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your hair.” She reached up and brushed them out. They fell on her desk.
    She was good company when she wasn’t too busy, but she was busy most of the time. And she was sexy in the easygoing way women get when they feel free to pick and choose with whom, where, and when. As for where, she was happier at her place, a tiny cottage secreted behind the Congregational Church. It had a kind of a kitchen-living room about the size of a Chevy Blazer, and a somewhat bigger bedroom, which the word boudoir would have described perfectly, if the down and lace coverlet weren’t usually buried under paperwork.
    â€œI’ll just straighten up while you cook.”
    We had stopped at my place for beer and ingredients. I opened a couple of St. Pauli Girls and started melting cheese on the stove.
    â€œSo how’d you hurt your knee?”
    â€œKeep a secret?”
    She came out, wide-eyed. “Sure. What’d you do?”
    â€œThis goes no further. No kidding.”
    â€œI swear on the souls of my unborn children. Come on, Ben. What’s going on?”
    â€œA detective hired me to videotape a couple committing adultery.”
    She looked puzzled.
    â€œIt’s a divorce case.”
    â€œYou took dirty pictures?”
    â€œI didn’t. I was supposed to. I mean I agreed to. But I didn’t.”
    â€œYou’re weird, Ben.”
    â€œIt seemed like a good idea at the time. Turned out it wasn’t. I couldn’t do it.”
    â€œI should hope not.”
    I told her about Alex Rose, and Alison Mealy’s braces, and how the evening had gone downhill from there, leaving out the precise reason I had stopped filming. The raccoon sent her into stitches, until I told her how Oliver had shot him. She got misty-eyed.
    â€œHad to put him out of his misery.”
    â€œI know, I know. It’s just that it’s so sad, they’re just living their lives and along comes this disease they’ve no defense against and we shoot them.”
    Vicky had grown up in a big Irish-Catholic family in a close-in suburb and hadn’t acquired the sterner eye you get when you farm at the edge of the forest. I said, “Why don’t you tell Sally to look into oral vaccines? I read they’re experimenting in Belgium.”
    Sally Butler was the dogcatcher. Rabies vaccine seemed a good way to steer Vicky McLachlan away from the adultery-taping subject, which I saw still troubled her. And later that night, in the dark, she asked, “Why’d you do it?”
    â€œAlison—”
    â€œDon’t blame the teeth.”
    I told her my theory of ’Eighties dealmaking, wherein running the deal became far more important than the results.
    â€œNo,” she said, “you’re always trying to walk on the edge. It’s the only thing that excites you.”
    â€œI got kind of excited a minute ago. Remember?”
    â€œThat wasn’t me. You were remembering what you saw through her window.”
    As I formulated a reply, Vicky rolled over and said she was going to sleep. I moved spoonlike behind her, the way she liked, and kissed her back. It took me too long to realize she was crying.
    ***
    Newbury celebrates Labor Day the third weekend in September, partly because the bigger towns have huge parades that siphon off the crowd we need to buy tickets to our fire department cookout, and partly because summer shouldn’t end on the first Monday of the month. Weatherwise, it’s a little risky, as we occasionally celebrate in a sleet storm, but the morning after my exploits at the Longs’ dawned warm and sunny as August.
    Vicky sent me packing early; she had a speech to rehearse.
    I limped home. My machine was blinking. Alex Rose.
    I got his machine.
    He called back.
    â€œSo how’d it go?”
    â€œLousy.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œHow lousy? You get caught or something?”
    For all I knew he had tapped the Longs’ phone lines,