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be a plumbing contractor, climbed into the passenger seat, and the boy crawled in back.
    Kate got behind the wheel and rolled down the window. “Don’t wait around, Stoney,” she said. “I plan to keep these fellas out through the bottom of the tide, see if we can’t hang a keeper for the birthday boy.”
    â€œTide doesn’t turn till, what, after eight?”
    She nodded. “It’ll be late. Close up at six and get on home and feed Ralph.”
    â€œI’ll leave you a note if I hear anything.”
    â€œI know you will,” she said.
    He stood there as she pulled away, the Blazer belching smoke and sounding like a motorcycle. Got to fix that damn tailpipe, he thought, before she gets a ticket.
    Around five o’clock Calhoun heard a car pull into the lot. He glanced out the window and saw a green Ford Explorer with a light bar on top and the York County Sheriff’s Department logo on the door.
    A moment later Sheriff Dickman came in. “Happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said. He was a short, barrel-chested guy with twinkling eyes and a sly leprechaun grin. The sheriff was close to sixty, but Calhoun knew he had the vitality of a man half his age. He wore khaki pants and matching shirt, a Stetson on his head, a badge on his chest, and a revolver on his hip.
    â€œHear something?” said Calhoun.
    â€œNope. Wondering if you did.”
    â€œNope,” said Calhoun. “Coke?”
    â€œSure,” said Dickman. “Let’s sit outside so I can keep an ear on the radio.”
    They sat on the porch. The radio in the Explorer squawked and buzzed through the open window. Dickman took off his hat and hung it on his knee. He smoothed his hand over his balding head and said he’d alerted everyone in his department, plus his counterparts up in Cumberland and Oxford counties and the state police, to be on the lookout for a gray-and-rust ’63 Dodge Power Wagon that might’ve been in an accident, and he’d had one of his deputies call the hospitals. So far, nothing.
    â€œMaybe you’d want to call his house again,” said Dickman.
    â€œNo harm in that, I guess,” said Calhoun.
    He went inside, got the portable phone, brought it out on the porch, and dialed the number for Lyle’s house. This time a young man named Danny answered. Nobody had seen or heard from Lyle, as far as he knew, and Danny had been there all day.
    When Calhoun disconnected, he turned to the sheriff and shook his head. “He hasn’t been home, and he hasn’t been here,” he said. “Something’s definitely happened to him.”
    The sheriff shrugged. “I expect you’re right. Don’t know what else we can do. Something’ll turn up.”
    â€œThat’s what I’m afraid of,” said Calhoun.

    Darkness had fallen by the time he pulled into his dooryard that night. He fed Ralph and heated a can of beans for himself, tuned his stereo to the classical music station out of Portland, and settled into his soft chair for an evening of reading. Ralph curled up on the floor beside him, strategically positioning himself so that Calhoun could dangle his arm over the side and absentmindedly scratch his ears.
    Shortly after he’d come to Maine, Calhoun had bought a thick American Lit college anthology at a yard sale. The book was nearly two thousand pages long. It began with the diaries and poems and sermons of the first settlers—John Smith and John Winthrop and Roger Williams, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. It ended with some stories by Ann Beattie and John Updike and Bernard Malamud.
    Calhoun was sure he’d read a lot of this stuff during the time of his life that was still fuzzy, all those years that he’d lived before he woke up in the hospital. He wanted to recapture it, to catch up on his education.
    He’d been doing it slowly and chronologically, dipping