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Late that night I finally made it over to check on Mr. Lindstrom's house. I don't know if I'd actually planned on going inside or if I was just going to check it out from the front, but when I got there I realized there was no way I was going in alone. Ethan and Pop had gone to dinner and then over to the hospital, and Bo and Rosasharn and even Jeremy (he'd finally managed to talk to the right Amy) all had dates and had left earlier to see a movie in Saratoga. They asked me to go with them, but I wasn't crazy about being the odd man out. I'd tried Katie one more time and missed her again, and I still hadn't left a message, I don't know-maybe I was afraid that if she knew I was calling her,
she'd have an excuse all prepared why we couldn't go out—especially if it were true that her best friend had the hots for me.

Except for wishing I could be with Katie I didn't mind being on my own for a while. Earlier in the evening Bo and Rosasharn and Jeremy and I had set up at Blood Red Pond to shoot a couple of simple filler scenes. As soon as we took a break to eat, I took the offensive with Jeremy, trying to knock him off balance before he had the chance to do the same to me.

“Brie?” I said, holding it out in front of him. Brie was exactly the kind of thing guaranteed to make Jeremy crazy. I wasn't crazy about it myself. It was too strong, too much like something gone bad. But I'd made sure I had some in the cooler when I'd packed it up for the evening.

“Yuppie chow.” Jeremy slapped my hand out from under his nose. “Mice won't even eat that stuff.”

I opened the package so it could breathe and stuck it back under his nose.

Jeremy slapped my hand away again, harder this time, and got up and took his plate of food to the other side of the fire. I considered this a victory of sorts, but Jeremy hadn't thrown in the towel yet. He'd just retrenched.

He poked Rosasharn. “You know how Gabe-boy always thinks he's so smart. Well, I was reading some teacher magazine at Bo's that said they gave a math test to kids all around the world and the Irish scored second from the bottom.”

“That's the
civilized
world, Jeremy,” I told him.
“Your
people didn't even get to take it.” Actually it would have been hard to say exactly who Jeremy's people were. His ancestors came from all over Europe,
and he even had a little American Indian in him. I used to get him going by calling him the human mutt. Then, it seems, someone told him about the dangers of inbreeding, and he started feeling more secure in his diversity.

“How's your sister-uncle-cousin?” he said, getting in a lick about my pure Irish bloodline.

Rosasharn smacked him. “I can't believe you'd bring her up now. Didn't you hear? She died yesterday.”

Jeremy smacked him back. “Shut up, ya tub.”

And so it went on like that. And the funny thing is, Bo, who never argues with, insults, or mocks anybody, gets a bigger kick out of this than any of us. I swear he does. He always sits there with a little smile on his face taking it all in. Sometimes I even have the feeling we're staging these rank-athons just for his benefit.

Anyway, after the others left to get ready for their dates and pick up the girls, I stayed there reading by the fire. I'd probably been reading a good two or three hours and was almost to the end of my Emerson book when I got the idea to check on Mr. Lindstrom's house. It was time for me to head home for bed anyway, so I put out the fire, packed up what little stuff I had with me, and started out to the road.

Ordinarily, to get to Mr. Lindstrom's house from the pond, I would have taken the lane through the woods. Not only was it shorter, but I liked the soft feel of the grass and dead leaves and pine needles under my feet, and I loved walking under the big old trees that canopied the lane, at times so thickly you felt like you were walking through a tunnel. But that night I decided to take the long way around. Looking back on it, I remember noticing how pitch dark it had been and how quiet—you know, the kind of quiet where in the movies some guy always says it's
too
quiet. Also, I remember that as I was
sitting by the fire, I looked up from my book a couple of times and had the strange sensation that I was being watched. Maybe I'm only remembering these things because of what I saw afterward and what I've since found out, but I don't think so. Feeling any kind of uneasiness about being in those woods was unusual for me. After all, I grew up thinking of these woods as my own backyard. Maybe the whole idea of being watched had been planted in my head by Ethan's new habit of staring out into the woods, or maybe it's like Bo always says, that everything in the universe is connected, and because of this I knew something was up before I even
knew
I knew something was up.

Anyway, the creepy feeling I'd developed while sitting around the campfire stayed with me even after I was out of the woods. When I walked by the spot where Walter Owens had found Mr. Lindstrom, I felt a chill go up my spine. All I could think of was what it must have been like for him lying out there all night, not completely unconscious, but probably not all there either, so it must have been like being stuck in some kind of nightmare—one where you're not even sure where you are or what's happening and all you know for sure is that you can't move. I hurried past and tried not to think about it. That's why, when I finally found myself in Mr. Lindstrom's yard looking up at his house, it took me so much by surprise.

