asked Augusta if she was all right, and Augusta stammered yes, "I'm just- suddenly-surprised." For a $ fee Augusta was allowed to photocopy both documents.

Maybe I should stop now. Maybe this is enough?

Yet curiosity pressed her forward. There was the unconscious hope that, seeking Adam Berendt, venturing ever farther into the past, Augusta would somehow be united with the man, in person. The young Adam. A boy named Francis.

No one in Red Lake with whom she spoke seemed ever to have heard of "Adam Berendt," which led Augusta to conclude that he'd left the area soon after changing his name. It was as "Adam Berendt" he'd moved to Minneapolis and then to Muskegon, Michigan, and finally to Detroit where, it appeared, he'd become involved in money-making. In Red Lake, he'd been "Francis Xavier Brady," whom a number of people recalled to Augusta. A local librarian, a woman in her sixties, remembered him as "Frankie Brady, a friendly but lonely-seeming young man with one blind eye, he said he'd injured in a hunting accident," who dropped by the library all the time, sometimes in his work clothes, dirty and sweaty-smelling, wanting to take out books and to talk about them; this rawboned young guy was a loner, said he'd come from Montana, worked at a lumberyard, and drove a truck, and was taking classes at the high school at night, to get his diploma-"Frankie put a lot of emphasis on education.

You could tell, the way he chose his words, he was trying to be the smartest he could be. As if he'd come from someplace where people didn't talk, only grunted and shoved one another around." Augusta asked what sort of books did Frankie Brady withdraw from the library, and the librarian said, warmly, he'd been a boy who read "almost everything, anything."

For instance, he'd read his way through the shelf of Reader's Digest con-densed books in a few weeks. Week after week he took out a hefty anthology titled The World's Greatest Philosophers, which he joked about, saying he was "working his way through the centuries, but slow." Frankie favored *

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poetry anthologies, and books on popular science, and self-improvement books like Dale Carnegie, and picture books on art, and histories of the American West. There was a single book in the library on the Korean War, and this book Frankie withdrew often, for, he said, his dad had died in that war, and was an "unknown hero." For a young man of nineteen or twenty he seemed younger than his age sometimes, but other times, when he was in a melancholy mood, and you couldn't get more than a few words out of him, he seemed much older. "One of those young people with an 'old soul.' That was Frankie Brady when we knew him." The librarian provided Augusta with other names to contact in Red Lake, and, before Augusta could ask, gave her directions to one of the places Frankie Brady had lived. It was a boarding house near the railroad yard: a ramshackle old shingled building, still standing, evidently still inhabited, though very derelict, with a sign on the sagging veranda-* - -and guinea fowl picking in the grassless front yard.

Augusta stared hungrily. Adam lived here! Long ago.

She would go to the front door, boldly. She would knock. She would ask to see-what? Which room?

Instead, Augusta kept a discreet distance, and took photographs.

Next day Augusta called upon the wife of the owner of the Red Lake Marina in the part-brick, part-aluminum "ranch" house at the lakeshore, but the hard-faced, dyed-blond woman (of about Augusta's age, but looking older) regarded her suspiciously, and visibly stiffened when Augusta asked her about Frankie Brady, and told Augusta she was sorry, she couldn't talk to her-"See, I'm too busy. I'm bus-sy, see." The woman's voice trembled with anger, her eyes were fierce with dislike. Augusta went away shaken. She loved him. Like me. We could be sisters. What had it been, thirty-two years at least, and the dyed-blond woman still felt the hurt, the loss. What this meant for Augusta, she didn't want to think.

Next, Augusta called upon the white-haired wheelchair-bound former principal of Red Lake High, a courtly gentleman in his late seventies who brightened seeing Augusta's face, and was happy to talk at length about Frankie Brady, the young man he'd taught in night school in-was it *68?

