For Valli Shaio and Gregorio Kohon

The chasm was merely one of the
orifices of that pit of blackness
that lies beneath us, everywhere.

Ghosts are always hungry.

I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me … the most dreadful thing …

In West Virginia, he came awake with a jerk and realized that for some seconds he had been driving in his sleep. “We’re going to pull up and take a nap.” He left the freeway outside of Clarksburg and drove on a state road until he saw against the sky a red revolving sign with the words PIONEER VILLAGE on it in white. He was keeping his eyes open only by will power. His mind did not feel right: it seemed that tears were hanging just behind his eyes and that very soon he would involuntarily begin to weep. Once in the parking lot of the shopping center, he drove to the row farthest from the entrance and backed the car up against a wire fence. Behind him was a square brick factory which manufactured plastic animal replicas for display—for Golden Chicken trucks. The factory’s asphalt yard was half-filled with giant plastic chickens and cows. In their midst stood a giant blue ox. The chickens were unfinished, larger than the cows and dully white.

Before him lay this nearly empty section of the lot, then a thick cluster of cars in rows, and then the series of low sandstone-colored buildings which was the shopping center.

“Can we look at the big chickens?” the girl asked.

He shook his head. “We’re not getting out of the car, we’re just going to sleep.” He locked the doors and rolled up the windows. Under the child’s steady unexpectant gaze he bent over, felt under the seat and drew out a length of rope. “Hold your hands out,” he said.

Almost smiling, she held out her small hands, balled into fists. He pulled them together and wound the rope twice about her wrists, knotted it, and then tied her ankles together. When he saw how much rope was left, he held out the surplus with one arm and roughly pulled the child to him with the other. Then he wound the rope about them both, looping them together, and made the final knot after he had stretched out across the front seat.

She was lying on top of him, her hands bunched in the middle of his stomach and her head on his chest. She breathed easily and regularly, as if she had expected no more than what he had done. The clock on the dashboard said that it was five-thirty, and the air was just beginning to turn cooler. He hitched his legs forward and leaned his head back against the headrest. To the noises of traffic, he fell asleep.

And awakened it seemed immediately, his face filmed with sweat, the faintly acrid, greasy odor of the child’s hair in his nostrils. It was dark now; he must actually have slept for hours. They had gone undiscovered— imagine being found in a shopping center parking lot in Clarksburg, West Virginia, with a little girl tied to your sleeping body! He groaned, shifted himself to one side and woke the girl. Like him, she came immediately into wakefulness. She bent back her head and regarded him. There was no fear, only intensity in her gaze. He hurriedly untied the knots, dragged the rope from around them; his neck complained when he sat upright. “You want to go to the bathroom?” he asked.

She nodded. “Where?”

“Beside the car.”

“Right here? In the parking lot?”

“You heard me.”

He thought again that she nearly smiled. He looked at the girl’s intense small face, framed in black hair. “You’ll let me?”

“I’m going to be holding onto your hand.”

“But you won’t look?” For the first time, she showed concern.

He shook his head.

She moved her hand to the lock on her door, but he shook his head again and took her wrist and held it tightly. “Out on my side,” he said and pulled up his own lock and got out, still clutching the girl’s bony wrist. She began to edge sideways toward the door, a girl of seven or eight with short black hair, wearing a little dress of some thin pink material. On her otherwise bare feet were faded blue canvas sneakers, fraying at the tops of the heels. Childishly, she put one bare leg down first and then wiggled around to swing the other out of the car.

He pulled her around to the factory fence. The girl bent her head back and looked up. “You promised. You won’t watch.”

“I won’t watch,” he said.

And for a moment he did not watch, but let his head roll back as she stooped, forcing him to lean sideways. His eyes drifted over the grotesque plastic animals behind the fence. Then he heard some fabric—cotton— moving over skin, and looked down. Her left arm was extended so that she was as far from him as she could get. The cheap pink dress was pulled up over her waist. She too was looking at the plastic animals. When the girl was finished, he took his eyes from her, knowing that she would glance at him. She stood up and waited for him to tell her what to do next. He pulled her back toward the car.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked.

He laughed out loud with surprise: this cocktail-party question! “Nothing.”

“Where are we going? Are you taking me someplace?”

He opened the door and stood aside as she climbed back into the car. “Someplace,” he said. “Sure, I’m taking you someplace.” He got in beside her, and she moved across the seat to the door.

“Where?”

“We’ll see when we get there.”

“It’s a city.”

“Like New York?”

“Yes.”

“Like Clarksburg?”

He nodded.

“Are we always going to sleep in the car?”

“Not always.”

“Can I play the radio?”

He said yes, and she leaned forward and twisted the knob. The car was invaded by static, two or three voices speaking at the same time. She punched another button and the same crowded hiss erupted from the speaker. “Twist the dial,” he said. Frowning, her face concentrated, she began slowly to turn the selector. In a moment she had locked onto a clear signal, Dolly Parton. “I love this,” she told him.

So for hours they drove south through the songs and rhythms of country music, the stations weakening and changing, the disk jockeys swapping names and accents, the sponsors succeeding each other in a revolving list of insurance companies, toothpaste, soap, Dr Pepper and Pepsi-Cola, acne preparations, funeral parlors, petroleum jelly, bargain wristwatches, aluminum siding, dandruff shampoos: but the music remained the same, a vast and self-conscious story, a sort of seamless repetitious epic in which women married truckers and no-good gamblers but stood by them until they got a divorce and the men sat in bars plotting seductions and how to get back home, and they came together hot as two-dollar pistols and parted in disgust and worried about the babies. Sometimes the car wouldn’t start, sometimes the TV was busted; sometimes the bars closed down and threw you out onto the street, your pockets turned inside out. There was nothing that was not banal, there was no phrase that was not a cliche, but the child sat there satisfied and passive, dozing off to Willie Nelson and waking up to Loretta Lynn, and the man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.

Once he asked her, “Have you ever heard of a man named Edward Wanderley?”

She did not reply but regarded him levelly.

“Have you?”

“Who’s he?”

“He was my uncle,” he said, and the girl smiled at him.

“How about a man named Sears James?”

She shook her head, still smiling.

“A man named Ricky Hawthorne?”

Again she shook her head. There was no point in continuing. He did not know why he had bothered to ask in the first place. It was even possible that she had never heard those names. Of course she had never heard them.

—Asshole, that’s not your girl, who is that girl?

Then they would put him in a cell and begin to beat him, working on him methodically with nightsticks, turning his skin purple …

But none of that happened.

She woke as he was watching her. “I have to go to the bathroom again,” she said.

“Are you okay? You’re not sick, are you?”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Okay,” he grunted and moved to open his door.

“Let me go by myself. I won’t run away. I won’t do anything. I promise.”

He looked at her serious face, her black eyes set in olive skin.

“Where could I go, anyhow? I don’t even know where I am.”

“I don’t either.”

“So?”

It had to happen sometime: he couldn’t hold on to her at every moment. “You promise?” he asked, knowing the question was foolish.

She nodded. He said, “All right.”

“And you promise you won’t drive away?”

“Yes.”

She opened the door and left the car. It was all he could do not to watch her, but it was a test, not to watch her. A Test. He wished overwhelmingly that he had her hand trapped in his fist. She could be scrambling up the bank, running off, screaming … but no, she was not screaming. It often happened that the terrible things he imagined, the worst things, did not occur; the world gave a hitch and things went back to the way they had always been. When the girl climbed back into the car he was flooded with relief—it had happened again, no black hole had opened up for him.

He closed his eyes and saw an empty freeway, divided by white lines, unreeling before him.

“I have to find a motel,” he said.

She leaned back into the seat, waiting for him to do whatever he wanted. The radio was turned low, and sounds from a station in Augusta, Georgia—a silky, lilting guitar—drifted out. For a moment, an image leaped to his mind—the girl dead, her tongue protruding, her eyes bulging. She gave him no resistance! Then for a moment he was standing—it was as if he were standing—on a street in New York, some street in the East Fifties, one of those streets where well-dressed women walk sheepdogs. Because there was one of those women, walking along. Tall, wearing beautifully faded jeans and an expensive shirt and a deep tan, walking along toward him with her sunglasses pushed to the top of her head. A huge sheepdog padded beside her, wagging its rump. He was nearly close enough to see the freckles exposed by the undone top buttons of the woman’s shirt.

Ah.

But then he was right again, he heard the low guitar music, and before he switched on the ignition he patted the top of the girl’s head. “Have to get us a motel,” he said.

For an hour he just continued, protected by the cocoon of numbness, by the mechanics of driving: he was almost alone on the dark road.

“Are you going to hurt me?” the girl asked.

“How should I know?”

“You won’t, I think. You’re my friend.”

Then it was not “as if’ he were on the street in New York, he was on that street, watching the woman with the dog and the suntan come toward him. Again he saw the little random scattering of freckles below her collarbone—he knew how it would taste if he put his tongue there. As often in New York, he could not see the sun, but he could feel it—a heavy, aggressive sun. The woman was a stranger, unimportant … he was not supposed to know her, she was just a type … a taxi went by, he was aware of iron railings on his right side, the lettering on the windows of a French restaurant on the other side of the street. Through the soles of his boots, the pavement sent up heat. Somewhere above, a man was shouting one word over and over. He was there, he was: a portion of his emotion must have shown in his face, for the woman with the dog looked at him curiously and then hardened her face and moved to the outer edge of the sidewalk.

Could she speak? Could someone in whatever sort of experience this was utter sentences, audible ordinary human sentences? Could you talk to the people you met in hallucinations, and would they answer back?

He opened his mouth. “I have to”—to get out, he was going to say, but he was already back in the stalled car. A soggy lump that had once been two potato chips lay on his tongue.

What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?

The maps seemed to show that he was only a few miles from Valdosta. He drove unthinkingly on, not daring to look at the child and therefore not knowing if she were awake or sleeping, but feeling her eyes on him nonetheless. Eventually he passed a sign which informed him that he was ten miles from the Friendliest City in the South.

It looked like any southern town: a little industry on the way in, machine shops and die-stampers, surreal groups of corrugated metal huts under arc lights, yards littered with cannibalized trucks; further in, wooden houses in need of paint, groups of black men standing on corners, their faces alike in the dark; new roads went scarring through the land, then ended abruptly, weeds already encroaching; in the town proper, the teenagers patrolling endlessly, vacantly in their old cars.

He passed a low building, incongruously new, a sign of the New South, with a sign reading PALMETTO MOTOR-IN; he reversed down the street back to the building.

A girl with upswept lacquered hair and candy-pink lipstick gave him a meaningless, dead smile and a room with twin beds “for myself and my daughter.” In the register he wrote: Lamar Burgess, 155 Ridge Road, Stonington, Conn. After he handed her a night’s payment in cash, she gave him a key.

Their cubicle contained two single beds, an iron-textured brown carpet and lime-green walls, two pictures—a kitten tilting its head, an Indian looking into a leafy gorge from a clifftop—a television set, a door into a blue-tiled bathroom. He sat on the toilet seat while the girl undressed and got into bed.

When he peeked out to check on her, she was lying beneath a sheet with her face to the wall. Her clothes were scattered on the floor, a nearly empty bag of potato chips lay beside her. He ducked back into the bathroom, stripped and got into the shower. Which blessed him. For a moment he felt almost as though he were back in his old life, not “Lamar Burgess” but Don Wanderley, one-time resident of Bolinas, California, and author of two novels (one of which had made some money). Lover for a time of Alma Mobley, brother to defunct David Wanderley. And there it was. It was no good, he could not get away from it. The mind was a trap—it was a cage that slammed down over you. However he had got to where he was, he was there. Stuck there in the Palmetto Motor-In. He turned off the shower, all traces of the blessing departed.

In the little room, only the weak light over his bed to illuminate those ghostly surroundings, he pulled on his jeans and opened his suitcase. The hunting knife was wrapped in a shirt, and he unrolled it so the knife fell out on the bed.

Carrying it by the chunky bone handle, he crossed to the girl’s bed. She slept with her mouth open; perspiration gleamed on her forehead.

For a long time he sat beside her, holding the knife in his right hand, ready to use it.

But this night he could not. Giving up, giving in, he shook her arm until her eyelids fluttered.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I want to sleep.”

“Who are you?”

“Go away. Please.”

“Who are you? I’m asking, who are you?”

“You know.”

“I know?”

“You know. I told you.”

“What’s your name?”

“Angie.”

“Angie what?”

“Angie Maule. I told you before.”

He held the knife behind his back so that she could not see it.

“I want to sleep,” she said. “You woke me up.” She turned her back to him again. Fascinated, he watched sleep settle over her: her fingertips twitched, her eyelids contracted, her breathing changed. It was as if, to exclude him, she had willed herself to sleep. Angie— Angela? Angela Maule. It did not sound like the name she had given him when he had first taken her into the car. Minoso? Minnorsi? Some name like that, an Italian name—not Maule.

He held the knife in both hands, the black bone handle jammed into his naked belly, his elbows out: all he had to do was thrust it forward and jerk it up, using all his strength …

In the end, sometime around three in the morning, he crossed over to his bed.

“What questions?” He had been keeping his back turned, at her request, as she got into the pink dress, and he suddenly had the feeling that he had to turn around, right now, to see her. He could see his knife in her hands (though it was back inside the rolled-up shirt), could feel it just beginning to prick his skin. “Can I turn around now?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Slowly, still feeling the knife, his uncle’s knife, beginning to enter his skin, he turned sideways on the chair. The girl was sitting on her unmade bed, watching him. Her intense unbeautiful face.

“What questions?”

“You know.”

“Tell me.”

She shook her head and would not say any more.

“Do you want to see where we’re going?”

The girl came toward him, not slowly but measuredly, as if not wishing to display suspicion. “Here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the map. “Panama City, in Florida.”

“Will we be able to see the water?”

“Maybe.”

“And we won’t sleep in the car?”

“No.”

“Is it far away?”

“We can get there tonight. We’ll take this road—this one—see?”

“Uh huh.” She was not interested: she hung a little to one side, bored and wary.

She said: “Do you think I’m pretty?”

No. Other things were worse.

“You want to come in with me, Angie?”

She opened the door on her side and got out in that childish way, as if she were climbing down a ladder; he held the screen door open for her. A fat man in a white shirt sat like Humpty Dumpty on a counter. “You cheat on your income tax,” he said. “And you’re the first customer of the day. You believe that? Twelve-thirty and you’re the first guy through the door. No,” he said, bending forward and scrutinizing them. “Hell no. You don’t cheat Uncle Sam, you do worse than that. You’re the guy killed four-five people up in Tallahassee the other day.”

“What—?” he said. “I just came in here for some food—my daughter—”

“Gotcha,” the man said. “I used to be a cop. Allentown, Pennsylvania. Twenty years. Bought this place because the man told me I could turn over a hundred dollars’ profit a week. There’s a lot of crooks in this world. Anybody comes in, I can tell what kind of crook they are. And now I got you straight. You’re not a killer. You’re a kidnapper.”

“No, I—” he felt sweat pouring down his sides. “My girl—”

“You can’t shit me. Twenty years a cop.”

He began to look frantically around the store for the girl. Finally he saw her staring gravely at a shelf stocked with jars of peanut butter. “Angie,” he said. “Angie—come on—”

“Aw, hold on,” the fat man said. “I was just tryin’ to get a rise out of you. Don’t flip out or nothin’. You want some of that peanut butter, little girl?”

Angie looked it him and nodded.

“Well, take one off the shelf and bring it up here. Anything else, mister? ‘Course if you’re Bruno Hauptmann, I’ll have to bring you in. I still got my service revolver around somewhere. Knock you flat, I’ll tell you that for free.”

It was, he saw, all a weary mockery. Yet he could scarcely conceal his trembling. Wasn’t that something an ex-cop would notice? He turned away toward the aisles and shelves.

“Hey, listen to this,” the man said to his back. “If you’re in that much trouble, you can just get the hell out of here right now.”

“No, no,” he said. “I need some things—”

“You don’t look much like that girl.”

Blindly, he began taking things off the shelves, anything. A jar of pickles, a box of apple turnovers, a canned ham, two or three other cans he didn’t bother to look at. These he took to the counter.

The fat man, Buddy, was staring at him suspiciously. “You just shook me up a little bit,” he said to him. “I haven’t had much sleep, I’ve been driving for a couple of days …” Invention blessedly descended. “I have to take my little girl to her grandmother, she’s in Tampa—” Angie swiveled around, clutching two jars of crunchy peanut butter, and gaped at him as he said this—”uh, Tampa, on account of her mother and me split up and I have to get a job, get things put together again, right, Angie?” The girl’s mouth hung open.

“Your name Angie?” the fat man asked her.

She nodded.

“This man your daddy?”

He thought he would fall down.

“Now he is,” she said.

The fat man laughed. ” ‘Now he is!’ Just like a kid. Goddam, You figure out the brain of a kid, you got to be some kind of genius. All right, nervous, I guess I’ll take your money.” Still sitting on the counter, he rang up the purchases by bending to one side and punching the buttons of the register. “You better get some rest. You remind me of about a million guys I took into my old station.”

Outside, Wanderley said to her, “Thanks for saying that.”

“Saying what?”: pertly, self-assuredly. Then again, almost mechanically, eerily, ticking her head from side to side: “Saying what? Saying what? Saying what?”

But inside, when he said that he wanted a room for himself and his daughter, the old man merely glanced incuriously at the dark-haired child in the car, and said, “Ten-fifty a day. Sign the register. You want food, try the Eat-Mor down the road apiece. There’s no cooking in the bungalows. You planning on staying more than one night, Mr.—” He swung the register toward him. “Boswell?”

“Maybe as long as a week.”

“Then you’ll pay the first two nights in advance.”

He counted out twenty-one dollars, and the manager gave him a key. “Number eleven, lucky eleven. Across the parking lot.”

The room had whitewashed walls and smelled of lavatory cleaner. He gave it a perfunctory look around: the same iron carpet, two small beds with clean but worn sheets, a television with a twelve-inch screen, two awful pictures of flowers. The room appeared to have more shadows in it than could be accounted for. The girl was inspecting the bed against the side wall. “What’s Magic Fingers? I want to try it. Can I? Please?”

“It probably won’t work.”

“Can I? I want to try it. Please?”

“All right. Lie down on it. I have to go out to do some things. Don’t leave until I come back. I have to put a quarter in this slot, see? Like this? When I get back we can eat.” The girl was lying on the bed, nodding with impatience, looking not at him but at the coin in his hand. “We’ll eat when I get back. I’ll try to get you some new clothes, too. You can’t wear the same things all the time.”

“Put in the quarter!”

He shrugged, pushed the quarter into the slot and immediately heard a humming noise. The child settled down onto the bed, her arms fully extended, her face tense. “Oh. It’s nice.”

“I’ll be back pretty soon,” he said, and went back out into the harsh sunlight and for the first time smelled water.

The Gulf was a long way off, but it was visible. On the other side of the road he had taken into town the land abruptly fell off into a wasteland of weeds and rubble at its bottom bisected by a series of railroad tracks. After the tracks another disused weedy patch of land ended at a second road which veered off toward a group of warehouses and loading sheds. Beyond this second road was the Gulf of Mexico—gray lathery water.

He walked down the road in the direction of town.

Carrying two large shopping bags, he emerged from Treasure Island and turned in the direction that was downtown. Diesel fumes drifted toward him, cars with Keep the Southland Great bumper stickers rolled by. Men in short-sleeved shirts and short gray crewcuts moved along the sidewalks. When he saw a uniformed cop trying to eat an icecream cone while writing out a parking ticket, he dodged between a pickup truck and a Trailways van and crossed the street. A rivulet of sweat issued from his left eyebrow and ran into his eye; he was calm. Once again, disaster had not happened.

He discovered the bus station by accident. It took up half a block, a vast new-looking building with black glass slits for windows. He thought: Alma Mobley, her mark. Once through the revolving door, he saw a few aimless people on benches in a large empty space—the people always seen in bus stations, a few young-old men with lined faces and complex hairdos, some children racketing around, a sleeping bum, three or four teenage boys in cowboy boots and shoulder-length hair. Another cop was leaning against the wall by the magazine counter. Looking for him? Panic started in him again, but the cop barely glanced at him. He pretended to check the arrivals-and-departures board before moving, with exaggerated carelessness, to the men’s room.

He locked himself into a toilet and stripped. After dressing up to the waist in the new clothes, he left the toilet and washed at one of the sinks. So much grime came off that he washed himself again, splashing water onto the floor and working the green liquid soap deep into his armpits and around the back of his neck. Then he dried himself on the roller and put on one of the new short-sleeved shirts—a light blue shirt with thin red stripes. All of his old clothes went into the Treasure Island bag.

Outside, he noticed the odd grainy grayish blue of the sky. It was the sort of sky he imagined as hanging forever over the keys and swamps much further south in Florida, a sky that would hold the heat, doubling and redoubling it, forcing the weeds and plants into fantastic growth, making them send out grotesque and swollen tendrils … the sort of sky and hot disk of sun which should always, now that he thought of it, have hung over Alma Mobley. He stuffed the bag of old clothes in a trash barrel outside a gun shop.

In the new clothes his body felt young and capable, healthier than it had all through that terrible winter. Wanderley moved down the shabby southern street, a tall well-built man in his thirties, no longer quite aware of what he was doing. He rubbed his cheek and felt that blond man’s feathery stubble—he could go two or three days without looking as though he needed a shave. A pickup driven by a sailor, five or six sailors in summer whites standing up in the rear of the truck, drove past him, and the sailors yelled something—something cheerful and private and derisory.

“They don’t mean no harm,” said a man who had appeared beside Wanderley. His head, with an enormous hair-sprouting wart dividing one eyebrow, came no higher than Wanderley’s breastbone. “They’s all good boys.”

He smiled and uttered a meaningless agreement and moved away—he could not go back to the motel, could not deal with the girl; he felt as though he might faint. His feet seemed unreal in the Hush Puppies—too far down, too far from his eyes. He found that he was walking rapidly down a descending street, going toward an area of neon signs and movie theaters. In the grainy sky the sun hung high and motionless. Shadows of parking meters stood out, purely black, on the sidewalk: for a moment he was certain there were more shadows than parking meters. All the shadows hovering over the street were intensely black. He passed the entrance to a hotel and was aware of a vast brown empty space, a brown cool cave, beyond its glass doors.

Almost unwillingly, recognizing a dread familiar set of sensations, he went on in the terrific heat: consciously he kept himself from stepping over the shadows of the parking meters. Two years before the world had gathered itself in this ominous way, had been slick and full of intent—after the episode of Alma Mobley, after his brother had died. In some fashion, literally or not, she had killed David Wanderley: he knew that he had been lucky to escape whatever it was that took David through the Amsterdam hotel window. Only writing had brought him back up into the world; only writing about it, the horrid complicated mess of himself and Alma and David, writing about it as a ghost story, had released him from it. He had thought.

Panama City? Panama City, Florida? What was he doing there? And with that strange passive girl he had taken with him? Whom he had spirited down through the South?

He had always been the “erratic one,” the “troubled one,” the foil to David’s strength, in the economy of family life his poverty the foil to David’s success; his ambitions and pretensions (“You actually think you can support yourself as a novelist? Even your uncle wasn’t that dumb”: his father) the contrast to David’s hard-working good sense, to David’s steady progress through law school and into a good law firm. And when David had bumped into the daily stuff of his life, it had killed him.

That was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Until last winter: until Milburn.

The shabby street seemed to open like a grave. He felt as if one more step toward the bottom of the hill and the sleazy movie theaters would take him down, down, as if it would never stop but turn into an endless falling. Something which had not been there before appeared before him, and he squinted to see it more clearly.

Breathlessly he turned around in the piercing sunlight. His elbow caught someone’s chest, and he heard himself murmuring sorry, sorry to an irritated woman in a white sunhat. He unconsciously began to move quickly back up the street. Back there, looking down to the intersection at the bottom of the hill, he had momentarily seen his brother’s tombstone: it had been small, of purple marble, the words David Webster Wanderley, 1939-1975 carved into it, sitting in the middle of the intersection. He fled.

Yes, he had seen David’s tombstone, but David had none. He had been cremated in Holland, and his ashes flown back to their mother. David’s tombstone, yes, with David’s name, but what sent him rushing back up the hill was the feeling that it was for him. And that if he were to kneel in the middle of the intersection and dig up the coffin, within it he would find his own putrefying body.

He turned into the only cool, welcoming place he had seen, the hotel lobby. He had to sit down, to calm himself; beneath the disinterested regard of a desk clerk and a girl behind a magazine counter, he sank down onto a sofa. His face was clammy. The fabric of the sofa’s upholstery rubbed uncomfortably into his back; he leaned forward, ran his fingers through his hair, looked at his watch. He had to appear normal, as if he were just waiting for someone; he had to stop trembling. Potted palm trees had been placed here and there about the lobby. A fan whirled overhead. A thin old man in a purple uniform stood by an open elevator and stared at him: caught, he looked away.

When noises came to him he realized that since seeing the tombstone in the middle of the intersection he had heard nothing. His own pulse had drowned all other sound. Now the efficient noises of hotel life floated in the humid air. A vacuum cleaner hummed on an invisible staircase, telephones dimly rang, the elevator doors closed with a soft whoosh. Around the lobby, small groups of people sat in conversation. He began to feel that he could face the street again.

“I got you some new clothes.”

“I don’t want new clothes, I want food.”

He crossed the room to sit in the empty chair. “I thought you’d get tired of wearing the same dress all the time.”

“I don’t care what I wear.”

“Okay.” He tossed the bag onto her bed. “I just thought you might like them.”

She did not respond.

“I’ll feed you if you answer some questions.”

She turned away from him and began picking at the sheets, wrinkling them and smoothing them out.

“What’s your name?”

“I told you. Angie.”

“Angie Maule?”

“No. Angie Mitchell.”

He let it go. “Why haven’t your parents sent the police out to find you? Why haven’t we been found yet?”

“I don’t have any parents.”

“Everybody has parents.”

“Everybody except orphans.”

“Who takes cares of you?”

“You do.”

“Before me.”

“Shut up. Shut up.” Her face became glossy and self-contained.

“Are you really an orphan?”

“Shut up shut up shut up!”

To stop her screaming he lifted the canned ham out of the box of groceries. “All right,” he said. “I’ll get you some food. We’ll have some of this.”

“Okay.” It was as if she had never screamed. “I want the peanut butter too.”

While he was slicing the ham she said, “Do you have enough money to take care of us?”

She ate in her dedicated way: first she bit off a mouthful of ham, then dipped her fingers in the peanut butter and brought a wad of it home and chewed the two together. “Delicious,” she managed to utter around the food.

“If I go to sleep, you won’t leave, will you?”

She shook her head. “But I can take a walk, can’t I?”

“I guess so.”

He was drinking a can of beer from a six-pack he had picked up at the little store on his way back; the beer and the food together made him drowsy, and he knew that if he did not get to bed, he would fall asleep in the chair.

She said, “You don’t have to tie me onto you. I’ll come back. You believe me, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“Because where could I go? I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“Okay!” he said. Once again, he could not talk to her as he wished: she was in control. “You can go out, but don’t be gone too long.” He was acting like a parent: he knew that she had put him in this role. It was ludicrous.

He watched her go out of the mean little room. Later, rolling over in bed, he dimly heard the door clicking shut and knew that she had, after all, come back. So she was his.

He rose, went to his suitcase and took out the rolled-up shirt and went back to stand beside his bed. He held the shirt by the collar and let gravity carry the hunting knife to the bed, unrolling the shirt as it fell. When it hit the bed it was too heavy to bounce. Wanderley picked it up and hefted it.

Holding the knife once again behind his back, he shook the girl’s shoulder. Her features seemed to blur before she turned over and dug her face into the pillow. He grasped her shoulder again and felt the long thin bone, the prominent wing jutting out from her back. “Go ‘way,” she muttered into the pillow.

“No. We’re going to talk.”

“It’s too late.”

He shook her, and when she did not respond, tried to roll her over by force. Thin and small as she was, she was strong enough to resist. He could not make her face him.

Then she turned over by herself, as if in contempt. Lack of sleep showed in her face, but beneath the puffiness she looked adult.

“What’s your name?”

“Angie.” She smiled carelessly. “Angie Maule.”

“Where do you come from?”

“You know.”

He nodded.

“What were your parents’ names?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who took care of you before I picked you up?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“They aren’t important. They were just people.”

“Was their name Maule?”

Her smile became more insolent. “Does it matter? You think you know everything anyhow.”

“What do you mean, ‘They were just people’?”

“They were just people named Mitchell. That’s all.”

“And you changed your name yourself?”

“So what?”

“I don’t know.” That was true.

So they looked at one another, he sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the knife behind him and knowing that whatever was going to happen, he would be unable to use it. He supposed that David too had been unable to take life—any life but his own, if he had done that. The girl probably knew he was holding the knife, he thought, and simply dismissed it as a threat. It was not a threat. He too was probably not a threat She had never been even apprehensive of him.

“Okay, let’s try again,” he said. “What are you?”

For the first time since he had taken her into the car, she really smiled. It was a transformation, but not of a kind to make him feel easier: she did not look any less adult. “You know,” she said.

He insisted. “What are you?”

She smiled all through her amazing response. “I am you.”

“No. I am me. You are you.”

“I am you.”

“What are you?” It came out in despair, and it did not mean what he had meant the first time he asked it.

Then just for a second he was back on the street in New York, and the person before him was not the stylish suntanned anonymous woman, but his brother David, his face crumbled and his body dressed in the torn and rotting clothing of the grave.

… the most dreadful thing …

Of all the rooms in which they habitually met, this was Ricky’s favorite—the library in Sears James’s house, with its worn leather chairs, tall indistinct glass-fronted bookcases, drinks on the little round tables, prints on the walls, the muted old Shiraz carpet beneath their feet and the rich memory of old cigars in the atmosphere. Having never committed himself to marriage, Sears James had never had to compromise his luxurious ideas of comfort. After so many years of meeting together, the other men were by now unconscious of the automatic pleasure and relaxation and envy they experienced in Sears’s library, just as they were nearly unconscious of the equally automatic discomfort they felt in John Jaffrey’s house, where the housekeeper, Milly Sheehan, forever bustled in, rearranging things. But they felt it: each of them, Ricky Hawthorne perhaps more so than the others, had wished to possess such a place for himself. But Sears had always had more money than the others, just as his father had had more money than theirs. It went back that way for five generations, until you reached the country grocer who had cold-bloodedly put together a fortune and turned the James family into gentry: by the time of Sears’s grandfather, the women were thin, palpitating, decorative and useless, the men hunted and went to Harvard and they all went to Saratoga Springs in the summers. Sears’s father had been a professor of ancient languages at Harvard, where he kept a third family house; Sears himself had become a lawyer because as a young man he had thought it immoral for a man not to have a profession. His year or so of schoolmastering had shown him that it could not be teaching. Of the rest, the cousins and brothers, most had succumbed to good living, hunting accidents, cirrhosis or breakdowns; but Sears, Ricky’s old friend, had bluffed his way through until, if he was not the handsomest old man in Milburn—that was surely Lewis Benedikt—he was the most distinguished. But for the beard, he was his father’s double, tall and bald and massive, with a round subtle face above his vested suits. His blue eyes were still very young.

Ricky supposed that he had to envy that too, the magisterial appearance. He himself had never been particularly prepossessing. He was too small and too trim for that. Only his mustache had improved with age, growing somehow more luxuriant as it turned gray. When he had developed little jowls, they had not made him more impressive: they had only made him look clever. He did not think that he was particularly clever. If he had been, he might have avoided a business arrangement in which he was unofficially to become a sort of permanent junior partner. But it had been his father, Harold Hawthorne, who had taken Sears into the firm. All those years ago, he had been pleased—even excited—that he would be joined by his old friend. Now, settled into an undeniably comfortable armchair, he supposed that he was still pleased; the years had married them as securely as he was married to Stella, and the business marriage had been far more peaceful than the domestic, even if clients in the same room with both partners invariably looked at Sears and not himself when they spoke. That was an arrangement which Stella would never have tolerated. (Not that anyone in his right mind, all through the years of their marriage, would have looked at Ricky when he could have looked at Stella.)

Yes, he admitted to himself for the thousandth time, he did like it here. It went against his principles and his politics and probably the puritanism of his long-vanished religion too, but Sears’s library—Sears’s whole splendid house—was a place where a man felt at ease.

Stella had no compunctions about demonstrating that it was also the sort of place where a woman too could feel at ease. She didn’t mind now and then treating Sears’s house as though it were her own. Thankfully, Sears tolerated it. It had been Stella, on one of those occasions (twelve years ago, coming into the library as if she led a platoon of architects), who had given them their name. “Well, there they are, by God,” she had said, “The Chowder Society. Are you going to keep my husband away from me all night, Sears? Or aren’t you boys through telling your lies yet?” Still, he supposed it was Stella’s perpetual energy and constant needling which had kept him from succumbing to age as old John Jaffrey had. For their friend Jaffrey was “old” despite his being six months younger than Hawthorne himself and a year younger than Sears, and in fact only five years older than Lewis, their youngest member.

Lewis Benedikt, the one who was supposed to have killed his wife, was seated directly across from Ricky, an image of expansive good health. As time rolled through them all, subtracting things, it seemed only to add to Lewis. It hadn’t been true when he was younger, but these days he bore a definite resemblance to Cary Grant. His chin would not sag, his hair would not fall. He had become almost absurdly handsome. This evening, Lewis’s big placid humorous features wore—like all their faces—an expression of expectancy. It was generally true that the best stories were told here, in Sears’s house.

“Who’s on the griddle tonight?” asked Lewis. But it was only courtesy. They all knew. The group called the Chowder Society had only a few rules: they wore evening clothes (because thirty years ago, Sears had rather liked the idea), they never drank too much (and now they were too old for that anyhow), they never asked if any of the stories were true (since even the outright whoppers were in some sense true), and though the stories went around the group in rotation, they never pressured anyone who had temporarily dried up.

Hawthorne was about to confess when John Jaffrey interrupted. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, and then responded to the others’ inquisitive glances, “no, I know it’s not me, and a good thing too. But I was just thinking that in two weeks it will be a year to the day since Edward died. He’d be here tonight if I hadn’t insisted on that damned party.”

“Please, John,” said Ricky. He didn’t like to look directly at Jaffrey’s face when it showed his emotions so clearly. His skin looked like you could push a pencil straight through it and draw no blood. “All of us know that you were not to blame yourself.”

“But it happened in my house,” insisted Jaffrey.

“Calm down, doc,” Lewis said. “You’re not doing yourself any good.”

“I’ll decide that.”

“Then you’re not doing the rest of us any good,” Lewis said with the same bland good humor. “We all remember the date. How could we forget?”

“Then what are you doing about it? Do you think you’re acting as though it never happened—as though it was normal? Just some old poop kicking the bucket? Because if so, let me inform you that you’re not.”

He had shocked them into silence; even Ricky could think of nothing to say. Jaffrey’s face was gray. “No,” he said. “You’re damned well not. You all know what’s been happening to us. We sit around here and talk like a bunch of ghouls. Milly can hardly stand having us in my house anymore. We weren’t always like this—we used to talk about all sorts of things. We used to have fun—there used to be fun. Now there isn’t. We’re all scared. But I don’t know if some of you are admitting it. Well, it’s been a year, and I don’t mind saying that I am.”

“I’m not so sure I’m scared,” said Lewis. He took a sip of his whiskey and smiled at Jaffrey.

“You’re not so sure you’re not, either,” snapped the doctor.

Sears James coughed into his fist, and everybody immediately looked at him. My God, thought Ricky: he can do that whenever he wants, just effortlessly capture our attention. I wonder why he ever thought he couldn’t be a good teacher. And I wonder why I ever thought I could hold my own with him. “John,” Sears said gently, “we’re all familiar with the facts. All of you were kind enough to go through the cold to come here tonight, and none of us are young men anymore. Let’s continue.”

“But Edward didn’t die at your house. And that Moore woman, that so-called actress, didn’t—”

“Enough of that,” Sears commanded.

“Well, I suppose you remember how we got on this kick,” said Jaffrey.

Sears nodded, and so did Ricky Hawthorne. It had been at the first meeting after Edward Wanderley’s odd death. The remaining four had been hesitant—they could not have been more conscious of Edward’s absence had an empty chair been placed among them. Their conversation had stuttered and stalled through half a dozen false beginnings. All of them, Ricky had seen, were wondering if they could bear to continue to meet. Ricky knew that none of them could bear not to. And then he had had his inspiration: he had turned to John Jaffrey and said, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

Dr. Jaffrey had surprised him by going pink; and then had set the tone of all their subsequent meetings by saying, “I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me—the most dreadful thing …” and following it by telling what was in effect a ghost story. It was riveting, surprising, frightening … it took their minds off Edward. They had gone on like that ever since.

“Do you really think it’s just coincidence?” asked Jaffrey.

“Don’t follow,” Sears grumped.

“You’re dissembling, and it’s beneath you. I mean that we started on this tack, me first, after Edward …”

His voice trailed off, and Ricky knew that he was caught between died and was killed.

“Went west,” he put in, hoping for lightness of touch. Jaffrey’s stony lizardlike eye, darting at him, told him he’d failed. Ricky leaned back in the opulent chair, hoping to vanish into the luxurious background and be no more conspicuous than a water stain on one of Sears’s old maps.

“Where did you get that from?” Sears asked, and Ricky remembered. It was what his father had used to say when a client died. “Old Toby Pfaff went west last night … Mrs. Wintergreen went west this morning. There’ll be the devil to pay in probate court.” He shook his head. “Yes, that’s right,” Sears said. “But I don’t know …”

“Exactly,” said Jaffrey. “I think something pretty damn funny is going on.”

“What do you advise? I take it that you’re not just talking for the sake of interrupting the proceedings.”

Ricky smiled over the tops of his joined fingers to show that he took no offense.

“Well, I do have a suggestion.” He was doing his best, Ricky saw, to handle Sears carefully. “I think we should invite Edward’s nephew to come here.”

“And what would be the point of that?”

“Isn’t he by way of being an expert in … in this sort of thing?”

“What is ‘this sort of thing’?”

Pushed, Jaffrey did not back down. “Maybe just what’s mysterious. I think he could—well, I think he could help us.” Sears was looking impatient, but the doctor did not let him interrupt. “I think we need help. Or am I the only man here who has trouble getting a decent night’s sleep? Am I the only one who has nightmares every night?” He scanned them all with his sunken face. “Ricky? You’re an honest man.”

“You’re not the only one, John,” Ricky said.

“No, I suppose not,” said Sears, and Ricky looked at him in surprise. Sears had never indicated before that he too might have awful nights—certainly it never showed on that big smooth reflective face. “You have his book in mind, I imagine.”

“Well, yes, of course. He must have done research— he must have had some experience.”

“I thought his experience was of mental instability.”

“Like us,” Jaffrey said bravely. “Edward must have had some reason for willing his nephew his house. I think it was that he wanted Donald to come here, if anything should happen to him. I think he knew that something would happen. And I’ll tell you what else I think. I think we ought to tell him about Eva Galli.”

“Tell him an inconclusive story fifty years old? Ridiculous.”

“The reason it’s not ridiculous is that it is inconclusive,” the doctor said.

Ricky saw that Lewis was as surprised, even shaken, as he that Jaffrey had brought up the story of Eva Galli. That episode lay, as Sears had said, fifty years in their past; none of them had mentioned it since.

“Do you think you know what happened to her?” the doctor challenged.

“Hey, come on,” Lewis put in. “Do we really need that? What the hell is the point?”

“The point is trying to find out what really happened to Edward. I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.”

Sears nodded, and Ricky thought he could detect in his longtime partner’s face a sign of—what? Relief? Of course he would not admit to it; but that it could be seen at all was a revelation to Ricky. “I’m in a little doubt about the reasoning,” Sears said, “but if it would make you happy I suppose we could write to Edward’s nephew. We have his address in our files, don’t we, Ricky?” Hawthorne nodded. “But to be democratic, I’d like to put it to a vote first. Shall we just verbally agree or disagree and vote like that? What do you say?” He sipped from his glass and looked them over. They all agreed. “We’ll start with you, John.”

“Of course I say yes. Send for him.”

“Lewis?”

Lewis shrugged. “I don’t care one way or the other. Send for him if you want.”

“That’s a yes?”

“Okay, it’s a yes. But I say don’t drag up the Eva Galli business.”

“Ricky?”

Ricky looked at his partner and saw that Sears knew how he was going to vote. “No. Definitely no. I think it’s a mistake.”

“You’d rather have us go on as we have been going on for a year?”

“Change is always change for the worse.”

Sears was amused. “Spoken like a true lawyer, though I think the sentiment ill becomes a former member of YPSL. But I say yes, and that makes it three to one. It’s carried. We’ll write to him. Since mine was the deciding vote, I’ll handle it.”

“I’ve just thought of something,” Ricky said. “It’s been a year now. Suppose he wants to sell the house? It’s been sitting empty since Edward died.”

“Faw. You’re inventing problems. We’ll get him here faster if he wants to sell.”

“How can you be sure things won’t get worse? Can you be sure?” Sitting as he had at least once a month for more than twenty years in a coveted chair in the best room he knew, Ricky fervently wished that nothing would change—that they would be allowed to continue, and that they would simply tease out their anxieties in bad dreams and stories. Looking at them all in the lowered light as a cold wind battered the trees outside Sears’s windows, he wished for nothing more than that: to continue. They were his friends, he was in a way as married to them as a moment ago he had considered he was to Sears, and he gradually became aware that he feared for them. They seemed so terribly vulnerable, sitting there and regarding him quizzically, as if each of the others imagined that nothing could be worse than a few bad dreams and a bi-weekly spook story. They believed in the efficacy of knowledge. But he saw a plane of darkness, cast by a lampshade, cross John Jaffrey’s forehead and thought: John is dying already. There is a kind of knowledge they have never confronted, despite the stories they tell; and when that thought came into his well-groomed little head, it was as though whatever was implied in the knowledge he meant was out there somewhere, out in the first signs of winter, out there and gaining on them.

Sears said, “We’ve decided, Ricky. It’s for the best. We can’t just stew in our own juices. Now.” He looked around the circle they made, metaphorically rubbing his hands, and said, “Now that’s settled, who, as Lewis put it, is on the griddle tonight?”

Within Ricky Hawthorne the past suddenly shifted and delivered a moment so fresh and complete that he knew he had his story, although he’d had nothing planned and had thought he would have to pass; but eighteen hours from the year 1945 shone clearly in his mind, and he said, “Well, I guess it’s me.”

After the other two had left, Ricky stayed behind, telling them that he was in no hurry to get out into that cold. Lewis had said, “It’ll put blood in your cheeks, Ricky,” but Dr. Jaffrey had merely nodded—it really was unseasonably cold for October, cold enough for snow. Sitting alone in the library while Sears went off to freshen up their drinks, Ricky could hear the ignition of Lewis’s car grinding away in the street. Lewis had a Morgan which he’d imported from England five years before, and it was the only sports car Ricky had really liked the looks of. But the canvas top wouldn’t be much protection on a night like this; and Lewis seemed to be having a lot of trouble getting the car to start. There. He’d nearly got it. In these New York winters, you really needed something bigger than Lewis’s little Morgan. Poor John would be frozen by the time Lewis got him home to Milly Sheehan and the big house on Montgomery Street, around the corner and seven blocks up. Milly’d be sitting in the semi-dark of the doctor’s waiting rooms, keeping herself awake so that she could jump up as soon as she heard his key in the door, help him off with his coat and pour a little hot chocolate into him. As Ricky sat listening, the Morgan’s engine coughed into life—he heard them drive away and pictured Lewis clapping a hat on his head, grinning at John and saying, “Didn’t I tell you this little beauty would perform?” After he’d dropped John off, he’d leave town altogether, zipping along Route 17 until he was out in the woods, and go back to the place he’d bought when he had returned. Whatever else Lewis had done in Spain, he had earned a lot of money.

Ricky’s own home was literally just around the corner, not a five-minute walk away; in the old days he and Sears had walked to their office in town every day. In warm weather they sometimes still did: “Mutt and Jeff,” as Stella said. This was directed more at Sears than himself—Stella had never actually liked Sears. Of course she had never let this submerged dislike interfere with her attempts to dominate him a little. There was no question that Stella would be waiting up with hot chocolate: she’d have gone to sleep hours ago, leaving only a hall light burning upstairs. It was Stella’s conviction that if he was going to indulge himself at his friends’ houses and leave her behind, he could knock around in the dark when he got home, bumping his knees on the glass and chrome modern furniture she had made him buy.

Sears came back into the room with two drinks in his hands and a freshly fired-up cigar in his mouth. Ricky said, “Sears, you’re probably the only person I know to whom I could admit that sometimes I wish I’d never got married.”

“Don’t waste your envy on me,” Sears said. “I’m too old, too fat and too tired.”

“You’re none of those things,” he answered, accepting the drink Sears gave him, “you just have the luxury of being able to pretend you are.”

“Oh, but you pulled out the prize plum,” Sears said. “The reason you wouldn’t say what you’ve just said to anyone else is that they’d be stupefied. Stella is a famous beauty. And if you said it to her, she’d brain you.” He sat back in the chair he’d occupied earlier, stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. “She’d slap a box together, dump you in it, bury you in five seconds flat and then run off with an athletic forty-year-old smelling of salt water and bay rum. The reason you can tell me is that—” Sears paused, and Ricky feared that he’d say, I sometimes wish you’d never married too. “Is it that I am hors de combat, or is it hors commerce?”

Listening to his partner’s voice, holding his drink, Ricky thought of John Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt speeding away to their houses, of his own redecorated house waiting, and was aware of how settled their lives were; of how much they had found a comfortable routine. “Well, which is it?” Sears asked, and he replied, “Oh, in your case hors de combat, I’m sure,” and smiled, stingingly aware of their closeness. He remembered what he had said before, all change is change for the worse, and thought: that’s true, God help us. Ricky suddenly saw all of them, his old friends and himself, as on a fragile invisible plane suspended high up in dark air.

“Does Stella know you have nightmares?” Sears asked.

“Well, I didn’t know that you did,” Ricky answered, as though it were a joke.

“I saw no reason to discuss it.”

“And you’ve been having them for—?”

Sears leaned further into his chair. “You’ve had yours for—?”

“A year.”

“And I. For a year. So have the other two, apparently.”

“Lewis doesn’t seem ruffled.”

“Nothing ruffles Lewis. When the Creator made Lewis, he said, ‘I am going to give you a handsome face, a good constitution and an equable temperament, but because this is an imperfect world, I’ll hold back a little on brains.’ He got rich because he liked Spanish fishing villages, not because he knew what was going to happen to them.”

Ricky ignored this—it was all part of the way Sears liked to characterize Lewis. “They started after Edward’s death?”

Sears nodded his massive head.

“What do you think happened to Edward?”

Sears shrugged. They had all asked the question too many times. “As you are surely aware, I know no more than you.”

“Do you think we’ll be any happier if we find out?”

“Goodness, what a question! I can’t answer that one either, Ricky.”

“Well, I don’t. I think something terrible will happen to us. I think you’ll bring down disaster on us if you invite that young Wanderley.”

“Superstition,” Sears grumbled. “Nonsense. I think something terrible has already happened to us, and this young Wanderley might be the man who can clear it up.”

“Did you read his book?”

“The second one? I looked at it.”

This was an admission that he had read it.

“What did you think?”

“A nice exercise in genre writing. More literary than most. A few nice phrases, a reasonably well-constructed plot.”

“But about his insights …”

“I think he won’t immediately dismiss us as a bunch of old fools. That’s the main thing.”

“Oh, I wish he would,” Ricky wailed. “I don’t want anybody poking around in our lives. I want things just to keep on going.”

“But it’s possible that he will ‘poke around,’ as you say, and end by convincing us that we are just spooking ourselves. Then maybe Jaffrey will stop scourging himself for that blasted party. He only insisted on it because he wanted to meet that worthless little actress. That Moore girl.”

“I think about that party a lot,” Ricky said. “I’ve been trying to remember when I saw her that night.”

“I saw her,” said Sears. “She was talking to Stella.”

“That’s what everybody says. Everybody saw her talking to my wife. But where did she go afterward?”

“You’re getting as bad as John. Let’s wait for young Wanderley. We need a fresh eye.”

“I think we’ll be sorry,” said Ricky, trying for one last time. “I think we’ll be ruined. We’ll be like some animal eating its own tail. We have to put it behind us.”

“It’s decided. Don’t be melodramatic.”

So that was that. Sears could not be swayed. Ricky asked him about another of the things on his mind. “On our evenings, do you always know what you’re going to say in advance, when it’s your turn?”

Sears’s eyes met his, marvelously, cloudlessly blue. “Why?”

“Because I don’t. Not most of the time. I just sit and wait, and then it comes to me, like tonight. Is it that way with you?”

“Often. Not that it proves anything.”

“Is it like that for the others too?”

“I see no reason why it shouldn’t be. Now, Ricky, I want to get some rest and you should go home. Stella must be waiting for you.”

He couldn’t tell if Sears were being ironic or not. He touched his bow tie. Bow ties were a part of his life, like the Chowder Society, that Stella barely tolerated. “Where do these stories come from?”

“From our memories,” Sears said. “Or, if you prefer, from our doubtless Freudian unconsciouses. Come on. I want to be left alone. I have to wash all the glasses before I get to bed.”

“May I ask you one more time—”

“What now?”

“—not to write to Edward’s nephew.” Ricky stood up, audacity making his heart speed.

“You can be persistent, can’t you? Certainly you may ask, but by the time we get together again, he will already have my letter. I think it’s for the best.”

Ricky made a wry face, and Sears said, “Persistent without being aggressive.” It was very much like something Stella would have said. Then Sears startled him by adding, “It’s a nice quality, Ricky.”

At the door Sears held his coat while he slipped his arms into the sleeves. “I thought John looked worse than ever tonight,” Ricky said. Sears opened the front door onto dark night illuminated by the street lamp before the house. Orange light fell on the short dead lawn and narrow sidewalk, both littered with fallen leaves. Massive dark clouds moved across the black sky; it felt like winter. “John is dying,” Sears said unemotionally, giving back to Ricky his own thought. “See you at Wheat Row. Give my regards to Stella.”

Then the door closed behind him, a spruce little man already beginning to shiver in the cold night air.

“Of course. I told you I would.”

“What did you say to him?”

“What was agreed. I also mentioned the house, and said that we hoped he would not decide to sell it without inspecting it first. All of Edward’s things are still there, of course, including his tapes. If we haven’t had the heart to go through them, perhaps he will.”

