No, no. This was real. Here was Charlie, here was the ground, the air, the trees, the sky above, the sweet green buds of leaves quaking from the branches, pushing forward into life, come what may. I knew these woods. I knew my cabin, the lake, the pines, the road. I was the only person to walk through the birch woods on a regular basis. The neighbors were far enough to have their own birch woods, their own paths. And why would anybody come all the way up here, just to walk on my path? Why would Blake have come, other than for me? It was no mistake. The note was a letter. Who else but me would have found it? I had been chosen. It may just as well have been addressed to me. Dear Vesta. I’ve been watching you. . . .
Was Blake watching me even now as I hurried out of the woods? I could imagine a teenage boy, just growing out of the doughy adolescent mask that hid his deviance. Did it give him some strange pleasure to see me so alarmed? Was his mind mingling with my mind somehow, planting these thoughts, these imaginings and reasonings? Dear Vesta. I know where you live. Suppose the woods had never been mine at all. Suppose I’d been the invader, and Blake, pushed to act finally, had sent me this message to scare me off, to ruin my world so that he could have it all to himself. My mind wrangled the possibilities. As we walked, I took the note out again to read it. Her name was Magda. That much still was true.
The sun was up now as we crossed the edge of the woods. The day ahead was bright and clear. There was no dark, brooding cloud, no sharp tang of storm in the fresh spring air. There was nothing to get tense about, nothing at my back, no need to run. So I found a note. So what? It couldn’t hurt me. Magda, if she had been a threat, was dead and gone. And Blake claimed, at least, that he was no killer. There it was in black and white: It wasn’t me. I could choose to believe it. There was nothing to fear. It was just a piece of paper, words on a page. Silly to get so invested. Stupid even. Stupid.
Down the hill we went, and across the road and up the gravel path to the cabin. At the door, I dropped the leash and wiped Charlie’s feet with a rag, as I always did, holding the note between my lips, folding my lips inward so as not to wet the paper. Charlie looked up at me, annoyed but unperturbed. Certainly, if there was anything to fear, the hair on the back of Charlie’s neck would be standing on edge, a sharp ridge to indicate danger, the threat of death. I rubbed his velvet ears. We went inside.
It was still cool and dark in the kitchen, which faced westward onto the gravel path and the little garden. I’d recently started tilling the soil in the clearing just outside the kitchen windows. I hoped to plant flowers, maybe tomatoes, squash, carrots. I’d never had a garden before. The earth in Monlith had been too dry. Nothing would have grown out there in that stale, red dirt. But in Levant, where it was green and pretty, I felt inspired to bring something new to life. I stood at the sink and looked out through the window, picturing how my garden would grow. Across from the raked-up dirt, there were spindly and rotted horsehair ropes hanging from a thick branch of the one large sycamore on the property. These were remnants of a swing, I supposed, installed back when the place had been a summer camp for Girl Scouts. The boathouse had been torn down, but my cabin, the main structure where the girls learned crafts and ate their meals, had endured. I had found rusted bobby pins, thimbles, jacks, broken knitting needles, small scissors fit for children’s hands in the soil, wedged in between the grubs and earthworms. Those little artifacts must have been twenty or thirty years old by then, maybe older. Besides the sycamore and a few splintery stumps of rotted oaks, the trees on my property were all tall pines, mostly eastern whites. I had borrowed a book from the library and meant to study up on the local flora but it had been too scientific, too technical, not enough pictures to hold my attention. I had no sensitivity to science. Walter and his rational mind had exhausted my patience for that kind of mental busywork. Since his death, I’d grown to be more poetic in my thinking. Too much magic was dashed by cold logic.
If those birch woods across the road were good for dawn walks, my old pines were more for midnight. Shut in under their dark canopy of thick branches, sound was dampened by the nesty carpet of dried pine needles underfoot. The space the pines made was like an interior, like my den, a place where you’d sit and read or listen to records. A glass of bourbon, a warm wool sweater, a green glass desk lamp, a dark mantel, these things would have done nicely there. I didn’t go very deep into the pines, however. Twice I’d wandered more than a quarter of a mile deep, and both times I became short of breath. There was something I was allergic to out there, some mold or spore, I guessed. Those thick groves of pines would keep me safe, I’d thought; the poisonous air would force any ne’er-do-well to retreat. But now that Magda had been murdered, I was not so sure.
Charlie came and rubbed his face against my knee, as though he sensed my anxiety. Sweet creature. Would I need a gun? An alarm system? Since I had moved in, I’d always left the door unlocked. I had nothing anyone would care to steal, anyway. But now, I felt the pine woods might actually invite danger. If there was a good place to hide, it was in the thick of those trees. That was where the killer was, I imagined, crouching in the shadows, biding his time until he struck again. My throat clenched. I dared myself to turn around, to look back over my shoulder through the kitchen window at the pines, but I could not. Someone could be standing there—I pictured Blake in oversized gym shorts and a blood-splattered T-shirt, a surly, skinny teen with a stunned, possessed look on his face. I held the note in my hands. Her name was Magda. Then I folded it defiantly and slipped it under a pile of mail on the table by the door. Leave it alone. Come on now, Vesta, I told myself. It will be there later, if you get bored. You’ve done enough imagining for one morning. Don’t make trouble for yourself. Just go on about your day.
I turned on the overhead light, took off my boots, and hung up my coat, Charlie whining at my heels, hungry for breakfast. “I know, I know.” Everything in the kitchen was as I’d left it. Coffee can upside down on the counter to remind myself to go buy more. Clean dishes in the rack, one plate, one cup, the usual mess of silverware, no butcher knife. The radio was on, as it always was when I left the house. That was a habit I’d picked up long ago. When we were newly married and still young and poor—Walter slaving over his dissertation, me working as a secretary in a medical billing office—we lived in a city apartment and played the radio to muffle the noises of our neighbors coming through the walls. Walter thought it wise to leave it on anytime we went out at night, to ward off burglars. I found it a comfort to come home to music playing, or a news report. Welcome back, the announcers said. And if I ever had to leave Charlie alone at home, I liked knowing that he wasn’t just sitting in the dreary silence there, but keeping up with culture and current events, or listening to Bach or Verdi or Celtic music. If you’re just joining us . . . But I rarely left Charlie alone in Levant. We were attached at the hip, as they say. This just in . . .
I heated a pot of chicken stew with rice on the stove and ladled it out into Charlie’s food bowl on the kitchen floor. I had been feeding him leftovers since we’d moved to Levant. As a result, I only cooked things we both liked, especially in winter: stews, roasts, sweet potatoes, gravy. On this home-cooked diet, Charlie was calmer, his eyes brighter, his whole presence clearer. I knew he appreciated my cooking. You see, these were the simple things that gave me pleasure: I fed my dog. I looked out the den windows at the water, peaceful and pale under the morning sun. There was my little rowboat still tied to the dock. I had yet to take it out to the island in the middle of the lake that spring. The oars were right there in the den, leaning against the wall. Over the summer, I’d been so proud to row around and look back at the land, at all my property. It was mine. I owned it, this gorgeous pocket of planet Earth. It belonged only to me. And the island with its strange promontory and perilous rocks, a few lone pines, a blueberry bush, and a clearing just big enough to lay a blanket down, all of that belonged to me, too. I took great comfort in ownership. Nobody could ever interfere. The deed was in my name alone, all twelve acres. I hadn’t even seen it all, because of my allergy to the pines.