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CHAPTER 11
As I drove south on the Mile-A-Minute Highway, I tried to convince myself that I needn’t bother
with Carolyn Poulin. I told myself she was Al Templeton’s experiment, not mine, and his experiment,
like his life, was now over. I reminded myself that the Poulin girl’s case was very different from that
of Doris, Troy, Tugga, and Ellen. Yes, Carolyn was going to be paralyzed from the waist down, and
yes, that was a terrible thing. But being paralyzed by a bullet is not the same as being beaten to death
with a sledgehammer. In a wheelchair or out of it, Carolyn Poulin was going to live a full and fruitful
life. I told myself it would be crazy to risk my real mission by yet again daring the obdurate past to
reach out, grab me, and chew me up.
None of it would wash.
I had meant to spend my first night on the road in Boston, but the image of Dunning on his
father’s grave, with the crushed basket of flowers beneath him, kept recurring. He had deserved to die
—hell, needed to—but on October 5 he had as yet done nothing to his family. Not to his second one,
anyway. I could tell myself (and did!) that he’d done plenty to his first one, that on October 13 of
1958 he was already a murderer twice over, one of his victims little more than an infant, but I had
only Bill Turcotte’s word for that.
I guess in the end, I wanted to balance something that felt bad, no matter how necessary, with
something that felt good. So instead of driving to Boston, I got off the turnpike at Auburn and drove
west into Maine’s lakes region. I checked into the cabins where Al had stayed, just before nightfall. I
got the largest of the four waterside accommodations at a ridiculous off-season rate.
Those five weeks may have been the best of my life. I saw no one but the couple who ran the local
store, where I bought a few simple groceries twice a week, and Mr. Winchell, who owned the cabins.
He stopped in on Sundays to make sure I was okay and having a good time. Every time he asked, I
told him I was, and it was no lie. He gave me a key to the equipment shed, and I took a canoe out
every morning and evening when the water was calm. I remember watching the full moon rise silently
over the trees on one of those evenings, and how it beat a silver avenue across the water while the
reflection of my canoe hung below me like a drowned twin. A loon cried somewhere, and was answered
by a pal or a mate. Soon others joined the conversation. I shipped my paddle and just sat there three
hundred yards out from shore, watching the moon and listening to the loons converse. I remember
thinking if there was a heaven somewhere and it wasn’t like this, then I didn’t want to go.
The fall colors began to bloom—first timid yellow, then orange, then blazing, strumpet red as
autumn burned away another Maine summer. There were cardboard boxes filled with coverless
paperbacks at the market, and I must have read three dozen or more: mysteries by Ed McBain, John D.
MacDonald, Chester Himes, and Richard S. Prather; steamy melodramas like Peyton Place and A Stone
for Danny Fisher; westerns by the score; and one science-fiction novel called The Lincoln Hunters, which
concerned time-travelers trying to record a “forgotten” speech by Abraham Lincoln.
When I wasn’t reading or canoeing, I was walking in the woods. Long autumn afternoons, most
hazy and warm. Dusty gilded light slanting down through the trees. At night, a quiet so vast it
seemed almost to reverberate. Few cars passed on Route 114, and after ten o’clock or so there were
none at all. After ten, the part of the world where I had come to rest belonged only to the loons and
the wind in the fir trees. Little by little, the image of Frank Dunning lying on his father’s grave began
to fade, and I found myself less likely to recall at odd moments how I had dropped the souvenir
pillow, still smoldering, over his staring eyes in the Tracker mausoleum.
By the end of October, as the last of the leaves were swirling down from the trees and the
nighttime temperatures began to dip into the thirties, I started driving into Durham, getting the lay