Twisted

already a very dry plate.
    “Oh, nothing. It’s just . . . I never really thoughtabout you going off to the wilderness alone before. I mean, you always think about somebody getting mugged in the city but at least there’re people around to help. And the cops’re just a few minutes away.”
    Alex hugged her. “This isn’t exactly the Outback we’re talking. It’s only a few hours north of here.”
    “I know. But I never thought to worry till Jessie said something.”
    He stepped back and shook a stern finger at her. “All right, young lady. No more TV for you either.”
    She laughed and patted his butt. “Hurry home. And clean the fish before you get back. Remember that mess last time?”
    “Yes’m.”
    “Hey, hon,” she asked, “were you really in a fight in high school?”
    He glanced toward Jessica’s room and whispered, “Those three rounds? They were more like three seconds. I pushed Pat down, he pushed me, and the principal sent us both home with notes to our parents.”
    “I didn’t think you and John Wayne had anything in common.” Her smile faded. “Safe home,” she said, her family’s traditional valediction. And kissed him once more.

    Alex turned off the highway, snapped the Pathfinder into four-wheel drive and made his way along a dirt road toward Wolf Lake, a large, deep body of water in the Adirondacks. As he progressed farther into the dense woods, Alex decided that he agreed with his daughter: The monotonous countryside neededsunlight. The March sky was gray and windy and the leafless trees were black from an early-morning rain. Fallen branches and logs filled the scruffy forest like petrified bones.
    Alex felt the familiar anxiety twisting in his stomach. Tension and stress—the banes of his life. He breathed slowly, forcing himself to think comforting thoughts of his wife and his daughter.
    Come on, boy, he told himself, I’m here to relax. That’s the whole point of it. Relax.
    He drove another half mile through the thickening woods.
    Deserted.
    The temperature wasn’t cold but the threat of rain, he supposed, had scared off the weekend fishermen. The only vehicle he’d seen for miles was a beat-up pickup truck, mud-spattered and dented. Alex drove fifty yards farther on, to the point where the road vanished, and parked.
    The airy smell of the water drew him forward, his tackle box and spinning rod in one hand, his lunch and thermos in the other. Through the white pine and juniper and hemlock, over small, moss-covered hummocks. He passed a tree with seven huge black crows sitting in it. They seemed to watch him as he walked beneath their skeletal perch. Then he broke from the trees and climbed down a rocky incline to the lake.
    Standing on the shore of a narrow cove, Alex looked over the water. Easily a mile wide, the lake was an iridescent gray, choppy toward the middle but smoothing to a linenlike texture closer to shore. The bleakness didn’t make him feel particularly sadbut it didn’t help his uneasiness either. He closed his eyes and breathed in the clean air. Rather than calming him, though, he felt a surge race through him—a fear of some sort, raw, electric—and he spun about, certain that he was being watched. He couldn’t see a soul but he wasn’t convinced that he was alone; the woods were too dense, too entangled. Someone could easily have been spying on him from a thousand different nooks.
    Re-lax, he told himself, stretching the word out. The city’s behind you, the problems of work, the tensions, the stress. Forget them. You’re here to calm down.
    For an hour he fished with a vengeance, casting spoons, then jigs. He switched to a surface popper and had a couple of jumps but the fish never took the hook. Once, just after he launched the green, froglike lure through the air, he heard the snap of a branch behind him. A painful chill shot down his back. He turned quickly and studied the forest. No one.
    Selecting a different lure, Alex glanced down at his perfectly ordered and cleaned toolbox he used for tackle. He saw his spotless, honed fishing knife. He had a fleeting memory of his father, years ago, pulling off his belt and wrapping the end around his fist, telling young Alex to pull down his jeans and bend over. “You left that screwdriver outside, boy. How many times I gotta tell you to treat your tools with respect? Oil the ones that rust, dry the ones that warp, and keep your knives sharp as razors. Now, I’m giving you five for