“I’ll keep calling you until you do.”

I said, “Goodbye, Tina,” added, “Goodbye, Alex,” and hung up. Then I curled myself into a ball and went back to sleep.

I WOKE AGAIN in that same melancholy greyness of summer dusk that never fails to make me nostalgic. It made me feel that way even when Gabe was alive and we were walking along the boardwalk to Tuffy’s for hamburgers and beer. I have never been afraid of the dark. There is beauty to be found in darkness—the moon rising over the lake, making diamonds on the water, the shimmer of northern lights, the lights of ships in the distance. It is not darkness I fear. It’s greyness, the in-between, the dying.

I made coffee and sipped it, feeling the caffeine doing battle with the alcohol and winning, until the telephone rang again. It was Mel.

“Just called to see how you’re doing,” he said.

I told him the widow Marshall was doing fine.

“Why do you call yourself that?” he asked.

“Because it gives me intrigue. Widows are always more intriguing than married women, don’t you think?”

“I think you have always been intriguing.”

“And I think you’re a nice guy. So does my sister, by the way.”

“Tina’s an intriguing woman. She still there?”

“No, she’s either in a Boeing over Manitoba or in a limo under the chauffeur.” I heard a truck in the background. “Where are you?”

“On a watch.”

“What, a Rolex?”

“I was sitting here and I started thinking about you, wondering how you were doing.”

“I don’t need you to come and see me.”

“That’s not why I was calling.”

“Sure it is. I’m alone in the house. We don’t even need a motel room now, do we?”

I heard him breathe out slowly.

“Okay,” I said before he could speak. “I appreciate you calling, I really do. But there’s something I have to do tonight.” I looked at the clock. It was almost ten. “Call me from your place at midnight if you’re still up.”

“You’re not going out.” It was a command, not a question.

“I have to.”

“Did your sister tell you how many convicted perverts we’ve identified living on the strip? We’ve been interviewing them—there must be a dozen of them.”

“Mel, I can find more than that on the bus into Toronto.”

“One of them has been watching you from your garden shed.”

“They’re tied in, aren’t they?” I said.

“What are?”

“The guy in the tool shed and Gabe’s death.”

He thought it over. “It could be.”

“I knew it.”

“We don’t know for sure. Just don’t go out until I get there.”

“You’re not coming here, Mel. Not tonight. Not anymore.”

“Then wait for the morning.”

“No.” I knew what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do it now.

He grunted. Something had distracted him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Something going on where you are?”

“Yeah.” He lowered his voice. “I’ll call you later.”

“Sure.”

I was used to this. Gabe would call me while he was on a stakeout, or a watch, as Mel called it, especially late at night. He would tell me he was calling to see if I was safe, alone in the house on the beach strip. I knew that was a crock. Gabe had seen something that had shaken whatever faith he had in the goodness of human nature, and he needed to talk with someone he cared about. Someone, I suppose, he trusted. He would call and ask how I was, and I would say I was fine, I was watching television or reading a book, and ask when he would be home. And he would say, “Oh, soon. I have a couple of things to do yet, a couple of reports to write.” And I could tell from his voice, from the amount of shake in it and the way it sounded pinched and higher than normal, that something had upset him.

“You’re a cop,” I said to him once. “You spend time around murder scenes. You should be used to it by now.”

“I’ll never get used to some things,” Gabe said. “Some cops do, but I never will.”

“Then find something else, Gabe,” I told him. “You don’t have to be out on the street all the time.”

“Yes, I do,” Gabe said. I remember he smiled at me in the way that could break my heart, and he reached his hand, one of his lovely bear-paw hands, toward me and curled it around the back of my head. “How about a coffee with some brandy in it?” he said. “And then I’ll tell you the joke about the bald-headed Swede who worked in the pickle factory.”

There was no joke about a bald-headed Swede and a pickle factory. Talking about a non-existent joke was a joke in itself. We were silly like that. His mention of the joke about the Swede was our signal that we would fool around later, starting on the sofa in front of the television and finishing in the bedroom. Or, as we had done one warm evening, among the caragana bushes on the beach. God, some of us remain children when it comes to sex, as though we can restore its mystery and fascination to the same level as when we were teenagers. Perhaps that’s what Tina meant when she said men have affairs because they are afraid of death. The only way to hold off dying is to grow younger, not older. Maybe sex fools men into believing they are growing younger.

I pictured the way Gabe looked when he made me smile, how pleased he appeared when he saw me laugh at his jokes, his fun. That’s the expression I remembered, along with the strong body and the bear-paw hands. I looked at the metal box delivered to me that afternoon. Gabe was not in there. I didn’t know what the hell was in there, but it was not Gabe, and I didn’t want it with me.

The onshore wind would be cool, I knew. I slipped on a sweater, picked up the box, took my keys from the hall table, and left the house, locking the door behind me.

SOON AFTER WE MOVED HERE, I told Gabe about the amusement park, the one that had stretched from the canal along the bay side of the strip across Beach Boulevard from our house. It had been built as an attraction for the wealthy families from the city who spent summers on the strip, Victorian classy with lawn bowling, a concert stage, and elaborate wrought-iron benches set beneath willow trees. When the wealthy people left for their air-conditioned mansions in the city and the workers moved in, the park became cheap and tacky the way amusement parks are supposed to be, with neon signs, carnival rides, arcade games, greasy french fries, and even greasier guys with cigarettes in their mouths and combs in their back pockets. The park was still operating when I was a teenager, although most of the rides were closed and things that once had been merely shabby were now a little scary.

My father said that when he was a boy in the 1950s, excursion boats steamed across the bay from the city during the summer, carrying people to the beach strip amusement park, where picnic tables were set among trees near the shore and kids played on a safe, sandy beach. No one we knew went to Florida in the winter or to the northern lakes in the summer. No one we knew could afford it. Everything they needed for fun was on the beach strip. I suspect many of the old people who live on the strip today were once kids who rode the excursion boats to the amusement park back then, giddy with anticipation for rides on the merry-go-round, the ponies, the Octopus, and the Ferris wheel. The rides are gone, but the people remain, maybe because their goal as children was to always be near those long-gone amusements on the strip, and living here in rented rooms and peeling-paint cottages is the only ambition they truly achieved in their lives.

The amusement park had been separated from traffic by fancy cast-iron fencing set between concrete posts lining the shoulder of the road. Each post was topped with an electric light inside a white globe, and the line of posts and lights extended all the way from the canal to the farthest end of the amusement park, across from the house that Gabe and I shared. I remember how attractive the line of shining globes appeared in the night air when I was a child, glowing soft against the glare of the neon and fluorescent lights of the rides and arcade. When the amusement park was demolished, so was the string of lights. The cast-iron fence was carried off to be melted down in the blast furnaces across the bay, and the light standards were shattered and carted away.