I walked up hot High Street to the hotel for a shave, shower, and change of clothes; snatched up the accumulated mail without sorting through it; went over to the office to see what was what. Hello, Ms. Pond and partners. Pleasant enough, thank you. Get Buffalo on the phone, please. Come again, Buffalo? No “Monsieur Casteene” to be found in Fort Erie? No one home at Jerome Bray’s establishment (Comalot, you say? Is that first o long or short?) except a family of goats and a crazy lady who calls herself Morgana le Fay? Who you what? Have reason to suspect might be Harrison Mack’s daughter? By all means investigate further! And now, Ms. P.: Joseph Morgan, please, in Fort Erie. Not available? Your name is what? Jacob Horner, administrative assistant? Ms. Bea G., please—Bibi, I believe you call her… Not there? Since 8/14? Never mind whose birthday! Presumably with Mr. Bray in Lily Dale?

Oh, Polly, where are you to advise me? I asked your successor now to get Jane herself on the phone, thinking to share with her my concern for her, our, daughter and perhaps (discreetly) to signal my apprehensions about her fiancé. While Ms. P. dialed I leafed through the mail; saw your dear handwriting on one envelope; tore into it in the dim hope that whatever it contained might invite my apology for so rebuffing you — and found the announcement of your wedding on the 21st.

A wedding performed, you kindly explained on the back of the announcement, after that last desperate visit to Cambridge three weeks since, when — hoping against hope I’d welcome you home, order you to stay, propose marriage on the spot to the woman who’d left me only to prod my sluggish heart — you’d been coldly turned off instead; and even so, madly imagining I might just be ill or distracted, madly praying that one last word might drop the scales from my eyes and heart and prompt me at last to say Come, Polly, Come with me and old Osborn Jones, let’s sail together to the end of the chapter… you called; you telephoned me at Todds Point in the middle of the night, cursing and loving me, hoping and praying; called to propose flat out to me what, decades since, I ought to have proposed to you. And your call was answered by a sleepy young woman’s voice, and for the last time you swallowed your pride; rang off without a word; went home to Florida; said yes at last to your patient friend, and to me a hurt but even yet loving last good-bye.

Good-bye, Polly.

Cancel that call, Ms. Pond. Cancel everything. No, nothing wrong; everything is right, and full to overflowing with intrinsic value, except that I remain alive.

Back aboard the boat I sat for some time stunned, then made a certain codicil to my will regarding the posthumous disposition of my “personal papers,” including this. Home next day to Todds Point, where I spent the Labor Day weekend considering, among other things, Tomorrow Now. Why await the equinox, or the winding up of business, or the illumination of mysteries, before ending, ending, ending it? Was there any reason at all not to have done?

One. In the office on Tuesday morning last, September 2, I found Buffalo on Line One, calling me before I could have Ms. Pond call him. Nothing new on “Morgana le Fay” (which was all I cared about), but all was chaos at that other crazy place, the one across the river in Canada. As of yesterday, Labor Day, Joe Morgan was dead, an apparent suicide; all the white patients and staff were being evicted by the blacks — no Bibis or Bea Goldens or Jeannine Macks among them. Should he continue to keep an eye on things, discreetly?

Sure, but not at the expense of A. B. & A. In my capacity as executive director of the Tidewater Foundation I retained him to investigate and report the goings-on at the Remobilization Farm, from which we ought probably to withdraw our benefaction. Then, discretion be damned, I called Jane directly and told her everything I knew, suspected, or feared about Jeannine, Drew, André Castine, and, alas, poor Morgan — everything except my quasi-incest of three weeks since.