They were standing apart from the other two, just inside the doorway to John Jaffrey’s living rooms. John and Lewis were seated in Victorian chairs in a corner of the nearest room, talking to the doctor’s housekeeper, Milly Sheehan, who sat on a stool before them, dangling a flowered tray which had held their drinks. Like Ricky’s wife, Milly resented being excluded from the meetings of the Chowder Society, unlike Stella Hawthorne, she perpetually hovered at the edges, popping in with bowls of ice cubes and sandwiches and cups of coffee. She irritated Sears to almost exactly the same extent as a summer fly bumping against the window. In many ways Milly was preferable to Stella Hawthorne—less demanding, less driven. And she certainly took care of John: Sears approved of the women who helped his friends. For Sears, it was an open question whether or not Stella had taken care of Ricky.

Now Sears looked down at the person fate had put closer to him than anyone else in the world, and knew that Ricky was thinking that he had weasel-worded his way out of the last question. Ricky’s sagacious little jowls were taut with impatience. “All right,” he said. “I told him that we weren’t satisfied with what we knew of his uncle’s death. I did not mention Miss Galli.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Ricky said, and walked across the room to join the others. Milly stood up, but Ricky smiled and waved her back to the stool. A born gentleman, Ricky had always been charming to women. An armchair stood not four feet away, but he would not sit until Milly asked him to.

Sears took his eyes off Ricky and looked around at the familiar upstairs sitting room. John Jaffrey had turned the whole ground floor of his house into his office—waiting rooms, consulting rooms, a drug cabinet. The other two small rooms on the ground floor were Milly’s apartment. John lived the rest of his life up here, where there had been only bedrooms in the old days. Sears had known the interior of John Jaffrey’s home for at least sixty years: during his childhood, he had lived two houses down, on the other side of the street. That is, the building he had always thought of as “the family house” was there, to be returned to from boarding school, to be returned to from Cambridge. In those days, Jaffrey’s house had been owned by a family named Frederickson, who had two children much younger than Sears. Mr. Frederickson had been a grain merchant, a crafty beer-swilling mountainous man with red hair and a redder face, sometimes mysteriously tinged blue; his wife had been the most desirable woman young Sears had ever seen. She was tall, with coiled long hair some color between brown and auburn, and had a kittenish exotic face and prominent breasts. It was with these that young Sears had been fascinated. Speaking to Viola Frederickson, he’d had to struggle to keep his eyes on her face.

In the summers, home from boarding school and between trips to the country, he was their babysitter. The Fredericksons could not afford a full-time nanny, though a girl from the Hollow lived in their house as cook and maid. Possibly it amused Frederickson to have Professor James’s son babysit for his boys. Sears had his own amusements. He liked the boys and enjoyed their hero worship, which was so much like that of the younger boys at the Hill School; and once the boys were asleep, he enjoyed prowling through the house and seeing what he could find. He saw his first French letter in Abel Frederickson’s dresser drawer. He had known he was doing wrong, entering the bedrooms where he now freely stood, but he could not keep himself from doing it. One night he had opened Viola Frederickson’s desk and found a photograph of her—she looked impossibly inviting, exotic and warm, an icon of the other, unknowable half of the species. He looked at the way her breasts pushed out the fabric of her blouse, and his mind filled with sensations of their weight, their density. He was so hard that his penis felt like the trunk of a tree: it was the first time that his sexuality had hit him with such force. Groaning, clutching his trousers, he had turned away from the photograph and seen one of her blouses folded on top of the dresser. He could not help himself; he caressed it. He could see where the blouse would bulge, carrying her within it, her flesh seemed to be present beneath his hands, and he unbuttoned his trousers and took out his member. He placed it on the blouse, thinking with the part of his mind that could still think that it was making him do it; it was making him push its distended tip down where her breasts would cushion it. He groaned, bent double over the blouse, a convulsion went through him, and he exploded. His balls felt as if they’d been caught in a vise. Immediately after, shame struck him like a fist. He rolled the blouse up into his satchel of books and, going a roundabout way home, wrapped the once-flawless thing around a stone and tossed it into the river. Nobody had ever mentioned the stolen blouse to him, but it was the last time he’d been invited to babysit.

Through the windows behind Ricky Hawthorne’s head, Sears could see a street lamp shining on the second floor of the house Eva Galli had bought when, on whatever whim or impulse, she had come to Milburn. Most of the time he could forget about Eva Galli and where she had lived: he supposed that he was conscious of it now—of her house shining at them through the window—because of some connection his mind made between her and the ridiculous scene he had just remembered.

Maybe I should have cleared out of Milburn when I could, he thought: the bedroom where Edward Wanderley had died exactly a year ago was just overhead. By unspoken common agreement, none of them had alluded to the coincidence of their meeting here again on the anniversary of their friend’s death. A fraction of Ricky Hawthorne’s sense of doom flickered in his mind, and then he thought: you old fool, you still feel guilty about that blouse. Hah!

You know what a schoolmaster’s duties were in those days. This was no urban school, and it was no Hill School either—God knows that was where I should have applied, but I had a number of elaborate ideas in those days. I fancied myself as a real country Socrates, bringing the light of reason into the wilderness. Wilderness! In those days, the country around Elmira was nearly that, as I remember, but now there isn’t even a suburb where the little town was. A freeway cloverleaf was put up right over the site of the school. The whole thing’s under concrete. It used to be called Four Forks, and it’s gone. But back then, during my sabbatical from Milburn, it was a typical little village, ten or twelve houses, a general store, a post office, a blacksmith, the schoolhouse. All of these buildings looked alike, in a general sort of way—they were all wooden, they hadn’t been painted in years so they all looked a bit gray and dismal. The schoolhouse was one room, of course, one room for all eight grades. When I came up for my interview I was told that I’d be boarding with the Mathers—they’d put in the lowest bid, and I soon found out why—and that my day would start at six. I had to chop the wood for the schoolhouse stove, get a good fire going, sweep the place out and get the books in place, pump up the water, clean the boards—wash the windows, too, when they needed it.

Then at seven-thirty the students would come. And my job was to teach all eight grades, reading, writing, arithmetic, music, geography, penmanship, history … the “works.” Now I’d run a mile from any such prospect, but then I was full of Abraham Lincoln on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other, and I was bursting to start. The whole idea simply enraptured me. I was besotted. I suppose even then the town was dying, but I couldn’t see it. What I saw was splendor— freedom and splendor. A little tarnished perhaps, but splendor all the same.

You see, I didn’t know. I couldn’t guess what most of my pupils would be like. I didn’t know that most country schoolteachers in these little hamlets were boys of about nineteen, with no more education than they’d be giving. I didn’t know how muddy and unpleasant a place like Four Forks would be most of the year. I didn’t know I’d be half-starved most of the time. Nor that it would be a condition of my job that I report for church every Sunday off in the next village, an eight-mile hike. I didn’t know how rough it would be.

I began to find out when I went over to the Mathers with my suitcase that first night. Charlie Mather used to be the postmaster in town, but when the Republicans got into office they made Howard Hummell the postmaster, and Charlie Mather never got over his resentment. He was permanently sour. When he took me up to the room I was to use, I saw that it was unfinished— the floor was plain unsanded wood, and the ceiling consisted of just the roofing joists and tiles. “Was makin’ this for our daughter,” Mather told me. “She died. One less mouth to feed.” The bed was a tired old mattress on the floor, with one old army blanket over it. In the winter, there wasn’t enough warmth for an Eskimo in that room. But I saw that it had a desk and a kerosene lamp, and I was still seeing stars, and I said fine, I’ll love it here, something to that effect. Mather grunted in disbelief, as well he might.

Supper that night was potatoes and creamed corn. “You’ll eat no meat here,” Mather said, “unless you save up and buy it yourself. I’m getting the allowance to keep you alive, not to fatten you up.” I don’t suppose I ate meat more than six times at the Mather table, and that was all at once, when somebody gave him a goose and we had goose every day until there was nothing left of it. Eventually some of my pupils began bringing me ham and beef sandwiches—their parents knew Mather was a mean-fisted man. Mather himself ate his big meal at noon, but he made it clear that it was my duty to spend the lunch hour in the schoolhouse— “offering extra help and giving punishments.”

Because up there they believed in the birch. I’d taught my first day when I found out about that. I say, taught, but really all I’d managed to do was keep them quiet for a few hours and write down their names and ask a few questions. It was astonishing. Only two of the older girls could read, simple addition and subtraction was as far as their math went, and not only had a few of them not heard of foreign countries, one of them didn’t even believe they existed. “Aw, there’s nothin’ like that,” one scrawny ten-year-old told me. “A place where people ain’t even American? Where they don’t even talk American?” But he couldn’t go further, he was laughing too hard at the absurdity of the idea, and I saw a mouthful of appalling, blackened teeth. “So what about the war, dopey?” another boy said. “Never heard tell of the Germans?” Before I could react, the first boy flew over the desk and started beating the second boy. It looked as though he was literally set on murdering him. I tried to separate the two boys—the girls were all shrieking—and I grabbed the assailant’s arm. “He’s right,” I said. “He shouldn’t have called you a name, but he is right. Germans are the people who live in Germany, and the world war …” I stopped short because the boy was growling at me. He was like a savage dog, and for the first time I realized that he was mentally disturbed, perhaps retarded. He was ready to bite me. “Now apologize to your friend,” I said.

“Ain’t no friend of mine.”

“Apologize.”

“He’s queer, sir,” the other boy said. His face was pale, and his eyes were frightened, and he had the beginnings of a black eye. “I shouldn’t never of said that to him.”

I asked the first boy what his name was. “Fenny Bate,” he managed to drool out. He was calming down. I sent the second boy back to his desk. “Fenny,” I said, “the trouble is that you were wrong. America isn’t the whole world, just as New York isn’t the whole United States.” This was too complicated, and I had lost him. So I brought him up to the front and made him sit down while I drew maps on the board. “Now this is the United States of America, and this is Mexico, and this is the Atlantic Ocean …”

Fenny was shaking his head darkly. “Lies,” he said. “All that’s lies. That stuff ain’t there. It AIN’T!” When he shouted he pushed at his desk and it went crashing over.

I asked him to pick up his desk, and when he just shook his head, starting to slobber again, I picked it up myself. Some of the children gasped. “So you’ve seen or heard of maps and other countries?” I asked.

He nodded. “But they’re lies.”

“Who told you that?”

He shook his head and refused to say. If he had shown any signs of embarrassment, I would have thought that he’d learned this misinformation from his parents; but he did not—he was just angry and sullen.

At noon all the children took their paper bags outside and ate their sandwiches in the lot around the school. It would be window-dressing to call it a playground, though there was a rickety set of swings in back of the school. I kept my eye on Fenny Bate. He was left alone by most of the other children. When he roused himself from his stupor and tried to join a group, the others pointedly walked away and left him standing alone, his hands in his pockets. From time to time a skinny girl with lank blond hair came up and spoke to him—she rather resembled him, and I imagined that she must have been his sister. I checked my lists: Constance Bate, in the fifth grade. She had been one of the quiet ones.

Then, when I looked back at Fenny, I saw an odd-looking man standing on the road outside the building, looking across the school grounds at him, just as I was doing. Fenny Bate was sitting unaware between us. For some reason, this man gave me a shock. It was not just that he was odd in appearance, though he was that, dressed in old disreputable working clothes, with wild black hair, ivory cheeks, a handsome face and extremely powerful looking arms and shoulders. It was the way he was looking at Fenny Bate. He looked feral. And with the wildness, there was a striking sort of freedom in the way he stood there, a freedom that went deeper than mere self-assurance. To me he seemed extremely dangerous; and it seemed that I had been transported into a region where men and boys were wild beasts in disguise. I looked away, almost frightened by the savagery in the man’s face, and when I looked back he was gone.

My notions of the place were confirmed that evening, when I had forgotten all about the man outside on the road. I had gone upstairs to my drafty room to try to work out my lessons for the second day. I would have to introduce the multiplication tables to the upper grades, they all could use some extremely elementary geography … things of this sort were going through my mind when Sophronia Mather entered my room. The first thing she did was to turn down the kerosene lamp I had been using. “That’s for full dark, not evening,” she said. “We can’t afford to have you using up all the kerosene. You’ll learn to read your books by the light God gives you.”

I was startled to see her in my room. During supper the previous evening she had been silent, and judging by her face, which was pinched and sallow and tight as a drumhead, you would say that silence was her natural mode. She made it very expressive, I can tell you. But I was to learn that apart from her husband, she had no fear of speech.

“I’ve come to quiz you, schoolteacher,” she said. “There’s been talk.”

“Already?” I asked.

“You make your ending in your manner of beginning, and how you begin is how you’ll go on. I’ve heard from Mariana Birdwood that you tolerate misbehavior in your classes.”

“I don’t believe I did,” I said.

“Her Ethel claims you did.”

I could not put a face to the name Ethel Birdwood, but I remembered calling it out—she was one of the older girls, the fifteen-year-olds, I thought. “And what does Ethel Birdwood claim I tolerated?”

“It’s that Fenny Bate. Didn’t he use fists on another boy? Right in front of your nose?”

“I spoke to him.”

“Spoke? Speakin’s no good. Why didn’t you use your ferule?”

“I don’t possess one,” I said.

Now she really was shocked. “But you must beat them,” she finally got out. “It’s the only way. You must ferule one or two every day. And Fenny Bate more than the rest.”

“Why particularly him?”

“Because he is bad.”

“I saw that he is troubled, slow, disturbed,” I said, “but I don’t think that I saw that he was bad.”

“He is. He is bad. And the other children expect him to be beaten. If your ideas are too uppity for us, then you’ll have to leave the school. It’s not only the children who expect you to use the ferule.” She turned as if to go out. “I thought I would do you the kindness of speaking to you before my husband hears that you have been neglecting your duties. Mind you, you’ll take my advice. There’s no teaching without beating.”

“But what makes Fenny Bate so notorious?” I asked, ignoring that horrific last remark. “It would be unjust to persecute a boy who needs help.”

“The ferule’s all the help he needs. He’s not bad, he’s badness itself. You should make him bleed and keep him quiet—keep him down. I’m only trying to help you, schoolmaster. We have use of the little extra money your allowance brings us.” With that she left me. I did not even have time to ask her about the peculiar man I had seen that afternoon.

Well, I had no intention of doing further damage to the town scapegoat.

(Milly Sheehan, her face puckered with distaste, set down the ashtray she had been pretending to polish, glanced at the window to make sure the drapes were closed and edged around the door. Sears, pausing in his story, saw that she had left it open a crack.)

She, who detested being called “Stel” said, “Did you think she was beautiful?”

“I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t.”

“Well, if you think I’m beautiful too, I guess it’s all right.” She smiled rather automatically at Sims, who was twenty years younger than herself and infatuated, and looked back at the Archer Hotel, where the tall young woman was just negotiating the door and disappearing within.

“If it’s all right, why are you staring?”

“Oh, it’s just—” Stella closed her mouth. “It’s just nothing at all. That’s the sort of woman you ought to be taking to lunch, not a battered old monument like me.”

“Jesus, if you think that,” Sims said and tried to take her hand beneath the table. She brushed his hand aside with a touch of her fingers. Stella Hawthorne had never appreciated being fondled in restaurants. She would have liked to have given his paw a good hard slap.

“Stella, give me a break.”

She looked straight into his mild brown eyes and said, “Hadn’t you better get back to all your nice little students?”

In the meantime the young woman was checking into the hotel. Mrs. Hardie, who had been running the Archer Hotel with her son since the death of her husband, emerged from her office and came up to the lovely young person on the other side of the desk. “May I help you?” she asked, and thought how am I going to keep Jim from this one?

“I’ll need a room with a bath,” the girl said. “I’d like to stay here until I can find a place to rent somewhere in town.”

“Oh, how nice,” said Mrs. Hardie. “You’re moving to Milburn? Well, I think that’s real sweet. Most all the young people here nowadays just can’t wait to get out. Like my Jim, he’ll take your bags up, he thinks every day here is another day in jail. New York is where he wants to go. Would that be where you’re from?”

“I’ve lived there. But some of my family lived here once.”

“Well, here are our rates, and here’s the register,” said Mrs. Hardie, sliding a mimeographed sheet of paper and the big leather-bound register across the counter to her. “You’ll find this a real nice quiet hotel, most of the folks here are residential, just like a boardinghouse really, but with the service of a hotel, and no loud parties at night.” The young woman had nodded at the rates and was signing the register. “No discos, not on your life, and I have to tell you straight off, no men in your room past eleven.”

“Fine,” the girl said, turning the register back to Mrs. Hardie, who read the name written in a clear elegant handwriting: Anna Mostyn, with an address given in the West Eighties in New York.

“Oh, that’s good,” said Mrs. Hardie, “you never know how girls will take that these days, but”—she looked up at the new guest’s face, and was stopped short by the indifference in the long blue eyes. Her first, almost unconscious thought was she’s a cold one, and this was followed by the perfectly conscious reflection that this girl would have no trouble handling Jim. “Anna’s such a nice old-fashioned name.”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Hardie, a little disconcerted, rang the bell for her son.

“I’m really a very old-fashioned sort of person,” the girl said.

“Didn’t you say you had family here in town?”

“I did, but it was a long time ago.”

“It’s just that I didn’t recognize the name.”

“No, you wouldn’t. An aunt of mine lived here once.

Her name was Eva Galli. But you probably wouldn’t have known her.”

(Ricky’s wife, sitting alone in the restaurant, suddenly snapped her fingers and exclaimed, “I’m getting old.” She had remembered of whom the girl had reminded her. The waiter, a high-school dropout by the look of him, bent over the table, not quite sure how to give her the bill after the gentleman had stormed off, and uttered “Huh?” “Oh get away, you fool,” she said, wondering why it was that while one half of high-school dropouts looked like thugs, the other half resembled physicists. “Oh, here, better give me the bill before you faint.”)

Jim Hardie kept sneaking looks at her all the way up the stairs, and once he had opened her room and put her suitcase down offered, “I hope you’re going to stick around a good long time.”

“I thought your mother said you hated Milburn.”

“I don’t hate it so much anymore,” he said, giving her the look which had melted Penny Draeger in the back seat of his car the previous night.

“Why?”

“Ah,” he said, not knowing how to continue in the face of her total refusal to be melted. “Ah, you know.”

“I do?”

“Look. I just mean you’re a goddamn great-lookin’ lady, that’s all. You know what I mean. You got a lot of style.” He decided to be bolder than he felt “Ladies with style turn me on.”

“Do they?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. He couldn’t figure her out. If she was a nonstarter, she would have told him to leave at the beginning. But though she let him hang around, she wasn’t looking interested or flattered—she wasn’t even looking amused. Then she surprised him by doing what he had been half hoping she would do, and took off her coat. She wasn’t much in the chest department, but she had good legs. Then, entirely without warning, a total awareness of her body assaulted him—a blast of pure sensuality, nothing like the steamy posturing of Penny Draeger or the other high-school girls he had bedded, a wave of pure and cold sensuality which dwindled him.

“Ah,” he said, desperately hoping she would not send him away, “I bet you had some kind of great job in the city. What are you, in television or something?”

“No.”

He fidgeted. “Well, it’s not like I don’t know your address or anything. Maybe I could drop in sometime, have a talk?”

“Maybe. Do you talk?”

“Hah. Yeah, well, guess I better get back downstairs. I mean, I gotta lot of storm windows to put up, this cold weather we got …”

She sat on the bed and held her hand out. Half reluctantly, he went toward her. When he touched her hand, she placed a neatly folded dollar bill in his palm. “I’ll tell you what I think,” she said. “I think bellboys shouldn’t wear jeans. They look sloppy.”

He accepted the dollar, too confused to thank her, and fled.

(It was Ann-Veronica Moore, thought Stella, that actress at John’s house the night Edward died. Stella allowed the intimidated boy to hold her fur coat. Ann-Veronica Moore, why should I think of her? I only saw her for a few minutes, and that girl really didn’t resemble her at all.)

The other children filed out, buzzing with speculation—I’m sure they thought I was going to cane him once they were out of sight—and then I noticed that his sister was lurking in the dark rear corner. “I won’t hurt him, Constance,” I said. “You can stay behind too if you wish.” Those poor children! I can still see both of them, with their bad teeth and tattered clothing, he full of suspicion and resentment and fear and she simply fearful—for him. She crept into a chair and I went to work to try to straighten out some of Fenny’s misconceptions. I told him all the stories of explorers I knew, about Lewis and Clarke and Cortez and Nansen and Ponce de Leon, stuff I was going to use later in class, but it had no effect on Fenny. He knew that the world went only about forty or fifty miles out from Four Forks, and that the people within this radius were the world’s population. He clung to this notion with the dogged stubbornness of the stupid. “Who in the world told you this, Fenny?” I asked. He shook his head. “Did you make it up yourself?” He shook his head again. “Was it your parents?”

Back in the dark corner, Constance giggled—giggled without any humor. That laugh of hers sent chills through me—it conjured up pictures of a nearly bestial life. Of course, that was what they had; and all the other children knew it And as I found out later, it was much worse, much more unnatural, than anything I could have imagined.

Anyhow, I raised my hands in despair or impatience, and the wretched girl must have thought I was going to strike him, because she called out, “It was Gregory!”

Fenny looked back at her, and I swear that I’ve never seen anyone look so frightened. In the next instant he was off his chair and out of the schoolroom. I tried to call him back, but it was no good. He was running as if for life, off into the woods, sprinting in the jack-rabbit country way. The girl hung in the doorway, watching him go. And now she looked frightened and dismayed—her whole being had turned pale. “Who is Gregory, Constance?” I asked her, and her face twisted. “Does he sometimes walk by the schoolhouse? Is his hair like this?” And I stuck my hands up over my head, my fingers spread wide—and then she was off too, running as fast as he had.

Well, that afternoon I was accepted by the other students. They’d assumed that I had beaten both of the Bate children, and so taken part in the natural order of things. And that night at dinner I got, if not an extra potato, at least a sort of congealed smile from Sophronia Mather. Evidently Ethel Birdwood had reported to her mother that the new schoolmaster had seen reason.

Fenny and Constance didn’t come to school the next two days. I stewed about that, and thought that I’d acted so clumsily that they might never return. On the second day I was so restless that I paced around the schoolyard during lunchtime. The children regarded me as they would a dangerous lunatic;—it was clear that teacher was supposed to stay indoors, preferably administering the ferule. Then I heard something that stopped me dead and made me whirl around toward a group of girls, who were sitting rather primly on the grass. They were the biggest girls and one of them was Ethel Birdwood. I was sure that I’d heard her mention the name Gregory. “Tell me about Gregory, Ethel,” I said.

“What’s Gregory?” she asked, simpering. “There’s no one with that name here.” She gave me a great cow-eyed look, and I was certain she was thinking of that rural tradition of the schoolmaster marrying his eldest female pupil. She was a confident girl, this Ethel Birdwood, and her father had the reputation of being prosperous.

I wasn’t having it “I just heard you mention his name.”

“You must be mistaken, Mr. James,” she said, dripping honey.

“I do not feel charitable to liars,” I said. “Tell me about this Gregory person.”

Of course they all assumed that I was threatening her with a caning. Another girl came to her rescue. “We were saying that Gregory fixed that gutter,” she said, and pointed to the side of the school. One of the rain gutters was obviously new.

“Well, he’ll never come around this school again if I can help it,” I said, and left them to their infuriating giggling.

After school that day I thought I’d visit the lion’s den, as it were, and walk up to the Bate home. I knew it was about as far out of town as Lewis’s house is from Milburn. I set off on the most likely road, and walked quite a way, three or four miles, when I realized I’d probably gone too far. I hadn’t passed any houses, so the Bate home had to be actually in the woods themselves, instead of on their edge as I had imagined. I took a likely-looking trail, and thought I would simply tack back and forth toward town until I found them.

Unfortunately, I got lost. I went into ravines and up hills and through scrub until I couldn’t have told you where even the road was anymore. It all looked appallingly alike. Then, just at dusk, I was aware of being watched. It was a remarkably uncanny feeling—it was like knowing a tiger was behind me, about to pounce. I turned around and put my back against a big elm. And then I saw something. A man stepped into a clearing about thirty yards from me—the man I had seen before. Gregory, or so I thought. He said nothing, and neither did I. He just gazed at me, absolutely silent, with that wild hair and that ivory face. I felt hatred, absolute hatred, streaming from him. An air of utter unreasonable violence hung about him, along with that peculiar freedom I had sensed earlier—he was like a madman. He could have killed me off in those woods, and no one would have known. And trust me, what I saw in his face was murder, nothing else. Just as I expected him to come forward and attack me, he stepped behind a tree.

I went forward very slowly. “What do you want?” I called, simulating bravery. There was no answer. I went forward a bit more. Finally I got to the tree where I had seen him, and there wasn’t a trace of him—he had just melted away.

I was still lost, and I still felt threatened. For that was the meaning of his appearance, I knew—it was a threat. I took a few steps off in a random direction, passed through another thick stand of trees, and stopped short. For a moment I was scared. Right before me, closer than that apparition had been, was a thin shabbily dressed girl with stringy blond hair: Constance Bate.

“Where’s Fenny?” I asked.

She raised one bony arm and pointed off to the side. Then he too rose up like a—”like a snake from a basket,” I must admit, is the metaphor that comes to mind. On his face, when he stood up in the tall weeds, was that characteristic Fenny Bate expression of sullen guilt.

“I was looking for your home,” I said, and they both pointed at once in the same direction, again without speaking. Looking through a chink in the woods, I saw a tarpaper shack with one greasepaper window and a stingy little pipe of a chimney. You used to see a lot of tarpaper shacks here and there, though thank goodness they have disappeared now, but that one was the most sordid I ever did see. I know I have the reputation of being a conservative, but I’ve never equated virtue with money, nor poverty with vice, yet that mean stinking little shack—looking at it, you knew it stank—somehow for me appeared to breathe foulness. No, it was worse than that. It wasn’t merely that the lives within would be brutalized by poverty, but that they would be twisted, malformed … my heart fell, I looked away and saw an emaciated black dog nosing at a dead cushion of feathers that must have been a chicken once. This surely, I thought, must be how Fenny got the reputation for being “bad”—the prim folks of Four Forks had taken one look at his home and condemned him for life.

Yet I didn’t want to go in there. I didn’t believe in evil, but evil was what I felt.

I turned back to the children, who had the oddest frozen look in their eyes. “I want to see you in school tomorrow,” I said.

Fenny shook his head.

“But I want to help you,” I said. I was on the verge of making a speech: what I wanted to say to him was that it was my plan to change his life, to rescue him, in a sense I suppose to make him human … that obstinate, frozen look on his mug stopped me. There was something else in it too, and I realized with a shock that something about Fenny was reminding me of my last glimpse of the mysterious Gregory. “You must come back to school tomorrow,” I said.

Constance said, “Gregory doesn’t want us to. Gregory said we have to stay here.”

“Well, what I say is he comes, and you come too.”

“I’ll ask Gregory.”

“Oh, to hell with Gregory,” I shouted, “you’ll come,” and walked away from the two of them. That queer sensation stayed with me until I found the road again —it was like walking away from damnation.

On Sundays I made the long hike to Footville for my required visit to the Lutheran church there. It was not as deadly as I had feared. The minister was an old German, Franz Gruber, who called himself Dr. Gruber. The doctorate was genuine—he was a much subtler man than his gross body or residence in Footville, New York, suggested. I thought his sermons were interesting, and I decided to speak to him.

When the Bate children finally appeared, they seemed worn and tired, like drinkers after a strenuous night This became a pattern. They’d miss two days, come in, miss three, come in for two: and each time I saw them, they looked worse. Fenny in particular seemed in decline. It was as though he were aging prematurely: he grew even thinner, his skin seemed to crease on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. And when I saw him, I could swear that he looked as though he were smirking at me—Fenny Bate smirking, though I would have sworn that he didn’t possess the mental equipment for it. For him, it seemed corrupt—it frightened me.

Therefore, one Sunday after the service I spoke to Dr. Gruber at the church door. I waited to be last to shake his hand, and when everybody else had filed away down the road, I told him that I wanted his advice on a problem.

He must have thought that I was going to confess to an adultery, or some such. But he was very kind, and invited me into his home, across the street from the church.

Very graciously, he escorted me into his library. This was a large room, entirely book-lined—I hadn’t seen a room like it since I’d left Harvard. It was obviously the room of a scholar: it was a room where a man comfortable with ideas worked with them. Most of the books were in German, but many were in Latin and Greek. He had the patristic writings in big soft leather folios, Bible commentaries, works of theology and the great aid to sermon-writers, a Bible concordance. On a shelf behind his desk I was surprised to see a little collection of Lully, Fludd, Bruno, what you could call the occult studies of the Renaissance. Also, even more surprisingly, a few antiquarian books about witchcraft and Satanism.

Dr. Gruber had been out of the room fetching beer, and when he came in he saw me looking at these books.

“What you see,” he said in his guttural accent “is the reason you find me in Footville, Mr. James. I hope you will not think me a cracked old fool on the evidence of those books.” Without my prompting him, he told me the story, and it’s as you’d expect—he’d been brilliant, approved of by his elders, he had written books himself, but when he had shown too much interest in what he called “hermetic matters,” he was ordered to stop that line of study. He’d published one further paper, and been banished to the most out-of-the-way congregation the Lutheran establishment could find. “Now,” he said, “my cards are on the table, as my new countrymen say. I never speak of these hermetic matters in my sermons, but I continue my studies in them. You are free to go or to speak, as you please.” This sounded a little pompous to me, and I was a little taken aback, but I saw no reason not to continue.

I told him the whole story, not stinting on the detail. He listened with great attentiveness, and it was clear that he had heard of Gregory and the Bate children.

More than that, he seemed to be very excited by the story.

When I finished he said, “And all of this happened just as you have explained?”

“Of course.”

“You have spoken of it to no one else?”

“No.”

“I am very happy you have come to me,” he said, and instead of saying anything further, pulled a gigantic pipe out of a desk drawer, filled it and began to smoke, all the while fixing me with his protuberant eyes. I began to feel uneasy, and half-regretted that I had taken his earlier comments so lightly. “Your landlady never gave you any idea of why she thought Fenny Bate was ‘badness itself’?”

I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the negative impression I’d just had of him. “Do you know why she would?”

“It is a well-known story,” he answered. “In these two little towns, actually it is quite a famous story.”

“Is Fenny bad?” I asked.

“He is not bad, but he is corrupt,” said Dr. Gruber. “But from what you say—”

“It could be worse? I confess,” I said, “it’s entirely a mystery.”

“More so than you imagine,” he said calmly. “If I try to explain it to you, you will be tempted, on the basis of what you know about me, to think me insane.” His eyes bulged even more.

“If Fenny is corrupt,” I asked, “who corrupted him?”

“Oh, Gregory,” he replied. “Gregory, without doubt Gregory is in back of it all.”

“But who is Gregory?” I had to ask.

“The man you saw. I’m positive of that. You have described him perfectly.” He held his pudgy fingers up behind his head, imitating my own gesture to Constance Bate. “Perfectly, I assure you. Yet when you hear more, you will doubt my word.”

“For the sake of heaven, why?”

He shook his head, and I saw that his free hand was trembling. For a second I wondered if I really had stumbled into intimate conversation with a madman.

“Fenny’s parents had three children,” he said, puffing out smoke. “Gregory Bate was the first”

“He is their brother!” I exclaimed. “One day I thought I saw a resemblance … yes, I see. But there’s nothing unnatural in that.”

“That depends, I think, on what passed between them.”

I tried to take it in. “You mean something unnatural passed between them.”

“And with the sister as well.”

A feeling of horror went through me. I could see that cold handsome face, and that hateful careless manner —Gregory’s air of being free of all restraint. “Between Gregory and the sister.”

“And, as I said, between Gregory and Fenny.”

“He corrupted both of them, then. Why isn’t Constance as condemned by Four Forks as Fenny?”

“Remember, schoolteacher, that this is the hinterland. A touch of—unnaturalness—between brother and sister among those wretched families in shacks is perhaps not so unnatural after all.”

“But between brother and brother—” I might have been back at Harvard, discussing a savage tribe with a professor of anthropology.

“It is.”

“By God, it is!” I exclaimed, seeing that crafty, prematurely aged expression on Penny’s face. “And now he is trying to send me off—he sees me as an interference.”

“Apparently he does. I hope you see why.”

“Because I won’t stand for it,” I said. “He wants to get rid of me.”

“Ah,” he said. “Gregory wants everything.”

“You mean he wants them forever.”

“Both of them forever—but from your story, perhaps Fenny most of all.”

“Can’t their parents stop this?”

“The mother is dead. The father left when Gregory grew old enough to beat him.”

“They live alone in that appalling place?”

He nodded.

It was terrible: it meant the miasma, the sense of the place as somehow damned, came from the children themselves: from what happened between them and Gregory.

“Well,” I protested, “can’t the children themselves do something to protect themselves?”

“They did,” he said.

“But what?” I had prayer in mind, I suppose, since I was talking with a preacher, or boarding with another family—but as to that, my own experience had shown me how far charity went in Four Forks.

“You won’t take my word for it,” he said, “so I must show you.” He abruptly stood up, and gestured for me to stand as well. “Outside,” he ordered. Beneath his excitement, he seemed very disturbed, and just for a moment I thought that he found me as unpleasant as I did him, with his showers of pipe tobacco and his bulging eyes.

I left the room and on the way out of the house, passed a room with a table set for one. I smelled a roast cooking, and an open bottle of beer sat on the table, so it could be that all he disliked was being kept from his lunch.

He slammed the door behind us and set off back toward the church. This was mystifying indeed. When he had crossed the road, he called to me without turning his head. “You know that Gregory was the school handyman? That he used to do odd jobs around the school?”

“One of the girls said something about it,” I replied, watching him continue on around the side of the church. What next, I wondered, a trip into the fields? And what would I have to be shown before I would believe it?

Lately, all the stories, his own included, had made him tense for hours afterward; but tonight he felt more than that. Tonight he felt especially anxious. Ricky’s nights were now uniformly dreadful, the dreams of which he had spoken to Sears pursued him straight through until dawn, and he had no doubt that the stories he and his friends told gave them substance; still he thought that the anxiety was not due to his dreams. Nor was it due to the stories, though Sears’s had been worse than most—all of their stories were getting worse. They frightened themselves each time they met, but they continued to meet because not to meet would have been more frightening yet. It was comforting to get together, to see that they were each bearing up. Even Lewis was frightened, or why would he have voted in favor of writing to Donald Wanderley? It was this, knowing that the letter was on its way, ticking away in a mailbag somewhere, that made Ricky more than usually anxious.

Maybe I really should have left this town ages ago, he considered, looking at the houses he passed. There was scarcely one he had not been inside at least once, on business or pleasure, to see a client or to eat a dinner. Maybe I should have gone to New York, back when I got married, as Stella wanted to do: it was, for Ricky, a thought of striking disloyalty. Only gradually, only imperfectly had he convinced Stella that his life was in Milburn, with Sears James and the law practice. Cold wind cut into his neck and pulled at his hat. Around the corner, ahead of him, he saw Sears’s long black Lincoln parked at the curb; a light burned in Sears’s library. Sears would not be able to sleep, not after telling a story like that. By now, they all knew the effects of reliving these past events.

But it’s not just the stories, he thought; no, and it’s not just the letter either. Something is going to happen. That was why they told the stories. Ricky was not given to premonitions, but the dread of the future he’d felt two weeks earlier while talking to Sears came thudding back into him again. That was why he had thought of moving out of town. He turned into Melrose Avenue: “avenue,” presumably, because of the thick trees which lined either side. Their branches stood out gesturally, tinted orange by the lamps. During the day the last of the leaves had fallen. Something’s going to happen to the whole town. A branch groaned above Ricky’s head. A truck changed gears far behind him, off on Route 17: sound traveled a long way on these cold nights in Milburn. When he went forward, he could see the lighted windows of his own bedroom, up on the third floor of his house. His ears and nose ached with the cold. After such a long and reasonable life, he said to himself, you can’t go mystic on me now, old friend. We’ll need all the rationality we can muster up.

At that moment, near where he felt safest and with this self-given reassurance in his mind, it seemed to Ricky that someone was following him: that someone was standing back on the corner, glaring at him. He could feel cold eyes staring at him, and in his mind it seemed that they floated alone—just eyes following him. He knew how they would look, clear pale luminous and floating at the level of his own eyes. Their lack of feeling would be dreadful—they would be like eyes in a mask. He turned around, fully expecting to see them, so great was his sense of them. Abashed, he realized that he was trembling. Of course the street was empty. It was simply an empty street, even on a dark night as ordinary as a mongrel pup.

This time you really did it to yourself, he thought, you and that gruesome story Sears told. Eyes! It was something out of an old Peter Lorre film. The Eyes of … of Gregory Bate? Hell. The Hands of Dr. Orlac. It’s very clear, Ricky told himself, nothing at all is going to happen, we’re just four old coots going out of our minds. To imagine that I thought …

But he had not thought the eyes were behind him, he had known it. It had been knowledge.

Nonsense, he almost said aloud, but let himself in his front door a little more quickly than usual.

A more immediate surprise was that his hands were shaking. He had been going to make a cup of chamomile tea, but when he saw how his hands trembled, he took a bottle out of a cabinet and poured a small amount of whiskey into a glass. Skittish old idiot. But calling himself names did not help, and when he brought the glass to his lips his hand still shook. It was this damned anniversary. The whiskey, when he took it into his mouth, tasted like diesel oil, and he spat it out into the sink. Poor Edward. Ricky rinsed out his glass, turned off the light and went up the stairs in the dark.

In his pajamas, he left the dressing room and crossed the hall to his bedroom. Quietly he opened the door. Stella lay, breathing softly and rhythmically, on her side of the bed. If he could make it around to his side without knocking into the chair or kicking over her boots or brushing against the mirror and making it rattle he could get into bed without disturbing her.

He gained his side of the bed without waking her and quietly slipped under the blankets. Very gently, he stroked his wife’s bare shoulder. It was quite likely that she was having another affair, or at least one of her serious flirtations, and Ricky thought that she had probably taken up again with the professor she’d met a year ago—there was a breathy silence on the phone that was peculiarly his; long ago Ricky had decided that many things were worse than having your wife occasionally go to bed with someone else. She had her life, and he was a large part of it. Despite what he sometimes felt and had said to Sears two weeks before, not being married would have been an impoverishment.

He stretched out, waiting for what he knew would happen. He remembered the sensation of having the eyes boring into his back; he wished that Stella could help, could comfort him in some way; but not wishing to alarm or distress her, thinking that they would end with every new day and thinking also that they were uniquely, privately his, he had never told her of his nightmares. This is Ricky Hawthorne preparing for sleep: lying on his back, his clever face showing no sign of the emotions behind it, his hands behind his head, his eyes open; tired, uneasy, jealous; fearful.

She stood at the window and smoked, a tall attractive woman with dark hair and long blue eyes. She could see down nearly the entire length of Main Street the deserted square to one side with its empty benches and bare trees, the black fronts of shops and the Village Pump restaurant and a department store; two blocks on, a traffic light turned green over an empty street. Main Street continued for eight blocks, but the buildings were visible only as dark shopfronts or office buildings. On the opposite side of the square she could see the dark facades of two churches looming above the tops of the bare trees. In the square a bronze Revolutionary War general made a grandiose gesture with a musket.

Tonight or tomorrow? she wondered, smoking her cigarette and surveying the little town.

Tonight.

His body was covered with an old quilt so faded that some of its squares were white. Beneath it, his legs lay paralyzed, two raised lines of fabric. When Ricky looked up, he realized that he could see every detail of the wooden planks on the wall with a more than usual clarity: he saw how the grain flowed down each board, how the knotholes were formed, the way the nailheads stood out at the tops of certain, boards. Breezes filled the room flicking the dust here and there.

From down at the bottom of the house, he heard a crash—it was the noise of a door being thrown open, a heavy cellar door banging against a wall. Even his upstairs room shook with it. As he listened, he heard some complex form dragging itself out of the cellar: it was a heavy form, animal-like, and it had to squeeze through the doorframe. Wood splintered, and Ricky heard the creature thud against a wall. Whatever it was began to investigate the ground floor, moving slowly and heavily. Ricky could picture what it saw—a series of bare rooms exactly like his. On the ground floor, tall grass and weeds would be growing up through the cracks in the floorboards. The sunlight would be touching the sides and back of whatever was moving heavily, purposefully through these deserted rooms. The thing downstairs made a sucking noise, then a high-pitched squeal. It was looking for him. It was snuffling through the house, knowing he was there.

Ricky tried again to force his legs to move, but the two lumps of fabric did not even twitch. The thing downstairs was brushing against walls as it passed through the rooms, making a scratchy noise; the wood creaked. He thought he heard it break through a rotten floorboard.

Then he heard the noise he had been dreading: it shouldered through another doorway. The noises from downstairs were suddenly louder—he could hear the thing breathing. It was at the bottom of the staircase.

He heard it hurl itself at the stairs.

It thumped up what sounded like a half dozen stairs, and then slipped back down. Then it went more slowly, whining with impatience, taking the stairs two or three at a time.

Ricky’s face was wet with perspiration. What most frightened him was that he couldn’t be sure if he were dreaming or not: if he could be certain that this was only a dream, then he had only to suffer through it, to wait until whatever it was down there got up to the top of the stairs and burst into the room—the scare would wake him up. But it did not feel at all like a dream. His senses were alert, his mind was clear, the entire experience lacked the rather disembodied, disconnected atmosphere of a dream. In no dream had he ever sweated. And if he was wide awake, then the thing banging and thundering on the stairs was going to get him, because he couldn’t move.

The noises changed, and then Ricky realized that he was indeed on the third floor of the abandoned building, because the thing looking for him was on the second. Its noises were much louder: the whining, the slithery sound as its body rubbed through doors and against walls. It was moving faster, as if it smelled him.

The dust still circled in the random beams of sun; the few clouds still drifted through a sky that looked like early spring. The floor rattled as the creature thrust impatiently back onto the landing.

Now he could hear its breathing very clearly. It threw itself at the last staircase, making a noise like a wrecking ball hitting the side of a building. Ricky’s stomach seemed packed with ice; he was afraid he would vomit—vomit ice cubes. His throat tightened. He would have screamed, but he thought, even while knowing it was not true, that if he did not make any noise maybe the thing would not find him. It squealed and whined, banging its way up the staircase. A stair rod snapped.

When it reached the landing outside his bedroom door, he knew what it was. A spider: it was a giant spider. It thudded against the door of his room. He heard it begin to whine again. If spiders could whine, that was how they would do it. A multitude of legs scrabbled at the door as the whining grew louder. Ricky felt pure terror, a white elemental fear worse than he’d ever experienced.

But the door did not splinter. It quietly opened. A tall black form stood just beyond the doorframe. It was no spider, whatever it was, and Ricky’s terror decreased by an unconscious fraction. The black thing in the doorway did not move for a moment, but stood as if looking at him. Ricky tried to swallow; he managed to use his arms to push himself upright. The rough planks rubbed against his back and he thought again: this isn’t a dream.

The black form came through the door.

Ricky saw that it was not an animal at all, but a man. Then another plane of blackness separated off, then another, and he saw that it was three men. Beneath the cowls draped over their lifeless faces, he saw the familiar features. Sears James and John Jaffrey and Lewis Benedikt stood before him, and he knew that they were dead.

He woke up screaming. His eyes opened to the normal sights of morning on Melrose Avenue, the cream colored bedroom with the graphics Stella had bought on their last trip to London, the window looking out on the big back yard, a shirt draped over a chair. Stella’s firm hand gripped his shoulder. The room seemed mysteriously absent of light. On a strong impulse he could not name, Ricky jumped out of bed—came as close to jumping out of bed as his seventy-year-old knees would permit—and went across to the window. Stella, behind him, said, “What?” He didn’t know what he was looking for, but what he saw was unexpected: the entire back yard, all the roofs of the neighboring houses, were dusted with snow. The sky too was oddly without light. He didn’t know what he was going to say, but when he opened his mouth he uttered: “It snowed all night, Stella. John Jaffrey should never have had that dadblasted party.”

He rubbed his eyes and his dry cheekbones; he smoothed down his mustache. “It was a year ago last night.” Then he heard what he had been saying. “No, of course not. There’s no connection, I mean.”

“Come back to bed and tell me what’s wrong, baby.”

“Oh, I’m okay,” he said, but returned to the bed. When he was lifting the blankets to get back in, Stella said, “You’re not okay, baby. You must have had a terrible dream. Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It doesn’t make much sense.”

“Tell me anyhow.” She began to caress his back and shoulders, and he twisted to look down at her head on the dark blue pillow. As Sears had said, Stella was a beauty: she had been a beauty when he met her, and apparently she would be a beauty when she died. It was not a plump chocolate-box prettiness, but a matter of strong cheekbones, straight facial planes and definite black eyebrows. Stella’s hair had gone an uncompromising gray when she was in her early thirties, and she had refused to dye it, seeing long before anyone else what a sexual asset an abundant head of gray hair would be when combined with a youthful face: now she still had the abundant gray hair, and her face was not much less youthful. It would be more truthful to say that her face had never been precisely youthful, nor would it ever truly be old: in fact with every year, up nearly to fifty, she had come more completely into her beauty, and then had pitched camp there. She was ten years younger than Ricky, but on good days she still looked only a blink over forty.

“Tell me, Ricky,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

So he began to tell her his dream, and he saw concern, horror, love and fear cross her elegant face. She continued to rub his back, and then moved her hand to his chest. “Baby,” she said when he was through, “do you really have dreams like that every night?”

“No,” he said, looking at her face and seeing beneath the superficial emotions of the moment the self-absorption and amusement which were always present in Stella and which were always joined, “that was the worst one.” Then, smiling a little because he saw where she was going with all this rubbing, he said, “That was the champ.”

“You’ve been very tense lately.” She lifted his hand and touched it to her lips.

“I know.”

“Do all of you have these bad dreams?”

“All who?”

“The Chowder Society.” She placed his hand on her cheek.

“I think so.”

“Well,” she said, and sat up and, crossing her arms elbows-out before her, began to work her nightdress over her head, “don’t you old fools think you ought to do something about it?” The nightdress went off, and she tossed her head to flip her hair back into place. Their two children had left her breasts sagging and her nipples large and brown, but Stella’s body had aged only a little more than her face.

“We don’t know what to do,” he confessed.

“Well, I know what to do,” she said and went back down on the bed and opened her arms. If Ricky had ever wished that he had remained a bachelor like Sears, he did not wish it this morning.

“You old sexpot,” Stella said when they were done, “you would have given this up a long time ago if it hadn’t been for me. What a loss that would have been. If it weren’t for me you’d be too dignified to ever take your clothes off.”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh? What would you do, then? Chase after little girls like Lewis Benedikt?”

“Lewis doesn’t chase after little girls.”

“Girls in their twenties, then.”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

“There. I’m right. You wouldn’t have any sex life at all, like your precious partner Sears.” She folded back the sheets and blankets on her side of the bed, and got out. “I’ll shower first,” she said. Stella demanded a long time by herself in the bathroom every morning. She put on her long white-gray robe and looked as if she were about to tell someone to sack Troy. “But I’ll tell you what you should do. You should call Sears right now and tell him about that awful dream. You won’t get anywhere if you won’t at least talk about it. If I know you and Sears, you two can go for weeks at a time without saying anything personal to each other. That’s dreadful. What in the world do you talk about, anyhow?”

“Talk about?” Ricky asked, a little taken aback. “We talk about law.”

“Oh, law,” Stella said, and marched off toward the bathroom.

When she returned nearly thirty minutes later he was sitting up in bed looking confused. The pouches beneath his eyes were larger than usual. “The paper isn’t here yet,” he said. “I went downstairs and looked.”

“Of course it isn’t here,” Stella said, dropping a towel and a box of tissues on the bed, and turned away again to go into the dressing room. “What time do you think it is?”

“What time? Why, what time is it? My watch is on the table.”

“It’s just past seven.”

“Seven?” They normally did not get up until eight, and Ricky usually dawdled around the house until nine-thirty before leaving for the office on Wheat Row. Though neither he nor Sears admitted it, there was no longer much work for them; old clients dropped in from time to time, there were a few complicated lawsuits which looked to drag on through the next decade, there was always a will or two or a tax problem to clarify, but they could have stayed home two days of every week without anybody noticing. Alone in his part of the office suite, Ricky lately had been rereading Donald Wanderley’s second book, trying unsuccessfully to persuade himself that he wanted its author in Milburn. “What are we doing up?”

“You woke us up with your screaming, if I have to remind you,” Stella called from the dressing room. “You were having problems with a monster that was trying to eat you, remember?”

“Um,” Ricky said. “I thought it looked dark outside.”

“Don’t be evasive,” Stella called, and in another minute or two was back beside the bed, fully dressed. “When you start to scream in your sleep, it’s time to start taking whatever is happening to you seriously. I know you won’t go to a doctor—”

“I won’t go to a head doctor, anyhow,” Ricky said. “My mind is in good working order.”

“So I said. But since you won’t consider that, you should at least talk to Sears about it. I don’t like to see you eating yourself up.” With that, she left for the downstairs.

Ricky lay back, considering. It had been, as he said to Stella, the worst of the nightmares. Simply thinking about it now was unsettling—simply having Stella go down the stairs was, at some level, unsettling. The dream had been extraordinarily vivid, with the detail and texture of wakefulness. He remembered the faces of his friends, bereft poor corpses, abandoned of life. That had been horrid: it had been somehow immoral, and the shock to his morality even more than the horror had made him open his mouth and scream. Maybe Stella was right. Without knowing how he would bring up the subject with Sears, he nevertheless picked up the receiver of the bedside phone. After Sears’s phone had rung once, Ricky realized that he was acting very much out of character and that he didn’t have the faintest idea why Stella thought Sears James would have anything worthwhile to say. But by then it was too late, and Sears had picked up the phone and said hello.

“It’s Ricky, Sears.”

Evidently it was the morning for demonstrating inconsistency of character; nothing less like Sears than his response could be imagined. “Ricky, thank God,” he said. “You must have ESP. I was just going to call you. Can you come by and pick me up in five minutes?”

“Give me fifteen minutes,” Ricky said. “What happened?” And then, thinking of his dream, “Did anybody die?”

“Why do you ask that?” Sears said in a different, sharper voice.

“No reason. I’ll tell you later. I take it we’re not going to Wheat Row.”

“No. I just had a call from our Vergil. He wants us out there—he wants to sue everybody in sight. Step on it, will you?”

“Elmer wants us both at his farm? What happened?”

