An inch wide the stick had been. And lethal in its own right! It made him shiver. He remembered Joe Dixon and Joe Ditson long ago after the war and after they had come out of a Japanese POW camp. Their stories had made him shiver, too. Every now and then he'd catch himself in a weird and frightful reverie of their plight and of Frances' plight. His skin would crawl with the known terrors. His resolve grew in proportion.
  
Phyllis began to relent. Her smile came up more readily.
  
December eventually came howling down out of the Maritimes, the snow drifting at times nearly five feet high across schoolyards and playgrounds and at other times shutting Route One down to a minor crawl. Silas Tully was like a ship on the lone sea of a month of storms, moving anywhere and everywhere in that redoubtable red truck of his, high slung, ground-clearing, ominous in its power, red as a fire bomb, taking winter head on, as it had not been taken on before by a proximal retiree. On his way at times he remembered the awesome and orange Walter Snowfighters of the Eastern Mass. Bus Company and how they had kept much of the North Shore roads clear of snow back there in the days when Frances could have seen them. He passed by places where clear-cut and exact pictures came back to him, full of details and all the background in place, places he had known, obviously places that Frances had known too. He felt

driven. His recall was working in top order and damned if he wouldn't show retirement itself a thing or two, if he had to die trying.
   
Before long every cop in Lynn and Salem intimately knew of him and his mission, and when he passed by their beats or their stations or dropped in again to get the name of a still-living retired cop who might have heard a word or two, they smiled and muttered small asides about senility and Alzheimer's disease, but still held out one last long and thin line of hope for him. They shared the blue charge, and though he may have been against the windmills, they quietly acknowledged his mission and his drive.
  
One of them was a bright young cop from Lynn who had graduated from Salem State. His name was Rick Sanborn and he had read about the case and let much of it filter through his mind. Nothing showed itself to him, nothing that held any light, but after much thought, he came to a conclusion and called Silas Tully about it. What he offered was nothing more than what Noel Rebenkern had offered...the fact of the garroting.
   
"I know it might sound odd to you, Mr. Tully, but that thing with the stick really bothers me. I think it's the most interesting thing there is to discuss. Nothing I can add, or discuss any more than this, but I swear it talks to me when I think about it. Something so apparent about it we can't see it. I feel it in my bones. It's dark and unnatural, as if the devil himself was in on it. You might think I'm crazy or something, but it really hangs on me. I know I've only been around a short time and you're an old hand at all of this, but I just had to tell you how it bugs me all the time. Even when I was in school at Salem State, and I'd be thinking of old cases or tough cases you kind of hear about, this one kept coming at me."
  
They had had a number of discussions about the case. The youngster was adamant, though quite unsure why he was so homed in on the awful stick.  Silas Tully kept a track record of the garrote image. The way it continually reared its ugly head did not go unnoticed.
  
When the preponderance of his gathered facts began to tip itself sideways, threatened to spill itself all over itself, he plotted and laid out a graph. Everything he knew he put onto that graph, and after a hundred attempts of making verticals and horizontals show some attachment or connection, revising the very structure with each attempt, every revision becoming a little clearer, he began to see all the tangibles and intangibles in a different light. No one, he knew, had ever seen what he had seen; at least, not from this perspective. That it was merely a different view, a different focus, was not lost on him at first, because somewhere under his eyes, somewhere on the spread of the page, a single clue might leap out of darkness, one lone bulb or candle glow in the utter darkness of the mystery, one fallible and untested little item would come forward that would unscrew a murder now fifty years unsolved and still counting.
   
In January of that extra tough winter both Phyllis and the chief were on him to slow down, not to quit outright, but to slow down. "Fat chance I'll have at Florida!" Phyllis said when he came late for supper for the third day in a row. "It'll close on empty before we know it. You'll fall over at that damn desk of yours or behind the wheel of that truck and it'll be all over." But even as she said it, she tempered it and laid a soft hand across his shoulder, tapping home her love. One thing Silas Tully always noticed were the small signals left out in the air or in the corner of a room for the taking, a sigh, a tap, a look another soul might never catch a glimpse of, the huge and ponderous world and all of life beating its way at the smallest edge. He heard the microwave's new-tech signal, electronic, radar-related, almost mystic in its new-age music, sounding as if something had been decoded, broken down, realized; she'd been watching for him all the while, as she always did. The warmth of the house slid around him like a favorite jacket taken down from an old nail in the back hallway.
  
Neil Rebenkern, always from some distance watching his old comrade and compatriot, at least understood the drive and the compulsion targeting Silas Tully. He'd spoken once to Reed Clanberry, as Reed rolled himself out from under a cruiser whose transmission had pissed the bed, hydraulic fluid a red stain over a good portion of his shirt and his hands as black as baked potatoes in a camp fire. "What the hell I'm afraid of is that he won't get to his friggin' retirement at all. He'll just close shop one day and check his badge. It'll be all done, and Phyllis will come down here and we'll have a nice chat and she'll go away from here red-eyed and he'll be gone off with all the others." Talking to Reed always helped him, for Reed was always on his back or on his butt while working on one of the cruisers in the police garage, down and dirty in his support of brother officers, though his bent was machines, how they ran, what the theories said they should do.
  
"He's a big boy, chief," said the elongated and prone Reed, still laid back on the roller, the near seven feet of him hanging over the small roller like one of the Three Stooges on a child's bed. "So let him have his way at this latest escapade. He ain't been wrong but once I know of, and we didn't want to celebrate that one too much. Just let old Jarhead go his way. If it's there, if anything's there, he'll bring it home."
 
