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“I’ve read your charge sheet,” Bennett says. “And I’m familiar with Mr. Mallory.”

He doesn’t bother telling me what I already know. That Roger Mallory, who lives in the house directly across the circle from ours, is a retired Clark Falls police officer himself. That in his retirement, he runs an educational citizens’ academy for the department, sits on various civic boards around town, built the citywide neighborhood watch program that has earned Clark Falls statewide media coverage, and is widely—understandably— considered an inspiration to this community.

Bennett doesn’t point out that I am some childless East Coast liberal arts academic who moved here five minutes ago. That, jobwise, I don’t even wear the pants in my house. He doesn’t confirm what I can’t help fearing, which is that I am fucked.

“Listen, there’s a hell of a lot that affidavit doesn’t say,” I tell him. “I—”

“Let’s deal with what the paperwork says for now. We’ll have plenty of time to deal with what it doesn’t say.”

“But listen—”

“One step at a time, remember?” Bennett looks at his watch just as the guard thumps his fist on the door. “Right now our twelve minutes are up, and we’re still talking about Step One.”

It takes a great deal of effort, but I close my mouth and try to pay attention.

“After I’m gone, while you’re stuck in here spinning your gears, I want you to think all of this through.”

“I don’t even know where to start.”

“As your attorney, my advice is to start at the beginning,” he says. “All the pieces—every detail, every last point between wherever that is and where we are now. Okay?”

I must be nodding, because Bennett nods back.

“You’re an English professor, so you know what I’m looking for here. Clarity, logic, structure. A nice dramatic flow can’t hurt, but we can work on that later. Have the Cliffs Notes ready for me in the morning.”

Step One. My head is swimming. I can’t see how to begin collecting my thoughts.

As the stranger who has agreed to defend me buttons his coat and pulls on his gloves, it occurs to me to ask him, “What’s Step Two?”

“Sorry?”

“You said that tomorrow is Step Three and this is Step One. What’s Step Two?”

“Right.” A final nod. “That’ll be the tough one. But it’s important.”

“Okay.” At this point I’m prepared to hear just about anything.

“Try and get some sleep,” he tells me.

While I sit there, trying to decide if he’s being serious, Douglas Bennett makes an
OK
sign with his thumb and index finger.
One step at a time.

Then he straps his bag over his shoulder and knocks back to the guard.

THE VICTORIOUS WARRIOR WINS FIRST, and then goes to battle.
Our neighbor Barry Firth said that. I remember because it cracked me up, coming from Barry. At least it seemed funny at the time.

This was only in September. Just three months ago. Pete and Melody Seward had invited the whole circle over to their place for a Saturday barbecue—Sara and me, Trish and Barry Firth, Roger, Michael Sprague.

I remember seeing my new pal Brittany Seward that night; she’d been stuck in charge of her kid stepsister and the Firth twins. I remember—fondly, no matter how that sounds to anyone now—that she’d been reading the beat- up Cambridge edition of
Gatsby
she’d borrowed from my library while the tots zoned into juice box comas in front of some talking animals on Pete’s giant television inside the house.

Meanwhile, we cultivated adults had stayed out on the Sewards’ back deck as daylight seeped away behind the trees, drinking margaritas and playing Risk, the old- fashioned board game where you build up your armies and try to dominate the world.

Upon capturing Madagascar and the South African peninsula, thus eliminating the Callaway team and our pitiable troops from the game, Barry had nodded sagely, joined his palms together, and that’s when he said it.

The victorious warrior wins first.
I still remember the flickering light from half a dozen citronella candles playing dramatically over his brow.
And then goes to battle.

Poor Barry. Pudgy, earnest, nice guy Barry Firth. We’d hurt his feelings, cackling like tipsy teenagers, but it was that sort of evening, and we’d all assumed he was trying for laughs. How does anybody deliver a line like that with margarita salt on his eyeglasses and a straight face?

It wasn’t until two or three pitchers later that Trish, to her husband’s booze- blushed horror, had confided the truth to the group: Roger himself had given Barry the board game we’d been playing as a gift for Christmas the previous year, along with one of those popular business wisdom books titled
Suit Tzu: The Art of War from Battlefield to Boardroom.
According to Trish, Barry had been posting sticky notes with hand- scribbled quotations around the house for random inspiration ever since.

“And who got the Flint account in May?” he’d protested, sending us all howling again.

It strikes me now, in a way that it hadn’t then, that we hadn’t all been yukking it up at Barry’s expense.

Not our friend Roger Mallory. Roger just grinned, chucked Barry on the shoulder, and said, “Keep at ‘em, General.”

Come to think of it, Roger hadn’t been drinking margaritas, either. Within the next few turns he’d single- handedly overtaken the whole of Africa with one massive invasion force. Come to think of it, playing Risk that night, he’d outlasted us all.

•    •    •

I already feel defeated. How am I supposed to tell this story so that any reasonable person would believe it?

By tomorrow morning, Roger Mallory will have zipped up his side of this so- called case against me so tightly that nobody will be able to see the seams.

What am I saying? He’s done that already. If I know Roger, he moved his pieces into place long before Detective Bell ever set foot on our doorstep.

I need to remember that if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned that I’ve never really known my neighbor Roger at all. I don’t know how he’s managed to set this offensive into motion. I don’t know how he’s managed to put me here. But I still know this:

You can bounce a quarter off Roger Mallory’s reputation in Clark Falls. You could bounce
me
off Roger Mallory’s reputation in Clark Falls.

