I do not believe in ghosts. Perhaps I do not believe in ghosts because I refuse to believe in ghosts and my mind rejects the possibility and seeks other explanation. In the Troy affair such explanation, for me, involved death-wish, hallucination, guilt complex, retribution, self-punishment and dual personality, but there again I am out of my ken: I am not a psychiatrist, I am a private detective. There are those who disagree with my conclusions, and you may be one of those. So be it, then. All I can do is render the events just as they occurred, beginning with that bright-white afternoon in January when my secretary ushered Miss Sylvia Troy into my office.

“Miss Sylvia Troy,” said my secretary and departed.

“I’m Peter Chambers,” I said. “Won’t you sit down?”

She was small, quite good-looking, very feminine, about thirty. Close-cut wavy russet-red hair was capped about a smooth round face in which enormous dark brown eyes would have been beautiful except for a flaw in expression almost impossible to put into words. There is only one word — haunted I — and that word, of course, is susceptible to so many different interpretations. Her eyes were far away, gone, out of her, not part of her, remote and lost. She remained standing while I, still seated behind my desk, squirmed uneasily.

“Please sit down,” I said in as cordial a tone as I could muster within the embarrassment of trying to avoid those peculiarly-luminous, strangely-isolated, frightened eyes.

“Thank you very much,” she said and sat in the chair at the side of my desk. She had a soft lovely voice, almost a trained voice as a professional singer’s voice may be termed trained: it was round-voweled, resonant, beautifully-pitched, very feminine, melodious. She was wearing a red wool coat with a little black fur collar and she was carrying a black patent-leather handbag. She opened the handbag, extracted three hundred dollars, snapped shut the bag, and placed the money on my desk. I looked at it, but did not touch it.

“Not enough?” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“The way you’re looking at it.”

“Looking at what?” I said.

“The money. Your fee. I’m sorry; but I can’t afford any more.”

“I’m not looking at it in any special way, Miss Troy. I’m just looking at it. Three hundred dollars may be enough or not enough — depending upon what you want of me.”

“I want you to lay a ghost.”

“What?”

“Please, sir, Mr. Chambers,” she said, “I’m deadly serious.”

“A ghost—”

“A ghost who has already killed one person and threatens to kill two others.”

I directed my squirming to seeking in my pockets and finding a cigarette. I lit it and I said, “Miss Troy, the laying of ghosts is not quite my department. If this so-called ghost of yours has killed anyone, then you’ve come to the wrong place. There are constituted authorities, the police—”

“I cannot go to the police.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I tell my story to the police I would be incriminating myself and my two brothers in...” She stopped.

“In what?”

“Murder.”

There was a pause. She sat, limply; and I smoked, nervously.

Then I said, “Do you intend to tell me this story?”

“I do.”

“Won’t that be just as incriminating—”

“No, no, not at all,” she said. “I must tell you because something must be done, because somebody — you, I hope — must help. But if you repeat what I tell you to the police, I will simply deny it. Since there is no proof, and since I would deny what you might repeat, nobody would be incriminated.”

It was coming around to my department. People in trouble are my department. Had there been no mention of a ghost, it would have been completely and familiarly in my department. But it was sufficiently in my department for me to tap out my cigarette in an ashtray, pull the money over to my side of the desk, and say, “All right, Miss Troy, let’s have it.”

“It begins about a year ago. November, a year ago.”

“Yes,” I said.

“There are — or were — four of us in the family.”

“Four in the family,” I said.

“Three brothers and myself. Adam was the oldest. Adam Troy was fifty when he died.”

“And the others?”

“Joseph was thirty-six. Simon is thirty-two. I am twenty-nine.”

“You say Joseph was thirty-six?”

“My brother Joseph killed himself — supposedly killed himself — three weeks ago.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“And now if I may — just a little background.”

“Please,” I said.

“Adam, so much older than any of us, was sort of father to all of us. Adam was a bachelor, rich and successful — he always had a knack for making money — while the rest of us” — she shrugged — “when it came to earning money, we were no shining lights. Joseph was a shoe-salesman, Simon is a drug clerk, and I’m a nightclub performer and, I must confess, a pretty bad one at that.”

“Nightclub performer. Interesting.”

“I do voices, you know? I used to be a ventriloquist. Now I’m a mimic; imitations, that sort of thing. Nothing great. I get by.”

“And Adam?” I said. “What did Adam do?”

“He was a real-estate broker, and a shrewd investor in the stock market. He was a stodgy stingy man — which is probably why he never got married. He was like a father to us but, actually, he never helped us with money unless it was an emergency. But advice — plenty. And criticism — plenty. I can’t say he was bad to us, but he wasn’t really good to us. I hope I’m making myself clear.”

“Yes. Very clear, Miss Troy.”

“Now about the wills.”

“Wills?” I said.

“Last wills and testaments. We all have like it’s called reciprocal wills. If one dies, whatever he leaves is divided amongst the rest of us. I’m sure you know about reciprocal wills.”

“Yes, of course.”

“All right. Now last year, Adam made a real big win in the stock market and he suggested that we take a vacation together, a winter vacation, and that he would pay for all of it. A couple of weeks of skiing, fun, out-of-doors, up in Vermont. Two weeks in a winter wonderland, you know?”

I nodded.

“We, the rest of us, Joseph, Simon, and I — we arranged for those two weeks — the two middle weeks in November — and we all went up to a lodge at Mt. Killington in the Green Mountains of Vermont.” She shuddered and was silent. Then she said, “I don’t know how it began. Maybe we all had it in our minds, maybe that guilt was like a poison in all of us, but it was Joseph who said it first.”

“Said what, please?”

“Said to get rid of Adam. Adam was upstairs sleeping and the three of us were sitting around downstairs in front of a big roaring fireplace, drinking, maybe getting a little drunk, when Joseph put out the suggestion and we were with him so fast it was like all of us said it together. I don’t want to blame anyone. I say all three of us have the blame together. None of us ever had any money, real money, and all of a sudden it came to us, that we could have just that, real money, while we were still young enough to enjoy it.” She shuddered again and put her hands over her face. She spoke through her hands. “From here I’d like to go real quick. Please?”

“Okay,” I said.

Her hands dropped to her lap. “Next day, dressed warmly in ski suits, we went out on an exploring adventure, up into the mountains. Way up, high, Adam was standing near a crevice, a ravine, about a two thousand foot drop, with a little narrow river running on bottom. Joseph came up behind him, shoved, and Adam fell. That’s all. He fell. All the way. There were like echoes coming back, and then — nothing. When we returned, we reported it. We said he had slipped and fallen. The police went up to investigate, there was an inquest, and that was it.”

“What was it?”

“The coroner’s verdict was death by accident.”

I came up out of my chair. I walked my office. I walked in front of her, in back of her, and around her. She did not move. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap. I said, “All right. So much for the incriminating matter. Now, if you please, what ghost killed whom?”

She was motionless. Only her lips moved. “The ghost of Adam killed Joseph.”

“My dear Miss Troy,” I said. “Only a few minutes ago you told me that Joseph committed suicide.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Chambers, I did not tell you that.”

“But you—”

“I said supposedly killed himself.”

Grudgingly, I admitted my error. “True, you said that. But how can one possibly tell the difference? I mean—”

“May I tell it my own way?”

“Please do.” I went back to my chair, sat, watched her as she spoke, but my eyes did not meet hers. Somehow, on this bright-white normal afternoon in January, in the accustomed confines of my very own office, I could not bring myself to look full upon this woman’s eyes.

“I live at One-thirty-three West Thirty-third Street,” she said.

“Uh huh,” I said and happily business-like, I jotted it down, delighted for something prosaic to do.

“It’s a one-room apartment on the fourth floor. 4 C.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I murmured, jotting assiduously.

“Two months ago, on November fifteenth, exactly one year from the time of his death, Adam came to visit me.”

“Adam came to visit,” I murmured as I jotted — and then I flung the pencil away. “Now just a minute, Miss Troy!”

Quite mildly she said, “Yes, Mr. Chambers?”

“Adam is the guy who’s dead, or isn’t he? Adam is the guy whom, allegedly, you people murdered, or isn’t he?”

“Yes, he is.”

“And he came to visit you?”

“Precisely.”

I sighed. “Where?”

“On the afternoon of November fifteenth, I had gone out to the supermarket for a bit of shopping. When I came home, he was there, sitting quietly in a chair, waiting for me.”

I recovered my pencil and pretended to make notes. “Are you sure it was Adam?”

“The ghost of Adam. Adam is dead.”

“Yes, naturally, ghost of Adam. How did he look?”

“Exactly as he had looked on the day he died. He was even wearing the same clothes — the high-laced boots, the green ski suit, the green ski cap.”

“He talked to you?”

“Yes.”

“How did he sound?”

“As always. Adam had a deep booming voice. He sounded sad, aggrieved, but not, actually, angry.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said that he had returned to visit retribution on us; those were the exact words — visit retribution. He said he was going to kill Joseph first, then Simon, and then me. Then he stood up, opened the door, and walked out.”

“And you?”

“I called my brothers, they came to my apartment, and I told them just what happened. Of course, they didn’t believe me. They told me it was my imagination, that I had been highly nervous of late. They suggested that I go see a doctor. All in all, somehow, they talked me out of it. I did nothing about it — not even when Joseph was killed.”

“Suicide, even supposed suicide—”

“Joseph slashed his wrists and died. But there was no weapon. No weapon was found near the body; there was no weapon with blood anywhere in his apartment.”

I lit a new cigarette. The flame of the match trembled. I blew it out quickly and deposited it in the tray. I inhaled deeply. I said, “Miss Troy, you did nothing about it then — why are you doing something about it now?”

“Because Adam came to visit me again last night. When I returned from work, he was seated in the same chair, dressed exactly as the other time. He said that he had accomplished his purpose with Joseph — and that Simon was next. Then he got up, opened the door, and went out.”

“And you?”

“I fainted. When I came to, I became hysterical. That passed, and then I put on fresh make-up, and went directly to my brother Simon. It was late at night, but I didn’t care. Simon lives on West Fourth Street, quite near to where I work. I rang his bell until he woke up and let me in. I told him what had happened and again he just didn’t believe me. He told me that he insisted that I go to a doctor and that he was going to make arrangements for just that. Today I decided I had to do something about it. I’d heard about you — and I’m here. Please, Mr. Chambers, will you help me? Please. Please.”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” I said. I inquired and made notes about names, addresses and phone numbers, where she worked, where her brother worked, all of that. Then I printed my home phone number on one of my business cards and gave it to her. “You may call me here or at home whenever you please,” I said.

“Thank you.” She smiled her first smile, gratefully.

I placed her three hundred dollars into a drawer of my desk and said, “All right. Let’s go.”

“Go? Where?”

“I’d like to see your apartment. May I?”

“Yes, of course.” She stood up. “You’re very thorough, aren’t you?”

“That’s the way I work,” I said.

