Missy Dandridge came in five days a week to vacuum, clean… and do the laundry. Rachel would never see those sheets at all until she put them back on the bed… clean. He supposed it was possible that Missy would mention it to Rachel, but he didn’t think so. She would probably whisper to her husband that the Creeds were playing some strange sex game that involved mud and pine needles instead of body paints.

This thought made Louis laugh all the harder.

The last of the giggles and chuckles dried up as he was dressing, and he realized that he felt a little better. How that could be he didn’t know, but he did. The room looked normal now except for the stripped bed. He had gotten rid of the poison. Maybe “evidence” was actually the word he was looking for, but in his mind it felt like poison.

Perhaps this is what people do with the inexplicable, he thought. This is what they do with the irrational that refuses to be broken down into the normal causes and effects that run the Western world. Maybe this was how your mind coped with the flying saucer you saw hovering silently over your back field one morning, casting its own tight little pool of shadow; the rain of frogs; the hand from under the bed that stroked your bare foot in the dead of night. There was a giggling fit or a crying fit… and since it was its own inviolable self and would not break down, you simply passed terror intact, like a kidney stone.

Gage was in his chair, eating Cocoa Bears and decorating the table with it. He was decorating the plastic mat under his high chair with Cocoa Bears and apparently shampooing with it.

Rachel came out of the kitchen with his eggs and a cup of coffee. “What was the big joke, Lou? You were laughing like a loon up there. Scared me a little.”

Louis opened his mouth with no idea of what he was going to say, and what came out was a joke he had heard the week before at the corner market down the road-something about a Jewish tailor who bought a parrot whose only line was “Ariel Sharon jerks off.”

By the time he finished, Rachel was laughing too-so was Cage for that matter.

Fine. Our hero has taken care of all the evidence-to wit: the muddy sheets and the loony laughter in the bathroom. Our hero will now read the morning paper-or at least look at it-putting the seal of normality on the morning.

So thinking, Louis opened the paper.

That’s what you do, all right, he thought with immeasurable relief. You pass it like a stone, and that’s the end of it… unless there comes a campfire some night with friends when the wind is high and the talk turns to inexplicable events. Because on campfire nights when the wind is high, talk is cheap.

He ate his eggs. He kissed Rachel and Gage. He glanced at the square, white-painted laundry cabinet at the foot of the chute only as he left.

Everything was okay. It was another knockout of a morning. Late summer showed every sign of just going on forever, and everything was okay. He glanced at the path as he backed the car out of the garage, but that was okay too. Never turned a hair. You passed it like a stone.

Everything was okay until he had gotten ten miles down the road, and then the shakes hit him so hard that he had to pull off Route z and into the morning-deserted parking lot of Sing’s, the Chinese restaurant not far from the Eastern Maine Medical Center… where Pascow’s body would have been taken.

The EMMC, that is, not Sing’s. Vic Pascow was never going to eat another helping of moo goo gai pan, ha-ha.

The shakes twisted his body, ripped at it, had their way with it. Louis felt helpless and terrified-not terrified of anything supernatural, not in this bright sunshine, but simply terrified of the possibility that he might be losing his mind. It felt as if a long, invisible wire was being twirled through his head.

“No more,” he said. “Please, no more.”

He fumbled for the radio and got Joan Baez singing about diamonds and rust. Her sweet, cool voice soothed him, and by the time she had finished, Louis felt that he could drive on.

When he got to the Medical Center, he called hello to Charlton and then ducked into the bathroom, believing that he must look like hell. Not so. He was a little hollow under the eyes, but not even Rachel had noticed that. He slapped some cold water on his face, dried off, combed his hair, and went into his office.

Steve Masterton and the Indian doctor, Surrendra Hardu, were in there, drinking coffee and continuing to go over the front file.

“Morning, Lou,” Steve said.

“Morning.”

“Let’s hope it is not like last morning,” Hardu said.

“That’s right, you missed all the excitement.”

“Surrendra had plenty of excitement himself last night,” Masterton said, grinning. “Tell him, Surrendra.”

Hardu polished his glasses, smiling. “Two boys bring in their Jady friend around one o’clock in the morning,” he said. “She is very happily drunk, celebrating the return to university, you understand. She has cut one thigh quite badly, and I tell her it will be at least four stitches, no scar. Stitch away, she tells me, and so I do, bending over like this-”

Hardu demonstrated, salaaming over an invisible thigh. Louis began to grin, sensing what was coming.

“And as I am suturing, she vomits on my head.”

Masterton broke up. So did Louis. Hardu smiled calmly, as if this had happened to him thousands of times in thousands of lives.

“Surrendra, how long have you been on duty?” Louis asked, when the laughter died.

“Since midnight,” Hardu said. “I am just leaving. But I wanted to stay long enough to say hello again.”

“Well, hello,” Louis said, shaking his small, brown hand. “Now go home and go to sleep.”

“We’re almost through with the front file,” Masterton said. “Say hallelujah, Surrendra.”

“I decline,” Hardu said, smiling. “I am not a Christian.”

“Then sing the chorus of ‘Instant Karma’ or something.”

“May you both shine on,” Hardu said, still smiling, and glided out the door.

Louis and Steve Masterton looked after him for a moment, Silent, and then looked at each other. They broke out laughing. To Louis, no laugh had ever felt so good… so normal.

“Just as well we got the file finished up,” Steve said. “Today’s the day we put the welcome mat out for the dope pushers.”

Louis nodded… The first of the drug salesmen would begin arriving at ten. As Steve liked to crack, Wednesday might be Prince Spaghetti Day, but at UMO every Tuesday was D-day. The D stood for Darvon, the all-time favorite.

“A word of advice, 0 Great Boss,” Steve said. “I don’t know what dese guys were like out in Chicago, but around here they’ll stoop to just about anything, from all-expenses-paid hunting junkets into the Allagash in November to free bowling at Family Fun Lanes in Bangor. I had one guy try to give me one of those inflatable Judy dolls. Me! And I’m only a P. A.! If they can’t sell you drugs, they’ll drive you to them.”

“Should have taken the Judy doll.”

“Nah, she was a redhead. Not my type.”

“Well, I agree with Surrendra,” Louis said. “Just as long as it’s not like yesterday.”