Ana rose from our bed. In silver cast by the moon, she stripped off her nightgown. Frigid air grazed my face as she opened the balcony door and slipped outside. Lunar shadows thrown from bare-branched treetops spread across her pale skin. Part of me seemed to float above her in the glittering night, to ache as the heat deserted her. With each frosted breath her chest rose less. Though I worried, I waited until she broke her trance and carried the cold, like a chalice from a mountaintop, to the space I kept warm beneath our blankets.

You see, my story concerns the nature of innocence.

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At breakfast, she stroked my neck as she set her coffee beside mine. Her black hair, gathered in the hood of her sweatshirt, shrouded the sides of her face. Above her brows I saw skin chapped by her midnight sojourn. The rest of her looked untouched.

She put her foot on the table to tie her Nike. The light of our alcove showed a hair her razor habitually missed on the underside of her leg. This flaw comforted me. Often I felt humbled by her body. I touched the hair. Ana worked a double knot into her laces. She shifted to the other foot and began to bounce on her toes, stretching her Achilles tendons as she tightened her second shoe. The predawn darkness outside made black mirrors of our windows.

“Watch out for dragons.” I dared another caress.

“Dragons hibernate.” Her mouth, tightened with tiny dimples of preoccupation, pressed me a grin.

My caretaker side wouldn’t stay silent. “I hear wind. The temperature is eight degrees.”

Her work for an internet design consulting firm and mine as a lawyer gave us shared ground as strivers in the ancient campaign to bring order out of chaos. Our compatibilities went to an edge when she indulged her passion for extremes. With her friend, Helen Hickman, she ran barelegged in Kansas winters. A twist of an ankle or a slip on the ice could leave her vulnerable to exposure. In the summertime, the women ran on dirt roads through hundred-degree heat, unclothed but for thin halters and bikini shorts. I worried about temptation. Skye County isn’t free of desire.

Ana scratched my head with the tips of her nails. “I don’t get cold.”

“I love you.”

“Do.” She kissed my nose.

Out of my sight in the hall, she murmured to herself while she finished her stretches. The door opened and closed. I bundled into a coat and walked to the curb for the Pawnee Bend Daily Sword. Ana ran in place under a street light until Helen joined her. Shivering in the icy dim, I admired their strides, Ana almost a creature of air, Helen longer legged and even more graceful. They hurried beyond the light and around a corner on their route to a country lane where an Osage hedge hampered the wind.

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I was called from my office to attend Mother’s deathbed. She squeezed my arm with a spasm of determination. “Promise me you will not marry outside the Church.” The heat of her fever carried through her mottled skin to my fingertips. A young priest brought the final sacrament. As she reached for him, her hand dropped to the sheet. With a solemn caress, he closed her eyes. When he began to pray, I walked out to wait in the hall.

The priest finished with Mother’s spirit and come to find me. Father Anthony Vitale’s olive skin and dark curls marked him with an ethnicity out of place in rural Kansas. A nurse brought us coffee. We sipped the evil brew and winced. Orderlies entered Mother’s room with a gurney. I cried.

“If I can help with your process. . . .” Father Vitale offered.

“Self examination is like dissecting a frog.” I wiped my eyes. “You learn what’s inside—”

“—but the frog dies.”

“I try to live with the surface of things.” My words became a lie as I spoke. He’d helped me through the first step of grief.

He tried more. “She died quietly.”

“But not in peace.” This proved to be the most intimate exchange I would have concerning Mother’s death.

“Thank you, Father.” The nurse, who wore a cross, patted the priest’s arm. Above a rim of Styrofoam, he considered me with caution. “We could do a simple service.”

“Give her the whole bit. Mass. Communion.” I believed I owed this tribute to the Church for the comfort Mother took from her faith. “Invite the bishop.”

“He might come.”

“Can we schedule it for tomorrow afternoon?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Arrangements have been in place for a long time.”

“Relatives from out of town usually need–”

“There won’t be any.”

“Yes, then, if you—”

“Thanks.”

An aggression in the way he dipped his shoulders made me think of a wrestler feinting and searching his opponent for a hold.

