If there was an active Katie Callahan gene in the boy, maybe it was his penchant for risk-taking. He skied too fast, he drove a car too fast, and he was more than fast with girls; it seemed to his writer father that Joe just took too many chances.

“Maybe that’s the Katie in him,” Danny had said to his dad.

“Maybe,” the cook replied; Tony Angel didn’t like to think that anything of that awful woman had gotten into his grandson. “Then again, it might be your mother, Daniel. Rosie was a risk-taker, after all-just ask Ketchum.”

In the time he’d spent looking at those photographs of his mother, Danny could have written a novel-though he’d stopped looking at the photos, for a while, after he learned the truth about his mom and Ketchum and his father. He’d once tried to give the photos to his dad, but Tony Angel wouldn’t take them. “No, they’re yours-I can see her very clearly, Daniel.” His father tapped his temple. “Up here.”

“Maybe Ketchum would like the photos,” Danny said.

“Ketchum has his own pictures of your mother, Daniel,” the cook told him.

Over time, a few of those photos Danny had pressed flat between the pages of the novels left behind in Twisted River-some of them, but no way near all of them-had been sent to him by Ketchum. “Here, I found this picture in one of her books,” the accompanying letter from Ketchum would say. “I thought you should have it, Danny.”

Albeit reluctantly, Danny had kept the photos. Joe liked to look at them. Perhaps the cook was right: Maybe Joe got some of his risk-taking or reckless instincts from his grandmother, not from Katie. When Danny looked at his mom’s pictures, he saw a pretty woman with intense blue eyes, but the drunken rebel who’d do-si-doed two drunken men on the black ice of Twisted River-well, that element of Rosie Baciagalupo, née Calogero, wasn’t evident in the photos her son had kept.

“Just keep an eye on his drinking,” the cook had told his son-he meant young Joe’s drinking. (It was Tony Angel’s way of inquiring if his eighteen-year-old grandson was drinking yet.)

“I suppose there’s the occasional party,” Danny told his dad, “but Joe doesn’t drink around me.”

“The kind of drinking Joe might do around you isn’t the kind we need to worry about,” the cook said.

Joe’s drinking would bear watching, the writer Danny Angel imagined. As for his son’s genetic package, Danny knew more than he cared to remember about the boy’s mom, Katie Callahan; she’d had one whale of an alcohol problem. And in Katie’s case, she’d done more than the “occasional” marijuana, when she and Danny had been a couple-she’d smoked more than a “little” pot, Danny knew.

IT COULD BE ARGUED that Windham College was in its death throes before the end of the Vietnam War. Decreasing enrollment and an inability to meet a loan repayment would force the college to close in 1978, but Danny Angel sensed that there were signs of trouble ahead for Windham well before then. The writer would resign from the college in 1972, when he accepted a teaching job back at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. He’d not written The Kennedy Fathers yet; Danny still had to teach for a living, and for teaching-writing jobs, Iowa is as good as they get. (You have students who are serious, and busy with their own writing, which means you get lots of time to write.)

Danny Angel would publish his second novel and write his third when he was again in Iowa City. In those years, before Joe was a teenager, Iowa City was a great town for Danny’s son, too-pretty good schools, as one would expect in a university town, and a semblance of neighborhood life. Iowa City wasn’t the North End, to be sure-not when it came to restaurants, especially-but Danny had liked being back there.

The writer gave his dad a choice: Tony Angel could come to Iowa City or he could stay in Putney. Danny wanted to keep the Vermont farmhouse. He’d bought the rental property on Hickory Ridge Road, just before he accepted the Iowa offer and resigned from Windham, because he wanted his father to be able to stay in Windham County -if the cook wanted to.

In the cook’s mind, Carmella was the question. For the five years Tony Angel ran the Benevento pizza place in Putney, he’d taken a lot of shopping trips to Boston. It was more than a two-hour drive each way-kind of far for “shopping.” Danny’s dad claimed that he had to buy his pizza sausages at the Abruzzese meat market in the North End-and while he was in his old neighborhood, he might as well stock up on his cheeses, his olives, and his olive oil. But Danny knew that his dad was trying to “stock up” on as much of Carmella as he could. They hadn’t really been able to break things off cleanly.

The cook had invested very little in Benevento; compared to where he’d worked before, in both Coos County and Boston, a pizza place in a poor man’s college town had been relatively easy. He’d bought the building from an aging hippie who’d called himself The Sign Painter; it had looked to Tony Angel like a failing small business, and there was a rumor in town that the sign painter was responsible for the misspelling of the theatre word on the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro. (The word on the marquee of the Main Street movie house was spelled “Theater,” not “Theatre;” for years, the Latchis had sought funds to correct the mistake.) It was no rumor that the sign painter’s wife, an allegedly flaky potter, had recently run out on him. All she’d left the miserable sign painter was her kiln, which gave the cook the idea for his brick pizza oven.

At the time Danny invited him to come to Iowa City, Tony was a little tired of running his own restaurant-a pizza place wasn’t quite the kind of restaurant the cook wanted to own, anyway-and things with Carmella had pretty much run their course. Seeing each other only occasionally, she’d told the cook, had made her feel she was in an illicit relationship instead of a legitimate one. The illicit word sounded to Tony like something that might have come up when Carmella had been confessing her sins-either at St. Leonard or St. Stephen’s, wherever Carmella did her confessing. (Confessing one’s sins was a Catholic thing that had never caught on with the cook.)

Why not just see what the Midwest was like? Tony Angel thought. If he sold it now, the cook could get a little money for Benevento -whereas, if he waited, and if Windham College was going under, which Danny said it was, what would anyone want with a pizza place in Putney?

“Why don’t you just let a fire get out of control in your pizza oven, and then collect the insurance?” Ketchum had asked his old friend.

“Did you burn down Twisted River?” the cook asked Ketchum.

“Hell, it was a ghost town when it burned-it was nothing but an eyesore, Cookie!”

“Those buildings, my cookhouse among them, weren’t nothing, Ketchum.”

“Shit, if that’s how you feel about a little fire, maybe you should just sell your pizza place,” the cook’s old friend told him.

It was hardly a “little” fire that took down what had been the town of Twisted River. Ketchum had planned the torching to perfection. He chose a windless night in March, before mud season; it was before Carl had stopped drinking, too, which was why Ketchum got away with it. No one was able to find the deputy sheriff; in all probability, you couldn’t have woken up the cowboy if you’d found him.

If there’d been any wind, Ketchum would have had to light only one fire-to burn both the town and the cookhouse. But he might have started a forest fire in the process-even in what had been a typically wet month of March, when there was still a lot of snow on the ground. Ketchum wasn’t taking any chances. He liked the forest-it was the town of Twisted River and the cookhouse that he hated. (The night Rosie died, Ketchum had almost cut off his left hand in the cookhouse kitchen; he’d heard Cookie crying himself to sleep while Jane had stayed upstairs with the cook and little Danny.)