If You Could See Me Now

Six __________

“Miles,” she said, “your cousin died in 1955 while the two of you were swimming in the old Pohlson quarry. She was drowned.”

“No. She drowned,” I said. “Active verb. I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t have killed her. She meant more to me than my own life. I would rather have died myself. It was the end of my life anyhow.”

“You may have killed her by accident — you may not have known what you were doing. I am only an old farm woman, but I know you. I love you. You have always been troubled. Your cousin was also a troubled person, but her troubles were not innocent, as yours were. She chose the rocky path, she desired confusion and evil, and you never committed that sin.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. She was, I don’t know, more complicated than I was, but that was part of her beauty. For me, anyhow. No one else understood her. And I did not kill her, accidentally or any other way.”

“Only you two were there.”

“That’s not certain.”

“Did you see anyone else that night?”

“I don’t know. I might have. I thought I did, several times. I got knocked out in the water.”

“By Alison’s struggles. She nearly took you with her.”

“I wish she had. I haven’t had a life since.”

“Not a whole life. Not a satisfied life. Because of her.”

“Stop it,” I shouted. The heat of the kitchen was building up around me, seeming to increase with every word. The stuff on my face was beginning to burn. My shout had frightened her; she seemed paler and smaller, inside all those wrinkles and the man’s baggy jacket. She slowly sipped at her coffee, and I felt a great sad inevitable remorse. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I shouted. If you love me it must be the way you’d love some wounded bird. I’m in a terrible state, Auntie Rinn.”

“I know,” she said calmly. “That’s why I have to protect you. That’s why you have to leave the valley. It’s too late now for anything else.”

“Because Alison is coming back, you mean. Because she is.”

“If she is, then there is nothing to do. It is too late for anything. She has hooks in you too deep for me to remove them.”

“Thank God for that. She means freedom to me. She means life.”

“No. She means death. She means what you felt out there tonight.”

“That was nerves.”

“That was Alison. She wants to claim you.”

“She claimed me years ago.”

“Miles, you are submitting to forces you don’t understand. I don’t understand them either, but I respect them. And I fear them. Have you thought about what happens after she returns?”

“What happens doesn’t matter. She will be in this world again. She knows I didn’t kill her.”

“Perhaps that doesn’t matter. Or perhaps it matters less than you think it does. Tell me about that night, Miles.”

I let my head drop forward, so that my chin nearly touched my chest. “What good would that do?”

“Then I will tell you. This is what Arden people remember about you, Miles. They remember that you were suspected of murder. You already had a bad reputation — you were known as a thief, a disturbed, disordered boy with no control over his feelings. Your cousin was — I don’t know what the word is. A sexual tease. She was corrupt. She shocked the valley people. She was calculating and she had power — I recognized when she was only a child that she was a destructive person. She hated life. She hated everything but herself.”

“Never,” I said.

“And the two of you went to the quarry to swim, no doubt after Alison had deceived your mothers. She was ensnaring you even more deeply. Miles, there can exist between two people a kind of deep connection, a kind of voice between them, a calling, and if the dominant person is corrupted, the connection Is unhealthy and corrupt.”

“Skip the rigamarole,” I said. “Get on with what you want to say.” I wanted to leave her overheated kitchen; I wanted to immure myself in the old Updahl farmhouse.

“I will.” Her face was hard as winter. “Someone driving past on the Arden road heard screams coming from the quarry and called the police. When old Walter Hovre got there he found you unconscious on the rock ledge. Your face was bleeding. Alison was dead. He could just see her body, caught on a rock projection down in the water. Both of you were naked. She had been… she had been abused.” Her complexion began to redden. “The inference was there to be made. It was obvious.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I think she seduced you and died accidentally. That she died by your hand, but that it was not murder.” Now her blushing was pronounced: it was a ghastly effect, as if she had rubbed rouge into her cheeks. “I have never known physical love, Miles, but I imagine that it is a turbulent business.” She raised her chin and looked straight at me. “That is what everybody thought. You were not to be charged — in fact, many women in Arden thought that your cousin had gotten just what she deserved. The coroner, who was Walter Hovre in those days, said that it was accidental death. He was a kindly man, and he’d had his troubles with his own son. He did not want to ruin your life. It helped that you were an Updahl. People hereabouts have always looked up to your family.”

“Just tell me this,” I said. “When everybody was silently condemning me while hypocritically setting me free, didn’t anyone wonder who had made that phone call?”

“The man didn’t give his name. He said he was frightened.”

“Do you really think screams from the quarry can be heard on the road?”

“Evidently they can. And in these times, Miles, people remember your old story.”

“Goddam it,” I said. “Don’t you think I know that? Even Duane’s daughter has begun to hear rumors about it. Her crazy boyfriend, too. But I’m bound by my past. That’s the reason I’m here. I’m innocent of the other thing. My innocence is bound to come out.”

“I hope with all my heart that it does,” she said. I could hear the wind rattling the branches and leaves outside, and I felt like a character from another century — a character from a fairy tale, hiding in a gingerbread house. “But that is not enough to save you now.”

“I know what my salvation is.”

“Salvation is work.”

“That’s a good Norwegian theory.”

“Well, work, then. Write! Help in the fields!”

I smiled at the thought of Duane and myself mowing hay side by side. “I thought you were advising me to leave the state. Actually Polar Bears won’t let me leave. And I wouldn’t, anyhow.”

She looked at me with what I recognized as despair. I said, “I won’t let go of the past. You don’t understand, Auntie Rinn.” At the end of this sentence, I shocked myself by yawning.

“Poor tired boy.”

“I am tired,” I admitted.

“Sleep here tonight, Miles. I’ll pray for you.”

“No,” I said automatically, “no thanks,” and then thought of the long walk back to the car. By now the batteries had probably run down, and I would have to walk all the way back to the farmhouse.

“You can leave as early as you like. You won’t bother a dried up old thing like me.”

“Maybe for a couple of hours,” I said, and yawned again. This time I managed to get my hand to my mouth at least halfway through the spasm. “You’re far too good to me.”

I watched her bustle into the next room; in a moment she returned with an armful of sheets and the fluffy bundle of a homemade quilt. “Come on, youngster,” she ordered, and I followed her into the parlor.

Together we put the sheets on the low narrow seat of her couch. The parlor was only marginally cooler than the kitchen, but I helped her smooth the quilt over the top sheet. “I’d say, you take the bed, Miles, but no man has ever slept in my bed, and it’s too late to change my habits now. But I hope you won’t think I’m inhospitable.”

“Not inhospitable,” I said. “Just pig-headed.”

“I wasn’t fooling about praying. Did you say you’ve seen her?”

“Three times. I’m sure I did. She’s going to come back, Auntie Rinn.”

“I’ll tell you one thing certain. I’ll never live to see it.”

“Why?”

“Because she won’t let me.”

For a solitary old woman close to ninety, Rinn was an expert in the last word. She turned away from me, switched off the lights in the kitchen, and closed the door to her bedroom after her. I could hear fabrics rustling as she undressed. The immaculate tiny parlor seemed full of the smell of woodsmoke, but it must have come from the ancient stove in the kitchen. Rinn began to mumble to herself.

I slipped off my jeans and shirt, sat down to remove my socks, still hearing her dry old voice rhythmically ticking away like a machine about to die, and stretched out between the papery sheets. My hands found one nubbly patch after another, and I realized that they had been mended many times. Within seconds, to the accompaniment of the dry music of her voice, I passed into the first unbroken and peaceful sleep I’d had since leaving New York.

Several hours later, I woke to two separate noises. One was what seemed an incredible rushing clatter of leaves above me, as though the woods had crawled up to the house and begun to attack it. The second was even more unsettling. It was Rinn’s voice, and at first I thought her praying had become a marathon event. After I caught its slow, insistent pulse I recognized that she was saying something in her sleep. A single word, repeated. The whooping clatter of the trees above the house drowned out the word, and I lay in the dark with my eyes open, listening. The smell of woodsmoke hung unmoving in the air. When I heard what Rinn was saying, I folded the sheet back and groped for my socks. She was pronouncing, over and over again in her sleep, my grandmother’s name. “Jessie. Jessie.”

That was too much for me. I could not bear to hear, mixed up with the windy racket of the woods, the evidence of how greatly I had disturbed the one person in the valley who wanted to help me. Hurriedly I put on my clothes and went into the kitchen. The undersides of leaves, veined and white, pressed against the back window like hands. Indeed, like the pulpy hand of one of my would-be assailants in Arden. I turned on a small lamp. Rinn’s voice went dryly on, scraping out its invocation to her sister. The fire in the woodstove had died to a red glowing shadowy empire of tall, ashes. I splashed water on my face and felt the crust of Rinn’s herbal mixture. It would not wash off: my fingers simply bumped over it, as over the patches on the sheets. I inserted a fingernail beneath the edge of one of the crusty spots, and peeled it off like a leech. A thin brown scale fell into the sink. I peeled off the rest of the dabs of the mixture until they covered the bottom of the sink. A man’s shaving mirror hung on a nail by the door, and I bent my knees to look into it. My heavy bland face looked back at me, pink in splashes on forehead and cheek, but otherwise unmarked.

Inside a rolltop desk crammed with the records of her egg business I found the stub of a pencil and paper and wrote: Someday you’ll see I’m right. I’ll be back soon to buy some eggs. Thanks for everything. Love, Miles.

I went out into the full rustling night. My mud-laden boots felt the knotted roots of trees thrusting up through the earth. I passed the high cartoon-windowed building, full of sleeping hens. Soon after that, I was out from under the dense ceiling of branches, and the narrow road unrolled before me, through tall fields lighter than the indigo sky. When it traversed the creek I once again heard frogs announcing their territory. I walked quickly, resisting the impulse to glance over my shoulder. If I felt that someone or something was watching me, it was only the single bright star in the sky, Venus, sending me light already thousands of years old.

Only when the breeze had dissipated it over the long fields of corn and alfalfa did I notice that the odor of woodsmoke had stayed with me until I had gone halfway to the road, and left Rinn’s land.

Venus, light my way with light long dead.

Grandmother, Rinn, bless me both.

Alison, see me and come into my sight.

But what came into my sight as I trudged down the valley road was only the Volkswagen, looking like its own corpse, like something seen in a pile of rusting hulls from a train window. It was a misshapen form in the dim starlight, as pathetic and sinister as Duane’s Dream House, and as I walked toward it I saw the shattered rear window and the scooping dents on the engine cover and hood. Eventually it hit me that the lights were out; the battery had died.

I groaned, and opened the door and collapsed onto the seat. I passed my hands over the pink new patches of skin on my face, which were beginning to tingle. “Damn,” I said, thinking of the difficulty of getting a tow truck to come the ten miles from Arden. In frustration, I lightly struck my hand against the horn mechanism. Then I saw that the key was gone from the ignition.

“What’s that for?” asked a man approaching me from the high slope of the Sunderson drive. As he crossed the road I saw that he had a thick hard belly and a flat face with no cheer in it. He had a pudgy blob for a nose, signaling his family connection to Tula Sunderson. Like the hair of most men called “Red,” his was a dusty tobaccoish orange. He came across the road and laid an enormous hand on top of the open door. “Why do you wanta go honkin’ that horn for?”

“Out of joy. From sheer blinding happiness. My battery’s dead, so the car won’t move, and the damned key’s gone, probably lying somewhere in that ditch. And you might have noticed that a few gentlemen in Arden decided to work over the car this evening. So that’s why I was honking the horn.” I glared up into his doughy face and thought I saw a glint of amusement.

“Didn’t you hear my callin’ you before? When you jumped out of this-here jalopy and tore on up toward the woods?”

“Sure,” I said. “I didn’t have time to waste.”

“Well, I been waitin’ on the porch to see you come back. I sacked out up there a little bit — didn’t think you’d be so long. But just in case, I took your keys out of your jalopy. And I turned off your lights to save your battery.”

“Thanks. I mean it. But please give me the keys. Then we can both get to bed.”

“Wait up. What were you doin’ up there anyhow? Or were you just runnin’ away from me? You were sure goin’ like a jackrabbit. What are you tryin’ to get away with, Miles?”

“Well, Red, I can’t really say. I don’t think I’m trying to get away with anything.”

“Uh huh.” The amusement became more acid. “According to my ma, you been doin’ some pretty peculiar things up to Updahl’s. Says that little girl of Duane’s been hangin’ around more than she should. Specially considering the problem we got here lately. You kinda got a thing about hurting girls, don’t you, Miles?”

“No. I never did, either. Quit wasting my time and give me my keys.”

“What’s so good you got up in those woods?”

“Okay, Red,” I answered. “I’ll tell you the truth. I was visiting Rinn. You can ask her yourself. That’s where I was.”

“I guess you and that old witch got somethin’ going.”

“You can guess all you want. Just let me go home.”

“This ain’t your home, Miles. But I guess you can go back to Duane’s. Here’s your keys for this piece of shit you’re driving.” He held them out by extending one big blunt finger protruded through the keyring so that ring and keys looked dwarfed, like toys. It was a gesture obscurely obscene.

By the time I got the car into the driveway, my face had begun to burn and itch; my eyes watered, and I left the car just past the walnut trees and walked diagonally across the lawn, pressing the palm of my unbandaged hand to my face. It felt as cool and healing as water. My lace was blazing. The night air too seemed oven-like and composed of a million sharp needling points. I was moving slowly, so that the rush of hot gelatinous air would not scrape at my face.

As I approached the house, all the lights came on at once.

It looked like a pleasure boat on dark water, but it made me feel cold. I lowered my hand from my face and went slowly toward the screen door. The mare in the field to my left began to whinny and rear.

I half-expected a jolt from the metal doorknob. I almost wished that I were back on that bed of mold, beneath those giant dark trees.

I crossed the porch, hearing no noise from the interior of the house. Through the mesh of the screen, I looked sideways to see the mare’s body plunging up and down, scattering the dumbfounded cows. Then I swung open the door to the sitting room and looked in — empty. Empty and cold. The old furniture lay randomly about, suggesting an as yet unlocated perfect order. All the lights, controlled by a single switch beside the doorframe, were burning. I touched the switch, aware that the mare had ceased her whinnying. The lights went off, then on, apparently working normally.

In the kitchen the overhead bulb in its shade illuminated the evidence of Tula Sunderson’s work: the plate of cold food had been removed from the table, the dishes washed and put away. When I touched the light switch, it too worked in the usual fashion.

The only explanation was that the wiring had gone massively wrong. At the moment that this possibility came to me I became aware that something — something important — was out of place in the living room. And that my face was still reacting painfully to contact with air. I returned to the kitchen and turned on the taps over the sink and splashed water over my forehead and cheeks. The feverish sandpapered feeling began to lessen. The only soap within reach was dishwashing liquid, and I squeezed a green handful into my right palm and brought it to my face. It felt like balm. The stinging disappeared. Delicately I rinsed away the soap: my skin felt tight, stretched like canvas over a frame.

This transformation, temporary as it was, apparently also made me more acute, for when I was in the living room again, I saw what had caused my earlier sense of dislocation. The picture of Alison and myself, the crucial picture, no longer hung on the nail over the doorway to the stairs. Someone had removed it. I looked around at the walls. Nothing else had been changed. It was an unthinkable violation, a rape of my private space. I rushed into the old bedroom.

Tuta S. had evidently been at work. The mess I had left on the floor had been bundled back into the broken sea chest and the splinters of wood from the chest’s lid were laid out beside it like gigantic toothpicks. I knelt to open the chest and threw up the lid to see Duane’s unhappy mulish countenance scowling at me. I lowered the lid gently. Pandora’s box.

Unless it had been stolen, there was only one place where the photograph could be, and it was there I found it — in fact, even while I was ascending the narrow staircase I knew where I would find it. Propped between wall and desk, beside the earlier photograph of Alison.

And I knew — if the unknowable can be at all said to be known — who had put it there.

Following what seemed to be a general rule about nights spent in the old Updahl farmhouse, my sleep was interrupted by a succession of disturbing dreams, but all I could remember of them when I awoke — too late, I noted, to witness the parting of the lovers on the road and Alison’s athletic, comic entrance through her window — was that they had made me start into wakefulness several times during the night. If you cannot remember them, nightmares lose all of their power. I was as hungry as I could remember ever being, another sign of renewed health.

I was as certain as if she’d left a note that Alison Greening had moved that photograph, and the information that she had influenced another hand to do it for her did not alter my conviction.

“You don’t mind my moving that picture, do you?” said Mrs. Sunderson when I came down for breakfast. “I thought since you had that other one up there, you might want them both. I didn’t mess with anything in that writing room of yours, I just put the picture on your desk.”

Startled, I looked at her. She was working her fat arms over a frying pan. Grease spat, flames jumped. Her face was set in an expression of sullen obduracy.

“Why did you do it?”

“Because of the other one. Like I said.” She was lying. She had been Alison’s agent; it was also clear that she had disliked having the photograph within her view.

“What did you think of my cousin? Do you remember her?”

“Not to speak of.” She went firmly back to the eggs.

“You don’t want to talk about her.”

“No. What’s past is past.”

“In one sense,” I said, and laughed. “Only in one sense, my dear Mrs. Sunderson.”

The “my dear” made her look toward me with magnified goggling eyes. More brooding, puzzled silence over the sizzling eggs on the gas burner.

“Why did you tear up that picture of Duane’s girl? I saw it when I straightened up your mess in the front bedroom.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Oh I do remember. I didn’t really know what it was. It was a random gesture. A reflex.”

“So some would say,” she pronounced as she brought me the eggs. “Maybe some would say the same about that car of yours.”

I could still taste those eggs two hours later when I stood on the asphalt of the Arden filling station beside a squat young man with Hank blazoned over his heart and listened to him groan about the condition of the VW.

“This is some mess,” he said. “I sure hope you got insurance. First off, we ain’t even got a man these days who can beat out those dents for you. And all these is foreign parts. This glass here, and that headlight and missing hubcap. They might be a long time in coming. It’s gonna cost plenty.”

“You don’t have to get them from Germany,” I pointed out. “There must be a VW agency around here somewhere.”

“Maybe,” the boy reluctantly agreed. “I heard about one somewheres, but I can’t remember where it is right now. And we’re all backed up on work. We’re doubling up.”

I looked around at the deserted gas station.

“You can’t see it all,” Hank said defensively.

“I can’t see any of it.” I was thinking that it must have been at this station that the Polish lover of Duane’s fiancée had worked. “Maybe this will help you squeeze it into your schedule.” I took a ten dollar bill from my pocket and folded it into his hand.

“You live here, Mister?”

“What do you think?” He just coolly regarded me. “I’m a visitor. I had an accident. Look. Forget about the dents, they’re not too important, just get the glass and headlights repaired. And take a look at the engine to see if it needs any work. It’s been acting up.”

“Okay. I need a name for the slip.”

“Greening,” I said. “Miles Greening.”

“That Jewish?”

The boy reluctantly parted with one of the garage’s loaners, a 1957 Nash that steered l:like a lumber wagon; further into Arden, I took the precaution of parking it in a side street in an area where the houses appeared to be at least moderately prosperous.

An hour and a half later, I was listening to Paul Kant say to me, “You put yourself and me in trouble just by coming here, Miles. I tried to warn you. You really should have listened. I appreciate your friendliness, but there are only two people that the good folks around here think could have done these crimes, and here we are together. Cozy. If you’re not scared, you should be. Because I’m terrified. If anything else happens, anything else to a child I mean, I think I’m a dead man. They took baseball bats to my car last night, just to let me know they’re watching.”

“Mine too,” I said. “And I saw them working on yours, but I didn’t know whose it was.”

“So here we are, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Why don’t you just get out while you have the chance?”

“I can’t, for several reasons. One of them is that Polar Bears asked me to stay put until everything is over.”

“Because of the Alison Greening business?”

I nodded.

He let out an enormous, scooping sigh, too large for his small body. “Of course. Of course. I didn’t even have to ask. I wish my sins were as far in the past as yours.” I looked up, puzzled, and saw him trying to light a cigarette with a trembling hand. “Hasn’t anybody warned you about being associated with me, Miles? I’m quite a notorious character.”

“Hence the ritual.”

“It’s been a long time since anyone in Arden used a word like hence, but yes, hence the ritual.”

I had come to Paul’s by way of Main Street, where I first stopped in at a shop to buy a portable record player. The clerk looked at the name on my check and disappeared with it into an office at the rear of the shop. I was aware of my presence causing a little flurry of attention among the other customers — they were pretending not to look at me, but they moved with that exaggerated carelessness of people trying to catch every nuance. After a while the clerk returned with a nervous man in a brown suit and a rayon tie. He informed me that he could not accept my check.

“Why not?”

“Ah, well, Mr. Teagarden, this check is drawn on a New York bank.”

“Obviously,” I said. “They use money in New York too.”

“But we only accept local checks.”

“How about credit cards? You don’t refuse credit cards, do you?”

“Ah, no, not usually,” he said.

I yanked a lengthy strip of cards from my wallet. “Which one do you want? Mastercharge? American Express? Diners’ Club? Mobil? Sears? Come on, you make the choice. Firestone?”

“Mr. Teagarden, this isn’t necessary. In this case—”

“In this case, what? These things are as good as money, aren’t they? Here’s another one. Bank Americard. Take your pick.”

The other customers by now had dropped the pretense of not listening, and a few were threatening to come forward to take a closer look. He decided to accept Mastercharge, which I could have predicted, and I waited while he took one of the portable stereos from stock and went through the usual business with the card. He was sweating by the time he had finished.

I spent some time looking through the record racks at Zumgo’s and the Coast To Coast Store, but could not find what I needed for the Alison environment. At a little stationery shop a block from Freebo’s I found a few of the books I remembered Alison had liked: She, The White Guard, Kerouac, St. Exupéry. These I purchased with cash, having conquered for good that other childish business.

I cut through sidestreets to get back to the Nash locked my purchases inside it, and then went back to Freebo’s.

“Can I make a phone call?” I asked him. He looked relieved, and pointed to a pay phone in the rear corner. I knew by his demeanor what his next words would be before he spoke them.

“Mr. Teagarden, you been a good customer here since you came in town, but some people came to see me late last night, and I wonder if…”

“If I might lay off? Take my business elsewhere?”

He was too embarrassed to nod.

“What did they say they’d do? Break your windows? Burn your place down?”

“No, nothing like that, Mr. Teagarden.”

“But you’d be happier if I quit coming in.”

“Maybe just for a week, just for a couple of days. It’s nothing personal, Mr. Teagarden. But, well, some of ‘em decided — well, it might be better to wait it out for a while.”

“I don’t want to make trouble for you,” I said.

He turned away, unable to face me any further. “The phone’s in the corner.”

I looked up Paul Kant’s number. His whispery voice greeted me hesitantly. “Stop hiding,” I said. “This is Miles. I’m in Arden, and I’m coming over to talk about what’s happening to us.”

“Don’t,” he pleaded.

“You don’t have to protect me. I just waited to prepare you. If you want people to draw conclusions from the sight of me banging on your front door, then let me bang away. But I want to find out what’s going on.”

“You’ll come even if I say not to.”

“That’s right.”

“In that case, don’t park near my house. And don’t come to the front door. Pull into the alley between Commercial Street and Madison, and then walk up through the alley so you can come around to the back. I’ll let you in the back door.”

And now, in a dark shabby living room, he was telling me that he was a notorious character. He looked the way you’d expect one of Freud’s case studies to look — frightened, his body a little shrunken and bent, his face prematurely aged. His white shirt had been worn too many days; his face was small and monkey-like. When we had been boys, Paul Kant had radiated intelligence and confidence, and I thought that he was the person my age in Arden whom I most respected. On summers when Alison was not at the farm, I had divided my time between raising hell with Polar Bears and talking with Paul. He had been a great reader. His mother was an invalid, and Paul had the grown-up, responsible, rather bookish demeanor of children who must care for their parents. Or parent, in his case — his father was dead. Another of my assumptions had been that Paul would get a good scholarship and shake the traces of Arden from him forever. But here he was, trapped in a shabby musty house and a body that looked ten years older than it was. If he radiated anything, it was bitterness and a fearful incompetence.

“Take a look out the window,” he said. “Try to do it without being seen.”

“You’re being watched?”

“Just look.” He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another.

I peeked around the edge of a curtain.

Halfway down the block a big man who looked like he could have been one of the party which had shied stones at me was sitting on the fender of a red pickup, directing his eyes at Paul’s house.

“Is he there all the time?”

“It’s not always him. They do it in shifts. There; are five, maybe six of them.”

“Do you know their names?”

“Of course I know their names. I live here.”

“Can’t you do anything about it?”

“What do you suggest? Telephoning our benevolent Chief? They’re his friends. They know him better than I do.”

“What do they do when you go out?”

“I don’t go out very often.” His face worked, and ironic lines tugged deeply into his skin. “I suppose they follow me. They don’t care if I see them. They want me to see them.”

“Did you report that they wrecked your car?”

“Why should I? Hovre knows all about it.”

“Well, why, for Christ’s sake?” I burst out. “Why all this fire in your direction?” He shrugged, and smiled nervously.

But of course I thought I knew. It was what had occurred to me when Duane had first suggested that Paul Kant was better left alone: a man with Duane’s history of sexual suppression would be quick to react to any hint of sexual abnormality. And a town like Arden would maintain a strict nineteenth-century point of view about inversion.

“Let’s just say I’m a little different, Miles.”

“Christ,” I blustered, “nobody’s different any more. If you’re saying that you’re gay, it’s only in a backwater like Arden that you’d have problems because of it. You shouldn’t allow yourself to be terrorized. You should have been out of here years ago.”

I think for the first time I understood what a wan smile was. “I’m not a very brave man, Miles,” he said. “I could never live anywhere but Arden. I had to drop out of life to take care of my mother, and after she died she left me this house.” It smelled of dust and decay and damp — Paul had no smell at all. He was like something not there, or there in only one dimension. He said, “I’ve never really been… what you’re implying. I thought I was, I guess, and I guess other people thought I was. But the opportunities here are rather limited.” Again I got that pale, self-mocking half-smile that was only a lifting of the edges of the mouth. He was like something in a cage.

“So you just sat here and put up with Zumgo’s and what your neighbors whispered about you?”

“You’re not me, Miles. You don’t understand.”

I looked around at the dim room filled with old lady’s furniture. Lumpy uncomfortable chairs with anti-macassars. Cheap china figurines: shepherdesses and dogs, Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Gamp. But there weren’t any books.

“No,” I said.

“You don’t even really want me to confide in you, do you? We haven’t seen each other since we grew up.” He stubbed out the cigarette and scratched his fingers in his tight black curly hair.

“Not unless you’re guilty,” I said, beginning to be affected by the air of despairing hopelessness which surrounded him.

I suppose the sound he uttered was a laugh.

“What are you going to do? Just wait until they break in and do whatever it is they have in mind?”

“What I’m going to do is wait it out,” he said. “It’s what I’m best at, after all. When they finally catch whoever it is, maybe I’ll get my job back. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I thought we might be able to help each other. If I were you I’d scram out of the back door in the middle of the night and go to Chicago or someplace until it’s all over.”

“My car won’t move. And even if it did, I’d be picked up in a day or two.” He sent me that ghastly smile again. “You know, Miles, I almost envy that man. The killer. I’m almost jealous of him. Because he wasn’t too afraid to do what he had to do. Of course he is a beast, a fiend I suppose, but he just went ahead and did what he had to do. Didn’t he?” The small monkey’s face was pointing at me, still wearing that dead smile. Mixed in with the smells of dust and old lady’s possessions was the odor of long-dead flowers.

“Like Hitler. You sound like you should talk to Zack.”

His expression altered. “You know him?”

“I’ve met him.”

“I’d keep away from him.”

“What for?”

“He can hurt you. He could hurt you, Miles.”

“He’s my biggest fan,” I said. “He wants to be just like me.”

Paul shrugged; the topic no longer interested him.

I said, “I think I’m wasting my time.”

“Of course you are.”

“If you ever need help, Paul, you can come out to the Updahl farm. I’ll do whatever I can.”

“Neither one of us can help the other.” He looked at me blankly, wishing I would leave. After a moment he spoke again. “Miles, how old was your cousin when she died?”

“Fourteen.”

“Poor Miles.”

“Poor Miles, bullshit,” I said, and left him sitting there with the cigarette smoke curling around him.

Outside the warm air smelled unbelievably fresh, and I recognized that my chest was tight, clamped by an emotion too complex to identify. I inhaled deeply, going down Paul’s wooden steps to his tiny yard. It seemed to me that I could almost hear the paint peeling off that hopeless house. I looked both ways, knowing that if anyone spotted me I was in trouble, and saw something I hadn’t noticed when I had come in. In a corner of the yard beside Paul’s low fence was a doghouse, empty and as in need of paint as the house. A chain staked to the front of the doghouse trailed off into the weeds and bushes beside the fence. The chain seemed taut. The hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I was aware of the texture of the shirt next to my skin. I did not want to look, but I had to. I took two steps across the dying lawn. It was lying in the weeds with the chain around what was left of its neck. Maggots swarmed over it like a dirty blanket.

The tightness in my chest increased by a factor of ten, and I got out fast. The dreadful thing stayed in my vision even when my back was turned to it. I went through the gate and began to walk quickly down the alley. It had been a wasted gesture, the visit. I wanted only to get away.

When I was no more than thirty feet from the end, a police car swung in front of me, blocking off the alley. A big man sat at the wheel, twisting his body to look at me. I was in full light, fully visible. I automatically felt guilty and afraid, and swiveled sideways to look down to the alley’s other end, which was clear. I looked back at the man in the police car. He was motioning for me to approach him. I walked toward the car, telling myself that I had not done anything.

When I got closer, I saw that the man was Polar Bears, in uniform. He swung open the passenger door and circled a forefinger in the air, and I walked around the front of the car and got in beside him. “You’ve had brighter ideas,” he said. “Suppose someone saw you? I’m trying to keep you from getting your head busted in.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Let’s say it was a guess.” He looked at me in a kindly, almost paternal fashion which was as genuine as a glass eye. “I got a call about an hour ago from a boy works at the filling station. Boy named Hank Speltz. He was a little upset. It seems when you brought in that VW, you gave him a phony name.”

“How did he know it was phony?”

“Oh, Miles,” Polar Bears sighed. He started up the car and rolled away from the curb. At the corner he swung into Main Street and we purred gently along past Zumgo’s and the bars and the bakery and the Cream City brick facade of the Dairyland Laboratories. “You’re a famous man, you know. You’re like a movie star. You have to expect to be recognized.” When we reached the courthouse and the city hall, he did not pull into the police parking lot as I had expected, but kept going on over the bridge. On that side of Arden, the shops drop away fast, after you pass the bowling alley and the restaurants and a few houses, and you are back in open corn country.

“I don’t think it’s a crime to have a car repaired under an assumed name,” I said. “Where are we going, anyhow?”

“Just for a ride around the county, Miles. No, it’s no crime, that’s right. But since damn near everybody knows who you are, it’s not very effective either. It just makes boys like Hank, who aren’t too well supplied upstairs, sort of suspicious. And Miles, why in hell did you use that name?” On “hell” he banged one of his fists into the steering wheel. “Huh? Answer me that. Out of all the names you could have picked, why the devil did you pick Greening? That’s what you don’t want to remind people of, boy. I’m trying to keep all that in the background. We don’t want that to come out.”

“I think it came out the first second I showed up in Arden.”

Polar Bears shook his head, disgusted. “Okay. Let’s forget it. I told that Hank kid to forget about it. He’s probably too young to know about it anyhow.”

“So why are you upset?”

“Forget about my problems, Miles. Let’s see if we can get any work done. You learn any thing talking with Paul Kant?”

“He didn’t do anything. He certainly didn’t kill anybody. He’s a sad frightened man. He isn’t capable of anything like these killings. He’s too scared to do anything but shop for his groceries.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“He’s too frightened even to bury his dog. I saw it just when I was leaving. He couldn’t kill anybody.”

Polar Bears tilted his hat back and hunched clown further on the seat. He was too big to fit comfortably behind a steering wheel. By now we were well out in the country, and I could see the broad loops of the Blundell River between trees. “Is this where the fishermen found the body of the Olson girl?”

He tilted his head and looked at me. “No. That was a couple miles back. We passed the spot about five-six minutes ago.”

“On purpose?”

“On purpose for what?”

I shrugged: we both knew.

“I think our friend Paul might not have told you all the truth,” Polar Bears said. “If he was going out grocery shopping, wouldn’t he manage to buy some dogfood?”

“What are you saying?”

“Did he offer you anything when you were visiting? Lunch? A sandwich? Coffee?”

“No. Why?” Then I saw why. “You mean he doesn’t leave his house? You mean his dog starved to death?”

“Well, it might of starved, or somebody might of helped put it out of its misery. I don’t know. But I do know Paul Kant hasn’t been out of his house in about a week. Unless he sneaks out at night.”

“What does he eat?”

“Damn little. I guess he must have some canned stuff in his kitchen. That’s why you didn’t get any lunch out of him. He’s screwed down pretty tight.”

“Well, how the hell can you—”

He held up one hand. “I can’t make a man go out and buy groceries. And as long as he doesn’t actually starve, it might be better this way. Keeps him away from trouble. You maybe saw one of our local vigilantes watching his house.”

“Can’t you chase them away?”

“Why should I? This way I know what the hotheads are doing. I think there are some things you ought to know about Paul, Miles. I doubt that he’d tell you everything himself.”

“Everything he needed to.”