The case of Paul 2473 really began when he discovered the old book. He recognized it instantly for what it was, because he had once been through the Micro-filming Section where they were recording some old-fashioned but worthy volumes on genetics before destroying them. But the sight of this book, obviously an uninspected relic of the dim past, provoked a simultaneous curiosity and dread in him.

He’d been marching with the Thursday Exercise Platoon over a country back road, and now they were enjoying their ten-minute rest period, lying by the roadside among the grass-strewn brick ruins of some ancient building. Paul was bored — Thursdays always bored him intensely — and both his mind and eye were casting about for something of interest to focus upon.

Which was why his gaze had roamed over the crumbling, disintegrating wall beside him. He saw the aperture almost immediately. At this particular spot, the bricks seemed to have fallen down against a still standing portion of the wall so as to make a small igloo or cave. A tiny, cozy, rain proof den, he thought, for some small wild thing. A few of the little beasts always seemed to survive the best efforts of the decontamination squads which constantly scoured vacant areas.

Paul turned over and lay on his stomach so that he could peer into the dark hole, and saw the book. He knew instantly, of course, what the proper procedure was. He should take the thing, not open it, but hand it over instead to the Platoon Leader. He’d been taught that all such objects pertaining to the former civilization could be either valuable or dangerous. He had no more right to destroy the book than he had to look at it.

Half-intending deceit but not fully decided, he checked first to see if he were being observed. The Leader was nowhere in sight. The members of the Platoon were all prone, none of them close to Paul, and none of them paying the least attention to him. Tentatively, still not committed to disobedience, Paul reached into the hole, grasped the book and drew it out.

It was small, light, and seemed ready to fall apart at his touch. Trembling, but overwhelmed by curiosity, he lifted the cover and glanced at the fly leaf. The Logic of Murder, he read.

For a moment he experienced a dismal disappointment. The word “logic” had some meaning for him, though vague. The last word, “murder,” was completely and totally mysterious. The book was useless if he knew absolutely nothing of its subject matter. But as he pondered it, he was not so sure. The book might teach him what “murder” was. And “murder” might be something vastly entertaining.

“Everybody up!” The Platoon Leader’s shrill bark of command came from far away through the trees.

In the instant before the somnolent members of the Platoon could rouse themselves and stir from the matted grass, Paul 2473 came to a momentous decision. He thrust the little book inside his shirt. Then he got up, stretched, and walked back to the road where the files were forming.

The drive, almost obscured by flanking bridal wreath, lilacs and forsythia, followed one boundary line of the property to a stone building that was once a barn. Between that and the house was a boxwood hedge pruned to a height of six feet.

The house was built in the early 1830’s. It was a small, two-story cottage of red brick with a slate roof and huge central chimney. Weathered green shutters framed the windows and recessed front door. Beyond the swell of pin oaks and pines sheltering the site lay Sugar Loaf Mountain. And beyond that, a hazy suggestion of the Catoctin range.

From the moment they first saw the house, Phyllis had a watchful feeling about it. As if she expected some major obstacle to prevent their buying it. But the price was incredibly within their means; Ben had no objection to driving thirty-five miles into Washington; and the county school Kate would attend had a fine reputation.

One night shortly after they’d moved in, Phyllis and Ben were sitting on the steps of the hack porch, watching Kate gather grass for a jarful of lightning bugs, her bangs damp with concentration. The sun had almost gone down, and there was a faint mist rising from the creek that crossed the back of their land. The air seemed to be layered with both warmth and coolness, pungent with sweet grass and pennyroyal.

“I’d feel a lot easier in my mind,” Phyllis said to Ben, “if we’d discover even one thing wrong about all this. People like us just don’t find one hundred twenty-five-year-old homes in perfect condition for twenty-three thousand.”

Ben folded the sports page and leaned back against her knees. “It’s pretty far out here, and most families wouldn’t consider a two-bedroom house.” Then he added dryly, “Besides, I’ve never liked the way old houses smell. I noticed it about this one, too, right off.”

“I’ve told you a hundred times, it’s the boxwood. That’s what the smell is, not the house, darling. Anyway, you’ll have to get used to it. I have absolutely no intention of getting rid of that hedge. Mrs. Gastell said it’s as old as the house.”

Ben grinned as he turned and looked up at her. “Then would you at least trust me to spray it? There are spider webs all over the stuff.”

“You’d better check with that nurseryman first, just to be sure. What’s his name...?” Phyllis pulled a letter from the pocket of her jamaicas and glanced through it. “Newton. He’s just this side of the bridge in Gaithersburg.”

“Who’s the letter from? The old lady?” Phyllis nodded. “What’d she have to say?”

“Oh, nothing much. Just that she’s getting settled, and she thinks she’ll like Florida. Every other word is about her granddaughter. I guess the real reason she wrote was to remind us to put in a new furnace filter this fall. A few other things like that.” Phyllis frowned. “There’s a part here at the end I couldn’t quite figure out.”

She handed Ben the letter.

He scanned the page and then handed it back. “What’s so mysterious about this? All old people take a proprietary air about everybody else’s kids. Personally, I don’t know why she’s so worried about the creek. It’s not more than a foot deep. There’s no danger of Kate’s getting drowned. And I haven’t seen any snakes down there — not up to now, I haven’t.”

“Well, it’s not only what she said in the letter. It’s the way she’s acted about Kate since she saw her. Almost as if she wouldn’t have sold the house to us if she’d known we had a child. But I’m sure I mentioned Kate to her the first time we came out with the agent.”

Ben lit a cigarette. “Maybe she thought Katie would tear up the place.”

“No, it wasn’t that. In fact, several times I told her how we’ve taken Kate to all kinds of museums and historic homes, and how she’s always been careful with valuable old things. But Mrs. Gastell hardly paid any attention at all to me. She kept saying Katie shouldn’t be allowed to wander all over the place by herself.”

Ben shrugged. “Mrs. Gastell’s seventy years old. People her age think we give our kids too much freedom. That’s all she meant.” Their daughter had abandoned the lightning bugs and was now making hollyhock dolls, lining them chorus-fashion across the brick path to the grape arbor. Her shorts were grass-stained and the soles of her bare feet were already seasoned a greenish-rust. Ben reflected on her a moment and then he said, “I guess it will be hard on Katie, being alone so much now. It might be a good idea to get acquainted pretty soon with the people around here.”

Phyllis leaned her elbows on his shoulders. “That’s the trouble. Nobody on this road has children her age. But it’s only six weeks until school starts. And in the meantime there’s plenty around here to keep her occupied. The two of us can start all kinds of projects. I can’t describe what a wonderful feeling it is, not to have people running in for coffee all day long or the phone ringing every ten minutes. Everybody knows this is a toll call, thank goodness. Maybe now I can start on the book.”

Ben stood up abruptly. “No, you don’t. Not after what you went through with that last story. Remember, you promised me you wouldn’t do a thing for the rest of the summer.”

She took his hand. “I didn’t mean anything soon. I only meant now that we’ve moved. I promise not to write a word until we’re all settled and Kate’s in school.” She called to the child, “I’m going to start your bath now, so don’t be long.”

“In a minute,” Kate said automatically. “Daddy, come here. I made seven pink ones with white hats, and seven white ones with pink hats and...”

Phyllis smiled, and went into the kitchen. She turned on the brass lamp over the round pine table. The planked floor gleamed with a fresh coat of wax. It was a low-ceilinged room, full of early morning sunshine and pine shaded in the afternoon. Women years before her had stood at her window and cleaned berries, kneaded bread, stamped butter with a thistle-patterned mold. Perhaps the room had given them moments of completeness, as it gave her now when she poured milk into a brown earthenware pitcher and set it beside a bowl of tawny nasturtiums.

Then as she was slightly bent over the table, one hand on the pitcher, Phyllis had the sensation that this room, the whole house, had an inexplicable fullness. That the very atmosphere had absorbed a century and a half of other lives. It reminded her of an incredible camera she had once read about — one that recorded, through heat radiations, images from the past, that were of course invisible to the naked eye. There was something about this house that seemed to retain, at times even emanate certain... presences. And it was not a feeling that came from any conscious attempt to visualize previous occupants. Somehow this thought disturbed her.

She let go of the pitcher and went into the bathroom. The sound of water rushing from the faucet partially distracted her from whatever had bothered her and she dumped half a jar of bubble soap into the tub. Kate would love her extravagance.

Archer entered the little shop, the ting of the door chime almost covered by the ticking of the clocks lining the shelves upon the walls. The room was small and softly dark, only the hands of the seated man at the high bench at the end of the room appeared to be illuminated by the light from a gooseneck lamp. He crossed the room, waiting patiently while the spatulate fingers of the workman maneuvered a tiny cog into the jeweled bed of a clockwork mechanism, after which the piece was placed precisely in the center of a square of cloth. Then one of the brightly illumined hands moved to the edge of the bench to touch a switch, flooding the room with light.

Shrugging the loupe out of his eye, the fat man stared at him impassively, his bulbous eyes wetly intent. “May I be of service?” he said, the words precise, the tone musical, touched faintly with accent.

“Daggett sent me,” Archer said.

The fat man sat unmoving, not a muscle indicating that he had heard.

“He said to give you this.” Archer reached into the pocket of his jacket, placing a torn piece of pasteboard on the bench.

The man reached into a drawer, then neatly fitted the torn half of Archer’s card into a matching half, laying the two pieces on the bench without comment. After a moment’s examination he heaved his blocky figure off the stool to cross to the door of the shop, which he closed and locked, turning again to face the younger man. “You may call me Jaeger,” he said. “Come.” He led the way through a door set in the back wall, to a richly furnished living room, sumptuous leather pieces harmonizing with a muted Oriental rug. “Be seated, Mr. Archer.”

“You know my name?”

“Yes.” Jaeger was dialing the telephone, turning his gaze once again to his visitor, holding the stare unblinkingly while he awaited a response. “Describe Archer,” he said into the receiver, his eyes flicking over Archer’s body as he received the information. “Hold out your right hand, Mr. Archer. I wish to see your ring.”

“You’re very careful,” Archer said, holding out his hand.

“Very,” Jaeger replied, cradling the phone. “Do you like music?” He indicated the neat rows of phonograph records near the console across the room.

“Yes.”

“It is the only reality,” Jaeger said, crossing to the wall. “Schubert?”

Archer nodded.

The swelling strains of the Second Symphony filled the room.

“I will turn it low. Then we can talk.” Jaeger sat, folding himself into one of the leather chairs. “No unnecessary details, Mr. Archer, and no names. The address, the layout of the building, what you want done, and when. Nothing more.” Unconsciously his right hand beat time to the music as Archer took some papers from his pocket.

“Here’s a drawing of the interior of the house. A photo of the outside.”

“Expertly done,” Jaeger said, his lips pursing a little as he studied the blueprint.

“I am an architect.”

Jaeger fixed him with a steady gaze. “I know,” he said.

