Long Shot by Paul Monette

the likes of Edna Temple, who thought of innocence in anyone over eighteen as a sort of emotional disorder. Any other time, the three of them would have surely broken off relations over something as big as this. That they worked out a truce instead was tribute to a passion for the fixing of priorities. To clear the name of Harry Dawes, they let their crossed connections bring them close. They didn’t go to bed that night till they were all agreed what crime it was. If they meant to bring a murderer to earth, they had to stick together.
    So he probably wondered what he was doing all alone, at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning, walking across the canyon in a charcoal three-piece suit. Sid and Edna had let him off at the western end of the reservoir. Then they streaked away in the rented car—no time to lose, at an hourly rate—and left him to his own devices. He felt like a lonely terrorist dropped behind enemy lines. He had not been provided with a ticket home. He scanned the top of the hills as he skirted along the water’s edge, in case they had a lookout posted. He was enough of a fatalist to know they’d pin him down eventually, but he hoped to get inside, at least, before the hammer fell.
    Because he kept one eye on Steepside, he saw the two figures on horseback the moment they came through the gate. He ducked in the bushes and waited them out—elbows and knees in the damp earth, and a colony of potato bugs bumping about in their armor not two inches from his nose. When at last the two riders crossed his path, he pulled in his head like a turtle and winced at the fall of every hoof. As they passed three feet from where he lay, he held there steady as a canyon snake. He was crouched at the bottom of the incline where the horses shifted gears and sped away. And he only heard the one remark he was doomed to misconstrue.
    â€œThere was no Harry Dawes,” he heard the rider shout.
    A moment later, he scrambled up out of the sage. He watched them put some distance down along the straightaway, as he flicked at the mud on the knees of his suit.
    Then he turned once more to the uphill climb. In a matter of seconds, he was striding up the switchbacks. He was out of view from above by now, but knew he had to get off the trail. They used it as a getaway.
    So that, he thought, was Vivien Willis Cokes. He wasn’t sure when he first glimpsed her, high on the hill above him. Now that he’d watched her ride away, he realized she was smaller than they made her look in photographs. She had the looseness in her limbs of a girl ten years younger. As faultlessly dressed for a morning’s ride as Vogue could ever wish. And something else: If they told her Harry Dawes didn’t exist, if that was the way they solved it, then she must live in a sort of cocoon.
    He stepped off the trail to the bare wet hillside. His feet went sliding, on account of his cordovan wingtips, and he had to grab hold of the sagebrush so as to scramble up to firmer ground. He hopped from rock to rock and clumped through patches of knee-high grass. He tried not to clutter his mind with too much thinking ahead. He had not climbed anything other than stairs since he was twelve years old. He just kept going, till he came up over a rise and saw the beams and cantilevered bays looming above him on the heights, where Steepside rode the hilltop like a ship.
    He sat on a boulder and wiped his brow. From his left vest pocket he took out a Hershey bar. Edna had stocked him with energy, nuts and raisins and candy, so his spirits wouldn’t flag halfway. He tore it open and bit it in two. Then he looked about at the great green crater of the canyon, as if to get his bearings. It only took a second to pick her out, far below on a jut of land beneath a shady tree. She was breaking bread with a cowboy. Behind them on the trail, the horses cropped at the hillside sweets.
    He didn’t know quite what to make of the other-world