“Houdini was a guy.”

“OK,” she said, catching her breath. “I’m Mata Hari.” She threaded a leg between his knees and pushed his shoulder hard. He flipped onto his back and she hopped on his waist and held his wrists to the bed, grinning and dangling her hair toward his face.

“Well you may be Hari,” he said, “but I’m a hairy beaver!” He capsized her and she rolled onto her hands to prevent him from pinning them again. He lowered his chest onto her back and thwacked the mattress with his open palm. She made a muffled squeal in surprise. “I’m a raging wild beaver!”, he said, pounding his palm into the mattress again, closer to her thigh. “I’m a wild, drifting beaver,” this time smacking her butt cheek with his palm as Nicky yelped. “And I am going to thwack you with my tail!”

Chapter 2

Discovery

Sunday, October 22, 1995

After breakfast the Clinic called. Carlos had car trouble and couldn’t make it to work, so Nicky was needed after all. A woman had just come in with a cat that needed emergency surgery for a broken leg.

“Sorry, honey,” Nicky said. “It’s not much fun being alone on your birthday.”

Vin told her he felt bad that she’d had to work so much recently. He’d been hoping they could spend a lazy day together.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Nicky said, before reminding him they were going out tonight.

He felt his spirit deflate as he remembered their dinner engagement at the Tuckermans, then silently chastised himself. Abby was Nicky’s boss and the Tuckermans knew everyone. He and Nicky were new here and needed to make an effort.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Nicky added, “if the dog-fight woman comes by, give her the gentamicin spray on the medicine shelf in the pantry. Dosage is on the label.”

Vin kissed her goodbye and returned to the breakfast table, where he finished the Sunday paper. He washed his dishes and walked out to the deck – another clear day in the low seventies. Randy was napping in a sunny corner and the driftwood sticks from last night lay arrayed on the table. That’s what I can do today, he thought.

He bagged the sticks and brought them into the house, then padded down to the finished half of the first floor. With a fireplace and a sliding glass door to the backyard, this room resembled a den, but Vin had made it his office. He opened the door to the cement-floored laundry and storage area and saw nylon ski bags leaning against the far wall. Beside them on the floor sat two pairs of snowshoes they’d bought last year in Maine. He smiled as he remembered snowshoeing through the woods with Nicky near his parents’ house over Christmas, then wondered wistfully if it made sense to own skis or snowshoes in Washington, D.C.

Next to the snowshoes was a stack of boxes with a rope ladder heaped on top. He’d acquired it a few weeks ago when he came home from biking to discover he had locked himself out of the house. So he’d biked five miles to a cluttered hardware store in Potomac and found the ladder. He hooked it to the deck and climbed up, re-entering the house through the glass doors to the living room. For a while he left the ladder in place, but when the novelty wore off he’d resorted to leaving the lower-level sliding door unlocked when he went running or biking.

His folding sawhorses were nearby and he moved them to the foot of the stairs. A plastic crate held his power drill, socket wrenches, screwdrivers. He pawed through a shoebox of screws and bolts but wasn’t satisfied with what he found. I need to go to the hardware store anyway, he thought, for wire.

He drove to the intersection of River and Falls, where two strip malls comprised the heart of downtown Potomac. The narrow-aisled hardware store had an unpredictable inventory of products piled on shelves to the ceiling, but he’d come to appreciate it over the course of several visits. Finding the rope ladder on his first visit had been serendipitous. This time he only needed standard items: picture-hanging wire, a wooden dowel, glue, bolts, and eyelet-screws. He paid for them and drove home, then carried his tools and sawhorses out to the driveway. When he examined his purchases, he realized he’d forgotten something.

“Damn. I need a work surface.” Plywood or planks or something. He had no desire to drive in search of boards he only needed for an hour or two, so he shuffled back downstairs to the storage area. Nothing. The house looked like it had been built in the early 1970s; it didn’t have old cellar doors or a plank fence he could scavenge. He circled the exterior of the house just in case, knowing already that he wouldn’t find anything. Looking out over the back lawn he remembered the abandoned shed on the wooded hillside below. That might work.

He retrieved a hammer and a small crowbar from his tool crate and set off across the lawn toward the woods. Halfway down the hill, the brown sides of the wooden shed took shape through the trees. He angled toward it.

It was larger than he expected, maybe eight by ten feet, with thick clapboard siding and an overhanging shingled roof. The front door faced downhill and was flanked by a pair of small windows. It was tightly closed and fitted with a swing latch but no padlock.

He climbed two worn-out steps, flipped back the latch, and pulled the door open. It groaned away from the jamb. Looking in he saw floating dust in the light from the windows. The shed’s interior felt dry and the air smelled generations old, devoid of life. He stepped inside and the floorboards creaked as his eyes adjusted to the light. Directly before him was an old wooden workbench built into the back wall. He ran his fingers through the dust on its pockmarked surface and felt the random grooves and drill holes left by unknown hands. Someone worked long hours here, he thought, wondering if he would trade the logical tools on his own desk for the physical tools that once rested here. A narrow shelf above the bench sagged forward but held only dust. He gripped the front edge of the workbench with both hands and pulled up. It was solidly attached to the wall, so he studied the remainder of the shed.

To his right the ruins of three wooden chairs were propped against the wall. In the back left corner stacks of wooden shingles were devolving into a shapeless pile. The center portion of the left wall was unobstructed, with a series of naked hooks hanging on every third plank of siding. He stepped to the wall and ran his fingers along a plank. When he rapped it with his knuckles, it returned a solid sound. Maybe cedar.

Looking down he noticed that a plank was badly cracked and dented at the level of his knees. He tapped below the crack with his hammer to separate the pieces, then examined the portion above the break. The plank was ten inches wide, half an inch thick, and still solid. Perfect. Its edges were nailed to wooden studs.

He used the crowbar and hammer claws to free the long portion of the broken plank, then unscrewed the metal hook and tossed it onto the workbench. Now he could now see the planks on the outer side of the studs that supported the exterior siding. He marveled at the quantity of wood and labor that had been invested in this simple shed decades ago. Today it would be pre-fab particle-board and vinyl, he thought, and fall apart in fifteen years. He started work on an adjacent plank. This one came free more quickly, since he had better leverage.

Sweating now, he stopped to brush his hair back from his forehead and dry his palms on his sleeves. Might as well take a third, he thought, and have two whole ones. He could put them all back in place easily enough when he was done with them. He used the crowbar and hammer to free the edges of the third plank. A pile of shingles blocked its base, so he pushed them out of the way. His eye was immediately caught by a strange mark that the shingles had obscured. It was a C-shaped arc overlaid with three straight slashes that converged to a point.