“The address of the house is on that envelope. Here are the keys.”

“Neighbors?”

“None nearby. The house rests on a cliff overlooking the ocean on a seven-acre plot.”

“It is tenanted?”

“Not at present.”

“Why don’t you sell it?”

“My father left it to me when he died a year ago. The restrictions of the will do not permit a sale.”

“But you may collect insurance?”

“Yes.”

“A stone house. Slate roof. Awkward. You wish a total loss?”

“Yes. A total loss.”

“Do you have gas in the house?”

Archer nodded.

“Show me where the gas line is.”

Archer pointed to a closet leading off the living room. “It comes in here at the back of this closet, branches off to the kitchen at the back, another branch of the pipe through the wall to the fireplace in the living room.”

“There is a cellar?” Jaeger asked.

“No. The house is on a concrete slab.”

“The interior walls?”

“Brick or stone, for the most part.”

Jaeger looked up at him. “It’s not an easy problem. We shall have to blow it up.”

“Yes,” Archer said.

“To blow it up is easy. To simulate an undetectable gas explosion is an art.”

“That’s why I am here.”

“My service is expensive, Mr. Archer.”

“How expensive?”

“Five thousand dollars... in advance.”

“Twenty-five hundred now and twenty-five hundred more when the job is done.”

Jaeger made a little deprecating gesture with his hands. “All. Now,” he said. “In cash.”

“How will you do it?” Archer asked.

“First the money.” Jaeger crossed to the phonograph. “Delius?” he asked politely.

Archer reached for the envelope in his jacket pocket, opened it, and tossed it on the coffee table beside the chair.

“Listen to this,” Jaeger said. “It soars to the skies.” He counted the money methodically, placing the bills in little piles in front of him, a thousand dollars to a pile. “This is music, too,” he said.

“Now tell me how you will do it.”

“It is necessary that I tell you. I shall need your help.”

“My help?”

“You must prepare the house according to my instructions. Also, there are some supplies that I will need. You will buy them, thus making yourself accessory before the fact.” The thick lips twisted into a smile. “My insurance policy.”

“I didn’t agree to that.”

“Your money is on the table. Take it and go.”

Archer hesitated. “What would you want me to do?”

“You will close the house up tightly, leaving the furniture and personal effects intact.”

“What else?”

“You will discreetly purchase a case of dynamite and an ordinary automobile storage battery, leaving them on the closet floor.”

“Dynamite?”

“You are an architect. You will know where to buy it or where to have it bought.”

Archer studied the bland face before him. “I’ll do it, Jaeger.”

“I’ll be there Thursday night at eleven-thirty.”

“Does it take long?”

“Only long enough to attach a small device to the gas pipes in the closet.”

“When will it happen?”

“At twelve o’clock the following day. Exactly.”

“Do you wish to inspect the house?”

“That will not be necessary. I have your excellent plans. Every moment I am there is dangerous for me — and you. I enter — devote ten minutes to the work — then go.”

“What should I do?”

“Stay in town. Conduct yourself normally. After you have prepared the house.”

“Will you need tools?”

“Nothing. A roll of tape. I’ll bring it.”

Archer rose to leave. “It is all arranged, then?”

“All arranged, Mr. Archer.”

The swirling strains of Debussy sang around him as he left the shop.

The wind and sea shot craps with everything on deck not bolted down. The boat moved up and down and every way that motion goes. Me, I hung onto a lifeline while the deck slanted, sea-water washed to my knees, and the wind sand-blasted my face. Only it wasn’t sand, but little pellets of salt water. A whole world full of them. Here I stood knee-deep in the lower left-hand corner of the Gulf of Mexico, my fare paid from Veracruz to Merida, with no guarantees.

Lightning and thunder, a sea full of stabbing stalagmites, and then suddenly the pitch of the deck changed. What junk hadn’t washed overboard blew around me, iron like paper glancing off my feet and calves, breaking nothing I noticed.

Quite a few hours later I pried my fingers from around the lifeline. We’d escaped the witches. Their big dark skirts billowed over on the horizon. Putty water rolled under the boat.

I crossed the deck, closed the cabin door against still howling wind. Nobody was there but me, by myself. So I got out of the life jacket, out of my slicker and coat and shirt and pants. In my shorts and money-belt, I shivered. Before I got dry clothes though I dug a finger into the belt just to make sure I had the big stone. I had it all right. I took it out. A million of me stared back from the facets. How it shone. It occurred to me that I could’ve used the diamond as a reflector if I’d been washed into the gulf. Occurrences like this come to me all the time. I skip over the improbability of their working. Improbabilities I ignore.

Now I might as well tell you. You probably guessed it already from the flashy way I have of describing things. My imagination is keen. It’s a gift.

Like this stone was a gift. Practically. A gift from the gods. Because there I sat in the lounge of Del Prado in Mexico City, minding my own business, when these ladies at the bar started laughing. Laugh and laugh. Until all of them had out their handkerchiefs, wiping their eyes dry of joke-water. On the floor by my foot I saw the stone. Something connected with my hair-trigger imagination went to work. I covered the stone with my foot.

Stand up, bring over the gem, and ask which woman dropped it was what the ordinary right-thinking man would do. But barging into the conversation was wrong. Impolite. Anyway, I already figured the stone belonged to the middle woman. The one about thirty, with jewels, and smoky blonde hair. She outranked the dumpier women in style and quality of clothes. They had to be casual acquaintances. So what I didn’t want was just loud thanks.

Now I have to tell you how I live. I live by being useful to people. Without fawning. I accent my fine features and manly build with the best tailoring. Ladies are good to me. They buy me things I don’t ask for. The presents come from a deep desire to share my company. No gentleman could deny them.

I win the respect of men too. Maybe it’s the wide range of topics I know first-hand. Maybe they see in me the boldness they once had.

My uncle says if I weren’t so restless I’d be a millionaire by now. He’s a millionaire. It isn’t a criticism. More of him later.

So what happens is I promote. I illuminate my backer. I enrich him. Then I move on to something new. Change is a condition of my nature. The millionaire for all his strokes of brilliance gets rich by being conservative. That’s what I think. How I think.

The reason I’ve told you what I think, and how, is so you can understand two things. (1) I didn’t steal the stone. (2) I intended to return it to its rightful owner.

So I sat in Del Prado until the three women left. I picked up the stone, went to my apartment. The idea was that I’d check the lost-and-found columns. I could see myself declining the reward, a reward that might not even have gotten mentioned if I’d returned the diamond on the spot. In the privacy of the lady’s suite I could see myself allowing her to dwell on my attributes. We’d think of something.

No ad appeared.

So the stone was mine by default. Before I had time to worry about it I was on this boat headed for Merida, Yucatan. A friend offered to back me in a tourist hotel catering to Americans on their way to the Mayan ruins around Chichen-Itza. I was to look into the purchase of Hotel Narcissus now that I hadn’t drowned.

“Nice stone.”

I clamped my hand over my diamond. I looked around. Hanging over the edge of the upper bunk was the face of one of my fellow passengers. Nothing but a boy, maybe sixteen. He grinned. Teeth came to points like a row of tobacco-stained gabled roofs. “Quite nice,” I said putting the stone back in the money-belt, sitting on my own bunk, and taking off wet shoes and socks.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “your secret’s safe with me.”

I said, “You seem to be trying to stimulate a conspiracy.”

He just grinned.

I reached for my clothes, started dressing. The stone was on me and my conscience was clear. I even felt good-natured. Maybe it had something to do with being alive after the storm.

“Taking it to Merida for sale?” he said.

“I’m going to Merida on business. Other business.”

“You’re in business?”

He was harmless. I ignored his sarcasm and told him my hotel plans, changing only names and locations. He didn’t believe me. Nobody believes the truth. With his dark, pitted face and big-boned meatless nose, he suggested deserts and tents. Cunning. Which is not to say he was anything like me; I saw that at once. His motives were practical. Mine are charged with an intuitive search for grandness everywhere.

He swung up on his bunk, then sprang to the floor. “You want to sell that stone, don’t you?”

“It’s a keepsake.”

“You can talk to me. Call me Abel.”

“It’s a keepsake, Abel.”

“I don’t ask where you got it. I ask if you want to sell it. I think we can get a quarter of what it’s worth. That’s good, considering.”

“We?” I admired that. “If I meant to sell it, I’d’ve gone to a dealer in Mexico City.”

“You’re from the capital?”

I admitted I lived there.

“Then why didn’t you sell it there?” He cocked his head. “Because the police have its description.”

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“I don’t care how you got it. The point is you’ve got it and it doesn’t belong to you.”

“Oh...?”

“I could tell the way you looked at it, and handled it. It’s the way I look at a thing that doesn’t belong to me. My eyes feast.” He gave me the rip-saw grin. “Don’t admit a thing. Just listen. Merida is my home. I know the place. People. I get around. Let me take you to him.” One of the other passengers in the four-bunk cabin came in, a student who’d spent part of the morning telling me about climbing Mount Popocatepetl. He’d shown me his membership card in the Alpine Club of Mexico City College. Because he majored in anthropology, he thought it only right to see the Chichen-Itza ruins before going back to the States and into his father’s grain-elevator business. Climbing into his bunk now, he just moaned. His tongue lay like dead liver over his lower teeth. He turned his face to the bulkhead.

“Outside,” I said to Abel. We left the seasick student after I got a coat. Wind blew across the deck. Lime seas nipped at the railings.

“The man I know,” Abel said, “used to work in customs. During the war many Europeans tried to slip gems into Mexico. This man made a fortune. He knows how to dispose of such things.”

What Abel didn’t say impressed me. “The man has influence?”

“Everywhere!”

I looked for men like that in every town. From what Abel told me so far I could find him for myself. But I try not to spread bad feeling. I spread good feeling. “Suppose I said yes.”

Abel said, “We split.”

I looked out to sea.

“You can’t sell the stone in Mexico without me. And you can’t smuggle it out. I don’t think you’d dare.”

I liked the boy even though he had no aptitude for what he was doing. “What do you think the stone is worth?”

“Let me see it again.”

Up in the wheelhouse, the captain was looking the other way. I fished out the stone, stamped it into the palm of Abel’s hand. He held the gem to the light as if he understood what he was doing. “You might get eight hundred dollars. That’s four hundred dollars each.”

He was guessing. I don’t know gems so I guessed too. “It’s worth three thousand.”

“In a window.”

I took back the stone. “I’ll give you a hundred pesos for the man’s name.”

Abel just grinned. “Not pesos. Dollars. I get half of whatever you get.”

“You know the man?”

“I guarantee he has influence,” Abel said. “I’ve dealt with him. In a small way.”

I saw Abel’s flaw. His aims were trivial. Still, I liked his curiosity. His problem was to keep out of jail. I said, “The man’s name.”

“Half.”

“His name.”

“Half?”

Money isn’t everything. “Half,” I said.

“Sandalio Fuentes. I’ll tell you how to get to his house.”

