“No,” she said. And then, “Yes.”

“You’re with someone else,” he said, hearing the hopeless flatness in his voice despite himself. They rode into an aspen grove alive with shimmer and the dry-autumn rasping of heart-shaped leaves.

“No,” she said again. “Not completely with. Not in love. I don’t think I’ll be in love again for a long, long time. But there is someone I’m attracted to. Someone I’ve been spending time with.”

“During the summer pre-program seminars?” Dale hated asking questions right then but could not have stopped himself if his life depended upon it. Perhaps his life did depend upon it. His voice sounded alien and dead even to him. The aspen leaves rattled and the wind stirred the dry, high grass as they rode out into the upper pasture. Clare’s nipples were hard against the thin cotton of her T-shirt. Her cheeks were flushed. She looked beautiful. At that moment, he almost hated her for that.

“Sure,” she said. “I met him then.”

“Have you. . .” He stopped himself just in time and looked away, west down the long canyon. The ranch was not quite in sight. He knew that it would not look the same to him when it did appear through the pines.

“Slept with him?” finished Clare. “Yes. We’ve had sex. It’s part of my new life there. Exciting.”

“Exciting,” repeated Dale. One of their generational differences over the past four years of surprise encounter, attraction, involvement, had been her use of the phrase “having sex” and his old-fogey insistence on his version of “making love.” Eventually she had spoken of their lovemaking only as lovemaking. Dale had seen it as a great step forward in their relationship. He chuckled at that now, feeling no mirth whatsoever. The gelding tried to look around at him as if he had given it a confusing command through his legs or the reins. He kicked it in the ribs to keep up with Clare’s roan, who had to be held back from a canter this close to the ranch.

“Exciting,” said Clare. “But you know me. You must know how little it means.”

Dale now laughed with some sincerity. “I don’t know you, Clare. That’s all that I do know right now.”

“Don’t make it difficult, Dale.”

“Heaven forbid.”

“You predicted this a thousand times. No matter how often I said that it wouldn’t play out this way, you insisted it would. Every time I wanted to settle things between us. . . about Anne and the children. . . this was one of your reasons for waiting. What I didn’t understand was that. . .”

“All right,” said Dale, interrupting her with a harsher note than he had meant to use. “You’re right. I understood then. I understand now. You just denied that it could happen so many times that I got stupid. I sold myself on the fantasy.”

“I don’t want to hurt you any more than. . .”

“What do you say we shut up for now and just talk later, during the drive back to the airport? Let’s just enjoy the last half-hour or so of the trip.”

They did not, of course. Enjoy the end of the camping trip. Or talk during the ride back to Missoula.

It was the last time he had seen Clare. It was two months before he loaded the Savage over-and-under, set the barrel against his brow, clicked off the safety, and pulled the trigger. It was ten months before he decided to spend his sabbatical year writing in Illinois. It was one year, six weeks, and three days before he arrived at his dead friend Duane’s house in this godforsaken exile in Illinois. But who was counting?

It took Dale a while to unload the Land Cruiser and to find someplace for his stuff. The boxes of books and winter clothes could wait, of course, but he wanted to set up his ThinkPad computer somewhere comfortable and to dig out the clean sheets, pillowcases, towels, and other items he had brought from the ranch. Everything personal, he realized, was going into the parlor/study where Mr. McBride had slept long ago and where Mr. McBride’s aging sister had lived—without changing anything—for most of the past forty years.

The ThinkPad went on the old desk comfortably enough—the wall outlet had no polarizer holes, but Dale had anticipated that and brought a two-prong adapter for the surge protector. Sandy Whittaker had warned him that there had been no phone lines to the house since 1960, but Dale had brought his cell phone. The phone was equipped for e-mail, of course, but he was old-fashioned and he made the infrared connections to the Thinkpad and dialed up the Peoria AOL access number. His phone informed him that there was no service. None at all. He could not even make a telephone call.

“Shit,” said Dale. He had deliberately checked with Illinois Bell to make sure that there was service to this part of the county.

Well, this had to be some sort of local glitch. . . a cell shadow or perhaps even a problem with the cell phone itself. He could always drive a few miles to get back into clear reception to make his calls and launch his e-mails. The thought gave him a frisson that was not totally unpleasant. It had been years since he had been so isolated. Even at the ranch he’d had the C-band antenna pulling in a score of satellites for TV—some of them broadcasting in high-definition now—and two regular phone lines, one dedicated for fax, as well as his mobile phone. Now he was. . . quiet. Hell, he thought, I wanted time for serious reading. . . research. This will help. He wanted to believe it.

Dale unpacked more stuff through the dim afternoon. He knew that he should drive to Oak Hill and do some grocery shopping—he’d be damned if he’d go to something called the KWIK’N’EZ—but he had packed a cooler for the trip with some sandwiches, three bottles of beer, some orange juice, a few apples and oranges, other stuff, and it seemed still good. He set these few things in the refrigerator, decided he was hungry, and had one of the ham sandwiches and a beer for lunch.

For years, every time he had packed a lunch to eat in his office at the university or for a trip, Anne had done something she first started while packing picnics during their honeymoon twenty-seven years earlier: when Dale unwrapped his sandwich, there would always be a single bite taken out of it. A salutation. Beatrice saying “salve” to young Dante. A reminder.

There were no bites taken out of this sandwich. Nor would there be any in the future.

Dale shook his head. He was still tired and the beer had not helped that, but this was no time for more self-pity.

He carried the last couple of boxes in from the truck. The sheets and clean blankets and pillowcases and towels were in the last box, of course, and he took his time unpacking them. The sheets were too big for the small bed in the study, but he folded them over until they fit without too much wrinkling. The thick towels looked out of place in the severe bathroom.

It was getting dark. Dale went into the parlor and wandered through the dining room and back into the kitchen. No TV had magically appeared. It would have been nice to watch the network news and then the local news from Peoria. . . even nicer to catch CNN Headline News or call up some news sites on the Net. He went back to pull the last of the extra towels and sheets from the boxes.

His Savage over-and-under shotgun/.22 rifle was packed beneath the bottom layer of towels, wrapped in plastic, broken into its two component parts, but clearly oiled and ready.

Dale actually took a step back from the box in shock. He not only clearly remembered not packing the weapon, he remembered where he had put it—in the basement at the ranch, wrapped in its soft gun case, far back on the highest and hardest-to-reach storage shelf.

Dale’s hands were shaking as he lifted the old weapon out of the box and carefully unwrapped it. At least there was no ammunition—neither.22 shells nor shotgun shells for the.410. He looked in the lower breech.