"I got it. That's a cowboy gun."

"It's a Colt Peacemaker, a.45." He opened the thumb cover and with the ejector rod eased the shell out. He held the end up for the boy to see. "There, that's the cap in the center. The pin on the hammer hits the cap and that sets off the powder. The old-time guns like this use black powder. Like the one your mother's got. Newer guns use smokeless."

"Can you take me shooting, Mr Pellam? Please?"

"Let's talk to your parents about it. Maybe."

"Shoot something. Will you?"

"Not now, Sam. It's not a toy." He put the gun back in his waistband. "Let's find me my cartridges."

With even more enthusiasm the boy swept the detector over the ground. Pellam wasn't paying much attention to him, he was looking at the dark patch of plowed-over earth in the distance, the parking lot, where Marty'd died a horrible death. He didn't notice the boy stoop down and pick up something then come racing over to him.

"Look what I found, Mr Pellam. Look!" Sam dropped the two cartridges into his hand. They were.30 caliber, though the length was odd, stubbier than a.30-'30 or.30-'06, bigger than a Garand. They couldn't have been from a carbine like an M-1 because a short-barreled rifle wouldn't have been accurate enough for a shot of this range.

"Good job, Sam." He patted the beaming boy on his shoulders. "Just what I'm looking for." He dropped the cartridges into his pocket.

"You show me your collection some day, Mr Pellam?"

"You bet, Sam. Time to get home."

"Aw…"

Together they walked down the mountain, swapping fishing stories.

That night, Sam upstairs, and Keith still at the company, Meg Torrens ate a turkey sandwich with cold cranberry sauce and drank a glass of white wine, reading the headlines and the first paragraphs of all the stories in the New York Times.

She heard the clicks and tiny pops of the hundred-year-old house, the muffled roar of the furnace coming on-something reassuring about the way its simple brain kicked the machinery on and coursed hot water through the pipes. It would shut off and there'd be moments of complete, muffled silence.

She finished the Arts section, dropped the paper and walked upstairs to Sam's room.

"Hi, Mommy."

She walked to his computer.

"Tell me again. You dial, then what do you say?" Meg looked at the computer.

"Aw, Mom," Sam said. He was tired, it was nearly nine. "It's a modem. Nobody says anything. You just get a tone. That means you're on-line."

"Show me." In the master bedroom the clock radio played a sad country western tune, an old Patsy Cline song.

Sam bent over the keyboard and typed rapidly. Meg and Keith spent thirty dollars a month for access to a current events database, which Sam had learned contained a sports submenu; they'd ended up with huge overages one month when he'd printed out the starting lineups of every baseball team since 1956.

He picked up the phone, dialed, his mouth twisted with exasperation, though Meg knew he was tickled to show off this esoteric knowledge. A squeal came from the phone. He held it toward her like a ray gun. "Zap, zap, zap!" And pressed a button on a small box. The computer screen came to life.

"You're on-line, Mom. What do you want to look up?"

"A name. I want to look up a man's name."

She typed in some characters. The response come back in five seconds. Meg scrolled through the text. "How do I print it?"

"You either do a screen dump or download the whole file."

Where did they learn this stuff?

"Just tell me what to push."

"Here." Sam happily hit a button, and the raspy matrix printer began its satisfying sound.

Reminded her of the Polaroid.

Bzzzt.

The sound lasted for some time. There was a lot to print.

13

Apples. A thousand apples, a hundred thousand. A million.

Pellam'd never seen so many apples in his life. And in so many forms. Apple pies, fritters, turnovers, apple butter, jelly, pickled apples and candied apples. You could dunk for them. You could buy them fresh by the bushels, buy them dried and painted and glued together into wreaths and wall hangings shaped like geese and pigs.

There were girls dressed up like apples. All the boys seemed to have round, rouge cheeks.

A woman tried to sell him a chance to win a Dutch apple pie by tossing a ring onto a board with apples nailed onto it.

"I don't really care for apples," he told her.

The football field was filled with more than a thousand people, milling through the booths, playing the games and examining the junk for sale-sweaters, wooden trinket boxes, clocks made from driftwood, ceramic, macrame. Janine had a jewelry booth. Pellam had homed in on it right away, waited until she was busy making a sale, and did the obligatory appearance. All she had time to say was "Dinner tomorrow, remember?"

He nodded.

"At four. Don't you forget, lover boy." She winked and blew him a kiss.

Pellam estimated half the crowd was tourists, half was locals. No one older than seventeen seemed exactly sure why they were there. The tourists were catching the tail of some indigenous upstate experience-the country, the country!-and holding on for a while, buying vases, jewelry, decorations, food to take back to their Manhattan apartments. The Cleary moms and dads were gossiping and doing some serious eating. The kids, of course, were the only ones really enjoying themselves because for them it was nothing more than tons of apples. And who needed more than that on a nice fall day?

No more 'Roids. He'd left the camera in the camper. Now, he was just another tourist scoping out the leaves, the booths, the scenery.

The Toyota showed up five minutes later, racing through the parking lot and skidding to a stop on the crumbling asphalt. Meg saw him right away and waved. Keith wasn't with her but Sam was. The boy waved energetically. He wondered if Sam had said anything about Pellam's tendency to collect lethal weapons.

Like the other night at dinner, she looked ten years younger than the upstate matron who'd visited him in the clinic. Her hair wasn't teased and stiff but was tied back in a ponytail. She wore tight jeans and a dark paisley high-necked blouse under a suede jacket. A silver antique pin was at her throat.

The boy stayed close. "Hi, Mr Pellam."

"Howdy, Sam."

"Hello," Meg said to Pellam. He nodded in reply.

They were suddenly enveloped in a large crowd of Izod-shirted Manhattanites. The men with curly dark hair, the women in black stretch pants. Everybody had great forearms and calves, courtesy of the New York Health and Racquet Club.

The gang passed and they found themselves alone.

"You made it," Meg said.

"Wouldn't miss this for the world."

"Here," Meg called. "A present."

She pitched him an apple. He caught it left-handed.

"I hate apples," he said.

Sam grinned. "So do I."

"Cleary still a small town?" Pellam smiled.

She frowned.

He asked, "Won't they talk, we walk around like this?" They circled on the fringes of the festival.

"Let 'em," Meg said. "I'm feeling rebellious today. Phooey."

Sam was running sorties to the booths but always circling back to study Pellam with casual awe. Then he'd be off again, hooking up with some buddies from school, conspiring, looking amazed and devious and overjoyed-and always on the move.

"Energetic, aren't they?" Pellam watched an impromptu race.

Meg said, "There's nothing like children for perspective. What they teach you about yourself is the best. Somebody said that the most honest and the most deceitful, the crudest and the kindest of all people are children." She laughed. "Of course, that's only half true when you're talking about your own kids."