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impulse to look at this as I passed, and I wondered how long it would take before some part of me got the message.
    I crossed the empty two-lane highway before taking the last left in town. This led into the woods, the fences sparsely punctuated with heavy-duty mailboxes and gates leading to houses down long driveways. After ten minutes I reached the box labeled JACK AND AMY WHALEN. Rather than open the gate, I vaulted over it, as I had on the way out. I forgot to compensate for the weight in the backpack and almost reached the other side face-first. I’d started exercising again recently, taking runs through the National Forest land that started at the boundary of our property. Now that the initial aches had worn off, I felt better than in awhile, but my body wasn’t ready to forget that it was a year since I’d been truly fit. Though there was no one to see, I still felt like an ass and swore briskly at the gate for fucking me around. My father used to claim that inanimate objects hate us and plot our downfall behind our backs. He was probably right.
    I walked up the rutted path toward the place a rental agreement said was now home. It was colder again, and I wondered if tonight was going to be when the snows finally dropped. I wondered also—not for the first time—how we were going to get in and out when that happened. The locals referred to snow without starry-eyed romanticism. They talked about it like death or taxes. The Realtor had breezily said something about a snowmobile being advisable in the deepest months. We didn’t have a snowmobile. Weren’t going to be getting one either. Nowhere in my life plans was there a slot for ownership of a snowmobile. Instead I was laying in reserves of cigarettes, canned chili, and sauerkraut. Always have had a thing for sauerkraut, not sure why.

    The drive curved down into a hollow before climbing back up along the ridge. About a half mile from the road, it widened into the parking area. From this side the house wasn’t much to look at, a single-story band of weathered cedar shingles largely obscured in summer by trees. It had been that way in the photo I’d seen on the Internet, and it looked rustic and cute. In winter and real life, it looked like a nuclear bunker caught between the legs of dead spiders. It was only when you got inside that you realized you’d entered at the top of two and a half levels, and there was double-height glass along most of the north face of the building, where the hillside dropped away sharply. In daylight this gave a view across a forest valley that climbed up to the Wenatchee Mountains, segueing into the Cascades and from there eventually to Canada. As Gary Fisher had found, you tended to just look at it for a while. From the deck you could also see a pond, about 150 yards in diameter, which lay within the property’s four-acre boundary. In the afternoons birds of prey floated across the valley like distant leaves.
    I unloaded the backpack’s contents into their predetermined spots in the kitchen. The answering machine was on the far end of the counter. The light was flashing.
    “About time,” I said, the first words the house had heard since Fisher left.
    But it wasn’t. Two people had called, or one person twice, but left no message. I sent beats of ill-will to the perpetrator/s and another to myself for not getting caller ID working yet. The box claimed it was possible, but the manual had been translated from Japanese by a halfwit prairie dog. Just changing the outgoing message had required technical support from NASA. I knew the caller/s couldn’t have been Amy, who knew how much nonmessages piss me off and would at least have intoned “No message, master” in a gravelly tone.
    I got out my cell and pressed her speed-dial number, hooking it under my ear while I got a beer from the fridge. After five rings I was diverted to the answering ser vice yet again. Her business voice warmly thanked whomever for calling and promised