Excerpt of The Man in the Crooked Hat by Harry Dolan

Chapter 1

On the shore of the Huron River, Michael Underhill sits in the grass with his back against a tree. He watches the sunlight glinting on the water. He listens to the burble of the current.

The woman is next to him, her back against the same tree. You could see them from the river, if you were out there in a canoe. But it's late in the season. There's no one on the water.

Underhill picks up a leaf from the ground beside him.

"Sometimes I think too much," he says in a quiet voice. "I remember this thing that happened, an accident. Just dumb. I was driving to the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon, coming up to an intersection. I had the green light. There was a fire truck idling on the cross street. He had the red, so he was waiting. But he must have gotten a call, because suddenly he turned on his lights and siren."

The leaf is yellow and dry. Underhill twirls it by the stem.

"Now I have to decide. Hit the brakes or go on through. It happened fast, but I remember thinking: This is not good. I hit the brakes. And I stopped in time, right at the intersection. But the car behind me didn't. It slammed into me—I can still remember the sound. The driver was a kid. I think she was nineteen."

He holds the leaf steady and looks at the veins.

"No one got hurt, and even the damage to my car wasn't too bad. I had to take it in and have them replace the bumper and the tail-lights. The girl's car was worse, but it wasn't my problem. I wasn't at fault. What the whole thing amounted to was a bad afternoon and some phone calls to the insurance company and a week of inconvenience while my car was in the shop. But I kept thinking about it. It didn't have to happen. I could have made a different choice. When the driver of the fire truck turned on his siren, he didn't move out into the intersection right away. I could have gone through and there would have been no harm. No damage. No hassle. So why didn't I go through?"

Underhill closes his hand around the leaf and feels it crumble. The woman is silent beside him.

"It still bugs me, even though it happened years ago," he says. "And this thing today, I know it's going to be the same. I'm going to wonder if it might have turned out differently. If I had taken a different tack. If I had talked to you in a different place. It'll bother me for a long time. In my defense, I think I handled it pretty well. I was friendly. You were friendly. We struck up a conversation. It's broad daylight in a public park. You shouldn't have been nervous. I didn't think you were nervous. And I worked my way up to it—to asking you the question. It wasn't a hard question. There's no reason it should have made you suspicious. If you had given me a straight answer, that would have been the end of it. I would have smiled and gone away. No harm. All you had to do was tell me the truth."

He opens his hand and lets the pieces of the leaf fall to the ground.

"But I could see that you weren't comfortable," he says. "You didn't trust me. That wasn't right. I didn't deserve it. And then pretending you didn't remember. That's just clumsy. Anyone would have seen through that. What was I supposed to do? Let it go? How could I? By then we'd gone too far. You were starting to be afraid of me. You shouldn't have been afraid of me."

Underhill gets up from the ground and brushes his hands over the front of his shirt. A cool wind touches his face. The woman doesn't stir.

Out in the river, a fish breaks the surface of the water.

"You shouldn't have been afraid of me," Underhill says again.

The woman's camera is lying in the grass where it fell. Underhill lifts it by the strap, swings it back and forth to build momentum, and hurls it out into the middle of the river.

He returns to the tree and crouches down. He touches a lock of hair that has fallen over the woman's forehead. He takes her ear-rings from her ears, takes her wedding band. Throws them out into the water. They don't go as far, but it's far enough.

He stands on the shore, wondering if there's anything else he should do.

"This is as much on you as it is on me," he says after a while. "I'm not going to feel bad about this."

One last look around. His hat is in the grass. He picks it up and puts it on his head and walks away.