AT THREE-THIRTY, he was back at the motel; got cleaned up, thinking about Reynolds in her dark living room, with her French fries, and lard sandwiches. She'd once been a pretty girl, he'd been told.

He met Joan at four o'clock. They stopped at Johnnie's Pizza, found that they agreed on sausage, mushroom, and pepperoni, and the inherent evilness of anchovies. "Little spooky going back to the farm," Virgil said, as they rolled out of town. "Keep an eye out the back. See if there's anybody trailing us."

"You don't have to trail anybody out here," she said. "If you see Joan Carson heading out of town on this road, it's ninety-five percent that she's going out to the farm. There's not much else out here."

"Didn't think of that," he said.

"Besides, we're not going to the farm," she said. "We're going up the hill behind it-that's as nice as the dell in its own way, and I want to see where that guy was when he was shooting at us."

"I was already up there," Virgil said. "First thing this morning."

"You were?"

"It was a shooting site, Joanie. I had to go up and look around," Virgil said. "Didn't find a thing."

"Did you go to the flat rock?" she asked.

"What flat rock?"

"Ah-didn't go to the flat rock." She was being mysterious about it.

THEY WENT PAST the farm, followed the road around behind the hill, cut into the hillside where the shooter had gotten off, and where Virgil was that morning. Joan looked over the spot where the shooter had hidden his truck. Then Virgil got the shotgun out of the back of the 4Runner, and walked her along the now-faint track through the weeds to the stump where the shooter had made his nest. The day had turned hot, the humidity climbing, and far down to the southwest, they could see the puffy white tops of clouds that would become thunderheads; the world smelled of warm prairie weed.

"He might not have known the hillside that well," Joan said, when she saw the shooting nest. She pointed far down to her left. "There's a spot down there where you can come in-that's where kids come in when they're sneaking out to the dell. Good hidden place to park, too. Then, you'd come up from the side of the dell, where there's a really sharp break. We never would have seen him. He would have been right over our heads."

"So he messed up in a couple of ways," Virgil said. "I was wondering if he meant to miss us…but I can't see why he would. And he wasn't that far off. If he meant to miss us, he was playing a dangerous game."

They probed around some more, then headed back to the truck. Joanie pointed him west, to a clump of shrubs where they left the car, out of the sun. "Ground's too broken up above here, you can screw up a tire," she said. "Get the pizza. I'll get the blanket and cooler."

She led the way up the hill to a formation that almost looked like an eroded castle, a natural amphitheater in the red quartzite, at the very summit of the hill. They found a spot with shorter grass, in the shade of a clump of wild plum trees, and put down the blanket. Virgil braced the shotgun against one of the trees.

"I need pizza," Virgil said. "Beer. Hot out here."

"Get a beer. I'll show you the flat rock. Put the pizza on the rock in the sun, it'll stay warm…"

HE FOLLOWED HER across the hillside to a narrow bed of flat red rock, twenty feet long, six or eight feet wide, sloping just a few degrees to the south. When he saw it, Virgil thought, "Blackboard," and Joan said, "Look."

He looked, but he didn't see for a moment. Then he saw a handprint, a small hand, the size of a woman's. Then another, and another, and then a cartoon arrow with a tip and fletching, and a turtle and a man with horns, and then more hands, and circles and squares of things that he didn't recognize.

"Petroglyphs," Joan said. "Chipped out of the rock. Pecked out with another stone. Something between three hundred and a thousand years old. There are older ones at Jeffers, but these are pretty old."

"Jeez…Joanie." Virgil was fascinated. He got down on his hands and knees, crawling around the rock. "How many people know about these things?"

"The Historical Society people, and folks who are interested in petroglyphs and who won't mess them up. My grandfather told a reporter that there used to be a circle of stones here, not this red quartzite, they looked like glacial rocks, or river rocks. They were arranged around the flat rock like a clock, and each stone had a symbol on it. People stole them over the years. Nobody knows where they are now-probably some big museum, or Manhattan decorator shop or something."

"Look at this…" He was pointing. "That looks like an elk. Did they have elk here?"

"That's what they say. There are three buffalo over in the corner up here."

"THERE'S A MAGAZINE article in this," Virgil said, eventually. "Something about plains hunting in the Indian days…take a lot of photographs, mess them around in Photoshop, make a story out of it."

"Leave them alone," Joan said, shaking her head. "It's nice to know that they're out here. That they have nothing to do with magazines or television."

SO THEY SAT under the plum trees and talked, ate pizza, drank beer, and watched the thunderheads grow from white globes into pink anvils, as the sun slid down in the sky. Joan gave him a talk:

"I was thinking about us last night, and I don't think this is a real relationship. You're my transition guy. You're the guy who gets me back into life, and then goes away."

"Why am I gonna go away?" Virgil was feeling lazy, lying back on the blanket, fingers knitted behind his head as a pillow; and he didn't disagree.

"Because you are," she said. "We'd be serious about as long as one of your marriages was serious. You're a good guy, but you've got your problems, Virgil. You manipulate. I can feel you doing it, even if I can't figure out what you're doing. That would drive me crazy after a while. And I have the feeling you're pretty happy when you're alone."

"That doesn't sound so good," he said.

"Well, you're gonna have to figure yourself out," she said. "Anyway, I'm not giving you the gate. I'm just saying…"

"…we're not for all eternity."

"We are not," she agreed. "But the sex has been grand. I didn't even remember how much I used to like it. My husband…I don't know. It just got tiresome. He was more interested in playing golf than playing house, that's for sure."

"Good player?" Virgil asked.

"Not bad, I guess. The last year we were married, one of the most intimate things we'd do is lay in bed, and he'd tell me about every one of seventy-seven shots on the golf course that day-the club, the ball flight, what happened when it landed, bad breaks, good breaks, what he was thinking when he putted. But you know…someday, you just gotta grow up."

"Why'd you marry him in the first place?" Virgil asked.

"He was good-looking, hard worker, available," she said.

"There are worse things in the world."

"Yeah, but he just didn't flip my switch," she said. She plucked a long grass stem and nibbled on the butt end. "I thought we'd grow into it, but we didn't."

"A lot of women think men are like raw lumber-something that you can build a house out of, with a lot of hard work," Virgil said. "But some guys, you know, they're going to do what they're going to do. Can't work with them. They're not good lumber."

"Is that what happened with your wives?"

"Oh…no. I just married them because they were hot and I was stupid. Actually, all of us were stupid. Didn't know what we were doing. Somebody had to work. Couldn't go dancing all the time…"

THEY WERE STILL talking about it, watching the birds, arguing about whether the thunderheads were coming in or would slide to the south, eating pizza…

And a slice of a woman's laughter slid over the hillside like a butterfly, fragile, attractive, and definitely there.