“Would you like a sweet, honey?” she had asked cheerfully.

13

Twilight had begun to steal across the day.

Polly straightened up in the rocker, aware that she had almost fallen asleep. She bumped one of her hands, and a hard bolt of pain raced up her arm before being replaced once more by that hot anticipatory tingle. It was going to be bad, all right. Later tonight or tomorrow, it was going to be very bad indeed.

Never mind what you can’t change, Polly-there’s at least one thing you can change, must change. You have to tell Alan the truth about Kelton. You have to stop harboring that ghost in your heart.

But another voice rose up in response an angry, frightened, clamorous voice. The voice of pride, she supposed, just that, but she was shocked by its strength and ardor as it demanded that those old days, that old life, not be exhumed… not for Alan, not for anybody. That, above all, her baby’s short life and miserable death should not be given over to the sharp, wagging tongues of the town gossips.

Whatfoolishness is that, Trisha? Aunt Evvie asked in her mindAunt Evvie, who had died so full of years, double-pumping her beloved Herbert Tareytons to the last. What does it matter if Alan finds out how Kelton really died? What does it matter if every old gossip in town, from Lenny Partridge to Myrtle Keeton, knows? Do you think anyone cares a fig about your bun anymore, you silly goose? Don’t flatter yourself-it’s old news. Hardly worth a second cup of coffee in Nan’s.

Maybe so… but he had been hers, God damn it, hers. In his life and in his death, he had been hers. And she had been hers, too-not her mother’s, her father’s, Duke Sheehan’s. She had belonged to herself.

That frightened, lonely girl who had washed her panties out every night in the rusty kitchen sink because she had only three pairs, that frightened girl who always had a cold-sore waiting to happen at the corner of her lip or on the rim of one nostril, that girl who sometimes sat at the window overlooking the airshaft and laid her hot forehead on her arms and cried-that girl was hers. Her memories of herself and her son together in the dark of night, Kelton feeding at one small breast while she read a John D. MacDonald paperback and the disconnected sirens rose and raved through the cramped, hilly streets of the city, those memories were hers. The tears she had cried, the silences she had endured, the long, foggy afternoons in the diner trying to avoid Norville Bates’s Roman hands and Russian fingers, the shame with which she had finally made an uneasy peace, the independence and the dignity she had fought so hard and so inconclusively to keep… those things were hers, and must not belong to the town.

Polly, this is not a question of what belongs to the town, and you know it. It’s a question of what belongs to Alan.

She shook her head back and forth as she sat in the rocker, completely unaware she was making this gesture of negation. She supposed she had spent too many sleepless three o’clocks on too many endless dark mornings to give away her inner landscape without a fight.

In time she would tell Alan everything-she had not meant to keep the complete truth a secret even this long-but the time wasn’t yet. Surely not… especially when her hands were telling her that in the next few days she would not be able to think about much of anything at all except them.

The phone began to ring. That would be Alan, back from patrol and checking in with her. Polly got up and crossed the room to it.

She picked it up carefully, using both hands, ready to tell him the things she believed he wanted to hear. Aunt Evvie’s voice tried to intrude, tried to tell her this was bad behavior, childishly selfindulgent behavior, perhaps even dangerous behavior. Polly pushed that voice aside quickly and roughly.

“Hello?” she said brightly. “Oh, hi, Alan! How are you?

Good.”

She listened briefly, then smiled. If she had looked at her reflection in the hallway mirror, she would have seen a woman who appeared to be screaming… but she did not look.

“Fine, Alan,” she said. “I’m just fine.”

14

It was almost time to leave for the Raceway.

Almost.

“Come on,” Danforth Keeton whispered. Sweat ran down his face like oil. “Come on, come on, come on.”

He was sitting hunched over Winning Ticket-he had swept everything off his desk to make room for it, and he had spent most of the day playing with it. He had started with his copy of Bluegrass History.Forty Years of kentucky Derby. He had run at least two dozen Derbys, giving the tin Winning Ticket horses the names of the entrants in exactly the manner Mr. Gaunt had described. And the tin horses which got the names of the winning Derby horses from the book kept coming in first. It happened time after time. It was amazing-so amazing that it was four o’clock before he realized that he had spent the day running long-ago races when there were ten brand-new ones to be run at Lewiston Raceway that very evening.

Money was waiting to be made.

For the last hour, today’s Lewiston Daily Sun, folded to the racing card, had lain to the left of the Winning Ticket board. To the right was a sheet of paper he had torn from his pocket notebook.

Listed on the sheet in Keeton’s large, hasty scrawl was this: It was only already running the last race of the night. The horses rattled and swayed around the track. One of them led by six lengths, and crossed the finish line far ahead of the others.

Keeton snatched up the newspaper and studied the evening’s Raceway card again. His face shone so brightly that he looked sanctified.

“Malabar!” he whispered, and shook his fists in the air.

The pencil caught in one of them darted and plunged like a runaway sewing needle. “It’s Malabar! Thirty-to-one! Thirty-to-one at least!

Malabar, by God!”

He scribbled on the sheet of paper, panting raggedly as he did so.

Five minutes later the Winning Ticket game was locked in his study closet and Danforth Keeton was on his way to Lewiston in his Cadillac.

1st Race: BAZOOKAJOAN

2nd Race: FILLY DELFIA

3rd Race: TAMMY’s WONDER

4th Race: I’M AMAZED

5th Race: BY GEORGE

6th Race: PUCKY BOY

7th Race: CASCO THUNDER

8th Race: DELIGHTFUL SON

9th Race: TIKO-TIKO

five in the afternoon, but Danforth Keeton was

CHAPTER NINE

1

At quarter to ten on Sunday morning, Nettle Cobb drew on her coat and buttoned it swiftly. An expression of grim determination was stamped on her face. She was standing in her kitchen. Raider was sitting on the floor, looking up at her as if to ask if she really meant to go through with it this time.

“Yes, I really mean it,” she told him.

Raider thumped his tail against the floor, as if to say he knew she could do it.

“I’ve made a nice lasagna for Polly, and I’m going to take it to her. My lampshade is locked up in the armoire, and I know it’s locked, I don’t need to keep coming back to check because I know it in my head.

That crazy Polish woman isn’t going to keep me prisoner in my own house. If I see her on the street, I’ll give her what-for! I warned her!”

She had to go out. She had to, and she knew it. She hadn’t left the house in two days, and she had come to realize that the longer she put it off, the harder it would become. The longer she sat in the living room with the shades pulled down, the harder it would get to ever raise them again. She could feel the old confused terror creeping into her thoughts.

So she had gotten up early this morning-at five o’clock!-and had made a nice lasagna for Polly, just the way she liked it, with plenty of spinach and mushrooms. The mushrooms were canned, because she hadn’t dared go out to the market last night, but she thought it had turned out very well despite that. It was now sitting on the counter, the top of the pan covered with aluminum foil.