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that Eagles could not defend himself, and then he did what he did, that horrifying stuff with the face.”
    Although Ian Rose doesn’t tell me at first, I know that he had not lived with his son, Cleve, since he had separated from the boy’s mother many years before. And now that they were finally alone, their spaces were clearly delineated in their mountain home, an old, large house with two floors and an attic, where they had established an independence from each other as if they lived in an apartment building: the two floors for the father; the attic, sacred space for the son. The truth was they didn’t spend much time together and hardly spoke to each other; they had just begun to get to know each other more in depth, and it still wasn’t easy for them to communicate. Not that it much bothered either of them. Living together had been easier than they’d imagined. They shared their fondness for the woods and isolation, but Ian was pragmatic and grounded, while Cleve had a bit of the artist from his mother. So they had little in common except for one fundamental trait Cleve had clearly inherited from his father: both were dog lovers. The three dogs, Otto, Dix, and Skunko, were the central figures in the house. The humans came and went, and big parts of their lives transpired outside the house, so they were no more than transitional elements there. On the other hand, the dogs were always there, filling the place with their antics, running back and forth, and when they lay by the fire, they seemed to be there just to protect the humans. So much warmth and affection came from those dogs that knew everything about the house and protected it with their sharp sense of smell and their barking. Of course, great balls of dog hair had to be swept out of the house, the furniture smelled like dogs, the upholstery was frayed from their teeth, and the yard was crisscrossed with tunnels dug by the animals. In return, the dogs made the property practically impenetrable; with that trio on guard like Cerberus night and day it wasn’t easy for anyone to trespass. In a word, the dogs were the house, and for Cleve and his father, coming home meant reintegrating into the pack.
    Ian Rose couldn’t help but regard his son with a contained admiration that came from the realization that the boy, his only son, was turning into an outstanding man. As for Cleve, when he felt suffocated by the paternal presence, he escaped to New York City, less than three hours away by motorcycle, and stayed in the studio he rented in the East Village near St. Mark’s Place, returning to the mountain house only when he started to miss the bustle of the dogs and the silence of the woods, and the company of that father he was just getting to know. So they adapted to each other’s company without much ado and largely in silence, confident that their communication would improve in time.
    Consequently, they had exchanged few words that night, which had turned surreal by the savagery of the afternoon. Father, son, and dogs gathered in a tight semicircle in front of the blazing fireplace, while at their backs, the windows that faced the woods imposed a blackness that seemed absolute.
    “Perhaps we should put up curtains,” Rose the father said, measuring his words so as not to admit to his son the feeling that what had happened would somehow rupture the equilibrium, damaging the previous order.
    He didn’t know how to express it in words; it was just a premonition. He had not been a friend of Mr. Eagles; his relationship with the deceased had been limited to greeting him when he delivered the cartons of dog food, paying him, and chatting about a few trivial matters and nothing else. Nevertheless, he felt that the murder had torn the delicate fabric of a natural law that for years had remained intact in the mountain.
    “Or put lights out in the garden,” Cleve said, tired after several hours of questioning by the police and investigators now swarming the