Bad Men

He read the label. “Flagstone. I don’t know it.”

“It’s South African.”

“Robert Frost,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“The wine. It’s named after a Robert Frost poem. You know, the one about the two roads diverging in a forest.”

She hadn’t noticed, and felt vaguely embarrassed by her failure to make the co

“It’s hard to forget a poem like that on an island covered by trees,” he said, inserting the corkscrew.

“At least you can’t get too lost if you take the wrong road,” she replied. “You just keep going until your feet get wet.”

The plastic cork popped from the bottle. She hadn’t even seen him tense as he drew it out. She placed two glasses on the table and watched him pour.

“People still get lost here,” he said. “Have you been out to the Site?”

“Jack took Da

“The memory of what happened still lingers there, I think. A couple of times each summer, we get tourists in to the station house complaining that the trails out to it should be more clearly marked because they went astray and had trouble finding the road again. They’re usually the worst ones, the loudmouths in expensive shirts.”

“Maybe they deserve to get lost, then. So why don’t you signpost it better?”

“It was decided, a long time ago, that the people who needed to find it knew how to get to it. It’s not a place for those who don’t respect the dead. It’s not a place for anyone who doesn’t find it sad.”

He handed her a glass and touched it gently with his own.

“Happiness,” he said.

“Happiness,” she said, and he saw hope and sadness in her eyes.

If Maria

Yet something about her troubled him. No, that wasn’t true. It was not about her, precisely, but to do with some undisclosed element of her life. Joe Dupree had learned to read people well. His father had taught him the importance of doing so, and life on the island, with its exposure to the same faces, the same problems day after day, had enabled him to hone his skills, weighing his first perceptions against the reality of individuals as their characters were inevitably revealed to him. He glanced at the woman’s fingers as she put the cork back in the bottle and replaced it in the fridge. She sat down opposite him, and smiled a little nervously. Her right hand toyed with her ring finger, yet there was no ring upon it.

It was something that he had seen her do a lot, usually when a stranger came into the store or a loud noise startled her. Instinctively, she would touch her ring finger.

It’s the husband, thought Joe.

The husband is the element.

Bill Gaddis was not a happy man. There were a lot of reasons why Bill was unhappy even at the best of times, but now he had a specific reason. He was leaving a fine woman in the sack to answer an insistent knocking at his door, and that made him very unhappy indeed. He might even have been tempted to ignore the knocking, under other circumstances, but around here people had a habit of being good neighbors and the good neighbor at the door might take it into his or her head that, what with the lights being on and no reply coming from the Gaddis house, maybe somebody had had an accident, taken a tumble down some steps or slipped on some water in the kitchen, and nobody wanted to be the one who had to say, “Hell, I was out there just last night, knocking and knocking. If only I’d checked through the windows, or tried the back door, they’d still be alive today.” And Bill didn’t want old Art Bassett or Rene Watterson coming in the back way, hollering and nosing about, expecting to see someone lying on the floor with blood pooling, only to find Bill with his ass in the air and his mind on other things.

He wondered now why they had even decided to settle here. It was Pe

It had its good points, though. His wife had picked up a job at the Holiday I

Bill got himself a job driving trucks for a paper company, and they saw just enough of each other to remind themselves why they preferred to see only that much. In the first weeks, Bill would drive over to the Holiday I

Bill shrugged on a robe, rearranging it to conceal his dying hard-on, and shuffled to the door, swearing as he went. He left the lights out in the hallway and pulled back the curtain at the side window. He didn’t recognize the woman on the step, but she looked fine, maybe even finer than the woman he’d just left, and that was saying something. She had a map in her hands.

Bill swore louder. How hard could it be to get lost with a mall slap bang in front of you? Christ, if Bill stood on his lawn, he could see the mall, clear at the top of Yale Avenue. He took his time looking the woman over, lingering at her breasts. Bill swore once again, this time under his breath and more in admiration than in anger, then opened the door.

He barely had time to register the gun in the woman’s hand before she jammed it into the soft flesh under his chin and forced him against the wall. Behind her came a redheaded man, and after him two others, a real pretty boy and a Richard-Roundtree-after-a-beating motherfucker with a big ’stache, who brushed past Bill and headed straight into the house.

“The f-”

“Shut up,” said the woman. She ran her left hand over Bill’s body, stopping briefly at his groin.

“We disturb something?”

From the bedroom Bill heard a scream, followed by the sound of Je