Polar Bears swung the car into a crossroads and began to go back in the general direction of Arden. We had gone nearly as far as the little town of Blundell, and we had not seen another person yet. The police radio crackled, but Hovre ignored it. He drove still at the same unhurried pace, following the line of the river through the valleys. “I wonder about that. You see, Paul’s had a few problems. Not the sort of thing a man is proud of. He’s been in a little trouble. You know how he lived in that rundown old place with his mother for years — even dropped out of school to nurse her and work so he could pay her doctor bills. Well, when the old lady died, Paul hung around town for a little bit, sort of lost, I guess, but then he packed up and went to Minneapolis for a week. About a month later, he did the same thing. He sort of settled down into a pattern. The last time he went, I got a call from a police sergeant over there. It seems that they had Paul under arrest. It seems they’d even been looking for him.” He glanced over at me, savoring the denouement. He couldn’t keep from smiling. “Seems they had a character used to hang around Boy Scout meetings — in summer, you know, when they meet in school playgrounds. Never said anything, just watched through the fence. When some of the kids walked home, he’d sort of amble on behind ‘em, not saying anything, just trolling after these kids. After a fair number of times, say half a dozen, one of the parents calls the police. And the guy ducks out of the way — police couldn’t find him. Not then. Not until he tried something in a park with lots of mommies and kiddies and cops around. He damn near exposed himself. When they came up on him, it was old Paul, with his hand on his fly. He was their boy. He’d been going over to Minnesota to release his urges, you could say, and then coming back here until he had to do it again. He confessed, of course, but he hadn’t actually done anything. But he was scared. He committed himself voluntarily to our state hospital and stayed put there months. Then he came back. He didn’t have anywhere else to go. Now I suppose he forgot to tell you about that little episode in his life.”

I just nodded. Eventually I thought of something to say. “I’ll have to take your word that what you told me is correct.” Hovre snorted with amusement. “But even so, what Paul did — what he didn’t do, rather — is a million miles from rape. The same person wouldn’t commit both kinds of crime. Not if I understand people at all.”

“Maybe so. But nobody around Arden is going to rule it out, you understand? And there are things about these killings that people generally don’t know. What we have here isn’t a straightforward rapist. Even a rapist who kills. We got something a little fancier. We got a really sick man. Could be impotent. Could even be a woman. Or a man and a woman. I go for the single man idea, but the others are possible.”

“What are you telling me?”

We were back on the fringes of Arden now, and Polar Bears was homing in toward the Nash as if he knew where it was.

“I got a theory about this boy of ours, Miles. I think he wants to come to me, he wants to talk about what he’s been doing. He’s got all that pressure, all that guilt building up inside of him. He’s bursting a gut to tell me about it. Wouldn’t you say?”

I didn’t know, and told him so.

“Just consider it. Sick as he is, he’s a mighty lonely man. He probably doesn’t even enjoy what he’s doing to these girls. But he knows he’s going to do it again.” Polar Bears looked at me; he was smiling and confidential and helpful. “There’s a big head of steam in our boy. He’s got to blow it off, but he knows it’s wrong — sick. I’m the one he has to talk to, and he knows it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s someone I see now and then, someone who’s around here and there, ready to share a few words. I might have seen him two or three times this week alone.” He pulled up to a stopsign; across the road and down the block sat the Nash. I wouldn’t have known how to find it. “Well, speaking of luck, Miles, isn’t that Nash the loaner Hank gave you?”

“Yes. What are you going to do about the men who wrecked my car?”

“I’m looking into it, Miles. Looking into it.” He rolled across the street and pulled up beside the old Nash.

“Are you going to explain what you said about the killer? About his not being a straightforward rapist?”

“Sure. Why don’t you come over to my house for a bite to eat some night this week? I’ll tell you all about it.” He reached across me and opened the door. “My cooking won’t kill you, I guess. I’ll be in touch, Miles. Keep your eyes open. Remember, you can always call me.”

His flat ingratiating voice stayed in my ears all the way home. It was almost hypnotic, like having your will taken from you. When I got out of the car at the farmhouse I was still hearing it, and I could not shake it even while I was pushing furniture around. I felt slightly engulfed by Polar Bears, and I knew the furniture would not come right, lock into the correct position, until I was free of him. I went upstairs and sat at my desk and looked into the two photographs. Eventually everything else went away, and I was left with Alison. Dimly, far away, the phone was ringing.

And the third time it happened like this:

A girl walked out of her home in the late afternoon and stood in the humid motionless air for a moment, wondering if it were not too hot to go bowling with her friends. Perspiration seemed to leap from her scalp. She remembered that she had left her sunglasses in her room, but she could not waste the energy to go back in and get them. She could feel her body sagging in the heat and the pollen count was up nearly to 200. She would be sneezing by the time she got to the Bowl-A-Rama.

Maybe it would be better to simply stay in her bedroom and read. She was small for her age, and her pretty face had a piquant, passive cast which looked utterly at home in front of a book. She wanted to be a teacher, an English teacher. The girl looked back across the brown lawn to her house, and sunlight bounced off the plateglass window. There was not a shadow in sight. She sneezed. Her white blouse already adhered to her skin.

She turned away from the glare of the sun off the picture window and went toward town. She was following the direction she had seen Chief Havre’s car travel, two or three hours earlier. Girls in Arden did not like going anywhere alone since the death of Jenny Strand: friends waited at the bowling alley. But surely in the daytime one was safe. Galen Hovre, she thought, was not intelligent enough to catch the killer of Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand: unless the big man she had seen sitting beside the sheriff was the murderer.

She idled along looking at the ground, her thin arms swinging. She admitted to herself that she disliked bowling, and did it only because everyone else did.

She never saw what grabbed her — there was only an awareness of a shape coming swiftly out of an alley, and then she was slammed against a wall and the fear was too bright in her mind for her to speak or cry out. The force with which she had been lifted and moved seemed scarcely human: what had touched her, what was bearing down on her, scarcely seemed the flesh of a fellow creature. Surrounding her was the pungent smell of earth, as if she were already in her grave.

Seven __________

My arms and legs could not move. Yet in another dimension, they were moving, not lying still on the floor of my workroom but taking me toward the woods. I witnessed both processes impartially, both the internal (walking into the woods) and the external (lying on the workroom floor), thinking that the only previous time such an experience had been given to me was when I had burst open the sea chest and looked at the photograph she had directed to be put on my desk. The air was sweet, perfumy, both in and out. The lights had all gone out and the fields were dark. At some point in the immeasurable, unreckonable amount of time since I had stood up to see why the mare was terrified, night had come. I was walking across the dark field toward the cottonwood trees; I parted thick weeds, I walked out onto a grassy root-hump and jumped easily across the creek. My body was light, a dream-body. There was no need to run. I could hear the telephone, owls, crickets. The night air was soft, so sweet it seemed liable to catch in the trees, like fog.

I passed easily beyond the next area of fields and entered the woods. Birches gleamed like girls. Who had turned the lights out? My right index finger registered the sensation of polished boards, but it was touching a ghostly maple. Leaving it behind, I walked on a mulch of leaves. The gradient began to change. A deer plunged deeper into the woods somewhere to my right, and I turned in that direction. Uphill. Through trees closer and closer, high life-breathing oaks with bark like rivers. I touched the flank of a dead maple, down across my path like the corpse of a soldier, and lifted myself with my arms so that I sat on it and then swung my legs over and let myself fall onto the springy floor again. My knees absorbed the shock. There was still the light problem, but I knew where I was going.

It was a clearing. A clearing perhaps sixteen feet across, ringed with giant oaks, the ashes of a fire at its center. She was there, waiting for me.

Magically, I knew how to get there: all I had to do was drift and I would be taken, my feet would guide me.

When the trees approached too near, I shoved them aside with my hand. Twigs caught in my jacket and hair, pulling at me as a thorny weed had captured my foot outside the Dream House. Leaves stirred in the thick perfumy air. Where my feet had been were sucking black holes. On the perpendicular sides of trees hung glistening mushrooms, white and red. I waded through ferns as high as my waist, holding my arms as if they cradled a rifle.

There was a darkening of the spirit. Going closer to where I had to go, I saw the edges of starlight on the bark-rills and began to be afraid. When I passed through a gap, it seemed to close behind me. The breathing life of the forest expressed an immensity of force. Even the air grew tight. I climbed over a lightning-blasted trunk. Living stuff coiled around my boots, golden roots proliferated over them. I stepped on a mushroom the size of a sheep’s head and felt it become jelly beneath my weight.

The rough hand of a tree brushed my face. I felt my skin tear along my jaw, and crack like a porcelain cup. Branches closed over my head. The only light leading me was from leaves and ferns themselves, the light plants produce like oxygen. Another tree clicked into place behind me, blocking the way back. I went to my knees. By scraping along the soft damp forest floor I got beneath the lowest, branch of the sentinel tree. My fingers touched grass and stones; I pulled myself into the clearing.

When I stood, my shirt was green with moss. The bandage was gone from my left hand. I could feel snapped twigs and dried, crumbling leaves in my hair. I tried to brush them away, off, but my hands could not move, my arms could not lift.

The trees jostled and whispered behind me. The blackness was edged and pierced by a thousand sharp silvery lights on leaf-edge and the curve of tendrils. The clearing was a dark circle with a darker circle at its center. I could, move, and went forward. I touched the ashes. They were warm. I smelled woodsmoke, and it was heavy and sweet. The dense forest behind and before me seemed to grow taut. I froze beside the warm ashes, bent forward over my knees and in total silence.

What will happen after she comes back? Rinn had asked me, and I felt a terror deeper than that of the first time in the woods. A high rustling whistling noise was coming toward me from where the leaf-light was strongest, a whispery sound of movement. My skin felt icy. The sound dragged toward me.

Then I saw her.

She was across the clearing, framed between two black birches. She was unchanged. If anything had touched my thin layer of cold skin, I would have cracked open, I would have shattered into a heap of white cold fragments. She began to move forward, her motion slow, unstoppable.

I called her name.

As she drew nearer the noise increased — that high whispery whistling scratched in my ears. Her mouth was open. I saw that her teeth were water-polished stones. Her face was an intricate pattern of leaves; her hands were rilled wood, tipped with thorns. She was made of bark and leaves.

I threw my hands back and felt smooth wood. Air lay in my lungs like water. I realized I was screaming only when I heard it.

“His eyes are open,” a voice said. I was looking at the open window above my desk, the curtains blowing and small papers lifting in the warm breeze. It was day. The air was its normal w, unperfumed. “His eyes are wide open.”

Another voice said, “Are you awake, Miles? Can you hear?”

I tried to speak, and a rush of sour fluid poured from my mouth.

The woman said, “He’ll live. Thanks to you.”

I sat up suddenly. I was in bed. It was still daytime. The telephone was ringing downstairs. “Don’t worry about it,” someone said. I turned to look; beside the door, her pale eyes reflectively on mine, the Tin Woodsman was closing a book. It was one I had given Zack. “That phone’s been going all night and morning, I guess. It’s Chief Hovre. He wants to talk to you about something. Was it an accident?” On the last sentence her tone changed, and her head tilted up. In her eyes I saw the fear of a complex betrayal.

“What happened?”

“You’re lucky you weren’t smoking. Pieces of you would probably be on top of Korte’s barn by now.”

“What happened?”

“Did you leave the gas on? On purpose?”

“What? What gas?”

“The gas in the kitchen, dummy. It was on most of the night. Mrs. Sunderson says you’re alive because you’re up here. I had to break a window in the kitchen.”

“How was it turned on?”

“That’s the big question, all right. Mrs. Sunderson says you were trying to kill yourself. She says she should have known.”

I rubbed my face. It was unscratched. The bandage was still on my left hand. “Pilot light,” I said.

“Blown out. Or gone out. Both of them. Boy. You should have smelled that kitchen. So sweet.”

“I think I smelled it up here,” I said. “I was sitting at my desk, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor. It was almost as though I left my body.”

“Well, if you didn’t do it, it must have happened by itself.” She seemed relieved. “There’s something wrong with this house. Just when you got home two nights ago, all the lights went on, all over the house.”

“You saw that too?”

“Sure, I was in my bedroom. And last night, they all went off at once. My dad says the wiring never was any good in this old house.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be keeping away from me?”

“I said I’d leave as soon as you were all right. See, I was the one who found you. Old man Hovre phoned our house. He said you weren’t answering your phone. He said he had important news for you. My dad was asleep, so I came over myself. It was all locked up, except for the porch. So I pushed up the window in the front bedroom downstairs, and that’s when I smelled the gas. I went around to the kitchen and broke a window. To let air in, Then I held my breath and climbed in and ran into the living room and pushed up the window. A little later I came up here. You were on the floor in the other room. I pushed open the window in there too. I thought I was going to be sick.”

“What time was this?”

“About six. This morning. Maybe earlier.”

“You were still up at six o’clock?” She tilted her head again. “I just got home. From a date. Anyhow, I just waited to see if you were alive, and then Mrs. Sunderson showed up. She went straight to the phone and called the police. She thought you did it on purpose. Tried to kill yourself. She’ll be back tomorrow, she says. If you want her today, you’re supposed to call her up, In the meantime, I told old man Hovre you’d call him when you felt better.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for saving my life, I guess I mean.”

She shrugged, then smiled. “If anyone did, it was old man Hovre. He was the one who called me. And if I hadn’t found you, Tuta Sunderson would have. Eventually. You weren’t ready to die.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“You were moving all over the place. And making noises. You knew who I was.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were saying my name. At least that’s what it sounded like.”

“Do you really think I tried to kill myself?”

“No. I really don’t.” She sounded surprised. She stood up and tucked the book beneath her elbow. “I think you’re too smart to do anything like that. Oh. I almost forgot. Zack says thanks for the books. He wants to see you again soon.”

I nodded.

“Are you sure you’re okay now?”

“I’m sure, Alison.”

At the door she paused and turned toward me. She opened her mouth, closed it, and then decided to speak after all. “I’m really happy you’re okay now.”

The telephone began to trill again. “Don’t worry about answering the phone,” I said. “Sooner or later I’ll get it. Polar Bears wants to invite me to dinner. And Alison — I’m very happy you were around.”

“Wait until we’re comfortable before you start asking the serious questions,” said Galen Hovre two nights later, cracking ice cubes from a tray into a bowl. My intuition had been at least partially correct. I was seated in a large overstuffed chair in Polar Bears’ living room, in that part of Arden where I had parked the Nash. Havre’s was a family house without a family. Newspapers several weeks old were piled on one of the chairs, and the red fabric of the couch had become greasy with age; the coffee table supported a rank of empty beer cans. Polar Bears’ pistol hung in its holster from the wing of an old chair. The green carpet showed several darker patches where he had apparently made half-hearted stabs at washing out stains. On end tables on either side of the couch, two big lamps with stands shaped like wildfowl cast murky yellowish light. The walls were dark brown — Havre’s wife, whoever she had been, had fought for unconventionality. On them hung two pictures not, I was willing to bet, of her choosing: a framed photograph of Polar Bears in plaid shirt and fisherman’s hat, holding up a string of trout, and a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. “I generally have a little drink after dinner. Do you want bourbon, bourbon or bourbon?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Helps tamp down the grease,” he said, though in fact he had surprised me by being an adequate cook. Pot roast, reasonably well made, may not be notably elegant, but it was not what I had expected from a two hundred and seventy-five pound man in a wrinkled police uniform. Burned venison steaks were more like it, I had thought: virile, but badly executed.

One reason for the invitation had been immediately clear: Polar Bears was a lonely man, and he kept up a tide of chatter all during the meal. Not a word about my supposed suicide attempt, nor about the girls’ deaths — he had talked about fishing. Tackle and equipment, bait, seawater vs. freshwater fishing, fishing then vs. fishing now, boats and “People on Lake Michigan claim those coho salmon taste pretty good, but give me a river trout any day,” and “Course there’s nothing like dry fly fishing for sport, but sometimes I like to take my old spinning rod and just sit by the shallows and wait for that wily old grandad down there.” It was the talk of a man deprived by circumstances or profession of normal social conversation and who misses it badly, and I had chewed my way through several slices of juicy beef and a mound of vegetables in thick sauce while he let the tap flow and the pressure decrease.

I heard him tip a stack of plates into the sink and run water over them; a moment later he came back into the living room carrying a bottle of Wild Turkey under his arm, a porcelain bowl of ice cubes in one hand, and two glasses in the other.

“Something just occurred to me,” I said as he grunted, bending down over the table, and set down glasses, ice, and then the bottle with a deliberate thump.

“What’s that?”

“That we’re all men alone — single men. The four of us that used to know each other. Duane, Paul Kant, you and me. You were married once, weren’t you?” The furnishings and the brown walls made it obvious, even the ducks mounting up one of the side walls; Polar Bears’ house existed, it occurred to me, in symmetry with Paul’s, except that Polar Bears’ bore the traces of a younger woman’s taste, a wife, not a mother.

“I was,” he said, and poured bourbon over ice and leaned back on the couch and put his feet on the coffee table. “Like you. She ran off a long time ago. Left me with a kid. Our son.”

“I didn’t know you had a son, Polar Bears.”

“Oh, yeah. Raised him myself. He lives here in Arden.”

“How old is he?”

“Round about twenty. His mother left when he was just a little runt. She was no good. My boy never had much education, but he’s smart and he works around town on a kind of handyman basis. Got his own place too. I’d like him to join the police, but he’s got his own ideas. Good kid, though. He believes in the law, not like some of them now.”

“Why didn’t you or Duane remarry?” I helped myself to a good dose of bourbon.

“You could say I learned my lesson. Police work is hard on a wife. You never really stop worrying, if you see what I mean. And then, I never found another woman I could trust. As for good old Du-ane, I don’t think he ever really did like women. He’s got his girl to cook and keep house, and I reckon that’s about all he wants.”

I recognized that Polar Bears was making me feel very relaxed, giving me the spurious sense that this was nothing more than a casual evening between two old friends, and I looked at him from, my chair. Light silvered the thick flesh on the top of his head. His eyes were half closed.

“I think you’re right. I think he hates women. Maybe he’s your killer.”

Polar Bears gave a genuine laugh. “Ah, Miles, Miles. Well, he didn’t always hate women. There was one that got to him, once upon a time.”

“That Polish girl.”

“Not quite. Why do you think his daughter’s got that name of hers?”

I gaped at him, and found that his slitted eyes were watching me anything but sleepily.

“Truth,” he said. “I think he even lost his cherry to that little Alison Greening. You weren’t around every summer she was, you know. He was stuck on her, and I mean stuck. Course she mighta gone to bed with him, or done it standing up beside a haystack more likely, but she was too young for that to be public, and she treated him like shit most of the time anyhow. She just tore him up. I always thought that’s why he went and engaged himself to that Polish girl.”

The shock was still ringing in my chest. “You said he lost his virginity to Alison?”

“Yep. He told me himself.”

“But she could have been no older than thirteen.”

“That’s right. He said she knew a lot more about it than he did.”

I remembered the art teacher. “I don’t believe it. He was lying. She used to laugh at him.”

“That’s true too. He was real burned up by the way she preferred you to him whenever you were around. Jealous. Crazy jealous.” He bent forward over his belly and poured more bourbon into his glass, not bothering to add ice cubes. “So you can see why you shouldn’t go tossing that name around. Duane might think you was deliberately rubbing salt in his wounds. Not to mention that you oughta think about protecting yourself. I hate to act like a spiritual adviser, Miles, but I think you might even try goin’ to that church in the valley. People might let up on you if they see you acting more like them. Sit and absorb a little of Bertilsson’s wisdom. Funny how all these Norskies took to that little Swedish rat. I can’t see him for horse piss, but the farmers all love him. He gave me some story about your stealing out of Zumgo’s. A book, he said.”

“Ridiculous.”

“So I told him. What’s your side of this suicide business, anyhow, Miles? I don’t suppose there’s any truth in it.”

“None. Either it was an accident, or someone was trying to kill me. Or warn me off.” I was still mentally struggling to sit up.

“Warn you off what? You ain’t on anything. I’m glad it didn’t have anything to do with our talk yesterday.”

“Polar Bears,” I said, “did your father ever find out who called him, that night my cousin drowned?”

He shook his head, unhappy with me. “Get all that out of your head, Miles. Get it out of your system. We’re talking about now, not twenty years ago.”

“Well, did he?”

“Goddam it, Miles.” He poured what was left of his drink down his throat and bent forward, grunting, to make another. “Didn’t I tell you to leave that alone? No. He never did. That good enough for you? So you say this gas business was an accident. Right?”

I nodded, wondering what this conversation was really about. I had to talk to Duane.

“Well now, you see that’s what I thought. I wish we could have kept Tuta Sunderson out of it, because she’s bound to go around telling people what she thinks, and her version is a little hard on you. And right now, we’ve gotta take attention off of you. Aren’t you gonna have any more of this good booze?”

My glass was empty.

“Come on. Keep me company. I gotta have a few drinks at night in order to get to sleep. If Lokken arrests you for drunken driving, I’ll tear up your ticket.” His big seamed face split into a smile.

I poured two inches into my glass and added a handful of ice cubes. The bourbon appeared to have as much effect on Polar Bears as Coca-Cola.

“You see,” he said, “I’m tryin’ my darnedest to keep you out of trouble. I like talking to you, Miles. We go back a long way. And I can’t allow one of our good citizens of Arden to come in and sit here and see his police chief get sloshed, can I? We’ve got a good little understanding going. You forgive me for the Larabee business, and I’ll listen to anything you have to tell me. I forgive you for boosting a book out of Zumgo’s. You probably had a lot of things on your mind.”

“Like getting anonymous blank letters.”

“Like that. Uh huh. Real good. And like your wife dying. And right now, we got another problem here. One that means you gotta keep a low profile, old buddy.”

“Another problem.”

He sipped at his drink, and slid his eyes toward mine over the rim like a card player. “It’s what I was tryin’ to talk to you about two nights ago, old buddy. A new wrinkle. Are you startin’ to shake, Miles? What for?”

“Just go on,” I said. I felt as cold as in the old Updahl kitchen. “This is what you’ve been leading up to all night.”

“That’s not entirely fair, Miles. I’m just a cop trying to see all around a case. Trouble is, it keeps on growing.”

“There’s another one,” I said. “Another girl.”

“Maybe. Now you’re mighty clever to get that out of me, because we’re trying to keep it quiet for the time being. It isn’t like the other ones. We don’t have a body.” He made a fist and coughed into it, stringing out the suspense. “We don’t even know there is a body. A girl named Candace Michalski, good looker, seventeen years old, just disappeared the other evening. Two-three hours after I dropped you off at the Nash a couple blocks from here. She told her parents she

was going bowling down at the Bowl-A-Rama — we passed it going out of town, remember — and she never came back. Never even made it to the Bowl-A-Rama..”

“Maybe she ran away.” My hands were shaking, and I sat on them.

“Out of character. She was an honors student. Member of the Future Teachers of America. Had a scholarship to River Falls next year. That’s part of the state university system now, you know. I took some extension courses in police science there some years back. A good girl, Miles, not the kind that lights out.”

“It’s funny,” I said. “It’s funny how the past keeps up with us. We were just talking about Alison Greening, who is still, ah… on my mind a lot, and you and Duane and I all knew her, and people are all remembering about her death—”

“You and Duane were a lot closer to her than I was.” He laughed. “But you gotta take your mind off her, Miles.”

My body gave a tremor. “And an Arden girl with a Polish name leaves town or disappears, like that girl of Duane’s…”

“And you make a museum out of your grand-maw’s house,” he said almost brutally. “Yeah, but I don’t exactly see where that gets us. Now here’s my thinking. I talked to the Michalskis, who are all shook up, naturally, and upset, and I said that they should keep quiet. They won’t tell anyone about Candy. They’ll say she went visiting her aunt in Sparta — or anything like that. I want to keep the lid on it for as long as possible. Maybe the girl will write them a postcard from a nudist colony in California. Huh? Maybe we’ll find her body. If she’s dead, maybe we can smoke out her killer before anybody gets the chance to get all hysterical. I’d like a nice clean arrest, and I guess the killer would prefer that too. With the sane part of his mind, anyhow.” He levered himself off the couch and put his hands in the small of his back and stretched. He looked like a tired old bear that had just missed a fish. “Why did you want to go and steal from Zumgo’s, anyhow? That was shit-stupid. Anyone would think you were asking to be put away.”

I shook my head. “Bertilsson is wrong. I didn’t steal anything.”

“I’ll confess to you, I wish that boy would come up to me and say, I did it, now get it over with. He wants to. He wants me to get him. He’d love to be sitting right where you are, Miles. He’s all screwed up inside. He’s about ready to snap. He can’t get me out of his mind. Maybe he killed that Michalski girl. Maybe he’s got her hid away someplace. Maybe he doesn’t know what to do now that he’s got her. He’s in a bad spot. I feel sorry for the bastard, Miles, honest I do. If we do get a suicide, I’ll say, that was him. I missed him, dammit. But he missed me too. What time is it?”

I looked at my watch. Polar Bears moved over to his front window and stood leaning against the glass, looking out into night. “Two.”

“I never get to sleep until four or five. I’m screwed up nearly as bad as him.” The gunpowder odor seemed particularly strong, along with the smell of unwashed skin. I wondered if Polar Bears ever changed his uniform. “How’s that project you mentioned? Comin’ along okay?”

“Sure. I guess so.”

“What is it, anyhow?”

“Historical research.”

“Real good. I still need your help, though. I hope you’ll stay with us until this is all cleared up.”

He was watching my reflection in the window glass. I glanced at his revolver hanging in its holster from the side wing of a chair.

I said, “What did you mean the other day when you said something about the killer’s not just being an ordinary rapist? That he might be impotent?”

“Well, you take rape, Miles,” Polar Bears said, moving heavily across the room to lean on the back of the couch. “I can understand rape. It’s always been with us. I’ll tell you what I couldn’t say to a woman. These cases didn’t have anything to do with rape. These things were done by somebody with a bad head problem. Rape isn’t perverted, the way I look at it — it’s almost a normal thing. A girl gets a fellow all heated up so he can’t control himself, and then she hollers rape. The way these girls dress is almost incitement to rape. Hell, the way some girls look is an incitement to rape. A fellow might misunderstand what some bottom-swinging little critter is all about, what she wants. He gets all steamed up and can’t help himself. Fault? Both parties! That’s not exactly a popular point of view these days, but it’s sure enough the truth. I’ve been a cop long enough to see a hundred cases of it. Power, they say. Of course it’s about power. All life is about power. But these cases now weren’t done by any normal man. See Miles, these girls didn’t have any form of intercourse at all — the examiner at the state hospital in Blundell, Dr. Hampton, didn’t find any traces of semen. They were violated by other means.”

“Other means?” I asked, not really sure I waned to hear any more.

“A bottle. A Coke bottle. We found one smashed up beside both Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand. On Strand, something else was used too. A broomhandle, something like that. We’re still looking for it in the field off 93. Then there was some knife work. And they were both beaten up pretty badly before the real fun started.”

“Christ,” I said.

“So it might even be a woman, but that’s pretty farfetched. It’s hard to see a woman being strong enough, for one thing, and it doesn’t really sound like a woman, does it? Well.” He smiled at me from his position behind the couch, leaning forward on his arms. “Now you know as much as we do.”

“You don’t really think Paul Kant did these things, do you? That’s impossible.”

“What’s impossible, Miles? Maybe I did it. Maybe you did, or Duane. Paul’s all right as long as he stays inside and keeps out of trouble.” He pushed himself off the couch and went into the kitchen. I heard an explosive bubbling sound and realized that he was gargling. When he came back into the living room his blue uniform shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a sleeveless undershirt straining over his immense belly. “You want some sleep, Miles. Take care you don’t run off the road on your way home. It was a nice evening. We know each other better. Now scat.”

Through the huge magnifying lenses, Tuta Sunderson’s eyes looked like goggling fish. Sulky, she forced her hands into the pockets of her gray cardigan. For the three days following my late-night conversation with Polar Bears, she had sullenly arrived every morning, noisily tramped around the kitchen, wordlessly cooked my breakfast, and then busied herself cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom while I experimented with the placement of the furniture. The old bamboo and fabric couch went against the far wall, to the left of the small shelves. The glass-fronted case (I remembered it holding Bibles and novels by Lloyd C. Douglas) faced into the room from the short wall by the porch door; the only thing resembling an easy chair sat on the other side of that door; but the other chairs and small tables seemed too numerous, impossible to place — a spindly-legged table with a magazine rack? A cane-backed chair? I was not sure I could even remember them in the room, much less where they had been situated. Perhaps a half dozen other small articles of furniture presented the same problem. Tuta Sunderson could not help.

“It wasn’t always the same way. There is no right way.”

“Just think. Try to remember.”

“I think that little table there went sort of alongside that couch.” She was humoring me, half-reluctantly.

“Here?” I moved it under the shelves.

“No. Out more.”

I pulled it forward.

“If I was Duane, I’d have your head examined. He spent pretty near his whole rebate on that nice furniture. When he told my boy about it, Red went down and got some real nice bargains for me, too.”

“Duane can move this stuff back downstairs when I leave. That table doesn’t look right.”

“Looks good enough to me.”

“Because you don’t understand.”

“I reckon there’s lots I don’t understand. You’ll never get your writing done if you do this all day long.”

“Why don’t you change my sheets or something? If you can’t help me, at least you could get out of my way.”

Her face seemed to fill with water, like a sack.

“I reckon you left all your good manners in New York, Miles.” With that, she visibly gave up on me for the moment, and turned toward the window. “How long before that little car of yours gonna be ready from the filling station?”

“I’ll try them in a few days.”

“Then will you be leaving the valley?” She cocked her head, watching something on the road.

“No. Polar Bears wants me to stay. He must be bored with his usual company.”

“You and Galen pretty close?”

“We’re like brothers.”

“He never invited anyone to his house before. Galen keeps himself to himself. He’s a smart man. Guess you had a ride in his police car. Folks in Arden told Red.”

I moved a chair to a spot beside the oil heater, then moved it nearer the bedroom door. “You seem to have cars on the brain today.”

“Maybe because I just saw someone stop and put something in your mailbox. Not the mailman, It was a different car. Why don’t you go out there where it’s warm and see what you got?”

“Now you tell me,” I said, and went toward the porch. I stepped outside into the sunlight. For the past two days, Tuta Sanderson had taken to wearing a sweater while she worked, in part to irritate me with the anomaly of a cardigan in hot summer weather, in part because the farmhouse was genuinely cold and damp: it was as if a breeze came slicing down from the woods to pitch camp in the house. Behind me I could hear her saying, just loudly enough for me to hear, “Some more of your fan mail.”

Which, in the event, was what it turned out to be: fan mail. It was a single sheet of cheap lined paper torn from a school exercise book, and printed on it was BASTERD YOURE IN OUR SIGHTS. Yes, a familiar image from the movies; I could almost feel the cross-hairs centering on my chest. I looked down the road, saw the nothing I expected to see, and then leaned forward with my arms on the mailbox, making my breathing regular. Twice in the past two days I had received silent telephone calls, bringing me down from my new project to a noise of muffled breathing on which I could smell onions, cheese, beer. Tuta Sunderson said people all talk, and I could guess that there were rumors of the Polish girl’s disappearance. Tuta’s attitude itself, more abrasive since my “suicide attempt,” showed that she had attended to these whispers: she had just thrown back to me my remark about Red’s manners.

As I walked back toward the farmhouse I could see her mooning at me through the window. I slammed the porch door, and she scuttled over to the cupboards and pretended to dust the shelves.

“I don’t suppose you recognized the car?”

Her flabby upper arms wobbled; her rump bobbed in sympathetic motion. “It wasn’t from the valley. I know all the cars hereabouts.” She peeked at me over her fat shoulder, dying to know what I had found in the mailbox.

“What color was it?”

“It was all dust. I couldn’t see.”

“You know, Mrs. Sunderson,” I said, putting it very slowly so she would not miss a word, “if it was your son or any of his friends that came in here that night and turned on the gas, they were attempting murder. The law takes a hard line on that sort of thing.”

Furious, baffled, she turned around. “My boy’s no sneak!”

“Is that what you’d call it?”

She whirled around again and began to dust the dishes so vigorously that they rattled. After a moment she permitted herself to speak, though not to face me. “People say something else happened. They say Galen Hovre is going to get him soon. They say he sits down there in his office knowing a lot more than he tells.” Then another wall-eyed peek at me. “And they say Paul Kant is starving himself in his mother’s house. So if it happens again people will know he was inside and didn’t do it.”

“What a field day they’re having,” I said. “What fun they’re all having. I envy them.”

She shook her head maddeningly, and I would gladly have gone on in that vein, but the telephone rang. She glanced at it and then at me, telling me she would not answer it.

I put the sheet of paper down on the table and picked up the receiver. “Hello.” Silence, breathing, the smells of onions and beer. I do not know if these were truly the odors of my caller, or if they were only those I expected from someone who made anonymous telephone calls. Tuta Sunderson pounced on the sheet of paper.

“You miserable boor,” I said into the mouthpiece. “You have pigshit where you should have an imagination.”

My caller hung up; I laughed at that and at the expression on Tuta Sunderson’s face. She put down the misspelled note. She was shocked. I laughed again, tasting something black and sour at the back of my throat.

When I heard the porch door slam I waited until I saw her toiling up the road, the lumpy cardigan over one arm and the handbag jigging on its strap. After a long while she moved out of the frame of vision the window gave me, struggling in the sunlight like a white beetle. I put down my pencil and closed the journal. Standing on the cool porch, I looked up toward the woods — all was still, as if life stopped when the sun was so high. Sound told me that it did not: out of sight down the road, Duane’s tractor put-putted from the far field, birds said things to one another. I went down the rutted drive, crossed the road, and jumped the ditch,

On the other side of the creek, I could hear crickets and grasshoppers, and small things whirring in the grass. I went up the bifurcated hill; crows took off from the alfalfa, screeching, their bodies like flak, like ashes in the air. Sweat dripped into my eyebrows, and I felt my shirt clammily adhering to my sides. I thumped down into the dip and then began to rise again, walking toward the trees.

