He stood in the darkness under the lintel of the old apartment building and fumbled his wet key into the lock. He thought about Evelyn Woodward and what she had meant to him. For a time she had seemed to be a doorway back into a world from which he had been exiled—not a replacement for Abigail, but a way out of this blind canyon his life had become, into the highlands, the sun-washed places in which he had almost ceased to believe.

She hadn’t been equal to that aroused need, and who could be? It was better not to want such things. He had arrived at a sort of modus vivendi with his grief, and such deals were best not broken. You wore your grief, and if necessary you ate it and you drank it until it became your substance, until you looked in the mirror one day and there was nothing looking back but grief itself, a man made entirely of sorrow, but still standing, somehow still alive, surviving.

He left his wet clothes hanging over the curtain rod in the shower stall and went to bed, craving these few hours of oblivion before another dawn.

The knock at the door startled him awake.

The knock was peremptory and fierce, a Proctor’s knock. He woke blinking at daylight, his heart pounding hard.

He went directly to the door and opened it, apprehensive but not afraid; he was too tired of all this to be afraid.

The only light in the dim hallway was a patch of pale October morning through the east-facing window. Two junior Proctors, pink-cheeked youngsters only just beginning to master the routine arrogance of the professional religious policeman, looked at Dex and past him into the room. Then they moved to opposite sides of the door.

A woman stepped forward.

Bewildered, Dex could only stare.

She was wearing what he supposed his great-grandmother might have worn in her youth: a black, high-collared, long-sleeved, floor-length dress fixed with buttonhooks over the kind of corset that rendered the female figure as an S-shape, all bosom and buttocks. Definitely not a uniform; there was too much lace at the collar and cuffs. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and swept back to frame her face. She was about as tall as his collarbone.

She looked at Dex with a fierce determination. But she was blushing at the same time, maybe because he’d come to the door in nothing but briefs and a sleeveless T-shirt.

She said, “I’m sorry to disturb you … are you Mr. Dexter Graham?”

She spoke with that odd accent he had heard from some of the soldiers. The inflections were European, the vowel sounds almost Irish. She made “Dexter Graham” into something exotic, the name of a North Country highwayman in a Walter Scott epic.

He overcame his speechlessness and said, “Yes, I am.”

“My name is Linneth Stone. Lieutenant Demarch sent me to speak to you.” She paused. “I can wait, if you need to dress.” The blush deepened a little.

“Okay,” Dex said. “Thank you.” And went to look for his pants.

CHAPTER FOUR

Evelyn had been willing to stand in line for water like everyone else.

She had stood in line before. There were special deliveries to the house every Tuesday and Thursday, and the Proctors were generous with it, but she liked having her own ration. It permitted small luxuries: a private cup of coffee, when there was coffee; or tea; or just a quick extra wash on a hot day. The water line was a small nuisance and she didn’t begrudge the time she spent there.

Her new dress changed all that.

The dress was a wonderful gift, and she had accepted it in the spirit in which it was given, but not without reservations. It made the growing gulf between herself and the townspeople too obvious.

The dress was of some faintly iridescent, dark green material—bombazine twilled with silk, the lieutenant had said. It came with a complement of underclothing so baroque that she had needed an instruction manual, which the lieutenant also supplied: a tiny hardbound volume called Appearance, Its Perfection, for Women, by Mrs. Will. Once Evelyn had deciphered Mrs. Will’s peculiar spelling, sorted out a stay from a buttonhook, and understood that in this place a pin was called a pince, she managed all right.

She even liked, sort of, the way she looked in the dress. The effect was Victorian, of course. Prim. But it did interesting things for her figure. To be so thoroughly covered and at the same time so completely advertised—it was odd, and oddly interesting. In Boston and New York, the lieutenant said, all the finer women dressed like this.

But Two Rivers wasn’t Boston or New York; it hadn’t been even in the old days. And that was the problem. She had already been accused of taking favors from the Proctors who were lodged in her house. Eleanor Camby, the undertaker’s wife, had stood behind her in a ration line and whispered the word quisling over and over again. Evelyn didn’t know the word but understood immediately what it meant. Collaborator. Traitor.

To stand in a similar line wearing green bombazine and lace collars—no, not possible.

She could have just worn her old clothes when she went into the street, but Evelyn sensed that this was precisely what the lieutenant did not want. The purpose of the dress, or one of its purposes, was to make her different, to make her unique.

So when she wanted her water ration she begged a ride from one of the junior officers (Evelyn thought of them all as “baby Proctors”; their ranks were too complex to remember), in this case a young man named Malthus Feliks. Feliks drove her downtown in one of those boxy care that looked like antique Jeeps.

Feliks wasn’t talkative, but he was courteous to her—and that was refreshing. She had learned to expect contempt or at best indifference from the junior officers. They were trained that way, she supposed; too, they must be intimidated by the strangeness of Two Rivers. The town had become a terrifyingly strange place no matter which end of the glass you peered through. Today Feliks drove along the leaf-choked streets at a less than bone-bruising clip, and even smiled once (an acrid Proctor’s smile, but genuine) when she commented on the particular blue of the sky. Last night’s rain had cleared the air. October skies, Evelyn thought, were the bluest of all.

It was the dress, she thought, that made Feliks more courteous. If not the dress itself, then what it represented. His commanding officer’s imprimatur. A mark of possession, if not rank.

No, she scolded herself. No, don’t think about it that way. Even if Feliks does.

She was dismayed to discover that the water truck had been moved. Today it was parked in the lot behind JFK High School. Of all places. She considered telling Feliks to turn around, it wasn’t worth the risk of being seen—not here. But Feliks might tell the lieutenant, which would leave the wrong impression. And what, fundamentally, was she ashamed of? Nothing. She had nothing to hide.

Water was dispensed to ration card holders between the hours of noon and six; the truck had only just arrived. Feliks exchanged words with the militiamen lounging in the cab of the tanker. The Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse wasn’t a branch of the armed forces; Feliks didn’t officially outrank these men, but Evelyn had noticed the way the military deferred to the religious police. The powers of the Bureau were vague, hence enormous, the lieutenant had told her. It was easy, he said, perhaps too easy, all things considered, for a Censeur or a senior Proctor to make trouble for an enlisted man. So, naturally, the soldiers were wary of them.

A surly militiaman unlocked the spigot at the back of the truck. Evelyn took her camping thermos from the car. Feliks wouldn’t fill it for her and she knew better than to ask. It was her water, her chore. She stooped to fit the thermos under the steel faucet and swept her dress out of the way with one hand. The water gushed out and spattered her shoes. It looked clean but smelled faintly of oil. It always did.