Sears was impatient. “Something earthshaking, apparently. Pull the plug out, Ricky.”

Lewis’s property had included both woods and pasture along with the stone farmhouse he had cherished from the moment he had seen it. It was like a fortress with shutters, a huge building constructed at the start of the century by a rich gentleman farmer who liked the look of the castles in the illustrated novels by Sir Walter Scott admired by his wife. Lewis neither knew nor cared about Sir Walter, but years of living in a hotel had left him with a need for the sense of a multitude of rooms about him. He would have had claustrophobia in a cottage. When he had decided to sell his hotel to the chain which had been offering increasing amounts of money for it over the six preceding years, he had enough money left after taxes to buy the only house in or near Milburn which would truly have satisfied him, and enough to furnish it as he wished. The paneling, guns and pikestaffs did not always please his female guests. (Stella Hawthorne, who had spent three adventurous afternoons at Lewis’s farm shortly after his return, had said she’d never been had in an officers’ mess before.) He’d sold the pasture land as soon as he could, but kept the woods because he liked the idea of owning them.

Jogging through them, he always saw something new which quickened his sense of life: one day a pocket of snowdrops and monkshoods in a hollow beside the stream, the next a red-winged blackbird as big as a cat peering wild-eyed at him from the branches of a maple. But today he was not looking, he was simply running along the snowy path, wishing that whatever was going on would stop. Maybe this young Wanderley could set things right again: judging by his book, he had been to a few dark places himself. Maybe John was right, and Edward’s nephew would at least be able to figure out what was happening to the four of them. It could not just be guilt, after all this time. The Eva Galli business had happened so long ago that it had concerned five different men in a different country: if you looked at the land and compared it to what it was in the twenties, you’d never think it was the same place. Even his woods were second growth, though he liked to pretend that they were not.

Lewis, running, liked to think of the huge climax forest that had once blanketed nearly all of North America: a vast belt of trees and vegetation, silent wealth through which moved only himself and Indians. And a few spirits. Yes, in an endless vault of forest you could believe in spirits. Indian mythology was full of them—they suited the landscape. But now, in a world of Burger Kings and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets and Pitch ‘n Putt golf courses, all the old tyrannical ghosts must have been crowded out.

They aren’t crowded out yet, Lewis. Not yet.

It was like another voice speaking in his mind. Like hell they aren’t, he said to himself, passing one hand over his face.

Not here. Not yet.

Shit. He was spooking himself. He was still affected by that damned dream. Maybe it was time they really talked about these dreams to one another—described them. Now suppose they all had the same dream. What would that mean? Lewis’s mind could not go so far. Well, it would mean something: and at least talking about it would help. He thought he had scared himself awake, this morning. His foot came down into slush, and he clearly saw the final image of his dream: the two men withdrawing their hoods to show their wasted faces.

Not yet.

God damn. He came to a halt, exactly halfway on his run, and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of the running jacket. He wished he had already completed the run and were back inside his kitchen, brewing up coffee or smelling bacon frying in the pan. You’re tougher than this, you old buzzard, he counseled himself, you’ve had to be, ever since Linda killed herself. He leaned for a moment on the fence at the end of the path, where it circled back into the trees, and looked aimlessly out over the field he had sold. Now it was lightly covered with snow, a bumpy expanse from which hard light momentarily bounced and sang. All that too would have been forest. Where the dark things hid.

Oh hell. Well, if they old, they weren’t anywhere in sight now. The air was leaden and empty, and you could see nearly all the way across the dip in the valley to where the trucks on Route 17 steamed on toward Binghamton and Elmira, or the other way toward Newburgh or Poughkeepsie. Only for a moment, the woods at his back made him feel uneasy. He turned around; saw only the path twisting back into the trees; heard only an angry squirrel complain that he was going to have a hungry winter.

Pal, we’ve all had hungry winters. He was thinking of the season after Linda had died. Nothing puts off guests like a public suicide. And is there a Mrs. Benedikt? Oh yes, that’s her bleeding all over the patio— you know, the one with the funny bend in her neck. They had cleared off one by one, leaving him with a deteriorating two-million-dollar asset and no cash inflow. He’d had to let three-fourths of the staff go, and paid the rest out of his own pocket. It had been three years before business had returned, and six years before he had paid his debts.

Suddenly, what he wanted was not coffee and bacon, but a bottle of O’Keefe’s beer. A gallon of it. His throat was dry and his chest ached.

Yes, we’ve all had hungry winters, pal. A gallon of O’Keefe’s? He could have swallowed a barrel. Remembering Linda’s senseless, inexplicable death made him yearn for drunkenness.

It was time to get back. Shaken by memory—Linda’s face had come back to him with utter clarity, claiming him through the nine years since that moment—he turned from the fence and inhaled deeply. Running, not a gallon of ale, was his therapy now. The path through the mile and a half of woods seemed narrower, darker.

Your problem, Lewis, is that you’re yellow.

It was the nightmare that had brought back the memories. Sears and John, in those cerements of the grave, with those lifeless faces. Why not Ricky? If the other two living members of the Chowder Society, why not the third?

He was sweating even before he started the run back.

The return path took a long angle off to the left before turning back in the direction of the farmhouse: normally this loafing misdirection was Lewis’s favorite part of his morning run. The woods closed in almost immediately, and by the time you had gone fifteen paces you forgot all about the open field at your back. More than any other part of the path, it looked here like the original climax forest: thick oaks and girlish birches fought for root space, tall ferns crowded toward the path. Today he ran it with as little pleasure in it as it was possible for him to feel. All those trees, their number and thickness, were obscurely threatening: running away from the house was like running away from safety. Going over the powdery snow in white air, he pushed himself hard toward the cut back home.

When the sensation first hit him, he ignored it, vowing not to allow himself to be whammied any more than he was already. What had come into his mind was that someone was standing back at the beginning of the return path, just where the first trees stood. He knew that no one could be there: it was impossible that anyone had walked across the field without his noticing. But the sensation persisted; it would not be argued away. His watcher’s eyes seemed to follow him, going deeper into the crowded trees. A squadron of crows left the branches of an oak just ahead of him. Normally this would have delighted Lewis, but this time he jumped at their racket and almost fell.

Then the sensation shifted, and became more intense. The person back there was coming after him, staring at him with huge eyes. Frantic, despising himself, Lewis pelted for home without daring to look back. He could feel the eyes watching him until he reached the walkway leading across his back garden from the edge of the woods to his kitchen door.

He ran down the path, his chest raggedly hauling in air, twisted the doorknob, and jumped inside. He slammed the door behind him and went immediately to the window beside it. The path was empty and the only footprints were his. Still Lewis was frightened, looking out to the near edge of his woods. For a moment a traitorous synapse in his brain told him: maybe you should sell out and move into town. But there were no footprints. Nobody could possibly be out there, keeping out of sight in the shelter of the trees—he wouldn’t be scared out of the house he needed, forced by his own weakness to trade his splendid comfortable isolation for a crowded discomfort. To this decision, made in a cold kitchen on the first day of snowfall, he would hold.

Lewis put a kettle on the stove, got his coffee pitcher off a shelf, filled the grinder with Blue Mountain beans and held the switch down until they were powder. Oh hell. He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of O’Keefe’s and after snapping off the cap drank most of it without tasting or swallowing. As the beer hit his stomach, a two-sided thought surprised him. I wish Edward was still alive: I wish John hadn’t pushed so hard for his godawful party.

“Well, speak up,” said Ricky. “What is it, trespassers again? We explained our position on that. He must know even if he won that he couldn’t make enough on a trespassing suit to pay expenses.”

They were just entering the foothills of the Cayuga Valley, and Ricky was handling the old Buick with great care. The roads were slippery, and though ordinarily he would have had his snow tires put on before making even the eight-mile drive to Elmer Scales’s farm, this morning Sears had not given him time. Sears himself, huge in his black hat and black fur-collared winter coat, seemed as conscious of this as Ricky. “Keep your mind on your driving,” he said. “There’s supposed to be ice on the roads up around Damascus.”

“We’re not going to Damascus,” Ricky pointed out.

“Even so.”

“Why didn’t you want to use your car?”

“I’m having the snow tires put on this morning.”

Ricky grunted, amused. Sears was in one of his refractory moods, a frequent consequence of a conversation with Elmer Scales. He was one of their oldest and most difficult clients. (Elmer had come to them first at fifteen years of age, with a long and complex list of people he wished to sue. They had never managed to get rid of him, nor had he ever altered his perception of conflict as a situation best addressed by an immediate lawsuit.) A skinny, excitable man with jutting ears and a high-pitched voice, Scales was called “Our Vergil” by Sears because of his poetry, which he ritually sent off to Catholic magazines and local papers. Ricky understood that the magazines just as ritually sent them back—once Elmer had shown him a file stuffed with rejection slips—but the local newspapers had printed two or three. They were inspirational poems, their imagery drawn from Elmer’s life as a farmer: The cows do moo, the lambs do bleat. God’s Glory walks in on thundering feet. So did Elmer Scales. He had eight children and an undimmed passion for litigation.

Once or twice a year either partner was summoned out to the Scales farm and Elmer would direct him to a hole in a fence where a hunter or a teenager had cut through his fields: Elmer had often identified these trespassers with his binoculars, and he wanted to sue. They usually managed to talk him out of this, but he always had two or three litigations of other sorts under way. But this time, Ricky suspected, it was more serious than Scales’s upsets were normally; he had never before asked—commanded—both partners to come out.

“As you know, Sears,” he said, “I can drive and think at the same time. I’m doing a very sedate thirty miles an hour. I think you can trust me with whatever has Elmer worked up.”

“Some of his animals died.” Sears said this tight-lipped, implying that his speaking would be likely to result in their going off the road at any minute.

“So why are we going out there? We can’t bring them back.”

“He wants us to see them. He called Walter Hardesty too.”

“They didn’t just die, then.”

“With Elmer, who knows? Now please concentrate on getting us there safely, Ricky. This experience will be grisly enough as it is.”

Ricky glanced at his partner and for the first time that morning saw how pale Sears’s face was. Beneath the smooth skin prominent blue veins swam at intervals into visibility; beneath the young eyes hung gray patches of webbed skin. “Keep your eyes on the road,” said Sears.

“You look terrible.”

“I don’t think Elmer will notice.”

Ricky’s eyes were now safely on the narrow country road; this gave him license to speak. “Did you have a bad night?”

Sears said, “I think it’s beginning to melt.”

As this was a blatant lie, Ricky ignored it. “Did you?”

“Observant Ricky. Yes, I did.”

“So did I. Stella thinks we should talk about it.”

“Why? Does she have bad nights too?”

“She thinks that talking about it would help.”

“That sounds like a woman. Talking just opens the wounds. Not talking helps to heal them.”

“In that case, it was a mistake to invite Donald Wanderley here.”

Sears grunted in exasperation.

“That was unfair of me,” Ricky said, “and I’m sorry I said it. But I think we should talk about it for the same reason you think we should invite that boy.”

“He’s not a boy. He must be thirty-five. He might be forty.”

“You know what I mean.” Ricky took a deep breath. “Now I want your forgiveness in advance, because I am going to tell you the dream I had last night. Stella said I woke up screaming. In any case, it was the worst dream yet.” By a shift in the car’s inner weather, Ricky knew that Sears was immediately more interested. “I was in a vacant house, on an upper floor, and some mysterious beast was trying to find me. I’ll skip the development, but the feeling of danger was overwhelming. At the end of the dream it came into the room where I was, but it wasn’t a monster anymore. It was you and Lewis and John. All of you were dead.” Glancing sideways toward his passenger, he saw the curve of Sears’s mottled cheek, the curve of the hatbrim.

“You saw the three of us?”

Ricky nodded.

Sears cleared his throat, and then cranked the window down a quarter of the way. Freezing air rushed into the car. Sears’s chest expanded beneath the black coat: individual spiky hairs of the furry collar flattened in the rush of air. “Extraordinary. You say there were the three of us?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Extraordinary. Because I had an identical dream. But when that dreadful thing burst into my room, I saw only two men. Lewis and John. You weren’t there.”

Ricky heard a tone in the other’s voice it took him a moment to identify, and when he had named it, the recognition carried enough surprise to silence him until they turned into Elmer Scales’s long driveway. It was envy.

“Our Vergil,” Sears pronounced, to himself Ricky thought. As they went slowly up the drive toward the isolated two-story farmhouse, Ricky saw an obviously impatient Scales, dressed in a cap and a plaid jacket, waiting for them on the porch and saw also that the farmhouse resembled a building in an Andrew Wyeth painting. Scales himself looked like a Wyeth portrait; or, more accurately perhaps, a Norman Rockwell subject. His ears stuck redly out beneath the tied-up flaps of his cap. A gray Dodge sedan was pulled up in the cleared space beside the porch, and when Ricky parked next to it he saw the sheriff’s seal on the door. “Walt’s here,” he said, and Sears nodded.

The two men got out of the car, pulling their coats in tightly around their necks. Scales, now flanked by two shivering children, did not move from the porch. He had the high hard look of excitement which accompanied his most passionate litigations. His reedy voice called to them. ” ‘Bout time you two lawyers got here. Walt Hardesty’s been here ten minutes.”

“He didn’t have as far to come,” Sears grumbled. The brim of his hat curled in the unobstructed breeze cutting across the fields.

“Sears James, I don’t suppose any man alive ever got in the last word with you. Hey, you kids! Get back in the house, you’ll freeze your butts off.” He swatted one with each hand, and the two boys scuttled back inside the door. Scales stood above the two old men, smiling grimly.

“What is it, Elmer?” Ricky asked, holding his coat closed at his neck. His feet in his well-shined black shoes were already chilled.

“You’ll just have to see. You two town boys aren’t really dressed for a walk across the fields. Guess that’s your hard luck. Hang on a second, I’ll get Hardesty.” He disappeared for a moment into the house and emerged again with the sheriff, Walt Hardesty, who was wearing a loose sheepskin-lined denim coat and a Stetson. Alerted by Scales’s remark, Ricky looked at the sheriff’s feet: he wore heavy leather hiking boots. “Mr. James, Mr. Hawthorne.” He nodded to them, steam pluming out over his mustache, which was larger and more ragged than Ricky’s. In this cattleman’s outfit, Hardesty looked fifteen years younger than his true age. “Now that you’re here, maybe Elmer will show us what this mystery’s all about.”

“Damn right I will,” said the farmer, and clumped down the porch steps and began leading them away from the house, walking on the path toward the snow-dusted barn. “Just you come this way, gentlemen, and see what I’m gonna show you.”

Hardesty fell in beside Ricky. Sears was walking alone, with immense dignity, behind them. “Colder ‘n a bitch,” the sheriff said. “Looks like being a damn long winter.”

Ricky said, “I hope not I’m too old for one of those.”

With exaggerated gestures and an expression like glee on his skinny face, Elmer Scales was unhooking a long rail fence which led into a side pasture. “Now you pay attention, Walt” he called back. “You see if you can spot any tracks.” He pointed to a line of splayed footprints. “Them’s mine from this morning, goin’ and comin’.” The prints returning were widely spaced, as if Scales had been running. “Where’s your notebook? Ain’t you gonna take notes?”

“Calm down, Elmer,” the sheriff said. “I want to see what the problem is first.”

“You took notes fast enough when my oldest boy racked up his car.”

“Come on, Elmer. Show us what you want us to see.”

“You town boys gonna ruin your shoes,” Elmer said. “Can’t be helped. Follow me.”

Hardesty did as commanded and set off beside Elmer; his broad back in the bulky coat made the farmer look like a capering boy. Ricky glanced back at Sears, just now approaching the gate and regarding the snowy field with disgust “He might have told us we’d need snowshoes.”

“He’s enjoying himself,” Ricky said wonderingly.

“He’ll enjoy himself when I get walking pneumonia and fire a lawsuit at him,” Sears muttered. “Since there’s no alternative, let’s go.”

Gamely Sears put a well-shod foot down into the pasture, where it immediately sank into snow up to the laces. “Ugh.” He retracted it; shook it. The others were already halfway across the field. “I’m not going,” Sears said, jamming his hands into the pockets of his opulent coat. “Damn it, he can come to the office.”

Ricky said, “Well then, I’d better go at least,” and started after the other two. Walt Hardesty had turned around to look at them, stroking his ragged mustache, a frontier lawman translated to a snowy field in New York state. He appeared to be smiling. Elmer Scales plodded on oblivious. Ricky picked his way from one footprint to another. Behind him, he heard Sears emit enough air to fill a balloon and begin to follow.

Single file now, Elmer talking and gesticulating in front they went across the field. With an odd air of triumphant glee, Elmer stopped at the top of a ridge. Beside him, half-covered by snow, were piles of dirty washing. When Hardesty reached the low gray piles, he knelt and prodded; then he grunted, pushing, and Ricky saw four neat black feet roll stiffly into the air.

His shoes soaked and his feet wet, Ricky came up to them. Sears, holding his arms out for balance, was still threading toward them, his hat brim flattened by the wind.

“I didn’t know you still kept any sheep,” he heard Hardesty say.

“I don’t, now!” Scales yelled. “I just had those four, and now they’re all gone. Somebody killed ’em. Just kept ’em around for the sake of the old days. My daddy had a couple hundred, but there’s no money in the stupid dang things anymore. The kids liked ’em, that’s all.”

Ricky looked down at the four dead animals: flat on their sides, eyes glazed, snow in the matted wool. Innocent, he asked, “What killed them?”

“Yeah! That’s it, ain’t it!” Elmer was working himself up into a tantrum. “What! Well, you’re the law around here, you tell me!”

Hardesty, kneeling beside the dirty-gray body of the sheep he had rolled over, looked up at Scales with distaste. “You mean you don’t even know if these animals died naturally, Elmer?”

“I know! I know!” Scales lifted his arms dramatically: a bat in flight.

“How do you know?”

“Because nothing can kill a damn sheep, that’s how I know! And what the hell would kill four at once? Heart attacks? Boy!”

Sears now joined them, his frame making the kneeling Hardesty look small. “Four dead sheep,” he said, looking down. “I suppose you want to sue them.”

“What? You find the lunatic who did this and sue his ass off!”

“And who would that be?”

“Dunno. But …”

“Yeah?” Hardesty looked up again from the sheep huddled at his knees.

“I’ll tell you inside. Meantime, Mr. Sheriff, you look ’em over good and take notes and find out what he did to ’em.”

“He?”

“Inside.”

Hardesty, scowling, was probing the carcass. “You want the vet for this, Elmer, not me.” His hands moved to the animal’s neck. “Uh oh.”

“What?” said Scales, almost leaping with anticipation.

Instead of answering, Hardesty crab-walked to the next nearest sheep and thrust his hands deep into the wool at its neck.

“You might have seen this for yourself,” he said, and gripping its nose and mouth pulled back the sheep’s head.

“Jesus,” said Scales; the two lawyers were silent. Ricky looked down at the exposed wound: like a wide mouth, the long slash in the animal’s neck.

“A neat job,” Hardesty said. “A very neat job of work. Okay, Elmer. You proved your point. Let’s get back inside.” He wiped his fingers in the snow.

“Jesus,” Elmer repeated. “Their throats are cut? All of ’em?”

Wearily Hardesty yanked back the heads of each remaining animal. “All of them.”

Old voices spoke clearly in Ricky’s mind. He and Sears looked at each other, looked away.

“I’ll sue the heart out of whoever did this!” Elmer screeched. “Shit! I knew something was funny! I knew it! Shit!”

Hardesty was now looking around at the empty field. “You sure you went up here once, and then went straight back?”

“Uh huh.”

“How did you know something was wrong?”

“Because I saw ’em up here this morning from the window. Normally when I’m washin’ my face at my window them stupid animals is the first thing I see. See?” He pointed across the fields to his house. The shining pane of the kitchen window faced them. “There’s grass under here. They just walk around all day, stuffin’ themselves. When the snow gets real bad I pen ’em up in the barn. I just looked out an’ I saw ’em, like they are now. Something sure was wrong, so I put on my coat and my boots and came up. Then I called you and my lawyers. I want to sue, and I want you to arrest whoever done this.”

“There aren’t any tracks besides ours,” Hardesty said, smoothing his mustache.

“I know,” said Scales. “He brushed ’em out.”

“Could be. But you can usually tell, on unbroken snow.”

Jesus she moved she can’t she’s dead.

“And there’s another thing,” said Ricky, breaking into the suspicious silence which had developed between the two men and interrupting the lunatic voice in his mind. “There’s no blood.”

For a moment all four men stared down at the sheep and the fresh snow. It was true.

“Can we get off this steppe now?” Sears said.

Elmer was still staring down at the snow, swallowing. Sears began to move across the field, and soon they were all following.

“All right kids, out of the kitchen. Get upstairs,” Scales shouted as they came into the house and removed their coats. “We gotta talk in private. Go on, git.” He shooed his hands at some of the children who were clustered in the hallway, staring at Walter Hardesty’s pistol. “Sarah! Mitchell! Upstairs, now.” He led them into the kitchen and a woman as thin as Elmer shot up out of a chair, clasping her hands. “Mr. James, Mr. Hawthorne,” she said. “Could you use some coffee?”

“Kitchen towelling, if you please, Mrs. Scales,” Sears said. “Then coffee.”

“Kitchen …”

“To wipe my shoes. Mr. Hawthorne undoubtedly requires the same service.”

The woman looked down in dismay at the lawyer’s shoes. “Oh, good heavens. Here, let me help you …” She took a roll of paper towelling from a cupboard, tore off a long section, and made as if to kneel at Sears’s feet. “That won’t be necessary,” Sears said, taking the wadded paper from her hands. Only Ricky knew that Sears was disturbed, not merely rude.

“Mr. Hawthorne … ?” A bit rattled by Sears’s coldness, the woman turned to Ricky.

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Scales,” he said. “That’s very kind of you.” He too accepted several sections of the towelling.

“Their throats were cut,” Elmer said to his wife. “What did I tell you? Some crazyman’s been out here. And—” his voice rose “—a crazyman who can fly, because he didn’t leave no prints.”

“Tell them,” his wife said. Elmer looked at her sharply, and she hurried off to put the coffee together.

Hardesty asked, “Tell us what?” No longer in the Wyatt Earp costume, the sheriff was restored to his proper age of fifty. He’s hitting the bottle worse than ever, Ricky thought, seeing the broken veins in Hardesty’s face, the deepening irresolution. For the truth was that, despite his Texas Ranger appearance, the hawk nose, lined cheeks and gunslinger blue eyes, Walt Hardesty was too lazy to be a good sheriff. It was typical of him that he had had to be told to look at the second pair of sheep. And Elmer Scales was right; he should have taken notes.

Now the farmer was preening himself, about to deliver his bombshell. Stringy cords stood out in his neck; his bat ears went a deeper shade of red. “Well hell, I saw him, didn’t I?” His mouth dropped comically, and he surveyed each of them in turn.

“Him,” his wife said in ironic counterpoint behind him.

“Shit, woman, what else?” Scales thumped the table. “Get that coffee ready and stop interrupting.” He turned back to the three men. “As big as me! Bigger! Starin’ at me! Damnedest thing you ever saw!” Enjoying his moment, he spread his arms. “Right outside!

Just a little further than that away from me. How’s them apples?”

“Did you recognize him?” Hardesty asked.

“Didn’t see him that well. Now I’ll tell you how it was.” He was moving around the kitchen, unable to contain himself, and Ricky was reminded of an old perception, that “Our Vergil” wrote poetry because he was too volatile to believe he was not capable of it. “I was in here last night, late. Couldn’t sleep, never could.”

“Never could,” echoed his wife.

Screeches, thumps came from overhead. “Forget the coffee and get on upstairs, straighten ’em out,” Scales said. He paused while she left the room. Soon another voice joined the cacophony above; then the noises ceased.

“Like I said. I was in here, readin’ through a couple-two-three equipment and seed catalogues. Then! I hears something from out near the barn. Prowler! Damn! I jumps up and looks out the window. Seen it was snowin’. Uh oh, work to do tomorrow, I says to myself. Then I seen him. By the barn. Well, between the barn and the house.”

“What did he look like?” Hardesty said, still not taking notes.

“Couldn’t tell! Too dark!” Now his voice had soared from alto to soprano. “Just saw him there, starin’!”

“You saw him in the dark?” Sears asked in a bored voice. “Were your yard lights on?”

“Mr. Lawyer, you gotta be kidding, with electric bills the way they are. No, but I saw him and I knew he was big.”

“Now, how did you know that, Elmer?” asked Hardesty. Mrs. Scales was coming down the uncarpeted stairs—thump thump thump, hard shoes hitting the wooden risers. Ricky sneezed. A child began to whistle, and abruptly ceased as the footsteps paused.

“Because I saw his eyes! Didn’t I? Just starin’ out at me! About six feet above the ground.”

“You just saw his eyes?” asked Hardesty, incredulous.

“What the hell did this guy’s eyes do, Elmer, shine in the dark?”

“You said it,” Elmer replied.

Ricky jerked his head to look at Elmer, who regarded them all with evident satisfaction, and then without meaning to, looked across the table at Sears. He had gone tense and immobile at Hardesty’s last question, trying to let nothing show on his face, and on Sears’s round face he saw the same intention. Sears too. It means something to him too.

“Now I expect you to get him, Walt, and you two lawyers of mine to sue his ass from here to summer,” Elmer said conclusively. “Excuse my language, honey.” His wife was coming into the little kitchen again, and she nodded at his apology, acknowledging its rectitude by tapping it with her chin as it went by, before taking the percolator off the burner.

“Did you see anything last night, Mrs. Scales?” Hardesty asked.

Ricky saw a similar recognition in Sears’s eyes and knew that he had given himself away.

“All I saw was a scared husband,” she said. “I suppose that’s the part he left out.”

Elmer cleared his throat; his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Well. It looked funny.”

“Yes,” Sears said. “I think we know all we need to know. Now if you’ll excuse us, Mr. Hawthorne and I must be getting back to town.”

“You’ll drink your coffee first, Mr. James,” said Mrs. Scales, putting a steaming plastic cup down before him on the tabletop. “If you’re going to sue some monster’s ass from here to summer you’ll need your strength.”

Ricky forced himself to smile, but Walt Hardesty guffawed.

Outside, Hardesty, back in the protective coloration of his Texas Ranger outfit, bent over to speak softly through the three-inch crack Sears had opened in the window. “Are you two going back into town? Could we meet somewhere to have a word or two?”

“Is it important?”

“Might be, might not. I’d like to talk to you, though.”

“Right We’ll go straight to your office.”

Hardesty’s gloved hand went to his chin and caressed it. “I’d rather not talk about this in front of the other boys.”

Ricky sat with his hands on the wheel, his alert face turned to Hardesty, but his mind held only one thought: Its starting. Its starting and we don’t even know what it is.

“What do you suggest, Walt?” asked Sears.

“I suggest a sub rosa stop someplace where we can have a quiet talk. Ah, do you know Humphrey’s Place, just inside the town limits on the Seven Mile Road?”

“I believe I’ve seen it.”

“I sorta use their back room as an office when I’ve got confidential business. What say we meet there?”

“If you insist,” Sears said, not bothering to consult Ricky.

They followed Hardesty’s car back to town, going a little faster than they had on the way out. The recognition between them—that each knew the frightening thing Elmer Scales had seen—made speech impossible. When Sears finally spoke, it was on an apparently neutral topic. “Hardesty’s an incompetent fool. ‘Confidential business.’ His only confidential business is with a bottle of Jim Beam.”

“Well, now we know what he does in the afternoons.” Ricky turned off the highway onto the Seven Mile Road. The tavern, the only building in sight, was a gray collection of angles and points two hundred yards down on the right.

“Indeed. He blots up free liquor in Humphrey Stalladge’s back room. He’d be better off in a shoe factory in Endicott.”

“What do you think this conversation will be about?”

“We’ll know all too soon. Here’s our rendezvous.”

Hardesty was already standing beside his car in the big, now nearly empty parking lot. Humphrey’s Place, in fact no more than an ordinary roadside tavern, had a long peaked and gabled facade with two large black windows: in one of these neon spelled out its name; in the other Utica Club flashed on and off. Ricky pulled in beside the sheriff’s car, and the two lawyers got out into the cold wind.

“Just follow me,” Hardesty said on a rising curve of intonation, his voice inflated with false bonhomie. After looking at one another with shared discomfort, they went up the concrete steps after him. Ricky sneezed twice, hard, the moment he was inside the tavern.

Omar Norris, one of the town’s small population of full-time drinkers, was seated on a stool at the bar, looking at them in amazement; plump Humphrey Stalladge moved between the booths, dusting ashtrays. “Walt!” he called, and then nodded at Ricky and Sears. Hardesty’s bearing had changed: within the bar, he was taller, more signeurial, and his physical attitude to the two older men behind him somehow suggested that they had come to the place for his advice. Then Stalladge glanced more closely at Ricky and said, “Mr. Hawthorne, isn’t it?” and smiled and said, “Well,” and Ricky knew that Stella had been in here at one time or another.

“Back room okay?” Hardesty asked.

“Always is, for you.” Stalladge waved toward a door marked Private, tucked in a corner beside the long bar, and watched the three men across the dusty floor. Omar Norris, still astonished, watched them, Hardesty striding like a G-man, Ricky conspicuous only in his sober neatness, Sears an imposing presence similar to (it only now came to Ricky) Orson Welles. “You’re in good company today, Walt,” Stalladge called behind their backs, and Sears made one of his disgusted noises deep in his throat—as much at that as at the negligent wave of his gloved hand with which Hardesty acknowledged the remark. Hardesty, princely, opened the door.

But once inside, after indicating that they should go down the dim hallway to the dark room at its end, his shoulders slumped again, his face relaxed, and he said, “Can I get you anything?” Both men shook their heads.

“I’m a little thirsty, myself,” Hardesty said, grimaced, and went back through the door.

Wordlessly the two lawyers went down the hall and into the dingy back room. A table, scarred by a thousand generations of cigarettes, stood in the center; six camp chairs circled it. Ricky found the light switch and flicked it down. Between the unseen light bulbs and the table stood cases of beer stacked nearly to the ceiling. The entire room smelled of smoke and stale beer; even with the light on, the front portion of the room was nearly as dark as it had been before.

“What are we doing here?” Ricky asked.

Sears sat heavily in one of the camp chairs, sighed, removed his hat and put it carefully on the table. “If you mean what will come of this fantastic excursion, nothing, Ricky, nothing.”

“Sears,” Ricky began, “I think we ought to talk about what Elmer saw out there.”

“Not in front of Hardesty.”

“I agree. Now.”

“Not now. Please.”

“My feet are still cold,” Ricky said, and Sears gave him a rare smile.

They heard the door at the end of the hall sliding open. Hardesty came in, a full glass of beer in one hand and a half-empty bottle of Labatt’s and his Stetson in the other. His complexion had become slightly reddened, as if by a rough plains wind. “Beer’s the best thing for a dry throat,” he said. Beneath the camouflaging mist of beer which floated out with his words was the sharper, darker tang of sour-mash whiskey. “Really wets the pipes.” Ricky calculated that Hardesty had managed to swallow one shot of whiskey and half a bottle of beer in the few moments he had been in the bar. “Have you two ever been here before?”

“No,” Sears said.

“Well, this is a good place. It’s real private, Humphrey makes sure you’re not disturbed if you got something private you want to say, and it’s kind of out of the way, so nobody is likely to see the sheriff and the two most distinguished lawyers in town sneakin’ into a tavern.”

“Nobody except Omar Norris.”

“Right, and he’s not likely to remember.” Hardesty swung a leg over a chair as if it were a large dog he intended to ride, lowered himself into it and simultaneously tossed his hat onto the table, where it bumped into Sears’s. Then the Labatt’s bottle went onto the table; Sears moved his own hat a few inches nearer his belly as the sheriff took a long swallow from his glass.

“If I may repeat a question my partner just asked, what are we doing here?”

“Mr. James, I want to tell you something.” The gunfighter eyes had a drunk’s shining sincerity. “You’ll understand why we had to get away from Elmer. We’re never gonna find who or what killed those sheep.” He swallowed again; stifled a burp with the back of his hand.

“No?” At least Hardesty’s awful performance was taking Sears’s mind off his own troubles; he was miming surprise and interest.

“No. No way, no how. This ain’t the first time something like this happened.”

“It isn’t?” Ricky brought out. He too sat down, wondering how much livestock had been slaughtered around Milburn without his hearing of it.

“Not by a long shot. Not here, see, but in other parts of the country.”

“Oh,” Ricky leaned back against the rickety chair.

“You remember a few years back I went to a national police convention in Kansas City. Flew out, stayed there a week. Real good trip.” Ricky could remember this, because after Hardesty’s return the sheriff had spoken to the Lion’s Club, the Kiwanis, the Rotary, the Jaycees and the Elks, the National Rifle Association, the Masons and the John Birch Society, the VFW and the Companions of the Forest of America—the organizations which had paid for his trip, and to a third of which Ricky by obligation belonged. His topic was the need for “a modern and fully equipped force for law and order in the small American community.”

“Well,” Hardesty said, gripping the beer bottle in one hand like a hot dog, “one night back at the motel, I got talking to a bunch of local sheriffs. These guys were from Kansas and Missouri and Minnesota. You know. They were talking about just this kind of setup —funny kinds of unsolved crimes. Now my point is this. At least two or three of these guys ran into exactly the same thing we saw today. Bunch of animals lying dead in a field—wham, bam, dead overnight. No cause until you look at ’em and find—you know. Real neat wounds, like a surgeon would do. And no blood. Exsanguinated, they call that. One of these guys said there was a whole wave of this in the Ohio River valley in the late sixties. Horses, dogs, cows—we probably got the first sheep. But, Mr. Hawthorne, you brought it all back to me when you said that about the no blood. That’s right, that reminded me. You’d figure those sheep would bleed like crazy. And in Kansas City, the same thing happened just a year back before the conference, around Christmas.”

“Nonsense,” said Sears. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this rubbish.”

“Excuse me, Mr. James. It’s not nonsense. It all happened. You could look it up in the Kansas City Times. December 1973. Buncha dead cattle, no footprints, no blood—and that was on fresh snow too, just like today.” He looked across at Ricky, winked, drained his beer.

“Nobody was ever arrested?” Ricky asked.

“Never. In all of those places, they never found anybody. Just like somethin’ bad came to town, put on its show and took off again. My idea is that things like this are somethin’s idea of a joke.”

“What?” Sears said explosively. “Vampires? Demons? Crazy.”

“No, I’m not sayin’ that. Hell, I know there’s no vampires, just like I know that damned monster in that lake in Scotland isn’t there.” Hardesty tipped back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. “But nobody ever found anything, and we ain’t gonna either. There isn’t even any sense in looking. I figure just to keep Elmer happy by telling him how I’m workin’ on it.”

“Is that really all you intend to do?” asked incredulous Ricky Hawthorne.

“Oh, I might have a man walk around some of the local farms, ask if they saw anything funny last night, but that’s about all.”

“And you actually brought us here to tell us that?” Sears asked.

“I actually did.”

“Let’s go, Ricky.” Sears pushed his chair back and reached for his hat.

“And actually I thought the two most distinguished lawyers in town might be able to tell me something.”

“I could, but I doubt that you’d listen.”

“A little less high and mighty, Mr. James. We’re both on the same side, aren’t we?”

Ricky said, over the inevitable phht of expelled air from Sears, “What did you think we could tell you?”

“Why you think you know something about what Elmer saw last night.” He fingered a groove in his forehead, smiling. “You two old boys went into deep freeze when Elmer was talking about that. So you know something or heard something or saw something you didn’t want to tell Elmer Scales. Well, suppose you support your local sheriff and speak up.”

Sears pushed himself up from the chair. “I saw four dead sheep. I know nothing. And that, Walter, is that.” He snatched his hat from the table. “Ricky, let’s go do something useful.”

“About?” Sears waved toward their office building.

“Miracle of miracles. A parking space right in front of the door.”

“About what Elmer saw.”

“If it is obvious to Walt Hardesty, then it is obvious indeed. Yes.”

“Did you actually see anything?”

“I saw something not there. I hallucinated. I can only assume that I was overtired and somehow emotionally affected by the story I told.”

Ricky carefully backed the car into the space before the tall wooden facade of the office building.

Sears coughed, placed his hand on the door latch, did not move; to Ricky, he looked as though he already regretted what he was going to say. “I take it you saw more or less the same thing that Our Vergil did.”

“Yes, I did.” He paused. “No. I felt it, but I knew what it was.”

“Well.” He coughed again, and Ricky grew tense with waiting. “What I saw was Fenny Bate.”

“The boy in your story?” Ricky was astonished.

“The boy I tried to teach. The boy I suppose I killed —helped to kill.”

Sears took his hand from the door and let his weight fall back on the car seat. Now, at last, he wanted to talk.

Ricky tried to take it in. “I wasn’t sure that—” He stopped in midsentence, aware that he was breaking one of the Chowder Society’s rules.

“That it was a true story? Oh, it was true enough, Ricky. True enough. There was a real Fenny Bate, and he died.”

Ricky remembered the sight of Sears’s lighted window. “Were you looking out of the library windows when you saw him?”

Sears shook his head. “I was going upstairs. It was very late, probably about two o’clock. I had fallen asleep in a chair after doing the dishes. I didn’t feel very good, I’m afraid—I would have felt worse if I’d known that Elmer Scales was going to wake me up at seven o’clock this morning. Well, I turned off the lights in the library, closed the door, and began to go up the stairs. And then I saw him sitting there, sitting on the stairs. He appeared to be asleep. He was dressed in the rags I remembered him wearing, and his feet were bare.”

“What did you do?”

“I was too frightened to do anything at all. I’m no longer a strong young man of twenty. Ricky, I just stood there for—I don’t know how long. I thought I might collapse. I steadied myself by putting my hand on the banister, and then he woke up.” Sears was clasping his hands together before him, and Ricky could tell that he was gripping hard. “He didn’t have eyes. He just had holes. The rest of his face was smiling.” Sears’s hands went to his face and folded in beneath the wide hat-brim. “Christ, Ricky. He wanted to play.”

“He wanted to play?”

“That’s what went through my mind. I was in such shock I couldn’t think straight. When the—hallucination—stood up, I ran back down the stairs and locked myself in the library. I went to bed on the couch. I had the feeling that it was gone, but I couldn’t make myself go back out on the staircase. Eventually I fell asleep and had the dream we were discussing. In the morning of course I recognized what had happened. I was ‘seeing things,’ in the vulgar parlance. And I did not think, nor do I think now, that such things are exactly in the province of Walt Hardesty. Or Our Vergil, for that matter.”

“My God, Sears,” Ricky said.

“Forget about it, Ricky. Just forget I ever told you. At least until this young Wanderley arrives.”

Jesus she moved she can’t she’s dead spoke in his mind again, and he turned his eyes from the dashboard where they had been resting while Sears told him to do the impossible, and looked straight into the pale face of his law partner.

“No more,” Sears said. “Whatever it is, no more. I’ve had enough.”

… no put her feet in first.

“Sears.”

“I can’t, Ricky,” Sears said, and levered himself out of the car.

Hawthorne got out on his side, and looked across the top of the car at Sears, an imposing man dressed in black, and for a moment he saw on the face of his old friend the waxy features his dream had given him. Behind him, around him, all of the town floated in wintry air, as if it too had secretly died. “But I’ll tell you one thing,” Sears said. “I wish Edward were still alive. I often wish that.”

“So do I,” Ricky whispered, but Sears had already turned from him and was beginning to go up the steps to the front door. A rising wind bit at Ricky’s face and hands, and he quickly followed, sneezing again.

Jesus she moved, his own words, coiled and died in the washed-out air as if he had just spoken them. Pursued by them, he quickly got out of bed.

Jesus she moved, and this time he heard it spoken. The voice was level, without shading or vibrato, not his own. He had to get out of the house. Of his dreams, he could remember only the last startling image: before that there had been the usual business of lying paralyzed in a bare bedroom, no bedroom he’d ever seen in his life, and the coming of a threatening beast which resolved into dead Sears and dead Lewis: he had assumed they’d all been having this dream. But the image which propelled him across the room was this: the face, streaked with blood and distorted with bruises, of a young woman—a woman as dead as Sears and Lewis in the familiar dream—staring at him with glowing eyes and grinning mouth. It was more real than anything about him, more real than himself. (Jesus she moved she can’t she’s dead)

But she moved, all right. She sat up and grinned.

It was coming to an end for him at last, as it had for Edward, and with part of his mind he knew it And was grateful. A little surprised that his hands did not melt through the brass handles of the dresser drawer, Jaffrey pulled, out socks and underwear. Unearthly rose light pervaded the bedroom. He quickly dressed in random articles of clothing, selecting them blindly, and left the bedroom to go down the stairs to the ground floor. There, obeying an impulse stamped into him by ten years’ habit, he let himself into a small rear office, opened a cabinet and took out two vials and two disposable hypodermics. He sat on a revolving typing chair, rolled up his left sleeve, took the syringes from their wrappers and put one on the metal-topped table beside him.

The girl sat up on the blood-smeared car seat and grinned at him through the window. She said, Hurry up, John. He pushed the first needle through the rubber cap over the insulin compound, pulled back the barrel and socked the needle into his arm. When the hypodermic was empty, he retracted it and tossed it into the wastebasket beneath the table; then he put the other syringe into the second vial, which contained a compound of morphine; this went into the same arm.

Hurry up, John.

None of his friends knew he was a diabetic, and had been since his early sixties; neither did they know of the morphine addiction which had gained on him since the same period, when he had begun administering the drug to himself: they had only seen the effects of the doctor’s morning ritual gradually eating into him.

With both syringes at the bottom of the wastebasket, Dr. Jaffrey came out into his entrance hall and waiting room. Empty chairs stood in rows against the walls; on one of these appeared a girl in torn clothing, red smears across her face, redness leaking from her mouth when she said Hurry up, John.

He reached into a closet for his overcoat and was surprised that his hand, extended there at the end of his arm, was such a whole, functioning thing. Someone behind him seemed to be helping him get his arms through the sleeves of the coat. Blindly he grabbed a hat from the shelf above the coathooks. He stumbled through his front door.

When he passed the big windows of the Village Pump restaurant, William Webb, the young waiter Stella Hawthorne had intimidated, was setting out napkins and silverware, working his way toward the back of the restaurant where he could take a break and have a cup of coffee. Because he was nearer to Dr. Jaffrey than Eleanor Hardie had been, he took in the details of the doctor’s pale, confused face beneath the fishing hat, the coat unbuttoned to reveal the doctor’s bare neck, the tuxedo jacket over the pajama top. What went through his mind was: the old fool’s got amnesia. On the half-dozen occasions Bill Webb had seen Dr. Jaffrey in the restaurant, the doctor had read a book straight through his meal and left a minute tip. Because Jaffrey had begun to hurry, though the expression on his face suggested that he had no proper idea of where he was going, Webb dropped a handful of silverware on the table and rushed out of the restaurant.

Dr. Jaffrey had begun to flap down the sidewalk. Webb ran after him and caught up with him at the traffic lights a block away: the doctor, running, was an angular bird. Webb touched the sleeve of the black coat. “Dr. Jaffrey, can I help you?”

Dr. Jaffrey.

In front of Webb, about to run across the street without bothering to check the traffic—which, in any case, was nonexistent—Jaffrey turned around, having heard a toneless command. Bill Webb then was given one of the most unsettling experiences of his life. A man with whom he was acquainted, a man who had never looked at him with even polite curiosity, now regarded him with utter terror stamped into his features. Webb, who dropped his hand, had no idea that the doctor saw, instead of his ordinary, slightly froggy face, that of a dead girl grinning redly at him.

“I’m going,” the doctor said, his face still registering horror. “I’m going now.”

“Uh, sure,” said Webb.

The doctor turned and fled, and reached the other side of the street without mishap. He continued his birdlike run down the left side of Main Street, elbows hitching, coat twisting out behind him, and Webb was sufficiently unsettled by the look the doctor had given him to stand staring at him open-mouthed until he realized that he was coatless and a block from the restaurant.

“I’m going now,” he said.

Though on any normal day John Jaffrey could have gone straight to the bridge without even thinking about which streets would take him there, this morning he wandered about Milburn in a growing panic, unable to find it. He could picture the bridge perfectly—he saw even the rivets with their rounded heads, the flat dull face of the metal—but when he tried to picture its location, he saw only fuzz. Buildings? He turned into Market Street, almost expecting to see the bridge lifting up between Burger King and the A&P. Seeing only the bridge, he had forgotten the river.

Trees? A park? The picture the words evoked was so strong that he was surprised, leaving Market Street, to see about him only empty streets, snow heaped at the curbside. Move on, doctor. He stumbled forward, righted himself by leaning against a barber pole, went on.

Trees? Some trees, scattered in a landscape? No. Nor these floating buildings.

As the doctor wandered half-blindly through streets he should have known, tacking from the square to Washington Street on the south, then over to Milgrim Lane and down declining Milgrim Lane past three-room wooden houses set between carwashes and drugstores into the Hollow and real poverty where he would be as close to unknown as he could be and still be in Milburn (here he might have been in trouble if it hadn’t been so cold and if trouble hadn’t become a meaningless concept to apply to him), several people saw him go. The Hollow people who saw him go thought he was just another crazy, doomed and oddly dressed. When he accidentally turned back in the right direction and crossed back into quiet streets where bare trees stood at the ends of long lawns, those who saw him assumed that the doctor’s car was nearby, because he had begun to move in a slow trot and was hatless. A mailman who grabbed his arm and said, “Man, do you need help?” was shocked into helplessness by the same wide-open gaze of terror that had stopped Bill Webb. Eventually Dr. Jaffrey wound back into the business district.

When he had twice circled Benjamin Harrison Oval, both times going right past Bridge Approach Lane, a patient voice in his mind said Go around once more and take the second right turn, doctor.

“Thank you,” he whispered, having heard amusement as well as patience in the voice he’d once heard as inhumanly toneless.

So once more, exhausted and half-frozen, John Jaffrey forced himself to move painfully past the tire-repair outfits and muffler centers of Benjamin Harrison Oval, and lifting his knees like a wornout milkhorse, at last made the turn into Bridge Approach Lane.

“Of course,” he sobbed, seeing it at last, the gray arch of the bridge over the sluggish river. He could trot no further; by now in fact he could barely walk. One of the slippers had fallen off, and the foot it had covered was entirely without sensation. He had a flaming stitch in his left side, his heart thudded, his lungs were one vast ache. The bridge was an answered prayer. He trudged toward it. This was where the bridge belonged, here in this windy area where the old brick buildings gave way to weedy marshland, here where the wind felt like a hand holding him back.

Now, doctor.

He nodded, and as he drew nearer he saw where he could stand. Four big scallops of metal, themselves cross-hatched by girders, formed an undulating line on either side of the bridge. In the middle of the bridge, between the second and third metal curves, a thick steel girder protruded upward.

Jaffrey could not feel the change from the concrete of the road to the steel of the bridge, but he could feel the bridge move beneath him, lifting a little with each particularly strong gust. When he reached the superstructure, he pulled himself along on the rail. After reaching the central girder, he gripped one of the rungs, put his frozen feet on the bottom rung, and tried to climb up to the flat rail.

He could not do it.

For a moment he stood there, hands on one rung and feet on another, like an old man hanging from a rope, breathing so heavily it sounded like sobbing. He managed to lift his slippered foot and put it on the next rung. Then by using what he felt was surely the last of his strength, he pulled his body up onto it. Some flesh from his bare foot adhered to the lower rung. Panting, he stood on the second rung, and saw that he had two more rungs to go before he would be high enough to stand on the flat rail.

One at a time, he transferred his hands to the next highest rung. Then he moved the slippered foot; and with what felt like heroic effort, moved the other.

Pain seared his entire leg, and he clung to the supports, the bare foot lifted into cold wind. For a moment, his foot blazing, he feared that shock would tumble him back down onto the bridge. Once down, he would never be able to climb up again.

Delicately he put the toes of his still-flaming foot on the rung. It was enough to hold him. Again he transferred his numb arms. The slippered foot went up a rung—by itself it seemed. He tried to pull himself up, but his arms merely trembled. It felt as though the muscles in his shoulders were separating. Finally he threw himself up, assisted he thought by a hand pushing upward in the small of his back, his fingers luckily caught the rung, and he was nearly there.

For the first time he noticed his bare foot, bleeding onto the metal. The pain had increased; now his entire left leg seemed to be in flames. He put the foot down onto the flat rail, and held tightly with both exhausted arms while he moved his right foot beside it.

The water glistened feebly beneath him. Wind buffeted his hair, his coat.

Standing before him on a platform of gray wind, dressed in tweed jacket and bow tie, was Ricky Hawthorne. Ricky’s hands were clasped, in a characteristic gesture, before his belt buckle. “Good work, John,” he said in his dry kind voice. The best of them all, the sweetest, cuckolded little Ricky Hawthorne.

“You take too much guff from Sears,” John Jaffrey said, his voice weak and whispery. “You always did.”

“I know.” Ricky smiled. “I’m a natural subaltern. Sears was always a natural general.”

“Wrong,” Jaffrey tried to say. “He’s not, he’s …” The thought died.

“It doesn’t matter,” came the light dry voice. “Just step forward off the bridge, John.”

Dr. Jaffrey was looking down at the gray water. “No, I can’t. I had something different in mind. I was going …” Confusion took it away.

When he looked up again, he gasped. Edward Wanderley, who had been closer to him than any of the others, was standing on the wind instead of Ricky. As on the night of the party, he wore black shoes, a gray flannel suit, a flowered shirt. Black-rimmed spectacles were joined at the bows by a silvery cord. Handsome in his theatrical gray hair and expensive clothes, Edward smiled at him with compassion, concern, warmth. “It’s been a little while,” he said.

Dr. Jaffrey began to weep.

“It’s time to stop messing around,” Edward told him. “All it takes is one step. It’s simple as hell, John.”

Dr. Jaffrey nodded.

“So take the step, John. You’re too tired to do anything else.”

Dr. Jaffrey stepped off the bridge.

Below him, at the level of the water but protected from the wind by a thick steel plate, Omar Norris saw him hit the water. The doctor’s body went under, surfaced a moment later and spun halfway around, face down, before it began to drift downriver with the current. “Shit,” he said: he’d come to the one place he could think of where he could finish off a pint of bourbon without being cornered by lawyers, the sheriff, his wife or someone telling him to get on the snowplow and start clearing the streets. He tilted more bourbon into his mouth, closed his eyes. When he opened them it was still there, lower in the water because the heavy coat had begun to weight the body down. “Shit.” He capped the bottle, stood up and went back out into the wind to see if he could find someone who would know what to do.