When we landed in Merida, I accepted Abel’s invitation to stay at the home of his parents. The house was surrounded by mildewed walls. The boy’s parents greeted me like their son’s guardian. They owned a store. The income, I figured, didn’t justify Abel’s shady inclinations.

The father did the talking while the mother stroked her beard and stared into ceiling corners. He recited local business conditions, suggested bargaining attitudes when I went to see about buying the hotel. Casually I asked if he knew a Sandalio Fuentes. “Everyone in Merida knows Sandalio Fuentes,” he told me. “A man with connections!”

After everyone else went to bed, Abel’s father and I had chocolate. He told me how worried he was about his son. People confide in me constantly and completely.

Then he showed me to my room. We said good night. At the door he turned. “The room has just been sprayed,” he said. “So don’t worry about tarantulas.”

I said good night again. I dreamed nothing.

After breakfast Abel took me aside. He volunteered to lead me personally to Sandalio Fuentes. Quietly but firmly I said no. He said, “How do I know you won’t cheat me?”

I told him he had no way of knowing, that at his age hot blood stood in the way of clear judgment. “I’m twice your age,” I said. “Take my word.”

The residential district Abel directed me to exploded with tropical flowers. I didn’t appreciate them. Abel was headed for trouble. Adventure is the exclusive business of adventurers. It’s an art. It takes brains and discipline. All Abel had was the flourish. The itch to try. He needed scratching.

Sandalio Fuentes met me in a white shirt and slacks. In his study hung a diploma from Georgia Tech. Next to it was a photograph of himself with an arm around Jack Dempsey. He started to talk about the good times he’d had in New York during prohibition, shifted into an account of his chairmanship of the Yucatecan delegation to the last Mexican presidential convention, unfolded newspapers in which his name and picture appeared. Facts gushed like a river. I noticed though that none of the facts cost him anything. He knew how to keep his mouth shut. I’d come to the right man. “Now,” he said with confidence, “you want something from me.”

“Possibly.”

He made me a drink. He said that a liver condition kept him from drinking with me. He told me about his operation.

When he gave me a chance, I told him how the diamond came into my possession. I wasn’t dealing with a boy now.

“What’s this to me?” he said.

“I thought you might like to look at the stone.”

Sandalio Fuentes bit off the end of a cigar, mentioning that he had them imported specially from Cuba. “Who sent you?”

“A boy named Abel.”

He went through a filing system in his head. “I don’t know him.”

“I thought not,” I said. “Still, he sent me. Would you like to look at the stone?”

“Look?”

“Buy.”

Sandalio Fuentes lit his cigar. “You have it?”

As I laid the big diamond on the green desk blotter his eyes swelled. Fine hairlines webbed his brows. He blew smoke away. Without taking his eyes from the stone he reached into the drawer of his desk, took out a magnifying glass shaped like a chess rook. The kind jewelers use. He studied the stone a long time. Then he turned to me. “This is glass. Well-cut glass. It’s worthless!”

“Make an offer.”

He laughed in my face.

I left with the stone in my pocket. What I supposed was the opening shot of the negotiations proved to be his last word. The sparkling thing was worthless. Worse than that, I’d jeopardized an important connection in Merida.

Abel came down the path from his house to meet me. His eyes slitted with worry. “You came back!”

“Did you doubt me?”

“How much did you get?”

“He hasn’t paid anything.”

Abel threw bony arms at the sky. “How much did he offer?”

I said, “Eight hundred.”

“Exactly what I predicted!” He did a dance in the dust. “That’s four hundred for each of us.”

“No.”

“No? You’re backing out?”

“Listen.” I described Sandalio Fuentes’ passion for the diamond, a passion I supposed would’ve been there had the thing been real. “He’s a good man to know,” I acknowledged. “I’ll let him have it for a thousand dollars.”

“But he offered eight hundred!”

“Don’t underestimate me.”

“You should’ve taken the eight hundred! We’ll never get a thousand! We won’t get a peso now!”

The boy’s panic didn’t surprise me. It surprised him I’m sure. Showed him how ill-equipped he was for this kind of job. He needed the scare. I left him.

I walked toward the downtown district of Merida. I composed the telegram I’d send my uncle. I have an uncle. Everyone has someone. My uncle loves me with the love of one outcast for another; my father speaks to neither of us. In the telegraph office I wrote out the message: Everything as splendid as usual. Need five hundred dollars. Thanks. I’d repay, as I always do loans from my uncle, at the next good turn of my luck.

I sent the telegram, then walked to the Hotel Narcissus. Before introducing myself to the owner, I decided to observe the hotel’s business so I went into the bar. I ordered the drink Sandalio Fuentes mixed me. All wasn’t lost with him. He had style. He could appreciate style. A shrewd man. An artist.

All at once I recognized someone. I checked her clothes and the spray of jewelry on her well-formed wrist. I couldn’t mistake the smoky blonde hair.

The stone had to be hers.

Ice melted in my drink before she decided to reach into her purse for cigarettes. Then I constructed in my imagination the fall of the stone from her purse, I even recreated, for my own amusement since she looked the other way, an expression of surprise and decision I might’ve shown on discovering the stone. I marched over to where she sat. I pretended to pick up something. “This is yours?” I said.

Her large gray eyes matched the smoky blonde hair. “What?” She took the stone, turned it over and over. “Why! That’s astonishing! Astonishing!”

“I think it fell from your purse.”

“But, you see it’s been missing. I don’t know how I could’ve overlooked it. I’ve searched and searched. Thank you. But this is astonishing!”

I observed her cultivated features, the evaporation of boredom from her milky brow. Now I glanced at the stone in her hand. “You’re wise not to carry the original. That’s a convincing copy.”

A light blush ignited her face. “Then you know precious stones.”

“A trifle.”

The play in her eyes meant growing involvement. Her blush became something else, a glow of anticipation. I knew it would do me no harm. She said, “How charming.”

Where there is an imitation, there has to be an original. We compared the two in her suite.

I was waiting on the back porch, a trifle mistrustful of the dark. It was overly quiet and the trees seemed to be watching me dourly as if they knew I was going to do something I shouldn’t. Even the wind had stopped. I could hear Pa snoring through the upstairs window in slow, breaking rhythms.

It felt as though I’d been standing there for hours, but it wasn’t more than fifteen minutes. I’d gotten out of bed at ten of twelve and the midnight bells had come tolling over the meadows about five minutes after I’d come down. I was almost hoping that Pete wouldn’t show up. But I knew he would. He was always out late at night anyway. He was the only one allowed out so late; or maybe he wasn’t allowed; but either way, he was always around, looking for some mischief.

Pete had seen the murderer last night and had told me about it this afternoon while I was watering Pa’s horse at the trough in front of the Dooley House. He’d promised to take me tonight, if I could get out. It had to be very late, he said, because we had to be sure the murderer didn’t see us because he was going to be hanged shortly and everybody knows it’s bad luck to be looked at by somebody who is going to be hanged. We couldn’t go to look at him during the day because he’d be sure to see us. So we had to be sure he was asleep. I really wanted to see him too. I’d never seen a murderer before and I wasn’t going to be done out of it now no matter what.

I heard him coming then. He was coming through the elms across the road. I could hear him in there. I went down the porch steps as light as I could and went across the back yard and climbed over the picket fence. I met him in the middle of the road. A full white moon had come over the trees and you could see almost like it was morning.

“I made it,” I said.

“That’s good,” Pete said. He had his thumbs hooked inside his suspenders. He was wearing the Union Army forage cap that Clay Taylor had recently brought back from Virginia for him. Pete was the only one in Capstone who owned a hat like that and he wouldn’t trade it for anything. He said it was as near as he could come to fighting Rebs; the War was in its second year then.

We went down to the crossroads and then along Grant Avenue’s moonlit emptiness.

“You sure he won’t see us?” I asked.

“Nothing to be worried about,” Pete said. We walked between the ruts that the wagons made, on the shaggy grass that grew there.

“How many times have you seen him?”

“Twice,” Pete said. “The last two nights.”

“What does he look like?”

“You’ll see. You’ll see him good tonight. The moon is just right.”

The jail stood off by itself, a long, low, oblong building. Down further were the Dooley House and Gibson’s tavern and the stores, but they were quiet now, very quiet.

We lightfooted around behind the jail. High up in the long, whitewashed wall were the little cell-windows. Pete had moved the rain barrel under one of them and that was where the murderer was. Pete climbed up onto the barrel first and took hold of the bars and looked in, bending his face in close.

“Is he there?” I whispered, clasping my hands.

“Shhh,” he said.

“Let me up,” I said.

He moved aside on the barrel and I climbed on. I hooked my fingers into his belt and pulled myself up and took hold of the bars and held my breath and looked down into the cell.

He was lying on the cot, the murderer was, on his back, sleeping. The moon fell full and bright through the bars and showed him good. I recognized him now as a man I’d seen about town from time to time, Jimmy Grover. Mostly I’d seen him drunk. He was not a very large man but was sort of round. He had a short beard which lent a peculiar sadness to his reposing face. His hands were clasped over his chest and he looked just like any other man who is asleep.

“That’s him,” Pete whispered.

“He don’t look so special,” I said.

Then his eyes opened. They opened slow and mysterious and were looking right up at our faces in the bars. And he looked worse with his eyes open — he looked like he was dead. The way they had just opened like that, it was uncanny; they had opened and found us there, or more properly caught us, and were holding us, and there was nothing we could do about it. We couldn’t move. We couldn’t do anything but stare back, our fingers caught around the bars.

At first his eyes showed nothing, as if our faces peeping there were a continuation of his dream. Then they became startled and I could detect a tremor go through his body. But he didn’t move yet. I think if he would have moved — if he would have so much as parted his hands — we would have gone over backwards off the barrel.

He spoke first.

“What do you want?” he said. He was a little afraid and perhaps a trifle indignant.

Neither of us spoke, could answer. He asked it again, his voice not so harsh this time.

“We don’t want anything,” Pete said.

“You must want something,” the murderer said.

“Honest we don’t,” Pete said.

The murderer moved now, slowly, almost deliberately slowly so as not to alarm us. First his hands slid away and then he sat up on the cot, watching us.

“You’ve come to look at me, haven’t you?” he said. “You must think I’m a strange specimen.”

“Yes sir,” Pete said, not precisely agreeing, but trying to be agreeable.

“If you’ve come to see a murderer, then you’re wasting your time,” the murderer said, sitting there in the moonlight and looking up at us as if we were the peculiar ones.

“You mean to say you’re not a murderer?” I asked.

“I never killed anybody,” he said.

“Then why are you here?” Pete asked.

“The jails are full of innocent men.”

“But everybody says you’re a murderer,” Pete said stubbornly, as though trying to convince him.

Then he commenced to tell us his side of what had happened those few days ago when he’d got into his trouble.