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In the morning, Ana didn’t run. I took her gesture as sympathy. While we sat in the alcove and shared the Daily Sword, I tried to open our tender subject. “Yesterday at the courthouse . . .”

She fled the kitchen. The courthouse conjured the possibility of civil marriage, a solution she’d wanted and I’d put off. My need to wait until Mother’s blessing no longer mattered had cost us regrets. I read blankly through the news in the Sword, agitated by the passing of the moment.

Ana came back dressed in camouflage and carrying her bow. Hunting obsessed her and Helen. Steel tips of arrows flashed in her quiver. The bowstring threaded through pulleys able to build killing force from the draw of her arm. She put on a mask of the same snow-and-shadow pattern as her coveralls. Her eyes and lips moved. “I can’t cancel my trip.”

“The service is at two. I’ll go early to check the arrangements. Meet me at the church and leave right after.”

Her hunt lasted until dawn. As I stepped from the shower, she pressed against me, thrust icy hands under my towel, and offered a kiss of atonement and a scent of blood.

As if I were her prey she took me. At the end of our lovemaking she released me, gave me a bite on the neck, and pushed me out of the bathroom. Her hunting gear lay on our bed. Two arrows remained in the quiver. The third, dropped beside the bow, had a tip darkened by blood. Ana’s victory chant, muffled by walls and water, pulsed through the house like an implacable low-frequency vibration. Exhausted by death and love, I sat on the bed with a towel around my waist, rolling the stained arrow between my fingers.

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A heavy north wind made my suit feel thin under my coat as I walked to my car. Our neighbor, Marlin Taggart, spied on me through his curtains. We’d quarreled over driveway boundaries. If I veered across his line as I backed into the street, I’d find a complaint in my mailbox. Sometimes I’d cross the boundary deliberately, just to excite him.

Below our oak tree, a stain spotted the snow. Pushing aside a branch, I saw the pheasant Ana had gutted and hung. I imagined my lover steadying the aim of her bow while the glimmers of dawn hardened the outlines of her prey in a snowbound field. Bare- shouldered, Ana waved at me from an upstairs window. When I blew a kiss, she parted the curtains to show me her breasts. I wondered if Marlin Taggart shared the moment.

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At the casket, Ana reached out toward Mother’s body. I mistook the gesture for reconciliation. Mother had hated her. Approaching to take my turn, I saw a fringe of brown under the rosary twined in Mother’s hands. Ana had smuggled an oak leaf beneath the fingers of the corpse.

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Mother’s friends, most of them very old and frail, were still shuffling out of the church when Ana departed for Wichita and her flight to a convention in Atlanta. As she drove away, tires crunching the snow, I let her wave carry me to our shower. The weight of the ceremony kept me from blowing a kiss. In the tilt of her chin I saw a victor.

Father Vitale stopped beside me. “How’s your inner process?”

“Dead as a frog.” Ana’s car turned a corner.

He hugged himself. “I hate driving on this stuff. Would you mind if I ride with you in the limo?”

“Certainly.”

On the way to the cemetery, we talked about basketball, about winters in New Jersey where he’d lived his childhood, about anything but whether he’d seen the oak leaf.

At home, I found the pheasant still hanging. This public display of her hunting victims had always seemed to me like a way of boasting. No one in the community, other than Ana and Helen, could shoot a bow well enough to bring down one of these chicken-sized birds. If I allowed her trophy to hang overnight, cats were likely to drag it down. I went inside to find a knife, and discovered a fresh bottle she had left on the counter. Whiskey led my thoughts in a parade through my unremarkable past. Mother raised me alone. Her determination powered me, her only child, through college and law school. Moving to Pawnee Bend let us start with a new status given by my profession. I’d suffered through a brief marriage to a devout woman, before Ana Frye came to town. While the early winter darkness filtered the view outside our windows I recalled our first moment, an accidental-seeming exchange of pleasantries at the Checkered Gingham, and how our meeting there the next day had been less of a coincidence. If Mother hadn’t died, I’d have gone on Ana’s trip with her, and now I’d be administering a pre-dinner screw to her in a hotel in Atlanta. The fantasy didn’t erase the funeral. More whiskey brought enough detachment to let me feel pleased with my comment to Vitale: dead as a frog.
Still thinking of the priest, I found a knife and went into the yard. Night had come fully. While I cut down the bird, wrapped it in plastic, and dropped it in the freezer, I imagined Ana killing the creature to express her contempt for Mother. I have a habit of talking out loud when I’m alone. As I went to sleep, I wondered if I’d spoken to the stars.

