“You’re welcome,” she settled upon. “Sit, sit. You’ll stay for dinner?”

“No, I can’t. I have to get going. I’ve taken up too much of your husband’s time as it is.”

Despite her inherent decency and good nature, I could see that she was relieved.

“If you’re sure.”

“I am. Thank you.”

I stayed on my feet to put on my coat, and Durand showed me to the door.

“I ought to tell you,” he said, “that when I first saw you, I thought you were someone else, and I don’t mean one of the Harrington boys. Just for a second, mind.”

“Who did you think I was?”

“There was a man came here, couple of months back. It was evening, darker than it is now. He did what you did: stared at the house for a time, even went as far as to come onto the lawn so he could take a look at the back of the house, out where the garage used to be. I didn’t like it. I ventured out to ask him what he thought he was doing. Haven’t seen him since.”

“You think he was casing the house for a robbery?”

“At first, except that when I challenged him, that’s not what he said. Not that a burglar would tell you he was casing a place, not unless he was dumb as dirt.”

“What did he say?”

“‘Hunting.’ That’s what he said. Just that one word: ‘Hunting.’ Now, what do you think that means?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Durand,” I said, and his eyes narrowed as he wondered if he was being lied to.

“Then he asked me if I knew what had happened here, and I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, and he said that he thought I did. I didn’t care for his tone, and told him to be on his way.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

“Not so well. He was wearing a wool hat, pulled down over his hair, and he had a scarf around his neck and chin. It was a cold night, but not that cold. Younger than you. Late twenties, maybe older. A little taller too. I’m nearsighted, and I didn’t have my spectacles. Keep leaving them places. I should buy a chain.” He realized that he was drifting from the subject at hand, and returned to it. “Apart from that, I don’t recall much about him, except-”

“What?”

“I was glad to see him leave, that’s all. He made me uneasy, and not just because he was on my lawn, snooping around on my property. There was a thing about him.” Durand shook his head. “I can’t explain it right. I could say to you that he wasn’t from around here, and that would be as close as I could get. He wasn’t from anywhere like here, anywhere at all.”

He looked out over the town, taking in the carsuo;‘ in the c moving on the streets, the lights of the bars and stores near the train station, the dim shapes of people heading home to their families. It was normality, and the man who had stood on his lawn did not belong in it.

Night had now come. The streetlights caught the patches of frozen snow, making them shine in the gloom. Durand shivered.

“You be careful, Mr. Parker,” he said. We shook hands. He stayed on the step until I reached the sidewalk, then he waved once and closed the door. I looked up at the window with the broken pane, but there was nobody there. That room was empty. Whatever remained there had no form; the ghost of the boy was inside me, where he had always been.

I MET ANGEL AND Louis for dinner that night at the Wildwood BBQ on Park Avenue South, not far from Union Square. It was tough to make the call between Wildwood and Blue Smoke up on Twenty-seventh, but novelty won out; novelty, and, for Louis, the prospect of beans that had pieces of steak added to them. When it came to rib joints, Louis liked extra meat with everything, probably including the Jell-O. If he was going to die of a coronary, he was going to do it in style.

These two men, both of whom had killed, yet only one of whom, Louis, could truly be called a natural killer, were now my closest friends. I hadn’t seen them since late the previous year, when they had managed to get themselves into some trouble in upstate New York and I’d followed their tracks to see if I could help. It hadn’t ended well, and we’d kept some distance from one another since then; not due to any ill will, but because Louis was concerned about the possible fallout from what had occurred, and didn’t want to see me contaminated by association. Now, though, he appeared content, or as content as Louis ever seemed to be, figuring that the worst was over. In truth, it was hard to tell. After all, it wasn’t that when Louis laughed, the world laughed with him. Instead, when Louis laughed, the world tended to look around to see who had fallen over and impaled himself on a spike.

It was always an entertaining spectacle, seeing Angel and Louis eat ribs, in part because some kind of role reversal seemed to occur. Louis-tall, black, and dressed like a showroom dummy that has suddenly decided to take flight and seek better accommodations elsewhere-ate ribs in the manner of a man who fears that his plate could be whisked away at any second, and he should therefore consume as much as possible as quickly as possible. Angel, on the other hand, who was small and white (or, as he liked to put it, “whiteish”), and who not only always looked like he’d slept in his clothes but looked like other people might have slept in them too, nibbled his food in an almost delicate manner, the way a small bird might if it could hold a short rib in its claws. They were drinking ale. I was sipping a glass of red wine.

“Red wine,” said Angel. “In a rib joint. You know, we’re gay, and even we don’t drink wine in a rib joint.”

“Then I guess if I were gay, I’d just be a more sophisticated homosexual than you. In fact, regardless of my sexuality, I’m still more sophisticated than you.”

“You not eating?” asked Lis bird e souis, pointing with the end of a mostly demolished rib at the small pile of bare bones on my plate.

“I’m not so hungry,” I said. “Anyway, after watching you two, I’m considering vegetarianism, or just never eating again. At least, not in public, and certainly not with you.”

“What the hell is wrong with us?” Angel sounded spectacularly aggrieved.

“You eat like an old lady. He eats like they just thawed him out next to a mammoth.”

“You want us to use a knife and fork?”

“Do you know how to use a knife and fork?”

“Don’t tempt me, Miss Manners. The knives are sharp here.”

Louis finished his final rib, wiped his face with his napkin, and sat back with a sigh. If his heart could have sighed with relief, it would have echoed him.

“Glad I wore my buffet pants tonight,” he said.

“Me too,” I said. “You’d worn your regular pants, one of your buttons would have taken someone’s eye out by now.”

He arched an eyebrow at me, and waited.

“Sorry,” I said. “You continue to be boyishly slim.”

Angel signaled the server for another beer before speaking.

“You want to tell us about it?” he said.

But they knew most of it already. I had lost my Maine private investigator’s license, and my lawyer, Aimee Price, was still fighting to have it restored to me, hampered at every turn by the objections of the state police and, it appeared, a detective named Hansen in particular. From what Aimee could establish, the order to revoke my license had come from high up, and Hansen was just the messenger. A court challenge was still an option, but Aimee wasn’t sure that it would be useful. The state police were the final arbiters when it came to licensing, and any court in Maine would probably be guided by their decision.

My firearms permit had also been revoked, although the precise nature of the revocation was still unclear to me and to my lawyer. I had initially been ordered to hand over every gun in my possession pending what was vaguely termed “an inquiry,” and was told that it would be only a temporary matter.