THE CURSE

Charles L. Grant

Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

© 2012 / The Estate of Charles L. Grant

Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber

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OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY CHARLES L. GRANT

The Oxrun Station Series

The Last Call of Mourning

The Grave

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE:

This is Charles L. Grant's first horror novel.  It is rife with the clichés of the day, and we are told that mention of this novel made the author grumble.  That said, it's an important milestone in his career, and we are proud to bring it back to a new generation of readers.  This is where it all began…

David Niall Wilson

Crossroad Press

Chapter I

Terry was glad she had chosen to stay in the back seat. The way the real estate agent was driving, she thought it the safest place to be, certainly safer for her than for the highway drivers who were forced to guess what his next move would be. She considered leaning forward to ask Syd if he'd paid up their insurance, then decided neither he nor the agent would appreciate her sense of humor.

My curse, she thought, and again ignored the driving by staring with reluctant envy at the car's massive interior. Carefully, almost reverently, her fingers kneaded the sable leather upholstery, then traced the elaborate Castilian designs in the doors' inserted metal-work—all the motion executed in studied avoidance before lingering over the panel of toggles topping the armrest in the seat's center. The temptation to palm them into operation simultaneously made her smile, and had her husband not been with her, she knew she just might have done it. Fighting such obvious lures for the weakly adventurous caused ulcers, she believed, and she wondered again how Syd had managed to fend off her spending urges long enough to spirit away funds for the down payment.

"You're a bloody incurable hedonist," he'd accused her one autumn evening. She was modeling a new winter coat trimmed with synthetic fox and belted with rattlesnake. Her turns in front of the secondhand sofa were just sharp enough to keep him from snatching the price tag. "You're downright obscene sometimes."

"I am an Epicurean," she corrected primly, and deftly detached the tag and folded it into a pocket before he could read it. "I have taste, you see. That's the big difference between you and me, Sydney Guiness. Taste." And she aimed a mock bump and grind at her shadow on the wall.

"Your innocent little readers should only see you now," he said and stretched out, his hands cupped behind his head, a foam throw pillow kicked to the floor to make room for his feet. His eyes, as dark as the close-cut beard that softened his jaw, wandered rapidly over the ceiling in feigned terror, and his lips began to tremble violently. He groaned once, and she took an involuntary step closer. "They're coming down," he whispered harshly, clutching at his throat, pulling at his collar. "They're coming down to crush me." He gagged and twisted onto his side away from her. "I can't escape, Terry. They're going to bury me alive and I'll never be heard from again. Never, do you hear?"

"What?" she asked, caught in spite of herself. "What's coming down? The ceiling?"

"The goddamned bills!" he shouted, and rolled to his feet to grab her shoulders before she could back away. "You're trying to drive me mad, aren't you? Admit it, love, and spare me all this agony. You're trying to be like that guy in Gaslight, right? To control my money without the unseemly mess of a murder." He leaned closer, his eyes wide, thick brows pulled low. "But you won't get away with it, my one true love. You'll never succeed in driving this man mad no matter what you do. I'm on to you, Theresa Ann Guiness. You'll never get away with it."

"Well, God knows I try," she said, punching him lightly in the stomach before hugging him tightly.

But he'd paid the bills, as usual, and had taken her out to dinner a week later, which was decidedly unusual, and, in the middle of the Baked Alaska, dropped a smudged and battered passbook onto her plate.

"Open it," he ordered. His frown vanished, and she thought the grin that split beard and moustache was uncannily wolfish, and smug. "Come on," he said. "Open it before it disappears."

She did. Wiped at it with a finger. Choked. Tried to laugh and choked again. A waiter rushed over with a brimming glass of water, then tapped her gently in the back. A moment later she waved him away with sputtered thanks, and stared at the figures recorded on the last page.

"The house?" she said, almost too frightened to believe it. He nodded and she drained the water. "But how? I mean . . . Syd, where? I mean, where did you get it all?"

He'd gloated and rubbed the side of his nose. "Superb budget planning, m'dear." He leaned back in the chair and stroked at his beard. "That, and a few subtle lies about my take-home pay and a bonus or two you never got your slippery little hands on."

"But that's unfair! We could have bought a lot of things!"

"Right," he said. "It worked, didn't it?"

And even now, as the taurine real estate agent struggled with his Cadillac through the summer weekend traffic, she found it difficult to believe that they were finally on their way to freedom. That after five years of high-rise cubicles and increasingly expensive inner city complexes, they could actually be browsing in the market for a home of their own.

You're a damned sneak, she thought to her husband in the front seat. You knew what this is doing to me.

Immediately after they'd opened the search—how far back? In April? It seemed so long. What century?

The apartment began to shrink inexorably around them like some diabolical machine in a low-grade horror film. What she had found utterly charming when they'd taken possession was exposed as cheap corner-cutting by the builder; what she'd bragged to her friends about as being modernly convenient became cramped, and with a suddenness that astonished her. Every Saturday, then, they fled to ride through Long Island, southern Connecticut, and New Jersey, checking the visible market against that which appeared daily in the newspapers. And as they searched, her dreams of Edwardian mansions and rambling estates fragmented and scattered under the relentless wind of fiscal reality; but following a fortnight of self-pitying depression during which she had surrendered all hope, Syd brought her protesting to an agency a coworker had recommended, and the cycle resumed: the tours, the wanderings, the poking through bedrooms, baths, family rooms, kitchens. She would have run crying from every one of them. She would have gladly apologized to the apartment for even thinking about abandoning it, but she was trapped and there was no shaking it: the fever had returned, and she was getting weary of fighting it.

A sharp turn off the highway led them into the low hills between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and she snapped back to the car.

"Of course, it isn't all that spectacular," Enfallo was saying to a silent, always silent, Syd, "but for your basic starter home, I think you'll find it exactly what you're looking for. More important, of course, it's what you two young folks need right now."

He shifted his ungainly bulk and thumbed up the air conditioning, pushed the blower a notch higher. His fingers, well tanned and weighted by heavy gold rings, drummed on the steering wheel while he muttered at the traffic. Syd only grunted as she knew he would, and turned his head to watch the monotonous green blur past them.

There has to be a book of some kind, she decided, one with a million pages and a zillion pictures of nice young couples representing every age and salary bracket combination. And with each there has to be two pages of dialogue cues that every agent has to memorize before he can pull away from the curb. There has to be. They all say the same stupid, inane things; like an overly patient mother explaining a picture book to her two nice, but dense, children.

"Now the living room in this house—" and Enfallo suddenly hunched over the wheel in a violent coughing fit. The car swerved and Terry feared her first and only home would turn out to be a pauper's casket. She grabbed for the armrest and inadvertently lowered the window at her shoulder. As the humid heat slapped her, she tugged at the first switch her fingers touched and blew out a held breath as the window closed again. Enfallo, meanwhile, fought the car off the partially eroded shoulder and glanced into the rear-view mirror. Terry smiled quickly, and nodded as she leaned expectantly forward, blinking at a blast of cold air from the dashboard.

She was beginning to feel like a puppet, or better, an actress playing a part for the twentieth straight year. Her role in this particular production was that of the female numbskull, breathing heavily at every dozen words as though they and they alone would free her from the bondage of eternal rent damnation. She received all the lurid descriptions, the miraculous possibilities, the plans for elaborate formal gardens, while Syd was made to suffer through the double-talk technicalities and glossed-over-finances—and it had severely disconcerted every agent they'd yet encountered when it was Terry who demanded exactitude on quotations about taxes, heat, electricity and water; Terry who questioned ceiling stains, floorboard gaps, construction materials, and caulking in basements. She and Syd had written their own little scenario, which more often than not proved more exciting than the houses they saw.

"I smoke too much," Enfallo apologized. "One of these days I'm going to switch to cigars or a pipe. But what can you do when the world's like it is, right?"

Syd grunted. Terry nodded again, shivering and wishing she had brought a sweater. She was sure now that darting in and out of air-conditioned cars was going to give her pneumonia, terminal.

"But as I was saying, the living room is certainly large enough to hold even that Spanish kind of furniture, the big stuff, if you know what I mean. Say, aren't you Spanish, Mrs. Guiness?"

"Black Irish," she said, delighting in the small victory. "If my hair was shorter, you could see that right away. My skin's also a little too pale to be Mediterranean."

The agent shrugged, and poked at jowls sprouting gray whiskers that shouted for an afternoon shave. "Well, you can't win them all, right? Anyway, the kitchen has been completely remodeled, absolutely up to date. And the bedrooms are easily large enough to hold queen-sized beds, if you like that sort of thing. You'll see what I mean. The basement, of course, has been paneled—by one of the earlier owners, I believe, and refloored so you can have a rec room, if you like that sort of thing. There is, naturally, six-inch insulation throughout," and he turned to Syd who nodded as if he understood all the implications and was taking them into serious account.

"What the hell do I know from dry wells and furnaces?" he'd demanded once, his frustrations no greater but more visible than hers. "Look, Terry angel, all I want is some place where I can yell without having someone pounding on my ceiling because I'm disturbing their idiot cats."

"Don't you worry about it, love. I'll take care of everything."

Which she did. As always.

"Now this is Hawthorne Street," Enfallo announced as though he'd just turned onto the Champs Elysees or Regent Street. "Quiet, as you can see, and all the homes in this section of the township are relatively new. Oh, a few older ones here and there, but you can see that the neighborhood doesn't suffer for them. In fact, they lend a kind of quaint charm to the whole area." He tapped Syd's thigh with a manicured finger. "You saw how easy it was to get here from the Interstate?" Syd nodded and Enfallo grinned, his lips self-consciously tight to hide yellow-stained teeth. "And this," as he turned sharply without signaling, "is Prynne Lane. A peaceful enough dead end, just like I promised you. Didn't I tell you I'd take care of you? You just have to trust me, right? I wouldn't steer you wrong, not at all. Of course, there's no heavy traffic. . . ."

Terry watched the buildings ease gently into focus as the car slowed to a reasonable speed, and she was able to concentrate more fully by ignoring Enfallo's intensified pitch. Though the area was not a development, the buildings were obvious escapees from the same architectural nightmare: cookie-mold colonials, bi-levels, and ranches. Most of them newly green, white, or muted gold—all of them aproned by generous pampered lawns, coyly hidden behind decades-old red maples, willows, a scattering of cherry and dogwood, and a very few massively boled oak and elm. Hives of children played in several of the yards, and compact cars were parked in front of closed garages. It was pleasant enough, she decided. Probably screaming noisy during the first weeks of no-school summer, but pleasant.

The street itself had been recently repaved and shimmers of old formed rainbows in several shallow depressions. And when she glanced up over the hood, she was surprised to see that the road ended as if someone had sliced it off with a carving knife. Instead of a gradual tapering, fading from tarmac to dirt to wilderness, there was, at the far end, an abrupt barrier of trees and tangled underbrush which prevented her from seeing clearly beyond it. But she remembered Enfallo describing to Syd how the lane stuck out like a finger into a vast meadow that itself bordered a state park. Should they take this place, he'd said, there was practically no chance at all that someone would build behind or next to them. Some arrangement with the neighborhood; but when Syd pressed for details, Enfallo had changed the subject with a promise of looking it up as soon as he could.

"What do you think, angel?"

Terry blinked and smiled. What do you think, with the emphasis on the think—whenever he stressed the you, all bets were off as far as he was concerned and he needed her to provide them with a polite way of telling an agent he was out of his mind for taking them to a place like . . . whatever.

"It's nice." Simply saying nice would have indicated her own serious doubts.

"Great," he said, smiling for the first time that day. To Enfallo, he said, "So where's this poor man's mansion of yours?"

"You're looking at it."

Syd slouched to stare across the fat man's chest; Terry merely turned her head, and tried not to sigh. No bells, she thought, no rockets, bands, or carousels. But she had to at least give the agent credit for not building their young hopes on sandy promises.

The house was a standard Eastern ranch, indented where the front door began with a concrete porch set-tied on cinder block openwork. Judging by the array of windows, she estimated two bedrooms to the left of the front door, living room on the right flanked by a carport. Along the back would be the dining area, kitchen, bath, and a third bedroom. The outside was cedar shakes aged a dark brown, the trim an uninspiring white. There was a high-spreading dogwood in the center of the browning front lawn, and chest-high hedging that ran from the end of the street across the front and down the left side, and by its sudden downward slope, she realized the recreation room Enfallo mentioned would probably have a private entrance lower than the main part of the house. A black mailbox by the driveway was canted slightly backward, as if struck once too-often by careening red wagons. Silently they left the car, and she stood for a moment where slate walk joined the city's concrete, one hand resting lightly on the hedge. The tiny leaves were cool despite the sun, and she suddenly had hopes.

But there were no surprises; once through the front door, everything was as she imagined it would be. The gleaming hardwood floors, the freshly white walls, the living-dining room el with facing picture windows. Two doors directly opposite the entrance: one a closet, the other leading down to the so-called family room. She poked into the three bedrooms, the tiled bath, the yellow-and-brown kitchen, and wrinkled her nose at the sun-heated mustiness of a house long closed to the living. No surprises, but she caught herself placing furniture just the same.

They waited awkwardly in the narrow backyard while Enfallo stumped across the street to speak, he said, with a neighbor about any hidden problems the seller neglected to mention. Another part of the infernal drama; now she and Syd were to argue over trifles (or praising same), wonder about price, grope for the flaws that might change their minds. Instead, however, they said nothing. Watching, rather, a man and two small boys hiking across the field behind the house. A double row of winter-bent birch separated sod from the open expanse that rolled softly to a far line of forest; laurel and shrub filled the spaces, and Terry briefly closed her eyes to conjure a vision of estate-width the colder seasons and the dying of the leaves would bring. The man stopped, then—a dark figure against the blue August sky—saw them watching, and bent down to his small companions. When he straightened, they all waved, and Terry surprised herself by waving back. Then they vanished, over the crest of a low hill evidently much steeper on the far side.

"Friendly," Syd muttered.

"Damned good eyes to see us through all that tangle," she said, "but it's a nice change, that's for sure." She squeezed his hand and he pressed both against his side.

"Mrs. Ortiz wouldn't be butting in for milk every damned day."

"She's old, Syd, what do you expect? She can't get out the way she used to."

"We wouldn't have those idiot Carter bastards screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night."

"I think triplets are cute. We should have a few sets some day."

"I could use the front room, the one in the corner, for my layouts, and you could have the middle one for a study. No more drafting boards or easels tripping us in the front room anymore."

"It was kind of cozy. I sort of liked it."

"You're scared, angel."

There was no need for a nod, a theatrical gasp at his apparent ESP, or a quick worried blinking of affirmation. Rent was so easy—one year at a time, and leases painlessly broken when the other tenants became annoyances or the apartment too crowded for their accumulation of memorabilia. A house; and she shivered in spite of the heat, and the lackluster shade. The responsibility, the mortgage, the absolute frightening permanence of everything owning a home implied. After all, she was only twenty-seven—much too young to be rooted like that scarred elm in the back, too full of wings to piece together a permanent nest. It occurred to her as she watched Syd pace off the width of the lawn that he was somehow trying to transform her, mold her Pygmalion-like into a suburban robot that cleaned and dusted and polished and waxed at the mere flick of a marital switch. How could she possibly make progress in her fledgling career and keep a house—so goddamned big, for God's sake from deteriorating into a private, thirty-year indentured slum? It was beyond her, above her, a too powerful giant for her puny female Jack.

When Syd passed her, she reached out and took his arm, stood in front of him, her eyes level with his chin.

She drew a finger through his beard, then scratched her own cheek lightly before biting on an unpainted nail.

"The drive's a little long," he said quietly, "but it would be nice to come home to. To open my own front door without worrying whether or not you left the latch on before you got into the tub. I could mow the lawn on Saturdays like a sane human being. Have a rose garden back there, or over on the side by the empty lot. Put up decorations at Christmas. Stuff like that. You know what I mean?"

She stared at him, trying to reconcile her fears with his dreams, and in his face saw the tension pulling like overloaded gravity at the slightly puffed flesh around his eyes, saw the pleading little boy look fail because of it. There had been something, perhaps the inherent instability, of apartment living that had continuously thwarted his learning to relax completely; and now he had been given the added burden of his job's security. In addition to the gradual decline of the economy as a whole, he was only a minor cog in a minor agency that never saw a month go by without at least one takeover bid from the larger Madison Avenue firms. The worrying tired him; would the new client be pleased with his idea? Were the presentation designs precisely what the campaign demanded? Did President Fellon's unctuous grin mean he'd finally lost his touch, and the client, and the job?

Do yourself a favor, Theresa Ann O'Hare Guiness, and try thinking of your chauvinist partner first for a change.

He watched her, but he didn't push and for that she was glad, a paradox situation since it was the one fault of his she could not abide, his lack of forcefulness. She wandered to the hedge between her—her? God, had she decided already?—her yard and the neighbor to the left. There were no swings or sandboxes or tires hanging from tree limbs. That pleased her; no small children, which was good for late night's work and late morning's sleep. Turning, she saw Syd caressing the gray trunk of one of the quartet of ancient trees that broke up the lawn between house and birch line. Then he looked up and whistled softly to a squirrel twitching its brown-plumed tail. She squinted, and saw him building birdhouses and feeders, laying a patio outside the rec room's sliding glass doors, swearing loudly , while he insisted on constructing his own personal barbecue pit.

Oh, what the hell, she thought. A gesture, then; she reached up and pulled the single black braid of her hair over her shoulder, tugged at it thoughtfully while worrying at the red rubber band at its tip. She shook her head and crossed to the jumble of trees and underbrush that marked the separation of lane and meadow. Again she noticed the slight rise of the untended ground, and a scattering of wildflower and dandelion that poked through the long grass to the top of the rise. Field mice, rabbits, swallows, crows; straight-from-nature models for her illustrations, she thought. A plus if there ever was one. You sure don't find them easily on Third Avenue these days.

Perspiration gathered on her upper lip and she wiped it off, prepared to turn and face Syd's joy when a startlingly sharp glint of metal made her stop and kneel. In a bush covered with small green and dusty leaves was a doll, a rag doll covered with dried mud, its legs and arms stubby and nibbled at. Its head was wooden, the features hastily carved into unusual, disturbing angles, and the eyes were mere gouges. It was jammed into the bush's center close to the roots, but when she reached in to rescue it, thorns dug into her hand.

"What do you got there, angel?"

She yelped and stood quickly, nearly losing her balance as she glared at Syd's apologetic grin. "A toy, a doll," she said, pointing with one hand as she wiped the other against her slacks. "One of those kids at the end of the street must have lost it."

Syd bent over, made interested noises, and started to reach for it. She warned him about the thorns and watched as he debated ignoring her, lost, shrugged and moved her back to the inadequate shade of the largest yard tree.

"Okay, angel my love, what's the verdict before our intrepid guide gets back?"

Don't push, she thought, for God's sake, don't push. And said, "Well, for what we want, I don't see how we could go wrong."

"The agent says it came on the market just this week. We're the first to see it besides him. It'll go fast, he says. Gone like the proverbial wind if we don't act fast."

"There wasn't any furniture left inside," she said, instantly suspicious. "Whoever moved out did it awfully quick, don't you think?"

Syd curved his fingers into claws and passed at her face. "A body in the cellar, an insane old hag secretly the daughter of the mayor locked in the crawlspace that passes for an attic." He dropped his hands and frowned. "Enfallo says it was a quick company transfer. That's what he said. The guy that owned the place had to move out to the West Coast with a week's notice." He shook his head. "Wow, what a hell of a way to make a living."

"Well, maybe, but it's awfully cheap for a place in such good shape. Considering it's what, ten years at the most?"

Syd bit down on his impatience, but Terry didn't look away. "Look, angel," he said, "it's a company sale. They apparently want to get rid of it and write the loss off before they start sinking too much into taxes and things. Or something like that."

Terry hugged herself and looked back at the house. There was pressure, and she didn't like it. Enfallo she could take because pressure, however gentle, was his business weapon, but Syd had a way sometimes of making her feel several notches below absolute idiocy. It wasn't deliberate, and he always denied it when her pride could no longer stand it. But still . . . he had this way about him, and now was exactly the wrong time to bring it out into the open for discussion.

"Well?"

"Come on, Syd, give me a chance to breathe a little."

"Oh, Terry, what more do you want, anyway? It's the right size, neighbors on one side only and I even think the house is deserted, and a whole damned field and woods you can use for the books. What do you want; them to pay us to take it off their corporate hands?"

Enfallo barged through a small gap in the hedge before she could answer, and she winced at the snap of broken branches. "What do you think, eh? What do you think, folks?" He stepped between them and placed heavy damp arms around their shoulders. "Of course, you can always put in central air conditioning if you want—it can handle it, though there's a beautiful breeze that comes in from the field at night. There's even room for a nursery when you need it. Downstairs, that unfinished place could be a nursery, too, if you didn't want the kid to wake you up at all hours. See what I mean? Perfect. I wouldn't kid you, you know. I want your business again, right? I want you to come to me, Mrs. Guiness, when you're a famous author—children's books, right?—and say, Enfallo, I need to sell this place and get me something a hundred times bigger. So would I lie to you?"

"No," she said, squirming just enough to disengage his arm. "But I don't write, I illustrate."

"What's the difference?" he said, laughing to show he was big enough to admit to a slip in his infallible memory. "You want to come to me again if I do you right, and, of course, I want you to come back. I'm talking to you like you were my own family, Syd and Terry, and I wouldn't kid you at all. Believe me."

"We'll have to think about it," Syd said, and nodded to her. They immediately put the tree between the agent and their conversation.

"I hate him," she said quietly, putting a hand to her face to hide her grin.

"Slimy little bastard, ain’t he? I never trust a man who wears a tie when it's ninety degrees outside, and it's still not midafternoon."

"If he were part of my family, I'd rather be an orphan."

"Maybe we could tell him to buy himself a decent razor with his commission."

They laughed, kissed once, and after a silent staring discussion, rejoined the agent.

"We'll take it," Syd announced, hooking his thumbs into his waistband as though the contracts had already been signed.

"And whatever they're asking," she said, "offer them three thousand less because this yard will need a ton of work, and the paneling downstairs is coming apart at the seams, and that so-called laundry room looks like it could use a good fumigation, about twice a week for the next year. Remember, three thousand less and don't you dare argue with them."

"That's firm."

"No question."

"I'll write you a check for the binder on the way back."

"How soon can you draw up the papers?"

Take that, Terry thought as Enfallo momentarily paled at the rapid instructions. He coughed his anger, straightened his tie, and led them slowly to the front of the house. "Number Three," he said, pointing to the scrollwork over the front door. "It's supposed to be lucky."

"I'm sorry if we came on a little strong," she said, feeling suddenly guilty and knowing Syd would be glaring at her. "We're just a little excited is all. Our first house, if you know what I mean."

"Don't worry about it," Enfallo said, obviously not meaning it, but willing to be considered a game player. "And since you're being so nice to me, Mrs. Guiness, I should probably tell you that this isn't exactly an all-white neighborhood. Not," he said hurriedly when he saw her frown, "that I believe you two to be of the prejudiced nature. You're much too intelligent for that sort of thing. But sometimes, unfortunately, appearances can be deceiving, and it does make a difference to some people about things like that."

"Of course," Syd muttered sourly.

"Blacks do not bother me, Mr. Enfallo," Terry said, as stiffly as she could.

"Blacks?" Enfallo looked around at the nearby houses, then ducked his head as he opened the car door for her. "Blacks? Oh my, not blacks, Mrs. Guiness. Indians."

A sudden squeal of tires cut off her question, and she pressed up against the door as a car backed rapidly out of a driveway opposite the ranch, paused and raced down The Lane. Near the corner, an elderly woman encased in an aluminum walker had reached the center of the street. She looked up at the car, and Terry almost screamed as it swerved toward her, cut away and struck down a dog that had just stepped off the curb.

"He tried to kill her!" Terry said, feeling a surge of bile in her throat. "Syd, did you see that?"

The car had braked in the street, and the driver, ignoring the shouts of the old woman, walked to the corpse of the animal. He looked, down, looked at the woman, then kicked the body into the gutter before returning to his car and driving away.

"Oh, my God, Syd!" She grabbed his arm and hung on tightly. "He tried to kill that woman, then deliberately ran down that poor dog. What kind of a neighborhood is this, anyway?"

Syd pulled her close and turned her away from the scene of the accident. "Take it easy, angel, take it easy. I'm sure it's not what you think." He looked to Enfallo who nodded rapidly. "Come on, angel, get in the car."

"But aren't you going to do something?"

"Do what, love? I don't think it was deliberate, and I doubt Mr. Enfallo does either."

"I'll call the police and report it, Mrs. Guiness," the agent said. "Don't worry."

"That poor old woman," Terry whispered, unable to control her quivering. "I wonder if it was her pet."

"A stray, most likely," Enfallo said. "They're all over nowadays."

"What," Syd said, suddenly changing the subject, "did you mean about there not being blacks but Indians around here? India Indians?"

"No. American Indians. You know, feathers and scalps and all that."

Terry felt herself calming, simultaneously hating herself for the ease with which she hardened herself to the incident. "So what?"

The oversized chest sagged as if the agent had been holding his breath against a reversal of their decision. "Oh, nothing, Mrs. Guiness, but of course I wouldn't feel right if I didn't tell you everything about the neighborhood."

"We're family," she said, sliding into what felt like an oven.

"Absolutely. I just really wouldn't feel right in my heart if I didn't let you in on all the facts concerning your recent move."

"Like wagon trains," she mumbled, then grinned stupidly when he turned around to stare. "I don't think we'll be bothered, and would you mind turning on the air conditioning? It's rather stuffy in here."

Sycophantic to the point of burlesque, the agent switched on the engine and the cooling system, offered them both cigarettes, put the pack hastily away when they refused. He asked about side visors to keep the sun from Syd's face, the correct temperature level for Terry's comfort. Then he headed for Hawthorne Street as though he were in a funeral procession. And fitting, she thought as she stared at the dog's broken body in the gutter; damn, even on a dead end, drivers won't slow down. I'm going to have a word with that man when I find out who he is. The bastard.

Once they were on Hawthorne, however, Terry realized that not all the lots on The Lane had been cleared for housing, and for several hundred yards to either side on the larger road, there were similar untouched parcels of land. In wondering, she tuned out.

Enfallo's prattling about the wisdom of their decision, the dawn of their future now breaking over their bowed and humble heads. "Do they cause any trouble?" she asked suddenly.

"Terry, drop it," Syd muttered, hunching down and away from the cooling unit's blast.

"Those Indians," she persisted. "I want to know if they caused trouble on the block. Parties, drunks, that sort of thing."

"Oh, my, no, Mrs. Guiness. Nothing at all like that."

"Terry, please!"

"It's just that there are those who are somewhat apprehensive, shall we say, about property values and so forth, and they believe—mistakenly, as we both know, Mrs. Guiness—that nonwhites have a depreciatory effect on market prices. In fact, if you want to know the truth, Denver McIntyre is one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. The only thing is, he has this . . . what would you call it, an obsession? . . . this thing about the reservation."

"What reservation?" Syd, Terry saw with perverse delight, had finally become interested.

"Why, the one this area used to be, of course. Couple hundred years. Not that long, actually, though to hear Denver talk about it, it was a ghetto even before the whites moved in from the coast. Actually, I think it was back in the 1880s. There are arrowheads all over the place. No totem poles. Just arrowheads."

Terry declined further comment, and in the middle of an explanation to Syd about the building of what the locals called The Lane, they passed a small, timeworn house with a too bright FOR SALE sign posted in the front yard. A SOLD banner had been affixed across it, and there was a short-haul moving van parked near the front door. A little girl, no more than eight or nine, was standing on the grass watching two men hefting a plastic-covered sofa into the back of the truck. She was crying.

We are going to buy a house, Terry thought as she turned to follow the silent exodus through the rear window. We are really going to buy our very first house. She pinched her wrist, jumped at the pain. Damn! Liberated or not, I think I'm going to cry.

Chapter II

Nine weeks, and through the perversity of her mind's clock they could have been, on alternate days, the same as nine years or nine minutes.

On weekends, armed with bedrolls, scrub brush, pails, and polish, she implanted the first of her housekeeping seeds.

She disposed of the suddenly visible landlord's strenuous objections and none too subtle references to her lease by telling him with acute precision what and where was the best method for storing his security—"Just send us the interest, please, because that's the law. Registered mail, if you don't mind. I wouldn't want you to think we were cheating you."

She despaired at moving all the unattractive, but decidedly their furniture until Syd accompanied a bottle of champagne home with a new account, and flourished a check to dispel her doubts. After a day's searching for sentimental attachments, she called the Salvation Army who promised her a profusion of prayers every day for a year; and she blushed when the young man in the lieutenant's uniform kissed her on the cheek as he carried out a third-hand lamp.

She fought off the superintendent’s whining demands that they paint the apartment before moving: "Look at all them stains, Mrs. Guiness. It'll take me a week and three coats to cover them up right." She folded her arms and glowered: "And while you're at it, Rosen, don't forget to cover up the cracks in the ceiling from Mrs. Ortiz's bathroom that you haven't taken care of since last winter."

All of it too fast, and too slow. Syd appeared to be oblivious to the chaos and she hated him, envied his detachment. He moved through it as though he were packing for a weekend in the Poconos, and one evening she locked herself in the bathroom and cried for an hour while he pleaded to be forgiven for whatever it was he had done wrong.

She lay awake too many nights painting and repainting, papering and paneling, laying new floors that mirrored the ceiling, covering them then with carpeting far too lush to walk on with socks, much less shoes. She considered, over a piece of graph paper, raising part of the roof in the back so she and Syd could have a real studio of their own and not bother the baby whenever it, he, she, came to unsettle their routine.

The baby.

"Are you asleep?"

"Should I be?"

"I want to talk to you."

"Do you know what time it is?"

"It's important."

"About the house."

"About the house, and stop reading my mind! Syd, are you sure we're doing the right thing, what with the economy and all going to hell like it is? I mean, it's a pretty big step we're taking, you know. We won't be able to just pack up and leave when we get tired of looking at the same walls and floors all the time. What if we don't like the neighborhood? Suppose the people living there really liked the family that was there before us and resent our moving in so quickly before they have a chance to forget them? What if you don't like driving all that way to the city every day? What if —"

"Terry, please."

"But we have to think of these things, Syd. They're important!"

"We've signed the contracts, angel. What more can I say?"

"You could tell me you love me, you know."

"Would it help?"

"Some."

"Then come over here and let's discuss all these important points like grownups."

"I don't think you want to discuss anything."

"Neither do I."

One afternoon she stood in front of the bathroom mirror and bunched her hair to the back of her head with one hand to see if she would look more Irish or Spanish with it shorn. All it did, she decided gloomily, was make a thin face thinner, pale skin more white, the lips of her undersized mouth too big and too red; she never had to use lipstick and somehow felt betrayed that she couldn't. She stepped back, then, and pushed up onto her toes to see if her figure had altered, her bust line enlarged as a result of becoming a tyro homeowner. Then she slapped each breast in turn and damned their mediocrity, wondering why Syd managed to find them so attractive when he could have had (she liked to believe) any one of a thousand women far more provocatively structured. She shrugged and tried to encircle her waist with her hands, frowned at the slight bulge below her navel as though the look would turn the fat into an embryo.

"You know something? I do believe you are finally cracking up, Theresa Ann O'Hare Guiness."

Her reflection pouted and brushed lightly at the hair that hinted at blue when the lights were dim.

"On the other hand, you sure as hell don't look like an illustrator for brats’ books either."

There was a faint shouting on the street below, a door slamming down the hall, a child screaming in the stairwell, a cat stalking loudly on the fire escape. Suddenly she felt lonely.

After a quick call to the secretary who worked for Syd and three other men, she took a cab to Penn Station and caught the first train to Connecticut. Two hours later she dropped in on her younger sister and spent all afternoon, evening, and the following morning shedding the last of her fears by unloading them on what was left of her family.

"If Pop were alive," Peggy said, "he'd tell you to stop bothering us and do what you want. You're a big girl now, in case you hadn't noticed."

Terry wrestled with her cup of tea and followed the designs in the kitchen table's Formica top. "Pop's dead now, Peggy."

"All right, then, forget him and take my advice, and stop bothering me. I got troubles of my own, in case you hadn't noticed."

Terry looked up and saw the rabbit fear in her sister's eyes vanish as quickly as it had appeared. "Vic?"

Peg nodded, brushed a strand of red hair from her eyes. "He's going to lose his job again, I think. Cutbacks at the plant are even taking out the senior supervisors now. Vic swears we're heading for a depression. He wishes he never came over here; at least in Eire, he could starve with his friends." She tried to grin away the pain, turned instead to look out a dirt-streaked window. "He says you ought to see the lines standing by the bulletin board waiting for the posting of the new layoffs. It sounds like college, when they stick up the exam grades and you can't wait to see how badly you failed."

"I remember," said Terry, wishing there was something, anything she could say to cut her sister's strain at the source; but there was still the house, and moving day was set for less than two weeks from today. Normally it would have taken at least three months, according to the bank's loan officer, but when he had seen the size of their deposit, the amount of their intended down payment, he fairly collapsed into a spasm of red tape splicing and paper machinations that supposedly sped up the process. Terry wasn't at all sure it was actually true, and hoped the little man wasn't going to ask for a tip or something.

"Come out," Terry said as Peg dumped the cups into the sink. "When you can, come out and see us."

"Don't worry," Peg promised. "We'll visit."

And Terry hugged her tightly before rushing out to mollify the waiting taxi. Visit they no doubt would, she thought on the train back to the city, like they did the first time Vic had been laid off—a visit that had lasted for well over two weeks and had driven Syd to working nights for the first time since they'd been married. Pulling into the station, she had an uncharitable vision of the baby's room being turned into a miniature efficiency with boarding house privileges. Not that she begrudged Peg the help, but she often wondered what the redhead planned to do with her college education. The fact that Vic had none was becoming less and less superfluous.

"Hey, listen, angel, don't worry about it," Syd told her. "We'll sic the Indian on them and hang their scalps in the den."

"That wasn't nice."

Syd only shrugged, but he didn't apologize.

It was too late to change their minds.

They moved.

And Terry was shocked at the callous way she fled the city, always believing she was as sentimental as any woman could be about attachments, no matter how uncomfortable. There should have been some memories, the cherished scrapbook kind, she wanted to tell Syd as he maneuvered to keep their Japanese hatchback behind the truck carrying what  remained of their belongings. We've spent most of our lives on one side street or another, and it doesn't seem fair that I couldn't find something more to carry with me besides relief. Something. Anything. Even a chunk of brick or brownstone. A smudge of dust off the living room windows, for crying out loud.

But in those close to three decades, both their families had evaporated in the wake of company transfers and personal wanderlust, their friends proved in retrospect to be no more than dinner and theater companions, and their dreams of success became unaccountably more attainable when protected by the crowded width of the Garden State. It was her plan that inspiration should flourish more openly in the quiet of The Lane, solidify and grow strong before the city could muster itself to trample it under smog and scare headlines.

She looked back only once. On the George Washington Bridge. She was unimpressed, and wondered what in hell she had been doing all those years when escape now seemed such an obvious solution.