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When I entered my office the next morning, I found my secretary shuffling papers in a distracted way.

“Angie?”

“He wasn’t at mass.” She’d been waiting to unburden.

“Who?”

“Father Vitale.”

Angie had been part of the furnishings when I took the law office. Her presence comforted clients, and she gave me valuable lessons about who did what to whom in Pawnee Bend, but we were too different to be close. I hadn’t known she went to daily mass. “Is he ill?”

“They checked the rectory. No one was there. Lights were on. And something burned on the stove the night before.” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

I gave Angie the day off, locked the door, and sat behind my desk with my topcoat over me like a blanket.

A ringing telephone ended my nap. As I reached for the receiver, I checked my watch and found I’d been asleep for forty-five minutes. “Yes?”

“Mr. Spaulding?”

I recognized the formality of the chief of police. “Hi, Leo.”

“There’s something important.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

The police worked with me on criminal matters in municipal court, where I was prosecutor. Our jurisdiction extended to minor failings: shoplifting, underage drinking, wandering dogs. Crimes of more consequence went to my friend, Pete Hickman, the county attorney.

Chief Rand treated lawyers as a species of outlaw. He wasn’t above weeding his own garden. For Leo to come to me now meant a police officer had ticketed an important citizen, or more likely a bigwig’s child. The chief would hand me the ticket with no request, discharging his duty, clearing his backside, and leaving me with the quandary of whether to give the accused a break. If I did, he’d say the decision was mine. If I didn’t, he’d tell the parent he’d done his best.

As I went to unlock the door for Leo’s arrival, the telephone rang again. I reached over the partition in front of Angie’s desk and lifted her receiver. “Law office.”

“This is Nicholas Atreus.”

“Tom Spaulding, Mr. Atreus. How can I help you?”

“My former wife lives in Pawnee Bend.”

Hearing the effort it cost him to put “former” in front of “wife, ” I asked, “Would this be an alimony or child custody matter?”

“We were happy. We had what married people want. We were close.” His voice faltered. “Then he showed up, and she—”

“Before we go further, Mr. Atreus, I should—”

“The man wrecked our marriage. Walked in and took her. I didn’t do anything to cause this, Mr. Spaulding. I have resources. I was attentive. I cherished her.”

“Mr.—”

“Yesterday, I read about a lady who sued the woman who broke her marriage. Alienation of affection, the newspapers called the lawsuit. She got a judgment.”

“A difficult case, Mr. Atreus. Expensive.”

“Money is something we can discuss.”

“You haven’t told me her name.” I scattered Angie’s desk-top to find a pen and paper.

“Her name is Helen. You would know her as Helen Hickman.”

“Sir, I’m sorry.” I put down the pen. “Are you calling me from Michigan?”

“Yes. East Lansing.”

“This is a small town. I’m acquainted with Helen, and I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed but not surprised. People expect lawyers to waffle and connive. “Is there someone else? Another firm?”

“If I were you, I’d take this out of town. Look for a lawyer in Wichita. I’m afraid I’m not in a position to give you a name.”

Nicholas Atreus hung up.

I’d connived more than he’d ever realize. Any lawsuit against my friend, Pete Hickman, for alienating the affections of his wife from her former husband, would have to be filed here in Pawnee Bend. Our judge, Al Frankin, was a good man with a single prejudice. As a consequence of brusque treatment he’d received during a temporary judging assignment years before, he hated Wichita lawyers.

