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Harry’s shoulders. He was smiling, a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth. In the background, almost out of frame, Bobby on the living room floor, opening a gift. “Christmas 1974” was written in ballpoint pen in the white lower margin of the photo. It was his mother’s handwriting.
    He stopped, knowing what was next. A few minutes later, when the glass was half empty, he turned the page.
    At the top was a photo of Melissa as a little girl, dressed as a witch for Halloween. Then, beneath it, a few years older, in a Girl Scout uniform, hugging a collie. For weeks after her death, he had tortured himself with these photos, touching the pain as if prodding an open wound.
    On the next page: Melissa in high school; her graduation portrait. Already a woman at seventeen, already beautiful, her black hair shining. She had looked no older when they met five years later at Rutgers, Harry gathering credits before applying to the state police academy, Melissa a teaching assistant in his social science class.
    Next were the wedding photos. Melissa in white, bridesmaids spread out behind her; he in his dress uniform, three weeks out of the academy. He remembered how he’d felt that day, his career stretching before him, the woman he loved at his side. For their first dance together, the song they’d chosen, he’d whispered along with the words as he held her:
    We said we’d walk together, come what may
That come the twilight should we lose our way
If as we’re walking a hand should slip free
I’ll wait for you
And should I fall behind
Wait for me …
    He turned pages. Melissa on their honeymoon in Grenada, laughing, perched on the gunwale of a sailboat, holding on to a line while the boat dipped steeply toward the bright blue water. Then on the beach outside the hotel, picking shells from the surf, the sun low behind her.
    Almost the end of the album now. An eight-by-ten of Melissa in the yard of their house in Metuchen, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, not smiling, her dark hair catching the light. Then a final photo, taken on the day she came home from the hospital, her head shaved, her arm around the oversized stuffed dog he’d bought her. The last page was her funeral card, centered in the plastic sheet.
    He turned back to the shot of her in the yard, touched it, felt the sad and sudden tang of desire that always came to him when he looked at it. He traced her body with a fingertip, thought of her in those last days at home, shrunken and sick, a different person. Not this woman at all.
    He thumped the album shut.
    Later, he carried the bottle and glass up to the bedroom. He pulled off his boots and stretched out on the sheets. He lay there a long time, drinking wine, waiting for a sleep that didn’t come.

FOUR
    The road up to the Shore Line Country Club was lined with dogwood trees, their bloom already fading in the midsummer heat. White petals covered the ground like snow.
    He downshifted as he neared the main building. To the left, the golf course stretched out perfect green to a far line of trees. To the right was a fenced-in pasture and, beyond it, a barn. In the pasture, two figures rode horses side by side at a canter.
    He felt tired, irritable. Too much wine and too little sleep had given him a headache that aspirin couldn’t touch.
    The road ended in a circular parking area in front of the porticoed entrance. He pulled up under the green-and-white awning, and a teenager wearing a blazer in the same colors got up slowly from a chair beside the front door. Harry waited for him to come up to the car.
    “I’ll park it myself,” Harry said. “Just show me where.”
    The kid looked the Mustang over. He had long blond hair gathered in a neat ponytail.
    “Phat wheels. What year?”
    “Sixty-seven.”
    “What you got under there?”
    “Two eighty-nine. Four-speed.”
    “Rockin’. You can pull up on the grass over there, under the tree.”
    He parked under a spreading oak, alongside a midnight blue BMW