Marionreached the farm about quarter to nine. There had been no cars on the highway when he turned off onto the dirt county road, and he encountered no cars on the dirt road as he drove to the farm.

There are approximately 1,200,000 acres in that portion of southern New Jersey known as the Pine Barrens. Statistically speaking, the built-up portions of southern New Jersey represent a very small fraction of the total land area. The term "Pine Barrens," Marion had learned, had been applied to the area from the earliest days of colonization. "Barrens" meant the area was barren, except for stunted pine trees.

There were some exceptions of course. Some people had acquired title to land within the Barrens with the intention of farming it. Some had succeeded, including, for a time, some of Marion's maternal ancestors. It was a mystery to Marion how they had managed to eke a living out of their double section (1,280 acres, more or less, as the deed described it) but there was no question that they had, from the early 1800s for almost a century.

The house, as closely as he had been able to determine, had been built circa 1810, and the farm had been in use until just before World War I. He had no idea why it had not been sold, but it hadn't, and it had come to him via inheritance.

For a long time, he had thought that the reason he had not sold it was because no one wanted it. The house was 6.3 miles from the nearest paved road. There was a well, but the water was foul-tasting, and while Marion did not pretend to understand things like this, he suspected it was somehow contaminated. The taxes were negligible, and he had simply kept the farm.

Now he knew, of course, that it hadn't been his decision at all, but the Lord's. The Lord had had plans for the farm all along.

The fences, except for vestiges here and there, had long ago disappeared, as had the wooden portions of the farmhouse, and the barns and other outlying structures. What was left was a three-room building, partly constructed from field stone and partly from crude brick.

Marion's father had replaced the windows in the building, and installed a tin roof when Marion was a little boy. Marion now understood that his father had had some half-baked idea of making the farmhouse into some sort of vacation cabin, but that idea had sort of petered out. Marion's mother had not liked driving into the Pine Barrens to spend the weekend cooking on a camping stove and using an outside privy. There was absolutely nothing to do at the farm but sit around and talk and look out at stunted pine trees.

She had, he now understood, tried. She had planted various kinds of flowers and bushes, most of which had died, but some of which, roses and some bushes the names of which he had never known, had survived and even flourished. You couldn't see the farmhouse, behind the vegetation, until you were within a hundred yards.

There were unpaved roads running along the south and north property lines, maintained as little as possible by the county, who showed up once a year with road scrapers. There were two roads, more properly described as paths, leading from the unpaved roads. One of them led to the farmhouse, and the other, nothing more than earth beaten into two tracks, simply crossed between the two unpaved county roads.

When Marion reached the house, he parked the car behind the house, and then, using a flashlight to light his way, walked around to the front, unlocked the padlock, removed it from the hasp, and let himself in.

He flashed the light around the room. There were no signs of intruders. Standing the flashlight on its end, he took a Coleman lantern from a shelf, filled the tank from a gallon can of Coleman Fluid, pumped it up and got it going. Then he extinguished the flashlight, and carried the Coleman lantern and the can of Coleman Fluid into the bedroom, where he repeated the fueling and lighting procedure for a second Coleman lantern.

He then returned to the front room, where he refueled a Coleman stove with Coleman liquid. Unless properly handled, the Coleman lanterns and stoves were dangerous. Marion could not understand why people were blind to that. The newspapers were always full of stories of people who were burned when they tried to refuel lanterns and stoves while they were still hot.

He then went out to the rental car and brought the six detonators into the house. He carefully placed them in a drawer of the dresser in the bedroom, lying them on a bed of work shirts and underwear, for a cushion under them, and then carefully placed more work shirts and underwear on top of them. Marion knew that there was no such thing as being too careful with detonators.

Then he returned to the car again, took his suitcase out of it, and carefully locked it. In the interests of safety, it was better to leave the Composition C-4 right where it was, in the car.

He went into the bedroom, and changed out of his suit and dress shirt into what he thought of as his farm clothes, a flannel shirt, denim overalls, and ankle-high work shoes.

Then he made another trip out to the car, unlocked it, took out the groceries he'd bought just outside of Camden, locked the car again, and carried the groceries into the house.

He pumped up the Coleman stove, got it going, and cooked his supper, a hamburger steak with onions, instant mashed potatoes, lima beans, and coffee. For dessert he had ice cream. It was cold, but no longer frozen, but that couldn't be helped. It was just too much of a nuisance to carry ice to the farm.

After he finished eating, he washed the dishes and the pots and pans and put the garbage into one of the grocery bags. He would take it to the garbage dump in the morning.

If, he thought, making a wry little joke with himself, if there was still any place to dump garbage in his garbage dump.

The problem with the farm, Marion often thought, was exactly opposite from the problem he had with the house in Philadelphia. In the city, people were always trying-and often succeeding-in taking away things that belonged to him. At the farm, people were always giving him things he hadn't asked for and didn't want. Such as wornout automobile tires, refrigerators, mattresses, and bed springs.

He didn't like it, of course. No civilized person could be anything but annoyed with the transformation of one's private property into a public dump. But he understood why it had happened, and why the police couldn't do much about it.

While the land was mostly flat, there were two depressions, each more than two acres in size, both of them touching the road that cut across the property from one county road to the other. The garbage dumpers simply backed their trucks up to the edge of the depressions and unloaded their worn-out mattresses, rusty bed springs, old tires, and broken refrigerators.

Marion had from time to time complained to the authorities about the unauthorized dumping, but to no avail. They told him that if he, or they, caught someone dumping, they would of course deal with the matter. But since there was no one living in the area, police patrols seldom visited it, their presence being required elsewhere.

His only solution, they told him, was to both fence and post the property. Fencing 1,280 acres was of course for financial reasons out of the question. And when he had put up PRIVATE PROPERTY-TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED signs where the paths began at the county roads, the only response had been that the garbage dumpers, or someone else, had used them for target practice. It had been a waste of money.

Four months before, on one of his monthly weekends at the farm, he had taken the canvas tarpaulin off the old Fordson tractor his father had bought years before, jump-started it with jumper cables from his rented Chevrolet, and driven it around the farm on what he thought of as his quarterly inspection of the property.