"Can't say I have."

"And there's a bunch of-Hold on while I just lower you a bit. How tall are you, anyway?-bunch of businesses that moved close to town a while ago that just keep getting bigger and bigger. There's Sonopress, ITT, BASF, all those high-tech places. They're even going to expand the airport."

"I didn't know Asheville had an airport."

"It's about as big as my left toe. But like I said, that's going to change. My mom's always moaning about how fast everything's growing."

Her mother's opinions carried us until she exchanged the scissors for a hair dryer, which roared to life like an old Norton Commando and effectively put a stop to all conversation.

"There." She turned it off, spun my chair this way and that, nodding to herself. "Take a look." She turned me back to face the mirror.

"It looks great."

"I think it works," she said complacently, and hummed to herself as she pulled off my towel and brushed a few stray hairs from my collar.

She went behind the cash register. "Would you like some product-some of that conditioner? Then that'll be just thirty-five dollars."

She zipped my card through the magnetic reader and the receipt churned silently from its machine. I added in a good tip and signed.

"That cut should be trimmed every six to eight weeks, so I'll expect you back before too long."

"I'll be here." And then I was outside, with the sun warm on my newly exposed neck, and feeling hungry. I started walking.

The heart of downtown Asheville looks as though some mad city planner scooped up half the art deco buildings in Miami, dumped them at random points around a small town square, then stuck in a fountain for pretty, along with a few postmodern structures whose only apparent aesthetic purpose was to reflect in their green glass the older, more substantial buildings. Everything was achingly clean.

As I moved more or less east through the streets, the character of the passersby gradually changed from individual people striding purposefully on everyday errands to that amble, stop, gawk-while-we-hold-hands-and-block-the-street pattern of the tourist.

I turned around and marched down a street called Biltmore Avenue, looking for a place real people might belong.

I found two pubs, practically side by side. I avoided the one with the aggressively shiny brew kegs, wine list, and perky logo, and chose the one that boasted Forty Beers on Tap!

It was like stepping back in time to being a teenager in England; the place smelled of smoke and beer and felt utterly peaceful. Patrons talked in low murmurs, minding their own business over tall glasses half filled with dark, murky brew and streaked with white foam. Smoke curled bluely through the occasional slant of sunlight; dark wood gleamed. I found a table in a corner, facing the door, and ordered pizza and a pint of Greenman ale, which turned out to be more like a bitter than anything else and slipped down beautifully. The pizza, when it came, had everything on it. The sausage was chewy and tough and I savored every bite. I ordered another beer, and half drowsed in the snug warmth, until I felt the light touch of Julia's hand on my hair, and her whisper, My anti-Samson. The room fractured and shimmered.

She sat next to me in the truck all the way back, her hand resting on my thigh.

"Something's changed," she said. We drove west. The sun, low on the horizon, shone straight into the cab. She wore the same coat as on the night we'd met. A raincoat. Today it was dry.

"I still love you."

"Bed linens, bread, orange juice ..."

In the rearview mirror, my face was gold in the sunlight. Hers wasn't, and when she turned to look at me, she didn't squint against the glare.

"... beer, milk, fruit and vegetables and fish. And a newspaper."

"Dornan will need a decent place to sleep tomorrow night, and breakfast. And I want something for dinner that's not rice." I couldn't explain the newspaper.

The raincoat had disappeared. Now she wore jeans and a white, low-cut button T that exposed her tight belly. When had she worn those?

"You didn't mention the other things," I said. The tarps, the cash, the liquid propane gas, the double tanks full of diesel fuel. She didn't seem to hear. After a while, I realized why: they were going-away things.

CHAPTER THREE.

The Isuzu bumped into the clearing just after midday, and Dornan poked his head through the open window. His face had more lines, or maybe it was the light. He climbed out and stretched. "Mountain roads ..." He looked around, looked at me. "Something's different."

"Yes."

"Ah. Well, I brought everything you asked for, plus a few extras." He went round to the back of the Isuzu, opened the rear door, and pulled out a cooler. "There's steak, and beer, and potatoes. Some decent coffee. And just in case you get the power on ..."-he balanced the cooler against the rim of the trunk, reached in, and pulled out an espresso machine-"this."

"Good," I said, then ran out of polite conversation. "Bring the records, and my clothes." I lifted the cooler from him and carried it into the trailer. He followed with my hanging bag.

