Shelby sat down on the bed in Gabriel’s house. He had broken in through a back window after he saw Gabriel leave for work. Now Shelby took out his gun from its shoulder holster. He had not owned it long and found that it had a tendency to jam. He was not used to the Glock’s squared-off barrel, but had practiced with it at a firing range until he knew he could use it. He had practiced so much that he had worn the skin off his trigger finger and had to use a synthetic substance over the blister. It was a rubber compound made for burn victims, and he dabbed it on each day so he could keep shooting. Shelby checked the magazine and then cocked the slide to put a bullet in the chamber. Then from his other pocket he took a silencer and screwed it onto the end of the Glock’s barrel. The added weight of the silencer made the balance of the gun feel strange in his hand.
He made a point of not looking through Gabriel’s drawers, or familiarizing himself with the tiny details of Gabriel’s life—the way he hung his clothes, the food in his cupboard and the titles of a stack of books piled neatly on a shelf beside his bed. The way the black-on-faded-red lines of the Hudson Bay blanket wrapped like bands around the mattress. His little alarm clock still perched on his bedside table. His spare boots still standing by the closet, heels against the wall. Shelby kept his distance from these things. It made his job easier and afterward more simple to forget.
All day, he sat in the room. He watched the shadows stretch across the wall. By six o’clock that evening, Shelby realized that Gabriel wasn’t coming home. Now things would be more messy and more complicated. Shelby slipped out the back, the same way he’d come in. As he made the dash to the forest, he noticed that the streets were filled with people. They moved in a shuffling stream toward the Woodcutter’s Lodge with its clock tower and illuminated clock face, like a full moon lodged against the meeting hall. Then he knew where Gabriel had gone. He wondered what was happening.
Shelby wiped sweat off his forehead on the sleeve of his jean jacket. Then he jogged out to the road, hands in pockets. His eyes had blackened from the fight with Gabriel, so he had dabbed base makeup on the areas to hide the purple stain on his skin. He hoped that would be enough. It was too late now to care. He spread a smile like grease-paint camouflage across his face and slipped into the walking crowd, heading for the hall. He grinned at children who laughed with excitement and slalomed around the adults. With an easy motion, he brushed a hand across the fabric of his jean jacket, feeling the pistol snug against his rib cage.
Dodge stood in the road, wearing an ankle-length, signal-orange duster jacket. He directed traffic into the gravel parking lot of the Woodcutter’s Lodge. When the headlights fanned across him, the orange jacket made him look as if he had burst into flames. The hall itself was blinding bright from lights that had been set up by the television crew.
Mary the Clock walked past Dodge into the hall. She sat down next to Paul, the caretaker of the Woodcutter’s Lodge, who sat patiently and alone on a chair in the corner. Then Madeleine came up to Dodge and kissed him and smiled. “I’ll see you afterward,” she said. A few minutes later, Gabriel entered the hall, still wearing his work clothes and carrying his lunch box under his arm. He nodded hello to Dodge, who nodded back and smiled.
A man Dodge did not recognize slipped past him. He did not see the man’s face. All Dodge saw was the short-cropped blond hair and broad shoulders beneath a blue jean jacket and a heavy knuckle-duster college ring on the ring finger of his right hand. The man stayed at the back of the hall, hands in pockets, head turned away from the fish-eyed camera lenses.
The TV crew were checking their sound system. A man with black jeans and a black T-shirt climbed onto the stage. The logo on his T-shirt said STEPHANIE’S BONES—SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO. He leaned toward the microphone attached to the podium and said “Pop, pop, pop.” The steel chairs creaked as people sat in them. Eels of black cable slithered across the floor. Talk was constant in the room, spiked with laughter that rose and fell back into the mumble of the crowd.
Shelby sat down next to Mary the Clock. “What’s going on here?” he asked her. As he spoke, he kept his eye on Gabriel.
“Mr. Mackenzie is going to give a speech,” she said. Then she wound up her clock.
“What about?” Shelby felt suddenly panicked. The old man’s buckled on me, he thought. He’s going to turn this into a confession. He got up and moved toward the side door, where he knew Mackenzie would be waiting. Just as he approached the door, Mackenzie himself walked out. “What are you doing?” asked Shelby. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m just going to check the speaker system,” replied Mackenzie. “Is everything all right?”