“I don’t know why I never did it before,” John said, his face gleaming. “I feel younger tonight than I have in a decade.”

“How wonderful, John,” Stella said, leaning forward to kiss his cheek. “What does Milly think of it?”

“Not much.” He looked bemused. “She couldn’t figure out why I wanted to have a party in the first place.

She couldn’t understand why I wanted to have Miss Moore here at all.”

Milly herself came into view at that moment, holding a tray of canapes before Barnes and Venuti, the two bankers, and from the determined look on Milly’s plump face, Ricky saw that she had opposed the idea from the first. “Why did you want to?”

“Excuse me, John, I’m going to mill,” said Stella. “Don’t worry about getting me a drink, Ricky, I’ll take one from someone who isn’t using his.” She went through the doorway in the direction of Ned Rowles. Lou Price, gangsterish in a double-breasted pinstriped suit, took her hand and pecked her on the cheek.

“She’s a wonderful gal,” John Jaffrey said, and the two men watched Stella deflect Lou Price with a phrase and continue toward Ned Rowles. “I wish there were a million like her.” Rowles was turning around to watch Stella approach him, his face lighting up with pleasure. In his corduroy jacket, with his sandy hair and earnest face, Ned Rowles resembled a journalism student more than an editor. He too kissed Stella, but on the mouth, and held both her hands as he did so. “Why did I want to?” John cocked his head, and four deep wrinkles divided the side of his neck. “I don’t know, exactly. Edward’s so entranced with this girl that I wanted to meet her.”

“Is he? Entranced?”

“Oh, absolutely. You wait. You’ll see. And then, you know, I only ever see my patients and Milly and the Chowder Society. I thought it was time to bust out a little. Have a little fun before I dropped dead.”

This was very giddy for John Jaffrey, and Ricky glanced at his friend, taking his eyes from his wife, who was still holding hands with Ned Rowles.

“And do you know what I can’t get over? One of the most famous actresses in America is upstairs in my house, right this minute.”

“Is Edward with her?”

“He said she had to take a few minutes before she joined us. I guess he’s helping her with her coat or something.” Jaffrey’s ravaged face simply gleamed with pride.

“I don’t think she’s quite yet one of the most famous actresses in America, John.” Stella had moved on, and Ned Rowles was saying something vehement to Ed Venuti.

“Well, she will be. Edward thinks so, and he’s always right about things like that Ricky!” Jaffrey gripped his upper arms. “Did you see the kids dancing downstairs? Isn’t that fantastic? Kids having a good time in my house? I thought they’d enjoy meeting her. It’s a fantastic honor, you know. She can only be here a few more days. Edward’s got the taping nearly done, and she has to get back to New York to rejoin the play. And here she is, in my house! By God, Ricky.”

Ricky felt almost as though he should press a cold cloth to Jaffrey’s forehead.

“Did you know that she just came out of nowhere? That she was the most promising student in her drama class, and the next week she got her part in Everybody Saw the Sun Shine?”

“No, John.”

“Just now I had a wonderful idea. It was about having her here in the house. I was standing here, listening to the kids’ disco music from downstairs, and hearing bits and pieces of the George Shearing record from in there, and I thought—downstairs is the raw, animal life, kids jumping around to that beat, on this floor we’ve got the mental life, doctors and lawyers, all middle-class respectability, and upstairs is grace, talent, beauty—the spirit. You see? It’s like evolution. She’s the most ethereal thing you’ve ever seen. And she’s only eighteen.”

Never in his life had Ricky heard John Jaffrey express such a fanciful concept. He was beginning to worry about the doctor’s blood pressure. Then both men heard a door close up on the next landing, followed by Edward’s deep voice saying something that had the sly intonation of a joke.

“I thought Stella said she was nineteen,” Ricky said.

“Shhh.”

A beautiful little girl was coming toward them down the stairs. Her dress was simple and green, her hair was a cloud. After a second Ricky saw that her eyes matched the dress. Moving with a kind of rhythmic idle precision, she gave them the tiniest of smiles— still it was brilliant—and went by, patting Dr. Jaffrey’s chest with her fingertips as she passed them. Ricky watched her go, amused and touched. He had seen nothing like it since Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box.

Then he looked at Edward Wanderley and saw at once that John Jaffrey was right. Edward’s feathers were shining. He had obviously been stirred up by the girl, and it was equally obvious that it was difficult for him to leave her alone long enough to greet his friends. All three men began to move into the crowded living room. “Ricky, you look great,” Edward told him, putting an arm easily around Ricky’s shoulders. Edward was half a foot taller, and when Edward began to propel him into the room, Ricky could smell an expensive cologne. “Just great. But isn’t it time you stopped wearing bow ties? The Arthur Schlesinger era is dead and gone.”

“That was the era right after mine,” Ricky said.

“No, listen, nobody’s older than he feels. I stopped wearing neckties altogether. In ten years, eighty per cent of the men in this country will wear ties only to weddings and funerals. Barnes and Venuti over there will be wearing that getup to the bank.” He scanned the room. “Where the hell did she go?” Ricky, in whom new ties evoked a desire to wear them even to bed, looked at Edward’s unfettered neck as his friend surveyed the crowded room, saw that it was even more corded than John Jaffrey’s, and decided not to change his habits. “I’ve spent three weeks with that girl, and she’s the most fantastic subject I ever had. Even if she makes the stuff up, and maybe she does, it’ll be the best book I’ll ever do. She’s had a horrible life, horrible. It makes you weep just to hear it—I sit there and cry. I tell you, she’s wasted in that piece of Broadway fluff, wasted. She’ll be a great tragic actress. Once she’s out of her teens.” Red-faced, Edward guffawed at his own preposterousness. Like John, he too was in flight. “You two seem to have caught that girl like a virus,” Ricky said.

John giggled, and Edward said, “The whole world will, Ricky. She’s really got that gift.”

“Oh,” Ricky said, remembering something. “Your nephew Donald seems to be having a great success with his new book. Congratulations.”

“It’s nice to know I’m not the only talented bastard in the family. And it should help him get over his brother’s death. That was an odd story, a very odd story—they both seem to have been engaged to the same woman. But we don’t want to think about anything macabre tonight. We’re going to have fun.”

John Jaffrey nodded in happy agreement.

“Yeah, Pete’s decided on Cornell. I always hoped he’d at least apply to Yale—my old school. I still think he’d make it.” A heavy-set man with a stubborn face like his son’s, Barnes was disinclined to accept Ricky’s congratulations. “The kid isn’t even interested anymore. He says Cornell’s good enough for him. ‘Good enough.’ His generation’s even more conservative than mine. Cornell’s the kind of rinky-dink place where they still have food fights. Nine or ten years ago, I used to be worried that Pete would grow up to be a radical with a beard and a bomb—now I’m afraid he’ll settle for less than he could get.”

Ricky made vague noises of sympathy.

“How are your kids doing? They both still out on the West Coast?”

“Yes. Robert’s teaching English in a high school. Jane’s husband just got a vice-presidency.”

“Vice-president in charge of what?”

“Safety.”

“Oh, well.” They both sipped at their drinks, refraining from trying to invent comment on what a promotion to vice-president in charge of safety might mean in an insurance company. “They planning to get back here for Christmas?”

“I don’t think so. They both have pretty active lives.” In fact, neither of their children had written to Ricky and Stella for several months. They had been happy infants, sullen adolescents, and now, both of them nearly forty, were unsatisfied adults—in many ways, still adolescent. Robert’s few letters were barely concealed pleas for money; Jane’s were superficially bright, but Ricky read desperation in them. (“I’m really getting to like myself now”: a statement which to Ricky meant its opposite. Its glibness made him wince.) Ricky’s children, the former darlings of his heart, were now like distant planets. Their letters were painful; seeing them was worse. “No,” he said, “I don’t think they’ll be able to make it this time.”

“Jane’s a pretty girl,” Walter Barnes said.

“Her mother’s daughter.”

Ricky automatically began to look around the room to catch a glimpse of Stella, and saw Milly Sheehan introducing his wife to a tall man with stooping shoulders and thick lips. The academic nephew.

Barnes asked, “Have you seen Edward’s actress?”

“She’s here somewhere. I saw her come down.”

“John Jaffrey seems very excited about her.”

“She is really sort of unnervingly pretty,” Ricky said, and laughed. “Edward’s been unnerved too.”

“Pete read in a magazine that she’s only seventeen years old.”

“In that case, she’s a public menace.”

“Oh poof, when I’m too old to work I’ll lay down and die. Did you have anything to eat?”

“Not yet. This must be your nephew.”

“Oh, please forgive me. You haven’t met.” She touched the arm of the tall man beside her. “This is the brainy one in my family, Harold Sims. He’s a professor at the college and we’ve just been having a nice talk with your wife. Harold, this is Frederick Hawthorne, one of the doctor’s closest friends.” Sims smiled down at him. “Mr. Hawthorne’s a charter member of the Chowder Society,” Milly concluded.

“I was just hearing about the Chowder Society,” Harold Sims said. His voice was very deep. “It sounds interesting.”

“I’m afraid it’s anything but.”

“I’m speaking from the anthropological point of view. I’ve been studying the behavior of male chronologically-related interaction groups. The ritual content is always very strong. Do you, uh, members of the Chowder Society actually wear dinner jackets when you meet?”

“Yes, I’m afraid we do.” Ricky looked to Stella for help, but she had mentally abstracted herself, and was gazing coolly at both men.

“Why is that, exactly?”

Ricky felt that the man was about to pull a notebook from his pocket. “It seemed like a good idea a hundred years ago. Milly, why did John invite half the town if he’s going to let Freddy Robinson monopolize Miss Moore?”

Before Milly could answer, Sims asked, “Are you familiar with the work of Lionel Tiger?”

“I’m afraid I’m abysmally ignorant,” Ricky said.

“I’d be interested in observing one of your meetings. I suppose that could be arranged?”

Stella laughed at last, and gave him a look which meant, get out of that.

“I suppose differently,” Ricky said, “but I could probably get you into the next Kiwanis meeting.”

Sims reared back, and Ricky saw that he was too unsure of his dignity to take jokes well. “We’re just five old coots who enjoy getting together,” he quickly said. “Anthropologically, we’re a washout. We’re of no interest to anyone.”

“You’re of interest to me,” said Stella. “Why don’t you invite Mr. Sims and your wife to the next meeting?”

“Yeah!” Sims began to show an alarming quantity of enthusiasm. “I’d like to record for a start, and then the video element—”

“Do you see that man over there?” Ricky nodded in the direction of Sears James, who more than ever resembled a stormcloud in human form. It looked like Freddy Robinson, now separated from Miss Moore, was trying to sell him insurance. “The big one? He’d slit my throat if I did any such thing.”

Milly looked shocked; Stella lifted her chin and said, “Very nice meeting you, Mr. Sims,” and left them.

Harold Sims said, “Anthropologically, that’s a very interesting statement.” He regarded Ricky with an interest even more professional. “The Chowder Society must be highly important to you.”

“Of course it is,” Ricky said simply.

“From what you just said, I’d assume that the man you just pointed out is the dominant figure in the group—as it were, the honcho.”

“Very astute of you,” Ricky said. “Now if you’ll forgive me, I see someone I must have a word with.”

When he had turned his back and gone away only a few steps, he heard Sims ask Milly, “Are those two really married?”

The first person who found him was Clark Mulligan, the owner of the Rialto, Milburn’s only movie theater. His Hush Puppies were unaccustomedly clean, his trousers pressed, his belly successfully contained by his jacket button—Clark had spruced himself up for the evening. Presumably he knew that he had been invited for his relation to show business. Ricky thought it must have been the first time John had had Clark Mulligan in his home. He was glad to see him; he was always glad to see him. Mulligan was the only person in town who shared his love of old movies. Hollywood gossip bored Ricky, but he loved the films of its golden days.

“Who does she remind you of?” he asked Mulligan.

Mulligan squinted across the room. The actress was standing demurely across the room, listening to something said by Ed Venuti. “Mary Miles Minter?”

“She reminded me of Louise Brooks. Though I don’t suppose Louise Brooks’s eyes were green.”

“Who knows? She’s supposed to be a damn fine little actress, though. Cropped up just out of nowhere. Nobody knows anything about her.”

“Edward does.”

“Oh, he’s doing one of his books, isn’t he?”

The interviewing is nearly done. It’s always difficult for Edward to say good-bye to his subjects, but this time it will be especially traumatic. I think he fell in love with her.” And indeed, Edward had jealously joined Ed Venuti, and managed to interpose himself between the banker and the little actress.

“I’d fall in love with her too,” Mulligan said. “Once they get their faces up on the screen, I fall in love with all of them. Have you seen Marthe Keller?” His eyes rolled.

“Not yet, but from the photos I’ve seen she looks a lot like a modern Constance Talmadge.”

“Are you kidding? How about Paulette Goddard?” And from there they went happily on to speak of Chaplin, of Monsieur Verdoux, of Norma Shearer and John Ford, Eugene Pallette and Harry Carey, Jr., Stagecoach and The Thin Man, Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, John Gilbert and Rex Bell, Jean Harlow, Charlie Farrell, Janet Gaynor, Nosferatu and Mae West, actors and films Ricky had seen as a younger man and had never ceased youthfully to cherish, and the fresh memory of them helped to dampen the recollection of what a young man had said about himself and his wife.

“Wasn’t that Clark Mulligan?” His second visitor was Sonny Venuti, Edward’s wife. “He looks terrible.” Sonny herself had changed over the past few years from a slender, pretty woman with a lovely smile to a bony stranger with an uneasy, dazed expression permanently fixed in her eyes. A casualty of marriage. Three months before she had come into Ricky’s office and asked what she had to do to get a divorce: “I’m not sure yet, but I’m definitely thinking about it. I have to find out where I am.” Yes, there was another man, but she would not name him. “I’ll tell you this, though, he’s good-looking and intelligent and he’s as close to sophisticated as you can get in this town.” She had left no doubt that the man was Lewis. Such women always reminded Ricky Hawthorne of his daughter, and he had led her through all of her options gently, outlining all the steps, explaining everything carefully and succinctly, though he knew she would never return.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Oh, entirely.”

“I talked to her for a second.”

“Yes?”

“She wasn’t interested. She’s only interested in men. She’d love you.”

At the moment, the actress was talking to Stella, not ten feet away, which seemed to undercut Sonny Venuti’s statement. Ricky watched the two women conversing without hearing their words; Sonny went on at some length to explain why the actress would love him. The subject of these remarks was listening to Stella, she responded, both women were lovely, cool, amused. Then Miss Moore said something that visibly confounded Stella: Ricky’s wife blinked, opened her mouth, snapped it shut, patted her hair—if she had been a man, she’d have scratched her head. Ann-Veronica Moore, trailed by Edward Wanderley, went off.

“So I’d watch myself,” Sonny Venuti was saying. “She might look like a little angel, but that kind of woman loves to turn men into hash.”

“Pandora’s Box,” said Ricky, reminded of his first impression of the actress.

“What? Oh, never mind, I know, it’s an old movie. When I came to you that time you mentioned Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy twice.”

“How are things now, Sonny?”

“I’m trying again, Jesus, how I’m trying. Who can get a divorce in Milburn? But I still want to find out who I am.”

Ricky thought of his daughter, and his heart twisted.

Then Sears James joined Ricky in his corner. “Privacy at last,” he said, putting his drink on a table and leaning against the bookshelves.

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“An appalling young man tried to sell me insurance. He lives across the street.”

“I know him.”

Since they were in total agreement on the subject of Freddy Robinson, there was nothing more to say. Eventually Sears broke the silence. “Lewis might need help getting home. He’s been a bit bibulous.”

“Well, after all, it’s not one of our meetings.”

“Hmm. I suppose he might pick up a girl who could drive him home.”

Ricky glanced at him to see if he meant this personally, but Sears was merely surveying the party blandly, obviously bored. “Did you talk to the guest of honor?”

“I haven’t even seen her.”

“She’s highly visible. I think she’s over—” He lifted his drink in the direction he had seen her, but the actress was no longer there. Edward was talking to John, presumably about her, but Ann-Veronica Moore was no longer in the room. “Keep an eye on Edward. He’ll find her.”

“Isn’t that Walter Barnes’s son standing by the bar?”

Though it was now long past ten, Peter Barnes and a young girl were indeed by the bar, and the waiter who had relieved Milly of her duties was mixing drinks for them. Doctor Jaffrey’s housekeeper had clearly not had the heart to send away the teenagers downstairs, and the bolder ones had invaded the upstairs party. The piano music which had replaced Aretha Franklin abruptly ceased, and Ricky saw Jim Hardie juggling several record albums, trying to decide which was least out of date. “Uh, oh,” he said to Sears, “we have a new disc jockey.”

“That’s it,” Sears said. “I’m tired and I’m going home. Noisy music makes me want to bite someone.”

He moved massively away. Milly Sheehan stopped his progress and spoke agitatedly to him. Ricky guessed that she was in a tizzy over the sodden appearance of the teenagers. Sears shrugged—it was not his problem.

Ricky wanted to go home then, but Stella had begun to dance with Ned Rowles, and soon several of the wives had enticed their husbands to that part of the room nearest the record player. The teenagers danced energetically, sometimes almost elegantly; the adults looked foolishly imitative beside them. Ricky groaned; it was going to be a long night. All had begun to speak louder, the barman mixed a half dozen drinks at a time, moving an upended bottle over a row of ice-filled glasses. Sears reached the door and disappeared.

Christina Barnes, a tall blonde with an avid face, appeared by Ricky. “Since my son has managed to take over this party, how about dancing with me, Ricky?”

Ricky smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t be a gentleman, Christina. I haven’t danced in forty years.”

“You must do something pretty well to hang on to Stella all these years.”

She’d had about three drinks too many. “Yes,” he said. “You know what it was? I never lost my sense of humor.”

“Ricky, you’re wonderful. I’d love to give you a backrub one of these days and see if I could find out what you’re made of.”

“Old pencil stubs and out-of-date law books.”

Clumsily she kissed him, hitting the edge of his jaw. “Did Sonny Venuti see you a couple of months ago? I want to talk to you about it.”

“Then come to my office,” he said, knowing she would not.

“Excuse me, Ricky, Christina,” said Edward Wanderley, who had come up on Ricky’s other side.

“I’ll leave you men to your private business.” Christina went off in search of a dancing partner.

“Have you seen her? Do you know where she is?” Edward’s broad face was boyish, anxious.

“Miss Moore? Not for a little while. Have you lost her?”

“Damn. She just vanished.”

“She’s probably in the bathroom.”

“For twenty-five minutes?” Edward rubbed his forehead.

“Don’t worry about her, Edward.”

“I’m not worried, I just want to find her.” He stood on tiptoe and began to look over the heads of the dancers, still grinding his fist into his forehead. “You don’t suppose she went off with one of those awful kids?”

“Couldn’t say.” Edward slapped his shoulder and went rapidly out into the room.

Christina Barnes and Ned Rowles appeared in the vacuum Edward left at the edge of the carpet, and Ricky went around them to look for Stella. After a moment he saw her with Jim Hardie, obviously declining an invitation to learn the Bump. She looked over at him with some relief, and separated from the boy.

The music was so loud they had to speak directly into one another’s ears. “That’s the most forward boy I’ve ever met.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I looked like Anne Bancroft.”

The music abruptly stopped, and Ricky’s reply carried over the entire party. “No one under thirty should be allowed to enter a movie theater.”

Everyone but Edward Wanderley, who was quizzing a hostile Peter Barnes, turned to look at Ricky and Stella. Then the ever-hopeful Freddy Robinson took the hand of Jim Hardie’s girlfriend, another record fell onto the turntable, and people went back to the business of being at a party. Edward had been speaking softly, insistently, but Peter Barnes’s aggrieved voice floated out a moment before the music began: “Jesus, man, maybe she went upstairs.”

“Can we go?” he asked Stella. “Sears left a while ago.”

“Oh, let’s stay a while. We haven’t done anything like this in ages. I’m having fun, Ricky.” When she saw his crestfallen face, she said, “Dance with me, Ricky. Just this once.”

“I don’t dance,” he said, making himself heard over the din of the music. “Enjoy yourself. But let’s go in about half an hour, all right?”

She winked at him, turned away, and was immediately captured by gangsterish Lou Price, to whom this time she succumbed.

Edward, seeing nothing, rushed by.

Ricky walked around the edges of the party for a time, refusing drinks from the barman. He spoke to Milly Sheehan, who was sitting exhausted on the couch. “I didn’t know it would turn out like this,” Milly said. “It’ll take hours to clean up.”

“Make John help you.”

“He always helps,” Milly said, radiance touching her plain round face. “He’s wonderful that way.”

Ricky wandered on, at last arriving at the top of the stairs. Silence from upstairs and down. Was Edward’s actress up there with one of the boys? He smiled, and went downstairs for the quiet.

The doctor’s offices were deserted. Lights burned, cigarettes had been stamped out on the floor, half-filled cups stood on every surface. The rooms smelled of sweat, beer, smoke. The little portable record player in the front room spun on, the needle clicking in the empty grooves. Ricky lifted the tone arm, put it on its support and turned the machine off. Milly would have a lot of work down here the next morning. He looked at his watch. Twelve-thirty. Through the ceiling came the thumping of a bass, a tinny echo of music.

Ricky sat in one of the stiff wating-room chairs, lit a cigarette, sighed and relaxed. He wondered if he might help Milly by beginning to straighten up these downstairs rooms, then realized that he’d need a broom. He was too tired to go scouting for a broom.

A few minutes later footsteps woke him out of a light doze. He straightened up in his chair, listening to someone opening a door at the bottom of the stairs. “Hello?” he called out, not wanting to embarrass an illicit couple.

“Who’s that? Ricky?” John Jaffrey came into the front waiting room. “What are you doing here? Have you seen Edward?”

“I came down for the quiet. Edward was rushing around trying to find Miss Moore. Maybe he went upstairs.”

“I’m worried about him,” Jaffrey said. “He looked so—so taut. Ann-Veronica’s dancing with Ned Rowles. Couldn’t he see her?”

“She vanished a while back. That’s why he was anxious.”

“Oh, poor Edward. He doesn’t have to worry about that girl. She’s good as gold. You should see her. She’s absolutely lovely. She looks better than she has all night.”

“Well.” He pushed himself out of the stiff chair. “Do you want help finding Edward?”

“No, no, no. You just carry on. I’ll find him. I’ll try the bedrooms. Though what he’d be doing there—”

“Still looking, I expect.”

John wheeled around, muttering that he couldn’t help but worry, and went back through the consulting rooms. Ricky slowly followed.

Harold Sims was dancing with Stella, holding her tightly and keeping up a steady stream of talk into her ear. The music was so loud that Ricky wanted to scream. Nobody but Sears had left, and the young people, many of them now drunk, whirled about, hair and arms flying. The little actress cavorted with the editor, Lewis was talking to Christina Barnes on the couch. Both were oblivious to the presence of sleeping Milly Sheehan, not eight inches away. Ricky wished profoundly that he were in his bed. The noise gave him a headache. His old friends, Sears excepted, seemed to have lost their minds. Lewis had his hand on Christina Barnes’s knee, and his eyes were unfocused. Was he really trying to seduce his banker’s wife? In the presence of her husband and son?

Upstairs, something heavy fell over, and only Ricky heard it. He went back out onto the landing and saw John Jaffrey standing at the top of the stairs.

“Ricky.”

“What’s wrong, John?”

“Edward. It’s Edward.”

“Did he knock something over?”

“Come up here, Ricky.”

Ricky went up, growing a little more worried with each step. John Jaffrey seemed very shaken.

“Did he knock something over? Did he hurt himself?”

Jaffrey’s mouth opened. Finally sounds emerged. “I knocked a chair over. I don’t know what to do.”

Ricky reached the landing and looked into Jaffrey’s ruined face. “Where is he?”

“The second bedroom.”

Since Jaffrey did not move, Ricky went across the hall to the second door. He looked back; Jaffrey nodded, swallowed and finally came toward him. “In there.”

Ricky’s mouth was dry. Wishing that he were anywhere else, doing anything but what he was doing, he put a hand on the doorknob and turned it. The door swung open.

The bedroom was cold, and almost bare. Two coats, Edward’s and the girl’s, were lain across an exposed mattress. But Ricky saw only Edward Wanderley. Edward was on the floor, both hands clutched to his chest and his knees drawn up. His face was terrible.

Ricky stepped back and nearly fell over the chair that John Jaffrey had overturned. There was no question that Edward was still alive—he did not know how he knew it, but he knew—yet he asked, “Did you try to feel his pulse?”

“He doesn’t have a pulse. He’s gone.”

John was trembling just inside the door. Music, voices came up the stairwell.

Ricky forced himself to kneel by Edward’s side. He touched one of the hands gripping Edward’s green shirt He worked his fingers around to the underside of the wrist. He felt nothing, but he was no doctor. “What do you think happened?” He still could not look again at Edward’s distorted face.

John came further into the room. “Heart attack?”

“Do you think that’s what it was?”

“I don’t know. Yes, probably. Too much excitement But—”

Ricky stared up at Jaffrey and took his hand from Edward’s still warm hand. “But what?”

“I don’t know. I can’t say. But, Ricky, look at his face.”

He looked: rigid muscles, mouth drawn open as if to yell, empty eyes. It was the face of a man being tortured, flayed alive. “Ricky,” John said, “it’s not a very medical thing to say, but he looks as if he was scared to death.”

Ricky nodded and stood. That was just how Edward looked. “We can’t let anyone come up here. I’ll go down and phone for an ambulance.”

Half an hour later, Edward’s body was on its way to hospital or morgue. Ricky drove Stella home. “You didn’t see her leave?” he asked.

“One minute she was dancing with Ned Rowles, the next minute she was out the door. I thought she was going to the bathroom. Ricky, how horrible.”

“Yes. It was horrible.”

“Poor Edward. I don’t think I really believe it.”

“I don’t think I do either.” Tears filled his eyes, and for some seconds he drove blindly, seeing only a streaky blur. To try to take the image of Edward’s face from his mind, he asked, “What did she say to you that surprised you so much?”

“What? When? I barely spoke to her.”

“In the middle of the party. I saw her talking to you, and I thought she said something that startled you.”

“Oh.” Stella’s voice rose. “She asked me if I was married. I said, ‘I’m Mrs. Hawthorne.’ And then she said, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve just seen your husband. He looks like he’d be a good enemy.’ “

“You couldn’t have heard her correctly.”

“I did.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s what she said.”

First about the town, then about the good doctor. My uncle’s town, Milburn, is one of those places that seems to create its own limbo and then to nest down in it. Neither proper city nor proper country—too small for one, too cramped for the other, and too self-conscious about its status. (The local paper is called The Urbanite. Milburn even seems proud of its minuscule slum, the few streets called the Hollow, seems to point at it and say: See, we’ve got places where you want to be careful after dark, the age hasn’t left us high and dry and innocent. This is almost comedy. If trouble ever comes to Milburn, it won’t start in the Hollow.) Three-fourths of the men work somewhere else, in Binghamton mainly—the town depends on the freeway for its life. A feeling of being oddly settled, unmoving, heavy, and at the same time nervous. (I bet they gossip about one another endlessly.) Nervous because they’d feel that they were forever missing something—that the age after all has left them high and dry. Probably I feel this because of the contrast between here and California—this is a worry they don’t have, there. It does seem a particularly Northeast kind of anxiety, peculiar to these little towns. Good places for Dr. Rabbitfoot.

(Speaking of anxiety, those three old men I met today—my uncle’s friends—have it bad. Obviously has to do with whatever made them write to me, not knowing that I was getting so sick of California I’d have gone anywhere I thought I might be able to work.)

Physically, of course, it’s pretty—all these places are. Even the Hollow has a kind of sepia thirties prettiness. There’s the regulation town square, the regulation trees—maples, tamarack pines, oaks, the woods full of mossy deadfalls—a sense that the woods around the town are stronger, deeper than the little grid of streets people put in their midst. And when I came in I saw the big houses, some of them big enough to be called mansions.

But still … it is wonderful, a heaven-sent setting for the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel.

He’s black, definitely. He dresses gaudily, with old-fashioned pzazz: spats, big rings, a cane, a flashy waistcoat. He’s chirpy, showbizzy, a marathon talker, slightly ominous—he’s the bogeyman. He’ll own you if you don’t watch out. He’ll get you seven ways to Sunday. He’s got a killer smile.

You only see him at night, when you pass a piece of land normally deserted and there he is, standing on a platform outside his tent, twirling a cane while the jazz band plays. Lively music surrounds him, it whistles through his tight black hair, a saxophone curls his lips. He’s looking straight at you. He invites you in to have a look at his show, to buy a bottle of his elixir for a dollar. He says he is the celebrated Dr. Rabbitfoot, and he’s got just what your soul needs.

And what if what your soul needs is a bomb? A knife? A slow death?

Dr. Rabbitfoot gives you a big wink. You’re on, man. Just pull a dollar out of your jeans.

Now to state what is obvious: Behind this figure I’ve been carting around in my head for years is Alma Mobley. It also suited her to give you what you wanted.

All the time, the capering smile, the floating hands, the eyes of bleached and dazzling white … his sinister gaiety. An’ what about that little Alma Mobley, boy? Suppose you see her when you close your eyes, then what? Is she there, hee hee? Has you ever touched a ghost? Has you ever put your hand on a ghosts white skin? And yo’ brutha’s peaceful eyes—was they watchin’ you?

Jaffrey, either? Oh, he was a dear, dear man, he must have been doctoring here in Milburn for forty years, he was the kindest man you ever saw, not sugary-sweet, you know, but when he put his hands on you, you just felt the kindness flowing out, she rattled on, looking me over, inspecting me, trying to figure out just what the devil her boss wanted me for, and then this old woman sitting at her switchboard locked him with an angry smile and slapped the trump card on the table, she said of course you don’t know, but he killed himself five days ago. He jumped off the bridge—can you imagine that? It was just tragic. Mr. James and Ricky Hawthorne were so upset. They still haven’t gotten over it. Now that Anna girl is making them do twice as much work, and we’ve got that crazy Elmer Scales calling up every day, yelling at them about those four sheep of his … what would make a nice man like Dr. Jaffrey do a thing like that, do you imagine?

(He listened to Dr. Rabbitfoot, lady.)

Oh, you’d like to go out to the cemetery?

The sign, Pleasant Hill Cemetery, was a length of stamped gray metal on one side of a black ironwork gate; if it had not been for the big gates standing at what looked like the entrance to just another hilly field, Don would have missed it. He looked at the gates as they came nearer, wondering what kind of farmer would be grandiose enough to stick up a baronial gate at his tractor path, slowed down, glanced up at the rising narrow road—more than a tractor path—and saw half a dozen cars parked at the top of the hill. Then he saw the little plate. Just another field, but heavens what they planted there. He swung his car through the gates.

Don left his car apart from the others, halfway up the hill, and walked to the top: nearest him was the oldest section of the cemetery, tilted slabs with pitted markings, stone angels lifting arms weighted with snow. Granite young women shielded their eyes with forearms hung with drapery. Thin skeletons of weeds mounted up the leaning slabs. The narrow road bisected the old section and led into a larger region of neat small headstones. Purple, gray and white, these were dwarfed by the expanse of land rolling out from them: after a moment, a hundred yards away, Don saw the fences surrounding the cemetery. A hearse was drawn up at the land’s lowest point. The black-hatted driver cupped a cigarette so that it would not be seen by the little knot of people clustered around the newest grave. One woman shapeless in a pale blue coat clung to another, taller woman; the other mourners stood as straight and motionless as fenceposts. When I saw the two old men standing together at the base of the grave, I knew they had to be the two lawyers—if they weren’t lawyers they were from Central Casting. I started to come toward them down the slope of the narrow road. Then I thought, if the dead man was a doctor, why aren’t there more people—where are his patients? A silver-haired man beside the two lawyers saw him first and prodded the massive one who wore a black fur-collared coat with his elbow. The big one glanced up at him, and then the little man beside him, the one who looked as if he had a cold, also took his eyes from the minister and looked curiously at Don. Even the minister stopped talking for a moment, stuck one frozen hand in the pocket of his overcoat, and gaped at Don with rubber-faced confusion.

Then, finally, a sign of welcome, a contrast to this guarded examination: one of the beauties, the younger one (a daughter?), wafted toward him a small genuine smile.

The man with silver-white hair who looked to Don as though he should have been in the movies left the other two and sauntered toward Don. “Are you a friend of John’s?” he whispered.

“My name is Don Wanderley,” he whispered back. “I got a letter from a man named Sears James, and the receptionist in his office said I could find him out here.”

“Hell, you even look a little like Edward.” Lewis grabbed his bicep and squeezed. “Look, kid, we’re having a rough time here, just hang in there and don’t say anything until it’s all over. You got a place to stay tonight?”

So I joined them, half-meeting, half-avoiding their glances. The woman in the pale blue coat sagged against the challenging-looking woman holding her up: her face worked and she wailed oh no oh no oh no. Crumpled colored tissues lay at her feet, lifting and scampering in the wind that cut into the hollow. Every now and then one of them shot away like a small pastel pheasant and caught in the mesh of the fence. By the time we left there were dozens of them there, flattened out against the wire.

Of course they were thinking of John Jaffrey. The news had come near noon of the day following that in which Ricky’s premonitions had reached their height: he had known that something dreadful had happened the moment he recognized the shaky voice on the other end of the line as Milly Sheehan’s. “It’s, it’s,” she said, her voice trembling and cloudy. “Mr. Hawthorne … ?”

“Yes, it’s me, Milly,” he said. “What’s happened?” He pushed the buzzer that communicated to Sears’s office and told him to switch on the telephone speaker for his extension. “What is it, Milly?” he asked, knowing that his voice would be much too loud for Sears, but momentarily unable to speak softly—the speakers, while reproducing the client’s voice at a normal volume, tripled the noise made by anyone at the other office extension. “You’re breaking my eardrums,” Sears complained over the line.

“Sorry,” Ricky said. “Milly, are you there? It’s Milly, Sears.”

“So I gathered. Milly, can we help you?”

“Oooo,” she wailed and the back of his neck went cold.

The phone went dead. “Milly?”

“Pipe down,” Sears commanded.

“Are you there, Milly?”

Ricky heard the telephone clattering against some hard surface.

The next voice was Walt Hardesty’s. “Hey, this is the sheriff. Is this Mr. Hawthorne?”

“Yes. Mr. James is on the other line. What’s going on, Walt? Is Milly all right?”

“She’s standin’ lookin’ out the window. What is she anyhow, his wife? I thought she was his wife.”

Sears burst in impatiently, his voice loud as a cannon in Ricky’s office. “She is his housekeeper. Now tell us what is happening out there.”

“Well, she’s fallin’ apart like a wife. You two are Dr. Jaffrey’s lawyers?”

“Yes,” Ricky said.

“Do you know about him yet?”

Both partners were silent. If Sears felt the way Ricky did, his throat was too tight for speech.

“Well, he was a leaper,” Hardesty said. “Hey, hang on, lady. Sit down or something.”

“HE WAS A WHAT?” Sears bellowed, his voice booming through Ricky’s office.

“Well, he took a dive off the bridge this morning. He was a leaper. Lady, calm down and let me talk.”

“The lady’s name is Mrs. Sheehan,” Sears said in a more normal voice. “She might respond better if you called her that. Now since Mrs. Sheehan evidently wished to communicate with us and is unable to do so, please tell us what happened to John Jaffrey.”

“He took a dive off …”

“Be careful. He fell off the bridge? Which bridge?”

“Hell, the bridge over the river, what do you think?”

“What’s his condition?”

“Dead as a doornail. What do you think it would be? Say, who’s gonna take care of the arrangements and all that? This lady’s in no shape …”

“We will,” Ricky said.

“And we might take care of more than that,” Sears uttered furiously. “Your manner is disgraceful. Your diction is shameful. You are a ninny, Hardesty.”

“Just wait a damned—”

“AND! If you are assuming that Dr. Jaffrey committed suicide, then you are on shaky ground indeed, my friend, and you’d be well advised to keep that assumption to yourself.”

“Omar Norris saw the whole thing,” Hardesty said. “We need ID before we can get set for the autopsy, so why don’t you get over here so we can get off the phone?”

Five seconds after Ricky put down his phone Sears appeared in the doorway, already thrusting his arms into his coat. “It’s not true,” Sears said, pulling on the coat. “It’s some mistake, but let’s get over there anyway.”

The telephone buzzed again. “Don’t answer it,” Sears said, but Ricky picked it up. “Yes?”

“There’s a young woman in reception who wants to see you and Mr. James,” said the receptionist.

“Tell her to come back tomorrow, Mrs. Quast. Dr. Jaffrey died this morning, and Mr. James and I are going to his home to meet Walt Hardesty.”

“Why …” Mrs. Quast, who had been on the verge of indiscretion, changed subjects. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Hawthorne. Do you want me to call Mrs. Hawthorne?”

“Yes, and say I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.” By now, Sears was in a rage of impatience, and when Ricky moved around his desk, his partner was already in the hallway, twirling his hat. Ricky grabbed his coat and hurried to catch up.

Together they went down the paneled hall. “That ponderous, unthinkable oaf,” Sears rumbled. “As if you could believe Omar Norris on any subject except bourbon and snowplows.”

Ricky stopped short and put his hand on Sears’s arm. “We have to think about this, Sears. John might actually have killed himself.” It still hadn’t sunk into him, and he could see that Sears was determined not to let it sink into him. “He’d never have any reason to go walking on the bridge, and especially not in this weather.”

Sears’s face suffused with blood. “If you think that, you’re a ninny too. I don’t care if John was birdwatching, he was doing something.” His eyes avoided Ricky’s. “I don’t know and can’t imagine what, but something. Did he seem suicidal to you last night?”

“No, but …”

“Therefore, let’s not wrangle. Let’s get over to his house.” He sped down the hall ahead of Ricky and banged open the reception room door with his shoulders. Ricky Hawthorne, hurrying after, came out into the reception room and was mildly surprised to see him confronting a tall girl with dark hair, an oval face and small, chiseled features.

“Sears, we don’t have time now, and I told this young woman to drop in tomorrow.”

“She says—” Sears took off his hat. He looked as if he’d been hit on the head with a plank. “Tell him what you told me,” he said to the girl.

She said, “Eva Galli was my aunt, and I’m looking for a job.”

“I gather that a good friend of yours has just died,” the girl said to Ricky. “I’m sorry to be coming at such an awkward time,” and ruefully smiled with what looked like genuine concern. “Please don’t let me delay you.”

He glanced once more at her foxlike features before turning to Sears and the door—Sears reflectively buttoning up his coat, white faced—and it seemed to him that maybe Sears’s instincts were right, maybe this girl’s coming was a part of the puzzle, nothing seemed accidental anymore: as if there were some kind of plan and if they could only get all the pieces together they’d see what it was.

“It’s probably not even John,” Sears said in the car. “Hardesty is such an incompetent that I wouldn’t be surprised if he took Omar Norris’s word …” His voice died out; both partners knew this was only fancy. “Too cold,” Sears said, his lips puckering out childishly. “Too damn cold,” Ricky agreed, and finally thought of another thing to say. “At least Milly won’t starve.” Sears sighed, almost amused. “Good thing too, she’d never get another job with eavesdropping privileges.” Then there was silence again as they recognized that they were agreeing that John Jaffrey probably had stepped off the Milburn bridge and drowned in the freezing river.

After they had picked up Hardesty and driven to the tiny jail where the body was being kept until the arrival of the morgue truck, they found that Omar Norris had not been mistaken. The dead man was John—he looked even more wasted than he had in life. His sparse hair adhered to his scalp, his lips drew back over blue gums—his whole being was vacant, as in Ricky Hawthorne’s nightmare. “Jesus,” Ricky said. Walt Hardesty grinned and said, “That ain’t the name we got, Mr. Lawyer.”

“Give us the forms, Hardesty,” Sears said quietly, and then, being Sears, added, “We’ll take his effects too, unless you managed to lose them along with his dentures.”

They thought they might find a clue to Jaffrey’s death in the few things contained in the manila envelope Hardesty gave them. But in the collection taken from John Jaffrey’s pockets they could read nothing at all. A comb, six studs and matching cufflinks, a copy of The Making of a Surgeon, a ballpoint pen, a bundle of keys in a worn leather pouch, three quarters and a dime—Sears spread it over his lap in the front seat of Ricky’s old Buick. “A note was too much to hope for,” Sears said, and then leaned gigantically back and rubbed his eyes. “I’m beginning to feel like a member of an endangered species.” He straightened up again and looked at the mute assortment of objects. “Do you want to keep any of this yourself, or should we just give it to Milly?”

“Maybe Lewis would like the studs and cufflinks.”

“Let’s give them to him. Oh. Lewis. We’ll have to tell him. Do you want to go back to the office?”

They sat numbly on the warm cushions of Ricky’s old car. Sears removed a long cigar from his case, snipped off the tip, and without bothering to go through the usual rituals of sniffing and looking, applied his cigar lighter to it. Ricky wound his window down uncomplaining: He knew that Sears was smoking out of reflex, that he was unconscious of the cigar.

“Do you know, Ricky,” he said around it, “John is dead and we’ve been talking about his cufflinks?”

Ricky started his car. “Let’s get back to Melrose Avenue and have a drink.”

Sears put the pathetic collection back into the manila envelope, folded it in half and slid it into one of the pockets of his coat. “Watch where you’re driving. Has it escaped your attention that it’s snowing again?”

“No, it has not,” Ricky said. “If it starts this early and if it gets much worse, we could find ourselves snowed in before the end of winter. Maybe we should lay in some canned food, just to be on the safe side.” Ricky flicked on his headlights, knowing that Sears would soon begin to issue commands about this. The gray sky which had hung over the town for weeks had darkened nearly to black, broken by clouds like combers.

“Humph,” Sears snorted. “The last time that happened—”

“I was back from Europe. Nineteen-forty-seven. Terrible winter.”

“And the time before that was in the twenties.”

“Nineteen-twenty-six. The snow almost covered the houses.”

“People died. A neighbor of mine died in that snow.”

“Who was that?” Ricky asked.

“Her name was Viola Frederickson. She was caught in her buggy. She just froze to death. The Fredericksons had John’s house, in fact.” Sears sighed again, wearily, as Ricky turned into the square and went past the hotel. Snowflakes like balls of cotton streaked past the dark windows of the hotel. “For God’s sake, Ricky, your window’s open. Do you want to freeze us both?” He raised his hands to lift the fur collar nearer his chin, and saw the cigar protruding from between his fingers. “Oh. Sorry. Habit” He lowered his own window and dropped the cigar through it. “What a waste.”

Ricky thought of John Jaffrey’s body lying on a stretcher in a cell; of breaking the news to Lewis; of the bluish skin stretched over John’s skull.

Sears coughed. “I can’t understand why we haven’t heard from Edward’s nephew.”

“He’ll probably just turn up.” The snow slackened off. “That’s better.” Then thought, well, maybe not: the air had a peculiar midday darkness which seemed unaffected by his headlights. These were no more than a glow nearly invisible at the front of the car. It was the objects and oddments of the town which instead seemed to glow, not with the yellow glow of headlights but whitely, with the white of the clouds still boiling and foaming overhead—here a picket fence, there a door and molding shone. Here a scattering of stones in a wall, there naked poplars on a lawn. Their bloodless color reminded Ricky eerily of John Jaffrey’s face. Above these random shining things the sky beyond the boiling clouds was even blacker.

“Well, what do you flunk happened?” Sears demanded.

Ricky turned into Melrose Avenue. “Do you want to stop off at your house for anything first?”

“No. Do you have an opinion or don’t you?”

“I wish I knew what happened to Elmer Scales’s sheep.”

Now they were pulling up in front of Ricky’s house and Sears was showing obvious signs of impatience. “I don’t give a gold-plated damn for Our Vergil’s sheep,” he said; he wanted to get out of the car, he wanted to end the discussion, he would have growled like a bear if Ricky had mentioned the apparition of barefooted, boneheaded Fenny Bate on his staircase—Ricky saw all this, but after he and Sears had left the car and were walking up the path to the door he said, “About that girl this morning.”

“What about her?”

Ricky put his key in the slot. “If you want to pretend that we need a secretary, fine, but …”

Stella opened the door from within, already talking. “I’m so glad both of you are here. I was so afraid you’d go back to stuffy Wheat Row and pretend that nothing had happened. Pretend to work and keep me in the dark! Sears, please, come in out of the cold, we don’t want to heat all outdoors. Come in!” They shuffled into the hall and moving like two tired carthorses, took off their coats. “You both look just awful. There’s no question of mistaken identity then, it was John?”

“It was John,” Ricky said. “We can’t really tell you any more, Stella. It looks like he jumped from the bridge.”

“Dear me,” Stella said, all her momentary brightness gone. “The poor Chowder Society.”

“Amen,” Sears said.

After late lunch Stella said that she’d make up a tray for Milly. “Maybe she’ll want to nibble something.”

“Milly?” Ricky asked, startled.

“Milly Sheehan, need I remind you? I couldn’t just let her rattle around in that big house of John’s. I picked her up and drove her back here. She’s absolutely wrecked, the poor darling, so I put her to bed. She woke up this morning and couldn’t find John, and she fretted in that house for hours until horrible Walter Hardesty came by.”

“Fine,” Ricky said.

“Fine, he says. If you and Sears hadn’t been so wrapped up in yourselves, you might have spared a thought for her.”

Attacked, Sears raised his head and blinked. “Milly has no worries. She’s been left John’s house and a disproportionate amount of money.”

“Disproportionate, Sears? Why don’t you take her tray up and tell her how grateful she should be. Do you think that would cheer her up? That John Jaffrey left her a few thousand dollars?”

“Scarcely a few thousand, Stella,” said Ricky. “John willed almost everything he owned to Milly.”

“Well, that’s as it should be,” Stella declared, and stamped off to the kitchen, leaving them both mystified.

Sears asked, “You ever have any trouble deciphering what she’s talking about?”

“Now and then,” Ricky answered. “There used to be a code book, but I think she threw it out shortly after our wedding. Shall we call Lewis and tell him? We’ve put it off too long already.”

“Give me the phone,” Sears said.

But it was snowing again now; the dogs would be barking in their kennels and old Otto would be skimming off whey, cursing the early winter.

A pity. Yes: a pity was what it was, and more than that: a mystery. Like Edward.

He stood up abruptly and dumped his dishes in the sink; then he looked at his watch and groaned. Eleven-thirty and lunch already over; the rest of the day loomed over him like an Alp. He did not even have an evening of bubbleheaded conversation with a girl to look forward to; nor, because he was trying to wind things down, could he anticipate an evening of deeper pleasure with Christina Barnes.

Lewis Benedikt had successfully managed what in a town the size of Milburn is generally considered an impossibility: from the first month of his return from Spain, he had constructed a secret life that stayed secret. He pursued college girls, young teachers at the high school, beauticians, the brittle girls who sold cosmetics at Young Brothers department store—any girl pretty enough to be ornamental. He used his good looks, his natural charm and humor and his money to establish himself in the town’s mythology as a dependably comic character: the aging playboy, the Suave Old Bird. Boyish, wonderfully unselfconscious, Lewis took his girls to the best restaurants for forty miles around, ordered them the best food and wine, kept them in stitches. He took to bed, or was taken to bed by, perhaps a fifth of these girls—the ones who showed him by their laughter that they could never take him seriously. When a couple—a couple, say, like Walter and Christina Barnes—walked into The Old Mill near Kirkwood or Christo’s between Belden and Harpursville, they might half expect to see Lewis’s steel-gray head bending toward the amused face of a pretty girl a third his age. “Look at that old rascal,” Walter Barnes might say, “at it again.” His wife would smile, but it would be difficult to tell what the smile meant.

For Lewis used his comic reputation as a rake to camouflage the seriousness of his heart, and he used his public romances with girls to conceal his deeper, truer relationships with women. He spent evenings or nights with his girls; the women he loved he saw once or twice a week, in the afternoons while their husbands were at work. The first of these had been Stella Hawthorne, and in some ways the least satisfactory of his loves, she had set the pattern for the rest. Stella had been too offhand and witty, too casual with him. She was enjoying herself, and simple enjoyment was what the young high-school teachers and beauticians gave him. He wanted feeling. He wanted emotion—he needed it. Stella was the only Milburn wife who, tested, had evaded that need. She had given his playboy image back to him—consciously. He loved her briefly and wholly, but their needs were badly mismatched. Stella did not want Sturm und Drang; Lewis, at the center of his demanding heart, knew that he wanted to recapture the emotions Linda had given him. Frivolous Lewis was Lewis only skin deep. Sadly, he had to let Stella go: she had taken up none of his hints, his offered emotion had simply rolled off her. He knew that she thought he’d simply gone on to an empty series of affairs with girls.

But he had instead gone on, eight years ago, to Leota Mulligan, the wife of Clark Mulligan. And after Leota, to Sonny Venuti, then to Laura Bautz, the wife of the dentist Harlan Bautz, and finally, a year ago, to Christina Barnes. He had cherished each of these women. He loved in them their solidity, their attachments to their husbands, their hungers, their humor. He loved talking to them. They had understood him, and each of them had known exactly what he was offering: more a hidden pseudo-marriage than an affair.

When the emotion began to go stale and rehearsed, then it was over. Lewis still loved each of them; he still loved Christina Barnes, but—

The but was that the wall was before him. The wall was what Lewis called the moment when he began to think that his deep relationships were as trivial as his romances. Then it was time to draw in. Often, in times of withdrawal, he found that he was thinking of Stella Hawthorne.

Well, he certainly could not look forward to an evening with Stella Hawthorne. To fantasize about that would be to confirm his foolishness to himself.

What was more foolish than that ridiculous scene this morning? Lewis left the sink to look out the window toward the path into the woods, remembering how he had raced down it, panting, his heart leaping with terror—now there was real asininity. The fluffy snow fell, the familiar wood raised white arms, the return path trailed harmlessly, charmingly off at a screwball angle, going nowhere.

“When you fall off a horse, you get back on,” Lewis told himself. “You get right back on that mother.” What had happened? He had heard—voices? No; he had heard himself thinking. He had spooked himself by remembering too exactly Linda’s last night alive. That and the nightmare—Sears and John advancing toward him—had bamboozled his emotions so that he behaved like someone in a Chowder Society story. No evil stranger had stood behind him on the path back home; you could not walk through the woods without being heard. Everything was explicable.

Lewis went upstairs to his bedroom, kicked off his loafers and pushed his feet into a pair of Dingos, pulled on a sweater and a ski parka and went back down and out the kitchen door.

