Following the deer path in the snowy half-light, I slide over the ridgeback and find myself descending again. The subtle change in terrain worries me. By all I rights I should be continuing uphill, toward the paved road that runs along the eastern bank of the Androscoggin through Leeds and Greene.

Instead the ground levels out. I push through a copse of sumacs and find myself overlooking a flat white field. There is a pause in the snow, and I am surprised how well I can see.

Bent and broken vegetation juts up through the surface. Weeds?

No, bulrushes.

This isn’t a field. It’s a frozen wetland.

The absurdity of my latest problem almost makes me laugh out loud. I’m not on the eastern shore of the Androscoggin after all. I am on an island in the river, cut off from escape by many yards of uncertain ice.

18

I found the cat, Nemo, waiting on the hood of my Jeep. He’d left prints all over it. God knows how he’d gotten out of the house. Jewett, with all his high security, didn’t strike me as the cat flap type. Maybe he preferred the risk of a pet door to the certainties of a dirty litter box.

Nemo greeted me with a fluffed tail and an extra-long hiss. He was one of those enormous Maine coon cats, a twenty-pounder. In a fight between him and an actual lynx I wasn’t sure which feline would prevail.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said as I put on my sunglasses. “I’m going.”

He whipped his frazzled tail.

I’d never been a cat person. Dani had a stray she’d adopted named Puddin’. She’d tried to give the little thing a more dignified name, but the cat, being a cat, refused to respond.

Nemo jumped clear when I got within grabbing distance and, even then, he acted as if the idea had been his.

Cats, I have often said, are strange visitors from an alternate reality where they are the overlords.

I raised the lift gate to check on Shadow and found him sleeping again. It worried me that he was still sacked out this way. Had Lizzie Holman given him too heavy a dose of Midazolam after the anesthesia?

I hadn’t assumed I had time to visit the bartender, Burch. But with the wolf conked out, maybe I could stretch my visit an hour longer.

I drove slowly at first, taking in the view. Behind Jewett’s barn were shimmering white fields that stretched two hundred yards before running into a wall of oaks, birches, and pines. The distant trees were tall and picturesque; they looked like the woods in a Robert Frost poem.