"Where should I put it?"

I jerked my chin forward, towards the bedroom, "On the bed," and started transferring the cooler contents to the fridge.

By the time he came back with the two cardboard file boxes, the food was in the fridge and I was wiping down the inside of the cooler. "On the table. I've almost finished."

He leaned against the table for a moment, considering. "The power is on," he said, "and you've had your hair cut." It wasn't a question, so I didn't respond. "I'll make coffee."

He hummed to himself while he ground and measured, but he moved more slowly than usual, and there was more shadow than there had been around the bones of his wrists and nose.

"You've lost weight."

He didn't turn around, but said after a moment, "So have you."

"I'm sorry," I said, and now he did turn around, but I wasn't sure how to explain what I meant: that I knew I'd been selfish; that I hadn't cared about his worry, about Tammy; that there just wasn't much room inside me for anything but my grief.

"I just want you to find her for me, and bring her back," he said.

"I'll find her."

"And bring ... Oh, god. You think she's dead."

"No." The espresso machine hissed and spat. "Make the coffee and come and sit."

He made the coffee mechanically and brought it to the table.

"I'm going to find Tammy," I said. "I'll talk to her. If she wants to come back, I'll bring her. If."

"You'll tell me where she is?"

"If she wants me to."

He could have said a lot of things then, but he didn't. He forced himself to smile. "You'll let me know she's safe at least?"

"Yes." If she was.

He sipped at his coffee for a while, as though I weren't there. "It's a nice afternoon," he said at last. "I think I'll take a walk."

"There's a trailhead on the west side of the clearing. If you follow that, it'll bring you to the creek. If you're not back by four, I'll come find you."

I sat for five minutes after he'd gone, then took the lid off both boxes. One held a collection of opened and unopened mail-junk and bills mainly-going back at least three months, plus the other information I'd asked for: insurance documents, 401(k) and bank statements, birth certificate, apartment lease. The other was Dornan's private shrine to Tammy. He had saved everything, in no particular order: printouts of e-mails were bundled with birthday cards and Post-it notes; snapshots poked out from cassette cases; there were plane tickets and hotel bills and dinner receipts. On top lay a shopping list. Slim-Fast, it said forlornly, toothpaste, water, dishwasher soap. I imagined Tammy loading a dishwasher, and the only picture I could get was her playing to an audience: stretching so that her pants pulled tight across thigh and buttock. But her handwriting was not what I'd expected: no circles over the i, no fat loops; it was strong and clear and angular, and she had preferred black ink.

I didn't want to know what Tammy had said to Dornan via e-mail, what she had whispered late at night to his phone machine; I doubted I'd need to.

I started with the mail, sorting it quickly into bills, junk, and personal. The junk I put back in the box, the personal-all unopened-I set aside, and the bills I sorted further by date and type, discarding anything before the first of the year. Tammy had not canceled the lease on her apartment, so there was ten months' worth. All had been paid by Dornan; his notation of check number and date and amount was scrawled in the upper right corner of each. The Visa card pile was significantly smaller than the others; it contained nothing since August. Her other credit card, an American Express, was there in full, though the last three months showed no spending activity. I pulled an example from each pile. The AmEx listed plane tickets, hotel bills, out-of-town restaurant meals. Business expenses. Probably referred immediately to the company she worked-used to work-for. The Visa was billed from a variety of Atlanta restaurants, two different hair salons, Macy's, Saks, auto repair, pharmacy: purely personal. The conclusions were obvious.

I found the 800 number on the bill and, while it rang, assembled a few things from the box. A bored, beaten voice answered. "ParkBanc this is Cindy how may I be of service."

"Yes, hello. I'm calling about my Visa bill."

"Name please."

"Tammy Foster."

"Account number please."

I read off the number. I heard her fingernails ticking on the keyboard even on the cellular phone. "Tammy J. Foster," she read back to me like a robot. "Last four numbers of your social security number for security purposes."

I read them from the bank statement. More plastic ticking. As my partner, Frank King, had said when I was a uniformed rookie in Atlanta, Finding people's not rocket science, Torvingen. They got a social security number, it's easy- "Address please ma'am."

"Yes, well that's why I'm calling. I haven't had a bill since July, so you probably still have my old Atlanta address."

"No ma'am we have a New York City address."

"Well, it's probably the wrong one because, like I said, I haven't seen a bill since July."

