"Or a—Coke? I think I have a Coke stuck in the refrigerator."

"Okay, thanks."

She walked bent over, and haltingly. In the jammed tiny room there were two doorways, one at the rear left leading into the kitchen and one at the right into the bedroom. I heard the sounds of fumbling and muttering in the kitchen and took the chance to look around me.

The walls were covered with doodads of every description. Gold-tone butterflies in a group of three, one rather pretty painting of a bowl of flowers, two awful prints of cherubic children being sweet with cute animals, a straw basket holding dried flowers that looked extremely dusty, a plaque with The Serenity Prayer... I began to feel dazed at the multitude of things that presented themselves for inspection. I thought of all the room in our house and felt a stir of guilt.

Then the television caught my attention. All this time it had been on, but I had not paid any attention to the picture. I realized now that the scene I was seeing was the apartment building lobby. An old man with a walker moved slowly across the screen as I watched. Good Lord. I wondered if many of the residents chose to watch life in their lobby.

Mrs. Totino tottered back into the room with a glass of Coke and ice clutched in her shaking hand. The ice was tinkling against the glass with a quick tempo that was distinctly nerve-wracking.

"Did you like the placemats?" Mrs. Totino asked suddenly and loudly.

We negotiated the transfer of the Coke from her hand to mine.

"I've never seen any like them," I said sincerely. "Now, I know you won't be offended when I tell you that they were wedding presents for T.C. and Hope. They'd been packed away in a drawer for these many years, and I thought, why not let someone else enjoy them? And they've never been used—it's not like I gave you a used gift!" "Recycled," I suggested.

"Right, right. Everything's this recycling now! I recycled them." I had hoped to see a picture of the Julius family, but in all this clutter, there were only two photographs, in a double frame balanced precariously on the television set. Both photographs were very old. One showed a stern small woman with dark hair and eyes standing stiffly beside a somewhat taller man with lighter hair and a thin-lipped shy face. They were wearing clothes dating from somewhere around the twenties, I thought. In the other picture, two girls who strongly resembled each other, one about ten and the other perhaps twelve, hugged each other and smiled fixedly at the camera. "Me and my sister, her name's Alicia Manigault, isn't that a pretty name?" Mrs. Totino said fondly. "I've always hated my name, Melba. And the other picture is the only one ever taken of my parents."

"Your sister is still... does she live close?"

"New Orleans," Mrs. Totino said. "She has a little house in Metairie, that's right by New Orleans." She sighed heavily.

"New Orleans is a beautiful place, I envy her. She never wants to come see me. I go there every now and then. Just to see the city." I wondered why she didn't just move. "You have relatives here now, Mrs. Totino?"

"No, not since... not since the tragedy. Of course you know about that."

I nodded, feeling definitely self-conscious.

"Yet you bought the house, or your husband bought it for you, I understand from Mr. Sewell."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You aren't scared? Other people backed down from buying it at the last minute."

"It's a beautiful house."

"Not haunted, is it? I don't believe in that stuff," said Mrs. Totino robustly. I looked surreptitiously for a place to deposit my glass. The Coke was flatter than a penny on a railroad track.

"I don't either."

"When that lawyer with the stupid name called to say someone really wanted to buy it, and he said it was a couple about to be married, I thought, I'll just send them a little something... after all these years, the house will be lived in again. What kind of shape was it in?"

So I told her about that, and she asked me questions, and I answered her, and all the while she never talked about what I was most interested in. Granted, the disappearance of her daughter, her granddaughter, and her son-in-law had to have been dreadful, but you would think she would mention it. Aside from that stiff reference to "the tragedy" she didn't bring it up. Of course she was most interested in changes we had made to the apartment over the garage, the one built for her, the one she'd inhabited such a short time. Then she moved to the house, conversationally. Had we repainted? Yes, I told her. Had we reroofed? No, I told her, the real estate agent had ascertained that Mr. Julius had had a new roof put on when he bought the house.

"He came here to be near relatives?" I asked carefully. "His relatives," she said with a sniff. "His aunt Essie never had any children, so when he retired from the Army, he and Charity moved here to be close to her. He'd saved for years to start his own business, doing additions onto houses, carpentry work, stuff he'd always wanted to do. He could have gone anywhere he wanted, but he picked here," she said gloomily. "And asked you to live with them?"

"Yes," she admitted. "Want some more Coke? There's half a can left in the kitchen. No? Yes, they had figured out how they could add an apartment on the garage. Didn't want me in the house with ‘em. So I moved from New Orleans—I'd been sharing a place with my sister—and came up here. Left her down there." She shook her head. "Then this all happened."

"So," I said, about to ask something very nosy but unable to stop myself, "why did you stay?"

"Why?" she repeated blankly.

"After they disappeared. Why did you stay?"

"Oh," she said with comprehension. "I get you. I stayed here in case they turned up."

"Don't you think that's kind of eerie, Martin?" I asked that night, as he put away the leftovers and I washed the dishes.

"Eerie? Sentimental, maybe. They're obviously not going to turn up alive, after all these years."

I recalled the saccharine pictures in the apartment, the figurine. All very sentimental. "Maybe so," I conceded reluctantly. "Did you see that Angel and I had rearranged the living room?" I asked after a moment. I squeezed out my sponge and pulled the plug. The sink water drained out with a big gurgle, like a dragon drinking water. "It looks good. I think the gallery table Jane left you needs some work, though.

One of the legs is loose."

"I think maybe you'd better tell me about the Young-bloods, Martin."

"I told you, Shelby needed a job..."

I gathered my courage. "No, Martin, tell me really." He was hanging up the dishtowel on a rack mounted beside the sink. He got it exactly straight.

"I wondered when you were going to ask," he said finally.

"I wondered when you were going to tell."

He turned to face me and leaned against the counter. I leaned against the one at right angles to him. I crossed my arms across my chest. His sleeves were rolled up and his tie was loosened. He crossed his arms across his chest, too. I wondered what a body-language expert would make of this. "Are the Youngbloods my jailers? Are they here to keep an eye on me?" I thought I'd lead off with the most obvious question.

Martin swallowed. My heart was pounding as if I'd been running.

"I knew Shelby in Vietnam," he began. "He helped me get through it."

I nodded, just to show I was registering this information. "After the war... after our part of the war ... I'd met some intelligence people in Vietnam. I spoke some Spanish already, and so did Shelby. We had some Hispanic guys in our unit and we spoke Spanish with them, got a lot better. It was something to do."

Martin's knuckles were white as he gripped his crossed arms. "So, after we left Nam, we left the Army but we signed on with another company that was really the government."