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roost.
    “Yeah,” Tom decided to say. “I was.” He wanted to give the kid the benefit of the doubt, but Christopher had turned away and was looking at his hands, as if he now felt embarrassed for asking.
    “I made mistakes,” Tom continued. “In my personal life and on the job.” He hesitated. “What makes you ask that?”
    Still looking at his hands, Christopher answered, “A man living alone out in the woods without a drop of alcohol in his home is either Amish or recently sober,” he said, “and we drove here in a Chevy Blazer.”
    This made Tom laugh. It sounded loud in the little house, but it felt okay. “What’d you — did you just go through my cupboards? I thought you needed to use the bathroom.”
    “You’ve got clear recycling containers in the garage. I saw them when we pulled in. Not a can or bottle. You got me some juice from the fridge, not a thing in there. No wine rack. No mini-bar.”
    Tom nodded and looked around the living room, feeling a brief surreal wave as if he were seeing the place for the first time. It passed quickly. He found his eyes drawn to the view again. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Not bad, but my old man used to keep his bottle hidden behind the trash can under the sink. Well, not exactly hidden, but not exactly top-shelf, either. So, you never know.”
    The kid didn’t reply to this, but Tom saw in his peripheral vision Christopher’s head lift back up, his hands slip under his thighs in a boyish gesture. It felt like the kid might want to say something else, that there were some other deductive powers he had yet to unveil, but Christopher stayed silent.
    “I used to drink vodka,” Tom said. “My father was a whiskey man. He said vodka was for girls and gays. But I was a vodka man, I guess, so I could tell myself I wasn’t like him. In fact, probably the only reason I focused on the vodka, aside from liquor-is-quicker, was to spite him. Otherwise I wouldn’t have cared what I drank.”
    Tom broke off. He felt cold. He stood and walked to the thermostat and turned it up past seventy degrees.
    “You comfortable?” Tom asked
    “Yes.” Christopher wasn’t watching Tom — he was still looking out the window, but something in his posture had changed.
    “You sure I can’t get you anything else?”
    “No, sir, thank you, I’m fine.”
    “Where were you, before you were at the gas station, by that old phone booth? At a friend’s?”
    “Is that where you first saw me?”
    Tom nodded. He waited for the kid to ask him why the old cop had been sitting and watching a never-used phone booth in the middle of the night.
    “I can’t really remember.”
    “Having trouble with your memory? We call that ‘convenient amnesia.’” Tom searched the kid for guile but could find none.
    “Yes. But I think I’m beginning to understand some things now.”
    Tom nodded once, as if this made sense. He was still standing at the thermostat when the kid said: “Look.”
    Tom looked out the window at what Christopher was staring at.
    The snow fell at a slant now; a northerly wind had kicked up, and blew steadily.
    Tom didn’t have much of a lawn to speak of, just a strip of grass in front of the house, a dirt cul-de-sac, and the short driveway; forty-or-so yards of road.
    He squinted even though his contact lenses were still in.
    There were shapes moving down the driveway, drawing closer. They looked like people.
    “Here they are,” Christopher said from the couch behind him.
    * * *
    Jared stalked slowly across the kitchen and lowered himself into a crouch. Elizabeth felt dizzy on her feet; she felt sick. Her head was swimming, the kitchen yawing out, stretching this way and that, like reflections in a funhouse mirror. She thought of the glinting chips of the wine glass, shattered on the fieldstone walkway. The sound of the glass breaking in her memory brought her back around.
    “What’s out there?” Her voice was a whisper. She whispered even though she had screamed. She