Pete Hickman had gone to East Lansing two years earlier to attend a trial law workshop. He’d planned the trip as a tax-deductible junket to the Upper Peninsula for a fishing vacation. I’d expected him to return with a cooler full of frozen steelhead. Instead, he came home with a fiancee. He handled her divorce and married her in front of the magistrate, which sparked discussions between Ana and me about our own unwedded state.

The rattling of the office door brought me to Chief Rand. I let him in. Despite the weather, he kept his blue satin jacket unzipped. Leo was built of squares: right angles defined his frame, chin, and forehead. He looked more sour than usual. His wife, a pretty woman I barely knew, had abandoned him recently and moved, taking their children. He wore a gun belt with a chromed pistol. Another officer waited in a patrol car, tracking our gestures through the lobby window. Leo’s way of remaining silent until the other person spoke bordered on rudeness. I always felt goaded to needle him.

“So, Chief,” I asked, “whose kid stepped over the line?”

Leo took a notebook from an inside pocket of his jacket. “When was the last time you saw Father Vitale?”

“The priest? At the funeral. Why?”

Slow writing in his notebook.

I added, “My secretary told me he didn’t show for mass.”

“What were you talking to him about, after the services?”

“Weather.”

“And in the car on the way to the cemetery?”

“Basketball. Why?”

“One of my men found Father Vitale’s body this morning, in a road ditch at the edge of town.” Leo put the pen in his pocket and folded the notebook.

“An accident?” My face prickled.

“No.” His eyes lowered as if I’d conveyed a message. “He had an arrow through his neck.”

“You —” I sat. “A hunting accident?”

“We’re assuming a time of death of between seven and eight last night.”

“Anyone old enough to handle a compound bow probably isn’t dumb enough to shoot arrows across a road in the dark.”

Leo looked into my eyes. “We don’t know the type of bow.”

“I’m no archer, but isn’t that what hunters use? The curved bows with the pulleys.”

“Some use a crossbow.”

Several thoughts began to articulate. Father Vitale, who’d been a saint to my Mother, was dead; the chief of police had come here to interrogate me; Ana used a bow; and crossbows take a different type of arrow than compound bows. My remarks possibly implied I knew what kind of arrow they found in the priest’s neck. “How have you placed the time of death?”

“Father Vitale was known to go running at seven o’clock every Monday, Wednesday and Friday night, regardless of the weather.”

The police knew a lot of people’s habits, probably including Ana’s.

“Sorry, Mr. Spaulding,” Leo said, “but I have to ask you the whereabouts of your . . . of Miss Frye last night.”

“Atlanta, Georgia. At a convention. She was supposed to chair a working session after dinner, and give a paper this morning.”

“Which is why she left town before the interment?”

“Yes. To catch a plane. She’d arranged this months ago.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“No. But she put a call on the answering machine to let me know she’d arrived.”

“When?”

“Nine o’clock last night, I think.”

“You weren’t home?”

“I was in bed. I let it ring.”

“You weren’t expecting her to call?”

“Not really. I think this is the first time she’s gone out of town alone since we’ve been together.”

He reopened his notebook. “The number for her hotel?”

“Sure.” As I went to find Ana’s itinerary, I realized Leo hadn’t taken notes. Had he already known where she’d gone, and been interested only in my reactions? I was amazed at how defensive I’d become when I had nothing to hide. My palms sweated, and I made jerky movements as I searched my desk. Undoubtedly Leo heard these betrayals of my disquiet. I found the note with the hotel’s name. Before I went to the lobby, I stood behind my desk, surrounded by the icons of my status–the framed degrees, the leather chair, the high-horsepower computer. Whom you make yourself matters, more so in Pawnee Bend than most places. Lives add up. The police wouldn’t cross certain lines when they dealt with me. Ana had her own graduate degrees and her own position in the community. Of course, the cause of death would require them to go through the process of eliminating her as a suspect.