This was where she had twice led me. Birds twittered, darting through branches far above. Light came down in that streaming way it does only in forests and cathedrals. I watched a gray squirrel race out onto a slender branch, bend it under his w, and then transfer to a lower, stouter branch like a man stepping out of an elevator. When the ground began to alter, so did the trees; I walked on spongy gray mulch between oaks and elms; I skirted pines and conifers and felt thin brown needles skid underfoot. As when I lay on the polished floor, I waded through high leafy beds of ferns. Berries crushed against my trousers. A lightning-blasted old ruin of an oak lay splintered and jagged in my path, and I jumped on top of it, feeling the softness of rotting wood. Filaments of green snagged and caught in the eyelets of my boots.

Going as I had gone in vision that night, I passed the thick unmoving trees until I saw where they seemed to gather like a crowd at an accident: I slid through a gap, and was in the clearing. The sunlight, after the filter of the network of the leaves, seemed violently yellow and intense, lionlike, full of inhuman energy. Tall grass tipped under its own w. Insect noises hovered in vibrato over the clearing. A chirring unmoving noise.

At the center, in the charred place, the ashes showed a still red core, like the ashes in Rinn’s old woodstove. It had Alison’s warmth. Galen Hovre was wrong about Duane and my cousin. Or Duane, all those years ago, had lied.

Oddly, perhaps predictably, when I had dreamed about walking up into the woods the journey had a direct, palpable actuality, and when I actually went up there it felt like dreaming. I thought, almost fearing it, that I would sense some deeper closeness to Alison Greening if I approached the clearing where I had met her dreadful apparition in my vision; that space was hers, and I thought of it as the source of the chill which penetrated the old farmhouse. If there is another world, a world of Spirit, who is to say that its touch may not shake us to our boots, that its heat may not come to us as the cold of quarry water? But discounting that nightmare vision of Alison as a creature stitched together from leaves and bark, indirection brought me closer to her, evoked her more satisfactorily, than a crude search through the woods and clearing. I had begun a memoir, a task she had motivated (I could remember her telling me, one high summer day when we climbed the hill behind the valley and, carrying shovels, searched for Indian mounds, that she was going to be a painter, and I a writer), and it seemed to cement us even further, since — at the most obvious level — it meant that I thought about her even more than I might otherwise. She was the groundbass of what I wrote. It was as though I were reeling her in, sentence by sentence. And then, one morning after suffering through a breakfast presided over by a Tuta Sunderson who had accepted seven one-dollar bills from me and then wordlessly handed back two as if they represented an immoral suggestion, I had driven the Nash loaner over the Mississippi bridge on Highway 35 — a wonderful American sight, those islands showing their wooded backs like green water buffaloes in the brown river — to Winona, Minnesota, looking for the, records necessary to the Alison-environment. If I’d had to, I would have gone all the way to Minneapolis, Albums on the Pacific label from the ‘fifties are rare items. An initial glance through the racks in a Winona record store unearthed none, but then I saw the sign saying Second Hand Department Downstairs, and went down to flip through, in a basement illuminated by a single bulb, crate after crate of albums with worn sleeves and crumbled spines. Surrounded by cast-off Perry Comos and Roy Acuffs and Roger Williamses, two records shone like gold, and I grunted with such loud approval that the owner appeared at the top of the stairs to ask if I were all right. One was an old Dave Brubeck record I remembered Alison telling me she had loved (Jazz at Oberlin) and the other — -well, the other was a true find. It was the Gerry Mulligan quartet album on Pacific which Alison had urged me to buy, the one with a cover painting by Keith Finch. Finding that record was like finding a message from her scrawled on a page of my manuscript. It was the record, above all others, which evoked her, the one she had most cherished. The owner of the record store charged me five dollars for the two records, but I would have paid twenty times that. As much as my writing, they brought Alison nearer.

“What is that stuff you play all the time?” asked the Tin Woodsman. She was standing on the porch on Saturday night, peering in through the screen door. “Is that jazz?” I put my pencil into my manuscript and closed it. I was sitting on the old couch downstairs, and the kerosene lamps shed a muted orange glow which softened her features, blurred already by the mesh of the screen. She wore a denim shirt and trousers, and looked more feminine, in that soft light, than I had ever seen her. “Look,” she said, “it’s okay. I mean, Dad’s in Arden for some kind of meeting. Red Sunderson called him just before dinner. All the men are talking about something. They’ll probably be at it for hours. I heard you playing that record the other day. Is that this kind of music you like? Can I come in?”

She entered the room and sat facing me from a wooden rocker. On her bare feet were tan clogs. “What is it, anyhow?”

“Do you like it?” I really was curious.

She lifted her shoulders. “Doesn’t it all sound sort of the same?”

“No.”

“What’s that instrument playing now?”

“A guitar.”

“A guitar? That’s a guitar? Come on. It’s a… urn, a whatsit. Some kind of horn. A sax. Right?”

“Yes. It’s a baritone saxophone.”

“So why did you say it was a guitar?” Then she smiled, seeing the joke.

I shrugged, smiling back.

“Shit, Miles, it’s cold in here.”

“That’s because it’s damp.”

“Yeah? Hey Miles, did you steal out of Zumgo’s? Pastor Bertilsson’s telling everyone you did.”

“Then I must have.”

“I don’t get it.” She looked around the room, shaking her head, her jaws working on a piece of gum. “Hey, you know this room looks really neat this way. It’s just like it used to be. When I was a little kid and Great-Gramma was still alive.”

“I know.”

“It’s neat,” she said, still examining the room. “Didn’t there used to be more pictures? Like of you and Dad?” When I nodded, she asked, “So where are they?”

“I didn’t need them.”

The gum snapped. “Boy, Miles, I don’t know about you. You’re really superstrange. Sometimes you remind me of Zack, and sometimes you just talk crazy. How did you know where everything went in here?”

“I had to work at it.”

“It’s sort of like a museum, isn’t it? I mean, I almost expect to see Great-Gramma!”

“She probably wouldn’t like the music.”

She giggled. “Hey, did you really steal from Zurago’s?”

“Does Zack steal?”

“Sure.” She made her seawater eyes very wide. “All the time. He says you have to liberate things. And he says if you can take things without being caught, then you have a right to them.”

“Where does he steal from?”

“Places where he works. You know. Stuff from people’s houses, if he’s working for them. Stuff from the gas station, if he’s working there. You mean, you’re a college professor and all and you steal things?”

“If you say so.”

“I can see why Zack likes you. That would really turn him on. Some big Establishment guy ripping off stores. He thinks he might be able to trust you.”

“I really think you’re too good for Zack,” I said.

“You’re wrong, Miles. You don’t know Zack. You don’t know what he’s into.” She leaned forward, putting each hand on the opposite shoulder. The gesture was surprisingly womanly.

“What’s the meeting in Arden about? The one Red and your father went to.”

“Who cares? Listen, Miles, are you going to church tomorrow?”

“Of course not. I have my reputation to think of.”

“Then try not to get stinko again tonight, huh? We gotta plan. We’re gonna take you somewhere.”

After showering on Sunday morning I went upstairs and hugged my bathrobe about me while I examined my clothes. Mrs. Sunderson had wordlessly washed my muddy jeans and shirt and folded them on top of the bureau. The jeans had a quarter-sized hole at one cuff; looking at it awakened uneasy memories of my scramble through the woods; I was grateful that I had gone back to the clearing and found no more than a dying picnic fire. I fingered the hole in the jeans then withdrew my hand. I remembered a portion of Polar Bears’ advice to me, and wandered indecisively to the closet where I’d put the one suit I had brought with me. It was seven-thirty; I had just time enough to dress and make the service. It had to be done correctly — I had to be dressed correctly, I could display no nervousness, my attitude must shout innocence. Just thinking about it while looking at the suit in the closet made me nervous. You’re like Paul Kant if you don’t go, stated a clear voice in my mind.

I took the suit from the hanger and began to dress. For a reason probably closely related to vanity, in New York I had packed, along with clothing appropriate to the farm, my most expensive things — eighty-dollar shoes, a lightweight pinstripe from Brooks, several of the custom-made shirts Joan, being nicely ironic, had once had made for me for Christmas. I certainly had not foreseen wearing them to Gethsemane Lutheran church.

After I had knotted a thick, glossy tie and put on the jacket I looked at myself in the bedroom mirror. I resembled a Wall Street lawyer far more than a failed academic or murder suspect. I looked innocent, big and bland and prosperous and washed in milk. A baby for the work of the Lord, a man who would absent-mindedly mutter a prayer while sinking a difficult putt.

On the way out of the house I slipped the copy of She into my jacket pocket: a sliver of Alison for company.

I pulled the Nash into the last space in the gravel parking lot before the church and got out into the hot sun and began to walk over the crunching white stones to the church steps. As they did every Sunday, the men were standing on the wide high steps and on the concrete walk, smoking. I could remember them standing there, smoking and talking, when I was a child; but those men had been the fathers and uncles of these, and they had dressed in sober, poorly cut suits of serge and gabardine. Like the previous generation, these men had the badges of their profession, the heavy hands with stiff enormous thumbs and the white foreheads above sunburnt faces, but Duane’s was the only suit among them. The rest wore sport shirts and casual slacks. Walking toward them, I felt absurdly overdressed and urban.

One of them noticed me, and his cigarette had frozen in mid-arc to his mouth. He muttered to the man beside him, and I could read the three syllables of Teagarden on his lips.

When I reached the concrete walk to the church steps, I here and there recognized a face, and greeted the first of these. “Good morning, Mr. Korte,” I said to a squat bulldog-like man with a crewcut and heavy black glasses. Bud Korte owned a farm a mile or two down the valley from the Updahl land. He and my father had often gone fishing together.

“Miles,” he said, and then his eyes shot wildly away toward the cigarette he was pinching between two fingers the size of small bananas. “Howdy.” He was as embarrassed as a bishop just greeted familiarly by a hooker. “Heard you was back.” The eyes shot away again, and landed with painful relief on Dave Eberud, another farmer I recognized, now looking in his, horizontally-striped shirt and plaid trousers as if his Mother had dressed him in too much haste. Eberad’s snapping turtle face, twisted slightly in our direction, snapped forward. “Gotta have a word with Dave,” said Bud Korte, and left me examining the shine on my shoes.

Duane, in his double-breasted suit, its jacket unbuttoned to reveal wide red braces, stood halfway up the church steps; his posture, one foot aggressively planted on a higher step, his shoulders brought forward, plainly said that he did not want to acknowledge me, but I moved toward him through men who drew together as I passed.

When I began to go up the steps I could hear his voice. “… the last auction. How can I wait it out? If beef goes down below twenty-seven a pound, I’m through. I can’t raise all my own feed, even now with that new land, and that old M I got is fallin’ apart.” Looming heavily beside him was Red Sunderson, who stared at me, not even bothering to pretend to listen to Duane’s complaints. In the sunlight., Sunderson looked younger and tougher than he had at night. His face was a flat angry plane of chipped angles.

He said, “We’re mighty fancy today, Miles.”

Duane irritably glanced at me, and then shifted his cocked leg. The sunburnt part of his face was unnaturally red. “I considered we might see you here sometime.” But it’s too late now, his tone said.

“I said, we’re mighty fancy today.”

“It’s all I brought with me besides jeans,” I said.

“Ma says you finished playing with that old furniture.”

Duane made a disgusted, angry sound with his lips. Behind me, a man drew in a hissing breath like a secret laugh.

“What’s an old M?” I asked.

Duane’s face became a deeper shade of red. “A goddamned tractor. A goddamned tractor with a busted gearbox, if you wanta know. Since you’re through wrecking my furniture, maybe you’d like to junk up my tractors too, huh?”

“Been in the woods lately, Teagarden?” asked Red Sunderson. “Been gettin’ any up in the woods?”

“What’s that about the woods?” asked my cousin. Red was still staring at me from his flat chipped face incongruously mounted with his mother’s blobby nose.

Some tribal signal was drawing the men at the bottom toward the steps; at first I thought they were coming for me, but when the first shouldered past without looking at me, I knew that the services were about to begin, and it was time to rejoin the women. Red turned away as if he could no longer bear to look at me, and I was left with redfaced furious Duane. I said, “I have to talk to you about something. About Alison Greening.”

“Hell,” he uttered, and then, “Don’t you sit with me, Miles,” and stomped up the stairs with his friends.

I could hear them whispering as I followed them into the church. By either gossip or telepathy, they all knew who would be the last man to enter the building, and the women were all craning their necks to look at me. On several of their plain country faces, I caught expressions of horror. Duane went his shovel-handed way down to the right aisle. I went to the left, already sweating through the tailored shirt.

Halfway up toward the front I slid into a pew and sat down. I could feel their faces pointing at me white and red, and tilted my head back and examined the familiar interior. White arched wooden ceiling, white chaste walls, four stained-glass windows on either side with Norwegian names at the bottoms: in memory of Gunnar and Joron Gunderson, in memory of Einar and Florence Weverstad, in memory of Emma Jahr. Up in Bertilsson’s sanctuary behind the altar, a huge sentimental painting of Jesus anointing St. John. A while bird like one of the town hall pigeons hovered above the pale symmetrical face.

When Bertilsson popped like a figure on a German clock through his entrance at the front of the church, he unerringly looked at me first. The telepathy had reached him too. After that, much standing up and sitting down, much responsive reading, much singing. A wizened woman in a purple dress gave abrupt, unmusical accompaniment on a small organ. Bertilsson kept watching me with oily eyes: he seemed to brim with a generalized emotion. His ears were very red. The four or five other people in my pew had moved farther and farther away from me, taking advantage of all the standing and sitting to shift a few inches each time.

My shirt felt like paper about to shred; a fly buzzed angrily, obsessively, somewhere up near the ceiling; whenever I leaned back, I stuck to the wood of the pew. Above the blond wood of the pew before me protruded a boy’s vacant face, regarding me with dull eyes and open mouth. A drop of saliva hung on the full part of his lower lip.

After “O God Our Help in Ages Past” Bertilsson motioned for us to sit, using the gesture with which an actor silences applause, and moved to the pulpit. Once there, he deliberately removed a handkerchief from his sleeve, dabbed his shiny forehead, and replaced it. More time-wasting while extracting his sheaf of notes from within his loose garments. All this time, he was looking directly at me.

“The text for the day,” he said, his voice light and confidential, “is James II, verses one to five. ‘My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus; Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect to persons. For if there come into your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment… ‘ “

I tuned him out and let my head fall forward, wishing that I had not taken Polar Bears’ advice. What good could come of this? Then I was needled by a sharp awareness that Polar Bears had told me something far more important — a fact that connected to another fact. It was like a thorn in my side, nagging at me. I tried to go over the conversations I’d had with Hovre, but Bertilsison’s sermon kept breaking in.

He had managed to wrestle the Good Samaritan into James II, I noticed, quite a feat even for someone as glib as Bertilsson. It seems the Samaritan was not a superficial respector of persons. “But this works in reverse, my friends.” I looked up at his odious, glistening moonface and silently groaned. He was still fixing me with his eyes. “Yes, my friends, we must not condemn the Samaritan to seeing but one side of this coin.” I closed my eyes.

Bertilsson rolled on inexorably, and it was only his pauses while he rummaged for the ripest vocabulary that told me he was improvising. I looked up and saw him folding his notes, unconsciously making them into neat square packages with sharp edges. The boy before me permitted his chin to drop even further.

Then I realized what Bertilsson was going to do, and he did it while I witnessed the malice leaking from the glistening eyes and the rolling voice, “Is not there one among us in fine raiment, one who cannot hide his anguish beneath fine clothing? Is not there one among us needful of the Samaritan’s touch? A man in pain? Brethren, we have with us a man sorely troubled, who imagines life not God’s gift, as we know it to be. A sparrow’s life, a child’s life, all are precious to Him. I speak of a man whose whole soul is a cry of pain, a cry to God for release. A sick man, my brethren, a man sorely ill. My friends, a man in need of our Christian love…”

It was unbearable. The fly still angrily thrummed against the ceiling, wanting out. I stood up, stepped out of the pew, and turned my back on Bertilsson. I could hear the glee in his voice, far below this message of love. I wanted to be up in the woods, holding my hands above the warmth of an ember. A woman began to chatter like a bird. I felt shock radiate between the white walls. Bertilsson rolled on, calling for my blood. I walked down the side aisle, going as quickly as I could. At the front of the church I swung open the big door and stepped outside. I could sense them all twisting their necks, looking at me. A vision of fish.

Back across the gravel to the ugly little car, and home in sweltering sunlight. I yanked off my jacket and threw it into the back seat. I wanted to be naked, I wanted to feel mulch and pine needles beneath the soles of my feet. Halfway to the farmhouse on the valley road, I began to shout.

Eight __________

As I went across the lawn toward the house I could hear the stereo going. Someone was playing the song “I’m Beginning to See the Light” on the Gerry Mulligan record. My anger at Bertilsson’s inspiration left me all at once: I felt tired, hot, directionless. The smell of bacon cooking drifted toward me with the sound of Chet Baker’s trumpet. I came up onto the screen porch and felt suddenly cooler.

Alison Updahl, chewing on something and dressed in her uniform, appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. Her T shirt was pale blue. “Where were you, Miles?” I just went past her. When I reached the old bamboo couch I collapsed into it, making its joints creak and sing. “Would you mind if I turned off the music? I don’t think I can listen to it now.”

“You don’t mind my—” She pointed to the turntable and lifted her shoulders.

“Not enough to actually object,” I said. I leaned over and lifted the tone arm with trembling fingers.

“Hey, you were in church,” she said grinning a little. She had noticed my necktie and striped trousers. “I like you in those clothes. You look sort of classy and oldfashioned. But isn’t it early for church to be out?”

“Yes.”

“What did you go there for anyway? I don’t think they want you there.”

I nodded.

“They think you tried to kill yourself.”

“That’s not all they think.”

“Don’t let them bug you. You and old man Hovre are in real good, aren’t you? Didn’t he invite you to his house?”

The bush telegraph. “How do you know that? Did I tell you?”

“Everybody knows that, Miles.” I sagged back into the couch. “Hey, it doesn’t mean anything. Not really. They just talk.” She was trying to lift my mood. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the positive thinking. Did you come over just to play the records?”

“You were going to meet me, remember?” She pulled her shoulders back, smiling at me, and put her hands in the small of her back. If the clothing she wore had seams, they were straining. Her blood smell hovered between us, neither increasing nor decreasing. “Come on. We’re going on an adventure. Zack wants to talk to you.”

“Women would make great generals,” I said and followed her back outside.

Minutes later I was driving past the church. The sound of singing carried all the way to the road. She looked at the cars in the parking spaces, stared at the church, and then turned to look at me with genuine astonishment. “You left early? You walked out?”

“What does it look like?”

“In front of everybody? Did they see?”

“Every single one of them.” I loosened the knot of my tie.

She laughed out loud. “Miles, you’re a real cowboy.” Then she laughed some more. It was a pleasant, human sound.

“Your pastor seems to think I’m a sex murderer. He was shouting for the noose.”

Her high approving good humor suddenly died. “Not you not you,” she said, almost crooning. She twisted her legs up beneath her. Then she was silent for a long time.

“Where are we going?”

“One of our places.” Her voice was flat. “You shouldn’t have gone. It just makes them think you’re trying to trick them somehow.”

It was better advice than Polar Bears’, but it was too late. She let herself slump over so that her head rested on my shoulder.

I had undergone too many swift alterations and swings of feeling, and this gesture nearly made me weep. Her head stayed on my shoulder as we drove toward Arden through the rising, sun-browned hills. I was looking forward to seeing her march into Freebo’s as though beneath her sandaled feet were not wooden boards but a red carpet. This time, I considered, we would both need the mysterious protection of “who Zack was” to get into Freebo’s.

Yet it was not Freebo’s to which she was taking me. A mile outside of Arden we approached a juncture I had not yet permitted myself to notice, and she straightened up and said “Slow down.”

I glanced at her. Her head was turning, showing her blunt profile beneath the choppy blond fringe of hair. “Left here.”

I slowed the Nash to a crawl “Why here?”

“Because no one ever comes here. What’s wrong with it?”

Everything was wrong with it. It was the worst place in the world.

“I’m not going up there,” I said.

“Why? It’s just the old Pohlson quarry. There’s nothing wrong with it.” She looked at me, her face concentrated. “Oh. I think I know why. Because it’s where my aunt Alison died. The one I was named after.”

I was sweating.

“Those are her pictures in your upstairs room, right? Do you think I look like her?”

“No,” I breathed. “Not really.”

“She was bad, wasn’t she?” I could sense her heating up again pumping out that odor. I stopped the car. Alison said, “She was like you. She was too freaky for the people around here.”

“I suppose.” My mind was working.

“You in a trance or something?” She biffed my shoulder. “Get out of it. Turn up. Turn up the path.”

“I want to try something. An experiment.” I told her what I wanted her to do.

“You promise you’ll come up afterwards? You won’t just drive away? It’s not a trick?”

“I promise to come up afterward,” I said. “I’ll give you five minutes.” I leaned across and opened her door. She crossed the deserted road and began to march stiffly up the track to the quarry.

For two or three minutes I waited in the heat of the car, looking unseeing down the highway. A wasp flew in, all business, and bumped his head against the windshield several times before losing his temper and zooming by accident out the window on the other side. A long way down the highway a broiler farm occupied the fields to the left, and specks of white which were chickens moved jerkily over the green in the sunlight. I looked up toward a flat blue sky. I heard nothing but the mindless twitter of a bird.

When I got out of the car and stood on the sticky tar of the highway I thought I could hear a faint voice calling; if it was a voice, it seemed indistinguishable from the landscape, coming from nowhere in particular; it could have been a breeze. I got back in the cir and drove up the track to the quarry.

The day I had returned to the Updahl farm I had expected a surge of feeling, but experienced only flatness and disappointment; the act of stepping out into the terrific heat of the flat grassy area near the quarry hit me with an only half-anticipated force. I anchored myself in the present by placing the palm of my right hand on the baking metal of the top of the Nash. It all looked very much the same. The grass was browner, because of the summer’s dry heat, and the outcroppings of speckled rock appeared more jagged and prominent. I saw the same flat gray space where the workmen’s sheds had stood. The screen of bushes above the quarry itself had grown spindly, the small leaves like brushstrokes, dry and brown, papery. Drawn up nearer to them than my car was a dusty black van. I pulled my hand off the hot metal of the car and walked on the path through the bushes to the rocky steps down to the lip of the quarry.

They were both there. Alison sat with her feet in the water, looking up at me with expectant curiosity. Zack, a bisected white exclamation point in his black bathing suit, was grinning, snapping his fingers. “It’s the man,” he said. “It’s my main man.”

“Did you shout?”

Zack giggled. “Wowee.” Snap-snap of his fingers.

“Did I shout? I screamed my head off!”

“How long?”

“A couple of minutes. Couldn’t you hear?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You screamed as loud as you could?”

“I’m practically hoarse,” she answered. “If I yelled any longer, I would have ripped something.”

Zack bent his legs and sat down on the black pile of his clothing. “It’s the truth, man. She really hollered. What’s it about, anyhow? What’s your stunt?”

“No stunt,” I said. “Just finding out about an old lie.”

“You’re too hung up on the past, Miles.” His grin grew more intense. “Jesus, man, look at those clothes. What kind of clothes are those for a swim?”

“I didn’t know I was going swimming.”

“What else do you do at a quarry?”

I sat down with my legs before me on the smooth hot lip of rock. I looked up at the bushes overhead. They would have been hidden up there, waiting to jump down. That was where they had been. I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. I could smell the water and it was Alison’s smell.

“I haven’t been here for twenty years,” I said. “I don’t know what you do here.”

“It’s a great place to groove on ideas,” Zack said, stretched out whitely in the sun. His ribs dowel under the skin like sticks and his arms and legs were skinny and covered with thin black hair, his body looked obscene, spidery. Beneath the black strip of bathing suit lay a prominent sexual bulge. “I thought it was time we saw each other again.” He spoke like a general summoning his adjutant. “I had to thank you for the books.”

“That’s okay,” I said. I removed my tie and dropped it and the jacket I had been carrying by my side. Then I pulled my shirt out of my trousers and unbuttoned it halfway down to let air enter.

“Miles went to church,” Alison said from the quarry’s edge. “Old Bertilsson preached about him again.”

“Hah hah hah!” Zack exploded with laughter. “That old fart. He oughta be making shitty little doilies, hey? He’s a feeb. I hate that sucker, man. So he thinks you’re the Masked Marauder, huh?”

Alison asked, “Did you bring towels?”

“Hey? Sure I brought towels. Can’t go swimming without towels. Brought three of them.” Zack rolled over on his belly and examined me. “Is that right? Am I right about him, my main man?”

“More or less.” It was too hot for my heavy shoes, and I unlaced them and pulled them off.

The Woodsman said, “Well, if you brought towels, I’m sure going to swim. My throat hurts from all that yelling.” She looked over her shoulder at Zack, who indulgently flipped his hand in a do-what-you-want gesture.

“I’m gonna go skinny,” she said, and glanced at me. She still had not got over her desire to shock.

“You can’t scare him, he’s the Masked Marauder,” said Zack.

She stood up, displeased, leaving dark high-arched footprints on the stone, and pulled the blue shirt over her head. Her breasts lolled large and pink against her chest. She pushed her jeans down unceremoniously, revealing all of her stocky well-shaped little body.

“If you’re the Masked Marauder, haven’t you been busy lately?” asked Zack.

I watched Alison go padding to the edge of the quarry and stand, judging the water for a moment. She wanted to get away from us.

“That’s not actually funny,” I said.

She raised her arms and then used her leg muscles to spring out into the water in a clean dive. When her head broke water, she began to breast-stroke across the quarry.

“Well, what about that guy, anyhow?”

“What guy?” For a moment my mind blurred and I thought he meant Alison Updahl.

“The killer.” He was lying on his side, gleeful. He seemed to be supercharged with sly, flinty enthusiasm, as if secrets were bubbling inside him. His eyes, very large now, appeared to be chiefly pupil. “He kinda turns me on. He’s done something else, you know, something most people don’t know about yet.”

“Oh?” If that were widely known, Polar Bears’ strategy was a failure.

“Don’t you see the beauty of that? Man, that D. H. Lawrence would have. The guy who wrote those books. I been reading those books. There’s a lot in them.”

“I don’t think Lawrence ever sympathized with sex killers.”

“Are you sure? Are you really sure? What if a killer was on the side of life? Hey? See, I looked at that Women in Love book — I didn’t read all of it, I just read the parts you underlined. I wanted to get inside you, man.”

“Oh, yes.” It was an appalling notion.

“Doesn’t he talk about beetles? That some people are beetles? Who should be killed? You gotta live according to your ideas, don’t you? Take the idea of pain. Pain is a tool. Pain is a tool for release.”

“Why don’t you stop talking and come in and swim?” Alison called from the center of the quarry. Sweat poured down my face.

Zack’s intense black eyes focused unblinkingly on me. “Take your shirt off,” he said.

“I guess I will,” I said, and unbuttoned it the rest of the way and dropped it on top of my jacket.

“Don’t you think the people who are just stupid beetles should be killed? That’s why I dig this guy. He just goes out and does it.”

We had left Lawrence a long way behind, but I wanted only to let him rant, so that he would be done earlier. “Has there been another one? Another murder?”

“I don’t know, man, but answer me this. Why would he fuckin’ stop?”

I nodded. Suddenly all I wanted was to be in the water, to feel the quarry’s cold water about me again.

“Maybe my favorite part of the book was about blood-brotherhood,” Zack said. “I dug that nude wrestling part between two men. You underlined almost all of that.”

“I suppose I might have,” I said, but he had switched gears again.

“He’s free, you see, whoever this guy is, he’s free as hell. Nobody’s gonna stop him. He’s thrown out all of the old shit holding him back. And if he thought anybody was gonna stand in his way, bang, he’d get rid of him.”

This conversation was reminding me uneasily of my afternoon with Paul Kant; it was even worse. Where Paul Kant had been low-voiced and depressed, this skinny boy was simply shivering with conviction.

“Like Hitler did to Roehm. Roehm was in his way, and he just smashed him with his foot. The Night of the Long Knives. Bang. Another beetle dead. You see the beauty in that?”

“No,” I said. “There isn’t any.” I had to get away from him, and when Alison shouted to us again, I said, “It’s too hot for this. I think I’ll swim a little.”

“You gonna skinny-dip?” His mad eyes were taunting me.

“Why not?” I said, irritated, and shucked the rest of my clothing. Infuriatingly, Zack stood when I did, and slithered out of his skimpy black bathing suit. We dove into the water together. I felt more than saw the Woodsman watching us from the center of the pool.

The water hit me like an electric jolt. The memories of the last time I had been in the quarry hit me too, with an even greater force, and I could see her as I had seen her then, her hands and feet flashing. Then I recognized that I was seeing not my Alison, but my cousin’s daughter, an altogether more adult female form. Underwater, I frog-kicked away, wanting to experience the rush of emotion away from the other two. It was like a clamp around my chest, and for a moment, fleeing the legs dangling in the water, I thought I would be killed by my own emotion. My heart fluttered, and I kicked away for another second and then surfaced, breathing noisily.

Zack’s grinning face was four feet away, looking absurdly young beneath his streaming black hair. His eyes seemed to have no white at all. He said something inaudible, choked by his own pleasure.

Then he repeated it. “This is where it happened, isn’t it, Miles?” He was exuding crazy glee.

“What?” I said, my stomach frozen.

“You and Alison’s aunt. Hey?” His mouth was lifted in a loose insane smile.

I turned away and began to swim as strongly as I could toward the lip of the quarry. His voice was calling, but not to me.

Water was thrashing behind me. Now he was calling to me. “You don’t talk, do you? You don’t talk, do you?” His voice was loud and brutal.

Eight feet from safety I felt a hand catch my ankle. When I kicked out with my free leg, another hand grasped my calf, and then I was yanked backward and down. While two hands held my legs, other hands pushed my shoulders, and I felt a heavy body riding my back, beginning to squeeze my chest. The one on top leaned forward to wrap arms around my neck, and cushiony breasts pressed against me. I bucked underwater, but she clamped me with greater force, expelling the rest of the air from my lungs. Games, I thought, and breast-stroked, thinking that my breath would outlast hers. Zack still clung to my ankles. I kicked idly, resolved not to give them the satisfaction of a struggle. Then I realized that she was close enough to the surface to raise her head and breathe, and a spurt of fear made me fight.

I shook violently, but she forced me deeper into the tunnel of water. The hands on my legs let go, and I knew that Zack too was going up to breathe. My chest fought for air. In moments, Zack appeared before me under the water and raised his arms to my shoulders. I swung at him, but the blow was ridiculously slowed by the water. He dug his fingers into my shoulders and held me helpless, prone in the water. Astride me, the Woodsman squeezed and squeezed.

If I had been alone with the Woodsman, I could have thrown or pulled her off, but while Zack held me and pinned my arms, I could do nothing but struggle; making my air problem worse. As I grew weaker, Zack moved in nearer and put his hands on the small of my back, pulling me down even further. I realized with shock and horror that he was erect when a fleshy club bumped my hip.

In the next instant I breathed in a gulp of burning water, and I knew that they were going to kill me.

Then their hands and arms fell away, the weight of Alison rolled off my back, and I was helped to the surface.

I held to the rock edge of the quarry, coughing painfully. Water came up like vomit. Getting out of the quarry was impossible; I clung with my weak arms and my head lolled against my shoulder. After a moment I could lever myself up far enough so that my forearms were flat on the hot stone, and I bent my head to rest on them. Through half-opened eyes, not really recognizing what I saw, I noticed Zack sliding out of the water and up onto rock as easily as an eel. Then he bent down and braced himself to take the arm of the naked girl. That bastard nearly killed me and it turned him on, I thought, and an emotion half fear and half anger gave me the energy to struggle up onto the edge of stone. I lay in the sun., shivering, my skin burning where it touched the hot smooth rock.

He sat down beside me. I saw only a spidery flank with thin black hairs streaming across white skin. “Hey, Miles. Hey, man. You okay?”

I rolled away, onto my back. The hot stone seared me. I closed my eyes, still coughing. When I opened my eyes, they were blocking the sun, standing above me. They were black against the flat blue sky. Alison knelt to cradle my head. “Let me alone,” I said. I wriggled away. “Did you plan that?”

“It was just fun, Miles,” he said. “We were playing.”

“Poor old Miles, he ‘most drowned,” crooned Alison, and came toward me again and pushed herself against me. I was engulfed in cool wet skin. Involuntarily, I looked at Zack. “I’m sorry, man,” he said, unselfconsciously manipulating his testicles. I turned my eyes away and found myself staring at Alison’s soft heavy breasts and firm belly. “Give me a towel,” I ordered. Zack stepped away toward the pile of clothing.

Alison brought her face closer to mine. “This is where it happened, isn’t it? You can tell Zack. You could tell him anything. That’s why he wanted to meet you here. He heard about it at Freebo’s. That’s why he knows you understand him. He wants you to be brothers. Didn’t you hear what he was saying before?”

I fought to stand up, and after a moment she released me. Zack was coming toward me, a pink towel in one hand. The other hand held an open switchblade. I stepped backwards.

When Zack saw what must have been in my face, he tossed me the towel and said, “Hey, man. I want to help you take off the bandage. It’s not doing you any good any more.”

After knotting the towel around my waist, I looked at my left hand. It was caught in a soggy limp mass of gauze, a webby useless thing already half off my palm. Zack took my hand in his and before I had time to push him away, neatly sliced the mess of gauze away from my palm. Then he ripped away the tape in one quick motion.

Above the base of my thumb was a reddish triangle of new skin, defined by a thin red line on all three sides. I gingerly touched the spot with uncurling fingers. It was delicate, but it had healed. Zack threw the drowned package of tape and gauze up into the bushes. I looked at him and his eyes were crazy and gleeful. His face was very young, framed by long smooth Indian’s hair.

