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would have asked him for this favor. “I’m thinking about it.”
    “Don’t think too long.”
    My mother walked out of the kitchen, but then returned almost immediately to retrieve her Pall Malls. And she had another question for me. “How does Mrs. Dunbar fix her stuffing?”
    “She mixes in sausage. And slices of apple. To keep it moist, she says.”
    “Sausage and apple ... huh!” Her eyebrows rose as if she found Mrs. Dunbar’s method of preparing dressing more baffling than the news of the shooting.
    “It was good.”
    “I’ll take your word for it. Have you had your fill of turkey yet? If you haven’t, I could make a little one for us. But big enough so we’d have some extra for sandwiches.”
    “That’s okay.”
    “Well, let me know if you change your mind. Red Owl’s going to sell their leftover birds cheap.”
    “But it wouldn’t be for Thanksgiving.”
    “No, but it’d be turkey.”
     
    I knew the Dunbar house so well that I could tell which of their four telephones Mrs. Dunbar had answered from the sound of her footsteps as she walked away to find her son after putting the receiver down. High heels on the wood floors—the telephone on the small table next to the wide staircase.
    As soon as Johnny came on the line I asked, “Did you hear about Lester Huston?”
    “Yeah,” he replied. “Deputy Greiner called a little while ago to tell Dad what happened. Dad lit into him because apparently Greiner told Lester Huston that Louisa Lindahl was in critical condition. He made it sound like she was going to die. So Lester Huston thought there was a good chance he’d be charged with murder.”
    “What the hell did Greiner do that for?”
    “That’s what Dad asked him. The deputy kept saying it was part of his interrogation. Dad told him that when Sheriff Hart gets back to town he’s going to hear what a screwup he has for a deputy.”
    “Man, what I would’ve given to hear your dad read Greiner the riot act!”
    “He was pissed, all right. Royally pissed.”
    Before that day I would have had a hard time imagining Dr. Dunbar angry. But now I had seen his expression when I touched Louisa Lindahl’s stomach.
    “Does Louisa Lindahl know Huston’s dead?”
    “Dad went upstairs to break the news to her a few minutes ago.”
    “Upstairs?”
    “Dad didn’t want her spending the night in the clinic. There aren’t any real beds in there, and it would have been too far away if she needed something during the night. So we moved her upstairs to that little back bedroom.”
    “It was okay to move her? Jesus, she was shot—. And you helped? Did you carry her or what?”
    “She could walk a little, but only a couple steps. We tried propping her up between us, but she couldn’t raise her arms to put them around our shoulders because it pulled too hard on her stitches. So finally Dad just carried her.”
    “He carried her? Up the stairs?”
    Johnny laughed. “Sure, he’s a doctor!”
    “Did she say anything, you know, when you were trying to help her?”
    “Nah. She barely knew where she was. But when we helped her off the table, she whispered, ‘Fuck.’”
     
    Lying awake in bed that night, I tried in vain to recall the sight of Louisa Lindahl’s breasts. But try as I might I couldn’t concentrate on that image. Instead, questions kept imposing themselves. What, I wondered, would make a man lean into his own death when all he needed to do to save his life was sit back and slacken the noose that he himself had knotted? Was it fear of the punishment he’d receive, or did he find unbearable the realization that he had killed the woman he’d loved?

5.
    AMONG DR. DUNBAR’S MANY CONTRIBUTIONS to civic life in Willow Falls—serving on the school board, standing by as physician-in-attendance at high school athletic events, heading up charity drives—he organized hockey in our town.
    Though we clearly did have a climate conducive to the sport—our ponds and the Willow River usually had