“According to Moses, ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.’ Well, thank goodness, that couldn’t be more clear!” the little English teacher declared. “Whoever Moses was, he was a much better writer than the tentative soul who is writing the ‘Police Report.’ ”

“So you’ve been seen, you’ve been recognized—so somebody knows,” I said to him.

The snowshoer shrugged. “Or someone has heard something,” Elliot said, sighing. “My dear Adam, you have to stop worrying—you worry too much.”

I held up the handwritten note. “This doesn’t look like a kid wrote it,” I told him.

“I’ll tell you who knows,” the snowshoer suddenly said. “The fish deliveryman definitely knows I don’t have any boobs—he was groping all around for them! Does the note smell like fish?” Mr. Barlow asked me. I sniffed it—it didn’t smell like fish.

“You’ve got to be more careful—you promised,” I reminded him.

“I promise, my dear Adam,” the little English teacher told me. “But it’s not always clear what you need to be afraid of.”

I would remember that, if not Deuteronomy 22:5—I would, in fact, make an effort to forget the judgmental Moses. But New Hampshire is Puritan territory. In a country of sexual intolerance, there’s more than one Moses around.

26. THE GETAWAY DRIVER

I was still a student at Exeter when Nora told me I had to see The Wrong Car. She and Em saw it somewhere—at a noir festival, Nora said. Nora didn’t like gangster movies any better than I did, but she shared Susan Barlow’s opinion that the getaway driver was really handsome—small, but handsome. “I think he looks a lot like our Elliot,” Mrs. Barlow had said.

“Well, he’s not that small, darling,” Mr. Barlow had replied.

“He’s that handsome,” Susan Barlow had insisted.

“He’s handsome, all right,” Nora said to me, while Em did weird things with her eyes. Em was batting her eyelashes and pointing to my eyes; then she stood so close to me that I could feel her eyelashes flutter against my cheek. “This little actor, Paul Goode, is a dead ringer for you, kiddo,” Nora told me. “He doesn’t look a lot like the snowshoer.”

Em’s pantomime was pretty clear. “The getaway driver has my eyes?” I asked her. Em nodded, her hands on an imaginary steering wheel, driving purposely into an ambush.

“It’s not only that your mother thinks this actor looks like you,” I reported to the snowshoer. “Nora and Em think he looks like me.”