End Of The Peer
by
Martha Grimes

The bestselling author of The Old Contemptibles brings her brilliant
brand of British psychological suspense to a dazzling new novel of
small-town American intrigue. Maud Chadwick learns about loss as her
son leaves the nest--and learns about murder as her lawman lover
follows the trail of a serial killer.

Ballantine Books

ISBN: 0345376579

Copyright 1994

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and
we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in
the fishing boats at anchor there, As the night descended, tilting in
the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing
emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting
night.

Oh!  Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order
words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of
ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener
sounds.

"The Idea of Order at Key West"

--W A L L A C E S T E V E N S Maud The Rainbow Cafe treated any day
before a holiday like big money.

Maud wondered as she set the hot beef sandwich and mashed potatoes on
the counter just why Shirl expected this surge of extra business.  The
only people at the counter had been Ubub and Ulub Wood, and they'd
eaten what they always ate, the daily special.  Ubub and Ulub had other
names, but they'd been long forgotten.  It was either Dodge Haines or
Sonny Stuck who'd decided to call them by the letters on their license
plates--UBB and ULB.  They drove twin Ford pickups, black and
battered.

No one could figure out just how they'd managed to get those trucks
battered up in the same way, so that the only thing that distinguished
one from the other was the tag.

Maud hadn't wanted to go to work this day, and then she had.  She had
meant to stay home, but it was the Labor Day weekend, so she had
settled on going in an hour later than she usually did.  Shirl hadn't
even noticed, despite her prediction of their getting in a crowd.

She drew a cup of coffee in a white mug and put that in front of Ulub,
who didn't say anything, he never did.  Maud wondered if he ever had.

Since he always wanted the special, Shirl and Charlene always knew what
to give him.  Ubub did the talking, what there was of it, for both of
them.

Shirl was ringing up a take-out order of doughnuts and coffee, sitting
on a high stool behind the register and shoving the stuff across the
black counter at a teenage kid.  She handed him his change and a
venomous look as if he'd made her open the register at gunpoint.  He
left.

When the teenager left and was walking past the window, Shirl started
talking about "the little creep" to Maud.  Not the one who'd left, but
her son.  Probably, any kid that age brought her son to mind.  His name
was Joseph, and she only called him by name when she wasn't in a white
rage with him, which was seldom.

Everyone else called him loey.  He was "the little creep", his father,
who'd left them flat after Joey was born, was still "the big creep."

Charlene kept telling Shirl she should be glad he wasn't getting stoned
and flying off rooftops.

"The little creep's too lazy to fly, and of course he ain't doing
drugs--it'd cut into his shoplifting time."  Joey had hooked some
sunglasses from the SuperSaver Discount Store the day before.

Shirl had called this down the counter to Charlene as she shoved a
plain white bakery box at a customer.  Lemon chiffon was always the
special pie of the day except at Thanksgiving and Christmas, when
Charlene wiped off the blackboard and wrote in "Punkin."

Joey would come in nearly every day for lunch and Maud would get him
his favorite--beef stew--and butter four slices of bread for him.  I le
was usually off school, suspended but not expelled, and Shirl acted
like a parole officer.  The boy had a pale little face and a smile like
smoke, hardly there and quickly dispersed, as if there'd been something
in the past worth smiling about, a memory that had guttered out.

Shirl would shuffle towards him and start in, calling him "Joseph this"
and "Joseph that," ask him all sorts of questions: did he mow the lawn,
rake the leaves, shovel the snow?  depending on the time of year.  She
didn't stop until he'd eaten the fourth slice of bread, when she'd
stick another cigarette in her mouth and shuffle away.  Then Maud would
pour him a second cup of coffee.

He'd smile that vanishing smile at her, give her his condolences for
haing to work there, ball up his napkin, and leave.  It was a ritual
whenever he was suspended from school for breaking into lockers or
calling the math teacher a pervert.  a sleazeball, a scumbag.  Five
days a week Maud would watch him come in and go out and remember
something about gates of ivory, gates of horn.  She'd had three years
of college, mostly literature courses, and loved to read.  Still, she
couldn't recall where those gates were, or just what they meant, except
some important passage to somewhere, somewhere final.

As she hung her apron on the peg and took down her coat at seven
o'clock that evening, she thought how Joey would be going back to
school the day after Labor Day.

Then she stopped thinking about Joey and school, for that only made her
think of Chad, and he was gone.

That was why she hadn't wanted to go to work.  She had really wanted to
come down here, where she was now, to the end of the pier.

Maud sat on the end of the pier watching the party across the water.

It had been going on, it seemed, all summer, and she wondered, as
people do about the tree in the forest: did it simply stop when she
wasn't around to hear it?  It had been just before the Fourth of July
when she'd noticed the lights and come down here and looked across the
wide lake at Japanese lanterns like strings of Christmas lights.  The
first time she'd simply stood for a while, squinting over the water,
hearing the faint strains of music.

The next night she'd come down with her martini glass and sat on the
edge of the dock, her bare legs dangling over the edge.

The night after, she'd come with a wood-and-aluminum chair and a cold
bottle of Popov vodka, and in the following nights and weeks she slowly
furnished the end of the pier.

After the Fourth, she'd brought down a small table and a Colonel
Sanders plastic tub filled with ice in which she'd stowed her
ready-mixed-martini Popov bottle.  Then, when Chad came home from
college, she'd got him to haul down an old rocker from the bedroom of
the cottage that sat back along the path in the woods.

He told her it wasn't a pier, it was a dock, and he couldn't imagine
why she'd want to sit out here for hours at night.

Chad had been sitting in the aluminum chair, drinking beer, looking
around the lake frontage, checking out the marshy grass-the pier was in
a little cove--and the tree with a heavy root above ground like a bent
knee, a tree praying in the matted grass and weeds.

He sighed, world-weary at twenty, and asked her, "Why do you keep
working at Shirl's?"

"Because it's dark and quiet, I guess."

He pulled another beer from the carton, there was a little sucking
noise as he uncapped it.  "I hope that's not what life is, just
something dark and quiet."

"If you're lucky," she'd said.

In the darkness his head turned.  "Come on, Mom."

It hadn't been the real question, anyway.  It wasn't "Why do you work
at Shirl's?"  but "Why do we live in such a nonhappening place, why
didn't you finish college and get your English degree, why didn't you
get a great job, become an executive, maybe, or at least marry one,
someone we could have lived with instead of him, why don't you own your
own restaurant, why is that a cube of ice in your glass and not the
moon?"  Maud said, "Shirl likes you."

He was lighting a cigarette, and the flame from his disposable lighter
lit up his profile and went out.  "Shouldn't she?  I'm polite."

"Polite isn't the point.  She doesn't like anybody.  But she does
you.

She's always holding you up to loey, and even he likes you."

Maud shook the Popov bottle free from ice crystals.  "What do you talk
to her about?  She won't let Charlene or me wait on you."

Maud was extremely pleased by this.

"Her feet."

Maud twisted the bottle back into the plastic tub and turned to him.

"Her feet?"

"She's got corns and bunions.  That's why she's always wearing
slippers."

"Concentrate on You"--they liked Cole Porter over there-- came
floating across the lake.

"It's the first time she ever offered anybody a job since I've been
working there, and that's ten years.  You liked it up here, then."

"When you're ten you like practically anyplace except jail.

Anyway, I don't think I'd've made a fortune in tips at Shirl's.

Don't they play any real music over there?"

"You can't dance to the Grateful Dead.  They like to dance.  I'm not
saying you should've taken the job--just that she offered it.

And Lorraine said Jewel Chapman would've loved to have you work at the
feed store."

"There's just not enough money in it.  You want me to earn money for
school, and there's a lot of house painting in Hebrides--" "I'm not
saying .  . . Oh, well."  Hebrides was twenty miles away, without a car
he could only stay here on weekends instead of all summer long.

Today he had left, which was why she hadn't wanted to go to work.

But some part of her knew better, that if she didn't go in, she'd just
sit around the cottage all day, like a mourner returned from a
funeral.

They had taken the local taxi to Bakersville to get the small plane to
the city to get the large plane to get the space shuttle .  . .

Maud stared up at the night sky, looking for an airplane's tiny red
light, like a red star trailing across the sky, as if his plane might
have doubled back.  She thought that pinpoint of red light, throbbing
along, must have replaced the sound of a train whistle for pure
melancholy.

He'd left early, two days before he had to.  "Mom, I was wondering .

.

. Would you mind .  . .?"

Whenever Chad started with that, she knew she'd mind.

"I-was-wondering-would-you-mind" was a group of words that had taken on
a life of its own.  Yes, she'd mind, though she almost always said no,
she wouldn't, because what followed was never truly unreasonable, just
painful.  It always had something to do with going away, leaving before
he actually had to.

"Disappearing" was the way Maud thought of it, Chad called it "leaving
for college."

The latest addition to the pier's decor was a lamp Maud had found in
the crawl space beneath the cottage eaves.  It was black iron with
clawlike legs and had a stained beige shade of faded roses.

She'd got Chad to rig several extension cords together so they would
stretch back and plug into the outlet at the rear of the cottage.  Maud
read a lot.  When there was a lull in the party across the lake, when
everyone had gone in from the terrace and battened down inside and she
couldn't make out the music, she'd switch on the lamp and read whatever
she'd brought down with the vodka.

Lately, she'd been bringing to the pier her old college anthology of
American poetry.  She'd come upon a poem by Wallace Stevens called "The
Idea of Order at Key West," the point of which she was trying to
grasp.

This was not for her a mental exercise or a desire to further educate
herself in the world of poetry.  It was very important to her (although
she couldn't have said why) that she understand this poem.  A lot, she
felt, would then be revealed to her.  She'd read parts of it to Sam,
who couldn't understand it either, and seemed more interested anyway in
complaining about the lamp.

Sam was always fussing about the lamp, telling her to get rid of it.

"It's dangerous," Sam kept saying, though he was pretty vague about the
danger.  She asked if he was afraid it would electrocute the fish if it
fell into the lake, and he said it would probably blow fuses all over
the place.  What was dangerous about that?  she asked him.  Just
blowing a fuse?

"Well, but don't you think it must look kind of strange if they"-he
nodded towards the party--"look over here?  And see someone sitting
under a lamp?  It would look strange, I think."

She told him she needed the lamp for reading.

The only person she knew who understood about books, how they would
make you feel rooted to the ground and to the past, somehow, the way TV
never could, was Miss Ruth Porte.  Miss Ruth came to Shirl's every
evening except Thursdays and weekends for her dinner.  She always sat
in the high-backed rear booth, the side not facing the big television
screen that rattled and wept its way through the day.  It drove Miss
Ruth Porte crazy, she said.  Why didn't they bring along a book--Miss
Ruth liked Jane Austen--if they wanted entertainment?

Miss Ruth would smooth her hand over her vellum-covered Jane Austen,
carefully wrapped in plastic, and say, "It's just like family, her
people.  It's the kind of thing these new writers don't understand,
that readers want to feel this is a family they can almost walk and
talk amongst.  Writers these days"--it was never clear who they
were--"only want to write about breakups and breakdowns, everything
unraveling and everybody going to the devil."  She would pause then
over her menu, open it and close it several times, not satisfied with
the expression of whatever notion she had.  "It doesn't have to be good
family--the dear Lord knows most families aren't, and certainly Miss
Jane Austen knows it.  Let's see, what's the special?"

Maud would stand patiently with her small book of checks and pencil for
taking the order.  Often she would make comments about whatever book
she was reading, not because she wanted to soft-soap Miss Ruth (who was
the last of the Porte family and rumored to be rich) but because there
was hardly anyone else to talk about books to.  Besides Wallace
Stevens, Maud was reading F.

Scott Fitzgerald, and Miss Ruth was very enthusiastic.  saying he was
much, much better than Ernest Hemingway, despite what the Book Mark
people thought.  This was a reading club that met every Thursday night,
which was why she didn't come into the Rainbow Cafe.

Miss Ruth would always inquire about Maud's son, Chad, whom she thought
to be "splendid.  just splendid," and it was no idle compliment.  It
was right in line with what everyone else seemed to think, and Maud
wished they'd stop talking about him as if he were a visiting
divinity.

Everyone seemed hanging around waiting to get anointed or something.

He knew what to say to people, it was as simple as that.  God only knew
where he'd got this instinct, for it surely hadn't come from her.  She
considered herself what they call pathologically shy, which was one
reason she liked working at Shirl's.  All the customers were used to
Shirl's surliness, which had spilled over onto Charlene and Wash, the
cook, and even the two part-time girls who came in when there was what
Shirl thought of as a rush.

Maud, compared with everyone else, was considered a real find.

Shirl's customers were always asking her what she was doing working
here, and she would always answer "Just lucky, I guess," with a little
wink, and they would laugh.  When they all sat in a line at the
counter--Dodge and Sonny and Mayor Sims and sometimes even Wade Hayden
from the post office, and Ubub and Ulub-- and reacted to something in
unison, turning their heads right or left, it would put Maud in mind of
a decrepit chorus line, and then she would have to laugh, too.

She knew it mystified the customers that she was working as a waitress
when she had all of that education.  It was hard to make people
understand that education or not, there were some people who had no
ambition in that way, who didn't want a profession, and who didn't want
a lot of money, and she was one of them.  So with her three years of
college and her timid smile, she imagined they took her for someone
with a sad past, like a duchess in exile.

Two speedboats ripped by, crossing in each other's wake.  The pier felt
the reverberation, the slap of the churning water, before it closed
behind the boats, smoothly and seamlessly.

Maud stuck an olive on a cocktail stirrer.  The dish of olives sat on
the wooden barrel she'd found behind the house.  The stirrer had come
from a small, flat box of six she'd found in the crawl space.  Each had
been carefully niched into an inner strip of white cardboard.  They
were clear glass topped with pink glass flamingoes, the sort of thing
people never buy for themselves, but give as gifts.  This one had never
been used, or never been given.

Another small craft cozied up to the dock over there.  By now there
were at least a dozen, more than usual because it was the Labor Day
party.  The guests didn't all come by boat, of course, most of them
probably drove down some old road on the other side of the house.

Now from this silvery-white boat emerged the party-goers.  She was too
far away to see what they actually were wearing, beyond brief blobs of
gold or blue or red, but she knew some of them must be wearing long
gowns that made it difficult to maneuver out of the boat.  The high,
trilling voices of the women, the brief whoops of laughter from the men
that accompanied their emergence from the silver cocoon of the rocking
boat suggested to her that they were rescuing their hems from trailing
in the water.  Others would come down to the dock, with their drinks
and cigarettes--she could see the coal ends throbbing on and off.  They
helped the new arrivals up and then all trooped back to the party,
towards the patio.  She wondered where the latecomers had come from.

Was there another party farther down the lake that took precedence?

That was hard to believe.  Probably from their small cocktail parties
in their smaller cottages they had met briefly with this as the final
destination.

This scene was repeated endlessly, until the dark lake over there was
divided by strips of light from the boats, so many that it sometimes
resembled a small marina.

Maud had always been quite sure they were not ordinary people and that
they were in some way acutely blessed, as one might be who would remain
in a state of grace for a season.  She never came to the pier during
the day to see what the house over there looked like then.  And she
knew that this was the last party, the l.abor Day party, for La Porte
was basically a summer place, where the summer people threw open the
shutters of the big Victorian houses right after Memorial Day and shut
them after Labor Day.  Then La Porte became a ghost town.  To hear
Shirl talk it was always a ghost town, the summer people came in their
shorts and Docksiders, hung over and tan as only the rich seem to get,
to do little more than buy the Sunday paper and milk.

"Where's the warehouse, that's what I want to know," Shirl would
grumble around her smoke.  "They all got food at those lake
places--where do they get it?  One of them's got a helicopter pad-is
that how?  They fly it in--the caviar, the champagne, the roasted
pheasant?"

Maud held her glass by the stem.  She hated drinking martinis from a
warm glass, and between drinks she shoved the glass into the ice to
cool it again.  The several patio doors over there were all open now,
and she could see them dancing.  Sometimes they had a real live combo
out on the patio, other times she supposed it must be a stereo.  It
comforted her, like the book in her lap, that they liked Cole Porter.

It was like a party out of the past, something that might have taken
place in the 1920S or 30s, something her dead parents might have
attended, and danced to "Begin the Beguine."

Several of them--she had to squint to make them out--had come out on
the long, long patio and were dancing to it right now.

Laughter and glass breaking.

She picked her glass from the bucket, poured herself a drink, and
dropped in an olive.  If the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald walked, it
walked there, laughing and breaking glasses on the patio.

But the ghost of Wallace Stevens would not need to get drunk and break
glasses.  (He had been in insurance, to her great mystification.) Maud
even went so far as to believe that the ghost of Wallace Stevens could
sit comfortably on the end of the pier in the folding chair reserved
for Sam (and C,had, when he was here) and contemplate the party across
the water.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

(Maud read)

The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body,
fluttering Its empty sleevesShe replaced the flamingo-topped cocktail
stirrer that she used as a marker and closed the book.  Sipping her
martini, she thought about it, frowning slightly.  The sea was
formless, apparently.  So the singer had to .  . . had to .  . . She
squinted, looking offacross the lake .  . . What?  She shook her
head.

It would come to her, sometime, what Wallace Stevens meant.

Then there was her favorite line--oh, what a line!

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know.  . .

"I wonder who," she had said to Sam back in July, "Ramon Fernandez
was."

Sam had been silent for a moment, since Sam rarely shot back answers,
and then he said that he was probably some friend of the poet.  "When
I'm in Hebrides next week I could go to the library and see if there's
anything there on that poem."

Maud slapped the book shut and stared.  "No!  All I said was I
wondered.  Wonder--wonder!  The answer's something I have to decide for
myself."  She actually felt a little afraid that Sam might just look
the poem up.

He sighed.  "Maud.  If Ramon was a personal friend--" "Ramon
Fernandez.

We're not on a first-name basis with him," she snapped.

Sam shook his head.  "Well, if Senor Fernandez was a friend of Mr.
Stevens, there's nothing for you to decide."

"You're so literal.  And what do you mean, Senor'?  How do you know
he's Spanish or Mexican, anyway?"  Maud was frowning at the Popov
bottle to see if there was enough to get her through this
conversation.

"I'm not surprised you don't understand this poem."

"Cuban," Sam had said equably, as he snapped open another can of
Coors.

"What?"  Maud shot up in her chair, back rigid.  "He is not Cuban."

Sam shrugged.  "Stands to reason.  The loet's in Kev West.  right?

Florida.  Closest place where somebody might be from named Ramon
Fernandez"--he tilted the Coors and drank--"is Cuba."

Maud slapped her hand to her forehead.  "Your name is Dutch, isn't
it?

Dutch.  Does that mean you commute from Lancaster, Pennsylvania?"  She
turned a furious face to him.  "You're deliberately ruining this poem
for me."  She turned away and stared out over the water.  "And it's
important."  She felt like crying.

"Sorry."

After a suffering silence that had Maud rocking and staring straight
across the lake, Sam suggested that if she was so curious about the
couple on the other side of the lake he could always cruise around with
a disturbing-the-peace complaint.  Maud got so anxious that she yelled
at him, something she hardly ever did with anyone but Chad, and told
him not to dare.  She wasn't "curious," and how could they be
disturbing the peace when they probably owned a half-mile of lake
frontage?

She thought she heard a scrunching on the path, Sam coming along with
his six-pack of beer, but when she turned to look, saw that it was the
black cat that had turned up a month or so ago and kept disappearing
and reappearing.  It walked slowly and stealthily onto the pier and
simply sat, blinking.

Maud tried not to look at it because it made her stomach tighten,
seeing that it was sick and probably a stray.  It was the eye that was
bad.  It must have been a tumor, for the right eye was completely
clouded over and bigger than the other.  There was no iris to see, just
what looked like a hard blue carapace that must have started out small
but gotten larger and larger.

This was the fourth night the cat had come, and she had remembered to
bring along a plastic dish.  A half-pint of milk was sitting on top of
the ice, and she poured that into the dish and set it some little
distance away since she imagined the cat wasn't all that trustful of
people.  Maud wondered what the cat did during the day, whether it hung
around the pier, catching field mice in the rushy grass.  It made no
move toward the milk.

Could it see the dish, even?

To Maud, the cat's having a tumorous eye was a source of inexplicable
dread, worse than seeing it in an old, sick person.

What made it worse was that the cat had this affliction but didn't
know.

"Why in hell would you want the poor cat to know?"  Sam had asked.

"Wouldn't that just make it worse for it?"

"That's not what I meant, you don't understand."

"Would you want to know?"

Maud couldn't really understand it herself, why it was worse that the
cat wasn't aware that this shouldn't be happening to it.

"Yes.  Anyway, that's a stupid question because I'd know whether I
wanted to or not."

"Okay, then.  The cat doesn't know, whether it wants to or not."

"You're just twisting it all around."  She had watched the cat that
night, sitting as it was now, yawning, not knowing, unaware that
something hideous was consuming its left eye.  It wasn't that Maud
found the malformation repulsive, it was that the cat didn't know that
there was an alternative, that its eye might have been perfectly
normal.

"I.et's just say," Sam had said when the cat first turned up, "that the
eye doesn't hurt, which it probably doesn't, the way that cat just sits
there and doesn't seem to mind."

"How do you know it doesn't--?"

Sam had waved his hand for her to shut up.  "For the sake of the
argument let's just say.  Now, for all that cat knows, that's just the
way things are supposed to be.  One day something starts clouding up in
its eye.  Does it think, Je-sus, but I better get me to a doctor," or
I'm dying," or I'm going blind'?  No.  It just takes what comes and
doesn't worry about it."

The cat at this point had gone over to the edge of the pier an lain
down, as if it were bored by all of this talk about its fate.  Then it
rolled over.

"You're just reading stuff into that cat's mind.  Stuff that cat
doesn't have any idea about and doesn't care."  Sam had popped another
cap on a can of Coors for emphasis.

Maud hadn't answered.  The conversation was going around in circles and
she couldn't explain.  She imagined herself in a room with a window
suddenly shuttered against the light, imagined herself starting,
sitting up, wondering what had happened.  No, she thought impatiently,
that wasn't it.

The cat had inspected the dish of milk now, but didn't drink it.

Could it see it?  That was stupid, it had one good eye.  Anyway, it
could certainly smell it.  Maybe it was too cold.  Maybe she shouldn't
have put the carton on the ice.  Just because she and Sam liked their
drinks icy cold didn't mean the cat would.

Why would you want the poor cat to know?

Maud fingered the book in her lap--the book of American poetry-as if it
were one of those little stoppered bottles she thought Indians used for
magical purposes and it might release the answer.  The cat was sitting
nearer her chair, looking up at her with its clouded eye.  It was worse
than pity, what she felt.  It was more like remorse and shame.  Blood
crept up her neck, heated her face as if a torch had been set to it,
and she would have poured herself another drink except that a tremor
had started in her hand so that she had to set the glass down.  It was
as if a task had been set for her: she must work out the answer to this
problem about why it was worse for the cat that it didn't know.

For the life of her, she couldn't think of one single human situation
that might fit the cat's.  Again, she thought of a room, imagining
herself asleep in the dark.  She squinted across the water, where the
lanterns were lifting and bobbing.  It must be windier there.

The room could not be like a prison cell.  It was important that it be
a fine room, one with a very high ceiling and pale, prettily tinted
walls.  And at the end were to very high windows, long and narrow,
almost like French windows but not reaching the floor.  Curtains made
of light stuff like chiffon would rise and fall in the breeze.  The
curtains were pale yellow.  Every morning (except for the last one,
when she would rush from the room, terrified, she'd decided)--every
morning, she would wake slowly to see these soft, lemon-colored
curtains billowing out in a wind blown from .  . . where?  what?  From
the water, the sea.

For this room would be somewhere in a warm country--Greece,
maybe--where the east-facing windows with their delicate.  blown
curtains would franne two oblongs of blue sky.  Maud rubbed her elbows
and searched for the right shade of blue.  She thought of her one piece
of good jewelry, a ring that had been her grandmother's, an opal.  The
lemon-yellow curtains ( it might be Cyprus, where the lemon trees grew)
would blow in a wind off the green sea.  The walls would be pink, and
the ceiling perhaps garlanded, the bed a sort of filigree ironwork, and
no furniture except for a wardrobe that would house her few dresses,
all long cotton with straps, no sleeves.  She would go with bare
shoulders and feet.

Maud started when the music changed across the water, and realized she
was a long way from the cat's problem.  She was merely dreaming about
herself walking in pale cotton dresses, hems to her ankles, walking
across the cool stone of the floor.

This was the scene that would meet her eyes every morning.  She would
see the pale pink stuccoed walls (it might be a villa in Italy) and the
frescoed ceiling, the pale curtains and the opal sky.

And then one morning she would wake slowly to partial darkness.  It
would seem at first like one of those half-dreams, an inner darkness,
something the mind knew was only temporary and would soon climb up into
full light.

Only in this case it didn't.  For one of the windows would be missing
The point, Maud thought, frowning, was important.  It was not like
waking into a slow and awful awareness that you couldn't see out of one
eye, and jumping up and calling the doctor.  But that the window was
missing.  Where it had been was only the wall, the wall grown over the
place where the window had been.  On one side of the room everything
was dark, the curtains were gone, the pink drained from the walls, the
figures holding garlands vanished from the ceiling.

It was all gone, the bed was dark, she could not make out the
wardrobe.

And she could not say, "I'm blind in one eye."  She could not run out
into the street in her terror and yell that her room was disappearing,
that the wall had overgrown the window.  No one would believe her.

They would think she was merely some Greek crazy, gone mad like the one
who had murdered her children.  She would be completely isolated.  She
would be alone with no explanation.  And this was what made her problem
like the cat's.

Now she felt better, slightly.  She felt a bit triumphant because she
could explain to Sam how much more dreadful it was for the cat not
knowing.

She visualized it again, that room, floating over the Aegean.  Sea of
jade, a sky of opal, the diaphanous curtains of milky yellow like
dissolving pearl, a room of pure light, without the burden of
furniture, of the past, of the future .  . .

With its missing window vanishing from her mind's eye Maud felt her
throat constricting.

She was relieved to hear just after that the sound of Sam's car pulling
up.  Maud squinted back at the headlights, which switched off, and she
heard the door slam.

"Evening," he said as he set about emptying the six-pack of Coors into
the tub of ice, shoving five into the space around the Popov bottle and
setting one on the upturned barrel.  Sam sighed and lowered himself
into a chair.  Before he said anything, he always had to line up his
cigarettes and matches and pop the can of Coors.

Having done that, he settled back in the aluminum and woodslatted
chair, crossed an ankle over his knee, and rubbed the ankle.

"It's the big one tonight, I guess," he said of the party, and tipped
the can back and drained half of it.  Then he offered Maud a cigarette
from his pack of Winstons.  They sat back and smoked.

"Had to break one up over at the Red Barn earlier," he said.

"Bunch of kids were on something.  Then I had to go over to Spirit Lake
and break up a fight at the hotel."

Sam had been La Porte's sheriff for years.  He'd started out as deputy
and was now in charge of the four-man police department.

He was easygoing and well liked.

"That place is crazy."  Maud shook her head.  Spirit Lake was another
summer resort town, two miles away, even smaller than La Porte, and
even emptier in the winter.  If people thought La Porte was a ghost
town, well, it had nothing on the ghostliness of Spirit Lake in dead
winter.

"Still, it's Labor Day.  Guess you can't blame people for wanting to
celebrate," Sam said sympathetically.  That was one reason he was well
liked, he could make allowances.  "Chad get off?"

Maud nodded, looking straight ahead.  "I was about to write a letter to
him today.  I had it all worked out, but--" "Why were you writing?  He
only just left.  He's off to visit his friend.  Isn't that what you
said?  That he was going to visit his friend in Belle Harbor?"

Maud squinched her eyes shut.  Sometimes he drove her crazy.  "I know
where he is.  Do you have to keep saying it?"  Irritated, she tossed
her watered-down drink into the lake and stuck her glass into the
ice.

"I wasn't going to mail it yet, just write it, that's all.  Anyway,
that's not the point."

' L_

"Oh," said Sam.

He was waiting patiently for her to tell him the point, but now she
couldn't bring to mind exactly the way she'd felt when she'd tried to
write the letter.  Her fresh drink tasted tepid.  "Never mind," she
said, though she'd forgotten the point herself.

Her saying that bothered him, so he urged her to go on.

"Well, just don't keep interrupting."  There was a silence while she
tried to enter into the feelings she had had earlier when she was
writing the letter.  Trying to.  All day at the Rainbow Cafe she had
been fretting over the fight they'd had abot where Chad's money was
going.  So when they'd got to the airport neither one of them was in an
especially amiable mood.  "This is what I don't understand," she was
saying about the letter.  "The words were all there, as neatly lined up
as boxed chocolates one after the other.  They were clearly in my
head.

Now, why is it they wouldn't simply move down my arm to my fingers and
right out along the page?  I started writing and it all disappeared.

It was like the ink just dried up in my mind."

Sam said nothing, but she knew he was thinking the problem over.

Sam wasn't much of a letter writer.

"The words just--frizzled."

"Frizzled?"

"You know--curled up around the edges.  Frizzled.  Burned.  Turned to
ashes."

"Hmm."

She knew it took Sam a while to think things like this over.

Sometimes he made no comment at all beyond a "well" or an "oh," but
that was one reason she liked to talk to him.  If Sam couldn't think of
a helpful reply, he made none at all, except for the times when he was
being deliberately (she thought) obtuse.  But usually, when her full
thought was out, if he couldn't add to it, he didn't try to take away
from it by saying something like others might: "Have a hard time
writing myself," or "Try again," or something like that which demeaned
her point.  And he never tried to cheer her up, even though he often
found her in a bad mood, to say the least.  Most people would probably
have thought his silenc strange, after all, wasn't that what friends
were for?

To cheer you up?

No, friends knew the difference between that downcast, hangdg, lowdown
feeling people called "blues" (music the party across the water never
played, for some reason) and what Maud had.  And what Maud had was
something unnameable and probably unnatural, unless you wanted to call
it "depression."  That was probably ú the only word anyone could come
up with, but it didn't help her much.

After the lull in the dancing the combo started in on "Brazil."

She was glad she'd never left anyone behind in Brazil or it would
probably have started her crying.

Another boat--or was it the same black Chris-Craft?--ripped by near the
far shore.  "Isn't that the same one?  Where do they go, anyway?

There's nothing at the other end of the lake."  There wasn't anything
at either end as far as she could make out, except for the Red Barn,
which wasn't much but what the name said.  They sold beer and
half-smokes and had a jukebox and one of those big TV screens like the
wall of a house caving in on you.

It showed up, the depression, in the way she'd been about to weep over
the cat's eye and the loss of the high-ceilinged room.  It wasn't
natural to cry as much as she did, and god only knew, to cry over what
she did.  Oh, she imagined a lot of people cried over music, songs that
put them in mind of their dead sweethearts in Brazil and so forth.  But
she'd go straight as a board, freeze up right in front of the
milk-shake machine at the Rainbow if someone played "Blue Bayou" or
Elvis sang "I'm so lonesome I could cry."  It was like her hand was
electrified, holding the aluminum milkshake container, unable to
release it.

You don't cry just looking at your own cat because she's sleeping with
her head on her paws, or over a black car because its rear wheels are
up on blocks, or at a rock you see by the side of the road, or a band
of wrens waving on tall stalks and then suddenly taking off.  At least
she thought you don't.  And it nearly went without saying she'd put
away all the pictures of Chad when he was four and seven and ten and
even sixteen.  It might be that when she had the roll developed that
they'd taken before he left, she'd just tuck them in the album without
looking at them, as if they might burn her eyes out.

It looked to her like she had two choices: crazy or depressed.

The issue seemed to be settled a few days ago when she'd picked up a
copy of Time (or was it Newsweek?) that featured an article on
depression.

It was epidemic, almost.  It was growing among young people (which
didn't help her own case).  But there were different kinds.  She read
all of the symptoms with interest, not surprised that the tendency to
cry was one.  Fatigue.  That.fit.  Although you didn't really score
yourself, the idea was that if you had perhaps three or four symptoms
you were depressed, five or six, seriously, more than six, almost
clinically.  And it counted, also, which ones you had.  Any thoughts of
suicide were, of course, rather serious.  A lot of thinking about
suicide was pretty dangerous, and attempting it--this seemed to come
across to the reporters as a surprise-was the clincher.  There were
twelve symptoms.  Maud checked and saw she had all of them except
one.

It wasn't exactly what you wanted to write your mother about.  But her
mother was dead.  It wasn't exactly what you wanted to write your son
about, either.

"I don't know," said Sam.

"What?  You don't know what?"  His voice had brought her out of her
reverie.

"Whether it's the same one."

"What same one?"

Sam turned and gave her one of his long looks.  "The boat, for god's
sake.  You asked if it was the same .  .."

Maud had forgotten what she'd said.  "You're so literal."

"You forgot, didn't you?"  He took a pull at his Coors, smiling in that
exasperating way he did when he'd caught her out in some small thing.

"You were just sitting here mooning over something and forgot what you
were saying."

Her little laugh sounded artificial even to her.  "Just because you
take everything literally .  .."

"Literal has nothing to do with it.  Want some more?"

Sam was tugging the Popov bottle out of the ice, which he wasn't
supposed to do, and he knew it, and she put her hand over his and
shoved it back down.  Maud liked to pour her own drink in a certain way
and at certain times.

Holding her glass up to the lamplight, she said, "Well, you're
certainly in one of your moods."

"What're you talking about?  I don't have moods."

That was true.  Even when she knew he was sad, or disturbed, he didn't
show it.  "You certainly do.  Usually, it's when you've been going
around at night checking on us."

"Us?"

She turned a patient little smile on him.  "Ever since Nancy Alonzo was
murdered you've been checking up.  I guess it's nice of you to do it.

But it makes you moody.  Obsessed' is a better word."

He just sat there smoking and not answering.  When Sam didn't answer,
she knew she'd struck a nerve, and pulled back.  "It was pretty
terrible, what happened.  But it happened in Hebrides.

You're not sheriff of Elton County, so you shouldn't be worrying about
it."

"It might have happened in Hebrides, but she lived in La Porte.

That cuts no ice with Sedgewick, though."  Sedgewick was the sheriff
over there, and there wasn't much love lost between the two men.

As Sam talked about Sedgewick and Elton County, Maud poured herself a
cold martini and listened to the music.

From across the water the faint strains of a whole orchestral
arrangement scored her thought.  It was only the music, but she had
long ago learned the words:

The morningfound you miles away, With still a million things to say .

. .

Maud could feel her scalp prickle and tighten, the skin crawl.  It was
the exact same feeling that people were always using to describe fear
or disgust: "My skin just crawled."  It was as if the thoughts had
somehow got too large for the skull to contain them, a terrible feeling
that traveled down her arms and broke out in gooseflesh.

She would have to practice harder at containing her thoughts.

That image of her mother had slipped out from behind one of her mind's
bolted doors, at least she thought she'd bolted it, but here it was,
opening a crack, and her dead mother slipping out like a child told to
stay in its room, and sneaking along the hall to tiptoe downstairs.

And then the image became unruly, clotted with other images,
unmanageable, for it was as if her mother were slyly opening other
doors along the way, doors that Maud had stupidly, momentarily left
unsecured.  Her mother was letting out the other occupants, there was
the blur of her dead father (who had died too long ago to visualize
concretely), there was her Aunt Sheba, with her wry, ironic mouth given
to caustic comments, who marched resolutely down the hall collecting
Chad, Chad at the age of five or six--Aunt Sheba coaxing him out to
come along, there was a party, let's not miss it.  They were all
collecting on the stairs before Maud could control them, herd them back
into their locked rooms--shove them back behind their doors.  There
they were, all gathered on the stairs to sit and watch through the
banisters the flamboyant party to which they had not been invited.  The
party that flowed from inside to outside, from the old family drawing
room out onto a lawn and then across the lake.

And there was no control: her mind was crowded with old relatives, ones
she hadn't thought of for ages, ones that it wasn't necessary
absolutely to keep locked up--other aunts, uncles, the cousin who had
died of cancer at twenty-eight, and then friends she had lost touch
with.  They were filling the hall, the wide staircase, peering over the
mahogany banister, searching the lake as if those passing boats might
ferry them across itReturn I will To old Brazil

There on a lawn somewhere was Chad at five, at ten, at sixteen.

Go back, back inside.  She could never, of course, tell this to another
living soul, because how could they understand what she meant?  A
psychiatrist, maybe, someone like Dr. Elizabeth Hooper, who'd been in
the Rainbow that day, but who else?  "Possessive," that's what Shirl
would say."  You want to keep that kid locked up, that's all."  Of
course, Shirl would be the least sympathetic of all, since she spent so
much of her time yelling at Joey to either stop playing hooky or haul
ass out of the house and work.

And yet Maud didn't think she was possessive--not in that sense.

She frowned in her effort of trying to figure out just what it was:
that she wanted to be able to go back and see it all over again--not
like snapshots (they only caused her pain), but to have all of those
stages of growing up out there, like the lines of light thrown by the
lanterns across the water.

She clutched at the book of poetry in her lap as she looked across the
lake--the music was louder, faster, strident with the sting of some
female vocalist--and thought about the woman in the poem walking by the
sea, singing.  Maud had got far enough in her understanding of this
poem to know that somehow the woman singing there had power over the
sea.  A simple mortal woman had some kind of control over it.

But the singer wasn't simple, Maud admitted to herself,
despairingly.

Obviously the poet meant the woman was an artist.  A singer, a poet, a
musician--an artist.  She had "genius," and that was the reason she had
control, although Maud did not at all know just what the control was,
except that it was crucial.

"Tina Turner."

Maud jumped slightly at the sound of Sam's voice.  Half her mind had
been aware he had stopped talking some moments ago and had been just
sitting there, quiet, drinking his beer, listening to the party across
the water.  "What?  What?"  She squinted at him.

Sam nodded toward the other side of the lake.  "Tina Turner."  He
yawned, patted his hand politely against his mouth, and looked down at
Maud's lap.  "You still trying to figure out that poem about Key
West?"

It annoyed her-well, embarrassed her a little--that he seemed to be
able to read her thoughts.  Irritably, she asked, "How can you tell
that's Tina Turner?  You can't possibly.  It's too far away."

"Well, I can tell."

He could not, it was just a singer and a fast, jumpy song.  Hardly
anyone was dancing, there was only a little clutch of tiny figures.

She liked the small daubs of the gowns of the women, even though the
dark, the distance, and the lantern light muted them, blurring the
pinks, turning them lavender.  And then she realized she could no more
see such mutations ihan Sam could hear whose voice that was.

Someone--a man, she thought-- broke away from the group and walked
slowly down to the dock and stood there smoking.

"It's not about Key West," she said when she saw Sam fold a stick of
gum into his mouth.  He did this sometimes preparatory to leaving, and
she did not want him to go.

"It says it is in the title.  The Idea of Order--' " She sighed
hugely.

"Oh, for god's sake."  She started to lecture him and thought she
should change her tone if she wanted to keep him there.  Patiently, she
explained.  Re-explained.  "It is about a kind of order--" "I figured
that out.  It says so in the title."

"It is about a person's ability to order things.  In this case it's a
singer making some sense out of the sea .  . . No .  .."

She held up her palm as if to stave off some objection Sam had clearly
not been about to make--yet.  "To master' it."

"Tina Turner, for example."

She refused to speak to him now.

Diplomatically, he changed the subject.

"That cat's going belly-over off this dock in one more minute."

"What?"  she shouted.

"Well, for Christ's sake, there's no need to scream.  All I said was,
that cat--" She looked at the black cat.  It was hunched down nearly
halfover the edge, as if it had some serious business under there,
something on the underside of the splintered wooden plank.  "It's
okay."  But it wasn't okay with her that now her attention had been
drawn again to the cat, at least, though, its bad eye was turned away
from her.  "Don't you know if that cat belongs to anyone?"  She knew
the tone was accusatory, the implication was that he was a policeman
and he should know the comings and goings of the village's animals.

"No.  It's just a stray.  It's not wild, though."

Maud fingered out the olive in her glass and sucked on it.  "Why isn't
there a vet around here?  That cat's really sick."

"Well, there's one in Hebrides.  You thinking of taking that cat to a
vet?"

"The tumor's getting bigger.  How can I?  I don't have a car."

"There's the Merk."

"It doesn't run, you know that."  She knew the black Mercedes
fascinated Sam.  Where had Maud ever got an old Mercedes?

"Trouble could be in the transmission, the main cylinder."

Main cylinder.  What was he talking about?  Maud wondered if it was
the main cylinder that was burning out or grinding down in her brain.

The glass sweated in her hand and she put it down on the barrel top,
closed her eyes, and listened to the water slapping out against the
pilings.

Sam went on talking about someone on Route 12 who was a transmission
specialist, named Paul.  A genius at it.  "And blind as a bat," Sam
said, with a little, wondering shake of his head.

Maud turned her gaze from the dancers over there, who seemed to be
drooping against one another like flowers.  She knew there were blind
musicians but not blind transmission specialists.

"He's got the touch.  It's all in the fingers, you think about it."

Sam ran his thumb over the tips of his fingers, back and forth, eyes
shut, as if he were feeling some delicate mechanism.

"You know, if you've got no use for that car, give it to Chad.

This is his last year, by summer Paul could have that can-" He
stopped.

"Last year."  It was an implicit, unspoken agreement between them that
Chad's last year in college was not to be talked of as such.

Now Sam was making as much noise as he could crumpling his can of
Coors, and talking so fast about cars in general he might have been the
auctioneer at the annual police auction of repos, trying to drown out
what lingering vibration there might be from that phrase as if it were
a plucked violin string.  Chad was a favorite, a favored topic of
conversation, and so was his time at the university, but it was to be
talked about as if it were never-ending, a thread woven in and out of
all of the other talk, drawing it together, yet never cut.  Bad enough
in itself he was away, that this might be more than a mere caprice on
his part or Maud's part or Fate's part was not to be looked at.  That
there might indeed be some final term was not to be spoken of in any
concrete sense.  Not, for lord's sake, in the sense that a present, a
gift, would be given to immortalize the occasion of Chad's final
departure.

"I saw a nice little Datsun that I think you could get cheap."

"I don't want another car.  What would I do with a car?"

Sam took a mouthful of beer, drew in on his cigarette, was
thoughtful.

"You could get out and around more.  Go places."

"Oh, for Pete's sake."  She hated it when someone started talking about
her as if she were an invalid, someone like Ada Chowder, who lived in
the Hebrides Nursing Home and was only released to ú visit her son and
daughter-in-law every third Sunday.  It wasn't like Sam to say
something so stupid.  "You could take it," she said, feeling
vengeful.

"What?  The Datsun?  I've got--" "No, damn it.  The cat.  You could
take it to Hebrides."

