“Yes, but—”

But Blanchard was unstoppable. “Now, if I were PR, you’d be wrong to say yes. The evils PR do would be hard to assess. That starts with ‘P,’ and it rhymes with ‘T,’ and that means trouble. But a private secretary doesn’t have that commercial hypocritical taint. A private secretary can get the new you out there!”

“The new me?”

“It’s time,” declared Blanchard, “that everybody just got over it!”

“Yes!” cried Hall. “Just myself, I—”

“You’re chastened,” Hall told him. “You’re human after all. You regret the effects of what you’ve done, but that’s the past. That’s yesterday, when all your troubles—”

“Would I have to give back the money?”

“Never!” Blanchard’s eyes flashed. “You’re explaining your common humanity, you’re not feeding the multitudes!”

“No, no, I see.”

“We’ll start small,” Blanchard said. Somehow, he was halfway across Hall’s desk, staring into his eyes. “Church social egg rolls on the lawn. Boy Scout groups meeting here. Have your photo taken at the wheel of one of Mr. Hall’s famous cars.”

“Not driving it!”

“Sitting in it.” Blanchard beamed, his arms spread wide. “The squire of Pennsylvania,” he announced. “How bad a fella could he be?”

“You’re hired!” Hall cried.

32

MAC SAID, “BUDDY? Wha’d we stop here for?” Here was the road along the periphery of Monroe Hall’s estate. Everything to the left of the road belonged to Hall. The guardshack entrance was about a mile and a half behind them. Buddy had pulled off where the shoulder was wide, and across the way was the end of the former tomato farm, now reverted to weeds, with the untouched woods just starting to its right.

Buddy said, “Look at that place. Not a gate around. You could just walk in there.”

“The wire,” Mac said.

Buddy, sounding bedeviled, said, “I know, I know.”

As usual, Buddy drove, Mac in back. Now Ace, beside Buddy, frowned at him and said, “Buddy? You got an idea?”

“I don’t know.” Buddy glared at the peaceful empty field over there as though trying to read too-small print. “The wires are too close together,” he said.

Mac said, “We know that.”

“We don’t have a plane,” Buddy said, and nodded. “And we can’t get one, I know that.”

“Good,” Mac said.

Buddy said, “Could we pole-vault over it?”

“Not me,” Ace said.

Mac said, “Buddy, did you do pole vault in high school?”

“I don’t think we had pole vault,” Buddy admitted.

Mac said, “You wanna try to learn pole vault now, at your weight—”

“Whadaya mean, my weight?”

“You know what I mean. Any of our weight, but you’re the one wants to pole-vault. You figure you’ll get over that electric wire and not fly into it three feet off the ground like the Wright brothers—”

“I could train,” Buddy said. “We could all train.”

“Tonto go home now,” Ace said.

Mac said, “I could hold your coat, Buddy. And I could take you to the emergency room after you land.”

Buddy, exasperated, said, “Now, who the hell is this?”

“It’s me, Buddy, Mac, your friend, and I’m trying to—”

“No, this little white car behind us.”

So Mac twisted around, and behind them, just off the road, had parked a little white two-seater Porsche. As Mac focused on it, both doors opened, and Mark and Os stepped out, dressed in their usual suits and sunglasses and supercilious expressions. “Hey, it’s Harvard,” he said.

Buddy said, “I still say Dartmouth.”

“Anyway,” Mac said, as their two alleged co-conspirators approached their Taurus, “we know they’re not Oklahoma Normal.”

This time, without an invitation, Mark and Os simply joined them, opening both rear doors, Mark sliding in on Mac’s right, Os on his left. Fortunately, the new arrivals were both slender, so it wasn’t too crowded back there. “We’ve had a thought,” Mark said, by way of greeting.

“We’ve had a lot of thoughts,” Mac told him.

“Oh, really?”

“We were here now goin over the last of them. Pole vault.”

“Ah, “ Mark said. “We considered that one, as well. But it’s not so good on the follow-through.”

“Follow-through?”

“Let us say,” Mark suggested, “that one of us, or for that matter all of us, are athletic enough to pole-vault over the fence, landing in absolute safety on the far side. Do you know what happens next?”

“Something bad we didn’t think about,” Mac guessed.

Os said, “The pole keeps going. It hits the fence. It breaks the wire.”

Mark shook his head. “No way to stop it.”

Ace said, “How do you like that, Mac? Your catapult idea was better after all.”

“Catapult?” Surprised, Mark said, “No, that’s one we didn’t think of. On the other hand, you’d hit the ground at rather an unacceptable speed, wouldn’t you?”

“We rejected it already,” Mac said.

“Quite sensibly. In fact,” Mark said, “we’ve noticed that you haven’t come up with anything consistently except to keep very close tabs on our friend the personal trainer.”

Mac said, “You’ve noticed?”

Excited, Buddy said, “I’ve seen that white car, Mac! They been following us.”

“In reality,” Mark said, unruffled, “we’ve all been following the personal trainer, at a loss for anything else to do. You three have been in his home so often you ought to pay rent. We’ve all searched his car. Through sources I can’t reveal, we’ve gone into his background and found nothing useful to blackmail him with.”

“Same with us,” Mac said. “Through sources we can’t reveal, we came up with the same nothing.”

“So we now,” Mark said, “have a suggestion.”

Sounding suspicious, the way he always did, Ace said, “Yeah? What?”

“The approach direct,” Mark said.

33

“KNOCK, KNOCK.”

“Who’s there?” Chester asked hopelessly.

“O.J.,” Mellon said.

“O.J. who?”

“Orange juice sorry now?”

“Yes,” Chester said truthfully.

“Time for lunch,” Mellon said. “Turn in up there, the restaurant in there’s good and it’s always empty.”

Having left the town of Mellon’s last appointment, they were now out in the country again, driving past a mall where the tallest and most impressive construction was the sign out by the road: MIDPOINT MALL. Which, come to think of it, was probably the goal for every mall, wasn’t it?

Turning in at that giant sign, seeing in truth acres of parking lot with only a few dusty vehicles, mostly pickups, huddled close to the glass fronts of the line of stores, Chester said, “How come it’s so empty?”

“They lost their anchor store. What we want is down at the end, past where it used to be.”

Driving straight ahead, ignoring the white parking-space lines painted all over the blacktop, Chester said, “How come they lost it?”

“Went bust,” Mellon said. “It was one of those big box housewares places, but there was an even bigger one about ten miles farther on. Killed them. Now there’s nothing in here but the little satellites, the photo developer, the liquor store, cell phone store, restaurant. It’s just past where the anchor used to be.”

Driving by the onetime anchor store, Chester slowed to look at the place. Large windows were blankly open, but showed little of the cavernous interior because there were no lights on in there. A chain was looped through the six door handles and padlocked. Above the entrance, the faint ghosts could be seen where the letters of the store’s name had been removed: SPEEDSHOP.

Making out those letters, Chester said, “They’ve got other stores, don’t they?”

“Oh, sure,” Mellon said. “These big chains, if they make a mistake where they put one of their places, they just walk away from it, cut their losses.”

The restaurant was next, and last. Chester said, “Would you mind, before we go in, we drive around and take a look at the back?”