“No, it is not.” Shelby’s voice was low and angry. “What exactly are you going to tell these people?”
“I’m going to tell them I made a mistake.” Mackenzie’s heart was beating fast as he thought of addressing the crowd. The formality of it made him nervous. “I’m going to stop the logging.”
“You’re going to blow everything!” Shelby couldn’t help raising his voice.
“I’m going to undo what I’ve done,” said Mackenzie. “It’s all right,” he said. “You get to keep your money.”
“It’s not about money anymore,” snapped Shelby, still trying to keep his voice low. “It’s about timing, and what I’m telling you is that you left this too late.” The doors of the hall closed with a thump. Shelby turned to see Dodge taking his place in front of them.
“Will you take your seat, please?” Dodge called to him.
Shelby looked around wide-eyed for an escape route. He knew he was about to be compromised. His worst fear was coming to life. He could not allow it.
“Sit down!” Dodge called to him.
“Yes, do sit down,” Mackenzie said.
Slowly Shelby took his place. His face was blank with shock.
Alicia opened the side door and motioned to Mackenzie.
Mackenzie walked over and kissed her.
“Good luck,” she told him. “I’ll wait for you in the back room. I wish you’d let me see that speech. You know how you hate formal speaking.”
Mackenzie held it away from her and smiled. He wanted her to be as surprised as everyone else. He turned away and walked over to the podium. He cleared his throat into the microphone and the rumble of the crowd immediately fell to a murmur. The lights were in his face and he couldn’t see anyone, but he could hear the size of the crowd. Hear their breathing. Hear the soft rustle of clothing as people settled down into their chairs.
Alicia closed the door behind her. Just before it clunked shut, she looked out at Mackenzie. He seemed very alone out there by himself on the stage, squinting into the lights, which showed up the creases around his mouth and eyes. They looked like a spiderweb spun across his face. Alicia dragged a chair to the keyhole and spied through it. She thought of the dances she had seen out in that hall when the Woodcutter’s Lodge was not just Jonah’s private club—swing bands staffed by old men in glitter-encrusted jackets who played as if their lives depended on it while the windows sweated condensation. She remembered weddings and raffles and jumble sales and memorial services. These pictures charged so fast and clearly through her mind that Alicia wondered if this was how it might be to drown, her life flashing before her eyes.
Mackenzie felt the heat of the floodlights. They sealed him off from the crowd. The stage seemed so vast. Everyone had stopped talking. Now there was only the rustling of clothes and the occasional cough. There had been no opening applause. No introduction. He set his walking stick against the podium, checked that all the pages of his speech were there and in order, and then raised his head to meet the stares of the audience. He tapped at the silver-webbed ball of the microphone. “Can everyone hear me in the back?” No one answered him. “Good!” he said and laughed nervously. He stared for a second at his speech. For a moment, the words all clumped together and his mind could not pull them apart. Slowly they drifted into meaning. “Thank you for coming!” His words sealed the silence of the hall. “I know we have been living in a time of trouble lately.”
In the front row, Shelby stood up. Mary the Clock, in the next seat over, reached out to touch his arm, but Shelby pushed her hand away. Then Shelby pointed at Mackenzie, as if to single him out from a dozen others on the stage.
“Please,” Mackenzie said, and held up his hand. “If you’ll please just listen to what I have to say?” Then everything stopped making sense. His hand slapped back against his shoulder. He couldn’t understand how it happened. A jolting hum washed through him. He couldn’t hear properly. The hall was filled with noise. He could not move. Could not speak. He felt impossibly weak. He just stood there, trying to go on with his speech, but he could no longer read the words. The page was all messy. It was blotchy with something, and at first he thought these blotches were in his eyes and then he saw they were coming from his hand, which hovered over the paper, still ready to turn to the next page when he had finished reading. Almost all the words had vanished now, and the blotches spread and mingled, filling the pencil-ledge of the lectern, spilling onto his shoes and the floor. Then Mackenzie held up his hand and he could see right through it to the crowd. There was a huge hole in the middle, with red and blue veins hanging down like jungle vines across his palm and the flesh was titanium white. It was blood on his speech. He had been shot. He understood that now. His breath slopped like scalding porridge into his lungs.