Sam made a tiny, gurgling noise in his throat, the sound of someone
who's choking a little on the craziness of a notion.

"Don't I have enough to do without carting cats around?"  His laugh was
deprecating.  "Besides, Sims would really like that, wouldn't he?  Me
using the car to take a cat to Hebrides?"

Mayor Sims spent most of his time in the Half Moon Bar and couldn't
care less, but she knew Sam was feeling defensive and in his pause to
take several more sips of beer would come up with at least four other
reasons why he couldn't take the cat.

"It'd give Donny a laugh, too, that's for sure."  Sam caved in his
empty beer can, put it in the basket.

"So what.  He's only a deputy.  You're the loot."

As he was shaking the ice shavings from his next can, Sam looked up,
squinting at her.  "The what?"

"The loot.  That's the word New York cops use for lieutenant."  Or at
least in books."  When she saw Sam's baffled look, she sighed.

"I mean the boss.  The highest-ranking cop in La Porte."

It was the way she looked at the fact of departure, she couldn't help
herself.  Her scalp prickled, again the skin tightened and she looked
stony-faced up at the sky while Sam talked on about cars to fill in the
void.  Up there was the night sky, as black as macadam, and the hard,
unfiltered light of the stars.  She felt she was trying to bear its
weight to keep it from crashing down around them.

She was supposed to be proud, Shirl kept saying, when pride had
nothing to do with it, had no place in any lexicon of what was
happening, was a word you could only attach to a Norman Rockwell
painting.  He must have done one of a boy in a mortarboard between Mom
and Pop, all of them beaming away.

The stars looked hammered in place up there, and her glass grew warm in
her hand.  She had felt something similar when Chad had finished high
school.  That, she thought, had been bad enough, the end of his living
at home.  But there were vacations and there was dependence.  She'd
hear other women saying "WThew!  Time I had a rest from all that" and
wondered to what alien race of mothers she belonged.

Sam's voice came through her thoughts as a low sowing of
indistinguishable words, the patio on the other side of the water was a
chartreuse blur.  As a parent she felt disgraced.

"That boy's done you proud," Shirl had said at lunchtime, taking bites
from her jelly doughnut in between drags from a cigarette held in the
same hand, with the other she was wiping down the top of the pastry
display case--Shirl's two hands always seemed to do the work of four.

And she managed at the same time to nod her head toward the far end
where Joey sat mopping up brown gravy with a hunk of bread, implying,
of course, that she was stuck with "the little creep."

"Not," she added, holding up a sticky hand for emphasis, "that I'm
giving Chad all the credit.  It's you you oughta be proud of, raising
him the way you did.  The way he turned out, that's your doing, don't
forget."

That this cause-and-effect mother-and-son relationship must also apply
to Shirl and Joey was something she could blithely ignore.

It was the father who had had the effect there--the adverse effect, of
course--and Shirl loved to think Maud shared with her the total failure
of their ex-husbands' ability to function as fathers.  "That big
creep," she told Maud, had taken off one fine day in May and was never
heard from again.  "One fine day in May," she was always saying, making
it sound like an oldfashioned song.

"He's up and off, the big creep.  Leaving me with the mortgage, the
bills, the kid.  Not one red cent did he leave me nor did he send
me."

"He pays nearly all the bills," Maud said of Chad's father, while Shirl
wound out the rag in the sink.  "I'd never've been able to send him to
that school.  It costs a fortune.  It costs eleven thousand a year for
tuition."  The shake she was making done to a thick cream, he poured it
into one of the ribbed glasses.  It was so thick it stood up around the
straw.

"So what's money, girl, I'd like to know?"  asked Shirl, apparently
forgetting money was her major complaint about the big creep.  "It
ain't money makes a kid turn out with character and personality.  Is
that shake for him?"  Again she nodded towards Joey.  "Christ, is it
his birthday or something?"

Maud sighed and walked down the counter with the glass as Shirl called
to Joey that he had enough zits already he looked like a potholed road
and he could just kiss his chances with Louella Harper goodbye if he
drank that shake because he'd sure never kiss Louella.

The six faces at the counter all turned to the object of these words,
and as she set down the milk shake Maud could hear Joey mumbling into
his drowned potatoes for someone to fuck off.  He did not look up to
see Maud giving him an encouraging smile, although he did thank her and
cleave his hand to the ribbed glass as if this were some way of
wreaking vengeance on his mother.

"Living well is the best revenge," said Maud brightly, wanting to cheer
him up.

This earned her a squinty-eyed look and a request for a spoon for this
"shit-thick" shake.

Maud pulled an iced-tea spoon from a plastic cutlery tray and put it
before him.  She walked back down to get the coffee pot and refill
Ulub's cup.  He was extending it, his oil-black thumb holding back the
spoon.  Shirl could have poured the coffee, all she was doing now was
standing smoking, but she no doubt thought that concentrating on bad
fathers was more important and picked up where she'd left off.

"Conscience money.  That's all it is."

Rinsing off a Coca-Cola glass, Maud said again that Chad's father paid
for it, if that's what it was.

Shirl was driving home a point and she wasn't letting Maud deflect her,
even though it was Maud's marriage and divorce and Shirl hadn't been
there.

"I don't care if he put all the crack dealers in L"Tetroit"--it came
out "Dee-troit"--"through Yale, it still don't make up for walking out
on your wife and baby boy"--she was shoving her closetogether eyes up
into Maud's face--"for a piece of ass."

Shirl's idea of conversational discretion was lowering her usual bawl
to an asplike whisper that whipped down the counter, stinging each
customer into looking up before they all returned their eyes to their
plates and cups.

"Tight ass at that," Shirl hissed.

Maud's ex-husband had once actually walked into the Rainbow Cafe with
his wife, and that had provided Shirl with a mother lode of
conversational possibilities superseded only by God having been around
at the Creation.  Veld, the new--well, slightly used, given two prior
husbands and three years of marriage to Ned--Mrs. Chadwick, was a
model and once a Miss Universe contender.  She had flyaway cheekbones,
a mass of red-gold hair that looked windblown but you knew was actually
blown by a hairdresser, a pencilthin figure, and model's shoulders
accented by shoulder pads like a football player's.  Shirl said she
looked like the TV antenna on top of the Rainbow Cafe, but Maud knew
Shirl was just trying to make her feel better.  The shoulder pads were
stacked under a green silk designer dress.  Veld glowed like neon and
vibrated on and off, standing there in the Rainbow looking around at
its dark booths and long counter with a "how quaint" expression,
twisting this way and that--torso, chin, neck--as if Ubub might jump up
and take pictures.

Probably it was unconscious posing, Maud thought later, charitably,
since Veld was probably never far from the cameras and strobe
lights.

When they walked in tanned like crisp toast with Chad in tow, it caused
a mild sensation--as interesting an event as would ever happen in the
Rainbow, Shirl had said, short of an onslaught of hooded Palestinian
terrorists.  Ulub and Ubub had looked up from their short stacks and
eggs, Dodge Haines had nearly slid from his stool, Mayor Sims, who'd
come in for a sobering cup of coffee before confronting Mrs. Sims, had
stopped in the middle of delivering to Dodge what sounded like an old
campaign speech on drugs.  There were a few strays (as Shirl called
people off the street), who'd swiveled in their booths to have a gander
at Veld.

It had been just this time a year ago, a few days before Labor Day, and
Ned said they'd come "on the spur" (Maud just bet), and Veld angled
her way to the counter and cut in with this super idea of taking Chad
on an "island hop": Nantucket, Puget Sound, the Cape, Martha's
Vineyard.  And did Maud mind too very much if they carted this
wonderful child (Chad kept his face blank, his eyes down, and looked
guilty for being there) off just four days early and then they'd whisk
him to school after this whirlwind vacation, and it sounded to Maud
like they were all caught in a plane propeller, but Veld smiled and
smiled, her long, tanned arm half-leaning, half-dropping across the
counter as if she were already in the middle of Puget Sound doing a
crawl stroke.

And Ned.  All he'd done was just bunch his arm around Chad's shoulders,
occasionally giving him a fatherly squeeze, playing Daddy Warbucks to a
fare-thee-well.

Mind?  Of course she minded.  Did Mr. Blank-Face want to go?  Of
course he did, though she knew he knew this was completely rotten, Ned
and Veld swooping in this way and taking his mom by surprise.  And it
wasn't as if they were fighting a custody battle, it was only an
"island hop."  Maud had stood behind the counter in the midst of all of
this green glitter and bonhomie and felt like a cow in a field, beige
and dull, chewing over her response.

She saw herself reflected in the eyes of the incandescent Veld-Maud
with her shoulder-length, straight, sand-colored hair and desert-brown
eyes, the ordinarily subdued freckles probably breaking out like a
fresh crop of zits.  Stood there with a cut-out smile while ribs of
white anger shot through her.

But the anger dissolved momentarily, replaced by an empathy for Chad,
who had nearly dislocated his shoulder getting away from his father's
grip to go over and sit down and start a conversation with Ulub.  This
in itself was an act of desperation (though you'd never know it from
his laid-back smile), since neither of the Woods talked.  Ubub did act
as main factotum sometimes, placing the orders at the counter.  So Chad
started up this monologue, offering them cigarettes (which they
regarded as if they were strange Indian signs) in order to show Maud he
was sloughing off these two tanned people and their offer if that was
what his mom wanted.

Maud kept on smiling and said, sure, sure, that was fine, that was very
nice, she was sure Chad would enjoy that.  Would any sane
nineteen-year-old not enjoy going back to college with a tan like the
ones Veld and Ned were sporting?  Oh, La Porte had its lake, but no
sand beaches, and people didn't do much swimming, just boating of
sorts.  La Porte had seen better days.  Once it had been a fashionable
little summer resort, but it was pretty downat-heel now.

Veld and Ned had come to town and left with Chad, who was wearing
(Maud noticed) a new pair of Gucci shoes and an Italian jacket that
made his eyes look like molten gold.  It was so strange, Maud thought,
how her own dull coloring had translated itself into that sunlit
look.

And Shirl had rooted herself by the coffee machine, drinking in the
scene like her cup of coffee, enjoying every revolting minute of it.

It was the first, last, and only time Maud had ever seen Veld.

- When Ned had paid for their three glasses of iced tea and called to
"Velvet" they'd better be going, Maud heard Shirl make a ú retching
noise over the cash drawer, which had sprung out to slap her in the
stomach.

Ned had left a tip.

He had folded up a twenty into a little square and stuck it under the
iced-tea glass.  That was Ned's version of "discreet."

No one had noticed this but Chad.  He had stared at his father's
departing back, plucked the bill from the counter, and looked at it as
if it were a hand grenade.

It had saved what little could be saved of the encounter when Chad had
shoved it back into Ned's pocket without a word.

Maybe Shirl had been thinking of this present Labor Day as some sort of
anniversary of last year's and Velveeta's (as Shirl called her) visit,
because she couldn't seem to stop talking about the haplessness and
hatefulness of husbands, and what she'd have done if the big creep had
come back to La Porte dragging the new Mrs. Creep along.  Since she
was scraping out the hard vanilla from the bottom of the ice-cream
container, much of this was echoing up from the nearly empty basin.

But her head and hand would emerge, the scoop dipped in warm water, and
she'd call down the counter to Maud, who was trying not to pay
attention, cutting up the lemon chiffon pie.

Dodge Haines, who was getting the apple pie a la mode, crusty with ice,
leered over his coffee, and the others up and down the counter were
equally entranced with this playback of the visit of Maud's ex-husband
and his new wife, also, it gave a man like Dodge, macho to the core, a
chance to exchange his witty keep-'em-barefoot-and-pregnant
philosophical views with Shirl.

The only person who had the good taste at least to pretend not to
listen was the tall brunette sitting at the counter, the one for whom
Maud had just cut up the lemon chiffon.  This was Dr. Elizabeth
Hooper, a woman Maud could hardly say she knew, for Dr. Hooper didn't
live in La Porte, but a woman for whom Maud felt an infinite respect
and empathy.

Dr. Elizabeth Hooper fascinated Maud.  She came through La Porte
exactly once a month, every third weekend, like clockwork.  She was
tall and elegant, wore simple suits in cold weather, simple dresses in
warm.  Today she had on a frosty blue linen dress.  Maud always studied
her dresses and accessories.  To the shoulder had been pinned a gold
brooch, and she wore a gold bracelet, one long, bare arm rested on the
counter, but unlike Veld's, it was pale, untanned.  This alone would
have sent Dr. Hooper rocketing in Maud's esteem: she was clearly a
woman who had other things on her mind besides Nantucket.  Maud also
liked the way she sat at the counter rather than sitting in one of the
dark, high-backed booths, the way the other women who came in on their
own did.  It bespoke to Maud a certain confidence and carelessness,
that Dr. Hooper couldn't be bothered worrying over being a woman
alone.

For despite the entire feminist movement, Maud had seen absolutely no
change in the mouselike withdrawal of any woman from fifteen to fifty,
the caginess they felt over being in a restaurant alone, as if it were
a porn movie house.

Since Maud considered herself terminally shy, it had been nearly two
months before she got up the nerve to speak to Dr.  Hooper.

She could never keep up the friendly chat of Charlene or the constant
complaining of Shirl as they moved down the counter and among the
booths.  Except for Miss Ruth Porte, who seemed so frail and quiet it
would have been shameful not to be able to converse with her, Maud
hardly exchanged a sentence with the customers, could not be forced to
even under the constant agitating of Dodge Haines, who considered
himself La Porte's lady-killer and never seemed to look at any woman
above breast level.  "You'd think my tits was my eyes," Charlene would
say, but in such a salacious tone that you knew she enjoyed it.

Charlene had a big smile and big breasts and bestowed herself on
everyone like a basket of fruit.

All Maud could do to make up for her lack of conversation (except for
her book talks with Miss Ruth) was to smile, and her smile wasn't like
Charlene's--no wide red lips and flash of bleached teeth.  Her smile
was little more than a slight upward hook at the ends of her mouth, a
shy smile.  She tried to smile a lot to make up for her silences--which
were at least appreciated greatly by Joey and, she thought, by Dr.
Elizabeth Hooper-- because otherwise the people of La Porte might think
she was putting on airs.  It was her college education and her being
favored so much by Miss Ruth-Porte, also educated and able to talk to
Maud about books, that she was afraid might make people think she was
uppity.  But even though Maud's smile was constrained, she knew it was
pleasant.  An old boyfriend (a hundred years ago, when there were such
things) had told her she had the prettiest smile he'd ever seen.  It
was the smile of a little kid, of an infant, even, the smile of someone
who'd just learned and really meant it.  It was the most sincere smile,
he said, he'd come across.  Maud had forgotten his name, this high
school boy, but she remembered the grave look on his face, the effort
that had gone into describing her smile just right.

It was a compliment she had tucked away in her mind like a petal in a
book and looked at again and again for thirty years.  Only Chad, who'd
told her she looked more like thirty than forty-seven, and Sam, who had
told her (to her utter astonishment) she was the most comfortable
person to be with because she was as serene as a nun (when she wasn't
mad)--only they had ever said anything as nice.  Ned had never paid her
a compliment she could remember.

Maybe it was her "serene" smile that made Dr. Elizabeth Hooper react
in kind.  It was probably because Maud was the only one in the Rainbow
(except for Ulub and Ubub) who hadn't tried in some way to wheedle out
of her why she kept coming through La Porte.

Charlene had found out Dr. Hooper was a psycho-whatever because a
cousin of a friend of an aunt of hers knew someone who'd gone to see
her.  Or so Charlene said.

But no one could find out what she was doing in La Porte, going back
and forth, and sometimes staying overnight at Stuck's rooming house
near the end of Main.  There was much speculation about whether she'd
been called in by Miss Ruth to pay personal visits to Miss Ruth's crazy
Aunt Simkin.  Shirl, who was never hard-pressed to mind her own
business, still felt "funny," she said, about asking Dr. Hooper why
she came through town.

It was, Maud supposed, because Dr. Hooper was a psychiatrist, and
people who'd never read about it or been to one (as Maud had while she
was married) thought they could read your mind and probably suck your
soul out of your body.  The way Shirl talked about them, leaning on the
counter, moodily smoking a cigarette and polishing a glass, head
doctors were about as safe to be around as mass murderers or that Boy
Chalmers fellow who they said had murdered Nancy Alonzo and done the
same thing to those two women in Hebrides.  She threw down the towel
and shuddered.  It hardly bore thinking about.

So she went back to thinking about Dr. Hooper.  Maud would watch Dr.
Hooper's flickering glance at Shirl or Charlene and wonder if perhaps
she could see what was going on in their minds.

It was Maud who always waited on Dr. Hooper and who always saved back
a piece of lemon chiffon pie if they were running short.  It was true
that Shirl made the best pies of anyone around except for Jen Graham,
who ran the hotel over in Spirit Lake, and this particular pie was
especially popular: the filling was a pale cloud of whipped-up lemony
filling, and the crust was melt-in-your-mouth baked meringue.  That
Shirl had begged the recipe off Jen Graham and then started claiming
the pie was her original creation, just about everybody knew, although
Shirl thought it was a deep, dark secret and a real sleight-of-hand
performance on her part to wheedle a recipe out of Jen.  The Rainbow's
big white pie boxes were always carted away by customers after eating a
slice of lemon chiffon for dessert.  So they often ran out of it.  Even
Chad loved it, and he hated lemon pie.

Dr. Hooper was in the Rainbow Cafe the third weekend of every month,
Fridays and Sundays, eating her pie and drinking her coffee, and often
writing a postcard or two, sometimes a letter.

It always amused Maud to watch Mayor Sims maneuver around behind Dr.
Hooper, leaning back and staring down his nose in his attempt to make
out what she was writing.  Dr. Hooper always caused a mild stir,
probably because she was their mystery woman.  Her appearances in La
Porte and the Rainbow were as dependable as the turning of day into
night.

It was Dr. Hooper herself who had finally, some months ago, started a
conversation.  She had asked Maud what school her son attended.  It had
so surprised Maud that Dr. Hooper knew she had a son, Maud had slopped
coffee into the saucer when she was refilling the cup.

Dr. Hooper said, "I heard the owner"--and here she looked off towards
Shirl--"talking about him.  She seems to think very highly of him."

Her smile was slow, she seemed to deliberate before every action, and
she looked serious even when smiling.  "That's unusual," she added,
before going back to cutting through her wedge of pie.

Maud held the coffee pot aloft, thinking the statement mysterious,
inscrutable, just the sort of non-small talk she'd expect from Dr.
Elizabeth Hooper, if she ever spoke at all.  Dr. Hooper certainly
wouldn't go in for "Well, we're getting weather," as Sonny Stuck had
said that day.  Still, to introduce the subject of Maud's own son was a
pretty heady subject for conversation.

Forgetting specifically what she'd asked, Maud answered, "Well

... thank you."  Then, feeling foolish with that response, she'd gone
on: "I mean .  . . why is it unusual?"  Ignoring Dodge Haines and Sonny
Stuck holding up their cups for refills, Maud had just set the pot back
on the Pyrex burner and got a clean napkin to mop up the spilled coffee
in the saucer.  Dodge called to her, but she paid no attention.  Let
Charlene wriggle on down there.

Dr. Hooper said, "It's unusual for older people to be impressed by
anyone twenty or so."

"Twenty.  He's twenty."  Nervously, she began to shine up the
milk-shake container.

Dr.  Hooper nodded solemnly.

"I have a son myself.  He's fifteen.  He's in a prep school up
north."

She fiddled with a menu.  "That's why I go through La Porte, it's right
on the way.  But I usually have to stay overnight, because it's quite a
trip.  I stay at the rooming house down the street."

As if everybody didn't know.  Mildred Stuck, who rented out rooms,
thought having a New York psychiatrist staying at her place made her
Queen of the Rainbow Cafe, nearly, she'd even had the brass to sit
right down in Miss Ruth Porte's booth and start braying about her
"clientele."  But it was clear she didn't know a thing about Dr. Hooper
or she would have told Miss Ruth.

Maud's mouth opened, but no words came out--that's how amazed she was
that Dr. Elizabeth Hooper had a son away at school, just as she, Maud,
did.  She wanted to ask about him, but before she could think of
anything sensible, Dr.  Hooper went on.

"Adults--I mean older adults--" and she smiled slowly again to indicate
she didn't mean to suggest Maud's son wasn't "adult"-"usually haven't
much respect for younger ones.  For young people.

And I imagine"--again, she smiled slowly, as her glance strayed toward
the end of the counter and Joey, drinking a Coke-- "that she'd be hard
to impress.  She seems rather disappointed in her own son."

Maud blinked, looking from Shirl, who was complaining to some customer
about his handing her a twenty when ("the damned fool must have known")
it was Labor Day weekend and all change disappeared on holidays (to
hear Shirl tell it)--looking down to Joey, then back to Dr. Hooper,
sipping her coffee, and wondered if Shirl was right after all, if there
was some sort of mind reading going on.  Not soul sucking, of course,
just mind reading.

How stupid, she thought.  Anyone with a grain of intelligence and any
powers of observation wouldn't have to hang around the Rainbow for long
to know Shirl was "disappointed" with Joey.  And this woman was a
psychiatrist.

"People .  . . parents .  . . I seldom hear them paying compliments to
young people."  Frowning over her coffee cup, seeming to give this
point her gravest consideration, Dr. Hooper added, "Indeed, I never
do."

As Charlene flounced by behind her and grabbed up the coffee pot (it
was Maud's turn at the counter, after all, Maud stood her ground and
asked with deadly seriousness, "Why do you think that is?"

"Well ... there doesn't seem to be much respect for young people.

Their parents certainly don't have much for them, in the sense they
seem to be more problems than people.  I expect it might be because
everyone feels so guilty--the parents, the children.  It goes back and
forth, gets passed around the table and back again."  She replaced her
cup and folded her hands before her, her expression, her position a
little like someone kneeling in a pew.

"So your son must be quite unusual."

He was unusual, but Maud didn't think she should blatantly agree.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Shirl, who was banging open the
display case to get at the pies, staring at her.  But Shirl would turn
to stone before she'd interrupt a conversation with Dr. Hooper, since
Shirl herself was dying of curiosity to know about her.

"I guess people seem to like him," Maud said.  "I guess he's able to
talk to adults more than most kids his age.  He seems, well,
comfortable with them, I think.  I remember when he was, oh, six or
seven ..."  This was ridiculous, she thought, busying herself with
polishing up the milk-shake container, she couldn't stand here and
reminisce.  And there was that familiar tightening in her throat, that
would be just fine, wouldn't it--in answer to a polite question on this
woman's part, suddenly to start crying?

Yes, that would be fine.

Dr. Hooper was finished but not leaving, turning slightly back and
forth on the wooden counter stool.  She slid the conversation
effortlessly into something more general.  "I don't mean to say that
it's just children that have a hard time of it."  Her tone was slightly
apologetic, as if it were she and not Maud who was making things
difficult, conversationally.  "So do parents.

Parents are so often forced to desperate remedies."  She grew silent,
her eyes downturned.  "What do you think?"

That Dr. Hooper thought her opinion truly mattered astonished Maud and
drew her eyes from her fun-house reflection in the aluminum container
up to Dr. Hooper's mild brown gaze.  Maud rocked a little on her
heels, as if her body were being pushed by the sudden force of all of
the unanswered questions she had about herself and Chad, about her
depression over the sense of loss, about the .  . . betrayal.  The word
simply clicked into place in her mind and shocked her.  "Betrayal."

Her face grew stiff with the exertion of trying to keep this disloyal,
irrational thought from showing there.  But the word dragged a rush of
other irrational notions with it--the notion that she'd been tricked,
tricked into believing childhood would last forever.  Believing it in
her crazy, mixed-up way.  Face it: what she felt this very minute was
that he had tricked her, his six-year-oldness, his child-ness had
tricked her, and she felt, even as Dr. Hooper was taking the three
onedollar bills from her purse and still looking at Maud with those
luminous eyes--Maud felt the rage beginning.

It would spread as it always did, burning in her constricted stomach
muscles, raying out through her limbs, upward to her face like a hot,
angry blush, and then settling in a tight sore lump that she feared
would fester and burst.

All of this went through her mind in a moment, less than a moment, and
she saw herself, as if she were standing away from herself, writing up
Dr. Hooper's check with a little frown of concentration that was
supposed to suggest she was merely considering her answer.  Wetting her
lips, she wrote down the pie and coffee, a dollar eighty-five, afraid
this woman had seen this inexplicable, murderous rage which was
subsiding as quickly as it had come.  She added the tax slowly, afraid
to look into Dr. Hooper's eyes for fear that Dr. Hooper had seen
clear through her, through her carefully ironed apron and sprigged
cotton dress, her freckles, pale skin, and light eyes, to a woman with
all of the characteristics of a psychopath.  The question still hung in
the air, What do you think.?, and what Maud wanted to say was, "I think
I could kill someone, I could be one of those parents who could kill
their own children, and it terrifies me that I could, even for
one-tenth of a second, actually stand in that person's shoes, feel that
person's arm raising the knife or the gun" ... but to turn, Maud
wondered confusedly, on whom?  The knife seemed to twist backward into
her own heart, the gun rise to her own temple.  And the murderous anger
returned while she drew a line on the check to tote up the pie, coffee,
tax-returned, receded in waves, and left behind it the stuff of
depression like detritus for the birds on the beach.

As she slowly tore Dr. Hooper's check from the pad and repositioned
the oblong of carbon paper, she wondered, how in God's name could all
of this go through a person's mind while she was writing on a
dirty-white check with "Thank You" scrolled at the top in faded blue
ink?

She placed the check by Dr. Hooper's cup, fixed the small, tilted-up
smile on her face as she slid the book of checks back into her apron
pocket and answered the question.  "Well, I think most parents don't
know how they feel or what to do, and maybe it's because of all the
decisions they have to make--not the big ones, the little ones, the
ones that seem to come up every minute, and you have to make up your
mind in a split second without being able to get anyone's advice, and
where the odds are always against any decision being right because what
you think is in everybody's best interests isn't at all, since a lot of
the time you don't even want everybody's best interests, don't even
know what they are, not even your own.... Maybe that's why I don't
blame Shirl.  Or anyone."  Maud stopped suddenly, closed her mouth as
if slamming a tiny door, feeling that what was behind it, a rush of
thoughtless words bursting out, unbidden and unchecked like some
horror-film poltergeist, so alarmed her that she just had to clamp her
lips together, try to paste on again that little hooked smile to let
Dr.  Hooper know she wasn't irrevocably crazy.

But Dr. Hooper merely nodded in her thoughtful way.  Her long, elegant
fingers placed the three one-dollar bills with the check (it was always
the same amount) as she said, "I've never heard a parent say that."

Her own smile was a little like Maud's, closedmouthed, tilting up.

Is that good or is that bad?  Maud wanted to ask.

But Maud had been surprised that Dr. Hooper had come in just this
morning, apparently on her way "up north," for tomorrow was Labor
Day.

"Well, he sometimes goes back to school early.  Before he has to."

Immediately, Maud felt an even closer bond.  She hung on to the silver
milk-shake container, her hands jittering up and down, and told
Elizabeth Hooper that Chad himself had left early to visit a friend of
his.  Probably, she couldn't keep the irritation--or was it sadness?

they seemed to overlap--out of her voice, and she cut up Dr. Hooper's
lemon chiffon pie pretty ruthlessly.  Then it occurred to her that if
Dr. Hooper's son had gone back to school already, he obviously wasn't
riding with his mother.

"He doesn't spend summers with me."  Dr. Hooper's dark eyes were on
the piece of pie.

Maud could sense that something here was wrong, so she merely said "Oh"
and wiped her hands down her apron sides.  Yes, there was really
something wrong, for Dr. Hooper's hand shook as she raised her coffee
cup.  Then she said, not to Maud but very quietly to her piece of pie,
"He doesn't live with me, he lives with his father.  His father has
custody."

Maud returned the pie to the display case, looking at, and then away
from, Elizabeth Hooper, who was clearly upset.  Maud licked her lips
and tried to say that she couldn't imagine that someone like her, who
went to so much trouble to see her son, could not get custody.  God,
look at Shirl.  Well, that wasn't fair, she guessed, Shirl actually did
put up with a lot from Joey and had raised him all by herself....

And Dr. Hooper once again seemed to be reading Maud's mind, for she
said, "I could have had custody, I didn't want it."  She had affixed a
stamp to a postcard and now brought her balled-up fist down on it.

Then she looked at Maud with a thin smile.  "I'm a child psychiatrist,
and that's how smart I was."

Dr. Hooper hitched her bag over her shoulder and collected her
check.

He looked down at the drawer of knives he held on his lap and thought
of the loneliness and emptiness and the ones who had caused it, and
were still causing it, and that it was only right they should have to
pay.

It was an ordinary kitchen drawer with a white enamel front.  He had
pulled it out by its ridged aluminum handle so that he could sit with
it and hold it like a baby or a pet.  He was sitting on the green
slat-backed kitchen chair, his long hands resting either side of the
drawer, looking down at the knives, different sizes, different shapes,
and the cylindrical, tempered-steel sharpener he used to keep them
carefully honed.

Now, he picked up the butcher knife, ran his thumb lightly along its
edge, and had to suck the droplet of blood that made a tiny bubble even
with so light a stroke.  He remembered he had been in a bit of temper
when he'd drawn that one swiftly from side to side down the
sharpener.

He tried the paring knife, the cleaver, the cook's knife, the hook-bill
of the knife for dismembering chicken, the two utility knives.  The
serrated bread knife he didn't bother with.  It was no good to him.

His mind was a black well you could drop a body in, and because it was
so deep in this blackness, the sound at the bottom would be no more
than the splash of a small rock.  A well, a vault, cellar,
cavern--empty of light.

Not even as much light as he had been able to see when he was very
small under his shut bedroom door after his mother had gone.

Just a strand of light.  He would crawl out of bed and lie facing the
door, his eyes seeing nothing under it but that strand of light, could
not see his mother, had thought she was gone forever.  He would lie
there willing her to come back, thinking the sheer force of his will,
his concentration, would make her return to his room, that he would
hear what had been the indistinct and distant clap of her slippers down
the hall growing more distinct, coming back and stopping at his door
again.  But he figured his mind must not be strong enough, that there
was some weakness there, for she didn't come back.

He would lie there on his side, then, looking at the band of light
under the door.  If he didn't do this, the dark would swallow him, for
even if his eyes adjusted to it the things in his room--lumpy chair,
bureau, hump between bedposts, posts themselves--would be barely
distinguishable, without definition, and melt back into darkness from
mere staring to bring them out of it.  His best friend back then had
been terrified of the Thing in his closet at night, a Thing he'd
described as a monster with teeth like panes of glass that he could
feel shatter when the monster bit into his throat.

But he, he had never been afraid of a Thing in the closet, he had been
afraid of the closet itself, of the darkness and the loneliness.  For
they always came together.  The loneliness was not quite as bad in the
daylight hours, because he was out of the house doing something.  He
could feel it, though, always, even then, as a dull ache, for although
he was around others, he never felt, being around them, what he
needed.

What he needed was intimacy.

Everyone needed it, of course, he was no different from anyone else,
except that his need was consuming.  Loneliness drove him to
desperation.  He wondered why the doctors left it out of the list: sex,
hunger, thirst.  Would he kill someone for a glass of water, for a can
of beans, for a good fuck?  Sex?  Why, sex had hardly anything to do
with it.

His hands once again returned to the sides of the drawer, he looked
through to the larder, looked at the spigot slowly dripping water (he'd
have to fix that washer), and thought, reasonably, as he'd never been
dying of hunger or thirst, he couldn't say what that would make a man
do.  And, of course, when it came to sex, he supposed they weren't
actually talking about killing for it.  He frowned.  But, then, didn't
animals .  . . ?

Looking down at the knives that speared back the reflected light of the
bright bulb above, he shook his head, trying to clear it.

In his childhood room there had been such a light, it would sway
slightly above his bed until his mother pulled the metal cord.

Sometimes she would lie down with him and he wouldn't even care about
her breath, heavy with whisky and cigarettes.  No, he wouldn't care.

God knows he had tried other ways to get what he needed.  To get rid of
the loneliness and find the intimacy.  Even the word seemed warm and
slightly liquid.  If only his speech hadn't been tangled, stupid words
hitting, bashing, mangling one another in their rush toward friendship,
toward intimacy, and if that hadn't made the women look down, look
away, even step back, almost as if (now the face that turned to the
drawer had to smile) .. .

As if he was holding a knife on them.

He hated that he had to show them the knife, that they had to know that
they were going to die, for although it didn't completely spoil the
end, it made it sad, much more difficult.

But there was no other way, for they had to see what they'd done and
what they were guilty of.  How strange was the often held idea that
just before the moment of death, in the moments of dying, the
expression in a dying person's eyes grew remote, clouded, shuttered.

That a shade snapped down, or curtains suddenly pulled to.

To him, it was just the other way around.  It was the moment when the
shade snapped up, the musty curtains suddenly opened to let in the
light.  It was the moment of profoundest and deepest intimacy.  There
was no holding back.

And he had tried, always, and gently, to explain this.  Although his
holding them had to be rough (how else could he keep them still?), his
voice had been gentle (which in itself was a small miracle), and the
words had flowed from his mouth like syrup, smoothly.  Naturally, they
fought it.  Some women had incredible strength.

He was sorry that they couldn't, by an act of a merciful God (but,
then, there was no God, not really), simply die in his arms
peacefully.

Yet, if they had, would they have understood?  Would their minds have
been full of him and the fear of the dark?  Or would they be thinking
about some other person, some lost place, a long, green meadow full of
sunlight?  They would not be thinking of him.

He drove the paring knife into the chair arm so hard the blade broke
from the handle, and realizing he'd done this without meaning to, that
the loneliness had driven him to this, he started to weep, wiped his
sleeve along his eyes, placed the broken knife carefully on the
table.

Taking the drawer out, smoothing his thumb along the knifeedges,
childish fits of rage--he knew the signs.  That the loneliness, the
need for intimacy were overwhelming him again and he would have to do
something.

But they hadn't screamed.

It had surprised him that they hadn't screamed.  Probably because he
had been just an old, sad face for the most part, and then, after he
had explained and pinioned them and brought out the knife, any scream
had been locked in their throats, frozen there, choking them.  Yet he
had usually had to clamp his hand over their mouths because of the
pleas, the whimpers, the "no"s (no no no no no no) that he was loath to
hear.

Except Tony.  Antoinette.  When he brought the knife from under his
jacket, she'd looked at him and laughed.  I.aughed fit to kill.

(Now he bowed his head in shame for that lousy pun.) She was something,
wasn't she?  Had it angered him she'd laughed?  Hadn't taken his
reasons seriously?  Of course not, he wasn't childish.

He had laughed with her, out there in the woods.  It had been good to
laugh, the idea that that last long look of understanding might be one
of pleasure was infinitely preferable to the terror later in the eyes
of Loreen Butts.

But her laughter had run down like an old car sputtering to a stop when
he'd held her against the oak tree.  Carefully and slowly he'd
explained he wasn't going to rape her, it wasn't sex he was after.  It
was closeness.

Understand?

Tony had looked at him wildly, her eyes wild over the top of his hand
where he felt the hot breath coming.

And then slowly she nodded.

Is that what you want?  You want me to fuck you?  You want sex?

The look in her eyes changed to something sly and knowing.  Again she
nodded.

That's what you want, you can have it, of course.  Die happy.

To his astonishment, as he stood against her still with his hand over
her mouth, she took her own two away where she'd been dragging, clawing
at his, and ripped the top of her cheap rayon blouse down with one
hand, the other yanked at his fly.  He was hard as a rock.

With her head she was trying to nod toward the ground.

You want it on the ground?

Swiftly, she nodded her head, three, four times.

He held the knife to her throat, lowered her to the ground, where she
squirmed, panted, and he spread the fingers of his hand and heard her
begging for it.  He was enthralled, he was fascinated.

He brought the knife down from her throat, held the cold steel across
her nipples, which excited her even more, and he looked down at his
hard cock and shoved it in .  . .

Stupid bitch.

Stupid bitch.  It might have worked, she might have got hold of that
knife if she'd waited until he was pumping away, if she'd waited until
he came, if she'd pretended to come too, again and again and again.

.

.

That's the way he thought of it later, after he felt her go for the
knife, after he raised it, brought it around, and slit her throat.

Oh, redemption.

PART TWO

I: .  i'

r Sam He was out there somewhere.

He was as much out there as the black slab rocks that marked off
Swain's Point, rooted in the dark like the massive pines that
surrounded the boarded-up fishing lodge at the end of the Point.

As Sam drove the potholed road that circled the lake, checking the
cabins through screens of shrubbery and openings through oaks and
pines, he could sense that presence.

Sam was almost positive that it was no vagrant, no passing stranger,
who had tied up and knifed Eunice Hayden, which was what everybody had
believed and gone on believing for four years since her murder,
probably because they didn't want to believe it could be somebody they
knew.

The trouble was that Eunice Hayden had not been exactly a model of
deportment, there at the end of her short life.  No one could
understand this: how any child of Molly and Wade Hayden could turn out
like Eunice, when all of her childhood Eunice had been straight as a
plumb line, and as rigid and strained, like a child in a black bonnet
in a Gothic picture.  Wade Hayden had been postmaster for twenty years,
and his wife, Molly, was always the first person people called on if
there was any money to be raised in a good cause, for the church or the
library or the school.

Molly could be depended on to go out and get it, could look out of her
flinty eyes and make you feel completely responsible for the cracked
bindings on books or the short supply of pews.  And Eunice's father,
Wade, people were always saying, was as honest as the day was long.

Sam had always wondered why they said it.  How would a postmaster
display his dishonesty?

Shortchange you on stamps?

As he drove slowly, catching the occasional shifting blue light of a
television, he tried to put these ungenerous thoughts out of his
mind.

The girl was dead now.  And her mother, Molly, was dead too, she'd
died, people thought, from the shock of it, six months later.  Molly,
Sam knew, who looked as tough as a washboard, had always been ailing.

Still, the cold-blooded murder of her daughter certainly had hurried
death along, he was sure.

So Wade Hayden had had to retrace the same dirt pathway to the same
graveyard and the same tree under which his daughter had been buried,
maybe even treading in the same footprints, his own, in which the dust
had barely had time to resettle itself.

Of course, the family had come in for their share of questions.

One always had to look to family.  Wade and Molly had been in Hebrides,
they said, Molly had gone shopping while Wade did some pinch-hitting
for a friend of his at the Hebrides post office, which wasn't much of
a post office, he'd often told people, being only a one-man, one-room
PO, with hardly enough business even to warrant the one man.  Wade
would say this with obvious pride in his own position as La Porte's
postmaster: even though La Porte was a smaller place, still there was
so much summer business it warranted two men.  So Wade had an
assistant.  He was always glad to help out over in Hebrides whenever
the postal clerk (as Wade called him) needed a relief person.  That's
where he'd been, while his wife had been doing some shopping, and
they'd been there for the whole of the afternoon, or at least three
hours of it, the three hours during which their daughter had been
murdered.

So they'd come in for their share, only it was hard for Sam to lean on
the bereft parents the way you might on someone not family, the way
he'd leaned on Bubby Dubois and Dodge Haines.

It was Dodge who'd found her, and who never let anyone forget it,
though he soft-pedaled the fact he'd come in for a fair amount of
questioning himself.  The Haydens had a small spread a halfmile from
the lake, a few acres with a house and a barn and a henhouse.  Molly
sold free-range eggs, and a number of men you wouldn't expect to be
much interested in eggs had been going out there to buy them.  Dodge
Haines was one.  Bub Dubois's kids had been seen coming out of the
barn, too.  Even the mayor had got to making speeches about
factory-laid eggs and started his personal campaign for the Haydens'
double-grade-A brown eggs.  It was some time before a few people--the
mayor's wife, for one-- realized it was Eunice who'd been left to see
to the selling of the eggs, and that the transactions in the barn might
be taking a little longer than was necessary.

Bubby Dubois did not at all appreciate the rumor that his sons, Darryl
and Rick, had her front to back.

Dodge Haines found Eunice in the henhouse, trussed like a chicken,
blood from her slashed throat and breast in places you would never
expect it could fly to--the wooden beams, the manger-as if it meant to
cry out for vindication.  Eggs were lying crushed all around her, a hen
with its neck broken lying beside her, and the stench so bad he didn't
even have time to get out of the henhouse before he vomited.

Interference.  That was the way he liked to put it.  There had been no
sexual interference, no rape as such.  Might as well have been,
according to the doctor who appeared on the scene with the county
police, what with the rectal passage a ruin and the vagina cut up that
way.  It was as if someone had gone at Eunice intending to kill her
with sex and, that not succeeding, had used a knife.

It was only Maud Chadwick who'd given voice to his, Sam's, feelings
about Eunice Hayden: living with all that uprightness, those pillars of
La Porte, what could Eunice do but go a little wild?  Even Shirl's Joey
had it better.  At least, he probably felt a little bit free to tell
his mom "Fuck off" once in a while, since Shirl did the same to him,
felt no compunction at all about embarrassing him in front of
strangers.  Molly Hayden had embarrassed her daughter, too, but in such
a way no one could really call it that, "good works" was what they
called it: getting Eunice all dressed up when she was twelve or
thirteen and going door-to-door to collect for the church bazaar.  That
a twelve-year-old would probably rather be strapped to a buzzsaw than
have her friends think she was doing good works apparently never
occurred to Molly Hayden, rattling a collection can down on the corner
of First and Tremont streets one Christmas, both of them dressed in
rags and shawls with holes in them, letting what rich there were in La
Porte know that not everyone would have a turkey on the table if they
didn't drop their money in the can.  Chad had been going just that one
semester to La Porte High School (a year during which he'd let Maud
know daily that he'd sooner sleep standing up in an iron maiden than go
to school ), he said Eunice had been and still was the laughingstock of
the school.

And the worst thing Molly had contrived to "humble" (for that's how she
put it) her daughter was to take her into the Rainbow Cafe or Wheeler's
Restaurant or even the DoNut DeLite and try to get the waitress or
manager to exchange a meal for pot holders Eunice had crocheted or dish
towels clumsily edged.  Eunice had always had to do the talking.  Even
Shirl, who was proof against any sob story, would go beet red and just
tell Eunice to be quiet and for her and her mother to sit down and
order what they wanted from the menu.  "Damned old cow," Shirl would
say after they'd gone.  "And the Haydens far from poor.  There's a
mother for you."

And if Joey happened to be down the counter, the comment would be
directed at him.  Count your blessings.

Suffer little children, Molly was always saying.  Well, said Maud, she
ought to know.  And add to that that Eunice was as plain as a fence
post, though broader in the beam, and it wasn't surprising to Maud that
she'd do something extravagant.  Could Sam imagine, Maud had asked,
Eunice giving Wade or Molly Hayden the finger?

