Nocturnes

It was as he had suspected: the house was impregnable.

He retreated into the forest, and then was gone.

Later that night, I watched from our bed as Rachel undressed in the moonlight. She eased the straps of her slip over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, then stared at her reflection in the mirror, turning first to one side, then the other. The moonlight touched the swelling of her belly and cast the shadow of her breasts upon the wall.

“I’m big,” she said.

“Bigger.”

I ducked my head just in time to avoid being hit by a shoe.

“I look like a whale.”

“Whales are lovable. Everybody loves whales, except the Japanese and the Norwegians, and I’m neither. Come to bed.”

She finished undressing and slipped under the covers, then lay awkwardly on her side, looking at me.

“Did you meet your client?”

“Yep.”

“Did you take the job?”

“Yep.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not tonight. It’s nothing bad, so don’t start worrying. It’ll keep until the morning.”

Rachel gri

“So whatcha wa

She leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips. Softly, I kissed her back.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I can’t get pregnant.”

“Very fu

“I’ll even let you be the alpha male.”

“I am the alpha male.”

Her hand moved slowly down my chest and on to my stomach.

“Of course you are, darling,” she whispered. “Of course you are…”

IV

The town of Two Mile Lake lay in the middle of hard-scrabble land, three miles northeast of the towns of Bingham and Moscow. Here the Ke

North of Two Mile Lake, up by the confluence of the Ke

Two Mile Lake must have envied some of the comparative prosperity enjoyed by its northern neighbor. It wasn’t entirely clear how the town had come by its name, as there was no body of water worthy of the name closer than Wyman Lake. Two Mile had a kind of standing pond on the northern edge of town, and if you were particularly foolhardy you might take a chance on swimming in it, or eating something that came out of it, but it was no more than a couple of hundred feet at its widest point. Instead, the only conclusion that anyone could reach about the town’s name was that if you headed north from it, then you’d head right back south again after two miles, because there was nothing there to see. In essence, Two Mile Lake was two miles away from nowhere.

I followed 16 through Kingsbury and Mayfield Corner, then headed up Dead Water Road a ways until I reached the town’s southern limits. I kept my foot to the pedal and pretty soon I was at the town’s northern limits. In between I passed a couple of stores, a school, a pair of churches, a police station, and the remains of a dead dog. I wasn’t sure what had killed the dog, but boredom seemed like a good guess.

I parked beside the gray municipal building and headed inside. The local cops shared the premises with the town council, a fire truck, a garbage truck, and what looked like a charity store, its windows grimly festooned with old men’s suits and old women’s bingo dresses. At the little office inside the door I gave my name to the elderly secretary, who looked old enough to remember William Bingham in pantaloons. Then I gave it to her again, as she’d managed to forget it somewhere between hearing it and looking for a pen with which to write it down. Behind her, an overweight woman with frizzy black hair typed slowly on a computer, the expression on her face suggesting that someone had forced her, on pain of death, to suck repeatedly on a sour lemon. They seemed like the kind of women who considered it their sacred duty to be unhappy and regarded anyone with a smile on his face as mired in unimaginable vice. I smiled, and tried to give the impression that I only engaged in imaginable vices. In return, the secretary directed me to an uncomfortable plastic chair. When I sat on it, it teetered to the left, forcing me to shift my weight to the right or tumble straight back out the door.

After a couple of minutes, a man appeared in the doorway of the room to my left. He wore a brown uniform shirt and neatly pressed brown trousers. According to the badge at his breast, his name was Grass. The local stoners probably laughed themselves blue in the face, at least until Grass got up close and personal with them. He was a big man in his fifties, and he still looked fit. There was no paunch, and when he shook my hand I felt one of my knuckles pop. His face was deeply ta

“I’m Wayne Grass,” he said. “Chief of police.”

“Charlie Parker,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”

“I know who you are,” he said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

I followed Grass into his office. It was tidy, with flowers growing in pots on the windowsill. There was a picture of a woman and two children on his desk. The woman was very pretty and looked a lot younger than Grass. The kids, a boy and a girl, were in their early teens.

“My family,” he said, spotting the direction of my glance.

“Recent picture?”

“Just last year. Why?”

“No reason,” I said.

“My wife is a little younger than I am, if that’s what you mean.”

“Nice work,” I said.

Grass gri

“So what can I do for you, Mr. Parker?”

“I’ve been hired by a man named Frank Matheson. He’s worried about a photograph that he found in the mailbox of a house that he owns. It’s the photograph of a child. The house is the old Grady house.”

I waited, watching the smile on Grass’s face melt away.

“I’m disappointed,” he said at last.

“Why would you be disappointed?”

“I told Frank Matheson that I’d take care of it, and I will, but I’m not going to let him scare some little girl and her parents half to death, and maybe start a panic among others, just because he found a picture in a mailbox.”

“You think that’s what he wants to do?”

“I don’t know what he wants, but that will be the result. We need to tread softly on this thing. We’ll circulate the picture, see what comes up. Hell, it may not even have been taken in the state. That photograph could have come from anywhere. But if Frank Matheson or anyone else goes to the newspapers and the TV stations and starts telling them that this little girl’s picture was placed in a dead child killer’s mailbox, what do you think is going to happen?”