breath and chokes on it, coughs for a few moments. Then, “I’ll give you five seconds to remove yourself from my office. Five seconds.”
It amuses him that she feels in the position to offer an ultimatum. He raises his left hand, spreads his fingers and counts down for her, bending his little finger first. “Of course you’re curious. A smart woman like yourself, the healer of the community.” Then his ring finger. “… who learns that the man she’s been married to for sixteen years raped a girl.” The middle finger. “… and got away with it.” The index finger. “… and hasn’t paid for his sin at all.” Now the thumb curls over the rest, making a fist. “Five seconds,” he says. “That’s all it took to tell the story of your husband’s life. Sometimes there’s only one fact you need to know about a person, isn’t that true? Now you know that one fact about your husband.” She looks at him, then away, as if he’s some scary dog—a German shepherd or Doberman pinscher—that gets aggressive when challenged eye to eye. He never realized he had it in himself to appear so frightening.
“Deep down you know your husband is one of those ordinary men quite capable of rape. He wouldn’t drag anyone off the sidewalk into the bushes, nothing crude like that, but he did lure a girl onto the dock by the Bayswater Inn, and he raped her. Raped her,” Paul says in a louder voice. “Raped her!” he shouts, then tilts his ear to the ceiling. “You’d think somebody would come running, like you said. How long will it take? I could yell even louder. Or maybe you want to try?” She scans the room, looking for a possible exit. The window, not a viable option, closed tight against the July heat. How would she get there, shove it up, and jump through without his calmly walking behind her and hauling her back inside, his hands wrapped around her waist? Besides, consider how hard the fall would be, ten feet down into the asphalt parking lot, a tangle of limbs twisted in unnatural directions. No, she has to stay and listen. “Then he couldn’t even let her alone afterward. Your husband called the girl and told her she better keep quiet because he’d spread it all over town that she had sex with him, and that would ruin her reputation more than his.”
“I don’t believe you.” Still a calm voice. An admirable coolness considering the situation she now finds herself in.
“There’s what you believe,” Paul says, “and what really happened. You can always take your pick.” He removes his hand from the phone.
She grabs the receiver and punches in the numbers 911.
That’s okay, he’s said enough. He’ll go gently now. He has another appointment to keep anyway.
The postcard said: “What lies do you tell yourself about yourself? Come to the dock below the Bayswater Inn at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, alone. Faithfully yours …” It was leaning against the phone on his desk when he came back from lunch Monday morning. On the front was a giant moose and the caption IT’S BIGGER IN MAINE. On the message side there wasn’t any stamp, meaning it had been hand-delivered by the sender himself, or maybe by some kid paid a few bucks to do it.
He would not tell Amy. This time he’d go alone.
It was an uncommonly clear day on Red Paint Bay, the kind of late afternoon where you could see across the choppy stretch of water to the cabins on the opposite shore. It looked closer than a half-mile, so close that he had tried to swim to it the night after graduation. He came down to the dock at midnight, stripped to his boxers, and jumped in. A few hundred yards out he stopped to tread water for a moment and realized that for all his effort, the lights on the other side didn’t appear any nearer. He flipped over and did the backstroke to shore, staring up into the endless sky above him.
He wasn’t sure this was a good idea. In fact, he figured it was probably a bad idea to come alone to the dock below the inn to meet the person sending him anonymous postcards, one of them calling him Rapist! He had been able in the beginning to make himself believe that the messages were meant for someone else or related to hiring David Rigero. But the obituary, the questions at