Wade Hayden even looked a little like Abraham Lincoln--gangly, with
dark hair and that long jaw and sad black eyes.  Since her mother was
so hell-bent on raising money for good causes, perhaps Eunice had
decided on a better way to get it, and not have to go door-to-door
standing out in the cold.  Lie around in some warm, musty hay.

Sam DeGheyn worried a lot about Maud Chadwick.  He hadn't liked leaving
her alone, especially after her son had just left, since he knew how
much store she set by that boy.  Sam had never seen a mother so taken
with a child and at the same time so convinced she had done it all
wrong.

As he neared Bunny Caruso's cottage, Sam pulled off the road to watch
what action there might be there, and let the engine idle as he thought
about Murray Chadwick.  He didn't like his first name, so he was called
Chad.  Chad was one of the nicest kids Sam had ever met, and he'd met
plenty, and under less-than-ideal circumstances.  What he couldn't
understand was why Maud thought none of her son's good qualities had
come from her, not even his looks, and he looked just like her, or like
a lit-up version of her.

Sam was recalling the first time he'd run into Maud Chadwick and
smiling over the memory.  She'd just got to town and had come into the
sheriff's office, stood on one foot, then another, until she'd finally
managed to get out that she didn't understand about the parking-ticket
envelope.  Because the meter had run over, someone (and here she'd
reddened, because the man in the uniform she was talking to just might
be the someone) had put this envelope under the wiper, and she wasn't
sure where to take the envelope.  She'd put the fifty cents in it.  .

.

He wanted (not unkindly) to laugh at the desperation in her voice, at
the gap between what she was requesting and the effort it took her to
ask for it.  Sam had just chewed his gum slowly, sitting there with his
hands warmed by his armpits, and thought this new lady was extremely
pretty--and thought also that she didn't know it.  Perhaps it was
Maud's shyness, compared to her son's ability to talk (sometimes a
little glibly, Sam thought), that made her think they couldn't be much
alike.

From Bunny Caruso's cottage there came a crash of what could have been
glass breaking or a dozen other things.  Sam was used to night-rending
sounds coming from Bunny Caruso's.

Where, Sam wondered, did Maud think Chad got all of his qualities?  She
certainly didn't think there'd been much genetic enhancement from the
father's side.  Sometimes she'd look up at the star-salted sky as if
Chad's good qualities had just sifted right down from the heavens.

As he passed the blued panes of windows behind which TV sets glowed,
he'd wondered if it would help if Maud got a television, it might keep
her inside at night.  That was pretty ridiculous.

Imagine this woman, who was trying to figure out why in Key West there
was some kind of order lacking in La Porte, watching "Wheel of
Fortune"!  If the phrase came up "Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you
know," would Vanna White go bananas?  He supposed he shouldn't go on at
Maud the way he'd just done, because she got so mad, but that was, in a
way, why he did it.  The anger dragged her out of whatever haunted
version of her life she was momentarily entertaining.

Sam's wife, Florence, called her "spooky."

"The Duboises passed by her on that dock several times.  You know, they
got that expensive speedboat last year"-That Dubois talked about as if
it was a fucking yacht.

--"and she just sits there in a chair.  A rocking chair, and with a
lamp."  Florence had turned from the microwave--she microwaved
everything--and went on: "At night, can you believe it?  With a lamp
dragged down there?  How's she get it lit, I wonder?"

Sam was supposed to answer, but he just went on reading the La Porte
Pendant and said nothing, and again she gave her attention to the
microwave, which she had a way of staring at for abnormally long
periods of time, the way people look at their wash going round or their
TV screens.  Through the kitchen door, Sam could see their own
television screen and the faces flickering there, mouths forming silent
words.  The sound was often off.

"And if that isn't spooky, tell me--tell me.  Ha!"  Back to him again,
she beat a tattoo on her hips with her fingers.  Florence was never
long on patience.  She hated to microwave anything that required her to
push the minute buttons.  She was into seconds only.  She stared at the
black glass at the same time she hated the thing.  Florence was trying
to make him comment, she knew he liked Maud Chadwick.  "Weird, that's
what the Duboises said.  Bubby calls her one weird lady."

" "Bubby should know," Sam said, turning to the personals, seeing who
was advertising a reunion and for everybody to come.  Some of these
people had folks in the hundreds.  They couldn't send out invitations,
they advertised.

"And what's that supposed to mean, Samuel?"  The rising inflection hit
the syllables like a musical scale.

Florence thought calling him "Samuel" was a massive irritation to
him.

He had never told her that Samuel wasn't his given name.  His parents
believed in simplicity.  He did not answer her question, but looked
over the top of the paper and said, "Is that toast in there?  Are you
microwaving the toast again?"

"I repeat--what's that supposed to mean?"

"That you can't microwave toast, that's what."  Sam took a mouthful of
coffee.  It was sludge.  She made it in the microwave.

"Fuck the fucking toast!"  Florence was low on cuss words.  "I'm not
talking about the toast.  I mean that comment about Bubby Dubois.  What
did you mean about he should know'?  About weird, I mean."

Florence knew perfectly well or she'd never have remembered Sam's
comment all this time.  Still, he wished he hadn't brought it up.

Avoiding a direct attack on the father, he simply noted the two Dubois
sons' behavior.  "Darryl and Rick are going to be hauled in one of
these days, bet on it.  I caught them dealing crack at the grade
school, Donny caught them trying to gang-rape the Childess girl--" The
microwave buzzed and she yanked the door open.  "A dirty rumor, that's
all that was!"

Sam sighed.  No sense getting into a fight about the father, Bubby
Dubois.  Bubby--what kind of man would still go by his baby-name?

The thing was, Florence was sleeping with him, and she was eyeing Sam
now with those liquid black Greek-olive eyes of hers and fearing he
knew.  Perhaps knowing Sam knew.  Everyone in La Porte probably knew
it.

He was pretending not to notice that she was standing there with the
ceramic plate with his egg, bacon, toast, and that her large, familiar,
still-enticing breasts were heaving--he wondered if with anger or with
fear.

He could not look at her, because he no longer loved her, no longer
cared much if she had a lover or not.  And in some strange way this
made him feel the guilty party.  He almost pitied Florence that she
couldn't be doing better than Bubby Dubois, much like a father would
worry over a daughter's throwing herself away on some bum, some
fucked-up guitarist who did gigs with a secondrate band.

Keeping his head down, he took the plate from her hands.  His eyes
smarted.  They always did when he thought how he wished they'd had
kids.  Just one, just one.

So he pitied Florence because she was sleeping with Bubby Dubois, who
ran a huge used-car business outside of Hebrides, had a cracked and
tanned face like pie crust from all of those days with the hoods of
cars stabbing the sun right back at him--the cars or the water, hair
like meringue, a wispy white cloud of it with little tides of brown
tipping the waves.  When he wore that peach lounge suit of his, he
looked edible.

"Did you have to microwave the damned toast, Florence?"

Staring down at the plate, she said, "And the eggs.  And bacon."

It was accusing, as if his request for bacon and eggs had presented,
together with the toast, a tactical maneuver that not even the Japanese
could figure out and the Sanyo was lucky not to have short-circuited.

The toast slices were limp as washcloths.

"Just because you've got a thing for Mrs. Spooky Chadwick, you don't
have to go turning the tables."  There was a glint of triumph in her
eyes as she folded into her mouth a limp bacon strip that looked gray
as chewing gum.  Her face had a morning patina of shine, a slight
greasiness that Sam had once thought sexually stimulating--something
liquid emanating from the black, shiny hair, from the olive eyes.

Florence was a good-looking woman.

When he just sat there blandly drinking his orange juice (the only
thing that escaped the Sanyo) and not answering the charge about Mrs.
Chadwick, Florence took another shot: "Or maybe Bunny Caruso?  Maybe
her?"

He got up and dragged his uniform jacket from the chair, looking at
her, shaking his head.  What was in her tone and what was in her eyes
was fear.

He knew she was scared to death he'd walk out on her one of these days,
leave her to her Sanyo and to Dubois, and the very fear of it forced
her into these strange tests of how far she could go.

Sam just smiled and said he had to go to work, gave her a kiss on the
cheek, and saw the tears spring up in her eyes.

Every woman he knew seemed to have behind her eyes these little stands
of water, ready to overflow.

Not just women, either, he thought, remembering his own reaction two
minutes ago.  Everyone.

Now he lit a cigarette, switched off the engine, and watched the light
shifting in Bunny Caruso's cabin, mottling the shabby curtains.  If he
had walked up the muddy path filled with rain pools that never seemed
to dry up to "check on the disturbance"-" Thought maybe I heard
something crash, Bunnj'--Bunny Caruso would just stand there, thin even
in that long, loose dress she could slip over her head in one second
flat, and tell him (eyes wide with innocence) that Hubert was "up to
things" again.

Hubert was neither husband nor lover who occasionally might be beating
the living shit out of Bunny.  Hubert was, according to Bunny, her
"familiar."  Hubert was part of the whole rigmarole of Bunny's
so-called business: like the crystal ball on its drift of black velvet,
and the flickering candle she used during her "sessions" because she
had to douse the light bulbs or Hubert wouldn't appear, heaping
messages from the dead on the heads of the living.  And the mirrors.

Sam had never seen so much mirror space.  The ceiling was mirrored, and
two of the walls.  He supposed it was the paraphernalia that made her
customers trudge through mud to get a peek at the future (or the past),
because it certainly couldn't be Bunny Caruso herself.  She had all the
sex appeal of the old pump outside of the town courthouse.  Thin and
knobbly, her legs stuck out of her hot-pink shorts in the summer like
spindles.  When she wore her strapless halter, she was always pulling
it up, because she had little girl's breasts, breasts hardly developed,
and the nipples (she made sure they showed through) looking like pencil
points.

Sam sat and smoked and wondered who was in there now, having a
"session."  The mayor, most likely.  He was one of the regulars-always
consulting Hubert about the next election, or what they should do about
the potholes on Tremont Street, or the council session coming up.  But
it was (according to Bunny) really the past that they came for: to be
in touch with their loved ones, to hear the grave and gravelly voice of
Hubert issue from Bunny's lips and raise the curtain back up in a dead
play.  "To speak to one's long-lost loved ones, Sammy," she'd told him,
her eyes sequined with tears, her little ferret-nose sniffling.

"Imagine, Sammy dear!"

Sammy dear could well imagine that the mirrors got a pretty good
workout and that the thumpings and bumpings and occasional crashes
meant the loved ones were definitely connecting.

According to Bunny, the mirrors in her two-room asbestos shingle cabin
had been installed at the request--no, by demand-of Hubert, who in his
former life had been a prince of Liechtenstein and had liked to see
himself, in full regalia, from all sides.

Leaning against the doorjamb on one of his rare "checkout" visits, Sam
had chewed his gum slowly, enjoying almost more than the mirror story
itself hearing Bunny trying to wrap her tiny pink ú tongue around the
word "Liechtenstein."  He would have invited himself in except he
wasn't sure if Bunny's customer could get himself together as quickly
as Bunny herself had.  Anyway, Sam didn't want to see himself reflected
endlessly in the Caruso hall of mirrors.

Not that Bunny never invited him in.  When she visited the police
station, she'd talk about Sam's aura, go through some routine of
clutching her knobbly elbows, and shiver "deliciously" (as she put it)
at what Sammy couldn't sense.  It was because she had second sight and
a sixth sense.  And Hubert.

Some of these visits were duty visits, although they both kept up the
pretense of sociability.  Sam kept a rein on Bunny: he'd suggested she
bring in a medical report every two months or so.

It was, naturally, understood that he was just a little worried about
her and acting not as an officer of the law but in simple
friendship.

He was worried about her nerves, that her bouts with Hubert were
probably exhausting, and from what he'd seen in the movies, mediums
could have a pretty rough time of it.  They could collapse from their
exertions.  If she'd rather not go to their local doctor, any doctor
would do--maybe one in Hebrides.

Sam even elaborated upon this unnerving business of Bunny's by telling
her about a famous writer (Maud had gone on about) named Georges
Simenon, who always had a total, complete physical examination, a
complete check-up, before he trotted off to hole himself up in some
hotel or other to write his next book.

Bunny was fascinated.  Wide-eyed fascinated.  "How many books did this
George write?"

Sam tried to remember what Maud had told him.  He leaned back, nodded
gravely, and said, "Somewhere around two hundred."

"Jee-sus."  Bunny had clasped her hands over her tiny tits--but not as
a come-on, just because she was probably used to grabbing at them--and
said, "Sammy, do you think I could?"

Sam frowned, pushed his dark glasses back on the bridge of his nose.

He always put them on, even inside, when he saw Bunny coming along the
sidewalk, otherwise she'd see the laughter in there.  "You don't have
to have a total physical.  Just a little blood test, maybe."

She waved her hands like a woman drying her nails.  "No, no.  Write a
book.  You think I could write a book like this George?"

He quickly folded a stick of gum into his mouth so it would have
something to work on other than the laugh that threatened.  Bunny was
never even sure how to spell her name: sometimes she did it with a y,
sometimes with an ie.  She was only a couple of years younger than Sam,
and he remembered how, when they'd been in La Porte High School
together, people had tittered over Bunny not even being able to spell
her own name--the old joke come true.

"Well, Bunny," he'd said as he opened and shut a couple of drawers,
"why don't you try?  The thing is, we need to watch your nerves.

Okay?"

Between them they'd never mentioned that blood tests generally weren't
a requirement for dealing with imminent nervous collapse.

There'd never been a case of AIDS in the county, and Sam wasn't
particularly worried about the men in La Porte carrying it around, but
God only knew who Hubert might be dragging in from worlds as yet
untested, and Sam sure as hell was taking no chances.

The spelling of her name might once have been problematic for Bunny,
but she wasn't so dense she didn't know that Sam knew her body wasn't
being used as an empty vessel through which Hubert, Prince of
Liechtenstein, could speak in the voices of the dead.

Thus, she also knew that the invitations to Sam to put him in touch
with his dear departed would always be declined.  But the ritual visits
to the police station were somehow, for Bunny, therapeutic, like
confession--as if Sam were the priest, and she the anonymous penitent,
screened from full view by Hubert and the crystal ball.  Both priest
and penitent really knew who the other was (didn't they usually, in the
church?), but the pretense, helped along by both of them, relieved
Bunny from strict allegations--not from Sam so much as from herself.

ú The fantasy was nurtured by both of them.  The clean bill of health
she slipped across his desk in the little brown envelope might have
been like the fifty cents for a parking fine.

And the allegations of others, Sam ignored.  Mabel Sims and her bridge
cronies most likely had a high old time around the table talking about
the goings-on in that cabin on Swain's Point.  If Mabel (and Helen
Haines) knew who Bunny was going on with, they might have sung a
different tune.  As it was, the penny-colored eyes of Mayor Sims's and
Dodge Haines's wives tracked Bunny's every step from Tremont to First
Street before they went into Cooper's Drugs to strangle their soda
straws and talk to each other in the big mirror behind the counter.

The Sims contingent referred to Bunny as a "loose woman."

That actually made Sam smile, sitting out here in the dark, butting out
his third cigarette in an ashtray that wouldn't close, it made him
smile to think that some of the La Porte townspeople were stuck back in
the fifties somewhere, watching reruns of "Father Knows Best" and
surprised to hear Liberace had been dead for all these years.

As far as Sam was concerned, Bunny Caruso was doing La Porte a hell of
a lot less harm than the Red Barn, where his deputy, Donny, had told
Sam he wasn't at all sure what was really in one of the glass sugar
holders and should he get a search warrant?

They'd had Darryl Dubois in twice for possession of crack and angel
dust, and he'd managed to unload the stuff someplace between the bar
and the door of the Red Barn.

Running his fingers through that meringue-cloud of hair, Bubby Dubois
had expressed the opinion that Sam DeGheyn was out to get him, and the
expression in his eyes had added, "And we know why, don't we?"

Bunny, with her clean bill of health, was dealing in fantasy, not
cocaine or crack.

And god only knew, everyone, Sam was thinking, needed some kind of
fantasy to get through this life.

' Loose woman.

Helen Haines had used the same words about Eunice Hayden.

It was this, and not curiosity about whether Dodge Haines or Winfield
Sims or any other loose men were in there, that had Sam sitting here
for fifteen minutes in the dark watching Bunny's cabin.

About ten months before the murder of Nancy Alonzo, there was a woman
by the name of Loreen Butts found in the woods behind the Oasis Bar and
Grille outside of Hebrides.  She was found with her panties down, her
clothes ripped off her, and her throat and stomach slit.  And nine
months before that, Antoinette Perry was killed the same way and in
very nearly the same place.  The thing that was different about Tony
Perry's murder, though, was that her body was found in a section of the
wood that made it hard to tell just whose jurisdiction it fell into.

The Oasis Bar and Grille was near the county line.  Sedgewick had
claimed the Perry murder--had done so rather heatedly, Sam thought.

But he'd been forced to share it, and Sam never did think he'd really
gotten to see all of the evidence Sedgewick had turned up.

Boy Chalmers had been the chief suspect in the Butts murder.  He was a
handsome young fellow who'd been in the Oasis with Loreen several hours
before she was killed.  He'd been with her and fighting with her,
fighting inside and out in the parking lot, according to some of the
customers.  He hadn't had an alibi for those few hours when he claimed
he'd just gone on home.  Well, there was, supposedly, motive, the fight
having been pretty rowdy, there was, supposedly, opportunity, too,
given his inability to prove he'd left the Oasis grounds.  But Sam
thought he'd been convicted on flimsily put-together circumstantial
evidence, nonetheless.

And, of course, when Boy Chalmers had been taken in for the Loreen
Butts murder, there'd been a lot of talk about Antoinette Perry.  Boy
had hotly denied even knowing Tony Perry, which might have been a
tactical error on his part, since just about every man in Hebrides knew
her.  Still, there was absolutely no evidence to show he did know the
Perry woman, no one had ever seen him with her in any circumstances,
much less intimate ones.  But since the method was identical in both
killings, lack of evidence connecting Boy and Tony Perry wasn't going
to stop his being charged with that murder too.

There wasn't much question about Tony Perry's being tight or loose.

Tony Perry had "companioned" ( as some had heard her put it) a number
of men within the twenty-mile radius that took in both Hebrides and La
Porte.  She was very good-looking--very, indeed, she'd reminded Sam,
when he saw her lying in Francis Silber's mortuary, a little bit of his
own wife, Florence.  Even dead, Tony Perry exuded heat and smoke, as if
her body was not so much breaking up, but was instead sending out a
sexual effluvium that not even death could dampen down.

Tony Perry had left behind her two small children, who in the end had
been transported upstate to a home.  Probably, life would go on for
them much the same as always, for it was well-known they'd gotten
little care from their mother.  There was no father-- that is, no man
who would own up to it.

Loreen Butts had lived in a mobile home with her little boy, Raymond,
and her husband, a truck driver who was away a lot.

There was some talk about Loreen, also, speculation that she too had
been bestowing her favors on more than one man in and around
Hebrides.

It wasn't Sam's county and it wasn't his case.  They'd let him talk to
Boy Chalmers, though, and Sam just had a feeling about the kid--he was
twenty-two or -three--that he was telling the truth.  One of the
reasons for this feeling was that-for all Chalmers's height, girth,
muscle, and golden-boy looks (hence the nickname: the kid's mother had
adored William Holden in Golden Boy)--he sensed that the kid was gay.

And fighting it every step of the way, he couldn't admit it even to
himself.  All the time Sam had been sitting there at the table in the
incident room, he'd talked about his mother.  Mom.  Mom was
wonderful.

Mom was Alexis Beauchamp Chalmers.  Mom was from the South, from
Charleston, and he ought to meet her sometime, she was beautiful.

If there was anyone Boy Chalmers wanted to kill it was Mom, Sam had
decided.

Boy and Loreen: well, they'd had this fight in the Oasis and he'd
walked out.  Yeah, he knew there were plenty of witnesses to the
fight.

He'd walked out around ten o'clock and Loreen, fuming, followed him
outside.

"Shit, man, she was mad.  No one--Loreen thinks--walks out on Loreen.

Shit, she starts fooling around with this wank at the bar, and what am
supposed to do?  Take it?  You don't know Loreen."

According to the sheriff, Loreen had hung around until nearly closing
time, which, that night, had been near one a.m. Sam wondered why the
Chalmers kid would stansl around for three hours outside waiting for
her to leave, when the fight (according to the witnesses) was pretty
routine for the Oasis clientele, even if it was also pretty loud.  It
consisted mostly of shouting on both sides and Chalmers's banging out
the door red-faced, with Loreen Butts going after him, into the parking
lot.  So what puzzled Sam was, why would Boy then come back to stick
around for three hours?  If he was going to kill the woman, why not
then and there, in the heat of battle?  And some "wank at the bar"
putting moves on your woman hardly seemed a great motive for murder.

Unless she'd done it to you again and again and you were her
long-suffering husband.  Maybe then you might brood, walking around in
the woods, brood and stew and come back with a knife.  But Boy?  A
casual date and some drinks in a tavern?

No, it just didn't figure.

Sam wondered a lot more about the husband's having an alibi than Boy's
not having one.  Carl Butts had been nearly a hundred miles away with
his rig, sleeping at a truck stop just this side of Meridian.  No one,
Sam had suggested, had stayed awake all night ú to make sure that Butts
was actually sleeping like a baby while his wife, Loreen, was being
raped and carved up outside of Hebrides.  You think we're idiots?

asked the Elton County sheriff.

You think we don't know it's usually close to home?  You think we
didn't check the mileage?  You think we--?

Husbands, Sam had agreed, generally don't bother raping their wives
before they kill them, though he imagined it happened sometimes.

Hadn't everything?  He didn't go on to say: Christ, any truck driver
could set back an odometer, any truck driver had so fucking many good
ol' buddies along the route he could probably produce enough witnesses
to fill the back of his rig.

Sam didn't say it because he didn't really believe it.  It felt too
much like a story he himself was constructing because he thought the
Chalmers kid had been railroaded into the county jail.  Sam didn't mind
telling them--Sims and the state's attorney, Billie Anderson--he
thought it was a disgrace.  He thought no one had been overly zealous
in a search for the murder weapon (never found, but the pathologist
thought the blade was that of a common kitchen knife).  He thought the
FBI should be called in.  County lines were being crossed, and none of
them had the forensics experience of the FBI people.

Just the mention of taking this matter out of her hands was enough to
drive Billie Anderson crazy.  And Billie, cold sane, wasn't really
anyone Sam wanted to deal with.  She was worse than Sims because she
was smart, she was shrewd.

But the Eunice Hayden killing--no, they couldn't hang that one on Boy,
because Boy had an alibi: he'd been in his bike shop with four kids
whose bikes he was repairing.  Boy had four witnesses to his
whereabouts for the entire afternoon and part of the evening of Eunice
Hayden's death.

Sedgewick and State Attorney Anderson had tinkered in every way they
could with that alibi, the four kids had been talked to again and
again, and their testimony questioned because they were, after all,
only ten or thirteen.  But they all remembered, because one of the kids
was going into the hospital the next day, and Boy had fixed their
bikes, no charge.  Boy Chalmers was popular with kids, that in itself
told Sam something.

If one-tenth of the effort spent in trying to break down Boy's alibi
had been spent in trying to find the truth of Carl Butts's, Sam thought
they might have gotten somewhere.  Cuckolded husbands were pretty
likely suspects.  The police in Meridian had checked out the truck
stop, but without much assiduity, after all, the Highway in the Skyway
truck stop was their own favorite eating joint, and they weren't about
to yank around their friends there.

Sedgewick was not at all pleased that Sam was messing in the Butts
case: it wasn't Sam's case, and he was sorry if Boy Chalmers had
charmed the pants off Sam DeGheyn (Sam just chewed his gum at that
one), but get the hell out of the Elton County jurisdiction.  Tony
Perry might have been half his, but Loreen Butts was all Elton
County.

Sedgewick said it as if the two of them were bickering over prom
dates.

So Sam had waited for over three months before approaching the Elton
County sheriff again, hoping that Sedgewick would have forgotten his
massive irritation by then.

Sam had stopped in the sheriffs office in Hebrides to invite Sedgewick
for lunch at the Stoplight Diner, a popular little place at a
crossroads just the other side of Hebrides and one Sam knew Sedgewick
liked.  He had a case on a waitress they called Tater, some holdover
nickname from the "One potato, two potato" childhood game that Tater
had been particularly adept at.

Sam had deliberately left his uniform behind and worn jeans and a
quilted hunting jacket over a checkered woodsman's shirt, and a cap
with a brim.  He hated hunting, Sedgewick loved it.

Sedgewick was a hell of a lot better at stalking deer than men, had
more patience with it, had more respect for the intelligence of what he
hunted.  Men, he'd often say to Sam, couldn't teach him no new
tricks.

He was a great hunter and a sloppy cop.

Fortunately, he had ú no ax to grind, had no career ambitions, or he'd
have been more suspicious of Sam's casual request to be allowed to talk
to Carl Butts.

The request was made over the third mock-frosted mug of Coors, and
Sedgewick was very busy watching the swaying rump of his henna-haired
waitress, Tater.  Sam only wanted to satisfy himself as to the
character of Loreen Butts, that was all.  Just curiosity, nothing
official.  Sedgewick told him it damned well wasn't, and maybe he
could have a word with Carl Butts, but not if he was going to harass
that poor man.  Boy Chalmers was in the county jail, with his next stop
the state prison.  Appeal turned down, case closed and neatly tied
up.

The discussion of the two murders was casual, what with the sheriff
dividing his time between his beer and Tater, he'd reach for her thigh,
growl, and look lecherous as she passed by, giggling.  Sedgewick was a
lecher, indeed, Sam wondered if the talk about Sedgewick and Tony Perry
had anything to do with the sheriffs vehemence in wanting so much to
claim that first murder.

Right now, the sheriff was happy enough to go one step further and be
helpful by telling Sam that Butts was probably home because he'd seen
him in town that morning.  He drove his rig four days and got off
three.

"And don't you go harassing that man--he's bought his share of trouble
and grief."

The only thing Carl Butts had bought that Sam could see was three cases
of Bud tallboys and a half-gallon of Jack Daniel's.

Sam knocked on the trailer's storm door, still with the summer screen
insert in it.  That autumn, Sam remembered, had been especially chill,
the air musky with the smell of leaves someone was burning illegally on
the other side of the dank river that narrowed between its high banks
as it slid through the trailer park grounds as if trying to shoulder
off the debris: rusty tin cans and bread wrappers and empty plastic
detergent bottles.  The sheriffs office had served the trailer park's
owner, Nicholas L"Amour, with several warrants, demanding he improve
the conditions.  But the L"Amour Trailer Haven (its dirty buff sign
decorated with hearts filled in with information about lot size, price,
and amenities--kiddies' playground, for example, that no kiddies went
near, sauna in a lean-to where you could see through the boards) never
saw any improvements, money was changing hands, but not between the
owner and the grounds keeper.

Carl Butts, though he didn't leave his chair, was a man of probably
only medium height, but squarely built: square jaw set on thick neck,
square shoulders and torso--the type of man that put you in mind of a
trash compactor, pressed down hard and heavy inside, a lot more than
meets the eye.

Sam guessed it was a lot less, the way he stayed glued in the TV chair,
the tube of flesh beginning to overshadow the belt, and the rather
whiny voice that called to someone in the dark environs to get the
door.  He was sitting almost within arm's reach of it himself, but the
person who came to it was a woman.

It must have been from her that Butts got his sweetheart looks and
general ebullience.  She had narrow eyes and a mouth like a mail
slot--thin, squared off, and with a way of clamping down on words.  Sam
wondered idly, as he answered the question as to what his business was
here, if Grant Wood had made his first pit stop here at the L"Amour
Trailer Haven, Mother Butts was right out of American Gothic.  Finally,
she let him in, and then quickly reclaimed her seat before the TV, as
if Sam might steal it.

Butts looked up briefly from the soap they were watching, grunted out
something about his day off, and returned his eyes to the screen.

Neither of them asked Sam to have a chair, both of them wore equally
puzzled looks, prompted by a witless dialogue between two interns and
the open-mouthed, wide-eyed expressions of two nurses (meant, probably,
to register shock, but managing only to look stupid).  The Buttses were
as intent on figuring this out as if it were the Idea of Order at
General Hospital, an intellectual puzzle capable of being patched
together only by a roomful of Harvard professors.

Sam folded his arms and watched for a minute.  He'd seen bits and
pieces of this one, it was Florence's favorite.  He started burrowing
his way into their attention by addressing the woman as "Mrs. Butts"
and discovering he'd been wrong.

"Grizzell.  That's Griz-zell," mister, accent on the second
syllable--not like them papers kept calling it, Grizzel."  Made it
sound like "gristle."

" She had a whiplash voice and the same punishing eyes as the grammar
school teacher who'd walked between the third-grade desks with a narrow
birch rod.

At least he'd got her attention for a moment.  "Mrs.  Grizzell.

Sorry.  I guess I just supposed you were Mr.  Butts's--relative."

He didn't want to say "mother" in case she turned out to be not more
than ten years older than Carl Butts.  "Newspapers aren't known for
being accurate.  But you'd think they could get a name spelled right,
wouldn't you?"  Sam smiled his damnedest, realizing this was the
mother-in-law, Loreen Grizzell Butts's mother.

She eased a bit in her rocking chair and nodded.  "Think so.  Now,
what's police coming back for?  They got that Boy Chalmers that
murdered my Loreen."  Her attention went back to the soap, where a
discussion between a toffee-haired girl and a tearful woman had
replaced the one between the doctors.

Same talk, different people, thought Sam.  "I'm real sorry about your
daughter, Mrs. Grizzell.  I'm sorry to intrude upon your grief,
ma'am."

At that, she had to look up and look grieved, and pull the wad of
handkerchief from her sleeve.  But her eyes were still gorging on the
soap.

"Carl, offer the man a chair.  What did you say your name was?"  she
asked, as Butts rose to drag over a folding chair with an orange vinyl
back and seat.  The color clashed with the pink petunia pattern on the
slipcovered easy chair in which Butts sat.

He grunted when Sam thanked him.

"DeGheyn," said Sam in answer to her question.  "Sam."

Her eye strayed from him to the ceiling, the cobwebs there, and she
repeated the name, mouthing it carefully.  "De-Gin."

"Well, more Da-Geen."  Long e. Rhymes with beguine," if you remember
that old song."  Sam smiled.

As if she didn't quite trust his pronunciation, she asked, "Just how do
you spell that name?"

"D-E-G-H-E-Y-N."

That floored her, she stopped her rocking, then picked it up at a
rather reckless speed, all the while shaking her head.  "That ain't no
American name.  What kind of name is that, anyways?"  Her eyes
narrowed.

"Dutch."  Sam smiled, offered his cigarettes around.  She shook her
head, but her son-in-law took one, his eyes still clamped to the
swimming greeny-blue of the TV.  They'd both forgotten he was a
policeman, apparently.  "It's a funny spelling, all right.  And even
funnier, it's really supposed to be pronounced without any g sound, and
with a long i--"Da-Hine."  You'll appreciate why I use the G."

She just shook and shook her head in wonder at the vagaries of oddly
spelled names.  "Hine?  Hine?  Well, I never did hear any name so
peculiar that don't sound like it's spelt!"  She shook her head in
wonder.  "Yes, I most certainly do appreciate you use the G.

You American?"  Her eyes narrowed.

"Born-and-bred U.S. of A. So was my mother and father.  It was my
great-great-great-grandfather that was Dutch."  Sam had no idea if this
was true, the origins of his name were lost in the swirling mists of
the Atlantic crossing.  What he had discovered was that it was the name
of a famous Dutch painter, but looking at the picture on the Butts wall
of a twelve-point buck, gold antlers painted on black velvet, he
thought he'd leave that detail out.

Yet Mrs. Grizzell seemed satisfied by this, for she nodded and smacked
her lips.  Sam went on: "And I'll tell you, it's annoying-I mean, when
I her someone pronounce it who's read it, or just looks at the name on
my desk.  I have to keep correcting them."

Soul mate, her eyes said.  Oh, she knew all about that problem.

"Carl, shut that damn thing off.  I never could make out what those
fools was doing, anyways."

Butts made no move, beyond mumbling something about "the damned
fools."

He referred to her as "Ma Gris" as if his motherin-law were a French
perfume.

Sam had seen five minutes now and then of this soap because it was
Florence's favorite.  Walking through the living room, coming or going
out, he'd picked up bits and pieces.  Now he said, pointing his
cigarette at the screen, "I think she's supposed to be in love with
that doctor there.  Only he's married.  That's what she's tearing her
hair out about."

"Floozy," said Ma Gris, rocking, arms crossed, hands holding her
elbows.

"It ain't her causing the trouble," said Butts, topping another
tallboy.  "It's him--it's that intern or whatever.  Want a Bud?"  He
held up a can and Sam thanked him kindly.  Butts tossed it to him.

"Bunch of assholes, anyway."

"So shut it off: I wish to talk to Mr.--" Carefully, she said
"DeGheyn," as if the word were a delicate china cup that might crack
under the weight of the two syllables.

Sam did not want the set shut off, it might provide him with an
opening.  Inclining his head toward the women who were rabbiting away
near the nurses' station, he said, "Now, that one looks like that woman
on Dynasty."

" Ma Gris's head swiveled round to the screen, her eyes narrowed to
slits, as if even this were a suspicious statement.  "What woman's
that?"

Sam thought for a second.  "Angela--something?"

"That ain't Dynasty," " she said, spitting it out.

""Falcon Crest," " said Butts, scratching at his belly.  "That's Jane
Wyman you're talking about.  This one don't look like her, does she, Ma
Gris?"

Hell, thought Sam.  Well, given in his whole life he'd clocked up maybe
one full hour of the soaps, he thought he was doing pretty damned
well.

Nothing lost, let them chew over Jane.

"I got no use for that woman, none," Ma Gris said in deadly level
tones.  "Do you know she divorced our President."  A sort of hissing
whisper emphasized the devilish nature of Jane Wyrnan's treacherous
deed.  "And let me tell you something."  She leaned forward and tapped
Sam on the knee with a ridged fingernail.  "The Betty Kelleys of this
world, they ought to be drawn and quartered, drawn and quartered, think
they can sling dirt against our President's wife."  Ma Gris rocked
furiously, arms locked forthrightly across her skinny chest, nodding to
Sam as if in approbation of his, not her, judgment.

"What the hell you going on about, Ma Gris?  Who's Betty--?"

"Do not swear at me, Carl Butts.  It's that blond-headed floozie of
which I speak."

Sam quickly got out his pack of gum and shoved a stick into his mouth,
clearing his throat and also biting the tender flesh of the inside of
his upper lip.  A week's pay, step right up to the bat and give a
week's pay, he thought, to have Maud listening to this.  When he could
trust himself to speak, he said, "I most certainly agree.  Gossips like
her deserve to be horse-whipped."

His mind was clicking, clicking over any way to introduce the topic of
murder.  The attempt on Reagan's life might do, but any venturing near
the Reagan household, with Ma Gris in the party, could have him here
until the snows came to cover him up.  And no closer would he be to
Loreen Grizzell Butts.

The charge of "floozie" came this time from Carl Butts, who hadn't
forgotten they'd been talking about the soap-opera life of the hapless
Jane Wyman.  "You got the wrong gal, mister.  You're thinking of
Krystle."  He took a long swallow of beer and looked at Sam with an air
of superiority.

Who was Crystal?  he thought.  Ma Gris leaned forward.  "With a K," she
said.

Sam thought for one insane moment she could read minds.  And then he
realized it was just her passion for justice in name-spelling.

"Dynasty," that must be it.  He smiled broadly and said, "Listen, I got
to tell you this story about Dynasty."  You'll appreciate it," he
added, as if no one else had the intelligence to do so.

"I was watching"--meaning Florence was--"one afternoon and saw"-oh,
shit, what was the apparent hero's name?--"saw Mr. Handsome Gray-Hair
go backwards straight down that long fligh.  of stairs.

Shot to death--" "Blake," she said, rocking frantically, and all
ears.

"That's right.  Blake.  Well, he was just lying there, and there was
Miss Platinum"--it had to be Krystle--"Krystle with a smoking gun."

Both Butts and his mother-in-law clearly wanted to leap into the
account, but Sam held up his hand and smilingly shook his head.

"But let me just finish.  That night I was watching"--in other words,
Florence had been--"and there's Blake walking around as healthy as
could be.  Hale and hearty, no damage done.  But that afternoon he was
dead as a doornail.  Looked it, I mean.  And there was Krystle just
loving him up as if that afternoon had never happened."

Neither Butts nor Ma Gris laughed.  It was far too serious a subject
for ribaldry.  Sam chewed his gum ferociously, remembering telling Maud
about all this, how it was the quintessence of the soaps: get shot in
the afternoon and resurrected at night.  The whole of soap opera.  The
two of them had laughed so hard she'd nearly knocked the lamp off the
end of the pier.

He didn't expect the Butts contingent to laugh, and they didn't.

Carl explained to Sam he was seeing a rerun in the afternoon.

"That's a real popular show--been going for, oh--how long, Ma Gris?

Seven, eight years, maybe?"

She didn't answer her son-in-law, but instead addressed Sam.  "It
should be disallowed."  When Sam's puzzlement showed, she went on,
rocking the harder as if to firm up her argument.  "See, the reruns
spoils things--like it did for you, to see Blake killed and then a few
hours later, walking around bold as brass."

Unmindful of the inanity of her comment, she smacked her dry lips in
satisfaction.

Sam felt nearly sucked into the vortex of this total illogic, he almost
felt he should convince her that any "Dynasty" freak would already have
seen Krystle trying to stiff Blake.

It was Butts who answered her.  "Well, now, Ma Gris, why get mad at
Blake?  It was Krystle's doing.  Right?"  His head turned toward Sam.

Sam was afraid they'd all start getting involved in the "Dynasty"
family squabble and opened his mouth to divert this.  It was
unnecessary, for she counterattacked.

"You men always side!"

She didn't need to add "against the women."

Sam couldn't have written a better script himself to open up the Loreen
Butts case.  He laughed slightly.  "Now, though, Mrs. Grizzell--in
this case, she did shoot him."

Ma Gris slapped her hands on the arms of the chair in the act of
rocking forward and answered ferociously: "Drove her to it!  That man
drove that poor woman--" "Hey!  Now, just you hold on, Ma."  Butts
nervously fingered a cigarette from a pack tight in the pocket of his
fatigue-green T-shirt.  "Just you hold on now."  He lit the cigarette
and tossed the matches in the full ashtray angrily.  "I'd say just hold
on."

He puffed in quick little jabs and kept his eyes trained on the
bluegreen images on the silenced soap opera.

After a moment Sam said, "Well, Krystle was under a lot of pressure."

Smack went the knobbled hands down on the chair arms.  It must have
smarted, but Sam had given her her opportunity.  "God knows the poor
woman was--" Butts was still feigning interest in the faces floating
like ragged water, but now his face reddened as he said, "It ain't
Krystle you're talking about, is it?  It's Loreen.  You think I drove
Loreen to seek companionship elsewhere."

His prim way of putting this rather astonished Sam.

Mrs. Grizzell said, "Why, no--that--" "Don't tell me no.  You been
near to sayin' it straight out ever since it happened."  He stubbed out
his cigarette furiously.

Equally surprising to Sam was the mother-in-law's equable answer.

"Now, your job did take you away a lot, Carl.  And Loreen left alone
here to see after the boy."

"That's my fault?"  He punched his thumb into his chest.  "And she
never did much seeing to Raymond, anyway."

"Raymond's my grandson.  Looks the spit of the Grizzells, if I do say
it."  Smoothing her skirt, she went on: "Never said it was your
fault.

Man has a job, he's got to do it.  But look what the papers made of it,
of my Loreen being .  . . you know.  Now, Loreen was never one to go
about with other men--not like that Perry woman.  Everyone knew she was
a common whore.  Went off and left them kids of hers with no one to
take care of--" Butts cracked his knuckles, his biceps rippled beneath
the thin cotton.  "Took up with Boy Chalmers, though, didn't she?"

"Never took up' tall, you know her and Boy was friends from grade
school.  That's what Boy Chalmers was, just a friend."

"All he could be," murmured Butts to the silent hospital corridors,
where the nurses soundlessly belabored their patients.

Sam had moved not a muscle, had hardly blinked for fear of disturbing
the current between the two.  Now he brought down the front legs of the
chair he'd been tilted back in.  The tiny, sly smile on

Carl Butts's face vanished at Sam's movement, he looked at Sam
furtively, and his jaw clenched like a vise.  Sam said nothing.

Loreen's mother went on, unmindful of the implication of her
son-in-law's comment.  "To tell the truth--and I don't mean to pain
you, son--but I always thought Loreen and Boy would .  . .

you know."  Her eyes widened, the cold blue of them covered with a
glaze of time.  She brought out her handkerchief again, kneading it in
her lap.

Butts said nothing, but Sam saw his mouth crimp.  He looked at his
shoes.

To Sam, Ma Gris said, "Let me tell you about Loreen.  That girl was
shy.  Shy and quiet."  She swiveled to glare at her sonin-law.

"And don't you go trying to paint a picture like the papers did-that my
Loreen was a tart!"  It was the even, deadly tone she'd used before,
the last words brought down neat as a cleaver.

Carl Butts flinched.  "I never said that.  You know, I never."

"But smart," she went on.  "Loreen was smart as a whip.  Clever.

She could've been an actress."  Here she looked at the TV, the doubled
image of the toffee-haired girl.  "Better than her.  Could have acted
rings around her.  Could've been better than Jane Wyman and Krystle put
together."

"Well, she could rile a man, Ma, you know that."  He sounded almost
apologetic.  "Tart as green apple pie, Loreen could be."

The woman nearly screeched: "Don't you go calling Loreen a tart!

Yes, she could rile a person, but only if pushed, Carl Butts.  It is a
bald-faced lie to make out anything else."

"Ma Gris, I only meant--" But what he only meant cut no ice with her.

To Sam, she said, "They got it all wrong--the papers, the police."  And
she suddenly sat back as hard as if Butts had shoved a fist in her
chest.  Ma Gris must have remembered it was police she was sitting here
jawing at.  "Just what do you want to come bothering us for, Mr.
Du-Geen?"  Spite stung the syllables.

"Sorry, Mrs. Grizzell.  You see, I kind of agree with you, that we got
it all wrong.  See, I talked with Boy Chalmers, and he didn't seem the
type to do this."

"Goddamn right he wasn't!"  Butts all but shouted.  His jealousy, his
questioned manliness finally overcame his better judgment.

"That man's a fag!"

Ma Gris paled.  "Carl Butts!"

With as mean a look as Sam had seen, he leaned toward her.  "Queer as
they come.  Mr.  Handsome-Boy.  Has everyone fooled."

"Including Loreen, do you think?"  asked Sam.

The mother-in-law kept opening and closing her mouth like the wide-eyed
nurse on the TV screen.  She was speechless.

