"Wouldn't you say?"

  "I would."

  I looked at her, put my arms on the table and leaned toward her, my face softening. I actually thought about it. Coming clean.

  She waited.

  I opened my mouth to speak, then realized just how stupid that would be. I closed my mouth, sat back, and said, "If I see him, I'll let him know."

  52

  BUCKY TURNED OFF THE ENGINE and got out. He worked his boots into the gravel and stood for a minute, letting the quiet settle in on him. He inhaled the woods through his nose and let it out slow. A red squirrel chattered and somewhere down in the thorns a deer crashed through the brush. Three geese flew overhead, late for breakfast, silent except for the sound of their wings in the air. Dead leaves whispered, then went quiet.

  Bucky circled Ben's car and swiped his finger on the windshield. The sun still glowed white through the clouds and made a dull glare that showed the small smudge. A light film of dust from dry dead leaves had settled on the car.

  There'd been no rain. That meant it was two days' worth of dust. The car had been there since the last time Bucky had spoken with Ben. Bucky took a faded blue bandanna from his pocket and used it to open the Lexus's door. No keys. No blood. Only the smell of leather. He closed the door and stepped into the middle of the driveway, where he knelt to read the tracks. Too many scuff marks and too dry to make any sense.

  He stood and walked back down the driveway until he came to a low soft spot, still brown with autumn mud. That he could read. His own tracks were freshest with hard crisp edges on the tread marks. There were Ben's tracks, or portions of them, the car's tread narrower than a truck's. Someone else had been there at the same time. The dried dirt of this other track was made about the same time as Ben's. Bucky would have a hard time telling someone exactly how he knew, but he knew it wasn't magic. To him it was as obvious as an overbaked loaf of bread to a baker or a good wind to a sailor. He touched it to make sure. Truck tracks. Wide. Maybe an H2.

  Maybe Thane.

  Bucky went to his truck and returned with a digital camera, snapping three shots of the tire tracks from different angles. He didn't know if he could convince anyone else to be as certain as he was about the time of the tracks, but the picture would let him try. The first thing to do was search the lodge and Bucky did that. There was no sign that anything bad had happened.

  He walked back to the Lexus and began to survey the ground in widening circles outside the car, searching the dusty grit. Halfway to the cabin he found it. A dug-up spot in the gravel. Someone jumping into action, moving toward the swamp. Running from something. Bucky looked for a sign of what. His eyes crossed the driveway and continued on through the woods until they came to rest on the tree stand.

  He went through the woods to the base of the stand. In the mud, size thirteen boot prints. Resting on a bed of brown leaves ten feet away was a single spent shotgun shell. Bucky picked it up with a stick and examined it before putting it down. It was fresh, fired from a twelve gauge. Probably two days ago. The picture started to come together. He went back to the disturbance in the grit and searched the bank on the swamp side of the driveway.

  Five feet away, he spotted a patch of leaves that might have been scuffed up. He moved toward it, then knelt and looked along that same direction down the bank, shading his eyes even though the light from the pewter sky was dull. Five feet farther there was another scuff mark. He sifted through the leaves, moving them one at a time until he exposed a small corner of a dead leaf that had been pressed into the dirt by a flat curving object. The heel of a shoe. Ben's shoe.

  Twenty feet on, his heart jumped into his throat. A round spot, the size of a nickel, spotted a dead maple leaf. He scooped it up and held the leaf close. He knew before he tasted it, but wanted to be sure so he scraped a bit off the brown button of dark matter with his pinkie nail and put it to his tongue. He felt his saliva glands kick in and his stomach turned.

  Blood.