Noel Rebenkern nodded and walked off. It was cut and pasted. Even the damn mechanic had the good-to-the-bone feeling about Silas. He walked off, pulling at his belt line for the second serious time in one day. The skinny, overly long mechanic had unsettled him. Damn, I ought to know better that that!   In the corridor between the garage and his office his words had no hollowness to them. From then on he would keep his mouth shut. What the hell! His own retirement was not that far off either. Either one of them, Silas or him, could slide into oblivion on the greased skids, as long as nothing came out of the woodwork to scald the town manager or the board of selectmen, as long as nothing could screw up the works. Saugus was, normally, a quiet town split by the pike, having its own brand of politics, its own nirvana this side of Boston and that side of Manchester-by-the-sea and Prides Crossing and the dollar signs sitting behind stone walled estates.
  
The reveries were coming on him again. They were rather serious now, full-blown pictures of those other times, and the feelings that went with them. Such moments might have frightened him if the anchor of Silas was not always a part of those reveries; good old Silas, jawed-down Silas, bulldog Silas, comrade. The old sentiments piled on top of one another and he realized Silas had made life most interesting, had colored it for him, and had drawn from him the highest comparisons every step of the way. Even as he walked away from the long mechanic those thoughts came on him again; he pictured Silas, for the umpteenth thousandth time, poring over details, his mind locked down to one microbial trail, pulling straight with him an array of genes and DNA's, and the chief thought of being in the fourth row of Dodger Stadium the year before and Pavarotti, alone even with the other two tenors, locking on, getting ready to sing Nessum Dorma. In a quick moment of change he then compared his old friend to Denver's John Elway stepping up to the line, down six points, thirty-eight seconds to go, and the ball on his own 38 yard line. Piece of cake!  
  
Clarity and reality hit him as he thought of Frances Cochran and her crushed head and battered face and immolated body. An utter helplessness came over him. He thought all there was left for her was Silas Tully, like Pavarotti getting ready, Elway about to make something happen.  A jolt of unnerving energy flushed through his body, carrying him away from comparisons. All there was left for her was Silas Tully!
   
Silas Tully, for all the thoughts and considerations and condemnations of his task, for all the small asides strewn in his path or beside it, for all the occasional almost-suppressed laughter that trickled in his passing wake like weak-kneed commentaries, kept at it. Again and again and again, for long days on end and weeks on end, he kept at it. And the terribly long winter passed and spring seeped onto the land. Freshness and a new eagerness not thought possible came on him just as the land swelled with newness of its own. On him had also come a few clarifications expressing themselves with all their own vigor: (1) whoever that foul murderer was, he must have at one time been in the wide and circuitous net which the police had cast out after the discovery of poor Frances' body, a net which swung as wide as Idaho and Ohio, a net which had caught up fellow students and neighbors and itinerants and those usual suspects who had records or who had been recently released from prison and he had been let out of that net because of a perfected alibi or other reason; and (2) the act of the garroting itself which he could not shake. No matter how hard he tried, he could not dissuade himself that there was nothing insignificant about the employment of the horrible stick. If the stick had been used before she had been bludgeoned, he surmised, she would have been dead anyway, or close to it, and there would have been no reason for smashing her head open. If her head had been smashed first, there would have been no reason to garrote her. He made it that simple to himself. That the killer was maniacal did not say he was stupid, for he had eluded the police for half a century…if he was not dead…if he had not died out there on a Pacific beach…if he had not died in Marine garb in a Marine firefight. No way! Never a Marine!
   
Late April had come and the new smells were everywhere, and the chief's boat, Just Too Blue, was in the water of the Saugus River, right near the penciled memorial stone erected for another police officer downed in his tracks. Silas had spent a lot of time over the years fishing on the craft with Noel or just beering-out out there on the Atlantic, away from phones and the traffic and the mayhem, aging themselves on the ageless sea. Now retirement was rearing its head for good and the dreadful punches of time came at him, coming brutal and bony and downhill all the way, punching their way into his abrupt consciousness at times, walking him to the edge. Retirement might be like a death sign.
   
Frances, gasping for air, choking, pain riding her body like a malevolent lover, was with him every second of his wakeful hours and had obviously been with him as he slept. Her grip was frightful and grew more ominous. Phyllis felt it, he felt it. Unknown sources in his body made demands on him, sometimes twisted him and he fought to maintain his equilibrium, his sense of purpose, his life-long effort of trying to be personally uninvolved with crime and its victims. In this case it did not work. There was something else.... he did not feel blameless and that bothered him.
   
Wanting a new perspective, a new lift to go along with new raw feelings, he borrowed Just Too Blue for a day and sat, anchor down, out near Egg Rock, the mound of granite rising from the bay off King's Beach where he could look back at Lynn. The tide rolled under him. Time rolled under him. The agony was no less and no clearer out on the cool surface. He wished he could look back omnisciently at one piece of a clue, a small piece of any clue...the single strand of red hair found on her body, the car with the yellow wheel spokes, a tire track left undetected, a footprint, a thumb print. If only he could look into the minds of the suspects, still believing that he had once been in the net.

And the garrote came back to him there on the wide sea.
   
Visibly, willfully, he turned from it, shunting it aside. His graph was spread out on the deck, the awfully intricate grid of lines seeming to go unconnected and crazily in every direction. But somehow the lines came plotted to him and a number of variables of their connections appeared readable.  He wanted to tighten some screws, but futility came at him. On the high sea, the endless water spreading behind him as if going on to infinity, chances were slim to none at catching that blackguard murderer. They were like the chances of finding one wave in the unending series of waves rolling under him to be a special wave. Here Silas knew himself to be a very minor drop of matter in this vastness, as well as in the matter of this business of solution. For a moment he felt overwhelmed by his own tininess, one small wave among the thousands and thousands of waves, until the thought came to him that for Frances Cochran, fifty years dead, forgotten by so many, so many of her peers gone, her parents long gone, he was the only hope, the last hope of resolve.