Syd had picked her up at her publisher's, and she clutched tightly in her lap the newest edition of a series' volume she'd worked on some four years earlier. She intended the slim yellow book to be both talisman and mentor: whenever she felt constricted by her maddeningly slow progress toward international fame and lucrative awards, she would take it out to measure her professional growth and warn herself about slipping too far from a child's view of the world; and whenever she ranted at the prose and story and pronounced her obvious natural ability to do far better than whatever manuscript she was working on at the time, she would compare the book to her own handwritten pages secreted in the bottom of a locked desk drawer, and puncture her own ego's balloon. Only slightly less painful than the barbs of the critics, but it would be less all the time. Distance, she decided, would finally make the difference between a hobby and a career.

By morning's end she was dozing. By midafternoon, when the van was at last unloaded, she prepared to relax, then gaped at the preternaturally prompt arrival of the furniture warehouse delivery truck. She immediately declined Syd's exasperated insistence on food and drink and ran herself on sheer frustrated desperation. Nothing was going to fit. Nothing would look right anywhere, and it was the damned store's fault for those totally unrealistic setups. All their money had been spent in a vain boxing match with a vague shadow of something called their yet-to-be.

She cried when a mover scraped a lounge chair against a white wall and left a streaked black line right where any visitor could see it; she cried when she followed an appliance man into the basement laundry room and watched the way he manhandled washer and dryer into position without the proper regard for the future they would bleach and fluff dry.

She fought and lost when Syd insisted they hang the draperies to keep the neighbors from premature snooping.

She fought and lost when he demanded they put her framed first sketches along the far wall of the living room.

She fought and won the right to cry unashamedly when the last of the delivery vans spouted blue exhaust in the early dusk. And as she did, Syd scooped her into his arms and carried her laughing across the threshold, dumped her on the sofa and instantly poured her a four-finger drink he guaranteed would knock her out for the rest of the weekend.

"No," she said, pushing his hand and the glass away. "I just need to rest a little. You don't realize how much work there is left to do."

Silence, then, as he drank and she permitted herself a footnote of pride at the way the drapes matched the floral browns of the upholstery, and how it all gave the room a faintly Victorian cast. A favorite trick, then: a camera panning to set the scene—to her left the wall with her sketches, a portable television on a cherry stand in the front corner, a sturdy elongated cobbler's bench beneath the front windows, Syd's armchair with its back to the front door. A short wall, then, as yet unadorned, and the hall leading to the rest of the house. Back to her left, and the single brass lamp glowing dimly between sofa and wall. She closed her eyes briefly. Opened them, and she searched the room for hints of ghosts, and was pleased and amazed that it was all perfectly familiar, right, as it should be in a first home so recently quiet after chaos. She allowed herself an audible sigh of content.

"Didn't think we'd really make it," said Syd finally. "I thought for a while there that one of us was going to have a heart attack."

"Not you, of course," she said, swinging her legs up to prop themselves on the arm, laying her head in his lap.

"Of course not," he said. "I was perfectly calm throughout the entire operation. But my God, angel, you should have seen yourself! Why the hell were you crying all the time? I thought this was supposed to be a happy time."

"It is. But I like to cry. It's my privilege."

"As a woman, no doubt."

"Nope. As a perfectly normal human being on the verge of a nervous breakdown."

They stared at the hidden front windows, seeing through the gently folded cloth to the street, the house opposite, the hills, the highway, the city they would visit only because they worked there. Somewhere not far to the west was the Delaware River, and Terry imagined she could hear it—it, instead of the traffic and the downstairs neighbors and the sirens and the brakes that barely prevented an accident a hundred times a night.

Just as she felt herself falling asleep, Syd disturbed her by twisting around.

"What?" she said.

He scratched at his face, the back of his head. "I'm not sure I like that picture window back there, after all. Even with the curtains I keep thinking someone is looking in at me from outside the house."

"Darling, there are no apartments or houses or wigwams out there. Believe me, I tell you this true. I wouldn't lie. There's nothing there but the yard and the meadow."

He nodded and finished his drink. "Yeah, I suppose you're right. Habit, I guess. It's going to take some getting used to, isn't it?"

His hand rubbed absently over her stomach, caught itself in a familiar rhythm and pressed slightly harder in widening circles until it brushed the underside of her breasts. She closed her eyes and stretched, sensation beneath the cotton blouse oddly enhanced and definitely erotic at the lack of street noise and the aroma of exhaust, feet thumping up stairs and fists pounding on walls. Hooking her fingers around his neck, she lifted herself to his face and wondered which of the rooms they would baptize first; bedroom, living room, the middle of the hall. She turned onto her side and pressed into his stomach.

The doorbell chimed. "Shit," he said without taking his lips from hers.

"Watch it, boy, you're in mixed goddamn company." She sat up quickly and pulled her braid to smooth it. Then she took his hand and held it to her breast for a moment before pinching his cheek. "Maybe it's our first neighbor come to call and bid us fond welcome. Or something."

"Huh!" he grunted disgustedly. "Where the hell were they when we were moving? Good of them to wait until all the work was done."

"Shut up, crank," she said over the chimes' repeated summons. "Now go let them in. We might as well start this suburban stuff right."

Further protest was only a formality, which he indulged in obscenely until he reached the door. Then he waited as she posed behind the sofa, one hand carelessly on the back, the other stroking the braid as though it were a cat on her shoulder. Then she nodded, fighting the sudden flurry in her stomach, and couldn't help gaping when the man and two children walked in. It was an instant's examination.

He was easily a foot taller than Syd, and twice as broad at shoulders and hips. Midnight hair parted in the middle and held close to the skull by a plain brown leather band. Clean shaven. High cheeks made larger by abundant good health. And when he smiled a greeting, his eyes retreated into shadows and became deep wells of black. There was no guessing his age properly, but when he stepped into the light, ushering the two boys ahead of him, she saw faint ridges in his dark skin, and the highlights in his hair became strands of vagrant gray. He wore a dark plaid shirt, wide-belted jeans and, when she allowed herself a quick downward glance, sharply pointed boots as black as his eyes.

"You must be Mr. McIntyre," she blurted, and ducked away from Syd's disapproval by coming forward with her hand extended. He held it briefly, and she nearly jumped at the coldness.

"Indeed," the man said, the smile remaining, becoming impossibly larger. "Ah, the word is already out. My cross. But first, these are my grandchildren, Kit and David. Bookends, as you can see."

Syd shook hands with the twins solemnly and the courtesy was solemnly returned. Terry resisted the temptation to hug them and brought them all into the rectangle of furniture. McIntyre chose the bench, and the glow from the lamp gave his face a bronze uncertainty that made her think instantly of a death mask, and just as instantly she wanted to apologize for the thought.

Syd made an unnecessary show of settling into his chair before leaning forward to rest his forearms on his knees. "You said the word was out?"

"Hush, dope," she whispered, and hurried into the kitchen to look for snacks and something to drink. If she'd only taken some time to run down to that little store she'd seen on Hawthorne Street! She tried to sound as though she were whipping up a feast, but strained nevertheless to hear the answer to Syd's question, laughing at herself when she realized she needn't have bothered—McIntyre's voice would have carried in a hurricane.

"Indeed, Mr. Guiness—"

"Syd, please. And my wife's Terry."

"Syd. Thank you for that. Well, it appears that my family has become the conscience scapegoat for inadequate salesmen who can't close a deal around here."

There was a pause as Terry returned with a tray and served soda to the boys and coffee to the men. It was suddenly an awkward moment, and she cast for something to say without seeming condescending or patronizing. In reviewing several possible lines of dialogue, she found herself grinning at their inanity, and when she looked up, wondering at the continued silence, she saw the four of them staring openly at her. Flustered, she attempted a diversion by asking the boys what grade they were in, what subjects they were studying. McIntyre laughed and pulled his grandchildren to his side. Neither had even attempted a smile.

"You're kind, Mrs. Guiness—Terry—but don't feel as if you have to apologize for what you're thinking. And don't worry about the boys. Sometimes I think the only woman they respond to is their schoolteacher. Even their mother has a problem."

Terry smiled her relief. "Thank you," she said. "I'm not the most tactful person in the world, you see."

"So," he said suddenly, and loudly, slapping at his tree-trunk thighs. "Tell me about yourselves, if you like." The boys quickly clambered onto his legs, balancing themselves with an arm around his shoulders. "Then I will give you all the dirt there is to have in this deceptively quiet little street."

Terry felt instantly on her guard while part of her chided her wariness as a product of her city living. To her surprise, Syd wasted no time in launching into what she considered to be an ultimately boring narrative. Several times she tried to interrupt with a question of her own, but she was ignored on all accounts except when asked to clarify or nod agreement. McIntyre listened politely, smiled when appropriate, laughed at exactly the right times, and for the proper length. Again she tried to stem the biography, but Syd's face began to flush in his excitement. His hands moved from his knees, pointing to her sketches, picking up one of her books to show an expansively impressed McIntyre, a passively interested set of twins.

To escape, she mumbled something about heating up the kettle and hurried into the kitchen where she gripped the edge of the stove and stared at her distorted reflection in the stainless exhaust hood.

No, she thought, this isn't right at all. He must be drunk, telling that man, that stranger, all those things. There's something—she frowned, searching futilely for whatever it was that bothered her. Then she became angry when she realized what she was doing. It's not the city way anymore, she told herself, and you'll just have to get used to good-natured prying once in a while. Maybe, she answered herself as she returned empty-handed to the living room, but does he have to smile like that all the time?

"Mr. McIntyre," she finally said, breaking into Syd's elaborate reconstruction of their decision to move, "the agent Syd was telling you about, he mentioned something to us about this area being a reservation once. Was he right, or was it just a line to make the place seem more mysterious?"

McIntyre carefully smoothed the boys' short hair and shifted his buttocks farther back on the bench. He nodded, once, and she worried again that she had managed to offend him through not knowing what she was talking about.

"A long time ago," he said slowly. "A decade or so after the Civil War, if memory serves this hardwood head of mine. A small one, it was. More accurately, merely a convenient holding place until. . . ." He grinned, then, and let the boys slide to the floor where they leaned against his legs, eyes wide and staring shyly around the room.

How many times have they heard this, I wonder, she thought.

"Shortly after 1865," McIntyre said with his face tilted toward the ceiling, "the government became afraid that what remained of the few Eastern tribes would try to emulate their Western brothers and do some damage to the white centers of population and industry. Accordingly, the bureaucrats lumbered their agencies into action and rounded up as many scattered families as they could find without actually combing every hill and valley. Delaware, Lenape, Algonquin, and others were persuaded by various means to settle temporarily in this valley until such time as more permanent and fertile accommodations could be found and made available. Some of them came willingly, while others chose to flee after citing past government records; these, as it turned out, were the more intelligent, and lucky."

"We got wiped out bang," one of the boys said suddenly, and McIntyre quieted him with a stern pat on the head.

Then he shrugged ruefully. "But it's true. Naturally you won't find any of this in the files of the Bureau—"

"—Of Indian Affairs," Syd said, apparently miffed that he was slowly being eased out of the conversation circle. Terry exaggerated a pout and he glared at her.

"Right, Syd. So, we have to rely on others to get the full story. Oral tradition among my own people—and in several others if you have the time to search and listen—this tradition tells us that in June of 1875 a complement of federal troops set all the families who'd managed to survive the previous winters into a stockade out where the meadow is now. Legend says it was on the hill, but no one knows for sure."

"Bang," the boy said again, was echoed by his brother.

"Bang," McIntyre said sadly. "Someone gave the order and the entire Indian community was massacred without explanation. They weren't given a chance to defend themselves, nor were they given an option to move elsewhere. Ironically," he said further as Terry was about to comment, "this also happens to be the place where supposedly a chief of greater antiquity than even myself was slaughtered by a race of men neither red nor white. Some say giants, some say creatures half animal, half god. At any rate, the legends don't ascribe a particularly joyful history to Prynne Lane and its environs."

"My God," Syd said, his face as pale as if it had happened that afternoon.

"How horrible," and Terry wined at the parlor liberal sound of it, winced even more when she thought it would make a hell of an exciting story for a new series she could write as well as illustrate.

"Horrible, yes, but more then than now," said McIntyre. "Myself, I'm Shawnee, and although there were reputedly some of us here—which I am often inclined to doubt—I really don't feel like running out and scalping every white man I see. It would be hell on the neighborhood, believe me."

He laughed, and Terry was glad to laugh with him.

"The past is dead," Syd said, and McIntyre nodded rapidly. "Right! To resurrect it only means staring at fleshless bone."

"Shawnee," Syd said, more to himself than the others. "It seems to me I remember back in college reading—"

"Oh, Syd, come on!"

"Insignificant," McIntyre said. "Besides, look at me, will you? Here I am trying to be the delightfully different version of the outdated welcome wagon, and here we are talking about scalpings and massacres and old squaws' bedtime stories."

You brought it up, Terry thought, but you're right about one thing; it's a hell of a way to greet new neighbors.

"What I would really like to say, what I came over in the first place to say, is that we are all glad to have you on The Lane, Syd and Terry. And as soon as you're
finally settled in, and the bugs are out of the adjusting, the rest will be along to call me a liar and a thief, the neighborhood idiot and a garrulous old man who talks to bushes when there's no one around." He rose to his feet and, pulling the boys with him, was at the door and on the concrete stoop before Syd or Terry could catch up with him. "I'm diagonally across from you, in that gorgeously drab fake Cape Cod over there. If you need anything like tools and such, come on over or call. If I'm not there, my son or father will be glad to help you out."

He leaned over and whispered to the twins who offered to shake Syd's hand, bowed stiffly to Terry, and rushed shrieking across the street. "Sometimes I think they should be tied down," she said.

"I, too. But they do get on your nerves sometimes. Anyway, friends, I really am glad to meet you both. Welcome to The Lane, and I trust we can be your family."

Like a soldier on parade, she thought as he turned away. She stayed at the door despite the snap of an October breeze and watched as he passed out of the range of their porch's yellow light. God, he must be fifty at least and he walks like a kid just out of college. She brushed at a wisp annoying her eye. And he doesn't make a sound—oh, brother! Listen to that, will you? I'm beginning to sound like people he must hate.

Syd came up behind her, coat in hand, and draped a heavy cardigan over her shoulders. "A stroll, m'lady," he said and closed the door behind him. He searched for a moment in his pockets, then grinned. "No need to lock up, is there? Not with the chief guarding the fort."

They moved across the lawn, listening to the crackle of an early frost.

He really was silent, she thought as they turned toward Hawthorne. My God, maybe it's true!

"Time?" she asked.

He waited until they reached the first of The Lane's three streetlights, then glanced at his wrist. "Nine," he said.

"Is that all? Lord, it feels like four in the morning."

"Long day, angel."

They passed a deserted lot cleared of everything but the brush. Several of the houses were already dark even though it was Saturday, and by the looks of at least three of them, she didn't think many were occupied at all. A puzzlement, then—something for her to consider when the house had settled itself. She tripped over a chunk of raised sidewalk, half turned when Syd caught her arm to balance her, and she saw a dark shape lying over the curb.

"Oh," she said, and knelt.

"What?"

It was a rabbit, thick with winter fur that was blackly matted across its stomach. Its ears dipped into the street and as she reached to pull it completely back to the grass, she saw that its eyes were still open.

"Poor thing," she said, straightening.

"Car," Syd judged. "Maybe even a bike. Its neck looks crushed, too."

"Please, Syd!" and she pulled him away.

Another silence.

"Nice of McIntyre to drop in on us like that," he said. "I was beginning to wonder if we'd moved into a sideways tenement."

"He never told us his first name, you know."

"But we knew that already, angel. Enfallo told us a long time ago, that first day, remember?"

"Yes, but he didn't tell us."

An occasional car winked past the mouth of The Lane, its growl lingering with the after image of headlights. The air was fragile, almost crystal in its readiness to shatter under the soft blows of her white puffs of breath. She lifted two fingers to her mouth and pretended to smoke a cigarette. Then she glanced above the treetops and stopped, pointing.

"I've never seen so many all at once. It's just like the planetarium, isn't it?"

"No city lights to blot them out. Elementary physics, my dear."

"Killjoy. Where's the soul of that romantic who I thought I'd married?"

"On the drafting board with baby's diapers and dishwashing powder."

"Well, just cut it out and look at them, dope. I can't believe there are so many of them just sitting up there doing nothing."

"Maybe there's a book in that, angel."

"Maybe. One of these days, though, I'm going to stop talking about it and write one." She grinned and punched his arm.

"I thought you already wrote a couple?"

"I have. That's why I just talk anymore."

"Tell me something, angel my love, why are we whispering?"

It's the night, Terry concluded long after the time to answer had passed. The night. No talking allowed. Listening only—to our shoes on the sidewalk, the television in that other ranch over there, the high-up drone of an airplane. She shook her head at the twilight's distortions created by the fringes of the streetlights. Then she leaned heavily against Syd's arm. He pulled her close.

"Enfallo told me there was a murder around here last year."

"So?"

"Well, I thought it might bother you or something."

"Then why did you tell me?"

"Rather have you hear it from me than one of the neighbors. I just didn't want you to think I was keeping something from you, love. It doesn't bother you, does it?"

"We're from the big city, remember? Why should I be surprised that people around here are any different than anywhere else?"

"That's a lousy attitude for a woman who supposedly likes kids and has hope for this misbegotten world."

She was cold. The breeze finally found gaps in her sweater, the wide bottoms of her pants.  She began to shiver violently.

"Let's get back before you catch your death."

They turned, and she checked the sky one more time. "Let's do this a lot, Syd. It's quiet out here."

"I know. Spooky, isn't it?"

"I want to picnic in the field and hike through the woods and maybe see if there isn't a way we can afford a better camera so I can take some close-up pictures. I'll bet this place is unbelievable in the spring."

"If your teeth don't stop chattering like that, you won't be around that long. You'll shake yourself to death."

Not me, she said to the outlines of the trees made larger by the rising full moon; I've got plans you'd never even think I could dream up, Sydney, my love.

And lying in bed—they had decided baptizing the bedroom was completely appropriate for the occasion—she could see a piece of the sky lighten in shades of silver gray. A cloud edged in black passed to one side of the moon, another fell into tendrils and regrouped. The breeze became a wind and led already fallen leaves in a hissing reel. As the rain began—pellets of ice, pebbles of hail—she rolled onto her side and watched the shadows on the wall fade into black.

Chapter III

You realize that this isn't exactly fair, Terry accused the view from the dining room window. According to all the films I've seen, not to mention the books and the slick-paper stories, the turning of the year is supposed to be something rather special. It's supposed to be that one romantically apocalyptic moment when whatever shroud one wore throughout the previous twelve months turns Cinderella-like to silk wraps and flowing chiffon. You, she thought in sudden anger, don't look a damned bit like any silk I ever saw.

Snow responded to her melancholy by slapping against the window. There was nothing here of the softly gentle fluff of Christmas cards and Grandma Moses, or even the tremulous hesitation of tiny flakes generally characteristic, of a season's first fall. The storm, instead, was brittle, shoved by a deeply vocal wind and sounding like nails scratching against the glass. Even before the day's diffused gray light had faded, the yard and the field beyond had been covered by a gleaming coat of crusty ice; and the trees had already begun to lower their limbs as though trying to their bark.

But then, she decided, why should New Year's Eve be any different from the rest of December? Ah, now, Theresa, you're feeling sorry for yourself again. Things aren't all that bad, girl. What was the name Aunt Bea used to call you—twit? If that means you're a stupid ass, she was doing all right.

Well, it's still rotten, no matter how you look at it. Beauty is in the eye of the whatever, you know. Why not use this experience for one of your great impending epics and be done with it.

"Oh, now this is beautiful," she said to the snow. "It's gotten so bad I'm even talking to myself."

She stirred her tea idly, wincing at the sound of spoon grating against stoneware. Reflexively, she rubbed a heavy palm across her forehead even though her headache had finally been beaten back an hour before. The sweater she had caped over her shoulders slipped at the motion, and she grabbed for it, knew it would slip again and fastened the top but       ignoring the choking sensation at her throat. It occurred to her then that a visit to the McIntyres might do her some good in shoring up her rapidly flagging morale and equally disintegrating nerves. But the thought of being in the same house, much less the same room, with the elder immediately changed her mind. Not that she had anything personal against Denver's father, was in fact fascinated by the age he claimed and the eras he had lived and suffered through. However, his constant muttering just this side of subvocal made her wonder how the rest of the family was able to endure it.

The twins, of course, revered the elder Indian as though he were some manifested relic of a long-forgotten tribal god. Denver and his son William tolerated him—so Denver had said—because he was, after all, the patriarch of the family and consequently their honor-bound obligation. But they never explained his muttering, nor the colorful robes he insisted on wearing, even though the house was kept well above normal temperature. Once, she had dared to ask William about it and received only a look—a hands-off and ignore-it combination.

She laughed and drank the tea despite the gradual loss of its comforting warmth. The elder aside, if there ever was an odd one, William was it. How completely unlike Denver he was and so were they all when she thought about it carefully—how completely different. Frail as a winter weed which made his height appear to equal his father's, and of a voice more suited to a pulpit than the small tavern he operated in the village. In fact, after her first few visits to the house, all at Denver's insistence, she refused to return while the son was there. His constant companion of gloom made her recall far too often the brooding melancholy of a quietly mad Heathcliffe.

No wonder the boys so seldom smile, she thought. The old man's incomprehensible chanting, the father's morbidity—even Denver's role as the stoic. archetypal Indian scarcely lent an aura of good and bright cheer to the house.

She shuddered and dismissed them all. Better to think of her own poor Syd, trapped in the city most of the day until the waiting finally drove him out into the Jersey wilderness. He had called her not five minutes before noon to tell her about a new and open-walleted account, got back an hour later to give her the bad news.

"But Syd, damnit, it's New Year's Eve!"

His voice was blurred against a background of storm-induced static. "Angel, what can I do, put a plug in the goddamned sky? Every reporter on the dial is apologizing all over the place for the lousy forecast. Not that that helps me a damned bit."

"Syd!"

"Don't worry, angel love. If this storm even hints about taking a breather, I'm off. You know where I can get any dogs?"

At half-past two he called for the last time. "Hey, I'm going to make a run for it. Send out the Saint Bernard with the hundred proof and be sure there's a flare in the sky every ten minutes. If I'm not home by Sunday, marry Pritchard and get him to stock some beer in that store of his so he can make some money."

"Are you sure you'll be all right?"

"I'm too stupid, angel. Pray for five, but give me an hour more just in case the Yukon decides to join the Union."

She had prayed, then, for five, followed it with a few uneasy words for six and was now working anxiously on seven. She had convinced herself that he would make it eventually, but her nerves were refusing to give her foundation. Sipping again, she looked up and frowned. The darkness outside wasn't helping her at all, nor were the floodlights that had been switched on to give the yard some depth, to give the world an anchor. They barely penetrated beyond the partially completed concrete patio outside the downstairs glass doors. Syd's project. His first. For a leisurely summer's eve.

The sky is falling and bleeding white,

God save us then from winter's night.

"Ugh," she said. "Thank God I'm not trying to be a successful poet. We'd both starve to death."

She laughed, brought her cup and saucer into the kitchen and switched on the ceiling light with her elbow. She sensed the cold ice of the stainless steel sink, kept her hands clear of the sides as she rinsed out the dishes. After another glance out the window that split the cabinets, she pulled the curtains shut, straightened the folds and hugged herself briefly. Her eyes, fighting her resolve, strayed to the wall clock: 6:55—and she immediately fell to pacing through the house, losing track gratefully of the number of times she switched the lights on and off in the bedroom, the study, the workshop, hoping the shadows driven into the corners would suddenly swirl magically and materialize into a laughing, lusting Syd.

I should have told him to stay where he was. But it's New Year's Eve; no sacrifice is too great. Stop it, she told herself in the middle of the hallway. There are sayings about people who talk to themselves like that, you know, she thought to herself.

Flashes of newscasts she had seen in previous winters frightened her in spite of the warnings she gave herself for it: cars trapped in drifts like beached whales in white sand; men, wrapped to their eyes and breathing out smoke, digging down to extricate somnolent citizens buried huddled in their back seats; like a nightmare from Dali, the roads erased and the cars stretched to the horizon with no place to go.

She hurried back to the living room and, after a moment's indecision, pulled back the drapes and stared at the faint yellow globe on the porch across the street. And as she watched, it flickered once and was extinguished. Lucky you, Alexander Pritchard, she thought. You've no one to wait for anymore. Unkind, she chided herself then. He's not all that bad for a part-time recluse.

Not long after Syd's last bravado call, Terry had checked through the kitchen's larder and decided that if the storm was going to last very much longer, she would need a few things to keep her husband happy and her own appetite for snacks content (telling herself it was as good an excuse as any for getting out of the house before she drove herself into cutting out paper dolls). And having once decided, she drew on boots, greatcoat, muffler and headscarf, and trudged through the then gentle snowfall toward Pritchard's small grocery just around the corner on Hawthorne Street.

Most of the children had been out with shovels, cleaning walks and driveways as though they really understood that to delay meant a more difficult job later in the evening, an impossible one in the morning. They waved to her as she passed, taunting her with snowballs and high-pitched challenges; but she only waved back, called out a name or two, and kept on. The slowly shrinking flakes were turning sharp against her cheeks, and the sudden gusts of frigid wind made her gasp and turn her back until the air calmed again.

She wanted to stop when Bess Griffith poked a dark head over a crude snow wall and offered her a part in building her brother's magnificent fort.

She was tempted to forget the store and the food when Val and Karen Dorinen dared her to ride their saucer sled on the driveway's ice. She did pause to trade a few poorly aimed snowballs with them, but she did not stop. She wanted to; she had been tempted to, but the cold had begun forays into her bones and aching teeth. Warmth became the only goal, and Pritchard's was the place to get it.

Opposite the Denbeau house was a narrow trail which cut through the string of empty lots that ran bleakly to the end of The Lane. She had just stepped onto it when she realized the house was oddly dark, and neither walk nor drive had been touched since the snowfall began. She wondered for an anxious moment about the widow and her two teenage children, thought she might turn around and inquire after them. Only thought it, however, as she decided to leave well enough alone. Twice before, on her way to the grocery, Terry had been moved to offer the invalid woman a helping hand, and twice had been taken loudly to task for being pitying. True enough at first, she thought, but the pity had vanished quickly in the torrent of the woman's bile. Of all the families on The Lane, this was the only one that did not bid her and Syd welcome, nor had they taken part in the unofficial and irregular round of parties which were scattered throughout each month. Denver, when asked, had offered an explanation for Mrs. Denbeau's bitterness, and Terry had soon shrugged off what curiosity had remained.

When she reached Hawthorne Street, thankful for the continual procession of feet that had tamped the trail's snow down to a brown ice, she'd stood for a moment watching the slow traffic and the encouraging mixture of chain rattle and engine roar of the huge yellow-and-black plows that hulked along the curb piling slush out of the way. Syd wouldn't have any trouble here at least, she thought, and tried to run the last hundred yards under the trees already dropping clumps of white too heavy to bear.

Alec Pritchard's store was all purpose, serving the immediate area with tolerably high prices diluted with gratefully late hours. Pritchard himself was as cotton-strained white and willow-wisp frail as what remained of his hair. His scalp was liver spotted and shining, and his forehead was grotesquely disproportionate to his size—like a ledge punched too far out from a symmetrical hillside. And Terry was convinced that this was what made the old tradesman so gentle. He had to be with that deformity, or else fall into the clichéd role of the neighborhood ogre.

Once inside the establishment, far smaller than most of The Lane's homes, she had simply wandered along the cramped aisles until winter had fled her taut and raw skin. Pritchard had been seated on the high stool he kept in the middle of the horseshoe counter. He nodded when she arrived, told her as she prowled that he was closing up early because of the storm.

"I won't be long, Mr. Pritchard. Just need a few things," she said, smiling. "Syd's stuck getting home. I'll want some hot chocolate, a ton at least, for when he finally gets here."

"Oh, he'll get home all right, Mrs. Guiness." The words were coughed out, as though his larynx was too stiff to work. "It isn't as bad as it looks."

"Still," she said, "you can't help worrying, can you?"

He eased off the stool and leaned forward over a ramshackle display of razor blades and garishly bright combs. "I'm telling you as best I can, Mrs. Guiness. Your husband will be home safe and sound. It's the way of it, you see."

She had shrugged, then nodded and smiled. Though his voice had demanded she believe him, his expression bugged her. She backed away, bumped into the display case reserved for local artisans of pottery and toys, and stiffened. Still smiling. Slowly relaxing. Pritchard had a way, sometimes, that the others found was what they called New England folksy, but Terry only called it the prattling of an old man preparing to back out of the world, leaving behind a trail of unintelligible, and therefore profound, epigrams. Yet there were also times when the fierce color in his cheeks faded, his voice stopped coughing, and she could lean on the counter for hours and listen to his stories of the growth—desecration, he called it—of the area. He was, in the last, lonely.

Later, when she'd arrived back home, she couldn't help thinking that as much as she enjoyed listening to and gossiping with the old man, there were moments when his stubbornly positive approach to the simple and the complex became annoying. Like his conviction of Syd's safety.

Like the afternoon, a month back, when she had seen a collection of dolls arranged in the special showcase. In looking closely, she had found one that matched exactly the doll she'd found the day Enfallo first brought them to Number Three. When she mentioned it to the storekeeper, he insisted she had made a mistake. The elder McIntyre had fashioned each one of these himself, he'd said, and since they were being sold as a set, what she had found in the lot could only have been a similar, manufactured toy; there was no possibility that it could have been the same one. There was no use in arguing, his tone commanded, and she hadn't. Several days later, when she realized she hadn't asked what the set was selling for, she returned to the store and found in their place a set of scale antique automobiles clumsily carved from what looked to her like a discarded collection of a child's building blocks. Pritchard had been close-mouthed about who had purchased the dolls, admitting only that it was someone passing through from Pennsylvania.

"I dislike mysteries," she said to the empty room, instantly regretting the sound of her voice. At best, the house was an ideal size for two people to live in and, when one of them wished to be alone, to be lost in temporarily. But when either half of the pair was out, it became cavernous to the point of nightmare. The silence she enjoyed while Syd was working became wind tunnels for stray breezes to expand into hurricanes. The serenity grew cracks that separated into branches of juniper scratching against an outside wall, the periodic thunk of the furnace in the basement, the off-key hum of the second-hand refrigerator.

She circled the room to touch each piece of furniture as a charm, then returned to the kitchen to put the kettle on. And as she cradled the cup in her hand, she decided, the steam whistle piercing would be too much to take while she was alone. Anger masked her nervousness, and she walked quickly to her study, deliberately coming down hard on her heels to drive away her imagination's demons.

The room, first on the left, was crowded, as she liked it. A broad-topped desk, several painted bookcases, four eye-level rows of veneer shelves Syd had swearingly affixed to the front wall by the window. An easel in front of the window faced the storm, and Terry stepped around it to appraise the sketch she had begun that morning. It was an extrapolation, a guess, a freeform dream of the meadow in spring, tinted in green, based on yellow. There was no book to fit it yet, there had been none at all since her last assignment had been completed several weeks before they gave up the apartment. Publishing, too, was affected by the slump, and those who had generally asked for her collaboration first were not producing. She reached out a hand to straighten the stiff paper she liked to use, and felt beneath her fingers the fear that what little popularity she'd enjoyed in the industry was starving. The same old story, she thought as she toyed with a worn piece of charcoal, the eternal march from the promising young newcomer to can you tell me whatever happened to what's-her-name.

As she stretched her hand to the sketch, she saw her watch and realized she'd better get cracking on a prayer for eight. Then a thought as the charcoal hovered without touching: as long as she was going to wallow in such morbid moods—and to pass the time, Theresa, admit it—she reached for the telephone nestled in the desk's clutter and dialed her favorite number.

Madeleine Duchette was the children's editor Theresa had happened upon during her first intrusion with portfolio and hopes—and she had seldom left once Duchette had seen what she had been doing. It was the editor's patience, in fact, that eventually led to her first substantial contract whose royalty clauses had enabled her to buy without overly worrying what she was doing to Syd's painfully advanced budget. She'd been putting off the call for days now, afraid that Madeleine would say in her pseudo-London accent: Terry, you're a very talented woman, and we're all quite pleased with your progress here at the house. But let's have a look at the record, love, if you don't mind, thanks very much. You still need a bit of seasoning, you see. A bit of freshening up. A vacation from trying so hard, if you hear me correctly. The Golly series went well, of course, but the last two books about that creature in Connecticut did not come up to your standards at all. Not at all. I think we will remainder them.

It was always far easier to blame the illustrator for the books the children disliked. Terry had learned that well enough, and early.

While she waited for the connection to be completed, she stared at the window and wished she had been able to put up curtains instead of blinds. Even the royalties were conspiring against her this month. The line was busy, and Terry hated herself for being relieved as she quickly hung up.

A moment later the telephone rang, startling her. Her hands washed dryly in front of her. Syd, she thought instantly, and immediately the house became cold. It rang again, and she picked it up. "Hello, Syd?"

She frowned. There was no dial tone. Someone was clearly on the other end, but she could hear nothing. "Syd, is that you? I can't hear you, darling."

Still nothing. The line seemed hollow, like a well long deserted by man and water.

The thoughts came machine-gun rapid, each deadlier than the last. He's dead. The police. A hospital. A stranger, calling from a roadside booth to say he'd found the car overturned in a ditch. Under a bridge. At the bottom of a dry riverbed. It was half buried in snow, Syd's hand frozen to the steering wheel he had covered in leather the summer before.

"Syd?" Empty. An autumn street hissing dead leaves. When no one responded to further prodding, she slammed the receiver down and pulled at her hair, her blouse, the rope belt at her waist.

Less than half a minute later, it rang again. She thought of not answering, not playing the game somebody obviously thought was funny and clever. There was always that possibility, however, that it could be about Syd. It was too much to ignore.

This time there was static. Intermittent. Like someone talking and waiting for an answer, she thought. "Syd?"

Static.

"Syd, I can't understand you. There's a lot of damned interference on the line."

Static bursts. One word almost clear: Theresa.

"Syd, I'm sorry but I can't understand a word you're saying. It must be the storm. Syd, can you hear me? Can you?"

Static. Prolonged. Nothing she could recognize.

"Syd, listen to me. Can you hear me? Listen, hang up and try again, all right? Hang up and try the number again."

Her fingers ached where they gripped the mouthpiece, her ears strained to sift sense through the constant noise. The effort was pushing a headache up the back of her head, and she was about ready to cry. It wasn't fair not being able to talk to him!

"Syd, are you coming home? Are you stuck, Syd? Is there anything the matter?"

Static. One word: Theresa. Static.

The doorbell chimed. "Oh, damn!" She vacillated, made to put the receiver down on the desk, then shouted into the hall, "Come in, it's open!" To the phone, "Syd, there's someone here. Please hang up and try again, okay?"

A single word, clear now, echoing in the well: Theresa.

The doorbell? The phone went dead, and the hollow sensation returned. Inexplicably frightened, she hung up and ran for the front. Panting, more from nerves than exertion, she opened the door slowly, just enough to see the woman standing under the porch light.

Terry stared, initially disappointed it wasn't her Syd; then, suddenly mindful of the storm's cold, she threw open the door and grabbed the woman's arm, hustling her back into the house before returning to the porch to drag in the suitcase.

