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house. Stoat laid a twenty on the bar and raced home. Once inside the front door, he sidestepped the dog and hurried to his den. The room did not appear ransacked, and none of the personal items on his desk had been taken or moved out of place.
    Then Palmer Stoat noticed the polished glass eyeballs, arranged in a pentagram star. The geometry was so flawless that it appealed in an occult way to Stoat’s obsession with neatness and order. (The inverse manifestation of this fetish was a compulsion to jettison all traces of potential untidiness—every scrap of trash, waste or rubbish—with no regard for the consequences. It’s what made Stoat the impenitent litterbug he was.)
    So he did not disturb the mystery pentagram. Slowly he raised his face to look at the walls; at the stuffed lynx, the timber wolf, the mule deer, the bighorn ram, the elk, the marlin, the tarpon, the peacock bass. Stoat stared at all of them, but they weren’t staring back.
       
    Twilly Spree had a habit of falling in love with any woman who was nice enough to sleep with him. One was named Mae, and she was ten years older. She had straight straw-blond hair, and caramel freckles from her cheeks to her ankles. Her family was wealthy, and she showed an endearing lack of interest in Twilly’s inheritance. He likely would have married her, except for the fact she was already married to a businessman in Singapore. Mae filed for divorce three days after meeting Twilly, but the lawyers said it would take years for her to get free, since her spouse avoided the United States and therefore could not be served with papers. Having nothing else to do, Twilly got on a plane and flew to Singapore and met briefly with Mae’s husband, who quickly arranged for Twilly to be beaten up, arrested in a brothel and deported. After Twilly was returned to Florida, he said in all innocence to Mae: “What’d you ever see in a creep like that?”
    Mae and Twilly lived together five months. She said she wanted him to help her become a free spirit. Twilly had heard the same line from other girlfriends. Without him asking, Mae gave up her bridge league and her Wednesday pedicures and took up the mandolin and bromeliads. Mae’s father became concerned and flew down from Sag Harbor to check Twilly out. Mae’s father was a retired executive from the Ford Motor Company, and was almost single-handedly responsible for ruining the Mustang. To test Twilly’s character, he invited him to a skeet range and placed a 12-gauge Remington in his hands. Twilly knocked down everything they tossed up. Mae’s father said, Sure, but can you hunt? He took Twilly to a quail plantation in Alabama, and Twilly shot the first four birds they jumped. Then Twilly set the gun in the grass and said, That’s plenty. Mae’s father said, What the hell’s the matter with you, we’re just getting warmed up.
    And Twilly said, I can’t eat more than four birds so what’s the point?
    The point, thundered Mae’s father, isn’t the eating. It’s the sport of it!
    Is that so? Twilly said.
    To shoot something fast and beautiful out of the sky, Mae’s father told him. That’s the essence of it!
    Now I see, said Twilly.
    And that evening, as Mae’s father’s chartered King Air took off from a rural Montgomery airport, somebody hiding in the trees with a semiautomatic rifle neatly stitched an X pattern in one wing, rupturing a fuel bladder and forcing the plane to turn back for an emergency landing. The sniper was never found, but Mae’s father went on a minor rampage to the authorities. And while he ultimately failed in his efforts to see Twilly Spree prosecuted, he succeeded in convincing his daughter that she had taken up with a homicidal madman. For a while Twilly missed Mae’s company, but he took satisfaction in knowing he’d made his point emphatically with her father, that the man definitely got the connection between his own vanities and the Swiss-cheese holes that appeared in his