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Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Second Sight:

Toward closing time on a Friday afternoon in August, Neddie Doyle called me at my office. "Mike needs you," she said.

I started to make a joke out of it. I said, "Hell, Mike doesn't need anybody. Least of all me."

But when she said, "Yeah, Brady, he does, and he insists that it's you," her tone told me that this was no joking matter.

I asked her what was up, but all she'd say was, "It's Mike's idea. He should tell you."

It occurred to me that Mike could've called as easily as Neddie, and the fact that he hadn't gave me a spooky feeling. The Doyles lived in Hancock, New Hampshire, a two-hour drive from Boston. I told her I could be there the next morning.

I hadn't seen Mike Doyle since he abruptly and mysteriously quit his Federal Street firm three years ago and moved to Hancock in the sticks of southwestern New Hampshire. I still remembered him as the idealistic guy I'd known in law school, the Peace Corps volunteer who'd given two years of his young life to teaching African villagers about irrigation. He'd been a whip-smart, handsome, athletic stud who ran rings around Charlie McDevitt and me when we played Sunday-morning touch football at the Yale Law School, argued rings around us in late-night discussions about constitutional law, and picked up girls that snubbed the rest of us in New Haven bars.

After we graduated, the young idealist quickly matured, if that's the word for it, into a relentless litigator. Mike made partner in two years, got his name added to the letterhead, earned about a million dollars a year, and quickly turned stodgy old Fisk, Evans, and Burleson into F. E. B. and D., the top-billing law firm in Boston. When I was still a struggling attorney determined to make it as a lone wolf, Mike threw my way cases that were too insignificant for his big-time firm. In those days, I took anything, and he helped me to get my feet under me.

I was Mike's personal lawyer, and I suppose if I'd ever wanted to sue somebody, I'd've hired him. Smart lawyers always hire other lawyers to do their legal work. Mike and I were both smart that way.

Over the years, we remained friends. Not buddies, the way he and Charlie and I had been in law school, but friends. Mike was a good guy. His success didn't go to his head. When our kids were young, our families would get together a few times a year for cookouts, and now and then Mike and I would meet after work for a drink to talk about old times.

Neddie, Mike's wife, was a gifted watercolorist. She also happened to be gorgeous, of course. Christa, their daughter, was vivacious like her mother and smart and athletic like her dad. And lucky Mike, he managed to retire from the rat race after just twenty years of it. Some guys manage to get it all right the first time around. It was hard not to envy Mike Doyle.

Or at least, that's what I used to think.

* * *

It took a little less than two hours on Saturday morning to drive to Hancock, New Hampshire from my apartment on the Boston waterfront. I headed for Peterborough, then followed Neddie's directions through a maze of wooded country roads, found the dirt driveway that wound through the pine forest and up the hill to the clearing where the Doyle house overlooked Mt. Monadnock.

It was a pretty nice house -- all glass and raw cedar and New Hampshire granite -- and the way it perched there on the hilltop with its rock gardens and stone walls and fieldstone paths and clumps of paper birch, it looked like part of the rocky landscape.

Neddie greeted me at the door, gave me a hug, took my hand, and led me inside. "Don't be shocked," she said.

But I was.

Mike Doyle was lying in a hospital bed that they'd set up in the big living room. A gray-haired nurse was fiddling with the needle in the back of his hand. Plastic bags filled with transparent fluids hung on the aluminum rack beside the bed, and thin tubes snaked down from the bags to the needle. More tubes sneaked out from under the thin blanket that covered Mike and emptied into bags hanging off the foot of his bed. A blue oxygen tank sat in the corner of the room.

Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass wall, the view of the green, rolling New Hampshire hills and, on the horizon, craggy Mt. Monadnock, was spectacular on this sunny August morning. But Mike's head was turned away from the vista, and his eyes were shut, and his breathing was slow.

In the couple of years since I'd last seen him, Mike Doyle had become an old man. His skin had that translucent look that you see on very old people, and it stretched so tight over his cheekbones that it looked more like a skull than a face. His hair had gone white.

Neddie, who was standing beside me, touched my arm. "He's not going to wake up for a while," she said. "It's the morphine. I'm sorry. He's desperate to talk to you. He's usually okay in the morning. Come on. I'll get us some coffee. Let's go out on the terrace."

It was one of those sticky August mornings in New England that promised to turn downright hot, with thunderstorms building in the afternoon, but out there on the Doyles' fieldstone patio high above the surrounding valleys, the breeze was cool and the air smelled sweet.

Neddie poured some coffee, and we sat in the big wooden armchairs.

"I didn't even know he was sick," I said.
"That's why he quit the firm," Neddie said. "It's some damn exotic parasite he picked up in Africa. He was fine for over twenty years. Didn't even know anything was wrong. Then . . ." She shrugged. "The doctors said there was nothing they could do about it. Mike told the partners he was leaving the day after he found out. He didn't want anybody to . . . to watch him deteriorate."

"He's dying?" I said.

"Oh, yes." She smiled softly. "He spent two years trying to convince the villagers they shouldn't wash their dishes in the water downstream from where their animals sloshed around in it. He showed them how to dig wells and irrigation ditches and taught them to boil their drinking water. Ironic, huh?"

"How long?"

"A month. Six weeks at the most. He's gone downhill fast this past year or so."

"Jesus," I said. "I'm sorry."
We were quiet for a minute. Then Neddie said, "He wanted to talk to you himself. But I guess I better speak for him." She looked at me. "This is his idea, not mine."

"If there's something I can do . . ."

"Mike thinks there is," she said. "He's got it in his head that you're the only one who can. It's about Christa."