"Your account is current ma'am."

"Well, that can't be right. Like I said, you haven't sent me a bill for months. What address do you have there?"

"One moment."

-It's your illegals that are hard to track. Otherwise, hell, just follow the money. Frank had been right, mostly. The exceptions were dead people, and smart people with no scruples and enough money to pay for both active and passive concealment. Unless Tammy was dead, I could probably do it just from the bits of paper I had here. Dornan could easily have hired a private investigator to do the job for a hundred dollars: all they had to do was run her name through their subscription databases. No doubt he hadn't gone that route because- "Your mother's maiden name please ma'am."

I read it from the birth certificate. "Acklin."

"Yes ma'am. We have you listed at Apartment C 95 Seventh Avenue South New York New York 10012."

Greenwich Village. What was she doing in Greenwich Village? "Well, that's the right place, all right. But I don't get it. Why aren't I getting my bills? It doesn't make any-Oh, shoot," I said, doing my best to sound embarrassed. "I think I'm calling about the wrong account here. I was looking at my American Express and my Visa at the same time and I guess I just mixed them up and called the wrong one. It says here I paid the last few bills, so I guess I got them."

"Yes ma'am. Your account shows your last payment of $354.89 paid September 29th. That was billed to the New York address."

"God, I'm sorry."

"Yes ma'am," she said, still bored. "Have a good day." She disconnected with a click.

New York. Blaring horns, shrieking sirens, the sour stink of ten million people, all streaming by at a thousand frames per second. New York. And I would have to go there. That's why Dornan had asked me to find her, not some faceless agency, so that I would go to her on his behalf and ask her to come home.

I put each item back in the box one at a time, carefully squaring envelopes and aligning stamps, concentrating on arranging the bills in chronological order, deliberately not thinking, because if I thought about all the basic groundwork I should do, the phone calls I ought to make, I would walk away, walk into the woods and not come back, and I had promised.

I heard Dornan emerge from the trees just before four, but he didn't come in. I got two Coronas from the fridge, opened them, and took them outside. He stood at the southern edge, looking down and out over the heath bald. I let the bottles clink as I walked, and held his out when he turned.

He nodded and drank. "Nice woods you've got here."

"About two hundred acres."

He nodded some more. "So why do you have that strip of AstroTurf in front of the trailer when there's all this natural stuff?"

"It doesn't get muddy. Works as a doormat."

"Ah." He wouldn't meet my eyes.

"I didn't look at the private papers. I didn't need to."

Now he looked at me. "You know where she is?"

"Yes." Her, or someone pretending to be her. "I'll be ready to leave tomorrow. It might take a few days." He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. It shook slightly. "I haven't shown you what I'm doing with the cabin. Bring your beer. Then we'll cook that steak."

His smile told me he knew I was doing it to help him, but he followed me to the cabin anyway.

"It faces south and west, and the long side measures thirty-six feet. The logs are oak, hand hewn. They're a hundred years old and there's no reason for them not to last another century." I laid my palm against the solid wood. It was still warm from the sun. New York. "This is a craftsman cabin, built for my great-grandfather by masters, not one of the more usual settler's shacks made from whatever came to hand and which have long since rotted away, and good riddance."

His smile was real this time. "You always have been a snob, Torvingen."

"I like well-made things." I squatted and patted the corner of the building. Ten million people. "See how the sill and first end log are quarter-notched? If you could rip up the floor you'd see that the sleepers it rests on are all lap-jointed and middle-notched, and then pegged."

He nodded seriously. He hadn't a clue what I was talking about. It was suddenly necessary that he understand.

"Everything here was done by hand. You couldn't just drive to Home Depot and load up your truck a hundred years ago. They had to cut the tree-and remember they didn't have chain saws. Then they had to hew the logs: make the round sides flat. Even the chalk they used in their chalk boxes was made from local stuff, like pokeberry juice and lime."

"What's a chalk box?"

"What you use to snap out a line, so you know you're cutting straight. You make the line, then score the log every two or three inches with a poleaxe. Then you use a broadaxe to slice off the chips."

"Which you could probably use as kindling, to start a fire."

"What?" My throat felt very tight.

"Don't look at me like that. I'm doing my best. I only know two things about wood: it grows on trees and you can burn it, and I only learned the second thing two days ago. But go on, I'm listening."

"This door-"