  The path, now that he knew it was a path made by a man, became easier to follow. The disturbed spots in the leaves stayed five feet apart. A running man. A place where he'd fallen. More blood spots. Bucky stopped, blinked, and looked up at the sky. The tiny wet flecks it spat were a reminder that his time to read the woods would be short. He was more than halfway to the swamp when he saw a big scuff mark. Leaves and dirt dug up in two divots so great even a greenhorn could spot them. Another sudden change in direction. Bucky scanned the woods in the direction opposite where the dirt had been sprayed. He staggered forward, fearing that the sudden change in direction was the result of a direct hit. The dark brown spots became splotches, confirming the new wound. Bloodstains jumped out at him now from the forest floor, getting bigger as he went. Bucky saw the brambles and the triangular opening where the game trail went in. He jogged toward it, knowing the way he knew with animals that wounded things ran downhill, taking the path of least resistance. He didn't have to examine Thane's boot prints or the hand marks in the mud where they both had begun to crawl. The rain was coming down in full drops now and the wind began to lift the leaves from their resting places and carry them tumbling away through the trees like mad little demons.

  Every so often, Bucky would check the mud for the man tracks, but for the most part, he kept his eyes on the thick tangle of branches around him. He was looking for the frayed ends of broken twigs, the spot where one or another of these two men made their mad break to get free from the tangled undergrowth. When he saw the first pale filaments, he pushed through the brush and looked down at the mud below. Ben's shoe prints, clear enough for a child to track. Snapped twigs and sticks and broken vines.

  Bucky stopped and made a careful examination of the mud. There were no boot prints, only Ben's shoes. Bucky stood up to look around and his spirits rose with him. Ben might have escaped. Bucky thought of all the possibilities. There was a lot of blood, but the wounds could have been muscle. If it were fresh, Bucky could have told exactly what part of the body it was from by looking at it. But dried as it was, he could only guess and he preferred to hope.

  He followed the new trail through the brush to the path along the swamp, then followed Ben's shoe prints toward the road. Another good sign. Ben had known where to go for help. They stopped at the water's edge.

  Bucky saw the broken grass and the confusion of hand and boot tracks in the mud. His stomach turned, knowing what it meant. Part of him wanted to stop reading the signs. Rain pattered against the black surface of the water. Bucky got down on his hands and knees again, willing a sign that continued along up the trail. There was nothing. He stood up and paced the shoreline, thinking. He imagined a final struggle, Ben lying dead, and Thane trying to figure out what to do with the body. There was a small flat-bottomed boat up by the road bridge. Bucky jogged to it and saw right away that it hadn't been moved. He hustled back to where he'd found the last shoe prints, blinking up at the rain. His heart and lungs burned.

  If he was going to find anything, it had to be now. He paced back and forth at the spot he knew Ben had been murdered, peering into the woods and swamp, frantic. He found Thane's boot tracks and some smaller prints, a woman's, read them, and reread them to no avail. Then he splashed back and forth in the teeming rain until there was nothing but his own muddy ruts on the trail and even they began to fill with milky brown pools.

  He sat down in the mud and stared out at the rain-blasted surface of the swamp water until the drops began to drip from his mustache and he wiped his mouth on the back of his soaking sleeve. And it was then, when he'd given up hope, that he saw it.

  His son Russel, coated in mud from head to toe. A soft spot in the creek bed. Scott and Thane laughing about it, until he told them about the deadly suction.

  Bubbles in the swamp.

  53

  I CANCELED MY DINNER with the politicians and I was almost home. Wind pushed at the H2 as I drove along the rise above Sandy Beach. I looked down the dirt road bisecting the farm fields. A road like the one in Van Gogh's last painting of the field where he killed himself. The road to nowhere. The road Ben tried to take Jessica down. To talk about his wife running off. According to Ben's story.

  The construction site next to our house was an open wound. Two enormous mounds of dirt rose toward the sky. The trucks and excavators were long gone. Even the deep teeth marks of their tracks had begun to erode. A single trailer rested on cinder blocks. A beat-up bulldozer and a white pickup truck slept beside it in the red glow of dusk. I lost sight of both as I pulled down into the circle drive. Inside, I called Jessica's name. In the entryway, I glanced at the mirror that wasn't there. Its replacement was a woven Navaho rug. Bright red and orange. Colors that didn't match the space. I ran upstairs, then down. Tommy was holed up in the game room with a friend, playing Xbox. He jumped up and hugged me, then got back to the game.

