Wolf Point by Edward Falco Page A

the play of light on the ceiling for a minute before he decided to drive into town for supplies and then come back and make breakfast.
    He carried his clothes into the master bedroom, where he sat on the still warm rugs in front of the dead fire and dressed. The cabin was quieter even than his home in Virginia, which he had thought, after living a lifetime in New York, was the quietest place on earth. Here, though, the only sound was the rain. If there were boats on the Saint Lawrence, they were either moving silently or they were too far away to hear. No cars. No airplanes. No people. Not even the hum of a refrigerator or the drone of a heating system. Not even, this morning, any wind. Only the soft tapping of a light rain as he pulled on his shoes and slipped into his jacket before creeping down the hall to the living room, where he had expected to find Lester asleep on the couch. Instead of Lester, he saw his photography equipment—a pair of tripods, two leather camera bags, and another equipment bag—in the center of the room atop a crumpled green blanket, as if Lester, after removing the equipment from the Rover, had taken care not to damage anything by laying it directly on the floor.
    Outside, the grass that grew up to the concrete foundation was slick and wet. He needed to walk only a few feet for an unobstructed view down the hill to the big oak where he had parked the Rover, and where, as he would have guessed, it was no longer parked. From the tire tracks in the mud, he could see where it had been backed up and turned around toward the blacktop. On the road itself, the muddy tire tracks started thick and then faded in the direction of Alexandria Bay. When he remembered that he had left the car keys in his pants pocket, he reached for his wallet, which, of course, wasn’t there either.He closed his eyes and lowered his head and waited in the rain for the first rush of anger and frustration to pass. The sky was a mass of fat clouds moving slowly out to the sea. In daylight, the isolation and the beauty of the area were evident. In front of him, the single road that twisted along the bottom of the hill bracketed by green expanses of trees was the only sign of commerce. Behind him, the row of empty cabins and the river.
    He wiped rain away from his eyes and went around to the back of the cabin, where he found a boulder against a tree and sat with his arms crossed and his knees up, huddled into himself, watching the river, which seemed to be moving rapidly, or at least that was the illusion it gave looking down on it from his height, at his angle. Water smacked the rocks on the shore as white streaks of foam appeared and disappeared all the way across to the Canadian side, only a few miles distant. Scattered across the river were scores of tiny islands interwoven with narrow waterways. T watched the river roll past in the rain for a minute or two, then rose to his feet without premeditation, as if some invisible puppeteer decided to work his strings. He started back for the bedroom, where Jenny was most likely still sleeping. He was soaked. And cold. He could almost feel the warmth of her sleeping body snuggled under covers.
    He found her, however, already awake. She lay on her side just as he had left her, only now her eyes were open. They followed him as he walked down the hall.
    “You’re all wet,” she said.
    T stood in the doorway dripping water. “Lester took the Rover and my wallet. He’s gone.”
    “Probably went to town to get food,” she said. “He took the whole wallet?”
    “Took the keys and wallet out of my pants, while we were sleeping.”
    “He’s so paranoid,” she said. “He probably just wanted to make sure we didn’t go anyplace without him.”
    “You think he’s coming back?”
    Jenny smiled as if his misperceptions were too cute for words. She stretched her feet under the covers. “Trust me,” she said. “He’ll be back.”
    T watched her for a moment while she stared back at