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I said I did.

“You must know some of those things, Mark. What the fuck happened? Won’t you tell me?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. I was lying, and I think she knew it.

I remember a call I got in the fall of 1978, the dormitory mom (there actually were such things back then) puffing up to the third floor of Roberts Hall and telling me my mother was on the phone and sounded upset. I hurried down to Mrs. Hathaway’s little suite, afraid of what I might hear.

“Mom? Everything okay?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Something happened to your father while they were on their hunting trip in the 30-Mile Wood.” Then, as if an afterthought: “And to Butch.”

My stomach dropped; my testicles seemed to rise up to meet it. “Was there an accident? Are they hurt? Is someone…” I couldn’t finish, as if to ask if someone was dead would make it so.

“They’re all right. Physically all right. But something happened. Your father looks like he saw a ghost. And Butch… the same. They told me they got lost, but that’s hogwash. Those two men know the 30-Mile like the back of their hand. I wish you’d come home, Mark. Not right now, this weekend. Maybe you can get it out of him.”

But when I asked, Pop insisted that they’d just gotten lost, finally found their way back to Jilasi Creek (a slurred, Americanized version of the Micmac word for hello), and came out behind the Harlow Cemetery, pretty as you please.

I didn’t believe that crap story any more than Mom did. I went back to school, and before Christmas break, a terrible idea surfaced in my mind: that one of them had shot another hunter—which happens several times a year during hunting season—and killed him, and buried him in the woods.

On Christmas Eve, after Mom had gone to bed, I finally summoned the nerve to ask him about that idea. We were sitting in the living room, looking at the tree. Pop looked startled… then he laughed. “God, no! If something like that had happened, we would have reported it and taken our medicine. We just got lost. It happens to the best of us, kiddo.”

My mother’s word came to me, and I almost said it: hogwash.

My father had a dry sense of humor, and it was never on better display than when his accountant came up from New York—this was around the time Pop’s last novel was published—and told Pop his net worth was just over ten million dollars. Not J.K. Rowling numbers (or even James Patterson’s), but considerable. Pop thought it over and then said, “I guess books do a lot more than furnish a room.”

The accountant looked puzzled, but I got the reference and laughed.

“I won’t be leaving you broke, Markey,” Pop said.

He must have seen me wince, or maybe just realized the implication of what he’d said. He leaned over and patted my hand, as he had when I was a child and something was troubling me.

I wasn’t a child any longer, but I was alone. In 1988 I married Susan Wiggins, a lawyer in the county attorney’s office. She said she wanted kids but kept putting it off. Shortly before our twelfth wedding anniversary (for which I’d purchased a string of pearls), she told me she was leaving me for another man. There’s a lot more to the story, I suppose there always is, but that’s all you need to know, because this story isn’t about me—not really. But when my father said that thing about not leaving me broke, what I thought of—what I believe we both thought of—is to whom I would leave that ten million, or whatever remained of it, when my time came?

Probably Maine School Administrative District 19. Schools always need money.

“You must know,” Ruth said to me that day in the Koffee Kup. “You must. Off the record, remember?”

“Off the record or on it, I really don’t,” I said. All I knew was something happened to Pop and Uncle Butch in November of 1978, on their annual hunting trip. After that Pop became a bestselling writer of thick novels, the kind critics used to call three-deckers, and Dave LaVerdiere gained fame first as an illustrator and then as a painter “who combines the surrealism of Frida Kahlo with the American romance of Norman Rockwell” (ArtReview).

“Maybe they went down to the crossroads,” she said. “You know, like Robert Johnson was supposed to have done. Made a deal with the devil.”

I laughed, although I would be lying if I hadn’t had the same idea cross my mind, mostly on stormy summer nights when the rolls of thunder kept me awake. “If they did, the contract must have been for a lot more than seven years. Pop’s first book was published in 1980, the same year Uncle Butch’s portrait of John Lennon was on the cover of Time.”

“Almost forty years for LaVerdiere,” she mused, “and your father’s retired but still going strong.”

“Strong might be too strong a word for it,” I said, thinking about the pissy sheets I’d changed just that morning before setting sail for the Rock. “But he is still going. What about you? How much longer are you going to spend in our neck of the woods, ferreting out dirt on Carmody and LaVerdiere?”

“That’s kind of a shitty way of putting it.”

“I’m sorry. Bad joke.”

She had eaten her muffin (I told you they were good) and was mashing up the few remaining crumbs with a forefinger. “Another day or two. I want to go back to the elder care place in Harlow, and maybe talk to LaVerdiere’s sis again, if she’s willing. I’ll come out of this with a very salable piece, but no way is it the piece I wanted.”

“Maybe what you wanted is something that can’t be found. Maybe creativity is supposed to remain a mystery.”

She wrinkled her nose and said, “Save your metaphysics to cool your porridge. Can I pick up the check?”

“No.”