I guess in the end, I wanted to balance something that felt bad, no matter how necessary, with something that felt good. So instead of driving to Boston, I got off the turnpike at Auburn and drove west into Maine’s lakes region. I checked into the cabins where Al had stayed, just before nightfall. I got the largest of the four waterside accommodations at a ridiculous off-season rate.
Those five weeks may have been the best of my life. I saw no one but the couple who ran the local store, where I bought a few simple groceries twice a week, and Mr. Winchell, who owned the cabins. He stopped in on Sundays to make sure I was okay and having a good time. Every time he asked, I told him I was, and it was no lie. He gave me a key to the equipment shed, and I took a canoe out every morning and evening when the water was calm. I remember watching the full moon rise silently over the trees on one of those evenings, and how it beat a silver avenue across the water while the reflection of my canoe hung below me like a drowned twin. A loon cried somewhere, and was answered by a pal or a mate. Soon others joined the conversation. I shipped my paddle and just sat there three hundred yards out from shore, watching the moon and listening to the loons converse. I remember thinking if there was a heaven somewhere and it wasn’t like this, then I didn’t want to go.
The fall colors began to bloom-first timid yellow, then orange, then blazing, strumpet red as autumn burned away another Maine summer. There were cardboard boxes filled with coverless paperbacks at the market, and I must have read three dozen or more: mysteries by Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, Chester Himes, and Richard S. Prather; steamy melodramas like Peyton Place and A Stone for Danny Fisher; westerns by the score; and one science-fiction novel called The Lincoln Hunters, which concerned time-travelers trying to record a “forgotten” speech by Abraham Lincoln.
When I wasn’t reading or canoeing, I was walking in the woods. Long autumn afternoons, most hazy and warm. Dusty gilded light slanting down through the trees. At night, a quiet so vast it seemed almost to reverberate. Few cars passed on Route 114, and after ten o’clock or so there were none at all. After ten, the part of the world where I had come to rest belonged only to the loons and the wind in the fir trees. Little by little, the image of Frank Dunning lying on his father’s grave began to fade, and I found myself less likely to recall at odd moments how I had dropped the souvenir pillow, still smoldering, over his staring eyes in the Tracker mausoleum.
By the end of October, as the last of the leaves were swirling down from the trees and the nighttime temperatures began to dip into the thirties, I started driving into Durham, getting the lay of the land around Bowie Hill, where a shooting was going to occur in another two weeks. The Friends’ Meeting House Al had mentioned made a convenient landmark. Not far past it, a dead tree was leaning toward the road, probably the one Al had been struggling with when Andrew Cullum came along, already wearing his orange hunting vest. I also made it a point to locate the accidental shooter’s home, and to trace his probable course from there to Bowie Hill.
My plan was no plan at all, really; I’d just follow the trail Al had already blazed. I’d drive to Durham early in the day, park near the fallen tree, struggle with it, then pretend to have a heart attack when Cullum came along and pitched in. But after locating Cullum’s house, I happened to stop for a cold drink at Brownie’s Store half a mile away, and saw a poster in the window that gave me an idea. It was crazy, but sort of interesting.
The poster was headed ANDROSCOGGIN COUNTY CRIBBAGE TOURNAMENT RESULTS. There followed a list of about fifty names. The tourney winner, from West Minot, had scored ten thousand “pegs,” whatever they were. The runner-up had scored ninety-five hundred. In third place, with 8,722 pegs-the name had been circled in red, which was what drew my attention in the first place-was Andy Cullum.
Coincidences happen, but I’ve come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears.
The next day, I drove back to Cullum’s house just shy of five in the afternoon. I parked behind his Ford woody station wagon and went to the door.
A pleasant-faced woman wearing a ruffled apron and holding a baby in the crook of her arm opened to my knock, and I knew just looking at her that I was doing the right thing. Because Carolyn Poulin wasn’t going to be the only victim on the fifteenth of November, just the one who’d end up in a wheelchair.
“Yes?”
“My name’s George Amberson, ma’am.” I tipped my hat to her. “I wonder if I could speak to your husband.”
