“Listen, sport, there was nothing false about what we just did.”

“Yeah, well, I feel that way, too, but I just don’t want you to expect too much of me.”

Scotty turned on her side and put her head on his shoulder. “Johnny, I’ve been stuck up here with nobody, and I mean nobody even to spend an evening with, let alone make love to. I like you, really I do; I think we’ve become friends. But that’s enough for me; is it enough for you? Are you looking for somebody to be in love with you?”

“Oh, no,” Howell said, with sincerity. “I don’t think I could handle that right now.”

“You like me? Are we friends? Do you feel close?”

“Yes, I do. I really do.”

“Well, then, as long as we seem to have slid into this wonderful patch of screwing, why don’t we just ride it out, so to speak, and see how it goes?”

He kissed her on the top of the head. “I think that’s a marvelous idea,” he said. Then, drained and shattered, he fell soundly asleep.

Sometime past midnight, Howell woke with a start, sat straight up in bed. The linens were in disarray. Scotty lay sprawled beside him, face down, naked. He was immediately aroused, wanted her.

But what had wakened him? He had been dreaming the dream, he knew that, but some sound had interrupted. Had it been inside the house? He got his feet on the floor and made his way gingerly into the living room. He didn’t want to turn on the lights. Anyway, the embers of the fire cast some small light. As his eyes became used to it, he saw the girl again.

He froze. She was in the same position as before, standing at the window, her back not quite to him. The light wasn’t good, but he had never seen her for more than a second or two, and he wanted a longer look. Afraid even to blink, he studied her dim outline carefully, and this time saw something different. Although she was small and slight, she seemed to have more shape than he had noticed before; there was something more mature about her. He took a deep breath.

“Kathleen,” he said, softly.

She turned slightly toward him; her face was in shadow, but she seemed to be looking directly at him. After a moment, she turned back toward the window.

Howell took a step toward her, then another. She stepped back into a shadow and seemed to become part of it. She was gone. Howell moved to the window; he wanted to see what she had seen. Outside, lit only by stars, was the lake, just as it always was. He pushed open the french doors and walked onto the deck, out over the water.

There was no moon; the silence was perfect; the crickets had stopped. A chill climbed up his naked skin. Now he knew what had awakened him; not a sound, but a sudden absence of sound. Once before, he remembered, the crickets had stopped.

He looked about him in the darkness, but he could see nothing, no one. His fingers found the deck’s railing, and he leaned against it, stretching to see further. Then, with a loud crack, the weathered railing suddenly gave way and he pitched forward into the darkness, down toward the black waters of the lake. He grabbed a breath, held it, and waited for the cold shock.

But there was no water, only grass at his feet. He was standing in another place, and he knew with certainty that he was not himself; he was another man. He felt ill, felt terribly hung over. He looked wildly about him, completely disoriented. It was still night, but there was no cabin in this place. And no lake.

He stood in a patch of grass and ferns on a forested mountainside and looked out over a valley. There was a house below him, something less than a mile away, with cheerfully lit windows and smoke curling up from the chimney. The floor of the valley was covered with a thick ground fog which reached the steps of the house. Suddenly, the noise of a car engine caused him to turn to his left. An old car, a convertible, sped past him, perhaps twenty yards away, and headed down a road which led into the valley. A childish compulsion to identify all automobiles caused him to say aloud, “Lincoln Continental, 1940.” The voice was not his.

He watched as the car moved into the ground fog of the valley and approached the house. It stopped in the front yard, and a man got out and approached the house. Someone met him at the door and admitted him. Howell heard the screen door slam, and, a moment later a yell, a scream – a man’s voice. Howell was gripped with a thick dizziness, and time seemed to pass. Then he heard the slam of a car door and heard the engine start. The car turned onto the road and headed back the way it had come, toward where he stood. It was moving fast, and in a moment he would be able to see the driver. Already, he could see a glow from the instruments inside the car. There… There, he could nearly see…

A blinding white light filled his vision, obliterating house, car, everything, then the light was black, and he was upside down, cold, choking, struggling desperately for his feet and for air. He surfaced, gagging and spitting, sucking air into his starved lungs. He brushed the water from his eyes, saw the dock, and made for it. When he had climbed out of the water, he did not stop to rest until he was up the steps and back on the deck. Avoiding the broken railing, he looked out over the lake. A cloud drifted away from the moon, revealing everything as it was before. The crickets were chirping loudly.

He moved into the house, found a terry-cloth robe, and poured himself a stiff drink. For half an hour he sat at the table in the living room, looking out over the lake and trying to shape what had happened to him into an acceptable form. He had nearly drowned, he decided, finally, and in his panic had hallucinated. But the hallucination had been his dream, he was sure of it. He had experienced his dream while awake. He had been somewhere else, had been another person, had seen the car and the house, but not the driver. The hallucination had stopped too soon. He was sure that, in the dream, he had seen more.

He finished his drink and went back to bed. Scotty was still as he had left her. She stirred as he climbed onto the bed. He ran his hand lightly down her back. She made a small noise and snuggled up to him.

“What a night,” she said softly into his shoulder.

“What a night, indeed,” he said back to her, then fell asleep.

13

Scotty drove to work feeling pleasantly tired, drained, and happy. With a lover now available, she felt that some lost part of herself had been restored. She reflected that if she ever were sent to prison, she would kill herself. She had tried it with women, and there had been something, quite literally, missing. Scotty liked men, and she was delighted to have one again.

She arrived at the sheriffs office simultaneously with a furniture delivery van. Two men were struggling with a large, apparently very heavy filing cabinet. She thought that odd, since she usually ordered that sort of thing for Bo Scully, and she had not ordered this. She preceded the two men into the office and was surprised to find the sheriff there ahead of her. He ordinarily did not arrive before mid-morning.

“Is that for us?” she asked him, waving toward the two men, who were now rolling the thing into the office on a dolly.

“It’s for me,” Scully replied hoarsely. “I ordered it a while back, before you joined us.”

He looked a bit odd, and Scotty thought at first he must be hung over. Then, as she brushed past him to get to her desk, she realized that he was drinking. She was astonished. She knew Bo knocked a few back with the boys – she had seen him hung over often enough – but she had never seen him drinking in the morning.

“Where is everybody?” she asked. There was usually at least one other clerk or deputy in the office besides herself.