“You’re my best friend,” he said. He held out his left palm, and the image of him as a thin lead-white Indian lurched into stronger focus in my mind. He stood there, skinny, his ribs thrusting beneath his skin, dripping, dangling, armored in loony radiance. His dog’s eyes filled with shining light. “I’ll prove it to you, Miles. We can be brothers.” He raised the switchblade like a scalpel and deliberately sliced his left palm. Then he dropped the blade and continued to hold his palm out toward me, inviting me to press mine against it. Allison screamed when she looked up at the sound of the knife clattering and saw blood dripping onto the flat rock.

“Miles!” she screeched. “Go to the truck! Get the bandages! Go!”

Zack’s face did not alter by a millimeter: he was still encased in the armor of crazy light. “You did it,” I said, still grasping the dimensions of what I had seen. “It’s you.”

“Miles,” Alison sobbed, “run, run, please run.”

Zack stood shining at me with dog’s eyes and loose smile. To escape the light of the smile I ran around him, around the Tin Woodsman who was rushing toward Zack, and sprinted in bare feet and flapping towel up to the black van.

When I yanked down on the handle of the rear doors and pushed them open, something that had been wedged against one of them fell out into the dust. I looked down and saw a familiar shape just ceasing to roll. It was one of the old wide-hipped eight-ounce Coke bottles.

“What did you do that for?” she asked, still naked, the water dried by the sun from all but her darkened hair, as the paperback of She began to sink into the water of the quarry. I was conscious of Zack behind us, standing near his dropped knife on the hot stone, and I was aware of having too many reasons to be able to roll them up into a single answer. I was sending a chip of Alison into the place where she had died; I was furious with them both and with myself for not knowing how to reckon with what I suspected, the sight of the Coke bottle having brought back clearly what Polar Bears Hovre had told me; I was simply overcome with anger and disgust and throwing away something I valued was the simplest way to express that I had looked into the face of damnation. When I had crawled into the back of the van, I had seen, glittering amidst the rubble of spare parts, one of the thousand-faceted doorknobs I had removed from my desk.

“Get away from him,” Zack said. “Ally, get your ass over here.”

“Why?”

“Alison,” I said softly, “Zack is in trouble. I think you should keep away from him.”

“You don’t understand him. Nobody does.”

“Just take my advice,” I said, “please,” very aware in spite of everything of the Maillol-like body of the naked girl I was bending toward.

That night and the next I dreamed of being back in the drifting blue horror, suspended, dead, guilty beyond the possibility of help or forgiveness. It was the quarry, the deep pitiless water of the quarry, and it was where I had let her die, the greatest sin of my life, the one before which I had been most helpless, and the greatest crime I knew. The crime for which she could not forgive me. Even in sleep I believe I wept and ground my teeth. They had been up there, and I had not been able to send them away, those murderers of both her life and mine. It was a bottomless guilt. I would be freed of it only by her return. I had twice immersed myself in the cold water of the quarry, twice I had breathed it in, and both times I had emerged alive: that too was a crime, when she had not.

Sunday night I came miserably awake near two o’clock, smelled the air like a forest animal, and got downstairs in time to turn off the gas cocks, on the stove. The recurrence seemed to prove that the cause was a simple mechanical failure, if one that could have had fatal results. What had awakened me, and therefore saved me, was the ringing of the telephone. I had once told Alison that if I got one of “those” calls at night, I would not answer it. But after twisting the handles on the stove and shoving open a window to admit the cool meadow air, I was in the perfect mood for handling Onion Breath. “Stinking skulking creeping weasel,” I pronounced into the phone, “crawling cowardly weak crippled ugly snake.” Incapable of syntax but with a good stock of adjectives, I went on until he (she) hung up. I could not then return to bed and that dominating nightmare. The kitchen was very cold; I waved newspapers to dispel the gas, and closed the window. After wrapping a blanket from the downstairs bedroom around my shoulders, I returned, to the kitchen, lit a kerosene lamp and a cigarette, and combined some further elements of the Alison-environment, gin, vermouth, twist of lemon peel, ice. Her drink, with which I had been dosing myself nightly. Wrapped in the blanket, I sipped the martini and sat in one of the kitchen chairs near the telephone. I wanted another call.

Half an hour later, when the person might have judged me to have returned to sleep (I thought), the telephone rang again. I let it trill three, then four times, then twice more, hearing the noise of the bell spread through the cold farmhouse. Finally I raised my arm and detached the receiver and rose to speak into the horn. But instead of breathing I heard what I had heard once before, a whuffling, beating noise, inhuman, like wings thrashing in the air, and the receiver was as cold as the sweating glass of my martini and I was unable to utter a word, my tongue would not move. I dropped the icy receiver and wrapped the blanket tightly around myself and went upstairs to lie on the bed. The next night, as I have said, following the day which was the first turning point, I entered the same drifting guilt-ridden dream, but I had no anonymous calls, from either living or dead.

On the day — Monday — which marked my slide into knowledge and was the interregnum between these two awful nights, I came down from my work for lunch and asked a stony-faced Tuta Sunderson how to turn off the gas before it reached the stove. She became even more disapproving, and gruntingly bent over the range and pointed an obese finger down at the pipe descending from the wall. “It’s on this pipe. What for?”

“So I can turn it off at night.”

“Ain’t fooling me,” she muttered, or I thought she did, while she turned away to jam her hands into the pockets of her cardigan. More audibly, she said, “Made a big stir in church yesterday.”

“I wasn’t there to notice. I trust things went well without me.” I bit into a hamburger and discovered that I had no appetite. My relationship with Tuta Sunderson had degenerated into a parody of my marriage.

“You afraid of what the pastor was saying?”

“As I recall he made a very sweet comment about my suit,” I said.

As she began to lump herself toward the door, I said, “Wait. What do you know about a boy named Zack? He lives somewhere in Arden, I think. Tall and skinny, with an Elvis Presley hairdo. Alison’s boyfriend. He calls her ‘Ally.’ “

“I don’t know that boy. If you’re going to waste good food, get out of the kitchen so I can do my work.”

“Good God,” I said, and left the table to stand on the porch. That cold breath of spirit which could only be felt on these twenty square yards was strongly present, and I knew with a certainty for once filled not with joy but resignation that Alison would appear on the date she had set twenty years before. Her release would be mine, I told myself. Only later did I recognize that when Tuta Sunderson said that she did not know that boy, she meant not that the boy was a stranger to her, but that she knew him well and detested him.

Yet if my release were to be total there were things I needed to know, and a series of bangs and clatters from the long aluminum rectangle of the pole barn suggested an opportunity for learning them. I left Tuta Sunderson’s complaining voice behind me and stepped off the porch and began to walk through the sunshine toward the path.

The noises increased as I drew nearer, and eventually the sound of Duane grunting with effort joined them. I threaded through the litter of rusting parts and junked equipment at the pole barn’s front end and walked onto the packed powdery brown dust which is the barn’s only floor. Under the high tented metal roof, Duane was working in semi-dark, slamming a wrench on the base of a tractor’s gearshift. His peaked cap had been thrown off earlier, and lay in the dust near his boots.

“Duane,” I said.

He could not hear. The deafness may have been as much internal as caused by the terrific banging clatter he was making, for his face was set into that frustrated angry mask common to men who are singlemindedly, impatiently, making a botch of a job.

I said it again, and his head twisted toward me. As I stepped toward him, he turned his face away silently and went back to banging on the base of the gearshift.

“Duane, I have to talk with you.”

“Get out of here. Just get the hell out.” He still would not look at me. The hammering with the wrench became more frenzied.

I continued to come toward him. His arm was a blur, and the noise echoed against the metal walls. “God damn,” he breathed after I had taken a half-dozen steps, “I got the son of a bitch off.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The goddamned gearbox, if you really wanna know,” he said, scowling at me. His tan shirt was stained irregularly with perspiration and a black smear of grease bisected his forehead at the white line where his cap stuck. “It’s jammed in first, and on these old Ms you gotta go in from the top here and slide a couple of plates around to get the slots lined up, see, but what the hell am I talking about this with you for anyhow? You wouldn’t know a gearbox if you saw it outside of Shakespeare.”

“Probably not.”

“Anyhow, on this one here, I have to take off the whole shift mechanism because everything’s rusted shut, but in order to do that, you have to get the nuts off first, see?”

“I think so.”

“And then I’ll probably find out the battery’s dead anyhow, and my jumper cables got burned to shit the last time I used them on the pickup and the plastic melted all over the terminals, so it probably won’t work anyhow.”

“But at least you got the nuts off.”

“Yeah. So why don’t you go break up some more furniture or something and leave me work?” He jumped up on the side of the tractor and began to twiddle the burring on the wrench down to the size of the nut.

“I have to talk with you about some things.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about. After that act of yours in church, nobody around here has anything to talk with you about.” He glared down at me. “At least not for the present.”

I stood and watched as he removed the troublesome nut, dropped it on a greasy sheet of newspaper by the tractor’s rear wheels, and, grunting on the seat, lifted the shift levers and an attached plate up out of the body of the machine. Then he bent down and knelt before the seat. “Shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s all grease in there, and I can’t see the slots, that’s what’s wrong.” His pudgy face revolved toward me again. “And after I fix this damn thing, the same thing will happen next week, and I’ll have to do it all over again.” He began to scrape oily sludge out with the point of a long screwdriver. “Shouldn’t even be grease like that in here.” He impatiently took a rag from the hip pocket of his coveralls and began to work it around in the hole he had opened up.

“I want to ask you about—” I was going to say, about Zack, but he interrupted me.

“Not what you said at the church. There’s nothing to say about that.”

“Alison Greening?”

His face hardened.

“You never slept with her, did you?” Looking at him kneeling like a squat filthy toad on the tractor, it seemed an impossibility. He began to scrub harder, his face frozen. “Did you?”

“Yeah. Okay.” He plucked the rag out and threw it aside. “So what if I did? I didn’t hurt anybody. Except myself, I guess. That little whore treated it like it was a new comic book or something. And she only did it once. Whenever I wanted to do it afterwards, she laughed at me.” He looked at me, hard. “You were the golden boy, anyhow. What do you care? She made me feel like shit. She liked making me feel like shit.”

“Then why did you name your daughter after her?”

He began to tug at something within the body of the tractor. He was trembling.

Of course. I had known it yesterday, when I had looked up at the dying bushes and seen a white shirt flitting in memory between them. “You followed us out to the quarry, didn’t you? I know that that story about the driver hearing screams was a lie. I proved that you can’t hear screams from up there down on the road.”

His face, even the white parts, was turning red.

“So someone else was there, someone surprised us. It was you. Then you ran away and called the police when you knew she was dead.”

“No. No.” He slammed his fist into the tractor’s seat, making a million small metal parts jangle. “Goddam you, you had to come back here, didn’t you? You and your stories.”

“Twenty years ago, somebody told a story all right. And has been telling it ever since.”

“Wait.” He glared at me, his face still massively red. “Who told you about me and Alison, anyhow?” I did not speak, and saw comprehension battle fury in his face.

“You know who told me. The only person you told. Polar Bears.”

“What else did Hovre say?”

“That you hated her. But I knew that. I just didn’t understand the reason.”

Then he said too much. “Hovre talked about her?”

“Not really,” I said. “He just let it slip that…” I looked at Duane’s face, full of sly questions and frightened questions, and I understood. Understood at least part of it. I heard the cough from one side of the quarry’s top, the whistle from the other.

“You try to go and prove anything,” Duane said. “You can’t prove a thing.”

“Polar Bears was with you,” I said, almost not believing it. “Both of you came to the quarry. And you both jumped us. You both wanted her. I can remember Polar Bears coming around day after day, staring at her…”

“I gotta fix my tractor. You get the hell out.”

“And everybody up here thinks it was me. Even my wife thought it was me.”

Duane stolidly replaced the gear levers and plate and started to tighten the nuts. He looked shaken, and he would not meet my eyes. “You better talk to Hovre,” he said. “I ain’t sayin’ no more.”

I felt, in the big dim dusty interior of the pole barn, as I had when the Woodsman and Zack had held me under water, and I made it to an oil drum before my legs gave out. Duane was not bright enough to be a good liar, and his stolid stupid refusal to talk was as good as a confession. “Jesus,” I breathed, and heard my voice tremble.

Duane had opened up the engine of the tractor; his back was to me. His ears flamed. As in the Plainview diner, I could sense violence gathering between us. At the same time, I was aware of the force with which sensory impressions were packing into my mind, and I clung to them for sanity: the big dim space open at either end, the thick powder of brown dust on the floor, fluffy and grainy at once, the litter of machinery lying around, discs and harrows and things I could not identify, most of it in need of paint, with rusty edges; in a corner, the high tractor; a sparrow darting through as I sat on the oil drum; my throat constricted and my hands shaking and my chest inflamed; the searing metal walls and high empty space above us, as though for a jury of observers; the man in front of me, hitting something deep inside the smaller tractor he was bent before, sweat darkening his shirt, dirt and grease all over his coveralls and the smell of gunpowder overtaking all other odors. The knowledge that I was looking at Alison’s murderer.

“It’s crazy,” I said. “I didn’t even come here to talk to you about this. Not really.”

He dropped the wrench and leaned forward on the tractor’s engine block, supporting himself with his arms.

“And it doesn’t matter any more,” I said. “Soon it won’t matter any more at all.”

He would not move.

“God, this is strange,” I said. “I really came here to talk to you about Zack. When you brought up the other thing I thought I’d ask you about what Polar Bears said…” He pushed himself back from the tractor and for the space of a taut second I thought he would come for me. But he went to the side of the barn and returned with a hammer. And began to pound savagely, as if he did not care what he was battering or saw something besides the tractor beneath the hammer.

From down the path at my grandmother’s house I faintly heard a screen door slam. Tuta Sunderson was going home.

Duane heard it too, and the sound seemed to release him. “All right, you son of a bitch, ask me about Zack. Hey? Ask me about him.” He gave the tractor a thwacking, ringing blow with the hammer.

He turned to face me at last, his feet stirring up dust like smoke. His face was inflamed and explosive. “What do you want to know about that no good bastard? He’s as crazy as you are.”

I heard the calls and whistles of that terrible night, saw the white shirt flitting behind the screen of bushes, heard the coughing of a boy hidden behind those bushes. As they watched with the hunger of twenty-year-old manhood the naked girl flashing like a star in the black water. The quick, quiet removal of clothes, the leap upon her and the boy. Then knocking him out before he even saw what had happened and hauling up his body onto the rock shelf before turning to the girl.

“Do you want to know what’s funny about people like you, Miles?” Duane half-screamed. “You always think that what you want to talk about is important. You think that what you want to say is like some kind of goddamned present — huh? — to people like me. You think people like me are just goons, don’t you, Miles?” He spat thickly into the dust and gave the tractor another ringing blow. “I hate you goddamned professors, Miles. You fucking writers. You people with your fifty-cent words and your ‘What I wanted to say was really this, not this.’” He turned furiously away and reached inside the tractor to draw out a clamped pipe. This he rapped twice with the hammer, and I understood that something had broken off inside the clamp. He stamped, puffing up dust, his frustration growing. “I have half a dozen punches around here, and do you think I can find one of them?” Duane stamped over to the darkest section of the barn and rooted in a pile of loose equipment. “So you want to know about Zack, hey? What do you want to know about him? About the time he barricaded himself in his house and they had to go in with axes to get him out? That’s when he was nine. About the time he beat up an old woman in Arden because she looked at him funny? That’s when he was thirteen. About all the stealing he did, all along? Then there’s the fires he used to go for, yeah, he went for ‘em so much he sometimes didn’t wait for other people to start ‘em, and then there’s—” He dipped forward suddenly, like a heron after a frog, and said, “God damn, I found one. Then there’s Hitler, I thought we won that war and it was all over, but no, I guess if you’re real smart, smarter than a dumb shitkicker like me anyhow, you know Hitler was the good guy and he really won because he provided this and that, I don’t know. Understanding. Then there’s the social worker he had once, said because he didn’t have a mother he grew up mean as a snake—” Now he was approaching the tractor again, taking up the clamped pipe —

— coughing, up behind the bushes, impatiently unbuttoning the white shirt and unlacing his boots, hearing the signal of a whistle that now, in two minutes, five minutes, they would jump on the girl and stop her contempt in the simplest way they knew, hearing her voice saying Do birds cough? —

I heard him make a noise in his throat, The pounding stopped. The hammer thudded to the ground, the pipe sprang back. Duane hopped away from the tractor, gripping the wrist of his splayed left hand with his right, and moved with surprising speed past me and out into the sun. I went after him; his body seemed compressed, under a suddenly increased gravity. He was standing spread-legged beside the rusted hooks and curls of metal, examining his hand, turning it over. He had sliced the skin at the base of his thumb. “Not so bad,” he said, and pressed the wound against his coveralls.

I did not know then why I chose that moment to say “Last night the gas went on again,” but now I see that his accident reminded me of mine.

“Everything’s fouled up in that house,” he said, holding his hand tightly against the filthy coveralls. “I oughta tear it down.”

“Someone told me it might be a warning.”

He said, “You’re liable to get all the warnings you can use,” and stepped off toward his house, having given me another as useless as the rest.

I went back to my grandmother’s house and called the Arden police station. What I wanted was not to accuse Polar Bears or to seek a futile revenge by cursing at him, but simply to hear his voice again, with what I now knew or thought I knew in my mind while I listened to it. I felt as bottomless as the quarry was said to be, as directionless as still water, and I do not believe that I felt any anger at all. I could remember Polar Bears striking his steering wheel, enraged, saying, “Don’t you know better than to use that Greening name? That’s what you don’t want to remind people of, boy. I’m trying to keep all that in the background.” That was Larabee at work, keeping things out of sight — he would say, using his Larabee-side as he had while defending it, for my own good. But Hovre was not in his office, and Dave Lokken greeted me with a cold reluctance which barely permitted him to say that he would tell the Chief that I had called.

Upstairs, my workroom looked very little as it had on the day I had set it up. The books once piled on the floor were either given away or stacked in a far corner to gather dust. The typewriter was in its case on the floor, and I had thrown away all the typist’s paraphernalia. I was writing my memoir in pencil, being too clumsy a typist to be able to work at the speed required. All of the thick folders of notes and drafts, along with my laboriously compiled packs of file cards, I had burned a week and a half before. I read somewhere that birds shit before they fly, and I was engaged in a parallel process, stripping myself down for takeoff, making myself lighter.

I often worked until I fell asleep at my desk. That was what I did Monday night, and I must have come awake about the time the men from Arden and the valley thrust their way into Roman Michalski’s house and ruined Galen Havre’s plans by giving flesh to the rumors they had all heard. My eyes burned, and my stomach felt as though I had been swallowing cigars, a sensation precisely reproduced in my mouth. The room was icy, my fingers were cold and stiff. I stood up and turned to the window. I realized that Polar Bears had not called back. In half-light the mare tossed her head in the field. When I looked across the far fields I saw her again, standing in that vulpine way, not bothering with the shield of the trees, and staring directly at the house. I could not take my eyes from her, and stood in the blast of cold, feeling her energy come streaming toward me, and then I blinked and she was gone.

Nine __________

After the noise of Zack’s receding motorcycle pulled me from the second night in a row of that dreadful dream, I lay in the gray light of early morning, experiencing what seemed an utter desolation. For the second time the thought of Alison Greening brought with it no current of joy and anticipation. The wrong things had happened; I was in the wrong room, the wrong place; I was the wrong man. It must be the way a young soldier feels when after he has enlisted out of a glorious mish-mash of ideals, adventurousness and boredom, he finds himself cold, hungry, shouted at and on the verge of battle. I simply could not think of what to do. I had been going to tell Polar Bears what I knew about Zack — but did I really know it? (Yes. I did. Anyway, I thought I did.) But my relation to Polar Bears had irrevocably changed. I could remember all too clearly his telling me that rape was normal. Had he been telling himself that for twenty years?

I saw that both Duane and Polar Bears must have hated my coming back to Arden. I was the last person they wanted to see again. Especially since I had begun speaking about Alison Greening almost from the moment I arrived in the valley.

And then I thought of the slight vulpine figure I had seen last night, leveling her face toward the farmhouse like a loaded gun, and thought too of the vision I’d had when the gas had almost killed me. And of the lights in my grandmother’s house flashing on, all at once, making the place look like a boat floating out of its harbor. I was unforgiven.

I wondered how well I knew — had known — my cousin Alison. Again I saw that face of sewn. leaves coming toward me, and I hurriedly left the bed, threw on my robe, and went downstairs.

I thought: now you are almost afraid of it.

And thought: no. You have always been afraid of it.

My bare feet were very cold.

When the telephone rang, I hesitated a moment before lifting the receiver from its hook. Polar Bears, up early from another sleepless night. Do birds cough?, that ardent high electric voice in my ears. But I smelled blubber, and knew that I did not yet have to solve the problem of what to say to Galen Hovre. She said, “Mr. Teagarden? Miles?”

“Present.”

“I can’t come to work today. I won’t be there this morning. I’m sick.”

“Well,” I began, and realized that she had already hung up. Stupidly, I stared at the receiver, is if it could explain Tuta Sunderson’s behavior.

The explanation came about an hour later, after I had dressed and was seated upstairs, trying to smother thought by the familiar tactic of concentration on work. I had succeeded in this of enough during my marriage. Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking. Yet I had more problems fighting for mental space than Joan’s infidelity with various Dribbles had given me, and I had writ less than half a page of my record before I put my head down on the desk, my face damp with sweat and the desolation back in full strength. I groaned. The admission that I might — did — feel unease, disquiet, fear, all of those, at the enactment of the vow between my cousin and myself had opened up a vast psychic hole. I remembered Rinn’s harsh words — I felt as though I were thrust back into the world of the “blue horror” dream, as though mere wakefulness could not separate me from it. I was still a guilt expert; that was a vocation which outlasted the academic.

Alison Greening was my life; her death had thrown me forever out of significance, out of happiness; but suppose Rinn was right, and that significance and happiness had been flawed and illusory from the beginning. Suppose that by returning to the valley I had brought death with me? Or if not death, its taint? The terror I had felt in the woods flicked at me again, and I pushed myself away from the desk and left the study. All the way down the stairs I felt pursued by that slight figure, that atom of the woods.

Downstairs, I was jerked back into the present. I knew why Tuta Sunderson had refused to come to work. They were there, out on the road, waiting like vultures.

Because that is what they resembled, vultures, sitting in their cars just past the walnut trees. I could not see their faces. They had switched off their motors. I imagined them assembling at the prearranged time, each pulling up on the road before the house, coming from all over Arden, all up and down the valley. Somehow, they had heard about Candace Michalski’s disappearance. My throat dried. From where I was standing at the kitchen window I could see perhaps twenty of them, each alone in his car, all men.

At first, like a child, I thought of calling Rinn — of invoking that safety.

I swallowed, and went into the living room and opened the door to the porch. Now I could see them all. Their cars filled the road. Some of them must have gone down to Duane’s driveway to turn around, because they were bunched in a thick pack, all facing the same way, three abreast in places where I could see only the tops of the farthest cars glinting light. From them rose wavy lines of heat. Menace came from them like a physical force. I stepped backwards into the dark of the room, and saw them still, framed in the doorway. The men in the cars visible to me sat twisted sideways on their seats, looking toward the porch.

One more impatient than the rest honked his horn.

And then I knew they would not leave their cars, for no one answered the single horn blast with his own: they were just going to sit out there.

I walked out onto the porch where I would be visible. Another car honked, one of those nearest the house. It was a signal: he’s out: and I could see some of the hunched figures in the cars swing their heads sideways to stare at me.

I went back into the kitchen and dialed Polar Bears’ office. A voice I recognized as Lokken’s answered me.

“Hell no, he ain’t in here. All hell’s broke loose since last night. He’s out with two of the others, lookin’ for that girl.”

“The news got out.”

“It was that damn Red Sunderson did it, he and a lot of the boys called on the family last night, and now they got all stirred up, runnin’ around and demandin’ things and holy man, we been workin’ — hey, who is this, anyways?”

“Get in touch with him fast and tell him to call Miles Teagarden. I’ve got some trouble here.” And I know who did it, I said silently. “And I might have some information for him.”

“What kind of information would that be, Teagarden?” I had ceased to be Mr. Teagarden.

“Ask him if a doorknob could have been used on those two girls,” I said, and heard my heart thudding.

“Why, you lose a doorknob, Teagarden?” came Lokken’s insufferable yokel’s voice. “Whyn’t you call up your friend Larabee and ask him to find it for you? You outa your skull or something? The Chief ain’t gonna do you no favors, Teagarden, don’t you know that?”

“Just get him over here,” I said.

Some of the men could see me telephoning, and I held the receiver for a few moments after Lokken hung up and stood directly in front of the window with the black cone of plastic to my ear. Two of the cars in front of the column came to life, and drove off after their drivers had tapped their horns. Two others crept up to take their places. I juggled the hook and then dialed Rinn’s number. I could see the man nearest to me watching my arm move. He too tapped his horn and drove off in the direction of the highway. The front end of a blue pickup appeared in his space. Rinn’s telephone trilled and trilled. I didn’t know what I expected from her anyway. I hung up.

I heard cars gunning their engines and tires crunching the road. My throat felt looser. I took a cigarette from the pack in my shirt pocket and lit it with a kitchen match. Cars were still moving off and turning around out on the road, and as I exhaled I saw the blue truck move past the frame of the window, then two cars at once, tan and dark blue, then a gray car with spectacular dents in its side. For two or three minutes I waited and smoked, hearing them wrangle their way out, backing up onto the lawn, noisily bouncing on the drive to the garage, turning around.

When I thought they were all gone I saw the nose of a dark Ford pull into the frame of the window and stop.

I went out onto the porch. Three of them had stayed behind. When I pushed open the screen door, not really knowing what I intended to do, two of them left their cars. The third, whose pickup was nearest the drive, backed his truck around the last of the walnut trees and came about five yards up the drive. When he hopped out of the cab I saw that it was Hank Speltz, the boy from the garage. In front of the house, the lawn had been ripped into muddy tracks.

“Go on up that way, Hank, and we’ll jump the ditch,” called one of the two men out on the road. The boy began coming warily up the drive, his hands spread.

One of the men jumped the ditch and began coming through the line of walnut trees, the second following a little behind. They looked like the men I had seen outside the Angler’s Bar, the men who had stoned me — big middle-aged, roughs, with bellies hanging over their belts and plaid arid tan shirts open past their breastbones. A circle of red just below the neck, and then the dead white skin visually covered by undershirts.

“Hovre is coming here,” I called. “You’d better get out with the others.”

A man I did not recognize called back, “Hovre ain’t gonna be here in time to stop us doin’ what we’re gonna do.”

“Where you got the Michalski girl?” shouted the man hanging back.

“I don’t have her anywhere.” I began to sidle toward the garage and the path to Duane’s house. Hank Speltz, his face hanging open-mouthed like a wrestler’s, was coming up. I tossed the remaining two inches of cigarette onto the torn lawn, and went nearer the garage.

The man in the plaid shirt who had spoken first said, “Come at him slow,” and Hank Speltz halved his pace, shuffling like a bear from side to side. “Get the hell on up here, Roy,” he said. “Where you got her?”

“He’s got her hid somewhere inside. I tol’ you.”

“I’ve never seen her.” I kept moving to the side.

“He’s going to that garage.”

“Let him go. We’ll get him there.” He had a red hook-nosed face with deep lines, a bully’s face — the face of the schoolyard terror who had never grown up. The two of them were coming at me slowly across the lawn. “Keep an eye on him in case he runs toward that Nash,” shouted the man in the cap.

“Whose idea was this?” I called.

“Ours, smartass.”

Then I was close enough to the garage and I hit the clip off the lock and opened the door. I looked at the curl of smoke coming from my cigarette and knew what I was going to try to do. “Go in there and we got you cornered,” the leader crowed. Knowing that any sudden movement would make them rush me, I backed into the open garage and went into its gloom. The three -gallon gascans were where I remembered them from the day I had broken open the sea chest. I picked one of them up: full. With my back to them, I bent down and screwed off the cap. When I emerged carrying the heavy can, one of them guffawed. “Gonna put gas in your car, Teagarden?”

Only the man in the plaid shirt saw what I was going to do. “Shit,” he yelled, and began to run at me.

With as much force as I had, I threw the gascan toward the curl of smoke. I supposed that the odds were no worse than they were if I’d bet on a horse. Fluid began to spray out in wheels and loops.

For a moment we were all standing still, watching the gasoline come spraying out of the sailing can, but when the crump of the explosion came I was already running up the path toward Duane’s house. I heard them shouting behind me. A bit of flying metal whizzed past my head. One of them was screaming.

I had just about time enough to get to the near side of Duane’s house; when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw them coming through the fire, two of them. The man in the cap was rolling on the ground. Pieces of scattered fire dotted the lawn all the way to the row of walnut trees. Now they were stopping to kneel by the man in the cap.

If I had been right that Duane’s basement was originally a root cellar like my grandparents I would be able to get into it from the outside.

“Duane ain’t gonna help you, you son of a bitch!” came a distorted, yelling voice.

I came running past the dogwood and sweetpea and onto Duane’s lawn.

“Cuz he’s gone!”

I don’t know what I was picturing: hiding down there, finding a burrow, defending it with an ax. As I raced across the short lawn I saw that I had been right. The white-painted boards of the entrance cover — the old access to the cellar — extended from the base of the house, just visible around the corner on the side facing the road. I came skidding around the corner and the door I yanked on swung easily upwards.

I fell down the earthen steps and rolled beneath the hanging axes. Then I remembered. The far wall, where my desk had been, in cases like mummies. I scrambled up from my knees and ran, crouching, over to the shotguns.

I took one up case and all and dipped my hand into the box of shells and ran back to the earthen steps. Like moving up from water into light, going back toward the slanting rectangle of blue air and sunlight.

I had the twelve-gauge out of the case as the men and Hank Speltz came running around the corner of dogwood and sweetpea. I broke the gun and slotted two shells into the barrels. “Stop right there,” I said, and raised the gun and pointed it at the chest of the man in the plaid shirt. Then I rose up from my belly on the earthen steps and came out of the cellar. My breathing was so harsh that I could scarcely form words. They dropped their arms and stood momentarily still, shock and anger in their faces.

“Now get the hell out of here,” I said.

They were beginning to circle. They were as wary as beasts.

“I’ve never seen that girl,” I said. “I’ve never seen any of them. I only knew about the Michalski girl because Polar Bears told me she was missing.” Put the gun against my shoulder, pointed it at the opening in the plaid shirt. Expected the recoil. “Get together and stay together. Stop moving around like that.”

They obeyed. I could see the man in the cap limping up behind them, his hands in the air. His tan workshirt was flecked with black, blood leaking through some of the holes. His hands were blackened too. He stood by the dogwood with his hands up. “Walk backwards,” I said. “All the way to your cars.”

Hank Speltz took a step backwards into this dogwood, looked around wildly, and then began to edge around to the path. The others moved with him, following me with their eyes.

“If you’re so innocent, how come you stuck around up here?” asked the man in the plaid shirt.

I gestured with the shotgun.

“Screwing that old crazywoman up in the woods,” said Hank Speltz. “That’s how come. And what about Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand?”

“You’re asking the wrong man,” I said. “Now I want you to start moving backwards toward the cars.”

When they did not move I shifted the barrels to the right, flicked the safety, and pulled one of the triggers. The recoil nearly jerked the shotgun from my hands. The sound was louder than the explosion of the gascan. All of them moved smartly away from the dogwood. I saw that I had shredded the leaves and ruined the blossoms, leaving broken twigs and the smell of powder hanging. “You damn near killed Roy back there,” said the one in the plaid shirt.

“What was he going to do to me? Move.” I raised the barrels, and they began to step backwards down the path.

Over their shoulders I could see the mess of the long front lawn. A ragged, irregular black circle yards from the drive showed where the -gallon can had exploded. Smaller burned patches, a greasy yellow in color, were dotted all over the lawn, churned and rutted by their tires. A large hole had been blown in the mesh of the porch screen. The animals had disappeared down into the far end of the side field.

“We ain’t through, yet,” said the man whose name I did not know.

“Hank, get in your pickup and drive out,” I said. “I’ll be coming in to pick up my car soon, and I don’t expect any trouble.”

“No,” he said, and sprinted toward the truck in the driveway.

All three of us watched him roar away scattering dirt as he turned onto the valley road.

“Now you, Roy.” The man in the cap looked at me glumly, lowered his hands, and walked heavily over the lawn to pass between the walnut trees. He stopped to stamp out the small flames licking up at the base of one of the trees.

“Now it’s your turn,” I said to the remaining man.

“Whyn’t you just kill us?” he asked belligerently. “You like killin. We all know about you. You got sumpun wrong in your head.”

I said, “If you don’t get out of here right now, you won’t believe what’s happening to you. You’ll probably live for a minute or two, but you’ll be glad to die when they’re over.” I cradled the gun in my arms and leveled it at his belt. And then I did an astounding thing — a thing that astounded me. I laughed. Self-disgust hit me with such force that I feared for a moment that I would vomit.

A screaming voice: “Miles, you bastard! You bastard!”: Duane.

“Calm down.” Another voice, deeper, lower. “Get the shit out here! Now!”

“Just simmer down, Duane. He’ll come.”

“Goddam you! Goddam you! You crazy?”

I cautiously open the door and see that Duane in fury appears to be reduced in size, a small square jigging knot of redfaced anger. “I told you, goddamit! I said, stay the hell away from my girl! And second, what the hell is all this?” He whirls around, his rage giving him agility, and the gesture of his arms encompasses, as well as the greasy yellowish and black burns on the ripped lawn and the marks of the explosion — the gaping hole in the screen, twisted pieces of the gascan — the figure of Polar Bears in uniform behind him, and Alison Updahl hurrying up the path toward her home. She glances over her shoulder, nearly there already, sending me a look, half fear, half warning.

