“Order the cider,” Louise tells her daughter as she sets off to grab a table and Susie heads for the bar. There’s some serious drinking going on at the Lyon, and the noise level is such that Susie and Louise have to sit close together at their table, with their heads nearly touching, in order to hear one another.

“I hope you’re going to mention Harriet Laughton in your article,” Louise says. “She’s the heart and soul of the fund-raising committee. I wanted to ask March to join the committee, but I can never seem to get hold of her.”

“I know. I couldn’t either.”

Susie had been calling and calling, with no success. When Richard phoned her to say he also couldn’t reach March and hadn’t heard from Gwen for several weeks, she went out to Guardian Farm, and she didn’t like what she found.

“What do you want?” Hollis said to her when she got out of her truck. Susie was so startled by the hostility of his tone that she took a step backward; she shaded her eyes against the sun, the better to gauge his expression, but there was nothing to see. Just an angry man, staring her down.

“Actually, I want to see March,” Susie had said. “Is that a criminal offense or something?”

All she got for an answer was the wind, flapping between them. A loose shutter on the house banged back and forth. Susie could practically see Hollis reaching inside himself for a way to get rid of her, a lie to tell. Funny how she’d never noticed before how much he’d aged; his posture was that of a young man, but that’s not what he was anymore.

“What are you going to do, Hollis? Call the police and have me escorted off your property?”

Before he could respond, March came to the door. She ran out to hug Susie, then insisted on dragging her into the kitchen for a cup of tea.

“Why didn’t you tell me Susie was here?” March said to Hollis. “You hate company, that’s all there is to it.”

She had thrown her arms around him, and Hollis had let her kiss him. For an instant, he seemed happy, there in her embrace.

“‘He’s all bark,” March said to Susie as they headed for the house. “Oolong.” March had remembered her friend’s favorite tea. “Right?”

“Right.”

Once in the kitchen. Susie couldn’t help but notice how streaked with white March’s dark hair had become. March had stopped coloring it. and now simply drew it away from her face with silver clips. Hollis had come in after them, but after he allowed March to tease him about being antisocial. he withdrew to the parlor. Still, Susie had the sense he was listening.

“I’m worried about you,” she told March after she’d been served a mug of tea. The house was cold and dim; March was wearing a heavy gray sweater that looked like one of Hollis’s castoffs.

“You’re always worried about me.” March laughed. She explained that she would have been over to see Susie, but her Toyota had suddenly died. As soon as Hollis finished working on it, she’d come for a visit. “You don’t have to worry,” she’d insisted.

But sitting in the Lyon with her mother, Susie is still worried. “To tell you the truth, I wish March had never come back here,” Susie admits as she and Louise sip cider in the crowded tavern. “What does she see in him?”

“Ah, love,” Louise says with a surprising amount of bitterness.

Susie tilts her head and studies her mother.

“Didn’t you think I knew?” Louise says. “How could I not?”

“Are you talking about Dad?”

“I didn’t think it was a suitable topic for discussion. I still don’t.”

Louise checks the buttons on her sweater, as if something was undone. Clearly, even talking around the edges of the Judge’s relationship with Mrs. Dale is tremendously difficult. Watching her mother, Susie feels extreme tenderness.

“Then we won’t discuss it,” Susie says.

“Fine.” Louise takes her daughter’s hand in her own. “That’s settled.”

“Unless you ever want to,” Susie can’t help adding.

“Susie,” Louise warns.

“Fine. Next topic.”

“Did you call Richard Cooper back and let him know you went to see March?”

“I did. He’s all broken up about March leaving, but his main concern is that Gwen’s living out there. I can’t say that I blame him.”

“I saw her down in the Marshes,” Louise says. “That girl, Gwen.”

“Are you serious?”

“I brought out some groceries and warm clothes sent by the library committee-there was a wonderful sweater, a hundred percent wool-and I put everything on the porch, the way I always do because Alan doesn’t like it if you knock on the door. That’s when I saw her.”

“Inside the house?” Susie can hardly believe it. “I thought he didn’t speak to anyone.”

“Well,” Louise says, “he’s obviously talking to her.”

In fact, Gwen has been going out to the Marshes most afternoons. Hank has so many chores to do, along with any after-school jobs he can find, as well as working on his senior thesis, that Gwen has too much time on her hands. She sometimes rides Tarot out to the Marshes, but usually she leads him, so he’ll get a little exercise without having to carry her weight. Despite the cold, Tarot is content to accompany her; there are still some withered apples on the ground in the Coward’s yard, and the grass is high and salty. The Coward has begun to tell Gwen about her family: How beloved her grandfather Henry was. How her other grandparents, the Coopers, were said to think so well of themselves they had to deflate their heads every morning or else they’d sail away on the strength of their own vanity. He has recounted a few small details about the fire, when his wife died, if only to suggest the reasons he has plunged into this life he now leads. The weirdest thing is, when he speaks about himself he uses the third person: Alan Murray couldn’t go into that house. He stood there and stood there, but he couldn’t move.

“So who are you now if you’re not him?” Gwen has asked.

“I’m someone else,” the Coward has told her, as if that information was as plain as the nose on his face.

That someone is often so far gone when Gwen comes to visit that he can’t stand up. Once, she found him shivering on the floor. Another time, he was inches away from the smoldering ashes of his stove. Gwen knows where he keeps his liquor-the bottles are stored beneath the floorboards near his bed. On those occasions when he’s not completely smashed, the Coward tells her what the village used to be like when he was a boy. Olive Tree Lake was so clear you could drink the water in a cup. Foxes trotted along back roads. Blue herons nested in the Marshes.

Gwen tries to bring the Coward treats, usually bread and butter, his favorite, but she doesn’t chide him about his drinking. She knows how it feels to have somebody on your case, the way her mother used to be; it never does any good. It’s cold in the Coward’s house, and filthy as well, yet Gwen looks forward to coming here. Or perhaps it’s the act of getting away from Guardian Farm she savors. Strange, but the Marshes seem real to her; it’s the Farm that seems like a dream.

The phone lines have never been fixed, nor has her mother’s car. No mail has been delivered for ages. Gwen has written to her father three times, and she still hasn’t heard from him. She intends to ask if he’ll send a plane ticket, so she can go home for Christmas vacation. She hasn’t told Hank anything about her plan, and the secret has driven a wedge between them, not because of the vacation-that’s nothing-but because if she gets ownership of Tarot beforehand, she’ll borrow money from Susie Justice to have him trucked to California, and she won’t use her return ticket to come back. She has to get out, that’s what she’s afraid to say out loud in Hank’s presence. She has to do it soon.

Today, when Gwen goes to the Marshes the weather is so bad, with ice everywhere, that she leaves Tarot home. Sister follows her, though, and by the time they get to the Marshes, the terrier’s coat is braided with ice. The Coward, however, is completely wasted. He took his weekly trek to the liquor store last night, then overindulged even more than usual. Gwen covers him up with an old quilt, right there where he lies on the wooden floor. She stays for a while, Sister beside her, though the house is cold and the Coward smells bad. She thinks about the life she used to have and how it doesn’t even seem to belong to her anymore, and it helps her to understand the Coward’s past. That’s the reason he stays out here-everything he was has slipped away, and trying to retrieve it would be like diving into a bottomless pit.