Spencerville

cleanliness and orderliness. He opened the refrigerator and saw that it was nearly empty, which was probably not the way it usually was. Clearly, the Baxters were gone and were not coming back for some time.
    He opened the basement door and went down the stairs. He found the den and turned on the lights. A few dozen animal heads were mounted on the walls, and he noted the gun rack that could hold twelve rifles or shotguns. It was completely empty.
    He went upstairs again and glanced into the dining room and living room, again noting how clean and tidy everything was. He opened the coat closet in the foyer and saw that there was only one man’s civilian trench coat and one police uniform topcoat and two ladies’ overcoats. All the casual and cold weather outerwear was missing.
    Keith went upstairs and glanced into a boy’s bedroom and a girl’s bedroom, then into a room that was a home office. He went into the office and rummaged around, pulled some Rolodex cards, then left. He found the master bedroom and opened the two closets. Again, only dress clothes hung on the poles, and whatever casual and outdoor clothes and footwear there may have been were gone. In Cliff Baxter’s closet were four neat police uniforms—two summer and two winter, along with the accessory shoes, hats, and belts. The bureau drawers were pulled open, and most of the underwear was gone. Keith had a pretty good idea where they had gone, and by the looks of what they’d taken, Baxter intended to be away a long time, perhaps forever. Most important—if her missing clothes were a true indication, it appeared that Annie was alive and that he intended to keep her alive.
    Keith went into the master bathroom and saw that the medicine cabinet was open. There was a bloody towel on the sink, blood in the washbasin, and on the counter were a box of gauze, a bandage roll, and a bottle of iodine. On the floor was Baxter’s tan uniform, the trousers stained with dried blood.
    An inch or so to the left or right, Keith thought, maybe a half inch deeper, and he’d have severed the femoral. Better yet, if he’d reached Toledo Airport an hour earlier, they’d be in Washington now. And if he hadn’t gone with Adair to Washington on Thursday, he and Annie would be in Rome by now. And so on and so forth. It didn’t do any good to dwell on the bad timing; the important thing was that he and Annie were alive and fate had given them one more chance to be together.
    He picked up Baxter’s bloody trousers from the floor and went back into the master bedroom. Like most of the house, it had sort of a country look—oak furniture, hooked rugs, chintz curtains, and dried flowers. It struck him that Annie, despite her bad marriage, or perhaps because of it, had taken a great deal of time and trouble with the house, the small details, the touches of hominess and warmth. He supposed she did it out of pride, or out of a need to present a normal setting for her children or her friends and family, but also out of a longing for a life and a marriage that in some small way reflected the surroundings she’d created of home and hearth, peace and caring. Keith, for some reason, found it all very sad and troubling.
    There was no great need to be here, he knew, and the risk probably outweighed whatever information he could gather. But he knew he had to come here, to be a voyeur and peek into the lives of Cliff and Annie Baxter, two people who, more than any others, had so profoundly changed and influenced his life.
    Cliff Baxter, who as a schoolmate had never been invited into the Landry home, had very recently broken into it and, in some way, Keith reflected, that violation was more flagrant than Baxter’s burning of the house, or even what had happened in the motel room. Keith had no intention of burning the Baxter house down, because it was filled with Annie’s things and her children’s things. But he felt that he had to leave behind some evidence of his presence, some mark of contempt—though not, he thought, for Cliff Baxter to see, because Keith had decided that Baxter would never see this house again. But he wanted to do something for himself, and for the record.
     
    *  *  *
     
    Keith examined his handiwork in the living room. Sitting in the wing-back chair was Baxter’s bloody uniform, stuffed with towels and linens, and protruding from the neck of the uniform shirt was the stuffed head of a wolf.
    Keith told himself he wasn’t crazy, that the blow to