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So I ran.

The village of Haines Junction, Yukon saved my life.

I’d been running two years when I found it—through desert villages in northern Mexico, the Baja Peninsula, the towns and cities of America.

I worked a summer in a lumber yard in Macon, Georgia.

I was a busboy for one week in Baltimore.

A ranch hand for a west Texas winter.

I slept in tents.

Homeless shelters.

Bunkhouses.

Fields beneath stars on cool clear nights.

I grew my hair out.

I didn’t shave.

I didn’t bathe.

I left places.

Arrived at new places.

I stopped reading.

Stopped writing.

I fulfilled my alcoholic tendencies.

I traveled by bus.

Hitchhiked.

Jumped a train once through South Dakota.

I never talked to anyone.

Because my name had become synonymous with murder and matricide I lived in constant fear, suspected everyone.

At a construction site in London, Kentucky, the foreman asked if I liked to read thrillers. Maybe he was just being friendly. I wasn’t there the next day to find out.

My face appeared on FBI posters.

I was the subject of television specials.

Books were written about me.

My novels sold like crazy.

People wanted to know how a serial murderer writes.

They said my stories were windows into an evil soul.

I became notorious.

A darkly comic figure of pop culture.

My name instilled fear.

My name was a punch line.

My name meant murder.

Having never been married, I was accustomed to living alone, but I’d not experienced this grade of utter abandonment.

I was homeless, hunted, and lonely.

It was no way to live.

In December, two nomadic years after my escape from the snowbound Wyoming desert, I took a bus to Vancouver, bought a plane ticket, and flew to Whitehorse, Yukon, a thousand miles north.

I rented a car and drove the Alaska Highway one hundred fifty kilometers west to the village of Haines Junction at the foot of the St. Elias Mountains. I’d researched the village for a book I never wrote. It seemed like a quiet isolated place to die.

I pulled off the highway outside of town, a vast coniferous forest extending in every direction, great white mountains looming in the west. The temperature held at minus thirty. The sky was gray, dusky, the subarctic sun a halfhearted presence over the distant peaks. The dashboard clock read 1:47 p.m. I would simply walk into the woods, sit down against a tree, and freeze to death. It seemed a peaceful way to go. Vaguely romantic. I thought of Jack London’s "To Build a Fire." I looked forward to that warm euphoric stillness that would come near the end.

Wearing only a T-shirt, I opened the door and stepped out of the car into crusty snow. The cold was beyond comprehension. My eyes burned.

I walked a ways into the woods, chose a leafless aspen, and sat down with my back against the silver bark. I waited. I began to shiver. My stomach rumbled. I thought, Why die hungry? I got up, walked back to the car, and drove into the village, home to eight hundred residents though far fewer in these bleak winter months. I parked downtown in front of a diner called Bill’s, the street decorated for Christmas. I reached to open the car door but stopped.

I put my head on the steering wheel.

Wept.

But those dark times rarely haunted me. I’d lived in the woods outside of Haines Junction now for five years and it was sweet and essential to be this other man.

To the community my name was Vincent Carmichael and I’d become a full-fledged resident. The townsfolk might’ve described me as quiet but friendly. I was the American with long brown hair and an untamed beard. Everyone’s acquaintance. No one’s friend. But that was okay here. People came to this remote northwest corner of Canada to escape things. Haines Junction was a lodestone for damaged people.

During the tourist season, I worked as a chef in the kitchen of The Lantern, one of two fine-dining establishments in the village. There I earned enough money to live through the winter months, October to April, when there was no work and little to do but stay indoors near a fire.

I spent half my savings on a cabin. Six miles