The smart thing would have been to get back in his car then and there and return to Vermont. He'd signed the morgue's paperwork on the way out. The police and other authorities would be satisfied with his service and would know where to find him in any case. He could even make arrangements for Mary's disposal long-distance, perhaps shipping her to her mother as a small poetic gesture.

But he knew he wouldn't be doing any of that. He'd known it on the drive down. Mary's death had made clear the need to settle issues he'd tried to abandon by escaping New York, but which had continued to cripple him as surely as any rifle bullet.

The real question, therefore, wasn't whether he would stay in the city to discover what had pushed Mary to virtual suicide. It was whether the small glimmerings of hopefulness he'd recently been acquiring in Vermont would be strong enough to fight the undertow he could already feel tugging at his ankles.

He shivered and pulled his light coat tighter around his neck. The twilight season between winter and summer was hard to call spring in a world of concrete and steel. The days were pleasantly warm, but the nights still held a snow-sharpened edge. Burying his hands in his pockets, he set off toward the Lower East Side, some thirty blocks to the south.

The decision to walk had immediate benefits. It put him in motion, it let him blow off steam, and it took him outside of his own head, a place he knew wasn't the healthiest of environments. In a telling paradox, however, walking these streets helped resurrect memories he'd been struggling to suppress since hitting the city limits.

He'd grown up in New York, near the George Washington Bridge at the north end of Manhattan. He knew these urban sounds and moods in particular, and was familiar with the almost organic energy that seeped from the city's pavements like a steady pulse, twenty-four hours a day. Alone in the middle of a darkened street, you knew you were amid a huge number of people. You could almost hear their collective breathing.