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yet have a crime. Perhaps he was only planning a crime: a murder behind deserted bleachers, a rape in the football field, an assault, a disappearance.
    â€œMaybe we should meet tonight,” I now said to Carter. “I can come over to your place. We could make dinner together. We could make love.”
    â€œDo you want to know what I think?” Carter said, “I think the best thing you can possibly do right now is dig into your work.”
    â€œReally?” I said.
    â€œReally. Then you might better understand why I’m so wrapped up with Soft Skies. You might even decide to be a part of the series of demonstrations I have planned for next summer.”
    â€œI didn’t know you were already thinking about summer,” I said, more hurt than interested.
    â€œI have to make plans if we don’t want any more plants like Angel Landing Three,” he said.
    â€œOh Carter,” I said, annoyed. “You can’t stop an entire industry single-handed.”
    â€œI know that,” Carter said. “Hey, I know.”
    â€œWhere do you plan to be?” I now asked. “Next summer.”
    â€œI want you to go with me,” Carter said.
    â€œWhere?” I asked.
    â€œI’m not certain. I’ll be here until Angel is closed down, and then who knows? California, Oregon, wherever I’m needed.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œI want you to go with me,” Carter said.
    â€œAnd just quit my job?” I asked.
    â€œI have enough money for both of us. Two can live as cheaply as one.”
    â€œI see, you want me to dig into my job and then quit it.”
    â€œI love you,” Carter said suddenly. He sounded so far away, so sad.
    â€œReally?”
    â€œI’ll miss you tonight,” Carter said. “I always do.”
    â€œIs that true?” I asked, but he had already hung up. By the end of the day I had made up my mind. I would leave Outreach and stop at the Mercy Home; Minnie would be finished calling out Bingo numbers, she would have read her last story in faulty Russian to an old woman who longed for lumps of sugar in her tea and the language she had nearly forgotten. As Minnie and I walked home together, there would be no reason to wonder if what I planned to do was right or wrong, because I had decided before I left work that day, before I locked the office door behind me: I would do what Finn asked; I was ready to meet him.

THREE
    T HE MERCY HOME HAD once been a bordello. In the early nineteen hundreds, when Fishers Cove was a whaling town, sailors who planned to stay in port for a week often did not leave for months. Sometimes, after meeting a particularly beautiful woman, they did not leave at all; instead they opened taverns and grocery stores and shoe repair shops, and even though they listened to the sea, they no longer really heard it; they had begun to see the outline of Connecticut across the harbor much more clearly than they could see the waves.
    Now, very little of the house’s past was left, except for the blue Victorian turrets. It had been gutted; stained-glass windows were shuttered behind iron bars; where there had once been a redwood dining table, a reception booth staffed by nurses now stood. In the dayroom, which had once been a parlor filled with velvet and flesh, a television set blasted to a line of captive viewers, an audience strapped into wheelchairs, too exhausted to move out of the line of the newscasts and the game shows. Just behind the double glass doors which had replaced carved oak, Minnie was waiting for me.
    â€œOver here,” Minnie signaled with a wave of her hand. “Here.”
    The nursing home had once been painted in bright, cheery colors, but that paint had faded years ago, and beneath sharp fluorescent bulbs the whole place looked dismal.
    â€œAre you deaf?” Minnie whispered from the doorway. “Over here.”
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I asked. When Minnie raised an annoyed