Of these men and women, some took taxis. Some of those taxis turned left onto Queesik Bay Road and some turned right, in the direction of Dublin, the edge of the reserve’s territory, and Westmuir County as well.

And two men and one woman had arrived in their own cars, gone into the smoke shop, left without bags, and then got into taxis, leaving their cars behind. And all of those taxis had turned right.

2 Saturday, August 13, and Sunday, August 14

] 15 [

She rode the bike under the moon, north out of town, and kept to the smaller roads, just in case. She no longer had the electric gun on her. She’d used the last cartridge on the woman, and there was no hope of getting any more. They had been effective.

It would be easier now with the cash. She’d grabbed some clothing out of the drawers in the bedroom – a blue hoodie, a couple of pairs of socks, and a pair of pants – and when she stopped at a gas station, past midnight, she imagined she looked like any other person out at night. Still, she kept her face hidden within the hoodie, as she bought another map, a bar of soap, and a chocolate bar. She ate the chocolate ravenously as she continued on the bike and felt the sugar swelling in her veins, driving her on. She hadn’t felt this alive in a long time.

All along the roads here were quaint signs pointing down lanes to cottages. Little wooden fish or buoys with names painted on them. She went down one, the road turning to gravel, and rode the bicycle all the way to the bottom, where a line of cottages was spread out along the reedy shoreline of a lake. Some of the cottages were lit – these she avoided and carefully walked the bike between two that were quiet and dark. She leaned the bike against one of them and shucked her clothes in the dark before walking down to the water’s edge, naked, with the bar of soap in her hand.

The water was cool but not cold; it was getting close to the middle of August now. She’d seen the date on a newspaper: yesterday had been Wednesday, August 10, 2005. Now the lakes would be keeping some of the daytime’s warmth in the nighttime. She gratefully slid in waist-deep and dunked herself. When had she last felt this kind of peace? She washed herself from head to toe and even used the soap to wash her hair. It wasn’t shampoo, but it would do.

She swam out in the calm, past the ends of the few docks where watercraft were moored. There was plenty of evidence of children here in the form of bathing rings and blow-up toys. She had the feeling that she’d stumbled on to a little community, the kind of place where you could leave your kids for a few minutes and you knew someone would be watching them. You wouldn’t even have to ask. When she’d been a child, her parents sometimes had rented a place like this, usually once a summer, where her father could get away from his desk job in the city. Sometimes they’d go with their neighbours – Anton and his wife, Theodora, and their son, Nicolas, whom she had liked. They’d splash around in the water and make elaborate meals at one or the other’s cabin, and then the adults would stay up clinking glasses and telling stories. Larysa thought back on those days, and remembered herself at ten, and twelve, and fourteen, thinking about a boy her age, just one wall away, one wall separating them. She’d been a romantic girl, imagining her wedding, the look on her father’s face. Of course she’d marry Nicolas. There was no question of that. She wondered where he was now. Last she’d heard, he’d moved away to school. She’d stayed at home while she studied for her masters in human physiology, and rarely thought of him anymore.

She floated on her back beneath the clear, star-filled sky and the moonlight glinted off the parts of her that stayed above the water: her toes, the tops of her thighs, the little mound of belly, the tops of her breasts. A prickling of pubic hair floated on the surface of the water like tiny fronds. Her body had changed later than most. Her mother had reassured her that the same thing had happened to her when she was a girl, and it took sixteen years for Larysa’s body to wake up and change. Now she liked what she saw: she was slender, but not thin, with good legs and breasts, and even her face had changed in the last three years: all the teenaged roundness was now gone. There was an angularity to her face, something longer and more adult had settled into her features. She felt she had a face that had to be taken seriously, a face that would look all right if she smoked with it. But she was training to be a nurse, so smoking was out. At least smoking tobacco was. She was still a kid, after all. No more. She’d never be able to think of herself as young girl again.

When she got out of the water, the air set her skin ablaze with cold and she felt every hair stand on end. She rushed back between the cottages where she’d left the bike and used the sweatshirt to towel off. When she was dry enough, she dressed and huddled, bent over for warmth, against the wall. It was too late now to get anywhere else, and she had to sleep. It would have been possible to use some of Henry’s money to get a motel room, but she was too tired to carry on for the night. Instead, she waited, bundled up in her clothing, until she was sure no one had seen her, and then she broke into one of the cottages she was certain was empty, quietly cutting the screen out of a back door with the knife Henry had given her. Then she used it to pry the plate off the base of the door handle and unscrew the mechanism. She was in luck: in a place like this, people didn’t worry too much about the security of their doors. She wheeled the bike into the cottage.

Inside it was silent and the air was stale and cool. She was certain that no one was living here right now. She moved through the rooms in the dark and only switched on a light over the bathroom sink. It was enough to see by in the rest of the cottage. It was clear that no one had stayed here recently, and perhaps that meant she could spend a couple of days here, recovering. The fridge was empty, and the beds were unmade, but by the glow of diffused light, she was able to find some bedding, which she threw on the couch. She lay down and closed her eyes, but her mind was still revving from everything she’d done and been through in the last few days, and she could not sleep. By now, she realized, Henry’s wife would have gone to the police and her existence would be confirmed. She could have killed Henry’s wife. What would another have mattered? They’d be looking for her now. They knew what she looked like.

She couldn’t sleep. She got off the couch and looked at her drawn, thin face in the mirror. Too thin. Her hair was straggly. If the police had a likeness of her, this hair would give her away. She got her knife out and took a hank of hair in her fist. She leaned over the bathroom sink and hacked it off. Her hand came free again and again with sheaves of light brown hair. She stared at them in her palm and thought with wonder that the tips of the hairs in her hand had probably emerged from her scalp at a time in her life when there had been no trouble at all except getting her essays in on time. These dead cells had been alive briefly in their follicle and then, like a shadow expressing the passage of time, they had been pushed out. They’d had one of the old movie channels in the living room in Bochko’s house. In one of them, a woman said, “Here I was born, and here I died.” That was what the body did, measuring out its hours and days in hair and nails. Rings around your years.

Larysa dropped the hair into the sink and took another handful of it up.

When she was done, it looked pretty ragged, but it was different. She didn’t look at all as she had before, and that was what mattered.