He took one step backward. Nausea rushed up to meet him. He did not feel himself falling or the moment when he hit the floor, but he knew he had fallen because he was staring at the ceiling. The pages of his speech slipped through the air above him, flitting first one way and then the other and then skimming across the stage.
Everyone seemed to be screaming. Chairs tipped over. He heard the clang of metal as they hit the floor. Please, he wanted to tell them, give me time to finish my speech. He wanted to gather the fallen pages and continue reading. But slowly the knowledge was reaching him. There would be no speech. He realized now that Shelby had not just been pointing. He had been aiming a gun. Faces crowded around. I’ve been shot, he thought. So this is how it feels.
Mackenzie wanted desperately to get to his feet. Not to need help. To walk home and for everyone to stop staring all slack-jawed with horror. But he couldn’t get up. He couldn’t even remember how to get up. It seemed as if his mind had forgotten which nerves connected to his legs and his arms. His brain sent out signals but none of them went to the right places. Instead they sent back messages of pain, which scattered like embers through his body.
Then Mackenzie saw Shelby standing over him. He was still holding the gun. He’s going to finish me off, thought Mackenzie. He imagined it would be the same as in the old film footage he had seen of Frenchmen who had collaborated with the Germans being shot at the end of World War II. The firing squads let loose a volley and then an officer walked past the bodies, putting a bullet into the head of each one to make sure the job was complete. He felt strangely calm about it. Shelby set the gun against Mackenzie’s forehead, but it did not go off. Shelby swore and tried to cock the slide but it was jammed. Then he was gone, out through the little side door.
Dodge waded through the crowd, which poured past him and out into the street. He swept them aside with the motion of a swimmer. He kept moving forward until he found the crumpled-up body of Madeleine. She was lying under a chair. He picked her up, searching in panic for the wound.
She opened her eyes and her hands grasped his arms and then he knew she had only been taking cover. “Stay,” he shouted, and even with the shout, his words barely reached her over the chaos in the hall.
Dodge jumped onto the stage and saw Mackenzie. The old man was gasping in a way that reminded Dodge of a landed fish. Alicia Mackenzie crouched over him, hands pressed down on his wrists as if they were wrestling and she had won. Dodge began telling people to step aside. But they did not hear him, so he pushed them away, gently at first, but using force when they did nothing more than totter and return to their hypnotized staring.
Then a vicious, clattering bell sounded through the hall. It shocked Dodge so much that he ducked down behind the podium and was going for his gun before he realized that the sound came from an alarm clock and that he was crouching in a puddle of Mackenzie’s blood. It soaked through the fabric of his trousers at the knee.
It was Mary the Clock, and the Big Ben that rested against the ledge of her breasts was already dying as the spring wound down. She was just sitting there in the front row, hands resting on her lap, crying.
Mackenzie had heard the bell, too. He looked across at Mary’s tearstained face and thought how hard he had tried to keep secret what had happened between them. Too late, he thought, to put things right. The clock’s bell rattled to a stop.
Alicia’s face appeared over him again.
“I was going to make it all better,” Mackenzie said. “You would have been so proud of me.” Then he closed his eyes, and for the second time in his life he began to pray. He prayed to the angel who had watched him all these years, always flying just above the trees. He prayed not even with words, but with one half-formed idea that he might find his way back from this chaos that war-danced all around him, so he could have another chance to put things right.
“Please, Mrs. Mackenzie.” Dodge took hold of Alicia’s forearm, the bones so thin he felt as if he would break them if he gripped with any force. “Call an ambulance!” he shouted into the crowd. He took off his jacket, balled it up and rested it beneath Mackenzie’s head. Then he loosened the old man’s tie, took a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around the tatters of Mackenzie’s hand. Luminous white sticks of bone jutted from the skin and the delicate trenches of his handprints disappeared into the crater where the basin of his palm had been. The white cloth covered it up. Blood dyed it red. Dodge knotted the bandage, then unbuttoned Mackenzie’s shirt to see where the bullet had entered.
