“The Red Sox are up. I got to go.”

“There’s money in it for you.”

Buster held the door. “How much?”

Walter Stanley put his foot on the threshold. “Twenty-five cents for every book I take, hardcover or paperback.”

On television, the crowd roared. Buster’s eyes shifted toward the living room.

The guy said, “I can see you’re a hard bargainer. Fifty cents. I’ll take your books home, look them over, and any I sell, I’ll share the profits.”

“I don’t think so.” Buster tried to close the door again.

But Walter Stanley’s foot was in the way. “I’d love to see the last few innings. I … I played in minor leagues, myself.”

“You did? Where?”

“Made it to Triple A. Played half a season for Pawtucket.”

“The Pawtucket Red Sox? The Pawsox?”

“I got some great stories.”

So Buster let Walter Stanley, book scout and ex-minor leaguer, into the house.

But Walter Stanley wasn’t always his name, and he was no baseball player, and he wasn’t looking for a book but a document he had reason to believe Buster knew about. He was also the last person that Buster McGillis ever saw.

The next day, Buster’s friend, Morris Bindle, found him.

Buster was dead in his recliner, his oxygen tank empty, his ashtray full of cigarettes, and a rerun of the Red Sox game playing on television.

By then, the man who called himself Walter Stanley was in New Hampshire, observing the habits of a certain history professor from Dartmouth.

THE PROFESSOR’S NAME was Stuart Conrad. And he liked to imagine ice.

Even in the calm October dawn, when his breath was a wisp in the air and winter was just a shadow beyond the northern mountains, he imagined ice, because ice had shaped New England. Ice and ideas.

Professor Conrad knew more about ideas. But each morning, when he and his dog explored the world together, he thought more about ice.

The dog, a yellow Lab with a powerful head and gentle jaws, scampered out of the house ahead of him and leaped onto the backseat of the Volvo.

The professor took a sip from his coffee mug, gave the wipers a quick turn to clear the dew from the windshield, and off he went.

He drove past Fraternity Row and along the edge of the college green, where the mist hovered a few feet above the grass, and he fancied that he could see the ghost of Daniel Webster strolling down from Dartmouth Hall. He did not notice the Chrysler Sebring that slipped out of a parking spot to follow him.

He turned on Wheelock Street and headed for the Connecticut River.

Thirty thousand years earlier, thought the professor, after the mountains had risen and settled, the ice had begun to move south. After ten thousand years, it covered all of New England under a mile-thick sheet that sat for ten thousand years more. Then it began to retreat. It scraped the tops off the mountains and dropped them into the valleys. It left lonely boulders in some places, great veins of gravel in others. It retreated around hillocks of ice so dense that they did not melt for centuries more. And it scoured huge furrows that would become the riverbeds of New England.

The Connecticut was born in far northern New Hampshire, in three lakes that were born of the streams that drained the woods of western Maine. It widened quickly, marking the boundary between New Hampshire and Vermont. It bisected Massachusetts, creating two unofficial states, one that looked toward Boston, the other that paid Boston and its politicians as little mind as possible. Then it flowed through the state that took its name, laying down a rich riparian plain on its way to the sea.

In New England, only Rhode Island was not touched by its waters.

If the professor had been thinking more about the cars on the road and less about ancient ice, he might have noticed that the Sebring behind him had Rhode Island plates, and it followed him north on Interstate 91, then west a few miles on Route 4.

The dog began to shiver when they passed the plastic moose in front of the Queechee Village gift shops. He let out a whimper when they pulled into the parking lot near the bridge.

It was October, so people from all over the world were coming to see the foliage. They came in cars and SUVs and lumbering tour buses from Boston. Most of them were retirees, taking that fall trip they’d always dreamed about. And retirees got up early. But not this early.

The lot was empty, except for that black Chrysler Sebring pulling in. Its driver was a younger man, around thirty-five.