Once the door was shut and the chill had left to moisten the insides of the windows, she leaned heavily against the wall and folded her arms over her breasts. "He got laid off again, right?"

Pegeen shrugged out of her coat and draped it carefully over one arm. Her face, as pale as her sister's, was splotched with violent pink where the wind had penetrated the gray scarf that covered her from nose to neck. When she took off her beret, the short red hair refused to fall into place, and she pushed at it listlessly. Her head was down, but what Terry had first thought was snow melting on her cheeks, she now saw were the tears that prevented her from speaking.

There was a prolonged, agonized moment when Terry didn't think she had the strength for more crises that day, then the grief that she faced galvanized her into motion. She grabbed her sister's shoulder for a quick and hopefully reassuring hug. Half pushing, mostly pulling, then she moved her down the hall into the bedroom where she goaded Peg into stripping off her wet clothes and donning the sweater and pants outfit she had received for Christmas.

And she talked. Incessantly. Quietly, as she brushed at Pegeen's hair. Soothing, as she wiped her face gently with a mint-scented cream lotion and brought her to the kitchen table. She knew it was foolish, that nothing at all she was saying was registering, but Pegeen's continued silence only sparked her tongue to vault to new subjects, old jokes, gossip her sister wouldn't possibly understand because she didn't know the neighbors.

Why don't you shut up, she ordered herself as she poured them both steaming dark tea unhesitantly laced with brandy. Haven't got time. I'm too scared.

"So this old Indian—you should see him, Peg. He must be two feet tall and looks like a mummy. So this old man sits on a corner no matter what room he's in and talks to himself. Denver—he's the one I told you about, the one Syd's more friends with than me—Denver says it's because he's finally gone senile, thinks he's back at the tribe or something. But I'll tell you, kid, it's damned spooky. And how Mary—that’s Denver's daughter-in-law—how she puts up with it I'll never know. You should meet Mary, really. She never says a word, but when she does, everybody stops what they're doing and listens. Of course, I don't always understand. . . ."

Peg was hunched over her cup, her palms around it as though it were a fire. Terry pushed a plate of powdered doughnuts toward her and finally, when there was no response, reached out to tap her forehead lightly. "Hey listen, kid, I can't keep this gab up forever, you know. It's nice of you to come and keep me company while Syd's gone and all, but don't you think you ought to sort of hold up your end of the conversation?"

She sat back and turned her saucer slowly, watching the steam twist toward the single light embedded in the ceiling. Though Pegeen was four years younger, her figure was larger in all respects, and the childhood jealousy that Terry had never quite shaken surged weakly as she looked at the curves beneath clothing. Her sister, she admitted, was actually far more attractive than she, despite the fact that her father had always thought Pegeen looked more Scots than Irish. Somehow her face had not remained starvation thin, and her nose had filled out and uplifted slightly, while Terry's retained her mother's sharp angles and blunted tip. Pegeen's chin, Terry continued without knowing why, blended roundly, not jutting just enough to interrupt the jawline and call attention to the family's broad-lipped mouth.

More attractive, perhaps, but much more vulnerable. Pegeen had married at nineteen because she had been positive she had known what mature love was and had found it resting on the blacksmith shoulders of Vic Hogan. Four years later she was struggling to keep the image intact while the substance flickered into extinction, like a lighted candle before the wind. Terry herself had known Syd since their common New England college days, but they had put off marriage until two years after graduation while she learned that daily bread was harder to come by than a smile from a harried city cop.

Now that's unfair, she thought as Peg began visibly to stir out of her shell. You didn't marry Syd so you could eat well, you know. Nor did you because you needed a decent roof to keep you dry while you tried to break into a field as competitive as anything any man could possibly imagine. And in talking to herself, almost forgetting Pegeen's presence, she wondered for the first time exactly how unselfish she really was, really had been.

She bit thoughtfully into a doughnut and laughed when the lemon filling oozed over her fingers.

"Slob," Pegeen said; and Terry relaxed; amazed at how stiff she had been positioned as she waited for that first word.

"Sister, don't you think you can tell me now?"

The laugh was more like a bark, and twenty-three years seemed more like forty. "What can I tell you that you don't already know, Ter?"

"Vic's been laid off again. Why? Company trouble? Or . . . you know."

"There was a letter with the paycheck. They called it a furlough, which is a nice way of saying we're not in that much trouble, but it's a good way of getting rid of the undesirables."

"He drinks?" A former suspicion turned unpleasant fact chilled her.

"Drinks, fights, thinks he's down at the Lock Kenny Arms hoisting one with the boys just in from the fields. Terry, he's frightened of this country, has been ever since he came over. But the damned fool won't admit it."

"And today?" she prompted, sensing another lecture on the difference between a homegrown Irishman like Syd, and Vic's not so perfect example of the genuine article.

"A week ago, actually," Peg corrected, though she refused to look up from her tea. "Vic came home with the news, then went out for a drink at a bar. He never drank at home, Ter. He doesn't think it's right for me to see it." She smiled weakly and shook her head. "He came back around midnight, sober as Pop, and said he'd decided to move somewhere else—the Midwest, California, maybe—and look for a job he could hold down permanently. We, uh, talked about that a lot, leaving the East, I mean. Things seem like they're so much better out there, you know?" The cup began to move faster in her hands. "We, uh, didn't have enough money for the both of us, so . . . so he went alone. Chicago first, and he told me to come down here until he could get on his feet and send . . . ." Again the tears erupted without warning. She made no attempt to wipe them away.

"And you stood there like an idiot and let him go?" Terry was angry. Syd would probably think the idea wasn't all that bad—they both knew Vic was a fawning supplicant at Pegeen's altar, and total desertion was absolutely out of the question. But to leave the child alone in that hovel they laughingly called an apartment, to force her to leave in the middle of a storm like this without knowing if Terry would really take her in—shit, she told herself, you're starting to sound like a goddamn soap opera.

"Peg, you did have a say, didn't you? I mean, it was partly your decision, too, wasn't it?"

Pegeen nodded, and Terry needed little boost from her imagination to hear her sister's redheaded temper filling the apartment with stevedore descriptions and hellfire extraction of a thousand promises, all of them impossible for Vic to keep. A child she may be, but Terry often envied the age that extended beyond her birth date.

"He'll be back, Terry."

"Sure, sis."

"He said he would call every other night from wherever he was to let me know he was all right."

"I know, Peg, I know."

A silence as the kettle cooled, popping its heat into the kitchen loudly.

"So, then, it's done."

Peg nodded again, and Terry suddenly wondered how she was going to explain all this to Syd.

"Okay, good," she said. "You can sleep out on the couch for a while," and her voice rose to curb the beginning of a protest, "until you can find a place of your own, and a job that will keep you in it. In fact, the Traubs—a couple of not so maidenly sisters in the last house on our side of the block—they might have some rooms to let. I've heard they do that once in a while. Tell you what: first thing in the morning, I'll give them a—"

"Terry, please! I can take care of myself."

And that's the hell of it, Terry thought. You damn well can when you really want to.

"Well, look," she said, "just let me ask around, okay? You have a car? No? Well, no matter. Look, I'm tired of Syd taking his own sweet time getting back—"

"Aren't you worried?" The little girl had returned, and Terry once more found herself the elder sister. The role switching—not a new thing—confused her momentarily, but she was used to it.

"Listen, the day that skinny, bearded—"

The telephone rang. Peg looked expectantly at her, but Terry only stared at the extension on the wall. "Shall I get it for you?"

Terry nodded, her hands trembling on her lap. She reached for her cup and tepid liquid slopped onto the table. She made no move to mop it up, watched as Peg rose, picked up the receiver, and listened. Then she shrugged and hung up. "Nobody. Probably a wrong number."

"Probably," Terry said. "Hey, look, I was just about to heat up something when you came. You must be starved, poor thing. Were the trains bad?"

"I took a bus," Peg said, watching Terry slide two frozen dinners into the oven. "It wasn't all that bad until we reached New York. Then once we got out from under the river, it was like someone had stolen the highway. Would you believe I left Connecticut before noon?"

"My God—"

But if the bus had made it, if the various connections were still open though slow, where was Syd?

"Of course, I had to take a cab from the next town—or do you call these places villages?—whatever. Anyway, I took a cab, from the next town, and the creep wouldn't even come up your street because it wasn't plowed. Had to walk that idiot suitcase Mom gave me for graduation. Damn, but the wind comes down this road, doesn't it?"

The telephone interrupted her, and Terry jumped to her feet and snatched the receiver from Peg's hand. Sorry, she mouthed, gesturing and shrugging in an attempt to prove her nerves were doing fine but her apprehensions were working overtime.

"Syd?" The static returned. She motioned to Peg to listen in and held the earpiece canted away from her head. "Syd, is that you? Speak up, I can't hear a thing."

A crest, now, of distant moaning. Terry closed her eyes to find an appropriate picture and recognized the muffled sweep of the wind. She smiled, replaced the receiver on its cradle and leaned in a slump against the jamb between kitchen and dining room.

"I don't get it," Peg said.

"It's the storm, sister," she said, hugging relief to her breasts like a rag doll. "It's been doing that noise thing for a couple of hours now. A line's obviously gone down somewhere and there's a short or something making all that racket. You get to hear a lot of weird things, even the wind. A couple of times I even thought I was listening to my own name." She smiled, hugged herself tighter "Kind of listening to a seashell, you know? But I'll tell you something you'd damn well never better tell Syd," she continued as she pushed herself off the wall and began pulling the makings of a salad from the refrigerator. "It sure as hell scared me for a while. In fact, it happened just when you rang the doorbell, and I thought for sure I was getting my first obscene phone call."

"You mean you never had one?'

"Have you?"

Peg lifted herself to sit on the edge of the counter and struck a pose of mock worldliness. "Hundreds of times, big sister. Twice, actually. One was just a lot of heavy breathing. The other was so foul it was like mucking around in bloody shit."

"Talk about foul!"

Peg grinned. "Oh, come on, Ter. You're no Miss Irish Purity, you know."

"The real estate agent thought I was Spanish."

"Oh Christ, what was he, a fag?"

Terry laughed, looked at the clock and saw it was already long past eight. She stopped shredding the lettuce and stared. Peg followed her gaze, pushed herself back to the floor and put an arm around her waist. "Hey, Terry," she said quietly, "he'll be all right. Honest he will."

"But he started when—"

"Come on, hon, let's sit for a minute, okay?"

Terry allowed herself to be guided into the living room and onto the couch. Peg's mutterings said nothing, but soothing nevertheless until the trembling left Terry as limp and exhausted as if she had worked all day without a break.

"Terry, the bus thing is easy, you know," Peg said as though she were reading Terry's mind. "You ever see the size of those interstate monsters? And what the hell have you got? An oversized roller skate. I'll bet he can't do more than five or ten miles an hour on highway. Believe me, the bus wasn't traveling all that fast, either."

"You're right, I guess. But I still wish—"

The phone rang and the door slammed open simultaneously.

"Goddamn," Peg said, rushing for the kitchen.

"Goddamn," Syd said while the snow blew in around his legs. "Happy New Year to you, too."

Chapter IV

Time lost its synchronization with the rest of the universe. Everything moved while Terry apparently stood still; there was noise while she could only remain silent. Nothing at all made sense in her confusion; then, illusion within illusion, she rose above herself and watched.

The man in the doorway was flapping his arms like a penguin, scattering snow and water on walls and furniture. He was hatless, and the melting white in his hair quickly faded to glistening rivulets that streaked his face, dripped from his beard, as he threw his coat to the floor and kicked his shoes down the hall.

The redheaded woman, ignoring this performance, was standing in the dining room, a pale green telephone receiver pressed to her mouth as her face flushed with the effort of yelling.

The third character's face was hidden, but she stood with a fist to her throat while her free hand swept the air helplessly between the man and the redhead. And what was initially startling rapidly became comical, equally tragic.

Terry laughed, cried, snapped back into the real world and ran into the crush of Syd's arms, heedless of the soaking her blouse suffered.

While the noises gradually shifted into recognizable words.

Syd: alternately soothing and demanding—both quietly—several times raising his voice dramatically to damn everything and everyone connected with the weather, the roads, and the designers of subcompact automobiles whose traction apparently ended at the miniscule hood ornament.

Pegeen: unleashing her strained and straining nerves in a stampede of obscenities none of which Terry thought would possibly be matched, at least in volume, by the perverted imagination of her persistent caller.

Herself: groping for relief, contact with her husband, explanations to be received and given, saying whatever her overwrought emotions prompted.

It was Babel, and it was heaven; and when calm had finally been restored and Syd had dried off and changed into jeans and a blue flannel shirt, the three sat quietly exhausted in front of the television set to wait for the Times Square globe's marking off of another passing midnight. Pegeen was still fighting a blush of comely embarrassment that Syd should have heard her generally private store of vocabulary. And Terry sat on the floor next to Syd's armchair, refusing to let go of his hand while he reenacted the story of his trip home several times—and neither of the women grew tired of listening.

"I tell you without exaggeration, Terry, it was absolutely insane." The muted announcer of a variety show pointed to a studio clock closing in on twelve, breathing as heavily as if the two hours left were a scant two minutes. "I got brand-new snow tires just a month ago, and you'd swear I didn't have any on at all. I was being passed like I was standing still! Even the goddamn plows were going faster than me. Man, now that is one hell of a lousy job to have. Imagine being out all the time in weather like this!  Miserable! As fast as they went by, the stupid road covered right up again. A couple of times I thought I was going to have to get out and walk, it got so rotten." He shuddered for effect and kissed Terry's forehead. "However, I persevered, mainly because we ain't paid for the car yet."

"It's the weight, you see," Pegeen said unexpectedly.

"Huh?"

"It's the weight of the car, Syd," she repeated, almost shyly. "Your tires aren't going to make all that much difference because the car is too light. Somebody once told me you should put a hundred-pound bag of sand or something in the back. You're supposed to get better traction that way."

Syd blinked rapidly, a habit to cover slow understanding, and Terry couldn't help but frown. Neither her husband nor her sister had been particularly friendly before, but something in the circumstances set the two apart from her now in an indefinable way she wasn't sure she liked.

Pegeen, meanwhile, dropped immediately back into her embarrassed silence, and Syd was about to launch into another version of his trip when Terry suggested and they played a spirited and ribald game of Scrabble. There were challenges no one took seriously, and cheating no one bothered to call, and when it had ended, amid a great explosion of laughter and tears still tinged with relief, Peg excused herself and disappeared into the bathroom.

Terry slid the game box onto a shelf under the coffee table and sat in a corner of the sofa. "You seem to like her now, yes?"

Syd leaned back, stretching his legs so his heels just caught the table's edge. The television's remote control unit was by his side and he cut off the volume, ignored the picture. "Funny, but I used to think she was surprisingly old for her age. I just now realized what a child she can be. Why, angel? You jealous?" He stared at her under half-closed lids, widened and then suddenly and laughed as he pointed. "By God, Irish, you are!"

She felt herself grow hot as she denied it, immediately changed the subject to the phone calls.

"Oh, yeah," he said, still smiling. "I'll have to call the business office tomorrow. They'll be able to tell me what to do."

"Can't. Tomorrow's a holiday."

"All right, so Thursday, then."

She glanced down the hall at the slit of light under the bathroom door. "The trouble is, I'm not really sure if there was someone there or not. I mean, I couldn't swear to it. It could have been just my imagination."

"If the thing rang, Terry, somebody had to be at the other end."

She shook her head. "Not necessarily, Syd. It might have been a short, you know, or something like that."

He held up his hands, palms out. "Okay, okay, I'm not arguing with you, angel. If you think there was somebody there, then I believe you already. Just the same, though, I think I'll call to see if there were lines down in our area. Just to satisfy my own curiosity."

Argue was exactly what she was going to do, but she let it pass for the time being. None of it would help her to forget the day's double nightmare. But her smile was strained with Syd launched into a recital of a series of New Year's resolutions he'd thought up during the drive. She remembered to laugh brightly when he glanced over for her approval, to applaud enthusiastically or mockingly to show her appreciation of his cleverness under duress. But the sounds of the black fog over the telephone continued to haunt her. Overtired and overwrought was her instant self-diagnosis, though it didn't drive the sensations away.

When Pegeen returned, her eyes newly swollen, they debated the program listings until they agreed on an old movie familiar enough to watch without worrying about talking spoiling their enjoyment. And for this Terry was grateful until she realized what it was they were watching. Edward G. Robinson as a man suddenly given to the curse of clairvoyance. Terry tried to anticipate the plot, not recalling the film's title: Robinson's daughter is going to be killed. No. He's going to kill an old man. Something about a plane wreck? A ship sinking off some deserted, deadly island? What was the title? Dead Man's Eyes, or was that one of those horrors with Lon Chaney, Jr.? Ridiculous, she thought, and the more she tried to ignore it, the more confused she became. Her hands tensed, began to tremble and she grabbed for a magazine lying on the table. Held it tightly. Saw but couldn't read the list of articles on the cover. A telephone rang during one scene and she dropped the magazine, covering her nervousness with a quick finger to her lips and a gesture toward the set.

What was the matter with her? The clairvoyance? It was that, and something more. She sat stiffly—Pritchard had told her Syd would be coming home and he'd be all right. The old man's face under the store's fluorescent lighting had wrinkled into a smile completely without mirth; a knowing smile, she thought, but it couldn't have been because he couldn't have known. Small talk. Comfortingly empty words for the nervous new girl on The Lane. It was easy—tell her everything's going to be just fine and maybe she'll get out of the store before she lapses into hysteria and loses some customers.

"Crap," she said, and was startled when Syd and Pegeen turned to stare at her.

"I thought you liked this one," Syd said, misunderstanding. "You want me to change it? There's a special on—"

"No, no," she said. "I'm sorry. I was just thinking about Pritchard. I walked down there this afternoon after you called."

Pegeen moved deeper into the sofa's opposite corner so she could watch Terry and the screen at the same time. "Who's Pritchard?"

"Lives across the street, right opposite us," said Syd, pointing vaguely toward the drapes. "Owns a general store-type affair down around the corner."

"We got to talking—you know how it is—and he told me that Syd would be coming home tonight in spite of the storm." And as she said it, Terry knew how stupid it all sounded. "I mean, he said it like he knew it. The movie reminded me. Predictions and things like that. What's the phrase . . . second sight? You know what I mean."

"Come on, angel! Are you trying to tell me you believe all this stuff? Miss Cynic of the Twentieth Century? Look, love, Pritchard's a nice old guy who lives by himself. He was just trying to make you feel better, that's all."

"I know that," Terry said, more sharply than she'd intended. "I . . . it was the stupid movie, that's all. It just reminded me of what happened. I know what he was doing, you know. I'm not completely an idiot."

"Nobody said you were, angel."

"Well, it sure sounded like it. The movie just brought it back, that's all. It was nothing, okay? Forget it."

Pegeen, who had remained silent, only shrugged at Terry's challenging glare and began an overly intense study of a commercial break.

I must be coming down with something, Terry decided. I'm not making any sense at all, like I had a damned fever or something. She laid a palm to her forehead and the back of her neck, hoping to discover traces of incipient illness or signals of strained tension that would explain her unusual mood. She felt, then, like a character in a Poe story, one whose canopy bed was slowly collapsing in on itself, ready to trap her in slow suffocation.

Edward G. Robinson. Alexander Pritchard. She wanted to laugh and snap herself into a proper disposition, but the telephone's whispering of her name crept under her defenses like a persistent draught. She waited. Another commercial. The silence of the room and the storm outside.

Suddenly she stood. "Syd, I'm a little tired. What is it, ten-thirty? Will you two wake me before midnight? I want to see the ball. I always see it, you see, and. . ." She looked from her husband to sister and felt her eyes beginning to squint. Pegeen moved to her side and carefully brushed a hand through her hair.

"She's had a hell of a day."

"So have we all," said Syd, and he turned off the set. "Come on, angel. I think this will have to be one midnight we'll pass on. Peg—"

"If you think I'm going to stay up alone, you're crazy. Besides. . ." and she shrugged without having to explain.

Terry wanted to change her mind, didn't want Pegeen's New Year's spoiled, but Syd had his arm around her waist and was leading her down the hall.

"I'll lock up," Peg called and Terry, struggling to protest, could do nothing more than a weak hand and let her husband do the rest;

The bedroom was chilly, and her skin reacted instantly as she stripped and mutely accepted the nightgown Syd pulled from the closet. While he undressed, she padded quickly to the bathroom and, while brushing her teeth, tried to recognize the hollow-eyed woman facing her. The countenance was vaguely unsettling, and she passed over brushing her hair, using a rubber band instead of a ribbon to hold it back from her face.

The sheets were stiffly cold, but the pleasurable shock was absent. Hastily, she pulled the blanket to her chin, drew up her knees and tucked in her arms until her fists were at her neck. In the dim, nightstand light she watched Syd pull on his pajamas, stretch, sigh and, in the darkness, slide beneath the sheets.

"Terry?"

Time might have passed, but she couldn't tell. "Hey, angel?"

His whisper brushed like a feather across her ear. "Listen, kid, I don't want you to worry about Peg. I don't mind if she stays a while. I never did like that drunk of hers anyway. She's well rid of him. Tomorrow I'll borrow a folding bed or something like that, and we can fix up my workshop for her. I don't use it all that much that I can't part with it for a few days."

"Second, I'm sorry for the way the day turned out. I mean, our first New Year's in a house." He moved closer and kissed her shoulder, ear, the side of her neck. "I love you, you know." He kissed her cheek, his hand heavy on her hip. "Happy New Year." His hand remained where it was until she muttered the same, then he rolled over, pulled at the blanket, and became motionless.

Damn you, she thought, it isn't your fault about the storm and my sister and . . . but it was Syd all over that he unthinkingly accepted the blame for anything that annoyed her. I love you, too, she said, then smiled as she realized she wasn't speaking aloud. And that's just like you, Sydney Guiness, falling asleep while I'm trying to be humble.

The wind rose, and sleep only tagged her at the fringes. The snow became hard again, frantically moving like a clawing thing searching for purchase on the side of the house, groping for a way through the cracks and hidden gaps. It meshed, lulled, and occasionally was smothered by the clanking grumbling intrusion of a snow plow that had finally turned into The Lane. Her eyes flickered open as it passed the house, its whirling yellow light scattering black so quickly the furniture she could see took on the illusion of movement. She was fascinated for a while, then closed her eyes tightly and waited for sleep to become final.

And in waiting, then, shaped the dialogue she would have when Madeleine called with a million-dollar contract. And after the signing, she began spending the money; adding rooms to the house for the unborn children for whom she would surrender her career, the clothes by the closetful, a larger pair of cars, a trip to Europe that would last until they became bored and homesick, a savings account for the children's education, a home on the coast where they could waste every summer browning and bodysurfing. I will have a maid, she decided, and a manservant, and they will come when I call them, always on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with substitutes for their days off, which they won't take because they love us so much. I'll have a cord installed by the bed, and whenever I pull it she—her name will have to be Alice—when I pull it, Alice will run upstairs like her life—

She snapped her legs straight and yanked her arms out from beneath the sheet. She was completely awake, her eyes open and shifting to find enough light to allow them to focus. The digits of the clock-radio on the bureau were blurred, but she was sure it was already well past midnight. She realized she'd been listening to but not consciously registering a noise muffled somewhere in the house. Reaching behind her, she pushed at Syd but there was no response, and she knew she couldn't expect one unless she sat up and shook him violently; Her head lifted off the pillow and she looked toward the door. It could have been Peg, prowling for something in the kitchen, or just being unable to sleep and therefore pacing. It could have been, but in an unfamiliar house she would have had to turn on a least one light, and there wasn't a glow beneath the door.

Syd grunted in his sleep and yanked the blanket tighter around his neck. She shoved him again, but the awkward movement hurt her shoulder and she stopped. The plow returned, faded, and finally she tired of indecision and slipped off the bed. The floor was cold, and her legs tightened in reaction, while sleep fled as though it were morning. She pulled on her robe and fumbled in the bureau's top drawer for the penlight she'd picked up at Pritchard's. She tested it against her palm, first, then flashed it at Syd and smiled.

So I'm a big brave girl, she thought—and almost changed her mind. Oh hell, as long as I'm up I might as well get on with it and prove myself the dope he thinks I am.

The beam from the small flashlight was narrow and far less effective than she'd hoped. Like peering through pinholes in black fabric, she thought as she opened the door to the workshop opposite the bedroom, then down the hall to the bathroom and her study—left and right. She was beginning to feel slightly foolish playing heroine in a decidedly non-Gothic home.

Reaching the hall's end, she checked the living room as best she could from where she was standing, but there was nothing out of place, and the noise had faded, making her more annoyed when she couldn't remember precisely what it had sounded like. Again the light sliced across the room. Peg was still huddled on the couch beneath a pair of drab green blankets. Her face was hidden by the couch's arm, and Terry decided not to move into the kitchen, the risk of waking her sister too great to chance.

Storm noises was what she was hearing, and the plow thrown in for added effect. All that, nothing more, and the day's worry had twisted it all. And so to bed, Theresa, she ordered, perversely not feeling the least bit tired. But as she turned back toward the hall, she heard it again. The sound of a man walking barefoot through grass, a woman gliding across a thickly piled carpet, a child's deep-sleep breathing—the images contorted without resolving into clear pictures and were all the more puzzling for it, as though a kaleidoscope were trying to bring sense to madness.

The penlight darted again, and again there was nothing to see. The sounds shifted and became louder: the man on dirt, the woman on wood, the child panting in a nightmare. Peg, little more than a shadow, hadn't moved, and Terry shook her head to see if it would clear.

Distance. Desolation. Dragging despair. She tried to characterize what she was hearing, to affix labels in order to spark comprehension. The light picked holes in the front door, glinting off the chain latch still in place, glaring briefly from the brass knob. Not in the crawlspace, she thought as she looked toward the ceiling, relieved she wouldn't have to pull down the steps and climb into the musty cold. There was only one place left, then, and she turned around to open the door to the floor below.

It was as though the basement level didn't exist. Except for an occasional trip to the laundry room, they had stayed away, added a door, refusing to abandon the living room for what she considered to be a recreational dungeon. And now, as she descended the steps and felt the smooth wood beneath her feet, she wondered if there hadn't been another reason—but on the face of it, this made less sense than her sudden confusion during the movie. As she flicked on the light switch midway down, she decided neither were rational enough to worry about.

The floor was tiled an uninspiring gray, the semi-paneled walls lifelessly flat. In the glare of the fluorescent rectangle in the ceiling's center, she halted at the bottom step and glanced around. Void of furniture, the room was cavernous, the cold intensified and seeping through her legs. She jumped once, nearly screaming when she saw without immediately recognizing her wraithlike reflection in the uncurtained glass doors. Then she laughed at herself—thinking that perhaps she was a little too loud—and stepped closer. Snow was banked across the bottom, was sweeping out of the darkness to strike the glass and slither in stop-start dashes to the patio. It was like another room in the glass, and Terry wondered if Alice had started out this way on her road to a child's madness. Theresa, watch it! and she tried to smile at herself, and couldn't.

Turning her back on the storm, she rubbed at her throat and concentrated on locating the source of the noises. The wind, she noticed, was far more constant in the basement, more insistent. The room blurred. Tears welled. She blinked them angrily away, scrubbed at her eyes with her knuckles. Her vision remained distorted and she took a stumbling step forward before she realized she couldn't see the staircase, or the rectangular black space that was the upstairs doorway.

The narrow dusty shelf that divided the wall into panel and plaster wavered, then elongated, moved toward and away from her and became a brown and desolate tableland stretching to a horizon shimmering white. Staring unmoving, through rising twisting bands of desert heat, she saw what appeared to be figures, but the perspective was wrong; they were far too small and the angle confused her. The cold on her back drew away and was replaced by a penetrating heat that broke perspiration along her spine. Her hands rose and the robe slipped from her shoulders, pooled at her feet, and she stepped onto the cloth, her soles warming instantly. The heat increased. She reached behind her neck and pushed her hair up and away from her head. The exposed skin tightened in anticipation. She thought nothing, felt only the heat, saw only the odd figures moving steadily toward her. She knelt, bent over until her forehead touched the floor and she was aware of tiny pebbles and dried tips of grass.

The sounds, then, not a walking nor a breathing, but a rhythmic persistent sighing. A tone so low, so far below the scale she could feel the vibrations. She stretched out her arms, turned her hands so that her palms lay flat against the floor, against the ground. In time to the sighing, she rocked back and forth until her muscles stretched and she pressed her buttocks against her heels. Her breasts became heavy beneath the flimsy gown, pulled down her chest until she was prone in an attitude of supplication. Her fingers began to spread, but she didn't feel the ache of skin growing taut almost to the point of splitting. Her soles began to burn. An urge to roll onto her back and tear at her nightgown so to allow her skin to shrivel under the sun.

A roaring intruded, gathering momentum: earthquake, stampede, a waterfall thundering along a dry riverbed driven by a sudden spring shower. The sky from white to gray to roiling black. The thundering, louder, deafening to the level of needling pain that exploded within her skull. The heat, held for what seemed like days, subsided as the roaring began again.

A chill broke through and fastened itself to her limbs, her breasts, stomach, palms. Louder still until she opened her eyes in panic, opened her mouth to scream for help, and did nothing but gape as the thunder fell into the faint and familiar grumbling of the snow plow on The Lane.

There was dislocation, and a disturbing sense of error in the manner in which the house had been arranged. She pulled back her arms and lifted herself to her elbows, peering around the room until she realized she wasn't where she should have been.

"What the hell? This isn't my bedroom." She knew she sounded ridiculous talking aloud, but confused anger and a lingering fear kept her from stopping. "This is dumb! Where the hell is my bedroom, damnit?"

She sat up quickly and swept the robe into her arms, nuzzling the narrow band of fur that trimmed its neck. Then, clutching it tightly, pushing it against her breasts until they ached, she rose and backed slowly toward the stairs. There was a gap, but she was too bewildered to locate the first span of the bridge.

As far as she knew, sleepwalking had never been one of her idiosyncrasies, but on the basis of the evidence . . . She stopped halfway up the stairs, almost dropped the robe as she leaned against the railing. The gap again. Too puzzled to be more than nervous, she toyed with the light switch and watched the room blink white-black, white-black, a strobe effect on the snow that froze its direction.

With one hand guiding along the wall, she moved to the first floor where her foot-stepped on something small and cold. When she bent down, her fingers felt metal. "Now what the—" It was the penlight. Quickly she switched it on, relieved that even its slender trembling finger could push back some of the black.

Pegeen groaned in her sleep, and Terry jumped, fairly ran down the hall to the bedroom. My God, she thought as she dropped the robe to the floor. What a hell of a night. First Peg, then Syd; I miss New Year's Eve in my first house, the damned plows keeping me awake all night with their goddamned noise—

She was sitting on the bed, one leg cocked to slide beneath the sheet. The noise! The pillow was welcomingly cool on her cheek. There was a noise, something that had awakened her. Not sleepwalking at all. A noise. But—

She twisted around and groped until she found Syd's back. It had to have been a noise or she wouldn't have gotten up. She tried, then, to find it again, to resurrect it. She remembered she had been trying to find images for it, trying to untangle confusion so she could fill out safe and sane labels. But she could no longer remember what it had sounded like. Nor why she had been lying on the floor in the basement.

Her fingers moved until she could grip Syd's arm. A dream, most likely. But she didn't believe it. "Syd," she said, and was asleep before she could finish.

Chapter V

After commenting on her bleary-eyed look, Syd had listened with a great show of concern to the story of her sleepwalking, but when she admitted not recalling what had happened between checking the living room and waking on the floor, his immediate reaction was a stifling of laughter. "A dream? Damn, Terry, but you have a hell of a way of catching up on your sleep. Are you sure you didn't dream you were dreaming? You were kind of restless, you know. You might not have left the bed at all."

She glared and slammed a platter of sausage and eggs onto the kitchen table. "How would you know that?" she said angrily. "It didn't take you very long to go dead to the world, you know. And in case you're interested, I did not get much sleep, and the least you could do is give me a little sympathy."

"Oh, come on, Terry! Telephone calls and dreams—what the hell's going on around here?"

She kept her back to him, waiting at the stove for the kettle to boil. "And would you mind keeping your voice down? You'll wake Peg."

"You're kidding." His sarcasm clamped her mouth shut. "It's almost noon, for crying out loud. Isn't it about time she joined the rest of the world?"

Terry sat stiffly, pouring the hot water into his cup without regard for its slopping over onto his saucer. She placed the kettle on a folded towel and swallowed to keep from shouting. "Honestly, I really don't know what's come over you today. The girl has been through hell, you know. Vic's gone, and she had to come all the way through that storm from—"

"Excuse me for breathing, madam, but I seem to remember a certain husband of yours who made a bitch of a trip from the city on what was supposed to be a joyous and exciting holiday." He bit into a sausage and chewed once before grimacing. "Jesus, woman, these are almost raw!"

"Suits your mood," she snapped.

"Oh, beautiful, that's really nice. Happy New Year to you, too." He slammed his fork down so hard she thought he would shatter the plate. "I'm going to watch some—"

"But Peg's still—"

"Hell's bells!"

She listened, trembling, and heard the door of his workshop close as though it had been kicked. Tears fought to brimming but she refused to let them come. She thought she had sensed it the night before, and now she was positive: her episode with the telephone was being tolerated by an indulgent husband, was being summarily written off as the inevitable result of womanly nerves hallucinating under stress. And the dream? That, too, was predictable—the thrashings of an overtired mind seeking a way out of fear because of Syd's drive, and the explosion of relief at his safe return. It was all so rational that she wanted to scream, all so reasonable that she nearly doubted the evidence of her senses. Nearly, but she did not abandon them. If pressed, she might be able to ignore the puzzling dream, but the telephone calls were indisputably real. Peg was a witness; she had heard the instrument ring, had answered it twice herself and heard the noises. But what she hadn't heard was the calling of Terry's name. But it had happened. Theresa. There was no mistake, yet the continuing possibility of her mind's playing tricks on her made her increasingly angry. Forgetting her own admonition, then, she straightened the kitchen as noisily as she could, with each gunshot slap of a plate or pan a point in her favor.

And the mood continued for most of the afternoon, dissipating only, and slowly, when Denver and the Griffiths came pounding on the front door with a challenge to a snow war. Though Pegeen balked at first, pleading weariness, Denver would have none of it. Bellowing through the house for Syd, he ordered the Griffiths to uncover coats and boots for the women, then stood glowering at their leaving before tramping down the hall to drag Syd out from his pout.

The two armies, the members of which changed sides at any treacherous temptation, ranged up and down The Lane, picking up children, the Traubs and, just before dark turned the snow gray, an unwilling William who had spent the day cleaning his tavern of the aftermath of the midnight celebration.

"Hey," Pegeen said, as she and Terry ducked a barrage of snowballs and squeals, "who belongs to the girl?" She nodded toward the brown-and-white colonial opposite them.

Terry looked at the unmoving figure on the porch. "That's William's wife," she said. "None of this nonsense for her, so I'm told. She hardly ever leaves the house except to go to the store."

"She must think we're nuts."

"Aren't we?"

"Speak for yourself, big sister," she said. "I've just changed sides."

