Man in the Woods by Scott Spencer

Author:Scott Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In the silence of the car, he has been composing a letter in his mind, or a speech. Dear Kate, I love you so deeply and so much. But he sees her glancing at him and he speaks. “They say that murderers always return to the scene of the crime,” Paul says, sinking lower in the passenger seat as Kate steers her car off of the Taconic Parkway and onto the Saw Mill.

“No one’s a murderer here, so you can just shut up about that,” says Kate. She assumes this will sound affectionate, loyal, and confident, but she sees Paul’s uncertain expression and now she reaches for him, rests her hand on his knee, and adds, “I’m sorry.”

He looks at her quizzically, as if a world in which Kate has to be sorry is somehow bizarre. But I don’t think I was ever meant to live with another person.

“Next exit, right?” Kate asks.

Paul’s knees ride nervously up and down. He looks like someone in an interrogation room who is starting to realize he won’t be able to hold out much longer. He looks like someone who is about to crack. As they close in on Tarrytown his mind is besieged with irrational fears, fears that began when he acquiesced to Kate’s request to see for herself the place where he did it, beat a man to death, and which have intensified the closer they get to Martingham. Yet he maintains his resolve to see it through. Kate is hammering out her own sense of what had happened that November afternoon, what happened to Paul, and what, by extension, and through the intractable bonds of love, has happened to her, and Paul feels he has no right to interfere.

Until today, she did not ask which woods he had stopped in, and Paul never volunteered. Once, maybe the night he told her what he had done, or perhaps it was the day after, he started to tell her in detail where he had turned off the road, where he had parked his truck, but some instinct had made her stop him. Kate, normally curious, and sometimes insatiably so, didn’t want to be able to picture Paul’s deed too clearly. She had already begun on the path she had chosen, which was to keep him safe, this man, her man, who, except for that one thing, that one terrible thing, did nothing but make life better for everyone around him. Ignorance wasn’t bliss but rather a gauzy scarf thrown over the lamp of knowledge, coloring the light, making it less harsh.

Yet it was odd to know so little about what had really happened that November afternoon, and Kate has begun to wonder how the blows had landed, where the body had fallen, what happened first, what happened second, what happened after that. And where? How could Paul and the man find themselves so alone, like two fugitives facing each other in the wilderness, how could this happen in the middle of Westchester

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