People knew the ladies shot to kill. Leo would check Helen’s alibi as well as Ana’s. I’d seen enough police work to appreciate the way Leo’s tedious mentality encouraged tenacity in his officers. They had an ability to pressure suspects into making admissions. During my time in Pawnee Bend, the department investigated three murders in which the evidence had been circumstantial–no eyewitnesses, and no confession–and in each case the killer was arrested and convicted. Two were in prison for life. The third, a man who had exterminated his wife’s lover in a particularly cruel manner, had languished on death row for years while his attorneys exhausted his appeal rights.

Coming with the note, I found the second officer waiting with Leo in the lobby. I knew he must have come inside when he no longer saw me through the window.
Leo jotted the name of Ana’s hotel, then zipped his jacket. “Will you be available?”

“All day.”

No calls came while I waited. People would give me a period of privacy following the funeral. And many of my acquaintances would be quieted by the priest’s death. Father Vitale had revived the dwindling congregation at Our Lady of Sorrows. Mother had been enthralled by him. From her reports of his sermons I understood him as, if not one of the renegade reactionary Catholics who wanted to return the Church to the days of Latin masses and harsh penances, at least a very conservative young man. Unlike his predecessors in the parish, who for decades had vaguely and rather weakly proclaimed God’s love, he had demanded, in an understated and scholarly but inflexible way, a return to strict belief in the Church’s teaching. He reminded me of the polished, self- assured, Jesus-spouting ministers of our town’s most robust Protestant denominations, the Pentecostals and the United Brethren. His approach had succeeded. At Sunday Mass, Mother had told me ecstatically, the pews were full again. If my ex-wife hadn’t left town, she would have come under his sway.

Mother never played up Father Vitale in front of the woman who had broken my marriage. Mention of religion caused Ana to draw into a tight posture, if not of battle, then of utter rejection. At home it was not a subject we discussed, except through the occasional vicious joke.

What had happened would interest her, and I wanted to convey the news of Leo’s questions without causing her to worry. I tried the hotel in Atlanta, had trouble making sense of the messaging system, and finally managed to leave word. She’d hear an electronic version of my voice sounding lighthearted, saying hello, the priest is dead, I miss you, goodbye. That’d get me a return call, or at least keep me in her mind.

In less than an hour, Leo came back. I brought him into my office. The sides of the desk marked the lines of authority: I was the guy in the big chair, and he was the visitor. None of this kept me from feeling nervous as he took out his notebook.

“The passenger manifest shows Ana on board her scheduled flight to Atlanta,” he began. “The hotel shows her checking in as scheduled. She used her credit card this morning to buy breakfast. Given the driving time between here and the airport, and the airline schedules, there’s no way she could’ve been in Pawnee Bend last night.”

“Well, Chief Rand,” I said, “you probably have a lot of other bases to cover. If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

He made no move to leave. A man’s cough in the outer office told me a second officer had come with him.

Leo examined me as if he read a book. I felt my irritation rise. Why were we going through this? A second before I opened my mouth to deliver a direct invitation to leave, I understood his purpose, and felt, too late, like an idiot.

“Did you spend last night with anyone?” Leo clicked his pen.

He’d been pointing toward this question. Ana possessed an alibi. I didn’t. “No,” I answered, “I was at home with no company.”

“Can we confirm this?”

“My neighbor, Marlin Taggart, seems to notice a lot.”

“Did you engage in any activities?”

“I drank myself to sleep.”

While he wrote this, I realized he was asking appropriate questions, and I was giving flippant answers. “Anything more?” Rand asked.

“No.”

“We’re not releasing the cause of death, Mr. Spaulding. The use of an arrow won’t be public knowledge.”

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Father Vitale’s funeral was enlivened by the presence of forty of his relatives. We Kansans channel our feelings inward and view emotion with suspicion. The New Jersey Vitales sobbed, I was told, enough to drown the rosary service. They cried through a memorial at the church, in the presence of a bishop and a gaggle of monsignors. Though I avoided the services, I saw family members embracing and wailing in the parking lot of the grocery market.

In the midst of their catharsis, they took the body to New Jersey and forsook us to our snowbound ways.

The Vitale clan departed on the morning Ana returned from Atlanta. I was at the office. She went to work without stopping by. Pleased to get home and find her travel clothes humped on the floor, I waited in front of the television. When I heard her car in the driveway, I poured beers.

