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low, wet edges of the woods and ignited the blazes that would, in two or three weeks, engulf the hardwood ridges around Prosperity with the beautiful flames of autumn.
    It was mid-September and the first color was beginning to creep in. It appeared suddenly along the roadways as if sprayed by some graffiti artist during the night. Each day, the colors would spread, so gorgeous that I would stop the car and get out and just stare, trying to absorb this thing that was wondrous but passed as quickly as a sunset.
    It was Saturday, mid-morning, and I had stopped on the Albion Road, on my way back from the Albion General Store, where I had picked up a coffee and a Boston Globe. I sat by the side of Route 137, at a spot where flickers of red were showing in a line of swamp maples that grew along the margin of a bog. Four-wheel-drive pickups rumbled by, their big rippled tires whirring on the pavement. I picked up the Globe and read a page-one story about a teenage girl who, sureenough, had been shot and killed in Roxbury. A very pretty girl, she smiled sweetly in the photo in the paper. She had been caught in the crossfire of a gunfight between two feuding gangs.
    Somebody ought to take these gang kids out and teach them how to shoot straight.
    That was life for kids in Boston, three hours and several light-years away from Albion, Prosperity, and Belfast, Maine. On the streets of Roxbury and Dorchester, kids ran the risk of dying from a stray bullet. But what were the risks here? I wasn’t sure. Maybe driving drunk on twisting country roads. Latching on to the wrong guy or girl and a life of domestic hell. Or the welfare rut. Or the habit of petty crime that saw whole lives spent moving from county jail to state prison to county jail. Or even more subtle than that, maybe it was just the risk of growing old too fast, and living a life full of regret.
    Maybe.
    I didn’t really know, when it came down to it, and the plan for the day was to see if I could at least begin to find out.
    But how?
    There was a funny thing about small-town reporting. It was hard.
    In the city, you had hundreds and thousands of people to pick from. They stood in bunches on street corners, in subway lines, gathered by the fountains in shopping malls. City people were accustomed to strangers, so they didn’t spook easily. They might tell you to drop dead, or some raunchier equivalent, but at least that was the beginning of a dialogue.
    In the closed world of small-town Maine, a stranger was an event, an aberration from the routine, something inherently suspect. A stranger asking questions was more suspicious still.
    And there was the logistical problem. Where were these kids I needed to get to know? Behind which trailer door? In which house, set back at the end of a long driveway carved out of the woods? And when I knocked, who would answer? Daddy? Gramma? Some guy with a handgun on his hip?
    Well, Jack, I said, starting the truck and heading back toward Prosperity, that’s why they pay you the big money.
    My first stop was home. Bumping down the road, I waved to the girls who were living in the cabin near the corner, where the road turned from pavement to gravel. The girls were from New York and Massachusetts and went to Unity College, five miles away in the town of Unity. They were athletic and wholesome and their cars, a Jeep and a Subaru station wagon, had racks for skis and mountain bikes and kayaks and sailboards. The college girls were nice kids but they kept somewhat to themselves, as if Maine were one giant national park and their neighbors were just the people at the next campsite: strangers who would be gone in the morning.
    When I went by the Varneys’, Clair was on his tractor, an old but immaculate John Deere. He was tilling under a section of his vegetable garden and he waved and I waved but I didn’t stop to talk. For the first time in many months, I had built up some momentum and I didn’t want to lose it.
    I grabbed a