The Ax Read Free

winding black line that moves westward out of the town, away from the riverside. I can come to it, according to the map, from the north, on a back road called William Way, thus avoiding the town itself.
    The houses in the hills northwest of Fall City are mostly large and subdued, light with dark shutters, very New England, on large parcels of well-treed land. Four-acre zoning is my guess. I wind slowly along the narrow road, seeing the affluent houses, none of the affluent people or their affluent children visible at the moment, but their signs are everywhere. Basketball hoops. Two or three cars in wide driveways. Swimming pools, not yet uncovered for the summer. Gazebos, woods walks, lovingly reconstructed stone walls. Extensive gardens. Here and there a tennis court.
    I wonder, as I drive along, how many of these people are going through what I’m going through these days. I wonder how many of them now realize just how thin the ground really is, beneath those close-cropped lawns. Miss a payday, and you’ll feel that flutter of panic. Miss every payday, and see how
that
feels.
    I realize I’m concentrating on all this, these houses, these signs of security and contentment, not only to distract myself from what I’m planning, but to make me firm in my intention. I’m
supposed
to have this life, just as much as any of these damn people on this damn winding road, with their names on their designer mailboxes and rustic wooden signs.
    The Windhull’s.
    Cabett.
    Marsdon.
    The Elyot Family.
    William Way does T at Churchwarden Lane, as the map shows. I turn left. The mailboxes are all on the left side of the road, and the first one I see is numbered 1117. The next three have names instead of numbers, and then there’s 1112, so I know I’m moving in the right direction.
    I’m also coming closer to the town. The road is mostly downhill now, the houses becoming less grand, the indicators now more middle class than upper middle. More appropriate for Herbert and me, after all. What neither of us wants to lose, because it’s all we’ve got.
    The nine hundreds, and at last the eight hundreds, and there’s 835, identified only by number, HCE apparently being the modest sort, who doesn’t flaunt his name at the brim of his property. The mailboxes are still all on the left, but Everly’s house is surely that one on the right, with an arbor vitae hedge along the verge of the road, a blacktop driveway, a neat lawn with two graceful trees on it, and a modest white clapboard house surrounded by low evergreen plantings and set well back; probably late-nineteenth century, with the attached two-car garage and the enclosed wraparound porch added later.
    A red Jeep is behind me. I continue on, not too fast, not too slow, and about a quarter mile farther down the road I see the mailman coming up. Mail woman, actually, in a small white station wagon plastered with US MAIL decals. She sits in the middle of the front seat, so she can steer and drive with left hand and foot, and still lean over to reach out the right side window to the mailboxes along her route.
    These days, I am almost always home when the mail is delivered, because these days I have a more than casual interest in the possibility of good news. Had there been good news in my mailbox last month or last week or even yesterday, I wouldn’t be here now, on Church-warden Lane, in pursuit of Herbert Coleman Everly.
    Isn’t he likely to be at home as well, watching out the front window, waiting for the mail? Not good news today, I’m afraid. Bad news today.
    The reason I’ve given this full overnight trip to the Everly project is because I had no idea how long it would take me to find and identify him, what opportunities I might have to get at him, how much time would be spent tracking him, waiting for him, pursuing him, before the chance of action would present itself. But now, it seems to me, the likelihood is very good that I’ll be able to deal with Everly almost at