His morning footprints were already filling with new snow. The air felt delicious, crisp as a winesap apple; light snow continued to come down. If he could not go coon hunting with Otto Gruebe, he might be able to get in some skiing before long. Lewis walked across his brick patio and stepped onto the path. Above him the sky was dark and scattered with shining clouds, but clear gray light filled the day. Snow on the pine branches gleamed, particular and white as moonlight.

He deliberately set off on what was normally his return path. His own fear surprised him, tingling in his mouth and belly like anticipation.

“Well, I’m here, come and get me,” he said, and smiled.

He felt the presence of nothing but the day and the woods, his house at his back; he realized after a moment that even his fear had vanished.

And now, walking over new snow toward his woods, Lewis had a fresh perception. It may have come because he was seeing the woods from an unfamiliar angle, going at them backward, and it may have been because he was just walking through them for the first time in weeks, not jogging. Whatever the reason, the woods looked like an illustration in a book—not like a real woods, but a drawing on a page. It was a fairytale woods, looking too perfect, too composed—drawn in black ink—to be real. Even the path, winding off in a pretty indirection, was a fairytale path.

It was the clarity which gave it mystery. Each bare and spiky branch, each tangle of wiry stalks, stood out separately, shining with its own life. Some wry magic hovered just out of sight. As Lewis went deeper into the woods, where the new snow had not penetrated, he saw his morning’s footprints, and they too seemed haunting and illustrative and part of the fairytale, these prints in snow coming toward him.

He went into his dining room. The big mahogany table reproached him; its surface was dull, lightly scratched here and there from times he’d put Spanish earthenware down on it without using a mat. The spray of flowers in a jug on the center of the table had wilted; a few petals lay like dead bees on the wood. Did you really expect to see someone out there? he asked himself. Are you disappointed that you didn’t?

Turning out of the dining room with the jug of wasted flowers in his hands, he saw again the fairytale tangle of the woods. Branches glistened, thorns shone like thumbtacks, implying some narrative on which he’d already closed the book.

Well. He shook his head and took the dead flowers into the kitchen and dumped them into the waste bin. Whom did you want to meet? Yourself?

Unexpectedly, Lewis blushed.

He set down the empty jug on a counter and went back outside, crossing the patio to the old stable some previous owner had converted into a garage and tool shed. The Morgan was parked beside a toolbench covered with screwdrivers, pliers and paintbrushes in cans. Lewis bent his head, unlocked the door and cramped himself in behind the wheel.

He reversed out of the garage, left the car and heaved the door shut, then got in and swung the car around on the bricks and drove down the tree-lined lane to the highway. He immediately felt more like himself: the canvas top of the Morgan bucked in the wind, cold breeze parted his hair in the middle. The tank was almost full.

In fifteen minutes he was surrounded by hills and open country marked off at intervals by stands of trees. He took the little roads, opening the car up to seventy, sometimes eighty when he saw a nice stretch of straight road before him. He skirted the Chenango Valley, followed the line of the Tioughnioga River as far as Whitney Point, and then cut off west toward Richford and Caroline, deep in the Cayuga Valley. Sometimes on curves the little car’s back end skittered around, but Lewis corrected the skid expertly, not even thinking about it. Lewis instinctively drove well.

Finally he realized that he was traveling the same route, and in the same way, as when he’d been a student returning to Cornell. The only difference was that exhilarating speed then had been thirty miles an hour.

After nearly two hours of driving, taking little roads past farms and state parks just to see where they’d go, his face was numb with cold. He was in Tompkins County, close to Ithaca, and the country here was more lyrical than around Binghamton—when he reached the tops of hills, he could see the black road arrowing through vales and over tree-lined rises. The sky had darkened, though it was only midafternoon: Lewis thought he’d see more snow before nightfall. Then ahead of him, just far enough away to build up the right amount of speed, was a wide place in the road where he knew he could make the Morgan spin completely around. But he reminded himself that he was sixty-five years old—too old to do stunts in cars. He used the wide place in the road to turn around toward home.

Going more slowly, he drove across the valley toward Harford, cutting back east. On the straight ways he opened the car up a little, but was careful to keep under seventy. Still, there was pleasure in it, in the speed and the cold breeze on his face and the dainty handling of the little car. All this nearly made him feel that he was a Tau Kappa Epsilon boy again, skimming over the roads toward home. A few heavy snowflakes drifted down.

Near the airfield outside Glen Aubrey he passed a stand of denuded maples and saw in them the gleaming clarity of his own woods. They seemed suffused with magic, with some concealed meaning that was part of a complex story—hero foxes that were princes suffering a witch’s curse. He saw the footprints racing toward him.

… suppose you went out for a walk and saw yourself running toward you, your hair flying, your face distorted with fear …

His viscera went cold as his face. Ahead of him, standing in the middle of the road, was a woman. He had time to notice only the alarm in her posture, the hair which billowed around her shoulders. He twisted the wheel, wondering where in hell she’d come from—Jesus she just jumped out at me—at the same time as he realized that he was bound to hit her. The car was going to slew around.

The rear end of the Morgan drifted slowly toward the girl. Then the entire car was traveling sideways and he lost sight of her. Panicked, Lewis cramped the wheel the other way. Time whittled down to a solid capsule encasing him as he sat helpless in a flying car. Then the texture of the moment changed, time broke and began to flow, and he knew, as passive as he’d ever been in his life, that the car had left the road: everything was happening with unbelievable slowness, almost lazily, and the Morgan was floating.

It was over in a moment. The car stopped with a boneshaking jolt in a field, its nose pointed toward the road. The woman he might have struck was nowhere in sight. The taste of blood filled Lewis’s mouth; locked on the wheel, his hands were trembling. Maybe he had hit the woman and thrown her body off into a ditch. He fought the door, opened it and got out. His legs were trembling too. He saw at once that the Morgan was stuck: its rear tires were bolted to the field. He’d need a towtruck. “Hey!” he shouted. “Are you okay?” He forced his legs to move. “Are you all right?”

Lewis went unsteadily toward the road. He saw the crazy streaks his car had made. His hips ached. He felt very old. “Hey! Lady!” He couldn’t see the girl anywhere. Heart pounding, he waddled across the road, afraid of what he might see lying in the ditch, limbs splayed out, head thrown back … but the ditch cradled only a mound of unblemished snow. He looked up and down the road: no woman anywhere in sight.

Lewis eventually gave up. Somehow the woman had gone away as suddenly as she’d come; or he had just imagined that he’d seen her. He rubbed his eyes. His hips still ached; bones seemed to be rubbing together. He went creakily down the road, hoping to see a farmhouse from which he could call the AAA. When he finally found one, a man with a thick black mattress of a beard and animal eyes let him use his telephone but made him wait outside on an open porch until the truck came.

“Hell,” he said out loud. The car was still in the drive; he had been in the house only long enough to get warm. The midday restlessness, the feeling that if he did not move some bad thing would happen—that something worse than the accident was aimed at him like a gun—was back. Lewis went up to his bedroom, removed the sweater and parka and put on a clean shirt, a rep tie and double-breasted blazer. He’d go to Humphrey’s Place and have a hamburger and a few beers. That was the ticket.

A keening note on the fiddle stitched into his brain as soon as he was inside, and Lewis frowned at the musician sawing away on the bandstand, hair down to his shoulders, left hip and right foot jigging in time, but the boy’s eyes were closed and he never noticed. Then an instant later the music was just music again, but his headache remained. The bar was crowded and so warm that Lewis began to perspire almost immediately. Big shapeless Humphrey Stalladge, an apron over his white shirt, moved back and forth behind the bar. All the tables nearest the band seemed to be filled with kids drinking beer from pitchers. When he looked at the backs of their heads, Lewis honestly couldn’t tell the boys from the girls.

What if you saw yourself running toward you, running toward the headlights of your car, your hair flying and your face twisted with fear …

“Get you anything, Lewis?” Humphrey asked.

“Two aspirin and a beer. I’ve got a rotten headache. And a hamburger, Humphrey. Thanks.”

Down at the other end of the bar, as far from the bandstand as he could get, looking both damp and filthy, Omar Norris was entertaining a group of men. As he talked his eyes bulged, his hands made swooping motions, and Lewis knew that if you were close enough to him you’d eventually see Omar’s spittle shining on your lapels. When he had been younger, Omar’s stories of getting out from under his wife’s heel and of W. C. Fields-like stratagems for avoiding all work but running the town snowplow and working as the department store Santa had been amusing enough, but Lewis was mildly surprised that he could get anyone to listen to him now. People were even buying him drinks. Stalladge came back with his aspirin tablets and set a glass of beer beside them. “Burger’s on the way,” he said.

Lewis put the aspirins on his tongue and washed them down. The band had stopped playing Wabash Cannonball and was doing something else, a song he didn’t recognize. One of the young women at the tables in front of the band had turned around and was staring at him. Lewis nodded to her.

He finished his beer and looked over the rest of the crowd. There were only a few empty booths by the front wall, so he caught Humphrey’s eye and pointed to his glass, and when it was filled he started to go across the room to one of them. If he didn’t get one early enough, he’d be pinned to the bar all night. Halfway across the room he nodded to Rollo Draeger, the druggist—come out to get away from Irmengard’s endless complaints—and belatedly recognized the boy seated beside the girl who had stared at him: Jim Hardie, Eleanor’s son, usually seen these days with Draeger’s daughter. He glanced back at the couple, and found them both staring at him now. Jim Hardie was a suspect kid, Lewis thought: he was broad and blond and strong, but he looked like he had a streak of wildness as wide as the county. He was always grinning: Lewis had heard from Walt Hardesty that Jim Hardie was probably the one who had burned down the deserted old Pugh barn and set a field on fire. He could see the boy grinning as he did that. The girl with him tonight was older than Penny Draeger; better-looking, too.

Lewis remembered a time, years ago, when everything had been simple, and it would have been he sitting beside a girl listening to a band, Noble Sissle or Benny Goodman—Lewis with his heart on fire. The memory made him automatically look around the room for Stella Hawthorne’s commanding face, but he knew that the moment he’d entered he had half-consciously recorded that she was not in the room.

Humphrey appeared with his hamburger, looked at his glass and said, “If you’re gonna drink that fast, maybe you want a pitcher?”

Lewis had not even noticed that his second beer was finished. “Good idea.”

“You don’t look so hot,” Humphrey said.

The band, which had been discussing something, noisily went back to work and spared Lewis the necessity of replying. Humphrey’s two relief barmaids, Anni and Annie, came in, releasing a wave of cold into the room. They were just enough reason to stick around. Anni was gypsyish, with curly black hair fluffing out around a sensual face; Annie looked like a Viking and had strong well-shaped legs and beautiful teeth. Both of them were in their mid-thirties and talked like college professors. They lived with men off in the country and were childless. Lewis liked both of them enormously, and sometimes took one or the other out for a meal. Anni saw him and waved, he waved back, and the guitarist, backed by a seesawing fiddle, yelled

When he looked up Ned Rowles was standing beside him. Lewis raised his eyebrows and, still chewing, half-stood and motioned for Rowles to enter the booth. He liked Ned Rowles too; Ned had made The Urbanite an interesting newspaper, not just the usual smalltown list of firemen’s picnics and advertisements for sales at the grocery stores. “Help me drink this,” he said, and poured beer from the pitcher into Ned’s nearly empty glass.

“How about me?” said a deeper, dryer voice over his shoulder, and, startled, Lewis turned his head to see Walt Hardesty glinting down at him. That explained why Lewis had not seen Ned at first; he and Hardesty had been back in the room where Humphrey stacked his surplus beer. Lewis knew that Hardesty, who was year by year surrendering himself to the bottle as surely as Omar Norris, sometimes spent all afternoon in the back room—he would not drink in front of his deputies.

“Of course, Walt,” he said, “I didn’t see you before. Please join me.” Ned Rowles was looking at him oddly. Lewis was sure that the editor found Hardesty as tiresome as he did himself and had no desire for more of his company, but did he expect him to send the sheriff away? Whatever the look meant, Rowles slid over on his side of the booth to make room for Hardesty. The sheriff was still wearing his outer jacket; that back room was probably cold. Like the college student he resembled, Ned went as long as possible with only a tweed jacket for protection against winter.

Then Lewis saw that both men were looking at him oddly, and his heart jumped—had he hit the girl after all? Had someone written down his license number? He’d be guilty of bit and run! “Well, Walt,” he said, “is this about anything special, or do you just want a beer?” He filled Hardesty’s glass as he spoke.

“Right now, I’ll settle for the beer, Mr. Benedikt,” Hardesty said, “Quite a day, right?”

“Yes,” Lewis said simply.

“A terrible day,” said Ned Rowles, and he passed a hand through the hair falling over his forehead. He grimaced at Lewis. “You don’t look so good, pal. Maybe you ought to go home and get some rest.”

Lewis was even more puzzled than before by this remark. If he had struck the girl and if they knew about it, the sheriff would not just let him go home. “Oh,” he said, “I get restless at home. I’d feel a lot better if people stopped telling me I looked terrible.”

“Well, it’s a miserable business,” Rowles said. “I guess we’d all agree to that.”

“Hell, yes,” Hardesty said, finishing off his beer and pouring another. Ned’s face was set in a painful expression of—what? It looked like sympathy. Lewis splashed more beer into his glass. The fiddler had switched to guitar, and now the music had become so loud that the three men had to bend over to be heard. Lewis could hear fragments of lyrics, phrases bawled into the microphones.

“Benny Goodman?” Hardesty snorted. “Myself, I like country. Real country, Hank Williams, not the junk these kids play. That’s not country. Take your Jim Reeves. That’s what I like.” Lewis could smell the sheriff’s breath—half beer and half some terrible foulness, as if he’d been eating garbage.

“Well, you’re younger than I am,” he said, pulling back.

“I just wanted to say how sorry I was,” Ned interjected, and Lewis looked at him sharply, trying to figure out just how much trouble he was in. Hardesty was signaling to Annie, the Viking, for another pitcher. It came within minutes, slopping over when Annie set it on the table. When she walked away she winked at Lewis.

Sometime during the morning, Lewis remembered, and sometime during his drive … bare maples … he had been aware of an odd, dreamy clarity, a sharpness of vision that was like looking at an etching—a haunted wood, a castle surrounded by spiky trees—

“You’re the law, what do you make of it?” Lewis said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the band.

“I say it’s a damn funny world—gettin’ to be a damn funny world,” Hardesty shouted at him, and gave Lewis one of his Texas hard-guy looks. “Real damn funny. I’d say that your two old lawyer buddies know something about it, too.”

“That’s unlikely,” Ned understated. “But I ought to see if one of them wants to write something about Dr. John Jaffrey for the paper. Unless you’d like to, Lewis.”

“Write about John for The Urbanite?” Lewis asked.

“Well, you know, about a hundred words, maybe two hundred, anything you can think of to say about him.”

“But why?”

“Jesus wept, because you don’t want Omar Norris to be the only one—” Hardesty stopped, mouth open. He looked stupefied. Lewis craned his neck to see Omar Norris across the crowded room, still waving his arms and babbling. On the bar before him sat a row of drinks. The feeling of something bad nearby which had dogged him all day intensified. An out-of-tune fiddle chord went through him like an arrow: this is it, this is it—

Ned Rowles reached across the table and touched Lewis’s hand. “Ah, Lewis,” he said. “I was sure you knew.”

“I was out all day,” he said. “I was—what happened?” A day after Edward’s anniversary, he thought, and knew that John Jaffrey was dead. Then he realized that Edward’s heart attack had come after midnight, and that this was the anniversary of his death.

“He was a leaper,” Hardesty said, and Lewis saw that he’d read the word somewhere and thought it was the kind of word he should use. The sheriff took a swallow of beer and grimaced at Lewis, full of self-conscious menace. “He went off the bridge before noon today. Probably dead as a mackerel before he hit the water. Omar Norris there saw the whole thing.”

“He went off the bridge,” Lewis repeated softly. For some reason, he wished that he had hit a girl with his car—it was only a moment’s wish, but it would have meant that John was safe. “My God,” he said.

“We thought Sears or Ricky would have told you,” Ned Rowles informed him. “They agreed to take care of the funeral arrangements.”

“Jesus, John is going to be buried,” Lewis said, and surprised tears came up in his eyes. He stood up and clumsily began to edge out of the booth.

“Don’t suppose you could tell me anything useful,” Hardesty said.

“No. No. I have to get over there. I don’t know anything. I’ve got to see the others.”

“Tell me if I can help at all,” Ned shouted over the noise.

Not really looking where he was going, Lewis brushed into Jim Hardie, who had stationed himself unseen just outside the booth. “Sorry, Jim,” Lewis said and would have gone by Jim and the girl, but Hardie closed his fist around Lewis’s arm.

“This lady wanted to meet you,” Hardie said, grinning unpleasantly. “So I’m making the introductions. She’s stopping at our hotel.”

“I just don’t have the time, I have to leave,” Lewis said, Hardie’s hand still clamping forcefully on his forearm.

“Hang on. I’m doing what she asked me to do. Mr. Benedikt, this is Anna Mostyn.” For the first time since he’d met her glance at the bar, Lewis looked at the girl. She was not a girl, he discovered; she was about thirty, perhaps a year or two on either side. She was anything but a typical Jim Hardie date. “Anna, this is Mr. Lewis Benedikt. I guess he’s about the handsomest old coot in five or six counties, maybe the whole damn state, and he knows it too.” The girl grew more startling the more you looked at her. She reminded him of someone, and he supposed it must have been Stella Hawthorne. It crossed his mind that he’d forgotten what Stella Hawthorne had looked like when she was thirty.

A ravaged figure from a low-life painting, Omar Norris was pointing at him from the bar. Still grinning ferociously, Jim Hardie let go of his arm. The boy with the fiddle swung his hair back girlishly and counted off another number.

“I know you have to leave,” the woman said. Her voice was low, but it slid through the noise. “I heard about your friend from Jim, and I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was.”

“I just heard myself,” Lewis said, sick with the need to leave the bar. “Nice to meet you, Miss—”

“Mostyn,” she said in her effortlessly audible voice.

“I hope we’ll be seeing each other again. I’m going to work for your lawyer friends.”

“Oh? Well …” The meaning of what she had said reached him. “Sears and Ricky gave you a job?”

“Yes. I gather they knew my aunt. Perhaps you did too? Her name was Eva Galli.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Lewis said, and startled Jim Hardie into dropping his arm. Lewis plunged off into the interior of the bar before changing direction and rushing toward the door.

“Glamour boy musta got the shits or something,” Jim said. “Oh. Sorry, lady. I mean, Miss Mostyn.”

The Morgan’s canvas top creaking, cold billowing in, Lewis drove to John’s house as fast as he could. He did not know what he expected to find there: maybe some ultimate Chowder Society Meeting, Ricky and Sears speaking with eerie rationality over an open coffin. Or maybe Ricky and Sears themselves magically dead and wrapped in the black robes of his dream, three bodies lying in an upper bedroom …

Not yet, his mind said.

He pulled up beside the house on Montgomery Street and got out of the car. The wind pulled the blazer away from his body, yanked at his necktie: he realized that like Ned Rowles he was coatless. Lewis looked despairingly at the unlighted windows, and thought that at least Milly Sheehan would be in. He trotted up the path and pushed the bell. Far away and dim, it rang. Immediately below it was the office bell for John’s patients, and he pushed that one too and heard an impatient clamor go off just on the other side of the door. Lewis, standing as if naked in the cold, began to shake.

Cold water lay on his face. At first he thought it was snow, then realized that he was crying again.

Lewis pounded on the door futilely, turned away, the tears like ice on his face, and looked across the street and saw Eva Galli’s old house.

His breath froze. He almost thought he saw her again, the enchantress of their youth, moving across a downstairs window.

For a moment everything had the hard clarity of the morning and his stomach froze too, and then the door opened and he saw that the figure coming out was a man. Lewis wiped his brow with his hands. The man obviously wanted to speak with him. As he approached, Lewis recognized him as Freddy Robinson, the insurance salesman. He too was a regular at Humphrey’s Place.

“Lewis?” he called. “Lewis Benedikt? Hey, good to see you, man!”

Lewis began to feel as he had in the bar—he wanted to get away. “Yes, it’s me,” he said.

“Gee, what a pity about old Dr. Jaffrey, hey? I heard about it this afternoon. He was a real buddy of yours, wasn’t he?” Robinson was by now close enough to shake hands, and Lewis was unable to avoid grasping the salesman’s cold fingers. “Hell of a note, hey? Goddamned tragedy, I call it. Boy.” He was shaking his head sagely. “I’ll tell you something. Old Dr. Jaffrey pretty much kept to himself, but I loved that old guy. Honest. When he invited me over to that party he had for the actress, you could have knocked me down with a feather. And man, what a party! Really, I had the time of my life. Great party.” He must have seen Lewis stiffen, for he added, “Until the end, of course.”

Lewis was looking at the ground, not bothering to reply to these horrible remarks, and Freddy Robinson rushed into the silence to add, “Hey, you look kind of crapped out. You don’t want to stand here in the cold. Why don’t you come over to my place, have a good stiff drink? I’d like to hear about your experiences, chew the fat a little bit, check out your insurance situation, just for the record—there’s nobody at home here anyhow—” Like Jim Hardie, he grabbed Lewis’s arm, and Lewis, harassed and miserable as he was, sensed desperation and hunger in the man. If Robinson could have handcuffed Lewis and dragged him across the street, he would have. Lewis knew that Robinson, for whatever private reasons, would fasten on him like a barnacle if he allowed him to.

“I’m afraid I can’t,” he said, more polite than if he had not felt the enormity of Robinson’s need. “I have to see some people.”

“You mean Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, I guess,” Robinson said, defeated already. He released Lewis’s arm. “Gosh, what you guys do is so great, I mean I really admire you, with that club you have and everything.”

“Christ, don’t admire us,” Lewis said, already moving toward his car. “Someone’s picking us off like flies.”

It was uttered almost casually, a merely dismissive remark, and within five minutes Lewis had forgotten he’d said it.

He drove the eight blocks to Ricky’s house because it was unthinkable that Sears would have taken Milly Sheehan to his place, and when he got there he saw that he’d been correct. Ricky’s old Buick was still in the drive.

“Oh, so you’ve heard,” Ricky said when he opened the door. “I’m glad you came.” His nose was red, with crying Lewis thought, and then saw that he had a bad cold.

“Yes, I saw Hardesty and Ned Rowles and they told me. How did you hear?”

“Hardesty called us at the office.” The two men entered the living room, and Lewis saw Sears James, seated in an easy chair, scowl when the sheriff was named.

Stella came in from the dining room, gasped, and ran across the room to embrace him. “I’m so sorry, Lewis,” she said. “It’s such a damn shame.”

“It’s impossible,” said Lewis.

“That may be so, but it certainly was John who was taken to the county morgue this noon,” Sears said in a thick voice. “Who’s to say what is impossible? We’ve all been under a strain. I may go off the bridge tomorrow.” Stella gave Lewis an extra squeeze and went to sit beside Ricky on the Hawthorne’s couch. The Italian coffee table in front of them looked the size of an ice rink.

“You need coffee,” Stella said, scrutinizing Lewis more carefully, and got up again to go into the kitchen.

“You’d think it impossible,” Sears went on, unruffled by the interruption, “that three adult men like ourselves would have to huddle together for warmth, but here we are.”

Stella returned with coffee for all of them, and the desultory conversation ceased for a moment.

“We tried to reach you,” Ricky said.

“I was out for a drive.”

“It was John who wanted us to write to young Wanderley,” Ricky said after a moment.

“Write to whom?” Stella asked, not understanding. Sears and Ricky explained. “Well, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” she finally said. “It’s just like the three of you, to get all worked up and then ask someone else to solve your problems. I wouldn’t have expected it from John.”

“He’s supposed to be an expert, Stella,” Sears said in exasperation. “As far as I’m concerned, John’s suicide proves that we need him more than ever.”

“Well, when’s he coming?”

“Don’t know,” Sears admitted. He looked rumpled, a fat old turkey at the end of winter.

“If you ask me, what you ought to do is stop those Chowder Society meetings,” Stella told him. “They’re destructive. Ricky woke up screaming this morning— all three of you look like you’ve seen ghosts.”

Sears remained cool. “Two of us saw John’s body. That should be reason enough for looking a little out of sorts.”

“How did—” Lewis began, and then stopped. How did he look? was a singularly stupid question.

“How did what?” demanded Sears.

“How did you happen to hire Eva Galli’s niece as a secretary?”

“She asked for a job,” Sears said. “We had some extra work.”

“Eva Galli?” asked Stella. “Wasn’t she that rich woman who came here, oh, a long time ago? I didn’t know her very well; she was much older than I. Wasn’t she going to marry someone? Then she just upped and left town.”

“She was going to marry Stringer Dedham,” Sears said impatiently.

“Oh yes, Stringer Dedham,” Stella remembered. “My goodness, he was a handsome man. There was that awful accident—something at a farm.”

“He lost both arms in. a threshing machine,” Ricky said.

“Ugh. What a conversation. This must be like one of your meetings.”

All three men had been thinking the same thing.

“Who told you about Miss Mostyn?” asked Sears. “Mrs. Quast must gossip overtime.”

“No, I met her. She was at Humphrey’s Place with Jim Hardie. She introduced herself to me.”

The feeble conversation died again.

Sears asked Stella if there was any brandy in the house, and Stella said she’d get some for everybody and disappeared again into the kitchen.

Sears yanked savagely at his jacket, trying to make himself comfortable in the leather and metal chair. “You took John home last night Did he seem unusual in any way?”

Lewis shook his head. “We didn’t talk much. He said your story was good.”

“He didn’t say any more than that?”

“He said he was cold.”

“Humph.”

Stella returned with a bottle of Remy Martin and three glasses on a tray. “You should see yourselves. You look like three owls.”

They did not so much as nod.

“Gentlemen, I’ll leave you with the brandy. I’m sure you have things you want to talk about.” Stella looked them over, autocratic and benign as a primary teacher, and then moved quickly out of the room without saying good-bye. Her disapproval stayed with them.

“She’s upset,” Ricky said apologetically. “Well, we all are. But Stella’s more affected by this than she wants to show.” As if to make amends for his wife, Ricky leaned forward over the glass icerink table and poured a generous amount of cognac into each glass. “I need this too. Lewis, I just don’t understand what would make him do it. Why would John Jaffrey want to kill himself?”

“I don’t know why,” said Lewis, taking one of the glasses. “Maybe I’m glad I don’t.”

“Talk sense for a change,” Sears growled. “We’re men, Lewis, not animals. We’re not supposed to stay cowering in the darkness.” He too accepted a glass and sipped. “As a species, we hunger for knowledge. For enlightenment.” His pale eyes angrily fixed on Lewis. “Or perhaps I misunderstood you, and you did not actually intend to defend ignorance.”

“Overkill, Sears,” Ricky said.

“Less jargon, Ricky,” Sears retorted. ” ‘Overkill,’ indeed. That might impress Elmer Scales and his sheep, but it does not impress me.”

There was something about sheep—but Lewis had forgotten it. He said, “I don’t mean to defend ignorance, Sears. I just meant that—hell, I don’t know anymore. I guess I meant that it might be too much to take.” What he did not articulate but was half aware of was the notion that he feared to peer too closely into the last moments of any suicide’s life, be it friend or wife.

“Yes,” breathed Ricky.

“Twaddle,” said Sears. “I’d be relieved to learn that John was merely despairing. It’s the other explanations that frighten me.”

Lewis said, “I have the feeling that I’m sort of missing something,” and proved to Ricky for the thousandth time that he was not the dullard of Sears’s imagination.

“Last night,” Ricky said, holding his glass with both hands and smiling fatalistically, “after the other three of us had gone, Sears saw Fenny Bate on his staircase.”

“Christ.”

“That’s enough,” Sears warned. “Ricky, I forbid you to go into this. What our friend means, Lewis, is that I thought I saw him. I was badly frightened. It was an hallucination—a ha’nt, as they used to say in these parts.”

“Now you’re arguing both ways,” Ricky pointed out. “For my part, I’d be happy to think you’re right. I don’t want to see young Wanderley here. I think we might all be sorry, just about the time it’s too late.”

“You misread me. I want him to come and say: give it up. My Uncle Edward died of smoking and excitement, John Jaffrey was unstable. That’s the reason I agreed to John’s suggestion. I say, let him come, and the sooner the better.”

Lewis said, “If you feel that, I agree with you.”

“Is that fair to John?” Ricky asked.

“John’s past being fair to,” Sears said. He finished the cognac in his glass and leaned forward to pour more from the bottle.

Sudden footsteps on the stairs made all three swivel their heads toward the entrance from the hall.

Turned that way in his chair, Lewis could see Ricky’s front window, and he noticed with surprise that it had begun to snow again. Hundreds of big flakes hammered the black window.

Milly Sheehan came in, her hair all flattened on one side and all frowsy on the other. She was sausaged into one of Stella’s old dressing gowns. “I heard that, Sears James,” she said in a voice like the wail of an ambulance. “You’ll bully John even when he’s dead.”

“Milly, I meant no disrespect,” Sears said. “Shouldn’t you—”

“No. You won’t get rid of me now. I won’t give you coffee now and bow and scrape. I have something to say to you. John didn’t commit suicide. Lewis Benedikt, you listen too. He didn’t. He wouldn’t have. John was murdered.”

“Milly,” Ricky began.

“Do you think I’m deaf? Do you think I don’t know what’s going on? John was killed, and do you know who killed him? Well, I do.” Footsteps, this time Stella’s, came hurrying down the stairs. “I know who killed him. It was you. You—you Chowder Society. You killed him with your terrible stories. You made him sick—you and your Fenny Bates!” Her face twisted; Stella rushed in too late to stop Milly’s final words. “They ought to call you the Murder Society! They ought to call you Murder Incorporated!”

They want me to be able to write, too—they’re very firm about that. Sears James said, “We didn’t ask you here so that we could interrupt your career!” So they want me to give about half of my day to Dr. Rabbitfoot, and the other half to them. There’s the feeling, definitely, that part of what they want is just someone to talk to. They’ve been talking to themselves for too long.

We had a painful, halting conversation. Stella Hawthorne said, “I hope you knock some sense into these characters’ heads,” which mystified me. They hadn’t yet explained the real reason why they asked me to come. I nodded, and Lewis said, “We have to talk about it.” That silenced them again. “We want to talk about your book, too,” Lewis said. “Fine,” I said. More silence.

“I might as well feed you three owls,” Stella Hawthorne said. “Mr. Wanderley, will you please give me a hand?”

I followed her into the kitchen, expecting to be handed plates or cutlery. What I did not expect was for the elegant Mrs. Hawthorne to whirl around, slam the door behind her and say, “Didn’t those three old idiots in there say why they wanted you to come here?”

“I guess they fudged a little,” I said.

“Well, you better be good, Mr. Wanderley,” she said, “because you’re going to have to be Freud to deal with those three. I want you to know that I don’t approve of your being here at all. I think people should solve their problems by themselves.”

“They implied they just wanted to talk to me about my uncle,” I said. Even with her gray hair, I thought she could be no older than about forty-six or seven, and she looked as beautiful and stern as a ship’s figurehead.

“Your uncle! Well, maybe they do. They’d never deign to tell me,” and I understood part of the reason for her fury. “How well did you know your uncle, Mr. Wanderley?”

I asked her to use my first name. “Not very well. After I went to college and moved to California, I didn’t see him more than once every couple of years. I hadn’t seen him at all for several years before his death.”

“But he left you his house. Doesn’t it strike you a little bit funny that those three characters out there didn’t suggest you stay there?”

Before I could reply she went on. “Well, even if it doesn’t, it does me. And not only funny, but pathetic. They’re afraid to go into Edward’s house. They just all came to a kind of—a kind of silent agreement. They’ve never entered that house. They’re superstitious, that’s why.”

“I thought I felt—well, when I came to the funeral I thought I saw—” I stammered, not sure of how far I could go with her.

“Bully for you,” she said. “Maybe you’re not as big a blockhead as they are. But I tell you this, Don Wanderley, if you make them any worse than they are already, you’ll have me to answer to.” She put her hands on her hips, her eyes sizzling, and then she exhaled. Her eyes changed; she gave me a tight pained smile and said, “We’d better get busy or I suppose they’ll start to gossip about you.”

She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a platter holding a roast the size of a young pig. “Cold roast beef all right for you? The carving things are in the drawer to your right. Start cutting.”

It began like a job interview.

“Well, here you are at last, Mr. Wanderley,” said Sears James, pouring more cognac into his glass and removing a fat cigar case from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Cigar? I can vouch for their merit.”

“No thanks,” I said. “And please call me Don.”

“Very well. I have not welcomed you properly, Don, but I will do so now. We were all great friends of your uncle Edward’s. I am, and I speak for my two friends as well, very grateful that you have come across the country to join us. We think that you can help us.”

“Does this have to do with my uncle’s death?”

“In part. We want you to work for us.” Then he asked me if we could talk about The Nightwatcher.

“Of course.”

“It was a novel, therefore in large part an invention, but was this invention based on an actual case? We assume you did research for the book. But what we want to know is whether in the course of your research you discovered any corroborating evidence for the ideas in your book. Or perhaps your research was inspired by some inexplicable occurrence in your own life.”

I could almost feel their tension on my fingertips, and perhaps they could feel mine on theirs. They knew nothing about David’s death, but they had asked me to expose the central mystery of both The Nightwatcher and my life.

“The invention, as you put it, was based on an actual case,” I said, and the tension broke.

“Could you describe that to us?”

“No,” I said. “It’s not clear enough to me. Also, it’s too personal. I’m sorry, but I can’t go into it.”

“We can respect that,” Sears James said. “You seem nervous.”

“I am,” I admitted, and laughed.

“The situation in The Nightwatcher was based on a real situation that you knew about?” asked Ricky Hawthorne, as if he hadn’t been paying attention, or could not believe what he had just heard.

“That’s right.”

“And you know of other similar cases?”

“No.”

“But you do not reject the supernatural out of hand,” Sears said.

“I don’t know if I do or not,” I said. “Like most people.”

Lewis Benedikt sat up straight and stared at me. “But you just said …”

“No, he didn’t,” Ricky Hawthorne put in. “He just said his book was based on a real event, not that it recounted the event exactly. Is that right, Don?”

“More or less.”

“But what about your research?” asked Lewis.

“I didn’t actually do much,” I said.

Hawthorne sighed, glanced at Sears with what looked like irony: I told you so.

“I think you can help us anyway,” Sears said, as if he were contradicting a voiced opinion. “Your skepticism will do us good.”

“Maybe,” Hawthorne muttered.

I was still feeling that they had blundered into my most private space. “What does all this have to do with my uncle’s heart attack?” I asked. There was a lot of self-defense in the question, but it was the right question to ask.

It all came out—James had decided to tell me everything.

“And we’ve been having unthinkable nights. I know that John did too. It is not exaggerating to say that we fear for our reason. Would either of you dispute that?”

Hawthorne and Lewis Benedikt looked as though they were remembering things they’d rather not, and shook their heads.

“So we want your expert help, and as much time as you can reasonably give us,” Sears concluded. “John’s apparent suicide has shaken us all very deeply. Even if he was a drug addict, which I dispute, I do not think he was a potential suicide.”

“What was he wearing?” I asked. It was just a stray thought.

“Wearing? I don’t recall … Ricky, did you look at his clothing?”

Hawthorne nodded. “I had to throw it out. It was the most astounding assortment of things—his evening jacket, a pajama shirt, the trousers to another suit. No socks.”

“That’s what John put on when he got up the morning he died?” Lewis asked, astonished. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”

“At first I was shocked by it, and then I forgot. Too much was happening.”

“But he was usually such a fastidious man,” Lewis said. “Damn it, if John jumbled his clothes up like that, his mind must have been jumbled too.”

“Precisely,” Sears said, and smiled at me. “Don, that was a perceptive question. None of us thought of it.”

I could see him beginning to snatch up all the available rationalizations. “It doesn’t simplify things to point out that his mind was jumbled,” I pointed out. “In the case I had in mind when I did my book, a man killed himself, and I’m damn sure his mind was shaken, but I never found out what really happened to him.”

“You’re talking about your brother, aren’t you?” asked Ricky Hawthorne cleverly. Naturally. So they all knew, after all; my uncle had told them about David. “And that was the ‘case’ you alluded to?”

I nodded.

“Uh oh,” Lewis said.

I said, “I just turned it into a ghost story. I don’t know what really happened.”

For a moment all three of them looked embarrassed.

“Well,” Sears James said, “even if you are not accustomed to doing research, I’m sure that you’re capable of it.”

Ricky Hawthorne leaned back into his eccentric couch; his bow tie was still immaculate, but his nose was red and his eyes bleary. He looked small and lost, in the midst of his giant furniture. “It will obviously make my two friends happier if you stay with us for a while, Mr. Wanderley.”

“Don.”

“Don, then. Since you seem prepared to do that, and since I am exhausted, I suggest we all say good night You’ll spend the night at Lewis’s?”

Lewis Benedikt said, “That’s fine,” and stood up.

“I have one question,” I said. “Are you asking me to think about the supernatural—or whatever you want to call it—because that absolves you from thinking about it?”

“Perceptive, but inaccurate,” Sears James said, looking at me with his rifle shot’s blue eyes. “We think about it all the time.”

“That reminds me,” Lewis said. “Are you going to stop the Chowder Society meetings? Does anyone think we should?”

“No,” Ricky said with an odd defiance. “For heaven’s sake let’s not. For our sakes, let’s continue to meet Don will be included.”

So here I am. Each of the three men, my uncle’s friends, seems admirable in his own way: but are they losing their minds? I can’t even be sure they have told me everything. They are frightened, and two of them have died; and I wrote earlier in this journal that Milburn feels like the sort of town where Dr. Rabbitfoot would go to work. I can feel reality slithering away from me, if I start to imagine that one of my own books is happening around me.

The trouble is, I could almost start to imagine that. Those two suicides—David’s and Dr. Jaffrey’s—that’s the problem, that simple coincidence. (And the Chowder Society shows no signs of recognizing that this coincidence is the main reason I am interested in their problem.) What am I involved in here? A ghost story? Or something worse, something not just a story? The three old men have only the sketchiest knowledge of the events of two years ago—and they can’t possibly know that they’ve asked me to enter the strangest part of my life again, to roll myself back through the calendar to the worst, most destructive days: or to roll myself up again in the pages of a book which was my attempt to reconcile myself with them. But can there really be any connection, even if it is just the connection of one ghost story leading to another, as it did with the Chowder Society? And can there truly be any factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to my brother?

I had found the hook for the Hawthorne lecture; it was in an essay by R. P. Blackmur: “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.” The idea seemed to radiate throughout Hawthorne’s work, and I could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity, by the impulse in them for nightmare—by what was almost their desire for nightmare. For to imagine a nightmare is to put it at one remove. And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life.” When I had the ideas which would structure the lecture, the details fell onto the pages of my notebook.

This work and my writing students kept me fully occupied for the five days before the lecture. Helen and I met fleetingly, and I promised her that we would get away for a weekend when my immediate work was done. My brother David owned a “cottage” in Still Valley, outside Mendocino, and he’d told me to use it whenever I wanted to get away from Berkeley. This was typical of David’s thoughtfulness; but a kind of perversity had kept me from using the house. I did not want to have to be grateful to David. After the lecture I would take Helen to Still Valley and kill two scruples at once.

On the morning of the lecture I reread D. H. Lawrence’s chapter about Hawthorne and saw these lines:

That was what I had been looking for all along. I put down my cup of coffee and started to restructure my remarks. Lawrence’s insight extended my own, I could see all the books in a new way. I discarded paragraphs and wrote in new ones between the crossed-out lines … I forgot to call Helen, as I had promised to do.

In the end I used my notes very sparingly. Once, straining for a metaphor, I leaned on the lectern and saw Helen and Meredith Polk seated together in one of the last rows, up at the top of the theater. Meredith Polk was frowning, suspicious as a Berkeley cop. When scientists hear the kinds of things that go on in literature classrooms, they often begin to look that way. Helen merely looked interested, and I was grateful that she had come.

When it was over Professor Lieberman came up from his aisle seat to tell me that he had enjoyed my remarks very much, and would I consider taking his Stephen Crane lecture in two months’ time? He was due at a conference in Iowa that week, and since I had done such an “exemplary” job, especially considering that I was not an academic … in short, he might find it possible to extend my appointment to a second year.

I was stunned as much by the bribe as by his arrogance. Lieberman, still young, was a famous man, not so much a scholar in Helen’s sense as a “critic,” a generalizer, a sub-Edmund Wilson; I did not respect his books, but I expected more of him. The students were filing up toward the exits, a solid mass of T-shirts and denim. Then I saw a face lifted expectantly toward me, a slim body clothed not in denim but in a white dress. Lieberman was suddenly an interference, an obstacle, and I agreed to give the Crane lecture to get rid of him. “Very good, Donald,” he said, and disappeared. As quickly as that: one moment the seersuckered young professor was before me, and the next I was looking into the face of the girl in the white dress. It was the graduate student who had stopped Helen and me on the stairs.

She looked completely different: healthier, with a light golden layer of tan on her face and arms. The straight blond hair glowed. So did her pale eyes: in them I saw a kaleidoscope of shattered lights and colors. Her mouth was bracketed by two faint lines of irony. She was ravishing, one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen—no small statement, for Berkeley was so populated by beauties that you saw two new ones every time you looked up from your desk. But the girl before me had none of the gaucheness or assertive, testing vulgarity of the usual undergraduate knockout: she simply looked right, perfectly at home in herself. Helen Kayon didn’t have a chance.

“That was good,” she said, and the faint lines beside her mouth twitched as if at a private joke. “I’m happy I came after all.” For the first time, I heard the Southern accent: that sunny drawl, that lilt.

“So am I,” I said. “Thank you for the compliment.”

“Do you want to relish it in private?”

“Is that an invitation?” And then I saw that I was being too quick, too self-consciously flattered and one-dimensional.

“A what? No, I’m not aware that it was.” Her mouth moved: what an idea.

I looked up to the top of the lecture theater. Helen and Meredith Polk were already in the aisle, going toward the door. Helen must have begun to move as soon as she’d seen me look at the blond. If she knew me as well as she had said she did, she had known just what I was thinking. Helen went through the exit door without turning around, but Meredith Polk tried to assassinate me with a glance.

“Are you waiting for someone?” the girl said.

“No, it’s nothing important,” I said. “Would you join me for lunch? I never did have lunch, and I’m starving.”

I was behaving, I knew, with appalling selfishness; but I also knew that the girl before me was already more important to me than Helen Kayon, and by letting Helen go at once—by being the bastard Meredith Polk said I was—I was eliminating weeks, perhaps months of painful scenes. I had not lied to Helen; she had always known that our relationship was fragile.

The girl walking beside me across the campus lived in perfect consonance with her femininity; even then, moments after I had first seen her in good light, she seemed ageless, even timeless, beautiful in a nearly hieratic and mythic way. Helen’s separation from herself had kept her from gracefulness, and she was blatantly a person of my own blink of history; my first impression of Alma Mobley was that she could have moved with that easy grace over an Italian piazza in the sixteenth century; or in the twenties (more to the point) could have earned an appreciative glance from Scott Fitzgerald, flying past the Plaza Hotel on her devastating legs. Set down like that, it sounds absurd. Obviously I had noticed her legs, I had a sense of her body; but images of Italian piazzas and Fitzgerald at the Plaza are more than unlikely metaphors for carnality. It was as though every cell of her possessed ease; nothing less typical of the usual Berkeley graduate student in English can be imagined. The gracefulness went so deep in her that it seemed, even then, to mark an intense passivity.

Of course I am condensing six months’ impressions into a single moment, but my justification is that the seeds of the impression were present as we left the campus to go to a restaurant. Her going with me so willingly, with such unconcern that it resounded with unspoken judgments, did contain a whiff of the passive —the ironic tactful passivity of the beautiful, of those whose beauty has sealed them off inside it like a princess in a tower.

I steered her toward a restaurant I had heard Lieberman mention—it was too expensive for most students, too expensive for me. But the ceremony of luxurious dining suited both her and my sense of celebration.

I knew immediately that it was she I wanted to take to David’s house in Still Valley.

Her name, I learned, was Alma Mobley, and she had been born in New Orleans. I gathered more from her manner than from anything explicitly stated that her parents had been well off; her father had been a painter, and long stretches of her childhood had been spent in Europe. Speaking of her parents, she used the past tense, and I gathered that they had died some time ago. That too fit her manner, her air of disconnection from all but herself.

Like Helen, she had been a student in the Midwest. She had gone to the University of Chicago—this seemed next to impossible, Alma in Chicago, that rough knock-about city—and had been accepted as a PhD student at Berkeley. From what she said, I understood that she was just drifting through the academic life, that she had none of Helen’s profound commitment to it. She was a graduate student because she had a talent for the mechanics of literary work and was bright; it was better than anything else she could think of doing. And she was in California because she had not liked the Chicago climate.

Again, and overwhelmingly, I had the sense of the irrelevance to her of most of the furniture of her life; of her passive self-sufficiency. I had no doubt that she was bright enough to finish her thesis (Virginia Woolf), and then with luck to get a teaching job at one of the little colleges up and down the coast. Then, suddenly and shockingly, she lifting a spoonful of mint-green avocado to her mouth, I had another vision of her. I saw her as a whore, a 1910 Storyville prostitute, her hair exotically twisted, her dancer’s legs drawn up—her naked body was very clear for a moment. Another image of professional detachment, I supposed, but that did not explain the force of the vision. I had been sexually moved by it. She was talking about books—talking not as Helen did, but in a general-reader way—and I looked across the table and I knew that I wanted to be the man who mattered to her, I wanted to grab that passivity and shake it and make her truly see me.

“Don’t you have a boyfriend?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“So you’re not in love?”

“No,” and she gave a minute smile at the obviousness of the question. “There was a man in Chicago, but that’s finished.”

I pounced on the noun. “One of your professors.”

“One of my associate professors.” Another smile.

“You were in love with him? Was he married?”

She looked at me gravely for a moment “No. It wasn’t like what you’re thinking. He wasn’t married, and I wasn’t in love with him.”

Even then I recognized that she would find it very easy to lie. This did not repulse me; instead it was proof of how lightly her life had touched her, and was a part of all that I already wanted to change in her. “He was in love with you,” I said. “Was that why you wanted to leave Chicago?”

“No it was already over by then. Alan didn’t have anything to do with it He made a fool of himself. That’s all.”

“Alan?”

“Alan McKechnie. He was very sweet.”

“A very sweet fool.”

“Are you determined to know about this?” she asked, with her characteristic trick of adding a soft, almost invisible irony which denied the question any importance.

“No. Just a little curious.”

“Well.” Her eyes, full of that shattered light, met mine. “It’s not much of a story. He became … infatuated. I was in a tutorial, with him. There were only four of us. Three boys and myself. The tutorial met twice a week. I could tell he was getting interested in me, but he was a very shy man. He was very inexperienced with women.” Again that soft, lobbing deflection in her voice and eyes. “He took me out a few times. He didn’t want us to be seen, so we had to go places not in Hyde Park.”

“Where did you go?”

“Hotel bars. Places like that. Around the Loop. I think it was the first time he’d ever done anything like that with a student, and it made him nervous. I don’t think he’d had much fun in his life. Eventually I became too much for him. I realized that I didn’t want him in the way he wanted me. I know what you’re going to ask next, so I’ll answer it. Yes, we slept together. For a while. It wasn’t much good. Alan was not very —physical. I began to think that what he really wanted to do was go to bed with a boy, but of course he was too whatever to do that. He couldn’t.”

“How long did it last?”

“A year.” She finished her meal and dropped her napkin beside the plate. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this.”

“What do you really like?”

She pretended to consider it seriously. “Let’s see. Really like. Summer. Movies. English novels. Waking up at six and seeing very early morning out of the window—everything is so empty and pure. Lemon tea. What else? Paris. And Nice. I really do like Nice. When I was a little girl, we went there four or five summers in a row. And I like very good meals, like this one.”

“It doesn’t sound like the academic life is the one for you,” I said. It was as though she had told me everything and nothing.

“It doesn’t, does it?” She laughed, as at something of no importance. “I suppose what I need is a Great Love.”

And there she was again, the princess locked in the tower of her own self-regard. “Let’s go to a movie tomorrow night,” I said, and she agreed.

The next day I persuaded Rex Leslie, whose office was down the hall from mine, to exchange desks with me.

The art cinema was showing Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, which Alma had never seen. Afterward we went to a coffee shop, a place packed with students, and bits of conversation from adjoining tables filtered through into our own. For a moment after we sat down, I experienced a flash of guilty fear, and recognized a second later that I was afraid of seeing Helen Kayon. But it was not her sort of place; and anyhow at this hour Helen usually was still at the library. I felt a moment of intense gratitude that I was not there too, grinding away at a discipline that was not only my own but merely a condition of employment.

“What a beautiful movie,” she said. “I still feel like I’m in it.”

“You feel movies very deeply, then.”

“Of course.” She looked at me, puzzled.

“And literature?”

“Of course.” She looked at me again. “Well. I don’t know. I enjoy it.”

A bearded boy in a lumberjack shirt near us said in a carrying voice, “Wenner is naive and so is his magazine. I’ll start buying it again when I see a picture of Jerry Brown on the cover.”

His friend said, “Wenner is Jerry Brown.”

“Berkeley,” I said.

“Who is Wenner?”

“I’m surprised you don’t know. Jann Wenner?”

“Who is he?”

“He was the Berkeley student who founded Rolling Stone.”

“Is that a magazine?”

“You’re full of surprises,” I said. “You mean you’ve never heard of it?”

“I’m not interested in most magazines. I never look at them. What kind of magazine is it? Is it named after that band?”

I nodded. At least she had heard of them. “What kind of music do you like?”

“I’m not very interested in music.”

“Let’s try some other names. Do you know who Tom Seaveris?”

“No.”

“Have you ever heard of Willie Mays?”

“Didn’t he used to be an athlete? I’m also not very interested in sports.”

“It shows.” She giggled. “You’re getting even more intriguing. How about Barbra Streisand?”

She pouted charmingly, self-parodyingly. “Of course.”

“John Ford?” No. “Arthur Fonzarelli?” No. “Grace Bumbry?” No. “Desi Arnaz?” No. “Johnny Carson?” No. “Andre Previn?” No. “John Dean?” No.

“Don’t ask me any more or I’ll start saying yes to everything,” she said.

“What do you do?” I asked. “Are you sure you live in this country?”

