I drove past Otter River State Forest. I was only about ten minutes from Malcolm Hume’s house. I didn’t have his cell phone number—I don’t even know if he had one—but I wouldn’t have called it anyway. I wanted to just show up and see what was what. I didn’t want to give Professor Hume time to prepare. I wanted answers, and I suspected my old mentor had them.

I didn’t really need to know it all. I knew enough. I only needed to be sure that Natalie was safe, that she understood some very bad people were back on her trail, and if possible, I wanted to see if I could run away and be with her. Yes, I had heard about Fresh Start’s rules and oaths and all that, but the heart doesn’t know from rules and oaths.

There had to be a way.

I almost missed the small sign for Attal Drive. I made a left onto the dirt road and started up the mountain. When I reached the top, Lake Canet was laid out below me, still as a mirror. People toss around the word pristine, but that word was taken to a new level of purity when I saw the water. I stopped the car and got out. The air had that kind of freshness that lets you know even one breath could nourish the lungs. The silence and stillness were almost devastating. I knew that if I called out, my shout would echo, would keep echoing, would never fully dissipate. The shout would live in these woods, growing dimmer and dimmer but never dying, joining the other past sounds that somehow still echoed into that low hum of the great outdoors.

I looked for a house on the lake. There was none. I could see two docks. There were canoes tied to both of them. Nothing else. I got back in my car and drove to the left. The dirt road was not as well paved here. The car bounced on the rough terrain, testing the shocks and finding them wanting. I was glad I took the insurance out on the rental, which was a bizarre thing to think about at a time like this, but the mind goes where it goes. I remembered Professor Hume had owned a four-by-four pickup truck, not exactly standard liberal-arts driving fare. Now I knew why.

Up ahead I saw two pickup trucks parked side by side. I pulled my car behind them and got out. I couldn’t help but notice that there were several sets of tire tracks in the dirt. Either Malcolm had gone back and forth repeatedly or he had company.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

When I looked up the hill and saw the small cottage with the dark windows, I could feel my eyes start to well up.

There was no soft morning glow this time. There was no pinkness from the start of a new day. The sun was setting behind it, casting long shadows, turning what had appeared empty and abandoned into something more black and menacing.

It was the cottage from Natalie’s painting.

I started up the hill toward the front door. There was something dream-like about this trek, something almost Alice in Wonderlandish, as though I were leaving the real world and entering Natalie’s painting. I reached the door. There was no bell to press. When I knocked, the sound ripped through the stillness like a gunshot.

I waited, but I heard no returning sound.

I knocked again. Still nothing. I debated my next move. I could walk down to the lake and see if Malcolm was on it, but that stillness I had witnessed earlier seemed to indicate that no one was down there. There was also the matter of all those tire tracks.

I put my hand on the knob. It turned. Not only was the door left unlocked, there was, I could see now, no actual lock on it—no hole in either the knob or the door to place a key. I pushed the door open and stepped inside. The room was dark. I flicked on the lights.

No one.

“Professor Hume?”

Once I’d graduated, he had insisted that I call him Malcolm. I never could.

I checked the kitchen. It was empty. There was only one bedroom. I headed toward it, tiptoeing for some odd reason across the floor.

When I stepped into the bedroom, my heart dropped like a stone.

Oh no . . .

Malcolm Hume was on the bed, lying on his back, dried foam on his face. His mouth was half open, his face twisted in a final, frozen scream of agony.

My knees buckled. I used the wall to support me. Memories rushed at me, nearly knocking me over: the first class I took with him freshman year (Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau), the first time I met with him in that office I now called my own (we discussed depictions of law and violence in literature), the hours working on my thesis (subject: The Rule of Law), the way he bear-hugged me the day I graduated, with tears in his eyes.

A voice behind me said, “You couldn’t leave it alone.”

I spun around to see Jed pointing a gun at me.

“I didn’t do this,” I said.

“I know. He did it to himself.” Jed stared at me. “Cyanide.”

I remembered Benedict’s pillbox now. All the members of Fresh Start, he said, carried one.

“We told you to leave it alone.”

I shook my head, trying to keep it together, trying to tell the side of me that just wanted to collapse and grieve that there’d be time for that later. “This whole thing started before I got involved. I didn’t know a damn thing about any of this until I saw Todd Sanderson’s obituary.”

Jed suddenly looked exhausted. “It doesn’t matter. We asked you to stop in a million different ways. You wouldn’t. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re guilty or innocent. You know about us. We took an oath.”

“To kill me.”

“In this case, yes.” Jed looked again toward the bed. “If Malcolm was committed enough to do this to himself, shouldn’t I be committed enough to kill you?”

But he didn’t fire. Jed no longer relished shooting me. I could see that now. He had when he thought I’d been the one to kill Todd, but the idea of killing me just to keep me quiet was weighing on him. He looked back down at the body in the end.

“Malcolm loved you,” Jed said. “He loved you like a son. He wouldn’t want . . .” His voice just drifted off. The gun dropped to his side.

I took a tentative step toward him. “Jed?”

He turned to me.

“I think I know how Maxwell Minor’s men found Todd in the first place.”

“How?”

“I need to ask you something first,” I said. “Did Fresh Start begin with Todd Sanderson or Malcolm Hume or, well, you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just . . . trust me for a second, okay?”

“Fresh Start began with Todd,” Jed said. “His father was accused of a heinous crime.”

“Pedophilia,” I said.

“Yes.”

“His father ended up killing himself over it,” I said.

“You can’t imagine what that did to Todd. I was his college roommate and best friend. I watched him fall apart. He railed against the unfairness of it all. If only his father could have moved away, we wondered. But of course, even if he had, that kind of accusation follows you. You can never escape it.”

“Except,” I said, “with a fresh start.”

“Exactly. We realized that there were people who needed to be rescued—and the only way to rescue them was to give them a new life. Professor Hume understood too. He had a person in his life that could have used a fresh start.”

I thought about that. I wondered whether that “person” could very well have been Professor Aaron Kleiner.

“So we joined up,” Jed continued. “We formed this group under the guise of a legitimate charity. My father was a federal marshal. He hid people in witness protection. I knew all the rules. I inherited that family farm from my grandfather. We made it into a retreat. We trained people how to act when they change identities. If you love gambling, for example, you don’t go to Vegas or the track. We worked with them psychologically so they realized that disappearing was a form of suicide and renewal—you kill one being to create another. We created flawless new identities. We used misinformation to lead their stalkers down the wrong path. We added distracting tattoos and disguises. In certain instances, Todd performed cosmetic surgery to change a subject’s appearance.”