  In the walk-out great room beneath the main floor, a dozen renderings of the new house, the castle, rested on easels. A mini-boardroom. In the center of the floor was a drafting table, riddled with plans. A card table beside it bore the replica of the new house and the old, a scale model that cost ten thousand dollars.

  A muddy track came in from the sliding doors that looked out on the lake. The track circled the tables. I shook my head and stopped in front of a watercolor rendering of the new house, the way it would look from the water. Three stories of flat-cut fieldstone. A round turret in the center. Tall broad windows. Dormers. Parapets. Sweeping slate roofs. A stone terrace with a formal pool and geometrical shrubs. Affluence. Power. Perfect order.

  The scent of raw earth snuck in through the crack in the sliders. I went to close them and saw Jessica in a hard hat on the foundation with a man in a rusty Carhartt jacket. His arms flying through the air. Her hands were planted on her hips. The sun's last rays gave the scene a rose-colored hue. They didn't notice me until I was moving toward them with my arms extended for balance, careful not to fall into the basement hole or the deep trench on the outside. A ponytail poked out from her hat and she wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and muddy work boots. The man with his back to me was Dino, the GC

  for her project.

  He turned when he saw me and threw his arms in the air.

  "Thane, you tell her," he said.

  "Tell her what?"

  "See this line?" he said, squatting down and squinting along the line of his extending arm and all five fingers. "She wants it framed, but I can't. Not straight. We've got to dig it out and pour this thing over."

  "The Con Trac guy said you could fir it or something," Jessica said. Her eyes were moist and pinkrimmed. Dino set his mouth and shook his head. "It's too far off. You build on this and you're going to have a crooked house. I'm not doing it. You're mad now, but you'd hate me worse if I did it.

  "Look," Dino said, skipping across one of the planks that bridged the concrete wall to the outside ground.

  He raised a massive board and fed it across the trench on the outside of the foundation to me. I held it and he marched back across the plank holding the other end.

  "When are you gonna fill that?" I asked, angling my head down into the trench. He looked down in and said, "When it dries a little. That's why I left the dozer."

  He set his end of the board down and told me to do the same. It was a foot wide, nearly two inches thick, and maybe sixteen feet long. He positioned it in the corner of the foundation and by the time it got to me, the entire end was hanging off the inside of the wall.

  "Just," Jessica said, reaching down and pulling the board onto the line of the wall. Dino looked at me and said, "Help me here."

  "They can put it straight on this part, honey," I said, pointing, "but then they won't have a ninety degree angle going in at the other end. See that?"

  "So it's off a little," she said. "No one's going to see this corner. We'll plant a tree or something."

  "Honey," I said. "You can't. He's right."

  Her face crumpled up and she looked toward the end of the lake.

  "This is our house," she said, turning on me. "You're just standing there smiling like this is fine?"

  "It's not fine. Come on," I said, moving toward her, holding out my hand. "We'll have to fix it, but we can't frame on this. You'll have gaps everywhere. Even if you could hide it on the outside, the inside would be a mess."

  "That roof doesn't go on and we lose the whole goddamn winter," she said. Lines extended out from the corners of her eyes.

  "We're okay," I said, taking her hand.

  Dino jammed his hands in his pockets and looked up at the sky.

  "Gonna rain," he said. "You guys let me know when they can get back and redo this foundation."

  He walked off with his head down and got into his truck.

  Jessica slipped free and headed for the house. I followed and tried to put my arm around her as we crossed the lawn. The wind kicked up, blowing grit in my eyes.

  "Want me to grill some steaks before this rain?" I said when we were inside.

  "Not hungry," she said. "I thought you had a dinner at the lodge. I'll heat up that pasta for you and Tommy."

  I took her shoulders.

  "Come on, we've got everything we always wanted. Don't do this. We'll fix it and move on. This house is fine for now."

  "You ever notice how everything's fine for you?" she asked, baring her teeth with a fake smile.