“Let me try you. Have you heard of Anthony Powell or Jean Rhys or Ivy Compton-Burnett or Elizabeth Jane Howard or Paul Scott or Margaret Drabble or—”

“They’re English novelists and I’ve heard of all of them,” I said. “But I take your point. You’re really not interested in the things you’re not really interested in.”

“Exactly.”

“You never even read newspapers,” I said.

“No. And I never watch television.” She smiled. “Do you think I should be stood against a wall and shot?”

“I’m just interested in who your friends are.”

“Do you? Well, you are a friend of mine, aren’t you?” Over it, as over our entire conversation, was that veneer of disinterested irony. I wondered for a moment if she were actually entirely human: her nearly complete ignorance of popular culture demonstrated more than any assertion how little she cared what people thought of her. What I had thought of as her integrity was more complete than I could have imagined. Maybe a sixth of the graduate students in California had never heard of an athlete like Seaver; but who in America could have avoided hearing of the Fonz?

“But you do have other friends. You just met me.”

“I do, yes.”

“In the English Department?” It was not impossible: for all I knew of my temporary colleagues, there might have been an extensive cell of Virginia Woolf fanciers who never looked at the newspapers. In them however this remoteness from their surroundings would have been an affectation; of Alma the reverse would have been true.

“No. I don’t know many people there. I know some people who are interested in the occult.”

“The occult?” I could not imagine what she meant. “Seances? Ouija boards? Madame Blavatsky? Planchettes?”

“No. They’re more serious than that. They belong to an order.”

I was stunned; I had fallen into an abyss. I envisioned Satanism, covens; California lunacy at its worst.

She read my face and said, “I’m not in it myself. I just know them.”

“What is the name of the order?”

“X.X.X.”

“But—” I leaned forward, scarcely believing that I had heard correctly. “It can’t be X.X.X.? Xala …”

“Xala Xalior Xlati.”

I felt disbelief, shock; I felt a surprised fear, looking at her beautiful face. X.X.X was more than a group of California screwballs dressing themselves in robes; they were frightening. They were known to be cruel, even savage; they’d had some minor connection with the Manson family, and that was the only reason I had read about them. After the Manson affair they were supposed to have gone elsewhere—to Mexico, I thought. Were they still in California? From what I had read, Alma would have been better off knowing button men in the Mafia: from the Mafia you would expect the motives, rational or not, of our phase of capitalism. The X.X.X. was raw material for nightmares.

“And those people are your friends?” I asked.

“You asked.”

I shook my head, still astonished.

“Don’t worry about it. Or about them. You’ll never see them.”

It gave me an entirely different picture of her life; sitting across from me, faintly smiling, she was for a moment sinister. It was as though I had stepped off a sunlit path into jungle; and I thought of Helen Kayon working on Scots Chaucerians in the library.

“Even I don’t see them all that much,” she said.

“But you’ve been to their meetings? You go to their houses?”

She nodded. “I said. They’re my friends. But don’t worry about it.”

It could have been a lie—another lie, for I thought she had not always been truthful with me. But her entire manner, even her concern for my feelings, demonstrated that she was being truthful. She raised her cup of coffee to her lips, smiling at me with a trace of concern, and I saw her standing before a fire, holding a bleeding something in her hands …

“You are worrying about it. I’m not a member. I know people in it. You asked me. And I thought you should know.”

“Have you been to meetings? What goes on?”

“I can’t tell you. That is just another part of my life. A small part. It won’t touch you.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Was I thinking even then that she would give me material for a novel? I do not think so. I thought that her contact with the group was probably much slighter than she had suggested; I had only one hint, much later, that it may not have been. She was romancing, exaggerating, I told myself. The X.X.X. and Virginia Woolf? And La Grande Illusion? It was very far-fetched.

Sweetly, almost teasingly, she invited me back to her apartment. It was a short walk from the coffeehouse. As we left the busy street and turned into a darker area of tall houses, she began to talk inconsequentially of Chicago and her life there. For once I did not have to question her to get information about her past. I thought I could detect a glancing relief in her voice: because she had “confessed” her acquaintance with the X.X.X? Or was it because I had not quizzed her about it? The latter, I thought. It was a typical late summer Berkeley evening, somehow warm and chilly at once— cold enough for a jacket but with a sense of hidden warmth in the texture of the air. Despite the unpleasant surprise she had given me, the young woman beside me —her unconscious grace, her equally natural wit which lay embedded in her talk, her rather unearthly beauty— enlivened me, made me happier for life than I had been in months. Being with her was like coming out of hibernation.

We reached her building. “Ground floor,” she said, and went up the steps to the door. For the pleasure of looking at her, I hung back. A sparrow lighted on the railing and cocked its head; I could smell leaves burning; she turned around and her face was washed into a pale blur by the shadows of the porch. Somewhere in the neighborhood a dog barked. Miraculously, I could still see her eyes, as if they shone like a cat’s. “Are you as circumspect as your novel, or are you going to come in with me?”

I simultaneously recorded the fact that she had read my book and the featherlight criticism of it, and went up the steps to the door.

I had not imagined what her apartment would be like, but I should have known that it would be nothing like Helen Kayon’s untidy menage. Alma lived alone— but that I had suspected. Everything in the large room into which she brought me was unified by a single taste, a single point of view: it was, though not obviously, one of the most luxurious private rooms I have ever seen. A long thick Bokhara rug lay over the floor; a painted firescreen was flanked by tables which looked to my untrained eye to be Chippendale. A vast desk was placed before the bay window. Striped Regency chairs; big cushions; a Tiffany lamp on the desk. I saw that I had been right to think that her parents were moneyed. I said, “You’re not the typical grad student, are you?”

“I decided it was more sensible to live with these things than to put them in storage. More coffee?”

I nodded. So much about her now made sense, fit a pattern I hadn’t seen before. If Alma was remote, it was because she was genuinely different; she had been raised in a manner that ninety per cent of America never sees and in which it only provisionally believes, the manner of the bohemian ultra-rich. And if she was essentially passive, it was because she had never had to make a decision for herself. On the spot I invented a childhood of nursemaids and nannies, schooling in Switzerland; holidays on yachts. That, I thought, explained her air of timelessness; it was why I had imagined her flying past the Plaza Hotel in the Fitzgerald twenties: that kind of wealth seemed to belong to another age.

When she came back in with the coffee I said, “How would you like to take a trip with me in a week or two? We could stay in a house in Still Valley.”

Alma raised her eyebrows and cocked her head. It struck me that there was an androgynous quality to her passivity; just as there is, perhaps, an androgynous quality to a prostitute.

“You’re an interesting girl,” I said.

“A Reader’s Digest character.”

“Hardly.”

She sat, her knees drawn up, on a fat cushion before me; she was strongly sexual and ethereal at once, and I dismissed the notion of her being somehow androgynous. It seemed impossible that I had just thought it. I knew that I had to sleep with her; I knew I would, and the knowledge made the act even more imperative.

By morning my infatuation was total. Going to bed had taken place in the most understated manner possible; after we had spent an hour or two talking, she had said, “You don’t want to go home, do you?” “No.” “Well then, you’d better stay here tonight.” What followed was not just the ordinary limping round of the body, lust’s three-legged race; in fact she was as passive in bed as in all else. Yet she had effortless orgasms, first during the minuet stage and then later during the hell-for-leather period; she clung to my neck like a child while her hips bucked and her legs strained against my back; but even during this surrendering she was separate. “Oh, I love you,” she said after the second time, gripping my hair in her fists, but the pressure of her hands was as light as her voice. Reaching one mystery in her, I found another mystery behind it. Alma’s passion seemed to come from the same section of her being as her table manners. I had made love with a dozen girls who were “better in bed” than Alma Mobley, but with none of them had I experienced that delicacy of feeling, Alma’s ease with shades and colors of feeling. It was like being perpetually on the edge of some other sort of experience; like being before an unopened door.

I understood for the first time why girls fell in love with Don Juans, why they humiliated themselves pursuing them.

And I knew that she had given me a highly selective version of her past. I was certain that she had been nearly as promiscuous as a woman could be. That fit in with the X.X.X., with a sudden departure from Chicago; promiscuity seemed the unspoken element of Alma’s mode of being.

What I wanted, of course, was to supplant all the others; to open the door and witness all of her mysteries; to have the grace and subtlety directed entirely toward me. In a Sufi fable, the elephant fell in love with a firefly, and imagined that it shone for no other creature but he; and when it flew long distances away, he was confident that at the center of its light was the image of an elephant.

Which is to say no more than that love cut me off at the knees. My notions of getting back to novel-writing vanished. I could not invent feelings when I was so taken over by them myself; with Alma’s enigma before me, the different enigma of fictional characters seemed artificial. I would do that, but I had to do this first.

Thinking of Alma Mobley incessantly, I had to see her whenever I could: for ten days, I was with her almost every minute I was not teaching. Unread student stories piled up on my couch, matching the piles of essays about The Scarlet Letter on my desk. During this time our sexual bravado was outrageous. I made love to Alma in temporarily deserted classrooms, in the unlocked office I shared with a dozen others; once I followed her into a woman’s lavatory in Sproul Hall and went into her as she balanced on a sink. A student in the creative writing class, after I had been very rhetorical, asked, “How do you define man, anyhow?” “Sexual and imperfect,” I answered.

I said that I spent “almost” every moment with her that I did not spend in class. The exceptions were two evenings when she said that she had to visit an aunt in San Francisco. She gave me the aunt’s name, Florence de Peyser, but while she was gone I still sweated with doubt. The next day, however, she was back unaltered —I could see no traces of another lover. Nor of the X.X.X., which was the greater worry. And she surrounded Mrs. de Peyser with so much circumstantial detail (a Yorkshire terrier named Chookie, a closetful of Halston dresses, a maid named Rosita) that my suspicions died. You could not return from an evening with the sinister zombies of the X.X.X. full of stories about a dog named Chookie. If there were other lovers, if the promiscuity I had sensed that first night still clung to her, I saw no sign of it.

In fact, if one thing bothered me it was not the hypothetical rivalry of another man but a remark she had made during our first morning together. It might have been no more than an oddly phrased statement of affection: “You have been approved,” she said. For a lunatic moment, I thought she meant by our surroundings—the Chinese vase on the bedside table and the framed drawing by Pissarro and the shag carpet. (All of this made me more insecure than I recognized.)

“So you approve,” I said.

“Not by me. Well of course by me, but not only by me.” Then she put a finger to my lips.

Within a day or two I had forgotten this irritatingly unnecessary mystery.

Of course I had forgotten my work too, most of it. Even after the first frantically sensual weeks, I spent much less time on teaching than I had before. I was in love as I had never been: it was as though all my life I had skirted joy, looked at it askance, misunderstood it; only Alma brought me face to face with it.

Whatever I had suspected or doubted in her was burned away by feeling. If there were things I didn’t know about her, I didn’t give a damn; what I did know was enough.

I am sure it was she who first brought up the question of marriage. It was in a sentence like “When we’re married, we ought to do a lot of traveling” or “What kind of house do you want after we’re married?” Our conversation slipped into these discussions with no strain—I felt no coercion, only an increase in happiness.

“Oh, you really have been approved,” she said.

“May I meet your aunt someday?”

“Let me spare you,” she said, which did not answer the implied question. “If we get married next year, let’s spend the summer on the Greek islands. I have some friends we can stay with—friends of my father’s who live on Poros.”

“Would they approve of me too?”

“I don’t care if they do or not,” she said, taking my hand and making my heart speed.

Several days later she mentioned that after we had visited Poros, she would like to spend a month in Spain.

“What about Virginia Woolf? Your degree?”

“I’m not really much of a student.”

Of course I did not really imagine that we would spend months and months traveling, but it was a fantasy which seemed at least an image of our shared future; like the fantasy of my continued unspecified approval.

As the day of my Stephen Crane lecture for Lieberman drew nearer, I realized that I had done virtually no preparation, and I told Alma that I’d have to spend at least a couple of evenings at the library: “It’ll be an awful lecture anyhow, I don’t care if Lieberman tries to get me another year here because I think that we both want to get out of Berkeley, but I have to get some ideas together.” She said that was fine, that she was planning to visit Mrs. de Peyser anyhow for the next two or three nights.

When we parted the next day, we gave each other a long embrace. Then she drove off. I walked back to my apartment, in which I had spent very little time during the previous month and a half, straightened things up and went off to the library.

On the library’s ground floor I saw Helen Kayon for the first time since she had left the lecture theater with Meredith Polk. She did not see me; she was waiting for an elevator with Rex Leslie, the instructor with whom I had swapped desks. They were deep in conversation, and while I glanced at them Helen placed the flat of her hand on Rex Leslie’s back. I smiled, silently wished her well and went up the stairs.

That night and the next I worked on the lecture. I had nothing to say about Stephen Crane; I was not interested in Stephen Crane; whenever I looked up from the pages, I saw Alma Mobley, her eyes glimmering and her mouth widening.

On the second night of Alma’s absence I left my apartment to go out for a pizza and a beer and saw her standing in the shadows beside a bar called The Last Reef; it was a place I would have hesitated to enter, since by repute it was a haunt for bikers and homosexuals looking for rough trade. I froze: for a second what I felt was not betrayal but fear. She was not alone, and the man with her had obviously been in the bar— he carried a glass of beer—but was not apparently a biker or a gay in search of company. He was tall and his head was shaven and he wore dark glasses. He was very pale. And though he was dressed nondescriptly, in tan trousers and a golf jacket (over a bare chest? I thought I saw chains of some sort flattened against skin), the man looked animal, a hungry wolf in human skin. A small boy, exhausted and barefooted, sat on the pavement by his feet. The three of them were strikingly odd, grouped together in the shadows by the side of the bar. Alma seemed comfortable with the man; she spoke desultorily, he answered, they seemed closer than Helen Kayon and Rex Leslie though there were no gestures of familiar warmth between them. The child slumped at the man’s feet, shaking himself at times as though he feared to be kicked. The three of them looked like a perverse, nighttime family—a family by Charles Addams: Alma’s characteristic grace, her way of holding herself, seemed, beside the werewolflike man and the pathetic child, unreal, somehow wicked. I backed away, thinking that if the man saw me he would turn savage in an instant.

For that is what a werewolf looks like, I thought, and then thought: the X.X.X.

The man jerked the twitching boy off the pavement, nodded to Alma, and got into a car by the curbside, still holding his glass of beer. The boy crept into the back seat. In a moment the car had roared off.

Later that night, not knowing if I were making a mistake but unable to wait until the next day, I telephoned her. “I saw you a couple of hours ago,” I said. “I didn’t want to disturb you. Anyhow, I thought you were in San Francisco.”

“It was too boring and I came back early. I didn’t call because I wanted you to get your work done. Oh, Don, you poor soul. You must have imagined something awful.”

“Who was the man you were talking to? Shaven head, dark glasses, a little boy with him—alongside a biker’s bar.”

“Oh, him. Is that who you saw me with? His name is Greg. We knew each other in New Orleans. He came here to go to school and then dropped out. The boy is his little brother—their parents are dead, and Greg takes care of him. Though I must say not very well. The boy is retarded.”

“He’s from New Orleans?”

“Of course.”

“What’s his last name?”

“Why, are you suspicious? His last name is Benton. The Bentons lived on the same street as we did.”

It sounded plausible, if I didn’t think about the appearance of the man she was calling Greg Benton. “Is he in the X.X.X.?” I asked.

She laughed. “My poor darling is all worked up, isn’t he? No, of course he isn’t. Don’t think about that, Don. I don’t know why I told you.”

“Do you really know people in the X.X.X.?” I demanded.

She hesitated. “Well, just a few.” I was relieved: I thought she was glamorizing herself. Maybe my “werewolf” really was just an old neighbor from New Orleans; in fact, the sight of him in the bar’s shadows had reminded me of my first sight of Alma herself, standing colorless as a ghost on a shadowy campus staircase.

“What does this … Benton do?”

“Well, I think he has an informal trade in pharmaceuticals,” she said.

Now that made sense. It suited his appearance, his hanging around a bar like The Last Reef. Alma sounded as close to embarrassment as I had ever heard her.

“If you’re through with your work, please come over and give your fiancee a kiss,” she said. I was out the door in less than a minute.

Yet a factor in the change was certainly the “approval” I had so mysteriously earned. I finally asked her about it outright on the morning of the Crane lecture; it was a tense morning for me since I knew I was to do a bad job, and I said, “Look. If this approval you keep mentioning isn’t yours and if it isn’t Mrs. de Peyser’s, then whose is it? I can’t help but wonder. It’s not your friend in the drug trade, I suppose. Or is it his idiot brother?”

She looked up, a bit startled. Then she smiled. “I ought to tell you. We’re close enough.”

“We ought to be.”

She was still smiling. “It’s going to sound a little funny.”

“I don’t care. I’m just tired of not knowing.”

“The person who has been approving of you is an old lover of mine. Wait, Don, don’t look like that. I don’t see him any more. I can’t see him anymore. He’s dead.”

“Dead?” I sat down. I sounded surprised, and I am sure I looked surprised, but I think that I had expected something of this order of weirdness.

She nodded; her face serious and playful at once— the “doubling” effect. “That’s right. His name is Tasker Martin. I’m in touch with him.”

“You’re in touch with him.”

“Constantly.”

“Constantly.”

“Yes. I talk with him. Tasker likes you, Don. He likes you very much.”

“He’s okayed me, as it were.”

“That’s right. I talk to him about everything. And he’s told me over and over that we’re right for each other. Besides that, he just likes you, Don. He’d be a good friend of yours if he were alive.”

I just stared at her.

“I told you it would sound a little funny.”

“It does.”

She lifted her hands. “So?”

“Um. How long ago did—Tasker die?”

“Years ago. Five or six years ago.”

“Another old New Orleans friend?”

“That’s right.”

“And you were close to him?”

“We were lovers. He was older—a lot older. He died of a heart attack. Two nights after that he started to talk to me.”

“It took him two days to get change for the phones.” She did not reply to this. “Is he talking to you now?”

“He’s listening. He’s glad you know about him now.”

“I’m not so sure I’m glad I do.”

“Just get used to the idea. He really likes you, Don. It’ll be all right—it’ll be just the same as it was before.”

“Does Tasker pick up his phone when we’re in bed?”

“I don’t know. I suppose he does. He always liked that side of things.”

“And does Tasker give you some of your ideas about what we’ll do after we get married?”

“Sometimes. It was Tasker that reminded me about my father’s friends on Poros. He thinks you’ll love the island.”

“And what does Tasker think I’m going to do now that you’ve told me about him?”

“He says you’ll be upset for a little while and that you’ll think I’m crazy for a while, but that you’ll just get used to the idea. After all he’s here and he isn’t going anywhere, and you’re here and we’re going to be married. Don, just think about Tasker as though he were a part of me.”

“I suppose he must be,” I said. “I certainly can’t believe that you’re actually in communication with a man who died five years ago.”

In part, I was fascinated by all this. A nineteenth-century habit like talking with departed spirits suited Alma down to the ground—it harmonized even with her passivity. But also it was creepy. The talkative ghost of Tasker Martin was obviously a delusion: in the case of anybody but Alma, it would have been the symptom of mental illness. Creepy too was the concept of being okayed by former lovers. I looked across the table at Alma, who was regarding me with a kindly expression of expectancy, and thought: she does look androgynous. She could have been a pretty nineteen-year-old freckled boy. She smiled at me, still with expectation kindling in her face. I wanted to make love to her, and I also felt a separation from her. Her long beautifully shaped fingers lay on the polished wood of her table, attached to hands and wrists equally beautiful. These too both attracted and repelled.

“We’ll have a beautiful marriage,” Alma said.

“You and me and Tasker.”

“See? He said you’d be like that at first.”

On the way to the lecture I remembered the man I had seen her with, the Louisianian Greg Benton with his dead ferocious face, and I shuddered.

After the lecture I went to a bar and ordered a double Johnny Walker Black. Before I left I went to the telephones at the back and took out the San Francisco directory. I looked under P first and found nothing and started to sweat, but when I looked under D I found de Peyser, F. The address was in the right section of town. Maybe the earth was solid ground after all; of course it was.

“I’ve been pretty busy,” I said.

“How are the women out there?”

“Strange and new,” I said. “In fact I think I’m engaged.”

“You don’t sound so sure about it.”

“I’m engaged. I’m getting married next summer.”

“What the hell’s her name? Have you told anybody? Wow. I’ve heard about being understated, but …”

I told him her name. “David, I haven’t told anybody else in the family. If you’re in touch with them, say I’ll be writing soon. Being engaged takes up most of my time.”

He told me how to get to his place, gave me the name of the neighbors who had the key and said, “Hey, little brother, I’m happy for you.” We made the usual promises to write.

I had been misled by David’s constant description of the place as a “cottage.” What I expected was a two-or three-room frame building, probably with outdoor plumbing—a beer and poker shack. Instead it looked just like what it was, the expensive toy of a rich young lawyer.

“Your brother just lets this place stay empty?” Alma asked.

“I think he comes here two or three weeks every year.”

“Well.”

I had never before seen her impressed. “What does Tasker think?”

“He thinks it’s incredible. He says it looks like New Orleans.”

I should have known better.

Yet the description was not inaccurate: David’s “cottage” was a tall two-story wooden structure, dazzling white and Spanish in conception, with black wrought-iron balconies outside the upper windows. Thick columns flanked the massive front door. Behind the house we could see the endless blue ocean, a long way down. I took our suitcases from the trunk of the car and went up the steps and opened the door. Alma followed.

After going through a small tiled vestibule, we were in a vast room where various areas were raised and others sunken. A thick white carpet rolled over it all. Massive couches and glass-topped tables stood in the different areas of the room. Exposed beams had been polished and varnished across the width of the ceiling.

I knew what I would find even before we inspected the house, I knew there would be a sauna and a Jacuzzi and a hot tub, an expensive stereo system, a Cuisinart in the kitchen, a bookshelf filled with educational porn in the bedroom—and all this we found as we went through the house. Also a Betamax, a French bread rack serving as shelf space for Art Deco gewgaws, a bed the size of a swimming pool, a bidet in every bathroom … almost immediately I felt trapped inside someone else’s fantasy. I’d had no idea David had made so much money during his years in California; neither had I known that his taste stayed on the level of a hustling young Jaycee.

“You don’t like it, do you?” asked Alma.

“I’m surprised by it.”

“What’s your brother’s name?”

I told her.

“And where does he work?”

She nodded when I named the firm, not as “Rachel Varney” would have done, with a detached irony, but as though she were checking the name against a list.

Yet of course she was correct: I did not like David’s Xanadu.

Still, there we were: we had to spend three nights in the house. And Alma accepted it as if it were hers. But as she cooked in the gadget-laden kitchen, as she reveled in David’s collection of expensive toys, I grew increasingly sour. I thought she had adapted to the house in some uncanny fashion, had subtly altered from the student of Virginia Woolf to a suburban wife: suddenly I could see her stocking up on chip dip at the supermarket.

Once again I am compressing ideas about Alma into a single paragraph, but in this case I am condensing the impressions of two days, not of three times that many months; and the change in her was merely a matter of degree. Yet I had the uneasy feeling that, just as in her apartment she was perfectly the embodiment of the Bohemian rich girl, in David’s house she threw off hints of a personality suited to Jacuzzi baths and home saunas. She became more garrulous. The sentences about how we would live after our marriage became essays: I found out where we would make our base while we traveled (Vermont), how many children we would have (three)—on and on.

And worse, she began to talk endlessly about Tasker Martin.

“Tasker was a big man, Don, and he had beautiful white hair and a strong face with the most piercing blue eyes. What Tasker used to like was … Did I ever tell you about Tasker’s … One day Tasker and I …”

This more than anything marked the end of my infatuation.

But even then I found it difficult to accept that my feelings had changed. While she described the characters of our children, I would find myself mentally crossing my fingers—almost shuddering. Realizing what I was doing, I would say to myself: “But you’re in love, aren’t you? You can even put up with the fantasy of Tasker Martin, can’t you? For her sake?”

The weather made everything worse. Though we had had warm sunshine on the day we arrived, our first night in Still Valley was submerged in dark dense fog that endured for the next three days. When I looked out the rear windows toward the ocean, it was as though the ocean were all around us, gray and deadening. (Of course, this is what “Saul Malkin” imagines in his Paris hotel room with “Rachel Varney.”) At times you could see halfway down to the valley road, but at other times you saw about as far ahead as you could extend your arms. A flashlight in that damp grayness simply lost heart.

Thus, there we are, mornings and afternoons in David’s house while gray fog slides past the windows and the noise of waves slapping the beach far down suggests that any minute water will begin to come in through the bottom of the door. Alma is elegantly curled on one of the sofas, holding a cup of tea or a plate with an orange divided into equal sections. “Tasker used to say that I’d be the most beautiful woman in America when I was thirty. Well, “I’m twenty-five now, and I think I’ll disappoint him. Tasker used to …”

What I felt was dread.

On the second night she rolled out of bed naked, waking me. I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes in the gloom. Alma walked across the cold gray bedroom to the window. We had not closed the drapes, and Alma stood with her back to me, staring at—at nothing at all. The bedroom windows faced the ocean, but though we could hear the cold noises of water all through the night, the window revealed nothing but surging gray.

I expected her to speak. Her back looked very long and pale in the murky room.

“What is it, Alma?” I asked.

She did not move or speak.

“Is anything wrong?” Her skin seemed lifeless, white cold marble. “What happened?”

She turned very slightly toward me and said, “I saw a ghost.” (That, at any rate, is what “Rachael Varney” tells “Saul Malkin”; but did Alma actually say, “I am a ghost?” I could not be sure; she spoke very softly. I’d had more than enough of Tasker Martin, and my first response was a groan. But if she had said I am a ghost, would I have responded differently?)

“Oh, Alma,” I said, not as fed up as I would have been in the daytime. The chill in the room, the dark window and the girl’s long white body, these made Tasker a more real presence than he had been. I was a little frightened. “Tell him to go away,” I said. “Come back to bed.”

But it was no good. She picked her robe off the bed, put it around her and sat down, turning her chair toward the window. “Alma?” She would not answer or turn around. I lay down again and finally went back to sleep.

She continued to project us into our future, but after Still Valley I began to invent excuses for avoiding her. I thought that I loved her, but the love was overshadowed by dread. Tasker, Greg Benton, the zombies of the X.X.X.—how could I marry all that?

And then I felt a physical as well as a moral revulsion. Over the two months following Still Valley, we had generally ceased making love, though I sometimes spent the night in her bed. When I kissed her, when I held or touched her, I overheard my own thinking: not much longer.

My teaching, except for rare flashes in the writing classes, had become remote and dull; I had stopped my own writing altogether. One day Lieberman asked me to see him in his office and when I arrived he said, “One of your colleagues described your Stephen Crane lecture to me. Did you actually say that The Red Badge was a ghost story without a ghost?” When I nodded, he asked, “Would you mind telling me what that means?”

“I don’t know what it means. My mind was wandering. My rhetoric got out of hand.”

He looked at me in disgust. “I thought you made a good start,” he said, and I knew there was no longer any question of my staying on another year.

She did not call that night. I dreamed of her sitting in the prow of a small boat, drifting away down a canal and smiling enigmatically, as if giving me a day and a night of freedom was the last act of the charade.

By morning I had begun to worry. I telephoned her several times during the day, but either she was out or not answering the phone. (This evoked a clear picture. A dozen times while I had been in her apartment, she had let the phone ring until it stopped.) By evening, I had begun to imagine that I was really free of her, and I knew that I would do anything to avoid seeing her again. I telephoned twice more during the night, and was happy to get no answer. Finally I stayed up until two writing a letter breaking it off.

Before my first class I went over to her building. My heart was beating fast: I was afraid I’d see her by accident and have to mouth the phrases which were so much more convincing on paper. I went up the steps of her building and saw that the drapes were drawn over her windows. I pushed at the locked door. I almost pushed the bell. Instead I slid the letter between the window and the frame, where she would see it and the inscription Alma as soon as she came up the stairs. Then I—no other word for it—fled.

Of course she knew my teaching schedule, and I half-expected to see her loitering outside a classroom or lecture theater, my smug letter in her hand and a provoking expression on her face. But I went through my teaching day without seeing her.

The following day was a repetition of the last. I worried that she might have killed herself; I dismissed the worry; I went off to my classes; in the afternoon I rang and got no reply. Dinner at a bar; then I walked to her street and saw the white oblong of my treachery still in her window. At home I debated taking my phone off the hook but left it on, by now almost ready to admit that I was hoping she would call.

The next day I had a section of the American literature class at two o’clock. To get to the building where it met I had to cross a wide brick plaza. This plaza was always crowded. Students set up desks where you could sign petitions for legalizing marijuana or declare yourself in favor of homosexuality and the protection of whales; students thronged by. In their midst I saw Helen Kayon, for the first time since the evening in the library. Rex Leslie was walking beside her, holding her hand. They looked very happy—animal contentment encased them as in a bubble. I turned away from that sight, feeling like a Skid Row derelict. I realized that I had not shaved in two days, had not looked at myself in the mirror nor changed my clothes.

And when I turned away from Helen and Rex, I saw a tall pale man with a shaven head and dark glasses staring at me from beside a fountain. The vacant-faced boy, barefoot and in ragged dungarees, sat at his feet Greg Benton seemed even more frightening than he had outside The Last Reef; standing in the sun beside a fountain, he and his brother were extraordinary apparitions—a pair of tarantulas. Even the Berkeley students, who had seen a great deal in the way of human oddity, visibly skirted them. Now that he knew I had noticed him, Benton did not speak or gesture to me, but his whole attitude, the tilt of the shaven head, the way he held his body, was a gesture. It all expressed anger—as though I’d enraged him by getting away with something. He was like an angry blot of darkness on the sunny plaza: like cancer.

Then I realized that for some reason he was helpless. He was glaring at me because that was all he could do. I immediately blessed the protection of the thousands of students: and then I thought that Alma was in trouble. In danger. Or dead.

I turned away from Benton and his brother and sprinted toward the gate at the bottom of the plaza. When I had crossed the street I turned around to look back at Benton: I’d felt him watching me run—felt his cold satisfaction. But he and his brother had vanished. The fountain splashed, students milled. I even had a glimpse of Helen and Rex Leslie going into Sproul Hall, but the cancer had melted away.

By the time I reached Alma’s street my fear seemed absurd. I knew that I was reacting to my own guilt. But had she not marked our final separation by standing me up at the restaurant? That I should have been in a sweat for her safety seemed a final manipulation. I caught my breath. Then I noticed that the drapes in Alma’s windows were parted and the envelope was gone.

I ran down the block and up the stairs. Leaning sideways, I could see in her windows. Everything was gone. The room had been stripped bare. On the floorboards which had been covered by Alma’s rugs I saw my envelope. It was unopened.

And if I had been so eager to be rid of her, why did I now feel that I was shuffling through a less significant world? Alma gone, I was left with the bare world of cause and effect, the arithmetic world—if without the odd dread she had aroused in me, without the mystery too. The only mystery I had left was that of where she had gone; and the larger mystery of who she had been.

I drank a good deal and cut my classes: I slept most of the day. It was as though I had some generalized disease that took my energy and left me with no occupation but sleeping and thinking about Alma. When after a week I began to feel healthier, I remembered seeing Benton in the plaza and imagined that he’d been angry because he had known that what I had gotten away with was my life.

After I started to meet my classes again I saw Leiberman in the halls after a lecture and at first he ducked his head and intended to snub me, but he thought better of it and flicked his eyes at mine and said, “Step into my office for a second, will you, Wanderley?” He too was angry, but it was anger I could deal with; I want to say it was only human anger: but what anger is not? A werewolf’s?

“I know I’ve disappointed you,” I said. “But my life got out of hand. I got sick. I’ll finish out the term as honorably as I can.”

“Disappointed? That’s a mild word for it.” He leaned back in his leather chair, his eyes blazing. “I don’t think we’ve ever been let down so much by one of our temporary appointments. After I entrusted you with an important lecture, you apparently threw together the worst mishmash—the worst garbage—” He collected himself. “And you’ve missed more classes than anyone in our history since we had an alcoholic poet who tried to burn down the recruitments office. In short, you’ve been lax, slipshod, lazy—you’ve been disgraceful. I just wanted you to know what I thought of you. Single-handedly, you’ve endangered our entire program of bringing in writers. This program is supervised, you know. We have a board to answer to. I’ll have to defend you to them, as much as I detest the thought.”

“I can’t blame you for feeling as you do,” I said. “I just got into an odd situation—I think I’ve sort of been cracking up.”

“I wonder when you so-called creative people are going to realize that you can’t get away with murder.” The outburst made him feel better. He steepled his fingers and looked at me over them. “I hope you don’t expect me to give you a glowing recommendation.”

“Of course not,” I said. Then I thought of something. “I wonder if I can ask you a question.”

He nodded.

“Have you ever heard of an English professor at the University of Chicago named Alan McKechnie?” His eyes widened; he folded his hands. “I don’t really know what I’m asking. I wondered if you knew anything about him?”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“I’m curious about him. That’s all.”

“Well, for what it’s worth,” he said, and stood up. He marched over to his window, which gave a splendid view of the plaza. “I dislike gossip, you know.”

What I knew was that he loved gossip, like most academics. “I knew Alan slightly. We were on a Robert Frost symposium five years ago—sound man. A bit too much the Thomist, but that’s Chicago, isn’t it? Still, a good mind. Had a lovely family too, I gather.”

“He had children? A wife?”

Lieberman looked at me suspiciously. “Of course. That’s what made it so tragic. Apart from the loss of his contributions to the field, of course.”

“Of course. I forgot.”

“Look? What do you know? I’m not going to slander a colleague for the sake of—the sake of—”

“There was a girl,” I said.

He nodded, satisfied. “Yes. Apparently. I heard about it at the last MLA convention. One of the fellows from his department told me about it He was vamped. This girl simply pursued him. Dogged him. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, in a word—I gather he finally did become enchanted by her. She was a graduate student of his. These things happen of course, they happen all the time. A girl falls for her professor, manages to seduce him, sometimes she makes him leave his wife, most times not. Most of us have more sense.” He coughed. I thought: you really are a turd. “Well. He did not. Instead he went to pieces. The girl ruined him. In the end he killed himself. The girl, I gather, did a midnight flit—as our English friends have it Though what this has to do with you, I can’t imagine.”

She had falsified nearly everything in the McKechnie story. I wondered what else might have been a lie. When I got home, I rang de Peyser, F. A woman answered the phone.

“Mrs. de Peyser?”

It was.

“Please excuse me for calling you on what may be a case of mistaken identity, Mrs. de Peyser, but this is Richard Williams at the First National of California. We have a loan application from a Miss Mobley who lists you as a reference. I’m just running the usual routine information check. You’re named as her aunt.

“As her what? What’s her name?”

“Alma Mobley. The problem is that she forgot to give your address and phone number, and there are several other Mrs. de Peysers in the Bay area, and I need the correct information for our files.”

“Well it’s not me! I’ve never heard of anybody named Alma Mobley, I can assure you of that.”

“You do not have a niece named Alma Mobley who is a graduate student at Berkeley?”

“Certainly not. I suggest you get back to this Miss Mobley and ask her for her aunt’s address so you don’t go wasting your time.”

“I’ll do that right now, Mrs. de Peyser.”

David telephoned me in April. He sounded excited, happy, more youthful than he’d been in years. “I have amazing news,” he said. “Astounding news. I don’t know how to tell you.”

“Robert Redford bought your life story for the movies.”

“What? Oh, come off it. No, really, this is hard for me to tell you.”

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

“Okay. Okay, that’s what I’ll do, wiseass. Two months ago, on February third” —this was really the lawyer at work—”I was up on Columbus Circle, seeing a client. The weather was terrible, and I had to share a cab back to Wall Street Bad news, right? But I found myself sitting next to the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. I mean, she was so good-looking my mouth went dry. I don’t know where I got the guts, but by the time we got to the Park, I asked her out to dinner. I don’t usually do things like that!”

“No, you don’t.” David was too lawyerly to ask strange girls for dates. He’d never been in a singles bar in his life.

“Well, this girl and I really hit it off. I saw her every night that week. And I’ve gone on seeing her ever since. In fact, we’re going to get married. That’s half of the news.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “I wish you better luck than I had.”

“Now we come to the difficult part. The name of this astounding girl is Alma Mobley.”

“It can’t be,” I said.

“Wait. Just wait. Don, I know this is a shock. But she told me all about what happened between you, and I think it’s essential that you know how sorry she is for everything that happened. We’ve talked about this a long time. She knows she hurt your feelings, but she knew that she just wasn’t the right girl for you. And you weren’t right for her. Also, she was in a bad patch in California. She wasn’t herself, she says. She’s afraid you have absolutely the wrong idea of her.”

“That’s just what I do have,” I said. “Everything about her is wrong. She’s some kind of witch. She’s destructive.”

“Hold on. I am going to marry this girl, Don. She’s not the person you think she is. God, how we’ve talked about this. Obviously you and I have to talk about it a hell of a lot ourselves. In fact I was hoping you could hop a plane to New York this weekend so we could have a good long talk and really work through it. I’d be glad to pay your fare.”

“That’s ridiculous. Ask her about Alan McKechnie. See what she tells you. Then I’ll tell you the truth.”

“No, wait, buddy, we’ve already been through all that I know she gave you a garbled version of the McKechnie affair. Can’t you imagine how shattered she was? Please come out here, Don. All three of us have to have a long session.”

“Not on your life,” I said. “Alma’s a kind of Circe.”

“Look, I’m at the office, but I’ll call you later in the week, okay? We have to get things straight. I don’t want my brother having bad feelings about my wife.”

Bad feelings? I felt horror.

That night David rang again. I asked him if he’d met Tasker yet. Or if he knew about Alma and the Xala Xalior Xlati.

“See, that’s where you got the wrong idea. She just made all that stuff up, Don. She was a little unsteady out there on the Coast. Besides who can take all that stuff seriously anyhow? Nobody here in New York ever heard of the XXX. In California, people get all cranked up about trivia.”

And Mrs. de Peyser? She had told him that I was terribly possessive; Mrs. de Peyser was a tool to get time by herself.

“Let me ask you this, David,” I said. “Sometimes, maybe only once, haven’t you looked at her or touched her and just felt—something funny? Like that, no matter how strongly attracted you are to her, you’re squeamish about touching her?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

David would not permit me to creep away from the whole issue of Alma Mobley, as I wanted to do. He would not let it go. He telephoned me from New York two or three times a week, increasingly disturbed by my refusal to see reason.

“Don, we have to talk this thing out I feel terrible about you.”

“Don’t.”

“I mean, I just don’t understand your attitude about this thing. I know you must feel terrible resentment. Jesus, if things had worked out the other way around and Alma had walked out of my life and decided to marry you, I’d be tied in knots. But unless you admit your resentment, we can never get to the point of doing something about it.”

“I don’t resent anything, David.”

“Come off it, kid brother. We have to talk about it sometime. Alma and I both feel that way.”

One of my problems was that I didn’t know to what extent David’s assumptions were correct. It was true that I resented both David and Alma: but was it merely resentment that made me recoil from the thought of them marrying?

A month or so after that, many seesawing conversations later, David called to say that I was “going to have a break from being hounded by your brother. I’ve got a little business in Amsterdam, so I’m flying there tomorrow for five days. Alma hasn’t seen Amsterdam since she was a child, and she’ll be coming with me. I’ll send you a postcard. But do me a favor and really think about our situation, will you?”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “But you care too much about what I think.”

“What you think is important to me.”

“All right,” I said. “Be careful.”

Now what did I mean by that?

At times I thought that both David and myself had underestimated her calculation. Suppose, I thought, that Alma had engineered her meeting with David. Suppose that she had deliberately sought him out. When I thought about this, Gregory Benton and the stories of Tasker Martin seemed more sinister—as if they, like Alma, were stalking David.

“Have you heard from his fiancee?”

“Oh, did he have a fiancee? Imagine that—he never let on. Was she with him?”

“Of course she was,” I said. “She must have seen everything. She must know what happened. I’ll get on the first plane going.”

There was a plane the next day to Schiphol Airport, and I took a cab to the police station which had cabled David’s office. What I learned can be set down very barely: David had gone through a window and over a chest-high balcony. The hotel owner had heard a scream, but nothing more—no voices, no arguments. Alma was thought to have left him; when the police entered their room, none of her clothing was still in the closets.

I went to the hotel, looked at the high iron balcony, and turned away to the open wardrobe closet. Three of David’s Brooks Brothers suits hung on the rail, two pairs of shoes beneath them. Counting what he must have been wearing at the time of his death, he had brought four suits and three pairs of shoes for a five-day visit. Poor David.

Two days after that I was back in Berkeley. My little apartment seemed cell-like and foreign. It was as though I had grown irretrievably apart from the person I had been in the days when I hunted down references to James Fenimore Cooper in PMLA. I began to sketch out The Nightwatcher, having only the most nebulous ideas for it, and to prepare for my classes again. One night I telephoned Helen Kayon’s apartment, thinking that I would ask her out for a drink so that I could talk about Alma and my brother, and Meredith Polk told me that Helen had married Rex Leslie the week before. I found myself falling asleep at intervals all during the day and going to bed before ten at night; I drank too much but could not get drunk. If I survived the year, I thought, I would go to Mexico and lie in the sun and work on my book.

And escape my hallucinations. Once I had come awake near midnight and heard someone moving around in my kitchen; when I got out of bed and went in to check, I had seen my brother David standing near the stove, holding the coffeepot in one hand. “You sleep too much, kid,” he said. “Why not let me give you a cup?” And another time, teaching a Henry James novel to my section of the survey class, I had seen on one of the chairs not the red-haired girl I knew was there, but—again—David, his face covered in blood and his suit torn, nodding happily at how bright I could be about Portrait of a Lady.

But I had one more discovery to make before I could go to Mexico. One day I went to the library and instead of going to the stack of critical magazines, went to the reference library and found a copy of Who’s Who for the year 1960. It was nearly an arbitrary year; but if Alma was twenty-five when I met her, then in 1960 she should have been nine or ten.

Robert Mobley was in the book. As nearly as I can remember it, this was his entry—I read it over and over and finally had it photocopied.

MOBLEY, ROBERT OSGOOD, painter and watercolorist. b. New Orleans, La, Feb 23. 1909; s. Felix Morton and Jessica (Osgood); A.B. Yale U. 1927; m. Alice Whitney Aug 27, 1936; children—Shelby Adam, Whitney Osgood. Shown at: Flagler Gallery, New York; Winson Galleries, New York; Galerie Flam, Paris; SchlegeL Zurich; Galeria Esperance, Rome. Recipient Golden Palette 1946; Southern Regional Painters Award 1952, 1955, 1958. Collected in: Adda May Lebow Museum, New Orleans; Louisiana Fine Arts Museum; Chicago Institute of the Arts; Santa Fe Fine Arts; Rochester Arts Center; many others. Served as Lt Cmdr. USNR, 1941-1945. Member Golden Palette Society; Southern Regional Arts League; American Water Color Society; American League of Artists; American Academy of Oil Painting. Clubs: Links Golf; Deepdale Golf; Meadowbrook; Century (New York); Lyford Cay (Nassau); Garrick (London). Author: I Came This Way. Homes: 38957 Canal Blvd New Orleans, La; 18 Church Row, London NW3 UK; “Dans Le Vigne,” Route de la Belle Isnard, St Tropez 83 France.

This wealthy clubman and artist had two sons, but no daughter. Everything Alma had told me—and David, presumably—had been invention. She had a false name and no history: she might as well have been a ghost. Then I thought of “Rachel Varney,” a brunette with dark eyes, the trappings of wealth and an obscure past, and I saw that David had been the missing element in the book I’d tried to write.

But I’ve come to one perhaps foolish conclusion. I’m no longer so ready to reject the notion that there might be some factual connection between The Nightwatcher and what happened to David and myself. I find myself in the same position as the Chowder Society, no longer sure of what to believe. If I am ever invited to tell a story to the Chowder Society, I’ll tell them what I’ve written out here. This account of my history with Alma—not The Nightwatcher—is my Chowder Society story. So perhaps I have not wasted my time after all; I’ve given myself a base for the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel, and I’m prepared to change my mind on an important question—right now, maybe the important question. When I started this, the night after Dr. Jaffrey’s funeral, I thought it would be destructive to imagine myself in the landscape and atmosphere of one of my own books. Yet—was I not in that landscape, back at Berkeley? My imagination may have been more literal than I thought.

I too have an unusual feeling which I’ll record here at the risk of feeling idiotic whenever I see it in later years. This feeling is absolutely unfounded: more a hunch than a feeling. It’s that if I start to look more closely into Milburn and do what the Chowder Society asks, I’ll find what sent David over that railing in Amsterdam.

It was not his marriage or children which had changed Freddy, but living across the street from John Jaffrey’s house. At first, he had thought that the old boys he saw trooping in once a month or so were comic, unbelievably stuffy-looking. Dinner jackets! They had looked unprecedentedly grave—five Methuselahs padding out their time.

Then he began to notice that after sales meetings in New York he returned home with relief; his marriage was going badly (he was finding himself attracted to the high school girls his wife, two children ago, had rather resembled), but home was more than Montgomery Street—it was all of Milburn, and most of Milburn was quieter and prettier than anywhere he’d ever lived. Gradually he felt that he had a secret relationship to Milburn; his wife and children were eternal, but Milburn was a temporary restful oasis, not the provincial backwater he had first thought it. And once at a conference, a new agent sitting next to him unpinned his Humdinger badge and dropped it under the table, saying, “I can stand most of it, but this Mickey Mouse crap drives me up the wall.”

Two further events, as unremarkable as these, assisted Freddy’s conversion. One night, aimlessly walking about an ordinary section of Milburn, he went past Edward Wanderley’s house on Haven Lane and saw the Chowder Society through a window. There they sat, his Methuselahs, talking among themselves; one raised a hand, one smiled. Freddy was lonely, and they seemed very close. He stopped to stare in at them. Since moving to Milburn, he had gone from twenty-six to thirty-one, and the men no longer seemed so old; while they had stayed the same, he had aged toward them. They were not grotesque, but dignified. Also, something he had never considered, they were enjoying themselves. He wondered what they were talking about, and was assailed by the sense that it was something secret—something not business, not sport, not sex, not politics. It simply washed through him that their conversation would be of a sort he had never heard. Two weeks later he took one of the high school girls to a restaurant in Binghamton, and saw Lewis Benedikt across the room with one of the waitresses from Humphrey Stalladge’s bar. (Both had sweetly rejected Freddy’s advances.) He had begun to envy the Chowder Society; before long he would begin to love what he considered they represented, a way of combining civilization with a quiet good time.

Lewis was the focus of Freddy’s feelings. Closer to Freddy’s age than the others, he showed what Freddy might become.

He watched his idol at Humphrey’s Place, noticing how he raised his eyebrows before answering a question and how he tilted his head to one side, often, when smiling; how he used his eyes. Freddy began to copy these mannerisms. He copied too what he thought was Lewis’s sexual pattern, but scaling down the ages of the girls from Lewis’s twenty-five or twenty-six to seventeen or eighteen, which was the age of the girls who interested him anyhow. He bought jackets like those he saw Lewis wearing.

When Dr. Jaffrey invited him to his party for Ann-Veronica Moore, Freddy thought the doors of heaven had opened. He pictured a quiet evening, the Chowder Society and himself and the actress, and told his wife to stay home; when he saw the crowd, he began behaving like a fool. He stayed downstairs, too shy and disappointed to approach the older men he wanted to befriend; he made eyes at Stella Hawthorne; when he finally gathered the nerve to approach Sears James— who had always terrified him—he found himself talking about insurance as if under a curse. After Edward Wanderley’s body was discovered, Freddy crawled away with the other guests.

After Dr. Jaffrey’s suicide, Freddy was desperate. The Chowder Society was disintegrating before he had even had a chance to prove his worthiness for it. On that night, he saw Lewis’s Morgan pull up to the doctor’s house, and ran out to comfort Lewis—to make his impression. But again it had not worked. He was too nervous, he had been fighting with his wife, and he had been unable to keep from mentioning insurance; he had lost Lewis again.

At first it seemed like another morning’s work—another tiresome claim to be settled. Rea Dedham made him wait ten minutes on her frozen porch. From time to time he heard a horse neighing in the stables. Finally she appeared, wrinkled and hunched in a plaid shawl over her dress, saying that she knew who did it, yessir, she knew, but she’d looked at her policy and it didn’t say anywhere that you didn’t get your money if you knew, did it? And would he like any coffee?

“Yes, thank you,” Freddy said, and pulled some papers from his briefcase. “Now if we could get into some of these claim forms, the company can start processing them as soon as possible. I’ll have to look at the damage, of course, Miss Dedham. I guess you had some kind of accident?”

“I told you,” she said. “I know who did it. It wasn’t any accident. Mr. Hardesty is coming out too, so you’ll just have to wait for him.”

“So this is a case of criminal loss,” Freddy said, checking off a box on one of his papers. “Could you just tell me about it in your own words?”

“They’re the only words I have, Mr. Robinson, but you’ll wait until Mr. Hardesty is here. I’m too old to say it all twice. And I’m not going out in that cold twice, not even for money. Brr!” She hugged herself with her bony arms and shivered theatrically. “Now you sit still and get some coffee into yourself.”

Freddy, who had been awkwardly holding all his papers, his pen and his briefcase, looking around for a vacant chair. The Dedham girls’ kitchen was a dirty cave filled with junk. One chair supported a couple of table lamps, another a stack of Urbanites so old they were yellow. A tall mirror in an oakleaf frame on one wall dully gave him back his reflection, a figure of bureaucratic incompetence engulfed by disorderly papers. He backed up to one dark wall, bent down and knocked a cardboard box off a chair with his bottom. It fell to the floor with a loud crash. The only sunlight in the room streamed over him. “Heavens,” Rea Dedham said, shrugging. “Noise!” Freddy cautiously extended his legs and arranged his papers on his lap. “Dead horse, is that it?”

“That’s it. You people owe me some money—a lot of money, the way I see it.”

Freddy heard something heavy rolling toward the kitchen through the house, and soundlessly groaned. “I’ll just get started on the preliminary details,” he said, and bent over so that he would not have to look at Nettie Dedham.

“Nettie wants to say hello,” Rea said. So he had to look up anyhow.

A moment later the door creaked inward, admitting a heap of blankets in a wheelchair. “Hello, Miss Dedham,” Freddy said, half-standing and clutching the briefcase with one hand, the papers with the other. He gave her a quick glance, then fled back into his papers.

Nettie uttered a noise. Her head seemed to Freddy to be chiefly gaping mouth. Nettie was covered up to the chin in blankets, and her head was pulled back by some terrible constriction of the muscles so that her mouth was permanently open.

