Relentless

felt fresh and buoyant, with a sense of having experienced something transcendent, though I could not put into words what it had been.
    In the light of a single lamp, the ceiling was blank, mere plaster and paint.
    When I sat up, I discovered that Milo had packed away all his gear. Not a single item littered the cottage floor.
    In the bedroom, Penny lay sleeping in one bed, Milo and Lassie in the other.
    I stood watching them sleep.
    In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here, and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.
    Everything that rises must converge. The ultimate convergence of man and maker requires the navigation of that final passage, death. At that moment, however, watching my family sleep, I was in the thrall of a quiet elation and was not thinking of death, though as it turned out, Death was thinking of me.

   In the morning light and stillness, the fog no longer mimicked smoke. Damp and chill, it barely eddied, stirring significantly only in the wake of the Mercury Mountaineer.
    The vehicle was fully loaded. Although we paid for two nights at the motor court, we left nothing behind at the cottage. I wanted to be able to flee Smokeville and its environs, and make for the open highway without delay, if suddenly flight seemed essential.
    Tom Landulf, whose first book had been published only fourteen months previously and who had died three months thereafter, had lived outside of Smokeville, along a winding state route, where houses were few, the sea beyond view, and the forest everywhere encroaching.
    On the Internet, Penny found a recent magazine story about the case and its aftermath, in which a Realtor suggested the property might not sell for years. Potential buyers were reluctant to live in a place where extremely violent murders had occurred.
    The house stood back from the road, cloaked in fog. We almost missed it. The Realtor’s sign near the mailbox caught our attention.
    I didn’t want to park in the driveway. If a car pulled behind us, we might be boxed in even though we had four-wheel drive.
    In front of the property, neither shoulder of the two-lane blacktop was wide enough to allow me to park off the pavement.
    After continuing north on a gradual downslope for about three hundred yards, past a meadow only glimpsed between white curtains of mist, then past a length of bearded forest, I came to a wide lay-by on the right. I was able to get forty feet off the pavement, where the fog would shroud the vehicle from what little traffic might pass.
    My intention was to go alone, but Penny responded as if I had proposed to strip naked and walk into a lion’s den, while leaving her and Milo staked out as sacrificial lambs.
    “I’m just going to go in there and prowl around,” I said. “I can do that best alone. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”
    “We won’t know what we’re looking for, either,” she said. “If the three of us don’t know what we’re looking for and we look for it together, we’ll find it or we won’t find it quicker than you would or wouldn’t find it on your own.”
    “That sounded like something I would say.”
    “I know. We’ve been married too long.”
    “Look, Penny, the police have already been through the place. If there were anything to find, they would have found it.”
    “Then why did we come all the way to Smokeville?”
    “To meet the locals who knew Landulf. The house is secondary.”
    “Then don’t go in, and we’ll all not go in together.”
    A back door opened, and we turned to look at Milo.
    He said, “I’m going in, and I’m going to pretend you came with me,while you can sit here and pretend I stayed with you, so then we’ll have gone in
and
not gone in together.”
    After telling Lassie to stay, he got out and closed the door.
    I said, “He sure does have the Boom family hardheadedness.”
    “You mean the Boom family determination,” Penny said.
    We got out, locked the Mountaineer, and left Lassie to guard it. If she wanted to squeeze into the glove box, that was her business.
    The fog seemed to penetrate my flesh and lick its cold tongues in my bone marrow.
    Milo zipped up his quilted jacket. On the long-sleeved black T-shirt he wore under the jacket, white letters spelled FREEDOM .
    Penny checked under her blue blazer and I reached under my corduroy sport coat to be