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parents’ bedroom, where there was a mirror, smoothing this imperfection.
    Tucked in the lower right-hand corner of the mirror frame was an old photo of my father wearing this same uniform and a grim expression. This was the real Claude Truman. The Chief. Fists balled on his hips, barrel torso, flattop haircut, smile like a grimace. ‘A man and a half,’ that was how he used to describe himself. The snapshot must have been taken in the early eighties, around the time my mother banned alcohol from the house once and for all. I was nine the night it happened, and at the time I thought it was my fault, at least in part. I was the one who cost Dad his drinking privileges.
    That night, he came home in one of his glowering moods and fell into his chair by the TV. For my father, drunkenness was a bad attitude. He got very quiet, radiating menace like the hum emitted by electric power lines. I knew enough to keep my distance. But I could not resist the gun he dropped on the table with his wallet and keys. A big .38 usually glimpsed on top of his dresser or hidden under his coat. Here it was, in plain view. I inched toward it, mesmerized – my intention was just to touch it, to satisfy a craving for its oily steel surface, its textured grip – and I reached out one finger. My ear exploded. Excruciating pain burst inward from my eardrum: He’d smacked the earhole with the flat of his palm because he knew it would cause the most agony yet leave no visible mark. I heard myself screaming in the distance. Over the roar in my ear, there was his voice: ‘Quit the boohooing!’ and ‘You want to kill yourself?’ and ‘Let that be a lesson to you!’ – for there was always an exalted purpose to Dad’s violence.
    Mum was livid. She poured out every bottle, warned him never to bring alcohol into ‘her house’ again, and never to come home with it on his breath. There was shouting, but he did not resist her. Instead, he vented his rage on the kitchen walls, punching holes right through the plaster and Sheetrock to the rough planks behind. Lying in bed upstairs, I could feel the tremors.
    But Dad must have sensed it was time to quit too. His drinking and temper were no secret around here. To some extent, I’m sure, the exaggerated respect people paid him – the displays of esteem and friendship for the law-and-order police chief – were the false tributes paid to bullies.
    For the next eighteen years – until my mother died – he stayed sober. His reputation for violence persisted, but gradually Versellians came to view his rages as Dad himself did: Most of the people he pounded on or bellowed at or otherwise abused probably had it coming to them.
    I tucked the old snapshot of Dad back in the mirror frame. It was all ancient history now.
    On my way out, I brought down a clean shirt for him and hung it in the kitchen. I left him there pushing scraps of egg around his plate.
    Lake Mattaquisett is roughly the shape of an hourglass. It stretches about a mile from end to end along a north-south axis. The southern side is the smaller of the two, though it is what most people are referring to when they mention the lake by name. At the southern tip is the former ‘fishing lodge’ of the Whitney family of New York. It is a camp lodge in the rustic style preferred by nature-minded Manhattanites of a certain class before the Depression. Now owned by a family trust, the big house dominates this end of the lake. There is a sloping trail that leads from the house through the verdant gloom of the pine woods and emerges, a quarter mile later, into the bright reflecting light at the water’s edge. The place is generally occupied only in August, when the plague of mosquitoes has eased somewhat. Other, more modest homes dot the banks of the lake, but they do not compare to the Whitney lodge and so, as if conscious of their inferiority, they hide from the road and can only really be seen from the water. The northern side of the lake is far less