And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

It’s not going to matter how I tell my story. It’s not going to matter what I claim. Douglas Bennett could be the Alan Dershowitz of Iowa, and it still wouldn’t change the simple reality that no informed person within a hundred miles of this town would ever believe that Roger Mallory is capable of doing what he’s doing to me.

Me.

What about poor Brit Seward? While I’m sitting alone in here, outlining the story I need to submit to my defense attorney in a few hours, what kind of nightmare has settled in for Brit Seward out there?

I want to see the evidence that allows the police to show up at my house, charge me with these crimes, and take me away in handcuffs without the first bark of warning. Pornographic images of the eighth grader next door? I want to see that evidence.

What am I saying?

Of course I don’t.

Brit. Kiddo. What have you gotten yourself into? What have I done?

There was some racket for a while earlier, as the detox cage filled up with refugees from the town bars. I could hear the incoming traffic and the fratboy laughter and the occasional drunken bellowing all the way down here in my cell. At one point, from what I could gather, someone threw up on somebody else. Later, it sounded like a fight broke out.

All of that quieted down some time ago. The drunks are sleeping, and I’m still awake. I guess what they say is true after all: time does crawl behind bars.

Enough.

Douglas Bennett doesn’t want this rambling mess in my head. He wants clarity. Logic. Structure.

How about irony?

This isn’t our first involvement with the local law since we’ve been here, after all. That’s where I’ll start with Douglas Bennett in the morning. He wants me to start at the beginning? I’ll begin with our very first day in Clark Falls.

The police came to see us that night, too. A different detective, a whole different gang of uniforms, all shaking the bushes, looking for answers. We were on the right side of things then.

I wonder how they’re coming along with
that
case by now?

IT’S THE PRIVATE QUANDARY of all untested men,
my friend Charlie told me after the attack. It seemed like every bit the kind of thing my friend Charlie, an untested man, might say. He called it “the last question deep down in the stomach.”
How would I handle a wolf at the door?

According to Charlie, I had my answer. When it came down to the animal basics, Paul Callaway bared his teeth and stood his ground.
The victorious warrior wins first,
I should have told him.

But I can be realistic. My friend Charlie Bernard doesn’t have a relationship with the animal basics. He has a PhD in English literature, just like me. The fact is, the guy who broke into our house that night could have split my head open, had his way with Sara, had his way with
me,
and made himself a sandwich if he’d wanted one.

Either I got lucky, I’d told Charlie, or our wolf hadn’t really been hungry.

The university had called out of the blue that January, during the winter break. They were a third- tier state school with an undergraduate enrollment nearly three times that of Dixson College, where Sara had chaired her department and I had recently come up for tenure in mine.

“What do you think?” she’d asked me on the plane ride home from our first visit to campus in February.

“I think it’s just like Massachusetts,” I’d told her. “Massa chusetts with more cows. Without the ocean.”

But their graduate economics program had begun to make a promising splash in the national publications. A big donation had helped them to establish a heavy- duty faculty endowment, which had enabled them to offer Sara a no- nonsense salary hike. Next to Boston, the relative cost of living in Clark Falls, Iowa, seemed like a clerical mistake. And though she’d never mentioned it before that initial phone call, Sara confessed that she’d developed a private inkling toward an administrative position beyond department chair. We’d flown back to campus again in March, again on Western Iowa’s dime.

Finally, in April, after one last, long discussion over two bottles of oaky red wine, Sara had called to accept the position of associate dean for graduate studies, duties to commence in the fall.

On the morning of July 12, the Associate Dean and I overslept at a Holiday Inn off the Interstate, drove fast through open cornfields for six more hours, and found the movers waiting for us in the driveway.

It was high summer in the Midwest, buggy and sweltering. While I apologized to the guys smoking cigarettes by the truck in the glaring noon sun, Sara christened 34 Sycamore Court by hurrying through the front door, moving directly to the main floor bathroom, and barfing in the sink.

The day grew longer from there.

“Paul?”

“I’m in here.” Night. Living room. Utter upheaval.

“Look at this.”

Her voice sounded like it was coming from the kitchen. I called back, “Tell me if it’s good or bad.”

“Jodi left us something.”

A stack of business cards? The head of a competing realtor? I worked my way toward the kitchen, navigating the crooked city of unpacked boxes the movers had settled none too gently in the middle of the floor. Sara stood at the refrigerator, holding the door open against one slim hip. Had to be a head.

On the otherwise bare top shelf stood a bottle of champagne, a red ribbon tied around the neck in a bow.

“Huh,” I said.

She handed me a card, which read,
Welcome Home, Callaways! Call me if you need anything. Jodi, Heartland Realty.©

Sara nudged me. “And you didn’t like her.”

“I never said I didn’t like her.”

“You said she sucked all the oxygen out of the room.”

Had I said that? “Okay. Only most of the oxygen.”

“Well, I think we can agree that this is a very thoughtful gesture.”

“One of us could be alcoholic,” I pointed out. “Or Mormon.”

“Or knocked up.”

She gave me such an odd look that we both cracked grins. It seemed as though only days had elapsed since her doctor back east had confirmed this unexpected bit of parting news, and though it had actually been closer to three weeks by then, I don’t think either of us had fully absorbed it yet.

I still wasn’t sure which had come as the bigger surprise: the little blue line in the little white window of the home pregnancy kit, or our mutual embrace of the result. Anyone who knows
us—friends, family members, and the two of us included—would have found the idea of Sara and me getting into the parenting business, at our age no less, only slightly less plausible than the idea that we’d pack up and move to the middle of flyover country.

Yet here we were.

I stepped in and rubbed her shoulders; Sara sighed and sagged. The refrigerator door closed with a soft- seal thud.