I can't recall why I awoke, but some deep sense of disquiet had penetrated through my REM sleep and drawn me back into the darkness of night. The rain had stopped and the house seemed peaceful, but the hairs on the back of my neck were almost rigid and my perceptions were immediately razor-sharp, the mugginess of sleep dispelled by the instinctive knowledge that some danger was near.

I slipped silently from my bed and pulled on a pair of jeans. My Smith & Wesson lay in its holster by my bed. I removed the gun and thumbed the safety. The bedroom door was open, the way I had left it. I pulled it a little farther, the well-oiled hinges moving silently, and carefully placed a foot on the bare boards of the hallway.

My foot hit something soft and damp and I drew it back immediately. The moonlight shone through the windows beside the front door, bathing the hallway in a silvery light. It illuminated an old coatrack, and some paint cans and a ladder that lay to my right. It also shone on a set of muddy footprints that ran from the back door, through the kitchen, up to my bedroom door and then into the living room. The mark of my bare foot lay in the print nearest the bedroom door.

I checked the living room and the bathroom before making my way to the kitchen. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest and my breath was white as the cold night air invaded my home. I counted to three in my head then came in fast through the kitchen door, the gun panning around the room.

It was empty, but the back door was open slightly. Someone had jimmied the lock then made his way-I assumed it was male by the size of the boot prints-through the house, and watched me while I slept. I recalled the bald-headed grotesque I had encountered the day before and the thought of him observing me from the shadows made me sick to my stomach. I opened the back door fully and scanned the yard. Leaving the kitchen and porch light off, I slipped on a pair of work boots that I kept in the kitchen beside the door, then stepped outside and walked once around the house. There were more prints on the porch and in the mud below. At my bedroom window they turned slightly, where the visitor had stood watching me from outside.

I went back into the house, dug out my Maglite and threw on a sweater, then traced the tracks through the mud and out onto the road. There had been little traffic and it was still possible to see where the boot marks petered out on the tarmac. I stood on the empty road, looking left and right, then returned to the house.

It was only when I turned on the kitchen light that I noticed what lay on the table in the corner of the room. I picked it up using a piece of paper towel and turned it over in my hand.

It was a small wooden clown, its body made up of a series of brightly painted rings that could be removed by twisting the clown's smiling head off. I sat looking at it for a time, then placed it carefully in a plastic bag and left it by the sink. I locked the back door, checked all the windows and returned to bed.

I must have drifted off into an uneasy sleep at some point, because I dreamed. I dreamed that I saw a shape moving through the night, black against the stars. I saw a tree standing alone in a clearing and shapes moving beneath it. I smelled blood and sickly sweet perfume. Squat, white fingers moved across my bare chest.

And I saw a light die, and I heard a child crying in the darkness.

CHAPTER SIX

The first gray light of dawn had appeared at the window and the ground had frozen again when I rose and returned to the kitchen. I looked at the shape of the clown in the bag, its contours masked, its long red nose jutting through the white plastic, its colors dimly visible like a faded ghost of itself.

I slipped on my running gear and started for U.S. 1. Before I left, I made sure all the doors and windows were locked, something that I didn't ordinarily do. I turned onto Spring Street and headed down to the Mussey Road intersection, the redbrick exterior and white wood steeple of the Scarborough First Baptist Church to my left and the 8 Corners store straight ahead. I continued on Spring to 114 and kept going, the road quiet, the pine trees whispering above me. I passed Scarborough High School on my right, where I had attended school after moving to Maine, even getting a few games with the Redskins one spring when half the team went down with flu. To my left, the parking lot of the Shop n Save was silent, but there was already traffic ahead on the untidy strip of U.S. 1. It had always been untidy: by the time zoning began in the 1980s, it was too late to save it. Then again, maybe it's in the nature of U.S.1 to be this way, because it looks the same in just about every place I've ever been.

When I first arrived in Scarborough there was only one mall in the town, the Orion Center. It had the Mammoth Mart department store, which was kind of like a Woolworth, and Martin's grocery store, and a Laundromat and a liquor store, the kind my grandfather used to refer to as a "Dr. Green's" from the days when they were all painted uniformly green in compliance with the regulations of the state liquor commission. At Dr. Green's we bought Old Swilwaukee and Pabst Blue Ribbon-the legal drinking age was still eighteen then, not that it mattered-to drink on Higgins Beach, down at the quiet end beside the bird sanctuary, where the piping plover marks its territory with a song like small bells tolling.

I remember, in the summer of eighty-two, trying to convince Becky Berube to lie down on the sand there with me. I was unsuccessful, but it was that kind of summer, the kind that makes you think you're going to die a virgin. Becky Berube has five kids now, so I guess she learned to lie down pretty quickly after that. We drove sixties automobiles: Pontiac convertibles, MGs, Thunderbirds, Chevy Impalas and Camaros with big V-8 engines; even, in one case, a Plymouth Barracuda convertible. We took summer jobs at the ClamBake at Pine Point, or as waiters and busboys at the Black Point Inn, and the sound of the sea was as familiar to us as our own voices.

I crossed Route 1 at Amato's Italian restaurant and continued down Old County Road, through the salt marshes that flooded once a month with the phases of the moon, and past the Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church until I reached the cemetery. My grandfather was buried on Fifth Avenue, a joke he liked to share with my grandmother after they bought the plot. They lay there together now, and while I rested I cleared some of the weeds away and said a small prayer for them.

When I got back to the house I put on a pot of coffee, ate some grapefruit and thought again about what had happened the night before. It was almost nine by the clock on the wall when Ellis Howard arrived at my door.

Ellis looked like lard poured into a flexible, vaguely human-shaped mold and left to set. Wrapped in a brown sheepskin coat, the deputy chief in charge of the Portland Police Department's Bureau of Investigation climbed, with some difficulty, from his car. The detective division of the Portland PD was divided into sections dealing with Drugs, Crimes Against Persons, Crimes Against Property, and Administration. Ellis was in charge, assisted by a detective lieutenant named Kramer-who was currently on sick leave with kidney trouble-and four sergeants, each with responsibility for a section. In total, there were maybe twenty detectives and four evidence technicians involved. It was a small, efficient operation.

Ellis rolled up to the porch, like a bowling ball that someone had wrapped in fur. He didn't look like he could move at even half the pace of a bowling ball, didn't look like he could run to save his life or anyone else's. But then Ellis's job wasn't to run around and, anyway, looks could be deceptive. Ellis watched and thought and asked questions and watched and thought some more. Little got past Ellis. He was the kind of man who could eat soup with a fork and not spill a drop.