'6?-a bad time in the United States, with the war in Vietnam going all to hell, and local boys, Red Lake graduates, dying there, or coming back hurt. "Frankie Brady was one in a thousand. It was like he'd only just discovered reading-books-the 'life of the mind,' where most people don't live, ever. For sure, folks in these parts don't. Frankie was like a young dog Middle Age: A Romance *

that's been starved, grateful for anything you give him." Of Frankie Brady's private life he'd never known much except "he'd had some trouble behind him, in Montana. That was why he showed up in Red Lake, out of nowhere. He felt guilty, he wasn't fighting in Vietnam, couldn't get in any branch of the armed services because of his eye. And then he disappointed some of us, the way he left." "How did he leave?" Augusta asked. "Ma'am, Frankie just left. He was managing a lumberyard here, a pretty big responsibility for a kid in his early twenties, but there was pressure on him, maybe from a girl, or maybe he just got bored here and had to leave.

Frankie always had a sort of expansive personality, you know. Even when he didn't say much he'd listen hard, and stare at you with that eye of his, like you felt the specialness of the moment, whatever it was. He could make you happy when he wasn't happy himself, which was a lot of the time. So when Frankie left Red Lake, people missed him, and some were hurt. Not that he owed anybody anything, or made any promises that I know of, but a few months after he earned his diploma, which he'd worked hard for, and was proud of, he told just a few people good-bye, I wasn't one of them, and left Red Lake and nobody ever heard of him again.

There was some talk he'd changed his name and gone to live in-maybe Michigan." Augusta could see the puzzlement and hurt in the old man's face and wanted to take his hands in hers and comfort him. "Do you have news of him, ma'am? He's dead now, isn't he?"

Quickly Augusta said no, she knew little of Francis Brady, she was making inquiries on behalf of a relative, she'd never herself met the man.

Days passed. "Elizabeth Eastman" in her dreamy fugue-state, underarms sprouting hairs in the luxury of no one knowing her in this place, this left-behind lakeside town of no distinction where memories of Adam Berendt still rankled, after decades. Augusta drifted about the town and its outskirts taking photographs, telling herself I will make of his lost life art, he'd be proud of me. She rented a rowboat at the marina, and rowed along the shore of the lake until her soft hands blistered and her face smarted with sunburn though she was wearing a straw hat. Always keeping in sight of the shabby little marina, making her slow, weaving way past rows of cottages and bungalows, she was thinking Now he will see me, he will come to me. Augusta knew, yet didn't wish to know, that life isn't a sequence of posed, "brooding" photographs; life isn't a movie in which a scene must come to a dramatic culmination, or any culmination at all.

A middle-aged woman awkwardly rowing a boat on a lake in northern

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Minnesota, at the onset of mosquito season, shocked by how quickly her shapely body has wearied, her arm, shoulder, back and thigh muscles have begun to ache, may simply row the boat until she gives up, and returns wincing to the dock. Outboard motorboats roared past her, rocking her in their wakes. There were no sailboats on this lake. Certainly there were no yachts. On a dock, a boy yelled what sounded like "Gus-sie!"-or was it "Hus-sie!"-at a black retriever splashing in the water.

Yet: that evening Augusta was approached in the Red Lantern Tavern, where she was drinking whiskey before ordering something to eat, and there was the Ogden County sheriff to speak with her. He introduced himself as Rick Hewitt. Augusta put out her blistered hand to be shaken.

Hewitt was a white-haired man in his late fifties with a coarse, shrewd face and eyes that reminded her of-whose?-Roger Cavanagh's. Shifty and reptilian but maybe friendly? Hewitt told Augusta he'd been hearing she was asking after his old friend Frank Brady. He offered to buy her another drink but Augusta deftly countered by insisting upon buying him a drink, if he'd talk to her a little about Frank Brady. "Is Brady somebody you're mixed up with, back where you come from? You doing a check on the guy, or what?" Hewitt asked. Augusta said, summoning her Salthill-hostess smile, "You answer the questions here, Sheriff. Not me."

Hewitt laughed. You could see he was impressed with this good-looking, obviously classy woman from somewhere back east who was trying to fit in with the locals.