“You remember nice Mr. Robinson,” Rea said to her sister, putting down cups of coffee on the table. Rea apparently ate all her meals standing up, for she made no move to sit now. “He’s going to get our money for poor dear Chocolate. He’s filling out the forms now, isn’t he? He’s filling out the forms.”

“Ruar,” Nettie uttered, waggling her head as she spoke. “Glr ror.”

“Get us our money, that’s right,” Rea said. “There’s nothing wrong with Nettie, Mr. Robinson.”

“I should say not,” he said, and looked away again. His eye fell on a stuffed robin under a glass bell, surrounded by dark brown leaves. “Let’s get down to business, shall we? I gather the animal was named—”

“Here’s Mr. Hardesty,” Rea said. Freddy could hear another car coming up the drive, and lay the pen across the papers in his lap. He glanced uneasily at Nettie who was working her mouth and staring dreamily at the mottled ceiling. Rea set down her cup and began to struggle toward the door. Lewis would open it for her, he thought, still clutching his awkward pile of papers.

“Sit down, for heaven’s sake,” the old woman snapped.

Hardesty’s boots crunched across the snow, mounted the porch. He had knocked twice before Rea got to the door.

Freddy had seen Walt Hardesty in Humphrey’s place too often, sneaking into the back room at eight and lurching out at twelve, to think much of him as a sheriff. He looked like a bad-tempered failure, the sort of cop who’d enjoy using his gunbutt on someone’s head. When Rea got the door open, Hardesty stood on the porch with his hands in his pockets, his sunglasses like armor over his eyes, and made no move to come in. ” ‘Lo, Miss Dedham,” he said. “Well, where’s your problem?”

Rea pulled the shawl more tightly around herself and went through the door. Freddy hesitated a moment and then realized that she was not coming back in; he dumped his papers on the chair and followed. Nettie waggled her head at him as he passed.

“I know who did it,” he heard her saying to Hardesty as he went toward them. The old lady’s voice was high and indignant. “It was that Jim Hardie, that’s who.”

“Oh, yeah?” Hardesty said. Freddy joined them, and the sheriff nodded at him over Rea’s head. “Didn’t take you long to get here, Mr. Robinson.”

“Company paperwork,” Freddy mumbled. “Official paperwork.”

“Guys like you always got papers up the old kazoo,” Hardesty said, and gave him a taut smile.

“It was Jim Hardie for sure,” Rea insisted. “That boy’s crazy.”

“Well, we’ll see about that,” Hardesty said. They were nearly at the stables. “You find the dead animal?”

“We have a boy these days,” Rea said. “He comes out to feed and water and change the straw. He’s a nancy-boy,” she added, and Freddy jerked his head up in surprise. Now he could smell the stables. “He found Chocolate in his stall. That’s six hundred dollars’ worth of horsemeat, Mr. Robinson, no matter who did it.”

“Uh, how did you reach that figure?” Freddy asked. Hardesty was opening the stable doors. One horse whinnied, another kicked at its stall door. All the horses, to Freddy’s untrained eye, looked dangerous. Their enormous lips and eyes flared at him.

“Because his sire was General Hershey and his dam was Sweet Tooth and they were two fine horses, that’s because why. We could have sold General Hershey for stud anywhere—he looked just like Seabiscuit, Nettie used to say.”

“Seabiscuit,” Hardesty said under his breath.

“You’re too young to remember any of the good horses,” Rea said. “You write that down in your papers. Six hundred dollars.” She was leading them into the stables, and the horses in the stalls shied back or swung their heads, according to their nature.

“These animals ain’t too damn clean,” Hardesty said. Freddy looked more closely and saw a huge patch of dried mud on the side of a gray.

“Skittish,” Freddy said.

“He says they’re skittish, the other one says they’re dirty. I’m too old, that’s the problem. Well, here’s poor old Chocolate.” The statement was unnecessary; the two men were staring over the stall door at the body of a big reddish animal on the straw-littered floor. To Freddy it looked like the body of a huge rat.

“Hell,” Hardesty said, and opened the stall door. He stepped over the stiff legs and began to straddle the neck. The horse in the next stall whinnied, and Hardesty nearly fell down. “Hell.” He steadied himself by propping an arm against the wooden side of the stall. “Hell, I can see it from here.” He reached down to the horse’s nose and tugged the entire head back toward him.

Rea Dedham screamed.

“Who the hell would do a thing like that?” Freddy asked, still shocked by the sight of the long wound in the horse’s neck.

“Norbert Clyde claims it’s Martians. Says he saw one. Didn’t you hear about that?”

“I heard something,” Freddy admitted. “Are you going to check into where Jim Hardie was last night?”

“Mister, I’d be a damn sight happier if people didn’t tell me how to do my job.” He bent over the old woman. “Miss Dedham, you settled down now? You like to sit?” She nodded, and Hardesty said to Freddy, “I’ll hold her up, you open the door of my car.”

They propped her up on the car seat, her legs dangling out. “Poor Chocolate, poor Chocolate,” she moaned. “Horrible … poor Chocolate.”

“All right, Miss Dedham. Now, I want to tell you something.” Hardesty leaned forward and propped a foot up on the car. “Jim Hardie didn’t do this, you hear me? Jim Hardie was out drinking beer with Pete Barnes last night. They drove up to a beer joint outside Glen Aubrey, and we got them checked in there till damn near two o’clock. I know about your little feud with Jim, so I asked around.”

“He could have done it after two,” Freddy said.

“He was playing cards with Peter Barnes in the Barnes’s basement until daylight. That’s what Pete says anyhow. Jim’s been spending a lot of time with Pete Barnes, but I don’t think the Barnes kid would do a thing like this or cover up for someone who did, do you?”

Freddy shook his head.

“And when Jim hasn’t been with the Barnes kid, he’s been with that new dame, you know who I mean. The good-looker—looks like a model.”

“I know who you mean. That is, I’ve seen her.”

“Yeah. So he didn’t kill this horse, and he didn’t kill Elmer Scales’s heifers either. The State Farm Agent says it was a dog turned killer. So if you see a big flying dog with teeth like razors, I guess you got it.” He looked at Freddy hard, and turned back to Rea Dedham. “You about ready to go inside now? Too cold out here for a old lady like you. I’ll get you inside, and go back and get someone to get rid of that horse for you.”

Freddy stepped back, rebuffed by Hardesty. “You know it wasn’t a dog.”

“Yep.”

“So what do you think it was? What’s going on?” He looked around, knowing that he was missing something. Then he had it, and opened his mouth just as he saw a bright bit of cloth fluttering on the barbed-wire fence near the stables.

“You want to say?”

“There wasn’t any blood,” Freddy said, looking at the cloth.

“Good for you. Farm Agent decided not to notice that. You gonna help me with this old lady?”

“I dropped something back there,” Freddy told him, and walked back toward the stables. He heard Hardesty grunt, picking up Miss Dedham, and when he got to the stables, turned around to see him carrying her in the door. Freddy went over to the barbed wire and pulled the long bit of cloth from it—silk. It was torn from a scarf, and he knew where he had seen it.

Freddy began—it was not the word he would have chosen—to scheme.

Back home, after he had typed up his report and mailed it and the signed forms off to the head office, he dialed Lewis Benedikt’s telephone number. He did not really know what he would say to Lewis; but he thought he had the key he’d been looking for.

“Hey, Lewis,” he said. “Hey, how are you? This is Freddy.”

“Freddy?”

“Freddy Robinson. You know.”

“Oh yes.”

“Ah, are you busy right now? I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

“Go ahead,” Lewis said, not very promisingly.

“Yeah. If I’m not taking up your time? … Okay. You know about those animals that were killed? Did you know there was another one? One of those old horses the Dedham sisters own, I wrote the policy on it, well I don’t think any Martian killed it. I mean, do you?” He paused, but Lewis said nothing. “I mean, that’s screwball. Uh, look, isn’t that woman who just moved into town, the one who sometimes hangs around with Jim Hardie, isn’t she working for Sears and Ricky?”

“I’ve heard something to that effect.” Lewis said, and Freddy heard in his voice that he should have said Hawthorne, James instead of Sears and Ricky.

“Do you know her at all?”

“Not at all. Do you mind if I ask what the point is?”

“Well, I think there’s more going on than Sheriff Hardesty knows about.”

“Could you explain yourself, Freddy?”

“Not on the phone. Could we meet somewhere to talk about it? See, I found something out at the Dedham place, and I didn’t want to show it to Hardesty until I had talked with you and maybe with, ah, Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. James.”

“Freddy, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“Well, to tell you the truth I’m not so sure myself, but I wanted to get together with you, have a few beers maybe and bat a few ideas around. Sort of see what we can come up with on this.”

“On what, for God’s sake?”

“On a few ideas I have. I think all you guys are just terrific, you know, and I want you to know if there’s any kind of trouble coming your way …”

“Freddy, I’ve got all the insurance I need,” Lewis said. I’m not in the mood to go out. Sorry.”

“Well, maybe I’ll see you in Humphrey’s Place anyhow? We could talk there.”

“It’s a possibility,” Lewis said, and hungup.

Freddy put his receiver down, satisfied that he had planted enough hooks in Lewis for now. Lewis was bound to call him back once he’d thought about everything Freddy had told him. Of course if everything he was thinking was true, then it was his duty to go to Hardesty, but there was plenty of time for that—he wanted to think out the implications before he spoke to Hardesty. He wanted to make sure that the Chowder Society was protected. His thoughts went more or less in this order: he had seen the scarf from which the piece had been torn around the neck of the girl Hardesty called “the new dame.” She had worn the scarf at Humphrey’s Place on a date with Jim Hardie. Rea Dedham suspected Jim Hardie of killing the horse; Hardesty had said something about a “feud” between the Hardie boy and the Dedham sisters. The scarf proved that the girl had been there, so why not Hardie too? And if these two had for whatever reason killed the horse, why not the other animals? Norbert Clyde had seen a big form, something peculiar about the eyes: it could have been Jim Hardie caught in a ray of moonlight. Freddy had read about modern witches, crazy women who organized men into covens. Maybe this new girl was one of them. Jim Hardie was fodder for any lunatic who came down the pike, even if his mother would never see it. But the reputation of the Chowder Society would be damaged if all this were true, and if it got out. Hardie could be shut up, but the girl would have to be paid off and forced to leave.

He waited two days, anxiously waiting for Lewis to return his call.

When Lewis did not, he decided that the time for aggression had come and once again dialed Lewis’s number.

“It’s me again, Freddy Robinson.”

“Oh, yes.” Lewis said, already distant.

“I really think we ought to get together. Hey? Honestly, Lewis, I think we should. I’ve got your best interests at heart.” Then, searching for an unanswerable appeal, “What if the next body is human, Lewis? Think about that.”

“Are you threatening me? What the hell are you saying?”

” ‘Course not.” He was flattened. Lewis had taken it the wrong way. “Listen, how about tomorrow evening some time?”

“I’m going coon hunting,” Lewis immediately said.

“Gosh,” Freddy said, startled by this new facet of his idol. “I didn’t know you did that. You hunt raccoon? That’s really great, Lewis.”

“It’s relaxing. I go out with an old boy who has a few dogs. We just go off and waste time in the woods. Great if you like that sort of thing.” Freddy heard the unhappiness in Lewis’s voice, and for a moment was too disturbed by it to reply. “Well good-bye,” Lewis said, and hung up.

Freddy stared at the phone, opened the drawer where he had put the section of scarf, looked at it. If Lewis could go hunting, so could he. Not really knowing why he felt it was necessary, he went to the door of his study and locked it. He searched his memory for the name of the old woman who worked as receptionist for the law firm: Florence Quast. Then he got her number from the book and mystified the old lady with a long story about a nonexistent policy. When she suggested that he call either Mr. James or Mr. Hawthorne, he said, “No, I don’t think I need bother either of them, I think that new girl of theirs could answer my questions. Could you give me her name? And just where is she staying again?”

(Are you thinking, Freddy, that somehow she will be living in your house very soon? And is that why you locked the door of your study? Did you want to keep her out?)

Hours later, he rubbed his forehead, buttoned his jacket, wiped his palms on his trousers and dialed the Archer Hotel.

“Yes, I’d be happy to see you, Mr. Robinson,” the girl said, sounding very calm.

(Freddy, you’re not really afraid of meeting a pretty girl for a late-night conversation, are you? What’s the matter with you, anyhow? And why did you think she knew exactly what you were going to say?)

“Aw, this is great,” Hardie said, and banged the horn. Even in the dark his face was a red mask in which the eyes were slits: that was the way Jim Hardie always looked while he was doing his most outrageous stunts, and whenever Peter Barnes ever took the time really to think about it, he was grateful that in a year he was going off to college and getting away from a friend who could look as crazy as that. Jim Hardie, drunk or otherwise stimulated, was capable of frightening wildness. What was either almost admirable or even more frightening was that he never lost his physical or verbal efficiency, no matter how drunk he was. Half-drunk, like now, he never slurred his words or staggered; wholly drunk, he was a figure of pure anarchy. “We’re gonna tear things up,” he said.

“Great,” Peter said. He knew better than to protest; besides, Jim always got away with everything he did. Ever since they had met in grade school, Jim Hardie had talked his way out of trouble—he was wild, but not stupid. Even Walt Hardesty had never gotten anything on him—not even burning down the old Pugh barn because dumb Penny Draeger had told him that the Dedham girls, whom he hated, were using it as a stable.

“Might as well catch a few grins before you go to Cornell, hey?” Jim said. “Might as well catch all the grins you can get, because I hear that place is the pits.” Jim had always said that he saw no point in going to college, but he occasionally showed that he resented Peter’s acceptance, by early admission, to Cornell. Peter knew that all Jim Hardie wanted was for them to go on raising hell, a perpetual eighteen, forever.

“So is Milburn,” Peter said.

“Good point, my son. It sure as shit is. But let’s at least liven the place up, huh? So that’s what we’re going to do tonight, Priscilla. And just in case you thought you were going to dry up in the course of our adventures, your old friend James took care of that.” Hardie unzipped his coat and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. “Golden hands, you turd, golden hands.” He unscrewed the cap with one hand and drank while he drove, and his face grew red and taut. “You want a shluck?”

Peter shook his head; the smell nauseated him.

“Stupid bartender turned his back, right? Zoom. Asshole knew it was gone, too, but he was too much of a dipshit to say anything to me. You know something, Peter? It’s depressing, having competition no better than that.” He laughed, and Peter Barnes laughed too.

“Well, what are we going to do?”

Hardie passed him the bottle again, and this time he drank. The headlights swam apart and became four, and he shook his head, forcing them back to two.

“Hah! We are gonna peep, my boy, we are gonna take a look at a lady.” Hardie palled at the bottle, chuckled, dribbled bourbon down his chin.

“Peep? Like a peeping Tom?” He let his head roll toward Hardie, who could obviously steam on to morning and through the next day, getting less predictable all the time.

“Peep. Look. Shoot a beaver. If you don’t like it, jump out of the car.”

“On a lady?”

“Well, not on a man, shitface.”

“What, hide in a bush and look through …”

“Not exactly. Not exactly. Someplace much better.”

“Who is it?”

“That bitch at the hotel.”

Peter was now more confused than ever. “The one you were talking about? The one from New York?”

“Yeah.” Jim swung the car around the square, passing the hotel without even bothering to look at it.

“I thought you were balling her.”

“Well, I lied, man. So what? So I exaggerate a little. Truth is, she never let me put a hand on her. Look, I’m sorry I made up a little adventure about her, okay? She made me feel like a jerk. Taking her out to Humphrey’s, giving her all my best lines—well, I want to take a look at her when she doesn’t know I’m there.” Jim bent forward and, disregarding the road altogether for a reckless amount of time, groped under his seat. When he straightened up again, he was grinning widely and holding a long brass-trimmed telescope. “With this. Hell of a good scope, Junior—cost me sixty bucks in the Apple.”

“Mmn.” Peter lolled back against the seat. “This is the grungiest thing I ever heard of.”

A moment later, he became aware that Jim was stopping the car. He pushed himself forward and peered through the window. “Oh no. Not here.”

“This is it babe. Move your ass.”

Hardie shoved his shoulder, and Peter opened the door and half-rolled out of the car. St Michael’s cathedral loomed before them, huge and forbidding in the darkness.

“Shut your trap. I work in a hotel, remember?” Hardie produced a bundle of keys on a ring from beneath his jacket. The other hand held the telescope and the bottle. “Go over there and take a piss or something while I try the keys.” He set the bottle down on the step and bent toward the lock.

Peter walked away down the long gray side of the church. From this side, it looked like a prison. He unzipped, steamingly pissed, staggered and splashed on his boots. Then he leaned against the church with one arm, stood as if deep in reflection, and quietly vomited between his feet. That too steamed. He was thinking about walking home when Jim Hardie called, “Come on, Clarabelle.” He turned around and there was Hardie grinning at him, waving the keys and the bottle at him beside an open door. He resembled one of the gargoyles on the cathedral’s facade.

“No,” he said.

“Come on. Or don’t you have hair on your balls?”

Peter trudged forward, and Hardie reached out and yanked him through the door.

Inside, the cathedral was cold, and dark with an undersea darkness. Peter stopped still, his feet on brick, feeling an immense space around him. He reached out his hands and touched chill air. Behind him, he heard Jim Hardie getting all of his things together. “Hey, where’s your goddamned hand? Here, take this.” The telescope slapped against his palm. Hardie’s footsteps went away off to the side, clicking on the brick floor.

He turned and saw Hardie’s hair flickering in the dark. “Move it. There are some stairs around here someplace …”

Peter took a step forward and crashed into some sort of bench.

“Quiet.”

“I can’t see you!”

“Shit. Over here.” There was a movement in the darkness: he understood that Jim was waving, and cautiously moved toward him.

“You see the stairs? We go up there. To a sort of balcony.”

“You did this before,” Peter said, amazed.

“Sure I did it before. Don’t be a dope. Sometimes I used to take Penny here and screw around in the pews. What the hell? She’s not Catholic either.”

Peter’s eyes were adjusting, and diffused light from a high circular window helped him to see the interior of the church. He had never been inside St. Michael’s before. It was much larger than the white suburban box in which his parents spent an hour on Easter and Christmas day. Enormous pillars divided the vast space; an altar cloth shone like a ghost. He burped and tasted vomit. The staircase Jim was pointing to was wide, of brick, and curved against the inner skin of the cathedral.

“We go up there, and we wind up right in the front, facing the square. Her room is on the square, see? With a good telescope we can look right in.”

“It’s dumb.”

“I’ll explain later, shithead. Let’s go up.” He began to go quickly up the stairs. Peter stayed behind. “Wait,” Hardie said, turning around and descending a couple of the steps. “You need a cigarette.” He grinned at Peter, pulled out his cigarettes and gave one to Peter.

“Here?”

“Shit, yes. Nobody’s going to see you.” He lit his cigarette and Peter’s. The flame of the lighter reddened the walls, made everything else disappear. The smoke helped the taste in Peter’s mouth, somehow making the vomit taste more like beer again. “Take a drag or two. See? It’s okay.” He blew out smoke, but with the flame extinguished, Peter could only hear him exhale. He drew on his own cigarette again. Hardie was right; it calmed him. “Just come on up now.” He started again, and Peter followed.

At the top, far up inside the church, they followed a narrow gallery around to the front of the church. There a window with a broad stone sill looked across the square. Jim was sitting with his legs up on the sill when Peter reached him. “Would you believe it,” he said. “I once had a beautiful moment with Penny right on this spot.” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out. Peter saw him wink in the gray illumination from the window. “Drives ’em crazy. They can’t figure out who was smoking. Here. Have a drink.” He held the bottle out.

Peter shook his head and gave him the telescope. “Okay, we’re here. Now explain.” He sat on the cold sill and jammed his hands into the windbreaker’s pockets.

Hardie looked at his watch. “First, some magic. Look out the window.” Peter looked: the square, the dark buildings, bare trees. The Archer Hotel across the square had no lighted windows. “One, two, three.” On three the lights in the square switched off. “It’s two o’clock.”

“Some magic.”

“Well, if you’re so hot, turn them back on.” Hardie swung around, kneeling on the stone, and put the telescope to his eyes. “Too bad her light’s not on. But if she gets near the window I’ll be able to see her. You want a look?”

Peter took the telescope and trained it on the hotel.

“She’s in the room above the front door. Straight across and a little bit down.”

“I got the window. There’s nothing there.” Then he saw a red flash in the blackness of the room. “Wait. She’s smoking.”

Hardie grabbed the telescope from him. “Right. Sitting there smoking.”

“So explain why we broke into a church to watch her smoke.”

“Well, the first day she comes to the hotel I tried to come on with her, right? She puts me down. Then a little bit later she asks me if I’ll take her out. She says she wants to see Humphrey’s Place. So I take her there, but she’s barely paying attention to me. Really pissed me off, man. I mean, why waste my time if she’s not interested, right? Well, you know why? She wanted to meet Lewis Benedikt. You know him, right? The guy who was supposed to of offed his wife over in France.”

“Spain,” said Peter, who had very complicated ideas about Lewis Benedikt.

“Who cares? Anyhow, I’m sure that’s why she asked me to take her there. So she’s hot for wife-killers.”

“I don’t think he did it” Peter said. “He’s a good guy. I mean, I think he’s a good guy. I think that women sometimes sort of—you know—”

“Shit, I don’t care if he did it or not. Hey, she’s moving. He was silent; Peter was startled a moment later to have the telescope thrust into his hands. “Take a look. Fast.”

Peter lifted the telescope, searched for the window, scanned past the top of the A in the hotel’s sign. Back to the A; then straight up. He involuntarily moved several inches back on the sill. The woman stood at the window, smiling, holding a cigarette, looking right into his eyes. He thought he might have to vomit again. “She’s looking at us!”

“Get serious. We’re way across the square. It’s dark out. But you see what I mean.”

Peter gave the telescope back to Jim, who resumed looking at the woman’s window. “See what you mean about what?”

“Well, she’s weird. Two o’clock, and she’s in her room in the dark with all her clothes on, smoking?”

“So what?”

“Look, I lived in that hotel all my life, right? So I know how people act in hotels. Even the old farts who stay with us. They watch television, they want room service, they leave their clothes all over the room, you get bottles on cabinets and rings on the tables, they have little parties in their rooms and you have to scrub the carpet afterward. At night you can hear them talking to themselves, snoring, spitting—well, you can hear everything they do. You can hear them pissing in the sink. The walls are thick but the doors aren’t, see? If you’re out in the hall you can practically hear them brush their teeth.”

“So what?” Peter asked again.

“So she doesn’t do any of that. She never makes any noise at all. She doesn’t watch TV. Her room hardly ever needs to be cleaned. Even the bed is always made up. Strange, huh? So what does she do, sleep on top of the covers? Stay up all night?”

“Is she still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me see.” Peter took the telescope. The woman was still standing at her window, smiling faintly as if she knew they were talking about her. Peter shivered. He gave back the telescope.

“I’ll tell you some more. I carried her suitcase up when she checked in. Now I’ve toted about a million suitcases, believe me, and that one was empty. She might have had a few newspapers in it, nothing more. Once when she was at work I looked in her closets— nothing. No clothes. But she didn’t always wear the same thing, man. So what the hell did she do, wear them in layers? Two days later I checked again, and this time the closet was full of clothes—just like she knew someone came in to look. That was the night she asked me to take her to Humphrey’s, and I figured she was going to chew me out. But no, she hardly talked to me at all. About the only thing she said was, ‘I want you to introduce me to that man.’ ‘Lewis Benedikt?’ I said, and she nodded, like she already knew his name. I took her up to him, and he ran away like a rabbit.”

“Benedikt did? What for?”

“I thought he was afraid of her.” Jim put the telescope down and lit another cigarette, looking at Peter all the time. “And you know something? I was too.

There’s just something in the way she looks at you sometimes.”

“Like if she thinks you were poking around in her room.”

“Maybe. But it’s a heavy look, man. It really gets you. There’s one other thing too. If you walk along the halls at night, you can tell if people have their lights on, right? The light comes through the bottom of the door. Well, she never has her lights on. Never. But one night —well, this is crazy.”

“Tell me.”

“One night I saw some flickering underneath her door. Flickering light—like radium or something, you know? A kind of greenish light. Cold light. It wasn’t a fire or anything, and it wasn’t from our lamps.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I saw it.”

“But it doesn’t mean anything. Green light.”

“Not just green—sort of glowing. Sort of silvery. Anyhow, that’s why I wanted us to take a look at her.”

“Well, you did, so let’s go home. My father’ll be angry if I’m late!”

“Hold on.” He looked through the telescope again. “I think something’s happening. She’s not at the window any more. Holy shit.” He lowered the telescope. “She opened the door and went out. I saw her go into the hall.”

“She’s coming over here!” Peter scuttled off the sill and moved down the gallery toward the stairs.

“Don’t wet your pants, Priscilla. She isn’t coming here. She couldn’t see us, remember? But if she’s going somewhere, I want to see where. You coming or not?” He was already gathering up his cigarettes, the bottle, his bundle of keys. “Come on. We gotta hurry. She’ll be out of the door in two minutes.”

“I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying!”

They pounded along the gallery and down the stairs. Hardie ran through the side aisles of the cathedral and pushed the door open, which gave stumbling Peter enough light to avoid the pillars and the edges of the pews. Out in the night, Jim clipped the padlock back on the door and ran to the car. Peter’s heart beat rapidly, in part from relief at being out of the church. Yet he was still tense. He pictured the woman he had seen in the window coming across the snowy square toward them, the wicked queen from Snow White, a woman who never turned on a light or slept in a bed and who could see him on a black night through a church window.

He realized that his head was clear. As he got into the car beside Jim, he said, “Fear sobers you up.”

“She wasn’t coming here, idiot,” Hardie said, but pulled away from the side of the cathedral out to the south side of the square so rapidly that his tires squealed. Peter looked anxiously into the long expanse of the square—white ground broken by bare trees and the dim statue—but saw no evil queen drifting toward them. The picture had been so clear in his mind that, disbelieving, he continued to scan the town square after Jim had turned into Wheat Row.

“She’s on the steps,” Jim whispered when they were nearly to the corner. Looking toward the hotel through the bare trees, Peter saw the woman calmly descending to the sidewalk. She wore the long coat, a fluttering scarf, a hat. She looked so absurdly normal in this clothing, turning out into the deserted street past two in the morning, that Peter laughed and shuddered at once.

Jim switched off the headlights and rolled quietly up to the stoplight. Off to their left and across the street, the woman moved quickly into darkness.

“Hey, let’s just go home,” Peter said.

“Screw that. I want to see where she’s going.”

“What if she sees us?”

“She won’t.” He turned left and went slowly down the top of the square past the hotel, his lights still off. Though the lights in the square were not on, the street lamps would remain lighted until dawn, and both boys saw her entering a pool of light at the end of the first block across Main Street. Jim drove slowly across, and then waited until she had walked another block before going further.

“She’s just taking a walk.” Peter said. “She has insomnia, and she takes walks at night.”

“Like hell.”

“I don’t like doing this.”

“Okay. Okay. Get out of the car and walk home,” Jim whispered fiercely at him. He reached across Peter and opened the passenger door. “Get out and run home.”

Peter sat in the blast of cold from the door, almost ready to get out. “You should too.”

“Jesus. God damn you! Get out or close the door,” Jim hissed. “Hey! Wait a second!” Both boys watched as another car swung onto the street ahead of them and paused under a street lamp two blocks ahead. The woman went unconcernedly up to the car, the door swung open, and she got in.

“I know that car,” Peter said. “I’ve seen it around.”

“Of course you have, you dodo. Seventy-five blue Camaro—it belongs to that turkey, Freddy Robinson.” He picked up speed as Robinson’s car drove away.

“Well, now you know where she goes at nights.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? What else? Robinson’s married. In fact, my mother heard from Mrs. Venuti that his wife wants to divorce him.”

“That’s because he sucks around high school girls, right? You know that Freddy Robinson likes ’em young. Haven’t you ever seen him out with a girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Who was it?”

“A girl from school,” Peter said, not wanting to say that it was Penny Draeger.

“Okay. So whatever that jerk is doing, he’s not just out on a date. Now, where the hell’s he going?”

Robinson was leading them through northwest Milburn, making turns that seemed random, going further from the center of town. These houses under a black sky, snow drifted on their front lawns, looked sinister to Peter Barnes: the scale of the night diminished them to something larger than dollhouses, smaller than themselves. Freddy Robinson’s taillights moved ahead of them like the eyes of a cat.

“All right. Let’s see, he’s going to turn right up ahead, and go west on Bridge Road.”

“How do you—?” Peter stopped talking and watched Robinson’s car do as Jim had predicted. “Where is he going?”

“To the only thing out this way that doesn’t have a set of swings in the back yard.”

“The old railroad station.”

“You win a cigar. Or better yet, a cigarette.” Both boys lit Marlboros; in the next minute, Robinson’s car swung into the parking lot of Milburn’s disused station. The railway had tried for years to sell the building; it was an empty shell with a board floor and a ticket window. Two old boxcars had stood on the overgrown tracks for as long as the boys could remember.

As they watched from an unlighted car down Bridge Road, first the woman, then Robinson, left the Camaro. Peter looked at Jim, afraid that he knew what Hardie was going to do. Hardie waited until Robinson and the woman had gone around the side of the station and then opened his door.

“No,” Peter said.

“Fine. Stay here.”

“What’s the point? Catch them with their pants down?”

“That’s not what they’re going to do, idiot. Out here? Or in that freezing old station, with the rats? He’s got enough money to hit a motel.”

“Then what?” Peter pleaded.

“I want to know what she says. She brought him here, didn’t she?”

And he closed the door and began to move quietly up Bridge Road.

Peter touched the door handle, pushed it down and heard the lock disengage. Jim Hardie was crazy: why should he follow him any further into pointless trouble?

Already they had invaded a church and smoked cigarettes and drunk whiskey there, and here was Jim Hardie, not satisfied, creeping along after cradle-robbing Freddy Robinson and that spooky woman.

What? The ground vibrated and from nowhere a freezing wind slammed into him. More than two voices seemed to lift beyond the station, screeching into the sudden wind. It felt as though a hand were banging inside Peter’s skull.

The night deepened about him, and he thought he was fainting; he dimly heard Jim Hardie falling into the snow up ahead, and then they and the old station seemed surrounded by a moment of pure brightness.

He was out of the car, standing up on earth that seemed to bounce, looking toward Jim: his friend sat up in the snow, his body covered with white; Jim’s eyebrows gleamed, greenish, like the dial of a watch— snow did that sometimes, caught by angled moonlight— Jim ran toward the station and Peter was able to think: That’s how he gets in trouble, he’s not just crazy, he never gives up— and they both heard Freddy Robinson scream.

Peter squatted down beside the car as if he expected gunshots. He could hear Jim’s footsteps receding in the direction of the station. The footsteps paused; terrified, Peter looked cautiously around the fender of the car. Back and legs dusted with gleaming snow, Jim was unknowingly miming his own posture, and peering around the side of the station.

He wished he were two hundred yards off, watching through a telescope.

Jim crawled a few yards farther: Peter knew that now he would be able to see the entire rear of the station. Beyond the platform, stone steps led down into the railbed. The two abandoned boxcars sat, mired in weeds, at either end of the station.

He shook his head, and saw Jim running, bent over, back to the car. Jim did not speak to him or even look at him, but opened the door and scrambled in. Peter got in—his knees stiff from kneeling—just as Jim started the car.

“Well, what happened?”

“Shut up.”

“What did you see?”

Hardie hit the accelerator and popped the clutch; the car shot widely forward. A film of snow covered Hardie’s jacket and jeans.

“Did you see anything?”

“No.”

“Did you feel the ground shake? Why did Robinson yell?”

“I don’t know. He was lying down on the tracks.”

“You didn’t see that woman?”

“No. She must have been around the side.”

“Well, you saw something. You ran like hell.”

“At least I went!”

The rebuke quieted Peter, but more was to come. “You damn chickenshit, you just hid behind the car like a little girl—you got the balls of a pigeon—now listen, if anybody asks where you were tonight, you were playing poker with me, we were playing poker in your basement just like last night, right? Nothing happened, you get it? We had a few beers and then we picked up the game from last night. Okay?”

“Okay, but …”

“Okay.” Hardie turned to glare at Peter. “Okay. You want to know what I saw? Well, something saw me. You know what? There was a little kid sitting on the top of the station, and he must have been watching me all the time.”

This was totally unexpected. “A little kid? That’s crazy. It’s almost three in the morning. And it’s cold, and there’s no way to get up to the roof of the station anyhow. We used to try it often enough, back in grade school.”

“Well, he was there and he was watching me. And here’s another little tidbit.” Hardie savagely cramped the car around a corner, and nearly went sideways into a row of mailboxes. “He was barefoot. And I don’t think he had a shirt on either.”

Peter was silenced.

“Man, he gave me the flying shits. So I got out. And I think Freddy Robinson is dead, man. So if anybody asks, we played poker all night.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Whatever I say.”

Freddy Robinson’s wife learned that her husband had carried only the skimpiest life insurance coverage on himself, and that Humdinger Fred, the prospective member of the Million Dollar Roundtable, was worth only fifteen thousand dollars dead. She made a tearful long-distance call to her unmarried sister in Aspen, Colorado, who said, “I always told you he was a cheap so and so. Why not sell your house and come out here where it’s healthy? And what kind of accident was that anyhow, honey?”

Which was the question that Broome County deputy coroner was asking himself, faced with the corpse of a thirty-four-year-old man from which most of the internal organs and all the blood had been removed. For a moment he considered writing under CAUSE OF DEATH the word “Exsanguination,” but instead wrote “Massive internal insult,” with a long appended note ending with the speculation that the “insult” had been caused by a marauding animal.

And Elmer Scales sat up every night with the shotgun across his lap, not knowing that the last cow had been killed and that the figure he had tauntingly half-seen was looking for bigger game;

and Walt Hardesty bought Omar Norris a drink in the back room at Humphrey’s Place and heard Omar say that now that he had time to think about it, maybe he did hear a car or two that night, and it seemed to him that wasn’t all, it seemed to him there was some kind of noise and some kind of light. “Noise? Light? Get the hell out of here, Omar,” Hardesty said, but stayed nursing his beer after Omar left, wondering just what the hell was going on;

and the excellent young woman Hawthorne, James had hired told her employers that she wanted to leave the Archer Hotel and had heard in town that Mrs. Robinson was putting her house up for sale, and could they talk to their friend at the bank and set up the financing? She had, it turned out, a healthy account at a savings and loan in San Francisco;

and Sears and Ricky looked at one another with something surprisingly close to relief, as if they hadn’t liked the thought of that house sitting empty, and said they could probably arrange something with Mr. Barnes;

and Lewis Benedikt promised himself he’d call his friend Otto Gruebe to make a date to go out with the dogs for a day’s coon hunting;

and Larry Mulligan, laying out Freddy Robinson’s body for burial, looked at the corpse’s face and thought he must have seen the devil coming to carry him off;

and Nettie Dedham, penned in her wheelchair as she was penned within her paralyzed body, sat looking out of the dining-room window as she liked to do while Rea busied herself with the horses’ evening feed and tilted her head so that she could see the evening light on the field. Then she saw a figure moving around out there and Nettie, who understood more than even her sister credited, fearfully watched it approach the house and barn. She uttered a few choked sounds, but knew that Rea would never hear them. The figure came nearer, hauntingly familiar. Nettie was afraid it was the boy from town Rea talked about—that wild boy in a rage that Rea had named him to the police. She trembled, watching the figure come nearer across the field, imagining what life would be like if the boy did anything to Rea; and then squawked in terror and nearly tipped over the wheelchair. The man walking toward the barn was her brother Stringer, wearing the brown shirt he’d had on the day he died: it was covered with blood, just as it had been when they’d put him on the table and wrapped him in blankets, but his arms were whole. Stringer looked across the small yard to her window, then held the strands of barbed wire with his hands, stepped through the fence and came toward the window. He smiled in at her, Nettie with her head rolling back on her shoulders, and then turned again toward the stable.

“I know,” his father said. “I wanted to talk to you about something. We haven’t talked much lately, Pete.”

“Yeah, I guess. But can’t it wait? I have to get to school.”

“You’ll get there, but no, I don’t think it can wait. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days.”

“Oh?” Peter poured milk into a glass, knowing that it was likely to be serious. His father never came out with the serious things right away: he brooded about them as if they were bank loans, and then hit you with them when he had a plan all worked out.

“I think you’ve been seeing too much of Jim Hardie,” his father said. “He’s no good, and he’s teaching you bad habits.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Peter said, stung. “I’m old enough to have my own habits. Besides, Jim’s not half as bad as people say—he just gets wild sometimes.”

“Did he get wild Saturday night?”

Peter set down the glass and looked with feigned calm at his father. “No, weren’t we quiet enough?”

Walter Barnes took off his glasses and polished them on his vest. “You’re still trying to tell me you were here that night?”

Peter knew better than to stick to the lie. He shook his head.

“I don’t know where you were, and I’m not going to ask. You’re eighteen, and you have a right to your privacy. But I want you to know that at three o’clock your mother thought she heard a noise and I got up and walked all through the house. You weren’t downstairs in the family room with Jim Hardie. In fact you weren’t anywhere in the house.” Walter put his glasses back on and looked seriously at his son, and Peter knew that now he was going to produce whatever plan he’d thought up.

“I haven’t told your mother because I didn’t want her to worry about you. She’s been tense lately.”

“Yeah, what’s she so angry about, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” said his father, who had an approximate idea. “I think she’s lonely.”

“But she’s got a lot of friends, there’s Mrs. Venuti, she sees her every day almost—”

“Don’t try to get me off the track. I’m going to ask you a few questions, Pete. You didn’t have anything to do with the Dedham girls’ horse being killed, did you?”

“No,” Peter uttered, shocked.

“And I don’t really suppose you know anything about Rea Dedham being murdered.”

To Peter, the Dedham girls were illustrations from a history book. “Murdered? God, I—” He looked wildly around the kitchen. “I didn’t even know.”

“I thought so. I just heard about it myself yesterday. The boy who cleans their stables found her yesterday afternoon. It’ll be on the news today. And in tonight’s paper.”

“But why ask me?”

“Because people are going to think that Jim Hardie might possibly be involved.”

“That’s crazy!”

“I hope for Eleanor Hardie’s sake that it is. And to tell you the truth, I can’t see her son doing anything like that.”

“No, he couldn’t, he’s just sort of wild, he doesn’t stop when the ordinary guy would …” Peter shut up, hearing his own words.

His father sighed. “I was worried … people knew that Jim has something against those poor old women. Well. I’m sure that he had nothing to do with it, but Hardesty will undoubtedly be asking him questions.” He put a cigarette in his mouth, but did not light it. “Okay. Scout, I think we have to be closer. You’re going to college next year, and this is probably our last year together as a family. We’re going to give a party weekend after next, and I’d like you to loosen up and come and be a part of it. Will you do that?”

So that was the plan. “Sure,” he said, relieved.

“And you’ll stay for the entire party? I’d like it if you could really get in the swing of things.”

“Sure.” Looking at his father, Peter saw him for a moment as already surprisingly old. His face was lined and pouchy, marked by a lifetime of worry.

“And we’ll have more talks in the mornings?”

“Yes. Whatever you say. Sure.”

“And there’ll be less hanging around in beer joints with Jim Hardie.” This was a command, not a question, and Peter nodded. “He could get you in real trouble.”

“He’s not as bad as everyone thinks,” Peter said. “He just won’t stop, you know, he keeps on going and—”

“That’s enough. Better get to school. Can I give you a lift?”

“I’d like to walk. I get there too early otherwise.”

“Okay, scout.”

Five minutes later, books under his arm, Peter left the house; his viscera still retained the imprint of the fear he had felt when he thought his father would ask about Saturday night—that was an episode he planned to put out of his mind as completely as possible—but the fear was only a trembling area surrounded by a sea of relief. His father was far more concerned about being closer to him than about whatever he got up to with Jim Hardie: Saturday night would slip backward into time and become as remote as the Dedham girls.

He rounded the corner. His father’s tact lay between him and whatever mysterious thing had happened out there two nights ago. In some way, his father was a protection against it; the terrible things would not happen; he was protected even by his immaturity. If he did not do anything bad, the terrors wouldn’t get him.

By the time he reached the top of the square, the fear had almost entirely vanished. His normal route to school would have taken him past the hotel, but he did not want to take the slightest chance of seeing that woman again, and he turned off into Wheat Row. The cool air clipped against his face; sparrows thronged and cheeped across the snowy square, moving in quick zigs and zags. A long black Buick passed him, and he looked in the windows to see the two older lawyers, his father’s friends, in the car’s front seat. They both looked gray and tired. He waved, and Ricky Hawthorne lifted a hand in a returned greeting.

He was nearly at the bottom of Wheat Row and walking past the parked Buick when a commotion in the square took his attention. A muscular man in sunglasses, a stranger, wandered over the snow. He wore a pea jacket and a knit watch cap, but Peter saw from the white skin around his ears that his head was shaven. The stranger was clapping his hands together, making the sparrows scatter like spray from a shotgun: he looked irrational as a beast. Nobody else, neither the businessmen going up the pretty eighteenth-century steps of Wheat Row nor the secretaries following in short coats and long legs, saw him. The man clapped his hands again, and Peter realized that the man was looking directly at him. He was grinning like a hungry leopard. He started to lope toward Peter: Peter, frozen, sensed that the man was moving more rapidly than his steps could explain. He turned to run and saw, seated on one of the tilting tombstones before St. Michael’s, a little boy with ragged hair and a slack grinning face. The boy, less fierce, was of the same substance as the man. He too was staring at Peter, who remembered what Jim Hardie had seen at the abandoned station. The stupid face twisted into a giggle. Peter nearly dropped his books, ran, kept running without looking back.

The suggestion had been Ricky Hawthorne’s. “I haven’t seen her in an age, and I understand she had a stroke some time back, but we might learn something from her. If you’re willing to make the journey on a day like this.” It was a day when noon was as dark as evening; storms hung over the town, waiting to happen.

“You think there might be some connection between her sister’s death and your own problem?”

“There might be,” Ricky admitted. “I don’t really think so, of course, but it wouldn’t do to overlook even these peripheral things. Trust me that there is some relevance, anyhow. We’ll have it all out later. Now that you’re here, we shouldn’t keep you in the dark about anything. Sears might not agree with me, but Lewis probably would.” Then Ricky had added wryly, “Besides, it might do you good to get out of Milburn, however briefly.”

And that had been true at first. Binghamton, four or five times the size of Milburn, even on a dark, lowering day was another, brighter world: full of traffic, new buildings, young people, the sound of urban life, it was of its decade; it pushed little Milburn back into some novelettish period of Gothic romance. The larger city had made him recognize how enclosed Milburn was, how much an appropriate field for speculation like the Chowder Society’s—it was the aspect of the town which had initially reminded him of Dr. Rabbitfoot. It seemed he had become accustomed to this. In Binghamton there was no drone of the macabre, no lurking abnormality to be sniffed out in stories over whiskey and in nightmares by old men.

But on the third floor of the hospital, Milburn held sway. Milburn was in Walt Hardesty’s suspicion and nervousness, his rude “What the hell are you doing here? You’re from town. I’ve seen you around—I saw you in Humphrey’s.” Milburn was even in Ned Rowles’s lank hair and rumpled suit: at home, Rowles looked conventional and even well dressed; outside, he looked almost rubelike. You noticed that his jacket was too short, his trousers webbed with wrinkles. And Rowles’s manner, in Milburn low-key and friendly, here seemed tinged with shyness.

“Just struck me as funny, old Rea going so soon after that Freddy Robinson being found dead. He was out at their place, you know, not more than a week before Rea died.”

“How did she die?” Don asked. “And when can we see her sister? Aren’t there evening visiting hours?”

“Waiting for a doctor to come out,” Rowles said. “As to how she died, I decided not to put that in the paper. You don’t need sensationalism to sell papers. But I thought anyone might have heard, around town.”

“I’ve been working most of the time,” Don said.

“Ah, a new book. Splendid.”

“Is that what this guy is?” Hardesty asked. “That’s just what we need, a writer. Sweet jumping Jesus. Great I’m gonna be talking to a witness in front of the fearless editor and some writer. And this old dame, how the hell is she going to know who I am, anyhow? How is she gonna know I’m sheriff?”

That’s what is worrying him, Don thought: he looks like Wyatt Earp because he’s so insecure that he wants everybody to know that he wears a badge and carries a gun.

Some of this must have shown on his face, because Hardesty became more aggressive. “Okay, let’s have your story. Who sent you here? Why are you in town?”

“He’s Edward Wanderley’s nephew,” Rowles said in a tired voice. “He’s doing some work for Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne.”

“Jesus, those two,” Hardesty moaned. “Did they ask you to come here to see the old lady?”

“Mr. Hawthorne did,” Don answered.

“Well I suppose I ought to fall down and pretend I’m a red carpet.” Hardesty lit a cigarette, ignoring the no smoking sign at the end of the corridor. “Those two old birds have something up their sleeves. Up their sleeves. Hah! That’s rich.”

Rowles looked away, obviously embarrassed; Don glanced at him for an explanation.

“Go on, tell him, Fearless. He asked you how she died.”

“It’s not very appetizing.” Rowles, wincing, caught Don’s eye.

“He’s a big boy. He’s built like a running back, ain’t he?”

That was another thing about the sheriff: he would always be measuring the size of another man against his own.

“Go on. It’s not a goddamned state secret.”

“Well.” Rowles leaned wearily back against the wall. “She bled to death. Her arms were severed.”

“My God,” Don said, sickened and sorry that he had come. “Who would …”

“You got me, you know?” Hardesty said. “Maybe your rich friends could give us a hint. But tell me this— who would go around doing operations on livestock, like happened out at Miss Dedham’s? And before that, at Norbert Clyde’s. And before that, at Elmer Scales’s?”

“You think there’s one explanation for all of that?” This was, he assumed, what his uncle’s friends had asked him to discover.

A nurse went by and scowled at Hardesty, who was shamed into stamping out his cigarette.

“You can go in now,” the doctor said, leaving the room.

Hardesty, thrusting forward, was bustlingly untroubled by the patient’s gaping mouth and signs of agitation. “I’m the sheriff, Miss Dedham,” he said, “Walt Hardesty, the sheriff from over in Milburn?”

Don looked into the flat panic in Nettie Dedham’s eye and wished him luck. He turned to the editor.

“I knew she had a stroke,” the editor said, “but I didn’t know she was as bad as this.”

“We didn’t meet the other day,” Hardesty was saying, “but I talked to your sister. Do you remember? When the horse was killed?”

Nettie Dedham made a rattling sound.

“Is that yes?”

She repeated the sound.

“Good. So you remember, and you know who I am.” He sat down and began speaking in a low voice.

“I suppose Rea Dedham could understand her,” Rowles said. “Those two were supposed to be beauties, once. I remember my father talking about the Dedham girls. Sears and Ricky would remember.”

“I guess they would.”

“Now I want to ask you about your sister’s death,” Hardesty was saying. “It’s important that you tell me anything you saw. You say it, and I’ll try to understand it. Okay?”

“Gl.”

“Do you remember that day?”

“Gl.”

“This is impossible,” Don whispered to Rowles, who twitched his face and went around to the other side of the bed to look out of the window. The sky was black and neon purple.

“Were you sitting in a position where you could see the stables where your sister’s body was found?”

“Gl.”

“That’s affirmative?”

“Gl!”

“Did you see anybody approach the barn or stables prior to your sister’s death?”

“GL!”

“Could you identify that person?” Hardesty was sitting forward at an exaggerated angle. “Say if we brought him here, could you make a noise to say he was the one?”

The old woman made a sound Don eventually recognized as crying. He felt debased by his presence in the room.

“Was that person a young man?”

Another series of strangled noises. Hardesty’s excitement was turning into an iron impatience.

“Let’s say it was a young man, then. Was it the Hardie boy?”

“Rules of evidence,” Rowles muttered to the window.

“Screw the rules of evidence. Was that who it was, Miss Dedham?”

“Glooorgh,” moaned the old woman.

“Shit. Do you mean to say no? It wasn’t?”

“Glooorgh.”

“Could you try to name the person you saw?”

Nettie Dedham was trembling. “Glngr. Ginger.” She made an effort which Don could feel in his own muscles.

“Glngr.”

“Ah, let’s let that go for now. I got a couple more things.” He rotated his head to look angrily at Don, who thought he saw embarrassment too on the sheriff’s face. Hardesty turned back to the old woman and pitched his voice lower, but Don could still hear.

“I don’t suppose you heard any funny noises? Or saw any funny lights or anything?”

The old woman’s head wobbled; her eyes darted.

“Any funny noises or lights, Miss Dedham?” Hardesty hated having to ask her this. Ned Rowles and Don shared a glance of puzzled interest.

Hardesty wiped his forehead, giving up. “That’s it. It’s no good. She thinks she saw something, but who the hell can figure out what it was? I’m getting out of here. You stay or not, do what the hell you like.”

Don followed the sheriff out of the room, and paused in the corridor as Hardesty spoke to a doctor. When Rowles emerged, his aging boy’s face was pensive and considering.

Hardesty turned from the doctor and glanced at Rowles. “You make any sense out of that?”

“No, Walt. No sense that makes sense.”

“You?”

”Nothing,” Don said.

“Well, I’ll be damned if I’m not going to start believing in spacemen or vampires or something pretty soon myself,” Hardesty said, and went off down the corridor.

Ned Rowles and Don Wanderley followed. When they reached the elevators, Hardesty was standing inside one, stabbing a button. Before Don could reach the elevator, the door had whooshed shut unimpeded by the sheriff, who obviously wanted to escape the other two.

A moment later another elevator appeared, and the two men stepped inside it. “I’ve been thinking about what Nettie might have been trying to say,” Rowles told him. The doors closed and the elevator smoothly descended. “I promise you, this is crazy.”

“I haven’t heard anything lately that isn’t.”

“And you’re the man who wrote The Nightwatcher.”

Here we go, Don thought.

Don buttoned up his coat and followed Rowles outside into the parking lot. Though he wore only his suit, Rowles did not appear to notice the cold. “Here, get in my car for a second,” the editor said.

Don got into the passenger seat and looked over at Rowles, who was rubbing his forehead with one hand. The editor looked much older in the interior of the car: shadows poured into his wrinkles. ” ‘Glngr?’ Isn’t that what she said, that last time? You agree? It was a lot like that anyhow, wasn’t it? Now. I never knew him myself, but a long time ago the Dedham girls had a brother, and I guess they talked about him for quite a while after he died …”

“My father says I’m not supposed to see you so much anymore.”

