8

He didn’t think much of people, but he loved birds. The field down below his house was full of song sparrows and at least two eastern meadowlark pairs. In the evenings, he’d sit on his porch just riding the music, listening to the males marking their territory. His favorite was the hermit thrush. You could never find him, but his call was sad and sweet, like a voice from a better world. A couple nights back, he thought he heard a bobolink.

He’d been out that morning running errands, picking up bags of seed from the Garden Center for the chickadees, nuthatches, and finches that mobbed his feeders. As he drove, he kept turning over in his mind ways to move things along with Li’l Sis. He hadn’t pushed to get her address—he’d once frightened off a perfect sweetheart who might have been his best catch ever by yanking too hard. One minute, you had them eating out of your hand, ready to do anything, and the next minute, they’d slip off the hook and disappear, and you’d never know why.

But with some patient play on the line, he’d learned that Li’l Sis was in the eighth grade and lived somewhere in Massachusetts. When the name of her horribly unfair, stupid social studies teacher slipped out—McCauley—it took him less than an hour on the Internet to discover that Li’l Sis had to be living somewhere in the Amherst-Pelham school district. It was only three hours’ drive down there, and he had a nephew in the area, Buddy, who enjoyed Playtime and would be happy to help out.

He bounced his Jeep up into the garage, pulled the brake, and popped the hatch. After the car died, there was only the sound of the birds and the wind in the trees, which was how he liked it. To the west, a grassy field, spotted with wildflowers, sloped down toward a pine copse. Two ruts ran through it, leading to a narrow dirt road through the trees and eventually to a small pier he kept on the water with a motorboat tied up. The Lake Champlain frontage had been his grandfather’s, and he’d inherited it years ago along with a little bit of money. That was when he decided that six semesters chasing a UMass degree was enough. He had everything he needed anyway. The place was completely private. No neighbors for a quarter mile on either side and so shut in by trees it was practically invisible both from the road and the water.

Apart from the money and the land, he’d inherited a love of Lake Champlain itself. The lake was vast enough that it even had its own monster, now nicknamed Champy, with legends trailing back to before the time of the white man. He’d never seen Champy, but he could feel her down there in the dark water. The middle of the lake was very deep. When something went into it, properly weighted, Champy never gave it back.

A squad of blue jays in the sugar maple alongside the garage was bombarding him with indignant squawks. Their insults made him smile. At the back of the car, he began pulling out bags of sunflower seed, cracked corn, and suet blocks. Over to the side, next to the jack, he kept his traveling kit: a small green duffel with a teddy bear sporting an i love you! T-shirt with a large red heart, some petite-size gauzy pajamas, a blindfold, a gag, two tubes of lubricant, and duct tape.