Butts waved a deprecating hand at Sam.  "Oh, hell, man.  Women can
hardly ever tell.  A real man can, that's all."  And he looked Sam up
and down as if calling his manliness into question, since apparently
Sam hadn't figured out Boy Chalmers.

But the look changed when Sam said, "So neither one of you thought he
was guilty."

In the silence, only the creak of the rocking chair was audible, and
even it stopped, finally.  Neither one of them would meet Sam's eyes.

They knew what he was thinking: that the two of them had kept silent
because the other main suspect was Carl Butts.

Butts began defending himself against Sam's silence.  "Well, the jury
thought so.  And maybe they're smarter."

Ma Gris leaned towards the TV set, switched it off, sat back.  She said
nothing, nor would she look at Sam.

Sam stood up.  "I guess I'll be going.  Thanks for the beer.  Mr. 
Butts . . . Mrs. Grizzell."  He nodded toward each of them, though the
eyes of each were now fastened to the dark screen.

Sam let the door swing quietly behind him and walked down the rubbishy
pavement.  In the gathering dusk he saw the faint gleam of a firefly,
ready for the dark.

Nearly a year ago, that screen door had shut.

He'd gone through half a pack of cigarillos sitting out here in the
dark watching Bunny Caruso's house.

He hadn't expected that any talk with Carl Butts would have turned up
new evidence, and it hadn't.  Even if Butts and Loreen's mother had
agreed to testify to the characters of both the victim and the alleged
murderer, it wouldn't have been enough to turn the case around.  A
mother is obviously going to say her little girl wasn't "that type",
and though the husband was as sure as Sam himself that Boy Chalmers was
a homosexual, it was a supposition on their parts.  The kid wasn't a
practicing homosexual, Sam had spent plenty of time with his friends
and family, obliquely asking that question.  A few of the men who knew
him were inclined to wonder about Boy's sexual leanings, but, again, he
was so well liked no one wanted to come right out and voice their
suspicions.

Anyway, wondered Sam, starting in on a fresh cigarillo, what the hell
would it have proved?  Even if the kid were a rampaging fag and
everyone knew it, who's to say a gay might not in a moment of gross and
perverse behavior try to rape a woman?  Sam didn't believe it, not
about Boy Chalmers, but it wasn't something anyone could prove.

So Boy Chalmers had by now lived out a year of a life sentence.

When Tony Perry and then Loreen Butts had been murdered, Sam had
remembered the Hayden crime--not that he'd ever really forgotten
it--and walked into the mayor's office and told him he thought the
Eunice Hayden case should be reopened, that he, Sam should be given
access to the files on it, and that Sheriff Sedgewick should cooperate
in every way possible.

This was before the murder of Nancy Alonzo, and Mayor Sims was in the
fourth year of the throes of his re-election campaign.  He could never
stop campaigning, because he must have realized how tenuous was his
hold on the job and seen an opponent behind every tree.  Unfortunately,
there weren't that many who wanted the position--a young attorney here,
a chairman of the board of education there, but no one seemed to be
taking it seriously.  You get into the habit, Sam supposed, of seeing
the same man turn up in the Rainbow on the same stool talking about the
same town business.  For Sam to walk in with something so politically
inflammatory as wanting to drag out an old murder and tie it to a fresh
one made the mayor wave away his curtain of cigar smoke (he honestly
thought that his cigars and seersucker suits would put people in mind
of Spencer Tracy) and look at Sam as if he'd gone crazy.

"You trying to tell me that that murder-rape over in Elton County a
couple years ago and that Eunice Hayden case--you trying to tell me
that because of this you think there's some Jack the Ripper type out
there?"

"No."

"Then you trying to tell me you think the same sombitch did all these
women?"

"Yes."

"Just because there's been three murders in four years--four years,
mind you--" Sam interrupted.  "All of them done the same way.  And I'd
say that sort of thing in two tiny places like La Porte and Hebrides
might suggest our women better bolt their doors."

Sims leaned back and smiled meanly.  "Well, I guess I lknow what your
problem is.  You never did find who killed Eunice Hayden, so you want
to make it look like neither did Sheriff Sedgewick find who really
killed the others.  That it?"

"No, that's not it."

Sims's mode of argument was to ignore answers and repeat himself.

"So since you never did discover the Hayden girl's killer, you want to
throw up a little dust to make it look like maybe Sheriff Sedgewick
over there didn't do a good job?"

"I think maybe he didn't.  I think the wrong man's in prison.  I also
think the criminal justice system showed signs of working pretty quick,
for once."

"And just what's that supposed to mean?  You inferring there's
something fishy?"

"I'm just saying Boy Chalmers went inside as quick as the jurors went
out."

This was too much of a conundrum for Sims.  He stared at Sam through
squinty eyes and tossed down his pen.  "My god, but you got crust.

There's nothing to show Boy Chalmers ever even knew Eunice Hayden, so
the Hayden case, that's got nothing to do with these two others.  Why,
not even our state attorney could get past Chalmers's alibi, and she's
tough as they come."

Sims loved Billie Anderson, who was just as political as he was.

What Sims was too stupid to see was that his own argument was
circular.

Follow it around again and it would show that if Boy Chalmers hadn't
killed Eunice Hayden, it was a good bet he hadn't killed the other two
women.  But all Sam said was, "There's nothing to prove Chalmers knew
Antoinette Perry, either.  It was just assumed, wasn't it?"

Apparently, the mayor was so certain he was right that his anger
drained away and his small, wet mouth twisted into a pearly little
smile as he leaned back, hands locked behind his neck.

"Well, you do take the biscuit, Sammy, you really do.  First off, that
Perry and Butts woman, they were raped.  Eunice wasn't ever raped."

"Oh.  What would you call it, then, that knife stuck up in her?

Interfered with'?"

"Watch your mouth, DeGheyn.  The doc said she wasn't raped.  Now, I'm
not a big-time policeman like you, but even I've heard of what is
called an MO.  Then why wasn't the Hayden girl done the same things to
as the others?  You tell me."  Mayor Sims drew some papers toward him
and started signing--his indication the interview was over.  "Now get
outta here and check the parking meters."  He looked up.  "You just
might be needing a vacation, Sammy."

Meaning: lay off or you'll be taking one.  Sam hadn't expected
cooperation, so he wasn't especially disappointed, as far as the threat
was concerned, he couldn't care less.

But Sam didn't lay off, he kept on asking questions about Boy
Chalmers.

What he found was that Boy had never had a serious love interest,
though he was extremely popular--one girl thought he looked like Robert
Redford, and talked as if Boy's incarceration couldn't be really
happening, that it was more like a movie, and maybe Paul Newman would
come along and somehow get Boy out.

And two months ago, back at the end of June, Boy had gotten out.

It hadn't been with the help of Paul Newman, though, it had been Alexis
Beauchamp Chalmers.

A little over two months ago, at the end of June, Boy's mother had gone
to visit him in prison.  It was Boy's birthday, and Alexis had been
permitted to take him a cake.  Oh, there'd been no files, knives, or
guns in it, it was pretty much hacked up and kind of pasted back
together by the time Alexis and Boy sat down to blow out the unlit
candles.

But because it was his birthday and because Boy had been a model
prisoner, they were allowed to sit in one of the detention rooms with a
guard at the door, to celebrate.

The guard told the authorities later that Mrs. Chalmers had even
offered him a piece of cake--a real nice woman, Mrs. Chalmers-but of
course he'd just put the slice of cake aside.  "You don't think I been
stupid enough to eat it?  Could been drugged."

But Mrs. Chalmers had become violently ill, and he had gone quickly
for help.  And the chain of events, the several flukes from then on,
from that unguarded door all the way down the hall to freedom, was a
warden's nightmare.  Another guard had been in the john, still another
had left his post at the bidding of two other guards who were having
trouble containing a prison fight.

And the last guard, the one who stood between him and the outside
world, Boy had managed to overpower.  It was a small prison and not a
maximum-security one.

People figured Alexis Beauchamp Chalmers was the best little actress
they'd ever seen.  But they could never be sure, because she really had
got sick, and the pretty little pink-icing rosebuds had turned up
traces of salmonella poisoning.  What had passed between Boy and
Alexis, sitting there eating that cake, no one knew.  Since he hadn't
got sick, people figured Alexis must have planned the whole thing.

It was only twenty-four hours before they caught Boy in Dubois's
used-car lot, trying to hot-wire an old Ford.  He'd been stupid enough
to run back to Hebrides and right into Sheriff Sedgewick's arms instead
of running hell-for-leather in the opposite direction.

For Boy, it was the wrong twenty-four hours.  This, at least, was Sam's
thinking, for, in spite of the awful coincidence of Boy's escape and
the murder of Nancy Alonzo in that same wood, near the spot where
Loreen Butts was murdered, Sam still didn't think Boy was guilty.

The mayor, on the other hand, seemed hardly to be able to contain his
jubilance at proving Sam DeGheyn one hundred percent wrong.

Right after Boy's recapture, he'd gloated.  "I guess that pretty much
shuts you up about Boy Chalmers, don't it, Sammy?"

All Sam could think of, looking at Sims's mouthful of teeth, which he'd
happily punch out, was that the mayor could stand a visit to the
dentist.  The rise of anger he felt was at Sims's ability to laugh in
the face of this horrible tragedy.  Sam hadn't known Loreen Butts or
Tony Perry personally, but he had known Nancy Alonzo.

While Sam just stood there, his hands under his armpits, his arms
hugging his chest in an attempt to smother his rage, Sims had gone on
signing whatever documents were on his desk, signing them with a
flourish.  And talking.

"Yeah, I reckon Billie Anderson'll throw the book at him this time.  No
more birthday parties for Boy.  Now maybe you can use your energies on
something more useful, huh?  Maybe you can start earning your
salary."

elmer.

Sam just stood there.

The smile disappeared suddenly.  The goading wasn't working, and Sims
didn't like that.  "Now, I heard you don't agree with some of the
evidence.  I heard you think that crime-scene officer was wrong."

When Sam didn't answer, Sims leaned forward.  "Well?  What did you
think that man who's got more experience and smarts than you ever had
was wrong about?"  When Sam still didn't answer, Sims went on, but with
increasing uncertainty.  "Hell, she writes his name in her own blood on
the ground there and you still say maybe Boy Chalmers is innocent.  My
godamighty, man!  What kinda proof you need, anyways?  Man's a
jailbreaker and out one day and another woman gets her throat slit?  I
mean, what kinda proof--?"

Pure exasperation stopped him.  Sims just shook his head at Sam's
foolishness.

But when Sam still didn't answer him or move a muscle, Sims got up,
leaned over his desk with his hands fisted, and nearly bellowed.  "Let
me just tell you something, fella!  This Alonzo case is closed.  I
don't give a tinker's damn if she was a La Porte girl, or if she did do
cleaning at the court house here, or if she was a friend of yours.  The
case is closed.  Now, why don't you get out there"-- and here he
waggled his arm in some general "out there" direction--"and maybe do
something useful.  Drag your Deputy Donny Dawg out there to the Red
Barn and clean up the sugar "You hear me?"

"I hear you, Mr.  Mayor."  Sam's voice was without expression.

Sam had been the sheriff around here for too many years to give a
thought to Mayor Sims's temper or Mayor Sims's threats, he was as much
a fixture as the courthouse pump, a town relic, a piece of history the
people could no more do without than their Labor Day parade.

He was the loot.  Sam smiled.

He heard voices, a man's and Bunny's, her piping voice which sounded
eternally surprised, and looked through the screen of pines.  Bunny and
her customer were standing on the tiny, slanting wood porch, and she
was waving away moths that had fluttered in when the porch light
flicked on.  Fireflies thronged the patchy grass, and mosquitoes hung
like a veil of gauze over the water holes.  The man was slapping the
back of his neck, uttering some obscenity.  Then he laughed.

Sam watched Bunny Caruso, standing there in her long, loose dress--her
"medium's gown."

He wasn't thinking of loose women, he was thinking of nisfits.

Tony Perry had lived alone with her two children, never been married,
hadn't had much to do with people, except the men she slept around
with.  Sam frowned.

Eunice Hayden wasn't Sam's idea of "loose", whatever Eunice had been up
to those last months before her death, Sam could still remember her as
the washed-out young girl he'd seen standing on the corner of Tremont
and First like a shipwreck victim, marooned.

"She didn't make friends easy," her mother had said, probably meaning
that Loreen, as a youngster, didn't have any at all.

Maybe the girl had been smart, maybe not.  Smart can kill you socially
at that age.

l

Bunny Caruso, who was giggling on her front porch, had been counted the
school idiot, more or less--laughed at, kept forever on the fringes of
the crowd.  Got fired from one job and then another, treated with
contempt by some of the La Porte people long before she'd found her
True Calling.  A misfit, to say the least.

Willow Pauley, who lived her agoraphobic life, had reported someone
watching her house: a man in the trees.  "Swingin' from them,
Willow?"

Another woman alone, another misfit.

And Sam's favorite misfit: Maud Chadwick.

Watched her through the trees.

The memory of watching her through the trees rose in him like thick
black smoke.  If he didn't get at her, he would suffocate.

Sitting here now with the drawer of knives, he found himself gulping
air.

He had run his thumb over each one, meaning to choose the one that drew
blood with the lightest touch.  He barely caressed the blade of the
hunting knife--his favorite, drew it easily and smoothly along until
the thread of blood came to the skin's surface.

He breathed easier.

Letters, he had been thinking, were bad news.  One had been propped on
the cold potbellied stove, and it wasn't even to him, but to that sorry
old drunk with his sharp whiskers and callused hands he'd had to call
"Dad."  He'd had to call him that or his mother wouldn't lie with him
anymore.  And the letter had been for that old drunk.

Letters.  Women.  They came and they went.  The women around here saw
him and didn't know they'd seen him.  They didn't know he was imprinted
on their eyes.

He thought of Sam DeGheyn watching through the woods.  Now, that was
really funny.  I le giggled, thinking of it.  The sound rose in his
throat like froth.  It was so funny, he cut himself deeper, running the
knife blade absently across the palm of his hand.

Licked it.  He didn't care, he didn't often feel pain.  In his crotch
he felt pain, the pressure from that thick coil of smoke rising upwards
through his limbs, engorging.

Watching from the woods, he knew just where she went, and when.

And what was funny was that Sam thought he was out there all alone,
watching them.

Yet there he'd been while Sam was watching.

The sheriffs shadow.

Now, that--that was funny.

Both of them--with a gun, with a knife--watching through the trees.

Oh, that was a scream.  He was out there somewhere.  That was a
scream.

He felt a pressure in his throat rising and he tossed his head back.

Beyond the window the sparrows took off.

Bunny Caruso's coy giggle was matched with the man's hawking laugh
that sounded more like a man having a seizure than a man having a good
time.  They stood on the tiny porch.

Because his back was partially turned, Sam couldn't make out who it
was.  At first he thought it might be Dodge Haines's brother Rob, but
then he heard that laugh.  Sam thought he recognized it, and when the
screen door creaked shut and Bunny's friend's lounge suit moved like
quicksilver toward his car, Sam gaped.

Bubby Dubois.

His first reaction was a short gasp of astonished laughter, his second
was a molten anger that seemed to twist his stomach muscles as if he
had a cramp.  He felt, he supposed, the way a father must who finds his
daughter's young man screwing another girl.  Why he thought Dubois,
unfaithful to his own wife, would be faithful to Sam's, he didn't
know.

Why he should feel what would be Florence's own humiliation, he didn't
know, either.  He felt betrayed.

The engine of Bubby Dubois's Cadillac ticked over with the precision of
a time bomb, and Sam pulled his dark glasses from the glove
compartment, put on his cap, drew on his black gloves, and got out of
his car.  To avoid slamming the door, he left it open and started
across the hard, rutted road.  Smoke plumed from the Cadillac's
exhaust.  Sam avoided the gravel and came up on the driver's side just
as Bubby tossed his arm over the passenger seat and looked over his
shoulder and started backing slowly.

"How's your future look, Bubby?"  asked Sam, his head lowered to the
open window, hands gripping the sill.

Bubby Dubois and the Caddy both lurched, quivered back and forth for a
moment, and froze.

"Sam?"

Sam slowly chewed his teaberry gum and gave Bubby a tight, closed-mouth
smile before saying, "You bet."

"Well, I'll be damned.  Sammy!  Long time, no see."

"Small world, Bubby."

Sam could tell, from the way Dubois was running his hands back and
forth on the wheel, from the spit-polished look of eyes like dimes,
that Bubby was considering, hoping, that Sam DeGheyn had come to the
cabin on a similar mission.  The idea was quickly discarded when the
eyes saw themselves reflected in the mirrored glasses.

Sam was leaning against the door on outstretched arms, like someone who
meant to roll a car over.  "So, how's your future look?"

Dubois slid his sweat-slick palm from the wheel and rocked it.

"Aw, you know .  . . Little of this, little of that."  He smiled, he
had a neat white row of teeth, like a kid's.

With a short bark of laughter, Sam said, "Hell, if that's all Hubert
can tell you, you wasted your money."

"Hubert?"  Bubby stared at the windshield with a puzzled frown.

"Prince of Liechtenstein."  Sam removed one hand from the sill to
adjust the black-visored cap, bringing it down toward the
mirror-glasses.  Slowly, he chewed his gum as he watched Dubois trying
to conjure up some image that would fit "Hubert."

Silently, Bubby mouthed the name.

"Now, Bunny must have called on Hubert.  How else could you be in touch
with your loved ones?"

"Like my wife," Sam desperately wanted to add.  But his mind could
quickly flip through the consequences of that response as if they were
printed on Rolodex cards.

"Oh, yeah--Hubert!"  said Bubby, with a cunning look.  "Well, Hubert
wasn't much into things tonight.  .."

Sam watched sweat like spittle snake a tiny track down around Bubby's
hairline.  Was Dubois really so dumb to imagine Sam didn't know what
was going on in Bunny Caruso's mirror-lined room?

"Thing is, I heard this kind of crash in there, and I was worrying
about Bunny."  Sam's face drew a little closer, Bubby's natural reflex
was to lean back.  "I've been out here for some little time."  The
glasses hid his eyes, he kept his voice flat.

Bubby's head jerked around.  "How long?"  The mere idea that Sam had
been keeping the cabin under surveillance was the worst thing yet.

"Oh, twenty, maybe thirty minutes.  Like I said: I heard this crash .

.."  Sam's tone made it clear he was expecting an explanation.

"Yeah .  . . yeah."  Bubby had pulled a square of white handkerchief
from his pants pocket and was pressing it here and there against his
face like a powder puff.  "It was a lamp."

"Sounded more like a sideboard falling flat.  Or maybe a bed breaking
up."  Sweat it, man.  "Probably Hubert getting up to something."  Bunny
Caruso, thought Sam, should really fill her clients in on details.  But
he supposed only a cop could inspire the colorful account of a prince
of Liechtenstein.  Why bother to tell her clients?  Would they
appreciate Hubert?  "Seances can be pretty rough, they tell me."

Bubby was making tentative movements towards relaxing a little-putting
the handkerchief back in his pocket, lighting a cigarette--but
obviously wondering if he should.  The hand that held the lighter
trembled, the polished corneas glittered.  He took a chance and tried
to joke around.  "Worse'n slam dancing."

His artificial laugh was more of a snort, like someone drawing back
phlegm.  "You ever tried it?"

If the man had winked, Sam would have dragged him from the car and
they'd have done a little slam dancing themselves against the concrete
abutment of the shack.  No.  Sam thought for a moment.  "I guess I
don't want the past back again."  Where had he heard that, or something
like it?  Maud had said it, or read it.  It was from one of her
books.

For the briefest of moments Dubois, Bunny, the shack, the stink of jail
cells, of beery trailers, of the debris of broken marriages--all were
elided from his mind and replaced by the end of the pier, the party
across the lake, the black, unchurned water.  In a flash, his mind cut
through the anger, the mortification, the desire for vengeance, to the
pose, and he withdrew his hands from the window, stood back from the
car, and stuck them in his pockets.

The pose was Town Loot, Mr. Danger, Black Leather.  At what was he
angry?  With whom?  Did he really think he was out in the dirt road in
front of some honky-tonk saloon, the sheriff with his gun hand just
above the holster, about to protect some lady's honor?  If he didn't
love his wife, and his wife was screwing another guy, and that guy was
doing the same with someone else, what the hell was that but ironic and
trivial?  What infuriated him was a marriage acted out before a
microwave instead of a bed, that his wife was a foolish, fearful woman,
that he wasn't really trapped but that he felt like it.  And that he'd
like to slough everything off.

He really didn't want the past back.  He didn't much want the present,
either.

"Sam?"

Dubois's voice brought him out of this haze of thought.  The name was
spoken plaintively, as if Bubby were some kid requesting the teacher to
let him leave the schoolroom to take a piss.

Sam slapped the hood of the car.  "See you, Bubby.  I've got places to
check out yet."  He made it sound as if Bunny's was merely a stop on a
long list.

Bubby's body went slack with relief.  Immediately, he twisted the key,
gunned the accelerator.  "Swell seein' you, Sammy.  Be sure to give my
love to--" The name stuck in his throat.  Bubby looked alarmed.

"Florence," said Sam, looking over the hood of the Caddy.

"Sure."  The car shot back, turned at the road, spat up gravel as it
shot off.

Sam didn't look around but kept his eyes on Bunny's cabin.  The windows
had darkened, lights gone off as soon as she'd left the porch.

He'd been fooling around here, playing cop, when he should have been
over at Wade's house.

As he crossed the road to the patrol car, he told himself he'd cut his
ritual visit to Wade's short, he wanted to get back to the pier.  Maud
would be sitting there alone.

Sam slammed the door, started the car, stared for a moment through the
windshield.

He was out there somewhere.

It was hard for Sam to imagine any sort of violent act taking place on
Hayden property.  It was almost as peaceful as that old pier, and far
less illusory.  Or was it?  Sam frowned as he drove down the road with
the big white house up on his left and into the tarmac area near the
barn where Wade's white station wagon was parked beside a Jeep
pickup.

Ever since he had started spending hours talking with Maud and looking
out over the lake, Sam had begun to wonder if he could put his hand
through stuff that looked solid but might turn out to be mist and
fog.

Sounds were muted, objects seemed to have dropped where they stood.

Off to one side of the tarmac was an ancient Chevy, up on blocks.  It
had taken on the air of sculpture or statue, something immutable,
unchangeable, marking a spot whose significance everyone had
forgotten.

No one had forgotten the Hayden place, though.  Not Dodge Haines,
certainly, whose cigar it must be sparking up there on the porch, and
whose truck was parked on the tarmac.

Occasionally, Dodge came for a visit, probably to still any lingering
doubts in Wade's and the township's mind that Dodge had had anything to
do with the death of Eunice Hayden.

As he walked across the close-cropped grass, his shoes wetted with
ground mist, Sam was aware of lingering doubts about Dodge Haines, a
man he had never much liked, even before the Hayden crime, a man who
was mostly bluster and bad jokes, and another client of Bunny
Caruso's.

Dodge (who'd got his nickname years ago because of his loyalty to
Chrysler) considered himself a hellion with the ladies.  The Rake of
the Rainbow Cafe was stuck back there somewhere in the forties, he
thought that mock kisses, pinched thighs, ogled necklines got the women
all worked up.

There was no love lost.  If Sam disliked Dodge Haines, Dodge hated Sam
DeGheyn.  After the murder of Loreen Butts, Sam had knocked on Dodge's
door so often that Mayor Sims had finally told him it looked like
harassment.

"There was just as much circumstantial evidence to indict Dodge Haines
for Eunice's murder as there was to convict Boy Chalmers for the Butts
woman's," Sam had said.

"Jesus, but you're full of shit, DeGheyn," Sims had replied, dragging
his height and girth around his desk like a man in manacles.  "Haines
found her, didn't he?"

"So he says."

"Hell's that mean?"

Sam shrugged.  "I'm just wondering when he got there."

"The Moffits said they saw his truck parked by the barn."

"Sure.  But they don't know when it pulled up."

"In the man's sworn statement he says he went out to see Hayden, walked
into that barn, and there was Eunice trussed up like a chicken."

That's what he said.  And the rest."  Sims looked at Sam blackly.

"I know what he said, Mr.  Mayor."

"Get off my back, Mr.  DeGheyn."

"Coffee, Sam?"  asked Wade, holding up the dented aluminum percolator
that seemed as much a part of the Hayden place as the house and the
cows and hens.  He brought it out to the porch on these Sunday nights
and set it on a hot plate so he wouldn't have to keep going back and
forth to the kitchen.  The porch was his favorite venue, the
ladder-back rocker his favorite chair.

Dodge was sitting in the swing, whose chains creaked when he moved.  He
nodded curtly, looked off into darkness.

"I don't mind, Wade.  Thanks," Sam said as Wade handed him the white
mug.  "How's business, Dodge?"  Dodge had a construction company that
Sam thought might be getting too much county business.  Dodge and Mayor
Sims were great pals.

Dodge shrugged.  "So-so."  He rocked his hand just as Bubby Dubois
had.

Everyone must be going broke around La Porte.  Dodge wasn't drinking
coffee, he had a pint bottle in a brown paper bag.  It was part of a
persona Sam had never quite placed.  Tough guy?  No frills?

Down-to-business?  Sam didn't know, and neither, he figured, did
Dodge.

The Seagram's in a paper bag was meant to underscore the cowboy boots,
the wide belt with the heavy buckle, the string tie.  He had a hound's
face--heavy jaw, jowls, drooping and bruised-looking tissue under the
eyes.

"Want a snort?"  Dodge held up the bottle.  He still called them
"snorts" and often drank Seven and Sevens.  Dodge had to be civil to
Sam, even, at times, convivial, to make sure no one would get the idea
he harbored a grudge, which might also make them wonder why.

Sam smiled slightly.  "I don't mind," he said again, holding out the
mug of coffee, into which Dodge dribbled whisky.  Sam thanked him and
leaned back against the railing of the big wraparound porch, freshly
painted every three years.  The whole Hayden spread looked painted in
place, it was that neat.

Talk was sparse with the three of them there.  In addition to Sam's
lingering doubts about Dodge, and Dodge knowing the doubts lingered,
there was Wade himself, a still sort of man.

C)neon-one, he didn't mind talking.  When it got up to three, Wade
seemed to consider it a party, and he wasn't much good at parties.

Sam remembered him hovering with his paper punch cup when Mayor Sims
had cut the ribbon for the opening of the new post office on Main.  It
was neatly laid pink brick, more efficient, bigger, air-conditioned,
square, and charmless.

Sam made some comment about Wade's tomato crop, and Dodge said about
Wade's horse, Fleetwood, "Oughta race that horse over to Brewerstown
races someday."

"Well."  Wade rocked and sipped, sipped and rocked.

"No, you ought," said Dodge, as if it were an argument.  "That's one
damn fine horse."  He unscrewed the bottle cap, took a mouthful, and
put the cap back on.  He wasn't cheap, but he seemed to like to husband
his whisky, as if he were drinking on a dare.

He'd have loved Prohibition, Sam thought, if he'd been old enough to
drink back then.  Dodge was somewhere in his mid-fifties.

Comment about the old sow, about the half-dozen cows that Maud called
"a tragedy of cows," with their thin white faces all looking hopeless
and alike, like actors in a Greek play wearing masks.

Dodge apparently thought he'd earned the right to leave, had appeased
the gods of doubt, and rose from the swing.  Sam told him not to go,
that he himself had just stopped by for coffee and couldn't stay
long.

But Dodge just stretched and yawned and said he'd had a long day and
went clattering down the porch steps.  With his pint under his arm and
his hands gouging his pants pockets he went whistling phonily off to
his pickup.

"How you feeling, Wade?"  Sam asked.  It was no casual inquiry.

Often, in the last years, Sam had got to worrying about Wade.  He was a
somber man, but very mild and pleasant, and much liked by the people of
La Porte.  In his tall, lanky way, he was almost handsome, too.  The
double deaths of daughter and wife had brought the women out in droves
with their freshly baked pies and chicken casseroles.  It was the first
time Sam had seen Ella Ponteen in a fancy dress and carrying a covered
dish.  Women, Sam had thought, from the time their kids were born,
always thought of food as salvation.  Eat your spinach, drink your
juice.  Maybe they were right.

Sam's question was taken, too, as serious, calling for a serious
reply.

Wade put down his coffee mug for a moment, stretched his arms so the
large hands clamped onto his knees, and looked past Sam and the porch
rail.  "I been better, Sam.  I been better, as you know." Sitting
thus, his posture for serious speech, Wade started to talk.  The
shyness and hesitation in speech disappeared as he progressed, and his
progression was along familiar lines.  Sam had taken Dodge's place on
the swing, was pushing himself back and forth with one foot, arm across
the swing's back, head on fisted hand.  It was pretty much always the
same speech, and Sam wondered if that was what therapy was all about:
the same speech over and over, the same events culled from memory,
chipped away at in slightly different words, as if the experience were
a piece of sculpture turning a many-faceted precious stone, but the
heart of it never changing.  It was always the same stone.

Was this what Dr. Hooper listened to--over and over again, the same
details?  Sam looked off, hearing Wade's voice as a kind of muted
background music, and thought he'd ask her on one of her passages
through La Porte.  Maybe even tomorrow, Labor Day.  She was staying
over at the Stucks' rooming house.  He'd seen her earlier, coming out
of the Rainbow, and had to stop and stare.

Sam hadn't told Maud that he considered Elizabeth Hooper a mysterious
and beautiful woman who appeared almost out of nowhere at an appointed
time and place and who carried within her the remnants of other
people's lives, torn memories, rags of feeling.

". . . All of four years now, and I still just can't work it out in my
mind, you know, how someone could done such a thing..."

Despite his reverie, part of Sam's mind still following Wade's
drift--although it was always much the same study in loneliness, guilt,
reprisal--Sam never knew but what the man's words might not offer up a
clue, some new way of saying it.  So he listened, staring off into
darkness towards the barn.

Sitting with his hands locked on his chair arms as if he meant to shove
himself out of the chair, Wade was saying what he'd said many times
before, that the loss of a child was the most bitter loss to be
borne.

l'hat it was difficult for Sam to understand, perhaps, he being
without.

"Being without."  It sounded as if the barrenness of Sam's marriage
were a judgment, and that such aridity prevented compassion.

"What's terrible is, he got away with it.  It's not to be borne that
someone could do that and get off scot-free.  There's times I wondered
was it that Chalmers fellow."

Sam stopped the swing.  How many times had he heard Wade say it?

Wade just couldn't take in that Boy had an ironclad alibi for the time
of Eunice's death.  But he supposed it must ease the pain a bit for
Wade to think there was someone he could look to.  He turned his gaze
from the far fields, indistinguishable one from the other in the
dark.

"I'm sorry we didn't find him, Wade."

"Hell, I ain't blaming you, Sam, you know that."  Wade's voice was
tight, and his jaw was working on a piece of tobacco.  The hard way he
chewed, it might have been gristle.  Then he sat back and picked up his
mug, two fingers through the handle, thumb on the rim.  "Dodge said you
was rooting around--that's his words, rooting around'--and that you had
been ever since Eunice .  . .

well .  .."

Sam studied Wade's profile, the way the flesh beneath the cheekbone,
the socket of the eye had hollowed out more over the last year.

"When'd Dodge tell you that, Wade?"

The tall man shrugged.  "Couple months ago.  Round the time that Alonzo
woman was killed.  Dodge said it'd started you asking questions about
the others.  That Butts woman, and Eunice."

Slowly, he turned to look at Sam, and his tone was slightly accusing:
"You never told me nothing like that, you know."

No, he hadn't.  Sam had said nothing to Wade about his suspicions
regarding Boy Chalmers, though it had meant possibly shortcircuiting
some of Sam's own unofficial investigation.  He would himself have
liked to get Wade talking more concretely about that day, replaying it
over and over again.

"Well, Wade, I wouldn't say I was rooting around."  It's been a long
time, after all--although I have been thinking about it, that's
true."

"I'm glad to hear that.  I thought the police just closed the case and
forgot all about Eunice."  He took another swallow of coffee.

"Hard to forget, Wade ... a thing like that."  Sam shook his head when
Wade raised the pot again from the warmer.  "No, thanks."  He drained
his cup, rose, and set it on the table.  "It's nearly twelve, got to be
going."

"I don't guess Dodge and Mayor Sims is too happy about it.  About you
rooting around."  Wade gave a slow smile, almost sly.

"No, I don't guess so, Wade.  Well, I've got to be going."

They said good night, and Sam walked off across the hard dirt yard lit
only by a cold half-moon.

I wonder where they go when the summer s over said Maud, trying to
stretch two fingers farther into the narrow olive bottle, scissoring
them around an olive that kept falling back.  Besides the cut-glass
olive dish there was a little plate of lemon twists and cocktail
onions.  And a garlic clove.  It was always there, and Sam knew she was
waiting for him to ask about it.  He didn't.

"Far as I know, Raoul and Ev--" Her head turned quickly to Sam.  "I
didn't say I wanted to know, did I?"  Irritated that he might tell her,
still she was glad Sam was back.  It was nearly midnight, the party
across the lake usually crested around now, and she was getting
depressed.

Getting?  Wasn't she always?  No, this was different, it was
superficial, even facile depression, a relief from the real thing.

"You said," said Sam, the fresh beer balanced on the arm of the folding
chair, " I wonder where they go."

" "That's wondering.  Wondering is totally different from wanting to
know.  I.ike wondering about their names.  You told me their names.

When I said I wonder what their names are," I didn't actually mean I
wanted to know."  She would much rather run a few possible names
through her mind, pick one, discard it, start the process over again.

Knowing the last name (which she didn't, but she suspected Sam did)
would be entirely too real, last names pinned you right down to a phone
book, a street, town, city, country.

And, of course, if the name was ordinary, that could be near fatal to
her fantasies about the people who owned the house across the lake.

"Raoul."  That wasn't the real name, she was sure-- pretty sure.  Sam
had let the first names pop out, and when she'd reacted with a mild
kind of violence (knocking the lamp over), he'd smiled rather slyly and
retracted.  Or half-retracted: he'd asked her if she really believed
"Raoul" and "Evita" could possibly be the real names of the couple over
there.  Sam was very quick, though, very quick.  He could have
pretended he'd just made the names up in order to hide the fact he'd
revealed them.

The thing was, she rather liked the names, and she imagined they very
well could be real, given the Hollywood glamour going on over there.

She was afraid of their real histories--God only knew she didn't want
to find out they lived in Yonkers or even Manhattan.  And what if they
came from some palsied mid-sized city like Omaha?  What if they had a
regular house on a regular street in Des Moines?  No one named "Raoul"
or "Evita" could possibly be a full-blooded American, though, and
therefore they would probably drive off a cliff before they'd live in
Des Moines.  She didn't want to know the real histories of the owners,
or even the guests, because she was afraid of their possible
mediocrity.  Her imagination could really go to town working up ports
of call for Raoul and Evita.

A few times there had been complaints, she'd heard, about noisy parties
"over there," but Sam, with his customary delicacy, had refrained from
identifying the culprit house.  Anyway, it was no more than drunken
cavorting in the driveway--which Maud couldn't see and which,
consequently, didn't exist for her.  God knows she had nothing against
drinking, as long as the glasses were perfect, the gestures of raising
them elegant.

Sam had said, with that eerie perception he sometimes displayed, that
he hadn't intended to give away their names.  "You don't even know but
what I made them up, do you?"  and he'd looked out over the moonstruck
lake with that tiny smile .  . .

"Sorry," said Sam, who actually did know where they lived, and did know
their names, although he had very little contact with the summer
people, the ones who owned the quarter-million spreads on the other
side of the lake.  He drove around back there sometimes in the dusk and
marveled at these houses, at the way they had tucked themselves,
architect-designed and long and low, into the landscape, burrowed there
like moles.  Big as they were, they had surprised his eye, separating
from their camouflage of trees, plants, and shrubs only if he looked
closely.

Maud didn't have to worry about reality barging in from over there,
jumping off the dock swimming towards her, waving, yelling, singing,
drowning.  If she ever drove along the old roads on the other side she
would find them just as dreamy.

He had thought up "Raoul" one night after he and Florence had been to
La Porte's single movie house to see Kiss of the Spider Woman.  The
name "Raul Julia," Sam thought, had got to be about the best in the
book if a person wanted to conjure up exotic, mysterious people and
settings.  What a name!  It was definitely a Mother Grizzell name.  Ma
Gris would absolutely make a meal of that name.  He wondered if the two
of them were still in that trailer, sitting as they'd sat a year ago.

Perhaps she'd died.

For all of her wiry aggressiveness, she hadn't looked all that strong
to him.

The "Evita" he'd stumbled on when he'd been flipping through the chrome
jukebox menu of numbers in the Rainbow Cafe and found "Don't Cry for
Me, Argentina."  Evita Per6n.  He'd thought "Evita" went extremely well
with "Raoul."  It was a marriage made in heaven.

God knows it was better than their real names, ordinary as La Porte
names.  Maud would have fits.

"It's all right," Maud said, giving her attention to the olive jar and
finally loosening up the one that was wedged in, so that all the olives
rolled out into the olive dish.  From across the lake came the jumpy
sounds of "Anything Goes."  There was a little stirring of the
guests.

Some had come out to the patio, and she loved the daubs of color the
gowns of the women made, even though the distance and the lantern
light muted them, blueing the greens, or the greens yellowing the
blues.  In other words, she admitted to herself, you can't really
tell.

It was too dark to see such mutations, the patio was like a little
chartreuse island.

They sat in silence, Sam humming a few bars of the music, smoke
drifting up from his cigarette.

She was glad he'd come back before going home.  Often, she wondered
about his wife, Florence, who occasionally came into the Rainbow to buy
pastry or order a cake for a special occasion.

Maud had never talked to her, Shirl always waited on her up there by
the cash register.  Florence was quite good-looking, she thought, in a
smoldering, Italian way.  Sam had smiled and said she was
secondgeneration Greek.

She also wondered where he went on these nightly excursions ("just to
check on things") around La Porte.  Did he circle the lake and drive
past the backs of those houses over there?

Probably not.  But he could be gone for two, three hours, and although
he'd said he was going to Wade Hayden's, she couldn't really imagine
sitting around with Wade Hayden for over two hours.

This was not because she disliked Wade.  She didn't even know him
except to see him behind the counter in the post office, where he
would always say, " Lo, Maud" and " Bye, Maud," with nothing much
happening in between.  His smile would be reserved as he'd stamp a
package "Priority Mail" that she'd be sending to Chad.  He was very
remote.  Reserved and remote.  Maud wanted to laugh.

Beside her, Wade Hayden was probably Times Square.  They should have
got on like a house afire, standing there together on opposite sides of
the counter.

She'd forgotten about that poor girl of his, Eunice, and the sudden
memory brought the rocking chair down with a small thud.

Sam turned and looked at her.  "Something wrong?"

"I just remembered œunice Hayden.  I swear, but I just can't put that
together.  It doesn't make sense."

"Does murder ever?"  Sam picked up the binoculars and fiddled with
them.

"Well, of course.  Take Detroit or Chicago or New York City.  There it
makes sense.  The very senselessness of it makes sense."

"You've lost me."  Sam turned the binoculars over.  "eiss.  These are
good.  Where'd you get these?"

"In the attic.  But listen: that's what those places--I mean Detroit
and New York, for instance--are like.  Killings are part of the
puzzle.

But not here.  It's like someone took a piece from the wrong puzzle, a
piece of blue sky, maybe, and forced it into a black pavement.  Thumped
it right in, I mean.  And spoiled the whole design."

"Maud, for lord's sake, what's the difference?  You can't force a piece
of sky into a New York street, eiiher."  He adjusted the focus.

Her fist curled and her eyes squeezed shut.  He recognized the signs of
a snit coming on.

"The sky's always falling in the gutters of New York.  And don't be so
damn literal."  The eyes opened and the fingers mauled around in the
jar of olives.  "I hate it when the pimento gets out."  She tossed the
bruised olive into her glass and pulled the bottle from the ice.  "Now
this"--and Maud made a sweeping motion with the Popov bottle--"makes
sense.  There's the lake, the moon over it, and the little boats,
there's us on the end of the pier, and there's the party across the
water.  The arrangement is perfect."  She made a circle with her thumb
and index finger.

Binoculars raised to his eyes, Sam said, "Um .  . . Well, there's some
people wouldn't agree it's perfection."

Maud gave him a soppy smile.  "That comment is beneath you.  What are
you doing with my binoculars?  Put them down!"

Sam dropped them, and they dangled on the narrow black strap.

"For Christ's sake, that's what they're for.  l)istance.  What do you
do with them, count your toes?"

Maud started rolling her hair up the side as if the lake were her
mirror.  She knew the gesture irritated Sam.  "The rule is, we're not
supposed to see the party up close."

Sam sighed.  "The rule.  You just made that up."

With feigned sweetness, Maud said, "I never needed it before.  The rule
is, you do not try and see the people over there any closer than you
can see with your naked eye.  I don't know why, so don't ask me.  It's
the rule.  I think it's because--" Maud stopped to sip her drink and
stir the glass flamingo--"it would spoil the design.  It would break it
all up."  She gazed up at the night sky.

"The moon would crack, the lake would shatter like glass, the patio
would tilt, and the pier would collapse."

For a moment Sam looked at her.  "That is certified shit."

As if there were crumbs in the lap of her skirt, she brushed it
smoothly, slowly.  "That is because you are blind.  You can't see
anything if it isn't in perfect focus."

Sam swung the binoculars from around his neck and set them on the
pier.

He pulled a Coors from the bucket, snapped the cap.  At least she'd got
off the subject of Eunice Hayden.  So he was, really, pleased to sit
there and listen to her ramble on about some fucking room or other
she'd seen in a vision.

"I didn't say vision."  I'm not clairvoyant--which is one of my
favorite words.  It's musical.... Anyway, I was talking about a room in
my imagination.  I keep seeing it.  It must be in Spain, there are
Spanish tiles on the floor.  Or in Mediterranea.  The weather--" Sam's
head snapped up.  ""Mediterranea?"  There is no such place."

She sighed and dropped her head in her hand.  "I mean, as any fool
could tell, any country or place around the Mediterranean Sea.

God, can I just tell about this room?"

"Shoot."

"The weather is fine.  I mean, it's not just sunny, it's silky or
gauzy.  There's a bed with an iron frame, and a big wardrobe, and a
wooden chair pulled up at a sort of dressing table.

