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the engineering team some months after the tunnel project had begun. He remembered the moment when blasting had broken through the far side of the mountain, when a jagged hole of light had penetrated the dark rock. And he remembered, too, the feeling he’d had when he and Rose first arrived in Laurel. Surrounded on three sides by mountains and cinched in by the belt loop of the Mad River, which cut a gorge through Mt. Abraham and was continually fed by the rainwater washing down its granite slopes, Laurel felt comfortingly invulnerable. The low, rock-strewn grasslands to the west were given over mostly to dairy farms and, farther north toward Lake Champlain, to orchardists, who planted their hillsides with rising and falling Vs of trees, which gave the land a sprightly buoyancy.
    Conrad had imagined that they had severed time itself when they arrived that first day in the town square. He saw how mountainsrose up around them on three sides, how the forests and dappled orchards on the fourth side made a maze as dense and elaborate as any grown to thwart a fairy tale’s sorcerer. Nuclear missiles, airborne diseases, even the insidious contagion of society’s most perverse tendencies, would fall away against the town’s natural geo graphic baffles.
    Parking their car and walking across the velvet grass to the ornate bandstand in the center of the square, they had looked around, pleased. A Victorian affair with ornate trim capping the hexagonal roof like the fringe on an old-fashioned surrey, the bandstand was used in summer for a concert series and, occasionally, for a blood-donation clinic. Then, nurses would mount the short flight of steps to the varnished floor within, their white tunics fluttering, a Red Cross banner tied to the posts and flapping mightily. A steady trickle of people, who arrived with their sleeves rolled past their elbows, would be admitted under the pink lights and given juice in white paper cones, their dark blood draining into pint bags.
    For the town’s bicentennial celebration, Harrison Supplee, who owned the hardware store and took it upon himself to orchestrate most civic events, had asked Conrad if he wouldn’t see whether he might do something with the bandstand. “Spruce it up, you know,” he’d said vaguely, as the two of them had stood there one morning surveying it. Conrad, whose gilding business was by then an unqualified success, had looked it over, pronounced it sound, and spent the spring and summer evenings preceding the festivities gilding the interior framework of the bandstand. The delicately arched rafters and soaring cross ties had been painted with gold leaf, endowing the construction with a weightless grace. Rose said it looked as though you could pluck off a piece and it would melt in your mouth like sugar.
    Those long evenings, as the sky grew dark, purple martins andbats had crossed the square, and Conrad had painted away happily in the glare of a utility light. The twin lamps by the hotel’s green awning had glowed yellow. Single blue lights burned in the rear rooms of stores fronting the square, throwing window displays—an old-fashioned mannequin, the shining, curved armatures of plumbing fixtures, the dark spines of books—into exaggerated relief. From a distance, it appeared as though Conrad were a man on a boat, riding the dark surface of a still lake.
    But that first day, sitting on the rounded benches within the bandstand, he and Rose had looked out at the square—the needle hands of the clock on the granite wall of the bank moving slowly around, the cordial progress of slight traffic, the flapping canopy over the doors of the hotel, the white spire of the Congregational church glinting in the sun. Rose had gripped his arm. “Oh, we’ll be happy here,” she’d said. “I can feel it.”
    Now, arriving at the bottom of the hill at River Road, Conrad stopped at the bulwark by the water and stared out