Crossers by Philip Caputo Page A

into plastic lawn bags and hauled them to Goodwill. He sold her sloop and her car and wished there were an agency to which he could consign the comical hum Amanda made when she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer some question of his, or the mock pout she put on when she suffered a minor disappointment—all the little tics that he remembered about her.
    The house was on the market only a week before it sold, for twice what he’d paid for it. After he peddled his furniture at an estate sale, Anne insisted he stay with her and her husband in Redding. He then consulted with his lawyer on how best to dispose of his financial assets, which with the proceeds from the house now totaled in the low eight figures. He was surprised, and somewhat embarrassed, by how hard it was to get rid of even a minor fortune, portioning his out to various charities and conservation groups, to a scholarship fund for minority students at his prep school, Hotchkiss, and to a trust for his daughters and any future grandchildren. Combined with his generous retirement package, what remained was considerably more than enough to sustain him in style if he lived to be a hundred, which he fervently hoped he would not.
    His sister held a valedictory Christmas dinner for the whole family. Morgan and Justine came in from the city and stayed the night. They cried when he left the next morning. With all his belongings fitting easily into the cargo compartment of his Suburban and with his dog for company, he saw himself as a refugee of the strange new war that had begun on a temperate September morning. Were it not for his girls, he would have felt deracinated, jobless, wifeless, parentless (his father had died of esophageal cancer at sixty-seven; his mother had fallen to a stroke three years ago).
    There was no rush, and he made the trip in easy stages, watching the landscapes change from hills to plains to desert to mountains and back to desert. He caught the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square on a motel-room TV in New Mexico, spent New Year’s Day driving through eastern Arizona, and at last, a week after starting out, arrived at the San Ignacio.
    H IS HOUSE IN N EW C ANAAN had had twelve rooms, his new dwelling two, heated by a wood-burning stove. It was off the grid, electricity supplied by a generator, and was sheltered in a grove of Emory oaks backed by a ridge and sided by two low hills. The front porch, supported by varnished pine posts, looked out upon the grasslands and tree-speckled canyons of the San Rafael Valley, rolling away to the Patagonia Mountains and the San Antonios in Mexico, a view most people would have described as “breathtaking” or “inspirational.” Castle did not find it so. Although he wasn’t blind to the beauty of his surroundings and was grateful that there was nothing in them to prompt the wrong memories, he hadn’t come out for inspiration and breathtaking vistas, nor with any illusions that living close to nature in the great American West would release him from his despotic grief and the fear it sometimes permitted to share its reign. An easing of his bondage, not an ending, was all he expected of his solitary life in the sequestered adobe. It was a kind of halfway house between the iron lockdown he’d known and the liberation he’d sought with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

2
    S OMETHING WAS OUTSIDE . Something she’d heard or smelled on the cold drafts sneaking through the cracks in the window frames roused Samantha from her sleep and drew her to the door. Castle caught her movement out of the corner of his eye as he sat reading—the movement not of the dog herself but of her shadow, passing along the wall on the opposite side of the room. He laid the book on his lap and looked at her as she faced the door, so alert and motionless that she and her silhouette resembled two dogs on point. A low growl deep within her chest made her sound more menacing than she was.
    “Just a coyote, maybe javelina,” Castle said.