“There wasn’t any note or anything, he’d just done it. The coroner said they’d been dead about a month, and there was some rush to get them buried. We all went to the funeral, closed casket of course, and nobody had much to say about it afterwards. I guess we all felt bad we hadn’t tried to do more. But how could we have known?”

He stopped then, and we were silent. The picture of what had happened more than twenty years before was too vivid, more alive in my mind than the present, and I guess it was the same for the old man. He came to first, glanced at me apologetically, then at Frank, and his movement brought me back. I looked too, and saw that Frank was furious, lips tight with rage. The old man began to look frightened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have told you all that. I guess I kind of got carried away. I hope you’re not upset.”

“Not at all. It’s a very sad story. I’m grateful, really, that you told me.”

“Well I’m sorry I went on so long. I’ve kept you here a long time.”

“You haven’t kept me from anything.” We were looking at each other, understanding — something. “Thank you.”

I left then. On the way home, back to the cabin that was my home, where people had died, I began to grow uneasy. I wanted to know, was afraid to find out, if the cabin would be changed for me, if the story gave it a past I didn’t share, that would make it different.

But it didn’t. There was a little light left in the sky, just enough to see the outline of the cabin when I reached the top of the lane. I wished I’d left a light on inside, to welcome me back.

But I was home. The place was still mine, nothing had changed. I wanted to be sure, went into the kitchen and tried to feel the McAllisters, tried to see him, thin and rotting, sitting on a chair inside the door, slumped over with his shotgun at his feet, were his eyes open or closed? and I could raise the picture, but he didn’t belong there, not in my kitchen.

I went on into the living room, seeing the young woman, tired into age, her head shot away, and she was there too, but only like a photograph, unreal. In what had been a bedroom, my small escape room, there would have been a little bed with a child in it. I could see her, blonde and fragile, and I could pull down the blankets and feel them stick, clinging to her wound, and she too was long gone.

How had he felt about this place? Is that why he did it, to hold it for them in just a single moment?