Peachy-shaded powder is spilled a little over the table.  One of those
old Pond's powder boxes is sitting on the glass .  . .

though probably in Mediterranea you can't buy it.  The curtains are as
translucent as chiffon and billow around the window that looks over the
sea.  There's a small wrought-iron balcony that I can walk out on--I
wear a loose dress and I'm barefoot--that I can walk out on and look
out over the sea.  The sea is the color of jade until the sun starts
setting and tosses this dazzling scarf of light over it at six o'clock
and turns it to topaz.  At night it's grape-colored.  And it's always
moving.  I can't see the waves breaking on the shore because my room is
very high up, but I can see the waves barely forming out there in tiny
wrinkles.  At night if the moon is very bright, which it usually is, I
can see narrow bands of white foam, just a ruffle of white."  Maud
stopped to take a cigarette from his pack and tamp it down.  She had
her own, but she enjoyed filching his.

"Is the ice bucket on the balcony?"

She squinted past the blue flame.  "What?"  Then she looked around at
the tub and frowned as if it were some newfangled thing tilting
precariously on the end of the pier.  "No," she snapped.

"If there was an ice bucket I'd have said."

Dangerous waters, but Sam stroked through them.  "Well.  It was only
because the place sounded a little like here .  .."

Her eyes were as wide and wild as a gazelle's as she swept them over
the scene around her.  "Here?  Here?  Well, fortunately not.

The polizia don't go around arresting the wrong people in
Mediterranea."  The rocking chair thumped back, and she smoked in quick
little jabs.

Sam was wary.  "What're you talking about?"

"As if he didn't know.  Those women raped and murdered.  Nancy Alonzo
and Loreen Butts and the other one."  She looked at Sam.

"That Chalmers fellow you arrested--" "Boy Chalmers.  And Ididn't
arrest him--the police in Hebrides did that.  And the mayors in both
towns were extremely pleased.  Not to mention the state's attorney."

Maud was rocking the chair gently to the rhythm."  Moonlight Becomes
You."  Can you imagine?

Remember Dorothy Lamour?  Someone told me she lived in Baltimore,
Maryland.  .."

"You certainly know the right thing to wear .  .."  Maud sang.  She
had a light, sweet voice that put Sam in mind of a tall, pastel summer
cooler--the sort of thing you held sitting on white wicker on a wide
green lawn .  . . Christ, he was getting as bad as her.

"She wore hibiscus in her hair.  Dorothy would be better off in my room
than in Baltimore.  I wonder if she sells real estate.  I think someone
told me she did."  Maud shook her head.  "That doesn't fit, either."

Although she appeared to have forgotten about Boy Chalmers and the
rape-murders, Sam knew she hadn't.  Maud rarely forgot any of the
threads of her conversation, any more than Odysseus' wife-what was her
name?--would have given up weaving that endless tapestry.  "Tell me
some more about the room.  It's interesting."

"Why should I?"  She sang a few more words:

What a night to go dreamin$ Mind if I tag al-looooong .  . .

"Well .  . . I'll tag along to your room."  He thought of Florence.

Had she been out going dreaming with Bubby Dubois?  How could anyone go
dreaming with him?

Maud's voice came through the image of that blubbery body humping his
wife.  Her sly voice.  "Why don't you ask me if there was anyone else
in the room?"

Better sly than hurt, so Sam said, "Okay.  I'm asking."

Maud stilled the rocking chair and leaned over the arm, closing in.

"Nooo."  Now it was sly sweetness.  "Nooo.  There're no chairs on my
balcony, so I'm not sitting out there looking over the water with some
knuckle-brained, ham-fisted member of the polizia."  In a grand
gesture, she made a curve with the hand that held her martini glass and
the liquid went flying out, sparkling the air.  as if she were
baptizing the pier.  "Shit," she said, looking into its emptiness.

"Sounds like your room's in Venice."  It appeared to be a neutral
comment, but he just couldn't keep the recklessness out of it.  He knew
well enough that she didn't want to qualify her room or place it
anywhere in particular beyond its Mediterraneal bearings.  He knew she
was looking up at him from under the veil of her hair.  "Because of the
water," he said.  He was really more interested in why she was so sure
Boy Chalmers was the wrong man.

Probably just to be pig-headed.

"It most certainly is not."  She grabbed the vodka bottle and wrung
another drink out of it.  "There's no jade sea around Venice--at least
not in the postcard I saw of it.  And, anyway, Venice is on the
Adriatic."

Anyone who didn't know that was surely too witless to be the repository
for her great dream.  "Oh.  Well, I guess I'm not swell enough for
Mediterranea.  Or even Adriatica."  Sam stretched out his legs and
dropped the mirror-sunglasses down from their resting place on top of
his hair.  "So tell me why you think Boy Chalmers is innocent."

"Who?"

He had interrupted her fantasy-telling, and now she was going to be
difficult.  "The wrong man.  The wrong man T arrested."

She had herself picked up the binoculars now and was training them
across the lake.  He knew she would refuse to talk about Chalmers
unless he noticed what she was doing.  And commented.  Sam sighed.

"Well, you're breaking your own rule, aren't you?  Didn't you just say
we're not supposed to be looking through the binoculars?"

"I'm not."

If he didn't know Maud so well, he'd've thought she was drunk silly.

But she was never drunk, just silly.  Sam stared up at the black sky.

He was tempted not to comment, but he supposed he'd have to.  "You're
not.  But you're looking right through those binoculars."

"My eyes are closed."

Oh, for Christ's sake, her eyes are--Sam couldn't stand it, he reached
out and wrenched them from her grip.  Which was, of course, just what
she wanted--to drive him to distraction.  She was smoothing out her
skirt and humming "Moonlight Becomes You."

As he wound the strap around the binoculars and then set them on the
dock, he said, "I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me why you think the
Chalmers kid didn't do it."

Dignified silence reigned.

"Maud?"

Making a long sausage curl of her hair, she rolled it slowly up above
her ear.  She knew it annoyed him, which is why she did it.

"I'd really like to hear what you think.  Since we seem to be the only
ones who think it.  Sims thinks I'm nuts."

He must have hit just the right mendicant-on-the-streetcorner note.

"He's the nut.  An alcoholic old nut who shouldn't ever be mayor."  She
stopped in the act of pulling the little beaded cord of the lamp off
and on, off and on, as if she'd just discovered the wonders of
electricity.  "He hates you because if you ever ran for mayor, you'd
win.  Still, I hate to say it, but it would be just too much of a
coincidence that on the very day Boy escapes from prison there's
another murder."  She looked at Sam, worried.

He popped another can of Coors.  "Oh, I'm not saying it's
coincidence.

I guess I'm saying whoever's doing these killings took advantage of
Boy's being loose."

Maud frowned and went back to pulling the cord.  It illuminated and
then plunged into darkness the edge of the dock where the black cat was
snoozing.  "That's certainly possible, I guess.  Do you know Chad said
that?"  When Sam looked at her, eyebrows raised, she nodded.  "He
did."

"Chad?"

"Um-hen.  He was talking about him a few weeks ago, down here.  He was
setting up the lamp for me and all the extensions .  .."  She looked
behind her.

Impatiently, Sam prompted her to go on.  "Why didn't Chad think it was
Boy like everybody else?"

"Chad is not like everybody else."  She sighed and dug around in the
ice for a cocktail onion, which she plunked in her glass before pouring
a fresh martini.  "I guess he's like us."  And she sighed again, as if
she, Sam, and Chad belonged to some alien race of folk who because of
their greater perception and subtlety had to live beyond the fringes of
ordinary society.  "Did you know he met Boy Chalmers once?"

"Hell, no, I never knew it.  You never told me."

"That's because I never knew it, until that weekend.  Chad was riding
that ancient bike out on the road to Hebrides--oh, way over a year ago,
I think he said.  One of the tires gave out, and Boy was coming along
on his motorcycle.  He stopped and fixed the tire.  To do it, he had to
go back to his bicycle shop and get a pump and patch, or whatever, but
Chad said he was really helpful.

He went to a lot of trouble."

"Why didn't he ever tell you this after Boy was up for Loreen Butts's
murder?"

She was pulling the little metal cord of the lamp.  Off.  On.  Off.

On.  "He says he did.  He says I forgot.  But I didn't forget.  He just
forgot to tell me.  You know how he is."  She kept twitching the
cord.

"No, I don't know how--will you stop fucking around with that lamp?  A
person would think you'd been living by gaslight all these years.  You
shouldn't have a lamp down here, for Christ's sake, Maud!"

She looked at him evenly, said coolly: "Then tell me, how else can I
read my book?"  She lifted the book of poetry.

"Read inside.  I'm surprised Chad would help you set this up."  Sam
turned and looked behind him.  "You must have a dozen extensions
trailing back there to the house.  Have I ever seen anything so
stupid!"

"I don't know.  Have you?"  Maud was reading her poem, mouthing the
words silently and elaborately.

Sam gritted his teeth.  "You could have an accident.  You could topple
over into the lake and that lamp right on top of you."

Maud did not look up from her book as she replied, "I've often thought
of going swimming with the lamp, yes."  Quickly, she reached up and
tugged the cord.  Off, on.

He should sic her on Mayor Sims.  No, Maud was only like this around
him.  And Chad, too.  He drank his beer and looked over at her as she
sat there pretending to read that poem, dramatically mouthing the lines
and now fluttering her hands a little, just in case he wasn't noticing
that she was ignoring him.  She turned a page.  It rustled
elaborately.

Sam knew the reason he'd got on her case about the lamp, and knew the
reason he was so irritable, was because it made him terribly nervous,
Maud sitting out here alone for half the night, unprotected except when
he could be here with her.  "Go on about Boy Chalmers.  What else?"

"Chad didn't say anything else."  She closed her book, a stage prop not
immediately useful to her.  "He just said he didn't see how Boy could
possibly have done these murders.  Boy was just too fucking nice.

Those were his exact words."  She looked meaningfully at Sam.  "I don't
approve of people always saying fuck this' and fuck that."  It's a word
that should be used sparingly, if indeed at all.  Some people must
always resort--" Oh, shut up, Sam thought, listening to her ramble on
about the impoverishment of the language.  "Did Chad say anything at
all else?"

"No.  But Boy must really have made an impression on him for him to
believe he's innocent when he'd rather not."

"How do you mean?"

"Chad would rather think he's guilty."  Maud turned to him.  "That
would mean whoever's guilty had been caught.  For that would mean I'm
out of danger."  She folded her hands in her lap and looked out over
the lake with the most self-satisfied expression Sam could imagine.

Chad worrying about her pleased Maud immensely.

But she was right.  Chad would certainly rather think the killer
caught.

"Thanks," he said.  "Thanks for telling me."

"Yooo-rrr welcome," she said, rolling her hair up the side of her head
again.

Smiling slightly, he leaned his head back and studied the night sky.

"Wish we could all live in Mediterranea."  He felt her grow still,
probably pleased he had remembered about her dream room.

"The carabinieri probably don't need a new loot."  She plucked the
Popov bottle out again and held it up to check the vodka line.

"I guess if you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, you'd
take that room."

Looking disgusted, she forced the bottle back into the Colonel Sanders
bucket and set her glass on the barrel.

But he could nearly read her mind: she saw a game in all of this, the
what-would-you-ask-for-if-you-could-have-anything game, and he knew she
wouldn't be able to resist.

"Well, what would you ask for?"  Her tone was as stepped-on as the
singer over there whining about everything happening to him.

"Depends."

The chair stopped rocking.  "What do you mean, depends'?  If you could
have anything you wanted, it doesn't depend."

" "Oh."  After a fumy silence in which the vocalist missed planes and
got his letters shot back to him, Sam said, "Where would I be living
when I asked for--whatever?"

"What?  .  . . Anywhere, of course, if you can have anything .  .."

Sam eased down in his chair and rolled the can of Coors across his
forehead.  "I'm thinking."

"Go ahead, then.  Think."

Sam wanted to say "Key West."  But she'd read into that reply that he
wasn't taking the poem seriously, or her need to understand it.  "New
York."

Maud stopped rocking and sipping and banged down both chair and
drink.

"New York?  Why in the name of god New York?  You l could live
anywhere"--she stretched out her arms--"and you choose New York?  Death
Valley, the Mojave Desert I could understand .  .

."
 She settled back again, her face turned to the black sky, and said,
"But not New York."  Her mouth on the last word was like a little steel
vise.

"So now it appears I can't live anywhere I want."

"I didn't say that.  Did I say that?  Just be reasonable, will you?"

She paused.  "Why New York?"

"Because I have a niece there.  Her name's Rosie."  Sam did not have a
niece named Rosie.  He had pulled her out of the air, walking down
Fifth, probably because of the tune coming from some old wreck of a
piano over there, and a drunken choir of voices: "You are .  . . my
heart's boo-kay."  He felt, suddenly, a rush of nostalgia over this
imaginary girl who had not even existed a minute before.

Maud folded her arms across her chest, hard.  Had she been standing,
she would have looked like one of those hardy women in an old pioneer
movie.  "You never told me about Rosie."

"I don't think about her all that much, I guess."

"Is she on your side or Florence's?"

"I don't think she's chosen up sides."  Sam checked his watch.  One
a.m. Florence would certainly be choosing up any other side but his.

"You know what I mean.  You're just trying to irritate me."

Sam smiled.  "Maybe.  Rosie's my brother's girl."  Now he was inventing
an entire family.  It came from sitting around with Maud, who only
touched down on Earth when she was working.  He didn't care, anything
that would keep her talking was okay by Sam.

Thump went the chair again as she twisted her whole body around to
glare at him.  "What brother?  You've only got a sister.  That's what
you told me.  Don't you ever tell the truth?"

Sam chewed his lip.  "He's a half-brother.  Mom was married before she
married my father.  His name's not even the same."

Maud started rocking again.  "Half-brother.  That makes Rosie hardly
any relation at all."

It annoyed him, the way she discounted the niece who had just been
born, streaked her way to eighteen or twenty, and was now walking down
Fifth, looking in shop windows.  He saw her as clearly as he would if
he'd been the window dresser, seen her straight through the
sun-sparkled glass.  She had a filmy blondness that looked as if it
were etched in sunlight.  Wide blue lake-water eyes .  . .

"So, you haven't yet said what you'd want most.  Living in New York,
that is.  If you could have anything.  A stretch limo, for instance."

Having turned Rosie into the merest wraith of a relative, Maud seemed a
little content, tapping her fingers to the music.  The guests were out
on the patio again.  If he squinted his eyes, he could make out a tiny
figure dressed in blue with pale yellow hair.  "Valet parking."

The cigarette she was raising to her lips dropped.  "You're supposed to
choose the thing you want most.  You're not playing."

Sam yawned and slowly rose.  "I am.  Valet parking.  This is New York,
remember."

Maud tossed the cigarette into the lake.  "Good God, you could have the
Trump Tower if you wanted it."

"Then I'd really need valet parking.  Listen: I want you to go in
now.

I don't like you sitting out here all on your own in the dark.  You
never know what sort of weirdos are hanging around.  I have to get
home."  He was not going home, he meant to continue his rounds.  Sam
leaned over her, resting his hands one on each arm of her wooden
rocker.  "And unplug that goddamned lamp."  He walked away.

"It's Labor Day, it's the last party.  I'm sitting here and watching.

And I don't see why you have to leave.  You've got late shift tomorrow,
haven't you?"  Sam turned on the dock, looking at the back of her head,
at the rigid way she held herself.  Then she said, "She did write his
name in her own blood."

Sam stood there for another moment and then went back to put his hand
on her shoulder.  "Are you talking about Nancy?"

"That's what they said she wrote: Boy."

" "I don't think she meant Boy Chalmers."

Maud looked up at him, squinting.  "Who did she mean, then?"

"Her son.  Her little boy."

"What?  You don't mean you think he--?"

"No, of course not.  He's only seven years old.  No, I think she was
trying to leave him a message.  You knew Nancy, didn't you?

Didn't she once work in the Rainbow for a while?"

Maud nodded, staring up at him.  "Washed dishes."

"Well, you remember she worked for us too, cleaning at night.  We used
to talk."

"In the Rainbow she'd never talk to anybody.  I guess that's not
surprising--you'd end up talking to Shirl.  She was so shy.  Nancy, I
mean.  I tried to get her to talk.  But she'd just keep her eyes on the
dishes.  It was terrible the way her husband must've beat her up.  It
was terrible they took the little boy away from her, as if it were all
her fault."

"You know what she called him, Maud?  Dear boy."

" "Oh."  It came out a breathy, drawn-out "ooohh."

"Dear boy."  It seemed such a sadly old-fashioned way of speaking.

Maud suddenly remembered her mother using it, often, when talking about
her younger brother, Maud's uncle.  And he was dead now, too.  He was
dead of an aneurism, he'd fallen off a bar stool when he was barely
forty-five.  Everyone else thought this was funny, Maud hadn't.  Dear
boy.

"I believed her, the story she told about her SOil falling down the
cellar steps.  I was out at their house.  Those steps were deadly.

There was this big hook--lord knows what it was for-sticking out of the
wall.  The kid could easily have fallen and broken his arm on those
steps.  After all the other accidents that happened to the kid when
that drunk of a husband was around--Rick Alonzo, what a deadbeat--I
guess the social worker thought the boy'd be better off in a foster
home.  It was hard on her, really hard."

Hard?  Maud could well imagine.  It made her hold her breath even to
think of it.

Sam went on.  "She'd be mopping the floor, wringing the mop out and
talking about him.  Dear boy," she'd say."

Maud listened to the birdcall of the clarinet across the lake.

"Billie Anderson nearly laughed me out of her office when I pointed out
that I didn't think Nancy had written anyone's name.

There was a smudge, another word in front.  And that b wasn't a capital
B."

Maud felt a near-unbearable weight on her heart.  "Oh, Sam.  You think
she wrote--" " Dear boy."

" They were silent for a long moment, Maud rocking, Sam standing
there.

Then he said, "I'll see you later," and walked off the dock.

He heard her voice again, at his back, and turned and shook his head.

What else, how else would Scheherazade keep him hanging around here?

"I guess that means I can't continue my story, I can't tell you about
the drowning."  She reached up and pulled the bead cord on the lamp.

Its shaded glow threw a cone of dull amber over her hair.

"What drowning?"  His arms were crossed over his chest.  He knew her.

"Mine," she said simply, reaching a languid hand toward her glass.  "It
happens quite beautifully in the molten sea beyond the room I was
telling you about.  Well, good night."

The molten sea, for Christ's sake.  "How do you drown in this
vision?"

In a stagy manner, she turned her profile to him.  "I thought you had
to go."

Sam stared at the moon and shook his head.  "I can come back in about a
half hour.  Just to make sure you haven't drowned in the molten lake.

So give me a quick synopsis."

Maud cleared her throat as elaborately as a diva and said, still facing
forward, "I don't know how, but suddenly I find myself above the sea.

It's like a net of gold.  The sun's setting.  I'm in this long, long
dress of filmy gold, and I simply drop--no, I don't drop--I sail gently
down and I lie floating on the sea.  I blend with it .  . . my dress,
my skin, because of the reflected sunlight, and it's as if the sea
closes over me, but you can't tell the difference.  I fit it.  The sea,
I mean."

She fell silent and he waited.  Then she turned around and said, "I'm
the perfect puzzle-piece."

For a few moments he stood there several feet behind her, frowning,
feeling a chill.  "Turn off that goddamned lamp and I'll be back in a
while."

He stood right off the path through the woods where she'd had to walk
on her way home and breathed in the moist night air.

What had delivered her into his waiting arms but the wish of his dear
dead angel mother, to make up for the pain she'd caused him?

She'd left her last letter to that bristle-bearded old man who'd done
nothing but sit at the kitchen table and drink their money away.

The queer had escaped from jail!  It still made him snigger.  The queer
got out and gave him a perfect reason for doing it on that particular
night, when he'd been hanging back because he thought it was too
soon--too soon after the Butts woman.

It wasn't because he thought he was in danger.  No, it was because he
liked watching her.

He liked watching her walk down Main, skittering along with her head
down, her feet hardly touching the pavement.  She was like a leaf, a
pale brown leaf, thin and ribbed and blown about by any wind.

He sighed, tonight, remembering.

And remembering, he found the cold handle of the knife jutting up from
his hip.  He could almost hear the rustles in the woods that he'd heard
that night in June when she moved along the path.

Coming towards him.

He leaned back against the tree, leaned his head back until his face
was pointing upwards through the branches, his neck taut, as taut as
hers had been.  He ran his fingers smoothly up and down, up and down,
and felt the answering tautness below, could feel his jeans begin to
strain.

"Nancy."

He whispered it even now and could imagine her all over again.

She'd started, out there in the unshadowed darkness, a dark so complete
that only the stark whiteness of the ash trees in the cold moonlight
could pierce it.

And his eyes.  But his eyes had burned out patches of these woods,
turned the hard dry leaves beneath their struggling bodies to
cinders.

"Hullo, Nancy."

He heard her intaken breath, could see her fighting with the dark,
trying to make out where the voice had come from.  He giggled.

She'd tried to yell, but it came out a gurgle that he simply reached
out and cut off, one hand around her neck, dragging her body towards
him.  Before he drew out the knife, he would make her understand that
he was master and she nothing more than a pitiful wood creature, a
squirrel or a rabbit.

He'd clamped his hand around her chin, squeezing her mouth up to his,
felt his tongue like an asp darting, darting at her teeth as if he'd
sting her to death.

And then she was on the ground, both of her hands held as if roped by
his one hand, and, dreamlike, the knife appearing in the other, cutting
into her clothes, her flesh like butter, trailing straight down from
her chin, and all the clothes fluttering and unresisting beneath the
tip.

As he plunged into her he shrieked.  He felt the pure righteousness of
it.  Her eyes were hollow, white, turned back in her head as if she
dared not look at his blinding eyes.

He brandished the knife in the air and waited for her to recognize this
world he had ushered her into.

Her eyes stared up at him.

He smiled and slit her throat.

Tonight, he had to shake himself out of this remembrance.

How could she still have had a breath of life in her?  How could she
have had strength to leave a sign, a word in her own blood on the
ground?

And why?

Why had she written that faggot's name, who'd never have the balls to
do what he had done--why write that name in her own blood?

Ever since that night at the end of June, he'd puzzled over this.

It nearly drove him crazy, wondering.  All he could think was that it
was the hand of god or his dear angel mother, who wanted to make sure
the evil were punished.  And the righteous went free.

Nothing else could explain it.

It must mean he was on the right track.  That it wasn't too soon.

And god only knew this one deserved to die, too.

He would have liked to stay here in the woods a little longer, one hand
on the knife, the other on his neck, remembering.

But he must move off now down the path and get to a place where he
could watch to see if she'd be out tonight as she usually was, and
which way she'd go.

If anyone deserved to die.  If anyone deserved to die.

A hat he thought she was doing was drinking.  Someone in La Porte
might have said that Willow Pauley's being a secret drinker was hard to
believe, but Sam had no difficulty believing it.  He only wished
people in La Porte would pull their shades down or draw their drapes
and, occasionally, lock their doors.

Sam had walked back to the police car and was watching Willow Pauley in
her brightly lit white kitchen, where she stood near the sink, moving a
glass to her lips and then lowering it, and then bringing it up again,
rhythmically.  He saw all of this as if a dark cutout against a white
background had moved.

Willow's house was not isolated like Bunny Caruso's.  It was a sturdy
frame-and-brick that sat in its large lot facing Main Street.  But it
did have a privacy that others on the street lacked, as it was spiked
around with trees, mostly ash and pine.

Before he died her father had run the nursery just outside of town.  He
loved trees so much he'd even named his two daughters and one son after
them: Willow, Ashley, and Oak.  Mr. Pauley had planted enough ash,
pine, and oak around the house that by now the property was heavily
wooded in back.

And it was the back that Sam always checked out.  The old dirt road
that ran all the way around the lake trickled off like rivulets from a
stream and wound around and narrowed down into little more than ruts.

One of them ended up here.  The place could be approached from the
rear, and Sam had got out and made a brief tour in and out of the heavy
cover of trees.

Now he was sitting as he had outside of Bunny's, wishing that Willow
would lead her life behind a down-drawn blind.

It was spot checking, that was all.  It was all he could do, but he
didn't do it on company time.  Even if his idea about the killings was
totally wrong, there was nothing to lose.  He yawned and looked at the
luminous dial of his watch and back at the window.  One-fourteen a.m.
and Willow was apparently cooking.

Cooking and drinking.  She raised the glass again, and the angle of
light showed it to be a wineglass, a large, globelike glass.

Sam studied the spokes of the steering wheel and thought about Nancy
Alonzo.  She might have been thirty, thirty-five even, but she hardly
looked twenty.  Working as hard as she had all of her life, and only
her hands had aged.  He remembered how she had stood there, wringing
her red, rough hands, asking Sam if he could help her get the boy
back.

I never hurt him, Sheriff: I would never, ever hurt that dear boy.

Sam told her he knew she hadn't and wouldn't.  He'd tried like hell to
get the agency to reconsider, but with all the other "accidents" the
child had suffered through, well, now it was broken limbs, and this was
just too much.  Poor Nancy.

Poor Nancy.  Even now, two months later, Sam could hardly believe that
Nancy Alonzo's reward for all of her hard work and suffering was a
horrible death.

Sam raised his head from his crossed hands and watched Willow's
window.

Sims had no trouble, Sam thought, believing it.  Sims treated the
killing of Nancy Alonzo and the escape of Boy Chalmers from prison
almost as if they were calling cards from heaven, something he could
whip out and hand to the sheriff.

Sam squinted through the windshield at Willow's back door, the little
wooden porch, and the steps going up.  The door probably wasn't
locked.

The trouble was, there were artificial limitations he had set.  He had
made big assumptions, he was aware of that.  But if he began with the
gut knowledge that Boy Chalmers hadn't done that murder near the Oasis
tavern, and the sure knowledge that the Hebrides and state police
hadn't done much looking around, then he could at least start from
there.  Someone else had done it, and in order to move at all, he
assumed that it was someone from these parts.  Sedgewick kept talking
about Hebrides and La Porte, that they were two different places.  But
the murder of Tony Perry had taken place in that no-man's-land of
woods, and the Oasis Bar and Grille, that was as near to La Porte,
almost, as it was to Hebrides.

At any rate, if he was to do anything at all by himself and on his own
time, he had to leave out trying to do any more spot-checks in
Hebrides.  He didn't know the women there, he didn't know their habits,
and it was bigger than La Porte.  It was also out of his jurisdiction,
though he didn't give a fuck about that.

If he was wasting his time, it was his time.

He sighed, turned his eyes to the rear window of the brightly lit
kitchen, and saw Willow actually lighting a candle, as if she might be
expecting a suitor.  That old-fashioned word simply came unbidden to
his mind.  Willow Pauley wasn't a woman to have a suitor.

S EVEN

He had watched her for nearly a year.

He watched her now coming down the steps of the house, holding on to
the wooden railing and carefully placing her feet in the way of someone
old or infirm.  The crown of her head was down, she was looking at her
feet, and light from the street lamp capped it with silver.  She
reached the pavement, turned up her coat collar, and walked north to
where the pavement ended suddenly.  It was as if the La Porte
boundaries were sharply defined.

From where he now stood, fitting the blade of the serrated knife into a
leather holder he'd made especially for it, he could see both ways.  He
couldn't have found a better place to stand and observe whoever passed
up and down Main Street.  No one could see him, no one knew he was
there.

Clever, that's what he'd always been.  Lowering his head, he giggled.

It was funny, it really was.  Then soberly he zipped up his jacket and
moved like any night creature from his place of safety, a fox from its
den.

Her coat was white or cream-colored.  That made it easier to keep her
in sight in the darkness relieved only by the sickly yellowish glow of
the vapor lamps.  This was the end of town, there was no one about, and
no one walked toward the town's edge this time of night, anyway.  He
had watched too often and too long to make a mistake of that.

In a way, he liked her, would have liked her a good deal, maybe, if
she'd been a good woman.  She was a person of habit, as he was.

She was dependable.  You could count on her to behave in the same way,
to do the same things at the same time.  You could count on her.

The thought made him hesitate, made him miss a beat in his rhythmic
walk, and he felt just the barest tightness in his chest.

The knife in its leather holder rubbed against his thigh.  He pulled it
out and ran his thumb delicately along the blade.

Even if he fell back and put more distance between them, he could see
her easily because of her coat.  Her coat was white (your dress was
blue).

His foot scraped on the pavement as he stopped.  He squinted his eyes
shut and put his hand to his ear, rubbing the heel of the palm into it,
like a swimmer whose ear was engorged with water.

Where had that line come from?  "I was dressed in blue."

He walked on, heavily.  He could see the stand of pines just beyond the
end of the pavement and knew she would sleepwalk along the road
there.

She was a dreamer, a sleepwalker ("I was all in blue").

He stumbled a little, the pressure in his head was worse.

"I was all in blue .  .."

Two people.  They were singing.  The image that flickered on and off in
his mind was of a man and a woman sitting somewhere against a painted
sunset by the sea, singing.  His hand was slick on the handle of the
knife.  His fingers were biting into his skin.  Something was draining
out of him, and he felt the tightening in his chest ray out to his
limbs.  It was not the same pressure that he had felt four years ago,
or two, or one.  That pain had in it the comfort of the rightness of
the thing.

He had gained on her without knowing.  Now she stopped.  He went
cold.

If she looked around .  . . He stepped into the shadows of the walled
drive of the last house.

But she didn't.  She knew she had to go down.  The others knew l it,
the fight they put up was for show, it was only a friendly argument.

His face felt oiled like the knife, only in sweat, and he wiped his arm
across his forehead.  He felt the sense of purpose leaving him and
stubbornly fought to hold on to it.  The voices of the singers were
intrusive.  He tried to shake them off, too, and kept on walking.

Why didn't she look back?

When he saw the woman in the Oasis Bar and Grille, he had not even
known what moved him to seek her out, to set his feet in her
direction.

Her lips had been wet and shiny as red patent, glistening in the smoky
light of the Oasis.  That silver blouse as transparent as water, that
eddied and curled around her breasts and nipples .  . . None of that.

It was later he had found out about the little boy, her little boy.

.

.

As if a switch had been thrown in his brain, a wire crackled, and his
head snapped to the left, his body felt the current.  He was crying,
losing his will, it was running like sap from a tree.

To steady himself, to draw some sort of boundary around himself, he
studied the houses left and right.  That was Miss Ruth's front porch,
chocolate-brown trim.  Willow Pauley's house back off the street,
showing edges of light through the trees, was she up?  The row of pumps
at the Red Bird gas station.

The familiar windows and the square patterns of La Porte made him
breathe more easily.  Why did she seem always to be coming to the edge
of the pavement and yet never entering the dirt road, the woods?

Hadn't it been a long time?

"I was all in blue."

The voices of the singers were growing louder, and the scene from an
old movie flashed into his mind.  She was moving now towards the trees,
and he remembered the little girl in the movie, the one that had turned
almost overnight into a woman.  But her dress was white--stark
virginal white, with a sash across it as black as sin.  His body felt
as weightless as the cone of mist thrown down by the last vapor lamp.

She was small in the distance, far ahead of him, the white coat no
larger than a moth.

He stepped from the last broken rock of the pavement, walking more
quickly, but steadily.  Only the movement in his mind was different.

In his mind he was tumbling towards her.  He was stumbling over the
hard earth of the rutted road, his arms outreaching to her as to some
point of definition.

He could only lean for support on the knife, which had grown in his
mind as big as a tree.

A white moth, fluttering .  . .

E G H T

The bladelike shrieks of laughter had come from another boat angling
across Maud's line of vision.  Quickly, she pulled the cord to turn the
light off and closed the book.

She had left the lamp on as Sam walked away, hoping he'd stopped to
look back and taken note of her refusal to do as he said, to knuckle
under to his commands or to shrivel in the face of unknown, unnamed
horrors like ivory grins in the night.  She had plenty of named and
known ones, she didn't need his jungle drums and rustling bushes.

Raised voices, shouts, and laughter issued from a party boat, a square
thing on pontoons with a fringed canvas top, which held new guests, she
assumed.  She squinted to make out the amorphous shape of the boat,
which had turned mid-lake and was shoveling across the water toward the
party.

Had these people started out together, or had they come from other
places, other parties?  Had the boat been picking them up all along the
shore, heading for Raoul and Evita's?

This cargo of dark figures seemed to fit the near-funereal movement of
the boat.  Only the coal ends of cigarettes, the tiny, wraithlike
flames of globed candles showed the voices were not disembodied.

Maud shaded her eyes, squinting at the far dock.  One-thirty in the
morning and the party was getting this fresh influx of guests.  It
could easily go on until dawn and into the morning.

The Labor Day weekend marked the end of the season, just as Memorial
Day marked the beginning.

Where did they go, Raoul and Evita, when the season ended?  It was a
question Maud liked to turn over in her mind, for there was such a
feast of possible destinations.  Brazil was one, for with names like
"Raoul" and "Evita" .  . .

As she tried to dislodge the two olives cramped together in the bottom
of the jar she wondered, with self-disgust, why she kept on assuming
things about them on the basis of names Sam had probably made up.

There hadn't been even a hint of a name until that movie came to town
called Kiss of the Spider Woman with an actor named Raul Julia.  He was
very handsome, she had seen it twice.  The second time she had sat
right in front of Joey, who had then come to sit beside her and share
his monster tub of popcorn.  He ate it by the handful, pushing the
popcorn in with his hand, making comments about the "creepy faggot,"
the other character, until she had had to tell him puleeze to be
quiet.

So they had sat there in the Empire Theater watching Raul smolder away
on screen as if he had a whole grate of burning coals behind his
eyes.

It was only after that movie that Sam had come up with that name.

She didn't know where he'd got the "Evita," unless it was from that
musical.  She didn't think anyone in the movie, including the Spider
Woman, was named Evita, but it was all very suspicious.

Maud sipped her drink.

The party boat, its prow retreating in the mist, could have been a
phantom boat, the trailing wisps of fog like a tattered flag, a
skeleton crew, the passage of the Damned .

Oh, for god's sake, she said to herself.  The lake people were anything
but damned.  They were all probably from New York, Boston, or places in
the Poconos marked by stone walls and weathered shingles.  Maud saw
them all as too wealthy and too savvy to work on an image.  The men
never bought Travel and Leisure in Cooper's Drugs, they just plucked it
from the rack and stood there and read it until Bobby Cooper marched up
to them and pointed to the hand-lettered sign.  They'd just shrug and
pay for the Times and saunter out.

They had left behind them the days of "summering" in some "quaint"
little place they had "discovered" in the Dolomites or spending an
entire season in Iceland.  They were too smart for that, Maud
thought.

They had found La Porte by accident, pure and simple, saw it had an
enormous lake and a snow machine, and slapped their sides with glee.

It was not a place you would ever say you "summered in," but only "went
to."  Rock-hard selfconfidence lined with a few diamond mines would
probably be the qualification for summer people in La Porte, too far
north and too deep inland to even suck up to the fringes of trendiness,
much less set a new trend.  Maud based her conclusions on rather foggy
premises, but she still argued with Shirl, who thought they were a
bunch of cheap phomes, that the lakers were simply extremely rich, rich
enough they could try and weasel a third refill of coffee without
paying the extra thirty cents.

"So they're rich phomes, so what?"  Shirl would say as she removed a
big tray of chocolate fudge cake from the shelf behind her, stared at
it, and then returned it to the case.  It was a mystery to her why this
cake didn't go walking out the door like her lemon chiffon pies and her
double-glazed doughnuts.  It was another recipe she'd "borrowed" from
Jen Graham, who was famous for her chocolate fudge cake, anyone who ate
Jen's cake was hooked for life.  Anyone who ate Shirl's never ate it
again.

("Can't understand it," Shirl had said.  "It's even got her secret
ingredient."  The "secret ingredient" turned out to be a handful of
cold coffee grounds that Jen had written into the recipe.

Religiously, Shirl tossed in the coffee grounds.) Then she'd slide out
one of the trays of her double-glazed doughnuts from the glass case by
the cash register and wham it into the glass-fronted shelves behind
her.  After the lake people in their white togs and designer sunglasses
had strewn the Sunday Times all over the tabletops and shoveled down
their breakfasts and then started buying bags of take-away doughnuts,
Shirl's magic moment would come.  With the whole tray of unbought
doughnuts resting succulently behind her, she could tell them she was
"out", she could lean one elbow on the cash register and the other on
her hip and wait for the inevitable nod toward the held-back tray.

"Them doughnuts is for charity, for the poor people."

"The Poor of La Porte" was always the Sunday banner for Shirl, who,
flying investigative-reporter colors, would route the libertine misuses
of the township's money and its huge budget deficits right to the door
of the summer rich, who, in vaguely biblical language, were those who
brought and took away.  The Cote du Jours, she called them.  And no,
they couldn't take home the last green-apple pie, either.

Maud would stand behind the counter dipping glasses in scalding water
and listen and shake her head.  La Porte had its poor people, yes, but
Shirl couldn't have picked one out of a lineup even if he'd been
stuffed between Lee Iacocca and Elizabeth Taylor.  ("That little
squirt?  So she's got eyes--big deal.  I got eyes, you got eyes, even
Joey's got eyes.") Yet they were big tippers, and Shirl hauled in money
on Sunday.

They thought the place was "quaint," probably because of the scarred
wooden booths and the marble-topped soda counter and the rough-hewn,
gum-chewing, chain-smoking owner.  The men loved the fact that they
couldn't bribe her or charm her out of that tray of doughnuts.  Shirl
seemed to strike them as the Last Gnarled Frontier of Free Enterprise
or something, when all she was was plain damned mean.

Maud always asked to work the counter on Sundays (which was fine with
Charlene, who got the big tips) because she didn't want to have to see
them all up too close.  Blurs of white tennis sweaters or caps and
(thank heavens) so many designer sunglasses it looked like a spaceship
convention were all Maud had to see.  She was afraid that she would no
longer be able to imagine them in black ties and swishing gowns, and
she was especially afraid she might discover Raoul and Evita, might
sense who they were, mark the Latin skin, hear the slight accent.  .

.

Maud shook her head to clear it.  Sam had made the names up, she
reminded herself.  Their names were probably "Kelly" and "Craig" and
they lived in the Trump and carried little dogs around.  Still .  . .

She could hear the party boat disgorge the newcomers, squeals and yaps
just like those little dogs.

Her head was lolling a bit, but it came up when the patio door over
there suddenly must have opened, perhaps from the thrust of the music
itself.

"Brazil."

It was an omen.

So Maud forgot the Trump Tower, but she couldn't put New York out of
her mind.  There was Rosie.

The party boat had pulled away from the dock and moored amongst the
other little boats.  And to the music of "Brazil," several of the dots
of color had beaded together into what was, yes it was, a line.  A
conga line.  They were snaking all the way to the patio door.

Here Sam had all along had a niece who lived in New York and he'd never
told her.  Maud looked across the lake now with narrowed eyes.

Unless he'd lied.

Chad She was a perfect stranger.  Why were they lying here in this
handsomely draped four-poster bed, among the coats?

Two drunken dances out by the pool, each of them holding a tall drink
of bullet-proof rum with an exotic flower spearing it, not dancing
really, just leaning against each other.

Bethanne had dropped her French-cut panties the moment they walked into
the bedroom, as if she were a guest removing her shoes in deference to
Oriental custom.  The rest of their clothes were still on their
backs.

Voices of more than a hundred guests ebbed and flowed downstairs in the
Bonds' double living room on one side and double library-no, it must
have been a game room and library.  Enough people to make you think
half of them were mirror images of the other half.

He'd never seen such clothes.  They should have had a runway.

Teeny-tiny sequined skirts, long, loungy velvet trousers.

High-cheekboned faces, enameled lips and eyes.

One of them was here.  She could have been twenty, his age, she could
have been sixteen--it was impossible to tell about women anymore.  He
didn't know her last name.

"You don't want to do a line, you don't want to free-base, you don't
want to smoke, and you don't want to fuck.  Why the hell am I here?"

she said.

"You wanted me to pour you into the bathroom next door.  You're pretty
liquid."

The bathroom's proximity to his room was probably why all of the coats
were here.  God knows, the Bonds had servants and closets enough to
collect them downstairs, but the rich apparently just run up to pee in
the marble bathroom and then fling their coats through the nearest
available door.

He raised his head slightly to see what covered his stockinged foot.

He'd removed his shoes in deference to Ralph Lauren.

Silvery fur.  Fox fur, maybe.  The closest he'd ever got to this stuff
was Veld's Russian mink.  Was that sable flung over the deep
armchair?

He didn't want to know what that glimmering white one was.  This Labor
Day weekend was on the warm side, and these women were still dragging
around in their weighty furs.

The girl rolled over, elbow on the pillow, caramel-tanned pointy chin
on her palm.  She made him think of the creme brulee on the sideboard
of desserts downstairs.  Her hair was sun-scorched, long, tendrilly,
her dress a metallic sheath of gold that turned russet when the silk
moved across her hips.

She fingered his watch, the Rolex impressed her.  She walked the
fingers of her sinewy, tennis-playing little hands across his shirt
front, asking in her breathless voice, "So what do you want?"

He'd had three of the rum drinks when he was used to beer and maybe a
little grass.  She'd taken out her stash of coke, a mirror, and a razor
blade as soon as she'd hit the bed, right after she'd discarded the
panties.  It seemed to be done in one fluid movement, as if the whole
thing went together.  He told her to put it back, he didn't want to see
the stuff.  Oddly enough, she obeyed.  Then she extracted a miniature
solid-silver flask and took a pull on its contents before she offered
it to him as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

He smiled at the gesture, it was somehow endearing.  Answering her
question, he said, "A thousand dollars."  Chad stared up at the softly
glowing ceiling.  I low'd the Bonds get that lighting effect?  Dragged
down a few stars, probably.

"What?"  Her tickling fingers stopped.

"A thousand.  A bank error."

"So call the fucking bank.  Now .  .."  Tendrils of hair webbed his
face.

He blew them away.  "They made a mistake.  It was a check for a hundred
my mom paid into my account.  The bank got the decimal in the wrong
place."

A sealskin coat slipped from the bed as she suddenly sat up, crossing
her legs.  "My god, are we going to talk about money?"

"Money" sounded as if it were a bad taste in her mouth.  She rolled
away from him, held back her gorgeous hair, and took another drink from
the flask.

"Unfortunately, it's spent."

"Like your dick," she said, recapping the flask.  Then she snatched
something else out of the metal purse, leaned forward over her crossed
legs, and started writing.

He wouldn't have thought there was any room in that purse.  It must
have had a false bottom, a magical gold cube from which she, a magical
girl from another world who'd infiltrated the party guests, could call
forth all manner of things, balms and anodynes, unicorns and gemi.

But here she was, solid and sexy, writing in a checkbook.  "If you're
so fucking indigent, where'd you get that Rolex you're sporting?"

She pronounced it "in-th-gent."  Chad smiled over at her where she sat
laboriously writing, the tip of her tongue caught between her pearly
little teeth.  There was something so vulnerable about her that he
wanted to pat her shoulder.  "Hong Kong."  That was a lie, his father
had given him the Rolex.

"You people without money are so borer-ing."  She wrenched three
syllables from the word.

