Archangel Read Online Free PDF

even when it worked against him. He wanted to protect her, even when he had to protect himself against the things that she had done. Mackenzie wished she could have come to work at the mill instead of making things difficult for him every chance she got. When she was a teenager, she had stood in single protest outside his logging company gates, with a sign condemning his first clear-cut operation. The sign was made of plywood, with STOP CLEAR-CUTTING in fuzzy-edged, black spray-painted capital letters. The sign was too heavy for her to hold up for more than a few minutes at a time. She leaned against the fence, coughing in the dust that logging trucks kicked up as they rumbled into the mill. Mackenzie once sent out some lunch to her on a tray, but she refused it, just as he would have done if he had been in her shoes.
    Despite her hostility toward him, Mackenzie could not help his affection for her. Mackenzie had no children, and Madeleine was the age his own child would have been if things had gone differently.
    The Volkswagen passed by, its engine puttering with the same persistent energy that Madeleine herself seemed to possess.
    Mackenzie thought about the other newspapers that would be calling soon—
The Skowhegan Times
and
The Down East Gazette
, based over in Greenville. He thought of them smacking their lips at the scandal. The Forestry Safety Commission would demand a report, too. They would send investigators to check every machine in his mill, every chain saw, every truck. The Pfeiffer family would have to be taken care of. There would be a burial. A memorial service organized. He would shake hands and make a speech and politely refuse the Spam-and-mayonnaise sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Even if the news of the unsafe chain saw never leaked out, Mackenzie knew he would still be blamed by the family. He would be blamed because there always had to be someone to blame. Mackenzie thought of time moving ahead without mercy for James Pfeiffer,already chipping away at the memory that remained of him in other people’s minds.
    “If we can just make it through these months ahead,” Mackenzie said, as much to himself as to the silent man who rode with him, “we’ll be all right. Better than all right.” At that moment, he caught sight again of his reflection in the car’s window. He shuddered. Suddenly he remembered why it bothered him so much. The warped image reminded him of the night he cut off his leg. He had stared at his pain-twisted face in the moonlit frozen puddles on the road as he waited to die or be saved.

CHAPTER 2
    L ong after dark, Mackenzie sat in his office. Floodlights illuminated the lumberyard. They gave a shine like snow to the corrugated iron rooftops. Grit left over from the winter still pebbled the roads. With one more season, the old Victorian houses on Main Street had sunk deeper into the ground. Their roofs were bowed like the backs of beaten horses and the porches tipped forward, as if they meant to dump their cargo of paint-chipped Adirondack chairs onto the front lawns.
    Mackenzie laid his hands on the lime-green blotter on his desk and felt the paper drink sweat from his palms. Dodge would follow through with the investigation. No sense praying that he wouldn’t. I have to find a way out, thought Mackenzie. Make it look like someone else’s fault.
    He picked up the phone and called Coltrane. Told him to come back to the mill. Then he went down to the storeroom, where spare chain-saw blades and hammers and boxes of nails were piled so highthat he could not see the walls. He felt uneasy in the quiet. For Mackenzie, the mill was a place of noise and motion always bordering on chaos. It haunted him to be here when the place was closed. When he returned to his desk, carrying the thing he needed from the storeroom, Coltrane had already arrived. Mackenzie stashed it in his desk drawer and waved Coltrane into his office.
    Coltrane stood in front of him, arms folded, long back arched