“This was Cassie Blythe’s dog, Bear,” I said, and watched as Bear’s hand paused momentarily in its exploration of the animal’s fur.

“It’s a nice dog,” he said.

“Yes, it is. Bear, why are you doing this?”

He didn’t respond, but I saw the guilt flicker in the depths of his eyes, like a small stray fish sensing the approach of a predator. He tried to take his hand away, but the dog lifted its muzzle and pressed at his fingers until he went back to petting it. I left him to it.

“I know you don’t want to hurt anybody, Bear. You remember my grandfather?” My grandfather had been a Cumberland County sheriff’s deputy.

Bear nodded silently.

“He once told me that he saw gentleness in you, even if you didn’t always recognize it in yourself. He thought you had the potential to be a good man.”

Bear looked at me, seemingly uncomprehendingly, but I persevered.

“What you’re doing today is not gentle, Bear, and it’s not good. These people are going to get hurt. They’ve lost their daughter, and they desperately want her to be alive in Mexico. They want her to be alive, period. But you and I, Bear, we know that’s not the case. We know she’s not down there.”

Bear said nothing for a time, as if hoping that I might somehow disappear and stop tormenting him.

“What did he offer you?”

Bear’s shoulders sagged slightly, but he seemed almost relieved to be confessing.

“He said he’d give me five hundred dollars, and maybe put some work my way. I needed the money. Need the work too. It’s hard to get work when you’ve been in trouble. He said you were no good for them, that if I told them the story I’d be helping them in the long run.”

I felt the tension ease between my shoulders, but I also felt a tug of regret, a tiny fraction of the pain the Blythes would feel when I confirmed that Bear and Sundquist had lied to them about their daughter. Yet I couldn’t find it in myself to blame Bear.

“I have some friends that might be able to give you some work,” I said. “I hear they’re looking for someone to help out down at the Pine Point Co-op. I can put in a word for you.”

He looked at me. “You’d do that?”

“Can I tell the Blythes that their daughter isn’t in Mexico?”

He swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish she was in Mexico. I wish I had seen her. Will you tell them that?” He was like a big child, incapable of understanding the great hurt that he had caused them.

I didn’t answer. Instead, I patted him once on the shoulder in thanks. “I’ll call you at your sister’s, Bear, tell you about that job. You need money for a cab?”

“Nah, I’ll just walk into town. Ain’t far.”

He gave the dog an extra-vigorous rub, then started toward the road. The dog followed him, probing at his hands, until Bear reached the sidewalk, then it lay down on the ground again and watched him depart.

Inside the house, Ruth Blythe had not moved from her position on the sofa. She looked up at me and I glimpsed the tiny light in her eyes that I was about to extinguish.

I shook my head, then left the room as she rose and walked to the kitchen.

I was sitting on the hood of Sundquist’s Plymouth when he emerged. The knot on his tie was slightly askew and there was a red mark on his cheek where Ruth Blythe’s open hand had connected. He paused at the edge of the lawn and watched me nervously.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Now? Nothing. I’m not going to lay a finger on you.”

He visibly relaxed.

“But you’re finished as a private investigator. I’ll make sure of that. Those people deserve better.”

Sundquist almost laughed.

“What, they deserve you? You know, Parker, a lot of people around here don’t like you. They don’t think you’re such a big shot. You should have stayed in New York, because you don’t belong in Maine.”

He walked around the car and opened the door.

“I’m tired of this fucking life anyway. Tell you the truth, I’ll be happy to be out of it. I’m moving to Florida. You can stay here and freeze for all I care.”

I stepped away from the car.

“ Florida?”

“Yeah, Florida.”

I nodded and headed for my Mustang. The first drops of rain began to fall from the clouds, speckling the mass of twisted wire and metal that lay on the curb. The oil seeped slowly into the road as Sundquist’s key turned uselessly in the ignition.

“Well,” I said, “you sure won’t be driving there.”

I passed Bear on the road and gave him a ride to Congress Street. He strode off in the direction of the Old Port, crowds of tourists parting before him like earth before the plow. I thought of what my grandfather had said about Bear, and the way the dog had followed him to the verge of the lawn, sniffing hopefully at his hand. There was a gentleness to him, even a kindness, but his weakness and stupidity left him open to manipulation and perversion. Bear was a man in the balance, and there was no way of knowing how the scales would tip, not then.

I made the call to Pine Point the next morning, and Bear began working shortly after. I never saw him again, and I wonder now if my intervention cost him his life. And yet I sense, somehow, that deep down inside him, in the great gentleness that even he did not fully recognize, Bear would not have had it any other way.

When I look out on the Scarborough marsh from the windows of my house and see the channels cutting through the grass, interlinking with one another, each subject to the same floods, the same cycles of the moon, yet each finding its own route to the sea, I understand something about the nature of this world, about the way in which seemingly disparate lives are inextricably intertwined. At night, in the light of the full moon, the channels shine silver and white, thin roads feeding into the great glittering plain beyond, and I imagine myself upon them, walking on the white road, listening to the voices that sound in the rushes as I am carried into the new world waiting.

THERE WERE TWELVE snakes in all, common garters. They had taken up residence in an abandoned shack at the edge of my property, secure among the fallen boards and rotting timbers. I spotted one of them slipping through a hole beneath the ruined porch steps, probably on its way home from a morning spent hunting for prey. When I ripped away the floorboards with a crowbar I found the rest. The smallest looked to be about a foot long, the largest closer to three. They coiled over one another as the sunlight shone upon them, the yellowish stripes on their dorsa glowing like strips of neon in the semidarkness. Some had already begun to flatten their bodies, the better to display their colors as a warning. I poked at the nearest with the end of the crowbar and heard it hiss. A sweetish, unpleasant odor began to rise from the hole as the snakes released their musk from the glands at the base of their tails. Beside me Walter, my eight-month-old golden Labrador retriever, drew back, his nose quivering. He barked in confusion. I patted him behind the ear and he looked at me for reassurance; this was his first encounter with snakes and he didn’t seem too sure about what was expected of him.

“Best to keep your nose out of there, Walt,” I told him, “or else you’ll be wearing one of them on the end of it.”

We get a lot of garters in Maine. They’re tough reptiles, capable of surviving subzero temperatures for up to one month, or of submerging themselves in water during the winter, aided by stable thermals. Then, usually in mid-March when the sun begins to warm the rocks, they emerge from their hibernation and start searching for mates. By June or July they’re breeding. Mostly, you get ten or twelve young in a nest. Sometimes there are as few as three. The record is eighty-five, which is a lot of garter snakes no matter what way you look at it. These snakes had probably chosen to make their home in the shack because of the comparative sparsity of conifers on this part of my land. Conifers make the soil acidic, which is bad for night crawlers, and night crawlers are a garter’s favorite snack.