She had to be kidding.  She wasn't.  Zip.  She chucked the check
towards him, tossed the checkbook on the floor, rolled over, and
started unbuttoning his shirt.  He held the check up and squinted at it
in that starry light coming from its hidden source around the ceiling
moldings.  His other hand trailed after hers, rebuttoning the shirt.

"We don't even know each other," he said.  "This is for one thousand
dollars."

Her hand went to unzip his fly.  "Jesus, your pants have little
buttons."

"I think they're French.  Maybe Italian.  Borrowed."

Bethanne got her face right down, squinting, fascinated.  Then she
started trying to fiddle with the little buttons.

He kept staring at the check.  Not even her narrow fingers trying to
wrench him free made him hard.  He was limp, staring at the check.

"Why are you writing me a check for a thousand dollars?"

Her hand stopped fiddling, started squeezing.  "Because you said you
owed it or something.  You been doing drugs?  My god, what's wrong with
you?  You want me to strip?  You want something special?"  Now she was
trying to wiggle out of what there was of a dress.  "You want to
unzip?"  She turned her back.

He didn't move, he lay there thinking of the thousand he'd have to pay
back to the bank before his mom found out.

It had been nearly three months before the bank had recognized its
error and one of the assistant managers called Chad.  Mr. Frobish had
been very understanding when Chad went in to see him.

People were generally understanding of Chad.  He might have thrown a
switch inside, the way he could turn up the charm voltage.

Yes, Mr. Frobish understood that Chad had simply assumed his father
had paid the money into Chad's account.  Yes, he could allow Chad a
certain period of time to see that the bank got it back.  Mr. Frobish
knew Ned Chadwick was loaded.  Yes, two months seemed reasonable
enough.

The Bethannes of this world didn't have bank problems.  Bethanne's
mother was a stockbroker.  The way she'd said it made Wall Street sound
like a regular meeting place for mothers.

"What's yours do?"  she'd asked, out on the terrace, with no particular
interest.

He'd been silent, his chin against her forehead.  "She's in the
restaurant business."

"Hmm.  Be nice to own one.  It's always so shitty trying to get a
decent table."

"She doesn't own it."

She hadn't cared and he hadn't commented.

Her pretense of truculence right now didn't convince him, she was too
stoned to bring it off.  Unfortunately she was a talker, and she
rambled on, ever more sleepily, about how he'd dragged her up here to
his room and then--whish (the palms of her hands missed each
other)--nothin'.  "What's wrong with you, Chaddie?"

Chaddie.  My god, it was worse than Murray.

Murray was the sort of name he might have expected his father to
pick.

Murray: not a family name, not a friend's name, not some old blowhard
up in New Hampshire (his father's home state) who'd sat around in the
general store playing checkers and sucking his teeth.  Murray was a
name you couldn't do anything with.  Murr-what the hell kind of
nickname was that?  The kids in second and third grade had certainly
seen the name's possibilities.  With the appropriate swishes and vocal
flutings, they'd called him "Mary."

Finally, he'd lied and told them Murray was only a middle name.

His real name was Ed.  But then friends of his would come around asking
for Ed and his mom had to keep telling them they had the wrong house,
there was no Ed there.  If you're seven or eight you don't feel much
like arguing with a mom, because you know they're all probably hiding
knives behind their backs, even when they're standing there framed in
the doorway looking perfectly friendly, but denying there's any Ed in
the house.

"I'm glad something's funny."

Chad had nearly forgotten Bethanne was there.  "What?"

"You laughed.  Or gargled--I don't know."  She was sitting up now, her
back braced against the headboard, her knees drawn up, forcing the
satiny skirt all the way down her thighs.  Her eyes were closed and she
was smoking grass, holding a pinched butt between her thumb and
forefinger.

Christ, he wondered, what else did she have stowed in that hammered
gold cubicle?  A water pipe?

"I was just thinking."

"About the money .  .."  Deeply she inhaled, drawing the smoke into
cavernous lungs.  "Whyn't ya ask Billy?  He's got it up to his
eyeballs."

"Billy" was what they called him at home.  "Zero?  At school we call
him Zero."

Bethanne managed, with much labor, to wrench her head around to stare
at him.  "Zero?  Him?  Su'prise he even talks t'ya."  The eyes closed
again.

"He made it up, not us.  It's a pun on his name."

She was too stoned to care what Billy Cooper Bond did with his name.

Her arm moved dreamily, an underwater movement, to pass him the
roach.

Rather than argue, he took it, hoping that would shut her up.  He
dragged in on the grass but didn't inhale.  He'd inhaled several
hundred times too many already.  It was grass and coke that had told
him that a thousand dollars on his bank statement was perfectly
reasonable.  When he handed the toke back to her, Bethanne was asleep,
suddenly asleep and snoring, sputtering like a tiny outboard motor
trying to engage.

It was his mother who'd come up with the solution to his name.

After the third or fourth kid had been at the door asking for Ed, she'd
finally figured it out.  But why was Murray telling people his name was
Ed?

He'd been scared but didn't know why.  Maybe it was because disowning
his name was like disowning her.  Like orphaning himself.

Chad sat up, planted his feet on the floor, and looked down at his
shoes.  Docksiders didn't really go with the designer trousers.  They'd
cost forty-nine dollars, and his mother had sent him the money for
them.  That was just before he'd called her about the hundred he
needed.  For books.

Textbooks are expensive, he'd told her.  So was traveling and so was
coke, he hadn't told her.

"Textbooks?  It's the middle of the semester.  What happened to the
ones you bought at the beginning?  Did they turn?"

Christ, but he hated when she tried to be funny when he knew his
position was arguably weak.  "Mo-om."  Tone of disgust.  "He's assigned
another one.  So's the French teacher."

"You haven't even used up the French text you bought two months ago.

How could you?  You don't go to class."

How did she know that?  She was guessing.  Educated guess, since he'd
left his midterm grades lying around the house.

"I go, I go.  There was just that time I was sick.  Look, I've got to
have it by Friday."

"Friday?  That's two days from now, Chad."

"Well, can't you messenger it?"

"What was that?"

Oh, shit--now she'd get off on her Hated Words list.  His mom loathed
words like "enjoy," "make nice," and especially the New Verbs (as she
called them), such as "finalize", and now she'd go

"I've got a nineteen-year-old with an indigent mother who probably
spends most of his time in the girls' dorm and beer-keg parties .  .

."


He knew it, she would go on and on, so he put down the phone to go to
get a beer.  Came back, picked it up from the sprung sofa: ". . . who's
flunking French .  .."

Put it down again and sighed.  Why was it, for a person who was so shy
she was zombified around strangers, that she could rattle on and on and
on and on, working up whole tapestries of events from single threads,
whole scenarios (one of her Hated Words, "scenario") from casual
comments?  He picked up the phone--yes, she was still talking.  God!

the Greyhound would leave Friday with the other guys, and he'd still be
here with her talking.

". . . nineteen, for lord's sake, why do you expect to have money
messengered?"

Couldn't she just say yes or no?  He smiled and said, "Okay, okay, just
FedEr it."

Silence.  He grinned.  He could usually shut her up this way.  Well,
she did it to him all the time.  And he knew she was on the other end
of the phone trying not to laugh.

"Funny--that's hysterical .  . . Look, why did you wait until today to
let me know about this?"

Because we didn't get the idea until today, he didn't tell her.

Hung up, and felt guilty.  He was always feeling guilty about his
mother, about the way she worked so hard for so little.  And because
she made him feel guilty, naturally he got angry.  It was much easier
to get angry at her than at his father.  His father was too distant, a
figure in the fog.

So he hung up and felt guilty.  And when you feel guilty you just get
stoned again.

His father had left them when he was seven, and Chad had always had
this murky sort of fear that his mother would do the same thing.

She'd been making one of those sour lemon pies that he hated, running
the knife around the edge of the crust as she'd thought it over.  "If
you don't want to be one of the family .  .."  That's what she was
going to say, he was sure.

"But there's only two of us!"

Already, she was leaving and taking the hated pie with her.  "If you
don't like my lemon pie .  .."

But what he feared hadn't happened.  She'd just pinched off the
dangling cord of crust and asked why he hadn't told her his name
bothered him so much.  If he didn't like "Murray," well, maybe he could
be "Chad."  He tried it out a few times, repeated it over and over.  It
was a great name.  Especially because it was his name, or part of his
last name.  Why hadn't he thought of it?

Then he wondered why she had.  Did she want someone else for her son
that she could so easily throw away his name?

He told her he hated that sour pie.

Chad sat up, planted his feet on the floor, and looked down at his
shoes.  His mother had sent him the money to buy them plus another
check to his account when he'd needed more books.

That was the hundred that the bank had magically turned into a
thousand.  He tried to remember how he had managed, even with the help
of a little coke, which is where most of it had gone, how he had
managed to convince himself, how his mind had been so fucked up he
really could convince himself his mother had sent a thousand bucks.

His mom didn't have a thousand bucks.  He had reasoned it this way:
when he'd told her there was this big emergency (had he told her
that?), she'd called his dad and somehow got the money from him.  Talk
about fucked--Jesus Christ, as if she'd ever call his dad for that.

.

.

Bethanne was right, Zero was swimming in money.  His father was
probably betting a thou downstairs at his private poker game, tossing
ten bills into the kitty.  But he couldn't bring himself to ask Zero.

He wasn't sure why.  Self-respect, he supposed.

His only consolation lay in the money he'd managed to make this summer,
doing house painting in Hebrides and Meridian.  But he'd only managed
to earn half of the money that way.  If he hadn't had to put out some
of his earnings for a room in Meridian, he could have saved more, but
there was no way he could commute the distance to I.a Porte without a
can-or even with, for that matter.  Still, he'd managed to send Mr.
Frobish five hundred and twenty-five dollars and beg him for another
couple of months' grace.  But where he was going to get the rest in a
couple of months, he didn't know.

He got off the bed and went over to look down into the dark, the moon
in the pool as if it had fallen there.  The pool would be covered over
soon and littered with leaves after the Bonds went back to Manhattan.

Strange how they simply stopped living here in this mansion and started
living there in some penthouse, as if their lives were cut in half.

Voices rustled like taffeta coming up the stairs, women on their way to
use the john.  He wasn't being a decent house guest hanging around up
here.  He should go back to the party.

The telephone on the nightstand riveted him with its little red
snake's-eye of a button that was always on, maybe part of a security
system.  He stared at the illuminated dial and at the luminous digits
Chad thought how easy it would be to pick up, call his father, get the
money that way.  Get twice the money.  His father would like nothing
better than to get an SOS from Chad, to have the opportunity to pull
Chad's chestnuts out of the fire, to act as savior, at the same time
giving him some Polonius advice on lending and borrowing and honesty.

Or worse, to become, in this little deception of Maud, Chad's confrere,
compadre--such compadre-lsm most certainly to include Veld, later
on.

He could hear it: "The kid just seemed to forget' that extra
zero--isn't that too much, well, isn't that rich' Chad could picture
them over one of their little champagne-and-oyster midnight dinners,
bubbling like the wine over the kid's putting one over on his mother.

He picked up the phone and got the operator.  He told her he had to
reverse the charges, no, he didn't have a phone card.

She let the number ring eight, nine, twelve times before coming back on
the line to tell him the party didn't answer, sir.

He hung up.

Hadn't he known the party wouldn't answer?  He knew she was down on the
end of the pier watching that house across the lake.

At least, he thought, lighting a cigarette, I tried.

Liar.

Without his realizing it, Bethanne had woken, for now she had gotten up
from the bed and was stepping into her French-cut silk panties,
unsteady on her feet.  One thin brown hand gripped the post of the
tester bed.  Skirt jacked up, one leg in, as if the left and right
sides of her body hadn't jigsawed properly.  The gold cube dangled from
her arm, its chain caught in the bend of her elbow swinging as she kept
trying and missing the panties with the other foot.

For the first time since they'd come into the room, he felt like making
a grab for her and pulling her down on the bed.  Because for now she'd
dropped the act in this woozy concentration on getting the clothes on
instead of off.  Such an intensity about her.

But he didn't, it would have started the whole thing up again, taken
too much time--though time from what, he didn't know.

Bethanne stumbled and swore at some furs ("fucking ermine,"
"goddamshitty bunch mink") that must have got in the way of her
heels--mumbling at them and kicking as if they'd still been on the
backs of the slaughtered animals.

Chad still lay on the bed, telling himself to go downstairs again.  He
did not like this party, he didn't like big parties, and since Zero was
the only one he really knew, he felt shy.

He must have dozed off.  The next thing he knew was that someone had
opened the door of the dark room and thrown another coat on the pile.

If he didn't move the coats, the women would be collecting them until
dawn.

Half a dozen fur coats.  Slippery satin linings, soft mink and sable.

And the white one: was it possible for a woman to wear the fur of a
snow leopard?

Why are you being so self-righteous?  he asked himself as he walked
down the hall to the room where he thought he'd seen the maid
depositing a carpet of coats.  The door was slightly ajar and he went
in with his bundle.  He stopped dead.

TH E END OF THE Pl ER

Before the window in a pool of moonlight, the only light in the
otherwise dark room, Eva Bond stood bare to the waist.

The Englishman sat on the edge of the bed, fully clothed.  Chad heard
his indrawn breath, felt his anger at the interruption.

Chad did not want to look up from the stack of clothes, he wanted only
to manage to leave the room with his head cast down, his eyes on the
floor.

He backed out, closing the door on the Brit's expletives.

"Wrong room."

Downstairs there were another hundred or more strangers.  The movement
and heat of bodies, the clink and ring of glasses and bottles ... how
many cases of champagne had he seen in the kitchen?  Where had all of
these people come from?

This afternoon, Zero's car hadn't passed another house since the
outskirts of Belle Harbor, and that was five miles away.  And he
doubted any of these people called Belle Harbor beautiful, much less
called it home.

He had stopped on the landing.  Stairs swept down in an arc on either
side to the foyer, which was a huge black-and-white tiled room in
itself.  There was a teardrop chandelier that turned some of the guests
into kaleidoscope bits.

From this height, as if he were standing on a balcony, he thought again
of a theater.  This was as theatrical as his first view of them on the
wide, white steps of the big house early this afternoon, when Zero had
parked the Porsche in the drive.  His family had not "gathered" on the
steps.  They looked "arranged" by a slick magazine photographer, or
even by some French or Italian director, who wanted to make a point,
wanted to let the audience glimpse their inner lives.  (Why French or
Italian he didn't know, except he thought they were more aware of, or
more accepting of, a lack of possibilities.) The Bonds were miles apart
just as they were steps apart.  The mother stood with her hands locked
before her, the glimmer from the noonday sun striking the striped dress
she wore and haloing her pale, pale blond hair.  Mr. Bond stood on the
second step, Mrs. Bond on the other side, and farther up stood Zero's
sister.  They might have been waiting, frozen there, for the director
to call for action.

For a bewildering few seconds, there was no action.  And then suddenly
Zero's father stepped down with a wide smile and a loud greeting, threw
his arm around Zero's shoulders at the same time he was shaking Chad's
hand.

Zero had disengaged himself smoothly from the wrap of his father's arm,
had made a playful pass at his younger sister, Casey, had acknowledged
his mother's presence only by nodding and speaking her name: "Eva."

Now she was at the bottom of the winding staircase, talking to the
Englishman as if they had met, casually, just here, a hostess engaged
in small talk with one of her guests.  Her gray satin gown slid
straight from its thin straps to her ankles, her silvery blond hair had
the metallic look of Zero's Porsche lighter, a razor cut that dipped
from the nape of her neck to her chin.  She stood perfectly still.

Even the tulip champagne glass seemed an extension of her hand.  She
was a beautiful, smooth woman who seemed to husband her energy.  When
Zero had introduced them earlier, her tapered fingers had slid into his
hand in a soundless greeting.  No clicks, no clumsiness, simply a cool
pose on the wide steps.

He wished that he could retreat, move back up the stairs and come down
some other way, but now she had seen him.  She looked straight at him,
dispassionately.  Then the man looked up with a remorseless smile.

Chad kept on walking down the staircase, didn't smile as he passed
them, and stopped when he heard the man say, "Come on back, sport--I'd
like a word."

"Sport"?  The guy was really pushing his luck.

Chad turned and saw that the Brit was still smiling, a master smiler,
Chad bet, a real scumbag.  Chad didn't return the smile.

Mrs. Bond's "companion" reached out his hand to Chad and said, "I'm
Maurice Brett.  And you're Chad.  Oh, come on.  Shake."

Perhaps it was a reflex action to an outstretched hand, Chad shook
hands, and when he drew his back, he saw the bills.

Said Maurice Brett, " Mnnev That'c the word."  And he held to than the
bedroom scene.  "You don't have to worry about me telling him, Mrs.
Bond."

He pushed through champagne glasses, caterers, brittle laughter, gowns
and tuxedos.  A woman whose breasts seemed to be oozing over the top of
her cream satin gown grabbed at his arm and wondered why they hadn't
been introduced.  "I'm Brie Sardinia and you're Billy's friend," she
managed to say between sips of champagne as her hand ran down his arm
until it was grasping his own hand.  The name "Brie" was well chosen,
since she looked like a soft, ripe cheese.  "My husband spends all
night in there"--she looked over her shoulder toward the game
room--"playing poker.

up "Who's Sorry Now?"  Slow, easy, hypnotic.  Casey was the one member
of the family Zero seemed to like having around.  She was wearing a
figure-hugging black dress much too old for her, with a low neckline
and bat-wing sleeves.  When Zero saw her in it he said, "Charles Addams
would've loved you."

"Mother said I could wear it," she'd whined.  Deliberately playing the
little-sister role, Chad had thought.

"When did mother ever tell you you couldn't wear anything?"

Zero had been big-brothering Casey, but he was right: Chad wondered if
Eva Bond ever restrained her daughter.  The father sure as hell
didn't.

He obviously adored her.  The feeling didn't appear to be returned,
Casey preferring instead her unapproachable mother.  Perhaps people
were like that--the person on the other side of the lake, the one so
far off you could only call to, would be the one that you would,
finally, make the fatal error of swimming to.

Chad reached the old boat house on the edge of that lake and a dock
jutting out from it, whose planks were springy, half-rotten.

In the boat house were two rowboats that looked bereft of attention
over the past years.  They swayed gently with the rise and fall of
water.  The shelter smelled musty, unused.  The paint was peeling from
the boats, and one of the oars was broken.  He sat on a wooden bench,
lit a cigarette, and leaned back against the damp wall.

He wondered about the boat house--why it wasn't used, why the Bonds
didn't have some speedboat or catamaran moored here.  And hadn't Zero
made a perfectly straight-faced reference to a "yacht broker"?

Bilge water lapped at the edge of the planks, and the boats bobbed on
the waves churned up by a boat rushing by to nowhere.

Did William Bond know that jerk was screwing his wife?

A poem came back to him: I dressed my father in his little clothes .

.

.

He rested his head in his hands and tried to recall what came after
that.  I asked him where the running water goes.

He couldn't remember the next lines and got up impatiently, thrust his
hands in his pockets, and stared down at the little boats.  Down to the
sea in ships, set them afloat!  In the poem the ether was the son.  He
was dressing his father instead of the other way around.  Yet at the
end the fantasy breaks down and the roles are again reversed.  Chad
wished he could remember the rest.

Water slapped around the boats.  Chad looked at it for a while and then
climbed down into one of the rowboats, holding on to the planks for
support.  Even moored safely within the boat house it felt insecure, a
thing to be borne away by the smallest wave or the slightest breeze.

He lit a cigarette and rested his elbows on his knees, smoking and
swaying slightly with the motion of the boat.

Steps came down the gravel.  He turned and could tell it was Zero only
because of the white silk scarf.  Then came the sound of running feet,
and the moon slipped out from its cloud cover to shine on Casey's pale
face as she ran down the path behind Zero, the long, pleated sleeves
sweeping behind her.

"You bored?  Right."  Zero said it as if boredom were Belle Harbor's
specialty.  He stepped into the boat, calling for Casey to hurry up.

When she too had clambered in, Zero pulled the oars from their locks.

"What in hell are we doing?  You're not rowing this hulk out on the
lake, are you?"  Chad looked around wildly.

"No.  I thought I'd take it up on the highway for a spin."  He was not
an oarsman, he spun the boat so that it hit the dock with a thud.

Casey just sat there, elbows on her knees.  "No one can find us," she
said with satisfaction.

"There's water at my feet now," Chad said.

Relentlessly, Zero kept on pulling at the oars.  "You know how to
swim."

Chad sat there wishing he'd got hold of his mother.  Why?  Was she
supposed to come running with life jackets?

Why they seemed headed for the middle of the lake he couldn't
imagine.

Zero hadn't taken off the white scar, or his dinner jacket, or loosened
his tie, as if he were suddenly in a hurry to make a break for it.

Zero released one of the oars and brought out a silver flask and tossed
it to Chad.

Chad took a drink and said, "I thought you had a yacht.  You said you
had a yacht."

"We do.  It's around here somewhere," he said without interest.

"You make it sound like you misplaced a pair of cufflinks."

Behind him, Casey was humming, it was that old song about a
blackbird.

They were about a hundred feet from the dock when Zero finally pulled
in the oars from water as black and pleated as Casey's dress.

While Zero was lighting up, Chad said, "So you do this all the time?

Do a few dances and then row out to the middle of the lake in a leaky
boat?  Look, the water's definitely up to our ankles, dude."

"Stop worrying.  We're just trying to save you from Bethanne.

There's a life jacket right behind you, on the bottom."

Casey stopped the blackbird song and laughed.  "She's a nympho, didn't
you know?"  Back to the song: " Where my sweetie waits for me--' " "
Sugar's sweet, so is she," " Zero sang.  "Come on, everybody knows that
song!"

Chad said, "You sit here in the middle of the lake in a sinking boat
singing Bye, Bye, Blackbird."

" It wasn't a question, since that was exactly what they were doing.

Suddenly Casey stood up.  The boat lurched."  No one here can love or
understand me--'" "Sit down!"  Chad yelled.

" Oh, the hard-luck stories they all hand me."

" Zero was leaning back, legs half-covered with water.

Said Chad, "This boat is sinking."

" .  . . Iight the light."

" " I'll be home late tonight."

" The rowboat was sinking in an oddly balanced way, taking the three of
them down as if it were one of those fake cardboard cutouts in a
musical that moves across the stage on permanent, painted waves.  The
painted boat would sink behind the painted waves, and the audience
would applaud their little number.  It was a sedate, an almost patient
sinking, almost as if it were waiting for the last line to be belted
out: " Black-BIRD .  . . Bye-ah-BYE-EYE-EYE!"

" T he water went up to their shoulders now.

Chad was looking across the dark water with rising hysteria.  He was
wearing the life jacket, sure.  But what about little Casey?

Little Casey was lying on her back, floating.

Zero said, "Well, I guess this calls for some sort of plan.

Cigarette?"  His legs churning water and one arm out, he brought out
his silver case, drew up his legs, and lay there floating and smoking,
the boat now probably on the bottom of the lake.

"No, thanks," said Chad.  "I'm trying to quit."  He spat out water,
shook his head to get his hair out of his eyes, held the Rolex to his
ear.  Were they waterproof?  "We've had the warm-up--what do we do
now?"

('.asev was snlashina around.  diDDin under, comin up, shakin lecture,
I'm leaving."  And she streaked off towards shore, towards the house,
whose undulating length and spaced lights looked like train
compartments.

Zero called to Casey, who was by now a third of the way back, her
bladelike stroke barely creasing water.  "Don't go in the house without
us, do you hear?"

A distant reply which might have been "Okay" or "Oh, hell" or "Bye-bye"
floated back.

"We just going to flop here all night?  That's the big plan?"  asked
Chad, who was toeing off his fifty-buck Docksiders.  Mom will just love
that.  "You said you lost them?  How do you lose a pair of shoes?  They
fell off your feet while you were walking across the campus and you
didn't notice .  . .?"  That's what his mother would say, getting up
steam as she went along.

"You want to go back to that fucking Bethanne?  Casey's right-she's a
nympho."

His arms were growing tired with the stretching, his legs with the
paddling.  "Could we continue this conversation sitting in a couple
chairs?"

But Zero looked extremely comfortable, floating and drifting about, the
end of his cigarette sparking like a star as he drew in, smoke misting
the water as he exhaled.  He looked indeed just as comfy as he had
lying on Chad's bed earlier.  Casey, or the water trail of Casey, was
well over halfway to land.  Chad wasn't really afraid for his life, not
in this floating life-raft, but he questioned the sanity of this little
outing.

Buoyed up by the water and looking at the stars, he would almost have
enjoyed it except that his thoughts kept shifting between that bedroom
scene and the drowned Docksiders that must be lying now on the floor of
the lake like a sunken treasure ship.  He felt the heat of the blush
spreading across his neck and face.  He'd never given back to her the
money he'd saved because the shoes were on sale for half-price.

That and some "loose change" his Dad had sent him had gone for grass,
beer.  A little coke.  A little--he wasn't, thank God, addicted.  Sam
could have hauled him in that night in the Red Barn.

"But I won't.  Just stop using if you're half as smart as I think "I
hardly ever do.  I mean, at school a couple times--recreational .

.

. you know."

""Recreational'?  Oh, come on.  You've got to be fucking kidding.

"I'm not addicted.  It's controlled use."

Sam swore softly.  "Who the hell do you think you're talking to?

Some yobo?  Don't insult me."

Sam had gone on.  Chad liked Sam, but he couldn't stand being
lectured.

"Where're you getting the money?"

Deadly tone.

"Babysitting, maybe?"

He'd started to say something snotty, but he knew better than to fuck
with Sam.  Not that Chad was afraid Sam would tell his mom.

He wouldn't.  He liked her too much.

What Chad remembered now was that they--he and Sam--had sat there in
the squad car not talking for some time, enjoying, he supposed, a
rather companionable silence in spite of the occasion.

He'd been ten the first time he saw Sam.  It was near the courthouse,
Sam was standing looking at a Rolls parked by a fire hydrant.  He had a
gun on his hip and shades over his eyes, a leather jacket that barely
hid the holster.  He was looking at this car, shaking his head.  Then
he caught sight of Chad, who'd just come out of the matinee, full of
Gary Cooper.  It was a rerun of High Noon.  He was thinking how he
could tell his mom he'd lost the two dollars so he could go back the
next Saturday and see it again.  He was thinking of all this and then
he'd seen Sam.  To come out from seeing a sheriff, especially Gary
Cooper, and then to see a real live sheriff standing off there in front
of you with his dark glasses and his holster .  . . well, that made you
think.

Sam had turned those dark shades in Chad's direction and said, "Some
people .  .."  Then he'd shaken his head again.  "Think a Rolls or a
Jag isn't bound by the laws that apply to a Ford pickup."

That had surprised Chad--the way the sheriff just talked to him as if
he, Chad, were some acquaintance, another adult he was used to sharing
his views with, chatting here on the pavement.

Chad had all of a sudden straightened up, made himself a quarter of an
inch taller, and made his own assessment of the situation.

"Probably one of those lake people."

"Probably you're right.  Well .  .."

It was as if they'd been having this sidewalk chat for some time, or
ones like it, for years maybe.

"I guess you're giving him a ticket."

"Wish I could think of something that'd make it stick--that people
don't go around parking by hydrants.  A ticket doesn't mean much to
this person.  He's got the money to pay it."  Sam shrugged.

"If he's got a car like that he's pretty rich."

Sam took out his book, wrote the ticket, zipped it off, and stuck it
under the wiper.  "Haven't I seen you with Mrs.  Chadwick?"

"Yeah.  Yes, sir."

"You her son?  She has a son, I think."

Chad had been enormously pleased that there was some doubt in Sam
DeGheyn's mind, as if Chad might just have been a friend of Maud
Chadwick's.  "That's right.  My name's Chad.  My name used to be
Murray, but I changed it."  He wanted the sheriff to understand Chad
had been in charge of his name.  "I didn't like Murray."

"Uh-huh.

That happens.  I'm Sam DeGheyn.  Glad to meet you."

"Me too."

"Well, that's the end of my duty.  I'm going to the Rainbow for a
coffee.  You want to join me, or have you got stuff you have to do?"

For the second time in this brief interchange, Chad had been amazed.

No one had ever asked him if he wanted to have a cup of coffee with
them.  And he liked the way Sam DeGheyn seemed to think Chad might be
busy, just the same as anyone else in the town--the lawyer his mother
knew, or the doctor, or even someone on the police force.  He hated
coffee, of course, but that wasn't the point.

So he'd fallen into step with Sam and gone to the Rainbow, where Shirl,
then known to him only as a stocky woman with a square face who talked
a lot in a loud voice, set up coffee for Sam and a soda for him.  His
mother hadn't started working at the Rainbow yet.

It was the first time Chad had had any good feelings about La Porte
since they had come to live there.  Before this he had hated it.  He
still wanted to go back to Sweet Air, but the road out hadn't pointed
with such insistence since that Saturday afternoon.

"Look, I'm sinking."

"No, you're not," said Zero.  He was floating a distance from Chad,
would have melted into the water had it not been for the white scarf
and shirt front.

Chad made as many waves as he could, slapping about, bitching, anything
to disturb Zero's becalmed mind.  Swear to god, he wouldn't be
surprised if Zero turned north and just started swimming out to sea.

"Float," said Zero.  "Rest up for the small hours.  Things can get
weird back there."

Weird back there?  thought Chad, trying to pull up his legs.  Well,
that was one way of looking at a bunch of people drinking and eating
and listening to music while you were floating out here in a dinner
jacket in the middle of a black lake.  But then as he started to float
he felt suddenly pleasurably encapsulated, insulated.  Looking at the
stars, just buoyed up by the water, he would almost have enjoyed it
except that he kept thinking of his mother and the Docksiders.  He lay
there on his authentic water bed trying to think up a good lie.  He
didn't think she'd much go for having lost them mid-lake.  "You've
finally learned how to walk on water, Chad.  I always knew you
could."

Way off in the dark, a tiny figure waved and called.  Casey had got to
the shore.

"Might as well go," said Zero, chucking his cigarette and watching it
arc in the sky.  Then he rolled over and started to swim.  "Race
you?"

"Oh, shit, shut up.  Anyway, my shoes are at the bottom of the lake.

They were new."

Zero angled over to him.  "So?  So you can have a pair of mine.

Let's go."

"Not the same."  Water was curling from Chad's mouth as he turned his
face for air.  "Mom paid a hell of a lot.  Now what do I tell her?"

Zero was a stroke ahead of him and called back, "The truth.

What's wrong with that?"

"Oh, sure."  Chad coughed on a mouthful of water, gaining on Zero.

"She'd believe this?  She's not stupid."

"They'll believe anything, kid.  Even walking on water."

They circled a narrow path between the boat house and the front
steps.

Zero was plucking at the tiny blooms from patches of wildflowers.  He
snapped off a little trail of leaves from a willow just before they
entered the front door.  Chad shook his watch.  It didn't seem to be
working.  He took it off and dropped it in a tub of ornamental shrubs
and followed Zero.

They came dripping into the large foyer, and the few guests standing by
the Sheraton tables or leaning against the staircase turned puzzled,
frowning looks on the three and then, bored, picked up their
conversations again.

"Come on, Ophelia," said Zero, reaching for Casey, who was heading for
the stairs to go up and remove her soaked black dress.

"What's going on?"  she asked, the question ending in a whine, for as
she said it, Zero swept her up, dumped a handful of crushed flowers and
willow leaves on her head, and carried her to one of the rrhrl f
ntrvwvc .f the livinsr r(len.  which was nearly the size must have
sensed them immediately, even though she hadn't, until now, been facing
the doorway.

The three curved and carpeted steps and the archway above framed Zero
and Casey in a small proscenium.  With an exquisite intonation Chad had
never heard from him before, Zero said: "And from her fair and
unpolluted lesh May violets spring."

Raised voices, a few screams, cut off, and then a collective indrawn
breath, before the guests realized it was some sort of joke.

Eva Bond's face was expressionless as she moved with her fluted glass
across the room, seemingly unaware of the nervous laughter, the
wide-eyed gaping, a fugitive sort of fear.  She walked slowly up the
three steps and stood looking at her son for a frozen moment.  Zero
looked past her.  Casey shifted and opened one eye.

Then their mother moved past them across the marble foyer towards the
billiard room and library.

Furiously, Casey hit Zero on the arm and broke free.  "Oh, why don't
you just give up?"  She ran for the stairs.

Zero slowly lit up a cigarette, the guests turned away.  His smile was
a faded imitation of a smile as he said, "No one here likes Hamlet?"

He walked away, calling back a question: "Bethanne still around?"

Chad didn't care that he would probably catch a fever: in the wet
clothes he needed to apologize to Zero's mother.  She was moving toward
the library, stopping for a moment to respond to whatever comments her
husband and his poker-playing friends made as she walked past.  Then
she went into the library and shut the high doors behind her.

Mr.  Bond stopped him: "Chad.  Got any plastic on you?"

Chad turned to the gaming table, green baize and walnut.  "What?"

"Anything except gold.  Just the regulars--AmEx, Visa, Diners,
NatWest.

What happened?  Did you fall in the swimming pool?"  Chad looked at the
ring of laughing faces, five of them, all turned expectantly to him,
someone who could solve the problem--except for the doctor, who frowned
as he said, "No, no, no.  It'd be Diners, AmEx, or Lloyds Visa.

Who the hell deals with NatWest anyway?"

Chad had never seen square or oblong chips like these before: bronze,
white, black stacks, oblong, square, and round.

Brandon, the porky-faced one, who seemed to be holding most of the
chips--two tall stacks of bronze, one of white, a few blacks- reached
into a big cut-glass bowl where ice cubes were melting into a water
pond.  Then he plucked up a tiny lemon peel from a matching dish,
popped that into his mouth, and pulled over the pitcher, from which he
took a swig, and more or less rolled it all in his mouth, mixing.  He
shoved the pitcher toward Brie Sardinia's husband.  Mr. Sardinia held
the Waterford pitcher aloft and in Chad's direction.  "Martini?"

"What have you got on you?  Diners, maybe?"  Zero's father asked
again.

"Only an Access card."

Mr.  Bond shoved back his horn-rims.  "A what?"

The doctor cleared his throat.  "It's one of those money cards."

His voice was low and sad, as if he were back in the hospital, telling
Chad's mother the bad news about Chad's condition.  Then he tossed down
a card.  "Yeah, oh, yeah" went the round of smiles towards Chad, the
poor pisser who'd be the last to know the headstone and the plot had
already been picked.

"Billy!"  said Mr. Bond, hitting his fist on the table.  Then to Chad
he said, "He's got waterfalls of the damned things."  Zero's father
popped an ice cube into his mouth, followed it with an olive, and then
lifted the pitcher and drank.  Wiping his chin with a napkin then, he
said to Chad, "Ask him, will you?  Billy, I mean.  I know he's got
Diners, Lloyds, so he must have an Express."  He slapped down a credit
card, its identity downward.

The backs were pretty much the same, the signatures had been covered
with adhesive.  "Do you play?"

The others looked at Chad, if not soberly, at least in invitation.  The
pitcher was back with Brandon again.

Chad looked around the table.  "Never did with plastic.  Wouldn't it be
easier just to use.  . . Never mind."

He knocked at the library door and entered when she called, "Come
in."

Eva Bond was sitting behind a large mahogany desk, her arms resting on
the top, hands folded.  Behind her was a French window, moonlight
throwing rhomboids of light across her hair, across the desk where the
edges melted into shadows.  That eerie placeless light whose source
seemed hidden lit parts of the room dimly.

This time it seemed to be coming from the bookcases or the wall behind,
so that the edges of some of the volumes were bathed in gold.

"Chad," she said, looking him up and down.  "You'll catch cold."

"I'm almost dry by now."  He tried to smile.

From a dark brown leather armchair with a very high back came the voice
of Maurice Brett: "You and Billy make a good pair."  His face and hand
appeared around the edge of the chair, the smoke pluming across them.

"It's a relief you've caught us non-in flagrante delicto."  His smile
was ruthlessly charming, but still a smile in smoke.

"Sorry I interrupted."

Eva Bond said to Chad's departing back, "Stay, please."  It sounded
like a command, although he didn't think she meant it that way.  "And
please shut up, Maurice."

She still sat perfectly straight, hands interlocked, and would have
appeared to be some sort of high-powered executive except for the
gown.

She motioned to the leather sofa.  "Won't you sit down?"  She smiled.

"It's all right."

Chad wasn't sure whether she meant Chad's wetness or Brett's
presence.

"Incidentally, sorry about my crass behavior," said Brett, who was
nothing of the sort.

"All right."  Chad refused to look at him.

"I expect you think I'm a bit of a rat."

Chad said nothing.  The leather arm of the sofa was glistening and
supple.  It reminded him of Bethanne's skin.

". . . and make a better offer.  A thousand?"  Brett was waving his
hand slowly, bills wedged between the fingers.  "Just what you need, I
believe, old sport?"

Chad felt as cold as he had in the lake.  "I don't need anything."

"But your mum might.  Oh, sit down, for lord's sake.  How do I know
about the money?  I see the question in your eyes.  I know it from
Bethanne, of course.  Funny, she thought it rather charming: someone
who couldn't be bought.  That's a bit of a giggle, considering.  So you
still think I'm trying to blackmail you?"

"No," said Zero's mother.  "No.  You're trying to control him.  Why
don't you get out, Maurice?"

"Actually, I'm trying to help the poor boy."  Brett rose and went
swiftly to the table.  He wheeled the telephone around.  "Go ahead,
call your mother."

Chad wasn't sure why he even answered the man.  "She won't be there."

Brett checked his watch.  "Good God, man, it's after one.  Are you
afraid to wake her up?"

"I mean, she won't be in the house."  Chad looked down to hide a
flicker of a smile.  "She'll be on the pier."

Brett's eyebrows went up.  "Where do you live--Atlantic City?  Does she
gamble?"

"She'll be on the end of the pier."  Chad said it again.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Nothing to you."

Brett moved back to his chair, repocketed the money, which had never
left his hand, lit another cigarette.  "What in bloody hell are you
kids up to?  Take Billy, now .  .."

Eva Bond had risen, her fingers splayed over the top of the desk, her
head down.  "Leave."  Her eyes were riveted on Maurice Brett.

"Of course, darling.  It's just this one little thing.  Billy-Zero, as
you call him--good name--put on more than his usual magnificent
performance."  He turned to Chad.  "What was that all about?"

"Zero's a performer.  He's an act, a clown, a nice guy.  You wouldn't
notice the last.  You don't have any children is my guess."

"Thank.  God.  No."  Each word dropped like a stone, and blood rushed
to his face.

He's furious, thought Chad.  At least there's something beneath that
air of condescension.

"Because," Brett went on, "he enjoys humiliating his mother."  He
paused.

Chad thought that might be more difficult than Brett imagined.

"Mr.  Brett--" "Ah!  Do I hear a note of respect?"

"No.  What I'd like to know is, what're you up to?  Goodbye."

That, he thought, was one hell of an apology to his hostess.  He
shivered as he climbed the stairs.

Zero was lying on the bed in another Ralph Lauren room, wearing a silk
robe and supple leather slippers, lying there with his hands behind his
neck and staring at the ceiling.  It looked almost as if he were back
there floating on the lake.

The room was dim, the recessed lighting casting watery shadows along
the walls and ceiling.

"You look like hell," said Zero, his eyes trained on the wardrobe.

"Have some clothes."

"Your dad needs your credit cards."

Zero rolled over.  "For fuck's sake, are they still at that stupid
game?  Diners, American Express, Lloyds Visa."

" Zero mimicked his father's voice as his little finger made a motion
of knocking ash from an invisible cigar.  "I've got an Erron card, I
ditched the others, I get so sick of hearing the names.  You know how
they pay up at the end of the night?  Anything over, say, seven
hundred-which is the kind of cash they carry to parties-- anything over
gets charged.  Pops has one of those charge machines.  And those
chips?

Cloak room, hat check--beyond that, don't ask me how it works.  You
should watch them shoot pool."

Zero swung his legs to the floor.  "Might as well go back to the
party.

Who's Bethanne with?"

"Last time I saw her she was with your best friend.  That redhaired
dude."

Zero gave him an oddly sad look.  "You're my best friend, kid.  Was she
upright?  Prone?"

"They were in the swimming pool."

Zero closed the door of the wardrobe, hiked his legs into some
loose-looking pants.  Italian, Chad thought.  Armani?  Ferenzi?

He tucked a shirt into them and pulled on a jacket, loose like the
pants.  "Open that chest, will you--bottom drawer.  I need a scarf."

The bureau was directly behind Chad's wing chair.  He leaned around and
pulled out the drawer.  There must have been two dozen of them.  The
white silk scarves glittered in the uneven light.

Chad pulled one out and tossed it to Zero.  Why had he thought Zero had
only one, since he always wore it and it always looked fresh?

"Thanks."  Zero draped the scarf around his neck, said, "Come over
here, will you?"  He'd opened the other side of the chest, both doors
with beveled mirrors, and was stooped down, looking at the shoes.

"Take a look.  I've got a couple of pairs of Docksiders in here that I
hardly ever wear.  I think they're two different sizes, because Eva did
the buying and she didn't know what size shoe I wore.  Could she pick
me out of a lineup, do you think?"

For a moment, Zero was silent.  "Try em on."

"Thanks, but no."

"What in the fuck are you talking about?  It was my fault you lost the
shoes."

"You didn't know the boat would go down.  You didn't plan to go for a
swim."

TH E END _.

Zero dropped the shoes on the floor.  "For fuck's sake, why the
argument?  Here are two pairs of the damned shoes, and I know one will
fit you, Cinderella, because it's a size too big for me.  I never wear
them anyway."

Why was he arguing?  He didn't know.  "I'll find them."

"They're at the bottom of the fucking lake, dude."  Zero was leaning
against the wardrobe, arms folded, toeing the Docksiders around.  "Now
I guess you want the scuba-diving equipment."

Chad sat up.  "You have some?"

"You're nuts, kid.  You're crazier than I am.  No, I don't have any.

But I'm sure there's some around.  Pop, or his cronies, probably they
have some.  Send them down to look.  They'd love it.

Look, what is it about these shoes?"

Chad shrugged.  "They're just part of something else."

"The something else must really be worth hearing about."  By now Zero
had flopped back on the bed again, reached over and opened the door of
a walnut bedside table that was really a small refrigerator.  He yanked
out a beer and tossed it to Chad.  "Go on."

"With what?"

"The something else, of course.  Whatever it is that's set you on this
fucking search for a certain pair of shoes."

Chad avoided an answer by asking, "Where's Casey?"

"Probably in her room, reinventing the guillotine."

There was no delay between the knock on the door and the door's
bursting open.

As if she had been called, she had come.  Casey stood in the backlit
doorway, in silhouette, and in the same black dress, her hair still
straggling with water and bits of weed.

"Guess she finished," said Zero.  "You don't look too good, either.