A fortnight later, the dream and the calls were pushed to topics for cocktail parties. Esther and Ruth Traub offered Pegeen a room in their home and were refused politely. Syd had a choice of losing his job or taking a cut; his last bonus was spent on a battered Franklin stove they shoved into a corner of the laundry room until they had the time and money to repair it. When it became apparent that Terry was not about to make further use of the downstairs room, Pegeen talked Syd into allowing her to use it until she could locate a job and a more permanent address. To Terry's surprise, he'd acquiesced with only a token struggle, and the women immediately launched a scavenger campaign to furnish the room. Using Ruth's station wagon, they struck at rummage sales, auctions, and a warehouse clearance, from the last uncovering a sofa bed and a pair of golden drapes that fit the glass doors perfectly. They polished the paneling, washed the walls, and Terry began to feel envious.

Syd found a lock for the doors and gave the only key to Peg. "You want to mess around," he said, "just keep the noise down."

By the end of the month there had been no calls from Vic, and one afternoon Peg shocked Terry by saying she had visited a lawyer the previous week.

"You can't do it, Peg. The Church won't allow it."

"The Church? When was the last time you went to Mass, Ter? Never mind, that's none of my business, but the last time I went was when I was married."

"But what would Pop—"

"He's dead, Ter, and I'm not about to let the best years—"

Terry nodded an abrupt interruption. The completion of the cliché was unnecessary.

"Listen, Terry, he's running too fast, and I'm not about to run with him. We tried all that and it didn't work and now it will be done. If he's not there already, by summer he'll be back in Ireland."

"Oh, Peg. . . ."

"So what should I say? It's over, right?"

"He's still your husband, sister."

"More like my son, I think," and Terry immediately dropped it, less shocked by the first divorce in the family than by her own instance of hypocrisy. And there was guilt for throwing the Church in Pegeen's face when, in fact, neither she nor Syd had found the Church comforting enough nor contemporary enough for their own particular problems. God was around, they'd decided, but living in another, more exclusive neighborhood.

Easter to April and the rains of spring. The painters were out. Syd brightened their own white trim, borrowed a trick from Jim Griffith and brushed away the dirt of winter from the cedar to keep the aging brown gleaming.

He was working on the eaves over the porch while Terry sat on the stoop to offer him moral support and a thermos of coffee. Over the hedge she could see Denver balancing on a scaffold at the side of his house, using a wire brush on the window frame's peeling paint. He turned once, and she waved, called him encouragement. He returned the wave, turned back to the house, and, suddenly, while Terry stood and screamed, toppled from the single plank and grabbed for the ropes that locked it in place. By the time she could move, Syd had already jumped from his ladder and was racing across the street. She followed, watching as McIntyre hung from the rope, then began to slide rapidly to the ground. By the time she reached him, he was leaning on Syd and breathing heavily.

"Denver. . . "

He grinned at her. "A beautiful woman will do that to an Indian all the time."

"But—" and she reached for his hands to check the rope burns.

"Nothing," he said. "We're also damned tough."

"That could be," she said to Syd later, "but his hands weren't even warm!"

"Terry, shut up and hold the ladder, okay? Tarzan I'm not, you know."

"But shouldn't he have been burned or something?"

"Darling little girl, the rope was smooth and his grip was strong. Now hold the ladder, please?"

Terry tried to interest the neighborhood in standing watch at various hours during the night to find the driver who was continuing to strike down small animals and leaving their bodies crushed at the curbs. Either out of guilt or disinterest, however, only the Traubs responded, and, after the first week, the project was abandoned for a good night's sleep.

The Golly books were ordered out of print, and Terry wept as though a child had died.

Pegeen, more from Syd's gentle prodding than her own volition, found a job at Pritchard's store, and an apartment in a complex still under construction two miles down Hawthorne Street. It would be ready by summer's end, she was promised, and Terry instantly initiated plans for revitalizing the basement room and grafting it onto the life of the house.

The meadow, meanwhile, more than fulfilled Enfallo's promise. Once the last of winter had retreated north, green replaced white as the neighborhood color, and the sounds of the world changed.

The children exploded from their indoor confinement as if school had already ended, and new lawns had to be protected by small stakes and lengths of string with dangling cloth strips. Syd discovered a green thumb and unleashed self-proclaimed talent in a torrent of seedings, weedings, rakings, and fertilizings. Quickly, too quickly for Terry's taste, he blended into the Saturday morning rites with an enthusiasm he'd usually saved for denigrating his employer. When she reminded him of his attitude toward the urban male's complex toward a lawn, he announced he had discovered the Wonders of Nature that lay dormant beneath the rotating blades of a three-horse mower.

She was forced to concede him the fresh air he seldom had before, but took to standing at the living room window and watching as he crawled around the edges of the driveway, searching out each stray new blade or old weed as though it were an ancient enemy. And often, the McIntyre twins would coax him into a game of catch or touch football, and if either the Dormen girls or Bess Griffith raced by after their loose and running dogs, he was the first to join the chase. He filled out, toned down and, she imagined, with the coming of summer would turn darker than Denver under the hot sun.

Pegeen became scarce. In taking the job at the store, she discovered something she'd never known she had; an innate ability for organization and display which the old man exploited at a disturbingly low wage. Whenever Terry brought that to her attention, Pegeen said it would be great practice when she opened a store of her own, and besides, she and Pritchard were too close as friends for her to be complaining about salary.

"I've got it all planned, sis. Once I learn all I can from Alec, I'll move on to something bigger. By that time I should have enough money and savvy to try it on my own."

"Brother, I can see it now; when you're ninety-nine, you'll be called Old Peg and you'll sit behind a counter with an ass as broad as a chair and twice as heavy."

"Don't knock it, Terry. It's better than sitting home all day."

She walked slowly across the field, angling toward the gentle, cowl-like slope where she'd first seen Denver and the boys. Denver and the boys, speaking as though they were his sons, not William's, as if Mary did not exist except as a painting over someone's huge fieldstone fireplace. Mary and William, she decided, were figments of her imagination, as was the elder. It was a peculiar situation, this McIntyre household, and she'd long ago concluded it would be useless to attempt an understanding. Most likely, it had something to do with their Indian background, but since she'd never found the nerve to ask, she decided she had no right to even speculate.

The grass was already tall, moist as it brushed her sandaled feet. Wildflowers newly bloomed. Birds flew in flocks from the state park forest. She moved carefully, successfully avoiding most of the rocks shoved edge up by winter, hidden depressions and burrows' entrances scattered among half-buried, rotting logs—the carefree sprinting of a romantic young woman was decidedly too dangerous and she walked instead, carrying sketchpad and box of charcoal.

And Pegeen had been right, depressingly so. Since the turn of the year, Terry had been unable to establish a single contact in the city. Several times she'd locked herself in the study for over a week to organize a new series of illustrations Madeleine had sent her on speculation; and each set had been returned with regrets for the wrong mood or the wrong coloring or the wrong level of sophistication for the purpose of the book. Once a week during March she rode with Syd into the city and made the rounds with credits and portfolio, and after each footsore excursion, she'd cried, while Syd tried to soothe and drive simultaneously.

"It's over!" she dramatized on Sunday after dinner.

"You've been saying that all week, angel. You take longer to die than Camille."

"Well, it's true, damnit. I'm a has-been before I'm even thirty."

He'd laughed and pulled her unwillingly down to his lap to nuzzle her neck and tug at her braid. "Listen," he whispered, a hand stealing across her stomach, "soon enough we'll do something right, conjugal wise, and you'll be up to your easel in diapers and pacifiers. Meanwhile, how about clamming that self-pity and either stick it out the window for the squirrels to get fat on, or do something on your own. God knows you've talked about it often enough. And after all, has-been, how hard can one-syllable words be anyway?"

Too damned hard, she'd wanted to tell him but neither could she surrender what had suddenly turned into a crusade for self-preservation.

"Hey, Mrs. Guiness, look out!"

Terry took a step, then jumped back and saw the tiny houses scattered at her feet. They were clumsily woven of new grass and twigs, and only the various toy soldiers and Indians deployed around them let her know exactly what they were supposed to be.

Karen Dormen, still calling a warning, charged down from the top of the slope, her boy-short blonde hair puffed by the wind. Her younger sister tagged behind her, and the two gently eased Terry away from the scene of the pretend battle. Both girls were overweight, looking heavier under their jackets, and they were liberally covered with grass stains and dirt; from no distance at all they could easily have been taken for boys.

"Sorry," Terry said. She knelt to look closer at the village. "Don't much care for dolls, huh?"

Val, her cheeks swollen with gum like a chipmunk, made a noise of disgust and blew a large pink bubble she burst with a dirty finger. Karen only shook her head and sat on her heels, pointing at the sketchpad. "You going to draw our pictures?"

"Sure, if you like."

"No. I don't want to look like those silly kids in your books. My mother keeps telling me to thank you for them. They're nice. But I don't want to look like them."

Terry smiled, was careful not to laugh. "Well, look, I know just what you mean, Karen. But those were for little kids. If you let me, your picture will be more grown up."

"Will we be in a book?" Val asked as she flattened two houses with her palm.

"If you like."

"I don't."

"Me neither," Karen said. "I don't want to be famous. I just want to be a baseball player and make lots of money."

Toy soldiers and baseball. Terry wondered if her own daughter—to be born when she was one hundred, the way things were going—would be like the Dormen girls and accumulate scars and home runs instead of dolls, or would the world ever retreat to the simplicity of rag dolls and taffeta. It would certainly be a lot less complex, she thought, standing and backing away from the game that did not include her.

The girls began arguing about procedure, snatching the toys from each other and repositioning in the spring soft ground.

Terry watched a moment longer, then turned back up the slope which, she realized, was longer than she'd imagined, almost too gentle to be recognized as an incline. When it finally leveled, she was on a well-trampled area nearly thirty yards in diameter and empty of the flowers that dotted the green surrounding her. She was facing The Lane, directly in line with the end of the street; and through the brilliance of newly green leaves she could see patches of houses that would be invisible by June. And as The Lane was blunted by the phalanx of birch, so did the meadow separate the community and the wild. Far behind her was the wall of forest that marked the outermost reaches of the state park, a wall that scalloped the meadow's perimeter and encased it like a buffer between two species of chaos.

No street noises here; only the bees black and yellow, the quiet grunting of the girls still at their game below her, and the occasional sweep of  flock of sparrows or the discordant scoldings of crow and blue jay. After a silent debate, Terry took off her worn black windbreaker and spread it on the ground. A quarter-turn for perspective and she sat, propping the pad on her upraised knees and sketching without concentration. Nothing in particular yet; whatever the wandering eyes of her fingers approved.

The tree line broken by a chimney or two. The girls flat on their stomachs, squinting realism into their armies. A pair of red-brown squirrels chasing through a pattern she couldn't discern, arcing their tails and bounding over obstacles like mating-dance rabbits. A single cloud, wisping and lost and eventually breaking into fragments like wandering smoke. There was no breeze and, as noon passed, the sun grew warm. She was aware of Val and Karen staring at her, becoming bored, and running with a unison shriek toward home.

Alone, she watched the images come faintly to life on the paper. Her eyes were quick in glances up and down, her left hand flipping the pages when something warned her to finish and continue. She split herself, allowed a single part to wonder at the uncompromising peace the meadow's solitude bequeathed her; far better by half than the study where the intrusions of subtle noises disrupted her vision. If she'd been aware the field held this much promise, she would have spent the entire winter bundling like an Eskimo, sitting on the hill and making her fortune. What she was doing now was good she knew; modesty in the face of failure was a luxury she could no longer afford.

But her fingers eventually tired, and her back and legs grew cramped from the forced sitting. Reluctantly, she set pad and charcoal aside and stood, stretching toward the sun, feeling her breasts, stomach, loins rise and relax.

Exploring, she told herself, is the best part of this day, and she walked toward the forest, stopping abruptly and with a gasp caught in her throat when she came to the far end of the top. She remembered how Denver and the twins had seemingly dropped off the edge of the world that afternoon in October. Now she knew why. As though a bulldozer had ravaged the western slope, the hill plummeted straight down at least fifty feet. There was still grass, but far more extrusions of boulder and huge rocks. Two steep paths exposed night-black soil and she decided this must be the daredevils' sleigh route, Everest, the moon, and a wall of Fort Apache. At the foot, the meadow lunged away table flat, the colors of its spring blurring into a unified flow like Caribbean waters.

Queen of the Hill, and of all she surveyed. Terry giggled and was about to chance one of the trails when she saw a low, piece of wood topping the high grass. It was shaped rather like a tombstone, she thought, and she could see rough markings in the weathered gray, gouged as though done with a knife. She knelt, shading her eyes against the setting sun while she strained to read what had been carved there.

"You can't make it out from here, Mrs. Guiness."

Terry was so startled she fell backward, her hands splayed behind her to keep her from going prone. A figure moved to the edge of the hill, and it was black in front of the sun, haloed, tall, standing with legs apart and hands loosely on hips. Her heart pounded so loudly she was sure it had frightened every bird within miles, but as she fought to regain her breath, as one hand went to her breast as she struggled unaided to her feet, she quickly calmed down and grinned sheepishly. "William," she said. "Do you always play the role like that?"

William, gaunt in black shirt and trousers, nodded without smiling. "I have an image," he said, his voice as sepulchral as his father's was ebullient. "All we Indians have to be sneaky and silent. It's part of the mythos. My reputation depends upon it."

Never understanding when he was kidding, Terry smiled nervously and turned back to the marker. "What is it? It looks like a grave."

He moved to her side and his shadow chilled her. His hair was banged and cut straight along his back and shoulders. Even in the sun's bright glare there were no highlights, none of the blue-black glint that marked his sons' or even her own. There was a length of rawhide around his neck, but what pendant it might have held was hidden under his shirt.

"Is it a grave or something?" she repeated, wishing the Dormen girls hadn't run when they did.

"In a way. Not long ago it was a commemoration."

She waited, watching him stare at the marker and feeling her palms begin to itch. "For what? A battle?"

"Of sorts."

Suddenly she understood, and felt the fool for prying. "The . . . reservation?'

He looked down at her, away. "My father has told you the story of what happened here."

"The first night we were here. Back . . . in October."

"Down there the Indians stood, wrapped in their blankets, waiting for the soldiers to tell them how to get to the next reservation." He raised a hand and pointed. "Their huts—they were no more than that—were over by the trees. A single soldier, a private, brought them over to talk with a lieutenant." His lips played at grinning, but there was more of the cold than the man in it. "No generals here, Mrs. Guiness. Just a raw lieutenant and a few leftover corporals and privates. They ranged the Indians with their backs to this drop, down there. It's said it was over in two minutes."

"I'm sorry," she said quietly.

"Why? Your people are Irish, aren't they?"

Terry became annoyed that her emotions had been questioned by a man who seldom even bothered to greet her on The Lane. "I said I was sorry it happened, William. My own people are not without tragedies of their own, you know."

Now that was really dumb, she thought; you're beginning to sound like a damned parlor liberal, and a smug one at that.

William bent over and grabbed a handful of grass, shredding each blade between thumb and forefinger. "I didn't mean to impugn your honesty, Mrs. Guiness. You've been good to my children."

She nodded a curt acceptance of the apology and walked back to retrieve her pad. "William," she called over her shoulder, "Denver said something to us about giants and things—or was it giants or things?—anyway, something that had been here before the reservation, eons before. Do you know anything about it?"

When she turned back for an answer, he hadn't moved except to face her. There was a faint thrumming, and the angry red sun made her blink tears away. When she recovered, rubbing her head against the possibility of a headache, William stood beside her, the box of charcoal in his hand.

"It's only a story, Mrs. Guiness. It was invented by those who came after to explain why the graves are unmarked except for. . ." and he gestured over his shoulder. "It's a way of saving face, by saying the bodies were slaughtered for god food." He smiled, and she was startled. "We all have our pride, Mrs. Guiness, but sometimes the Indian feels a need to embellish."

She felt then as though she were expected to say something, but William merely nodded and strode down the slope toward The Lane. She watched him, a black shadow, until he disappeared into the stand of birch, then hurried back to the drop. Stuffing her pad and box under her arm, she descended, half slipping, half running until she tripped over a protruding branch and sprawled onto her knees. When she looked up, she was facing the ancient marker. The words had been greatly obliterated by a century of weather, but what she saw made her flip open the pad and begin to draw. A rubbing might be more impressive, she thought as she completed the sketch, but the sun had already begun a tightrope act on the trees, and she didn't relish a trek across the meadow without sufficient light.

"Look," she said to Syd as soon as he had come in the door. She shoved the pad at him, forcing him to drop his attaché case.

"What's so important? A nude of Miss Traub the younger?"

"Look at it, dope. It's something I found on the other side of the hill in the field this afternoon."

"Looks like a gravestone or something. What's it say? Your writing, printing, is worse than a kindergarten dropout."

"It says, 'To the old ones, Rest.'" She waited for a comment, but he only shrugged and handed it back. "Well, it doesn't sound like something you usually read—"

"My dear," he said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her toward the kitchen, "it sounds exactly like something you find on a gravestone. What the hell else could it be?"

"But—" She wanted to protest, to demand inspiration and the opening of a conspiracy to decipher the inscription, but Syd only sniffed at the pot of simmering soup on the stove and pronounced it done.

Straightforward, he said, and perhaps it was; but Terry refused to believe it was as simple as that. If the marker had been erected by one of the victims' ancestors, it was obviously a salute to their souls so violently taken from them. But it was too stilted for such a poetic idea; as though, instead, the author had little knowledge of English, or at best, a white man who had tried to imitate some Indian proverb or other.

She slammed the lid onto the soup pot and found herself staring at the telephone. "For what?" she asked herself. "To call Denver and say, 'Hey, would you believe I have a mystery here where there isn't one? Tell me all you know about the past hundred years or so.'"

"Are you talking to yourself again?" Syd called from the bathroom.

"Are you taking a shower with the door open again?"

"What's it to you?"

"You want to catch double pneumonia or something?" She raced out of the kitchen just as the water thundered. She stopped, cursed, and ran again, poking her head into the bathroom. Already, steam had billowed onto the mirror, and she grimaced and slammed the door shut.

"Hey, why don't you join me? The water's fine."

"Not a chance," she yelled. "I'll burn the soup."

"How the hell do you burn soup?"

She pounded on the door twice and returned to the kitchen to sit and stare toward the meadow. All right, she told her faint reflection in the now dark glass, so there's no mystery. But there must be something there I can use; what a waste if it just stays out there and rots. Those people deserve more than that, for crying out loud.

When Syd joined her, she was already doodling on a small pad she kept tacked to the wall by her chair. He was singing when he entered the room, immediately quieted when he saw her working. She smiled at him absently, gratefully knowing he wouldn't interrupt her concentration until the inspiration had passed. In fact, she was surprised she hadn't seen the possibilities before. What, she asked herself, was the biggest commodity in the market nowadays? The ethnic game, that's what. Teach the kids that differences were not necessarily evil, but something to be proud of when handled properly. Here were all the elements of just such a lesson—and directly from history, at that—and also a whacking good suspense story, if she worked it well. A book of her own. She grinned and cupped her chin in one hand. For so long she'd been stabbing blindly at equally blind muses, and the final answer had almost literally knocked her over the head.

"Excuse me."

She looked up blankly.

"I know it's verboten to interrupt genius, but unless I'm mistaken, I've just found out how one burns soup."

Chapter VI

Terry wrapped a loop of telephone cord around her finger and pretended it was Duchette's neck. "Maddy," she said, "you don't know how frustrating it's been. It took me three weeks to get the outline and prelims done. The least you can do is give it serious thought."

"Darling, I always give your work serious thought."

"Not nearly enough lately, if you don't mind me saying so."

A pause Terry refused to fill with an apology. "All right. If I say go, what do you plan to do with it?"

"Win a National Book Award. Come on, Maddy, you have the outline in front of you. Yes or no, or let me get on the wire with someone else on the street."

Another pause, and Terry grinned at the study wall.

"You are a stubborn woman, Theresa Guiness. Only your potential keeps me from dismissing this out of hand. You will, of course, have to do further research into this camp thing, and more details from the locals there. However, I will not promise you a sale on this, only that I'll take a look at the finished—"

"Hey, Maddy, remember me? Theresa O'Hare Guiness? What you're telling me is that I could starve to death praying I'll hit you on a good day when all your work is done. Sorry, Maddy, but you know better than that."

"You have a husband, dear. You shan't lose too much weight."

"Suppose he runs away with my sister?"

"He won't."

"Suppose he gets fired? He might, you know, the way the firm is dropping clients; or the other way around, actually."

"Write a book."

"On speculation? You're out of your mind. Offer me an advance commensurate with my past record, send me half with the proviso being that I give it back if the thing's no good. All you lose is a little time."

"And my job."

"Send me a check and a confirmation and I'll start before the week's out."

"You're impossible, Terry Guiness."

Terry agreed and hung up before Duchette could change her mind.

Following the call, the rest of the morning vanished between the desk and easel in equal portions of self-congratulations and angered frustration: a cycle that spiraled into routine and varied little save in intensity well into June.

She spent a light-to-dusk week at the county seat library, checking the education files on elementary vocabulary and word/association impact, reread a dozen books whose audience she was after, and spent several hours sitting on the curb with Bess Griffith and the Dormen girls, talking.

Pegeen, who had been using her own back door exclusively and had been seldom seen on the main floor after dinner, took to handling the cooking and mollifying Syd's bruised ego when Terry found her time compressing frighteningly toward a self-imposed deadline of the thirtieth of the month. She regretted, fretted over Syd's piteous moaning whenever she excused herself from the table and vanished into the study, telling herself he was a big boy and not likely to begrudge her an opportunity to slice a chunk of popularity for herself should the project be successful. His outbursts of temper she passed over with an equanimity that startled him into more tantrums; and when he subsided into moping around, the lawn and taking long meadow walks, she told herself he was working it out and would soon come around to the excitement that kept her awake at night and rushing during daylight.

She visited the McIntyres in hopes that either William or Denver would spend time checking the stories they'd told her about the reservation, but neither man seemed particularly interested. William only shrugged, maddeningly indifferent, when she explained her work. Pressing, she forced him into an admission that he cared little for his heritage except as something he had to escape in order to survive.

"I put up with the bad jokes in the tavern because if I don't my children will starve," he said, "but it does not mean I have to like it. I do not. And I do not, if I may be frank, appreciate the idea that you are unearthing this misfortune in a children's book, of all things."

"But they must learn, William," she said. "And besides, it'll be the fantasy aspect I'll lean on, not the horror of the actual fact."

"I do not like it. There is no feeling."

Denver was less adamant, but no less displeased. "It's all nonsense, Theresa Guiness, and have you considered what disservice you might be doing to the descendants of those who died out there? Not to mention the Indian population at large?"

Terry shook her head, puzzled at the unforeseen objections. "No, Denver, I can't agree. In the first place, by your own admission, there are no descendants, or at least none that we're aware of; and secondly, the Indian population at large thinks the whole thing is a hoax anyhow."

She laughed at his gape. "Right, I've been doing some checking, you see. A few letters here and there among the Councils in the East, and all of them wonder where the hell I got such an outlandish bit of distorted history."

Denver darkened, his eyes vanishing in the shadows of his brows. "It is not outlandish, and it is not distorted, young woman. And I'll thank you not to question my honesty again."

"Denver, you're as bad as Syd sometimes. I am not questioning anything. All I'm saying is, there'll be no harm done by the story. Don't you understand this will be a book for children, not a mass market adult collection of purple prose?"

Mary entered at that moment and stood between her men, her head reaching only to their shoulders, her girth heavy with the expectation of her third child. Terry attempted to enlist her support as a mother who hopefully would grasp what the men could not, but the woman only allowed that her husband had the final say and what she thought was of little consequence.

"Impossible," she said to Pegeen. "The whole damned bunch of them are impossible."

"You're stealing something of theirs, sister dear," she said. "Naughty."

"Crap."

"Theresa, sometimes you're not nearly as sensitive as you like to think you are, artist or not."

A Monday afternoon, and the two were alone in the store.

"I'm as sensitive as anyone in this business has to be, Peg."

"Not if you're going to call it a business, you're not."

Peg stalked around the shelves with a feather duster, attacking each section as if dust found there would bankrupt the entire business. Since assuming most of the small operation's management, Peg had changed, and Terry wasn't at all sure she liked it. An air, as her father used to say, an indefinable something that lent itself to examples of self-reliance, confidence, and all the other Emersonian virtues Terry's Old World background had early assigned to men. It was an inconsistent attitude in view of her own career, but Peg, she told herself, was a different case.

Suddenly Peg stopped, brushed back a strand of dark red hair from her face and leaned against the central counter, toying with the register's keys. "I'm worried, sis."

Terry blinked, wondering if it was Vic.

"No," Peg said, guessing the thought. "It's about Alec. I'm worried about him."

"What's to worry? Aren't you doing well here?" She looked around; knowing the place had never been so clean nor the inventory so well-stocked and moving. "The recession bothering you that much?"

Her sister waved the idea away impatiently, then hoisted herself to sit on the counter, her sneakers banging lightly against the glass case that displayed luncheon meats and dairy products. "We're doing very well, thank you. So well it scares me sometimes. No, that's not what's bothering me."

"So? What? You got a man on the sly or something?"

"Don't I wish," she laughed—too loudly, Terry thought. "No, it's the old man, Alec. He just hasn't been right, not himself for the past few days."

"Is that all?" Terry said. "Well, if you ask me, he hasn't been right for the last few years, but—"

A woman trailing four preschool boys interrupted them, and Terry shifted to one side while Peg mounted the stool that was hers by default and kept her eyes on the convex mirrors mounted in the corners of the ceiling. Her arms folded across her breasts as she smiled vacantly at the woman, and Terry wondered without apology if she would soon begin to develop a protuberant forehead like Pritchard's. She hadn't been aware before of how many of the old man's mannerisms Peg had adopted and, like Pritchard, how laconic she'd become. It's not right, she thought, but waited for clarification; though she hadn't noticed anything herself, Peg's working with Pritchard so closely might have made her more sensitive to his condition. It was making Terry uncomfortable.

After the woman and her charges had left, Peg shook her head at the shambles of the candy rack and angrily set the bars and packages back in their places. "Look, Ter," she said as she worked, "you know how he can be, right? Cranky, sometimes so damned set in his opinions."

Terry shrugged and said nothing.

"Well, not anymore. He temporizes, procrastinates, agrees with anything and everything I say." Absently, she tore open a chocolate bar and took a bite. "I could tell him we're going to have an earthquake this afternoon, he'd only nod and wipe his face with a handkerchief. You know, he hasn't been—want some?" She held out the candy but Terry shook her head. "I'm eating too much of this garbage lately. Nerves, I guess. He really does get on my nerves, you know. He hasn't been here all day. In fact, he hasn't put in a full day for nearly two weeks. Almost exactly. I'll bet he doesn't even eat right. He sure doesn't get anything here at the store. You sure you don't want any? I went over to his house the other night to see if I could get him something—you know, a tonic or something like that. He was standing in front of the fireplace, and I swear to God he was praying. And I never thought I'd hear something like that coming from him, believe me. When I saw him and he saw me, I thought for sure he was going to have a heart attack. No fooling, Ter." She paused, squinting. "You know, he as much as threw me out then? Told me to mind my own business or I'd get hurt, too. Too? I don't know, I just don't know."

Terry closed a hand on Peg's arm as she was about to open another candy bar. "For crying out loud, Peg! Pritchard's an old man. God, he must be trampling all over seventy. His age has finally caught up with him, that's all. He's sucked you into taking the lion's share of the work here, and now his bones are settling in, fairly crying out in relief." She spread her arms wide in a dramatic gesture that collided with a mobile advertisement for ice cream. Startled, she glanced up at the whirling colors, and when she looked down she saw Mary standing at the screen door, beckoning anxiously. Terry pointed to herself, and Mary shook her head.

"You got company," she said, turning her sister around by the shoulder. "The Indians are coming."

"So why doesn't she come in? I got the plague or something? She's got two good legs. At least, I think she has. You can never tell with those stupid long skirts she's always wearing."

She crooked a finger, but Mary refused, the smooth lines of her face distorted by an anguished frown.

"Damnit, Terry, doesn't she know I have better things to do than play stupid games?" She untied her apron and threw it over the counter. "Keep your grubby hands out of the till, sister. I know exactly how much is in there. To the penny."

"I love you, too," Terry said, grinning, then began reading the magazine displays on the counter in an attempt to ignore the pantomime conversation outside. But it didn't work, and when she looked up she saw Peg clutching at her skirt, tugging at the material nervous1y. Then there was the flash of a key ring and Terry realized she'd be locked in if she didn't move quickly. A half-dozen rapid steps and she punched at the door until Peg moved back to let her out. She had a quip ready, but a concentration of tension kept her quiet, and she quickstepped out of Peg's way so she could lock up and turn the "closed" sign over.

"Hey, Mary, Peg, what's going on?"

Peg rattled the door to check the lock, then straightened slowly and turned, her hands pressed to her hips. Her face was drawn, older, an illusion of translucence in the afternoon light. She started to speak once, licked her lips and said, "It's Alec."

Terry looked to the Indian, but Mary had already sprinted away from the store with Peg. Dumbly she watched, feeling like a stranger, then followed them up the trail to The Lane as fast as she could. She had no intention of engaging in a foot race to Pritchard's house, but she moved to keep up with them, to stay near her sister, in case she should be needed. She spotted immediately a patrol car and ambulance in Pritchard's driveway, their lights flashing mindlessly, silently.

There was a small crowd bunched on the lawn and as Terry approached she noticed no sense of urgency—only expectation. The children, just the previous week released from school, stood close by their parents, clutching at hands and pockets and seeming altogether smaller than they were.

Suddenly, Terry wished Syd would come home; she felt oddly out of place in spite of her nine months' residency, and hovered at the fringes, looking for Peg, giving up her questions when the first were met with politely silent rebuffs. The McIntyres stood apart, and she was surprised to see the elder with them, his white hair uncombed and veiling his face. The twins stood in front of Mary, each with his right hand resting on her swollen belly. Terry smiled at Denver but he appeared not to see her. Damn, she thought and took a pace toward the policeman who had remained in the car. Before she could say anything, however, the front door opened and the crowd sighed.

Attendants in wrinkled white carried a wheeled stretcher down the steps. The policeman following them nodded a signal and his partner left the cruiser's radio and moved to intercept the slowly closing onlookers. Terry was standing by the rear of the ambulance when the stretcher was rested on its wheels so the door could be opened. She glanced up and saw Peg standing on the porch. There was a glinting on her cheeks from the red setting sun, and Terry knew she was crying. A child whimpered behind her, and a flock of crows raced raucously over The Lane toward the field.

God no, she thought, and forced herself to gaze at the old man. His face seemed powdered with chalk dust, his neck muscles were taut, and lying outside the tight white sheet his arms were shadow thin. His eyes, however, were open, but Terry saw nothing of pain or fear, only a studied resignation. She wanted to look away, to call for Peg to say something to him, but as she turned, Pritchard's head shifted, he saw her and his lips twitched as though to smile.

Then, one of the policemen began to issue quiet orders, and the interns readied the ambulances inside, though their movements suggested to Terry that they had little hope of getting him to the hospital alive. They moved to lift the stretcher, and Pritchard grabbed Terry's hand. He pulled and involuntarily she tried to break away. His fingers pinched her wrist, and she knelt before he could drag himself from under the sheet. Her vision blurred: the resignation had fled, what was left was pleading.

Without knowing why, then, she whispered, "You'll be home, Alec. We'll watch the store, and you'll be home soon enough."

He swallowed heavily. "I tried," he said, forcing her to lean closer to hear the voice rough and dry like a man thirsting. "I tried, Mrs. Guiness, but they wouldn't let me. Just like before, they wouldn't let me."

He coughed and his grip tightened, and a coolness slipped into her palm. The policeman pried him loose as Terry began to wince from the pain, took her shoulder and helped her to stand. The stretcher vanished, and before the doors closed, Peg scrambled in.

"What was it?" she asked the policeman who evidently thought she needed his moral as well as physical support.

He watched the ambulance backing out of the drive. "Heart attack, the guys said. We found him trying to crawl to the door. In the living room he was." He pointed to Peg's face barely seen in a curtained side window as the siren shattered the neighborhood calm. "She his daughter or something?"

"My sister," Terry said, and would have laughed at the policeman's look had the circumstances been different. "She worked with him in his store on Hawthorne. Sort of his manager."

He nodded understanding and after a perfunctory query after her comfort, rushed to the car and drove off.

The excitement, penned, finally broke and the children streaked down The Lane in a shouting game of tag. But she was still alone. No one questioned her, no one asked what the old man had pressed into her hand. She held it to her side, then looked down. It was a key.

"We should have known better."

Terry spun around and couldn't help a gasp at the sight of Mrs. Denbeau leaning heavily on a tarnished metal walker. Her face was all angles, none of them softened by the dull gray hair that looked as though it had been hacked at rather than cut. Despite dark glasses, Terry could see the nearly purple shadows under her eyes, almost turned away from the blood-red slash of lipstick that smeared at the corners of her mouth. This was the first time Terry had seen her other than through a screen door, and the shock muddied her senses until she realized she was being spoken to, bitterly.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Denbeau. I'm afraid I wasn't listening."

"Neither were they," the woman snapped, tossing her head in the direction of the retreating neighbors. "I said it wouldn't be the first or the last, but they said I was only grieving." She glared and poked at Terry's chest. "I did my grieving months ago, Mrs. Guiness. And I told them it wouldn't be the last. And it wasn't. That's why they're running away."

"From what?" Terry couldn't help the sarcasm in her voice, and wasn't dismayed when Mrs. Denbeau opened her mouth, shut it and moved clumsily down the sidewalk. There was a moment when Terry wanted to chase after her, but she decided against it, staring instead at the gleaming bronze key in her hand. Why Pritchard hadn't given it to Peg, she didn't know. But apparently he'd been still conscious enough of his surroundings to want his home looked after. Not, she thought glumly, that he'll ever use it again.

She checked her watch and sighed at the hour at least before Syd would be home to start his vacation. A restlessness made her blow out several deep breaths, then she decided to go inside and make a quick inventory. That way she would know if anything was missing when the estate's lawyers came to check his will against the fact.

Slowly she walked around the two-story house, making an elaborate show of testing the windows she could reach. There would be neighbors watching her, no doubt some resentful of her abrupt responsibility. The back door was locked, the yard overgrown with weeds and dying grass. She nodded as though she saw nothing unusual, returned to the front and scanned the second floor. Nervously, then, she fingered the key, stiffened and let herself in.

Eat your hearts out, she said to the curtains she knew would be fluttering all along The Lane. Theresa Ann O'Hare Guiness is in charge now.

The furnishings were meager at best, and what there was was wooden and unfriendly. Suddenly unsure of herself, she hurried through the rooms, saving the living area for last: the only room carpeted, the only one with upholstered chairs. Crawling to the door, the policeman had said, and from the scuffs in the carpet's thick pile she could see he had fallen by the fireplace, struck or grabbed onto the glass-topped coffee table and had tipped it over. A pipe lay on the slate hearth and tobacco spilled brownly toward the rug. She stared, shrugged, and turned to leave when something caught her eye.

