I realized that while dreaming, I had been staring at the bookcase. Suddenly I saw what it was I was staring at, and I hotfooted it over there and started reaching for the book before I arrived.

"Saxony! The Night Races into Anna. Look at this!" I had the book and thumbed through it, back to front. "Hey, hey, will you look at this! It has three more chapters than your edition, Sax!"

That brought her over. She snatched it out of my hand.

"You're right, but I don't understand." She turned to ask Mrs. Fletcher, but the old woman was gone. We looked at each other and then I looked out the window, which was just over Sax's shoulder. Dwarfed by the nodding and swaying yellow-and-black sunflowers, our new landlady moved across the garden. She was looking toward the window, toward us.

Saxony sat on the high white bed and kicked off her loafers. "Do you mind if I read it first? I won't he long."

"No, go ahead. I want to take a shower."

But there was no shower. Only one of those seven-or eight-foot-long bathtubs with white lion claws holding white balls for legs. I didn't mind a good soothing soak in tepid water – in fact, after everything that had happened today, it sounded good. There was even a brand-new chunky bar of Ivory soap in the metal tray and a thick purple towel and washcloth slung over the side of the tub.

I was soaping my head and singing a Randy Newman song when she came in. She had the book in her hand and, without saying anything, sat down on the top of the white wicker clothes hamper.

"Are you okay, Sax?"

"Yes. I just didn't feel like reading. I thought I did. Are you mad at me?"

"No. Yes. Yes, I guess I was, back there, before, but everything's worked out so well that I can't be mad any longer."

"Was it because I mentioned your father?"

"Partly. Partly that, and then when you told them about the biography."

She got off the hamper and walked to the sink. She looked at herself in the medicine-chest mirror.

"I thought so. Are you excited about going to this dinner with her?"

She spoke in a monotone that I wasn't used to. She normally had a voice for every mood, and it was easy to tell how she was feeling by the way she spoke. Since she came into the bathroom, though, she'd sounded like a talking computer.

"Of course I'm excited! Do you know that if she quote accepts us unquote, we'll he halfway there?"

"Yes, I know. What do you think of the town?"

"Saxony, will you please tell me what's wrong with you? You sound like The Night of the Living Dead. What are you, half asleep? You don't seem to realize that we have been invited to dinner tonight by Anna France, as in the Anna France." I guess I was angry and my voice showed it. I caught her eye in the mirror, and she gave me a weak smile. Then she turned around and looked at me and I felt like some sort of dope there in the bathtub with my knees up under m chin and a head full of shampoo suds.

"I know." She kept looking at me and then said it again. "I know." She moved over to the hamper, picked up the book, and left the room.

"What the hell was that supposed to mean?" I asked the tub. The soap squiggled out of my hand and fell into the water with a plop.

I finished my bath only half-conscious of what I was doing, because I was trying to figure out what was going on. But when I was done and had dripped my way back into the bedroom, she was up and at 'em again, so I decided to keep quiet.

We wanted to walk to the France house. Mrs. Fletcher was out on the front porch in one of the rocking chairs, shucking corn. Nails was lying next to her, guarding but not eating a big pink-and-white bone. She gave us careful walking directions to Anna's, which turned out to be about six blocks away. Going down the porch steps, I was sure that she was watching our every move, but I didn't turn around to check. It would have been too obvious, and I didn't want to be on bad terms with her. If we decided to stay awhile, her house was too nice and comfortable (and cheap) to make me want to throw it away simply because she was odd and nosy.

The sun was setting on the top of the icehouse, but it looked pale compared to the deep lemon of the building. There were the ghosts of once-black letters on the side of the place that we hadn't seen when we first passed it.

"Hey, will you look at that? 'Fletcher and Family.' I wonder why she didn't tell us before that she owned it?"

"Maybe she was embarrassed to admit to her wealth?" Sax looked at me and squinched up her eyes against the sun.

"What wealth? She rents rooms in her house and owns a closed-up icehouse? I think she didn't want to 'fess up to owning a place where people got killed because of owner neglect."

That idea held the floor for a few silent minutes of walking.

It was the beginning of the evening, and the sky had cleared to cobalt blue with a streak of sharp white airplane exhaust vapor through its center. A lawnmower whined somewhere and the air smelled of cut grass, and of oil and gasoline when we passed Bert Keener's Exxon Station. A guy was sitting in front of the office in a red aluminum lawn chair with a can of beer propped on a pile of old worn tires nearby. Another Norman Rockwell painting, this one titled "Bert's Exxon Station in June." A new white Volkswagen pulled into the station and rolled up to the pumps. The man inside rolled down his window and stuck his head out.

"Get your ass over here, Larry. You gettin' paid to drink beer or what?"

Larry, in the lawn chair, made a face and looked at us before he got up. "These guys that buy these little Kraut cars all get to thinking that they're Hitler, you know?"

We walked past a closed grocery store with particolored stickers all over the windows announcing the weekly specials. I noticed that the prices were cheaper than in Connecticut.

A drive-in hamburger joint was next, with a lot of bright orange everywhere and rock music piped out over its dirt parking lot via a speaker on the roof of the squat, square building. A late-sixties Chevrolet was the only car there, and I noticed that everyone in it was eating big soft-ice-cream cones.

Without knowing it, we had arrived at Anna's street. My stomach, which had been pretty calm until then, said "contact" to the rest of my system, and within milliseconds I was jumpy and scared.

"Thomas…"

"Come on, Sax, let's just go. Let's get it over with." I was revving up and knew that I had to keep going or else my knees would start shaking and I'd become tongue-tied.

"Thomas…"

"Come on!" I took her limp hand from the crook of my elbow and dragged her down the street.

Everyone must have been either eating dinner or out because no one was in sight as we walked toward Anna's. It was almost a little eerie. The houses were mostly white Midwest-solid. Picket fences and aluminum siding and some metal statues on the lawn. Mailboxes with names like Calder and Schreiner, and my favorite – "The Bob and Leona Burns Castle." I could imagine Christmas-tree lights on these places in December. Christmas-tree lights hung over the front doors, and big light-up Santa Clauses on the roofs.

And then there it was. It wasn't hard to make out the house, because I had looked at the magazine picture enough times. Huge, brown, Victorian, full of intricate gingerbread woodwork, and on closer view, small stained-glass windows. Hedges in front that were full and carefully trimmed. Even though it was a kind of dark cocoa brown, the house looked freshly painted.

My grandmother lived in a house like that. She lived to be ninety-four in Iowa and refused to see any of her son's movies. When she died and they went through her belongings, they found eleven leather scrapbooks on his career that went back to his first film. She had wanted him to be a veterinarian. She kept lots of animals in and around her big farmhouse, including a donkey and a goat. Whenever we visited her, the donkey always bit me and then laughed.