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made it. He’d gotten here, all the long way to Maine’sdowneast coast, so far from the island of Manhattan and, as he had already begun realizing, so utterly different from it.
    And he felt … fine. Scared, a little, and still not sure how he was getting away with such an adventurous, such a previously unthought-of, expedition. He didn’t quite trust his success yet, he guessed. But so far, so good.
    Two men slid onto stools at the counter. They were in their sixties, maybe, Harold thought from their work-bent postures, and they were similarly dressed in jeans, boots, and faded plaid shirts, with Red Sox ball caps on their heads. When they spoke, continuing a conversation that had evidently begun outside, their accents amazed Harold.
    “Pretty fah from heah.” The first man stirred sugar into his coffee.
    “Fah,” the second man agreed. “Nawt thet fah, tho.”
    They were saying that something was only somewhat far from here, Harold realized. He listened some more.
    “State prison’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from here, if you’ve got a car once you make it outside the fences.” Cah .
    “They didn’t say he’s got a car. In the newspaper.”
    Paypah . “Maybe he didn’t. Not then. He might by now, though. Have one, that is.”
    The second man drank coffee, then added, “He’s not coming here, though. I know, I know”—he put his work-worn hands up to ward off objections—“this’s where he’s from originally. Killer like that, though, he does a runner”— runnah —“he’ll hightail it to somewhere else, prob’ly. Somewhere he can blend in.”
    Somewheyah . “Prob’ly,” the first man agreed, nodding sagely. “Like New York City. Hell, I guess most anyone you’d meet out on the street might be a killer, there.”
    You’ve got that right, Harold thought wryly, gathering from what he’d just overheard that a convicted murderer had recently escaped from the state prison and was on the loose. But that had nothing to do with him, he told himself reassuringly. All he wanted was a walk in the woods, and there was certainly nothing there, he felt sure, to appeal to a prison escapee.
    He got up from his booth. The men had turned to discussing a hunter who’d gone out three days ago and hadn’t returned. Old Bentley, they called him. Bentley Hodell; had heart trouble, poor guy. Had an attack out there, maybe— mebbe —out in the woods.
    “Excuse me,” Harold cut in. “Could either of you tell me a good place for a fellow to take a hike? Like, out in the forest?”
    The men, who when they turned he saw to his surprise were not in their sixties at all, but closer to his own age, perhaps in their mid-thirties or even younger, gazed silently at him for a moment. During it, Harold saw traces of the fresh-faced boys they had been before hard work began taking its toll: bright blue eyes, open expressions, regular features.
    “Not in a park, though,” Harold added. “I want to hike in the real Maine backcountry.”
    The men looked communicatively at each other as if silently agreeing on a place to recommend. Then they told Harold about it, even borrowing the waitress’s ballpoint to draw him a rough map on a paper napkin from the bright metal dispenser on the counter.
    “Watch out for the killer,” they added, but laughingly, and Harold decided that if they weren’t worried, he wasn’t, either.
    Killah .

CHAPTER 2

    M y name is Jacobia Tiptree—Jake, to my friends—and when I first came to Eastport I thought I’d never get rid of my awful ex-husband, Victor. After our divorce, he’d followed me here for the express purpose of annoying my wits out, and then he did so: earnestly, diligently, and unceasingly, displaying in the process a sly creativity he’d previously shown only while cheating on me.
    That was a dozen years ago; now fast-forward six years, to him in a rented hospital bed in the guest room of my antique, ramshackle house on Key Street. Victor was dying, and he said he