Ana waved off the drink. “I’m going for a run before dark.”

Her kiss fell short of my hopes. “The dragons are out.”

“So I hear.”

“Chief Rand checked on you.”

She hung her coat on a peg. “They’ll cover everybody who has an archery hunting license, don’t you suppose?”

“The cause of death wasn’t supposed to be public.”

“Everyone at work knew.”

When I tried to hug her, she eased out of my encirclement. “Later, ardent one.”

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Later turned out to be scintillating. We were toweling off from a cool-down shower when I remembered to tell Ana the Hickmans had invited us to dinner.

“I know.” She gave my belly a flick with a towel. “Helen called me at work.”

When I first met Ana, I hid her from Pete and my other bachelor friends until I had persuaded her into bed. She connected to Pete as soon as I introduced them. He often made a third on our outings. A few months later, he went to Michigan and caught Helen.

Dinner at the Hickmans’ followed our pattern of wine-soaked laughter. Father Vitale might still have been alive. I’d started the evening curious to know whether the police talked to Helen, but I decided the question was better handled in daylight.

In my eyes, and the eyes of men I’d seen staring, Ana was spellbinding. Her fair skin contrasted with her dark hair, and her deeply formed athletic body struck the senses. Beyond the physical, she had a quality of elusiveness. I desired always to catch her and hold her in a way I never managed.

If Ana enticed, Helen bewitched. Golden haired, green eyed, tall, slender, soft, and silken curved, with skin able to retain the hue of honey in the depths of a Kansas February, her alarming good looks required her to spend her days disguised in baggy pants, sweaters, and eyeglasses she didn’t need. On our evenings together she made up for her public modesty, wearing skimpy dresses with her hair shimmering and her jewelry dangling.

Pete and I considered ourselves blessed.

Helen and Ana went off by themselves. I sat in the television room with Pete. A seventy-two-inch screen lit the wall with hockey highlights. Our wine, a good Italian red, remained sweet. Laughter of the women filled the house. I cheered the body slams of the skating brutes. Pete slumped in his seat. For several minutes I assumed he’d fallen asleep, then he leaned toward me, his head swaying between his knees, and mumbled.

Drunkenly, I bent to his level. “Whaa, buddy?”

“Said . . .” He drew a long sigh. “I said, never marry for beauty.”

“You didn’t take your own advice, my friend.”

His fixed stare reminded me of Leo’s interrogation. “Helen was promised to me by the gods.” His head sank to his knees, and he began to snore.

Laughter from the women melded with footfalls. I stood, not wanting to seem as drunk as Pete. Ana and Helen darted through the hall, running arm in arm and naked.

Nothing in the slant of their hips spoke of innocence, of childish pleasure. The stretch of their legs, Ana’s wild peek at me over her shoulder as they vanished through a doorway, flaunted a full awareness of their sexual power. Wine vapors made me doubt my eyes. Pete snored. Shadows thrown by the television blurred across the walls. Not wanting to lose the image of their supple backsides and their mingled hair, light and dark, I staggered after the women.

In the trail of their weightless barefoot steps, my shoes seemed to bear down like hooves. The last peal of their laughter dazzled my brain and left me in a silence dominated by my laboring breath. White light lifted the colors of the walls and erased shape and distance. Blinded and unbalanced, I stood waiting to be released. Everything I knew seemed to lie behind me.

Cold air carried threads of a lingering flowery scent, and restored to my sight the hallway with its ordinary decorations. In the foyer I found the door open to the wind. Ana zipped her skirt. Helen pulled her short dress down over her hips and shivered beguilingly.

I drove home with my vision swimming from alcohol and my male esteem cracking like the road ice beneath the tires. Did my lover prefer a woman’s body to my own? Or what other strange secret had she revealed? Ana fumbled her hands under my coat in an attempt at intimacy until she fell asleep.

In the morning I woke too wasted to give sex more than a wistful thought. Ana made a clatter downstairs. When I came to the kitchen she’d gone, leaving a carafe of coffee and the dishwasher humming.

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