“Just sitting in their cars, goddam it — just sitting out there — no goddam trouble — and what the hell did you do? Make a goddam bomb? Look at my lawn!” He stomps heavily, too furious to speak any longer.

“I tried to call you,” I say to Polar Bears.

“You’re lucky I don’t kill you now!” Duane screams.

“I’m lucky they didn’t kill me then.”

Polar Bears firmly positions one hand on Duane’s shoulder. “Hold your horses,” he says. “Dave Lokken told me you called up. I didn’t expect there’d be any trouble, Miles. I figured you could take a bunch of our country boys starin’ at you from the road.”

“Sittin’ there — just sittin’ there,” Duane says, quietly now that Polar Bears is gripping his shoulder.

“I didn’t think you’d declare war on ‘em.”

“I didn’t think you’d go crawlin’ around after my girl either,” Duane hisses, and I see Polar Bears’ fingers tigh. “I warned you. I told you, stay off. You’re gonna get it — for sure.”

“They didn’t just sit there. Most of them left when they saw me dialing the telephone, but three of them decided to come for me.”

“See who they were this time, Miles?”

“That boy from the garage, Hank Speltz, a man named Roy, and one I didn’t know. One of those who threw stones at me in Arden.”

“Stones… stones,” hisses Duane, his contempt so great that it is almost despair.

“How d’ya manage all this?” He lifts his chin toward the lawn where tire tracks and brown muddy ruts loop crazily.

“They did most of it themselves. They drove all over it. I guess they were in a hurry to get out before you showed up. The rest I did. I flipped an open gascan from the garage on top of a burning cigarette, I didn’t even think it would work. You knew they were going to be here, didn’t you?”

“You got me again. Sure I knew. I figured they’d just help keep you—”

“Out of trouble. Like Paul Kant.”

“Yeah.” His smile almost expresses pride in me.

“You and Duane were together? With Alison?”

“Keep her name out of your mouth, damn you,” Duane says.

“Just having a beer in the Bowl-A-Rama.”

“Just having a beer. Not working on your story.”

“Even a cop doesn’t work all the time, Miles,” he says, and I think: no. You do work all the time, and that’s why you are dangerous. He takes his paw off Duane’s arm and shrugs his shoulders. “I wanted to explain to Duane here that you and me are sort of helpin’ each other out on these killings. That’s a big plus for you, Miles. You shouldn’t want to take that plus away from yourself. Now I hear you been talking to Duane about some crazy idea you got. You been talking about just the exact thing I told you not to talk about, Miles. Now that kinda makes me question your judgment. I just wanta be sure you’ve seen the error in your thinking. Old Duane here didn’t tell you you was right, did he? When you hit him with this crazy idea?” He looks at me, his face open and companionable. “Did you, Duane?”

“I said he should talk to you.”

“Well, you see, you got him all suspicious and worked up.”

“I knew it out at the quarry, really. I had the girl shout. You couldn’t hear her on the road.”

Duane stamps in a furious muttering half-circle. “Undressed. You were undressed.”

“Hold on, Duane, you’ll make it worse. Old Miles will just go on drawing the wrong conclusions if you get sidetracked. Now, Miles, Duane says he never said you was right in your ideas. Now let’s ask him. Were you out there that night?”

Duane shakes his head, looking angrily at the ground.

“Of course you weren’t. It’s all in the records my father made. You went out on 93 and turned the other way, toward Liberty. Right?”

Duane nods.

“You were mad at that little Greening girl, and you just wanted to get the hell away from her. Right? Sure,” as Duane nods again. “See, Miles, if you just tell a girl to yell without her knowing anything about why, she’s not liable to really give her best, like a girl would if she’s bein’ attacked. You see the error there? Now, I don’t want you to go on talking about this, because you’ll just dig yourself into a deep hole, Miles.”

There is no point in prolonging this charade. “That little Greening girl,” the figure of lean intensity I have seen leveling her muzzle toward the house? That little Greening girl, the fire in the woods and the blast of freezing wind? I can smell cold water about me.

I think that which I do not wish to think; and remember Rinn’s words. My guilt drowns me.

Duane, for different reasons, also does not wish to continue. “To hell with this,” he says. Then he straighs up and his pudgy red-and-white face flames at me. “But I warned you about seeing my daughter again.”

“She asked me to come with her.”

“Did she? Did she? That’s what you say. I suppose you say you didn’t take off your clothes in front of her.”

“It was just for swimming. She took hers off first. The boy undressed too.”

In front of Duane, I cannot tell Polar Bears my fears about Zack. I have already said too much, for Duane looks ready to flail out again.

I am trembling. I feel cold wind.

“Yeah, okay,” Duane says. “Sure. Whatever you say.” He turns his upper body toward me. “If you fool around with her, Miles, I won’t wait for anyone else to get you. I’ll get you myself.” Yet there is no real conviction in this threat, he does not care enough; treachery is what he expects from women.

Polar Bears and I watch him tramping up the path. Then he turns to me. “Say, you look kind of peaked, Miles. Must be all that skinny-dipping you do.”

“Which one of you raped her?”

“Hold on.”

“Or did you take turns?”

“I’m beginning to question your judgment again, Miles.”

“I’m beginning to question everything.”

“You heard me mention that hole you could be digging for yourself?” Polar Bears steps toward me, big and solid and full of serious concern, and I see dark blue blotches of perspiration on his uniform shirt, dark blue smudges beneath his eyes. “Jesus, boy, you gotta be crazy, throwing bombs at the citizens here, gettin’ yourself in trouble…” He is moving with a cautious, wary slowness and I think this is it: he’s going to break, he’s going to fight me. But he stops and rubs a hand over his face. “Pretty soon this is all gonna be over, Miles. Pretty soon,” He steps back, and the sour combination of sweat and gunpowder engulfing me like smoke recedes with him. “Miles. Jesus Christ. What was that you were telling Dave Lokken about something like a doorknob?”

I cannot answer.

That night and every night afterward I turned off the gas where Tuta Sunderson had shown me. In the mornings, when she heaved herself into the kitchen and began to cough and stamp her feet and shuffle around and clear her throat and produce the entire array of noises expressive of sullen discontent with which I had become familiar, among them was always the sharp grunt of suspicious disapproval — and contempt? — that accompanied her discovery that I had done so. I would have fired her but for my certainty that, like Bartleby, she would have come anyhow. The day after the visitation by Hank Speltz and the others, I heard the coughing, feet-stamping, etc., and went downstairs to ask her if she had known what was going to happen. Foolish me. “Did I know what? What was going to happen? So what happened?” She had made no comment on the condition of the lawn or the hole in the porch screen. I told her that I imagined her son had been involved. “Red? Red doesn’t get messed up in anything. Now how many eggs do you want to throw away today?”

For days I did nothing but work; and I worked undisturbed, for it seemed that no one would talk to me. Apart from her morning demonstrations of how much noise she could produce, Tuta Sunderson was silent; Duane kept away, even turning his head so he would not have to look at me on the infrequent times he passed the old farmhouse. His; daughter, presumably beaten or warned off in a less physical manner, also avoided me. Sometimes, from my bedroom window I could see her criss-crossing the path to go to the equipment barn or the granary, her body looking rushed and inexpressive, but she never appeared downstairs in the kitchen or on the porch, chewing something from my larder. At night, I was of awakened from dozing at my desk, the martini glass beside me and the pencil still in my hand, by the sound of Zack’s motorcycle cutting off when it came parallel to me. I wrote. I dozed. I drank. I accumulated guilt. I hoped that soon the Michalskis would get a postcard from their vanished daughter. I hoped that Polar Bears was right, and that it would soon be over. I often wanted to leave.

At night, I experienced fear.

Rinn had given up answering her telephone, and I kept telling myself that I would visit her tomorrow. But that too I feared. The anonymous calls ceased, both from Onion Breath and from the — whatever the other thing was. Perhaps there was a fault in the old telephone.

I received no more blank letters, and only one more bit of fan mail. It was printed on lined paper with torn perforations along one side, and it read WE’LL GET YOU KILLER. I put it in an envelope and mailed it with a note to Polar Bears.

It seemed to me that I had died.

Many times, I thought: you were wrong, back at the quarry. That he had Coke bottles in his truck is no proof; the doorknob taken from wherever I had put it is no proof. And then I thought of him slicing open his hand.

I said: it is not your problem. And then thought of his dedicating a record “to the lost ones.”

And thought of Alison Greening coming toward me, a creature of sewn leaves and bark. But the thoughts which followed this could not be true.

It was impossible to talk with Polar Bears. He did not respond to my note or to the printed threat.

When the telephone finally rang on a Monday afternoon, I thought it would be Hovre, but when I was greeted by another voice pronouncing my name, I thought of a bent hungry man with tight curling black hair and aging face. “Miles,” he said. “You told me to call you if I ever wanted help.” His voice was dry and papery.

“Yes.”

“I have to get out of here. I’m out of food. I lied to you that day — I said I went out, but I hadn’t in a long time.”

“I know.”

“Who told you?” Fear made his voice trill.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No. No, it probably doesn’t. But I can’t stay in town any more. I think they’re going to do something. Now even more of them are watching my house, and sometimes I see them talking, planning. I think they’re planning to break in. I’m afraid they’ll kill me. And I haven’t had anything to eat for two days. If — if I can get away can I come there?”

“Of course. You can stay here. I can get a gun.”

“They all have guns, guns are no use… I just have to get away from them.” During the pauses I could hear him gasping.

“Your car doesn’t work. How can you get here?”

“I’ll walk. I’ll hide in the ditches or the fields if I see anyone. Tonight.”

“It’s ten miles!”

“It’s the only way I can do it.” Then, with that ghastly wanness, that dead humor in his voice, “I don’t think anyone will give me a ride.”

About nine-thirty, when the light began to fail, I started to expect him, though I knew that he could not possibly arrive for many hours. I walked around the old house, peering from the upstairs windows for the sight of him working his way across the fields. At , when it was fully dark, I turned on only one light — in my study — so that he would not be seen crossing the lawn. Then I sat on the porch swing and waited.

It took him four hours. At two o’clock I heard something rustle in the ditch behind the walnut tress, and my head jerked up and I saw him moving across the ripped lawn. “I’m on the porch,” I whispered, and opened the door for him.

Even in the darkness, I could see that he was exhausted. “Stay away from the windows,” I said, and led him into the kitchen. I turned on the light. He was slumped at the table, panting, his clothing covered with smears of dirt and bits of adhering straw. “Did anyone see you?” He shook his head. “Let me get you some food.”

“Please,” he whispered.

While I fried bacon and eggs, he stayed in that bea position, his eyes fluttering, his back bent and his knees splayed out. I gave him a glass of water. “My feet hurt so much,” he said. “And my side. I fell into a rock.”

“Did anyone see you leave?”

“I wouldn’t be here if they did.”

I let him recover while the eggs fried.

“Do you have any cigarettes? I ran out six days ago.”

I tossed in my pack. “Jesus, Miles…“he said, and could go no further. “Jesus…”

“Save it,” I said. “Your food’s about ready. Eat some bread in the meantime.” He had been too tired to notice the loaf set squarely in the middle of the table. “Jesus…” he repeated, and began to tear at the loaf. When I put the food down before him, he ate greedily, silently, like an escaped convict.

When he had finished I turned off the light and we went into the living room and felt our way to chairs. I could see the tip of his cigarette burning in the dark room, tilting back and forth as he moved in the rocker. “Do you have anything to drink? Excuse me, Miles. You’re saving my life.” I think he began to cry, and I was glad the lights were off. I went back to the kitchen and returned with a bottle and two glasses.

“That’s good,” he said when he had taken his. “What is it?”

“Gin.”

“I never had it before. My mother wouldn’t let alcohol in the house, and I never wanted to go to the bars. We never had anything stronger than beer. And that was only once or twice. She died of lung cancer. She was a chainsmoker. Like me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“What are you going to do now, Paul?”

“I don’t know. Go somewhere. Hide. Try to get to a city somewhere. Come back when it’s over.” Cigarette glowing with his inhalations, dipping forward and back as he rocked. “There was another one, another girl. She disappeared.”

“I know.”

“That’s why they were going to come for me. She’s been missing more than a week. I heard about it. on the radio.”

“Michael Moose.”

“That’s it.” He gave a crackly humorless laugh. “You probably don’t know Michael Moose. He’s about three hundred and fifty pounds and he chews peppermints. He’s grotesque. He’s got flat slicked-down hair and pig’s eyes and a little moustache like Oliver Hardy’s. He’s right out of Babbitt, He imitates Walter Cronkite’s voice, and he’d never get a job anywhere but Arden, and kids laugh at him on the street, but he’s better than I am. To Arden. They think he’s funny-looking, and they make jokes about him, but they respect him too. Maybe that’s too strong. What it is, they take him as one of them. And do you know why that is?”

“Why?”

His voice was flat and bitter. “Because when he was growing up they knew he went out on dates, they know the girls, and because he got married. Because they know, or say, that he’s got a woman over in Blundell who’s a telephone operator. Red hair.” The cigarette waved in the air, and I could dimly see Paul Kant raising the glass of gin to his lips. “That’s it. He’s one of them. You know what my crime is?” I held my breath. “I never had a date. I never had a girl. I never told a dirty joke. I never even had a dead girl, like you, Miles. So they thought I was — what they thought. Different. Not like them. Like something bad they knew about.”

We sat there in silence for a long time, each of us only a vague form to the other. “It didn’t start that way, you know. It didn’t matter that I was less, shall we say robust, when we were all little kids. In grade school. Grade school was paradise — when I think about it, it was paradise. It got bad only in high school. I wasn’t cute. I wasn’t like Polar Bears. No athlete. I didn’t chase the girls. So they started to talk about me. I noticed that people didn’t want me around their kids about the time I had to leave school.” He bent, and felt for something on the floor. “Would you mind if I had another drink?”

“It’s right on the floor beside your chair.”

“So now when this admirable character goes around ripping up little girls, they assume it’s me. Oh yes, Paul Kant. He’s never been quite right, has he? A momma’s boy. Not quite normal, in a society that makes being normal the most virtuous quality of them all. And then there was another thing — some trouble I had. Stupid scum. They put me in a police station. They hit me. For doing nothing. Did they tell you about that?”

“No,” I lied. “Not a word.”

“I had to go to a hospital. Seven months. Little pills every day. For doing nothing. Stares when I got out. Only job I could get at Zumgo’s. With those leering women. Jesus. Do you know how I got here tonight? Had to sneak out of my own house. Wind through the streets like a dog. Know about my dog, Miles? They killed him. One of them. He came up at night and strangled my dog. I could hear him crying. The dog.” I could imagine the little monkey face contorting. The smell of gin and cigarettes drifted through the dark room. “Jesus.” I thought he might have been crying again.

Then: “So what do you say, Miles Teagarden? Or do you just sit and listen? What do you say?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

“You were rich. You could come here in the summers and then go back to one of your private schools and then go to some expensive university and smoke pipes and join a fraternity and get married and get a Ph.D. and live in apartments in New York and go to Europe and wreck cars and buy Brooks Brothers suits and, I don’t know, do whatever you do. Teach English in a college. I’m going to have some more of your gin.” He bent, and I heard the bottle clinking against the glass. “Oh. I spilled some.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It wouldn’t to you, would it? I’m getting drunk. Is it you, Miles? Is it you? Come on.”

“Is what me?” But I knew.

“Are you the admirable character? Did you take time off from your Atlantic Monthly life to come out here and rip up a few little girls?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s not me either. So who is it?”

I looked down at the floor. Before I had decided to tell him about Zack, he was speaking again.

“No, it’s not me.”

“I know that,” I said. “I think—”

“It’s not me, no way is it me. They just want it to be me. Or you. But I don’t know about you. Still, you’re being nice to me, aren’t you, Miles? Being so nice. Probably never had someone strangle your dog. Or do people like you have dogs? Borzois, wolfhounds. Or a cute little cheetah on a leash.”

“Paul, I’m trying to help you.” I said, “You have a ludicrous misconception of my life.”

“Oops, sorry, oops, mustn’t be offensive. Just a poor country boy, I know. Poor dumb pitiable country schunuck. I’ll tell you why no way it’s me. This is it, boy. I’d never go after a girl. That’s why. You hear what I’m saying?”

I did, and hoped he would not torture himself by going further.

“You heard that?”

“I heard.”

“You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Because I’d do it to boys, not girls. Isn’t that funny? That’s why it isn’t me. That’s what I’ve always wanted, but I never did that either. Never even touched one. I wouldn’t hurt any of them, though. Never hurt them.”

He sat there, slumped in the rocking chair, the cigarette glowing in his mouth. “Miles?”

“Yes.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Is it important to you to be alone now?”

“Get the hell out of here, Miles.” He was crying again.

Instead of leaving the room, I got up and walked past his chair and looked through the window facing the porch and the road. I could see nothing but the darker square mass of my own face reflected in the glass and the torn meshes of the screen beyond it. Beyond that, everything was black. his mouth made noises on his glass. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll leave you alone, Paul. I’ll be back though.”

I went upstairs in the dark and sat at my desk. It was three-fifteen. There was the morning to worry about. If the men from Arden broke into Paul’s house and found that he had gone, the news, I was certain, would reach Polar Bears almost immediately. And if they were going to break into his house, it could only mean that they had been persuaded somehow that he and not I was responsible for the girls’ deaths. But then they might think of looking for Paul at my house — and I could see nothing but disaster for both of us if a gang of Arden hooligans stormed into the house and found the two of us. A shotgun from Duane’s basement would not rescue me again. I heard the sound of a car starting up outside, and I jumped. It faded.

Fifteen minutes passed. Time enough, I thought, for Paul to have recovered. I stood up, and recognized how weary I was.

I came down the stairs into the dark room. I saw the tip of a cigarette glowing at the edge of the ashtray. The odors of gin and smoke seemed very thick in the air of the cold small room. “Paul?” I said, going toward the rocking chair. “Paul, let me get you a blanket. I have a plan for tomorrow.”

And then I stopped. I could see the top of the rocker against the window, and it was unbroken by the silhouette of his head. The rocker was empty. He was no longer in the room.

Immediately I knew what had happened, but I switched on one of the lights anyway, and confirmed it. The glass and three-fourths empty bottle sat on the floor beside his chair, the cigarette had burned nearly to the rim of the ashtray. I went into the kitchen, and then opened the door to the bathroom. He had left the house shortly after I had gone upstairs. I swore out loud, half in anger at myself for leaving him, half in despair.

I went through the porch and out onto the lawn. He could not have gone far. And I remembered the sound of the car that I thought I’d heard upstairs, and began to run across the lawn.

When I got to the road, I turned right by reflex and pounded down toward the Sunderson farm, in the direction of Arden for perhaps forty seconds. But he could have gone the other way, deeper into the valley — I didn’t even know what lay in that direction; and I recognized that he could also have gone into the fields, as he had done on the way from Arden earlier that night. I thought of him hiding behind a building; or crouching in a field, riven by fear and self-loathing, and told myself that he had nowhere, really nowhere to go. He would come back before daylight.

I turned around on the dark road and began to trudge home. When I reached the drive to my grandmother’s house I hesitated, and then walked a bit further up the road in that direction. It was hopeless. I could see nothing. I could find him only if he allowed me to. I turned back and went up the drive and sat on the porch swing to wait. An hour, I told myself: it won’t be as much as an hour. I would sit and wait. As tired as I was, it was unthinkable that I could fall asleep.

But an hour later I was jerked awake by a sound I could not at first identify. A high agitated wailing, the sound of mechanical fury, mechanical panic, it came from somewhere off to my right, but was loud and near enough to distort my sense of place: for a moment I thought I was in New York, awake before dawn in New York. It was a New York sound, and as I gradually located my surroundings I located this sound too. It was the siren of a fire engine.

I found that I was standing up on the porch in the gray light of very early dawn, listening to a fire engine. Fog lay across the fields, and carpeted the valley road. As I listened, trying to position the sound of the fire bell, it abruptly cut off. I wheeled around and banged open the door to the living room. Bottle and glass on the floor, dead cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. Paul Kant was still gone.

Numbly, knowing that I had to hurry, I stepped down the porch’s single step. Fog lay in the ruts on the lawn and concealed its burned patches. I went stumbling toward the drive, completely forgetting the car I must have walked right past, and went out onto the road. Then I began to run. Just visible down the road, in the direction of the highway, red suffused the dark gray air.

By the time I reached the Sunderson house I had to stop running, and I walked as quickly as I could without increasing the pain in my chest until I reached the shell of the schoolhouse; then I jogged as far as the church. The red sandstone bluff and the redness of the sky. Andy’s, I thought, and forced myself to run again. I heard men moving, machinery working. When I came around the sharp corner of the bluff I began to run harder. The fire engine was drawn up into the parking lot beside Andy’s and a police car had pulled in slightly ahead of it, to the side of the gaspumps. I heard fire, that terrible raging noise of destroying. But it was not Andy’s that was burning. I could see the flames jumping behind the high white front of the general store.

I thought, remembering: it might have been a motorcycle I heard, not a car. I had been too groggy to tell the difference.

I rushed past the front of Andy’s and around the side.

At first I saw only the blazing facade of the Dream House, rushing into extinction as Duane must so of have wished it to do. It looked transparent, skeletal. The frames of the doors and windows hung darkly, like bones suspended in the red-orange flames. Three firemen in rubber boots and iron hats played a useless hose on the blaze. Steam rose with the smoke. Then I saw Polar Bears calmly watching me from beside the fire-truck; he was out of uniform, dressed in a shapeless sports jacket and brown trousers, and I could tell by looking at him that he had not been to bed. his insomnia had kept him up, working at his bottle of Wild Turkey until the call from the fire department had come. It was still dark enough for the flames to redden the ground and the sky and the back of Andy’s store, and as I walked nearer, I felt the heat. Dave Lokken, in uniform, stood talking to Andy and his wife, both wearing bathrobes and shocked unmoving faces, directly at the back of the store. The fire stained their faces peach. All three noticed me at the same time and stared at me as if I were a ghoul.

Polar Bears motioned me to him. I kept watching the fire; the first boards collapsed inward, sending up a huge shower of sparks.

“Fire bells wake you up?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You got here in a hell of a hurry. Sleeping in your clothes?”

“I wasn’t in bed.”

“Me neither,” he said, and gave me one of his sad paternal smiles. “Care to hear the story? I’ll have to tell you anyhow. You’ll be interested.”

I was looking dumbly at a mess of gray army blankets thrown in a heap halfway between the burning Dream House and the back of Andy’s, and I nodded.

“Of course these boys aren’t really going to do anything with that hose,” he said, “but they might keep the flames from jumping to Andy Kastad’s store. That’ll be the best they could do. The call came too late for them to save that little abortion of Duane’s, but I reckon nobody’ll be too sorry to see that go, least of all Duane. It should of been pulled down long before this. What happened was, Andy and his wife woke up in time to save themselves — claim they heard a noise and then they heard the fire. Both jumped out of bed. They look through the window. Get the scare of their lives.”

I glanced back at Andy and his wife, and thought it was probably true.

“So old Margaret calls the volunteers while Andy runs out the back to do something — he doesn’t know what. Piss on it, maybe. And he sees something. Can you guess what?”

“No.” Polar Bears was using his favorite trick of building up suspense.

“No. No indeed. Say, by the way, Miles, I don’t suppose you happened to see your friend Paul Kant tonight?” his head was cocked, his eyebrows raised, his manner entirely unembarrassed by the digression. Another favorite trick.

“No.”

“Uh huh. Real good. Anyhow, like I was saying, Andy comes boiling out of his back door, all set to pour beer or something all over the fire, and he sees this object in the doorway of the house. Now he’s like you. He can’t guess what it is either. But he thinks he’d better have a closer look. So he runs up, takes a grab and pulls it away. Half of it’s on fire. And when he sees it good and plain, he runs back inside and calls me up too, only Dave and I are already rarin’ out here.”

“What’s the point of all this folksy crap, Polar Bears?” The heat of the fire seemed to be intensifying, grilling the side of my face.

“I thought you mighta guessed.” He put a big hand on my bicep and began to lead me toward the store. “The point is that you got nothing more to worry about, Miles. Everything’s over. I picked the wrong horse, but you’re out in the free and clear as of this moment. It’s like I told you. I missed him, but he missed me too.”

I stopped and looked up into his massive face and saw, operating far beneath the confidential tone and manner, bafflement and anger. He jerked me forward, commanding me to join his charade. I stumbled, and he gripped my arm more tightly. “We’re at the sixteenth of July, old buddy, so if you got nothing holding you here after the twenty-first, I guess you’ll be leaving us. That’s less than a week. Long enough to keep your mouth shut, I guess.”

“Polar Bears,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I think I know who you’re looking for.”

“Who I was looking for,” he said.

We were nearly at the heap of blankets, and I was aware of Lokken shooing Andy and Margaret Kastad away. They bustled off somewhere behind me, seemingly glad to leave.

“That was a man he found in there,” Polar Bears said, and bent over like a man about to pick a coin off the sidewalk.

“A man?”

Wordlessly Polar Bears folded back the edge of the blanket.

I was looking at his face. Part of his hair was burned away and his cheek was bloody. His eyes were still open. I felt my knees try to vanish, and I remained standing up only by great effort. Polar Bears touched me across the line of my shoulder blades and I again felt his suppressed anger. It came out of him like the touch of a branding iron. I heard him say, “That’s your ticket out of here, Miles,” and glanced at his fire-reddened features and then back at Paul’s body.

“What’s that on the side of his head?” I asked, and heard my voice tremble. “It looks like he was clubbed.”

“Falling board.”

“They didn’t start to fall until I got here.”

“Then he fell down.”

I turned away.

“One more thing, Miles,” said Polar Bears beside me. He bent over again, flipped back the edge of blanket, straightened up, and used his foot to kick over another section of gray wool. “Look. Something else Andy pulled out.” He took my arm and revolved me like a toy. It took me a moment to recognize what lay exposed beside the kicked-back gray blanket, because the metal had been blackened by the fire. It was the second -gallon gascan from the garage beside the farmhouse.

“How he started the fire,” said Polar Bears. “Plain as day.”

“What is? That gascan’s from my home.”

“Sure it is. He snuck out, stole that can of gas, came back here, spilled it around and set it alight. He might as well have confessed. He couldn’t take it any more.”

“No, no, no,” I said, “Polar Bears, he was at my place earlier. He was trying to escape before that gang of thugs beat him up or killed him. He wasn’t guilty, he didn’t have anything to confess.”

“Give it up, Miles,” Hovre said. “You already told me you hadn’t seen him. It’s too late to lie about it.”

“I’m not lying now.”

“You were before, but you’re not now.” His voice was toneless and disbelieving.

“He left my house a little after three. Somebody must have been following him all the time. Somebody killed him. That’s what he was afraid of. That’s why he ran. I even heard the car.” My voice was rising.

Polar Bears scuffled a few paces away. I saw that he was struggling to keep himself under control. “Now, Miles,” he said, turning around to face me again, “it seems to me, just to get back to reality here, that the coroner might go one of two ways on this one. You listening? He might judge this as suicide or accidental death in the commission of a crime, depending on how much he wanted to protect the reputation of Paul Kant. Either way he’s got to weigh in the evidence of that gascan.”

“Those are the only two verdicts you think he might consider?”

“Yep.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“You won’t be able to do anything here, Miles. You better finish off that research of yours and get out.”

“Who’s the coroner here?”

Polar Bears gave me a flat angry triumphant glare. “I am.”

I could only stare at him.

“In a county of this size, it didn’t make much sense to have two men both drawing public salaries.”

I turned wordlessly to look at the fire. It was much lower now and the doorframe and all of the roof had collapsed into the roaring heart of the building. My skin felt half-roasted, face and hands. My trousers were hot where they brushed my legs. I sensed the Kastads shying away from both me and the fire.

“He was at my house,” I said. I could not bear it any longer. I started to walk towards him. “He was at my house, and you raped my cousin. You and Duane. You killed her. Probably accidentally. But this makes two deaths you want to shovel dirt over. This time it won’t happen.”

His fury was more frightening than Duane’s because it was quieter. “Dave,” he said, looking over my shoulder.

“You can’t pin it all on an innocent man because he’s conveniently dead,” I said. “I know who it is.”

“Dave.” Lokken came up behind me. I could hear him walking over the gravel.

“It’s that boy Zack,” I said. “There’s one other possibility, but it’s too crazy… so it has to be Zack.” I heard Lokken whisper something in surprise behind me. “He had those Coke bottles in his truck, and a doorknob…”

“Do you know who Zachary is, Miles?” interrupted Polar Bears, his voice flat as a tombstone.

“He likes fires too, doesn’t he?” I said. “Duane said he liked them so much sometimes he didn’t wait for someone else to start them.”

Dave Lokken grabbed my arms. “Hold him, Dave,” said Polar Bears. “Hold him good.” He came up close to me, and Lokken pinned my arms back, holding me so tightly I could not move. “You know who Zachary is?”

“Now I do,” I tried to say.

“He’s my boy,” said Polar Bears. “My son. Now I’m going to teach you when to shut up.”

In the second before he hit me I saw his face irradiated with rage and I had time to wonder if Duane would have told me the final detail if he had not cut his hand. Then I couldn’t think about anything but the pain. Afterwards he told Lokken to let me fall, and I toppled over onto the gravel. I could not breathe. I heard him say, “Lokken, get your fat ass out of here fast,” and I opened my eyes and saw his shoes. One of his toecaps lifted and came down on my face. I could hear Lokken running off. Polar Bears’ odor poured over me. The foot lifted from my face. his voice came straight into my ear. “You would have been a lot better off if you hadn’t never come here, Miles. And I think you better act like you know it.” I could hear him breathing hard. Wild Turkey mingled with the smell of gunpowder. “Miles, goddamn you, if you say one more word about those goddamned Coke bottles or goddamned doorknobs I’ll break you in half.” his breathing became ragged and harsh, and his belly strained out against his belt with the force of it. “And your cousin died twenty years ago, Miles. You say one more word about her and you’re through. Now remember this and remember it good. Whoever it was that was there when your cousin died saved your life by dragging you up onto the shelf. Maybe they wouldn’t repeat the favor. Maybe they’d just drop you back in the water.” Then he grunted, standing up, and was gone. I closed my eyes. I could hear tires spraying gravel.

When I opened my eyes again I touched my face. I felt slick blood. Then I sat up. I was alone. Duane’s Dream House was only a burning jumble of boards emitting a plume of dark smoke. Paul’s body was gone, and so was the heap of blankets. I was absolutely alone, lying on the white gravel beside a dying fire.

Ten __________

The final stage began.

When I reached home, I washed the blood from my face and went upstairs to bed and stayed there thirty-six hours. I was without friends — Paul was dead, Duane hated me, and Polar Bears had revealed himself as an enemy too complex to see clearly. I felt his touch burning me like a branding iron, and that touch was worse than his blows. My only protection was Rinn, a woman more than ninety years old. Yet if Polar Bears and Arden in general had absolved me of suspicion, why did I need protection? From Zack? I had done my worst there. I rolled under the damp sheets, groaning. I felt great dread.

I know that I waited, hearing nothing but the sound of my own voice saying to Polar Bears over the body of Paul Kant that there was another possibility, but it was too crazy, and knowing that it was there that my real dread originated… and lay rigid with tension. But nothing happened. There is no other possibility, I told myself. Gradually I calmed, eventually I went back to sleep.

I woke, aware of the smell of cold water inundating the room. “Alison,” I said.

A hand touched my shoulder. This happened. I rolled over and reached out and touched — I touched the body of a girl. A slight cold body, much colder than my hands. I was in that condition of only partial wakefulness when reality is at its most tenuous. I was conscious only of having been forgiven, and of her presence. My hands went, on their own impulse, to her face and felt what I could not see, the taut cheekbones bracketing that wild contradictory magical face, then her smooth hair. I felt her smile loosing itself under my palm, and there was no doubt that it was the smile of Alison Greening. A great general feeling of blessedness suffused my entire body. I touched her slim legs, embraced her lithe waist, cradled my head in the dip of flesh at the base of her neck. I have never felt such joy.

Actually, I have felt precisely that joy, and for the same reason: during the years of our marriage, I would at times come groggily half-awake and brush against Joan and think Alison, and embrace her, feeling in her longer taller body as we made love the lineaments of the dead girl I needed. At such moments, I experienced the same numb ecstasy, the same blessing; but on this night, the sensations were even more particularized, and as I embraced her shoulders and entered her, the small hands on my back and the slender body beneath mine were undoubtedly Alison’s. Everything else vanished, all the wretchedness of the past week. If we had been on a battlefield I would not have noticed the gunfire and exploding shells.

As her body warmed, the strangeness began. It was not that her body changed — it was not as crude as that — but that it seemed at times during the night double-exposed, shifting imperceptibly in shape so that in one half of a second it was that body I had seen flashing in the water and in the other half it was fuller, so that a leg drawn up against my flank seemed to increase in weight, to press with greater urgency. The breasts against my chest were small, then heavy, then small; the waist, slim, then sturdy; but it is more accurate to say that both were present at once and when I was aware of this double-exposure I dully imagined it as a flickering between the two halves of a second.

Once, for only a moment that was submerged deep into an onrushing succession of longer moments — a moment like the smaller fraction concealed within a fraction — my hands seemed to touch something besides flesh.

Hours later I opened my eyes and saw young skin beneath me, a curve of flesh which resolved itself into a shoulder. Hands were kneading my back, a round knee lifted between my legs. The bed was a lath of odors. Sexual perfume, that raw, pungent odor, talcum powder, young skin, newly-washed hair. And the smell of blood. I jerked my head up and saw that the girl beneath me, even now sliding her hand to excite me once again, was Alison Updahl.

