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wrecked car. A bunch of official types with a shovel.
    More pages and more clippings. I went to the back and then turned to the front. A black-and-white wallet-size picture fell out on the floor. I picked it up. It showed a man and woman sitting on a lawn but it was taken at a weird angle, from above and crooked. The man had his arm around the woman’s waist. The woman was staring into his eyes, like something from an old movie.
    Strange.
    The woman was pretty, with dark hair combed back. She was wearing a full skirt with pleats and her legs were stretched out on the grass. They looked like pretty legs. The man looked passionate. I held the picture up to the light. It almost looked like Martin. What? In his passionate youth? In a play? Was that his wife, or was he married before—
    I heard a sound.
    Scraping. Metallic. Nothing. Then again.
    The mailbox. Somebody scraping in the mailbox for the key. But the key was in my pocket.
    I listened. Nothing, then another scrape. Nothing. A tap on the door. I closed the binder and put it back on the shelf. Turned and switched off the light. The room went black except for the edges of the blanket at the doorway.
    A bang. I stood and listened. Another bang. The door rattled.
    I took a step toward the blanket. Fought off an urge to run. Listened.
    Nothing.
    Was there a back door? I couldn’t remember. How would I explain being here in the dark? The landlord? Who would be out there?
    There was another bang, then glass breaking, falling on the floor.
    I jumped and batted at the blanket and walked toward the front door. Kicked something and stumbled, then ran to the door. There was a fist-size hole near the knob. I waited at the door. Listened. A car whined by, fast. I opened the door but the bottom caught on the glass and I squeezed through the narrow opening and half-walked, half-trotted to the car. Keys. I dug and emptied my pockets. Handkerchief. Change. The studio key. The picture of Martin and the woman. Keys. Get the hell out.

4

    S o now I had a secret. But it was like somebody seeing a murder while committing a burglary. How did I know somebody almost broke into Arthur’s? Because I more or less broke in myself.
    When I got back to the paper, I felt myself almost slink through the door. For somebody who prided himself on his basic honesty, it wasn’t a comfortable feeling.
    I needed to stop and think, to sort things out. I needed a timeout.
    No such luck.
    The first thing I saw was the back of a tan trench coat, gray corporate slacks, corporate-approved L.L. Bean boots.
    â€œOh, damn,” I said. “Not now.”
    David Curry didn’t hear me because he was up to his eyebrows in Cindy’s aura, thinking that just because she was smiling she was buying his act, which she was, but no more so than she did any of the other male revues that came through the door.
    Curry was the local flack for St. Amand Paper, a puffed-up flunky who thought he was really something just because he wore a suit to work. The suits were corporate issue, right down to the yellow tie,which, in Androscoggin, was like wearing a cummerbund. But Curry wore them because the big guns in Pittsburgh wore them, or at least they had last time he saw them. Of course, yellow had been replaced by red in corporate fashion, but he didn’t know that, and I didn’t feel like telling him. If he thought wearing a yellow tie would help him to make it through the ten years he had left until retirement, let him wear it. If there were more women in the higher corporate echelons, Curry would wear a dress.
    One could only hope.
    Curry was a yes-man, a valet for the people who made the real decisions, and, more importantly, didn’t want anything printed about the mill or the company that they hadn’t written, approved, preread, or censored.
    â€œHey, Jack,” Curry said, turning around. “How’s it going there? On the trail of something hot or what?”
    â€œNot really