“We’d been drinking some, Eddie Larsen and I,” he said. “We’d got ourselves a jug from Gibson’s and gone over towards the marsh in good spirits. On the way we passed the Misses Tabers and Doctor Howell, and Eddie, being in his state, sorta sassed them and I had to cuff him on the head to make him stop and he yelled at me for it and we went off arguing into the woods. That’s what the Misses Tabers and the doctor told at the trial and they were right as far as they told; what was wrong was the conclusions that were made of it.”

“You couldn’t blame people for thinkin’ it,” Pete said.

“Maybe not. But it ain’t right to hang a naan for what people happen to conclude,” Jimmy said hotly. Then he subsided a bit. “I’ll tell you the rest, if you want to hear.”

“We want to hear,” I said.

“We finished the jug, Eddie and I, and he wanted some more. He said that there was probably some in Mattick’s shed and that he’d go over there and steal a jug. I was in good spirits, but still in control of myself. No, I says, you can’t go onto a man’s property and steal from him, especially a man such as Mattick. But Eddie, he was of a mind and when he got like that there was no standing him off. The last I saw of him he was reeling down the road to Mattick’s place. The next thing I know is two days later I’m arrested for the murder, for which they have not even found a corpse...”

“But lots of blood marks on the rocks near the road,” Pete said.

“It’s a far cry from real evidence,” Jimmy said.

“They say you killed him and buried him somewheres,” Pete said.

“Hang it, boy, I know what they say. And I say they’re liars.”

“They say you was awful drunk and did it without knowing and that now you don’t remember,” Pete said.

“That’s what they say, and that ain’t evidence,” Jimmy said. He rose now and stood there in all dignity, the moon halfway up him, his legs standing in shadow. “You’re looking at an innocent man, boys,” he said.

“Then who is the murderer?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“But you’re stuck for it,” Pete said.

“Unless a miracle happens,” Jimmy said.

“Well you hang on,” said Pete, “and maybe the miracle will come true.”

We got down off the barrel then and went away. We walked up along the middle of the empty road.

“I don’t know,” Pete said, “but he looks innocent to me.”

“Innocent or not, they’re going to hang him sure. Pa said it yesterday.”

“I don’t like it,” Pete said, starting to brood on it.

“A man can look innocent and not be.”

“Or might well be too. I’ll tell you, Gascius, once they hang a man it don’t make no difference to him if they find later he was innocent after all. They can name a park or a horserace after him, but he’s finished all the same, poor chap.”

“But if he’s innocent then where is Eddie Larsen? It’s been more than a week now.”

“Could be anywhere. Maybe waiting for them to hang old Jimmy and then come out of the woods and say wasn’t it a fine joke he done. Some fellows has got humors like that.”

“So what can we do?” I asked.

“We give it our every thought,” Pete said as he hooked his thumbs into his suspenders.

Pete would think of something, I knew. The prospect was both intriguing and intimidating because often he let ingenuity outgallop prudence. His ideas often sounded as if they had been propounded in a nightmare and then been chased for two miles over stones and then fallen down a precipice into a rapids and gone over a waterfall and been thrown back onto dry land still on hind legs and still running.

I suppose I felt sort of sorry for old Jimmy. Justice in Capstone in the 1860’s was brief and positive. Public opinion — which was the prejudices of the men who sat on Dooley’s porch — generally decided if a man was guilty or not, and so the trial was generally a mere formality. If enough men said, “I reckon Jimmy Grover murdered Eddie Larsen,” then that was the way it was to be no matter how hard Jimmy Grover’s lawyer ranted.

So they had the gallows all fixed and waiting for Jimmy and it looked sure like he was going to dance on it.

This will be the last season that Dorothy goads me into turning over the back lawn. I’ve lost count of how many successive Septembers she has gotten me to sow new lawns, back or front or both. Each fall I gripe that it’s me we’re killing, not the crabgrass. It was inevitable that one day I’d realize that her gardening would kill me if I didn’t kill her first. So this year we will turn over the back lawn again, but when I seed it, Dorothy will be lying underneath.

My twist to this familiar plan is so foolproof that I’m sorry I didn’t think of it one, two, five years ago. Each year Dorothy nags until I agree to hire old Krajewski to bring in his rotary plow and turn over either or both lawns. Then, while she spends the next four days at the flower show in Newark, I spread fertilizer and seed, and water every four hours. This September I’ll help her pack her bags, then just before she leaves I’ll rap her over the head. I will dig a trench in the newly turned-over lawn, put her in, then the next morning I’ll do my seeding. The quick germinating ryegrass in the seed mixture will sprout within three days. By the fifth day, when I will have to report her missing because she didn’t return from the flower show, the lawn will have a uniform stand of young grass.

Greg MacNeel nursed his drink along, wanting to pick it up and swallow it and order another, but knowing that would accomplish nothing at all toward solving the problem. Actually, it would in all probability have an adverse effect because in addition to soothing his jangled nerves it would give him a false outlook and that was one thing he could not afford. Not now.

Simply stated, the problem was a matter of choosing between two alternatives. On the one hand he could chuck Clarissa, break off with her — completely and with finality. He was very good at that. Or, he could kill Harry Melton. Clarissa would then be free to marry him and she would have all Harry Melton’s money.

Eenie, meenie, minie, mo...

He took another sip of his drink and looked around the dim-lit bar. It had started right here less than three months ago. Clarissa had been watching him in the mirror behind the bar. He knew she was watching him, that wasn’t an unusual thing to happen to Greg MacNeel. A glance at him explained it, cleft chin, straight nose tipped up just a bit at the end, wide-set gray eyes, wavy black hair, white even teeth. The sum total of his features was an aristocratic handsomeness that fostered an intuitive dislike in most men and a hopeful distrust in women.

He waited, over-eagerness being the mark of the amateur. After awhile he lifted his glass to his lips and as he did so he crooked a finger and the bartender came and stopped before him. The contrast between the two men was complete, Adonis confronted by a gargoyle.

“Refill, Mr. MacNeel?”

“Not just yet. Who is she, Barney? The one there at the end, that’s been giving me the once-over.”

Barney flourished his rag over the spotless bartop and cut his eyes down the bar. “The blonde doll with the earrings and brooch? The one that spells dough with a capital D?”

MacNeel suppressed a smile. “That’s the one.” Barney had become a great deal more observant of the finer things these past months, as a result of watching MacNeel in action.

“Search me. Never laid eyes on her before. Not bad, though.”

“Not bad at all. What’s she drinking?”

“She’s had a pair of champagne cocktails. Acts a little like something’s bugging her.”

MacNeel finished his drink and pushed the glass across the bar. “I’ll have that refill now, Barney, and a champagne cocktail for the lady, with my compliments.”

The bartender grinned his admiration, screwing his homely face into a caricature of itself. “You’re a pleasure to observe, Mr. MacNeel! None of these young punks can hold a candle to you, not a candle! The old master himself!”

Greg MacNeel took the words in the sense they were offered, as a statement of fact rather than as flattery. A man does not succumb to blandishments concerning a business he has been successfully engaged in for more than twenty years. He did wish, however, that Barney had not put quite so much emphasis on the word “old”. MacNeel was barely thirty-nine, but he was a realist and therefore aware of the beginning sag beneath his chin, of the incipient paunch when not wearing his girdle, and of the alarming quantity of black hair that turned up in his brush each morning. Barney, by using that word, had reminded him that the time was drawing near when he should consider some permanent alliance, and the time to find just the right one was while the cards were still stacked in his favor.

So he had met Clarissa there in Barney’s place and after he had gotten a few more cocktails into her, he learned from her that she was married to a man named Harry Melton and that Harry Melton was twice her age and had a great deal of money.

“I’m the little bird in the gilded cage, Greg,” she said later as they danced at a road house in Jersey.

“How’d you manage to fly the coop tonight? It can’t be much of a cage.”

“Harry’s in Chicago on business. He doesn’t go away often and when he does I feel that if I don’t get out of that house and have a little fun I’ll go stark raving mad.” She shook her head as she looked up at him. “You wouldn’t know what that feels like, would you?”

He grinned. “I suspect you weren’t forced at gunpoint to marry the man.”

Clarissa laughed, bitterly. “Everybody can be bought. I was bought.” She touched a finger to MacNeel’s lips. “Let’s have a fling. I’m Cinderella and it’s not midnight yet.”

“I hope this will be more than a fling with us.”

She laughed again, but gaily this time. “That smacks of a line, Mr. MacNeel. But I like it.”

It was a line. And of course they both knew that it was. But Harry Melton’s trips away from the city grew more frequent and every time Harry was away Clarissa went directly to Greg. They met in out of the way places, and never twice in the same place. Clarissa insisted on this. “I don’t love him, but I do love his money,” she said to Greg.

And that was another thing that bothered MacNeel. Clarissa never picked up the tab, even though he told her frankly that he was broke. She explained that expenses incurred while her husband was out of town would be hard to explain.

About a month later, Greg stopped off at Barney’s place one afternoon.

“Well, hello there, Mr. MacNeel! Ain’t seen you in awhile!”

“All play and no work, you know, Barney.”

Barney winked knowingly. “The doll with the earrings and brooch?” he said, and his hands got busy mixing a martini.

MacNeel shrugged and the bartender’s face split in a wide grin. “Magnifico! Like putting the little leaguers against the Yanks I Yes sir, these young squirts just ain’t got the touch of the old master!”

There it was again, that unpleasant pang when the word “old” came up. “You make it sound too easy,” MacNeel said, “We’ve all got our problems.”

Barney frowned. “You got problems?” He put the martini on the bar, in front of MacNeel. “I should have a half a dozen of the problems you handsome guys got, two blondes, two redheads, and a pair of brunettes. If you ever get married and settle down, Mr. MacNeel, the world is goin’ to lose one of the great ones!”

Barney moved down the bar to wait on a customer and Greg MacNeel sat staring into his drink. He picked it up occasionally and sipped at it. He was thinking about marriage. He’d marry Clarissa if he could. In a way, he really liked her. Maybe if she got a divorce, it could be framed so that she would get a hefty settlement from the old man.

The bartender came back and picked up MacNeel’s empty glass. MacNeel nodded and Barney set about preparing a fresh martini. “Like I was saying, Mr. MacNeel, I should have the problems you good-lookin’ guys have. Now you take me, for instance, ninety-nine percent of the time a dame’ll laugh right in my face.”

MacNeel smiled. It was a switch, the customer listening to the troubles of the bartender. “You probably make out better than any guy in town.”

Barney sighed philosophically. “Well, there’s always that one percent that doesn’t laugh at me. You might not believe it, but some dames really dig us ugly guys! Sure! I figure it’s got something to do with the mother instinct. Anyhow, when you work for something, really work, you appreciate it* more. Keeps you right on your toes, too.” He tapped his forehead. “Keeps you using the old bean.”

It was suddenly necessary for me to escape from Heathstone Rest Sanitarium.

