I edged away from her as she jingled indecisively and was immediately claimed by an elderly poet and a would-be playwright who wanted to debate the Mapplethorpe photos and the First Amendment.

Wondering who else might not have realized that we’d closed early yesterday, I put in a call to the office and punched in the code that would cause our answering machine to play back. Sure enough, amid some non-urgent routine messages was Denn McCloy’s: “This is for Deborah Knott. Please ask her to meet me at the Possum Creek Players Theatre tonight at nine. I have something very special to give her.”

Like what, Denn? I asked him mentally as I looked up the number at the Pot Shot. Another round of rifle fire?

There was no answer. After five rings, their answering machine switched on. I left a message that I was returning Denn’s call and that I’d be back home by eleven. All across America, it’s machines talking to machines.

Dwight probably laid the fear of God and the law on Denn yesterday. Maybe he wanted to apologize in person. Unless-?

I suddenly remembered the luscious dark red velvet cloak he’d created for The Further Adventures of Red Riding Hood. The young woman who played Red was awful, but the costumes were great. In fact, I wanted Denn to sell me the cloak, but it was such a useful and versatile costume that he didn’t want to let it go. He’d promised though that if he ever changed his mind, I was to have first dibs, and we had a running joke about it.

Now wouldn’t that make a nice apology, I thought, turning my car south on Forty-Eight toward Makely. Too bad I’d missed him.

I was scheduled to speak at a Parents Without Partners dinner meeting at Makely that evening-they wanted legal advice about guardianships and trusts; I wanted their votes- but I had an extra hour to kill. Impulsively, I made a three-point turn right there on the highway and headed back through Cotton Grove.

It wasn’t that I expected Denn to still be sitting in the parking lot at the theater twenty-four hours later. On the other hand, if he and Michael had made up and then decided on the spur of the moment to go away for the weekend, an extravagant gesture was well within the realm of possibility. I could see him putting the cloak in a plastic garment bag and hanging it under the back arch with a large sign: Mea Culpa, Deborah, or something equally and dramatically penitent.

It was odd about couples, the dynamics of staying together or growing apart. Minnie and Seth got more like each other every year, whereas you had to wonder why the Vickerys hadn’t flown apart years ago. Pride? Lying in the bed you’d made? And Denn and Michael. Now there was an odd couple for you. Michael so cold and so conventional, if you didn’t count stringing his fences with precise crosses. And Denn so theatrical and impulsive-he’d sure given me a whole new slant on the term hair-trigger temper-but capable of a warm generosity I’d never seen with Michael. No wonder their union was in trouble.

“At least they’re all still honoring whatever vows they made,” said the preacher starchily.

The pragmatist held his tongue.

The Possum Creek Players Theatre began life as a one-room schoolhouse in the center of town a hundred years ago. The one room grew to three before it was abandoned for a new brick school in the twenties. A pentecostal congregation immediately bought the building and moved it to the banks of Possum Creek about five miles north of Cotton Grove. In the fifties, shortly after the church elders had taken out a new mortgage to remodel the structure, long-simmering animosities over scriptural interpretations suddenly came to a boil and emotions ran so high that the church split right down the middle. The wealthier members pulled out and built a new church at a crossroads south of Cotton Grove. The rest of the flock, unable to meet the mortgage payments, soon drifted off to other churches, and the bank foreclosed.

After that, the building sat empty for several years. The property kept changing hands. Different enterprises tried and failed out there, but nothing seemed to work until the Possum Creek Players organized and eventually raised enough money to take it over on a fairly sound financial footing. Raleigh was near enough to furnish better-than-average amateur actors; and Raleigh provided a dependable paying audience as well, once the theater had built a reputation for campy musical comedy, farce, and melodrama.

A gravel road wound in from the highway, through a stand of pine trees and azaleas out to the old white clapboard building on the banks of the creek. With the sun at my back, I drove into the sprawling dirt parking lot where a neat square sign announced that Bouncing Betty’s Betrothal would open the first of June. As I thought, the parking lot was empty, but I drove around back. There, a covered archway sheltered a set of double doors used to move sets and furniture in and out of the building.

To my surprise, Denn’s Volvo was pulled up to the far edge of the concrete loading zone. The theater’s double doors were in shadow, but I could see that one of them stood slightly ajar.

I tapped my horn.

Nothing.

I switched off my motor and stepped out of air-conditioned coolness onto sun-parched grass. Warm air flowed around my bare arms almost like the red velvet cloak itself.

The sun was down below the pines now, and silence wrapped the shadowed creek bank. I walked across the concrete pad and pushed the door wider.

“Denn? Michael?” I called. “Anybody here?”

All at once it struck me what a dumb thing it was to be walking into an isolated building out here in the middle of nowhere. Probably deserted, but maybe not. Not with Denn’s car parked only ten feet away.

“And let us not forget who’s shown himself to be just a little too damn free in the way he handles a rifle,” said the pragmatist.

“She who fears and runs away lives to fear another day,” the preacher agreed nervously.

I backed away from the door, feeling slightly foolish. On the other hand, I do keep a loaded.38 locked in the truck of my car and this seemed like as good a time as any to get it out.

The concrete loading zone was only eight or nine inches off ground level, but when I turned, I found myself looking straight down into the front seat of Denn’s car. An instant jolt of pure adrenaline jerked me backwards. I was propelled by such a strong and instinctive survival response that I had no time to reason. I could only react in primitive, headlong, terrified flight across the strip of open ground between the two cars. I dived into mine and dug out of there so fast that gravel spun out in all directions, and I hunched as low as I could, expecting to feel a shotgun blast between my shoulder blades at any second.

Like the blast that’d taken out the driver’s side of the Volvo windshield and blown away Denn McCloy’s whole face.