LITMIR.BIZ

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of guilt and anxiety, but nothing came. There was only relief.

      After another five miles she turned on the radio and searched across the local news and country music stations and weather reports until she came across the voice of Alanis Morissette. Leonie drove on, singing softly, with no idea where she was heading.

      The first sign for the upcoming freeway startled her. She had automatically followed the route home – not home any longer, but towards Boston.

      She didn’t in the least want to go back there. She braked suddenly and swung in to the side of the road, causing the Ford station-wagon behind her to sweep by in an angry diminuendo of hooting. In the past she might have reddened in belated apology, but now she merely shrugged and wound the wheel in the opposite direction. She took the next turning at random, then another, driving deeper into countryside she had never penetrated before until she had no idea even whether she was headed north or south. The fuel gauge blinked an amber light at her and she frowned back at it, unwilling to have her shapeless reverie broken.

      A sign ahead indicated that she was coming to the town of Haselboro. She had never heard of it, and it looked a small, sleepy place as she drove past the neat lawns and white gates of the outlying houses. Although she had eaten the muffin and cranberry jelly for breakfast she realised suddenly that she was ravenously hungry.

      Haselboro didn’t have much of a centre. There was a dingy supermarket down a slip road and a garage opposite it across a wider section of the through road. Leonie pulled into the garage forecourt beside the gas pumps and a boy in blue coveralls emerged at once. ‘Fill it up.’ She smiled at him. He had longish hair the same colour as Lucas’s and a face buckled with shyness. Leonie rummaged in her bag and brought out her wallet. There were only fifteen dollars in cash, but she had her credit cards and bank book.

      ‘Going far?’ the boy asked, not quite looking up from the fuel nozzle.

      ‘Yes. Well, no. Not really. I’m not quite sure where I am.’

      He did squint round at her then. ‘Got a map, have you?’

      ‘No, actually.’

      ‘There’s one in there, if you want to have a look. I can’t give it to you, it’s not mine.’ He pointed towards the shop door.

      ‘Just a glance would be a help.’

      The map lay on a counter near the cash till, with a half-eaten hot-dog oozing ketchup into a paper napkin alongside it. Leonie looked longingly at the bitten frankfurter as she flipped the map open. She fumbled the route from Pittsharbor with her forefinger, trying to trace the roads she must have followed in her meander. At length she located Haselboro. To her surprise it was only a couple of miles from the coast. She had driven a sprawling U north-eastwards from Pittsharbor.

      The boy materialised at her shoulder.

      ‘I’m sorry, I interrupted your lunch.’

      ‘It’s okay.’ He blushed as he busied himself with her credit card.

      ‘Where can I get one of those?’

      ‘Huh?’

      ‘A hot-dog.’

      ‘Oh, there’s a store down the next street. It’s more of a grocery store, they don’t really sell hot-dogs but I’m sure they’d fix you one if you asked. It’s my mom working there. Say I told you to come by.’

      ‘Well, thank you, um …’

      ‘Roger.’

      ‘Pleased to meet you, Roger.’

      ‘And you, ma’am.’

      Leonie went out again into the sunshine and found that she was smiling.

      The store was on a corner at the intersection of two streets. Traffic lights blinked at an empty road each direction and a large yellow dog lay panting in the shade of the store awning. There was a public telephone against the outside wall. Leonie glanced at it and hurried into the store.

      A pleasant-looking woman was stacking cans behind a glass-fronted display case. She had the same shyly indirect gaze as Roger. ‘I guess I can,’ she agreed, when Leonie had blurted out her request. ‘It’ll just take a couple of minutes out back.’

      While she waited Leonie idly read the local ads on cards pinned beside the door. Laurel Jackson had lost her progressive bifocals, brown steel-rimmed, some time after the first week in August. There was to be a colossal yard sale at Kingdom Road, and a grey and white cat, four white paws, very friendly, had gone missing from home. And under the heading Summer Rental was a snapshot of an uncompromisingly plain grey-boarded box of a cottage, one square window on either side of a tight front door, set in a pretty woodland clearing.

      Leonie read the details twice. Suddenly available for short summer rental. One bedroom, fully furnished, $280 per month, plus utilities. No pets, no children, no smokers. There was a name and a telephone number at the foot of the card.

      She became aware that Roger’s mother was at her elbow, holding out the hot-dog in a folded paper napkin. ‘Ketchup or mustard?’

      Leonie paid, then propped herself against the hood of Tom’s car while she ate, eyed by the yellow dog. The peace and emptiness of Haselboro was soothing. An idea was turning over in her mind and before the last mouthful of frankfurter it had turned into a decision. If not Boston, where she didn’t yet want the company of friends or their inevitable questions, then why not here rather than anywhere else?

      It was far enough from the sight and sound of the sea.

      In a cottage in the woods she would take a spell of solitude and reflection. Such a place would give her the privacy she needed and the independence, much more than a hotel or a bed and breakfast. There were still almost two weeks of her summer vacation remaining and she could spend that time alone, thinking, and walking and making some plans for the future. At the end of it she would have to go back to Boston, to the job that she now needed more than ever, but maybe, Leonie thought, her mind running ahead, if she kept a cottage she could come back to it when she needed to. It would be her own place, not permanent enough to be a tie but still somewhere she could depend on. Somewhere that was neither Boston nor Pittsharbor and so free of all the associations that clung to the familiar places.

      ‘Was that hot-dog good?’

      ‘Better than good. Mrs …?’

      ‘Brownlow.’

      ‘Mrs Brownlow, I’m looking for a rental cottage. Not for too long, maybe only a couple of weeks while I sort some things out. Do you know if this one is still available?’

      She looked doubtful. ‘Jim Whitsey’s place? It’s a ways out of town, I wouldn’t know who’s up there right now. But you could give Jim a call, he’s generally at home in the day since he retired. Phone’s right out there on the front wall.’

      Two hours later, after a series of wrong turnings on the woodland roads, Leonie sat in the sun on the cottage step waiting for Jim Whitsey. Goldenrod and magenta spikes of loosestrife grew in the long grass at her feet. There was plenty of light in the clearing and the mixed woodland encircling it danced with shafts of pale green and gold. It seemed welcoming after the forbidding spruce stands of the Pittsharbor shore.

      Mr Whitsey bumped up the track in a Chevy pick-up. He shook hands and unlocked the cottage door, stepping aside to let Leonie walk in. He was a man of few words.

      There was a woodburner in the main room and the ingrained scent of woodsmoke caught in Leonie’s throat with a reminder of the shadowy room in the Captain’s House. The kitchen was in a corner of the same room, with the bedroom leading off it. The only other room was a tacked-on bathroom at the rear, with an old water-heater and a green-stained bath. A large spider was stranded in the bottom. Leonie opened the window and carefully deposited it outside. ‘I’ll take it.’

      ‘Two weeks in advance. Cash.’

      ‘I’ll have to drive back into town to the bank.’

      ‘Yup.’

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