Not that the place was driving me crazy, or becoming a bore. The inmates still interested me, but my burgeoning personality was ready to absorb the greater varieties outside. Heated thoughts were running to wild little sportscars, turning more to girls of which there was a rather lugubrious selection at Heathstone.

But more to the point — I must admit it — I was frightened. If I didn’t get out and have a final showdown with Mother at once, I might never have the chance. I might remain buried in Heathstone until the world abruptly came to an end.

I read the letter again, the one from Mother.

“Dearest Sunny: Happy Birthday! As you read this, I’ll be honeymooning with silly Mr. “Y” whom I mentioned in my last letter. He looks like a crane with an amputated beak and is well into his second childhood if he ever grew out his first. But all is compensated for by his rolling in wealth like a pig in mud (as you might guess, ha ha!).

Stay happy, study hard, add to your genius and finish that delightful novel. If you need anything let me know at once. Mr. “Y” and I will be at the Retreat beginning July 3rd, so remember to write but don’t forget to make it General Delivery. Mr. “Y” is a narrow smug old soul who take philistine offense at the postmark on the letter. Say hello to your eccentric friends for me, especially to that handsome devil, Dr. Lawrence. Hope you enjoy your present. Love always, Mother.”

The first letter in nearly two months when she used to write every week. The birthday present, a wristwatch, wasn’t comparable to her usual expensive gifts, but was a shoddy gesture. It was also a brief formal note compared with her usual long effusive outbursts. She was losing interest in me. She would forget about me completely!

Fear gnawed, then turned to quite ominous rage. As bughouses go, Heathstone was one of the finer institutions. Its guests paid up to fifteen hundred dollars a month for doubious special privileges. But just the same I had no stomach for being walled off there forever. It was adding insult to injury for my Mother to forget about me, as if I were simply buried alive!

No, it was now or never that I get out and settle with Mother. If my being a free spirit irritated her too much, she might find herself choking on her protests. If something really gruesome occurred then so be it. It was now July 1st, the morning of my 17th birthday. They would be at the retreat beginning the 3rd. I had to be there on the 3rd also to connect up with that blissful couple. And it would be a somewhat shocking get-together, I would make sure of that!

I had to escape that evening to reach the Retreat by the 3rd, and fix things so that I would never be sent back to Bedlam.

First, to arrange a transfer from Seclusion Cottage K to Heathstone Hall which housed the administrative staff and the open wards where milder inmates considered well enough not to need close custodial care were herded about.

My cottage window was open. I looked through the heavy wire mesh at the lovely spring morning under the shade trees. Then I began to howl and gibber with a repercussive skill that comes only after long association with pros. A layman shrieking wholeheartedly produces nothing comparable to even the mild outbursts of a practiced lunatic. The most energetic novice can howl himself hoarse and elicit perhaps a few derisive catcalls. But let a pro sound off and every fellow inmate takes up the cry with the lunar urgency of a pack of hungry wolves.

This isn’t tolerated, especially in status institutions such as Heathstone. Burly attendants, who go by the polite euphemism of bughousers, bear down like beerhall bouncers and clubbing fists skillfully find their marks; a report is turned in — you fell over a chair or out of bed. If the bughouser can restrain excessive indignation you’re “necked-out”, that is, choked into insensibility with no marks visible so that the filling out of a form is not necessary. But I rated more humane treatment from Eddie who regarded my 178 I.Q. with awe, and even suspected me of being a spy from some public investigative committee. Above all, he was greedy. And Mother had always provided me with ample bribe-moneys.

I slipped Eddie a ten plus my birthday watch. “Go tell the Director he must see me at once. I’ve been hallucinating rather wildly about my mother.”

“Okay, Sunny,” he said and scurried away.

Dr. Zitner, I knew, would treat my request in a cavalier manner. But Dr. Zitner was away on vacation, replaced by Dr. Lawrence who now doled out salvation, reprieves and purgatives. I expected compassion from Dr. Lawrence. Ever since he had seen my Mother when she came to visit me, he had shown zealous interest in me. “How’s your charming Mother,” he was always asking me.

I didn’t blame him for being influenced by my Mother’s charms. I admired her predatory talents that had, in a dangerously competitive business, resulted in her becoming exceedingly wealthy.

“Sit down, Sunny,” Dr. Lawrence said, smiling from behind Zitner’s teakwood desk. He tossed me a pack of smokes and a lighter and I sat down and lit up. He studied me meanwhile through smoke that seemed designed to curtain any clinical light. He was the studied informality type, the I’m-just-a-plain-Joe kind of Doc. This was supposed to inspire confidence, but seemed to me only a cover up for genuine ignorance. “What’s this malarky about Mom hallucinations, Sunny?”

“Malarky?” I feigned astonishment.

“Exactly. During Dr. Zitner’s absence I’ve been examining your personnel files. You’ve had no hallucinations here. There’s something fishy about these reports, too.”

“I’m not here to be pried at like a clam,” I said. “But to ask a favor. I’ve felt a music mood coming on. If I were transferred back to Heathstone Hall I could play Mozart on the recreation piano.”

He studied me as if trying to pretend I was something a bit more than a bug under a microscope.

“We’ll see,” he said, mysteriously.

I tensed. He was holding his permission in abeyance. I was in for more clinical probing. I couldn’t waste time with that jazz. All I could think about was getting upstate for that final gruesome rendezvous with Mother.

“You’re so talented,” he said. “Mozart on the piano. And a novel finished.”

“Not quite,” I said. “My precocity will make it a sure commercial success when it is finished. And its literary value will bring praise from critics. They’ll compare it with early Sagan, which will then seem like the mewlings of a semi-literate sophomore.”

Dr. Lawrence grinned. “You couldn’t convince me you had delusions of grandeur, not even if you came in here saying you were Françoise Sagan.” He blinked slowly like a frog. “Your case intrigues me. Why do you insist on loving your mother? Why no normal resentments?”

I was on guard. My Mother was my own business. I couldn’t afford to have any interference now. She was going to settle up with me. I was going to get everything that was coming to me. And I didn’t intend giving anything away.

“Level with me, Sunny.” He thumped a file folder. “I think you’re the victim of injustice. Something smells.”

“Such as what?”

“In the first place, I don’t think you’re any crazier than I am — if that’s any sort of effective comparison.”

“It’s quite appropriate,” I said. “Anyway, I’m only a patient here myself. Dr. Zitner put the official stamp on me. I’m strictly psycho.”

“I put in my dissenting vote, Sunny.”

“So what? You’ll never go over the head of Dr. Zitner.”

“But you could level with me and we might work out something.”

“Who am I to challenge Dr. Zitner’s diagnosis?” I said.

Dr. Lawrence leaned forward. “It’s easy to railroad a juvenile. Any constituted adult authority can have any juvenile committed. A juvenile has no legal rights. You found that out didn’t you, when at the tender age of fifteen you were accused of being a teen-age maniac? All right, so you were committed. But so far as I’m concerned you were perfectly sane at the time. Now, every month Dr. Zitner gets a big fat check from your Mother, and as a result you remain crazy. So Zitner’s human, and we all must earn a living, granted. But why should you accept it all so meekly? Why no protests?”

“Either because I’m really a loony,” I said, grinning. “Or because I’m too smart to disagree with Doc Zitner. I might be proud of my 178 I.Q. and prefer not to get my cells short-circuited by having Zitner subject me to shock-therapy. Take your pick.”

Dr. Lawrence nodded. “That makes sense.” He fondled his lower lip and mused over my enigmatic presence. Meanwhile I was eagerly trying to control my nervous excitement in anticipation of leaving Heathstone and getting the show on the road. There was a kind of beautiful terror in imagining my Mother and me confronting one another at last — with murder arriving to seal our continued familial affections forever.

“All right, Sunny. It’s a rare thing for an authentic psycho to admit it. And you’re obviously a phony. No one but a psycho can act like one and you’ve never fooled me for a minute. Your being in a booby hatch is about as logical as Noel Coward standing in for King Kong.”

I laughed appreciatively.

Then he barked suddenly. “So why do you insist on loving your mother who has kept you locked up in a cage for three years?” Lawrence was getting himself worked up. “Of course I know she sent you to the finest institution of its kind, but it isn’t an ivy-walled private school! This is a nuthouse, friend! But you don’t fight. You never protest. Why do you go on loving your mother?” He slammed the desk. “If you were really crazy, then loving the hand that poisoned you might make crazy sense. Guilt, need for punishment, disguised hostility. Name your school, take your choice. But you’re not crazy. So loving your mother has to make some other kind of sense.”

“I don’t love her. Love is a deceptive illusion, a sentimental relic of the past. I admire, respect my Mother.”

“All right! Call it admiration and respect then. But do flies admire Flit? You ought to hate your Mother!”

“But that’s just it,” I yelled. “She’s my Mother!”

“Just simple, old-fashioned loyalty to the clan. That it?”

“The present fad of loathing one’s parents doesn’t appeal to me. Mother did the only possible thing under the circumstances. It hurt her far more than it hurt me, I’m positive of that.”

“Well, for a broken-hearted mother she’s sure been having a good time out there. If your mother’s behavior is supposed to represent celebrated mother-love, then it’s too far out for me. Ever since you were in swaddling clothes it seems your mother’s main concern was to avoid the sight and sound of you. She farmed you out to foster homes when you were less than a year old. Then into private schools, finally into an insane asylum! Mother seems to have considered you an intentional leper, or a carrier of bubonic plague.”

“She had to earn a living,” I said. My face felt flushed. Inside of me, a cauldron of hot lava waited to boil over.

“What kind of work? Come on, tell me. Whisper it in my ear if it’ll make you blush. Write me a note.”

“It was none of my business,” I said.

“Then why do you conceal facts?”

“I’m not!”

“You’re trying to conceal your own sanity!”

I shrugged. “All right, I’m sane, perfectly normal. All I ask is that you don’t tell Dr. Zitner I’ve been arguing about his judgment. Now, what about my transfer to Heathstone Hall?”

“Acquiescence isn’t an explanation,” Dr. Lawrence said. “Now you cooperate, answer questions with some pretense at honesty, and I’ll seriously consider giving you another trial ran in the Hall.”

I tried to appear cool and relaxed. This salvation-happy Doctor was intent on seeking what he thought of as justice in my case. He could foul up everything. He was sharper than I would have given him credit for being. He might even end up having my mother investigated before I could get to her myself!

I lit up another cigarette and grinned. “I know your game,” I said. “You want to expose Zitner as a fraud so you can take over Heathstone yourself.”

His eyelids flickered. “An astute deduction and it only intensifies my conviction that you are not crazy. But listen, Sunny, has it ever occurred to you that I don’t want to see your genius wasted, that I don’t like seeing talent railroaded into a booby hatch?” He glanced at the file. “Three years ago you ran to the police with certain — it says here — ‘fantastic allegations’ concerning your mother. Is that correct?”

I nodded.

“You were enrolled at Black Hills Military Academy and you ran away from there so you could go home for Christmas. Was your charming mother expecting you?”