Slowly she moved to the fireplace. She found a rusted poker lying beside a nearby chair and poked in the ashes until she had eased a small doll onto the hearth. "Well, I'll be damned," she said, and knelt to brush the sullen gray from its face and clothes. "A fella passing through, huh?"

Syd stared when she dropped the doll onto the table in front of him. He jabbed at it thoughtfully with a pencil, then scratched behind his ear. "Beats me, angel. It could be the same one we saw, but...

"Well, don't you even know?"

He shrugged and pulled his cup to him like a soup bowl. "Ter, I just didn't get that good a look. And I never saw the ones in the store. I'm sorry, but I can't say anymore than that."

She was frustrated enough to groan, but grateful that he was at least being honest. Which was more than she could say for the McIntyres. They had refused to see her after she'd left Pritchard's. She had only wanted to give back the doll, but when she held it up for Mary to see through the front door, Mary had stepped back quickly and called for Denver.

"Theresa," the big man had said before she could speak, "we are mourning the loss of a friend and ask not to be disturbed."

"He's not dead yet," she'd said without thinking.

"He is dying and will not return."

"All right. I just wanted to give you this," and she held up the doll again. "I found it in Pritchard's living room. I saw it, or something like it, once in his store, and he said your father made it."

Denver didn't blink. "I'm sorry, Theresa, but my father couldn't have made something like that. His hands . . ." and he stretched out his own and shook them violently. "I'm sorry, but Alec must have been wrong. Now please. . . ." He shut the door in her face.

"They must have known each other a long time" Syd added more sugar to his tea, sipped, and grimaced. "Damn, but something must be wrong with the water. This tastes like—"

"Syd!" She slapped the back of his head and laughed when he jumped from the table to avoid the liquid spilled from his cup.

"You could have ruined my pants, dope. I spent nearly thirty bucks on them."

"Wow, big spender."

"I'll have more when that book of yours is done. How'd you do today?"

"Not a word. Alec's accident. . ." They moved to the living room and sat on the sofa. The front curtains were open and they watched the last of the twilight shadows haze the air blue-gray. The foliage hastened darkness, made the hedge look carved from black stone. She felt depressed, and more so when Syd was unable to explain what Pritchard had meant.

"And then there was Denbeau—"

"You actually saw that old thing?"

"Well, she's not so old, but she said something about warning the others. Weird."

"Maybe she was talking about her husband. Denver told me something about that."

She sat up straight. "You talked to him? Today?"

"No, not today, dope. Months ago. Remember Enfallo said something about a guy being murdered?"

She nodded, a moment later her eyes widened as she made the connection. "Her husband was the guy? Why didn't you tell me, Syd? I could have put my foot in it proper."

He laughed, stood and drew the curtains. The lamp pushed his shadow to the ceiling. "It wasn't the most artistic killing in the world," he said as he rooted under his chair for his slippers. "It was around this time last year, and The Lane had just seen another family off. They'd been leaving by ones since the summer before when an impromptu rock concert in the meadow was raided by the state police and not a few drugs were confiscated, nor a few heads cracked. Some of the elderly began to feel nervous and wanted to leave before the youngsters returned to try again. It was more than that, though. Denver thinks it was the open space, all of it around them. Most of the people who have moved here were from the city, and they can't seem to get used to the idea of not having neighbors crowding them in on all sides."

"I know what they went through," Terry said, huddled in the corner and wishing they had Pritchard's fireplace. "But we didn't run. We got used to it."

"Because that's what we were after. Most everyone else is looking for escape from the dangers of the city, not the people per Se."

She thought about it a minute, found a rebuttal or two, but let them pass. "The Denbeaus," she prompted, and Syd lighted a pipe, began to pace from wall to door.

"Denver said the man, Oscar, was a salesman who seldom came home for more than a few days at a time. After one of these trips—I never did find out what he sold—he and his missus had a fight you could hear from one end of The Lane to the other. He accused her of hopping in and out of beds, hammocks and cars' backseats with every man on the street. Then he stormed over to McIntyre's where he wanted to fight with Denver. He must have been juiced to the gills to want to take on Denver. God, what an idiot!

"Anyway, William took the first part of the guy's screaming with those half-closed eyes of his. Denver, though, wouldn't take any of it. He grabbed Denbeau by the shirt and tossed him out on his fat ass. The last time anyone saw Oscar alive was when he was weaving his way out toward the meadow. When William came back from the tavern, he went for a walk and found Denbeau's body."

Syd paused for effect. "It, he, was draped over that wood monument on the other side of the hill. The police wouldn't let anyone near it. Denver said it must have been beaten pretty badly. Even the old lady was refused permission to see it until it had been taken to the county morgue."

"Who did it?"

Syd shrugged. "Who knows? Denver doesn't. There weren't any arrests. Mrs. Denbeau had a stroke that night, obviously in no condition to club her husband to death."

Terry was still puzzled. She reached out a hand and Syd took it, sat beside her. "But what was she talking about, saying it wasn't a surprise about Alec?"

"I don't know. Maybe she thinks those kids from the concert were taking their revenge on a neighborhood that spoiled their little orgy. Who the hell knows? She's a queer bird anyway."

"Well, I feel sorry for her."

"You'd feel sorry for a wounded cobra."

They fell into a wrestling match that broke only when Terry heard Peg moving downstairs. She wrenched free and pulled open the door. There was only one light burning, and in the shadow at the foot of the stairs, Peg seemed frail and insubstantial.

"Peg?"

"He's dead, Terry. He woke up once, just before, and he smiled at me. Then he died." Her head dropped to her chest, lifted and she turned away. "I'm going to bed. If anyone asks, the store's closed until after the funeral. Good night."

"But Peg, wait a minute—"

"Good night, Terry. Please!"

Terry closed the door silently, raised a finger to Syd's questioning look and beckoned him into the kitchen.

"She loved that old creep," he said. "It's your dad all over again."

They fixed a sandwich snack, but their mood was somber. Only Syd talked, mainly about the painting he was going to do on his three weeks off. They had been planning to take two of the three and drive as far west as they could, stopping whenever they felt moved to, seeing whatever struck them interesting. And Terry became guiltily angry at Pritchard for dying.

"Maddy called today," she said while they were cleaning up.

"Witch. How much did she cheat you this time?"

"Oh, Syd, be fair. She's only trying to do her job. And she didn't cheat me out of anything. She got the first illustrations and chapters today and was, for her, so excited she nearly climbed through the wire to kiss me. She said she was making precedent by doubling the advance. The check should be here by the end of the week. I can hardly wait to get it!"

Syd stared, then grabbed her hand and shook it, pulled until she was close enough to kiss. "But why didn't you say something earlier, angel? I mean, this is the big time for my girl. For crying out loud—"

"Please, Syd."

He stuttered, then softened his smile to a gentle grin. "Okay, I get it. But in spite of the trouble and the day, I'm damned proud of you."

"I'm going to blush," she said. "It still hasn't sunk in yet."

"You've already spent every penny, I'll bet."

She nodded, just to keep him quiet, then excused herself and went into the bathroom. It was cold and she shivered as she stripped and turned on the water. The shower thundered into steam and she rubbed at her arms and thighs until the temperature adjusted itself to her liking.

Talk about mixed blessings, she thought, sucking in her breath when the water pelted her skin; the biggest move of my career and all I can think of is that poor old man, and my poor old sister. Old. That's exactly what she is. Too old for somebody that young.

The rest of the evening was quiet, spent in front of the television until Syd's yawns infected them both.

Once in bed, however, Terry propped her pillow against the headboard and sat staring at the fractured light of the street lamp. A breeze kicked and the light shifted. She wanted to think, but she felt her eyelids drooping, casting her into a darkness she felt instinctively wasn't what she wanted.

On a field. Brown with fall's dying grass. In the distance, a troop of figures moving toward her. The sighing. Rhythmic, chanting, welling from the ground to form a dome under the noonday sky. White light, white heat, ribbons of heat lifting from her feet. Behind her, another sound. Counterpoint grunting. She wanted to turn but there was nothing for her body to do but stand as a statue and watch the slow fall of the sun. The figures moving, never growing closer, while the grunting increased and lifted until it seemed to come from above her. The ground grew cold and there was snow, just as quickly melting and bringing green to the field. A shadow slithered to cover her own, stretching to meet the figures still indistinguishable, still distant, still walking as on a treadmill. The shadow was formless. Black, gray, white, pink, red, it turned to liquid and fell toward her and she realized she was standing at the bottom of a slope. Her back tensed, and she knew there was a sharp outcropping of earth behind her, a wall, a cliff, a mound. A rush of air and something was falling toward her, screaming, though there was no sound but the sighing, the grunting. A screaming, nevertheless, and suddenly it froze, all of it, a mural she recognized but could not put a name to until it began to shrink, slowly at first, then rapidly until it was falling away too fast to keep her from becoming dizzy. A new sound, thunder, and she wanted to call out against the illusion of falling, then stood in stunned silence when the colors faded to black and white and she was staring at a picture fastened by pins to the frame of her easel.

Her head jerked forward and she rubbed at her eyes. Her feet slid off the bed, but she stopped herself. "In the morning," she whispered. "In the morning."

Chapter VII

She moved quietly, not wanting to wake Syd. The circles under his eyes, the strain at his mouth even in repose—the agency's cutbacks were moving closer to his office every week. Already he was scouring the want ads for new positions, cursing his inadequate training for little else than what he was now doing.

She drank a glass of orange juice while standing at the back door, looking over the narrow porch they never used.

It's going to be sultry, she thought. A definitely unpleasant harbinger of a miserable summer. The real heat shouldn't have come until the last of July.

A robin fluttered to the grass, its head cocked in search of worms. It hopped toward her, then fled when a half-dozen crows settled down by the hedge. They spread out in a single line and moved slowly across the yard, stabbing, stopping every few minutes to preen their wings. When they reached the trees in the center, they rose to hide in the leaves. Act Three, Terry thought, now comes the horrible lion stalking through the jungle. And she laughed silently when Bess' Siamese burst through the hedge and stood rock still, with tail dipped to the ground. It was old, and when it moved, its belly brushed at the grass.

So who shall be the great white hunter and save the populace from the terror? She tapped a fingernail against the screen. The cat froze, turned its head slowly toward her and stared, and Terry used a knuckle to send it dashing out of the yard. Brave eagle, she thought, biggest damned coward in the neighborhood.

She carried her glass to the sink and held it under the faucet. She knew she was stalling; sooner or later she would have to go into the study and look at the easel, if only because her deadline was but four days away and Maddy had begun her gentle, dourly program of harassment. But she felt no pressure; all that remained was the final short chapter and two, perhaps three illustrations. It was the color that bothered her most. What she'd sent in had been pastel, too gentle for the excitement, yet it was too late to suddenly go stark, too late to redo all that had gone on before. And as she thought about it she became nervous, anxious to get to work and fearful of doing so. It was a fine book, even by her own exacting standards, and she was positive it would do well. But . . .

"All right, woman," she told her reflection in the stove's chrome hood. "Get your ass into gear. It ain't going to kill you, you know."

She hurried back into the bedroom and changed into a light blouse, which she tied under her breasts, and a pair of patched and faded jeans. Her feet she left bare, and her hair was tied back with a frayed piece of yellow yarn.

A minute as she looked down at Syd, his naked chest slightly moist with the early heat. Raising her fingers to her lips, she blew him a kiss and, after opening both windows, carefully drew the door closed.

Onward, she said, and went into the study before she could lose her nerve. The easel faced away from her, and though she was tempted to fuss at the desk, she stepped around the frame, puffed her cheeks and blew. The paper was empty. Just as she'd left it. Feeling around behind her, she found the stool and sat heavily, wiping her brow and shaking, her head. The dream-image was still quite vivid, and she decided that it needed doing, if only to cleanse her for the day's work.

But before she completed the outline she unpinned the paper and tossed it into a corner, spitting after it dryly. It was a miserable sketch, oddly lifeless, and in her anger she knew she'd wasted the hours before lunch. "So, a walk," she said. "Get the old muscles creaking, the old brain unmuddied."

She picked up a pad and dark pencil, thought about and discarded the idea of a light sweater. She slapped at her bare midriff and left by the front door, hoping Syd would sleep away most of the day. If anyone around here needs the rest, she thought, he does.

She walked to the crest of the hill, glad for the jeans instead of shorts when she saw the number of bees swarming over the meadow's flowers. The fact that she'd never been stung only added to her anxiety, and when she reached the drop couldn't blame the heat for all her perspiring.

The marker hadn't changed. But why should it? And the answer: knowing now that a man's body had been draped across it. Perhaps there would be a specter of blood, a slice of tissue from the long-gone corpse. Again she slid down the incline and walked up to the monument. It reached her neck when she stood directly before it, was far thicker than she'd first thought. She touched it cautiously, found no splinters, and pressed against it firmly. She closed her eyes. Waited.

Felt foolish. Waited.

The heat burned her neck. She moved behind and let both hands grip the curved top, and her head bowed until her forehead touched the rain-smooth wood. Mumbling nonsense syllables, thinking of the books she'd read and the characters who conjured the past through occult spells and deals with the demonic Underworld. The grass, initially cool to her soles, became brittle, warm, and she shifted to the front where there was bare earth. She lifted her face to the sky, and the darkness behind her closed lids exploded into a red that swam and made her head ache. Tighter, and the light intensified. Straining, and suddenly she backed off and sat hard on the ground.

"I was pushed," she said aloud. "Goddamnit, I was pushed!"

She snatched up her pad and scrambled back to the top of the hill, had to tighten her legs to keep from running. When she emerged from the stand of birch, she saw Denver in the middle of the street; beyond, Mrs. Denbeau struggling from her mailbox. A package was tucked awkwardly under her arm. It slipped, and when she bent to retrieve it, she looked Terry's way. Denver put his hands on his hips, and Mrs. Denbeau straightened and hobbled as fast as her walker would allow into her garage. Denver waited a full minute before turning, a slight sardonic grin on his face.

"That old woman doesn't like me a bit," he said loud enough for her to hear. "Come on over and sit a while with me." He smiled, but Terry knew it was more than a casual invitation. His hand reached out, waited until she was by him, then closed on her upper arm. "A magnificent day, don't you think? One of God's best. A little too hot for some folks, but then there's always the winter or the movie theater if you want cold air blowing in your face."

He led her to his stoop and helped her sit on the top step. Then he leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. "Mrs. Denbeau, for example—"

"I heard her husband was murdered last year."

He looked back at her and nodded slowly. "Terrible thing. I suppose Syd told you all about it?"

She nodded, pressing the pad hard into her thighs.

"I had to toss the guy out on his ear. Frightened the hell out of little Mary. Luckily she wasn't pregnant at the time or I think I would have scalped the drunken bastard."

"Denver," she said suddenly, having roused a simmering anger into words, "you were very nice to us when we moved in last year. When we came—"

"Well, it's easy to be nice to nice people, Terry."

Forked-tongue to you, too, she thought. "Thanks, but I have to admit to some confusion. I mean, if we're still friends—"

"But how else would it be?"

"—Then I'd like to know what I said yesterday that offended you. It was purely unintentional. You must know that."

McIntyre pulled a checked handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped his face and the back of his neck.

"For that, Theresa, I'd like to apologize."

"Look, it's not necessary to go through all that," she said shortly, annoyed at the patronization she sensed rather than heard. "All I want to know—"

"Theresa, it is necessary that I explain. Bear with an old man, will you?"

Some old man, she thought. He could take on any ten men and come out a winner without even sweating. But she smiled, and became uneasy when he leaned back to rest his elbows on the stoop. His face was lower than hers now, and slightly behind—it made her uncomfortable, knowing he was looking up at her yet unable to shift gracefully to meet his gaze. She concentrated on her own front door, hoping that Syd would suddenly waken and interrupt them.

"You see," Denver began, "Alec and me, we moved to The Lane about the same time. The first ones here, in fact, when the street was a dirt lane the folks on Hawthorne used to go to the meadow. His wife, Marsha, died a couple of summers later. Heart attack while she was out hunting for blueberries. Alec was never the same after that. And let's face it, Theresa, his physical appearance did not lend itself naturally to a flock of women hovering around his fireplace. It hit him hard, you see, and me and Mary and William, we sort of took him into our house like he was King. Helped him get the store, lent him money, little things like that. He was very close to us, Theresa, and since we still hold to a few of the old ways, we were mourning him and it just naturally didn't invite visitors, if you know what I mean."

"It seems like a lot of people die around here," she said without thinking.

"Old people die no matter where they are. Young folks, too. Like Timothy Barnes."

"Who?"

Denver laughed. "My God, didn't that agent tell you?"

She twisted around. "I don't think so, no."

"Why, Tim Barnes was the man who owned Number Three before you two folks came in. He was training to be a mile runner. Used to do that sort of thing in college, I understand, and when the track people went professional he decided to try it out himself. Heat prostration a June or two back. His wife moved to . . . Minneapolis, I think."

Company transfer, she thought, and we're like family. Oh brother, Syd, have I got news for you.

"So, people die, Theresa. Some because their time's come, others—like Denbeau and Barnes—because they bring their time to themselves too soon."

"Which one was Alec?"

There was a silence that made her want to vanish when she realized the implications of her question. Quickly, she fussed with her pad until she spotted a stick figure she'd doodled some time before. "Denver," she said brightly, "can I ask you about that doll again?"

"Why?" His voice was expressionless.

"Well," she said, deciding to play the role of the disingenuous young girl, "Alec told me that the elder had made that collection in the store. He said your father wanted them sold if possible. You know, that's what he said. I don't care, really, but it's kind of curious, you know?"

Denver sighed loudly and straightened, returning his forearms to his thighs. She saw the muscles tightening in his neck, his fingers kneading his knees. "Alec hadn't been well for a long time, Theresa. In fact, your sister was a godsend to him, really she was. A beautiful woman, you know. Kind of makes me wish I were thirty years younger. Twenty-five?"

"Around that," she said, almost adding, "And stop your stalling."

"Well, I saw those showcase dolls, too, and Alec told me the same thing. But as I said yesterday, the elder could not have done anything of the sort. He has palsy. He can't even hold his own knife and fork—he has to be fed by hand."

"But I've seen him dozens of times," she blurted, "and never noticed anything like that."

"Because," he said patiently, "when he's in what the doctors call repose, there's no problem at all. It's only when he tries to hold something. Like a pencil, or a knife."

He stood then, and turned abruptly as though he were going to make a point, but his feet tangled and with a surprised yell he fell sideways across the steps. Terry scrambled back, then jumped to the walk and knelt beside him. He was holding his head, shaking it, then pushing her away roughly.

"I'm okay," he said. "I'm okay."

"Not quite," he said. "Just banged up the grass a little."

"But I saw—"

He smiled and pointed to a flattened patch of grass near the bottom step. "If I hit the edge of that concrete, Theresa, this red man's face would really be red."

She nodded, still shaking from the scare and unable to keep from staring at his temple. It had all happened so fast, perhaps he was right. Perhaps? She frowned. No perhapsing about it; he was already up and walking off the ache.

"Sorry, Denver," she said. "Are you all right?"

"Don't worry, little lady. Surprised me more than anything. You just hurry back to your walking or writing or whatever you do to keep Syd happy."

"You're sure?"

He nodded, exaggerated a grimace, and pushed her gently toward the street. "Go," he said. "Your husband awaits."

She looked up and saw Syd standing in the doorway, wearing only a pair of cut-off jeans. He called a greeting to the Indian and smiled broadly as she ran up and hugged him tightly.

"Hey, slow down, woman! You want to put on a show right here in front of the whole neighborhood?"

"Well, look who's walking around half-naked."

"Jealous," he said, following her into the house.

"You wish you had my body."

"If I had your body, husband dear, we wouldn't be married, I don't think."

"Oh, I don't know about that. I've always thought you were a little strange."

"Peg up?" she said, leaning against the bathroom door while he shaved.

"Haven't seen or heard. Yesterday must have been a hell of a blow, angel. I wouldn't expect her up for hours."

"You think I should go down and talk with her?"

"About what? You'll only start her crying again."

"Yeah, but—"

"Grief, my angel, can be shared by two, like the poet says, but it can only be borne by one."

"Oh, my," she said. "Aren't we full of the philosophical bent today."

He grinned and wiped his face with a towel. "Look at that mug, will you? A remarkable piece of workmanship, if I do say so myself."

"You cut yourself."

He leaned toward the mirror, frowning. "Where?"

"Here," and she placed a finger alongside a droplet of blood beneath his ear.

"Shit."

"Foul!"

"It must have been that damned dream. I haven't cut myself in a hundred years."

"Dream?" She grabbed his wrist, made him lower his toothbrush. "What dream?"

"Hey," he said, putting his hands on her shoulder, "what are you so excited about?"

"What dream?" she persisted.

"Hell, I don't know. I must have been tired or something. A nightmare."

She took his hands from her, pushed until he was seated on the edge of the tub. "Come on, Syd, tell me about the dream."

He shrugged and rubbed his hands across his chest. "What can I say? A run-of-the-mill nightmare. Nothing special." He frowned, then, when he saw she wouldn't move from in front of him. "Okay. Remember when I took that walk last night before bed?"

She nodded, biting her lower lip to keep from interrupting.

"Well, I found that wood thing you were telling me about. You know, all the time we've been here and I've never been ten feet from our own yard. Stupid, isn't it? That place over there would make a hell of a picnic ground. I was over by the park, too, and heard a stream. I wonder if—"

"Syd, damnit, stick to the subject!"

"Okay, okay." He held his palms up to ward off her anger. "I was thinking about the marker and I was going to nip down to the library after lunch to see if I could find out anything about it."

"I tried the city already," she said glumly. "Nothing. Nobody ever heard of it."

"Right, but I couldn't get the thing out of my head. That, and unwinding from the office and all . . . you know how it is, angel. We're not doing all that well these days, and I guess I was kind of uptight, you know what I mean?"

She did, and wished he were the kind of man who allowed himself the privilege of the confidence of others; but almost everything that bothered him he kept to himself until he was positive he could either solve it or expunge it from his system. Like the Denbeau murder he was sure would upset her; and, she was sure, he also knew about the Barnes death, thinking she wouldn't live in a house that belonged to a dead man. What he would never understand was that she wanted desperately to worry with him.

"I don't remember all of it," he was saying, "except that there was this wooden marker and I was trying to run away from it, but it kept getting bigger and bigger until I was afraid it would fall over on top of me. There was all this thunder that kept confusing me, too, and I think the thing was swaying toward me when I finally woke up." He stopped and looked down at his feet. "I guess it means I got some problems I think are going to crush me, they're getting so big."

Terry knelt on the floor and laid her cheek on his leg. She closed her eyes when his hand buried itself in her hair, untied the yellow yarn, and brushed before cupping her chin and lifting. "You know," he said softly, "this here rug has got the deepest shag I ever saw in my life."

She shifted to allow his fingers access to the tie of her blouse, shivered at the scratch of nails across her stomach. "My feet are dirty," she murmured, "from walking in the field."

He unfastened the buttons and pulled the blouse from her shoulders. "It's not your feet I'm interested in."

"You're a lecher, you know that?"

She lay back and watched as he flicked off the light. The sun brightened the translucent window over the tub, darkening the front of him and making him a shadow. She was cold, then, blamed it on the steam still clinging to the walls and mirror. Colder, when he pressed against her and gripped her shoulders. His spine under her hands was damp, and she used her nails to keep from losing him, used her teeth to nip at his lips, his chin.

"Syd! You shaved off your beard!"

He raised back on his elbows and laughed, shaking his head. "I was wondering when you'd notice, dumb-head. For an artist you're not very observant."

As though she'd never seen him before, she stared at the sharp cut of his jaw, the slightly red skin between nose and upper lip. When she touched it, it was soft, and suddenly she grabbed him tightly, pulling his face into her breasts and waiting for the bucking moment of release.

Afterward, while he traced the faintly blue veins in her breasts, she watched the light in the window shade to gray, felt the afternoon close in as though a lid were being lowered over the house. Something caught at her hearing and she strained until she recognized music below her.

"I think Peg's awake," she said.

He grunted and sat up. "Well, thus endeth the orgy. Go make me some lunch. Cheese, if you don't mind. Cold."

She dressed, ducked out of the room as he slapped her buttocks. She ran down the hall laughing, was still laughing when Peg opened her door and stepped in front of her.

They stared for a moment before Terry held out her arms and Peg fell into them. But there were no tears nor words of consolation; only sounds that soothed and tried to bridge an incomprehensible gulf of loss. Terry asked if she wanted some lunch, but Peg refused.

"Sis, do you think Syd would mind if I borrowed the car for a while?"

"I don't think he's going anywhere. Why not? The keys are in the bowl on the breakfront. What's up?"

Peg was wearing a deep navy dress with starched white at the collar. Her hand twisted around a thin silver belt and she kept her cheeks sucked flat against her teeth. "I have to go into town for a bit."

"Peg, must you?"

It was too much, the strain of pretending mourning was a simple thing, and Terry rushed to fetch the keys herself. Peg moved to the door and waited. "There are some things that have to be done, Terry. I have to find out about . . . about the burial."

Though she knew she was being unreasonable, anger flared. "Damnit, why you, Peg? Haven't you been through enough? Let Denver or somebody else handle it."

"No," Peg said firmly. "I want to. I have to. There's no one else. No one."

How much more can she take, Terry thought as she watched Peg back out of the drive and move slowly down The Lane. Everybody keeps dying on her, one way or another.

When the phone rang she hoped Syd would gallop out of the bathroom to spare her the effort, but after the fifth summons she cursed at the air, slammed the door, and snatched the receiver off its cradle.

Syd came into the kitchen as she was talking, his eyebrows lifted, a finger at his chest. She shook her head, listened, made what she hoped were the appropriate responses and hung up.

"Creditors, right?"

"Wrong," she said, sitting at the table. "You're not going to believe a word of this."

"Try me. And hurry up. You've made me hungry."

"That was Jim Griffith. Seems he was Pritchard's lawyer. The old fool made out a new will the beginning of this month."

"So?"

"Guess who's leaving our cellar for a new house?"

He blinked, scratched his head, and grinned. "Well, well, she had more on the ball than I thought. Got a little loot?"

"More than that. All of it."

His grin faded to astonishment. "All?"

"The house, the store, enough to pay a few years' taxes."

"Jesus H. Christ!"

"This," she said, "has been a weird day."

"Does she know?"

"I don't think so. Not yet. Jim was looking for her."

"Brother," he said. "Some people have all the damned luck."

Chapter VIII

Late afternoon reminded Terry of a day she'd spent at the shore as a little girl. She and her father had been walking for hours, racing the waves as they died in the sand, digging furiously after the bubbles left behind by sand crabs. Most of the bathers had left for supper, and there was only the two of them, and a few stringy clouds that obscured the horizon. They'd found a dune and lay facing the ocean, pretending to be great celestial artists carving animals from the fluff that approached them.

Suddenly a wind swirled debris into their faces and a cold pebble rain soaked them before they'd had a chance to get to their feet. What she had seen had been her first and last squall line; and now, holding Syd's hand and sprinting across the field toward the trees, she felt the same tingling apprehension. The sky, once a brilliant eye-stinging blue, had hazed, and the sun's platter had blurred until it diffused like a flashlight in fog. Storm warning, she thought, and uttered a quick prayer to make it hurry.

There was little food in the hamper she was carrying; most of the space was occupied by a pair of wine bottles swaddled in ice-encrusted towels, a trick Syd had learned, he informed her, during his trainee days at Ft. Gordon, Georgia. The idea, he said, was to get just drunk enough to loosen a little of the strictness that clung to their morality and find out if making love in weeds and leaves was all it was cracked up to be. Terry wanted to tell him she didn't need the wine, but he was so excited she gladly played his game.

They gave the hill wide berth, having tacitly agreed to temporarily forget dreams and Indians and the death of an old man. Peg, too, was forgotten; but here Terry felt stirrings of guilt. Peg had been too much forgotten the past few weeks; too often they'd neglected to invite her to spend an evening though she was but a staircase away. And too often they were guilty of wishing she hadn't accepted the invitations she did. It wasn't fair that sisters should feel that way about each other, she thought, and wondered if Pritchard had had anything to do with the shift in their attitudes.

She stumbled, cried out when Syd didn't loosen his grip quickly enough and her wrist twisted. Immediately he stopped and grabbed the hamper from her good hand. Taking her arm, then, he bent close and carefully turned the wrist until he was satisfied he hadn't broken one of the smaller, more fragile bones. Then he made her sit on a hummock while he unwrapped one of the bottles and used the towel to dampen her forehead and bind the already swelling area.

"You do that pretty good, doc," she said. There was pain, now, and a faint but unmistakable throbbing. "Do you think I'll live?"

"I doubt it," he answered solemnly. "There seems to be a fracture of the intregal fibia with an incaceration of the callipygian conundrum. I'm afraid we'll either have to shoot you or stuff you. Your choice."

She stroked her chin and narrowed her eyes. "You shitting me, man?"

"Not on your life, lady. It's a common trait with the female Irish all their bones are filled with liquid. In your case, sour milk."

"Hey, that wasn't funny."

He pulled the hamper under him and sat, his arms hung over his knees. "Terry, you would make absolutely the worst actress in the entire world, you know that? Lassie could lie better than you."

"What is this?" she said, squirming uncomfortably, "the prelude to a brush-off or something?"

"Or something," he admitted. "Look, angel, ever since I told you about that damned dream, you've been making like you want nothing more than to grab at my body and do all sorts of de Sade things to it."

"Well?"

He reached out and trapped her chin between thumb and forefinger, tried to lift her eyes to meet his, but she slapped his hand away and twisted to face the hill.

"Come on, angel, let's get it out now, before we ruin the whole summer."

"Well. . . ."

He lowered himself to the ground and removed the remaining bottle from the basket. The top was already opened before she could stop him, and she reluctantly accepted it.

"Drink," he ordered.

"Without a glass?"

"Snob."

She tilted the bottle, too far the first time and squealed as the cold liquid dribbled down her chin and between her breasts. The second attempt was more successful.

"Angel, are you trying to make a connection between the nightmare I had last night and the dream you had on New Year's Eve?"

"I don't know," she said honestly. "I think so."

"Well, what else do you have to know?"

The question instantly triggered a dozen more of her own. She admitted to him a confused and hurt puzzlement at the behavior of Denver, the radical sweep of his temperament and the games he played with his Shawnee background. She told him how the older man had reacted to questions about the doll, and the unsatisfactory answer he'd given about rejecting her the day Alec died.

"Well," he said, "I think I can see that."

"If they were all that close, Syd. Somehow I doubt it. I mean, Alec never left the house. Ask Pegeen. She tried a hundred times to get him to sit in the backyard and get a little sun. Or just walk around The Lane and say a few words to the neighbors. But he wouldn't. Never. Like he was scared of us."

When Syd made no comment, she jumped to William and the way he turned up unexpectedly while she was sketching.

"Hell, that's easy. You ever see the way he walks? He should be in a Western, for crying out loud. He could sneak up on a butterfly."

"No, it's his attitude. When I was doing the marker, you'd think I was stealing something that belonged to him. And the book!" She threw up her hands, searched the sky for a sign that would make Syd understand. "You know, if he had his way, the book would never see print at all. He thinks it's demeaning to the Indian or something." Her face became pleading. "I don't mean it that way, you know. It's just a ghost story for children. Almost all of it is made up."

"Okay, angel," he said, "take it easy. What else?"

"I had another dream. Last night. About . . . well, not about the hill, exactly, but something like it, I think." She glanced to see that he was listening, then described the horrible reality of the experience and the peculiar resolution as the dream became a sketch on her easel. "Dumb, but I was actually afraid to go into the study this morning. And when I did—"

"There was nothing there, right?"

"Yes, damnit, there was nothing there. But Syd, something was there, even if I couldn't see it. Something about this reservation. Damn!"

"All right," he said, laying a hand on her shoulder and pressing to keep her seated. "So you had this dream. Anything more?"

"Well, while you were still asleep I walked out here, before I came on Denver." She thought a moment before covering his hand with hers. "I tried to. . . well, I tried to lose myself in the marker, commune with it, you know? I thought maybe I could force myself to come up with a reason why it's been pursuing me all this time."

"Pursuing you? Come on, Ter, you're sounding like a late-movie heroine."

"Well, damnit, I don't know how else to put it. It's just . . ." and without wanting to, she started to cry, furious at herself for her weakness.

Syd waited until she'd finished. "Here," he said, handing back the bottle. "Have one on me."

"I'm cracking up, right?"

"Drink! And no, you're not cracking up."

"You think not? Wait until you hear the last thing." He waited again and she wondered if what she'd just put together would sound like more of his heroine ravings. None of it had occurred to her before, and even now she wasn't sure the puzzle she imagined was there at all.

"Now this is only a feeling, mind, but I don't think Denver's been completely honest about this place," and she pointed in the general direction of the marker. "There's something odd when a massacre that was supposed to have happened as big as that isn't even mentioned in history books. Something like that just doesn't go unnoticed."

"It's happened, angel."

"Maybe." She faced him, then, resting her arms on his knees. "But I don't think so. It's funny, but I never thought of that until just now, but I don't believe a word Denver McIntyre or any of his family have been telling us all this time."

"Fine. A good thesis, as they say, but to what purpose? Why go to all the trouble to spin a yarn like that? Just to give you nightmares?"

A blue jay screamed over their heads and landed a few feet from the hamper. Its breast puffed, and it stalked over the cloth that had been around the now nearly empty bottle. When the ice penetrated its claws, it squawked, pecked at the towel and flew off, scolding in a circle before wheeling toward the forest. "A sign," she said, making her voice as ominous as she could.

"He's telling us: nevermore."

"That was a raven, dope."

"Raven, jay, what's the difference?"

Terry watched the bird vanish into the leaves, then rose and pulled Syd to his feet. "I'm sorry, Syd, but I don't feel—"

"I sort of guessed," he said, putting the things back into the basket. "But you still haven't told me why Denver would make up such a story?"

"How should I know? To make himself seem more important, maybe, or give his family something to cling to while the white man moves into his world and keeps him from becoming part of it. How the hell should I know?"

"Well, you don't have to get mad at me, kid. Maybe he's hiding a body."

Maybe, she thought, and started walking.

"Hey, you're going the wrong way!"

"Nice of you to tell me, mister. I want another look at that stupid marker."

"What the hell for, Ter? Clues?"

"Exactly."

He groaned, and she grinned without turning around, knowing he would be following, muttering imprecations and impotent threats. However foolish her fears had sounded once exposed to his listening, she had now caught herself up in a mystery of her own making, and as she rounded the base of the slope, wanted nothing more than to be proved wrong.

She stood, hands on hips, in front of the marker. Slowly she read the inscription aloud, less for Syd's benefit than an attempt to glean sense from it, sense that would allow it a reasonable place in whatever she was groping for, whatever she feared.

Who exactly were the Old Ones this tombstone—she couldn't help referring to it as anything else—mentioned? Just those who had been massacred? But suppose there hadn't been a massacre; then what? Strange Indian gods? Not necessarily impossible, she decided, but damned close to improbable. From what she had read, Indians didn't bury their gods, nor mark their graves with inscriptions.

No gods, the possibility of no massacre. So who the hell were they?

