“I’m looking for Marie Benoit. I hear she lives around here.”

  The woman smiled and jerked her head to one side, indicating the north. “The house at the top of the hill, just before you leave town, on the right.”

  “Thanks.” I put the truck back into gear.

  “She’s not there, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yup. Went to the circus.”

  “The circus?”

  “Bread and Puppet, up in Glover.”

  I nodded. “Right—I’ve heard of it.”

  “They’re having a big to-do—lots of people. Too much for me. Besides, I think those people are a little funny, anyway. Nice, but funny. Marie likes ’em, though.”

  “Have you known Marie long?”

  “Almost twenty years now. Don’t know her well, of course. She’s not here very often, and keeps pretty much to herself, but she’s a friendly thing—just private. You a friend of hers, as well?”

  “I met her in Brattleboro. She said nice things about Wheelock.”

  The woman glanced back at her garden. “Well, I’m running out of light.”

  I looked at her for a moment, suddenly feeling cold and slightly ill. “You asked if I was a friend of hers, ‘as well.’ Was there someone else looking for her today?”

  She straightened, again shoving her glasses back. “Yes. Came by about half an hour ago.”

  “Thin man? Gray hair tied back in a ponytail?”

  “That’s him.”

  I thanked her, drove to the top of the hill, pulled off the road into Marie Benoit’s driveway, and switched on Brandt’s cellular phone. If ever there was a need for the cavalry he’d mentioned, this was it—except that there wasn’t much cavalry in this part of Vermont.

  Brandt was still at the office, as we’d agreed earlier. “What’s up?”

  “Shattuck’s already here—he’s got a half-hour lead on me.”

  “Shit. Where are you?”

  “Wheelock. Susan Pendergast has gone to the Bread and Puppet Circus in Glover—they’re apparently putting on a big show. I need people—as many as you can round up.”

  I started the truck again and began driving as fast as I could up the road toward Glover, some eight miles farther on, cradling the phone in the crook of my neck. I could hear Brandt on the other end shouting instructions to someone in the background.

  He came back on. “Joe—how did he do it?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ve got a bad feeling about it. Get hold of that clerk’s assistant who helped us out with the birth records. I didn’t give it any thought at the time, but when I was in there last, she seemed a little out of it—under stress somehow. Shattuck trained Susan Pendergast in urban guerrilla tactics. The town clerk’s office would’ve been a natural place for him to start looking for her.”

  “I’ll check it out. Keep that phone with you.”

  I drove as quickly as I could along the narrow, twisting road. The oddly named Bread and Puppet Circus had been founded years earlier as an alternative to traditional indoor theater. It was socially political in its rhetoric, loosely organized, and supported by volunteers and low-paid workers. It also staged its performances out-of-doors, both locally and in other parts of the world. What made it unique among other vestiges of early countercultural street theater, however, was its use of props. Bread and Puppet—which also made and sold bread to raise money—was famous for its papier-mâché masks, statuary, and “puppets,” some of which were fifteen feet tall and carried on the ends of long poles by white-dressed attendants. The effect of seeing these looming, gaunt, often grim-faced giants high over the heads of the audience strewn across the grass, with only the mountains and the sky as backdrop, was alternately enchanting, mystical, unnerving, and downright ominous.

  This, combined with the unique music and the unconventionally delivered social messages—along with the tough but savory bread—made it a very popular attraction. If the Circus was putting on an especially big performance, I expected to find hundreds of people in attendance.

  I began seeing cars parked on the shoulders on both sides of the road a half mile from my destination. I continued on more slowly, unsure of the geography. I’d seen photographs of the circus and read articles about them, but I’d never actually been up here before. What also fueled my caution was a conviction that if Shattuck knew Susan Pendergast was here, he knew I wasn’t far behind.

  I passed a dirt road on the left with a “Bread and Puppet Circus” banner strung across it and then immediately came to a gathering of buildings by the road—a huge barn attached to a farmhouse on the right, opposite a rough shed and a couple of colorfully decorated but decrepit school buses. In front of the barn was a driveway with a prominent “No Parking” sign. I backed my truck in and killed the engine.