I scrambled off. “You.”

“Mnnn.” She crept forward into me. Her eyes were flat and pale as ever, but her face was soft.

“How long have you been here?”

She laughed. “I wanted to surprise you. But last night you didn’t even act surprised. Just starved. You really make a girl feel welcome.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since about one last night. Your face is all cut up where Mr. Hovre hit you. You know that dumb deputy he has, Dave Lokken? He’s been telling everybody. About two days ago. About how Mr. Hovre hit you. How it was Paul Kant all along. So I thought I’d help you celebrate. Even though you tried to make him think it was Zack. But that was just stupid.”

“I want you to leave.”

“Oh, it’s okay. I mean, he won’t know anything about it. It’s Thursday morning, and on Thursday mornings he always goes over to the Co-op. He doesn’t even know I’m out of the house.”

I looked at her carefully. She seemed to be entirely comfortable, unaware of any oddity.

“You were here all night?”

“Huh? Sure I was.”

“You didn’t feel anything strange?”

“Only you.” She giggled, and put an arm around my neck. “You’re pretty strange. You shouldn’t have said that about Zack to Mr. Hovre. Zack really likes you. He even read some of those books you gave him, like he told you. He usually only reads books about crime, you know, murder and stuff. Did you say it because of out at the quarry? What we did? We were just fooling around. You were cute then. Even after, when you were mad, you were looking at me — you know. ‘Course I didn’t have any clothes on. Like now.”

She grimaced, apparently having scratched herself on something in the bed, and brushed off her hip with her hand; the gesture uncovered all of her compact upper body, and I felt an involuntary flame of sexual interest — the Woodsman was right. I had been starved. I still felt as though I had not made love in months. I reached over and cupped one of her breasts. The smell of blood began to pour outward again. My only excuse is that we were in bed together, and that she was being deliberately seductive. It was an experience entirely different from that of the night before. Her body was altogether foreign to me, our rhythms did not match, and I kept being thrown out of stride by sudden charges and spasms from her. Eventually I rolled over and let her direct things, as she evidently wished to do. It was an awkward performance, I suppose unhelped by my doubts about my own sanity. I had been so certain that my partner had been my cousin; when I tried to recall the “double exposure” sensation, it seemed very vague. But one thing was certain — Alison Updahl was a sexual stranger to me, less melodic with her body.

When it was over, she sat up in the bed. “Well. Your heart wasn’t in that one.”

“Alison,” I said, having to ask it, “did Zack do those things — the killings? Because Paul Kant didn’t, in spite of what Polar Bears thinks.”

Her tenderness had vanished before I had finished speaking. She swiveled her legs over the side of the bed, making it impossible for me to see her face. I thought that her shoulders were trembling. “Zack only talks about stuff, he never does it” She lifted her head. “Hey, what do you have in this bed anyhow, I was scratching myself on it all morning.” She stood up, turned to face me, and threw back the sheet. On the bottom sheet lay a scattering of thin brown twigs — I about enough to cover the palm of a hand. “Time you changed your sheets,” she said, in control of herself again. “They’re starting to sprout.”

I looked with a dry throat at the small things beside me on the rumpled sheet. She turned away.

“Alison,” I said, “answer something for me.”

“I don’t want to talk about those things.”

“No. Listen. Did you and Zack request a song on the radio about two weeks ago? From A and Z, for all the lost ones?”

“Yes. But I said I can’t talk about that — please, Miles.”

Of course Alison had no notion of what those finger-like twigs meant to me, and when I got hurriedly out of bed she at first ignored me as she dressed. “Not, exactly chatty, are you? Except for stupid questions,” I she said, yanking a T shirt over her head. “Not exactly big on smalltalk, hey Miles?” She squirmed into her jeans. “You just like to ruin things. Well, you don’t have to worry. I won’t invade your privacy any more.” Then, when I did not protest, she looked at me more closely. “Hey Miles, what is going on? You looked just as spooked as you did that first day you came back.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “I have the same reason. For your own good, you’d better leave.”

“For my own good? Jesus, are you ever a case.”

“No doubt,” I said, and she stamped her feet into clogs and clattered down the stairs without saying goodbye.

Other explanations — there had to be other explanations. I had picked up the twigs on my clothing as I had walked into the woods, or simply while walking around the farm. Or they had adhered to my clothing when Polar Bears had permitted Dave Lokken to let me fall. I stood up and brushed them from the sheets. Eventually I straightened the bed, dressed, went into my office and took a pencil and some sheets of paper downstairs to try to work at the kitchen table. Tuta Sunderson showed up not long after, and I asked her to change the sheets.

“Heard you was over at Andy’s the other morning,” she announced, hands on hips. “Lot went on there, I guess.”

“Um,” I said.

“You’ll be grateful for some of it, I guess.”

“Nothing like a good beating.”

“Red says that Paul Kant should have been run off a long time ago.”

“That sounds like good old Red.”

“I think he killed himself. That boy Paul was always a weak one.”

“Yes, that’s one of your favorite theories, isn’t it?”

Half a dozen times that day I nearly left, got into the car and took off for someplace — it did not matter where. But I still did not have my car and I still thought there might be other explanations than the one which had leaked into my consciousness on the night when I had looked through the window of my room and seen that slight figure blasting cold jealous energy at me from the edge of the woods. That was when the conscious fear had started.

And it remained, refusing to be salved by theories. It followed me downstairs and upstairs, it was with me while I bolted my food, and when I sat and wrote, it stood behind me, sending its chill straight through my clothing.

She is your snare, Aunt Rinn had said. All of my life had demonstrated the truth of that statement.

Which put me where I had started, with the overwhelming memory of the terror I had felt, that night in the woods. I tried to reconstruct those moments. Later, I had explained it to myself as a fantasy cooked up out of literature, but at the time — that was important, at the time I had sensed nothing literary but instead the pure and overwhelmingly terror of evil. Evil is what we call the force we can discover where we send our minds as far as they can go: when the mind crumbles before something bigger, harder than itself, unknowable and hostile. Had I not courted that evil, by willing my cousin back into life? She did not promise comfort, I knew, thinking again of the figure at the edge of the fields; she did not promise anything I could comprehend.

I still could not admit to myself what I had begun to imagine. That night, the night which changed everything, began calmly enough, in the manner of most of my evenings. I had half-heartedly munched an assortment of things in the kitchen — nuts, a couple of limp carrots, some cheese — and then wandered outside onto the lawn. The night was warm and full of the scents of hay and mown grass, and I could hear crickets chirruping and invisible birds lifting off the walnut trees. I rubbed my face and went down to the road. I could not see the woods, but I knew they were there. From the center of the warm night, an icicle of cold reached out to touch my face. Now that the inhabitants of Arden and the valley had decided that I was innocent of the girls’ deaths, I felt more watched, more under observation, than ever before.

I thought of the twigs in my bed, and went back up the drive.

I pulled my chair up to the desk. Mechanically, I began to resume writing. After some minutes I became aware of an intensification of the atmosphere: the air in the room seemed charged, crowded with unseen activity. The overhead light appeared to waver, darkening my shadow on the page before me. I blinked and sat up straight. I could smell cold water all about me.

A palm of cold wind struck the pencil from my hand, an elbow of wind cut into my body.

The light darkened as my shadow had, and I was immediately aware of Alison’s presence fighting to enter me. My face and hands were icy. I tipped backwards in my chair, windmilling my arms. She was coming in through nose and eyes and mouth; I screamed with terror. A stack of paper shot up into the air and fragmented. I felt my mind become elastic, skidding, stretching out of my control. She was within my mind, within my body: beneath my animal terror, I felt her hatred and jealousy. My feet kicked out at the desk, and the door racketed away from the trestles. The typewriter thudded to the ground. My head struck the wooden floor. When my right arm found a stack of books, they geysered up into the air. I felt her hatred on all my senses: the darkness, the burning cold of my mouth and fingertips, the flooding smell of water, a rushing noise, the taste of fire: in my mouth. It was punishment for the last sad copulation, that spiritless animal joining. She was boiling within me, and my arms thrashed and my back arched and slammed against the wood. I sent papers flying toward the window, toward the lightbulb. My body was sent rolling across the floor. Saliva, mucus, tears slid across my face. For an instant I was above my body, seeing it thrashing and writhing across the littered floor, watching my slimed face contort and my arms hurling books and papers, and then I was back in the boiling, thrashing mess, suffering like an animal in a fit. Her fingers seemed slipped into mine, her light, violent bones overlay mine.

My ears were pressed forward, fluid filled my nose, my chest burst.

When my eyes opened it was over. I heard myself panting, not screaming. I had not sensed her leaving, but she had left. I was looking at a quiet edge of the moon through the window above the toppled desk.

Then my stomach violently unlocked itself, and I barely made it downstairs in time. A bitter brown colloidal juice shot upwards into my mouth. At that moment I was seated on the toilet, feeling watery liquid expel itself from the other end of my body with an equal force, and I turned my head toward the sink, my eyes closed and a sickly perspiration blossoming on my face.

When I came limply out of the bathroom into the kitchen I had to support myself by leaning against the sink as I drank glass after glass of cold water. Cold water. The smell pervaded the house.

She wanted me dead. She wanted me with her. On that night which seemed a century ago, Rinn had warned me. She means death.

And the other things — the girls’ deaths? I looked that dread in the face, fully, for the first time. I sat in the room I had labored to prepare for her and numbly tried to accept what I had refused to think about before: the other possibility I had mentioned to Polar Bears. I had awakened Alison’s spirit, that terrible force I had felt in the woods, and I knew now that spirit was rancid with jealousy of life. On the twenty-first she would appear — and would have anyhow, I now saw, even if I had not worked at reconstructing the old interior of the farmhouse — but as the date drew nearer, she was growing in strength. She could take life. That, she had been able to do from the day I had begun to draw near the valley.

I sat in the cold room, paralyzed straight down to the core. Alison. I thought: the twenty-first begins at midnight on the twentieth. One day away from the day just beginning to appear in stripes of dark purple over the woods blackening the hills.

As the morning drew closer I moved out onto the porch. The bands of purple increased in width; the wide fields, striped yellow and green, grew in visibility and detail. Fog lay upon them in trails of misty gray, wisps of cotton snagged in the corn.

Footsteps awoke me. My hands and feet were cold. The sky had become a flat uniform pale blue, and the mist was gone from everywhere but the very edges of the woods. It was going to be one of those days when the moon is visible all morning, hanging in blue sky like a white dead stone. Tuta Sunderson was coming heavily up the drive, trudging as though her shoes were encased in concrete. Her bag jigged at her side. When she saw me, her mouth clapped shut and her face hardened. I waited for her to open the screen door and come onto the porch.

“You don’t have to come here any more,” I said. “The job is over.”

“What do you mean?” I could see suspicion darken her goggling eyes.

“Your employment is terminated. I don’t need you any more. The job is finis. Kaput. Ended. Over. Finished. Done.”

“You been sitting here all night?” She crossed her arms over her chest, an operation requiring an impressive amount of effort. “Drinking gin?”

“Please go home, Mrs. Sunderson.”

“You afraid of my seeing something? Well, I’ve already seen it.”

“You haven’t seen anything.”

“You look kinda sick. What did you do, swallow a bottle of aspirin or something?”

“I don’t know how suicide ever got along without you.”

“By rights I should get the whole week’s wages.”

“Indeed you should. In fact you should get two weeks’ wages. Forgive me. Please take fourteen dollars.” I reached in my pocket, drew out bills, counted out two fives and four ones and handed them to her.

“One week’s, I told you. That’s five dollars. You’re paying for today, Friday and Saturday besides the three days I worked.” She took one of the fives and cropped the rest of the money beside me on the porch swing.

“Splendid. Please go and leave me alone. I realize that I’ve been awful to you. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.”

“I know what you’re doing,” she said. “You’re as filthy as any beast of the field.”

“That was eloquent.” I closed my eyes. After a while the noise of her breathing changed, and I could hear her turning around. I was getting better. Now I could smell anger. Thank you, Allison. The screen door banged shut, I kept my eyes closed as I heard her walking down the drive.

Who slept together?

One crushed an anthill.

One broke a chair.

One was afraid.

One swam in blood.

One had cold hands.

One had the last word.

When I opened my eyes she was gone. A dusty brown Ford, the mailman’s car, came up the road and passed the impaled metal receptacle without braking. No more fan mail, no more letters from my cousin. Yes. It made sense. Her body — her skeleton, after twenty years — was in a graveyard in Los Angeles, beneath a headstone I had never seen. So she had to put herself together out of the available materials. Or be just a wind, the cold breath of spirit. Leaves, gravel, thorns. Thorns for tearing.

I stood up and went down from the porch. I said in my mind: thorns for tearing. I felt as though I were walking in my sleep. The door on the driver’s side of the Nash had slipped out of alignment, and it dipped when I opened it, creaking loudly in a voice like rust.

For a moment I could not remember where I was going, and simply put-putted up the roads going slowly and serenely as Duane on the big tractor. Then I remembered. The last, the only help. I depressed the accelerator, made the car rattle, picked up speed as I went past the Sunderson house. Mrs. Sunderson was at one of the windows, watching me go by. Then the shell of the school, the church, the tight curve at the sandstone bluff. I passed Andy’s, and saw him pumping gas. his face was like clotted milk. Behind him was a large black area of dead land. his clotted-milk face swung around, tracking me as I passed.

When I came to the narrow path going up between the fields to the trees I swung hard on the wheel again and began to bounce along, going in the direction of the sun. A few ears of corn in the row nearest the road had been struck down, broken off at the stalk, and they lay flattened and sprawling at the field’s edge. Here and there, whole rows had been trampled down; stick-leg cornstalks tilted crazily. Soon I reached the first of the trees, and then the fields vanished behind me and I was threading between big oaks. The narrow early sunlight filtered by the boughs and leaves came down in ribbons. I parked on the slope beside the tall red henhouse. When I got out of the car I could hear the gabbling of the birds. A few terrified hens ran away into the woods, lurching from side to side.

I looked in the henhouse first. I pulled open the doors and stepped inside, hit once again by the stench. It seemed even stronger than on the day when I had clumsily helped her cull the eggs. Two or three birds flapped their wings, high up on their nests, Beaked heads swiveled, button eyes stared fixedly. Slowly, I backed out, the fixed eyes glaring at me from the sides of their old men’s heads. I closed the door as gently as she had taught me.

Two chickens were roosting on the hood of the Nash. I went up the path toward her house. Here the sunlight was blocked from entering directly, and there was only a golden hovering rustle overhead, where the leaves formed another sky. The little house seemed dark and empty.

One had cold hands.

One had the last word.

On a counter in the kitchen stood a plate stacked with something wrapped in a red and white gingham cloth. I touched the cloth. It was dry. I folded it back, and saw mold sprinkled green on the surface of the top piece of lefsa.

She was in the bedroom, lying in the middle of the double bed. A yellowed sheet, a patchwork quilt, covered her. My nostrils caught an odor like a deep bass chord. I knew she was dead before I touched her and felt the stiffness of her fingers. The white hair was spread thickly on the embroidered pillow case. Two, three days dead, I thought. She might have died while Paul Kant’s body was being dragged from the flames of the Dream House, or while I was fitting my body within a ghost’s, I put down her stiff hand and went back into the dark kitchen to telephone the Arden police.

“Uh, goddam,” said Dave Lokken after I had spoken two sentences of explanation. “You’re there now? With her?”

“Yes.”

“You say you found her?”

“Yes.”

“Any, uh, marks on her? Any signs of, uh, assault? Any indication of cause of death?”

“She was about ninety-four years old,” I said. “I suppose that’ll do for cause of death.”

“Well goddam. Goddam. You say you just found her now? What the hell were you doing up there anyways?”

For the last protection. “She was my grandmother’s sister,” I said.

“Uh, family reasons,” he said, and I knew he was writing it down. “So you’re up there in those woods now? That’s where her farm is, right?”

“That’s where I am.”

“Well, goddam.” I couldn’t figure out why he was so agitated by my information. “Look. Teagarden, you don’t budge. Just stay there until I can get out there with an ambulance. Don’t touch anything.”

“I want to talk to Polar Bears,” I said.

“Well, you can’t. You get that? The Chief ain’t here now. But don’t worry, Teagarden, you’ll be talkin’ to the Chief soon enough.” He hung up without saying goodby.

Lokken had been like a being from another, more furious world, and I went back into Rinn’s bedroom and sat beside her on the bed. I realized that I was still moving with the numbness which had settled on me during my almost sleepless night in the living room I had prepared for Alison Greening, and I nearly stretched out on the bed beside Rinn’s body. Her face seemed smoother in death, less Chinese and wrinkled. I was conscious of the bones pushing through the skin of her face. I touched her cheek and then tried to pull the sheet and quilt up over her head. They were pinned beneath her arms; and I remembered Lokken’s telling me not to touch anything.

It was over an hour before I heard vehicles coming up the drive from the valley road, and went onto her porch to see a police car drawing up alongside the Nash, followed by an ambulance.

Chubby Dave Lokken bounced out of the police car and waved angrily at the two men in the ambulance. They got out and crossed their arms and leaned against the side of the ambulance. One of them was smoking, and the leafage of smoke from his cigarette wound up to the dense covering of trees. “You, Teagarden,” Lokken shouted, and I turned my head to look at him. For the first time I saw the rumpled-looking man wearing a suit who stood beside the deputy. He had a Marine crewcut and wore thick glasses. “Teagarden, get the hell out here!” Lokken shouted. The man beside him sighed and rubbed his face, and I saw the black bag in his hands.

I came down from the porch. Lokken was nearly hopping with rage and impatience. I could see his breasts bulging in his uniform shirt. “All right. What’s your story, Teagarden?”

“What I told you.”

“Is she in the house?” asked the doctor. He looked very tired, and as though Dave Lokken had begun to wear on him.

I nodded, and the doctor began to move up this path.

“Hold on. I got a few questions first. You say you found her. Is that right?”

“That’s what I said and that’s right.”

“You got a witness?”

One of the ambulance men snickered, and Lokken’s face began to flush. “Well?”

“No. No witnesses.”

“You say you just came here this morning?”

I nodded.

“What time?”

“Just before I called you.”

“I suppose she was dead when you got here?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you coming from?” He put great weight on the question.

“The Updahl farm.”

“Anybody see you there? Wait up, doc. I wanta finish here before we go in. Well?”

“Tuta Sunderson saw me. I fired her this morning.”

Lokken seemed puzzled and angered by this detail, but he decided to ignore it. “You touch the old woman in any way?”

I nodded. The doctor looked at me for the first time.

“You did, huh? You touched her? How?”

“I held her hand.”

His color darkened, and the ambulance man snickered again.

“What made you decide to come up here this morning anyhow?”

“I wanted to see her.”

“Just wanted to see her.” his flabby incompetent face shouted that he would love to swing at me.

“I’ve had a rough morning,” said the doctor. “Dave, let’s get this over with so I can get back and write my reports.”

“Uh huh,” said Lokken, violently nodding his; head. “Teagarden, this here honeymoon of yours might come to a sudden end.”

The doctor looked at me with an almost professional curiosity, and then he and Lokken went marching up to the house.

I watched them go, and then looked at the ambulance men. They were both concentrating on the ground. One glanced at me and then snatched his cigarette from his mouth and scowled at it as if he were thinking of changing brands. After a moment I went back inside the house.

“Natural causes,” the doctor was saying. “Looks like no problems with this one. She just ran out of life.”

Lokken nodded, writing on a pad, and then looked up and noticed me. “Hey! Get out of here, Teagarden. You ain’t even supposed to be in here!”

I went out onto the porch. A minute later, Lokken bustled past me to wave in the ambulance men, who disappeared behind for a second and then reappeared carrying a stretcher. I followed them into the house, but did not go as far as the bedroom. They needed no more than seconds to place Rinn on the stretcher. The sheets and quilt had been replaced by a white blanket, pulled up over her face.

As we stood watching them carrying her down to the ambulance, Lokken was a symphony of small movements: he tapped a foot, burled a shoe on his trouser leg, patted his fat thigh with his fingertips, adjusted his holster. I understood that all this expressed his reluctance to stand so near me. When the doctor came out saying, “Let’s shake it, I got four hours’ work on the other one,” Lokken turned to me and said, “Okay, Teagarden. But we got people who will say they saw you going up into those woods. Don’t you go anywhere but back home. Got me!? Hey, Professor? You got me?”

All of which was explained by a visit I received later that day. I had been picking up the papers in my office, just gathering them up by the armful and dropping them into bushel baskets. The typewriter was useless now; the carriage had been bent so that the roller would not advance, and I threw the machine into the root cellar.

When I heard a car driving up toward the house I looked out the window: the car had already drawn up too close to the house to be visible. I waited for a knock but none came. I went downstairs and saw a police car drawn right up before the porch. Polar Bears was sitting on the near front fender, wiping his forehead with a big speckled handkerchief.

He saw me come out onto the porch, put his hand down, and shifted his body slightly so that he was facing me. “Step outside, Miles,” he said.

I stood right in front of the screen door with my hands in my pockets.

“Sorry about old Rinn,” he said. “I suppose I should apologize about Dave Lokken, too. Dr. Hampton, the county M.E., says my deputy was a little rough with you.”

“Not by your standards. He was just stupid and pompous.”

“Well, he’s no mental giant,” Polar Bears said. There was a quiet watchful quality — a restraint — to his manner which I had not seen before. We stayed where we were and regarded each other for a bit before he spoke again. I didn’t give a damn for him or anything he said. “Thought you’d like to know. The M.E. says she died forty-eight, maybe sixty hours ago. The way he puts it together, she probably knew it was happening and just got into bed and died. Heart attack. Nice and simple.”

“Does Duane know?”

“Yep. He got her transferred to the funeral parlor this afternoon. She’ll be buried day after tomorrow.” his big head was tilting, looking at me with squinting eyes. Beside him, his hat pointed toward me so that I could see light reflected from the star-shield pinned to the crown.

“Well, thanks,” I said, and moved to go back inside.

“One more thing.”

I stopped. “Yes?”

“I oughta explain to you why Dave Lokken was acting sorta extra uptight.”

“I’m not interested,” I said.

“Oh, you’re interested, Miles. See, we found that Michalski girl this morning.” He sent me one of his low heavy smiles. “Funny sort of coincidence there. She was dead, naturally. But I don’t expect that’s a surprise.”

“No. Nor to you.” I felt the dread again, and leaned against the screen door.

“Nope. I expected it. The thing is, Miles, she was right up there in those woods — not three hundred yards from Rinn’s little cabin. We started workin’ our way in from 93—” pointing with one arm — “and we just pored through them woods, see, lookin’ at every little twig, and this morning we found her buried under loose dirt in a sort of clearing up there.”

I swallowed.

“You know that clearing, Miles?”

“I might.”

“Uh huh. Real good. That’s why old Dave was sorta salty with you — you were up there with one body, and we found another one so close you could spit that far. It’s just a little natural clearing, got some campfire remains in the middle of it. Been used pretty regular, by the look of it.”

I nodded. I kept my hands in my pockets.

“Could be you used to go up there. Now that don’t make any difference but for one fact. Oh, and Miles, she was worse than the other two. Her feet were burned. Come to think of it, her hair was burned too. And, let me see. Oh yeah. She was sorta kept there. This friend of ours, he tied her to a tree or something and — I’m only guessing — -went up at night to work on her. For more than a week.”

I thought of the slight figure drawing me up toward the clearing, and of how I had taken the warm ashes as a sign of her healing presence.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any idea about who’d do a thing like that, would you?”

I was going to say yes, but instead said, “You think it was Paul Kant?”

Polar Bears nodded like a proud schoolmaster. “Real good. Real good. See, that brings up the little fact I mentioned before. What do we need to know?”

“How long she’s been dead.”

“Miles, you shoulda been a cop. See, we don’t think she died of — our friend’s little experiments. She was strangled. Big fucking bruises on her throat. Now our friend Dr. Hampton isn’t sure yet when that might have happened. But suppose it happened after Paul Kant killed himself?”

I said, “It’s not me, Polar Bears.”

He just sat there blinking, feigning polite attention. When I said no more, he folded his hands into his lap. “Now, we both know who it isn’t, don’t we, Miles? I had a talk with your prime suspect yesterday. He told me that those Coke bottles came from Duane’s cellar, where you could get at ‘em pretty easy, and he says you threw out that doorknob yourself. They were Duane’s. Says he doesn’t know how they got in his truck. And I know he hasn’t been up in the woods at night, because he confessed to me what he’s been doing with his nights.” He smiled again. “He and Duane’s girl used to go down to that shack behind Andy’s. Do pokey-pokey all night. Paul Kant sort of ruined their fun.”

“Nobody living is the one you want,” I said.

He squinted up his entire face, then let out a disgusted grunt and put his hat back on his head. “Miles, if you go crazy on me you’re gonna ruin all the fun.” On went his sunglasses. He pushed himself off the fender. He looked like something you’d run from on a dark night. “Why don’t you take a little trip with me?”

“A trip?”

“A little jaunt. I want to show you something. Get into my car.”

I just looked at him, trying to figure it out.

“Get your ass in the car, Miles.”

I did as I was told.

He spun the squadcar out onto the highway without speaking to me, his face a tight mask of distaste. All of those unhappy odors began to build up. We went toward Arden at a good twenty miles over the speed limit.

“You’re taking me to her parents,” I said.

He did not reply.

“You finally decided to arrest me.”

“Shut up,” he said.

But we did not stop at the police station. Polar Bears zoomed straight through Arden, and we picked up more speed as we left town. Restaurants, the bowling alley, fields. The farms and the corn took over again. Now we were in the same country he had driven me through before, the afternoon I had talked to Paul Kant: wide fields green and yellow, and the Blundell River shining through a screen of trees. Eventually Polar Bears took off his hat and sailed it onto the back seat. He ran a palm over his forehead. “Too damn hot,” he said.

“I still don’t get it. If you were going to work me over you could have done it miles back.”

“I don’t want to hear your voice,” he said. Then he glanced over at me. “Do you know what’s in Blundell?”

I shook my head.

“Well, you’re gonna find out.”

Exhausted-looking cows swung their heads to watch us pass.

“The state hospital?”

“Yeah, that’s there.” He would say no more.

Hovre hit the accelerator even harder, and we sped past the sign at the Blundell town limits. It was a town much like Arden, one main street lined with stores, wooden houses with porches on a small grid of streets. Lightbulbs on a string and a row of banners hung before a used-car lot, the banners too limp to flap. A few men in straw hats and working clothes squatted on the curb.

Polar Bears took the first road out of town, and then guided the patrol car into what looked like a park. The road turned narrow. It was edged with a long green lawn. “State hospital grounds,” he said noncomittaly. “But you and me ain’t going there.”

I could see the big gray buildings of the hospital complex appearing through the trees to my left. They had a Martian remoteness. Sun umbrellas dotted the lawn, but no one sat beneath them.

“I’m gonna do you a real favor,” he said. “Most tourists never get to see this feature of our county.”

The road divided, and Polar Bears turned into the left fork, which soon ended in a gray parking lot before a low gray building like an ice cube. Shrubs around the sides of the cube struggled in the hard clay. I realized where I was a half second before I saw the metal plate staked into the ground in the midst of the shrubs.

“Welcome to the Furniveau County Morgue,” Polar Bears said, and got out of the car. He went across; the tacky asphalt of the lot without looking back at me.

I reached the door just as it closed behind him. I pushed it open and stepped into a cold white interior. Machinery hummed behind the walls.

“This here’s my assistant,” Polar Bears was saying. I realized after a moment that he meant me. He had his sunglasses off, and he rested his hands on his hips. In the antiseptic cold interior of the morgue, he smelled like a buffalo. A short dark-complected man in a spotted white coat sat at a battered desk in an alcove and incuriously looked at him. The desk was bare except for a portable radio and an ashtray. “I want him to have a look at the new one.”

The man glanced at me. It didn’t make any difference to him. Nothing made any difference to him.

“Which new one?”

“Michalski.”

“Uh huh. She’s back from the autopsy. Didn’t know you had any new deputies.”

“He’s a volunteer,” said Polar Bears.

“Well, what the hell,” the man said, and pushed himself away from the desk. He went through green metal doors at the end of the hall. “After you,” said Polar Bears, waving me through.

It was useless to protest. I followed the attendant down a cold row of metal lockers. Hovre followed, so close that he nearly walked on my heels.

“You braced for this?” he asked me.

“I don’t see the point,” I said.

“You pretty soon will.”

The dark-complected man stopped before one of the lockers, took a ring of keys from his pocket, and unlocked the door.

“Belly up,” said Polar Bears.

The little man pulled the long tray out of the locker. A dead naked girl was lying on the slab. I had thought they covered them with sheets. “God,” I said, seeing her wounds and the scars from the autopsy.

Polar Bears was waiting, very still. I looked at the girl’s face. Then I began to perspire in the icy room.

Polar Bears’ voice came: “She remind you of anybody?”

I tried to swallow. It was more than enough proof, if I needed any more proof. “Did the first two look more or less the same?”

“Pretty close,” said Polar Bears. “That Strand girl was as close as a sister might be.”

I remembered the violence of the hatred I had felt when she had seemed to storm inside me. She had come back all right, and she had killed three girls who had an accidental resemblance to her. I would be next.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” said Hovre. “Close ‘er up, Archy.”

The dark little man, who had been standing with his arms braced against the front of the locker as if asleep on his feet, pushed the tray back into the locker.

“Now let’s go back to the car,” said Polar Bears.

I followed him out into the blast of heat and sunlight. He drove me back to the Updahl farm without saying a word.

After he turned up the drive he cut the patrol car onto the lawn before the porch and got out as I did. He came toward me, a big intimidating physical presence. “Suppose we just agree to stay put until I get the final word from the M.E.”

“Why don’t you put me in jail?”

“Why, Miles, you’re my assistant on this case,” he said, and got back into his car. “In the meantime, get some sleep. You look like hell.” As he twirled the car into the drive, I saw the grim, entirely satisfied smile on his lips.

I woke up late in the night. Alison Greening was seated on the chair at the foot of the bed. I could just distinguish her face and the shape of her body in the moonlight. I feared — I do not know what I feared, but I feared for my life. She did nothing. I sat up in the bed: I felt terribly naked and unprotected. She seemed utterly normal; she looked like an ordinary young woman. She was looking straight at me, her expression placid and unemotional, abstracted. For a moment I thought that she looked too ordinary to have caused all the upheavals in me and in Arden. Her face was waxen. Then my fear came booming back into me, and I opened my mouth to say something. Before I could form words, she was gone.

I got out of bed, touched the chair, and went across the top of the house to my office. Papers still lay on the floor, papers spilled out of bushel baskets. She was not there.

In the morning I gulped down a half-pint of milk, thought with distaste of food, and knew that I had to get away. Rinn had been right, all that time ago. I had to leave the valley. The sight of her calmly, emotionlessly sitting on the chair at the foot of the bed, her blank face washed in moonlight, was more frightening than the frantic assault on my room. I could see that face, drained by the pale light, and it held no feeling I recognized; the complications of emotion had been erased. There was no more life in it than there was in a mask. I set down the bottle, checked my pockets for money and keys, and went outside into the sunlight. Dew lay shining on the grass.

Highway 93 to Liberty, I thought, then down to where I could pick up the freeway to La Crosse, and then I’d cross the river and head for a small town where I would leave the Nash and telegraph the New York Chemical for money and buy a second-hand car and go to Colorado or Wyoming, where I knew nobody. I backed out into the valley road and picked up speed, heading for the highway.

When I checked the rearview mirror as I passed the church, I saw another car keeping pace with me. I accelerated, and it kept the distance between us steady. It was like the prelude to that awful night when I had lost her, the night when we had made the vow. As the other car picked up speed and came closer, I saw black and white and knew that it was a police car. If it’s Polar Bears, I thought, I’ll attack him with my bare hands. I pushed the accelerator to the floor, and yanked at the wheel as I went around the curve by the sandstone bluff. The Nash began to vibrate. The patrol car pulled up easily and began to nose in before me, forcing me to the side of the road. I spun into Andy’s and went around the gaspumps. The patrol car anticipated me and moved ahead to block my exit. I looked around, considering backing up and swinging around into the side parking lot, but his car would have caught the old Nash in thirty seconds. I turned off the ignition.

I got out of the car and stood up. The man behind the wheel of the patrol car opened his door and rose up into the sunshine. It was Dave Lokken. Walking toward me, he kept his right hand on his holster.

“Nice little race.” He was imitating Polar Bears, even in his slow walk. “Where do you think you were going?”

I slumped against the hot metal of the Nash. “Shopping.”

“You wasn’t thinking about leaving, I hope. Because that’s why I been sittin’ out near your place for two days, to make sure you don’t even think about it.”

“You were watching me?”

“For your own good,” he said, grinning. “The Chief says you need a lot of help. I’m gonna help you stick around where we can keep an eye on you. The medical examiner is supposed to call the Chief real soon now.”

“I’m not the one you’re looking for,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth.”

“I guess you’re gonna tell me it was Chief Havre’s boy Zack. I heard you say that a couple of nights back. You might just as well of put a gun to your head. His boy is all the family the Chief’s got. Now get back and get home.”

I remembered the pale mask looking at me from the foot of the bed; and then I looked up toward the windows of Andy’s store. Andy and his wife were standing up there looking down at us, one face showing horror, the other contempt.

“Come on and help me get my car back,” I said and turned my back on him.

After a couple of steps I stopped walking. “What would you say if I told you your Chief raped and killed a girl?” I asked. “Twenty years ago.”

“I’d say you was lookin’ to get your head blown off. Just like you been doin’ since you got here.”