While Syd perched on a tabletop boulder, she knelt on the patch of bare earth and frowned as though the facial contortion would hasten understanding. Then she rocked back onto her heels. "Now why," she asked, "is this space here cleared while the rest of the place is all overgrown?"

"Tell me, Sherlock. I'm all ears."

"Tourists who like to look at it, or take pictures, or even chip off pieces of it for souvenirs? Not likely. Tourists we would know about because unless they hiked all the way through the park to get here, they'd have to come up The Lane, right? And we'd see them, right?"

"If you spend all your time playing Madame Defarge with your knitting on the porch, then you're right."

"Come on, Syd, cut it out."

"Okay, then, I'll grant you that much. No tourists. What then? Secret sermons by the dark of the moon?"

"That was a lousy Peter Lorre."

"It was supposed to be Boris Karloff."

"For a Boris Karloff, it was a lousy Peter Lorre." She held up one hand. "So," she said, touching one extended finger. "No tourists. No neighbors because they don't come out here except for the kids, and they usually keep to the far side of the hill. And kids couldn't play here for long without scribbling something on the rocks or the marker."

She turned around to face his scoffing, and was slightly unnerved to see him staring, not at her but at the weathered wood. "So it's not a lot of people, or even a few. A couple at the most."

She smiled and passed her hands lightly over the dirt. In spite of the heat, rapidly more oppressive as the sun inched toward the horizon, it was cool and painstakingly cleared of twigs, dead grass, and sizable rocks. Then she leaned forward into the shadow and saw a darker area of loosened earth. She hesitated, looked back to Syd, who nodded. As her fingers carefully pulled the dirt toward her, she thought her hands should have been trembling with excitement, or fear. But she was preternaturally calm, probing the hole carefully every few seconds. Nearly six inches down, she encountered something soft, but definitely not more loose dirt. With two fingers she scissored until she took hold, then pulled gently.

"I'll be damned," Syd muttered.

The doll was of the same design as the one she'd taken from Pritchard's house and had hidden in a bottom drawer of her dresser. With a fingertip she flicked off the clinging moist earth and held it close to examine its face.

"What is it, an Indian?"

"I don't know, Syd. Take a look."

He moved to kneel beside her but refused to take it from her hands. "Beats me, kid. What do they call these things, totems? Amulets? I don't know."

"Me neither. But why bury it, I wonder? I mean—"

"Terry, put it back," Syd said. He nudged her back until she complied, talking while she tried to replace the dirt and sweep the small area clean of what had been left over. "It must be some kind of religious thing. And maybe it's not so sinister after all, you know what I mean? Some kind of offering to the gods of whoever believes in this marker, or whatever it stands for. We shouldn't be disturbing it, then."

"But Syd, why was its forehead pushed out? Like Alec's?"

He pulled her back toward the house, not running, but she was afraid of his solemnity. He was obviously thinking along the same lines as she, and she didn't like it. What she wanted was Syd to tell her to take two aspirin and lie down for a while. Instead, he had accepted her mystery without much more than a token struggle. Again she wondered how long this had been bothering him, and a flash of impatience made her wish he'd opened his mouth sooner. But for what, she thought, not wanting to believe she could have somehow saved poor Alec. I tried, but they wouldn't let me. Let me do what? Who in hell were they?

"Come on," he said, pushing her through the front door. "Make yourself less wanton and more like a respectable conservative matron digging into the most fascinating subject that ever crossed your path."

"What  in hell are you talking about?" she demanded as he pushed her down the hallway and into the bedroom.

"The history of Prynne Lane—Jesus Christ, did you ever hear of such a name for a street in your life? Listen, if the biggies don't carry the so-called massacre or even the reservation in their precious pages, there's only one other place we can find it."

"All right," she said, her shirt doffed and in her hand. "I refuse to budge one more stitch until you tell me what you're talking about."

Syd had already changed into a short-sleeved white shirt and dark pants. "If I've learned one thing living out here, angel, it's that this place is no different than any other in the state. Look, a lot of the Revolution passed through the county seat, as well as travelers West. Doesn't it figure there must be a local historical society to record these momentous occasions?"

She shook her head, changed her mind and nodded. It had to be, and she told him she knew who was in charge.

"Tell me Mary McIntyre and I'll cut my throat."

"Lucky you. Actually, it's Esther Traub and sibling."

He froze in the act of brushing back his hair. "The one with the horse's teeth?"

"That's Ruth. Esther has the purple hair."

"My God, Theresa Ann, what the hell am I doing?"

Remembering that Peg had borrowed the car, they took a cab instead, a faded yellow station wagon driven by a woman more lumberjack than model.

"I'm beginning to have second thoughts," Terry said as they turned from The Lane onto Hawthorne. "Why don't we just forget all this and go home?"

"What's the matter, angel, you scared?"

Scared. She watched the impatient traffic honk angrily past their slow-moving vehicle. She couldn't be frightened because there was nothing to be frightened of; yet the oppression of the day's stifling heat contradictorily made her extra sensitive. If Denver was lying, so what? He was an old man who apparently needed fantasies to function in an alien world. And what harm had there been? There was certainly no threat to her marriage, home, or Syd's work. There had been no menacing burning of crosses on her front lawn or mysterious notes telling her to leave The Lane or else.

There had only been the dreams. And the telephone. And the death of Alec Pritchard.

Marsha Pritchard. Tim Barnes. Oscar Denbeau. She looked down at the four fingers spread across her thigh. And shivered.

The Historical Society was evidently a recipient of some patron's largesse, though pamphlets cluttering a basket by the front door insisted the work done inside was financed entirely through local subscription. The building housing it was a miniature Monticello nestled cleanly beside the county courthouse, itself a graying marble-and-brick Georgian horror left over from the WPA school of architectural design. A small, Gothic-lettered note over the society's doorbell invited them in, and after a moment of feeling incredibly foolish, Terry swept a hand through her hair and turned the knob.

Immediately inside was a large room whose walls were buried by bookcases fronted in glass. Within, she could see blotches of colors from book covers, brochures, and other untouchable paraphernalia. Large oaken tables were situated at regular intervals on the bare wooden floor, and again displays, only now the books were opened to strategic pages and the relevant passaged enlarged by rectangles of magnifying glass.

At the back of the room was a wall-length fieldstone fireplace, and directly in front of it a small counter littered with leaflets, postcards, and neatly stacked invoices. A cash register squatted incongruously at counter's end, and behind that, Esther Traub. Her hair, Terry noted, as her eyes adjusted from the glare of the sun, was not quite as purple as she'd remembered, but purple enough, and badly colored; too many escaped strands of iron gray wafted through a thick black hair net. Around her neck was a gold chain from which dangled a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and pinned to the center of her sagging bodice was an oversized pocket watch edged in silver.

At the sound of Terry's light cough, Esther looked up, squinted, and hastily shoved her glasses into place. Then she smiled broadly and stepped around the counter. Terry could feel Syd trying not to laugh, and pinched his hip. Miss Traub's dress had hiked up to reveal knees, the rolled stockings beneath, and huge feet inside red-and-white tennis sneakers.

"Mrs. Guiness, and Mr. Guiness!" she howled as though there was construction noise to compete with, "What a delightful surprise. I must say I hadn't thought you two were the types to go hunting through a small town's past."

Syd took her offered hand, covered it, and smiled broadly, allowing as how Terry was working on an important new book at the moment and needed some expert advice. And where else to go but directly to the source of all knowledge for the area?

Miss Traub giggled doubtfully, and Terry saved Syd from further lying by pushing him gently toward the nearest display wall. "Don't pay any attention to him, Esther," she said, guiding the confused woman back to the counter. "He makes everything sound more important than it is." But, she continued, she did need help on something she was basing on the Indian reservation story, a fantasy she hoped would give the readers a good shudder and teach them something more about the people who settled this part of the country long before the white man showed up from Europe.

"But Mrs. Guiness, couldn't you ask Denver McIntyre about this?"

"Well," Terry said, "actually, I don't think I could get as much from him as, say, from someone whose training is as well grounded as yours."

"Flatterer," Esther said, grinning. She frowned, took off her glasses and stared up at the ceiling in deep thought. Terry risked a glance at Syd, who had finally made his way past the front door and was starting on the far wall. He caught her look and bowed mockingly.

"You know," Esther said, "I just might have the thing you need." She scurried into a back room, reappeared almost instantly with a small, square booklet frayed and stained from more than casual use. "This is a listing of the local Indian tribes, and all their legends."

"But Esther, I'm afraid—"

A raised palm ordered silence. "You see, dear, as far as anybody but the McIntyres knows, there was no reservation. Never. Nor was there anything like a massacre the old fool uses to scare the new neighbors with." She smiled sadly and patted Terry's arm. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, dear. I can see in your face that your book is probably ruined."

Terry recovered quickly, relieved that Miss Traub had misinterpreted her dismay. "On the contrary, Esther, the book will be enhanced by this. It's always easier to work with fiction than fact, you know." She smiled and reached out for the booklet.

"Well . . . I don't know that I should give you this," and Terry's throat went dry. "But since you're neighbors on The Lane and I know you book people would care for this as though it were your very own children, I don't see why not." She grinned. "Ruth and I can fight about it later. It's the only copy we have, you see."

Resisting the temptation to snatch it from the old woman's hand, Terry held out her hand and Esther dropped it into her palm.

"There was no reservation," Esther said, "but there's a story about a graveyard . . . well, you'll read about it, dear. I don't want to spoil your fun."

Syd, meanwhile, had maneuvered himself back to Terry's side and intruded quickly. "Hey, beautiful, Esther, but I think Terry and I had better be moving along. The editor promised to call this afternoon and we, wouldn't want to miss it."

He pulled her arm gently, though not before Terry managed a quick and grateful shake of Esther's hand and a promise to guard the booklet with her very life if necessary. Esther nodded, smiling blindly, with her glasses in her hand. Once on the porch, nearly reeling from the renewed heat, Syd laughed and flagged down the cab circling the town square.

"You should have seen her face, angel, when we left. She looks like she can't decide whether to be flattered about our coming or call the police and have us locked up before we steal her precious little pamphlet."

Terry muttered something, she wasn't sure what, and allowed herself to be eased into the station wagon. She knew he was impatiently annoyed at her for not appreciating his cleverness, but she couldn't take her eyes from the cursed treasure in her hands. The mysterious lark had suddenly turned serious.

Denver had been lying.

William had been lying.

And now she was sure she knew who Alec's they was.

Chapter IX

During the slow ride home, Syd tried banter to nudge Terry out of the depression that had settled over her. He revived memories of the childlike escapades they'd undertaken in the name of young love; he repopulated their old apartment house with the cranks, the winos, the busybodies who shuffled through their lives like bit-part stereotypes from a Forties' movie; once he tried tickling her waist and under her arm, but she only shook him off and slid into the corner, brooding. It was infectious; by the time they reached the house, his good humor had faded, preventing him from even a token bargaining with the driver.

Terry stepped into the yard, then turned about and leaned against the hedge, staring across the street at what would be Peg's new home when the legalities had been cleared away. The thought that her sister might accept it in the hopes of using it as a lure for her not quite husband crossed her mind, and sickened her. Peg was doing quite well on her own, thank you, despite the dizzying reverses of her shaky fortune. Her father had said Peg's curse was looking too much like a Scot, down to the freckles that starred her face beneath her eyes, and now Terry was half-inclined to believe it. It had taken the loss of a man to bring her to Prynne Lane, the loss of another in a markedly different respect to give her financial security for the rest of her life if she wanted it.

The hedge, which Syd kept breast-high and tabletop flat, dug into her arms. She shifted to ease the pricking and set the booklet down in front of her. Her left hand shaded her eyes from the westering sun while the right turned pages desultorily, and her attempts to read random selections failed. Immediately after she'd left the taxi, she had spotted the car under the port, and though she was tempted to believe Peg might be needing her, instinct prompted her to delay a few minutes outside. If Peg was seeking comfort, she'd know it soon enough.

And there was still so much to sort and file, and study. The lies and elaborate deceptions, the links between the McIntyres and Pritchard, between Denver and Oscar Denbeau (Marsha? Barnes?)—she scowled her puzzlement as she picked idly at diminutive green leaves and let them fall into the hedge's maze. Of course, it all could be as Esther said, a horror story to frighten the new neighbors. Sooner or later, Denver would confess the prank, the practical joke, the whatever it was, and The Lane would return to normal. Sooner or later.

She mentioned it to Syd, who was waiting patiently by her side. He agreed readily, and tried to get her inside to make him some supper. He was still trying, and she loved him for it.

"No, I'm not really hungry, love," she said. "Would you mind raiding the fridge yourself? It's too hot in. I'd rather stay out here a while longer."

"Suit yourself, Sherlock. When your stomach starts complaining, call me. I make a hell of a good peanut butter pancake."

She produced the obligatory groan and grimace, but didn't watch when he left. Instead, he settled herself on the knee of an exposed root under the dogwood. The lowest branches, heavy with leaves and age, dipped as a breeze coasted toward the field, but there was no cooling, nothing but a languid shifting of the humid air that set her lungs working for scarce comfort. Remnants of a dead white blossom fluttered to cover one foot and she shook off the petals, ground them with her heel into the grass. Then she leaned forward, forearms on thighs, and thumbed through the booklet to glance at the faded black-and-white illustrations, none of which struck her as immediately interesting enough to examine more closely. As far as she could determine, lithographs and daguerreotypes of the estates and trading posts that had settled the region before civilization became urban, curious, but valueless. She flipped to the back for an index, and sighed when she realized she would have to read the whole thing to discover what Esther had thought was so interesting.

From the beginning, listlessly, she read and forgot the names of early crossroad villages, streams, and gentry farms. A mention of Indians, but little more than one-line dismissals of traveling bands struggling through from New York to Pennsylvania. So much for chapter one, she thought, and leaned back against the dogwood bole, stretching her arms in front of her to rid them of the stiffness her tension inflicted. The second chapter, and the third, contained more of the same stilted prose, and she wondered who had taken the time, expended the effort to produce what was apparently a limited edition. It certainly wasn't intended for scholarly research—there were too many assumptions and reliances on local legends and unsubstantiated rumors for that purpose.

The fourth chapter, however, startled her. She looked around quickly, as though expecting someone to be reading over her shoulder, then looked down at the page her finger pressed flat. A badly drawn, but determined profile of a man. An Indian. The caption identified him as Tecumseh; a Shawnee chief who had tried to unite the wilderness tribes into an effectual force against the inexorable encroachment of early nineteenth century settlers. In spite of the portrait's poor reproduction, the messianic quality was disturbingly evident. She held the picture away from her, hoping distance would clarify a nagging hint of recognition. She tilted it, brought it closer, but the changes in perspective accomplished nothing. Maybe I need glasses, she thought, when she glanced up to rest her eyes, she realized much of the problem was the unnoticed haze of twilight. The sun was already below the treeline, and there were black strands of cloud rising like smoke from the serrated horizon.

She was about ready to stand when she heard a door slam, and without knowing why, she sat again and waited. The hedge, and the fact that she was still in the dogwood's pool of shadow, made her effectively invisible. Footsteps, then, striding along the tarmac, and as the streetlights winked on and added a blue glow to dusk, she saw Denver moving purposefully past her house toward the field. She stared openmouthed, then sucked in her cheeks and bit down to stifle an exclamation of surprise. As he passed the gap in the hedge, he glanced in her direction, and his teeth were white in a brief and unpleasant smile.

Terry shook her head, crawled out from under the branches and knelt by the hedge, poking her head out to watch as McIntyre disappeared into the birch without making a sound. He was carrying what seemed to be a glass from which he drank as the darkness swallowed him. The temptation to follow brought Terry to her feet, but the sharp creak of her own front door forestalled her, and she turned.

Syd was beckoning from the porch, and the brusqueness of the motion warned her not to risk ignoring him.

"What?" she said when she reached him, but he only grabbed her arm and pulled her inside. "Come on, Syd, what's up?"

"I don't want you to worry," he said. "But I think something's wrong with Peg."

Terry stared, then pulled away and ran down to her sister's room, stuffing the booklet into her hip pocket.

Pegeen was lying on the bulging green sofa. Syd had covered her to her neck with a blanket, and her face shone with perspiration, her hair wetly dark where it straggled over temples and forehead. Terry dropped to the floor beside her and laid a palm to her cheeks, her brow. She sucked in air harshly, twisted to see Syd standing nervously by the steps.

"She has a fever," Terry said.

"I thought so, but I can't find the thermometer."

"But I don't understand."

"I was eating, see," he said as he walked to her, "and thought you'd want a sandwich or something after all that heavy reading you were doing out there. I thought I heard you call, so I got up and looked out the front window. You were still pouring over that stupid thing, and I decided it was my imagination until I heard it again and came down here." He pointed to a spot near where he stood. "Peg was lying on the floor unconscious. It looked like she was trying to get to the stairs. I mean, it didn't look like she'd just fallen over, if you know what I mean. I picked her up and put her there. I guess it's all right to have the blanket. She was shivering and moaning. I called, but you didn't hear me, I guess."

Terry nodded, then fussed with the edge of the blanket while she tried to decide what had to be done. A doctor first, obviously, but what to do until he came? It was possible Peg was merely reacting to the past two days' strain, or then again it might have been coming on for weeks. She sent Syd to call the Hawthorne Clinic, then sat cross-legged on the floor and watched her sister's face for signs of animation. It was pale, frighteningly so, and her eyelids fluttered, her throat worked at swallowing. But she said nothing to Terry's whispered prompting. Nothing at all.

It's stifling in here, she thought suddenly, and moved to open the glass doors. There was little immediate improvement; the breeze that eventually found its way inside only stirred the air.

"Peg?" she said softly, bending close to her ear. "Peg, can you hear me? It's Terry."

The continued lack of response made her take a panicked step backward, spun her around when Syd called out.

"I've got them," he said, taking the stairs two at a time. "They said they're short tonight, and could we bring her down?" Terry nodded instantly. "Okay, you watch and I'll back the car to the street. I’ll be back in a second."

The second dragged into months, and the time Syd took to carry Peg to the car and ease her onto the back seat was a decade, if not longer. No one was on The Lane as they sped away, and as Terry sat on the back floor hump and caressed Peg's hot and still pale cheeks, she could think of nothing but the years before when youth was their domain and no one bothered them except their teachers. It had been a strict, conservative childhood, and she often wondered if her parents, had they lived, would be pleased with the way their daughters had turned out. I doubt it, she thought, then chided herself for not thinking positively, not trying to communicate some portion of hope to Peg.

"How's she doing?" Syd asked, taking a corner sharply.

"Same." She was aware of the strain in her voice, forced a cough to lose it. "I don't understand. I don't understand. What could come on so quickly like this? I don't get it."

"I wish I could—damnit, get the hell out of the way!" A truck blared past them. "I wish I could help you, angel, but it beats the hell out of me."

Tears spurted onto her cheeks, vanished by the swipe of a palm.

"She was holding onto something when I found her, Ter."

Terry pulled herself up to lean over the back of the passenger seat. Syd pulled something from beneath his shirt, nearly swerved into the oncoming lane before it was free. She reached over and snatched it from him.

It was a doll. The wooden face was carved like the others, but the hair was different: not black, not straight, but red and curled slightly at the tips.

"Like the stuff you read about in the Caribbean," Syd muttered. "What do you call it?"

"Voodoo," Terry said flatly. "But it can't be."

"I know," Syd said, "but there it is."

The car suddenly darted into a broad parking lot in front of a low redwood building. Syd followed a track of painted yellow arrows around to the emergency entrance, slammed on the brakes, and jumped out almost before the car had fully stopped. He flung open the door, helped Terry out and grabbed Peg's shoulders, pulling until, grunting loudly, he could hoist her into his arms. Terry ran ahead, pushing open the door and leading the way down a short green corridor to a desk where a nurse and intern were waiting. A Pullman table had been shoved against a wall and Syd placed Peg down as gently as he could.

"Wait," he ordered Terry as she was about to follow the intern and the table. "Over here," and he guided her to a plastic chair in an alcove waiting area in front of the reception desk. "I have to give the nurse some information," he whispered, though they were the only ones there. "Stick around until I get back."

Terry nodded, too numb to think, too stunned to protest. He vanished around the corner, and silence swept into the vacuum of his leaving.

The doll. In buckskin. She closed her eyes, saw it on the seat of the car. There was no doubt, except for the red hair. Only, Alec's had had the telltale forehead. I tried, but they wouldn't let me. Let me what? She opened her eyes to look around the alcove, seeing the potted plants in the corners, the dog-eared magazines on the mahogany veneer tables; seeing but not registering, a clearing only for her mind until she could change scenes. Then she closed her eyes again and tried to bring back the day she'd entered Alec's home after he'd been taken away. The doll had been found in the fireplace. But they wouldn't let me. Let me burn it, was what he had been trying to say. Destroy it!

And so was Peg. In the laundry room was the ancient wood-burning stove she and Syd had found at an auction the month before. It was going to be refinished and placed in the living room. Peg had been trying to get there, not the stairs, get there and burn the doll.

Her eyes snapped open. The shivering she attributed to the air conditioning. Peg's doll: red hair; Alec's doll: protruding brow. Whose doll had he been trying to destroy? Black hair: hers? Syd's?

As though on signal, he came around the corner and she rushed into his arms, crying loudly and letting him soothe her with meaningless sounds. Then she pulled him to the couch and as calmly as her voice would allow, told him everything. The scoffing died before she reached the end. She could see . . . doubt. But no derision.

"Fine," he finally said. "But how did she get it?"

"So you believe me?" She clenched her teeth to keep from shouting.

"No," he said, gently, as to a child screaming about monsters hiding in dark bedroom corners. "There's no such thing as voodoo magic, angel. Only psychology well applied. You know that as well as I do."

"But—"

"But there's something, and we'll damn well have to find out what it is. Somebody obviously came by while we were gone, gave her the doll, and probably tainted something she ate."

"No magic."

"None. What magic there seems to be is only an illusion, not a suspension of natural law." He frowned, not unkindly, and kissed her. "Listen, why am I telling you all this? You're not stupid, you know."

"Maybe," she said, "but what about the dolls?"

"If I were Ellery Queen or Nero Wolfe, maybe I could tell you. But I'm not, and I can't even guess until I know who came to see her and why."

Terry fussed with the magazines. "I wish the doctor would hurry up."

"He'll be out as soon as he can."

Suddenly angry, she slapped a magazine onto the table. "Damnit, Syd, why do you have to be so reasonable all the time?"

"What did I do now?" The look on his face dismayed her, then made her laugh.

"Nothing," she said, touching his cheek, missing the beard her fingers liked to stroke. "It's me. I'm sorry. It's just Peg, and finding out McIntyre was a liar about—" Her hand froze. "McIntyre!" She dug at her hip pocket, pushing Syd out of the way as she stood. The booklet, now hopelessly wrinkled, trembled in her hands as she leafed quickly through it. She tore a page and Syd warned her about Esther's wrath.

"Damn her and her stupid library" she snapped. "Look at this," and she held out the open history. "Tecumseh," he read aloud. "So?"

"Look again," she demanded.

He did, and she sat again, her hands folded tightly in her, lap. Expressions crossed his face rapidly; doubt, astonishment, a trace of fear that lingered after doubt returned. He shook his head and turned the page to read. "No," she said, and snatched it away. "Just tell me what you saw." She held her breath and her chest ached while he debated silently, rubbing his chin, nose, pulling at the hair that curled around the back of his ear.

"I saw an Indian chief," he said deliberately. "His name was Tecumseh." Then he snapped his fingers. "That's what I was trying to remember. The day we moved in and we met him and the twins. You remember I said something about the Shawnee? This," and he tapped the booklet with a finger, "is what I couldn't place at the time. Tecumseh. Of course! One of the greatest Indians who ever lived."

"And?"

He took a deep breath and looked to the ceiling, stretching his neck as though it was stiff. "And if this picture is reasonably accurate. . ."

"Well, damnit, Syd!"

"Damnit, yourself, Theresa! The thing looks just like Denver, okay? Is that what you wanted me to say?"

She didn't know. She wasn't sure. Hoping, perhaps, that he would see no resemblance at all between the Shawnee chief and William's father. But he had said it, and when she opened the booklet to look again, she knew she was right.

"But then," Syd said, grinning weakly, "all them foreigners look alike to us white folk."

Terry glared, and he retreated an inch. "Coincidence," he said.

"I know," she said. "But this is what Esther must have wanted me to find. The question is—"

"I know, I know," he said, holding up his hands. "The question is why? My God, that's all we seem to be asking anymore. Why this, why that, why did he lie, why is Peg sick, why—oh, shit!" He rose and walked to the water fountain, and took a long and unnecessary drink. Before he returned, the doctor approached them, and Terry immediately shunted the booklet aside as she listened unbelieving when she was told Peg had contracted a virus they had not yet been able to isolate with the clinic's limited facilities. She was asked permission to take Peg to the county hospital for testing, and she agreed without thinking, watched in silence as her sister was wheeled to the double doors in back and lifted into an ambulance.

Terry wanted to go with her, but Syd held her back. Peg was unconscious still, and according to the doctor, would likely remain that way until morning. Terry's gesture was loyal, but not practical. Come in the morning, she was told, and if anything changed in the meantime, she would get a call.

The house was empty, and Terry stood the sensation for less than an hour before hurrying out to sit on the top step of the front porch. It was dark, and the stars were hidden by invisible cloud cover A wind grew from the afternoon's hot breeze, and with it the scent of rain. Prichard's house was dark. The McIntyre's had only one light burning, in what Terry knew was the side bedroom. The Griffiths farther down were having a party. There were several cars lining the curb in front of the split level, and every window she could see was bright. She wanted, then, to walk over there and announce the illness of her sister; it wasn't right there should be celebrations on such a night. It wasn't right the world should carry on as though nothing were happening to the most important people in it.

She cried again, knowing she was mourning already, hating herself for it, and unable to stop. Syd came out to sit beside her, his arm light around her shoulders. She wanted to lean her head against his chest, scream in his ear, punch until she drew blood; but she only accepted the glass he offered and drank without asking. It was bitter, and she hoped it was poison.

A page of newsprint was blown over the hedge, caught on an untrimmed branch and hung flapping noisily until it shredded and scattered itself over the lawn. A dead brittle leaf scuttled past the driveway, paused as though seeking a direction, then pushed on, its scraping dampened when it struck the grass between sidewalk and curb. The party at the Griffiths, though muted, intruded, and Terry became angry again.

She reached out a hand, but Syd had left her. She turned to look at the door, and saw the light in a far window. He was in his workshop, for the first time in weeks, and she was reminded of the book she was supposed to be finishing. The Big One. The Prize Winner. The tome for a child that would carve her reputation into contract without end and send the sycophants of the industry bustling from the city to camp on her lawn and demand snippets of her wisdom. She decided to burn it.

The light went out. Syd returned and patted her knee. "I called the hospital, Ter. Spoke with a guy named Flaherty. One of us, I guess." He tried to laugh, failed, ended it with a sharp cough. "He said they have her resting comfortably. The fever is steady, not dangerous, and what they call her vital signs are all good. She, uh, has a little trouble breathing, but they put her in an oxygen tent just to be sure nothing goes wrong."

Peg, lying corpselike beneath a wrinkled, transparent sheet of plastic, tubes and wires and bubbling things extending from her arms and neck and nose and mouth as if she were a reincarnation of Frankenstein's failure. The image popped like a bubble as soon as it appeared, but Terry watched it linger, fade, and frighten her almost into believing in premonitions.

"I'm so tired." Her eyelids were heavy, a slight burning behind them causing her to squint.

"I also read the pamphlet thing."

She lowered her head to his shoulder. Finally, the wind began to lower the temperature and she pushed herself closer, tucking a hand under his waistband at his spine. Drifting. Syd's voice droning.

"It seems that Tecumseh was trying to stop the Indians from fighting each other and take out their anger on the white man, instead. Traveled all over, the article said, talking, preaching with the help of a brother who had become some kind of a prophet. While he was down South someplace, another brother—or maybe the same one—tried to attack some encampment in Ohio. Harrison was the general there. The Indians thought bullets wouldn't hurt them, but they were surprised as hell when they dropped like flies. Tecumseh found out and had to run for it. Into Canada. Joined up with the British to fight in the war of 1812.

"Harrison," she murmured. "Nice name. Harry. Tippecanoe and Tyler too."

He tightened his arm. "Right, you remember! Well, Tecumseh had this premonition about his dying one day, so he takes off his uniform and puts on all his Indian gear. Supposedly he died on the Thames River up there."

"The Thames is in England."

"In Canada too, angel. According to the guy that wrote the article, Tecumseh's body was taken away and no one knows where the Indians hid it."

She struggled against sleep, puzzled because she hadn't felt tired before. "So what?"

"Now this you are not going to believe. There's also some phenomenon that started way out West, a thing called the Ghost Dance. It spread all over the place. Says that one day, all the Indians, all the dead Indians, are going to come back and give the white man what he gave them, only worse. The booklet says not many people know it, but the guy who started this all was inspired by Tecumseh. Apparently he didn't really die on the Thames, but the Indians wanted everyone to think so. They needed him, see, to lead all the warriors when they came back from the dead. They gave him something, a potion made from all the animals they held sacred, the totems, which is supposed to keep him going until another kind of ritual brings the corpses back. The book says—are you ready for this?—they're coming at the cry of Tecumseh and the call of thunder."

Terry shook her head. "Legends. I want to know what they. . ." Her tongue grew a coating of cotton and she licked her lips to clear her mouth. Syd moved, pushing until she sat upright. "What . . . ?" She felt pressure around her back, under her knees, and she was flying. The lights in The Lane swirled as though she were on a carousel. Vanished. The wind disappeared. A lamp blurred past her eyes, and she floated into a tunnel, riding something that jounced her and made her swallow to keep bile from entering her throat.

It was warm again, without the wind, and she closed her eyes, waiting, groaning at yielding softness beneath her back, her head. A light, and Syd bent over her, smiling. "Sleep, angel. We'll talk in the morning."

"I don't get it," she said, her words slurred. "I've got to wait for Peg. She has to come home."

"Sleep," he repeated, and covered her with a blanket. "You drugged me," she accused, momentarily clearheaded and disappointed in her husband.

He looked away, turned off the bureau light. "The doc said you needed something to ease the strain. He said you looked tired enough to sleep a week. He gave me something."

"No fair, Syd. You're supposed to be helping me."

"I am, love. Don't you worry."

The darkness was an added quilt, pinning her arms to her sides, preventing her legs from slipping to the floor. "Rat," she said, resigned to unconsciousness.

"I love you," he said. "Rest, and we'll talk more in the morning, okay?"

"Rat."

She heard the door close, saw the vertical shaft of light when a lamp in the living room was switched on. Voices, and she knew it was the television. She listened, drifted, listened, and slept,

Chapter X

She awoke abruptly, as though someone had doused her with cold mountain water. Her eyes snapped open, her mind shed instantly the after effects of the drug. She grabbed the blanket and, tossed it aside, sat up quickly and clutched at the mattress when her head seemed undecided whether to implode or explode. The dizziness passed, and she grinned at herself—she was, in fact, a little kid, trying to be brave in the face of Peg's illness. She knew she couldn't have slept without the drug, and by now she would have been less than worthless.

She glanced around the bedroom, immediately wondering about the time. Her watch had stopped, and Syd had apparently taken the clock radio from the night stand. With curtains and shades drawn, it was almost night dark. She undressed, shivering at the dampness that clung to her skin while she pawed through the closet for something to wear. After deciding on one of Syd's shirts and another pair of jeans, she padded down the hail, intending to take a shower.

Although it was the middle of the day, the house was dark throughout. She paused by the workshop and pressed an ear against the door. Then she opened the study. A gray cast from the window made black ghosts of the easel and desk, and she closed the door and rushed into the living room.

"Syd?" Her voice hinted at echoes. "Syd, damnit, where are you?"

The hospital, she thought. He's probably gone to the hospital. But not without taking me, not unless . . . she ran into the kitchen, but the note board by the telephone was blank.

All right, then, there's nothing to worry about. He's gone for a walk before the rain comes. Not to worry, right? He couldn't have known you were going to get up so soon, He probably thought you'd be sacked out until supper.

Calmed, but not entirely convinced, Terry deliberately ignored the basement door and went into the bathroom. Hot water billowed steam to the ceiling immediately she turned it on, and she cursed when she burned her wrist trying to make it cooler. A look in the mirror, and a pout for the slight bulge around her waist and the perceptible sag of her breasts—you're getting middle-aged before your time, Theresa O'Hare Guiness—and she stepped into the tub, gasping at the stinging heat, relaxing almost to the point of collapse as her muscles responded to the pounding massage.

A plan is what she decided she needed, something to pass the interminable time between reports from Peg's doctor. A fleeting image of the pale sweating face unnerved her, and she shook to vanish it, scattering water from her hair. Damn, she thought, now I'll have to wash it.

Quickly she soaped herself, feeling slightly guilty at the decidedly erotic sensation of her palms gliding over her skin. Before she allowed herself to succumb, however, she picked up the plastic shampoo bottle from the shelf set next to the window. She bent over and let her hair receive the full thrust of the water, then carefully, slowly, worked in the soap. Lemon, and her mouth began to water. She licked her lips, tasted suds and hot water, and spat toward the drain. An island of white swirled as she watched, and she was reminded of the hill in the field.

Tecumseh. Was that the section Esther had wanted her to read? Surely, she frowned, forgetting her washing, surely it wasn't meant to be taken literally. That there was a definite, supernatural connection between the Shawnee hero's death and legendary immortality, and Denver McIntyre? And if it were true—just for the sake of ridiculous argument—how does the rest of the clan fit in? Another lie, then: the elder not Denver's father, William not his son, nor the twins the issue of his blood.

My God, she thought, this is getting more complicated than one of those British locked-room mysteries. Puzzles within puzzles. A maze in which she couldn't yet distinguish the exit from the deadends. Rather more like blind man's bluff, and her mind's hands were striking bits and pieces of a complicated group statue, unable to fit an image to the whole.

Absently, she reached out for a towel, and as she turbaned it round her hair, decided not to dwell any longer on the McIntyres until Syd's clear thinking returned to play the devil's advocate. All she was doing otherwise was making herself feel inordinately stupid. The solution had to be as simple as it had to be obvious; and once Syd pointed it out to her, she'd feel bad enough for not having been able to see it in the beginning.

A deep-throated rumbling replaced the shower's cascade. Thunder, she thought. It's about damned time.

Drying, dressing, leaving her hair wrapped until she felt the energy to work her brush, she returned to the kitchen and made herself a pot of tea. The radio, a welcome diversion to the house's silence, gave her the midafternoon time, and she smiled. Ah, dear father, she thought, if you could only see me now; sleeping to all hours and not feeling the least bit horrible for it. You're probably up there now waiting for a chance to beat the living hell out of me.

She called the hospital twice, and twice received the same cautious answer: Peg was resting well, still in the oxygen tent, still unconscious. Her temperature had remained constant throughout the night and morning, and though she was being fed intravenously, she appeared to be holding her own. Against what, Terry demanded, and the doctor—the Flaherty Syd had spoken to—stammered until she forced him to admit he hadn't the slightest idea, that the closest he could presently come was a combination of pneumonia and exhaustion.

