Right now I want to say something about myself and Colonel Tom. One morning toward the very end of my career in Homicide I came in for the eight to four—late, drunk, with a face made of orange sand, and carrying my liver on my hip like a flight bag. Colonel Tom got me into his office and said, Mike, you can kill yourself if that’s what you want. But don’t expect me to watch you doing it. He took me by the arm and led me to the second tier of the headquarters garage. He drove me straight to Lex General. The admissions doc looked me over and the first thing he said was, You live alone, right? And I said, No. No, I don’t live alone. I live with Deniss…After they dried me out I convalesced at the Rockwells’ residence—this was when they lived way out in Whitefield. For a week I lay in a little bedroom at the back of the ground floor. The distant traffic was music and people who weren’t people—as well as people who were—came and stood at the foot of my bed. Uncle Tom, Miriam, the family physician. And then the others. And Jennifer Rockwell, who was nineteen years old, would come and read to me in the evenings. I lay there trying to listen to her clear young voice, wondering if Jennifer was real or just another of the ghosts who occasionally stopped by, cool, self-sufficient, unreproachful figures, their faces carved and blue.

I never felt judged by her. She had her troubles too, back then. And she was the daughter of a police. She didn’t judge.

The husband, smoking his pipe, would walk the perimeter of the walled garden and consider how well the pollarding of the trees had succeeded. He would eventually circle the house to where the door leading to the back pasture would be open, and through the opening see Anna hunched over the table writing, or reading some large book, never looking up, never conscious of him a few yards from her open doorway, and he’d shake his head and drift away. The woman was from America, his wife had told him. When she stood up she was as tall as he was, lightcoloured hair to the neck. She looked strong and healthy. She had asked him in her New World French where the good places to walk were, and he had drawn a map with the best paths, routes that weaved through other properties and crossed the river. He reminded her to close all the gates. When the owner of the manoir came there, he’d always be driving off immediately— to pick up floc from an Armagnac distillery or on some other errand. But this guest was different. She had no desire to spend time in town. She was content here. She might spend half an hour talking when they came their one day a week, but then she would be back at the table, with her books. He knew she walked into the village now and then. As a postman he travelled all the time, it was in his blood. Staying in a house the whole day seemed unnatural. So when she asked him into the back room, and escorted him through the lean corridor of the house to the kitchen, where he saw the open door leading to the pasture, which was where he had stood watching her work the previous week, and where now she offered him a sheet of paper, he drew the map for her clearly and to scale—his job had taught him exact kilometre distances and property boundaries and stream beds. He drew the rectangle of the house and a quick oval for the herb bed, then re-created the world outside, ending with distant copses and deer forests, dismissing places she should avoid, those that tourists inhabited. In Anna’s terms the map was a ‘keeper,’ and she might one day frame it and hang it in her living room on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, a private core of a memory. In some part of her mind, she felt that if worse came to worst, she could always escape back here.