  I got out and looked around warily. Up and down the road were hundreds of cars, vans, and trucks. And yet there was not a soul in sight.

  I walked over to the barn, a gigantic three- or four-story whale of a building, weather-beaten and sagging, and pushed open a small side door marked “Museum.” It was dark and silent inside. The ramshackle white house attached to one side seemed equally abandoned.

  On the soft breeze, I heard the muffled thumping of distant drums. I crossed over to the dirt road with the banner. It, too, was lined with cars, and led downhill, curving to the right. The sounds of music—pipes, more drums, instruments I couldn’t identify—had grown louder.

  At the bottom of the curve, around a small outcropping of trees, I came within sight of a broad field, some distance off, that had been cut into the side of a hill years before—perhaps as an old gravel pit. Now, softened and disguised by grass and passing time, it had become a perfect amphitheater, its three green walls gently sloping toward the flat, circular “stage” at the bottom.

  I stopped close by the trees, still under their protection, and surveyed the scene. The Bread and Puppet Circus was in full swing, its many members dancing and carrying their trademark towering puppets to the accompaniment of odd and exotic-sounding musical instruments. But they were facing the same way I was—directly into the crowd of well over a thousand people. If I continued the way I was heading, I would come out into full view of the crowd as I followed a well-worn trail that swept up and around the right side of the back of the amphitheater. For several minutes, I would be clearly visible to everyone watching the show.

  I retreated up the road a short way and cut into the woods that bordered the left side of the amphitheater, hoping to come out above and south of the old pit, where my appearance would pass largely unnoticed. It was becoming darker—I guessed the half-light following sunset would be completely gone in about forty-five minutes—and I was becoming pessimistic about ever locating Susan Pendergast.

  I was almost to my goal, but still in the woods, when the soft chirping of the cellular phone brought me to a halt. I pulled it out and answered.

  “We found the assistant town clerk,” Brandt said, his voice thin and distant. “She’s dead.”

  “Oh, Christ.” I was suddenly seized with a violent anger, directed both at Shattuck’s casual bloodthirstiness and my own inability to bring it to an end.

  “She was at home. It looks like a broken neck. She probably told him what he wanted to know, and then he killed her so she wouldn’t talk. I guess you were right about him staking out her office—maybe he’d already gotten to her and was holding something over her… Coercing her somehow. If so, all he had to do was wait ’til we’d done his research for him, before driving up to Motor Vehicles in Montpelier for a current address, no questions asked… Where are you now?”

  “I’m just about to start searching the crowd. You got backup coming?”

  “There was a domestic brawl somewhere in your general area. It’s got almost everybody tied up, but they’re trying to break people loose. They’re moving as fast as they can, but they got to cover the distance.”

  “Have them block off the roads when they arrive. If they get here before the show ends, they should have everybody stay where they are. That’s got to play to our advantage. And tell them to bring lots of lighting. It’s going to be dark soon. And, Tony?” I added as an afterthought. “Get hold of Al Hammond at the LynBurke Motel. He was planning to spend the night there. Maybe he can help out.”

  “Right.”

  I switched off the phone and stepped out of the woods into the mowed swath that curved around the upper semicircle of the amphitheater. What I saw filled me with hopelessness and frustration—a thousand people, many of them with their backs to me, sitting on the grass, jammed together in a solid sea, amid the rapidly failing light.

  I joined a fringe of people at the back who were mostly standing, many of them equipped with either still or video cameras. I walked up to an older man with several Nikons around his neck.

  “Excuse me. Could I ask you a big favor?” I said in a low voice.

  He looked at me with a startled expression. “Sure—what’s up?”

  I pulled my badge out and discreetly showed it to him. “My name is Lieutenant Joe Gunther; I’m from the Brattleboro Police Department. I’m looking for someone in this crowd. I know it sounds a little crazy, but I was wondering if I could borrow one of your long lenses so I could see better.”