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "It's average," she said. She turned and marched through the room and up the stairs, speaking over her shoulder as she went. "The average IQ is one hundred. The average income is thirty-five thousand a year. The average married couple has sex once a week. Sound good to you? Ten million dollars we're giving him and that son-of-a-bitch gave us a crooked house."

  She walked into the kitchen and took down a bottle of Riesling.

  "You talking about Johnny G?" I asked, stomach tight.

  "Are we planning on giving ten million dollars to any other crooked sons-of-bitches?"

  "Morris sent that hundred-million-dollar overage check to Con Trac today."

  She took a glass from the cupboard, opened the wine, and filled it. She raised it to me and said, "Then the glass is half full, isn't it?"

  "You think we could just leave? Run? What about Tommy?"

  She took a big swallow and looked out at the lake. In a distant voice she said, "If we have to."

  Then she looked at me and said, "Australia. France. Italy. They all have private schools that speak English. With money you can do anything. New names. All that."

  "Jesus."

  "But we'll be fine," she said, looking away again. "Things like this happen all the time. Always have, always will. Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger. Look at Martha Stewart. Back on TV. People forget what you did if you have money and now we've got it."

  "What happened to the money?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "She really got ninety million?"

  I shrug my shoulders. "I guess. Sure."

  "That was okay? You going to jail while she was out there with all that?"

  I look at the small window in the door, then back at his face and say, "Who cares, right?"

  "I don't know, man. Did you?"

  My chest tightens and the air seems thin.

  He leans toward me and in a whisper says, "What really happened with her. Admit it. To yourself . . . It's time."

  My sinuses swell.

  "She ripped the bones from my back and chucked me down like a bag of jelly," I say.

  "She was bad," he says.

  "I told you she was."

  "You never said how bad."

  My brain grows so hot that it begins to melt, and the truth oozes out. 54

  BUCKY LED THE TWO WOMEN agents out to the small lodge. He'd seen the doubt in their eyes when he first began telling them the story, but had convinced them, especially the redhead, Agent Lee, at least to take a look. He checked the rearview mirror and saw their car churning through his cloud of dust as they went up the driveway.

  Tim McCarthy, the investigator from the state police office, was already there along with a white Onondaga County coroner's van. The agents talked about McCarthy with him sitting in their office as if he were deaf. He knew from their discussion that for political reasons, the sheriff had given the FBI control of the investigation. If they did find a body though, that had to be handled by the coroner. According to Agent Rooks, the frizzy-haired one, McCarthy was using the new situation to worm his way back in. The redhead said she didn't blame McCarthy, that any good detective would do the same. Bucky got out, shook hands with McCarthy, and watched him do the same with the agents before he introduced the man from the coroner's office. The assistant coroner had already unloaded a handcart with big bicycle tires that carried the GPR unit, ground-penetrating radar, used to detect buried bodies and graves. Down the hill, Bucky could hear the drone of the motorboat. Its long dark shape moved through the trees and along the glassy black water.

  "I'm thinking he took his first shot from there," Bucky said, pointing to the tree stand. "Otherwise, why would Ben run down the bank in dress shoes?"

  "Presuming it was Ben Evans wearing the shoes," Agent Rooks said.

  Bucky looked at her, sizing her up the way he would a mule.

  "The casing is under the stand," he said, pointing. "Right over here."

  He led them to the tree stand. Agent Lee crouched down and slipped the shell into a plastic bag, then stood up and looked around.

  "Presuming the gun was fired at Ben," he said, glancing at Rooks, "I'll show you where he was and the path he took."

  It was a cloudy, chilly day and the leaves crunched under their feet as the agents followed him across the driveway and down through the woods. He showed them the muddy spot in the path, explaining the footprints he'd seen, but felt stupid doing it since the only thing left were small puddles. Agent Rooks had her hands jammed deep into the pockets of her blue Windbreaker, and her lips worked sideways when Bucky described how he figured it all went down.

  "Here's where the blood started to get thick, a chest wound, lung, liver, good blood," he said, walking toward the heavy brush. "The real blood was in that thicket over there. I can show someone later. Even with the rain, there should be something. There was a lot."