Read The Ax for Free Online

and the only other paper I normally read, the
Journal
, our local weekly, does not extend its reach as far as Fall City. Our cable service doesn’t carry local channels, but I doubt Everly made the TV news.)
    My Massachusetts road atlas shows Longholme about twenty miles west of Springfield and north of the Massachusetts Turnpike. Berkshire Way is another wiggly black line—suggesting hills again—extending out of the town proper, this time northward. It’s a long sweep around for me to avoid the town and stay on country roads, but I think it’s worth the time and trouble. Still, it’s almost twelve o’clock when I finally make the turn onto Berkshire Way.
    This is decidedly more rural, with a few actual farms along the way. The private homes are mostly large but unpretentious, as though the residents don’t feel they have anything to prove to their neighbors. The countryside is more open, with cleared fields and wide valleys rather than the tumbled woodsiness of Connecticut. It doesn’t feel suburban, probably because it’s just a little too far from New York and Boston and Albany and every other northeastern urban center.
    7911 Berkshire Way turns out to be a modern house on a traditional plan, on the right side of the road as I come along. Probably built after World War II, when the boys came home to create us baby boomers, so that fifty years later we could all be shunted off the social order.
    I’m a bit surprised at the house and disappointed with EGR, with his daughters “at university,” which does not imply yellow aluminum siding and green fake shutters and a TV satellite dish as prominent as an erection right next to the house. There are scrubby plantings around the base of the building and a few small specimen fruit trees haphazardly placed, but nothing has been planted along the line between scraggly lawn and roadside.
    The wide door of the two-car garage is lifted open as I drive by, and there are no cars in there. Nobody home. Damn.
    I drive on. A quarter mile farther, a convent school provides a handy parking area in which to turn around. I drive back, looking for an inconspicuous place to park. Unlike the last time, the mailbox is on the same side of the road as the house, so I’ll have less warning when EGR comes out to get his mail. If he’s home. If he comes out to get his mail. If the mail hasn’t already been delivered.
    Next beyond the Ricks house, back the way I’m now going, is an empty field, strewn with shrubs and low pines, with a For Sale sign—white letters on red, phone number added in black Magic Marker—on a post near the road. Next beyond that is another house similar to EGR’s, built around the same time, probably by the same builder, onto which a few additional rooms were pasted over the years. Stucco was applied at some point, instead of aluminum, and painted the color of squash. A large metal For Sale sign from a local real estate agent stands on the unmowed lawn, and the place has an abandoned air to it, as though the family has gone away to live somewhere smaller, less expensive, closer to the Welfare office.
    I turn at this decamped home, enter the driveway, stop, and back turning out of it, so that I’m parked off the road in front of the house, with a clear view beyond the offered field to the front of EGR’s place. I’ve been careful not to block the view of the For Sale sign with my Voyager, because I want the occasional passerby to assume I’m waiting for the agent.
    I’m getting hungry, but I don’t want to give up my vigil, lose my opportunity to finish the day’s work. In my mind’s eye, a car pulls in at the driveway over there, a man gets out of it, he crosses to the mailbox, I drive forward, and it’s all over.
    Does he get his mail while still in his car? And then does he drive into the garage before getting out of the car? And does he close the garage door immediately? And do I follow him, the Luger in my hand, or under my jacket?
    I can only