Syd returned as she finished her third cup, and when she ran out of the kitchen, he was dumping an armful of books onto the coffee table.

"About time," he said, easing himself to the carpet and grabbing for the nearest volume. "I thought you were going to sleep all day. A hell of a way to spend my vacation, if you ask me." Then he sobered. "Are you all right, angel?"

She hurried to his side, kissed him soundly on the cheek, and settled next to him, her eyes confused by the display of titles before her. "Give," she said. "What the hell is all of this?"

"Well. . . ." He leaned back on his palms. "I got to thinking this morning that you weren't going to be much company today, and I really didn't relish watching all those game shows and soap operas on the boob tube, so I read the article again and decided to raid the library."

Article. The scene on the porch flickered before her, made her realize how hard she'd been trying to bury its connections. "But I already went down there. I told you that. There wasn't anything."

"Not on the so-called reservation, which we now know is a hoax. But I wanted to know more about Tecumseh. You know, blood lines, legends, stuff like that."

"You mean you're going to take all this crap seriously? Ghost dances, magical potions and shit like that?"

"Absolutely not," he said. "At least, not literally."

She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and prayed for a miracle of instant comprehension. Then she picked up one of the books and thumbed through it. "Nice pictures," she said. "Now what in hell are you talking about?"

"What I'm talking about is that I think that while you and I, being people of the world and products of the big city—"

"Come on, Syd!"

"No, wait a minute, that's important. Just button up and listen." He let himself fall the rest of the way to the floor and made a pillow of his hands. "We come from the city; you see, and that gives us a big disadvantage when it comes to dealing with rural types. It's like a kind of culture shock, going to another country almost and having to learn entirely new habits, customs, idioms, things like that."

"I get it, but we haven't done too badly."

"No, we haven't. But, see, we're still more inclined to play the role of the cosmopolitan sophisticate and dismiss out of hand every creepy-sounding story we hear as being the product of a deranged mind."

She lay on her side beside him, frowning. "But I never said Denver or the others were deranged, Syd."

"And I never said you did. What I am saying, see, is that we have to consider the stories and forget the folk, keeping in mind that they might just believe."

She thought for a minute, tracing channels through the carpet's nap. "You mean, we have to assume that Denver might believe in this, or something like it, and then do our thing. As though we were country people instead of city bred."

He grinned broadly and patted her head. "Now you've got it, kiddo. We have to shake off all that smog and mugging veneer and really get down to what counts out here. And on The Lane, what counts is that the McIntyres are not normal people. They have, for some reason, developed this reservation thing probably to keep busybodies like us from finding out the truth about what's really happened here."

"And what," she said, "is this awful truth you're hinting at?"

"If I knew that, angel, I wouldn't be lying here breaking my neck on the floor. I'd be out there doing something about it."

"So. . . "

"So we read what we can in the books, and wait for divine inspiration to strike our pates with a plan of decisive action. That's what." He righted himself and helped her to sit. "And remember, we are not looking for ghosts or voodoo or anything like that. We are looking for explanations we can understand so we can deal with . . . whatever."

He began, then, to check all the indexes, summarily dismissing some without bothering to read, others he dropped into his lap and hers for future reference. She watched him without staring, suspecting that all of this nonsense was but a ploy to divert her attention from Peg's condition. There was, then, a moment when she felt she should be at her sister's side, but the waiting obviously wouldn't solve anything, would produce nothing but compounded anxiety. Reluctantly, she tried to fall into Syd's scheme, reading until her eyes blurred and she couldn't tell one Indian from another, one tribal custom from its brother. Neither could she unearth any mention at all of the booklet's legend concerning Tecumseh's alleged return.

The dinner hour passed without her suggesting a meal. She stood, stretched, looked down at Syd following a chart with his finger, and she wondered why he hadn't proposed a simple confrontation with the McIntyres; legends and ghosts and warring dead men notwithstanding, there still might be that all too real and perfectly innocuous explanation. But she hesitated to broach the subject. She herself wouldn't go near the house, and she readily admitted to a slow but growing fear of the Indian. The power of that understated strength beneath the surface she had no wish to provoke. Once unmasked, he might become violent, or worse under the circumstances, turn the neighborhood against her. She looked around the room and realized that Number Three had become her first permanent home since she'd left the nest her father had built; the apartments didn't count—there was too much of the transient about them. But this house was something she would not, could not let Denver drive her from. No matter what he was.

"Damn," said Syd, crawling back to his chair and resting his head against the cushion. "Nothing. Not a blessed thing."

"Well, what did you expect? A ten-page revelation?"

"No, but I at least hoped to find something more about what happened to that damned Indian. But the accounts are so conflicting! He was shot by a wounded soldier, he vanished into cannon fire and never returned, he vanished—period. They took his body, they buried him where he fell, they burned it, they stole it—Jesus Christ, why couldn't they have had television or something back then so we'd know more!"

She shared his frustration, but refused to allow it to dampen her mood; the impending storm was doing well enough in that regard. "Did you see anything about the dolls? I didn't."

Closing his eyes, he shook his head. "Zilch. Crap. Terry, sometimes I wonder if those things ever existed."

"Well, you sure as hell don't have to worry about that." She hurried down the hall, paused when a flicker-blue burst of lightning snapped from the bedroom. She waited until the thunderclap had grumbled over the roof, then pulled out the dresser drawer and fumbled beneath her lingerie. Frowned. Pulled open the next drawer down and pulled out handkerchiefs and underwear. Then she put hands on her hips. All right, what the hell did you do with it, Jerk? Again she searched through the two drawers, moved to those she knew for a fact didn't contain the doll she'd uncovered in Alec's house.

"Syd," she finally called. "Where'd you put the doll I had in here in my dresser drawer?"

His answer was muffled, but the sense clear enough.

"The study," she muttered, and rushed into her room to scatter the books and papers on her desk. She yanked boxes from the closet shelf, shoved aside volumes and manuscript notebooks on the bookcase. Nothing. She jerked up the shade in hopes of adding more light before remembering the sun had long since gone. Again lightning, and she turned to leave, saw the easel and couldn't help a startled scream.

Syd shouted and in a minute was at her side. She pointed to the canvas on the frame. "Well?" he said, leaning closer to stare and squint. "What's the matter?"

Swallowing hard, she felt her hands fluttering nervously, around her face and neck. "I didn't put it there, Syd. I haven't touched a piece of charcoal for nearly two days."

A faintly sketched picture; a field, a plain, in black and white. Smudged figures on the horizon. No sun. The marker was half hidden, hand grasping a tomahawk in the foreground. There was no writing on it that she could see, but she recognized its outline and its slight cant to the left.

"It reminds me of something," he said. "Damnit, I hate things like that, when you think you know something but you can't put—"

"My dream," she whispered. "When I went sleepwalking. And the other night. That one, too."

"Damn, you're right, angel. When you do this, anyway? It's not very good, if you don't mind me saying so."

"I didn't do it."

He looked down at her. "Well, of course you did! Who else uses this room but you?"

"I said I didn't do it." Her voice was firm, though she had no idea how she managed it. "I haven't touched this canvas since the other day, Syd."

He gestured weakly. "Maybe you started it and forgot about it because of Peg."

"I don't forget things I draw. And certainly not something of those dreams."

The second dream had ended on an easel, she recalled, but that picture was darker, much darker and more complete. This was merely a series of slashes in preparation for something more elaborate. "Out" she said suddenly, and pulled him back into the living room.

"The doll," Syd said, annoyed at her behavior. "You must have misplaced it."

"Damnit, Syd, stop being so bloody calm! I didn't misplace it. I know exactly where I put it, and it's not there now."

He looked at her steadily, neither belief nor doubt in his expression. As though trying to decide, she thought, and waited instead of cursing.

"All right," he said tightly. "This has gone far enough." He strode to the closet and pulled out his raincoat. "It's time this bullshit came to an end. Lies about reservations are one thing, but coming into my house is quite another."

"What are you going to do?" And she knew it was a stupid question before it came out.

"I am going to pay a visit to our local wigwam and find out just what the hell that old man has in for us. I still say Peg was drugged, you know, no matter what those quacks at the hospital think."

She reached for her coat but his fists pinned her wrists. "No, you're not going." When she opened her mouth to protest, he kissed her, hard, and eased her back into the room. "You stay here. Someone has to wait for a call from Flaherty."

She was torn, then, and mad enough to cry. He kissed her again and left, and she hesitated only a moment before running to the bedroom to grab a light sweater and race back to the porch. Syd had already started across the street, angling away from McIntyre's house because of the wind that gusted toward the meadow. She saw him take the steps two at the time, yank back the screen door and press the bell. She saw the door open and Syd pushed his way in. The door closed immediately behind him. The light went on in the front room.

Be careful, she whispered silently. I don't need you to be another Custer, you big dope.

Chapter XI

The temperature dropped. The sweater, draped around her shoulders, flapped as the wind cut across the yard and whistled faintly under the eaves. Thunder was almost constant now, and lightning bolts illuminated The Lane with such rapidity that she was reminded of a silent movie flickering on a black screen. All that was missing was the heroine fleeing, and a piano.

When the chill became too much, she ducked back inside and turned on the porch light. Then she switched off the lamp and pulled open the drapes. She stared for a moment at the walk and saw patches of brown spreading rapidly on the concrete, expanding until they were joined and exploding in gleaming, short-lived fountains. Puddles formed where the drainage by the hedge was inadequate, and the street became a stream, the air bleached white with rain. A car hissed to a stop by the driveway. Terry waved a hand as though it would sweep the window clear of water, and the car bumped over the curb, turned and sped away. She pressed her cheek against the glass to watch as it paused at the corner, its taillights like two animals, rats, trapped in a hunt. The image was retained as she returned her gaze to the McIntyre house, and its too obvious symbolism made her deride her own imagination and close the drapes.

"Okay," she said, clapping her hands once and wiping them on her hips, "let's get a little food into you so you won't drop of starvation at this critical juncture of your nightmare."

Bitter, old girl, she thought as she groped past the furniture obstacles and turned on the kitchen light. And unnecessary. You should be pleased you have a white knight willing to charge out in all kinds of weather to do your dirty work for you.

She set out a frying pan and dropped butter into it, then placed two breasts of chicken into the bottom and leaned against the stove to listen to the storm counterpoint the simmering, spattering meat. Remembering a vegetable, she set a pot of water on the burner to boil, before reaching for the telephone.

The nurse she had spoken to the day before remembered her instantly and, though she claimed to be breaking all standing rules, told her Peg had taken a slight turn for the better. Terry put out a hand for something to hold onto and inadvertently grabbed the handle of the pot instead. The water, pot, and lid slid off the stove onto the floor, and it was a full two minutes before she was able to convince the nurse that her curses were not aimed at the competency of the hospital's staff.

"What do you mean by better?" she asked, tucking the receiver between neck and shoulder while she mopped up the water with a hand towel. "Is she awake, or what? Why didn't you call? Doctor Flaherty promised he would call as soon as she woke up."

"She isn't awake," the nurse said calmly. "What I meant was—you didn't burn yourself, did you? Those things can be nasty if you don't treat them right away."

"No, I didn't burn myself," Terry said impatiently.

"Oh, good. Well, what I meant was that your sister's temperature had decreased somewhat—not much, but enough so that the doctor is very encouraged. She's still, uh, asleep and still in the oxygen tent, but I would guess that they'll be taking her out by morning if her temperature continues to drop. But please, Mrs. Guiness, don't tell anyone I said anything. You know how they are about gabbing like this."

Terry thanked the nurse profusely, promising everything short of her future royalties in return for the welcome bulletin. It would, at last, be all right. The world, once lost, was back on the track and when Syd returned from straightening Denver out, they would have plenty to celebrate. She considered means, then pulled two wine glasses from the cabinet over the refrigerator and put them into the freezer, noting the time so they wouldn't become too brittle. Fifteen minutes, she thought, would be ample time for Syd to get back and the glasses to be ready. She hummed several off-key notes, heard herself and shifted to a whistling. She didn't even begrudge the time necessary to complete the floor's cleaning. It was, she thought, one of the most pleasant chores she had had to perform in a very long time.

And when the telephone rang, she sang the greeting. Static.

She took a shuddering breath of recognition and slammed the phone onto its hook, shaking her head and backing away from the wall. No, she told it, this wasn't going to happen again! Not now, not when Peg's getting well and Syd's getting the steam off his chest. I am not going to allow it. I will not permit it.

The phone rang. Once. Twice. It paused. Rang. The sound drowning the thunder and the wash of rain slapping against the kitchen window.

You're a big girl, Terry, aren't you? She pulled at her shirt and approached the  instrument, ignoring the sudden weakness in her knees and ankles, staring at the white-faced dial as though the look would silence it. When she reached out, she saw the tremors and slapped her fingers against her side, grabbed the receiver and held it at arm's length. She strained, could hear nothing, no man's voice trying to bridge the distance. Slowly she brought the earpiece closer.

There was static that jumped when lightning bleached the room's shadows. Now the familiar surge of air she had once attributed to the wind. There was no use talking; she knew she wouldn't be answered, at least not by anyone she knew. Deeper breaths, now, to calm herself. The initial shock had passed, anger had been fleeting and only attentive curiosity made her stand there, listening, waiting for what she halfprayed would not come.

One word: Theresa!

The earpiece pressed warmly against her hair. She felt rather than heard something behind the name, a throbbing unidentifiable, pulsing as though she were listening to blood coursing through a thick open vein. Closer, and it was a heartbeat.

Again: Theresa.

"Who is it?" she demanded in spite of herself, and ashamed for the tears that made her voice whispering harsh. "Who is it? What do you want? Who are you, damnit, who are you?"

Only: Theresa.

And the throbbing became louder, erasing its own image, resolving itself into a faint but unmistakable chorus of rhythmic voices that rose in unison to whisper over the wind and the static: Theresa.

She dropped the receiver. It dangled on its curled cord, thumping against the wall, spinning, and, thumping again. The noise filtered into the air, filling the room, and she ran from it, pursued by it until she ducked into her study and slammed the door behind her, leaning her back against it. She braced, sobbing, for the heavy blow that would splinter the wood and send her sprawling.

The curtains were still open, the shade full up. The lightning was trapped in the droplets that clung to the screen outside the window, miniature storms in themselves trembling and trapped until the wind shook around the house and they were punched loose, only to be replaced by others equally gleaming, equally trapped.

Terry moved to pull the curtains and stumbled into the easel. Her shoulder stung where it met a corner of the sharp-edged frame, and she rubbed at it, sobbing still, while one hand fumbled for the loop of the shade. She yanked it and a screeching grated her nerves and made her shiver. Then she pulled the curtain draw and leaned against the wall.

On the desk the telephone rang. Terry shook her head until she was dizzy. Sanity began to fray. It was impossible that she was listening to the phone. It was only an extension. The other was off the hook. It couldn't possibly be ringing. It should be disconnected. The other was off the hook!

The telephone rang. She bit at her lower lip, tasted salt and gagged, wiping the blood from her chin with the back of her hand. Then she fell to her knees and crawled to the wall, felt along the baseboard until her fingers wrapped around the plug and yanked it out. Gasping, punching the floor once, twice.

The telephone rang. Thunder and lightning simultaneously, a ripping and a single explosion like marble falling against marble. She stood quickly and her back scraped the corner of the desk. Yelping more in surprise than in pain, crying loudly, she lurched across the room, struck the easel again and fell, the canvas toppling onto her chest. She grabbed and hung onto it as if it were a life jacket, rolled to her side and used the nearest wall to help push her to her feet.

Hugging herself until she remembered what was drawn on the canvas, and she held it away from her.

And when again thunder and lightning thudded and licked across The Lane, she saw that the lines had been drawn over more heavily, the figures not quite as indistinct, the hand less flesh than bone, an old man's hand holding the hatchet that pointed toward the marker.

The picture slid from her fingers, clattered onto the floor, but she didn't hear it. Her mind retreated, struggled to regain some balance. Her eyes reflected the turmoil, wide and shifting from door to wall to door, seeing nothing but a line of men and women trampling dead summer grass in a march that had begun far below the horizon. Seeing nothing but a shadow loom behind her, engulfing the old man's hand, stretching toward the advancing figures; a shadow without a shape, and though she wanted to know, had to know what it was and why it was covering her, she couldn't turn, couldn't breathe until the storm's cannonade restored her hearing, her vision, and the sound of her sobs.

An arm stretched out to one side, a hand groped and found the light switch. Blinding, then, and she blinked away tears. The corners of her mouth trembled in an attempt to smile at the familiar disorder of the study. Attempted, and failed. She looked down at her feet, then, and wriggled her toes, held her fingers in front of her eyes until she was certain they had returned to her control. Her lungs ached, and she rubbed her breasts, pressed in her stomach, pulled at the skin at her throat until she felt air pass in, sigh out. A residue of dizziness tilted the room and warned her not to remain.

With a pat on the wall for assurance, she took a step, stumbled over the canvas and easel, and nearly fell into the hallway. Wisps of hair had fallen over her face, and she could taste damp strands caught between her lips. She pulled and freed them, grabbed her hair and bunched it in one fist to drape it over a shoulder. It was cool despite her panic, and soft, and she stroked it for calming as she walked steadily into the front room and turned on all the lights.

Thunder. Faint. The center of the storm drifting toward the city and leaving behind a slanting rain, the sound so incessant it was almost silent. A flutter of lightning. The lamp dimmed, brightened.

Terry cocked her head. A wailing, a siren's wailing. Terror fanned out from her spine, checked itself when .she laughed nervously. The telephone was still dangling from its cord in the kitchen. The wailing was the company's warning to replace the receiver.

"With pleasure," she said loudly, almost shouting. She immediately matched action to the thought, and then slumped wearily against the wall. She stared at the stove, not knowing whether to laugh or scream. Her chicken was burning, and the smell of scorched butter and charred meat was beginning to turn her stomach.

This time, however, there was no burst of anger, no rain of self-recrimination. There was no feeling at all as she numbly scraped the ruined meal from the frying pan into the bag of garbage she kept under the sink. There was only the sound of the fork grating against the metal.

The telephone rang. She froze. "No," she whispered. "Go away." Crouching now, on the floor like the rats she had seen in the retreating taillights of the car. Perspiration streamed obscenely down her stomach from between her breasts, slithered along her sides from under her arms, iced to her buttocks from her spine. Her eyelids could not open any wider. "Go away." She hissed. Spit. A hand clawed at the air toward the phone.

Ringing. With one shoulder pressed against the cabinets, she inched toward the wall. Her knees protested, but she would not stand. She pulled at the cord, cursed, and pulled again until the receiver jumped from its cradle and she caught it in both hands. There was a voice. She could hear it. A voice. It was calling her name. Loudly. But not Theresa. Mrs. Guiness.

Biting at her lips to keep back the sob that was blocked in her chest, she recognized Flaherty's voice. "Mrs. Guiness, are you all right out there?"

She nodded, laughed at herself and pushed against the wall to stand. "I'm fine," she said, after several false starts. "Just fine, A little nervous, though. It's the storm, you see."

"A gem, isn't it? It has some of my patients down here scared half to death. I've just, in fact, spent the last half hour keeping the children's ward from breaking into a stampede, riot, or whatever it is children do when they're scared." He laughed, and though she knew it was calculated therapy, joined him until she forced herself silent, feeling that if she continued she wouldn't be able to stop.

"Well, I'm glad you're okay, Mrs. Guiness. What I called about was your sister. I hear you've been talking to some of the nurses on duty at the desk, and I want to be sure you've been getting the correct information. I know you're anxious, Mrs. Guiness, but I really wish you had waited until I had something to tell you."

Not feeling the least guilty, Terry licked at her lips. "She said . . . she said, the last one I talked to, that Peg's fever has broken? Or at least it's come down some since yesterday?"

A pause. Hesitation that made Terry sag against the wall. "Well, that had been the case earlier, Mrs. Guiness. But I'm afraid now that the fever has gone back up again. We're putting her into ice treatment to try to break it if we can."

"What is it?" She was insistent now, catching the doubt in Flaherty's voice, a lack of confidence that he knew what he was up against. "What's going on down there, Doctor? Should I come down right away?"

"No, Mrs. Guiness! No, you stay right where you are. Besides the dangers of driving in this storm, there wouldn't be a thing you could do around here but sit around and drink lousy coffee and get in my way. I promise you again: when it looks like Pegeen is coming out of it, I'll give you a call. But I don't want to see you here before that time."

"But the ice thing?"

"The ice is simply procedure, Mrs. Guiness. It's just another way of breaking through a fever that persists. And other than that, Mrs. Guiness, she's doing as well as when you last called."

"In other words, she's not doing well at all, right?"

"In other words, Mrs. Guiness, Pegeen is holding her own, and I can safely say we all here expect a breakthrough at any moment."

A breakthrough in what, Terry wondered after she'd hung up. A breakthrough in the diagnosis or the treatment? She was angry enough to be tempted to call the hospital back, to ask the question, but she knew too that the only answer she would receive from either doctor or nurse would be another calming generality that served only in making her more nervous, and fearful.

She stood at the dining room window and looked out at the yard.

Syd was taking a long time. Too long for a confrontation or even a peace party. Should she call the Mclntyres and see if he'd left yet? He might have tripped over something in that miserable wind. A tree could have fallen on top of him. He could have fallen into the gutter and split open his head.

The lightning became more infrequent, outlining the trees and the hedge in black against black. She thought for a moment there was a man standing in the yard, but in the next flash she saw it was only a branch wrenched from the elm she'd been pampering against the odds of its tremendous age. But still, it looked like a man. Caped. No hat. Its face remarkably wooden and expressionless.

And then she remembered the doll.

Chapter XII

The advent of paralysis terrified her. She should have dashed out to the car without a second's deliberation, but her hand remained suspended in front of the window, fingers slightly spread to trace tracks in the beading condensation. The glow from the kitchen gave depth to the window, her reflection trapped within like a hologram portrait of a dark-haired mannequin. On the tiny watch that slowly weighted her wrist and made her arm quiver, she watched the progress of the second hand.

Tick: Denver astride the white line, Mrs. Denbeau scuttling back into her house.

Tick: William in black easing her away from the lip of the hill.

Tick: Mary trembling at the door, beckoning to Pegeen as through a wall of barbed wire.

Terry shuddered.

Tick: Denver falling, no marks on his hand.

Tick: The elder with two ringlets of white hair braided and dangling in front of his ears, in his hands a small, thin-bladed knife.

Tick.

Tick.

The spider leg jerked a final time, then eased into a smooth circular sweep and Terry's hand dropped wearily to her side. Lightning momentarily erased her reflection, and her bonds were severed. She spun around, collided with the table and staggered back to the wall, biting her tongue against the sudden stab of pain. Rubbing at her hips, she sniffed once to swallow tears, pushed herself away from the wall and limped to the closet. Blindly she groped until she felt the cool plastic of a poncho, yanked it out and slipped it hastily over her head. On the shelf somewhere there was a flashlight, and she shoved aside boxes cursing before her fingers slid over the serrated metal cylinder. It was nearly a long as her forearm, but the weight reassured her and she thumbed the switch to check its brilliance before pulling the poncho hood over her hair and running outside.

It was cold. The wind flattened the plastic against her back as she ran along the concrete porch and jumped off the edge onto the drive. A scurry of shredded forsythia branches bunched at her feet, grabbing as though to climb her leg. She kicked in disgust, bent to pull the wet wood away, kicking again until it vanished into the darkness. A look, then, frantically toward Denver's, but the light was still on in the front room and no sign at all of Syd.

No time to run there, she thought, and ducked around the corner of the house under the protection of the carport. The wind followed, but the rain became a spray that dampened her face, gathered into droplets and slid toward her stomach. She gripped the car roof until she'd calmed enough to hold the flashlight steady. Wiped the moisture from her face. Took a deep breath.

Now, she thought, and pressed the light against the rear passenger side window, squinting to bring into focus the doll lying opposite her on the floor. Hurrying around, she grabbed at the recessed handle and pulled. It was locked. Not believing it, she pulled again, sobbing aloud and aiming a vicious kick at the side of the car. She pounded on the roof with the flashlight, punched impotent fists against the door. A gust nearly toppled her off balance. She screamed in anger, then pressed her forehead against the window, staring.

The doll was facing her. Its eyes were in shadow, giving it an unpleasantly blind appearance. The red hair seemed afire. Terry blinked, rubbed at her eyes, tried to force a closer look. Around the doll's neck was . . . she shook her head, looked again. A necklace, glittering as the light trembled in her hand. It must have been hidden under the buckskin shirt and jarred loose when Syd lifted Peg from the back. It was fashioned delicately of silver, highlights of which starred until they obliterated the soft malevolence of interspaced ovals of turquoise. Staring still, too numb for action, she spotted a pendant pressed against the doll's breast. Blinking, she tried to make out the shape, and when she saw the stylized outline of a human face glaring into the light, she stepped back until her hands gripped one of the carport's posts.

The key, she told herself, deliberately turning her face into the rain to drive off the necklace's hypnotic effects. Pegeen.

Stuffing the flashlight into a poncho pocket, she ran down the drive, slipping when she reached the sidewalk and grabbing at the hedge to maintain balance. The thorn-like branches gouged her palm and she cried out, pulling her hand to her mouth and sucking. There was no relief, and her original speed had been halved as she splashed through a puddle in the gutter and crossed the road.

Here, there was nothing to block the full effects of the storm, and she was staggered by the wind, her breath forced from her lungs as it swept by her on the heels of rain that slapped and stung. As she leapt over the opposite curb, another gust struck her and she spun around, her arms flailing, failing to keep her on her feet. She fell facedown into mud and wet grass. Gasping. Spitting out filthy water. Pushing to her knees and retching dryly. On her feet again, her hands stretched in front like a grotesque version of blind man's bluff.

The poncho grew heavy, the hood finally blown back from her face. But she felt nothing as she clambered up the steps and pressed a thumb against McIntyre's doorbell while her free hand pounded on the frame of the screen door. Minutes, she was sure, though it might have been hours, before the inner door swung rapidly inward and Mary peered into the darkness, her eyes suddenly widening in shocked recognition.

"Syd!" Terry shouted. "I need Syd! He has the keys!" She was stammering, stuttering, and couldn't control the mistakes of her tongue. Mary hesitated and Terry yanked at the outer door, screaming Syd's name hysterically. Suddenly Mary was gone and William was in her place. He listened to Terry's ravings, then nodded as though the night was calm and she had stopped by merely to say hello. When he opened the door, she stumbled over the threshold into his arms, realized what had happened and shoved him away.

"Syd," she gasped. "I have to get Syd. I need. . . ." She swallowed and took a deep breath. "I need the keys to the car. I must get to the hospital right away."

"Syd isn't here," William said.

"But he is!" She stared and held out a hand. "I mean, he came over here an hour ago to see Denver. And you and Mary. He. . . ." She faltered against his unwavering stare and wiped a hand across her face. This wasn't the time to be cowed. She had to get into the car. Syd. . . . She tried to look around William and past his wife, but they shifted slightly and she was prevented from seeing past the tiny entrance foyer. "Please, William," she said, hating the plea in her voice. "I've got to see him."

"He is not here, Mrs. Guiness. He has not been here all night."

She shook her head and took a step back. "Now I know that isn't true. I stood right over there," and she jerked a thumb over her shoulder, "and saw him come inside. You tell me where he is, or by God I'll call the police." Her voice rose at the last, and she felt a brief moment of triumph at the almost imperceptible change in his stolid expression.

He looked carefully at Mary whose hands were folded protectively over her bulging stomach. If something passed between them, she missed it. William abruptly turned back to her and smiled, closemouthed. Mary disappeared down the hall toward the kitchen, her voice whispering to someone. There was no answer, or none that Terry could hear.

"I'm sorry," William said, distracting her. "I was not here before and did not know Mr. Guiness had come. Mary will find out about him for you. Denver, you see, is not in. He went into town to see a movie." His smile became a caricature of a grin. "John Wayne. My father has what you call a thing about John Wayne."

They continued to wait until Terry thought she would scream with impatience. Finally, Mary bustled back down the hall and spoke to William. Not in English, and Terry was instantly suspicious. She watched William's face, but there was no indication of duplicity or surprise. When he looked back at her, her hand was already on the latch.

"I'm sorry," he said. "The elder does not know about Mr. Guiness. He says—"

"Thanks," she said shortly. "Sorry I got your rug wet."

Gathering the neck of the poncho in one hand to keep the rain from lashing under its protection, she darted into the storm, dropped the hand when she nearly tripped over a small wagon dark on the grass. Both hands outstretched again, she fought the crosswind back to the car. Duplicates. She wasted no time in recriminations against Syd's fear of duplicate keys. Her lips were tight, her cheeks taut as she pulled the flashlight from her pocket and turned it so she could smash the butt end against the door's pane. And when she tried and nothing happened, she stared, unbelieving. Not a chip, not a crack. She struck again, then again, and the blows came faster and progressively weaker as frustration dissipated anger's strength. A quick flash inside and the doll stared blankly back at her.

"Think!" she whispered, her own voice drowned by the storm.

Then she grabbed the flashlight in both hands, tears now blending with the rain on her face, raised her arms and smashed the butt into the glass a final time. The protective shield of the flash shattered into her hand, but she ignored the running lances when she saw the pane had become webbed. Taking the broad head, she swung the light like a baseball bat and the window powdered. Again, and there was a gap large enough to force her arm through. Frantic, now, she scrambled for the lock release, yanked it up and pulled the door open. Her crying was louder, her lungs unable to hold air long enough to catch a decent breath. On her knees, she reached for the doll, grabbed its neck and shook it mindlessly, sobbing as much in relief as at the agony in her hand. "Later," she whispered, "do it later. Run now. Scream later."

Slamming the door shut, she ran into the house and down the steps, her wet shoes sliding and, at the last step, kicking out from under her. Flinging her arms back, she caught herself before her head slammed against the floor. Then she crawled to the laundry room.

An explosion of thunder froze her. Blue-white illuminated the corners. She rocked back onto her heels and faced the pot belly stove. The slitted door resisted her first attempts, then shrieked open. Her hands were trembling so violently, the doll would not fit through the wide gap on the first try. She closed her eyes and pulled reins on the runaway panic in her mind, steadying, though not calming. Her hand reached out slowly, and the doll fell into the gray ashes.

She watched herself. A hand, pink with blood mingled with water, reaching for a pile of discarded newspapers. Catching one, dropping it, reaching for the next. Bunching it. Stuffing it into the stove. When she pulled her hand away, the paper was edged in red.

Bracing a hand against the concrete floor, pushing until her knees cooperated and she was on her feet. Left hand into a pocket before remembering the flashlight was broken. To the wall. The lights would not burn. A shelf just above eye level. Her fingers scattered detergent boxes and bottles of fabric softener and bleach, nameless shapes and clammy cloth. Finally she closed them around a box of wooden matches.

Careful now, she warned. Do it right. She licked at her lips. The first three matches flared and died; they were damp and left streaks of sulphur along the box's abrasive side. A fourth flared, flamed. Dropping the box and holding onto her wrist to keep the match steady, she painfully lit the paper. Reaching. The paper browning, hissing black, and finally a tongue of blue that darted along the crumbled edge until gouts of yellow billowed out at her. She cried and held her injured hand against her stomach. She rocked, and the paper burned. She stuffed more in, and the odor was familiar, then tinged with the bite of charring cloth, the light snap of thin wood.

"In a minute I will call the hospital," she told the fire. "I will call the hospital and everything will be all right. Everything will be all right. It will be, you know. It will be. Everything will be all right. Fine. Just . . . fine . . . ."

The stove welled toward her, receded, ballooned and was punctured. A hand brushed back the poncho and she shook her hair free. The movement made her nauseous and, protesting silently, she felt herself falling backward, slowly, as though she was sinking beneath the waves of ebb tide.

She thought she couldn't have been unconscious for more than a few seconds, five minutes at the most. Her hand throbbed and she stripped off the poncho and ran upstairs and into the bathroom. With tweezers she pulled the shards of glass from her palm, rinsed it and bound it tightly with nearly a full roll of gauze. She would have to make a trip to the clinic soon to have it cared for, but at the moment she had other things, more important things to worry about.

What McIntyre had done with Syd was the primary concern. She no longer doubted that McIntyre was, if not homicidal, at least manic enough to try to eliminate anyone who got in the way of his so-called legend. She tried telling herself that her actions with the doll were the results of unbridled panic aggravated by the storm and Syd's prolonged absence, and again belief was replaced by skepticism. Call the police, then, but what could she say? What proof had she that Denver had harmed her husband, or even threatened them?

She paced the living room from sofa to door and back again. There had to be something she could do. But if only she knew exactly, without a shred of doubt, what she and Syd were fighting! And that such a thought would even venture into her mind frightened her more than the believing of it: a modern woman, a business woman of sorts, preparing to do righteous battle for her man against forces possibly gathered mistily beyond the fringe of natural law. It would have been laughable, but the stinging of her palm and the death mask staring of Alec as he lay on the stretcher further strained her skepticism. However it may appear to the outside world, if and when it was over, The Lane constituted her only reality, and she knew that whatever occurred within its boundaries she had to accept, natural or otherwise. For the moment.

Having decided then, she hurried into the bedroom and changed into dry clothes, substituting sweater for blouse, walking boots for loafers. She toweled the inside of the poncho, and from the hardware drawer in the kitchen found a screwdriver, weapon enough and not as dangerous as a knife, should she have to run.

As she stood in the center of the room, burying the last of her indecision, the telephone rang. Instinctively she reached out, then snatched back her hand. This wasn't the hospital. It was . . . the whatever it was calling her name. When the last ring died into the refrigerator's hum, she grabbed the receiver and dialed, asked for and was connected with Dr. Flaherty.  "I'm in a hurry, doctor," she said briskly. "I want to know about my sister. Please spare me the bedside manner. Just tell me."

"Mrs. Guiness, I can understand your concern—"

"Doctor, I have neither the time nor the patience to fence with you. I must know my sister's condition right away. Not tomorrow, or an hour from now, but right away. My sister, doctor."

"To be frank—"

"It's about time."

"—Your sister's not responding as we expected; Antibiotics, the ice, oxygen, nothing seems to be effective as yet. Of course, we haven't given up hope," he added quickly, "but I don't know what to tell you."

The doll, she thought. It's burned. Peg should be all right.

"Mrs. Guiness, are you still there?"

She blinked. "Yes, of course I am. Thank you, Dr. Flaherty, you've been more than kind. And I apologize for my rudeness."

She hung up and braced herself against the stove. Pegeen was going to die. Terry had been mistaken about the doll all along. It wasn't voodoo, as Syd told her; and since it was not, what then had Alec tried to do that had been prevented by Denver?

One way, she thought, and left the house, ran across the street as her hair caught in the wind. One hand poked back inside the poncho and pressed against her jeans' pocket. The key to Alec's house seemed too large, too bulky, cold when she pulled it out, slippery when she crouched in front of the lock and eased it in. She twisted several times before it turned over, darted inside and was encased in black before anyone had spotted her. For the first time that evening she was  grateful for the driving rain, at least now there would be no peeking through curtains. She was effectively invisible for whatever she had to do.