My throat felt tight. “No, I wanted to surprise her,” I said.

“You mean it surprised your mother to have her only beloved son home for Christmas! Is it possible that you sneaked home for Christmas, Sunny, because you knew that if you gave advance notice she would prevent you from sharing the joyous Yuletide?”

My mouth felt dry. The cigarette tasted foul and I smudged it out.

“Why don’t you admit it, Sunny? She didn’t want you home for the happy holidays. You would have been an impediment, a canker, a wet blanket—”

“Why don’t you try the rack, or thumbscrews?” I asked.

Lawrence studied me a moment. Then he swiveled his chair and looked out the window. “On that Christmas Eve, did you or did you not interrupt a rather bizarre interlude between your mother and a certain Mr. Croats?”

“What is this, a trial?” I yelled.

“And did you then run to the police and tell them that your mother had deliberately, even perhaps maliciously, set Mr. Croats on fire?”

I started laughing.

“It doesn’t strike me as funny stuff, Sunny.”

“Sorry, but you know the basis for humor, Doc. I got a mental picture of old man Croats on fire, running around that blazing Christmas tree trying to put himself out with a bottle of seltzer.”

“You weren’t laughing when you ran to the police,” Dr. Lawrence said wryly. “Anyway, they considered your story to be unrealistic. And they therefore didn’t believe you.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Because at the time I was not in my right mind.”

“And it’s a good thing they didn’t believe you, isn’t it, Sunny?” Dr. Lawrence stood up suddenly and leaned across his desk. “Imagine people thinking, even erroneously, that a charming woman like your mother would go around setting old men on fire!”

“Especially,” I said with a calm grin, “on Christmas Eve.”

Dr. Lawrence sat down with a sigh. “A convenient time for a fatal accident, wasn’t it? Your mother explained all of that afterward, of course, how it was a terrible accident. Croats was trying to put out the Christmas tree blaze and in so doing contracted a fatal dose of the flames.”

“That’s what happened,” I said. “A fatal accident.”

“And the original story to the police was only the result of hallucinations, right, Sunny?”

“That’s all in the report,” I said. “Stamped by Dr. Zitner. You see, emotionally, I had never really understood being kept away from home all those years. I resented it. I was jealous of the men who replaced me in my mother’s affections and I wanted revenge. When I sneaked back home for Christmas and saw Mr. Croats on fire I imagined that he had been deliberately set afire, because that was what I wanted to do to him. Later, probably because of moral cowardice or because I wanted my mother to show how she hated those men as much as I and that she loved me after all, I imagined that mother had set him on fire.”

“Very neat,” Dr. Lawrence said. “But granting all that was true why must you remain crazy and incarcerated here, Sunny? Any other mother, or most mothers, would have forgiven you and sought your release. You’re cured. You could be released any time.”

“Not according to Dr. Zitner,” I said. “According to Dr. Zitner, I’m a hotbed of repressed hostility, capable of anything. It would be dangerous for me to roam around loose out there.”

Dr. Lawrence, smiling warmly, stood up. He walked around the desk and looked down at me. “Thank you, Sunny, for an extremely interesting discussion. I’ll tell Eddie to transfer your stuff over to the Hall.”

I stood up. “Thank you, sir.”

“But no funny stuff, Sunny. Don’t try running away.”

“Why should I do that?”

“A better question would be, why shouldn’t you? But I know the answer. Your mother would send you back. Strictly for your own good, of course, even though her heart would be breaking.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily say that.”

“But you’ve never taken the chance and put the proposition to the test, have you?”

“No, because that would be stupid.”

“Not only stupid, but it would upset your mother, right? The devotion you two have for one another is really a touching thing. If you were released, you might start spreading unpleasant gossip about your mother again. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

“No,” I said. “Her life is difficult enough as it is.”

Soon as Eddie transferred my personal belongings to a locker in the open ward at Heathstone Hall, I packed a few items, including my Leica camera, into a padded bundle and tossed it through the window bars into some brush in the rear of the institution’s north wing. After that, I entertained a few of my fellow inmates with Mozart and Brahms. I wasn’t in the mood for it. I kept thinking of the bloody rendezvous waiting at the Retreat, and the result was hardly a polished performance. But my audience wasn’t the discriminating sort and it did have a properly therapeutic atmosphere.

Later, about sundown, I mixed with the patients in the recreation rooms and later edged outside for more strenous play — that included tennis, swimming and a few rounds of croquet.

Only the mildest and most malleable patients were allowed to roam about in that relatively free manner. Most of them found Heathstone a pleasant place compared with the complex world outside and wouldn’t have escaped if urged to do so. Most of the others were literally scared into submission. This is by way of pointing out that the attendant of the open wards had been lured into complacency. My particular attendant lolled in a sunchair, half-dozing as I casually stroked a croquet ball into the brush, walked in to retrieve it and never reappeared at Heathstone.

I continued on along the wall of the North wing, picked up my bundle and hiked away into the woods and over the wall.

I glanced back with a touch of nostalgia at Heathstone Rest. My companions there had much to recommend them. They had merely, for the most part, sought refuge from a frightening world. There is a justifiable logic in regarding what is whimsically known as “sane society” with alarm. Like the poor, God must be on the side of the disturbed people, for there are getting to be so many of them.

As for me, I saw only a quantitative difference between the inside and outside of Bedlam. I was ready to start living fast and on a scale that would allow for no imposed limitations. I was ready to live dangerously and meeting Mr. “Y” and my mother would give me a good sendoff.

I proceeded to make my way exuberantly and directly, without wasting time, toward the Retreat upstate. I hitchhiked into the nearest town, picked up suitable clothes in a hockshop. I had saved a neat little nestegg from the liberal allowance sent me regularly by Mother. At a war-surplus store I bought a canteen, a blanket, and an army knapsack. I expected to spend at least one night sleeping under the stars. I went to a gunshop and bought a high-powered BB target pistol. These weapons are perfectly lethal when fired accurately at close range, and they require no gun permit or a certificate of legal age. I bought film for my Leica, then boarded a Greyhound bus that was headed upstate.

With my knapsack and appropriate attire, I suggested a rather sophisticated nature boy heading out to the boondocks to replenish my spirit with open sky and earthiness.

A lovely young girl challenged me with hot dark eyes, and my unleashed senses stirred me toward aggressive action, but I kept myself under control. I would no more make a move to exploit my freedom until it was assured, than I would go to the races with only a dime in my pocket.

Meanwhile, I sat back and watched the night lights of my world — my oyster — rolling past. I would appropriate whatever I demanded of it which would be considerable. My Mother would furnish the financial means, and murder itself would, of course, be no obstacle. It never has been, as you know, for really ambitious people.

First, I would acquire a wardrobe and a sportscar, custom-built. By then my novel would be published and fame added to financial status. That is important because, after all, any rigidly grooved idiot can be wealthy.

As the bus rocked through the night, I lay back on a cushion of anticipation. There would be interviews, television appearances, tours. There would be a European jaunt, visiting a few individuals important in the world of international art. I could even hear a broadcast tape-interview with Françoise Sagan in Paris.

“But, Sunny,” she said in her sulky French. “You’re so young!”

“My dear, I was never young,” I said. “Early in life I decided not to waste my life on youth.”

“But you’re only seventeen. And this novel — it sounds so autobiographically mature. You couldn’t already have spent three years in a mad house!”

“Oh yes. I had myself put away so I could mature at once.”

“You didn’t! Why, that’s so philosophically correct!”

I laughed. “Isn’t it, my dear Françoise. What better training could a young artist have for interpreting the present state of the world than to spend his formative years in an asylum?”

I lay staked out about fifty yards from the cabin, back up among the pine trees. It was a wild pleasant nest on top of a pile of boulders, curtained off from below by brush. Dead pine needles were my bed. I lay listening to nature’s song, watching the cabin and the lake. Night came again. Moon and stars appeared in familiar patterns. Night prowlers and their prey came out to cavort in their eternal drama of bloody pursuit and flight. I munched chocolate bars and studied the sky. Each star seemed to be but a glittering facet of my multiple destiny.

Early on the morning of the 3rd I practiced a little, plunking BB shot into birds and squirrels. I loaded my Leica carefully.

Although I had no idea what name my Mother would be honeymooning under this time, finding the cabin had been a simple bit of detective work. I knew she would own the cabin. Every letter I had ever gotten from her when she was honeymooning or vacationing with some guy had been written from the Retreat — postmarked Stevens Corners, a whistle-stop in a secluded valley. I knew, from letter references, that it was on the lake. I had only to find that section of the lake reserved for private cabins as opposed to the public campsites. This being the heart of the vacation season, I had only to find the one empty cabin among those privately owned after determining that my Mother wasn’t in any of the others. Anyway, she had said she would arrive on the 3rd.

At nine a.m. a spanking new station wagon drove up and parked in front of the cabin near the front porch. I controlled my excitement with difficulty as Mother jumped exuberantly out of the car followed by Mr “Y” who moved in a much less animated manner.

Mother, wearing a red skirt and white blouse, urged him to even greater animation, goading him with laughter and polite teasing as he struggled unloading and carrying heavy suitcases onto the porch. Mother had always been carefully selective so, of course, Mr. “Y” was hardly up to this sort of unabated workout. Mother’s description of him had been amusing, but understated. Compared with Mr. “Y”, old Croats could have won the Mr. Universe contest hands down. My Mother, although she was a bit plumper now and a blonde, had not changed, but was as spry and effervescent as ever.

After Mr. “Y” wheezed and staggered the suitcases onto the porch, I heard Mother giggling as she asked him to carry her over the threshold. I shuddered, but didn’t see what happened then as they moved out of sight under the porch roof.

Later they appeared on the back patio with lunch and a batch of martinis. Mother wore sunshorts and seemed to have acquired a nice suntan. Mr. “Y” in an old-fashioned bathing suit reminded me of a spindly, pale insect that had lived all of its life in a dark cellar.

There followed a fast and prolonged game of ping-pong at which Mother was adept. Mr. “Y” almost collapsed, but was goaded into the woods in the rear of the cabin where Mother led him skipping grotesquely, like a Diane who had stumbled onto a decrepit and disgruntled old faun.

Mother wouldn’t waste any time. She had often said she was strictly a city girl. The Retreat was a necessary evil. Her dislike of nature and open spaces bordered on allergy. She would work fast.

I checked my Leica with the exposure meter, rolled a fresh charge of BB shot into the pistol, and followed them into the woods.

From less than ten feet away, I began snapping pictures of their idyllic little pagan rite. From behind a curtain of thick leaves I could observe and record without fear of detection. The creek had been dammed up to form a large pool. I could almost hear the precarious knocking of the old boy’s heart as he tested the icy water with his foot and jumped back shivering. “Why didn’t we go in the lake?” he croaked dismally. “Warmer in the lake.”

