By the time he was finished, the dishes were done and they had left the kitchen in favor of the living room with its dozens of framed photographs, presided over by Mr. Chasse from his place on the TV.

“So?” Ralph said. “How much of it do you believe?”

“All of it, of course,” she said, and either did not notice the expression of relief on Ralph’s face or chose to ignore it. “After what we saw this morning-not to mention what you knew about my wonderful daughter-in-law-I can’t very well not believe. That’s my advantage over Bill.”

Not your only one, Ralph thought but didn’t say.

“None of this stuff is coincidental, is it?” she asked him.

Ralph shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“When I was seventeen,” she said, “my mother hired this boy from down the road-Richard Henderson, his name was-to do chores around our place.

There were a lot of boys she could have hired, but she hired Richie because she liked him… and she liked him for me, if you understand what I mean.”

“Of course I do, She was matchmaking.”

“Uh-huh, but at least she wasn’t doing it in a big, gruesome, embarrassing way. Thank God, because I didn’t care a fig for Richie at least not like that. Still, Mother gave it her very best. If I was studying my books at the kitchen table, she’d have him loading the woodbox even though it was May and already hot. if I was feeding the chickens, she’d have Richie cutting side-bay next to the dooryard.

She wanted me to see him around… to get used to him… and if we got to like each other’s company and he asked me to a dance or the town fair, that would have been just fine with her. it was gentle, but it was there. A push. And that’s what this is like.”

“The pushes don’t feel all that gentle to me Ralph said. His hand went nvoluntarily to the place where Charlie Pickering had pricked him with the point of his knife.

“No, of course they don’t. Having a man stick a knife in your ribs like that must have been horrible. Thank God you had that spray can. Do you suppose Old Dor sees the auras, too? That something from that world told him to put the can in your pocket?”

Ralph gave a helpless shrug. What she was suggesting had crossed his mind, but once you got beyond it, the ground really started to slope away. Because if Dorrance had done that, it suggested that some (entity) force or being had known that Ralph would need help. Nor was that all. That force-or being-would also have had to know that (a) Ralph would be going out on Sunday afternoon, that (b) the weather, quite nice up until then, would turn nasty enough to require a jacket, and (c) which jacket he would wear. You were talking, in other words, about something that could foretell the future. The idea that he had been noticed by such a force frankly scared the hell out of him. He recognized that in the case of the aerosol can, at least, the intervention had probably saved his life, but it still scared the hell out of him.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe something did use Dorrance as an errand-boy. But why?”

“And what do we do now?” she added.

Ralph could only shake his head.

She glanced up at the clock squeezed in between the picture of the man in the raccoon coat and the young woman who looked ready to say Twenty-three skidoo any old time, then reached for the phone.

“Almost three-thirty! My goodness!”

Ralph touched her hand. “Who are you calling?”

“Simone Castonguay. I’d made plans to go over to Ludlow with her and Mina this afternoon -there’s a card-party at the Grangebut I can’t go after all this. I’d lose my shirt.” She laughed, then colored prettily. just a figure of speech.”

Ralph put his hand over hers before she could lift the receiver.

“Go on to your card-party, Lois.”

“Really?” She looked both doubtful and a little disappointed.

“Yes.” He was still unclear about what was going on here, but he sensed that was about to change. Lois had spoken of being pushed, but to Ralph it felt more as if he were being carried, the way a river carries a man in a small boat. But he couldn’t see where he was going; heavy mist shrouded the banks, and now, as the current began to grow swifter, he could hear the rumble of rapids somewhere up ahead.

Still, there are shapes, Ralph. Shapes in the mist.

Yes. Not very comforting ones, either. The), might be trees that only looked like clutching fingers… but on the other hand, they might be clutching fingers trying to look like trees. Until Ralph knew which was the case, he liked the idea of Lois’s being out of town just fine. He had a strong intuition-or perhaps it was only hope masquerading as intuition-that Doc #3 couldn’t follow her to Ludlow, that he might not even be able to follow her across the Barrens to the east side.

You can’t know any such thing, Ralph.

Maybe not, but itfelt right, and he was still convinced that in the world of the auras, feeling and knowing were pretty nearly the same thing. One thing he did know was that Doc #3 hadn’t cut Lois’s balloon-string yet; that Ralph had seen for himself, along with the joyously healthy gray glow of her aura. Yet Ralph could not escape a growing certainty that Doc #3-Crazy Doc-intended to Cut it, and that, no matter how lively Rosalie had looked when she went trotting away from Strawford Park, the severing of that cord was a mortal, murderous act.

Let’s say you’re right, Ralph,-let’s say he can’t get at her this afternoon if she’s playing nickel-in, dime-or-out in Ludlow.

What about tonight? Tomorrow? Next week?

What’s the solution? Does she call up her son and her bitch of a daughter-in-law, tell them she’s changed her mind about Riverview Estates and wants to go there after all?

He didn’t know. But he knew he needed time to think, and he also knew that constructive thinking would be hard to do until he was fairly sure that Lois was safe, at least for awhile.

“Ralph? You’re getting that moogy look again.”

“That what look?”

“Moogy.” She tossed her hair pertly. “That’s a word I made up to describe how Mr. Chasse looked when he was pretending to listen to me but was actually thinking about his coin collection. I know a moogy look when I see one, Ralph. What are you thinking about?”

“I was wondering what time you think you’ll get back from your card-game.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether or not we stop at Tubby’s for chocolate frappes.”

She spoke with the air of a woman revealing a secret vice. “Suppose you come straight back.”

“Seven o’clock. Maybe seven-thirty.”

“Call me as soon as you get home. Would you do that?”

“Yes. You want me out of town, don’t you? That’s what that moogy look really means.”

“Well…”

“You think that nasty bald thing means to hurt me, don’t you?”

“I think it’s a possibility.”

“Well, he might hurt you, too!”

“Yes, but…” But so far as I can tell, Lois, he’s not wearing any of my fashion accessories. “But what?”

“I’m going to be okay until you get back, that’s all.” He remembered her deprecating remark about modern men hugging each other and bawling and tried for a masterful frown. “Go play cards and leave this business to me, at least for the time being. That’s an order.”

Carolyn would have either laughed or gotten angry at such comicopera macho posturing. Lois, who belonged to an entirely different school of feminine thought, only nodded and looked grateful to have the decision taken out of her hands. “All right.” She tilted his chin down so she could look directly into his eyes. “Do you know what you’re doing, Ralph?”

“Nope. Not yet, anyway.”

“All right. just as long as you admit it.” She placed a hand on his forearm and a soft, open-mouthed kiss on the corner of his mouth. Ralph felt an entirely welcome prickle of heat in his groin. “I’ll go to Ludlow and win five dollars playing poker with those silly women who are always trying to fill their inside straights. Tonight we’ll talk about what to do next. Okay?”