“So what? Do you care? How old are you anyhow, five?”

“Well, he’s worried about something. He doesn’t look very happy.”

“He doesn’t look happy,” Jim mimicked. “He’s old. I mean, what is he, fifty-five? He’s got a boring job and an old car and he’s too fat and his favorite little boy is going to fly out of the nest in nine or ten months. Just take a look around this town, friend. How many folks do you see with big smiles on their wrinkly old faces? This town is loaded with miserable old suckers. Are you gonna let them run your life?” Jim leaned back on his barstool and smiled at Peter, clearly assuming that the old argument was still persuasive.

Peter felt himself sinking back into uncertainty and ambiguity—these arguments were persuasive. His father’s worries were not his: and the issue had never been that he did not love his father, for he did, but merely whether he should always obey his father’s infrequent orders—or as Jim put it, “let him run your life.”

For had he, after all, done anything truly bad with Jim? Because of Jim’s keys, they had not even broken into the church; then they had followed a woman. That was all. Freddy Robinson had died, and that was a shame even if they had not liked him, but nobody was saying that his death had not been natural; he’d had a heart attack, or had fallen down and hurt his head …

And there had been no little boy on top of the station.

And there had been no little boy sitting on the gravestone.

“I suppose I should be grateful your old man let you come out tonight.”

“No, it’s not that bad. He just thinks we ought to spend less time together, not that we shouldn’t spend any time at all together. I guess he doesn’t like me sitting in places like this.”

“This? What’s wrong with this?” Hardie gestured comically around at the seedy tavern. “Hey, you— Sunshine!” Jim shouted. “This is a hell of a great place, isn’t it?” The bartender looked back over his shoulder and grimaced stupidly. “Civilized as shit, Lady Jane. The Duke down there agrees with me. I know what your old man is afraid of. He doesn’t want you to get in with the wrong crowd. Well, I am the wrong crowd, that’s true. But if I am, then so are you. So the worst has already happened, and as long as you’re here, you might as well relax and enjoy it.”

If you wrote down the things Hardie said and looked at them afterward, you’d find the errors, but just listening to him talk, you’d be convinced of anything.

“See, what the old boys all think is craziness is just another way of stayin’ sane—you live in this town long enough you’re in danger of woodworm in the headboard, and you have to keep reminding yourself that the whole world isn’t just one big Milburn.” He looked over at Peter, sipped his beer and grinned, and Peter saw the fractured light in his eyes and knew, as he had all along, that underneath the “stayin’ sane” kind of craziness there was another, real craziness. “Now admit it, Pete.” He said, “Aren’t there times when you’d like to see the whole damn town go up in flames? The whole thing knocked down and plowed over? It’s a ghost town, man. The whole place is full of Rip Van Winkles, it’s just one Rip Van Winkle after another, a bunch of weird Rip Van Winkles with vacuums for brains, with a knothead drunk for a sheriff and crummy bars for a social life—”

“What happened to Penny Draeger?” Peter interrupted. “You haven’t gone out with her for three weeks.”

Jim hunched over the bar and wrapped his hand around his beerglass. “One. She heard I took that Mostyn dame out, so she got pissed off at me. Two. Her parents, old Rollie and Irmengard, heard that she went out a couple of times with the late F. Robinson. So they grounded her. She never told me about that, you know? Good thing she didn’t. I would have grounded her, all right.”

“Do you think she went out with him because you took that woman to Humphrey’s?”

“How the hell do I know why she does things, man? Do you see a sequence there, my boy?”

“Don’t you?” It was sometimes safer to give Jim’s questions back to him.

“Hell.” He bent all the way forward and lay his shaggy head on the wet wood of the bar. “All these women are mysteries to me.” He was speaking softly, as if regretfully, but Peter saw his eyes gleaming between his lashes and knew it was an act. “Yeah. Well you might have a point. There might be a sequence there after all, Clarabelle. There just might be. And if there is, then that Anna dame besides not giving me any herself after teasing me along, also screwed up the sex life I had. In fact, if you look at it that way, you could definitely say that she owes me a few.” He rolled his head a quarter turn up on the bar, and his eyes gleamed at Peter. “Which had occurred to me, to tell you the truth.” He sat there, bent over, his head like a separate object on the bar, grinning maniacally up at Peter. “Yes, it had, old pal.”

Peter swallowed.

Jim straightened up and knocked on the bar. “Two more flagons here, Sunshine.”

“What do you want to do?” Peter asked, knowing that he would inevitably be carried along with it, and looked through the tavern’s greasy windows at a pane of darkness flecked with white.

“Let’s see. What do I want to do?” Jim mused, and Peter realized sickeningly that Jim had known all along what he wanted to do, and that inviting him out for a beer was only the first moment of the plan; he’d been steered into this conversation as surely as he’d been driven out into the country, and all of it, “another way of stayin’ sane” and the ghost town business, was enumerated on a list somewhere in Hardie’s mind. “What do I want to do?” He cocked his head. “Even this palace gets a little boring after a flagon or six, so I guess going back to dear little Milburn would be pleasant. Yes, I think we’ll definitely be going back to dear little Milburn.”

“Let’s stay away from her,” Peter said.

Jim ignored this. “You know, our dear lovely sexy friend moved out of the hotel two weeks ago. Oh, she is missed. She is missed, Pete. I miss seeing that great ass going up the stairs. I miss those eyes flashing in the corridors. I miss her empty suitcase. I miss her amazing body. And I’m sure you know where she went.”

“My father arranged the mortgage. His house.” Peter nodded more vigorously than he needed to, and realized he was getting drunk again.

“Your old man’s a useful old gnome, isn’t he?” Jim asked, smiling pleasantly. “Innkeeper!” He banged on the bar. “Give my friend and myself a couple of shots of your best bourbon.” The bartender resentfully poured out shots of the same brand that Jim had stolen. “Now, back to the point. Our friend who is so sincerely missed moves out of our excellent hotel and into Robinson’s house. Now isn’t that a curious sort of coincidence? I suppose that you and I, Clarabelle, are the only two people in the world who know that it is a coincidence. Because we’re the only people who knew she was out at the station when old Freddy passed.”

“His heart,” Peter muttered.

“Oh, she does get you in the heart. She gets you by the heart and the balls. But funny though, isn’t it? Freddy falls down onto the tracks—did I say falls? No: floats. I saw it, remember. He floats down onto the tracks like he’s made out of tissue paper. Then she gets all hot to own his house. Is that also one, old buddy? Do you see a sequence there too, Clarabelle?”

“No,” he whispered.

“Now, Pete, that’s not how you got early admission to Cornhole U. Use those powerful brain cells, baby.” He put his hand on Peter’s back and leaned toward him, breathing the clear odor of alcohol into Peter’s face. “Our sexy friend wants something in that house. Just think of her in there. Man, I’m curious, aren’t you? That sexy lady moving around in Freddy’s old house— what’s she looking for? Money? Jewelry? Dope? Well, who knows? But she’s looking for something. Moving that sexy frame of hers around those rooms, checking everything out … that’d be a sight to see, wouldn’t it?”

“I can’t,” Peter said. The bourbon moved in his guts like oil.

“I think,” said Jim, “that we will begin to move toward our transportation.”

Peter found himself standing outside in the cold by Jim’s car: he could not remember why he was alone. He stamped his feet, rotated his head on his shoulders; said, “Hey, Jim.”

Hardie emerged a moment later, grinning like a shark. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Just had to tell our friend in there how much I enjoyed his company. He didn’t seem to believe me, so I had to repeat my message several times. He demonstrated what you could call a lack of interest. Fortunately, I managed also to take care of our liquid requirements for the remainder of this pleasant evening.” He partially unzipped his jacket and let the neck of a bottle protrude.

“You’re a madman.”

“I’m crazy like a fox, you mean.” Jim opened the car and leaned across the seat to unlock Peter’s door. “Now to return to the subject of our previous discussion.”

“You really ought to go to college,” Peter said as

Jim started the car. “With your talent for bull, you’d be Phi Beta Kappa.”

“Well, I used to think I’d be a pretty good lawyer,” Jim said surprisingly. “Here, have a jolt.” He passed Peter the bottle. “What’s a good lawyer besides a superior bullshitter? Look at that old Sears James, man. If I ever saw a guy who looks like he could shit you from here to Key West …”

Peter remembered his last sight of Sears James, seated massively in a car, his face pale behind the bleary window. Then he remembered the face of the boy sitting on the headstone in front of St. Michael’s. “Let’s stay away from that woman,” he said.

“Now that’s just the point I want to discuss.” He gave Peter a bright look. “Didn’t we reach the point where this mysterious lady is wandering around the house looking for something? As I recall, Clarabelle, I invited you to picture that.”

Peter nodded miserably.

“And give me back that bottle if you’re not going to do anything with it. Now. There’s something in that house, isn’t there? Aren’t you a little curious about what it is? There’s something going on, anyhow, and you and me, old buddy, are the only people who know about it. Am I right so far?”

“You might be.”

“CHRIST!” Hardie yelled, making Peter jump. “You dumb SHIT! What else can I be? There’s some reason she wanted that house—that’s the only thing that makes sense. There’s something in there she wants.”

“You think she got rid of Robinson?”

“I don’t know about that. I didn’t see anything but him sort of floating down onto the tracks. What the hell? But I can tell you one thing, I want to get a look at that house.”

“Oh no,” Peter moaned.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Jim protested. “She’s just a broad, after all. She’s got strange habits, but she’s just a woman, Clarabelle. And for shit’s sake, I’m not really stupid enough to go in there when she’s there.

And if you’re too chickenshit to go in with me, you can walk from here.”

Down, down the dark country road; down the dark road to Milburn.

“How will you know if she’s out? She sits in the dark every night, you said.”

“You ring the bell, dummy.”

On the crest of the last low hill before the turnoff, Peter, already sick with worry, looked down the highway and saw the lights of Milburn—gathered in a little depression in the land, they looked as though one hand could gather them up. It looked arbitrary, Milburn, like a nomad city of tents, and though Peter Barnes had known it all his life—though it was, in effect, all he had known—it looked unfamiliar.

Then he saw why. “Jim. Look. All the lights on the west side of town are out.”

“Snow pulled down the wires.”

“But it’s not snowing.”

“It snowed when we were in the bar.”

“Did you really see a little kid sitting on top of the station that night?”

“Nah. Just thought I did. It must have been snow, or some newspaper or something—shit, Clarabelle, can a kid get up there? You know he can’t. Let’s be straight, Clarabelle, it was a little spooky out there that night.”

They continued on to Milburn through the growing dark.

Jim stopped the car half a block away from the house. “If only the goddamned lights didn’t go off.” They were both looking at the building’s blank facade, the curtainless windows behind which no figure moved, no candle shone.

Peter Barnes thought of what Jim Hardie had seen, Freddy Robinson’s body floating down onto the overgrown railway tracks, and of the-little-boy-who-wasn’t-there but perched on the tops of stations and headstones. And then he thought: I was right the last time. Fear sobers you up. When he looked at Jim, he saw him tense with excitement.

“I thought she never turned them on anyhow.”

“Man, I still wish they didn’t go off,” Jim said, and shivered, his face a grinning mask. “In a place like this”—gesturing out at the respectable neighborhood of three-story houses—”you know, in a Rotarian pig heaven like this, our lady friend might sort of want to blend in. She might keep her lights on just so nobody thinks there’s nothing funny about her.” He tilted his head. “Like, you know, that old house on Haven Lane where that writer guy lived—Wanderley? You ever go past there at night? All these houses around are all lit up and there’s old Wanderley’s place as dark as a tomb, man. Gives you the frights.”

“This gives me the frights,” Peter admitted. “Besides that, it’s illegal.”

“You really are the pits, you know that?” Hardie turned on his seat and stared at Peter, who saw his barely controlled urge to get moving, to do, to flail out again at whatever obstacle the world had put in his way. “Do you get the feeling that our lady friend worries about what’s legal and what isn’t? Do you think she got that house because she was worried about the damned law—about Walt Hardesty, for Chrissake?” Hardie shook his head, either disgusted or pretending to be disgusted. Peter suspected that he was working himself up for an action even he thought might be reckless.

Jim turned away from him and started the car moving; Peter hoped for a moment that Hardie was going to circle around the block and go back to the hotel, but his friend kept the car in first gear and merely crept up the block until they were directly in front of the house.

“You’re either with me or you’re a jerk, you jerk,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

“First off, take a look in a downstairs window. Do you have balls enough for that, Clarabelle?”

“You won’t be able to see anything.”

“Jesus,” Hardie said, and got out of the car.

Peter hesitated only a second. Then he too got out and followed Hardie up across the snowy lawn and around the side of the building. Both boys moved quickly, hunching over to avoid being seen by the neighbors.

In a moment they were sitting on their haunches in drifted snow beneath one of the side windows. “Well, at least you have guts enough to look in a window, Clarabelle.”

“Don’t call me that,” Peter whispered. “I’m sick of that.”

“Great time you picked to tell me.” Hardie grinned at him, then lifted his head to peer over the sill. “Hey, look at this.”

Ignoring it, he unlocked his door; opened it The staircase was empty.

He went to answer his phone.

And with relief too heard Ricky Hawthorne’s voice: “I’m going batty sitting here in the dark. I’ve spoken to Sears and Edward’s nephew and Sears graciously said that we can get together at this short notice at his house. I’d say we need to. Do you agree? We’ll break a rule and just come as we are, shall we?”

Maybe that makes him one of us, Ricky thought: and he saw that Don was the sort of person they would have befriended, years and years back; if he had been born forty years earlier, he would have been one of them as if by birthright.

Still, there was a streak of secrecy in him. Ricky could not imagine what he had meant by asking if any of them had heard music during the early evening.

Pressed about this, he had evaded explanations; pressed further, he had said, “I was just getting the feeling that everything happening has a direct relationship to my writing.”

This remark, which would have seemed egotistical at any other time, was given density by the candlelight; each of the men stirred in his chair.

“Isn’t that why we asked you here?” Sears said.

And then he had explained: Ricky listened puzzled to Don’s account of his idea for a new book and the description of the Dr. Rabbitfoot character, and how he had heard the showman’s music just before Ricky’s call.

“Are you saying that events in this town are occurrences from an unwritten book?” Sears asked incredulously. “That’s sheer poppycock.”

“Unless,” Ricky said, thinking, “unless … well, I’m not really sure how to put this. Unless things here in Milburn have focused lately—have come to a focus they did not have before.”

“You mean that I’m the focus,” Don said.

“I don’t know.”

“This is nonsense,” Sears interjected. “Focused, unfocused—all that’s happened is that we are managing to frighten ourselves even more. That’s your focus. The daydreams of a novelist can’t have anything to do with it.”

Lewis sat apart from all this, wrapped in some private misery. Ricky asked him what he thought, and Lewis replied, “Sorry. I was thinking about something else. Can I get myself another drink, Sears?”

Sears nodded grimly; Lewis was drinking at twice his normal rate, as if his appearance at a meeting in an old shirt and a tweed jacket gave him license to break another of their old rules.

“What’s supposed to indicate this mysterious focus?” Sears asked belligerently.

“You know as well as I do. John’s death, first of all.”

“Coincidence,” Sears said.

“Elmer’s sheep—all the animals that have died.”

“Now you believe in Hardesty’s Martians.”

“Don’t you remember what Hardesty told us? That it was sort of a game—an amusement some sort of creature gave itself. What I’m suggesting is that the stakes have been raised. Freddy Robinson. Poor old Rea Dedham. I felt, months ago, that our stories were bringing something about—and I fear, I very much fear, that more people are going to die. I’m saying that our lives and the lives of many people in this town may be endangered.”

“Well, what I said stands. You have certainly managed to frighten yourself,” Sears said.

“We’re all frightened,” Ricky pointed out. His cold made his voice raw and his throat throbbed, but he forced himself to go on. “We are. But what I think is that Don’s arrival here was like the fitting of the last piece into a puzzle—that when all of us were joined by Don, the forces, whatever you want to call them, were increased. That we invoked them. We by our stories, Don in his book and in his imagination. We see things, but we don’t believe them; we feel things—people watching us, sinister things following us—but we dismiss them as fantasies. We dream horrors, but try to forget them. And in the meantime, three people have died.”

Lewis stared at the rug, then nervously spun an ashtray on the table before his chair. “I just remembered something I said to Freddy Robinson on the night he cornered me outside John’s house. I said that someone was picking us off like flies.”

“But why should this young man, whom none of us had seen until a short time ago, be the last element?” Sears asked.

“Because he was Edward’s nephew?” Ricky asked. It came to him straight from the blue sky of inspiration; a moment later he felt a painful spasm of relief that his children were not coming to Milburn for Christmas. “Yes. Because he is Edward’s nephew.”

All three of the older men almost palpably felt the gravity of what Ricky had called “the forces” about them. Three frightened men, they sat in the molten light of the candles and looked back into their past.

“Maybe,” Lewis at last said. He drained his whiskey. “But I don’t understand about Freddy Robinson. He wanted to meet with me—he called me twice. I just put him off. Made a vague promise to see him in a bar sometime.”

Sears asked, “He had something to tell you before he died?”

“I didn’t give him the chance to tell it. I thought he wanted to sell me insurance.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Because he said something about trouble coming your way.”

They were silent again. “Maybe,” Lewis said, “if I met him, he’d still be alive.”

Ricky said, “Lewis, that sounded just like John Jaffrey. He blamed himself for Edward’s death.”

For a moment all three men glanced at Don Wanderley.

“Maybe I’m not here just because of my uncle,” Don said. “I want to buy my way into the Chowder Society.”

“What?” Sears exploded. “Buy?”

“With a story. Isn’t that the admission fee?” He smiled tentatively around the circle. “It’s very clear in my mind because I just spent some time writing it all in a journal. And,” he said, breaking another of their rules, “this isn’t fiction. This happened just in the way I’ll tell it—you couldn’t use it as fiction because it didn’t have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened. But if Mr. Hawthorne” (“Ricky,” the lawyer breathed) “is right, then five people, not four, have died. And my brother was the first of them.”

“You were both engaged to the same girl,” Ricky said, remembering one of the last things Edward had said to him.

“We were both engaged to Alma Mobley, a girl I met at Berkeley,” Don began, and the four of them settled into their chairs. “I think this is a ghost story,” he said, pulling, in Dr. Rabbitfoot’s image, the dollar from his jeans.

“So the Who’s Who entry proved that everything she had said was false,” Don concluded. “David was dead, and I never saw her again. She had simply disappeared.” He wiped his face; exhaled loudly. “That’s it. Is it a ghost story or not? You tell me.”

None of the men spoke for a moment. Tell him, Sears, Ricky silently prayed. He looked over at his old friend, who had steepled his fingers before his face. Say it, Sears. Tell him.

Sears eyes met his. He knows what I’m thinking.

“Well,” Sears said, and Ricky closed his eyes. “As much as any of our stories is, I guess. Is that the series of events on which you based your book?”

“Yes.”

“They make a better story than the book,” Sears said.

“But they don’t have an ending.”

“Not yet, perhaps,” Sears said. He scowled at the candles, which had burned down into the silver holders. Now, Ricky prayed, his eyes still closed. “This young man you imagined to look like a werewolf was named— ah, Greg? Greg Benton?” Ricky opened his eyes again, and if anyone had been looking at him they would have seen gratitude written on his every feature.

Don nodded, clearly not understanding why this was important.

“I knew him under a different name,” Sears said. “A long time ago, he was called Gregory Bate. And his half-witted brother was called Fenny. I was present when Fenny died.” He smiled with the bitterness of a man compelled to eat a meal he hates. “That would have been quite some time before your—Benton— decided to affect a shaven head.”

“If he can make two appearances, then he can make three,” Ricky said. “I saw him on the square not two weeks ago.”

The lights, violently bright after so long a time of candlelight, came suddenly on. The four men in Sears’s library, their distinction and whatever of ease the candlelight had given them erased by the harsher light, looked fearful: we look half-dead already, Ricky thought. It was as though the candles had drawn them into a warm circle, the warmth of a candle and a group and a story; now they were blown apart, scattered on a wintry plain.

“Looks like he heard you,” Lewis, drunk, said. “Maybe that’s what Freddy Robinson saw. Maybe he saw Gregory turning into a wolf. Hah!”

The werewolf came slowly, unstoppably toward them, in no hurry at all. “You want to meet her, don’t you?” His grin was ferocious. “She will be so pleased. You will have quite a welcome, I promise you.”

Peter looked wildly around; saw phosphorescent light leaking from beneath a door.

“She is not perhaps quite in shape to see you yet, but that makes it all the more interesting, don’t you think? We all like to see our friends with their masks off.”

He’s talking to keep us still, Peter thought. It’s like hypnotism.

“Aren’t you the two boys interested in scientific exploration? In telescopes? How nice it is to meet two fine young fellows with inquiring minds, two fellows who want to extend their knowledge. So many young people merely coast along, don’t they, so many are afraid to take risks. Well we certainly can’t say that about you now, can we?”

Peter glanced at Jim Hardie’s face: Jim’s mouth hung open.

“No, you have been extremely brave. Now I will be with you in a moment, and I want you to relax and wait for me … just relax and wait.”

Peter slammed the back of his hand into Jim’s ribs, but Jim did not move. He glanced back at the terrible figure coming toward him, and made the mistake of looking directly into the blank golden eyes. Immediately he heard a voice like music coming not from the man but speaking directly inside his head: Relax, Peter, relax, you will meet her …

“Jim!” he screamed.

Hardie gave a convulsive shudder, and Peter knew that he was lost already.

Settle down, boy, no need for all that noise …

The golden-eyed man was nearly to them, reaching out his left hand. Peter stepped backward, too frightened for coherent thought.

The man’s white hand glided nearer and nearer Jim’s own left hand.

Peter turned his back and pounded halfway up the next flight of stairs. When he looked around the light beneath the door on the landing was spilling out with such intensity that the walls were tinted faintly green: green too was Jim, in that light.

“Just take my hand,” the man said. He was two steps below Jim, and their hands nearly touched.

Jim brushed his fingers against the palm of the man’s hand.

Peter looked up the stairs, but could not leave Jim.

The man beneath was chuckling. Peter’s heart froze, and he looked down again. The man was grasping Jim’s wrist with his left hand. The wolfish eyes glowed wide.

Jim screeched.

The man holding him moved his hands to Jim’s throat and twisted his body with immense force, slamming the boy’s head against the wall. He planted his feet on the boards of the landing and again smashed Jim’s head into the wall.

Your turn.

Jim fell onto the boards and the man kicked him aside as if he were as weightless as a paper bag. A bright smear of blood like a child’s fingerpainting lay on the wall.

Peter ran down a long corridor lined with doors; opened one at random and slipped in.

Just inside the door, he froze. The outline of a man’s head showed against a window. “Welcome home,” the man’s toneless voice said. “Have you met her yet?” He stood up from the bed. “You haven’t? Once you do, you’ll never forget it. An incredible woman.”

The man, still only a black outline against a window, began to shuffle toward Peter, who remained stock-still just inside the door. As the man drew nearer, he saw that it was Freddy Robinson.

“Welcome home,” Robinson said.

Found you.

Footsteps in the corridor paused outside the bedroom door. Time. Time. Time. Time.

“You know, I don’t exactly remember—”

Panicked, Peter rushed at Robinson with his arms extended, intending to shove him out of the way: the moment his fingers touched his shirt, Robinson broke up into a shapeless pattern of glowing points of light; his fingers tingled. It was gone utterly in an instant, and Peter rushed through the air where it had been.

“Come out, Peter,” said the voice outside the door. “We all want you to come out”; and the other voice in his mind repeated Time.

Standing in front of the bed, Peter heard the doorknob moving. He scrambled onto the bed and banged the heels of his hands against the top of the window frames.

The window slid up as if on grease. Cold air streamed over him. He felt the other mind reaching for him, telling him to come to the door, not to be silly, didn’t he want to see that Jim was all right?

Jim!

He crawled out of the window as the door opened. Something rushed toward him, but he was already across the upper roof and jumping down onto the next level. From there he let himself drop onto the roof of the garage; and from the garage he jumped onto a snowdrift.

As he ran past Jim’s car he looked sideways at the house; but it was as solidly ordinary as it had looked at first: only the lights in the stairwell and front hall burned, casting an inviting rectangle of yellow onto the walk. That too seemed to speak to Peter Barnes, to say imagine the peace of lying down with your hands crossed on your chest, imagine sleeping under ice …

He ran all the way home.

“Sears,” Lewis said, “it’s a funny thing, but it’s hard not to make an ass of yourself when you talk about stuff like this.”

“That’s a point. But for God’s sake, stop drinking.”

“You know, Sears,” Lewis said. “I get the feeling our little decorums aren’t going to be much good anymore.”

Ricky asked him, “Do you want to stop meeting?”

“Well, what the hell are we? The Three Musketeers?”

“In a way. We’re what’s left. Plus Don, of course.”

“Oh, Ricky.” Lewis smiled. “The sweetest thing about you is that you’re so damned loyal.”

“Only to the things worth being loyal to,” Ricky said, and sneezed loudly twice. “Excuse me. I ought to be home. Do you really want to give up the meetings?”

Lewis shoved his glass toward the middle of the table and slumped down in his chair. “I don’t know. I suppose not I’d never get any of Sears’s good cigars if we didn’t meet twice a month. And now that we have a new member, well …” Just as Sears was about to burst out Lewis looked up at them and was as handsome as he’d ever been in his life. “And maybe I’d be scared not to meet. Maybe I believe everything you said, Ricky. I’ve had a couple of funny experiences since October—since the night Sears talked about Gregory Bate.”

“So have I,” Sears said.

“So have I,” echoed Ricky. “Isn’t that what we’ve been saying?”

“So I guess we should tough it out,” Lewis said. “You guys are in another league intellectually from me, maybe this kid here is too, but I guess it’s a hang together or hang separately kind of situation. Sometimes, out at my place, I get really spooked—like something is out there just counting the seconds until it can nail me. Like it nailed John.”

“Do we believe in werewolves?” Ricky asked.

“No,” Sears said, and Lewis shook his head.

“I don’t either,” said Don. “But there’s something …” He paused, thinking, and looked up to see all three of the older men looking expectantly at him. “I don’t have it worked out yet. It’s just an idea. I’ll think about it some more before I try to explain it.”

“Well, the lights have been on for some time now,” Sears said pointedly. “And we had a good story. Perhaps we’ve made some progress, but I don’t see how. If the Bate brothers are in Milburn, I’d like to assume that they’ll do as the ineffable Hardesty suggests, and move on when they’re tired of us.”

Don read the expression in Ricky’s eyes and nodded.

“Wait” Ricky said. “Excuse me, Sears, but I sent Don out to see Nettie Dedham at the hospital.”

“Oh, yes?” Sears was already magisterially bored.

“I went, yes,” Don said. “I met the sheriff and Mr. Rowles there. We all had the same idea.”

“To see if she’d say anything,” Ricky said.

“She couldn’t. She isn’t able to.” Don looked at Ricky. “You must have called the hospital.”

“I did,” Ricky said.

“But when the sheriff asked her if she had seen anyone on the day her sister died, she tried to say a name. It was obvious that that’s what she was doing.”

“And the name?” Sears demanded.

“What she said was just a garble of consonants—like Glngr. Glngr. She said it two or three times. Hardesty gave up—couldn’t make any sense out of it.”

“I don’t suppose anyone could,” Lewis said, glancing at Sears.

“Mr. Rowles took me aside out in the parking lot and said that he thought she was trying to say her brother’s name. Stringer? Isn’t that right?”

“Stringer?” Ricky said. He covered his eyes with the palm of a hand.

“I’m missing something,” Don said. “Would somebody explain to me why that’s so important?”

“I knew this was going to happen,” Lewis said. “I knew it.”

“Get a hold of yourself, Lewis,” Sears ordered. “Don, we will have to discuss this among ourselves first. But I think that we owe you a story to match the one you told us. You will not hear it tonight, but after we’ve discussed it, I imagine that you will get the ultimate Chowder Society story.”

“Then I want to ask another favor,” Don said. “If you decide to tell it to me, could we have it at my uncle’s house?”

He saw the reluctance pass through the three men; they looked suddenly older—even Lewis seemed frail.

“That may not be a bad idea,” Ricky Hawthorne said. He looked like one vast cold wrapped in mustache and spotted bow tie. “A house of your uncle’s was where it started for us.” He managed to smile at Don.

“Yes. I think you’ll hear the ultimate Chowder Society story.”

“And may the Lord protect us until then,” Lewis said.

“May He protect us afterward,” Sears added.

“What’s for dinner tonight, mom?”

She tilted her head and looked at his reflection in the mirror for approximately a second. “Hot dogs and sauerkraut.”

“Oh.” Hot dogs were fine with Peter, but his father detested them.

“Is that what you wanted to ask, Peter?” She did not look at him this time, but kept her eyes on the reflection of her hand pulling the brush through her hair.

Peter had always been conscious that his mother was an exceptionally attractive woman—maybe not a fabulous beauty like Stella Hawthorne, but more than merely pretty all the same. She had a high, youthful blond attractiveness; she had always had an unencumbered look, like a sailboat one sees far out in a bay, nipping into the breeze. Men desired her, he knew, though he did not wish to think about that; on the night of the party for the actress, he had seen Lewis Benedikt caress his mother’s knees. Until then he had blindly (he now thought) imagined that adulthood and marriage meant release from the passionate confusions of youth. But his mother and Lewis Benedikt could have been Jim Hardie and Penny Draeger; they looked a more natural couple than she and his father. And not long after the party he had felt his parents’ marriage begin to unravel.

“No, not really,” he said. “I like to watch you brushing your hair.”

Christina Barnes froze, her hand lifted to the crown of her head; then brought it down in a smooth heavy stroke. She found his eyes again, then looked quickly, almost guiltily away.

“Who’s going to come to your party tomorrow night?” he asked.

“Oh, just the usual people. Your father’s friends. Ed and Sonny Venuti. A few other people. Ricky Hawthorne and his wife. Sears James.”

“Will Mr. Benedikt be here?”

This time she deliberately met his eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe. Why? Don’t you like Lewis?”

“Sometimes I guess I do. I don’t see him all that much.”

“Nobody sees him all that much, darling,” she said, lifting his mood a little. “Lewis is a recluse, unless you’re a twenty-five-year-old girl.”

“Wasn’t he married once?”

She looked at him again, this time more sharply. “What’s the point of all this, Peter? I’m trying to brush my hair.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Peter nervously smoothed the counterpane with his hand.

“Well?”

“I guess I was just wondering if you were happy.”

She laid down the brush on her dressing table, making its ivory back click against the wood. “Happy? Of course I am, sweetie. Now go downstairs and tell your father to get ready for dinner.”

Peter left the bedroom and went downstairs to the small side room where his father was undoubtedly watching television. That was another sign that things were going wrong: Peter could not remember his father ever choosing to watch television at night before, but for months he had taken his briefcase into the television room, saying that he wanted to work on a few papers; minutes later the theme music of “Starsky and Hutch” or “Charlie’s Angels” would come faintly through the closed door.

He peeked into the room, saw the Eames chair pulled up in front of the flickering screen—”The Brady Bunch”—the salted nuts on the bowl on the table, a pack of cigarettes and lighter beside them, but his father was not there. His briefcase, unopened, lay on the floor beside the Eames chair.

Out of the television room, then, with its images of lonely comfort, and down the hall to the kitchen. When Peter walked in, Walter Barnes, dressed in a brown suit and worn brown wingtip shoes, was just dropping two olives into a martini. “Peter, old scout,” he said.

“Hi, dad. Mom says dinner’s going to be ready soon.”

“I wonder what that means. An hour—an hour and a half? What did she make anyhow, do you know?”

“It’s going to be hot dogs.”

“Whoof. Ugh. Christ. I guess I’ll need a few of these, hey, Pete?” He raised his glass, smiled at Peter, and sipped.

“Oh, dad …”

“Yes?”

Peter stepped sideways, shoved his hands in his pockets, suddenly inarticulate. “Are you looking forward to your parry?”

“Sure,” his father said. “It’ll be a good time, Pete, you’ll see. Everything’s going to work out fine.”

Walter Barnes began to walk out of the kitchen toward the television room, but some instinct made him look back at his son, who was spinning from side to side, hands still in his pockets, his face snagged with emotion. “Hey there, scout. Having trouble at school?”

“No,” Peter said, shifting miserably: side to side, side to side.

“Come on with me.”

They went down the hall, Peter hanging back. At the door to the television room, his father said, “Your friend Jim Hardie still hasn’t come back, I hear.”

“No.” Peter started to sweat.

His father placed the martini on a mat and put himself heavily into the Eames chair. They both glanced at the screen. Most of the Brady children and their father were crawling around the furniture of their living room—a living room much like the Barnes’s own—looking for a lost pet, a turtle or a kitten (or perhaps, since those Brady kids were cute little rascals, a rodent).

“His mother’s worried sick,” his father said, and popped a handful of macadamia nuts into his mouth. When those had gone down his throat, he said, “Eleanor’s a nice woman. But she never understood that boy. You have any idea where he might have gone?”

“No,” Peter said, looking to the rodent hunt as if for clues to the conduct of family life.

“Just took off in his car.”

Peter nodded. He had walked over toward Montgomery Street on his way to school the day after his escape from the house and from halfway down the block had seen that the car was gone.

“Rollie Draeger’s a bit relieved, is my guess,” said his father. “Probably just good luck his daughter’s not pregnant.”

“Um hum.”

“You wouldn’t have any idea where Jim went?” His father glanced at him.

“No,” Peter said, and risked a look in return.

“He didn’t confide in you during one of your beer-drinking sessions?”

“No,” Peter said unhappily.

“You must miss him,” his father said. “Maybe you’re even worried about him. Are you?”

“Yeah,” Peter said, by now as close to tears as he sometimes thought his mother was.

“Well, don’t be. A kid like that will always cause more trouble than he’ll ever be in himself. And I’ll tell you something—I know where he is.”

Peter looked up at his father.

“He’s in New York. Sure he is. He’s on the run for some reason or other. And I wonder if he might not have had something to do with what happened to old Rea Dedham after all. Looks funny that he ran out, don’t you think?”

“He didn’t,” Peter said. “He just didn’t. He couldn’t.”

“Still, you’re better off with a couple of old farts like us than with him, don’t you think?” When Peter did not give him the agreement he expected, Walter Barnes reached out toward his son and touched his arm. “One thing you have to learn in this world, Pete. The troublemakers might look glamorous as hell, but you’re better off steering clear of them. You stay with people like our friends, like the ones you’ll be talking to at our party, and you’ll be on your way. This is a hard enough world to get through without asking for trouble.” He released Peter’s arm. “Say, why don’t you pull up a chair and watch TV a little while with me? Let’s spend a little time together.”

Peter sat down and pretended to watch the television. From time to time he heard the grinding of the snowplow, gradually working past their house and then continuing on in the direction of the square.

Alone again in his room he looked up Robinson, F, in the directory and dialed the number, his heart trying to bump the roof of his mouth. After two rings, someone picked up the receiver and immediately replaced it.

The radio brought disasters. A fifty-two-year-old man in Lester died of a heart attack while shoveling out his driveway; two children were killed when their mother’s car struck a bridge abutment near Hillcrest. An old man in Stamford died of hypothermia—no money for the heating.

At six the snowplow again rattled past the house. By then Peter was in the television room, waiting for the news. His mother looked in, a blond head in a swirl of cooking orders: “Remember to change for dinner, Pete. Why don’t you go all out and wear a tie?”

“Is anybody coming in this weather?” He pointed to the screen—a blur of falling snow, blocked traffic. Men with a stretcher carried the body of the hypothermia victim, seventy-six-year-old Elmore Vesey, out of a rotting snowbound shack.

“Sure. They don’t live far away.” Inexplicably happy, she sailed off.

His father came home gray-faced half an hour later, looked in and said, “Hiya, Pete. Okay?” and went upstairs to roll into a hot tub.

At seven his father joined him in the television room, martini in hand, cashews in the bowl. “Your mother says she’d like to see you in a tie. Since she’s in a good mood, why not oblige her this once?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Still no word from Jim Hardie?”

“No.”

“Eleanor must be losing her mind with worry.”

“I guess.”

He went back up to his room and lay on his bed. Being in attendance at a party, answering all the familiar questions (“Looking forward to Cornell?”), walking around with a tray and pitchers of drinks, were what he felt least in the world like doing. He felt most like curling up in a blanket and staying in bed for as long as they’d let him. Then nothing could happen to him. The snow would build up around the house, the thermostats would click on and off, he would fall into great arcs of sleep …

At seven-thirty the bell rang, and he got up from bed. He heard his father opening the door, voices, drinks being offered: the arrivals were the Hawthornes and another man whose voice he did not recognize. Peter slid his shirt up over his head and replaced it with a clean one. Then he pulled a tie under the collar, knotted it, combed his hair with his fingers and left the bedroom.

When he reached the landing and was able to see the door, his father was hanging up coats in the guest closet. The stranger was a tall man in his thirties—thick blond hair, squarish friendly face, tweed jacket and blue shirt without a tie. No lawyer, Peter thought, “A writer,” his mother said at that instant, her voice way up out of its normal register. “How interesting,” and Peter winced.

“Here’s our boy Pete,” his father said, and all three guests looked up at him, the Hawthornes with smiles, the stranger merely with an appraising glance of interest. He shook their hands and wondered, taking Stella Hawthorne’s hand, as he always did seeing her, how a woman that old managed to be as good-looking as anyone you saw in the movies. “Nice to see you, Peter,” Ricky Hawthorne said, and gave him a brisk dry handshake. “You look a little beat.”

“I’m okay,” he said.

“And this is Don Wanderley, he’s a writer, and he was the nephew of Mr. Wanderley,” his mother said. The writer’s handshake was firm and warm. “Oh, we must talk about your books. Peter, would you please go in the kitchen and get the ice ready?”

“You look sort of like your uncle,” Peter said.

“Thank you.”

“Pete, the ice.”

Stella Hawthorne said, “On a night like this I think I want my drinks steamed, like clams.”

His mother cut off his laugh—”Pete, the ice, please” —and then turned to Stella Hawthorne with a fast nervous grin. “No, the streets seem all right for the moment,” he heard Ricky Hawthorne say to his father; he went down the hall into the kitchen and began cracking ice into a bowl. His mother’s voice, too loud, carried all the way.

A moment later she was beside him, taking things from under the grill and peering into the oven. “Are the olives and rice crackers out?” He nodded. “Then get these on a tray and hand them around, please, Peter.” They were egg rolls and chicken livers wrapped in bacon. He burned his fingers transferring them to a tray, and his mother crept up behind him and kissed the nape of his neck. “Peter, you’re so sweet.” Without having had a drink, she acted drunk. “Now, what do we have to do? Are the martinis ready? Then when you come back with the tray, come back in for the pitcher and put it on another tray with the glasses, will you? Your father’ll help. Now. What do I have to do? Oh—mash up capers and anchovies to put in the pot. You look just lovely, Peter, I’m so glad you put on a tie.”

The bell rang again: more familiar voices. Harlan Bautz, the dentist, and Lou Price, who looked like the villain of a gangster movie. Their wives, brassy and meek respectively.

He was passing the first tray around when the Venutis arrived. Sonny Venuti popped an egg roll in her mouth, said “Warmth!” and kissed him on the cheek. She looked pop-eyed and haggard. Ed Venuti, his father’s partner, said, “Looking forward to Cornell, son?” and breathed gin in his face.

“Yes, sir.”

But he was not listening. “God bless the Martoonerville Trolley,” he said as his father put a filled glass in his hand.

When he offered the tray to Harlan Bautz, the dentist slapped his back and said, “Bet you can’t wait to get to Cornell, hey, boy?”

“Yes, sir.” He fled back into the kitchen.

His mother was spooning a greenish mixture into a steaming casserole. “Who just came?”

He told her.

“Just finish adding this goop and then put it back in the oven,” she said, handing him the bowl. “I have to get out and say hello. Oh, I feel so festive tonight.”

She left, and he was alone in the kitchen. He dropped the rest of the thick green substance into the casserole and twirled a spoon around in it. When he was putting it back into the oven, his father appeared and said, “Where’s the drinks tray? I shouldn’t have made so many martinis, we got a crowd of whiskey drinkers. Oh, I’ll just take out the pitcher and use the other glasses in the dining room. Hey, the joint’s jumping already, Pete. You ought to talk to that writer, he’s an interesting fella, guess he writes chillers—I remember Edward telling me something about it. Interesting, no? I knew you’d have a good time if you spent some time with our friends. You are, aren’t you?”

“What?” Peter closed the oven door.

“Having a good time.”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Get out there and talk to people.” He shook his head as if in wonderment. “Boy. Your mother’s all wound up. She’s having a great time. Nice to see her like this again.”

“Yes,” Peter said, and drifted out to the living room, carrying a tray of canapes his mother had left behind.

There she was, “all wound up,” as his father had said: almost as if literally wound up, talking rapidly through a cloud of exhaled smoke, darting from Sonny Venuti to pick up a bowl of black olives and offer them to Harlan Bautz.

“They say if this keeps up Milburn could be cut off entirely,” Stella Hawthorne said, her voice lower and more listenable to than his mother’s and Mrs. Venuti’s. Perhaps for that reason, it stopped all conversation. “We only have that one snowplow, and the county’s plow will be kept busy on the highway.”

Lou Price, on the couch beside Sonny Venuti, said, “And look who’s driving our plow. The council should never have let Omar Norris’s wife talk them into it. Most of the time Omar’s too boiled to see where he’s going.”

“Now, oh, Lou, now, that’s the only work Omar Norris does all year round—and he came by here twice today!” His mother defended Omar Norris overbrightly: Peter saw her looking at the door, and knew that her febrile high spirits were caused by someone who had not arrived yet.

“He must be sleeping out in the boxcars these days,” Lou Price said. “In boxcars or in his garage, if his wife lets him get that close. You want a guy like that running a two-ton snowplow past your car? He could run the damn thing on his breath.”

The doorbell rang, and his mother nearly dropped her drink.

“I’ll get it,” Peter said, and went to the door.

It was Sears James. Beneath the wide brim of his hat, his face was worn and so white his cheeks looked almost blue. Then he said, “Hello, Peter,” and looked normal again, taking off his hat and apologizing for being late.

For twenty minutes Peter took canapes around on trays, refilled drinks and evaded conversation. (Sonny Venuti, grabbing his cheek with two fingers: “I bet you can’t wait to get away from this awful town and start chasing college girls, right, Pete?”) Whenever he looked at his mother, she was in the middle of a sentence, her eyes darting to the front door. Lou Price was loudly explaining something about soybean futures to Harlan Bautz; Mrs. Bautz was boring Stella Hawthorne with advice about redecoration. (“I’d say, go rosewood.”) Ed Venuti, Ricky Hawthorne and his father were talking off in a corner about the disappearance of Jim Hardie. Peter returned to the sterile peacefulness of the kitchen, loosened his tie and cradled his head on a counter spattered with green. Five minutes later the telephone rang. “No, don’t bother, Walt, I’ll get it,” he heard his mother cry in the living room.

The kitchen extension stopped ringing a few seconds’ later. She was on the phone in the television room. Peter looked at the white telephone on the kitchen wall. Maybe it was not what he thought; maybe it was Jim Hardie to say hey don’t worry, man, I’m in the Apple … he had to know. Even if it was what he thought. He picked up the receiver: he would listen only for a second.

The voice was Lewis Benedikt’s, and his heart folded.

“… can’t come, no, Christina,” Lewis was saying. “I just can’t. My drive is six feet deep in snow.”

“Someone’s on the line,” his mother said.

“Don’t be paranoid,” Lewis said. “Besides, Christina, it would be a waste of time for me to come out. You know.”

“Pete? Is that you? Are you listening?”

Peter held his breath; did not hang up.

“Oh, Peter’s not listening. Why would he?”

“Damn you, are you there?” His mother’s voice: sharp as the buzz of a hornet.

“Christina, I’m sorry. We’re still friends. Go back to your party and have a great time.”

“You can be such a shallow creep,” his mother said, and slammed down the phone. A second later, in shock, Peter also put down his receiver.

He stood on wobbly legs, almost certain of the meaning of what he had overheard. He blindly turned to the kitchen window. Footsteps. The door behind him opened and closed. Behind his own blank reflection—as drained as when he had looked into an empty room on Montgomery Street—was his mother’s, her face an angry blur. “Did you get an earful, spy?” Then there was another reflection between them—it was like that for a moment, another pale blur sliding between his face and his mother’s. It shifted closer, and Peter was looking at a small face not in reflection, but directly outside the window: an imploring, twisted childish face. The boy was begging him to come out. “Tell me, you little spy,” his mother ordered.

Peter screamed; and jammed his fist in his mouth to stop the noise. He closed his eyes.

Then his mother’s arms were around him and her voice was going, muttering apologies, the tears now not latent but warm on his neck. He could hear, above the noise his mother was making, the voice of Sears James declaiming: “Yes, Don came here to take possession of his house, but also to help us out with a little problem—a research problem.” Then a muffled voice that might have been Sonny Venuti’s. Sears replied, “We want him to look into the background of that Moore girl, the actress who disappeared.” More muffled voices: mild surprise, mild doubt, mild curiosity. He took his fist out of his mouth.

“It’s okay, mom,” he said.

“Peter, I’m so sorry.”

“I won’t tell.”

“It’s not—Peter, it wasn’t what you think. You can’t let it upset you.”

“I thought maybe it was Jim Hardie calling,” he said.

The doorbell rang.

She loosened her grip on his neck. “Poor darling, with a crummy runaway friend and a psycho mother like me.” She kissed the back of his head. “And I cried all over your clean shirt.”

The bell rang again.

“Oh, there’s one more,” Christina Barnes said. “Your father will make the drinks. Let’s get back to normal before we’re seen in public again, okay?”

“It’s someone you invited?”

“Why sure it is, Pete, who else could it be?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and looked at the window again. No one was there: only his mother’s averted face and his own, glowing like pale candles in the glass. “Nobody.”

She straightened up and wiped her eyes. “I’ll get the food out of the oven. You better get in and say hello.”

“Who is it?”

“Some friend of Sears and Ricky’s.”

He walked to the door and looked back, but she was already opening the oven door and reaching in, an ordinary woman getting the dinner ready for a party.

I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, he thought, and turning his back on her went out into the hall. The stranger, Mr. Wanderley’s nephew, was talking near the living-room arch. “Well, what I’m interested in now, to tell the truth, is the difference between invention and reality. For example, did you happen to hear music a few days ago? A band, playing outside somewhere in town?”

“Why no,” breathed Sonny Venuti. “Did you?”

Peter stopped dead just inside the arch and gaped at the writer.

“Hey, Pete,” his father said. “I want you to meet your dinner partner.”

“Oh, I wanted to sit next to this handsome young man,” Sonny Venuti crooned, smiling at him popeyed.

“You’re stuck with me,” said Lou Price.

“Come on over here, scout,” his father called.

He pulled himself away from Don Wanderley, who was looking at him curiously, and turned to his father. His mouth dried. His father was standing with his arm around a tall woman with a lovely fox-sharp face.

It was the face which had looked the wrong way through a telescope across a dark square and found him.

“Anna, this is my son Pete. Pete, Miss Mostyn.”

Her eyes licked at him. He was conscious for a moment of standing halfway between the woman and Don Wanderley, Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne looking on like spectators at a tennis match; but himself and the woman and Don Wanderley forming the points of a long narrow triangle like a burning-glass, and then her eyes moved over him again, and he was conscious only of the danger he was in.

“Oh, I think Peter and I will have lots to talk about,” said Anna Mostyn.

Peter Barnes, a tall black-haired boy who looks both capable and sensitive, was the dropped bomb. He seemed merely uncommunicative at first—understandable in a seventeen-year-old playing servant at his parents’ party. Flashes of warmth for the Hawthornes. He too responds to Stella. But underneath the distance was something else—something I gradually imagined was— panic? Despair? Apparently a friend of his disappeared under a cloud, and his parents evidently assumed that to be the cause of his moroseness. Yet it was more than that, and what I thought I saw in him was fear—the Chowder Society had either tuned me to this, or caused me mistakenly to project it. When I was making my pompous remarks to Sonny Venuti, Peter stopped in his tracks and stared at me; he really searched me with his eyes, and I had the idea that he wanted badly to talk to me—not about books. The startling thing was that I thought that he too had heard the Dr. Rabbitfoot music.

And if that’s true— if that’s true— then we are in the middle of Dr. Rabbitfoot’s revenge. And all Milburn is about to blow up.

Oddly, it was something Anna Mostyn said that caused Peter to faint. He trembled when he first saw her: I am sure of that. He was afraid of her. Now Anna Mostyn is a woman not far short of beauty, even the awesome Stella Hawthorne sort; her eyes seem to go all the way back to Norfolk and Florence, where she says her ancestors came from. She has apparently made herself indispensable to Sears and Ricky, but her greatest gift is for merely being politely there, helpful when that is needed, as on the day of the funeral. She suggests kindness and sympathy and intelligence but does not overwhelm you with her excellence. She is discreet, quiet on the surface of things a supremely self-contained, self-possessed young woman. She really is remarkably unobtrusive. Yet she is sensual in an inexplicably unsettling way. She seems cold, sensually cold: it is a self-referring, self-pleasing sensuality.

I saw her fix Peter Barnes with this challenge for a moment during dinner. He had been staring at his plate, forcing his father into yet more bluster and bonhomie, and annoying his mother; he never looked at Anna Mostyn, though he was sitting next to her. The other guests ignored him and chattered away about the weather. Peter was burning to get away from the table. Anna took his chin in her hand, and I knew the sort of look he was getting. Then she said to him very quietly that she wanted some of the rooms of her new house repainted, and she thought that he and one or two of his school friends might like to come to her house to do it. He swooned. That old-fashioned word fits perfectly. He fainted, passed out, pitched forward— swooned. I thought at first that he’d had a fit; so did most other people present. Stella Hawthorne calmed us down, helped Peter off his chair, and his father took him upstairs. Dinner ended shortly afterward.

And I know how. It is their air of timelessness: but where Alma would have flown past the Plaza Hotel in the twenties, Anna Mostyn would have been inside, smiling at the antics of men with flasks in their pockets, men cavorting, talking about new cars and the stock market, doing their best to knock her dead.

Tonight I am going to take the pages of the Dr. Rabbitfoot novel down to the hotel’s incinerator and burn them.