At first I thought the light in the upstairs room was off. A closer look revealed that it wasn't, but the shade had been drawn, allowing only a sliver of light on either side.

I took a step back, and then another. A minute later I was out of the yard and on the road.

I started for
home at a quick walk, but before I knew it I was jogging. Then, when I reached the stretch of road in front of Mr. Lindstrom's old barn, I all of a sudden remembered the thing Ray McPherson claimed to have seen scooting across the road there, and cranked it up another notch. I felt foolish, but I hit my lawn at a full run.

After I landed on the porch and had the security of the porch light overhead, I started feeling a little more rational again. First, I decided, I'd ask Pop if he'd been over to Mr. Lindstrom's taking care of things, or if maybe he'd finally heard from Mr. Lindstrom's daughter and
she'd
been around. And if we didn't come up with a logical explanation, we could go over and check on the house together. Things don't seem nearly as ominous when you're with somebody else, and that's especially true when that somebody is Pop.

Our house was quiet and, except for the center hallway, dark when I stepped inside. At first I thought both Pop and Ethan were already in bed. Then I heard the creak of Pop's chair in his study. I figured he hadn't heard me come through the door or else he would have run out to greet me. Generally whenever one of us steps through the door, it's a real homecoming for Pop.

I walked over to the study to say hello, but before I got there a familiar piano melody wafted out, and then I heard Shane MacGowan's voice. I sighed. Pop was holed up, listening to the Pogues again.

I'd bought Pop that Pogues CD a few Christmases ago. Pop's tough to shop for, but one thing you could always count on was Irish music—the good stuff, though, not the kind of grandmother stuff most people think of when you mention Irish music. Bo and I had gone to Celtic Treasures in Saratoga that year and the guy had said that if Pop was really true-blue Irish, he couldn't help but love the Pogues. He grabbed the disc and offered to play it for me, but I'd had such good luck with the Liam O'Flynn CD he'd recommended for Pop's birthday I bought the thing without listening to it. Afterward, I wasn't sure if I'd done the right thing.

The best song on the CD is called “Fairytale of New York,” and when Pop heard it for the first time that Christmas, it actually brought tears to his eyes. I can't describe it exactly, but in some way it was as if he was seeing his own life in that song. It had hard drinking, a touch of sentimentality, and it most definitely had Pop's sense of humor. It had one more thing that always got to Pop: the story of a perfect love that had somehow taken a turn for the worse. The whole thing was Pop to a T. Not only that, but Shane MacGowan, the lead singer, even
sounded
just like Pop, having the same raspy, wistful voice that had always been Pop's trademark. Anyway, from that day on, whenever Pop would fall into a certain mood, he'd go into his study, plug in that Pogues CD, and play that song over and over.

The thing is, the song was so tragic and so hopeful at the same time that I could never be sure if it was pulling Pop up or dragging him down.

I waited in the hallway until after the song was over and Pop had clicked it off with the remote. Then I stepped into the doorway, but didn't say anything right away. There was an eerie stillness to the room that
made me think of a wax museum for some reason. Pop sat frozen in his rocking chair, not rocking or puffing on his pipe, or even rubbing his temples the way he sometimes did after a long day. The room was dark, but I could see his outline clearly enough, backlit from the light of the stereo.

“Hi, Pop,” I said, kind of softly, wondering if maybe he'd started to fall asleep in his chair.

The chair turned slightly in my direction. “Gabriel?” Pop said hoarsely and almost as if it were a question. “I didn't hear you come in.”

“How're you doing, Pop?” I walked into the room and sat in the chair opposite him.

“I'm not making any serious plans to check out quite yet,” Pop said, but you wouldn't have known it from the tone of his voice. He tried to laugh and couldn't even pull that off.

“How's Mr. Lindstrom?” I had kind of a sinking feeling about this. The way Pop was acting made me think the worst had happened.

“Hanging in there,” Pop said, nodding. “Hanging in there as well as can be expected.”

“That's good,” I said. “He seemed to be looking a little better when Bo and I saw him this morning. Maybe he'll be able to come home soon.”

“God willing,” Pop said, and nodded thoughtfully. “God willing.”

I waited to see if he'd say anything more. He studied me a minute before going on.