  He stared at me for a moment, the smile fading from his face. “Are you putting me on?”

  “No—I’m quite serious, and I’m running out of time.”

  Something in my voice or expression must have done the trick, because he bent down to the bag at his feet and came out with a monstrous telephoto lens that he quickly snapped onto one of the camera bodies around his neck. He then slipped it off and handed it to me. “It’s the biggest one I’ve got. You’re not going anywhere with it, are you?”

  “Only along the edge here. Stay with me. If I spot the person I’m after, I’ll pass you the camera and get out of your hair.”

  He nodded and stepped back slightly to give me more room.

  I hefted the camera up to eye level and began scanning the faces of the crowd on the bank opposite me. Beyond them, across a distant, overgrown field, I could see the dimly lit top of the barn where I’d parked my truck.

  It was an impressive lens—high-quality, one thousand millimeters, very clear. Even in this light, it functioned well, allowing me a distinct close-up view of even the most distant faces. As I moved from one person to the next, carefully sweeping from left to right, I began to feel more optimistic. Given enough time and enough light, finding Susan Pendergast again became a possibility—assuming she was here at all.

  Of course, hers wasn’t the only face I was seeking, and I knew that if Shattuck was also searching for her, he, too, would be on high ground, studying the crowd. I had therefore begun my sweep with the people on the crest of the amphitheater.

  That, as it turned out, was a piece of incredible luck, not for what I saw on that crest but in the distance behind it. Over the shoulder of one of the spectators I’d focused on, in the field separating the distant road from where we stood, I caught the blur of something bobbing up and down.

  I refocused the lens. The bobbing turned into a man, his back to me, running toward the barn, a telltale ponytail swinging from side to side.

  “Shit,” I muttered, and handed the camera back to its owner.

  “You found him?”

  I didn’t pause to answer. I was sprinting off as fast as I could, a good quarter mile behind.

  I hadn’t seen Susan, but the absolute certainty that Shattuck had beaten me to her was utterly clear to me. The quiet, almost unnoticed death of a backwoods hermit with a false name and a secret stash of money had led me here with fate’s inexorable momentum. I had stood by in ignorance while Kevin Shilly had been cruelly murdered. Was I again too late to stop the murder of the one person left I had the power to save?

  I discovered a narrow trail that cut through the field and the line of trees that bordered the road, making my progress better than I’d expected. Nevertheless, when I reached the road, it was empty.

  I crossed the road to my truck, listening, my gun now in my hand, hoping for some sign to tell me where Shattuck had gone. Instinctively, as if drawn by its magnetic mass, my eyes went to the huge dark barn and to the museum door I’d pushed open earlier to look inside: I had closed that door behind me. It now stood open.

  I went up the steps silently, pausing just outside, my back against the wall, trying to remember the layout I’d only just glimpsed before. Directly opposite the door was a broad set of stairs leading up to the museum; to the left was a gift-shop area, with bins full of prints, metal postcard racks, and various T-shirt displays. Beyond that had been three other doorways too dark to see into. To the right of the entrance was either a wall or another door—I couldn’t remember.

  I took a deep breath, gripped my gun with both hands, and swung inside, pivoting on my heel so that I ended up crouching at the foot of the stairs, my back against the wall, facing both the upstairs and the darkened gift-shop area. Almost immediately, I heard the single soft scrape of a foot somewhere above me.

  I moved up the stairs slowly, my attention focused ahead, but also aware of any movement from beyond the gift shop. The wood beneath me was ancient, worn, and scarred, but solid and utterly silent, all the creaks and groans long ago beaten out of it.