“You tenderfoot,” my Mother said, giggling girlishly. Then, without hesitation, she dived in, came up sputtering and laughing in uninhibited joy. “Oh come on, don’t be a wet blanket!” she yelled, good humoredly. “Come on, dear, let’s play!”

Mr. “Y” bent down and rubbed his pale bones. “Ah,” he whined. “Ah, honey.”

She grabbed at his ankles, but he stumbled away. She taunted and teased, but he crouched a few feet from the edge of the water, and assumed a stubborn sullen expression. “Well,” Mother pouted charmingly, “I’ll just have to play by myself.”

She surface-dived, clowned, cavorted like a water nymph. Mr. “Y” watched her with that sullen stubborn resistance. There might be trouble with Mr. “Y”, I thought. For all his outward appearance, he could well be made of extremely stern stuff.

Suddenly Mother gasped, doubled over in the water. She beat at the water futilely and began to choke and cry out for help.

Mr. “Y” was a reluctant and cautious hero. He approached the water with the enthusiasm of a house-cat and leaned over it trying to reach my Mother who managed to remain out of reach.

I was busily snapping my Leica as Mother grabbed his ankles and pulled him in. Then I realized that the main reason why he had been reluctant to go in was because he couldn’t swim. Mother immediately took advantage of this handicap by leaping up and pushing his head under repeatedly. But as I feared, Mr. “Y” was fired by unexpected reserves of survival urges. He began crawling desperately up the bank, digging and wriggling in the mud. Mother’s usually capable hands slipped. She lunged to reclaim her hold, this time by the straps of Mr. “Y’s” antique bathing suit. I continued clicking away with my Leica as his suit began sliding off, causing him to turn — a victim of false modesty — in an effort to hold the suit on. He even succeeded in continuing his frantic flight up the bank with one hand.

I could see that Mother was desperate, even as desperate as Mr. “Y”. Deciding it was time to establish my postponed partnership with my Mother and define it uncontrovertibly forever, I stepped out of concealment. Bending down I banged the barrel of the pistol against Mr. “Y’s” forehead.

The shock was sufficient. Stunned and terrified, he slid back down into the water where my Mother quickly disposed of him.

Following the initial surprise at seeing me, Mother hugged and kissed me with genuine spontaneous joy. This I appreciated.

“But what on earth are you doing here?” she asked.

“A boy should be with his mother,” I said.

“I know, but you’ll just have to go back, honey,” she said regretfully. Then her eyes flickered toward Mr. “Y”, bobbing like a misshapen bottle in the pool.

“No, I’m not going back,” I said. “I’m staying with you now. It wouldn’t be fair for either of us, for me to stay in there indefinitely. Actually, it was never necessary for me to be put away.”

I patted her wet shoulder in reassurance. “I know what just happened with Mr. “Y.” And it’s all here in my Leica. That’s just in case I’m ever called on to prove that what I’ve just seen wasn’t an hallucination.”

“Why, Sunny, that sort of sneaky business isn’t like you!”

“It’s just in case,” I said, smiling. I lifted the pistol. “Just as this is. There’s no need to send me back and you mustn’t. My assistance with the difficult Mr. “Y” should be proof enough of that. I know about all the others, too. I’ve always known. No need to mention names, but I know and I understand.”

“And you don’t — don’t care?”

“Of course not. On the contrary, I admire your success.”

“But you did go to the police about Mr. Croats.”

“That was before I wised up, as they say. That was before I really understood you, Mother. I bore a grudge. I thought you boarded me out just to get rid of me. Now I know you did it because you didn’t think I would understand. You thought I would condemn your actions.”

“Of course I thought you would.”

“I felt bitter that night and went to the police — mostly because you just never confided in me, never shared your work and dreams. If you had been honest with me from the first, you would never have had to have me committed so that whatever I might have said would be considered the hallucinations of a mad person. I would have understood the truth. After all, I’m your son.”

“I know, I know,” she half-sobbed with joy and relief and then embraced me. “And you really sympathize with my — kind of enterprise?”

“Of course, Mother!”

“I didn’t want to put you in that place, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do after you told about Mr. Croats.”

“Oh there was one alternative, Mother. And I got to thinking about that. I knew that because you didn’t take that logical alternative you really loved me.”

“What else could I have done Sunny?”

“You could have murdered me.”

“Oh no, Sunny!” she screamed. “I could never have done such a thing. Why, I’m your Mother!”

She heard it too, just as I did. A slight chuckling sound from the brush nearby. I twisted around and grabbed up the pistol. I edged forward. At that moment, Dr. Lawrence stepped into view and stood there grinning at me.

Dr. Lawrence chuckled again and casually lit a cigarette. Either he was a brave man or didn’t consider me a threat. I walked a few feet nearer so some high-compression BB slugs could easily penetrate his stupid head.

He ignored me, bowed slightly and said good morning to Mother. Without looking at her, I caught the very agreeable tone in her voice as she acknowledged his affable greeting.

“All right, Doc,” I said. “Now maybe you figure to die happily because you’ve solved everything.”

Dr. Lawrence exhaled thoughtfully into crisp morning air. “Yes, my research can lead back to odd sources. But I don’t like to waste time. I was sure you intended to run away, Sunny. I had been confiscating your letters. The pattern became clear to me, but I followed you, a sort of a shortcut to the heart of the matter.”

I pointed the pistol at his face. “Too bad you won’t live to receive the Nobel Prize for snooping,” I said.

“I hope I didn’t exaggerate your intelligence, Sunny.”

“Only your own,” I said.

He laughed. “You mustn’t compare me with Mr. Croats, Mr. “Y” or those other lucrative expendables, Sunny. I wouldn’t be easily explained away. Especially with a load of buckshot in my head.”

“But you won’t be worried about it,” I said.

“Now wait, Sunny, please,” my Mother said. She swayed past me in that seductive walk and smiled at Dr. Lawrence.

“Get out of the way!” I screamed at her. But she ignored me and walked right up to him and there they stood gazing into each others’ eyes. It was the sort of unabashed drooly gaze often seen in Ladies Home Companion illustrations. It was nauseating and incredible and if filled one with choking rage.

“Get out of the way, Mother!” I yelled again. “We’ve got to kill the damnable snoop!”

She continued to gaze up into Lawrence’s face, transfixed. “But Sunny,” she whispered, without turning toward me, “Dr. Lawrence saw everything didn’t he? He saw what was happening and he didn’t do a thing to prevent poor Mr. “Y’s” unfortunate accident.”

I stumbled back and sat down heavily on Mother’s florid beach-towel. It was true, horribly true. No need to speculate about Dr. Lawrence’s game which he had probably been playing, or planning to play, for some time. He wanted half of what my Mother had acquired, he wanted to share the wealth that I had expected to monopolize. And Mother was also eager to play the game, only this time I could see it was true love in all of its sentimental odiousness. Dr. Lawrence knew everything. From now on he would be calling the plays. I realized suddenly that I had better admit the facts, make a fast adjustment, or I would be lucky to end up with a weekly allowance.

I jumped up as Dr. Lawrence, his arm around Mother’s waist, walked toward me smiling. He put his other arm over my shoulders.

“It’s my business to know things of this sort,” he said. “And what you’ve always needed, my boy, is a father. A real father. You’ve needed a genuine, warm, family relationship. I want you to call me Dad.”

I had to grin. “You’re the doctor, Dad,” I said.

Then, Dr. Lawrence being a legally constituted medical authority, we discussed the proper sort of obituary report for Mr. “Y.” Then we carried him back to the patio and went into the cabin for lunch before making our emergency call.

Detective Abraham Levine of Brooklyn’s Forty-Third Precinct was a worried and a frightened man. He sat moodily at his desk in the small office he shared with his partner Jack Crawley, and pensively drew lopsided circles on the back of a blank accident report form. In the approximate center of each circle he placed a dot, drew two lines out from the dot to make a clock-face, reading three o’clock. An eight and a half by eleven sheet of white paper, covered with clock-faces, all reading three o’clock.

“That the time you see the doctor?”

Levine looked up, startled, called back from years away. Crawley was standing beside the desk, looking down at him, and Levine blinked, not having heard the question.

Crawley reached down and tapped the paper with a horny fingernail. “Three o’clock,” he explained. “That the time you see the doctor?”

“Oh,” said Levine. “Yes. Three o’clock.”

Crawley said, “Take it easy, Abe.”

“Sure,” said Levine. He managed a weak smile. “No sense worrying beforehand, huh?”

“My brother,” said Crawley, “he had one of those cardiograph things just a couple months ago. He’s just around your age, and man, he was worried. And the doctor tells him, ‘You’ll live to be a hundred.’ ”

“And then you’ll die,” said Levine.

“What the hell, Abe, we all got to go sometime.”

“Sure.”

Abraham Levine was fifty-three years alive, twenty-four years a cop. A short and chunky man, he wore plain brown suits and dark solid-color ties, brown or black plain shoes. His hair was pepper-and-salt gray, trimmed all around in a stiff pseudo-military crew-cut. The crew-cut didn’t go with the face, roundish, soft-eyed, sensitive-lipped, lined with fifty-three years’ accumulation of small worries.

“Listen, Abe, you want to go on home? It’s a dull day, nothing doing, I can—”

“Don’t say that,” Levine warned him. “The phone will ring.” The phone rang as he was talking and he grinned, shrugging with palms up. “See?”

“Let me see what it is,” said Crawley, reaching for the phone. “Probably nothing important. You can go on home and take it easy till three o’clock. It’s only ten now and— Hello?” The last word spoken into the phone mouthpiece. “Yeah, this is Crawley.”

Levine watched Crawley’s face, trying to read in it the nature of the call. Crawley had been his partner for seven years, since old Jake Moshby had retired, and in that time they had become good friends, as close as two such different men could get to one another.

Crawley was a big man, somewhat overweight, somewhere in his middle forties. His clothes hung awkwardly on him, not as though they were too large or too small but as though they had been planned for a man of completely different proportions. His face was rugged, squarish, heavy-jowled. He looked like a tough cop, and he played the role very well.

Crawley had once described the quality of their partnership with reasonable accuracy. “With your brains and my beauty, Abe, we’ve got it made.”

Now, Levine watched Crawley’s face as the big man listened impassively to the phone, finally nodding and saying, “Okay, I’ll go right on up there. Yeah, I know, that’s what I figure, too.” And he hung up.

“What is it, Jack?” Levine asked, getting up from the desk.

“A phony,” said Crawley. “I can handle it, Abe. You go on home.”

“I’d rather have some work to do. What is it?”

Crawley was striding for the door, Levine after him. “Man on a ledge,” he said. “A phony. They’re all phonies. The ones that really mean to jump do it right away, get it over with. Guys like this one, all they want is a little attention, somebody to tell them it’s all okay, come on back in, everything’s forgiven.”

The two of them walked down the long green hall toward the front of the precinct. Man on a ledge, Levine thought. Don’t jump. Don’t die. For God’s sake, don’t die.