did the same. Perkins bowed back, and his sister gave a tiny curtsy.
And then, with a push, they were out the door and standing on the front porch. The sun was sinking lower in the sky, and the town’s quiet little main street was bathed in its golden light. It was like stepping from a bad dream into a painting. There was still a sense of unreality in the bucolic beauty of the setting, but the foreboding that had enveloped Lee melted the moment they set foot outside the house.
Lee looked at Butts, who was sweating—but then, Butts often sweated.
“Did you—?” he began.
“Yeah—what was that?” Butts said, loosening his tie. “I don’t know,” Lee replied. “Something about those two—” “And that house! No wonder Santiago thought Perkins was creepy.”
Lee turned to glance behind them as they clattered noisily across the wooden porch. The lace curtains on the door fluttered, as though someone had been peering through them. Next to the door, he noticed something he had failed to see before. It was a statue of a Green Man, an ancient Celtic symbol of fertility that Lee had always found rather sinister. The image took many forms, but certain elements were always present—it was always the face of a laughing man, with vines and plants growing out of his mouth.
Green men had always struck him as grotesque and nightmarish, and this one was no exception. The eyes stared wildly over the lecherous grinning mouth, and the suppurating vines were reminiscent of the writhing snakes that sprouted from the head of the Medusa. It reminded Lee of a Green Man he had seen in Rosslyn Chapel, the famed church in the tiny village of Rosslyn, just outside Edinburgh.
“Whatchya lookin’ at?” Butts asked. “It’s a Green Man.”
“Yeah? What’s that?” As they walked to the car, Lee explained the significance of the Green Man as a Celtic fertility symbol.
“You notice anything else weird about his place?” Butts said as they climbed into the Saturn.
“What?”
“There were no light switches on the walls.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I saw some—what do you call ‘em?—sconces, but no switches. And that oil lamp I saw—I think they don’t have any electricity there.”
“You think?”
“Yep. I’m tellin’ you, there’s something weird about those two.”
But as they drove up the tiny main street, Lee was struck by how normal and familiar his boyhood town looked, and how little it had changed. There were the same rambling clapboard houses with their leafy lawns and porch swings and hanging baskets of pink begonias swinging gently from the white wicker trellises. In the gentle afternoon sun of late August, the town resembled a Norman Rockwell painting. He half-expected to see a rosy-cheeked family through white lace curtains, sitting down to a meal of turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes, their faithful little black-and-white terrier sitting patiently at their feet.
He and Butts didn’t speak as Lee drove the Saturn up the long hill leading out of the valley toward Route 202. They stayed silent as he passed the little churchyard and turned onto the long hilly road leading past Washington’s Headquarters Road and Three Bridges. As he drove down roads he had driven a hundred times before, Lee forgot about the Perkins siblings and began to think about this river valley, steeped in Revolutionary War history. As a boy, he had thrilled to the stories of the patriots battling the British troops. It was hard to imagine this softly rolling countryside in the dead of winter. Even though he had seen it every year of his life, Lee always found it hard to remember these green and inviting hillsides in the stark, stony whiteness of late December. He thought of the cold, hard winter the soldiers endured before the heroic attack on Trenton, just a few miles up river.
The Matthew Arnold painting of that triumphal moment never lost its power to move him. It was not so much the heroism of Washington he admired, but the sheer raw courage of the men, cold and hungry and half-starved, trekking wearily across the winter landscape and across the half-frozen river in rickety wooden boats, moving horses and cannons to the other side in the dead of night. Not for the first time, he wondered, if faced with that kind of hardship, whether he would have stood the test.
Butts broke the silence.
“Where we goin’ now?”
“To Flemington. It’s on the way back.”
Their last stop would be the most difficult—a visit to Ana’s house. The crime-scene technicians already been called out to process the