  The steps led up through the floor above, so that I had to crouch just below floor level and stick my head up quickly for a fast survey. What I saw was the source of dreams and nightmares—a huge, looming dark cavern of a room, columned and laced overhead by giant wooden support posts and beams—a classic monument of timber-frame construction, with bracing and counter-bracing made of massive hand-adzed, tree-sized poles, linked in countless mortise and tenon joints. It was a structure of cathedral-like complexity, and all of it—the posts, the walls, the ceilings, and the two galleries lining the central aisle—was covered or populated with the papier-mâché manifestations of decades of whimsy-driven puppeteers. Masks of humans, clowns, animals, and demons hung everywhere; bodies made of sheets fell from enormous, pale, frozen-faced heads like stalactites; serried ranks of twelve-foot human forms, some with the faces of gargoyles, stood guard by the dozen; and everywhere, from every angle, row after tightly packed row of those large, dark, sightless eyes stared out at whatever passed before them.

  Susan Pendergast, if she was here, had chosen well—this was a place of confusion and befuddlement, of hope for the pursued and despair for the pursuer, where stillness and silence reigned, where movement meant revelation and death.

  And yet move I had to if I was to finally thwart one man’s twenty-four years of rage and save the life of a woman who’d made living an act of survival.

  The two parallel floor-level galleries I’d noticed during my quick inspection were each separated from the central aisle by continuous three-foot-high wooden barricades, also festooned with decorative baubles, masks, and designs. Both galleries contained a variety of three-dimensional set pieces—frozen, puppet-peopled scenes of diners at table, animals at play, or simply a crowd of people gathered as in an audience. They were dense and layered and offered a protective maze of cover, assuming I could reach them.

  I figured Shattuck knew I was here and that he was watching where I was hiding as carefully as he was searching for Susan. To try stealth to reach cover, therefore, was obvious folly. Dark as it was—and it was difficult seeing even the nearest wall in any detail—I would still be visible to anyone watching. An explosive entry, with a scramble to safety, seemed the only alternative. It also might destabilize Shattuck’s stalking of Susan enough to give her an advantage of some kind.

  I firmly planted my feet on the steps, rocked forward slightly, and launched myself in a sprinter’s half-crouch toward the three-foot barricade of the nearest gallery. I sailed over it in a dive, tucking my head in to land in a somersault, and crashed into a trio of puppets sitting around a small linen-covered table. I landed in a tangled sprawl amid hollow oversized bodies, a cloud of dust, and fragments of broken wood. Spurred on by the fear of a bullet, I twisted onto all fours and crawled as swiftly and silently as possible away from my calamitous landing site.

  There was no bullet, however, nor any sound whatsoever. Stealthily now, I repositioned myself farther up the gallery, under the billowing skirts of a lady twice my height in Colonial dress, still hearing no more than my own quiet breathing. I rose slowly up the center of the puppet, alongside the central wooden pole on which she hung, careful not to touch the fabric surrounding me. Moving in slow motion, I pulled out my Swiss Army pocketknife and, using the small scissors blade, meticulously and quietly cut a tiny window in front of my right eye.

  Through this opening, I had a fairly broad view of both the gallery opposite and the barn’s central aisle, as far as the gloom allowed. The problem was, of course, that unless something moved out there, I was confronted with only an army of lifeless, empty, oversized shells.

  I didn’t think Susan would give herself away; she had chosen this spot, and knew the value of stillness within it. Nor did I intend to move; I’d secured a near perfect observation post. The role of hunter was exclusively Shattuck’s—it was his field to explore and his choice to risk exposure.

  Or so I thought.

  Far to the left, near the staircase, I saw something move—slightly, with no more urgency that the sweep of a clock’s minute hand. I closed my eyes briefly to intensify their sensitivity to the dark. In the brief moment following their reopening, I saw the figure of a man in profile, shifting with the subtlety of a cloud’s shadow on the moon. He was tall, lean, darkly dressed, his hair close-cropped.

  Someone else was here beside Susan, Shattuck, and me. Instinctively, I realized the Outfit had risen to the challenge I had thrown down in Chicago.

  Now there were two hunters, one prey, and me.

  Never before had I played in a lethal chess game of this kind, where all the players stood apart, unallied, and potentially at risk from one another. I would later recall what happened next only in super-compressed bits of memory—like a series of blurred snapshots taken so close together that the action of one bleeds into the next.