“What would you say if I told you that the girl he raped—” I turned back around, looked at his angry yokel’s face and gave up. He smelled like burning rubber. “I’m going into Arden,” I said. “Tag along.”

I saw him driving along behind me all the way to Arden, at times speaking into his radio microphone, and when I haggled with the boy Hank Speltz, he stayed in the car and parked across the street from the garage. The boy at first told me that the “repairs” to the VW would cost me five hundred dollars, and I refused to pay it. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his coveralls and looked at me with sullen hatred. I asked him what he had done. “Had to rebuild most of the motor. Patch what I couldn’t rebuild. Lots of stuff. New belts.”

“I imagine you’re being funny,” I said. “I don’t think you could rebuild a cigarette.”

“Pay up or no car. You want me to get the police?”

“I’ll give you fifty dollars and that’s it. You haven’t even shown me a worksheet.”

“Five hundred. We don’t use worksheets. People around here trust us.”

It was my day for being reckless. I went across the street and opened Lokken’s door and made him follow me back to the garage. Hank Speltz looked as though he regretted his remark about getting the police.

“Well,” Speltz said after I had forced Lokken to listen to an account of our interchange, “I was chargin’ you in advance for the body work.”

Lokken looked at him disgustedly.

“I’ll give you thirty bucks,” I said.

Speltz howled, “You said fifty!”

“I changed my mind.”

“Make out a bill for thirty,” said Lokken. The boy went inside to the garage’s office.

“It’s funny,” I told Lokken, “you can’t do any wrong in this country if you’ve got a cop beside you.”

Lokken waddled away without replying, and Speltz reappeared, grumbling that the new windows had cost more than thirty dollars.

“Now fill it up,” I said. “It’s on my credit card.”

“We don’t take out-of-state credit cards.”

“Deputy!” I yelled, and Lokken glowered at us from behind the wheel of his car.

“Shee-ut,” the boy said. When I pulled the battered car up to the pumps, he filled the tank and returned with the credit card apparatus.

Out on the street, Lokken pulled his car up beside mine and leaned toward me. “I had some news on my radio a while back. I probably won’t be watching you any more.” Then he reversed, turned around, and sped away down Main Street, going in the direction of the police headquarters.

I discovered what Hank Speltz had meant about rebuilding the engine when I pressed the accelerator going up the hill past the R-D-N motel. The car died, and I had to coast over to the curb and wait several minutes before it would start again. This was repeated when I went up the hill toward the Community Chest thermometer and the Italian distance, and again when I was coming down the last hill toward the highway. It cut out a fourth time when I pulled into the drive, and I let the car coast to a stop on the lawn.

Another police car was drawn up in my usual place before the garage. I saw the Chief’s star on the door.

I began to walk toward the figure sitting on the porch swing. “Everything work out okay at the filling station?” asked Polar Bears.

“What are you doing here?”

“Good question. Suppose you come inside and talk about it.” Part of the facade had been put aside: his voice was level and weary.

When I came up inside the porch I saw that Polar Bears was sitting beside a pile of my clothing. “That’s a brilliant idea,” I said. “Take away a man’s clothes and he can’t go anywhere. The riverbank school of detection.”

“I’ll get to the clothes in a minute. Sit down.” It was an order. I went to a chair at the end of the porch and sat facing him.

“The medical examiner phoned in his report a couple hours ago. He thinks the Michalski girl died on Thursday. Might have been as long as twenty-four hours after Paul Kant meatballed himself.”

“A day before you found her.”

“That’s right.” Now he was having difficulty concealing his anger. “We were a day late. We might not have found her at all if someone hadn’t decided to tell us that you liked to go up into those woods. Maybe Paul Kant would still be alive too if we’d been there earlier.”

“You mean maybe one of your vigilantes wouldn’t have killed him.”

“Okay.” He stood up and walked toward me, his feet making the boards squeak. “Okay, Miles. You’ve been having lots of fun. You’ve been making a lot of wild accusations. But the fun’s almost over. Why don’t you wrap it all up and give me a confession?” He smiled. “It’s my job, Miles. I’m being real nice and careful with you. I don’t want any sharp Jew lawyer from New York coming out here and saying I walked all over your rights.”

“I want you to put me in jail,” I said.

“I know you do. I told you that a long time ago. There’s only one little thing you gotta do before your conscience gets a nice rest.”

“I think—” I said, and my throat went as tight as Galen Havre’s face. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think Alison Greening killed those girls.”

His neck was swelling. “She wrote, I mean she sent, those blank letters. The one I showed you and the other one. I’ve seen her, Polar Bears. She’s back. The night she died we made a vow that we’d meet in 1975, and I came back here because of that, and… and she’s here. I’ve seen her. She wants to take me with her. She hates life. Rinn knew. She’d…”

I realized with shock that Polar Bears was enraged. In the next second, he moved with more rapidity than I would have thought possible in a man of his size, and kicked the chair out from under me. I went over sideways and rolled into the screen. He kicked out, and his shoe connected with my hip.

“You goddamned idiot,” he said. The smell of gunpowder poured over me. He kicked me in the pit of the stomach, and I jackknifed over. Splinters from the boards dug into my cheek. As on the night of Paul’s death, Polar Bears bent over me. “You think you’re gonna get out of this by playing crazy? I’ll tell you about your tramp cousin, Miles. Sure I was there, that night. We were both there. Duane and me. But Duane didn’t rape her. I did. Duane was too busy knockin’ you out.” I was struggling to breathe. “I hit her on the head just after Duane clubbed you with a rock. Then I had her. It was just what she wanted — she was only fighting because you were there.” He picked up my head by my hair and slammed it down onto the boards. “I didn’t even know she was out until it was all over. That little bitch was teasing me all summer, the little cunt. Maybe I even meant to kill her. I don’t even know any more. But I know that every time you said that little bitch’s name I could have killed you, Miles. You shouldn’t have gone messing around with what’s past, Miles.” He banged my head on the boards once again. “Shouldn’t have gone messing,” He took his hand off my head and inhaled noisily. “It’s no good your tryin’ to tell this to anybody, because nobody’ll believe you. You know that, don’t you?” I could hear his breathing. “Don’t you?” His hand came back and slammed my head down again. Then he said, “We’re moving inside. I don’t want anybody to see this.” He picked me up and dragged me inside and dropped me onto the floor. I felt a sharp, bursting pain in my nose and ears. I was still having trouble breathing.

“Arrest me,” I said, and heard my voice bubble. “She’ll kill me.” The weave of a hooked rug cushioned my cheek.

“You want things too easy, Miles.” I heard his feet moving on the floor, and tensed for another kick. Then I heard him going into the kitchen. Water splashed. I opened my eyes. He came back drinking from a glass of water.

He sat on the old couch. “I want to know something. How did it feel when you saw Paul Kant on the night he died? How did it feel, looking at that miserable little queer and knowing he was in hell because of what you did?”

“I didn’t do it,” I said. My voice was still bubbling.

Hovre emitted an enormous sigh. “You’re making me do all this the hard way. What about the blood on your clothes?”

“What blood?” I found that I could lever myself up to a sitting position.

“The blood on your clothes. I went through your closet. You got some pants with blood on em’, a pair of shoes with what could be bloodstains on the uppers.” He put the glass down on the floor. “Now I gotta take those to the lab over in Blundell and see if they come out the blood type of any of the girls. Candace Michalski and Gwen Olson were AB, Jenny Strand was type O.”

“Blood on my clothes? Oh. Yes. It happened when I cut my hand. The first day I came here. It dripped onto my shoes when I was driving here. Probably on my trousers too.”

Hovre shook his head.

“And I’m AB,” I said.

“How would you happen to know that, Miles?”

“My wife was a do-gooder. Every year we gave a pint each to the blood center in Long Island City.”

“Long Island City,” He shook his head again. “And you’re AB?” He pushed himself up from the couch, walked past me to get to the porch.

“Miles,” he called to me, “if you’re so simon-pure innocent, why are you in such a hurry to be put in jail?”

“I already told you that,” I said.

“Kee-rist.” He returned holding my clothes and shoes. I felt the pain in my head jump in anticipation as he came toward me. “Now I’m gonna tell you the facts of life,” he said. “Word is gonna get around. I’m not going to do anything to stop it. I’m not even going to have Dave Lokken sitting on his fat ass down the road. If anyone comes out here to find you, that’s all right with me. A little jungle justice wouldn’t bother me a bit. I’d almost rather have you dead than in jail, old pal. And I don’t think you’re stupid enough to think you can get away from me. Are you? You couldn’t get far in that beat-up car anyhow. Hey?” His foot came toward me, and stopped an inch short of my ribs. “Hey?”

I nodded.

“I’ll be hearing from you, Miles. I’ll be hearing from you. We’re both gonna get what we want.”

After I soaked for an hour in a hot bath, letting the pain seep away into the steam, I sat upstairs and wrote for several hours — until I saw that it had begun to get dark. I heard Duane shouting at his daughter. His voice rose and fell, monotonously, angrily, insisting on some inaudible point. Both Duane’s voice and the oncoming of dark made it impossible to work any longer. To spend another night in the farmhouse was almost impossible: I could still see her, sitting in the chair at the foot of my bed, looking blankly, even dully, at me, as if what I were seeing were only a waxen model of her face and body, a shell a millimeter thick behind which lay spinning stars and gases. I put down the pencil, grabbed a jacket from my plundered closet and went downstairs and outside.

The night was beginning. The dark shapes of clouds drifted beneath an immense sky. Above them hung a moon nearly washed of color. A single arrow of cool breeze seemed to come straight toward the house from high in the black woods. I shuddered, and climbed into the battered Volkswagen.

At first I thought of simply driving around the county roads until I was too tired to go further and then sleep the rest of the night in the car; then I thought I might go to Freebo’s and speed oblivion by purchasing it. Oblivion could scarcely cost more than ten dollars, and it was the best buy in Arden. I rattled onto 93, and turned the car toward town. But what sort of reception could I expect in Freebo’s? By this time, everybody would know about the medical examiner’s report. I would be a ghastly pariah. Or an inhuman thing to be hunted down. At that point the car went dead. I cursed Hank Speltz. I did not even begin to have the mechanical competence to fix whatever the boy had done. I pictured driving back to New York at a steady rate of thirty-five miles an hour. I’d need another mechanic, which meant that I would have to commit most of the money remaining in my account. Then I thought of the waxen face concealing stars and gases, and knew that I would be lucky ever to get back to New York.

That night I made an appeal to compassion, a second appeal to violence.

Finally I got the car started again.

As I sped down one of the Arden back streets I saw a familiar shape passing a lighted picture window, and I cut over to the curb and jumped out of the car before the motor was dead. I ran on the black asphalt in the middle of the road and crossed his lawn. I pressed Bertilsson’s bell.

When he opened his door I saw surprise alter his features. His face was as much a mask as hers. He ignored his wife’s calls of “Who is it? Who is it?” behind him.

“Well,” he said, grinning at me. “Come for my blessing? Or did you have something to confess?”

“I want you to take me in. I want you to protect me.”

His wife’s face appeared over his shoulder, at some hidden opening in their house, a corner or a door. She began to march forward.

“We’ve heard the distressing details of the Michalski girl’s death,” he said. “You have a nice sense of humor, Miles, coming here.”

I said, “Please take me in. I need your help.”

“I rather think my help is reserved for those who know how to use it.”

“I’m in danger. In danger of my life.”

His wife’s face glared at me now from over his shoulder. “What does he want? Tell him to go away.”

“I rather think he’s going to ask to be put up for the night.”

“Don’t you have a duty?” I asked.

“I have a duty to all Christians,” he said. “You are not a Christian. You are an abomination.”

“Tell him to go away.”

“I’m begging you.”

Mrs. Bertilsson’s head jerked upward, her face cold and hard. “You were too sick to take our advice when we saw you in town, and we’re under no obligation to help you now. Are you asking us to let you stay here?”

“Just for a night.”

“Do you think I could sleep with you in my house? Close the door, Elmer.”

“Wait—”

“An abomination.” He slammed the door. A second later I saw the drapes meeting; in the middle of the window.

Helpless. Helpless to help, helpless to be helped. This is the story of a man who couldn’t get arrested.

I drove to Main and stopped the car in the middle of the empty street. I honked the horn once, then twice. For a moment I rested my forehead on the rim of the steering wheel. Then I opened the door. I could hear the buzz of a neon sign, the momentary beating of wings far overhead. I stood beside the car. Nothing around me moved, nothing demonstrated life. All of the shops were dark; on either side of the street, cars pointed their noses at the curb like sleeping cattle. I shouted. Not even an echo answered. Even the two bars seemed deserted, although illuminated beer signs sparkled in their windows. I walked down the middle of the street toward Freebo’s. I felt drifting blue gather around me.

A stone the size of a potato was caught in the grid of a drain by the curbside. It might have been one they had thrown at me. I tugged it out and hefted it in my hand. Then I hurled it at Freebo’s long rectangular window. I remembered throwing glasses at the wall of my apartment, back in the passionate days of my marriage. There was an appalling noise, and glass shivered down onto the sidewalk.

And then everything was as it had been. I was still on the empty street; the shops were still light; no one was shouting, no one was running toward me. The only noise was the buzzing of the sign. I owed Freebo about fifty dollars, but I would never be able to pay him. I could smell dust and grass, the odors blown in on the wind from the fields. I imagined men inside the bar, backed away from the windows, holding their breath until I left. Inside with the scarred tables and the jukebox and the flashing beer signs, all waiting for me to leave. The last of the last chances.

On the morning of the twenty-first I woke up in the back seat of the car. I had been permitted to survive the night. Shouts, angry yells from Duane’s house up the path. His problems with his daughter seemed terrifically remote, someone’s else’s problem in someone else’s world. I leaned over the carseat and pulled the door release, pushed the seat forward, and got out. My back ached; I had a sharp, persistent pain behind my eyes. When I looked at my watch I saw that it was thirteen hours to dark: I would not run from it. I could not. The day, my last, was hot and cloudless. Sixty feet away, the chestnut mare leaned its head over the fence of the side field and regarded me with silky eyes. The air was very still, A big horsefly, greenly iridescent, began to bustle across the top of the car, concentrating on the bird droppings. Everything about me seemed a part of Alison’s coming, clues, sections of a puzzle which would lock into place before midnight.

I thought: if I get back into this car and try to drive off, she will stop me. Leaves and branches would block the windshield, vines would trap the accelerator. My visual sense of this was too powerful — for an instant I saw the homely interior of the VW choked with a struggling profusion of foliage, and I gagged on the spermy odor of sap — and I snatched my hand away from the top of the car.

I did not see how I could endure the tension of the intervening hours. Where would I be when she came?

With the desperate foolhardiness of a soldier who knows that the battle will come whether or not he is prepared for it, I decided what I would do at nightfall. Really, there was only one place for me to be when it happened. I had waited twenty years for it, and I knew where I would go to await the final moment, where I had to go, had to be when the noise of rushing wind came and the woods opened to release her for my own violent release. There were no more last chances.

Time passed. I moved dazedly around the house, at times wondering vaguely why Tula Sunderson had not appeared, and then remembering that I had fired her. I sat on the old furniture, and fell bodily into the past. My grandmother slid a pan into the oven, Oral Roberts declaimed from the radio, Duane slapped his hands together from a chair in a dark corner. He was twenty, and his hair swept upward from his forehead in a pompadour. Alison Greening, fourteen years old, magically vibrant, appeared in the doorway (man’s button-down shirt, fawn trousers, sexual promise making the air snap about her), and glided through on sneakered feet. My mother, hers, talked on the porch. Their voices were bored and peaceful. I saw Duane look at my cousin with a look of hatred.

Then I found myself in the bedroom with no memory of having climbed the stairs. I was staring at the bed. I remembered the feeling of breasts against my chest, first small, then cushiony, how I had fit myself into a ghost’s body. She was still moving downstairs; I heard her light footsteps crossing the living room, heard her slam the porch door.

You got into trouble again last year. My face had blazed. Summer’s lease is fading, dear one. I went across into my office and saw papers spilling out of bushel baskets. Do birds cough? I saw only one conclusion. I was in check. Still, in memory, she glided downstairs. I felt as though absorbent cotton encased me, as though I were moving through treacle, thick dust…

I went back to the bedroom and sat in the chair which faced the bed. I had lost everything. My face felt mask-like, as if I could peel it off like Rinn’s balm. Even as I began to weep, I recognized that my features had become as blank and empty as her own, the night I had seen her gazing carelessly at me from this chair. She has entered me again, she is downstairs drinking Kool-Aid in the bubble of time that is 1955, she is waiting.

Some hours later, I am sitting at my desk and looking out the window when I hear Alison Updahl scream. A moment later, my senses awakening from their fog, I see her tearing down the path to the barn. In the back her shirt is ripped, as though someone had tried to swing her around by it, and it flaps as she pelts away. When she reaches the barn she does not stop, but races around the side and goes over a barbed wire fence to get into the back field and run in its declivities and grassy rises up toward the blanketing of woods on that side of the valley. These are the woods where Alison Greening and I, each carrying a shovel, had climbed to look for Indian mounds. When the Woodsman reaches a little rise and begins to run down into a hollow packed with massed yellow blossoms, she tears off the flapping T shirt and throws it behind her. I know at that second that she is crying.

Then a secondary, nearer motion: I see Duane, dressed in his working clothes, coming indecisively down the path. He carries a shotgun under one arm, but he seems in an uneasy relationship to it. He marches forward ten feet, the shotgun pointing the way, and then he pauses, looks at it, and turns his back on me. A few paces up the path, then another turn and the resumption of the march in my direction. Then he looks at the shotgun again. He takes another three steps forward. Then he sighs — I see his shoulders lift and depress — and tosses the gun into the weeds by the garage. I see his mouth form the; word bitch. He glances at the old farmhouse for a moment as if he is wishing that he might see it too in flames. Then he looks up at the window and sees me. I immediately smell gunpowder and burning flesh. He says something, jerking his body, but the words do not carry through the glass, and I thrust open the window.

“Get out here,” he says. “God damn you, get out here.”

I go downstairs and out onto the porch. He is pacing over the ruin of the front lawn, his hands deep in the coverall pockets, his head bent. When he sees me, he gives a powerful sideways kick to a ridge of dirt left by a skidding tire. He glares at me, then bends his head again, and swivels his foot in the ridge of dirt. “I knew it,” he says. His voice is hoarse and choking. “Damn women. Damn you.”

His face seems to be flying apart. His condition is unlike the fury I had seen earlier, and more like the suppressed dull rage I had witnessed in the equipment barn, when he flailed the tractor with a hammer. “You’re filth. Filth. You made her filthy. You and Zack.”

I come out of the porch into waning sunlight. Duane seems nearly to be steaming. To touch him would be to burn your hands. Even in my foggy state, concentrated on what will happen four or five hours later, I am impressed by the high charge of Duane’s emotional confusion. His hatred is nearly visible, but as if suffocated, like a fire under a blanket.

“I saw you drop the gun,” I say.

“You saw me drop the gun,” he mimics. “You saw me drop the gun. Big fucking deal. You think I couldn’t kill you with my bare hands?” With ten per cent more pressure behind it, his face would explode and go sailing away in a hundred pieces. “Hey? You think you’re gonna get away that easy?”

Get away with what, I could ask, but I am riveted by his despair.

“Well, you ain’t,” he says. He cannot control his voice, and it spirals up into falsetto. “I know what happens to you sex creeps in jail. They’ll make hash out of you down there. You’ll wish you were dead. Or maybe you’ll be in a nut house. Huh? Either way, you’re gonna rot. Rot. Every day you’ll be a little sorrier you’re still alive. And that’s good. Because you don’t deserve to die.”

The quantity of his hatred awes me.

“Oh, it’s gonna happen, Miles. It’s gonna happen. You had to come back here, didn’t you? Wave your goddamned face, your goddamned education, in front of me? You bastard. I had to beat it out of her, but she told me. She admitted it.” Duane brings himself forward toward me, and I see the colors alternating on his face. “Guys like you think you can get away with anything, don’t you? You think the girls will never talk about it.”

“There was no ‘it,’ ” I say, finally understanding.

“Tuta saw her. Tuta saw her come out. She told Red, and my friend Red told me. So I know, Miles, I know. You made her filthy. I can’t even stand to look at you.”

“I didn’t rape your daughter, Duane,” I say, scarcely believing that this scene is happening.

“You say. So tell me what happened, shithead. You’re good with words, you gotta command of the language, tell me what happened.”

“She came to me. I didn’t ask her to. I didn’t even want her to. She climbed into my bed. She was used by someone else.”

Of course Duane misunderstands me. “Someone else—”

“She was used by Alison Greening.”

“Goddam, goddam, goddam,” and he jerks his hands out of his pockets and strikes himself on either side of his head. “When they got you locked up to rot, I’m gonna burn this place to the ground, I’m gonna bulldoze it over, all you city people can go to hell, I’m—” He is calmer. He takes his fists from his temples, and his eyes blaze at me. They are, I notice for the first time, the same color as his daughter’s, but as filled with abstract light as Zack’s.

“Why did you decide not to shoot me?”

“Because that’s too easy on you. You didn’t come back here, stir it all up, just to get shot. The worst things in the world are gonna happen to you.” His eyes I blaze again. “You don’t have to think I don’t know about that little fucker Zack. I know about how she sneaks out. You don’t know anything I don’t, even if you buy ‘em drinks and that. I got ears. I hear her crawling back into her room in the mornings — she’s just dirt, like all the others. Starting with the one I named her after. They’re all dirt. Animals. A dozen of ‘em wouldn’t make one good man. I don’t know why I ever got married. After that Polish bitch I knew all about women. Dirty, like you. I knew I couldn’t keep her and you apart. Women are all the same. But you’re going to pay.”

“Do you hate me so much because of Alison Greening?” I ask. “Pay for what?”

“For being you.” He says this flatly, as if it is self-explanatory. “It’s all over for you, Miles. Hovre is gonna put you away, I just talked to him. Twenty-four hours at the most. If you try to run, they’ll get you.”

“You talked to Hovre? He’s going to arrest me?” I feel the beginnings of relief.

“You bet your ass.”

“Good,” I say, startling Duane. “That’s what I want.”

“Jesus man,” Duane utters softly.

“Alison Greening is coming back tonight. She’s not what she used to be- — she’s something horrible. Rinn tried to warn me.” I look into Duane’s incredulous face. “And she’s the one who has been killing those girls. I thought it was Zack, but now I know it was Alison Greening.”

“Stop-saying-that-name,” Duane says.

I turn around and begin to sprint toward the house. Duane shouts behind me, and I yell back to him, “I’m going inside to call Hovre.”

He follows me inside and glares at me suspiciously as I dial the number of the police station. “Ain’t gonna do you no good,” he mutters, stumping around the kitchen. “Only thing you can do now is wait for it. Or get in that heap of yours and try to run. According to Hank you can’t do more than forty in her, though. You wouldn’t get to Blundell before Hovre caught you.” He is talking as much to himself as to me; his bowed back faces me.

I am listening to the ringing of the telephone, expecting Dave Lokken to answer; but Polar Bears’ voice comes to me instead. “Chief Hovre.”

“This is Miles.”

Duane: “Who you talkin’ to? Is that Hovre?”

“This is Miles, Polar Bears. Why aren’t you on your way out here?”

There is a baffling pause. Then he says: “Why, Miles I just been hearing about you. Seems you couldn’t stop. I reckon your cousin Du-ane is there with you.”

“Yes. He is.”

“Fuckin’-A I am,” says Duane.

“Good. Say, we got results on that blood. It’s AB, all right. It’ll take another day to break it down further to see if it’s male or female, the lab boys say.”

“I don’t have another day.”

“Miles old friend, I’d be surprised if you had another five minutes. Isn’t Duane carrying a twelve-gauge? I told him to bring one when he went down to see you. The law can overlook some things a man might do, if he’s been pushed too far.”

“I’m asking you to save my life, Polar Bears.”

“Some might say that you’d be a whole lot safer dead, Miles.”

“Does Lokken know what you’re doing?”

I hear the wheeze of his coughing. “Dave had to go all the way to the other end of the county today. Funny thing.”

“Tell him to get out here now,” Duane says. “I can’t stand having you in the house any more.”

“Duane says you should come now.”

“Why don’t you and Duane keep up your conversation? Sounds real fruitful to me.” He hung up.

I turn around, still holding the receiver, and see Duane looking at me with dull eyes in a flushed face. “He’s not coming, Duane. He thinks you’re going to shoot me. He wants you to do it. He sent Lokken off on a wild goose chase so nobody will know how he arranged things.”

“You’re talking guff.”

“Did he tell you to bring a shotgun?”

“Sure. He thinks you killed those girls.”

“He’s more devious than that. He told me about Alison Greening. He told me what happened. He’d rather have me dead than in jail. If I’m dead, I’m still guilty of the killings, but I can’t talk to anybody.”

“You shut up about that,” he says, his arms swinging at his sides. “Don’t say one word about that.”

“Because you hate thinking about it. You couldn’t do it. You couldn’t rape her.”

“Huh,” Duane snorts, his face red and strained. “I didn’t come here to talk about this. I just wanted to hear you admit you put the dirtiest part of yourself into my girl. Do you think I liked beating it out of her?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Yes. I think you did enjoy it.”

Duane whirls and presses the palms of his hands against a kitchen cupboard, supporting his weight on his arms, as I had seen him do against the engine block of a tractor. When he turns around again he is doing his best to smile. “Now I know you’re crazy. Boy, that just says it all. Maybe I oughta kill you, like you say Hovre wants.”

“Maybe you should.” I am transfixed by his ghastly attempt at relaxation. His face is colorless now; it looks as though you could pluck gobbets off it, like clay. His personality, which I had thought as stolid and bull-like as his body, appears to be breaking up, shaking apart into its facets.

“Why did you let me come here at all?” I ask. “Why didn’t you write back to say that someone else was staying in the house? And why did you pretend to be friendly when I first came?”

He says nothing; he simply looks at me, dull and sullen anger expressed by every inch and angle of his body.

“I’m as innocent of the deaths of those girls as I was of the death of Alison Greening,” I say to him.

“Maybe that was the first warning you had,” Duane says. “I’m gonna be listening for the sound of that junker of yours, so you’d best sit tight until Hovre comes to get you.” Then a smile which appears almost genuine. “I’m gonna enjoy that.” His gray face breaks, alters, as a perception hits him. “By God, if I’d of had my shotgun here, I would have cut you in two.”

“Then Alison Greening would come for you tonight.”

“It don’t make any difference how crazy you pretend to be,” Duane says. “Not now it don’t.”

“No. Not now.”

When Duane left the farmhouse he said, “You know, my wife was as dumb as the others. That cow actually wanted it. She couldn’t even pretend she was better than that. She used to yammer about how dirty I got out in the fields, and I used to say the dirt on me is nothing compared to what’s in your mind. I just hoped she would give me a son.”

When dusk began to devour the landscape, I knew that I had approximately three hours to get where I had to go. I would have to walk. Duane would hear the car, and telephone Hovre. They did not belong where I was going. The alternative was to wait in the farmhouse and take every creak of the boards for the sign of her coming. No. If she were going to appear and spring the trap of our old vow, the Pohlson quarry, where it started, would be where it would end. I had to go back, alone, to where it had begun, to see it as it was on that night, without the Woodsman and Zack, to stand in darkness on those flat slabs of stone and breathe that air. I felt almost that if I stood on that spot again, I might go back to the beginning and reverse things: might find an echo of the living girl, and reclaim myself and her in that salvation. Duane and his furious repressions, Polar Bears and his schemes, were tiny in the light of this immense possibility. I forgot them both five minutes after Duane left the farmhouse. Starving Paul Kant had worked through the fields; so would I.

It took me a little more than a quarter of the time it had Paul. I simply walked along the soft verge of the highway, going in dying light where I had to go; once a rattling slat-sided truck passed me, and I veered off into a cornfield until its red taillights disappeared around a bend. I had a pervasive sense of invisibility. No clumsy hothead in a truck could stop me; no more than I could stop my cousin from asserting her claim. Fear sparkled beneath my skin; I walked quickly, scarcely aware of the gravel over which I moved; at the top of the long winding hill I touched the wood of the Community Chest sign and felt the dampness of woodrot. Lights burned in a farmhouse just visible in a black valley. For a second I had the sensation that I was about to leap from the hill’s sheer side and fly — a dream of the inhuman, a dream of escape. Cold hands brushed my sides and urged me forward.

At the base of the drive leading up the smaller hill to the quarry I paused for breath. It was just past nine o’clock. In the darkening sky hung the white lifeless stone of the moon. I took a step up the drive: I was a magnet’s negative pole, the lunar pole. My feet throbbed in their city shoes. A random branch of an oak stood out with supernatural, almost vocal clarity; a huge muscle rolled beneath its crust of bark. I sat on the edge of a pebbly granite shelf and slid off my shoes. Then I dropped them beside the rock and, finding what I had to find to move, moved. The air breathed me.

On tiptoe, with wincing feet, I went up the drive. Gravel gave way to dry grass. At the top of the drive I eased down onto my heels. The flat brown area was before me, the line of dying bushes at the far end. The sky was darkening fast. I realized that I was carrying my jacket in one hand, and I pulled it up over my shoulders. Air caught in my throat. Alison Greening seemed profoundly in the landscape, a part of all of it. She was printed deeply into every scrabble of rock, every tick of leaf. I went forward, the bravest act of my life, and felt invisibility stir about me.

By the time I reached the other side of the flat brown space, it had become dark. The translation from dusk to night was instantaneous, a subdivision of a second. My stockinged feet found a smooth rock slab. A blister burned at my heel. Its redness mounted up my leg, I could see that color rising and staining me, and I went forward again over brown grass to the line of bushes. My mind fluttered, and I snapped my head to the right, and saw a pair of finches shooting off into the bowl of the sky. Moonlight touched them for an instant, then lay upon and silvered the threads and bones of the sparse bushes. I took another step, and was on the first rock, looking down at the cup of black water which was the quarry. It was the center of an intense, packed silence.

And of a great brightness. The moon, as medallion-like as Alison’s face, shimmered and glowed from the water’s center. My leg was shaking. My mind was no more than a flat plate of images. It would have taken me a minute to remember my name, that leap from slippery Miles to froggy Teagarden. The stone beneath me ground at my feet; I went down onto the next step, and felt myself pulled toward the brightness. That flat pane of water with its glowing center drew me on, brought me down toward it. Another step. The entire silent pool edged with smooth rock was as if humming — no, was humming, wedged in the divide between the bottomless dark of the water and the flat shining head of the moon. The world tipped to slide me down, and I tipped with it.

Then I was there, on the bottom of the bottom of the world. Cool rock pushed upward on the soles of my feet. Heat burned at my temples and crisped small hairs in my nose. Water slid across my wrists. My fingers touched my sleeves, and they were dry. At the bottom of the bottom of the world, my face turned to the moon’s cold effigy, I sat in a hard unreal brightness.

When my body began to tremble I planted my hands on the shelf of cool rock and closed my eyes. The signs of her coming were unimaginable; it seemed to me that she might step out from the center of that gleaming disc on the water. Rock flowed under my hands; with my eyes clamped shut I was moving, part of a moving element, the rock which fitted itself beneath my hands and body like a negative, mirrored image. This sensation was very strong. My fingerprints folded into minute grooves in the stone, hand-shapes met my hands, and when I snapped open my eyes again I thought I would see before them a sheer rise of rock.

I centered myself in my body, centered my body on the slab of rock. I felt the rock lift with my breathing, the veins in my hands connect to veins in the stone, and I ceased to move. I thought: I am a human mind in a human body. I saw white unreal brightness on my knees and my stockinged feet. High walls circled me, the water lay still, the only thing in the world beneath me. I knew that I had very little time left. The jacket lay across my shoulder like leaves. I had all the rest of my life to think; to wait.

But waiting itself is thinking, anticipation is an idea in the body, and for a long time even my pulse was charged with the energy of my waiting. I thought of hurtling through time; I was no longer trembling. My fingers slid into grooves in the stone. In the bowl of the quarry, the night was terrifically still. Once I opened my eyes and looked at my watch where dots by the numerals and slivers along the hands glowed green: it was ten forty-five.

I tried to remember when we had started to swim. It had to be sometime between eleven and twelve. Alison had probably died near to midnight. I looked up at the stars and then back down at the water where the moon floated. I could remember every word spoken on that night, every gesture. They had been crowded into my mind for the past twenty years. Twice, while lecturing to my sophomores, I had spun backwards to those busy minutes and seen them all again while my disembodied voice droned on, being witty at the expense of literature. It was true to say that I had been trapped here, in that section of time, ever since, and that what had frightened me in my classroom was no more than an image of my life.

It was all still happening, in a space behind my eyes that belonged to it, and I could look inward to see it and us. The way she looked, grinning at me as cool air settled on my shoulders. Do you want to do what we do in California? Her hands on her hips. I could see my own hands working at my buttons, my legs, the legs of a thirteen-year-old boy, hanging pale and slim to the rock slab. I looked up and she was a white arc just entering the water, a vision of a leaping fish.

That would be printed on two other minds as well as mine. They had seen us: our bodies cutting the water, our arms white, her hair a sleek mass against my face. From their angle we would be pale faces beneath water-darkened hair, two faces so close as to be flowing together.

I shook all over. I raised my arm and looked at my wrist: eleven o’clock. A patch of skin, on the back of my neck began to jump.

I closed my eyes again and the energy of the stone again rushed up to meet my hands, heels, outstretched legs. My breathing seemed overloud, amplified by the complicated passages within my body. The whole area of the quarry was breathing with me, taking in and releasing air. I counted to one hundred, making each inhalation and exhalation last eight beats.

Very soon.