Where've you been?"

"Downstairs, being polite.  People are leaving."

"Good.  I can get undressed again."

"You could at least go down," she said with no special interest.

I

Still she lingered, her hand twisting the doorknob.  Then she said,
"I'm dying."

Zero, who'd been about to hit the intercom, turned swiftly and stared
at her.  He dropped his head back on the pillow.  "Again?"

She didn't move into the room.  Chad leaned forward, but he couldn't
see the expression on her face.  Her voice sounded pretty deadly,
though.

"I'm dying.  If you think it's so fucking funny--" "Stop talking like
that."  Zero threw his arm across his face.

"You do it all the time.  What kind of role model are you?"

"As good as you'll get around here.  What is it this time?"

"You don't care I'm dying."

"The last time was when you wanted to go to the stag party the night
before graduation."

"I bet you showed blue movies."  Casey picked a weed from her hair.

"Snuff films."

"You're disgusting."

"You seemed to forget you were ten and we were all twenty-one.

That time it was .  . . yes, rheumatoid arthritis, and you were walking
with two canes."

"I was in great pain," she said stiffly.

"Because you fell off that damned horse out there even Kent Desormeaux
would be afraid to get up on.  Then you were dying from what you called
subliminal hematoma."  It's subdural," incidentally."

"I had an accident and hit my head and it was months before I knew
it.

Don't you remember how woozy I was?  All right, I'm dying, but you
don't care.  When you see me floating by the bank just like she did,
you'll be very, very sorry."

Zero yawned.  "Yeah.  Well, I'm sorry in advance.  So when it happens
you'll know I was sorry."

"First I'll have to go insane."  The voice was angry but
lilting-probably her version of a crazed voice.

"I hope I'm around for that.  So what're you dying of this time?"

There was a hesitation.  "AIDS."

They were still at it, the bowl and pitcher replenished, the three
holes in the credit-card deck apparently filled.

In the few moments it had taken Chad to get downstairs, he had made a
decision.  He was leaving tomorrow (today, really), he was going back
to La Porte, even if he had to hitchhike, he was quitting school, at
least for a year.  And he was moving in with his mom.  Or at least, if
that felt too dependent, maybe he could find a room in Hebrides and
save up money painting houses for a year.

And during those moments a running stream of guilt simply dried up.

But it was replaced, fed by another spring, another stream.

Now he felt guilty about Zero, of all people.  That he was letting him
down.

His hand was in his back pocket, feeling for the hundred dollars he had
saved for the trip.  His mother had given him a twenty ("in case you
have to tip the servants").

The ring of faces looked up at him, smiling.  Chad smiled back.

They seemed as happy as the dwarfs when Snow White came to call.

Then he looked at the big Waterford bowl, the pool of water forming,
and then directly across at Mr. Bond, twisting his upraised credit
cards in a little wave.

"Deal me in."

Chad had three Waterford-pitcher martinis, bluffed Mr. Sardinia's AmEx
flush with only a pair of Dinerses, beat out Brandon's pair of Lloydses
with three Visas.

When one of the Bonds' servants touched his shoulder and said Mrs. Bond
would like to see him in the library, Chad was sitting with two hundred
and fifteen dollars in assorted cloak-room chips from Pierre's, the
Four Seasons, and Au Pied de Cochon in Paris.

And he still hadn't figured out the rules.

THREE

Eva Bond was standing at the French window behind the desk, staring at
nothing.  Nothing, as far as Chad could see, but dark panes of glass.

"I was afraid you might be losing," she said.

"I'm sure they wouldn't have allowed that."  He smiled.

She was wearing a lightweight coat in a sour shade of cream that was
plain to the point of cheapness.  It was a coat that she might have
pulled off the rack of the old Hebrides Emporium, a small department
store, now shut, where everything looked thin, poor, and out of
fashion, even the salespeople, even the very walls.

Chad had gone there several years ago to buy his mother a birthday
present.  There had been only two or three customers, yet the manager
and the clerks didn't seem to notice that business had fallen off.  The
manager wore a boutonniere--a white carnation.  The salesladies all
wore crisp white collars of linen or lace, and no jewelry.  In the
cool, dark store, as he went from counter to counter (scarves, gloves,
glassware and china), they spoke softly and pleasantly, handling their
cheap goods as if they had been silk and Sevres.

He had bought a scarf first.  Then a pair of brown cotton gloves that
the saleslady had brought out from the display case among other pairs,
each contained in its plastic box.  Then a long-stemmed glass in the
china and glassware section.  The woman there had not appeared to think
it odd at all that he was purchasing only one glass.  Each item had
been wrapped slowly and carefully, almost venerably, in tissue while
each of the salesladies talked in low tones of the weather, and
college, and La Porte.

The store was dark and cool, and exiting to a sun-blanched pavement
gave him a shock.

He felt anxious and sad--anxious because he had spent all of the money
on things his mother never used.  She didn't wear gloves or nylon
scarves.  And he had realized when the glass had been deposited in its
box, closed with a white Emporium seal, that it was not, after all, a
martini glass but a champagne glass.  Yet to return it, to hand it back
to the pleasant woman in the white collar, was unthinkable, just as the
sadness he felt when he looked back at the store was unspeakable.  It
looked doomed.

Six months later the Hebrides Emporium had suddenly closed.  Every day
he had felt compelled to buy the Hebrides Banner to read the store's
advertisements and had been relieved in the way a visitor to a sickroom
might be to see the patient was still alive.  Then the ads disappeared,
and he combed the whole paper to see if there was a mention of it.

Yes: there was a grim announcement that the Emporium had filed for
bankruptcy.  And although he knew it was mere fancy on his part, he
read into the bleak, brief account of the store's history a
self-righteous, sneering tone that implied the town had finally
exorcised a dreadful presence on the corner of Walnut and Beech
streets.

Chad had taken the local bus to that corner in the business district of
Hebrides.  The store was padlocked, boarded up, shuttered, blank, as if
it were something too disgraceful to be seen.

He could not tell his mother the story behind the gifts, he did not
want to appear unmanly.  When she opened one and then the other (gloves
and scarf), he said quickly that she needed gloves in the winter, that
she should wear them and a scarf, too.  She was too careless.  He
glanced at her and saw behind the eyes and the smile the shadow of
disappointment.  After all, she had dropped hints to help him out:
little things like shoe wax, and where had she ever put her cuticle
scissors, and so on.  Then she opened the glass and stared at it for
some time.  And rose and went to the kitchen.  When she came back, she
was carrying a bottle of champagne.  "How did you ever know?"  But her
voice could only partially reclaim the expectant note from before she'd
opened the presents.  Smiling, she poured champagne into the fluted
glass and said, "Sorry, but you get the water glass."

His own smile was dispirited, he had failed, he had disappointed her,
and himself.  The disappointment became defensive, and they both
retreated into silence.  Eventually, after trying on the gloves several
times, shaking out the scarf, she said something about presents his
father would give her.  Last-minute thoughts .

. .

But couldn't she see his were totally different?

Yet he wondered why, when all the time he was in the Emporium he had
been concentrating on what his mom would want, he had bought her what
she wouldn't.

All of this went through his mind during the moment that Eva Bond
turned from the window and nodded to him.

When he looked at her standing there in that regal designer's gown and
the pathetic coat, Chad had his one translucent thought-that this Mrs.
Bond was not the same woman who had greeted him on the steps, and
possibly never had been.

"Why are you wearing a coat?"  He blurted this out to cover a confusion
brought about by that single moment of clarity.

She smiled a little, looking down at it.  "Oh, just going for a walk.

Most of the guests are gone."  She moved to the desk.  One hand closed
around the edge of a large book lying in its center.

"I wanted to see you.  I wanted to apologize for .  .."  She lifted
her arm as if she meant to indicate the chair in which Maurice Brett
had been sitting, but dropped it again, an unfinished gesture.

"You don't have to."  He had been about to add, "It's your life", but
that sounded brutal to him, given she looked now rather thin and very
fragile.  For it sounded in his own ears as if he wouldn't give a damn
if she went ahead and ruined that life.

Again, she went back to the chair behind the desk and sat down.

Perhaps it served as a protective barrier.  She opened the book, shut
it again.  I.looking at him, she drew out the silence for a painfully
long time before she said, "I'd like to suggest something, but you
might take it the wrong way.  But first I wanted to tell you that I
liked the way you shoved the money back in Mr. Brett's face."  As she
studied some bit of the Byzantine design on the carpet beyond the desk,
she smiled slightly.  "It was just the sort of thing Billy would have
done."

Stunned, Chad stared at her.  But she didn't notice and didn't shift
her eyes.  Whatever she had wanted to suggest that he might take "the
wrong way" seemed forgotten.

"Is he popular .  . . well liked?  In graduate school, I mean?"

"When you have that much money, isn't it hard to tell your friends from
your friends?"  He smiled.  "But, yes, as far as I can tell."  And Chad
was anxious now.  Her question really hadn't to do with the university
or whether her son was "popular."

"I wondered.  He has friends here, but no one sufficient .  .."

She frowned, searching out the right word or words.

"What or who would suffice?"  Chad tried to help her out.

She lifted, dropped, her hands on the chair arms.  All of her gestures
appeared futile.  The look she cast him was tentative and quickly
withdrawn.

After a momentary silence, she said, "Last March--but you probably know
about this--for over two weeks I couldn't find him.

I called his apartment and so did my husband.  I knew none of his
friends.  You're the only one he's ever brought for a visit, you see.

Finally, I called the dean.  It seems Billy hadn't gone to any of his
classes for two weeks, hadn't paid his tuition, hadn't appeared at
all.

The dean was apologetic, but they'd had to take him off the class
rosters--until the tuition was paid, at least.

It was two months overdue.  His father was dumbfounded, given he'd sent
Billy so much money."  Almost apologetically, she said, "So I called
the police.  My husband was furious, he said it would hurt rather than
help.  Imagine the police coming to your door .  .."

Chad remembered it well enough.  There had been nearly two weeks in
March when Zero had simply stopped like a clock.  Stopped going to his
seminars (even the Shakespeare seminar), hadn't turned up at a couple
of big parties, or Mooney's Bar, or the Qwiklunch--a favorite place,
where on two occasions he'd finished up fights with his opponent's head
in the crock of garbanzos and stopped the manager from calling the
campus cops by stuffing some hundred-dollar bills in his pocket.  Chad
had checked out all of Zero's haunts, including the Bowlerama.  He
didn't bowl (didn't do any sports), he'd just grab a dog with mustard
and onions and sit and watch the bowlers.

It particularly surprised Chad that he found him after a week sitting
silently in the dark, because Zero always seemed to have boundless
energy.  He walked in any weather with his coat open (cashmere or
mackintosh) and that white silk scarf fluttering off behind him.  The
way he looked, the way he dressed--fitted out by Bill Blass, Perry
Ellis, or Armani--had the most glamorous females on campus dogging his
footsteps.

Yet the longest relationship Zero had ever had, which only lasted for
six months, was with a thin-faced, soft-spoken girl named Paula,
nervous and unremarkable in every way except for her brains (the brains
of a biochemist) and her kindness.  She was the one who'd search
through a blizzard for a stray cat.  And maybe because she was not
beautiful or sexy, word got around that Zero was probably gay, word
that could easily have been stopped by one of the three or four
good-looking females Zero had dated for very brief periods before he
scratched them out as if he were canceling checks.  They weren't about
to scotch the rumor.  When it reached Zero's ears one night in
Mooney's, he'd knocked over his beer, and Chad was expecting another
Qwiklunch scene.  But Zero was laughing so hard he choked.  "I can
imagine who started that one," he'd said.  "That quarterback fern who
only scores on the field."

Zero hated beautiful women.

That week in March before Chad pounded on his door, Zero had answered
none of his calls.  His Porsche had been in place, Chad figured he must
be in his apartment.

It was dead dark.  Zero had called out, "Enter."  Even coming from the
relative darkness of a March dusk, Chad had to blink up outlines of
sofa, bureau, and Zero sitting at a card table set before the window.

He was looking out at nothing except a few dark trees that hadn't yet
come into leaf.

"So, Chad."  Zero made it sound as if they'd been conversing here for
hours and now came the summing-up.

"Where the hell've you been?"

"Sitting here, smoking.  And drinking."  He lifted a bottle of Jameson
Black Bush an inch from the table.

"That all?"  Chad made as much of a survey of the room as he could in
that light.  "No coke?  Not even a little pot?"

"I don't do drugs.  Never did.  You know that."

True.  And he didn't sound drunk, either.  Never had.  In another room
the telephone rang.  Chad stared at him.  "You're not going to pick
up?"

"The machine will," Zero said to the window.

The ringing stopped.  The faint, metallic sound of a voice ran onto the
tape.

"Eva again.  She keeps calling.  This is, oh, the eighth or ninth
one."

Chad was angry.  He himself had called a half-dozen times.  All right,
so it was Zero's business if he wanted to hole up.  But it'd been a
week now, and this was his own mother.... "Why the fuck don't you
answer?  Your mom is probably climbing the wall."

The silence and darkness deepened as Zero looked across at him.

"My mom'?  Eva?"  He smiled slightly.  "What about your mom?"

"What about her?"

"What's she like?"

"I've told you."  Chad felt uncomfortable.

Zero flicked ash from his cigarette with his little finger.  "She reads
poetry and works her ass off in a diner so you can flunk French and
smoke pot."

The look he gave Chad, from smoky eyes under dark brows, was
excoriating.  Chad felt singed.  And more than a little angry.  "Who
the hell are you to comment on the way I run my life?  You don't seem
to be doing such a hot job of yours."  Immediately he felt sorry when
Zero, who had taken no offense at, nor apparently any interest in, this
mild attack, turned his face toward the watery windowpanes and the
leafless trees, past which the snow fell slowly, illuminated by the
globe of a street lamp.  And he had, in that instant, an entirely
different picture of Zero--Zero of the cashmere coats, the silk
scarves, the Italian suits, the Porsche convertible.  In that instant
Chad knew that Zero had no attachment whatever to the things of this
world.

"Dude, listen .  .."  Chad began.

"Segue off, will you?"  His tone was devoid of animosity, almost
pleasant.

But Chad didn't.  He sat down there at the table, his presence
seemingly unfelt by Zero, and poured himself a shot of Jameson and
looked around the room, wondering what to say.  But the room revealed
nothing, and Chad had, once again (for he had been here many times),
the odd feeling that the separately and carefully chosen pieces of
furniture did not bear the stamp of their owner.

The room was not filled with the secondhand junk that you could find in
most of the rooms around town, purchased quickly and by the roomful
from one or another of the dark shops whose cranky owners would never
go to the trouble or expense of fixing a broken spring or polishing up
a surface and whose living depended on the coming and going, the
arrival and departure, of the students.  Chad had been in several of
these shops with Zero and had felt how he would hate for his livelihood
to be wedded to transience and impermanence.

Zero, however, did not buy junk.  He had an uncanny talent for
ferreting out, amidst broken-springed, legless, stacked-up pieces, a
true antique whose value seemed lost on the owners of the stores.  In
this way, Zero had acquired the Sheraton sideboard, inlaid with
marquetry, above which hung a handsome mirror of beveled glass, the
rosewood writing table, the Elizabethan chair of wood so dark it looked
burned black, with a high ribbed back and strange gargoylelike finials
at the end of its arms.

Chad let his look rest like a patina of dust on each of a dozen pieces
in turn, and he thought how like a small museum Zero's room was, the
furniture beautiful or bizarre, but unique.  Yet for all of its
uniqueness, the room spoke less of its occupant than would a hotel room
where a traveler might set out on a bureau a framed picture.  Zero
seemed like that traveler without a picture, or a visitor who had come
and gone and refused to leave his calling card.

Perhaps because of the dark, or perhaps because Chad hadn't wanted to
see it, it wasn't until after held made his survey of the room that
Chad saw the white bandage.  The cashmere sweater sleeve had drawn back
with the movement of Zero's hand, raised to smoke his cigarette, and
the bandage seemed almost luminous, raised there like a little white
flag against dark water.

Chad's throat felt raw, as if he'd been swimming against an icy
current.  It was hard to get the words out.  "What's wrong with your
wrist?"

"Hmmh?"  Zero said dreamily.  The glance he gave Chad was more a look
turned inward.

"Your wrist.  What happened?"

Zero looked down at his arm.  "Burned it."  His smile was a little
slow.

The two of them sat there at the table by the window with the snow
clumping now on the sill, skirting the trees, and mounding on the tops
of the cars.

The walk glittered in the cone of light streaming down from the street
lamp, and Chad said, "Remember Shadowland?"

"Shadowland" was like a code name for that winter when, just before the
Christmas break, students and faculty had been stopped from leaving
because of a snowfall so dense and deep it barricaded most of the
little town behind doors and windows.  Chad and Zero had been on the
verge of leaving when their flight was canceled, and they couldn't have
got to Chicago anyway to catch it because Zero's Porsche was buried
under a cloud of snow, a white mound in a string of white mounds by the
curb.

Oddly, neither of them was disappointed.  They took their white
imprisonment as an opportunity and managed to get to the grocery store
and the liquor store before everything shut down.

They had been passing the Paper Store when Zero caught sight of some
party hats in the window and insisted on setting down the crate of
champagne and going in to purchase the hats.

Thus, they had spent five days drinking only Dom Perignon and eating
Hebrew National salami sandwiches and caviar, and watching from Zero's
shadowy room, the snow plows beetling heavily along the street
outside.

They wore their party hats for five days.  They made up personae to go
with them.  There were eight hats, and that gave them four characters
each.  Zero would sit in the Elizabethan chair wearing the flimsy gold
crown and intone lines from King Lear, or Chad would put on the frog
hat and search for the wizard, or beneath the tall blue cone, Zero
would weep, taking on the character of the Princess of Shadowland.  She
was his favorite character, and her palace his favorite domain.  The
Princess had woken to find the king and queen and ladies-in-waiting all
gone, vanished, until she recognized in the flitting shadows along the
cold walls king, queen, ministers, and servants.  It was the job of the
Princess to turn the shadows human.

There was an elephant hat and a lion hat, there was a hat with a
picture of Elvis Presley and his guitar, a black cone with silver
stars, and one with a silver Studebaker.  (This one really killed Zero,
he loved playing the Studebaker.) They had decided that these were
leftover hats, extra hats from some job lot of hats for theme parties,
and that the bespectacled woman who ran the Paper Store (and didn't
look like she'd ever been to a party in her life) had cheaply sold them
together in one package.

Probably, there'd originally been eight hats for Elvis fans, or a set
of animal hats for a kiddies' party, or even hats for a bunch of car
buffs.

In the stories that Chad and Zero concocted, each had to participate in
the other's tale, wearing the appropriate hat.

Zero could continue Chad's plot line, and Chad could add elements to
Zero's.  There was some sort of loose idea that each would stump the
other, but it never worked, because events simply became more
fantastical.  The lion was fixing flat tires, the frog was making
salami sandwiches with caviar for the wizard.  The only act to be
mastered was a quick changing of hats, for if the frog spoke from under
the Elvis hat, you had to pay a dollar.  Or if you were at one moment
the Studebaker and quickly changed into Elvis, the other person had
then to shift his manner of speaking to you (for you wouldn't talk to
Elvis as you would to a Studebaker) or pay a dollar.

Zero never had to pay a dollar, for he was able to slip in and out of
roles as easily as water sliding through weeds or over pebbles, no
sudden hat switch of Chad's too difficult to make his way through or
around.  But his favorite character was always the Princess of
Shadowland.

On the day that Chad and Zero were able to leave for home, all of the
characters were to appear together in one tale, or at least as together
as Chad and Zero could bring them, hastily taking off and putting on
hats, becoming one and becoming another and telling of their travels
and travails.  Zero said they would all live in Shadowland together,
Elvis and the Princess, Lear and the frog, the wizard and the elephant,
the Studebaker and the lion.

They were, at the end, each supposed to solve the Princess's dilemma,
to come up with a way of turning the shadows back into king and queen
and servants.  But on that last day, they awoke from their champagne
sleep to sunlight so bright and hard they had to turn away from the
window.  Outside, the Porsche was revealed in all of its geranium red,
and people were walking to and fro with brightly wrapped packages along
pavements from which nearly all traces of snow had melted.

So, in order to get to Chicago and catch their flight, they had had to
scramble, to shower and shave and change and toss their cases in the
car.

They never broke the spell, they never solved the puzzle, the palace
remained filled with shadows, and the Princess drifted and sighed among
them.

That was, at least, the way Chad saw her now, sitting again in Zero's
room, watching the snow fall.  Saw her walk down colonnades,
shadow-sunken.  He watched Zero watching the unhurried fall of March
snow and assumed he'd never heard the question.

"Remember Shadowland?"

And then he assumed Zero wasn't going to answer, for the silence went
on and on.

At last, Zero turned from the window and said, "That fucking frog never
could drive--he ran over Elvis and totaled the Studebaker."

"What's funny?"  Eva Bond asked, with a smile.

The shadowy room in Chad's mind was replaced by this strangely lit one,
and he realized he must have been sitting here for some moments without
commenting.

Chad shook his head quickly, trying to recall what Eva Bond had said
just a moment ago.  He remembered.  "The police?"

"The one who called me back said there was nothing wrong.  Billy looked
pale, he said, and tired, but he was dressed, and the apartment was
perfectly neat.  No orgy, Mrs. Bond."  The policeman laughed a
little.

He was very nice--very.  Your mother called, wants you to call her," I
told him."  Ruefully, she looked at Chad.  "That's a wonderful reason
for the police to bang on your door.  Your mother called."

" She sighed.  Then she said to him, "I wonder why he wouldn't answer
my calls."

Was this it, then?  Was he to be the messenger who bears the bad news,
who recounts the sad tale of spoil, woe, and death, and gets hanged for
his trouble?  For reasons obscure to him, he grew angry.  "Why don't
you ask Zero?"

She stood up, turned to the French window, turned back.  "Oh, Billy
wouldn't tell me."

"Why not, I wonder?"

There was a silence.  "I can hear that self-righteous anger in your
voice.  It comes, I suppose, from your twenty-year-old vision of what
parents should be and do."  She smiled.  "I find most children to be
somewhat pious and preachy."

"Are we?"  Chad was annoyed with this unjust assessment, made worse by
her controlled little smile.  He had to match her.

Leveling his voice, he said: "Do you think that's all we
are-ingrates?"

He couldn't keep his voice down, spotlighted as he felt by her cool
stare.  "Don't you know you can all make us feel guilty as hell?  I
wonder: why didn't Zero let you know where he was for two weeks?  And
why did he have to put on that crazy display with Casey tonight?"

Her eyes hadn't left his face.  "I thought it was rather good-idiotic,
perhaps, a bit like his father's poker game, but quite brilliant in its
way.  Billy likes attention."

"Likes attention?  Can't you see behind it?"

She did not answer this directly but said, "We all had parents once."

She started to button up her coat, turning again to the window.  "We
were all, as the poet said, fucked up in our turn."

She paused.  "I gave up long ago trying to change the course of
things.

Things just happen.  You can't alter their direction or ward them off,
like holding up crosses in the face of the devil."

With her hand on the latch of the French window, she smiled.  "You
really think I don't love him, don't you?"

When she reached the path she turned and gave him a little

:'

wave.

He listened to the sound of her heels scraping on the gravel.

Then he walked over to the desk and looked down at the large leather
book she had been fingering.  It was a photograph album of the sort
that he had seen years ago and wondered at the patience of the
organizer.  The corners of each snapshot were secured by small black
triangles.

Most were of Zero, many were of Zero and Casey, a couple of dozen of
Zero and his mother, fewer of his father, fewer still of the whole
family.  And they had been taken by many different cameras: Polaroid,
thirty-five-millimeter, an old Instamatic.

The album was worn, some of its pages loosened from the metal rings.

It had been handled a great deal over the years.  As he went to close
it, a few loose pictures at the rear fell onto the floor.  Chad looked
down to see Eva Bond looking almost roguish in her flying gear.  She
was leaning against the single-engine plane, wearing a leather jacket,
helmet, and white scarf.  It looked like white silk.  For a moment he
merely stared, sightlessly, at the figure in the carpet against which
they lay.  As he reached to pick them up he had the strange sensation
he was looking at two lives, lived long, long ago, now fallen into
desuetude, irreclaimable.  He thought of Zero, sitting in that dark
room, he thought of Zero's mother, standing a moment ago at the French
window.  He felt ill.

At the sound of the car engine, Chad went to look up the little path
she had walked towards a garage large enough to house a half-dozen
cars.  The lights of Maurice Brett's BMW glowed.  The car backed up,
spat gravel as it accelerated, and nearly leapt towards the long
driveway.

What?

He couldn't believe it.  Was Maurice Brett by way of being a
penance?

Zero was standing at the window that overlooked the path his mother had
just taken, looking down at the path with such concentration that Chad
had to say his name twice.

He looked around.  Chad might have been someone he knew from the past
but couldn't quite place.  His face was ashen.  "Where's she going?"

"What?  Who?  What're you talking about?"

Zero was across the room in a flash and running out and down the
stairs.  Chad followed, saw him go into the huge living room, now empty
of everything but flat champagne, half-drunk cocktails, sodden food.

He heard the yelling.  He heard the sound of glass breaking.  Then he
saw Casey, in the hall, in an old bathrobe and what looked like Zero's
leather slippers.

"Go on back to bed," said Chad.

But she stared at him, twisting and twisting the cord of the
bathrobe.

When Chad said it again, she turned towards her room.  But when he got
to the bottom of the stairs, she was still standing there at the top,
looking over the banister.

Will Bond was gazing up at his son.  He had a drink in his hand until
Zero yanked it away and threw it against the wall.  Whatever the father
was trying to say was lost in the firing of glasses and
bottles--against the patio door, against the huge mirror over the
fireplace, against the hearth itself--and Zero was shouting, "You knew
it, didn't you?  You could have stopped her.  God damn it, that's my
mother!"

Zero raced past Chad without even looking at him to the front door.

Within fifteen seconds Chad heard the Porsche's engine roar.

Jesus, he was going to drive that car at a hundred per, if Chad knew
him.  The Porsche might even overtake them, despite the long head
start.  And could the Bonds' Jaguar keep up with it?

"What the hell's going on?"  asked Will Bond, who was swaying where he
stood, not from vodka but from the assault on his senses.

"Give me your car keys.  Please."

Will Bond made no move, simply looked at Chad from blurred eyes.

"Gimme the keys to the Jag, damn it!"

In a stupor, Zero's father reached in his pocket and tossed him the
keys.

The Jaguar careened down the drive.  In five minutes he was coming up
to the highway and had to decide: north or south?  He made a sharp turn
to the south and pressed down hard on the accelerator.

In a few moments he discovered how powerful this car was.

Chad heard a scuffling in the back, looked in the rearview mirror, and
saw Casey climbing over into the front, still in the bathrobe.

The Jag swerved, and they nearly rolled onto the soft shoulder.

"Christ!  You could get killed!"

The shoulders of the robe moved indifferently.  "So what?  I'm going to
die anyway."

How much of a head start had Zero got?  Five, maybe ten minutes.

But he was driving a Porsche, he could overtake the BMW.  The BMW
wouldn't be speeding.

The Porsche would overtake it, yes.  And then what?  Chad could
visualize Zero moving up alongside and, like the state police,
motioning them to pull over.  And if they didn't, the Porsche would
keep the BMW in view, even if Zero had to tailgate.  But the car would
pull over.  Chad hoped at least that Zero would not be fool enough to
try and run them off the road.

Chad tried to imagine the look on Eva Bond's face, the confusion of
feelings that would surely overwhelm her upon realizing that she was so
important to Billy that he would automatically go after her.

How, he wondered, had this inarticulate, longtime suffering started?

And what drove the two of them to go on refueling it?

If he was doing eighty, the Porsche was probably doing a hundred.

Fields, farms, fences flew past as blurs, just barely distinguishable
one from another.  It was too fast, he wasn't used to this car, he
didn't know how fast it would go before hurtling them onto the soft
shoulder or into the sheet of rock on the left.  He dropped to
seventy.

And even at that speed, two cars hurtled by him, one filled with a
bunch of young joy-making, turned-on kids.

Beside him, Casey seemed to have shrunken inside the big quilted
bathrobe.  She had said nothing for miles, she must have dozed off.

And then, coming up on him, he saw the double red and blue lights of a
state trooper.  Shit!  He pounded the steering wheel and was about to
pull over to the side when the police car barreled past him.  Behind it
was another, both with sirens blaring, and behind the second car two
troopers on bikes.  He slowed and began to pull over.

"What's going on?"  Casey rose up from her seat.

"Nothing.  Go back to sleep."

"Sleep?  Who said I was asleep?  How the fuck could anyone sleep with
you red-lining it and a bunch of cops after you?"

He pulled the car back onto the highway and ran it up to seventy
again.

"They're not after me.  Just shut up, will you?  I didn't want you to
come along, did I?"  He wondered if she knew, if she had ever had a
notion that her mother was screwing another guy.

The pitch of her voice was very low when she said, "We'll never catch
him."

Chad wondered if Casey meant it literally or figuratively--or both.

She sounded very sad.

Then he heard the wah-wah of an ambulance coming from the opposite
direction.  At the curve dead ahead he saw clusters of police cars,
cops, civilians, their faces bathed a sickly pink from the wheeling
domes' reflected light.  No matter what the hour, there would always be
people stopping to witness an accident.  It must be one hell of an
accident.

And the source of light was fire.  A trooper was signaling him to pull
over.  He'd barely stopped the Jag before he flung open the door and
yelled at Casey to stay back.

"What is it?  What is it?"  Her voice was raspy, her eyes wide and
terror-stricken.  "What is it, Chad?"  She was starting to cry.

"An accident."  He put his arm around her and told her, please, to stay
in the car, knowing she'd get out and follow him.  Chad had walked on a
few feet before a trooper stopped him: "No farther, bud."  Chad
remembered the other cars, the two that had passed him, the teenagers,
obviously high on something.

Chad swallowed.  "Did anyone get out alive?"

The policeman ignored the question.

"Listen, man!  Some of the people who were up ahead of me I knew.

Christ, you could at least answer a simple question!"

Chewing gum, the cop adjusted his glasses.  "No one would've got out of
that hulk."  He nodded towards what remained of an automobile.  Chad
had never seen a car so completely gutted.  Parts of it were flung onto
the highway--a tire, a smashed door, the chassis was burnt black.

"Look, officer, can you get any information for me?  See, my-mother
was driving in a car a few miles ahead of me."  His tone was
pleading.

"Just wait a minute."  The trooper's voice was very sympathetic.

"What kinda car was she in, son?"

"BMW."  He choked from the heat and smoke.

The cop walked away, talked to a few of the others, then came back.

"It wasn't a BMW."  The trooper even sounded relieved.  He was probably
sick of relaying nothing but bad news.  "Sports car.

They think a Porsche."  He stuck his hands under his armpits, went back
to surveying the black hulk, adding, "Used to be red."

~had lunged toward the fire, but the arm shot out to hold him back was
like a steel girder.  "Jesus, kid, there is nothing anybody can do,
unless you can maybe walk through fire."  Then the trooper jerked his
head around and said, "Take care of your little sister."

Casey was a few steps behind him, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"It's Mommy, isn't it?"  Her voice was clotted, she gulped in air.

Chad put his arms around her again.  Through the thickness of the
bathrobe she felt small and bony.

"It's not your mom."

In another few minutes the flames had nearly subsided.  All of
them--police, ambulance crew, onlookers--stood transfixed, watching the
outline of the gutted car turn to cinders, smoke and ashes drifting up
as the flames went down.  Cars were still stopping, their drivers and
passengers getting out.  One of them walked slowly toward the wreck
through the shimmering heat.

It was a woman.  It was Eva.

She stopped a good ten paces from them, looking over the top of Casey's
head directly into Chad's eyes, her own eyes horrified and then, in the
play of the last vestige of fire, dark, hollow, gutted.  Chad first put
his cheek against Casey's soft hair and then dragged her arms from his
waist and turned her around.  Casey yelled and ran to her.

It was as if the positions had simply reversed, he thought, finding it
almost impossible to keep from dropping his eyes.

His thoughts scattered, his eye traveling across the crowd, across the
debris, the wet trails left by the hoses, the throbbing lights of
police cars, black cars as shiny as patent and headlights streaming
across the road.  He had misunderstood, he had misunderstood the whole
thing.

He looked back at the woman in the old coat who had come here obviously
alone, whose silvery hair was suddenly whipped in a wind, and whose
white scarf loosened and fluttered away.

He did not know how long they stayed there, watching the fire die in
the spill of oil that had run in a jagged circle around the
burned-black automobile where the still-persevering firemen in their
heavy oilskin kept turning their hoses and moving about.

Under hats that seemed too big for them, the last of the flames
reflected across their faces, forming delicate webs of light and dark,
and Chad thought of Shadowland.

Ramon

Fernandez l

A perfect stranger, thought Sam, looking down at the body of Elizabeth
Hooper lying on the blood-caked ground.  Or what was left of her.  Not
just her throat was slit, the whole of her had been ravaged, the knife
trailing from neck to pubis.  She lay in what was left of her slip,
brassiere, and panties.  Her white coat had been tossed aside.  There
was no sign of her dress.

All of Sam's men and half the Elton County force were here, even though
it was Sam's territory.  He had called Sedgewick and asked him for
reinforcements, and to bring along his forensics people, the local
police hadn't got either the equipment or the expertise that the county
police had.  His real reason for buttering up the sheriff was to get
him over here to see firsthand what Elizabeth Hooper looked like.

Sedgewick stood there, fat and frowning, warming his hands under his
armpits, shaking his head.  "This here's going to get all the women in
a panic.  There ain't no way to keep it quiet, her being an
out-of-towner.  We got reporters from here to kingdom come on our
backs."

"Is that high priority?  Don't you think the women around here should
be locking their doors and not taking midnight walks?"

Sedgewick was hitching up his pants preparatory to an argument, but
couldn't get the belt over the beer belly.

"Elizabeth Hooper was from the city, like you said," Sam continued.

"Very quiet, very nice.  Had nothing to do with anyone.

Just came through once a month on the way to visit her son.

Nothing like Perry or Butts--but she was carved up like them, wasn't
she?  Like them and Nancy Alonzo."

Sedgewick knew where this was heading now.  "Wait one little minute,
DeGheyn.  You trying to tie this up with those others again?  You still
trying to clear Boy Chalmers?  Shit, I'd as soon believe he ex-caped
again than go along with your cock-and-bull theories."

Angry though he was, Sam pulled out his cigarettes, offered one to
Sedgewick, who took two and put one behind his ear.  They lit up.  "But
he didn't, did he?  This time Chalmers is locked up tight as a tic's
ass."  He kept all traces of sarcasm out of his tone and tried to talk
in Sedgewick metaphors.  Anything to get the sheriff, the mayor, the
state's attorney to simply admit the obvious: it'd been somebody else
all along, not Boy Chalmers.

It was not going to be easy.

"Jeesus, DeGheyn!"  Sedgewick tried to shrug it off with an artificial
little laugh.  "You'll not be satisfied until you can turn up a serial
killer, will you?"

"I'd be satisfied, Sheriff."  Sam's smile was thin.  "But would he?"

Sedgewick looped his thumbs in his wide belt and ignored that.

"Four homicides in .  . . what?  Three years?  Hardly New York City, is
it?"

"Five, Sedgewick."

"Huh?"  He chewed his tobacco a little more slowly, studied Sam warily,
as if Sam might try and put something over on him.

"Eunice Hayden."

"Wha .  . . hell you talking about?"

"Five murders in four years.  Kind of a distressing regularity to it,
wouldn't you say?"

Sedgewick's jaw stopped working, and he spat.  "Shee-it.  That girl was
totally different.  She was just a kid.  And she wasn't raped,
neither," he added lamely.  To get off the Hayden murder and to show
Sam the wheels were turning, he said, "What I wonder is, where in
hell's Hooper's clothes?  Her dress, I mean?  Now that ain't never
happened before, so this one maybe makes me think the killer's
got--what d'ya call it?  Got a fetish.  Yeah.  A fetish."

He licked his lips and chewed his gum faster, as if savoring the
word.

"Know what I think?  I think this might've been one of them city
psychos followed the woman here.  Maybe she had problems with some
weirdo back in the city.  After all, what do you know about her?"  He
seemed rather proud of that insight and even favored Sam with a tight
smile because he thought he'd put another dent in Sam's argument.  Then
he moved away when one of his men called him.

Sam didn't reply.  He supposed he should be thankful that this homicide
had happened in the woods, away from the La Porte citizens, who all
still slept snugly in their beds.  And the police ambulance had come
from the other direction, the direction of Hebrides.  Why Dr. Hooper
had been walking along this narrow dirt path, he couldn't imagine.

Walking this path in the woods, at this late hour .  . . Maybe she
couldn't sleep.

And Sedgewick did have a point.  What did he know about Elizabeth
Hooper?  Only that she'd been stopping in La Porte for over a year, it
must be, stopping on her way to her son's school.  Maud had told him
that.  Sam had seen Dr. Hooper ten, maybe a dozen times, usually in
the Rainbow, where she appeared to have carved out a little niche for
herself, sitting there at the counter beside Ulub and Ubub, or Dodge,
or Wade, or Sims.  Being polite when Dodge addressed a question to
her.

Polite as could be, but not really answering.

She talked to Maud, though, whatever Sam had learned about her, he'd
learned from Maud.  How she'd given up custody of her son, behavior
that to Maud might as well have been extraterrestrial.

Otherworldly stuff, something as foreign, Maud had said, as that
spacecraft in Close Encounters.  Sam had told her he thought that was a
peculiar analogy.

Well, she'd said, people just floated off, came back, floated off
again, so that you'd almost think that there were these other worlds
they went to, places we had no knowledge of.  (It always came to "we",
Sam had to be as ignorant of these things as Maud herself, he'd
noticed.) There was this place Chad's friend lived--Belle Harbor.  Maud
in her fantasies would have Belle Harbor on another planet.  Sam had
reminded her that it was a place pretty much the size of La Porte, only
a little over a hundred and fifty miles up the coast.  It was inland,
too, like La Porte.  But it was much, much richer.

Looking down at the body of Elizabeth Hooper, he thought about Fate.

Rarely did Sam think fatalistically, and never about Fate with a
capital F, as he did this night.  Why had she stopped here in La
Porte?

Elizabeth Hooper could easily have chosen the rich, chic Belle Harbor
as her getting-off point.  Its huge lots, spangled with lakes, were
full of large, dazzling white houses, marinas, slips for yachts on the
bayside--a rich person's paradise.  Dr. Hooper looked rich, Dr. Hooper
had class.

Dr.  Hooper was dead.

Right now there were twenty or so men fanned out through the wood.  No
one had come up with anything.  Sam stood there looking down at the
body, at the face that bore no sign of a hellish attack.  He always
thought she'd been a truly beautiful woman, and likable too, even
though she didn't start up conversations, just came into the cafe once
a month, like clockwork.  He heard the soft plop of a pine cone,
thought about her son.  Jesus, how was the kid going to handle this?

Was there anything much worse than the death of your mother?

Mothers weren't supposed to die.  He thought of ,he way his own mother
had one night slipped away in her sleep.  It was he who'd found her,
and he went on and on, talking to the woman in the bed, raising the
window blind, telling her it was a perfect October day, denying,
denying, denying.  When his sister had come into the room, Sam was
still talking, asking questions.  "Right, Mom?"  Stuff like that.  His
sister was ten years older, and strong, but it took all of her power to
get her screaming seven-year-old brother out of the room.

The stretcher bearers had moved the body onto the canvas and were
taking Elizabeth Hooper away.  It just didn't make any sense, there was
no order in it.  Maybe, he thought, as he watched the stretcher
disappear into the woods, he could get Sedgewick to postpone the
inevitable telephone call, either to the ex-husband or (God help us) to
her son.  He could drive up there.  Maybe he could get Maud to go with
him, if anyone could feel her way into a kid's head, it was Maud.

Sam wondered if he should call Chad.  Maud was going to be horribly
upset about the murder of Elizabeth Hooper.  Elizabeth Hooper was
perhaps Maud's favorite person, next to Sam, next to Chad.  Sam was
unreasonably irritated that Chad wasn't here right now, as if in some
way Chad's presence could cancel out the terrible sorrow of Elizabeth
Hooper's son.  For Sam bet that in the last analysis the boy probably
loved his mother, who'd left him, more than his father, who'd stayed.

And he wondered, as he had often done, what it would be like to be a
father, a parent.  That kind of love was very strange.  It was almost
like the better you were at it, the less you were needed.

It was like a judgment.

"Well, well, I do declare.  Never seen a grown man cry."

The sheriff was back.  Sam's collar felt damp, and when he put his hand
to his face it came away wet.

"Even you, Sedgewick--even you must have had a mother.  Fuck off."

Sam turned and walked to his patrol car.

He had washed the blue dress carefully and was nearly finished ironing
it, and just as carefully.  He wasn't used to ironing, and it would be
sacrilege to leave a scorch mark on it.

Finally, he held it up.  Clean as clean could be.  Not a wrinkle.

He took pillows from the couch and from one of the other bedrooms and,
together with the blue dress, went to his own bedroom.

Very carefully, he stuffed the dress.  The smaller pillows he shoved up
to near the neck to fill out the bustline.  The bigger ones he put up
the skirt.  He wished he'd taken the bra and panties, too, but he
hadn't, so you make do with what you have.

Once it was stuffed, he laid it down on his bed.  Then he undressed and
got into the double bed himself.  He wound his arms around the blue
dress and started crying, crying for all he was worth.

She would understand.  She would say the right thing.  She could
explain how life wasn't crazy, even if it looked that way, that God had
a pattern and, crazy as life seemed down here, it would all come out.

It would come out almost like sins did in the confessional.  How he
wanted to crawl inside her.  He could cut a hole in the first pillow
underneath the skirt, he could get the scissors and cut a hole, he
could

Some of the guests were leaving the party in twos and fours, Jand Maud
was getting anxious.  It was only two in the morning, and she knew how
long those parties could go on, still, the ones who were going down to
the dock signaled that at some point the lights would go out.  It was
Labor Day right now, she thought.  And Labor Day marked the end of
things.  The house over there would be winterized, Raoul and Evita
would go back to Manhattan, and Chad would be back at the university.

His last year.  Sam wasn't allowed to say it, but she must have said it
a dozen times a day to herself.

She could feel an anxiety attack coming on.  "Panic" was a better
word.

She wished to God Dr. Hooper were here.  Yes, this would be one of
those things only Dr. Hooper could handle.  Usually the panic hit her
when she was just about to either go to sleep or wake up.  And that was
probably because her defenses were down.

She could feel the onset, a slight whirring noise and a rush of wind.

