“What?”

“When did you get married, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“September… two thousand and one. It’ll be four years this fall.”

“And before Mulhouse Springs, where did you live?”

“ Toronto,” she said.

“And why did you folks move up here? Mulhouse Springs isn’t exactly Yonge and Bloor.”

“It was Colin’s decision,” she said, coming to the table. “He wanted more space.”

“For what?”

“To ‘think,’ he said.” She gave a nasty little laugh. “Writers, huh?”

“What does he need to think about that he couldn’t think about in Toronto?”

Her face suddenly became serious. “I’ve stopped asking.”

Wingate put a cube of sugar into his tea and stirred it. “Tell me more about Colin.”

“Like what?”

“Who do you think he went to see in Toronto?”

“Someone probably wanted to hire him to ghostwrite a computer manual. Or a biography of their cat.”

“Is that how he makes a living?”

She laughed that knowing, exasperated laugh again. “Make a living? Colin’s been working on the Great Canadian Novel for fifteen years. From long before I met him. He’s never published anything that actually had his name on it. You know, before the Westmuir Record.”

Wingate nodded. An unpublished writer and a dog-sitter had bought this house? “How did the two of you meet?”

Claire Eldwin reached behind her and took a pouch of Drum off the countertop and began to roll herself a cigarette. “In a class. Nine years ago. He sometimes fooled one of the colleges into hiring him to teach a continuing studies class.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“You know, adult education. Most institutions of higher learning have a cash cow on the side called ‘continuing studies.’ It’s evening classes taught by alcoholics and sexual deviants to anyone with a pulse and a chequebook. His class was called Get Published Now. You know the saying those who can’t, teach, right?”

“I’ve heard it said.”

“There’s a corollary: those who can’t teach, fuck their students on the side. That’s how we met. Romantic, huh?”

“Well, you married him.”

She lit the cigarette. “Guilty.”

“And now you think he’s having an affair.”

“Colin is always having an affair.”

“He sounds like a super guy. What’s his novel about?”

“Damned if I know. It’s the Great Canadian Novel. It’s probably about the snows of yesteryear. I can hardly wait. Do you want a drink?”

“No, thank you. Do you know where your husband’s staying in Toronto?”

“All I know is that it’s warm and wet.” “Mrs. Eldwin.”

She stood and went into the kitchen and took a bottle of Grand Marnier out of the fridge. “This stuff gives you a wicked hangover and then you have to drink more of it to get rid of the hangover. It’s the perfect consumer product. Imagine making yourself necessary.”

“I just want to get this straight,” he said. “The people who called your husband on Friday offered him a job, is that right?”

“That’s what I understood.” She leaned on the counter. “Why are you so interested in my husband, Officer? Just lay it on me: what’s he done?”

“He hasn’t done anything as far as we know. It’s just that… we think he might be in some trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“We’re not sure.” She looked at him, seemingly lost in thought. “Did you ever hire that PI?” he asked.

“Your boss offered to be of use, so I didn’t. Should I have?”

“No,” he said.

“You don’t think my husband is fucking some bimbo, do you?”

He hesitated a moment. “No, Ma’am. I don’t.”

“Well, you don’t know him, trust me.”

“It doesn’t sound like I’d want to.”

“No…” she said, rubbing an invisible mark off the counter-top. “You’d like him. Everyone likes him. He tries to be good.”

“Is that why you tolerate his behaviour?”

“I don’t tolerate it. I live with it.”

“You’ve got plenty of choices, Mrs. Eldwin. You could leave him. You could kick him out. Hell, you could kill him.”

She gave him a weird look. “You know, he tells me I should. Sometimes I think he’s just trying to preempt my anger, but I know he thinks he doesn’t deserve me.”

“Do you think that?”

“Everyone deserves their fate. You know that story about the rattlesnake that asks the horse to carry him across a flooded river?”

“I haven’t heard that one.”

“Snake says, Take me to safety, and the horse tells him to forget it, he’ll bite her if she lets him near. The snake says, If I bite you, we both die, and the horse sees his point and lets him get on her back. Halfway across, he bites her. You’ve killed us both, she says, why did you do that?”

“Because it’s my nature,” said Wingate.

“Right. How can I hate him for his nature?”

“You don’t have to love his nature, but you don’t have to live with it, either.”

She finally poured herself a drink. “You talk like a man who’s never been in love.” He watched her drain the Grand Marnier in one long draught. “You get used to being bitten when you’re in love. You find yourself getting used to the poison. You even start to crave it.”

She was pitiful. He couldn’t rule out that she was crazy enough to tie her own husband to a chair in their basement and chop off his hand. Maybe Claire Eldwin was the “her” that needed saving. “Do you mind if I take a look around?”

“Hey, mi casa, etcetera.”

He thanked her and got up from the table, went down the hallway behind the living room. It was a nicely appointed house with some decent paintings on the walls and shelves of books and CDs. The house spoke of people who spent money easily. So where did it come from? There were bookshelves in the hallway full of paperbacks and piles of magazines with their spines hanging over the edge of the shelves. He picked one off the top: a copy of People from a couple of years ago. He pushed the door open that led into the master bedroom, with its neatly made bed. He was out of Mrs. Eldwin’s view now, and he pulled on a pair of black gloves and opened the closet doors. Four seasons’ worth of slacks and pants and dresses and dress shirts hung from a bar. He ran his hand along the shelf above and then quietly clapped the dust off his gloved fingertips.

There was nothing of interest in the drawers, nor in the bathroom. On one of the bedside tables, he found a pile of paper with one of the drafts of Eldwin’s story on it. It was written over with small cuts and corrections. Eldwin had crossed out the word gaspingly and replaced it with mind-manglingly. Wingate looked more closely at the sentence. He thought the word Eldwin had probably wanted was horrorstruck. He made sure the papers looked the way he’d found them.

He retreated to the hallway. A guestroom with a convertible couch was across from the bedroom. Some books lay piled on the couch, leaning against one of the arms. The room next to it appeared to be Eldwin’s office, and Wingate spent a little more time in it, shuffling through papers on the desk. These appeared to be pages from the Great Canadian Novel. From what he could tell at a quick glance, Eldwin had been working on a section that took place in a mining town in northern Ontario. It looked as if Eldwin did most of his composing on his desktop computer, a bulky PC model at least six years old. Listening for Mrs. Eldwin, he leaned down under the desk and turned the computer on from the hard drive. It bonged softly and took two minutes to boot up, and then Wingate quickly searched the root directory for text files. He found the first four chapters of “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” but there was no evidence of the replacement chapters he’d told Portman he was going to send. He stared at the screen and then tried to open Outlook to go through Eldwin’s email, but the program was password-protected. Wingate blinked at the empty box and then typed in Verity and Verityforms, knowing he was just shooting in the dark, and neither worked. He couldn’t remember the DNS number from the back of the mannequin, but he was pretty sure that wouldn’t have worked either. He shut the computer down and then stood in the office a moment or two longer, looking at the shelves. The books here were mostly hardcovers, recent fiction in English, as well as some of the classics in old paperbacks. Tolstoy and Joyce. Chesterton, Gogol, and Graham Greene. On a higher shelf, Trollope and Flaubert and the essays of Michel de Montaigne. He realized these books were in the original French. He breathed in deeply and sighed an arrow of air out of his mouth. He wasn’t sure what any of this meant, apart from the fact that this guy was obviously hoping to punch above his weight.