To my surprise, she was unsurprised. Her “own people” had already informed her of all those things, Jane declared coolly, including Morgan’s regrettable suicide, and other things besides, which, given the pending litigation, she was not at liberty to share with me. My retention of a private investigator on behalf of the foundation she did not disapprove; that was my business. Her fiancé’s background, on the other hand, was not; she would thank me to cease my prying thereinto, or at least my bothering her with my “discoveries.” The blackmail threat I could forget about, as she intended to. It was nothing: it had been dealt with, or was being, or would be, by her people. As for Jeannine and Drew: she had already made clear to me her sentiments, which were unchanged. But I was to understand that that business of my possible paternity of her daughter was a fiction which she Jane had never seriously entertained. She regarded it as one of the several, should we say idiosyncratic, obsessions with which I amused myself. Now, if I didn’t mind…

Where is Harrison’s shit? I demanded. Jane chuckled: She would leave it to me in her will. ’Bye.

I telephoned Drew, thinking to go with him at once to Buffalo, Lily Dale, Fort Erie, in search of his sister. Yvonne answered, even chillier than Jane: she was sure she didn’t know where her estranged husband was; their house was hers until the end of the week, when she was leaving Red-neck Neck forever. ’Bye.

So far as I knew, Joe Morgan had no living relatives except his college-age sons. I asked Ms. Pond to make me air reservations to Buffalo for next morning and to have the foundation arrange a memorial service at the college for its first president. (In the event, when I met and conferred with the Morgan boys in Fort Erie yesterday, we arranged the funeral too, to be held in Wicomico the day after tomorrow.)

Wednesday, then, I flew to Buffalo, in pursuit of my shall-we-say-idiosyncratic-et-cetera, consulted and terminated our investigator (nothing new), hired a car, and drove down alone to Lily Dale, to “Comalot.” A ramshackle farmhouse and outbuildings; there were the goats, a rangy Toggenburg buck and two mixed-breed nans, one pregnant. No sign of Bray, but as I drove up, a wild-haired, scowling, long-skirted, granny-glassed young woman came from the barn, already shaking her head at me. The Bernstein girl! What on earth was she doing there? None of my business. Where was “Bea Golden”? Come and gone. Gone where? Didn’t know and didn’t care. Jerome Bray? Hard at work with “Lilyvac II”; couldn’t be interrupted. Might I inspect that machine and arrange a conversation with its owner? I might f — g not; if the f — g Tidewater Foundation wouldn’t put up, it could f — g shut up and get off the premises. She had spoken to me at all, declared Ms. B., only because I’d once arranged bail for her with those red-neck pigs; but that gave me no f — g permanent claims. There might be a police search, I informed her, if Bea Golden didn’t soon turn up. Ms. B. replied sweetly: Till f — g then. As she strode away I called after: Was she also known as Morgana le Fay? Without turning, she hitched up her skirt and flashed her (bare, white, uncomely) bottom. When she reentered the barn she closed the door behind her.

I considered waiting them out, or driving away for an hour and then returning unexpectedly, or concealing myself in the nearby woods and watching for Bray or Jeannine. But the detective had done all that, without success, and my rights in the matter, as no more than a concerned friend of the family, were tenuous. Back to Buffalo.

Thence (yesterday) over the Peace Bridge to Fort Erie and the “Remobilization Farm.” Sure enough, a general exodus of whites was in progress, ordered by a young black chap who but for his green medical tunic might have passed for Drew’s late friend Tank-Top. He called himself Doctor Tombo X; he was the son of the late owner of the establishment; he was surly; and he was perhaps quite within his rights (in the absence of either a will or a board of directors) to evict whom it pleased him to, though I warned him not to expect further support from the Tidewater Foundation. I spoke as aforementioned with Morgan’s sons: stalwart, taciturn, capable boys who however welcomed my offer of legal and funerary assistance. In an hour we’d made arrangements for interment on Saturday in Wicomico, where their mother was buried. About their father’s “freaking out” they were reticent, whether from lack of information or a wish for privacy. No doubt his defeat by the Schott-Cook party at Marshyhope, plus the general upheaval and antirationalism of this wretched decade, repotentiated Morgan’s distress at the loss of his wife, which he had never truly got over. But such dramatic metamorphoses as his are always as ultimately mysterious as is, for that matter, their absence.