Soon it engulfed her completely, her hearing went, her eyes started to
cloud over.  Unable to move, unable to latch onto anything, not the arm
of the chair, not the lamp, there was nothing to hold her down, to hold
her onto the pier.  Maud could hear nothing outside this alien space,
where the distant whirring grew until all she could hear was the
beating of huge wings.

: It was horrible.  It was horrible.  It was like being in the eye of
the storm--worse probably, because at least a tornado was a natural
disaster.

The only person she had told about this was Sam.  He said he'd like to
think about it for a while, that it reminded him of some thing he'd
read.  A few days later he'd come into the Rainbow and given her a book
that had to do with life after death.

"I don't believe in life after death," she had said with some rancor in
her voice.  "I don't believe in death."

"Interesting," Sam said.

"Not for me, at least, or Chad."

"Then how do you account for the money Sonny Stuck makes at that big
funeral home?  The best-looking building in La Porte?"

She wiped the counter hard with a dish rag, frowning.  "I don't know.

It's a trick or something.  But I guess that's not the point.  What
does the book say?"

"Read it," Sam had said, and then left.

It was surprising.  There were countless other people who had felt a
rushing wind of wings.  It made her feel better to know she wasn't
alone.  It made her feel worse when she read that this was one, usually
the first, of several steps towards an out-of-body experience.  Maud
sometimes felt that something was trying to drag her off the pier.

Like some people during an operation could float above the table and
watch the doctors and nurses hacking the hell out of what was left.

No, thanks.  Then a brilliant light was reported by all of them.  That
was usually the last step.  Or at least the last step before the first
step you took into the land of the dead.

If she just stuck it out, she knew the panic would end, and it did.

The pier was firm beneath her feet, and everything was as it should
be.

Except she was sure she was dying.  Oh, not in that stupid
soul-leaving-the-body sense.  There would be no bright light, no sight
of the dead whom she had loved.

She was now thinking about Dr. Hooper's son.  She had seen a snapshot
of him and thought him very handsome, he looked just like his mother.

Maud wished suddenly that she'd invited Dr. Hooper down to the pier
tonight.  Well, that was a stupid thought, imagine asking someone like
Dr. Hooper, "Hey, would you like to come down to the pier for a
drink?"  Really.

Dr. Hooper stayed overnight sometimes at Stucks' place, or "the
Brandywine," as they liked to call it.  Perhaps she'd gone out to
dinner at one of the places the lake people frequented, such as the
Silver Pear, a restaurant that specialized in quaint.  It was quaint
and expensive, and she and Chad disliked it intensely.  Dr. Hooper
probably would dislike it too, although she could easily afford to eat
there instead of the Rainbow Cafe.  You could tell she did very well in
her profession just from her clothes.  Or maybe she'd just stayed at
the Brandywine and gone to bed, she probably didn't feel like being
among people any more than Maud herself did.  Yet Dr. Hooper could at
least look forward to four or five more years of seeing her son on
weekends and vacations, since he was only in the second year of prep
school.

Maud lit a cigarette and envied Dr. Hooper.  No, she didn't, for on
the minus side was that the boy lived with his father.  Lived with his
father and might even like his father better, for hadn't his own mother
given up on him?

She felt for Dr. Hooper's son.  And she wondered if he'd forgiven his
mother.  To Maud she seemed such a wonderful woman--calm, quiet,
intelligent.  Sweet--yes, sweet.  Sam had said that.  Maud thought
about that movie with Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman in it, where
Meryl Streep had left the husband and the little boy.

She remembered how eloquently Meryl had pled her case at the end, and
she was sure Dr.  Hooper could too, if she'd wanted.

She herself could never in a million years have left Chad like that,
but she did not at all think this a point in her favor.  She did not
think that Meryl Streep and Dr. Hooper had loved their children any
less.  They had simply been able at some point to imagine themselves as
existing separately from them.  Maud couldn't.

Well, the father might well be the favored one with the Hoopers' son.

But what right did Ned have after he'd run offwith the Toyota
saleswoman to come trooping back into their lives and pick up almost as
if he'd never left?  Achieving, she thought sometimes, for Chad, almost
a certain glamour.  The Prodigal Dad.

He who should be favored over old stay-at-home Mom, the lady who was
always boringly there .  . .

Oh, Christ, don't be ridiculous.  Still, she stayed on the alert for
signs of Chad's switching his affections.

She squinted across the lake.  There came another couple away from the
party down to the dock.

After all, Chad didn't know why his father had gone off, and
occasionally he hinted around that maybe it was her fault.  It was an
idea Maud knew he liked to toy with, seeing how he could divvy up the
blame.  She had never told him his father had run away with another
woman.  It wasn't because she was noble.  She was just saving that
particular little morsel in case Chad showed signs of bolting, of going
over to the enemy camp.

Maud chewed the skin around her thumbnail.  Well, maybe that wasn't
precisely the reason she hadn't told Chad.  Actually, it embarrassed
her that she hadn't really cared that much when Ned had taken off with
that saleswoman at the Toyota dealership, the one who'd sold them their
last car.  Maud remembered her as wearing draped and silky dresses of
the sort that Veld favored, with big belts and shoulder pads.  Maud
couldn't recall whether she'd looked like Veld--probably not, since
Veld was a fashion model.  Maud never did know where Ned had met
Veld, or what had happened to the Toyota saleswoman.

Maud much preferred the way Dr. Hooper wore her clothes.  That blue
dress she'd been wearing today was perfectly plain linen, cut on the
bias, and probably cost a fortune.  Maud could tell, she used to sew.

Maud wondered again if Dr. Hooper had gone out to one of the lake
restaurants for dinner.  Maybe the Silver Pear.

At the Silver Pear you didn't simply eat, you had a "dining
experience."  It was one of those restaurants that offered large
promises and small portions.  Chad had needed another basket of bread
just to fill up.  It was in an old Victorian house about a mile farther
up the lake.  The owners were Gaby and Julian (restaurateurs, Maud had
noticed, always had names like that, never "Mary" and "Bob"), and
they'd carefully kept to the original structure, turning the several
downstairs parlors into separate small dining rooms.  Between the
fireplaces and the candles in hurricane lamps, the rooms were masses of
flickering shadows, an effect that prig restaurants often strove for.

Besides the glass-enclosed candle, each table seemed littered with the
detritus of some New York designer's notion of rustic splendor.  Chad
had taken her there two years ago on her birthday.

All through dinner she had moved things around--vase, little silver
basket of potpourri, silver-painted pear (one on every table)--trying
to get to the silver salt and pepper shakers, also pear-shaped.  It was
like maneuvering through a tiny silver-plated orchard.

The argument had been over Chad's Christmas vacation and where he was
going to spend it.  Ned and Veld wanted him to go to Vail in
Colorado.

Even though Maud knew it wasn't them Chad wanted to cozy up to, that it
was the blazing fireplace in some swanky lodge in Vail where they would
be Christmasing (Veld's word, in constant motion, all her nouns were
verbs).  Chad had never skied in his life, but what difference did that
make when there were all of those blond girls in ski boots and heavy
sweaters with reindeer designs sitting by the fire with drinks,
apres-skiing?

Maud knew she'd lose, she knew she'd have to agree, still, there must
be room for negotiation.  "Well, all right--but not the last half of
the vacation."

Oh, what a trial, his sigh had said.  "Mom, that's when they'll be
there."

"And I'm supposed to Christmas without you?"  She was shoving the
poached salmon around her plate, appetite gone.  Then she worried the
silver pear, moving it here and there, imagining the silver orchard,
trying to remember that fairy tale that silver pear trees figured in.

. .

"Of course not Christmas Day," Chad was saying.  "I'll be here
Christmas Day."  He was being eminently reasonable--couldn't she see
that?

"But you'll be New Year'sing there, is that what you mean?"

"Well, yeah .  . . New Year'sing'?-What kind of word's that?"

Maud looked at him narrowly.  She was growing increasingly
suspicious.

"So how long do you mean to hang around the slopes?"

Very casually, he said, "Oh.  Well, we thought I could just fly back to
school from Vail."

The other diners, lake people who all appeared to wear white, probably
flew back from Vail, or at least talked about flying back from Vail,
all the time.  "Vail" was falling just a little too trippingly off
Chad's tongue, as if he'd been careening all over the slopes in his
mind and it was hardly to be borne that he might have to return to La
Porte.  "Vail" grated on her ear.  More important, her stomach felt
hollow: Chad would be spending the last part of his vacation with Ned
and Veld.

"Why can't you Christmas with them the first week of your vacation and
New Year's with me?"

"For Christ's sake, Mom, stop talking like that.  And I just said: how
can I if they're going to be in Vail the second week, not the first?"

Of course it shouldn't make any difference, but it did, and he knew
it.

It was always harder to endure his absence at the end, for then she had
nothing to look forward to.  Nothing but absence.

Maud remembered gazing at the room, at the diners there, the couples
and the foursomes, the women in pastels from which the firelight had
drained the color, so that everyone seemed dressed in white, white
attendants at yet another of her deathbeds.  Every departure a death,
so of course she had to negotiate: a few more days, please.

The couple at the next table, the man lighting cigarettes, then
slipping the slim silver lighter into his white duck pocket: these
summer people did things in smooth, single motions, like swimmers
cutting seamlessly through water, or skiers slanting down mountains, or
players sliding across the court to make their perfect returns.  Maud
heard, in her mind's ear, tennis balls plop like pine cones in the
snow.

And she thought: their lives must be soft like that, for they reeked of
privilege.  Their voices, their modulated laughter seemed to float
toward Maud like mist rolling over the lake.

Did the four at that table by the window, the panes starry with
reflected points of light--did they have children?

Yes, of course they did, but they were smooth, ornamental children,
maintained for giving pleasure much like the little boats that slipped
by on the water, or docked for the night, berthed along the water's
edge.  Maud could envision the children asleep now, floating in dreams,
bobbing up and down to the rhythm of dream imagery.

And if they got divorced, there would be no predicament.  Maud could
see that woman in the filmy pastel dress back in New York, now
separated from him, living her own life in her vast, museumlike
Manhattan apartment, where she had a Life of Her Own as a painter or
perhaps an editor with some literary sort of publisher.  Maud could see
the son shamble in, tan, cashmere-sweatered, plopping down in a soft
armchair, breezily greeting his mother and saying he might be
Christmasing with a few friends in Portofino, and then, here comes the
daughter: "Daddy wants me to Christmas in the Hamptons.  It sounds
super.  .

."


And the mother, the woman with the pale hair, so absorbed in her paints
and canvas or else her brilliant first novel, or an author she's
discovered, barely hears this, for it barely matters, and thinks, "Ah,
now I can Christmas with Kyle."  Or Robert.  Whichever lover she feels
is deserving of her Christmas company.

No, this beautiful painter-editor-with-lovers mother--she didn't need
to strike bargains.  But for Maud, it was always like that: the little
trade-offs, negotiating and renegotiating.

Then she had started wondering about the birthday dinner itself: was it
simply a sop, a way of getting her in a good mood so she wouldn't give
him a hard time about Vail?  That was painful, not being sure.

"I've got to spend some time with them, for god's sake."

"I didn't say not to.  I'm just talking about which time, which
part."

She hated herself, felt ashamed for sounding like some haggling
purveyor of beads and silks in a Baghdad bazaar, trying to raise the
selling price a rupee at a time, just a little more, a little more.

The argument had escalated, not in raised voices but in rancor and
bitterness.  He couldn't understand, or said he couldn't, why she had
to make such an issue of it.

It was odd, though, he never gave as a reason that, after all, his dad
was paying for the university.  Sometimes she thought it was because he
knew it would be taking unfair advantage, and other times she thought
it was because they both knew it was not really an issue.  If Maud had
had all of that money, these arguments would still have gone on.  Ned
probably thought he had staying power because he had buying power.  In
a way Maud almost wished it were true, it would make her and Chad's
relationship much easier to understand.

She watched several more of the party-goers try to get into their
boats, with a lot of whoops and hollers and laughing when one nearly
went over the side.  But the music went on.  They'd probably be up
until dawn, especially since this was the last party.

The ice in the bucket had melted except for a few pieces, which she
chased through the water and put in her glass.  Sam said he'd be back,
so he would, even at this hour.  It was after two a.m. It was
wonderful: no more had she thought it, she heard the car, the door
slamming, and he was coming down the walk.  She hoped he wouldn't start
some depressing talk about the end of the season.

"Hello, Maud."

She turned.  "Wade Hayden, for the Lord's sake!  What are you doing
wandering around at this hour?  I expect you couldn't sleep, either."

She did not want to make it appear that she sat down here for any other
reason.

"Mind if I set down, Maud?"  She nodded.  He sat in Sam's chair and put
a brown paper bag beside it.  He looked at the forgotten can of
Coors.

"I don't drink as a rule, but I wonder, would you mind.

. .?"

, Actually, she would: if the last beer were drunk, it might mean - Sam
wouldn't come.  Oh, for pete's sake.  "Go right ahead, Wade."

Then she thought Sam would get a real thrill out of this-Wade Hayden
taking the Coors out of the cold water and popping the top.

"Someone having a party over there, Maud?"  His smile was just a
twitching up of the lip.  "And never invited us?"

There was something slightly chilling about the way he coupled them.

"Us."  She drank the weak martini.

"Something I got here to show you."  He reached into the brown paper
bag and brought out the blue dress.  "Pretty, ain't it?"

Maud sat dead still.  She felt very fragile, were she to move, she
might splinter apart.  She was cold with fear.  The dress was Dr.
Hooper's.  Maud always looked carefully at her clothes, wishing she
herself could wear such simple things and look as good as Dr. 
Hooper.

She had to respond.  Her mouth was dry, but she said, "Wade, that is
very pretty.  Is it a present for someone, maybe?"

She didn't know how she got her mouth to move, it felt that tight.

Wade Hayden smiled that unfelt smile again.  "It sure is.  It's for
you.

She had never seen Wade Hayden anywhere but in the post office or the
Rainbow, and he never said anything except hello and goodbye.

Something was horribly wrong, she had to be careful of what she said
.

. . but not so careful he would hear the fear in it.  "Well, that is a
nice dress, Wade.  But why should you be giving me a present?  It's not
my birthday."  She managed to bring to her frozen mouth a little
smile.

"Oh, you'd never guess what it's for.  I know your boy's left for
school, and I know you miss him.  This is just a little something I
brought you for being a good mother.  There's not a better mother for
miles around, there's not even one as good.  You could say that being
postmaster, you know an awful lot about people.

Can't help but."  His look at her was oddly kind.  "You want to try it
on to see if it fits?"

Without looking at him, she took the dress and held it on her lap.  And
without speaking to him, she looked up and over the water and saw that
it was quiet, all quiet, no one except for a man--she could make out
the glimmer of his white jacket-standing on the dock over there,
smoking a cigarette.  The tip made a tiny glow, a pinpoint of light
winking on, then off.  But he was too far to call to, might as well
have been in a plane up there in the black night whose winking red
light meant people were going somewhere, places she couldn't
follow--back to school, to the city, to that room whose balcony hung
over the sea.

Maud smoothed and smoothed the dress.  Two tears made their way down
her face, fell on the dress.  Dr.  Hooper.

"No, Wade.  I don't think I can try on your dress, thank you all the
same."

Elizabeth Hooper would never come through La Porte again, never sit at
the counter eating pie again, never see her son again.

F O U R

Sam hadn't moved the car, hadn't done anything.  Stupid to get on the
bad side of Sedgewick.  But everybody has their limits, he thought, and
he was sick of kowtowing to blind bastards like the sheriff.

He switched on the engine as if he knew where to go and let it idle.

If it had been his kid .  . . He thought of Wade.  Stony, silent except
to try and go over the murder of his own daughter again and again.  No
wonder.  What else would go through a man's mind after something like
that happened?

Sam suddenly thought of Rosie.  He thought of Rosie strolling down
Fifth on her lunch hour, looking in shop windows, eyeing a Spanish
shawl, brilliant splashes of reds and orange for her red-gold hair,
something to toss over her shoulder in a grand gesture, go sweeping
down Fifth Avenue in the soft air of one of those perfect spring days
to which even New York City gets treated-A spasm caught at his hand and
he dropped the cigarette when he realized he'd been thinking of an
imaginary girl.  Watching her, following that bright Spanish shawl worn
by a girl who didn't even exist until he'd said her name to Maud.

There had never been a Rosie.

Grinding out the cigarette with his heel, Sam wondered, was he going
Maud-mad?  Maud-Mediterranea-mad?  He smiled.  The thought and the
smile revived him a little, enough to go back over the whole damned
business.

He leaned his head against the head rest, closed his eyes, and thought
about the women.  To him, they were different.  Tony Perry might have
been an out-and-out whore (though he loathed the word), a woman with
children she didn't pay much or any attention to.  Loreen Butts,
according to the mother, was shy and quiet, according to the husband,
could be hard to handle, according to Boy Chalmers, ditto.  Carl Butts
was away most of the time, leaving her the care of the son.  Not that
the son ever got much care .  . . Sam frowned.  But how could Elizabeth
Hooper even be compared?  Or Nancy Alonzo?  Nancy had been a local,
yes, but that was about all she had in common with Perry and Butts.  He
lit a cigarette, his frown deepened.  But wait a minute.  Yes--yes, she
could, if she'd walked out on her son and husband.  Eunice Hayden.

Eunice hadn't been raped, no .  . . Still, he knew all of these
killings had been done by the same man, knew it as well as he knew that
his headlights were running twin paths of smoky light through the
woods, sectioning off trees, undergrowth, rocks.  What else did the
victims have in common except they all had kids?  Not Eunice, though.

They all had kids.  They all had kids who a lot of people saw as
neglected at best and abused at worst.

The thought simply stuck.  Well, it was ridiculous.  Most women did,
and there was Eunice--she didn't fit.  As much as he tried to rid
himself of the answer, it still came rushing toward him, insane and
senseless.  Neglected children.  Tony.  Loreen.  Nancy.

Elizabeth.  In the mind of the murderer, neglected.  But Eunice?

Her mother, Molly, watched over her like .  . . her mother, Molly,
hated Eunice.  Eunice starts rolling in the hay like a common whore,
some would say, maybe to spit in her mother's face.  . .

Dear God, the one person who might be able to see in this insanity some
sort of design was one of the victims .  . .

He was still trying to piece it together when his radio started
squawking, bristling with what sounded like overlapping voices.

But it was only Donny, his deputy.  He lifted the mike and pushed the
button.  "DeGheyn."

"Sheriff?  Sheriff?"  Donny always seemed to be questioning just who
that was.

Sam sighed.  "Yes.  It's the sheriff."

"Listen, Sheriff.  Maud Chadwick's kid--you know him?--her kid's trying
to get in touch."

Sam held the handset away from him.  Donny was shouting.  Donny always
shouted, because he didn't appear to believe contact was ever being
made over airwaves, radar, whatever.  "Stop shouting.

What about Chad?"

"What?  What?"  Donny bellowed.  "Okay.  Listen, the Chadwick kid needs
to talk to you."

Sam frowned.  "Did he say why?"

There was a silence.

"Did he say why?  Donny?"

Nothing.  Had the damned fool signed him off?  He did it all the
time.

"Sheriff?  You there?  No.  He didn't say."

"Where was he calling from?"

Fade-out again.  Then the voice crackled back.  "From Meridian.  I
think that's where."

Meridian was about fifty miles out of Belle Harbor, about a hundred
miles from here.  What the hell was Chad doing there?

"Donny?"

Nothing but static and distant, tinny sound.  Donny could have been
beating a plate with a spoon for all Sam knew.  He hadn't been Sam's
first choice for deputy, certainly.  "Donny?"  Now Sam was shouting.

"Jail."

"What're you talking about?  Chad's in jail?"

Dead silence.  Donny was probably messing with the board and he'd cut
Sam off again.

He replaced the mike and switched on the engine.  The car lurched along
the dirt road and took the turn onto Main with two wheels an inch off
the ground.

He banged the door of the office shut and told Donny to get his feet
off the desk and go and help out Sedgewick's men.

Recognizing this was indeed the sheriff, Donny yanked his belt and
holster from a shelf and scrambled for the door.

Sam didn't bother sitting down, he placed the call to Meridian.

"No, he ain't exactly arrested."

Involuntarily, Sam put his hand on his holster.  His nerves were on
edge, and the Meridian police force--if you could call it that-- was a
cluster of Donnys.  "Well, if he ain't exactly, then how about letting
the kid go?"

"It's this car.  The kid was driving this Jag that was reported
missing."

"You're saying Murray Chadwick stole the car?"

"Not exactly."

"Then what, exactly?"

"This real bad accident out on twenty-nine.  About ten miles from here,
you know?"

"No, I don't know.  What's that have to do with the Jag?"

"It's all the same people.  I mean, the Jag owner--well, some family
member--was in the accident.  We're just trying to put it together.  It
was reported, see.  This Jag that the kid was driving.  Some car, lemme
tell you.  No wonder it got stole."

Jesus.  "I thought you said he didn't steal it."

"Yeah.  Well, not exactly."

"Let me talk to him."

Chad told Sam what had happened.  "I wasn't stealing the fucking car,
Sam.  And I don't think Mr. Bond ever reported it that way.  I don't
think he'd do that, and anyway, he wouldn't care about a fucking car at
this point."  He was close to weeping, he sounded like he already had,
and a lot.

"They don't think you did.  They're just trying to get the whole thing
figured out.  That might take them some time, and I don't see why you
should have to hang around for it."

"I was on my way home.  I tried to call Mom, but no one answered.

Is she down there on the fucking pier?"

He sounded little-boy enraged.  It would all be, in some part, Maud's
fault.  Sam smiled.  "Yeah, she's down on the fucking pier.

If there's any problem about leaving there, just tell them to call
me.

They know me.  It's probably as much excitement as Meridian's seen in a
year."

Chad laughed.  A weak sound, but better than before.  "Right.  It
shouldn't take me more than a couple of hours."

"For Christ's sake, you might have a lag, but don't get picked up for
speeding.  I'm going to see your mother."

There was a brief silence.  Then he said, "Listen, thanks, Sam."

"Don't mention it.  Just get here."

"You going to tell her?"

"Tell her what?"

Now there was a longer silence, an in-depth silence, as if the boy were
turning over the years.

"I don't know."  He sounded puzzled.

F V E o, of course you can't," said Wade.  "Don't know what got into
me.

Course you can't put on the dress.  Sorry--I guess I wasn't thinking,
Maud.  A lot's happened."

Maud felt relief for a second, loosened her grip on the arms of the
rocking chair, but tightened up again almost immediately.  It was still
Dr. Hooper's dress, wasn't it?  And Wade was looking at her, a look
she did not return, she just kept her profile to him, her eyes on the
dock opposite.

He was still there, the man or boy, the tiny red eye of the cigarette
winking on and off.  Chad.  She concentrated as hard as she could on
the name and the figure over there.  Chad.  She closed her eyes
tightly, trying to project the name across the water.

"Things that's been happening, Maud, I thought maybe you'd
understand."

He paused.  "What's wrong?  You got your eyes shut tight as a baby."

"Baby."  The word sounded, in his mouth, obscene.  But she opened her
eyes.  Her throat worked.  Maud raised her fisted hand to cough
delicately, to see if any words would come out, for she'd seen, and
given no sign whatever she'd seen, the knife.  "Why, nothing, Wade.

Nothing at all.  I guess I'm just surprised you'd be out this late."

It amazed her that she sounded perfectly natural.

Amazed her she had the control--even the control to smile a little.

"You strike me as someone usually in bed at sundown.  With the ch--"
She coughed.  And then she knew why she'd not said the word
"chickens."

Because of Eunice out there in the barn.  He'd killed Eunice, too.

All of them.

Now she even forced herself to rock the chair, it creaked on the
rotting planks, and she felt her neck creak, too, as she ever-soslowly
turned her face to look at him with that same stiff smile.  Wade Hayden
was grinning crazily back at her, but she didn't look away.  She dared
to look straight at the knife.  "Wade, what've you got that old kitchen
knife for?  You can't hunt with that."  She said it slowly and almost
dreamily, her mouth curled up in that memory of a smile.  The way, she
thought, Joey smiled.

Shirl would go on seeing Joey in the Rainbow Cafe forever.  But she was
never going to see Chad again, never.

Somehow she managed to go on rocking, holding Dr. Hooper's blue dress,
and saying, while he was looking down at the knife with a puzzled
expression, "What things, Wade?  Why don't you tell me what things have
been happening?"

"That's what I was meaning to do, Maud.  Bad things."  Now the knife
was between his thumb and forefinger, dangling, swaying slightly.

"Things I did.  I thought you might hear me out."

She tried to bring her son's face to mind and she couldn't.  It was
blotted out by the fear.

She felt a momentary reprieve.  Yes, she assured him, she would hear
him out.  If she didn't look at him, if she concentrated on the dock
over there, she might be able to convince herself that this wasn't
really happening.  Beyond that row of little boats she had no future.

She wondered if she even had a past.  It was all unreal.  "What things
were those, Wade?"  she asked again, conversationally, her fingers
pleating the blue dress.

Wade was crossing his legs, clearing his throat, as if to get
comfortable and in voice.

"You didn't know me and Eunice very well."

No, she hadn't.  Her tongue felt thick.  He'd murdered his own child.

"We was like that."  He held up two fingers close together.  "Much
more'n her and her mother.  Yeah, Eunice and me, we understood one
another.  Trouble was, Eunice took herself off whorin' around."

It jolted her, the way he said this, his voice so measured and calm.

Maud's hair was a cap of perspiration, her scalp prickled.

She would have to hide her terror.

". . . whorin', and got herself pregnant."  He turned it into three
syllables--"preg-a-nant."  Now his voice, almost guttural before,
became high and thin and whined like a saw as he brought his fist down
on the arm of the aluminum chair.  "You can't have that going' on, not
in your own house--not your own flesh."

She could feel the heat coming off him, it was like the shimmering heat
that can rise, miragelike, from baked surfaces--a road, the desert.

She had to answer him: "No.  No, you can't, Wade."  Keep saying his
name.  Did he even hear her?  Did he even know where he was?

"Eunice, she'd've turned out like that Loreen Butts or that Tony
what's-her-name."  He had forgotten.  Maud shut her eyes.  He'd
actually forgotten the name, as if Tony were only some lost
acquaintance, someone he'd known casually.

"Did you ever know Loreen Butts?"  His tone was conversational,
casual, as if they'd just stopped on the pavement to exchange a bit of
gossip.

No.  The word did not come out, she choked on it, swallowed.  Maud
cleared her throat.  "No," she said firmly.

He turned to her.  "You coming down with something, Maud?  You're all
over sweat.  Nothin' worse'n a summer cold."

Nothing worse.  She clutched her book.  Behind her, twigs snapped.

Sam.

It's not Sam.  You didn't hear a car.  Forget Sam.  She tried to shut
out Wade's voice.  He was talking about Loreen Butts.

"Thing was, she took up with that Boy Chalmers.  He's queerer than a
three-dollar bill, everyone knows that.  In a way it's just as well
that sheriff in Elton County arrested him.  Boy Chalmers."

Wade leaned over, spat onto the boards.  "His kind shouldn't be walking
around.  Don't surprise me trash like that Loreen Butts would take up
with Boy Chalmers."  Now he was back to talking about Eunice again.

"Thing is, Eunice's ma never really knew how to raise her, though I
expect she tried.  Not like my own momma.

You should've known her.  .."

His angel of a mother.  Maud gripped her book, the blue dress now lying
folded over the chair arm, and listened to this peculiar, disjointed
tale, about how wonderful his angel mother was.  It was all a lie.

Wade's mother had gone offwhen he was just a little boy.  Sam had got
it from Molly Hayden, even Molly, so tight-lipped around nearly
everyone, even she would talk to Sam.

Where was he?  Was he coming back?

"Dr. Hooper."  Maud didn't know she'd said it aloud until Wade turned
to her, turned as if he were still with cold, his whole torso, not just
his head.

"She had you all fooled, didn't she, that woman?  Probably just because
she was a doctor, you thought she was better than other people?  You
know them letters she used to write?  Well, you ought to have read them
letters and I bet you wouldn't think she was so wonderful."

His voice, Maud thought, had taken on the rancor and bitterness of an
invalid, a sick old woman like Aunt Simkin.

"You didn't know she walked out on her boy, did you?"  His tone had
deepened.  "Letters is bad news, most of the time.  Being postmaster,
well, I should know.  Postmasters got a sacred trust."

She felt him looking at her, wanting her to ask.  "I expect they do,
Wade.  I'm not sure just what it is, myself."  She coughed.

"It's a sacred trust to know.  To know what goes on in your town.

That Billy Katz--you know him?  He's postal clerk over in Hebrides.

Billy Katz is a disgrace to the profession."  Wade leaned forward, spat
into the dark water, then continued, conversationally.  "Yeah, that
Billy.  If it wasn't for me going over there to pinch-hit him, well,
that town'd hardly get any service at all.  Don't think I didn't know
all about Loreen Butts and that Antoinette woman.  Ain't much goes on a
postmaster don't know about."  He took a pull at the can of beer,
laughed as he swallowed, and wiped the spittle from his mouth.  "Sam
DeGheyn thinks I was over to Hebrides all that afternoon.  You
remember?  Afternoon Eunice was murdered?"

As if this were just another to-be-forgotten date on the calendar.

Maud's fingers were tight around the blue dress.  She couldn't
answer.

"Sam DeGheyn thinks he is the cat's pee-jays around here."  His tone
became sly.  "He was carrying on with that Alonzo woman, did you know
that?"

Maud shook her head.  She knew it wasn't so, and yet a flicker of
jealousy spurted up within her.  It was astonishing that in the midst
of all this fear, she could feel something as clear as jealousy.

"Oh, hell, yeah."  He kept his eyes on her.  "Fooled around over there
in the courthouse after hours.  I bet he had her in just about every--"
"How'd you fool him, Wade?"  She blurted it out in a voice that sounded
tight as violin strings.  "How'd you put one over on Sam?"

His laugh was more of a giggle.  It was awful.  "Easy as pie.  All I
had to do was jump in my pickup and come back to the farm and then go
back again.  Only took an hour, not much more.  Anyone'd come into the
post office, all I had to do was say I was in the john or was sick.  No
one come in, I guess.  Who wants to talk to Billy Katz, anyway?  He
don't know his ass from--excuse my French."

The giggle was frightening, almost worse than his thumb running the
blade of the knife.

"Dr.  Elizabeth Hooper.  . . Dr.  Elizabeth Hooper..."

He repeated the name again and again as if he were stroking it, tasting
it.  He told Maud how he had watched, that very night, from inside the
dark post office.  "She wasn't nothin' but a whore, Maud."  His voice
had taken on again that whining petulance.  "Had to do her, didn't I?

Just like I did the others.

What the hell did she care about her boy?  She just walked out on him,
didn't she?  Like Loreen Butts left that baby of hers time and again so
she could go with that Boy Chalmers."  The voice had changed to that
high, rasping whine again, as he talked about standing at the window of
the post office.  It was down the street a little from the Brandywine
Guest House, but he could look up that way and watch.

"Don't .  .."  Maud held up her hands to stop him telling her about
what had happened.

It was crazy to challenge him, to suggest he'd done something wrong,
but she couldn't help herself.  Not when it came to Dr. Hooper.  "She
was here because of her son.  Because of him she came through here like
clockwork, once a month, just to see her son."

Maud was weeping now, looking out over the water.  All of those people
across the lake and not one of them could help her.  Sam.

"It's too late."

The change in his voice jolted through her like an electrical shock.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the knife move, no longer
forgotten.  She had said just the wrong thing: it was not her place to
argue Dr.  Hooper's case, it was her place to tell Wade he was right.

Wade Hayden needed absolution, he might be going to kill them both, but
he needed something from her.  That was the reason his voice was so
cold with rage.

Suddenly the fear left her.  She couldn't understand why or how it had
fled to go and watch her from some other place.  She squinted, looking
across the water, and saw either the same figure returned or another
much like it.  The figure was no more than a black stick, but she could
still see the tiny light of cigarette or cigar.  It was as if the fear
had fled across the water to stand way over there and observe her.

Maud just sat there waiting, smoothing her hand over her book of poetry
as if it were some kind of talisman.  She did not fully understand this
new feeling, here she was sitting on the end of the pier with a madman,
a psychopath, a murderer, and she felt lightweight.  Looking across the
water, she felt the scene before her dissolve into particles of light
and then reform itself into something the same yet subtly different,
something that couldn't be seen with the naked eye but could only be
felt.  "Ramon Fernandez, tell me .  . .

Wade was saying something.

"What?"  she asked.

""Ramon," you said."

She must have said the name aloud.

" Ramon Ferdinand," you said.  Who's he?"

"Not"Ferdinand."  Fer-nan-dez."

"What kinda name's that?  Is that a Spanish name?"

She smiled slightly, smoothed her hand over the book.  "Maybe it's
Cuban."

"Sounds like a spic."  Angrily, he spit into the water.  He seemed to
have forgotten why he was here.

She smiled again.  "Well, he's not."

"It's one of them spic names," he said sulkily.

Maud thought for a moment, and then she started to rock.  It was as if
this were a night like any other night, just the two of them sitting on
the end of the pier, chatting.  The three of them, she thought,
thinking of Ramon.

"He's a friend."

"Well."  His voice held a note of apology, but he was still sulking.

"A good friend.  Yes, I've known him for--oh, years and years."

She turned to look at him now, at the thin and craggy profile, the
nail-bitten hand that was now loose on the knife.

"He ain't from around here, is he.  I guess I'd remember a name like
that."

"No, he's not."  She paused.  "He lives in Key West."

"Key West, Florida?  That place where all the queers go?  I hope you're
not going' to tell me he's a queer."

"He owns a marina.  You know, where people berth their boats."

Wade was working up to spit again.  "Kinda work queers do."

"It's beautiful, the marina.  All the boats."

"You never been to Florida, have you?"

Maud kept on rocking slowly and studying the line of boats across the
water.  "just the once.  It's so beautiful.  The sun goes down right
behind the marina.  You've never seen such a sunset in your life, not
up here in the North."

"Hell, sun goes down here just like everywhere.  What's so special
about Key West?  All it is is full of queers."

He'd forgotten everything, it seemed.  Forgotten the blood, the knife,
the reason he'd come here, and she kept on rocking and talking about
the Key West she'd never seen except in her mind.

And then she felt that what happened didn't make all that much
difference.  The most Wade could do would be to take the knife and
stick it into her.  And in the long scheme of things, of wars and
famines, floods, fires--that wasn't very much.  What people thought was
important was important only in the way a rattle is to a baby:
something bright that makes a pleasant noise, something the baby simply
wants.  That knife wasn't much more than a rattle.  If he suddenly
plunged it into her, it would merely move through particles of light.

For the first time in her life, Maud felt free.

Something would have to be done, nevertheless.  She turned and looked
at him.  "Wade, I guess it's time for me to go in."

He was still little-boy sulky.  "I was hoping we could just set here
and talk more."

"Maybe some other night."

She rose.  He didn't move.

"I've got to take the things in."  Maud moved the bottle from the
Colonel Sanders bucket and dumped the melted ice out.  All Wade did was
to look up at her, blinking, as if his eyes were trying to adjust to a
new darkness.  "You could help.  You could just fold up that chair and
bring it along."

He got up slowly, sighing with impatience.  Still holding on to the
knife, he folded up the aluminum chair as Maud pulled the bead chain on
the lamp.  They were in darkness.  She flicked it on again, and there
was a tiny dazzle of moonlight on the knife, the chair, the silver
bucket-stand.  She picked up the stand and reached for the lamp.  "Do
you think you could carry this?"

"I guess," he said, his tone still truculent.  His big-knuckled hand
closed around the lamp.

Maud looked at him, at the pathetic and rather silly picture he made.

He was standing with the chair under one arm, the knife still clutched
in that hand, the lamp in the other, holding it by its wrought-iron
stem.  He was squinting at the light, his thumb and forefinger about to
pull the bead chain.

She shook her head.  It was so sad and so simple.  No way in the world
he could keep his balance, she thought, as she suddenly swung the
bucket stand and caught him a glancing blow across the shoulder.

Wade weaved, looking at her, surprised and puzzled.  Then he pitched
over backwards into the lake.  There was an awful, terrible sound, and
she shut her eyes and clamped her hands over her ears.

Maud stood there, eyes squinched shut, when she felt a softness against
her ankle.  She looked down to see the black cat had been rubbing
against her foot and now had trailed over to the very end of the pier
to poke its head over the edge.

She guessed if the cat could stand it, so could she, though it would
help if your eyes were cloudy.  Testily, she leaned over.

What she had expected to see, she didn't know: devastation far worse
than this.  The body of Wade Hayden floated face-down on the water, his
work shirt ballooning upward as if someone had pumped in air to inflate
it.  The lamp, of course, had disappeared, but left behind it the
memento of its flowered shade, which floated near Wade's head .  . . as
if it were a party hat come off when the silly, drunken fool fell into
the lake.

Out on the black water, another speedboat ripped by.  And Maud, sinking
into this strange dream of death and water, watched to see what its
wake would do to the body, almost as if the pull of water could drag it
out to sea.  The body barely moved, the rosecolored shade bobbed.

She picked up the cat for comfort and wondered: Why didn't you simply
turn to ash?  Ashes should be scattered there.  Tears ran down her face
and dropped onto the cat's fur, it whined and struggled out of her
arms.  She stood there, arms straight down, looking at the figure of
Wade gently tugged by the little waves.

Someone seemed to be calling her name from a great distance.  She
barely recognized the sound of it, and she registered the other sounds
behind her-the spitting-up of gravel, the car engine cutting off, the
thunk of a shutting door--as alien rustles from another universe.

"Maud?  Maud?  Are you there?  What the hell happened to the lights?"

Sam came, hurrying, onto the pier.  She stood there clasping and
unclasping her hands, not speaking.

"Maud?  What's going--?"

The overturned chair, the fallen bucket-stand, the bottle lolling .

.

.

He walked over to the edge.  "Jesus God!"  he breathed, down on one
knee.  The body rose slightly, fell like a resting swimmer on the
ruffled waves.  "What in hell happened?  Maud, are you all right?"

Holding her book and the dress tightly against her, she said, "Where
are the cops when you need them?  It was him all along.  It was Wade
who murdered them."

"Jesus," Sam breathed.  Then he put his hands on her shoulders.

"Got to get to my radio.  Maud?"

She merely nodded and stood there looking off at the boats, at the
party-goers drifting towards the dock.  Drowsy laughter floated across
the lake.

Sam was back and taking off his leather jacket.  "What the hell
happened?"

"You're the loot, figure it out.  What are you doing?"  She was
shaking the jacket away from her shoulders.  "Why in hell are men
always tossing their coats at women?  You see too many movies."

"Are you going to tell me?  What happened?"

"I had to push him, didn't I?  There wasn't anybody else around to push
him.  Here--here's her dress."  Before Sam could react, Maud said
sternly, "Don't tell me about it, I don't want to hear."

Then she looked at the old boards at her feet.  "What about him-what
about her son?  It's not right he should hear it from his father."

Maud's shoulders started to heave, and she felt her face burning, get
puffy, as if a squall of tears were coming.  "It's not fair he should
hear it from his father.  I don't care if she felt she had to walk out,
she was a good mother."  In a moment, she would start wailing,
crying.

"I thought maybe?"  Sam said calmly, "I'd just drive up there, maybe
tell him myself."

There was a silence.  Testily, she said, "You won't do it right.

You'll probably read him the autopsy report."  She looked off towards
the little line of boats, their number diminished now.

"I thought maybe you could come with me."

Maud took in a deep breath of night air, puffed out her cheeks, let it
go.  "Well .  .."  For a long moment, Maud looked across the lake.

The lights of the Japanese lanterns still glowed softly.

"Are their names really Raoul and Evita?  I bet you lied."

Sam winced.  "For Christ's sake, Maud.  Wade Hayden just got-- you were
down here with a killer, Maud.  Who cares about Raoul and Evita?  Come
on.  Let's go up to the house."

"Gee, thanks."  She shook his arm away as she had done the jacket.

"Christ, you're grumpy.  You're grumpy because I didn't come back."

Maud ignored that.  "I guess you'll get a vacation.  You finally solved
it.  Even though it was really me."  She sighed and started walking
toward the house.  "Will my picture be in the papers?"  she asked, over
her shoulder.

Sam came abreast of her.  "I expect."

"After we see Dr. Hooper's son, I want to go to the university and see
Chad.  To let him know I'm still alive."  She sounded rather proud.

Chad.  Sam had forgotten about Chad.  He stopped and looked up at the
night sky, purpling now along the horizon.  Was it that late?

Was it almost dawn?

"Listen, Maud.  I talked to Chad.  He telephoned to say he was driving
back here this morning."

"What?  What do you mean, driving?  He doesn't have a car.  And why
would he be, anyway?  He's in Belle--" "Belle Harbor, I know.  Well, he
called from Meridian.  He borrowed his friend's car."

Impatiently, she said, "Meridian?  What's he doing in Meridian?"

"I thought I just told you.  He called from there."

"That still doesn't explain why he's coming home."

Sam thought for a moment as he tried to settle his jacket around her
shoulders, with her fidgeting like that blind black cat that was
stealthily slinking around the end of the pier.  "He forgot his
books."

Maud shouldered off the jacket.  "Oh, for god's sake.  He wouldn't come
all the way back for that, he'd make me FedEr them.  Anyway, he can't
read.  It's not a nice thing to lie to me about."  Leaving the jacket
on the ground, she walked away.

"Maud, god damn it!  I'm not lying.  He'll probably be here in a couple
of hours."  Sam picked up the jacket.  He felt like slinging it at
her.

She turned.  "You're sure you're not making it up?"

"No.  Go ahead--ask Donny if you don't believe me.  Or stand out on the
road until he comes."  He was getting pretty impatient with her.

"You don't have to get tetchy."

"I don't?"  He brought his face down close to hers.  "Listen to me: I
don't like seeing women get murdered.  Dr. Hooper--I liked Elizabeth
Hooper.  I don't want her lying there spattered with blood.  I feel
pretty goddamned tetchy.  Out there, if you've forgotten, a dead man's
floating belly-down in the lake!"

"I should know.  I just had a martini with him."  She started up the
path again.

"Oh, for Christ's sake .  .."  Sam caught up with her, put his arm
around her shoulders.  She didn't shake it off.

Then, as if none of this exchange had occurred, she went on, "So after
we see Dr. Hooper's son and after Chad goes back to school, I want to
go to New York."

She kept on walking, but Sam stopped dead.  "New York?  What for?"

In the distance a siren sounded.  It was far away, a ghost siren.

"To see Rosie."

Then she turned and stopped, and Sam thought her smile glimmered like
the lights in the little boats across the water.

"Unless you lied."

He caught up with her on the path, and as they walked away from the end
of the pier, he thought she must have said, (but he couldn't be sure
because of the music drifting over the water), said or sighed, "Dear
boy."  the end.