Alicia sat on the floor. “Get up!” she told her husband. “Jonah! Get up!” Then she held her hand to her ears, as if she could no longer stand the sound of her own voice.
Dodge pulled back the soggy red mess of cloth that had been Mackenzie’s shirt. The bullet had gone in high on the right side of the chest. He slid his hand under Mackenzie’s shoulder, feeling for the torn skin of an exit wound, but there was none.
Mackenzie breathed in shallow gasps. His skin was green, as if a layer of jade lay just beneath the flesh and glimmered through. His pupils were great black disks. “Save my speech,” he croaked at Dodge. He waved his arm toward the scattered sheets of paper. “You read it to them.”
Dodge did not understand Mackenzie’s slurred words. He kept his hand pressed against the thumbnail-sized wound. Blood had seeped across Mackenzie’s stomach and stained his white chest hair and the band of his boxer shorts. Dodge could feel the blood welding his hand to Mackenzie’s chest. He did not feel sick about this now, but had a prickling sensation along his scalp that told him he would be sick about it later and probably for a long time.
The pain had left Mackenzie now. His head was filled with the gibberish of fever dreams. For a moment, he forgot why he was lying there. Then he recalled that he had been shot. This knowledge, reappearing suddenly as if for the first time, did not frighten him. Mackenzie felt so far removed from himself that it was as if the shock of the bullet had jolted his soul half out of his body. Now Mackenzie saw himself the way people see images through a pair of broken binoculars: two identical but slightly overlapping images. Mackenzie recalled something his father had told him just before he passed away. The man had said he just wanted to sleep for a long time, as if it were not death that he approached, but dreams.
Dodge sat on the floor with Mackenzie’s gray-topped head in his lap. Looking at him, a man who had seemed at all times indestructible, Dodge was struck by how flimsily the old man’s life was anchored to his body. He marked Mackenzie’s breathing as if it were the ticking of a clock. Sweat collected on Dodge’s forehead and leaked into his eyes. He tried to move his hand to reach for a handkerchief, but his fingers had blood-bonded to Mackenzie’s wound.
The paramedic team arrived from the fire station in their wide-axle ambulance, flashing red and yellow and blue lights like giant Christmas-tree baubles racked up on its roof. A moment later, Twitch Duvall burst from the little room onto the stage, swinging the steel suitcases containing his medical equipment.
Dodge stood back while Twitch measured Mackenzie’s blood pressure. He wrapped the band around Mackenzie’s arm. The short gasps of the blood-pressure gauge were like Mackenzie’s own breaths as Twitch pumped air into the armband. He shined a penlight in the old man’s eyes, then hooked an IV into Mackenzie’s arm with a long needle that slid into his flesh as if it had no more substance than smoke. Twitch and Dodge lifted Mackenzie onto a stretcher and carried him out to the ambulance. As soon as it was gone, Dodge went back inside the hall to find Madeleine. A few people remained, sitting stunned in their chairs, as if they expected the meeting to continue. The television crew was also there. They sat in a huddle, smoking cigarettes. But Madeleine was gone. Dodge heard someone calling him. It was Linda Church.
“Is Mr. Mackenzie dead?” she called to him.
“I don’t know.” Dodge started walking out of the hall.
“Can we interview you for a moment?”
The huddle of TV crewpeople began to stir, throwing their cigarettes on the floor and stepping on them.
“Not at the moment,” Dodge said. “I’m going to be closing up the hall now. So you’ve got fifteen minutes to pack the stuff or I’ll have to leave it locked in here until after the investigation. All right?”
Linda Church breathed out sharply through her nose and dropped her hands to her side. The crew began packing up.
Outside, people moved through the streets like sleepwalkers. Their voices filled the air with muttering. Dodge looked from face to face, searching for Madeleine.
Shelby sprinted to his car and jammed the key in the ignition. Then he stopped. He turned off the ignition and felt the car shake and be still. There was still one job to finish. Gabriel. In Shelby’s mind, the man’s time had come and gone. His death and shallow grave in some nameless muddy place were overdue.