I saw myself as I had been a month earlier, when I had only half dared to admit that I had returned to the farm to keep an appointment with a ghost. And brought a string of deaths dragging like a tail behind me. Despite the pretense of the boxes of books and notes, I had not done even three good days’ work on my dissertation: I had given it up on the feeblest of pretexts, that Zack’s foolish ideas were too much like Lawrence’s. Instead I had almost willfully turned the valley against me. And I saw myself: a large man with thinning hair, a man whose face immediately expresses whatever emotion has hold of him, a man rampaging through a small town. I had insulted more people in four weeks than I had in the past four years. I witnessed all of this as from the outside, saw myself bursting into stores and giving crazy messages from bar-stools, miming shoplifting, my face registering disgust. Even Duane had done a better job of disguising his feelings. From the morning of my arrival, I had felt Alison Greening’s approach, and that fact — the vision of her hovering at the edge of the fields — had sent me sliding as irrationally as a pinball.

I said her name, and a leaf rustled. The moonlight made my body look two-dimensional, a figure from a cartoon.

It had to be nearly the time. Eleven-thirty. Pressure suddenly happened in my bladder; I felt my face grow hot. I crossed my legs and waited for the pressure to ebb. I began to rock forward on my stiff arms. Nerves in the stone responded to my movement, and echoed it so that at first the stone rocked with me, and then took all the motion and rocked me itself. The need to urinate built into an ache. I was rocked more intensely, and it vanished. I lay back and let the stone fit a hollow for my skull. My hands, stretched by my sides, found their true places.

Very soon.

A cloud covered half the stars and slowly scudded past the dead circle of the moon. My body seemed already to have given up its life, and the stone to have taken it into itself. The cold quarry water was breathing through me, using me as its bellows; I thought I heard her walking toward me, but a breeze skimmed past, and still the complications of life, the complications of feeling streamed from my body into everything around. I thought: it cannot last, it is too much, death is necessary, necessary. Suddenly it seemed to me, at the bottom of my fear like a flash of gold, that I had returned to the valley knowing that I would die there.

I heard music and knew it came from the electric point of contact between my head and the rock above the water. Soon, soon, soon. My death came speeding toward me, and I felt my body lighten. The tremendous forces about me seemed to lift me an inch or two above the rock, the music sounded in my head, I felt my soul contract into a humming capsule just below my breastbone. So I remained for a long time, gathered to split apart at her touch.

I witnessed my heavy profane sarcastic deathbound naive person hurtling through Arden, hiding within the body of my grandmother’s house, quailing on the floor of a forest, half-raping a coiling girl; I gasped because the sensation of levitating, all my cells linked by moonlight in a contract to ignore gravity, had endured so long.

All my being told me when midnight approached. I could not a second time will away the quick pain in my bladder, a leaf rattled in a twist of wind, and warm fluid rushed over my legs in a delicious letting go. I reached out for hr, every second of her time ticked along my body. I caught only bright empty air.

And fell back to earth and unliving stone. In that giant embarrassment, the music ceased and I was conscious of my lungs pulling in air, the rock inert beneath me, the water black and cold, and I pushed myself backwards to rest my back against the wall of the quarry. The wet legs of my trousers hung on my legs. I’d had the time wrong. It must have happened later; but I caught the edge of desperation in the thought, and I leaned back and looked through the bleach of moonlight to the greatest loss in my life.

It was two minutes past twelve. She had not come. The twenty-first of July had slipped into the past and she was not coming. She would never come. She was dead. I was stranded alone in only the human world. My guilt, moving under some impetus of its own, shifted hugely within me and came to a new relationship with my body.

I could not move. I had invented it all. I had seen nothing at the edge of the fields — nothing but my hysteria. I pulled the jacket tightly around me, obeying a reflex left over from childhood.

The shock endured for hours. By the time my trousers had begun to dry, I realized that my legs and feet had gone to sleep, and I leaned forward and bent my knees with my hands. intense pain arrowed out from my knees. I was grateful enough for it to try to stand. For a time I drowned my awareness in pain, moving awkwardly on someone else’s legs. Then I sat on one of the stone steps and looked again into loss. I could not cry: too much of the loss was of myself. Whatever I was going to be, whenever I could think about becoming something I could call myself, I was going to be different. I had made up a self which relied on the possibility of Alison Greening for its shadings, and now I felt like a Siamese twin whose other half had been surgically severed, cast away. The guilt which I had carried for twenty years had drastically altered its dimensions, but I could not tell if it had grown larger or smaller.

I was going to have to live.

I spend the entire night by the quarry’s side, though I knew from the moment I had seemed to fall back to earth — even before I had looked at my watch — that Alison-Greening was gone from my life for eternity.

During the last hour I spent mourning Alison’s second and final departure from my life, I was able to think about Arden and what had been happening there. Duane, Polar Bears, Paul Kant, myself. How after twenty years we had come together again in a tragic landscape. How we had all been marked by women. I saw the patterns tying us together, like Zack’s “lines of force.”

And I saw something else.

At last I understood that the murderer of the girls had been my cousin Duane. Who hated women more than any other man I had ever met, who had probably planned the murders of the girls who resembled Alison Greening from the day I had written him that I was coming to Arden. Duane’s were the old Coke bottles, the axes, the doorknobs: Zack must have stolen the one I had seen from wherever Duane had hidden them.

Sitting by the quarry’s side, still numb with the shock of loss, I saw it with a brisk, heartless clarity. Alison gone, it could only be Duane. And his daughter had feared this, I saw — she had run from any discussion of the girls’ deaths. What I had taken for a desire to appear more callous (therefore, she imagined, more adult) than she was made even more sense, given the fear that her father was a killer. She had really rebuffed any conversation about the dead girls.

I stood up: I could walk. A kind of strength blessed me. An entire era of my life, like a geologic period, was coming to an end — it would end with what I was going to have to do. I did not have the whisper of an idea of what I would do after that.

I walked down the side of the hill and found my shoes. In one night they had gone dead and curling, and when I forced my feet into them, the inner soles felt like the hides of dead lizards. They seemed not to fit, to have been shaped by another man.

When I stepped onto the highway I saw a high rattling truck coming toward me from the direction of Arden. It was a blood relative of the truck from which I had fled the previous night; I stuck out my hand, thumb up, and the man beside the wheel pulled up beside me. From the truck floated the earthy smell of pigs.

“Mister?” said the old man behind the wheel.

“My car broke down,” I said. “I wonder if you’re going anywhere near Norway Valley?”

“Hop yourself right in, young feller,” he said, and leaned across to open the door for me.

I climbed in beside him. He was a wiry man in his mid-seventies, with white hair that stuck up like a scrubbing brush. On the steering wheel his hands were the size of steaks. “Up early,” he said, not quite making it a question.

“I’ve been traveling a long time.”

He started the truck rolling again, and its whole rear section began jouncing and squealing.

“Are you actually going into the valley?”

“Sure,” he said. “I just been taxing a load of porkers into town, and now I’m going home. My boy and me farm a piece of land about eight-ten miles down the valley. You ever been that way?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s nice. It’s real nice down there. Don’t know what a healthy young feller like you is doing bumming around the country when you could settle down on the best farmland in the whole state. Man wasn’t born to live in cities, way I see it.”

I nodded. His words unlocked in me the knowledge that I was not going to return to New York.

“I reckon you’re a salesman,” he said.

“Right now I’m between jobs,” I said, and earned a bright look of curiosity.

“Shame. But you vote Democrat, we’ll get this country back on its feet and young men like you will have jobs again.” He squinted into the road and the rising sun, and the bouncing truck sent wave after wave of pig over us. “You remember that, now.”

When he turned the truck into the valley road, he asked just where I wanted to go, exactly. “You might think about coming all the way with me, and we could set you up with a good cup of coffee. What say?”

“Thanks, but no. I’d like you to drop me off at Andy’s.”

“You’re the boss,” he said, perfectly equable.

Then we were slowing down before Andy’s gaspumps. The seven o’clock sunlight fell on the dust and gravel. As I pulled down the door handle, he turned his brush-topped head slyly toward me and said, “I know you were fibbing me, young man.”

I just looked at him in surprise, wondering what he could have read in my face.

“About your auto. You don’t have any auto, do you? You’ve been thumbing your way right along.”

I met his smile. “Thanks for the ride,” I said, and stepped down from the cab and the thick odor of pigs into warm light. He rattled away, going deeper into the valley, and I turned to walk across the gravel and climb the steps.

The door was locked. I peered in through the glass and saw no lights. Andy had no CLOSED sign on the door, but I looked at the bottom panel of glass behind the screen and saw a dusty card which said Mon-Fri 7:30-6:30, Sat 7:30-9:00. I pounded on the screen door, rattling it. After forty seconds of steady pounding, I saw Andy waddling toward me through the crowded tables, peering at me to figure out who I was.

When he got close enough to identify me, he stopped. “We’re closed.” I motioned him forward. He shook his head. “Please,” I shouted. “I just want to use your phone.”

He hesitated, and then came slowly up toward the door. He looked worried and confused. “You got a phone down at Duane’s place,” he said, his voice muffled by the glass.

“I have to make a call before I get there,” I pleaded.

“Who you going to call, Miles?”

“The police. Polar Bears Hovre.”

“What’re you gonna say to the Chief?”

“Listen in and you’ll know.”

He came the necessary two steps and put his hand on the lock. His face jerked, and then he slid the bolt and opened the door. “Screen door’s still locked, Miles. I suppose if you’re gonna call the police it’s okay… but how do I know that’s what you’re gonna do?”

“You can stand right behind me. You can dial it for me.”

He revolved the pinwheel catch. “Quiet. Margaret’s back in the kitchen. She won’t like this.” I followed him inside. He turned his face toward me; he looked worried. He was used to making the wrong decisions. “Phone’s on the counter,” he whispered.

As he went toward it his wife called from the back of the store. “Who was it?”

“Drummer,” Andy called back.

“For goodness’ sake, send him off. It’s too early.”

“Just a minute.” He pointed to the telephone; then whispered, “No. I’ll dial it.”

When he had the number he gave me the receiver and crossed his arms over his chest.

The telephone rang twice, and then I heard Lokken’s voice. “Police?”

I asked to speak to Polar Bears. If you want your killer, I was going to say, just do what I tell you. He’ll be on his farm, driving his tractor or banging on some machinery.

“Teagarden?” came the deputy’s high-pitched astonished whine. “Is that you? Where the hell did you get yourself to anyways? You’re supposed to be here, this morning. What the hell?”

“What do you mean, I’m supposed to be there?”

“Well, see — the Chief sent me out on this damnfool errand yesterday afternoon. I didn’t get what I was supposed to get because it wasn’t there in the first place, it never even was there, he just wanted me outa the way I guess. Anyhow by the time I got back it was near to midnight and he was hoppin’ mad. Duane called him up and said you run off somewheres. So the Chief says, hold your horses, I’ll know where he is. I think he went and got Duane to help him bring you in. So where are you now? And where’s the Chief?”

“I’m at Andy’s store,” I said. I glanced over at him. His worried face was turned toward the rear of the shop; he was afraid his wife would appear and find me. “Lokken, listen to me. I know who should be arrested, and I think I know where the Chief would have gone. Pick me up at Andy’s.”

“You bet your ass I’m pickin’ you up,” said Lokken.

“You’ll get your killer,” I said, and handed the receiver back to Andy.

“Should I hang it up?” he asked, perplexed.

“Hang it up.”

He clicked it down and then stared at me, becoming more conscious every moment of my beard-stubble and wrinkled clothes. “Thanks,” I said, and turned away and threaded past the tables and went out, leaving him with his hand on the telephone. I went down the steps and out into the early light to wait for Lokken.

In eight minutes, which must have been a record, the deputy’s squadcar came speeding down the valley road. I waved, and Lokken braked to a halt, raising a great white plume of dust. He jumped out of the car as I walked across the road toward him. “All right, what is this?” he demanded. “This just plain don’t make sense. Where’s Chief Hovre?”

“I think he imagined that I’d go back up to that clearing where you found the Michalski girl. Maybe Duane went with him.”

“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t,” said Lokken. His hand was on the butt of his gun. “Maybe we’ll go there, maybe we won’t. Why in hell did you call the station?”

“I told you.” His hand curled around the gunbutt. “I know who killed those girls. Let’s get in the car and talk about it on the way.”

Very suspiciously, he stepped away from the side of the car and permitted me to walk around its nose. We got in at the same time. I leaned back against the hot plastic of the seat. “All right,” Lokken said. “You better start talking. If it’s real good I might listen.”

“Duane Updahl did it,” I said. His hand, holding the ignition key, froze on the way to the slot and he swiveled his head to gape at me.

“I wasn’t even in town when Gwen Olson died,” I said.

“That’s why I’m listening to you,” said Lokken. I returned his glance. “We just heard this morning from the Ohio state police. The Chief had them checking into your story about staying in a motel ever since you told him about it. They finally found a guy named Rolfshus says he recognized your picture. He runs a little place off the freeway. Well, this here Rolfshus says you might be someone checked in there that night.”

“You mean Polar Bears was looking for that motel since the night I told him about it?”

“He’s tooken statements too,” said Lokken. “Lots of folks up here don’t like you.” He started the car. “I don’t know what the Chief would say, but it sure as hell looks to me like you’re okay on that Olson killing. So why the hell do you say it’s Duane?”

I gave him my reasons as we spun down the road. His hatred of women, his hatred of me. The physical evidence. “I think he set up the whole thing to get me a life sentence in the booby hatch,” I said. “And Polar Bears was hoping he’d shoot me, so that I couldn’t say anything about how Alison Greening really died. He sent you off so you’d be far away when it happened.”

“Christ, I don’t know,” said Lokken. “It’s crazy. What’s this about Alison Greening?”

So I told him that too. “And I think Duane has been half-crazy ever since,” I ended. “When I wrote him that I was coming back, I think he just snapped.”

“Holy man.”

“I sort of snapped too. Otherwise I think I would have seen it earlier. I had a crazy theory, but last night it turned out to be wrong.”

“Everything about this is crazy,” Lokken said in despair. He pulled the car up on the shoulder of the road beside the rows of corn. Polar Bears’ car sat, facing the way we had come, on the other side of the road. “Looks like you were right about the Chief, anyhow. You think they’re both up there?”

“I think Duane would go with Polar Bears,” I said. “It’d be too risky for him not to.”

“Let’s have a look. Hell, let’s have a look.” We got out of the car and jumped the ditch.

He said nothing, the run up toward the woods took much of his breath, but after we had forded the creek Lokken spoke again. “If what you say is right, Duane might of tried something on the Chief.”

“I don’t think he would,” I said.

“Yeah, but he might of,” he said, and drew his gun. “I don’t exactly remember where the damn clearing was.”

I said, “Follow me,” and began to work up over the rise and toward the beginning of the woods. Lokken crashed along behind me.

When I reached the first of the trees I began to trot uphill, going in the direction of Rinn’s old cabin. I had no idea of how the scene would be played. For once, I was grateful for Lokken’s presence. It did not make sense that Polar Bears would have spent the entire night in the clearing. Gradually the big gnarled trees drew closer. I slowed to a walk. In places I had to part branches and tall weeds with my hands.

“Do you notice anything funny?” I said after a time.

“Huh?” Lokken’s voice came from a good distance behind me.

“There isn’t any noise. No birds, no squirrels. No animal noises.”

“Huh,” said Lokken.

It was true. Other times when I had come up into the woods, I had been aware of a constant natural chatter about me. Now it was as though all the birds and animals had died. In that dark place, surrounded by the looming trees, the silence was decidedly spooky.

“Gunshot scares ‘em off,” Lokken said. “Maybe there was some trouble.” He sounded as apprehensive as I felt, and I knew that he still had the gun in his hand.

“We’re pretty close to the clearing now,” I said. “We’ll know soon.”

A few minutes later I saw the ring of trees around the clearing. “Right through there,” I said, and looked around at Lokken. His face was red with effort.

“Yeah. I remember now.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Chief? You there?” He got not even an echo; he shouted again. “Chief! Chief Hovre!” He looked at me hard, angry and frustrated, sweat running down his face. “Dammit, Teagarden, shake your butt.”

Though I felt cold, I too had begun to sweat. I could not tell Lokken that I was afraid to go into the clearing. Just then the woods seemed very potent.

“Come on, we saw the car, we know he’s here,” said Lokken.

“Something’s funny,” I said. I almost thought I could smell cold water. But that was not possible.

“Come on. Let’s go. Move it.” I heard the revolver click against a tree as he shook it at me.

I went toward the circle of trees; light hovered in the clearing beyond them.

Then I went through the sentinel trees and stepped into the clearing. The sudden dazzle of light at first made it difficult to see. Smoke came from the banked fire at the clearing’s center. I took another step toward it. I wiped my eyes. There was no humming, vibrant noise of insects.

Then I saw them. I stopped walking. I could not speak.

Lokken noisily broke into the clearing behind me. “Hey, what’s goin’ on? Hey, Teagarden, they in here? You—” His voice ended as if chopped off with an ax.

I knew why Lokken had vomited when he had seen the body of Jenny Strand.

Polar Bears was in front, Duane behind him fixed to a shorter tree. They were pinned to their trees, both naked, their bodies blackened and hanging like crushed fruit.

Lokken came up beside me, making a noise in his throat. I could not take my eyes from them. It was the most savage thing I had ever seen. I heard the handgun thump onto the earth. “What the—” Lokken began. “What—”

“I was wrong,” I whispered. “Jesus Christ, I was wrong. She’s back after all.”

“What—” Lokken’s face had turned a glistening, cloudy white.

“It wasn’t Duane after all,” I said. “It was Alison Greening. They came up here last night and she killed them.”

“Jesus, look at their skin,” moaned Lokken.

“She was saving me. She knew she could get me any time.”

“Their skin…”

“She punished them for raping and killing her,” I said. “Oh my God.”

Lokken half-sat, half-fell into the tall grass.

“Now she’ll be after Duane’s daughter,” I said, suddenly realizing that another life was probably lost. “We have to get down to the farm right now.” Lokken was retching into the grass.

“How could someone — someone lift them two like that—”

“My crazy theory was right.” I said to him. “We have to get to the farm right now. Can you run?”

“Run?”

“Then follow me as soon as you can. Go down and drive your car to Duane’s place.”

“… place,” he said. Then his eyes cleared a little, and he picked up the gun and waved it at me. “You wait. You don’t go anywhere, hear?”

I bent over and pushed the gun aside. “I brought you here, remember? And do you think I’m strong enough to lift those two and pin them to trees like that? Now hurry up and get straight. If it isn’t too late, we have to keep this from happening again.”

“How—”

“I don’t know,” I said, and turned away from him, and turned again with an idea. “Give me your keys. You can hotwire Polar Bears’ car.”

When I got back down to the road I hastily got into the squadcar and twisted Lokken’s key in the ignition. The motor started at once. I rolled away from Polar Bears’ car and stepped the accelerator all the way down to the floor.

A tractor chugged down the road before Bertilsson’s church; it straddled two lanes. I blew the horn, and the straw-hatted overweight man on the tractor’s seat wagged his hand without looking back. I looked for the siren button and found it. The farmer jerked around on the seat, saw the car, and steered the tractor to the side of the road. I blasted the horn and zipped by.

When I drove up to the old farmhouse I could see nothing unusual — the mare grazed among the cows, the lawn lay ripped and burned, Alison was not in sight. I swallowed, turning into the drive, afraid that I would find her as I had found her father and Polar Bears. I braked as I cut the car onto the lawn, and jumped out before it had stopped rolling.

I could smell her — I could smell cold water, as if rain had just ceased to fall. My legs nearly refused to move, and in my stomach lay an iciness that fear had deposited there.

I began to jog up the path to Duane’s house. A door slammed. I realized that Alison Updahl had seen the squadcar pull into the drive. She came running around the side of her house. When she saw me instead of Polar Bears or Dave Lokken, she stopped running and stood hesitantly on the path, looking worried, pleased and confused all at once. The air seemed to tighten, as it had on my first night in the woods: it seemed to grow thick and tight with malevolence. “Run!” I shouted to the girl. I waved my arms, semaphoring. “Get going!” The smell of the quarry washed over us, and this time she too caught it, for she half-turned and lifted her head.

“Danger!” I yelled, and began to sprint toward her.

Wind knocked me down as casually as a breeze flips a playing card.

“Miles?” she said. “My father didn’t—”

Before she could say come home, I saw another woman, a smaller woman, appear momentarily on the path behind her. My heart froze. The shadowy second girl stood with her hands on her hips, looking at both of us. She vanished in the next instant. Alison Updahl must have felt some particle of the other’s force, and she twisted her upper body to look behind her. I saw the terror begin in her — it was as though life and will had suddenly drained from her. She had seen something, but I did not know what. I got up from the dust and stones of the path. “Take off,” I shouted to her.

But it was too late. She was too terrified by whatever it was she had seen, and she could not move. “Alison!” I shouted, and it was not the living girl I addressed. “Leave her alone!”

There was a whirring, typhoon-like noise of rushing, rattling wind. I turned in its direction, and was aware of Alison Updahl, stunned like a bird before a snake, turning slowly too. In the long grass before the road, wind was making a pattern: carving circles in flattened grass. Leaves and twigs began to fly together. Out on the road, stones and chunks of tarry asphalt lifted and flew toward the circling pattern.

I called to Alison Updahl, “Come toward me.” She jerked herself forward, stumbled. The air was filled with small flying bits of wood, with tumbling leaves.

Through the leaf storm I ran toward her. She had fallen on the path, and a shower of small branches and stones came cascading down upon her. I grasped her hand and pulled her upright.

“I saw something,” she muttered.

“I saw it too. We have to run.”

The whirling pattern exploded. Most of the twigs and leaves filling the air were blasted soundlessly away, and spun lifelessly down to earth all over the area between the two houses. Only a tall skeletal superstructure, a vague outline of brown and green, remained towering; then it too blew away. A few stones rattled around us. The noise of screeching air, as if we were in a hurricane, stayed with us. Again the grass was printing itself into wide circles.

Her mouth opened, but she could not speak.

I took her hand more firmly and started to run. As we came hurrying down the path. Dave Lokken pulled into the drive in Polar Bears’ car. He still looked like a man climbing out of a three-day drunk. He looked at the girl and me, running as hard as we could in his direction. “Hey,” he said. “We gotta get those bodies…”

The circling pattern on the grass moved in his direction. Then I saw the figure of the girl, still shadowy, that I had seen on the path appeal beside his car. Immediately, both windshields shattered. Lokken screamed and covered his face with his arms. A force I could not imagine pulled him from the carseat and through the open window at his side. He rolled across the gravel of the drive. His nose was pouring blood.

I tried to take Alison Updahl toward the side field, seeing that it was useless to try to hide in the house. We had gone three paces, me tugging, she stumbling, when our hands were torn apart and a wind that stank of the grave and rotting meat buffeted me aside and knocked me against the tree where my grandfather used to hang his scythe. Something started to move across the grass toward Alison Updahl.

It was as though the rind of the world had broken away, just sheared away, houses, trees, dogs, people, jobs, sunlight, all of it, and only the most primitive and the darkest life was left, what remains when everything comprehensible and usual, the rind, has peeled off and what emerges is like what you see when you flip over a long flat rock in the woods. Lokken, lying down in thick vines behind me, his nose still gouting blood, saw what I saw and screamed a second time. I knew that he was covering his eyes.

Alison got to the porch and rushed inside. Whatever it was that followed her vanished like a smudge on a pane of glass.

A spout of material — grass, leaves, pebbles — lifted from the lawn and shattered against the side of the house.

There was one gascan left in the garage. I saw it in my mind and felt the way the grip would fit my hand, and without knowing what I would do with it or how it would help, I made myself run into the garage and lift it. It was full, as I knew it would be. By itself, the weight of the heavy liquid seemed to draw me outside again, as if it were pulling me down a slope.

I went toward the house. You have already done this once, I told myself, you did it last night: but I knew that beside the quarry I had been ready to die and now I was not. I glanced back at Lokken; he was half crouching in the weeds into which she had rolled him, making noises in his throat. Blood covered his uniform shirt. No sound came from the house. I had a sudden mental vision of poor Duane, poor Polar Bears, pinned like fruit to the trees, their skin black and white, and obligation to the past — a feeling like love — moved me forward.

The smell was like water from graves, and it blanketed the porch. The gascan weighed heavily in my hand. I went through into the living room. Everything looked different. It was all there, nothing had been moved, but the room I had prepared for Alison Greening was now darker, meaner, shabbier; water stains blotted the walls. The smell was thicker inside than on the porch. Alison Updahl was cowering on a chair, her legs drawn up before her chest as if she would kick anything that came too close. I do not think that she saw me. Her face was a tight white shield. What she had seen when she had twisted around on the path was what Lokken and I had witnessed moving toward the house. “I’m not going to let her get you,” I said. “I’m going to get you out.” It was just noise.

I heard the windows breaking all over the house. The girl before me twitched: her eyes were all whites. “Stand up,” I said. She put down her legs and tried to lever herself out of the chair. I turned away, satisfied that she could move and began to splash gasoline around the room. If we have to go this way, I thought, it will be better than — I saw the bodies pinned to the trees. I doused the furniture and splashed the gasoline on the back wall.

She was there, I knew; I could sense her in the house. It was that awareness of a hostile force I had had on the first night in the woods. Alison Updahl was up on her feet, her arms out in front of her like a blind woman’s. The floor of the room was filmed with dirt; I saw a triangle of moss sprouting in a corner of the ceiling.

Then I saw a shadow against the gasoline-spattered wall. Small, formless, but essentially manlike. I dropped the empty gascan and it rang on the floor. Outside, a branch thwacked against the white boards. “Miles,” Alison Updahl said very softly.

“I’m here.” Useless words of comfort.

Leaves pushed against the broken kitchen window and forced it in. I heard them boiling in the corrupt air .

The shadow against the wall grew darker. I caught the girl’s outstretched arm and pulled her toward me. Her eyes were fluttering, but I could see their pupils. “That smell…” She was on the edge of hysteria, I could hear it slice in her voice. She moved her head and saw the darkening shadow on the wall. The earth on the floor was stirring, moving in dervish circles.

“I’m going to light a match,” I said. “When I do, I want you to run out on the porch and jump through the screen. It’s full of holes, it’s weak. Then just keep running.”

In horror she was watching the shadow darken. Her mouth opened. “I dug up a cowdog once… after I buried it…”

The shadow was three-dimensional, standing out from the wall like a relief. The rotten air filled with the rustling of leaves. With part of my mind I thought that the room looked like it had been pulled up out of a flooding river. I tightened my arm around Alison Updahl’s shoulder. She seemed scarcely to be breathing. “Now get out,” I said. “Fast.” I pushed her toward the porch. The air hissed. The matches were in my hand. My fingers shook. I twisted five or six matches out of the book and managed to scratch them in a general way against the lighting surface. They went up into flame, and I tossed them toward the back of the room.

Heat and light exploded there. Beneath the whooshing sound of the gas igniting I heard the porch screen letting go as Alison tumbled through it.

Standing across the room from me was no shadow, no circling pattern on the grass, no tall outline of sticks, no dark thing from beneath the world’s rind, but a living person. Maybe if I were closer to her I could have seen the seams and imperfections, the rough vein of a leaf or the discoloration in the white of an eye, but from where I stood she looked as she had in 1955, a perfect girl of bone and skin and blood. Even then, she stopped my breath, with the fire beating in on us, beating in. It was that face composed of a thousand magical complications. Not a man in fifty could have looked at it without aching — -for the pain it would know, for the pain it would cause.

She was not smiling, but it was as if she were. Her gravity encompassed and suggested all feeling. Only gravity, the grave composure of such a face, can do this. Behind her figure small and slim the fire beat upwards on the wall. My skin baked in the heat.

With moveless fascination I saw that the tips of the fingers on one of her hands had caught fire. Without passion, with a clear quiet gravity which promised more than I could know or understand, she held me with her eyes and face.

Upstairs the house let go with a noise like a sigh. Fire sucked in a flaming orange stream up the narrow staircase. I stepped backwards, away from the flames. My eyebrows were crisping; I knew that my face was burned as if by the sun.

I understood, being looked at by her or what looked like her, that a contract was being made. I understood that she would rather have me dead, but that Duane’s daughter, her namesake, was the reason I would live. Now her entire hand was blazing, lost at the center of a glowing circle of light. Yes, there was a contract: I did not wholly comprehend it, I never wholly would, but I was bound to it.

She let me back away as far as the door. The expression on the face so much like her face had not altered by as much as a millimeter. The heat was unbearable, killing; I turned and ran, as much from the sense of bondage as from the fire.

Like Duane’s Dream House, the old farmhouse was igniting behind me, and when I turned around on the lawn to watch it go up, I saw that it too was a dream house. I felt as though part of me was still inside it. I was bound to it, bound for life, as I had been for twenty years. Seven hours earlier I had thought 1 had come to a new accommodation, and I now saw — still only half-comprehendingly — that all accommodations are the same accommodation. I felt simultaneously heavier and lighter, with my face burned and my life returned to me freighted with the responsibilities I had always had because I had taken them, because I was simply the person who had them. My cousin’s daughter was standing before the walnut trees, watching me with disbelief. When I noticed the expression in her eyes, I began to shake more noticeably. I turned away from her regard and watched the house. Dave Lokken lay whimpering behind us.

I thought of her in there, sealing me to my bargain. The whole upper and rear portions of the house were distorted by flame. I had laughed at Duane without recognizing that I too owned a dream house; and he had paid for my illusions, on the night when they were strongest in me.

“There was a — a person in there,” breathed Alison Updahl. “I thought you were going to die.”

“And I thought you were,” I said. “I didn’t know I could really do anything to stop it.”

“But you could.”

“I was here. That was enough.”

The house was roaring now, making a vast devouring sound. She moved right up next to me. “I saw something horrible,” she said. “Miles—”

“We saw it too,” I told her, cutting off her gasp as she remembered. “That’s why he’s like that.” We both glanced at Lokken, who was kneeling now and looking at the house with red stunned-looking eyes. Blood and vomit covered his shirt.

“If you hadn’t come just then…”

“You would have been killed. And so would I. That’s what it was about.”

“But now that — person — won’t come back.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. She’ll never come back like that, anyhow.”

The whole house was in the last stage before collapse, and I could feel the heat beating against my face. I had to immerse myself in cold water. Blisters were forming on the palms of my hands. Behind the flames the old building was so skeletal that it looked as though it could float.

“When I dug up our cowdog it smelled like that,” Alison said. “Like inside.”

Boards and rafters began to tumble inward. The entire porch leaned against the wall of flames, sighed like a tired child, and soundlessly sank down into flatness.

“If she doesn’t come back like that, how will she come back?”

“As us,” I said.

“Your father and I loved her,” I said. “I suppose he hated her too, but he named you after her because he loved her first, before he hated her.”

“And he killed her, didn’t he?” she asked. “And blamed it on you.”

“He was just there. It was really Zack’s father. He was the one.”

“I knew it wasn’t you. I wanted you to tell me, out at the quarry. I thought it was my dad.” I could see her throat fluttering, jumping like a frog’s. “I’m glad it wasn’t.”

“Yes.”

“I feel… numb. I can’t feel anything yet.”

“Yes.”

“I feel like I could talk a lot or not say anything at all.”

“I know,” I said.

The sides of the house were still upright, bracketing two open rooms of surging and twisting fire. At the center of a strand of flame stood an immovable shadow, a brief column of dark. Dave Lokken staggered to his feet.

“Is my father…?” She took one of my hands, and her touch was cool.

“We weren’t in time,” I said. “Lokken and I found your father and Polar Bears. Up in the woods. I wish we could have done something. Lokken will bring them down.”

The shadow I was watching as she clung to me darkened in the midst of the fire. Her tears flamed in the damaged skin at the base of my neck.

I led her to my car. I could not stand there any more. His eyes stupid with shock, Lokken watched us getting into the VW. We too were in shock, I knew. My hands and face hurt, but I still could not feel the pain, it was only an abstraction of pain. I backed out into the drive and stopped to look at the house for the last time. Goodby, grandmother, goodby, dream house, goodby dreams, goodby Alison. Hello. Goodby. Goodby, Alison. Who would be back — as a gesture seen on a crowded street, or as a snatch of music heard from an open window, as the curve of a neck and the pressure of a pair of hands, or as a child. Who would always be with us, now. Neighbors were coming slowly up the road, some of them walking, holding dishtowels and tools in their hands, some of them getting out of their pickups with taut, worried faces. Red and Tuta Sunderson were moving slowly across the lawn, going toward Dave Lokken. The old farmhouse was nearly gone and the flames were low. I backed the car through the people and swung it out on the road so that it was facing deeper into the valley.

“Where are we going?” asked Alison.

“I don’t know.”

“My father is really dead?” She put a knuckle in her mouth, knowing the answer.

“Yes. So is Polar Bears.”

“I thought he was the one — the one who killed those girls.”

“I thought so too, for a little while,” I said. “I’m sorry. Polar Bears thought so too for a little while. He was the one that finally put the; idea in my head.”

“I can’t go back, Miles,” she said,

“Fine.”

“Will I have to go back?”

“You can think about it,” I said.

I was just steering, just driving a car. For a while her crying was a wet noise beside me. The road seemed to wind generally westward. I saw only farms and a winding road ahead of me. After this valley there would be another, and then another after that. Here the trees grew more thickly, coming right down to the buildings.

She straightened her back on the seat beside me. There were no more crying noises. “Let’s just drive,” she said. “I don’t want to see Zack. I can’t see him. We can write back from wherever we get to.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Let’s go someplace like Wyoming or Colorado.”

“Whatever you want,” I said. “We’ll do whatever you want.” The curve of a neck, the pressure of a pair of hands, the familiar gesture of an arm. The blisters on my hands began truly to hurl; the nerves in my face began to transmit the pain of being burnt; I was beginning to feel better.

At the next curve of the valley the car trembled and the motor died. I heard myself begin to laugh.