"You love him? This other guy?"

A beat of a pause. "I thought I did. But I don't think so."

"You love Keith?"

"I know I love Sam and my house. I think I love Keith. I'm tired of having an affair. I shouldn't be saying this to you, should I?" Her eyes were wide, and she seemed very young.

Pellam smiled. "Say whatever you want. I like listening."

"Keith's so smart. He doesn't… It's not like he makes me feel stupid, not intentionally, I mean. But I feel stupid."

"Why do you say that?"

"I'm just not, well, intelligent."

"What does that mean?" Pellam asked. "That you can't do calculus in your head? Or recite the periodic table of the elements?"

"Keith tries to tell me about his business, I don't follow what he's saying. I try, but-"

"Meg, he's a chemist. Why should you understand chemistry?"

"Well, politics too. And I don't read a lot. I try but it's just beyond me."

"You're talking in generalities. What's beyond you?"

There was a pop and a flash of light behind them. Meg jumped, then laughed. A bulb in one of the kitchen's wall sconces had burned out. Meg pulled the shade off, blew on the bulb to cool it and unscrewed it. "When I was a girl, I was afraid of the light. Isn't that odd? Most kids are afraid of the dark. But I hated the light. There was no door to my room and the light from the living room, that white-blue light from bare bulbs, would glare and keep me up. Even when I was older, when my mother put a sheet up for a door, that didn't keep the light out. You know why I hated it? It was that when they fought, my parents' voices seemed to come from that light. I'd hide under the blankets. Mother thought I was afraid of ghosts or something. I was afraid of the light. That's what I feel like now. Light is so hard to escape from." Meg changed the bulb. "I feel you're some kind of darkness." She laughed. "I'm sure this is coming out all wrong."

For a time, after he started scouting, Pellam had wondered why this always happened. Why people talked to him as much as they did, bared their hidden secrets and passions. Priests didn't hear the kinds of things Pellam heard. Then he realized it wasn't so much that he was a good listener; it was that he was safe. They could spill their guts and he'd be gone in a week or two. Their secrets with him.

"I knew you didn't have anything to do with Sam," she said. "I really did." The words were halting. Women are usually better apologists than men. But Meg wasn't.

"What're you going to do?" he asked.

"I'm going to stop seeing him, my lover."

"Is that what you want to do?"

"It's what I have to do…" She looked at her watch. "Pellam, can I ask a favor?"

He didn't think it was going to involve freckles on her chest or anywhere else. He'd given up on that. He said, "Sure."

"Keith's going to be working all day. But Sam'll be home in a while. Could you stay around here? Did you have any plans?"

"Nothing to speak of."

"Would you? We could all have Sunday dinner. Maybe you could do some shooting with Sam. He's got a.22 and a little.410 shotgun we gave him last year."

Pellam said, "I'd love to."

"Really?"

"Really."

Then she was smiling like a sassy schoolgirl. She looked at her watch. "We've got an hour before I pick him up. There's something we could do together-just you and me."

Where was this leading?

She took his hand and pulled him toward the door.

"Where're we going?" he asked.

"Raking leaves."

"Are you serious?"

She pulled him outside. "Sure, come on. It's fun."

"I haven't raked leaves for twenty years. They don't have leaves in L.A. And even if they did, I wouldn't rake them."

He resisted at first. But here she was, a beautiful woman with whom he'd shared secrets. And so he said, "I guess."

He paused on the back porch. Looked out on what must've been four or five acres of colored leaves. She tossed him a rake.

He studied it for a moment. Then said, "I don't know how it works."

The glint of light caught the deputy's eye.

He pulled the Plymouth squad car off the road and eased it into the late-morning shade of a sugar maple, scarred from past years' syrup spigots. He climbed out of the car, pulled his lavender-tinted sunglasses on and began walking through the tall grass and forsythia whips. He'd lived in and around Cleary all his life and knew the customs and routines-where people tended to be and when you could expect to see them there and when you couldn't.

And one place you didn't expect to see a car parked was in this field on Sunday morning.

He climbed over what was left of a low stone fence and walked through a row of more maples to a narrow dirt road that led into some woods and just stopped about halfway through.

The car was parked exactly in the center of this road. The deputy paused twenty yards away and looked at it. A cheap Nissan. White. New York plates and a Cleary Tigers bumper sticker. The reason he stopped wasn't because he was noting all these details. He stopped because he didn't want to see what was in the car.

Figuring he'd deduced what had happened. Two high schoolers had spent their last hours on earth making out only to doze off and die, thanks to a bum exhaust pipe. That was the only possible reason anyone would park on this road on Saturday night and the only reason anyone would still be here now.

He took a breath to calm his stuttering heart and walked forward. He found out that he was wrong. There was another reason a car was parked in the middle of this deserted road. Because the driver had been murdered.

The boy had been shot three times in the chest with a small-caliber gun. His face was serene and there was hardly any blood on the body. Which meant he'd died quickly. The boy's face was pressed against the passenger window, away from the deputy, and his hand gripped the door handle. There was no lividity-sinking of the blood to the lower extremities of the body. This meant that he'd died recently.

Damn. His heart sank. The deputy walked around to the other side of the car and looked at the face. He recognized Ned Harper. A high school boy, a football player and, he believed, a one-eighty-division wrestler. He'd remembered that he'd seen Ned's father driving the Nissan around town. He wondered why the parents hadn't phoned him in missing. Maybe when your son was an eighteen-year-old football player, you assumed he'd be out late and didn't start to worry for a day or two. The deputy's daughter was two years old and he worried about her constantly. He didn't think there'd ever come a time when he didn't.

Who'd do something like this?

Maybe the boy'd picked up a hitchhiker. Maybe an escaped prisoner from Sing-Sing down in Ossining. But then why would he leave the car? Maybe it was an accident. He'd been hunting with a friend, the gun went off and the other boy panicked. But, no, the deputy realized. That couldn't be it. Not with three separate wounds.

He walked in a slow circle, looking for obvious clues, but he knew the sheriff would take charge of that and call the county in too. Then he realized he was just stalling, not wanting to make the call to report it.

The sun shot off the slanted window, a dove called from deep in the moist forest. The deputy walked slowly back to the car, praying he wouldn't be the one elected to tell the boy's parents.