First You Have to Row a Little Boat by Richard Bode

Author:Richard Bode [BODE, RICHARD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759523883
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2012-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

“Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain,” said Dupin.

“Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?”

“A little too self-evident.”

“Ha! ha! ha!—ha! ha! ha!—ho! ho! ho!… oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!”

Dupin finds the letter at once, not because he’s observant but because he’s perceptive; he looks through the letter, beyond the letter into the devious heart of the thief himself, and there he sees what the Prefect can’t see and will never see no matter how long and hard he looks. It’s not surprising that the detectives we hold in high esteem—Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Nero Wolfe, Charlie Chan, Lieutenant Columbo—all possess this uncanny ability to see the obvious. We admire them, we say, for their powers of deduction—but detection isn’t deduction; it’s something else: the ability to examine the evidence the world presents with an unfettered mind.

I search for the source of fog and I find it everywhere. It rises at dew point in the valley, settles on the hilltop, and blows in from the sea like a huge cloud that hugs the land. Unlike the tide, it abides by no timetable but ebbs and flows in compliance with its own mysterious clockwork, casting its primal spell over all it touches, transfiguring the landscape we thought we knew.

I was a young man when I married, and with the fervor of youth I told myself, This bond will last forever, but I was wrong. Three decades after my marriage began, it ended, and even though that ending was what I sought, what I wanted, I once again found myself bound by fog, this time through divorce, which is death of another kind. In some ways it’s even worse, for in death we know the ones we love are physically gone, but in divorce they’re still with us, reminding us of the shared life that went awry. And yet the separation is just as shattering, and it’s the acute pain of separation that casts us into that lost world.

In the dim days after my wife and I parted, I found myself caught in fog so permanent, so pervasive that I thought it would never lift. I thrashed about, moving from one liaison to another, unable to forge a genuine attachment, unable to make even the most basic decisions about where to eat or what to wear without continually changing my mind. Trapped in my own private miasma, I spent one entire day driving back and forth between two car dealers ten miles apart, trying to figure out if I wanted the station wagon at one or the hatchback at the other—until at last I pulled over to the side of the road and slumped down in the seat, exhausted by the ordeal.

And then I remembered that harrowing morning halfway between the mainland and the barrier beach when I sat on the deck of my blue sloop, staring into the mist—and I knew what I had to do. I found myself a cottage

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