From another pocket she pulled out the penlight and flicked it on, following the narrow beam up to the living room. Then she stood in front of the fireplace and traced the outline of her previous visit, kneeling to search for something she'd missed. But in the ashes there was nothing, nor on the rug or anyplace else in the room that she could determine. But it was here that Pritchard had been discovered, and here that the doll had been found.

Hefting the poker, she tapped it impatiently against the slate hearth, her lips moving in soundless curses until an accidental sweep of light flashed back at her from the poker's tip. Pulling it closer, she blew carefully at the dust, turning the forged iron slowly. Her imagination, she thought. Another glint. Caught in small gashes in the metal, gashes caused by pounding against stone, were slivers of silver. She pried one loose with a nail, but it fell, and when she flashed the light down to recover it, a faint telltale blue winked at her from between the odd-shaped sections of hearth. With forehead nearly touching the slate, she stared until she found a tiny fragment of turquoise wedged tightly into the accumulated dust.

It wasn't the doll, then: it was the necklace. It had already been taken from the doll buried by the marker, already gone from the doll she'd seen in the lot. And the doll in the dresser? Alec had taken its necklace and pulverized it. And who had he saved? Her? Syd?

"Oh, my God, Alec," she said, leaning back onto her haunches. "Oh, my God, I've killed my sister."

Anguish closed her throat, raised a pounding in her temples. She dropped the light and poker and began to rock, beating at her breasts until they ached, moaning up a sorrow-filled scale to a soft-pitched keening that was amplified by the empty house, competed with the soughing wind. But her eyes were dry, and her throat soon cleared. Mourning would have to be deferred; she had a legend to destroy.

She left the house quickly, bracing herself against the now familiar assault of the wind. Running across the lawn, she paused by the side of Denver's house and through the fog-like density of the rain saw a wavering square of light on the back lawn. When she reached the corner, she dropped into a crouch and huddled under the crude wooden porch that led to the rear door. Up the steps, then, counting on the storm to cover any noise that would alarm those inside.

The window was less than a foot from the railing and by leaning just slightly she could see through the thin curtains into a room painted a painfully bright green. Mary was standing by the sink, her back to the room. William was in a straight-backed chair tipped onto its hind legs. The elder was on the floor, a blanket beneath him, a blanket around his shoulders. There was no talking, but the younger man's eyes were focused on his grandfather's hands. Terry settled back onto her heels, leaned forward again, farther and higher. Other than the chair, the room was without furniture, and there was no sign of Syd that she could see. Nor of Denver. William's head snapped back as though he were fighting sleep, but his eyes remained open and it was a discomforting moment before Terry realized he was in some sort of hypnotic trance, induced perhaps by the hands that wove invisible patterns over the elder's legs. There was something on the blanket, dark and shapeless, half hidden by the elder's bobbing shoulder. The wind shifted, then, and blinded her, and when she had shaken off the water, the old man was already moving to his feet. Neither Mary nor William stood close to assist him.

Suddenly there was a muffled yell and Terry ducked. The yelling continued and she recognized it as a chanting, a rising and falling song without translation, and it was more than the cold rain that raised bumps on her skin and weakened her determination. Taking a deep breath without successfully calming herself, she looked into the kitchen again and saw the elder and William shuffling around the edge of the air in silent drumming. Circling. Mary at the sink, her face lifted to the ceiling, her mouth open and sighing while her hands lightly patted her stomach. The something in the blanket's center. A bowl. And . . . Terry swore, but couldn't make out the shape.

A distant flash of lightning fragmented through the trees behind the house, and Terry ran down the stairs to hide under the porch. Without knowing precisely what it looked like, she knew they were performing the ritual of the Ghost Dance. The summoning of the dead. The calling of the warriors to return to the realm of the living to claim what had been theirs. Denver . . . Tecumseh . . . waiting for the hill in the field to give up its dead.

Nonsense, she told her hands as she rubbed them for warmth. It's nothing but a remnant of a religion I don't know anything about.

To the Old Ones, rest.

The Ghost Dance. Ritual of desperation. The last frantic hope of a scarred and doomed people.

Syd. If he had left the Mclntyres of his own free will, he would have stopped in the house to let her know, left her a note, a sign. He had gone to see Denver, and the last time she had seen the Indian, he was heading for the field.

She was reluctant to leave the protection of the porch. The storm, for one, had unleashed a reserve of fury usually left to the August and September hurricanes that lashed the coastal towns. And, if she should rave into the field armed with only a screwdriver and her fury, what could she do if she found Denver there? Attack and kill him? Could she kill? Could he be killed?

She turned hands into fists and pressed them against her forehead, cursing her confusion and fear, ranting silently at her inability to order things and people about as though they were figures in one of her illustrations. And suddenly it occurred to her that she might be able to do just that, or in failing, at least precipitate movement that would allow her to act. To do something!

Chapter XIII

She stood on the front porch, biting the insides of her cheeks. There was a momentary temptation to run to the Griffiths, the Dormens, but their reactions would be the same as the police. More so if she tried to convince them Denver was . . .

In spite of the storm, she tried to make herself look less disreputable, checking and wiping away telltale signs of mud on her boots and poncho. Then she rang the doorbell, keeping her thumb on the button until Mary again peered through the screen. Contrite gestures, since speech was impossible, caused Mary to back away and allow Terry to step into the foyer. The contrasting warmth soothed her, made her eyes sting as though she'd been days without sleep. She said something, neither caring nor knowing what the words were, listening rather for the sounds of chanting from the kitchen. But there was nothing untoward, and she was disappointed when William stepped into the square of light at the end of the hall, nodded, and moved to greet her.

"William," she said quickly, falling easily and nervously into the role of a rambling neighbor who'd left her manners behind, "I'm really sorry about before. I mean, I really shouldn't have come over here and shouted like I did." She waved away William's response. "The storm, see, it scared me a little, I guess, and you know how it is with newlyweds and all." She turned to Mary and smiled broadly, prompting a weaker one in return. "Mary would know, right, dear? And you in your condition seeing me like that! God, you must think I'm really crazy! You must think I'm some kind of city freak, right?"

"Mrs. Guiness," William said firmly, "we thought nothing of the kind. I do not believe you are a freak. I understand your concern. I was thinking, however, that if Mr. Guiness came over while I was still at the tavern—"

"Oh, he must have!" Terry interrupted, her hands waving water over walls and rug. "I thought that myself. That's why I came over. I'll bet he and Denver went to the show together. They're pretty close, you know."

She almost laughed at the deflated expression on his face, and immediately apologized to herself for feeling sorry she had stolen his thunder.

"Exactly," he finally said, taking Mary by the shoulder and pulling her close. "They are probably both at the movies laughing at John Wayne. In fact, I must apologize to you, Mrs. Guiness, for not thinking of it sooner."

There was a silence, and Terry reached nervously for a curl plastered wetly to her cheek.

"And how is your sister, Mrs. Guiness?"

The abrupt change of subject startled her, and she knew immediately she had lost something, not yet sure what.

"Not good," she stammered in the face of their prodding stares. "I don't think the doctors know what's really wrong with her."

"But you do, don't you, Mrs. Guiness?"

She tried a smile, but in the wake of the accusation her advantage faded to nothing. "No," she said, drawing it out and shaking her head as she inched her way back toward the door. "No, I don't. I mean, if I did, don't you think I'd run like hell to the hospital to tell the doctors so they could make her well again?"

"No," William said, releasing his wife. "No, I don't think so, Mrs. Guiness. You might, but you know they wouldn't believe you. In fact, I think you'd rather try to cure her yourself."

"Ridiculous."

"It has been said so, Mrs Guiness. After tonight, however, perhaps not." He smiled and barely lifted his shoulders in a shrug.

"William!"

The name forced a gasp from Terry, froze her hand in the act of groping for the doorknob. William stood to one side, and she could see the elder standing in the kitchen door. Backlighted, he was a shadow taller than fact, and his voice was canyon deep, canyon old. He hobbled slightly as he moved, his head bobbing as if he'd long ago abdicated control of its actions. When he was ten paces closer, he stopped, still in shadow, his white  hair glowing like a frayed cloud.

"What is it?" William said. He was brusque, reluctant to surrender his position of control.

"William."

"I know, I know, but—"

Terry knew she was listening, but she couldn't understand a word of what was happening. There seemed to be another level of communication which she could not fathom and to which she was not privy, a silent and perhaps even telepathic exchange. What she could grasp, however, backed her until she felt the knob hard against her spine. She smiled inanely at Mary, and ignored even the slightest glance at William and the elder. Her right hand finally found purchase on the knob and her fingers tightened while her left dipped into her pocket and closed around the screwdriver. The odd conversation continued, with the elder saying only William's name, and William spurting half-sentences, unintelligible phrases partly in English, partly in the language she had heard earlier.

Suddenly, Mary darted forward and grabbed her arm, shouting and pulling her back into the center of the foyer. Terry spun to one side and pulled out the screwdriver, stabbing at Mary, striking her on the hand and shoulder until William leapt at her and smothered her against his chest with his arms.

Fighting, as much for air as freedom, Terry felt herself being lifted off her feet and carried back into the kitchen. She knew she was shouting, calling for Syd in the midst of obscenities, but it was fruitless. The light, fluorescent and glaring, blinded her, and by the time she could remember all she had known about self-defense and a man's weakest points, William had dumped her into the straight-backed chair. Then he stood behind her, holding her arms back, straining the muscles in her shoulders, thrusting her breasts out. The poncho billowed and she felt cold water dripping into the tops of her boots.

"No shouting," William whispered into her ear, yanking sharply and making her gasp. "The elder does not like noise."

"Damn him," she spat, and Mary slapped her twice.

"You will be silent," William ordered.

Defeated, her arms aching and growing numb, Terry nodded. She was close to tears, but something refused to allow her this display of weakness in front of her enemies. All she wanted now was for Syd to come charging into the room and sweep her out as he lay the Indians low with great sweeps of a broadsword, battle axe, anything at all. But she blamed no one; in trying to be a heroine, in playing out the roles she'd usually reserved for the books she could not write, she had precipitated the events she'd hoped for, and was now paying the price she had refused to consider possible.

"All right, then," she said sullenly. "Damnit, all right, I'll keep quiet."

Her eyes closed when William called out, opened again and watched the elder enter the room. Always before in the shelter of a corner, bent, mumbling, hair straggling as if it had never been washed, never been smoothed by comb or brush, she had caught only glimpses of his face here and there, an inadequate sighting her imagination had filled in. But under the halo of light, he was different, so completely opposite Terry wasn't sure she recognized him.

His face was a mask of infinite tragedy; the madness of Lear, the pathos of Loman tracked across broad cheeks and high forehead through incredibly deep canyons of folded skin. The eyebrows were cloud white, the nose a distorted image of something once sharp and planed. The lips had vanished in the maze of wrinkles, the chin in an unbroken line to the wattles loose at his neck. A parody of age, eons, imbedded with agony. But it was his eyes that kept her from squirming away from his gaze. She could see scarcely any white at all, only a black that had no business being anywhere else but at the bottom of a midnight well. A screen for the century of his living, twin ebony lenses that stared directly at her, and through her. And when Mary took his arm and guided him to the center of the room so that his slippered feet brushed the edge of the fringed blanket, Terry knew he was blind.

She looked away then, and down. Felt an acrid welling in her stomach. In the middle of the blanket was a bowl, and the mass she had not been able to identify from the window was the body of a rabbit, its throat slit, its blood spilling into the receptacle and caking on its fur. Against the wall under the window were four others, already drained.

She remembered the rabbit in the gutter during that first night's walk. She swallowed and fought with those portions of her mind that needed retreat into insanity. She looked around quickly, at the thoroughly modern kitchen crammed with cabinets and shining new appliances. The cans of food on the counter. The water glass by the sink. Normal. All of it normal. Except for the people, and the bowl of blood.

The elder shifted then, tilted his head—an ancient bird searching for a meal. He lifted a hand more bone than flesh and William released her arms. Gratefully she rubbed at them, feeling the now cold poncho on her legs and back, slippery beneath her buttocks as she wriggled in search of comfort.

There was a sharp hiss, and Terry began to yield to surges of faint hope. Mary was standing with her back to the counter, leaning slightly backward. She was obviously in the first throes of labor, and Terry could see the fear in the perspiration that sheened her brow, the dry tongue that flicked at her trembling lips. Behind her she could sense William's sudden indecision; he was being torn now, between obedience to the elder and loyalty to his soon-to-be-born child. So, she thought, the bastard is human after all. Stall, then, and then might be a chance.

"William," she said, barely above a whisper. His hand gripped her shoulder and she tried, failing, to shrug it away. "William, could you at least explain? I have a right to know, don't I?"

The old man swiveled around at the sound of her voice. He had lowered himself on the blanket carefully, his palms down to meet the floor and arrange his legs before resting on his knees. The bowl he pushed to one side. He was facing just to her left, ear cocked, shoulder lifted. He uttered a series of sharp gutturals and William's hand tightened. Mary had closed her eyes and pursed her mouth to suck in a series of deep, painful breaths. William answered shortly, and the elder reached a hand over his shoulder, waggling his finger until Mary grasped them tightly. He stroked her wrist, murmuring to her until her breathing eased and she was able to smile, almost shyly. But Terry saw the pain that would not leave her face.

"William," Terry said, more insistently. "Please! You owe me that much, at least don't you think?"

The elder spoke again, nodding, his free hand darting as though the air in front of him was a loom.

William released her shoulder and stepped around the chair to face her. When she looked up, the ceiling light was directly behind his head and she was reminded of the afternoon in the field when the sun had turned him to shadow.

"You will be killed," he said flatly.

Terry nodded. The bravado in the action merely a facade for the lurch in her stomach and the fear that churned dangerously in her bowels. She was suddenly hot. The poncho captured her body's heat and made her perspire until she could feel the sweater dragging her torso down. But the killing was to be expected, and since it was obvious to her that Syd was also dead, she no longer cared.

"There will be a reason for your dying."

Then she realized William was translating the elder's grunts, the sing-song litany punctuated by his still moving hands. Mary shuddered, but her face was impassive, and Terry understood a new definition of hate.

"Soon." His eyes drifted to a point just above her head, seeing nothing, focused on an expected future she wanted to believe had been painted in madness. "A man, Mrs. Guiness, came to the Nations of the West, as one who had come to us, the brother of Tecumseh. The man of the West was a seer, a prophet, who asked for the peace that never came as long as the white man rolled with his tide. The man died. He returned. He taught the Nations of the West, and they began to dance to gather the spirits of the long dead, the soon dead, the dead of the warriors whose numbers smothered the spring rains."

It was hypnotic, Terry thought, and she kept her eyes moving around the room to keep herself from falling into the same trance-like state that had gripped William. He was talking, she knew, about the Paiute who had claimed death and transfiguration and who had inspired the Ghost Dance. William droned on, describing the reactions of the Nations as the Ghost Dance was picked up by some, ignored by others and moved inexorably across the plains to lodge in the homeland of the Sioux. The Miami; the Shawnee, the Cree, most of the Eastern tribes had virtually vanished under the assaults of generals like Andrew Jackson and were pushed aside by the unstoppable progress of a white population lured by farmland, furs, and rumors of gold and silver, iron and lead.

"Another man came. He counseled silence. Patience. Some listened, others ignored, but it was not long before all believed and the silence continued. He moved, always taking on faces, clothes, the appearance of the year. He was not given a name or a sign. He was only HE, and only those who listened knew who he was, knew why he spoke on the wind and in dreams."

Terry stopped paying attention and began to scan Mary's face to spot the moment when she would no longer be able to hold back the convulsions that had stiffened her spine and beaded her cheeks and brow. Soon, she prayed, and wrenched herself back to catch the tag end of the Indian's monologue. It was, Terry thought, an uneasy explanation of why there had been no mention of this legend. Without a name or a face, this mysterious figure would be effectively invisible to those outside Indian culture, would be able to keep their belief in the Ghost Dance a hidden thing. A clandestine messiah, she thought, and wondered how far she dared go in upsetting the moment.

William stopped, muttered something to the elder, and glared at her. "I am boring you? I was under the impression that you wanted to know, Mrs. Guiness."

"But I do," she protested meekly "And I also know more than you think."

"Your book, Mrs. Guiness. You should never have started it."

"It was your story, William, and Denver's, that got me into it. Blame yourself, if you have to blame someone."

William smiled unpleasantly. "Then tell me, Mrs. Guiness. What do you know so that I may tell the elder.

He hesitated, exaggerating her indecision to keep him from noticing the abrupt sag in Mary's knees, and the tightening of the elder's grip on her wrist; what magic he had woven earlier was rapidly dissipating.

"This mysterious man you're telling me about, and in a nice way, too, this man who keeps the Ghost Dance alive. I know his name."

The old man hissed angrily and William knelt in front of her, his fingers grabbing her ankles. "You can't," he said, and she delighted at his dismay, as if in her knowing she would somehow defeat them.

"Tecumseh," she said, grateful at least for one small triumph. "You think he's come back to free you all and lead you and your people to some kind of glory." She felt like laughing, but the look on his face sobered her instantly. "Denver," she added, unable to stop. "I saw him the other day, just after looking through a book. You think he is Tecumseh, don't you? You think he's the one who's going to whisper in your dreams and set you back on top again."

There was a moment when she thought William would shift his hands from her ankles to her throat and throttle the victory before it could produce a smile of her own. But he only sat back on his heels and let his arms fall limply to his sides. He spoke to the elder; the elder answered at length. Then William grabbed her arms and yanked her to her feet. Thinking she'd finally pushed them too far, she began to struggle, but the strength in the man's hands made her whimper involuntarily, and his pulling kept her too far off balance to do anything but follow.

They rushed awkwardly down the hall, turned and stumbled up the narrow staircase to the second floor. It was dark, and she cracked a kneecap against a low table pushed against a wall. The pain jolted into lights that added to her blindness and paradoxically cleared her head and set her searching for a way to escape. With the elder blind and Mary in no condition to wrestle with her now, all she needed was a way to get free of William and at the front door.

He stopped, reached through a room and turned on a light. "Denver's room," he said, stepping aside.

The room was empty. No bed, bureau, not even a small chair or rug. She frowned, and saw in a corner a glittering silver necklace. "I don't get it," she said finally. "What is this?"

"He doesn't sleep here. He doesn't sleep in this house, Mrs. Guiness. He never has. You know now he is not my father. My father, my real father, died twelve years ago, an alcoholic. He couldn't wait."

"But—"

William pushed her inside and followed, standing in the doorway to block a possible run. "He fashioned the necklaces here, Mrs. Guiness. For the people who thought they knew what he was." He laughed, then . . . "But they all thought he was a murderer. You were the only one, you and your husband, who knew he was—"

"Rubbish!" she said, and flinched at his angry glare.

"We tried to warn you, Mrs. Guiness. But you were not frightened." He smiled. "You do not frighten easily at all."

A scream turned him around. It rose to a long sobbing wail, sank to a moaning before rising again like an ocean swell. William hesitated, then spun around and raced toward the stairs. The screaming persisted, underscored by a hoarse shouting, and Terry uttered a quick prayer to all the gods she'd known, before following as quietly as she could. Mary had finally broken the hold the elder had had on her nerves, and the pains of immediate childbirth shattered her stoic silence.

The commotion centered in the kitchen. Terry took the steps two at a time and twisted around in the first floor hall to see the woman lying on the floor, the elder and William hovering over her in helpless uncertainty. Terry wasted little more time yanking open the front door.

The storm had ended; only remnants of the wind cooling her face and sifting up under the poncho to turn the perspiration into rivulets of ice around her waist and thighs. She considered again calling the police, Jim Griffith, anyone at all, but the only one on the block she knew would believe her, want to help her, and could not was Mrs. Denbeau.

Without thinking, then, she turned right and ran for the stand of birch separating her from the field. Denver would be somewhere around the hill, she thought, and Syd . . . Syd would be there, too.

There was no battle plan, no time at all for formulations of strategy. What measures she would and could take depended on what, if anything, Denver was doing.

She ran through the underbrush and broke into the open, stumbling once and flailing to keep on her feet. Why The Lane? Why her? She tripped and fell headlong into the high grass. The blades whipped her face, blinded her as her hands broke her fall and scraped over rock. The clouds were breaking, and behind them the white of the moon. She lay still, sucking for air, clawing at the poncho until she pulled it off and tossed it away. To her knees, then to her feet. And she felt the ground rise, saw, as her eyes adjusted to the pale silver, the crest of the hill. She swerved to skirt its base, and her boots slid on an open patch of mud. Again she fell, striking her head on a fist of rock.

Lights. Brilliantly red, burning gold, swirling nebulae that forced nausea to roil uncontrolled. She pushed up with her palms and vomited, tears stinging, nostrils flaring and closing against the acrid stench. She cried loudly, no longer believing silence would protect her, cried and wiped her mouth with her sleeve, ran heedlessly forward. The moon had found a breach in the cover and the meadow was a silver-gray sea, using the rain to turn its surface into facets of diamonds that blurred as the tears refused to halt, kept burning, kept blinding.

She called out once, and thinking she heard an answer, reached somewhere for additional speed and rounded the hill, staggered to a halt against a huge boulder. She could see the marker clearly, and there was a body lying at its foot. She stared, gulping, wiping at her chin. The body moved, and she called out again.

Syd was stretched out on his back, and she took his head, cradled it, rocking and crooning, brushing back his hair and kissing eyes, nose, lips, brow until he blinked and looked up.

"My God," he said, and pulled her down, and she held him like a shield against the night. Then his arms tightened and she felt the heaving of his chest, the salt that touched her lips when she kissed his cheek.

She laughed. No superhuman was her husband, nor was she; and however much time had passed was not nearly enough to keep them from sitting up and, while touching faces, chests, fingers, palms, telling their stories.

Syd had indeed confronted Denver, practically threw the doll in his face and demanded to know what the hell he was trying to do to his wife. There were denials and feigned reactions of indignant hurt. But Syd pressed until he found himself bound by William and dragged into the kitchen. Denver had taken off his clothes and strode around naked.

"If that man's fifty, I'm a hundred," Syd said. "He's got to be no older than me, angel. Christ, you should see his arms!"

They had explained, as they had to Terry; and like Terry, Syd had grasped for belief in places other than the legend. And had failed.

"Peg," he said suddenly. "They admitted killing all those others, and working on Peg." The name was a question and Terry told him what she had tried to do. "No," he said. "Can't be. Can't be."

"Syd, right now I don't know and I don't care. Let's go home and get in the car and get the hell out of here! Go someplace and try to make some sense. . . . What's the matter?"

Syd passed a hand over his face. "I came to just a few minutes after Denver conked me. He told William to get the potion. Tonight, he said." He reached behind him and pulled out a doll. "I saw him bury this by the marker."

Terry started to laugh, keeping her lips pressed tightly together to stifle the sound.

"He told me I was needed, angel. To bring it about."

"He's going to kill you?"

Syd shook his head, then exposed his arm. She gasped, cried out and turned away. There was a gash on his forearm, bound now, but the cloth was stained dark rust.

"He let the blood sink into the ground. He told me how he did the same to Denbeau. And Marsha Pritchard."

"God!"

"This is the gate, he said."

"Shut up, Syd."

"He—"

She slapped him, winced at the pain in her hand, and slapped him again.

Above them there was a cry, a shout, a commandment. Thunder exploded. The moon disappeared. Terry screamed, Syd grabbed her and pulled her face-down to his chest. The world flared white, and there was lightning walking across the field. Each succeeding flash cracked ozone and thunder, and she was deafened though she knew she was still screaming. The world was splitting apart, and she had a vision of falling into a pit rimmed with red fire that burned an unnatural black. And when she looked up, Syd's face was pale, bloodless.

She followed his gaze to the top of the hill. At first she could see nothing beyond the bewildering electrical display, then nothing but the grass that bent against the rising wind. She rubbed at her eyes, shook her head, rubbed again.

There was a figure standing on the edge, arms raised to gather the thunderbolts to his chest. He was dark, naked, hair streaming out behind him. He was tall, and growing taller.

Scrambling to her feet, Terry pulled until Syd followed her behind the marker. It was a false sense of security, but it was something she could grasp as she watched the legs of the figure rise and fall in time to the thunder, stamping hard on the ground, the hands into fists yanking downward, reaching up and yanking down again. A noise above the wind, part of the wind, riding with it and sustaining—had she been on her porch, she knew she would have heard it; the chanting of the elder, the chanting of her dreams.

"Denver!" Syd shouted into her ear, and she nodded, unable to look away.

The chanting.

The stamping.

Thunder and the streaks of lightning that sounded like sheets tearing in the wind. Terry clamped her hands to her head and bent over, shaking her shoulders when Syd tried to get her to look back to the hill.

The chanting.

The answering thunder.

It was mad, and maddening, and she prayed for a way to end it, to keep the world from drowning in her nightmare.

She screamed hatred, spitting on the marker.

"Angel!" Syd shouted and pulled her back.

The ground began to shake. The marker heaved upward, split in half and burst into blue flame untouched by the wind.

She looked up, and in the violence of the storm, there was a moment of calm that allowed her to regain her breath and accept, finally, the giant on the hill.

Denver was standing with hands defiantly on his hips. The boulders on the side, in the ground, were tearing loose, rolling toward them. Syd grabbed her hand and they began to run, slipping in the mud, ignoring the lightning that caged them, the thunder that mocked them. She turned once, and stopped to watch as the first of the hands poked through the ground, seeking purchase to pull their monstrous bodies into the open. Denver leaned down.

"Syd!" she screamed, and he was gone.

And when she fell, rolling, sitting with one hand in front of her face for protection, the figure on the hill plucked a doll from the ground, held it up to the thunder, and tore off its head.

SPECIAL SNEAK PREVIEW

GILA! By Kathryn Ptaceck

PROLOGUE

. . . And the green lizards, and the golden snake,

Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

SHELLEY, Adonais

The cloud welled up, expanding, towering, looming, blossoming. Up, up, up into the shape of a mushroom. The wind surged, screaming and sweeping outward in a circle of total destruction. Plants withered, animals died, stone and sand melted and fused.

The wind of destruction and change spread.

Then, abruptly, the destruction lessened, decreased. The radiation had already seeped, changing what it touched.

And on the fringes of that wide circle, the lizards watched.

1

Erlinda Gonzales glanced up at the clock as she washed the grease off the red countertop. Eleven thirty-five. Twenty-five minutes more, and the El Ranchito Carry-out Diner/Reptile Gardens/Curio Shop on the highway turnoff to the White Sands National Monument would close for the night, and then she could leave.

As she pushed back a strand of black hair, the Chicana sighed, for it had been a long, exhausting day. It had been hot, unusually so for mid-September, and the air was sluggish. The metal fan, set high on a shelf, merely served to push hot air from one end of the small diner to the other. The Ranchito had no air-conditioning. Maybe, if she opened the windows, she'd catch a cool night breeze. The stocky woman glanced at the red curtains. No, there'd be dust all over by morning.

Wearily she recalled the day's cranky turistas, who'd complained continually about everything. And there'd been wrong orders and broken crockery, as well; and Tiny, the cook, had been in a foul mood since midmorning when he'd burned his hand on the grill.

And she was uneasy; she didn't know why. Perhaps it was the heat of the day. Maybe it would rain.

Sometimes she felt uncomfortable before a change of weather. The wind blew now, a low moaning sound that put her teeth on edge.

Still, soon, so very soon she would be going home, and Tomás would be waiting in bed for her. And she would slip into his arms, and the uneasiness and tiredness would disappear, and things would become much, much better. Yet home was a twenty-mile drive along a darkened road not much better than a washboard. At least the jolts would knock the dust of the day off. But the six-o'clock alarm would ring and the same tired routine would begin again. The same kinds of customers, the same kinds of problems, over and over.

With a jangle of India cow bells the door opened, a gust of wind sweeping in, and the woman glanced with resignation at the new customer, struggling to close the door.

It was Billy "Tex" Perkins, an old regular and independent trucker. He was friendly, chatty, and always left a good tip. The rangy man slid onto a brown-and-white cowhide bar stool at the counter.

"The same as usual, Erlinda," he said, then leaned back, cupping his hands, to light a cigarette. He inhaled quickly, the smoke streaming out of his nostrils in two pencil-thin lines.

She called over her shoulder to the cook in the kitchen. "Four over easy, stack of cakes." Wiping her hands on her yellow apron, she poured the man a cup of coffee. "How's business been? You're late tonight. I expected you over an hour ago." Erlinda pushed the cup across to him.

"Got delayed." Tex traced the wet ring left by the cup with a tobacco-stained finger. "Good goin's lately. Could be better, though." He shrugged. "Or worse." He grinned suddenly. "Whyn't you come along with me sometime, Erlinda?"

She studied the creases in his face, the wind-beaten and tanned skin, and smiled. For years he had been asking that of her. She wondered what would happen if she said yes someday. But it wasn't likely, not with dark-haired Tomás to go home to.

He drained his cup and held it out for more coffee.

"Comin' here tonight I seen this big animal just outside of my headlights. Really strange, y'know? Could have sworn it was a coyote. Maybe a wolf. Maybe just a big tumbleweed."

She grinned. "Maybe it's a camel left over from the cavalry days."

The trucker laughed. "Could be." He lit another cigarette.

Above the groaning wind, a muffled giggle sounded from a secluded corner booth, back behind the now-silent jukebox, and Erlinda came around the corner. She crossed her arms and stared disapprovingly.

"Okay, you kids, break it up. You know the rules. Order or get out." Her voice was firm, yet her dark eyes were slightly amused.

The embracing couple pulled apart, and the blonde girl patted her bouffant hairdo. She tittered nervously, and twin spots of red appeared on her cheeks. The boy dropped his eyes to the table, then moved his hand surreptitiously as he closed his zipper. Erlinda sighed.

"Oh, we'll take two Cokes, please," the brown-haired boy said at last. He nervously played with a button on his shirt and refused to meet Erlinda's eyes. The girl beside him wiggled.

As Erlinda walked away, she could still hear their furtive whispers. "Hey, watch it, Steph, that hurts!"

She shook her head, then paused at the booth closest to the counter. Red Chief, a fixture at the diner, slept with his old head cradled on the scarred plastic table. His green-and-black flannel shirt was threadbare in spots and one elbow poked out a ragged hole. His jeans were dusty, dirt caking the creases. The laces of his boots were long gone and the tongues flapped loosely when he walked.

Poor old man, she thought with pity. No one at home wanted him, not his son, his son's wife, nor their five children. His wife had been dead for twenty-three years. He didn't even have the dignity of his own revered ways, for Red Chief—Erlinda didn't even know his real name—had worked for the white man all his life, had tried to live the way of the white man, and then in his old age, he had been rejected by the white man. In the past, the aged ones would have simply walked out into the desert until they dropped. Now, he slept in the diner, drinking away what little money he had, and wandered around the fringes of the desert, as if seeking an answer to his woes innature.

The waitress got the drinks and eyed the kids as she set the glasses down with a sharp tap. "Your dad know where you are, Stephanie?" she asked the blonde.

The girl shrugged, a gesture made elaborately casual. "Oh, yeah."

Sure, Erlinda thought.

"You two gonna get in trouble one of these days," she said.

"Hey!" the boy, Steve, protested. He glanced at the girl, then at the woman. "We ain't doin' nothin' illegal. It could be worse; we could be neckin' out on the mesa."

"Yeah. But her father isn't goin' to stand for no boy messin' with his baby girl."

"I'm not a baby," the girl said loftily, and looked into the mirror of her compact. She tugged at her lacy white blouse and hastily buttoned one of the buttons that stretched across her full breasts.

"No. You're not," the woman admitted, deciding to leave them alone. As she rounded the counter, Tex leaned down to brush some dirt off his boots, then busily applied himself to his meal. She glanced back at the clock. Eleven forty-nine. Why did time pass so slowly at night? Especially before closing. She picked up the gray dishcloth and began wiping the counter surface again.

The wind rose in a steady howl, whistling through the crack around the windows and door. Sand shifted across the floor. Damned white stuff, the woman thought. Got in her hair, her clothes, all over the counter. Why the turistas were so eager to see a big sand box, she didn't know.

A prickling crept along her neck, tickling the back hair. On moonlit nights when the desert became a sea of white, as it was this night, the abuelos danced in the graveyards, holding skeletal hands and moaning the names of those about to die. Or so her grandmother would say. Crazy old woman, Erlinda thought, shrugging, dismissing her relative's mystical turn of mind.

"Them new boots?" she asked Tex with a vague nod of her head.

"Yeah." The trucker drew his legs up to better show off the black boots with the pointed toes and high heels. "Brand new. Paid two fifty for 'em," he said with a touch of pride in his voice.

"I think you got taken, Tex."

"Nah," he said, as he stirred his fork through his eggs. "They're genuine lizard skin."

"Yeah?" she asked with curiosity, and leaned across the counter. If she talked, she wouldn't notice the uneasy feelings. Unconsciously, she fingered the gold crucifix on a chain at the base of her throat. "What kind of lizard?"

"Dunno. Guess maybe it's just plain lizard lizard."

Another giggle burst from the booth where the two teenagers sat. Erlinda glanced up sharply, reprimand on her lips, when a horn honked outside. Another trucker? Should know that they didn't have outside waitress service.

The honking continued, the whining sound piercing the woman's head, even over the sound of the shrieking wind. "Sounds like your horn got stuck."

"Damn," the man said. He sipped his coffee and wavered, torn between finishing his meal and fixing the horn. It was obvious he didn't relish going back out into the sandstorm.

"Hey!" said the boy, looking at the trucker. Stephanie was frowning, the corners of her generous mouth mulishly pulled down. "Turn it off, man."

A new sound was added—that of metal being crushed or twisted.

"Goddamn, that tears it," Tex shouted, wiping his mouth and tossing down his paper napkin. "Some s.o.b.'s gone and hit my rig!" He stood up and in five strides had crossed the dirty expanse of the diner's floor. He slammed the door behind him so hard that the glass panes wobbled.

There was a moment of silence as the wind lulled, then a bloodcurdling scream. The kids pulled apart and stared around, their eyes large. The wind renewed its shrieking and howling. The boy's lower lip trembled, and he looked toward the waitress.

Reflexively, Erlinda pulled out the 12-gauge shotgun from behind the counter. She'd kept it there ever since that crazy guy with the .45 had come crashing into the diner late one night years before, demanding all the money, telling her to lie down on the floor so that he could use her. She'd been lucky that night. A sheriff's deputy had just gone off-duty and was eating there, and had shot the guy in the chest before anyone was hurt. Tomás had bought her the shotgun the next day, and it was never far away.

She checked the barrels. Both were loaded.

Licking her lips, Erlinda slowly advanced toward the diner's door.

The teenagers had scrambled up from their booth and were backing toward the counter, their hands gripped in fright.

Red Chief never looked up. He just kept sleeping and snoring.

Hiss. Hiss.

The sound was loud, louder than the wind.

Something was on the other side of the door.

Erlinda's heart hammered in her chest, and her palms were sweaty. She couldn't get frightened; it would freeze her up. She would put a bead on whoever—whatever—it was. . . .

Erlinda raised the shotgun to her shoulder, sighted, and began to squeeze the trigger.

With a resounding crash that shook the entire diner, the door and wall caved in, the plaster dust rising in great clouds.

Forgotten, the shotgun dropped, and Erlinda screamed and screamed and screamed.