“For some reason? I’ve got a buzzed head. The truth is Noah came home from daycare with lice, and I had to chop it off. Then I decided I liked the look.” She pointed at a well-trampled path that led off through a cleared area, a vacant lot that was waiting for a new mobile home to be deposited there. “You want to see a view?”

“A view of what?”

“The river. The fields. Everything below.”

Normally, I would have, but the bleary sun had descended into the skeletal treetops to the west.

She didn’t give me a chance to object, though. She dug her hands into her pockets and began to trudge along the well-beaten footpath. Among the boot tracks were paw prints and the occasional urine stain. The route was favored by dog walkers.

“Watch your step,” Felice said as she skipped over a crusted turd.

The trail entered some scrubby underbrush—sumac, willows, and speckled alder—the usual bushes that spring up at the edges of fields. A thorny sprig of multiflora rose tried to snag my arm as I pushed it aside.

When we came to the edge, we had a view down the winding road that led to the summit, past some of Jewett’s land, and all the way to the professor’s experimental orchard.

It wasn’t a cliff, per se. But it was a place where you wanted to watch your step. Neither the drop nor the rocks below had stopped the neighborhood kids from sledding down the slope.

“Levi comes here to play,” Felice said. The breeze tore the breath from her mouth. “I tell him he’s going to kill himself, but Treasure Dillon eggs him on—that girl is as mean as Tina.”

“What’s your connection to the Dillon family?”

“None, thank God.”

“I’d heard everyone here is related.”

“My dad isn’t, and I’m not. Arlo isn’t. There’s also—”

“Who?”

“Some others.”

In the blue-gray light I could see fissures running down the Androscoggin where the river hadn’t yet frozen over. There were patches along the edges of these open channels that looked like they’d melted when the sun had hit them but were hardening again in the twilight.

Beside me Felice put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, God.”

She had fixed her attention on Jewett’s land. The devastation caused by the skidder was even more horrifying when viewed from above. The three young loggers had left for the evening, gone drinking probably, abandoning their savage machine in the wasteland.

“They totally destroyed those lovely woods,” she said.

“I met the guys with the saws on the way up,” I said. “I don’t think they knew what they were doing.”

“You’re wrong there. They knew exactly what they were doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“That they’re assholes like the rest of them.”

“You mean the Dillons?”