2

The sleet that had made the city a skating rink turned to heavy snow when the train left Valhalla. By the time we pulled into Kamensic, I could see cars sliding across the southbound lane of the Saw Mill, and the beacons of emergency vehicles flashing like Christmas lights in the distance.

My father was waiting for me at the station. I’d called him before I left the city; he’s an early riser, up before dawn even at the darkest time of year.

“Hello, Cass.” He dipped his head to graze my cheek in a kiss, zipped his old L.L.Bean parka, then headed toward the parking lot.

“You didn’t have to pick me up. I told you I could walk.”

“Did you see it’s snowing?” he asked, and we drove home.

Since the late 1960s my father has been the Kamensic Village magistrate, holding court on alternate Tuesdays and otherwise tending to a few old legal clients from his basement office in the house where I grew up.

The town had turned into a junk-bond trader’s Disneyland since then. Most of the old colonial houses were now trophy second homes, or teardowns turned McMansions, empty save for the shriek of alarm systems set off by barking dogs, and a seasonal army of workers bused in from Stamford, wiry Latino men wielding lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and, this morning, snowblowers. Martha Stewart owned a $20-million cottage outside town, where she’d spent the last few years trademarking the name Kamensic for a line of outdoor furniture that cost as much as a semester at a Baby Ivy.

I hated going back, though I was cheered to see the storm had knocked a giant oak onto the most recent addition to a neighbor’s house.

“Their alarm was going all night,” my father said as we pulled into the drive. “I tried calling the owners in the city, but they won’t pick up their phone.”

“They’re getting a lot of snow inside their new addition.”

My father smiled. He’s the only person in Kamensic who still mows his own lawn.

We ate breakfast, then read The New York Times. We didn’t talk all that much, but I was used to that. My mother died in a car crash when I was four, an accident that left her impaled on the steering wheel and me rigid and staring, wide-eyed, when the police found the wreckage. Since then, my father’s basic rule of thumb has always been that as long as I didn’t get hauled in front of his court, he wouldn’t ask too many questions.

“How was Maine?” he asked.

“Cold.”

“Did you stop in Freeport?”

“No.”

He stood and gathered a pile of papers from the sideboard. “I have a few things to take care of downstairs.”

He started for the door to the basement, stopped, and turned. “Oh, Cass—this came for you.” He pulled an envelope from the sheaf of papers and handed it to me. “You’re not in default on your student loan, are you?”

This was a joke. I’d dropped out of NYU in my freshman year, which was about the last time I’d received any mail at this address. I looked at the envelope, puzzled. “When did it come?”

“Last week.”

He went downstairs. I walked into the living room, eerily blue-lit from the snow whirling outside, sat, and stared at the envelope. Thin, airmail-weight paper, with my name and address written in black cursive ballpoint ink. Painstaking, almost childish handwriting, like someone trying to make a good impression. I felt the tiniest frisson, somewhere between dread and exultation.

I knew that writing—or had known it, once.

But the memory was gone now. The oversize stamp showed a snow-covered expanse with bands of green and violet rippling above it.

ISLAND 120.

No return address. Who the hell did I know in Iceland? I squinted, trying to read the postmark.

REYKJAVÍK.

The fragile paper tore when I opened it. Inside was a newspaper clipping in Icelandic. It featured a grainy black-and-white image of a fir-tipped islet with a caption beneath: PASWEGAS, MAINE, USA. I scanned the column until I recognized my name—CASSANDRA NEARY.

So I had a fan in Iceland; someone who read Stern, maybe. I frowned and examined the envelope again.

There was something else inside. I removed it carefully.

It was a photo of a naked teenage boy, sprawled on an unmade bed. Grainy black and white, 4 × 6, the edges curled and faintly browned with age. He was wiry, his chest nearly hairless, half-erect cock shadowed in his crotch. His hair fell to his shoulders and framed an androgynous face: white skin, curved ridge of cheekbone, small chin, full lips, and slightly prominent teeth.

But it was those bruised eyes that killed me, eyes so deep set they seemed lined with kohl. He had his hands locked behind his head and gazed at the viewfinder dead-on. Not a come-hither stare but a wary, challenging look, as though he were debating whether to lunge across the bed and smash the camera or pull the photographer down beside him on the gray sheets.

I knew how that particular argument ended. I knew how they all ended, because I’d been the one behind the camera.

“Fucking hell,” I whispered. “Quinn.”

Thirty years ago I’d stood beside that bed, in a room less than a mile from where I sat now. I’d shot roll after roll of Tri-X film, always pictures of Quinn O’Boyle, sometimes clothed but mostly naked; before we fucked, afterward, during. Quinn hunched over his old Royal upright typewriter, or nodding out, or poring over his dog-eared paperback of The Return of the King. Walking toward the Kamensic train station, slumped in a booth at the Parkway Diner. Quinn and me standing side by side, a flare where my camera’s flash ignited the mirror that held our reflection. I’d ridden my bike to Mount Kisco to have the film processed at a grimy store whose proprietor specialized in “art photos,” an old man who chain-smoked Larks and smelled like Sen-Sen. He only raised an eyebrow once, when he handed me back my contact sheets and said, “Aren’t you kinda young for this?”

I turned the picture again and stared at the boy on the bed. I’d shot scores of photos. Hundreds, maybe. I’d stashed them in a wooden Chivas Regal box, but I hadn’t seen it, or any of the photos, in almost three decades. I’d ransacked my room, the house, the basement. I never found them.

And Quinn—he’d also disappeared. The two of us had broken into a local drugstore one night when we were eighteen. We weren’t caught. My little stash of Quaaludes saw me through my first year in the city, but by then Quinn had taken off upstate with a woman he met in Harlem one night. I was sick with desire for him, sick with rage, and terrified that I’d never shoot another photo worth looking at. I channeled it all into speed and the photos that eventually became Dead Girls. Around the time the book came out, I heard that Quinn had gotten popped for breaking into another drugstore up in Putnam County. He wrote to me from his parents’ house, where he awaited sentencing, desperate pleading letters, handwritten or typed on lined paper torn from a composition book. Sometimes he sent fragments of a story he was working on. Once he sent a Quaalude, crushed in transit to a smear of pink powder.

I never wrote back. When he left me, I felt as though someone had jabbed my eyes with a needle. Nothing looked the same after that. I’d honed my sense of damage on him, the bitter pheromone I’d inhale as I watched him hold a spoonful of brown powder over a gas flame till it melted into the chamber of a syringe. For years after he was gone, I still carried that acrid taste in my mouth and the afterimage of his eyes, the pupils swallowed by junk.

I had assumed he was dead. His family had moved to the Midwest. I never tried to track him down.

What the hell was he doing in Iceland?

“Who’s your letter from?”

I started as my father came into the room behind me. “No one. Just a newspaper article.” I slipped the photo back into the envelope and pocketed it, tossed the news clipping into the wastebasket. “Has anything else come here for me?”

“Not a thing. I need to head over to the town office for a few hours. Are you staying for dinner?”

I stared out to where trees and stone walls dissolved into a formless blur. “No. I have to get back. Can I catch a ride with you to the station?”

While he got ready I went upstairs to my old room. Nothing there remained of me, no posters or books, no clothing or record albums; just my old bed, now sanitized with a white chenille spread and white pillows. I took out Quinn’s photo, stood by the window, and stared at it. I felt a shiver of apprehension, a dark flash at the corner of my eyes, the lingering odor of scorched metal and blood.