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of paper I had here. Dornan could easily have hired a private investigator to do the job for a hundred dollars: all they had to do was run her name through their subscription databases. No doubt he hadn’t gone that route because—
    “Your mother’s maiden name please ma’am.”
    I read it from the birth certificate. “Acklin.”
    “Yes ma’am. We have you listed at Apartment C 95 Seventh Avenue South New York New York 10012.”
    Greenwich Village. What was she doing in Greenwich Village? “Well, that’s the right place, all right. But I don’t get it. Why aren’t I getting my bills? It doesn’t make any— Oh, shoot,” I said, doing my best to sound embarrassed. “I think I’m calling about the wrong account here. I was looking at my American Express and my Visa at the same time and I guess I just mixed them up and called the wrong one. It says here I paid the last few bills, so I guess I got them ”
    “Yes ma’am. Your account shows your last payment of $354.89 paid September 29th. That was billed to the New York address.”
    “God, I’m sorry.”
    “Yes ma’am,” she said, still bored. “Have a good day.” She disconnected with a click.
    New York. Blaring horns, shrieking sirens, the sour stink of ten million people, all streaming by at a thousand frames per second. New York. And I would have to go there. That’s why Dornan had asked me to find her, not some faceless agency, so that I would go to her on his behalf and ask her to come home.
    I put each item back in the box one at a time, carefully squaring envelopes and aligning stamps, concentrating on arranging the bills in chronological order, deliberately not thinking, because if I thought about all the basic groundwork I should do, the phone calls I ought to make, I would walk away, walk into the woods and not come back, and I had promised.
    I heard Dornan emerge from the trees just before four, but he didn’t come in. I got two Coronas from the fridge, opened them, and took them outside. He stood at the southern edge, looking down and out over the heath bald. I let the bottles clink as I walked, and held his out when he turned.
    He nodded and drank. “Nice woods you’ve got here.”
    “About two hundred acres.”
    He nodded some more. “So why do you have that strip of AstroTurf in front of the trailer when there’s all this natural stuff?”
    “It doesn’t get muddy. Works as a doormat.”
    “Ah.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
    “I didn’t look at the private papers. I didn’t need to.”
    Now he looked at me. “You know where she is?”
    “Yes.” Her, or someone pretending to be her. “I’ll be ready to leave tomorrow. It might take a few days.” He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. It shook slightly. “I haven’t shown you what I’m doing with the cabin. Bring your beer. Then we’ll cook that steak.”
    His smile told me he knew I was doing it to help him, but he followed me to the cabin anyway.
    “It faces south and west, and the long side measures thirty-six feet. The logs are oak, hand hewn. They’re a hundred years old and there’s no reason for them not to last another century.” I laid my palm against the solid wood. It was still warm from the sun. New York. “This is a craftsman cabin, built for my greatgrandfather by masters, not one of the more usual settler’s shacks made from whatever came to hand and which have long since rotted away, and good riddance.”
    His smile was real this time. “You always have been a snob, Torvingen.”
    “I like well-made things.” I squatted and patted the corner of the building. Ten million people. “See how the sill and first end log are quarter-notched? If you could rip up the floor you’d see that the sleepers it rests on are all lap-jointed and middle-notched, and then pegged.”
    He nodded seriously. He hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. It was suddenly necessary that he understand.
    “Everything here was done by hand. You couldn’t just drive to