“Gabriel, there's something I should tell you. I was hoping I wouldn't have to, but now I think it's time I did.”

I felt my stomach tighten. Announcing that he had something to say just wasn't Pop's style and didn't seem like a good omen.

“She's hit him with a lawsuit,” he said. He was looking out the window, but it was too dark out there to see anything.

“A lawsuit?” I said, puzzled and relieved at the same time. “Who?” Pop wasn't always the most linear of thinkers, and I was used to having to guess which direction he was coming in from. He'd often agonize over different cases he was working on, and I thought at first maybe he meant the girl with the dead cat was suing her ex-boyfriend.

“The papers were served on him three or four weeks ago,” Pop continued, still staring out the window. “I've no doubt the whole business contributed to the stroke. He came to me right away, upset, of course . . . more upset than I'd ever seen him—angry, embarrassed, hurt, confused, all rolled into one. I got hold of her lawyer and tried to set up a meeting between her and her father, but she refused. She didn't want to have anything to do with him, except through her lawyer.” He gave kind of a helpless wave of his arms. “It's moot now,” he said, “since John couldn't sit through a meeting anyway. But it's hard going there every day and seeing the same questions in his eyes: ‘Did you hear from her?' ‘Is she coming?' And each time I have to tell him no, I can see the hurt in those eyes. I'm sure he thought that whatever their differences had been, she'd want to see him now.”

I took all this in. Of course, I knew now it was Mr. Lindstrom's daughter he was talking about—that she was suing him and wouldn't speak to him—but other than that none of it made much sense to me. “Why's she suing him?” I asked.

Pop turned and looked me in the eye. “Rachel—that's her name—is seeking punitive damages for
prolonged physical abuse, claiming, among other things, that his violence toward her over the years has damaged her chances of ever having a healthy relationship with a man.”

“Mr.
Lindstrom
abused his daughter?” I said, my jaw dropping down.

“Unfortunately, that very reaction is what makes cases of this sort so difficult. People hear the word
abuse
and automatically react with horror and indignation. It's not the kind of thing anybody wants to appear to condone, so it makes it that much harder to get a client a fair shake.”

“Do you think he did it?”

Pop gave a little shrug. “It's not just a matter of 'did it' or 'didn't do it.' John was never one to spare the rod, as they used to say. He doesn't deny that. He had two good hands and a leather strap, and he used them when he saw fit—probably generously, if I know John.”

I wondered what Pop thought of this. He'd never in his life raised a hand against either Ethan or me. He never needed to. For one thing he was so easygoing it was rare for him to get upset enough, at least with us, to even
want
to. For another thing, when he asked us to do something, and told us he really wanted us to do it, we went and did it—simple as that. Even if it meant apologizing to somebody like Mrs. Quinby, which I wouldn't have done in a million years on my own.

“Do you think he's guilty?” I said, trying my question a different way.

Pop shrugged again. “The question
is
—guilty of what? Of losing his temper? Of striking someone? Of raising his kids the way he was raised, and the way I was raised?” He ran a hand through his gray hair, which late at night tended to be even wilder than usual, giving
him a kind of Mark-Twain-Meets-Einstein look. “It's a funny time we're living through, Gabriel. I've lived for a while, maybe too long, but I've never seen a time when so many people were blaming each other for so many things. You read the papers. . . . You watch TV. It's almost all you see. Every day my young client from that cat-poisoning affair gets treated to an earful of invectives from the animal lovers who line up outside before he's escorted into the courtroom. If you could see their faces, contorted with a raw and ugly hatred. . . . And the things they shout . . . some of their suggested punishments . . . I'd be embarrassed to tell you. They have no way of knowing for certain if he's
even guilty,
and there's at least some evidence to suggest he's not. Even if he is, shouldn't he be included as one of the creatures covered by this outpouring of love they insist motivates their interest in the whole affair?” He leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. “I sometimes wonder whether, if Jesus were to reappear now, he'd dare try that ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone' business again. If he did, I suspect prudent men everywhere would duck for cover from the onslaught of the ‘pure at heart.'” He reached over for his pipe and held it, but didn't light it. “The truth is we all come into the world imperfect, and whether we like to admit it or not, we've all caused our share of harm to others, through stubbornness, or selfishness, or just plain weakness. And maybe because I've caused
more
than my share, it disturbs me to see just how unforgiving people can be. I don't know—maybe I'm afraid this is all a preview of my own Judgment Day.”