very much,’ said Claire.
He sighed and pressed his hand to his forehead. ‘My wife.’
Claire’s gaze softened to a look of sympathy. It was apparent she knew about his problems. Everyone in town did.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Hey, loser!’ Doreen yelled. ‘You got no right to treat me like this!’
With deliberate effort, he redirected his attention to the thigh bone. ‘How old was the victim, do you think?’
She picked up the femur and turned it over in her hands. For a moment she held it with quiet reverence, fully aware that this broken length of bone had once supported a laughing, running child. ‘Young,’ she murmured. ‘I would guess under ten years old.’ She lay it on the desk and stared down in silence.
‘We haven’t had any missing children reported recently,’ he said. ‘The area’s been settled for hundreds of years, and old bones are always turning up. A century ago, it wasn’t all that unusual to die young.’
She was frowning. ‘I don’t think this child died from natural causes,’ she said softly.
‘Why do you say that?’
She reached over to turn on his desk lamp, and held the bone close to the light. ‘There,’ she said. ‘It’s so crusted over, you can barely see it through the dirt.’
He reached in his pocket for his glasses – another reminder of the years’ passage, of his youth slipping away. Bending closer, he tried to see what she was pointing at. Only when she’d scraped away a clot of dirt with her fingernail did he see the wedge-shaped gash.
It was the mark of a hatchet.
When Warren Emerson finally regained consciousness, he found he was lying next to the woodpile and the sun was shining in his eyes. His last memory was of shade, of silvery frost on the grass and bulging pockets of soil, heaved up from the cold. He’d been splitting firewood, swinging the ax and enjoying the sharp ring it made in the crisp air. The sun had not yet cleared the pine tree in his front yard.
Now it was well above the tree, which meant he had been lying here for some time, perhaps an hour, judging by its position in the sky.
Slowly Warren sat up, his head aching as it always did afterwards. His hands and face were numb from the cold; both of his gloves had fallen off. He saw the ax lying beside him, its blade buried deep in one end of a maple log. A day’s worth of firewood, already split, lay scattered around him. It took him a painfully long time to register these observations, and to consider the significance of each in turn. The thoughts came to him with effort, as though dragged from a great distance, arriving tattered and in disarray. He was patient with himself; eventually it would all make sense.
He had come out soon after sunrise to split his wood for the day. The result of his labor now lay all around him. He had almost completed the morning chore, had just swung his ax into that last log, when the darkness came over him. He had fallen onto the woodpile; that would explain why some of the logs had rolled off the top. His underwear was soaked; he must have wet himself, as he often did during a fit. Looking down at his clothes, he saw that his jeans were saturated.
There was blood on his shirt.
He staggered to his feet and walked slowly back into the old farmhouse.
The kitchen was hot and stuffy from the woodstove; it made him feel a little dizzy, and his vision had started to fade around the edges by the time he reached the bathroom. He sat down on the chipped toilet lid, clutching his head, waiting for the clouds to lift from his brain. The cat came in and rubbed against his calf, meowing for attention. He reached down to her and drew comfort from the softness of her fur.
His face was no longer numb from the cold, and he was now aware of pain throbbing insistently in his temple. Clutching the sink for support, he rose to his feet and looked in the mirror. Just over his left ear, the gray hair was stiff and matted with blood. A streak of it had dried across his cheek, like war paint. He stared at his own reflection, at a face deeply etched by sixty-six years of hard winters and honest work and loneliness. His only companion was the cat, now meowing at his feet, not from affection but hunger. He loved the cat, and someday he would mourn her passing with tears and a solemn burial and nights of longing for the sound of her purring, but he was under no illusion that she loved him.
He removed his clothes, the frayed and bloodstained shirt, the urine-soaked jeans. He undressed with the same care he devoted to every other task in his life, leaving his clothes in a tidy heap on the toilet lid. He turned on the shower and stepped in without waiting for the water to warm up; the discomfort was only momentary, scarcely worth a shiver in the context of his cold and uncomfortable life. He washed the blood out of his hair, the laceration stinging from the soap. He must have sliced his scalp open when he fell on the woodpile. It would heal, as all his other cuts had. Warren Emerson was a walking testament to the durability of scar tissue.
The cat renewed her meowing as soon as he stepped out of the shower. It was a pitiful sound, despairing, and he could not listen to it without feeling guilty. Still naked, he walked to the kitchen, opened a can of Little Friskies chicken bits, and spooned it into Mona’s cat bowl.
She gave a soft growl of pleasure and began to eat, no longer caring whether he came or went. Except for his skill with a can opener, he was extraneous to her existence.
He went to the bedroom to dress.
Once it had been his parents’ room, and it still contained all their possessions. The spindle bed, the bureau with the brass knobs, the photographs hanging up in their tin picture frames. As he buttoned his shirt, his gaze lingered on one photo in particular, of a dark-haired girl with smiling eyes. What was Iris doing at this moment? he wondered, as he did every day of his life. Did she ever think of him? His gaze moved on to another photo. It was the last one taken of his family, his mother plump and smiling, his father ill at ease in a suit and tie. And wedged between them, with his hair slicked to one side, was little Warren.
He reached out, fingers touching the photo of his own twelve-year-old face. He could not remember that boy. Up in the attic were the toy trains and the adventure books and the brittle crayons that once belonged to the child in that photo, but that was a different Warren who’d played in this house, who had stood smiling between his parents for a Sunday photograph. Not the Warren he saw when he looked in the mirror.
Suddenly he felt a terrible longing to touch that child’s toys again.
He climbed the steps to the attic and dragged the old blanket chest under the light. With the bare bulb swinging overhead, he lifted the chest lid. Inside were treasures. He took them out one by one and set them on the dusty floor. The cookie tin with all the Matchbox cars. The Lincoln Logs. The leather pouch of marbles. At last he found what he’d been looking for: the set of checkers.
He lay out the board and set up the checkers, red on his side, black on the opposite.
Mona came padding up to the attic and sat beside him, her breath smelling of chicken. For a moment she regarded the board with feline disdain. Then she tiptoed over to it and sniffed at one of the black pieces.
‘Is that your first move then?’ said Warren. It was
