Chapter One

NUMBER 7

When I awoke after sleeping alone for the first time in almost two years, I hoped I was wrong about the cold. I was pretty sure it had made itself right at home behind my eyes and deep in my throat, but I still wanted to fight it. I was too busy for a cold, it was just that simple.

    Wasn't it hard enough just getting Abby out the door in the morning, and then keeping up with the endless pageant of wife beaters, drunk drivers, and petty thieves who paraded through the Chittenden County court system every day?

    And wasn't my house alone sufficiently burdensome? I was determined to raise Abby in the only home she'd ever known, a century-old farmhouse I'd purchased with Elizabeth in East Bartlett--a small collection of houses, a church, and a general store in the hills six miles east of the main village itself. It was on a paved road and it had a paved driveway, but otherwise a realtor would have been hard put to call it convenient--especially for a single father working almost twenty miles away.

    Often it was a nightmare just leaving Burlington in time to be back in Bartlett by six-thirty at night so I could retrieve my daughter from the various homes around the day-care center where she would stay between five P.M.--when the day care closed its doors for the day--and the moment I arrived in the village. Some months, Abby would spend that hour and a half at the home of the neighbors to the north of the center, with a nice, playful sixteen-year-old with the inappropriately elderly name of Mildred. But Mildred played field hockey in th