He sat across from Augusta in her booth. He accepted the drink. He told her he'd known Frank Brady "pretty well"-"as well as anybody got to know Frank" in Red Lake. For a while they worked at the same lumberyard. They were both in their early twenties, unmarried, kicking around, living in town. Hewitt had come back from Vietnam in '6 after a two-year tour and he'd temporarily had enough of guns and being in uniform and he wasn't in a mood to get married, yet. "Frank hadn't any relatives in Minnesota, or maybe anywhere, from the way he never talked about them.

He liked women but was shy of getting involved, which I didn't blame him for, at the time. We were together a lot, I mean like four, five nights a week sometimes, from '6 till September '6 when Frank left Red Lake.

Though Frank didn't drink, which set him apart from the rest of us." "Did he say why?" Augusta asked. "Ma'am, he said the stuff was 'poison' to him, it drove him 'crazy.' He said he'd had a drinking problem as a kid." "A drinking problem! How young?" "Like maybe junior high. He wasn't in a Middle Age: A Romance *

mood to talk about it, much. He didn't care to talk about himself. He'd ask me about Vietnam. Lots of questions. He didn't think the war was justi-fied but he felt guilty about not going in. He'd have wanted to join the Marines, his dad had been a Marine, but with his blind eye, for sure they didn't want him. Nobody wanted Frank Brady in any kind of uniform."

Augusta said, disbelieving, "Frank Brady wanted to fight in Vietnam, though he didn't approve of the war?" Hewitt said, with a smirk, "What I told you, ma'am. Frank felt guilty about not going in. On account of the other guys, like me, going in. And some of us shot up pretty bad. Or worse." Augusta absorbed this revelation in silence. Well, Adam had been a boy at the time. Younger than her own sons were now. There wasn't the retrospective knowledge then, and the moral disgust spawned of that knowledge, of the Vietnam debacle.

Hewitt said, watching Augusta's face, "Another thing Frank confided in me, ma'am, he didn't want it generally known but he had a record, too.

He'd been incarcerated in a youth facility out in Montana." Hewitt spoke so matter-of-factly, Augusta had to touch his arm to make him pause.

"Excuse me, officer? A what? 'Facility'?" "Helena State, it's called. It's a kind of camp, midway between a state penitentiary for older felons and a juvenile home." "But-why was Frank Brady incarcerated?" "For almost killing somebody, ma'am." "Almost killing somebody! Who-was it?" "His 'foster father,' he said. Frank was a ward of the county. His parents were dead, he was twelve years old when he came into the system. He got shunted around in foster homes and when he was fourteen he didn't get along with the 'foster father,' a drinker and s.o.b. who was said to push kids around, and one night Frank loses it, and pushes the guy back, and they get into a serious fight, and Frank comes close to beating the guy to death with a pickax." Hewitt shook his head, and took a swallow of his whiskey. "And this guy wasn't any runt, either. I did some inquiries, a few years later." Augusta was listening in horror. Adam Berendt? A boy of fourteen wielding a pickax? Nearly killing a man? Hewitt said, "At Helena, some Ojibways ganged up on Frank and beat him, blinded him in one eye. Indians and whites are always fighting in these facilities. Frank was fifteen when he lost the eye. He'd say, 'I'm God-damned lucky to be alive. I don't mind being half-blind if that's the price.' " Hewitt laughed.

"It was like Frank in a certain mood, to make the best of a thing. Like losing an eye was a sign of something positive, if you reasoned it out. He always said Helena straightened his head. He had to calm down there, went

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back to school. He'd had a hard time learning to read and write, he was what d'you call it-dyslexic. 'My brain is wired wrong,' Frank would say. 'I got to work twice as hard as anybody else to make it work right.' They paroled him when he was eighteen. The charge was aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and with intent to kill." Hewitt spoke slowly, as if reluctantly. But there was a cruel, sly purpose to his words.

Augusta was feeling faint. "Thank you. I see."

"Not surprised, are you, ma'am? You look a little white. This was all a long time ago."